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I used to live and work within the five hundred meters between We The Curious and the Hotwells roundabout and it did not make for good eating.
It was sort of the restaurant equivalent of a shopping centre vending machine. Despite being very central, the area is something of an independent food desert; you can absolutely get some dinner if you’re happy to line the pockets of Pizza Express shareholders or if you want to rub shoulders with the sorriest of stag dos in Slug and Lettuce. I had to do my shopping in a miniature Tesco which primarily serviced the nearby office workers and therefore stocked a vast quantity of soggy, fridge-cold sandwiches, protein bars and little else. For a while there was Friska, which was my go-to coffee and oops-I-forgot-about-lunch spot, but then even that closed.
The rental costs of the units on that stretch of Millennium Promenade and Cathedral Walk must be wince-inducing, so it’s little wonder few independents take the risk. When it comes to food, the reputation for the area is so uninspiring that when I arranged to meet some of The Bristol Sauce crew at Lagman and said it was on the harbourside, one of them auto-piloted to Wapping Wharf.
But change is afoot. If I still lived there now, I’d have a new independent Chinese hand-pulled noodle restaurant within a glutinous strand’s reach of my flat, and a pretty good one at that.
Lagman is not the place to take anyone in need of any of the following: table service (indeed any service at all), table cloths, comfortable seating, alcohol or even glassware, relaxing ambience, napkins, knives, the ability to reserve a table, a menu to read at said table or the option of dessert.
It is little more than a canteen or a takeaway, complete with touchscreens for ordering and numbers called out when your order is ready. You should collect your own can of something sugary from the fridge and then bring your tray back after you’ve finished eating.
In fact, Lagman encompasses many of the signifiers of omnipresent fast food joints, but with hand-pulled noodles and less instantly recognisable branding. Hopefully it doesn’t have the same vom-worthy statistics about faeces on the ordering screens. I was trying very hard to put that out of my mind as we took our wooden pews outside.
Does this mean you shouldn’t go to Lagman? Quite the opposite. You should go, preferably soon, and embrace it for exactly what it is; a quick, convenient and relatively cheap dinner that delivers a hell of a lot of satisfaction providing you get one of two dishes. Or better still, both.
The first dish you must order is the rou jia mo. The rou jia mo is often referred to as China’s answer to the beef burger, but actually the beef burger is Europe’s answer to the rou jia mo, as it long predates any meat-in-bread creation that came out of Germany or America. The filling, which was traditionally made with pork slowly cooked in a flavoursome stock laced with spices, can be traced back as far as 200BCE. The bread, which varies by region, can be partially leavened dough that almost resembles a pitta and is cooked in a hot pan, or a more paratha-like laminated coil.
Here, due to Lagman’s halal nature, the rou jia mo is made with beef. It’s a simple but perfect creation; flakey, buttery, crisp bread, stuffed with pulled beef cooked in a spiced stock and dotted with fresh coriander. Rou jai mo are not common in the UK and this is one of the first to appear in Bristol (the other being an as-yet untested version at Meet Up Noodle Bar), but it will catch on like wildfire; like dying your hair green; like stick and poke tattoos or shouting the word Jeevans every time you hear ‘Easton’ in a compulsive gentrified call-and-response.
The second essential item at Lagman is, of course, a bowl of hand-pulled noodles, which you can see being whipped and braided into shape through a window into the kitchen. Beware — not all noodle dishes here are created equal. The wide, rebelliously non-uniform biang bang noodles with tender beef short rib stand head and shoulders above the rest, all of which sampled on a recent Wednesday evening presented as far too sweet and lacking in anything else. But the short rib biang biang were resplendent with masterful spice and seasoning, dripping in umami, gloriously chewy in all the right places, firmly in the Goldilocks spice zone and have been playing on my mind ever since.
As a table of seven, we managed to order most of the menu, and I can therefore confirm that nothing else served at Lagman is worth your time. ‘Best ever chips’ are anything but; uniform McCains oven cuboids, admittedly crisp, but seasoned in a mix of sugar, salt and MSG that suggests very poor ratios. Unless you like your chips tasting like pick n mix, of course. Gyoza are no different to those that you’d come across in the freezer section of big Tesco, pickled mustard greens are fine but one dimensional and the tofu skin was more reminiscent of a pair of Adidas shoelaces that have been dragged through an unidentified floor juice than anything else.
But for short rib biang biang and a stuffed rou jai mo at student-friendly prices, this place is a no-brainer. And we’re not the only ones to have discovered it; every table was occupied, inside and out, with people happily slurping wonky noodles — chins to bowls, eyes down, t shirts and jorts stained, conversation paused. There was a steady stream of people from all walks of life appearing to place their order on the screen and then waiting patiently for their number to be called.
Lagman gives me hope — is this an independent that could not only survive this food dessert, but perhaps even become an oasis?
All words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Lagman, Unit 1b, Waverley House, BS1 5LW
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Overall, I'm probably giving this one a miss!