Restaurant review: Me Kong

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When I ran through the trends in Reading’s food scene last year, two stood out: the proliferation of new, casual pizza restaurants and a similar blossoming of restaurants to cater to Reading’s Hongkonger community. Last week I explored the former at Smelly Alley’s Zi Tore so it only seemed fair, this week, to dive into the latter at Me Kong, the newest of these restaurants to open.

I identified some of these spots opening in 2025 – Woodley Food Stasian out in Woodley, Take Your Time where Dolce Vita used to be and the subject of this week’s review, which is tucked away behind Reading Library just down from The Blade next to the retro classic that is the Abbey Baptist Church. It’s a spot which somehow didn’t feel like it existed before Me Kong sprang up there: I can’t remember what, if anything, was there before.

But even that undersells the increase in restaurants catering to this market. After all Good Old Days Hong Kong, which I reviewed around this time last year, has been around since late 2023. Worse still, I missed out a couple of developments last year – YL Restaurant for one, which opened in the back of the supermarket that used to be the Warwick Arms a long time ago. And then there’s Soul Chill, a cafe that opened right opposite where I used to live on the corner of London Street and South Street. Its Google listing initially made it look like a bubble tea spot, but it boasts breakfast and lunch options.

All this, of course, springs from the introduction in January 2021 of the BNO Visa for Hongkongers, giving them the right to settle in the U.K. with a path to citizenship. Reading – always a multicultural, well-educated, polyglot place – has as a result both developed and embraced a significant Hongkonger community. With that come all the advantages of vibrancy, including – selfishly, for me – new and interesting places to eat.

Me Kong is a particular type of establishment, a cha chaan teng. These are “tea restaurants” that originated in Hong Kong in the Fifties, following on from the bing sutt, or ice room. Cha chaan tengs are often likened in print to the British greasy spoon or the American diner, but I think that’s more to try and find a term of cultural reference readers might understand. In reality they are a creature all their own, and a very eclectic one at that.

Food at a cha chaan teng is often described almost as a fusion of Chinese and European – another term often used is ‘soy sauce western’ – with dishes including Chinese ones with which you’d be familiar and more esoteric options like baked pork chop with ketchup, or macaroni soup topped with char siu. In Hong Kong cha chaan tengs are a great gastronomic leveller – swift, efficient and frequented by blue and white collar workers alike.

Plenty of my research suggested that cha chaan tengs are on the wane in Hong Kong, as for that matter greasy spoons are here, but it’s somehow fitting that a wave of them is opening in the U.K. Because I’ve read that when they first sprung up in Hong Kong in the Fifties it was because Hong Kong, run by the British, welcomed Chinese refugees. There are echoes of that, I suppose, in the situation now, seventy years later.

A taste of home, or nostalgia, makes perfect sense if you settle somewhere so far away from your roots, and last month I saw a few photos of customers queuing round the block to try Me Kong for the first time. But did this food also have the potential to win over a wider customer base?

Someone thought so ten years ago, when a restaurant literally called Cha Chaan Teng opened in Holborn, but the reviews were not good. Marina O’Loughlin, then writing in the Guardian, said the food gave her “the kind of clammy shame I’d feel if I woke up post-bender to find myself the fifth Mrs Gregg Wallace”, adding that “cha chaan tengs aren’t renowned for their cuisine”: what’s the opposite of a white saviour?

There is a difference, though. That restaurant was geared at customers of European descent, while Me Kong promises to be the real thing. So on a Tuesday lunchtime I pootled over with my great friend Jerry, who was especially interested in Me Kong because it’s probably the closest restaurant to his gorgeous, incredibly tasteful flat. Forget whether I liked it or not: I also wanted to see if Jerry could find a brilliant new local.

We got there around twenty past twelve and the place was already packed with a queue for tables, albeit one that hadn’t moved out onto the street. I will say though that although we as a nation like to think we’ve invented queuing, Me Kong has perfected it – quickly assessing each table size needed and gradually corralling us into different spots in the waiting area.

At the front there were counters showing off all of Me Kong’s baked goods – buns, pastries and the like – and so some of the people joining the queue were simply buying that stuff to take away. Nothing fazed Me Kong’s front of house, and after no more than five minutes we were ushered to a table.

Me Kong’s interior is really rather impressive, I think. On one level it’s a front room with booths, a back room with tables and a corridor connecting them. But that doesn’t even begin to do it justice, on many levels. They’ve gone all the way through the building, so the front looks out on Abbey Square and the back onto the Holybrook, and that results in a really lovely space where everything feels airy and beautifully lit.

Not only that, but it felt polished and finished in a way new establishments so often don’t: the colour of the wood panelled counter; the tasteful banquettes; the bright line drawings on the wall, everything seemed really considered. And the branding, from the menus to the cups to the napkin dispensers, was extremely well thought out. I got the impression this wasn’t their first rodeo: I’d be surprised if it was their first restaurant, for that matter. It felt fully formed.

I should also mention that Jerry and I were, at the point when we sat down, the only customers of European descent in the place. But I never felt conspicuous, because the staff were just so terrific from start to finish. One server explained to us that they really wanted to promote this kind of food, and I got that impression throughout the meal.

In fact, I’m jumping the gun by saying this but I’ve never been to a restaurant where the staff were quite so keen to tell you what the gorgeous-looking dish that had turned up at another table was (“that’s the braised eggplant with garlic sauce” one of them told me, as I admired a delectable-looking pot on my left).

Me Kong’s menu, on a ring-bound set of cards with that impressive branding, was a proper box of delights with an awful lot going on. One section featured noodles, either dry or in soup, along with five set meals, another common feature in a cha chaan teng. These gave you the option of some Hong Kong classics – ham macaroni soup, say, or char siu macaroni soup – paired with a bun and either fried egg or omelette.

A large section of rice dishes again led with a staple of the cha chaan teng, baked pork chop with cheese and tomato sauce on rice. Many of these dishes were more on the fusion side, so were perhaps more for purists. Another page of the menu featured four clay pot dishes and five stir fries, and another page of snacks offered dishes like deep fried chicken leg with curly fries – again, an authentic cha chaan teng choice – along with a full range of options from the bakery.

I would say that with the exception of that aubergine dish, which looked like it might have had minced pork in it, there wasn’t much for vegetarians here. The page marked Vegetables featured various green veg with garlic or oyster sauce, but would feel limited if that was your lot. There was, however, plenty here for the cost-conscious. The most expensive dish on the menu was south of £15, those set meals were less than a tenner.

Plenty of decisions for Jerry and I to make – but first, tea. Me Kong does sell alcohol (Sapporo on draft, or Guinness) but I really wanted to try the Hong Kong milk tea, another speciality of this kind of restaurant. It’s hard to describe but imagine a very strong cup of PG Tips, souped-up builder’s tea, served with condensed milk, a very pleasing shade of deep amber, and you wouldn’t be far off. I put a sugar in it, but on reflection wished I’d added more.

I don’t normally put a picture of a cup up on the blog, especially one where you can see so little, but: see what I mean about the branding?

I’d read online that Hong Kong milk tea is strained through a sock, or something like it (hopefully one exclusively used for this purpose), often multiple times, to achieve a particular level of smoothness. I can’t say whether a hosiery department was involved, but it did have a certain pleasing consistency. Maybe it was the note of Carnation, or the power of imagination, but whatever it was I enjoyed it.

Jerry originally wanted to try a yuen yueng, a blend of coffee and tea also particular to cha chaan tengs, but they didn’t have any Hong Kong coffee so he joined me in a tea. He liked it, but less than me: when we had a follow up drink I opted for more of the same, and he had an iced lemon tea – specifically requested as slightly less sweet on the excellent advice of the table next to me.

Before I talk about the food, I did want to say something about that. I’ve already said that the staff were really keen to explain other dishes and illuminate us on the cuisine of Hong Kong. But I’ve never eaten in a restaurant where that evangelism so extended to the other customers, too. During our meal the tables on either side of us were occupied by multiple parties – restaurants like this tend to be brisk – and so we got to rubberneck all manner of delights. Not only that, but the people ordering them were more than happy to tell us what they were.

All that meant that although we played it relatively safe with our order we saw more than enough to work out what to have next time. That macaroni soup topped with satay beef looked like an interesting, comforting order, but I was even more intrigued by a dome of rice crowned with an omelette draped over it, the whole thing then decorated with vertical strips of char siu. The traditional pork chop baked with cheese came in an earthenware dish, the kind you might associate with a lasagne, and I got a sufficiently good look to decide I’d leave that one to the experts.

Nicest of all were the lovely pair of civil engineers on my left. They worked in Thames Tower and had found out about the place and one, whose family were from Hong Kong, had decided to bring her colleague along to see if it recaptured the food of her memories.

She ordered a clay pot dish that I considered but been put off ordering because of the mystery meat component of “Chinese sausage”, and she even kindly let me sample a bit. It was delicious, with a sort of air dried texture like salami and a complex, fragrant flavour. I made a note not to let it deter me next time.

So yes, I chose the conventional option, the black bean chicken pot. But I am so happy that I did, because it was simply outstanding. A hefty pot full to bursting with boneless chicken thigh, skin on, cooked absolutely bang on so it was firm but had just enough give, no evidence of the velveting that can sometimes make chicken off-putting. Huge bits of spring onion, caramelised until heavenly, coexisted with all that chicken and extra goodies: little cubes of potent ginger and plenty of equally burnished nubbins of garlic.

But all that would be nothing without the sauce, a black bean sauce of ridiculous savoury depth, a glossy number with notes of Marmite which clung to everything: to the pot, to every crevice of chicken, to each layer of onion, each piece of ginger and garlic, every grain of steamed rice. This was deliciously viscous stuff, and I made it a mission to ensure that I left as little of it gleaming at the bottom of that black pot as I possibly could.

There is a part of me that is very tempted, just after noon on Friday when this review goes up, to find myself in that place again eating exactly this dish: it was that good.

Jerry had chosen every bit as well as me, going for the Singapore vermicelli with char siu and prawn. This was a magnificent one-stop shop, a very generous tangle of rice noodles tumbled through with chilli, prawns, strips of pork, beansprouts and fried egg. The menu described it as spicy, our server said it wasn’t so hot. Having tried a few forkfuls, I’d probably split the difference and say it was nicely challenging.

