The Story
Options occupied 30 Throgmorton Street — the same address that had been the Bodega Bar for decades before it. The Bodega was described in 1973 as 'a remarkably long, narrow bar based on a styling vaguely art nouveau, the walls subdivided by pilasters of alabaster and marble, the plaster ceiling enriched with sub-Art Nouveau and Rococo motifs.' By the early 1990s, Options had inherited that extraordinary shell and filled it with something rather less decorative — City traders, derivatives desks, and the ritual of the after-market drink. Throgmorton Street was its own ecosystem: the Throgmorton Bar at No.27 with its mosaic-clad stairwell and Pompeian friezes; Moore's Bar at 34a in the basement, stuffed with Victorian bric-a-brac; the Arbitrager, the last to fall, which a visitor described as looking 'more like a Dickensian hole-in-the-wall gin shop than a pub.' The Stock Exchange clock still hangs on the building next door. The rest is COYA — a luxury Peruvian restaurant, all dark stone and gold leaf, where the alabaster pilasters used to be.
Ghost Hunter mode reveals 500+ closed and demolished pubs on the PINtPOINT radar — each one a room that once poured pints on that exact street corner.