TOM PARKER BOWLES reviews a new Canadian sports bar that's just opened in London: 'The wings are bleak, dry and joyless'

Well, this is a new one. La Cage, that is: no mere sports bar, rather a ‘Montreal Sports Brasserie’ that’s just landed on Kensington High Street. Apparently they have 35 locations across Quebec, where it’s been a destination ‘for sports fans and food lovers’ for ‘decades’. With nearly a dozen vast and pristine screens, showing everything from football to cricket, darts to Grand Prix, it will certainly keep those sports fans happy. As to the food lovers? Don’t bet on it.

La Cage is a huge, glossy expensive space, all dark wood, bare bricks and hanging sculptures made from ice-hockey sticks. The Quebecois sure like their ice hockey. Commercial house music, tinny and irksome, pumps from the speakers, while lights are moodily low. Service is charming but disorganised, even though the place is only half full. Don’t miss the Bloody Montreal Caesar (made with Clamato, that great Canadian clam and tomato juice mix), which comes with a crisp slice of smoked streaky bacon.

It’s all pretty much downhill from there.

Now, I do love a good sports bar. Passyunk Avenue, an ice-hockey puck’s thwack down the road, gets it right: exalted handheld stodge, heavy on the grease and salt. The best are found in regional American airports, where I’ve spent many a happy hour, whiling away the inevitable wait with ice-cold beer and a bottomless buffalo wings platter. Wings at La Cage are sorry specimens, bleak, dry and joyless. And there’s not enough sauce. Buffalo wings should be soaked in the stuff. Ribs are worse still, over-sweet and desiccated, tasting of cheap meat and misery. Caesar salad has neither anchovies nor allure, and is the sort of fridge-cold, morose melange served up in a mid-level business hotel. And what in name of Céline Dion are fried capers doing in there? They seem to have wandered in from a different dish altogether.

On the plus side, pizza is actually edible, with a puffy, blistered crust, while poutine – all rubbery, squeaky cheese curds and chips soaking in a mess of gravy – is excellent. I suppose if they’re going to get anything right, it may as well be Canada’s (unofficial) national dish.

So if you’re after poutine and Premier League, La Cage delivers. Just don’t bother with dinner.

About £35 per head. La Cage, 201-203 Kensington High Street, London W8; lacage.uk

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