I ended up on holiday in Bordeaux almost by accident. I was attending a wedding in a château in the Dordogne (even typing this, I feel I have to explain that this is just not the sort of thing I ever, ever do) on a Saturday, and wanted to make a holiday of it. So where to have a city break afterwards? I considered Biarritz and San Sebastián, even contemplated hopping on a train back to my old favourite Montpellier before choosing Bordeaux mainly because our flight home departed from there, and we had to drop a hire car there anyway. I’d never heard of anybody, really, who had spent any time there but surely it would be a nice place to spend a week?

Well, as you can probably tell from the fact that this feature even exists, it is indeed a very nice place to spend a week. France’s sixth biggest city, nestled in the curve of the Garonne, it has an awful lot to offer. A wonderful museum of wine (which I didn’t get round to visiting) and a number of galleries (ditto), but just as importantly a gorgeous historic centre – it’s the largest urban development to be recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in France, including Paris.

More to the point, wine bars are everywhere, to the extent where it’s almost worth having your main meal at lunchtime, taking advantage of the superb menus du jour, and then propping up a bar in the evening, eating small plates or charcuterie and enjoying an unbeatable selection of wines by the glass. As a way to while away the days, eating and drinking as the Bordelais do takes some beating, and it made life back in Blighty feel decidedly monochrome and humdrum. As I’ve said many times, Reading needs a great wine bar: Veeno simply doesn’t cut it.

It’s not perfect, I should add. The tram system was a little creaky and unreliable, and although my hotel was lovely it was in an area near the train station that verged on feeling unsafe after sunset and pretty scuzzy even in the mornings. If you go, stay in the historic centre. And choose your arrival and departure dates carefully: a lot of the good places are closed on Sundays and Mondays, and some of the wine bars don’t open on Tuesdays either.

I left having eaten and drunk superbly – and done some great people-watching and window-shopping into the bargain – but still feeling like I hadn’t completely got to the heart of the city. An eight hour wait in an airport almost completely lacking aircon, in thirty degree heat, thanks to BA flight delays also slightly marred my memories of the place. Bordeaux: great city, shitty airport (the tourist board can have that one for free).

But then something rather magical happened which made me see the city in a different light: totally by chance, my friends James and Liz had booked a long weekend there the week after I got home. Would I mind giving them some recommendations, they asked? So effectively much of this city guide was road tested before it was even written, and seeing pictures and iMessages from the places I had visited only a few days before brought it home to me: Bordeaux really is wonderful place. 

Strip away the frustrations of the trams, or the location of my hotel, or the hellish journey home and I could see the city, through the eyes of my delighted friends, as it really was – a beautiful part of the world, and a destination in its own right for anyone who loves food and drink and being a flâneur. I never seem to see it talked about in the way that, say, Lyon is, but I wonder if that’s because the French don’t want everybody in on the secret. I’ve come to the conclusion that France keeps all the best wines, James said, after a beautiful lunch at Zéphirine, below. They might take that approach to cities, too.

Where to eat

1. Zéphirine

Zéphirine may have been the single best meal of the trip, a lovely, tasteful and spacious dining room where the nicest staff look after you and serve you the most beautiful food. They have an à la carte menu and a tasting menu, but the only difference is that with the former you pick your main course and with the latter they let you try all three. The former is more than enough food, including a raft of small plates to share, and costs a very reasonable sixty Euros.

Everything we had was fresh and gorgeous, with a real emphasis on outstanding local produce, to the extent that many of the things I remember were the vegetarian dishes. Ricotta piled onto airy lozenges of focaccia, topped with translucent discs of radish was an absolute joy, and duckling in a deep, olive-studded sauce was a miraculous thing. But the veg that came with it – tender, just-cooked carrots and potatoes totally permeated with flavour (“it’s seasoned to the core” was James’ verdict the following week, “I just don’t understand how”) – were, if anything, even better. 

All that and we enjoyed our meal two tables down from Kyle MacLachlan – well dressed, painfully polite, fastidious and on his phone for much of the meal. I considered getting an autograph for my brother, who watched Dune so much as a teenager that he could recite the script verbatim, but thought better of it. I found out later, on Wikipedia, that MacLachlan owns a vineyard: I bet he loved Bordeaux.

