Secret bars: what the word is supposed to mean

The word has been used badly for a decade. A bar with a bookcase at the entrance and two hundred people inside is not a secret bar; it is a bar with a bookcase. The door is the smallest part of the idea.

What the door is actually for

It is a valve. A room that cannot be seen from the street fills at the speed people find it, which is slow enough that the bar can keep up and the music can stay at a level where the room still works.

Take the door away and everything downstream of it changes: the queue appears, the volume goes up to cover the noise of the queue, and by midnight nobody remembers what the place was supposed to be.

How to tell

Three questions. Can you see it from the street? Is there a queue? Can you talk at the bar after midnight? A real one answers no, no and yes.

A fourth, quieter test: does the staff tell you what to order, or ask you what you feel like? Rooms built around a concept do the first. Rooms built around a bar do the second.

Ours

Inside Mezontle, at the end of a passage, fluted glass and brass with no plaque. Twelve tables, fourteen seats, four nights a week. The list is the door policy and there is nothing else to get past.