What saved it from chilli overload was a certain nuttiness, although I’m not sure where it came from. Perhaps it was the curry powder, an essential component of this dish which gives it its ochre hue. Professor Wikipedia advises me, pleasingly, that Singapore noodles have nothing to do with Singapore but are also a post-war Hong Kong creation.

The thing that made me happiest about these noodles was how much Jerry loved them. He told me he could happily see himself coming here of an evening, ordering these and sitting there taking it all in: he added that previously his go to had been the pad thai at Rosa’s Thai but that this was easily a rival for it. Getting people to eat at Me Kong instead of Rosa’s Thai is, I suppose, as good a mission statement for this blog as any: I’m glad it had that effect on my friend if nothing else.

But I can also see exactly what he meant about it being a space where you’d want to spend time. It was so busy, so beautifully efficient and well run, and so popular – with friends, with couples, with families. Small children were everywhere, but for a moment you could forget you were in the U.K. because they were, without exception, impeccably behaved.

The word that jumps out at me – that restaurants don’t always aim for and in any case don’t hit often enough – is fun. Everything about Me Kong was a riot, from its cheerful, charming staff to its delighted, curious kind customers. How could anybody experience that and not want to be part of it again?

Determined to cover as much of the menu as possible we stayed for some sweet treats and this was when, maybe, Me Kong’s sure touch faltered ever so slightly. I wanted to try the real staples here, so we started with a pineapple bun: no pineapple is involved, but it got the name because the sugar crust on top can, apparently, vaguely resemble a pineapple. I rather liked this – it reminded me of an iced bun, but with a crust rather than icing on top. Worth trying so you can say you’ve tried it, absolutely, but I don’t know when I’d feel a hankering for one again.

I really expected to love the French toast, another Hong Kong signature, but it didn’t quite hit the spot. Two slices of white bread, joined together with a thin mortar of punchy peanut butter, came fried and brought to the table with a little pack of Anchor butter to melt on top. Jerry said that those cultural references – Anchor butter, builder’s tea – added to that feeling of nostalgia, and I could see where he was coming from.

But for me this was just a little too stodgy, a little too light on the fun considering how many calories were involved. Ironically it needed to be more indulgent: the very nice civil engineer at the next table told me that often this was served with maple syrup, which would have utterly transformed it, but the server told me that they didn’t do tweaks or customisation for anybody, which I respected.

We didn’t finish it, because as an experience it was just a tad too grubby: I didn’t feel, as Marina O’Loughlin did, shame equivalent to waking up married to Gregg Wallace, but perhaps something comparable, like having a mucky dream about Nadine Dorries.

The last of our trio of desserts was a similar experience: I’d asked for an egg tart and been told that we’d have to wait twenty minutes for a fresh batch to come out of the oven. So we did, and when it came it was still warm and the pastry, buttery and short, was truly exemplary.

And yet I wanted to like the filling so much more than I did. I don’t know whether I was expecting the appealing wobble of a pastel de nata, or the nutmeg-dusted propriety of its English relative, but this was more egg white than egg yolk, somewhat lacking in richness and far more like blancmange that had found itself a very nice house. Again I wouldn’t order it again but I’m glad I tried it and for £1.70, only 10p less expensive than the pineapple bun, it was not an expensive mistake.

Our bill for everything came to just over £54, and there were two remarkable things about it. One is that if you order food they knock a very specific 51p off the price of each of your drinks, so they each cost £2.99. The second is that the service charge they add is only 8%: I questioned this with our server saying it wasn’t enough, and he laughed. “Next time you can tip a hundred pounds!” he said.

He also told me – and this might be useful to you, though it wasn’t to me – that if you spend over £40 they have a deal where you can get free parking at the Queens Road Car Park.

I hope the tip is so low because the staff there don’t need to rely on it to be fairly paid, because they very much deserve that. All of them were just terrific, and I know this has a strong whiff of and everyone stood up and clapped, but it’s true: practically every one of them said thank you to Jerry and I as we walked through the restaurant on our way out. I sent the pictures of our food to Zoë later as I was relaxing at Jerry’s with a cup of tea and a medicinal glass of red, and got exactly the reply I was expecting: perhaps you’ll take me some time soon.

This is precisely the kind of review, and the sort of restaurant, I wanted to kick off the year with. Me Kong is an absolute blast, brilliantly run and happens to do some excellent food, and I scoped out enough options on my first visit to give me plenty of food for thought on my second, third and fourth – if I can tear myself away from that chicken in black bean sauce, that is. It is already incredibly busy in a way most Reading restaurants in January would kill for, but I can see that continuing even after the novelty value has died off.

But what I also loved about it was how inclusive it was, how keen it was to tell its story far and wide. That spirit deserves to be returned in kind by Reading’s restaurant-goers. And it also made me a little proud of Reading: that our diverse, happy, tolerant town can still attract people like that and businesses like this, despite all the naysayers and bigots in the comments section of the Reading Chronicle.

I think if you read this blog you’re not like those people, and I think you’d find an awful lot to like at Me Kong. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the months ahead, I see some of you there. I certainly won’t be in Rosa’s Thai, that’s for sure.

Me Kong – 8.4
St Laurence House, Abbey Square, Reading, RG1 3AG
0118 3431543

https://www.facebook.com/MeKongReadingUK/

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Restaurant review: Zi Tore

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Unlike any restaurant reviewer I know of, I publish the list of restaurants I intend to visit. It’s regularly added to as places open and people tip me off about their favourite venues, in Reading or slightly further afield, and every time I review somewhere it drops off that list – until, maybe, many years later, the time is ripe for reappraisal. From the outside, it probably just looks like a bunch of restaurants, in alphabetical order.

But the reality, for me at least, is that it’s a nuanced to do list. It’s almost more of an in-tray, never more so than at the beginning of the year, and the order in which I tackle it depends on a number of factors. Because not all of those spots have anywhere approaching equal priority in my mind, and that dictates how quickly I get round to them. I’m aware, for instance, that it’s a fair old while since I visited Newbury or Wokingham on duty: over three years for the former, nearly three years for the latter. I ought to rectify that.

Then there are the new places that I really need to review, if only because they look interesting. If not for my accident I would have reviewed Pho 86 and Nua by now, and spots like Blip and Matteo Greek Grill & Bakery also merit investigation sooner rather than later, to see if smashed burgers can take off in Tilehurst or whether at last somebody can make a go of the old Colley’s Supper Rooms site. I’m curious myself about the answers to those questions, so I need to go exploring at some point.

And of course the accident currently factors into these things. So places near the top of the in-tray, for the time being, need to be fairly close to home and at least slightly lend themselves to eating with one hand; my motor skills are gradually improving with physio, but writing one of these reviews still involves wrangling with the delights of Apple Dictation, which understands what I’m saying about as often as my wife does when her hearing aids aren’t in.

Every to do list has that one thing on it that you should have done a very long time ago, the item that sticks out like a sore thumb and makes you feel guilty. And in my case that item, the subject of this week’s review, is Italian restaurant and cafe Zi Tore, the one which took the spot on Smelly Alley vacated by the Grumpy Goat back in October 2023: yes, it really has been that long since the Grumpy Goat shut. Hicks Baker weren’t quick off the mark getting someone to jump into this particular grave, but Zi Tore opened nearly a year ago with co-owner Paolo Lanzetta, a proud Neapolitan, in the kitchen.

The Reading Chronicle covered the story as only they could, getting the name of the restaurant wrong – it’s not ‘Zia Torre’ – and accidentally giving Lanzetta dual nationality. “It has always been my dream to open a restaurant like this so people can try authentic Italian and Nepalese cuisine” they misquoted him as saying: you can’t get the staff, can you? That’s our local paper for you though, they just don’t know their calzone from their momo.

All that means that I am very long overdue checking out one of the trailblazers of the Italian invasion that hit Reading in the first half of 2025. I’ve reviewed Paesinos, reviewed Amò – not without controversy – and failed to get to Peppito’s before it closed five months after opening. But Zi Tore remained the blind spot: I tried to get there early one evening in May, only to get turned away because they seemed to be closing early, but I’ve not been back since.

And everything I’ve heard since then has been good. I’ve had comments to the effect that they’re staying open later these days, feedback borne out by their later opening hours on Google. Long-standing reader Mansoor, a man I trust on many things, said that of all of Reading’s new restaurants last year Zi Tore was the one he ended up visiting most frequently. And my friend Enza, my authority on all matters Italian, has loved Zi Tore for a long time, especially their graffe.

I’ve also heard rumours that one of Amò’s pizza chefs, short of work now that the restaurant has been closed for over a month without explanation, had crossed town to start working at Zi Tore. So that was it: slap bang at the top of the 2026 in-tray. On a drizzly weekday, during a week that was originally meant to be time off but was now filled with medical appointments, Zoë and I wandered up Smelly Alley to finally give it a whirl.

Zi Tore has done a lovely job of the exterior and the frontage and the window, with arancini and pizza slices tantalisingly on display, draws you in nicely. But beyond the counter, I found the interior a little inhospitable. It’s difficult to describe it without harking back to the site’s Grumpy Goat days, but the back room on the ground floor, where all the beer used to live, was a slightly unlovely space with a handful of tables, starved of daylight or much ambience.

Upstairs was much better, although that also brought back memories of the site’s previous life. It’s a nice space with a fetching mini mezzanine looking out over Smelly Alley, and taking the bar out had definitely created more room. But even here the furniture felt functional and a little sterile, as if they’d bought it piecemeal.

One table with makeshift bench seating could accommodate six people, one of the plum spots up by the window had an actual bench and low table – great for coffee and cake, perhaps less so for lunch. It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, Arctic: an aircon unit in the ceiling was switched off, its remote on a nearby low table set to a random 30 degrees. It all felt a little spartan, not quite finished, even though the place was on the verge of celebrating its first birthday.

Zi Tore’s menu had the kind of concision that pleases restaurant reviewers: seven different Neapolitan pizzas, two types of pasta – ravioli or gnocchi – with one of three sauces, a lasagne and three smaller dishes under the heading “Street Food”. That was slightly marred by a separate paper pizza menu, a recent addition perhaps, with another half a dozen pizza options. Some felt like the kind of combinations you’d get at Amò, making me wonder if the departing chef had taken a few ideas with him.

