The Alexandra (Harrogate)

What: Pub
For: Drinks
With: Friends
Site: They don't have one, but there is a facebook group if you care enough to search for it.

The Alex is a nice big pub in Harrogate, equipped with a giant bar, two pool tables and more TVs than you can shake a stick at. Most often they tend to be showing sport, add that to the pool tables and real ales, and you can see why most of their clientèle are male.

However, they're clearly anxious to cater for the girlfriends who will at some point get dragged along. A fairly standard set of cocktails is available (including pitchers, and some really rather fun shooters) enough to make it better than Wetherspoons, anyway. It also tends to have offers on wines - usually a discounted bottle or the promise that if you buy two glasses they'll give you the bottle for free. Very nice of them.

Another big plus is that they don't have something that the only other big pub offering pool has: Giant squishy sofas. To me, a big squishy sofa can make or break a place, usually it's enough to persuade me to stay all night, so long as no one nicks my seat when I go to the bar. I won't whine about sitting on a normal chair, a bench, or a bar stool, but the sofa is king. If I ever open any kind of pub, bar, coffee shop etc, I will insist upon having as many squishy sofas as I can.

That aside, back to the Alex.

Drink prices are about average, and it's always busy on a Friday and Saturday night. To the extent that there may be three people between you and the bar when you go to get a drink. Fortunately, the bar is massive (as I've said), and the bar staff are very quick. You feel a bit mean asking for three complicated cocktails, until you realise it'll take them much less than three minutes to make them.

Having eaten here once, I can also tell you that the food is quite good. Standard pub fare is on offer, but it's quality is somewhat better, and I'm told they do an enviable Sunday lunch. I suspect that's true, but I also suspect that there will be quite a wait for it, since if it does get busy, they have a lot of tables to serve.

So, in summary, not a bad place to sit with friends and waste a couple of hours, and (usually) big enough to deal with how popular it is.