Restaurant review: Pompette, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

This review begins, as a couple of mine have before, outside the Missing Bean on Turl Street in Oxford, a little before noon. I have grabbed a couple of seats outside on the cramped little benches, my dear friend Jerry is inside ordering lattes and pain au chocolat. It will rain later, but the morning is still surprisingly bright, fresh and clement. Loads of people are enjoying their coffee al fresco, sharing in the sharp and long-awaited happiness of being able to do so, all contented smiles and budging up to make room for others. Those that aren’t are just walking past, adding to the rich pageant of an Oxford morning when it feels like spring is within touching distance.

Jerry and I have met in Reading station, just next to the ticket machines, and been those annoying people in our train carriage nattering and catching up – his holiday in Gran Canaria, my continuing convalescence – all the way to Oxford, the first thirty minutes of a conversation that, all told, will go on for about twelve hours unabated. Jerry and I are in Oxford to explore somewhere new for lunch, and all is right with the world.

That makes this the third instalment of a trilogy of Saturday lunches with Jerry in Oxford. It began indifferently last spring, when we braved Gees, a restaurant that turned out to be the city’s largest, most expensive salad bar (fun fact: the owner was recently charged with murdering his centenarian mother).

It continued in the summer when we sat outside Arbequina on the Cowley Road, drinking Asturian white wine in the sunshine and enjoying one of my meals of the year. It was meant to conclude in November at Pompette, the French restaurant out in Summertown, but the weekend of our reservation I was sleeping at home, freshly discharged from hospital.

So it’s surprisingly emotional to have it back in the calendar and to see it happen, to sit on the train with my friend, to drink coffee with him in one of my happy places, lunch just around the corner. The welcome blast of sunshine suggests that winter is nearly over, that nature is healing, but I am healing too.

Pompette celebrates its eighth birthday this year, and in that time has cemented itself as one of the only restaurants in Oxford to get any visibility outside the city. It got glowing write ups in the national press shortly after opening, and since has made its way into the Michelin guide and the Good Food Guide. The critics stop reviewing places after a while, but the guides always keep score, and Pompette was again listed last year by the Good Food Guide as one of Britain’s 100 best local restaurants. It’s in good company, along with the likes of Clay’s, Upstairs At Landrace, Paulette and overall winner – and one of my favourite discoveries of all my time writing this blog – Lucky Lychee.

I have eaten at Pompette a couple of times, but not for something like five years. I went the winter after it opened with a group of my friends known as the Guild Of Ponces and thoroughly enjoyed it (to read about a meal we had at a less convincing French restaurant, click here) and then I took Zoë there the summer after the pandemic. We had a lunch there that was good but flawed, and at the time I decided not to write it up: after all, it was 2021 and it didn’t feel like the right time to say “here’s a hit and miss meal only a train and bus ride away”. Who would have cared?

But Pompette always hovered high on my Oxford to do list, and as Jerry and I ambled through the door bang on time for our reservation I was reminded why. It’s a big space but a very, very attractive one, split into two large dining rooms with space up at the bar and a private dining room upstairs. It’s impossible not to love, with the exposed brickwork, calming deep blue walls, gorgeous framed prints and handsome furniture: even the shelves of merch – cookbooks and tote bags – are appealing.

You would think the sheer scale of it would make it feel vast and impersonal, but I was impressed by how little that was the case. It takes some doing to create a sense of intimacy in a dining room built to these proportions, but our little table in the window was nicely spaced from our neighbours. Shortly after we were seated, just after one o’clock, a group of speculative diners was turned away: at the time I didn’t understand it because the room was still sparsely populated, but before long nearly every table in our half of the restaurant was occupied.

And they had multiple lunchtime sittings, too: a studious group left the table for four next to us just after we left and a lively, fun pair of middle-aged couples swiftly took their place, bedding in for an even boozier lunch than mine and Jerry’s. By then Jerry and I had already kicked off proceedings – a manzanilla for him and something called a Picon Bière for me, a half of Méteor with orange bitters in it, an Aperol for the Untappd classes.

I absolutely loved it, and like the demi pêche my friend Dave discovered last year, or the panaché I loved in Montpellier it gave me a new-found respect for the ways the French have worked out to make beer all fancy. We toasted one another’s good health over a little bowl of almonds, gleaming with oil and dotted with salt, just like the ones I’m used to buying in Malaga.

Pompette’s menu is ostensibly French – chef Pascal Wiedemann hails from the Alsace, although he made his name in London at French restaurants Racine and Terroirs – but it wanders well beyond the Alsace and, to be honest, beyond France’s borders too. I’ve had vitello tonnato there before, and the menu the day Jerry and I visited boasted stracciatella, pumpkin gnocchi with Gorgonzola, boquerones with Manchego and croquetas; in that sense it’s almost the same ball park as the sleek pan-European fare at Branca. There’s also hispi cabbage, which very much places it as a restaurant in the U.K. in 2026.

But the spine of the menu is Gallic: cod brandade, pot au feu, jambon de Bigorre and cervelle de canut, a Lyonnais dip made from fromage blanc, speak to that. And that’s the other thing I would stress about Pompette: don’t read too much into the menu on their website. Jerry and I agreed on the train up that it looked, from our research, pretty limited but was boosted on the day by a trio of very tempting specials. Without that, if you couldn’t find anything you liked, you might end up resorting to steak, which always feels to me like something of a fallback in very good restaurants.

The years have ravaged the pricing: when I look at the picture of my receipt from 2021 the main course was shy of £20, whereas nearly everything is £30 or more now. But none of that feels like it matters so much when something knocks it out of the park, and that’s exactly how I felt about my starter. A puck of boudin noir came encased in bronzed but fluffy brioche, the whole thing moated with the kind of thick, reduced sauce you can almost see your face in. A little wedge of beautiful quince was a fig leaf to wellness, dusted with espelette pepper which I thought the dish could probably do without.

But really, this was one of those plates where, for as long as it’s in front of you and some of it remains, the world is a kind and happy place. When I think about what it was like, I can only remember eating anything comparable in France and when I described it to my boss the following week – he is a keen Oxford fan, especially of the Daunt Books just round the corner from Pompette – he said “so it was sort of like an incredibly middle-class hot dog, then”. Well, no. No but also yes.

Jerry was determined to conquer the gastronomic spectre of his trip to Gran Canaria, where he trudged through a very disappointing fish soup, so he braved Pompette’s soupe de poisson. But, spoiler alert, no bravery is really required when you order somewhere like Pompette. At Pompette, it is all about everything – from the cooking to the eating to the meal itself – taking absolutely as long as it needs to take, of perfecting over time and reducing to an epitome.

Just as this became the epitome of the perfect Oxford lunch with Jerry, the soup was its best self, utterly reduced and concentrated, so deep in flavour that you needed a metaphorical diving suit. Jerry adored it. I didn’t try it, although if I’d had a spoon handy I’d have given it a go, but even after it was finished that aroma, intense with fish and lightly coaxed with aniseed, stayed with me, making me wish I’d ordered it. The rouille, Gruyère and croutons were all present and correct, and Jerry made me try a bit of the crouton because he couldn’t believe its lightness. I did as I was asked. I couldn’t believe it either.

