I’ve talked about this before, but it helps when you’re writing a restaurant review to have some kind of hook, some reason why you decided, this week of all weeks, to check that particular venue out. Canny restaurants make that easy by having something about them, whether it’s in their branding, their social media or their USP – or, in London, by having a well-connected chef or owner.
In the case of M’s Smokehouse, which opened on the Basingstoke Road at the end of January, you’re spoiled for choice. Its Instagram describes it as the “First and Only Smokehouse in Reading”, which isn’t strictly true – remember Bluegrass BBQ? But Bluegrass closed last January, so the second half of that description is correct, for now at least. I don’t know about you, but I miss Bluegrass: a decent independent alternative in south Reading would be a find.
And there’s more. The smokehouse’s Instagram blurb also describes it as a “halal smokehouse”, and in that respect it is definitely a first: so no pulled pork or sausages, just brisket, burgers and fried chicken. Now, that kind of thing might enrage the swivel-eyed types who used to comment on my blog’s Facebook page, pretending to give a toss about animal welfare, but I thought it was worth checking it out.
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“This should be lovely” said my dear friend Jerry as we took a table in the window at Cuttlefish, a couple of minutes’ walk away from the far side of Oxford’s Magdalen Bridge. “A fish restaurant!”
I was spending Good Friday with Jerry, in what I rather hoped would become an annual tradition – last year we spent it lunching at Gees – and as is habitual I had given him a range of options to choose from in advance. He passed on the London candidates I gave him: only the smaller plates appealed at Andrew Edmunds and The Hero, and the offal-heavy selection at Borough Market’s Camille was dismissed in a split second. That left Oxford, where Jerry was tempted by No. 1 Ship Street but thought, on balance, that Cuttlefish had more to tempt him.
All this worked out rather well, in truth. People have been bemoaning the lack of a fish restaurant in Reading for a long time – the easily pleased since Loch Fyne closed eight years ago and the more exacting since long before that. The nearest thing to it we have, I suppose, is Henley’s Shellfish Cow, but it always feels to me like a restaurant where they chose the name because they liked the pun and everything else followed from there.
Given that lacuna in Reading’s food scene a short hop to Oxford to see if there was anything suitable sounded like an excellent idea. Besides, after my last Oxford review there was a request to install Jerry as my permanent Oxford correspondent for all long boozy lunches: let it not be said that I never, ever give the people what they want. So Jerry and I rocked up at the start of the long weekend, the sun finally out, ready to investigate.
My preliminary research, however, had given me a bit of a sinking feeling, not that I told Jerry that. The fanciest thing about the website was Cuttlefish’s fetching logo, but lurking beyond that was a menu that seemed a little bit strange, a little bit cheap, a little too large and somewhat lacking in fish. Sure, they sold oysters and caviar and seafood platters, but for a fish and seafood place there appeared to be little fish on the menu.
Perhaps, I told myself, it was all in the daily specials depending what they could get that day. But it also felt a little all over the place, with classic fish and chips sitting uneasily next to squid ink spaghetti and “mixed seafood and chicken paella”.
Maybe some of that could be explained away as overlap with the La Cucina, the Italian restaurant next door under the same ownership. But that was before you got on to the five different types of burger, the steak frites, the brunch menu featuring eggs benedict and chorizo tortilla. Nothing about it shouted that Cuttlefish was a restaurant which had decided to focus on doing a few things very well.
That was sort of borne out by the dining room. It didn’t boast loads of jarring nauticalia, and the pictures on the walls were tasteful black and white numbers. But the Tolix chairs – would that I could go back in time and buy shares – felt low rent, as did the vinyl tableclothes meant, seemingly, to imitate planks of driftwood, which rather clashed with the attractive bare wooden floorboards. Never mind: we took a nice spot in the window and I wedged my arse into a Tolix. Behind Jerry, I could see that the paintwork of the bay windows was a little tired.
Service was lovely and friendly, but it started off shakily and never quite recovered. Jerry is a lovely and self-effacing man who always puts other people first, the kind who volunteers to take the crappy single bed in a communal Airbnb. Maybe it’s his Irish Catholic upbringing, but he is congenitally predisposed not to want his own way, to the point where he sometimes apologises even for having a preference.
I discovered this at lunch because, given that we were at a fish and seafood restaurant, I rather assumed that we’d be attacking a Picpoul de Pinet or an albariño, a riesling or a Chablis. Cuttlefish’s wine list, as you would expect, boasts all of those things, although it never gives a vintage and, in some cases, also neglects to mention the producer. But it was on this day, after years of friendship and several meals on duty, that I discovered that Jerry doesn’t especially care for white wine.
“I’m really sorry” he said, getting that apology in early. “But we can have white if you want.”
I stopped and thought. This was news to me, and I’ve been out for lunch with Jerry numerous times – including twice in Oxford – where I’ve pressed on and ordered a bottle of white without ever realising that Jerry only really enjoys red.
“No, don’t be silly! I’m not a purist about drinking white with fish.”
So we asked our server for help and that’s where our problems began. It felt like there was an unbridgeable language barrier between us, because I was unable to explain, somehow, that we wanted tips on which the lightest and fruitiest of the reds on the wine list was. It didn’t give many clues and there were no obvious candidates like, say, a Fleurie. It didn’t help that this part of East Oxford is a mobile reception not spot: no Vivino to come to the rescue.
