Table Five by Cappadocia, Whiteladies Road: 'The air of a small Las Vegas casino, or the inside of a very large scanner'
'Cappadocia has decided to go fine dining, not realising the ridicule that term attracts'
Retaliating against the seemingly never ending export of Bristol restaurants to Bath is Cappadocia, which has followed in The Scallop Shell/Noah’s wake and bucked the trend. Table Five is Number Two for the Cappadocia team in Bristol; they have socially and literally climbed from Baldwin Street to fancy whites and ‘fine dining’ in Clifton. Philip Sweeney does the maths.
There are many possible grounds for praising or criticising a new restaurant, but this is the first time I can recall writing a good review out of sheer relief at what they haven’t done to the frontage. If you’re not familiar with Cappadocia’s first Bristol branch on Baldwin Street, it’s a jumble of plastic flowers so inescapably horrible as to make the slightly smaller version with which the Ivy Brasserie dismayed Clifton for a while seem almost tasteful. Table Five is, confusingly, the Cappadocia team’s third restaurant, and their second in Bristol.
Given that the stretch of Whiteladies Road in question is already pretty tacky, what with the mismatched shantytown of lean-to restaurant terraces across the road, I was seriously worried that the new Cappadocia might make the environment so stressful to my delicate aesthetic sensibilities I’d have to stop walking down Whiteladies and take to Pembroke Road instead.
But no. Opening day arrived, the shopfitters’ Transits got off the pavement and what was revealed was...an absence of plastic flowers! A very large gold on black sign, some big outdoor heaters and discreetly foliaged planters enclosing rather smart tables. All in all, a seriously inoffensive kit-out to neighbour the unjustly reviled Gail’s, which is now the smartest shop on the strip.
I’ll return to the interior décor shortly — unless the globetrotting Sauce Editor WhatsApps me from Tierra del Fuego to shut up already about plastic flowers — but first a word about the service. A very plus point. Extremely pleasant, helpful, even charming, on my early visits. A young Spanish waiter fell over himself with eagerness to advise on the Turkish wines, bring samples to try, and suggesting which dishes we might like.
And the food is, on the whole, good. For what it is. The trouble is the menu isn’t that great. For Table Five, Cappadocia has decided to go fine dining, not realising the ridicule that term attracts among modern sophisticates. In practice this means fewer of the sorts of things you go to traditional Turkish restaurants for — a wide range of grilled meats, for example, including excellent liver — presumably on the grounds that they’re not fine dining enough. Substituted are items from a rather bland international repertoire. So there are no pide, the very tasty Turkish equivalents of pizza, nor the delicious lentil soup you often find.
No falafels on hot starters, but instead scallops with pea puree and Malibu sauce (£15), the latter apparently an invention of a 1950s American fast food outfit called Sizzlers. Tasty trad mains like Adana kebab, moussaka, and the other restaurant’s signature Ottoman stuffed chicken have been omitted in favour of miso salmon and beef ribs with mashed potato and broccoli.
Nonetheless you can eat perfectly decently, if not cheaply. We tried flawless sucuk beef sausage with an unusual and subtly savoury cream cheese (£12), rich and fresh tzatziki (£8), calamari (£11; soggy, and accompanied by poor coriander mayonnaise), excellent fluffy hot Turkish bread (£5), good lamb beyti (£29; minced, kofta style, with smoked yoghurt), good tavuk (£23; marinated grilled chicken fillet), chips (£5; okay) and a wan and tasteless side salad (£7). The wines were fine: mainly glasses of Villa Doluca white and red (£7 for 175 ml, £8.50 for 250cl, £25 a bottle), the house wines, from the northern Thrace region whose Bulgarian portion is starting to get its bottles back on the UK wine shelves. Since Greek wines are also currently flirting with fashion, why not Turkish?
But this review isn’t over till I’ve done the interior décor. Obviously it’s not all Farrow & Ball greys and austere 1930s globe lighting. There are significant quantities of plastic foliage, but, give them a break, after exercising such admirable restraint on the outside, they can surely let their hair down a bit indoors. By day, the big room is quite peaceful visually but come evening vivid mauve lighting springs into action on walls and ceiling, giving the place the air of a small Las Vegas casino, or the inside of a very large scanner.
Tables are arranged grid style in rectilinear rows, which is a traditional European style I rather like. For some reason, though the outside tables are smart with white linen, inside they’re bare.
One consumable the new Cappadocia doesn’t seem to feature is shisha: perhaps fine dining rules exclude it. Not that I have anything against shisha, but a number of the Turkish places up Gloucester Road seem to have been invaded by shisha and desserts at the expense of the good grilled food they used to focus on.
This dereliction of gastronomic duty by the competition is an important reason why the Cappadocia team deserves to succeed with their trio of restaurants. And five, it turns out, is the table number the Cappadocia boss was sitting at in the original restaurant when he decided to open number three. There may well be more to come.
All words and photos by Philip Sweeney
Table Five by Cappadocia, 50 Whiteladies Rd, BS8 2NH
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Seems a pity that Cappadocia is drifting away from true
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