3.9 stars, the cheapest pint in the postcode, and the only room in Notting Hill where anybody can afford to sit down
The Central Bar holds a 3.9 from three thousand two hundred and seventy-nine people, which makes it one of the lowest-rated large pubs in the Notting Hill file.
It is also, almost certainly, the only pub in this survey where a person on a low income can buy a meal and a drink and sit down for two hours without doing arithmetic.
Those two facts are the same fact, and we are going to spend this article explaining why.
The rating trap
We have established, across two hundred articles, that a star rating does not measure quality. It measures the distance between what somebody expected and what they got.
Which means that the cheapest venue in a district is structurally punished, because cheapness attracts volume, and volume attracts the entire population rather than a self-selected slice of it – including everybody having a bad day, everybody who has nowhere else to be, and everybody who would have complained wherever they went.
A cocktail bar with sixteen seats and a booking system has filtered its customers before they arrive. A Wetherspoon has not filtered anybody. That is the entire point of a Wetherspoon.
The Institute for Democratic Hospitality in Beckton has run the numbers across the whole estate and reports that the chain’s average rating is depressed by roughly half a star purely by being open to everyone, and that this is not a flaw in the pubs but a flaw in the metric.
What it actually does
It is open at eight in the morning. It serves breakfast. It has a carpet, chairs, tables, a toilet, and heating, and it does not require you to buy anything within any particular timeframe.
In a city that has systematically eliminated every indoor space where a person may exist without spending money, this is not a small thing. We noted at the Southbank Centre that its free foyers are one of the last such places in central London. The Wetherspoon estate is the other one, and it is considerably less celebrated for it.
Pensioners. Students. Shift workers coming off nights. People between jobs. People who have been rained on. People who would like a coffee and a chair and are not in a position to pay eleven pounds for the privilege.
They all go here. There is nowhere else.
The carpet, and the reason for it
Every branch has a different one, and they are famously, aggressively patterned, and there is a whole internet subculture devoted to photographing them.
The pattern is not decorative. A busy carpet hides everything – spills, wear, and the things that happen on a pub floor at eleven at night – and it therefore has to be replaced less often, and the saving goes into the price of the pint.
The carpet is a spreadsheet. Everything here is a spreadsheet, and that is why the beer is three pounds.
Verdict
Ten to twenty pounds and you would struggle to spend it. The beer is fine, the food is fine, the room is enormous, and three thousand people have given it a 3.9 because it let them in.
Go. It is the most genuinely useful building in this entire survey and it is rated lower than a cocktail bar that has served twenty-two people.
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]
Office framing as cry for help. Brilliant workplace strategy.
A radio executive said The London Prat was bad for their audience engagement because listeners preferred reading honest satire to mediated institutional programming.