The Ultimate Curmudgeonly Jukebox

There have been a number of posts recently in the beer blogosphere about people’s ultimate pub jukebox. Now it has to be said that beer snobbery has nothing on music snobbery, and there is a whole range of acts whose music might be utterly unlistenable and devoid of commercial success but still merits a high place in the “critical canon”. Whereas I make no apology for liking Magnum, and for liking Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter.

I am an unabashed fan of classic rock and AOR. So here are ten tracks, not necessarily my ten favourite tracks, but ones that, if I walked into a pub and heard them playing, I’d say “yeah, alright...”

• AC/DC – Hell’s Bells
  
• Belinda Carlisle – Lay Down Your Arms
  
• Big Country – Wonderland
  
• Boston – More than a Feeling
  
• Dire Straits – Single Handed Sailor
  
• Don Henley – Boys of Summer
  
• Heart – Crazy on You
  
• Mountain – Nantucket Sleighride
  
• Pearl Jam – Alive
  
• Tom Petty/Stevie Nicks – Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around

And I haven't even mentioned Roxette!

If you go in any rock pub, you’ll find a band cranking out covers of Bad Company, AC/DC and Van Halen, and the critically preferred wank will be nowhere to be heard.

Edit: Thanks to Mark Wadsworth for the cartoon.

What men want

I recently unearthed this article from the Morning Advertiser a few weeks back about what men are looking for in pubs. “A pint of ale, a packet of crisps and some peace and quiet are still what men desire most in a pub,” it says. Certainly suits me. But it goes on to say:

What emerged was a desire for a back-to-basics format, which somewhat reflected pub life back in the 1950s — an era when pickled eggs and bottled beer ruled the roost and television was still reserved for the living room of private homes.

This view seems the antithesis of what licensees in 2010 are being encouraged to offer — where’s the wine, coffee, Wi-Fi, 3D TV and Michelin-starred gastro grub?

Industry watchers and pub companies believe that any licensee pursuing this version of a wet-led, old-man’s boozer is playing to a strictly niche market. Very few examples of this business model will survive in the longer term, we are constantly told.

But, as the article goes on to say, while this model of operating pubs is often dismissed as a thing of the past, there are still a fair number of pubs that do well following that format – the Armoury in Edgeley, which has recently received a thoroughgoing refurbishment from Robinson’s, being a good local example. Many pubs in the Sam Smith’s estate fall into that category too.

It’s certainly the case that most of the pubs where I feel most at home are ones like that – tied house, traditional layout, extensive bench seating, mostly mature clientele and food, while usually served, not allowed to dominate to the exclusion of all else, and they can still be found in this part of the world.

Although it must be said that, from my perspective, this pub in Blackpool sounds like a descent into the seventh circle of Hell:

Veteran licensee Dave Daly, manager of the Castle in Blackpool, says live TV football is the one attraction guaranteed to fill his pub — but he admits it takes much more than a bank of television screens to ensure he gets the right volume of footfall.

The Town & City Pubs-owned venue, in the shadow of the resort’s famous tower, has the space to hold 800 customers on two floors — and on key Saturdays Daly says numbers can often approach capacity.

“We have 28 screens in total and we need every one of them. But getting things right in other areas is crucial,” he says. “Proper staffing and stock control are essential to cater for such high numbers and plastic glasses are also essential.

“It’s very much a male-dominated audience and lager sales go through the roof. We don’t do any food; it’s vertical drinking all the way and our take is often 15% or 20% up on a big Saturday,” he reveals.

Wow, lager in plastic glasses, 28 screens and vertical drinking – must jump on that train to Blackpool!

Edit: There’s a picture of the Castle pub in Blackpool here. It looks just as you would expect.

Premiumisation

Phil has recently made some interesting comments about Pete Brown’s Cask Report on his Oh Good Ale blog here and here. One of the points he addresses is that raised by Pete that cask beer should be able to command a price premium over kegs and lagers (or at least not sell at a discount to them) as it is a higher quality product. On the face of it, that seems a reasonable enough proposition, and something that applies in many other consumer markets. However, it is likely to run into a number of practical difficulties.

