Month: November 2023

Restaurant review: Chequers, Bath

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I hadn’t been to Bath since before the pandemic, so when arranging a leisurely weekend lunch with my old friend Dave it sprung to mind as a break from the norm. Especially as that norm largely involves him visiting me in Reading and complaining at length that Swindon has nothing anywhere near as good (a hypothesis I tested a few months back: it isn’t the whole story).

My relative ignorance of Bath is largely a consequence of the ridiculous train fares: it costs pretty much the same exorbitant amount to sit on the train for fifteen more minutes and get off at Temple Meads, so that’s what I’ve done every time. And otherwise I usually go to Oxford, which as we’ve established is cheap, convenient and full of good places to eat. But I’ve been hearing an increasing buzz about a number of interesting restaurants springing up in Bath, so I thought this would be an auspicious opportunity to try somewhere properly new for a change.

But where to go? Even a little research uncovered an embarrassment of riches. There’s the likes of Upstairs At Landrace and Beckford Bottle Shop and Canteen, which have attracted the attention of various broadsheet hacks, and Wilks, the formerly Michelin-starred former Bristol restaurant which has recently relocated. There’s excellent fish at the Scallop Shell, or wine and small plates at Corkage. And finally there’s Chequers (not The Chequers, if their website and social media are to be believed), a gastropub near the Royal Crescent that won a Bib Gourmand from Michelin this year. 

Well, I say finally but actually the list goes on and on: I could also have gone high end at The Elder or institution Menu Gordon Jones, or eaten more casually at any of Pintxo, Bath’s branch of Bosco Pizzeria, Yak Yeti Yak (which celebrates its twentieth birthday next year) or much-loved Italian Sotto Sotto. Why had I never reviewed anywhere in Bath before? And why didn’t it have a restaurant blog of its own? It was baffling.

So why Chequers this week? Well, I’d like to say that it’s because I reviewed all the options and wanted somewhere classic and timeless, untouched by the ebbing tides of small plates, natural wine and craft beer. I’d like to say, as I have before, that the Bib Gourmand remains, in this country, far more useful than stars or the Top 100 Restaurants or Gastropubs or the proclamations of some blogging tosspot or other.

But in truth I went to Chequers (the lack of a The is going to get annoying, I can tell: we’ll get through it together) for a far simpler reason. I gave a list to my friend Dave, asked him to pick and he chose Chequers because it was the only only he had been to before. In hindsight, I probably should have predicted this outcome: Dave has raised risk aversion to an art form, never encountered an airport he didn’t want to arrive at four hours before his flight was scheduled to take off. He is a man who uses the L word constantly with his wife and all his close friends: unfortunately, it stands for logistics.

Anyway, from the outside it was hard to imagine it could be a bad choice. It’s in a particularly attractive part of the city, just off from the beautiful Georgian sweep of The Circus, and Rivers Street is so fetching that even before I’d set foot through the front door of Chequers I found myself wishing it was my local. And inside it was all tasteful and classy, wood-panelled walls in muted Farrow and Ball shades and a stunning parquet floor. I say I wished it was my local, but I couldn’t say whether it was one of those gastropubs that was still a pub, or whether you’d have to be eating to pay it a visit.

Not that it mattered in our case – my friends Dave, Al and I had made our way there with one thing on our mind: luncheon. We were given an especially nice table in a little three-sided nook off from one of the two dining rooms, with comfy banquettes and a nice view out across the pub.

The menu, too, was more cheffy than pubby. The only real concession to pub food was the presence of burger and chips or steak and chips, but other than that it was a real beauty pageant of great sounding dishes, all of which you could comfortably order. On any other day I could have been telling you about the octopus with romesco, or the thyme roasted bone marrow, the saag aloo fritters or the pork tenderloin with Stornaway black pudding. Starters jostled around the ten pound mark, mains ran a much wider gamut from seventeen to thirty.

So agonising choices all round, posed by a kitchen that seemed, on paper at least, to know exactly what it was doing. And although I’d say most of it was squarely Modern European, little hints – a ponzo cured yolk here, tamarind glazed oyster mushrooms there – spoke of a little culinary wanderlust.

Matters were further complicated by a specials board including roasted monkfish tail with sobrasada, or brill with seaweed butter. Fish courses were well represented in general and I should also add, because I never talk about this enough, that there were two credible meat-free options for both starters and mains, more than half of which appeared to be vegan.

We had plenty to catch up on, so it was some time before we got our shit together and placed our order. But in the meantime we occupied ourselves with a snack from the specials board, pork scratchings with apple compote. These were wonderful, light, Quaverish things which were somehow completely lacking in grease but still left your fingers shiny by the time you’d finished.

If I was being pedantic I’d say these were more pork rinds than pork scratchings, but it’s not like I was demanding a refund. The apple dip, almost a deep, fruity ketchup, went brilliantly. Our server had brought over a bottle of Fleurie, the fancy face of Beaujolais, and it was absolutely divine with enough complexity, we thought, to stand up to what we planned to order. We clinked glasses, with a good feeling about what lay ahead.

One thing Dave loves even more than logistics is venison, so when the menu offered multiple opportunities to eat it he was dead set on taking those opportunities. I might have inwardly rolled my eyes at him – predictable, risk averse Dave – and then he showed me up as the judgmental twat I am by ordering a phenomenal dish. A solitary venison faggot, deep and delicious, was plonked on a puddle of parsnip puree, itself ringed with jus, and crowned with parsnip crisps.

But the thing that made this so enviable was the salsa verde which anointed it. Venison with dark fruits or chocolate is a tried and tested way to tease out the characteristics of that singular meat. But salse verde? A new one on me, and downright brilliant. Dave claims he let me try some for completeness’ sake, for the review. But I think he just wanted to provoke starter envy.

I couldn’t complain too much, though, because Al and I had both plumped for an equally admirable dish. Lamb neck terrine (which we couldn’t help but pronounce as nectarine to our server, with predictably unamusing consequences) was a really wonderful, earthy choice. But that denseness was offset with a superb lightness of touch elsewhere.

