The Rose & Crown, Oxford

Excellent side-street pub featuring a compact front room, an overwide corridor with a serving hatch and the bar at the back with some elongated tables. Very traditional throughout. Four cask beers on handpump: Old Hooky, Oxford Brewery's Shotover Prospect, Vale Best IPA and Shagweaver from North Cotswold. Some way north of the city centre, but certainly worth the walk.

This is a cosy multiple room pub in a pleasant neighbourhood a little way North of the city centre. Rather unusually, this pub was still offering strict table service, as per Covid guidelines from over a year ago, which meant that we were quickly shuffled into the small front parlour and had little opportunity to explore the rest of the pub. You enter into a bare boarded corridor that runs down the right-hand side of the pub, with a small bar area and serving hatch to the left and a few limited seating options down the end wall. The front parlour is through a door to the left of the entrance and has a terracotta tile floor, lincrusta walls and a nice art-deco style fireplace with a large mirror above. There’s only enough space for two tables, served by chairs and a hard bench, making it a compact, almost micropubesque space. The décor is very homely and includes a couple of old pub signs, quirky artwork, various newspaper clippings and a nice portrait of the pub. Following the corridor past the hatch, there is a larger rear room with some similar seating options, in greater quantities, and the main bar counter to the front. Beyond this is a sheltered courtyard garden with lots of bench seating and an outdoor toilet block. This seemed like a very popular spot and the shelter meant that customers were happy sat out here despite the cold temperatures. A lounge music soundtrack played in the background throughout our stay and there was a steady trickle of customers coming and going throughout the course of our visit. Table service meant there was no opportunity to examine the handpulls in the main bar, with laminated menus presented instead. These listed the cask options as Hook Norton Old Hooky and Oat Sower, Oxford Shotover Trinity and Adnams Southwold Bitter, but I ordered a pint of the Oat Sower and was presented with something that was cold and fizzy enough to make me think it was on keg dispense – it wasn’t a particularly pleasant pint either. This is a very nice pub with a lovely old, traditional interior that is well worth the walk out of the city centre to explore. We clearly didn’t get the chance to see the place at its best with the table service restricting our movements and resulting in a dubious choice of beverage, but that wouldn’t discourage me from returning once normal service has been fully resumed.