We arrive for a leisurely lunch before taking a walking tour of Bloomsbury. It's a reasonably pretty, old-world pub serving Samuel Smith's beer. A bit distressed; a bit empty.
Directed upstairs for food, we look at the menu. The menu is a sort of Greatest Hits album of crap pub food from the 1980s and 1990s. You can entirely imagine the kitchen it's coming out of, which in my head was one hungover cook with a microwave and a deep-freeze. So my girlfriend orders Now That's What I Call Microwaved Chilli Con Carne With Some Sad Doritos and I eventually go for a cheese and pickle sandwich, with some trepidation. The barman, who is charming but perhaps a bit under-prepared for the rigours of cheese sandwich ordering, takes some time to get this order in, and I start to suspect people don't come here for the food. He calls downstairs. "Who's in the kitchen? ... Oh, is he still in bed?", this conversation begins. I place a mental check mark next to the 'hangover' portion of my kitchen fantasy.
As I cross the room to the bar there's a sharp pain as the heavy wooden door of a sideboard, which had been leaning rakishly against the unit because the hinges had broken, chooses this moment to topple over, catching me in the Achilles tendon. The barman is profusely apologetic - "I keep telling the company to fix that, but they never send anyone", he chuckled at one point - but this goodwill does not extend to, say, waiving the 1.5% levy on card payments that I am charged while paying.
I limp back to my seat and await the Dolorous Sandwich. And lo, it arrives 20 minutes later, the most desultory cheese and pickle sandwich you can imagine. Of course it comes with soggy, half-cold oven chips! Of course! The chilli is about what you'd expect, too, a sort of dull brown paste and a sand-castle shaped cone of rice.
It is probably unfair to judge this place on the food, so let me at least mention the two different Samuel Smith's beers I tried, both of which were quite nasty. The wheat beer on tap tastes like a bland alcohol-free Hoegaarden, and the Pale Ale (bottled) was like a pale ale, except cut with nail-polish remover. I would like to enjoy Smith's beers - the design on the labels is very charming, and it's not some global mega-brand like Budweiser - but having drunk the lager, the wheat bear and the ale so far, I don't like any of them.
One star because the barman was nice, basically, and the drinks reasonably cheap. read more