Around 9pm, the tables outside this popular Kentish Town pub are already full of cigarette-lighting, strawberry-vape-passing young people. But when American study abroad students walk into a bar, expect the prices to go up.
The Parakeet has raised the price of its Monday cocktail deal from £5 to £7 after crowds of American students queuing for cheap negronis and plum margaritas prompted the venue to hire a security guard this summer.
The pub has benefitted from Kentish Town’s rise as a sought after neighbourhood where rents increased the most out of any other London postcode this spring, climbing 14% in the period since last year, according to rental site SpareRoom.
On a recent Monday night in November, American study-abroad student Ethan, whose last name has been withheld for privacy, said his cohort discovered The Parakeet almost as soon as they arrived in the neighbourhood.
Ethan said: “Then we found out there were £5 cocktails, which is great.”
The £5 Monday cocktail night was meant to offer neighbours an affordable drink at the upmarket venue, and to fill tables on a typically slow night, a spokesperson for the pub’s owners said.
Instead, the cocktails became a hotspot, drawing young patrons from around London, including a notable number of American university students housed at private dorms in the area, according to staff at the bar.
Ethan is on the program Verto, which costs about $30,000 a year (about £22,700) and functions similarly to a gap year for first years whose top choice uni can only accept them later in the year.
Verto houses its students in Kentish Town at The Stay Club, a branch of for-profit student accommodation ranging from about £400 to £600 a week according to its website.
Just across the street, a second private accommodation, Unite Students, houses degree seekers at the Royal Veterinary College. Despite its name, current graduate students Salma, Jenna, Cassie, and Elissa say almost all of their peers are North American.
Elissa, who is English, said: “There are like under 10 UK students.”
So far, the £2 price hike has slowed but not stopped the pub’s appeal.
North American students studying abroad aren’t the only ones attracted to the deal in a city whose average cost of a night out has increased by about £20 since the 1990s, according to a study by Time Out magazine.
Adam Lee, a former server at the pub’s lauded restaurant said: “Especially in this economic climate, people are looking for cheap ways to drink, especially younger people.”
The deal is shrewd. The Columbo Group, who also owns late night stalwarts The Blues Kitchen and Jazz Cafe, opened The Parakeet in 2023 just months before the Kentish Town tube station closed for a year long set of repairs.
The group’s owners, nightlife veterans Riz Shaikh and Steve Ball, met while working as promoters for Fabric, one of London’s best known nightclubs, in the 1990s.
According to one bar tender, the £5 Monday cocktail deal wasn’t a money maker—at first. Cocktails at The Parakeet normally cost between £11 and £13. But the sheer volume of orders started to bring the profit of Monday nights in line with busier weeknights like Thursday.
Eventually, ‘the whole venue was just cueing at the bar,’ Lee observed.
The pub is working to balance the price with the experience of its clientele. Jacopo Tagliapietra, who works on the management side of The Parakeet, says the move to £7 cocktails slowed the crowds a bit.
Tagliapietra said: “The students probably weren’t too happy. But we need to find the sweet spot to give the best experience to those who come here on the Monday.”
Ethan says he and his peers have come to The Parakeet less frequently since the price increased.
He said: “I feel like it’s demoralizing to have an increase in price, especially since we’re first year students.”
For some students, though, like Canadian RVC graduate students Cassie and Jenna, the Canadian exchange rate makes a regular priced London cocktail cost about 24 Canadian dollars.
Salma, an American RVC graduate student, said: “It’s cheap, and London’s really expensive — and we’re broke,”
The Parakeet is not the only venue exploring £5 cocktails. The Italian destination Brutto, popular with influencers and British Vogue editors, offers a £5 negroni.
Elsewhere in London, Cuban bar Escuba de Cuba in Dalston regularly packs in leather-jacket wearing crowds for a 2 for £10 deal which began as a happy hour but has become part of the bar’s permanent menu.
For the students crowding the outdoor tables in November, the extra £2 isn’t the end of the world. ‘On Friday, they’ll cost £15,’ a young resident with a pixie cut shrewdly observed.
For now, The Columbo Group might have hit the balance: two pounds extra but the crowd keeps coming.
Verto and The Stay Club did not return comments in time for publication.
Photo credit: Emma Hilary Gould
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