Feature: Solo dining (2026)

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I used to have a friend – I lost him, like so many unreliable things, in the divorce – who was a keen wearer of hats. And he told me a story about how he got into wearing them that, like so many of his stories, stayed with me. He was on a bus, and so was an elderly chap wearing a splendid hat. It was so splendid, in fact, that my former friend complimented him on it. And the old gentleman turned to him and simply said this: what started as an affectation has become a necessity.

That struck my friend, and when he started wearing hats he said the same thing happened with him. The first few times, it felt like an affectation, but gradually over time it turned into a necessity. And then he told me that story, in a hat shop in Bridport fifteen years ago, when I was umming and aahing about buying a black trilby. His little parable of the dapper man on the top floor of an omnibus was the thing that tipped me over from window shopping to actual shopping.

And it was true: it felt like an affectation for a while, but then something changed. Fake it ’til you make it, I suppose. Many years and several hats followed, although I rarely wear them now. One necessity – the requirement to have music playing in headphones on journeys and commutes – triumphed over another. But I still think about that friend, and that fellow on the bus, from time to time. And lately I’ve realised that this whole affectation-necessity transmutation is also how I feel about eating in a restaurant on my own.

This is the fourth edition of my guide to solo dining in Reading, and every one has tracked my changing relationship with a table for one. The first one was written back in 2015, and is so dated it contains a Jason Derulo reference: all but one of the venues I recommended have now closed. The second, from 2018, tries too hard to convince readers that eating alone is fabulous (spoiler alert: after you get divorced you do tend to do it more often, at home or out and about) and is full of chains.

The reason I’m updating my guide from three years ago is partly because Reading has changed – farewell Buon Appetito, so long the Lyndhurst and Cairo Café – but mostly because I have. This year I’ve had to eat on duty more often on my own, because Zoë needed an operation on her back, and then had it and was in hospital, and then came home and convalesced. I suppose in that sense you could call dining solo a necessity.

But it’s also the year when I’ve learned to truly love eating on my own, on duty or just to treat myself. And it’s probably no coincidence that it’s also the year following an accident when, more than at any time since the pandemic, I realised that you can’t take being able to eat out at all for granted.

So honestly, some of my happiest meals this year have been me on my own with a good table, a half bottle of red, a book I genuinely intend to read but never do and a great view of a dining room and a group of people, what Larkin called a “frail travelling coincidence”, who happen to be sharing that room and that lunchtime with me.

I’m talking about meals like my brilliant two hours of pyrotechnics in the most muted of spaces at Cheltenham’s Le Champignon Sauvage, one of my best meals of this or any year, or – at a very different price point – my equally accomplished three courses at Mignonette in Richmond, a meal I’ve thought about many times since. It’s also, incidentally, why I disliked my lunch at overhyped celeb hangout The Devonshire, because its staff had no understanding whatsoever of what makes a lazy solo lunch so special.

But I’ve had similar experiences all over the place. In Didcot, at Django’s Smokehouse or in Oxford at The Punter or Bigfoot, or closer to home at M’s Smokehouse or Malmaison. I had a really delightful solo dinner at Malmaison, for crying out loud: so different to when I reviewed it as a table for two over a decade ago and was back out on the pavement forty-five minutes after taking my seat.

And even when those meals haven’t been perfect – The Punter is a prime example of this – the experience can still be enchanting. There is something about dining alone, and especially at length, at lunchtime, that is the ultimate gift to yourself. It is every bit as much an exercise in self-care as a day at Nirvana Spa, and if you choose wisely the food is dozens of times better. Every now and again I still talk to people who are really reluctant to go to a restaurant on their own, and I’ve always tried to persuade them that they’re missing out. But now, more than ever, I feel like I can be convincing on this subject, because of the years I have spent convincing myself.

The clearest evidence of that, I think, can be found in the places I have listed here. My previous article about solo dining proudly proclaimed that places had to be comfortable, that the menu should lend itself to dining alone, that the service should welcome the solo diner and that the people-watching should be good. And this is all very well, and true, but the places I listed lacked the courage of those convictions: too many cafés, too many light bites, too many places to wolf something down and move on, an inherent assumption that you’re eating solo for a good time, not a long time.

I think my previous guides were full of places to eat solo, but not necessarily to dine solo. This list tries to redress the balance. It’s why, for instance, you won’t find Blue Collar Corner in this piece: it is indeed a handy place if you want to grab a bite to eat before, say, going to the pub and it has a lot going for it. But grabbing a precarious spot at a table, trying to keep it as you go up to get a pint from the bar, hoping it won’t get nabbed when your beeper goes off and you cross the venue to pick up a burger? That’s not dining: it’s just eating.

The one thing that’s missing from this list, still, is places like Le Champignon Sauvage or Mignonette – truly lovely, grown-up independent restaurants where a reservation for one on a weekday or Saturday lunchtime feels like evidence that past you loved present you ever more than your parents ever could. But that is Reading’s fault, not anybody else’s.

Maybe we’ll get there one day, or perhaps you just have to love yourself enough to also spring for a taxi out into the countryside, so you can eat at Orwell’s, or the Three Tuns, or another of Berkshire’s or Oxfordshire’s finest pubs. I’m working on that: I suspect it, too, will just have to start as an affectation and somehow wind up as a necessity.

1. Angelo’s

Angelo’s is probably my Reading discovery of the year: one of the few reasons to be cheerful in a 2026 full of closures and stagnation, not to mention the arrival, like one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, of Shake Fucking Shack. It is the kind of grown up, independent restaurant I was beginning to think central Reading could no longer attract, which means that the odds are probably stacked against it. Unless Ebb & Flow turn out to be far more philanthropic landlords than you’d expect, anyway.

That being the case, on some levels I’m loath to suggest that anybody turn up there as a solo diner because I want them to make money and, unquestionably, that’s harder to do on a table that could seat two people and is only half full. But if you do get the chance, and they have the space, you could do a lot worse than go there one evening and enjoy their beef carpaccio, their unimprovable carbonara and their tartufo cioccolato.

While you’re there I suggest you sip a spritz, pick a glass of something good from the wine list and then a smaller glass of boozy nectar to go with dessert, and do your level best to make that table more profitable than a joyless congregation of Mounjaro-powered micro-nibblers. Can you picture me glaring out of a poster, finger pointing, bearing the slogan YOUR EXCELLENT AND AFFORDABLE ITALIAN RESTAURANT NEEDS YOU? No, me neither.

Angelo’s
9 Friar’s Walk, Station Hill Square, Reading, RG1 1HP
https://www.angelosdine.com

2. Honest Burgers

Honest Burgers has been in every edition of this feature I’ve written since it opened, and although it might damage my cred to admit this, it’s probably the restaurant in which I dine solo most often. What can I say? It’s just very reliable. It’s one of the most appealing dining rooms in Reading and with the exception of the one time in twenty when they have a Bad Chips Day, every meal there is wonderful in almost exactly the same way.

There are tables you might argue are well suited to solo diners, those weird little alcoves for two, but I find them a little uncomfortable and precarious: it’s probably more to do with my size than their ergonomics, mind you. But it doesn’t matter, because anywhere else is fine – with a view of the room or not, it is a restaurant which very rarely lets you down.

I have even honed my regular order there, perfected over the course of many visits, and I only deviate from it if they have a really appealing special: double smash burger with bacon, halloumi fries on the side, brown butter mayo for the chips and a cold pint of Lumina. It has been the high point of many evenings.

