If you plan it right, one of the great joys of this restaurant reviewing lark is that no two weeks need be the same. One week you’ll be in the town centre trying out pizza and pasta, the next you’ll be a short walk away immersing yourself in the culture of Hong Kong tea restaurants. And the following week, you’ll find yourself all the way across town – in Tilehurst, no less – checking out a smash burger restaurant that opened towards the end of last year. Three very different restaurants, all in Reading, in three successive weeks: it’s hard to get bored when the range continues to be that eclectic.
It’s one of the many reasons I don’t envy influencers: if I had to eat pizza, burgers, fried chicken and fry-ups week in, week out – let alone film myself doing it – I reckon I’d be dead behind the eyes by Easter. But it makes sense that those genres are the stomping ground of the influencer, because they’re low value (the meals, not the influencers, I should add).
If the influencer is paying, which they sometimes do, a burger or a pizza isn’t a massive outlay. And if the restaurant is handing out free food, which they also sometimes do, it’s not a huge amount to spend trying to get more exposure. Both sides of that equation would probably tell you that everybody wins, or that at least that they both do.
I am lucky that what I do is partly funded through another model altogether, so I have far more freedom to pick and choose, and I’m accountable to the people who support my writing in a different and more interesting way. But I am mindful of my New Year’s Resolution last month to stop taking pot shots at influencers, so all I’ll say is the very best of luck to them with all that.
That’s all relevant this week – forcing me to put my resolution to the test nice and early in the year – because this week I reviewed Blip, the hot new smash burger restaurant from the folks behind Zyka and The Switch, and a lot of content creators got there well before me.
I don’t mean Reading’s usual suspects. I mean well-established content creators with tens of thousands of followers. One chap said that he made a 5 hour trip to Reading from London, despite Blip having a second branch in Croydon, to try what he said was “the first halal smash burger in the whole of Reading” (Reading residents, I hope, haven’t forgotten Smash N Grab quite so quickly). Another, with almost 300,000 Instagram followers, feasted on what looked like the entire menu from, it seemed, the back seat of his car. Some of the people reviewing Blip had also visited the likes of Mr T and new arrival Smoke & Pepper.
By my reckoning, looking through Instagram, roughly a dozen influencers have eaten at Blip’s Reading branch since it opened in October, all of them enthusing about the food. That’s close to one a week. Unfortunately, adherence to the ASA guidelines is so poor – as it’s always been – that it’s impossible to tell how many of them spent their own money at Blip.
That’s especially a shame because it tars them all with the same brush: if a content creator really did travel 5 hours to Reading to drop under £50 of his own money on smash burgers, that commitment deserves to be recognised. If that’s what happened, it’s a pity to lump him in with people who have been less transparent.
Blip’s early success has not necessarily been completely caused by the buzz on Instagram, though. In November, barely a month after they opened, Blip won best burger in the South-East in something called the British Burger Awards. Now, I’m a bit dubious about awards that lack transparency about how they are decided, and the U.K. already has the National Burger Awards which has been running for over a decade.
I’m even more dubious when the awards scheme’s website doesn’t list Blip as a finalist. When I posted about this on Facebook one of Blip’s owners commented saying that the awards were genuine, completely nominated by customers and no money changed hands in order to secure a place on the shortlist.
So, we have a burger restaurant that has won an award and received multiple plaudits online, but because it’s 2026 and food coverage is in a strange post-truth world it’s still not possible to be confident whether Blip is the genuine article or not. So who do you trust? Well, possibly dreary long form restaurant bloggers of over 12 years’ standing, who hop on a number 16 bus on a Sunday afternoon to go and try it out with their own money: it’s old school, but it might just work.
A word you’ll often see mentioned in reviews by content creators but practically never on this blog is ‘viral’. Partly that’s because I don’t chase trends, more that even now, years after 2020, it still feels too soon to use the word viral to denote a Good Thing. That might just be me. But in Blip’s case it is worth talking a little about this, because if it is indeed viral, it’s a virus that has already been through a couple of mutations.
In 2023, London welcomed a viral smash burger spot called Supernova with a limited, no frills menu and simple, stripped back black-on-white branding to match. Supernova was no reservations, with queues for the best part of an hour, because hype will do that. Supernova now has three locations across London, and it spawned London imitators: French smash burger chain Junk opened in Soho the following year with a remarkably similar aesthetic and offering an almost equally pared-back menu: they now have two branches.
Then last year Parisian smash burger specialists Dumbo opened their first branch in Shoreditch, to equal amounts of hype and a renewed appetite for queuing. It’s surprising, in a city that channel hops trends and restaurants like it’s nobody’s business, to find it has the attention span to fall for the same kind of restaurant three years running.
But that’s burgers for you. I have been waiting for the burger trend to die off for something like fifteen years (I remember reviewing newly arrived Five Guys in the first year of this blog and literally thinking enough already) and I am now resigned to the fact that I will give up the ghost before it does.
The reason for that history lesson is that this trend has taken less time to reach Reading than they normally do. Reading has its fair share of burger spots and smash burger spots, but none of them has been anywhere near as brazen as Blip is about cribbing from its elders. The font, the branding, the size and breadth of the menu at Blip are like a mash-up of Supernova and Junk, the style of photography on Blip’s Instagram feed is directly lifted from Dumbo’s. If you were being charitable you’d call it a homage. If you weren’t, you might describe it as larceny.
So that explained the plain monochrome interior, the blacks and whites and silvers. But it felt, as it so often does, like the budget ran out after paying the marketing department; the logo, the menu board, the branding on the cups and the paper lining the trays was spot on, but the basic tables, the Tolix stools and chairs felt like an afterthought.
Never mind: Blip seats something like a dozen people so perhaps they see most of their trade as takeaway and delivery. There was a decent banquette along one wall and that’s where I parked myself. Something was working, anyway, because it was empty when I arrived just before 1pm and full when I left half an hour later.
The other thing that didn’t make sense was Blip’s insistence that you order using a giant touch screen and pay at the counter. I just didn’t understand this given how small a restaurant it was, and it didn’t sound thought through given that the touchscreen asked you to give your table number: the tables, helpfully, aren’t numbered.
All that said, the touchscreens do helpfully walk you through what is, in fairness, a reasonably compact menu. The beef burger comes as classic, house or house special and there isn’t a huge amount to choose between them: classic has gherkins and ketchup, house has Blip’s own signature sauce and costs a pound more. The house special comes with beef bacon and caramelised onions. All the burgers come in small, medium and large which translates to one, two or three patties.
The purity and simplicity of places like Supernova, Junk and Dumbo has been slightly watered down, because there’s also a truffle burger, and a chicken burger, and a couple of hot dogs made with beef sausage. Sides are limited to fries, loaded fries and onion rings.I chose a classic medium with extra crispy onions, standard fries and a cold drink along with a couple of the sauces to enable fry dipping, and the meal deal Blip has, the workings of which were slightly beyond me, meant that came out at £13.45: not much, in the scheme of things. Less than five minutes later, out it came.
So, the burger first. Packed tightly into a paper wrapper, it looked the part, even if it wasn’t the high-rise masterwork you might expect from the pictures on the website: to be fair to Blip, burger-sellers have been posting misleading photos since the year dot. But it was an attractive specimen, patties and cheese crammed into a slightly puckered potato bun, the edges of those burgers nicely crazed and crispy. It felt like it had been designed to be edible, as in feasible to convey into your gob without needing two hands, cutlery or a flip-top head. I was happy about that.
It tasted excellent, more to the point. The beef is apparently dry aged, and the texture of it was a joy – the seasoning, too. I would say that the patties are slender, slightly thicker than very good bacon, but not by much. My research on the burger restaurants which ‘inspired’ Blip suggests that again, this is something they were seeking to emulate rather than the result of cost-cutting. What that does mean is that I showed too much restraint going for a medium: if you’re hungry, you should go large. If you’re normal and not on Mounjaro, you should avoid small.
The classic comes relatively light on accoutrements, but the cheese and the ketchup added what they needed to: my optional crispy onions felt like they’d come out of a plastic tub rather than been made onsite and didn’t feel worth the extra trouble or expense for anyone. The gherkins – I’m 100% on Team Gherkin – were extremely welcome, pleasingly thick-cut.
Now, you might ask why I didn’t go for one of the fancier options. Here’s why: I thought their entry-level burger was the best way to judge the quality of the patties without having them struggle to be heard over the hubbub of house sauce, or truffle mayo. The one exception is that I would have had bacon, if it was on offer. I am as sympathetic to a burger serving halal beef as the next person, probably more so given the occasional comments about halal on my Facebook page from Islamophobes pretending to give a shit about animal welfare. All power to restaurants like Blip for sticking to their guns. But I’ve eaten enough beef bacon to know that it’s no substitute for the real thing: you’d only eat it if you had no other choice.
Similarly, I had my fries unloaded. If the house sauce or the truffle mayo turned out to be bad, paying an extra £1.50 to have your fries drowned in either would feel like a terrible mistake. So instead I had them as they came, with a little steel dish of house sauce and truffle mayo on the side.
Blip’s fries are pretty good, I think: skin on, nicely crispy, perhaps not as salty as they should have been. If Blip makes them onsite, they’ve done a reasonable job of chipping. If they don’t, they’ve done a very respectable job of buying. It was a generous portion for three quid, too: they came completely overspilling from the Blip branded cardboard cup, that wasn’t clumsiness on my part.
