BITE user comments - EldridgePope
Comments by EldridgePope
This is not a pub any more.
It's a chain restaurant called Côte Teddington.
23 Jun 2015 13:31
I've been a couple of times in the last month, and it really is the perfect summertime pub.
On a sunny day, there is no better place to get slowly plastered right on the riverside.
The beer is fine - I don't know why people say there could be more variety. It always has London Pride, then there are three or four other decent real ales to choose from.
The food's OK. Not perfect, but not bad.
The pub is modern inside but hasn't been modernised in an obtrusive way.
Given its location on a very quiet road, right by the river, overlooking a wooded island, I can't think of anything to improve the place.
9 Jun 2015 17:53
The Bloated Mallard, Teddington
This pub has closed in the last couple of weeks.
The sign on the door says Closed Until Further Notice.
The Teddington People website says Richmond CAMRA thinks it's to do with a rent rise.
25 Jul 2012 15:23
Really nice pub of Victorian origin. Obviously it's been changed through the years but it's avoided the ghastly intrusive changes of the 1970s to 2000s.
It's a really good backstreet pub. Not noisy. It does have recorded music, but not so loud you have to notice it.
Just a great place to have a drink and relax and be yourself, if that's who you want to be.
10 Apr 2012 19:58
What a truly excellent pub! The only thing slightly wrong with it is it gets a bit crowded and noisy - because it's so popular.
A great selection of unusual beers - perhaps six or seven I've never tried before - and some ciders.
The staff are pleasant.
Prices are low - �3 or so.
And they play music from 60s and 70s album bands like Cream - not too loud, but just loud enough so someone every so often says "I remember this - what's it called?"
Just a great pub. Keep it up!
9 Dec 2011 19:40
This pub's been no smoking since April. Hooray!
But it does seem to have problems over supply and demand - two Thursday evenings running they've run out of most of their bitters.
Still, high marks for the smoke free atmosphere.
27 May 2007 12:10
The Hero, Burnham Overy Staithe
Clean, modernised, tidy, slightly neutral pub.
No smoking, which is a huge plus for me.
Bitter was fine - some Norfolk brew, but I can't remember what. Food was fine too.
The only drawback was one of the staff - maybe the landlord. About 30, with a booming voice, which was no real problem until he asked some 6-foot-something youth for proof of age.
The resulting discussion went on for 10 minutes, and spread to the youth's dad and was so embarrasing we left early.
The barman was quite right to ask for proof of age, but not at such high volume that everyone in the pub heard about it. It should have been done quietly, and the youth (who turned out to be over 18 after he'd gone back to his cottage to fetch his driving licence) should not have been under the spotlight.
So, good pub, but spoiled by staff.
13 Apr 2007 17:34
Someone's spending a lot of money on this, but with not a lot of taste.
Gone is the black, white and green paint on the exterior ground floor - now it's all chocolate brown (yuk).
Inside they've put in an overpowering sort of floral design wallpaper.
And the name's been changed to the Bloated Mallard.
28 Mar 2007 08:49
Impossibly smoky last Friday evening - really unpleasant and disgusting.
My clothes reeked of cigarettes the next day.
It's not a bad pub otherwise, but it has made no effort to prepare for the smoking ban that's little over three months away - I won't be visiting again.
20 Mar 2007 16:40
I walked past this pub at 8 o'clock last night and the pub was empty.
Not just no customers - completely empty, with no staff and the doors locked.
There was no notice explaining why it was shut. What was really weird was that the lights on the gaming machine were flashing away in the dark, and the light was on in the kitchen. But there was no one around.
I think it was probably an alien abduction - some inter-planetary travellers unluckily chose The Railway as their first port of call. They were so disappointed that they beamed all the customers and staff up to their mother ship, where they are probably subjecting them to anal probes right now.
Such a strange pub. It's had one of its front windows boarded up for the last month or so. I live a few hundred yards away and every time I've tried it, the beer has been awful.
