Ben@Forest wrote:Paulatic wrote:Then to seemingly have a willingness to acquire produce from parts of the world with dubious practices. If and when his desired Brexit is complete I’d put money on he will be amongst the first to serve up chlorinated chicken from the USA and hormone treated beef from Australia. The price , I’ve heard, he does a steak for makes you wonder where it does come from.
I dont think the price of a steak there is through dubious sourcing. I had a steak plus pint for £11.00. Considering you can now buy a sizeable British steak in Aldi for £2.99 the economies of scale at Spoons will mean it's much less than that price. Also apparently the reason their beer is cheap is they buy up just about to go out of date kegs in bulk, knowing they have sufficient outlets to sell it quickly. It's clever buying and marketing that makes their prices cheap.
thats urban myth, breweries dont change price on beer based on date,and they make sure they only brew enough to sell anyway, its purely Wetherspoons have around 1000 pubs and they can buy in bulk and dictacte a reasonable cost to suppliers & shift the stuff quick enough, most other large pub chains are run to make as much money for the pubco, so dictate the price to the pub which pushes the cost of the beer up.
most of Spoons profit comes from getting you to buy food, so their focus is on the amount of covers they can get through and pushing the margins on every cost base, like rent of the buildings they get.
or when they started breakfast, they noticed coffee shops were doing good breakfast business, so they thought theyd capture some of the market which they did, I think they are now the biggest breakfast supplier in the UK, and the vegan breakfast is very good, you actually get more than you get in the meat breakfast now.
but like all chains there are good examples, there are bad examples, I wouldnt ever eat or choose to drink in the Greenwich Wetherspoons, the Durham one had bouncers during the day, and the one in Edmonton London wont let you in even for breakfast if Spurs are playing at home in the afteroon without a match ticket.
original question though Suffolk/Norfolk, hmm there arent actually that many around, I wouldnt have said either the Great Yarmouth or Lowestoft ones were cycling friendly, actually werent very friendly at all based on the clientele, I remember drinking a half very quickly in both to escape, and nor is Sudbury or Newmarket really cycling friendly, as they are all kind of block buildings on high street style roads, no real gardens or bike parking nearby.
Bury St Edmunds is a nice Spoons, but its upstairs in an old corn exchange so you wont see your bike from inside. I think the one left in Ipswich has a garden and railings so possibly better to leave a bike, and I think it was Beccles I remember visiting during the Womens Tour passing through one year for a quick coffee was nice too but not sure where youd leave a bike. Stowmarket as was mentioned does have a big garden...full of artifical grass but hey better than nothing. Norwich has a 3 still, queen of iceni near the station, plenty of bike parking options, against railings and things around there, the Bell hotel near the castle/chapelfield I think there are cycle racks nearby, and the glass house does have a garden as well.
Diss could be nice if they ever got round to building it. and although not Norfolk or Suffolk, I know theyve opened one in Harwich recently, which you can use the foot/cycle ferry to get across, and Ive certainly felt it was safe enough to park my bike down at the harbour for an hour or two to visit a pub
dont think Ive been to any of the others
