145 Fleet Street,
London,
EC4A 2BU
0872 148 1182
The ViewLondon Review
Next time you want to go down the pub, but wish to appear engaged in erudite and worthy pursuits instead, just say ‘I’m just off to revise the dictionary, luv’.
I reckon this is what Dr Johnson must often have said to his missus before he repaired to his regular haunt to chew the chops and the fat at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.
If you need to back up your story with specifics, you can even go and look at the seventh edition of his worthy tome, which sits in a glass case next to the ladies, somewhat sternly opened at the entry for ‘law’.
Mark Twain, Dickens and Oliver Goldsmith also frequented the pub’s dizzying succession of bars and choprooms, and the oak dining table and benches, dating from the pub’s restoration after the great fire, were already old when their literary bottoms sat on them.
Such practically tangible antiquity is all the more compelling because, despite the name, it is not presented as a slice of hygienically packaged ‘history’; it is merely an organic, if pleasantly dark and fuzzy, part of the atmosphere.
In the basement, which used to be the cellars of a Carmelite monastery, there are lots of excellent nooks & crannies, and small doors for stooped monks, and barrels for Friar Tuck. Low ceilings, beams and bricks conspire to create a most Falstaffian kind of potentially rogue-ish atmosphere that 21st century bar snacks do nothing to conceal.
There is a fine chophouse and restaurant on the ground and first floors which serve pleasingly apt food at around £9: Ye Famous (I jest not) steak & kidney pudding, Lamb chops (naturally) Bangers and mash, not forgetting Mediterranean roast vegetable Wellington, which is a wry name for a dish!
I don’t have enough space to catalogue the many joyous corners and anecdotes that abound on the three floors of the pub, but I would definitely take refuge here to plot revenge or take consolation in the Sam Smiths and the wonderfully stodgy puddings.