The sound of loud tabla music piped out onto the street from speakers above the front door indicates that Take Five Cafe on Stokes Croft is not your typical establishment. Run by ‘Cosmic’ Jake from Malaysia, Take 5 is a cafe by day but really comes into its own by night when it opens until well into the wee small hours of the morning.
Take Five Cafe is proud of its its place in the heritage and present day position in the Bristol clubbing scene. An A4-printed piece of paper gives a potted history of the building. It was a shoe shop 200 years ago before being used for storing wine then becoming a greasy spoon for 40 years.
In the early 90s, it was an illegal rave venue, before Jake arrived and transformed it into both a daytime and evening venue which since this summer has also opened in the mornings serving a cosmopolitan breakfast selection. There’s full English, veggie and vegan and also Italian (fennel-infused sausages on ciabatta), Mexican (with mex-style scrambled egg in a tortilla wrap) and Indian (curry and rice). All the breakfasts and curries cost £5.
Jake takes a lot of pride in the food that he cooks and has put a selection of his favourite recipes on the Take Five website including Thai green curry, Indian vegan curry and chilli pickle.
Jake himself sums up the Take Five Cafe in his potted history / stream of consciousness: “a humble desire to serve the people of this country that he so stubbornly loves irrespective of age, sex, sexuality, colour, race, religion and everything else that divides humanity, destroys the environment and presses any self-destruct button of this planet we are blessed to live on called Earth, which is amazingly awesome in this universe.” Cosmic.
Take Five Cafe, 72 Stokes Croft, Bristol. 0117 907 7502.
Bristol Culture 
although breakfast there is not that bad, the vegetarian food here is not that good, and things in general seem chaotic there, given that the food in the area surrounding take five has improved substantially just in the last couple of months my advise you be to avoid the food there … stokes croft is changing and your food has to be good …
that is nonsense chuck. I am a long standing customer of Take Five and they definitely serve the tastiest of vegeterian and non vegeterian meals around Stokes Croft. They serve homecooked asian food unlike the asian restaurants around, and none of the other cafes and restaurants specialise in Asian Cusine like Take 5. It is not chaotic but busy! And they have the friendliest of staff in Stokes Croft who are very caring and friendly. I have seen this cafe surviving in the darkest hours of the history of Stokes Croft based on the dedication, hard work, commitment and loyalty of the owners who have run it as an independent local business for so many years. If at all I know this is a cafe with one of the best reputations in Bristol for food and party hire. Stokes Croft is changing and this cafe deserves credit for contributing to this change by staying on in the area and run a reputable business when Stokes Croft was was riddled by muggers and dodgy people in the late 90s, and in fact pumping in a lot of money to renovate the building to add to the modernisation of the area. They even reduced their prices to help people afford eating ou, t home cooked food during this recession!