Sonder, Broadstairs

This is a fairly large brewpub with a very good town centre location and an adjacent deli store. The pub has a pleasant traditional interior which is dominated by dark wood fittings including the wall panels, servery, ceiling and floorboards – it’s a very ‘brown’ room! Huge windows to the front and right allow plenty of light in and are topped with nice stained-glass panes, with fairy lights hung over the tops. High tables and stools run around the windows, providing the majority of seating options in this main bar area, whilst a centrally positioned pillar has a circular ledge around it, served by more high stools and a few normal tables and chairs fill the gaps through the rest of the room. A large servery stands to the rear with a traditional counter and canopy plus a white tile bar back flanked by high tongue and groove wall panels which also spread out across the ceiling. To the left of the bar, there is a very nice, highly decorative glass partitioning screen which seems to act as the entrance to the Broadstairs Brewery, although there was very little action taking place when we visited. Stairs lead up to a mezzanine seating area with William Morris-style wallpaper, a bar billiards table and a few tables and chairs offering limited overspill from the main room. The pub takes its name from the John Buchan novel, which was itself named for the staircase leading down to the beach from the St Cuby private hospital in Broadstairs where Buchan was convalescing whilst writing the novel. As such, a large poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adaptation can be seen in one window and several smaller posters are dotted elsewhere around the pub. A decent funk and soul soundtrack could be heard playing quietly in the background, but with virtually no other customers in on a Saturday early evening, this had clearly been turned right down and would’ve been inaudible were there more customers present. Sadly, there were no Broadstairs beers available at the bar, so I was instead faced with a choice of Gadds Dark Conspiracy and No 3 and Dark Star Plateau. I opted for the No 3, which was a nice enough pint served by a very bored looking barmaid who had little to do other than peruse her phone all evening. This seemed like it could potentially be a decent pub, but it definitely suffered from being so quiet when we visited, leaving us in a large, open-plan empty space with no real atmosphere to speak of. I’d like to think we just timed our visit here badly, but this was my least favourite pub of our six-pub crawl around Broadstairs and St Peters and would be the one I drop from any subsequent visit.

This was my first visit to the second incarnation of the Thirty-Nine Steps, having visited the former micro-pub nearby three years ago. The new premises are much larger, with additional seating and a bar-billiards table on a small mezzanine, and the large windows on two sides counteract the generally dark decor. No sign of its own beer yet, so I found Bass, Perry St Pale from Iron Pier (£1.50, half), New Wharf Pale plus a couple of ciders available from the eight handpumps along the gantried servery. Also has a good selection of craft beers and other ciders on the keg taps.