Service is warm and welcoming – particularly to solo diners – I find, and it’s the perfect spot to stop for a meal after work, on your way home, or just because you’re in town and you’ve had a challenging day. When Zoë had back surgery a couple of months ago, she spent a couple of nights in hospital. I kept her company both days and fussed over her until about 8 o’clock, when visiting hours ended. On her first night in she looked at me, not unkindly, probably looking forward to some peace and quiet, and said something I’ll never forget. “Go on,” she said. “Go to Honest.”

Honest Burgers
1-5 King Street, RG1 2HB
https://www.honestburgers.co.uk/locations/reading/

3. Just Momo

Most editions of this guide have featured somewhere that you can eat momo, because they are the perfect dish for solo dining: ten perfect parcels of pleasure, to be eaten meditatively, one after the other. There’s a haiku in that meal somewhere, probably about the sharp melancholy you experience when you know you only have three momo left. It’s pretty much how I felt when I discovered my first grey chest hair, come to think of it, an event I still think triggered my messy and painful midlife crisis ten years ago.

This time round I’m picking Just Momo, a lovely, unpretentious spot, because of its simplicity: not only momo, although the chilli fried ones are reason enough to eat there, but also chow mein. On a bad night, either will perk you up. On a terrible night, the nuclear option is to order both.

Just Momo
4 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
https://justmomo.uk/

4. Kungfu Kitchen

In my previous guide to solo dining in Reading I said something which sounds very clever but is in fact extremely stupid. I said Kungfu Kitchen shouldn’t be on the list because “it’s a wonderful place but having to limit yourself to a single dish there is something akin to torture”. Here I am, three years later, discovering that what I said is hogwash.

Because yes, there’s a lot to be said for going to KFK with someone else, or a big group, so that you can try some of the lamb with cumin, and some of the fish fragrant pork, and some of the deep fried fish, and some of the salt and pepper snow mushrooms. That’s stating the obvious: everyone knows that.

What’s less obvious is the sheer joy of ordering something brilliant from the menu, a portion of egg fried rice and a refreshing pint of Parka, Reading’s house beer, and knowing that every single mouthful of it is yours. When does that ever happen, when you go to Kungfu Kitchen in a group? Precisely.

So recently, on the second night that Zoë was kept in hospital post-surgery (can you tell I really didn’t want to go home and/or cook?) I got an Uber from the hospital to KFK, and I got a lovely table where I could see most of the room. I drank that Parka and I slowly and methodically destroyed all evidence that the plate in front of me had ever had Jo’s boneless Shandong chicken on it: a dish of such savoury and spicy complexity that when I had it for the first time this year I kicked myself for the seven intervening years when I’d somehow never ordered it.

If for whatever reason you want to feel less lonely on your own, more connected to the world, there are few better ways to do it than to eat solo in a bustling restaurant. KFK was doing a very nice trade, and Jo and Steve both stopped by my table to chat and to fill me in on their various projects and hustles (it was not one of those nights when Jo regaled me with tales of people she’s thrown out of her restaurant and why: she should write a book). They had no idea of this, but it was exactly what I needed.

Kungfu Kitchen
62 Christchurch Road, Reading, RG2 7AZ
https://kungfureading.co.uk

5. Mama’s Way

Not only is Mama’s Way excellent for solo dining but, as I’ve said before, it’s so tiny that it barely lends itself to any other kind. If you’re lucky you and a dining companion can grab seats side by side up at the window, looking out onto Duke Street, and if you do you’ll feel like you’ve hit the jackpot. But I really love it for a solo meal, sharing that experience with whoever happens to have had the same excellent idea as you.

It feels enormously European in a way that so many places in Reading and beyond swing at and miss (yes, I do mean Vino Vita, thanks for asking). And it helps that the service is so immensely likeable, that the wine by the glass and the spritzes are so very drinkable and that the menu is compact, interesting and lends itself to exploration and experimentation. They may buy their pinsa bases in, but their pinsa is still the equal of anything you could eat across most of the rest of Reading, including a certain wine bar I’ve already mentioned once more than it deserves.

The picture above is of one of their sharing boards for two but – please don’t judge – I’m pretty sure I’ve ordered something similar for myself at least once and spent a very happy hour picking my way through it with wine to keep it company. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it.

Mama’s Way
10-14 Duke Street, Reading, RG1 4RU
https://mamasway.co.uk

6. Me Kong

Dining solo you can sometimes feel as if you stick out like a sore thumb, and the best restaurants are brilliant at dispelling those misgivings. I particularly love Me Kong because they are so superbly hospitable – and dining there as an overweight, very white, middle-aged man, I would be incongruous at Me Kong whether I was unaccompanied or not.

One of the nicest feelings when you dine solo is to be completely transported. It’s harder to do in some ways when you’re there without company, and in others being solo, without the distraction of the familiar, makes it a more achievable feat. At Me Kong, the sensation of being teleported is total and unwavering: there, amid that bustle and clamour, seeing a clientele happily reminded of home, something magical happens.

The other magical thing that happens, for me anyway, is that chicken in black bean sauce: sticky and savoury, dotted with huge cubes of ginger and garlic. One day I will go there without ordering it, but I would never deprive myself of it were I to eat at Me Kong on my own.

Me Kong
St Lawrence House, Abbey Square, Reading, RG1 3AG
https://www.facebook.com/MeKongReadingUK/

7. The Moderation

For the joy of having your own table and your own view and two or three courses of sublime food all to yourself, Reading has few places to match The Moderation, and I’m not sure it ever did. I feel like I never really gave it a fair crack of the whip back when I lived next door to the Lyndhurst and would fall into the Lyndhurst all the time, including solo, with the slightest excuse.

Well, fate rewarded me with a mixed blessing. Because the closest thing I can think of to that is The Moderation, and I now live much further away from it than I did and want to eat there far more often than I can. But I’m not going to damn the Mod with faint praise by comparing it to anywhere: it has been doing this so well, and for so long – with the same chef since day one, nearly twenty years ago – that it has earned the right that you compare other places to it.

It really is almost the complete venue: great food, tasteful spaces, a menu with an embarrassment of riches and a wine list with some magnificent surprises squirrelled away. If you go on your own you can’t have the mixed starters – not unless you’re even more brazen than me – but the chicken satay skewers with a chaser of sai oui, The Moderation’s outrageously good Thai sausage, will more than make up for that.

After that you’re in safe hands, whatever you pick from the mains. The nasi goreng is a stalwart, the short rib green curry is so good I gave it an award and the crispy fried sea bass will make you think about sea bass very differently. Looking at their menu at the moment I see they have a salad on there with minced duck and confit duck leg, and I’m already wondering how soon I can concoct an excuse to drop back in.

The Moderation
213 Caversham Road, RG1 8BB
https://www.themodreading.com/

8. Oishi

This time last year I broke my arm, as regular readers will know, and the last place I reviewed before that fateful accident was Oishi, the back-from-the-dead Japanese restaurant on the Oxford Road.

I absolutely loved it, and I decided that it would play a significant role in my future: when I was taking the train back from work, I would get off a stop early at Reading West some nights, walk to Oishi and have dinner there on my own. I daydreamed about a cold Asahi and a bowl of their yaki soba on an unforgiving winter evening. I decided it would make the world an infinitely better place.

And then I royally fucked my arm, and for months I was eating with one hand and not going anywhere. Takeaways were carefully planned to be things I could eat without looking like an idiot, and being back in the office was out of the question.

Eventually, my arm began to heal, and restaurants began to beckon, and then in time I found myself going back into the office. Sporadically at first, because there were meetings I couldn’t get out of, and then more often to spend the day brainstorming with my manager and doing the meetings that had to be a meeting, rather than ones that could have been a Teams call or even an email.

