There’s no such thing as Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay for restaurants, as far as I know. But if there was, the restaurant whose food I ate most last year is almost certainly Gooi Nara, the Korean restaurant on Whitley Street that has been there for something like ten years, if not more. And yet returning to it a couple of Saturdays ago for dinner with Zoë was the first time I’d set foot inside since I reviewed it in 2018.
The thing is, as regular readers will remember, I moved to Katesgrove a couple of years ago, which means that, along with Kungfu Kitchen, Gooi Nara is probably the closest restaurant to where I live. And what that means is that on the nights when neither of us can face cooking we know that a delivery driver won’t get lost, won’t drop other orders off en route to our house and can be trusted to turn up pronto with piping hot food from just round the corner. Over the last two years, between us, we’ve developed quite a Gooi Nara habit.
It’s no coincidence that they won my “takeaway of the year” award in 2024 – but my love of a Gooi Nara delivery has continued ever since. It is refined and perfected now to the point where Zoë and I order exactly the same thing almost every time: dakgangjeong, or Korean fried chicken, for her and tang su juk, chicken in sweet and sour sauce for me. The latter comes ready to assemble, one plastic container of gorgeous fried chicken and a tub of sweet, sharp sauce with orange and pineapple bobbing in it (I was skeptical too, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it). It has made me happy many, many times.
Sometimes we push the boat out and get some mandu, fried chicken dumplings, as well but otherwise those two and a couple of portions of rice are everything we need for a contented chomp in front of the telly after a hard day. I especially grew to love Gooi Nara when I was discharged from hospital and could only eat with one hand: I remember the first time I had their sweet and sour chicken after my accident I could only eat half, the rest popped in a LockNLock in the fridge. It was even better cold the next day: it remains the only occasion when I’ve had any leftovers at all.
That’s all well and good but I love their food so much, and always hear so many positive comments about it online, that it felt like we were doing them a disservice by only ever ordering the same two takeaway dishes. And my review was over eight years old, after all, so it felt like high time to go back. Early one Saturday evening Zoé and I took a short amble there, tracing the path of so many delivery riders in reverse, to check it out.
First things first: it was absolutely packed at 6.30pm on a Saturday evening. So much so that they could only just find room for us, tucked away at the very back with a great view of what was clearly a very successful restaurant. The decor didn’t feel like it had changed much in the intervening eight years: it still had a welcoming, homely feel, all wooden beams and faux slate walls.
The main difference, I would say, is just how well Gooi Nara appeared to be doing. It also started out very warm, and on a punishing day as the hot plate in the middle of our table got switched on it became even more sweltering.
In terms of the mix of customers, I would say that with the exception of the table next to ours later in the evening we were the only one exclusively made up of pasty Anglo-Saxons: I did envy my fellow WASPs at the other table who no doubt were getting an excellent introduction to the full gamut of the menu from people who knew exactly what to order.
It did appear, too, that Gooi Nara had a good reputation: I overheard a conversation at one of the big tables nearby to the effect that its occupants had converged at the restaurant from many places, some miles away. Maybe Gooi Nara filled that role for Southerners who couldn’t easily make it to New Malden, the Little Korea of the UK.
Gooi Nara’s menu has changed, I think, from when I visited it last. Back then I’m pretty sure it hedged its bets, with both a Korean and Japanese section, but now it’s all kind of thrown in together: edamame; takoyaki; agedashi tofu and pumpkin korokke feature, along with yaki soba and udon.
But the Korean elements of the menu are far more extensive, and the menu can be quite overwhelming with sections seemingly for everything: soup; rice; bibimbap; jeongol (or hotpot); noodles and of course Korean barbecue. The sides, to add to the confusion, appear at the very beginning, before everything they could conceivably be on the side of.
It made me wish I had my own food sherpa – is that cultural appropriation? – to guide me through the highlights of the menu, a feeling that only intensified as I saw some gorgeous dishes waft past to other tables. Was the delicious-looking tofu (I’m not even joking) that went to the table opposite the agedashi tofu, or the Korean doo-bu jeon? I decided on reflection it was the latter. And how good did the platter of various types of kimchi look when it arrived at the table next to me, a couple having one of the most Guardian conversations I’ve eavesdropped on in a very long time?
