Restaurant review: No. 1 Ship Street, Oxford

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Oxford, probably my favourite city in which to review restaurants, ostensibly has little in common with Reading. One has pretty old buildings and winding lanes, a shopping mall that doesn’t bump off your will to live in the space of five minutes, a bustling market with food, drink, coffee and cheese and shedloads of independent retail. The other has Forbury Gardens and a very good bus network.

That sounds like I’m doing Reading down. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Oxford complements Reading nicely: if there’s something you wish Reading had, you may well find it thirty minutes down the train tracks. And to be fair to Reading, Oxford may beat it for wine bars – because it has some and no, Vino Vita doesn’t count – and it has some lovely old pubs, but Reading is streets ahead when it comes to craft beer. Oxford is brilliant, but it has no Nag’s Head.

One thing they do have in common, though, is that their best restaurants are rarely found in the centre. Reading has some solid restaurants inside the IDR – your Me Kongs, and Mama’s Ways – but they’re the exception rather than the rule: it’s mostly chains and I suspect it always has been. The independent restaurants chasing that status right in the centre are probably London Street Brasserie and The Reading Room, neither of which quite pulls it off, but beyond that you might find yourself heading north of the river, or west down the Oxford Road.

Oxford is similar. If you overlaid the Oxford restaurants I’ve reviewed over a map of the place, it would look like my metaphorical attempts to hit a bullseye down the pub: everything everywhere but in the middle. Out east you have the Cowley Road, Iffley Road and St Clements, all with great places to eat, and Headington beyond that. Head north and you reach Little Clarendon Street before the myriad of choices available in Jericho or Summertown. But what about the centre?

Oxford has a mall, the Westgate, and it’s nicer than the Oracle. But that means it still gets chains, just fancier ones. It has the kind Reading doesn’t attract: Mowgli; Shoryu Ramen; Six By Nico. Notably it has a branch of award-winning small chain Beefy Boys – it would have been a coup, if they had chosen Reading. But in the rest of the centre it’s largely a mix of chains we have, chains we used to have and chains we can probably live without. It has Cosy Club, for people who wish the Lounge group were fancier, and The Ivy, for people who wish Cosy Club was, I don’t know, more showy.

Oxford readers would probably be the first to tell me that’s a slight oversimplification. Oxford has a few long-standing central restaurants with a durable fan following, like Chiang Mai Kitchen or Edamame: it tells you something about their longevity that I’ve eaten at both, each case long before I started writing this blog. It has a branch of Permit Room, the Dishoom offshoot that is so far limited to a mere five locations nationwide.

Beyond that, if you’re talking more upmarket restaurants, it has Quod, a buzzy brasserie on the ground floor of the Old Bank Hotel owned by the same group as Gee’s. And the conversion of the old Boswell’s department store into a hotel has given the city Treadwell, a new all-day restaurant whose menu looks a bit like somebody took Quod’s, gave it to the kitchen and said “make it quirkier”: whether fish and chips needs kimchi tartar sauce is anybody’s guess.

Having lost all my Reading readers with seven paragraphs about Oxford, and all my Oxford readers with seven paragraphs which aren’t about the restaurant I’m reviewing this week, let’s finally get to the point and talk about No. 1 Ship Street, the subject of this week’s review. It’s resolutely small and independent, it’s been open for nine years this summer and it’s very much in the city centre, just off the pedestrianised hellscape of Cornmarket Street, just around the corner from the Covered Market.

Chef Owen Little has been there from the very start, and No. 1 Ship Street shows no signs of slowing down as it reaches the end of its first decade, having been named last November as one of OpenTable’s Top 100 U.K. restaurants: to put this in perspective, nowhere in Reading featured on that list, and nowhere else in Oxford did either. I explained all this – fortunately for him in far less depth than I have here – to my dear friend Jerry as we had a pre-prandial beer in Teardrop, the tiny pub in the Covered Market.

Owner Ross Drummond apparently celebrated winning that award from OpenTable by giving the place a refurb for the New Year. I think it was a subtle one, because the bones of the dining room were already there: beautiful racing green walls, well-spaced tables, the whole thing sleek, luxe and unfussy. They’ve removed the slightly tacky spider lights and the tables now are gorgeous and copper-topped: Jerry, mentally making notes for his flat, was taken with those. 

It was difficult to believe that the horrors of Cornmarket Street were a stone’s throw away, but No. 1 Ship Street had created a beautiful, grown-up oasis dangerously close to its borders. I should say that we asked to be seated in the main dining room: I’m sure the one on the other side of the entrance is lovely of an evening, but I didn’t want to lunch in a windowless room on a June afternoon.

After a disappointing run of small-plates-for-sharing restaurants, some honestly described and some far less so, No. 1 Ship Street’s menu came as a blessed relief. Terms like appetites, starters and mains might be increasingly recherché out there in the wild, but in this restaurant they were alive and well. There was no spiel about the concept, because the concept was “remember how restaurants used to be?” and the conversational gambit wasn’t “do you need me to explain the menu?” but instead my personal favourite, “are you ready to order?”

Not that we were, at first, because No. 1 Ship Street’s menu was just tricky enough. The starters seemed to be where the more experimental bent came out – burnt aubergine soup, foie gras crème brûlée, frog’s legs and the like – while the mains were more conventional. So yes, there was a burger, and a steak, and a risotto. I guess you don’t survive nearly a decade in the centre of Oxford by taking massive risks.

Starters clustered between £10 and £16, mains began at £20 and climbed up from there. If you wanted oysters, lobster, a tomahawk or the restaurant’s surf and turf (which combined the latter two and cost £160) you could spend an awful lot more, and a specials board introduced about half a dozen other options, nearly all of them fish and seafood.

It was difficult enough that we ordered some appetisers and apéritifs while we decided – and No. 1 Ship Street is that happy kind of restaurant that brings them and gives you the time and space you need for that. Jerry’s bread was good and generous, speckled with nigella seeds and very enjoyable. Good salted butter at room temperature, embossed with the name of the restaurant, was a nice touch. For £6, the bread needed to be this good, and gladly it was.

My truffle and porcini arancini were the first evidence that the kitchen might quite like being tricksy for the sake of it. They were very good, the texture acceptably crunchy and the inside studded with mushroom. Not indecent value at £6 for three either. Whether they needed to be submerged in some kind of hot truffle mayo and then carpeted in Parmesan was another matter. I thought less might have been more in this instance.

Jerry tried a bit but revealed to me that he really wasn’t a fan of truffle. And I was reminded of the recent meal where I discovered he had been humouring me all these years by drinking white wine when he only really liked red wine. It turned out that my happy memory in lockdown of sitting on a park bench with Jerry in lockdown demolishing a bottle of red and inhaling a packet of Torres’ superlative truffle crisps was actually more evidence of Jerry being too nice to say he didn’t enjoy something. Let’s hope that somewhere out there he isn’t writing a blog telling the world what a terrible dining companion I am.

Never mind. The apéritifs, by the way, were knockout: mine a variant on a negroni sweetened and mollified with the substitution of amaro for vermouth and Jerry’s a champagne cocktail with a little cognac in the mix, sugar cube effortlessly effervescing at the bottom like buried treasure. We followed this up with an excellent South African Chardonnay – yes, a white – recommended by the very knowledgeable server, from the Elgin Valley. It had plenty of citrus and elegance, it was £48, and I liked it a lot. Jerry said he did too, and hopefully he meant it.

