Last summer – after a £350,000 refurb from Punch Pubs – The Moorend Spout in Nailsea reopened with new management at the helm, who also introduced a brand new menu to go with the refurb of the 17th century building.
From the outside, the place is nothing special to look at: a plain white building with a small amount of picnic table seating, and an external staircase that points you in the direction of the function room. Inside, though, is totally different.
The main bar area at The Moorend Spout – a pub managed by Fernando Kucmanski and his wife Noeli – is incredibly smart with its green-bricked fireplace, wooden floor and statement walls, and there’s a corridor leading through to a separate restaurant, which had been commandeered by a wedding party on the day we visited. The bar is well-stocked, with a Butcombe beer and Neck Oil on draught alongside some of the usual suspects (Guinness, Moretti, Madri, Pravha and Amstel, along with Thatchers Gold and Orchard Thieves ciders), and the toilets were clean and tidy.
What we hadn’t expected was the incredible beer garden, tucked away through a door to the left of the bar. With its palm trees, carefully manicured hedges, picnic tables shaded by Madri-branded umbrellas and wooden huts with tables providing somewhere more sheltered to sit, on this sunny Saturday it could easily have passed for somewhere further-flung than North Somerset.
There’s also a car park through the back gate of the garden, which is an added bonus.
Food-wise, there’s a weekday lunch menu, a separate kids’ menu and a Sunday lunch offering, as well as buffet options for larger parties. The main menu includes a few tapas-style options, along with grilled dishes, pub classics, burgers and a chef’s favourites section – I won’t deny that I was tempted by the pork tomahawk steak with chimichurri…
Instead, though, we both went for fairly similar choices. The fish and chips with peas (he chose garden rather than mushy) and homemade tartare sauce (£12.95) was a decent take on the pub classic, although the fish/batter could have been seasoned a little more heavily. We always love to see skin-on chips on the menu (far more flavour!), but the real star of the show was that homemade tartare sauce with an incredible chunky texture and great acidity.
I’m a sucker for a halloumi dish (I blame my 1/4 Turkish Cypriot heritage), so went for the deep-fried halloumi (also £12.95). It came with the same skin-on chips and tartare sauce but I opted for mushy peas instead of garden, served in a ramekin to keep the chips from getting soggy.
With four enormous wedges of halloumi on the plate, it was incredible value for money. While I couldn’t really taste the promised lemon in the batter, a quick squeeze from the wedge of lemon on my plate made up for it. The batter was crisp and the cheese still beautifully salty – it definitely hit the spot.
The main shopping area in Nailsea is a bit of a concrete jungle – not an area that would particularly inspire anyone to visit. However, follow this heritage walking route, as we did at the weekend, and you’ll see that there’s far more to the place – including some beautiful streets and views. We’d chosen The Moorend Spout for lunch as it was midway through the walk, and given that most of our Nailsea trips are to the aforementioned concrete jungle, it felt like an incredible oasis of calm.