The closure of Pepe Sale last week – temporarily or permanently, nobody knows for sure – rounds off the most brutal six months I’ve ever experienced in covering Reading’s hospitality scene for over ten years. At every price point, with every kind of venue, whether your tastes are more Cici Noodle Bar or Coco Di Mama, the Lyndhurst or TGI Fridays we’ve seen unprecedented levels of closures in town. There will be bright spots ahead – I anticipate quite a lot of people celebrating on the fifth of July, for instance – but you wouldn’t bet against the second half of 2024 being as gruelling as the first.

Normally closures are a part of life in hospitality, and for nearly every one there’s an equal and opposite newcomer. But that‘s slowed to a trickle this year, with only three significant new venues opening in Reading so far. The first is Zia Lucia, on St Mary’s Butts, which I recently reviewed here. And the most recent, which opened literally this week, is the Rising Sun on Castle Street, a fancy-looking gastropub by Heartwood Inns, a group which also owns Brasserie Blanc. Given that we’ve lost the The Corn Stores and Bel and The Narrowboat already in 2024, it’s a bold move.

But the single biggest opening of the year – which would have been the biggest opening of nearly any year – is Siren RG1, Siren Craft’s keenly awaited town centre taproom on Friar Street which opened in May. It’s been in the pipeline for some time and its arrival has generated the kind of excitement you only occasionally see in Reading without being associated with some American chain or other. For a town still grieving the loss of the Grumpy Goat, this felt like a reason to be cheerful.

It’s been very busy since it opened, which is heartening to see, and going there on duty as soon as it had bedded in was a high priority for me. Last week, meeting Zoë off the train after a hard day working in the big smoke, I finally managed to make it there for dinner.

Before I begin, for reasons that will become clear before too long, I have to take the unusual step of trying to convince you that I hadn’t taken against Siren RG1 before I even ate there. Part of that is because in the run up to their opening, I reacted slightly waspishly to their social media announcement that their new menu was going to centre around none other than burgers.

Really? I thought. It’s a tried and tested trope, but a trope nonetheless. Honest pairs local craft beer with burgers, the Phantom tap room now has 7Bone running the kitchen there. You could see Siren thinking it would work, but it didn’t feel like an exciting choice. Anyway, Siren ever so nicely replied to my Tweet pointing out that they would also be doing small plates and Sunday roasts. That made me feel a little snide and unworthy, so I decided to reserve judgment.

And then I’m afraid I did it again. Zoë and I tried to visit a couple of weeks after it had opened (I don’t normally do that, but such was its pull). And it was rammed and cacophonous, and they told me there was a 45 minute wait for food. So I went to Honest, which was almost empty, and had a lovely burger and some gorgeous beers from Two Flints and, because I can’t hold water, I Tweeted about that.

Again, Siren very graciously picked up on the Tweet and said how grateful they were to be so busy. They were right, whereas I – hot and tired after a long day capped by visiting my dad in hospital – just sounded like an entitled tosspot. Siren also said how much they liked Honest and Two Flints and, again, they were right with the implicit sentiment that we are lucky to have that as another option in town.

I’m getting all of this out of the way up front, and owning my utterances on the subject, for two reasons. One is because, even with all those things said, I think it’s marvellous that Siren has chosen to open a flagship site in the centre of town at such an awful time for hospitality. Like most people – apart from the at those prices you’ll find me in Wetherspoons instead merchants who comment on the Chronicle’s Facebook page – I would very much like it to succeed.

The other reason, which we’ll get to imminently, is that the food offering at Siren is incredibly disappointing, and if I’d just written the review without acknowledging all of the above some tiresome contrarian would have popped up and said “ah-ha! But you’ve had it in for them from the get-go, just look at this”. So there you have it: from here on in you can make up your own minds.

The interior of Siren RG1 is a big and impressive L-shaped space, broken into zones. The area to the far left felt like the dining room, although I think you could order from the food menu anywhere (it wasn’t entirely clear where table service started and bar service began). The central part, opposite the very striking bar, felt more for drinks, although I saw menus and saw customers eating there. And off to the right is a more casual area with high tables and stools, leading out to a partioned-off terrace which looked nothing special but which I imagine will come into its own now that the summer has finally decided to grace us with its presence.

