The Mill, Middlesbrough

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This is a large and rather smart dining pub on the fringes of town that seemed to have its fair share of drinkers as well as those stopping by for a meal. Entering from the car park, you find yourself in a raised space used as a greeter’s area, with lots of seating over to the right where ample tables with comfy looking chairs can be found under dark gastro-friendly coloured walls. Two steps take you down into the main bar area which is also bare boarded like the upper section, but employs a brighter colour scheme that makes this feel like a lighter, airier spot. There are some nice banquettes to the left and a row of high tables and stools through the centre, directly opposite the bar. The servery has a dark wood panelled counter and simple mirrored bar back, creating a bit of a corporate chain-pub feel – a description that doesn’t really apply to the rest of the pub. The room extends an unexpectedly long way beyond the far end of the bar, through to a kind of side room that looked like the best place for drinkers to congregate. There was plenty of seating back here under walls decorated with floral wallpaper and with a muted TV showing some live sports coverage. Continuing past the left-hand end of the bar, you reach a rear quarry stone floored dining room which had muted lighting, making it quite dark in the dying light of the day. Walls here are mocha coloured, there are dark wood beams across the ceiling, plenty of pew and chair seating and there’s a nice fireplace with an old range in the hearth, which all helps make this feel like the most characterful area of the pub. The whole pub is decorated with mirrors, wildlife-themed paintings, a remarkable number of quirky fake animal heads, including cow, ostrich and crocodile, a couple of wall mounted sets of antlers and a great many toy monkeys and sloths. The grassy area around the pub has been furnished with plenty of seating, extending into a couple of patio areas and supplemented by a children’s sandpit complete with mini beach huts. A good indie soundtrack played quietly in the background throughout our visit and the bar area had a nice buzz from a reasonable Friday evening crowd, although other areas, such as the dining room, were much quieter.
We stopped here for some food and thought the menu was quite interesting and food of a good quality. Beer-wise, I wasn’t expecting much of interest, but they had four handpulls on the bar, only two of which were in use, dispensing Taylors Landlord and Thwaites Wainwright. The latter was in surprisingly good condition and served up by one of the friendly team of bar and waiting staff.
Everything about this pub screams ‘food’, so I was a bit surprised to find a good band of drinkers squirreled away in the side room and a few more out in the garden. We thought it was a solid but unspectacular dining experience and that is probably a reasonable description of the pub in general. The place has some nice spots to settle down in and enough quirky bits to keep you interested, but the pedestrian beer range means other pubs in town are better bets for the drinker.

On 3^rd December 2021 - rating: 6
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