“Do you mean the red wine that’s the least strong?” she said.
“No, I mean – which is the fruitiest. You know, not heavy. Which one would go best with fish?”
You’d expect the reds on this list to have been selected with this eventuality in mind, but perhaps not.
“Well, there is the Picpoul de Pinet” she said.
“No, I mean reds. That’s a white wine.”
There was a pause, and I wondered if I was expressing myself exceptionally poorly (if you’ve read enough of my reviews, you’ll know that sometimes happens). The pause lengthened into a silence, and I wondered if time was standing still. No: Jerry was still moving.
“I will get my colleague.”
By the time he arrived we’d given up and settled on a French malbec. This server smirked slightly as we ordered it, as if it was a bad choice, but really, by that point we’d done quite enough deciding and wanted to do some drinking.
It was called Beauté du Sud and the markup on it was reasonable to the point of baffling: £32 for a wine that will apparently set you back £25 retail. If I’d paid £25 for it retail I’d be beyond disappointed, but in a restaurant it wasn’t bad: not too heavy but perhaps a little jammy. Tom Gilbey would probably have had something to say about the sugar levels.
So by this point my hopes were not high, and that was compounded by another cardinal sin: our starters must have come out about five minutes after we ordered them, and you probably know by now how much I love that i.e. not very. But that’s almost the last bit of criticism you will hear from me, because from this point onwards – against all the signs and much to my bemused pleasure – nearly everything was rather good.
Take my calamari, for instance. They even looked pedestrian, and I was half expecting to wade my way through a bowl of breaded rubber bands. So imagine my surprise when I found they were delicious, lightly dusted with a coating that adhered, had crispness, and that they were tender without the slightest twang of elastic.
Dressed with liberally squeezed lemon and then dipped into a ramekin of golden aioli, they were the kind of dish the idea of this restaurant promised, a promise the reality of the restaurant looked as if it would renege on. It wasn’t the hugest portion for £9, but I liked it too much to care about that.
And would you believe that Jerry’s starter was equally good? He’d ordered crab, white and brown, with toast, and it was a simple and surprising – that word again – dish.
“This is so much nicer than those meagre pots you get at the supermarket” enthused Jerry, and he was right. I love the purity of white crabmeat but the dark meat is where the flavour is and this was rich and thought through, with a slowly building heat in the mix which, again, you might not expect. Even the tiger-striped block of toast was considered, was the perfect thing to load the stuff onto. I always think salads are padding in a dish like this, and this one definitely was, but even without it this felt like a very creditable way to spend £11.
By this point the restaurant was still less busy than you’d hope it to be on a long weekend, but there was a regular, if small, trickle of customers arriving and leaving. The people watching potential couldn’t match a spot in North Oxford, or down the Cowley Road, but Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so that didn’t matter.
We were having such a good natter that I didn’t even spend my time worrying that our mains would turn up as quickly as our starters did, so I was pleasantly surprised – yes, surprise once more – when they turned up a very agreeable half hour or so later.
That said, I wish they’d given mine a little longer. The blackboard propped up outside the restaurant had promised two specials but one had already gone by the time we turned up at half-one, so I chose the other, the octopus. And on paper this dish had everything I could have wanted: firm, roasted baby new potatoes with a flash of bronzed skin, a little carpet of still-crunchy samphire, a beautiful sauce with plenty of sweet cherry tomatoes.
It almost was, and could have been, a taste of the Mediterranean (of Greece, where the octopus is usually previously frozen because stocks have never quite recovered from all that madcap dynamite fishing they used to do).
But the problem was that octopus is a tricky beast to get right and, unlike everything else the kitchen tried, their sure touch deserted them here. It was a proper chewy workout for the jaws, more than I would have liked, and it made me apprehensive about my forthcoming dental appointment and the inevitable top up of masseter botox which would follow. If I showed my dentist a picture of this octopus, perhaps he’d give me slightly more this time.
Only the narrow end of the octopus, blackened and crispier, was easy to eat. Even having said all that, I liked the dish so much that I was prepared to be forgiving: to get so close to the perfect dish, somehow, made me celebrate the 90% they had achieved rather that the 10% where they had fallen short. The whole thing sang with summer flavours, made the crummy weather of the previous week feel like an optical illusion, and for £18 I thought that was no mean feat.
Jerry very much enjoyed his fritto misto, although I think it was more his thing than mine. One element, the calamari, was shared with my starter, but the other components were a couple of enormous prawns, some pieces of whiting and a lot of whitebait. You might, as Jerry does, like whitebait rather a lot, in which case I’m delighted for you, but I personally never eat anything that can beat me in a staring content. And whiting might be a perfectly worthy fish – the bit I had tasted decent enough – but somehow it felt a little basic to me.
Then again, this fritto misto was £15, so can you complain? Pricing at Cuttlefish was a little erratic, with many of the mains costing little more than some of the starters. I guess I had been conditioned to think it should have been more expensive, but then again it’s not like they were dishing up whole Dover soles or thick steaks of swordfish. I’d have liked it a little better, I think, if they had been.
We had a couple of side dishes – Jerry because his main needed one and me because I’m greedy. My zucchini fritti were thick, soggy and under-battered, lacking salt or fun. Jerry’s french fries almost certainly came out of a packet and were served in the sort of miniature frying basket that dreary observational comics on Twitter used to slag off ad infinitum. I didn’t finish my courgette fries because they felt like empty calories. Jerry didn’t finish his frites because he just didn’t have room: I half expected him to apologise to our server for that.
