Venture, Reigate

A good brewers' Tudor exterior but the inside has been rather gutted, opened out with bare wood flooring and bare brick walls round the 'eating' side. The other side has some very out-of-place jungle wallpaper. A fair range of beers were on offer - Surrey Hills Shere Drop, By the Horns Hopadelic, Tribute and a St Austell Christmas brew - but I am afraid that the place didn't really do it for me: it just felt wrong.

Located on the fringes of the town centre, this is a good-sized pub that is branded as a ‘Bar & Grill’. The pub seems to have been opened up from a previous multiple room layout, resulting in a fairly shallow but wide U-shaped layout with seating areas either side of a centrally positioned servery. The room has smart floorboards, bright white or bare brick walls and some modern skylights, all of which help make the pub feel very light and spacious. There are plenty of tables served by chairs and benches either side of the servery, plus a few hard, mid-height benches which have been formed into booths down the right-hand wall. The leaded windows along the front wall of the pub have a series of brightly coloured stained-glass inserts depicting various images including a huntsman, various species of local wildlife and a nice frothy tankard full of beer. A couple of large framed photos have been hung on the walls, but the task of visual distraction has mostly been delegated to the countless TV screens dotted around the pub, which were all showing a live rugby union fixture with the sound turned off. There were a lot of kids in attendance which made the lack of any soft furnishings very evident as noise levels were pretty spectacular even though the pub was only around half-full. I hadn’t anticipated much in the way of cask ale here, so was pleased to find three of the four handpulls in service, dispensing Harvey’s Sussex Best, Taylor Landlord and St Austell Tribute. The latter set me back £4.50 for a pint and was brought over by the rather brusque barmaid who had also taken my track and trace details, overseen my hand sanitising and walked me to my table. The beer was in reasonable condition, but like many post-lockdown pubs I’ve visited to date, still some way from being in top shape. This place felt a little devoid of character as a result of the pub’s opening out into a large single room and the decision to decorate it with TV screens rather than with anything of interest. The presence of four handpulls means it works well as an option for a crawl around Reigate, but I’m not sure I saw enough to make me head back out here again in the future.

Official site of Venture - www.venturereigate.com

Official site of Venture - www.venturereigate.com