SCHOFIELD’S BAR is coming to Covent Garden.
Founders Joe and Daniel Schofield have built one of the most celebrated cocktail bars in Britain in Manchester’s Sunlight House. Since opening in 2021, they’ve created a beloved bar that boasts back-to-back wins at the CLASS Bar Awards before topping the UK’s Top 50 Cocktail Bars list in 2024.
SCHOFIELD’S BAR will open its second venue at 1A Earlham Street in Seven Dials during the first half of November. Spread across a ground-floor bar, terrace and basement, it will accommodate approximately 85 to 100 guests.
It is a considerable step for a business so closely associated with one city, one building and the two brothers who put their name above its door. Now they are preparing to find out what travels.
Meet Joe and Daniel Schofield
No strangers to the capital
Joe says it’s not SCHOFIELD’S London Edition.
“It’s SCHOFIELD’S BAR. The values will be exactly the same, and there will be plenty that guests recognise, but London needs its own personality.”
The Schofield brothers are no strangers to London. Before returning to Manchester, Joe and Daniel worked in some of the world’s leading bars, including The American Bar at The Savoy, Coupette and Singapore’s Tippling Club. Joe became the first bartender to win both the Altos Bartenders’ Bartender Award at The World’s 50 Best Bars and International Bartender of the Year at the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards.
“Manchester is home and always will be, but London has played a huge part in both of our careers,” Joe says. “Some of the bars and bartenders we encountered in London shaped the way we think about hospitality. So coming back as owners rather than employees feels significant.”
Not London for the sake of it
There was no great rush to return. The brothers spent around three years looking for the right site and were prepared to abandon the idea if they could not find a building capable of becoming a SCHOFIELD’S.
“We didn’t want to open in London simply for the sake of saying we’d opened in London,” Joe says. “Five years in Manchester has given us the confidence that SCHOFIELD’S BAR has an identity beyond the physical room.”
Sunlight House is a Grade II-listed Art Deco building that helped define the Manchester bar. Its 1930s architecture provides a natural setting for SCHOFIELD’S combination of classic cocktails, crisp service and old-school elegance.
The Covent Garden venue, designed with Richard Lockey of MDA Architects, will follow the same principle. Beautiful materials, considered proportions and exceptional service matter more than reproducing a particular decade.
“We have never wanted to build a themed bar,” Joe says. “What interests us about the great bars of the 1930s isn’t that everything looked like the 1930s; it’s that many of them were built with an ambition to last.”
Ninety per cent SCHOFIELD’S BAR
The drinks will provide the most obvious connection between the two bars. Approximately 90% of the Manchester offering will initially appear in London, including signatures such as the SCHOFIELD’S Irish Coffee.
There will also be a smaller collection developed specifically for Covent Garden, but novelty for its own sake is not on the agenda.
“The important thing is that every drink earns its place rather than being different simply for the sake of being different,” Joe says.
There’s more than enough drinks built to satisfy an influencer’s ring light before anyone considers who is ordering a second one. SCHOFIELD’S reputation rests instead on classics, making apparently simple drinks with unreasonable care.
“A cocktail can have three ingredients and still require enormous attention to make brilliantly every single time,” Joe says. “We’ve learnt not to chase trends. When we opened SCHOFIELD’S, we wanted to build something that could still feel relevant in ten or twenty years.”
The food will remain similarly focused. Expect British cheese and charcuterie, olives, popcorn and a small selection of sweets. No fully fledged restaurant beside a cocktail programme.
“The principle is food that works naturally with drinks and doesn’t turn SCHOFIELD’S into a restaurant,” Joe explains.
A bar for Covent Garden
Seven Dials is a very different proposition from Manchester’s Little Quay Street. Tourists, theatre crowds, local residents, office workers and bartenders finishing their shifts all pour through a comparatively small patch of the West End.
SCHOFIELD’S answer to which of them it wants to attract is simple: everyone.
“A great bar should be able to look after all of those people without making any of them feel as though the space isn’t for them,” Joe says.
The bar will remain predominantly walk-in, with only a small number of reservations accepted each day. That policy protects some of the spontaneity which has made Manchester successful, but applying it to a high-footfall Covent Garden site will bring different operational pressures.
“Preparation and organisation become even more important because speed shouldn’t come at the expense of hospitality or quality,” Joe says.
The physical layout should help. Guests will be divided between the ground floor, basement and terrace, creating several distinct environments within the same venue. Someone stopping for a quick Martini at the bar need not have the same evening as a group settling into the basement for several rounds.
The challenge is ensuring both receive the same standard of attention.
“If somebody comes in for one Martini on a busy Friday night, we still want them to feel as looked after as somebody spending an entire evening with us,” Joe says. “The challenge is making sure that as the volume increases, the experience doesn’t become transactional.”
The upcoming SCHOFIELD’S BAR in Covent Garden
You cannot put hospitality in a manual
The biggest question facing any second venue is not whether the drinks can be reproduced. Recipes, glassware and preparation systems travel rather well. A bar’s personality is more awkward luggage.
Joe and Daniel will remain actively involved in both venues, with Jack Mitchell and Liza Kholodna among the Manchester colleagues joining the London leadership team. They will be joined by new recruits from London’s hospitality community.
“We don’t want to parachute an entire Manchester operation into Covent Garden,” Joe says. “It’s important to have people who already understand SCHOFIELD’S BAR and can help transfer that culture, but it’s equally important that London develops its own team and its own identity.”
For the brothers, maintaining personal service across two venues will depend more on recruitment than scripts.
“You can’t write hospitality into a manual and assume that solves it,” Joe says. “We don’t want the team reciting scripts. We want personalities behind the bar.”
Remembering a name, topping up water without interrupting a conversation, and recognising whether a guest wants another drink or the bill are human judgements. Individually, they are tiny. Together, they determine whether a bar feels hospitable or merely efficient.
Protecting Manchester
Expansion stories tend to concentrate on the new opening, while the original venue loses attention. The brothers are alert to that danger. The Manchester bar will not change, and neither Joe nor Daniel intends to step away from it. Waiting five years before opening another venue has allowed them to build a leadership structure capable of supporting both.
“Manchester isn’t the prototype for London,” Joe says. “It’s SCHOFIELD’S BAR Manchester, and we’re enormously proud of what the team has built there.”
The second opening should also create opportunities for existing staff to move into senior positions or spend time working between the two cities.
“Ultimately Manchester has to continue getting better,” Joe says. “If London succeeds and Manchester suffers, that isn’t success for us.”
Nor is Covent Garden the first stage of a plan to place a SCHOFIELD’S in every city.
“The name is ours, so we’re naturally protective of it,” Joe says. “We don’t want SCHOFIELD’S BAR to become a format that can simply be rolled out wherever there’s an available unit.”
The cocktail Ray’s Mistake. Havana Club, Beefeater, Passion Fruit, Pineapple, Honey, Lime, Bitters, Soda.
Unmistakably SCHOFIELD’S BAR
London already has one of the world’s great cocktail scenes. The brothers are not claiming to arrive with the missing piece. What they can offer is their own interpretation of the classic cocktail bar. The question is, can that SCHOFIELD’S feeling can make the journey from Sunlight House to Seven Dials?
“If you walk into London and think we’ve simply copied and pasted Manchester, we probably haven’t done our job properly,” Joe says. “But if you spend an evening there and leave feeling that you’ve unmistakably been in SCHOFIELD’S, then we have.”
SCHOFIELD’S BAR is due to open at 1A Earlham Street, Seven Dials, during the first half of November 2026. Follow @schofields.bar for updates.
