Tag: Al

Restaurant review: Lapin, Bristol

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This might come as a surprise to you – probably not – but for the best part of the last fifteen years my friends and I have regularly taken part in something called Poncefest. Nope, not a misprint. The idea was to take a day off, invariably a Friday, and go into London together for a bit of shopping, always for fragrance, followed by a fancy lunch somewhere, then falling into a pub before getting the train home. Something like the Finer Things Club from the American version of The Office, only even finer.

Having sacrificed whatever credibility I might have had with that opening paragraph, I may as well explain. So yes, these trips usually involved shopping at one of London’s great fragrance shops – Bloom or Les Senteurs – and then a gorgeous, drawn out lunch. We’ve done Medlar in Chelsea, Soho’s famous Andrew Edmunds, Portland in Fitzrovia, Calum Franklin’s renowned pies at Holborn Dining Room and doubtless other places I’ve forgotten. We’ve even been to Oxford, enjoying a very pleasant lunch at Pompette one Friday towards the end of the year, exchanging Christmas presents and cards and eating brilliantly.

The members of the Guild Of Ponces – because I’m afraid that’s what we call ourselves – have fluctuated over time. It started as Al, Dave, Jimmy and I, but then Jimmy fell by the wayside and my stepfather Ian decided to join our number. He chose to drop out after a while, but by then we had also recruited my friend James, a man who didn’t need to seek out the ponce life, because the ponce life found him.

Like the Spice Girls, we each have our own unique identity. Al is Sartorial Ponce, because he’s always immaculately dressed: the man’s had his colours done, for goodness’ sake. Dave is Reluctant Ponce, to denote the fact that he always complains about the whole affair but secretly loves it.

Jimmy, back in the day, was Pub Ponce, and in charge for picking the post-lunch boozer. Ian, who knows more about Apple products than many people who actually work there, was Tech Ponce, and James is Preppy Ponce – or Neophyte Ponce, a title our newest member always gets, like the Baby Of The House, or New Guy in Loudermilk.

I, of course, am Grand Master Ponce. Would you expect anything else by now? Mock all you like – I’m immune these days, thanks to my childhood years in chess club and Dungeons & Dragons club (both hobbies, too late for me, are cool now). I unapologetically love Poncefests. They’ve always been a lovely miniature escape in the year, when my friends and I can catch up, more than slightly aware of how ridiculous the premise is.

Anyway, that was all well and good, but then Covid happened, and it all went quiet for Poncefest. A risk averse eighteen months meant that I saw my fellow ponces sporadically, and never all at the same time. Even after things unlocked, for some reason we were never all in the same place at once. We were like the Beatles, or the Pythons, without the acrimony. I lunched with Dave and Al a few times – once even for this blog – but a Poncefest proved elusive.

Of course, all the ponces were there for my and Zoë’s joint stag and hen do last year in Bruges, and at the wedding too, but both were part of a bigger gathering rather than a reunion per se. And then James went and put a spanner in the works by being seconded to India for nine months, and those gatherings, now five years dormant, felt more of a distant prospect than ever. So I was absolutely delighted when he returned to Blighty in the spring and talk on our WhatsApp group (the logo is a picture of Niles and Frasier Crane holding up a sign saying WILL WORK FOR LATTES) turned to getting the band back together. Would it happen?

It may not surprise you to hear that it did, and one sunny Saturday morning at the start of May I found myself bimbling round sunny Clifton, really looking forward to a long overdue luncheon. I’d bumped into people I knew outside Hart’s Bakery, straight off the train, before taking a bus to Bristol’s prettiest, if most unreal district. I stopped for a latte in the sunshine outside a little kiosk called Can’t Dance Coffee, before walking in wonder through Birdcage Walk, too taken with the glimmer of the sun through the foliage to realise I was, in fact, going in the wrong direction.

After an amble through Clifton, past the spot where I was born – it’s now been turned into flats – I found myself ruminating on all the different paths my life might have taken, and how many of them involved me never having left Bristol, or leaving but coming back to live here. Too much time alone always has this effect on me, so I grabbed a bench in the Mall Gardens, put something relaxing on my headphones and got lost in my library book. Not long after Al joined me and, because old habits died hard, we stopped in Shy Mimosa, Bristol’s excellent perfume shop, before grabbing a coffee and a taxi to our lunch venue.

Lapin was back in the centre of the city, in Wapping Wharf, a part of Bristol I knew and knew of but had almost never eaten in, unless you count a slightly underwhelming pizza at Bristol institution Bertha’s. Most of it is shipping containers, stacked two storeys high, and it boasts some of Bristol’s biggest names. Bravas‘ sibling Gambas is there, as are the likes of Root and Box-E. This year it’s been bolstered with three big names: Gurt Wings, who opened at the start of the year, to an apparently shaky start; COR‘s younger sibling RAGÙ and Lapin, which is the second site behind the owners of Totterdown’s BANK.

I should stress, by the way, that all those irksome block capitals are their choice, not mine: I guess in a city with as many good restaurants fighting for punters’ cash maybe they feel the need to shout. In any event, I’d chosen Lapin for a couple of reasons – partly because as a French restaurant it seemed especially appropriate for such a gathering and partly because it was shiny and new. On the day we visited it had been open exactly a month, by which time it had already received not one but two reviews from Mark Taylor, Bristol’s resident Reach plc hack. I on the other hand gave it a month to settle in, because that’s what I do.

It was a very warm day and Wapping Wharf was full of people younger, thinner and less fearful of hangovers than me, many of them sitting outside either at Lapin or its neighbours Gambas and Cargo Cantina. The place had the glow of youth, of sunlight diffused through an Aperol Spritz, but because I partly wanted to get a sense for the room we sat inside. Dave was already there – slightly early, because he is Dave – and James joined us shortly after, slightly later than us, because he is James. The natural order was very much in place.

