Feature: The hotel pub

If you were to look at one of the big operational trends of the post-Covid era, then pub businesses adding rooms to their offer would certainly feature in the top five. From small multiple operators running venues in the UK’s countryside specifically choosing sites with accommodation potential, all the way up to the Young’s and Fuller’s of this world – who both have ‘pubs and hotels’ in their descriptions – having rooms at the inn has become essential to so many make-ups. 

But while ‘pubs with rooms’ are so commonplace these days, ‘rooms with pubs’ is something we’re not as used to seeing. By this I mean a hotel-led operation adding a pub to its F&B offer, either as a branded space within the main building or, like the one I visited last month, a removed area that could just as easily operate on its own without 143 rooms sat above it. 

In London, there are a few examples where a large hotel group has created a pub to complement its accommodation – there’s the Blue Boar Pub in Westminster, National Pub & Bar Awards winner and part of Hilton’s Conrad London St. James; The Wigmore, which is The Langham London’s very own (and very impressive) boozer; or, how about the very imaginatively named The London Pub, which sits alongside Imperial’s Royal National Hotel? What all three of these have in common is that the hotels sit at the higher end of the bed-for-the-night scale, which is fine, and the pub models created suit them all perfectly. However, upon entering any of them, you are aware that it is an add-on to something much larger.

This was why I was so pleasantly surprised when arriving at Clerkenwell’s Hat & Feathers last month, as when I first caught site of the exterior, it appeared to be a pub in its own right – there was no visible suggestion that it was part of IHG Hotels & Resorts’ Hotel Indigo. It was just a cracking looking pub on the corner of a busy London junction. In fact, before IHG launched its brand-new hotel in June this year, it actually opened its Hat & Feathers doors a week before.  

“I mean, it’s fantastic,” says James Olivier, general manager of Hotel Indigo. “Because it’s the face of the hotel. This is such a prominent site on the corner and such a lovely historic building as well. It’s fantastic to have a British pub as part of what we’re doing. I mean, most hoteliers would bite your hand off for a real English pub in their venue, so we’re really lucky to have it. It’s Grade II-listed, it dates back to 1860, so there is a little history to the pub as well. The owners have done an amazing job restoring it to what you see today, as it had been closed for 13 or so years.”

The Hat & Feathers, next to Hotel Indigo

Let’s rewind  

It was back in June when IHG announced the opening of Hotel Indigo London Clerkenwell, marking the latest addition to the Hotel Indigo portfolio, which has grown into a global collection of uniquely designed hotels which are based around their local surroundings. Clerkenwell is no exception. Located at 2 Clerkenwell Road, just a five-minute walk from Farringdon Station, the 143-room boutique hotel draws inspiration from Clerkenwell’s rich heritage of clockmakers, goldsmiths and architects. Away from the pub, each guest room – which we were able to have a look at – combines design elements, textured finishes and patterns all intrinsic to local legacy. This approach is then transferred to the design of Indigo’s F&B offer. 

Its Sabini Bar, for example, is named after famous 1920s Clerkenwell mobster Charles Sabini. In contrast to the classic qualities of the Hat & Feathers, this space – which is much more hinged to the flow of the wider hotel – provides a refined room for signature cocktails, specialty coffee and a decent wine list. If you’re a hotel guest, you’re more likely to discover Hat & Feathers via the Sabini Bar, as they share a doorway, meaning the pub footfall from hotel guests comes away from the high street entrance, which does its job of drawing in those who aren’t staying the night.

“We want to try to appeal to the local market as well, and then also to our residents in the hotel,” adds Olivier. “With the different outlets we’ve got, we’re lucky, as we’re trying to get a really nice gastropub feel in here. Good food, a concise menu, but well done. Most made in-house. We’ve got a fantastic new chef on as well.”

The chef he speaks of is Stefano Cirillo, whose previous posts include The Lime Tree Hotel and south east London’s Lantana Café. Ahead of my chat with Olivier, I was able to order some food from the Hat & Feathers menu, which, as the general manager says, is concise and reads very simply. If you were playing pub menu bingo, it wouldn’t be long before your card was full – burger, fish and chips, pie, pork belly, steak, a vegan pasta, a mushroom risotto and, the outlier, a poke bowl. In what was an almost snob-fuelled regret of a judgement, I did immediately assume that with such a menu, perhaps the quality wasn’t going to be as high as the rest of the hotel’s investment. How wrong I was. After a near-perfect scotch egg (BINGO!), I thoroughly slowed my day down with a freshly baked chicken and mushroom pie, roasted veg and some small-cut potatoes. A thing of beauty, honestly. Much like a pub burger, a pub pie can be a roll of the dice, but not at the Hat & Feathers – fair play to Cirillo and his team. The food is right up there, which, given the restaurants in the area, I suppose it has to be.

“You can see the flare Stefano is bringing to the kitchen,” says Olivier. “With the menu, while it’s traditional dishes, I think they’re done extremely well. It’s just good produce, well done, well cooked. Sometimes hotels have a reputation of not being great places for the food and beverage side of things. But here, I think we’re very lucky in who we found and what we’re going to go with down the line.”

The pub dates back to 1860

In the zone

As well as Sabini and Hat & Feathers, Hotel Indigo has its restaurant Wilderness Kitchen, which, like its pub sister, can either be accessed from within the hotel or from the high street. Again, as I arrived from the tube, I had spotted Wilderness and assumed it was nothing to do with the hotel or the pub. Cirillo oversees the food here too, which celebrates Mediterranean-inspired, vegetarian-friendly cuisine made with seasonal British produce – a nod to the neighbourhood’s Italian roots and proximity to Smithfield Market. 

When chatting to Olivier about each F&B zone, I commend one of his team, Amid, who initially greeted me at the Hat & Feathers. He was sharp, attentive, friendly – all the makings of someone who believes in hospitality. Olivier tells me he has 45 full-time team members, as well as those who are outsourced for turning rooms, cleaning and the like. I offer that 45 isn’t that many, considering how much the hotel offers.

“We’ve got one F&B team who intersperse across the outlets and mix around,” he tells me. “Some people are better suited to working with each other, other characters work well in a pub environment rather than, say, a restaurant environment. But all the team have been trained across all the outlets, so can and move around. It’s very useful for business reasons as well. You need someone with character to talk to whoever walks in from whichever country in the world, plus the local coming through the door for a pint on a Monday night. That’s the team.”

Moving the team around each zone is one thing, but of course Olivier still needs to trade each area to its maximum potential. With a background in hotels, this is his first time overseeing a pub – a different beast to filling nearly 150 bedrooms on a regular basis, but a beast, nonetheless. How is the pub trading so far? Well, just like most city centre venues it seems. Thursday is the new Friday, as workers are working from home on that final day of the week. It hasn’t taken Olivier long to track the highs and lows of trading hours, and he is now in the process of creating events to attract non-staying guests, as well as marketing initiatives to the local university. Despite the history of the building, Hat & Feathers is a young business in its newest iteration, so it’s early days yet for Olivier and the team.

“We’re five months old, so we’re still ramping up our business from the hotel side of things,” he concludes. “I think there’s scope for us to play with the pub a bit more, as I say, putting some nice initiatives in like the pub quiz. We’ve got these two lovely meeting rooms upstairs, so just trying to make sure they are used more often as well, so we need to let people know what we’ve got. They’re lovely rooms. There’s a charm to this place, so it’s just trying to get behind that and boxing out around that USP. Then, we’ll see how the next year plays out.” 

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