Fez

A Different Register on the High Street

Margate's bar scene has spent the last decade reshaping itself around the town's cultural renaissance, with the Turner Contemporary's arrival in 2011 acting as an accelerant for independent food and drink. The pattern that followed mirrors what happened in similar post-industrial coastal towns: a first wave of casual-bohemian spaces, then a gradual stratification as operators with more specific ambitions moved in. Fez, at 40 High St, sits in that second wave, occupying a position on one of the town's most direct pedestrian routes and drawing from both the gallery crowd and the weekend visitors who arrive from London on the Southeastern high-speed service in under ninety minutes.

Approaching from the seafront, the High Street shifts character quickly: amusement arcades give way to independent retail and food operators within a few hundred metres. The bar's address places it within easy reach of the Old Town quarter, which concentrates much of Margate's hospitality. That proximity matters for the type of evening Fez seems designed to support: somewhere between the casual drink and the dedicated cocktail sit-down you might plan around in a larger city.

The Back Bar as Editorial Statement

In British coastal towns, spirits curation is rarely the lead story. Most seaside bars compete on draught lines, house wine lists, and volume. The bar formats that manage to build a back bar with genuine depth tend to do so in cities with established cocktail cultures: London operations like 69 Colebrooke Row or Edinburgh's Bramble have spent years building programmes where the spirit selection is the menu's skeleton, not its garnish. Doing something comparable in a town Margate's size requires a different kind of commitment, because the footfall profile is more seasonal and the regular-customer base thinner.

What a spirits-led format signals in this context is a willingness to operate for a narrower audience than the pub circuit demands. The Merchant Hotel in Belfast and Schofield's in Manchester have shown that serious back-bar programming outside London can anchor a venue's identity without requiring a metropolitan catchment. The question for a bar in Margate is whether the summer visitor spike and the year-round creative community together sustain a programme that asks more of the customer than a pint or a house cocktail.

Fez's position on the High Street, rather than tucked into the Old Town's quieter lanes, suggests the answer is to meet a broader audience partway rather than filter hard by format. That is a pragmatic call: the comparison is less with the dedicated cocktail rooms of major cities and more with what Mojo Leeds has done in making spirits-focused programming accessible to a crowd that does not necessarily arrive with a specific drink order in mind.

How Fez Sits in Margate's Bar Circuit

The town's hospitality offer has diversified enough that visitors now have genuine choices at different registers. On the seafront and around the harbour, bars like Buoy and Oyster anchor the more casual coastal tier, while The Lifeboat, recently under new management, represents the kind of neighbourhood pub that has been rethought rather than replaced. Fez occupies a different lane: it is less about the view and the briny air and more about what is behind the bar.

For visitors building an evening across Margate's Old Town and High Street areas, that distinction is useful. The town is small enough that these venues are walkable from each other, which makes sequencing a night here more like planning a circuit in a well-developed neighbourhood than committing to a single destination.

The Coastal Bar Curation Problem

Bars that commit to spirits depth in seasonal markets face a specific challenge: the summer visitor who arrives for a single night wants something recognisable, while the year-round regular develops expectations that generic programming cannot satisfy. The venues that resolve this tension most effectively tend to do so through a back bar that can be read at different levels, with crowd-pleasing formats that also carry enough craft interest to reward the more engaged customer.

Elsewhere in the UK, this balance has been achieved in different ways. Avon Gorge by Hotel du Vin in Bristol benefits from a hotel anchor that smooths seasonal variation. Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow relies on its status as a local institution with genuine historical depth. L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton and Hove has a wine-led format that creates its own distinct peer group on the south coast. Fez does not have a hotel to lean on or decades of local mythology, but the High Street address gives it access to both the passing trade and the returning visitor in a way that a more tucked-away location would not.

Internationally, bars like Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu have demonstrated that serious cocktail programmes can take root in leisure-tourism-heavy markets, provided the curation has enough conviction to build word-of-mouth beyond the immediate catchment. The mechanism is the same whether the city is a Pacific island capital or a Kent seaside town: a specific enough point of view that the bar becomes a destination within the destination.

Planning a Visit

Fez is on High Street in Margate's CT9 1DS postcode, within walking distance of the train station and the Old Town. Margate is served directly from St Pancras International via Southeastern's high-speed service, making it a realistic day or evening trip from London. Given Margate's concentration of hospitality in a compact area, building Fez into a broader evening that moves between the seafront and the High Street is a practical way to understand where it sits in the town's current offer.