The Marlborough Head, WC2

Just a short walk down Drury Lane from Covent Garden, the Lowlander is, as its name suggests, a bar specialising in food and drink from the Low Countries. Comprising a single, large, bare boarded room with the servery down the left hand side, the bulk of the pub has been filled with standard tables and chairs ideal for those wanting to sample the food. There is a red and cream colour scheme of the sort you might encounter in any traditional pub, but the difference soon becomes apparent when you view the collection of Belgian beer adverts and logos hung or painted on the walls. Three rows of long tables fill the middle of the room with some padded banquettes along the perimeter, giving the place a feel somewhere between a small drinking hall and a restaurant. Large windows on two sides, with frosted panes depicting some of the beers available within, provide plenty of light, although there is a darker, cosier area in the rear corner, where you can find more banquette seating, lots of photos on display and plenty more breweriana. Above this is an upper gallery, seemingly out of use on this visit, which looks down over the bulk of the pub and offers more padded banquette and chair seating. This upper level means that the whole pub has a very high ceiling and accordingly the bar back is also pretty vast, with a most impressive display of bottles arranged across it. There are no hand pumps on the bar, but a long row of fifteen keg fonts dispensing a varied range of Belgian beers compensates. Most styles were covered and several beers were home branded, so I decided to try the Lowlander Wit Beer which set me back a remarkable £3.00 for a half pint. The keg range is supplemented by a comprehensive bottled range, detailed at great length in a menu located on each table. Classic Dutch and Belgian bar snacks are available alongside a more comprehensive main menu and table service seems to be the norm throughout, although the friendly staff had no problem with me taking up a table without eating. I thought this was a fairly nice place that suffers as a result of its location, the result of which is a transient customer base and super-inflated prices. Fans of Belgian beers may be able to tick off a few rarer items in here, but for the whole pub-going package, I prefer De Hems in Chinatown.

Belgian (and apparently Dutch) themed drinking barn on Drury Lane, near Theatreland. Fairly unlovely opened-out interior but saved a bit by oodles of Belgian beer ephemera. The piped Britpop soundtrack wasn’t necessarily adding to the ambience unhelped by the echoey high ceiling (not much you can do about the latter I suppose). Lots of food being sold and the rigid long table seating arrangement reminded me somewhat of a Wagamama restaurant. An upstairs room was not open which seemed a strange decision on a busy Saturday evening. Of note was an impressive bar back display of bottles. Beer-wise, a long bank of Belgian keg plus a plethora of bottles in fridges. Flummoxed by the choice, I asked the barman for a half of ‘something dark’ from the keg range and ended up with a Troubadour Obscura at a debatable price of £3.90. I didn’t really warm to the place, the Belgian USP aside it isn’t one I’d imagine heading back to in a hurry. The Dovetail in Clerkenwell does the Benelux job better in my view.

Lowlander is a Dutch and Belgian beer bar / café situated on Drury lane opened in 2001 Impressive range of some 15 chrome beer dispensers along the bar top and then an extensive collection of bottled beers available, although they looked more Belgium than Dutch to me. The usual Trappist and Monastery beers are supported by a decent range of blonde beers, golden ales, Lambics and Flemish Red ales. But a lot are 6% and upwards and the 8%+ beers will set you back in excess of £5.50 a glass. So a good choice of beers, but I wasn’t taken by the layout of the place, one square space mainly laid to tables in lines across, and couldn’t work out if it was trying to be a bar, a restaurant or a café, especially as there was an extensive food menu available with mains in the £15.00 area, but the ambience was more of a corner café and not conducive of a restaurant where I would be expecting to pay that food ticket price. Anyway, we managed to get a corner table and wiled away a bit of time over a decent Flemish red, and consoled the pain in my wallet with the fact that we were watching the world go by a stone’s throw from Covent Garden.