The bacon cheeseburger and chilli cheese fries at 7Bone
The Restaurant: 7Bone, 110 Portswood Road, Southampton SO17 2FW
The Hungry Ones:
Left to Right: Gemma (The Boozy Rouge), Ollie (Burger King), Mike (Hungry Sotonian)
Gemma, Ollie and Mike ordered: Prince Charles is Overrated, Chilli Cheese Fries, Sipsmith Gin and Tonic, Kernel IPA, Corona lager.
The Scores:
My first review of 7Bone can be found here.
Nestled among the Indian restaurants and kebab shops of Portswood is an absolute gem: Southampton’s first gourmet burger restaurant: 7Bone. My first outing there during its opening weekend back in October gave me much cause for excitement: there was a whole paragraph on the website about the meat, the drinks menu was excellent and you could rock up without a reservation. Happy times indeed dining out in my hometown, which has not really seen anything of this kind before. My first 7Bone experience was, on the whole, overwhelmingly positive, but I did long for a pinker burger and some bloody jalapenos.
We returned on Saturday night to celebrate my brother Mike’s 19th birthday in his favourite fashion: a big dinner and copious amounts of drinks. It seemed that the word had got out about 7Bone as we were told that there would be a 35-40 minute wait for a table. Instead of being relegated to a cold queue, we gave them our number and went to the pub across the road for a couple of G&Ts to build up our appetites. Once seated, I ordered the same as my last visit: the bacon cheeseburger, chilli cheese fries and a gin and tonic. Sipsmith’s Gin, I might add, which, alongside the beer option of Kernel IPA makes me think tht the proprieter is a bit of a Londonphile. When the food came, I was very happy to see that the little opening-weekend snags had since been ironed out perfectly: my burger was delightfully pink in the middle and had a good amount of cheese and crisped bacon. The chilli cheese fries were not only covered in little green nuggets of jalapeno (hurrah!), but were housed in a far spicier meat chilli than before. It is reassuring to know that this is a place that listens to their customers.
Perfectly rare
There is very little to fault about 7Bone: as I have said before, the burgers are the best that you will find in Southampton and are starting to sidle up alongside some of the London giants in terms of quality. The value is excellent – £6.50 for a burger, £4 for an enormous portion of fries and a mere £3.50 for a gin and tonic makes for a very cheap dinner indeed. The bill for the three of us came to about £44 – not bad considering they also kindly threw in a free ice cream for the birthday boy. If I lived in Southampton, I would be here on a very regular basis. That being said, the price of a return rail ticket from London Waterloo to Southampton Central is a mere £25 with a network rail card, so I’m sure I can be tempted down more often.
The Boozy Rouge 