The Albion — Restaurant in London

I've featured my local Big Smoke pub before but on the rare occasion I found The Albion mostly empty, and serving the exceptional A&H London Black from the official glassware, I figured it was time to feature a review.

I believe this was the second pub Big Smoke opened, building on the success of The Antelope in Surbiton. It's been here as long as I can remember, and at one stage had a Gin Distillery out the back which I think is now just garden seating (opted not to pap this, but there's a huge garden there with beer festivals held in the summer).

Indoors, it's familiar to those who know the chain. Wooden panelling, ample seating, vinyl soundtracked vibe, 10+ ales and ciders, a multitude of keg offerings too including 2 AF options in the form of Lucky Saint and their own AF beer which has gone down well over the past month.

You get a mixture of students, weekend shoppers, families and real ale folk in here, it's a nice melting pot of booze enthusiasts and those looking for a pub not surrounded by Vape Shops, a step away from the town centre, outside of the rampant demolition you see taking over Kingston.

It's sort of a home away from home, despite only being some 15-20 minutes down the road from me, a chain familiarity but still less polished than those brand new Big Smoke pubs you spot in greater London. With time to kill it can be a quiet respite from the hustle and bustle of town, but with Rugby on and one of the few spacious family friendly pubs in the area it can get quite hectic. A nice problem to have for Big Smoke.

Food again is similar to the other sites, a sort of BBQ meets pub grub style, with plenty of bits in-between to choose from. See the place pack out for weekends with roasts on, and various offers during the week.

The pub dates back to 1845, little known about its history other than it was advertised as a sort of taproom with a view to watch the recreational sports on the green.

Once Greene King, now Big Smoke, another one saved...

Where do I start?… this pub came highly recommended and it sits on a corner opposite lovely park and we were looking forward to a great evening settling down having booked a table. They have a huge range of cask beers and cider, over 15 hand pump to my count . Plus a range of keg beers from their own brewery and others, think they have 20 Taps working We started by ordering 4 halves of pale ale, to do a taste comparison, and then tried another four afterwards, some of these were kegs and some on cask just about all of them were undrinkable, lifeless lack of hop flavour and certainly no cask conditioning to speak of .. We ordered a handful of other styles of beer making up to nearly 20 in total and between us we found three or four beers that we were happy to drink, the rest were all left on the table In the meantime we tried to order some food and no one knew where the menus were. I spent 10 minutes at the bar literally waiting for someone to find me a menu, in the end I took one from someone who was just returning to the bar. It was the usual pub offerings which looked pretty okay, needless to say we didn’t try any of it because we left less than an hour very unhappy with the beer and...

It really galls me to give such a bad review but one of the best pubs in Kingston has become one of the worst. The food is AWFUL.

We went 2 weeks ago and my chicken burger (an old favourite) was terrible - they had battered the chicken like it was a piece of fish. Th me max and cheese had been made with big pasta like rigatoni, the sauce was watery and the top burnt.

Hoping it was a one-off, we went tonight and ordered a “normal” double-cheeseburger. There was only a single patty in the burger and it was tiny. We complained and the excuse was “they had a different butcher and the burgers were twice the size”. I’m sorry but it was quite clearly a single, small patty and totally unacceptable that the wait staff lied when they could have just said they were low on burgers. We ended up sending it back which meant we went hungry and the pub lost money so no-one wins.

I love a great pub and have been here for many years, so it really does sadden me that I have to recommend people don’t come here any more. The pub needs to either look itself in the mirror as it’s not currently deserving of...