The Old Man and the C*** – The Hunter S., De Beauvoir, N1

Coming on like first time parents dead set on out-doing their peers, the folks behind Victoria Park’s The Hemingway agonised over it for long enough they saw fit to baptise its baby sister pub, The Hunter S. . Instantly familiar if you know the former but blessed of a better space and some amazing touches internally, God it’s a shame about the name. I mean, I get where they’re coming from, running with the writer thing, the onus evidently being on ones with a rep. But, while I know he was a piss head and a pugilist and used to knock around with Nat King Cole, at least Hemingway’s catalogue carries a bit of the man’s own considerable weight. Landmark though Fear and Loathing… is/was, as far as this generation’s concerned Thompson is all about the excess, and probably now mined mainly by the sort of shithead also taken with Howard Marks.  I don’t know, maybe it shows an appreciation of their audience, being in De Beauvoir and all. Maybe all these staggeringly pretty people would be here anyway if they’d just kept it simple.

Otherwise this is an excellent boozer. There are some near things in this part of town – The Talbot and The Scolt Head show glimpses, for example, the Duke of Wellington is solid but scruffy – but the Hunter S. is the most complete. It wins out, really, by combining a fancy yet functional aesthetic with some genuine application around good bar product. There’s enough of the safe and sound – Landlord and a superb Sharp’s Cornish Coaster –  to offset the comparably kitsch – Lowenbrau, anyone? – and a concise cross-section of the current – bottled Brooklyn, among others.  But the look and feel is also great. The ceiling has the most incredible copper leaf recess from which hangs the showiest of chandeliers. The handsome over-kill of stuffed animals lining the walls are too many not to presume they aren’t deliberately overdone. And the toilets, the Gents anyway, are a reason in themselves to pay a visit here. Fear it, though – if you’re anything like me on a hangover, the ‘art’ in there is likely to have you re-emerge feeling fruity and with renewed focus.

As it happens I was in the grip of hangover whilst there, hence hankering after Fish and Chips. Easy on the eye in terms of a plateful, a largely lovely take on the classic was hamstrung rather by the kitchen’s determination to do chips differently. Not so much hand cut as hand carved, they were robust enough that even triple-cooked they’d have been brittle. There was enough right with it, however, and enough else about the menu to go back for. Service wise it’s a little laid back, and intermittently icy at the bar, but generally well-intentioned and you get a good sense of who’s in charge. At least if the guy I’m talking about isn’t already, he absolutely should be.

Yep, really decent addition to East London’s pub landscape, this. And don’t people seem to be acknowledging that? Sunday evening and, for anyone who landed much after us, there was a distinct shortage of somewhere to sit. With that in mind the management could probably afford to be more economical with the practical population of what’s truly a fantastic space. Not only would it make commercial sense, but would help preclude the sort of slovenly, full length, feet up behaviour brought by one trendy prick ostensibly set on converting a smart settee into a chaise. Oi, Ratface? Yeah, you. Would you do that at home….? 

Wishing y’all a long hot Summer.

Sorry it’s been a while…

Photos not lifted from elsewhere for once. Arse courtesy of Crowy.

Hackney Ding Dong – Duke of Wellington, The Talbot, The Royal Oak

I started writing this thing, as much as anything, because I had too much time on my hands. Too much time and no money which, where opportunities to tear one off were two-a-penny, meant also that it was difficult to maximise on every site visit or put food-led pubs properly through their paces. These days I have a job. Not a particularly serious job, but a job. Hence, although I still have no money, I have increasingly few windows to get out into the field, and even less then to catalogue just how smashed or sick I subsequently get. Where this is pertinent in Hymnal terms is in regard to the assertion in the Ethos page here that boozers can stand up on the strength of a single redeeming feature. While I absolutely maintain that to be true, I’d also have had to be blind, now pastime is at a premium, not to notice how infrequently, from the point of view of venue, product and service – to name but three of the criteria by which one would invariably rate somewhere – a place ticks more than a couple of boxes. All of a sudden I’m concerned not only that the general public are way too tolerant of iffy standards, but that altered perspective has, God forbid, raised my own expectations of how far my resources need go.

