BITE user comments - kidsmoke
Comments by kidsmoke
yes - wetherspoons for snobs, at twice the price - and consider this: how bad have things got if you're going to a slug and lettuce to feel 'snobbish'?
29 Jun 2010 14:10
One of hove's most unusual/quirky/musical pubs, soon to be rogered beyond all recognition by the presumably family-biased buffoons behind the Connaught (great place to hang out if you have a screaming baby/mewling toddler/space taking-up pushchair).
West Hove now no longer has a live music venue. Thanks guys.
The plan is to make it "like zilli/pizza express", apparently. Thanks for saving me the trouble of walking there to confirm i do not like your renovation.
STOP KILLING HOVE'S PROPER PUBS! Whatever next, the Dyke Tavern....?
29 Jun 2010 14:07
great 'spoons, but it does smell a bit. at any time of day.
29 Jun 2010 14:01
a bit like a wetherspoons - but not as clean and with less ale selection. However it is cheap, and you can actually see the sea from some points. ok if you're desperate/skint. Oh, nice garden/orangerie out back.
29 Jun 2010 13:58
great refurb - the outer signage will 'age', assuming the pub lasts (fingers crossed). The pub is the sister to the lanes' Lord Nelson i think, same management anyway. A two-room pub, plus entertainments/hire rooms upstairs, plenty of comfy chairs, wood burning stove, really great ale selection (could do with some slightly stronger oens mind). Can get busy weekend nights, but lots going on here - including great food.
29 Jun 2010 13:57
one of hove's best. great music, beer/ale choice and proper friendly locals. plus a big dog who loves crisps. it's the place we take non-locals to show them how good hove pubs can be. say no more.
29 Jun 2010 13:54
great pub - great garden too out back (small one out front as well). very honest and there's one particular barman who is ultra attentive to customer's needs. never gets too busy, had a lovely pint of old peculiar there, and it is MILES better than the forager, next street along.
29 Jun 2010 13:53
this is an example of a pub taken over by people who love running pubs. great to see. i hope the location doesn't work against them and that the people from the beach find their way up to the alibi. monday nights they give free chili away! Sympathetically decorated (ie NOT just stickign an old beer advert on the wall) and a few ales on tap. They even put the day's crosswords in cups on each table so your not bored if alone. A great example of how pub takeovers should be done - take no forager/connaught/portland...
29 Jun 2010 13:50
used to be great. now taken over by hoards of hove's buggy people. there will be no proper pubs left in hove soon. and what happened to the old locals - used to get great rock n roll DJs and the like. Have they all been swept away like new york tramps. i despair. first the pedestrian becomes the terrible forager, now this.
29 Jun 2010 13:48
i find the female staff in this pub exceptionally rude, and �3.15 for a pint of bitter is ridiculous. Used to be good, now it isn't. A shame, as the location is great.
26 Apr 2008 17:15
The new inn has been in a stae of identity crisis since the refit three years ago.
Admittedly, it was run into the ground before, but now it doesn't seem to know if it wants to be a wine bar, a restaurant or a trendy cafe. It's like a mix and match pub, you never know what you're gonna get.
The roasts are pretty good at the weekend, and the terrace out the back is impressive. It's a monster pub, and i know it sounds old fashioned, but surely this was better when it had a jukebox and a pool table?
22 Mar 2006 19:52
this pub is like the christmas episode of 'The Office.'
Horrendous at every part of the day. A sports pub with a no sportswear policy, where a DJ is a tool simply to pull people who don't mind not hearing what each other is saying because they're not saying anything worth hearing.
Slightly different in the day - as i recall the pizzas were pretty good - cooked in a proper pizza over, thin and delicious. But it's next to Carlucios, so if you're out for a pizza, pick there every time.
22 Mar 2006 19:45
I dunno, there's something not quite right about the wheatsheaf. The decor is all that stuff pub owners but from warehouses around the M25 to make their pubs look 'olde worlde' (classic, weathered bookshelves, etchings of slogans from beer-themed poetry, pots and pans, vintage buckets), the beer is pretty much exactly the same beer as you can get in any Fullers chain across the country, and the food is a menu chosen by the owners of the company, strictly measured and rationed so as to make the maximum profit, rather than by an unpredictable
individual with an understanding of what locals might want. Word comes down from on high...
There are low wooden beams everywhere, thankfully the oppressive smoky atmosphere will, hurrah, be gone by this time next year, and the terrace out the side is not a patch on the one in the haven arms three doors down. And If you arrive of an evening after say, eight, you will not get a seat.
Oddly though, it's not a bad pub. There are just no surprises - there is nothing to offer a new pub hunter here that they won't have seen before. It is absolutely nothing to get excited about. Anyone who does is fooling themself.
22 Mar 2006 19:33
People who go to the wehatsheaf next door are probably the sort of people who like bland, Fullers-sponsored enormo-pubs decked out in a rustic style in accordance with their own marketed ideas of what a 'decent pub' should be.
The Haven arms IS a decent pub - it's more like a pub up and down the country than any of those refitted ones - this is a real pub frequented by real people, a local.
Obviously there are disadvanntages to this - the locals are colourful, the food is passable, the decor average, but for authenticity and easy going nature, i might venture that this is what i would tell foreigners a real pub was like - not something horrific like a tacky conversion.
Even on a weekend you can get room in this pub, as everyone else seems to turn left out of ealing station. Go right, but not as far as the wheatsheaf, and you won't go far wrong.