Starters were where things started to wobble. Jerry was torn between a number of options, one of which was the foie gras.

“I love it, but I know I shouldn’t, so I don’t order it these days” he told me. And I’m afraid I took that as an opportunity to deliver a tone deaf homily about not denying yourself things you like – I wish I could say it was the negroni talking, but such conduct is me all over – and so he chose it.

It was meant to be a foie gras crème brûlée with vin jaune gel and toasted brioche, and I’m sorry to say this, but the resemblance stops at the photograph, and possibly before that. A crème brûlée is meant to have a satisfying burnt top and be set underneath. It’s not meant to be a murky puddle of bumf. And it’s not meant to taste so little of foie gras that you wonder, as Jerry did, whether he’d accidentally been given something from the dessert section, a theory lent credence by the pointless popcorn on top.

Poor Jerry – all the guilt of having ordered foie gras without the corresponding enjoyment of getting to eat the bastard stuff. I felt personally responsible.

I felt less bad about it, though, because my starter was also disappointing. What was billed as seared scallops with clam velouté and parsnips was in fact a thin puddle of soup with a single scallop, cut in half, three clams and a crispy disc of perpendicular parsnip.

The overall effect, apart from masterful cost control in a £16 starter, was an oversweetened, unsubtle cacophony of a dish. Just like the foie gras crème brûlée, what turned up wasn’t in the slightest what the menu implied you would be tucking into. No wonder they brought you a spoon with this one. I once ate at Oxford restaurant Gees and wondered if I’d accidentally wandered into the U.K.’s most expensive salad bar. No. 1 Ship Street, by contrast, was beginning to feel like a spenny soup kitchen in disguise.

Were the mains, when the restaurant stayed closer to the mainstream, any better? Mostly, I would say. My confit duck almost worked: the skin was gloriously crisp, the fat rendered and the flesh underneath giving in all the right ways. Perching it on a pile of wild mushrooms, enjoyable ones at that, was a bit like giving the dish platform shoes: it made it look like you got far more duck than you did.

The white asparagus was thick and generous, with just enough bite, beautifully cooked to avoid the bitterness this variety can sometimes have. “It looks like a pair of dildos” was Jerry’s unvarnished take: I laughed like a drain and warned him that I planned to quote him verbatim. This is the bit in the description where I’d love to say and a plum jus brought it all together beautifully but instead I have to say that there was a thin drizzle of blandness that didn’t add enough moisture or flavour.

This dish needed carbs and didn’t have them, so I ordered some chunky chips. And these were well done, but with the main course so unrelentingly dry there was nothing for these to soak up, or act as a vehicle for. It also means that my duck dish, with chips on the side, cost £30. That’s a lot for not quite enough, there’s no way around that.

Jerry picked better I think, moules marinière from the specials. They were plump specimens, from St Austell Bay according to the blackboard, and Jerry thoroughly enjoyed them. They came with frites, and as with No. 1 Ship Street’s chips they were well executed.

But ironically, for me, this dish had the converse problem to both those starters. The mussels were high and dry, clustered in a wide-brimmed bowl. The joy of moules marinière is the bit at the end, when all the shells have been vanquished and you’re left with a bowl of that creamy liquor, to trawl with a spoon, picking up stray mussels, to drink like broth, to dab with bread or to tip your frites into. It makes it two meals in one.

But here, that last stage was a bit like some people I see prancing around on Instagram, too shallow to be worth persevering with. It seems that No. 1 Ship Street only dished up soup when you didn’t want it to. Jerry, mind you, loved it.

Despite all that, and perhaps paradoxically, we stopped for dessert. Because despite the food not being spectacular, and in some cases being downright weird, we were still having a lovely time. No. 1 Ship Street somehow, through its gorgeous, calming room, its very pleasing booze and unstintingly charming staff, created a space where you knew, on some level, that things could and should be better but didn’t mind as much as you should.

In that sense, it was almost the inverse of so many experiences I’ve had on duty lately, restaurants I ought to have liked more than I did. Here, instead, I found myself almost willing to suspend critical judgment. Only in the moment, really, and as I write this I remember all the things they got wrong. But weirdly, remembering them is almost like trying to recall a dream. I wonder how many people No. 1 Ship Street has pulled that trick on over nearly a decade. I’m not seeking to denigrate: it’s a neat trick.

Anyway, they saved some of the best for last. They make their own ice cream, and both the chocolate and salted caramel were smooth, rich, crystal-free and as good as anything you could get in George & Davis, if not quite the standard of Swoon on the High. The range of flavours was quite pedestrian, which surprised me: they save the cheffy stuff, the rose and rhubarb ice cream or the basil sorbet, to accompany Actual Desserts. £6 for two scoops with a beautifully light langue de chat was probably the bargain of the day.

Jerry was happy with his pistachio cake. I don’t know if I would have been, it was a thin, uneven slab of the stuff with something that did not look like basil sorbet. Maybe it was grape and basil sorbet – the menu, as so often, made it difficult to work out what you were going to get.

And again, that’s not necessarily a problem. In a restaurant where the words on a menu are just a jumping-off point, in the hands of the right kitchen, a meal can be a life of surprises. Underpromising and overdelivering is one of the great talents of hospitality done well, and the thing that makes memories – as much as anything does, over and above the people you bring with you. The problem with No. 1 Ship Street, for all I keep saying that it’s not a bad restaurant, is that none of the surprises, on balance, were good ones.

All that set us back £214, including the standard 12.5% tip, and more than usual I couldn’t really work out whether I’d been stiffed or not. We were there for the best part of two and a half hours, we had a marvellous time – although for me, lunching with Jerry, that was a given – and we were very well looked after.

Perhaps in the centre of Oxford, given the alternatives, No. 1 Ship Street is as good as it needs to be. Or maybe it had a bad day when I went, or I was too finicky. But I was left again marvelling at their powers of misdirection: how could they have created the semblance of a fantastic meal from such inconsistent food? Appropriately, it had the feel of being through the looking glass about it.

But I didn’t feel that way at the time, I only feel it now. At the time, Jerry and I agreed that we’d had a lovely meal, and off we strolled to the Rose & Crown to enjoy the refurbished outside space and improved beer offering. It had been another classic visit to Oxford, and if something was niggling at me it would take a couple of weeks for my reservations to fully germinate.

Restaurant reviewers are pontificators by nature, and never miss an opportunity to tell you what a restaurant Means, what it is All About. I’ve read a couple of think pieces lately about how it’s okay for a restaurant to be just good enough, in defence of the unspectacular, the “fine” or “ordinary”. Well, I suppose it’s one way to try and jazz up a boring meal, or meet your latest deadline at the Financial Times. You’ve got to have an angle.

But for the rest of us, who spend our own money, that’s not the axis you plot things on. It’s not unremarkable versus showy, hyped versus anonymous. Most of us deal in good or bad, or perhaps good enough and not good enough. No. 1 Ship Street’s failing is to try and show off, when it could just get the basics very right and send a lot of people away very happy indeed. It has the room, it has the service, it has all the ingredients to do that.

But somehow, for some reason, it chooses not to and, to give it credit, it almost gets away with it. But what do I know? If you clock up a decade slap bang in the centre of Oxford, even with the dearth of competition, you must know a thing or two. Even so, I can’t help feeling their second decade might prove more difficult.

