Mrfrisky's Qype profile

I don't even know why we bother going into this place. Ordinarily I'd use my stock answer, "spite", but a trip to the Edinboro Castle is totally an exercise in self-humiliation.

As many other posters have indicated, it should be a very reasonable boozer. It's quite a roomy, airy building and the beer garden's widely known for being one of the nicer ones around.

The range of beers looks promising, and when we were there a promotional poster announced that bottles of wine were sold at crazy discount knockdown prices if it happened to be raining outside. The more cynical reader might speculate that instead they're just jacking wine prices up ridonculously when it's sunny, but hey.

We've been attempting to enjoy this pub for several years now, and the problem is always the same - getting service is impossible. I was in on a Monday night, and there was virtually nobody around: just myself, another guy further around, and a girl in the process of being served. Quite what the barman was doing is anyone's guess, although it was definitely full of sound & fury. 4 or 5 other bar staff flitted past behind the bar, ignoring we impotent would-be drink purchasers. Maybe they wouldn't serve us because they were too young? Who knows.

It seems a silly thing to go on, and on, and on about, however the base function of a pub is to be able to get some drinks & then go and relax in whatever atmosphere the venue provides with your friends, and all I can say is i you're planning a trip to the Edinboro Castle then make sure that whoever's going to do a bar run has plenty of free minutes on their mobile plan, because that's the only way you're going to get to chat to them.

This pub has been a local to me in a home and a work sense in the past, and despite several inexplicable bits of renovation and a number of passing years, the synopsis has to be: FAIL.

Unless you want an airy room to sit with your friends and not drink. It's an absolute boon in those stakes.

• Special mention goes to the kitchen, by the way, for taking so long to figure out that we'd ordered & paid for food, and to work out how this offering might be prepared, cooked & served, that when we went up to enquire 40 minutes later they bluntly asserted that the kitchen was shut. Bravo. Presumably all the kitchen staff were flat out doing something behind the bar.

In this world, you can't go far wrong with food that starts with a flat circle of stuff. Pizza is awesome. Pancakes are awesome. A kebab can get you through in a tight situation. Pasties are quite popular, and that's just a Cornish pizza that's been folded in half. And I ain't met nobody who would ever say no to a decent Burrito.

Though Tortilla was a little hard to find initially (if you approach it from one direction all you can see are the signs for the Health Club rather than the source of Mexican goodness), and it looks like the kind of mainstream chainy type place that lovers of fine lunchtime cuisine tend to avoid - once you've tried their burritos I almost guarantee you'll be back.

In fact, the ordering process on the 3 times I've been there in the last 6 days does have me wondering what element of the presentation I've missed. Despite signs around showing you what the workflow & options are, I still feel like the staff are making it up on the spot. But even then, IT'S SO GOOOOOOOOD!

The food's fresh, tasty, affordable, healthy-ish, and did I mention tasty? I'm yet to master the art of eating a heftily-sized burrito without sending my Mexican spicy rice distributing itself all over the table and up the arm of my shirt. The chicken and the pork have been incredibly flavoursome - with that woody/smoky flavour that you don't get anywhere near with "bing cuisine".

The restaurant - well you wouldn't really call it a cafe? - is quite spacious, and has all the atmosphere of an airport departure lounge, although to their credit they haven't spattered it with spray-on Tex Mex kitsch, preferring just to get on with the business of making tasty lunchtime nosh.

These things might not even be very authentic, but damn they're good. I'm going back tomorrow.

I think this is the first review I've ever written whilst still on the premises...

When you get a nice spacious, airy room filled with magnificent beers from around the world, and then put a bunch of friendly staff behind the bar, you're on the way to having a sure-fire winner. If a review were simply about the pub, rather than the experience one has whilst there, then this'd be a safe hit into 5-star country.

Am going to have to mark it down a star though because of the frustration involved in going along on a sunny Saturday. Firstly, it fills up really quickly, and it's a completely personal bias, but it fills up with the types that I wouldn't usually be sharing a pub with. Probably the worst aspect of this is the rude encroachment and the increasing shouting, until your nice "meeting a friend for a beer" at your table turns into a cramped screaming match.

