Twenty-Nine Years of Table Football on Exmouth Market
No reservations. Ever.
The click-clack of a spinning rod, a plastic ball rattling into a wooden goal, and someone in the corner arguing about whether a wrist flick counts. That's the room before you've clocked the World Cup flags pinned across the ceiling, the zinc bar, the bright orange chairs, the Formica tables that have been here since Tony Blair's first term.
Café Kick opened on Exmouth Market in 1997 and helped start the al-fresco run that made this street what it is. Nearly three decades on, it's a Euro-chic sports bar built around three vintage babyfoot tables — the spiritual home of table football in London, and, as of this summer, a widely cited pick as the city's best bar for 2026. The Shoreditch sibling, Bar Kick, is the bigger sister. This one is the original.
A bar doing the same specific thing on the same specific street since 1997 is now, deservedly, the most talked-about room in London.
Editorial Deep
Outside the happy-hour window, order the Mahou on draft. It arrives in the traditional 350ml Spanish glass, cold enough to fog, and it is the drink the bar is built around. There is a full cocktail list and a spirits selection behind the zinc bar for anyone who wants them, but the room's centre of gravity is the beer, and pretending otherwise misreads the place.
Conversation works at a normal volume until about seven, when the babyfoot rods take over the acoustic register and everyone leans in a little closer. It is a small space — Formica tables inside, a zinc bar, bright orange chairs, ceilings papered with World Cup flags from tournaments most drinkers here can't quite date. Screens carry live football when there is football to carry.
Clerkenwell locals, Exmouth Market regulars, a steady rotation of media and design workers from the surrounding offices, and — reliably — a group of Europeans who have found the closest thing London has to their local. Match nights bring a broader football crowd; happy hour brings whoever finished work at four. The mix is the point, and the energy runs warm rather than rowdy, which is why the babyfoot tables get a queue rather than a fight.
Send someone to do exactly that visit and they will not come back complaining.
This is the best version of what a neighbourhood sports bar with table football can be, and it has been for twenty-nine years without materially changing the formula. Come back on a weekday at four for the happy hour and a game, or on a match night if the fixture matters. Don't come if your party is nine — the group cap is eight and it is not negotiable — and don't come expecting to book, because the bar takes no reservations under any circumstances, not for live sport, not for birthdays, not for anything. Walk in, or walk on.
Order this
Drink this.
bottled Brahma or Mahou 5 during 4-7pm happy hour; Mahou on draft in the 350ml Spanish glass otherwise; pan con tomate and chorizo in red wine to share
“Twenty-nine years of the same specific thing, done well, on the right street. A widely cited best bar in London for 2026, and hard to argue with.”
Café Kick has been on Exmouth Market since 1997 and it is still the spiritual home of babyfoot in London. Come for the four-to-seven window and a game, bring four rather than nine (the group cap is eight and firm), and understand walking in is the only booking mechanism — no reservations under any circumstance. On any other terms it's a competent neighbourhood bar; on its own terms, it is one of the most enjoyable rooms in central London.
The Verdict
