The Bobbin

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#8,480 of 21,469 Restaurants in London££ - £££, Gastropub, Vegetarian friendly

+44 20 7738 8953+ Add website

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Hours

Sun

12:00 - 22:30

Mon

17:00 - 23:00

Tue

17:00 - 23:00

Wed

17:00 - 23:00

Thu

17:00 - 23:00

Fri

12:00 - 23:59

Sat

12:00 - 23:59

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What is Travellers’ Choice?

Tripadvisor gives a Travellers’ Choice award to accommodations, attractions and restaurants that consistently earn great reviews from travellers and are ranked within the top 10% of properties on Tripadvisor.

Ratings and reviews

3.5

153 reviews

#8,480 of 21,469 Restaurants in London

RATINGS

Food

Service

Value

Atmosphere

Details

Someone from this business manages this listing.

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PRICE RANGE

£11.00 – £17.00

CUISINES

Gastropub

Special Diets

Vegetarian friendly

meals, features

Location and contact

1-3 Lillieshall Road Clapham, London SW4 0LN England

+44 20 7738 8953

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Can a gluten free person get a good meal at this restaurant?

Yes

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Details

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About

We are proud to offer Clapham Old Town a charming neighbourhood pub with a Mediterranean seasonal menu, great tasting beer and a carefully selected international wine list.We can accommodate bookings up to 12 people.We hope to see you soon!

PRICE RANGE

£11.00 – £17.00

CUISINES

Gastropub

Special Diets

Vegetarian friendly

Meals

Lunch, Dinner, After-hours, Drinks

FEATURES

Reservations, Outdoor Seating, Seating, Highchairs Available, Serves Alcohol, Full Bar, Table Service

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3.5

153 reviews

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Henry P

London9 contributions

Middle of the road and pricey

Apr 2023 • friends

Having lived here for long enough, I know that pub lunch prices in London can be high, but the quality has typically followed. Not here - a very expensive menu is let down by badly cooked food. The Bobbin burger was dense and overdone, with no structure due to the amount of wetness on it through the mozzarella, sauce and onions and the chips were more like wedges, but nice and crispy. Friend's roast had rock solid roasties that needed a decent bit more cooking. Calamari starter was very tasty but again, expensive for the size. G&T was lovely so there's that. All in, passable food but too expensive for what you get and the service was just a bit unusual.

Written 17 April 2023

This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.

Blackth0rn

Bristol1383 contributions

Decent food and friendly service

Oct 2023 • couples

A popular pub located in a residential side street just on the edge of Clapham’s Old Town, it looks quite attractive from the outside with the extensive blue wooden façade covering the whole of the ground floor, although that’s obviously not original and thus not quite as traditional looking as it may have been at one time. The menu offered a decent enough selection of dishes, although they were certainly a step or two up from your usual “pub grub” both in terms of price and style. Even a burger was £17.50, with the majority of the main courses being around £25. I started with the Burrata, black fig & pomegranate salad with pesto, pine nuts, focaccia & Capezzana olive oil which was a decent and tasty dish, and a good start to the meal. For the main course I went for the Penne & Italian sausage ragú with tomatoes, chilli, oregano, cream and parmesan, and this too was a tasty dish and went down very well. The waitress serving was friendly and very hard working, although she had absolutely no idea how to pour a pint – my London Pride must have been at least 25% head. That said, the landlord spotted it immediately and whisked it away to be sorted before I’d had a chance to say anything. Overall, the food and the service was good here, but it was really a bit too frantic to be really enjoyable. The starters were served very quickly, and the general hubbub from the rest of the pub, especially with the rugby on the TV, made it somewhat less than relaxing.

Written 3 November 2023

Peter E

1 contribution

Sunday Roast

Nov 2021 • none

I booked a last minute for Sunday roast and the woman on the phone was polite and very accommodating. It sadly went down hill from there, the staff were very awkward with us on arrival (accept one who took our original order) and had to explain who I was a number of times before being put in the corridor next to the loos, certainly not somewhere to eat unless it's a snack... there is a fire there but albeit was on not on a winters day. I realised after they don't allowed dogs in the restaurant (Not sure which part of the pub is restaurant), a new policy as dogs carry covid, right?!. We ate a good main but was forgotten about for anything else.. luckily behind me were the menus in a box so we could have a look and grab someone's attention. Anyhow as a frequenter of their sister pub the Fox and Hound who have scrapped the silly dog policy (probably because of the name) and the staff are far more friendly and accommodating, I'll go back there in future.

