A.B.O.E. closed in August 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
Last Friday I found myself in Bristol enjoying a badly-needed long weekend away. Our train pulled into Temple Meads, half an hour late, and Zoë and I wheeled our suitcases into the centre, three days of eating, drinking and excellent company ahead of us. But before we checked into our hotel, before we did almost anything, I had lunch on my mind and only one candidate to provide it. We made a pilgrimage to the Apple Cider Barge and there, next door, in its distinctive black and red was Gurtrina, the van belonging to fried chicken supremos and Reading legends Gurt Wings. How could I kick off my minibreak anywhere else?
By my reckoning it’s over six months since Gurt Wings stopped coming to Blue Collar – something to do with the council being difficult, if I remember rightly – and the reunion with their magnificent food was all the sweeter for all that deprivation and delayed gratification. In my time away the buffalo sauce had become just a little more piquant, the blue cheese saltier and tangier. The sun came out, the bench we were perched on positively glowed and we polished off our food in wordless joy. Truly, it would have been worth a trip to Bristol just for that.
Afterwards James Mitchell – the man behind Gurt, also known to his many fans as Uncle Gurty – came over and the three of us caught up and shot the breeze. I told him where we were planning to eat in the city, he mentioned a few places he’d heard were good and then he did something I wasn’t expecting. He went out of his way to tell me somewhere especially good I should check out.
“You need to get yourself to Oboe” he said.
“What, like the musical instrument?”
“No, A.B.O.E. It stands for ‘A Bit Of Everything’. The chef is a guy called Seb Merry who was on Masterchef, and he’s so passionate about his food. The whole team are brilliant. They do the best Bloody Mary I’ve had – it’s not on the menu, but if you ask they’ll make it for you. And they have this fried chicken dish – well, it’s not like our fried chicken but it’s amazing, it’s more like a croquette but you’d have to try it. And they do this incredible dessert, have a look at this.”
He fired up his phone and showed me a picture of a dessert which was all chocolate and caramel, thick slabs of each. I’ve rarely seen a photograph I wanted to eat more.
After our chat we went on our way and stopped in the Small Bar for the first beer of the holiday but that glowing endorsement weighed on my mind. If the man who does the best fried chicken you’ve ever tasted tells you that a restaurant does amazing fried chicken, and more besides… could I really let a trip to Bristol pass without investigating? But anyway, there’s no way they would have a table free the following night, I thought. But then I checked, and they had. So I texted my friends James and Liz, sent them the website.
I know the four of us are booked somewhere else tomorrow night, but Mr Gurt Wings says this place is incredible. What do you reckon, stick or twist?
James, a keen fan of Bristol’s restaurant scene, responded almost immediately. Let’s take a risk and twist, he said, and that was that. Bookings were made and cancelled, and the next night Zoë and I clambered off the bus halfway up the Whiteladies Road, ready to take our chances.
The interior was tasteful, all muted green paint, wall art and pillars. There was a mezzanine floor, although there didn’t seem to be anyone seated there on a Saturday night, and the whole place had a pleasing buzz. It sort of looked as if it could have been part of the Loungers Group in a previous life (I checked: it wasn’t) but none the less it was a pleasant dining room with tables companionably close without being crammed in.
It was also almost completely full and our server whisked us to a table right at the back, far too big for our party of four. He explained that a table for four near the front had slightly outstayed their welcome, and although they’d paid the bill they hadn’t yet left the premises. He told us, quite charmingly I thought, that he didn’t feel like acting the heavy with them given how much they had spent.
Then he asked if Zoë and I wanted a cocktail on the house while we waited. So Zoë had a negroni, made with rosemary vermouth, which she raved about and I asked for that off-menu Bloody Mary. I knew it would be good when the server didn’t ask me how spicy I wanted it: they just did their job and made it, and it was magnificent.
All in all, we were waiting ten minutes with our cocktails, hardly anything to complain about. By then James and Liz had arrived, more drinks had been ordered and we had taken our table nearer to the front of the restaurant, with a good view of other tables, dishes wafting past and the staff – just the two of them, that I could see – working non-stop.
The menu is the kind that makes jaded restaurant bloggers roll their eyes – no starters, no main courses, just snacks and small plates. The menu suggests two snacks and four small plates between two, which I suppose gives you an idea of whether they’re starters or mains. Now, I can be as critical of small plates venues as the next person and I’ve always found it counterintuitive that restaurants tell you to share small plates. I also thought that A.B.O.E.’s pricing was a little out of keeping with the small plates concept – snacks mostly cost just over five pounds, but the small plates ranged from fourteen to twenty-two pounds and that for me, at the risk of doing an accidental Partridge, is the kind of price I expect to pay for a big plate.
But anyway – perhaps it was the charm of the welcome, or the edge-softening effect of that Bloody Mary, but I found I was prepared to suspend my disbelief. So we bartered about the snacks we wanted to ourselves and the small plates we were reluctantly prepared to share, I popped it all down on a note on my phone and when our server came back we ordered with military precision.
“I just need to tell you,” he said, “that the steak tartare is a small portion, so it isn’t really suitable for sharing”.
