A Trip to Goodbye Horses

‘Listening Bars' have become a bit of a recent buzzword in trendy areas of London, New York and countless other hip places that serve interesting wine and tinned fish on sourdough, attracting a new breed of audio-obsessed guest who, occasionally, might be disappointed when they realise that Goodbye Horses isn’t a listening bar, but is actually a bar—with proper food—that happens to play good music. 

“We’ve somehow made it onto a lot of lists for London’s Best Listening Bars,” says co-founder Alex Young, and we hate to disappoint, but that’s not what we are. We do have a lot of records, and a sound system, but we want people to be able to chat and not get too caught up in whatever is playing. Have dinner, stay late. It should be fun.”

Opened last summer on a quiet stretch of residential road in De Beauvoir in North London, there’s an element of subversion in the Goodbye Horses approach. The Instagram features a single post—a painted moon that advertises the bar’s sister ice cream shop, The Dreamery. The website doesn’t have a menu and, with its location, a lovely corner building that looks more like a house belonging to a local eccentric with great taste, it’s not in an especially obvious spot. And, yes, the name is taken from the Q Lazzurus song.

“It took us three or four years to the find the space,” says Young, who runs the operation (including The Dreamery, and an attached coffee shop called Day Trip Coffee) along with George de Vos, a wine expert who oversees a cellar of more than 500 bottles, mostly as low intervention as possible, a concept called Zero Zero. The chef Jack Coggins is in the kitchen. 

“We wanted it to feel like a place that people would discover themselves a little bit. Off the beaten track.”

The interior was designed by the architect Leopold Banchini. There’s a huge low oak bar cut from a single tree, stone floors and an immediately eye-catching folkloric mural by the artist Lisa Stein (niece of Rick, but also a very talented painter). 

“What we want from it seems to change, and it’s definitely different from when we started out,” says Young. “Natural wine in London is established now,” adds de Vos, “but it can still be intimidating. A wine bar, needs to be as approachable as possible, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you see a wine list that you don’t recognise, so it’s our job to make things relaxed and easy for our guests.”

Our visit is marked by a summer storm brewing, with thunder growling overhead and heavy rain. On sunnier days the front garden looks like it might be one of the city’s nicest places for a drink. It also happens to have been designed by the Chelsea Flower Show gold-medal-winning gardener Ji-hae Hwang. 

You can tell that a lot of thought has gone into it all. Both Young and de Vos cite institutions like Brooklyn’s The Four Horsemen and Amsterdam’s Glouglou as places that wear their natural wine credentials lightly, appealing to both the immediate neighbourhood and more serious drinkers and diners.  

“Having this area around the door, where people can catch up after work, or drop in for a coffee in the morning, or sit down and order a proper meal and a bottle of wine. We’re trying to create a dialogue between all of those things,” says Young.

“Fundamentally, we want this to be a place where people can have a good time. You can’t lose sight of that."