After an impressive run I guess it was always a risk that the weird service would return and cause a dip, and so it did. We were asked if we wanted to order dessert, we asked if we could finish our wine first and were told “well, the kitchen is closing”. Nothing on Cuttlefish’s website says that it does that and, indeed, people were still taking tables shortly before that. But never mind: the dessert menu was full of staples like brownies, cheesecake and sticky toffee pudding and they did offer a glass of an unspecified Sauternes if you wanted to push the boat out, no pun intended.
Jerry went for ice cream, a classic Neapolitan trio of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. I don’t know if they were supplied by others or made by the restaurant, but they were as pleasing as their pastel shades might lead you to believe they would be. A couple of the scoops had ice crystals in them, which strangely left me with the impression they were less likely to be bought in, but either way it was a solidly nice and thoroughly unexciting dessert.
I picked from the specials, most of which were dessert with extra booze, be it a pastel de nata with a glass of port or an affogato with Frangelico on the side. I genuinely loved my two spheres of lemon sorbet with limoncello, and thoroughly enjoyed anointing the former with the latter. It felt like the kind of dessert you don’t see on menus much these days, a resolutely old school, tried and tested combo.
As it gradually melted to become the kind of Slush Puppy Oliver Reed would have considered a decidedly good time, I started to feel increasingly well disposed to Cuttlefish, despite its repeated efforts to stop me becoming so. £10 for this, and despite somehow costing more than the larger £7 selection of ice creams I couldn’t say I felt begrudging.
“This has been so nice” said Jerry. “So much better than those snouts and bollocks and trotters in London would have been.”
When our bill arrived it was only £113, not including tip, which did nothing at all to dissipate our collective goodwill. I think Jerry liked Cuttlefish more than I did, but Jerry is also a man who will take the single bedroom in an Airbnb to make his friends happy. In short, he’s just a spectacular human being. And yet I liked Cuttlefish too: I may be a crabby sod who needs to be worn down or won over, but I get there in the end. Once I do I’m as much of an advocate as anybody.
After that our afternoon took a happy, well-rehearsed trajectory. We wound our way to the Star Inn on Rectory Road, one of my two favourite Oxford pubs. Jerry sipped Asahi and I glugged Steady Rolling Man and, despite the utter lack of mobile reception, we got by the way people did in the days before smartphones, by simply chatting and gossiping and not looking things up when we didn’t know them, because there was no way of doing so.
We got into a chat with the academic at the next table, mainly because Jerry fell slightly in love with Nico, her greyhound, but he told himself it was okay that he couldn’t get away with dognapping Nico. “Greyhounds don’t lick”, he said to me. “I need a dog that’s going to show me proper affection.”
Nico’s owner told us stories about the fates faced by ex-racing greyhounds – she adopted him after an unsuccessful month-long career as a racing dog – and both of us came away from the conversation bitterly opposed to racing in all its forms. I have become a cat person in my middle age, but I’ll always make an exception for greyhounds.
It was in short a textbook Oxford outing, the kind to which I’ve become extraordinarily attached. I’m already looking forward to the next one, especially now I have a mandate from my readership to take Jerry out for lunch in the dreaming spires at every available opportunity.
I am increasingly aware lately that happiness can be fleeting, and you have to appreciate it as it happens, rather than simply realising further down the tracks with the benefit of hindsight. I had a brilliant time, and I don’t want these trips to Oxford – on Good Friday or otherwise – to ever come to an end. Fortunately, the city seems to have plans to keep me more than occupied.
En route to the Star I spotted a pub, the Port Mahon, which has decided to specialise in rotisserie chicken and mentally I made a note to put it near the top of my to do list. Once we got to the Star I couldn’t help but notice that they now have a permanent pizza trader. One who also serves a pint of dough balls in garlic butter and Parmesan: I saw them turn up at a neighbouring table, and it took all my strength not to order some. Next time. Or the time after that.
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For all the people in Reading and beyond on Ozempic or Mounjaro, despite all the weeks in the last few years when I’ve joined my ever-optimistic wife on the Fast 800 diet, there remain some times when there’s a big hole in your life and only carbs can fill it.
I’m not saying carbs merit their own tier in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs the way, say, wi-fi does, but carbs are the unconditional love of food, the thing that softens the edges: no wonder we talk about lapsing into a coma after eating them. They are the thing that nearly always makes the world feel better, cosier and less harsh. Well, that and ice cream – but even I, an inveterate ice cream lover, would concede that ice cream is chiefly for the brighter months, while carbs are a friend for all seasons.
That said, carbs come into their own during our winters, which seem to take up most of the year once summer ends, with their chilly, dreich, gathering gloom that makes the soul sink. My brother was over from Australia at the start of last month on a short notice family visit and he loved the greyness, the lack of blue skies. But he felt that way because it was summer back home, and hot as balls there.
By contrast, he found shivering on the terraces watching Maidenhead United in his specially bought winter coat and gloves, his newly-purchased polyester scarf costing less than the ticket for the match, somehow magical. Even so, as he drove me home after the match he admitted that he wasn’t sure whether he could hack four months of it. I sometimes wonder how any of us do.