I came away from it all feeling silly and parochial, realising that really I only knew a handful of dishes on the menu and the various bits and bobs I’d ordered the best part of a decade ago. I was well aware that on this visit I would stay in my comfort zone, even if I’d insisted to Zoë that we couldn’t order any of the things we would invariably put in our takeaway order. So we ordered a couple of starters, a couple of mains and two items for the barbecue, and even then I’d say we played it extremely safe. We might have been outside it, but our comfort zone was only a short walk away.
Everything came if not all at once then really in a very short space of time. One minute we were necking our cold bottles of Cass, a perfectly decent lager I would struggle to tell apart from Asahi, Ha Noi or Singha in a blind taste test, let alone its Korean alternative Hite, and the next our grill was switched on and pretty much everything we’d ordered was cramming in on our table.
And the table looked big, but since the centre of it was given over to said grill you ended up playing the equivalent of those sliding tile puzzles trying to work out what could go where. Try to combine that with the timings of actually cooking some of your food and the whole experience became a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time, impressive training in multi-tasking. Forget my doing those six pointless LinkedIn games every morning: this would be much better at keeping me mentally sharp.
Vegetable mandu were, if anything, even more enjoyable than the chicken ones which had been dropped off by a friendly rider so many times in the last two years. A bit more crinkly and expansive than their chicken equivalents, they had a pleasingly light, grease-free texture and a filling I could almost convince myself was virtuous. Gooi Nara’s dip of soy, sesame oil, sesame seeds and quite possibly something else beginning with S had a gladdening sharpness that complemented them very nicely indeed.
A quirk of Gooi Nara’s menu is that, if it is to be believed, you get 5 chicken dumplings or 5 prawn dumplings but a strangely non-committal “5-6” vegetable dumplings. Fortunately on this occasion we got a shareable, even number, but I’m pretty sure whenever I’ve ordered the chicken mandu I’ve been given 6 of those too. Go figure, pun not intended.
Also decent were the prawn tempura, which I would say were better than they looked. In the picture below they come across as a little wan, a tad too blond, but they had a real deft lightness and, again, next to no grease. The dip they came with, almost exactly the same as the one that accompanied the mandu, was still good but the dimensions of the vessel and the size and length of those prawns made it, practically speaking, a faff: it was a bit like trying to get a pool cue in a beer glass. £12.30 for these, so as much as both of the main courses we’d chosen.
By this point we’d also started to avail ourselves of the barbecue. Sam gyap sal, unadorned sliced pork belly, turned up looking a bit like those cheap bacon-flavoured corn snacks you can get in supermarkets, and I did wonder whether we should have gone for the spicy version, but it crisped up beautifully on the barbecue, that fat rendering and permeating just enough.
We chose the pork to cook first precisely because it wasn’t marinated the way our other barbecued meat was, to try and avoid cross-contamination. We had a couple of dishes of condiments to dip them in, and I failed to make a note of either, but one was definitely soy and the other was definitely not: I think it might have been ssamjang, the traditional sauce used with Korean barbecue containing gochujang and soy beans.
It was only later that I realised we should have ordered some lettuce to wrap the pork in: it’s hidden away, chronologically speaking, in the list of side dishes at the beginning of the menu.
My main – although the concept of a main slightly falls away when it all comes at once – was the chicken dolsot bibimbap, a dish I haven’t eaten in a long time. For the uninitiated, this is rice, chicken, veg and an egg yolk brought to the table in a hot stone bowl, so it keeps cooking and sizzling as you work your way through it. I broke up and dispersed the egg and made my way through it, and by the end some of the rice had reached the crispy state known in Korean as nurungji (I suppose the closest European equivalent is the delectable socarrat at the bottom of a paella).
I would have described this dish as a little nondescript, a tiny bit bland, if it weren’t for the squeezy plastic bottle of gochujang which came with it. The more of this I added, the more I enjoyed it, and the more I enjoyed it the more I added it: I do wonder how much you’re meant to use, and how much was left in that bottle when I was done, but it turned what could have been a trudge into a frolic.
The other thing that whole experience taught me was patience. Ordinarily I would have a moan – god knows you’ve probably readenough of them – about everything arriving at the same time and forcing me to choose what to eat first.
Eating in Gooi Nara that evening, among all that good-natured, deceptively well controlled bedlam, I realised that it was probably a very English mindset: that your food is at its best the moment it arrives at your table and it’s downhill from there, that it’s a scramble to eat it before it goes cold and that too many dishes at once guarantees disappointment.