Are either of the sauces worth it given that they give you a sachet of Heinz ketchup and mayo – the only two sauces not made onsite – for nothing? I don’t know about that. The house sauce was generically tangy without knocking my socks off, the truffle mayo a little sweet, its funk slightly artificial.
Maybe I should have had the intestinal fortitude to order the homemade naga sauce, so I could tell you that it bangs or what have you, but what I thought those fries really needed was more salt and a carpet bombing of Sarson’s. Someone on Reddit once accused me of being “a cranky old bloke who will downrate a place for boomer reasons”: times like this I think he might have a point.
Oh, and I had a drink of course. A can of diet cola – a brand called Ice X Pro which sounds like it could be the name of a very cheap deodorant or a very expensive four-bladed razor, or indeed anything else. I’ve never had it before, I’ll probably never have it again, it tasted like supermarket own brand coke and I’ve wasted enough words on it already.
The drawback of solo reviews is that I can’t tell you about the onion rings or the chicken burger, and my reluctance to slather a piece of burnt Basque cheesecake with an enormous slick of chocolate sauce means I can’t tell you about the dessert offering.
I’m sure there are videos of people eating some of those dishes, trying to get their microphone as close to their mandibles as possible and telling you all about the ASMR of the crunch. But for what it’s worth, if I came back to Blip I would be tempted to try them. I’d also be tempted to have a triple burger, though, and to share some fries with whoever came with me.
It is an if, because Blip is in Tilehurst and that means that for many people in Reading, trying their burger will involve either making a special journey or experiencing it with the gradual degradation of quality that comes with every single minute on the back of a scooter. One of the things about places like Supernova, Dumbo and Junk is that they are in the heart of Soho where there is loads going on, where that meal forms a small part of a night out or a day in the capital. In that sense, Blip would have made more sense in, say, the spot vacated by Mission Burrito than it does where it is. But then the rent would have been prohibitive, which I doubt it is in RG31.
So if you live in Tilehurst you’re looking increasingly lucky, I reckon. You have great brunch at The Switch, you have a pleasant casual Italian in Vesuvio, you have a wonderful café in the shape of Dee Caf, you have Zyka and Istanbul Mangal which I’m yet to check out. And you have Blip – which, despite copying restaurants which took off in the West End of London, does a thoroughly respectable job of making the western end of Reading a lot more attractive. Give yourself a pat on the back for moving somewhere that increasingly looks only a superb pub away from being one of Reading’s most surprising enclaves.
For the rest of us, it will depend on how much you like burgers. I wouldn’t travel five hours to eat one, even if Blip paid me to do it, but I might hop on the 17 now and again. Is it the best burger in Reading? I’ll leave those pronouncements to others, partly because I went and said that Mac’s Deli‘s patty melt was possibly Reading’s best burger less than a month ago and I feel a little like I let myself down even expressing an opinion. But it’s a decidedly good burger, and if it foreshadows an acceleration in the speed with which food trends make it to our Berkshire backwater I am all for it.
Blip – 7.3 8 Park Lane, Tilehurst, Reading, RG31 5DL
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When I ran through the trends in Reading’s food scene last year, two stood out: the proliferation of new, casual pizza restaurants and a similar blossoming of restaurants to cater to Reading’s Hongkonger community. Last week I explored the former at Smelly Alley’s Zi Tore so it only seemed fair, this week, to dive into the latter at Me Kong, the newest of these restaurants to open.
I identified some of these spots opening in 2025 – Woodley Food Stasian out in Woodley, Take Your Time where Dolce Vita used to be and the subject of this week’s review, which is tucked away behind Reading Library just down from The Blade next to the retro classic that is the Abbey Baptist Church. It’s a spot which somehow didn’t feel like it existed before Me Kong sprang up there: I can’t remember what, if anything, was there before.
But even that undersells the increase in restaurants catering to this market. After all Good Old Days Hong Kong, which I reviewed around this time last year, has been around since late 2023. Worse still, I missed out a couple of developments last year – YL Restaurant for one, which opened in the back of the supermarket that used to be the Warwick Arms a long time ago. And then there’s Soul Chill, a cafe that opened right opposite where I used to live on the corner of London Street and South Street. Its Google listing initially made it look like a bubble tea spot, but it boasts breakfast and lunch options.
All this, of course, springs from the introduction in January 2021 of the BNO Visa for Hongkongers, giving them the right to settle in the U.K. with a path to citizenship. Reading – always a multicultural, well-educated, polyglot place – has as a result both developed and embraced a significant Hongkonger community. With that come all the advantages of vibrancy, including – selfishly, for me – new and interesting places to eat.
Me Kong is a particular type of establishment, a cha chaan teng. These are “tea restaurants” that originated in Hong Kong in the Fifties, following on from the bing sutt, or ice room. Cha chaan tengs are often likened in print to the British greasy spoon or the American diner, but I think that’s more to try and find a term of cultural reference readers might understand. In reality they are a creature all their own, and a very eclectic one at that.
Food at a cha chaan teng is often described almost as a fusion of Chinese and European – another term often used is ‘soy sauce western’ – with dishes including Chinese ones with which you’d be familiar and more esoteric options like baked pork chop with ketchup, or macaroni soup topped with char siu. In Hong Kong cha chaan tengs are a great gastronomic leveller – swift, efficient and frequented by blue and white collar workers alike.
Plenty of my research suggested that cha chaan tengs are on the wane in Hong Kong, as for that matter greasy spoons are here, but it’s somehow fitting that a wave of them is opening in the U.K. Because I’ve read that when they first sprung up in Hong Kong in the Fifties it was because Hong Kong, run by the British, welcomed Chinese refugees. There are echoes of that, I suppose, in the situation now, seventy years later.
A taste of home, or nostalgia, makes perfect sense if you settle somewhere so far away from your roots, and last month I saw a few photos of customers queuing round the block to try Me Kong for the first time. But did this food also have the potential to win over a wider customer base?
Someone thought so ten years ago, when a restaurant literally called Cha Chaan Teng opened in Holborn, but the reviews were not good. Marina O’Loughlin, then writing in the Guardian, said the food gave her “the kind of clammy shame I’d feel if I woke up post-bender to find myself the fifth Mrs Gregg Wallace”, adding that “cha chaan tengs aren’t renowned for their cuisine”: what’s the opposite of a white saviour?
There is a difference, though. That restaurant was geared at customers of European descent, while Me Kong promises to be the real thing. So on a Tuesday lunchtime I pootled over with my great friend Jerry, who was especially interested in Me Kong because it’s probably the closest restaurant to his gorgeous, incredibly tasteful flat. Forget whether I liked it or not: I also wanted to see if Jerry could find a brilliant new local.
We got there around twenty past twelve and the place was already packed with a queue for tables, albeit one that hadn’t moved out onto the street. I will say though that although we as a nation like to think we’ve invented queuing, Me Kong has perfected it – quickly assessing each table size needed and gradually corralling us into different spots in the waiting area.
At the front there were counters showing off all of Me Kong’s baked goods – buns, pastries and the like – and so some of the people joining the queue were simply buying that stuff to take away. Nothing fazed Me Kong’s front of house, and after no more than five minutes we were ushered to a table.
Me Kong’s interior is really rather impressive, I think. On one level it’s a front room with booths, a back room with tables and a corridor connecting them. But that doesn’t even begin to do it justice, on many levels. They’ve gone all the way through the building, so the front looks out on Abbey Square and the back onto the Holybrook, and that results in a really lovely space where everything feels airy and beautifully lit.
Not only that, but it felt polished and finished in a way new establishments so often don’t: the colour of the wood panelled counter; the tasteful banquettes; the bright line drawings on the wall, everything seemed really considered. And the branding, from the menus to the cups to the napkin dispensers, was extremely well thought out. I got the impression this wasn’t their first rodeo: I’d be surprised if it was their first restaurant, for that matter. It felt fully formed.
I should also mention that Jerry and I were, at the point when we sat down, the only customers of European descent in the place. But I never felt conspicuous, because the staff were just so terrific from start to finish. One server explained to us that they really wanted to promote this kind of food, and I got that impression throughout the meal.
In fact, I’m jumping the gun by saying this but I’ve never been to a restaurant where the staff were quite so keen to tell you what the gorgeous-looking dish that had turned up at another table was (“that’s the braised eggplant with garlic sauce” one of them told me, as I admired a delectable-looking pot on my left).
Me Kong’s menu, on a ring-bound set of cards with that impressive branding, was a proper box of delights with an awful lot going on. One section featured noodles, either dry or in soup, along with five set meals, another common feature in a cha chaan teng. These gave you the option of some Hong Kong classics – ham macaroni soup, say, or char siu macaroni soup – paired with a bun and either fried egg or omelette.
A large section of rice dishes again led with a staple of the cha chaan teng, baked pork chop with cheese and tomato sauce on rice. Many of these dishes were more on the fusion side, so were perhaps more for purists. Another page of the menu featured four clay pot dishes and five stir fries, and another page of snacks offered dishes like deep fried chicken leg with curly fries – again, an authentic cha chaan teng choice – along with a full range of options from the bakery.
I would say that with the exception of that aubergine dish, which looked like it might have had minced pork in it, there wasn’t much for vegetarians here. The page marked Vegetables featured various green veg with garlic or oyster sauce, but would feel limited if that was your lot. There was, however, plenty here for the cost-conscious. The most expensive dish on the menu was south of £15, those set meals were less than a tenner.
