Sunday Roast and Beer @ The North Pole

Renovated and reopened last year and renamed the North Pole, this craft beer pub with over 22 beers and ciders on draught and more again in bottles behind the bar, this is slowly becoming my new hangout.

We almost moved in to a crappy flat next door when this was once called the North Star, thankfully the wife is in charge of all that and she saw sense not to move next door to a pub. Plus the flat was really crap. Yet now under its new guise as a craft beer pub I wouldn’t mind moving closer to this amazing drinking den.

With a fluent ever changing mix of beers on offer, I am loving this place more and more with each visit. Just a shame it is further from my house than the JB, otherwise I would live here.

Oddly I’ve never eaten at the North Pole, not sure how this has worked out as the food always looked good.

So this surprisingly warm and lovely Sunday afternoon, we ended up outside the North Pole with beer and roast in mind. It had been a while since my last roast, been eating too much Turkish to remember what one tasted like.

So to get the party going a couple of Pilsners were ordered, a Rothaus wheat beer and a beer from north Cornwall, good but not as flavoursome as the wheat beer. Plus the other reason we came here, the roast. So the pork shoulder and chicken were ordered.

Beers were going down very nicely when the roasts turned up. Both came with the same accompaniments, large yorkies, potatoes, carrots, beetroot and some fine gravy. Sadly no greens came with the meal, which I think is a first. This did lend the plates to a rather beige look about them.

Thankfully the meats were not beige. The roast pork was juicy and had a good crispy outer casing. Delish. The chicken again was perfectly cooked and no dryness in its flesh. Phew. Had too much of that recently.

We rounded the meal off with a chocolate fudge cake and sauce, with a half pint of an 8.4% Belgian style IPA called Flying Dog, Raging Bitch. Love it. This was the star of the show and I could have stayed all night and drunk some more. Alas no.

I need to go back for more food, maybe their Tuesday Carnivore Club to try some more of their grub, as the roast was good but not excellent. It was homely.

This is why I feel it is more of a craft beer pub than gastro, a place to come with your friends and sample a wide variety of beers and have some food to line your stomach to delay that drunken feeling for a couple more pints.

As I said I just wish the North Pole was closer to my house than the JB, otherwise I would be here all the time.