Bellita is the younger sister of Bristol stalwart Bell’s Diner and sits squarely in the ‘throw a stick and hit somewhere good to eat’ enclave of Cotham Hill. The name works on a personal level, too: it’s what my four year old used to call my mother, her first approximation of ‘Abuelita‘, which I take Read More
The Pony and Trap is the sort of place you’d love for your local. Long wooden pews, shaded lamps, tiled and wooden floors, leaded glass. It’s cosy, welcoming and intimate: stuffiness and over formality are strangers here, and the view is of endless fields. Oh, and it just happens to have a Michelin-starred kitchen. But Read More
I’m too long in the tooth to expect life to be fair, but sometimes you hear news which strikes you as so plain unjust that you wince. It’s so wrong that an immensely talented chef like Jonray has gone so young: it’s heartbreaking to think of Olive and Bella, on whom he absolutely doted, losing Read More
As far as hiding your light under a bushel goes, The Ox takes some beating in the self-effacement stakes. Lurking beneath a Wetherspoons in Bristol’s historically grand Corn St, with only a nameless brass plate above the door, you descend spiralling marble steps to enter a kind of subterranean gloom which makes decent photographs impossible Read More
It’s all about the momo, baby. Since I first came across them at Natraj on Bristol’s Gloucester Road in the early 1990s, these have always been something I look for on menus. Trouble is, as a mainstay of Nepalese cuisine, they’re not often found, or at least not in these parts, so the quest typically Read More
Some shoes are harder to fill than others. You might not want to be the man to replace Christian Bale as Batman, but you might fancy your chances of improving on Steve McLaren’s record as England manager. In any walk of life it’s a gamble, but sometimes the cards fall kindly. In the case of Read More
This blog is a very simple thing.
I won’t try to sell you any hand lotion, exercise programmes, coffee syrups or Patagonian nose flutes. You won’t find tips on dating, ‘wellness’ or yoga mats.
I write because I love it (and food, as indicated by my increasing girth). Greed happens to be my Deadly Sin of choice, but at least it is never shy of providing me with subject matter.
A simple thing, then: all you get is me wittering on semi-coherently about places I’ve eaten at; hence a ‘restaurant blog’ rather than a ‘food blog’, although there are a few recipes scattered throughout.
From mezze to Michelin ‘fine dining’ and all points in between.