I first got to know Hops & Glory a few years ago, when it was a good friend’s local and had more interesting beers and fewer belligerently unclothed flatmates than his place. Those two things alone would’ve drawn us in, but it ticked a lot of other boxes as well. All the boxes, actually, for what I want from a local pub. Warm in winter, with big windows steaming up on cold nights and flooding it with light in the summer. Incredible selection of craft beers – tap and bottle – and the distant allure of the microbrewery they were going to set up in the basement one day. Lots of armchairs, friendly bartenders, the occasional punter who looks like they’ve been sitting in that spot at the bar since the Dawn of Time. Not at all twee and not the smallest hint of kitsch, it had an air of twinkly-eyed granddad about it, rather than faux-trad cool. The food was limited, but along great lines, mostly charcuterie or cheese boards with doorstep slabs of bread.
Nothing about that sounds like a pub in need of an overhaul. If anybody had asked me if it’d be a good idea to, say, close for a few months in 2015 and reopen as a new beast – a Pub & Dining Room with modern British and European food, local produce, a calendar of food-drink pairing events – I’d have said: it’s brilliant already, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Luckily, arriving for a weekday dinner it seems like they barely have, at least when it comes to the key ingredients. There’s evidence of some all-round sprucing, and a handful of tables are pre-laid for dinner. But mostly it’s the same as before, right down to the craft on draught and the entrenched-looking regulars at the bar. However much Skye Bond – heading up the kitchen here, fresh from Islington gastropub the Pig & Butcher – has reworked the food, the welcoming, country pub feel’s still intact.
The menu’s short, and with four hungry people you could cover every dish. But we’re just two, and even at our most ambitious we still have to make some tough calls. We leave the tartare-ish starter with its British slant – raw beef, honey, mustard and millet – for another time. Ditto the Welsh rarebit, and the pot-roast guinea fowl and chestnut main course.
Instead we go for the yellow beetroot salad with coddled egg and capers to start, which turns up looking like a study in spring – the yellow and white of the salad in a pesto-like slick of capers. It’s a reminder that the emphasis of the new Hops & Glory menu’s on seasonally-available produce – and it’s also a reminder of how on-point the bartenders are here with their drinks-matching; they’ve pointed me towards the Moor So’Hop ultra-pale ale, as light and spring-like as the salad.
For our main courses we’ve gone for a Hereford bavette steak with grilled chicory and duck fat chips, and a Masala stone bass with cauliflower mash, with a Pragustus Albarino wine. To share, in protest at having to miss out on anything else from the menu. And those are, like the starters, all perfect, if what you want from pub food isn’t ground-breaking nouvelle cuisine but just beautiful classics – familiar enough to feel like comfort food, surprising enough to make your friendly local feel like a special occasion.
The Hops & Glory, 382, Essex Road, London, N1 3PF. 0207 2262277. Website.