You’d be surprised how happy I was to be back doing that, to be in a meeting room with my manager again comparing notes on good records we’d listened to lately, traipsing to the little cafe outside for a mocha and then saying “right, I suppose we’d better do some work then”. Nothing said that nature was healing quite like that.

And on one of those days, on a sunny evening in May, I got off the train at Reading West and walked to Oishi. I grabbed a little table with a view of the room, and I ordered sashimi and karaage chicken and a bowl of yaki soba. My glass of Asahi glowed amber in the sunshine beaming through the window, and I felt very strongly that despite six hellish months I was exactly where I was meant to be. I’m not right about everything – I’m not even right as often as you might think I am – but I was right that dining solo at Oishi does indeed make the world a better place.

Oishi
314 Oxford Road, Reading, RG30 1AD
https://www.oishi-reading.co.uk/

9. Paesinos

Last year I did something that I’ve not done in a very long time. I locked myself out. I’d rushed out of the house in a hurry to meet my friend Sheldon at the top of Kendrick Road, because he had a package of his homemade chorizo for me to try (everyone should have a friend like Sheldon), and I’d forgotten to take my house keys with me. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Zoë was at work, in London, many miles away and about three hours from finishing her shift. The only redeeming feature was that I had my phone and a power bank, so I wouldn’t run out of battery, but I had to find some way to occupy myself. And the first thing I did, after swearing a lot, was walk down the hill and have dinner at Paesinos.

It’s another of those small rooms looking out on the world that I think lend themselves so well to solo dining, a lovely vantage point to see the great and the good of Reading wandering down Kings Road, presumably back to their houses and flats – which they could get into, because they weren’t idiots like me. But I didn’t care, because I had Paesinos’ pizza with capers, anchovies and olives and a bottle of chinotto, and even if I had to find a way to kill another three hours after that, my period of exile had begun swimmingly.

After that I caught a train to Maidenhead, just for something to do, really, and I snaffled some beers at the wonderful Hoppy Place. It was good, but the best bit of my evening – far and away – was the pizza. A few days later I cooked some of the chorizo. It was worth getting locked out for.

Paesinos
Unit 4, 2 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
0118 3047578

10. Tasty Greek Souvlaki

Tasty Greek Souvlaki is the second survivor from the previous edition of this feature, and is another unbeatable casual spot to treat yourself to a good, unhurried meal, because you’re worth it (it’s interesting, looking back on this list, at how many of the restaurants on it are clustered together, like a group hug for singletons).

It’s decent in winter but summer, on that little terrace, is when it comes into its own. The thing to have here in a group is the mixed grill, sure. Yet if you dine here on your own you can treat yourself to a miniature version of that by having the mixed gyros merida, nicely rustling chips buried under a landslide of crispy pork and chicken. Some days the chicken is better, other days it’s the pork, but the only way to know for sure is to order something with both. Besides, they’re both good, always.

Preface the whole lot with a cold Fix or Mythos, ideally with a frosted glass, and some of their downright bloody lovely courgette fritters and you have the makings of a thoroughly agreeable date with yourself. I have a feeling you’ve earned it.

Tasty Greek Souvlaki
20 Market Place, RG1 2EG
https://tastygreeksouvlaki.com/

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Restaurant review: Chilis South Indian

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If you run a restaurant, and it does well enough – which I suppose is possible, even in these dicey times – eventually you’re going to think about your next move.

Admittedly, some proprietors are happy to stick where they are, perfect the site they are in. But many are bitten by the bug and, one way or another, they want more. Sometimes that will involve moving to a bigger site, the way Clay’s did for example, but for others opening restaurants is like having kids: despite all the sleepless nights, constant nagging worry and the endless drain on the finances, one simply isn’t enough.

For restaurateurs who reach this point there are a plethora of different options. The first is just to open a second branch, either in the same town or further afield. Margins being what they are, Reading no longer sees empires like the one Nino Bartolomei built in the Eighties and Nineties, so this is largely the domain of cafés these days: like our two branches of C.U.P. or of Lincoln; The Switch over in Tilehurst and out on Green Park; the twin Geo Cafés in the slightly more upmarket Caversham and Henley.

Some towns and cities are especially blessed, though, and develop hyperlocal independent chains – Bristol’s numerous outposts of Pizzarova spring to mind – but Reading simply doesn’t have the ecosystem for that. There was a time, pre-Covid, when I thought our town might get there, but now I doubt it ever will. And I say hyperlocal, but although all restaurant chains start that way that’s not where they all end up: both Franco Manca and Honest Burgers originated in the same Brixton market, before going on to experience very different fortunes on their journeys across the U.K.

Another option is to open another restaurant doing something different. Reading’s most successful exponent of this is arguably the team behind Coconut, now trading for well over a decade. Six years after Coconut opened, along came their second restaurant Osaka, in the Oracle, and at some point in the future we’ll hopefully see Kawaii, their difficult third album, which has been awaited on Station Hill since it was announced two years ago.

You could also include Café Yolk in that category: many years after they first began, they opened a smaller branch on Cemetery Junction and then, this year, a sandwich deli offering something totally distinct from all those brunches.

But my favourite in this genre, for sheer randomness, is “opening another restaurant very similar to one you already have, a couple of doors down from your original restaurant”. And, believe it or not, Reading has more than one of these.

So for instance you have Kungfu Kitchen, which mainly serves Szechuan food and – on the same run of shops, in Kungfu Kitchen’s old home – Happy Panda. It offers Cantonese food, dim sum and roast meats, but if you dine at either Jo will happily give you the menu from both and tell you to order whatever you like from either (when she’s not telling you exactly what to order anyway). If she needs to, she’ll just run something down from the other place.

I get that these menus are conceptually separate, but it’s still strange to see both places so close together. What was the rationale behind opening the second restaurant, I wonder? If the first one was rammed all the time perhaps it makes sense, but if not, don’t you just risk dividing your existing clientele between two almost adjacent dining rooms?

The other prime example is the subject of this week’s review. Indian restaurant Chilis opened in 2022 on the first floor of what I’m stubbornly choosing to still call King’s Walk, in the spot that used to host Art Of Siam; I reviewed it in 2024 and liked it a lot.

Then, early last year, they opened a second branch on the other side of the mall. It’s the old Bolan Thai site: if I was a Thai restaurant in Reading I’d start to worry that Chilis was coming for me next. And actually, Chilis had taken a hybrid of a few different approaches, because they started out with a big restaurant next to Newbury train station. They’ve also opened a random newsagent in Caversham, as you do.

So what’s the point of distinction between these two Reading restaurants whose front doors are literally a minute’s walk apart? Well, Chilis then rebranded the original as ‘Chilis Indian & Indo-Chinese Restaurant’ and the new arrival was ‘Chilis South Indian’. So potentially some difference, then: India’s a big place after all, with plenty of regional cuisine, and this moniker potentially encompassed the food of Kerala, Hyderabad and plenty more besides.

In an interview with the Chronicle, the owner made much of his Hyderabadi roots. His parents and grandparents were from there, he said, and they grew chillies on the family farm. But he also said that sometimes they got really big bookings that they couldn’t accommodate in their original site. “That’s why I opened in the same building” was his explanation. So: distinctive restaurant covering authentic regional cuisine, overflow car park for curry fans or both at the same time? I met my friend Graeme there on a Friday evening to investigate.

It’s not a bad space, as windowless dining rooms on the top floor of a mall go. I never ate there when it was Bolan Thai, or even Bengal Reef, but it’s quite tasteful, sleek and modern, all burgundy, cream and dark woods. Far nicer than the interior of the original Reading branch, which feels like it’s never evolved much from the restaurant it was before, aside from sticking a big flatscreen TV on one wall.

