Cracking coffee (and cakes!) at the Santo Lounge

Today, we got up at silly o'clock to watch the rugby. What a great decision that turned out to be! Both my adopted (Ireland) and actual (England) teams lost - and deservedly so. It's a shame that France chose this particular game to start trying but what can you do?

To commiserate ourselves, and reward our subsequent efforts in the home cleaning department, we took off to the local cafe bar for coffee and cakes.I love coffee. More precisely, I love good coffee! (There's a bit of a tautology here as I basically define good coffee as that which I love!) The Santo Lounge in Shirley does good coffee. It also does a tasty range of cakes, which work well in the commiseration/reward stakes!

The Santo Lounge is part of the Loungers chain on cafe bars. The first one we went to was The Trago Lounge in Portswood, which is in a former Pizza Hut - a great trade for Portswood in my opinion. This was a brunch visit, which made it a doubly good discovery as we had been looking for a decent brunch place in Southampton for a while. The Trago Lounge nailed it, as did the Santo lounge in subsequent visits. Having such a place so close is as dangerous as it is convenient!

The Trago Lounge also did fantastic coffee (and cakes), like the Santo Lounge. This bodes well for rest of the chain, so if you have a Loungers cafe bar nearby, I thoroughly recommend checking it out. I know some people have problems with chains - especially chains of cafes or bars - but when they're good, it doesn't bother me at all!