Fox & Grapes

Good Pub Guide Recommended

Wide mix of customers for very popular pub with enjoyable food and drink; bedrooms

This 18th-c pub is ideally placed on the edge of Wimbledon Common and is extremely popular with walkers at lunchtime. There's always a good mix of both drinkers and diners and the efficient, friendly staff manage to keep things running smoothly, even at peak times. The spacious main bar, with a step between its two halves, has high ceilings with unusual chandeliers, all sorts of wooden and leather dining chairs around scrubbed or painted tables on stripped boards or parquet flooring, built-in wall seats and settles with pretty scatter cushions, a couple of large cartwheels and high black leather chairs against the counter. Here they keep Fullers London Pride and Wimbledon Common PA and Copper Leaf on handpump, 13 wines by the glass (plus two sparking ones) and a few malt whiskies; background music and TV. There's a cosy area with green-painted planked walls and an ornately carved mirror. The bedrooms are light, airy and pretty. This is sister pub to the Malt House in Fulham (West London) and the Victoria in East Sheen (South London) and is part of the Jolly Fine Pub Group.

Bar food times: 12-9.30; 12-3, 4-9.30 Sat; 12-8.30 Sun

As well as breakfasts (8.30-10.30am; not Sunday), the rewarding food includes tiger prawn cocktail, pork rillettes with piccalilli and sourdough toast, buffalo ricotta tortelloni with peas, broad beans, mint and parmesan, chicken caesar salad, beer-battered fish and triple-cooked fish, salt marsh lamb rump with tempura courgette flower, goats cheese, basil pesto and pine nuts, yellowfin grilled tuna steak with warm new potato and green bean salad, caper and tomato salsa and aioli, 28-day-aged rare-breed sirloin steak with truffle butter and triple-cooked chips, and puddings such as coconut and kaffir lime pannacotta with chilli and mango salsa and treacle tart with vanilla ice-cream.