Bumped into a cousin the other day, one I don’t see very often and he said “…must stop by one of your pubs some time…” my involuntary reaction to which was to wince; I don’t own any pubs, do I?
His comment caused me to consider the nature of pubs and of my business and as is the way with these things, ruminations took me in an unexpected direction.
I am old enough to remember when Irish pubs became a thing in England, a thing that was then exported to Spain, France and elsewhere. I don’t believe they went directly from Ireland unless the same person responsible for the English version did it. I haven’t been but I’d like to think cities like Tokyo haven’t escaped the fiddle-on-the-wall nonsense.
Slainte.
When did it happen?
Picture the scene; someone was in an Irish pub once; a real one, in Ireland, and they were having such a good time ordering two beers at a time because they take so long to pour, slipping easily into a soft southern accent, visualising time spent with the
little people and they thought to themselves “Dave and the boys back home would enjoy this. We must build one in Dartford”.
But of course they had fallen into the trap of attributing their XL enjoyment level with the wrong things and instead of recognising the warm hospitality, the liveliness, the ridiculously high speed of conversation, the humour, etc. as the true sources of their fun, they conflated it to Micheal’s old discarded violin on a wall, the “O-something” name of the pub, foreign-looking words drawn in that odd script they use and highlights of green paint dotted about as the secrets to the perfect pub.
So they came home and opened Mc[insert name]’s.
Hope they cashed out early. Before the craics appeared….
So was it from this adventure that the preposterous notion of the Theme Pub came? A pub, but with a theme. An angle; something other than simply serving decent drinks, hearty food and hosting locals in a warm welcoming manner.
So we got Wild West Saloons with confederate flags instead of endless skies, Café Rouge with French-Lite menu du jour in place of surly waiters, the truly appalling Chiquitos whose success surely relies on nobody English having eaten Mexican food before. And others. And they all have a period in the sun building a heavily-promoted, auto-discounted trade until folk start seeing through the charade whereupon they sell out to an out-of-touch private equity behemoth who quietly oversee their decline until they can surreptitiously dump it.
Or retheme it.
One feature of many of these businesses, and one I have nicked, is the ambition, need and ability to morph slightly during a single day’s trading. JD Wetherspoons is a business I admire tremendously - a theme pub themed on, well, a pub, but operating at scale. And the ‘spoons are very good at welcoming breakfasters, older morning coffee drinkers, early quaffers of lager, lunchers, afternoon teaers (kind of), post-work drinkies types, diners-on-a-budget, DRINKERS and then finally people waiting for ambulances. All in the same day.
Genius.
I don’t imagine now-Sir Tim Martin wrote it in his business plan, but they also provide a warm (literally) environment for those with nowhere warm to go. And having visited a couple that included the famously extreme hike to the gents, I can imagine using them instead of an expensive gym too. 4,500 steps. Just remember if you’re in that last group of ‘spoon users, don’t use the App; the walk to the bar is essential for your count to, well, count.
Some of these morphers get it wrong. I remember visiting a now-defunct brand in Colchester some years ago for an early evening dinner. The other guests were all doing similar when at exactly 8pm they turned the lights down to one cheam (one thousandth of a glimmer according to The Meaning of Liffe), the muzak up to 11 and sent a server through the room holding a virtual sign that read “old people fuck off home”.
We all left slightly bemused and with our heads ringing, presumably to make room and time for a clean-down of the old people smell, a pre-emptive spray of cocaine-no-more on the cisterns for the imminent scheduled arrival of the beautiful people.
So we oldies left. And I was in my early thirties…
In a similar vein, an old trade friend once told me about enjoying a late lunch at a Something Rock Café in Chelmsford, a civilised affair with his wife and young son. Lots of money spent with all going well until a certain head-office-decreed time arrived at which point he was asked to leave because he didn’t meet the dress code any more.
Nice. And hilariously ill-judged/implemented.