When it comes to epitomising carbs I know people put Italian food on a pedestal, with its twin exemplars of pizza and pasta. But I always think Nepalese food is a bit of a dark horse in this regard; I know it has other jewels, its sukuti and sekuwa, its phenomenal pressed potatoes, but when I think of Nepalese food the thing that comes to mind first is momo. And then, if I can think beyond momo, I also consider Nepalese chow mein, with the hot sauce that separates it from its Chinese sibling.
Reading is extremely lucky to have a significant Nepali community, and it means that we are well represented when it comes to Nepalese food. And that, in turn, means that Nepalese food has been bringing Reading in general, and me in particular, comfort and joy for well over a decade.
For a long time, for me, that meant momo at Sapana Home. Nearly a decade ago, in the depths of my divorce, when my flat was no longer a home I would stop at Sapana Home on my way back from the station and order ten pan-fried parcels of succour, with a mango lassi chaser. There was a specific wistfulness I felt when I finished the sixth momo and knew that the plate, and my respite, were nearly over: the Germans probably have a word for it.
In happier times there was the glorious autumn of 2017 when I discovered Namaste Kitchen, and the hospitality of Kamal, at the foot of Katesgrove. I would walk there from my little house in the Village with the slightest of provocation, any excuse at all really, and self-medicate with cider, momo and chow mein: the rest of that year, gastronomically speaking, was made up of four magnificent months.
And in the depths of the pandemic, when Kamal had moved to his eponymous kitchen on the Caversham Road, it meant delivery bikes scuttling from there to our little house in the Village when only Kamal’s carbs could shut out an attack of the glums. I must have lost count of the number of deliveries from Kamal since he opened, both at the old house and this one, and whatever those orders contain they always feature chow mein and momo: to omit them would be unthinkable. Zoë would mutiny if the former was missing, I couldn’t do without the latter.
Three weeks ago, Zoë and I got off the train at Reading and we knew it was one of those nights. We’d been to see my dad in the hospice, and it was in relative terms a good visit. He had a sheet of exercises and told us he planned to start doing them, that he had been using a walking frame to reach the bathroom in readiness for when he was discharged home. He was so set on getting back to his house and his bed: he asked me what films he should watch when he made it there, talked about the things he was looking forward to doing when his life returned to normal. And we played along, because we didn’t know how else to handle it.
His speech seemed stronger than it had been, and it was a shame to leave. But we knew he was ready for us to go because he asked what we were doing that evening, his coded signal that he wanted to get some rest. I told him we were going on a mini pub crawl with Zoë’s CAMRA compadres, an event I always enjoy, and he appeared to like that answer.
It was an evening when we could believe we’d all had a false alarm, even though the hospice staff tell you, with the wisdom of years of experience, that patients often rally soon after they reach the hospice. It was the last time Zoë would see my dad alive, but none of us knew that then.
Even though my dad was on good form, relatively speaking, those visits take something out of you, make you think, make your mind go to places you’d rather it didn’t. So when we got back into town we only had a little time to decompress before having to go to the Greyfriar, be social, talk beer and pubs and buses with Reading CAMRA’s brilliant bunch. That hole was yawning and carbs could fill it, so I thought of Just Momo.
It’s on the same run of restaurants as pizza rivals Paesinos and seemingly permanently closed Amò, but of a slightly older vintage: it opened in winter 2024, the first of those sites to start trading. And the inside is pleasant, generic and featureless: a biggish box of a room with framed pictures on the wall and a real mélange of light fittings, from traditional to modern to bare, illuminating its basic tables and chairs. Only the exposed brickwork effect around the walls was bizarre: made of 3-D vinyl rather than flat wallpaper, and oddly spongy to the touch.
The restaurant was doing well when we arrived just before seven, with a fair few tables occupied. I was going to say that most of the customers were desi, but having had a preemptive Google it seems that Nepali people don’t identify with that term, so I won’t.
Just Momo is a bit misleading calling itself that, because it also does chow mein and one other dish, chatpate. But that’s hardly grounds to complain and their menu is a visually appealing, stripped down model of simplicity. It takes possibly the two most accessible dishes in Nepalese cuisine and sticks them front and centre: you can have chow mein with the protein of your choice, you can have momo any which way, but you’re going to be eating chow mein or momo or, if you have a hole in your life that only carbs can fill, both.
I say that you can have momo any which way, but that’s not strictly true. They come steamed or fried, in chilli sauce or plain, and they are chicken, vegetable or lamb. So no kothey, or pan-fried, momo, no jhol momo in broth and no buffalo (or buff, as Nepalese menu always term it) momo of any kind. Some momo purists might find that limiting but I didn’t, even though kothey momo are usually my first choice.
I went up and ordered a couple of types of momo, because Zoë shares momo, two portions of chow mein because Zoë likes, as she puts it, personal chow mein, a soft drink for her and a sweet Nepali tea for me. All that set me back just under £40.
Fifteen minutes later, out it all came and it was extremely gratefully received. The chow mein was more than acceptable, full of veg, topped with herbs and spring onions, tumbled with thick strips of chicken, noodles with plenty of bite. It only took a forkful to remember why this dish can be such a tonic, and if it didn’t quite hit the heights of Kamal’s Kitchen’s rendition it wasn’t far off, and besides Just Momo’s location is a lot more central.
