The Fentiman Arms

Waited for food for over an hour, service really poor, food was stone cold. Not going back.

A brilliant, fun boozer with an amazing garden for the summer that has blankets and heaters for the winter too. The food is usually pretty good, but too many times I’ve been disappointed with the service. Still, if you’re just looking for a fun, boozy afternoon in Oval, then this is the place to be.

We dropped in for lunch yesterday. Picked a table and I ordered an £8 sandwich. Tomato and mozzarella. Complete rip off. 2 small triangular sandwiches consisting of 4 small dry triangles of white Italian style bread, 2 very thin slices of tomato and 2 thin pieces of tasteless mozzarella. SHAME. very very poor. No butter, no mayo, no lettuce, no onion, no watercress, no condiments offered, no chance I will be going back. Just a few under cooked fat chips on the side that my husband ate. No ketchup! I’m just too American for a fancy London gastropub. IM AFRAID IM OUT! As a dragon would say!

A charming pub very close to the Oval cricket ground. Especially cosy in the winter.
Food was OK but not worth the price (especially the side dishes). Desserts were very disappointing!
Excellent service from the friendly staff.

Had a lovely dinner here on the new patio. It’s a great neighbourhood pub, and the warm service really makes it worth a return. Crowd is generally 20s-​30s and lively. I’ve been a big fan of the Geronimo Inns pubs and this one is no exception — homey and quirky décor (like the nook wallpapered with Penguin book covers), friendly service, excellent wine list and fantastic food. The food isn’t gastropub standards but it’s above and beyond standard pub fare. We had the cod croquettes starter, the pork chop main, the gnocchi, and the lamb main. Finally we finished up with the peach tart.
Lamb and gnocchi were delicious, especially the latter for the portion size and gooey cheesiness. The lamb was perfectly cooked with a yummy pomegranate seed salad alongside. The pork chop was good, but raw near the bone. When we told the waitress, she apologized and offered a drink or dessert on the house. I understand that pork is a bit difficult to cook without making it bone dry, and staff handled this hiccup excellently.
All in all, definitely worth coming round for some drinks and snacks and an afternoon in the sunshine!

I can’t comment on the food but the ale is very poorly kept. My pint of Youngs bitter was sooty in taste and the sample of Doom bar — a ubiquitous ale that should have the distinct refreshing clear taste typical of Cornish ale — recoil-​worthy. Seriously Fentiman Arms, go for quality (ideally get Cask Marque accreditation) over quantity if you can’t do both.
A couple of pluses are the space upstairs and music. But I’d take drinkable ale and background chatter over that any day.

Good atmosphere, dog friendly and an outside area which would be good on sunny days but the food was average at best. There were minimal food options left available when we arrived at 3, which as a vegetarian left me only with a starter to have as a main. My cauliflower cheese side was tiny and had barely any cheese. The service was poor — both starters and mains arrived at once, and i wasn’t told until 25 minutes after I ordered that what I wanted wasn’t available. My friends then ordered and only one main arrived out of 5 dishes, and the waitress kept coming back to tell us various dishes were no longer available, ages after we ordered. It was one problem after another! Very disappointing.

Great food — a bit pricy overall for both food and booze but it is made up for in great atmopshere and a wonderful beer garden.
Service can be a little bit hit or miss when it is busy, but overall love going!

I have died and gone to pub food heaven! This is an all-​around fantastic gastro pub. Having trouble finding a place for drinks on a Friday night in Vauxhall, my friends and I wondered a bit further away and decided on this place.
The pub is in a residential area so on the exterior, it looks rather dull. On the inside, however, it’s packed and tastefully decorated. It was a rugby night, so many people were crowding around the tv to watch the game. My friends and I manage to sneak into the nook with the amazing wallpaper. The table was reserved for later in the evening, but the servers didn’t make a fuss and the group never turned up in the end.
All the servers were so friendly and approachable. We ordered our food at the bar, but there was a waitress floating around somewhere (possibly serving the rowdy crowd of rugby fans). The fish and chips were spot on. In terms of dessert, try the pecan tart!
I can’t wait till the weather is warmer so I can check out their backyard patio! Definitely coming back for more.

I work in Vauxhall and always seem go forget about this lovely pub, until someone suggests we go there for a nice lunch or leaving do!
The décor and atmosphere is really lovely. It’s quite quirky without being in your face weird, combined with being a bit more upmarket looking than your average pub.
My favourite area to sit in is a section with penguin book cover wallpaper!
There is a good range of drinks and they serve delicious, upmarket gastro pub food. The huge chips (think massive hunks of potatoes!) are the perfect hot pub snack with a drink or two.
Drinks are a tiny bit pricey, but not unaffordable for London.
There’s a nice large outdoor garden, perfect for summer drinking too, plus a BBQ area where they sell hot dogs and burgers in the summer.
A really lovely pub for a nice catch up drink or meal with friends or a date.
Also, a real treat, they have an excellent playlist! Love their music!

Nice neighbourhood pub with good food and friendly staff. The garden in the back is large and is a nice place to go and hang out on a nice summer day/​evening. Thumbs up for the Malbec on the menu too!

An impromptu visit on the hottest evening of the year. We squeezed onto the last table on the buzzing terrace and instantly relaxed. I had a perfect smoked chicken Caesar with just the lightest touch of smoke on the meat, my partner enjoyed his well seasoned smoked mackerel pâté. All washed down with a cool bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc. Great atmosphere and excellent service by the very hard pressed staff — not easy shimmying between the closely packed tables!