If last Saturday’s crawl around Dalston and Hackney proved one thing it’s that it’s miles easier to look cool than it is to look discerning. Imagine Balls Pond Road, if you will, to be a literal pool of test(es) personnel, and you should find yourself a step closer to figuring out how certain pubs in the area succeed, by lackadaisically lollygagging around their theme, in taking the piss out of their punters on a day-to-day basis. Not that the one venue we visited on that specific thoroughfare was necessarily guilty here, but if I hadn’t already known Bethnal Green’s Mason & Taylor sprang from its midst, I’d never have put The Duke of Wellington in the same ball park. They’re two different models, of course, which will go some way to accounting for that, but there wasn’t anything like the pervasive professionalism here as greeted me at its craft beer-orientated off-shoot. And I’ll grant you there’s very often an air, when someone opens somewhere new, of a fresh, more ‘at it’ attitude to appearances, to creating an impression, as well as a determination to do right this time what perhaps they did wrong the last. Still, they shouldn’t need me to tell them their bottled stuff’s going to get warm if they don’t pull the fridge door to.

Given how fucking fashionable this part of town is, too, I’m often surprised its locals haven’t graduated from or, in the spirit of the now, revolted against the whole mismatched furniture, Bloody Mary, comfy sofas, Sunday papers thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but one should incorporate these things consciously, not just because one has had a look around and ascertained that’s what everybody does). The Scolt Head, on an apex of residential roads in delightful De Beauvoir Town (as ever, I’m clueless as to where this stops and Dalston starts or whether if you’re in one you’re in the other..) is just an exponent. A tall, tatty building with a sprawling interior, it rather lacks a soul. This being a charge usually levelled at pubs that don’t play music, I’m here to contend pubs that do can be just as culpable. Ones that also televise live sports and allow the noise from each to come together and then dissipate high above confused chatter about precisely what feel, if any, this pub is trying for.  Ones that are too big and have very little sense of self. My pint of the reduxed Truman brewery’s Summer Runner was served in a glass emblazoned with Greene King IPA. Enough said.

The Talbot, on Mortimer Road, with its exposed brick and fairy lights, does its level best to mask what’s a pretty unattractive building in a not terribly appealing spot. Here, leather Chesterfield chairs butt heads with dog-eared, not-quite-design-classics underneath a menu which, though outwardly appealing, I just wouldn’t want want to stick around to eat from. Why? My pint of Landlord was moody and credible alternatives were at a real premium. Which is kind of my beef. Just to look sharp ain’t enough. You’ve got to back it up. Humouring this sort of shit in places that think more (though not for very long) about appearance than good bar product creates a breeding ground for like undesirables. Vote with your Vans.

By the time we’d consumed cut-price pizza at Stingray and landed at The Royal Oak on Columbia Road, I was proper screwing. Packed and shit. Not unlike its sister, Spurstowe, who either got me on a good day or vice versa when I wrote this. Admittedly by this point there was the sense very much we were now drinking for the sake of it. Two or three bottles taken Off Broadway had eradicated the after-taste of ‘dicky’ Tim Taylor but also served to provide context to the unforgivably flat Meantime Pale Ale on cask here. It was awful, on the turn, and with the place awash with laughing painted faces (true), I left feeling like someone might have spiked me with Absinthe.

What did I start by saying? Oh, yeah; I don’t have time for this. Maybe I’m getting old but I need more substance, more genuine thought and less ‘imagination’ than perhaps these operators seem prepared to invest. And so should the kids spilling out on to their pavements, if nothing else because their permissiveness of bad product is just exacerbating the situation. In this part of town, anyway. And maybe that’s it. Maybe they can or will not be converted and we chose poorly when opting to freestyle from a more bankable, pre-determined path.  I’d rather not believe that but, hey, it’s already 2.30pm on Sunday. My Sunday. At least I know where not to go when next the chance arises.

Safe.

So, I was at Newton…

There’s something in the water at places called Newton. Get this. Just when you thought The Ship Inn at Low Newton would be hard pressed to better fulfil its outward promise than with friendly fire and fresh-caught fruits de mer, the landlady goes and installs a micro-brewery in the back. The Queen’s Head at Newton, Cambs, carved its alluring, no-frills niche by half-cocking customers cold-cuts and selling soup from a slow-cooker according to what shade the most recently tossed in components have coloured it. Pull up to the The Duke of Wellington at the Newton near Stocksfield, Northumberland, and you’re so disarmed by the gorgeous, panoramic rear aspect that as you step out of your vehicle you might even neglect to notice you’ve let your car door open onto the wing of a badly parked Bentley. (Oops..) It’s beautiful here. I’m in my element. I’m home. And I haven’t even had a pint yet.