The dining room, by the way, is rather nice. I think the nicest thing I can say about it is that you could easily forget that you were eating in a few shipping containers joined together. I tend to associate them with street food or Boxpark, with places you don’t linger, so I was glad that they’d turned these into a very convivial space, and one where there was quite enough daylight coming in from the big floor to ceiling windows. It was pretty no-frills, but just tasteful enough: sage walls, framed retro prints, tasteful overhead lights, sturdy, timeless furniture. No Tolix chairs to jam my arse into, I’m delighted to say.

Lapin’s menu was that especially challenging kind that felt like it contained no poor choices. Half a dozen starters, or a whole baked cheese to share, and another seven mains, again with three sharing options. On another day you would be reading about asparagus with sauce gribiche, confit duck with a spring cassoulet – whatever that is – Provençal fish stew or deep fried rabbit leg: the latter turned up at a neighbouring table towards the end of our meal and made me wish I could go back and start again.

Starters stopped just short of fifteen pounds, mains ranged more widely from just under twenty to just over thirty. The sharers were more expensive – côte de boeuf, for instance, clocking in at ninety-five pounds – sides were about a fiver, desserts just shy of a tenner. Little of that, in 2025, is especially shocking. The menu, under a section marked Accoutrements, gave you an option to add a spoon of caviar or a shaving of truffle to any of your dishes, and I was surprised by that: in a place defined by taste and tastefulness it felt – dare I say it? I guess I do – ever so slightly tacky.

But before the main event, drinks and nibbles. Lapin’s selection of apéritifs was tempting and extensive, and I think the four of us chose roughly in line with our ponciness. Al, easily the most refined, kept it classic with a Lillet Blanc. James and I, the next level down, had a cidre – Galipette – which was awfully nice, although now I’ve discovered you can buy it from Waitrose and Ocado I almost want to salute Lapin for their exorbitant markup. Dave, though, chose best with something called a demi peche, a keller pils with peach syrup. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it: Dave recreated it the following weekend at home, which was an exceptionally good idea.

We had a quartet of Comte gougères with that, and I thought they were decent but perhaps not too inspiring. The filling was good, the carpeting of finely grated cheese always welcome but the pastry itself lacked the lightness of touch it needed. At twelve pounds for these, I couldn’t help but compare them with the gorgeous cheddar curd fritters I’d had at Upstairs At Landrace a few weeks before, which had cost significantly less.

Now, when I review in a pair I always feel like I have to have something different to my dining companion, to present a range of dishes. That’s less of an issue in a bigger group, so as it turned out Dave and James ordered the same starters and mains, as did Al and I. Even at the time, I have to admit that I was thinking This is the life, I’m in a lovely restaurant with three of my favourite people, the wine is flowing… and I have less to write up than I might have done. Unworthy I know, but there it is.

Dave and James were pleased with their starter, I think. A puck of deep fried pig’s head was the good part, and the forkful I had was great. Plonking a forest floor of chicory and dandelion on top of it, though, was less successful. I don’t think either is really anybody’s favourite salad ingredient – not as pointless as frisée, but not far off – and the nicest croutons in the world aren’t going to redeem that.

Al’s and my starter was similarly along the right lines but not at its destination. I adore rillette, I adore rabbit, the prospect of rabbit rillette was a nailed-down choice for me. And it was pretty pleasant – clean and ascetic rather than punchy and rustic. I loved the carrot jam, and thought the dish could have stood a bit more of it. The bread, I’m sorry to say, was unremarkable. And somehow the whole thing combined to less than the sum of its parts, even with a few rogue cornichons secreted away.

This dish troubled me, if that isn’t a silly way to put it, because I should have loved it and I’m not sure why I didn’t. It felt too nice, too well-behaved, like an attempt to create a platonic ideal of a dish rather than the dish itself. As it happened, I was of course in France the week after I ate at Lapin, but it wasn’t the meals I had in Montpellier that came to mind when I weighed up this rabbit rillette. It was the unforced, unshowy kind of dishes I had earlier in the year, at Paulette.

We also, out of pure greed, ordered another starter to attack between the four of us. Duck liver parfait was, again, a pleasant, glossy little number, hiding in its ramekin under a layer of cherry. The menu called it “pickled stone fruit” but really, it wasn’t clear that any pickling had taken place. Again, this was nice rather than knockout – and, again, it highlighted that Lapin’s bread wasn’t the best. And that you could have done with more of it.

By this point, whatever misgivings I might have had about the starters, our meal was in full swing. There’s something lovely about that interplay with good friends – that mixture of catching up and reminiscing, of mild ribbing and in-jokes. All that was helped by an extremely good bottle of wine – a Languedoc white by Domaine Montplezy, not bone dry with notes of peach and citrus.

As it happens, I found that wine the following weekend in Montpellier at the wine shop round the corner from our B&B. We bought a bottle and again that means I got a good idea of Lapin’s markups, which are considerable. But perhaps that misses the point, and perhaps ordering a whole bottle of something does too: one of the things that is genuinely impressive about Lapin is that its whole wine list is available by the glass. Someone has spent a fair amount of money with Coravin, and it gives you an enviable range of choices compared to most restaurants I can think of.

If the starters were a little wobbly, the mains are where Lapin became far more sure-footed. My and Al’s skate wing was a really joyous plate of food, served in a vadouvin butter rather than the conventional beurre noisette that so often accompanies this fish. And that in itself was interesting – vadouvin is a mild curried sauce that originates from the French colonial period and you could almost taste in it the intersection between traditional and colonial French.

