Clouds, St Werburghs: 'The bamboo baskets come thick and fast' - restaurant review
A visit to the first bricks-and-mortar premises from the Ah-Ma's Dumplings team
Saucers - I have a confession to make. I am not currently in Bristol. I have run away to the sunnier climes of South Asia. I write to you today from the beach in Sri Lanka - I know, awful isn’t it? I’ll keep my bragging to a minimum. My next confession is that I actually haven’t been in the country since mid-January. I wanted to be able to reassure you wonderful readers that the Sauce’s content would continue as normal while I am away - for which I hope the proof has been in the pudding. In fact, with our first January news digest, our content has increased.
I have a brilliant, and growing, team of writers to keep our restaurant reviews flowing. I’ve also got a few backlogged that I’ve written myself. I think having a diverse range of voices, each bringing their own experience and perspective, is far more interesting than just having me bang on anyway. I hope you agree.
For now, I am Editor at Large. But I will be back. And in the meantime, we’ve got some cracking content lined up for you. Enjoy! ~ Meg
Cumulonimbus, altostratus, dimsumus. The comparison of dim sum to clouds is not a novel one, and is particularly apt for bao. Pearly white and gravity-defying, the two have much in common. Though the bao at the new dim sum restaurant Clouds in St Werburghs are filled with things much more interesting than rain; slow roasted belly pork and hoisin (£6.2 for 2) or spicy coconut butternut squash (£5 for 2). It’s no surprise really, given that this particular restaurant is the first bricks-and-mortar premises from the team behind Ah-Ma’s Dumplings, who earned a loyal following from their Bristol street food market efforts, established in 2014.
This is not your typical Cantonese restaurant. Peel back layers of the menu and you’ll find a choice of several cocktails, including an espresso martini with an all-the-rage absinthe rinse. There’s kombucha, because coke just doesn’t cut it anymore, and a handful of beers from Bristol stalwarts Wiper & True. To be fair, it would have been very ballsy of Clouds to stock any other beer given who their next door neighbours are. With the wine choice they’ve cast the net a bit wider; there’s even two orange wines to choose from for all the St Werburgers who want to impress their friends by ordering wine made from oranges*.
We turned up, a party of eight, with two nut allergies and a vegan who can’t eat mushrooms. Unfortunately that’s not the start of a joke, rather excellent foresight on my part. I figure if I keep taking these friends to restaurants that are likely to kill them, then eventually by a process of natural selection I will have a more resilient group of friends. The Clouds team, only a few weeks in, dealt with our many dietary requests, and us taking up half the restaurant, admirably.
Everyone was too busy admiring what a good job Stylemongers of Bristol had done with the interior design and exchanging dating stories to decide what to eat (amateurs), so I had to order for the table. The real reason I brought a group of eight to a dim sum restaurant? So I could order the entire menu. Strap in folks, for the bamboo baskets come thick and fast from here.
Continuing the light and fluffy theme was bao prawn toast (£5.9 for 6); crisp, savoury and filled with plump whole prawns. One of my friends remarked he’d never seen an actual prawn in prawn toast before, suggesting he might be ready for an upgrade from Marlings.
Pork and prawn wontons (£5.3 for 4) had also emerged from the fryer the perfect shade of gold, shattering to reveal deeply savoury centres ripe for dipping in sweet chilli sauce.
?????
There was a collective frown when I ordered two rounds of chestnut mushroom dumplings (£4.8 for 6), especially from the vegan who couldn’t eat them. I was vindicated by the arrival of six umami parcels with a hint of preserved mustard, not slimy in the slightest.
And there were prawn crystal dumplings (£4.8 for 3), named for their translucent qualities; skins so delicate you could see the punctuation of garlic chives within. Each mouthful a brief but blissful reminder of how great great dim sum can be.
It wasn’t until pondering dessert that we realised the pork sui mai (£5.8 for 3) hadn’t arrived amid all the chaos.
Clouds have taken the opportunity of a permanent site to expand beyond dim sum, with mixed results. Most impressive of the mains/bigger-plates/sharing-options/god-knows-what-we’re-calling-a-normal-sized-plate-these-days was green pepper and aubergine, each piece sliced like a fan and stuffed with pork (£13) - though slightly under-seasoned, the hau-gum (mouthfeel) was exquisite and probably similar to how a child imagines it would be like to eat a cloud. An astonishing feat to achieve with pig and vegetables, two distinctly ground-based beings.
Of all the lovely things one can do to a bird - fry, roast, barbecue (get your mind out of the gutter, you) - to steam a chicken has to be close to criminal. That said, the Chinese seem to have been practicing this technique for a very long time, and come the advent of 2025 they have got it pretty good. At Clouds, steamed chicken (£14.5) is served on the bone with jujube dates, mushrooms and lily flowers, in a broth begging to have chopsticks of rice plunged in. It was middling, and had there been any other form of chicken on the table, it would not have had a look in.
Dragging the Clouds back earthwards were Dong Po belly pork (£17) and organic greens (£6), both under-seasoned. The belly needed longer cooking for full rendering of all its marvellous fats, and to achieve true greatness. It didn’t hold a candle to the crisp pork over which I’d cried tears of joy at Nice Spice the lunchtime prior. And perhaps its my cultural insensitivity, in which case I am open to being corrected, but to serve it with raw, completely unseasoned bok choi - a stringent vegetable to eat at the best of times - seems odd.
There were two options for dessert: sesame puffs with lotus seed paste, peanut powder (which we omitted) and vanilla ice cream (£5 for 3), or lava bao filled with molten salted duck egg yolk custard (£5 for 2). True to form we ordered both and very much ended the meal on a high note. Cloud nine, you could say. Sorry.
Sesame puffs, similar to tang yuan or Korean injeolmi, deliver that same incredibly satisfying chew, here combined with salty umami sesame paste and sweet vanilla. I’m a big fan.
The lava bao incite childlike joy when they burst to reveal a sunshine yellow centre. Forget egg-bursting videos, this will be the next big thing. And I’d argue the resulting mess is infinitely more delicious than a plain old egg; the bao make for ideal custard mopping sponges.
Then, as with any party of eight, comes the torture of trying to split the bill. The table is cleared for the swathes of calculators that everyone starts typing on. Talk changes to ‘I owe you’s, ‘I’ll get you a drink’ and ‘Is the service included?’
Eventually we spill out back onto the January pavement, headed for the pub. Clouds is a great place to go for dim sum with friends when you want to be able to indulge in a cocktail or two or a nice glass of wine, but I probably wouldn’t bother with the mains next time. The closest comparison in these ends would be Wangs, where I would say the food is better but Clouds wins out on the drinks. So it’s up to you - dim sum or drink sum?
All words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Clouds, 107b Mina Rd, BS2 9YD
* Orange wine is not actually made from oranges. It is a wine made from white grapes where the skin has not been removed as early in the crushing process, resulting in more tannins and a slightly different flavour.
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I found Clouds to have better vegan dishes than Wangs, but I agree the "mains" felt a bit unnecessary. I'd prefer a larger dimsum menu with no mains tbh!