We decided to help celebrate the 30th anniversary the Bistrot Pierre company by dining at its venue tucked away on Westside’s 250-year-old Gas Street Basin. You can watch my picture gallery video of our experience here:
With its mixture of blue engineering bricks and white rendering, Waterside House is one of the last surviving Worcester and Birmingham Canal Buildings, and was formerly the company’s head office.
The Grade II-listed building looks impressive from the outside, as you can see in the main image above, a picture which won amateur photographer Adrian Walmsley top prize in Westside BID’s 2023 calendar competition.
Bistrot Pierre is pretty amazing on the inside too, whether you choose the bar area, the middle dining room, the conservatory-style upper room or the downstairs galley (the latter open at peak times).
We thought the pair of upper and lower alcove tables – each seating five or six at a push – were divine with their curved brickwork overhead. Even the stairs are works of art.
Bistrot Pierre has lots of ways to dine, including pre-theatre packages, steak nights, Sunday brunches and six-course Soiree Gastronomique menus on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month, a real bargain at £25.95.
We opted to try the lunch menu – £18.95 each for our two courses (or £22.95 for three). You can order a glass of wine, pint of beer or mocktail for £3.50 with this offer, but we just enjoyed a large jug of table water.
My bavette steak was served pink with superb garlic butter, pomme frites and lambs leaf, while my wife opted for Chicken Diane (in a sauce) served with dauphinoise potatoes and properly al dente French beans. We thoroughly enjoyed our main courses which were both excellent value for money and a substantial cut above standard pub meals.
If the mains offered an honourable draw, my sticky toffee pudding served with ice cream was declared the winning dessert versus my wife’s creme brûlée.
Service was friendly and efficient, and it was nice to wait a little for our meals to be so carefully cooked, leaving us both feeling pleasantly satisfied, like all good food should.
So don’t come here expecting to rush in and out a la Wetherspoon or to pay a Michelin-sized bill. This is a halfway house to treasure, with the option of walking along the canal towpath to either work up an appetite or to freshen up after your meal.
The verdict: ****
Our four-star meal cost £39.90 including 20% VAT, with a discretionary £3.99 service charge making the total £43.89.
For coffee, we enjoyed the world class historic view and fresh air of the canal towpath by sitting outside the new Italian Ciaro café next door, where two Americanos with warm milk came to £5.
With two Bank Holiday weekends coming up 6 and 27 May, you can take advantage of free, on-street parking (on these days only) to enjoy a lovely meal at Bistrot Pierre or elsewhere. But even regular parking charges are pretty inexpensive for the city centre.
Bistrot Pierre is at Waterside House, 46 Gas St, Birmingham B1 2JT telephone 0121 616 0730 or visit the website bistrotpierre.co.uk.
Picture credits: main image by Damien Walmsley, all other pictures and video by Graham Young.
ENDS