Plenty of decisions for Jerry and I to make – but first, tea. Me Kong does sell alcohol (Sapporo on draft, or Guinness) but I really wanted to try the Hong Kong milk tea, another speciality of this kind of restaurant. It’s hard to describe but imagine a very strong cup of PG Tips, souped-up builder’s tea, served with condensed milk, a very pleasing shade of deep amber, and you wouldn’t be far off. I put a sugar in it, but on reflection wished I’d added more.
I don’t normally put a picture of a cup up on the blog, especially one where you can see so little, but: see what I mean about the branding?
I’d read online that Hong Kong milk tea is strained through a sock, or something like it (hopefully one exclusively used for this purpose), often multiple times, to achieve a particular level of smoothness. I can’t say whether a hosiery department was involved, but it did have a certain pleasing consistency. Maybe it was the note of Carnation, or the power of imagination, but whatever it was I enjoyed it.
Jerry originally wanted to try a yuen yueng, a blend of coffee and tea also particular to cha chaan tengs, but they didn’t have any Hong Kong coffee so he joined me in a tea. He liked it, but less than me: when we had a follow up drink I opted for more of the same, and he had an iced lemon tea – specifically requested as slightly less sweet on the excellent advice of the table next to me.
Before I talk about the food, I did want to say something about that. I’ve already said that the staff were really keen to explain other dishes and illuminate us on the cuisine of Hong Kong. But I’ve never eaten in a restaurant where that evangelism so extended to the other customers, too. During our meal the tables on either side of us were occupied by multiple parties – restaurants like this tend to be brisk – and so we got to rubberneck all manner of delights. Not only that, but the people ordering them were more than happy to tell us what they were.
All that meant that although we played it relatively safe with our order we saw more than enough to work out what to have next time. That macaroni soup topped with satay beef looked like an interesting, comforting order, but I was even more intrigued by a dome of rice crowned with an omelette draped over it, the whole thing then decorated with vertical strips of char siu. The traditional pork chop baked with cheese came in an earthenware dish, the kind you might associate with a lasagne, and I got a sufficiently good look to decide I’d leave that one to the experts.
Nicest of all were the lovely pair of civil engineers on my left. They worked in Thames Tower and had found out about the place and one, whose family were from Hong Kong, had decided to bring her colleague along to see if it recaptured the food of her memories.
She ordered a clay pot dish that I considered but been put off ordering because of the mystery meat component of “Chinese sausage”, and she even kindly let me sample a bit. It was delicious, with a sort of air dried texture like salami and a complex, fragrant flavour. I made a note not to let it deter me next time.
So yes, I chose the conventional option, the black bean chicken pot. But I am so happy that I did, because it was simply outstanding. A hefty pot full to bursting with boneless chicken thigh, skin on, cooked absolutely bang on so it was firm but had just enough give, no evidence of the velveting that can sometimes make chicken off-putting. Huge bits of spring onion, caramelised until heavenly, coexisted with all that chicken and extra goodies: little cubes of potent ginger and plenty of equally burnished nubbins of garlic.
But all that would be nothing without the sauce, a black bean sauce of ridiculous savoury depth, a glossy number with notes of Marmite which clung to everything: to the pot, to every crevice of chicken, to each layer of onion, each piece of ginger and garlic, every grain of steamed rice. This was deliciously viscous stuff, and I made it a mission to ensure that I left as little of it gleaming at the bottom of that black pot as I possibly could.
There is a part of me that is very tempted, just after noon on Friday when this review goes up, to find myself in that place again eating exactly this dish: it was that good.
Jerry had chosen every bit as well as me, going for the Singapore vermicelli with char siu and prawn. This was a magnificent one-stop shop, a very generous tangle of rice noodles tumbled through with chilli, prawns, strips of pork, beansprouts and fried egg. The menu described it as spicy, our server said it wasn’t so hot. Having tried a few forkfuls, I’d probably split the difference and say it was nicely challenging.
What saved it from chilli overload was a certain nuttiness, although I’m not sure where it came from. Perhaps it was the curry powder, an essential component of this dish which gives it its ochre hue. Professor Wikipedia advises me, pleasingly, that Singapore noodles have nothing to do with Singapore but are also a post-war Hong Kong creation.
The thing that made me happiest about these noodles was how much Jerry loved them. He told me he could happily see himself coming here of an evening, ordering these and sitting there taking it all in: he added that previously his go to had been the pad thai at Rosa’s Thai but that this was easily a rival for it. Getting people to eat at Me Kong instead of Rosa’s Thai is, I suppose, as good a mission statement for this blog as any: I’m glad it had that effect on my friend if nothing else.
But I can also see exactly what he meant about it being a space where you’d want to spend time. It was so busy, so beautifully efficient and well run, and so popular – with friends, with couples, with families. Small children were everywhere, but for a moment you could forget you were in the U.K. because they were, without exception, impeccably behaved.
The word that jumps out at me – that restaurants don’t always aim for and in any case don’t hit often enough – is fun. Everything about Me Kong was a riot, from its cheerful, charming staff to its delighted, curious kind customers. How could anybody experience that and not want to be part of it again?
Determined to cover as much of the menu as possible we stayed for some sweet treats and this was when, maybe, Me Kong’s sure touch faltered ever so slightly. I wanted to try the real staples here, so we started with a pineapple bun: no pineapple is involved, but it got the name because the sugar crust on top can, apparently, vaguely resemble a pineapple. I rather liked this – it reminded me of an iced bun, but with a crust rather than icing on top. Worth trying so you can say you’ve tried it, absolutely, but I don’t know when I’d feel a hankering for one again.
I really expected to love the French toast, another Hong Kong signature, but it didn’t quite hit the spot. Two slices of white bread, joined together with a thin mortar of punchy peanut butter, came fried and brought to the table with a little pack of Anchor butter to melt on top. Jerry said that those cultural references – Anchor butter, builder’s tea – added to that feeling of nostalgia, and I could see where he was coming from.
But for me this was just a little too stodgy, a little too light on the fun considering how many calories were involved. Ironically it needed to be more indulgent: the very nice civil engineer at the next table told me that often this was served with maple syrup, which would have utterly transformed it, but the server told me that they didn’t do tweaks or customisation for anybody, which I respected.
We didn’t finish it, because as an experience it was just a tad too grubby: I didn’t feel, as Marina O’Loughlin did, shame equivalent to waking up married to Gregg Wallace, but perhaps something comparable, like having a mucky dream about Nadine Dorries.
The last of our trio of desserts was a similar experience: I’d asked for an egg tart and been told that we’d have to wait twenty minutes for a fresh batch to come out of the oven. So we did, and when it came it was still warm and the pastry, buttery and short, was truly exemplary.
And yet I wanted to like the filling so much more than I did. I don’t know whether I was expecting the appealing wobble of a pastel de nata, or the nutmeg-dusted propriety of its English relative, but this was more egg white than egg yolk, somewhat lacking in richness and far more like blancmange that had found itself a very nice house. Again I wouldn’t order it again but I’m glad I tried it and for £1.70, only 10p less expensive than the pineapple bun, it was not an expensive mistake.
Our bill for everything came to just over £54, and there were two remarkable things about it. One is that if you order food they knock a very specific 51p off the price of each of your drinks, so they each cost £2.99. The second is that the service charge they add is only 8%: I questioned this with our server saying it wasn’t enough, and he laughed. “Next time you can tip a hundred pounds!” he said.
He also told me – and this might be useful to you, though it wasn’t to me – that if you spend over £40 they have a deal where you can get free parking at the Queens Road Car Park.
I hope the tip is so low because the staff there don’t need to rely on it to be fairly paid, because they very much deserve that. All of them were just terrific, and I know this has a strong whiff of and everyone stood up and clapped, but it’s true: practically every one of them said thank you to Jerry and I as we walked through the restaurant on our way out. I sent the pictures of our food to Zoë later as I was relaxing at Jerry’s with a cup of tea and a medicinal glass of red, and got exactly the reply I was expecting: perhaps you’ll take me some time soon.
This is precisely the kind of review, and the sort of restaurant, I wanted to kick off the year with. Me Kong is an absolute blast, brilliantly run and happens to do some excellent food, and I scoped out enough options on my first visit to give me plenty of food for thought on my second, third and fourth – if I can tear myself away from that chicken in black bean sauce, that is. It is already incredibly busy in a way most Reading restaurants in January would kill for, but I can see that continuing even after the novelty value has died off.
But what I also loved about it was how inclusive it was, how keen it was to tell its story far and wide. That spirit deserves to be returned in kind by Reading’s restaurant-goers. And it also made me a little proud of Reading: that our diverse, happy, tolerant town can still attract people like that and businesses like this, despite all the naysayers and bigots in the comments section of the Reading Chronicle.
I think if you read this blog you’re not like those people, and I think you’d find an awful lot to like at Me Kong. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the months ahead, I see some of you there. I certainly won’t be in Rosa’s Thai, that’s for sure.
Me Kong – 8.4 St Laurence House, Abbey Square, Reading, RG1 3AG 0118 3431543
Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.
Unlike any restaurant reviewer I know of, I publish the list of restaurants I intend to visit. It’s regularly added to as places open and people tip me off about their favourite venues, in Reading or slightly further afield, and every time I review somewhere it drops off that list – until, maybe, many years later, the time is ripe for reappraisal. From the outside, it probably just looks like a bunch of restaurants, in alphabetical order.
