Café René

Interestingly decorated bar with fair value food all day and good choice of drinks

Features

Speciality beers
Cask ales
Live Entertainment
Separate restaurant
Sandwiches
  • Separate restaurant
  • Sandwiches sold

Bar food times: 12-9.30

Typical main dish: burger and chips

Typical main dish price: £10.95

Average two course evening meal price: £17.00

  • Speciality beers
  • Cask ales

Price of cheapest bitter: £3.80

Name of cheapest bitter: Wickwar

Live music Weds and Fri evenings

  • Children allowed in the bar

The good pub guide review

This city-centre bar not far from the cathedral dates from the 17th c and has a subterranean feel, with black beams, dim lighting and no windows ' plus stripped brick and timbering and an internal floodlit well with water trickling down into its depths. It is certainly different to many other places in the Guide. There's quite a choice of drinks: the long bar counter is made of dozens of big casks, and they keep four changing real ales tapped from the cask, such as Farr Brew The Best Bitter, Wickwar Falling Star and Wychwood Hobgoblin, plus farm ciders and a good choice of wines by the glass (decoration, including over the ceiling, consists mainly of great banks of empty wine bottles). Service remains friendly and efficient even when really pushed. One antique panelled high-backed settle joins the usual pub tables and wheelback chairs on carpet, and there's a sizeable dining area on the right. Well reproduced background music, a silenced games machine and big-screen TV (for rugby only). They have regular live music and hold a popular rhythm and blues festival at the end of July. There are picnic-sets under parasols out by the churchyard. To get here you walk down a flagstoned passageway beside the partly Norman church of St Mary de Crypt.

The good pub guide food review

Some sort of food is served all day: lunchtime sandwiches, chicken liver pâté, sauteéd garlic mushrooms, Caribbean lamb curry with gungo rice and poppadum, sweet potato and black bean chilli with rice and avocado, sausages with mustard mash, greens and red onion gravy, chargrilled mixed grill, various pies (fish/chicken and mushroom/steak and ale/sweet potato, goats cheese and spinach) with chunky chips, and puddings such as lemon tart and chocolate fudge cake.

2021 Awards

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Contact Details

Café René, 31 Southgate Street, Gloucester, GL1 1TP

(01452) 309340

Opening Hours

Weekdays: 11am-midnight (later Fri, Sat)