Very Tasty, Very Brizzle

The food writer Matthew Norman knew he was going to raise a few hackles when he wrote of Bristol in the Guardian: “It is with rueful affection that I say it has always been a shocker for restaurants. For a city of its size, population, charm and wealth, Bristol is a curiously arid food desert.”

But in fact Bristol, since Norman lived here many years ago, has now developed a thriving food scene. The Slow Food market has finally arrived, there are bustling farmers’ markets, including the original and best, St Nicholas Market on Corn Street where you can buy vegetables so fresh the soil is still damp, excellent cheese toasties, home-made doughnuts and gloriously chewy spelt bread.

There are a number of golden oldie restaurants, such as Conrad at Jamesons (30 Upper Maudlin Street, BS2 8DJ 0117 927 6565) and Juniper (21 Cotham Road, South Cotham, BS6 5TZ 0117 942 1744); a legion of funky waterfront bars, like the Mud Dock (40 The Grove, BS1 4RB 0117 934 9734), a fantastic mix of bike shed, fine food and finer tunes; you can do art and food in the Arnolfini (16 Narrow Quay, BS1 4QA 0117 917 2300), organic in Bordeaux Quay (V-Shed, Canons Way, BS1 5UH 0117 9065550), cinema and dinner in the Watershed (1 Canon's Road, Harbourside, BS1 5TX 0117 927 5100), feral trade and cult films in The Cube (Dove Street South, BS2 8JD 0117 907 4190), posh it up in Hotel du Vin (The Sugar House, Narrow Lewins Mead, BS1 2NU 0117 925 5577), go Byronesque in Park Street’s Goldbrick House (69 Park Street, West End, BS1 5PB 0117 945 1950), pig out on pies in Pie Minister (24 Stokes Croft, BS1 3PR 0117 942 9372 or Corn Street Corn Exchange, Old City, BS1 1JQ 0117 302 0070) or detox in Blue Juice (39 Cotham Hill, BS6 6JY 0117 973 4800) where, ironically, along with a wheatgrass chaser, you can buy the best brownies in town.

Then there are the festivals – Bristol is home to the stonkingly good Organic Food Festival, the newish Food and Wine Fair, as well as the Vegan Fayre and the Vegetarian Road Show.

Perhaps the place that epitomises the Bristolian food scene the best is Bell’s Diner (1-3 York Road, BS6 5QB 0117 924 0357) in Montpelier, an area that manages to be both quintessentially Bristolian with narrow streets, wafer-thin multi-coloured houses and continental European. Bell’s is in an old grocers shop, the décor the colour of a robin’s egg, bottles and ancient ads for self-raising flour still on the shelves. The food is French merged with molecular gastronomy – we are served a warm pea soup with truffle foam in a shot glass as an amuse-bouche – and yet as you look out onto a street from your shop-front window-seat, all manner of shenanigans are taking place.

People pound on each other’s front doors, a large man dressed like a gangsta pulls over in a souped up orange Merc and kids skateboard down the street while we are served beef carapaccio topped with beetroot sorbet and an egg that’s been poached for two hours. The French waiters possess impeccable sommelier-skills, and one tells us he’s been training for two years, even as he bends low over the table and incorrectly swaps around the spoons for dessert. We swap them back to the correct place, my companion NJR whispering: “Perhaps table-setting comes in year three.”

As well as the routine exchange of silver foil parcels outside our window, there are more legitimate ones, coming from the Thali Café up the road, which we surmise contain naan bread.

The Thali Café (12 York Rd, BS6 5QE 0117 942 6687) was set up by Sidharth Sharma, Jim Pizer and Sam Hackett and the concept is simple. You are served an Indian thali and that’s it. Or you can buy a tiffin carrier and use it over and over again to put your take away in. The Thali Café has expanded from Montpelier to Totterdown and Easton, where it’s called the One Stop Thali (see website for details on all locations). Here there are two options – north or south Indian thali. I contrive to mix up the two and enjoy a divine combination of rice, coconut chutney, saag paneer and tarka dahl. This is proper authentic Indian food, complete with curry leaves and roast chillies made with fresh vegetables. The service is slow but the laid-back atmosphere delightful.

The one food combination that Bristol has not had until now is a spa with a restaurant but fortunately that has been rectified with the opening of the city’s old Victorian lido. Now reborn as an infinity pool with a sauna, steam room and outdoor Jacuzzi, it retains many of the original features – changing rooms alongside the pool with wooden barrels containing the showers and candy-striped curtains. For once the rain stops and lying in the Jacuzzi beneath jasmine, higgledy-piggledy houses hidden by begonias feels Mediterranean.

The food at The Lido (Oakfield Place, BS8 2BJ 0117 933 9533) has the same flavour: mostly cooked in a wood burning oven it’s mainly Italian, simple, fresh and seasonal. I have wood roast girolles with shavings of zamorano on sourdough toast. The sourdough is wonderfully chewy, soft and sour and the ice creams that follow are exquisite: unexpected flavours such as salt butter caramel, rosewater and bitter chocolate with cherries work unexpectedly well.

Whilst the Lido is reserved for special occasions, my local is a more regular treat. At the café in St Werburghs City Farm (Open 10am – 4pm Wed – Mon at Watercress Road, St Werburghs, BS2 9YJ 0117 9428241) much of the produce travels an even shorter distance than I do to reach the tables. The farm itself provides most of the meat – goat, pork and lamb, as well as eggs – though for vegetarians it can be a little distressing to watch cute kids grow up, take a brief sabbatical and reappear in the stew. A group of disabled gardeners grow salad at the farm and sell their fresh leaves to the café.

The café backs up against Ashley Vale Allotments and holders trade their gluts for food stamps. Right now they’re exchanging callaloo, a West Indian spinach-like plant, and beetroot, which is turned into a rich spiced chutney, for lattes and flapjacks. As if this wasn’t socially enterprising enough, the menu always features at least one option that is ‘affordable’. Even without choosing the cheapest dish, I still manage to have two courses and a City Farm green tea for less than £9.

I have a frittata, the potatoes buttery soft, with a crisp goat’s cheese top, served with roast tomatoes and salad. My dessert, hazelnut praline brownie, has that winning combination of unctuousness and crunchiness, and is paired with frozen strawberry yoghurt: the fruit freshly picked from the allotment, the yoghurt from Jess’s Ladies, the ladies being a herd in nearby Gloucester. Even the crockery was made in the Burg, and the cutlery was a cast-off from another Bristolian restaurant. The food in the City Farm Café is invariably delicious, organic, inventive, filling, Fairtrade and cheap; but it’s packed with parents and their very, very noisy offspring almost all the time. I guess this is the price you pay for food that has taken steps instead of miles, and is, as they say, very Brizzle.