But it didn’t feel that way here. Those prawns and dumplings sat there, keeping their freshly fried heat. The pork sizzled on the barbecue, with more on the plate waiting to take their place. Our second barbecued meat hadn’t even made it to the front of the queue. And my bibimbap was still hot, gradually perfecting its texture. What was the rush? Everything would be eaten in its own good time, in the right order, with no need for conniptions.
Zoë loved her main, I don’t think I would have done. I managed to persuade her not to have her regular takeaway order, her chicken gam-poong gi, but she ordered it with prawns instead. I was expecting this to be prawns curled up, little inverted commas in a crisp coating, tossed in the gorgeous spicy sauce that makes this dish such a crowd pleaser in my house.
Instead they were fully extended like an accusatory index finger, the tempura prawns from earlier on making a reappearance with some sauce thrown in. So deeply impractical in many of the same ways as that starter, and downright impossible to eat with rice. I didn’t order them, and I certainly wasn’t allowed to try them, so it doesn’t really matter. Zoë really enjoyed it, and maybe in the free-for-all of our meal overall it didn’t really matter that they weren’t quite what I thought they would be.
The dish they didn’t go with, or at least I thought they didn’t, was Gooi Nara’s special egg fried rice with vegetables and shrimp. Zoë, again, seemed to enjoy it but I thought it was a bit steep at £11, especially considering that you could get a bibimbap for roughly 50p more. Plus I got a bit squeezy bottle of gochunjang, let’s not forget, and this looked like it badly needed that or something like it.
Finally, as we flagged in the heat, a little John Lewis portable fans valiantly whirring away to almost no avail, we barbecued the last dish in our order. By sheer coincidence I’d actually ended up ordering something from my 2018 visit to Gooi Nara – the ju-mul luk, beef with garlic and sesame oil. It was smothered in marinade there on the plate, slices much thinner and better cut than I remembered from my last encounter, and it smelled pretty amazing before it was ever even exposed to heat. As it cooked, the aroma got more and more gorgeous: perhaps we’d saved the best til last.
Tasting it at the end of the process, I rather thought we could have done. Every single piece was buttery-soft, that marination doing its work with no notes, and although it might have been nice to enclose each piece in a lettuce leaf and enjoy that contrast, I rather wonder if the lettuce might have wilted as badly as I did towards the end of an hour in that hot, noisy, oddly glorious room. By some tragedy, Zoë found herself full halfway through my final spell as the commis chef of our table. I buckled up and finished the rest: it had to be done.
Gooi Nara’s menu only has two desserts, both of which are Japanese, but we were too hot and too full to attempt either of them. Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to £95, not including service, and of course we were more than happy to tip: even just watching the constant parade of staff back and forward to tables, carrying a huge array of fascinating dishes without ever breaking rhythm, juggling orders for customers and brown bags out to delivery drivers, filled me with admiration.
It made me think of all the Saturday nights when we’d fired up a delivery app and our food – perfect, beautifully packed, prompt and piping hot – had arrived in what seemed like no time. Every evening that happened, the restaurant might well have been as busy as it was that evening. We emerged into the sunlight on Whitley Street feeling like we’d spent just over an hour somewhere totally not-Katesgrove, but also arguably in Katesgrove’s very best restaurant. We also resolved that, delicious and convenient though a Gooi Nara takeaway always was, we needed to visit again far, far sooner.
Rating Gooi Nara this time has been quite difficult. I definitely enjoyed it more than the previous time I went, but I have a feeling that the limitations on the rating it receives on this occasion have more to do with me than with them. So whatever mark Gooi Nara gets as a restaurant, I think this might be a review where I, as a reviewer, might struggle to scrape a 7. I have a feeling that if I’d been bolder, gone further to the perimeter of the menu, I could have enjoyed it even more and it would have done even better.
In that sense it would have been nice if Gooi Nara had, in the way that great communicators like Kungfu Kitchen, Clay’s, Kamal’s Kitchen and the Moderation do, tried more to tell the story of their food and bring newcomers in. But really, that’s not mandatory, especially when a restaurant has been going for about 10 years and is doing very nicely without having to do any of that. So much as I might have enjoyed having a bit more guidance on how to attack the menu, that was definitely a me problem, not a Gooi Nara problem.