The bar staff were very helpful, but in places unnecessarily bureaucratic - we arrived at 11:45 and wanted to order breakfast and run a tab. Firstly the barmaid had to go & ask whether they started serving at 11 or 12, then she said that we could only order via table service, and then that we had to order food to start a tab. Given that it was the same girl who eventually came to our table (and how at the time there was nobody else there), I can't see why she couldn't have just taken our order & started our tab.

But that nonsense aside - The White Horse is a lovely environment, and has a nothing short of spectacular range of beers (Continental & American beers, as well as well-maintained Real Ales). The food's nice & not overpriced, and if you could time your visit on a day where there was a large horse-related carnival just outside the M25 you'd probably find it to be a very pleasant environment.

No matter how hard I try, I really find it hard to actively LIKE the Bree Louise.

The first thing people usually point at is the marvellous array of marvellous beer - it's like there's a permanent beer festival going on in there, with 4 or 5 beers on handpump on one side, and then another 5 or 6 on gravity dispense over the other side ("gravity" is the other name for when a beer cask is mounted on a rack, table or shelf, and then the barman opens the tap on the bottom & pours you a beer straight out - in case you were wondering).

Yes it's highly commendable to have all those beers available, but that doesn't automatically make it a good pub. I've had many pints in there, and some of them still come out tasting a little bland. Not BAD, as such: they'd more than certainly give you a replacement if that were the case.

A feature of the place is that CAMRA members get a discount (50p per pint I think), but that seems a little unfair I think: if you were going for rounds with 3 friends then their rounds would all cost £2 more for exactly the same product. Of course it makes members' eyes light up, and possibly contributes to attracting the superlative reviews we see. (disclosure: I'm a CAMRA member - it's not a jealousy thing)

If you look around and ignore the beers, what you've got is a fairly tatty & dingy saggy-ceilinged room, stuffed with tables that are the wrong size for the space they've got (and you can test this by trying to walk through from one door to the other when all the seats are full - a lot of the time you can barely open the door adjacent to the toilets get into the place, and approaching the bar with the handpumps on it usually prompts the typical apologetic do-si-do). The toilets are the most barely provided functional arrangement, periodically wafting parfum d'urine through the premises. The last 5 or 6 times my friends & I have been through there we've chosen to sit outside at the picnic tables rather than lap up the ambience inside, and this was over winter.

It's not that I can't stand the place - my point is that on balance it's a shabby-to-OK boozer, which does an excellent job of providing range & quality of real ale.

Perhaps another summary worth considering is that "If you were looking for a pint or 2 of real ale in the Euston Station area, it's the place you'd most likely head to", rather than "If you were planning to go out somewhere for a night in a pub, you couldn't go wrong with this place".

If I was going to rate it on the beer, it'd be a solid 4. As a pub, I'd say a 2. So lets agree call it an overall 3.

"Fish & chips" is an interesting cuisine option - it's almost universally invoked with a modicum of enthusiasm, and is very much regarded as an English cultural cornerstone - and though it's ostensibly a simple meal, there's definitely a huge variation in quality. One thing that's always puzzled me, in fact, is how people maintain their enthusiasm for fish & chips from their local chippy when it's obviously terrible.

Having walked past The Laughing Halibut many-a lunchtime to see a queue stretching out the door and towards the corner of the street I was keen to give them a try and see what the fuss was about. With so many nice places to choose from in the immediate area, why on earth would you line up for 15 to 20 valuable minutes for a meal which flies in the face of popular health wisdom, with an eager look on your face!?

Turns out - I discovered, making a special weekend trip in - it's because these guys really know their way around a piece of cod. Crispy golden battered fish sits amid a sizeable pile of chips which, once I'd gotten them back to the office, were suitably crunchy (without being crispy) and tasty as well! (My chip vocab is a little lacking) They weren't the sad anaemic looking excuses you sometimes discover next to your fish. Similarly, the fish was tasty, with just the right thickness & texture of batter, and - perhaps it was coincidence - not a single bone.

