The Wheatsheaf, Milton Keynes

Official site of The Wheatsheaf - www.wheatsheafbowbrickhill.co.uk

A traditional looking stand-alone pub on the main road through this tiny village, it consists of a bar area at the front and a restaurant at the rear. There is also a car park at the rear of the pub, although little in the way of outside seating as far as I could make out. The barman was very polite, although I would perhaps have preferred friendlier and more informal. The bar area at the front of the pub is quite traditional and consists of an L-shape room and is mostly carpeted with some tiling around the bar. There is dark painted wood panelling on the lower part of the walls and pale beige plasterwork above with the usual generic watercolour pictures of country scenes. Seating is somewhat limited with just four or five large round tables and a couple of leather arm chairs at one end. At the other end was a darts board and a couple of locals were having a game on a recent visit. The restaurant area at the rear is much more contemporary and looks as though it may have had a recent make over with a laminate wood floor and upright leather chairs. There is a small bar counter here as well although whether that is still used or not I’m not sure. Food wise, the menu offered a fairly succinct selection of dishes and these were priced somewhat above your usual pub prices with the cheapest option (a steak and kidney pudding) coming in at £12.95 and a couple of the other dishes nudging the £20 mark. The menu does name check several local suppliers though, so I assume it’s all freshly prepared on the premises. Fortunately I was there on a Tuesday which is apparently curry night, and a blackboard offered three choices form this genre at £7 each, although I thought another £2 if you wanted poppadums was a bit steep. My Chicken Balti was a generous portion with plenty of tender chicken, although if I was being critical I didn’t think it had that much taste to it. Beers on tap were Young’s Bitter, Eagle IPA and Bombardier. The solitary cider was Strongbow, unfortunately.

Official site of The Wheatsheaf - www.wheatsheafbowbrickhill.co.uk