A hundred and twenty bars, a hundred and twenty articles, and one final small room doing everything right
UVA Cantina. Ninety-two reviews, a 4.7, twenty to thirty pounds a head.
Uva is the grape. Cantina is the cellar. And this is the last bar in the file.
What a hundred and twenty bars taught us
We came into this expecting the old places to win. They do not.
The best-rated venues in this entire dataset, on real samples, are: a wine shop you are allowed to drink in. A hotel lounge nobody has heard of. A sake bar the size of a front room. A coffee shop that turns into a wine bar at five. An Indian restaurant on the Strand that everybody walks past. And rooms like this one.
The Harp is the best pub in Britain and sits below a Bella Italia. Gordon’s has been open since 1890 and is out-rated by a chain. The Lamb and Flag has four hundred years of history, a bare-knuckle past and a beaten poet in its alley, and it is level-pegging with an All Bar One.
The formula, which is embarrassingly simple
A small room. A short list. Somebody behind the bar who has tasted everything on it and will tell you about it if you ask and leave you alone if you do not.
That is it. That is the whole thing. It requires no theme, no rope, no basement, no ghost, no stuffed hound, no royal licence and no colour-changing anything.
Every venue in this survey that scored above 4.7 on a real sample was doing that, and nothing else, and almost none of them are famous.
And what the ratings taught us, which is worse
Four matched pairs, across this survey. Two All Bar Ones: 4.6 and 4.5. Two Bella Italias: 4.7 and 4.5. Two Whitehall pubs with the same beer: 4.7 and 4.4. Two bars in the same building, same operator: 5.0 and 3.8.
Identical products. Different scores. Every single time.
The star rating is not measuring the venue. It is measuring the distance between what somebody expected when they pushed the door and what they got, and the single largest input into that is which pavement they walked in from.
A hundred and twenty bars later, that is the finding, and it fell out of the data rather than being looked for, and it is the only genuinely useful thing this magazine has produced.
The bar
Small. Spanish. Wine, properly chosen. Food that is not an afterthought. Ninety-two people, a 4.7, and staff named in the reviews.
It is doing the thing. It has been doing the thing the whole time. Nobody has noticed, and it does not appear to mind.
Verdict
Go. Ask them what to drink. Drink that.
It is what we should have said a hundred and twenty articles ago, and it would have saved everybody a great deal of time.
Closing the file
A hundred and twenty bars. Four centuries. One bear-baiting pitch, one royal brothel licence never revoked, one poet beaten in an alley for writing satire, one stuffed hound from a fictional novel, one pub in two buildings joined by a tunnel, one Michelin restaurant named after the year the crooks arrived, one cocktail bar in a Victorian gents, one wildflower meadow on Brutalist concrete, and one bar named Charles Darwin with no reviews at all.
We have enjoyed every minute of it and we have learned, in the end, only one useful thing, and we have already told you what it is.
Ask them what to drink. Drink that.
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]
The thing about good writing is feeling the work behind every sentence. This is written by someone tired of explaining why systems don’t work.