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“I look at bars like genres of music.”
Sly Augustin
The current Covid-19 pandemic has hit the bar industry particularly hard. Bars are gathering places, and people gathering is the threat that necessitated quarantine and sequester orders all across the United States and around the world. This crisis is international, and we wanted to find out if the challenges facing bars in America were similar to those faced in other countries.
To do that, we spoke with Sly Augustin, owner of Trailer Happiness in London. Trailer Happiness is a fantastic bar, and one that is generally considered to have sparked the modern Tiki Revival in the UK. We spoke a lot about what is happening to the bar industry currently, what we think people will do in the future, and the similarities between being forced to shut down our bars in two different countries.
“People are sticky. If you have a base of people in your bar early, it helps you get to critical mass.”
Sly Augustin
This is the first of a two-part conversation. Some highlights include:
- Thoughts on the spread of Covid-19 as bars reopen
- BLM protests in London
- The current state of bars in the UK
- How bars are like genres of music
- Making the best bar for your people
- Will bottled cocktails save us?
- What do you do in your bar when you can’t make drinks in it?
- Opening with limited capacity
- Improving the bar to improve the experience
- Are people ever going to go back to normal?
- The history of Trailer Happiness
- The origin story of Sly Augustin
- On Seeing the Future
- How Air Crash investigations relate to the bar business
- What London might look like as it reopens
- Strategies to save us
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