please note - reviews on this site are purely the opinion of site visitors, so don't take them too seriously.
"When is a pub not a pub?" asked Alice.
The Engineer is not a pub. It's a cocktail bar combined with some kind of restaurant. So why do they allow dogs to roam about? A filthy practice if you ask me. Not enough room anyway.
Snooty waiters with fancy aprons serving drinks at the tables, and expecting tips. This is not the common understood practice for pubs in UK.
Drinks are expensive.
BAH!
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Yep, pretty place geared up for dining. NOT A PUB really. No room for non-diners. Yuppy-Puppy Pub.
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only bombardier on draught,so opted for couple of pints of becks vier(�7.60)nice beer garden but totally wedged with diners and nowhere to sit,6/10
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Nice enough pricey gastropub with lovely garden, but most tables reserved after 6pm.
Good pint of St Peter's. Not my type of place but pleasant all the same. Rooms for dining all set out very neatly.
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Hadn't been here for about 3 years, was passing yesterday so popped in for a drink. What a disappointment. Don't think the place has been touched for that time - looking quite tired, toilets could do with a good clean and even a tidy would be good. Lunch had obviously been busy but to see the same glasses still waiting to be washed after half an hour is just poor. The staff were a bit 'hit and miss' - some seemed interested in what they were doing and others really could not have cared less.
A real shame as the place could be fantastic.....
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Horrible place. We went there today to have Sunday dinner and a few drinks but had to wait so long while the staff talked amongst themselves and to the SUV drivers propping up the bar we ended up leaving for refreshment further afield. Never again.
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Its a pretty place but its geared more for fine dining - so lesss of a pubb really but overall i liked it
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One of the first pubs where management realised, many years ago, that serving pints was all very well but serving �10+ per plate food and heavily marked-up wine was better (for their wallets). Truly a pioneering venue amongst gastropubs, this is actually not unpleasant to look at from the outside, has a nice garden (that you're allowed to sit in if it's quiet, or if you've reserved) and serves a good pint (St Peter's Golden and Bombardier)...However, a big 'but' - it costs (over a tenner for a pint of St Peter's and a small white wine). Even by Primrose Hill standards, this is an eye-wateringly pricey pub and has a clientele ranging from the loaded-but-pleasant to the loaded-and-obnoxious. I won't recommend either way on this one - it is what it is, and for a certain kind of person, it's perfect.
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Very good beer, well-meaning but harassed service. Vile customers. Easy to find better pubs nearby.
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It is far more a gastropub/restaurant than a pub really. Haven't eaten here for some time, but it certainly used to be very good indeed (though pricy) for food. Their is a bar area though. It may have been different and more busy in the bar than usual as it was a Thursday near Christmas, but I felt perfectly relaxed and comfortable just drinking there. Also the barman was very chatty to me and my friend. Only stayed for one pint, but the St Peters Golden Ale was in very good order.
It won't be to everyone's taste, and it is more a food place, but an average rating of 4.4 in my view is very harsh. May have caught it on a good day though.
mps77 - 11 Dec 2009 11:20 |
I recently went here for the first time for lunch with two freinds. Having has a reasonable lunch in the bar, I asked for the bill which came to around �110 which was fine as we'd had a pricey bottle of wine. The 'optional' service charge was nearly �14.00 which I politey asked to be removed as I felt it was far too much for 'basic' service at lunchtime and as I'd spent �110 in there (it wasn't busy). The staff were so nasty and grumpy about this that they intentionally ignored us when we left! I've never had such shocking treatment!! Go to the Landsdown up the road.. 100 times better!!
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Pubs are, in my mind, supposed to be relaxing places. This is not a relaxing place. Don't bother with the garden unles you've reserved and are eating.
With such irritating criteria attached to a vist, you're better off elsewhere.
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Really like this pub, nice bar staff, great food. A nice electic mix of punters, would definitely recommend it, especially on a sunday.
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Half of this pub is set up towards dining and the other half feels like a bar that people pop into whilst they wait for their table to be free. The old living quarters upstairs now have set tables and chairs in the rooms to maximise eating space. I�ve been in bigger toilets in a caravan and the cubicle is like a portable loo, even down to no light. I saw some signs up advertising a garden out the back, but I did not investigate.
