Gareth Kerr at Cafe Kick

SOMEWHERE out there, there must be an amazing junkyard, full of relics from pubs, scout halls and piers: pool tables that need three 10 pence coins, punctured dartboards, battered pinball units and Pac-Man.

And maybe too, a few table football tables.

It was, after all, a slight surprise to read in last week’s Islington Tribune that Cafe Kick – London’s mecca for a bit of big kid foosball – had cut the offer down to just one table. It used to have a whole flank, with people spinning away with one hand, a bottle of beer in the other.

Instead, more room at the institution in Exmouth Market has been made for dining.

It’s an understandable if sad business choice, just as it was for all the pubs who thought their pool tables were taking up space that could be used for customers. Often eating customers.

The cafe’s owner Gareth Kerr said the games were creating too much of a “masculine crowd”, but staff had an “epiphany” during the Covid-19 restrictions, when shouting “no spinning” in someone’s face was a health risk.

“We thought ‘wow this is so much better’, so we brought just one back,” he said.

“Even with the one, we cover it and people sit around it. Too many people and it becomes a bit groupy. It brings a certain crowd and becomes quite masculine. We still get a lot of people saying they can’t believe we’ve changed it and I say the style it was just doesn’t pay the bills. To make a little place like this work you need to get bums in seats.”

Mr Kerr said that through the 2000s Cafe Kick was a bar in every sense of the word.

There were no table service or reservations, and crowds would gather around the football tables.

But over the years the food operation has increased and table service replaced the fun chaos of the crowded bar.

All these changes directed the business back to a European-style café.

Mr Kerr said: “The table football helps out because that’s where interaction happens and the tables being in such close proximity. The risk with table service was that people wouldn’t interact, but that wasn’t the case.”

You get the impression it will always be a nice place to spend an afternoon or evening, and Mr Kerr doesn’t seem to be missing the roar that naturally comes with competitive adults playing a kids’ game late into the night.

But there’s not many places now where you can wind back the clock and smash a rubber ball around a metal table with a team of rigid plastic people.

Raise a glass to that nostalgic memory – and then order your dinner.