Slow Food Bristol presents an expert introduction to biodynamic wines and an exclusive preview of the summer menu at one of Bristol’s most talked about new restaurants, all at another bargain price on Wednesday 30 June 2010, 7pm

Biodynamic winemaking involves minimal chemical intervention and maximal attention to natural factors including astrology. These factors are also held to influence the tasting of wine, and it’s worth noting that the day of the Slow Dinner is a Flower Day in biodynamic terms, the most auspicious for appreciation of fine wine.

As the term biodynamic is much bandied about but little examined, we’ve arranged for Chris and a couple of expert  guests, including London-based pioneer biodynamic sommelier/supplier/consultant David Harvey, to talk about the subject, answer questions, and comment some of the wines. David and Jonathan, who’ll be cooking for us, will introduce the menu and join in general discussion.

The provisional Four Course Menu:

Cornish Crab, supplied by Alan Sparks, from small fishing boats based around Looe

Salad of the morning’s summer vegetables from the Coqs’ maraichers in Barrow Gurney and the                         Somerset borders, with lemon dressing, soft West Country goats cheese and fresh chilli.

Roast new season lamb, potato gratin, caper and anchovy dressed watercress.

Rich chocolate cake with spiced cherries

One glass of wine included.

 Timing: 7 pm: Aperitif , welcome and talks. 8 pm Dinner

Cost: £25 Slow Food members, £29 non-members, payable in advance. Drinks other than above to be paid for directly on the night.

Booking on this occasion, NOT via Slow Food, but directly to the Three Coqs  (tel 01179 493030 )

Further information: phone Nick Miller ( 0797 6072942 ) or Phil Sweeney ( 0117 904 1530 )       

Three Coqs Brasserie, Whiteladies Road,Bristol BS8 5AP

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A first for modern Bristol nightlife: music, ambience, food and cocktails all of the same standard (high).  The opening salvo of Slow Music nationwide combines a top class band direct from Havana, Cub

an food interpreted by one of the West’s finest chefs with cocteleria to match, a cigar terrace, and a comfortable stylish venue with table seating around the stage.

The music comes from Son del Tropico, another classic example of Cuba’s inexhaustible supply of great bands , on their first visit to play the Barbican: this is their only date outside London. A nine-piece in the trumpet-rich sonora configuration, Son del Tropico consists of veterans of some of Cuba’s most historic ensembles, led by arguably Cuba’s finest exponent of the tropical electric guitar, Pedro Justiz, generally known as Peruchin Junior. Peruchin is a musician’s musician, a jazz aristocrat and scion of one of Havana’s lesser known but most eminent musical dynasties. This the first event co-promoted by Slow Food Bristol, the gastro-activists with a healthy dose of hedonism, and the food will be created by Slow Food leading light Chris Wicks, chef-proprietor of Bells Diner, who is designing a special menu of evolved Cuban dishes and rum cocktails in the style that made him a regional star. All this in the spacious and well converted premises of the elegant old 1930s Cheltenham Cinema, or Jesters as it’s currently known.

