A perfect 5.0 from a sample of two, and a name inventing a pastoral avenue in the middle of Bloomsbury
The Bar at Iris Avenue holds a perfect 5.0 rating. It has been reviewed by two people.
Two. We have arrived, in the very first Bloomsbury batch, at the small-sample problem that has haunted this entire survey from Covent Garden onwards, and here it is in almost its purest form: a flawless score, built on a sample you could fit in the back of a taxi.
The two people
A 5.0 from two reviews tells you that two people went, and both of them, for whatever reason, gave it full marks. It does not tell you the bar is good. It does not tell you the bar is bad. It tells you almost nothing at all, and it will be displayed – on every listing site in the world – in the same font, on the same scale, as the Marquis Cornwallis down the road with its six and a half thousand.
The review count is printed underneath, in grey, smaller. This is a choice, and it is not an accident, and it benefits the two-review bar at the expense of the person trying to decide where to drink.
Iris Avenue, which is not a place
There is no Iris Avenue in Bloomsbury. There is no pastoral, tree-lined avenue of irises anywhere near this bar. The name is inventing a location – a soft, floral, faintly rural idea – and attaching it to a room in one of the densest, most built-up quarters of central London.
This is a specific move and we have seen it before. Name the venue after a place that sounds nicer than the place it is in. An iris is a flower and a garden and a spring morning. The reality is Bloomsbury WC1, all brick and traffic and students.
The Prat’s naming desk notes that “Iris Avenue” is doing exactly what “The Garden” did in Covent Garden – promising a greenery that does not exist – and that the English have always been suckers for a bit of invented pastoral, especially indoors, especially in a city.
The honest position
We cannot review this bar. We will not pretend to. Two people is not a sample, and everything we have learned across a hundred and twenty-four articles tells us that a 5.0 from two reviews is a number waiting for reality to arrive and adjust it.
It may be wonderful. Small new bars often are – small rooms with short lists tend to be good before anybody has found them. But the rating is not evidence of that. The rating is just two people, agreeing, once.
Verdict
Unknowable, on the numbers. A perfect score that means nothing yet, and a name inventing a flower-lined avenue in a district that has neither flowers nor avenue.
Go, if you like, and be the third. Your review would carry a third of the entire weight of the bar’s reputation, which is either a great responsibility or a good argument for how little that reputation currently means.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
This is what The Spectator sounded like before getting shouty and mean.