O'Neill's

85-87 St Mary Street, Cardiff [map]


Oh, O'Neill's (or, as their URL suggests, One Ills). It's never really a prospect that fills your heart with joy.

But whichever branch you visit (Cardiff or otherwise), you always know what you're going to get - essentially a hostelry from Dublin's Temple Bar fed through a chain pub-shaped filter.


Following the kind of high-level negotiations that would give Kofi Annan a tension headache, we secure ourselves two pints of particularly gaseous lager.


This is possibly Cardiff's brownest pub.

That aside, the place is rocking a 2:1 ratio of tomato sauce bottles to tables. (The sort of grassroots statistic that the ONS tends to overlook, for some reason.)


De rigueur Guinness-related ephemera.


View from the upper level. Which is much the same as the lower level, except about 18 inches higher up.


Craic addicts getting their fix.


We're all for a good pub booth but this is ridiculous - a seating arrangement that's so self-assured it's decided it's capable of accommodating about 12 people at once.

Which is not so much a pub booth as a Travelodge booking gone horribly wrong.