I will be back, and when I do I will try some more esoteric dishes: if you have any recommendations drop them in the comments. In the meantime, I suspect another paper bag with my regular takeaway order lurks in my not too distant future. Eat-in, delivery: get yourself a restaurant that can do it all.
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.
I first visited Glasgow over a decade ago, twice in quick succession, and came away thinking that it was absolutely one of my favourite cities I had ever been to. I loved the grand scale of its streets, the friendliness of its residents, its grit, its culture and its vitality. I’d been to Edinburgh several times before that and, truth be told, I thought Glasgow showed it up as a little pristine and joyless, chocolate-boxy and prissy.
On those two visits, I tried a bit of everything. I wandered round the People’s Palace, where the first exhibit I saw when I came up the stairs was a TV showing Rab C Nesbitt. I wandered up to the Necropolis and saw the beautiful vista of the city below.
My friend Nicola took me to the Barras Market, unlike any market I’d ever visited, trestle tables groaning with goods of debatable provenance. Inside, I reached a stall which could only be described as an Aladdin’s cave of pornography: every medium, every genre, almost a museum in its own right by the year 2014. I explored Merchant City and the West End too, all these very different parts of a captivating whole.
I went to see A Play, A Pie and A Pint in Oran Mor, the beautiful and iconic arts venue: back then it set you back a mere tenner to eat, drink and be culturally stimulated. I sat in the Three Judges at one end of the Byres Road on a Sunday afternoon and drank pints of stout while enjoying the delights of live jazz played by a bunch of septuagenarians with more get up and go and joie de vivre than I managed when I was half their age.
In the interval, one of the jazzmen told my friend Nicola and me how he’d gone on tour with Paolo Nutini, which had provided a nice little nest egg. We bought him a pint. Another gent wandered in off the street and tried to sell us supermarket meat from a carrier bag, still in its packaging, provenance again unknown. Truly all human life was there in Glasgow. I could live here, I remember thinking: the city, not the pub, although in truth probably both.
I drank cocktails in Chinaskis, and fancier cocktails on Blythswood Square – I was a cocktail drinker back then, far more than I am now – and every kind of booze in Nice N Sleazy on Sauchiehall Street, which Nicola told me absolutely had to be done if you were visiting Glasgow. It was like the Purple Turtle only brasher, and like everything else about the city I loved it.
And I ate, my goodness I ate. I ate in some magnificent restaurants which, to my pleasure and surprise, are still going strong today, institutions like Stravaigin, Number 16 and the Finnieston, along with some which to my equal sadness have closed, like Hanoi Bike Shop in the West End and Merchant City’s Guy’s. I came back from both visits saying that Glasgow was one of the best food cities I had ever been to. I swore to return and finally this month, over twelve years later, I did.
I was delighted to find that the city had lost none of its charms. It is still a marvellous, vibrant place with an awful lot to see and to do and, of course, brilliant places to eat and drink. It doesn’t, by and large, trouble the Michelin guide the way Edinburgh does, but its priorities feel different. It’s packed with great restaurants with beautiful dining rooms doing all manner of fascinating food and not so fussed about guide-chasing accolades.
It has old, ornate, gorgeous pubs – some of which are especially a joy for whisky lovers – and a coffee scene as good as anywhere’s. It has brilliant independent retail, particularly slightly out of the centre. And it has a perfectly circular metro system, the Subway, where your fares are capped at £3.40 for a day. It’s a pleasure to use.
Yet I came away from my four day visit frustrated that I had only scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg: my list of restaurants to visit next time was infinitely bigger than the list of the ones I managed to check off. I never made it to the Southside, which means I didn’t get to buy coffee and fragrance at Godshot, eat at Big Counter, knock back wine at Made Of Grapes or sample Errol’s Hot Pizza.
I also didn’t get to try the craft beer at Drygate or sample some of Glasgow’s most iconic boozers: places like the Pot Still, The Lismore, Scotia Bar, the Horseshoe. When I put it like that my FOMO kicks in and for a moment, despite having a lovely time, I feel like I barely went anywhere at all. I should have been up and about earlier, cramming in brunch, checking out the street art, spending the afternoon in a museum rather than having a delightful hotel siesta.
