The Lower Deck Cafe Bar@Corkers, Poole

Previously The Olympia Cafe, Lower Deck is the ground floor bar of the Corkers establishment, a quayside building whose first floor is a restaurant and which has accommodation on the top floor. The establishment has been in the same family since 1944 and was renamed Corkers in 1972, so it has some historic merit. The Lower Deck isn't my idea of a pub at all, it's more of a cafe. You sit down to order your beer and 15 minutes later a vacuous juvenile brings your beer to your table once they’ve finished discussing last night’s reality TV results. The bar is an odd combination of bar room at the back and tea shop at the front. There are a cake counter, coffee machines and little tables at which to take tea. There is also a lighting gantry and a dais for a DJ, so it may have once been used as a night club of some sort. There is a small outside terrace at the front, but it is too low to give a good view of the harbour. There are 5 megakeg offerings on gas pumps at the bar, and there is a handpump dispensing vastly overpriced Ringwood Best. The latter was off when it arrived, so they changed the barrel. However, the new barrel tasted decidedly strange, so one wonders whether there is an issue with the pipes – the manager didn't really seem to know much about beer cellars, so no surprise there. There was no warm greeting, no sense of their wanting our custom, just an unpleasant sneer at our failure to leave a tip. Actually I do have a tip: give this one a miss in future.