Ambitious pub/restaurant let down by mediocre cooking and impersonal welcome

And so the Brains machine marches on. In the space of 200 yards on the A48 near Cowbridge there now two big pubs run by Cardiff's voracious brewery. Will there be any pubs left for them to gobble up soon?

At the Aubrey, the Brains business model has become all too apparent. With so many premises under their control the time has clearly passed when they could approach each project lovingly, at leisure, and with a clean designer's notebook. These days you can imagine each pub just being delivered from a pile of pre-packed crates, and according to two models: basic, or gastro.

The Aubrey is from the gastro design. Leaf through your lazy-pub-designer handbook and you will see that currently 'gastro' means:

Piles of logs
Leather chairs
A fancy website with slightly amateur photographs of smart waiters hurrying about with plates carried aloft in the extravagant manner of Italian pizza restaurants
Lots of blackboards with 'handwriting' printed on them
The semblance of a good range of beers, but actually all made my Brains

All of which arrived safely at the Aubrey.

The trouble is, if you run a pub by the numbers then the result is going to be disappointing. Take the beer: Rev James on tap. Fine. But it's supercooled. No ale drinker wants to drink beer so cold he hankers for a bowl of ice cubes as a chaser to warm him up. And the food is of the same ilk. It's a perfectly decent menu with the likes of Shetland salmon, baked trout, a Moroccan cous cous number and the predictable supercharged versions of fish&chips et al. But, sad to say, it just doesn't taste much good. Our scallops, with chorizo, tomato sauce and tagliatelli were all present and correct. But the dish felt assembled, not cooked. Nothing blended. It was just a plate of reasonable ingredients plonked on top of each other. That's how robots cook, not chefs.

Pity really, because the Aubrey is in a nice setting (apart from the raging dual carriageway within metres of the outside seating), and they definitely had some very decent decorators. But the decoration is where the templates should have ended and the passion allowed to kick in. Sadly it didn't.