Review of 'The Stable'

A trendy up-market gastro pub on the vibrant Bristol waterfront area, Stable Pizza serves up some seriously good food. The interior lives up to the name with wood throughout and long, shared blocky wooden tables. We visited during the Bristol Food Connections festival (on a Saturday no less) so the place was quite busy and the restaurant offering up a festival-inspired selection of 50 or so ciders (a shame that I don't drink and my companion did not partake). It is a noisy but very cozy place as we were shown to our table, given menus on clipboards and told to order at the bar.

The 3 page menu is fairly basic with the main dishes being either pizza (cooked along the wall in several massive brick pizza ovens and manned by quite a number of hot looking cooks) or pies. Looking around us it seemed that the pizza menu was the more popular of the two so we stuck to that (the pie menu was also considerably shorter - 5 pies vs 12 pizzas). I had the “Longhorn Jim” (£13.50) pizza which was described as “Marinated Longhorn ground beef, Bath Pig Co. chorizo, field mushrooms, roasted red onions, tomato and mozzarella. Topped with smoked West Country ham.” The tomato sauce was wonderful though the meat flavours tended to, regretfully, merge into a general meaty taste whole while the mushrooms were completely lost in the red meat extravaganza. The sour dough crust was amazing - thin and very tasty with the slight burning of the ovens on the bottom - soggy only after 10 minutes of eating.

My companion had the “Avonmouth Angler” (£11) described in the menu as “Jackson‘s smoked mackerel, smoked salmon, marinated spinach, tomato and mozzarella. Topped with fresh parsley and lemon.” which was, she confirmed, extremely fishy but quite tasty. In her case she found after we shared a starter of “garlic bread” with cheese (£5) - that was really just a pizza crust with a slight flavour of garlic and a fairly tasteless cheese covering (but still quite satisfying) - she was quite full and unable to finish the entire pizza (though managed the toppings…).

The service, as you might expect, was quite friendly if a bit abrupt. The specials are written in chalk on the boards and tend towards the bozzy offerings.

Quite good pizza with amazing crust and sauce, shame about the toppings that come a poor second. I would return if I was in the area, if only to seek out something else on the fairly promising menu that offered a bit more flavour.

Rating: “It is OK but I have some issues”

Review Date: 2014-05-03


Cuisine: American/British

Address: Canon’s Road Harbourside, Bristol BS1 5UH

Location: Bristol (England)

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Telephone: +44 (0) 117 927 9999

URL: http://www.stablepizza.com/