Zéphirine
62 rue Abbé de l’Epée, 33000 Bordeaux
https://zephirine.fr

2. Echo

There are wine bars in both sections of this list, and whether they’re down as places to eat or to drink is often largely dictated by whether I mainly ate or drank there. But Echo, which was probably my favourite meal of the holiday, has a menu with starters, mains and desserts, and so although technically a wine bar felt more like a restaurant to me. It was an incredibly cool room packed with Bordeaux’s most beautiful types, although Zoë and I did spend much of the meal trying to work out whether the blustering Brit at the next table, a ruddy-faced spitting image of Stanley Johnson, was wearing a wig or not (my money was on it being a syrup).

More importantly, Echo had a superb wine list both by the bottle and the glass and a menu where you could gladly eat anything on it without suffering a dud dish. It featured quite a lot of fusion and slow food, and I particularly loved the vitello tonnato topped with – a genius idea, this – an XO sauce of enormous depth. That sauce also turned up in a tuna tataki, harmonising with rare sashimi-grade fish and an outrageously delicious lacquered aubergine. A buttery Breton biscuit crowned with a plume of lemon cream, criss-crossed with thyme emulsion, was quite the coup de grâce. It’s also worth noting that unlike most of the places on this list, Echo is open on both Sundays and Mondays. Lucky Bordeaux.

Echo
18 rue de la Cours-des-Aides, 33000 Bordeaux
https://echocaveamanger.myportfolio.com

3. Yarra

The district of Chartrons is north of the historic centre, on the same side of the Garonne and just before you get to the futuristic statement piece that is the Cité du Vin. All the research I did suggested that this was the bobo capital of Bordeaux and so, predictably, I loved the place. Rue Notre Dame is full of restaurants, bars, cafés and boutiques, and an absurdly pretty place to wander from one of those to the next. It’s no coincidence that three of the places on this list sit on that single stretch. But Yarra, even in that exalted company, was rather special.

It’s unprepossesing out front but cavernous out back, a series of stone-walled rooms with mismatched furniture, cool by virtue of not trying too hard. But the real draw is out back, a gorgeous secluded courtyard where I quite happy could have spent an entire evening making like a Bordelais. As you can probably guess from the name, the owners are Australian. That shows in the welcome (“rain water or angry water?” asked our server to see if we wanted still or sparkling). It also shows in the wines, because although I had several crackers by the glass my favourite was a Yarra Valley Riesling.

All that would get it a place on this list but the small plates are more than the icing on the cake. I defy you to look at a menu like Yarra’s and not order something, even if like me you have dinner plans later that evening. Octopus tacos with, of all things, pineapple were a joyous find but my absolute favourite were the anchovy pintxos – salty anchovy, mozzarella, fennel and guindilla assembled on a thin slice of bread, bright with oil and pesto. Might sound like overkill, but without doubt one of the most happiness-inducing things I ate all week. That you got four of them for six Euros made something ridiculously good ridiculous value.

Yarra
18 rue Notre Dame, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/yarra_bordeaux/?hl=en

4. Lauza

We had lunch at Lauza, a place which managed to be sober and grown-up without being stuffy, and I liked it very much. On the very outer edge of the historic city and a stone’s throw from one of my favourite coffee places, Café Piha, it served a clever and satisfying lunch which was precise, well thought through and excellent value.

You can eat off the à la carte, but at lunchtime the trick is to team the starter and dessert from that menu with the plat du jour, which brings the whole thing in at a silly twenty-eight Euros. Given that the mains on the à la carte cost around thirty on their own, that’s a hard offer to refuse. I particularly enjoyed a tartare made of a mixture of veal and herring which ramped up the umami before smothering the whole thing in a delicious, comforting potato foam, and I envied Zoë’s dessert, a chocolate cremeux which looked even better than my selection of cheeses.

Lauza
5 rue de Hâ, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.lauza.fr/en/

5. Racines

Racines was even closer to the line between sober and stuffy, but managed just about to stay on the right side of it despite looking like a place that said “business lunch” more than casual meal. That might also derive from the location, slightly out of the historic centre and bang opposite a huge glass-fronted building which housed, as it turned out, a bank.

