Soho Theatre Bar, Soho, W1

Official site of Soho Theatre Bar - sohotheatre.com

Official site of Soho Theatre Bar - sohotheatre.com

This bar, in the foyer of the Soho Theatre, is open to passers-by and was doing a cracking trade when we stopped in ahead of a recent show. It’s a simple, almost square, room with distressed wood flooring, a high sloping ceiling and walls painted in neutral shades. The left side of the room acts as a natural walkway from the entrance to the theatre, but to the right of this, there is an open plan seating area with padded bench booths down the end wall, some more padded benches in the centre of the room, used to partition the seating area from the bar and walkway, and a few tables and low stools under the large floor to ceiling front windows. The servery is on the rear wall and has a red Adnams branded counter front and plain modern bar back. Some support pillars to the front of the room have been covered in old flyers for past shows, as has a large section of the left-hand wall, whilst over to the right there is a nice collection of framed portraits of various stage performers underneath a Soho Theatre logo. A load of baubles have been strung across the ceiling, which has large neon letters spelling out the word ‘SOHO’ across it. A TV screen to one side of the room remained unused in favour of background music which was quiet enough to get completely lost once a few people had arrived. A sign above the entrance reads ‘Café, Bar, Restaurant’, but I didn’t see any evidence of food, with no menus and no-one eating except a bloke who’d brought a packed lunch with him. There are two handpulls on the bar, but both had turned Adnams pump clips – one of which was Ghost Ship – leaving a keg selection to pick from instead. Keg beers are also exclusively Adnams, with four to pick from in all. I tried the Blackshore Stout, which was fairly mediocre but better than the usual ubiquitous stout you usually find in places like this. The staff were all very friendly and were handing out free lateral flow tests to anyone who wanted to go into the theatre but hadn’t taken one prior to arriving. I had no expectation for this place, but thought it was a pretty decent little theatre bar with the most welcome bonus of having some cask ale available, albeit not on this particular visit. There are obviously plenty of proper boozers around Soho that are far more worthy of your time, but if you’re coming to see a performance, or just really fancy sampling something from Southwold’s finest, you can’t go too far wrong here.