Pricing was standard issue, with pizzas ranging from £10 for a margherita all the way up to £17 if you wanted porcini, roasted potatoes and sausage (typing this, that ensemble sounds rather good to me). Pasta dishes were between £12 and £15 depending on your shape and sauce of choice, and the smaller plates were less than a fiver. The other tempting dish, the pizza fritta, was a tenner and looked like a fish out of water in the street food section of the menu.

Cakes are not on the menu, so you have to go up to the display and ask at the counter: I didn’t indulge my sweet tooth on this occasion, but the cake I saw turning up at a neighbouring table looked thoroughly decent. I didn’t see any graffe – the loop-shaped potato doughnut beloved by my friend Enza – but perhaps they’re a weekend thing.

Zi Tore also doesn’t do table service, so you go up with your order and your table number and let them have it. I ordered a couple of coffees, a couple of small dishes, a pizza and a pasta dish: all that set me back just over £44, which felt like decent value. It was certainly comparable with its peers at Amò and Paesinos, although Zi Tore’s offering is slightly different from theirs.

It’s a shame to start the year with a regular complaint about timing, but I would have liked the coffees quickly – it was cold outside and almost as cold inside – and then the small dishes, then the main events. Zi Tore wasn’t hugely busy, with about four other tables on the go when we arrived, but in reality we waited what felt like quite a while and then everything turned up a matter of minutes apart.

No matter: the coffee, the starting point, wasn’t half bad. It arrived in those tall, almost-conical glasses I slightly associate with the last century, but my latte was very enjoyable and Zoë liked her mocha. In Reading’s coffee hierarchy this wasn’t competing with the likes of C.U.P. or Lincoln – or even trying to – but it was significantly better than Madoo‘s coffee, which has always been its Achilles heel.

Small plates, turning up twenty minutes after we ordered, were a mixed bag of realised and unrealised potential. I didn’t mind the sausage and friarelli arancino, just the one for £5, but it lacked a little pep. It was lukewarm, the shell had no real rigidity to it and inside the filling wasn’t brilliantly distributed: a big knot of dense sausage meat at the bottom, almost as if it had been placed there to stop the whole thing toppling over, like a Weeble.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, more that I knew better were out there: it didn’t match Amò’s but, on the other hand, it was far better than the ones at Vino Vita.

Far, far better was the montanara, a simple but exquisite treat, a pleasingly irregular, puffy oval of fried pizza dough topped simply with tomato, mozzarella and a solitary basil leaf. This was so enjoyable, and justified a visit to Zi Tore in its own right: there’s nowhere to hide when something has so few components, and it’s a great way to showcase how good your raw materials are. At £3.50, this is one of the Reading lunch scene’s bargains, and although we shared it between two – and it was big enough for you to do that – the wise move would be to come here and order one to yourself.

But the other wise move might be to order just that, because as I was eating it I did find myself thinking if only this was hot. It was fried pizza dough, I’m sure it was as hot as balls to begin with, and I wondered what had cooled it so: was it adding the toppings, or was it the fact that it sat around until everything else was ready or almost ready? Or could it have been that the upstairs was so Siberian that you couldn’t affort to wait until after your arancino to tuck into it? I think some benefit of the doubt is probably due here: I would go again and give this another try. Even on the upper reaches of what you could describe as ‘piping warm’ it was a very good choice.

The timestamps on my and Zoë’s photos tell me that our bigger dishes arrived less than five minutes later, and it’s good that we’d finished our smaller ones or there wouldn’t have been room on the table for everything. Zoë called shotgun on the pizza, and had ordered simply, the Diavola, a relatively classic pepperoni pizza with chilli.

First things first: it looked the part, and the rim was nicely speckled, blistered and spotted. This is, for better or worse, a very classic Neapolitan pizza, with all the pluses and minuses of that genre, still enjoying its moment in the sun in Reading as it is replaced with American interlopers and hybrids (and whatever ‘London-style pizza’ is) in the capital. That’s the extent to which I keep up with pizza trends, but in theory I’m still happy with the original forebear of all these mutations.

And yet, from the bit of this pizza I tried, this wasn’t my favourite rendition of it in Reading. Everything was very loose and sloppy, more so than at Zi Tore’s rivals on the Kings Road, which meant the centre was like what I imagine sex with Rupert Murdoch must be like, a droopy challenge. I heard someone online say “if it ain’t messy it ain’t fun” at some point last year, and personally when it comes to food I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed more.

But there was other problems here. The dough would have been best in class in Reading back in the days when Franco Manca got us all excited, but with the competition from the class of ’25 it was mid table – and that’s before we get to Zia Lucia’s charcoal base and its almost mythical effects on punters’ innards.

And the pepperoni didn’t do it for me either – now, it might well have been pepperoni rather than salami, but for me the benefit of pepperoni is its narrower gauge, the amount you can fit on a pizza, all those little chalices of fat dotted across the surface. Six big discs arranged with geometric precision didn’t have quite the same curb appeal. Zoë told me she also expected more pizza and more bite – from actual chillies, rather than a dusting of chilli flakes.

Does this sound miserable? I’m so sorry if it does, because I was so hoping to like this. Especially as Zoë left about a third of it – which would not have happened at Amò or Paesinos – and, just as damningly, I didn’t take it off her hands. But I do feel more unsure in my judgment than usual, because people I like rate Zi Tore and I, too, really wanted to.

I’m afraid to say, though, that the pizza beat the pasta hands down. I’d chosen ravioli – made fresh every day onsite – rather than gnocchi, and the porcini mushroom sauce over the ragu on the recommendation of others. And again I wonder if my antennae were just out of kilter that day, because I did not like it at all.

Didn’t like any bit of it, actually. The ravioli, six very large specimens, had bottoms more thick and dense than Robert Jenrick, when I was hoping for lightness and delicacy. I also think they could have stood to be smaller, or for you to have fewer of them, although if I’d liked them you can bet I wouldn’t have said that. The filling was meant to be ricotta and parmesan, but all I got was ricotta and an aggressive blast of citrus. Not a light zing of the stuff, but the sort of brutal clubbing you associate with bathroom products.

I tried eating them without the sauce to check that my tastebuds weren’t playing up. But yes, again, an overdose of lemon. Perhaps if there had been less, and more balancing saltiness from the parmesan, which was completely missing in action, it might have worked. But as it was it didn’t, and it slugged it out with the mushroom sauce for dominance. Those two components simply couldn’t get along at all: perhaps I should have known that and not combined them but, if they didn’t go, why was it an option on the menu?

Might I have enjoyed this better if the sauce took centre stage, paired with gnocchi? I tried that on its own, too, and decided the answer was probably no. It felt somehow less than the sum of its parts, without any savoury depth from the mushrooms, which might have been porcini but I was not convinced. And again, the presentation of this was about taking a plate and trying to fill it to the perimeter with stuff, just because. I would have liked less: lighter, more delicate presentation but with punchier, better balanced flavours.

Again, the ultimate heckle. There were six ravioli. I wanted to stop after three, but thought that would seem rude: isn’t it strange how as a paying customer you can still feel like that? I contemplated leaving two on the plate but felt that even that would somehow be discourteous or ungrateful. So I ate another, and then decided I’d done my duty. I was undeniably full, make no mistake, but it had felt like a friend cooking for you in all the wrong ways.

I so wanted not to begin the year with a review like this, especially after all the hoo-ha last year every time I stepped into any Reading restaurant which was even vaguely Italian. I’m surprised, given the smear campaign I found out about, that I was even allowed on the premises at Zi Tore.

But the cosmos has well and truly taught me a lesson. I made the mistake of saying in my round up of 2025 that I might be better off giving every Italian restaurant a rating of 6.6 and saying it was ‘quite nice’ from now on, and fate rewarded me with this experience. Look at the rating below: you couldn’t make it up, but if I moved it a notch up or down I’d only be doing it so as not to look as if I was fulfilling a prophecy.

So I need to at least be more nuanced when I sum up Zi Tore than to say that it’s quite nice. That doesn’t reflect the complexity of the reality, anyway, and visiting the restaurant nearly a year after it opened you can’t put the things you aren’t wild about down to growing pains or opening before they’re ready. The experience I had there is the experience I was supposed to have.

It is fantastic that a hospitality business took the space vacated by the Grumpy Goat, and that there is still one oasis of food and drink on a run which used to be synonymous with food and is now full of mobile phone repair shops nobody seems to visit (and, to be fair, Reading’s finest branch of Timpson). It’s also fantastic that it’s independent, and laudable that Zi Tore makes everything onsite and offers options you can’t get elsewhere in town that have made at least one Italian I know ecstatic and a little less homesick.

And I can see that I would return to Zi Tore, believe it or not. I’m really sorry that I didn’t love the pizza or pasta, but one of those window seats on the mezzanine with a cup of coffee, a montanara and the chance to explore some of their cake after that would very much appeal to me. Especially as the service was so good, and happy and helpful. But I don’t know if Zi Tore will survive and make enough money if all its customers order like me, or whether it really wants just to be a café given the expansion of its pizza menu and its opening hours.

Fortunately for Zi Tore I suspect not all of its customers order like me, or think like me, and Reading is a big enough place that it might well carve out a large enough share of the market keeping at what it does. But the market may well contract further in 2026, and so I wish them the best of luck. At the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Amò, closed for over a month on Kings Road, will reopen. Ironically, it might be good news for Zi Tore if it doesn’t.

Zi Tore – 6.6
7 Union Street, Reading, RG1 1EU
0118 9561531

https://www.zitore.co.uk

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Feature: The 2025 Edible Reading Awards

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You’ll have to forgive me, because in the normal run of events I announce my award winners at the end of the year, wrapping everything up in a bow so we can all get on with a fresh twelve months. I’m tardy this time, partly because writing these is still more laborious than it would normally be (I won’t go into all that again) and partly because, having dodged the flu/lurgy/Covid that Zoë invariably gets over Christmas most years, she’s managed to get clobbered with a chest infection instead, right on New Year’s Eve. So the house has become a little hospital ward in its own right, and writing has taken a back seat. Never mind: better late than never.

