Sonny Stores

Raleigh Road in Southville is the kind of street that resists categorisation: terraced houses with bay windows, a corner shop here and there, the low hum of a neighbourhood that knows what it is. Sonny Stores occupies one of those former corner units, and the exterior gives little away. A blackboard outside advertises takeaway pizzas. The painted sunflower above the door is the first signal that something more is happening inside.

Step in and the room reads contemporary rather than nostalgic. Terrazzo flooring with a Fellini-esque rhythm, potted plants dotted at intervals, walls that lean toward the bright and uncluttered. There is no Leaning Tower kitsch, no checked tablecloths performing Italianness for the room. Regulars describe the atmosphere as feeling closer to someone's living room than a restaurant. The name Sonny comes from the son of owners Mary Glynn and chef Pegs Quinn, who previously worked at the River Café in London, one of the kitchens that did more than most to shift British understanding of regional Italian cooking toward the ingredient-led and the honest.

How the Meal Moves

The kitchen's approach becomes clearest when you read a meal at Sonny Stores as a progression rather than a series of individual choices. Antipasti set a tone of restraint and quality sourcing: fat Nocellara olives, the kind that hold their brine without turning bitter, and Cantabrian anchovies that make no apology for being Spanish rather than Italian. They arrive chunky, salt-heavy, pooled in oil, and they work precisely because the kitchen isn't curating a geography lesson, it's assembling a table. That willingness to pull ingredients from outside the peninsula when they're simply better is a recurring editorial note across the menu.

Starters begin moving through Italian registers in a way that reflects the country's genuine culinary plurality. A dish of crispy beef tongue with salsa rossa reaches toward northern Italian tradition, where offal has always had a place at the table without ceremony. Then the menu shifts: deep-fried whole quail with hot honey and crème fraîche is a clear departure from any strict regional identity, and it signals that the kitchen is making a point about flavour rather than authenticity.

Pasta and the Main Course Arc

Pasta at Sonny Stores occupies the structural centre of the meal, and the kitchen earns that position. Pappardelle with chicken-liver ragù, parsley and Parmesan is the kind of dish that exists in hundreds of Italian households and almost nowhere on British restaurant menus at this level of execution. The ragù is rich without being heavy; the pasta has the give of something made that day. It is the sort of dish that the River Café put into wider circulation in Britain during the 1990s, and Quinn's background there is audible in the restraint.

The meal's most significant moment, based on consistent editorial attention, is a main course of poached cod in a clam broth: acqua pazza, the Neapolitan preparation in which a whole fish is cooked in a light tomato and white wine liquor. At Sonny Stores, the broth rests on bruschetta that draws the liquid into itself as it sits, so the last forkful of bread carries the full weight of the dish. It is the kind of finishing detail that separates a kitchen with genuine intent from one that assembles competent plates.

Dessert and the Closing Register

The meal closes in two directions. Pear ice cream with brown sugar and walnut is the lighter option, pitched at the kind of restrained sweetness that follows a rich broth without competing with it. The tiramisu goes the other way: a generous slab, the kind of portion that treats the dessert as an event rather than a formality. Both choices reflect a kitchen that thinks about how a meal ends, not just how it begins.

Where Sonny Stores Sits in Bristol's Italian Offer

Bianchis operates in a similar neighbourhood-restaurant register, and 1 York Place covers European territory that occasionally overlaps. But Sonny Stores sits in a specific and underrepresented niche: ingredient-driven Italian cooking at a neighbourhood scale, without the tasting-menu format or the fine-dining price signals that characterise destinations like Moor Hall in Aughton or L'Enclume in Cartmel. The River Café lineage is a meaningful credential in this context: it places the kitchen inside a tradition that has been shaping how Britain eats Italian food for three decades, a tradition that also runs through the kind of produce-first thinking you find at Gidleigh Park in Chagford at a different price register.

The weekday set lunch is where the value proposition becomes plainest. Neighbourhood regulars use it as a weekly fixture rather than an occasion, which tells you something about how the kitchen has calibrated the offer. Evening à la carte opens the menu further and is where the more considered dishes, the beef tongue, the acqua pazza, the full pasta range, sit most naturally.

Planning Your Visit

Sonny Stores is at 47 Raleigh Road, Southville, BS3 1QS, Bristol. Southville is a short walk from the city centre. Reservations are recommended, especially for evening service and weekends.