Racks Bar & Kitchen

We are here as a last resort as some family we with recommended it to us as we had to leave the last restaurant for lack of veggie options and what a surprise! We should of gone here first! 2 of our members had the 2 for £20 steaks and they were absolutely wonderful! One of us had the fish and chips, also very delicious and I had the vegetarian fajitas which was so delicious! So many side sauces and large portions too, lots of cheese and everything! There was choices of the veggie fajitas, a vegetable pie, some salads and a veggie burger (nuts) which does impress me when there is a fair amount of choice! All In all the they had a very large menu! Lots of choice! A gorgeous setting in old wine cellars, and it was just a lovely place! Recommend it highly!

Racks is a great place itself, with a good atmosphere, kind waiters/​waitresses, and decent location. The restaurant/​bar itself has an indoor and outdoor area (which I didn’t get the chance to experience due to the time of year). The inside gives you a very pleasant experience, with music playing in the background and an old school setting. The location is perfect for a lunch out, or a dinner before then going to another bar, pub, or club.
The food was of generous portion size, and good standard. I had the honour of trying the beef & ale pie with chips, and a drink. This was delicious, and very filling. Having said this, service was fairly slow for a time of day when it wasn’t particularly busy.
I have no idea about dinner menu prices, but lunch prices are decent if you stick with a main and nothing else (£5!!), however, beware that a side order of chips and a drink is going to ramp up costs pretty quickly. This is the biggest criticism I have about the restaurant.
Decent food, service, location, and atmosphere. Recommended.

Great food, great people and yes, great atmosphere.
The venue is strategically located in Clifton and the décor inside is praiseworthy. It’s probably the only place in Clifton, where you can buy a meal for just £5 in lunch time. It gets completely packed in summer, owing to its extravagantly warm outdoor seating.
The drinks are a bit, pricy though.
Well, it was our fav spot during the Uni Days. The owner is extremely customer friendly and is always eager to engage himself in a friendly conversation with the customers, ensuring, they get the best service, possible.
The inside is quite cosy and warm and capable of large seating. I will personally, recommend the fish cakes and the hand cut chips.
The best part of this place? The Massive Racks Homemade Pies!
The dinner is pretty expensive, so my advise is to try the legendary Racks £5 Lunch, which ends up saving us, even after leaving our student days!

Thursday evening: £10 offer for a delicious steak and chips. Best quality meat and hand cut chips. We were served by a very friendly girl :)
All in all, awesome meal!

I really do think this place does the best roast in Bristol, plenty of veg, huge Yorkshire puds and loads of spuds. I’m not the biggest meat eater and love the veggie sausages as an alternative rather than the routine nutroast you would find elsewhere!
In addition to the roast, the menu is vast; offering everything from a snack to a gigantic meal and the value is great considering we’re in Clifton. However if you’re going to select a main course option make sure you’re hungry before you attempt it. The portion sizes are very generous, as an alternative if you’re not so hungry most of the dishes come as what is classed as ‘a light bite.‘
The wine list here is also great; they have a fantastic Rioja on the red list and a delicious Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough.
There’s a lovely vibe in the place, always warm in winter with lovely log fires and live sports playing but without making it a rowdy place to go for a drink.
My one complaint is the service really isn’t great. I never get the sense that any of the staff would go the extra mile for you and I have experienced some strange behaviour in the past i. e asking if a table is ready to order before all the party has arrived, querying if the requested main course dish was wanted as a starter (NB: portion sizes above) and even when booking a table for Sunday lunch not informing the booker in advance or on arrival that they had run out of roast dinners until we enquired after overhearing another table’s conversation.
To sum up, if you’re looking for good food but happy with a pub experience rather than dining experience then go for it, it’s definitely worth a visit.

Racks is not for me personally but it’s an infamous bar in Clifton — the hot spot for a certain sort of student and the place for after work drinks for local businesses (think an army of middle-​aged estate agents and recruitment consultants who cling on to hope throughout their working week that Friday night is coming; a time to get sloshed and crack onto the bosses wife/​secretary). A lot of this is due to the large outdoor area, now the smoking area; nice on summer evenings of course, even if it is next to a pretty uninspiring road. The cover and outdoor heaters mean it can be used all round. They also sometimes have a BBQ here that looks interesting, I am yet to follow up that interest with my belly and wallet.
The inside is interesting enough, with long wooden tables, large chairs and low ceilings it creates an intimate space that would probably work well for a first date as it’s so inoffensive and neutral. I do find the bar is usually full of the stereotypical ‘regulars’ but I did go there recently to watch the football and had a nice chat with the group sat next to me.
There are lots of screens inside which should make it a great place to watch sports and it never really feels overcrowded, but sometimes you just want a bit more atmosphere and soul. The food is edible — a little over priced — but some of it tasty. I had a chicken sandwich with raita dressing — lots of flavours — but the portions were too small. Service at the bar was good — I got served in no time at all — and drinks prices were more reasonable than I had feared.
There is not much worth going out of your way to come here for; the food isn’t the best, there is no music or culture or decent conversation to be had with the patrons, but it is bland and inoffensive in a way that I imagine some people might love. So as with other wine bars dotted around Clifton, although Raks doesn’t do anything wrong per se, it doesn’t do anything particularly right either.

I came here after a rugby match, the team we were playing were sponsored by the one and only Racks of Bristol.
The bar was a great place for post game drinks, they had a good standard range of beers that you would expect. They also served food which was good when it arrived, however it took a while to get to us.
This is the perfect place for a post game drink or a pre night out one for that matter, it is also a good spot for a quick afternoon drink. In fact it is pretty good the whole time. I will be trying to get them on the front of my rugby shirts next year!

