Salted Peanuts - Bring back wet dogs in the snug

For at the latter end of the last century it was hard to find a well-bred inn serving a decent plate of grub and a glass of real ale. In those genteel days of yore the taverns had burgundy carpets and bentwood chairs and piped Radio Two. The rolls were granary and tended to nestle, the beer was keg and the ketchup came in sachets. It was microwave food and fizzy drink produced and sold by those with questionable taste for those with no taste buds.

And then the gastropub crept into our province. It was an idea that spilled from the capital. In the late Eighties, The Eagle in London’s Farringdon Road, formerly an early morning pub for Smithfield Market meat porters, started to serve first-rate grilled food cooked in full view of its lunchtime customers, most of whom worked for the Guardian newspaper.
The idea quickly took
hold in fashionable London. Over the next decade scores of the city’s Victorian drinking dens were stripped bare and given a lick of paint and a couple of scrubbed pine tables. Instead of a pint of keg and a cellophane-wrapped pie they offered proper ale, presumptuous wines and plain fare freshly cooked from a constantly changing blackboard.

By 2000 that idea had begun to creep down the M4 corridor and into the countryside. Out went frilly curtains and frozen lasagne and in came flagstone floors and bangers and mash. The coaching scene tablemat was chucked, as was the glass yard of ale above the bar and straps of horse brasses either side of the fireplace. Out too went stainless steel cruet sets, red paper napkins and KP nuts. In came open fires, abstract modern paintings and Michelin-starred potato crisps.

The gastropub had arrived – stuffed olives were tossed in the air and goblets of Chardonnay drunk in celebration. Here was proof that a Cotswold local could be as much a temple to the good life as any Parisian bistro or fancy London eatery.

Weekenders started comparing their local boozer with the capital’s best restaurants. They swanked to their London friends about the slow-cooked pork belly and raved over the ‘home-cooked’ sticky toffee pudding. Light brown road signs sprung up directing us to these Epicurean institutions that were labelled ‘destination’ pubs identified by signs that were sign-written rather than painted in the traditional figurative style. The blackboards – chefs had to be as adept with chalk descriptions as they were with chicken livers – boasted of ‘locally-sourced’ food and landlords started behaving like Gordon Ramsay and charging like wounded bulls.

However, amid this euphoria of having somewhere decent to eat, the point of the local pub was lost.

A country pub is not for a Christmas blow-out – it is for life. A pub is for drinking. It is for relaxing after work, escaping the wife and meeting with mates. It is for a sandwich and a swift half. It is for ham, egg and chips; darts, dominoes, large whiskies, loud conversation and somewhere to take a wet dog – none of which fits in with the thinking of our re-invented gastropubs.

Nor do these tasteful institutions like muddy boots, badly-dressed agricultural labourers, satellite television, pickled eggs, Walkers crisps and KP nuts that can be pulled off to reveal a glamour model. In fact most gastropubs earnestly wish they weren’t pubs at all.

The result is that going to a country inn in the Cotswolds is now is a grim affair. For just as the pubs at the end of the last century were gentrified, so our local boozers have been ‘gastrofied’. And the new ‘gastrofication’ is just as genteel as the ‘good taste’ saloon bar from the 1990s. The only difference is that in a gastropub the food is cut from a vacuum pack and slow-heated rather than taken from the freezer and put in a microwave.
 
There is a place for good local food in our pubs, but there is also a place for a public bar. Local licensing law should decree that a pub must behave as a pub and not as a bistro. It should insist on a badly-decorated snug bar where customers can stand and drink without pressure to eat. And in addition to any gastro-menu it offers, it should be obliged to sell filled rolls and steak and chips (and fried onion rings). And in particular it should have ketchup in a bottle in full view of customers and not in a sachet or, as is the current vogue, in a tasteful white porcelain container with a teaspoon that falls on the table.

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