On the same street at Sento, this place has pretentions of being a restaurant rather than a bar; but they have a couple of bar stools at the window. We sit on them and, eventually, get served (with beer and delicate tomato and anchovy toastie tapas). The beer is served in oversized wine glasses.
It's ok here, but the bar inside is very long – curving round into a restaurant where far more important customers apparently need attending too. Anyway, we very rarely see, let alone catch the eye, of the bar staff so we sup up and move on.
Beer is £4.30 a pint, but it’s very good. I think the vigorous twilight walk through Stockwood Park golf course makes a pint go down particularly well pre-curry night in Slip End.
The pub is relatively empty at half five, save for a group of lads in high-vis work gear – all drinking San Miguel – and a family of four, the adults of which are drinking San Miguel too… I don’t know: I can see the appeal in a hot country like Spain – cold beer in small glasses – but in autumnal South Bedfordshire?
Work is tough at the moment – with acceptance of unpaid overtime being an almost minimum requirement. I won’t do it.
Elsewhere in the pub game – the F&R are gearing up for Christmas. From the pictured pamphlet: Five course meal on Christmas Day… £70 (including a glass of welcome Prosecco). Five course meal on New Years’ Eve - £55 (including a glass of Prosecco at midnight). We saw the 1990s in at the F&R – there was no Prosecco at midnight then… what there was was a group of local lads singing “I should be so lucky” instead of “Auld Lang Syne”.
We sit outside again, watching coverage of England v Slovenia World Cup Qualifier. It's a boring game, and after a while Steph gives up on it and wanders over to take a look inside the cathedral.
This bar is right on the Alicante tourist drag but A) there aren't many tourists about B) it's very reasonably priced C) it's a lovely spot right outside the cathedral and D) Carmen and her kids live metres away – within earshot of the buskers in this square, and the tips-bell at Sento, equidistant from her flat in the other direction. It really doesn't seem such a bad place to live...
We'd planned to pop round and visit Carmen, but she'd just put the kids to bed – and her flat had been hit by a power cut. Of course she might have just said that to avoid meeting us, we wouldn't blame her, but we were right outside when we called, and the whole building was dark... again, she could have asked a big favour of her neighbours and had everyone’s electric switched off.
So, with Carmen not out, we return to Piazza to watch England unexpectedly grab a last minute winner – and thereby win the right to ignominiously fail in the finals.
After that we return to the apartment, and the next day we return to Blighty (on the top deck of a 747 jumbo jet, to Gatwick, courtesy of Monarch having gone to the wall the day after they flew us out).
Beer: San Miguel 5%
One of the more significant reasons why Steph’s folks love Benidorm, I reckon, is that so many of their friends and acquaintances (mostly from Line Dancing circles, or rows) do too. That’s perfectly understandable – and what better than to spend extended holidays than in the sun with friends and family? I’m not entirely sold – but I can see the point.
Anyway, we’re out with a group of friends – it's Kim’s birthday. Steph and I don’t know Kim, and I do harbour doubts that we’ve ostensibly gatecrashed a family do. No, it’s fine, apparently, but I wouldn’t necessarily inflict a party of strangers to my dubious company for a few hours on their birthday. But, no, again, it’s fine. I haven’t written up the meal, ‘cause it’s a restaurant… I have a locally brewed beer, and the steak. Ice cream for dessert.
Post-meal we wander somewhat aimlessly en masse around the Old Town and, having accurately identified us as the incoherent gaggle of foreign tourists we are, we get set upon by the Vetusta hawker who corrals us to a table outside his employers’ bar.
We wouldn’t have picked it ourselves, but the beer was ok. The coffee (my shout, the coffee – happy birthday) wasn’t.
After a strangely bewildering wild goose chase (involving Steph’s folks, who aren’t going to meet us after all, and an apartment – which we can’t find – that they wanted us to look over on their behalf…) we end up back at the LCA. It’s nearing mid-afternoon.
This place is bright and bustling, and just a bit better in every respect from the local competition… anyway, the music is still too loud and cheesy… but what the heck.
This turns out to be our last visit to La Cava Aragonesa this time round.
Beer: Nethergate Suffolk County 4.1%
LUTON TOWN 7 STEVENAGE 1
High spirits back at The Bricks; the football went reasonably well.
The pub is quite packed, and so we wander outside and discuss the possibilities of catching the Mlada Boleslav v Bohemians 1905 football match in Czech in a months’ time.
Other than that – discussions revolve around the football and how, despite being prone to a gaff now and again (once or thrice a season) we love our captain Cuthbert. There’s hilarity over the fact that John’s new pet dog has had, and severely chewed, his new £2K hearing aid. There’s then an ongoing critique of one of these bleak Scandi detective TV series – that I’ve never watched.
And with that passing over our heads – Steph and I head off toward Asda.
Unlike the last couple of years at The English Rose there are, mercifully, no Stevenage fans in this pub. I daresay the majority are fine, but the little band of noisy youths who chose to grace our erstwhile pre-match watering hole in High Town two years running were skin crawlingly embarrassing.
The music in The Black Horse tends on the “too bloody loud for a Saturday afternoon”. Michael bloody Jackson… turn it bloody off. They don’t, but they do decrease the volume a little after a while, which makes the audio assault a little more bearable.
It’s a shame because, apart from that – this is a good pub, and there are way too few of them, especially to cater for the pre-match football following. We decide that, if we ran this pub, we’d make it far quieter… and possibly get rid of the pool table.
Carmen, it seems, isn’t going to show up. We’re five minutes late when we arrive at The Piazza, our planned meeting point, and wait around another ten before deciding to do the tourist bit and have a look in the cathedral. Just before we enter, Carmen arrives. Lovely to see her. She has kids and parents in tow – and it’s nice sitting outside with the extended family.
