Metropolitan Bar, Baker Street

This pub stays open later than the nearby pubs. The idea of extended opening hours was to provide people with a more relaxed experience and end the sordid scenes of people guzzling booze at closing time, being evicted en massse, then throwing up and fighting. At 11:30pm when The Globe across the road is closed and this place is still busy it all seems quite relaxed.

Just wait until the bell rings. It is a cue not just to buy one for the road but for the staff to start getting rude and obnoxious. One minute you're a customer, next you are something very unpleasant and you are treated with the grossest discourtesy.

The aim is to clear the bar area and you are invited to finish your drink "downstairs" at the entrance, but the manner of the invitation is aggresive and insulting.

It doesn't matter if you are a regular customer. Doesn't matter if you have one swallow left before making your way home quietly with your book/newspaper/iphone ... you will be treated like scum. Don't bother trying to reason. The staff doing this couldn't give a damn, they want you OUT AT ONCE and that's all there is to it.

Definitely not a place to go if you like to be treated with respect. Of all the bars I have patronised this establishment takes the biscuit for the most gratuitous bad manners on the part of staff. Wetherspoon's management needs to send a mystery shopper here around closing time to feel the vibe. It may be "efficient" but offending customers so that they avoid the place is not effective or good business.

25 Jun 2009 01:37