There’s been substantial investment in this place. South-facing views across undulating countryside have been enhanced by split-level terracing that was still a work in progress as we arrived. A big-arse wood-burner commands the pub area, flanked by bookshelves to one side and a dartboard to the other. Handsome, purpose-built bench seating lines the wall perpendicular to the bar itself, the lime-washed wood of either lending a modern edge to a naturally light space you can’t help feeling might benefit more from warmer tones and less intense pyrotechnics. It carries with it the stamp of quality craftsmanship, mind you – you need a solid centre of gravity to force open the heavy toilet doors – but it’s a braver man than me that risks a buggered bounce-out or missing Double Top and embedding a 24g arrow in the new tongue and groove.

The same aesthetic carries through to the restaurant. I’d say it flows through, only it doesn’t. This is an extension and although it affords fabulous views it’s too bright and feels cold. The chairs are all wrong in a faux-French style, and the tables, of a size and evidently chosen to give the room a functional flexibility, are too uniformly spaced.

The food, on the other hand, is excellent. Imaginatively served, well cooked and, in view of the modest  lunchtime tariff, gut-bustingly good value. Startlingly good, in fact, to the degree you wonder how they account for or justify the comparatively high cost of their a la carte choices. Certainly I’d expect that the extra fiver or so per dish payable of an evening (some dishes go for around £20)  to go beyond the use of more obviously expensive ingredients or toward over-filling the plates. Or else that portions at this time of day end up a tad smaller. These were vast and, at £10 apiece, Medallion of Beef Fillet with Autumn Coleslaw and Hand Cut Chips, and North Sea Cod and Chips went an awfully long way. I was surprised, if not to be asked how I’d like the beef cooked, then at least to be told how I might expect it to arrive. “Medium”, it wasn’t, but it didn’t matter a bit. It was tender and offset by the presentational flourish that is serving chips (beautiful, by the way) in ornamental chip pan baskets. The Cod, in a batter whole-heartedly endorsed by my sponsor, was enormous and came with mildly minted mushy peas.

Dessert was categorically not needed but a worthwhile luxury, even if it was complicated both in the reading and eating by an unduly flowery make-up. Sweet Potato Cake (£5.50) came with a Date Puree and a Blackberry Foam which both H and I agreed might just as well have been ice-cream. Not that its consistency belied the name, rather that ice-cream would have been a simpler, more honest (this is a pub), and fittingly robust way to round off a lunch comprised of two classics. Delicious, all the same. Coffee was accompanied by Petit-Fours – a little too perfect to be homemade but I could be wrong – and with hindsight I’d probably take the owners to task over the need actually to charge double for a Double Espresso (£3.80) where a Cappuccino, traditionally the same but with hot milk, came in at over a quid less.

The all female staff was incredibly youthful, all competent and very sweet, although one or two did lack the confidence or maturity to appreciate the selling points of a smile. While this didn’t by any means let the offer down, the sense of a senior presence was lacking – someone, for example, to notice the mustard had been sat out long enough to begin forming a crust – , as was that of a personality to give the venue a face. Two of four ales were local, Corby Ale (3.8%, Cumberland Brewery), and my eventual choice, Tyneside Blonde (3.9%, Hadrian & Border Brewery) which went down about as easily as it name suggests it might.

The absence of a variety of alternatives in the surrounding area means the Duke’s already turning mid-week custom away, and this before an on-line presence has begun to be established. Once one has, and it’s home-page provides links beyond the food, drink and function offer to details of the 4-Star letting rooms and the outlook from within, there’s every reason to believe its popularity will only grow. Good for the few local institutions that do exist to be kept on their game, I think, and I’m sure places such as the Angel at Corbridge would have said the same before they’d had half their personnel poached. The Duke isn’t perfect. It’s not finished, to be fair, but there are elements to tweak. I’d be surprised if before long a better compromise wasn’t reached between pricing and portions from afternoon to evening. Equally, it would be disappointing if something cosmetic wasn’t done to increase the ambient appeal of a pretty soulless restaurant. But this is Newton, don’t forget. They’ll get it right. They invariably do.

This one’s for you, Han. For lunch, and for letting me stay, I thank you very much xx