The first problem, of course, is that “cask” is merely a method of storage, maturation and dispense, which says nothing about the inherent qualities of a beer. The idea that cask beer is lovingly crafted from traditional, natural ingredients, while keg is made from chemicals in somewhere resembling an oil refinery has always been largely a myth, and is no less so in 2010 than it was in 1972, despite the Cask Report describing it as an “artisanal” product. Many individual cask beers are of much higher quality than most kegs, but cask as a generic category isn’t. There are plenty of cask beers such as Pedigree and Old Speckled Hen that are also available in keg form. While serving them as cask is likely to result in more depth and complexity of flavour, at least when well-kept, they’re still basically the same stuff.

We also shouldn’t forget the long tail of fly-by-night micro-breweries who often haven’t fully mastered the art of brewing and produce wildly inconsistent and often revolting slop. If you went in a pub and saw a pumpclip for Old Scrotum from some brewery you had never heard of, would you really be happy to pay a price premium for it? In contrast, if you saw a Thornbridge beer on keg, you might.

When keg beers and lagers were first introduced in the 1960s, they sold at a higher price than cask beers as they were something new and different, required an investment in refrigeration equipment and CO2 cylinders, and held out the prospect of more consistent quality. That pretty much remains the same today, even though the marketplace has changed beyond recognition. Even bog-standard cooking lager like Carling is 20 or 30p a pint more than cask bitter. There is a lot of history to overturn.

It is also still the case that, where keg ales are sold alongside cask of a comparable strength, the keg generally sells for more. Clearly the keg drinkers see it as worth paying a price premium for over cask, not the other way round. We have also seen in recent years the growth of “smooth” as a distinct category, whereas in the past there would just be “bitter”, which could be either cask or keg. I’ve seen groups come into Holts, Hydes and Robinsons pubs and ask “have they got any smooth?” Does cask premiumisation ultimately lead to it becoming an entirely separate, and more expensive, beer category from keg – and thus inevitably one perceived as a middle-class drink?

Traditionally, price premiums in the on-trade have been associated with specific pubs and areas, not specific beers. If you are in a prosperous area, offer a smart atmosphere and want to keep out the riff-raff, then you may feel justified in charging more for your beer. But in the individual pub the pricing structure across the draught beer range remains much the same, typically with Draught Guinness at the top of the tree in terms of pence per unit, and cask down at the bottom. There is still little evidence of particular beers being able to command a price premium within their own category, although maybe Beck’s Vier and Stella 4% do to some degree over Carling and Fosters. The culture of seasonal ales and rotating guest beers also tends to militate against any cask beers gaining the long-term reputation that may justify paying more in the customer’s mind.

And, of course, there is the “quality lottery” that I have alluded to before here. By definition, cask beer is a product that will vary somewhat from pint to pint due to the stage of secondary fermentation it has reached, and various factors in cellarmanship. Even in the very best outlets, you will occasionally get a pint that is no better than indifferent; if you drink it in random pubs at least one in ten is likely to be pretty poor. That factor alone makes it harder to justify charging more for it, and probably always will – in a sense it’s part of its appeal.

Some establishments will continue to seek to charge a premium over others for draught beer that reflects their location, ambiance and aspirations. But there is a very long way to go in terms of both public perception and consistent quality before cask beer can command a premium over kegs, and that of course begs the question as to whether that’s a desirable aim in the first place. To my mind, the concept reflects a somewhat half-baked and perhaps rather London-centric view of the draught beer market.

If you are a brewer of cask beer and want to establish a premium perception in the marketplace, you need to gain more control over the distribution chain by determining where it is sold and how it is presented. Not to mention having a high-quality product in the first place. The history of business is littered with companies who have tried to go for a premium image and pricing but haven’t had the quality or consistency to back it up. Securing a price premium depends on long-term reputation – the challenge is how to build that up.

The death of passion

It’s reported that the Passionate Pub Company, a seven-strong pub operator in the North-East, has gone into liquidation after its bank RBS withdrew its support.

Passionate, which has traded since 1999, said it had been severely affected by the smoking ban, changes in the market with the move towards food sales, and price competition from supermarkets.

Are you listening, Gillian Merron? Probably not. What does she care now she’s lost her seat?

“It is hoped that the policy makers and the legislators can see the consequences of their actions on a beleaguered but important sector of the economy.”

Well, precisely. And will they?

