Standing Bar Near Me on Frith Street: Bar Italia's 4am Espresso Counter

Bar Italia at 22 Frith Street, London W1D 4RF, opens at 7am, closes at 4am every day, and takes no table bookings at all. An espresso costs £3.00, a negroni £12.00, and the long Formica counter is where most of Soho drinks them on its feet. If your search for a standing bar near me lands in Soho after the pubs have called last orders, this is the narrow neon-lit room that is still pulling shots when the rest of the street has gone dark.

Lou and Caterina Polledri came to England from northern Italy and ran an espresso business on Long Acre in Covent Garden before the war. In 1949, with a £50 loan from a friend who worked as an ice man, they took on the lease at 22 Frith Street. The café became a meeting point for Italians rebuilding their lives in post-war London, and the bar says the family's third and fourth generations run it today.

The building already had a claim to fame before the first cup was poured. On 26 January 1926, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in a room at this address. On the centenary in January 2026, his grandson Iain unveiled a new World Origin Site plaque outside, and the bar opened a Baird Room upstairs. The older blue plaque still sits above the front door.

The interior has barely moved since the fifties: red-and-white Formica, a terrazzo floor laid by Torino Polledri, a relative who specialised in terrazzo mosaic, and the big clock-and-neon sign that hangs over the pavement. The family's own story says plenty of London cafés have been refitted beyond recognition and this one has not. The busy counter is still the heart of the room, so the classic move is an espresso drunk on your feet from a thin china cup, then back out onto Frith Street.

Late nights are written into the bar's history. From the 1950s to the 1970s, as jazz clubs, rock bands and the mod crowd filled Soho, Bar Italia became the place to end up afterwards, with performers from Ronnie Scott's at 47 Frith Street keeping the counter busy. The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix are part of its lore, and Ed Gray's 2011 painting of regulars Rupert Everett and John Hurt hangs in the window. Pulp's 1995 song placed the café round the corner in Soho.

Coffee comes first. The espresso is £3.00 for a single and £4.20 for a double, a cappuccino is £3.80 or £4.40, and the frappe coffee is £4.70 if the night is warm. Anthony Bourdain called it the best cup of coffee, or damn close to it, and the bar still prints that line on its site. Add a home-made cannoli Siciliani at £4.80 or a slice of tiramisu at £5.20 and you have the classic Frith Street order.

After dark the drinks list takes over. The negroni and the Bar Italia espresso martini are both £12.00, and Time Out named the negroni the best in London in 2025. A Peroni or Moretti is £6.00, house wine is £7.00 a glass, and amari such as Averna, Fernet Branca and Montenegro are £6.50 each. Grappa Moscato is the one to try at £8.50 if you want something stronger with the coffee.

An honest call: the pizza and pasta are fine, but they are not why people cross London to stand here. A margherita at £14.50 or rigatoni carbonara at £15.50 makes sense at 3am when nothing else is open. Earlier in the evening you will eat better at one of the Soho restaurants around the corner, then come back here for coffee and an amaro on your feet.

Every visit is first come, first served, including match nights, and the private hire form says the same thing: day to day there are no table bookings. An afternoon espresso is the easiest way to find elbow room at the counter. The late crowd builds once the shows on Shaftesbury Avenue come down and again when the bars along Old Compton Street start to empty, which is exactly when the 4am closing time earns its keep.

When Italy play a major tournament, Frith Street turns into a fan zone. The bar's own history describes 9 July 2006, when Italy beat France on penalties for a fourth World Cup and pasta rained down from the upstairs windows onto the crowd. The scenes came back in July 2021 after the European Championship final. Kick-off nights are not bookable, so arrive at least an hour early or watch from the pavement.

If the counter is three deep and you do not fancy waiting, walk two minutes to Bar Termini on Old Compton Street for a sit-down negroni, or keep going north to Soho Square and come back once the theatre crowd has thinned out. Do not wait more than ten minutes at the door on a busy night, because the turnover here comes in waves.

Frith Street runs from Soho Square at the north end down to Shaftesbury Avenue. Start in the square under the plane trees, walk south past Ronnie Scott's jazz club with its painted frontage, and stop at the Baird plaques at number 22. From there it is one block to Old Compton Street and three minutes to Chinatown on Gerrard Street, which makes the bar an easy last stop on a Soho night out.

Address: 22 Frith Street, Soho, London W1D 4RF. Hours: 7am to 4am, every day. The nearest Tube stations are Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road, each about a five-minute walk. Breakfast dishes are served until 6pm, and the kitchen keeps making pizza and panini well past midnight. The bar holds a 5, Very Good, food hygiene rating from the Food Standards Agency.

Vegetarian dishes are marked V on the menu, and every pizza and pasta can be made with a gluten-free base or pasta and vegan cheese. Tell the team about allergies when you order, because the kitchen handles gluten, dairy, eggs and nuts. For a group celebration upstairs, use the private hire form on the website. For everything else, walk in, find a gap at the counter and order an espresso.