By this point we were slightly ahead of the table next to us, so we got to earwig on their conversation with the serving staff, who without exception were absolutely at the top of their game. The server told our neighbours that although you felt like there ought to be shellfish of some kind in that soup, there was none: but they used every single bit of the fish, guts and all, to produce that extraordinary flavour.

At this point we were caught by our neighbours paying far too much attention, which led to some good-natured bickering across the rest of a very happy lunch. One of the couples were locals – and very lucky to be, too – and their friends were up from Oxford. One was a lawyer who occasionally worked in Reading, so I made sure to recommend Clay’s to her. Our interest in their advice from the wait staff was eventually mirrored by their interest in seeing what Jerry’s and my food looked like, and by the end I think they were half tempted to join us in the pub for a post-prandial debrief. Anyway, two of them ordered the soup and both of them loved it.

One of the chaps at my table couldn’t persuade his friend to order the special Jerry and I had, which meant I felt bad when it turned up and was spectacular: he had to settle for sharing an enormous pork chop instead, which looked like a more than serviceable consolation prize.

But fortune favoured me and Jerry, in the shape of the most beautifully cooked duck breast swimming in a thick, glossy bigarade sauce – more of that bitter orange from my apéritif – and festooned with rind. Again, Pompette’s preturnatural talent with sauces was deployed to stunning effect: I think of all the cuisines out there French is my favourite, and it’s because of things like this. They are the clincher.

It turned out that Jerry was trying to lay ghosts to rest with this order as well, having cooked duck at home a while back and found that it came out tougher than Tom Hardy after a crash course of anabolic steroids. By contrast this was pink, the fat soft and moreish, the skin crisped and burnished, every contrasting texture timed and rested to be spot on all at once. “I bet this duck had a fantastic life” mused Jerry. Not as fantastic as ours right now, I thought.

The accoutrements with this were also bang on. I have never much liked endive, but Pompette has the talent many great restaurants do, where it can win you over on ingredients you thought you didn’t care for. This, braised and blackened, was a perfect foil. If I had one criticism it was that the splodge of celeriac purée, great though it was, was pretty small.

But on the other hand the thing on this plate you wanted to be huge was, and that was the croquette of duck leg. The picture down there doesn’t do justice to how big this was, or how substantial, how dense, how utterly crammed with shredded duck leg, herbs, salt, fat and nothing else. The duck breast was in the middle of the table, but this was the star of the show. And this main, to share, was £60 for two.

Ironically, the reason the gents at the table next to us didn’t order the duck special was that the dissenter didn’t like the sound of the duck leg croquette. I told his friend that he should consider making new friends. There was a pause, and I worried I’d gone too far, and then he spoke.

“Thank you!” he said.

By this point we had polished off a bottle of red that was a new one on me, a Vinsobres from the Rhone Valley. The wine list was absolutely magnificent, and will part you from plenty of money if your resolve weakens for a moment. Our server recommended a handful of reds from Jura’s legendary producer Tony Bornard, and they all sounded right up my alley, but I struggled with spending £100 on one: to Pompette’s credit, most of them are £50 retail so that markup is positively encouraging. But again, our server was superb at navigating us to something more kindly priced – £54, with a more conventional markup – but quite exquisite. We swirled it in huge, fishbowl-like glasses, and enjoyed every drop.

Pompette’s dessert menu is small – just the three options, plus a cheeseboard, with suggested wine pairings for all of them. I always give dining companions the first choice, but I was delighted that I could easily have ordered any of them. Once Jerry had chosen I was torn between the rhubarb and custard tart or the kirsch choux bun with warm chocolate sauce, and my server made the clever point that the latter had been on Pompette’s menu since day one so would always be there for me, whereas rhubarb had a season. I was sold. This argument also worked on the neighbouring table, roughly as we were settling up.

It was an absolute joy – a mild custard with just enough wobble, an acceptably thin pastry base and a gorgeous lacquered, almost tiled top level of rhubarb. I’m not used to being given a knife and fork for dessert but this dish did need it, because the rhubarb still had fibre and resistance, and otherwise would have slid clean off the rest.

But having a proper cross-section, as was intended, you realised what a precise balance of sweet and sharp it was. A puddle of crème fraîche next to it was topped with a splodge of rhubarb compote stewed beyond the point of resistance. See, it can also be like this, it seemed to say. I had this with the Jurançon they recommended for Jerry’s dessert, because it interested me more than the suggested pairing. £12 for the tart, £6 for a small glass of golden dessert wine, absolutely zero complaints.

Jerry went for a seemingly less French choice, a slab of sticky ginger cake with a coconut and rum sorbet slowly melting on it. This was perhaps French by way of Guadaloupe, and for me the best and most interesting thing about it was a glorious wedge of roast pineapple. Jerry liked it, and was determined to have dessert over cheese (with hindsight, I should have pointed out that they weren’t mutually exclusive), but the sorbet was the weak point for him. I think he was right – it was all coconut and very little rum, and something sharper might have worked better.

I know comparisons can come across as invidious, but I couldn’t help but view my companionable, libatious, drawn-out lunch at Pompette through the lens of my whistle stop tour of Hypeland at The Devonshire, the subject of last week’s review. This meal was less expensive – including tip our snacks, apéritif, three courses, bottle of wine and glasses of dessert wine set us back just over £216, slightly less costly than the Devonshire. Pompette’s room was nicer and more spacious, the service absolutely faultless.

And it was the kind of meal I wanted, a celebration of lunch, of good company, of having nowhere to go and eating in a restaurant with no desire whatsoever to move you along. The best part of three hours passed in a flash, and at the end of it we availed ourselves of the very tasteful loos and gorgeous-smelling hand soap and made our way back out into North Oxford knowing we’d had a lunch for the ages. Daunt Books followed, and then racing the rain to North Parade, our second Parade of the day, where the back room of the Rose & Crown had a table with our name on it and crisp cider behind the bar. It was, as days go, pretty unimprovable.

Reading doesn’t have anywhere like Pompette, despite the fact that Caversham would very much like to be Reading’s Summertown, or Jericho. That Reading can’t attract this kind of place is one of the eternal mysteries which I fully expect to be bemoaning until either I get bored or you do (let’s be honest: you’ll get bored first). That Oxford is a 30 minute train ride away, and Pompette is a short bus ride from the city centre is something, on the other hand, you will never hear me complain about.

I’ll almost leave the last word to Jerry this week. “It would be a perfect special occasion restaurant” he said. He’s too modest to appreciate that every lunch with him, for me at least, is a special occasion. But he does read this blog, so now he knows.

Pompette – 9.0
7 South Parade, Oxford, OX2 7JL
01865 311166

https://www.pompetterestaurant.co.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: The Devonshire, Soho

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Does the world need another review of the Devonshire, described by Esquire as “the buzziest pub in the world”? Quite possibly not, because since opening at the start of November 2023 everybody has been there, it seems, and it’s arguably all been said.

