The Famous Royal Navy Volunteer, Bristol

Since my previous review, this has been shut for a few months and has now re-opened under new management after a refurbishment. The basic layout is still an inverse “U” shape, with the right hand side being signed as a restaurant. The left hand bar is mostly one open space, although divided in to a separate area at the rear. Leaded windows look out on to the cobbled street. Decor wise, the paintwork is a mixture of cream and a very pale brown and there are plenty of nautical pictures such as old sailing ships on the wall. The flooring is some type of laminate wood and there were candles on all the tables as is the vogue in many pubs these days. At the rear were several brown leather arm-chairs and sofa’s which created a somewhat more relaxing ambience, although this made the plasma mounted up in the corner seem all the more out of place. Fortunately it was not in use on our visit, but a blackboard listed a number of forthcoming sporting fixtures which seems slightly out of kilter with the image the pub presents. An interesting feature were the gent’s urinals which were all made out of old beer kegs, with the top and part of the front cut away. The cistern too was an old keg. Unusually the hand pumps on the bar were all unlabelled, with the beer choices being displayed on a board to the right. There were quite a number of both cask and keg options, although whether it would be called a good selection or not is debateable, since they were all, at least as far as the cask went, from just one brewery, Yorkshire’s Summer Wine. On this occasion they were Calibo Cali, Rouge, Diablo, Oregon, Zenith, Resistance, Teleporter and Barista Stout. A similar number of keg options were available, some of which were duplicated with the cask offering and all but one still from Summer Wine. The only other choice was Williams Draught. Ciders were Sandford Orchard’s Devon Mist and Purbeck’s Dorset.