The plight of the British pub is a well documented and tragic tale of oppressive legislation and exploitative corporate behaviour. As a result of the environment in which pubs are forced to operate, most have elected to serve food of some description.
There are many country pubs whose menus are a shambolic spectacle of pretence and ponsitude. Meanwhile, there are some pockets of sensibility where the delights of the traditional pub snack are available for all, normally for a very reasonable price.
Take the humble whelk, for example. Creamy, fresh whelks offer the drinker a magnificent and unique flavour. They are cheap and relatively easy to obtain, and eating them requires no more than a cocktail stick or indeed one's own fingers.
Pickled eggs, pickled gherkins, pickled onions, pickled peppers... All of these wonders are available in pubs, gently bobbing around in ancient vinegar. A pickled egg rarely costs more than about twenty pennies, and you can even argue that it is healthy.
Continuing on the seafood theme from the beginning of the thread, a pint of prawns is a popular choice. Scotch eggs and pork pies - epic, yet frequently messed around with.
What are your favourite bar snacks, fellow Britons?
Christ, I miss pubs like these. I haven't seen one since I lived in a village as a lad. The pubs round here offer pork scratchings or McCoys. Not terrible snacks, but not great either.
When I were a lad, my local sold mussels and oysters - as fresh as you like, since you could see the feckers floating about in the sea from the bar - and there were cakes, sandwiches, and biscuits that the Landlord's wife cooked up. It sounds odd, but you've not lived till you've washed down lemon sponge with a pint of stout.
If you were blessed with a lock in, you'd get bacon sandwiches in the morning too, or an ulster fry if you'd earned it. Those were the days.
I still don't think I've seen anything pickled being sold in any pub, which I think is a shame.
My local is a non Wetherspoons CAMRA apporoved pub, that dates back to the 16th century. Since the old owners fucked it by turning it into a gastropub, charging extortiante amounts for small amounts of sub-par food. The head chef was the owner's daughter who hadn't long come out of catering college. Subsequently the food was poorly prepared and took far too long to actual get your order. One time it took 45 minutes to get 2 soups, by which time myself and my fiance had fucked off out of the pub to the chippy.
The new landlord is great, one of the first things h did was sell off the majority of the year old kitchen equipment and use that money to turn the kitchen into a skittle alley. When the smoking ban came in he made a fucking huge awning over the beer garden, set up heat lamps and cut a hole in the wall covered with perspex. He then set up a telly to fit in the hole along with external speakers so you can go outside for a smoke and not miss any of the football.
As for food gone are the over complicated grilled duck breast with a raspberry jus and seasonal roasted veg. To be replaced with chicken in a basket, burgers and curries. For snacks no other pub comes close, behind the bar there are shelves of crisps, peanuts, pork scratchings and other sundry bagged snacks. It also has a fridge full of jars containing whelks, cockles, mussels and other seafood.
Saturday and Sunday mornings you can go in for a fry up until 1pm. Tuesdays is quiz night where you can win a gallon of drink (AKA 8 pints for the winner) with a chance to win a few hundred quid for the winner, if you choose the right key for the cash box. Along with the raffle where you can win bottles of spirits and joints of meat.
I honestly love my local and the landlord. So much so I once drunkenly proposed to him, which he still takes the piss out of me for to this day.
>>3857>>3858 I won't tell you, simply because it is MY local. Even though there is another pub closer, but it's a tacky overpriced estate pub. It honestly looks like it hasn't been decorated since the 70's. So I would rather pay the fiver for a taxi or even go for a 30 minute stroll to my beloved pub, than go to the chav filled hellhole.
Some people deride 'Spoons for being a chain that is taking over the land's public houses and turning them into cookie-cutter clones, much like Starbucks. I take issue with this in the case of Wetherspoons though, as they at least buy very interesting buildings to convert most of the time. One of them in my town was an old dock and boathouse, and another used to be a city mansion. I do suppose they encourage a 'you know what you're getting' attitude, but they still offer a lot of stuff (proper ale and drinkable wine for example) that you don't get with somewhere like Yate's, and no single landlord could afford to build a pub in a former mansion, so I can't complain.
I don't work for Wetherspoons or anything, by the way, though my praise might sound pretty zealous. I still wouldn't touch their food...
>>3862 I don't mind Wetherspoons on occasions, normally for a cheap night out. Its the Lloyd's no1 bars i dislike, exactly the same as a wetherspoons except with shitty annoying pop-dance music at unbearable levels.
I'd disagree that food is necessarily bad; a short menu, ideally a pie, cheese/ham ploughman's, and a roast on Sundays, or something of that order, is quite good; equally it's gutting to walk in, and be presented with a fine menu, only to find the turd in the picnic: thai chilli burger or some other such bastard child of bored chefs.
Smoking should of course be allowed, and the problem with the gastropub goes deeper than the bland, and often tepid food; for me, the worn, patterned red carpet, the dark wood bar, the fire and the decorated sign on a pole- all avowed enemies of the gastropub- are just as much of an indispensable part of the pub as the pickled eggs and pork scratchings they serve.
I for one would think long and hard about any obscure bunch of nutjobs running for parliament, if the future of our pubs and inns was high on their agenda.
One little friendly boozer in Kent was recently (read: five years ago) gutted and turned into a modernish gastropub. They replaced the ancient wooden bar with brushed aluminium.