But the reality, for me at least, is that it’s a nuanced to do list. It’s almost more of an in-tray, never more so than at the beginning of the year, and the order in which I tackle it depends on a number of factors. Because not all of those spots have anywhere approaching equal priority in my mind, and that dictates how quickly I get round to them. I’m aware, for instance, that it’s a fair old while since I visited Newbury or Wokingham on duty: over three years for the former, nearly three years for the latter. I ought to rectify that.
Then there are the new places that I really need to review, if only because they look interesting. If not for my accident I would have reviewed Pho 86 and Nua by now, and spots like Blip and Matteo Greek Grill & Bakery also merit investigation sooner rather than later, to see if smashed burgers can take off in Tilehurst or whether at last somebody can make a go of the old Colley’s Supper Rooms site. I’m curious myself about the answers to those questions, so I need to go exploring at some point.
And of course the accident currently factors into these things. So places near the top of the in-tray, for the time being, need to be fairly close to home and at least slightly lend themselves to eating with one hand; my motor skills are gradually improving with physio, but writing one of these reviews still involves wrangling with the delights of Apple Dictation, which understands what I’m saying about as often as my wife does when her hearing aids aren’t in.
Every to do list has that one thing on it that you should have done a very long time ago, the item that sticks out like a sore thumb and makes you feel guilty. And in my case that item, the subject of this week’s review, is Italian restaurant and cafe Zi Tore, the one which took the spot on Smelly Alley vacated by the Grumpy Goat back in October 2023: yes, it really has been that long since the Grumpy Goat shut. Hicks Baker weren’t quick off the mark getting someone to jump into this particular grave, but Zi Tore opened nearly a year ago with co-owner Paolo Lanzetta, a proud Neapolitan, in the kitchen.
The Reading Chronicle covered the story as only they could, getting the name of the restaurant wrong – it’s not ‘Zia Torre’ – and accidentally giving Lanzetta dual nationality. “It has always been my dream to open a restaurant like this so people can try authentic Italian and Nepalese cuisine” they misquoted him as saying: you can’t get the staff, can you? That’s our local paper for you though, they just don’t know their calzone from their momo.
All that means that I am very long overdue checking out one of the trailblazers of the Italian invasion that hit Reading in the first half of 2025. I’ve reviewed Paesinos, reviewed Amò – not without controversy – and failed to get to Peppito’s before it closed five months after opening. But Zi Tore remained the blind spot: I tried to get there early one evening in May, only to get turned away because they seemed to be closing early, but I’ve not been back since.
And everything I’ve heard since then has been good. I’ve had comments to the effect that they’re staying open later these days, feedback borne out by their later opening hours on Google. Long-standing reader Mansoor, a man I trust on many things, said that of all of Reading’s new restaurants last year Zi Tore was the one he ended up visiting most frequently. And my friend Enza, my authority on all matters Italian, has loved Zi Tore for a long time, especially their graffe.
I’ve also heard rumours that one of Amò’s pizza chefs, short of work now that the restaurant has been closed for over a month without explanation, had crossed town to start working at Zi Tore. So that was it: slap bang at the top of the 2026 in-tray. On a drizzly weekday, during a week that was originally meant to be time off but was now filled with medical appointments, Zoë and I wandered up Smelly Alley to finally give it a whirl.
Zi Tore has done a lovely job of the exterior and the frontage and the window, with arancini and pizza slices tantalisingly on display, draws you in nicely. But beyond the counter, I found the interior a little inhospitable. It’s difficult to describe it without harking back to the site’s Grumpy Goat days, but the back room on the ground floor, where all the beer used to live, was a slightly unlovely space with a handful of tables, starved of daylight or much ambience.
Upstairs was much better, although that also brought back memories of the site’s previous life. It’s a nice space with a fetching mini mezzanine looking out over Smelly Alley, and taking the bar out had definitely created more room. But even here the furniture felt functional and a little sterile, as if they’d bought it piecemeal.
One table with makeshift bench seating could accommodate six people, one of the plum spots up by the window had an actual bench and low table – great for coffee and cake, perhaps less so for lunch. It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, Arctic: an aircon unit in the ceiling was switched off, its remote on a nearby low table set to a random 30 degrees. It all felt a little spartan, not quite finished, even though the place was on the verge of celebrating its first birthday.
Zi Tore’s menu had the kind of concision that pleases restaurant reviewers: seven different Neapolitan pizzas, two types of pasta – ravioli or gnocchi – with one of three sauces, a lasagne and three smaller dishes under the heading “Street Food”. That was slightly marred by a separate paper pizza menu, a recent addition perhaps, with another half a dozen pizza options. Some felt like the kind of combinations you’d get at Amò, making me wonder if the departing chef had taken a few ideas with him.
Pricing was standard issue, with pizzas ranging from £10 for a margherita all the way up to £17 if you wanted porcini, roasted potatoes and sausage (typing this, that ensemble sounds rather good to me). Pasta dishes were between £12 and £15 depending on your shape and sauce of choice, and the smaller plates were less than a fiver. The other tempting dish, the pizza fritta, was a tenner and looked like a fish out of water in the street food section of the menu.
Cakes are not on the menu, so you have to go up to the display and ask at the counter: I didn’t indulge my sweet tooth on this occasion, but the cake I saw turning up at a neighbouring table looked thoroughly decent. I didn’t see any graffe – the loop-shaped potato doughnut beloved by my friend Enza – but perhaps they’re a weekend thing.
Zi Tore also doesn’t do table service, so you go up with your order and your table number and let them have it. I ordered a couple of coffees, a couple of small dishes, a pizza and a pasta dish: all that set me back just over £44, which felt like decent value. It was certainly comparable with its peers at Amò and Paesinos, although Zi Tore’s offering is slightly different from theirs.
It’s a shame to start the year with a regular complaint about timing, but I would have liked the coffees quickly – it was cold outside and almost as cold inside – and then the small dishes, then the main events. Zi Tore wasn’t hugely busy, with about four other tables on the go when we arrived, but in reality we waited what felt like quite a while and then everything turned up a matter of minutes apart.
No matter: the coffee, the starting point, wasn’t half bad. It arrived in those tall, almost-conical glasses I slightly associate with the last century, but my latte was very enjoyable and Zoë liked her mocha. In Reading’s coffee hierarchy this wasn’t competing with the likes of C.U.P. or Lincoln – or even trying to – but it was significantly better than Madoo‘s coffee, which has always been its Achilles heel.
Small plates, turning up twenty minutes after we ordered, were a mixed bag of realised and unrealised potential. I didn’t mind the sausage and friarelli arancino, just the one for £5, but it lacked a little pep. It was lukewarm, the shell had no real rigidity to it and inside the filling wasn’t brilliantly distributed: a big knot of dense sausage meat at the bottom, almost as if it had been placed there to stop the whole thing toppling over, like a Weeble.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, more that I knew better were out there: it didn’t match Amò’s but, on the other hand, it was far better than the ones at Vino Vita.
Far, far better was the montanara, a simple but exquisite treat, a pleasingly irregular, puffy oval of fried pizza dough topped simply with tomato, mozzarella and a solitary basil leaf. This was so enjoyable, and justified a visit to Zi Tore in its own right: there’s nowhere to hide when something has so few components, and it’s a great way to showcase how good your raw materials are. At £3.50, this is one of the Reading lunch scene’s bargains, and although we shared it between two – and it was big enough for you to do that – the wise move would be to come here and order one to yourself.
But the other wise move might be to order just that, because as I was eating it I did find myself thinking if only this was hot. It was fried pizza dough, I’m sure it was as hot as balls to begin with, and I wondered what had cooled it so: was it adding the toppings, or was it the fact that it sat around until everything else was ready or almost ready? Or could it have been that the upstairs was so Siberian that you couldn’t affort to wait until after your arancino to tuck into it? I think some benefit of the doubt is probably due here: I would go again and give this another try. Even on the upper reaches of what you could describe as ‘piping warm’ it was a very good choice.
The timestamps on my and Zoë’s photos tell me that our bigger dishes arrived less than five minutes later, and it’s good that we’d finished our smaller ones or there wouldn’t have been room on the table for everything. Zoë called shotgun on the pizza, and had ordered simply, the Diavola, a relatively classic pepperoni pizza with chilli.
First things first: it looked the part, and the rim was nicely speckled, blistered and spotted. This is, for better or worse, a very classic Neapolitan pizza, with all the pluses and minuses of that genre, still enjoying its moment in the sun in Reading as it is replaced with American interlopers and hybrids (and whatever ‘London-style pizza’ is) in the capital. That’s the extent to which I keep up with pizza trends, but in theory I’m still happy with the original forebear of all these mutations.
And yet, from the bit of this pizza I tried, this wasn’t my favourite rendition of it in Reading. Everything was very loose and sloppy, more so than at Zi Tore’s rivals on the Kings Road, which meant the centre was like what I imagine sex with Rupert Murdoch must be like, a droopy challenge. I heard someone online say “if it ain’t messy it ain’t fun” at some point last year, and personally when it comes to food I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed more.
But there was other problems here. The dough would have been best in class in Reading back in the days when Franco Manca got us all excited, but with the competition from the class of ’25 it was mid table – and that’s before we get to Zia Lucia’s charcoal base and its almost mythical effects on punters’ innards.
And the pepperoni didn’t do it for me either – now, it might well have been pepperoni rather than salami, but for me the benefit of pepperoni is its narrower gauge, the amount you can fit on a pizza, all those little chalices of fat dotted across the surface. Six big discs arranged with geometric precision didn’t have quite the same curb appeal. Zoë told me she also expected more pizza and more bite – from actual chillies, rather than a dusting of chilli flakes.
