And it's only £8 if you take away.

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Good thing too, because our plans to eat out at Arcadia were completely scuppered when we learned that this modern drinkers' paradise does absolutely nothing for the diners.

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Well, not on a Wednesday anyhow, unless you consider a sandwich to be sufficient re-fuelling at the end of a long day.

The policy seems a strange one. Headingley may boast a saturation of eateries – from cheap and cheerful KFC to quality salumeria Salvo's; and there are no less than three excellent Thai restaurants within a quarter mile of Arcadia.

But you'll struggle to find many places where you can eat wholesome British pub fare washed down by the great beers of the world, yet Arcadia offers this magnificent combination only from Thursday to Sunday.

It didn't altogether ruin our evening. We hung around for long enough to try a good selection of the beers before hot-footing it up to the Jade Dragon for cut-price carry-out.

I've known this place since it opened, longer actually as I used to bank here before the sign of the Black Horse was lowered and Market Town Taverns moved in. It was quite a controversial move at the time, but it's hard to imagine the local scene now without Arcadia.

The name comes from Greece, where the people of Arcadia with their unsophisticated, primitive manners came to represent simplicity and innocence. The name is much used in literature – especially in science fiction – as a place of idyllic paradise. And in a suburb where the bars seem primarily geared to filling under-25s with cheap lager as quickly and efficiently as possible, the name seems curiously apt.

In this case, the bar was more likely and prosaically named to reflect its place in Headingley's Arndale Centre, which may lack the charm of the city's famed Victorian shopping arcades, but remains a hub of local trade.

Arcadia's website describes the Arndale as "aesthetically challenged", though the glass-fronted bar itself is easy on the eye, both from inside and out. Stepping in from busy Otley Road, you enter an open airy lounge, with a polished wooden floor and vintage brewery advertisements, dominated by a long and well-kept bar at the far end of the room. A wooden staircase leads up to a mezzanine floor, which has always been where I've headed on my numerous visits to Arcadia, and here there's a gentle terracotta, cream and bottle green paint job, while the walls are decorated with an interesting array of framed art deco posters. The style will be a familiar one to anyone who's visited some of Market Town Taverns' other venues, such as the Bar T'At at Ilkley, the Tithe at Northallerton or – my favourite – the Old Bell Tavern in Harrogate.

And in common with all the group's nine other outlets, the bar at Arcadia is a beer-lovers' paradise, with a great choice of traditional hand-pulled ales augmented by a cosmopolitan line up of world beers.
Timothy Taylor Landlord and Black Sheep are the only permanent fixtures on the bar and there were Hawkshead Bitter, Old Mill Mild and Golden Pippin on display when we called in.

I went for none of these, starting with Hawkshead Red, a firm, fruity, premium ale from the Cumbria brewery, followed by Kolsch Style Ale from Elland, which seemed a curious but interesting hybrid between an easy-drinking English session beer and the soft refreshing taste of a Kolsch – the light, characterful regional ales of Cologne.

It wasn't the only German influence on the bar either, with Kaltenberg, Erdinger and Warsteiner as well as Maredsous and Timmerman's wheat beer from Belgium and there are plenty of interesting bottled beers here too.
When it first opened in 2004, this was one of the city's first no-smoking bars, a radical concept which sparked lively debate in this column and letters to the editor. A year later Market Town Taverns brought the concept to the rest of their growing pub group – the first company to do so.

Five years on, the argument is so over and done that you wonder why we bothered having it in the first place. I don't particularly enjoy seeing bunches of smokers lingering in pub doorways or loitering within tents in beer gardens – but the visual nuisance is a small price to pay for clean air inside.

On this occasion, the beer was good enough to keep us here for a while, but the absence of the hot food was a bigger drawback the longer we went. Two pints in, we cut our losses and headed to the Jade Dragon, where the beer's not nearly as good, but the takeaways are great!