picture from Nottingham Food Lovers 

Nottingham has thankfully rid itself of the hideous theme pub Flares and the city has gone against its usual tradition of either leaving a pub empty or allowing a ‘metro’ version of a supermarket to open by opening a pub on the site. I have been to the Three Crowns on a few occasions and have found that despite its location it is a nice pub, convenient for pre-theatre and post-Rock City drinks. However I have one little niggle, it is clearly a Wetherspoons pub in disguise although it doesn’t seem to attract the usual scum that frequent the cheap chain despite it being next to the Job Centre, handy for the miraculous Giro into cider transformation that even Jesus couldn’t do with such regularity. Today we took the biggest risk known to humanity, we ordered food.

I have only one experience of eating in a Wetherspoon pub, it was several years ago in Redcar for Sunday lunch with my daughter. We only went there due to the paucity of places in Redcar to eat and waited ages for our microwaved frozen meals that we could have bought for half the price down the road in Iceland. Emily loudly proclaimed the vegetables ‘minging’ (there’s a word you don’t hear these days) and correctly pointed out that they’d had plenty of time to get it right given how long we had waited. With it being Saturday I wanted a full English breakfast and they proudly advertise ‘the ultimate’ breakfast, I’ll be the judge of that.

Mandi had a prawn salad sandwich with a side order of curly fries, which came with a free pint of Guinness (how very Wetherspoon) and I opted for the ultimate all day breakfast, and had to buy an additional Guinness. I should feel bad for drinking alcohol with breakfast but because it is the weekend and one o’clock in the afternoon I decided to go for it. The pub was fairly busy but the upstairs area had plenty of seating, and the place is clean and well maintained by attentive and friendly bar staff (I had a brief conversational moan with the barman about Christmas shopping), my only bugbear being the television tuned in to a sports channel.

At 7.69 it wasn’t quite ‘the ultimate’ all day breakfast but it was worth every penny. As the ingredients of a breakfast are freshly prepared, even a Wetherspoon ‘chef’ has very little room to fuck up this meal. Two fried eggs, grilled bacon, two sausages, half a grilled tomato, a flat mushroom, chips (yes, chips), and two slices of brown toast with butter isn’t quite what I would call ‘ultimate’ but it filled me up and left me with very little to complain about. What I will complain about is that the bacon wasn’t fried and brown bread has no place on a breakfast, but apart from that, no complaints. It lacked black pudding and hash browns and I would have preferred tinned tomatoes, but apart from that, no complaints.

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