Southampton
Publick House
62 Job’s Lane
Southampton
631-283-2800
Lunch and Dinner Daily
No offense to those who live there, but Southampton Village is a bit of a wasteland when it comes to year-round dining out opportunities. Some establishments are only open for dinner, some only for lunch. You’ve got your predictable cuisines that exist everywhere: American, Italian, and seafood are well represented. The Southampton Publick House can stake its claim to being the large and welcoming sports bar serving hearty portions of chow. If you like to fresser, this is the place for you.
The Southampton Publick House is like a roadhouse, but on a fancy road, Job’s Lane, dahling! It is small in the front and gets larger as you walk to the back dining room. I quit counting the flatscreen TVs above, around, and throughout, after 11. I think. The ceilings are high, with skylights and beautiful wood beams, some stained glass windows, and a lot of logoed beer trays on the walls. There are booths and tables and a large blackboard letting you know which fresh and bottled beers are available at the moment. The Publick House has some amazing beers, and this is probably the number one reason to come here. Plus, there are so many TVs, you are very likely to find your game playing on one of them.
The restaurant was pleasantly busy on the Sunday afternoon we visited. It was Redskins vs. the Iggles. Iggles won. This drove me to ordering the Irish nachos as one of our appetizers. Having been raised Irish Catholic, I can safely say we are experts on guilt and potatoes. (That is, until the Great Hunger of 1845-52.) Put the two together and you have Irish nachos! We also began our meal with chicken wings and a wedge salad. We all agreed that these three items would most certainly be representative of some classic pub grub.
The chicken wings can be ordered any of three ways: Buffalo, Thai, or barbecue, but you can’t sample a few of each. However, our delightful waitress, Janet, offered to bring them out bare, with little samplers of each sauce so we could dip away. Very nice. Unfortunately, the wings we got were so puny and shriveled I thought to myself, “I thought ortolans were against the law!” They were that Lilliputian. I’d like to think the chef/cook who sent that platter out took a look at it and said, “Uh oh,” and threw a few bonus bones into the lot, because the serving was actually 15.
We enjoyed the three sauces, the Thai was a thick sweet chili sauce, the barbecue sweet, thick, and smoky, the Buffalo excellent, similar to Frank’s or Texas Pete’s, very vinegary. The celery sticks were fresh and the bleu cheese dressing was fine. Once we got past the gnarly, very, very cooked wings we came to the conclusion that they were probably fresh, not frozen, and just happened to be from petite pullets.
The wedge salad was enormous — like hilariously enormous, bigger than a pomelo. It was between a half and a third of a head of a big iceberg. The dressing was slightly pink, different from the dressing served with the poussin wings, and not very cheesy. It was, however, topped with some bleu cheese crumbles and crisp bacon bits.
The Irish nachos were excellent, and an enormous portion, again. Imagine beginning a meal with two kinds of potatoes, lots of cheese and sour cream? The nachos were heavy on waffle fries, interspersed with shoestring sweet potato fries, covered with two kinds of mild cheese, a generous dollop (more like ice cream scoop) of sour cream, and some salsa.
For entrees we ordered a steak sandwich, salmon B.L.T., and fish and chips. The steak sandwich suffered from lack of seasoning, it seemed as if there wasn’t a speck of salt or pepper on it. It had a generous pile of sautéed onions on top, a few big leaves of iceberg that escaped my monster wedge, and some fries on the side.
The salmon B.L.T. was served on big potato rolls with crisp bacon, crisp tomato, and crisp lettuce. I didn’t get the wasabi flavor from the mayo on top. The coleslaw served alongside was very good, more vinegary than mayo-y. The guest who ordered the salmon B.L.T. described the flavor as “salmony.” The fish and chips were good, and being a big fan of malt vinegar, it was nice to see this served with them. The batter was sturdy, the fish probably cod.
As I said before, our waitress, Janet, was wonderful, cheerful, and funny. Her nails were in the holiday spirit, each and every one painted with a different Christmas motif. She didn’t seem at all surprised that we ordered three desserts in spite of not having been able to get through about 70 percent of our previous courses. Faux fressers! Fresser failure!
The prices at the Southampton Publick House are very reasonable. Appetizers and salads are $8 to $24, pub classics are $12 to $22, sides are $6 to $10. Dinner entrees are slightly higher at $20 to $32. Desserts are $8. Of the beers available we tried the Keller Pils, which was nice and light, and the Saison Deluxe, which was a more rustic ale. They were out of the Double White, which is one of my favorites here, but there are so many other great ones to try. Just remember that some of these more complex beverages are meant for sipping; they are higher in alcohol than your average ice cold Corona.
Several of the desserts are made in house so we tried those: carrot cake and apple crisp, along with commercial chocolate layer cake. The first two were very good, although the squirts and drizzles and powders could have been lightened up. It’s almost a disservice to a nice, light carrot cake to gussy it up with jarred butterscotch or caramel sauce. And those canned “whipped topping” toppings always start to dissolve into liquid on the plate once released from their little canisters of nitrous oxide. The apple crisp was warm and had a good ratio of spiced apples to crunchy streusel topping. The chocolate cake was pretty good: very dark and moist cake, decent frosting.
So Southampton may not have a diverse variety of restaurants, but it does have what matters, a cheerful, bustling sports bar that serves reasonably priced food in a family friendly atmosphere.
