WE were sitting on a sofa, a shandy and a pint of Castle Rock's Harvest Pale parked on a low-slung wooden table, and we were feeling increasingly drowsy on a Sunday afternoon.

That's good drowsy, Sunday afternoon drowsy, the sort of drowsy you get from late-afternoon sun streaming through pub windows and cooler-than-thou 60s and 70s songs on the speakers.

I'm rubbish with song titles. I definitely picked up on

and the Bond theme among a selection that also included a bit of brass and plenty of theme tunes to films of a Vespas-and-bedrooms variety – films where the middle-aged leading man bumbles and smokes, and the younger leading lady seems to own an awful lot of bikinis.

To aid with the mood, the excellent DJ was also running a slide show of 60s and 70s film posters – here's Elke Sommer pouting, there's Bob Hope smirking, there's Ron O'Neal swaggering, those young ladies must have brought their machine guns to the beach, etc.

Occasionally, one of my all-time favourite film posters would pop up. Under the tagline "Their deadly mission: To crack the forbidden island of Han!" appeared a collage of characters with a shirtless, nunchucks-wielding Bruce Lee looming from the centre.

.

Great film. And when you're in the city centre, it's sound advice as well. Every neighbourhood needs a local, even the city centre. And across the street from the central library, the Dragon does that job.

The layout's London-like long and narrow – really a single room, although steps up from the slightly wider front area to the back gives the place the feeling of two distinct spaces. Out back sits the beer garden where rounded, Adobe-style benches make a comfortable, attractive space out of not much room.

The food menu sticks mostly to the £4-to-£6 range – no swanky gastro-pub stuff, but plenty of fresh dishes that have never known the inside of the microwave. The veggie Thai green curry and Stilton-and-mushroom burger are two top-marks earners.

Music tends to be of the creative-yet-unobtrusive variety whether the place is relying on DJ or iPod (in addition to the Sunday-afternoon suave sounds of the 60s and 70s, the place does DJs on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights).

In addition to what you do get at the Dragon, the place must be commended for what you don't get there.

Recent research brought me to the Dragon on several occasions, and only once did I see anything that bordered on trouble. A group of tourists had gone from Pleasant Visitors to Red-Cheeked Yelling Jerk Phalanx in a startlingly short period of time. But the boss wasn't having it and the group was told, politely but firmly, that their next round would have to come from somewhere else.

It seems some city centre pubs practically seek to attract crowds like that. Stick some bouncers on the door, cram the punters in armpit-to-armpit and crank up the music so that conversation becomes secondary to just necking back cheap lager at a high rate of speed.

What a stupid way to spend an evening. What a perfect way to add a sense of drunken menace to a city centre.

That's not on at the Dragon, however. There, the music adds to the atmosphere rather than dictating it, the people talk rather than yell, and punters can take their coin elsewhere if their mummies haven't taught them how grown-ups are supposed to behave in public.

Which means that for the rest of us, there's one bit of advice that's appropriate any time a city centre beverage is sought: enter the Dragon.

ERIK PETERSEN