But that all would have required me to be a different, better person than the one I actually am (it would also have required me to not wake up hungover on any of my mornings, which was never realistically going to happen). And yet when I put pictures from my travels on Threads I got the most lovely comments from Glaswegians which fell into two categories, either Yes, isn’t Glasgow amazing? or When you put it like that Glasgow is actually amazing. I could identify with them: living in Reading makes you good at rooting for the underdog, if nothing else.
“I’m biased, obviously, but it’s the best” said one person. “Glasgow’s food is truly incredible!” added another. “You’ve chosen some excellent places” said a third, which was a huge compliment to my extensive research, as was “can confirm you went to the best spots”. Perhaps my favourite comment was “Never seen Glasgow in this way”: sometimes it’s lovely to have that experience, to have an outsider swoop in and highlight that your city is rather marvellous. But then I sense that Glasgow is a proud place, but not a boastful one.
So, all that road less travelled hogwash aside, let’s focus on the places in which I was lucky enough to eat, drink and shop. This city guide comes with the same caveat as my guides to Paris and Lisbon: I’m not pretending for a minute that this list is exhaustive, and even the multiple future visits I am planning could never make it so. It’s just a selection of restaurants, cafes and pubs that I loved on my recent trip, as kindly validated by some very agreeable people on Threads, and I hope it gives you some idea of where to start if you make your own journey to Glasgow, or makes you consider it as a candidate for your next city break.
I guarantee that if you do go, I’ll be deeply envious.
1. Brett
I did want to treat myself for at least one of my meals in Glasgow because, technically, the trip was partly to celebrate my wedding anniversary. Initially I considered Cail Bruich, the West End institution which is now Michelin starred, but eventually I decided instead to visit its less formal sibling Brett. It’s also on the Great Western Road, a great thoroughfare that reminded me of Bristol’s Whiteladies Road, but closer to the centre: let’s just say you know you’re in a fancy part of town when you alight from the metro and are almost immediately faced with a Farrow & Ball showroom.
Anyway Brett was a superb choice on every level, a classic example of a great neighbourhood restaurant whose only crime was not being in your neighbourhood. We had a wonderful table in the window with a great view of passers-by on one side and customers sitting up at the bar watching the open kitchen on the other (it also has a mezzanine, but I think the ground floor is the place to be).
Unlike some of the places on this list which are very much ‘order small plates to share and they’ll come in whatever order we decide’ – which you may or may not care for – Brett is very much a starters, mains and desserts kind of place, with an optional course which I very much recommend ordering. But really, everything was magnificent. I started with an outrageously good snack, a giant chicken wing boned and stuffed with haggis, sort of like a sausage roll if it was (a) amazing and (b) had the pastry swapped out for chicken.
It set the tone for a parade of stone cold brilliant dishes. Aged raw beef was like a tartare made with cecina, the whole thing punctuated with sweet, almost sharp apple and covered in shavings of ethical foie gras. That optional course I mentioned, which I think has been on the menu for ages, is linguini with a rich and salty mushroom XO sauce, topped with a single anchovy and a sheaf of crispy leeks, a foam of aged Parmesan on the side: not the easiest thing to eat, but quite the easiest thing to order.
The high standard continued for the rest of the meal. I liked my saddle of lamb with crispy lamb breast, cavolo nero and a bright green tomato salsa, but Zoë won the battle of the mains with an extraordinarily good dish of monkfish tail in brown butter, festooned with crispy Jerusalem artichoke, the sauce dotted with trout roe.
And then a dessert with a supplement, one you need to preorder: an absolutely faultless tarte tatin with vanilla ice cream and a sticky caramel sauce. I’ve seen other reviews say it’s a must-have but I don’t know: looking back at the menu I can’t help but wonder what the burnt honey and cardamom ice cream would have been like, and how it went with caviar.
But no matter, because Brett was just a wonderful meal from start to finish. The staff were bright, happy, authentic and brilliant at what they do, the room was wonderful – as we will see from the first four places on this list, Glasgow seems to specialise in stunning dining rooms – and the people watching was fantastic. I even enjoyed the willy-waving of the lone diner at the bar, trying to namedrop all the Michelin starred restaurants he’d been to in his conversation with the chef opposite him. There’s always one.
