Pub crawl

Last night we tried to have a night out, but everything seemed to conspire against us!  I'd had an email from one of your favourite pubs, The Lescar in Sharrow, to say that their January offer was a meal for two with drink for £15 so we thought, why not?

We love the Bohemian atmosphere, the board games, books, collages on the walls in the toilets and general zaniness of the place.  And the food is usually excellent, and they have a good selection of beer.

So, off we went.....but when we arrived something was different.  All the blackboard walls were painted and bare, all the interesting bits and pieces were gone, and the toilet walls had been tiled with boring black and white.  We should have realised that something was up, but I think we just assumed that they were decorating and that things would get back to normal.

We ordered food, sausage and mash with onion gravy for me and fish fingers and chips for John.  The food arrived quickly.....and was TERRIBLE!  The peas with John's meal were microwaved to little pebbles, and the batter was burnt.  I failed to find any evidence of onion in my gravy whatsoever.  We spoke to the bar staff (who were great), it seems that the pub was bought a while back, and no the stuff wouldn't be returning to 'normal', we pointed out that the whole place had become very much like any other of thousands of nondescript pubs across England and had lost all it's atmosphere.  We sat and filled in the online questionnaire about our experience whilst we finished our drinks and then escaped - we won't be going back.

We decided to try Delaney's, since we know the owner and the music is good (live music every night) - except it's not open on Mondays......so we tried The Washington.  We didn't even get to the bar before being overcome with bleach fumes......on to the Devonshire Cat.

Here we stayed for one drink before the lack of atmosphere and terrible smell of dirty chip fat drove us out again.......we ended the evening in the newly done up Broadfield.

I like it, a warm welcoming atmosphere, although I do feel it needs a bit of time to acquire a layer of dust and dirty!  They'd gone for a railway theme with partitions like carriages, fake gas lighting and luggage racks with old suitcases, I'll certainly go back.