The Grosvenor Casino, Bristol Review
If you want to have a rather glamorous night out, try dinner and a flutter at the tables of the Grosvenor Casino. In plush and luxurious surroundings you can channel your inner James Bond and make like 007 for the evening; no promises that you’ll meet Solitaire, (or even get to play it) but it’s certainly great fun.
The welcome is warm and friendly and since we last visited the Casino has been updated, the restaurant is tucked into a corner by the bar with muted shades of dark turquoise leather furniture and low lighting. The atmosphere is rather rarefied; the gentle click clack of the mah jong table monitors the hushed concentration of the players at the tables and it’s at the same time relaxing and exciting.
Just as in the movies if you are playing at the tables you can have your supper delivered to your side but we took a comfortable table in the restaurant on the basis that the menu looked rather good and deserved our full concentration. To start we ordered grilled garlic and chilli king prawns and honey and soy glazed beef with Asian slaw, followed by linguine Napolitana with roasted vegetables, chilli, garlic, Parmesan and basil and, after a tussle between roasted hake with herbed new potatoes, baby spinach and lemon, good old fashioned beer battered fish and chips with tartar sauce and mushy peas were to be first past the post.
Whisper it but I was always of the mind that food was the also ran of casinos but this notion was dispelled at once by our starters : my soy glazed beef was melt-in-the mouth tender strips of steak topped by the tart and sweet combination of the slaw which proved delicious, and the prawns were large and juicy, on toast, nestling in a rich parsley butter sauce. This was a great start to the meal and in the interval between courses we discussed the finer points of chemin de fer and baccarat and decided we didn’t know anything about either!
Our main courses arrived beautifully presented and we tucked in. I really loved my linguine topped off with a handful of pine nuts and bursting with the vibrant colours of peppers, onions, and basil, and the fish was perfectly cooked and crisply battered. Somehow after this I managed a home made Baileys bread and butter pudding covered in cream and custard which was excellent and I was in awe of the chef’s talents that he could produce both this, and on the other side of the coin Asian slaw.
We couldn’t have been better waited on if we had been at The Ritz, service was faultless and the food top notch. Our evening ended at the tables, luckily we didn’t lose our shirts and it was a most interesting and enjoyable experience.
Jacquie Vowles