On the same day, new Labour leader Ed Miliband expressed his support for pubs – but if his chief weapon is to increase off-trade prices, that is simply a blatant attack on the living standards of the less well-off. Who was it Labour was supposed to represent again? And it is an exercise in despicable hypocrisy when he supported the measure that has ripped the guts out of the pub trade, especially in working-class areas, over the past three years. I wonder if Ed has spent much time going round the pubs and clubs of Doncaster North asking ordinary drinkers why trade had fallen off a cliff.

The damning verdict of Mr Eugenides on his defeated brother is equally applicable to Ed.

Self-awareness

The various recent discussions about the Cask Report made me think how, during the lifetime of CAMRA, the market for real ale has been totally turned on its head, and the beer enthusiast has moved from observer to active participant. In the early 1970s, interest in real ale was almost an archaeological exercise. It was a declining product, produced by old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud breweries, sold in grotty backstreet boozers and drunk by middle-aged and elderly working men. Keg beer, in contrast, was fresh, modern, youthful and glitzy. Of course that's a bit of an exaggeration, but still essentially true.

In the early days of CAMRA, many of its supporters felt that they were just marking the passing of an era, in the same way as steam locomotive buffs were. Possibly in the future there might be the occasional brewpub producing real ale on a cottage scale, a bit like a preserved steam railway, but no more than that.

However, it didn’t work out like that. The rise of CAMRA chimed with the popular “small is beautiful”, “Good Life” ethos of the 1970s, and before the end of the decade we were seeing new beers like Ind Coope Burton Ale being launched, the first micro-breweries springing up and multi-beer exhibition pubs starting to appear. As we know, this process has only intensified in the following decades.

This is not a bad thing – indeed in some ways it is a very good thing – but it means that the nature of the relationship between producer and consumer has fundamentally changed, and is far more interactive. Brewers and pub operators are far more aware of what their customers want, and responsive to their requirements. It is a very big change from basically exploring a static or declining field of interest. It is almost as if the National Trust, aware of a wide and growing interest in stately homes, had suddenly decided to start building new ones. But that wouldn’t by any means be greeted with universal joy. And God doesn’t make any new birds for twitchers.

While the steam locomotive analogy only goes so far, you could regard the construction of the Tornado as an example of producing an “enthusiasts’ special” that takes railway preservation beyond the mere role of being a custodian of the past. But of course even that is only the equivalent of recreating 1940s Draught Bass rather than creating something entirely new.

And now, ironically, the joy of unexpectedly unearthing the past is more likely to come from visiting an obscure working men’s club and finding on the bar an 80s-style font for a keg beer you thought had disappeared twenty years ago, or finding one of the last pubs still dispensing cask beer by electric meters.

Extending the repertoire

Yesterday, the latest edition of the Cask Report, written by Pete Brown, was published. Broadly speaking, this gives a positive message for cask ale, with volumes remaining steady in the context of an overall decline in on-trade beer sales, and thus recording a gain in market share. This was the first time cask volumes had not shown a year-on-year decline since 1994, which is especially impressive given the very difficult general climate for the pub trade. Unlike pretty much anything else they offer, cask beer is the one thing you can only get in pubs, clubs and bars. This has already been dealt with in general terms by other bloggers such as Tandleman, Hardknott Dave and Pete Brown himself.

Two points sprang out, though. The first is that only 18% of people who drink cask beer sometimes, claim to drink it regularly. Clearly this provides an opportunity to increase sales by encouraging people to drink it more often, but it also underlines the point that, for many people, cask beer is just one element in their repertoire of drinking. Cask drinkers are also more likely to experiment in the fields of wine and spirits. There isn’t the Manichean divide between cask drinkers and keg/lager drinkers often portrayed by some voices in CAMRA. So generic condemnations of lager and “chemical fizz” may end up not “converting” people, but putting them off. If you want to encourage someone to try something, but make out that what he’s currently drinking or eating is rubbish, you are in effect implying he’s a fool.

The report also highlights the association between offering cask beer and a more affluent customer profile. Long gone are the days when it was the working man’s pint – that, if anything, is now Carling and Stella. But you have to be careful not to put the cart before the horse. Simply putting cask in a crappy downmarket pub won’t suddenly get middle-class drinkers flocking in. There’s a strong association between affluent areas and Waitrose stores, but you won’t regenerate Beswick by putting a Waitrose store in the middle of it. In many pubs, there may be the potential to introduce cask, or increase the cask offer, but you have to weigh it up carefully and take your customers with you.