Pea purée, all hyper-saturated colour and high-contrast flavour, was a perfect accompaniment. The terrine was studded with cubes of confit aubergine and the whole thing was set off with a tumble of girolles. The menu said they were pickled, but if they were it had been done very subtly. This cost nine pounds, and was every bit as tasty as it was decorous.

Now, normally my rule when I go on duty is to order something different from my companions. But I was feeling mutinous that day, no doubt a hangover from week after week of sitting across the table from Zoë watching her demolish my first choice on the menu, so for once I decided to go easy on myself and order the venison, as I knew Dave would do.

And as it turns out Al went for the same thing too, which I think amused our server. She was brilliant throughout the lunch by the way – fantastic at looking after us, hugely engaging and clearly enthusiastic about Chequers and what it does. She twinkled indulgently at the three of us from start to finish, although whether it was from genuine entertainment or pity I suspect we will never know.

So was the venison good enough to justify three separate orders? Well, it depends rather who you ask. Dave loved it and demolished it without complaint, Al did too. I was slightly more circumspect. Although I’m not sure why because every component worked. On paper it was a smash hit, the loin beautifully cooked, still a ruddy pink where it should have been.

And the cavolo nero was a ferrous joy – it’s one of my favourite veg and a surefire sign that autumn is well under way, even if it was still warm outside in November. Little wedges of golden beetroot and scattered blackberries added earthiness and sweetness. But the real star of the show, billed as a hash brown of all things, was a hefty brick of shredded potato, pressed and fried until burnished and crispy, a proper golden wonder. I found myself enjoying this more than the venison, although I don’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one – like it or not, it was the spud I found myself ekeing out.

So why did I like it rather than love it? Well, believe it or not it was a little too restrained for me. The jus, such as it was, was gorgeous (black garlic was involved, apparently) but the dish needed more of it. Venison is a dry meat at the best of times and this needed more sauce to bring everything together. Without that it was a bunch of well-behaved elements badly in search of an overarching theme (maybe, one day, I’ll make it into Pseud’s Corner).

It was also, at thirty pounds, the most expensive dish on the menu: I couldn’t help thinking of the previous day, when dinner at the Lyndhurst had involved pheasant breast, a croquette of shredded pheasant leg, a slab of confit potato, parsnip puree and a lake of gravy for considerably less money. The Lyndhurst might never get a Bib Gourmand, but for quality and value they can comfortably beat at least one pub that’s got one.

The choice of desserts was more compact than that of mains and starters, and because we all fancied two desserts we picked one each and one to share. The one in the middle of the table was Chequers’ pavlova, made with Pernod roasted fig and granola. I have to say that I’m glad this was the one we shared, because if I’d had one to myself I would have wanted to order another dessert to make up for the disappointment.

I love Pernod, I love figs, I love the sweetness of roasted fennel. This should have been right up my alley, but the Pernod was overpowering, brutally harsh and bitter. I had a spoonful and told the others they were welcome to it. Such a pity, though, because the meringue and the Chantilly cream were both outstanding.

My own personal dessert, although better than that, still didn’t scale the heights. I’m a sucker for a chocolate cremeux, and Chequers’ rendition was a glossy marvel. But serving it with a giant nugget of honeycomb that I struggled to break up with a spoon, half fearing that it would wang across the room, wasn’t a helpful combination. Blackberries made another appearance, pickled this time, although they’d been pickled with the same diffident touch as the girolles earlier on.

Maybe I was getting curmudgeonly by this point but I also didn’t understand why they’d festooned the whole thing with foliage. It made it look like something you’d find on the forest floor, if somebody’s owner hadn’t bothered to clean it up.

This might be sour grapes, because Al and Dave ordered something I never order, sticky toffee pudding, and it was the best sticky toffee pudding I’ve only ever had a spoonful of. I sniffily thought it was overkill serving it with salted caramel and a brandy snap biscuit on top and stem ginger nestled in the brandy snap. Well, this just goes to show that I know the square root of fuck all, because it was a miraculous dessert – every element working on its own, but completely transfigured by juxtaposition. The salted caramel sauce alone was worth the price of admission alone, the best I can remember (and I’ve tried a fair few).

“Why do people only say cheers with drinks?” said Dave as, thin-lipped and resentful, I took a sip of my dessert wine. “People ought to say cheers after the first mouthful of a dessert like this.” Smug wanker, I thought.

All good things must come to an end, and once we had digested, discussed and cogitated it was time to settle up and make our way across the city in search of somewhere to drink more and talk nonsense. Even then, in the back of my mind, I was thinking that Chequers, with that table, that view and the prospect that if I stayed another hour I might be able to excuse ordering a sticky toffee pudding to myself, was a decidedly difficult place to leave.

But the beers and banquettes at Kingsmead Street Bottle were calling to us, so it was time to go. Our meal came to just over two hundred and twenty pounds, not including tip. You could spend less, I’m sure, if you didn’t order multiple desserts and a trio of glasses of late harvest Semillon, but I didn’t leave feeling mugged.

A really beautiful pub doing really wonderful food is one of life’s great pleasures, as is a Saturday lunchtime spent in one with old friends,a good bottle of red, gossip and food envy. In that sense, Chequers was only ever going to be a success. And yet I do find myself weighing it against other places with similar credentials. I liked it far better than the Black Rat in Winchester which lost a Michelin star and lost its way. I’m not sure I preferred it to Oxford’s Magdalen Arms, where the prices are a little less steep and the food a lot less pristine.

And, of course, the nearest thing we have closer to home is the Lyndhurst: I’m sure if you picked it up and dropped it in Bath it would finally get the plaudits it always seems to miss out on. But nevertheless it’s impossible to dispute that Chequers has got so many things right, from the beauty of its dining room to the sheer quality of its welcome. And if I didn’t love everything I ate, I could appreciate that all of it, with the exception of that pavlova, was accomplished, clever and skilfully done.

