Tag: Dave

Restaurant review: Juliet, Stroud

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Stroud is lovely. Have you been? It’s so easy if you live in Reading: there’s a direct train that sets off once an hour, takes an hour and drops you close to the heart of things, less than five minutes from the foot of the town’s pretty, sweeping – somewhat steep – High Street. I’m there with my old friend Dave, who’s rapidly staking a claim to be my West Of England Correspondent, and he knows the town better than I do, so I let him lead the way.

The last time I was here was over four years ago, and it’s safe to say that although I liked it then, I didn’t remember it being quite this, well, good. Dave takes me into a mall called the Five Valleys Shopping Centre, to enjoy a brilliant latte at Rough Hands Coffee, along with a chocolate and sea salt cookie that is miles better than anything you could buy in any Reading mall. As he makes inroads into an almond croissant almost as big as his head, he tells me more about the place.

“It’s not like the rest of the Cotswolds, mate, it’s got a touch of Glastonbury about it. Let’s just say there are quite a few crystal shops.”

I look around. Although I’m sure Dave is right, I spot people queuing for coffee and baked goods, advertising their favourite brands on their totes. I see moustaches and those daft little Steve Zissou hats and more than a little Lucy & Yak – not all on the same person I might add – and truly, the place feels more hipster than hippy. You don’t get all this in Cirencester or Stow on the bloody Wold.

The edge blunted on my peckishness, we start exploring the Cotswolds’ most atypical town. The mall has a food court that, any other day, would make an excellent spot for lunch, and a boutique department store, Sandersons, that boasts a selection of niche fragrances to put many cities to shame. It’s so old school it no longer has a website, having decided to abandon e-commerce last summer.

But then we climb the high street and near the top, by a bookshop and an organic café, we reach the reason the place is buzzing so loudly on a sunny Saturday morning, the farmers’ market. It really is a delight, spreading from the splendidly named Shambles on one side of the street to the little maze of streets on the other, and perhaps the best way that I can describe it is to say that it’s a flagrant attempt to make me part with as much money as possible in the shortest possible time.

It’s like a deeply middle-class IKEA, where you arrive fully intending to buy just one thing but come away with a bag groaning with stuff you didn’t know you needed. I only planned to pick up some charcuterie, but also end up with a gorgeous seeded sourdough loaf from Hobbs House Bakery, a big bottle of grassy extra virgin olive oil and a business card from a lovely gentleman who may or may not end up making me a leather satchel by hand.

To limit myself to that takes all my strength, and on a cooler day I might have also left with cheeses, bean to bar chocolate, cakes, beer, doughnuts, pies, sausages, smoked salmon and a hernia; I reflect, later on, that it might be for the best that my slowly mending right arm still can’t carry more than a couple of kilos. It feels like every bourgeois need is catered for every Saturday from 9 to 2 in that compact but blissful space – did I mention the scented candles and room diffusers? – and that’s before we get on to the street food stalls or the little open air café using beans from nearby Rave Coffee.

It is, in short, idyllic. I can well understand why Stroud was named as one of the Sunday Times’ Best Places To Live this year, and why it won the whole thing five years ago. Last year Reading was mentioned in that august company, but this year the Sunday Times included Caversham in the list, a subtle way of saying “we got it wrong, only this bit of Reading is any cop”. For what it’s worth, even for the farmers’ market alone, Stroud pisses all over Caversham: Stroud is what Caversham would like to be if it grows up.

If I didn’t already have a restaurant reservation, and I hadn’t instead chosen to eat in the mall (pizzeria Fat Toni is meant to be good) I could easily have browsed and munched my way through the farmers’ market. I walk wistfully past a stall offering Thai food which smells better than any Thai restaurant I can remember. Lunch had better be good, I think.

Our venue for lunch is at the bottom of Union Street, the hill with that Thai food stall on it, opposite a disused pub and some vivid street art. It occupies the ground floor of a handsome building, The Old Music Centre, which had fallen into disrepair before sculptor Dan Chadwick bought it fifteen years ago. First it spent some time as a factory and another restaurant, and finally in late 2024 it reopened as Juliet, named after Chadwick’s wife.

It’s a fetching space that makes full use of the building’s dimensions and huge windows: airy and busy without packing tables in like sardines. There’s a small private-ish dining room and a smaller terrace outside, but otherwise you’re in that long dining room, all black leather banquettes, parquet floor and clever use of mirrors to flood the place with light. It radiates confidence that you’ll eat well and have a thoroughly good time into the bargain.

The menu read well, divided into sections with a very enjoyable flow to them: snacks first, then starters, then mains with a small selection of desserts at the end. Decent pricing, too, with the majority of the snacks £5 or less, the dozen or so starters ranging mostly from £10 to £16 and most mains between £20 and £30.

So far so conventional, you might think, but as I ordered a Kir royale and Dave plumped for an alcohol free Peroni, our server – one of a uniformly charming brigade – chucked in a curveball by explaining the concept of the restaurant. Who doesn’t enjoy having a concept explained to them?

“All of our dishes are designed for sharing” she said. And I’m sorry to say that my heart sank a little.

Partly because I was not long back from Glasgow, where I’d got tired of that shtick, and partly because this menu didn’t read like that at all. There was a dissonance to it. It made sense with the small plates, pretty much, although not with the snacks (“you get halfway through the gazpacho then hand it to me”) but how did you share tagliatelle with rabbit ragu, unless you were in Lady And The Tramp? And who in their right mind shared steak frites unless it was a piece of beef big enough for that, which at £26 the steak on the menu almost certainly wasn’t?

“If you want to have the big plates to yourself that’s absolutely fine” she followed up, in a way that suggested my expression hadn’t been as subtle as I thought. “Just let us know so we can make sure they come out at the same time.”

This was very decent of her but, as so often with this concept, it rankled with me that eating simultaneously with your dining companion had become something you couldn’t take for granted, the Ryanair-isation of restaurants.

Anyway, no harm done: Dave and I agreed on some small plates to share, and picked a big plate each. All would be well. And we took long enough about it that I saw one of my original choices, the vitello tonnato, turn up at our neighbours’ table submerged in a thick mulchy sauce. I decided it was about as unshareable as could be.

First, though, a gilda: a perfectly pleasant mouthful of anchovy snaking its way between two plump olives and a pickled chilli, the whole thing a study in muted greens and browns. A very enjoyable first bite of a meal, flavours not to be sniffed at, perhaps slightly petite at £3.50 a pop. That balance – never mind the quality, mourn the quantity – would prove to be emblematic: in my beginning is my end, as T.S. Eliot put it.

The other nibble we’d opted for was far better. I love salt cod, but I’ve never had it mantecato before – whipped, a litle like a brandade, velvety from all that emulsifying olive oil, salty, a beautiful golden hue. It was delightful, but the idea of sharing one of these between two really was for the birds.

Not only was it too good to share, but it would have been impractical to even try. The fact that the toast my salt cod was slathered on was also distinctly on the burnt side, making cutting it with cutlery or teeth more of a challenge than it should have been, reinforced that view. Fortunately we’d ordered two, and at £5 apiece they were infinitely better value than the gildas.

At this point things started progressing nicely, and the volley of small-plates-that-were-absolutely-not-starters-and-not-to-be-referred-to-as-such-under-any-circumstances showed off the best of what the kitchen could do, even if in one case that was ‘buy well’.

One of the strongest dishes of the meal was a really excellent sea bass crudo, taut leaves of fish brought to life with oil, bottarga, halved cherries and, I thought, a little orange zest. This was the gastronomic equivalent of dressing for the job you want, and for as long as we were eating it we could believe that the sunshine outside was the start of a glorious summer we had willed into being, by ordering dishes like this.

I had moved on to a really excellent glass of Muscadet: natural but not cloudy, with citrus and salt, which complemented this nicely. £9 a glass for a bottle which would cost you £19 online, a markup which might not sound unreasonable until you realise you’re only getting 125ml, a fact the menu neglected to mention anywhere. There’s that quality/quantity thing, again.

