Voodoo-Q – restaurant review

“As you can see we’ve got quite a baffling collection of smoked goods on the menu,” our nervous waiter told us on a recent Saturday lunchtime, certainly telling the truth but probably veering off script.

He was definitely right, however, with Voodoo-Q arriving on Gloucester Road to further satisfy Bristol’s taste for meat – which almost lost a stalwart in Grillstock recently before that business was brought back from the dead.

Maybe it was voodoo that brought Grillstock back from the dead? Probably not.

What is for certain is that Voodoo-Q hasn’t got any skulls or dead bats in sight, with striking murals both outside and inside the restaurant appropriating Mexico’s Day of the Dead ritual rather than the voodoo religion that has its roots in West Africa.

Day of the Dead meets voodoo at Voodoo-Q

Voodoo-Q has its own roots in Somerset. The Upton Inn in Upton Cheyney to be exact, where landlord Jamie Pike joined forces with next door’s Upton Cheyney Chilli Company to launch a barbecue-inspired menu from a smokehouse in their car park featuring many of their sauces and chillis, which later expanded from the pub into the Hare in Cirencester.

Voodoo-Q’s first Bristol home is the former Food Nation, with big metal trays not great for knees left behind underneath every table.

“When this site came up, it was time to push the big red button and go fully Voodoo,” the enthusiastic Pike told us.

What this means is meat, lots and lots of smoked meat including the High Priest Burger which at £30 is one of Bristol’s biggest food eating challenges.

Finish the four 8oz burgers with bacon, cheese, chilli, pork brisket, a bucket of fries, pickles and coleslaw within an hour and you’ll get your name on the wall and a free beer and bottle of chilli sauce from the Upton Cheyney Chilli Co.

That’s certainly not for the faint-hearted, and thankfully there are much more modest items on a menu including four vegetarian and vegan options with jack fruit substituting for pulled pork in the Pull the Other One (£10), the fruit and root vegetables served in a toasted bun with pickles and fries.

The rest of the menu is divided into ‘small offerings’ at £5 and £6 such as pit beans, chicken wings and crispy Creole squid; ‘from the smoker’ with all the options here slow-cooked and smoked in-house; as well as hot dogs and burgers.

From the from the smoker section, burnt ends (£10) were the size of cubes of jelly and looked likely to be not the leftovers of a whole brisket but chunks of brisket cut exclusively to be re-smoked and served as burnt ends.

Burnt ends are leftovers of a whole brisket that were once given away but are now prized as a delicacy. Described by Voodoo-Q as “BBQ’s black gold”, these burnt ends were slightly hit and miss, some stringy, some sugary, some melt in your mouth as advertised, others chewy; like a burnt ends Russian roulette.

The burnt ends at Voodoo-Q come with fries with ‘voodoo dusting’

Over the other side of the table, a Mini Priest cheese burger as part of the £6 children’s meal was much more satisfying, but not as satisfying as the ‘build your own sundae’ to finish which gave a wide-eyed six-year-old the opportunity to create her own ice cream toppings out of sprinkles, syrups and marshmallows.

For adults, things were not so great with sticky toffee pudding (£6) rather dry even when slathered in a pool of sauce.

More voodoo magic is still needed to turn Voodoo-Q into the restaurant that it hopes to be. Barbecuing has its own dark arts, and when these are perfected this new restaurant should be a meat-eaters’ paradise.

Voodoo-Q, 185 Gloucester Road, Bishopston, Bristol, BS7 8BG
0117 942 8800

www.voodooq.co.uk

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