Bombardier and St Peter�s Organic Ale were available along with some premium lagers.
This is not really my sort of place, but it sits well in Primrose Hill.
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Went here last (sat) night as we had an hour to kill before going to a gig and wanted somewhere with some real ale, where the music wasn't so loud you couldn't have a conversation and where we could actually be inside and this fitted the bill perfectly.
They had St. Peter's on tap, space to stand inside, pleasant atmosphere, and you could hear yourself think which is better than the other Camden venue's we tried.
Didn't have any problems getting in or getting served - but we weren't eating.
It's a bit out of the way but you can take a shortcut down the canal towpath from Camden Lock.
Only tried this twice now, once a long time ago, but didn't notice any of the problems other's mentioned so would go here again for somewhere quieter.
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A lovely environment for a few drinks and some food, unfortunately the man behind the bar spoils the experience by acting as if you are an unwanted guest at his party. The staff need to cheer up, lighten up and realise that they are not the coolest cats in town. If you want to behave like that head over to old street where the customers thrive on poor service. There is a pub a couple of hundred meters down the road, not as nice, but a lot more down to earth and friendly.
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Very rude staff, who act like they don't want to be there. Overly pretentious. Overpriced and very average food. It used to be a good gastro pub, but not anymore. Will never go back.
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Having read a few comments on here before I went to The Engineer last weekend, I was bracing myself for a stuffy, snooty and bad customer service-based boozer. However, I was very pleasantly surprised indeed! St. Peters Organic Ale on tap (possibly my best pint of ale ever?), very tasty celeriac soup and pork belly with canneloni beans; and an absolutely lovely waitress made a family outing a genuinley memorable one. My only disappointment was that I had no room left for pudding. Hoorah for The Engineer!
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Today was a glorious Autumn Sunday in London - possibly our last for 2008 - and everyone was out and about making the most of the city, with smiles as bright as the sunshine. That's everyone except the staff at The Engineer, who were grumpy and rude from the moment we arrived.
We had a booking for a large group of 12, which we all understand can be more difficult to look after in terms of serving meals etc so we split our group into a table of 6 and table of 4 - this pub doesn't do bookings fore more than 10. The waitress 'looking after us' in fact told us that their kitchen can't handle tables larger than 6.
Our plan for the afternoon was to sit in the beer garden on this beautiful day, eat a yummy lunch (which it was), and share quite a few drinks with some friends but the staff at this pub seemed intent on making sure that didn't happen - we were sick of the treatment so left as soon as we'd finished lunch to go to another pub near by for a few more drinks.
The staff at The Engineer don't seem to understand the concept of the hospitality business. They were anything but hospitable. I won't be coming back or recommending it.
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"Do you have a reservation?"; this from a snappy French / Belgian female. This must also be the mission statement of this establishment as it was the standard response to everyone who walked through the door. I could have understood this if the place was busy. It wasn't.
It's an eating establishment passing itself off as a pub so beware.
The service is snappy [meaning that the staff snap] but it's quick too. Our waitress would have had the plate away from me had I not wrest it from her!
Little food - lot of money!
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Par for the course for Primrose Hill these days: an eating establishment with a bar. Mirrors, big windows, big plants, usual flannel. However, a rarity indeed... St.Peter's Oganic Ale on draught! Delicious.Worth the trip for the beer alone. Cor.
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I went in one Friday lunchtime back in February, and had a nice pint of Bombardier.
Being a country boy, I was rather shocked to pay �3 per pint (pre-Budget!) but this was made up for by me bumping into Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse!
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Do you remember Bill & Maggie nuff said
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I tend to frequent public houses for the pleasure of drinking.....not being made to feel like a working class slave begging at my lordship's table for his scraps of gristle.
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I haven't personally been in here for quite some time, but I was interested to see in the current issue of Q magazine that they took James Blunt for a drink there: �3.20 for a Carling, �12.95 for an "organic cheeseburger with tomato relish and chips."
�16.15 for a pint of cooking lager and a burger and chips? The Wetherspoons experience at more than three times the price. Just a shame the magazine paid rather than the whiney-voiced one himself.
