I tried the fish and chips at M&S Café and it’s much better than the Colin the Caterpillar hot chocolate

It’s only 11.30am and I’m already clutching my tray in a long queue snaking around the counter at the main M&S Café at Cribbs Causeway, ordering fish and chips with a Colin the Caterpillar hot chocolate.

OK, admittedly, it’s not quite my idea of food heaven, but there’s a brand new all-day autumn menu at M&S Café and it needed to be road tested.

The new menu seems to be concentrating on comfort dishes and old favourites. There’s ‘our best ever’ chicken tikka masala with pilau rice, onion bhaji and mango chutney for £8.95 and the ‘back by popular demand’ chicken pot pie soup (£6) - which is a chicken soup served with an all-butter pastry lid. So, it’s essentially a chicken pie but the PR blurb assures us that it’s a ‘hug in a bowl’ and who am I to argue?

But it was the ‘gastropub beer battered fish and chips with petit pots and tartare sauce’ (£8.95) I was queuing for next to the Percy Pig slush machine.

That and the new limited edition ‘Colin the Caterpillar™ hot chocolate drink’, which has been added to the autumn menu in partnership with Macmillan Cancer Support. But more about this £3.55 mug of hot chocolate later.

Once I had ordered, I found a table in the large cafe with its car park views. Even at 11.30am, the place was almost full, mostly with shoppers sipping coffees or ordering a late breakfast. With the closure of M&S in Bristol’s Broadmead, a lot of people clearly miss their M&S Café lunches and meet-ups so Cribbs is now the nearest one.

Within five minutes, a cafe worker with a regulation hair net on her head delivered my fish and chips with some new cutlery, which was a relief as the knife and fork I grabbed from the dispenser were a touch smeary, as if some snotty nosed kid had been rearranging them.

It doesn’t say on the menu what the fish is other than ‘Scottish fish’ but it looked and tasted like haddock to me. The batter was crisp, crunchy and greaseless. The thick piece of steaming hot fish was pearly white with large flakes.

The generous pile of chunky chips were fluffy within their golden exterior and there were plenty of sweet petit pois and a small ramekin of tartare sauce with some nice chunky bits of chopped gherkin.

For £8.95, it was seriously good value and better than many fish and chips I’ve paid a lot more for in Bristol chippies.

Sadly the Colin the Caterpillar hot chocolate drink didn’t quite live up to expectation. For a start, it looked nothing like the colourful and elaborately decorated product in the picture on the menu board.

Rather than towering swirls of chocolate-coloured whipped cream and multicoloured sprinkles, this was far more basic.

The fact there were three cafe workers around my mug at one point may have been an indication that it was the first one they’ve had to make from this brand new menu. Maybe they hadn’t received the Colin the Caterpillar memo.

The chocolate drink itself was fine and not overly sweet but the topping was a rather flat squirt of normal whipped cream with a few green and white sprinkles. It lacked the ‘wow’ factor of the enticing photo.

Worse still, the mini Colin face chocolate seemed to have given up the ghost too and had disappeared into the drink within seconds. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, Colin appeared to sink to the bottom quicker than the Titanic.

Oh well, 5p from each sale goes to Macmillan and let’s hope they sell thousands to raise lots of money for this worthwhile cause.

So, a lunch of two halves, but I would definitely go back for the fish and chips, which I noticed was £3 cheaper than the fish and chips served at John Lewis at the other end of The Mall.

With money still tight, I think we know where many cash-strapped Cribbs shoppers will be going for their fish and chips this autumn. I just hope the Colin the Caterpillar hot chocolate-making course instructor gets to Cribbs for a quick refresher course before this limited edition drink sells out.