Hare & Hounds, St. Albans

Pub SignMan left this review about Hare & Hounds

Another backstreet pub in this part of town, this is a fairly large, multi-roomed boozer seemingly popular with a relatively younger crowd. You enter into a slightly lower front room with a grand fireplace under a huge dark wood lintel to the right with a couple of sofas in front of it, making it a good spot to grab on a chilly Autumn evening. The greeter’s lectern was just to the left of this space and having completed the unnecessarily complicated sign-in process, I was led through a low doorway to the left, into the main bar area where I was seated at a nice table opposite the bar. The servery runs along the back wall and has a tongue and groove counter front which runs in an unusual ‘bulging’ angular shape. The bar back is remarkably basic and detracts a little from the room’s overall effect although it had been brightened up a little by the addition of some fairy lights, which snake out from here across the ceiling beams. Tub chairs serve a few small tables opposite the bar but the majority of the seating appears past the left-hand end of the servery, where the room opens out into a bare boarded space with basic seating underneath low panelled walls decorated with traditional paintings and an acoustic guitar. One final room can be found to the rear right where some more chair and banquette seating can be found in a compact bare boarded space. A TV screen here was showing muted live football whilst a dreadful 90’s pop soundtrack played away in the background – I’m tempted to give this pub the score of shame just for making me listen to the bloody Macarena in full.
I counted six handpulls on the bar, two of which were unused, leaving a choice of St Austell Tribute, Adnams Ghost Ship, Youngs Special and Rat White Rat. The barmaid who had made the registration process such a chore on my arrival, continued to prove particularly inept in dealing with my complex order of one pint of White Rat, eventually managing to serve up a decent drop of a beer I don’t see down this way very often.
Despite the borderline hopeless service, I rather enjoyed this place which has a nice mix of rooms, mostly very nicely presented and comfortably furnished. Having at least one interesting beer on the bar certainly helped the cause and were there an interesting local brew available and a better choice of music on the stereo, I may well have thought even more highly of this place. Definitely worth a look if you’re crawling the backstreets of this part of town.

On 18^th November 2020 - rating: 7
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