Also very enjoyable, if not terribly sophisticated, were two planks of panisse obscured by Parmesan. I liked this, but it was fairly one note: I’d rather they’d stuck the salt cod mantecata on a lozenge of panisse and made two decent dishes into one great one. Was it shareable? Yes. Was it worth £10 when the same money got you two of the salt cod snacks? Perhaps not.

Nobody could say that the last of our small plates wasn’t sharable. Two wedges of fragrant, sweet as you like honeymoon melon came draped with speck and pinned with a couple more pickled chillies. It’s funny, I’d turned up to Juliet thinking that it was a French restaurant but that must have been the Mandela effect: the menu ranged across Europe, spending more time in Italy than France or Spain.

What that does mean, though, is that I had plenty of experience of dishes like this to compare it to. Very good melon and very good ham might have fallen out of fashion until recently but it’s never going to be a bad combination, especially when the sourcing is as meticulous as it was here. But was this dish, at £15, miles better than similar plates I’d enjoyed at Bristol’s RAGÙ or Oxford’s Arbequina, both of which had cost less? Not really, no.

Still, lunch was well under way and I couldn’t say I wasn’t having a smashing time. Dave and I had much to catch up on from our various misadventures, and I was determined to get the discussion out of the way about my dad’s funeral and Dave’s continuing unhappy relationship with Liverpool FC, so we could look forward to happier times ahead.

And the room was full of happy chatting diners, but by this point Dave and I were among the youngest people in there: the scruff and vitality of Rough Hands, the High Street and the market felt like they could have belonged to another town altogether.

I had moved on to a light, juicy syrah from Minervois (£7 a glass, so a little less painful: still 125ml though) and Dave had been tempted to drink a Früh Kölsch, reminded of a very enjoyable trip to Cologne a few years back. It came in the traditional glass, which was pleasing and correct but also meant that you were paying £4.20 for 200ml of beer. Did the folks at Juliet not like you getting drunk? Was that what was going on?

Despite being far from drunk, Dave really enjoyed his large-plate-but-definitely-not-a-main-course. It was a decent slab of John Dory, skin nicely blackened, on the bone but coming away with little encouragement, and the forkful I had was excellent. It came in what the menu described as a sauce vierge, but the presence of olives and capers suggested to me that this particular virgin might have lapsed into puttanesca territory. It happens to the best of us.

I wouldn’t say this dish was huge for £28, and I wouldn’t propose sharing it with anybody, but it was just about big enough, and went very well with Juliet’s frites, which were salty, light and well nigh flawless.

“I think if you’re paying that much for a main, it should come with some carbs” was Dave’s two pence. I’m glad it wasn’t just me.

My main tasted gorgeous. Taste was not the problem. Four slices of lamb rump, blushing just the right amount, were served fanned out on a moat of jus with peas and meagre ribbons of guanciale. As a dish, for quality, you couldn’t fault it. Can you see where this is going?

It’s difficult to show dimensions in these pictures, but this was not a large plate. It had the same dimensions as the ones that had brought our not-starters earlier on, but it cost twice as much as any of them. “Our large plates are designed for sharing” is a laudable aim, but it only works if your plates (a) work for sharing and (b) are actually large. It made me think of the beautiful duck I’d had at Pompette earlier in the year: that dish was for sharing. This dish was for jealously guarding, and still feeling peckish at the end. Thank goodness for those frites.

The lag between our penultimate and final courses gave Dave and I plenty of time to compare notes.

“If I came here again I’d just stick to the smaller plates and share” said Dave.

“I know what you mean, but whether these plates are big or small, or work as sharers or not seems pretty random.”

“Yeah, and your main” – see, we were still calling them mains – “wasn’t very big. But it’s the menu’s fault: if something costs nearly £30 I’d expect it to be larger than that” said Dave, gesturing at my empty smaller-than-you’d-like plate.

On balance, although it was tempting to compare this place with the likes of RAGÙ or Arbequina, the restaurant we both ended up using as a yardstick was Upstairs At Landrace, in Bath. There we had shared some small plates, had a main course each, come away fuller and, I’m pretty sure, spent a fair amount less. The Bath restaurant felt like the far better execution of an idea both places had come up with.

None of that, mind you, stopped us having dessert. Thankfully restaurants never try to make you share these, so we each had our own individual portion of chocolate cremeux. It was far and away the most successful thing we ate – glossy and moreish, just enough depth, not too much sweetness, and it came anointed with olive oil and sprinkled with flakes of salt. Truly unimpeachable, simple but superb. Why couldn’t it all have been like this?

It went really nicely with a glass of Banyuls, again a relatively stingy pour at 50ml, but for £5.50 you couldn’t complain. It’s not like me to quote exact prices like a local newspaper, or to dust off the Weights And Measures Act, but everything was so controlled at Juliet that I almost feel compelled to.

Last of all I ordered a ricciarello, a soft almond biscuit which is a speciality of Siena. It was gorgeous: ricciarelli are soft, irregular and crammed with almond, so not dissimilar to amaretti morbidi, but with an extra zing of citrus that makes them just a tad more interesting. I liked this a lot, and it was only a couple of quid. Ironically, considering it was one of the smallest things we ordered, I shared it with Dave.

After all that, we settled up: our bill for snacks, small plates, slightly less small plates, sides, dessert and small drinks came to £195, including a 12.5% service charge. Our bill at Upstairs At Landrace the previous year had been smaller: it was the only thing that was.

The rest of our day followed a well-trodden path. By the time lunch was over the market had packed up, and Stroud on a Saturday afternoon felt like Bruges after the coach trips pack up and leave or Mykonos when the cruise ships have moved on, a sleepy place with little sign of just how awake it had been mere hours before. We found a very nice pub called the Retreat that had striking red walls, gorgeous prints on them and Steady Rolling Man on draft, and we set the world to rights, or tried to, until it was time to take one of those regular trains back to our respective home towns.

Ordinarily, that is where this review would leave us, with Dave and I home from a day of fun, debriefing with our respective spouses. I would conclude by saying that Juliet is a good restaurant if not a great one, flawed in ways you could probably work around if you could be bothered, and possibly worth visiting if you found yourself in Stroud with £100 a head burning a hole in your pocket and more of an appetite to spend it there than on a cornucopia of fine goods from the market. But this week I have to close where I’d usually begin, by discussing the puzzling national consensus that Juliet is, in fact, an utterly phenomenal place.

The thing is, over the space of the twelve months since it first opened Juliet got unanimous rave reviews from almost every national critic. It’s rare for them to be of one mind, unless they know and like the owner – Jeremy King springs to mind – and rarer still that they reach that view about somewhere outside London. For any of them to stray that far afield is comparatively rare, but for all of them to descend on the same part of not-London is practically a unicorn.

Yet they all loved Juliet. Giles Coren, who had a house nearby at the time, said in the Times that “Juliet is not just great for a boondocks bistro; it’s great for anywhere in the world. It would be the best restaurant in Hampstead by miles. The best in Chelsea, no question.” Grace Dent in the Guardian, also writing to make sense of the provinces for Londoners, said it was “seriously worth a schlep to Stroud”.

What about William Sitwell in the Telegraph? “If this isn’t my favourite restaurant of 2025 I’m in for a year to remember” was his analysis. It goes on. Tom Parker Bowles said in the Mail On Sunday that he could stay all night and, not one to miss a Shakespeare pun, ended with “parting is indeed such sweet sorrow”: isn’t he erudite?

And then there’s arch bloviator Tim Hayward in the FT, what did he say? Well, your guess is as good as mine: in a windy old review entitled Raise your voices and howl for The Chefs he bibbled on about his trip there with “a small cadre of West Country foodisti”. Hayward’s writing always reminds me of the opening lyrics to the Beatles’ Julia, when John Lennon sings Half of what I say is meaningless. Even if that’s true, Lennon still had a better batting average than Hayward.

Sitwell’s was the only one of those reviews to explain that the menu is intended to be shared. None of them talked about whether the food lends itself to doing that, in terms of sizing or price. None of them really talked about cost or value at all, indeed Sitwell’s said that the price was “£126 excluding drinks and service”, which says to me that he spent more on booze than he’s comfortable admitting.

