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.