It wasn’t a conventional brown butter sauce dotted with capers, and instead came topped with monk’s beard, but in it you could sense some of the DNA it shared with the classic dish. It was little like those pavement cafés in Marrakesh’s Ville Nouvelle that, despite being stuck on the edge of northern Africa, feel like they carry some echo of Paris. I wouldn’t pick this over a more traditional rendition, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it.

James and Dave went for perhaps a more mainstream option from the menu, a whole truffle roasted poussin with a Madeira jus. This, to me, was probably a stronger choice – the truffle present but not dominating, the meat beautifully cooked and that jus setting off the whole shooting match. James very generously let me try some, and although I enjoyed it it didn’t make me wish I had ordered it.

That tells its own story, I guess, that I still wondered whether the real gem was elsewhere on the menu, undiscovered. But again, that might tell you more about me than Lapin: I can already picture Dave, at some point over the weekend, reading this review and thinking What is he going on about? That poussin was amazing.

The sides were a weird inversion of the natural order and a good example of how expectations can be completely confounded. The menu offers duck fat frites, and all four of us could think of nothing finer. But when we went to order four portions our server – who was excellent, as all the staff at Lapin were – suggested ever so nicely that this might be a bit monotonous and that we might want to mix it up a bit with some pomme purée.

So we did that, and were rewarded with an experience that is pretty much solely worth visiting Lapin to enjoy. The duck fat frites were decent rather than exceptional, but compared to the pomme purée they became more like “fuck that” frites. Because the pomme purée – no hint of hyperbole here I promise – was one of the best things I’ve eaten in years. Loaded with butter until it could take no more, than bathed in more brown butter, it took on a taste and texture that transcended savoury or sweet, almost with a note of toffee, or fudge.

Al told our server, when the empty dishes were taken away, that you could have served it as a dessert. He wasn’t far off: it was truly magnificent stuff.

Before dessert, three of us had an intermediate course, the Trou Normand. This is a Normandy tradition, a palate cleanser consisting of apple sorbet anointed with apple brandy. It was very good indeed, the sorbet smooth and hyper-real with the taste of apple.

The apple brandy, from Somerset, was excellent too. The menu said that you could add a glass of Calvados for an extra four pounds, although it wasn’t clear whether you would get Calvados on the side or whether the apple brandy would be swapped out for Calvados.

Whichever it was, the pricing of this felt a little awry: eight pounds felt like a lot, twelve in total for Calvados would have been like, well, like paying an extra thirteen pounds to dump a spoonful of caviar, randomly, on your main course.

Before dessert proper we’d also decided to push the boat out and order a bottle of dessert wine. Dave doesn’t do wine these days – he stayed on his demi peche during dinner – but he makes an exception for dessert wine. Again many of the dessert wines are available by the glass, and the menu pairs one with each of the desserts, but we couldn’t resist. Lapin also offered two really tempting bottles – a Rivesaltes Ambré 1978 for a slightly ridiculous amount or a 1992 vintage of the same wine for eighty pounds. Don’t judge, but we had the latter, and it was ambrosial.

Our server explained, in a “look what you could have won” kind of a way, that by most standards 1992 was still quite young for this wine but we were very happy with our choice nevertheless.

“1992, the year we met” said Dave to me, as we took our first heavenly sips. Suddenly I felt like however old the wine was, I was older still. But in any case there was much to celebrate, so I thoroughly enjoyed a wine as old as one of my oldest friendships. The wine has aged well, the friendship even better.

We tried a decent range of the desserts. I think on this occasion Al and I chose best with the St. Emilion au chocolat. I’ve never heard it called that before but it was an extremely nicely done ganache, a not ungenerous portion of it, topped, I think, with crumbled amaretti biscuit and served simply with terrific crème fraiche. I was always going to gravitate towards this dessert and, however good the others were, I would struggle not to order it again.

I think the other candidates were more workmanlike. Dave enjoyed the pain perdu with apple and vanilla ice cream, again crumbled with the good stuff to lend texture, with a shiny, sticky sauce. I expect if I ordered it I would have liked it too, and I imagine it went better with the dessert wine, in terms of colour coordination if for no other reason, than my overdose of chocolate did.

James ordered the Basque cheesecake, but neglected to take a picture. In fairness, you probably know what a Basque cheesecake looks like. Imagine one of those, with some rhubarb on the side. That’s what James had. He liked it, and Dave reminded me that it’s ridiculously easy to make which is why he never orders it in restaurants. I still have the WhatsApp message he sent me, with the recipe, favourited on my phone. One of these days.

Al is legendary for ordering two desserts, very much following in the footsteps of the great Nora Ephron who always held that this was one of the most important life lessons she ever learned. Technically if you count the Trou Normand and about a quarter of the Éclair Suzette we ordered to share between us, this meal constituted a personal best.

We’d ordered the éclair on the advice of our server and again, it had some nice touches – the candied orange on top, the Grand Marnier infused crème diplomat inside. But again, Lapin’s touch with the choux let it down. It was leaden rather than ethereal, and took some sawing through. As a finishing touch to the meal it summed up some of the inconsistencies, and gave me something to think about.

Our meal for four, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just shy of five hundred and twenty pounds. Now, after you’ve had your sharp intake of breath, I have to say that doesn’t feel like poor value, at all, for what we had. We had something like five courses each, and even then we threw in a couple of extra things to try. We had apéritifs and two bottles of wine, one of which was from the deeper end of the list.

All things considered, I think about one hundred and thirty pounds each isn’t at all bad, for the afternoon we had. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you should feel like you get this much living for it. It made me feel sad for my poor friend Jerry, parting with a hundred pounds for an infinitely less enjoyable meal at Gee’s not too long ago. Besides, expense be damned: this was Poncefest, it’s not like we were going to settle for a Happy Meal.