Chilis South Indian is nicer than that, and seemed to be doing a very good job of looking after a sizeable group when I arrived and nabbed a table. It was half-six, so early doors, but customers did start to trickle in as my meal progressed. I do wonder how many of them had booked this specific branch of Chilis, or were coming here because the other one was full, or even thought this was the other branch. Perhaps I should have gone from table to table and conducted a straw poll.

Speaking of research, this is where I would normally pop in a paragraph about the menu and regular readers know exactly how that pans out. I would say that the menu is made up of this and that, maybe come out with something fatuous about authenticity or spot some typos and then say that starters range from X quid to Y quid. You know, practically useful information that is never going to aspire to literary brilliance: for all I know you might skip that paragraph every week.

But this week, because I have kidded myself that this kind of devotion to detail is partly what you come here for, I went one step further: the night before my meal, I made a spreadsheet. I wanted to understand, you see, what the Venn diagram of New Chilis and Old Chilis looked like. Was it choice, or the illusion of choice? So I looked at the menu for Chilis South Indian and its older sibling, trying to work out how big an overlap there was.

Chilis South Indian’s menu has over a hundred dishes on it: mind-boggling, really. Now granted, some of those are generic stuff like rice and naan, and they do a number of different types of dosa each of which comes something like seven or eight different ways, so it’s probably a little bloated by that. The Chilis Indo-Chinese menu has around a hundred dishes on it too.

To Chilis’ credit, about three quarters of the Chilis South Indian’s menu is unique to the restaurant. Again, that number is stretched out by all the vada, dosas and idly that don’t appear on the Indo-Chinese menu (rather randomly kothu parotta, from Tamil Nadu, is on the Indo-Chinese menu but not the South Indian one: go figure). But another way to look at it is that these two restaurants between them, owned by the same people, a stone’s throw apart, offer the best part of one hundred and fifty dishes. How could they all be good, or distinctive? How could they all not rely on many common elements, like a base sauce?

I explained this to Graeme when he arrived and to his credit he listened and humoured me – without lapsing into a coma, I might add – as we both took introductory sips of the second cheapest wine by glass on the menu (a sauvignon blanc, perfectly pleasant). He even managed to conceal what must have been pity when I told him I’d made a huge note on my phone of all the dishes unique to Chilis South Indian and would he mind if we only ordered from that list, pretty please?

In honesty I think he was just happy to have finally finished the working week, although it might have clinched it when I told him the note on my phone included three separate fried chicken dishes. The other dishes specific to this restaurant were scattered across the menu but, as I’ve said, idly, vada and dosas were all well represented and there was also a section, called “Street Food Specials”, which was made up exclusively of vegetarian small plates that might well appeal to many of my readers.

Oh, and one dish was called “Govan Fish Curry”: I’m hoping that’s a misprint of a dish from Goa, rather than some exotic Glaswegian variant. Sorry, couldn’t resist spotting the typo.

So, first up, some of that fried chicken. Which turned out, really, not to be: kopi vepadu is an Andhra-style chicken fry, and is meant to be deeply spiced with a crispy exterior. Pleasant though this was, it wasn’t that: instead it was big chunks of chicken breast coated in a sticky sauce which was more like a paste. This wasn’t bad, but even at this stage I had the feeling that, given the rest of our order, we ran the risk of seeing those same pieces of chicken presented a variety of ways.

“This chicken is a little overdone” was Graeme’s verdict, not without justification. The problem here, really, is how difficult Clay’s has made it for any Indian restaurant in Reading to live up to any dish they’ve ever put on their menu. Clay’s did an Andhra-style fried chicken which is an absolute knockout, so crispy-coated but tender that you fight to share it with others while feeling you have a civic duty to do so. That dish is many, many times better than this one. I knew it, Graeme knew it, neither of us said it out loud.

Our second chicken dish – yes, we ordered two – was different but the same. In a way it was instructive to order both, to experience how they felt much of a muchness. Ironically chicken sukkah is not fried, but it came out exactly the same as the dish that was supposed to be: those standard issue bits of chicken again, again coated in a dry masala. I actually liked this dish more, I think: the chicken at least had a little caramelisation, and was fierier and slightly more interesting.

But it wasn’t nicer enough to justify ordering both. The coconut on top just reminded me of my mum’s attempts at Patak or the like from the Eighties, of bringing out a little bowl of dessicated coconut and another of chopped banana, because we were apparently fancy and that’s what fancy people dumped on top of their curries. What a strange voyage for all of us, to spend forty years going from that to Clay’s, let alone this.

Graeme specifically wanted to try the ghee podi idly, because he had fond memories of them from spending time in India. Graeme used to go every year with work, spending time in very rural India: he entertained me with his stories of near-death experience with various terrifying-sounding forms of wildlife. He stayed in a tent he had to put up himself, and while he was there he ate idly a lot: he said that Chilis South Indian were very close in quality to the ones he’d had there. He liked their light, spongy texture and all the bits and bobs you could spoon over them or dip them in.

The one time I went to India with work was to train a bunch of people we were outsourcing to. This was nearly twenty years ago, when it was all the rage. I touched down and checked into the hotel only to find that my colleagues back in Blighty hadn’t finished writing the training, and doing so proved beyond them for the whole of my time in India.

I essentially spent a week either loafing by the hotel pool or discovering that our £25 a night subsistence allowance let you eat like a king in Bangalore. I went to the Sheraton for their poolside Afghan barbecue and it still ranks as one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, anywhere.

I found the idly pretty dull.

Graeme is a better person than me, though, so if this sounds at all like your kind of thing I’d trust his judgement.

By now our evening was in full swing and I realised it was a long time since I’d done this kind of thing: eat perfectly serviceable Indian food with a very good friend as a precursor to going to the pub to drink and talk nonsense.

It felt like what life used to be like twenty years ago, rather than now, and it turned out I’d really missed that. Graeme told his stories about harrowing encounters with the local fauna, I told him that when I’d returned from India I was so sick I’d said my final farewells to my ex-wife, we moved on to work and gossip, war stories, trials and tribulations.

We even had a rather enjoyable bottle of white: Chilis wine list is so non-specific as to be ridiculous but they ought to do something about that, because the wine is nicer than you might expect. What was billed just as ‘Viognier £32.95’ was in fact a perfectly decent South African number – 2026 vintage, would you believe – that would set you back £16 in Laithwaites. Not life changing, but not bad.

I’m going to canter through the rest in an effort not to bore anybody – you or me – more than I have to. An Andhra spicy chicken curry was the same cubes of chicken as before, in a gravy that was wetter than either of the starters but not noticeably different from them. Graeme was equally unimpressed by this. “This chicken has been added to the sauce at the last minute” he said, cutting a cube open to show its milk-white core. “And it’s overcooked, too.”

Graeme preferred the lamb curry, the rara gosht. Normally this contains both chunks of lamb and minced lamb, but this was just pieces of lamb submerged beneath a gravy that, again, was different from the others but in the same way that the Kardashians are different from one another: maybe if you’re a devotee you can tell them all apart, but for me they all rather blurred into one.

I’ve had better curries at Chilis’ other branch, I thought. But have I, really? If I went back would I feel indifferent about that, too?

We had this with a paneer biryani, because if there’s one life lesson I’ve taken from Graeme – and I learned it with him at Clay’s – it’s that biryani is a perfectly acceptable alternative to a side of rice when you’re eating Indian food. Having had Chilis South Indian’s biryani, I think maybe that lesson is more appropriate for Clay’s than for restaurants like this. It was just bland rice with mostly albino cubes of paneer in it, only a few of them showing evidence of caramelisation.