You’d think the extra deliberation time would make writing these awards easier, but if anything it’s had the opposite effect. It’s been a good year for Reading food, with plenty of good, interesting places opening in and around the town centre. But the majority of those new places – the best of them, anyway – are squarely in the casual dining sector, offering pizzas and burgers, the stuff that influencers tend to review. We’ve not had a similar rise in other kinds of restaurants, and when I asked on my Facebook page what people would like to see more of in 2026 the comments, all full of hope and optimism, made for quite a frustrating crib sheet of many of the things Reading still lacks.

No specialist fish restaurant, no proper gelato parlour, no Mexican restaurant. No Latin American cuisine of any kind, come to think of it (“it’s hard to get Samoan chop suey round here” said possibly the most niche comment I received). A lot of people identified that we still lack a tapas restaurant, something I’ve been moaning about since the earliest days of this blog, when we had a bad one. Many others wanted a good, independent Italian restaurant and a French bistro: French food is having a proper moment in London, but that has not extended this far west yet.

Some people wanted things which required the geography (and possibly the climate) of Reading to be different – more al fresco dining and rooftop bars – and others expressed more general aspirations we can all get behind. “Less greedy landlords” said one person and, not necessarily changing the subject, “less John Sykes” said another. Everybody wanted lower rents for independents, a utopia we’ve been waiting for long enough to know it won’t happen. One comment wanted to see “a realisation by landlords that it’s better to have a good tenant paying less than you’d like than to have an empty unit paying you nothing at all”: don’t we all? “I just want a decent bagel bakery” read one plaintive cry.

It’s hard not to feel discouraged, reading all that. And doubly so for me, because a reasonable proportion of my reviews last year were of places outside Reading, in the surrounding countryside or further afield, in Bristol, Oxford, Bath or London. And I know there’s a degree of cherry-picking going on – I don’t pick places a train ride away unless I’m confident they’ll be worth the journey – but the restaurants I’ve encountered on my travels often have what Reading lacks.

And I don’t see places like that opening in Reading, not on the evidence of last year or any year since 2018. We don’t have a pub like the Three Tuns, a bar like Newbury’s Parched, a restaurant like Seasonality, a bakery like U. Bakery or a tapas spot like Arbequina. We have pizza and burgers, and pizza and burgers have their place, but it’s starting to feel a tad lopsided.

So these awards have something of a split personality, because this year I’m giving out awards for dishes and restaurants in Reading, but also for those further afield. I’ve had some excellent food in Reading, but the very best of what I’ve eaten in most cases, as this list clearly shows, has involved some travel. I sincerely hope 2026 closes the gap.

That isn’t intended to imply that you can’t eat wonderful food in Reading. Because you really can, and narrowing the awards down to a winner and two honourable mentions has been difficult in many cases. To give you an idea, I couldn’t find room for dishes – all excellent – by Kungfu Kitchen, Pau Brasil, The Moderation, and Good Old Days among the final winners, and an extra week or two of head-scratching didn’t make that any easier. But if deciding between Reading dishes was difficult, possibly deciding between dishes outside Reading was just a little more fun; one was an agonising choice of who went where on the podium, the other a somewhat more satisfying wander down memory lane.

Anyway, without any further ado let’s get on with opening another year’s set of sealed envelopes. I hope you enjoy this, even if you find much to disagree with in it. Here’s hoping the decisions are even more problematic when this all comes round again at the end of the year.

STARTER OF THE YEAR (Reading): Frittatini, Amò Italian Street Food

Amò’s pasta fritti, breadcrumbed, fried pucks of pasta with either ragu or – even better – aubergine and tomato are not always available, but when they are, they’re an absolute must order. I can’t remember how many times I ate them last year, I just know that it wasn’t enough. “They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form” I said when I ate them for the first time. I know I’m not always right, and doubtless you do too, but I was right about that.

It saddens me a great deal that I couldn’t give this award out to either of the runners-up. Honourable mentions go to Oishi for its exquisite prawn and leek gyoza and Club India, the pride of Winnersh, for curry leaf calamari, an almost impossibly moreish dish.

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2025: The Year In Review

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I imagine that you are reading this in the strange hinterland that is the time between Christmas and New Year. Whether you’re working, “working from home but not really” or have the time off, it’s a funny period when days lose their meaning, leftovers become meals, the fridge takes a lot of emptying and the liver takes a lot of punishment. It’s usually one of my favourite times of the year, even if it’s also a strange limbo. If nothing else, it’s the last seven days before I have to at least pretend to want to lose weight.

But if that is you, spare me a thought. Because this year (as you may already know) I’m at home convalescing from an impressively broken arm as I write this – or, rather, dictate it on my MacBook. Which means that my last few weeks have been like the week you’re going through now, and the next few weeks most likely will be too. Except I don’t get to do the socialising or the drinking with reckless abandon, although I still badly need to pretend to want to lose weight. Ideally, I need to genuinely want to lose weight, and not only that but I need to want to enough to actually do it. That’s a challenge at the best of times.

But this period lends itself well to reflection. So there’s no better time to look back on the year drawing to a close and ahead to the year to come. Traditionally, this annual blog post has been a bit gloomy, because ever since the pandemic either restaurants have been closing left right and centre or I’ve been saying “well, it might not have been so bad this year but just wait till next year: next year is going to be dreadful”. It’s always made for a cheery read, don’t you think?

So it might surprise you to find, as it has surprised me, that this year hasn’t been like that at all. I regularly read about London restaurants closing, or read essays from restaurateurs about how Rachel Reeves single-handedly hammered the final nail in their restaurant’s coffin (even though that is staggeringly reductive), but Reading has been weirdly buoyant in 2025. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our fair share of farewells, but this year that’s been far outweighed by the number of hellos. 

Some newcomers have jumped in the graves of recently departed favourites, but others have opened in sites that have been dormant for some time, or that weren’t previously restaurants at all. Where’s the money coming from? Why are people gambling on this in 2025 of all years, when the consensus seems to be that the dice are loaded against hospitality like never before? 

Search me. That requires the kind of socio-economic analysis you would get from Reading-on-Thames, not me. I just report the stuff, so with that in mind let’s have a look at this year’s comings and goings, to see if we can make any sense of it all. What’s the worst that can happen?

* * * * *

It’s traditional for restaurants to bite the bullet in January, having banked their Christmas takings and come to the realisation that they don’t fancy three bitterly cold months when punters have no cash, are on diets, are taking part in Dry January etc. But the only restaurant to take that course of action this year was Bluegrass BBQ. I thought that was quite sad, as it happens, because although I know its quality was variable I always loved their breakfast. There is still a gap in the market for a restaurant doing a high-quality breakfast in the centre of Reading, and Bluegrass’ departure leaves Côte as the only serious alternative to Bill’s for the most important meal of the day.

Departures started to bite in the Oracle across the rest of the winter. Mission Burrito decided to close at the start of February, which again saddened me even though I had to be honest and say that I couldn’t remember the last time I ate there. Maybe that was the problem, perhaps nobody could. In March we lost Gordon Ramsay Street Burger – weirdly one of the most widely read restaurant reviews I’ve ever published – and I’m not sure it was really mourned by anyone who didn’t work there. 

When I went, I remember saying that it wasn’t as bad as you might expect but that it still couldn’t match the standard of Honest: its closure suggests that at least a few people agreed with me. Maybe things will get surreal next year – Jamie Oliver announced that he is reviving the Jamie’s Italian brand, all transgressions seemingly forgiven, and you wouldn’t bet against him returning to Reading. Maybe it can move into that giant site that has been vacant ever since Lemoni gave up the ghost, and we can all feel like there’s been a glitch in the Matrix.

There was far more openly expressed sadness at the very end of March when Munchees closed. And even though I never went, and the last time I saw the interior was when it featured briefly in Broadchurch, I did understand this one. It was one of the very last of a breed of caffs that used to be part of the fabric of Reading, along with the likes of Platters, Chelsea Coffee House and others I’ve forgotten. 

I used to be a regular at Platters, drinking frothy coffee out of a plastic beaker, smoking like a chimney, doing the crossword in a red top tabloid and occasionally treating myself to bacon and eggs on toast (if it was just after payday). What can I say? It was the Nineties. And if my taste evolved and poncified, to Coffee Republic and then to the likes of Workhouse, Tamp and C.U.P. it didn’t mean that I didn’t hope there would still be a place for those kinds of cafés. But businesses can’t coast on nostalgia, they have to survive on takings; this leaves Rafina on West Street as the last of a dying breed.

Spring and summer brought another spate of closures, although fewer than you might have expected. In May Sarv’s Slice quit the Biscuit Factory in a blaze of acrimony, making all sorts of allegations about the management interfering with their equipment. Apart from a few pop-ups at Double-Barrelled and the Nag’s Head, Reading has not seen them again, and probably won’t as they concentrate on their new base in Ealing: their reputation was also enhanced by an appearance on Saturday morning TV.

This is of course an enormous shame, but as we will see, Sarv may have made a very smart decision to get out of town just as a wave of new pizza challengers hit the town centre. But they will be missed, not only for their excellent Neapolitan pizzas but for the Detroit style pies; nobody in Reading has even tried to emulate those. 

I’ve no idea what’s going on at the Biscuit Factory, which seems to be limping on amid constant speculation that it will close, but at some point this year we also lost Compound Coffee from its ground floor, a terrible shame as it did probably the best coffee that end of town. Also in West Reading, we said goodbye to Romanian restaurant Vampire’s Den at some point around May or June; I never ate there, so I can’t tell you whether their name was the biggest of their problems.

And also in June, a rather sad development: The Cellar, the restaurant which rose from the ashes of Valpy Street (and appeared to have the same owner and most of the same staff) stopped trading. At the time I thought this was a terrible shame but now, at the end of the year, I’m rather more suspicious of businesses that quit under one name and reopen under another, for reasons which will become clear before too long.

As autumn turned to winter, we got a closure which might represent some kind of record. Peppito, the new pizza restaurant on the first floor of John Sykes’s development (the one that used to be called King’s Walk) closed in October. Nothing surprising about that, you might think – John Sykes’ tenants don’t have the best survival rate – but it is noteworthy because Peppito only opened at the end of May. A cryptic message on Instagram said that the restaurant would be “pausing operations for a while” because of “circumstances”. 

Your guess is as good as mine, but the one time I walked past Peppito it appeared to only have one table, which made it almost completely reliant on delivery apps. Given Sykes’ insatiable desire for rent, I’m not sure bunging a couple of pizzas to Readings resident influencers was ever going to overcome the site’s inherent shortcomings. “This isn’t goodbye – it’s a reset” said the Instagram post: okay, sure.

