Gillian McKeith's guide to healthy restaurants in Bristol.

Bristol has been doing this properly for longer than almost anywhere else in Britain, and you can taste it. Plant cooking here was never a trend bolted onto a menu to keep up. It is simply how a whole generation of independents learned to cook.

The vegetable-first restaurants come first, because they are the reason to come. Root on Wapping Wharf builds the whole menu around vegetables and puts meat in the side column where I have long thought it belongs. Wilsons in Redland rewrites its menu every day from its own market garden, which is as close to honest cooking as a city restaurant gets. The Ethicurean out at Wrington cooks what grows in the walled garden outside the window, and Bulrush on Cotham Road South does foraging and fermentation with a full vegetarian menu rather than one grudging dish.

For fully plant-based, Café Kino on Stokes Croft is a worker co-op, vegan all day, and has fed this city for years without ever making a performance of it. Koocha Mezze Bar up the road does Persian small plates entirely without animal products, and the fesenjan is worth the trip on its own. Oowee Vegan converted a generation of Bristolians with a burger, and I would rather they ate that than the alternative.

Then the rooms where vegetables simply get taken seriously. Bellita on Cotham Hill is mostly vegetable, mostly natural wine and thoroughly good company. Poco Tapas Bar has been obsessive about sustainability since before it was expected. Marmo, Sonny Stores and Pasta Loco all cook Italian with daily vegetable plates worth ordering, Bravas does Andalusian tapas with a deep vegetable list, Eatchu makes excellent vegan gyoza, Adelina Yard runs a parallel vegetarian tasting menu and the Gallimaufry on Gloucester Road keeps a strong plant menu late into the evening.

I look at ingredients first, always. What is grown, how it is sourced, and whether the chef gives a carrot the same care and attention they would give a fillet of fish. Nobody on this page has paid a penny to be recommended, and the day that changes I will stop writing.