Racks is an ideal place to have a drink when the sun is gleaming. The place gives off an air of sophistication that could be misconstrued for pretence, however it is accommodating to all. I have occasionally come back from a particularly sweaty game of football and the friendly waiters didn’t bat an eyelid at my dishevelled appearance. They are unfortunately very slow. The light lunches take far too long to prepare. It is a sandwich not a Michelin star delicacy although when it did arrive it was better than competent. One other small qualm I have with the place is the table size. Make sure you exercise those vocal chords because you might need to shout over the enormous tables to be heard. Not an ideal place for a date then unless you’re fine with your date misconstruing your sweet sentiment ‘you look quite fit’ with ‘I like your tits’.

Had a meal here with friends recently. I have to say it was brilliant. The atmosphere was really good, staff were friendly and fast and the food was great. I had the racks burger — yum!
There was a full selection of drinks and lots of wines /​champagne to choose from
Yes some of the prices were a bit on the high side but was definately worth it. I noticed they had various offers ect on with meals for just £5 — not what I would call expensive at all!
Looks like a really good place for functions /​summer bbq’s. The terrace outside is nice and has heaters. The inside is sectioned off into quite a few areas so presumably, you can hire different bits?
To round it up: I will definately go there again :)

Racks is one of the friendliest and most cosmopolitan eating and drinking venues in Bristol. The emphasis is firmly on a fun, relaxed atmosphere with table service and great food.
The perfect place to hide away for an intimate afternoon in your own private space or join in the fun sharing a jumbo platter of nachos or watching the sport on the big screen. Racks is a great place for a party of any kind, small or large.
The menu is also great value for money and has something for everyone. It is complimented by a very reasonably priced wine list and a half decent selection of beers and lagers on tap.

It’s a bit of a shame this pub is so overpriced and full of toffs as it is very cosy, looks inviting and well placed (between Whiteladies and Clifton Village).
Not the most friendly of places but a welcome escape from the booze Britain type bars on the Whiteladies strip.
If you’re just having a quiet one then this place is a good bet though.

Rah rah, one for the posh Clifton set is this one. Rack’s Wine Bar is a highly desirable establishment, on the highly desirable St. Pauls Road (if you ignore that it’s next to the crumby students’ union), in Clifton. That means it’s a bit posh. All well and good if you like to feel a bit classy when you have a drink, but not really my cup of tea.
Despite being of the upper classes, they haven’t got any qualms about getting you leathered. Lots of exotic (and expensive) shots to sample — this is a good place to justify drinking too much in the name of widening your drinks palette.
The food is similarly high end and interesting, with a wide range on offer (but, as Jon B. says, only if you come in a large group). Come here if you’ve got money to burn or pretensions to air.

Racks is a high end wine bar, on St Pauls road, between the heart of Clifton Village and the bottom of Whiteladies Road. It’s quite a posh place — expect the real, clichéd Bristol Uni and general Cliftonite crowd in here.
I’m probably a fan though — the outside seating area is a really nice place to have a drink, even in the evening as it’s serviced by a good amount of patio heaters. You’ve got to come prepared for Clifton prices though, as a drink is going to be quite far the wrong side of £3. They do a good range of shooters — last time I was here I tried the more lethal concoction of Jagermeister, Goldschlagger and Midori, which went down surprisingly well, and at £3.50 was an adequate, but not cheap, price for a shooter like that.
They do have a table service, even if you’re just drinking, which is quite helpful and surprising, you really don’t expect that in Bristol. Also the staff here seem to be unfailingly attractive — I’m sure the management must have some sort of ploy going on, but I’m sure there’s not too many complaints. As well as a main menu of good pub type food, they do a range of set menus, including buffets, BBQs and a more gormet set menu. The food is an excellent quality, and I actually think fairly priced for the standard. The only drawback the menus other than the main are only available to large groups, but the main one is pretty wide ranging. Maybe a bit boring, but I advise the burger, a beer, a bit of sunshine and have a chill in the patio area — it’ll do your soul good.

This restaurant was just up the road from our hotel, and as we’d left it late to eat it was as good as anything. Being about 10.30pm the restaurant cum bar was busy, and had a nice ambience about it with friendly staff. The food, however, was distinctly average; my girlfriend and I were not particularly hungry so we ordered a tapas for two. Thats usings the term tapas very loosely; chicken skewers, cod goujons, garlic bread, chips & baked potato with bacon & cheese all looked and tasted heavily processed; like it all came out of Iceland for a fiver.

This place is sloane central! nice outside seating area now but I couldn’t spend more than 5 minutes here as the clientele were a bit much for me.

Decent bar but they’ve managed to charge too much on everything. However the food is very good.

Expensive, cavernous Clifton bar with a large, heated balcony right next to the street for smokers and voyeurs everywhere. The prices tend to keep the clientele to a specific socio-​economic demographic, which is probably what most of the locals spend their days researching so they can afford to drink there. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it doesnt make for much diversity.
Food is available too, and the menu always looks appetising, although again is grossly overpriced. Inside, there are couches and comfy seats galore, and a few nicely secluded cubby holes at the back of the bar for you and a few friends to unwind.

The strap line is reassuringly expensive and the drinks certainly are. The food is good value for money though and quite mouthwatering (you just have to read the descriptions on the black board and you will want to order something immediately). Historically it pulled in the local rugby crowd and it is one of those places to be seen.
There are lots of little nooks and crannies with leather sofas for lounging although some of the tables and chairs are more trendy than functional. There is a large outdoor seating section (gets covered in the winter) and they also have private rooms.
My husband makes me laugh when he talks about the gents toilets here (obviously, I can’t verify this having never been in myself)… They are in the cellar and have sloping ceilings, so you are tall you will battle with the urinals at one end :)