The story
Restaurant Roots, in Bournemouth, serves modern European tasting menus at 141 Belle Vue Road, Southbourne, BH6 3EN, and holds three AA Rosettes for 2026. The restaurant opened in 2015 and cooks in a small room where the menu changes monthly.
Jan Bretschneider leads the kitchen, and the food is built around flavour more than decoration. Dishes often pair unexpected ingredients, such as seaweed beurre blanc with kombu potato, to showcase local produce. The Good Food Guide also points to the proprietor's German heritage in the house rye bread, served with several spreadable toppings.
The Evening Tasting Menu costs £99 per person and runs Wednesday to Sunday evenings. Courses have included a truffle sourdough bread dumpling with Tunworth cheese, a Countryside Supper of rye bread, cultured butter and home-smoked salmon, and quail with New Forest asparagus and morel mushrooms. A vegetarian version follows the same structure. Lemon and blueberry with coconut and lemongrass closes the meal.
The dining room is intimate and elegant, with sea scenes on exposed brick walls. Guests can add 50ml wine pairings to the menu, or choose a wine flight. The Good Food Guide has praised the front-of-house team for its enthusiasm, so it is worth booking early.
Recognition
Ambience
Details
History
The location in a little parade of shops in the Southbourne district of Bournemouth may lead you to expect a run-of-the-mill neighbourhood bistro, but Roots has rather loftier ambitions than that. Its pint-sized dimensions and simple-enough decor, with sea scenes on exposed brick walls, belie the wide-angle culinary lens of Jan Bretschneider. That's abundantly evident from the off, with a serving of sumptuously textured rye bread with various spreadable toppings – a fond wave to the proprietor's German heritage. To follow, expect a range of dishes that look distinctive, even occasionally bizarre, but that mobilise layers of flavour of unexpected subtlety and impact. Kombu potato with cream cheese in seaweed beurre blanc might precede a pairing of scallop and oxtail, powered up with horseradish and salsify in red wine dressing. Another successful twinning, of halibut and lobster, comes in massaman curry guise, full of the sweetness of carrot and passion fruit, while the principal course on the taster could be as old-school as beef en croûte with parsnip in garlicky bourguignon. Bretschneider's signature ‘jelly and ice cream’ finisher might well be scented with winter truffle and boozed up with Tokaji, but the superb cheese selection is worth saving a little capacity for too. A relatively compact wine list is served with enormous enthusiasm by one of the most engaging front-of-house managers on the whole South Coast.
3 Rosette Award for Culinary Excellence
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