What’s the best thing about Christmas? While the presents are great and seeing family and friends is always the most precious part, the great food is also pretty special.
To really indulge in the Christmas fun, we recently paid a visit to Bar + Block in Bath to sample the new Festive Menu that’s now on offer. We’ve been to Bar + Bock a few times before and always enjoyed the excellent menus and friendly service, so we were eager to see what the festive offer would deliver.
Bar + Block Festive Menu offers a two-course menu from £24.95 (£27.95 for three courses), as well as a children’s menu from £7.50. Alongside this is the usual range of steaks, burgers and, of course, the delicious beef flavoured popcorn.
Family festive feast
With granny and grandad joining us for Sunday lunch, we focused purely on the festive options, with a joint decision to go for the two course option, ignoring the starters in favour of desserts all around – after all, you have to have a pudding…
This saw us going for a Festive Burger (home made burger with three pigs in blankets, cranberry sauce, beef dripping dirty roast potatoes topped with pulled beef, red wine gravy and sticky onions), a Fish Block (a jumbo tiger prawn and Canadian scallop in a scallop shell with two fillets of sea bass cooked over charcoal, served with French fries, garlic mayo, samphire and finished with a drizzle of garlic butter) and a Sirloin Wellington (chargrilled 8oz sirloin layered with garlic spinach, flat mushroom and puff pastry, served with beef dripping triple-cooked chunky
chips and a mushroom, red wine & pancetta jus).
Plus, of course, this was joined by two selections of the Festive Turkey Feast (turkey ballotine wrapped in pancetta and filled with stuffing, served with beef dripping roast potatoes, honey-glazed parsnips and carrots, seasonal greens, two pigs in blankets, a Yorkshire pudding and red wine gravy).
It’s worth noting here that the service, as has been the way on previous visits, was excellent in that the waiting staff were friendly, knowledgeable and happy to deal with the inevitable special requests from younger diners. The only downside was the longer than usual wait for our main courses, and more so, the puddings, in reaching us.
Time for the mains
Once the mains did arrive, the response was generally really positive, with good food and decent portions across the board. The sea bass, prawns and scallops in the Fish Block were well cooked – still moist and flavoursome – although there could have been a little more samphire, while the Festive Burger was cooked to perfection and proved to be the unexpected star of the show.
The Sirloin Wellington, meanwhile, was a strangely deconstructed affair, with the steak served on a base of puffed pastry, with a mushroom to one side. Fair enough, it still tasted really good, while the beef dripping triple-cooked chunky chips are worth a visit on their own.
As for the Festive Turkey Feasts, you’ll need a very healthy appetite to get through the plateful of potatoes, vegetables and turkey – a feat which we failed to achieve. Across the plate, the meal was very enjoyable, with the turkey keeping its moistness thanks to its pancetta wrap, the veggies cooked without being mushy and only the slightly overcooked spuds letting the side down.
Across the board, we were all happy diners, with just the lack of crackers and paper hats allowing us to go full on festive.
Puddings
As for the puddings, this was pretty much thumbs up all around. Christmas puds with a choice of vanilla or Bailey’s ice cream is always going to be a safe banker, the Mini Trio of Desserts (warm triple chocolate brownie, lemon drizzle cake and warm churros coated in cinnamon sugar, served with Bailey ice cream) kept grandad happy, Festive Chocolate Churros Sundae (warm churros layered with ice cream, whipped cream, warm chunks of triple chocolate brownie and chocolate fudge sauce) was universally enjoyed by the children, while the Chocolate Orange Dome (a chocolate dome layered with a chocolate shortbread, a light chocolate orange mousse and an oozing orange coulis centre, covered in a chocolatey glaze) was super sweet and all the better for it.
So it you’re in Bath and fancy a festive family feast, we can recommend the Christmas menu at Bar + Block. Hopefully the wait times for the courses will become less of a problem and don’t forget the beef popcorn.
For more information on the Bar + Block festive menu, go to www.barandblock.co.uk/en-gb/locations/bath