The Brave Old Oak, Towcester

A good-sized, L-shape pub located in a central position on the High Street, it has quite a cosy and refined ambience in spite of a couple of TV’s showing the sport. Barman seemed friendly enough, and they were reasonably busy even on a recent early evening visit. It’s essentially all one room, although divided in to a number of different sections. The man bar area is at the front and this is carpeted apart from wood strip around the bar counter. It’s quite cosy with a few black beams on the ceiling and a free standing brick chimney breast in the centre, although rather than a fire it contained a Father Christmas and a few bits of tinsel and such like – a tad early in October I thought. A number of pictures were on the wall, many of vintage racing cars from the nearby Silverstone track and also several of oak trees which seems appropriate given the pub’s name. Much of the walls were clad in wood panelling and many of these had crests or shields on, although I’m not sure of the significance of these. Beyond this towards the rear of the pub is a very large fire-place to the right with a black chimney hood and beyond this again is a snug area comfy old sofas and floor to ceiling wood panelling making it somewhat reminiscent of a hotel drawing room, although a plasma in the corner showing the football spoilt the ambience somewhat. Fortunately it was in a cupboard so could be hidden from view when not in use, but why it wasn’t when nobody was in thee watching it I’m not sure. The final room top the left was a little more contemporary with a wood strip floor and a carved wooden fire-place and a stack of logs ready for the colder weather. A beer garden was at the back although I did not investigate this. The food menu offered a decent enough selection of “pub grub” dishes and was divided in to sections such as Hand Helds, Burgers and Mains & Grills. Options here included Beef & Ale Pie, Fish & Chips, Scampi & Chips, etc., and these were mostly priced around the £7 - £8 mark. My initial choice of Chicken Jalfrezi was unfortunately unavailable as they had run out of rice – quite why they couldn’t have popped to the Co-op a few doors away I’m not sure. Perhaps this should have warned me about the level of skill in the kitchen. Instead I opted for the Beef lasagne with garlic ciabatta and a dressed side salad. The lasagne was quite a small portion and had been pretty much incinerated in the micro-wave, so much so that I could have done with a steak knife to cut though parts of it. The dressed side salad consisted of a few leaves that were going brown around the edges, and the dressing was notable only for it’s absence. It was I suppose tasty enough, but this is one of the worst meals I have had in a pub for a long time. Beers on tap were Jennings’s Bulls Eye, Hobgoblin, Pedigree and the seasonal Pumpking. The solitary cider was Strongbow, unfortunately. Had I not eaten in here I would probably have thought it was a half decent pub and given it least a couple more marks, but there’s really no excuse for serving such shoddy food, especially when you’re charging £7.50 for it.

Old Towcester High Street pub, apparently dating from the 1500’s on the northern edge of the Market Square which looks like it was formerly different buildings. Nice wood panelled walls and beamed ceiling interior well described below and the dining room section to the left was not suffering from overly loud muzac on our visit so we chose to sit and eat in this section. It functions as a typical Marston's beer/food pub and as such only the same Pedigree (again doubled up) and Hobgoblin were available, but the service was pleasant and efficient and the food was decent reasonably priced pub grub. So hit the spot for what we needed.

Brave Old Oak official site - www.braveoldoakpub.co.uk

Brave Old Oak official site - www.braveoldoakpub.co.uk