I've passed The Flappit pub countless times flitting between home and the Haworth area, quite often on the way to eat out somewhere else, but only recently noticed that they also served pub food.

So on one of the few bright sunny days of this summer, by way of reward for a morning's shopping in Keighley, five of us - three children and two adults - decided to call in for a midday bite to eat.

It's a traditional sort of pub, with a cosy but light and airy atmosphere to it, and a menu board dotted around the beams near the bar. The choice was quite varied, if fairly traditional.

There were sandwiches for the quick snacker, and a selection of starters if you felt you had more of a hunger on. One of our young friends decided she would have a starter as her one and only course, and chose the breaded mushrooms in garlic.

None of the rest of us fancied over-indulging, so we went straight for a main course too. Ever a sucker for a pie dish, I picked on the steak and Guinness pie for my choice, as did my wife Liz, and to our surprise daughter Madeleine snubbed the option of Beef and Yorkshire Pudding for a dish of breaded haddock and chips, as did her friend, but with new potatoes.

Our food came promptly enough - in fact we helped out bringing it to the table from the kitchen door to give the staff a bit of a lift - and in we tucked.

The food's not going to win any top prizes, but it is simple and pleasant enough without setting the taste buds jangling. The vegetables were straightforward boiled green beans and carrots, the chips ready-cut, and the pie was reasonably tasty, though it did seem a bit light on the Guinness content. But the pastry was nice and crisp and there was plenty of good meat.

Madeleine and her pal both enjoyed their haddock in crumble, and there was nothing left of the mushroom dish of our other little friend.

Everyone fancied a pudding, so we trooped back in to the pub to make our selection from the picture card menu which helped explain the curious names pf some of the dishes had. I chose a Kiss The Blarney - something like a cheesecake - while Liz had an Apple Gran, a kind of apple pie dish. Two of the girls had a bowl of ice cream each, and the third had a hot chocolate pudding with lashings of chocolate sauce.

To say they were bought-in dishes, they were actually quite pleasant, and nothing much was left on any of the plates.

We had paid as we had ordered at the bar, and the whole meal for the five of us had come to just over £20 - not including the drinks we'd had from the bar - which we thought was quite reasonable value for a standard pub bar meal.

Doug Akroyd

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