I’ve found the only gastropub worth eating at

The gastropub, an invention of the early 1990s, is a terrible idea. They burst on to the scene when breweries were made to sell off many of their pubs for a song to make way for competition, encouraging Marco Pierre White wannabes to snap them up and replace cheese sandwiches and pork scratchings with kidneys on toast and anything that could be put together in a kitchen the size of a shoebox.

Many of them have food prepared off-premises but charge restaurant prices. There are no proper tablecloths, the glasses are made to survive if dropped on concrete floors and it all feels a bit like going round to your friend’s house for a substandard dinner party. The times I have reluctantly ended up in one, at the behest of friends with the bad taste to live in the countryside, I have found myself having to queue at the bar to be served drinks to accompany my meal, which put me in mind of Nando’s.