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Our local...
still too busy and too expensive but the food is consistently great and service good given the hectic pace of the place
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I went here recently with a group of friends and was extrememly disappointed.
Whilst polite, the service was slow and the food was uninspired. I ordered a steak rare and it arrived as medium to well done. We also waited an age for our food and to top it all, the very good desert wines that we ordered arrived in standard pub glasses.
The pub also insisted on adding service charge to the bill. I suspect that this place has taken its eye off the ball and seems to be existing on its past reputation and prime location in Primrose Hill. For the �60 per head that we paid I can think of plenty of better places to eat in London. Actually, I can think of plenty of better places to eat for around a third of that price.
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Visited this for the first time on Sunday lunchtime. It struck me as about as near a restaurant as you can get in a pub - the food was very good indeed and my cod and my wife's burger both went down a treat. It is expensive, but not unreasonably so given the quality of the food. I queued for our drinks initially but thereafter it was table service, which was good. The flip side, though, is that this is not really a pub in the sense of being somewhere to go to drink. Only two real ales by my count - Bombardier and Hook Norton; I had a pint of the latter and it wasn't great. So, great for a bite to eat, but remember - it's not really a pub.
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Cramped indoors but an enjoyable beer garden round the back (when the weather is good that is). The staff have never been unfriendly to me (yet) but the beer is certainly overpriced. �4 for Erdinger Weissbier or an organic cider - a little steep in my books.
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I recently enjoyed a steak here. Good thing too, because it cost almost �20. I could have had 20 hamburgers off the 99p menu at McDonalds (nearby, in Camden) and still had change for 15 minutes on the meter. That's not the point though, is it.
You see, Primrose Hill is an expensive place to live. By default, the pubs have the same 'don't care' attitude as the clientele - which kind of makes an evening observing the relationship between pub and customer like watching a divorce proceeding in progress.
Fancy a pint at the Kravmer vs Kramer?
No thanks.
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Visited here with friends at 1.30-ish in the afternoon. I've never waited to get served for so long at a completely empty bar, particularly without a 'sorry to keep you waiting' from the barman who was preparing drinks for the restaurant. When I was eventually served, the barman was ungracious, with no pleases or thank-yous, and he had a face like thunder.
I've previously visited the restaurant here, where the food is OK, but hugely over-priced, and again, service is not friendly in the least. The Engineer is a really beautiful pub in a lovely location, it's just a shame that the service is so unbearably awful.
anonymous - 10 Nov 2006 10:52 |
A friend had her 30th birthday here (a party of 12). My friend's sister had bought a really nice cake but the manager refused to serve it - saying it was not policy. We had already ordered two courses, plenty of drinks and offered to all buy ice cream and coffees but she point blank refused, changing her mind and saying that as we had the table all night, she wouldn't allow us to have the cake! When we refused to pay the service charge, she simply shrugged her shoulders and said "well it's the staff that suffer not the business" (we had already given the excellent waitress the money in her hand).
I wrote a letter to the owners but heard nothing back. Clearly customer satisfaction is of no concern
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the restaurant is good; but dont go just for a pint as there's no room.
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i quite like this place. certainly not full of the idiots that the Lansdowne attracts! Food not that special believe it or not! Service always pretty friendly. can take a little too long though. garden nice if you can get a seat!
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I totally concur with the previous four reviewers. Definitiely more gastro than pub.
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This place is a restaurant, not a pub. Therefore if you're just in there for a drink you always feel guilty that you're getting in the way of people tring to eat their �10 burgers. If you don't like getting evil stares from all the white wine-drinking Hooray Henries for drinking beer, smoking or swearing or even talking about normal things then steer well clear. Attractive garden but not worth going for that alone.
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Terrible service for drinks. But it's famous as a gastropub, not really one to come for drinking.
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yeah you're right mate,..its shite in here,.."Engineer for show,...elsewhere for a pro"
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One of those most obnoxious and pretentious places I have ever had the misfortune to visit. Not really a pub, more a bar that attracts the usual character from that particular part of North London. Sometimes more staff than punters - and still takes an age to get a drink. Dont go if you like a good pint of Ale, go if you are interested in overpriced fish finger salads and beer that goes someway down the list of priorities.
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