9.5/10
Telephone: 0117-925 5577
Address: Narrow Lewins Mead, Bristol
Open: All week: lunch, noon-1.45pm; dinner, 6.30-9.45pm.
Price: Around £40 for three courses, plus wine
Wheelchair access and disabled WC
For the semi-professional hypochondriac, there can be no greater thrill than suffering a harmless condition so exceedingly rare that you have the opportunity to name it yourself. Whether it will find its way into subsequent editions of Black's Medical Dictionary I've no idea, but here's crossing our slightly arthritic fingers on behalf of Firkin Syndrome.
Named after the only satisfied guest in Fawlty Towers history (the one Basil said they really ought to have stuffed), this is typified by the wooziness and loss of spatial awareness that afflict those who encounter an indecently good British hotel with no ambition to fleece the punter to death.
At the Hotel du Vin in Bristol, the warmth of the name badge-less reception staff was a shock, and the quiet elegance of the bedroom (Egyptian cotton sheets and windows that open) an unnerving aftershock. It was only when I saw the bath, however, that I felt the legs going and the room start to rotate. In similarly priced hotels, baths are designed solely for the man known as Titch to his New Guinea pygmy tribe. This free-standing beauty was enormous, and had a water flow so powerful you could happily flood most of the West Country in the time it takes to undress.
After that excitement (and no, I don't get out much), anticlimax seemed inevitable. Not a bit of it. Sincere apologies, and you'd be wise to flip to the next page, but this review has no option but to gush like those taps. From the drink in the dimly lit bar (squidgy sofas, abstract murals, pistachios and giant green olives on the tables), where my friend and I got chatting with a dead cool young couple suffused with pleasure at celebrating their first year together, all the way through the meal, the experience was as close to faultless as you are likely to come without paying £170 a head in a Michelin two-starred joint.
The dining room has an authentic bistro feel, with aged floorboards and fireplaces, antique light fittings and walls painted the usual nicotine yellow and festooned with old advertising posters. Although buzzing with the sound of people having fun (an extremely rare, and quite possibly unlawful, sonic manifestation in an English hotel restaurant, where whispering is preferred), the acoustic was excellent. So was the service from young, unsnotty French staff. So too was a menu well tailored for a damp, chilly night, from which we both wanted just about everything.
Such was the faffing that we were well into a great fruity South African red (a Pinotage at £40 the bottle) recommended by the sommelier when the starters arrived. My friend, an erstwhile bistro owner-chef herself and not easily impressed, was hugely taken with her escabeche of mackerel (£6.75), which was warm and lemon-zingy, and came with not just a good potato salad but also some star anise. There might have been more of my gravlax (also £6.75), but the salmon was of the highest quality and couldn't have been fresher.
The chap in the bar with the brandy and a Cohiba from the walk-in humidor said he hadn't been that wowed by his roast partridge (£15.50), so my friend took the hint and ordered it. It was terrific: gamey without being too opinionated, very tender and served with big crisps and juniper sauce, although bafflingly without bread sauce. My honey-glazed pork belly (£14.50) was better still, the meat being sweet and melting and the crackling to die for, and served with grain mustard mash and a rosemary sauce. Side dishes of Savoy cabbage with pancetta, baked Portobello mushrooms and a carrot and swede purée (all £2.75) made ideal companions for two such perfectly autumnal dishes. We could, thank God, dredge up a pedantic moan about our shared pudding, the pears poached in red wine being a little icy. Even so, the imaginative matching of the fruit with slices of tête de moine cheese made it yet another winner.
This tiny hotel chain, thankfully unruined since it was bought by the larger and less upmarket Malmaison group, stands as a screeching rebuke to all those hideous big city horrors and gruesomely pretentious country house places that charge the same money or more to house you in a coffin, and serve food fit for dung beetles. We ought to have it stuffed.
