Restaurant review: Mono Pizza, Basingstoke

On August 28, 2026August 28, 2026 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

There’s an exhibition on at the Willis Museum in Basingstoke called I Grew Up 90s, and speaking as someone who tried and failed to grow up back then I felt I had to go and experience it, even if it was tantamount to enthusiastically massaging salt into the gaping wound of my middle age.

I never thought I would see the day when the Nineties came back into fashion, in much the same way no doubt that my parents rolled their eyes when kids decided to revive the Sixties. It had an air of ‘kill me now’ about it, as far as I was concerned. I can’t believe you like all that crap from back then people like me could reasonably say, although I now realise – with the perspective of thirty years’ distance – that what we really mean is Jesus, I am so old.

The Willis Museum is housed in the former town hall, an attractive building at the top of a gentle hill in the older part of Basingstoke, past the purgatory of Festival Place. On the way there a strip of street food stalls was doing a brisk trade – a sizeable queue outside the Thai stall suggested, as did the aromas, that it was decent – and in the market place outside voluble traders were flogging veg from trestle tables. The graceful early Victorian architecture was impressively incongruous, I thought, as I passed between the pillars of the entrance, ready to do some time travel.

Inside, the placard on the wall made an interesting case for the decade, depicting it as a strange bubble of time that history had forgotten. And I think there’s truth in that. It was a strangely innocent time, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the release of Nelson Mandela but before 9/11 and the credit crunch. In the Eighties we were scared of the bomb, or AIDS, but in the Nineties we weren’t scared of anything. We were lucky, but of course we didn’t know that.

The exhibition aimed to remind visitors of the Nineties through over 200 objects and artworks. It was the decade of Girl Power and Cool Britannia, the introductory blurb said. On the Internet we asked Jeeves, and on the streets we paged each other (incidentally, my favourite Easter egg of the time was that if you asked Jeeves “are you gay?” he always produced the result “I prefer the word jovial“: and to think people reckon they’re so original nowadays asking Siri to tell them a joke).

There were no smartphones, social media or reality TV to distract us, but we might occasionally have returned a tape late to Blockbusters, concluded the introduction. And wandering round it, feeling simultaneously old, young, comforted and sad I noticed they did have a huge Blockbuster logo on one wall, and a cabinet full of VHS tapes: Notting Hill; Ace Ventura; True Lies; Basic Instinct.

An HMV carrier bag was framed on another wall. “God, the number of those I must have handled” said Zoë, who worked there when the Nineties were already almost a decade in the rear view mirror, the shop still flogging CDs ahead of the death rattle caused by iPods, iPhones and streaming. I wondered how many times I’d come home from the Oracle on New Release Monday with one of those.

Other cabinets were full of reminders of other aspects of that forgotten age, trying hard to present it as halcyon. The Cadbury’s Spira bar – which I still miss, I don’t mind telling you – and a tub of Gino Ginelli ice cream. A giant foam finger from the original series of Gladiators. Cartman, Beavis and Butt-Head, arguably the most puerile firm of solicitors there never was. Purple Ronnie and the very first Nokias and Motorolas, a loaf of Mighty White and a recipe book for Chicken Tonight. The posters for Four Weddings, Reservoir Dogs and Trainspotting. A can of Tab Clear (“trial offer 23p”), a bottle of Two Dogs and a Hooch branded glass.

You could even buy a Tamagotchi from the gift shop, which reminded me that once in the Nineties, when my brother went to some insurance conference in Manchester overnight, he asked me to take care of his Tamagotchi which, of course, promptly died. I’m not sure what the electronic equivalent of getting another almost identical one from the pet shop was, but I remember fessing up to him in the Flier & Firkin – which is what the Oakford is now – and him taking it much more personally than I expected.

Standing there in the gift shop, seeing the packaging for ‘the original virtual reality pet’ I took a photo and sent it to him, knowing that even on the other side of the world in New South Wales, his Saturday night drawing to an end, he was one of the only people I knew who would understand what I was experiencing. Sorry again that I killed your Tamagotchi my message said. You’re forgiven came the response, hours later when I was fast asleep.

All that nostalgia left me badly needing to eat my feelings, and Zoë and I had plans for a late lunch at Mono Pizza, the Basingstoke restaurant highest on my radar. Now, at this point I need to apologise if you’re a reader living in Basingstoke, but my research on where to eat there resulted in fairly slim pickings. There’s taco spot El Bigote, which looks like it’s al fresco only, there’s Nigerian restaurant Afrizi, which I hear is rather good, and there’s Mono.

Beyond that, I didn’t find evidence of a burgeoning food culture in Basingstoke. I suspect Festival Place’s best days may be behind it, and the imminent closure of its Apple Store would suggest as much, but the presence of the likes of ASK Italian, Pizza Hut and Wimpy suggests that even Reading has it good compared to some places. By all means correct me if I’m wrong, because I really do love an underdog.

Anyway, Mono was the spot that jumped out at me. Run by married couple Timofei and Veronica Dragan, Mono took the tried and tested route to where it is now: starting out as a pizza van in late 2023, then parking up at a permanent pitch at Festival Place the following spring. And then, almost exactly two years later at the beginning of March, Mono moved to a permanent site just round the corner from the Willis Museum, taking over the ground floor of a handsome building in a spot that used to be a bar.

Plaudits followed when Mono – still a van at this stage – won Best Pizzeria last summer at something called Slice-o-Mania. Now, you can be sniffy about an event of that kind and say that it’s largely attended by people who think pizza is a separate food group, and you might have some justification for thinking that. But the fact remains that a huge amount of big names in the U.K. were there, and for an unsung food van from Hampshire, after trading for less than two years, to win big in that company is a truly impressive result.

And all of my research suggested that Mono was an interesting proposition: that Dragan was from Naples, that he sourced all of his ingredients obsessively from Italy, all the things you’d really want to hear about this kind of establishment. I like a pizza as much as the next normal person, and the bottom has rather fallen out of Reading’s pizza scene since Sarv’s Slice left, Amò closed and reopened and Dough Bros changed hands, so as I approached Mono’s tasteful, sage green edifice I found myself rather hoping for the best.

The interior was really rather nice. Big, in a they-might-have-bitten-off-more-than-they-can-chew sort of a way, but nice nonetheless. It was all green walls and well-proportioned tables, with one panel of fake greenery and a few slightly random Welsh dressers dotted around the place. It worried me slightly how quiet it was, though: we were there admittedly after the lunchtime rush had passed, but apart from one table outside and a few occupied within it was almost empty. Maybe everyone was in the queue for Thai street food, or lost in the time machine just down the street.

Over an Aperol Spritz – not bad, perhaps slightly watery – we had a good squizz at the menu. It is, and this is a good thing, very stripped down, not like some pizza menus that go overboard on filler. One antipasti option, three panini, ten pizzas and nothing else: if you don’t fancy that, go elsewhere. And the pizza options were also very restrained – no wacky combinations and not even the anchovy, caper and olive combo that’s inevitably my first choice. There was a simplicity to it: pizza by a purist, for purists.

We began with the only starter on offer, the selection of antipasti to share. In a way, this is just a deconstruction of all the things you might see chucked on a base and scorched in the oven. But it’s a good fishing expedition if you want to get a picture of what a pizzeria’s raw materials are like: it proved to be very illuminating as far as Mono was concerned.