We sat in the dining area and had table service throughout, although not before Zoë took a picture of the board so we knew which beers were on offer. Eighteen taps were given over to Siren’s beers as you’d expect, with plenty of Siren’s core range – Lumina, Yulu, Santo, Soundwave and the like. A further 7 lines featured “friends and local” breweries, again with familiar names like Double-Barrelled, Indie Rabble and Wiper & True. There’s also one cider, a couple of wines on draft and two cask pumps. As ranges go it slightly reminded me of the Nag’s, with less cask, or the Weather Station, but with fewer exciting guest beers, but nonetheless it was a very solid list.

Now, to cover the price thing: I really struggle with people who moan about the price of craft beer without considering the quality, not to mention the effort, work and thought that goes into running an innovative brewery in Britain in 2024. And I saw plenty of comments about this online, especially on the Reading Chronicle‘s Facebook page: my favourite was a comment that just said Bring back the Bugle ho yer England pub is it aloud, from a gentlemen who had obviously spent some time in a pub before putting pen to paper.

But I do have to say that Siren’s pricing seems sharp even if you are completely on board with craft beer costing more. The price list shows the price for the “largest size” without specifying what it is, but presuming it’s a pint some of the pricing seems eccentric even if you accept that the real SI unit for these beers is the two thirds. To give you a concrete example, Everyone, an excellent 5.2% pale from Double-Barrelled costs £8.50 a pint, on the steep side. Later in our meal Zoë had a half of an excellent pale from Track – it was lovely, but I think £6 for a half is again a little bit stiff even for people who regularly drink this stuff. I imagine I can expect some patient comments from somewhere telling me how and why I’m wrong: I probably am.

The food menu, for better or worse, is as Siren said it would be, nearly exclusively burgers and small plates. There are a handful of salads and some loaded fries options, but otherwise you had better fancy one of those two things. I can’t say that fazed us, but when we tried to order we had our first slightly surreal moment.

“You’re ordering some small plates and burgers, so I have to tell you it will all come out at the same time” said our server. Neither of us fancied that, because it just meant some of it would go cold when really we wanted to treat the menu as a starters and mains kind of proposition.

“What if we don’t want them to?”

“Well, I can have a word with the kitchen but I can’t guarantee it. We get busy later on.”

So in the end we just ordered our small plates, deciding that we’d order mains separately further along the evening. That was accepted without quibble, but the whole thing was still distinctly weird; the Wagamama approach of supplying all the dishes you’ve ordered in a timeline and sequence that only suits the restaurant is bad enough, but the only thing I can think of that’s worse is bringing out everything you’ve ordered all at once. But what I was most surprised by was that this policy was still in place over a month after opening and that nobody had challenged it before.

Anyway, about twenty-five minutes later our small plates came out and Siren RG1’s approach to starters and mains was no longer the most surprising thing about them. I’d had my eye on their sticky pork belly, glazed in a sauce using Broken Dream, their award winning stout, for quite some time so it was the first name on our team sheet. What arrived though was poorly executed, and incredibly disappointing. The fat was bouncy, the meat springy, the whole thing not rendered or cooked skilfully enough to get that contrast of textures right. And the glaze was unremarkable, offering no real depth or interest.

I often think the saddest thing about a small plate is when nobody wants to fight for the last remaining piece. But this was even worse – there were four or five cubes of pork belly and after I’d tried one I was more than happy to leave the rest to Zoë, who was equally unimpressed. We have been spoiled with pork belly dishes in Reading – for months the Lyndhurst did an outstanding one which showed how incredible it can be in the right hands, and Clay’s still does an almost unimprovable pork belly with jaggery and ginger. Both those kitchens understand how to get the very best out of that cut of meat: on this showing, Siren’s kitchen doesn’t.

Better, but still very flawed, were the cauliflower wings. Siren offers chicken or cauliflower wings as a small or large plate, and what was frustrating was how good the coating was – crunchy, salty and well-seasoned, giving the Colonel a run for his money. But the pieces were more the size of ostrich wings than chicken wings – huge slabs of cauliflower, with the knock on effect that they were far too firm, al dente verging on uncooked.