Look at me giving a rare 5 stars. I like this pub, plenty of space when the garden is in use. Nice beer, nice staff, the young adult cultural type crowd. I went here after a game at the oval. The walk from there may put you off going to a pub in the area, but this place sits in an affluent road. A few reviews on qype had me convinced to give it a go. Great place I will visit regularly from now on.

Nice, large corner pub. The front seating area catches the sun. Not much traffic passing when I visited, so is peaceful at times. Friendly and helpful staff. Lots of comfortable seating. Well worth a visit.

This was my very first stop on my very first trip to London. Wait, that’s not true, we stopped at Tesco’s on the way from the Tube station to my fiancé’s flat.
Anyway, my guide picked this place due to its location (within walking distance of his place), its ambiance (a pub-​like atmosphere but with a classier touch) and its food. And I say he nailed it: I loved this place.
They reserved the two biggest tables they had for us (picnic style which is a huge pain in the ass as there’s nowhere to put your purse and coat except on the table, and everyone on your side has to get up if you need a smoke or a wee). But that was only a minor annoyance as the service was great, the beer selection was decent, the crowd was fun and the bathrooms were never too crowded and clean. AND they boast a smoking patio (that’s American for beer garden, as I understand) out back.
Tried a few menu items — a pastry covered sausage that was pretty good, some crisps and I saw a Scotch egg show up for someone else at the table who said it was good. A creative menu with some traditional basics=score. I would come back for a nice dinner with my fiancé or for a night of pints with friends again. Fentiman would be great for either.

The food is unpretentiously good. The wine and beer are well selected and high quality. Open fire and interesting music make for a superb atmosphere. Just arrange a table early during busy periods like Friday night and over the weekend.

I was seriously disappointed in this pub. Most of the Geronimo chain have been pretty good, and we were just popping for a quick pint and a bite to eat before the cricket — what could go wrong? They had a table which needed to bevacated in an hour and a half — no problem, we thought, since we’d be off by then. How wrong we were!
We ordered 3 roasts and a pork thing, some lime and sodas and a beer. And waited. And waited. And waited. The hour and a half was up, so we got a bit worried we’d be kicked off before eating. We had asked after our food three times by this point, with a ‘5 minutes’ promise every time. This irks me — if the food is late, admit it and apologise, don’t tell a barefaced lie. The food was nowhere near being ready, clearly. We did get some drinks to tide us over. They were drinkable.
Finally it arrived: 2 roasts, a stone cold pork dish, and a stone cold lamb dish that was most definuitely not the roast I ordered. The disappointment on my face didn’t register with the waitress, who was off like a shot. I tracked her down and she said ‘I’ll just check’, then informed me that I was right (erm, isn’t the customer always?) and that I had ordered something different. Given the length of time it had taken, I didn’t want to re-​order so I ate it but told her I wasn’t willing to pay for it. It was cold and boring.
The food would have been OK had it been warm, but the service wasn’t even close to OK and there’s something going seriously wrong in a pub that lets food go cold at the pass after nearly 2 hours’ wait. They put my meal and the second round of drinks on the bill, and we had them take them off. There goes their last star — beyond cheeky to try to charge me for something I didn’t order, took 2 hours to arrive, and was horrible, and you’d promised not to.
Can’t recommend this one.

This pub used to be my local when I first decided to move south of the river. Vauxhall is very odd place, on one hand there are few rough and industrial parts where I wouldn’t venture after dark and then you also have got cute little places like Fentiman Arms or nearby Vauxhall Park with miniature houses, bird fountain and bowling green — absolutely gorgeous for picnic on a sunny day.
But back to the main point, I wouldn’t agree with Monica that the Fentiman Arms is only frequented by people with little personality as I used to go there every Sunday!
And I’m far from being boring.
Fentiman Arms is one of those lovely pubs tucked away from busy streets of London which is why you will be greeted by the same faces each week and will become friends with staff in no time. But what I loved the most about this pub, was its cosy atmosphere, comfy seats and the board games! The place becomes even more fun during spring or summer when beer garden at the back gets opened for weekly barbeques. If you live nearby then check it out!

In hindsight, this probably wasn’t the best choice of venue for a colleague’s leaving do.
They happily let us book a lunchtime table for 10, but didn’t mention that it was ‘BBQ menu’. So just two choices: £15 meat platter (served with salad and chips) or £9 veg stuffed peppers (again, served with salad and chips).
Only one of us actually felt like eating BBQ, so the rest of us considered the veg option. Could someone just order salad? No. Just chips? No. Just salad and chips? No.
So we were served 1 biggish plate of chips, 2 biggish plates of salad, 1 plate of meaty bits and 9 x half peppers. £9 for half a stuffed pepper, salad and chips? Yes indeed.
After a bit of moaning, we were upgraded to an extra plate of chips. To be fair, they also agreed that half a pepper wasn’t really much of a main course and knocked a few quid off the bill.
So a good venue for talking about cricket, wearing your fred perry with the collar sticking up and chewing a charcoaly sausage. For anything more, the Portuguese places up the road are a better option.

Stuck in the exact middle of Fentiman street is very nice place to relax on summers eve. The open, airy space with cushy bunkets give this pub a sort of Nantucket kind of feel. It always seems quite busy and filled with the local diversity of young professionals verging on family and a few local gays.
Chris the manager is very friendly and always makes the time for his us. The staff are polite and because of the low turn over, you can become friendly with them. I always say, ‘it pays to be a good tipper’ The food is good but best on Sundays. You have to book to get a table and be there early to enjoy the great roast beef. The back garden is huge and full in the summer.
my local hang out.