That brings us to the end of the year, and a few significant events. First of all Pappadams, which was taken over around March, completely rebranded and so ceased to be. That might be for the best, as I’ve heard reports from people who went there under the new management and said it wasn’t the restaurant it used to be, and not in a good way either. 

Another sad announcement came from Whitley, where Dough Bros announced that they would be serving their last pizzas on the 20th of December. Happily, a buyer has been found for that business so it will reopen under the same name in the New Year, and it’s looking to add smash burgers to its repertoire. Let’s hope the new owners are worthy custodians of its reputation.

It’s common for restaurants to announce their closure early in the New Year, but this year Bierhaus wasn’t fucking about. They filled their last steins on the Sunday before Christmas, bringing to an end a nine year spell on Queens Walk. There has been speculation about whether they will crop up elsewhere, and whether vacating the site has anything to do with the wider redevelopment of the Broad Street Mall: in any event this leaves that stretch looking even more desolate than usual, with Sushimania at one end and ThaiGrr! at the other.

Then we had the weirdest event of all: three days before Christmas, Phantom Brewery made an announcement that it was closing its sites in Reading and Henley and suspending brewing for the foreseeable future while it moved to a new location. It added, ominously, that it would “undergo a period of restructuring to ensure the appropriate foundations are in place for the next phase”.

The announcement provoked a lot of discussion locally, with suggestions from one employee that they had not been aware of this, and some claims from suppliers that they hadn’t been able to get hold of the brewery for some time. It also appeared that one of Phantom’s partners in particular, 7Bone, had not been aware until they read the announcement that they wouldn’t be cooking at the tap room that week.

Since then Phantom has appointed liquidators, and it looks like long and complicated discussions lie ahead. Staff at the brewery have contacted me to assure me that all employees were fully paid for their work up to the point of closure, and intimated that there is a lot more to this situation than meets the eye: as a result I have amended the text I initially put in this round-up, and will be more circumspect in future. Fingers crossed that all affected suppliers are reimbursed as much as possible as soon as possible. 

You would hope that that would be the final closure of 2025, but would you believe that there was time for just one more? Hard to credit, but it’s true: just after Christmas, the Blagrave Arms announced that its New Year’s Eve drinks would be its last. Now, that might not come as such a surprise to those of you who, like me, occasionally look at the business section of Rightmove, where the pub had been listed for sale for some time. The Hop Leaf on Southampton Street is on there too, if you have £420,000 to spare.

Rightmove also gives you an idea of what to expect in 2026. Sweeney & Todd is still for sale, although that hardly classes as news because the owners have been trying to offload it for a very long time. But there’s also a listing for a restaurant in Caversham which requires you to sign an NDA for its identity but is clearly, from the details in the listing, Papa Gee.

Similarly, there is a day café for sale in south Reading. And by all means sign the NDA to get details if you know literally nothing about Reading, but otherwise it’s clear from the specifics in the publicly available brochure – especially its layout and limited opening hours – that it can only be one specific establishment on Kennet Island. Will my 2026 roundup confirm that either of these businesses has closed or changed hands? Place your bets.

* * * * *

What a bummer! Let’s move on to happier news, and the glut of new hospitality businesses opening in Reading this year. I may not have captured all of them, but I do think this is most of them. And apologies in advance – it’s a lot.

January saw a number of places open in Reading. There was Paesinos, in the vanguard of the Italian invasion, which opened on King Street. Gurt Wings announced the start of a year long residency at Blue Collar Corner which was, to my mind at least, marred by consistency and staffing issues. It draws to an end on New Year’s Eve, so we will have to rely on pop-ups for our Gurt fix in 2026. The Lyndhurst re-re-opened, if that’s a thing, and have remained under the same management for a whole year, lending some badly needed continuity. 

And finally, of course, we got our first big name opening of the year when Rosa’s Thai took on their spot on the ground floor of the iconic Jackson’s Corner building. The fit out, by Quadrant Design, is very fetching indeed and every time I walk past it I’m glad it’s open, glad that it’s brought life to that corner of town, and pleased that people are inside having a good time. I am, in truth, equally pleased that I don’t have to eat there again.

In February the Burger Society announced that they were also taking on a residency at Blue Collar Corner: great news for fans of burgers, fried chicken and so on but maybe less good news for vegetarians, who would’ve found Blue Collar Corner slightly lacking in options. There was a slight impression that the market was struggling to attract traders, because the third spot was often taken by another street food business run by the Burger Society. It will be interesting to see what next year’s shake-up brings.

February also brought us the second of Reading’s four – count them, four – Italian restaurants in the town centre this year. Zi Tore, in the Grumpy Goat’s old home on Smelly Alley, opened daytimes only selling pizza, gnocchi and Italian baked goods. I’m yet to review it, because it turns out that they close earlier than advertised, but I’ll do my best to get there next year.

Because that wasn’t enough pizza for the RG1 postcode, in April we got Amò, literally a couple of doors down from Paesinos. Amò is a collaboration between the owners of Madoo and Earley-based Pulcinella Focaccia, and has more space than Paesinos with a very different menu and a different focus during the day. I liked both but, as we shall see, they didn’t necessarily like me back.

April also heralded the arrival of Dolphin’s in the town centre where 7Bone used to be, and rather interestingly Food Stasian in Woodley precinct, a no-frills restaurant in the old Adda Hut site offering, by the looks of it, a combination of Vietnamese and Hong Kong dishes. The arrival of restaurants to serve the Hongkonger community would be another trend this year, although most of the activity there was towards the end of 2025.

The final Italian restaurant to try its luck in the town centre this year opened in May. That was Peppito, and we’ve already talked about their record breaking reign. But May was also the month that we got our second significant opening of the year, with the arrival of Cosy Club at the edge of the Oracle, where Lakeland used to live. Cosy Club also leaned heavily on influencers, or content creators, or whatever else you want to call them: I went, spent my own money, and rather wished I hadn’t.

Things didn’t let up over the summer, and an awful lot of places opened in that time. July brought Club India out in Winnersh, potentially the most exciting thing to happen to Winnersh since it got name checked in that episode of The Office. Café Yolk opened their second site, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, with more emphasis on grab and go, and, at long last, Lincoln Coffee finally opened its second site in the old Workhouse Coffee building on King Street. The makeover they’ve done, which I imagine took ages and cost a lot, is fantastic. And the influencers just love the food, which they did not pay for.

The same day that Lincoln Coffee opened, it was all going on around St Mary’s Butts. The old County Deli site, where Kate Winslet used to work pre-Titanic, opened as Pho 86, a third Vietnamese restaurant in town. It had a slightly ropey hygiene rating from the council at first, but a subsequent inspection in October has largely sorted that out. Also that very day, possibly the single busiest day in Reading’s restaurant history since the opening of the Oracle, Thai restaurant Nua took over where Bluegrass used to be.

Station Hill also welcomed its first new business at the end of July, when Notes opened its first branch outside London; I was very excited about this one, which meant the disappointment when I ate there was even greater. We should see Italian wine bar Angelo’s (from the people behind Wokingham’s Ruchetta, which has now rebranded as Angelo’s) and Japanese restaurant Kawaii, from the owners of Coconut and Osaka, open next year. I do wonder if the spate of bars and cafés on Station Hill is largely connected to the lack of extraction at that site: it’s a pity there are so few proper restaurants there.

Hong Kong restaurant Take Your Time opened in August, taking over one of Reading’s most mothballed sites, the former home of Dolce Vita. Those are big shoes to fill, and with Reading’s most noted philanthropist John Sykes as your landlord there is no doubt also a big rent to pay. Best of luck to them with that: their menu is best described as iconoclastic.

August also brought two of the most interesting and surprising establishments I reviewed all year, namely Stop & Taste out in Emmer Green, where an ex-private chef cooked whatever he damn well pleased in a place that looked from the outside like a bog-standard chicken shop, and Mac’s Deli in Theale. The latter was the effortless second album from Mac Dsouza, the owner of Filter Coffee House, an outstanding day café selling brilliant sandwiches made from top-notch ingredients, showcasing Dsouza’s very own Japanese milk bread. 

As so often, most of the interesting things in Reading’s food scene happened absolutely nowhere near the town centre. Why could that be, I wonder?

We’re on the home straight now, as autumn came to an end and winter began to bite. Indian restaurant Bagaara opened on the Shinfield Road in September, where Firezza used to be. October gave us Blip, a smash burger place in Tilehurst from the owners of The Switch and Zyka. The look and branding were a clear homage to bigger burger restaurants in London, and they won a slightly dubious award barely a month after opening, but the burgers might well be good. I’ll find out in the New Year.

In November, 1650 Coffee – no extractor fan required – also opened on Station Hill. The provenance of it is unclear: I’ve heard separately that it’s from the team behind Café Yolk and that it’s owned by one of the original founders of Yolk. Either way, you do have to be slightly impressed that the majority of units on Station Hill are being taken by independent businesses with some link to Reading.

Quite the contrast to that is Smoke & Pepper, which is part of a biggish chain and opened on the Butter Market in the place of Munchees. The best way to describe the food they do is to say that it’s a restaurant for influencers and teenagers: smash burgers, loaded fries, chicken tenders and so on. Basically if you don’t need cutlery to eat it, they sell it. 

And it might be fantastic, and at some point I’m sure I will find out, but the opening of another restaurant with the same kind of menu as Mr. T on the edge of the Broad Street Mall, accompanied by gushing about how it hits different, or slays, or slaps, or whatever the fuck passes for English in those Instagram videos really doesn’t make me yearn to pay it a visit. Sorry-not-sorry about that.

One of the happiest events of Reading’s food year happened at the very start of December. After giving up her office job to re-enter the world of hospitality, and after a trial run in a couple of locations in Reading, Naomi Lowe re-launched the Nibsy’s brand with Beryl, her deeply fetching cream-coloured trailer, berthed permanently outside Reading station, offering gluten-free sweet and savoury treats and excellent coffee on the go. 

This is really welcome news, whether you need to eat gluten-free or not, if only because the coffee alternatives near the station are Prêt, Costa and Notes, none of which are any great shakes. But it’s also lovely to see one of Reading hospitality’s great innovators return to the business, after far too long away.