A missed opportunity here – if there had been more, but smaller pieces, with a better surface area ratio and with better cooked cauli underneath this could well have been a knockout dish. As it was, it was a great coating still in search of something worthwhile to coat. Perhaps the chicken wings would have been better, but I know a fair few people who would dispute the benefit of coating chicken wings in the first place, unless it’s with sauce.

Last but very much least, and easily the worst thing I tried that evening, were the chicken bites. I should have figured that out, really, from the description: crispy BBQ Korean chicken bites. It was muddled from the off – Korean chicken is a wonderful thing, so is Korean barbecue, but crispy BBQ Korean chicken just felt like throwing words together because they sounded good, rather than because they made sense.

If I’d had that suspicion before ordering, it was fully justified once the dish turned up. Here’s what we got.

Well, it was chicken. And I suppose the sizing was such that you could describe them as bites. But beyond that, any resemblance to anything described on the menu would have been hopeful at best. There was no evidence that a barbecue had been anywhere near them, let alone a Korean one. There was no evidence of Korean flavours anywhere to be seen, no unmistakeable whack of gochujang. And crispy was pushing it a great deal. Instead, you got some faintly soggy, stodgy chicken goujons in an unlovely batter with a stingy dribble of what tasted suspiciously like soy, topped with finely chopped spring onion.

What got to me about this dish, almost as much as its sheer mediocrity, was that it made me wonder about the thought processes of how this menu was put together and whether it had really involved a chef or rather just some consultancy or a focus group. It seemed to say “Korean food is really in right now, so lets have some crispy Korean chicken. No, crispy Korean barbecue chicken! No, we don’t know what that is either.” It felt to me like something you could buy at Iceland.

WIth that lot put away, and a growing sense of dread when I contemplated what kind of review this was going to be, we ordered a couple more beers and our main courses. In a way, having the starters and then a pause to reflect was a mixed blessing. Ordinarily I’d have ordered the chicken burger but given the small plate I’d endured – again, one we didn’t bother finishing – didn’t give me confidence that they cooked chicken well. Or I’d have been tempted by the beef burger with pulled pork, but the pork belly I’d had suggested the kitchen shouldn’t even be chatting pork up, let alone pulling it.

In the end, I nearly went for the beefburger with anchovy and mushroom ketchup, a nice nod to Cocks’s, the original Reading sauce from Victorian times. But our server told me I really should try the chicken burger and so I put my faith in her and followed her advice. And when it arrived, again, it was inconsistent and showed how close the line can be between getting it right and missing the mark. The coating was crunchy, crinkly and gnarly, but to me a little overcooked. And underneath, the chicken was still slightly bouncy, not breaking into shreds on collision with a ravenous set of incisors. This was soaked in buttermilk like the wings, but something had gone wrong here.

And it was a pity because it had the makings of an excellent burger. Arguably with tweaks to the chicken and the coating, given the nicely proportioned bun and the very well done buffalo sauce, this could be a chicken burger to rival the one at Honest. But as it was, again, the execution let it down. If you’re going to set out your stall to do the best burgers in town, a town which has seen many burger contenders come and go over the course of over a decade, you have to get it more right than this.

Zoë’s beefburger was easily the best dish of the night, although that was a low bar in this very fancy bar. She’d chosen the “Cheese Eyes” – no idea what that name is even meant to refer to – and it came not so much with a cheese skirt as the full fromage maxi dress, a truffled cheese sauce bursting its banks and escaping for the plate in every direction. Zoë absolutely loved this dish, from the patty to the cheese, to the truffle, to the onions and roasted garlic butter and beyond. I didn’t get to try any, but as I didn’t I asked what felt to me to be the most pertinent question.

“How does it compare to Honest?”

“This is every bit as good as Honest. I’d come here and have this again.”

