Style guide and writers area

Welcome

Welcome, writer. Whether this is your first time writing about food for publication or whether you’re an old hat and just checking back at some grammar pointers, we’re delighted to have you as part of our Sauce community.

The Bristol Sauce has two primary aims:

One is to connect people with great food through engaging writing.
The other is to provide opportunities for writers — some of whom may never have written about food before — to support them with their development and to pay them for their work.

For people who are willing to give their time, creativity and knowledge in The Bristol Sauce, we will reinvest time and energy into your development, welcoming you to our community with open arms, sharing opportunities with you and always paying you for your work.

Below is a series of resources intended to help aid you in your writing. Please get in touch if you need anything that is not addressed on this page.

Our manifesto

The Bristol Sauce is a home for great food and great writing. We shout from the rooftops (write emails) about great food, whether it is a kebab on Stapleton Road or a French bistro in Clifton. In order to write honestly about great food, we have to declare when things are not as they should be. We think that this mix of honest writing is important for readers, but also connects people with and supports a healthy local independent food scene.

We are based in Bristol, but we occasionally cover subjects or restaurants in nearby areas to add a little extra spice to the mix. We write restaurant reviews, lists about where to eat, curated guides, behind-the-scenes insights into the world of hospitality and the occasional bit of investigative journalism.

As well as exploring Bristol’s restaurant scene, we use food as a lens with which to look at culture, religion, sustainability and history. We are first and foremost a platform for writing, but in the future we hope to speak with you on podcasts, meet you at events and help you find great places to eat with an app.

We always pay in full for anything we write about. We are always honest and fair.

Writers rates and sending invoices

We currently pay the following for pieces that we determine are fit for publishing:

Restaurant review - £70 per review
Longer listicle, such as 25 Bristol restaurants to visit in 2025 - £100
Secret Service piece - £50 (this takes into account that there is not the same cost to the writer as there is for a restaurant review and we use the remaining budget to pay an artist to illustrate the piece.)

Please send timely invoices to Meg via email and we will pay you as soon as possible.

As The Bristol Sauce grows and our number of paying subscribers increase, our rates will go up accordingly.

Use of AI

As of November 2025, The Bristol Sauce is an AI free publication. As one of our writers, we ask you to pledge not to use AI to support your work. If this means that you need more support with a deadline extension, editing, or someone to bounce ideas off, please get in touch with Meg. If we suspect AI has been used, we will run copy through an AI checker and ask a writer to rewrite it if necessary.

We have taken this decision primarily because of the negative impact that AI has on the environment, on intellectual property and on cognition. We don’t believe that it is good for our planet, our minds, or our readers. There is an increasing number of publications very clearly using AI to write a lot of their content, and we believe an original human voice makes for far more engaging reading.

As AI develops, we will continue to monitor whether this declaration remains useful and relevant. If our outlook should change, we will update our readers accordingly.

Visiting restaurants - our code of conduct

Whether the restaurant knows who we are and what we’re up to or not, we should always go out of our way to be good guests. Working in hospitality is hard enough as it is. Always, always, always go out of your way to be kind and polite to staff. Tip minimum of 10 per cent.

Book a table but don’t let them know who you are or why you are visiting. We visit anonymously wherever possible to minimise any chance of bias. If you think there is a chance your name may be recognised, ask a friend to book for you.

Take someone with you. The more of the menu you can try, the more you’ll understand the restaurant and be able to assess it.

Order what the restaurant is known for and ask the staff for recommendations. We always go in with the intention of reviewing a place well, so we want to eat the dishes they are most proud of.

Pay attention to how other tables are being treated. Are they receiving the same service as you?

When you visit a restaurant to review, enjoy it but you have to be alert from the moment you walk through the door to the moment you leave. Everything matters, details are what brings a review to life - Andy Lynes, author of Smashed

Speak to the staff and the chef if you can. What extra tidbit of information can you find out that will add context to your review or enlighten our readers? What was the chef doing before this? What is their vision, their raison d’etre?