Has it suddenly closed?
Please let someone good take it over.
9 Jan 2007 13:24
I've commented favourably on this pub twice in the last two or three years, but I've changed my mind now.
I have visited once or twice a week for four or five years. The main area has always been extremely smoky and the pub does nothing to stop people smoking at the bar.
They used to have a smoke extractor which was quite efficient, until the pub was renovated about four years ago. But now there's nothing to remove the dense fog of smoke.
I never used to mind too much, because I could go outside in the summer, or sit in the small no smoking section at the back.
But the last few times I've been in they've cordoned off the no-smoking area for private hires. So I've just had to face the overpowering smoke of the idiots who forget they are killing themselves.
This pub was given a year to adapt to the smoking ban that comes in on July 1st. And what has the New Inn done to prepare for the smoking ban? Why, close the no smoking area, of course.
20 Dec 2006 14:27
This is normally a wonderful pub, and I've complimented it a few times over the years.
But I went to its three-day beer festival at the beginning of September and had a truly rotten experience.
Both the pints I had were roaringly off - one was overpoweringly yeasty and the other was horribly metallic.
They weren't meant to taste like that - they were just off. I'd have complained, and I know the staff would have been okay about it. But it was my birthday and I wanted a nice time.
Normally this is the most perfect pub in the area, and you can guarantee excellent bitter. But don't expect the 40-odd barrels they get in for the beer festival to be any good. I've been to their beer festivals in three previous years, and I've never had a pleasant-tasting beer, although this is the first year I've had anything that was off.
Next time I'll stick to their very good London Pride.
19 Sep 2006 09:38
The Prince of Wales, Twickenham
It has a wonderful garden, enclosed and shielded from the road, with high plants and flowers so you can hide from other people if you want. It's very unusual for a pub garden and an excellent feature.
Inside it's a bit bare with beechwood floors. So nice to see the collection of Vettriano prints on the walls - jolly tasteful.
The only real ales are from the Twickenham brewery. They're all good, but I'd quite like to see one mainstream beer like London Pride or Youngs Ordinary.
The pub seems to be run on a shoestring. Usually just one barman on the Friday evenings I've visited. It's not so busy that it matters (only about a dozen customers) but he was in a flat panic when the low-budget till locked and he spent the evening on the phone to the boss asking for help.
Overall, given the garden, the beer and the fact that it's not busy (and therefore not smoky) I'd say this was quite a good pub to visit.
20 Jul 2006 09:28
Went for lunch here yesterday.
No one was smoking anywhere in the pub, which was excellent - other times when I've been on a Friday evening it's been extremely smoky.
We sat in the no smoking area. The food was fine - good roast, potatoes and Yorkshires, but tasteless carrots, cauliflower and French beans.
Spitfire beer was good too.
24 Apr 2006 09:06
Strange place, strange pub.
I came here for a birdwatching walk/run along the sea wall to Yantlet Creek. It's a famous place for waders, etc. The whole area is treeless and bleak.
Allhallows is at the end of the road, and I wonder why people live here. There are also two large chalet parks and again, I wonder why people lease/rent a place here, because they don't seem to go for walks or birdwatch.
And the pub is the only one in the area. A 1920s/30s pub that says 'Charringtons' outside (I assumed Charringtons disappeared years ago).
They had two handpumps for bitter, but they were both off. The only remaining choices were John Smiths, something else and Toby's - so I tried that. It was like soda water with a little pepper in it.
The interior was gloomy but cavernous - high ceilings, an area at the back with a stage and a large TV for sports, and a separate restaurant room.
It doesn't look like it's been decorated or refurbished since the late '60s (despite what Lea's posting said above), which is a plus for me.
The roast beef Sunday lunch at about �6 was okay but nothing special. The staff were very pleasant.
So overall, a bit odd. Given it was the only pub for miles, and I was freezing after a couple of hours birdwatching, it was okay despite poor beer and average food.
