The Travel Critic

This is a tale of two halves. Or more precisely, a tale of two halves glued together with monkfish mousse and chip-shop grease. On the one hand, Noah’s is very good indeed. The food is excellent, the service bang on, the view of Clifton’s Regency crescents is beautiful. On the other, you’re eating your hand-caught Orkney scallops beneath an overpass where you’d half expect Idris Elba to be standing grim-faced over a corpse in Luther.

The place is split down the middle: fried fish and chips, the culinary ballast of postwar Britain, versus delicate fillets of Cornish sole and monkfish, the stuff Rick Stein built his empire on. One side a bottle of malt vinegar, the other a beurre blanc whispering of Michelin dreams.

Inside, it’s handsome enough. Dark wood, soft lighting, the sense someone has thought about it. My wife sits facing into the room, cooing over the glow of the decor. I face outwards, towards a car park where a group of bikers are relieving themselves against a concrete pillar. Flannel hand towels in the toilets, paper napkins on the table. A yin-yang of polish and pub.

The clientele are no less split: trendy American artists with ironic facial hair, Janet and Ian from Stoke Gifford who fancied a Friday night fish supper. Noah’s is nothing if not democratic.

And the food, let me stress again, is very good. Monkfish roasted just-so, chips fat and crisp, scallops seared sweet and tender. This is not about culinary failings. It’s about the fact that one half of me is eating in a chic fish restaurant, while the other is waiting for a pint glass to shatter on the pavement outside.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe Noah’s is holding a mirror up to Bristol itself: Georgian grandeur with brutalist flyovers jammed through its heart. But while that may be clever urban metaphor, it doesn’t always make for relaxing dining.

Still, if you can live with the whiplash, you’ll eat very well indeed.