Freddy Bird can’t stop smiling. After 10 years as head chef of , he is finally his own man.
Last week, Bird and his wife, Ness, opened Little French in North View, on the border of Westbury Park and Henleaze. After two decades of cooking for other people, he has realised a dream of running his own restaurant and there is a wide grin on his face when we arrive.
On the second official day, the restaurant was fully booked with a queue of hopefuls waiting at the door just in case staff can squeeze them in after a drink at the bar.
With a full team of chefs in the kitchen - many of them moved with him from the Lido - it also allows Bird to help waiting staff.
By the time we reached our booth table, he was back in the dining room, demonstrating to a couple of customers how to fillet a whole turbot at the table. As a recognisable face from TV shows like Saturday Kitchen and countless food festivals, Bird is not a chef to shy away from meeting his customers.
The site was previously the Mesa tapas bar - and Manna before that - but the focus of this new neighbourhood restaurant is now rustic French regional cooking rather than the broad Mediterranean sweep of before.
Open all day, seven days a week, from breakfast pastries and coffee in the morning through to dinner, the Birds want this to become a neighbourhood hub. Freddy and Ness have lived in the area with their three children for a decade so they know many of the customers already and they know what the area needed.
They also knew what the Bristol food scene was lacking - a proper French bistro - and the menu is a carousel of Gallic classics.
We started with a couple of bar snacks - juicy lamb chops seasoned with rosemary salt (£4.25 each) and milk-fed lamb’s kidneys with Dijon mustard (£5.50) - the latter as good as any I’ve tasted, pink, delicate and without the farmyard-meets-pissoir tang of bog standard kidneys.
Next, a bowl of intense, mossy green parsley soup (£7) was topped with fleshy slices of girolle mushrooms and a few snails. A sensational starter.
There was also a bowl of briny, super-fresh Palourdes clams (£8.50) dressed with really good olive oil, new season garlic, chopped parsley and black pepper, and five queen scallops (£11.50) luxuriating in their shells with an old-school sauce of Sauternes, butter and chives.
See the food on offer at Little French in the gallery below
Bird encourages people to share dishes and the people next to us were tucking into whole charcoal-grilled guinea fowls marinated in wild oregano and served with fries and aioli. ‘It’s posh chicken and chips basically,’ grins Bird, delivering the plate before scurrying back to the stoves.
We went for the whole wood grilled turbot - a beast of a fish that arrived in the kitchen from Devon that morning.
Weighing around 1.5kg, it was good value at £49.50 for two greedy diners - there are restaurants in London and Cornwall charging £60-plus for such treats.
Served at the table in the brown parchment paper it was cooked in, the moist, white fish fell away from the bone and the accompanying Jersey Royals were buttery, garlicky and flecked with spinach.
We were enjoying ourselves so much - helped along by a bottle of fabulous Wild Boy Chardonnay from Santa Barbara - that we forgot the fact the tartare hollandaise hadn’t materialised. Like fresh cutlery being replaced between courses, it was a minor blip during the first weekend when staff were still finding their feet. Such creases are sure to be ironed out swiftly.
A plate of rosy pink wood-grilled Pyrenean lamb leg (£19.50) was served with creamy new season garlic puree, purple sprouting broccoli and garlicky anchoiade for a true taste of Provence.
We also shared a delicious salad of tomatoes and tarragon (£4) and exemplary fries (£3) which were crisp, crunchy, greaseless and perfectly seasoned.
To finish, a generous dollop of rich and fluffy chocolate mousse (£5.50) was spot on - not too sweet and not too firm.
Deep, warm slices of prune and Armagnac tart and Armagnac custard (£6.50) could have done with a bit more booze. But then perhaps the Birds had already polished off the bottle in celebration of opening Little French. And who could blame them? It’s a humdinger of a new venue.
THE VERDICT:
Freddy Bird’s first solo outing is long-awaited and it doesn’t disappoint. Robust, full-flavoured Gallic cooking at prices kind enough to encourage locals to revisit often, Little French is big news for the Bristol restaurant scene and the city’s most exciting new opening so far this year.
RATINGS:
Overall: Five
Food: Five
Service: Four
Ambience: Five
Value: Five
Little French, 2 North View, Westbury Park, Bristol, BS6 7QB. Tel: 01179 706276.
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