The Tabard

The Tabard
Bedford Park & Turnham Green, London

Out in the London escape of Bedford Park, we managed to arrive here, as part of our architecture lecture. This pub was done by Norman Shaw (pretty famous around here). There is a lovely row of traditional English homes down the street, very typical and Englishy, and there is a nice church down the way as well. I wasn't all that impressed with the pub to be honest. It had no atmosphere because it was so big. It wasn't cozy, but there was also no one in here except for the few of us. It's a big pub, and when it's empty it seems cold. The food here is rubbish, but there was some nice, unique tile work done by Shaw here. I won't be coming back, but it's nice to try these kind of places.

The Tabard is a little too modern and too lit for me. It's not old, and you can tell. I like old places, warm places, pub-atmosphere places where everyone knows your name and comes back because they know it's good, for conversation, for drinks, for atmosphere....

Roast Beef
"Roast topside of beef served with a selection of potatoes and seasonal vegetables, Yorkshire pudding, and gravy"
This was not worth the money in quality, but this was a whopping portion of a meal! The roast beef was tough and rubber, and everything else on the plate was grease. Yes, they fried their potatoes to be like potatas en Espana. And yes, those onion ring looking things are the Yorkshire pudding, not very good I'm afraid. All you taste is fried grease. There was a this ball-wod on the side that was a little ping-pong ball of stuffing (like at thanksgiving). That was good. There were a total of 5 baby carrots, submerged in the pool of cornstarch gravy, as well as a total of 5 baby haricot verts. Yeah... not getting food here ever again.

Nachos
Can't ever go wrong with these. They were slightly spice seasoned with cheese, tomatoes, guacamole and sour cream. I really liked these!

Double-Baked Cheese Souffle
This was the biggest rip-off. The girls said it tasted like a dry, plain quiche, with cheese and spinach and some veggies in it. It looked like something I could have quickly whipped up and put in the oven. The cheese must have been a type of Quickes Cheddar or something. We expected it to be bigger than this at least. It was a disappointment, apparently.

This is the bar area. This is quite a clean pub. It's nice, and the bar area is nice. It's just not... pubish. There was reggae and pop music playing over the loud speakers, and the bar tender did not look like he knew what he was doing with everyone's drinks. I didn't get any beverages, but if I did, I wouldn't have asked him for a recommendation.