112 Princess Victoria Street, Bristol (01179 735 435). Open Wednesday-Sunday. Meal for two, including wine and service: £80
You wish Wallfish Bistro was a short stroll from your house. You don't right at this moment. Right now your eyes keep flicking to the photos to work out whether that's something you'd like to eat. But 1,100 words from now – possibly half that, if I do my job properly – you will. It's the sort of quietly overachieving, understated neighbourhood bistro that anybody with a grown-up's appetite, good taste and the cash to fund an occasional restaurant habit would want a stagger away from their front door.
For me it took one look at the menu. I immediately knew everything was going to be OK. Generally menus are where the English language goes to be hog-tied and tortured by people desperately overcompensating, be it for the quality of the food or of their written English. If the food is good the latter doesn't matter. Mostly it should be about nouns: big, fat promising ones, with the occasional preposition. The Wallfish menu is full of terrific nouns.
Quite right. The restaurant, a simple space of caramel-leather banquettes, bare-wood tables and the flash of eggshell blue, has much to live up to. It occupies a site in the knowingly boho Clifton district of Bristol, all whitewash and candy pastel stucco like a seaside town's backstreet, that was once home to Keith Floyd's first business. There is a plaque on the outside wall attesting to his presence here between 1969 and 1972, before he necked all his profits and went bust. There's an awful lot of churn in the restaurant business, but sometimes the buildings they once occupied feel like they have long memories.
The inheritors of this site are chef Seldon Curry and restaurant manager Liberty Wenham who, between them, have worked for the River Cottage operation, Ducksoup, in London's Soho and with Rowley Leigh at Le Café Anglais. It is the latter that the opening of the menu recalls with its list of aperitifs – the white-peach Bellini for £5 fizzes with the whisper of spring – and various nibbles. From that list, deep-fried squid comes with a crust of fennel seeds and cumin, and a dusting of chilli. I am stealing this idea.
Wallfish, as per the restaurant's logo, is another word for snails – a West Country tradition which has been forgotten and rediscovered numerous times over the years. The word is obscure enough not to warrant an entry in Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food (and that even includes an entry for giraffe). During one bout of rediscovery in the 1960s it was decided that serving wallfish with garlic was fancy and foreign and just wrong, so they turned up in Somerset pubs with only herbed butter.
The Wallfish Bistro is not in thrall to such petty nationalism; its snails come with garlic butter. It is a menu some might call restless and others at ease with itself. There is the muscular English certainty of a mixed-beet salad with Devon blue cheese and pickled walnuts or Portland crab on toast. That sits comfortably next to the enlightened internationalism of queen scallops with a chorizo crumb or grilled quail with lemon, yogurt and harissa.
Fried cod cheeks – what happened to these glossy pebbles of flesh before we noticed that cod actually have cheeks? – come crisp and hot alongside a bowl of mayonnaise flavoured with wild garlic. It has a pleasingly bitter kick, as if determined to make sure you'll recall having eaten it. A chicken broth with more wild garlic has a hedgerow's worth of sautéed wild mushrooms and, in the middle, a perfectly poached egg that leaks its yolk into the soup with one incision.
This is food that makes its mark through assertive flavours rather than tedious good looks. Witness two chops of salt marsh lamb from an animal that has lived, the bronzed ribbon of fat so crisp and hot and running, the meat pink, laid across a big toddler's mess of puréed roasted onions, caramelised sweetbreads, a few greens and the whack of anchovy. Nobody will hang that on their wall, which is quite right. It demands to be eaten.
A lump of gurnard, seared the right shade of golden, comes with clams and samphire and a light beurre blanc. It's seafood cookery for people who genuinely like fish rather than those who merely pretend to. There are many things here I regret not trying: the goat and pork ragu, the steak with bone marrow and chips, the sea bream with charred lemon and rosemary. Oh, you know: just all of it. Starters are around £6.50, and mains mostly in the low teens, with a one-course express lunch (with a glass of wine) on offer for a tenner.
This is a small operation, at least during the day. Liberty is out front recommending wines from a short offering which starts at £15 (on Wednesday nights they currently do bring-your-own with no corkage). Sheldon is out back doing most of the honours, which explains a list of desserts built on expediency. There's a panna cotta with the knicker-pink flash of rhubarb, and a chocolate mousse on top of salt caramel with a dollop of crème fraîche to calm everything down. No, not especially ambitious, but each is deftly executed and has us scraping at the glaze.
Down in the basement dining room I stumble across a copy of Rude Food, a book I very much enjoyed as an 80s adolescent. It's full of glossy Athena-esque photos of women with bananas nestled betwixt perky boobs, though my favourite was always the middle digit inserted into the lemon sole mousseline. And in the loo is a volume of Victorian food smut called Saucy ladies: 150 delicate sauces accompanied by 60 indelicate ladies. This is a recipe book I really should own.
I did not know Keith Floyd well, though his TV persona was so obvious and unforced that I believe it's fair to make assertions: I think he would have approved very much of Wallfish Bistro; of its lack of pretension, its commitment to appetite and, most of all, of a kitchen skilled in all the right departments. All that and a little erotica in the basement. I think Floyd would have wanted to eat here often, and I can say no better. And now you want to eat here, too. You wish it was just around the corner from your house. I knew you would.
Jay's news bites
■ For more local old-school joys try the mildly eccentric Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec near London's Elephant and Castle. It serves snails by the dozen, a cassoulet that will take two days to digest and a fully accessorised côte de boeuf. Afterwards take your drinks upstairs to the small jazz venue, a labour of love by owner Hervé Regent, whose gifted sons run the kitchen and front of house. A true gem (brasserietoulouselautrec.co.uk)
■ Life just got easier for Mexican food fans craving the genuine article, with the launch of Mexgrocer.co.uk, which imports products direct to Britain on Amazon. It does a strong line in corn tortillas, chillies in forms many and various and achiote, the Yucatan-style, tomato-based sauce made with annatto seeds.
■ The award for a book title that doth protest too much goes to Kristy Turner for But I Could Never Go Vegan! 125 Recipes That Prove you Can Live Without Cheese. It's Not All Rabbit Food And Your Friends Will Still Come Over For Dinner, set to be published in January 2015. Get your orders in now.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
