The Tap On The Line

Not bad. Solid, if typical tap selection. I was surprised to see Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as a tap option here in the UK. I had the hangar steak — it was good enough.
Staff was really great. The space is also really good. Given what else exists here for lunch options, you could do far worse.

A very pleasant pub to drop in for a drink. Good selection of beer, didn’t have a chance to try the food though, but it looked pretty good :)

Great service, atmosphere, food & drinks. Try the burger, it’s huge, but fantastic. We ate outside while waiting for the tube, happy we did.

A corporate designed pub from the Fuller Brewery people.
They put a lot of money into it to appeal to the upscale Kew Gardens clientele —
and given the poor pub options in Kew Gardens —
the presence of a new good pub would be a good thing.
What is good here is fantastic.
What is bad is corporate.
The major major plus — and this is a serious consideration — is architecture and interior design.
On looks– this place is a grand slam home run — and whoever designed it deserves to have a massive ego.
They used a vacant part of the Kew Overground station — and railway stations tend to start giving you good space. (High, airy, lots of old architectual touches)
Then in a touch of BRILLIANT corporate marketing meets architectual artistry — they designed a perfect women’s room for lunches and a perfect guy’s room for drinking.
The women’s room is filled with natural light, beautiful detail work and craft work, cute pictures of animals everywhere — and looks like a tea room in a gazebo rather than a pub.
My wife SO wanted to sit in this room.
The men’s room keeps all the touches of the original railway connection (or adds some nice fake touches like a faded London and Southwestern Railway mark stenciled into the wall)
The theme is 1930’s cream colored tile and dark woods that evoke a first rate Rio de Janeiro botequim.
The room is darker.
I SO wanted to sit in THAT room.
So whoever decorated those spaces is a master of gender specific psychology and eye stimulus.
Ah — but if the beer and food were better.
For Kew — they KNOW they have to have some real ales — so real ales are available.
But they are really trying to move Fuller Brewery products so those are conspicuously available and beautifully labelled and laid out.
Being a good sport I tried their London Black Cab Stout — which is everything a corporate brewer would come up with in a stout to maximize volume of sales.
There is a sweet and creamy starting taste that is pleasant — and the stout immediately evaporates into water with no aftertaste or afteredge.
So you can chug down lots and lots of London Black Cab Stout enjoying the first taste — but there is nothing to linger over.
Sorry — but Stout is supposed to fight with you and have an aftertaste that commands respect.
It is supposed to go down slow– not fast like Coca Cola.
Not a repeat purchase.
Corporate also shows up in the food.
Fish and chips used some sort of pre-​made pre-​processed frozen fish.
How did we know?
My companion’s and my fish came out IDENTICAL down to the microtexturing on the crust.
Plus — real fish and chips often «bends» as the fish is not symmetric or the coating is not symmetric so things cook at different rates.
These were flat as a pool table and beautifully symmetric.
Taste was ho hum.
The corporate mushy peas were great (totally totally minty! which is so hard to find)
and the chips were excellent.
But still I felt I was in a synthetic artificial experience not unlike the perfect village in the TV series «The Prisoner».
It is a great pretty room and if I lived in Kew Gardens — there might not be a lot of other options near by.
But the place would be much better if it combined its beautiful room with more soul in the beer and the cooking.