There’s been a fair bit of industry navel gazing lately, about how often a writer should visit a restaurant before reviewing it.
Some reviewers are all-in on their due diligence, making repeat visits and building up a comprehensive picture of a place before offering an opinion. Others favour the first listen album review, the reaction video approach, a single outing that may be buoyed by booze or clouded by mood, taking a certain pride in judging things purely on vibes.
Both have their merit.
I approach this particular write-up from a charmed/cursed position. I’ve eaten at Bath’s Upstairs at Landrace at least a dozen times, likely many more, and always just for fun. And that’s before we count trips to the bakery and their pizzeria downstairs.
It’s my neighbourhood restaurant, a place of submission and surrender. I’ve been here in every mood and state of inebriation, sober and pissed, celebrating and mourning. I must have photos of the signature cheddar curd fritters at all hours, from golden to bleary to gone.
I know it’s never more beautiful in the Upstairs dining room than when the late afternoon is streaming through those big windows, catching the dust motes, turning everything the colour of local honey. Or, indeed, of Bath stone. This is such a light room – in vibes and in actual photons – that eating here at dusk feels like dining inside a Vermeer.
But I’ve also been here when the candles are doing all the work, when it’s dark outside and the room has contracted into something more intimate. The light is always changing – my life is changing, too – halcyon white to flickering candlelight, day to dusk.
But the room holds steady. It’s an effortless, elegant, easy-going space, with a menu that shifts not with the quarters or the weeks, but with the days and services, all according to whatever chef Rob Sachdev has got his hands on that morning from a team of suppliers who clearly save their best for him. We imagine the restaurant printer runs out of ink often.
Sachdev spent his formative years at Brawn, the East London institution of similar poise and dedication to craft, seasonality and a certain Britalian sensibility. The lineage shows – and it’s telling that a restaurant this good chose Bath over the capital. It could stand its ground in Shoreditch or Bermondsey, but here the Landrace feels entirely of the city: honeyed, mellow, assured. Maybe Bath chose the Landrace.
My most recent visit was at the business end of the darkest of years, my world turned upside down, everything feeling bleak and jarring. It was the first public place I wanted to be. Because a menu this restlessly tied to the calendar has its own constancy. June heralds hogget and broad beans. December brings gentle festive flourishes; a game bird with bread sauce, clementine and cloves. In April there will be boiled asparagus and hollandaise. You can mark your own mood and contradictions, whether you’ve gained ground or gathered baggage, by the metronomic arrival of August’s first tagliatelle of girolles.
If you do have to choose a season though, make it dinner during spring’s transition into summer, or a late lunch in early winter, when the afternoon light is lower and it floods the dining room as you’re settling up, carrying you out the door. Sometimes stepping out of the warmth of the room into the grey rain is so depressing that I end up staying for dinner downstairs in the pizzeria.
A recent expansion has made it easier to walk in on a whim, which suits the whole neighbourhood restaurant thing that the Landrace has so thoroughly consummated. Always buzzing but always a table available in the two compact, connected dining rooms – there’s a specific kind of hospitality magic in that. The kind of place where you can trust that everything will be delicious and diligently sourced and seasoned, without having to think too hard about what to order.
Though I do always order the same thing to start: the cheddar curd fritters. Gold standard and glorious, I will order them for ever more. They’ve been much copied in Bath and beyond since the Landrace perfected them. Often imitated, never bettered, always ordered.
But in restaurant parlance, you’re only as good as your last service, so let’s kick things off with those cheddar curd fritters…
…Oh. Just last week I find they’re not on the menu.
The menu had been winterised, as my wife put it, any remnants of brighter times swept away by a brisk northerly wind. Instead, on an early December Saturday lunchtime, the meal felt like a statement on how British seafood is truly at its best when it’s cold – the weather and the fish itself, going against conventional wisdom about beach barbecues and sunshine seasoning your squid rings.
We started with Pembrokeshire rock oysters (£12 for three, though a fourth was added without fanfare – class) with a sherry vinegar mignonette, firm and briny and unimprovable.
Next, deep-fried sprouting broccoli and Savoy cabbage with lemon, aioli and chilli, which arrived looking like an echo of the craggy exterior of the previous dish’s oyster shells, one of those pleasing visual rhymes that’s probably an accident but which the supreme confidence of the place makes you think is deliberate. They had a distinctly tempura-with-Kewpie-mayo feel and landed perfectly with a sparkling co-ferment cider, an Artistraw Two-Step Rondo Foxtrot, which is quite hard to say after a bottle of the stuff. At a punchy 8.2% ABV, brightly acidic and bold, it carried us through the meal.
The star of this particular lunch: Pembrokeshire crab, which came with grilled calçots, fennel, guindillas and salted almonds. The effect of the brown crab and the salted almonds together evoked a romesco sauce – anchored in winter by the deep smokiness on the greens, the gentle heat of the chilli (still undulating from the last course, too) and the low thrum of brown crab. A generous scattering of picked, ice-cold white crab more than justified the £18 price tag.
For mains, a Breton stew of turbot, mussels, bacon and cider (there are call-backs everywhere if you look hard enough – maybe diners who order the restaurant’s limoncello spritz get their stew flavoured with it, too). There’s always something this prosaic on the menu, a poached or steamed white fish with boiled potatoes that sounds bland on paper but is so deeply comforting in practice. It’s the point at which you order the country loaf and really salty butter, to start dredging through the stew.
The Bath Christmas Market is sputtering away outside, so a roast pheasant crown too, with red cabbage, bread sauce, elderberry, and pan juices that tasted of rosemary – the same rosemary, I noticed, that scented the bathroom. Not the cat’s piss variant, but the heady, zesty type. There’s that echo again. Surely it’s not deliberate. But the place operates with such sincerity that you start thinking it might be.
There’s something principled about the seasonality here. The same ingredient appears several times across the menu and through their different wings – the bakery, pizzeria, flour mill, restaurant, and a clutch of familial suppliers all working in tandem. It’s a low-waste philosophy that fuels creativity, and it’s pleasing to clock if you’re paying attention. There are no gimmicks, everything just tastes exactly as it should; the Platonic ideal of each ingredient and dish. But when there are surprises, like the chilli and brown crab riff on a romesco, it’s all the more intriguing.
For dessert, a wickedly indulgent pain perdu with candied clementine and mascarpone, made with yesterday’s cinnamon buns from downstairs. Of course.
It’s taken me this long to notice that the shape of the menu itself looks like a set of stairs. The sections are staggered, climbing the page. Upstairs. And now I’m seeing stairs everywhere: in the route you take through the bakery to reach the dining room; in the toilet, where you lock yourself in, climb a staircase, and sit surveying your ascent; in the way the whole operation keeps building, literally and figuratively, adding new bits on all the time.
It all feels so assured and intentional. The sound of a thick heel on wooden floorboards. The steam of stock pots misting up windows and sealing you in. The dulcet timbre of a waiter who has utter confidence in the dish they’re handing over. It’s the same waiter who served you three years ago, you realise, and they’re gliding around the room now. You begin to feel strangely proud of them. It must be a room as nice to work in as to dine in. A place where you go to have your good taste confirmed.
The cheddar curd fritters are off the menu. They’ll be back, probably, in some form. Life goes on. But Upstairs at Landrace remains the kind of place you want to return to, again and again, in every season and in every mood. Bath has no better restaurant than this.
