Soft Buoys, Welsh Back: 'It is always the ideal time to eat soft serve'

One of the only reasons to be grateful for America

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The last thing anyone wants at the moment is a reminder that America exists. Even just writing the word I feel a drop in my stomach. The Americans have given us so many horrors — ICE, ambrosia salad, and most recently, the Melania documentary, which is excitingly looking like the biggest box office flop since Shrek 6.

Thanks to our cousins across the pond there are some truly awful abominations of the English language; not least trash, sidewalk, soccer and diapers. I’ll forgive them eggplant (early introductions of the vegetable to North America were indeed small, bulbous and white) and zucchini (from zucchino, the Italian word for a small squash brought over by the swathes of Italian immigrants) and I’ll even let them off cilantro as that came from the Spanish used by the Mexicans.

But their pronunciation of buoys is something I cannot overlook. Bow-ey. Bow-ey, for god’s sake. No I’m serious, have a listen for yourself. It was this nonsensical noise that we were ridiculing as we waited, hands tucked between knees for warmth, on a picnic bench next to the Soft Buoys shack on Welsh Back, with the occasional umami waft of grilling cheese turning us into a small pack of Pavlov’s dogs.

Yet without the Americans, we may not have grilled cheese at all. And we certainly wouldn’t have had Anthony Bourdain. So without America, despite all its flaws, we would not be able to get a Buoy-dain grilled cheese (£8) from Soft Buoys, and that is really quite something. Based on Bourdain’s favourite sandwich, it comprises layers of fried mortadella, provolone, mustard and five other cheeses and ties only with another example from the same little shack for the best grilled cheese I’ve had in recent memory. The golden surface and hefty caramelised skirt is punctuated only by the two green gherkins it has been speared with, which offer the perfect between-bite sour nibble.

Look at the skirt on that!

Taking inspiration from the other side of the world was the kimchi special (£7.50) with optional fried spam (£1.50). If you’re questioning spam in a kimchi sandwich, the nondescript spiced pork was introduced to Korea by American soldiers during the Korean war when meat was scarce and so began a nationwide multi-generational love affair. And to be fair to the Koreans, when fried and paired with Bokman’s kimchi, nori, kewpie mayo and Soft Buoy’s five cheese blend — it makes for a stellar lunch.

Topped with a bouncy Korean tteokbokki

But the real reason I’d come to Soft Buoys was for the eponymous soft serve. You might think a near-zero day in early January would not be the ideal time for eating soft serve outside, but you’d be wrong, because it is always the ideal time to eat soft serve — especially when it’s topped with things like brown butter and sultanas, sticky toffee pudding and brownie with miso caramel and coco pops (all £6).

Now seems a good time to remind you that Soft Buoys owner James also moonlights as part of the team at Bokman — or at least, he did, pre-fire. I’m not sure whether he learnt the soft serve craft there or was the originator of it, but either way I am delighted to see the joy spreading.

It’s serving

The sticky toffee pudding, served piping hot, jumped immediately onto the podium of Bristol’s best examples of the genre, pipped to the post only by The Pony’s. How James is creating such exquisite desserts in this postage-stamp of cafe is beyond me. The tiniest hairline cracks started to show with the brownie, which due to the baltic environment in which it was awaiting consumption, was very hard. In fact it was no match for our measly wooden spoons, one of which snapped in half at the first sign of resistance. The brownie and friends concoction was by no means bad, but not a patch on the sticky toffee pudding. I’ll have to return (it’s a hard life) for the brown butter, and indeed, every other flavour.

There’s more reasons to lament America than there are stars in the sky, but my motto is that if you’re going to feel depressed, deeply anxious, horrified, enraged, nauseated or any of the other negative emotions that are incited by a quick check of the BBC news homepage, you might as well do it with a grilled cheese in hand and a soft serve on the way. It won’t make it better, but it will at least provide a really good distraction on your lunch break. And who knows, if the 1984 trends continue, in the near future we may well be saying that the grilled cheese was in fact invented on Welsh Back in 2025, and then we can cut all ties with America once and for all.

All words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour

Soft Buoys, The Kiosk, Welsh Back, BS1 4SB

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