Our meal for two, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just under £145. And the service, by the way, was really good. I’d sort of expect that, as the sequel to a really successful restaurant that’s always looked after me well, but it wasn’t enough to change my overwhelming view of Chilis South Indian.

It feels like a really long time since I’ve had to write a review like this, but back in the day – pre-divorce, when I reviewed somewhere new in Reading literally every week – I had to write them a lot. Reviews of places that are fine. Not damned fine, not mighty fine, not fine dining, not fine and dandy: just fine. Because that’s what Chilis South Indian is, and what I think Indian restaurants in Reading used to be most of the time. Not distinctive, not interesting, not repugnant. Just decent, competent and a little generic.

The irony of it is this: this restaurant only exists – in its strangely-chosen, illogical location – because the restaurant it spun off from was so good. But somehow, Chilis South Indian manages to diminish them both. Not only is it unspecial, but its very presence makes its sibling unspecial too. Why go to one, when you could just go to the other? And when two restaurants become Ant and Dec in that way, the natural next question follows inexorably from that: why go to either? Chilis South Indian is not a terrible restaurant. But having eaten there, I no longer know the answer to that question.

Chilis South Indian – 6.5
The Village, King’s Walk, King Street, Reading, RG1 2HG
0118 3047578

https://www.chilisrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: YY Restaurant

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“This is weird,” said my old friend Dave as we gathered our stuff and prepared to leave Coffee Under Pressure, the drizzle persevering outside. “Normally I know where we’re going in advance when you take me to review somewhere, but today I have no idea.”

He’s right: Dave has become one of my most frequent dining companions, but usually when I eat somewhere out of town – in Oxford, Bath, Stroud or his hometown of Swindon. When that happens I give him a shortlist of places I’ve been wanting to visit, and let him have the final say. He’s not joined me on duty in Reading for a couple of years, and the criteria for Reading reviews are different: not so much where I really fancy, although sometimes I do, and more about where I really ought to cover.

On that basis, the subject of this week’s review is long overdue.

YY Supermarket has been a fixture on the Kings Road for several years now, thriving in a site that was the former home of the Warwick Arms and Bali Lounge; I used to drop in frequently to pick up my Lao Gan Ma, back when I lived in the Village. Then a couple of years ago they opened a restaurant in the back of the supermarket and it has done something no restaurant has done at that site for the longest time, namely flourished.

In the roll call of Reading’s cursed sites, that building occupies an exalted position, having seen off a bunch of places – the Biscuit & Barrel, Cardamom, The Aila, King’s Kitchen – none of which lasted long enough for me to review them. By contrast YY Restaurant is going strong, and has steadily built up a reputation as one of Reading’s best Chinese restaurants.

Its dim sum, made fresh rather than bought in and defrosted, has attracted particular praise. The really unusual thing about YY is this: I’ve not seen an awful lot of people talk about it online, but whenever it’s mentioned, it receives nothing but compliments. From normal people I mean, rather than somebody rambling about a ‘hidden gem’ that just so happens to have paid for their dinner.

In the run-up to my visit, as fate would have it, I had a comment on the blog from a reader, Chris. He had lived in Hong Kong for four years, he said, and he thought that YY served some of the best Cantonese food he’d eaten in the UK. “I intend to try a lot more of the menu during future visits (starting this weekend),” he said. It wasn’t a clincher – I’d already planned my visit to YY by then – but it definitely gave me reassurance that lunch was unlikely to be a duffer.

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Restaurant review: Django’s Smokehouse, Didcot

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Right, let’s hear it: did any of you have Didcot in the sweepstake? Thought not, which means that the jackpot rolls over for another week. Same time next Friday?

So yes, a curveball. A review from Didcot today. And I know that the obvious response from many of you will be why Didcot? To which I would answer, Why not? After all, it’s a mere thirteen minutes from Reading on regular fast trains, making it as easily accessible as the likes of Wokingham, and Maidenhead – both of which have featured on this blog more than once – and far easier to get to than Henley or Oxford.

I know that many people have bought tickets to Didcot Parkway without ever alighting to the platform, because it’s nothing if not a sweet spot for split ticketing, but who among us has ever ended our journey there and had a look around? But it would be worth it if Didcot was harbouring a terrific restaurant that justified an expedition, so the real question isn’t Why Didcot? but Is Django’s Smokehouse such a restaurant?

Django’s Smokehouse has a curious origin story. The building was the home of a Chinese restaurant called Chopsticks for over 20 years, and when Chopsticks’ owner tried to hand the business over to her son, 26-year-old Andy Lai, he decided that he wanted to turn it into a smokehouse. The idea had marinated with him throughout lockdown, and in 2022 Django’s Smokehouse opened its doors.

You could say it was a risk, but Lai was convinced he was on to something. Didcot was on the up, he thought – “in five years’ time people won’t recognise Didcot”, he said – and his experience of food festivals made him think that American barbecue was just the thing to fuel the town’s ascent. And he might have had a point, because this summer Django’s won Best International Restaurant at the 2026 Ox In A Box Awards, beating a very accomplished field including Oxford heavyweights Spiced Roots and Antep Kitchen, both of which I’ve reviewed.

Now, those awards are voted for by the public, and I’ve always been a little sceptical of those – I’m thinking of the massive annual data gathering exercise conducted by Prosecco-gargling permagrifters Muddy Stilettos here – but the fact remains that these particular awards receive tens of thousands of votes, and for a relatively unsung spot in Didcot of all places, which hasn’t even been reviewed by the local media, to come out on top points to a devoted fan following. It was enough for me, so on a cold and muggy Tuesday night I hopped on a train to Didcot, my unsplit ticket in my Apple Wallet.

I had no idea what the centre of Didcot would be like, and having now visited I consider myself none the wiser. The stroll from the train station into town felt strangely disconnected from civilisation and then suddenly I found myself walking along the perimeter of the Orchard Centre, Didcot’s answer to the Lexicon or the Westgate. The Christmas illuminations were up but unlit on Orchard Street, the pubs were done up for Halloween: retail and hospitality, I find, are annoyingly good at making you realise the year is drawing to a close.

Everything I passed made for a strange hotchpotch: a massive Cineworld and the swanky arts centre on one side of the road (it closes at 8.30pm), the biggest branch of Boswell’s I’ve ever seen and a very upmarket-looking outpost of Crispy Dosa on the other with, just after it, a colossal Ladbroke’s. It seemed as if all the buildings were on shuffle, and rounding the corner to approach Django’s Smokehouse I had to walk past a sizeable branch of PureGym. That felt like trolling, every bit as much as watching people take their driving lessons on the street where I live.

The welcome inside was warm and immediate, and made me feel less ridiculous about my pre-reserved table for one. It’s a big restaurant, when it needs to be: 150 covers across two floors, with a big dining room out back and another upstairs. The wall of the back room displayed Polaroids of customers who’ve passed and failed the restaurant’s “Danger Wings” challenge: Django’s website has a similar gallery for another of its eating challenges, featuring people who have gamely agreed for the restaurant to capture their attempts to clear their plates – successfully or less so – for posterity.

But on a Tuesday night, that shrunk down to the homely. All the customers there during my visit were in the front room, which was a surprisingly agreeable place to be. I was seated in the window looking in, at a table bigger than I needed, but there was a cosy and likeable feel to it. The cobwebs were up for spooky season, their award was proudly on display and menus advertised a Halloween bottomless brunch and “brisket for Christmas”. I liked it there, although that cosiness dissipated somewhat when a Deliveroo driver came in and the door behind him took ages to close.