Most of the U.K.’s national restaurant critics have been – your Dents, Corens and Parker Bowleses – and so have a plethora of restaurant bloggers, from the good to the bad to the bad and ugly (some even paid). The Topjaw crew are regulars, and boss level grifter Toby “Eating With Tod” Inskip is too: he even took poor trusting Phil Rosenthal there when he visited the capital. Phil clearly hadn’t been warned by his researchers that he was sharing a platform with U.K. hospitality’s biggest Farage fan (yes, even more than William Sitwell).

The brainchild of celebrity pub landlord Oisin Rogers, Flat Iron founder Charlie Carroll and Fat Duck alumnus Ashley Palmer-Watts, the Devonshire is a place you might well know about even if all of London’s many other hyped openings have passed you by. Nowhere, I suspect, has cut through to the national consciousness outside the London hospitality bubble as effectively for as long as I can remember.

Its ascendancy has tied in with a renaissance in the popularity of Guinness – some people claim that it’s the best Guinness in London, although they also said that about the Guinea Grill, Rogers’ previous pub – and the birth of a class of drinkers that think loving Guinness is an acceptable substitute for having a personality.

It’s a game of two halves, the Devonshire. The diners eat upstairs on a menu of British pub classics, the drinkers congregate downstairs where the Guinnesses line up on the bar, all guaranteed to find a home. Reservations are almost impossible to snag – unless you’re famous, in which case space will always be found for you, possibly in the pleb-free private space behind the velvet rope. Turn up on the right night (by which I very much mean the wrong night) and Ed Sheeran might be contributing to an impromptu ceilidh: let’s hope for everybody’s sake that he doesn’t play Galway Girl.

Awards have followed on from all those critical plaudits. In its first full year the Devonshire was listed as the second best gastropub in the U.K. (that same year the Guinea Grill, previously in the top 100, vanished without trace). At the beginning of 2026, SquareMeal named it London’s 42nd best restaurant. The National Restaurant Awards, meanwhile, placed it as the 12th best restaurant in the country last summer. So people rate the food: Michelin’s new Bib Gourmands were announced at the start of February and the Devonshire wasn’t among them, but you could easily make a case that it’s one of the very few restaurants in London that doesn’t need any help from the tyre man to put bums on seats.

You could easily think that the approbation is universal, but it isn’t. One of the London food subreddits I frequent had a discussion about the Devonshire a few months ago, and I heard quite a lot of criticism. Style over substance, more than one person said. Glad someone else agrees – utterly forgettable food, said another. In all honestly I came away massively disappointed by pretty much everything else for the money spent and the hype said one person, adding that he would have been better off going to Hawksmoor. It’s just okay was another pithy summary.

The comment that stuck with me was this one: Not been myself but I’ve not known anyone come back saying it was worth the hype. Because I was trying to pick through and differentiate between people who had been and not been impressed and those who simply took against it because of the hype, the exclusivity, the difficulty involved in getting a table and the inherent contradiction behind pretending to be egalitarian and always finding space for the famous and influential. Now, I have sympathy with all those viewpoints, but what I wanted to know was whether the food and the experience justified jumping through all those hoops.

Anyway, you get a review of the Devonshire this week for two reasons. One is that last month the Devonshire was named as the best gastropub in the whole of the U.K., nicking the top spot after coming straight in at number two the previous year. The other is that, idly looking at their exceptionally user-unfriendly booking page I managed to find a table free for lunch at a not unreasonably late time and thought that this was a now or never opportunity. Time to chip in, seemingly after everybody else has had their say, to try to sift fact from hype.

The pub and the restaurant are fairly separate entities, so you go in through the ground floor, past the mass of Guinness drinkers, to the welcome desk at the end where they lead you up the stairs, past framed pictures of Kate Moss, Nigella, Marianne Faithfull, and into the set of dining rooms on the first floor. The pub itself does a good job of looking like it has been there forever, but it is a manufactured image: it might well say SOHO SINCE 1793 on the front but before they turned it back into a pub it was various things, including a restaurant owned by attempted comeback king Jamie Oliver.

The room I was in (the Chop Room, according to my bill) was a very pleasant, airy one with plenty of light coming in from the big windows, a Gilbert & George taking pride of place on the white brick wall. The clientele, as far as I could tell, was a real mix containing what looked to me like a fair proportion of gastronomic tourists: that’s no criticism, as I was one myself. I wondered how many of these people were regulars, and how many were drawn in by the buzz.

What can’t be denied, though, is that the Devonshire has made the decision to absolutely cram tables into those rooms. I was put at a table for two, in the middle of a row with a table on either side, the gap between them one even Kate Moss couldn’t have made it through. I asked if I could move to an end table, so at least one of my arms could move unobstructed and, after what felt like a lot of deliberation, it was decided that I could.

The last time I was in a dining room this cramped was undoubtedly in Paris, the kind of places where you need to ask your neighbours to leave their seats if you wanted to go to the loo. In fact, I’ve only ever had those experiences in Paris, before the Devonshire. I guess the benefit of the doubt would say that they want to accommodate as many of their clamouring prospective diners as possible.

Much has been made of the Devonshire’s no choice set lunch menu – prawn cocktail, skirt steak, chips and béarnaise sauce, sticky toffee pudding – which is indeed decent value at £29. But I didn’t come all that way to eat the set menu, and on the à la carte there is almost a second, slightly more expensive set menu hiding in there, consisting of the dishes everyone orders: the scallops, the beef cheek suet pudding and the chocolate mousse.

That’s a decent way to experience the menu which is still pretty affordable, although unless you’re ordering a gigantic t-bone steak or the wagyu ribeye prices aren’t stratospheric: most mains max out at £40 and only a couple of starters will set you back more than £15. I made my order, asked for a glass of biodynamic Alsatian riesling from the very attractive list of wines by the glass and sat back, looking forward to a long, leisurely Soho lunch. That didn’t happen, as we shall see.

I’m going to talk about all the food first and get it out of the way, because a lot of it was rather good and yet it didn’t stop it being a deeply disappointing experience. We’ll get to that. First off, the Devonshire will bring you lovely, salt-speckled soft little buns, dished up from a hot tray with tongs, as many times as you like, along with room-temperature butter. I held fire on eating mine, because I thought the bread would be useful with my starter, but when I asked one of the sparkling, friendly servers she told me there was no need to show such restraint.

I wanted the bread for my starter, the starter nearly everyone orders. Three fat scallops, lavished with batons of bacon, topped with crumb and bathed in a sauce bright with vinegar, were pretty much everything people said they would be. The scallops, grilled in the shell, were just the right texture, the firm side of jelly, and a joy to slice, dip, dab and devour. But everything else perfected the synthesis: a really extraordinary mixture of salt and vinegar, of soft and crunchy, a dish you could eat over and over again. Which, given that you got three of the blighters – not bad for £18 – is pretty much what you got to do.

I cleaned each of those shells with a judiciously torn piece of bread, and I thought that, in this case at least, the hype was simply an accurate description. Next time I go to the Nag’s Head and order a packet of Scampi Fries and Bacon Fries I will sandwich one of the former between two of the latter, eat it, close my eyes and remember that combination of flavours elevated to an iconic level.