Brett’s à la carte is £59 for three courses, although if you’re anything like me and you have the snacks, the extra course, the supplementary dessert, welcome cocktails, a corking bottle of white and some really superb rosé dessert wine the damage will creep far higher into three figures, as it did for us. But it was worth every penny. Next time I go to Glasgow I might book Cail Bruich. But it’s hard to imagine I’ll enjoy it more than I did Brett.
Corner Shop is in Yorkhill, a bit of Glasgow I’d never previously visited, west of the more famous Finnieston and south of Kelvingrove, with its stunning art gallery, museum and park. It’s been open for a year but with its gorgeous, bright, almost midcentury dining room, its considered design and its thoughtful menu it has the air of a place that has been there far longer. It was, however, the source of one of my biggest disappointments of the trip.
The thing is, I had been admiring it and its well-curated social media, its gorgeous-looking menu, from afar for weeks in the run-up to my visit. And then we got there on a sunny Tuesday to find that they had just introduced a lunchtime menu del dia, £20 for two courses with only two choices of starter and main. Having eyed up their huge albondiga on a skewer, their squid pil pil, I was gutted.
But that shows what I know because that menu is both phenomenal and an outrageous steal, and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as bargains like, say, Quality Chop House‘s lunchtime offer. Plus, it’s only two courses if you decide it has to be. Once you’ve snaffled a pair of exemplary jamon croquetas with an apéritif and added on a puffy-crusted flatbread slathered with braised leeks and buried under an avalanche of cheese you really don’t feel like anything is missing.
That’s before we get on to the main attractions, a starter and main as delicious as they were plentiful and both superb value. The tenderest squid cut into ribbons came on stewed sweet onions, finessed with a textbook salsa verde and a bright lemon vinaigrette, and I could have eaten it all the live long day. Zoë’s in season asparagus looked gorgeous too, but there was no way I could forego the squid.
We both picked a standout main, though, an immensely generous pork chop sitting on a layer of spinach, the whole thing resting on a caramelised cauliflower purée that simply had no right being so savoury. I asked the restaurant on Instagram later what magic they had worked on it, wondering if something like miso had found its way in there, only to be told that the secret ingredient was what the secret ingredient always is: more butter than you could possibly imagine.
All that and a wine list full of treats by the glass in – I’ll be saying this a lot – one of the nicest dining rooms I’ve eaten in for a very long time. When I go back to Glasgow I will make sure I snag an evening booking at Corner Shop, but I hope their lunch menu has the success it deserves: by the end of my meal I was aggrieved on their behalf that they weren’t turning people away.
When I visited Finnieston back in 2014 that area was at the vanguard of Glasgow’s gastronomic advances. It’s still home to the Finnieston and Crabshakk, widely heralded as some of the best places in the city to enjoy fish and seafood. But I never made it to high end small plates restaurant The Gannet, on the same stretch, which closed last December after a brilliant 12 year run which included plaudits in the Guardian.
What that means is that I approached Eleven Fifty Five, its reincarnation in the same site with the same team, without any preconceptions or sadness about what had gone before. It had been open less than 3 months when I dined there on a Tuesday night, and if you’d told me it had been open for 12 months I would absolutely have believed you.
Apparently the intent was to change the venue from a fine dining restaurant to a neighbourhood bistro, which I can completely understand: I sense that Glasgow is a city that will wrap its arms round a neighbourhood bistro but might not feel quite so strongly about a plating with tweezers establishment. And whatever it was before, what Eleven Fifty Five is now is a beautiful, very accomplished restaurant. It’s almost like the people running it have been doing this for ages.
It’s another standout space – as I keep saying, it seems, about everywhere. Another grown up, sophisticated dining room, impeccably furnished and beautifully lit, with tasteful comfortable furniture, attractive banquettes and booths, bare floors, wood panelling, exposed brick and blood-red walls. In that sense, I don’t remember many neighbourhood bistros looking half this fetching.
But the menu is where you know you’re not in fine dining territory: you are instead in fine pricing territory. A couple of magnificent pig’s head croquettes, magnanimously portioned things, for £7 to go with your negroni? Why not. A pile of deboned, smoked chicken wings striped with tarragon and topped with crispy shallots? That will set you back less than £15, as will a beautiful puck of white pudding topped with a quail’s egg, perched on mushrooms and draped with lardo, the distillation of an all day breakfast into an all smiles starter.