Pete is also absolutely right to emphasise the quality issue – there is no point in offering cask beer if you can’t keep it properly, and a few poor pints will put people off drinking it in general. Warm, flat, hazy beer should be completely unacceptable.

The heyday of pubs

I cut my drinking teeth in the late 1970s, a period that surely will come to be seen as the all-time heyday of the British pub. Annual on-trade beer sales exceeded 37 million bulk barrels (over 10 billion pints), a post WWI record, and more than two and a half times the current level. And the pub trade had achieved a level of acceptance and respectability that it never did in the previous boom period of the late 19th century when the temperance movement was still an active force (which it of course now is again). Drinking in pubs had become a normal part of everyday life, something most people did from time to time. I remember my father saying to elderly aunts “it’s OK to go in pubs now, they serve food”.

It has been suggested that on this point I am looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Now, I recognise that back then the range of beer and food was often much more limited, poor cask beer was commonplace, many pubs had a sense of entitlement that led to a “take it or leave it” attitude to service, a cliquish, unwelcoming atmosphere could often be encountered, and there was a whole stratum of dirty, grotty bottom-end pubs that has now largely disappeared.

But it is a matter of recorded fact that pubs were shifting vastly more beer in those days, and so thus demonstrably far more popular than they are now. My subjective memory is also that going to the pub for a drink was, for far more people, a routine everyday activity. Apart from town-centre redevelopments, and areas of inner-urban depopulation, pub closures were virtually unknown.

Today, there are still some thriving and busy pubs, although a lot fewer than there once were, and the best pubs are in many respects well ahead of their counterparts of thirty years ago. But it is all too obvious that much of the pub trade is now scratching along on very thin pickings, and equally obvious that pubs in general have lost a lot of their broad social acceptability. I am struggling to think of the last occasion I went in a pub (except on a Friday night) and couldn’t find anywhere to sit. The last job I had where it was commonplace to go to the pub at lunchtime at least one day a week I left in 1988.

Middle-class people may eat enthusiastically in dining pubs, but you just don’t see them drinking in pubs in the way they once would. I vividly recall an occasion in the early 80s when my father and I went in a pub in one of the better-off parts of Cheshire, and encountered a gang of “golf club types” standing around the bar sounding off about the latest BMW models and Poppy’s gymkhana results. It wasn’t one of my most enjoyable pub experiences, but you rarely see it now. Drinking – and I mean drinking – in pubs has morphed from the staid and respectable to Mark Dredge’s realm of misbehaviour. It has become, to some extent, denormalised.

And, however good individual pubs may be nowadays, I make no apology for looking back nostalgically to the days when pubs as a whole were doing two and a half times the business, when there were half as many of them again, and when visiting them just for a drink was a core part of national life rather than something peculiar and vaguely antisocial done by oldsters, oddballs, students and drunks.

Music to whose ears?

Piped music in pubs used to be a perennial source of complaint, but I don’t recall mentioning it once since the creation of this blog. However, the other day I was in quite a traditional pub where dance-style music (possibly Radio 1) was being played at considerable volume. The average age of the customers was well over 50, so I doubt whether that would be their favoured listening, but the bar staff were all, by the looks of it, under 25. So no prizes for guessing who chose the radio station. But surely, if there is to be piped music at all, it should match the preferences of the customers, not the bar staff. “AOR Hits of the 80s” will do me nicely, thank you very much. It was a frequent complaint in the days of jukeboxes, that the staff could override customer selections and impose their own choice of music.

One of the big plus points of the main Wetherspoons chain (although not Lloyds No.1 Bars) is that they don’t have any piped music.

The Good Guide Guide

Prompted by this post on Mark Dredge’s blog, I ran a poll asking whether people bought the Good Beer Guide. There were 77 responses, broken down as follows:

Every year: 17 (22%)
Every two or three years: 7 (9%)
Occasionally: 3 (4%)
I have an old copy I still use: 5 (6%)
I once bought one but have long since lost it: 6 (8%)
Never bought one: 39 (51%)

Obviously quite a lot of readers of this blog aren’t real ale drinkers, so you would expect “never bought one” to be the biggest category. However, the second highest is those who buy one every year. Although far from CAMRA’s cheerleader-in-chief, I have in fact bought every single copy since 1978, and I always regret throwing away the 1978 edition, which was the last to use “blobs” to identify beers rather than actually naming them in the pub entries.