“That’s okay, that’s for me” said James, in a manner that suggested he had never really considered sharing it with anyone.
That does James a huge disservice because when it arrived, although it was indeed too petite to share, he insisted that I try a forkful of the tartare. It was made with dry-aged bavette, and I have to say it was pretty impressive with plenty of savoury depth. Not the very best tartare I’ve ever had – that honour still goes to Paris’ superlative Double Dragon – but pretty close. Certainly it compared well with a similar dish across town at Marmo, although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure about the stuff, allegedly taleggio, on top.
Zoë and Liz both went for the pumpkin croquette: A Bit Of Everything definitely applies geographically if in no other way, with this dish having hints of Japanese korroke. But unlike the croquettes at, say, Caper And Cure where you get four little spheres, A.B.O.E. goes for broke with a single enormo-croquette loaded with cheese and horseradish. Again, I was allowed a forkful and again it induced a reasonable amount of envy. Zoë in particular raved about this dish. I probably would have liked more, smaller croquettes to capitalise on the surface area but I couldn’t deny that the flavour of the thing was outstanding.
To continue the globetrotting, my snack was A.B.O.E.’s take on poutine. Rather than fries, it was cuboids of confit potato, à la Quality Chop House, buried in Parmesan with a jug of thick, intense, almost-sweet jus to trickle over the whole affair. Enormously enjoyable stuff: I imagine dreary types might complain that this wasn’t poutine, but it was a darned sight nicer than most poutine I’ve had. Besides, I knew exactly what it would be like because I’d checked out the restaurant’s Instagram in advance (it’s called research, you know).
The first of the small plates to come out was that fried chicken dish so beloved by the man behind Gurt Wings – high praise indeed, from an expert in the field. Well, he was right to say that A.B.O.E.’s rendition was nothing like his. It was surprisingly hard to describe, but it’s important to try because otherwise all you have to go on is the photo below, which looks on the scatological side. It was somewhere between a boudin and a ballotine, a cylinder of tightly compressed chicken thigh bound in a crispy coating, the whole thing smothered in a sticky curried sauce.
Did it work? Well, yes, we all thought it did. As with the pumpkin croquette, I personally would rather have had more, smaller pieces to maximise the surface area. The coating didn’t have as much crunch as I’d have liked, and came away under a knife rather than adhering to the chicken beneath. But you couldn’t argue with the flavours, or the note of citrus that danced through it. Uncle Gurty had not steered me wrong – and no, it didn’t look like fried chicken, much in the way that the poutine didn’t look like poutine. That was sort of the whole point.
I’d had my eye on the barbecued squid with galangal, but it became a must-order when our server, the charming Italian chap who had sorted out our welcome cocktails, told me they’d run out of the clams it was meant to come with. Their solution, he told me, was just to give you more squid. That was good enough for me, and the dish was tender and fragrant with a nicely building heat. Another of those dishes you slightly resented sharing, which in hindsight is a decent description of literally everything we ate.
The most expensive dish on the menu – so naturally we ordered two of these – was the short rib beef agnolotti. Nearly twenty-two pounds a portion, and for me a fascinating misfire. My companions all loved it so I was the lone dissenter, but for me the agnolotti themselves were overcooked, which made the whole dish a bit limp and mulchy.
Everything on the plate was good: the celeriac, apparently with aged beef fat, the glorious beef in the filling and a powerful mole verde, although we didn’t get the advertised goats cheese. As with everything else we tried, the flavour was unimpeachable but for me, the texture let this one down. But I may well have been wrong: certainly everybody else thought so.
Red mullet is James’ favourite fish on earth so he had to order a portion of that, and I got enough of a taste to appreciate that it was, like everything else, very skilfully done. I’m a sucker for braised lettuce, a relatively conventional pairing, but putting mustard – a delicious mustard, at that – in the mix was the sort of clever and unexpected touch Merry seems to specialise in.
The last of our small plates was an outrageously delicious one: barbecued cod with leeks wrapped in nori and two sauces – one of which, studded with ultra-salty nuggets of chicken skin, was one of the most compelling things I’ve eaten in some time. Again, this was at the north end of the price list and I can see you could argue it wasn’t an enormous amount of food for twenty pounds. But it was exceptional, one of the best-cooked pieces of fish I can remember served alongside a sauce with a proper, clobbering heft. James and Liz left a bit of theirs, and I waited as long as I could bear it before saying “would you mind if I finish that?”
Although service was brilliant, there were only two people working front of house (and, just as gobsmacking, I understand there were only two people in the kitchen). If there had been more, or they’d been less busy, we might have got to a second bottle of wine but instead we took our time with the one we had, a beautiful Minervois which sort of went with some of the dishes. It’s a small wine list, six white and six red, about half of them available by the glass.
Our server asked what we made of the food and checked what we’d ordered. He said it was a shame we hadn’t gone for the celeriac cacio e pepe and we said that it hadn’t quite made the cut. So he decided to send a plate of it out to us anyway, which was very kind and completely unexpected. It really was a beautiful dish – ribbons of just-cooked celeriac taking the place of pasta, more sweet and comforting cubes of celeriac and little mushrooms dotted throughout. Clever and imaginative, like everything else, and in its way every bit as enjoyable as the cacio e pepe I’d raved about earlier in the year at Manteca.