December also saw Pappadams close and rebrand as Anjappar – still south Indian, but part of a much bigger chain of what I presume are franchises. It also brought queues around the block when Hong Kong restaurant Me Kong opened at the back of the Blade. Along with Take Your Time, it again showed a subtle shift in the kind of restaurants opening in Reading, along with a hint about the communities they might serve.

You would think that was the last of it, but actually that prize goes to Matteo Greek Food & Bakery which opened where O Português used to be, right next to Palmer Park, on the 20th December. Details about it are sketchy, but the owner appears to be Albanian which puts it in the company of restaurants like Quattro and Spitiko. It could be an interesting one to watch next year. 

Next year will also bring a new business where The Cellar used to be, called The Nook. Again, there’s not much information online yet (try googling “the nook Reading” and you just get loads of wholesome stuff about nice places to leaf through a paperback with a hot cuppa) but it sounds like it will be a coffee kiosk upstairs and God knows what downstairs. Time will tell, as it always does.

* * * * *

So what have the main trends of 2025 been? Well, you can probably discern the obvious ones from what I’ve just written: a lot of pizza restaurants, relatively few big names chancing a town centre opening and, perhaps more of a curveball, a recent influx of restaurants aiming to cater for the Hong Kong community in Reading. But more widely, there are a couple of other trends that I’ve noticed as a restaurant reviewer.

The first is an increase in the number of influencers or content creators. To some extent, that’s possibly the biggest sign in everybody’s minds that the pandemic is very much ancient history. Back then, some influencers expressed concern about taking free food when the industry was in so much trouble. Despite the climate remaining challenging those concerns seem to have dissipated, so we see a lot more content on Instagram – some paid, some unpaid, some unpaid and declared, some unpaid and undeclared – not just in London, where this stuff makes the national news, but here in Reading.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there is an increasing willingness for brands to engage with those accounts. That Rosa’s Thai or Cosy Club would authorise the people handling their PR to dish out free meals isn’t a surprise. But to see smaller independent businesses – the likes of Amò, Blue Collar Corner or Fidget & Bob – doing likewise suggests that, like it or not, this form of coverage is now normalised. Businesses are making a calculation that this brings in more money than it costs, and whether the free food is declared or not (and in fairness it sometimes is) any concerns about credibility are not that business’ problem.

The other trend that I’ve definitely seen is an increasing – how best to put this? – prickliness from businesses about reviews. Maybe that is tied to businesses increasingly paying for coverage which they know will be positive, and maybe it’s not. Earlier in the month the Observer published an article querying whether the “vicious restaurant review” was on its way out. I don’t know about that: on the rare occasions when I do publish a review with a very low rating the page hits very much suggest that people still enjoy reading them.

But I will say that businesses are definitely engaging with those reviews in a very different way. You may recall that I reviewed Vino Vita earlier in the year. You might also recall that I thought the food was atrocious – rating 4.6 – and the whole experience something of a bin fire. What you may not know is the significant backlash I received as a result of publishing that review.

So Vino Vita’s Head Of Sales – still a real job, apparently – took to Instagram to post what she believed was a photo of me, describing me as a xenophobic narcissist and urging all hospitality businesses, especially Italian ones, to refuse to allow me on the premises. I also got some fan mail from a supporter of Vino Vita calling out my “lack of support for Reading’s businesses”. What else to expect from a man who only appreciates fish and chips, she asked? 

“I’ll make sure your face is known to every business you plan to visit in Reading – persona non grata” she signed off. Well isn’t that nice? At the time of writing, this boycott has so far failed to materialise: perhaps it will feature in a lot of restaurateurs’ New Year’s resolutions.

But what was really odd this year was that this kind of sensitivity was not limited to negative reviews. Even positive reviews received dissatisfied responses from the restaurants in question, as if you weren’t positive in the right way. For instance, I gave Paesinos – a restaurant I loved – a rating of 8.6, the highest I’d given out in the centre of Reading at the time. They blocked me on Instagram after reading a quote out of context about one item on their menu (to be fair, they subsequently read the whole review and relented).

Later in the year I reviewed Amò, which I also loved and also rated as 8.6. I then got an angry message on Instagram from one of the owners complaining that I’d spent the whole of my review talking about Paesinos, despite the fact that I had mainly been saying that it was almost impossible to choose between them and that they were both excellent. “You used my restaurant as a way to promote Paesinos” he said, rather epically missing the point.

The main lesson I’ve taken from all this is that maybe it’s best not to review Italian restaurants at all, or if I do not to give them a rating of 4.6 or 8.6. Perhaps I should just say that they’re all quite nice and give them 6.6, or just not bother. But even where a review is positive, I’ve had at least one occasion where the restaurateur thought it just wasn’t positive enough.

I reviewed one restaurant where I described a dish as ‘too well-behaved’. The restaurateur in question was so rattled by this that he wrote a whole blog post in which he said “what the fuck does that even mean?”, conveniently overlooking the fact that I’d explained exactly what it meant in that very paragraph. That was just part of a whole think piece that urged people to stop analysing food and just enjoy themselves: which is fine if you’re a punter, but is essentially arguing that people shouldn’t review restaurants at all (the blog in question, you might be surprised to hear, also reviews restaurants).

So it’s almost as if people in this climate, or people who run restaurants at least, want fewer people to review restaurants in general and for us to just accept bland uncritical gushing on TikTok or Instagram: nearly all the restaurants I’ve just mentioned gave free food to influencers in 2025. If you don’t like your food in a restaurant go home and cook for yourself, that think piece concluded. For me, this attitude is as good a reason as any for me to keep at it.

But it would be rank hypocrisy of me not to acknowledge at this point that I’m just as bad when it comes to taking pot shots at other people expressing their opinions of what they’ve eaten. 

I do have enough self-awareness to realise this, and it’s something I will be changing next year. So this is the last time you’ll hear me take a swipe at slack-jawed gormless influencers, with their toddler palates and mindless waggling fingers, smashing junk food into their gaping mouths and describing things as “sick” or “insane”, words only simpletons bandy about. 

It’s the last time I will criticise a restaurant blogger who constantly takes pot shots at those influencers on his social media, but was tacky enough to take a PR invite – food and accommodation, no less – for the first night of his actual honeymoon. And it’s the last time I will mock the unchecked privilege of a blogger who has claimed to cover the events in her city all year, while concealing the fact that she’s been on a hugely entitled gap year for practically all of 2025 and is probably writing that copy from a hammock in Ecuador.

Let them, as Mel Robbins likes to say. Grifters gonna grift. But it’s time to stop tilting at windmills because those battles are all over: I need to stop picking fights, stay in my lane and just do what I do, because that kind of competition is no competition at all. Don’t worry, I will still point out that the Chronicle is dogshit though, because some things don’t change. 

* * * * *

I just don’t need to do those things any more. The blog has had an absolutely terrific year, with traffic up from 2024 which I genuinely thought was not possible. That’s despite some of my blog traffic being lost to email subscriptions, a by-product of the blog moving partially to a subscription model at the beginning of the year.

And I do have to say something about that. It felt like a huge leap into the unknown when I published that post in January, and I was fully prepared to be laughed out of my corner of the Internet. That it didn’t happen, and that so many of you were prepared to put your hands in your pockets and support quality independent writing means more to me than you can know. 

I hope I’ve always made it clear that it wasn’t mandatory, and that much of the content on the blog would always be free to view, but I also hope those of you who have subscribed have felt that there was enough subscriber-only content to justify your support. I promise that it’s never, ever taken for granted.

That support has enabled me to do a number of things. First and foremost of course the blog is now ad-free, and will always remain so. That was literally the first thing I did. Secondly, it’s enabled me to widen the range of restaurants I review: I hope that I’ve got the balance right between Reading and outside Reading – although I plan to fine tune that in the New Year – but I certainly wouldn’t have reviewed Orwells for instance without the blog being on a subscription model.

It’s been nice, too, to hold back some reviews, like those of Rosa’s Thai, Cosy Club and Henley’s Three Tuns, for subscribers to read. Archive reviews of open Reading restaurants are also now subscriber only, and if you are a subscriber, I’d love to hear from you if you have any other ideas about the blog. The inaugural subscriber drinks over the summer was enormous fun too, and I do have to apologise that my accident has forced me to postpone the drinks planned for Christmas. We’ll just have to do spring drinks instead.

But it’s been such a terrific year in so many respects. Five readers’ lunches, including the first ever at The Moderation which was simply a magnificent meal from start to finish. Every bit as phenomenal was the event at Clay’s Kitchen in October where Nandana put together a fever dream of a menu, reinventing, elevating or restoring to classic roots the Anglo Indian dishes we all remember from countless Bangladeshi curry houses in the U.K. 

Nandana’s onion bloom pakora, miso glazed chicken tikka, her lamb keema pie and her pork vindaloo will stay with me long after I forgot many of the things I’ve eaten this year: of all of the meals I had in 2025, this one might have felt like the greatest privilege of all.

It’s also been a brilliant year for food. I’ll cover the best of it when I give out my awards imminently, but I’ve given out some of my highest ratings ever this year. I don’t think that’s rampaging grade inflation, it’s more a reflection that I’ve been to some outstanding restaurants. In London that’s been places like Paulette and The French House, in Bristol the spectacular RAGÙ. Closer to home Orwell’s and the Three Tuns have both knocked my socks off, almost equally but in completely different ways. That’s the beauty of restaurants.

I also think, though, that Reading’s restaurants have improved. After a very long barren period, which largely coincided with the pandemic and its aftermath, this year we got Club India, Stop & Taste, Mac’s Deli, Amò and Paesinos, and I made it to a revitalised Oishi. Any other year any of those restaurants might be the event of the year: how lucky we are that 2025 is the year when they all happened. There’s never been a better time to be in Italian in Reading, my friend Enza likes to say (and she isn’t even part of the vendetta against me, not as far as I’m aware).

My year has ended in circumstances I could never have imagined at the beginning, with an accident, hospitalisation and an operation which has forced me to take the last month of the year very easy indeed. But even that has been an experience with plenty of beauty in it. I wrote about my time in the Royal Berks and the response from regular readers, newcomers, hospital staff and volunteers has been one of the most moving things I can remember in a very long time. But it also reminds me that food, and Reading, and this blog are all about connection.

