Restaurant review: Za Za Bazaar, Bristol

It's billed as the UK's biggest restaurant, serving as many as 1,000 covers at a time, but is that really such a good thing?
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Restaurants: Za Za Bazaar
Za Za Bazaar: A hell of a lot of people eating a hell of a lot of food. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

Some claims aren't easy to fact-check, so I can't be entirely sure that Za Za Bazaar, which opened in Bristol just before Christmas, is the largest restaurant in the UK. I think the boast, or admission, just about stands up: the main restaurant has a stonking 700 covers, and the bar downstairs, where you can get the same food, does another 300. That full-capacity figure of 1,000 punters means it comes in ahead of the current biggest of the biggies, Cosmo in Croydon, which can seat a piffling 800 customers. That's a hell of a lot of people eating a hell of a lot of food: the projection was that they were going to get through 5,000 chickens a week, and since they claim they served 60,000 customers over the Christmas period, I'd say they're on track. Imagine how depressed that would make you if you lived in the Bristol area and were a chicken.

  1. Za Za Bazaar
  2. Harbourside, Canon's Road,
  3. Bristol
  4. BS1 5UH
  5. 01179 220330
  1. Open all week, 11am-11pm. All-you-can-eat £6.99 lunch and £12.99 dinner Mon-Thur, £9.99 and £15.99 Fri-Sun.

From the outside, the bright neon lights of Za Za Bazaar's two-storey building on Harbourside look lively and inviting, in a tarty way: if you didn't know what it was, you'd wonder what it was. I went on a Tuesday night in January, and booked a table at 7pm, thinking it was probably unnecessary. That was wrong: the place was heaving, with a queue at the entrance, and by 8pm there must have been a good 600 people inside. The contrast with the generally subdued, recessiony atmosphere outside was strong, and might well be part of the appeal.

Another big part of the appeal is what business wonks call "the model". Za Za Bazaar is (sensitive foodie readers, please look away) an all-you-can-eat buffet. The idea is for it to be like an Asian street market, which is an attempted glamorisation of the reality that it is a "food court". A crucial part of the appeal is the pricing. The all-you-can-eat extravaganza ranges from £6.99 at lunch during the week to £15.99 on weekend evenings. That's not much for, well, for all you can eat. There are six separate cooking stations where you can load up on food, with a bar to the left to load up on drinks. This might sound brutish and basic, but the decor masterminds have used bright lights and Indian posters to jazz up the room; successfully, I would say.

As for the food, the choice encompasses, to use their own categories, salads (subsections: salads, deli, sushi, take out), Far East (pho, starters, noodles, curries), Tex Mex (burgers, guest cuisine, barbecue, burrito and fajita), European (pasta, Brit classics, piri piri chicken, pizza), Indian (dosas, curries, kebabs and roti, starters) and desserts (cakes, ice-cream, patisserie, Indian sweets). Some of the food is prepared to order: noodles, pasta, dosas, fajitas and suchlike are put together by chefs while you watch. This helps ameliorate that depressing sense you sometimes have at a buffet that the food has been standing around for a while. The choice is numbing, and it would obviously be daft to assess the food as if it were trying to be fayne daining. Instead, Za Za Bazaar is pitched against the high street alternatives at around the same price point, and at that level does a pretty good job.

The prime movers behind the restaurant are Indian, and the best food here is Indian. If you go to a swanky hotel in India, you'll quite likely be eating at a buffet anyway, so the concept feels less of a stretch. Pizzas were iffy, dim sum was just about OK, burgers came in a weird, rigid, poppy-seed bun, Irish stew was a mysterious parody, sushi was poor (all you can eat sushi for £6.99? Really?), cauliflower cheese and pork stir-fry would have been all right if they hadn't suffered from the buffet curse of being below tepid by the time I got back to the table. That's another thing – your separate trips to get food, followed by multiple queueing, make this an oddly uncompanionable form of eating. It doesn't seem to matter, though, because they're already planning to grow, with the next opening slated for Norwich; Za Za Bazaar is expanding. If you go there often enough, you will, too.

Za Za Bazaar Harbourside, Canon's Road, Bristol, 01179 220330. Open all week, 11am-11pm. All-you-can-eat £6.99 lunch and £12.99 dinner Mon-Thur, £9.99 and £15.99 Fri-Sun.

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