Restaurant Reviews, Food Articles
It has always been Slow Food Bristol’s intention to build a data base of reviews and recommendations relating to the food and restaurant scene of Bristol and region (and indeed further afield). We hope shortly to generate a bit more activity on the website, including in this area. As always, if you’re interested, get in touch.
But in addition, Slow member and journalist Philip Sweeney would like to bring to your attention his website, www.theboulevardier.co.uk , whose food section has finally started running restaurant reviews. See current posting on Raymond Blanc and Bristol Brasseries, and forthcoming reviews of interesting eating places from Almondsbury to Zagreb, including the heir apparent to Ferran Adria on the Costa Brava when El Bulli closes down next year.
Theboulevardier.co.uk would like to hear from contributors of news, views, kitchen gossip and dramatic exposes, which may or may not be connected to matters Slow. See link on this site.
AGM looming, news brewing
After an unusually profound hibernation, Slow Food Bristol is flinging up the shutters and opening for business. The first Market of what looks a bit like Spring is about to happen, and we are calling an Annual General Meeting on March 29th, 2010 that is, to review our General Election strategy and do a spot of conviviality. Please see other sections of this site for updates on events, markets, etc.
Clifton Club Book Launch Supper
Slow Bristol Event coming up!
Slow Food Bristol, the Clifton Club, and Andrea Leeman invite you to a supper of Gloucestershire food and drink to celebrate the publication of Andrea’s new book, A Taste of Gloucestershire.
We pre-mentioned this a little while ago and already have bookings. Now here are the details:
Tuesday 10 November, 7.30 to 10.30, The Clifton Club (22 The Mall, Bristol BS8)
The new book is the third in a series including the much praised Tastes of Somerset and Devon. Andrea Leeman is a writer, cook, former restaurateur, Bristol resident, and, jewel in the crown of her achievements, a member of Slow Food Bristol. She has selected the ingredients for the meal from among the fine Gloucestershire producers her book features, and we’re hoping some of the producers will be present. Andrea herself will be, of course, to tell us about the book, answer questions etc.
We’re delighted to be able to stage this event in the magnificent premises of the Clifton Club, which if you’re unfamiliar with them, constitute a reason by themselves for coming to the do.Click link above for details of the Club (founded 1818, moved in 1882 to present premises designed by the eminent Francis Greenway, the Father of Australian Architecture, subsequently a sort of Boodle’s of the West …)
The buffet will be prepared by the Club’s chef, Douglas “Dougie” Bonar, one of the least publicized foodie names of Bristol, in keeping with the general air of discretion about the patrician joint he officiates over, but whose background (the Savoy,etc ) indicates he can tell a mandolin from a timbal.
The menu will include:
Smoked eel on rye bread with horseradish
Gloucestershire hommity pie
Potted ham with sage and nutmeg
Roast beetroot salad with walnuts, dressed with walnut oil and sea salt
Walnut bread and local cheeses
Apple tart and cream
Included in the price is a glass of wine or perry
The damage: a mere £15 for members or £18 for non-members
There’ll be a paying bar for additional liquid sustenance.
Book asap to avoid the ignominy of standing in the Mall gaping enviously at the croute of gastro-Bristol stepping out of their carriages into the glow of chandeliers and popping of corks from jeraboams of perry.
Email Phil Sweeney to reserve on phil@slowfoodbristol.org or call 0117 904 1530 Payment by cheque made out to Slow Food Bristol, posted to 71 Lower Redland Road, Bristol BS66SP
See you there.
October News
1. Market alert!
Sunday 4 October, Corn Street the usual lipsmacking array of this and that, all indispensable for sustenance during the arduous week ahead. If you missed September’s market due to holidays, half marathons and other mishaps, come on down.
2. Event alert!
Stick this in your blackberries: November 10th, our member Andrea Leeman, authoress of A taste of Somerset and A Taste of Devon, makes it a trilogy with the long awaited publication of A Taste of Gloucestershire. Slow Food Bristol is staging a launch buffet, with recipes from Andrea’s book and the presence we hope of some of the producers featured in it .And we’re very pleased to be doing it in the Clifton Club, whose august columns and perfectly elevated windows gaze down West Mall/Caledonia from the centre of the Mall (in Clifton, Bristol, that is). A blue chip addition to the list of interesting joints Slow Bristol is wheedling its way into. Full details available v soon. And also news of further events in coming weeks and months.