You might ask, given all that, why the rating down there is what it is. You might feel that this reads higher than that, or lower, and I would have some sympathy. When I think of meals I’ve had in Bristol, Lapin is really pretty good. But something stops it, for me, being in that upper echelon, with the likes of Caper and Cure, or Marmo. Or, if you’re comparing French meals with French meals, something prevents it reaching the standard of Paulette.

I keep coming back to that rabbit rillette, pretty close to being an eponymous dish for this restaurant. I keep remembering that it was nice and clean and pure and rarefied. And it’s not because Lapin is in a shipping container, because as I said the place managed to make me completely forget that. But Lapin, for all its excellent qualities, ever so slightly felt, to me, like a brilliant piece of cosplay, more than a French restaurant.

You could say that there’s nothing wrong with that, and I might agree. But that’s what stopped it, as far as I was concerned, attaining true greatness. I wouldn’t rule it out that at some point they will get there, and I imagine enough people in Bristol will rave about it to sustain it on that journey. In the meantime, it has a single dish that almost merits a pilgrimage, even if it’s a mere side, and it played host to a marvellous, long overdue reunion. When the ponces assemble next – in a suitably effete way, I can assure you – Lapin has set a standard we’ll be very lucky to exceed.

Lapin – 8.6
Unit 14, Cargo 2, Museum St, Bristol, BS1 6ZA
0117 4084997

https://www.lapinbristol.co.uk

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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: Los Gatos, Swindon

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When I announced on social media last month that I’d had a very enjoyable day eating and drinking my way round Swindon there was (admittedly a limited amount of) complete and utter astonishment. What? said one person, no doubt thinking I had been hacked. Good Lord! Where? said another.

A third, regular reader Trudy, was particularly interested, having recently moved to Swindon where, as fas as I’m aware, they don’t have a friendly neighbourhood restaurant blogger. I met Trudy at the recent ER readers’ lunch at Clay’s so I gave her a sneak preview of what this review is about to tell you: yes, there are places to eat and drink in Swindon, and they’re a lot better than you might expect.

I’m not kidding – Swindon has enough about it to justify a trip out west on the train. You have to do a thirty minute walk from the station, up a hill, but you are rewarded with Swindon’s Old Town which is a small but perfectly formed district full of nice shops, restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars. There’s an arts centre, and the Town Gardens, a beautiful Victorian park with a listed bandstand and a cafe (it also, according to the council’s website, hosts something called the “My Dad’s Bigger Than Your Dad Festival”: I love my dad dearly, but I’m not entering him in this any time soon).

Where had all this been hiding? You could almost imagine you were in a little town on the outskirts of the outskirts of the Cotswolds, and then I realised that I sort of almost was. And truly, I had a wonderful afternoon eating and drinking and making merry in the company of my friends Dave, who lives in Wootton Bassett but I suspect wishes he lived in Cirencester, and Al, who lives in Cirencester and so doesn’t have to.

We started out with a couple of outstanding coffees from the small, difficult to find but deeply charming Pour Bois – which I pronounced to Dave as if it was French before realising that of course it was pronounced poor boyz because we were in Swindon, not Montparnasse. My mistake: it’s not easy being Frasier Crane in a town full of Bob “Bulldog” Briscoes.

After lunch we wandered over to Ray’s, an ice cream parlour which is an Old Town institution, and sat on the wall opposite eating our ice creams in mute contentment. And then we wandered over to the Town Gardens, which – don’t hate me for saying this – slightly puts Forbury Gardens to shame, not least because it has a lovely little cafe serving superb coffee which was miles better than anything you could get from the equivalent kiosk in Reading. The beans are by local Light Bulb Coffee, and I also picked some up to try at home (it’s marvellous stuff).

After ice cream and coffee there was nothing for it but to try some beer. Did you know that Swindon has a nascent craft beer scene? I didn’t either, but it turns out it does, with several great venues dotted along the Old Town’s Devizes Road. We started out in Tap & Brew, local brewery Hop Kettle’s Swindon tap room, which served some stonking beers: my favourite was Kepler, a proper fruit explosion of a NEIPA so good that I bought a bottle to stash in my bag (it didn’t make it to the following weekend, that’s how good it was).

After that we had a short stumble to the Tuppenny, a lovely pub with an impressive selection of beer on keg – including both Double-Barrelled’s Parka and DEYA’s stupendous Steady Rolling Man as permanent fixtures – and a belting can fridge. I had some splendid pales, made a detour into sweet, indulgent stouts that tasted, by pure witchcraft, of battenburg or chocolate orange, and I rolled out to catch my train home totally convinced that Swindon’s Old Town could match any enclave Reading had to offer when it came to the finer things in life.

That’s all well and good, but I maintain that any day trip away has to be anchored around a meal, whether that’s dinner or lunch. And for Swindon, for me, that destination was never in doubt. So after our coffees at Pour Bois, and before our ice cream at Ray’s, Dave, Al and I headed to Los Gatos, in the heart of Old Town, to see if it still lived up to the billing it had in my mind as The Restaurant Worth Visiting Swindon For.

Los Gatos is a tapas restaurant, and it’s been going for nearly twenty years. I don’t get to Swindon often, but whenever I do I make sure I have lunch there. I’ve said before that tapas restaurants in this country tend to either be run by Spaniards, with mixed results, or by evangelical Brits who are trying to reimagine a tapas bar as its best possible self. Oxford’s Arbequina, Bristol’s Bar 44 and Bravas definitely fall into that category.