Written 6 December 2021

Harriet A

1 contribution

Misleading vegetarians

Jun 2022 • family

I have just left the bobbin, which we have not been to for a long while but have been to many times over 20 years of living in Clapham. My husband ordered the "mozzarella" burger which although according to new laws ingredients should be included due to allergies. He is vegetarian. I went to discuss this with staff as it was beef...no vegetarian options apart from risotto. To be made to feel so little when the man who seemed in charge said and I quote, "it's been like that for ages, it should have a V if it's vegetarian and you should have realise that" my response was it .I suggested the wording should have been clearer as to myself and many people a mozarella burger would be a mozarella burger? He responded again it's been like that for years, which is not good customer service or a response. I couldn't eat my meal as I was so angry with his lack of customer service. The waitress that served us was so sweet and tried to resolve the situation but he stormed off leaving her to sort this. We have always liked the Bobbin but this was a completely horrible experience. So I ended up paying £50 for food we could not even eat!

Written 19 June 2022

robyn

1 contribution

Awful management

Jan 2023 • family

If I could give zero stars I would. What a terrible start to the new year. Had a table booked by a friend on New Year’s Day for 2.45 for 6 adults and 3 babies and arrived half an hour early. We sat down but our baby was crying so thought we would go for a walk to get her to sleep before we were supposed to sit down, so she wouldn’t annoy anyone. Arrived back at 2.40 and saw other people sitting at our table and assumed we had been moved? Went to ask at the bar and was greeted by the most aggressive manager and bar staff. Ended up losing the table and trying to have a discussion with them was pointless as they were so unreasonable. We could not understand why they would give away the table 15 mins before our booking time. So we travelled an hour to have lunch with friends with our three one year olds only to be turfed out with everywhere else fully booked. Have never been treated so badly in a pub ever, I appreciate they may have been tired after New Years Eve but they should be embarrassed about how badly they handled the situation.

Written 1 January 2023

Hilary L

Sydney7 contributions

Not child friendly, very uncomfortable experience

Feb 2023 • friends

This place is not child friendly, we were made to feel very uncomfortable about how noisy our children were (we had a 9 month old and one year old twins with us). We do our best to make sure they don't disrupt other customers when we dine out, but there's only so much we can do :( The manager was really horrible and said the babies hadn't stopped making noise since we arrived (they were laughing). If you're a child friendly pub you should accept that kids will make a certain amount of noise. If you're not happy with that, you need to advise people when they make a booking and don't force them out once they're in. Other customers even backed us up, saying we weren't a problem. We did get a refund for our meal when we requested it as we hadn't finished our food or drinks. On the food - calamari and croquettes were great. Tuscan sausages and shin beef were over salty. Food was overpriced and there are better value options in Clapham. Honestly, I've never felt more uncomfortable in my life.

Written 26 February 2023

D C 72

London141 contributions

Conveyor belt speedy roast

Jan 2024 • friends

We booked a week in advance for Sunday lunch. We arrived and met with an immediate “oh sorry we need your table back in 1.5 hours, we tried calling but couldn’t get through”- was our welcome. We asked why, and they said we have a table of ten coming at 3pm. After seating the manager came over and said the same and explained they had a big table coming and needed our table back at 3pm. Again we questioned this, and tempted to leave but stayed . We did ask why they’d taken a booking and gave us a reduced ‘slot’ and they said again they had a big table coming. No other explanation. We skipped starters to make sure we weren’t rushed. We were given four flat glasses of Buck’s Fizz as an apology. Lunch was ok- the potatoes were hard, the yorkshires nice but so salty and my beef was pouring blood into the gravy. This is personal taste but not normal not to ask if you do serve blood pouring beef. No one checked us up- we had to ask for gravy, for the dessert menu, for more drinks and more wine. Overall, it was a racetrack, just a roast dinner conveyor belt with average roast dinner but stung £22 plus service for the main. Disappointing as used to be a nice venue, but the manager’s attitude and general welcome really poor and I can’t see this venue lasting. No doubt when it fails they will blame ‘current market and economy’.

