Koocha Mezze Bar

Koocha Mezze Bar opened in 2018 on Cheltenham Road as Bristol's first fully vegan restaurant, founded and still led by chef Noda Marvani, who learned the trade in her father's restaurant kitchen before taking over the family business and reshaping it around her own Persian heritage. At around eight years old it sits outside the brief's strict "1 to 4 years" window, but it remains a genuinely single-owner, chef-led independent rather than a group operation, and its reputation has held up well: 4.7 out of 5 on TripAdvisor, consistently ranked in the top 40 of over 1,600 Bristol restaurants. The food is Persian and Middle Eastern, entirely plant-based, built on bold spicing and scratch-made dishes from family recipes -- the venue's own framing, that "even the most devout meat eaters have declared their love after a meal," speaks to food confident enough not to need meat to feel substantial.

The clearest structural strength for this series, independently confirmed directly against Koocha's own published hours, is trading pattern: Monday through Thursday noon to 11pm, Friday and Saturday to 11:30pm, Sunday noon to 10pm -- genuinely open every single day of the week, with no closed day at all. Combined with the existing research's note that groups of up to 12 can be handled by policy on Sunday through Thursday, this makes Koocha the one venue in this whole 41-candidate research project confirmed open on both of this series' target early-week nights without a caveat.

Cheltenham Road sits just north of Stokes Croft proper, a slightly quieter, more residential extension of the same independent-led strip -- The Arches, where Koocha trades, is a small parade of independent food businesses rather than a standalone unit. The one open question this pass could not resolve is exact seating capacity/covers, not published on the venue's own site -- worth a direct ask alongside confirming the round-table-for-10 physical layout.