But that’s not entirely fair to Racines and it didn’t encounter me at my best: it was my final meal in Bordeaux and I’d just been told by my hotel that I’d need to rush it because no taxi driver wanted to brave the Tour De France disruption after three pm. The fact remains that Racines, owned by self-taught Scottish chef Daniel Gallacher, is an excellent place turning out formidable food.

The lunch menu gives you a choice of two starters, mains and desserts for a crazy thirty-two Euros and in terms of quality and quantity I thought it was even better than the comparably priced Lauza. A prawn tartare absolutely shone with citrus freshness but was perfected with a savoury bouillon with notes of Thai basil, and a substantial, sublimely cooked piece of hake was served with bergamot, sorrel and oyster cream in an exceptionally complex, well orchestrated dish.

And then all the whistles and bells fell away for a dessert which was just cherries, verbena and fromage blanc – simple, unshowy and beautiful; people talk about life being a bowl of cherries, but I didn’t know it could be this good. I left full, profoundly grateful for Racines’ great wine list and efficient aircon and slightly sad that I couldn’t try the full tasting menu available at dinner. I’ll just have to go back.

Racines
59 rue Georges Bonnac, 33000 Bordeaux
https://racines-bordeaux.com

6. Papouch

We discovered Papouch at the end of Rue Notre Dame on our amble through Chartrons early in the holiday and loved the look of the menu so much that we changed plans there and then to book it for our last night. It was a very smart choice. The staff – bright and infectiously friendly – moved another table out on to the pavement so we could enjoy the buzz of a warm al fresco Bordeaux evening. And all the food was simply gorgeous – all the menu is small plates for sharing and we did our best to have a crack at most of it.

That included wonders like new potatoes smashed and topped with kimchee, satay and a deep mushroom XO sauce. We also adored a khobez topped with yoghurt, mint, honey, cumin, a slow-cooked egg yolk and nuggets of an intense sausage something like merguez. And I really loved a dish they called “crispy rice spicy fish” that was like a cross between arancini, rice crackers and fishcakes, quite inimitable and a glorious surprise of a thing.

None of the dishes cost more than fifteen Euros, none was less than outstanding and I could have gone back the next night, ordered all the things I missed out on and doubtless had an equally magnificent evening. Only later did I realise, leafing through their Instagram, that the restaurant had barely been open a month. It has a bright future ahead of it.

Papouch
138 rue Notre Dame, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.papouch.fr

7. Brasserie Bordelaise

A lot of my Bordeaux restaurants were full of light, inventive and seasonal food, often light on the carbs. That, combined with clocking up nearly 20000 steps a day, meant that I put on less weight on this holiday than on most I can recall. But I picked somewhere more traditional for lunch with Zoë’s family, stopping in Bordeaux for the day before flying home from the family wedding, and it didn’t let me down.

Brasserie Bordelaise is a much more old-school choice, a surprisingly big restaurant with large, sturdy tables and large sturdy chairs where large sturdy people can eat large sturdy meals. And I absolutely loved that, helped along by a brigade of hard-working, charming staff.

This is all about the classics, so some of us feasted on oysters while I had a cool, subtle and utterly delicious gazpacho. Next to me Zoë and her parents demolished a gorgeous-looking charcuterie board. I didn’t order that well – my roasted chicken main was probably the only misfire of the meal – but around me everybody else enthused over their bavette, fillet steak, beef cheek or steak tartare. This is the place to go for that kind of hearty, fortifying stuff; I remember looking at the menu to order my dessert and thinking wistfully about the cassoulet less travelled. By my in-laws-to-be had a wonderful lunch, and we made some brilliant memories, and I found that mattered much more.

Brasserie Bordelaise
50 rue Saint-Rémi, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.brasserie-bordelaise.fr

8. Buvette

On the night we’d set aside for wine bars and getting drunk, we struggled. This is probably a very British thing to say, but sometimes the wine bars had the foreplay to shagging ratio all wrong, telling customers at the next table about the range of wines on offer while you waited to be served to the extent where your stomach thought your throat had been cut (I know, this manages to make me sound both like a Philistine and a pisshead). We left one wine bar where an hour in we’d only had one glass apiece and stumbled into Buvette looking for refuge.