Does this sound miserable? I’m so sorry if it does, because I was so hoping to like this. Especially as Zoë left about a third of it – which would not have happened at Amò or Paesinos – and, just as damningly, I didn’t take it off her hands. But I do feel more unsure in my judgment than usual, because people I like rate Zi Tore and I, too, really wanted to.
I’m afraid to say, though, that the pizza beat the pasta hands down. I’d chosen ravioli – made fresh every day onsite – rather than gnocchi, and the porcini mushroom sauce over the ragu on the recommendation of others. And again I wonder if my antennae were just out of kilter that day, because I did not like it at all.
Didn’t like any bit of it, actually. The ravioli, six very large specimens, had bottoms more thick and dense than Robert Jenrick, when I was hoping for lightness and delicacy. I also think they could have stood to be smaller, or for you to have fewer of them, although if I’d liked them you can bet I wouldn’t have said that. The filling was meant to be ricotta and parmesan, but all I got was ricotta and an aggressive blast of citrus. Not a light zing of the stuff, but the sort of brutal clubbing you associate with bathroom products.
I tried eating them without the sauce to check that my tastebuds weren’t playing up. But yes, again, an overdose of lemon. Perhaps if there had been less, and more balancing saltiness from the parmesan, which was completely missing in action, it might have worked. But as it was it didn’t, and it slugged it out with the mushroom sauce for dominance. Those two components simply couldn’t get along at all: perhaps I should have known that and not combined them but, if they didn’t go, why was it an option on the menu?
Might I have enjoyed this better if the sauce took centre stage, paired with gnocchi? I tried that on its own, too, and decided the answer was probably no. It felt somehow less than the sum of its parts, without any savoury depth from the mushrooms, which might have been porcini but I was not convinced. And again, the presentation of this was about taking a plate and trying to fill it to the perimeter with stuff, just because. I would have liked less: lighter, more delicate presentation but with punchier, better balanced flavours.
Again, the ultimate heckle. There were six ravioli. I wanted to stop after three, but thought that would seem rude: isn’t it strange how as a paying customer you can still feel like that? I contemplated leaving two on the plate but felt that even that would somehow be discourteous or ungrateful. So I ate another, and then decided I’d done my duty. I was undeniably full, make no mistake, but it had felt like a friend cooking for you in all the wrong ways.
I so wanted not to begin the year with a review like this, especially after all the hoo-ha last year every time I stepped into any Reading restaurant which was even vaguely Italian. I’m surprised, given the smear campaign I found out about, that I was even allowed on the premises at Zi Tore.
But the cosmos has well and truly taught me a lesson. I made the mistake of saying in my round up of 2025 that I might be better off giving every Italian restaurant a rating of 6.6 and saying it was ‘quite nice’ from now on, and fate rewarded me with this experience. Look at the rating below: you couldn’t make it up, but if I moved it a notch up or down I’d only be doing it so as not to look as if I was fulfilling a prophecy.
So I need to at least be more nuanced when I sum up Zi Tore than to say that it’s quite nice. That doesn’t reflect the complexity of the reality, anyway, and visiting the restaurant nearly a year after it opened you can’t put the things you aren’t wild about down to growing pains or opening before they’re ready. The experience I had there is the experience I was supposed to have.
It is fantastic that a hospitality business took the space vacated by the Grumpy Goat, and that there is still one oasis of food and drink on a run which used to be synonymous with food and is now full of mobile phone repair shops nobody seems to visit (and, to be fair, Reading’s finest branch of Timpson). It’s also fantastic that it’s independent, and laudable that Zi Tore makes everything onsite and offers options you can’t get elsewhere in town that have made at least one Italian I know ecstatic and a little less homesick.
And I can see that I would return to Zi Tore, believe it or not. I’m really sorry that I didn’t love the pizza or pasta, but one of those window seats on the mezzanine with a cup of coffee, a montanara and the chance to explore some of their cake after that would very much appeal to me. Especially as the service was so good, and happy and helpful. But I don’t know if Zi Tore will survive and make enough money if all its customers order like me, or whether it really wants just to be a café given the expansion of its pizza menu and its opening hours.
Fortunately for Zi Tore I suspect not all of its customers order like me, or think like me, and Reading is a big enough place that it might well carve out a large enough share of the market keeping at what it does. But the market may well contract further in 2026, and so I wish them the best of luck. At the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Amò, closed for over a month on Kings Road, will reopen. Ironically, it might be good news for Zi Tore if it doesn’t.
Zi Tore – 6.6 7 Union Street, Reading, RG1 1EU 0118 9561531
Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.
You’ll have to forgive me, because in the normal run of events I announce my award winners at the end of the year, wrapping everything up in a bow so we can all get on with a fresh twelve months. I’m tardy this time, partly because writing these is still more laborious than it would normally be (I won’t go into all that again) and partly because, having dodged the flu/lurgy/Covid that Zoë invariably gets over Christmas most years, she’s managed to get clobbered with a chest infection instead, right on New Year’s Eve. So the house has become a little hospital ward in its own right, and writing has taken a back seat. Never mind: better late than never.
You’d think the extra deliberation time would make writing these awards easier, but if anything it’s had the opposite effect. It’s been a good year for Reading food, with plenty of good, interesting places opening in and around the town centre. But the majority of those new places – the best of them, anyway – are squarely in the casual dining sector, offering pizzas and burgers, the stuff that influencers tend to review. We’ve not had a similar rise in other kinds of restaurants, and when I asked on my Facebook page what people would like to see more of in 2026 the comments, all full of hope and optimism, made for quite a frustrating crib sheet of many of the things Reading still lacks.
No specialist fish restaurant, no proper gelato parlour, no Mexican restaurant. No Latin American cuisine of any kind, come to think of it (“it’s hard to get Samoan chop suey round here” said possibly the most niche comment I received). A lot of people identified that we still lack a tapas restaurant, something I’ve been moaning about since the earliest days of this blog, when we had a bad one. Many others wanted a good, independent Italian restaurant and a French bistro: French food is having a proper moment in London, but that has not extended this far west yet.
Some people wanted things which required the geography (and possibly the climate) of Reading to be different – more al fresco dining and rooftop bars – and others expressed more general aspirations we can all get behind. “Less greedy landlords” said one person and, not necessarily changing the subject, “less John Sykes” said another. Everybody wanted lower rents for independents, a utopia we’ve been waiting for long enough to know it won’t happen. One comment wanted to see “a realisation by landlords that it’s better to have a good tenant paying less than you’d like than to have an empty unit paying you nothing at all”: don’t we all? “I just want a decent bagel bakery” read one plaintive cry.
It’s hard not to feel discouraged, reading all that. And doubly so for me, because a reasonable proportion of my reviews last year were of places outside Reading, in the surrounding countryside or further afield, in Bristol, Oxford, Bath or London. And I know there’s a degree of cherry-picking going on – I don’t pick places a train ride away unless I’m confident they’ll be worth the journey – but the restaurants I’ve encountered on my travels often have what Reading lacks.
And I don’t see places like that opening in Reading, not on the evidence of last year or any year since 2018. We don’t have a pub like the Three Tuns, a bar like Newbury’s Parched, a restaurant like Seasonality, a bakery like U. Bakery or a tapas spot like Arbequina. We have pizza and burgers, and pizza and burgers have their place, but it’s starting to feel a tad lopsided.
So these awards have something of a split personality, because this year I’m giving out awards for dishes and restaurants in Reading, but also for those further afield. I’ve had some excellent food in Reading, but the very best of what I’ve eaten in most cases, as this list clearly shows, has involved some travel. I sincerely hope 2026 closes the gap.
That isn’t intended to imply that you can’t eat wonderful food in Reading. Because you really can, and narrowing the awards down to a winner and two honourable mentions has been difficult in many cases. To give you an idea, I couldn’t find room for dishes – all excellent – by Kungfu Kitchen, Pau Brasil, The Moderation, and Good Old Days among the final winners, and an extra week or two of head-scratching didn’t make that any easier. But if deciding between Reading dishes was difficult, possibly deciding between dishes outside Reading was just a little more fun; one was an agonising choice of who went where on the podium, the other a somewhat more satisfying wander down memory lane.
Anyway, without any further ado let’s get on with opening another year’s set of sealed envelopes. I hope you enjoy this, even if you find much to disagree with in it. Here’s hoping the decisions are even more problematic when this all comes round again at the end of the year.
STARTER OF THE YEAR (Reading): Frittatini, Amò Italian Street Food
Amò’s pasta fritti, breadcrumbed, fried pucks of pasta with either ragu or – even better – aubergine and tomato are not always available, but when they are, they’re an absolute must order. I can’t remember how many times I ate them last year, I just know that it wasn’t enough. “They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form” I said when I ate them for the first time. I know I’m not always right, and doubtless you do too, but I was right about that.
It saddens me a great deal that I couldn’t give this award out to either of the runners-up. Honourable mentions go to Oishi for its exquisite prawn and leek gyoza and Club India, the pride of Winnersh, for curry leaf calamari, an almost impossibly moreish dish.
