Hold your Horses
The new licensee at Soho's renowned Coach & Horses has retained the pub's unique character rather than going for a gastropub make-over, achieving great results, says Adam Edwards
Soho's legendary Coach & Horses always had a unique formula for success. Heavy drinking was encouraged, the landlord was rude and the food was dire. The interior, despite occasional alterations, was 50 years out of date, the busy fitted carpet was dirty, the sconces nicotine-stained and the bar stools broken.
It was a faultless business template.
Earlier this year, the infamous pub was sold to a clean-living, well-spoken publican trained in gastropub lore who unsurprisingly decided to give the old place a face-lift. Re-invention, according to brewery lore, is the mother of necessity and early in November, with the seedy 20th-century boozer of yore banished to purgatory, it re-opened with polished windows and a pristine set of loos.
A week later I went to sup a critical pint in this godly establishment and pushed open the freshly painted, pillar-box red doors for a glass of real ale and a chat with the new man behind the pumps.
"Pull up a pew," said the casually dressed Alastair Choat, pointing towards a bar stool. Its oxblood leatherette upholstery was torn and frayed.
"What do you think of the carpet?" he said as I stared at the swirling Axminster that would not have been out of place in a rundown 30s B&B. "I spent a lot of time searching for it... I needed to get the colours just right."
Bohemian atmosphere
It struck me that the new Coach & Horses was not dissimilar to the old Coach & Horses, but in fairness to the up-to-date model it did not appear to have any chewing gum on the carpet or fag burns on the bar.
"You don't want to mess with a successful formula," said Choat.
A listed Victorian building with iron pillars and Taylor Walker lanterns outside, the pub and its former landlord Norman Balon are the stuff of legend. For 40 years Norman hosted fortnightly lunches in the pub's upstairs dining room for satirical magazine Private Eye and was immortalised as "the rudest landlord in Britain" by journalist Jeffrey Bernard, known to be fond of a drink, in his Spectator column. A subsequent West End play, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, featured Bernard locked in the pub, awaiting rescue by Balon. The play was followed by Norman's ghosted 1991 autobiography You're Barred, You Bastards!
Last May, 79-year-old Balon retired after six decades behind the ashtray-strewn bar and put the pub up for sale. During his time there it had become a second home to generations of bohemian artists, actors and writers. The names of those regulars - Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Francis Bacon, Tom Courtenay, Ian Hislop - slide off the tongue like shots of whisky, a sodden, salty crowd dominated by Balon's charismatic presence, powerful voice and withering four-letter wit. The Coach - or Norman's, as it was known to its regulars - was London's drinking den for the celebrated, the curmudgeonly and the quick-witted.
Doing things differently
And that is how the new landlord hopes it will stay. "Nowadays, all fashionably restored pubs rip up the carpet and take the floor back to the bare boards," said Choat. "But it is not cosy without a carpet, and you lose a lot of the atmosphere. And a pub like this is all about atmosphere."
Choat, a young 40-something, started his career in marketing. He learned the basics of the pub trade with Whitbread Inns, running a cluster of its Hogshead pubs in the Midlands before polishing up that experience with a spell at the upmarket gastropub chain Geronimo Inns.
He took a year off to travel, and when he returned to the UK he decided to buy his own pub. With the backing of two successful criminal barristers, he put in a bid for the Coach & Horses.
"'F**k off - you can't afford it,'" said Balon, when I asked him if I could buy it," said Choat as he pulled on a cigarette and supped his morning coffee from a half-pint glass.
"Now he comes here every day as a customer and says he thinks I have done a fabulous job with the subtleties of change."
Perhaps the only obvious alteration, other than a spring clean and decent loos, is the décor behind the bar. MDF was pulled off to reveal a back-lit plywood and light oak
veneer pelmet with the cut-out words
"Ind Coope" and "Double Diamond". This cheesy bit of '60s breweriana sits perfectly with the '30s pale oak dividers of the main
bar and its unreconstructed post-war bar
furniture.
"I'd have been crazy to have changed it too much," said Choat. "It was such a good business. It was a drinking pub with no music and a great atmosphere. I thought it was better to enhance that social history and atmosphere than try to turn it into a gastropub."
Resisting the gastropub
However, some changes have been made. Food has been introduced, but without any gastropub affectations. Bangers and mash, for example, comes with gravy made from home-made stock and hand-made mash.
"British food without a twist," says Choat.
He is also proud of Norman's Rude Pie (steak and oyster). He has added more pumps for real ale, two ciders on tap and more wines than were offered by Balon who took the view that wine was "to sell, not drink".
"I am turning the pub back to how it was 10 or 15 years ago, when Norman was in his prime," said Choat. "The same rules apply now as then: we do not want bores or too much fanciness."
The sight of a host of grumpy old men piling in for lunchtime sharpeners was testament to its new success. And later, as a score of dissolute Private Eye contributors filed behind the bar to reach the revamped upstairs dining room (repainted in fashionable blue and yellow, but with the same wobbly trestle tables and torn upholstered chairs), I realised there was no question about their loyalty to their new "mine host".
After all, if a landlord is prepared to search high and low for a carpet that looks as if his regulars have spent 40 years retching on it, he must be doing something right.
