The Sparrowhawk, Crystal Palace, SE19

Seemed to me to be food led.Very busy and warm modern bar.Harveys -sussex and Wells -a good stuffing on cask.

The Sparrowhawk is situated on the corner of a very busy road junction. The pub now sports the horrible battleship grey colour. Once inside the bar faces,there is a single room which is wrapped around the bar on three sides,the seating is normal tables and chairs and settees to the front and bench seating to the rear. There were three real ales on the bar,i had a drink of Cronx Kotchin which went down well,the other beers were Harveys Bitter and Purity UBU. The background music was too quiet to be heard properly,the pub was very busy on my Saturday afternoon visit. I did not encounter any problems in being served here,so they would probably serve anyone who turns up here for a drink. Pub visited 16/4/2016

There were three ales on in here - Harvey's Best, Purity Mad Goose, and Clarkshaw's Gorgon's Alive! (£2.10 a half). I felt obliged to try the Gorgon's Alive!, because it's such an unusual name for a beer, and Clarkshaw's is a local brewery based at Loughborough Junction. And pretty good it was too. I also saw a black cauldron on the counter, for some mulled drink, or possibly soup, I guess. There weren't any menus on the tables, but I saw people eating so they obviously do food weekday lunchtimes. This old pub has now been thoroughly made over. The bar counter's painted dark grey, with plenty of light grey painted woodwork at the front, plus wine racks are included in the modern bar back. So far so gastro. Furnishings are mainly big chunky tables and normal chairs, but with considerable "distressing" in evidence. There are also the inevitable chunky tall tables/tall stools. A few smallish prints adorn the walls of miscellaneous things - one might have been of a microscope - plus a larger one of a bird of prey, a sparrowhawk presumably. Any pub character this place may have had has been completely stripped out. This is an ordinary gastropub. But the beer was good though.

The Sparrowhawk official site, contains menu - thesparrowhawkpub.co.uk

The Sparrowhawk official site, contains menu - thesparrowhawkpub.co.uk

At the risk of sounding like a broken record – what is it with Crystal Palace and food orientated pubs? It wasn’t all that long ago that this was a rough and ready Jack Beards pub called the Hollybush; by no means a great pub, but a proper pub nonetheless. Now it has been given the full gastro makeover and presents itself as almost a café style bar rather than somewhere you might go for a few drinks. I say it has had the full gastro treatment, but part of me wonders if it has, as the end result is a plain drab interior with virtually no character or warmth. There are exposed wooden floorboards, plain walls with large windows along two sides and a mix of scrubbed wooden and formica topped tables, plus a few like they’ve come straight from IKEA. The seating is mostly standard chairs for the comfort of the diners, although there was the odd sofa and high stool here and there. The servery is central, with the room running in a C shape around it and a side door leads you out to the garden where there is some additional seating. A new feature to me was the ‘make your own’ Bloody Mary kit on the bar counter, which kind of summed the place up nicely. The pub is both dog and child friendly, which attracted a number of young families (and their pets) for a late lunch during my stay. On the bar, just Sambrooks Wandle on hand pull whilst a Harvey’s Best clip was turned round. The keg range was a little more adventurous and included Aspall’s Suffolk Cyder and Leffe. The bar staff seemed fairly uninterested in serving me and when they did, they seemed to view me as a bit of an inconvenience as I sat at the bar because all the tables were taken up with diners. This is probably the worst of Crystal Palace’s trendy food-led pubs, mainly because it is so completely and utterly bland. There are far better beer pubs in Crystal Palace and there are gastro pubs nearby with a lot more atmosphere and character too.

This pub screams gastro, refurbished and re-focused, it has changed beyond belief from the truly terrible Jack Beards. It is however more restaurant than pub, and the prices reflect this. Two ales on tap, Sambrooks Wandle and Harvey's Best, reasonable condition, but i did feel out of place just drinking, that said the food did look good. Some will love it, for me its not pubby enough.