But Los Gatos, for me, feels more like it’s trying to recreate than perfect – and there’s nothing at all wrong with that, because some days a recreation of Malaga or Granada in England would be a wonderful thing in its own right. Despite that it, too, was founded and run by Brits and named in tribute to the legendary Malaga bar of the same name. Originally they had a site round the corner, but they moved to their current site a minute down the road and then, during lockdown, they sold up.

The new owners have expanded by taking the site next door, and this was my first visit since the pandemic so I was a tad discombobulated by it not looking how I remembered. But the fact remains that it’s really nicely done, and it helps that our table was in the original room, where I’ve eaten before. It is a really lovely space, with tasteful terrazzo marble-effect tables and – as there should be – stools up at the bar. The room had plenty of natural light, attractive dark beams and a blackboard full of wines and sherries by the glass.

I’m not going to go all Berkshire Live and tell you it was just like being in Malaga, but I have to say the overall effect wasn’t a million miles off. We started with a crisp glass of fino apiece – turns out there were three Frasier Cranes in town after all – and enjoyed the building buzz of a restaurant turning a very healthy trade at lunchtime. Again, I stopped to remind myself that I was in Swindon. In honesty, I did that more than once during the meal.

The joy of a place like Los Gatos is looking at the menu, wanting to order nearly everything and then realising that in a tapas restaurant, provided there are enough of you, you can have a decent stab at it. And Los Gatos’ menu is very much that kind of menu with most dishes around the seven pound mark, all of them tempting.

There’s plenty of cooking on display too, rather than an over-reliance on buying and slicing, so although you can get jamon or queso they’re a very small section of a large and diverting selection. Typical Andulucian dishes are well represented, like spinach with chickpeas or fried aubergine with honey, and I suspect you could quite happily bring a vegetarian here: perhaps one of the main indicators that you’re not in Spain is that they even make a little effort to accommodate vegans.

But Dave, Al and I were neither of those things, so as Dave sipped an Alhambra and Al and I tackled a beautifully fresh, fruity white from Jumilla – decent value at just over thirty pounds – we did one of the most enjoyable things you can do in a tapas restaurant. We chatted away, picked out our favourite dishes, haggled and scheduled, putting them in our first and second wave. As we did, I thought about how much I’d missed this kind of sociable eating, with these two. Of course, I didn’t tell them that then, because we’re men in the last gasps of our forties, but writing it here will have to suffice.

Our first set of dishes were all, without exception, winners – so much so that my usual anal urge to photograph everything pretty much deserted me. That’s bad news for both of us – me because I’ll have to rely on my immortal prose and you because you’ll have to read it. The very pick of the dishes was the hake in beer batter – it’s a fish beloved of the Spanish but Los Gatos bring as much out of it as anywhere I’ve been in Spain. Three huge chunks of the stuff, in the lightest batter, sprinkled liberally with flakes of salt was the perfect reintroduction to their food, and a deep, golden saffron mayo played nicely with it, perhaps more gently than a honking alioli would have done.

Everything seemed geared for three to share because we also got three superb croquetas – much more dense and substantial than I’m used to with more heft and less bechamel. That might not suit everyone, but it really suited me. If you came to Los Gatos as a pair or a four those two dishes would cause you serious problems, but the three of us felt very fortunate.

Jamon – Serrano rather than anything fancier – was decent and hand carved, with a good umami note and a nice marbling of fat. It didn’t perhaps have the really intensely savoury quality, or melting fat of the very best Spanish hams, but it was eight quid or so and far from stingy, so I wasn’t in the mood to complain. By that point in the lunch I wasn’t in the mood to complain about anything, not even Dave’s jokes.

I also loved the mushrooms in a cream and sherry sauce, achieving a precarious balance between glossy sweetness and the underlying savoury note just peeking through thanks to the oloroso. We didn’t order any bread for the sauce, though, which was a mistake. I’ve been doing this gig for ten years and I still make schoolboy errors like that.

Our greed was such that there were still two other dishes in our first order, and one was a dish I’ve loved at Los Gatos for a long time. Morcilla de Burgos came beautifully presented, two discs of earthy, fragrant black pudding sandwiching a glorious middle layer of sweet piquillo peppers, quail’s egg perched on top. The prettiest thing we ate all day, so naturally the one I didn’t photograph, but a really gorgeous morsel. Also possibly the hardest to share – or perhaps I just didn’t want to – so if you go to Los Gatos order your own personal portion. For my sake, if not for yours.

And last of all, because we had been carb-free up to that point – we ordered an arroz con pollo. I seem to recall that Los Gatos serves paella at the weekends, and this was a miniature version of that. I quite liked it, and I was glad to see it topped with beautifully done chicken thigh, but again it was probably one of the less shareable things we ordered. The rice did come in handy though, because that sherry and cream sauce had a very agreeable habit of sticking to every single grain, if you crossed the streams.

And then, not at all sated but the edges knocked off our hunger, we regrouped. We looked at our list of outstanding dishes and made our decisions – did we still want them? Was it enough? Was it too much? If I’d just been with Dave, a slim man who very much intends to stay that way, it might have been tricky to get them all past the committee stage, but Al – whippet thin despite eating like a horse – has been known to have two desserts, just because, so I knew I’d be safe.

If the second round of tapas wasn’t quite as impressive as the first, that was partly because we were no longer ravenous. Also, the dishes you absolutely cannot bear to miss out on always end up in the first round, so the bar is meant to be lower when you go back to the menu.

And probably the two weakest dishes were in this section, although I’m not sure either would have made my must-order list in the first place. Calamares were decent but unspecial, and not a patch on the ones you can get in Spain, and the black beans with pancetta and chorizo were surprisingly bland for a dish including two of the greatest cured meats known to man. I found my mind drifting to the cannelini beans at Bristol’s COR, zippy with lemon and topped with breadcrumbs, achieving so much more with fewer ingredients.

