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Location: 148-148A Holland St, Glasgow G2 4NG
Year of Inscription: 2024
Venue Type: City Tavern / Historic Venue
Map
Description
Gallery
| EBG Rating: | 7.7/10 |
| Choice/ Quality of Drinks | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ A superior selection of cask ales for Glasgow from Scotland and the wider UK, decent keg selection by the standards of the city in general. A good selection of whisky bottles, usually 50+ options. |
| Style/ Décor | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Dating from 1902 with a typical city tavern appearance. Wet gloss patterned ceiling, island bar, high ceiling, mirrors and ornate wood fittings with old sayings gilded onto them. Horseshoe shaped bar upstairs. |
| Atmosphere/ Character | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ An odd sensation – The State is the very picture of a central tavern, but as there isn’t anything else quite like it around the city and even the nearest tend to have a greater ‘city bustle’, it doesn’t quite occupy the epitome of the Glasgow pub you feel it should. This is very high level discernment however – the atmosphere remains a feeling of solidity, reliability, institution and like the sum of all the parts that go into it. |
| Amenities/ Events | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Live music, food, snacks, TV |
| Value For Money | ❤️❤️❤️ Typical city centre prices. |
| Description | Boasting ‘the best steak pie in Scotland’, this quirky piece of homespun hospitality seems unusual in what is an institution city centre tavern with all the typical features of its 1902 inception – high ceilings with a patterned gloss finish, lavish bar area and ornate wood fittings, a sense of grandeur and space that is effective: reassuring and cradling. One of Glasgow’s beer specialists with a good range of cask, keg and bottles covering bases. It must be said that those who live in other UK cities may not find the range especially impressive but this is still something Glasgow is catching up with. Live music nights provide further points of difference, while the large tellies speak of the need to gather together a relatively diverse crowd, making it a fairly versatile venue too. The large mirrors give a sense of space that is disarming, but on an evening accentuate the opulent surroundings. Something about The State as a whole is intriguing – intimate and sensual in some ways yet also a pub operated at scale. (Added January 2025) |
