N0141 The Viscount

Once one of a chain of three aviation-named pubs (N0172 The Comet, review incoming; and N1040 The Goose - formerly called The Pilot), The Viscount is now owned by the family of someone I went to school with. Despite that I had never actually managed to haul myself out here to drink, even though I passed it on the bus twice a day for months working in British Telecom in the last decade. That's been finally resolved now anyway.

A relatively narrow but long pub, the lounge is on the Swords Road end and the bar at the rear end - the reverse of what you'd expect, but it is possible that the bar gets custom from the housing estate behind. That housing estate was originally, oddly, built to be an urban Gaeltacht in the 1920s or so, but you'll have to trust me on that as I read it in a book that isn't online and may have got confused about it.

We sat down towards the front of the lounge, which was mostly empty at the time; but then got joined by a substantial amount of the Whitehall Celtic team - ten of them - in matching tracksuits to watch the end of the Brighton - Liverpool game. This was down to the size of the projection TV at this end of the bar rather than any amazing punditry we could provide, so they moved down the pub after the final whistle.

This is a fairly standard older suburban pub, but with a slight oddity caused by having a Chinese restaurant upstairs. The food menu - stuck to the windows rather than on the tables - shows more normally pub grub style lunchtime options, and then evening options which are generally the more simple dishes from the restaurant upstairs with less of the "traditional" options you may expect.