Not there it is. See there. It is a verb, and it is pointing at something, and the exclamation mark is doing real work
Voila! Wine Bar Shop has ninety-eight reviews and a 4.6, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and is both a shop and a bar – which we have established, at Bedford Street Wines, is the single best value proposition in London drinking.
The word
Voila is not a noun and it is not an interjection, not really.
It is vois la – see there. It is an imperative. It is a verb telling you to look, and a word telling you where.
Which means that when a French waiter puts a plate down and says voila, he is not saying here it is. He is saying: look at this.
And when a conjuror says it, he is doing the same thing, and it is the oldest instruction in performance – the whole art of the reveal is telling the audience precisely when and where to direct their attention, and we made this point at the Escapologist, where Houdini got out in a minute and waited twenty.
The shop-and-bar
Which is the actual news here, and which we should explain again because it is the most useful thing in either survey.
A bar buys a bottle and sells it at three to four times what it paid. That multiple is not greed – it is rent, staff, glassware, insurance, licensing, and the fact that you are occupying a chair in Covent Garden for two hours.
A wine shop buys the same bottle and sells it at retail, on a much thinner margin, and then – for a small corkage – lets you drink it on the premises.
The wine is identical. The saving is enormous. The only thing you have given up is the chair.
And in a city where a glass of unremarkable red now runs to fourteen pounds, the chair has become the most overpriced piece of furniture in England.
Why there are so few
We said it at Bedford Street Wines and it holds. The licence is difficult, the economics only work at low volume, and the moment a shop-with-drinking becomes popular enough to need staff and tables and a kitchen and a lavatory, it has become a bar – and it must charge bar prices, and the loophole closes behind it.
The Prat has watched this happen three times in ten years in this city.
Enjoy it now. This is the good bit. It does not last.
The bar
Ninety-eight reviews is a modest sample and a 4.6 on it is a good, believable number.
Small. Short list. Somebody who knows.
Verdict
Buy a bottle. Open it. Stand up. Accept that every bar within four hundred metres regards you as a traitor, and enjoy it enormously.
The corkage question
It is not a rip-off and it is worth defending, because people get very worked up about it.
A corkage fee is paying for the glass, the service, the washing up, the room, the heat, the light, and the person who opened it – all of which cost money and none of which you are getting from a shop when you carry a bottle home.
What you are not paying is the four-times markup on the wine itself.
A fair corkage on a good bottle is one of the last honest transactions in London hospitality, and the venues that offer it are, without exception, the ones run by people who would rather you drank something good.
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Somewhere someone’s reading LONDON PRAT at their actual London desk recognizing their exact London job, their exact London despair about living here.