I also tried the potted shrimp, which I liked an awful lot: a deceptively big portion of these with a comforting hug of nutmeg and a lid of soft, spreadable butter. It didn’t look like much at £14 but that pot was as packed with prawns as the room was with tables – well, almost. It made the three mingey pieces of stripe-tanned crustless Melba toast look a little inadequate: I would have liked more, and resorted to eating the last of the prawns with a fork. Still, there was a constant procession of more bread, so you couldn’t very well complain.

So far so good, but my main course – the ox cheek and Guinness steamed pudding – struck a bum note. It arrived with some ceremony, anointed with gravy at the table (“I always love doing this bit” said my server), and it looked: well, it looked about as attractive as this dish, a symphony of beiges and browns, can look. But it was when you cut into it that it started to disappoint.

Its walls were claggy and thick – now, I know that’s the nature of this particular beast, but the filling is meant to justify that. And here it just didn’t. The amorphous brown mass obviously had bone marrow in it, which gave it that intense, savoury, mouth-coating note. But the bits of beef cheek were small and not cooked enough to truly fall apart, so the whole thing felt like a stodgy trudge.

Dipping the admittedly very good duck fat chips into that slightly bland gravy wasn’t transformational: in fact, the chips were better on their own. And my firm, nutty peas with ribbons of white onion and more of those batons of bacon were pleasant enough but unexceptional: if it had had some cream in it, proper à la Française stuff, I would have liked it better. Perhaps I should have gone for the carrots, or the creamed leeks, but by this point – I’ll explain shortly – I was starting to feel apathetic about the road less travelled.

I had dessert, too, I should add. The Devonshire’s chocolate mousse is a very agreeable example of the genre, not the best I’ve had but not a million miles away from it. It came with a jug of cream, which I wasn’t sure it needed, and three beautifully boozy cherries. It needed more of those.

Throughout my meal I think one of the things I liked best about the Devonshire was the people watching. Despite it being the closest thing London has right now to the original Ivy, before it turned sour, I didn’t see any celebrities. Rather it was like being in Soho House, seeing people who thought their very presence there made them almost famous. A few tables along from me a table of tourists enjoyed their coffee and, it appeared, took some leftovers away in a cardboard box: good for them.

Directly opposite me were two men in gilets and quarter-zip jumpers, both practising exactly the same techniques of male pattern baldness concealment, who looked as if they’d come out of the same vat in quick succession. They were pally with the servers in a way I don’t think I’ve ever attempted and ordered the biggest piece of meat they could find on the menu, the way people who identify as alpha males do.

But my favourites were the two lovely gents who sat on my left, who had discovered the Devonshire on YouTube of all places and were very excited to be there. Gent A sipped his Guinness and said to Gent B “if that was your last beer you’d die a happy man”, shortly after saying “this is the highlight of my whole week”. They ordered the same things as me, but were slightly behind me so they got a preview of the scallops and the suet pudding because, as I said, there’s almost another set menu within that à la carte.

Not only had they done their research – read all the reviews, read all the articles and puff pieces – but they engaged in some strangely endearing willy waving about it all. “Do you know how many scallops they get through a week?” said Gent A. Gent B didn’t know, so Gent A told him. “I wonder where they come from?” said Gent B. “It’s Devon or Cornwall I think” said Gent A (I knew this one – it’s Devon – but I didn’t interject). Then Gent B asked if Gent A knew how many pints of Guinness the pub got through in a week, and the game of Top Trumps began again. If I’d known I’d be sitting next to them I wouldn’t have needed to research this review at all. I could have just surreptitiously recorded their conversation.

“That bacon, mate” said Gent A about his scallop dish. “It’s Iberico bacon, it’s aged for 5 years.”

I kept my counsel: maybe you can indeed age bacon for 5 years, but it sounded unlikely. But I got a picture from this of the kind of person the Devonshire might appeal to and how it has permeated beyond the London food scene, all the blogs praising Cocochine or Row On 5 or prognosticating about who’s going to get a Michelin star next. The Devonshire appeals to TikTokers, and people who get their food coverage from YouTube, and it’s as much for box-tickers, in its way, as some restaurants are for star chasers.

So all that said, I need to talk about why the Devonshire was so poor. This bit is always boring and forensic, and makes me thankful for the time stamps on iPhone pictures but here goes. I’ll try to be quick: God knows, the Devonshire did.

I arrived around 2pm, I ordered around five minutes past. Those scallops? They arrived literally five minutes later. Either, like the Guinness on the bar downstairs, they were sitting around waiting for a table to go to or they were cooked and rushed out to me pronto. Either way, that’s not what I wanted at all. Remember that extra dish of potted prawns? That wasn’t part of the plan: I was worried about the breakneck pace, so as I was finishing my scallops I flagged down a server. Could I have an extra dish between my starter and my main please, I asked? I’m really in no hurry, I told her.

The potted shrimp arrived less than five minutes after that conversation and I tried to eat them slowly, in the hope of putting the brakes on. My main course arrived no more than three minutes after I’d finished eating the potted shrimp. And I suppose I could have said something again at that point, but what good would it have done? Would I have said “I’m sorry, but can you take this away and make me a fresh one in about twenty minutes?”

Maybe some diners would do that. But it felt entitled to me, so I ate my main and took my punishment. All in all, from ordering my lunch to my main course arriving was twenty-five minutes at most. And as lovely as the servers were, that says to me that they’ve forgotten something very basic about what restaurants are about. The clue is in the word, hospitality. I read a florid think piece recently about the delights of the solo lunch, a subject I’ve also written about before, but there are no delights in feeling like you’re on a conveyor belt from start to finish. I’d have understood it better, perhaps, if I’d been on the set menu. But I wasn’t.

Those tables that are so in demand at the Devonshire are booked in 2 hour slots, but despite my best efforts to delay things just over an hour had elapsed from taking my seat to getting my bill. In that time I managed to spend £117, including an optional 12.5% service charge which, in the words of the menu, “goes to our amazing staff”. Were they amazing? Well, they were and they weren’t: I have felt less processed in many, many chain restaurants. Perhaps hospitality operates close to its best by being a well oiled machine, but it fails when it feels like a machine.

In some ways that’s what confused me the most: what was the point? Why spend all that money on doing the place up, the Gilbert & George, the hype, the geeking out about the provenance of the ingredients if you’re going to make diners feel like they’re in a bloody canteen? I get that as a solo diner it might have been easy for the kitchen to do my food earlier, less complex than coordinating logistics with multiple dishes at larger tables, but you’d expect any restaurant to manage flow better. Nothing about me, as a solo diner at 2pm, screamed let’s get this over with.

And that’s the sad thing – if I’d loved the food, which was mostly quite nice at best, maybe I too would be going on about where all the meat comes from, raving about the on-site butchery in the basement, regurgitating the many, many facts Gent A and Gent B threw at each other. Instead, the thing I took away from my meal at the Devonshire was that I felt managed and turned, a product rather than the customer. Maybe that’s how they churn so many tables, create that buzz, make all that money. Maybe that’s what they want, and they can be packed until the end of days delivering this kind of experience. But I wonder who, if they had a meal like mine, would go back.