3. It’s official! :Slow Food Bristol is really cool!
To Slow Bristol members, demonstration of cutting edge chic may come as naturally as falling off a bar stool, but it’s still heartwarming to receive official endorsement. At lunch earlier this week with Catherine Gazzoli, the “CEO” of Slow Food UK, we learned that the Slow Cuban Night this summer had attracted lots of comment around the country. What sort of comment? “That it was really cool”
4. Goodbye Keith Floyd.
Floyd was a significant presence for the good in the Bristol catering sphere.We’re contemplating staging an Event around his gastronomic legacy. News before long. In meantime, see report on Bristol’s adieu to Floyd in www.theboulevardier.co.uk. This is a site which will shortly commence coverage of West Country gastronomic matters. Contacts from informants and contributors welcomed.
Noche Cubana – a flawed triumph.
A flawed triumph, a glittering disaster…the UK launch of Slow Music was certainly a night to remember, a magnificent shipwreck of an event which went down giggling with all handsbrandishing empty rum bottles.
The idea was a serious attempt to bring Slow succour to a musical rare breed, the supper club band, by combining a particularly distinctive practitioner with food, drink and surroundings of outstanding compatibility. The nine-piece Cuban band Son del Tropico, in London to play the Barbican, was hi-jacked on its free night and bussed down the M4 to join a specially created Cuban menu by Chris Wicks of Bells Diner and a couple of Bristol’s best cocktail barmen in the promising interior of a nightclub which, in spite of its unpromising name, consisted of a tolerably preserved 1930s cinema. Ticket sales started sluggishly, and Chris planned at first for 50 meals, later increasing this to 90.
Then three hundred and fifty people turned up and all hell broke loose. Chris heroically turned out 120 dishes of delights such as Creole pork with okra, black beans and rice and plantain and parsley tortilla, but could have shifted three times that. The bar, besieged, ran dry. The band was too loud, but the assembled convivialists just pulled back the tables and danced. A handful of people complained, very reasonably, that this was not the soigne affair they’d been led to expect, but far more simply revelled in it. The Telegraph’s food writer left enthusing wildly, and next day the Real Food Lover blog concluded “great music and dancing may be the missing ingredient to Slow Food”.
So we will persist. The Escargophone production staff are even now considering themes for the next Slow Music Night: a cucumber sandwich and the tea dance workshop is current favourite, with death metal and balti a close second.
URGENT! Not To Be Missed Slow Food & Music Event
Stop Press! New Cuban Night Event 29 June! Birth of Slow Music!
Please click on the flyer for the basic facts or here for the juicy details.
We need people to organize groups of friends to reserve if this ambitious and highly promising event is to be as successful as the last ones.
Call Phil Sweeney on 0117 904 1530
or Sue Miller on 07843 037074
Noche Cubana, Monday 29 June
Full Briefing
Welcome to the new Slow Food Bristol website.
Welcome to the new Slow Food Bristol website. It’s taken a while to drag into existence, but we hope you’ll find it worth the wait. Eventually. At present, you’ll notice, it contains a good deal of the old site’s content, but we hope rejuvenation will soon take hold. For this to happen, we need you to contribute: news, opinions, reviews, pictures…so please get in touch with me at phil@slowfoodbristol.org .
Events 2009
News imminently on our next events, which will include a charcuterie workshop and tasting at Papadeli and the launch of member Andrea Leeman’s eagerly awaited book on Gloucestershire Food, at an interesting new venue currently under negotiation.
Meanwhile, our most recent event, on the 26th of May, was our most successful in terms of attendance ever. Fifty-eight people turned out for theglittering Slow Rockfish Grill, among them UK Slow Chair Gerry Danby, who flew down from Yorkshire in Carlo Petrini’s personal Gulfstream for the evening with a bevy of starlets. The dinner marked the opening of the new Whiteladies Road successor to the old Slow favourite Fishworks, and was hosted by Mitch Tonks, chef-proprietor, who welcomed us to his smart new premises, talked about the network of West Country fishermen who supply his two restaurants, signed his new book, and, most importantly, cooked a simple but faultless meal of cuttlefish in ink, roast scallops, char-grilled monkfish, and sea bream en papillote.
Slow Music
What is it, you may well ask. Music which bears similar characteristics to the food championed by the Slow Movement, for one thing, but there might be numerous other factors. Whatever, music has been an increasing preoccupation of the Slow Movement’s Italian theoreticians for some years now, and we in the very musical city of Bristol intend to get in on the act, as it were. News soon. In the meantime, if interested, see two articles on the subject by Phil Sweeney, here & here. [NB these and other articles posted are not so much shameless self-promotion as scraping around for content for this site, which will doubtless soon start to arrive].
Market Award
In February, Bristol Slow Food Market (the UK’s first and the model for the recently introduced Italian Earth Markets) was the winner, along with the Bristol Farmers Market, of a National Association of Market Authorities Speciality Market of the Year Award, the Oscar of the market world.
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