Pasta Ripiena, 33 St Stephen’s Street, Bristol BS1 1JX (0117 329 3131) Starters £6-£7.50. Mains £14-£17. Desserts £5.50-£6. Lunch, three courses £17. Wines from £19
Recently, a chef got in touch with an invitation to review his restaurant. As a come-on, he sent me a photograph of one of his dishes. Boy, was it a looker: emerald green leaves of what appeared to be wild garlic were draped languorously across quenelles of an equally verdant pea purée. There was the promise of fresh morels and dribbles of a glossy jus, placed Jackson Pollock-style in exactly the right places, all of it spiralling towards the middle of the plate. There, the eye was drawn to two meaty cylinders, either beef fillet or venison, seared outside, the deep red of the eruption from a punctured jugular at their eye. You could have put it in a frame and flogged it at Sotheby’s.
The big question is, would that plateful be nice to eat? Obviously, I cannot say for sure unless at some point I set to work with knife and fork to violate the visual loveliness. However, long experience has taught me not to get excited. The meat was as lean as Rory Stewart, and without any marbling it risked becoming just a lump of cotton wool protein; an exercise in dreariness and disappointment and tooth grinding. Chefs like these cuts, because they are hard to screw up in the pan and look pretty on the plate. For the diner, or at least for this diner – who, despite the cliché, doesn’t eat with his eyes but with his big fat mouth – not so much.
The point is this: the best things to eat are rarely the prettiest. I make a cassoulet, with duck confit and salt pork and rugged Toulouse sausages, which after four hours in the oven looks like a crime scene for a badly thought out body disposal, the duck bones breaking the surface. There’s a Vietnamese chicken dish I make, with lots of fish sauce, soy and caster sugar, that ends up such a deep muddy brown the pan resembles a sample of ploughed field (or something else I won’t mention in a column dedicated to the pleasures of eating). But God, both dishes are a joyous whack of flavour.
And so to the main courses at Pasta Ripiena in Bristol, a small Italian bistro from the team behind the popular Pasta Loco, focusing on folded pasta dishes: ravioli, semi-circular mezzaluna, large cappellacci and the like, then bombarded with sauces, as if the kitchen is hiding its homework. It’s all hilariously messy – and brilliantly done. The plates look like paintings by one-year-olds that proud parents stick on the fridge. What’s key here is they have nailed the prime ingredient: the pasta itself. It is that virtuous combination of silkiness and tautness, a wonder of culinary engineering. Each fold holds its cargo perfectly without being heavy or deadening.
With that sorted they can get expansive. The best deal is at lunchtime when two courses are £14.50 and three courses £17. In the evenings those pasta dishes alone are around £15 each. Given the care, attention and generosity it doesn’t feel excessive, though it’s clear the bargain lies in slacking off and getting down there in the middle of the day. On a Tuesday lunchtime it looks like Bristol’s finest have taken the hint. The simple wood-lined dining room, with its bench-like banquettes and orange plastic school chairs, is buzzing.
That lunch menu offers just three choices at each course and, though there are only two of us, we decide the pricing is conducive to ordering all of it, if only as a selfless service to you, the readers. The darkest of the pasta dishes is the mezzaluna, the folds filled with a mess of ricotta flavoured with black truffle, then buried under a charcoal-coloured sauce of more truffle, wild mushrooms, deep roasted tomatoes and sage butter. It looks like the mulch of a forest floor just before the frosts come, and tastes more intensely of wild mushrooms than almost any other pasta dish I have eaten.
Ravioli, filled with sultry brown crab meat, is lightened with mascarpone and chilli, and then buried under a cascade of crisped breadcrumbs, and the sweetest of mussels from Fowey. This triumvirate of dishes is completed by broad cappellacci filled with ground chicken, with a little fiery ’nduja, ground black olives and quarters of charred baby gem. It is one of those rare situations where I don’t find myself mentally ranking the dishes in order of preference. Each one makes a compelling argument for itself.
The support acts are equally pleasing, including slices of lacy coppa allowed to come to room temperature, and a golden-crusted focaccia not long from the oven. The starters include three fat Atlantic prawns, charred to black in places, with a heavy lubrication of molten garlic butter. Rip off the heads and have a good suck. It’s where the flavour is. A slab of bread is smeared with “jamon butter”, which are two words that deserve each other’s company, and piled with chunks of taut-skinned red and green tomatoes, dressed with a light aioli. Dribbles of vibrant coloured oils, both green and red, around the plate’s rim, is the nearest they come to artful presentation. The third starter is a dark, sticky caponata with the crunch of pine nuts, the aromatics of basil and a little whipped goat’s curd.
At the other end, there is a finely executed pistachio and olive oil panna cotta, made by someone who knows exactly how much gelatin is needed to set this much cream. Eton mess goes on its holidays and comes back much wiser; broken meringue is beaten into yogurt flavoured with rosewater, mint and orange zest. It is small but perfectly formed. The only brow-furrow comes with a Tuscan chocolate torte, which is less show-stopper than heart-stopper. A cherry-sized ball of this, alongside an espresso the colour of night would be a perfect cocoa hit. But this is a whole darn cake. It is unstartable let alone unfinishable.
We each take a teaspoonful, give up and order the espressos anyway. Because we are being good boys we don’t hit the mostly Italian wine list, but there’s major choice under £30. Without booze a bill for two people eating as three doesn’t break £70. It will be more in the evening, but I challenge you to begrudge it. There are prettier meals to be had in Bristol. There are certainly fancier dining rooms. But I doubt there are many places which will leave you feeling so well cared for.
News bites
If Pasta Ripiena is the modern face of the Italian restaurant, then Da Maria in London’s Notting Hill is very much the opposite. In 2017, this tiny caff off the edge of a cinema was saved from closure, and quite right, too. It’s the sort of place that humanises a city. Go for cracking arancini leaking ragù, spaghetti with chilli, garlic and olive oil, and a small bill (87B Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JZ).
According to a new report compiled by Cardlytics, reported by propelhospitality.com, household spend on food delivered by restaurants went up by a massive 19% in 2018. While money spent per individual delivery order has gone up from £18.97 in 2015 to £20.56 in 2019, the amount spent in restaurants per visit has dropped from £21.73 to £19.95.
Monsieur Le Duck, the pop-up tribute to the food of Gascony reviewed positively here in February, has a permanent home in London’s Clerkenwell. The new menu will include a duck wellington and duck baguette alongside the confit and burger options (leduck.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
