Somerset, Italian Restaurant Guide

A menu of Italian small plates confounds expectations at this traditional Grade II listed 16th-century pub opposite the Abbey, where West Country ingredients are converted into a very wide choice of pizzette and pasta (all made in-house). You are advised to order two to three dishes each. Top Tip – Menu del Giorno lunch for two at £16 per person, served for tables up to 6, available Tuesday to Friday lunchtimes, 12pm to 2pm, and on Happy Wednesdays (4th Wednesday night of the month).

“Fabulous small plates in a buzzy environment” have established this tiny neighbourhood spot on a corner site in Bedminster as one of the new stars of the Bristol culinary scene – and many people’s “favourite”, for its “interesting”, Mediterranean-inspired cuisine. Australian chef Mark Chapman and his wife Karen last year opened their follow-up, an Italian restaurant called Ragù at Wapping Wharf.

2023 Review: ‘Authentically Italian, sustainably British’ says the tagline of this new Wapping Wharf container restaurant, run by friends Gilda Lombardi and Delphi Ross, which specialises in numerous varieties of pasta made on-site daily. It opened in May 2022 – too late to generate feedback in our annual diners’ poll – but the Bristol press says it’s proving a big hit locally.

Mark and Karen Chapman opened Cor (see also) in Bedminster three years ago and this newcomer in a shipping container on Wapping Wharf by the water in April 2025. Its launch was too late for feedback in our annual diners’ poll but online and press reviews are a rave with the Guardian’s Grace Dent in June 2025 hailing what might well be her “favourite new restaurant of 2025” – “a cool, minimal, romantic ode to Italian cooking” with “some of the most skilful cooking anywhere in Britain right now”. And in August 2025, The Daily Mail’s Tom Parker Bowles was scarcely less impressed with a menu with “no faff or fuss, just cooking that captures the pared-back purity of proper Italian food” – “every ingredient is immaculate, and all it takes is a sprinkle of salt and still more grassy, peppery olive oil, to create a dish of pure summertime succour. Classic, but beautifully done”. Grace’s Top Menu Tip – Ashton Court venison, “cooked rare but as soft as butter, and served on pungent gorgonzola with bone marrow butter”.