No. 1 Ship Street – 7.0
1 Ship Street, Oxford, OX1 3DA
01865 806637

https://www.no1shipstreet.com

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Restaurant review: Carmel, Queen’s Park

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At Carmel in Queen’s Park, a restaurant usually described as some combination of Eastern Mediterranean and North African, a snack of anchovies comes with tahini and crostini. Crispy squid is served with aioli and lemon. Flatbread is topped with merguez and jalapeño relish, hispi cabbage with a macadamia dukkah. You can have slow-cooked lamb shoulder with salad and more flatbread, and something called “campfire potato” on the side.

Right, shall we wrap up there? I can give you the rating and, as people at work say when a conference call is shorter than expected, give you back fifteen minutes.

But I imagine you’re thinking No, not yet. You want to know why I picked the restaurant, what the room is like, whether I liked those dishes, what the service is like. How much it cost, and whether it was worth it. You might never have been to Queen’s Park, and want to know where it is and what kind of area it is. If I ended now – here’s the food and that’s it – you’d probably feel put out, and rushed.

Well, now you have a vague idea what it’s like to eat at Carmel, because I’m afraid it was one of those meals. Let’s get this out of the way early doors: our table was booked for quarter past eight on a Saturday night, the place was packed and I don’t think we ordered for at least 10 minutes, possibly more. 

We ordered an aperitif, and a bottle of wine for later, and snacks and small plates, and then a big plate for sharing. We ordered what looked, to me at least, like a well-considered meal with a beginning, a middle and an end. Well, a pre-end anyway, because I’m sure we’d have stayed for dessert.

Having been stung in the past by meals where everything comes out too quickly, we asked our server for advice. Should we have our aperitifs and snacks first, then order the rest? No need, she said, because the kitchen would something something something and the food would come out something something. She was inaudible and, as it turned out, a little ineffectual, but we came away reassured.

Something like 10 minutes later, our first snack came out. Then, a couple of minutes later, our second. One of our small plates came with it and then, 3 minutes later, another. We hadn’t even got close to finishing our negronis – a shame, because they were great, the gin infused with sage – and our table was already packed with food.

Every time a server walked past, towards the buzzing terrace, with more plates I got the fear that they were going to be for our table. Surely they couldn’t be? The place was rammed, we’d only just got there and they’d taken 10 minutes to even ask us what we wanted. Yet they nearly always were. 

Another 3 minutes later – thank heavens for time stamps on photos – our side dish came out, ahead of the thing it was a side dish for. And then, with grim inevitability, 5 minutes after that, out came the lamb. Absolutely ridiculous. It took 18 hours to cook and about 18 minutes to come to our table. All in all, about £115 of food arrived in the space of 15  minutes. And I have to wonder whether, at some point over the last couple of years, I started Doing Restaurants Wrong.

Because experiences like this seem to be more normal now, to the point where I wonder if it’s what some or many diners actually want. One recent review of Carmel on Google said “The service was the fastest I’ve ever seen, food was served around 10min after we ordered and it wasn’t some easy dishes”. He gave the place five stars, while describing an experience I might expect from KFC or Honest Burgers.

It wasn’t what we wanted, though. Zoë had finished a relatively early shift that night and I met her in London on an evening when we both had the next day off, so as close to a date night as we seem to get these days. We were in no rush, and I don’t think we seemed like we were. So how did it go so wrong? 

With an experience like that there’s only so good a restaurant can be, but since my whistle stop summary at the start missed out so many important details let’s fill in the blanks. Queen’s Park is lovely, and one of those bits of London that belies its proximity to the centre: in Zone 2 but a mere seven minutes from Paddington, feeling like it’s not really London at all.

And Carmel is down Lonsdale Road, a pretty cobbled lane which was absolutely humming on a warm Saturday night. Londoners were thronged outside eating and drinking – some at restaurants like Carmel or Pizza Pilgrims but many just standing outside a pub called Wolfpack, or sitting on seats which may or may not have belonged to that establishment. It felt like a drinking flashmob, to the point where I wondered if people had brought their own furniture.

Carmel is an offshoot from Haggerston grill house Berber & Q, its more grown-up sibling, and it opened in late 2021. It was joined by critically acclaimed bakery and restaurant Don’t Tell Dad at the start of 2025, the overall effect being to create another of London’s many gastronomic microclimates. 

I was tempted by Don’t Tell Dad, but the menu at Carmel read like an absolute dream. Something jumped out from nearly every item on it saying “pick me, I’m different”, little invisible exclamation marks drawing the eye here and there. Smoked taramasalata, hummus with zhug. Sumac and tahini, harissa butter and pomegranata molasses. Labneh and dukkah, fermented chilli, smoked salt, parsley pesto. 

Restaurant reviewers, or anybody with an Instagram account, are used to saying that the camera eats first, but when you read a menu like this the eyes eat first: everything flows from there. 

And the room was beautiful – I was glad we were inside rather than on that clamouring terrace because it’s such a gorgeous space, with exposed brick painted white, a white tiled bar, a long communal table and handsome Ercol chairs. It didn’t feel of its place at all, but reminded me more of places in Ghent, or Copenhagen – effortlessly cool Europe, rather than London.

Leaving the woeful timing issues to one side, most of what we ate was good or better. Those anchovies, for instance, were a not ungenerous four, served swimming in oil with a pickled chilli, a little tomato, swirls of black tahini and two long strips of the restaurant’s wholewheat focaccia, turned into fancy Melba toasts. It was very nice, and in the parallel universe where Zoë and I ate this, finished our negronis, decompressed and talked about our day it would have played a beautiful part of a harmonious whole.

For that matter I loved the crispy squid, which managed to get everything right – the texture inside and out, just enough give but with a roughed-up, brittle exterior that hinted at something like polenta flour in the mix. This cost £10.50, as did the anchovies: if you gave me that £21 again I’d just order the squid twice.

We tried not to be distracted from our task of finishing it by the arrival of other dishes. 

And Carmel’s Hispi cabbage deserved not to share the limelight with anything else. I know as an ingredient it’s almost as done to death as broadsheet critics complaining about its omnipresence on menus, but I still love it and my forkful of Zoë’s confirmed her good sense in ordering it.

It had the right amount of blackening, the tender leaves spot on underneath, and everything it was paired with brought out its best self wonderfully – a bracing labneh, fragrant ras el hanout and a really enjoyable dukkah which positively transformed the humdrum macadamia into something worth hoovering up. £16.50 for this, and worth every penny.

I’ve read somewhere about Carmel’s flatbreads being described as some of London’s best pizza. In fairness that was four years ago, before the capital lost its mind for pizza, and perhaps it was true then. I think it would be harder to make that case in 2026, but I did rather like it: the crust faultlessly puffy and spotted, the crater in the middle loaded with paydirt.

But the base was easily the best thing, and the stuff in the middle felt like it was fighting among itself. What was billed as merguez didn’t have the taut texture of a really good sausage, so was more pappy, like a meatball. The enormous dollop of jalapeño had a blistering heat that overpowered everything else, and the yoghurt plonked in there felt like it had one job only, to calm the jalapeño down. 

There were a few bits of onion – “petals” apparently – and allegedly some confit garlic that I didn’t get at all, but the whole thing felt shouty. This too was £16.50, and by this point I was wondering what that money would get you at Pizza Pilgrims a few doors down. More, better, slower, probably.