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I imagine that you are reading this in the strange hinterland that is the time between Christmas and New Year. Whether you’re working, “working from home but not really” or have the time off, it’s a funny period when days lose their meaning, leftovers become meals, the fridge takes a lot of emptying and the liver takes a lot of punishment. It’s usually one of my favourite times of the year, even if it’s also a strange limbo. If nothing else, it’s the last seven days before I have to at least pretend to want to lose weight.
But if that is you, spare me a thought. Because this year (as you may already know) I’m at home convalescing from an impressively broken arm as I write this – or, rather, dictate it on my MacBook. Which means that my last few weeks have been like the week you’re going through now, and the next few weeks most likely will be too. Except I don’t get to do the socialising or the drinking with reckless abandon, although I still badly need to pretend to want to lose weight. Ideally, I need to genuinely want to lose weight, and not only that but I need to want to enough to actually do it. That’s a challenge at the best of times.
But this period lends itself well to reflection. So there’s no better time to look back on the year drawing to a close and ahead to the year to come. Traditionally, this annual blog post has been a bit gloomy, because ever since the pandemic either restaurants have been closing left right and centre or I’ve been saying “well, it might not have been so bad this year but just wait till next year: next year is going to be dreadful”. It’s always made for a cheery read, don’t you think?
So it might surprise you to find, as it has surprised me, that this year hasn’t been like that at all. I regularly read about London restaurants closing, or read essays from restaurateurs about how Rachel Reeves single-handedly hammered the final nail in their restaurant’s coffin (even though that is staggeringly reductive), but Reading has been weirdly buoyant in 2025. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our fair share of farewells, but this year that’s been far outweighed by the number of hellos.
Some newcomers have jumped in the graves of recently departed favourites, but others have opened in sites that have been dormant for some time, or that weren’t previously restaurants at all. Where’s the money coming from? Why are people gambling on this in 2025 of all years, when the consensus seems to be that the dice are loaded against hospitality like never before?
Search me. That requires the kind of socio-economic analysis you would get from Reading-on-Thames, not me. I just report the stuff, so with that in mind let’s have a look at this year’s comings and goings, to see if we can make any sense of it all. What’s the worst that can happen?
* * * * *
It’s traditional for restaurants to bite the bullet in January, having banked their Christmas takings and come to the realisation that they don’t fancy three bitterly cold months when punters have no cash, are on diets, are taking part in Dry January etc. But the only restaurant to take that course of action this year was Bluegrass BBQ. I thought that was quite sad, as it happens, because although I know its quality was variable I always loved their breakfast. There is still a gap in the market for a restaurant doing a high-quality breakfast in the centre of Reading, and Bluegrass’ departure leaves Côte as the only serious alternative to Bill’s for the most important meal of the day.
Departures started to bite in the Oracle across the rest of the winter. Mission Burrito decided to close at the start of February, which again saddened me even though I had to be honest and say that I couldn’t remember the last time I ate there. Maybe that was the problem, perhaps nobody could. In March we lost Gordon Ramsay Street Burger – weirdly one of the most widely read restaurant reviews I’ve ever published – and I’m not sure it was really mourned by anyone who didn’t work there.
When I went, I remember saying that it wasn’t as bad as you might expect but that it still couldn’t match the standard of Honest: its closure suggests that at least a few people agreed with me. Maybe things will get surreal next year – Jamie Oliver announced that he is reviving the Jamie’s Italian brand, all transgressions seemingly forgiven, and you wouldn’t bet against him returning to Reading. Maybe it can move into that giant site that has been vacant ever since Lemoni gave up the ghost, and we can all feel like there’s been a glitch in the Matrix.
There was far more openly expressed sadness at the very end of March when Munchees closed. And even though I never went, and the last time I saw the interior was when it featured briefly in Broadchurch, I did understand this one. It was one of the very last of a breed of caffs that used to be part of the fabric of Reading, along with the likes of Platters, Chelsea Coffee House and others I’ve forgotten.
I used to be a regular at Platters, drinking frothy coffee out of a plastic beaker, smoking like a chimney, doing the crossword in a red top tabloid and occasionally treating myself to bacon and eggs on toast (if it was just after payday). What can I say? It was the Nineties. And if my taste evolved and poncified, to Coffee Republic and then to the likes of Workhouse, Tamp and C.U.P. it didn’t mean that I didn’t hope there would still be a place for those kinds of cafés. But businesses can’t coast on nostalgia, they have to survive on takings; this leaves Rafina on West Street as the last of a dying breed.
Spring and summer brought another spate of closures, although fewer than you might have expected. In May Sarv’s Slice quit the Biscuit Factory in a blaze of acrimony, making all sorts of allegations about the management interfering with their equipment. Apart from a few pop-ups at Double-Barrelled and the Nag’s Head, Reading has not seen them again, and probably won’t as they concentrate on their new base in Ealing: their reputation was also enhanced by an appearance on Saturday morning TV.
This is of course an enormous shame, but as we will see, Sarv may have made a very smart decision to get out of town just as a wave of new pizza challengers hit the town centre. But they will be missed, not only for their excellent Neapolitan pizzas but for the Detroit style pies; nobody in Reading has even tried to emulate those.
I’ve no idea what’s going on at the Biscuit Factory, which seems to be limping on amid constant speculation that it will close, but at some point this year we also lost Compound Coffee from its ground floor, a terrible shame as it did probably the best coffee that end of town. Also in West Reading, we said goodbye to Romanian restaurant Vampire’s Den at some point around May or June; I never ate there, so I can’t tell you whether their name was the biggest of their problems.
And also in June, a rather sad development: The Cellar, the restaurant which rose from the ashes of Valpy Street (and appeared to have the same owner and most of the same staff) stopped trading. At the time I thought this was a terrible shame but now, at the end of the year, I’m rather more suspicious of businesses that quit under one name and reopen under another, for reasons which will become clear before too long.
As autumn turned to winter, we got a closure which might represent some kind of record. Peppito, the new pizza restaurant on the first floor of John Sykes’s development (the one that used to be called King’s Walk) closed in October. Nothing surprising about that, you might think – John Sykes’ tenants don’t have the best survival rate – but it is noteworthy because Peppito only opened at the end of May. A cryptic message on Instagram said that the restaurant would be “pausing operations for a while” because of “circumstances”.
Your guess is as good as mine, but the one time I walked past Peppito it appeared to only have one table, which made it almost completely reliant on delivery apps. Given Sykes’ insatiable desire for rent, I’m not sure bunging a couple of pizzas to Readings resident influencers was ever going to overcome the site’s inherent shortcomings. “This isn’t goodbye – it’s a reset” said the Instagram post: okay, sure.
That brings us to the end of the year, and a few significant events. First of all Pappadams, which was taken over around March, completely rebranded and so ceased to be. That might be for the best, as I’ve heard reports from people who went there under the new management and said it wasn’t the restaurant it used to be, and not in a good way either.
Another sad announcement came from Whitley, where Dough Bros announced that they would be serving their last pizzas on the 20th of December. Happily, a buyer has been found for that business so it will reopen under the same name in the New Year, and it’s looking to add smash burgers to its repertoire. Let’s hope the new owners are worthy custodians of its reputation.
It’s common for restaurants to announce their closure early in the New Year, but this year Bierhaus wasn’t fucking about. They filled their last steins on the Sunday before Christmas, bringing to an end a nine year spell on Queens Walk. There has been speculation about whether they will crop up elsewhere, and whether vacating the site has anything to do with the wider redevelopment of the Broad Street Mall: in any event this leaves that stretch looking even more desolate than usual, with Sushimania at one end and ThaiGrr! at the other.
Then we had the weirdest event of all: three days before Christmas, Phantom Brewery made an announcement that it was closing its sites in Reading and Henley and suspending brewing for the foreseeable future while it moved to a new location. It added, ominously, that it would “undergo a period of restructuring to ensure the appropriate foundations are in place for the next phase”.
The announcement provoked a lot of discussion locally, with suggestions from one employee that they had not been aware of this, and some claims from suppliers that they hadn’t been able to get hold of the brewery for some time. It also appeared that one of Phantom’s partners in particular, 7Bone, had not been aware until they read the announcement that they wouldn’t be cooking at the tap room that week.
Since then Phantom has appointed liquidators, and it looks like long and complicated discussions lie ahead. Staff at the brewery have contacted me to assure me that all employees were fully paid for their work up to the point of closure, and intimated that there is a lot more to this situation than meets the eye: as a result I have amended the text I initially put in this round-up, and will be more circumspect in future. Fingers crossed that all affected suppliers are reimbursed as much as possible as soon as possible.
You would hope that that would be the final closure of 2025, but would you believe that there was time for just one more? Hard to credit, but it’s true: just after Christmas, the Blagrave Arms announced that its New Year’s Eve drinks would be its last. Now, that might not come as such a surprise to those of you who, like me, occasionally look at the business section of Rightmove, where the pub had been listed for sale for some time. The Hop Leaf on Southampton Street is on there too, if you have £420,000 to spare.
Rightmove also gives you an idea of what to expect in 2026. Sweeney & Todd is still for sale, although that hardly classes as news because the owners have been trying to offload it for a very long time. But there’s also a listing for a restaurant in Caversham which requires you to sign an NDA for its identity but is clearly, from the details in the listing, Papa Gee.
Similarly, there is a day café for sale in south Reading. And by all means sign the NDA to get details if you know literally nothing about Reading, but otherwise it’s clear from the specifics in the publicly available brochure – especially its layout and limited opening hours – that it can only be one specific establishment on Kennet Island. Will my 2026 roundup confirm that either of these businesses has closed or changed hands? Place your bets.