The Band

Son del Tropico is resident in the Taberna del Benny, a colonial bar and restaurant beside Havana’s  Plaza Vieja. Six nights a week a jovial crowd of Cuban aficionados and tourists, some knowledgeable and some just lucky, is treated to as good a show as you can find in Havana. A magnificently declamatory old style bolero singer does the rounds of the tables, attracting gleeful applause at the end of a particularly histrionic verse. The bass, congas and bongos, the two trumpets, keyboard and tres keep the tumbaos churning away. To one side, Peruchin Jr slouches on a stool, picking his Yamaha guitar impassively, mixing a dense strand of faintly distorted rhythmic sound into the weft. Occasionally a bohemian couple takes the floor in front of the band for an entwined dance. The music consists of a long menu of the classic styles – sones, boleros, guarachas, mambos,danzones – interspersed with Peruchin’s own compositions and passages of exciting but controlled descarga, the Cuban term for improvisation, when Peruchin’s moustache still scarcely twitches despite the shouts of approbation from the audience and the quickening pace of the two chorus singers’ steps. Peruchin is a master of the descarga, which came into currency in the 1950s thanks to the pioneering sessions in which his father, one of Havana’s most sought-after pianists and arrangers, participated with legendary names such as Cachao Lopez, Guillermo Barreto and Tata Guines. Peruchin Jr studied piano at Conservatory and imbibed the craft of arranging from his father, but prefers to concentrate on guitar, and his style is so individual on this unusual instrument for Cuba that only the great Manuel Galban, of later Buena Vista Social Club fame, springs to mind as comparison:   Peruchin is funkier though, and more deeply Eastern Cuban. For decades Peruchin’s taught music and played in a succession of well thought of bands and at jazz festivals abroad with stars of the stature of John Mc Laughlin. At the Taberna del Benny, Son del Tropico’s work is brilliantly attuned to the location, tireless, neither too loud nor too soft, sensitive to the point of self-effacement when appropriate but as dynamic as a New York salsa outfit if they choose to put their foot down, consummate practitioners of the subtle craft of supper club entertainment rather than aspiring stadium monsters. For this, as much as their musical excellence, they are the perfect partners for Slow Food.

Slow Food Bristol

Slow Food Bristol is the local branch of the Italian-founded food and drink pressure group, now an international phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of members. Slow Food aims to promote good farming and production practice, and safeguard traditional foods and cuisines against global standardization, but also have fun: Slow Bristol organises meals, tastings and much more. Slow Food Italy has for some time run interesting musical events and this is Bristol’s first toe in the water, or actually rum, organised by a new music promoter, Escargophone Productions. The aim is to showcase music which is high quality, individual, human in scale, rich in cultural and geographic links, and also has an affinity with good eating and drinking, whether in cafes, pubs, brasseries or nightclubs. The antidote to Styrofoam crisps, wide screens and junk interior design. For more on Slow Food Bristol see www.slowfoodbristol.org.

Chris Wicks and Cuban Food

Since he took over Bells Diner round the corner in Montpellier, Chris has transformed a corner bistro into one of the West’s premier outposts of haute cuisine, while still retaining an attachment to local sources and traditions. His pot roast pork with squid, bok choy, orange and spicy tomato ketchup,  or two hour poached duck egg with Iberian ham jelly, asparagus and hot mayonnaise, have attracted comments such as “highly original, with impeccable technique” from the Good Food Guide and “enquiring mind and sound sense of taste…” from the Guardian. Recently, his more informal establishment One Thirty, across the road from Jesters, has added tapas, simpler dishes and cocktails to the offer. Cuban food , basically Spanish with additional input from Africa, China and the Caribbean, is beginning to ascend from the depths it sank to under State direction, but has a long way to go before it catches up with the range of both traditional and New Latin restaurants of Miami. The aim of the Noche Cubana food is not to mimic a Havana menu but to present a creative Bristol take on one, and this reason, plus the fact that his own kitchens are three minutes’ walk from Jesters, make Chris Wicks the perfect man for the job. He’ll be creating a short Twisted Cuban menu, based on the market, at £7-50 a dish. New Latin cuisine, flourishing elsewhere, is as rare in the UK as in Cuba, so this is an event not to miss.

The Venue

Jesters is at the junction of Cheltenham Road and Ashley Road, at 135-137 Cheltenham Road, Bristol BS6 5RR. Street parking in Cotham or Montpelier or the NCP at St James Barton, 10 minutes walk down Stokes Croft . Doors open 7.00, band  starts 8.30, finishes by 11.30, for taxi ordering, recorded music till later.

Tickets £10 - please email phil@slowdfoodbristol.org with details of names, and then send cheque, made out to Slow Food Bristol, to SLOW MUSIC, 71 Lower Redland Road, Bristol BS66SP. It would be helpful if you could also indicate whether intending to eat.

Further information

From Philip Sweeney, phil@slowfoodbristol.org, 0117 904 1530

or Sue Miller, 07843 037074

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.