Tipped

Industrial Chic

June 16, 2008

This is the sort of place I've coined with the term "industrial chic." SoS is a three story bar/resaturant that has adapted well to its surroundings.

A couple of friends and I went to watch the Spain vs. Sweden game there. They had a very nice large screen that comes down over the kitchen. It meant that no one could get in the way of your view, so you'd never miss a shot. It's a shame that they had the music up so loud. Though we tried to ask someone if we could turn up the game, they kept telling us to look for the supervisor... who just wasn't around. It was a great game though... just kind of funny to hear it to the sound of house music.

I had a pint of their SoS beer which is a Czech lager. It was pretty good. It had a sweet finish.

Tags: bar

Sending out an SOS

May 09, 2008

We ended up at this kind of bizarre, but mostly serviceable bar/restaurant/etc. beside the train tracks for drinks, but hoping for food as well. As it happened, the large downstairs bar area had only just stopped serving food, and the dining room upstairs was a bit more of an ordeal than we were prepared for, so we decided to have a sit and drink instead.
You can tell that they feel pretty good about themselves at SoS, and why shouldn't they, I suppose? They have an impressively long bar packed with fancy booze bottles behind, although the bartender was stumped when one of my colleagues asked for an ever-so-obscure cocktail: a Manhattan. Although he was quite polite about her first effort, he later said out of earshot that it was terrible. Oh well, I go for pints of beer myself normally, and the house Czech lager, SOS, went down nicely. The downstairs bar has many smaller tables as well as two big communal tables and a large square of comfy-looking leather couches.
So what of this place overall? I guess it was nice enough - we had a good place to sit at the communal table and although it was a bit noisy, we carried on with good conversation for a while. Upstairs there is much more to explore, including two floors of dining and one that is apparently geared towards wine tasting. All that said, I got a sense of the after-work element of SoS kind of limiting its ambition, and I don't know how likely I am to run back there again.

Tags: after work crowd, house beer, brunch