Opening Hours

Mon to Sat
Midday to 11:00 pm

Sunday
Midday to 10:30 pm

Food Served Daily 
Midday to 9:30 pm

Tel: 01453 832520

As reviewed in The Citizen  Saturday March 24 2001

MARKS OUT OF FIVE 

Excellence at the
2-in-1 pub

F YOU go to The Weighbridge Inn on the Nailsworth to Avening Road, don't go expecting nouvelle cuisine or dainty dishes. 

The Weighbridge knows its customers and many of them are serious ramblers making use of the network of footpaths and bridleways, crisscrossing the woods and fields surrounding the inn, and they need something substantial in their stomachs. 

That doesn't mean to say the food is rough and ready pub grub - hefty portions of chips with everything. Anything but. It is imaginative home cooked trencherman-style fare which hints at a chef rather than a pub cook in the kitchen. 

And The Weighbridge has its speciality, the 2 in 1 pie, a unique concoction which the pub boasts is known worldwide. This is a pie of two halves - one half is cauliflower cheese (although you can choose broccoli mornay or roast root vegetables as the veggie side) while on the other side you can choose from a variety of tasty meat or fish fillings. 

When we visited we had with us three teenagers, all with healthy appetites. Two of us tried the house speciality, one the game in a rich red wine with juniper berry sauce, which the university student member of our party (a notoriously hungry breed) ate with relish and the statement that, other than a dessert, he couldn't eat another thing. I had the pork, bacon, celery and creamy stilton sauce option which was lovely, though I would have liked a bit more oomph from the stilton. The pastry was real melt-in-the-mouth stuff and clearly home made.

My partner went for the pie option without the vegetable addition. His steak and mushroom pie was  tender and tasty with, as they all had, lots of top quality meat. 

The Weighbridge serves other things in addition to the celebrated pies and one daughter had a jacket  potato with lashings of delicious chicken tikka again with copious amounts of meat - and plentiful salad, while the other had a more than generous coq au vin which was served, with beautifully smooth, sweet potato and parsnip mash. 

Despite the huge portions, one look at the dessert menu was enough to tempt anyone. The desserts, if like the main courses, are designed on robust lines and there are lots of 'nursery-style' puddings with some slightly lighter offerings. 

We went for meringue surprise, which was deliciously light, although the 'surprise' fruits of the forest filling was voted rather too", the bread and butter pudding which was topped with marmalade and pronounced 'gorgeous', an enormous slice of lemon cheesecake and a three-flavour serving of ice cream, the award-winning Winstones, made just up the road in Rodborough. 

The Weighbridge has had a name for good food for a number of years - the famous 2 in 1 has been on the menu in various guises (which change with seasonal availability of, as far as possible, locally-produced ingredients) for the past 20 years. 

The inn itself goes back much further, being built on the old drovers' road to Bristol. In The 19th Century it was owned by Arthur Twisden Playne, who owned the nearby Longfords Mill, and memorabilia from the old mill, long closed and now being converted into housing, can be seen all over the inn. 

The inn and the actual weighbridge which was there are inextricably linked with the local woollen mills which weighed their raw materials and outgoing manufactured cloth there.

The food at the Weighbridge may come in hefty portions, but the bill certainly doesn't reflect this - ours came to just £64.44 for five of us, and that included a bottle of wine from the ever- changing wine list, and soft drinks.