It was a good decision. It’s a stylish-looking spot with a good, buzzy atmosphere, nice high tables, a compact but appealing selection of wines by the glass and a range of small plates which rescued the evening. It reminded me a little of Malaga’s Casa Lola, one of my favourite places for eating and drinking, and everything we had was top notch. I especially enjoyed the goat’s cheese, drizzled with honey and surrounded by crumpled rosettes of speck and really top-notch tinned smoked tuna from a cannery called Pirate, perfect winkled out with a fork and popped onto thin slices of baguette.

Buvette
41 Cr d’Alsace-et-Lorraine, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/buvette_bordeaux/?hl=en-gb

9. Le Guet À Pan

Bordeaux has a couple of cool-looking food halls, one near the station and another, I seem to remember, up near the Cité du Vin. But the main food market, the Marché des Capucins, looks like something out of the Eighties and comes to life at lunchtime, becoming steadily busier and with more traders as the week goes on. Like a lot of these markets, it’s a mixture of produce and food traders with an embarrassment of riches – oysters at one place, moules at another, pintxos at a third. 

I’ve been to many places like this, from Rotterdam’s Markthal to Barcelona’s Boqueria – my favourite remains Malaga’s peerless Atarazanas – but I’m not sure I’ve ever visited one as scruffily vibrant as the Marché des Capucins. I would have really struggled to decide where to eat, but I was lucky enough to stumble on a blog post by the excellent Lost In Bordeaux and so opted for Guet À Pan which had an appealing lunch menu. I wasn’t entirely sold on my truffled croque monsieur – the bread was a little hard and unyielding – but my starter, a pared-back trio of burrata, peaches and local tomatoes – was as enchanting as anything I ate all week. Reflecting on my lunch, Carrie Bradshaw style, I couldn’t help but wonder: maybe restaurant bloggers should be twinned, like towns? If so, bagsy me Bordeaux.

Le Guet À Pan
Place des Capucins, 33800 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/leguetapan/?hl=en

10. Henriette & Olga

I can’t go away on holiday in summer without seeking out ice cream or gelato, and Bordeaux was no exception. I saw plenty of places dotted around the centre but having done my research I zeroed in on Henriette & Olga and loved it so much that I went back another couple of times before the week was out. It’s very luxe, in a gorgeous spot on rue du Pas-Saint-Georges, one of my favourite Bordeaux streets, just opposite a very nice perfumery I never quite managed to visit.

Although it had a great range of flavours I couldn’t move beyond my two favourites, a chocolate which prioritised depth over sweetness and a caramel with indulgent, almost-burnt sugar and plenty of complexity; I blame the fact that the orange blossom honey and pine nut gelato was sold out every time I visited. Anyway, it was up there with the best gelato I’ve had anywhere else – in the UK, in Montpellier, even in Bologna, and I really loved the place. Delightful staff, too, and a lovely terrace out front if you fancy people watching.

Henriette & Olga
25 rue du Pas-Saint-Georges, 3300 Bordeaux
https://www.henrietteetolga.fr

Where to drink

1. L’Officine

I had a post-dinner drink at l’Officine one night and almost immediately filed it under I wish I’d spent an evening here. It was a lovely old-school wine bar, all simple wooden chairs, mosaic-tiled floor and honey-coloured stone walls, and it was absolutely rammed with people living the good life. It classed as one of my biggest regrets of the holiday, so I recommended it to James and Liz who promptly booked it for their Saturday night in the city (it’s bookable online, which is worth knowing).

So they went, and I saw their pictures of the other rooms in the bar, the ones I never graduated to, and their pictures of boards groaning with cheese and charcuterie and of tartines topped with cherry tomatoes and roasted peppers. Looking through, and wishing I was there, I was 90% delighted for them, 10% envious. That’s a good ratio for me, by the way: normally when I look at people’s holiday photos on Instagram it’s far closer to 30-70.

