Gastro gravy

The Queen’s Head pub in Crouch End has closed for a refurbishment into a gastro-pub. We are quite excited about this development, but many CrouchEnders are a little more reticent, mostly because the Queen’s has a loyal clientele who appreciate its Sky Sports big screen and Thursday night rock bands. However, I love good gastro pubs and the more the merrier in Crouch End, as far as I’m concerned – the Victoria Stakes is a little out of the village, more Muswell Hill than local, and the Kings Head, with its eclectic mix of seventies furnishings, is always too crowded and smoky. In search of a perfect role model, we’ve been to a couple of quiz nights at a superb gastropub in Islington on Liverpool Road, the Duchess of Kent, where the candlelit atmosphere is particularly cosy and the food, though as gravy-soaked as in all gastropubs, quite delicious.
I do fear though that the Queen’s will just end up looking like every other London chrome and pine-seated wine bar and lose its traditional boozer appearance. It could certainly lose its crap carpet and fruit machines without doing any major harm, but the bar itself is of a fine dark wood panelling that you so rarely see in the capital nowadays. I did discover a really good old-fashioned public house with all its panelling intact last week with my friend Chris – the tiny Mitre, in the narrow alleyway of Ely Place, Hatton Garden – which had carefully tended Adnams on tap and the feel (including the miniscule scale) of my much-missed Blue Bell on Walmgate, York. But like so many of the oldie-woldie City pubs, the Mitre is closed on weekends and anyway, according to the pub's history, it’s actually technically in Cambridgeshire rather than London. Depending on how the Queen’s Head turns out, maybe our quest for a decent pub is just another sign that we should head out to the country.