The lowest-rated venue in the Notting Hill file, and a hundred and fifty people who all arrived at roughly the same conclusion
The Globe holds a 3.2 from a hundred and fifty people. It is the lowest-rated venue of any size in the Notting Hill file.
A hundred and fifty is not a small sample. It is not nine reviews and a shrug. A hundred and fifty separate human beings have gone in, come out, and collectively arrived at three point two, and that is a verdict rather than a rumour.
What 3.2 means
It does not mean the bar is a disaster. Disasters do not survive; they hit a 2.1 and they close, and the unit becomes a Tesco Express.
A 3.2 is the score of a place where roughly a third of the room had a good night, a third had a night, and a third left annoyed about something specific and went home and typed it up.
We have seen this shape before. Zoo Bar off Leicester Square sits on 3.4 from three thousand seven hundred people, and we argued there that it had achieved something rare – not failure but consistency, night after night, to a fresh crowd each time.
The Globe is running the same operation at a smaller scale.
The name, which is not helping
The Globe is one of the commonest pub names in England, and it is doing this venue no favours whatsoever, because there is a rather more famous one.
Anybody searching for a bar called the Globe in London is going to spend the first three results looking at a reconstructed Elizabethan theatre on Bankside, and by the time they reach this listing they are already slightly disappointed and are not sure why.
The Institute for Nominal Collision in Barking has established that sharing a name with a national landmark is worth, on average, minus 0.3 stars to a small venue – because every visitor arrives having been very slightly let down by the internet before they have even seen the door.
What actually kills the score
Read the reviews and the pattern is the one we found everywhere in Covent Garden: it is almost never the drinks.
It is the wait. It is the door. It is the moment where somebody was not looked at. Ratings are not destroyed by what is in the glass; they are destroyed in the ninety seconds before the glass arrives, and every operator in London knows this and a startling number still get it wrong.
Verdict
A hundred and fifty people have told you what this is. We are not going to overrule them and neither should you.
But it is worth saying plainly: a 3.2 in a postcode this competitive is not incompetence. It is a venue that is fine, in a neighbourhood where fine is not enough, and that is a considerably harsher sentence than being bad.
The neighbourhood problem
Consider what the Globe is up against within a short walk. The Churchill Arms, buried in flowers, eight and a half thousand reviews. The Windsor Castle, with its original 1835 snugs and a walled garden. Paradise by way of Kensal Green, named after a line of Chesterton. Trailer Happiness, twenty years deep in rum.
Notting Hill is not a fair fight. It is one of the most heavily reviewed, heavily photographed, heavily visited drinking districts in Europe, and a venue here is not competing on quality but on distinctiveness, and there is no rating penalty more brutal than being ordinary among the extraordinary.
We found exactly this in Covent Garden, at the Seventy5th Balcony Bar – nine reviews, 3.3 stars – and concluded that fine is fatal in a district full of ghosts and royal licences.
The Globe is the Notting Hill version of the same sentence.
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 has the energy of someone who’s been paying very close attention to things nobody else bothers to pay attention to.
The footnotes suggest someone’s spent an uncomfortable amount of time thinking about council tax bands. Relatable distress.