Anchor & Hope

I'm sure that most of you know the drill here – no bookings, shared tables and always busy.

That can be annoying, if you are hungry and have to wait an hour for a table, in which time you sink a few too many pints, don't really feel like eating when you sit down, you are a bit too close to the people you are sharing a table with and feel that it was a bit of a waste of an evening.

These things are bad when you are planning a nice evening out with your friends. Logic would dictate that YOU WOULD NOT GO HERE IN THAT SITUATION.

This restaurant not gastropub (it has tables and serves food that is good) is all about the food. Now sometimes the portions are uneven, and sometimes they have run out of what you want by the time you get to order. That is life when everything is cooked fresh.
Yes the service can be erratic and once in a while the odd dish does not work as well as it should do. Overall this is a great place to get what I would call an home cooked meal.

There are always seasonal dishes, great bar snacks and a really good mixture of hearty fayre. The best dishes I have had their over the past few years:

red and yellow beets, goats curd and mint
beetroot, mackerel, watercress

Roast shoulder of kid
slow roast venison

treacle tart

these are the dishes that stick out in my mind, I have had many many more and as I mentioned before once in a while I am less than ecstatic with my meal, but I keep going back because it is good.

Service can be slapdash but there are no aspirations of michelin accolades, so just go and enjoy the food.

I'd heard about this place a while back so was looking forward to finally checking it out on a Friday evening. But unfortunately none of the great things I heard turned out to be true, and to call this one of London's top Gastropubs is an absolute joke.

We were seated at a table that featured a tabletop that was not properly attached to the base, causing it to wobble about 6 inches up and down on each side – I politely told one of the (uniformly surly) waiters about it and he said “that's the way we like them” then ran off. He then came back some time later (after one of us had a go at fixing it) and wiped the table with a very wet cloth leaving the one end of the table he wiped soaking before running off again.

We ordered some wine which came with tiny tumblers instead of wine glasses. This would have been fine had they bothered to wash them up – the inside of mine was covered with what I hope was chocolate.

Another waiter gave us the menus which promisingly featured some different dishes to those normally found in a pub. A few sounded good, but most of them had to be ordered by 4 or more people. I paid £16 for a rabbit dish which had half the amount of meat described by the waiter and no vegetables – which they didn't bother pointing out at the time of ordering. It was pretty tough and strangely smelt of frankfurters.

One of us had a pudding, which was an insipid looking chocolate mousse of varying consistencies in one of the small tumblers. The one good thing about it was that it confirmed that my dirty glass had indeed been tainted by chocolate.

All in all really poor and so overhyped. I'd leave and go somewhere else if for some reason I found myself drinking in there again and in need of some… More