Food review: The Wild Pig, Shrewsbury

Ooh, you’ve got a lovely car park,” said the customer, sitting a few seats down. Nice. “A lovely car park.” Not a lovely menu, a lovely dining room, or, indeed, a lovely bunch of coconuts. No: a lovely car park.

I imagine the customer in question once worked for a civil engineering company. Or perhaps he worked in parking at the town hall.

He was quite right, of course. The Wild Pig does have a lovely car park. It’s the one that football fans pay a fiver to use when they’re watching Shrewsbury Town FC, whose home ground is but a short walk away. The owners must despair. There they are, spending a fortune on a refurb, creating a menu with wild boar burgers and blue cheese, and the punters just want to talk about parallel parking. Ho hum.

The Wild Pig was formerly called Brooklands. It was taken over by its present owners – the team behind Shrewsbury’s Lion + Pheasant and The Boathouse – about a year ago. Two months it was given a major revamp with a new logo, new interior, shiny metal chairs and a bright and breezy pub classics menu. And the results have been pretty impressive.

The customer a few tables down was interested to know that the owners also ran The Boathouse.

“Actually,” they told the waiter, Lee. “We went to The Boathouse first. But have you ever tried parking at The Boathouse? Have you? You’ve got much more space here. That’s why we came.” Lee laughed. “I live above it,” he said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

And there, perhaps, the business plan is revealed. The Boathouse may be the number one pub-diner in town, but overflow customers need an alternative. We’re only joking.

The Wild Pig does a decent job and is in safe hands. It’ll inevitably prosper for the populous Meole Brace needs both a decent pub – box ticked – and somewhere decent to eat – box ticked. That doesn’t mean it’s the finished article. Standards could be elevated a little here and there to make the dining experience more enjoyable – more of which later.

But The Wild Pig does a good job of meeting expectations. There’s still a decent bar area with a pool table and plenty of wide screen TVs for those who want to watch Premier League action, or other sporting fixtures. There’s a good selection of local ales on tap as well as posh bar snacks – the scratchings aren’t any old brand of deep-fried pork rind, they’re Snaffling Pig, which, for this porcine-loving critic’s shilling are the best there are. If the details are all important, The Wild Pig ticks another box. The dining area is light and spacious. Large, sharing tables with metal chairs – similar, in fact, to those at its sister venue The Boathouse – provide ample room for guests. The menu is all about pub food with a preponderance for all things piggy.

So there’s a tapas-style selection of starters, featuring chipolata sausages with a honey and mustard glaze, chef’s meatballs, cured meats and crispy piggy bites as well as a smattering of vegetarian and pescatarian choices. I opted for the crispy piggy bites with apple purée. They were decent, though the skin was a little chewy and the accompanying apple purée could have been better. A little bland, it lacked acidity. The meat, however, was fine and an accompanying side salad was lovingly dressed.

Classics

The Wild Pig sticks to tried and tested classics: ham, egg and chips; steak and chips; fish and chips; bangers and mash; gammon with egg and pineapple or a homemade fish pie. There are six different burgers and at lunchtimes baskets brimful of ham and cheese sandwiches, fish finger sandwiches and scampi with fries and tartare sauce. It’s like a cabaret night from 1970 – and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Kids are also well catered for – they eat for free at quiet times of the day or enjoy mini portions of pizza, cheese burgers and other child-friendly dishes. There’s also a carvery on Sundays which, at less than a tenner, provides economical eating for those with an aversion to peeling veg and washing up.

Though the full boar burger and pork and chorizo burger looked great, I opted for a southern fried chicken burger in a toasted brioche bun with tomato relish, aioli and sweet potato fries.

Again, it was pretty damn good. The chicken was particularly enjoyable: tender and moist with plenty of fiery seasoning, it packed a flavoursome punch. The bun was decent – though there are better elsewhere in town – while the tomato relish was also pretty good.

The sweet potato fries were both sticky and crisp – in the way that only sweet potato fries can be. It was a little slow out of the kitchen. No doubt they speed up when the joint is packed.

I skipped dessert. Two courses of maximum protein were more than enough to sate a healthy appetite and my bill was entirely reasonable – a fiver for the starter and tenner for the main.

There’s a lot to love about The Wild Pig. Spacious, staffed by an experienced team, nicely styled and with an easily digestible menu of pub classics, it will become busier and busier until the whole damn car park is full.While most of the ingredients – from the Snaffling Pig snacks to the delicious chicken and the crunchy, sweet potato fries – were Maximum Wow, one or two others might be improved. But we’re splitting hairs. For The Wild Pig does a great job of providing affordable pub food to an audience of locals who want somewhere decent to drink and eat.

It’s not trying to compete with some of the Fancy Dan restaurants in town – including the two others that are part of its owner’s stable – and is carving out its own niche. I’m guessing it will max out with the Sunday lunch crowd, people looking for a great function room for weddings – yes, with a great car park – as well as the football crowd and those who love a decent pub lunch.

The makeover has worked and The Wild Pig is a decent pub restaurant serving humble and unfussy food.

It’s the perfect oinkment to a long hard day.