Written 29 January 2024

Rebecca O

1 contribution

If you, or anyone in your party, is vegetarian or vegan avoid this pub

Dec 2023 • family

I’ve been coming to this place for years having grown up in the area but I was hugely disappointed by my recent experience. We were a party of five family members meeting for a pre Christmas get together including my elderly parents (both in their mid/late 80s). We were told that our booking was for two hours yet we were seated 25 mins late, despite arriving on time, and then harassed to leave at the initial booking end time without any consideration to the fact that we were seated late. When we’d been sat for a few minutes the waiter came over and said that she’d need to take our order as the kitchen was closing soon. We ordered some extra drinks, when they arrived two of the three drinks were wrong. A Diet Coke instead of a Coke Zero, some random beer instead of a cider. My brother swapped his out at the bar but I just made do. There was no vegetarian/vegan main on the menu. I’ve been in pubs on the Outer Hebrides with a better vegetarian offer. This is Clapham. The waiter did acknowledge that it wasn’t good enough and initially pointed me towards the three cold veg/vegan starters but then said they could ask the chef if they could do me ‘something’. That ‘something’ turned out to be pasta and vegetables or risotto with broccoli etc. I opted for the risotto. What arrived was a very sad, grey, watery risotto with a few pieces of mushroom. We weren’t offered the dessert menu presumably because the kitchen had closed sometime previously. The pub was exceptionally busy and I could see the staff were doing their best in trying circumstances and were all very pleasant but why did the pub take our booking in the first instance? It seemed like a situation of trying to cram in as many bookings as possible in the lead up to Christmas to make as much money as possible without any consideration of the customer’s experience. This isn’t a cheap pub and what we had was a third rate experience instead of the joyful Christmas get together that we were all hoping for. There are plenty of other places to eat in Clapham and in future I will be doing just that.

Written 12 December 2023

Rohan K

London104 contributions

Sunday Roast - always enjoyable

May 2024 • friends

We always enjoy The Bobbin and this was no different - for a start, great when you can still get a Sunday Roast at 7.30pm!! The service seemed a little inattentive but ultimately I think they were just really short staffed. The early evening ambience was a curious mix of families alongside younger groups, some of whom seemed to be in a battle to see who could be heard loudest. The food, as always, was great. Between us we had one beef roast, one lamb roast, and a salmon. Generous portions, really tasty food. Even in these days where cost of living is high, I find myself asking if I want to be paying £26 for a roast dinner but that’s my choice to make. We’ll be back because we always enjoy it.

Written 27 May 2024

Will

London3 contributions

Good Sunday lunch albeit slightly let down by the service

May 2021 • couples

Overall this was a great local pub to visit. We went for Sunday lunch and the roast dinner was great. The meats in the roast were particularly good! Only let down was the service which was pretty unfriendly and almost rude, front of house staff need some training in engaging with the general public and how to create a welcoming atmosphere. Food arrived quickly end was very tasty. Such a shame that the service did slightly spoil the experience.

Written 20 June 2021

Rebecca S

1 contribution

Vile and rude

Jan 2023 • family

Never in my life have I been treated with such aggression. Our table that was booked 4 weeks in advance was given away 2 minutes before our booking was due to begin. The incredibly rude manager hung up on me and then was beyond vile to me and my friends. Such a shame as I’ve had several lovely experiences at the Bobbin in 2022 and even recommended this place to friends however I will not be going back after this episode which ruined my New Year’s Day. I wish I could give no stars!

Written 2 January 2023

London2 contributions

Great main, terrible dessert

Dec 2022 • friends

Great appetiser and main. The dessert was unfortunately really terrible. The taste was not great and the size was extremely small. 3 of us had the pear tart. 7 pounds each. Really felt as a rip off. Most likely they didn't have enough left and reduce the portions, but would have been more honest to say so than charging 3 slices for one.

Written 10 December 2022

ToriPatt

62 contributions

Lovely dinner

Jun 2021 • friends

I am a big fan of the Fox & Hounds pub which is a sister to the Bobbin so decided to try it for a low key dinner with a friend. The food was great and service was fantastic ... I don’t understand some of the reviews / previous comments! We shared a number of small plates including calamari, bruschetta, kofte meatballs etc and everything was lovely. The food was fresh and delicious, staff were friendly and attentive. I would definitely return!

Written 9 June 2021

Katmiccollou

Cambridge203 contributions

Visit if you are in Clapham - you won’t be disappointed!

Dec 2022 • family

Really nice meal in this quaint and friendly backstreet pub in Clapham. Excellent service and very reasonably priced. We shared some really good bruschetta and some croquettes. We then had the Tuscan sausage with mash and red onion jam plus gravy - delicious. Very good cheese platter - loads of choice for only £9. Sticky toffee pudding was also well regarded by our group. Second visit, will return.

Written 3 December 2022

Ms Business T

Greater London93 contributions

Perfect for a Sunday Roast

Feb 2023 • family

I recently visited the Bobbin for a Sunday roast. The service was good and staff were attentive. The Sunday roast is delicious and comes with a selection of roasted vegetables. I would recommend for a Sunday roast and return again.

Written 11 February 2023

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THE BOBBIN, London - Updated 2024 Restaurant Reviews, Menu & Prices - Tripadvisor