The Piazza seems like a tourist trap – on the square, right outside the cathedral, along with vendors and buskers. It’s possibly (actually, almost certainly) somewhere we’d not have gone to on our own – we’d have headed into the back streets – but in the company of a resident family it’s fine. And it is fine. Carmen, who studied photography with me fifteen years ago, noticing that I’m snapping away, produces her own camera – and a website on which she stores her photographs. She is, and always has been, far more accomplished than me – she takes some fantastic pictures. She doesn’t, as a rule, habitually photograph drinks in every pub she visits. More fool her, eh folks? “It’s not just beer”, she suggests.
No, there’s football too – on the Piazza tellies there’s coverage (a replay it turns out) of Man City v Shaktar Donetsk. Shaktar are apparently playing in Luton Town’s 1983 home kit. They still lose – as Luton Town were wont to do in 1983… although famously not at Man City (but they were wearing the away kit then).
Unlike the archetypal tourist trap we suspected this place to be – the bill for the beer was very reasonable.
Our favourite Alicante bar; no frills, very clean but run down at the same time. Most customers choose to sit outside, leaving ample room at the bar – and a large inside dining area which we’ve never seen populated. The Alhambra beer is a nice change.
No spontaneous dissolving into tears from the bar staff on this visit, but the night is young. We’re off to meet Carmen in a half hour; my old friend from uni’ is an Alicante resident, and likely wouldn’t dream of coming anywhere as untrendy as Santa Faz.
We kind of know where we’re going, Steph and I; but we do get to places we probably wouldn’t consider when we’re with company. Pikoteo is a very small Old Town backstreet tapas bar – specialising in the free (customer selected) tapas per drink. It’s a good system. My choice is for a small (but fat) chorizo sausage in a little bun. Very nice too.
This place is very understated and small, but good for that. There’s no wall to wall La Liga in this class of establishment – which would be perfectly fine other than the alternative entertainment is the ubiquitous little sound system, which in this place, is blasting out some really obscure (but extremely dull) English 60s pop music. I don’t recognise any of it, and could have done without.
Not that, had Itchycoo Park come on, I’d necessarily have been delighted.
We tend to travel to the same places – and when we get to those places, we go to the same places. In Alicante, in our book, the place to go is Santa Faz.
On THIS visit… consulting my notes… yes, it’s late lunchtime and we’ve come back from the Museo de Hogueras and the Museo Volvo Ocean Race, both interesting in their own way. It’s our last day in Spain, and we have postcards to write. Elsewhere the bar is generally quite quiet – but we do get set on by an old fellow who has heard us talking, and wishes to practice his English by shouting it at us. I think he was a bit deaf. He didn’t tell us that, but did want to let us know that he was a supporter of FC Barcelona. Did we like football? Yes. He’d never heard of Luton Town, and when I held up four fingers to illustrate in which league our team resided he seemed less than impressed – and shuffled off.
We did the same. Our plan is to go to some more bars, have a little siesta, then come out again later.
Beer: Amstel 5%We’ve taken a mid-morning meander up to Benidorm station in order to ascertain train times for tomorrow’s journey to Alicante. It’s hot, and the station is quite a long way out. It’s past noon by the time we get there, and there are a small number of suitably rundown “back street by the station” type bars. The first we go to is very dark, they have a power cut: meaning they can’t serve beer or use the tills. Every bar we pass (and fancy the look of) apparently has the same problem – so we wind up back in Benidorm Old Town.
This bar, on the edge of Tapas Alley, is nice enough – very fishy, which draws me inside. The photos may belie the popularity of the place. Even though it’s October, it’s still very hot. Most people (they’re mostly expats) like that kind of thing – and are sat outside. It’s cooler in – the beer is cooler still, which is nice after all that walking.
Beer: Cruzcampo 5%
Back street bar run on “free (chosen) tapas for every drink” line. This place, just off the beaten track, is seemingly run by and for the benefit of the owner rather than the somewhat lesser spotted tourist. The big telly at the back of the bar is screening news of the Catalonia Independence debacle. Everyone in these parts seems staunchly Spanish. The owner is binning bottles at the back of the bar – his eyes fixed to the screen. Apart from us, there is one other customer in a place which has none of the vibrancy but all of the integrity missing from the touristy joints of Tapas Alley.
Separate from the gratis range of tapas is the great big pork scratching – which as a 2Euro surcharge. Still, I want one. Having made the order I watch as the gnarled strip of pig blubber is cut into little bits and put in the microwave. So, it was hot and chewy and not like a pork scratching at all. It was alright… just not the same (or as good) as ones I’ve had before – which were bigger than, but served akin to, the Black Country varieties back home. We have a couple (or drinks, not scratchings) and, on paying up, suspect we’ve been overcharged.
Still, I do like this place.
It’s getting toward late afternoon by now – and we head back to… the expat part of town where the Brit bars are. We give them a miss, this trip, which might be amiss of us. I used to be far more of a Benidorm snob than I am now (having returned more than... anyone probably should). The expat part of town is noisy and brash – but there is a genuine sense of (apparently not overtly transitory) community here too – and you can get a pint of Amstel for 1Euro to sup on while sunburning y’tattooed torso.
They’re packing up, and this might be the last of the night. This is a sizeable, clearly normally busy, tapas bar at the end of the Tapas Alley arcade area - with an impressive range of foodstuffs available. Even through jaded eyes at 23:40, several beers in (although Steph says she still feels sober) this seems more traditional than anything we’ve seen in BENIDORM this visit.
Beer: Alhambra 5%