Perhaps they weren’t always like this, and drift and complacency is now setting in. Who cares? You can only make one first impression in London: there are many more fish in the sea, and countless other restaurants there. As I left to scuttle to the Tube in the rain I spotted Brasserie Zedel and Kricket and ruefully thought that my money would have been better spent in either. I probably would have been there longer, and found it much easier to get a table in the first place.

For that matter, a five minute walk away you have the French House. When I think about my lunch at the French House last year, it was everything the Devonshire wasn’t; I had four courses in a restaurant above a pub that is a genuine institution, not an ersatz, invented one. I was there for two and a half happy hours, enjoying the legendary long lazy Soho lunch all the early reviews of the Devonshire claimed that it delivered. I had better food, at a better table, I had far more booze and I spent slightly less money. I’d go there again in a heartbeat, but I won’t trouble the Devonshire’s labyrinthine booking system again.

The best gastropub in the U.K.? Sorry, but no: it’s not even the best gastropub in London. Actually, scratch that. It’s not even the best gastropub in Soho.

The Devonshire – 7.0
17 Denman Street, London, W1D 7HW

https://www.devonshiresoho.co.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: The Reading Room

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews

One of the constant criticisms of Reading, throughout most of my time writing this blog, has been its lack of what people consider to be a special occasion restaurant.

The town centre and its surrounds have rarely troubled restaurant guides and critics: the London Street Brasserie was briefly listed in Michelin, Mya Lacarte was in the Good Food Guide back in the day and Clay’s is now, but beyond that nothing. Clay’s has become Reading’s de facto special occasion restaurant if you love food, and I suppose Thames Lido is there if you’re a fan of what I believe people like to refer to as vibes. But the town centre in particular seems to be lacking that kind of restaurant.

I had a message on Instagram recently from someone asking if I could recommend somewhere in the town centre for exactly that, on a rare night out without the kids. He and his wife usually ate in Caversham when they had a date night, but where in the centre would fit the bill, he asked? I had to tell him I had nothing for him, except a suggestion to either go back to Caversham or take a train to somewhere like Goat On The Roof, Seasonality or The Three Tuns. Or catch a taxi to Orwells, a restaurant that has special occasion written all over it, at least if ‘special occasion’ means far too pricey for everyday dining.

There’s one flaw in this argument, though, which is that central Reading does have an establishment which, on paper at least, has all the credentials to meet the criteria. It’s swish enough, and it’s certainly expensive enough. The menu makes all the right noises, the room seems opulent and the chef has over eight years’ tenure there, following on from gigs at fancy (though not necessarily renowned) U.K. hotel restaurants. I’m talking about The Reading Room, the restaurant in the Roseate Hotel – you know, the place that used to be the Forbury Hotel and used to have a restaurant in it called Cerise.

The thing was though, I didn’t think I knew anybody who had been to the Reading Room. I asked around at the first readers’ lunch of the year and nobody had, although a few people said they’d been back when it was Cerise. And come to think of it, when I reviewed Cerise 12 years ago it was the same story. You would struggle to find any reviews of the Reading Room online, apart from Google reviews, and although it has two AA Rosettes – “Global cooking in elegant hotel restaurant” said the fulsome praise from the inspector – it too has never been anywhere near the Michelin Guide or the Good Food Guide.

If you read the Roseate’s website you might fancy eating at the Reading Room, although you might also wonder whether ‘sensorial’ is really a word (it turns out it is: I checked). Dinnertime at The Reading Room is not just fascinating food and drink, it’s fashion, lifestyle, art, gastronomy and mixology! All in one seamless orchestration says the website, although it also says that breakfast is a sensorial experience that nurtures and delights in equal measure, which sounds a tad purple to me. The Reading Room has been awarded, year after year says the website, enigmatically neglecting to mention what, exactly.

Anyway, I can see why people in Reading might not have taken a risk on the Reading Room, which took over from Cerise in early 2020 – which means, incidentally, that it’s probably the same chef who was cooking at Cerise. You might not want to gamble on a menu where most of the starters cost £20 and the mains £40 or more, because those prices start to look a little Michelin and not a million miles from the cost of eating at Orwells, which has a national reputation.

So the question remains: does Reading have a special occasion restaurant nobody knows about, or does it just have a very expensive hotel restaurant to match its very expensive hotel, one which probably gets by on having a largely captive audience eating on expenses?

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

Bar review: Bigfoot, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

This might be the first time I’ve been able to say this in over 30 years of working for a living, but my boss – he doesn’t read this blog, so I can get away with admitting this – is one of my favourite people. He’s a few years older than me, but I suspect he’s hired in his image and our politics, our cultural references, our general outlook on life and our regular Guardian reading match up nicely. I couldn’t help but think of him the evening I stopped by Bigfoot, a little spot on Oxford’s Cowley Road specialising in cocktails and tacos.

The thing is, my boss – like me – is a big music fan, always on the hunt for new bands to listen to. Unlike most people I know, his taste in music didn’t stop in an arbitrary year, preserved in aspic, leaving him just listening to old favourites. His Spotify Unwrapped is interesting every December, and we often swap recommendations: without him I wouldn’t have discovered the loping lo-fi jangle of Talking Kind, or the weird and wonderful 70s Algerian funk (I’m not making this up) of Ahmed Malek.

Unlike me, my boss is still a regular gig-goer, especially in Oxford where he watches all sorts of bands in all kinds of ramshackle venues. He took his wife to see a band called Shit Present last year on her actual birthday, without a shred of irony, and she joined him without complaint. That’s quite some marriage, I imagine.

My boss reports a consistent phenomenon at those gigs. The band is invariably young, lean and hungry, in the foothills of its twenties and having the time of its life. And the audience? “They’re all 6 Music dads like me” he says, ruefully. It happens when he goes to see Bar Italia, or Stick In The Wheel, or some band I’ve never heard of playing music you could describe without irony as a soundscape. His ears like a challenge.

When I stopped in Bigfoot, I got an inkling of how he must feel. Because everybody in there was young, from the head honcho behind the bar with his beard/beanie/fisherman’s jumper combo to the friends catching up at the table in the window, to the chaps behind me who were mansplaining to one another about “the societal pressures on women” without any women at their table, as if they had a fucking clue. Outside, in the January cold, a table of four young women directed subtle evils towards me, the mouldy old fiftysomething nabbing one of the only spots inside all to myself.

Bigfoot opened in December 2023 and has consistently offered cocktails in general, and margaritas in particular, ever since, along with tacos. It has slightly bowed to market forces since, adding beer and wine to its menu, but otherwise has continued to plough this admirable, idiosyncratic furrow. I was in Oxford with some free time for a solo meal so I thought, Why not? I forewent a table for one at somewhere more obvious and slipped into the no reservation spot early doors to snag a table.

It helps that I love that part of Oxford so much. I occasionally read some rabid panic on Facebook from someone still complaining about 15 minute cities, and I think the main problem is their lack of imagination. Because on the Cowley Road, if you stand outside Bigfoot, you are within a 15 minute walk of the Magdalen Arms or the Chester Arms. Arbequina and Spiced Roots are mere minutes away. You can buy Oxford’s best coffee at The Missing Bean, or drink in Peloton Espresso, my favourite Oxford café. What’s to dislike?

