Carpe Diem
Millennium Parade, Explorer Lane, Harbourside, Bristol (0117 316 9173).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
It seems the road to Bristol is paved with good intentions. The last time I came here it was also to review a restaurant with a loudly proclaimed ethical policy. Bordeaux Quay made much of its nonexistent carbon footprint, its recycling systems and the way it sourced its ingredients locally. When I pointed out that it then used those locally sourced ingredients to make lousy dishes which had nothing to do with the locality from which they were sourced, I received endless emailed complaints which said that the chef-proprietor, Barney Haughton, deserved to be canonised for what he had done for the environment. A bunch of these emails came from people with the surname Haughton...
I just hope the owners of Carpe Diem in Bristol do not have a multitude of family members with email accounts because it is, if anything, worse than Bordeaux Quay. The food is that killer combination of really stupid ideas and grossly incompetent execution. In a year with some quite spectacular lows this is by far the lowest. Forget the road to Bristol. The food here is a journey down the road to culinary hell.
Like Bordeaux Quay, Carpe Diem is located in a shiny new development down by the waterside. It is a big, rectangular echoey space which, when empty - as it was on our visit - looks like a modern furniture shop. Like Bordeaux Quay it declares itself carbon and nitrates neutral. Everything that can be recycled is; all coffees and teas are Fairtrade; the toilets use a water conservation system, and all meat comes from animals that are free range and - their words - 'live their life with dignity'.
Then they take that meat and treat it with so little respect, so little dignity, they might as well cut out the middleman - the poor, bemused diner - and shove it straight into the wormery. Take, for example, a starter of smoked duck, served sliced, fridge cold and with some of the clingfilm still attached. To go with this was a chunk of hard, crumbly chocolate torte. Is it a witty, interesting and modern food combination? No, it is a horrible, pointless and idiotic one. There was also a gingerbread crisp that didn't taste of ginger and a quenelle of quince raisin compote which was merely a poor man's Branston. These ingredients occupied four separate corners of a plate like guests at a party who didn't want to be introduced, and rightly so. There was a similar plating for an overseasoned crab cake, which tasted not at all of crab, with pickled fennel that had no aniseed kick and some gluey caramelised kumquat that reminded me of orange squash syrup.
Amazingly, the mains were, if anything, worse. Fillets of sea bass, at a shameful £17.50, had been fried for so long they had soaked up all the fat, managing to be both dry and greasy at the same time. They sat on a mess of blackened and crushed potatoes with red onions and capers, and around that was a split beurre blanc; in short, a puddle of slightly stale clarified butter.
I ordered my main course because it read like a car crash: Cotswold Old Spot tenderloin pork with lemon, liquorices, pumpkin and cafe au lait. On the upside, all I could taste of those silly ingredients in the tiny splatter of sauce was a sweetened medicinal bitterness. On the downside I could taste nothing in the pork. It was overcooked in a way that made it irrelevant whether the meat had come from an animal that had lived its life in a Cotswolds idyll or an industrial pig shed in Droitwich. So much for ethical principles: this was a disgraceful waste of a fine animal. We also tried a side dish of their mushroom ragout: a plate of hot but not cooked button mushrooms slathered in what seemed something akin to tomato puree.
The most successful dish of the day, in the sense that it was merely mediocre rather than horrid, was a lemon tart with no citrus zing, made with pastry that was soggy and almost as thick as my mobile phone. I ordered the 'double' vanilla creme brulee. I have no idea what the double thing was about. I do know the creme had split. It was a pot of sweetened scrambled egg. I pointed this out and they took it off the bill. Even so, with just two glasses of wine, that bill came to £80.
I am genuinely baffled. I do not understand why restaurateurs who would go to such trouble to get their ethical policies in order would then allow such dismal food to emerge from the kitchen. For the record, if you want good food served in a restaurant with a smart ethical policy, visit Acorn House, in London's King's Cross, which was named best newcomer in this year's Observer Food Monthly awards. As for Carpe Diem, if you should ever be so unfortunate as to find yourself there, do what the name says: seize the day and get out of there as fast as you can.