20 Feb 2006 08:34
First visit last week. Quite impressed.
Beechwood bar all a bit modern for my taste, but it was clean and neat.
Mostly people in 20s to 40s. Too many smoking as usual, but the extractor fans were switched on so it didn't bother me for a change. It had recorded music, but not too loud, and there were empty tables to sit at.
Menu looked good. Beer (Fullers, plus some other stuff) was very good.
I'll visit again.
8 Feb 2006 17:03
The Prince Blucher, Twickenham
Normally I'd be complimentary about this pub because it has quite good Fullers beer.
But it has been quite busy (i.e. noisy) every time I've been, perhaps because there was a football match on earlier.
And it has an interesting attitude to smoking - lots of people were puffing away in the no-smoking room (a defined room, but with pillars instead of walls to separate it from the rest of the pub). And the staff did nothing about it.
Even though there were places these smokers could sit outside the non-smoking room, they made an already unpleasant atmosphere completely unbearable.
So it's a good place to go when you have just been given three months to live with untreatable lung cancer. Otherwise, go somewhere else and live a bit longer.
3 Feb 2006 18:44
Nice beer.
Too smoky.
Friday night live band so loud we couldn't talk even in the other room - why have amplified music in such a small venue?
18 Jan 2006 10:40
I've visited this pub about 10 times over the last five years.
It's a classic backstreet pub. Quite bare inside, but you can usually find a seat.
It does seem full of regulars who talk really loudly to each other, but I haven't found them hostile to outsiders in any way.
The bar staff are very attentive. So even when they're chatting on the customer side of the bar, they are looking for people waiting to be served and they nip back very quickly.
The beers are in good condition - London Pride and Young's Bitter, which is perfect for me.
The main drawback for me is that everyone smokes, including the landlord and landlady, so I can't stay for more than one drink because it gets difficult to breathe - you're all going to die horribly from cancer or emphysema, unless you quit.
1 Dec 2005 10:05
I've been here about 30 times over the last 10 years.
It's got no atmosphere, but it's clean, not too smokey, the Young's beer is always good and you can usually find somewhere to sit.
But when I visited the week before last the service was truly terrible. I was the only person at the bar waiting to be served, and there were about five staff, three of whom kept leaving the bar area to do something elsewhere and returning every so often.
And all the staff either looked down at the floor or at each other and refused to make eye contact with anyone on the other side of the bar. Two of them fondled each other's buttocks every time they passed (cute, but I came for a drink not a peep-show).
Even the manageress, when she arrived behind the bar, caught my eye but then turned away and started to talk to her staff about the till.
After about 8 minutes I finally started to get served. Then another customer arrived and was also ignored. Unlike me, he was brave enough to get cross about it, and asked how the staff could miss him when he was over 6 feet tall. And the staff reaction? They shook their heads and muttered about the awkward customer.
13 Nov 2005 15:44
The Boaters Inn, Kingston Upon Thames
It says something about a pub when a member of staff responds to a complaint by saying the customer is wrong.
Even if you did clean the pipes, you were serving three different beers that night that had gone off.
We paid you �15 for the privilege of having six pints of unpleasant beer - not disgusting and undrinkable, but disappointing, smelly and definitely off.
Try checking the age of the beers your suppliers sell you. Find out how they store them before delivering them to you. Try checking whether your staff actually do clean the pipes. Check the temperature the beer is stored at. And just try tasting them every day to see if they're off, so we don't have to.
Clearly your beer isn't always off - I had a perfect pint of something like London Pride or Youngs Bitter one afternoon in June. But I'm not going to risk wasting money with you again - which is a pity, because I like the riverside location.
10 Sep 2005 13:28
I thought I should post another comment about this pub, even though nothing has changed.
The thing is, I've had so many pints in other pubs recently where the beer has been going off.
But the beer at the New Inn is always perfect. I have never had a pint that smelled of sulphur, or tasted metallic.
It serves the best pint of Young's I can find. Plus there are two or three other changing beers to try.
