Pieminister, the pie people, from Bristol, have opened up one of their restaurants here in Nottingham up on Long Row. Officially they only opened last weekend, but in reality they have been open for a few weeks now as they got the place up and running with a bit of a soft launch.

I have kind of been a bit of a long distance Pieminister Fan for a while now, I first sampled one of their pies in Oxford where they have one of their small cafés in the rather enjoyable ‘Covered market’, after that we always made a stop at their Stall at Borough Market in London to pick up one or two pies to take home.

More recently we have even been cooking up our own ‘pieminister’ pies at home using their cookbook. I guess we have become a little bit of a pieminister fan.

Pie Menu

Looking at the Pieminister Menu it all seemed to be a pretty reasonable deal with it being £5 for a basic pie with gravy. I mean it costs you £3.50 to buy a Pieminister pie from Waitrose (something I learnt after having dined here).

Now a pie for £5 sounds OK but you also then need to pay for something to go with it. So by the time you add peas and mash, or some chips the price has gone up a bit. OK so fair enough that is the same everywhere, but I kind of would like to just come in and order pie, peas, and chips and just get one price to make it easy.

We decided to order a pie each (a Moo and a Moodog) and then share a mash and a minted mushy peas (both £2.20 each), and that was just about enough, in the end.

I read that at lunchtime you can get a deal with a pie and a side for £6.50, or a pie and 2 sides for £7.50 with ‘free gravy’ (note gravy is always free).

Moodog Pie

I had the Moo Dog which is a pie filled with British Beef Steak, dry cured bacon, and Brew Dog 5am Red Ale, my companion has the Moo Pie which is very similar being ‘steak and craft ale’. If I am honest I am not sure that I could see the difference between them. I liked my pie, it had a nice rich yet sweet and almost tangy filling. I didn’t see much bacon, so I hope that I had the right pie, Having said that the pie on the other plate looked exactly the same. It kind of tasted the same too, but that might of been because both came with a quite powerful onion and red wine gravy.

The Mash was nice and smooth and a little buttery which pleased me, and the mushy peas were not bad either, perhaps a little crunchier than I like and perhaps not quite as minty as I had expected but a good effort anyway. You could just about get away with sharing a side between two people IF you had two sides.

The only slight downside is that the Pie comes in one of those ubiquitous white enamel plates that you see everywhere now AND it all comes on a wooden board which everyone seems to do now and winds me up no end. I would have rather had my pie served out of the box than wobbling about on a wooden chopping board. OK so perhaps my protests are mildly in jest but “Please someone just give me my food on a plate!” 🙂

More Menu Items – Hot Pot Anyone?

On this visit I had your basic pie and gravy and as always I thoroughly enjoyed it. I often choose the Chicken of Aragon which is very good Chicken Pie that they make at Pieminister it also contains ham hock, leek and thyme all pretty traditional .

You can get an open pie or hot pot as they call it here which is topped with potato. I quite fancied one of these, in particular the Captain Nemo which is basically a Fish Pie and I love a good Fish Pie! That might be something for another day!

I also fancied trying their mac and cheese which is one of their ‘supersides’ but I could not work out which pie to have with that it was a bit of a random option.

All in all I enjoyed my first trip to Pieminister in Nottingham and will probably be back in again at some point for another lunchtime visit

Pieminister in Nottingham is located at 57 Long Row a short walk from the Tram Stop in the Old Market Square and within reach by many buses

You can follow them on Twitter and see what they are upto on their Facebook page as well