Edmund Weil is one of the few operators to have guided an independent bar into old age. He comes with sage advice.

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It’s been a hell of a ride, filled with joy, discovery and fulfilment. Conversely, it’s also been a constant, attritional battle against rising costs, shifting trends and the simple entropy that pulls all things towards mediocrity. It’s one thing to open a bar; it’s another thing entirely to keep it open – and quite another to keep it excellent.

It’s prompted me to reflect on a simple question: in an industry defined by hype and churn, what does it take to endure? I recently gave a seminar at Athens Bar Show (also turning 15 this year) on this very topic, grounded in research and conversations with peers who’ve been at the coalface for over a decade: Joerg Meyer (Le Lion, Hamburg), Thanos Prunaros (Baba Au Rum, Athens), Carina Soto Velásquez (Candelaria, Paris), Benja Padrón Novoa (ex-Limantour, Mexico), Sly Augustin (Trailer Happiness, London), Richard Wynne (Callooh Callay, London) and many more.

What follows below encompasses my and their shared wisdom: the foundations laid, the constants protected and the changes made along the way.

Foundations

Foundations are the decisions made and principles put in place well before the first guest walks through the doors. Like the roots of a tree, they can’t really be amended or retrofitted in hindsight.

The first is personal outlook. In Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara tells us: “Hospitality is a selfish pleasure.” 

To keep a venue at a high standard over a decade and more, to dedicate the energy to it day after day, you must possess a peculiar personality trait: not only the ability but the need to derive fulfilment and validation from making other people happy. To live is to serve and to serve is to live. It’s a rare quality, and one shared by all those enduring bar owners named above.

Second is the design and fit out. A bar’s interior is a huge capital expense and it should be built to age gracefully. You want it to depreciate on your balance sheet, not in your guests’ eyes. We designed Nightjar with dark wood panelling and a uniform colour palette. With periodic refinishes over the years, this approach has turned out to mask a multitude of sins and on the surface the bar looks largely unchanged from the day it opened in 2010.

Contrast that with the old LAB bar in Soho, which we acquired as the site for Swift. Opened in 1999, LAB spent a decade as a beacon of London’s early cocktail revival, but 16 years later its mixed media interior - metals, plastics, woods, acrylics – had eroded and patinated at different rates, leaving a mismatched, tired feeling that screamed its age. LAB had a great innings, but by the end, the bar’s very fabric was working against it.

Finally, a strong but simple concept. An idea expressible in one line. Nightjar’s is “live music, deco design, experiential cocktails”. Trailer Happiness: “mid-century modern tiki”. Baba au Rum: “a rum and cocktail society.” A strong concept serves as a beacon for guests and an anchor for every decision you make, from hiring and music to menus and brand collaborations.

Constants

These are principles and values that the enduring owner will cleave to over the long life of their bar. We’ve come to operate on a strict hierarchy: Ambience > Service > Cocktails. This can feel counter-intuitive for ambitious, creative bartenders.

When Marian Beke was our first bar manager, his fanatical, brilliant obsession with drinks propelled us to the top of the 50 Best list. But it was only after he left to open his own bar that he told me he finally realised the truth: the ‘vibes’, the comfort, the lighting, the music and the service are all more important to a guest’s experience than the drink in their hand.

A perfect drink in a room with bad lighting and no atmosphere is a failed experience; an average drink in a magical room is a great night out. This leads directly to accountability. The difference between ‘quite good’ and ‘really great’ is found in the details. The glassware, the ice, the garnish; the lightbulbs, the loo rolls, the spelling on the menu. You can feel a bar where the team isn’t accountable – it’s in the sticky table, the flickering bulb in the corner, the half-hearted greeting. You build a team that takes responsibility for these details with the same intensity as an owner who refuses to open the doors until everything is right.

Next is iteration over innovation. As my friend
Leo Leuci (The Jerry Thomas Project in Rome) recently put it, “creativity is a cage”. If you build
your brand purely on creativity and innovation, you’re on a treadmill, constantly chasing the new. Sooner or later, a more creative, more innovative concept will steal the limelight, and your concept fades into obscurity.

Hype bars attract tourists and award-tickers; long-haul bars serve their regulars. Guests return for the things they love. It’s why the Toronto, the Zombie, and the London Mule have been on our menu since 2011. We don’t change them; we seek to improve them incrementally.

Of course, the team is central to all this. We pride ourselves on staff retention, yet after 15 years, every position has turned over many times. How can a team be both constant and ever-changing? It’s the Ship of Theseus paradox. Individual employees are the ‘matter’ – they will always come and go. The values, the culture and the standards are the ‘form’. As an owner, your job is to protect the form.

Finally, you must maintain strong relationships with brands. Brand investment is crucial for marketing and profitability. But to sustain these relationships, they must be a true partnership, not a simple cash-grab. Richard Wynne has a simple checklist when it comes to band activations: Is it good for our brand? Is it good for our business? Can we execute it at a high level? If the answer to all three isn't ‘yes’, the answer is ‘no’.

Change

Get the foundations and constants right and you’ll survive your first five years. To survive the next 10, you must adapt. The forces of change are relentless. Industry hype is an exhilarating but fleeting sugar rush; very few non-hotel bars over 15 years old remain on the 50 Best list (Thanos’s Baba Au Rum being the honourable exception that proves the rule). The city changes around you; the Shoreditch of 2010, teeming with tech startups, media folk and edgy artists, has been replaced by high-rise towers and a different kind of wealth, the old Victorian warehouses giving way to glass and steel.

Your audience changes. Our original guests are a decade and more older, with mortgages and kids. The new generation replacing them has a different outlook. They are, in my experience, more price-sensitive, less interested in the boozy minutiae of cocktails and more interested in the total experience. And then, of course, there’s geopolitics: history being made around us. We’ve endured the seismic, triple-hit catastrophe of Brexit (which drained the talent pool), Covid (which killed our cashflow), and the Ukraine war (which hurt consumer confidence by driving up inflation).

Faced with all this rolling change, you adapt or die. This is where we’ve had to evolve. Operational practice must sharpen. As Carina Soto Velásquez emphasises, the right accounting partner and a good hold on the numbers is fundamental. We had to
learn the unglamorous side of the business: to forecast, to budget, to obsess over spreadsheets and to adapt staffing levels to match sales, not just our hopes and dreams.

Marketing strategy has had to evolve at a breakneck pace since 2010 as traditional communications approaches have been buffeted by tsunami after tsunami of digital evolution. Press remains important but must now be accompanied by vibrant social media and a clinical approach to SEO and platform marketing.

Finally, management philosophy must mature. Over time we moved away from the old ‘maestro’ model, where everyone is in awe of the main man behind the bar, but they’re also overworked, exhausted and a bit terrified. By developing a more collective, empowered structure, we may have sacrificed a good deal of industry cachet and the cult of the genius bartender that defined our early years. But we gained happiness, retention and, ultimately, a sustainable, resilient business.

Longevity, it seems, isn’t a single act of creation. It’s the daily, gruelling defence of your standards. It’s about protecting the ‘form’ of the bar – its soul, its values – while having the humility to change the ‘matter’. It is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of that selfish pleasure: the stubborn, hard-won privilege of making people happy, day after day, in a room you love.