It needed the sauce it came with, but it made me think of how welcome dishes like this can be and set my mind off in a reverie of all the great noodle dishes out there, from Me Kong’s Singapore noodles with their dusting of curry powder to the soy-laced wonders of Oishi’s yaki soba. Three cuisines, one giant gastronomic group hug. The fug dispersed slightly, the spirits began to lift. Everything was working as it should.
If the chow mein was good, the momo were even better. Just Momo’s Instagram page shows them painstakingly making them by hand and these certainly didn’t feel bulk made and previously frozen. Fried lamb momo were piping hot, beautifully crispy bubbles kept from floating away by a gorgeous ballast of generously filled ground lamb. Having had these at Kamal’s Kitchen and at West Reading’s impressive Momo 2 Go I have to say that Just Momo could give either a run for their money.
Ten for just shy of a tenner still constitutes impressive value inside the IDR, where costs were prohibitive before everything got more expensive on April 1st and are only going to get worse. When I update my guide to solo dining in Reading, this place – and this dish – are going to be in serious contention. I also loved the fact that this, and all of Just Momo’s dishes, come in eco-friendly leaf plates “just the way it’s served in Nepal”, even if the green credentials you get from that are wiped out by flying them over from the motherland. I was less keen on the wooden knife and fork, but never mind.
Chilli fried chicken momo were a different permutation of brilliant but no less enjoyable. I loved the chicken filling, although I should really have had the chicken momo unadorned to make a fair comparison with the lamb: that’s next time sorted. But if I couldn’t judge them in isolation from crunchy peppers and a thick, punchy chilli sauce which clung to every crinkle of every dumpling, that was hardly a tragedy.
The overall effect was a plate which rounded out our order rather than just offering more of the same. And again, hats off to Just Momo for not bloating their menu with chilli this and Manchurian that, not trying to offer something for everyone the way restaurants on Reading’s newly dubbed Curry Mile – people are trying to make it A Thing – sometimes do. No Indo-Chinese or South Indian interlopers, just a tightly honed menu that offers a few Nepalese crowd pleasers. If you don’t like them, go elsewhere. But really: if you don’t like them, check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Service was lovely and friendly, as warm and sweet as my very enjoyable Nepali tea. I found myself thinking about the randomness of life as we finished our meal at Just Momo. Presumably they had their pick of the units on that run as the first tenants, and perhaps if they had chosen Amò’s spot and Amó had been forced to take their site Amò would be the ones still trading and Just Momo would have the sign outside their door for three months saying “closed for refurbishment”.
If I hadn’t liked Just Momo, I might have shaken my fist at the skies about that, but much as I miss Amò I loved Just Momo, so I was glad they dodged that bullet.
The rest of the evening was just what I needed after the day I’d had. Zoë and I joined the Reading CAMRA brigade in the pub, drank nice beers, chatted merrily about all sorts and I could almost forget, for a few hours at least, where I had been earlier in the day and what lay ahead. Drinks in a pub might have achieved that on their own, but I don’t know. I think it was the welcome of Just Momo, misnomer and all, and their array of wonderful carbs that proved the turning point. I am grateful to them for that, and I’ll be back to enjoy more of their food, on the flimsy pretext of repaying their kindness.
One little postscript, because I somehow feel I want to say it: I have had the strangest fortnight. Two weeks ago, on the date of my last review, I went to London with Zoë to celebrate my birthday. I had a wonderful lunch at The French House, wandered off to buy fragrance I wanted but did not need, photographed some Brutalism, drank Belgian beers at one of my favourite London pubs. The following morning, unexpectedly, Zoë and I were at the hospice for the last time, my dad’s room silent and cold, him finally at peace and free from pain.
And the day after that, because it had been booked for months and was badly needed, Zoë and I flew to Màlaga for our first holiday in six months. I spent a week in the warmth, happy and sad and guilty, drinking vermouth in my dad’s honour – every single time – my mending arm gently baked by the incessant sunshine. Shorts on, legs out, sandals on, living the best life I could manage, under the circumstances.
It is an incongruous experience to grieve on holiday, to feel like crying in your favourite restaurants and a beautiful hotel room with the nicest view, with your best friend. I can’t say I recommend it. I have no prior experience of this, really, and it’s weird and unsettling that it’s never constant, always intermittent. Right now it feels like it might be constantly intermittent for ever. Having a lovely time, wish you were here: I didn’t send a postcard but I thought it, often.
When we got back last Friday, we turned the heating on and unpacked and sat on the sofa, home at last. The holiday was over and impending reality was looming, nowhere near the horizon. Discussions and decisions awaited, as did conversations and condolences. I felt that hole again, the kind that carbs can pretend to fill, and because I couldn’t think what else to do, Zoë and I ordered takeaway – chow mein and momos, of course. I will say this, though: they were delicious. They almost worked.
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This week’s review comes from Bath, and from a restaurant I visited with my old friend Dave, and those of you with good memories might recall that I was last in Bath on duty roughly a year ago, also with Dave in tow. We ate at Upstairs At Landrace, which I liked a great deal, and afterwards we drank great beer at The Raven, and when I wrote it up I said that I had a feeling national restaurant critics visited Bath every few years when they fancied a genteel day out on expenses.
I’m not completely devoid of self-awareness, I promise, and here I am almost a year after my last visit having a thoroughly genteel day out with Dave. I can see why the broadsheet gang always include the city on their tour of the provinces.
