From "a pub without an identity" to tripled room sales: how Molly Mc's built a singing pub in Waterloo

How a Thailand holiday, a legendary Irish grandmother, and three private karaoke rooms turned a nameless London pub into one of the city's most-booked singing destinations, with room bookings and drink sales both tripling in under a year.

From Jack's Bar to Molly Mc's

Tucked under the railway arches between Waterloo and Southwark on Isabella Street, Molly Mc's has been a pub for years. But for a long time, it didn't have much of a story.

Owned by Irish brothers Johnny and Ryan Mc Elhinney of the Mc & Sons Group, a family business founded when their father Jack opened his first bar in Meath in 1967, the space was previously known as Jack's Bar. And by the team's own admission, it "just didn't have an identity."

That changed on a family holiday to Thailand.

Johnny's wife Ila is from Thailand, and while the family was out there one summer, they started brainstorming what the pub could become. Johnny Mc Elhinney has always loved a sing-song, you'll still catch him in the middle of one most nights. In Thailand, they'd been doing karaoke. The pieces clicked.

"Do you know what we'll do? We'll call it Molly Mc's after our grandma and we'll add in some singing rooms."

The Woman Behind the Name

Molly Mc Elhinney, grandmother to Johnny and Ryan, was, in the Irish phrase, "some woman for one woman." Born in 1914, she opened her first haberdashery in 1936 in the front room of her childhood home and built it into the iconic Mc Elhinney's fashion store. By 1973, sale days were so busy that local police had to shut down the roads to manage the queues.

That heritage is stitched into every corner of the pub. The three private singing rooms are named after people close to the family:

• Guinan's (4–8 singers), named after Molly's best friends Eileen and Angie Guinan, whose house she visited every evening after work for a cuppa. The salvaged wallpaper and wood panelling are inspired by the front room of their home.
• Jack's (4–10 singers), named after Johnny and Ryan's father, whose first bar in 1967 was called… Jack's. Family photos cover the walls.
• Slim's (2–4 singers), the upstairs room, named after the 1980s nightclub above the original Jack's bar in Maynooth. Small, cosy, and gives everyone more time on the mic.

Alongside the singing rooms are three snugs, Molly's, The Snug, and Snugeen, for larger groups who want their own private space without a stage.

The Results: Tripled Sales in Under a Year

The numbers speak for themselves. Since just before Christmas, around six to seven months of running the concept properly, Molly Mc's has:

• Tripled singing room bookings
• Tripled drink sales attached to those bookings
• Massively increased demand across the board over the last 8–9 months
• Reached the point where all three singing rooms are consistently full

Interestingly, the team originally opened with four singing rooms. Demand wasn't strong at first. Rather than push harder, they consolidated down to three, and the rooms went from half-empty to always booked.

Sometimes the growth lever is subtraction, not addition.

Who's Booking

Molly Mc's has become genuinely broad in its appeal. On any given night, the rooms host:

• 18-year-olds celebrating birthdays
• Groups in their 50s and 60s out for a proper night
• Small groups of 4–6, the current sweet spot for bookings
• Walk-ins from the main pub who fancy their own private singalong after a couple of Guinnesses

The team is proud of the mix.

"We sort of hang our hat on the fact that we are really inclusive and diverse. Anybody in the world is welcome at Molly's."

The rooms are decorated so that both your nan and your young niece can happily walk in, a design choice that unlocks the full demographic range rather than niching down.

The Pricing Model

Molly Mc's has structured its room rates to reward off-peak visits and monetise weekend demand:

Free Monday and Tuesday bookings drive footfall into otherwise quiet nights. Weekend pricing captures peak demand without pricing out the birthday-group audience.

How Guests Order Without Leaving the Room

One operational detail worth calling out: every singing room has a QR code guests can scan to order drinks and food directly to the room. Bottles of wine, buckets of beer, prosecco, Molly's famous Spice Bag, it all arrives while you're mid-song.

"You get your bang for your buck when you're in here for an hour. You haven't got to leave your friends."

That single design decision, removing the friction of leaving the room to reorder, is a big part of why drink sales tripled alongside room sales. Every song is another chance to reorder without the group breaking apart.

Why Singa

Molly Mc's picked Singa for a few practical reasons:

• Trusted through the network, the owner's friends had used it before at their venues
• Simple for the guest, no learning curve for people just walking in
• Reasonable cost relative to the return on the room investment
• Prior operator experience, the manager had used Singa at a previous company and became an internal advocate

The ongoing relationship matters too. On busy weekend nights, having account support available when something needs troubleshooting has been "really helpful." The dashboard also gives the team visibility into what's actually happening in the rooms, top songs, busiest times, what's landing.

"Easy to use for the guest. Gives them a great offer. They can choose what they want. And equally, we can dial in and see on the dashboard what's going on. For me, all round, absolutely."

What Repeat Looks Like

Weekend guests tend to treat Molly Mc's as a destination, a big night out, not a weekly habit. Weekday visitors are a different story. On Wednesday and Thursday nights, roughly 25% of guests are returning customers, driven by strong reviews of both Singa itself and the venue overall.

The pattern makes sense: weekend acquisition, weekday retention.

The Takeaway

Molly Mc's is a case study in giving a venue a reason, and then designing every layer of the experience around it.

The pub had good bones for years but no story. Adding karaoke didn't just introduce a new revenue line; it gave the whole place an identity to build around: the family heritage, the room names, the QR-code service model, the pricing structure, the Thursday-through-Saturday live trad music sessions that layer on top of the private rooms.

The result is a venue where guests are booking rooms, ordering more drinks, coming back midweek, and telling their friends. All in under a year.

As the team puts it:

"Great last 12 months. Here's to the next."

Thinking about adding karaoke rooms to your venue? Get in touch with Singa for Business to see how it could work in your space.