So some of my favourite moments have been every time someone interacts with my content, to tell me I’m right, to tell me I’m wrong, to tell me they plan to check somewhere out or to tell me that they’ve checked somewhere out because of something I wrote. I’ve been sent photos by readers of them posing with the owners of restaurants I’ve recommended in a European city guide. I’ve had emails or WhatsApps or messages on Facebook with pictures of one of my favourite places to eat and drink, sometimes saying “look, I made it here!” and sometimes saying “guess where I am?” For the record, I usually guess correctly.

I’ve had messages from friends telling me that they are in some of my favourite cities – Granada more than once this year – and that they are eating or drinking in one of my beloved haunts. I’ve even had an email from an orthopaedic surgeon in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, telling me that my city guides to Montpellier and Paris led to him eating and drinking brilliant things in both cities. He emailed me again this week to say how sorry he was to hear about my accident. Those are the things that make this so worth doing, and as I get to the end of another year of doing it – my thirteenth, unbelievably – it makes me very grateful that I’ve had this experience and excited to see what next year has in store.

So it just remains for me to thank you for every word you’ve read (sorry there are so many this week), every like, comment or share, even every time you’ve read a piece by me and said – to yourself, under your breath or out loud – that I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, I appreciate it all. I hope you have a fantastic New Year’s Eve, however you are celebrating, and that 2026 brings you everything you could possibly hope for. 

You will hear from me again early next year, because I have some awards to announce. Behave yourself until then.

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

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Restaurant review: The Royal Berkshire Hospital

On By ediblereadingIn None of the above, Reviews9 Comments

On the Wednesday afternoon, my second full day in hospital after the accident, I put some pictures up on Facebook. Nothing special, just a picture from my bed of Dorrell Ward, my left foot poking out, and a shaky, badly photographed picture of my lunch. Well, I never thought this would be my next forthcoming restaurant review my caption read. I know the English is clumsy but in my defence I was dictating it, because typing was too challenging at that point. Besides, I’d probably just had some morphine.

The comments were immediate, plentiful and properly lovely. A couple of the funny ones stuck with me. Chronicle hitman? said one: I replied that it was more likely to be a whack job by the owners of Vino Vita. Another said that is extreme lengths you’ve gone to to obtain a review. I had the comeback in my mind – no stone left unturned, I thought I would say – but looking at my Facebook page, it seems I never posted it. Perhaps the morphine had kicked in by then: I did spend quite a lot of the time asleep, at the rare times when sleep came easily, because that way everything hurt less.

But the thing is, on some level it is a gap that I’ve never reviewed the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Because you could make an argument that it is Reading’s largest restaurant: the trust employs 7500 people, admittedly across more sites than just the RBH, and has over 800 beds. Put that way, it’s hard to imagine that even Reading’s busiest conventional restaurant feeds more people in a week.

So I suppose, in a funny kind of way, this review is sort of overdue. During my four night stay in a place that doubles as Reading’s busiest restaurant, I begin to get an idea of what an unusual beast it is.

* * * * *

I wasn’t meant to wind up an inpatient in the Royal Berks. A whole chain of things had to go wrong for me to be in the place I was and make the decision I did.

First of all, I shouldn’t have been commuting home that Monday afternoon. The previous week I’ve been off with the cold that everyone has had, the cold that wiped us all out. And I only went into the office to catch up with my boss, only to find when I got there that he’d had to take the day off at short notice. If I’ve known I would have worked from home, and never made the fateful journey that led to me coming a cropper.

And my boss’s boss, seeing that I was less than 100%, told me to go home early. That played a part too. So I found myself getting off a train somewhere between four-thirty and five o’clock, cutting through Harris Arcade on my way to pick something up from the supermarket. If I’d been later, the arcade would have been closed and I wouldn’t have used it as a short cut. But all those things happened, one after another, and so a little before five I got to the Friar Street end of the arcade to find the shutter in front of the exit halfway down.

In my mind, I thought two things that weren’t necessarily true. I thought that if I headed back to the other end of the arcade, I might find that shutter down too, and then by the time I returned to where I was I’d be shut in the arcade. I also looked at the shutter in front of me and thought to myself I can squeeze under that. And in that respect, I was sort of right: I did manage to shimmy under the shutter.

The problem was that retaining my footing on the other side was completely beyond me.

I went unceremoniously flying, face first into a parked car. My glasses were smashed to pieces, my face bleeding and grazed. But that wasn’t the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was that my arm, in unbelievable pain, no longer felt like mine. I have had to tell this story more times than I can tell you: to friends, to family, to acquaintances, but also to every single NHS staff member who has spoken to me in any capacity since the accident. The first thing they ask you is to confirm your name and your date of birth. But the second thing they say, without fail, is so how did it happen?

I always start with it’s really embarrassing, followed by do you know the Harris Arcade in town?  My shame is then compounded by the fact that invariably, whoever I’m talking to knows exactly where I’m talking about: I can’t even make it sound less ridiculous an accident than it was. “I’ve never heard that one before” said the very nice man that took my first x-ray after I was discharged from hospital. Many of the reactions have been variations on that theme.

My wife has heard me tell the tale many times, and has given me tips on how to make it more entertaining which I refuse to follow. Stories in her family are currency, and sitting with them watching them trade anecdotes is one of my favourite things to do, an opportunity to relax and enjoy the show. Zoë tells me that to get a big laugh I should pretend that the shutter was literally rolling down as I reached it and that I chose in an instant to slide underneath it. 

But that makes me sound intrepid, or brave, or both. In reality, I’m just a dumb middle-aged man who made a bad decision and went down like an overweight sack of potatoes. The closest I’ve come to taking her advice is this: whenever I tell someone what happened I say I tried to get under the shutter like a shit Indiana Jones. Even that, I’m painfully aware, makes me sound cooler than I really am.

* * * * *

After the accident, in shock and in pain, unable to see, I am peeled off the pavement by Elliott and Alex.

Everyone likes to think that they would stop in circumstances like these, but I think we all know that most people don’t. Elliott and Alex do. They are second year students at the university, who just happen to be in town that afternoon. They ask if I’m okay, and it soon becomes apparent that I’m not. They help me to a bench outside M&S, near the statue of Queen Victoria. They call 999 and put me on the line. The call handler suggests that I should go to the minor injuries unit in Henley. Elliott and Alex are having none of that. I call my wife, still at work, and she picks up because she knows that I never call her when she’s at work.

“Is everything okay?” she asks me. No, I reply. My arm doesn’t work, I say.

Elliott and Alex call me an Uber to get me to the RBH. Getting into it is agony, but they keep talking to me, keep me in the room, keep me distracted. They call their friends and tell them they’re running late, and they ride with me to the hospital and wait with me until my wife arrives, having rushed back from work. These people don’t know me, don’t know anything about me, but they give up two hours of their evening to stay with a stranger, one who’s in excruciating pain and blind as a bat. They only go when they know that Zoë has got home, has picked up some stuff and is in a taxi on her way to me.

We swap phone numbers, and Elliott texts me several times over the weeks ahead. I am yet to persuade him to let me pay for the Uber, but I intend to keep trying. It is the first and probably the biggest kindness I experience, but by no means the last.

After they are gone, I squint at my phone held in my one good hand and wait for Zoë. From down the corridor I hear her at reception. “I’m looking for my husband” she says, and when asked to describe me, she says “he’s big and grey”. I make a mental note never to let her forget this, but I’m just so happy she’s there.

* * * * *

My first experience of the food on the ward, the day after I am admitted, is not the best. Despite the fact that I’m pretty much unable to move, arm in a cast, dosed up with codeine and morphine like clockwork, it hasn’t registered with me that eating with one hand is going to be extremely difficult. I order cornflakes for breakfast, and then realise that sitting up in my bed to eat them is something of which I’m simply not capable. I write that off, because oddly my appetite isn’t what it usually is, and decide I can save myself for lunch.

Lunch is a vegetable risotto, glistening strangely under artificial lights that give it almost an oversaturated look, like a Martin Parr photograph. I push a couple of forkfuls into my mouth and decide these are calories I can do without. Besides, I decide that it looks more like something deposited on a pavement after closing time than the sort of thing I’m used to in pubs and restaurants. At this point, I guess I’m thinking of the Royal Berks as like an all inclusive holiday: you can always sneak in food from elsewhere.

Zoë comes to visit me every day, and between us we soon learn the ecosystem of alternatives in the hospital. The top of the tree is the M&S – “that little Marks & Spencer is a godsend”, Zoë says to me, remembering all the vegetable samosas I smuggled in for her when she spent the best part of a week on the Covid ward. I have a bag of crispy chocolate clouds on my bedside table pretty much most of the time, the challenge being to eat them before the sweltering heat makes them unviable.

And then there’s the hierarchy of coffee. Back when I lived near the hospital I used to walk to AMT for their mochas, and on hot days I’d buy a Froffee, a coffee and ice cream milkshake, and drink it in Eldon Square Gardens, soaking up the sun. I was between jobs back then, and it broke up the afternoons. But AMT’s best days are behind it, and the mocha Zoë brings me one morning is genuinely undrinkable. 

Better, to my surprise, is Pumpkin: one afternoon my dear friend Jerry comes to visit me and fetches me a mocha from Pumpkin which is a hundred times better than AMT’s. He also brings me a copy of Viz and the latest Private Eye, which is the kind of thoughtful thing great friends do. I read them at night, by the light of my bedside lamp, after half nine when visiting hours are over and my knackered wife has gone home to get some rest. She keeps me company for 12 hours, every single day, and she never complains.

We aren’t used to spending nights apart, and of all of the things about this that might be one of the most upsetting. The lights are never completely off in the ward, because they’re always coming round to top up your drugs or check your blood pressure. But with my fan whirring, and the other noise abating, the Yves Klein blue curtains drawn around my bed, we send each other good night messages and pictures, and I try to quieten my mind by reading the magazines that Jerry has brought me.

When it comes to coffee the god tier is Jamaica Blue. I reviewed them, over seven years ago, but somehow I’d forgotten about their existence, or how good they were. On the morning of my discharge from hospital Zoë brings me one of their mochas, and for the first time in almost a week I am reminded of how wonderful a thing great coffee can be. It’s a small, tenuous link to my pre-accident life of little luxuries, of V60s at home or my latte at C.U.P, always at 8am, before hopping on the train to the office.

