Ian Waller and his family enjoy a delicious lunch at a great venue
There’s an awful lot to like about Flourish. Whether you’re visiting to enjoy the impressive farm shop, booked in for a workshop, planning to enjoy one of the many events or – like us – looking forward to a family lunch, it’s all here, and delivered with an enviable level of service and environmental consideration.
This wasn’t my first visit. Located in Saltford, just a short drive from Bath and Bristol, Flourish is a great place for business lunches or meeting up with friends at a venue that offers great food and free parking. There’s even electric vehicle charging points.
This time it was a family lunch – no big reason, just enjoying some time together on one of those gorgeous sunny winter days when you just don’t want to be at home.
With a menu offering a great choice of breakfasts (served until 11), lunches, pizzas and drinks, as well as Sunday brunches for the weekend, there was plenty for my lot to choose from. My youngest predictably went for the Flourish pizza – he loves a good pizza – with tomato sauce, mozzarella, red onion and chorizo sausage, dressed with chilli honey, rocket and parmesan (£15.50).
His sister preferred the Flourish Beef Burger, featuring the venue’s own butcher’s free-range beef burger, bacon, Emmental, crispy onion ring, mustard mayo and onion marmalade, all served in a Hobbs House ultimate burger bun with skin on fries (£16). While less descriptive of her meal, she happily ate the lot before eagerly eyeing up the puds.
My wife, meanwhile, chose the Flourish Ham & Ogelshield Cheese Sandwich, Flourish ham, mustard mayo, pickles, Ogleshield cheese and rocket in Hobbs House white or granary bread, served with a side salad and Flourish coleslaw (£9.95).
Ever the gannet, I couldn’t resist the slow cooked Moroccan spiced lamb with chickpeas, apricots, houmous, fresh red onion, pomegranate seeds and toasted flaked almonds, served on a stone baked flatbread with skin on fries (£15).
When it came to drinks, a combination of fizzies, juice, Earl Grey tea and a glass of malbec (I’ll leave it to you to guess who had what), fitted the bill, leaving us all to check out our surroundings while the chef weaved his magic.
While Flourish can be quite loud during lunchtimes, it’s more a busy energy of eager chatter than distracting noise, and we found it perfectly easy to hear each other without raised voices or sign language. For families with babies and toddlers, high-chairs are available, while for when the warm weather returns, there’s also a large outside patio for alfresco dining.
A big screen up on the wall over the kitchen served up a reminder of everything else on offer at Flourish, including upcoming craft workshops and the Food Festival, which will take part on 23 and 24 June.
Checking out the Flourish website, it’s great to learn about a host of environmental initiatives that the venue has in place, including solar panels, a project to harvest rainwater and reclaimed materials being used to build the shop displays.
When the meals arrived, the chatter finished and the dining began. Around the table, the response was really positive. The pizza looked perfect – fresh toppings, beautifully cooked and with a properly crispy base, with my youngest exclaiming that it was “Delicious,” adding that “The flavour of the chorizo was nice and smoky.”
His sister’s burger, meanwhile, was juicy and full of flavour, while the sandwiches were beautifully presented and a good bit more than a lunchtime snack.
As for my lamb, well, I hit the jackpot here. While the serving was pretty huge (there was no need for dinner that night!), the combination of ingredients and flavours were wonderfully brought together, with pomegranate seeds and apricots giving the whole dish a magnificently Moroccan vibe.
So, did we still have room for pudding? Well, yes and no… We each picked a cake from the display and then asked if they could be boxed up for us to take home for later.
Flourish appears to be one of those places that knows what it’s good at and works hard to keep up its standards. The whole feel of the place is a clever combination of rustic and environmentally aware, with quality produce and top class service available throughout. Certainly to be recommended.