Slug & Lettuce, Bournemouth

Official site of Slug & Lettuce - www.slugandlettuce.co.uk

Official site of Slug & Lettuce - www.slugandlettuce.co.uk

A spectacular Georgian town house which sits in its own substantial plot, overlooking Bournemouth’s night club sector. The large terraced garden at the front is a pleasant place to sit during the Summer days, but at night it tends to fill up with drunk morons. Inside, there are two floors of bar space joined by an impressive staircase and a circular balcony through which you can look down onto the bar counter below. There are multiple TV screens, all showing live sports matches from Sky. The WiFi works. The staff were mostly OK, more pleasant than in other Yates’s outlets I have visited, while the clientele were mostly the younger, rowdier element with various degrees of experimental facial hair. The food was the sub-standard prefabricated slop that would attract comment from the RSPCA if fed to a non-bipedal mammal, served with a smile but not with flair, while the beer belied previous experience and justified my optimism by being quite good: there were three ales on and a cider, all in good condition, especially the Hobgoblin Gold, a new one on me, which was very good indeed, and all served at the right temperature. I didn’t think I’d say this after previous Yates experience, but this is actually worth coming back to for its beer quality and to include in a crawl (though not a late one).

Improbably grand looking Yates up some steps in a converted town-house, imperiously looking down on its neighbours. Unfortunately it’s the usual Yates inside, the only real point of interest being the VIP snug which was quite quaint but was inevitably roped off. The two metal poles made me wonder whether they do some sort of exotic dancing in here. Fairly quiet on the evening we visited, just us and a couple of other punters watching the footy. Two ales at the bar; GK IPA and a watery, lacklustre St Austell Tribute. I could imagine that it might just about be tolerable to enjoy the front garden on a summer’s day but otherwise…