That evening my company was a couple of tables for two and another lone diner, also with a reservation. I wonder if she was writing a blog, too. And like I said, service was just pitch perfect from beginning to end: I have a soft spot for anybody who calls me “lovely” and refuses to judge an order which verges on conspicuous consumption. They didn’t win that award for nothing, that’s for sure.

Django’s menu had something for everyone who is not vegetarian or vegan: half a dozen well-chosen starters and then an onslaught of smoked meats – five different kinds, although if you’re in a group you can mix things up with a sharing platter. There were also loaded fries, as seen all over TikTok all the bloody time, and, on the other side of the menu, a small selection of burgers: I’m not sure why you’d have a burger at a smokehouse, but I guess it takes all sorts. Prices were decent, too. Starters mostly came in under a tenner and only two of the main courses – the wagyu beef brisket and the beef short rib – would set you back over £20.

There was also a small specials menu featuring, among the smoked pigs in blankets and truffled macaroni cheese, a queasiness-inducing quadruple smashed burger, which sounds like the kind of thing Shaggy and Scooby eat halfway through not contributing to solving the mystery, high as a kite. There were only a couple of meat-free options, and the server told me that after a run at the weekend the restaurant was out of smoked barbecued jackfruit: I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending I’d have ordered it, otherwise.

No power on earth would have stopped me, though, from kicking off with some frickles. I’ve had frickles in many places, and they often fail by being too big, too sparsely battered, too watery. Django’s were an absolute treat: little tart bombs, ticking away in a light and brittle batter, waiting to detonate. I liked the sweet mustard dip they came with, but to be honest I’d have been happy with them on their own. I’d have been happy with them on their own twice, for that matter.

They were easily their money at £7.50 if you like pickles, and fried food, and I am fortunate enough to love both. Django’s menu is a little amorphous in the sense that a lot of the starters would work as sides and vice versa, but these were probably a genre apart even from that – the ideal beer snack. I wish something like this was available in pubs across Reading, or even just one pub, actually. I’d make it worth their while.

On that note it’s worth saying that Django’s serves wine and some good-looking cocktails but its beers on tap, classic Americana, are Budweiser and a sessionable IPA from Goose Island. Context is everything: if I’d ordered that IPA in a pub I’d have found it thin and middling, but when you need something to zhuzh up a palate being continually coated with glorious fat, over and over again, its lemony effervescence was, by accident or design, a super choice.

The pork belly burnt ends were less successful. Huge hunks of meat, striated like sandstone, they looked like they’d turn out to be a highlight of my month. But sometimes appearances can be deceiving, and I wanted these to be more fun to eat than they were. The meat lacked give, required the punctuation of those thick layers of fat to make a satisfactory whole. But what they really needed was to be glossy with sauce, something to offset and augment, and instead they had a thin drizzle.

Not only that, but a thin drizzle of something subtle, when this is not a cuisine that calls for or rewards subtlety. The menu says that it comes with gochujang aioli, and leaving aside for one moment the fact that gochujang aioli isn’t a thing that needs to exist, what little sauce there was managed not to taste of either. The menu calls these sticky, which is the last thing they were, and it’s a shame. I’d have loved them to just be smothered in gochujang, come to think of it, and authenticity be damned.

I seem to have ordered pork belly bites, or something like it, a few times this year on duty, but never has the gulf between potential and achievement been so difficult to bridge. You can also have the burnt ends as a main – see what I mean about that amorphous menu? – but if you go to Django’s, I’d advise against it.

But I was not unhappy. My seat was comfy, my beer was cold, my people-watching was up to scratch. A couple of regulars came in who had clearly reached the point of befriending the staff, and a little genuine warmth in a restaurant goes a long way. I was on to another half of that IPA, and whoever was in charge of the music was trying to appeal to has-beens like me: Everybody (Backstreet’s Back); Zombie; it was like Gen X FM had taken over the turntable, or I was back in the Bull and Chequers in Woodley as a callow 23-year-old, at the mercy of whoever had stuck a few quid in the jukebox.

The server had done that winning thing where I’d asked her for recommendations and she’d suggested the thing I was tempted to order, the flipside of the phenomenon where you pick something and they say “oh, good choice”. So the slow-smoked 7 hour beef short rib was her idea and mine: the menu even has an asterisk next to that dish, denoting one of the restaurant’s favourite dishes. If I didn’t like it, perhaps it would reflect on all of us.

And it was so huge, and so almost good, and so very huge. I quite liked it, possibly because God loves a trier and it nearly worked. It was a colossal piece of meat and yes, it did sort of slide off the bone. It had a black pepper rub, and a George Hamilton tan, and it didn’t take much for a fork to shred it nicely. I could see why people would love this, because I came close to loving it myself.

But the beef managed not to entirely be to my taste, in a few ways that may have been particular to me. The bits that were dry were a little too dry, not sauced enough, an issue I’d also encountered with the burnt ends. The server nicely brought me some of the restaurant’s own barbecue sauce, and it was very good, but the beef needed it I thought. And then there was the fat, which for me wasn’t rendered enough. It reminded me of the times I’ve eaten an undercooked beef cheek, and there in its core, not melted down, I’ve found a gooey blob of fat like the end product of a messy sneeze.

I know some people love beef fat, almost certainly love it more than I do, and this mightn’t be a deal breaker for many of you, but it slightly deterred me. I know that the comparison might be superficial at best, but I thought of the short rib curry that the Moderation serves, or the short rib dish on the menu at Clay’s, and I wanted this dish to live up to that potential. Not comparing apples with apples, or even beef with beef: different cooking methods, different ethoses, all that jazz, but it didn’t quite hit the spot for me. It wouldn’t put me off trying other things at Django’s, but at £28 I wanted this to be a knockout.

Still, the fries were excellent – especially after my hideous experience last week – and Django’s coleslaw, with plenty of red cabbage and a dressing that tasted more like a vinaigrette, was very enjoyable. I would have liked some pickles on the side to lend acidity but I can eat pickles pretty much any time, so I would say that.

I would have ordered some sides, but I figured I’d asked for quite enough food as it was. Besides, a lot of the sides looked as if they might be bought in: my server confirmed that the popcorn chicken was, and stuff like the mozzarella sticks sounded more Iceland than Kansas City.

The friendly chatter between the servers and their regulars meant it felt like it took a while to get my bill, but I didn’t mind. It was nice, on a cold and inhospitable night, to sip my beer a little longer and postpone the drab walk back to the station: I couldn’t find anywhere in Didcot to have a good pre-train pint anyway, as the Town That Untappd Forgot.

Eventually, during a break in their conversation, I asked if I could settle up. “I was just about to come check on you” my server said, and I honestly believed her. My food and drink – and make no mistake, I left that restaurant full – came to just over £62, including a 12.5% service charge.

While I was sitting there, in no particular hurry, I wondered whether the owner was right that Didcot would be unrecognisable in five years. He only had another year for that prophecy to come true, after all, and I guess when he said that he probably had no idea just how challenging those five years would be for all of us. People who open restaurants are dreamers, but if it wasn’t for their reckless, sometimes poorly-researched dreams, towns and cities across the U.K. would be infinitely poorer.

That was definitely true of Reading, but I reckoned it was true of Didcot too: I mean, I’d now spent about two hours there and I unilaterally decided that qualified me as an expert.

So is Didcot worth going to, just to eat at Django’s Smokehouse? You’ll have your own view on that from what you’ve read but if you want to hear mine, the answer is: kind of. I wanted to like Django’s very much indeed, and parts of it I really did. The menu is admirable and interesting, the service is a shining credit to them.

I wish I could have unconditionally adored the food. I wish I’d been able to say “this took me back to when Blue’s Smokehouse opened in Bracknell”, or “if you miss Bluegrass BBQ this is the place for you” or even “close your eyes and you could almost be in Copenhagen, at Warpigs”. I can’t quite say any of those things, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t charmed in a quieter, less performative manner.

