I have an irrational dislike of bars, restaurants and cafes who oh-so-cleverly name themselves after the house number they happen to occupy. Gosh! What clever! How imagination! Simple yet style! There’s a whole bunch of them in Cheltenham alone; Hotel 131, 288 Bar & Wok, 81 The Prom, and the cleverly named
Number 7. Because it’s at number 7 St James’ Square, see? Tch. They could have come up with a name more relevant to the food on offer… perhaps “East/West”, or “The Globe”, or maybe “Pot Pourri”?
It’s a wine bar restaurant in a very quiet corner of town, very friendly and very local. I picked a starter I’ve never seen on a menu before: chilli con carne. This turned out to be a very rich and warm little bowl of the best kind of English chilli con carne, a nostalgic stab of the 80’s, served with a hunk of bread. Maureen tucked into two neat fishcakes, well constructed and nicely breadcrumbed.
I set my sail for a sirloin steak. Nicely charred it was, but I ordered rare and got medium-rare verging on medium at the ends. The peppercorn sauce with it had zero pep, the vegetables accompanying were cooked well but as plain as veg could be. Maureen’s plate of noodles topped with roast duck in a sweet chilli sauce was much better; good slick duck with plenty of tasty crispy bits, the sticky tang of sweet chilli and noodles beneath. It was a good thing to eat, I’d be happy to have a local Chinese that served this up.
The apple pie with toffee sauce that I finished up with was frankly a bit stodgy and unloved, though at least the sauce was properly done – not sickly. The glasses of wine we had persuaded us that Number Seven is just a wine bar, not a wine-lovers bar (which are so much harder to find!). So, a very reasonably priced meal, nothing wrong with the cooking at all, but simply too uninteresting – the risque chilli con carne starter aside! – for me to want to come back. If you like simple and un-ironically retro then Number Seven might well float your boat.