“Isn’t it great?” said our server as he took the empty plate away. “I shouldn’t like it, because I’m Italian and making this without pasta is, well…” He shrugged at that point to indicate that he knew full well the dish was culinary heresy. “And I’m not just Italian, I’m from Rome. But the chef is right, and it’s just so good.”
The menu also recommends that you share one dessert between two people. I don’t know if it was our greed, or the small plates not being quite big enough, but we disregarded that and ordered one apiece. Mine and Zoë’s was the dish I’d seen in the photo on Uncle Gurty’s phone the previous day. Dubbed the Rolo Finesse, it was about the most high-end Rolo you can imagine – a thick wobbly layer of something partway between caramel and toffee, gloriously indulgent with just the slightest hint of miso. Beneath that, a thick stripe of a chocolate cremeux that was almost more like ganache, and beneath that a crunchy base.
That would have been enough, but malted milk ice cream on the side and more little nubbins of that crunchy chocolate holding it in place elevated this to god tier. If I’ve had a better dessert this year I can’t remember it, and if I have a better one next year I’ll be very surprised indeed. I can’t tell you how delighted I was that this one of the only plates I didn’t have to share.
James and Liz both opted for the tiramisu and again, were generous enough to let me try it. It was – no surprises by now – excellent: light yet moreish, a far more elegant way to finish a meal than the whopping slab I’d just eaten. I’ve tried a few Bristol tiramisu over the last couple of years – Sonny Stores and Little Hollows spring to mind – and for my money this was better than either.
As we sat there in the afterglow of a brilliant meal, ready to pay and slope off to the Good Measure for a post-prandial beer, we discussed A.B.O.E. in the wider context of a city full of phenomenal restaurants. We knew it was good, but just how good was it? James thought it was better than Wilsons, but he’s been burned by going there after my rave review, eating a meal which was almost completely devoid of carbs and leaving hungry: it’s made him an avid detractor. Zoë liked it even more than COR, which is pretty much the most exalted praise you can award in Bristol.
I loved it, but I wasn’t sure how to place it. The flavours had been exceptional, the service some of the best I’ve had this year. But those small plates were priced on the keen side. It required further reflection, I decided. Our bill, not including the two comped cocktails and that extra celeriac dish, came to just over three hundred pounds, including a 12.5% service charge which the staff more than earned. As we paid up, James told our server how much he’d enjoyed it.
“Way better than Wilsons” he said. He always takes pleasure in saying that.
“Thank you!” she replied. And then, before we put on our coats and made our exit, she came back.
“I know this is cheeky, but I passed your compliments on to the chef, and he asked if there was any way you could write a review saying you thought the food was better than Wilson’s? It’s really high praise.”
“Don’t worry” I said, “I’m sure one of us will.”
The funny thing is that since my meal, which I’ve thought about many times, I’ve discovered, while writing this review, that A.B.O.E. has a bit of a controversial reputation. I’ve read a review online, best characterised as a tad sneering, that criticised A.B.O.E., partly for some of the dishes but mainly, it seems, because they linked up heavily with influencers just after they opened around the start of the year. One influencer in particular, a chap the Rolo Finesse is named after as it happens, came in for particular criticism.
Well, I can sort of see both sides of that. I’ve always felt a bit icky about influencers myself, especially ones who don’t declare ads or invites, although that criticism in my experience comes better from people who don’t take free or heavily discounted food themselves.
And looking at the influencer in question’s output, I did feel about three thousand years old. Saying that it’s, and I quote, “non stop grub-a-dubdub” at A.B.O.E. is the kind of expression that makes me want to sigh all the remaining air out of my lungs, as is the observation that “every component on your plate will SLAP so hard you won’t even know what month you were born in”. Let’s not even get into the bit where he described A.B.O.E.’s roast beef as “more tender than your nan’s left arm” or their cauliflower cheese as “so peng I could have cried”.
But the point is, much as it might pain me to admit it, the guy is not wrong (well, except maybe about my nan’s left arm). I, rather, would say that the staff work their socks off and are brilliant at what they do, I would say that every element of every dish has been given serious thought and cooked with enormous skill and that, irrespective of how or whether it slaps, let alone how hard, A.B.O.E. has a very talented kitchen doing fascinating things. I guess if you put what I said into an English-to-influencer Google Translate it might end up as roughly what he said.
I can always tell when I’ve really, really enjoyed my meal because I actively look forward to writing it up, to trying to put into words what I’ve experienced. In that sense A.B.O.E. is a restaurant blogger’s dream, and I feel lucky to be a Bristol outsider because it means that, free of all that infighting and beef I can just judge the food and the experience, and say that both were terrific. The list of places I need to go back to in Bristol gets longer and longer, which makes reviewing restaurants there difficult. But as long as they keep that dessert on the menu – which I suspect they will, if only because it pisses off all the right people – I can very much see myself returning.
A.B.O.E. – 9.4
109 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2PB
0117 9466144
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