We’d also ordered a classic dish, chorizo cooked simply in wine, and it was the kind of thing that restored your faith in a restaurant, both in terms of their ability to buy the right stuff and then cook it spot on. If I knew where they got their chorizo from I’d place an order, because I’m fed up of trying to rustle dishes up with the slightly gristly nonsense you get from Brindisa these days. We could easily have ordered a second dish of this, and I rather wish we had.

We also ordered chicken livers, again in a sherry and cream sauce, and although I didn’t mind it I didn’t think, with hindsight, that it was different enough from the mushrooms to justify ordering both.

And our penultimate dish was the most expensive thing I found on the menu, Galician-style octopus. When I’ve had this in Spain it’s just octopus, heavy on the paprika – and the octopus for that matter – and although octopus is always a joy, it can be a tad one note. I really liked what Los Gatos did with the dish, serving it with new potatoes and capers almost as a hot salad. And the octopus was beautiful – tender and tasty with no bounce or toughness, which is by no means a given abroad, let alone here. I think Dave and Al let me have more than my fair share of this dish. They’re good like that.

And the final thing we ordered? Another portion of that hake. Take a look at the picture below and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.

Service was great. In the course of researching this review I chanced upon some online reviews that said that it wasn’t the same since the restaurant expanded, that a staff of two or three had become a legion and that something magical had been lost. Well, I guess we all sometimes feel that way when our favourites get big and successful but personally I thought the staff were terrific, very efficient, just friendly enough and I was quite happy with them not being overworked. I’m a bit of a pinko like that.

We might well have had dessert, but knowing that there was an ice cream parlour literally on the other side of the road curtailed any ambitions we had in that regard. I couldn’t talk either of them into a Pedro Ximenez either, because beer was calling too. Our meal came to just under fifty pounds a head, not including tip, which I thought was a steal for everything we had.

Ordinarily I start every review of a tapas restaurant by complaining that Reading doesn’t have a tapas restaurant and never really has. You could set your watch by it. So this time, for novelty value, I thought I could shoehorn it in at the end. But rather than say that, I just want to say that this kind of restaurant, and this kind of eating, is among my very favourite kind. Ordering everything, trying everything, sharing your joy and diminishing any disappointments – it really is one of the best ways to eat there is. And when you find somewhere that does it well, you’ll gladly travel to it.

In my case, that does seem to involve flying to Andalucia at least once a year, but I am really delighted that Los Gatos, a mere half hour train ride away, remains more than good enough as a substitute for that. The fact that around it has sprung up this magnificent little ecosystem of coffee, craft beer, green space and ice cream is the icing on the cake. Old Town, square mile for square mile, is arguably a lovelier spot than anywhere in Reading, I think – and, yes, that includes Caversham.

So if Spanish food is even remotely of interest to you, I highly recommend that you make your way to Swindon – despite the incredulity of everybody you tell at work – because it very much merits the journey. I think I prefer Los Gatos to Oxford’s Arbequina, much as I love Arbequina, and it edges out Newbury’s Goat On The Roof, too. I still need to make it to El Cerdo in Maidenhead, at some point, but I doubt somehow that I’ll love it quite the way I love Los Gatos. 

And in terms of our closest Spanish restaurant, Wokingham’s Sanpa, put it this way: when I went back there earlier in the year I worried that the rating I gave it was far too harsh. Having now eaten at Los Gatos and seen what commited Brits can create as a temple to Spain, in an unfashionable town, I think that if anything I was far too generous. Go to Los Gatos instead: have a sherry, order that morcilla, send me a photo. I doubt I’ll enjoy many lunches more this year than the one I had there.

Los Gatos – 8.7
1-3 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BJ
01793 488450

https://www.losgatos.uk

Restaurant review: COR, Bristol

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For once, I turned up for lunch in Bristol moderately ahead of the curve. COR, a cosy small plates restaurant in Bedminster, has only been open since October and, so far, has mostly been Bristol famous rather than nationally famous. Not completely, though: Tom Parker Bowles raved about it in the Mail On Sunday on a recent visit. And last month, when Square Meal listed its top 100 restaurants for 2023 COR made the list: not too shabby for a restaurant that’s been trading for about four months. Even so, stepping through the front door with my old friend Al for lunch during a weekend trip to my favourite city, I felt slightly closer to the zeitgeist than usual.

They’ve got a lovely site. It’s a corner plot, double aspect with big windows letting in plenty of light and despite being on the compact side all the space is used superbly. There are relatively few tables, but there are also excellent, comfy-looking stools up at the window letting you look out on the painfully cool passers-by, on their way to a café, the terrific looking natural wine bar or a smashing chocolate shop. The seats at the bar look like fun too, and some of them give you a view out back to the open-ish kitchen. The restaurant is passionate about always saving some room for walk-ins at the window or at the bar: like so much else about it, it’s admirable.

COR’s menu read extraordinarily well. I know small plates aren’t for everybody, but these were grouped and flowed effortlessly, from nibbles to charcuterie, on to seafood, to a selection of vegetarian and meat dishes and then a handful of larger, more conventional plates. Just the three, in fact. The nibbles and charcuterie were close to a fiver, the small plates generally hovered just under ten pounds and the bigger ones were around fifteen quid.

Now some people will look at that and think “ugh”, probably put off by bad experiences with the small plates concept in the past. I get that – I’ve had many of those too – but to me this just read like a dream, an edible Choose Your Own Adventure with no bad endings. Our waitress, who was positively brilliant throughout, told us roughly how many dishes people ordered per head, although I must say that she probably meant customers built like her, or Al, rather than built like me. We may have disregarded her sterling advice. She also told us they were down to their last portion of mojama, air-dried tuna, on the specials board, and nodded approvingly when we asked to bag it.