So here goes one of those positive reviews that somehow, even so, isn’t quite positive enough: I thought Chequers was very good. I wouldn’t go to Bath just to eat there, but if I was in Bath, and I wasn’t in the business of constantly finding new places so I can write about them, I would definitely book another table. If ever you find yourself in Bath, I think you could do an awful lot worse.

Chequers – 8.3
50 Rivers St, Bath, BA1 2QA
01225 428924

https://chequersbath.net

Restaurant review: Noah’s, Bristol

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I knew a number of things about Noah’s, the newish fish and seafood restaurant that opened in Bristol at the start of May, from the research I did prior to visiting. I knew that it was run by a married couple, Daniel and Joie Rosser, and that their family ran the highly-regarded Scallop Shell just down the road in Bath. I knew that the place was named after their son, who turned one shortly after it opened. I knew that it occupied an iconic site in Bristol which used to double as Sid’s Café in Only Fools And Horses, although I had to admit I didn’t remember that at all. I knew the views out towards Clifton Suspension Bridge were meant to be quite something. And last of all, I knew that it was allegedly right under a flyover.

I didn’t really believe that last one could be true, but it was. It was a bracing half hour walk from our hotel, past M Shed and all the appealing restaurants of Wapping Wharf, and then down a long, unlovely road that ran the full length of Spike Island, until you felt like you were somewhat in the middle of nowhere. It was one of those walks that felt far longer than it was, drab and featureless, and I found myself wishing I’d taken a taxi (if you go to Noah’s, take a taxi). And then, at the end of the rainbow, there was indeed a flyover with Noah’s nestled underneath it, looking beautiful and incongruous.

It was mainly incongruous by virtue of being so beautiful. The outside, all wooden boards, tastefully curving in at the base, looked like the hull of a boat. And that motif continued inside, with big picture windows and portholes, bare wood floors and blue banquettes. It was a gorgeous, serene dining room, wonderfully lit, and managed to be vaguely nautical without ever approaching naff, in itself a considerable achievement. 

We were some of the first customers there at half past twelve and our welcome, from co-owner Joie, was warm and genuine. We took a generously sized table in the middle of the restaurant – the late morning sun was intense through those huge windows – and recovered from the walk, enjoying the space and that feeling of calm. I was concerned for them but I needn’t have been, because over the next couple of hours the place filled up nicely. Although it was an unseasonably warm autumn day I could see from the decking area outside that this place would come into its own again next summer.

One of the many things to like about Noah’s menu is that it changes daily: I had been watching it on their Instagram stories so I knew that it shifted subtly from day to day depending on what the restaurant had in and how they’d decided to cook it. Fish tended to be from Brixham or Newlyn, mussels were from St Austell but the menu always specifies where everything was caught.

Small changes notwithstanding, the spine of the menu remained constant – mains in particular involving either fried fish and chips or grilled fish with either chips or new potatoes. Simple pleasures, especially when done exceptionally well. They also have a very reasonable set lunch (which they offer even at weekends), called the Lock Keeper’s Lunch, which comes with a cup of tea and a teatime set menu which does not. I found that admirable too.

There was just the one meat free starter, which was vegetarian but not vegan, and a couple of fish free mains, one involving chicken and the other with chickpea fritters. So really, you do have to like fish to go to Noah’s or your choice is more limited than Tess Daly’s presenting skills. Starters were either side of the ten pound divide, mains clustered around twenty. I identified my first and second choice of main course, reasoning that I’d be happy with either of them, and then Zoë picked my first choice and somehow I still had FOMO. This happens, I should add, almost without fail.

But first, we had some starters, accompanied by a rehydrating bottle of sparkling mineral water to try and undo the damage from the night before. Bread was from Somerset bakery Lievito, who supply a few Bristol restaurants, and I rather liked it – nicely open-crumbed, although maybe lacking in a satisfactory crust. Giving three slices to a table for two is asking for trouble, though, if you ask me. The anchovy and rosemary butter needed two things, more anchovy and more butter. What there was I liked, but what there wasn’t is what I noticed.

Cod fishcakes were sold by the unit at a reasonable three pounds fifty and Zoë nabbed a couple. I don’t think you can go wrong with salt cod, and these were delicious spheres: from a distance they looked more blond than bronzed but the texture was bang on. Sitting them on a little moat of tomato vinaigrette and topping them with a dab of aioli was a terrific touch, too. My forkful passed too quickly: there wasn’t to be another.

Even better, I thought, were the prawns, plump fleshy commas fried until crispy and positively moreish. This dish was made by the addition of a superb sweet chilli sauce with proper heat, so well balanced that it showed up the shop-bought stuff as sugary, one-dimensional syrup.

My favourite of the starters, though, was all mine: gorgeous smoked sardine fillets loaded on to an airy rectangle of sourdough along with a tomato concasse with capers, all sweetness, acid and bite. Such a superb combination, and a reminder that salt and vinegar is not only the best crisp flavour but also the pairing that perfects so many fish dishes.

As it happens, the day I wrote this I had sardines on toast for lunch, decanted from a tin. Pale imitation doesn’t even begin to do justice to how many miles separate that lunch and this impeccable dish: perhaps I need to check out the Tinned Fish Market.

Mains were reasonably paced, turning up about twenty minutes after we’d dispatched our starters. Zoë had chosen ray wing, beating me to it – ordinarily I find it impossible not to order, when I see it on menus. It was a beautiful specimen, muscular and golden, and they’d presented it with the thinner side up: always the right way to do it, as there’s nothing worse than getting halfway through eating a ray wing, flipping it over and finding the metaphorical thin end of the wedge lying in wait.

From my look through Noah’s menus they tend to serve ray wing one of two ways – the classic, with brown butter and capers, or as a curveball with a curried lentil dal. On paper I prefer the former, but it was the latter on the day we visited and actually I thought it worked pretty well. Zoe let me try a little and using a knife to curl it away from the cartilage, dabbing it with the dal and eating it was a mindful, almost meditative experience. More of that please, as Anton Du Beke has taken to saying on Strictly.

