“Can you recommend a pub near Bristol Temple Meads with good food?” Err, actually, we’re not sure we can – which is quite strange, really.
A decade ago, it felt as if most pubs offered food, and a common grumble was that all pubs had become gastropubs.
Our 2017 book 20th Century Pub has a chapter about gastropubs, a chunk of which is also available as a blog post.
In that piece, researched and written in 2016, we said that the term gastropub had essentially died in 2011 when The Good Food Guide stopped using it because it no longer felt like a special category.
But no sooner was 20th Century Pub published than we began to notice a change in the market.
Back in 2022 we wrote about the declining quality and increasing price of pub food:
The success of the gastropub, both as a business model and as a buzzword, took it into the mainstream. By the late noughties, received wisdom across much of the pub industry was that you needed to offer food to survive and the wet-led pub was on the way out… Wetherspoon pubs, with their vast menus and low prices, further normalised the expectation that a pub would have food available if you wanted it… We’d argue this has reversed somewhat in the past decade. Between micropubs and taprooms, new wet-led enterprises have opened in most towns and cities in England, and are often go-to destinations.
There were also stories of pubs closing their kitchens, reducing their food offer to simple snacks, reducing the hours of food service, or farming out the work to pop-ups and food trucks.
Now, in 2025, if we think of our favourite Bristol pubs, hardly any of them serve food, and when they do it’s not ‘pub grub’ but pizzas, burgers, dumplings, noodles…
You might think, great! Those things are all better than microwaved lasagna and Brake’s Brothers steak and ale pie.
But part of the appeal of pub grub was its simplicity and variety. A party of six could go to the pub and between them eat fish and chips, linguini, a big salad, a burger, a pie, and bangers and mash.
That’s exactly the menu our acquaintance was after when they asked for a recommendation the other night.
Like many people not obsessed with pubs and the pub trade, they hadn’t noticed the change, and just assumed pub grub would still be there when they needed it.
It’s interesting how often we find ourselves in pubs that no longer serve food and hear people ask at the bar: “Is the kitchen open?” They haven’t updated their mental model from before the pandemic.
Trying to answer the question we’d been asked, we debated The Barley Mow a bit – it does have food, but when is it served? We couldn’t find this out online and nobody wanted to phone to ask.
In the end, we suggested a 10-minute walk into town where The Old Fish Market, a rather corporate Fuller’s pub, is still selling the 1990s gastropub dream.
Our correspondent was very happy with apparently excellent crispy pork belly and roasted vegetables.
That’s it, we suppose – pub grub has become the preserve of chains who can still squeeze profit out of it through centralised supply chains and carefully costed menus.
This is perhaps also why the Fuller’s and Young’s pound chains did so well over the Christmas period: they provide food when people most want it.
On a more positive note, we have observed a resurgence in the availability of clingfilm-wrapped cheese and onion rolls, pies, pasties and scotch eggs.
That includes at The Kings Head, one of our favourite Bristol pubs, whose beer offer skews hip and crafty.
Snacks like that might not satisfy those in search of a hearty three-course meal but they’re certainly welcome when, otherwise, you’d have to abandon a cosy spot, and ale on good form, to find something to eat.