That turned out to be an outstanding decision, although in fairness so was practically everything we ordered. So was booking the place for lunch in the first place, come to think of it. I’m used to eating mojama up at the bar in Granada, thick slabs of coarse, salty tuna sprinked with almonds and drizzled with olive oil, as simple as they come. This, by contrast, was gossamer-light, with a judicious single almond, beautifully toasted, per slice and little segments of sweet, sharp orange to improve things still further. My mind may have been playing tricks on me, but I think the whole lot rested on a smudge of houmous. Every mouthful was delightful, and it never lost that sense of surprise: small plates, in fairness, find that easier.

As we rhapsodised Al sipped his white vermouth, I my Asturian cider – yes, we’re those kinds of wankers – and all my cares dissolved; Bedminster wasn’t Granada, not by a long chalk, but it had already earned twin city status, and we’d just gotten started.

Finocchiona, fennel salami, was more about buying well. But COR definitely bought well, and if their menu had listed where they’d got the stuff from I’d have ended up buying well too. It had a wonderful whack of aniseed and I liked it very much – it also wasn’t too ridiculously priced at a fiver. As you will discover, I had trouble finding fault with nearly anything that COR did so I might as well take my opportunity here: only two cornichons? Really? Have a word with yourselves.

That minor disappointment out of the way, the last of our first wave of dishes was also on the specials board and if I eat anything as small but perfectly formed again this year I’ll have done very well for myself. The last time I was in Bristol I was wowed by a canelé rich with honey, whisky and smoke. This time, I was even more dumbfounded by COR’s savoury canelé which came drizzled with a grassy olive oil, tarragon and thinly sliced mushroom. Cutting vertically through it prompted the reveal, that the whole thing had been filled with a creamy, savoury mushroom duxelles which made me beam. This was emphatically not for sharing: Al and I scoffed one each, and I had half a mind to order another after dessert.

Another thing I really loved about COR was that they took our orders and artfully sequenced them almost like a gastronomic mixtape. None of this “your dishes will come out when they’re ready” bollocks that treats you to feast or famine, instead we got things in a carefully structured order that showed every dish off to its best advantage. Take this for example, Jerusalem artichokes fried until golden and sticky-edged and served on an earthy pool of artichoke velouté. It was simply magnificent, and if I couldn’t really detect much truffle in the truffled pecorino I was having far too much fun to give a shit. I have to really fancy Jerusalem artichoke to order it in a restaurant because of its legendary side effects. Here I did it anyway, and the side effects never materialised. That’s what I call winning at life.

Equally delicious was the next dish, slow-cooked pork shoulder crammed into radicchio and topped with ribbons of pickled fennel (and some slightly pointless dill). The pork was splendid, with the texture ignorant people are prone to describe as unctuous. This vegetation-as-taco concept seems to be a Bristolian one: I had something very similar, albeit far smaller, at Wilson’s late last year. But this was the size you actually wanted it to be – and well portioned for sharing. Did I wish I was eating them both to myself? I like to think I’m a decent friend, but yes. Yes I did.

By this point, Al and I were suffused with a warm glow, catching up for the first time in months, enjoying glasses of surprisingly fruity and accessible Cataratto (“do you know, that’s the only wine I like?” said our waitress, charm personified without necessarily realising it). And we got to talking about superlatives: Al has the misfortune to spend some of his time surrounded by people from Gen Z who only ever use one superlative – “stunning” – and use it all the time. About everything. Everything, he told me, is their “new favourite dish”, whether it’s a special occasion or some spaghetti hoops out of a tin. Even hearing about this perpetual state of wide-eyed wonder, I’m afraid, made me want to kick something very hard.

But we were both rather running out of adjectives by the time our next dish arrived. Tropea onions, cooked to soft, caramelised wonder, drizzled with a hazelnut beurre noisette and crispy sage leaves was another knockout, even without the three dollops of goats cheese (Ragstone, apparently) providing a little agriculture to offset the sweetness. I gave Al the spare onion: I told you I was a good friend, although he did let me have the extra Jerusalem artichoke, and I thought that one of the nicest things about sharing dishes is that you can both have virtually the same superlative experience. If there’s a better thing to do with an old friend than go to an excellent restaurant, I’m not sure I know what it is: I know some people like watching the football, or playing squash, or bloody golf, but for me this is as good as it gets.

“Would you describe it as stunning?” I asked. Al grinned.

“Definitely. New favourite dish.”

My new favourite dish – and in fact it stayed that way for the rest of the meal – was the next one. A really generous portion of cuttlefish, cooked sous vide and then finished on the grill I believe, was ludicrously tender and came already sliced into ribbons. I could imagine serving this with ‘nduja, or with salsa verde, but matching it with both, along with some capers, in a dazzling, dizzying tricolore was a stroke of genius. This dish would be at the apex of nearly any meal, and if I could find anywhere closer to home that served something like this I’d be there all the time, even if it was only half as good.

Our main courses involved the only misstep, and by “misstep” I mean “eight out of ten dish”. Al had decided to try the manicotti, a pasta dish, and he was encouraged in this by our waitress when he told her he was torn.

“It’s one of my favourite dishes, it’s like something your grandmother would make.”

“Your grandmother must be a better cook than mine was” I said, fighting back memories of wan fish, floured and fried, served on the kind of brown smoked glass plate every household had in the seventies. Still, she did at least cook proper chips in a chip pan, something nobody does now.

