Great food - shame about the beer!

As if he hadn’t got enough on his hands the ubiquitous Gordon Ramsay has expanded into pubs with the first of what is reported to be a new chain. I went to check out The Narrow which is down in Limehouse in east London on what was the perfect English summer day.


Good news first: it’s a great looking place right on the water with plenty of outdoor seating so you can sit and watch the tugboats and other Thames traffic sail by. Inside too is cool - open ceilinged, white-and-navy painted, straight from the pages of a coastal magazine.

The food - as you’d expect - is great and very fairly priced. We tried a couple of starters: some delicately spiced potted crab (£6) seasoned traditionally with mace and an unusual but fresh tasting salad of beetroot, radishes, capers and flat leaf parsley (£4) and three mains, which included a faultless monkfish and chips: fresh fish, perfect puffy batter, handcut chips, homemade mushy peas and tartare sauce - one of the best I’ve tasted and a snip at £10.50. (Our other dishes were lemon sole with potted shrimps and pigs cheek)

But the beer . . . It’s not as if there aren’t a lot of bottles on the list (35) and some like Deuchars IPA, Young’s Special London Ale & Innis & Gunn are perfectly respectable but on the whole they’re the big brands you see everywhere including Fosters and Corona, both rather ludicrously given a tasting note. It’s as if Gordon had put Blossom Hill and Paul Masson on his winelist which of course he’d never dream of doing.

Nothing from the US. Not much from Germany or even from round the UK. (The Rake and Wright’s Oyster and Porter House in Borough Market both do a much better job.) Nothing seasonal -chocolate stout is not the beer for May. The guest beer was inexplicably off.

So, it has to be said, was the service. We had a prolonged struggle to get the girl behind the bar to understand that we wanted to put our beers on our food bill, that we had booked to eat but hadn’t yet eaten. Drinks took an age to arrive. It’s early days yet and there are bound to be teething troubles but Gordon’s places normally run so much like clockwork that it’s a bit of a shock to find them wanting in this respect.

I hope he’ll also revisit his beer list and put some more interesting brews on it. Frankly at the moment it’s an opportunity missed which together with the pub’s out of the way location makes it not worth the detour down the Docklands Light Railway.