Bristol Evening Post - Pear Cafe Review

19 January 2008

With just two seats, The Pear Cafe must rank as the smallest eatery in Bristol, but what it lacks in space it more than makes up for with the delicious food on offer.

The Pear Cafe opened 18 months ago in the cobbled courtyard of The Coach House complex of small businesses in St Paul's. It's run by Elly Curshen and Polly Williams, both of whom have worked in some of Bristol's top restaurants over the past few years. This is their first joint venture and it puts an emphasis on high quality sandwiches, salads, soups and home-made cakes. Elly and Polly source as much as they can locally, including bread from Herberts Bakery, in nearby Montpelier.

These two enterprising young women also launched "Pear to go" recently, which allows customers to take away home-made frozen meals in oven-ready dishes, including lentil and spinach dahl (£4), shepherd's pie with free-range lamb and spiced parsnip mash (£5) and sausage, butterbean and roast pepper casserole (£4.50). They are the ultimate in ready meals. And Pear also offers a bespoke catering service for local offices.

The cafe serves breakfast from 8am to 10am, including pastries washed down with Fairtrade coffee, toast (30p per slice) or healthy porridge with fruit and honey (£1.60). By mid-morning, sandwiches, salads and soups are the main attraction. Elly and Polly make up healthy salad boxes (£3, plus toppings) which consist of couscous, rice, new potatoes, mixed leaves, tomato and cucumber plus two items from the counter and a balsamic dressing.

The soup of the day (always vegetarian) could be lentil, lemon, tomato and chilli, spiced roasted parsnip or sweet potato, chickpea and spinach. Sandwiches range from £1.60 to £2.75, plus additional sauces and toppings. The lengthy blackboard menu includes chicken and jerk mayo, free-range egg mayonnaise with spring onion, honey roast ham, tuna and lemon mayo or roast beef.

I went for the best-selling "Falafel special" (£3.60) which was a generous sandwich packed with excellent home-made falafels and hummus, well-dressed leaves and sweet chilli sauce. It tasted incredibly fresh.

The Pear Cafe has also gained quite a reputation for its delicious cakes - the butterscotch and plain chocolate brownies (£1.50) are worth the journey alone. Still warm from the oven, the chocolate chunks were melting as I bit into mine.

Five minutes' walk from Broadmead, The Pear Cafe makes a far more interesting lunchtime option than the usual supermarket dash.