1 Chandos Road, Bristol (0117 973 7999). Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
Lurking quietly at the bottom of the menu at Culinaria in Bristol is a dish which represents the frayed end of a golden thread running through the history of the modern British restaurant. It is Saint-Emilion au chocolat, an intense chocolate mousse made with the crunch of amaretti biscuits. The first reference to it in this country appears in Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking, published in 1951, which explains why it turned up a few years later on the menu at the Hole in the Wall in Bath. The restaurant's founder, George Perry-Smith, was hugely influenced by David, though he said he got his recipe off the back of a box of Old Glory matches. In the 70s, Perry-Smith moved to Helford in Cornwall, where he opened his own restaurant, and also worked with the great Joyce Molyneux at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth.
Which brings us to Culinaria, run by Stephen Markwick and his wife Judy. At the risk of making him sound like Methuselah's older brother, Markwick is probably the last chef who trained with both Perry-Smith – he worked for him at Helford – and with Molyneux. There are others who cooked with Molyneux – Rosie Sykes at Fitzbillies in Cambridge; Jane Baxter, until recently at the Field Kitchen – but only Markwick goes all the way back. For many years he held Bristol's only Michelin star at Markwick's. Then, in 2002, the Markwicks opened this place, which is part deli, part restaurant, with the civilised policy of only serving lunch and dinner on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
It is a bright, airy room with a lot of utilitarian blond-wood furniture. My companion said it looked like the café of a cathedral trying to maximise its revenue streams. It's a calming and reflective space. What matters is the food. It's that particular kind of French cooking which stands as the marker for an enlightened approach to how we eat in this country. Or, as Markwick himself has put it, he's been doing the same thing for years and watched it go out of fashion and come back in again.
God is in the detail. With a Provençal fish soup, more a light, creamy chowder than the usual rust-coloured broth, comes a perfectly made rouille the brightness of an amber traffic light. It is not the violent hit of garlic it can be in lesser hands, but instead a subtle flash of heat and flavour from the shores of the Med. The same attention is there in a spiced plum chutney which accompanies a duck confit salad, alongside fluffy potato cakes. A dish of sea trout with skin so crisp it could pass for maritime scratchings comes with asparagus, peas and podded broad beans in a light sorrel sauce and is just a snapshot of an English summer on a plate. A couple of lamb chops arrive with sensitively prepared sweetbreads, a light garlic sauce and a stew of peppers and borlotti beans. You will not rock back on your heels at the culinary daring. But you will be very well fed.
For dessert we skip the big chocolate moment. Instead we have a claret-coloured summer pudding with elderflower-flavoured cream, and a baked custard, sensitively flavoured with saffron, hiding plump gooseberries. The wine list is short and sensible.
At the end of the meal I fall to talking to Judy and Stephen. Which is when the bomb drops. The very day I am there they were meant to exchange contracts on the sale of the business. It hadn't happened for some reason, but selling up was still very much the plan. "I've been doing this for 35 years," Stephen said. "It is enough." That's understandable but, at the risk of tumbling into cliché, it does mark the end of an era, of something more important to good food in Britain than all the Ramsays, Pierre-Whites and Blumenthals put together. Please go and try the Markwicks' lovely restaurant while you can. It deserves, at its end, to be celebrated.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
