Let’s take you back to August. It’s a pleasant summer’s evening in Walle, Bremen’s West End, inside the bar Hart Backboard on the corner of the main drag into the city centre. It’s our first time here and we’re enjoying it a lot.
The bar is two-thirds full by 10pm, a nice balance. The ambience is chatty and convivial, there’s a warm timbre to the hubbub murmuring around a room lit with candles, fairy lights and globe lamps each adding flicker, twinkle and glow.
Despite being new to the city and to the bar, service is gracious and welcoming, the drinks order delivered directly without fuss, accompanied by some free salty snacks on the side, a small touch some overlook. Their beer selection is nothing specialist, though perhaps a little above Bremen’s average. A Franziskaner wheat beer from the tap arrives, tasting fresh. This still can be a very enjoyable beer if looked after, well-poured and – important for Hefeweizen – drunk at the right occasion. A warm summer evening is certainly that.
Scanning the room, soaking up the environment, it is clear the place is more than the sum of its parts. The care and love lavished on the place (which is no upscale bar) in order for it to feel lived-in, cosy, a venue with its own identity, somewhere you’d happily spend a longer time in, is palpable. The culmination of hundreds of small choices taken over years, the majority of which have added lustre to its appeal.
It is especially notable that Hart Backboard attracts a broad range of ages and gender without either inoculating itself to the point of blandness or over-trying. The very presence of a diverse audience burnishes it further.
There was no rule-book, no guideline for this business to follow that guaranteed this, instead their success is realised through strong intuition, careful judgement and a desire to please.
At these times it is worth pausing to appreciate the soft skills that have brought this about.
For just as there are ways to improve an experience, there are many more ways to ruin it.
All of us have visited venues which may offer a wall of beers, or a historic interior, or live events 7 days a week, but are let down by the poor quality of hospitality, the lack of any sense of welcome, a sense of churn and listlessness (sometimes pure disinterest, sometimes outright arrogance). The venue can be under or overheated, the music inappropriate for the setting or the acoustics in the room incompatible with having a large number of people in it on top of loud music. In late summer to early Autumn flies gather around kitchens and dishwashers spill over into the pub and are not dealt with, meaning you can be swatting these annoyances away well into winter. Sticky tables and floors in the wrong kind of bar shows a neglect, unloved items that change a pub from that nice “worn-in” feel to purely clapped-out. Bad smells. Staff indiscriminately spraying pink industrial disinfectant on the tables next to you. There can also be a meanness to an operation, lacking any attempt to foster the loyalty that ensures repeat custom. No samples, no deals, no loyalty cards, rules placed everywhere in the case of one notorious British brewery and pub chain. the bar almost acting as a barrier between you and the pub you want to love.
These type of places are unfortunately everywhere.
So, in an era where many are complaining about minimum wage rises affecting hospitality (do hospitality workers not spend their money in pubs?) while simultaneously complaining the same workers are staying at home, there are serious arguments that the perspective and emphasis needs to change, focusing on the power dynamics that disadvantage small independent pubs and the profiteering that burden pubs with expensive overheads. In difficult trading conditions there are also small changes pub owners can make, often costing little to nothing which help give customers a reason to return.
Hart Backboard gets this. So do many others. For the sake of throwing examples around – The Fountain in Leek, Piwna Stopa in Poznan, Nabuchodonosor in Toulouse.
Soft skills & small changes improve your pub or bar’s ambience and its sense of welcome, fostering loyalty; broadening and deepening your audience. Many of the best bar experiences we’ve had and the most successful, thriving businesses we’ve visited have been among the most humble and the most giving.
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