The whole thing seemed quite well-priced for the amount of food you got - probably a serve of chips & 2 bits of cod could satisfy 2 people, and set you back somewhere in the region of 10 or 11 quid. There's other types of fish there, but I've not had the chance to get anywhere near the menu since that day, so you'll have to go find out yourself.

There's a good reason why The Laughing Halibut's a local point of reference when giving directions - it's been there a good few years now, and judging by the following they've got it'll be there a few more yet.

Out on a Saturday evening's pub-skylarking with a friend we found ourselves in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and I have to say - I was very impressed!

Initially the heat from the fireplace seemed oppressive, but that was possibly in contrast from the frigid chill we'd come in from. As our eyes adjusted to the stygian darkness of the front bar we managed to find a couple of chairs and thought "Ah well, this is a tourist pub - we'll just grab one and then be on our way".

2 hours later we were still there, having shifted to pints of ale with port chasers & chatting to a few punters who'd rocked up - we met a couple of lawyers from Lancashire, and a couple of tourists who had romanced across 4 continents. Maybe it was the fact that the pub - erected in 1667 - claims to have played host to a couple of hundred years' worth of literati, such as Dickens, Twain, Voltaire, and Dr Johnson, and so visitors entered eager for it to present a memorable trip and experience, rather than just another nice old building to stand in, look at, and walk out of again.

As we sat, sipped & extemporised more than one new group of tourists ingressed - typically a shivering & slightly dejected looking gaggle led by an excited young man in front clutching a guidebook: and all of whom warmed up nicely, put away at least a swift half, before returning to the arctic Fleet-Streetian wastelands.

I can't comment on the quality of food, as we only supped of the hop & vine. The pristineness of the toilets was remarkable - we suspected a recent renovation, but in contrast to the ancient smoke-stained walls upstairs, the loos were almost hospital-like!

Having read other reviews here complaining about short pints & whatnot - the "standard" beers are dirt cheap (as Sam Smith's pubs always are), so getting 1/4 of an inch more head on your pint than you'd like isn't the end of the world... either let them know the tide's out, or quit whining.

Realistically, the joy in this pub's in sitting back soaking up the atmosphere & ambience and enjoying a snug fireside chat - so get to it! It's a treasure.

The only regret I've got is that the darkness in there was so impenetrable that I wasn't able to get a decent photo of the front room. And it had nothing to do with all the beer I'd drunk, honest.

We recently bowled in here for a Sunday roast whilst in the neighbourhood - as a visitor from the far North I'd often heard of The Union in the wilds of Greenwich, and was quite pleased with what I found.

The main drawcard of this place is the beer: the tap selection is almost solely the preserve of Meantime Brewery, London's excellent artisans of the brew. There were around 6-8 interesting looking beers on keg, and 3 further ales on handpump. We tried several of them, and they were all very tasty & fresh tasting - the Smoked Bock was an interesting find, the Wheatbeer had the fruity character of the German variety it's based on, and the handpumped London Pale Ale was sheer hoppy, piney joy in a glass!

The building itself seemed cosy enough, but with a slightly modernised edge to it: perhaps it was the blondwood finish of everything; it definitely didn't give off the vibe of Old Man pub.

We ordered Sunday lunch, and whilst initially thought we might've been screwed over on portion size (I seem to recall the roast being £12?), although it was all very tasty and by the time we'd finished we felt just on the pleasant side of being farctate. Which left room for more beer.

The staff were friendly and helpful: the barman mistook my indecision over which beer to try for confusion, and set about describing the different styles, which he did very capably and clearly without sounding like a prat.

I'd happily swing back through there - no questions!

The only downside is that it didn't seem quite as cosy as the Richard I next door. Otherwise: nice battle cruiser, this!

The Speaker is a neat, cosy little bolthole tucked away in Westminster - a perfect place to be snugly installed with a pint of real ale when the freezing rain's lashing down outside!

