At a time when many bars are struggling to attract customers, it's worth winding back to why they exist in the first place – never forget that bars are meant to be fun, says John Ennis of Graffiti Group in Liverpool. 

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And now? Now I walk into bars that look like they’ve been created for a design magazine spread rather than a night out. No bottles on the back bar, no sound of shakers, no energy, just pre-batched precision and a playlist set that does ‘cool and moody.’ Sometimes I ask myself whether we traded the soul of bartending for clinical efficiency.

From theatre to canteen

Hospitality was never meant to be sterile. The best bars in history – the ones that defined entire eras – had character. You didn’t just go for the drinks; you went for the people, the energy, the feeling that anything could happen. 

Now, so many bars feel like austere cocktail canteens. We’ve become so obsessed with serious drinks and complex techniques that we’ve forgotten what a bar is supposed to be: a place of escape, of indulgence, of fun. Every drink is pre-batched to ensure ‘perfection’, but perfection at what cost? Watching a bartender pull a bottle from the fridge and pour it into a glass isn’t an experience, it’s a transaction.

I remember bars where the bartender was half showman, half therapist. You went for a Martini and left with a story. You’d lean on the bar, watch them work, feel the room shift and pulse with conversation, music, movement. You could feel the life in the room.

Bars were social spaces first, where the drinks were important, yes, but they were part of a bigger picture. Now we’re designing bars for Instagram. Where’s the cluttered back bar, full of odd, interesting bottles that sparked conversation? The bartender who could make a drink with one hand while shaking yours with the other? The energy of a packed room, the clatter of glasses, the spontaneous moment when a bartender lights an orange peel on fire just because they can? All replaced with sanitised, curated, aesthetic-driven minimalism. To me this isn’t progress – it’s a funeral for everything that made bars great.

Hospitality is about how you make people feel

I’ve spent my life in bars. I’ve opened them, I’ve closed them and I’ve spent hours leaning on them, lost in conversation with strangers who became friends by last call. And I can tell you this: a great bar is defined by how it makes people feel. The bars people talk about decades later aren’t the ones that had the best clarified milk punch. They’re the ones that had soul.

Let me be clear: innovation is good. Technique matters. But not at the expense of fun. Because most guests don’t care about how the drink is made. They’re not coming in to hear about the three-day sous-vide process behind your house cordial. Most guests just want a great drink, made by a great bartender, in a great bar.

Bars that feel like bars

I’m not alone in this. I know there are still bars out there that get it. I know there are still social bars – places where bartenders shake with flair, where guests talk to each other, where the room has a hum that no interior designer could ever manufacture. But they are becoming rarer. I wonder if we are at risk of losing them entirely.

That’s the question that keeps me up at night. Because I want to live in a world where bars still feel like bars. Where they have life, chaos, unpredictability. Where the bartenders know your name, where the music is a little too loud, where the drinks are strong and the nights are long. That’s the world I want to drink in. What about you?