Cornish Steam x The Market Porter
The Market Porter, 9 Stoney St, London SE1 9AA
Robyn Gilmour
Thursday 14 November 2024
This article is from
Love Your Pub
issue 112
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The Market Porter is a behemoth, and one of the oldest Victorian Pubs in London, a stone’s throw from London Bridge and the iconic Borough Market. Inside, city financiers rub shoulders with day trippers taking in the Thames and nearby Globe Theatre, while outside those not lucky enough to get a seat stand with pints on ledges, the true Londoners unphased by the rain.
Coincidentally, owner Rolf Munding’s wife’s family is from Borough. The first thing he says about the pub is that it “sits on the corner of Stony Street and Park Street, just down the road from a pub on Park Street called The Globe. That’s where my wife’s family lived, breathed, and grew up.” Close family connections are a big part of what makes The Market Porter the jewel in Rolf’s wider estate of pubs, which he has spent years developing.
“The Market Porter was the first pub I ever bought, and when we got the keys, I looked at it and thought ‘we don't want to change anything here,’” Rolf says. “So we just emptied it, and for three days we repainted everything, fixed up a couple of things, and put a new kitchen in. When we reopened, our customers said ‘...something is different in here, but I can’t quite put my finger on what’. We had a good deal of trouble matching the green inside to the green outside, but that’s about the extent of everything we changed. The pub has its own recent history too. We survived the London Bridge terrorist attack, when my daughter was locked into the restaurant next to the pub while the attacker tried to get through the door with a knife. It was very scary, but just another thing the pub has borne witness to. I’m very, very proud of that place, it’s a great spot to visit.”
Not only does The Market Porter guarantee a brilliant pint and one-of-a-kind atmosphere, it also enjoys an upstairs restaurant, where diners can partake in what Rolf has heard is “the best fish and chips on the Borough”, but also a show stopping steak. A shameless restaurateur, when he hasn’t got his publican hat on, Rolf once owned Farringdon’s ‘Smiths’ of Smithfield, and took his executive chef to The Market Porter when both parties were ready to move on.
One final permanent feature of The Market Porter is The 7th Step Czech Pilsner that never leaves the bar. “We sell buckets of the stuff,” says Rolf, who acquired a taste for Czech beer while living in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in his youth. The Žatec-based brewery is, rather interestingly, named after a line in the film adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The scene in question features two friends, one of which asks the other how he always brews such good beer. The homebrewer responds with the assertion that neither the sixth nor the eighth step in his cellar is the appropriate temperature for lagering, but the seventh step always produces a beer that’s just right.
So, while you might visit The Market Porter for its history, reputation, atmosphere, or food, it might also be worth dropping by for a Czech pilsner with the stamp of approval of a lifelong fanatic.
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