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The Office Bar & Canteen Trendy, and the ultimate haunt for a hungry freelancer, Totterdown’s Office wins favour with MARK TAYLOR
IT’S NINE YEARS since I nervously handed my boss a letter breaking the news that I was leaving to go freelance. Since then, I have pretty much managed to avoid all offices, unless summoned in for meetings. Whether it’s the comfort of my own home or a café, these days my ‘office’ tends to be anywhere serving proper coffee and fast wi-fi – and long may it stay that way. And so, naturally, my heart sank when I received an email from the big boss lady asking me to visit The Office, although the palpitations soon subsided when I realised she was talking about the bar and canteen in Totterdown. Never has an invitation to ‘the O word’ been so gratefully received. I had visited this place when it first started serving food last year, and had enjoyed such a memorable meal that I immediately dropped everything and headed over to Wells Road for lunch.
barely made inroads before pushing it aside for fear of having no space for the other two dishes I had ordered. Unusually (and refreshingly) vegetable dishes dominate the menu here, all of them priced between £3 and £6. In the last week of May, seasonal treats included asparagus and Amalfi lemon, and artichoke tempura with lemon and anchovy sauce. Dishes from the fish and meat sections I didn’t get chance to try included mirin skirt steak, carrots and crispy onions, and poached scallops with mussels, lettuce, peas and sea purslane. Nothing on the menu costs more than £8. With the aforementioned cauliflower dish discreetly pushed into the wings, I moved on to the cuttlefish and harissa (£6) – an equally generous portion of tender cephalopod coated with the fiery, brick-coloured North African chilli paste. And then there were the three plump, goldenbreadcrumbed salt hake fritters (a giveaway at £3.50) packed with meltingly soft and salty fish and seriously addictive. The compact and well-priced wine list includes some real bargains under the £25 mark. My Caixas Albarino Martin Codax was a bright, citrussy, peachy white that worked particularly efficiently with the salt hake fritters. A carefully sourced beer list features draught Estrella and bottles of the more local Wipe and True Amarillo. From a dessert menu with a sharp seasonal focus, including strawberry and nectarine Eton Mess, I ordered the well-made treacle tart and rhubarb ripple ice cream (£4.50), which boasted really good, thin, crisp pastry and a well-balanced filling with a lemony, gingery edge. Whenever asked for his office telephone number, the late journalist Jeffrey Bernard used to give people the one for his favourite Soho haunt, The Coach and Horses. With food and drink this good, I may well have to change my business cards and put the number for The Office on mine. At least then I’ll be able to finally get away with that oldest of excuses; yes, “darling, I’m working late at the office”.
I used to live fairly close to the row of shops where The Office is located, and I seem to remember a hairdressers occupying the site where the bar is now. Back then, there was certainly nothing like The Office for discerning locals, and it’s good to see such a high quality and cool hang-out established in this part of South Bristol. With its polished concrete floors, exposed brick walls, Eastern European factory lamps and a back bar made from scaffolding poles, The Office looks more Hoxton than Totterdown. The chef is Matt Elliot, who cut his teeth at Bordeaux Quay before setting up the kitchen here. Young, shaggyhaired and with that ‘sleep is for wimps’ style reminiscent of a young Marco Pierre White, he looks the part of the young gunslinger chef and, boy, does he know how to cook. The menu at The Office follows a similar trajectory to places like Flinty Red, Manna and Bell’s Diner in that it’s broadly European, and most of the dishes are pitched between tapas and main course size. This means two of the meat/fish options might be as ample as three or four vegetable dishes, although I kicked off with the chargrilled cauliflower and harissa yogurt (£4) and it was so generous (just imagine a whole head of smokey, charcoal-edged cauli smothered in spicy yoghurt) that I
✱ THE OFFICE BAR & CANTEEN, 172 Wells Road, Bristol BS4 2AL; 0117 329 0161; www.theofficecanteen.co.uk
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