So if you want a reliably good pint in a pleasant location, come to the New Inn.
13 Aug 2005 09:17
The Boaters Inn, Kingston Upon Thames
Visited Friday night.
Had three different beers - all were going off and tasted vaguely unpleasant. An Eccleshall Brewery Blonde was vinegary; the Brakespeares smelled of sulphur and tasted metallic; the Spitfire tasted metallic and watery.
I'm not fussy and I don't have particularly sensitive taste buds, but I can tell when beer is going bad. And at �2.60 a pint, pubs like Boaters should be ashamed of themselves for serving this rubbish.
Maybe it's the summer heat (though it's not that hot at the moment).
Apart from the beer, the pub's in a wonderful location by the river. Though you do get parents coming here to get blotto while their 12 year-old shaven-headed kids run around in gangs, screaming.
Still, I could ignore that if they served beer that wasn't smelly and unpleasant.
13 Aug 2005 09:12
I visited last Tuesday lunchtime. It's become more of a wine bar that a basic pub. I asked for a packet of cheese & onion crisps and the dozy South African barman drifted off for a minute and came back and said there weren't any, without offering any alternatives. I then asked for pork scratchings and he said he'd never heard of them. So don't expect a normal pub.
That's the down side. The up side is that it has a fantastic location overlooking the river. It's newly-refurbished and clean. And apart from the first dozy bloke, I encountered better service than in any previous pub/bar/restaurant.
They had two or three blokes drifting around in aprons on the customer side of the bar, taking orders for food and for drink. One of them was very attentive, polite and pleasant.
Granted, the food did take a long time to arrive on a weekday that wasn't really busy - perhaps 20 minutes. But when it came it was very good indeed. It was only a burger (although they called it a steak sandwich), and I have never had a good burger anywhere - I hate them. But this was tender and tasty and came in fresh ciabatta with a creamy dressing. And thin chips that weren't the sort of pathetic reconstituted shoelaces you get at Macdonalds or most pubs and restaurants. At �6 it was a fairly pricey but extremely nice burger - I'll try it aain next time I go.
The beer I had was Youngs - actually not as good as I am used to. It was frothy, like those horrid beers such as Mcaffreys, and so I'd mark them down for that.
But otherwise, a surprisingly good experience.
5 Aug 2005 14:22
Visited lunchtime today.
It's not quite a pub like the other placed reviewed here - you have to buy food in order to have beer. There is a choice of two beers only - a wheat beer and Paulaner lager for �3.20 a pint.
The Paulaner was very nice, and since I don't normally drink lager that's a significant compliment.
The service was very disappointing. You have to order at a hatch, after choosing a table number. It wasn't busy at 12:25pm, but I was fed up that the bloke behind the till who watched me approach then spent 10 seconds looking at his mobile phone messages and only started serving me when I asked if there was anywhere else I was supposed to order. He never smiled once - not at me, nor at the other people he served in the following 20 minutes.
The woman who served the beer was fine, and smiled just like you expect; as did the woman who delivered the food.
But the food itself was poor. �5.40 for a baked potato (Folienkartoffel) with salad and a creamy dressing; it had been cooked on another day, then heated up but remained cold in the middle, and it was brown inside, so we left it about one third finished.
�5.40 for a sausage and fried potatoes (Thuringer Bratkart); the sausage was okayish, but the potatoes had been boiled first before frying, and hadn't been boiled for long enough so they were crunchy in the middle, like an apple.
On the plus side, it's a lovely view and the beer was good. On the minus side, there's a limited choice of beer, it's expensive, the food is very poor, and the main member of staff was unwelcoming.
31 Jul 2005 14:52
Okay, so I haven't visited this place yet - but what a great place it looks!
An outdoor Bavarian bar overlooking the Thames at Richmond.
German sausages and Bavarian beer in large glasses.
It looked fantastic in the July sunshine. Goodness knows what they'll do in the wintertime.