And the dal really was good, although it seemed a bit bet-hedging to serve it with lentils and still give you the choice of chips or new potatoes, both of which made more sense if it had been served with brown butter and capers. Minor quibbles about an excellent dish, and one I very much wished I’d ordered.

I on the other hand had chosen another kind of classic dish: haddock and chips, with tartare sauce and mushy peas. Quintessentially British, many would say, and when done well almost unimprovable. By happy coincidence, yesterday Noah’s announced that it had made the top 5 in the 2024 National Fish & Chip Awards, which is impressive going for a restaurant that has barely been open for six months. So this would be game-changing fish and chips, wouldn’t it? Just look at the photo below: what’s not to like?

Sadly, it turned out there were things not to like. It was a good illustration of how social media isn’t real life, because the ubiquitous flat lay photograph hid a multitude of sins. Looking down from above it seemed as good a portion of fish and chips as you could hope for. And it started well – the batter on top light and frilly, crinkled and crenellated, giving way to firm flakes of fish. But underneath, it was still soggy and oily, that oil glazing the chips in a way that wasn’t enormously pleasant.

And soggy-bottomed fish aside, the chips were not great. You can’t see it in this picture, because they’re entirely obscured by the fillet of haddock, but many of them were strangely grey-edged and unappealing. Plonking the fish on top of the chips is a serving choice, not one I’d personally have taken, but it happened to conceal some slightly manky chips.

They were lacking in crunch and salt, just didn’t have enough of the good stuff and, as I said, had that disconcerting hue. I left just under half of them. That might not bother you, it might be a me thing – I’ve never eaten a crisp I haven’t thoroughly inspected first – but for me if you serve fish and chips and neither of them is spot on, that feels like an elementary mistake (in fairness, Zoë’s chips looked more appetising).

It’s a pity because the tartar sauce, served artfully in a scallop shell, was also well executed. If anything, it was a bit too posh for me – I love the properly vinegary kick of the stuff in a jar, the cheaper the better – but I could appreciate it without necessarily loving it. The mushy peas must have been pretty authentic, because I didn’t fancy them at all. That definitely is me rather than the restaurant: I can handle crushed peas at a push, or pea purée, but when it comes to smushed-up marrowfat I’m very much a disciple of the Church Of Mandelson.

Anyway, in my book the best way to get over a disappointing main, unless you’ve positively taken against a place, is to dive headlong into a great dessert. Noah’s offers three to choose from, along with ice cream or affogato, but we both spotted the chocolate mousse and from that point everything else was an irrelevance. It was huge and outstanding – a dense, thick and indulgent thing with a globe of clotted cream ice cream on top. The ice cream was completely unnecessary, which is not to say I didn’t love it or finish every last morsel.

Although we’d been on the sparkling mineral water throughout, the list of sweet wines and digestifs was too good to swerve. I was very interested in an English amaretto, made by the modishly named E18hteen Gin, but I also spotted a red dessert wine, a tannat no less, that sounded too interesting to miss out on. Red dessert wines are one of my abiding loves in the world of booze – give me a Banyuls and I’m a happy man – but I’d never had one made with tannat before. I’m used to that brooding grape in Uruguayan reds, but what would it be like in a dessert wine?

The answer, it turned out, was stellar: one of the best dessert wines I’ve had in ages, all vanilla and cocoa, perfect with the mousse. “It’s one of my favourites” said our server, “and it really goes with that dessert.” I made a note of the wine, Googled it and wondered just how many bottles to get in for Christmas.

On another day we could have dallied longer and by then I had a full picture of the kind of restaurant Noah’s was – light, tasteful, full of locals and alive with chatter and company. You wouldn’t think this was a restaurant still in its first six months, or that it had such a challenging location. That’s a tribute, I think, to just how well they’ve hit the ground running and the work they’ve put into making sure they have something for everyone. Our bill for three courses, some sparkling water and those dessert wines came to just over a hundred and ten pounds, not including tip.

As so often with reviews of Bristol restaurants, I can’t help putting my Reading hat on and thinking Do we have anything like this? and, because the answer to that question is invariably no, Do I wish we did? The answer to that second question is a resounding yes – I don’t think Reading has ever had anything like Noah’s, and if you tell me we used to have Loch Fyne I would say yes we did, but it was no great shakes.

But other things make Noah’s feel special, too, I’ve seen few restaurants go to so much trouble to find their target market, to appeal to it and to try and hit so many bases without becoming some kind of bloated, all day dining behemoth that forgets what it’s all about. And yet, when I think about Noah’s some more, the one blot on the copybook is that fish and chips. It is such a shame that it wasn’t completely at the top of its game when I went – maybe I got unlucky with the fish, or picked the one day when their potatoes weren’t the best.

But even so I can’t bring myself to knock the rating down too much because literally everything else – the room, the welcome, the menu, those starters, that ray wing, that dessert – was very close to perfect. I ate at Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant in Padstow a couple of times earlier this year for my dad’s birthday and it was a lovely experience on each occasion, even if the whole of Padstow is like a Centre Parcs for affluent boomers. And yet, farther from the sea, many miles from the day boats, nestled in the concrete embrace of that incongruous flyover, I reckon Noah’s gives it, and certainly anywhere in Reading, a run for its money.

Noah’s – 8.5
1 Brunel Lock Road, Bristol, BS1 6XS
0117 4529240

https://www.noahsbristol.co.uk

Restaurant review: A.B.O.E., Bristol

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A.B.O.E. closed in August 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Last Friday I found myself in Bristol enjoying a badly-needed long weekend away. Our train pulled into Temple Meads, half an hour late, and Zoë and I wheeled our suitcases into the centre, three days of eating, drinking and excellent company ahead of us. But before we checked into our hotel, before we did almost anything, I had lunch on my mind and only one candidate to provide it. We made a pilgrimage to the Apple Cider Barge and there, next door, in its distinctive black and red was Gurtrina, the van belonging to fried chicken supremos and Reading legends Gurt Wings. How could I kick off my minibreak anywhere else?

