Mr Foggs Tavern

Victorian Theatre and the Art of the Themed Bar

Mr Fogg's Tavern is a bar in London at 58 St Martin's Lane, with a price tier of 3 and a smart casual dress code. At one end of that spectrum you have technically rigorous programmes that happen to have a concept bolted on; at the other, you have venues where the costume is the product. Mr Fogg's Tavern, at 58 St Martin's Lane in Covent Garden, has always aimed at something between those poles: a genuine investment in Jules Verne-era atmosphere matched with a drinks programme designed to carry the theme without being consumed by it.

The location matters more than it might first appear. St Martin's Lane sits in the corridor between the West End theatre district and the denser bar culture of Soho, which means the venue draws two distinct crowds: pre-theatre drinkers on a schedule, and an evening crowd that has already seen the show and wants somewhere with character. That dual function shapes the pacing of service and the structure of the menu in ways that distinguish it from the city's more single-purpose cocktail destinations.

What the Menu Architecture Tells You

The drinks list at a themed bar is often where the concept either justifies itself or collapses into kitsch. The stronger themed venues in London, Nightjar in Shoreditch, with its era-divided menu, or the more conceptually rigorous approach at 69 Colebrooke Row in Islington, use menu structure as a form of editorial, organising drinks around a logic that teaches the drinker something about the concept. Mr Fogg's Tavern follows a comparable instinct: the menu is organised around the conceit of global travel, with sections that map loosely onto the territories Phileas Fogg passes through in the source novel.

That structure does meaningful work. It gives the bartender a framework for making ingredient decisions, regional spirits, botanicals associated with particular trade routes, colonial-era recipes that carry historical weight, and it gives the drinker a way into the list that doesn't require prior cocktail knowledge. The menu becomes a navigational device, which is a smarter piece of design than it looks. The risk is always that the theme overwhelms the drink; the test of whether a venue like this has got the balance right is whether a well-made cocktail could survive having its name changed to something mundane. At Mr Fogg's Tavern, the evidence suggests the liquid is taken seriously enough to pass that test.

The bar format also speaks to the broader London shift away from the hidden-speakeasy model, the darkened staircase, the password-at-the-door theatrics that dominated the early 2010s, toward something more accessible without abandoning atmosphere. A venue like A Bar with Shapes For a Name represents the technical-programme end of that shift; Mr Fogg's Tavern represents the experience-first end, where the room and the concept do as much work as the glass.

The Room as a Drinks Menu

The physical environment at 58 St Martin's Lane is doing argumentative work. Victorian travel memorabilia, warm lamp light, the accumulated props of a fictional gentleman-adventurer's study: these aren't decorative choices so much as they are positioning statements. The bar is telling you, before you order, that you are somewhere with a point of view, and that the point of view predates the current cocktail revival by about 150 years.

This matters in Covent Garden specifically. The neighbourhood has historically struggled to hold serious drinking venues: high rents, tourist footfall, and the churn of post-theatre demand make it hard to sustain the kind of slow-burn, regulars-first culture that defines the leading bars in Islington or Soho. Mr Fogg's Tavern's solution is to meet the tourist and occasion-drinking demand directly, but to do so with enough craft and atmosphere that the experience doesn't feel like a concession. The result is a bar that locals can bring out-of-towners to without embarrassment, and that visitors to London can walk into without a reservation and come away feeling they've encountered something with genuine character.

Where Mr Fogg's Tavern Sits in the UK Bar Picture

Zooming out from London, the themed or experience-led bar format has strong precedent across the UK. Bramble in Edinburgh built a reputation on the opposite approach, minimal theatre, maximum technique, while the Merchant Hotel in Belfast channels Victorian grandeur through a hotel-bar format with similar period reference points. Schofield's in Manchester occupies the technically rigorous end of the spectrum, Mojo Leeds takes a rock-and-roll approach to occasion drinking, and the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow represents a different tradition entirely: the pub-as-institution, where history is the atmosphere. Mr Fogg's Tavern is closer in spirit to the Merchant Hotel's period sensibility, but operates in a cocktail-bar rather than hotel-bar context, and without the anchoring weight of a historic building to do the atmospheric work for it. That makes the design investment more deliberate, and the execution more exposed.

Internationally, the experience-led cocktail bar format has found confident expressions at venues like Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu, which similarly wraps a serious drinks programme inside a strong conceptual frame, and at L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton, where the concept is wine-focused but the logic of using a strong editorial identity to shape the drinking experience is comparable.

Who Goes and When

The Covent Garden location places Mr Fogg's Tavern in natural alignment with the pre- and post-theatre circuit. The area's major venues, the London Coliseum, the Noel Coward Theatre, the Duke of York's, all sit within a short walk of St Martin's Lane, which means early evening, particularly from around 5pm to 7pm, draws a well-dressed crowd on a schedule. Later in the evening the crowd shifts toward those using the bar as a destination rather than a waypoint.