please note - reviews on this site are purely the opinion of site visitors, so don't take them too seriously.
Easily the best real ale pub in Cambridge. Seventeen handpumps,excellent service.The Crafty Ales were very good.Hard to find very tucked away.
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Our final pub in Cambridge was the Maypole and it was a fitting end to our day. It's a little hidden away from the main action. But a total of 13 ales were on - Tiny Rebel Hank, Grain Lignum Vitae, Humpty Dumpty Shaltai Baltai & Red Mill, Three Blind Mice Pirate Hop & Uncle Buckthorn, Shortts Farm Strummer, Tring Black Hawk, Wiper & True Milk Stout, Milton Justinian, St Austell Proper Job & Adnams Bitter & Broadside. Ciders and perry were Cromwells Oliver's Session, Lilleys Pear & Raspberry & Gladiator, Seacider Medium & Westons Old Rosie. The pub has two rooms. I seem to remember the rear one being larger. But most people were in the smaller front bar. I need to come back when I'm a little more sober. But my first impressions were very positive.
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What a gem. The beer range was great and the food excellent. The staff could not be faulted and helped carry the beers over to our table in the garden. We spent several hours there trying some very good beers.
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A great location and an interesting range of beers. Tried a variety and all were good but as others have said the stronger beers at over £5 a pint are very expensive.
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A very nice community pub down a pleasant side street. My only gripe would be that it is waaay expensive even for Cambridge - £4 a pint average and the foreign bottled beer prices really taking the p**s. Even homegrown bottled beers like Brewdog's Punk IPA were £5.80 for a 330ml bottle, so just imagine the U.S. and Belgian prices! The food was very good, but once again £3-5 more than it really should be. I really liked the place and it's staff, but the prices are a bit off-putting.
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Great pub with an amazing range of ales. A bit on the expensive side but well worth the extra price.
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have been visiting the maypole for around a month now between once and twice a week and was delighted to find such a lovely welcoming pub in the centre of cambridge complete with good quality food and excellent beer choice including one of my very favourite beers on tap franziskaner.However yesterday i visited the establishment around 5pm and was disgusted at the treatment of myself and my friend we casually attempted to walk into the bar i was body checked by a man i didnt recognise he then told me that neither of us could enter the bar as we were drunk i initially thought he was joking and took it one in good spirits even if he was become irritating.Myself and my friend were NOT drunk we hadnt at this point even had an alchoholic beverage during the day,my friend was the told he was drunk as his flies were undone which I was unaware was a sign of intoxication I then tried to pass him and enter through the door on around 3 more occasions he blocked me off and moved aggresively towards me standing almost directly infront of my face.I felt intimidated at this point I then asked if he worked there and he said no my friend then asked to see barry whom we believed to be the owners name which I now realise is mario another man then spoke to my friend and snapped that noone called barry worked here I was astonished to realise this was the owners son,he had watched the whole incident and did nothing which in itself was an indication he saw nothing wrong with this mans unacceptable behaviour i actually became quite upset at this point and me and my friend just turned around and walked away in all my previous visits i have found the owner mario to be magnificent in terms of service and comes across as a genuinly lovely man however he witnessed none of this and i feel sure if he had he would have been astounded.I wont visit the maypole again after this encounter and I feel sad about that as I really enjoyed my previous visits there but the events of yesterday afternoon were dispicable
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Good range of ale - the Nethergate Priory mild was poor, it was on it's last legs with a bit of astringency - one of those should I take it back or not. I didn't. Tried the Milton Nero and that was excellent. Bad luck on the first pint.
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It wasn't really £3.9 million - sorry
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Great pint of Nero (albeit £3.90m - 5%), and the welcome from the long-time owner was particularly friendly; as good a proper pub as you'll get in Cambridge.
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The cask ale selection as adverstised in the latest Good Beer Guide made the Maypole a must on a recent pub crawl which was created as a centrepiece for a stag event. It was I believe the final venue visited after doorstepping some 12 other beerhouses, so memories may be somewhat restricted! That said, most were still on keen if not sharp form, and the general gist was that it was a cracking boozer, tucked away in an appealing little side street in the midst of the most picturesque and well-preserved parts of the city centre.
Beer-wise, a splendid array was available and every example sampled was found to be on form. There was a well-to-do, and arguably youngish accent to the predominant population, but this made for no less a pleasant and civilised environment in which to start drawing our proceedings to a close. There is plenty of outside scope here in addition to a fairly generous bar area, which I would imagine makes the Maypole a favourite in all seasons.
The downside? Well, the ludicrous prices of some beers! Whilst some were available for a more competitive £3.30 or so, there was a 5% ale offered for a whopping £4+, which would be high for a cask ale even in London. If this has been in excess of say 7% or even 6, then I could have countenanced this, but 5? Cambridge is an affluent city, but most pubs came in at perfectly acceptable price ranges; the Maypole I felt was punching above its weight in this respect. I don't know who owns it and what the economics are - I don't blame the licensee necessarily as conditions can be such that to sell a broader spread of beer, prices sometimes have to be set higher to make it profitable. I commented on this to the bar man, who looked at me rather dismissively, I assume to say one or both of two things: (i) don't blame me, I don't set the prices, and (ii) I've heard it all before, so just either pay up or leave! I compromised by steering away from the four-quid-plus options and sticking with the weaker, but no-less-appealing or flavoursome, beers.
