retiredmartin

August 2024. Cambridge.

Down to Waterbeach and back the same evening, exhausting but necessary, but at least we got a trip to our favourite Cambridge Thai pub out of it, and a visit to The Wrestlers seemed rather appropriate after the day we’d had.

The pub sign hasn’t changed in 25 years,

the interior had a refurb c.2005 to strip out the pool table and jukebox and any remaining “scruffy pub character”,

and a few years back the Wells pubs became Wells-less (the DNA has gone, appropriately for Cambridge) after the beers went off to Marstons.

Still, hard to argue with this line-up,

and 99% of the custom (IT guys, families with toddlers, Cambridge folk entertaining guests) will think that’s beer exotica.

And there’s still decent cask trade, enough to sell enough Adnams to keep it around NBSS 3.5.

Not a place for a pint, but more than good enough to accompany the best Thai food you’ll ever eat (it was good at our wedding in Hitchin, mind).

We’re always slightly shocked to see prices around £14, but frankly you can’t get fish and chips or a burger in anything other than a Spoons or a Hungry Horse these days, and the Green Beef Curry and rice should be on your culinary bucket list. Perhaps it is.

The beer may change, a bit, over the decades, but the Pad Thai tastes just as it did when the Wrestlers arrived in 1989.

Just don’t ask about calories.