What do you get when you place a building with poor infrastructure, ugly interior design, and concrete flooring in the middle of UTM?
You get the Blind Duck Pub.
This year marks the pub’s 20th anniversary, but you wouldn’t know that if you entered it throughout the week. It’s a dry, drab room. The Blind Duck Pub isn’t a place to relax and have drinks. It’s a room with tables.
Let’s go through the list of things wrong with the pub:
The seating arrangement is blocky and uninspired, and the atmosphere is bleak, flat, and industrial. The chairs are uncomfortable and the tables are old and rickety, leaving a space that should be lively, characterless.
Architecture imitates life. The pub should be the central hub of the campus, but instead it acts as a reminder of our apathetic, miserable student body.
And what is it with the pub’s hours? They’re open until 8:00 p.m. from Monday to Wednesday, but close at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, and 5:00 p.m. on Friday. Unless students are alcoholics, most of them don’t start drinking until 8:00 p.m. After a long week of studying, writing essays, and working, students want to be able to go out and grab drinks with their friends. The pub should be open late into the night, especially on Fridays.
Students go to the pub for cheap, greasy food but leave full of regret. It’s inexpensive, but not even worth it.
The pub’s greatest transgression, however, is their chicken wings. The pub’s renowned chicken wings have changed, and for the worse. The sauce tastes processed, the breaded wings are soggy, and the flavour is just not what it used to be.
The Blind Duck Pub needs to be advertising itself for what it is: a pub. A bar. A chill place to hang out with friends and get drunk.
The pub needs to modernize, otherwise it won’t be seeing many more anniversaries in its future.