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What a bummer! Let’s move on to happier news, and the glut of new hospitality businesses opening in Reading this year. I may not have captured all of them, but I do think this is most of them. And apologies in advance – it’s a lot.
January saw a number of places open in Reading. There was Paesinos, in the vanguard of the Italian invasion, which opened on King Street. Gurt Wings announced the start of a year long residency at Blue Collar Corner which was, to my mind at least, marred by consistency and staffing issues. It draws to an end on New Year’s Eve, so we will have to rely on pop-ups for our Gurt fix in 2026. The Lyndhurst re-re-opened, if that’s a thing, and have remained under the same management for a whole year, lending some badly needed continuity.
And finally, of course, we got our first big name opening of the year when Rosa’s Thai took on their spot on the ground floor of the iconic Jackson’s Corner building. The fit out, by Quadrant Design, is very fetching indeed and every time I walk past it I’m glad it’s open, glad that it’s brought life to that corner of town, and pleased that people are inside having a good time. I am, in truth, equally pleased that I don’t have to eat there again.
In February the Burger Society announced that they were also taking on a residency at Blue Collar Corner: great news for fans of burgers, fried chicken and so on but maybe less good news for vegetarians, who would’ve found Blue Collar Corner slightly lacking in options. There was a slight impression that the market was struggling to attract traders, because the third spot was often taken by another street food business run by the Burger Society. It will be interesting to see what next year’s shake-up brings.
February also brought us the second of Reading’s four – count them, four – Italian restaurants in the town centre this year. Zi Tore, in the Grumpy Goat’s old home on Smelly Alley, opened daytimes only selling pizza, gnocchi and Italian baked goods. I’m yet to review it, because it turns out that they close earlier than advertised, but I’ll do my best to get there next year.
Because that wasn’t enough pizza for the RG1 postcode, in April we got Amò, literally a couple of doors down from Paesinos. Amò is a collaboration between the owners of Madoo and Earley-based Pulcinella Focaccia, and has more space than Paesinos with a very different menu and a different focus during the day. I liked both but, as we shall see, they didn’t necessarily like me back.
April also heralded the arrival of Dolphin’s in the town centre where 7Bone used to be, and rather interestingly Food Stasian in Woodley precinct, a no-frills restaurant in the old Adda Hut site offering, by the looks of it, a combination of Vietnamese and Hong Kong dishes. The arrival of restaurants to serve the Hongkonger community would be another trend this year, although most of the activity there was towards the end of 2025.
The final Italian restaurant to try its luck in the town centre this year opened in May. That was Peppito, and we’ve already talked about their record breaking reign. But May was also the month that we got our second significant opening of the year, with the arrival of Cosy Club at the edge of the Oracle, where Lakeland used to live. Cosy Club also leaned heavily on influencers, or content creators, or whatever else you want to call them: I went, spent my own money, and rather wished I hadn’t.
Things didn’t let up over the summer, and an awful lot of places opened in that time. July brought Club India out in Winnersh, potentially the most exciting thing to happen to Winnersh since it got name checked in that episode of The Office. Café Yolk opened their second site, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, with more emphasis on grab and go, and, at long last, Lincoln Coffee finally opened its second site in the old Workhouse Coffee building on King Street. The makeover they’ve done, which I imagine took ages and cost a lot, is fantastic. And the influencers just love the food, which they did not pay for.
The same day that Lincoln Coffee opened, it was all going on around St Mary’s Butts. The old County Deli site, where Kate Winslet used to work pre-Titanic, opened as Pho 86, a third Vietnamese restaurant in town. It had a slightly ropey hygiene rating from the council at first, but a subsequent inspection in October has largely sorted that out. Also that very day, possibly the single busiest day in Reading’s restaurant history since the opening of the Oracle, Thai restaurant Nua took over where Bluegrass used to be.
Station Hill also welcomed its first new business at the end of July, when Notes opened its first branch outside London; I was very excited about this one, which meant the disappointment when I ate there was even greater. We should see Italian wine bar Angelo’s (from the people behind Wokingham’s Ruchetta, which has now rebranded as Angelo’s) and Japanese restaurant Kawaii, from the owners of Coconut and Osaka, open next year. I do wonder if the spate of bars and cafés on Station Hill is largely connected to the lack of extraction at that site: it’s a pity there are so few proper restaurants there.
Hong Kong restaurant Take Your Time opened in August, taking over one of Reading’s most mothballed sites, the former home of Dolce Vita. Those are big shoes to fill, and with Reading’s most noted philanthropist John Sykes as your landlord there is no doubt also a big rent to pay. Best of luck to them with that: their menu is best described as iconoclastic.
August also brought two of the most interesting and surprising establishments I reviewed all year, namely Stop & Taste out in Emmer Green, where an ex-private chef cooked whatever he damn well pleased in a place that looked from the outside like a bog-standard chicken shop, and Mac’s Deli in Theale. The latter was the effortless second album from Mac Dsouza, the owner of Filter Coffee House, an outstanding day café selling brilliant sandwiches made from top-notch ingredients, showcasing Dsouza’s very own Japanese milk bread.
As so often, most of the interesting things in Reading’s food scene happened absolutely nowhere near the town centre. Why could that be, I wonder?
We’re on the home straight now, as autumn came to an end and winter began to bite. Indian restaurant Bagaara opened on the Shinfield Road in September, where Firezza used to be. October gave us Blip, a smash burger place in Tilehurst from the owners of The Switch and Zyka. The look and branding were a clear homage to bigger burger restaurants in London, and they won a slightly dubious award barely a month after opening, but the burgers might well be good. I’ll find out in the New Year.
In November, 1650 Coffee – no extractor fan required – also opened on Station Hill. The provenance of it is unclear: I’ve heard separately that it’s from the team behind Café Yolk and that it’s owned by one of the original founders of Yolk. Either way, you do have to be slightly impressed that the majority of units on Station Hill are being taken by independent businesses with some link to Reading.
Quite the contrast to that is Smoke & Pepper, which is part of a biggish chain and opened on the Butter Market in the place of Munchees. The best way to describe the food they do is to say that it’s a restaurant for influencers and teenagers: smash burgers, loaded fries, chicken tenders and so on. Basically if you don’t need cutlery to eat it, they sell it.
And it might be fantastic, and at some point I’m sure I will find out, but the opening of another restaurant with the same kind of menu as Mr. T on the edge of the Broad Street Mall, accompanied by gushing about how it hits different, or slays, or slaps, or whatever the fuck passes for English in those Instagram videos really doesn’t make me yearn to pay it a visit. Sorry-not-sorry about that.
One of the happiest events of Reading’s food year happened at the very start of December. After giving up her office job to re-enter the world of hospitality, and after a trial run in a couple of locations in Reading, Naomi Lowe re-launched the Nibsy’s brand with Beryl, her deeply fetching cream-coloured trailer, berthed permanently outside Reading station, offering gluten-free sweet and savoury treats and excellent coffee on the go.
This is really welcome news, whether you need to eat gluten-free or not, if only because the coffee alternatives near the station are Prêt, Costa and Notes, none of which are any great shakes. But it’s also lovely to see one of Reading hospitality’s great innovators return to the business, after far too long away.
December also saw Pappadams close and rebrand as Anjappar – still south Indian, but part of a much bigger chain of what I presume are franchises. It also brought queues around the block when Hong Kong restaurant Me Kong opened at the back of the Blade. Along with Take Your Time, it again showed a subtle shift in the kind of restaurants opening in Reading, along with a hint about the communities they might serve.
You would think that was the last of it, but actually that prize goes to Matteo Greek Food & Bakery which opened where O Português used to be, right next to Palmer Park, on the 20th December. Details about it are sketchy, but the owner appears to be Albanian which puts it in the company of restaurants like Quattro and Spitiko. It could be an interesting one to watch next year.
Next year will also bring a new business where The Cellar used to be, called The Nook. Again, there’s not much information online yet (try googling “the nook Reading” and you just get loads of wholesome stuff about nice places to leaf through a paperback with a hot cuppa) but it sounds like it will be a coffee kiosk upstairs and God knows what downstairs. Time will tell, as it always does.
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So what have the main trends of 2025 been? Well, you can probably discern the obvious ones from what I’ve just written: a lot of pizza restaurants, relatively few big names chancing a town centre opening and, perhaps more of a curveball, a recent influx of restaurants aiming to cater for the Hong Kong community in Reading. But more widely, there are a couple of other trends that I’ve noticed as a restaurant reviewer.
The first is an increase in the number of influencers or content creators. To some extent, that’s possibly the biggest sign in everybody’s minds that the pandemic is very much ancient history. Back then, some influencers expressed concern about taking free food when the industry was in so much trouble. Despite the climate remaining challenging those concerns seem to have dissipated, so we see a lot more content on Instagram – some paid, some unpaid, some unpaid and declared, some unpaid and undeclared – not just in London, where this stuff makes the national news, but here in Reading.
Perhaps more surprisingly, there is an increasing willingness for brands to engage with those accounts. That Rosa’s Thai or Cosy Club would authorise the people handling their PR to dish out free meals isn’t a surprise. But to see smaller independent businesses – the likes of Amò, Blue Collar Corner or Fidget & Bob – doing likewise suggests that, like it or not, this form of coverage is now normalised. Businesses are making a calculation that this brings in more money than it costs, and whether the free food is declared or not (and in fairness it sometimes is) any concerns about credibility are not that business’ problem.