By my reckoning it’s over six months since Gurt Wings stopped coming to Blue Collar – something to do with the council being difficult, if I remember rightly – and the reunion with their magnificent food was all the sweeter for all that deprivation and delayed gratification. In my time away the buffalo sauce had become just a little more piquant, the blue cheese saltier and tangier. The sun came out, the bench we were perched on positively glowed and we polished off our food in wordless joy. Truly, it would have been worth a trip to Bristol just for that.

Afterwards James Mitchell – the man behind Gurt, also known to his many fans as Uncle Gurty – came over and the three of us caught up and shot the breeze. I told him where we were planning to eat in the city, he mentioned a few places he’d heard were good and then he did something I wasn’t expecting. He went out of his way to tell me somewhere especially good I should check out.

“You need to get yourself to Oboe” he said.

“What, like the musical instrument?”

“No, A.B.O.E. It stands for ‘A Bit Of Everything’. The chef is a guy called Seb Merry who was on Masterchef, and he’s so passionate about his food. The whole team are brilliant. They do the best Bloody Mary I’ve had – it’s not on the menu, but if you ask they’ll make it for you. And they have this fried chicken dish – well, it’s not like our fried chicken but it’s amazing, it’s more like a croquette but you’d have to try it. And they do this incredible dessert, have a look at this.”

He fired up his phone and showed me a picture of a dessert which was all chocolate and caramel, thick slabs of each. I’ve rarely seen a photograph I wanted to eat more.

After our chat we went on our way and stopped in the Small Bar for the first beer of the holiday but that glowing endorsement weighed on my mind. If the man who does the best fried chicken you’ve ever tasted tells you that a restaurant does amazing fried chicken, and more besides… could I really let a trip to Bristol pass without investigating? But anyway, there’s no way they would have a table free the following night, I thought. But then I checked, and they had. So I texted my friends James and Liz, sent them the website. 

I know the four of us are booked somewhere else tomorrow night, but Mr Gurt Wings says this place is incredible. What do you reckon, stick or twist?

James, a keen fan of Bristol’s restaurant scene, responded almost immediately. Let’s take a risk and twist, he said, and that was that. Bookings were made and cancelled, and the next night Zoë and I clambered off the bus halfway up the Whiteladies Road, ready to take our chances.

The interior was tasteful, all muted green paint, wall art and pillars. There was a mezzanine floor, although there didn’t seem to be anyone seated there on a Saturday night, and the whole place had a pleasing buzz. It sort of looked as if it could have been part of the Loungers Group in a previous life (I checked: it wasn’t) but none the less it was a pleasant dining room with tables companionably close without being crammed in.

It was also almost completely full and our server whisked us to a table right at the back, far too big for our party of four. He explained that a table for four near the front had slightly outstayed their welcome, and although they’d paid the bill they hadn’t yet left the premises. He told us, quite charmingly I thought, that he didn’t feel like acting the heavy with them given how much they had spent.

Then he asked if Zoë and I wanted a cocktail on the house while we waited. So Zoë had a negroni, made with rosemary vermouth, which she raved about and I asked for that off-menu Bloody Mary. I knew it would be good when the server didn’t ask me how spicy I wanted it: they just did their job and made it, and it was magnificent.

All in all, we were waiting ten minutes with our cocktails, hardly anything to complain about. By then James and Liz had arrived, more drinks had been ordered and we had taken our table nearer to the front of the restaurant, with a good view of other tables, dishes wafting past and the staff – just the two of them, that I could see – working non-stop.

The menu is the kind that makes jaded restaurant bloggers roll their eyes – no starters, no main courses, just snacks and small plates. The menu suggests two snacks and four small plates between two, which I suppose gives you an idea of whether they’re starters or mains. Now, I can be as critical of small plates venues as the next person and I’ve always found it counterintuitive that restaurants tell you to share small plates. I also thought that A.B.O.E.’s pricing was a little out of keeping with the small plates concept – snacks mostly cost just over five pounds, but the small plates ranged from fourteen to twenty-two pounds and that for me, at the risk of doing an accidental Partridge, is the kind of price I expect to pay for a big plate.

But anyway – perhaps it was the charm of the welcome, or the edge-softening effect of that Bloody Mary, but I found I was prepared to suspend my disbelief. So we bartered about the snacks we wanted to ourselves and the small plates we were reluctantly prepared to share, I popped it all down on a note on my phone and when our server came back we ordered with military precision.

“I just need to tell you,” he said, “that the steak tartare is a small portion, so it isn’t really suitable for sharing”.

“That’s okay, that’s for me” said James, in a manner that suggested he had never really considered sharing it with anyone.

That does James a huge disservice because when it arrived, although it was indeed too petite to share, he insisted that I try a forkful of the tartare. It was made with dry-aged bavette, and I have to say it was pretty impressive with plenty of savoury depth. Not the very best tartare I’ve ever had – that honour still goes to Paris’ superlative Double Dragon – but pretty close. Certainly it compared well with a similar dish across town at Marmo, although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure about the stuff, allegedly taleggio, on top.

Zoë and Liz both went for the pumpkin croquette: A Bit Of Everything definitely applies geographically if in no other way, with this dish having hints of Japanese korroke. But unlike the croquettes at, say, Caper And Cure where you get four little spheres, A.B.O.E. goes for broke with a single enormo-croquette loaded with cheese and horseradish. Again, I was allowed a forkful and again it induced a reasonable amount of envy. Zoë in particular raved about this dish. I probably would have liked more, smaller croquettes to capitalise on the surface area but I couldn’t deny that the flavour of the thing was outstanding.

To continue the globetrotting, my snack was A.B.O.E.’s take on poutine. Rather than fries, it was cuboids of confit potato, à la Quality Chop House, buried in Parmesan with a jug of thick, intense, almost-sweet jus to trickle over the whole affair. Enormously enjoyable stuff: I imagine dreary types might complain that this wasn’t poutine, but it was a darned sight nicer than most poutine I’ve had. Besides, I knew exactly what it would be like because I’d checked out the restaurant’s Instagram in advance (it’s called research, you know).

