Jo suggested we have dinner and a couple of pints at the Marble Arch on Saturday and it didn’t take much to get me to agree (she had me at ‘dinner’, to be honest, ‘pints’ and ‘Marble Arch’ were icing on the cake). We were hoping to get there early enough to bump into MyBreweryTap.com‘s Richard Burhouse (@MyBreweryTap) and Rob Derbyshire (@BGRTRob) of Hopzine.com fame, but alas they got there earlier than we did and had already supped their fill and moved on before we’d managed to get into town.

So instead we ended up chatting to half a dozen complete strangers over the course of the evening (topics of conversation ranging from bondage trousers and Stiff Little Fingers, to the relative acoustic merits of the Bridgewater Hall and the Lowry, via the best way to get to the Palace Theatre by car whilst avoiding the gas-main works that have buggered up the city centre for months) and had a bloody good time doing so.

There was ale involved, of course. And oh, my word, what ale there was…

On arrival, I headed for the bar to get Jo her customary half of Marble Stouter Stout and made a b-line for the Thornbridge Raven, which Rob D had mentioned was on earlier in the day. As it weighs in at 6% ABV I thought I’d just go for a half to start with, so I got myself a pint of Marble Pint at the same time, to ease myself in. But Jo finished up her stout and sent me back to the bar for another (along with our food order) and the Raven was so damn good – a dark, smoky, delicious black IPA with a lingering hop-bite – that I couldn’t resist a second. And that pretty much set the tone for the session…

Our food arrived just as we’d both gotten a pint of Marble Chocolate in and we feasted on char-grilled belly pork and black pudding (actually, the best damn black pudding I’ve ever tasted) with duck’s egg for starters, followed by sea bass served with creamed crab meat and spinach for Jo and turbot poached in red wine on creamed polenta with salsify sticks for me, and some lightly steamed greens on the side. Fantastic food, as always in the Marble Arch – we’ve eaten there a few times now and have never been anything less than blown away by whatever we’ve ordered – and it all went extremely well with the rich, tasty Marble Chocolate. Perhaps a dark ale or stout might not the obvious choice for a with-food beer, but the bitter-sweetness of the chocolate and roasted malts were very complimentary indeed to the satisfyingly meaty, beautifully cooked fish dishes.

After dinner we ordered dessert: another Marble Chocolate for Jo, whilst I decided to try a pint of Marble Brew 14. This one was a completely new to me (although apparently it went down rather well on the first #twissup pub crawl / blogger outing in Sheffield back in January. Brew 14 turned out to be a feisty session bitter that was all about the bitter oranges and big hops with a long, dry finish. Very, very good indeed and one I’d definitely have again.

At this point, Jo and I were thinking about winding down and heading home, so I opted for a quick half of Marble Dobber for the road. But of course, one half of Dobber is never enough and as I was heading back to the bar for another top-up, I spotted a new pump clip nestled among the array of Marbles: Thornbridge St Petersburg! I’ve been trying to track down and try this 7.7% ABV Imperial Stout for a while now, so this was just too good an opportunity to miss. And it was delicious: rich, smoky malt, chocolate and coffee, blended to perfection. A top-up of that one was absolutely compulsory, it would have been the very height of rudeness not to.

That really did finish the evening off for us and we weaved our way out the door to find a tram and head home for a nice cup of tea and a kip. Lovely, lovely evening and a fuzzy, fuzzy head the next day, but absolutely, totally worth it. I tell you what, it’s a good job we don’t live just round the corner from the Marble Arch, we’d never be out of the place.