Category: Rest of UK

Outside of London

Review: The Cauldron, Bristol

In the Cauldron

The Cauldron boasts of being the first entirely “solid fuelled kitchen in the last 100 years” – basically, they cook everything using wood or coal to “remove their reliance on the big 6 energy providers”. Don’t say it’s laudable. It’s not. If every restaurant in the UK switched to this approach we’d have lopped down …

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Review: Bell’s Diner, Bristol

Ox cheek croquettes

Bell’s Diner is a Bristol institution, it’s been there since 1976. And although it’s an entirely different team and a totally different menu these days, Bell’s is still 100% a neighbourhood bistro serving straight-forward dishes with continental inspiration. Maybe just leaning a bit more on Spain than France these days, most of the plates being …

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Review: The Hare, Milton-under-Wychwood

Tart

Just a quick one. Almost every Cotswold village now has a pub that has thrown itself over to evening meals and Sunday lunches for the country set, with varying degrees of success. You have to say this for the lot of ’em: they all aspire to cook fresh food, with plenty of local sourcing and …

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Review: Bulrush, Bristol

Bulrush

Oh wow, I love Bulrush. You’ll love it to, I suspect. This is top-notch fine dining at a knockdown price, and if I lived in Bristol I’d be here every month. Like a lot of the best things in Bristol, it’s tucked away down a side street in a one of the little residential districts …

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Review: My Sichuan, Oxford

Duck tongues

Oxford seems to have a thing for good, cheap oriental dining. All of the big London critics have snuck out to academia and waxed lyrical about Zheng, SoJo, Oli’s Thai and My Sichuan. So what better to sandwich in between the sketches of Raphael at the Ashmolean and a film at the indie Ultimate Picture …

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