Lonely Mouth, Gloucester Road: 'My mouth is as lonely as ever'
Average Japanese small plates and French toast with matcha... or is it?
These days, we are all Japanophiles. We love Japanese food, culture, clothes, and the Japanese commitment to refinery and perfection. Our obsession can be seen everywhere: sushi has overtaken sandwiches as the most popular meal-deal lunch and every street corner coffee shop serves lurid green matcha lattes. And therein lies the problem. Matcha sales increased by 202 per cent in the UK in 2023, and it hasn’t slowed much since then: in fact the UK matcha market (matchet?) generated a revenue of £38.7 million last year. Coupled with a bad harvest in Japan, an ageing working population, and global hoarding: high-grade matcha is now a rare commodity and the price has soared. Charlie XCX releasing her album Brat probably didn’t help things either. And so, while not excusable, it could perhaps slightly more understandable why a restaurateur who has been very open with their financial struggles might be tempted to swap out genuine matcha for food colouring. But nothing escapes the eagle eye of The Bristol Sauce critic…
You know when you’re not very hungry but you eat anyway, because your mouth feels kind of…lonely? Japanese has a single word for this (of course it does), kuchisabishii*, and what a titillating concept that is.
34-year-old Olivia Maxwell-Yates has created her brand from that sensation; making it the name of her pop-up and then her permanent spot at the elbow where Gloucester Road meets Ashley Down Road. Having recently been granted an evening licence, Olivia has extended Lonely Mouth’s offering from Japanese bento-box style breakfasts and lunches to small plates after 6pm. Now the bitter aroma of Triple Co coffee emanates from behind the counter by day, and the sizzling sound of frying banana blossom by night.
Making one Japanese restaurant stand out from the numerous others in any one UK city is as easy as eating soup with chopsticks. It’s like the multiplicity of climbing walls, or rustic coffee roasters; how do you find something new to say when, let’s be honest, you’re still selling the same umami-seaweed-and-rice based dinners or trendy yet chalky exercises at vaguely risky heights? Some restaurants specialise in silky smooth ramen, which delights the stomach and steams up the windows, others devote efforts to great décor, or excellent sushi, but Olivia has made Lonely Mouth’s USP its music; for it is a jazz kissa, or Japanese listening cafe — apparently Bristol’s first.
In 1920s Japan, Western culture and music was simultaneously all the rage and hard to come by, and so began the phenomenon of visiting kissa (short for kissaten — a tearoom or cafe) solely to sip coffee and listen to Beethoven symphonies or Bach cantata. Conversation was eschewed for quiet contemplation of records that would otherwise be too expensive to buy. Jazz-specific kissa grew out of this movement in the 50s, and, some decades later, establishments would start to cater to RnB or hip hop fans.
There is obviously no obligation for Lonely Mouth to follow this tradition to the letter**, but, apart from an impressive-looking hi fi set-up and stack of LPs in the corner, on the two occasions I visit, music is no more the focus than at any other city centre restaurant. My music-loving self is dampened slightly, as if dabbed all over by one of those post-sushi hand wipes. Upon enquiry at the bar, I am reassured that, as per the website, there are regular weekend DJs, and visitors are welcome to bring their own vinyl from home to play or pick from the shelf. Disappointed about the beats, I turn to the eats — when they arrive. It’s a lengthy wait and a pint of Asahi helps stave off the hunger.
Steak tartare chirashi (£14.50) with pickled daikon and Maldon oysters with sweet jeow som (£3.50 each) are shining highlights. There’s plenty to satisfy the veggies: banana blossom karaage (£8.50) is oversalted but has that sought-after crunch, silken tofu with ginger and garlic shoyu (£8.50) is infused with flavour, and crispy tofu with BBQ plum sauce (£7.50) is meaty and marinated.
Coming up last is a cloying koji-marinated monkfish tail (£14.50 — recommended by the chef, no less) with an almost stomach-turning blandness, and, tragically, overdone rice (£2.50). For an element so integral to Japanese cuisine that the word for cooked rice, gohan or meshi, also means ‘meal’, it’s not an exaggeration to declare the serving of claggy, overdone rice in a Japanese joint a heinous crime against everything edible.
One table over, an influencer being plied with food and drink is about to be the latest to join the hallowed halls of Lonely Mouth’s Instagram collaboration posts, which fall over themselves to ‘100 per cent recommend’ the restaurant and give it a ‘solid’ 9.5/10 rating. I sip on an uninteresting orange from the natural wine menu (it’s fine but not a patch on the stock at Bristol’s organic wine mecca, Kask) and recall quotes describing how every dish is PACKED with flavour (caps theirs). And that boring monkfish? It had one influencer’s tastebuds ‘dancing’.
I trotted back in on a Sunday morning for breakfast, wondering if it’s totally fair to inwardly hope that a restaurant proves your first impressions wrong with the second chance it has absolutely no idea you’re providing. In a bewildering turn of events, within five short minutes of ordering, an engorged hunk of French toast (£13.80) is plonked on the table laden with syrup and berries, and drowning in matcha cream.
Stranger still, the ‘matcha’ cream seems to disintegrate before my very eyes, with what looks suspiciously like specks of blue food colouring appearing and growing the more I work my way through it. Over 20 minutes later, the last few bites of toast are accompanied by a tardy coffee — an oat flat white distinctly lacking in oat milk.
Lonely Mouth is a cool concept with attractive branding, but a quality small plates jazz kissa it is not. Perhaps if it put slightly more energy into cooking rice than vibe curation, then there would be something to fall back on when the music stops.
*Among other untranslatable Japanese words is tsundoku, which describes the behaviour of buying books, letting them pile up, and never getting round to reading them.
**Though it is fairly explicit on the website about being ‘focused on an immersive and high-quality listening experience’.
All words and photos by Caitlin Johnson-Bowring
Lonely Mouth, 401 Gloucester Rd, BS7 8TS
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Yikes!