It’s your round (again) – Quiz night at the Waterfront

OK, so I apologise, I told you I’d do regular reviews of pub quizzes and then you don’t see any for about 4 months. What’s worse is that the one in this review is about to stop for the summer season as the pub it takes place in gets too busy during the warmer months.

So where are we this week? Well we’re back by the river just west of Wandsworth town station, now walk past the ship, along the Thames path and the stop at the Waterfront, Battersea reach. The Waterfront is a fairly new pub, pretty typical of the newer build pleasure palaces dotting the more South Western reaches of the Thames. I mean it could be anywhere, Battersea, Putney, Richmond…well not quite anywhere but you get my drift.

Inside the pub is spacious, clean and pleasant. Actually rather a nicer environment than you’d find in the more heavily frequented Ship and Alma, though I feel that the aforementioned do have much more character. There is plenty of outdoor seating for smokers and those wanting to soak up the view over the river.

I was with the Ultimate Rugby Fan (URF,) who is now suggesting that she would like a new nickname for these columns. Well as the season is drawing to a close I’ll have to consider that, especially as she has just started a fabulous new job, which she more more than deserved to get.

The Waterfront has a large bar, and that probably goes some way to explaining the large amounts of currency you need to pass over it to procure a drink. Riverside pubs generally aren’t cheap, but over £10 for two pints is I think even in this sort of location pushing it.

The food menu is very Young’s pub, a mixture of staples such as burgers, fish and chips etc. but also here bolstered by the pub’s own specialty of sourdough pizza. Like the drinks, the food is punchy in terms of price in my view. It’s rather a faux par for a reviewer to order the same main dish, as his fellow diners, but on this occasion both me and the URF had the pie of the day, steak and ale if you must know. This was good, not brilliant but good, tasty rather than delicious. The crust was slightly less well done than I would like, but that’s a matter of personal taste. The accompanying spinach was good, but the mash rather subdued in temperature, which detracted from the overall experience somewhat.

For the quiz, we had a surprise guest in terms of the URF’s friend a quiz master at another pub down the road. In fact he had been the question master at The Ship some months ago, see previous reviews. We had what we thought would be a winning team.

I have to say that this was one of the more innovative quizzes I have been to. Here we had two different picture rounds, a music round where our talented quiz mistress sang lyrics and you had to guess the artist and the song.

The session was relative short at about an hour and a half, which suited me and the URF. Enough to enjoy without overstaying welcome. The other teams seemed to be regulars which meant that we initially felt a bit like interlopers, but soon overcame this.

I made some very stupid errors whilst answering the questions, like getting the actors in outnumbered confused and at first forgetting where I was when Ken Livingstone was elected mayor. The very last question was actually a task where you had to taste and then deconstruct a cocktail into it’s various ingredients. I confidently stated that it contained many components that then turned out to be conspicuous by their absence.

This is an enjoyable quiz, and I hope that the Waterfront revive it once the nights start drawing in again. My advice then is get there in the next few weeks, give it a go and maybe even win a prize of which there are many. Where did our team come, well we won, thanks mainly to the URF’s skill with lyrics, but that’s another story.

Rob

 WATERFRONT