You would not get a good idea from any of those reviews whether Juliet is pricey, or will leave you feeling rinsed. This is what happens when you take advice from people who expense it all. They’re worse than cynics: they know the price of nothing and the value of nothing.

So what did they spend their word counts talking about? Parker Bowles had less than 400 words to play with, and name dropped the former restaurant critic he was having lunch with before discovering “another old mucker” up at the bar, who “is easily persuaded to join our table.” I’m sure his friend Dai Francis, whoever he is, was delighted to get a name check.

Coren told us that he bumped into Dom Joly there – thank god I wasn’t lunching at Juliet that day – before going on at length about how the owner Daniel Chadwick is “one of the best men ever to own a restaurant”. Was it ever going to be anything other than a rave? Maybe he should have recused himself, knowing that if he didn’t review Juliet another four restaurant critics still would.

But really, when three of the reviews manage to mention the sommelier by name but omit pretty crucial details about what a meal at Juliet is actually like, you do have to wonder if restaurant reviewing has started missing the point.

Amid all the showing off, name-dropping and knob-jostling, amid the florid hunt for the Next Big Simile, it feels to me like reviewers – critics and bloggers alike – have lost their way and forgotten what’s important: what’s it like to eat in a restaurant? Will I like it? How much does it cost? Is it worth the money? You can track chefs’ CVs all you like, you can talk about your buddies in the trade, you can vaguely patronise anywhere without an 020 area code, but all you’re really doing is bragging about what a great time you’ve had.

So there you go, they all had a ball. I’m not so sure, on balance, whether you would. But perhaps it doesn’t matter, because they sold their papers and it’s only money. Your money. And I can still finish by telling you that Juliet is a good restaurant but not a great one, flawed in ways you could probably work around if you could be bothered, and possibly worth visiting if you find yourself in Stroud with £100 a head burning a hole in your pocket and more of an appetite to spend it there than on a cornucopia of fine goods from the market.

I bet it’s a great day out on expenses, though.

Juliet – 7.6
49 London Road, Stroud, GL5 2AD
01453 367019

https://www.julietrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Chez Dominique, Bath

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This week’s review comes from Bath, and from a restaurant I visited with my old friend Dave, and those of you with good memories might recall that I was last in Bath on duty roughly a year ago, also with Dave in tow. We ate at Upstairs At Landrace, which I liked a great deal, and afterwards we drank great beer at The Raven, and when I wrote it up I said that I had a feeling national restaurant critics visited Bath every few years when they fancied a genteel day out on expenses.

I’m not completely devoid of self-awareness, I promise, and here I am almost a year after my last visit having a thoroughly genteel day out with Dave. I can see why the broadsheet gang always include the city on their tour of the provinces.

So this day was in some respects similar to my trip to Bath last year – great pre-prandial coffee, excellent afternoon beers at The Raven, carefully selected lunch venue as the meat in that sandwich, good company and wide-ranging chat about stuff and nonsense from start to finish. But we are a more careworn pair this year, and we agree over lattes at Bath café Picnic that, so far at least, 2026 has delivered us both a bit of a beating.

Dave has to have a tooth out in the not too distant future, his second in far too short a space of time. My arm is still a work in progress, my dad is in hospital and my central heating went bust for the whole of the coldest week of the year. Dave magnanimously decides that I win in the Shit 2026 stakes: “whenever I think how bad my start to the year is”, he tells me, “I remember yours and I know it’s worse”. Only his recent holiday to York – “think of the city guide you could write!” he says – and my imminent trip to Màlaga are chinks in the gloom. That and a good lunch of course, a break from our sea of troubles. But where to go?

As is traditional, I gave Dave a range of options and let him pick his favourite. But I think maybe this time I rather led the witness – he was never going to pick Beckford Bottle Shop now he has given up drinking wine, and Root was probably a little too plant-driven for him. So the clear winner was Chez Dominique, a French restaurant just the other side on Pulteney Bridge, on a street that in any other city might be especially beautiful but in Bath is simply one of countless lookers.

Chez Dominique, named after the owners’ first child, celebrates its tenth birthday in the summer, and in that time it has built up the kind of solid reputation that swerves boom and bust hype in favour of cultivating a lasting fan base as a neighbourhood restaurant. It has featured in the Good Food Guide multiple times, and Tom Parker Bowles raved about it six years ago on that year’s annual trip to Bath to expense a catch-up with his old mucker Reach plc hack Mark Taylor: the irony of me saying this is not lost on me.

But apart from that single mention in the media Chez Dominique has stayed in its very attractive, distinctly Georgian lane, offering, among other things, a ridiculously reasonable prix fixe menu – £22 for two courses, £27 for three – every lunchtime. That kind of money didn’t feel very 2026 at all, but I can’t say it didn’t add to the temptation, so we ambled over the bridge with empty stomachs, high hopes and expectations just about held in check.

Chez Dominique’s dining room is long and thin and it somehow looked dated without being passé. Something about it felt like how dining rooms looked twenty years ago, a vague sense reinforced by seeing the Papyrus font on the menu. Maybe it was the relative immunity from some of the trends of modern restaurants – no brick walls or crappy chairs, everything in a tasteful shade of bluish teal, mirrors just the right side of rustic on the wall.

I disliked the spider lights, which always strike me as a little H.R. Giger, but perhaps that’s me (that reminds me: when does the new series of Interior Design Masters start on BBC One?). But it was a likeable space, and they got even more in my good books by giving us one of the best tables in the place, a table big enough for four next to the fireplace which gave me a great opportunity to people watch over Dave’s shoulder.

The place was almost empty when we arrived, but just as people are apparently eating dinner earlier I think they also lunch later: practically every table was occupied by the time we were halfway through our lunch, and some of them with their second diners of the sitting. The demographic was cheery, prosperous and in the main older even than us: put that way it made sense that the only newspaper to cover Chez Dominique had been the Mail On Sunday.

Chez Dominique’s menu, Papyrus and all, was not without its temptations but not without its frustrations either. At lunchtime it is indeed 2 courses for £22 or 3 for £27, although the starters and mains are also individually priced for some reason which escaped me. Some of the dishes – both starters, on this occasion – came with supplements. Side dishes cost extra.

So far, so straightforward, but the specials on the blackboard were also individually priced – at between £25 and £34 – with supplements ranging between £5 and £14. Oh, and there was a chateaubriand for two which cost £75, and presumably if you ordered that your starters and desserts were at list price. The whole thing felt unnecessarily ornate, like they were determined to stick to looking as if they had a prix fixe however much everything else threw it out of whack.

“I have to do maths to work out how much everything is going to cost” said Dave. “I don’t really want to do maths at lunch.” We agreed that it just would have been easier to charge the same amount for most of the starters, most of the mains etc. so you didn’t have to muck about with the intricacies of pricing. That too would have involved doing maths, come to think of it, but never mind. We kicked off with a can of alcohol-free IPA from local brewery Electric Bear – saving our units for later, you see – and it wasn’t bad although, as with most things I’ve had from Electric Bear, I’m always aware that I’ve had better from nearby Bristol or Cheltenham.

My starter was one of the ones with a supplement, the ones that Make You Do Maths, and for what it’s worth it was one of the cleverest, most interesting things we ate. Tuna came beautifully seared, still very pink in the middle, in a little cairn surrounded by fun stuff – ribbons of pickled fennel, slices of blood orange and pinkish blobs of rhubarb sriracha. I’ve never had rhubarb sriracha, and before this dish I’d have struggled to tell you what I expected it to taste like.

But its combination of tartness and heat properly zhuzhed up what would otherwise have been a far more classical, but still very enjoyable, plate of food. Did it justify the £3 supplement? It’s one of those questions: in terms of the ingredients and processes, quite possibly. But I imagine that it was also probably the Starter Most Likely To Leave You Peckish. I’ve seen other pictures of this dish on social media which suggest the restaurant is still playing around with the plating of this one. The impression was that it still felt a little like a work in progress.

Dave did far better with the conventional choice. We have similar taste when it comes to menus, and on another day it would have been me ploughing through the pork terrine. Fortunately, he is always happy to offer a forkful, and it just confirmed to me that Chez Dominique’s version was faultless: dense and delicious, all killer (or, technically speaking I suppose, all killed), bound in bacon and festooned with everything that was good – capers, apple, what I think might have been chicory.