We just about managed to open our £40 bottle of rosé – by Judith Beck, a producer I’ve always liked – as our lamb came to the table. By that point much of the meal was behind us and 750ml of wine was in front of us, but we rolled up our sleeves and gave it our best shot. There is nothing like a cold, crisp rosé on a hot day, and this was nothing like a cold crisp rosé. We flagged a server down and asked if the wine cooler could have some actual ice in it. It was brought back with ice in it, and by the end of the meal our wine was almost cold enough.

So, the lamb. Pants, I’m afraid. It looked so good, like the platonic ideal of every kleftiko you’ve ever laid eyes on. Everything it came with was terrific, a salata mashwiya that was a sort of hot, roasted vegetable dish and a herb salad that zipped and zinged with the best of them. 

We had the campfire potato with this and it, too, was good: scorched, and smashed and smothered in salsa verde and sour cream. The lamb was perched on another of Carmel’s excellent flatbreads, which meant that all the fat slowly permeated it, which is exactly what you want. 

The fat, though. The fat was the problem. Because I know lamb is a fatty meat, and I like a bit of lamb fat, but this piece of lamb was 90% fat. A gelatinous hunk with a few scraps of well lubricated meat hitching a ride on it. That wasn’t apparent at first, but the more incisions we made the more we realised that the good stuff was vanishingly rare. The last time I saw anything wobble this much it was me, running for a bus.

I’ve read lots of comments and thinkpieces from restaurateurs saying that customers should be less English. If you don’t like something but you politely say it was nice, or fine, you’re depriving the restaurant of the chance to fix it. I was still happy to keep schtum, but when our server returned Zoë pointed out that the lamb was largely inedible blubber. So our server promised to feed that back to the kitchen and the management.

And when she returned, she explained that it she’d spoken to them but it wasn’t possible to tell how fatty a shoulder of lamb was until you cut into it something something something and this was a very fatty cut of meat and you know, something something something. So we gave up. We considered dessert, but also considered the timings of the last pre-purgatory train home from Paddington. We left the last of our wine and cut our losses.

The bill came in the shape of a piece of perspex with a QR code, and scanning it showed that the damage came to £210, including an optional 12.5% service charge. And I was sorely tempted not to pay the latter, which is something I never, ever do, but you had to flag down a server and specifically ask for it to be removed and at that point I just thought Okay, you win. You win with your breakneck pacing and wobbly lamb and incoherent service. 

Nothing, it goes without saying, had been taken off our bill in relation to that £56 main course. 

On the way back to the Tube station Pizza Pilgrims glowed with distinct look-what-you-could-have-won energy. We made our train, it only slighly whiffed of Burger King and I resolved that this was the very last review this year where I eat somewhere that offers small and large plates, has a concept or wants you to share everything. Not without being unremittingly high direction when I place an order. If you see me doing anything to the contrary, please stage an intervention. In your own time, mind you. No rush.

Carmel – 6.7
23-25 Lonsdale Road, London, NW6 6RA
020 38482090

https://www.carmelrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Pho 86

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The 21st of July last year might have seemed like a perfectly normal Monday to you, but in food and drink terms it was an eventful day for Reading. Lincoln Coffee finally opened its big new site on King Street, the one Workhouse had vacated the year before. A little way away, down Minster Street, Thai restaurant Nua opened in the spot given up by Bluegrass BBQ in January.

Both of those were expansions. Lincoln has retained its original site on the Kings Road (and indeed for a while it used to operate out of Reading Bridge House, back when having a coffee concession in an office building sounded like a capital idea). Nua has a site in High Wycombe and another in London, in an area its website describes as “Fitzorvia”. But the third hospitality business to throw its doors open on the 21st July? It was brand new, out of nowhere and a more interesting proposition.

That would be Pho 86, an independent Vietnamese restaurant that has sprung up in the site once occupied by The County Deli, most famously one of Kate Winslet’s first employers, that closed in 2010. After that it was Sonning Flowers for a while, and then a food shop called K&K Supermarket which sold Vietnamese ingredients, amongst others. It’s not clear whether the change of purpose coincided with a change of ownership.

Very little is clear, because it’s hard to find out much about Pho 86 online. I do know that they opened without an alcohol license, and with a hygiene score of 1 from the council, who inspected a week after they opened. Both those matters were covered in the local press, and things have moved on since then: alcohol is now available and the most recent hygiene rating, from last October, is a slightly less worrying 3. The Chronicle showed no curiosity about Pho 86’s backstory, however, so it’s hard to know whether this is the owners’ first rodeo.

And good luck figuring out from their website, because the blurb on it is so generic that it’s hard to believe that AI wasn’t involved. At Pho 86, we believe a great bowl of pho is more than just food — it’s comfort, culture, and connection it begins. It’s not X, it’s Y. It’s not been written by a human, it’s ChatGPT. Fair enough, I guess: times are tough for independent businesses, and hiring a copywriter is probably nowhere near the top of the to do list. It would have been nice to know more about them, but perhaps they’re letting their food do the talking.

So finally, after leaving it the best part of a year, I paid them a visit on a sunny Saturday lunchtime with Zoë. I might have made it earlier, if it wasn’t for the hygiene rating and the lack of booze, but another reason was Pho 86’s surprisingly old school approach to customers: no online booking, which is curiously retro in 2026. I should have phoned up, really, and made a booking, but it says something that I literally cannot remember the last time I did that, anywhere.

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Restaurant review: Juliet, Stroud

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Stroud is lovely. Have you been? It’s so easy if you live in Reading: there’s a direct train that sets off once an hour, takes an hour and drops you close to the heart of things, less than five minutes from the foot of the town’s pretty, sweeping – somewhat steep – High Street. I’m there with my old friend Dave, who’s rapidly staking a claim to be my West Of England Correspondent, and he knows the town better than I do, so I let him lead the way.

The last time I was here was over four years ago, and it’s safe to say that although I liked it then, I didn’t remember it being quite this, well, good. Dave takes me into a mall called the Five Valleys Shopping Centre, to enjoy a brilliant latte at Rough Hands Coffee, along with a chocolate and sea salt cookie that is miles better than anything you could buy in any Reading mall. As he makes inroads into an almond croissant almost as big as his head, he tells me more about the place.

“It’s not like the rest of the Cotswolds, mate, it’s got a touch of Glastonbury about it. Let’s just say there are quite a few crystal shops.”

I look around. Although I’m sure Dave is right, I spot people queuing for coffee and baked goods, advertising their favourite brands on their totes. I see moustaches and those daft little Steve Zissou hats and more than a little Lucy & Yak – not all on the same person I might add – and truly, the place feels more hipster than hippy. You don’t get all this in Cirencester or Stow on the bloody Wold.

The edge blunted on my peckishness, we start exploring the Cotswolds’ most atypical town. The mall has a food court that, any other day, would make an excellent spot for lunch, and a boutique department store, Sandersons, that boasts a selection of niche fragrances to put many cities to shame. It’s so old school it no longer has a website, having decided to abandon e-commerce last summer.

But then we climb the high street and near the top, by a bookshop and an organic café, we reach the reason the place is buzzing so loudly on a sunny Saturday morning, the farmers’ market. It really is a delight, spreading from the splendidly named Shambles on one side of the street to the little maze of streets on the other, and perhaps the best way that I can describe it is to say that it’s a flagrant attempt to make me part with as much money as possible in the shortest possible time.