So yes, if you like barbecue, or you’re in the area, or you have a split ticket and feel like living dangerously, Django’s is ten minutes and a world away from the station. Is it the best restaurant in Didcot? I’m not sure about that. I have always revered Zigana Turkish Kitchen, slightly further out, a spot where you smell the charcoal a block before you reach the front door, where the Efe is cold and eating the lamb chops for the first time verges on an epiphany. And yet, for some reason, I’ve never reviewed it. So that’s settled, then: next time I’m in Didcot I will go there. Maybe you’ll win the sweepstake, that week.

Django’s Smokehouse – 7.3
126 Broadway, Didcot, OX11 8AB
01235 813333

https://djangossmokehouse.co.uk

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Pub review: The Punter, Oxford

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I took a slightly roundabout route to deciding where to review this week. It was always going to be somewhere in Oxford, but the initial plan was to visit the Old Bookbinders, a gorgeous backstreet pub in Jericho that has served up affordable French food for fifteen years, with my old friend Dave. But then at the beginning of the week I got the dreaded WhatsApp from him: struck down with a bug, only just back at work, he’d be in no fit state for eating or boozing at the weekend.

I briefly contemplated going there solo, but then I recalibrated: I could try out Permit Room, the Dishoom offshoot in the centre of Oxford, instead. Unlike most people I’ve met, I’ve never eaten in a Dishoom: I save no reservations dining for holidays. But everything I read suggested that, although Dishoom might not be what it once was, Permit Room was another kettle of fish entirely.

There were only five branches, and Oxford was graced with one: the kind of chain that Reading would so dearly love to attract but never does. I was sold. I made a reservation for lunch, did my research, pored over the menu. But I didn’t wind up eating at Permit Room.

So what happened? Well, my manager happened. I was in the office last Friday and on a break between poring over spreadsheets and crafting impeccably disappointed emails we got to chatting, as we often do, about Oxford, a place where I suspect we both frequently daydream about living. That usually involves shooting the breeze about where to get good coffee, or eat good food and he happened to mention The Punter to me. Had I heard about the changes there, he asked?

The Punter has an interesting history. There’s been a pub there for 150 years, but it reopened under that name a mere 15 years ago. Then, in the height of the pandemic, it decided to remake itself as an exclusively vegan and vegetarian gastropub. The following year it appointed chef Anthony Skeats, who previously cooked at a Michelin-starred pub in Oxfordshire, and plaudits followed. It made the Good Food Guide and even featured in the Sunday Times when it was reviewed by Charlotte Ivers, the paper’s then restaurant critic.

Ivers was very much the Liz Truss of broadsheet restaurant criticism – a massive Tory who didn’t do the job for long and whose reign now feels like an aberration. And her review of The Punter was a little on the lukewarm side, but it was still a rare appearance by an Oxford establishment in the national press.

But the reason my manager asked if I’d considered The Punter, he told me, was that it was serving meat and fish dishes again. A little research confirmed that the pub had rowed back from its bold new direction. Skeats left a couple of years ago, and in February the pub launched a new menu – still 60% vegetarian, they said, but now with fish dishes. Why the volte-face, you might ask? Was it because the market just wasn’t there for an entirely meat free venue, or was it something else?

Well, according to owner Tom Rainey it was partly due to government policy but mainly down to the closure of the Botley Road, a major thoroughfare which was pretty key to being able to reach the pub at all. Rainey said that this reduced footfall to the pub by 75%, if not more.

The Botley Road was closed so Network Rail could rebuild the nearby railway bridge and add an extra platform to the station. Which doesn’t sound an unreasonable thing to do, but what was unreasonable was the sheer duration of the closure: excellent local website the Oxford Clarion described it as having reopened “after 1,258 days and £237m”. Rainey, speaking to the local media, was more to the point: he called it “three and a half years of hell”.

It’s always tricky providing background like this because my Oxford readers already know all this and everybody else might not be that interested, but to put it in some kind of context for my Reading readers: you know how the Fisherman’s Cottage went through a phase of complaining to the Chronicle about the council cutting off access to the pub? Imagine that to the power of ten, being virtually inaccessible for over three years.

Anyway, I’d like to say that I cancelled my plans to go to Permit Room because I’m a sucker for the underdog. But the truth is that after my manager told me the news about the Punter I looked it up online, and I really fancied the menu. It looked clean and tempting, and I thought a little outing to the Punter might be a lovely way to spend a Saturday. The sample menu still had vegetarian stuff on it, but half of the dishes involved meat or fish. It was as if its time as a vegetarian pub was an embarrassing episode in its past it was trying, gradually, to forget. We’ve all been there, though. I booked a table.

If the rhetorical route to the Punter was circuitous the physical one couldn’t be much more direct, now that pesky bridge has been sorted. You leave the train station and rather than striking out towards Park End Street and the Westgate, you instead turn right and within five minutes you’ve crossed a pretty little bridge and find yourself on Osney Island, right by the river, walking down East Street, a beautiful run of terraced Victorian houses. It reminded me of the Village in Reading, an enclave so close to everything, yet magically removed. You are right by the station and yet you’re utterly in the middle of elsewhere, dreaming about living in one of those houses (I looked them up: we probably can’t afford to).

And there, on the corner with South Street, is the Punter, a ridiculously attractive redbrick pub with a decent looking outdoor space. I imagine Victorian side streets used to be awash with these: places like the Punter, and the Retreat in Reading, make a good case for the survival of the fittest. Boats went past on the Thames and a gaggle of men in Lycra, all repping the Oxford Cycling Club, were gathered outside in the sun, drinking pints of cask beer. It was awfully bucolic for somewhere so near the city centre: I realised I’d never been to Osney Island before in thirty-five years of coming to Oxford, and I felt I’d missed out.

The Punter is absolutely beautiful inside. It’s a corner plot with two rooms and I was in the bigger, even more gorgeous one. Window is a noun that’s yet to transform, horrifically, into a verb, but if it ever does you could do some terrific windowing here: the bright blue frames look out on the redbrick terraces and the water, the whole thing almost more glass than wall. Vibrant, likeable art hung between each window, and the overall effect was oddly magical.

The staff had originally kindly plonked me at the one table that looked out on the river, but I asked nicely if I could move so I could see the whole room, experience all that life and light. The Punter’s well-curated Instagram feed boasts that customers come for the river and end up looking at the walls. They’re not far from the truth.

The menu was different to the one I’d seen online, which was something of a curveball, but the overall balance of it was the same: roughly half the dishes involved meat and fish, and most of the rest were vegetarian rather than vegan. Starters mostly maxed out at a tenner, mains clustered in the low twenties. Although the staff who looked after me were charming, friendly and a credit to the place, one of them owned up that the menu had changed recently and that he couldn’t advise me on some of the dilemmas it gave me. Perhaps if it had been a little more bedded in I might have chosen better.

My lunch started superbly, though. A Scotch egg from the bar snacks menu was exemplary and – to my surprise – completely vegetarian. Pea and leek took the place of sausagemeat, and a stellar job they did of it. The flavour was interesting and complex, although the advertised truffle had taken the day off, the yolk was perfectly fudgy, the crumb faultlessly light and crisp. An excellent herb mayo completed a really joyous dish that felt its money at £8.

So often vegetarian or vegan food involves ultra processed ingredients, bad karaoke renditions of meat. This was far better and infinitely more interesting. It felt like it was invented not by a vegetarian but by a meat eater who cared for vegetarians, wanted them to know the pleasure of a really good Scotch egg without betraying their ideals. I wondered whether every dish had been like this during the pub’s all vegetarian era: if so, I rather wished they hadn’t changed.

