Jean’s Bistro, Gloucester Road: ‘There is no better place to eat Thai food’ – restaurant review

Restaurants like Jean’s Bistro should be available on prescription; such places are deeply soothing for the soul.

So much so that despite having been to rather a lot of restaurants in the previous fortnight, I still found myself fizzing with excitement to meander up to the top of Gloucester Road and tuck into a papaya salad.

I am unabashed in declaring that Jean’s team serves the best Thai food in Bristol. Or at least the best Thai food in Bristol that you can buy in a restaurant – I can’t claim to have been invited into the homes of everyone capable of cooking a massaman curry or a tom yam soup.

This papaya salad was a little muted for my liking

Our ordering was so extensive at Jean’s Bistro that our waitress almost broke into an anticipatory sweat on our behalf, and hastily moved the two of us to a table for four so we would have enough space.

Jean’s is not a big restaurant by any means so we were fortunate that they could accommodate such hunger. In fact, inside the restaurant there are only about ten tables, but venture to the toilet and you’ll pass through a corridor of unexpected terraced garden for those with a particularly al fresco appetite.

In the seven years it’s been open, this tiny restaurant has garnered quite a reputation and anyone who has been there will insist on one thing – you cannot leave without having ordering something from the barbecue. For us it was pork belly (£13.90).

Despite the fierce competition it was crowned best dish of the table; umami driven slabs of meat with fantastically crispy fat. Sadly any pleasure I derived from such a perfect example of cooking was counterbalanced by the crushing knowledge that I will never be able to cook pork this well.

The laab was faab

Papaya salad (£7.50) should be an orchestral crescendo of spice, citric acidity and sweetness. This one was rather muted, more a backstage rehearsal. On the other hand, laab, which is on the menu as spicy pork Thai salad (£8.50) and beef panang curry (£10.00) were both fine examples of the genre.

Prawn fried rice (£12.50) was studded generously with juicy curls of pink and did a marvellous job of sauce-soaking.

As they brought the final dish over, crispy fried sea bass in spicy basil sauce (£18.00), our waitress did concede that she was very happy to provide us with takeaway boxes, though we had not yet admitted defeat.

The bass was unavailable and so had been replaced with bream, which made very little difference to the dish though I did note it was not as crispy and moreish as previous iterations I’ve had in Jean’s.

The vegetables in this fish dish were a little too al dente and detracted from the bream.

Jean’s is a restaurant that’s hard to drag yourself away from. It’s a restaurant that I expect has customers who come every week. It’s a restaurant that epitomises everything a good local restaurant should be; accomplished food, incredibly hospitable staff and tables full of people who look so relaxed and happy that they could be on the third week of a Thai holiday.

The carrier bag of leftovers devoured the next day only served to cement my opinion; there is no better place to eat Thai food in Bristol.

Jean’s Bistro, 441 Gloucester Road, BS7 8TZ
www.jeansbistro.co.uk

All photos: Meg Houghton-Gilmour

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