When you consider that this was £15.50 for two, it was ridiculously generous and enormously likeable. The Parma ham, with that slight sheen of the incarcerated in plastic, was pleasant but unmemorable. But everything else was better than it looked, better than I expected. A very good prosciutto cotto was miles better, really good quality and very tasty indeed. And the spicy salami, about which I had my reservations, was knockout stuff: coarse, not at all suspect and with an enormous chilli kick. Quite marvellous.

That’s before we get to the olives, which were good but not great, or the cherry tomatoes, sweet and bursting with contrast. Or the mozzarella. Hats off to Mono for not just wheeling out the ubiquitous burrata. I think I’ve always preferred mozzarella to burrata and I’m prepared to wait as long as it takes – it could be longer than a decade, the way things are going – for public opinion to catch up with me. But in many ways, the real bellwether was the bread – little squares of the stuff, like scraps of panino. They were light, airy, salty, just the ticket with any combination of the rest of the dish. In short, they boded well.

When my pizza, the ‘Pizza Rebby’, came out twenty minutes later it built on the potential of all that had gone before and synthesised it into a magical whole. That base was the final boss of dough, its evolutionary pinnacle, so light and well-done, so judiciously bubbled and blackened. I have got quite tired of the prevalence on social media of New York pizza, or New Haven pizza, or whatever “tavern style pizza” is, or London pizza. I’ve got tired of seeing mockneys on Instagram jabbering about how great it is. This. This is what good pizza looks like.

And the other cleverness of Mono is not just to have a small menu but not to do too much with any of those pizzas. This was not overloaded: potent clusters of punchy ‘nduja, translucent strips of pancetta gleaming away, ambrosial slivers of red onion, a surprisingly effective smattering of torn basil.

Zoë had chosen another classic, the Diavola, a variation on that theme with the spicy salami from earlier on taking the place of my pancetta. And, because it’s Zoë and she likes to tinker, she had asked to have gorgonzola added to it (“it’s the ‘Diavola plus'” she said to me, clearly pleased with her ingenuity). I would like to say that she was wrong, that she had offended the simplicity of Mono’s menu. But, because it’s Zoë, it elevated what was already an excellent pizza into a world-beater. The fire of both types of meat would have been enough – and again, you have to love Mono for refusing to touch hot honey with a twelve foot pole – but if it did need anything it was the pungent whack of salt from that blue cheese.

“I could come here every week” said Zoë, and I couldn’t agree more. I wasn’t sure, without that exhibition, that I had any other reason to visit Basingstoke: there’s nothing in the way of independent retail, one indie coffee shop, no craft beer. But you would travel for this.

We had to have dessert, and Mono’s menu is so concise that between us we ate everything on it. I’d asked what the “Mono pistachio” was and was told it was like a cross between an ice cream and a mousse. That doesn’t do it justice, and nor does the blurb on the menu that reads like a list of ingredients: pistachio cream with milk, pistachio paste, egg, cream, white chocolate and biscuit notes. So if you go, throw all that in the metaphorical bin and order it anyway.

What it actually is is something closer to a pistachio and white chocolate parfait, with a biscuit base, somehow at the middle of a Venn diagram of ice cream, cheesecake and doubtless many other treats. I adored it: it was delicious at first, rock hard and challenging to eat with the long, slender teaspoon. But as it softened, everything just came together. I had it with a pistachio cannolo which was maybe the least impressive thing I ate that day: the shell a little heavy but the filling miles more complex than my dessert. It was still more than decent. £7 for these two, would you believe.

Zoë loved her tiramisu, served grandly in a little chalice. It was relatively delicate, airy and boozy and she made quick work of it. It didn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of the very best – Paesino’s, say, or Ragù’s – but it was very, very close. “Besides, once you’ve had a heavy pizza you want something this light” she added. I’m told the hazelnut cannolo was also thoroughly agreeable.

Although there were few diners when we started our meal, I was reassured to see a regular trickle of people coming in to eat. The couple who had been eating outside when we arrived came in to specifically tell Dragan how much they’d enjoyed their meal, that it was their second visit so far but it wouldn’t be their last.

Our bill came to something like £86 for three courses and a drink apiece, not including service. There might be cheaper options: Mono’s pizzas generally cost between £15 and £20 but believe me, you get what you pay for. And service, from a trio of servers including Dragan, was bright, friendly and really winning. At one point the phone rang and I heard them take a reservation for a large table, and I remember thinking that those people were in for a really terrific evening.

The Internet is full of people who will tell you that every pizza they eat is the Best. Pizza. Ever, or every burger the Best. Burger. Ever. It gets a bit much, it jades you and the biggest cardinal sin of all: it’s so boring. If everything is special then nothing is. So I don’t say this all the time, but here goes: Mono’s pizza is the best I can remember having in this country. Better than Papa Gee, Knead, Paesino, or Amò at its peak. Better than wonderful pizzas I’ve had in Bristol, or at Blue Collar, or from Sarv. It’s really that good.

That’s the funny thing about my visit to Basingstoke, a journey that simultaneously showed me life thirty years ago and gave me a glimpse of my future. Because in the Nineties, my idea of a great pizza was a San Marco from Misselbrook & Weston, the little supermarket nearest to my suburban Woodley home. They were kept in the freezer section, and I could pick one up for something ridiculous like £3, bung it in the oven and think I was eating like a king. If Future Me appeared in a vision to Nineties Me and offered him a single slice of Mono’s Pizza Rebby, I think Nineties Me’s brain might melt.

That’s the thing about the past: it can be a lovely place, but you can’t live there. Besides, the food is way better here in the present.

Mono Pizza – 8.7
27 London St, Basingstoke, RG21 7PG
01256 280093

https://monopizzabasingstoke.co.uk

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Restaurant review: No. 11 Bistro, Pangbourne

On August 21, 2026August 20, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

This might be hard to believe, but a couple of years ago I nearly ended up moving to Pangbourne.

Well, sort of. Zoë and I were quite happy in our little house in the Village, and then one day I got a call from our lettings agent. Those calls were never welcome events: they usually involved our landlord wanting to hike the rent, knowing that if we pointed out that there was a clause in our tenancy agreement we’d suddenly find her serving notice under it. But this time it was a courtesy call to let us know that our landlord was selling up. No specifics were given, but at some point in the not too distant future we would suddenly have two months to find somewhere new to live.

We started looking immediately. And one of the places we looked at online, and asked to view in the flesh, was an attractive-looking flat in a converted property in Pangbourne, close to the station. That we considered Pangbourne at all probably tells you more about the state of the rental market in Reading than it does about the flat in question. Even so, in the time between putting in the enquiry and being told, naturally, that it had already gone I started to convince myself that living in Pangbourne might be rather nice.

I decided that an eight minute train into Reading was really no different to a bus ride to the centre of town. Besides, it might be fun to live away from the hubbub. Pangbourne was pretty and prosperous, it had a lovely butcher and a cheese shop. And I could still write the blog, couldn’t I? It would just mean evening trips into town, or eating at restaurants on my way home from the office. I could make it work, I told myself.

In the end, that was a parallel life I never got to live, and I wound up in my house in Katesgrove after all. But I couldn’t help wondering, as Zoe and I mooched round Pangbourne on a sunny Saturday, if I would have been happy there. The butcher, Green’s, is fantastic, with its old-school kiosk where you still pay for your bounty: their pork, apricot and chilli sausage roll made me very happy that evening, and their steak and Stilton pie knocks the spots off anything Sweeney’s can rustle up. And the cheese shop is marvellous – I left with a Comte, a triple cream, a very salty blue and a smoked goat’s cheese, along with all manner of crackers and biscuits.