It’s like a deeply middle-class IKEA, where you arrive fully intending to buy just one thing but come away with a bag groaning with stuff you didn’t know you needed. I only planned to pick up some charcuterie, but also end up with a gorgeous seeded sourdough loaf from Hobbs House Bakery, a big bottle of grassy extra virgin olive oil and a business card from a lovely gentleman who may or may not end up making me a leather satchel by hand.

To limit myself to that takes all my strength, and on a cooler day I might have also left with cheeses, bean to bar chocolate, cakes, beer, doughnuts, pies, sausages, smoked salmon and a hernia; I reflect, later on, that it might be for the best that my slowly mending right arm still can’t carry more than a couple of kilos. It feels like every bourgeois need is catered for every Saturday from 9 to 2 in that compact but blissful space – did I mention the scented candles and room diffusers? – and that’s before we get on to the street food stalls or the little open air café using beans from nearby Rave Coffee.

It is, in short, idyllic. I can well understand why Stroud was named as one of the Sunday Times’ Best Places To Live this year, and why it won the whole thing five years ago. Last year Reading was mentioned in that august company, but this year the Sunday Times included Caversham in the list, a subtle way of saying “we got it wrong, only this bit of Reading is any cop”. For what it’s worth, even for the farmers’ market alone, Stroud pisses all over Caversham: Stroud is what Caversham would like to be if it grows up.

If I didn’t already have a restaurant reservation, and I hadn’t instead chosen to eat in the mall (pizzeria Fat Toni is meant to be good) I could easily have browsed and munched my way through the farmers’ market. I walk wistfully past a stall offering Thai food which smells better than any Thai restaurant I can remember. Lunch had better be good, I think.

Our venue for lunch is at the bottom of Union Street, the hill with that Thai food stall on it, opposite a disused pub and some vivid street art. It occupies the ground floor of a handsome building, The Old Music Centre, which had fallen into disrepair before sculptor Dan Chadwick bought it fifteen years ago. First it spent some time as a factory and another restaurant, and finally in late 2024 it reopened as Juliet, named after Chadwick’s wife.

It’s a fetching space that makes full use of the building’s dimensions and huge windows: airy and busy without packing tables in like sardines. There’s a small private-ish dining room and a smaller terrace outside, but otherwise you’re in that long dining room, all black leather banquettes, parquet floor and clever use of mirrors to flood the place with light. It radiates confidence that you’ll eat well and have a thoroughly good time into the bargain.

The menu read well, divided into sections with a very enjoyable flow to them: snacks first, then starters, then mains with a small selection of desserts at the end. Decent pricing, too, with the majority of the snacks £5 or less, the dozen or so starters ranging mostly from £10 to £16 and most mains between £20 and £30.

So far so conventional, you might think, but as I ordered a Kir royale and Dave plumped for an alcohol free Peroni, our server – one of a uniformly charming brigade – chucked in a curveball by explaining the concept of the restaurant. Who doesn’t enjoy having a concept explained to them?

“All of our dishes are designed for sharing” she said. And I’m sorry to say that my heart sank a little.

Partly because I was not long back from Glasgow, where I’d got tired of that shtick, and partly because this menu didn’t read like that at all. There was a dissonance to it. It made sense with the small plates, pretty much, although not with the snacks (“you get halfway through the gazpacho then hand it to me”) but how did you share tagliatelle with rabbit ragu, unless you were in Lady And The Tramp? And who in their right mind shared steak frites unless it was a piece of beef big enough for that, which at £26 the steak on the menu almost certainly wasn’t?

“If you want to have the big plates to yourself that’s absolutely fine” she followed up, in a way that suggested my expression hadn’t been as subtle as I thought. “Just let us know so we can make sure they come out at the same time.”

This was very decent of her but, as so often with this concept, it rankled with me that eating simultaneously with your dining companion had become something you couldn’t take for granted, the Ryanair-isation of restaurants.

Anyway, no harm done: Dave and I agreed on some small plates to share, and picked a big plate each. All would be well. And we took long enough about it that I saw one of my original choices, the vitello tonnato, turn up at our neighbours’ table submerged in a thick mulchy sauce. I decided it was about as unshareable as could be.

First, though, a gilda: a perfectly pleasant mouthful of anchovy snaking its way between two plump olives and a pickled chilli, the whole thing a study in muted greens and browns. A very enjoyable first bite of a meal, flavours not to be sniffed at, perhaps slightly petite at £3.50 a pop. That balance – never mind the quality, mourn the quantity – would prove to be emblematic: in my beginning is my end, as T.S. Eliot put it.

The other nibble we’d opted for was far better. I love salt cod, but I’ve never had it mantecato before – whipped, a litle like a brandade, velvety from all that emulsifying olive oil, salty, a beautiful golden hue. It was delightful, but the idea of sharing one of these between two really was for the birds.

Not only was it too good to share, but it would have been impractical to even try. The fact that the toast my salt cod was slathered on was also distinctly on the burnt side, making cutting it with cutlery or teeth more of a challenge than it should have been, reinforced that view. Fortunately we’d ordered two, and at £5 apiece they were infinitely better value than the gildas.

At this point things started progressing nicely, and the volley of small-plates-that-were-absolutely-not-starters-and-not-to-be-referred-to-as-such-under-any-circumstances showed off the best of what the kitchen could do, even if in one case that was ‘buy well’.

One of the strongest dishes of the meal was a really excellent sea bass crudo, taut leaves of fish brought to life with oil, bottarga, halved cherries and, I thought, a little orange zest. This was the gastronomic equivalent of dressing for the job you want, and for as long as we were eating it we could believe that the sunshine outside was the start of a glorious summer we had willed into being, by ordering dishes like this.

I had moved on to a really excellent glass of Muscadet: natural but not cloudy, with citrus and salt, which complemented this nicely. £9 a glass for a bottle which would cost you £19 online, a markup which might not sound unreasonable until you realise you’re only getting 125ml, a fact the menu neglected to mention anywhere. There’s that quality/quantity thing, again.

Also very enjoyable, if not terribly sophisticated, were two planks of panisse obscured by Parmesan. I liked this, but it was fairly one note: I’d rather they’d stuck the salt cod mantecata on a lozenge of panisse and made two decent dishes into one great one. Was it shareable? Yes. Was it worth £10 when the same money got you two of the salt cod snacks? Perhaps not.

Nobody could say that the last of our small plates wasn’t sharable. Two wedges of fragrant, sweet as you like honeymoon melon came draped with speck and pinned with a couple more pickled chillies. It’s funny, I’d turned up to Juliet thinking that it was a French restaurant but that must have been the Mandela effect: the menu ranged across Europe, spending more time in Italy than France or Spain.

What that does mean, though, is that I had plenty of experience of dishes like this to compare it to. Very good melon and very good ham might have fallen out of fashion until recently but it’s never going to be a bad combination, especially when the sourcing is as meticulous as it was here. But was this dish, at £15, miles better than similar plates I’d enjoyed at Bristol’s RAGÙ or Oxford’s Arbequina, both of which had cost less? Not really, no.

Still, lunch was well under way and I couldn’t say I wasn’t having a smashing time. Dave and I had much to catch up on from our various misadventures, and I was determined to get the discussion out of the way about my dad’s funeral and Dave’s continuing unhappy relationship with Liverpool FC, so we could look forward to happier times ahead.