L’Officine
48 rue du Dr Albert Barraud, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.lofficinebordeaux.fr

2. Backyard – Brique House

Bordeaux isn’t really a beer destination in the same way as, say, Montpellier or Paris. There are the grand total of about two verified venues on Untappd for the city and finding craft beer was tricky. I guess on one level that should be no surprise for a city more synonymous with wine than arguably any other in the world, but I still thought there would be an active craft beer scene, perhaps smaller but more vociferous. 

I did however really enjoy Backyard, which is the Bordeaux outpost and tap room of Lille brewery Brique House. They had a great terrace looking out on the place des Quinconces which was sort of what the front terrace of the Oakford would look like if it was a hundred times more classy, they did very passable pizza with spicy sausage and splodges of ricotta, and I really enjoyed New Queen In Town (no doubt a reference to Zoë’s arrival in the city), their entry level IPA.

James and Liz also visited on their trip to Bordeaux – it’s open Sunday and Monday, which again is the exception rather than the rule – made inroads into the rest of their beer list and were very impressed. Oh, and if you do visit Backyard the interior has to be seen to be believed: the 90s really are back with a vengeance.  

Backyard – Brique House
40 Allées d’Orléans, 33000 Bordeaux
https://briquehouse.com/taprooms/backyard-brique-house-4

3. Space Factory

If you wanted an illustration that craft beer is yet to gain a foothold in Bordeaux Space Factory, the only Untappd verified venue in the historic centre, is a great illustration of that. That’s not to say I didn’t like it – it had a certain stripped back charm with grungy lighting and a mixture of Tollix stools and reclaimed chairs, and all the craft beer lovers in there seemed to be having a lovely time. But it lacked the cool of, say, Paris’ Liquiderie or the polish of some of Montpellier’s burgeoning beer scene.

That said I still had a lovely time there and would cautiously recommend it if you tire of wine – although why would you? – and want a big glass of something cold and crisp. The evening I went there was a tap takeover by relatively local brewery Brasserie Jukebox, from just up the road in Cognac, another place synonymous with an alcoholic drink that isn’t beer. I rather enjoyed their stuff, as it goes.

Space Factory
5 rue Beaubadat, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.spacefactory33.com

4. Beer Trotter

Beer Trotter, a little bottle shop on Chartrons’ rue Notre Dame, was my favourite beer venue of the trip. It’s small and unassuming, it’s only open shop hours – so closed at lunchtime and after 7.30 at night – but it’s a really lovely, modest little place. They have an impressive range of beers from further afield in Europe – I spotted some I really wanted to try from Sofia, of all places – and they stock seemingly everything from local brewery Azimut Brasserie.

But what I really loved was that they had just the two beers on keg, and what they lacked in quantity they easily made up for in quality. I had an IPA from Basqueland Brewing, just over the border, which was probably the nicest beer I had on my holiday, but even more exciting – for Zoë more than me – was a proper beer white whale, Sang Bleu by Cantillon. Zoë raved about it to the owner, and between our French and his English we managed to cobble together an understanding that the man really loves his Belgian beers.

I left wishing I could have stayed longer, wishing too that my luggage had more room in it to cram with cans to take home but most of all thinking that when I come back to Bordeaux I plan to rent an Airbnb in Chartrons, find somewhere wonderful for lunch every day and then pop in for a tipple at Beer Trotter before my inevitable siesta.

Beer Trotter
84 rue Notre Dame, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/beertrotterbordeaux/?hl=en-gb

5. SIP Coffee Bar

Bordeaux has a small but excellent coffee scene, and during the week I think I managed to try out most of the key players. Probably my favourite of the bunch, although they were all good, was SIP which occupies a lovely spot on a street corner and has a lovely terrace which catches the sun – I very much enjoyed multiple lattes there watching the world go by. The inside is also very attractive in a midcentury-chic sort of way, and deceptively big with a rather fetching mezzanine floor.

They also serve a great-looking brunch menu, and although I didn’t try the food there I enviously saw very attractive dishes turning up at neighbouring tables (the pancakes with bacon and maple syrup looked especially tempting). Instead we settled for a pain au chocolat each from the bakery opposite, which was predictably brilliant.

