There is a particular moment at a concert when a mega-famous rock band, having spent two hours rattling through their greatest hits in front of 50,000 people, announces that they’re going to play something new. The crowd goes quiet. Someone goes to the toilet. A bloke at the bar orders another pint. It’s not that the song is necessarily bad; it’s just that nobody came to hear it.

Restaurant specials boards can suffer from precisely the same problem. You’ve come for the hits. You know what you like. You want the patatas, the meatballs, the things you’ve been thinking about since you booked the table. But every now and then, a chef slips something onto that specials board that makes you stop mid-conversation and wonder why on earth you haven’t been eating it your entire life.

Which brings us to Bravas in Bristol.

We did the greatest hits, naturally. There were potatoes. There were meatboards. There was all the familiar, deeply comforting business of Spanish small plates, designed for sharing and for the sort of enthusiastic ordering that makes you briefly question whether you’ve misunderstood the size of the table.

And then there was the venison.

I am a huge, huge fan of venison, so when I spotted it on the specials board, I thought I was definitely, definitely having it. What I didn’t realise was that I was about to eat one of the best dishes I can remember having in a very long time.

The venison arrived beautifully cooked, a perfect medium rare, tender and gloriously juicy, accompanied by a wonderfully smooth celeriac purée. Scattered around it were whole blackberries, their sharp, fruity acidity and gentle sweetness cutting through the richness of the meat beautifully. It was one of those combinations that makes perfect sense the moment you taste it, as though the chef has somehow managed to persuade a handful of ingredients to do exactly what they were put on this earth to do.

Every element understood precisely what the others were doing. Nothing was fighting for attention. Nothing needed explaining. It was one of those dishes where you take a mouthful, pause, and then immediately take another because you need to confirm that the first one really was as good as you thought.

It was.

And this is what makes a really good specials board so exciting. It gives the kitchen the opportunity to do something personal, to cook beyond the greatest hits and put a little of themselves on the plate. It’s a chance to surprise people, to remind them that even if they’ve visited a restaurant a dozen times, there might still be something waiting for them that they’ve never experienced before.

At Bravas, that venison was the new track. And unlike the stadium crowd, I wanted to hear it again.

If every Spanish restaurant cooked like this, I’d happily eat Spanish food exclusively for the rest of the year. Possibly longer. I’m not making any promises about January.

Bravo, Bravas. An absolute belter.