Always take a picture of the menu. You’ll need it later. Also take landscape pictures of the following:

The outside of the restaurant
The inside of the restaurant (it is wise to do these two after you have eaten)
Every dish
Anything else particularly relevant

Take a couple of nice portrait photos too - we will use them for socials. Please wipe your lens before you take photos and try and make them look professional. Natural light is your best friend, but your mate’s phone torch diffused through a napkin will do in a pinch.

Finally, always pay in full for everything you eat and drink. We do not accept invites, gifts, discounts or similar in exchange for writing.

Advice on writing and tone of voice

Do your research. Has this restaurant been reviewed by anyone else? How long has it been open, where else has the chef worked, is there anything novel about it?

The first bite of a dish is with the eyes, the first taste of a restaurant review is an engaging, funny or insightful first sentence. Grab your readers by the eyeballs and don’t let them go.

Here are some excellent first lines:

‘Convicted burglar Gino D’Acampo has opened a restaurant in Birmingham’ - Meat & One Veg blog, 2019

‘Snoring is like stupidity: you don’t know you’re a sufferer until someone points it out’ - The Plate Licked Clean, 2022

‘To be a veteran Londoner is to be reflexively befuddled by Canary Wharf; a surveilled, corporate theme park that transforms, at the weekend, into a culturally barren ghost town of shuttered Prets, bored families looking at massive fountains, and bodycam-wearing security guards’ - Jimi Famurewa, 2024

‘This whole thing about how often men think about the Roman Empire is actually small potatoes when compared to their plans and strategies concerning The End Times’ - Bald Flavours, 2024

‘For me, it all began with a pie.’ - Georgina Pellant, 2024

What do these first lines tell us? That we can start in the middle or with something seemingly totally unrelated; as long as it’s entertaining and you eventually link it back. They also suggest it’s always worth checking a chef’s criminal record.

A bad restaurant review is an extended menu; a list of things the reviewer ate with an uninspiring adjective-ridden tail. A good restaurant review tells a story and invites in context or reference from the world beyond just the food that is on the table.

Give the reader a sense of time and place. My brother parodies a local bloggers output as’I went here and here is a picture and I ate this and here is a picture and it was nice and here is a picture and it was nice’ so for me it’s about taking them to the table with you. Make them feel they’re sitting with you, as an experience, rather than just listing what you ate and what you thought as some trudge through a menu - Plate Licked Clean

Take this one I wrote about Little Shop & Pantry on the eve of the Euro’s final. Or the review I wrote about a pop-up at Root, which made considerable reference to Jay Rayner’s review in the Guardian the same week. I like a theme that carries through a review, but it’s not compulsory.

Aim loosely for 800 words. If you want a challenge, go for 600. If it warrants it, you can have 1,000.

Clarity is king - never ever sacrifice ease of understanding for what you might think is a clever turn of phrase or poetic expression, your reader won’t thank you for it - Andy Lynes, Smashed

Sometimes if you don’t like a place, it’s because you’re not the target audience. Bear that in mind. Just because you don’t like it, someone else might.

That said — be honest. Honesty and integrity is the only thing that sets us apart and makes us trustworthy. If it’s bad, you can say it’s bad.

Style guide

We Don’t Capitalise Menu Items Or Headlines. Unless They Are Named After A Country For Example Pad Thai.
Avoid over use of exclamation marks! One per review only!
Dates are written as follows 20 December 2025 / DD Month YYYY
Numbers up to ten are written in full - for example, five star as opposed to 5 star. Numbers after ten are written as numbers, for example 16, 574 etc.
Banned words: iconic, hidden gem, Brizzle, gert lush
We apostrophise St Werburgh’s, St Paul’s etc.
The names of other publications and books, such as The Guardian, are to be put in italics.
You can swear, but just consider whether you really fucking need to.
In restaurant reviews and other relevant pieces, please put the price in brackets of every dish after its first mention. For example: the standout dish was the fish curry (£18).
Making up words, in the right context, is encouraged. You can start sentences with and. And because. Because The Bristol Sauce is a place where we are helped along by grammatical rules, not caged by them.
Palate and palette are not the same. Approach with caution.
Per cent is written out, not as a symbol.
Pop-up is hyphenated.
For how to spell, what to capitalise, appropriate use of grammar and other interesting style notes please consult the excellent and exhaustive Guardian style guide.