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Small rooms force good habits.
The ones that keep a destination bar honest.
BKK, Sunday night. You enter through Restaurant POTONG on the ground floor, a Michelin star welcome, then the path narrows to Opium. A tiny lift takes one at a time. A corridor skims the dishwash. Stairs climb steeper with each flight. I’m with a knot of DFBs for the Marriott Restaurants and Bars symposium, legs grumbling from the gym, and we climb anyway.
At the top, a host on her second day greets us with grace and command, speaking like she has lived it for years. She steadied the room, then service took the hint. When Opium hits capacity a metal cage slides across the bar face. Service stays smooth while would-be guests can still peek at what they are missing.
Tiny rooms do not absorb clutter or forgive indecision. The discipline you learn at twelve seats is the same frame a destination hotel bar needs when the floorplan and team grows.Measure aisles by shoulders, elbows and a tray; if two staff turn sideways, widen it on paper before you pour a drink.
Put the printer where builds end so dockets land at the hands. Plan the station for reach: everything on the core list within one step, off-menu tools in a tidy ring beyond that. If staff leave the well for basics, the first rush will expose it. If you need a diagram to pass each other, your bar is already in the weeds.
Set micro-pars that match reality. Glass for your most-used serve sits at roughly one and a half times the seat count; surplus lives off the line. Batch only what you can burn in one service or it becomes waste or temptation. Use slim trays with intent, not as travelling storage, so corridors stay clear and resets stay quick.Lose theatre that shouts.
Blenders and flames overwhelm a compact room. Aim speakers across, keep volume set for the quietest voice you still want to hear, light faces before shelves, and lift task light so no one squints at a spec. Keep comms soft: a raised finger pauses a ticket, a palm on the pass claims the plate, a thumb to the chest marks the runner.
Menus must fit the room they live in. I walked into a sixteen-seat bar with forty-eight cocktails last month. Beyond the waste, that count bakes in corner cutting and guarantees inconsistency when not every teammate is truly fluent. Keep the list lean. For most rooms, sixteen is a ceiling with NA integrated. For very small bars, ten is plenty. Rotate with intent. Retire one before you add one.
What stays is how the room held us. The cage closed, the noise stayed, the welcome stayed human, and nothing is improvised. Ten strangers fell into easy conversation because intimacy was designed, not lucked into. If your hotel bar has more square metres and less control than this shophouse, space isn’t your advantage. It’s your excuse.
That is why Opium sits in the The World's 50 Best Bars conversation: not outreach, but a room that engineers intimacy and leaves a memory you carry back down the stairs.