I think the dish was better than anything Al’s grandmothers could have conjured up either, but it wasn’t as much a tour de force as everything else had been. Manicotti are big sleeves of pasta, thicker and bigger than canelloni but the same kind of thing. Whereas this was a single giant tube, folded rather than rolled, and the overall look of it was somewhere between canelloni and some kind of pasta calzone, if I haven’t mixed my metaphors to death by saying that. It was stuffed with ricotta, topped with braised tomato, parmesan and rocket and it managed to look hearty, well-done and somehow unspecial.

“It’s okay” said Al. “It just doesn’t match everything that’s gone before. The braised tomatoes are fantastic, though. I just should have ordered the same thing as you.”

I mean, he should have. Because while I watched him eat a big sheet of pasta with some cheese in it pretending to be a Mobius strip, I was diving into a marvellous piece of onglet, as yielding as you like, with lashings of intense jus and – the icing on the cake – a dauphinoise of interlayered potato and celeriac, all topped with quite a lot of gruyere. It was just the most incredible thing, and when I saw on the menu that it clocked in at under sixteen pounds I thought there must have been a typo.

But there wasn’t. That whole plate of food for sixteen pounds was outrageously generous, charitable even. And speaking of charitable, even this dish had been served in a way that encouraged sharing, with the steak cut into substantial slices. I let Al have as many as he wanted to dull the food envy, because I’m not a monster: I suspect he would have had more, but it would have made the envy worse, not better. He consoled himself with some exceptional hand cut chips, dipped in a tarragon mayonnaise so herb-heavy it was the colour of guacamole. I had some too. Of course I did, it was world-beating.

We’d come all this way, so not having dessert would have been madness. The dessert menu is nicely compact – although they also have a selection of eight different cheeses – and Al had clearly learned from his mistake because, like me, he opted for the chocolate mousse. I think it’s an underrated dessert at the best of times, but this was at the very best of times – a hulking scoop of the stuff, dense yet airy, studded with plates of almond dentelle like the spines of a stegosaurus. That enough would have made it exquisite, but sprinkling it with flakes of sea salt and drizzling it with olive oil was the final touch.

“That chocolate mousse was so good” I told our waitress as she took our bowls away and we sipped our dessert wines (like I said, those kind of wankers), fighting the almost primal urge to order a savoury canelé for the road.

“Thank you so much! I actually made that yesterday, I spend some shifts in the kitchen as a pastry chef. I can’t actually eat it myself, it’s a bit too rich for me.”

I can’t imagine the level of self-restraint involved in being able to make something like that and not eat it, but then that’s why some people are slim and I’m not. Al, on the other hand, eats like a horse and is still as skinny as he was when I first met him about thirty years ago; this is why some people are jammy bastards and I’m not. But anyway, despite being thin, talented and impossibly young our waitress was a class act. All the people who served us throughout lunch were, actually: friendly, passionate about the food, with opinions on all of their favourite dishes, they were a real credit to the restaurant. How does anywhere get this good after just four months? It was quite miraculous.

Our waitress asked where we were from, and I mentioned Reading, and she proudly told us she’d been there. Once. Then of course the truth came out, that she’d passed through it recently on a train to London to watch a gig. It was the first time she’d ever been to London on her own, she said, at the tender age of twenty. And suddenly Al and I felt very old indeed, and seized with a sneaking suspicion that we should hightail it out of Bedminster and find an old man pub to hunker down in to carry on our gossiping session. The natural wine bar would just have to wait for another time. Our meal for two, with a very richly deserved service charge included, came to just under a hundred and ninety pounds. There was literally nothing to begrudge, except any of their punters who only paid ten per cent service.

As I was writing this review, I messaged Al, mainly to reminisce about what a phenomenal meal it was. What a stunning array of dishes I sent him, hoping to get a cheap laugh.

“One of my objections to the S word is the cognitive dissonance” he replied. “Stunning implies losing your senses, but with food that good your senses are very much alive. Sorry, you can tell I’ve thought about this too much.”

He’s right, though. What I loved about COR the most was having my senses awakened and reawakened time and again over the course of such a glorious lunch – old favourites, new combinations but always real integrity and imagination. Nothing was boring or humdrum, which I can say because I didn’t have that pasta dish, and in terms of the sheer number of hits I think it ranks as one of the best meals I can remember, at home or abroad.

I’m sure you know the drill by now with this kind of review. Bristol, Bristol, Bristol, hyperbole hyperbole hyperbole. But I like to think I’ve been here enough to sift the hypebeasts from the real contenders. The last time I was in Bedminster I ate at Sonny Stores, which was raved about by literally everybody but left me cold. And the last time I was in Bristol I went to Wilsons, which I raved about to literally anybody who’d listen.

And positioning COR relative to those two is pretty easy – it is miles better than Sonny Stores, a neighbourhood restaurant with a touch of the Peter Principle about it. But actually, although the number at the bottom is marginally lower than the one I gave to Wilsons, if you’re only having one meal in Bristol I would go here instead. Wilsons is a take it or leave it menu, a set seven courses, and when it’s on form it’s incredible. But I have friends who went there off the back of my review and although they loved the flavours, they found it a carb free zone and, I’m sorry to say, they left hungry. That will never happen to you at COR, and you will have an awful lot of fun deciding exactly how you want to become full. That’s what restaurants should all be about.

And how does COR compare to Reading restaurants? There’s nowhere in Reading even remotely like it. That is, and continues to be, the problem. You might get bored of hearing me say so, but it’s important to have goals. Reading’s should be to attract at least a couple of restaurants in approximately the same ballpark as this. I really hope it happens. It’s starting to get a tiny bit embarrassing.

COR – 9.5
81 North Street, Bedminster, BS3 1ES
0117 9112986

https://www.correstaurant.com