I was a little surprised that Mark didn’t see much point in buying it. However, the main reason people buy it, I suspect, is not that they are fanatical beer geeks or tickers, but they uses it as a guide to pubs worth visiting when on holiday, away on business or out on day trips. It is, in effect, not so much a beer guide as a more down-to-earth version of the Good Pub Guide. To this end, from a personal point of view it always seems a waste of entries to include working men’s clubs, and some branches do have a habit of including too many pubs in obscure suburban locations that in practice, in comparison with town-centre or rural pubs, very few Guide users are likely to visit.

I have a 2006 copy of the Good Pub Guide which I bought off eBay, but I have to say that, while it does list some of what I would regard as “good” pubs, to a large extent it is for me a guide to establishments to avoid.

And, while I accept that some Wetherspoons do serve very good beer in terms of both quality and choice, it always seems something of an admission of defeat when the only pub listed in a town is the local Spoons, which in the 2011 Guide is the case, for example, in both my twin home towns of Runcorn and Widnes. The menu and general pubgoing experience are always much the same, and you can easily find them on Spoons’ website.

Really, I want it to unearth places that I might not come across by chance – such as the Black Horse at Clapton-in-Gordano which no tourist would ever find unless they already knew it was there. Some years ago I was staying in Taunton, which is a very poor town for pubs, and the Guide led me to the Masons Arms, a characterful independently-run free house tucked away behind the main street, sadly now closed. Another excellent Somerset pub you would never find by chance is the Crown at Churchill just off the A38. It’s coming across places like that that make it worth paying the cover price for.

Drunk and orderly

There’s an excellent article here from The Spectator (oddly uncredited) pointing out how the crackdown on underage drinking in pubs has ended making our alcohol problems worse, not better.

...pubs have become no-go zones for those who inhabit the purgatorial zone between childhood and adulthood. And that’s a disaster, because it was traditionally in pubs that young people learned how to handle their drink. In the grown-up world of the boozer, teenagers were taught adult skills: how to conduct themselves socially, how to converse with other adults, how to flirt and how to drink in a way that wasn’t embarrassing. No amount of alcohol training by the Red Cross can replace that informal education of old.

Of course, this is only what Tim Martin has been saying for years.

Inevitably, in the current climate, the answer will not be a bit more encouragement to turn a blind eye in pubs, but a further counterproductive crackdown in the off-trade. Tesco are doing it right, it would seem.

Divided we fall

Some very wise words here from Jeremy Beadles of the Wine & Spirit Trade Association on the need for the drinks trade to speak with one voice.

On duty he “would like some tax freezes please”. But what of other critical issues, such as ways of tackling cheap off-trade alcohol?

Surely this is a tricky one for the head of a group that represents producers (including brewers such as Fuller’s and St Austell) alongside retail giants Tesco and Sainsbury’s.

“I think there’s a perception about cheap alcohol and some of it is not real,” he starts. “It is still a damn sight cheaper to buy alcohol in most of continental Europe than it is here.”

So youngsters pre-loading before hitting the pubs is a myth? According to Beadles, ‘pre-loading’ is not the issue some would have you believe.

“When you look at the level of pre-loading most people only have one or two drinks before they go out, so they are not blasted,” he says.

“There’s a small proportion who are, but does that mean we have to regulate the entire industry, the entire population – or should we find a different route?”

On that subject, Beadles is adamant minimum pricing is most definitely not the way to go. As well as, in his view, probably being illegal, it is also “simply about making alcohol too expensive for poor people to buy it”.

As I’ve often said before, the anti-drink lobby don’t care if you’re drinking in the pub or at home, they don’t care if you’re drinking Jaipur IPA or Carling, all they care is that you’re drinking at all. If different sections of the drinks trade start squabbling with each other and claiming the moral high ground, the only winners will be the neo-Prohibitionists.

Strange logic

There’s a rather strange line of reasoning here from Neil Robertson of the British Institute of Innkeeping, who argues that the pub trade must avoid being seen as an industry that relies on drink-drivers.

“We can not present ourselves as the suppliers of drink drivers,” warned Robertson.

“If we say hundreds of country pubs will shut, we are basically saying that we rely on and supply those people who drink and drive.

“We need to be more positive and stress that most of our customers are responsible and we are not worried about them drink driving.”