Even better than that, if such a thing is possible, is the milkshake Zoë brought me the previous afternoon from Jamaica Blue, an indulgence so lovely I could almost weep. Thick, cold, chocolatey, more fun than you would ever reasonably expect to have in a hospital. It tastes, to paraphrase Philip Larkin in another context, like an enormous yes.

* * * * *

If I didn’t rely on goodies from the M&S or from the hospital’s cafés as much as I could have done, there was a reason for that. The reason was that the food from the Royal Berks proved to be quite the surprise package.

The menus come round every morning, printed each day, a series of boxes and options to tick for the following day’s breakfast, lunch and dinner. The weeks are numbered, and the font at the top of the menu calls them Lunch and Supper, in Mistral, a typeface you know even if you don’t realise you do. It’s the one from the logo of Australian soap Neighbours, designed in the ‘50s, a beautiful cursive script that is simultaneously retro and timeless. I’ve always loved Mistral, and somehow it brings a tiny chink of sunlight into a room shrouded with blinds.

After that disappointing risotto, somehow I never have another entirely bad meal during my time in hospital. For lunch on my second full day, I have a beef curry with rice and chunks of potato and while I’m eating it, I realise that it’s actually quite good. Not just the absence of bad, although I would’ve settled for that, but decent. 

The meat isn’t soft, tender, falling apart as it would be in a Clay’s curry, and the spicing isn’t complex, or even front and centre, but it’s not bouncy, fatty or gristly. The waxy cubes of potato add something, and I find that even with a broken arm, even with a hot uncomfortable cast on me, even with the fan humming and the painkillers wearing off, this is a good meal.

And then, afterwards, an even happier surprise. An apple crumble where the base is sweet, stewed apple but more importantly, the ratio of crumble to fruit is beyond reproach. And by that I mean that it’s easily two thirds crumble, a huge and joyous permacrust of biscuit so thick that I’m fearful, with only one hand, of whether I’ll be able to force my spoon through it. I manage it somehow, and the rewards are considerable.

I include a picture of my lunch with a picture of my ward as I send that first Facebook post mentioning what’s happened to me and where I have found myself. The responses flood in wishing me well, but they also do something interesting that I didn’t expect: a lot of them talk about the food. Because, and I had no idea of this, the hospital makes all of its food from scratch, on the premises, and they serve it in the restaurant as well as serving it to the patients. They could so easily use the likes of Sodexo: how wonderful it is that they choose not to.

One commenter tells me that she used to be the patient services manager for the catering department. The hard work that goes into all of those recipes is outstanding she tells me, and I can well believe it. She also sends me a lovely message with a few tips about what you can and can’t do around the menu, catering life hacks; I thank her for them but decide not to do any of them, because I don’t want to be a diva. The staff start work at 6am every day, she tells me, and work for 14 hours to ensure feeding everybody in the hospital: Reading’s largest restaurant indeed.

So many people comment along those lines, about the food, about the staff, about what a wonderful place the Royal Berks is for people when they need care the most. One of comments says how lovely the hospital’s goulash and spicy lamb are, another recommends the “cultural and religious menu”, a tip that is echoed by Zoë from her time on the Covid ward. The menu just calls it a “ethnic meal”, but I order it multiple times and am never disappointed.

Somebody else tells me that she’s been a patient at the RBH on and off for 18 months. The food is one of the highlights she tells me. It sounds silly, but all these intersecting stories, this universality of experience makes me feel less alone, and less scared. It also reinforces that even if I have very limited experience of this hospital – this is the first time I’ve ever spent the night in a hospital since I was born – the RBH is at the centre of Reading life, and it touches everybody.

It was there when my wife was taken away from our house in an ambulance late at night for a prolonged stay on the Covid ward, in the depths of winter 2021. Both of my sisters-in-law were born there, so were both of my beautiful nieces. It’s the RBH that treated my father-in-law when he had cancer, and again when he had a heart attack. And that’s just my family – but from the pile of comments I got a clear impression that it was central to countless more families than mine.

I never quite get over not hating the food. The following day I have a beef stroganoff which again, is just downright comforting and nice. The little mini packets of biscuits are by Crawfords, and are really enjoyable with a cup of hospital tea; I allow myself two sugars while I’m in hospital, it seems only right. The ice cream is lovely too, despite not resembling any ice cream I would buy for myself on the outside. You almost need to eat it first, because by the time you finished your stroganoff or your keema curry – accompanied by a little pot of dal or vegetable curry – it is a texture almost like foam.

* * * * *

One of the comments on my Facebook page says NHS toast is up there. And there is truth in that, too: every morning my breakfast form requests white toast with butter and Marmite, and there is real comfort in eating that around 8am, when the ward starts to stutter to life and the shifts change over, when you give up hope of getting any more shut eye until the afternoon. 

With only one arm, I have to ask the nurses to butter my toast and put Marmite on it. Every morning I luck out, either getting a nurse who loves Marmite or, equally likely, one who has never tried the stuff. The tub they bring is generous, and it is generously slathered on. I eat it in silent gratitude, and then I attack my sweet white tea, a drink I haven’t had for the best part of a decade.

* * * * *

Everyone says this, but it’s true: the staff at the RBH are uniformly fantastic. From the people who butter my toast to the ones who help me adjust my bed, from John, the helpful nurse on my final morning who walks me to the loo and protects my dignity to the two T-level students who are spending the week helping out on my ward, who take my blood pressure across the four days with gradually increasing proficiency, everybody is amazing. From the porters who wheel me across the hospital in my bed for a CT scan to the staff who somehow managed to roll and transfer me from my bed into the scanner – while again protecting what little dignity I have – it’s impossible to express admiration or gratitude adequately for them. 

And everybody knows everybody, the porters greet each other as they pass in corridors, the way bus drivers do. The staff have an incredible spirit and I can only imagine the strain that is put under, every single day. At the time I’m simply emotional and grateful and full of feelings in a way that suggests that, the rest of the time, they’re probably buried further below the surface than they should be.  I’ve spent more of the last five weeks crying then I have the five years before that.

It’s only later on, when I get home, that I feel angry that things should be so difficult for the people that work there. During the pandemic, I always neglected to stand outside my house and bash a saucepan with a wooden spoon, to clap for carers. I found it performative, I felt like it had been suggested by a government that did not care for that sector one iota, and did nothing to protect it from the virus. I told people that I did my bit for the NHS by voting Labour. But now I realise that’s also performative, only in a different way, and just as bad. I resolve to donate to the Royal Berks’ charity when I get out, to support their extraordinary work.

* * * * *

Around Thursday lunchtime Melinda, one of the nurses looking after us that day, stops by my bed and asks me if I write this blog. She follows me on Facebook, and has seen the picture of my foot in the ward. I’d know that ward anywhere, she tells me. I own up, and we have a little chat about that, a touching little moment of connection which comes out of nowhere. I tell her that if she wants to feel really proud of where she works, she should go to my Facebook page and read the comments.

I mention this anecdote on Facebook a few days later when I’m convalescing at home, and someone else pops up in the comments. Me and that same nurse had this conversation in the staff kitchen and she showed me your post and that’s how I was introduced to your page she says. It’s nice to feel social media bringing people together, because there are so many reminders day in, day out of it doing precisely the opposite.

Later on Thursday afternoon, a doctor comes by to chat to me about my discharge the following day. The junior doctors are on strike tomorrow, and everything is being prepped in advance so I can check out without any undue delays. She asks how my time in hospital has been and as I’ve done here, as I’ve done with everybody who has asked since I got home, I pretty much gush about the amazing work that happens in the Royal Berks.

“I really hope you didn’t mind the food” she tells me. “We get quite a lot of complaints about that.”

“Actually I liked it” I reply. I think about it for a second, decide to blow my cover. “I write a restaurant blog in my spare time and the food here, and the way it is managed here has really impressed me.”

“You’re not Edible Reading, are you? I’m pretty sure I follow you.”

This might be the closest to fame that I’m ever going to get, but really I’m not at the epicentre of this story. The hospital is. Mine is just one of thousands of stories about this institution, one voice straining to be heard in a gigantic choir singing its praises. That is absolutely as it should be.

When I finally leave on the Saturday, gingerly shambling out into the daylight with Zoë to the car park where my father-in-law is waiting, my relationship with the RBH is far from over. There will be x-rays, they will fit a brace, they will do more x-rays, they will determine that the brace isn’t enough, and they will decide to operate. The fracture clinic is right next to Jamaica Blue: I grab a coffee to fortify myself before every appointment.

There will be a day when I sit there in the Day Surgery ward for seven hours, starving and anxious, while I watch everyone else go off for their surgery, come back and go home. There will be a conversation with the anaesthetists, where I only remember the beginning and then come round, groggy and in recovery, hours later. There will be that first phone call with Zoë afterwards, when I let her know that I’m still alive and enjoy the miracle of hearing her voice again. 

And there will be one more night in the hospital, back on Dorrell Ward. It might be a happy accident, or it might be deliberate, but they take me to the same ward and park my bed in the same bay. One of the nurses on duty was on duty when I first stayed in hospital. You again, she smiles. The next morning, the wife of the chap in the bed next to me comes over to talk to me and Zoë. “I’m so glad they put him in Dorrell” she tells us. “It’s the best ward in the hospital.”

I don’t know. Perhaps everybody says that. But it was hard not to feel like it was the best ward in the hospital, or that I was the best hospital in the country. Because they and their extraordinary staff took what would have been the most frightening, lonely and anxious week of my life and made it somehow a week of peace, care, healing and – let’s not forget – Marmite. 

So that’s my review of the Royal Berkshire Hospital. A place of peace, care, healing and Marmite. A place that is Reading’s biggest restaurant by accident, not design, and one that happens to be a restaurant many times better than it needs to be. It’s also the most paradoxical place I will ever review. Because obviously I sincerely hope I never eat there again, and I wouldn’t wish a meal there on my worst enemy. But if you do find yourself there, and many people do, every single year, I cannot say enough good things about it. The food’s not bad, either.

The Royal Berkshire Hospital
London Rd, Reading RG1 5AN
0118 3225111

https://www.royalberkshire.nhs.uk

You can support the Royal Berks charity here – I have made a donation, which is the least I can do after all those meals.

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