Dave especially liked the golden raisins which gave the whole thing a slight pop of sweetness. I’d have preferred a little proper bread to a couple of toasts bordering on melba, but I might just have been trying extra hard to find fault because I was jealous.

Our starters took about ten minutes to turn up after we’d ordered, and when our server, who was excellent, asked how they were I told her they were very nice and that we were really in no rush. And Dave, who reads this blog and has known me an extremely long time, gave me a look that said do you have to be like this? Poor Dave, always delighted to be at lunch with his friend – however bad a year I’m having – but now coming to accept, reluctantly, that a restaurant reviewer invariably comes with the territory. Well, he does until the bill is paid anyway. After that he fucks off so the two of us can beetle onwards to a pub.

“I would have been fine with the experience you had at the Devonshire“, he told me. But if he wasn’t so easily pleased and so happy with the path of least resistance would we still be friends, over thirty-three years after we met on his very first day at university? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Because Dave has proved to be such a marvellous friend, so many years on, he let me choose first from the mains even though I invariably let my dining companions call shotgun. I didn’t even have to play the ‘having a terrible year’ card, it was just a given. That’s how I ended up with the pick of the specials section, and was rewarded with the veal t-bone. “Surely nothing bad ever comes in a t-bone?” said Dave, and it was hard to disagree with him.

And yet, it was good rather than great. The veal was quite enjoyable, although not the biggest, and it was cooked past blushing. Which I didn’t mind, actually: I liked the fact that I wasn’t asked how I wanted it. But the best things about it – and this is not how it ought to be – were everything else. I adored the roasted pears, plonked indecorously on top, and I really liked the thick disc of black pudding, British rather than boudin noir. But I wanted the cider sauce it came with to be rich and indulgent, and this felt slightly thin and bland. Thin in both senses: I wanted it to taste of more, and I wanted more of it.

Was this a £34 dish (or a £14 supplement dish, if you have your slide rule handy)? Maybe, maybe not. In fairness it came with fries, which were exceptional (“they’re like really good McDonalds fries” was Dave’s verdict, and he was not wrong) and a spot-on, very well-dressed salad. I added some carrots in tarragon butter, which I really didn’t need: five carrots in not quite enough rather nice butter for £5. Far from unpleasant, but the salad would have been enough.

Dave had his second choice, which would have been my second choice too, the monkfish. I am wont to say that you don’t see it on as many menus these days and yet here we are, in Bath for the first time since last year and Dave has eaten monkfish as a main at both of those meals. Maybe it’s a Bath thing. And again, the faint praise came out a little too quickly. Dave didn’t mind the monkfish, and loved the samphire and mussels. But, as with the t-bone, the sauce was what let it down.

“I just expected more depth” said Dave. “I think about that fish soup you wrote about at Pompette, and I wanted something with that kind of punch.” And he was right, I tasted Dave’s and as crab bisques go it was a little underpowered. Everything felt a little toned down, when French food is meant to be where sauces reach their evolutionary summit. The kitchen that was playing it safe here didn’t feel like the same kitchen that would rustle up a rhubarb sriracha: someone didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions. Dave had some new potatoes with this, but I also shared the frites because they were just too good to hog.

Having complained a little about the mathematical rigmarole of Chez Dominique’s menu, I will say this for it: none of the desserts comes with a supplement – unless you order multiple cheeses, but let’s not get into that – which means that ordering one costs an extra fiver. Rude not to, and practically mandatory if you ask me. There are four on the menu, and we tried a couple with a glass of Sauternes each: £12.50 for the dessert wine, but in an unimpeachable 125ml pour.

Dave’s orange, olive oil and polenta cake was quite delightful, and far softer and more delicate than it looked at first sight. It had more of that blood orange that featured in my starter, and plenty of flaked, toasted almonds and if I had ordered it I think I would have been pretty pleased. I would also, in the back of my mind, have been remembering the cake I had at Manteca a few years ago, because comparison is the thief of joy: that’s what makes me a hoot at parties.

My dessert, the vanilla bavarois, felt like it had been pre-portioned and come out of the fridge. It was decent enough but, like my tuna starter, made you spend as much time noticing the negative space than it did the stuff that didn’t entirely fill it. It was very similar to a panna cotta, and I always tend to like those, and all three of my nubbins of rhubarb were nice. My chantilly cream, speckled with vanilla, was nice. It was all nice. Isn’t that nice? Exactly.

“I think if you’re going to serve a dessert in a glass like that, the dessert needs to come a lot closer to the rim of the glass than it does there” said Dave. Nicely put.

A very companionable hour and three quarters had elapsed, and we flagged someone down for the bill, quite happy to pay it irrespective of whatever supplements or arcane calculations had been involved. Our three courses apiece – including three dishes with varying supplements, our sides and drinks and what have you – came to just over £164, with the 12.5% service charge thrown in. Our lunch in Bath the previous year had cost a little less, with a couple fewer drinks, which makes Upstairs At Landrace look both superb and a bargain.

We settled up with no compunction whatsoever and raced off to the Raven, where as luck would have it one of the best tables in the place became available minutes after we arrived. Many beers followed, and then a boozy meander to the station – I managed to persuade Dave to take a train home an hour later than the one he’d planned to, which I always count as a personal triumph – and we agreed that this formula of coffee, lunch and the pub in Bath remained a winning one, even if the filling in this particular sandwich, this time, had been pleasant rather than spectacular.

I remember watching a video last year on Instagram of some bloke judging a pizza competition. I don’t know whether it was pizza fatigue or just a general lack of vocabulary, but slice after slice was pronounced “solid”. “Oh, that’s a solid effort” he said, after chowing down on one. “Solid pizza, that one” he said after the next. Everything was solid, as if pizzas being liquid or gaseous was even an option. Solid, the word you use when it’s not bad but you don’t really know what else to say.

And yet it’s the word I keep coming back to when I try to encapsulate Chez Dominique. It is emphatically a good restaurant – not an outstanding one, but definitely a good one. You could reliably have a relatively enjoyable meal there, and if you lived in Bath you might go there a few times a year.

Does it justify a detour from further afield? Probably not. They are lucky in that city to have it as a neighbourhood restaurant, I suppose, but some of that might just be that those people are lucky to have that as a neighbourhood. It’s always hard to separate the two, I find, when a restaurant is situated somewhere lovely.

Sadly, the reason why French restaurants, the likes of Paulette or Pompette, exert such a pull is that there hasn’t been anything remotely like that in Reading since Forbury’s closed. But Chez Dominique didn’t remind me, truth be told, of any of those places. It felt more like a higher spec version of Oxford’s Pierre Victoire, the prices slightly hiked and the offering slightly widened.

But even so, if you moved both Chez Dominique and Pierre Victoire to Reading and put them on the same street it would be one of the very few times in my entire life when I’m given a choice of two similar things and I wind up picking the cheaper option. The rest of the time, the only supplement I could really do with is to my income.

Chez Dominique – 7.6
15 Argyle Street, Bath, BA2 4BQ
01225 463482

https://www.chezdominique.co.uk

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Pub review: The Chester Arms, Oxford

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The concept of choice in restaurants, I’ve always thought, brings out the inner Goldilocks. Too wide a menu and paralysis sets in, but if it’s too narrow you can’t help feeling straitjacketed. It’s why restaurants that only offer one or two dishes: Le Relais de Venise with its entrecôte, or Burger & Lobster with its – well, you know – have never really caught on here.

I’m reminded of the immortal words of Peter Butterworth in Carry On Abroad, an evergreen favourite of mine, when his Spanish waiter Pepe comes out with the immortal words “of course you are having choices! You can having sausage and chippings, sausage and beans or beans and chippings. That’s choices”. And believe me, I don’t think anybody would have enjoyed dining at the Palace Hotel in Elsbels.

