Nothing sporty about it

A new sports bar in NCR is a nice hangout place but not meant for genuine fans

Somehow, sports bars have never taken off in New Delhi. Quite a few opened in the last few years but either shut shop or became something other than a sports bar. Whatever might be your opinion of sports bars, they are great fun, especially when a football or cricket match is on. The Sports Bar in Mumbai’s Phoenix Mills compound is one such place. So when a branch opened in Noida, I thought that finally there would be a place to go and catch some sporting action with friends.

How wrong was I?

Two of us sauntered into the Sports Bar on a day when India was playing Sri Lanka in an ODI. The place was packed (corporate crowd), but to our surprise only a handful were interested in watching cricket. We had a chat with the manager with the latest Bollywood tracks being played by the DJ in the background. The manager was candid and told us that this was Noida and they had to play the kind of music that people wanted to hear. “If we play anything else, people start complaining,” he said, with a resigned look on his face.

The place is spacious, with three levels of stadium-like seating, facing a giant 47-ft-wide screen. There are other LCD screens too, and a pool table. It scores well on space, but we didn’t feel we were in a sports bar. Listening to songs from movies like Singh is Kingg and other Punjabi tracks didn’t help! Sitting at the bar counter, we could not see the LCD screens, as our view was blocked by glasses hung upside down.

The food served was quite good and moderately priced and the staff extremely polite. The menu style is innovative: we were given a pencil and pad on which to tick what we wanted to order and write down quantity, and just pass it along.

In terms of styling, décor and food, the Sports Bar is fairly good. But in terms of sporting ambience, it falls short. We left wondering that if this was the ambience during a cricket match, what might it be like when Manchester United play Liverpool?

Score: 5/10. This place is anything but a sports bar. If you aren’t looking for that, it’s the kind of place you may end up liking