The other trend that I’ve definitely seen is an increasing – how best to put this? – prickliness from businesses about reviews. Maybe that is tied to businesses increasingly paying for coverage which they know will be positive, and maybe it’s not. Earlier in the month the Observer published an article querying whether the “vicious restaurant review” was on its way out. I don’t know about that: on the rare occasions when I do publish a review with a very low rating the page hits very much suggest that people still enjoy reading them.
But I will say that businesses are definitely engaging with those reviews in a very different way. You may recall that I reviewed Vino Vita earlier in the year. You might also recall that I thought the food was atrocious – rating 4.6 – and the whole experience something of a bin fire. What you may not know is the significant backlash I received as a result of publishing that review.
So Vino Vita’s Head Of Sales – still a real job, apparently – took to Instagram to post what she believed was a photo of me, describing me as a xenophobic narcissist and urging all hospitality businesses, especially Italian ones, to refuse to allow me on the premises. I also got some fan mail from a supporter of Vino Vita calling out my “lack of support for Reading’s businesses”. What else to expect from a man who only appreciates fish and chips, she asked?
“I’ll make sure your face is known to every business you plan to visit in Reading – persona non grata” she signed off. Well isn’t that nice? At the time of writing, this boycott has so far failed to materialise: perhaps it will feature in a lot of restaurateurs’ New Year’s resolutions.
But what was really odd this year was that this kind of sensitivity was not limited to negative reviews. Even positive reviews received dissatisfied responses from the restaurants in question, as if you weren’t positive in the right way. For instance, I gave Paesinos – a restaurant I loved – a rating of 8.6, the highest I’d given out in the centre of Reading at the time. They blocked me on Instagram after reading a quote out of context about one item on their menu (to be fair, they subsequently read the whole review and relented).
Later in the year I reviewed Amò, which I also loved and also rated as 8.6. I then got an angry message on Instagram from one of the owners complaining that I’d spent the whole of my review talking about Paesinos, despite the fact that I had mainly been saying that it was almost impossible to choose between them and that they were both excellent. “You used my restaurant as a way to promote Paesinos” he said, rather epically missing the point.
The main lesson I’ve taken from all this is that maybe it’s best not to review Italian restaurants at all, or if I do not to give them a rating of 4.6 or 8.6. Perhaps I should just say that they’re all quite nice and give them 6.6, or just not bother. But even where a review is positive, I’ve had at least one occasion where the restaurateur thought it just wasn’t positive enough.
I reviewed one restaurant where I described a dish as ‘too well-behaved’. The restaurateur in question was so rattled by this that he wrote a whole blog post in which he said “what the fuck does that even mean?”, conveniently overlooking the fact that I’d explained exactly what it meant in that very paragraph. That was just part of a whole think piece that urged people to stop analysing food and just enjoy themselves: which is fine if you’re a punter, but is essentially arguing that people shouldn’t review restaurants at all (the blog in question, you might be surprised to hear, also reviews restaurants).
So it’s almost as if people in this climate, or people who run restaurants at least, want fewer people to review restaurants in general and for us to just accept bland uncritical gushing on TikTok or Instagram: nearly all the restaurants I’ve just mentioned gave free food to influencers in 2025. If you don’t like your food in a restaurant go home and cook for yourself, that think piece concluded. For me, this attitude is as good a reason as any for me to keep at it.
But it would be rank hypocrisy of me not to acknowledge at this point that I’m just as bad when it comes to taking pot shots at other people expressing their opinions of what they’ve eaten.
I do have enough self-awareness to realise this, and it’s something I will be changing next year. So this is the last time you’ll hear me take a swipe at slack-jawed gormless influencers, with their toddler palates and mindless waggling fingers, smashing junk food into their gaping mouths and describing things as “sick” or “insane”, words only simpletons bandy about.
It’s the last time I will criticise a restaurant blogger who constantly takes pot shots at those influencers on his social media, but was tacky enough to take a PR invite – food and accommodation, no less – for the first night of his actual honeymoon. And it’s the last time I will mock the unchecked privilege of a blogger who has claimed to cover the events in her city all year, while concealing the fact that she’s been on a hugely entitled gap year for practically all of 2025 and is probably writing that copy from a hammock in Ecuador.
Let them, as Mel Robbins likes to say. Grifters gonna grift. But it’s time to stop tilting at windmills because those battles are all over: I need to stop picking fights, stay in my lane and just do what I do, because that kind of competition is no competition at all. Don’t worry, I will still point out that the Chronicle is dogshit though, because some things don’t change.
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I just don’t need to do those things any more. The blog has had an absolutely terrific year, with traffic up from 2024 which I genuinely thought was not possible. That’s despite some of my blog traffic being lost to email subscriptions, a by-product of the blog moving partially to a subscription model at the beginning of the year.
And I do have to say something about that. It felt like a huge leap into the unknown when I published that post in January, and I was fully prepared to be laughed out of my corner of the Internet. That it didn’t happen, and that so many of you were prepared to put your hands in your pockets and support quality independent writing means more to me than you can know.
I hope I’ve always made it clear that it wasn’t mandatory, and that much of the content on the blog would always be free to view, but I also hope those of you who have subscribed have felt that there was enough subscriber-only content to justify your support. I promise that it’s never, ever taken for granted.
That support has enabled me to do a number of things. First and foremost of course the blog is now ad-free, and will always remain so. That was literally the first thing I did. Secondly, it’s enabled me to widen the range of restaurants I review: I hope that I’ve got the balance right between Reading and outside Reading – although I plan to fine tune that in the New Year – but I certainly wouldn’t have reviewed Orwells for instance without the blog being on a subscription model.
It’s been nice, too, to hold back some reviews, like those of Rosa’s Thai, Cosy Club and Henley’s Three Tuns, for subscribers to read. Archive reviews of open Reading restaurants are also now subscriber only, and if you are a subscriber, I’d love to hear from you if you have any other ideas about the blog. The inaugural subscriber drinks over the summer was enormous fun too, and I do have to apologise that my accident has forced me to postpone the drinks planned for Christmas. We’ll just have to do spring drinks instead.
But it’s been such a terrific year in so many respects. Five readers’ lunches, including the first ever at The Moderation which was simply a magnificent meal from start to finish. Every bit as phenomenal was the event at Clay’s Kitchen in October where Nandana put together a fever dream of a menu, reinventing, elevating or restoring to classic roots the Anglo Indian dishes we all remember from countless Bangladeshi curry houses in the U.K.
Nandana’s onion bloom pakora, miso glazed chicken tikka, her lamb keema pie and her pork vindaloo will stay with me long after I forgot many of the things I’ve eaten this year: of all of the meals I had in 2025, this one might have felt like the greatest privilege of all.
It’s also been a brilliant year for food. I’ll cover the best of it when I give out my awards imminently, but I’ve given out some of my highest ratings ever this year. I don’t think that’s rampaging grade inflation, it’s more a reflection that I’ve been to some outstanding restaurants. In London that’s been places like Paulette and The French House, in Bristol the spectacular RAGÙ. Closer to home Orwell’s and the Three Tuns have both knocked my socks off, almost equally but in completely different ways. That’s the beauty of restaurants.
I also think, though, that Reading’s restaurants have improved. After a very long barren period, which largely coincided with the pandemic and its aftermath, this year we got Club India, Stop & Taste, Mac’s Deli, Amò and Paesinos, and I made it to a revitalised Oishi. Any other year any of those restaurants might be the event of the year: how lucky we are that 2025 is the year when they all happened. There’s never been a better time to be in Italian in Reading, my friend Enza likes to say (and she isn’t even part of the vendetta against me, not as far as I’m aware).
My year has ended in circumstances I could never have imagined at the beginning, with an accident, hospitalisation and an operation which has forced me to take the last month of the year very easy indeed. But even that has been an experience with plenty of beauty in it. I wrote about my time in the Royal Berks and the response from regular readers, newcomers, hospital staff and volunteers has been one of the most moving things I can remember in a very long time. But it also reminds me that food, and Reading, and this blog are all about connection.
So some of my favourite moments have been every time someone interacts with my content, to tell me I’m right, to tell me I’m wrong, to tell me they plan to check somewhere out or to tell me that they’ve checked somewhere out because of something I wrote. I’ve been sent photos by readers of them posing with the owners of restaurants I’ve recommended in a European city guide. I’ve had emails or WhatsApps or messages on Facebook with pictures of one of my favourite places to eat and drink, sometimes saying “look, I made it here!” and sometimes saying “guess where I am?” For the record, I usually guess correctly.
I’ve had messages from friends telling me that they are in some of my favourite cities – Granada more than once this year – and that they are eating or drinking in one of my beloved haunts. I’ve even had an email from an orthopaedic surgeon in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, telling me that my city guides to Montpellier and Paris led to him eating and drinking brilliant things in both cities. He emailed me again this week to say how sorry he was to hear about my accident. Those are the things that make this so worth doing, and as I get to the end of another year of doing it – my thirteenth, unbelievably – it makes me very grateful that I’ve had this experience and excited to see what next year has in store.
So it just remains for me to thank you for every word you’ve read (sorry there are so many this week), every like, comment or share, even every time you’ve read a piece by me and said – to yourself, under your breath or out loud – that I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, I appreciate it all. I hope you have a fantastic New Year’s Eve, however you are celebrating, and that 2026 brings you everything you could possibly hope for.
You will hear from me again early next year, because I have some awards to announce. Behave yourself until then.
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