Favourite eateries in my area – Brewhouse and Kitchen / Sadler's Brewhouse and Barbeque

Today I want to write about two nice brewhouses in my area.

Brewhouse and Kitchen

This is a very nice place to spend an afternoon with friends at. The atmosphere is great, the drinks are qualitative and the food is very tasty. Their nachos are a very nice to have to accompany the drinks. On their old menu they had a spectacular bread board and deep-fried mac'n'cheese bites. I really miss those dishes, but maybe they will return some day. It's still nice to go there for small get-togethers.

Sadler's Brewhouse and Barbeque

Sadler's is one of my favourite hangouts and you are likely to find me here on most weekends. Their menu is quite concentrated on the meaty dishes, but they also have excellent veggie options. The portions are huge, I mostly can't finish a main. They have a very good selection of drinks, obviously beers from the Sadler's brewery, and many other craft beers and ciders.

I like their burrito very much, but my favourite was a dish with deep fried Brie wedges, mac 'n' cheese bites, jalapeño poppers and chargrilled vegetables topped with hummus and pitta bread, which has now unfortunately been removed from the menu. At least I still have my archive photo to drool over.

My partner quite often has a double veggie burger topped with grated Emmental, served in a bun with fries and cornbread. It looks so good, but is a bit too large for me.

Favourite eateries in my area – Chalk Valley Farm & Kitchen / The Stable / Tap Room

I want to introduce to you three further favourite eateries of mine around my area in Southampton. All of these serve very nice veggie food, although they are not purely vegetarian places. Here are three more in case you missed my first post in this series.

Chalk Valley Farm & Kitchen

Chalk Valley is an excellent organic burger place and has been my favourite ever since they opened a few years ago. They use organic and local produce and are very ethical in their approach. You can choose your bun, patty and toppings for your burger yourself. They have the most excellent veggie patty and other wonderful toppings to choose from. The skin-on-fries are so tasty and often they have a special side salad on offer. Chalk Valley have opened larger premises this month, so I should visit them soon again to check it out.

The Stable

The Stable is just a dream place for me due to their offering: cider and pizza! They have a huge selection of ciders, of which you can take a tasting board, if you can't quite decide what to drink from the vast selection, or just want to get to know several ciders. They serve pizzas, pies and salads. I normally always have the pizza margherita with their house chilli oil. The crust is crispy and thin with such tasty toppings, just perfect for me. I never mind sitting for longer in this place, as the atmosphere is relaxed and fun. The Stable is a chain, so you might find one near you as well.

Tap Room

Tap Room is a very friendly pub close to my place. I always feel welcome, and enjoy spending time there. Their cheesy fries are just lovely when you have a smaller hunger, but mainly I love their Living On The Veg pizza and flatbread. They are filled with char-grilled vegetables, olives and cheese and served with a chilli mayo on the side. This is basically my Friday evening standard meal. They of course also have a good selection of drinks.

Favourite eateries in my area – The Rockstone / Neighbourhood / Ebb & Flow

I want to introduce to you some of my favourite eateries around my area. I already once revealed to you that I live in Southampton, in southern England, and all of these pubs and restaurants are quite close to my home, which means that I'm a regular visitor. I will continue this series at some point, but here are three places first of all. They aren't vegetarian places, but all are very veggie friendly.

The Rockstone

Few years back I went to The Rockstone pub at least once a week to share a huge portion of vegetarian nachos with char-grilled vegetables with my partner. The so called Tuesday “nacho night” was a must for us in order to have a good week. It was always interesting to see the seasonally changing vegetables on the portion. Once we tried to have a portion each instead of sharing, but failed quite miserable, the portions are just so huge. We also had a running gag back in the day that I could possibly only take a starter and would even then be too full. That rule still applies to this place.

Lately I've been eating there less, but it's always a good place to go, if you want to get full of good veggie food and dine in a relaxed pub atmosphere with frequent live music performances. They mainly make burgers, but are very veggie and vegan friendly. This is the place, where I ate deep-fried smoked cheese for the first time. It was such a wicked starter, but unfortunately not on the menu anymore.

Last time when I went there, I had the Highway to Halloumi salad as a main and rye bread with red lentil hummus as a starter. The halloumi was properly fried and they didn't hold back with the amount of halloumi. The red lentil hummus inspired me to make my own recently. My partner had the Mexican burger, which is very tasty, spicy and huge, served with fries and a side salad.

Neighbourhood

Neighbourhood is quite a new restaurant with beautiful modern interior decoration serving a variety of dishes many of which are vegetarian. This is a great place to have something more unusual for lunch.

I really like their robata grilled aubergine, pepper, portobello mushroom, sweet potato with flatbread and hummus dish, and also the grilled market garden salad, which is depicted here. It contains barbeque marinated sweetcorn, courgette, peppers, fennel, red onion and halloumi cheese with a basil puree. I definitely have to go more often to this place.

Ebb & Flow

Ebb & Flow is a quaint café with mismatched crockery and cute details in the interior design. This is the type of place where I like to have a break on a shopping trip, just to have a coffee or a quick snack.

They serve an all day breakfast with a really good vegetarian fry up with quorn sausages and all the typical fixtures of an English breakfast. They also have a few vegetarian options for sandwiches and flatbreads. Pictured here are a grilled cheese and cherry tomato sandwich and a roasted spring onion and smoked harissa hummus sandwich. I also always take their pineapple juice with the meals.

I've only once eaten here in the evening and then chose the tapas option. They had several different veggie tapas and it was quite a nice meal. I would really like to taste one of their mains one day.

Visit to Oxford

We tend to go to Oxford at least once a year and our favourite time to go is just after Christmas. So we did exactly that this year as well. It was the perfect opportunity to just relax, eat out and have no further plans.

In Oxford we normally stay at the Malmaison hotel right by the Oxford Castle. The building used to be a prison, which certainly gives its own interesting twist to the features. It's always good to stay there with all that friendly staff, nice bar and excellent rooms, also the location is very convenient.

A visit to the Botanic Gardens is always a must for me. Even in the winter there are many blooming plants and it's great to have a walk there on the canalside. This is the place where I normally take my most Oxford photos, so I hope that you like plants.

We also went to several of our standard pubs. Turf Tavern is a really nice one hidden away in a small alley. The pub also features in the Inspector Morse novels by Colin Dexter. Then we detected a new pub, Beerd, with excellent drinks and artisanal pizzas.

I consider shopping right after Christmas to be a bit naughty, but what else can you do when you walk into Oxford's Blackwell's bookshop with its huge offering. And guess what, Inspector Morse used to hang around here too. See his favourite hangouts here, which are quite similar to mine! 

Enjoy the photos!

 

Your VegHog