Nino’s Italian Deli is a great spot to sit in the sunshine and watch the world meander past, and the cornucopia of goodies on the shelves was tempting, as were the hefty focaccia sandwiches. But the coffee, a tad bitter and burnt, couldn’t match Reading standards. Nor could it at Artichoke, a café slightly further out of the village. That said, it had friendly staff, a pleasant decked front terrace – albeit one with a view of a Londis – and an almost Mediterranean feel. I put a picture on Instagram, with the caption Costa del Pangbourne.

I hadn’t ventured to RG8, though, for some Sliding Doors-themed day trip to another part of my personal multiverse: I was in Pangbourne to check out No. 11 Bistro. It opened its doors to the public at the start of June, and if the blurb I’d read came straight out of central casting – it’s never poor quality produce from miles away knocked up with supreme indifference, is it? – it still sounded worthy of investigation.

It was, after all, an independent bistro from a restaurateur who had worked at London Street Brasserie and Marlow’s Hand & Flowers. Not bad going for a chap who first featured in Berkshire Live of all places back in 2014, plating up at The Kitchen in Reading College as a 16 year old head chef. I could only imagine how proud he must feel, opening his own place now.

A prospect like No. 11 would have sparked considerable interest had it opened in Reading: heaven knows people, including me, like to complain that the town centre lacks this kind of restaurant. However, as we’ve learned over the last few years, Reading doesn’t attract good independents often enough, so a trip to Pangbourne was in order. Time to seek out what Muddy Stilettos termed “a fun new dining experience” – or, as human beings tend to put it, a good meal.

No. 11 has taken the site which was occupied by Italian institution Nino’s Trattoria for 13 years, and the restaurant’s first Instagram post was nicely worded: Meston clearly recognised that Pangbourne residents would probably say he had big shoes to fill.

I never ate at Nino’s, but Meston has wisely left the attractive dining room largely as it was in its previous incarnation, simply changing the wood panelling from sage to oxblood. Otherwise it is as it was: handsome, well lit through the big windows. I was very happy to learn that they had aircon, and delighted that it was so effective: a few groups were out on the terrace, but even on the Costa del Pangbourne it was far too warm for such antics.

We had a genuinely magnificent negroni – Meston’s brother James is apparently in charge behind the bar, and on the basis of the negroni I would definitely check out the six signature cocktails on the drinks menu. It passed enjoyably as we scoured a menu which seemed determined not to make matters easy.

Provenance wasn’t really talked about, with the exception of bread from Birch, the bakery just up the road. But on paper it was the kind of streamlined menu I always like to see: seven starters, seven mains, most starters just over £10 and most mains under the £30 glass ceiling. That might make you wince, but that’s just eating out now and I imagine Pangbourne is no different in that respect to anywhere else, except that its residents are more likely to be able to afford it.

The contents of the menu might also have been tailored to the demographic: nearly all of it stayed firmly in classic territory, the pineapple and capsicum salsa with the scallops sticking out like a sore condiment. It felt a little – this isn’t necessarily a criticism – like LSB twenty years ago, and I was surprised, a little, by how many of the dishes identified as ‘seared’.

We struggled to choose starters, so decided to share three. And if each was effective individually, they somehow added up to less than the sum of their parts. Sticky pork belly bites are a dish with my and Zoë’s names on it in figurative Sharpie, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in recent reviews. No. 11’s treatment was very different to others I’ve had, and I liked it, while not being entirely convinced that others would.

Rather than have cubes of well rendered meat these were thick strips, almost like reimagined Bacon Fries, and had been cooked to be more crispy than tender. I like my smoked streaky cooked so it snaps rather than bends, so these were right up my alley, but I might be in the minority there. I really enjoyed them, though, and I loved the honey and soy – more honey than soy, really – with which they glistened. A creditable sort of Asian slaw completed the dish without feeling too much like padding.

I was also a big fan of No. 11’s salt and pepper squid. This dish is straight out of the Paul Clerehugh Book Of Classics, so I’m sure Meston learned it at London Street Brasserie. It was almost more snack than starter, in a good way: lots and lots of very narrow rings of squid, in a coating which for my money lacked that salt and pepper flavour but made up for it in texture.

I think I would have liked this even more with a squeeze of lemon and a dollop of golden aioli: it almost felt Andalusian, but serving it with sweet chilli sauce and more Asian slaw felt like a bit of a misstep. I was getting the feeling that the starter menu might mostly be fried stuff with salad.

And this is what I mean about the starters being collectively less than the sum of their parts. Because the thing I was most looking forward to, the maple glazed chicken thighs, was also fried stuff with salad. Another extremely pleasant variant of it, but fried stuff with salad nonetheless.

The meat had the right texture, whether that came from marination or not, but the coating lacked a little crispiness, ironically not a problem either the pork or the squid had. Plonking it on a carpet of little gem was far from objectionable, and the harissa mayonnaise had a nice heat to it, but these three dishes felt to me how I suspect some of my reviews must feel to you from time to time – paragraph after paragraph, all saying much the same thing.

Could we have ordered better? Possibly. But burrata and bruschetta both felt a bit bla, and I wasn’t in the mood for a chicken liver parfait. More to the point, three between two was about right in terms of size: I was glad I got to try a bit of all of them. If I’d been out with a bigger group, eating just the one starter on my own, I think I might have felt more underwhelmed. But then I do seem to be one of the only people in Reading who isn’t on Ozempic or Mounjaro: maybe No. 11 has judged its demographic wisely, and I just happen not to be in it.

It really was, however, a lovely place in which to spend a lazy Saturday lunchtime. The restaurant was sparsely occupied when we got there, but it gradually filled up and it was clear that at least some of those diners, already, were repeat customers. I could see why, because the service was really excellent – friendly, on it and very good at judging just how formal to be, or not be.

And the bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc we’d ordered was slipping down with genuine alacrity. No. 11’s wine list is good and pleasingly concise, with over half the wines available by the glass. Again, the restaurant played it safe. There was nothing orange, natural or from more esoteric countries on it, but I imagine it would be relatively hard to go wrong – unless you ordered an Italian pinot grigio, anyway.

It was all going so nicely, so I’m really sorry that the restaurant wobbled when it came to the mains. I’d been tempted by the herb crusted halibut, but my server told me they’d made some changes to it, doing away with the brown shrimp butter I’d so fancied. It speaks well of the kitchen that they’d identified a dish that wasn’t working and corrected course. But somewhere along the way that instinct had deserted them with my eventual choice, chicken supreme with a mushroom velouté.

First of all, with a dish like this you really need to get the skin crispy, and ideally crackling with salt. That hadn’t happened here, and although the chicken itself was judiciously cooked it did feel like the pièce de résistance was missing. The crushed potatoes it was perched on were quite nice, too, but at this point I bumped into the second, bigger problem with the dish.

Because it wasn’t a mushroom velouté by any stretch of the imagination. It was a white sauce with some mushrooms in it – perfectly decent mushrooms, including some oyster, but not ones that really lent flavour to the sauce itself. And the sauce still tasted very strongly of flour, which means that it hadn’t been cooked off. Such a basic, avoidable error.

