N Bar, Norden, Rochdale

Please Note: This review is over a year old.

ROB Camra left this review about The Norden Arms

After a period of time as Osteria, an Italian restaurant, this is now back to being called the Norden Arms. To be honest it's much more of a restaurant now than it ever was before. We called in on our way back into town on Thursday after having lunch at Nutters. I had a pint of Saltaire and Ms CAMRA had a medium sized glass of Malbec. I had been given about 7/8ths of a pint and the barman was very disgruntled when I asked him to top it up. He then said "That will be £9.40". I asked him where on earth he'd got those prices from as that round would normally be around £7.50 in these parts. The wine turned out to be £5.90 per glass. We'd just had a much better bottle of Temperanillo/Garnacha at Nutters for rather less than that. We then went and sat down and only then did I discover that my pint was warm and badly conditioned. Rip off prices, poor cellermanship, grumpy staff, no wonder it was almost empty. It's owned by an estate agent. I hope he's better at that than he is at running a pub.

14/05/2013
This used to be The Blue Ball and it was a bit olde worlde and chintzy. Something needed to be done to make a go of it, but it's been designered to within an inch of its life. It claims to be "A traditional English Pub", it just isn't. As you enter there are some pine dining table and chairs to the left and sofa's and tables to the right. The far end wall has wallpaper of bookshelves rather than bookshelves themselves and a TV with one of those stupid fire effects on the screen. There's also an upstairs restaurant that I didn't get a look at. The saving grace is that they had 3 handpumps on the go with Marston's Pedigree on one and 2 beers from Irwell Works on the others. The beers appear to be rebadged for the pub rather than brewed specially as my pint of a 5.5% IPA tasted just like Mad Dogs & Englishmen, one of Irwell Works's standard range. To be fair the beer was in decent nick and at £3.30 (I think) wasn't too expensive for the area. The pub needed to be refurbished, but it's all a bit IKEA for me. Lets' see what it looks like after a bit of wear and tear.

On 3^rd June 2018 - rating: 1
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