1 York Place, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1AH. Snacks and starters £5– £14.50, mains £26.50-£30.50, desserts £5.50-£10.50, set-price three-course menu £29.50, wines from £30
There’s a cold television-drama rain in Bristol today: the kind of aggressive downpour that special effects teams use for gloomy crime-show night shoots so that it reads on camera, but that never happens in real life. Except it’s happening today, up here in these cream and stucco streets on the edge of Clifton. The sky is the colour of a battleship, the gutters are overflowing and nobody is walking. They are running. Now I am running, too, from a cab to the refuge that is 1 York Place. The picture windows are illuminated by warm orange lamps that act as a beacon against this lunchtime’s early evening light and the dining room is dressed in gentle Scandi shades of oatmeal. There are dried wild grasses attached to the walls, which serve to emphasise just what an escape from the storm this space will be.
All good restaurants serve as a refuge; as a redoubt against the tiresome demands of life, work or, as today, the weather. 1 York Place, the latest Bristol restaurant from chef Freddy Bird, does the job beautifully. I first tried his cooking in 2010 at the Bristol Lido, the best-catered swimming pool in Britain. His food there was what you’d treat yourself to after a brisk 50 lengths, or perhaps after watching someone else complete them: wood-roasted fish or lamb, fat ravioli filled with long-braised venison, a fennel and blood orange salad that referenced his years cooking at the Iberian-influenced Moro. A few years ago he opened the Little French in Bristol’s Westbury Park, which delivered on the name’s promise: fish soup, beef fillet with a peppercorn sauce, plus a side of the cheese and potato wonder that is aligot.
Now there is this second restaurant, which opened at the end of last year, and which wanders Europe a little more widely. What unites them is a determination to fill the plate to the very edge without recourse to daintiness or understatement. Come hungry. The snacks include potato beignet, served hot. It is a mashed potato and flour batter that has been dropped into the deep-fat fryer until puffed up to a deep golden, leaving a soft, gooey centre. Excavate the avalanche of freshly grated parmesan, flecked with smoked paprika, to find these knobbly doughnuts. Underneath, to reinforce the umami, is a cream flavoured with salted anchovy. Or have their whipped cod’s roe, the central well of which is generously filled with amber jewels of trout roe. Alongside are chopped up radishes for crunch and fire. When the radishes run out, move on to the nutty crust of the sourdough.
Those two dishes, costing £14.50, would serve as a classy, brilliantly unbalanced weekday lunch; an indulgence that you might not admit to anyone else. But there are other things demanding our attention. Prime among them is the lunchtime and early evening set-price menu, which is £29.50, including a glass of wine, a Bulgarian Merlot perhaps, or a crisp Spanish white. The successful writing of a set-price menu is a serious skill. It needs to work the margins while not looking as if it’s offering second best. It needs to be tightly written, but still cover most dietaries. There needs to be the whiff of bargain luxury. This one, which costs less than the most expensive main course, does it all brilliantly.
From that menu I start with a rustling heap of moon-shaped squash fritters, in a shattering batter dribbled with miel de cana or sugarcane molasses, and dusted with dried oregano. Around and underneath are soft, grainy nuggets of ricotta as a foil to the sweetness. After my lunch I looked back at what I started with at the Bristol Lido all those years ago: discs of battered and deep-fried pumpkin, with honey and oregano and goat’s cheese. I like a cook who cleaves to his own good ideas. The other starter on the set price menu was buttermilk-fried squid with aioli.
For my main I chose pieces of pork belly, over the tagliatelle in a lobster sauce, because these are the complicated, troubling choices my life demands now. Pray for me. The crackling crunched. The meat was soft. Underneath was a heap of nutty lentils. Slumped across the side was a sweet-sour quince jelly that would have bellowed autumn if the rain still slapping the windows didn’t already have that covered. For colour there were some vividly purple leaves of what we were told was “heritage” kale, its heritage possibly having something to do with a filthy hook-up with Barney the Dinosaur. It was that purple. This was meat and two veg, after it had learned how to tie a cravat and polish its shoes at Swiss finishing school.
It is no criticism of the main menu to say that I really didn’t feel I was getting second best. I just had a smaller choice. The à la carte starters included a thick plank of crunchy-shelled pastilla, made with shredded chicken leg, with a whack of cinnamon, but a light touch on the sweetness. It came with a banging harissa relish to remind you this was a savoury dish. That was followed by two slabs of John Dory, skin crisped and salty, flesh white and lightly bronzed, on a buttery mess of leeks and brown shrimps. If there’s a criticism, it’s that the portion was huge. Less on the plate could have brought down the £30.50 price tag and it might have proved finishable. Then again, that sated appetite may have had something to do with going face-down in the potato beignet and the whipped cod’s roe at the start.
To finish, from both menus, there was a house brick of extremely adult tiramisu, the thick layers of sponge sodden with both site-specific Bristol Cream and enough espresso to stimulate a dozy sloth into bouts of calisthenics. Or have the frangipane tart with the deep purple reveal of sliced fresh figs, in a pond of custard and cream, masking shards of sugary crunch. Service was attentive, but then it would be because, shockingly, we were the only diners this lunchtime. It barely needs saying that Bristol is a superb restaurant city, full of independents serving great food without faff or ludicrous ponce. The establishment at 1 York Place sums up that encouragingly bourgeois approach. For a while the rain had abated, but now the director appears to have called action and once more it is sloshing down. It’s as if the weather is telling us to stay put. If only we could.
News bites
Pasta Brown in London’s Covent Garden has launched a petition to save the business after being told it must vacate the premises it has called home for the past 50 years. The building is owned by a hotel that occupies the rest of the space and now wants the restaurant for a coffee shop, among other things. Pasta Brown, which also provides meals on a weekly basis for the local homeless, says the end of their lease imperils the livelihoods of the multiple families who work there. Read more about the petition here.
School Kitchen, which partners with schools to use catering spaces out-of-hours to offer a takeaway service with a share of revenue going to support educational projects, has announced its second outlet. It will operate out of the cricket pavilion at the Latymer Upper School Sports Grounds in London’s Chiswick. Where the original, in a York primary school, was only takeaway, SK Chiswick will also be a restaurant. The menu will feature dishes created by high-profile chefs including Matt Tebbutt’s toad in the hole, Tommy Banks’s hogget meatballs in a cep sauce and Nadiya Hussain’s cardamon rice pudding (schoolkitchen.com).
Liverpool restaurant Pilgrim is to reopen after a four-year Hiatus. Restaurateur Jamie Duffield launched the original in 2019 after winning the TV show My Million Pound Menu, but it closed in 2020. Plans to move into a permanent site were put on hold after Duffield was diagnosed with a cancer from which he has now fully recovered. The new version will be in the city’s Allerton district and will feature an open kitchen, 24 seats and a changing menu of seasonal Spanish dishes. Follow their progress on Instagram @pilgrim.restaurant
Join Jay Rayner and Grace Dent on Monday 16 December as they discuss his new cookbook Nights Out At Home, live at Kings Place and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on X @jayrayner1