The only time we omnivores really think it’s acceptable to restrict our choices is when we go to a restaurant that offers variations on a theme: burger restaurants, pizza parlours, Nando’s. And yes, Nando’s does technically serve stuff that isn’t chicken but that’s hardly the point, because nobody goes there for that. If somebody at a table at Nando’s is eating a halloumi burger, you can be very confident that they don’t eat chicken and have been dragged there by some inconsiderate sod who does.

Then, of course, there’s the other occasion when we feel as if we have no choice: because there’s something on the menu that we must have, or always order. But those things, as I discovered when I counted down Reading’s top 50 dishes a couple of years ago, are hugely subjective. My wife might be unable to visit Kungfu Kitchen without ordering their deep fried fish, and believe me she is, but other people would mount an equally passionate case for the sweet and sour aubergine, or the lamb with cumin.

Besides, the better the restaurant – like KFK, or Clay’s – the less likely it is, really, that there’s a single must-order dish. What are the chances that a kitchen so skilful would produce just the one thing everybody has to eat? Pretty slim, if you ask me.

No, generally the concept that a restaurant has something you must try, a legendary dish in the making, is another by-product of hype, and usually comes out of the mouths of critics when they visit somewhere, soon after it opens. I’ve tried Brutto’s coccoli, Town’s saffron risotto and Kolae’s fried prawn heads, all acclaimed as instant classics when those venues opened, and they varied from quite nice to very good. Were any of them dishes those restaurants should be exclusively associated with? Not really. Two of them weren’t even the best thing I had in those meals, but it shifts newspapers to rave.

So no, restaurants that become synonymous with a single dish are rare in general, and I don’t think Reading has any to speak of. But that makes the subject of this week’s review even more unusual, because it does occupy that very niche territory. The Chester Arms is an Oxford pub just off the Iffley Road, east from Magdalen Bridge but a smidge closer to it than the Magdalen Arms. It has been under its current management for over ten years. And it’s very much famous for one thing in particular, its steak platter.

Now, it feels wrong to me for most restaurants to describe their own dishes as famous. I still remember the overblown, unsubstantiated hype for The Botanist’s hanging kebabs, for instance, which were more hanging than famous. It’s a bit like restaurants keeping a certificate in their window from over ten years ago, or restaurant bloggers describing themselves as ‘multi award-winning’ when they have, in fact, won none. Famous is something other people are meant to say about you, not how you describe yourself.

And yet in the Chester Arms’ case, you might make an exception. The pub’s homepage describes them as “home of the famous steak platter” and the dish has its own page on their website. It’s the creation of head chef Hamzah Taynaz – although Companies House makes it seem like he might have parted company with the pub over the summer – and it looks like a doozie: onglet cooked rare or medium rare, chips, béarnaise, cabbage with bacon, dressed salad. £50 for two people, or £70 for three, which on paper at least is impressive value; it was £30 and £45 back in 2015, but it’s been a bruising decade.

The thing, though, is this: I have been told to visit the Chester Arms numerous times, by people I know and by people who’ve tipped me off online. It’s been the place at the top of my Oxford to do list for quite a while – I would have reviewed it last month were it not for a medical misadventure – and every single person who has told me to go there has mentioned the steak platter. Some of them had eaten it, and raved about it. Others hadn’t, but left me in no doubt that if they did go there it’s exactly what they would order.

In fact, when I went to Arbequina last month I happened to be on the same train as someone I follow on Instagram, and when I messaged her to ask where she’d eaten in the city I was unsurprised to find that she had gone to the Chester Arms. “We had a great meal there” was her verdict. “It lived up to the hype for us.” So finally, last weekend, I got my chance to try it for size.

My plus one for this meal was my old friend and Oxford compadre Dave, and as we had a pre-lunch latte in Peloton Espresso’s very agreeable back garden I told him that this meal made him, with the exception of Zoë, my most capped plus one. Not bad going for a man who valiantly resisted joining me on duty until a couple of years ago, I told him.

“I thought you’d expect me to have opinions about everything!” he laughed. “And I’m too easy-going for that, I just want to eat nice food. But then I realised that actually you aren’t fussed about all that, so now I don’t mind tagging along.”

Dave was, I had to concede, probably correct. He likes to make much of how low maintenance he is, by which he means that he’ll generally do whatever you like and doesn’t have strong preferences. In the past I may have found that a tad frustrating, but as a dining companion for a restaurant reviewer, it turns out, it’s pretty much a dream CV. Besides, Dave quite rightly pointed out that for our forthcoming holiday to Bruges I had insisted on the dates, insisted on a hotel, changed my mind and picked another hotel and so on and so on, so maybe I quite liked having a low maintenance friend after all.

The Chester Arms is another of those lovely backstreet boozers I didn’t even know existed and like the Star off Cowley Road, it reminded me a little of Reading’s Nag’s Head and the Retreat, only built to a different scale. It was a big, handsome corner plot with a decent-sized garden and inside it was a very attractive room with wooden floorboards, large sturdy tables ringed by fetching booths and plenty of natural light. It was a properly gorgeous space which made me think, as so often, that I really missed the Lyndhurst.

Having said that, I do have to say that some of its tables were more equal than others. The place was absolutely packed – you have to book quite far in advance if you want a table – and without much in the way of soft furnishings, which made it a cacophonous place to be. The two tables nearest to us were the handsome ones for larger groups but our little table with unforgiving chairs, near the kitchen, next to a stack of high chairs, felt like one they put in the seating plan because they could, not because they should.

In fairness the table directly in front of me was possibly even worse. The large group settled in nearby was full of people who were young, exuberant and happy to be there. I love Dave dearly, but we could only manage one of those three. “They’re probably all catching up at the end of their summer holidays, ready for term to begin” he said equably, and I felt even older than usual.

The Chester Arms’ menu was compact in the way you’d expect when most people are there for the feature attraction: a handful of nibbles, only three starters to speak of and three main courses which were not the steak platter. One of them was a vegetarian mezze selection (“perfect as a starter to share, or to be enjoyed as a main for one”) which had, by the looks of it, strong Nando’s halloumi burger energy. The starters were under a tenner, all mains save the steak platter hovered around twenty pounds.

Now, to get this out of the way from the off, our service was brilliant from beginning to end. Our server was young, American, properly charming and looked after we two avuncular has-beens perfectly, and I can’t say enough good things about her. With one exception, which is that I saw a blackboard with specials being shown to other tables later in the afternoon but we were never told about it or given a chance to look at it. In an ideal world it just said, in big cursive script, Stop fooling yourself, we all know you’re having the steak platter but, as I didn’t see it, I can only guess.

Dave was reluctant to have a starter in case the steak platter turned out to be too much, which did make me wonder if some kind of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers situation was going on, but I managed to persuade him to share the most appealing starter with me. Actually it might have been the absolute best thing I ate all afternoon, so I half wished I’d just pressed on without him. Lamb koftas were a trio of plump nubbins, beautifully coarse and with just the faintest whiff of offal to them, really gorgeous stuff.

They came with flatbreads which felt bought in, but which were good nonetheless, a small stack of guindilla and what was described as green tahini. I’m not really sure what that was, because tahini is a paste with a very distinctive taste and texture and this was none of those things, and it didn’t have a particularly strong note of sesame, but I quite liked it anyway. Dave was unconvinced by it, but won over by the koftas. He let me have the spare one, because he’s a good egg, and even though they were almost more faggot than kofta it did make me wonder what a Chester Arms mixed grill would be like. That had better not have been on the specials menu.

We had a while to catch up after that because each steak is cooked to order and takes, if the menu is to be believed, 45 minutes. So he sipped his pint of alcohol free Rothaus, and I had a pale from DEYA: we were both keeping our powder dry for a more substantial session post lunch. I didn’t know at the time – I learned this from Instagram after the fact – that landlady Becca Webb had just come back from a tasting tour in Bilbao with her wine suppliers, and if I had I might have paid closer attention to the wine list. Next time.

Anyway, Dave and I had a good old chinwag, if constantly drowned out by the relentless, unforgivable youngness of people at our neighbouring tables, as we struggled gamely with the heat from the nearby kitchen. The problem with a restaurant where everybody orders the same thing is that each time it comes out from the kitchen you perk up, think it’s yours and then realise it’s going to another table. But in a way it’s genius, because it raises your anticipation over and over again, and every passing platter looked amazing.