Not only that, but just across the road is the Ultimate Picture Palace, the arthouse cinema where I saw stuff like Le Samourai, Betty Blue and Paris, Texas, over thirty years ago. You can browse music in Truck Records nearby, which also happens to do good coffee.

And a very short walk from Bigfoot there’s also the Star Inn on Rectory Road, where Oxford’s best beer garden is hibernating, waiting for spring, and DEYA’s Steady Rolling Man is always on tap. I had very much enjoyed Peloton and the Star before ambling into Bigfoot, as it happens, and I was hoping that Bigfoot would complete a beautiful OX4 trifecta.

I loved the interior, all scruffy and ineffably cool, spider lights and baskets of limes hanging from the ceiling, art on the walls. A couple of cramped tables in the window had bentwood stools, and along one side of the room were what looked like bespoke benches with narrow tile partitions between them serving as tables, just deep enough to accommodate a glass or a plate of tacos.

Their curves matched the undulations of the bar, and the whole thing had a feeling of otherness that I loved. I felt like I could be in Bairro Alto, the Realejo or the 11th arrondisement, somewhere far cooler than me or, in all honesty, most of prosperous Oxford. That’s the great thing about the Cowley Road, it’s the metaphorical two fingers up that says the rest of this city might be like a supersized version of Henley on Thames but not us, buster.

The red on white menu by the bar screamed simplicity: four tacos, two of them vegetarian, all of them £2.80 a pop. They also do chips and dip, and burritos on Saturday but that’s your lot. Similarly, there were five margaritas, a couple of bottled boozy seltzers and a slightly confusing menu of what seemed to be beer and chaser combos. The beer choice was limited but considered: Modelo, the Mexican classic; the iconic American Pabst Blue Ribbon; and – this was an inspired choice – Mash Gang’s Chug IPA, one of the best AF beers made in the U.K. To complete a general feeling of bounty, the evening I was there three of the margaritas on offer were a fiver each.

I’m not a margarita aficionado but when in Rome and all that, so I gladly left my comfort zone and ordered Bigfoot’s classic, the textbook combination of tequila, agave, lime and salt. It came on the rocks – crisp, bracing and tasting every bit as boozy as I suspect it was. I don’t know which brand of tequila Bigfoot uses – I saw El Tequileño behind the bar, there might have been others – but this was the sort of cocktail I could easily see becoming habitual. Each sip, sharpened with a jag from that salted rim, was a delight.

Next time I’d be tempted to try a mezcal margarita; a look behind the bar revealed an impressive array, from multiple variants of Ojo de Tigre to La Higuera. The folks at Bigfoot are serious about being good at the narrow range of things they do.

The tacos didn’t so much subvert expectations as invert them. I expected my favourite to be the chicken thigh, but it was the most underpowered of the lot, the chipotle a little quiet, the mayo on them equally muted. White onion, too, felt like it was there to make up the numbers. But that’s not the same as saying it was bad, and if it hadn’t been outperformed by everything else on the menu maybe I would have been perfectly happy with it.

Far better were the carnitas tacos, with so much more going on: pork shoulder braised to a tangle, along with pickled red onion which provided the contrast missing from the chicken. The finishing touch – only knobbers call it a hero ingredient – was the pineapple, which made everything pop; you can argue about whether it belongs on a pizza if you want, not without justification, but it does belong in a taco. These were the wettest and messiest of the tacos, however carefully you fold them up and however precise your bite: more napkins might have been helpful.

The one I expected to like least and liked the best was the curveball, the oyster mushroom taco. Miso glazing gave it a very pleasing savoury depth and a meatiness that stopped me missing birria, or ropa vieja, or beef in any other guise; Bigfoot’s Instagram suggests they have been offering birria tacos as a special, but they weren’t on the night I visited. Of all the tacos I tried these were my favourites, with a zigzag of relatively subtle jalapeño crema and spring onion in a pick-up-sticks formation.

The tortillas were thick and soft, up to the task of holding everything in and piled high enough to introduce, nonetheless, an element of jeopardy. I don’t know if Bigfoot makes them, but a bowl of tortilla chips with salsa at a neighbouring table looked bought in: I decided not to give them a try.

I was having so much fun that I didn’t want to leave. The air was humming with the kind of great music that makes you reach for Shazam – or would do, if this part of Oxford wasn’t a mobile reception blackspot that somehow catapults you back to 1996. Outside the table of young women was playing cards, and I made a mental note to add card games to the list of things that became hip far too late for me, despite all my many hours playing cribbage on holiday after holiday in my thirties. One of the women peered balefully through the window at me. When is grandpa fucking off? the gaze seemed to say.

By this point, all the tables inside were occupied and the outside tables, too, were filling up. Where were these places when I was in my twenties, I wondered? When I was the right age to drink in these kinds of places either they didn’t exist or they did and I didn’t drink in them, most likely because I didn’t know about them.

The only place I could think of in Reading terms that had a feel anything like this was Bar Iguana, in the early Noughties. I remember going there once, nearly twenty-five years ago, and the bar staff were too busy kicking around a hacky sack to serve me. Even then I was too old for that bar, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Bigfoot was far more inclusive to the advanced in years, and the barman told me about a drink I’d eyed up heading to another table: the watermelon margarita, also on the specials menu. So naturally I had one and it was possibly more perilous than the classic margarita because it carried its alcohol content far less ostentatiously.

A chap at one of the other tables, trying to impress his date, asked the barman if it had cinnamon and star anise in it, and was very pleased with himself when it turned out that it did. I didn’t get any of that, but it was sweet and incapable of giving offence and probably dangerously boozy. The watermelon came through to the exclusion of anything else, but I quite liked that. At the end of the meal, I did dainty little watermelon burps all the way down the Cowley Road.

And I had more tacos, of course. I could claim this was to flesh out my research, but in truth it was because I liked them and to test the only one on the menu I hadn’t eaten. Nopales tacos came with cooked prickly pear cactus, refried beans, cheese and salsa roja and oddly, in some ways, they felt the most traditional ones I tried. The presence of cheese was welcome, and it turned out that cactus – or this cactus, anyway – had a texture a little like soft green peppers. I was glad I could say I’d tried it, but it didn’t outperform anything else on my little plate.

All that – seven tacos and two £5 margaritas – came to just under £34 including tip. I thanked the chap with the beard and the beanie effusively: far too effusively, probably, because I will never be cool. I expect he was grateful for my custom in the way the members of Bar Italia are grateful that my boss turns up to their Oxford gigs.

It felt like that embarrassing bit in In Bed With Madonna where Kevin Costner tells Madonna backstage on her Blonde Ambition tour that he thought her show was ‘neat’ and, after he leaves, she pretends to stick her fingers down her throat. At least I didn’t say Bigfoot was neat, or at least I don’t remember using those words.

