Not bad. Solid, if typical tap selection. I was surprised to see Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as a tap option here in the UK. I had the hangar steak — it was good enough. Staff was really great. The space is also really good. Given what else exists here for lunch options, you could do far worse.
Hamish S.
Place rating: 4 Edinburgh, United Kingdom
A very pleasant pub to drop in for a drink. Good selection of beer, didn’t have a chance to try the food though, but it looked pretty good :)
Kris K.
Place rating: 5 Columbus, OH
Great service, atmosphere, food & drinks. Try the burger, it’s huge, but fantastic. We ate outside while waiting for the tube, happy we did.
Samuel C.
Place rating: 3 Austin, TX
A corporate designed pub from the Fuller Brewery people. They put a lot of money into it to appeal to the upscale Kew Gardens clientele — and given the poor pub options in Kew Gardens — the presence of a new good pub would be a good thing. What is good here is fantastic. What is bad is corporate. The major major plus — and this is a serious consideration — is architecture and interior design. On looks– this place is a grand slam home run — and whoever designed it deserves to have a massive ego. They used a vacant part of the Kew Overground station — and railway stations tend to start giving you good space.(High, airy, lots of old architectual touches) Then in a touch of BRILLIANT corporate marketing meets architectual artistry — they designed a perfect women’s room for lunches and a perfect guy’s room for drinking. The women’s room is filled with natural light, beautiful detail work and craft work, cute pictures of animals everywhere — and looks like a tea room in a gazebo rather than a pub. My wife SO wanted to sit in this room. The men’s room keeps all the touches of the original railway connection(or adds some nice fake touches like a faded London and Southwestern Railway mark stenciled into the wall) The theme is 1930’s cream colored tile and dark woods that evoke a first rate Rio de Janeiro botequim. The room is darker. I SO wanted to sit in THAT room. So whoever decorated those spaces is a master of gender specific psychology and eye stimulus. Ah — but if the beer and food were better. For Kew — they KNOW they have to have some real ales — so real ales are available. But they are really trying to move Fuller Brewery products so those are conspicuously available and beautifully labelled and laid out. Being a good sport I tried their London Black Cab Stout — which is everything a corporate brewer would come up with in a stout to maximize volume of sales. There is a sweet and creamy starting taste that is pleasant — and the stout immediately evaporates into water with no aftertaste or afteredge. So you can chug down lots and lots of London Black Cab Stout enjoying the first taste — but there is nothing to linger over. Sorry — but Stout is supposed to fight with you and have an aftertaste that commands respect. It is supposed to go down slow– not fast like Coca Cola. Not a repeat purchase. Corporate also shows up in the food. Fish and chips used some sort of pre-made pre-processed frozen fish. How did we know? My companion’s and my fish came out IDENTICAL down to the microtexturing on the crust. Plus — real fish and chips often«bends» as the fish is not symmetric or the coating is not symmetric so things cook at different rates. These were flat as a pool table and beautifully symmetric. Taste was ho hum. The corporate mushy peas were great(totally totally minty! which is so hard to find) and the chips were excellent. But still I felt I was in a synthetic artificial experience not unlike the perfect village in the TV series«The Prisoner». It is a great pretty room and if I lived in Kew Gardens — there might not be a lot of other options near by. But the place would be much better if it combined its beautiful room with more soul in the beer and the cooking.