It was a nice summers day on Thursday, despite it still being spring. Deciding to take advantage of the heat and sunshine by eating outside, a pubs beer-garden seemed like a better idea than a cafés pavement table (as their generally on busy roads with smelly exhaust fumes), so I headed down to the Prince of Wales on Princedale Road. They have a beer garden out the back on Pottery Lane and, while it boasts no actual garden (i.e. it's all concrete), it does at least catch the sun nicely in the early afternoon.

After a strangely long wait at the bar - strange as it wasn't crowded there - I forgot to be gentlemanly and gladly embraced the opportunity to be served ahead of three other people to order one of the specials from the blackboard: a Chicken and Ham pasta combo that sounded rather nice. Only two of the blackboard choices were actually specials - the pasta and the fish - the rest of the menu is a static and rather small collection that won't do you many favours if you're vegetarian. Armed with a number-on-a-stick cut from the pub's pre-refurbishment wallpaper (more of that in a moment) I went and sat out the back in the sun on one of the picnic tables.

The Prince of Wales had been shut for pretty the whole of the year for extensive refurbishment... that ended over a month ago, and the pub had changed considerably. Once upon a time it was pretty dingy - horrible wallpaper, thin sticky carpet and a layer of nicotine over everything - including the high white ceiling and the rather impressive central wooden bar. And it was well known as a place you could easily find someone to sell you some drugs. Now they've washed off the nicotine, ripped down some of the wooden dividers to make it more open and airy (but kept some to keep it interesting) and torn off all the wallpaper and painted the walls various colours (again, some of the original paper remains for variation and to remind you how bad it once looked when it was all-covering).
 

Still no food - and that's not even my pint!

They've kept the central bar, but otherwise most of the bar furniture has been replaced by an eclectic collection of chairs and tables seemingly bought from various second-hand shops (but probably cost a bomb nevertheless): funky 50's, 60's and 70's furniture mixes with converted dentist chairs, car seats and cinema seats. But hang on a minute, where's my food? I check at the bar: coming soon, apparently. It's been a fair while - I have to move picnic tables as the one I picked has gone into shade, as the sun has moved considerably.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes: it's all very nice on the eye and generally comfy on the arse, but the extreme variation would probably leave you with the suspicion that your mates have nicked a better, more comfortable chair than you've managed to nab. Also some of the tables look a bit too low if you wanted to eat off them, or to get your knees under them (although the picnic tables out the back are fine and numerous). Oh, the light fittings and other accessories are made from a similarly varied collection of old-but-pretty stuff too. And that's about all I should say about the decor, except that it's taken them so long to refurbish the pub that the vast majority of their regular customers have since found new pubs to frequent. This may have an advantage in the fact that it's forced the drug-dealers to find a new "well known" place to always be found, and having lost their stuffy old regulars and workman crowd they can try and capture a new funky clientele: which is probably their loss and someone else's gain, as the funky new crowd doesn't seem to be turning up. I've passed it often and drank in it a few times the last month: the Prince of Wales is generally empty, no matter the time of day or night.

Why is that? Maybe it's because the word has got out that the service is so bloody slow! Getting served at the bar can take a terribly long amount of time - there aren't enough staff on the bar and their all terribly, terribly slow at their jobs. It's not that they don't care - quite the opposite, they look petrified and are constantly apologetic! But they are crap - they dither around with both the drinks and the register, they serve people utterly out of turn much to customers visible frustration and vocal indignation. And this goes for the food too - it takes forever for the chef to make it and have it descend in the dumb waiter from the kitchen upstairs (where the chef has sensibly barricaded themself). Unfortunately when the bar staff remove it from the dumb waiter they become dumb waiters themselves (sorry, I couldn't resist that): they don't keep good track of which table has ordered first despite giving out numbers on sticks when you order: I saw more than one group of people complain that their food was given to people at another table who'd ordered the same thing but much later on. This didn't noticeably happen to me - my food simply didn't arrive at all. I went to the bar and asked after it a number of times, always to be reassured it was coming soon. It got so bad that, eventually, the barmaid plied me with free drinks.