The first of the small plates to come out was that fried chicken dish so beloved by the man behind Gurt Wings – high praise indeed, from an expert in the field. Well, he was right to say that A.B.O.E.’s rendition was nothing like his. It was surprisingly hard to describe, but it’s important to try because otherwise all you have to go on is the photo below, which looks on the scatological side. It was somewhere between a boudin and a ballotine, a cylinder of tightly compressed chicken thigh bound in a crispy coating, the whole thing smothered in a sticky curried sauce.

Did it work? Well, yes, we all thought it did. As with the pumpkin croquette, I personally would rather have had more, smaller pieces to maximise the surface area. The coating didn’t have as much crunch as I’d have liked, and came away under a knife rather than adhering to the chicken beneath. But you couldn’t argue with the flavours, or the note of citrus that danced through it. Uncle Gurty had not steered me wrong – and no, it didn’t look like fried chicken, much in the way that the poutine didn’t look like poutine. That was sort of the whole point.

I’d had my eye on the barbecued squid with galangal, but it became a must-order when our server, the charming Italian chap who had sorted out our welcome cocktails, told me they’d run out of the clams it was meant to come with. Their solution, he told me, was just to give you more squid. That was good enough for me, and the dish was tender and fragrant with a nicely building heat. Another of those dishes you slightly resented sharing, which in hindsight is a decent description of literally everything we ate.

The most expensive dish on the menu – so naturally we ordered two of these – was the short rib beef agnolotti. Nearly twenty-two pounds a portion, and for me a fascinating misfire. My companions all loved it so I was the lone dissenter, but for me the agnolotti themselves were overcooked, which made the whole dish a bit limp and mulchy.

Everything on the plate was good: the celeriac, apparently with aged beef fat, the glorious beef in the filling and a powerful mole verde, although we didn’t get the advertised goats cheese. As with everything else we tried, the flavour was unimpeachable but for me, the texture let this one down. But I may well have been wrong: certainly everybody else thought so.

Red mullet is James’ favourite fish on earth so he had to order a portion of that, and I got enough of a taste to appreciate that it was, like everything else, very skilfully done. I’m a sucker for braised lettuce, a relatively conventional pairing, but putting mustard – a delicious mustard, at that – in the mix was the sort of clever and unexpected touch Merry seems to specialise in.

The last of our small plates was an outrageously delicious one: barbecued cod with leeks wrapped in nori and two sauces – one of which, studded with ultra-salty nuggets of chicken skin, was one of the most compelling things I’ve eaten in some time. Again, this was at the north end of the price list and I can see you could argue it wasn’t an enormous amount of food for twenty pounds. But it was exceptional, one of the best-cooked pieces of fish I can remember served alongside a sauce with a proper, clobbering heft. James and Liz left a bit of theirs, and I waited as long as I could bear it before saying “would you mind if I finish that?”

Although service was brilliant, there were only two people working front of house (and, just as gobsmacking, I understand there were only two people in the kitchen). If there had been more, or they’d been less busy, we might have got to a second bottle of wine but instead we took our time with the one we had, a beautiful Minervois which sort of went with some of the dishes. It’s a small wine list, six white and six red, about half of them available by the glass.

Our server asked what we made of the food and checked what we’d ordered. He said it was a shame we hadn’t gone for the celeriac cacio e pepe and we said that it hadn’t quite made the cut. So he decided to send a plate of it out to us anyway, which was very kind and completely unexpected. It really was a beautiful dish – ribbons of just-cooked celeriac taking the place of pasta, more sweet and comforting cubes of celeriac and little mushrooms dotted throughout. Clever and imaginative, like everything else, and in its way every bit as enjoyable as the cacio e pepe I’d raved about earlier in the year at Manteca.

“Isn’t it great?” said our server as he took the empty plate away. “I shouldn’t like it, because I’m Italian and making this without pasta is, well…” He shrugged at that point to indicate that he knew full well the dish was culinary heresy. “And I’m not just Italian, I’m from Rome. But the chef is right, and it’s just so good.”

The menu also recommends that you share one dessert between two people. I don’t know if it was our greed, or the small plates not being quite big enough, but we disregarded that and ordered one apiece. Mine and Zoë’s was the dish I’d seen in the photo on Uncle Gurty’s phone the previous day. Dubbed the Rolo Finesse, it was about the most high-end Rolo you can imagine – a thick wobbly layer of something partway between caramel and toffee, gloriously indulgent with just the slightest hint of miso. Beneath that, a thick stripe of a chocolate cremeux that was almost more like ganache, and beneath that a crunchy base.

That would have been enough, but malted milk ice cream on the side and more little nubbins of that crunchy chocolate holding it in place elevated this to god tier. If I’ve had a better dessert this year I can’t remember it, and if I have a better one next year I’ll be very surprised indeed. I can’t tell you how delighted I was that this one of the only plates I didn’t have to share.

James and Liz both opted for the tiramisu and again, were generous enough to let me try it. It was – no surprises by now – excellent: light yet moreish, a far more elegant way to finish a meal than the whopping slab I’d just eaten. I’ve tried a few Bristol tiramisu over the last couple of years – Sonny Stores and Little Hollows spring to mind – and for my money this was better than either.

As we sat there in the afterglow of a brilliant meal, ready to pay and slope off to the Good Measure for a post-prandial beer, we discussed A.B.O.E. in the wider context of a city full of phenomenal restaurants. We knew it was good, but just how good was it? James thought it was better than Wilsons, but he’s been burned by going there after my rave review, eating a meal which was almost completely devoid of carbs and leaving hungry: it’s made him an avid detractor. Zoë liked it even more than COR, which is pretty much the most exalted praise you can award in Bristol.

