A Tale of Two Pubs pt 1 - Ordering Drinks

Part 1 of a series on bar layout.
Why do some bars take forever to get your drink?

The Castle vs The Prince of Wales

While this doesn't make or break a good bar, I have been known to skip by a perfectly good pub because I hate ordering a beer there. A good example are the two closest pubs to where I live. The Prince of Wales and The Castle. They're both very similar, in fact, they're both owned by the same company and share the same staff. They both serve similar food. Both have seperate smoking/non smoking sections. Both have a similar mixed decor of retro/antique/modern furniture. Both have a similar selection of beers (though the Prince of Wales usually has more ales on tap).

The main differences are: the atmosphere - The Prince of Wales doesn't really play music as far as I can tell, and it much brighter inside. The Castle is mainly candle lit with a few low-wattage bulbs and plays dj music. Either one would suit me fine for a quick beer. But, the biggest difference, and the reason I never go to the Prince of Wales, is because you can't get a pint to save your life. They typically have more bar staff working, and their capacity is about the same. Yet it consistently takes 5x as long to get your order as the Castle.

This phenomena is caused by several factors such as idiots paying for their £2.80 pint with a card or the higher number wine/champagne drinkers - namely, the PoW has more upper class twats. But the Castle has plenty of these idiots as well, so that can't be the only factor. What I've noticed is at the PoW, there's far too much bar surface area for people to congregate around. That causes a couple immediate problems.

In the UK, unless there's a well defined queue (line up) behind them, people will order a beer and just stand there with their friends talking and drinking - but they'll always respect the queue. So, you end up with the drink line getting pushed further and further away from the tills and taps. When the barman comes to take your order, they have to go all the way to the taps to pour the beer, bring it back to you, go all the way back to get the other drinks, bring them back to you, ask if you want anything else, then go all the way back and punch in the order, come back and tell you the price, take your money/card and go back to the till, then come back with your change. Multiply that by an average of 10 waiting customers and it takes too damn long. I might as well take my beer and go back to the end of the line.

The second problem is line jumping. Because of the very large bar surface area at the PoW, people will always find an open spot to wait for the bartender. You can't blame anyone for that, it's expected. But, because the bar is so large and the bartenders are running around with their heads cut off, they can't keep track of who to serve next. If you're beside a group of girls with their tits hanging out, you're doomed. If you're unfortunate enough to be stuck behind someone ordering because there's no free space at the bar, you're going to be waiting a very long time. You might as well walk down to the next pub and order a beer.

Now, I've gone on and on about what the PoW does wrong. But what does the Castle do right? The Castle has two potential queue points (two registers), but one main one. People can, and do, still loiter along the bar, but the bar's not nearly as big. Because of the queue, they typically loiter along the bar where the taps are. Behind the bar, there's room for three people to slide around each other, and everything (the lager taps, the import taps, the bitter pulls, the liquer, the wine, etc) is within arms reach of the till. At the most, the bartender has to make two steps to get around their co-worker. I've very rarely ever had to wait to get a beer at the Castle.

A couple years ago, I had my kitchen renovated and paid some professionals to design the new kitchen layout. They talked about the "work triangle" and how when you're preparing food, you want to be able to take one step to your fridge, to the counter and then to the oven. The Castle has that down perfectly.

A side note to all of this. In the UK there's no such thing as table service. Every once and a while you'll come to a place that does this, and they're called restaurants. So, a lot of these points are irrelevant if you live in north america and never have to get off your ass to get your beer.

New Years Tip

Putting beer/champagne in the freezer to rapidly chill is only a good idea (and I stress this important point), at the start of the night. This is true of any night, but most of all on New Years Eve. Champagne has much more built up pressure than beer does which means a lot more bang when it eventually gets too cold and explodes. At the beginning of the night, you're coherent enough to remember that there's a powder keg in your freezer. After three or four bottles, you tend to lose track of how much booze you started out with. You might forget about that last bottle and head to the bar. You might wake up the next morning with the freezer door blown off the hinges. It's not something you want to deal with on new years day.