So this day was in some respects similar to my trip to Bath last year – great pre-prandial coffee, excellent afternoon beers at The Raven, carefully selected lunch venue as the meat in that sandwich, good company and wide-ranging chat about stuff and nonsense from start to finish. But we are a more careworn pair this year, and we agree over lattes at Bath café Picnic that, so far at least, 2026 has delivered us both a bit of a beating.
Dave has to have a tooth out in the not too distant future, his second in far too short a space of time. My arm is still a work in progress, my dad is in hospital and my central heating went bust for the whole of the coldest week of the year. Dave magnanimously decides that I win in the Shit 2026 stakes: “whenever I think how bad my start to the year is”, he tells me, “I remember yours and I know it’s worse”. Only his recent holiday to York – “think of the city guide you could write!” he says – and my imminent trip to Màlaga are chinks in the gloom. That and a good lunch of course, a break from our sea of troubles. But where to go?
As is traditional, I gave Dave a range of options and let him pick his favourite. But I think maybe this time I rather led the witness – he was never going to pick Beckford Bottle Shop now he has given up drinking wine, and Root was probably a little too plant-driven for him. So the clear winner was Chez Dominique, a French restaurant just the other side on Pulteney Bridge, on a street that in any other city might be especially beautiful but in Bath is simply one of countless lookers.
Chez Dominique, named after the owners’ first child, celebrates its tenth birthday in the summer, and in that time it has built up the kind of solid reputation that swerves boom and bust hype in favour of cultivating a lasting fan base as a neighbourhood restaurant. It has featured in the Good Food Guide multiple times, and Tom Parker Bowles raved about it six years ago on that year’s annual trip to Bath to expense a catch-up with his old mucker Reach plc hack Mark Taylor: the irony of me saying this is not lost on me.
But apart from that single mention in the media Chez Dominique has stayed in its very attractive, distinctly Georgian lane, offering, among other things, a ridiculously reasonable prix fixe menu – £22 for two courses, £27 for three – every lunchtime. That kind of money didn’t feel very 2026 at all, but I can’t say it didn’t add to the temptation, so we ambled over the bridge with empty stomachs, high hopes and expectations just about held in check.
Chez Dominique’s dining room is long and thin and it somehow looked dated without being passé. Something about it felt like how dining rooms looked twenty years ago, a vague sense reinforced by seeing the Papyrus font on the menu. Maybe it was the relative immunity from some of the trends of modern restaurants – no brick walls or crappy chairs, everything in a tasteful shade of bluish teal, mirrors just the right side of rustic on the wall.
I disliked the spider lights, which always strike me as a little H.R. Giger, but perhaps that’s me (that reminds me: when does the new series of Interior Design Masters start on BBC One?). But it was a likeable space, and they got even more in my good books by giving us one of the best tables in the place, a table big enough for four next to the fireplace which gave me a great opportunity to people watch over Dave’s shoulder.
The place was almost empty when we arrived, but just as people are apparently eating dinner earlier I think they also lunch later: practically every table was occupied by the time we were halfway through our lunch, and some of them with their second diners of the sitting. The demographic was cheery, prosperous and in the main older even than us: put that way it made sense that the only newspaper to cover Chez Dominique had been the Mail On Sunday.
Chez Dominique’s menu, Papyrus and all, was not without its temptations but not without its frustrations either. At lunchtime it is indeed 2 courses for £22 or 3 for £27, although the starters and mains are also individually priced for some reason which escaped me. Some of the dishes – both starters, on this occasion – came with supplements. Side dishes cost extra.
So far, so straightforward, but the specials on the blackboard were also individually priced – at between £25 and £34 – with supplements ranging between £5 and £14. Oh, and there was a chateaubriand for two which cost £75, and presumably if you ordered that your starters and desserts were at list price. The whole thing felt unnecessarily ornate, like they were determined to stick to looking as if they had a prix fixe however much everything else threw it out of whack.
“I have to do maths to work out how much everything is going to cost” said Dave. “I don’t really want to do maths at lunch.” We agreed that it just would have been easier to charge the same amount for most of the starters, most of the mains etc. so you didn’t have to muck about with the intricacies of pricing. That too would have involved doing maths, come to think of it, but never mind. We kicked off with a can of alcohol-free IPA from local brewery Electric Bear – saving our units for later, you see – and it wasn’t bad although, as with most things I’ve had from Electric Bear, I’m always aware that I’ve had better from nearby Bristol or Cheltenham.
My starter was one of the ones with a supplement, the ones that Make You Do Maths, and for what it’s worth it was one of the cleverest, most interesting things we ate. Tuna came beautifully seared, still very pink in the middle, in a little cairn surrounded by fun stuff – ribbons of pickled fennel, slices of blood orange and pinkish blobs of rhubarb sriracha. I’ve never had rhubarb sriracha, and before this dish I’d have struggled to tell you what I expected it to taste like.
But its combination of tartness and heat properly zhuzhed up what would otherwise have been a far more classical, but still very enjoyable, plate of food. Did it justify the £3 supplement? It’s one of those questions: in terms of the ingredients and processes, quite possibly. But I imagine that it was also probably the Starter Most Likely To Leave You Peckish. I’ve seen other pictures of this dish on social media which suggest the restaurant is still playing around with the plating of this one. The impression was that it still felt a little like a work in progress.