A favourite of nearby officeworkers (and often, parlimentarians), if you arrive much after 5pm - or at any time on a Friday night - the chances of finding one of the few available seats is fairly minimal. You would never call The Speaker a spacious place.

The selection of real ale is always excellent - often featuring beers from the Dark Star brewery, but even when you're not lucky enough to see one of them the lineup's seldom a disappointment. And the landlord knows what he's doing. It's not an Ale Pub by a longshot though, and there's plenty of the usual pub fare to please most punters (as well as, I'm told, quite a decent wine stable - no doubt a small concession to the tastes of the visitors from Westminster).

A traditional "woody" pub which avoids the "old man pub" dinginess with brightness & character, and the fact it's always quite busy accurately reflects this.

There's a tendency in this country for quite mediocre businesses to survive or even flourish based on their proximity to large groups of lazy people. There's the Station-to-Pub-Proximity-Rule to illustrate this (in that by and large the quality of a pub will be inversely proportional to its distance from a train station), and then there's the fact that a sizeable part of any office population will quite happily go to the pub or sandwich bar nearest to the office because... well... it's the nearest.

So, with that introduction: Cafe Fresco.

It's not that it's bad overall... it's just not that good.

They do a range of sandwiches and ciabattas, with the available fillings on display in the glass-fronted counter-cabinet. Some are quite tasty, some bland, and others probably lovely but visually sinister (the Mexican Tuna mix takes on a disturbing crusty look as time marches towards 2pm).

There's a daily rotation of hot food - lasagna, bacon pasta, curry, linguine carbonara - most of it underwhelming (or in the case of the carbonara, leaving you with a bloated hangover and a wish that you'd ordered a small one).

But by far the insider tip is Don't Drink The Coffee.

I've no idea what they do to it, or where they get their beans from, but you'd probably feel more fulfilled having mixed up a Nescafe. Seriously.

The impression this reviewer gets is that there's a fairly vast amount of cost cutting going on here - the coffee loyalty cards (if you can stomach 6 of those eldritch brews you're rewarded with a free one) are peppered with grammatical and logical errors, and the serviettes came cheerily printed with "Bom Apetite" (sic) - although how they got the ink to stick to them I'll never understand, because they seem totally impervious to food particles.

But on the upside they are very friendly in there, and if your motive for grabbing a morning coffee is less about what you're ingesting and more about a fleeting moment of familiar human contact before shuffling off into one of the nearby office blocks, then you definitely can't fault the place.

Have you ever wandered into a restaurant because you were getting really hungry, were in a rush to be somewhere else, and the place had (lots) of empty tables?

Well, in this case, the best advice would be to keep looking.

2 colleagues and I had originally hoped to get into Chowki for a bite before a gig, however it was completely heaving and we didn't stand a chance. After some furtive darting about Soho we settled on the Piccadilly.

Appearance-wise it seemed functional enough - a little tacky in that 70's/80's sort of way. The menu offered standard Italian fare, and the resulting food I could only describe as "the bare minimum to pass muster and be called acceptable". My spaghetti carbonara was just on the claggy side of al dente, and the sauce was both alarmingly yellow, and not particularly pleasant - a sin covered only by the accompaniment of a predictably harsh house red.

Where the place really let itself down was the customer service - the bill arrived and declared that in addition to our meals and the service charge, there was also a cover charge of around £4.50pp. We argued that this wasn't indicated anywhere on the menu or on signs around the restaurant, and the waiter argues with us that someone's got to pay for the breadsticks, and "for him to scrape the crumbs off the table".

We rationalised that so as not to be completely uncivilised we'd just cross out the service charge and be on our way. At this juncture the waiter chased us up the road and accused us (loudly) of not having paid our bill. We debated this point in a perfunctory manner & insisted that service charge is an optional item, and he looked as if he'd briefly considered the idea of strongarming the £4.10 that was being debated out of us before resigning himself to the fact that maybe it wasn't worth roughing up 3 burly chaps in broad daylight.

His parting words as he turned to run back were: "Well, just don't leave without paying next time".

I can say with surety that it's not an eventuality that's likely to come up again.