Roots
Bournemouth, Dorset
'The warmth created by the owners serving their own food in a tiny dining room is exceptional,’ enthuses one reader. Jan and Stacey Bretschneider’s personally run restaurant in Bournemouth’s Southbourne district affects people like that. With just 16 seats, it feels intimate and the decoration is 'lovely', although the cooking is on another level – this is high-end cuisine shot through with passion, honesty and inclusivity. Meals revolve around various tasting menus, and the kitchen lays down a marker with some remarkable canapés – everything is bang-on delicious, and that includes the asparagus juice encapsulated in green-dyed coco butter. Jan Bretschneider cooks in the modern European idiom, creating highly intricate dishes from expertly sourced produce – a single morel mushroom, say, stuffed with chicken mousse, wrapped in wild garlic and buried in a buttery, chicken-based foam flavoured with pepper dulse (seaweed). Elsewhere, fillet and confit mousse of lamb come wrapped in a cabbage leaf and crépinette with onion jam, black garlic purée and an intense lamb sauce lightly imbued with hay, while perfectly timed halibut with prawn mousse, asparagus in various forms and a miso-tinged sauce is ‘ungimmicky food’, produced with real care and precision. Desserts also show fine craftsmanship – a curious combo involving a sheet of red wine jelly draped over paste-like blobs of dark chocolate, candied beetroot and intensely sour nuggets of chewy passion fruit, for example. Significantly, the favourite item at inspection was also the simplest: dubbed ‘Dad’s countryside supper’, this bread course was designed to mirror what Jan ate as a child on the family farm in Germany, taking in a wonderfully malty loaf of warm, delicate rye bread, a pot of silky pork rillettes, a piece of poached, fall-apart cured and poached salmon, a cloud of aerated smoked fish-roe mousse, salted cucumber pieces in sour yoghurt and – of course – some really good butter. Three dozen international wines (from £25) are curated and served with care by the 'larger than life' maître d'.
Dining Information:
Private dining room, Credit card required
141 Belle Vue Road, Bournemouth, Dorset BH6 3EN
01202 430005