The service was enthusiastic and hugely welcoming, but more than that it was a great advert for Bordeaux in general. When the chap realised this was our first visit and that we loved our coffee, he wrote a list of recommendations on a scrap of paper for us. It had four names on it – three of which we’d already visited and one of which we planned to go to before the end of our holiday. They also happen to be the last four entries on this list. But although I loved them all, SIP remained my favourite.

SIP Coffee Bar
69 Bis rue des Trois-Conils, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/sip_coffeebar/

6. Black List Café

Black List, just the other side of the Cathedral Saint-André from SIP and Space Factory, was a lovely little spot and again, did a knockout coffee. Little is the operative word here, because it’s a very chic, very long, very thin room with benches down one side and no room, really, to sit on the other. So you all sit side by side in a line sharing a view, which I found I rather liked, although it reminded me of drinking at Flat White on Berwick Street before third wave coffee had exploded in the UK and almost nobody knew what a flat white was.

Service, as in so many of these places, was outstanding and the coffee was nectar. I only subsequently found out, sadly too late, that they also have a “boutique de donuts” – what a beautiful trio of words – around the corner called Snickelfritz. Maybe it’s best for my waistline that I didn’t realise that in time, but I’d like to have found out whether they can give Pippin Doughnuts a run for their money.

Black List Café
27 place Pey Berland, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/blacklistcafe/?hl=en

7. Café Piha

Now, if we’re talking about sweet treats to accompany your coffee the prize for that surely has to go to Cafe Piha, which is just over the way from Lauza, on a very pretty street called rue des Ayres (which I assume has nothing to do with Pam Ayres, much as I wish it had). Cafe Piha does excellent coffee, its outside seating gives you a great view of the city’s comings and goings and the inside is beautifully airconditioned, even if the person in charge of the sound system likes reggae a lot more than I ever will. 

But the other reason to go there is that they sell cookies from BATCH, a place a couple of doors down whose A-board boasts that they sell the city’s largest cookies. Well, that might be true – they make even a Ben’s Cookie look positively anaemic – but more importantly a better cookie is hard to imagine. Tectonic plates of biscuit, only faintly held together by huge seams of molten chocolate, they are both a struggle to eat tidily and a delight to eat messily. 

I imagine if you left them to cool they’d be even better, although I never had the patience for that, and although you can buy them to take away two doors down there was something about polishing one off with a silky, poised latte that, to me, made for a perfect mid-afternoon pick me up. You know, on the afternoons when I wasn’t in an ice cream parlour or sipping a rare lambic beer. 

Café Piha
69 rue des Ayres, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.cafepiha.com/coffee-shop-bordeaux/

8. KURO Espresso Bar

KURO (they do seem to like block capitals in Bordeaux) was the first place I had coffee in the city, and after three days of challenging café au lait – or nothing at all – in the Dordogne it was an emotional moment to be reunited with the good stuff. It has a lovely spot just down from the opera house, round the corner from Backyard, and I can’t tell you how grateful I was that it was quite that good, after slumming it for what felt like ages. If you do stop there for a coffee I also recommend a spot of wine shopping at L’Intendant, an incredible shop built around a spiral staircase where the wines just get grander and more tempting as you go along. I came home with a 2016 Pomerol, only slightly irked that I didn’t have the money and the space in my luggage to properly ransack the place..

KURO Espresso Bar
5 rue Mautrec, 33000 Bordeaux
https://kuroespressobar.wixsite.com/website

9. L’Alchimiste

Last but not least, L’Alchemiste was the coffee place I didn’t get round to until my final day. It’s arguably the godfather of the Bordeaux coffee scene and, unlike the majority of the cafés in this list, they roast their own beans. And if I didn’t love it quite as much as the others that might have said more about me – harried on my last day, rushing down a coffee before my hastily moved-forward lunch at Racines – than it did about L’Alchemiste itself.

What I will say is that my coffee was outstanding, although I never expected anything less, and that their terrace out front, on the absurdly pretty rue du Vielle Tour, just up from the eighteenth century Porte Dijeaux, is a marvellous place to sip, observe and wish you had just another couple of days in the city. That last bit – well, that might just have been me, too.

L’Alchimiste
12 rue de la Vielle Tour, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.alchimiste-cafes.com/alchimiste/espaces/

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