Pub Restaurants - a contradiction in terms?

Once upon a time (ie when I was a lot younger than I am now!) you knew where you were. There were pubs, which served drinks, and restaurants, which served dinner. If you wanted a sandwich or snack you went to a cafe and afternoon tea and cakes could be had in a teashop.


Then along came the fast food outlets, but they just added places where you could eat a burger for lunch or a kebab when you came out of the pub.


Now restaurants (and pubs) serve ‘traditional pub fare’ (or worse, ‘fayre’). Traditional pub fare is, surely, a packet of pork scratching with your pint! The only food choice to be made in our local twenty years ago was whether to go for cheese and onion crisps or salt and vinegar. If the establishment was really up market the landlord might even stock peanuts!


Now, they’d have us believe that traditional pubs have always served lasagne, shepherds pie and scampi and chips. I do remember chicken in a basket – introduced to keep punters at the bar downing drinks when otherwise peckishness would have sent them to the nearby chippie – and there was ‘Betty’s hotpot’ served in the Rovers Return at some time I seem to remember, but steak dinners and sticky toffee puddings were never part of the pub repertoire in my youth.


I am now confused as to what constitutes a restaurant, since so many pubs seem to serve more food than drink, and many restaurants have a bar at which you can drink before and after your meal... so where do you draw the line?


The only eateries which now seem to fully deserve the title of restaurant are those pretentious places serving the likes of ‘nouvelle cuisine’ which arrive at the table on a huge square plate on which is carefully and centrally placed a blob of some unidentifiable pureed vegetables of the portion size and consistency which I gave to my babies at four months old, topped with a sliver of fish or meat the size (and often the texture) of a postage stamp, the whole garnished with a twig of some herb or other and drizzled with a teaspoonful of some tasteless sauce. For which the mug – I mean diner – is charged three times the price of a huge plateful of shepherds pie at the local pub.


Suddenly, the thought of the pub restaurant doesn’t sound so silly – perhaps they were just filling the gap in the market!

To Autumn 2013

On this day in 1819 Keats wrote his famous ode.

But what would he have made of today's consumerism?

For the last few years I have been irritated by the Chrismas displays being wwheeled out before the summer holidays have even finished, so I have amended - a little bit - this famous poem to reflect what Autumn means 200 years on....



Season of mince pies and untimely Advent Calendars
Close bosom-friend of the grasping retail trade;
Conspiring with them how to load and pile
With tat, the trolleys that round the shops parade;
To bend with toys the Children’s Section floor,
And fill all aisles with chocolates and sweets;
To cram in every type of gift and card
For every family member; to set panic buying more,
And still more, food and drink we never need,
Until we forget warm days have not yet ceased,
For greed has o'erbrimmed their corporate plans.


Who hath not seen thee too early in the stores?
From September whoever wanders in will see
The tins of biscuits piled by the front door,
Turkish Delight, Yule logs, Christmas tree
Or if in the drinks section you may roam,
Drowsed with the fume of Cointreau, while the display
Groans with gin and whisky, Baileys and Cours;
Egg-nog and snowballs – when would we take these home
Except for Great Aunt Annie’s Yuletide stay?
And by the stock, with silver tray,
Staff offer little tasters, hours by hours.


Where are the Harvest celebrations? Or even Hallowe’en?
Think not of them, they make too little cash, -
A few buy apples and tins of stuff for the school assembly,
And trick or treat sweets and masks and all that trash;
Soon in a wailful choir Christmas adverts will begin;
The festive TV trailers, there among
The first Coca Cola advert assaults our ears;
And then we know we may as well give in;
Carols piped through all the shops decibels strong
We end up whistling Slade’s old song;
And celebrities tweet plugs for new CDs.