London – Eating & Drinking – Pubs & Bars – Pubs
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.
Check out my review of Edinboro Castle – I am mrfrisky – on Qype