Bill's - Bristol

Bill Collison, founder of Bill's, opened the first Bill's in Lewes, East Sussex, in 2001. Built on the same site where Bill had been running a successful greengrocery for several years, Bill's Café & Produce Store, as it was then known, was an instant success. The aim was to make a place that was colourful and exuberant, with dishes that were really tasty and also made you smile, that put every day and unusual seasonal ingredients together and gave everyone lots of ideas to take home with them. The team at Bill's baked, cooked and served deliciously different food, hung skeins of raffia from the ceiling, stacked towers of produce for people to buy and hired lively, enthusiastic staff to look after their customers. They wanted Bill's to be somewhere that really celebrated food and was welcoming to everyone, a place that felt like the next best thing to home. Breakfast at Bills is a great way to start your day; from a humble bacon or sausage sandwich to a bells-and-whistles super classic great British breakfast. Weekends are a different story, time to kick back and turn breakfast into brunch, complete with newspapers, freshly squeezed orange juice and plenty of tea or coffee. In the heart of Bristol's busy shopping area, on Queen's Road, this restaurant is brilliant any time of day. Open from first thing for breakfast and coffee, throughout the day and on into the evening, you can always be sure of a real Bill's welcome. We started with a blank canvas on this restaurant. Then, with a lot of love, clever ideas and salvaged materials, we set about restoring the building to a state of glory by replacing materials and features that had been lost over the years. The result is a gem of a restaurant that fits in very well with the Bristol buzz.