Is it last call for gastropubs?

Pubs that serve fine dining without the faff are prolific. But with 30 roasts and Michelin stars, Hannah Twiggs pulls up a barstool to see if we’ve lost sight of the boozer altogether

- Hannah Twiggs

Walk into The Unruly Pig in Suffolk and you’ll find electric pink walls, pig-themed art and a dish involving liver parfait that locals can recite like a prayer. At The Coach in Marlow, draught beer flows beside a treasure chest of kids’ toys and baked potato “tonnato”. The Star Inn at Harome serves Yorkshire puddings to fifth-generation farmers who park their Massey Fergusons next to Lamborghinis. And at The Hand and Flowers, you can get a duck pie that costs more than a round in your local Wetherspoon – and still feel like you’re in your mate’s front room.

This is the modern gastropub. Thirty years after the term was coined, it’s still the place we go to eat well without enduring the sanctimony of fine dining. But with prices climbing and the lines between pub and restaurant increasingly being blurred, one question lingers over the bar: have we reached peak gastropub?

The term “gastropub” first appeared in 1991, when The Eagle in Clerkenwell decided to serve restaurant-level food without ditching its ale taps and barstools. It was a neat concept at the time: a middle ground between the fusty boozer and the starched-tableclothed restaurant. By 2009, the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs list had launched, further legitimising the movement and providing an annual barometer for the best pub cooking in the country. By 2012, it had earned a place in the dictionary.

What even is a gastropub in an age when nearly every pub serves decent grub? The lines have blurred. These days, any pub with a blackboard menu and a pork belly special wears the badge. Where once a ploughman’s was enough, now there’s “market fish with fennel pollen”. Napkins are folded, wine is decanted, and the question of what makes a pub a pub has become something of a national identity crisis.