While Buffalo Lounge(formerly Mr Smith’s) is showing the whole of Cathays how to pitch a student bar without accentuating cheap over cheerful, just up the road Ba Rooba is a comparable but faintly less focused competitor. Taking over over-aspiration-filled Welsh restaurant Armless Dragon, there’s nothing wrong with the multifaceted bar as such. But in attempts to grasp all corners of the student market, it becomes a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. The food menu is steady if unremarkable, although the drinks show a little more guile: anywhere that serves Taffy Apple cider gets a double thumbs up and, like Buffalo Lounge, you can down two cocktails for £6. But here come the complications: live bands, DJs and big screens showing Sky Sports(including a massive 50-incher in rear area ‘The Snug’, with PlayStation 3 and Wii for advance hire). Ba Rooba isn’t so much killing several birds with one stone as throwing handfuls of gravel at an entire flock.
Rachel W.
Tu valoración: 3 Bristol, United Kingdom
Ba Rooba is one of those places that looks pretty dead when the students aren’t around. I guess this is the issue when you target the student population in Cardiff, because the inevitable back-lash is always that you lose the local trade, and mine for that matter!(It’s not that I’m anti-students by the way… it’s just that I’m a bit too long in the tooth to want to hang out with them en masse of an evening!) As far as it goes Ba Rooba is probably one of the better student haunts. They at least put on live music every now and again. Somewhat inevitably they have the big screens, so you can go and watch the rugby and footie, if that’s what floats your boat. They boast about serving ‘great food’, but I haven’t ever felt compelled to eat here, so I can’t comment on it myself.(What I can say is that I’ve seen more inspiring menus in other pubs!)