My wife and I recently took our daughter to her local drama club.
We had an hour to kill so we figured we would check out a local pub while we waited.
We decided to visit The Barn which is a Beefeater Steak Restaurant and Bar in Hockley Heath, Solihull as we hadn’t been there before and we had visited a few other pubs in the area on previous weeks.
First impressions of the pub were that it looked renovated from the outside which is a good sign.
We did notice that it was connected to the premier inn next door, which is handy if you’re staying at the premier inn, but as we only came for drinks, it didn’t really matter to us.
When we went in, there were some lovely decorations.
The bar was a bit empty and there wasn’t a lot of staff available, but a member of staff did spot us eventually and was friendly enough when taking our drinks order.
A reason why it may have been empty may have been time of day.
We visited at 5pm, which is too late for lunch but not early enough for dinner.
It was also a week night so most people are probably still at work at that time.
We had to pick our daughter up in an hour so we didn’t get food from the restaurant, but we got a couple of drinks and some bar snacks.
My wife ordered a San Miguel and I ordered a J20.
It was the first time I had tried a J2o and will most probably be the last. It was awful. That’s not the pub’s fault, that was probably my fault for ordering it.
My wife was feeling peckish so we asked for a packet of ready salted crisps and a packet of cheese and onion.
They didn’t have any cheese and onion crisps, however, so we only got the 1 packet of ready salted and the 2 drinks.
(I was secretly hoping they would have some fancy crisps, like Frazzles or Walkers Max KFC, but they didn’t.)
It came to a total of £8.34 (About $11 USD) which I thought was a bit pricey, but not too bad.
Entertainment-wise, the fruit machines were turned off, which again isn’t really a problem to me as I don’t play them, but if I wanted to have a go, I wouldn’t have been able to so that was something worth taking into account.
According to the Beefeater website, there is a reward club, where you can collect points for every food and drink you get.
This wasn’t mentioned to us, which is disappointing as something like that does actually make me come back, even if the food and drink aren’t that great and the price is high.
The Barn is definitely kid-friendly as it’s next to the premier inn, so if you’re staying at the premier inn and you get an unlimited breakfast, kids eat free.
According to the beefeater website, The Barn is also vegetarian friendly so that’s good for you herbivores out there.
I would say that I would probably only come back if my wife and I were staying at the Premier Inn hotel as they do the unlimited breakfast offer and maybe having breakfast at the barn is a different experience entirely.
The Barn does have some plug sockets so if you are bringing a laptop to use for work to the pub, you can plug it in to stop the battery from going when you’re midway through a review article for example.
You could also plug in your phone charger if you happen to carry a phone charger around with you and the battery on your phone has died.
When we were there, I did need to use the internet on my phone to look something up so I had a look at which was the strongest signal and it seemed like the Premier Inn Free Wifi was the strongest signal so I used that.
So there you have it, The Barn in Hockley Heath is like a typical chain pub, when we visited, it was an ok experience.
Would we visit again? I’m not so sure, maybe….