I was sad to find this dish so middling, because everything up to this point had signalled real potential: potential that might be in need of refinement, but potential all the same. This, though, felt like the kind of mistake that would get drummed out of you at Reading College.

That dish cost £26.50, and didn’t feel its money. But Zoë’s main, the venison pavé, was pricier still at £31, which meant there was even less excuse for it to be subpar. The support acts did a good job: No. 11 makes a mean (if scrappy-looking) potato dauphinoise, their jus was decent, the Roscoff onion was a nice touch. The problem was the star of the show – here you are paying for the venison, and to cook it to beige rather than blushing felt dangerously close to being knocked up with supreme indifference after all.

Strangely the dish of seasonal greens we’d ordered on the side was spot on: consistency and timing were the problems across the piece. The restaurant could get parts of the whole right, but nailing it all at the same time seemed to be beyond them.

It was instructive to review this restaurant the week after I’d gone to Angelo’s: in both cases the restaurant was new, filled a gap in the market and had the potential to excite. In both cases dishes were priced to a level where the restaurant really couldn’t afford to make a hash of them. In Angelo’s case the highwire act had worked, but No. 11 hadn’t quite pulled it off. Restaurant dishes are more expensive than they used to be and the £20 Rubicon for main courses was crossed a long time ago. That ship has sailed, but you can’t simply charge £31 for a dish and execute it like that without losing some of your target market.

With everything up to that point comparatively scattergun, the choice to order dessert wasn’t so much about being the decider, more about gathering further evidence. Again, No. 11’s menu is compact and on the safe side: an Eton mess; a cheesecake; a brownie; a sticky toffee pudding; a cheeseboard. So I thought we were in pedestrian territory, and then No. 11 lobbed in a killer curveball by serving up one of my desserts of the year so far.

I had been dead set to try the cheesecake, which Zoë didn’t fancy (“white chocolate’s not real chocolate, it’s just sugar” was her take) but then I saw a sticky toffee pudding being carried to one of the outside tables and, despite not being my usual order by a long shot, something about it called to me. Was it that connection to London Street Brasserie again, knowing that it was always the reliable thing to order there? I’m not sure, but No. 11’s rendition is one of the best sticky toffee puddings I’ve ever eaten, anywhere.

The pudding was the perfect temperature, warm not hot, with just enough moistness, crumbliness and squidge. The exceptionally generous moat of toffee sauce – rich with burnt sugar notes, so glossy you could see your face in it – was simply impossible to fault. And the huge sphere of clotted cream on top? Utter, decadent heaven: “would you rather have it with ice cream?” my server had asked, and I had said no with a note of incredulity I forgot to conceal. Who wouldn’t want a massive globe of clotted cream on top of a dessert like this? Heathens and vegans, that’s who. Nobody else.

Honestly, forget the cheese shop and the bakery, don’t worry about the butcher’s pies and pasties, banish all thoughts of the slightly average coffee from your mind. This justified a trip to Pangbourne, all by its sweet self.

It couldn’t possibly have been as good, and I know some people think a chocolate brownie is a cake with no place on a dessert menu, but Zoë felt equally strongly about her dessert. It was, apparently, excellent, still warm and pleasingly fudgy inside. It’s not clear whether No. 11 makes its own ice cream or buys it in, but either way it also met with Zoë’s approval, speckled with plenty of vanilla seeds.

I’m sure it was lovely, but if you read this review and pick the brownie over the sticky toffee pudding I think you might be beyond my help. Either that or I haven’t done a good enough job of describing it. I tend to stay away from what I think of as school dinners dessert: anything warm, anything with custard or dried fruits and so on, but my god, that sticky toffee pudding. Did I mention that I rather liked it?

Our bill came to just shy of £200. You could spend less there, but it all adds up, from the £13 negronis to the £40 bottle of white – from the cheaper half of the wine list – to the £9 desserts, which come to think of it were probably the best value of the entire meal. It included a 12.5% service charge, and that was the area where it felt like the restaurant had been open far longer than a month: my server told us they’d make sure the wine list had a dessert wine on it by the time I ate there again, and I have every confidence that they’ll do exactly that.

So No. 11 was a little bit less expensive than Angelo’s, the subject of last week’s review, but I couldn’t help comparing the two again. Because they are both trying to do similar things, to bring something new to the centre of a community, to fill a gap. In Angelo’s case it’s opening an Italian restaurant in a location that badly needs one, conversely in No. 11’s it’s replacing an Italian restaurant which, over many years, became Pangbourne’s favourite place to eat.

They’re both tough assignments in their own way, and if No. 11 was a little uneven I think you have to show some understanding: it’s the owner’s first restaurant, not the sequel to an original that has been flourishing for years. I saw enough to think that they will get there, if they’re blessed with a patient clientele. I hope that Pangbourne supports it and this is all the beginning of a beautiful symbiotic relationship.

I never ended up living in Pangbourne and I probably never will, although it’s a very agreeable place to spend a Saturday lunchtime. But if I had, I suspect I’d have wound up at No. 11 more than once. Never mind: I’ll always have this one pleasant afternoon, when my real life ever so slightly converged with a different one that might have been mine but wasn’t. And I’ll always remember that sticky toffee pudding.

No. 11 Bistro – 7.4
11 Reading Road, Pangbourne, RG8 7LR
0118 9841333

https://www.no11restaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Angelo’s

On August 14, 2026August 14, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Have you been to Angelo’s, the new Italian restaurant in the town centre, yet?

And have you been asked whether you’ve been there yet?

The thing is, people keep asking me if I’ve eaten there, to the point where it seems like Angelo’s is the only Reading restaurant anybody is interested in. I had a readers’ lunch at the Moderation a couple of Saturdays ago and I was asked so many times I lost count – although it was a pretty boozy afternoon, so that just means “more than three times”.

Not only that, but many of the folks asking me already had an opinion: pretty ordinary, said one person that afternoon, unmoved by the wild boar ragu. Really rather good was another verdict, also delivered at the readers’ lunch. And don’t think you have to have been in order to pitch in: I saw some pictures earlier and thought ‘I can do better than that at home‘, one of my readers told me on Instagram.

That felt like a bit of a slap across Angelo’s figurative face: I mean, I can do better than Cozze at home, but that says more about Cozze than my talents in the kitchen.

It’s easy to understand, though, why Angelo’s is such a big event. In 2024 the biggest openings of the year were the Rising Sun and Siren RG1, a chain trying to look like an independent and an independent with all the polish of a chain. Both were underwhelming at best. Last year, the headlines were grabbed by Rosa’s Thai and Cosy Club, desperately middling middle of the road fare for Reading’s middle classes, with Nua and Pho 86 quietly flying the flag for new indies in the town centre.

But this year? Unless you’re very excited about Shake Shack – in which case I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place – Angelo’s is not only the most interesting thing to open in the town centre but, in truth, the only interesting thing to open here. It’s shiny and new, it’s very central on the Station Hill development and it’s independent: the owner is also behind Ruchetta in Wokingham, which has also now been rebranded as Angelo’s. Although he’s doubtless sunk a lot of money into this high risk endeavour, there appears to be no venture capital involved.

