Normally a typical restaurant review starts with a discussion about the restaurant, the warm and friendly welcome, the opulent surroundings and beautiful clientele, waxing lyrical about the lavish, glamorous style of The Living Room, but regular readers of the magazine will already know we love the restaurant. We love the care attention taken by the staff, love the perfectly selected wine list and staggering cocktail menu, today our review has to start elsewhere, and its no bad thing! I simply can’t shift the memory of desert from my mind, and frankly I am not sure I want to … ever!

We left The Living Room on Bristol’s Harbourside an hour ago, the taste and image of the utterly delicious salted caramel and dark chocolate torte fills my mind, it’s perfectly soft, smooth and slightly salted caramel centre is unlike anything I have ever tasted, and already I have searched the internet looking for a recipe. It was nothing short of stunning and the best desert I have tasted in years, perfectly short pastry, dark chocolate and that amazing caramel, Wow! My dining partner ate a wonderful white chocolate and bourbon biscuit cheesecake served with basil syrup, which was a show stealer, sweet and yet somehow crisp and fresh! Amazing puddings! Right now that’s done, and trust me the puddings alone are worth a trip down there, I guess I need to go back to the starter.

As the menu is a perfect celebration of Spring and Summer where better to start than with a mixed deli board, the glorious sunshine of the last few weeks put Bristol’s climate somewhere closer to Barcelona, and this is reflected in our choice of starter, the sharing platter is a perfect summer dish, mixed Spanish meats including chorizo, prosciutto and salami sit next to olives, mozzarella and the most beautiful tomato hummus with bread, a perfect start to a summer meal and wonderfully reminiscent of holidays spent in the sunshine, all washed down with a lovely house crisp Chardonnay.

The taste of a warm summer

The taste of spring continues with a honey and mustard rack of lamb served pink complemented with potato gratin, beautiful soft with wafer thin layers and a light but flavour packed red wine jus. I opted for the surprisingly delicate mackerel filet and tantalising cod cheeks in a Pernod cream sauce, which was beautifully creamy with a slight bite of aniseed, which slices though the cream, complemented by the crispy pancetta. The menu is a perfect pitch for Spring, light, subtle and fragrant without compromising on the flavour, this menu is the best of modern English cuisine, intelligent, exciting and seasonal. A wonderful celebration of the season, The Living Room gets it right again!

David Penfold

Chermoula Marniated Potatoes and Asparagus & Fruit and Yogurt Ice Lollies

Spring is finally here and with it a whole range of refreshing seasonal fruits and veg which shouldn’t be missed! For those of you who are sick to death of a veg box full of cabbage, this is your season. So hands on the web to search for those hassle-free but special tasting recipes that will turn a quick nibble into an exotic Mediterranean feast! Good examples of what’s likely to enter your fridge within the next few weeks are; asparagus, broccoli, spinach, new potatoes, artichokes, apricots, avocados, mango and pineapples. As we all know, during spring time, Bristol is buzzing with social life so the last thing you want is to be at home slaving away with your apron on. Keep it simple! Keep it quick!
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I have long wanted to pay a visit to Casamia in Westbury Village and their appearance in last autumn’s Gordon’s Best Restaurant competition on Channel 4 hastened my booking. No doubt their new found fame will have had phones ringing off the hook, so I got in before the competition made booking impossible. It still meant two months of waiting, but it was well worth it.
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From its gorge-side balconies to its wine-cellar eateries to its picturesque waterside restaurants, Bristol has good food to offer. When it comes to fast food, however, Bristol is pretty bad, more or less because all fast food is bad. ‘But no,’ dubious chicken sandwich lovers will retort, ‘fast food is good because it’s bad!’ And for those whom kebabs are the best company for vodka and Red Bull will add in protest that there’s nothing a fancy salad can do better than a kebab at 2am after stumbling out of a nightclub. Perhaps it’s they way in which fast food speaks to out hungry-for-calories genetic history that makes it so desirable.

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Stokes Croft is changing. The arrival of Cabot Circus nearly three years ago had everyone fearing the worst and we grimly expected Bristol’s cultural quarter to become whitewashed with highstreet garbage while yuppy flats were squeezed into every square inch going but in actual fact, the biggest change we’ve seen in the area has been the creation and renovation of more independent cafés and pubs than you can shake an organic, Fair Trade carrot at! New venues have popped up like The Canteen and The Arts House, old venues have been transformed like Leftbank, The Social and The Bank, and now, alongside old favourites like The Pipe And Slippers, The Bristolian Café and The Croft, the community café to end all community cafés, Café Kino, has been given a facelift and a new home too.
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The Three Coqs Brasserie offers a rather unprepossessing face to the world. Situated above in Clifton Down shopping centre, and with a stairwell straight out of a swimming pool and gym, it certainly wouldn’t seem to be the place to go for well cooked bistro food and one of the most interesting wine lists in the city.

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Replacing the short lived Italian restaurant, La Voglia, on Stokes Croft, The Social is a brand new bar and café located opposite the Metropolis. Arriving alongside other new ventures, The Bank (previously the dingy looking Mackies) and 51 (ex-The Junction), The Social brings a different vibe to this part of town. Whilst 51, The Bank and Canteen all offer late night openings and live music, The Social brings a more chilled out atmosphere with candle lit tables and high quality, locally sourced food. The menu is very vegetarian and vegan friendly with a few meat options thrown in as well but it is the roast dinners offered on Sundays that steal the show.
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Classic Turkey!
Ingredients:
1 lemon
Small handful of chopped fresh parsley and thyme
150g softened butter
Fresh turkey crown breast
6 fresh bay leaves
6 balls of stuffing
6 slices of bacon
12 chipolatas

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Dinner at The Living Room has never before disappointed so when Mr P and I found ourselves bored of our Christmas shopping this (very early) festive Saturday, there was no doubt in our minds that The Living Room would be the perfect sanctuary to escape November Christmas music and the hoards surrounding the newly installed German Christmas market.

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Scrumpy: the staple drink of the South West and Bristol. Though in recent years it has flirted with further shores, it has never been truly understood except for in its own motherland. You’d think that after all these years this ancient past time would be going out of fashion but no longer is scrumpy confined to being the drink of flat-capped tweed wearing working class gents, everyone in Bristol is on it!

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