Restaurants / Reviews
La Guinguette – restaurant review
In France, there is a word for a place that is neither a restaurant nor a bar. That word is guinguette (pronounced ‘gang-get’) and when husband and wife Roxane and Jérôme and their best friend Ophélie wanted to open their first business in Bristol, La Guinguette was the perfect name.
The trio used to live in Paris and in their new home city have created the type of place that they would have loved to visit there; the type of place that you can pop into for a sandwich at lunchtime, and a cold beer or glass of French wine after work.
On a recent Saturday lunchtime, a croque monsieur arrived wrapped in grease-proof paper and with a miniature French flag on top; while Jérôme in the kitchen was sporting headwear that looked suspiciously like a beret. This is a little corner of France in Bristol.
is needed now More than ever
Vive la France!
Steak frites accompanied by blue cheese and a glass of Bordeaux
The crème brûlée is big enough to share
In what used to be The Parlour, vintage adverts cover one area of the walls including a baby smoking a Rizla: “toutes les classes fument le Rizla”.
Chalked up next to the bar are 14 different French wines and Moet & Chandon champagne all available by the glass or bottle. Slightly disappointingly, however, there are currently no French beers or ciders; but this is more than made up for in the aperitifs featuring kir, Pernod and Martini.
Sandwiches here are served with either salad or French fries, with cheese the predominant feature whether that’s melted raclette, goat’s cheese or the croque monsieur with gruyère, smoked ham and creamy mustard mayo.
If this dish wasn’t French enough, a steak frites (£13.50) was also the culinary equivalent of a man playing the accordion and singing the Marseillaise with a string of onions hanging around his neck.
And very good it was too: perfectly cooked medium rare with a little bit of pink juice still flowing, accompanied by thin crunchy fries.
La Guinguette is a Paris-style bistro
The menu here is divided into starters such as a small roasted camembert, sharing plates such as a planche de fromages (five more cheeses), and main courses including onion soup, Caesar salad and the traditional Nice pizza, a pissaladière.
From the puddings, to complete our hat-trick of dishes most likely to be found in a Montmartre bistro, we chose a crème brûlée which arrived at our table having been blowtorched, its top cracking into tiny pieces like a broken stained glass window revealing the rich custard within.
It may not be a restaurant; it may not be a bar; but La Guinguette has now become the closest place in Bristol to France.
La Guinguette, 243 Cheltenham Road, Bristol, BS6 5QP
07960 378 121
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
