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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Pekka Palvikenkku, and today we're going to look at home-cooked food. We've just received an order from Valjo Aimo. Hey, driver! Where are your products going?
Valjo is owned by Finnish dairy producers, and that's why Valjo Aimo's products stay in Finland. I'm Aimo, a partner of food professionals. When you choose me, you support home-cooked dairy products. Valio Aimo. Onnistumisen ainekset.
Kyllä, kyllä. Hi, I'm Rob Goodman. It's the Pub Crawlers. We're in Sheffield today, my favorite pub, The Grapes. I was chatting with my mate Stephen Martin. We were talking about pubs. We were talking about snooker, Sheffield bands, the annoyance of kids in pubs, all manner of stuff. Enjoy it. I was watching an Alan Partridge clip the other day.
You're so good at being a barmaid.
Can you imagine if this was a Netflix show?
I've had some children, but I'm also a guy who does pints.
Where do foxes live? Hey Martin, how long have you known me, do you reckon? I'm going to say since 2012 or 13. What a year it was. So that's 12 years.
Jesus, what did you admire about me when you first met me?
Well, your voice. Yeah, yeah. Lovely timbre, didn't it? Beautiful.
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Chapter 2: What makes The Grapes pub in Sheffield special?
I first heard you on the Anfield Lap. I was a listener.
The LFC supporter podcast that's been going since about 2010.
Yeah, some say the best. Some say the best, is the best. And then I met you in a place called Dre, just outside of Dublin. You did. Which was the first Anfield of that live show. There were 500 people present. known as the Brave 500.
They all keep in touch, don't they?
Yeah, we have a thing every year. And that's when I first met you and I've met some of the other guys. And then since then, I've been a vital part of your life, I would say.
You're like a fanboy stalker.
100%.
As I said to Stephen, the pilot we did, I said, when he met me, he definitely respected me more than he does now. And I think that's true of you as well. That's the problem with meeting your heroes. That is the problem. It's just a downward descent, isn't it? They let you down. Steve, I've dragged you to, dragged you against your will to the grapes in Sheffield. You tell me why I love it so much.
Why you love it so much.
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Chapter 3: How does snooker culture influence Sheffield's pub scene?
So this is a sort of pub I guess that some people would call an old man's pub. I hate that. Which is a term that people, I think, often use, I'm saying this as an old man, often use to describe a good pub as an old man pub. You don't come here...
for the atmosphere to happen to you excuse me you you sort of give us old man to take part in this it's just a nice pub where you can you can talk to your friends you can get a corner you can take the piss out of each other make each other laugh and those pubs i think are kind of dying out because sometimes you go into it can also be like we've been in on a
On an evening, I was going to say a Saturday, probably not a Saturday evening, but we've been on an evening and it's livelier and there's a jukebox and there's a piano and there's all of the things that make for entertainment. But yeah, it's not happening to you. It feels a little bit more organic when there is a liveliness about the place.
But yeah, the funereal feel of a mid-afternoon weekday pub is a tremendous thing.
I think the reputation of the Old Man pub, it's an interesting thing.
sort of muse on i think if i go back to the i don't know my my university times in the 80s or into the 90s there was no real sense that hey we're in a great old pub now i think people society so far moved on from that that obviously yes i suppose if you went in place like the philharmonic in liverpool which is so ornate people would still have gone oh it's the history here
But a pub like this would not have attracted, would not have been worthy of comment other than it having been, it's a great social local and people liked it. But it wouldn't have had the sort of traction it gets today.
I think what you can't separate out in your mind is... To what extent do you treasure it because you think it survived various waves of booth culture or various people who may have come in, property development, which obviously has meant not pubs anymore, but also someone deciding that maybe this pillow there is a bit tacky, isn't it? Or something like that. Whereas actually it's brilliant.
Or when we see a copper top table in a pub these days, you go, wow, someone's made a conscious decision to keep that. So it becomes a cruise over time that it becomes almost a curated thing by the decisions people haven't made to take stuff out. So no one's come along and taken off the Artex wallpaper that's behind us here. Which loads of people would go, oh, that's old hat.
