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Let’s talk about the customers’ tastes. What’re the most popular drinks here?
Well, it’s mostly a man’s pub. Although we try and make it a family pub, it’s typically a man’s pub, which means they come in for their smoke in the evening, a pint of lager, a pint of bitter. That is our main trait.
Although we are starting to get a few more continental beers, we start to sell a few more to the youngsters.
So women have different tastes, then.
Strangely enough, no. We find that women are quite happy to drink a half of whatever their husbands or boyfriends are drinking. They’re quite content with that. A lot of pubs now are going towards becoming more like a restaurant. Do you serve food here?
We haven’t really got the demand here for food, so, we’re just purely, a bar, snacks, especially when the chaps finish work, they come in after work we are quite content to serve them the basic pub food. But we’re not in the area here to be restaurant type pub at all now.
It’s very difficult in the trade these days, because to have live music entertainment, you’ve had to have public entertainment license. We would like to have Karaoke, but unfortunately, we’ve been stopped from having Karaoke because we haven’t got the license.
What about other entertainment?
Well, we do a lot of our own entertainment. We have theme nights. We might have wild west theme film nights. We might have 1940’s film nights, something like that.
I know you mentioned this was originally very much a man’s pub, and you’re trying to move it more towards a family pub. What lies ahead for you in the future?
Again, it’s a changing industry, my vision of the future, my own particular pub is that we will be more family-orientated. When I say family-orientated, I’m not talking so much about children, because I still don’t think personally that the pub is the place for children. I believe a pub should be somewhere you can come and chat if they want to. They can join in with dancing, to a record, or tape if they want to. They can play darts if they want to, or they can just sit perhaps in the back if they want to. I want choice, somewhere people can come to have choice.
If someone wants to become a publican, what advice would you give?
You’ve got to be prepared to work very hard. It’s one of the first things I would say. And as I’ve already repeated you must have a partner who is also willing to work hard as well. You do lose a lot of family life yourself. But the reward can be great, not necessarily financially, but mentally the rewards can be very great.
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