And the room was full of happy chatting diners, but by this point Dave and I were among the youngest people in there: the scruff and vitality of Rough Hands, the High Street and the market felt like they could have belonged to another town altogether.

I had moved on to a light, juicy syrah from Minervois (£7 a glass, so a little less painful: still 125ml though) and Dave had been tempted to drink a Früh Kölsch, reminded of a very enjoyable trip to Cologne a few years back. It came in the traditional glass, which was pleasing and correct but also meant that you were paying £4.20 for 200ml of beer. Did the folks at Juliet not like you getting drunk? Was that what was going on?

Despite being far from drunk, Dave really enjoyed his large-plate-but-definitely-not-a-main-course. It was a decent slab of John Dory, skin nicely blackened, on the bone but coming away with little encouragement, and the forkful I had was excellent. It came in what the menu described as a sauce vierge, but the presence of olives and capers suggested to me that this particular virgin might have lapsed into puttanesca territory. It happens to the best of us.

I wouldn’t say this dish was huge for £28, and I wouldn’t propose sharing it with anybody, but it was just about big enough, and went very well with Juliet’s frites, which were salty, light and well nigh flawless.

“I think if you’re paying that much for a main, it should come with some carbs” was Dave’s two pence. I’m glad it wasn’t just me.

My main tasted gorgeous. Taste was not the problem. Four slices of lamb rump, blushing just the right amount, were served fanned out on a moat of jus with peas and meagre ribbons of guanciale. As a dish, for quality, you couldn’t fault it. Can you see where this is going?

It’s difficult to show dimensions in these pictures, but this was not a large plate. It had the same dimensions as the ones that had brought our not-starters earlier on, but it cost twice as much as any of them. “Our large plates are designed for sharing” is a laudable aim, but it only works if your plates (a) work for sharing and (b) are actually large. It made me think of the beautiful duck I’d had at Pompette earlier in the year: that dish was for sharing. This dish was for jealously guarding, and still feeling peckish at the end. Thank goodness for those frites.

The lag between our penultimate and final courses gave Dave and I plenty of time to compare notes.

“If I came here again I’d just stick to the smaller plates and share” said Dave.

“I know what you mean, but whether these plates are big or small, or work as sharers or not seems pretty random.”

“Yeah, and your main” – see, we were still calling them mains – “wasn’t very big. But it’s the menu’s fault: if something costs nearly £30 I’d expect it to be larger than that” said Dave, gesturing at my empty smaller-than-you’d-like plate.

On balance, although it was tempting to compare this place with the likes of RAGÙ or Arbequina, the restaurant we both ended up using as a yardstick was Upstairs At Landrace, in Bath. There we had shared some small plates, had a main course each, come away fuller and, I’m pretty sure, spent a fair amount less. The Bath restaurant felt like the far better execution of an idea both places had come up with.

None of that, mind you, stopped us having dessert. Thankfully restaurants never try to make you share these, so we each had our own individual portion of chocolate cremeux. It was far and away the most successful thing we ate – glossy and moreish, just enough depth, not too much sweetness, and it came anointed with olive oil and sprinkled with flakes of salt. Truly unimpeachable, simple but superb. Why couldn’t it all have been like this?

It went really nicely with a glass of Banyuls, again a relatively stingy pour at 50ml, but for £5.50 you couldn’t complain. It’s not like me to quote exact prices like a local newspaper, or to dust off the Weights And Measures Act, but everything was so controlled at Juliet that I almost feel compelled to.

Last of all I ordered a ricciarello, a soft almond biscuit which is a speciality of Siena. It was gorgeous: ricciarelli are soft, irregular and crammed with almond, so not dissimilar to amaretti morbidi, but with an extra zing of citrus that makes them just a tad more interesting. I liked this a lot, and it was only a couple of quid. Ironically, considering it was one of the smallest things we ordered, I shared it with Dave.

After all that, we settled up: our bill for snacks, small plates, slightly less small plates, sides, dessert and small drinks came to £195, including a 12.5% service charge. Our bill at Upstairs At Landrace the previous year had been smaller: it was the only thing that was.

The rest of our day followed a well-trodden path. By the time lunch was over the market had packed up, and Stroud on a Saturday afternoon felt like Bruges after the coach trips pack up and leave or Mykonos when the cruise ships have moved on, a sleepy place with little sign of just how awake it had been mere hours before. We found a very nice pub called the Retreat that had striking red walls, gorgeous prints on them and Steady Rolling Man on draft, and we set the world to rights, or tried to, until it was time to take one of those regular trains back to our respective home towns.

Ordinarily, that is where this review would leave us, with Dave and I home from a day of fun, debriefing with our respective spouses. I would conclude by saying that Juliet is a good restaurant if not a great one, flawed in ways you could probably work around if you could be bothered, and possibly worth visiting if you found yourself in Stroud with £100 a head burning a hole in your pocket and more of an appetite to spend it there than on a cornucopia of fine goods from the market. But this week I have to close where I’d usually begin, by discussing the puzzling national consensus that Juliet is, in fact, an utterly phenomenal place.

The thing is, over the space of the twelve months since it first opened Juliet got unanimous rave reviews from almost every national critic. It’s rare for them to be of one mind, unless they know and like the owner – Jeremy King springs to mind – and rarer still that they reach that view about somewhere outside London. For any of them to stray that far afield is comparatively rare, but for all of them to descend on the same part of not-London is practically a unicorn.

Yet they all loved Juliet. Giles Coren, who had a house nearby at the time, said in the Times that “Juliet is not just great for a boondocks bistro; it’s great for anywhere in the world. It would be the best restaurant in Hampstead by miles. The best in Chelsea, no question.” Grace Dent in the Guardian, also writing to make sense of the provinces for Londoners, said it was “seriously worth a schlep to Stroud”.

What about William Sitwell in the Telegraph? “If this isn’t my favourite restaurant of 2025 I’m in for a year to remember” was his analysis. It goes on. Tom Parker Bowles said in the Mail On Sunday that he could stay all night and, not one to miss a Shakespeare pun, ended with “parting is indeed such sweet sorrow”: isn’t he erudite?

And then there’s arch bloviator Tim Hayward in the FT, what did he say? Well, your guess is as good as mine: in a windy old review entitled Raise your voices and howl for The Chefs he bibbled on about his trip there with “a small cadre of West Country foodisti”. Hayward’s writing always reminds me of the opening lyrics to the Beatles’ Julia, when John Lennon sings Half of what I say is meaningless. Even if that’s true, Lennon still had a better batting average than Hayward.

Sitwell’s was the only one of those reviews to explain that the menu is intended to be shared. None of them talked about whether the food lends itself to doing that, in terms of sizing or price. None of them really talked about cost or value at all, indeed Sitwell’s said that the price was “£126 excluding drinks and service”, which says to me that he spent more on booze than he’s comfortable admitting.

You would not get a good idea from any of those reviews whether Juliet is pricey, or will leave you feeling rinsed. This is what happens when you take advice from people who expense it all. They’re worse than cynics: they know the price of nothing and the value of nothing.

So what did they spend their word counts talking about? Parker Bowles had less than 400 words to play with, and name dropped the former restaurant critic he was having lunch with before discovering “another old mucker” up at the bar, who “is easily persuaded to join our table.” I’m sure his friend Dai Francis, whoever he is, was delighted to get a name check.

