Historical version 7 of Coach And Horses, W1J 5LD (view current version)
- 5 Hill Street, W1J 5LD (streetmap) (osm) (gmap) (bingmap) (streetview)
- noon-11pm Mon-Fri; closed Sat-Sun
Shepherd Neame pub in Mayfair (corner of Hill Street and Hay's Mews), in the Good Beer Guide. Note that it's not open on weekends.
It's fairly small, with a single bar. We visited on a Thursday. It filled up with suits (mostly men, but a few women too) around 6pm, and emptied out gradually over the evening; we were the only people left when last orders were called.
Has a jukebox, which does seem to make some rather unfortunate choices if nobody's feeding it money. It should also be noted that the lighting is rather dim, which in itself isn't a huge problem, but if you're facing in the wrong direction then the strip lighting shining into your eyes from behind the bar can be rather unpleasant.
Two real ales were available on our visit; Spitfire (£2.95/pint) and Kent's Best (£2.75/pint). They also had Asahi and Oranjeboom on tap.
Food is fairly standard pub food, reasonably priced and reasonably well executed. Main courses range from £5.95 (ploughman's lunch) to £7.95 (scampi and chips; steak, mushroom, and stout pie; chicken, leek, and ham pie). Burgers are £6-7. The only vegetarian main course is the bean burger. Sandwiches and toasties are also available, at £3.45-3.95.
The pies are proper pies, with shortcrust pastry all the way around. The mash is also proper mash, with lumps in. Sausages and mash with onion gravy was generally satisfying, with acceptably meaty sausages but a rather flavourless gravy.
They ran out of steak pies around 7:30pm, and then ran out of chicken pies 15 minutes later.
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