Another thing to really like about the Punter was its wine list. They did have a good cask selection, and just the one interesting pale ale from Buckinghamshire’s XT Brewing, but a well-curated selection of wine – four whites, five reds – was on offer with all but one available by the glass and smaller 125ml glasses priced fairly. I can think of an awful lot of restaurants that could learn from the Punter and I loved my French pinot noir so much that I clocked up another glass. Sitting there in that room, feeling a blend of relaxation and anticipation, I decided that good things were in my future.

For my starter I was torn between the truffled rarebit and the salt and pepper squid, and my server steered me towards the latter. It was pleasant, but not quite there: bronzed, clenched fists of squid promised good texture, but under that coating they lacked the softness of the truly fresh – not bad, or even uniformly bouncy, but close enough to good that you knew they could have been better.

I liked the coating, but I don’t think it was salt and pepper. It felt like there might have been a bit of nigella seed in there, and it just about went with the mayo – which was described as sriracha aioli but I suspect was just sriracha mayo. As I write that up, describe that attempted fusion of China, Thailand and Spain, I’m aware that it sounds busy in theory. In practice it wasn’t, but it also wasn’t entirely successful.

Here’s a terrible secret, though: at this point I really didn’t care. Because the pub was so lovely, and the surroundings were so enchanting, and I was far too busy wishing I lived just round the corner to raise classic restaurant reviewer niggles like squid freshness. The cyclists kept wandering in to top up on pints of ale, the pub was slowly attracting more dog walkers.

A table of four women, all a few years younger than me, came in for their 1.30pm booking and were pure joy and camaraderie, enjoying an afternoon together and intending to make the most of it. Wine was ordered – not a bottle, the implication being that such excess would follow in due course – and they started catching up. There was something about that group that had the nicest energy: no willy-waving, no oxygen thievery, just good friends sharing stories, comparing notes, feeding off each other.

It was clear that eating at the Punter was a break from their well-trodden routine (“they know us at the usual place”, one of them conspiratorially admitted to the others) and benevolently looking on I found myself feeling sort of happy and kind of lonely. It made me want to round up all my brilliant male friends – the likes of Jerry, and Graeme, and Dave – and make them go to the pub with me, to try and build something a bit like what they had. But it was a good sort of lonely, if there’s such a thing, because I knew that I at least did have friends like that, even if they weren’t there right now.

Besides, what did I have to complain about? I was having a solo lunch in a gorgeous dining room, flooded with autumn sunshine. I could see the river from my table, and the pinot noir was delicious. And the people watching was superb: I got a little glow from seeing those four good friends set the world to rights, in a conversation that aced the Bechdel test.

I have had a difficult 12 months, with my accident and my surgery, losing my poor dad – who would have loved The Punter, like he loved everywhere – and my wife’s operation. And yet here I was, on the other side of some of that, in this little pocket of tranquil reflection. It truly is a good life, if you don’t weaken.

Then the fish and chips arrived and ruined all that.

Really, it wasn’t good. Can you tell from the photo? I nearly had the monkfish and bream stew, but my server couldn’t tell me anything about it. I almost ordered the ham hock and cheddar “open pie”, but he told me that it was a sort of casserole with a pastry lid and a layer of mashed potato on the bottom, which I thought sounded downright weird. So I picked fish and chips, a great benchmark of pub food and generally a safe bet even in the iffiest of pubs.

Yet every element of this had something wrong with it. The fish was not unpleasant – haddock, falling neatly into flakes, and the coating was suitably light. But it was a small, anaemic piece lacking the crinkles and crunch of really good batter: the squid had been better, in that respect. The crushed peas tasted of lemon, which crushed peas really shouldn’t do. The tartare sauce was just mayonnaise that had gone on an unsuccessful speed date with some chopped gherkin. I like tartare sauce, I think, to be cheap and nasty, to be napalm for the roof of your mouth the way good salt and vinegar crisps are.

And then there were the chips: my god, the chips. I am a little bit finicky about chips, and I won’t generally eat them if they don’t pass a short visual audit. You can make a case for skin-on chips, or skin-off, but for my money you can’t make a case for “suspicious black patches on”. These were just manky, and there were enough scuzzy ones – which I encountered early enough in proceedings – that it rather put me off the rest. If they were bought in, which I assume they were, the pub needs to buy better. If they weren’t, there are even fewer excuses.

Could dessert recover from that? Well, actually, yes. I’m so used to ordering chocolate mousse and it being a dollop of something loose and airy, usually drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and scattered with salt, that I’d forgotten the simple pleasures of the more orthodox rendition. This was a lozenge of denser, less bubbled mousse – you could wonder if they’d used something like gelatin, if the pub wasn’t still a little vegetarian – on a slab of chocolate sponge, a rubble of chocolate crumb on top, cherry sauce Spirographed around.

I loved it, and I was grateful to the pub for doing its best to stop me leaving full of sadness and resentment. It’s worth also adding that the pub gets its coffee from local Jericho Coffee Traders, and my latte was as good as any coffee I’ve had in a restaurant or pub for as long as I can remember. My bill came to £65, not including tip, and I told my server that I’d had a marvellous time. Which wasn’t a lie, even if those chips should have been taken across the road and drowned in the Thames.

I used to work with a chap called Phil, nearly 20 years ago, who looked like Sonic The Hedgehog and entertained me very much. He was also obsessed with shaving his scrotum and telling everybody about it, which is a story for another kind of blog entirely, and he’s now high up in project management somewhere, so thank goodness he doesn’t read this. But I was reminded of Phil, when I reflected on my meal at The Punter.

Here’s why: we all went out after work one evening for his birthday, and he decided he wanted to eat at Prezzo. I went, because I wasn’t always the gastronomically hyper-evolved being who is writing to you now. Phil looked at the menu and railed, entertainingly and at length, about the fact that it included a burger. What kind of Italian restaurant offers a burger, he ranted? And what kind of chump orders it?

You can probably guess what’s coming: the server came round, Phil ordered the burger and naturally he hated it. At the time I thought it was emblematic of Phil himself, to do something he knew he would dislike and then enjoy his chagrin more than he could ever have enjoyed his meal. But I did a Phil at The Punter, because if you look at the dishes I enjoyed – the Scotch egg, and that chocolate mousse – they were vegetarian. It was only when I wandered off track, ate the fish, that disappointment came looking for me.

I told you I saw the truffled rarebit go to another table, and it looked good. The braised Hispi cabbage with miso chimichurri that also went to that table? That looked good too. I bet the black garlic rigatoni and the celeriac steak, the porcini and pearl barley burger – all of them on the mains – were good too.

So don’t read as much as usual into the mark at the bottom of this page, because it arguably reflects as much on me as it does on The Punter. That afternoon, taken in by the menu and the cyclists and the pinot and the sunshine, I emulated Phil. I reckon vegetarians, and people who are prepared to put their prejudice to one side, will eat even better at the Punter than I did. Except for the fries: those fries were an affront.

It is one of the greatest contradictions of restaurants and pubs that you can have a wonderful time without having a wonderful meal, a brilliant afternoon or evening eating middling dishes. The Punter is great evidence of that. I really hope it recovers from its three and a half years of hell, and I have more than half a mind to go back. And bit of me hopes that they reverse their position on the whole vegetarian thing. It’s always better to do what you love, and if you stick at it I remain hopeful that you find the love you deserve in return.

The Punter – 7.2
7 South St, Oxford, OX2 0BE
01865 248832

https://www.thepunteroxford.co.uk

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