Coren told us that he bumped into Dom Joly there – thank god I wasn’t lunching at Juliet that day – before going on at length about how the owner Daniel Chadwick is “one of the best men ever to own a restaurant”. Was it ever going to be anything other than a rave? Maybe he should have recused himself, knowing that if he didn’t review Juliet another four restaurant critics still would.

But really, when three of the reviews manage to mention the sommelier by name but omit pretty crucial details about what a meal at Juliet is actually like, you do have to wonder if restaurant reviewing has started missing the point.

Amid all the showing off, name-dropping and knob-jostling, amid the florid hunt for the Next Big Simile, it feels to me like reviewers – critics and bloggers alike – have lost their way and forgotten what’s important: what’s it like to eat in a restaurant? Will I like it? How much does it cost? Is it worth the money? You can track chefs’ CVs all you like, you can talk about your buddies in the trade, you can vaguely patronise anywhere without an 020 area code, but all you’re really doing is bragging about what a great time you’ve had.

So there you go, they all had a ball. I’m not so sure, on balance, whether you would. But perhaps it doesn’t matter, because they sold their papers and it’s only money. Your money. And I can still finish by telling you that Juliet is a good restaurant but not a great one, flawed in ways you could probably work around if you could be bothered, and possibly worth visiting if you find yourself in Stroud with £100 a head burning a hole in your pocket and more of an appetite to spend it there than on a cornucopia of fine goods from the market.

I bet it’s a great day out on expenses, though.

Juliet – 7.6
49 London Road, Stroud, GL5 2AD
01453 367019

https://www.julietrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Gooi Nara

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There’s no such thing as Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay for restaurants, as far as I know. But if there was, the restaurant whose food I ate most last year is almost certainly Gooi Nara, the Korean restaurant on Whitley Street that has been there for something like ten years, if not more. And yet returning to it a couple of Saturdays ago for dinner with Zoë was the first time I’d set foot inside since I reviewed it in 2018.

The thing is, as regular readers will remember, I moved to Katesgrove a couple of years ago, which means that, along with Kungfu Kitchen, Gooi Nara is probably the closest restaurant to where I live. And what that means is that on the nights when neither of us can face cooking we know that a delivery driver won’t get lost, won’t drop other orders off en route to our house and can be trusted to turn up pronto with piping hot food from just round the corner. Over the last two years, between us, we’ve developed quite a Gooi Nara habit.

It’s no coincidence that they won my “takeaway of the year” award in 2024 – but my love of a Gooi Nara delivery has continued ever since. It is refined and perfected now to the point where Zoë and I order exactly the same thing almost every time: dakgangjeong, or Korean fried chicken, for her and tang su juk, chicken in sweet and sour sauce for me. The latter comes ready to assemble, one plastic container of gorgeous fried chicken and a tub of sweet, sharp sauce with orange and pineapple bobbing in it (I was skeptical too, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it). It has made me happy many, many times.

Sometimes we push the boat out and get some mandu, fried chicken dumplings, as well but otherwise those two and a couple of portions of rice are everything we need for a contented chomp in front of the telly after a hard day. I especially grew to love Gooi Nara when I was discharged from hospital and could only eat with one hand: I remember the first time I had their sweet and sour chicken after my accident I could only eat half, the rest popped in a LockNLock in the fridge. It was even better cold the next day: it remains the only occasion when I’ve had any leftovers at all.

That’s all well and good but I love their food so much, and always hear so many positive comments about it online, that it felt like we were doing them a disservice by only ever ordering the same two takeaway dishes. And my review was over eight years old, after all, so it felt like high time to go back. Early one Saturday evening Zoé and I took a short amble there, tracing the path of so many delivery riders in reverse, to check it out.

First things first: it was absolutely packed at 6.30pm on a Saturday evening. So much so that they could only just find room for us, tucked away at the very back with a great view of what was clearly a very successful restaurant. The decor didn’t feel like it had changed much in the intervening eight years: it still had a welcoming, homely feel, all wooden beams and faux slate walls.

The main difference, I would say, is just how well Gooi Nara appeared to be doing. It also started out very warm, and on a punishing day as the hot plate in the middle of our table got switched on it became even more sweltering.

In terms of the mix of customers, I would say that with the exception of the table next to ours later in the evening we were the only one exclusively made up of pasty Anglo-Saxons: I did envy my fellow WASPs at the other table who no doubt were getting an excellent introduction to the full gamut of the menu from people who knew exactly what to order.

It did appear, too, that Gooi Nara had a good reputation: I overheard a conversation at one of the big tables nearby to the effect that its occupants had converged at the restaurant from many places, some miles away. Maybe Gooi Nara filled that role for Southerners who couldn’t easily make it to New Malden, the Little Korea of the UK.

Gooi Nara’s menu has changed, I think, from when I visited it last. Back then I’m pretty sure it hedged its bets, with both a Korean and Japanese section, but now it’s all kind of thrown in together: edamame; takoyaki; agedashi tofu and pumpkin korokke feature, along with yaki soba and udon.

But the Korean elements of the menu are far more extensive, and the menu can be quite overwhelming with sections seemingly for everything: soup; rice; bibimbap; jeongol (or hotpot); noodles and of course Korean barbecue. The sides, to add to the confusion, appear at the very beginning, before everything they could conceivably be on the side of.

It made me wish I had my own food sherpa – is that cultural appropriation? – to guide me through the highlights of the menu, a feeling that only intensified as I saw some gorgeous dishes waft past to other tables. Was the delicious-looking tofu (I’m not even joking) that went to the table opposite the agedashi tofu, or the Korean doo-bu jeon? I decided on reflection it was the latter. And how good did the platter of various types of kimchi look when it arrived at the table next to me, a couple having one of the most Guardian conversations I’ve eavesdropped on in a very long time?

I came away from it all feeling silly and parochial, realising that really I only knew a handful of dishes on the menu and the various bits and bobs I’d ordered the best part of a decade ago. I was well aware that on this visit I would stay in my comfort zone, even if I’d insisted to Zoë that we couldn’t order any of the things we would invariably put in our takeaway order. So we ordered a couple of starters, a couple of mains and two items for the barbecue, and even then I’d say we played it extremely safe. We might have been outside it, but our comfort zone was only a short walk away.

Everything came if not all at once then really in a very short space of time. One minute we were necking our cold bottles of Cass, a perfectly decent lager I would struggle to tell apart from Asahi, Ha Noi or Singha in a blind taste test, let alone its Korean alternative Hite, and the next our grill was switched on and pretty much everything we’d ordered was cramming in on our table.

And the table looked big, but since the centre of it was given over to said grill you ended up playing the equivalent of those sliding tile puzzles trying to work out what could go where. Try to combine that with the timings of actually cooking some of your food and the whole experience became a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time, impressive training in multi-tasking. Forget my doing those six pointless LinkedIn games every morning: this would be much better at keeping me mentally sharp.

Vegetable mandu were, if anything, even more enjoyable than the chicken ones which had been dropped off by a friendly rider so many times in the last two years. A bit more crinkly and expansive than their chicken equivalents, they had a pleasingly light, grease-free texture and a filling I could almost convince myself was virtuous. Gooi Nara’s dip of soy, sesame oil, sesame seeds and quite possibly something else beginning with S had a gladdening sharpness that complemented them very nicely indeed.