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Chapter 4: How do Sheffield bands contribute to the city's identity?
your pubs are different, some of them are pubs already, some of them you've created them from scratch. So you're aware of the process of curating a pub, but curating by not taking stuff away over time is another way of preserving it, making it a museum piece. And I guess, yeah, adding, if you're harking back to the 90s, adding 30 more years of that over time gives it a sort of,
gives it a... But why we call, I feel, I don't know whether you could say this is the last five, 10 or 15 years, culturally, I think England's ready to embrace what in their mind, if they close their eyes and imagine what a classic English pub, an old man pub looks like. And I think there's a romanticism about it that didn't exist, I would say, before the turn of this century that has come back.
I don't know if it's because TV has had things like Downton Abbey or Peaky Blinders. These things get thrown at me. Let me just stop you there. When I was doing a pub, I did one called The Red Lion in Liverpool, which was an absolute facsimile of a pub. I started with a real blank canvas. It had never been a pub.
I did a job on it that managed to fool American tourists that had been there 100 years. But a lady who works with me, MJ, I showed her and I said, she was in her mid-20s at the time, and I said, MJ, I want this pub to be for everybody. Is it just my older man fantasy pub? Or would you and your girlfriends come, you and your friends, your generation come?
And she went, oh, yeah, it's so vintagey, right? And I went, oh. In a way, she sort of crushed it, but also brought it into a modern context for me.
And you've talked as well about some of the little signifiers that you can put in. For example, bar staff who look young and are wearing band T-shirts or something in a context of a pub like this. You're right. There's a more cosmopolitan feel to it. And that's common to a lot of the Sheffield pubs. I think Fagans, which we're going to go and visit later, which has that feel of...
it's an old man's pub, but we're showing you that it's not just for old men. And I think, actually old men, in my experience, quite like a Madry in a Wetherspoons, and fair play. A lot of people have lived long enough to go, I'm just gonna do what works for me in my area or whatever. And I think the thing about the city pub, or the resurgence of this kind of pub.
I guess the country pub is kind of with drink driving legislation and just changes in habits. I feel like there's a bit of a resurgence in like city pubs where you can do a crawl and you can go from two, three, four of them. And Liverpool's a good example of that, Edinburgh, Sheffield, some of the cities that we're particularly excited, most excited about coming to every time we do.
I think the reason why this gets called an old man's pub is because it's old and men used to drink in it. No, but there is a language which is accepted around that term. But I also think they're becoming fewer and further between. So there's lots of modern pubs which are... very light, dry, and loud. And I like to sit down in a pub, I like to just sit and talk.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of bringing kids to pubs?
The good old man pubs are still trying to serve cask.
Some don't and some are good. But the biggest pub in probably Britain right now, the most famous, most trendy, is the Devonshire, which is in London, which just serves, I mean, it does have a restaurant out the back. It's a fucking restaurant. But people go there for its Guinness, not its cask ale.
Well, Guinness is the go-to. If you're getting that right, then you're putting some work into that. And I think you could do that with whiskey. I think there's little niche things in terms of the product that a pub can really specialize in to show that they're taking this seriously. And the product, you know, the product is important. But I think where...
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Rob, do you feel more, when you see a range of, say, five casks on, but when you see two, and it's, let's say, Doom Bar and Wainwright, no offense to those guys, and if they want to sponsor the show, but they're a product that's not been curated. Someone hasn't sought that out. It's not locally sourced. It's not necessarily, actually, I just quite like buying a Doom Bar. They just live their law.
they're never on, are they? I think what's worse is a cask that's not on, or one of them's off, and one of them can't. That's almost worse than not even trying, for me.
Yeah, for a pub to sell cask, to have cask constantly available, they have to commit to it, because they have to commit to it to the extent that the audience that drink cask, not everyone does, as you've elucidated, aren't stupid. So if they come in and you've got one or two on, they go, you don't really give a shit. This is a token effort to put cask on.