For me the most amusing takeaway from all this is the unexpected birth of Theme Pub 2.0; a theme pub where the theme is, well, that it is themed.
So instead of it being nominally Irish, Wild West, K-Pop, Gay, Druggy (rarely nominally in the UK but we all know where they are…) or YPV (Young Persons Venue - shudder) the theme IS the theme. Theme as theme.
I have recently seen pubs refer to themselves as “A Theme Pub” as though the word “Theme” is a theme. I imagine the benefit of this is you can mix fiddle-on-the-wall with canoe-on-the-ceiling, servers wearing dirndl, drinks served in welly boots, etc. without anyone being able to cry “off message”.
I butted into a conversation between a couple of youngsters…
“…meeting down the [pub name] tonight. You coming? It’s been done up and it’s now a theme pub”.
At which point, and knowing the pub in question, I interjected “what’s the theme?” to which the puzzled answer was “what? It’s a theme pub innit. Duh.”.
So Theme can be a theme.
A largely uncommented on but, to me, hugely significant thing happened during one of the lockdowns that further challenged old dogma. Boris et al asked hospitality to close at 10pm. Now I know for a fact that quite a few traditional pub keepers welcomed this rule even while in earshot of punters they complained. It gave them permission to eject people whose drinking had realistically already slowed down to a snail’s pace by 10 o’clock anyway while shrugging their shoulders and saying “…sorry Pete…it’s the bloody politicians…I’d stay open until 3am if it were down to me…nothing I can do…”, while inwardly celebrating an earlier night with barely-affected takings. Many have stuck to the new closing time post restrictions.
It just makes sense, and brings their working week down to a more manageable 110 hours.
Drinking habits were already changing but Covid restrictions accelerated some of them. People built bars in their gardens, some still work from home years on and the Alcohol Police continue to campaign for abstinence through punishing taxes while the cost of heating a large old leaky building haven’t exactly gone down recently.
All of this has conspired to reduce traditional pub traffic to and beyond the point of unviability.
But I would argue that a new theme of pub had already been born, one that endures no legacy of late opening, no reliance on 500 year-old buildings and zero exposure to punitive alcohol excise duties that make margins impossible. And they’re everywhere under various brands, the one thing they all have in common is that they never use the word “pub”. At all. Ever.
Chelmsford was recently named the town with the most Costa cafes in Britain. Twenty six. That’s right, 26. In one town. All packed with customers.
Peak Costa?
Probably not but these, along with independent cafés, tea rooms and garden centres are defacto the new pubs.
Arguably by creating our Wine-Boutiques concept nine years ago we coined a new theme; drinks shops that you can drink in.
This refusal of mine to acknowledge them to be a bar or pub or restaurant or tea room gives us carte blanche in the truest sense. I even started the idea with an actual blank sheet of paper. And white it was if I recall.
Carte blanche…
…to close at 9pm, a time at which many grown-ups have done their imbibing and conveniently too early for those youngsters who require luminous confected drinks, concussive music and the option to go straight to work from their night out; things we are hopelessly ill-equipped to provide.
And not to open seven days, cook food badly and be bullied into stocking supermarket brands or neutral, get-you-there spirit.
Or make complicated hot drinks with even more complicated names. As an aside and incorporating different “kinds” of milk, cup sizes and sprinkles, etc., guess how many interpretations of latte a Starbucks USA cafe can make for you. Go on, guess. Guess again; it’s ninety three billion.
93,000,000,000. And no, I haven’t made that up.
The other day I read a piece about the neo-pronounned Demi Lovato and I was at least a hundred words in before I realised they were talking about a person and not a skinny oat-milk Crappaccino served in a non-binary compostable tapered cardboard tube.
I digress, and having by now fully transited this rabbit hole of thought, I won’t wince next time someone refers to a Wine-Boutique as a pub or bar. It obviously isn’t one any more than Costa is.
Unless of course our customer wishes to use it thus…..