Paul Southgate
Google
I love this place. There, I said it. I love this place. The Kensington in Cotham is the sort of pub you rarely find outside London these days — and even in London they're being squeezed out faster than a pint in Soho on a Friday. It's the holy grail of neighbourhood spots: a proper local with style, substance, a deftly pulled Guinness, and a wine list that doesn’t look like it was printed in the back of a Ladbrokes.
There’s a guest beer on. Always a good sign. Not ten, not twelve, not the sort of barrage of IPA nonsense where every pint tastes like someone cleaned their bong in it — just one well-kept, rotating cask that makes you feel like you’re in on a secret. And the restaurant out back is actually, properly good. Thoughtfully done. Confident. The kind of thing that makes you lean over to your wife and say, mouth full of something beefy and delicious, “God, maybe we should move round here.” It’s that sort of place. It’s got that magic. You feel it in your bones — and your belly.
But here’s the rub. And there’s always a rub.
We arrived at 8pm on a Saturday night — peak time, peak mood, peak appetite. I was ready. I was primed. I had a Guinness in hand and the dreamy glow of a menu that does exactly what I want menus to do: stay the hell out of the way.
Three starters. Three mains. Three sharer/chop-type things. Boom. That’s it. That’s how it should be. None of this laminated, twenty-page novella of mediocrity. I always say — and I do, with dreary repetition — that if a menu needs more than one page, you’re about to be served reheated despair in a ramekin. So when I saw this short, punchy, confident little line-up, I nearly kissed the waiter.
But then came the heartbreak. They’d run out. Not just out of one thing, which you can sort of forgive if it’s an obscure cut of something foraged off a Welsh hill at dawn. But loads of things. A worrying amount of things. Unless I was going veggie (me? More likely to take up ballet) or my wife could be convinced to take on a hulking great
Chateaubriand with me (less likely still — she once winced at a côte de boeuf for two like I’d suggested we hunt it ourselves), we were left with… cod or onglet.
Now I like cod. And I adore onglet. But that’s not the point, is it? You can’t go into a restaurant with nine items on the menu and so many of them off. Not at 8pm. Not on a Saturday. That’s like showing up to the cinema and being told the projector’s knackered but they can act out the ending for you.
It kills the momentum. It breaks the spell. Because the spell, here, is that The Kensington is quietly brilliant. That it’s run by people who care. That it’s the sort of place that gets it. And it still might be! I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt, because I’m not a monster. And because I want this place to succeed. I want it to be great. I want it to be the kind of pub where you book dinner on a Tuesday and stumble out four hours later with half the room’s birthdays in your phone.
But they’ve got to sort that kitchen out. If you’re going to do the lean menu thing — and yes please, do it — then you’ve got to back it up with stock, planning, and the ability to make it to closing without shrugging at guests like it’s a village fête and the cake stand’s been pillaged.
That said, I’ll be back. Probably next week. Because I do love it. The Guinness is cold. The crowd is warm. And I can still taste that promise — the one that makes you Google house prices on the walk home.