Dave did far better with the conventional choice. We have similar taste when it comes to menus, and on another day it would have been me ploughing through the pork terrine. Fortunately, he is always happy to offer a forkful, and it just confirmed to me that Chez Dominique’s version was faultless: dense and delicious, all killer (or, technically speaking I suppose, all killed), bound in bacon and festooned with everything that was good – capers, apple, what I think might have been chicory.
Dave especially liked the golden raisins which gave the whole thing a slight pop of sweetness. I’d have preferred a little proper bread to a couple of toasts bordering on melba, but I might just have been trying extra hard to find fault because I was jealous.
Our starters took about ten minutes to turn up after we’d ordered, and when our server, who was excellent, asked how they were I told her they were very nice and that we were really in no rush. And Dave, who reads this blog and has known me an extremely long time, gave me a look that said do you have to be like this? Poor Dave, always delighted to be at lunch with his friend – however bad a year I’m having – but now coming to accept, reluctantly, that a restaurant reviewer invariably comes with the territory. Well, he does until the bill is paid anyway. After that he fucks off so the two of us can beetle onwards to a pub.
“I would have been fine with the experience you had at the Devonshire“, he told me. But if he wasn’t so easily pleased and so happy with the path of least resistance would we still be friends, over thirty-three years after we met on his very first day at university? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Because Dave has proved to be such a marvellous friend, so many years on, he let me choose first from the mains even though I invariably let my dining companions call shotgun. I didn’t even have to play the ‘having a terrible year’ card, it was just a given. That’s how I ended up with the pick of the specials section, and was rewarded with the veal t-bone. “Surely nothing bad ever comes in a t-bone?” said Dave, and it was hard to disagree with him.
And yet, it was good rather than great. The veal was quite enjoyable, although not the biggest, and it was cooked past blushing. Which I didn’t mind, actually: I liked the fact that I wasn’t asked how I wanted it. But the best things about it – and this is not how it ought to be – were everything else. I adored the roasted pears, plonked indecorously on top, and I really liked the thick disc of black pudding, British rather than boudin noir. But I wanted the cider sauce it came with to be rich and indulgent, and this felt slightly thin and bland. Thin in both senses: I wanted it to taste of more, and I wanted more of it.
Was this a £34 dish (or a £14 supplement dish, if you have your slide rule handy)? Maybe, maybe not. In fairness it came with fries, which were exceptional (“they’re like really good McDonalds fries” was Dave’s verdict, and he was not wrong) and a spot-on, very well-dressed salad. I added some carrots in tarragon butter, which I really didn’t need: five carrots in not quite enough rather nice butter for £5. Far from unpleasant, but the salad would have been enough.
Dave had his second choice, which would have been my second choice too, the monkfish. I am wont to say that you don’t see it on as many menus these days and yet here we are, in Bath for the first time since last year and Dave has eaten monkfish as a main at both of those meals. Maybe it’s a Bath thing. And again, the faint praise came out a little too quickly. Dave didn’t mind the monkfish, and loved the samphire and mussels. But, as with the t-bone, the sauce was what let it down.
“I just expected more depth” said Dave. “I think about that fish soup you wrote about at Pompette, and I wanted something with that kind of punch.” And he was right, I tasted Dave’s and as crab bisques go it was a little underpowered. Everything felt a little toned down, when French food is meant to be where sauces reach their evolutionary summit. The kitchen that was playing it safe here didn’t feel like the same kitchen that would rustle up a rhubarb sriracha: someone didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions. Dave had some new potatoes with this, but I also shared the frites because they were just too good to hog.
Having complained a little about the mathematical rigmarole of Chez Dominique’s menu, I will say this for it: none of the desserts comes with a supplement – unless you order multiple cheeses, but let’s not get into that – which means that ordering one costs an extra fiver. Rude not to, and practically mandatory if you ask me. There are four on the menu, and we tried a couple with a glass of Sauternes each: £12.50 for the dessert wine, but in an unimpeachable 125ml pour.
Dave’s orange, olive oil and polenta cake was quite delightful, and far softer and more delicate than it looked at first sight. It had more of that blood orange that featured in my starter, and plenty of flaked, toasted almonds and if I had ordered it I think I would have been pretty pleased. I would also, in the back of my mind, have been remembering the cake I had at Manteca a few years ago, because comparison is the thief of joy: that’s what makes me a hoot at parties.
My dessert, the vanilla bavarois, felt like it had been pre-portioned and come out of the fridge. It was decent enough but, like my tuna starter, made you spend as much time noticing the negative space than it did the stuff that didn’t entirely fill it. It was very similar to a panna cotta, and I always tend to like those, and all three of my nubbins of rhubarb were nice. My chantilly cream, speckled with vanilla, was nice. It was all nice. Isn’t that nice? Exactly.
“I think if you’re going to serve a dessert in a glass like that, the dessert needs to come a lot closer to the rim of the glass than it does there” said Dave. Nicely put.
A very companionable hour and three quarters had elapsed, and we flagged someone down for the bill, quite happy to pay it irrespective of whatever supplements or arcane calculations had been involved. Our three courses apiece – including three dishes with varying supplements, our sides and drinks and what have you – came to just over £164, with the 12.5% service charge thrown in. Our lunch in Bath the previous year had cost a little less, with a couple fewer drinks, which makes Upstairs At Landrace look both superb and a bargain.
