Wetherspoons Piccadilly (aka The Manchester & County), Manchester

This Spoons is ridiculously busy which is surprising as the standard guest ale price is £2.70 which is expensive for the chain and I also noticed most food items were dearer. I came in here just after eleven in the morning and it was as though several coach parties had just debunked. I left and when I returned in the afternoon it was busy but I got served OK. It's a fairly typical city centre Spoons consisting of a big square room with all the usual furnishings. It was too busy to note all the beers so I went for the Kelham Island Miami (£2.99) which was in excellent nick but expensive for a JDW.

Routine city centre Wetherspoons, usually fearfully busy because of the station, don't even think about it on a match day. Given the number of decent pubs around the only real reason to come here is for breakfast.

Like i have said spoons are either good or bad this is not a good one. Staff not interested its very busy got to fight your way in through the smokers stood in the doorways and all on the street

This is probably the worst of the Manchester JDWs for clientele. The door is always surrounded by nicotine bouncers and the whole of the front area within the pub is filled with the type of punter who normally congregate in a pub close to a bus station. However once you have fought your way through the unwashed and pretty smelly throng the middle and rear area of the pub is much more civilised. There was a good selection of guest beers on the bar and the two I had were in very good nick, plus the service was very efficient. It's never going to be one of my favourite pubs, but, being fair, this was quite a reasonable visit.

Called in a couple of times for an excellent breakfast, but when we went in for beer they would not accept the CAMRA voucher on half pints as the beer was different prices. When I checked, I found that the available beers all seemed to be at different prices. No problem with beer quality, and the service, table cleaning and state of the loos better than most JDW's.