Rail House Café, Victoria, SW1

A large modern bar/restaurant with upmarket furnishings, mostly tabled for diners but the central island bar has stools all round and attracts drinkers. More like a hotel bar than anything else, with a few keg taps. There are some amusing wheeled and benched tables outside.

One of the many upmarket bar / restaurants in the Nova development, all fairly anonymous with similar modern furniture and decor under generally high ceilings. This one has a gantried island servery, a semi-open kitchen and tables by the windows and in the smaller side areas all laid up for dining. However, if just looking for a drink, their are stools around the counter and plenty of outside tables on two sides. Only two keg beers on tap: the 'house' Platform Pilsner (£2.80, half) and Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

The large new development that has appeared in recent years opposite Victoria station houses a number of restaurants and swanky looking bars, one of which is this rather typical example which sounded like it might have a few promising beers on. On entering, I was met by a greeter – never a great experience when you just want a drink – and was advised that I could either sit on a stool at the bar, or else in a dedicated corner of the room with plenty of lounge furniture, the latter area commanding table service. The venue consists of a large, open plan room that is essentially partitioned by a sizable island servery positioned close to the entrance. The room has a mix of tile and exposed board flooring, large windows down two sides and a corrugated iron clad ceiling and rear wall. Elsewhere, there are wood panelled, patterned tile and herringbone effect walls, all of which combine to give the impression of different styles and areas within an essentially basic unit. The drinker’s sofa area includes a few tables and chairs as well, with more of these also available under the front windows in the narrow strip in front of the bar. Long benches and regular chairs fill the restaurant area which I thought looked very bland and featureless, although an open kitchen at least provided some degree of visual distraction. The bar has a long curving counter with a plain wood top and pleasant tiled front plus a basic bar back and heavy duty gantry held up by distressed metal support struts. Some nice wooden arch decorations have been put up across the ceiling, looking to mimic the familiar canopy design of old railway stations, but this is about as adventurous as the decor gets and for such a seemingly high-end aspiring venue, there’s not a great deal to see here. Stairs lead up to a smart cocktail bar which looked rather swanky, if you like that sort of thing, and there are plenty of long tables with high stools along the pavement outside, waiting for the weather to turn. Music played quite loudly throughout my early evening visit but I couldn’t spot any TV screens or other such distractions. It’s no surprise to find there is no ale available here, but a couple of keg brews caught the eye, including Sam Adam’s Boston Lager and a house beer called Platform Pilsner. Several bottled options were also available from the likes of The Kernel, Brewdog and Timothy Taylor as well as a few well known Belgian beers. It goes without saying that these are all horribly over-priced, served on a napkin and accompanied by a bill on a small silver tray. The Platform Pilsner was a fairly unremarkable brew and by no means worth the money I had to shell out to try it. This really is a bar for trendy poseurs and wannabes, situated in a characterless development aimed at people with more money than sense or taste. I won’t be coming back here and have to wonder whether we’ve made any progress by demolishing a number of perfectly good pubs, only to replace them with tosh like this.