At John Bull, English Grub With a SoCal Twist Is on Tap

I remember the John Bull Pub as an old, dusty, cavernous Pasadena bar serving really perfunctory English grub (which is saying something). It still has multiple TVs tuned to sports--every real English pub around here is basically a sports bar--but everything else seems to have changed.

Spruced up a good deal, in fact. The worn pew-like benches have been cashiered out to the patio, replaced by new wooden booths, and the place is vastly brighter and more attractive.

The food has been spruced up too. It remains in the English pub grub category, but with Southern California style; pesto pizza, chicken salad and popcorn shrimp share the bar snack menu with Scotch egg and ploughman’s lunch. For that matter, the cheese in the ploughman’s lunch is brie, and it includes avocado and fresh French bread as well as pork pie.

The Scotch egg is the usual hard-boiled egg fried in a coating of sausage meat. Another snack designed for rather a cooler climate than ours is the Canadian poutine (here spelled as pronounced in Quebec: putzin). It’s French fries mixed with cheese and gravy, very rich and pretty bland.

The strong suit of English pub food is the meat pies, and John Bull’s versions are very good. The steak and mushroom pie is a small ramekin of beef, mushrooms and onions covered with a plain crust, quite beefy, firmly spiced with fresh black pepper. If you like kidneys, the steak and kidney pie is even better. The tiny bit of unthickened sauce in the ramekin is intense with kidney and pepper flavors.

Even more notable, in a way, is what comes on the side of the pies. Instead of vegetables boiled to death, there are steamed broccoli florets and thinly sliced carrots tossed in butter (sometimes the carrots are positively fried to a delicious sweetness). There’s also a little pot of gravy, which actually tastes like genuine beef gravy, rather than the bottled stuff so many pubs serve.

You can get a rather lush Cornish pasty made with rich pastry and a filling of ground beef with peas (not overdone, still quite green), carrots and chunks of potato. This is one of the few pubs that serves cottage pie under its correct name, rather than as shepherd’s pie. Properly, shepherd’s pie is made with lamb; cottage pie is made with beef. This one includes peas, one surprising wedge of fresh tomato and the usual strong dose of black pepper under a topping of mashed potatoes.

Like all our pubs, John Bull offers fish and chips. They’re lightly breaded, tasting of fresh fish and clean frying oil. Rather mealy steak fries come on the side. The traditional condiment is English malt vinegar, and every table has a vinegar bottle (along with mustard, Worcestershire and Daddy’s Sauce), but you also get a wedge of lemon and a pot of tartar sauce.

Sausage rolls--fatty sausage in buttery crust--are for hard-core Brit food lovers. At least the banger sausages are better than average here. A banger is mostly bread crumbs, pork fat and spices, but this one has an attractive, burnished flavor that may convert a few diners. Incidentally, sausage rolls come with a generous salad of baby greens in place of carrots and broccoli . . . dressed California-style, with balsamic vinegar, if you want.

Bangers also come as bangers and mash, accompanied by mashed potatoes and those peculiar English canned baked beans in a lot of sweet tomato sauce. You probably have to grow up on them.

There are also some sandwiches, which come with either shoestring potatoes or a green salad. Oddly, the cold roast beef sandwich is more expensive than the grilled roast beef with melted Swiss cheese, but it’s worth it--more meat, and the juices in the hot sandwich make the toast too soggy to pick up.

Desserts are rarely the highlight of a pub meal. They tend to come with Bird’s custard, an imitation creme anglaise for which the English have an affection the rest of us cannot always fathom. There’s always a fruit crumble--a thin layer of fruit (most recently canned blueberry or peach) in a streusel topping.

The apple Wellington is a lot better. It’s slices of apple baked in a rich crust, basically a hot apple tart. And if you ask, they’ll serve it to you with ice cream instead of Bird’s custard.

BE THERE

John Bull Pub, 958 S. Fair Oaks Blvd., Pasadena. (626) 441-4353. Open noon to 2 a.m. daily. Beer and wine. Parking lot. All major credit cards. Bar snacks for one, $5 to $7.75; dinner for two, food only, $22 to $35.

What to Get: Cornish pasty, steak and kidney pie, cottage pie, fish and chips, apple Wellington.