Celebrating one year of The Bristol Sauce
A letter from Meg
A year ago I started The Bristol Sauce with a simple goal: to publish one restaurant review a week from a small cohort of writers and see if anyone cared. At the time, I could count on one hand the number of people writing about restaurants in Bristol — and even fewer who were writing well. Most of what passed for restaurant ‘writing’ was poorly disguised PR fluff. It wasn’t even enjoyable to read the lines, let alone between them, to guess what had been paid for and what hadn’t. I thought we could do better.
It turns out you thought so too. A year later, we have over 1,100 subscribers, 1,700 Instagram followers, an open rate consistently above 55%, and our most popular article has been read nearly 30,000 times.
But what I’m most proud of is our team of writers. When I launched this, it was just me. Since then, I’ve published the work of 14 others, some writing about restaurants for the very first time, with another four in the pipeline. Every single one of them has been paid; made possible by our paying Saucers. I believe that only good things can come from encouraging people to express themselves in an engaging and artistic way, and giving them a platform on which to do so.
Our mission today is exactly what it was a year ago:
We always pay for our meals.
We go anonymously wherever possible.
We are honest to a fault.
That honesty has landed me in hot water more than once, but how else can we reasonably do our jobs? If we never say something is bad, why should you believe us when we say something is good?
Of course, the question lingers: is it fair to criticise restaurants when the UK hospitality industry is on its knees? The recent #taxedout campaign highlights one of the biggest killers: the 20 per cent VAT that restaurants must send straight to the government for anything processed. Layer on a cost-of-living crisis, high business rates and post-Brexit staffing nightmares, and you’ve got a brutal environment in which to run a restaurant.
But to criticise is to care. To say nothing is to give up. A bad meal doesn’t mean a bad business; often the opposite. Criticism manages expectations, separates the wheat from the chaff, entertains, inspires and — most importantly — connects people with places worth their money and time. If everything is good, nothing is good.
Meanwhile, Instagram clout-chasing has all but replaced genuine restaurant writing. Bias is rife, captions blur into clichés, and restaurants are left footing the bill for fleeting hype. Every two or three months, someone declares that “criticism is dead.” It isn’t. It’s just evolving. And the appetite for genuine voices is clear.
With every movement, there is a counter-movement. With the almost total monopoly that hyper-saturated, close up, super short form content has over Instagram, there is a whole swathe of people who are sick of their attention spans being degraded and their minds melted by AI nonsense. I suspect some of these people are the reason Substack is growing at such a rate. Gen Z, nostalgic for simpler times and less tech, are driving a resurgence in book sales. Vinyl is all the rage. Topshop is returning to the high street. Nature is healing. London’s Vittles has gone into print, Slop is publishing beautiful produce-led issues, and here in Bristol we’re carving out our own patch of ground.
Food writing does not sit in isolation. Food is politics. The world is fractured, and it can feel like the walls are closing in: from conflict and hunger abroad to the rise of the far right here at home. Against that backdrop, celebrating restaurants may seem inconsequential — but it is powerful. As we saw at the far right protest this weekend, many Reformers still bought a samosa before heading to the march. The hypocrisy is astounding, but the exchange below also offers an opportunity.
The UK’s food is built on immigration: on people who arrived here and cooked the flavours of their homelands, on families who set up takeaways, on chefs who stitched together new identities through food. Though our impact may be small, at The Bristol Sauce it is our privilege to highlight that variety, to remind us that sharing dishes from all over the world is one of the best defences we have against fear and division.
So what next? To make this my full-time job, to keep growing our stable of writers and expanding what we cover, The Bristol Sauce needs to reach around 20,000 subscribers — twenty times the size of our audience today.
That’s ambitious, yes. But a year ago it was just me. Now it’s a community, a platform, and — I hope — a place you come to be entertained, informed, and inspired to eat out in Bristol.
If you value what we do, please subscribe, spread the word, and, if you can, upgrade your subscription for just £3.50 a month. Because if everything is good, nothing is good. And if nothing is honest, nothing is worth reading.
All words by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Read next:
The importance of food writing & an exciting update from Just Meg
The first fine dining restaurant to appear in America was Delmonico’s in 1827. The first restaurant review to appear in the New York Times was a review of Delmonico’s, some twenty years later. Astoundingly, thanks to the magic of the internet and dedicated archivists, you can read it
Well written and well said as usual. You should be proud of what you’ve achieved in this short time and congratulations 👏🏽
Great article - keep going for a few more years please!