Nestled in the calming tranquility of Baker Street Station and Marylebone, The Volunteer is a slightly too trendy pub with slightly too trendy drinks and slightly too trendy bar staff uniforms. There are bench seats inside, organic nuts and snacks decanted from jars and somewhat popular music playing in the background.... sounds terrible in the most wanky of ways, but I quite like it. There's no bitter, which sort of sticks in my craw, but it's really not a bitter drinking kind of place. Bitter is the warm flat beverage of the working class peoples [and their hero, me] and you won't find any of those guys in The Volunteer. The clientele is largely the same as the BFI Demographic. Haircuts and scarf wearers. However you get the odd pocket of Low-Rent City Boys and a few office drones trying to hedge up a level on the Trend Wheel.

Again, I'm making it sound shit. Usually a place full of checkered shirts and guffawing fills me with dread, and the lack of my title tipple is ordinarily enough to send me running for Sam Smiths, but The Volunteer is more than the sum of its parts. The staff are plentiful, meaning you're never stood by the bar clutching a tenner while someone's spilled organic Scrumpy soaks into the elbows of your shirt, and they’re friendly too. That counts for a lot, especially in these types of places where the staff tend to think that working there is more acceptable than drinking there.

The beer selection is PLENTIFUL let me tell you. On draft there's Bulmers, Becks, Staropramen, Red Stripe [the only lager I actually like that isn't made in Mexico] Fruuli and a ton of other slightly too trendy drinks. It's not cheap, and a round of Bulmers, Red Stripe and Westons Organic cost me just over 12 quid, but you come to expect that from the mid-end places. The atmos was friendly, apart from some Americans I tried to help not get robbed [they were all waving their money around loudly exclaiming to all and everyone how many of which note they had] but they're tourists, so not particularly typical.


BEER SELECTION: Bountiful! If you like aspirational beverages then you're quids in. ****
COST OF A ROUND: Just a little over the usual London price, but that's like a niceness tax sort of. ***
STAFF: Really nice, and very efficient. They don't skip people at the bar. That's like a super power! ***
FOOD: Snacks in jars and some gourmet burgers that sound and smell really nice. ***
SKIRT RATIO: 1 to 3 ratio, but the girls in there were classy looking and didn't fall over. ***
 
Overall: Everything about this place should be wrong, but somehow it works. ***

The Volunteer - Marylebone - Brought to you by Gazz Wood -