That would be enough to make it worth checking out, but it’s also the kind of restaurant many people think Reading is sorely missing: an Italian restaurant. Not a specialist pizza restaurant like Zia Lucia, not a place that only does pasta like London’s trendsetters Padella and Bancone, or Maidenhead’s pale imitation Sauce and Flour. And not an entry level defroster like Prezzo, Zizzi or Bella Italia, either: a proper Italian restaurant. The kind we haven’t had since we lost San Sicario, the kind we were blessed with for decades when Pepe Sale was at the height of its powers.

It helps that Angelo’s kept us waiting. They signed a lease last April, and everybody expected them to open before the New Year. But due to unspecified delays an opening date never materialised; the infrequent updates on the restaurant’s Instagram page gave more of a sinking feeling than a growing sense of excitement. Finally, they opened at the end of June and the early signs were not encouraging. A very minimalist website was one thing, but a menu strewn with more typos than AI slop – who knew there were so many ways to misspell ‘mozzarella’? – was another altogether.

Fortunately both have now been amended, but Angelo’s still feels slightly like it’s fixing things as it goes along: at the time of writing it’s walk-ins only for tables of fewer than six people, and the phone number has only just been added to their Google listing. All of that, though, can add up to creating a feeling of demand – it’s good to make people work for it, sometimes – and when Zoë and I sauntered up just after six on a Thursday evening all but a couple of tables inside were already occupied.

The space is neat and compact. There’s a front section with high tables and a bar that maybe sits ten or so people, and then a dining room out back which can accommodate twenty. It was tasteful, if maybe a little lacking in character, although I liked the little booths and teal banquettes.

But the restaurant had the best accessory of all: customers. On one side of me a pair of happy friends were catching up, on the other a group of three was having an absolute ball, all loud and infectious laughter. From my seat I could see out the window across Garrard Street, to a part of town that used to look so very different. I liked this space, fashioned out of nowhere. It reminded me a little bit of Me Kong.

Angelo’s menu bore little resemblance to the typo-strewn mess that first appeared online, in more ways than one. First, it was cleaner, professional, read very well. Secondly, and this is a little strange, the points of difference were more than mere spelling errors – perhaps ten dishes have survived from that original menu, just over a month ago, and the remainder have been replaced. Was the initial menu a beta test that should never have seen the light of day, or had the restaurant already figured out that some of its dishes didn’t work?

The other big alteration was the deletion of pizza: Angelo’s original menu offered eight, this one had removed them entirely. I think I read somewhere that this was the consequence of necessity, but I rather hope they have the courage of their convictions and stick to it: Reading has plenty of places to get pizza, but next to nowhere to get good pasta or antipasti. The menu I ordered from that night filled a yawning gap in the market – pizza, however well done, might dilute that.

Even truncated, it represented a good and interesting range, of both options and price points. The ten starters ranged from £7 to £15, and the dozen or so pasta dishes were almost uniformly between £16 and £18, unless you were itching for the black fettucine with seafood. A relatively modest six secondi were pricier, starting just below the £20 mark and marching north from there, but even so nothing seemed extortionate or unreasonable. I had loved Ruchetta when I went there on duty in 2014 but, even then, its dishes there were about as expensive as those on Angelo’s menu twelve years later.

We started with a pair of cracking Aperol spritzes, because it was summer, and the one thing on the antipasti menu that felt like a great shareable start to the meal. Zucchini fritti had survived the great menu cull, and I’d seen from other writeups that Angelo’s served these as thin, round slices rather than batons, almost creating the sensation of exceptionally upmarket chips and dip.

Did that work? Well, it did, but it could have worked a lot better. The advantage of strips is all that surface area to crisp up: these, by contrast, were limp enough that they were droopy when you picked them up. They weren’t much cop when it came to dipping them into what really was an exemplary lemon aioli.

So there is scope to perfect them, yes, but I was surprised by how enjoyable they were, even short of perfect. The seasoning on them was excellent, brilliantly judged, and if it meant you had to use a fork and load that aioli on with cutlery – far too evolved, for food of this kind – it didn’t stop them being a particular kind of wonderful.

We made short work of them, we made short work of our spritzes and slowly the sun went about the business of setting outside. “I really want this to be good” said Zoë, out of nowhere.

I totally understood what she meant. After a couple of years of disappointing big names opening in the town centre, Reading could badly do with a win. I looked round this fresh, new room and these fresh, new customers, took in the bright and chatty service happening all around me. No pressure, I thought to myself.

But all those were good signs, weren’t they? And the wine list was a good sign, too: sizeable, fascinating, covering price points from entry level – including 425ml carafes, if you wanted to be moderate and affordable – all the way up to eye-watering. Moreover, it was 100% Italian, covering so many different regions you just don’t see on wine lists in Reading: Umbria; Calabria; Piedmont; Sardinia.

Looking at it made me realise, again, how much I missed Pepe Sale – and how glad I was not to have to visit Vino Vita ever again. We ordered a bottle of pinot noir from Pesaro, a place of which I’d never heard, and I really loved it – silky, fruity and balanced enough to make a fist of going with everything we ate. It was £56, and what I could find online suggests you could buy it retail for just under half that: if every markup on Angelo’s wine list is in that ballpark, wine buffs are going to have some fantastic evenings there.

My starter was sheer joy. Four handsome scallops, cooked to just the right side of jellied, could have been enough of an attraction on their own. But tumbled with sweet roasted peppers and crispy matchsticks of pancetta, they were forkful after forkful of fun. I wasn’t prepared for how much I would enjoy this dish, or how simple, how superbly done it was.

The transformative element, though, was the salmoriglio, the bright Calabrian sauce of olive oil and lemon juice that perked up a dish which was plenty perky already. The whole thing was daytime TV presenter cheerful, without the artificiality that comes priced in with that. I could eat it again and again, although it also made me look forward to the day when Angelo’s has swordfish on its menu.

This starter was £15, and yet when I compared it to the masterpiece of eking out that was, say, No. 1 Ship Street’s more expensive scallop starter, I felt as if I was robbing Angelo’s blind, not the other way round.

Zoë was equally happy with her choice, another salutary lesson in the virtues of buying good stuff and leaving it as unfucked with as possible. A generous mosaic of pink and marbled beef carpaccio, sliced almost to translucence, was laid out and scattered with rocket and Parmesan. So little to it, but so much to enjoy.

“I could have gobbled three plates of it”, she told me later. “You can quote me on that.”

Also, and I know this is an aside, but how nice it was to eat in a genuine Italian restaurant that uses balsamic vinegar, not some gloopy, sugary glaze, and only uses it sparingly when appropriate, rather than festooning everything with thick ribbons of it to make something that would otherwise taste of nothing taste of something worse. I had almost forgotten how much I liked eating in an Italian restaurant in Reading that treated its customers like adults.

Pacing was faultless – there’s a sentence you haven’t seen me write much this year – and something like twenty-five minutes later, when I was still basking in the afterglow of my starter and enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with a great bottle of red, our main courses came out. We’d ordered from the deep and the shallow ends of the menu here, more by accident than design, but I think it speaks volumes about what Angelo’s has to offer that both were equally superb in different ways.

I loved my main course so much I can’t even tell you, and I loved the fact that it was a mere pound more expensive than my starter. Carbonara is a good test of an Italian restaurant, but I doubt many pass it with flying colours the way Angelo’s did. The golden colour of a Brazil shirt, pasta impeccably al dente, the sauce clinging to every strand, full of depth and saline complexity. This was a textbook carbonara: egg yolk, pecorino, no cream, no adulteration of any kind. Purists might object that it was pancetta not guanciale, but those purists need to get out more. Besides, that thatch of bronzed strips was heaven.

