The Ship Inn, Exeter

Please Note: This review is over a year old.

Pub SignMan left this review about The Ship Inn

This is a nice traditional pub, tucked away down an alleyway close to the cathedral. You enter into a large front room with dark floorboards, plenty of dark wood beams and pillars and a mix of plaster and exposed stone walls. The bar is to the rear right and it has a simple tongue and groove panel counter front and stone work bar back with all the ales listed on boards to the right. A spacious seating area can be found to the front, offering mixed tables served by numerous chairs, plus a couple of high tables and stools over to the front left, arranged around a lovely stone fireplace with a wide unused stove in the hearth and a plain mirror above. Long mid-height tables with cut-off stools appear a little further back, mostly beneath a large TV screen which was out of action on this visit, although another screen next to the bar was showing a rolling news channel. A couple of smaller seating areas can be found beyond the bar and to the rear left, albeit with nothing much going for them. A few customers seemed to be heading up to the first floor restaurant, but I didn’t get around to exploring up there myself. The place was rammed when I walked past on Saturday evening, seemingly for a karaoke night, but was totally unrecognisable when I returned on a very quiet Sunday evening, with the karaoke replaced by barely audible pop tunes playing in the background. In fact, the whole visit may have ended up as something of a total damp squib, had things not unexpectedly taken a turn for the fascinating/gross, when a group of sloshed ladies turned up, sat at the table across from me and proceeded to play a very loud game of ‘Never Have I Ever’, with a stunning lack of collective self-awareness!
There was a decent selection of ales for me to draw upon whilst enjoying such impromptu entertainment, with a good row of handpulls dispensing Greene King IPA and Abbot Ale, Exeter Tomahawk and Avocet, Otter Ale and Hanlons Nice Tackle. Four real ciders were also available and a friendly barman served me a very good pint of the Tomahawk, which was arguably the best pint I had in a central Exeter pub.
This seemed like a nice place to spend a bit of time and certainly appears to have one of the city’s stronger ale selections. You might need to time your visit right, to get a good balance between karaoke chaos and totally dead, but otherwise, this looks like a pretty safe bet for inclusion on a city centre crawl.

On 3^rd July 2022 - rating: 7
[User has posted 3114 recommendations about 3114 pubs]