Besides, it distracted me from Dave giving me a litany of people he knew, roughly our age, who were either seriously or terminally ill. They don’t call your fifties ‘sniper’s valley’ for nothing, and after I’d heard about three of them my fight or flight health anxiety kicked in and I asked him, ever so nicely, to stop. Is this what we’ve got to look forward to? I wondered to myself.

I can’t imagine anybody’s life expectancy would be enhanced by what turned up at our table about half an hour after our starters, but just look at it. You’d shave a few days off the end of your life for one of these, wouldn’t you?

It’s difficult to give any kind of scale with a photograph like that but trust me, that serving plate was substantial. Our two serving plates were on the smaller side, but that just gave you an excuse to go back again and again: not for nothing did the pot of utensils on our table include forks, sharp knives and a little set of steak tongs.

Everything about this dish was bang on or thereabouts. The onglet was cooked beautifully medium rare and, in the main was buttery and absurdly easy to cut, any tension in the fibres expertly soothed away; I appreciated the irony of eating something that was better rested, most likely, than I will ever be. The béarnaise was ever so slightly thin with a slight hit of vinegar, but it hadn’t split and went very well with the steak; I might have liked a little more, between two, and a spoon to dish it up with but as quibbles go those were minor.

The other thing I loved, though, was how complete a dish this was and how every component brought something to the table. The heap of savoy cabbage shot through with lardons was truly joyous, the chips were thick, crunchy and surprisingly good. And even the salad, which I’d dismissed in the run-up as a makeweight, was not an afterthought. It was properly dressed, and it supplied the lightness and acidity that would otherwise have been missing from the platter.

Our server had asked us if we wanted to upgrade to the platter for three (“nice bit of upselling”, said Dave) but we’d decided not to, mostly because I thought if I was reviewing the place you’d want to know if a platter for two actually served two. And my verdict is that it does: we finished all our steak and most of everything else, and even in the time between finishing and our almost empty plates being taken away we were both picking with forks – dunking a chip in the béarnaise or trawling it through the juices from the onglet, or the good stuff that was left after you’d airlifted the cabbage away. If service had been less on it, I think our plate would have ended up clean as a whistle.

I tried to send a picture of the platter to Zoë – because she’d asked, even though I imagine it would have made her seethe with resentment – and failed, because the mobile signal in that part of Oxford is like taking a day trip to 1997. Perhaps it was for the best.

Our server asked if we fancied dessert, so I asked Dave if he fancied dessert – because I’d have looked like a right fat bastard scoffing one on my own – and I was hugely relieved when he decided to join me. Perhaps the bodysnatchers hadn’t troubled his house in Wootton Bassett after all. The dessert menu was also compact: three desserts, or ice cream with Pedro Ximenez, or a selection of ice creams, or an affogato.

Another thing to like very much about the Chester Arms was the very appealing selection of digestifs, and the options of red or white port, Sauternes or PX: I had another half of the pale instead, but on another day would have veered in the direction of something smaller and sweeter. The pale, by the way, was decent if piney: not DEYA’s iconic Steady Rolling Man but a reasonable stand-in. I’d have checked it in on Untappd, but I was in 1997 so it hadn’t been invented yet.

I was tempted by something ice cream based, but the server couldn’t tell me where the Chester Arms’ ice cream came from and I wasn’t invested or entitled enough to make her ask. So instead I went for my tried and tested choice, a tiramisu. It was about as different as possible from most of the ones I’ve had recently – not loose, airy and boozy like the tiramisu at, say, Paesinos or RAGÙ. It was more old school, by which I suppose I mean inauthentic: much firmer, much denser, crammed into that Duralex glass like they’d almost forgotten to say when.

And it was gorgeous. I’d forgotten that authentic is overrated, with all the honest-to-goodness Italian food cropping up in places like Reading and Bristol, but this was a delight from first spoon to last – far, far more cream than sponge but laced with Courvoisier and Frangelico. I loved it far more than I expected to, and it made me think again that the Chester Arms might be famous for its steak platter but it had made the canny choice of ensuring that none of the other items on the menu were an also-ran.

Dave had the crème brûlée, which is just one of those dishes I never personally order. I tried a spoonful of it and it, too, was right on the money: just enough warmth, the carapace just the right thickness, the cream vanilla-speckled and exemplary.

We didn’t tarry, because by that point it was incredibly warm and both of us fancied stretching our legs. Besides, I had promised to introduce Dave to the Star and his beloved Liverpool had finished playing, so the lack of mobile reception was no longer the positive nuisance it had been. My advice is that if you’re going to spend time somewhere with absolutely no phone signal, the best idea is to do it in the company of someone where you can talk for hours without feeling the need to check your phone. So that’s exactly what I did.

Our meal for two – two and a half courses each, one of them that steak platter, and a pint apiece came to just under £100, including a discretionary 12.5% service charge which was totally earned. When you think that half of that whole bill was down to a single dish that the pub endearingly describes as a “small steak”, you have to hand it to them.

I’m really glad I finally made it to the Chester Arms – partly because it’s been an ambition for such a long time and partly because it was fascinating to try a restaurant in this country which really is synonymous with the one dish, to see if that reputation is justified. And it absolutely is – if you like steak at all, you would have a ball hopping on a train to Oxford and making your way to the Chester Arms. And if you don’t, but you know someone who does, make sure the two of you take a friend with you: you can have the fish and chips and they can have the time of their lives.

I do find myself wondering though, still: what was on that specials board? But I know that it could have had skate wing on it, or fried chicken, or countless other things, and I still would have ordered the steak platter. So does the steak platter qualify as famous? Yes, I think it probably does.

But if I went back to the Chester Arms again, knowing what their kitchen is capable of, would I really still order the steak platter a second time? Also yes. I’d be even sadder, though, if they’d taken those lamb koftas off the menu, because it was the dish I’d want to order every time, if it was up to me. That’s choices.

The Chester Arms – 8.4
19 Chester St, Oxford, OX4 1SN
01865 790438

https://chesterarmsoxford.co.uk

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Pub review: The Drink Valley, Old Town, Swindon

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Devizes Road is about a thirty minute walk from Swindon’s unlovely train station, a building with a whiff of the gulag about it. Or you can take a bus, which winds its way uphill and will get you there in roughly ten. Once you reach your destination, you’re not in Kansas any more. You’re still in Swindon, but in Old Town. And Old Town’s different.

Devizes Road isn’t a looker. It’s not the pretty street in Old Town: that’s Wood Street, around the corner, lined with delis and wine shops, tapas bars and spots for lunch. Devizes Road is another kettle of fish. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fantastic place to drink beer, a road literally lined with wonderful spots in which to do precisely that.

You have the Hop Inn, possibly the founding father of Swindon’s craft beer scene, and on the other side of the road you have the Tuppenny, a pub of which I’m inordinately fond that has Parka and Steady Rolling Man in its permanent collection and a beer fridge its own Untappd listing refers to as the “fridge of dreams”.

There’s Tap & Brew, the superb brewpub of quietly excellent local brewery Hop Kettle, with a beer garden that’s marvellous in the sunshine. Hop Kettle also has an upstairs bar called The Eternal Optimist with a speakeasy feel, at the end of the road above the marvellous Los Gatos, a restaurant which in itself would provide ample excuse for a trip half an hour down the railway line,

I’m not finished. You can now drink at The Pulpit, the Swindon outpost for local Broadtown Brewery, a relatively new addition. And as of late last year another option is The Drink Valley, another brewpub and in fact that brewery’s second Swindon branch, having made a success of their first one in the town centre.

Were you keeping count? I make that six great beer spots in the space of a five minute walk, three of them brewpubs or brewery taps of some kind. Forget schlepping all the way to London and dragging yourself south of the river to experience a London brewery crawl, hot and crowded and absolutely rammed with Steve Zissou-style microbeanies. A quick train journey west and you can have an equally terrific time without troubling the capital – why endure the Bermondsey Beer Mile when you can enjoy the Swindon Booze Street?

