This cavernous restaurant at Bristol Docks is the all you can eat Za Za Bazaar and I thought it might be a sensible location for lunch before going to the craft beer festival that was located around 100 metres away from it. As ever, sensible might be doing some heavy lifting there, but it was at least a plan that eating enough provided a stable foundation for an afternoon of beer. This sort of practical thinking is what has held civilisation together for centuries…..
There’s a team member downstairs who books customers in and she asked me if ninety minutes was long enough. I debated this with myself and decided that it probably was, although it later transpired that they weren’t enforcing the arrangement anyway. I didn’t want to be rushed, particularly when there were spring rolls involved, so I thought I’d be efficient in my food collection.
There’s no denying that this restaurant is large and it can apparently seat up to 1,000 people which is a little ridiculous. The pricing wasn’t too onerous, £22 for all you can eat and all the soft drinks you could possibly want.
Being the food expert that I obviously am, I got muddled up and thought these were onion rings when they were calamari, but both work for me. There’s a heap of randomness there and a fair amount of beige with spring rolls on top of the chicken in black bean sauce.
Some of the food, such as pasta and fish &chips, is made to order but there is plenty of choice available for those who didn’t want to wait. I didn’t much want to wait as I felt that there was enough to choose from.
The kitchens were all open and a fair number of the options were being made from scratch.
The design vibe is meant to be Asian street food and I liked the whole set-up.
OK, I like beige. My friend Ross would have very much liked this whole arrangement. I did wonder if there was an optimum sequence of plates, but I quickly got distracted when I saw a food that I liked.
Curry with onion rings, keeping it classy as ever….. The scale inevitably means this isn’t a delicate and calm location, but all the food was hot and it seemed to have a decent turnover.
This is one of the largest restaurants that I can recall visiting and I remember taking photos at this point as I realised that I’d had enough food. It did all seem to be a bit of a relic from the late 2000s and early 2010s when there was more dining confidence than there is perhaps now.
And a quick dessert.
Or two.
Overall, I rather liked this set-up and some of the food really was quite decent, the curries had a depth of flavour, the meat was tender, the food retained some texture and it was certainly all acceptable. This was meant to be something of a chain, but they opened a second in Newcastle and never made it any further and that one has now closed. They had hoped to open an outlet in Norwich, but that never came to pass.
I do wonder why all you can eat restaurants are falling away in the United Kingdom and the US. Although food prices and staffing prices are going up, the turnover at places such as this is high and it looks from the outside as if it’s profitable, but appearances might be deceptive. However, they’ve been trading here for over a decade, so it’s certainly working at this quite premium location in Bristol. But back to my decision as to whether this was a good choice for a craft beer festival, absolutely it was even though I thought I might have overdone the chicken curry and Vimto…. I might come here again I’ve already decided….