1000 Tiny Birds

Atrium Cafe

Bristol, 2023-01-03

Not every place I eat can be glamorous. Ideally, yes, the places I eat I would be making a conscious decision to go to, be it high class, low brow, comfort food or Michelin stars. But, such is life, sometimes you just have to eat, and sometimes you just have to eat once a week. So it is with The Atrium Café, the built-in catering of the Business School at UWE. The Nimble management, now myself included, will go there almost every Tuesday to eat broadly affordable and decent food in a location near enough the office to walk. With occasional variation, I have settled on my standard order - a grilled halloumi salad on a base of quinoa and mixed vegetables, and every now and then (ok - increasingly regularly) a side order of onion rings. These are both surprisingly good - for the most part the halloumi is grilled to perfection, retaining its elasticity, rarely settling too hard, and the salad well-dressed; the onion rings are crisp, with each constituent part holding its flavour rather than becoming indistinguishable mush. I know this isn’t a high bar to meet, and I don’t expect too much. I tend to leave content, 30% into the week, 70% to go.