Bigfoot doesn’t do dessert, but you have ice cream café George & Delila a few doors down – see what I mean about 15 minute cities – or you can, as I did, cross Magdalen Bridge, waft down The High and end up in Swoon Gelato. I sat at the front, in the window, with a salted caramel gelato feeling, as you do when you hit the OX1 postcode, a little less old and unhip. I didn’t mind all that anyway, but if I had the gelato would have made it all better.

I’m conscious that this review might be even more niche than usual for my Reading based readers. If you go to Oxford, you probably want a proper meal as part of a trip to the city, and stopping at a small, scuzzy bar that happens to do tacos may not really suit your purposes, unless you’re off to a gig nearby at the O2 Academy. They do lunch, I suppose, but only on Saturdays. So this one might have more appeal to locals, or that small section of my readership that lives in Oxford (or the Oxford subreddit, which is always so kind about my work).

But I thought all that and then thought sod it and decided to write it anyway. Because I keep coming back to what I said earlier on – if this bar was in Paris, or Lisbon, or Granada, and I’d visited it on a trip to one of those cities it would appear in the city guide I subsequently wrote. I would say that the place is charming and likeable, the tacos are very good and that it’s a fun place to hang out for a few drinks even if you then go on somewhere else.

I really loved it: admittedly, that was after two margaritas, and it’s possible that after three I’d have loved everyone and everything. Even so, I heartily recommend Bigfoot, if you’re anywhere near that area and in anything like the mood for what it does, especially if you combine it with Peloton and the Star, the other elements of that holy trinity. Getting old is no fun but, as friends always tell me, it beats the alternative. Finding spots like Bigfoot, however – even if it makes me feel a 6 Music dad at a happening gig – never, ever gets old.

Bigfoot – 8.1
98 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

https://bigfootoxford.com

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Blip

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

If you plan it right, one of the great joys of this restaurant reviewing lark is that no two weeks need be the same. One week you’ll be in the town centre trying out pizza and pasta, the next you’ll be a short walk away immersing yourself in the culture of Hong Kong tea restaurants. And the following week, you’ll find yourself all the way across town – in Tilehurst, no less – checking out a smash burger restaurant that opened towards the end of last year. Three very different restaurants, all in Reading, in three successive weeks: it’s hard to get bored when the range continues to be that eclectic.

It’s one of the many reasons I don’t envy influencers: if I had to eat pizza, burgers, fried chicken and fry-ups week in, week out – let alone film myself doing it – I reckon I’d be dead behind the eyes by Easter. But it makes sense that those genres are the stomping ground of the influencer, because they’re low value (the meals, not the influencers, I should add).

If the influencer is paying, which they sometimes do, a burger or a pizza isn’t a massive outlay. And if the restaurant is handing out free food, which they also sometimes do, it’s not a huge amount to spend trying to get more exposure. Both sides of that equation would probably tell you that everybody wins, or that at least that they both do.

I am lucky that what I do is partly funded through another model altogether, so I have far more freedom to pick and choose, and I’m accountable to the people who support my writing in a different and more interesting way. But I am mindful of my New Year’s Resolution last month to stop taking pot shots at influencers, so all I’ll say is the very best of luck to them with all that.

That’s all relevant this week – forcing me to put my resolution to the test nice and early in the year – because this week I reviewed Blip, the hot new smash burger restaurant from the folks behind Zyka and The Switch, and a lot of content creators got there well before me.

I don’t mean Reading’s usual suspects. I mean well-established content creators with tens of thousands of followers. One chap said that he made a 5 hour trip to Reading from London, despite Blip having a second branch in Croydon, to try what he said was “the first halal smash burger in the whole of Reading” (Reading residents, I hope, haven’t forgotten Smash N Grab quite so quickly). Another, with almost 300,000 Instagram followers, feasted on what looked like the entire menu from, it seemed, the back seat of his car. Some of the people reviewing Blip had also visited the likes of Mr T and new arrival Smoke & Pepper.

By my reckoning, looking through Instagram, roughly a dozen influencers have eaten at Blip’s Reading branch since it opened in October, all of them enthusing about the food. That’s close to one a week. Unfortunately, adherence to the ASA guidelines is so poor – as it’s always been – that it’s impossible to tell how many of them spent their own money at Blip.

That’s especially a shame because it tars them all with the same brush: if a content creator really did travel 5 hours to Reading to drop under £50 of his own money on smash burgers, that commitment deserves to be recognised. If that’s what happened, it’s a pity to lump him in with people who have been less transparent.

Blip’s early success has not necessarily been completely caused by the buzz on Instagram, though. In November, barely a month after they opened, Blip won best burger in the South-East in something called the British Burger Awards. Now, I’m a bit dubious about awards that lack transparency about how they are decided, and the U.K. already has the National Burger Awards which has been running for over a decade.

I’m even more dubious when the awards scheme’s website doesn’t list Blip as a finalist. When I posted about this on Facebook one of Blip’s owners commented saying that the awards were genuine, completely nominated by customers and no money changed hands in order to secure a place on the shortlist.

So, we have a burger restaurant that has won an award and received multiple plaudits online, but because it’s 2026 and food coverage is in a strange post-truth world it’s still not possible to be confident whether Blip is the genuine article or not. So who do you trust? Well, possibly dreary long form restaurant bloggers of over 12 years’ standing, who hop on a number 16 bus on a Sunday afternoon to go and try it out with their own money: it’s old school, but it might just work.

A word you’ll often see mentioned in reviews by content creators but practically never on this blog is ‘viral’. Partly that’s because I don’t chase trends, more that even now, years after 2020, it still feels too soon to use the word viral to denote a Good Thing. That might just be me. But in Blip’s case it is worth talking a little about this, because if it is indeed viral, it’s a virus that has already been through a couple of mutations.

In 2023, London welcomed a viral smash burger spot called Supernova with a limited, no frills menu and simple, stripped back black-on-white branding to match. Supernova was no reservations, with queues for the best part of an hour, because hype will do that. Supernova now has three locations across London, and it spawned London imitators: French smash burger chain Junk opened in Soho the following year with a remarkably similar aesthetic and offering an almost equally pared-back menu: they now have two branches.

Then last year Parisian smash burger specialists Dumbo opened their first branch in Shoreditch, to equal amounts of hype and a renewed appetite for queuing. It’s surprising, in a city that channel hops trends and restaurants like it’s nobody’s business, to find it has the attention span to fall for the same kind of restaurant three years running.

But that’s burgers for you. I have been waiting for the burger trend to die off for something like fifteen years (I remember reviewing newly arrived Five Guys in the first year of this blog and literally thinking enough already) and I am now resigned to the fact that I will give up the ghost before it does.

The reason for that history lesson is that this trend has taken less time to reach Reading than they normally do. Reading has its fair share of burger spots and smash burger spots, but none of them has been anywhere near as brazen as Blip is about cribbing from its elders. The font, the branding, the size and breadth of the menu at Blip are like a mash-up of Supernova and Junk, the style of photography on Blip’s Instagram feed is directly lifted from Dumbo’s. If you were being charitable you’d call it a homage. If you weren’t, you might describe it as larceny.

