Holborn Whippet, Holborn, WC1

Excellent beer hole, brown tiled, good cask & keg beer range good quality. Nice pub

As I approached for the first time last Friday I had trouble spotting the pub, so great was the throng standing outside. Inside it was no better, but as I was meeting friends I had little choice other than to stay. Spotting my group from afar, I decided to get a beer and then join them. So overwhelmed were the longsuffering and - in the face of adversity - polite staff, that it took me 15 minutes to get served, despite the fact that some other customers had thrown in the towel and walked off. The bar area is so narrow that the staff can't get past one another; the card reader wasn't wireless so the device's flex had to be stretched across the bar to reach customers, blocking the staff still further. My party informed me that a 15-minute queue was indeed the going rate and all for a pint of rather lifeless - and slightly soapy - Adnam's (apparently this 'pub' uses some alternative device to deliver real ale). I've never been in such a crowded pub and despite the lack of music, the conversational cacophony was deafening, due in part to very poor acoustics. So dense was the crowd that waiting staff could hardly manoeuvre a path through to deliver food, standing still and exasperated whilst holding aloft dustbin lid-sized pizzas as if they were Excalibur. Admittedly the place did eventually start to empty out a bit to a tolerable capacity around 9.30 but this was rather late. All this and the tiny lavatory means that I very much doubt I'll return and I'd rather be buried alive than risk coming here on a Friday night. Still, the mid-20th century County Durham mining prints by Norman Cornish provided a welcome distraction.

A rather minimalist bar divided into two similar areas by a wired glass door and screen which has "public bar" on the door glass. This looks rather 60s-70s, I wondered if this had been reclaimed from elsewhere. Seating is pretty much exclusively on stools, either at high tables or window drinking ledges. As has been described, the bar is central and has a large square brick pier behind from which the cask and keg taps sprout. The pier effectively prevents the staff from seeing from one side to the other so on occasion you have to wander around the other side to get attention which is a bit of a design flaw. Six cask taps, five were on; three from Dark Star, Hop Head, Partridge and Sunburst, Ledbury Real Ales Ledbury Dark plus Redemption Big Chief. At one point the cask ales started to come out rather flat, from over hearing the discussion I gather they use air pressure so maybe not for the purists although I think that is commonplace in Scotland. Food served, I saw a menu for various burgers and Ray's Pizzas plus they do snacks too. There is a bit of décor to help brighten the otherwise austere surroundings, various rather pleasing prints of old boys wearing flat caps supping pints and chatting. I quite liked it despite the lack of traditional features, the beer was very good, reasonably priced too and the barman who served me was friendly and seemed genuinely interested in the beers.

In here the beer is dispensed from a central brick built tower behind the servery, which also had on it a board displaying the beer available. Most odd, but it seemed to work. We had the Red Sky Plateau, which at £3.40 for a 3.6% golden session ale seemed fair enough. There were condiments on all the tables, but I didn’t see a menu. Set at one end of the architecturally enticing Sicilian Avenue, this restaurant conversion is one of the newest additions to the Holborn drinking scene. Beerwise it’s pretty good, but inside it’s furnished entirely with tall tables/tall stools, and outside with some benches on the pavement. A functional but characterless bar in my opinion.