I loved it, but I wasn’t sure how to place it. The flavours had been exceptional, the service some of the best I’ve had this year. But those small plates were priced on the keen side. It required further reflection, I decided. Our bill, not including the two comped cocktails and that extra celeriac dish, came to just over three hundred pounds, including a 12.5% service charge which the staff more than earned. As we paid up, James told our server how much he’d enjoyed it.

“Way better than Wilsons” he said. He always takes pleasure in saying that.

“Thank you!” she replied. And then, before we put on our coats and made our exit, she came back.

“I know this is cheeky, but I passed your compliments on to the chef, and he asked if there was any way you could write a review saying you thought the food was better than Wilson’s? It’s really high praise.”

“Don’t worry” I said, “I’m sure one of us will.”

The funny thing is that since my meal, which I’ve thought about many times, I’ve discovered, while writing this review, that A.B.O.E. has a bit of a controversial reputation. I’ve read a review online, best characterised as a tad sneering, that criticised A.B.O.E., partly for some of the dishes but mainly, it seems, because they linked up heavily with influencers just after they opened around the start of the year. One influencer in particular, a chap the Rolo Finesse is named after as it happens, came in for particular criticism.

Well, I can sort of see both sides of that. I’ve always felt a bit icky about influencers myself, especially ones who don’t declare ads or invites, although that criticism in my experience comes better from people who don’t take free or heavily discounted food themselves.

And looking at the influencer in question’s output, I did feel about three thousand years old. Saying that it’s, and I quote, “non stop grub-a-dubdub” at A.B.O.E. is the kind of expression that makes me want to sigh all the remaining air out of my lungs, as is the observation that “every component on your plate will SLAP so hard you won’t even know what month you were born in”. Let’s not even get into the bit where he described A.B.O.E.’s roast beef as “more tender than your nan’s left arm” or their cauliflower cheese as “so peng I could have cried”.

But the point is, much as it might pain me to admit it, the guy is not wrong (well, except maybe about my nan’s left arm). I, rather, would say that the staff work their socks off and are brilliant at what they do, I would say that every element of every dish has been given serious thought and cooked with enormous skill and that, irrespective of how or whether it slaps, let alone how hard, A.B.O.E. has a very talented kitchen doing fascinating things. I guess if you put what I said into an English-to-influencer Google Translate it might end up as roughly what he said.

I can always tell when I’ve really, really enjoyed my meal because I actively look forward to writing it up, to trying to put into words what I’ve experienced. In that sense A.B.O.E. is a restaurant blogger’s dream, and I feel lucky to be a Bristol outsider because it means that, free of all that infighting and beef I can just judge the food and the experience, and say that both were terrific. The list of places I need to go back to in Bristol gets longer and longer, which makes reviewing restaurants there difficult. But as long as they keep that dessert on the menu – which I suspect they will, if only because it pisses off all the right people – I can very much see myself returning.

A.B.O.E. – 9.4
109 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2PB
0117 9466144

https://www.aboebristol.com

Restaurant review: Cici Noodle Bar

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Cici Noodle Bar closed in March 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

When I was younger, I loved the weekend when the clocks went back. Even though I had all the time in the world, that extra hour in bed felt like a gift from the cosmos. And now I’m uncomfortably ensconced in middle age I realise that the bonus sixty minutes aren’t remotely worth all the consequences: dark mornings when you go to work, dark evenings when you head home, drear and dreich everywhere. And the extra hour? I think I spent at least a quarter of it resetting the clocks and the time on the oven. It’s a crappy tradeoff.

I read online somewhere recently that we have to wait until something like next March before the sun sets after 6pm again. I looked at my phone, hoped I’d read it wrong, realised I hadn’t and just thought: please, god, no. I have one more holiday planned this year, to Malaga in December where the sun will still be shining, the sky still a striking photogenic shade of blue. The quality of light alone, I know, will lift my spirits. Is it wrong to check the weather there once a day without fail?

I know some people love autumn, love the chillier days, love crunching golden leaves underfoot – to be fair, who doesn’t love that? – love the slide into mulled wine, Strictly on the telly, preparing for Christmas and hibernation. Maybe other years I would too, but this year feels like it’s been an especially gruelling one: much of the time I find I’m just tired, and ready for it to end. Every month the stagger to payday feels a little more like running on fumes.

Back when I was married (last time, not next time) my in-laws had a wonderful phrase for feeling a little bit blue, possibly for no tangible reason. The can’t help its, they called it: you had a case of the can’t help its. I’ve carried on using that ever since, and it’s seemed very appropriate lately, more often than I’d like. And all the things that fix it – a beer during the week, a bar of chocolate munched in front of Bake Off – work on one level, but on another I know they’re just sticking plasters. Sticking plasters that make me fatter, more lethargic and probably, in the longer term, sadder. And social media, of course, is full of people who look as if they’re having a marvellous time.

So this week I left the house on a Friday evening looking for comfort, for a solo dinner before Zoë finished a late shift in town. And comfort – when it doesn’t mean chocolate, for me anyway – often means carbs. There’s something soothing and cosseting about carbs that, on some nights, little can touch. That’s why I made a beeline for Cici Noodle Bar, which opened about eight months ago on Queen Victoria Street in the space formerly occupied by the unlamented Donuterie. I hadn’t heard much about the place, but everything I had heard was good.

Cici closes at half eight, so it’s more a lunch or quick early dinner option like Kokoro next door. Arriving at around half seven I was greeted with a completely empty room and nobody behind the counter, a veritable Marie Celeste. It’s a pleasant enough space, but more functional than fun: if I could go back in time I’d buy some shares in whoever makes Tolix chairs, because it’s more noteworthy now when you turn up to a casual dining place and they don’t have masses of the bastard things. But even so, I didn’t mind it – the pillar box red chairs and black walls had a pleasing look to them. It just needed what all restaurants need really, people.

I was about to give up when a chap came in from the back room.

“Are you still serving?”

