By Tony Attwood
Untold Arsenal is teaming up with Goonernews to create a guide to the best places to eat and drink around the Emirates Stadium.
And we need your help.
Drew and I have decided to branch out from our regular eating and drinking haunts for this coming season and visit other bars and restaurants for our pre-match delectations. But we want to know your favourites and (as long as it won’t get us sued for libel) any locations that you think we might be better off avoiding.
Your reviews can be as long or as short as you like, but we do need them to include
a) The name and address of the pub or restaurant
b) A brief description
c) The sort of food/drink on offer
d) What you think of the place
We also need your name or nickname to go with the review.
So what we are trying to avoid is something as simple as “avoid this place like the plague” or “the best pub near the stadium”. We want to know why one should avoid, or why one should be there.
By way of example here’s my review for the Coronet, the pub Drew and I used quite a lot last season.
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The Coronet, 338-346 Holloway Road
Review by Tony Attwood
Its five minutes walk from the stadium, and about ten from Holloway Road tube (turn left out of the station, head north and cross the road).
The Coronet is a converted cinema, still retaining mementos of its earlier use, now run by Wetherspoon. It’s huge, but on match days it is heaving, and even 90 minutes before a game it can be nigh on impossible to get a seat if you want to eat. But the bar staff are quick and organised, and if you do get a table, the food comes fairly fast too.
There are bouncers on the door, and in the 2012/13 season they checked tickets before letting you in, but this seems to have stopped. It’s noisy, it’s friendly, and I don’t think we ever had a bad experience in there. People are chatty, everyone there is Arsenal (apart from the one lone harmless Fulham supporter who somehow got in last season), and the food is standard Wetherspoon. Hardly gourmet but cheap. Fair old choice of beer, wine, spirits, coffee.
If you just want to be with a lot of Arsenal fans before a match, and have a drink, its as good as any.
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Drew and I will add a few more this season, and in each case we are hoping that fellow supporters will add their comments below. If you prefer you can email your review to Tony.Attwood@aisa.org and write EAT AND DRINK in the subject line.
Ultimately the whole collection (if we get a whole collection) will be published. But first off it will be on Goonernews. We’ve already experimented with a preliminary with articles on how to get to the stadium and how to get tickets. These articles are here in case you want to see how the whole thing will look when its presented.
I do hope you’ll join in – either now, writing from memory of recent seasons, or recounting your views, once the season starts.
And just to be quite clear, at this stage, its pubs, fast food emporia, fish and chip shops and restaurants that one might use before or after a home game.
Many thanks
Tony.
Curious. Is there a possibility of there being Arsenal friendly places of a similar nature for Arsenal’s away fans to frequent?
Great idea … But there isn’t anywhere at all to eat good food around the Emirates! It’s a good food free zone! Pies at piebury corner okay – served with nasty stuff though. There Oscar passable stall selling selling salt beef on rye by the stadium itself. After that it’s the dead zone. Love to hear different! What we really need us a campaign for a high end street food zone near stadium. Good luck! As a good obsessed food writer and fan my rule on match day is to eat no less than half a mile from the stadium!
This post should be right up Nicky’s alley : ) if I am not wrong.
Yet another winner from the Untold stable.
Although now too old to sample the wares available in and around the Emirates, to peruse a Guide would be a soupcon of light relief from the inevitable football report.
Gord – there are several sites around that do reviews of away locations, and I might come to that later, but first I want to get the “around the Ems” going.
I’d disagree that there is nothing around and about. They aren’t gourmet, but there are some decent places.
Tony, you should produce an Untold badge so that Untolders can recognise each other in these eateries around the Emirates. Unless we all think it’s better just to know each other at a distance. It might be!
I’ve never been to England. But doing a web search, there seems to be pages of Pubs, Cafe, Restaurants and other assorted places within about 20 minutes walking of Emirates. Is it helpful for me to put up my partial list?