If you're committing to put a minimum four or five on, what you're doing as a pub, you're making quite a commercial risk that you're going to have wastage. Because cask, unlike keg beer, which can last for months on end, lasts for three to four days. I mean, some people tell you they can stretch it longer, but it's three to four days. That's another part of the process.
It's a real gamble and a real commitment to genuinely... And if you need any of this, and then you need to stay out of it.
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Chapter 6: What role does music play in the atmosphere of pubs?
Can you imagine if this was a Netflix show?
No, because I think what... It would be amazing. Because in that world of big data and algorithms, you can't win. So if you're doing something completely original, someone says, well, I don't have any data to mitigate my risk because what you're offering me hasn't been done before.
If you're offering something which has been done before, which is what Alan was talking about, someone says, well, we've got too much of that. It's like, okay, so what do I do now? Because originality is turned down and also... You tread that line with your pubs, I guess, don't you, Robin?
Damn straight I do, yeah.
You want to be original and create something different, but then you also know this formula maybe works. I mean, the fundamental formula that this country... almost unlike most, hit upon was you walk into the pub, you go to the bar, someone gives you the drink, you give them the money or these days, swipe your phone or your card or whatever, come away with the drinks.
It's the best system for drink delivery that's ever been devised. And then you go to New York and you have to sit down and then you have to have dollar bills to give the tip. And you're like, at what point are they going to bring the bill? And none of that makes any sense. Go to the bar, bring it back. One of the worst things in COVID was table service having to happen.
And another key component of pubs for me is I don't want to wait around at the bar. So I actually almost, and this would be interesting to hear from you, I almost want a pub that may not be doing that well financially. I can get a drink easily. I don't want the whole... trying to get the barman's attention and all of that sort of stuff.
I totally agree with you. The pub that's just hanging in there is the best pub to go to, quite frankly. That's the pub. The pub where you walk in, there's an old fellow reading a paper, there's another one pissing about with his dog in the corner, and you're getting served straight.
That is often the pub where the person behind the bar is quite reluctant to serve you and quite reluctant to see it as their job to serve you. That can happen.
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Chapter 7: How do modern pubs differ from traditional ones?
Air, hair, lair? Yeah, and he turned to me and he went, air, hair, lair.
So he's been hilarious with his genitalia out and your genitalia out. That's what happens in the suburbs of South East London. Okay, incredible. One of the things I had in my agenda, just to keep things moving along, was tell me your funniest story you're telling Papa. That's quite a funny story. Your funniest Papa toilet story.
Your funniest Papa toilet story, which could always end up in horrible jokes about peepholes. Yeah. Things like that. Yeah, so that's lovely. Where do we take it from there? I feel absolutely flummoxed by that. In fact, I'm going to go to a section which I invented a couple of days ago. The flummox section.
It's the flummox section where you're absolutely in trouble with nowhere to go, which was to talk about pub agony, right? There's a question and you're in a pub and you need some serious advice. And I asked Amelia, who's looking at me now a bit despairingly, to come up with some questions. We quite like people to sort of suggest their own. So she's imagined Tommy32 in Bognor Regis going, Hi, Rob.
Hi, Tommy. Love the show. Long-time listener, first-time emailer. I'm hoping you can help me with my pub problem. Yeah, first-time drinker. That's going to go wrong, isn't it? My best mate keeps bringing his kids to the pub with him, and it's quite frankly ruining every single pub trip.
I don't know how to tell him without ruining our friendship, but it's got to the point where I don't want to have a pint with him. Please keep me anonymous. Tommy32 in Pognoritis.
So there are loads of pubs in London, particularly in East London, where you've got... Fucking kids, man. You've got people in between 30 and 40 that take up an entire room in a pub... and they drink wine, and they all bring their kids.
That's all parts of London.
And the kids run around everywhere. Run around. And these people that have all made these life choices catch up over a bottle of wine.
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