By the end of it I wasn’t only planning when I could go back to Angelo’s, I was planning when I could go back to specifically eat this again. Surely I had a free evening next week to slink off for a bowl of it? If I had my way, the people behind Cozze would be sentenced to come to Angelo’s, try this once and then have to eat their subpar albino version every evening for a month. That would teach them, or at least it would if they liked food better than margins.

Zoë, as regular readers will know, has an annoying habit of ordering better than me. But I thought she’d erred ordering the most expensive and pedestrian-looking dish on the menu. Ribeye, mushroom, cream and brandy sauce and chunky chips. Sounds a bit blah, I told myself, and at £33 it would have to be really, really good: everything in peak condition, everything in balance, everything coming together.

So of course, to my mixed delight and irritation, it was precisely that. Steak cooked perfectly medium as requested (I’d have had it pinker, but I don’t judge) a sauce of dreams – and more than enough of it, too – and some knockout, golden, crisp-edged and nicely irregular chips. I was happy for her, even if this dish felt about as Italian as I am, but I was just as happy, if not more so, for Angelo’s. Because this was high stakes, and they had not missed. Even her side dish, spot-on tenderstem broccoli positively infused with garlic and chilli, was a winner, not an afterthought.

I had to have dessert after two magical courses like that; I wanted to give Angelo’s the chance of the kind of clean sweep that propels that rating at the bottom into the upper echelons. It was a flab-free dessert menu with limited options but, again, they were the choices you would want to see: a tiramisu, a panna cotta, an affogato, a rum baba which turned up at the table next to me and looked positively immense, in every sense of the word.

But we both, in the end, went for the tartufo cioccolato and, yet again, Angelo’s pulled something out of the top drawer. I have had these before where they’ve felt a little anonymous, like a freezer ready fancy-schmancy choc ice, something to finish your meal with when you lack the imagination for a proper dessert. I’ve had them at Pepe Sale, and even as I’ve enjoyed them, I’ve known I was slightly short changing myself. But nobody ordering this at Angelo’s is doing anything other than treating themselves in a big way.

It was a huge, cocoa-powder dusted puck of a thing, crowned with ice crystals, and we waited for our dessert wine to turn up before we made inroads. But when we did, it was just glorious. Have you heard how Wall’s ruined the iconic Feast ice cream earlier this year by swapping its chocolate ice cream for vanilla while leaving that disconcertingly nostalgic core of plasticky chocolate intact? Angelo’s has performed that trick in reverse, so at the centre of its tartufo is a core of zabaglione. It is, and I don’t use these words lightly, life-alteringly good.

So, by the way, was the dessert wine. Angelo’s offers five by the 50ml glass, and none of them are cheap. But in for a penny in for a pounding, as my wife is wont to say, so we tried the priciest, the muffato from Umbria. It was the same gold I associate with all of the meal: the gold of the summer sunshine outside, the gold of the salmoriglio, the gold of my carbonara, of that zabaglione. Maybe everything Angelo’s touches turns to gold – in truth, it was beginning to feel that way.

It was, as I said, it was a costly way to end the meal – £13.50 a glass – but I quite liked Angelo’s pricing. It felt democratic rather than random, that you could have a main course that cost the same as your starter, or a glass of dessert wine that cost almost twice as much as the dessert accompanying it. I think you could come here and eat very well indeed, yet spend more or less than we did. I’m absolutely certain that the oenophiles among you could badly bruise your debit cards at Angelo’s. But it would all happen so nicely, and you’d come away so happy, that you wouldn’t mind one bit.

Our meal for two – and bear in mind we had nibbles, and aperitivi, and dessert wines and a metric fuckton of good times – came to £200 on the nail. Personally I don’t begrudge a penny of it, and it’s worth mentioning that they leave the question of service entirely up to you. I hope they get the tips they deserve, because service was delightful from beginning to end.

I don’t want to patronise Angelo’s by saying I was not only ecstatic but relieved that eating there was such a stellar experience. But it doesn’t pay to be dishonest, so I should admit that I was relieved. I didn’t want to put the boot into yet another big money signing for the town centre, especially an independent. Even if it is underneath Ebb & Flow, a collection of performative if well-appointed shoebox apartments whose main purpose seems to be to make wealthy buy-to-let landlords wealthier still.

I wanted something to buck the trend of unremitting meh that seems to afflict the RG1 postcode. I really, really did. But if I wanted Angelo’s to be decent, it was beyond my hopes that it would turn out to be quite this good. It is the best thing to happen to central Reading for ages, and the best thing to happen to a reviewer of central Reading restaurants, arguably, for even longer. So, has my enthusiasm been infectious? Does it make you want to go?

It’s worth it, believe me. I may be the latest person to ask you if you’ve eaten there yet, but I have a feeling I won’t be the last.

Angelo’s – 8.8
9 Friar’s Walk, Station Hill Square, Reading, RG1 1HP
0118 3042885

https://www.angelosdine.com

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Restaurant review: Le Champignon Sauvage, Cheltenham

On August 7, 2026August 7, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

A few Fridays ago I was sitting in a café called Suffolk Coffee in Cheltenham, drinking a latte and feeling something I don’t generally experience before going somewhere on duty: genuine anticipation.

Because I don’t often review a Michelin starred restaurant for this blog – it’s only happened twice so far, and the last time was over 10 years ago. Reviewing somewhere like that is a test of the reviewer every bit as much as it is a test of the restaurant: is my palate up to the task of appreciating it? Is my writing up to the task of capturing it? Just as footballers want to play against the best opposition, reviewers want to review the good stuff. It’s why you’d never find one worth their salt on a hyperbolic quest to find, I don’t know, the best burger in the U.K. We bore too easily for that.

The anticipation was heightened by the fact that I was about to have lunch at one of the restaurants on my bucket list, Le Champignon Sauvage. Amid all the ebbs and flows of gastronomic fashion, Le Champignon Sauvage has held a Michelin star since 1995: only three U.K. restaurants have held one longer.

In those thirty-one years, Michelin has changed its mind about the kind of restaurants it wants to celebrate, accepted bungs from tourist associations to extend its guide to godforsaken places like Dubai, introduced its pointless Green Star and scrapped it. And for eighteen of those years Le Champignon Sauvage held two stars, until Michelin took the second one away in 2018. Nobody knows why.

Nobody ever does, by the way. I’ve eaten in some great restaurants, like 5 North Street in Winchcombe or Chelsea’s Medlar, which lost stars for reasons that pass all understanding. And I’ve eaten in restaurants that held a star with no idea how they managed to blag one in the first place. It is the great enigma, and for all the pontification online about restaurants that should have one, or should have two, for all the episodes of that Apple TV show with Gordon Ramsay and the posho from Topjaw I suspect it will remain an enigma for a long time.

But anyway, it’s food for thought: on a personal level, when Le Champignon Sauvage first won its star I was just about to leave university. Blogs didn’t exist. Nor did smartphones, and I wouldn’t have an email address for a few more years. Just to channel my own version of We Didn’t Start The Fire: New Labour; 9/11; the credit crunch; Covid; Will Young winning Pop Idol; President Obama; President Trump. All these seismic things would come to pass, they just hadn’t yet.

