The Southern

I’m rather prone to using Saturday as my day for re-charging, often getting up to little more than some light shopping, followed by time in the kitchen, then a snooze in front of the Saturday afternoon football scores.

Signage

Not so, today, as I had a brunch with the Yelpers, then a trip to support the first annual Soup Swap, run by the excellent folks at Union of Genius and Elephant Juice. On the latter, in a rather poor show, I hadn’t actually got round to making soup to contribute to the swapping, but I swear I will do so for future events.

The Yelp brunch was at The Southern Bar, which is part of the small chain of Fuller Thomson bars, which includes Holyrood 9A and the Red Squirrel. I hadn’t been since it was under different ownership, although I have fond memories of the previous place, listening to St Jude’s Infirmary, amongst other local bands of the time.

We were a party of 20, today. This had a fairly significant impact, as the kitchen couldn’t cope with producing breakfasts for us all, at the same time, meaning that dishes took a long while to arrive, and were staggered across a lengthy period of time. The staff were apologetic and friendly, throughout this, but this wasn’t a great start.

Breakfast

I’d kept things simple, ordering their largest breakfast, called The Southern breakfast. When it arrived, it was rather disappointing.

I take the view that when preparing fry-ups, you can go one of two ways: you can opt for a select range of high quality items; or you can go for a high volume of fairly mediocre quality items. Both approaches have their times and places. What I was served today was a small amount of mediocre items. This did not please me.

The only item that was worthy of mention was the haggis, which was good and peppery. The single sausage was nondescript, the single rasher of bacon was forgettable, and so on and so forth.

So overall, I was seriously underwhelmed by The Southern. They do not handle large parties well, and the quality of their breakfast/brunch items is not good. I rather enjoyed my burger at Holyrood 9A, so imagine that the burgers here are of similar quality, so I’d steer you in that direction, should you find yourself here. But really, I’d just cut out the middle man, give this place a miss, and head elsewhere, directly.

Scores
Blythe scores The Southern
2/5 for food
3/5 for presentation
3/5 for setting
2/5 for service
giving an overall 10/20

Today’s questers were: Yelpers, Blythe

I ate: The Southern breakfast

I drank: two half pints of Black Isle ales, water

I wore: blue and white handkerchief

Total cost: c.£12