Siren charges extra for fries, just under three quid, which potentially pushes the price point above Honest – although at least it gives you the option to order one portion between two, which is what we did. Siren’s fries, as it happens, are excellent: skin on, crispy and golden and thoroughly agreeable, even if they dish them up in a metal cup which just means they’ll go cold quicker. But none the less, I liked them a lot. I have no idea if they make them themselves, but it would be nice if they did.

We could have stayed for dessert – there are three on offer, which include a sticky toffee pudding with Broken Dream sauce and a cheescake – but I don’t think we could face it by that point. We’d seen enough, and been disappointed by enough, and already in the back of my mind I was thinking “oh brother, this review is going to involve going near a sacred cow” so I didn’t want to make matters worse by finding another thing not to like. I always rely on Zoë in these instances, my Jiminy Cricket, to rein me in if I’m going too far or saying something impolitic. But I asked, and she felt as underwhelmed by it as I had. Our meal for two, including a 12.5 service charge, came to just over eighty pounds. That’s a lot of money to spend eating food so middling.

So, did I convince you that I wanted Siren RG1 to be good and that I went without fixed ideas, as far as I was able? Maybe, maybe not, although I’d hope that after reading me for long enough you’ve seen enough instances where I expected something to be good and went away aghast, or turned up to a venue with no great expectations and left utterly delighted. If you do find me guilty, I have a number of other offences you’ll need to take into consideration. But the fact remains that, for me, even if you strip away the expectation and the hype, Siren RG1’s food needs to be a lot better than this.

It made me think – sorry to mention them again – that I wish Siren had someone like Sheldon Fernandes, formerly of the Lyndhurst, in their kitchen. He’s a man who instinctively knows how to do small plates and casual dining, and every rendition of anything even remotely like Siren’s menu I saw from the Lyndhurst’s kitchen was leagues ahead of this. Great burgers, flawless pork belly, Korean fried chicken that actually uses Korean flavours and cauliflower wings you’d flog your grandma to taste. By contrast, Siren’s food is exceptionally lacklustre.

But let’s not compare Siren to a business that’s no longer trading, because that helps nobody. What’s more of a concern is that not far from Siren are places that do much of this better. I’ve already mentioned Honest, but it’s worth doing so again: their chicken burger is far better than Siren’s, their beef burger apparently on a par. They don’t sell a huge amount of beers, but the ones they do are excellent and considerably more reasonably priced than Siren’s.

Even more concerning, though, is that although the beer offering isn’t even in the same ballpark as Siren’s, when it comes to food I would probably pick the Oakford Social Club over Siren. Their fried chicken is good, their range is decent and if they don’t take as many risks at least they don’t fail as singularly as Siren has with its chicken bites and its pork belly. And again, we’re back to where I came in: I was disappointed when Siren decided to centre on burgers and slightly mollified when they also had a focus on small plates. But this menu, with an okay burger and some iffy small plates, doesn’t bear out the quality that was promised by Siren’s social media enthusing about their painstaking research and love of burgers.

I keep thinking, too, that the bricks and mortar craft beer places I’ve been to – not the likes of Phantom or Double-Barrelled, but permanent sites – do this far better. In Bristol Small Bar, Left Handed Giant’s equivalent to Siren RG1, offers fried chicken from Wings Diner which is absolutely excellent. Next door they have taken over a place, Renato’s, that pairs beer with great pizza. Earlier this year I went to Mikkeller’s brewpub in Farringdon, where they offer outrageously good fried chicken by Lucky’s. The quality of the food at Siren RG1 doesn’t match any of those places: the issue isn’t that they’ve chosen largely to focus on one thing, just that they haven’t done it well.

I feel, more than usual, that I’m sticking my head above the parapet saying all this. And I expect that if Siren responds at all to this it will be in a reasonable and balanced way that makes me look (and feel) very small indeed. But I think I’m right on this one. They have a great spot, great beer and a great concept. They could do very nicely even just serving middling food. But I don’t think that will be enough – for me, for their customers and for Reading as a whole. But more importantly if I know anything about Siren, given what I’ve seen in over ten years of watching their brand, I don’t think it will be enough for them either.

Siren RG1 – 6.4
21 Friar Street, RG1 1HR
0118 4027573

https://www.sirencraftbrew.com/our-venues/reading-bar