Book Before Six or Walk In for Coffee Instead
Tony Conigliaro's Soho aperitivo counter serves London's most disciplined Negroni in a room the size of a train carriage — with a one-hour clock ticking from the moment you sit.
A Bicerin arrives in a small glass, three layers holding their line — espresso at the base, chocolate above, cream floating on top — and the bartender sets it down without ceremony because at 11am on a Tuesday this is just what happens here. Old Compton Street is doing its usual thing outside. Inside, someone is reading a paper at the counter and the espresso machine is the loudest sound in the room.
Bar Termini opened in 2014 as a Tony Conigliaro project — he of 69 Colebrooke Row — with Marco Arrigo, Illy's head of quality, running the coffee. The premise was Italian: coffee bar by day, aperitivo counter by night, one dedicated Negroni menu holding the whole thing together. It has since spent multiple years inside the World's 50 Best Bars, peaking at #6 in 2018. The room did not get any bigger to accommodate the ranking.
London's most disciplined Negroni is served in a room that gives you sixty minutes to drink it.
Editorial Deep
The Marsala Martini is where the programme shows its hand less cleanly than it should. The venue's own menu now lists a horseradish vodka variant; older Top 50 write-ups describe a Beefeater, Marsala Dolce, dry vermouth and almond bitters build. The recipe has moved and the descriptions haven't fully caught up, so what lands in front of you depends on which version the bar is running that week. Ask before you order it.
The door on Old Compton Street gives away nothing. A narrow frontage, the name in small type, foot traffic thick enough that you can walk past twice looking for it. Inside is a single carriage-shaped room — counter down one side, a handful of small tables against the other, the espresso machine and bottle wall doing most of the visual work. Warm lighting, dark wood, brass fittings on the bar, mirrored back shelves throwing the bottles twice. It reads 1950s Italian without any of the checked-tablecloth cosplay that phrase usually invites.
Daytime is Soho regulars, media freelancers with laptops closed on purpose, and Italians who know what a proper Bicerin costs at home. From about 5pm it turns over to a pre-dinner crowd — theatre-goers stopping for one, couples on a first drink before somewhere on Dean or Frith, industry people from the surrounding restaurants killing an hour before service. It's a talking-volume room rather than a shouting-volume one, which the size enforces as much as the crowd does. Nobody is here to make a night of it, because the room won't let them.
£15.50 for the Spritz Termini is defensible on its own terms: rhubarb cordial made in-house, the Beefeater-Aperol-Prosecco build measured rather than free-poured, and the drink lands the way a Conigliaro drink lands — balanced, cold, no rough edge. That's the going rate for a serious Soho cocktail bar, and cheaper than the hotel-bar tier a Tube stop away. What softens it is the daytime side: a Bicerin and an espresso at the counter is a different bill entirely, and one of the reasons regulars treat this as an all-day room rather than a cocktail-only one.
This is the best version of a small Italian aperitivo bar in London, and it wants to be exactly that — not a session bar, not a destination for a long evening. Come back for the rosato Negroni before a Soho dinner, or come back at 11am for a Bicerin and a paper. Don't come back expecting to settle in for three rounds with four friends: the room won't hold you, the clock won't let you, and the format isn't built for it. The occasion is one drink, done properly, on the way to somewhere else — or the coffee-bar version of the same idea, earlier in the day.
Order this
Drink this.
Rosato House Negroni; Spritz Termini; Bicerin
“London's most disciplined Negroni, in a room that seats you for exactly one hour.”
Go for a rosato Negroni before dinner or a Bicerin mid-morning. Book via Tock if you want a table after 4pm; walk in earlier in the day when the coffee-bar half is running. Skip if you want a group of six settling in for the night — the room and the format both refuse it.
The Verdict
