Colonnade, Bristol

For him, it was Hawkwind in 1988. For me, the Chippendales, 1993. But by 2006, we (and our eclectic tastes) combined to create perfect harmony: Sparks, September 2006. 

The memories came flooding back as we took to a table adjacent to the very same historic, sandstone steps that we once stood on while queuing for tickets for the box office at Bristol’s former Colston Hall, surrounded by Bristol Byzantine Victoriana in all its imposing glory… that nobody took much notice of, back then.

Today, the Colston Street frontage of the original venue has been restored to prominence with columns and a glass front in the original entrance space, where the gleaming, spacious all-day brasserie Colonnade compliments the vibrant live music hub that is the Bristol Beacon, the restaurant taking its name from the full-length, 7-column portico that now seamlessly slides into the Beacon’s impressive grand design. 

A couple of nights ago, the legendary D.A.M Trilogy were playing at the Bristol Beacon for one night only (as Bowie himself did back in 1973, when he brought Ziggy to the west country). Now that our days of scoffing a pre-gig bag of chips from the Rendezvous on Denmark Street on a bench in the nearest bus stop are long since over, we made a very grown-up pre-theatre restaurant reservation to honour the occasion — and the Thin White Duke himself would most definitely have approved of our choice.

Refined wow-factor impact scales full contemporary heights at Colonnade. Gleaming glass; scrubbed-up, honey-coloured stone; panoramic interior vistas; bold lighting; marble-effect flooring; proud potted palms: it’s an exhilarating space indeed, further enriched by Head Chef Noah Chasteau’s own brand of foodie flamboyance.

Chasteau joined the Colonnade kitchen team as a Chef de Partie when the restaurant opened in January 2024 — and it’s easy to see why he so swiftly worked his way up the ranks: his menus reflect a clear passion for sustainability and ethical sourcing alongside the kind of creative genius and innovative flair that chefs with decades more experience might struggle to showcase. 

But here’s the rub, for me: Noah’s menu is a Small Plates affair, a format that I’ve developed a deep-rooted aversion to for all manner of reasons, one of my main bugbears being that, when I go out to eat, I want to trust the chef to determine the pace and synthesis of my dinner rather than being left to create my own expensive mistakes. Colonnade’s fascinating array of dishes, though (circa 14-16 on the evening we visited) coupled with self-assured but still politely unobtrusive recommendations from our waiter allowed me to kick my scepticisms to the kerb, where they remained ignored and unattended for (almost) the rest of the evening.

When are chips not just chips? When they’re Pommes Anna chips: layer upon layer of thinly-sliced confit potatoes pressed into neat ingots of deep-fried indulgence, super-buttery beneath their super-crisp jackets topped with a parmesan snow storm and a smattering of truffle somewhere in the mix, and accompanied by a little pot (two pots, actually — we just couldn’t hold back) of ambrosial aioli. If Chasteau’s chips are definitely not just chips, his cabbage isn’t just cabbage either: it’s confited, and drizzled, and nudged hither and thither with all manner of enticing enhancements, while colourful carrots are served on a silky butterbean purée enlivened by sweetly smoky hot maple and uplifted by subtly briney preserved lemon — not just carrots, okay?

We had pork, too: neat slices of creamy belly complete with perfect crackling served flanked by a complex, intense burnt apple purée and red cabbage that told a pleasantly fruity backstory of its own. And oh, the lamb shoulder! The softest, sweetest, most robustly-flavoured incarnation I’ve ever encountered, the inherent richness of the meat intelligently offset by vibrant mint salsa verde and a carrot purée that grounded an exquisitely balanced little dish that, being so intensely-flavoured, would have been too big in large plate format but proved to be a flavour-bomb superstar of our mini mix’n’match selection.

The only slightly dissatisfying — and still, only very slightly dissatisfying — plate of our chosen array was the Salmon Tartare. Okay, so it came served in two almost ethereally frangible filo cases topped with shimmering jewels of trout caviar resulting in a tasty bite experience indeed, but £10 for what was ostensibly a couple of canapés didn’t quite hit the small plate metamorphosis peaks that the rest of our supper so gracefully ascended, briefly rekindling to my gripes about small plates.

But ah, so what? It’s not often you go to a gig and the support act proves to be as memorably impactful as the headline superstars. Dinner at Colonnade: a fantastic voyage indeed.