Bar Termini

Where Soho Meets the Italian Bar Tradition

Old Compton Street does not do quiet. Soho's most persistent thoroughfare runs at a low-grade hum from morning through to last orders, and the bars and cafés along it have long had to earn their place against considerable competition. Bar Termini earns its at number 7, a narrow address that draws from a tradition much older than the cocktail bar format that surrounds it on either side: the Italian bar di quartiere, the neighbourhood bar that moves from espresso at the counter in the morning to an Aperol-hour crowd by early evening without ever changing its register.

That format — call it the all-day Italian bar — is rare in London. The city defaults to category specialisation: a coffee shop is a coffee shop, a cocktail bar opens at five, a wine bar occupies the middle hours. Bar Termini collapses that logic. Its doors open at 07:30 on weekdays, serving espresso-led drinks before most of the cocktail industry has reached for its first jigger, and it remains open until 23:30 Sunday through Thursday, midnight on Friday and Saturday. The Sunday start is pushed to 10:30. It is, practically speaking, one of the most accessible award-holding bars in the city when measured by sheer operating window.

What the Awards Signal About the Peer Set

Bar Termini's position in the World's 50 Best Bars rankings , #6 in 2018, #9 in 2017, #30 in 2016 , places it in a small cohort of London bars that have held top-tier international recognition over multiple consecutive years rather than appearing on a single list and disappearing. The 2025 Top 500 Bars listing at #130 reflects the natural drift of a bar that has been operating long enough for newer programmes to attract fresh votes, while the core recognition remains intact. That trajectory is not a decline story; it is the profile of a bar with an established identity rather than a programme chasing ranking attention through annual reinvention.

For context within London, the bars that have held comparable multi-year positions in international rankings include 69 Colebrooke Row and A Bar with Shapes For a Name, both of which approach programme design with similar discipline. What separates Bar Termini from most of its Soho neighbours is format specificity: the Italian bar model is not a theme applied to a conventional cocktail programme, it is the structural logic of the whole operation.

A Google rating of 4.6 across 1,407 reviews is worth noting in this context. Volume at that score suggests the bar is receiving general public traffic, not just bar-industry visitors and competition judges. That breadth of approval across a non-specialist audience is harder to sustain than a niche following, and it speaks to the format's legibility beyond the cocktail community.

The Collaborative Architecture of an All-Day Bar

Running a bar that operates coherently across twelve to sixteen hours requires a different kind of internal coordination than a dinner-service cocktail programme. The Italian all-day model demands that the team read the room across genuinely different contexts: the solo espresso drinker at 8am, the working lunch crowd, the aperitivo window in the early evening, the late-night drinker who arrives after dinner elsewhere. Each requires different pacing, different drink architecture, different front-of-house calibration.

This is the editorial angle that makes Bar Termini genuinely interesting as an operational model. The collaboration between the drinks programme and the service team is not structured around a single format peak, as it would be in a restaurant with a fixed service time. It has to flex constantly. Bars in the same Soho orbit , Academy and Amaro are nearby reference points , operate within narrower time windows, which simplifies that coordination considerably. Bar Termini's team is solving a harder problem.

The aperitivo format that structures the core drinking hours at Bar Termini is also worth understanding as a category position rather than a style choice. Aperitivo drinks , Negroni variations, vermouth-forward builds, spritz formats , occupy a lower ABV and lower price bracket than a full tasting-menu cocktail programme. They are designed for repeat ordering and social drinking rather than the contemplative single-serve experience of a high-concept cocktail bar. That is a deliberate choice about who the bar is for and how it wants to be used, and it is what makes the format translate across the day.

Soho as a Bar Location

Soho has been the centre of London's bar culture for long enough that its address premium is understood by anyone who has tried to open in it. The Old Compton Street stretch specifically carries associations with the neighbourhood's long history as a gathering place for creative and counter-culture communities. A bar that opens at 07:30 on this street is participating in that history in a way that a late-opening-only venue cannot: it is present for the neighbourhood's actual daily life, not just its evening performance.

The compactness of the space is consistent with the Italian bar model, where counter culture , leaning, standing, brief exchange , is valued over the distributed seating of a lounge programme. That physical format also makes Bar Termini a genuine all-hours address for the neighbourhood rather than a destination that requires forward planning. You can pass it, decide to stop, and find a place at the counter without the booking architecture that the city's most in-demand programmes now require.

The Broader UK Bar Context

Bar Termini's Italian-format model has few direct equivalents across the UK bar scene. Bars with comparable international recognition in other cities , Bramble in Edinburgh, Merchant Hotel in Belfast, Schofield's in Manchester , all operate within more conventional single-format frameworks. The all-day Italian bar as a category barely exists outside London, and even within London it remains a niche. Mojo Leeds, Horseshoe Bar Glasgow, and L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton each carry their own distinct bar identities, but none maps to the bar di quartiere model that Bar Termini has imported and sustained at an internationally recognised level.

That specificity of format, held consistently over nearly a decade of operation, is what the awards record is really documenting. Top-6 in the World's 50 Best Bars is not a credential that accrues from generic quality; it reflects a programme with a clear identity that the bar industry has found worth voting for repeatedly. For a reader trying to understand where Bar Termini sits in the London and UK bar canon, the Italian format commitment is the load-bearing fact. Everything else , the hours, the location, the Google rating, the multi-year ranking presence , is evidence in support of it. See our full London restaurants guide for broader context on how Bar Termini fits into the city's wider drinking and dining scene, and for routes to bars across price points and formats that sit in its neighbourhood orbit.

Know Before You Go

Frequently Asked Questions

What do regulars order at Bar Termini?

The bar's awards history and Italian format point clearly toward the aperitivo and espresso ends of the menu as its anchors. Negroni variations and vermouth-forward builds are the core of what the Italian bar di quartiere model delivers, and Bar Termini's multi-year placement in the World's 50 Best Bars , including a #6 ranking in 2018 , reflects how that programme has been received at industry level. Espresso drinks are available from opening, making morning visits as viable as evening ones for experiencing what the bar actually does.

What is the standout thing about Bar Termini?

The format combination is what separates it from the surrounding Soho bar scene. A World's 50 Best Bars #6-ranked venue that opens at 07:30 and operates on a walk-in basis across a sixteen-hour window is a specific and relatively rare proposition in London. The city has no shortage of internationally recognised cocktail bars, but very few hold that level of award recognition while also functioning as an all-day neighbourhood address. That operational range, sustained at consistent quality over multiple years, is the bar's most distinctive characteristic.