You can open a pub. You can make it look nice. You can put some decent beer behind the bar, employ some friendly people, cook some food and persuade people to come in, drink it, eat it and have a lovely time.
All of which is relatively straightforward.
The problem is that none of this necessarily gives you a pub with soul.
And The Albion in Clifton Village has soul. In abundance.
It makes sense the moment you walk through the door. It feels like somebody has taken the entire essence of Clifton Village — the nice people, the nice dogs, the nice houses and the slightly alarming number of people who appear to have better hair than you — and put it all in one place.
Everyone is nice.
The staff are nice. The people are nice. The dogs are particularly nice. There is probably somebody called Hugo sitting in the corner with a spaniel called Rupert, and if there isn’t, there absolutely should be.
And then there is the Sunday roast.
Which is also very nice.
But not nice in that desperate, middle-class restaurant way where someone brings you three leaves, a smear of something fermented and tells you the carrot has been “reimagined”.
No. This is a proper roast.
Beef. Yorkshire pudding. Gravy. Potatoes. Vegetables. The important things.
The sort of food that makes you immediately stop talking for a few minutes because your mouth has become considerably more important than whatever it was you were saying.
And that, really, is the point about The Albion.
Being here makes sense.
There are pubs that have been designed to look like pubs, and then there are places that actually feel like a pub. The Albion is the latter. It has the comfortable familiarity you want from a local, but with enough polish to remind you that you are in Clifton Village and not, say, behind a Halfords in Swindon.
It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to impress you.
It just knows what it is.
A good pub. A proper pub. Somewhere you can have a Sunday roast, drink something cold, meet friends, bring the dog, admire somebody else’s dog, wonder briefly why your own life doesn’t look quite as well put together as everyone else’s and then order another drink.
It has atmosphere without making a song and dance about having atmosphere.
And, increasingly, that is quite a thing.
The Albion is exactly what you want from a pub.
Only slightly better.
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