I'll visit it next week.
22 Jul 2005 16:00
The Weir Hotel, Walton on Thames
God what a great pub this should be! And what a lousy pub it actually is.
The staff are young and don't care about the customers - why should they? They only stay for a few weeks. Last time I went a barman kept coughing every thirty seconds while serving beer, without putting even his hand in front of his mouth.
Yesterday, a boiling hot Sunday, all they had on for lunch was a selection of about four items - mostly roasts with potatoes & veg.
And the beer - one of the two Brakespeares - was going off, and it left a nasty taste in the mouth.
In fact the only up-side was that the landlady had called the police because a young woman had been swearing a lot in the garden and wouldn't leave. THREE police cars, one van and about 7 or 8 coppers turned up and spent over an hour dealing with this un-violent drunk/drugged or psychotic person. What a marvellous use of police time. But just to prove there is a God, she was sick in the back of the police van.
Anyway, this is a rubbish pub.
20 Jun 2005 09:39
Visited on a warm evening, my second time in this pub.
Decor is okay. Beer and bar staff not okay.
The Battersea bitter was going off - metallic and yeasty taste.
The next pint - Greene King IPA - was also going off: a musty, unpleasant taste. But the landlady said there couldn't be anything wrong with it because it was a new barrel. Well, I've had Greene King many times before and this was the first time it has tasted nasty.
And all the measures were short - even a half pint was well over one centimetre below the rim of the glass.
20 Jun 2005 09:28
The Stag and Huntsman, Hambleden
I'm surprised no one has reviewed this pub before.
It's a classic country pub in the classic village frozen in time - Hambleden is outwardly so little changed from the 1890s that it's been used as a location in dozens of films and TV programmes.
The pub is beautifully preserved without being untidy or uncomfortable.
I've only visited on Sunday lunchtimes, but the food seems fine; there's a large if crowded garden; and good real ale (I forget which - probably Rebellion).
There are some great walks in the hills, valleys and woodlands around Hambleden, plus the Thames towpath a mile away.
8 Jun 2005 10:45
Clean, tidy. A bit lacking in character since a refit a couple of years ago but at least it's not too smoky or tatty.
Has Youngs ordinary which is always in good condition, plus one to three reasonable guest beers, which is much better than most other pubs.
You can get food up to about 9:15 which is reasonably priced and better than Chef & Brewer stuff - perfectly okay, but not really good, if you know what I mean.
There are three or four tables out front where you can look out over Ham Common, and a walled courtyard garden at the back, although it's a bit noisy from traffic passing by.
Overall it's a really adequate pub - absolutely nothing bad about it; you wouldn't necessarily bring your Australian cousins here to experience the perfect British pub; but you'd be pretty happy to drop in whenever you're passing. Which is more than can be said for the ghastly Brewery Tap pub nearby.
24 Feb 2005 18:59
I visited again last week to see if the beer has improved. It hasn't.
It should be a good pub - nice architecture, good original decor (though fairly clean and tidy, not shabby). But the beer (Bombardier) was tepid. Not actually warm for a change, but certainly not cool. And it tasted metallic. Bombardier is usually one of my favourite bitters, so I can tell that this was off.
This pub has got it wrong in such a strange way - normally I can get put off by smoke, horrible decor, nowhere to sit. But very few pubs - apart from The Railway - consistently manage to serve bad beer these days. It's either not cool enough, or it's off - and on the day I visited, it was both.
Please do something about you cellar - I'd really like to enjoy a visit to The Railway for once.
24 Jan 2005 13:27
Back to EldridgePope's profile
The Three Swallows, Holt
This is a very nice pub for locals and visitors.
It's clean and simple. It's not been tarted up for a 'dining experience' and it is still used by people who live and work in the village. I didn't try the food but the menu was varied and low price.
It's half a mile from the birdwatching/rambling centre of the village, so you have to go out of your way to visit it.
So. Go out of your way.
8 Nov 2015 23:48