BREWDOG
Westgate Street
‘Craft beer’ pub chain BrewDog, founded by two Scotsmen in 2007, rapidly expanded on the back of provocative attention-seeking, concocted controversies and a self-proclaimed ‘punk’ attitude designed to present themselves as rebellious, anti-establishment iconoclasts. It worked for a while, branches opened across the UK and Cardiff was duly saddled with one on Westgate Street in 2014. But it was all built on sand, and even as the company was going global, flogging crowdfunding shares, raking in government grants and opening a snazzy new brewery in Aberdeenshire it was beginning to collapse under the weight of its own bullshit. As debt mounted, ex-employees criticised BrewDog’s working conditions, business practices, “culture of fear”, bullying, misogyny and hypocrisy. Then, in late 2025 and early 2026, new owners bailed out and closed 48 bars across the UK, including the one in Cardiff. What remained was sold to a US beverage and medical cannabis firm while the residual insolvent operation went into administration and all those gullible enough to buy shares in BrewDog counted their losses. Woof, woof, belch…

PITCH
Mill Lane
Pitch Bar & Eatery survived for more than 10 years before closing in 2025, which virtually made it an ancient monument in Mill Lane’s epicentre of here-today-gone-tomorrow consumption for consumption’s sake. The longevity was solely due to its unique selling point of specialising in Welsh food and drink. Crikey; it comes to something when serving Welsh produce in the capital of Wales counts as a peculiar aberration worthy of comment! Try to imagine, say, French food in Paris being a shock. But this is Cardiff, where the Council, businesses and English incomers expend immense effort erasing every vestige of Welshness, the better to inculcate, indoctrinate and impose British identity. A recent example is the transformation of Cardiff Market from a vital core of quintessential Cardiffness where since the 18th century Cardiffians mingled, gossiped and interacted as they bought good quality Welsh fresh meat, fruit, vegetables and dairy products, to today’s hollowed-out non-place of yet more crappy street food outlets for cripplingly conformist internet clones who are barely aware they’re in Wales. I’m Cardiff born and bred, and I can tell you that the abolition of the people’s market breaks my heart.

REVOLUTION
Castle Street
This awful hell-hole of vile flavoured vodkas, sickly cocktails, disgusting burgers and atrocious music was a venue where tasteless, infantile, ignorant, Americanised 20-somethings could take selfies of their generic Instagram faces and pretend they were having a wonderful time while rendering the city centre out of bounds for 99.99% of Cardiffians. The chain lasted 10 years in Cardiff before it suddenly closed as the utterly inessential night-time ‘hospitality industry’ came up against sobering economic reality (i.e. the sweatshop minimum wage was slightly increased) and the Manchester-based company went into administration.

REVOLUCIÓN DE CUBA
The Friary
Owned by the same corporate chain as Revolution (‘The Revel Collective’), this dump differed only in the Latin American tropes that were crudely appropriated to lure clueless student freshers (think mojitos, tapas, rums and wiggling bums, gringo). The dreadful dive bit the dust earlier this year. That’s worth lighting a big fat Havana cigar in celebration.

STICKY FINGERS
Richmond Road
Another venue pitched at the easily-impressed, inexperienced 18-25 demographic who know no better. It opened in 2018 and, like most Cardiff bars in the anonymous, decultured, throwaway zones of the city centre, its main earner was food not drink (bigger profit margins and plenty of potential customers unable to boil an egg). The gimmick was what else but ‘street food’ – over-priced and over-spiced muck for brutalised taste-buds that recoil at subtlety, nuance and depth. After seven years catering to a transient population who will never set foot in Cardiff again, it thankfully closed at the end of 2025.

TWENTYSIX
Paper Mill Road
Contemporary Cardiff is organised to serve Big Business, private equity, hedge funds, millionaires, landlords, speculative developers, asset-strippers, passing visitors, vacuous consumers and eminently exploitable undergraduates – and most certainly NOT Cardiffians (we just pay the larcenous taxes that fund the Labour Council’s obscene annihilation of our home town). In this scenario a place can always be found for middle-class neo-liberal globalisers, usually from England, who descend on Wales to teach us poor wretches about their sophisticated ways, brandish their on-trend cliches and shoot fish in a barrel. Such people are particularly keen to impose the lucrative scam known as ‘street food’ (translation: unhygienic takeaway junk food loosely derived from places like Hong Kong where nobody has room to cook or eat in their tiny cubicle homes). The Canton area, being popular with fashion victims, has many street food enclaves, one being at the Bone Yard shipping container studios where a roster of street food vendors, a cafe, a seating area and a bar called TwentySix was launched in 2023. It closed for good after just over two years dishing up pissy lagers and adulterated gunk from all over Asia. You’ve heard of Delhi belly? This was more like Canton incontinence…