Besides, a friend of mine was in a pub near Borough Market the other week where the most expensive beer on the list was a mind-boggling £20 a pint: Old Town is far, far kinder on the wallet. I was in Old Town, as I invariably am, to have lunch and beers with my old friend Dave. Dave initially wasn’t mad keen on being a dining companion on this blog but as time has passed it’s turned out that he enjoys it far more than he thought he would. This is a very Dave phenomenon.

But the winds of change are blowing through Devizes Road, and much is different from when I was here last on duty. Burger spot Pick Up Point, which I so enjoyed last year, has closed down. Ice cream parlour Ray’s is under new management, and finding its feet. And The Drink Valley, the venue for this week’s review, has opened two doors down from Tap & Brew, its second branch slap bang in the heart of Swindon’s budding craft beer scene.

First, we took advantage of another welcome development: during the day, Tap & Brew now plays host to excellent local roasters Light Bulb Coffee, and when I joined Dave there just after 11 the place was jumping. Somehow it seemed bigger than when I was there last but in truth it was just packed, every table occupied with the kind of hipsters, families and pursuers of the good life that Dave wasn’t entirely convinced lived in Swindon. And yet there they were, that Field Of Dreams principle in action.

So before lunch I enjoyed a couple of superb lattes and Dave and I began the process of catching up. It’s funny, there are friendships where you don’t see somebody for ages and when you do, it’s as if no time has passed. Dave and I have, at times over the last thirty plus years, had a friendship more like that but these days I see him most months, a combination of great company, his empty nest, our mutual love of beer and good times and our spouses being busy at weekends. And even though I see him frequently there’s never any shortage of things to discuss, in his life or mine.

So we talked about our respective families, his son at Durham, his work and mine (we always conclude, on balance, that working for a living isn’t all it’s cracked up to be) the triumphs of Liverpool Football Club – Dave’s other lifelong passion – and our plans to go on holiday together to Bruges this winter, for the first time in nearly ten years. I fully expect it to be something like a cross between The Trip and Last Of The Summer Wine.

The Drink Valley, a name which would appear to make no sense whatsoever, opened in the centre of Swindon first, and its thing was craft beer and Indian small plates. Dave tried to get me to review it back then and I was tempted, because Reading has never had anything approaching a desi pub and I think it’s a concept that could do well almost anywhere. But he never tried too hard to persuade me, because it was in the centre of Swindon and Dave doesn’t go there from choice. An upmarket sister branch in Old Town was a much easier sell.

It’s hard to get much intel on The Drink Valley – I’ll drop that The from now on, if that’s okay with you – ahead of a visit. Their website used to be under construction, with wording saying “coming soon”, and a picture of their original branch. Now it just advertises a summer festival that takes place next week. The two Facebook pages give you a rough idea of the menu but the two Instagram feeds, much as they list promotions, live music or new beers, fail miserably at what must surely be two of the main functions of Instagram: to show you what the room looks like and what the food looks like.

That’s such a wasted opportunity, especially with Drink Valley’s Old Town branch because it was really quite gorgeous and, I would say, a cut above the decor of any of its neighbours on Devizes Road. Sturdy but tasteful tables were ringed with comfy armchairs in pastel colours, a deep red banquette running along one wall. The walls and wood panels were a beautiful midnight blue (“why does this colour always look classy?”, Dave wondered) and the overall effect was really pleasing.

Craft beer often feels like a bit of a sacrifice – never mind the interior, taste the IPA – and I’m not sure I expected Swindon to be the place that rebutted the idea that you have to choose between substance and style. It felt like the middle of a restaurant/pub Venn diagram, somewhere that wasn’t quite a restaurant or a pub but could quite easily pass for either.

The selection of beers, though, would definitely suggest pub rather than restaurant. Five hand pumps, all serving cask beer brewed by Drink Valley, along with just shy of a dozen options on keg. Four of those were also brewed by Drink Valley and the others featured breweries I knew well, like Polly’s and Vault City, and a couple that were new to me.

The most expensive beer maxed out at £8.50 for a pint, but it was a 7.3% sour so I doubt you’d be guzzling the full 568ml anyway, unless you were well and truly on a mission. We started with a half each of Ceres, a very approachable pale from North Wales’ Polly’s, and started the serious business of reviewing the menu. It was an interesting mishmash of small and big plates, of pub food and more leftfield choices.

So, for instance, there were just the four mains, a couple of which – fish and chips, sirloin steak – were the kind of thing you’d get at good and bad pubs across the land. Five burgers, too, mostly conventional fare, although the “bulgogi burger” with bulgogi sauce and kimchi mayo nodded to food trends. A couple of sharing platters and some loaded fries and nachos also felt reasonably mainstream.

But then we looked at the nibbles and starters and many looked like they’d wandered in from a different menu, one that ranged from Spain to Italy to Morocco, before upping sticks and taking a long flight east. Not only that, but some of the things on it were so eccentric that it didn’t feel like a Brakes van could have been involved in their genesis.

Take the first of our small plates – clusters of shimeji mushrooms belted with bacon, cooked in what was apparently an ‘nduja butter until the bacon was crispy and the mushrooms nicely done. This was a real delight, and both Dave and I loved it. The ‘nduja didn’t come through strongly for me, but it did lend a sort of salty funk that reminded me of blue cheese. I thought it was a superior take on devils on horseback, Dave thought it was everything good about a full English in a little package.

Either way it was clever, fun and quite unlike anything I’ve had. By this point I was on small beer number three, having tried a slightly too bitter pale by Rotherham’s Chantry Brewery and then moved on to a passion fruit mojito sour by Vault City which was sweet, boozy and surprisingly good with this dish.

“Try this” I said to Dave, offering him a sip. “It’s the kind of thing where you’ll try it and tell me it might be perfectly nice, but it isn’t beer.”

Dave took a sip and said exactly that. Which pleased me enormously, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I disagreed with him.

Those bundles of joy cost five pounds fifty for three, although as so often I think Drink Valley should work on giving you even numbers of these things to increase sharing and reduce arguments. Equally good, and equally good value, was a little bowl of nuggets of chorizo, cooked in wine, with a great mixture of chewiness, caramelisation and punch. This is such a simple thing to do, and such a perfect thing to have on hand when you’re drinking beer. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever been to a craft beer place, in this country at least, which thinks to serve it.

Drink Valley made good progress towards a clean sweep on the first impression with a very serviceable dish of Moroccan fried cauliflower. The spicing on the coating was impeccable, nicely arid with plenty of interest, and the cragged and crinkled exterior was cooked beautifully. The mayo, speckled with sesame, was a perfect dip, although I didn’t necessarily get the promised mushroom in it. The only fault with this dish was that cooking it perfectly involved getting all bits of it right: for me, the cauliflower had steamed slightly inside its glorious housing, lacking just a little of the bite I’d want to see.

But again, at less than six pounds I didn’t feel remotely robbed. What we were eating here were perfect beer snacks, and I couldn’t think of anywhere in Reading that offered something comparable. Well, except Siren RG1 I suppose, but when I ate there you got a little less for an awful lot more money, and it wasn’t much cop. Had Drink Valley stumbled on something here? Further research was undoubtedly called for, but what about the main courses we’d promised ourselves we would order?

The final dish, though, was decisively brilliant. Dave had insisted on us ordering salt and pepper squid, because he thought it was a really good dish to benchmark with. I was a little resistant to the idea, because I agreed with him and suspected Drink Valley’s rendition would fall short. Well – and Dave reads the blog these days, so I know he’ll especially enjoy this bit – he was right, and I was wrong.

What we got, in fairness, was not salt and pepper squid as I understand it. It didn’t have that distinctive coating, the way the same order at, say, Kungfu Kitchen would have done. But we got something even better. Six pieces of squid, beautifully scored, in a crispy salt and pepper-free coating, fried and brought to our table fresh as you like with some charred lemon and a nicely tangy srirachi mayo.

And my goodness: if you’d told me before the visit that I’d have some of the best squid I can remember anywhere in a craft beer bar in Swindon I’d have replied that you must be on mushrooms. But, would you believe, that’s exactly what this was. So fresh and tender, no twang of rubber, coated so well, cooked spot on, intensely moreish and dippable. And you got six pieces for a crazy six pounds fifty – so affordable and easy to divide up, even if you resented giving away half.

