The Basement Off Hoxton Square With Fifty Seats and a Phone Number
A tiny cocktail room where the drinks are precise, the door policy is a landline, and everyone gets a chair.
Down a flight of stairs off Hoxton Square, past a signboard easy to walk past twice, there is a room that seats about fifty people and refuses to seat anyone standing. That is the whole premise. Alastair Burgess opened it in 2010 after time behind sticks at Milk & Honey and Quo Vadis, and the motto printed on the menu — 'Great Cocktails, No Wallies' — has done more to shape the room than any design decision.
It made the World's 50 Best Bars every year from 2012 to 2019 and peaked at #6 globally in 2013, which is the kind of pedigree that usually comes with a door list, a mixologist in braces, and a smoke gun. Happiness Forgets has none of those things. It has a low ceiling, a short menu, and a phone.
A basement bar that solved the crowd problem by refusing to have one, and built a fifteen-year cocktail programme on the trust that buys.
Editorial Deep
The Perfect Storm has been on the menu since opening — Skipper's dark rum, honey, lemon, ginger and plum, built without ceremony and served without a garnish that photographs. It is one of two survivors from the 2010 list, and it is the one to order first. Drink it before you look at anything else on the menu, because it tells you what the bar thinks a cocktail should be: balanced, a little sweet, spirit-forward without being aggressive, and finished the second it hits the coaster.
At seven on a weekday the room is half full, softly lit, and quiet enough to hear a conversation two tables over. Come back at ten on a Friday and every one of the fifty seats is taken, the volume has climbed to where you lean in to your companion, and there is nobody standing at the bar because there cannot be. That single rule — no standing — is what the room does that other Hoxton basements don't. The ceiling stays low, the light stays warm, and the density never crosses the line where a bar stops being a bar and becomes a queue with drinks.
The crowd is East London thirties, mostly in pairs, mostly there deliberately rather than because they wandered in from the square. Because everyone has a seat, nobody is hovering with a drink waiting for yours to end, which changes the whole rhythm of the evening — you can sit for two hours without anyone glancing at your table. The trade-off is that a walk-in on a Saturday will almost certainly be turned away, and the friend who suggested meeting for 'a quick drink around eleven' has not understood the format.
A round of two cocktails lands in the ££ band the Top 50 listing puts it in, which for Hoxton in 2026 is fair rather than cheap — you are paying for the seat as much as the drink, and the seat is the point. Individual prices aren't published on the website, so build the evening around three cocktails each and expect the bill to feel appropriate rather than surprising. It is materially less than a round at the Connaught Bar and lands in similar money to Nightjar or Satan's Whiskers, which is the right peer set.
This is the best version of what it is trying to be, which is a small, well-run, unshowy cocktail room where the bartending is the entire product. Come back on a Wednesday at eight with one other person, book a wall table two weeks ahead, order the Perfect Storm and let the bartender pick the second round. Do not come back if you want a bar you can bring six people to on a Saturday without a plan, and do not come back for a nightcap after dinner nearby — by then the room is booked and the phone has stopped answering.
Order this
Drink this.
Perfect Storm — Skipper's dark rum, honey, lemon, ginger, plum
“A fifty-seat basement, No. 6 on the World's 50 Best Bars in 2013, that has quietly out-lasted most of the bars it beat that year.”
Happiness Forgets is not a destination cocktail bar in the theatrical sense — no smoke, no gimmicks, no door drama. It is a fifty-seat basement in Hoxton run on the premise that a cocktail bar should feel like sitting down for a drink with a friend who happens to know what they're doing behind the stick. Book a wall table a week ahead, order the Perfect Storm, expect the bill to land in fair Hoxton territory rather than palace-bar territory. Skip it if you want a nightcap you can walk into or a big group booking on a Saturday. Come for a deliberate two-hour sitting with one other person and it will do exactly what it says on the menu.
The Verdict