22 Mar 2006 19:23
i've been drinking in the castle on and off for about 7 years, and what always amazes me is the rudeness of the staff- and they're not even regular staff - it's like they have a rudeness test at the interview stage or something,
Anyway, the thai food is pretty good, but you're better off at Butlers just up the road. The English food is woeful, fat, dry chips, crispy burgers under padded white buns straight from the freezer, salads on the side more by way of an afterthought.
The place is never busy though (perhaps no surprise), so it's good if you are 'just drinking'.
Worth a look in on the way out of or into the broadway - but i would never make it my local - as a good rule of thumb, when the new inn was closed for two months during refurbishment a few years back, all the locals moved up, temporarily (some permantently!) to the red lion rather than go here - just five doors away.
Make of that what you will...
22 Mar 2006 19:17
i had a fry up here once when my hangover was so bad i couldn't be bothered to walk anywhere further, and it was, without doubt, the worst i've ever had. Also, i had steak and chips there on a works do once and they burnt the steak when i had asked for it rare - i complained, sent it back, and they sent back the correctly cooked steak, but with the same flipping chips, which had blatantly just been sitting on the side while they cooked another steak - ergo freezing cold.
Everyone knows what all bar ones are like. You don't need us to tell you.
22 Mar 2006 19:12
This 'pub' is like a youth centre. OK for sunday mornings with parents, and the fry ups are pretty good, but for socialising pub fans, this is nothing like you'll want.
Quite like an airport pub. It's the fairest comment i can make. Too close to the broadway for 'getting away from it', too removed from the southern part of ealing to attain any kind of identity.
And very echo-y - get more soft furnishings so we can hear ourselves think guys! Cripes.
That said, the terrace outside in the summer is a great place to people watch.
13 Mar 2006 19:56
The Red Lion was an old man's pub that got turned into a modern version of an old man's pub by Fullers in their quest to update, tastefully, every pub in their range.
There are a few problems with this - most notably that the bar is tiny for the pub they extended it into. You can be left waiting, three deep, for a pint on a fri or sat night, for ten minutes or more. And the clientele seem to have shifted from the bug eyed, dog carrying grizzled men of olde to the more luvvie type rugby boys that have fled here since the broadway offers nothing for them, thinking this to be the 'cool' alternative.
Thankfully though, the food is AWESOME, and there is a bustle about the place that is charming. In the summer the flowery garden is lovely, although often noisy (possibly to with the umbrella above?). Also, getting a round of drinks from the bar to anywhere but the very front of the pub is a task worthy of inclusion on the krypton factor, so very narrow is the pub.
Generally though, despite it's smugness at winning awards, which seems to have trickled down into the attitude of the bar staff (i'll admit previous posts are sadly correct, and i consider myself a local, although often you can be surprised in fairness), and slight air of menace from the older, more protective locals, the red lion is far and away the best pub in the ever modernising 'village' part of ealing.
A refurb done right? Quite possibly. A pub is not necessarily the sum of its locals. It could have been so bad. But it isn't.
13 Mar 2006 19:52
I always try and give The Grange a chance, after being continually annouyed wit the service, pruices and food - the location is amazing, right on the common, but they just can't get it together. Oftentimes you'll turn up and there is literally nowhere to stand, let alone sit. The food, when you can get a seat, is pretty good in fact, slightly poncy bar food down in the bar and quite expensive restaurant stuff in the posh bit, but there's so little space to do owt that the place just collapses into a kind of gordon ramsey kitchen nightmare when the place is really busy.
The pub used to seem much bigger, and admittedly in the summer there is a lot more space when the outbuilding is open and the garden is on form (BBQs are ace). Although then you have to put up with another annoyance - millions of squaeling babies and well to do young parents mulching around. Thankfully though, they can serve your beer in a plactic glass for you to take out to the common and escape the mayhem.
Pretty good for spotting posh dogs at that time of year too.
13 Mar 2006 19:41
The north star was far better before it was refurbished. Call me a luddite, but anything that was unique about it has now long since disappeared.
Although the ale selection, if you like that sort of thing, is very impressive, and the food never dissapoints.
The DJs are typical of suburban spinners, playing house and occasionally funk that was fashionable about two years ago to a crowd who aren't even listening but nevertheless have to shout to be heard over it. Better to go in the day when it is quiet, and more eclectic sounds boom out the soundsystem.
Also, i have no idea why the middle part is a no smoking area, as anyone who smokes has to walk through there to get to the toilet, 'thus smoking it up'.
Still, it's better than the townhouse.
13 Mar 2006 19:37
i might well go to pubs that people don't normally like, because they are quiet all the time, are the same as they were in 1962, or are just different to run of the mill pubs you might find on AN other high street in the country, but the kings, my local, is the best pub i have found in ealing, purely because it is never busy (i recall being in there on new year's eve once, just me, the missus and the barman - not sure he was too happy though), is never full of the noisy brigade you get round the broadway of an evening, and genuinely just has that 'local' feel to it.
The only downsides i can think of are that, bizzarrely, they always have the radio no quite loud, and that if you come into it 'cold', as it were, you might get some funny looks. Also, some of the younger barmaids can seem quite snooty. But they change staff quite fast, save for the ever reliable steve.
I'm continually baffled as to how this pub keeps going - it is a freehouse - and i can only assume the B+B part makes them enough money.
God bless the kings. A haven in ealing. The day it is renovated is the day i leave ealing.
13 Mar 2006 19:33
The Bow Street Runner, Hove
quite the most bizarre, character-full pub in hove. much better than barney's or the freemason or whatever saturday night horrorshow you care to mention in that area.
one question though, why the weird opening hours? We went in on a sunda y evening at about six, and they were 'closing up'? It was like 1946 or something. oh well, adds a frisson of excitement to your visit.
"Will i get served or won't i?"
29 Jun 2010 14:15