“Yes, sure” he said. Apart from a few subsequent Deliveroo drivers and a lady who turned up to get takeaway, I think I was to be his last customer of the evening. I placed my order, clarified that he brought it over and I didn’t have to go and collect it and then I went to sit at the high table up at the window. From there I looked out on Queen Victoria Street in the darkness, people scurrying to the station to head home after a hard day at work, or heading in the opposite direction towards the Oracle, their evenings about to begin. Maybe it was the fluorescent light, or that feeling of solitude in a crowd but I felt a like a cut price, low rent Redingensian Rick Deckard. A boy can dream, anyway.

Cici Noodle Bar’s menu, you may be unsurprised to hear, revolves almost exclusively around their hand pulled noodles. You can have them in broth, as ramen (the difference between these two isn’t really explained) or as they come. That’s pretty much it, barring a handful of sides, and most of their noodle dishes cost around a tenner. All very straightforward, and that kind of streamlined menu always inspires confidence in me.

I’ve never really got things like ramen – I tend to agree with the restaurant blogger Katie Low who once said they combine all the drawbacks of soup and of noodles without the benefits of either – so I went for a dish described as “dry noodles with beef brisket”. As you can maybe see from the picture below, it was emphatically a sauce free zone – I don’t think I was necessarily prepared for quite how dry it was. Noodles, pak choi, plenty of hefty chunks of beef, some coriander and a few translucent slices of radish. That was all. Had I made a mistake?

As it turned out, I hadn’t. I don’t always have the most nuanced palate, and I can sometimes equate subtle with boring. I tend to like crash bang wallop flavours like XO or gochujang, blue cheese or anchovies. Load up the salt or umami and I tend to be a happy man. So to slow down, strip back and taste this dish was really quite a revelation. The noodles were lovely – thick, somewhere between soba and udon, with just enough bite to make them interesting. The greenery added crunch, contrast and aromatics.

But the star of the show, with this dish, was the brisket. It’s too easy to wear out superlatives in this game, but this was easily some of the most tender beef I’ve eaten anywhere, surrendering to a fork – I was too much of a heathen to eat it with chopsticks – falling into flakes almost the way fish would. It had a surprising depth of flavour, too: maybe I was imagining it, overcompensating for the simplicity of everything else but I thought I detected something like star anise. Either way it was properly delicious. Even the few bits of fat there were, wobbly and gelatinous, were a glossy, moreish delight rather than a bouncy ordeal.

The other transformative component, though, was on the side. There were standard issue bottles of soy and vinegar but also, in a blue and white pot, there was laoganma, crispy chilli in oil, and a little teaspoon with which to dispense it. And dispense it I did, a little at first, then more and then more, the brick red savoury joy colouring everything in the dish and completing the experience. For those of you who haven’t had laoganma, which included me until recently, it’s made with chilli but not quite as punchy as you might fear, the whole thing given a sublime extra dimension with the addition of fermented black beans that lend extraordinary depth.

Without laoganma – it translates as “old godmother”, would you believe – my noodles were a very good dish. With it, they became great. By the end, as I dispatched those last nubbins of chilli-flecked brisket, I was dabbing my nose and pondering the possibilities: laoganma smudged on cheese on toast! Pastrami and laoganma sandwiches! Laoganma eaten out of the jar with a spoon! But although it elevated the dish, I did have to remind myself that the dish was pretty impressive already. What would the spicy chicken noodles be like, I wondered? Next time, I thought.

I wish I could be equally enthusiastic about the gyoza, but they fell a little flat. They tasted too much of the oil they had been fried in, and the oil tasted like it had done too much frying already. Perhaps that’s just the consequence of being their last customer on a Friday night, but it was a real shame because the gyoza themselves could have been good. I poured some soy and vinegar into the dish, which served to highlight the oil floating on the bottom of it, and made the best of a bad job.

Service was nice and friendly although the man behind the counter did wander off for long periods of time. That didn’t bother me at all, but another customer came in after me to order some food to take home and she nearly gave up after waiting for nearly five minutes with nobody behind the counter. “It’s really good, it’s worth waiting for!” I said between mouthfuls of brisket, persuading her to stay until the server returned. I’m glad I did, and hopefully she enjoyed her meal as much as I did mine.

But I suspect that, at the end of a long shift, the server was just keen to go home. That’s perfectly understandable, really. I also sense that he hadn’t been working there long – when he came to take my bowl away I told him how much I’d enjoyed my food and asked how long Cici Noodle Bar had been there, pretty standard restaurant small talk, but he didn’t know. My bill came to a stupidly reasonable fifteen pounds, not including service.

And it wasn’t until later when I checked my bank statement that I realised my payment had been made to Donuterie: if this was a case of Donuterie’s owner turning their hand to something else when the doughnut business failed they’d definitely done a far better job of it than, for example, that time that Italian restaurant Casa Roma rebranded as Maracas. Cici Noodle Bar, weirdly, felt a little like what that site should have been all along.

I’ve walked past Cici Noodle Bar, on the way home from work, a few times since I visited for this review and every time I’ve been really heartened to see customers in there. I really like what they do, and it definitely takes its place in the great pantheon of Reading noodle dishes like the exemplary chow meins at Kamal’s Kitchen and Sapana Home, not to mention the much missed duck noodles at Beijing Noodle House, the West Street institution that fed so many happy Reading diners on an affordable night out, many years ago. It could be the spiritual heir to the latter.

I’m yet to visit the obvious benchmark for Cici Noodle Bar, Marugame Udon which opened in March in the Oracle where Pizza Hut used to be. I got as far as walking through the door with Zoë, seeing that the layout was more like a cafeteria than a restaurant, thinking “sod this” and leaving again.

No doubt I will review it at some point, or at least I ought to. But even once I do I suspect my loyalties will probably lie with Cici Noodle Bar – slightly less polished, perhaps slightly less slick but delicious, independent and brave. It was warming, surprising and it definitely staved off the can’t help its, for a while at least. Or perhaps it was the laoganma: I must pick some up so I can carry out some controlled experiments in the comfort of my own kitchen.

Cici Noodle Bar – 7.5
27 Queen Victoria Street, RG1 1SY
0118 9090872

https://cicinoodles.com