We settled up with no compunction whatsoever and raced off to the Raven, where as luck would have it one of the best tables in the place became available minutes after we arrived. Many beers followed, and then a boozy meander to the station – I managed to persuade Dave to take a train home an hour later than the one he’d planned to, which I always count as a personal triumph – and we agreed that this formula of coffee, lunch and the pub in Bath remained a winning one, even if the filling in this particular sandwich, this time, had been pleasant rather than spectacular.
I remember watching a video last year on Instagram of some bloke judging a pizza competition. I don’t know whether it was pizza fatigue or just a general lack of vocabulary, but slice after slice was pronounced “solid”. “Oh, that’s a solid effort” he said, after chowing down on one. “Solid pizza, that one” he said after the next. Everything was solid, as if pizzas being liquid or gaseous was even an option. Solid, the word you use when it’s not bad but you don’t really know what else to say.
And yet it’s the word I keep coming back to when I try to encapsulate Chez Dominique. It is emphatically a good restaurant – not an outstanding one, but definitely a good one. You could reliably have a relatively enjoyable meal there, and if you lived in Bath you might go there a few times a year.
Does it justify a detour from further afield? Probably not. They are lucky in that city to have it as a neighbourhood restaurant, I suppose, but some of that might just be that those people are lucky to have that as a neighbourhood. It’s always hard to separate the two, I find, when a restaurant is situated somewhere lovely.
Sadly, the reason why French restaurants, the likes of Paulette or Pompette, exert such a pull is that there hasn’t been anything remotely like that in Reading since Forbury’s closed. But Chez Dominique didn’t remind me, truth be told, of any of those places. It felt more like a higher spec version of Oxford’s Pierre Victoire, the prices slightly hiked and the offering slightly widened.
But even so, if you moved both Chez Dominique and Pierre Victoire to Reading and put them on the same street it would be one of the very few times in my entire life when I’m given a choice of two similar things and I wind up picking the cheaper option. The rest of the time, the only supplement I could really do with is to my income.
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Could you eat exactly the same thing day in, day out, for weeks on end?
Fifteen years ago I worked in an office, back in the good old days when people actually liked going into the office every day because they had their own desk, their own desktop computer and regular deskmates, not some hotdesking hell optimised for isolation in the name of networking where you locked away your personal effects every evening and had nowhere to hang your coat. I miss those days, sometimes.
Back then, for a time, I sat opposite a chap called Neil who told me that at some point in his past, he ate the Prêt tuna mayo baguette for lunch every working day, without fail, for over a year. Didn’t he get bored, I asked him? He said it was just one fewer decision to make, and I didn’t know whether to be impressed or depressed. Maybe he just didn’t like food all that much. I imagine he stopped when, as was the fashion, our office got moved from the town centre to some misbegotten industrial park, nowhere near a Prêt.
I subsequently discovered that this was a lot more common than you might think. Former Deputy Prime Minister and swivel-eyed wrong ‘un Dominic Raab was in the news for doing exactly that back in 2018, and when the story came to light the Guardian unearthed a poll from the previous year before saying that 1 in 6 people had eaten the same lunch every day for the last 2 years. Not only that, but apparently 77% of workers had eaten the same lunch every day for 9 months. Every day. Nine months. You look at that on paper and can’t believe it could possibly be true.
Who are these people, I wonder? They walk among us, they look like us but – like evangelical Christians – I never expect to come across anybody who owns up to being one in daily life. Perhaps those mind-boggling statistics are no longer correct. It’s possible that the pandemic forced people to introduce some variety to their diets: it would be nice if at least one decent thing had come out of that whole affair.
Somehow, when it comes to dinner, having a regular order is more understandable. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to go to Clay’s or Kungfu Kitchen and order the same thing every time, however great it would be, but I do get it, especially if you don’t go somewhere too often.
When Gurt Wings was at Blue Collar Corner, I nearly always ordered their Korean popcorn chicken and, on the occasions where I strayed from the path, I usually wished I hadn’t. I’ve had other pizzas at Paesinos, but the one with olives, anchovies and capers remains my favourite. Sometimes you have a regular order because it’s the only thing you especially like. When I meet my family at Pho, their favourite, I always have the wok-fried rice with chicken and fried shrimp: I find the rest of their menu a bit ho-hum.
And yes, some restaurants have must-order dishes, although we could argue all day about what they are: Bhel Puri House’s chilli paneer, perhaps, Kamal’s Kitchen’s pressed potatoes, the Tuna Turner at Shed. But is there ever truly a universal consensus?
Often, when I’ve visited somewhere lauded by the critics and eaten the thing you must try – saffron risotto with bone marrow at Town, or The Devonshire‘s beef cheek suet pudding – it hasn’t knocked my socks off. Maybe dishes only reach that elevated status over time, rather than by the same three private schoolboy nepo babies – you know which ones – telling you what to order in their newspaper columns a few weeks after the place opens, saying something is an ‘instant classic’.
But is there a level even above that? Are there dishes so good that you must visit the restaurant just to try them, and – one final step beyond – so amazing that you have to revisit the restaurant over and over just to get your fix? Such dishes would be unicorns indeed, but this week’s review is of Smoke & Pepper, the smashed burger and fried chicken spot that opened late last year where greasy spoon institution Munchees used to be, because I had a tip-off that hiding on its menu was exactly such a dish.
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