It should have worked. On every level. Millennial pink neon art, reliably late opening hours, chugging cheap cocktails to disco playlists. Who doesn’t like disco playlists? And yet, after taking the “tough decision” to close four bars, Simmons has gone into administration, owing millions to the bank and tax collectors.
It has gone into administration because it was a bad idea. Simmons was as if some marketing guy sat down with a big tick-list of things people were supposed to enjoy and crammed them all into one place. But the trouble is, like at those American buffets serving every conceivable cuisine from dim sum to deep dish pizza, when you try to do everything you end up doing nothing at all.
When Simmons launched in 2013, I thought it might become a fairly significant part of my life. I missed university and liked late-night pints. But going to Simmons was never something I could quite convince anyone it was worth missing the last Tube for. And if I’m honest, I was also struggling to convince myself. Really, the group was only ever a sad room with a disco ball shining shards of light on bored staff members scrolling on their phones. Another catch-all dumping yard for bridge-and-tunnels types down from the suburbs.
Simmons tried to be everything, and ended up being nothing
Trying to appeal to the broadest possible market has been a cynical and frankly patronising strategy by restaurant groups for some time. See also the Drake & Morgan group, whose restaurants appear to have been designed to be purposefully bland in the same way Simmons was. In the Square Mile, not necessarily known for its cultural cache, there is an expensive bar called The Otherist. It is filled with beige furniture and expensive British seasonal food and offers a more grown up but similarly anodyne experience, so as not to offend anyone. If that sounds like cynicism, it is a feeling echoed to City AM by marketing specialists who work closely on the branding of some of the capital’s best restaurants.
As you’ll have heard, Gen Z are terrible bores and have stopped drinking, plus they go out less. When they do occasionally venture from their sensible lives, they tend to spend a lot of money on truly special experiences. I think you know where this sentence is going, but suffice to say, not enough of them were ending up at Simmons.
Perhaps the surveys say these places designed to please everyone will bring in the coin. But as we’ve seen with Simmons, humans are not quite so gullible.