Sunday Roast at Cau Restaurant in Bristol scores 3 out of 5
Posted on: 2015-05-14
Our rating:
CAU Bristol is a lively, buzzy and vibrant venue and its steak meals are genuinely sensational, but when it comes to Sunday roasts it needs to smarten up its act, present more of an abundance of food and offer better value for money.
Located on Queens Road in Bristol, CAU has been garnering an impressive reputation for its steaks - no mean feat in a city which has plenty of restaurants serving up a panoply of mouthwatering T-bones and sirloins.
The USP of CAU is that their steaks are imported from the Pampas Plains in Argentina, a huge departure from the majority of other eateries in the city which proudly boast their meat is procured from generally local sources. As a chain, CAU is proving particularly popular and disseminating its meaty goodness throughout the UK, and the Bristol restaurant is the sixth and the first one to served food all throughout the day.
It's certainly a venue will an airy, modern, spacious - almost space-age - feel, combing an industrial aesthetic with corrugated metal panelling, massive white banquettes, images of dreamy blue skies and cotton wool-style lampshades. There's also a huge open plan kitchen where you can the gastronomic maestros busying themselves with the food preparation, a feature I personally love because it adds a more thrilling, dynamic sense of theatre to proceedings.
As with the majority of other pubs and restaurants in the city, CAU is serving Sunday roasts, the ultimate food of the last day of the weekend that most eateries are currently bending over backwards to prove theirs is the best and most delicious.
**Nearest 5 out of 5 Sunday Roast review - The Clifton Wine Bar**
CAU's offering is something of a variation on a Sunday roast theme, serving up as it does the familiar on-trend big wooden board loaded with roast rump of beef, Yorkshire puddings, josper roast carrots, beef fat roast potatoes, onion rings and a small pot of red wine gravy.
The food itself was, on the whole, good - the thin strips of beef were succulent, tender and full of flavour, the carrots were thick and sweet, the roasters infused with the pungent flavours of the beef fat, and the Yorkshire pudding ginormous, light and very enjoyable. I've never had a roast dinner with onion rings before so that was an unusual, slightly odd addition but worked surprisingly well with meal as a whole. The gravy was a bit on the watery side for my taste and didn't really pack any flavour-filled punch.
My biggest problem lies not particularly with the quality of the food being dished up here, but the fact it's not served up on actual dishes. Big boards might the fashionable, trendy way to currently present meals, but essentially what you're getting, when shared between two people, is half the amount of food for double the price. At a time when we're all financially tightening our belts, it does feel a little bit like culinary exploitation and short-changing the punter. And at £15 per person, especially when you consider the average, full plate Sunday roast in many other pub restaurants nestles between the £10 and £12 mark, it just doesn't represent the best value for money.
Split between two people it equated to two slices of beef, two small roast potatoes, a carrot, a Yorkshire, and a dribble of gravy - which is why we had to pad it out (and feel like we'd eaten something substantial without the need for KFC pit-stop en route home) with puddings - chocolate brownie with toasted marshmallows and ice cream and chocolate fondant with vanilla ice cream (£5.95 each), which were suitably sweet, tasty and very good indeed.
Service was prompt and efficient though excessively fussy and intrusive - our waiter had the annoying habit of returning to our table to every five minutes to remove items of cutlery or bottles and, at one point, a glass that still had half a drink in it.
So a mixed bag then. There's no question that CAU is a lively, buzzy and vibrant venue and its steak meals are genuinely sensational, but when it comes to Sunday roasts it needs to smarten up its act, present more of an abundance of food and offer better value for money.
3/5
Review and pictures by Jamie Caddick for www.365bristol.com
Article by:
Born and raised in the suburbs of Swansea, Jimmy moved to Bristol back in 2004 to attend university. Passionate about live music, sport, science and nature, he can usually be found walking his cocker spaniel Baxter at any number of green spots around the city. Call James on 078 9999 3534 or email Editor@365Bristol.com.
