An English Pub Lunch?

We were visiting London for a week in 2010 and other than being at Heathrow on previous trips, it was my very first time in England. Me…the English history nut!

So, what’s one of the first things we want to do on your first morning in London after leaving our rented apartment was to go for a long walk.  It was a bit cloudy but heck this is London! Have you ever walked through Kensington Gardens during a wind/rain storm?  No?  Well we have!

Now that we were both soaked…Joe worse than me because he was wearing a jacket…wet pant legs, the works! Let’s find a nice English pub and have a traditional pub lunch, seated by a fire, drinking a pint and having a pie. We asked a doorman at a hotel near Kensington Palace and he directed us to The Churchill Arms not far away. From the outside it looked just the ticket!

I had just received my April 2015 issue of Bon Appetit which included an article by Lauren Collins titled “A Modern Guide to Timeless London,” a series of reviews of a few places she checked out along with photos of some of them.

And right there was a photo of the exterior of…you guessed it, The Churchill Arms!  This is a short quote from what she wrote.  “The Churchill Arms bills itself as “the very first pub in London with a Thai restaurant.”  She then goes on to say “this is better than it sounds. The atmosphere is more Blenheim than Bangkok: chamber pots, copper kettles, bulldog mugs. Both the fiery curries and the clutter serve as invigorating ripostes to a pub scene that gets more bland and interchangeable by the year.”

Except when one wanted the quintessential excellent, English pub with British food, one doesn’t want Thai food…we love Thai food but this was not what we were searching for.  And we left without eating or having a beer as the whole concept didn’t provide us with the experience we were hoping for.

Bet you’re wondering where we ended up…my notes say it wasn’t wonderful!