And in terms of food, St John had only just opened the year before: the food revolution in this country, such as it was, was in its crib. But this piece of history is even more striking: Le Champignon Sauvage has been run by a husband and wife team – Helen Everitt-Matthias running the front of house and her husband David in the kitchen – ever since it first opened in 1987.

Not for them chopping and changing, expanding to a group of restaurants and appointing new head chefs here and there. Instead, the two of them have put this restaurant on the map and kept it there for nearly forty years. In a country that changes its mind with the frequency of somebody whose attention span has been rotted by social media, a nation that swaps Prime Ministers like it’s bored and changing the channel, it feels like we won’t see Le Champignon Sauvage’s like again.

And the final evidence of that unique status is the thing Le Champignon Sauvage might be most famous for: David Everitt-Mathias is always in the kitchen. If he isn’t there, the restaurant is closed. He doesn’t do TV, and he has published three books in forty years. That’s it. If you eat in his restaurant, you know he has cooked your food. That’s unlike so many starred restaurants in the U.K. So I wanted to go there, while I still could, on a expedition to somewhere that embodied hospitality as a calling more than any other restaurant I could imagine.

Restaurant review: Spitiko

On July 31, 2026July 29, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews10 Comments

Having written about and celebrated Reading and its independent scene for nearly 13 years, one thing that has always irritated me is people who live to run the place down. You see them popping up on the comments section of the Reading Chronicle all the time, people who say that the town is all vape shops and money laundering, who hate the halal butchers and the global superstores and the mosque.

We all know what’s behind that, and it’s not really about Reading: it’s about wanting to take the country back to some rose-tinted past that wasn’t even that crash hot first time around. One where women were paid sod all – if they had jobs at all – and where nobody could be gay, or trans, or brown. One with three TV channels and everything closed on Sundays. One where youngsters knew their place.

It’s a land where those people still live in their heads, and if a country like that really existed I’d be all for them emigrating there. Reading – multicultural and vibrant – just happens to be in the crosshairs because it embodies so many things they’d change. But even though I despise that viewpoint, lately when I’ve gone into the centre of town I’ve felt weary, because the town I love is getting harder and harder to champion.

Rough sleepers are everywhere, begging feels more apparent than at any time I can remember. Friar Street is lined with vacant shop fronts and when new things open, they’re always chains and often the kind you wouldn’t choose. Shake Shack is on Broad Street now, next to Fat Face, and people who get excited about that kind of thing are beside themselves.

Also new is Amorino, which I visited recently for a gelato. You had to order using a big touchscreen which tried to upsell you every step of the way: that irked me when the people sticking gelato in your paper tub were right there. My ice cream took ages because the member of staff doing it kept weighing it, adding a tiny amount more, weighing it again. Because, in case you’d forgotten, it’s 2026.

But it tasted nice, even if eating it I realised that, for a long time, it had felt like Reading was always the bridesmaid, never the bride. We always got Amorino, never Swoon. We always got Wendy’s and Shake Shack, never Patty & Bun or Beefy Boys. Always the town, never the city. So for this week’s review I decided to visit the one part of Reading that seems fairly immune to the general worsening of things, and Friday night found Zoë and me in Spill, drinking pints of Parka ahead of a short amble along Prospect Street to Spitiko.

Yes, that’s right: it was time for a date night in Caversham.

I got into all sorts of trouble a long time ago for asking the simple question Why isn’t Caversham nicer?, but whether you thought it was nice or not in 2017 is rather beside the point these days. Because since then – and especially since the pandemic, when people spent money closer to where they lived – Caversham has flourished in a way that the rest of Reading simply has not.

It has acquired two excellent cafés, in the shape of Geo Café and The Collective. It boasts lifestyle stores and bakeries, bookshops and bars. It has a great pub with outside space in the shape of The Last Crumb, and one of Reading’s most distinctive restaurants in the form of Vegivores. And of course, to the detriment of the town centre it has arguably Reading’s best restaurant, Clay’s Kitchen.

Sitting in Spill with a beer, looking over at the outside tables filled with happy, prosperous people, Caversham had a certain affluent glow that you don’t generally see in the RG1 postcode. Friends were catching up, a couple were engaged in a fierce cribbage contest that reminded me of a former life. And seeing all that, drinking it in along with my cold pint of Parka, I got it: I understood why people in Caversham always seemed so happy with their lot in life. That was why Caversham residents, like wild swimmers or vegans, volunteered the information within five minutes of meeting you. Who can blame them?

Spitiko, technically, pre-dates Caversham’s renaissance. For many years 6 Prospect Street was home to Kyrenia, a Cypriot restaurant. Then at some point in 2016 it changed hands, and the new owner called it Ketty’s Taste Of Cyprus. Kyrenia’s legendary front of house Ihor left – the last time I saw him he was working at Papa Gee – and then, around the time of the pandemic, the restaurant rebranded again, this time to Spitiko – a Greek restaurant, rather than a Cypriot one.

I think one of the reasons I held fire on reviewing Spitiko for so long was that I loved Kyrenia so very much. I’ve written before about how it was one of the saddest closures in my time writing this blog, and talked at length about how often I went there. But it hasn’t been Kyrenia for a very long time, ten years or so, and it felt like time to try Spitiko afresh, as free of preconceptions as possible.

That’s also why I will try, as best I can, not to use the K word again in this review. Because having started this review railing against them, I don’t want to be one of those awful people who thinks everything was infinitely better in the past.

Spitiko’s dining room was spacious and airy, with plain tables and chairs and a pale wooden floor. Huge paintings of the windmills of Mykonos and the blue-domed churches of Santorini took up one wall, a bouzouki was propped up on a window sill. The only other flash of colour was the distinctive Hellenic cyan edging the windows and doors. The ground floor dining room was doing reasonably well on a Friday night, with over half its tables occupied.

One thing we did realise right away, though, was that it was deafening. Whoever designed that dining room was either in their early twenties or had never tried to eat in it: the lack of soft furnishings or sound insulation made it an incredibly loud place to sit and eat. Every table had to keep talking louder because every table was struggling to be heard, an escalating state of affairs that made it a very difficult space in which to spend time. Zoë, who has a coping strategy in these circumstances, took out her hearing aids: I had no such luxury.

Spitiko’s menu covers a lot of ground, and blends both Greek and Cypriot specialities. Feta and halloumi both feature, and the restaurant serves sheftalia, which is distinctly Cypriot. But it calls its stuffed vine leaves dolmades, the Greek name, rather than koupepia, even though they contain mince which is more common in Cyprus.

In any event, you have an enormous amount of choices – something like twenty-five appetisers and nearly as many mains. You also have the option of choosing a meat, seafood or vegetarian meze selection, for between £31 and £36 a person, but we decided against that because it’s the kind of order I might have placed in this building in the past. So we picked a selection of starters to share, and a main each, and tried to make ourselves heard above the hubbub.

But first we ordered wine, and this was where the first alarm bells rang. Greek wine, very underrated, offers a great range of excellent whites and reds. If you’re at a restaurant with a good wine list, it’s always worth looking out for a xinomavro or an assyrtiko because they often punch above their weight.

Spitiko, I’m afraid, is not that restaurant. They do have half a dozen reds and whites from Greece and Cyprus, but many are from a single producer. Nothing will set you back more than £30, but that means that most of the wines cost £10 retail. I looked most of them up on Vivino, the wine app, and I didn’t realise you could buy wines with ratings that low. So we ordered the best of a bad bunch, a bottle of Kouros Patras – straw-coloured, chilled and forgettable, if not actively offensive.