So that explained the plain monochrome interior, the blacks and whites and silvers. But it felt, as it so often does, like the budget ran out after paying the marketing department; the logo, the menu board, the branding on the cups and the paper lining the trays was spot on, but the basic tables, the Tolix stools and chairs felt like an afterthought.

Never mind: Blip seats something like a dozen people so perhaps they see most of their trade as takeaway and delivery. There was a decent banquette along one wall and that’s where I parked myself. Something was working, anyway, because it was empty when I arrived just before 1pm and full when I left half an hour later.

The other thing that didn’t make sense was Blip’s insistence that you order using a giant touch screen and pay at the counter. I just didn’t understand this given how small a restaurant it was, and it didn’t sound thought through given that the touchscreen asked you to give your table number: the tables, helpfully, aren’t numbered.

All that said, the touchscreens do helpfully walk you through what is, in fairness, a reasonably compact menu. The beef burger comes as classic, house or house special and there isn’t a huge amount to choose between them: classic has gherkins and ketchup, house has Blip’s own signature sauce and costs a pound more. The house special comes with beef bacon and caramelised onions. All the burgers come in small, medium and large which translates to one, two or three patties.

The purity and simplicity of places like Supernova, Junk and Dumbo has been slightly watered down, because there’s also a truffle burger, and a chicken burger, and a couple of hot dogs made with beef sausage. Sides are limited to fries, loaded fries and onion rings.I chose a classic medium with extra crispy onions, standard fries and a cold drink along with a couple of the sauces to enable fry dipping, and the meal deal Blip has, the workings of which were slightly beyond me, meant that came out at £13.45: not much, in the scheme of things. Less than five minutes later, out it came.

So, the burger first. Packed tightly into a paper wrapper, it looked the part, even if it wasn’t the high-rise masterwork you might expect from the pictures on the website: to be fair to Blip, burger-sellers have been posting misleading photos since the year dot. But it was an attractive specimen, patties and cheese crammed into a slightly puckered potato bun, the edges of those burgers nicely crazed and crispy. It felt like it had been designed to be edible, as in feasible to convey into your gob without needing two hands, cutlery or a flip-top head. I was happy about that.

It tasted excellent, more to the point. The beef is apparently dry aged, and the texture of it was a joy – the seasoning, too. I would say that the patties are slender, slightly thicker than very good bacon, but not by much. My research on the burger restaurants which ‘inspired’ Blip suggests that again, this is something they were seeking to emulate rather than the result of cost-cutting. What that does mean is that I showed too much restraint going for a medium: if you’re hungry, you should go large. If you’re normal and not on Mounjaro, you should avoid small.

The classic comes relatively light on accoutrements, but the cheese and the ketchup added what they needed to: my optional crispy onions felt like they’d come out of a plastic tub rather than been made onsite and didn’t feel worth the extra trouble or expense for anyone. The gherkins – I’m 100% on Team Gherkin – were extremely welcome, pleasingly thick-cut.

Now, you might ask why I didn’t go for one of the fancier options. Here’s why: I thought their entry-level burger was the best way to judge the quality of the patties without having them struggle to be heard over the hubbub of house sauce, or truffle mayo. The one exception is that I would have had bacon, if it was on offer. I am as sympathetic to a burger serving halal beef as the next person, probably more so given the occasional comments about halal on my Facebook page from Islamophobes pretending to give a shit about animal welfare. All power to restaurants like Blip for sticking to their guns. But I’ve eaten enough beef bacon to know that it’s no substitute for the real thing: you’d only eat it if you had no other choice.

Similarly, I had my fries unloaded. If the house sauce or the truffle mayo turned out to be bad, paying an extra £1.50 to have your fries drowned in either would feel like a terrible mistake. So instead I had them as they came, with a little steel dish of house sauce and truffle mayo on the side.

Blip’s fries are pretty good, I think: skin on, nicely crispy, perhaps not as salty as they should have been. If Blip makes them onsite, they’ve done a reasonable job of chipping. If they don’t, they’ve done a very respectable job of buying. It was a generous portion for three quid, too: they came completely overspilling from the Blip branded cardboard cup, that wasn’t clumsiness on my part.

Are either of the sauces worth it given that they give you a sachet of Heinz ketchup and mayo – the only two sauces not made onsite – for nothing? I don’t know about that. The house sauce was generically tangy without knocking my socks off, the truffle mayo a little sweet, its funk slightly artificial.

Maybe I should have had the intestinal fortitude to order the homemade naga sauce, so I could tell you that it bangs or what have you, but what I thought those fries really needed was more salt and a carpet bombing of Sarson’s. Someone on Reddit once accused me of being “a cranky old bloke who will downrate a place for boomer reasons”: times like this I think he might have a point.

Oh, and I had a drink of course. A can of diet cola – a brand called Ice X Pro which sounds like it could be the name of a very cheap deodorant or a very expensive four-bladed razor, or indeed anything else. I’ve never had it before, I’ll probably never have it again, it tasted like supermarket own brand coke and I’ve wasted enough words on it already.

The drawback of solo reviews is that I can’t tell you about the onion rings or the chicken burger, and my reluctance to slather a piece of burnt Basque cheesecake with an enormous slick of chocolate sauce means I can’t tell you about the dessert offering.

I’m sure there are videos of people eating some of those dishes, trying to get their microphone as close to their mandibles as possible and telling you all about the ASMR of the crunch. But for what it’s worth, if I came back to Blip I would be tempted to try them. I’d also be tempted to have a triple burger, though, and to share some fries with whoever came with me.

It is an if, because Blip is in Tilehurst and that means that for many people in Reading, trying their burger will involve either making a special journey or experiencing it with the gradual degradation of quality that comes with every single minute on the back of a scooter. One of the things about places like Supernova, Dumbo and Junk is that they are in the heart of Soho where there is loads going on, where that meal forms a small part of a night out or a day in the capital. In that sense, Blip would have made more sense in, say, the spot vacated by Mission Burrito than it does where it is. But then the rent would have been prohibitive, which I doubt it is in RG31.

So if you live in Tilehurst you’re looking increasingly lucky, I reckon. You have great brunch at The Switch, you have a pleasant casual Italian in Vesuvio, you have a wonderful café in the shape of Dee Caf, you have Zyka and Istanbul Mangal which I’m yet to check out. And you have Blip – which, despite copying restaurants which took off in the West End of London, does a thoroughly respectable job of making the western end of Reading a lot more attractive. Give yourself a pat on the back for moving somewhere that increasingly looks only a superb pub away from being one of Reading’s most surprising enclaves.

For the rest of us, it will depend on how much you like burgers. I wouldn’t travel five hours to eat one, even if Blip paid me to do it, but I might hop on the 17 now and again. Is it the best burger in Reading? I’ll leave those pronouncements to others, partly because I went and said that Mac’s Deli‘s patty melt was possibly Reading’s best burger less than a month ago and I feel a little like I let myself down even expressing an opinion. But it’s a decidedly good burger, and if it foreshadows an acceleration in the speed with which food trends make it to our Berkshire backwater I am all for it.

Blip – 7.3
8 Park Lane, Tilehurst, Reading, RG31 5DL

https://www.blipburgers.com

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE