The Charter Club
2 Sheinovo Str.
Tel:0898 537678
Open: Daily 8:30am - 11pm

Everyone needs to have a local. Somewhere to escape the daily grind, meet up with friends, talk, debate, drink. My local in Sofia happened more by accident than design. Having lived, until last week, in a small village on the outskirts of the capital, for convenience's sake I ended up adopting a place closer to work (and also because the local in my village was a shack-cum-cafe by the bus stop - OK for a coffee or a beer while waiting for the no.81 bus, but not exactly conducive to settling in for a good evening's drinking).

So, my adopted "local" became The Charter Club. It's on one of the small streets off Doctors' Garden and serves as a local to lots of people who work and study in this area of town. It's my local by default because it happens to be where a lot of my friends go to drink - in fact I guess it would be accurate to say that the after work pint at The Charter is something of an institution. But since moving into town and being presented with the possibility of finding a new place to frequent, I'm forced to re-examine my old haunt to see if it measures up to the competition.

So, what is required to make a place suitable local material? Decent beer at reasonable prices has to be right up there. Luckily, this is not a difficult combination to find in Bulgaria, and The Charter is no exception. It may not have such an extensive collection of bottled imports as some of the  more fancy bars in Sofia, but it does have regular imported guest lagers alongside the familiar, tried and tested names such as Kamenitsa, Zagorka and Amstel. At the moment, the guest beer is the Bavarian blond beer Paulaner. This is like a lighter Hoegaarden - great for drinking outside in the sunshine, and this brings us to the next criterion - the setting. First of all, The Charter is a pub, not a bar. It is for drinking, not posing. For example, the crowd that hangs out at Planet Club drinking cocktails in their designer sunglasses would likely not be seen dead there, and that I see as a bonus. That said, it is not a typical expat hangout either, that is, it's not a themed Irish bar, although they do show the football and have a big projector screen for this purpose - a feature that may come in handy during World Cup `06. However, it has little in the way of a theme. The decor is basic- wooden floors, wooden benches, wooden bar. And any day now some of the benches will migrate out onto the wooden terrace. (A word of warning should be inserted here: tread carefully when walking on the terrace if you don't want to end up falling through it. This is the voice of experience talking).

Just as the setting doesn't really conform to a stereotype, neither do the people who frequent the place. At any arbitrary moment the mix of people is likely to be the following: a few tables of students drinking pints and smoking roll-ups, debating music, politics, Big Brother, or whatever happens to be the topic of the day; a table or two of expats, most likely Brits, also drinking pints, smoking Victories and debating some of the more obscure points of the English language, or engaging in other similarly baffling British pastimes; a couple of girls (short skirts, long hair, make-up) hanging-out by the darts board; a group of young blokes playing darts; a couple of guys in suits at the bar, drinking spirits, watching the girls; a lone guy beating the hell out of the pinball machine in the corner.

So, what else? As mentioned above, darts and pinball provide in-pub entertainment, though I must admit I have never used either and still find the electronic darts so popular in Bulgaria less satisfying than the traditional version, complete with the dot to dot record of near misses it leaves mapped into the wall. And this is where I find something lacking, not only in The Charter, but in the bars and pubs in Sofia in general, a lack of pub games, more specifically: an absence of pool tables. I am no pool shark. OK, I admit it: I'm totally rubbish, despite the best efforts of a misspent youth, but, nonetheless, part of the ideal local experience involves shooting a few games of pool. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be something that's part of the Bulgarian pub-going culture, and I've yet to find a decent pub complete with pool table. Until I do, it's a pretty safe bet you'll see me back down The Charter tonight.