This is as good a point as any, by the way, to make reference to Spitiko’s greatest asset, the chap who looked after us. He was wiry, high-energy and full of charm – he told us he was Irish, although I didn’t get that from his accent – and he was undoubtedly the single best thing about eating there. I hope one day I bump into him again, at a better restaurant.

One thing I always associate with eating in Greece itself, rather than in a Greek restaurant here, is the wonderful sense of leisureliness that always accompanies food in a taverna. The air still has the warmth of the day, the al fresco tables around you are full of happy people, and later on your walk back to your room will be accompanied by the music of crickets and the glimmer of fireflies.

Not so in Caversham, where our four starters were banged down in front of us about ten minutes after we ordered them. They were each, in their way, the epitome of middling.

First up there was houmous, adorned with a single olive and a meagre drizzle of an olive oil so yellow and pale that it couldn’t add any joy to proceedings. The houmous itself, scooped onto scorched, bought-in pitta bread, wasn’t actively unpleasant but had nothing about it to elevate it from stuff you could buy in a tub for £2 from any supermarket in the land.

Here it was £6.25, and I did think the main thing you were probably paying for was the act of decanting. The menu talks about garlic, lemon juice, tahini: all things this should have contained but somehow tasted as if it had never seen.

Equally underwhelming, if not more so, were the dolmades. £7.25 got you three small ones, all in varying stages of falling apart. I didn’t have to cast my mind back far to think of better ones – for all their faults, the stuffed vine leaves at Antep Kitchen were far better than this – but also, they were meant to contain mince and if they did, subtle isn’t even close to the right word. But also these were served hot, and the speed, the heat and the texture all made me wonder if a microwave was involved. If it wasn’t, there would have to be another excuse for these being so disappointing.

Lamb kofta also couldn’t live up to the promise of seeing those words on the menu. What was going on here? Two worryingly uniform cylinders of dense, compacted meat, each cut into worryingly uniform halves. No irregularity, no char, no coarseness. There was no sign that these had been threaded onto a skewer, no sign that they had been formed by hand. No sign, in honesty, that they hadn’t come out of a packet.

Last of all, one of the dishes I always make a beeline for in Greece, feta saganaki. Deep fried cheese should be a genuine treat, whether it comes with honey and sesame seeds to offset the saltiness or is brought to the table flaming, doused in ouzo. This was neither, it was just a slab with a bit of a tougher exterior but no real evidence of crispiness or contrast. How could you take feta, deep fry it and produce something that was so far from fun? It felt like a betrayal – of Greek food, of our hopes, of all that and more besides.

There was sad salad on the side, as there was underneath the kofta and the dolmades. Technically I guess it was sadder salad, because it was all sad.

Could our main courses rescue matters? You mightn’t be amazed to hear that we found out pretty damned quick: fifteen minutes after our starters turned up, out came the mains. You may, however, be surprised to hear that I wasn’t as outraged as I could be. By this time I regarded the rest of the meal a bit like the way I think of a blood test: I knew it had to happen, but I didn’t mind getting it out of the way as fast as possible.

That wasn’t entirely fair, though, because the mains showed that Spitiko could cook – just not a whole dish, and not consistently.

Take my sheftalia – which are meant to be coarse sausages wrapped in caul fat. I was so looking forward to these, at the start of the meal anyway, and by the time they arrived they managed to surpass my successively lowered expectations. Unlike everything else so far, they felt made by hand – irregular, nicely stocky things with a crinkled exterior. And they tasted good. I’d had enough of Spitiko’s humdrum tzatziki by then, and fortunately these didn’t need it.

But even here, with one of the best things they did, they couldn’t nail the landing. First of all, sheftalia can be made with pork, beef or lamb and Spitiko’s menu promises pork. So why was one of the four clearly completely different? It tasted of beef and red wine, and I didn’t mind it at all but it was bizarre how it didn’t match the other three. If I’d had two of each, or the menu had said they were a mixture, I probably would have been delighted: without that, it just added to the sense of chaos.

And the accompaniments were barely worth bothering with. A fairly dull Greek salad with four cubes of oregano-speckled feta, no olives and – would any plate be complete without it? – more limp iceberg lettuce added very little. Even worse was a big helping of faintly yellow rice studded with eerily uniform bits of veg: peas, green beans and so on. Its texture was surprisingly clumpy and, again, it felt as likely to have been made by Batchelors. I ate all of my sheftalia, I snaffled the feta, I left most of the rest.

Zoë’s kleftiko was a similar story. The lamb itself was good, tender, beautifully fatty and a cinch to ease away from the bone. I was allowed to try a bit, and it wasn’t half bad: ironically a far better deal than the very expensive equivalent I’d tried at Queen’s Park’s Carmel earlier in the year. I have had better kleftiko in Reading, although I’ve boxed myself into a corner whereby I can’t tell you where, but it was pretty decent.

But again, the stuff that came with the kleftiko was irrelevant rather than elevating. The roast potatoes looked like perfectly acceptable waxy specimens, with no real sign of roasting or glorious crisp shells. The vegetables – broccoli, carrots – were bland ballast. It’s perfectly fine to make the sheftalia or the kleftiko the centre of the dish, but the stuff on the perimeter should cheer, not heckle.

By this point some of the tables had left, the absolute racket had died down a little and I tried to find ways to look on the bright side. You should have tried this place back in the day, I said to Zoë, except of course back in the day it wasn’t this place. Just another one to file away in the long list of things I wish I’d discovered and experienced with my wife, thwarted by our chronology and the fact that we had to spend all those years living our lives and becoming the people we did so that we could meet and fall in love and, hopefully, live happily ever after.

But as I keep saying in this review, you can’t live in the past – even if it was a past when I weighed five stone less, hadn’t lost loved ones, hadn’t broken my arm. The accumulation of damage, bad decisions and disappointment helps make you who you are: wish it away, and you wish you were somebody else. All far too deep to bring up at a date night in Caversham, I decided.

We would have had dessert, because the wine list included two Greek dessert wines, both of which I absolutely love. Our ever-charming server wandered off and came back effusive and apologetic: they’d run out of one, and they had about a glass of the other, but in a bottle which had been opened and not kept in the fridge. We waved it at us, we asked for the bill. £122 with a 12.5% service charge, which was the only element that felt like value.

We called an Uber back to Katesgrove and ate ice cream in front of the telly, catching up on Top Of The Pops. It’s nice to go to Greece, it can even be nice to go to Caversham, but it’s nicer still to go home.

I really wanted to love Spitiko, and I really wanted to prove my hypothesis that bits of Reading are still getting better and better despite the naysayers. It’s tempting to feel deflated, and think that neither of those things happened. But I don’t know about that. I think it’s more the case that Caversham continues to flourish and buzz, and that places like Vegivores, Spill, Clay’s, even BKRY demonstrate that future.

Put that way, Spitiko feels like part of the Caversham that predates all of that change. I hope they aren’t left behind, and that when their race is run one day there will be people who meet for dinner somewhere else, in that building or another one, and say “Remember Spitiko? That was a restaurant. God, the evenings we had there.” Sadly, though, I won’t be one of them.

Spitiko – 6.6
6 Prospect St, Reading, RG4 8JG
0118 9476444

https://spitiko.uk

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