It’s safe to say that at this point Drink Valley wasn’t in any way what I was expecting. And then Dave said something somewhat wonderful.

“You know what, mate, I could pass on the main courses. They all come with carbs, and I’m getting enough of that today with the beer. I could just go another round of small plates, instead.”

What a cracking idea, I said. Let’s do that.

“Won’t that interfere with your review?”

I thought about it briefly and made an executive decision that actually, it could be the making of it. Because you may or may not want to know about burgers, steaks or fish and chips, but you can get those anywhere. And if you go to Drink Valley, which I slightly hope at least one of you will, you can have those then, if that’s your thing. But I couldn’t think of anything better than eating more small plates like the ones we’d had, on a rainy Saturday afternoon with an old friend. So up I went to the bar to order our second wave.

When I did, I talked to the chap who’d served us both our food and our drinks. They’d been open almost bang on six months, he told me, and things were going well. He said the idea was that the original branch was craft beer and Indian food, whereas this follow-up was craft beer and Korean food: I didn’t challenge that, although I wasn’t sure the menu quite bore out that ambition.

He said that they brewed offsite and didn’t currently have a tap room, although in the fullness of time they wanted to can their beers and sell them more widely. I told him how great the squid was, and he told me it was his favourite dish on the menu. I got that little glow of pride from him that always comes with people giving a shit what they do, and in return I felt happiness that Dave and I were in with a fighting chance of being his most gluttonous customers that day.

Our second wave of dishes was maybe not quite as successful as the first, but that’s always the way: you start out picking your must-haves, and trying to repeat your success always risks ordering an also-ran. For me the least successful dish we had were the pork ribs, roasted in miso and barbecue marinade. They were very close to greatness, but not quite close enough: they looked the part, and the marinade came through really well – and was rather interesting, at that.

But they weren’t big enough specimens and the meat took some pulling away from the bone, lacking substance and tenderness. Again, there was an odd number and I left the spare rib – pardon the pun – to Dave. He loves ribs, and is threatening to take me to a place in Bruges called Mozart where they do bottomless ribs: he told me, with great pride, how his son got through quite a few of them on his visit earlier in the year.

More successful was the wild mushroom bruschetta: two halves of toasted ciabatta roll topped with mushrooms that packed an impressive intensity of flavour, although – and I know this is a bugbear of mine – I really don’t think they were wild at all. I do wish people would stop making wild claims about their non-wild mushrooms, but I’ve been moaning about that for years and it shows no signs of abating. And while I’m moaning – everything we had at Drink Valley was excellent value, which made the nine pounds fifty conspicuously irrational pricing. Nothing this small is worth that, however good it tastes.

The remainder of our dishes restored the natural order. I had been sniffy about ordering the honey and mustard chipolatas, because in the immortal words of someone (I think it might have been John Inman), I don’t generally go near a sausage unless I’m confident of its provenance. To quote another famous person, my ex-wife used to say that cheap sausages are made up of, and this was her exact phrase, “eyelids and arseholes”.

I’ve always thought she was right about that but, again, Dave talked me into this one. And again – he’s going to be insufferable after this – he was right. The texture of these, in any other context, I might have found a little homogeneous but they were just coarse enough, just herby enough, just sticky enough to be a treat, especially dredged through the honey and mustard gathering at the bottom of the bowl. Also, just to say – these were allegedly cocktail sausages. I’d like to see the cocktail that went with them. It would be a tiki bowl and a half.

We also had something that, by this stage, was a bit of a variation on a theme. Strips of crispy chicken, served sizzling in a hot skillet, cooked in garlic butter, topped with slices of jalapeno and sitting on a bed of beansprouts and carrots. It’s a well-known fact that, unless you happen to find yourself in TGI Fridays, nothing that comes to your table sizzling can be entirely bad, and so it proved here.

The chicken was quite pleasant, but it came into its own towards the end of the dish when the bits we were slow getting to got crispy-crunchy, almost blackened. And by that point the julienned carrots and beansprouts, conversely, had softened and taken on the garlic butter, become a treat in their own right. This was a dish that required patience to get the best out of it. In that respect, I think I rather identified with it.

Oh, and we had some more squid. I couldn’t resist ordering that.

I’d like to tell you what Drink Valley’s dessert menu is like, but I mostly failed in that endeavour. They do a Basque cheesecake, like everybody else, and ice cream and a brownie and a chocolate orange torte, but none of that interested me and I had half an eye on ice cream at Ray’s later on. But they did have something that served as an excellent dessert: a chocolate caramel brownie stout, brewed by Drink Valley themselves. Two halves of it cost us £7.60, so less than two desserts would have cost, and it was twice as fun.

“Time for dessert, is it?” said the man behind the bar when I ordered these, and then he told me that when Drink Valley brewed it they invited staff to the brewery to test drive it. “I don’t remember much of that evening!” he told me, and after a half I could understand why. It was almost nitro-smooth, with a depth of flavour and thickness that belied its 7% strength. If they’d had it in cans, I’d have come away with a couple.

We were preparing to grab our brollies and go out and brave the heavy rain, and I was inwardly congratulating myself for how we’d tackled the menu when I saw our man heading past to an adjacent table with the fish and chips, made with batter using Drink Valley-brewed beer. I couldn’t help rubbernecking as it went past our table, an unbreakable bad habit of mine I’m afraid, and the chap gave me a little smile. Next time, it said. Next time indeed. Our meal – a total of nine small plates and seven halves of beer – had come to just under eighty-five pounds.

The rest of the day was every bit as winning as the start it got off to. I trudged mutinously round the Town Gardens with Dave while he literally stopped to smell the roses and told me how he and his wife had got into wandering along canals. “What have you become?” I said to him, adding “Do you know, I think you’re the only person I’d walk round a park in the pissing rain with when there are amazing pubs five minutes away?” It’s not Fleabag’s sister running through an airport, but it’s close.

After that, there was beer. Beer at the Tap & Brew, beer at the Hop Inn (Dave mentioned their Korean chicken burger was excellent: “now you tell me”, came my refrain). Then there was beer at the Tuppenny, and more beer at the Tuppenny, and then Dave’s wife kindly picked us up and gave me a lift to the station. And then the perfect end to a perfect day: catching the same train as my very own wife, coming back from Bristol with a tin of leftover goodies from the work bakesale. I maintain that the injection of sugar saved me from a brutal hangover – forget Dioralyte, I’m stocking up on cornflake cakes from now on.

Anyway, that’s enough about my minutiae: back to Drink Valley. I remember when I returned from Montpellier thinking that the French understood how to eat with beer in a way that had eluded us Brits. I had beer with karaage chicken, or padron peppers, or charcuterie and cheese and amazing bread, and all of it was magnificent. And what do we get in the U.K.? Inevitably it’s a street food trader – burgers, pizza or fried chicken, it’s nearly always one of those three – and you eat it on a bench or on your makeshift chair and think this is the life.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is. Those things can be great, and when I’m next at Double-Barrelled eating something from Anima E Cuore I won’t feel like I’m slumming it. But Drink Valley reminds me, in the words of Frank Costanza, that there had to be another way. How I would love somewhere comfy and stylish that does an excellent range of craft beer and has a menu optimised for exactly that. Snacking, sharing, small plates and huge amounts of variety. I don’t want to keep going on about them, but Drink Valley is at the standard I really hoped Siren RG1 would attain.

Siren RG1 might well get there, as I’ve said before. But in the meantime, if Drink Valley is thinking about opening that third site I would implore them to think big and move further east. Until they do, Reading has nothing to match Old Town for such a concentration of great places to drink. It turns out you can also caffeinate superbly there and, crucially, eat well too. I’ll be back, because it turns out that Swindon is a destination in a way Reading isn’t quite. Their tourist board can have that one for free.

The Drink Valley, Old Town – 7.8
53 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BG
07827 484649

https://www.instagram.com/thedrinkvalleyoldtown/

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Restaurant review: Lapin, Bristol

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

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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