I'm sorry I seem to have focused on this so heavily; really this is unfair as overall the pub was found to be excellent and there's no question that me and my chums would return given the opportunity. The positives vastly outweigh the negative.
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Great pub. Good selection of ales, and some different foreign beer on draft too. Definitely one of the best pubs in Cambridge
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quality pub. lots of great ales. nice place to sit outside. well worth searching for. next to a NCP car park but you won't see that from the pub
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Fantastic pub. Had an excellent Buntingford beer a few months back; today the Brew Dog (5am Saint) was near perfect. Tried the home-made Italian food, which was also great. Lovely bar team as well.
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Fantastic pub. Had an excellent Buntingford beer a few months back; today the Brew Dog (5am Saint) was near perfect. Tried the home-made Italian food, which was also great. Lovely bar team as well.
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City centre pub, but tucked away from the main drag, so far as Cambridge has one. I counted eight ales on pump including Helter Skelter, Charter/Flight, Woodforde's Wherry, Summer Lightning and something called B G Sips. I'm not sure if they had increased the number available due to the beer festival on Jesus Green. The main part of the bar was crowded, but a smaller room was largely empty. Many students, a lot from the nearby performing arts faculties. So nice to be the hardest person in the pub...Guinness and local amateur sporting achievement decor, always interesting. Unobtrusive tv in the top corner so you can look up if your companion's conversation begins to bore you. The sign says Pubmaster, though I note other patron's comments. Pleasant, well worth a visit.
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Rarely visted before, but beer quality (Buntinford) was quite superb, can't just be because now free ownership ? Hard to find a cosy seat though.
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The pub wont win any awards for being pretty but it has a very good selection of beer on tap and they also do a mean cocktail. There was a great atmosphere in the evening, the pub was busy but I didnt have to wait to be served and even had the drinks brought over to our table.
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The long-standing landlords, the Castiglione family, recently bought the pub from the brewery (Greene King?). Their first move was to install 4 more pumps, which feature a rapidly changing retinue of ales, mostly from small brewers you won't see elsewhere in Cambridge.
Since I last wrote here, we've gone off piste from burgers to some of their Italian menu offerings. Based on that, I'll raise my description of the food from "not bad" to "Quite nice, actually".
A great pub that just got better.
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Lovely central pub with more ale pumps than before (now six I think). The beer is a bit pricey but it is the city centre. Not had one for years but the cocktails were great. Food is good and it's a good place to watch cricket (and other sports). Friendly staff and a lot of outside seating is available.
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Very good selection of beers and good food available. Landlord and staff extremely friendly - they remembered us from our previous trip to Cambridge in April this year.
Have to say that on this occasion the pub was very quiet for a Saturday night, so no problems at all with service.
A couple of bitters were available at the �2.60 mark, most at the �3.00 mark, but I would suggest that quality over quantity is the order of the day here. We shall return.
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A unique pub. In term, it's full of students, including the large garden. Even on the most crowded, studenty evening, even with a lot of people quite ratted, the crowd is impeccably polite. (The landlords rather insist on that).
You never need to push your way through a crowd -- if you stand there with a pint in each hand, someone will quickly spot you and move his mates out of your way.
Not much to look at. The 'garden' is paved, with plastic furniture, and next door is a multistory car park. But a great place to drink. There's a rapidly changing retinue of guest ales. And the food's not bad.
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You'll have the brightest cocktails ever here, and happy hour goes on forever!
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Generally a good pub, good food but the drinks are a bit over-priced.
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Nice atmosphere & good selection of well kept beer, but �3 a pint is over the top.
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well kept beer, superb cocktails, vv friendly management. so much better than most pubs in cambridge.
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Brilliant place. As has been said, it's not that prepossessing - interior from circa 1978, outside looks like a toilet block - but the staff more than make up for that
Beer is good, food generous, but the thing here is the service and the cocktails. A city centre gem which is completely unpretentious and allthe better for it
dodgy - 17 Apr 2006 21:31 |
Great place, family owned/run. Famous for the jugs of cocktails. There is a little-known upstairs room too, and a large beer garden with a lovely view of, erm, a multi-storey car park.
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Not much to look at from the outside, and to be honest not much beeter from the inside, but the Maypole is a cracking pub, especially when there's Rugby or Footie on - a wonderful respite from the usual grunting neanderthals that tend to accumulate around a telly on such ocassions.
The Adnams is usually on top form, and the food is cheap, plentiful and gorgeous (and fresh not pre-packed stodge nuked in a microwave).
Oh, and the friendly staff are mostly the landlord's family so it's in their interest to entice you back for more unlke the surly staff/managers that you get in the City Centre Chav Barns
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