If by “people who drink and drive” he means drink-drive offenders, then those are people who are breaking the current law anyway, and realistically I would doubt whether any pubs are critically dependent on the trade of those who fall into that category.

But, in reality large numbers of people do visit pubs by car and drink alcohol, whether or not with a meal, within the current legal limit – in most cases well within it. If those are, in his terms “people who drink and drive”, then large swathes of the pub trade are dependent on their business. This is an entirely lawful activity and if industry representatives are not prepared to say so they are conceding the argument to the opposition. Clearly, if the limit was cut, most of those people would either drink less or not bother going at all (or less often) which inevitably would have an adverse effect on the business of pubs. As with the smoking ban, though, it would be a slow and long-drawn-out erosion of trade, not a sudden one off hit.

In fact, the vast majority of people err on the side of caution and in practice limit themselves to an amount of alcohol that would leave them well below the current limit. If you have a go at the blood-alcohol calculator on RUPissed you might be surprised at how much you need to drink to take you over 80mg – but in reality very few deliberately aim to drink up to the limit, as is often alleged.

Oliver Robinson of Robinson’s brewery talks much more sense on the subject in pointing out that a limit reduction would decimate many pubs’ early-doors trade.

The credibility gap

Quite amazingly, Sir Peter North, who was responsible for the report proposing the reduction of the UK drink-drive limit, has admitted in evidence to the House of Commons Transport Committee that he had no information about what must be the crucial factor in looking at the issue:

Asked if he’d seen evidence from police records of how many accidents are caused by drivers whose blood/alcohol level is between 50mg and 80mg, North replied: “It’s not something that was made available to me.

“My own judgment is that we don’t need that sort of evidence to bring the limit down.”

So, effectively, he’s saying that he thinks we should be making policy on a basis of unsubstantiated gut feeling. Surely before legislating on such an important matter, something that would potentially have a devastating effect on the pub trade, it is absolutely essential that the proposals are founded on firm evidence, and there is confidence that they will be effective in improving safety.

Who reads this anyway?

A couple of weeks ago, I made the comment that “I always picture most of the readers of this blog as middle-aged blokes.” A commenter suggested I set up a survey to analyse the readership and demonstrate whether or not this was true, so I did. This has now closed, and with 102 responses it seems I have been proven right.

The age and gender breakdown was as follows:

Female under 35: 6 (6%)
Female aged 35-54: 2 (2%)
Female 55 or over: 3 (3%)
Male under 35: 18 (18%)
Male aged 35-54: 46 (45%)
Male 55 or over: 27 (26%)

So, not unsurprisingly, a strong male bias (89%), and a strong weighting towards the over 35s (76%). I think the male predominance is typical of pretty much every general discussion forum on the Internet, and I suppose quality beer is one of the finer things in life you only come to appreciate after the first flush of youth.

Hiding your light

There’s a thread on the CAMRA forum started by the indefatigable Richard English entitled “Some pubs don’t deserve to succeed”. And, regrettably, even in this marketing-savvy age, too many fall down on the basics of promoting themselves. I have written before about how pubs fail to advertise what is on offer within, which in locations where there is pedestrian footfall and a choice of venues, is crucial to bringing customers in.

I recently found myself in an attractive little Borders market town around lunchtime. It’s not a prime tourist trap, but clearly somewhere that does attract a fair number of visitors. There are six pubs on the main street, some remarkably attractive half-timbered buildings. One, although clearly still trading, wasn’t open at 12.15, another was closed and boarded and up for sale. Of the other four, two made no mention outside of offering food at all, one had a blackboard saying “see menu inside” and the fourth clearly had menus set out on the tables inside, although not displayed by the door.

From the general look of it, I chose the fourth, and went in and ordered a (somewhat lacklustre) pint. I picked up a menu and went to the bar to order, only to be told that, because of a flood in the kitchen, they weren’t serving food. The barmaid recommended a café-bar down the street, which as it turned out provided a perfectly decent light lunch, and also – surprisingly – had a handpump serving real ale, although that wasn’t very good either.

Surely it is basic common sense that if you are serving food, you display a menu outside and indicate the times during which food is served. And if you’re not serving food, how much effort does it take to write a notice saying “No food today” and stick it on the door?

Incidentally, the entry for the one Good Beer Guide pub in the town, which is just off the town centre, says bluntly “No food”. While I’m not naming names, the picture will give you a good clue as to where it was - looks wonderful, doesn’t it?