A quirk of Gooi Nara’s menu is that, if it is to be believed, you get 5 chicken dumplings or 5 prawn dumplings but a strangely non-committal “5-6” vegetable dumplings. Fortunately on this occasion we got a shareable, even number, but I’m pretty sure whenever I’ve ordered the chicken mandu I’ve been given 6 of those too. Go figure, pun not intended.

Also decent were the prawn tempura, which I would say were better than they looked. In the picture below they come across as a little wan, a tad too blond, but they had a real deft lightness and, again, next to no grease. The dip they came with, almost exactly the same as the one that accompanied the mandu, was still good but the dimensions of the vessel and the size and length of those prawns made it, practically speaking, a faff: it was a bit like trying to get a pool cue in a beer glass. £12.30 for these, so as much as both of the main courses we’d chosen.

By this point we’d also started to avail ourselves of the barbecue. Sam gyap sal, unadorned sliced pork belly, turned up looking a bit like those cheap bacon-flavoured corn snacks you can get in supermarkets, and I did wonder whether we should have gone for the spicy version, but it crisped up beautifully on the barbecue, that fat rendering and permeating just enough.

We chose the pork to cook first precisely because it wasn’t marinated the way our other barbecued meat was, to try and avoid cross-contamination. We had a couple of dishes of condiments to dip them in, and I failed to make a note of either, but one was definitely soy and the other was definitely not: I think it might have been ssamjang, the traditional sauce used with Korean barbecue containing gochujang and soy beans.

It was only later that I realised we should have ordered some lettuce to wrap the pork in: it’s hidden away, chronologically speaking, in the list of side dishes at the beginning of the menu.

My main – although the concept of a main slightly falls away when it all comes at once – was the chicken dolsot bibimbap, a dish I haven’t eaten in a long time. For the uninitiated, this is rice, chicken, veg and an egg yolk brought to the table in a hot stone bowl, so it keeps cooking and sizzling as you work your way through it. I broke up and dispersed the egg and made my way through it, and by the end some of the rice had reached the crispy state known in Korean as nurungji (I suppose the closest European equivalent is the delectable socarrat at the bottom of a paella).

I would have described this dish as a little nondescript, a tiny bit bland, if it weren’t for the squeezy plastic bottle of gochujang which came with it. The more of this I added, the more I enjoyed it, and the more I enjoyed it the more I added it: I do wonder how much you’re meant to use, and how much was left in that bottle when I was done, but it turned what could have been a trudge into a frolic.

The other thing that whole experience taught me was patience. Ordinarily I would have a moan – god knows you’ve probably read enough of them – about everything arriving at the same time and forcing me to choose what to eat first.

Eating in Gooi Nara that evening, among all that good-natured, deceptively well controlled bedlam, I realised that it was probably a very English mindset: that your food is at its best the moment it arrives at your table and it’s downhill from there, that it’s a scramble to eat it before it goes cold and that too many dishes at once guarantees disappointment.

But it didn’t feel that way here. Those prawns and dumplings sat there, keeping their freshly fried heat. The pork sizzled on the barbecue, with more on the plate waiting to take their place. Our second barbecued meat hadn’t even made it to the front of the queue. And my bibimbap was still hot, gradually perfecting its texture. What was the rush? Everything would be eaten in its own good time, in the right order, with no need for conniptions.

Zoë loved her main, I don’t think I would have done. I managed to persuade her not to have her regular takeaway order, her chicken gam-poong gi, but she ordered it with prawns instead. I was expecting this to be prawns curled up, little inverted commas in a crisp coating, tossed in the gorgeous spicy sauce that makes this dish such a crowd pleaser in my house.

Instead they were fully extended like an accusatory index finger, the tempura prawns from earlier on making a reappearance with some sauce thrown in. So deeply impractical in many of the same ways as that starter, and downright impossible to eat with rice. I didn’t order them, and I certainly wasn’t allowed to try them, so it doesn’t really matter. Zoë really enjoyed it, and maybe in the free-for-all of our meal overall it didn’t really matter that they weren’t quite what I thought they would be.

The dish they didn’t go with, or at least I thought they didn’t, was Gooi Nara’s special egg fried rice with vegetables and shrimp. Zoë, again, seemed to enjoy it but I thought it was a bit steep at £11, especially considering that you could get a bibimbap for roughly 50p more. Plus I got a bit squeezy bottle of gochunjang, let’s not forget, and this looked like it badly needed that or something like it.

Finally, as we flagged in the heat, a little John Lewis portable fans valiantly whirring away to almost no avail, we barbecued the last dish in our order. By sheer coincidence I’d actually ended up ordering something from my 2018 visit to Gooi Nara – the ju-mul luk, beef with garlic and sesame oil. It was smothered in marinade there on the plate, slices much thinner and better cut than I remembered from my last encounter, and it smelled pretty amazing before it was ever even exposed to heat. As it cooked, the aroma got more and more gorgeous: perhaps we’d saved the best til last.

Tasting it at the end of the process, I rather thought we could have done. Every single piece was buttery-soft, that marination doing its work with no notes, and although it might have been nice to enclose each piece in a lettuce leaf and enjoy that contrast, I rather wonder if the lettuce might have wilted as badly as I did towards the end of an hour in that hot, noisy, oddly glorious room. By some tragedy, Zoë found herself full halfway through my final spell as the commis chef of our table. I buckled up and finished the rest: it had to be done.

Gooi Nara’s menu only has two desserts, both of which are Japanese, but we were too hot and too full to attempt either of them. Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to £95, not including service, and of course we were more than happy to tip: even just watching the constant parade of staff back and forward to tables, carrying a huge array of fascinating dishes without ever breaking rhythm, juggling orders for customers and brown bags out to delivery drivers, filled me with admiration.

It made me think of all the Saturday nights when we’d fired up a delivery app and our food – perfect, beautifully packed, prompt and piping hot – had arrived in what seemed like no time. Every evening that happened, the restaurant might well have been as busy as it was that evening. We emerged into the sunlight on Whitley Street feeling like we’d spent just over an hour somewhere totally not-Katesgrove, but also arguably in Katesgrove’s very best restaurant. We also resolved that, delicious and convenient though a Gooi Nara takeaway always was, we needed to visit again far, far sooner.

Rating Gooi Nara this time has been quite difficult. I definitely enjoyed it more than the previous time I went, but I have a feeling that the limitations on the rating it receives on this occasion have more to do with me than with them. So whatever mark Gooi Nara gets as a restaurant, I think this might be a review where I, as a reviewer, might struggle to scrape a 7. I have a feeling that if I’d been bolder, gone further to the perimeter of the menu, I could have enjoyed it even more and it would have done even better.

In that sense it would have been nice if Gooi Nara had, in the way that great communicators like Kungfu Kitchen, Clay’s, Kamal’s Kitchen and the Moderation do, tried more to tell the story of their food and bring newcomers in. But really, that’s not mandatory, especially when a restaurant has been going for about 10 years and is doing very nicely without having to do any of that. So much as I might have enjoyed having a bit more guidance on how to attack the menu, that was definitely a me problem, not a Gooi Nara problem.

I will be back, and when I do I will try some more esoteric dishes: if you have any recommendations drop them in the comments. In the meantime, I suspect another paper bag with my regular takeaway order lurks in my not too distant future. Eat-in, delivery: get yourself a restaurant that can do it all.

Gooi Nara – 8.1
39 Whitley Street, Reading, RG2 0EG
0118 9757889

https://gooinara.com/

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