Mains are equally good value: Zoë had the best of it with a Himalayan salt aged ribeye with sauce Bordelaise, but I couldn’t complain about my lamb shoulder, braised to soft surrender, served with poached vegetables and crispy sweetbreads. There weren’t enough of the crispy sweetbreads – but there never are, and at £22 it was still very hard to quibble anything about that dish.
Cheeses, from Glasgow’s preeminent cheesemonger George Mewes, were unimpeachable, and the “chocolate bar” – praline, caramel, dark chocolate and a really terrific Guinness ice cream – is pretty much my idea of the perfect dessert. We pushed the boat out with a bottle of dessert wine into the bargain, and had a long and happy time trying, and failing, to be the last table to leave.
We had Kevin Dow looking after us – he has been running front of house for first The Gannet and now Eleven Fifty Five for over a decade – and to say service was silky-smooth would be an understatement. I absolutely adored my meal at Eleven Fifty Five, a class act that felt to me like an institution in the making. It makes you think, that Corner Shop is barely a year old and Eleven Fifty Five is only three months into this incarnation. That says to me that although Glasgow is already great, its best days may well still lie ahead.
Here’s an illustration of the illusion of choice, Glasgow-style: there are four restaurants in Glasgow that all have a Michelin Bib Gourmand: Ox and Finch; Ka Pao; Margo; and Sebb’s. For all their differences – Ka Pao serves South-East Asian food, for instance, and Ox and Finch is more contemporary European – they are all small plates restaurants and they’re all owned by the same people. That isn’t of itself a bad thing, but it probably gives you a decent idea of what’s in vogue in Glasgow right now.
We ate at Margo on the first night, which was the place I most liked the look of on paper. And although I liked it, I liked it less than I expected to.
That’s not the room’s fault. I’ve said this already in this guide and I’ll say it again before we’re done but my goodness, the interior is beautiful. It’s dark and conspiratorial, simultaneously cosy and spacious, all gorgeous tables and even more luxe booths, and as sophisticated a dining room as I could recall – a position it held until the following night, I seem to remember.
It wasn’t the food either, because it was gorgeous stuff. Coppa came thick but expertly sliced, smoky and just waiting to be crinkled up and popped in your mouth. Really exceptional sticky merguez were topped with charred peppers and toasted seeds, curls of squid were served with thick slices of morteau sausage on a bed of Puy lentils.
The pricier plates had an awful lot to like about them too, whether it was a round of confit lamb shoulder with salsa verde or pork belly with crispy skin, morcilla and black garlic ketchup. Skate wing with kumquat was an intriguing combination of flavours I had never imagined, let alone eaten, and the single best thing we had was barbecued hispi cabbage. I know everybody sneers at hispi cabbage but this, charred and served with castelfranco and caesar dressing, was one of the nicest things I ate all week.
So what was the problem? I suppose it was that Margo, for all its talents, epitomised everything that irks me about small plates culture. Most of the plates, really, either weren’t big enough to share or didn’t lend themselves to being shared: when you’re dividing a single piece of morcilla in half something has gone wrong. Service was polite and friendly but maybe a tad cool, and asking to order in waves – my usual way of trying to apply structure to this kind of menu – was brushed off straight away as not an option.
That meant you were constantly loading half of a not very sharable dish onto a plate which was never changed, accumulating all the residue of dish after dish, sauce after sauce. And “they’ll come out when they’re ready” meant, it turns out, “they’ll all come out in the space of five minutes”: that old chestnut again. So although I liked Margo, and its food definitely deserves a mention here, it’s the one place in this guide where I would say: go if that’s your kind of thing, but consider the alternatives first.
Sebb’s is a basement bar and restaurant right next to Margo and, as we’ve established, owned by the same people. I didn’t really want to go to two places in the same empire but Zoë insisted because she thought there was something special about Sebb’s from her look at the menu.
Annoyingly, she was right.
Somehow everything Margo got wrong, Sebb’s got right. It’s instructive to think about why. First of all, the dishes were actually better suited to sharing and secondly, the service – which was warm and likeable and couldn’t do enough for you – was more than happy for us to order in bits and bobs as we went. The dishes are, on the whole, a little cheaper than Margo’s but with no discernible difference in quality. Sebb’s is more of a speakeasy, they have their own superb IPA on draft which is brewed for them by Pilot and it is, in short, an awful lot of fun.
All the dishes were cracking, too. Sebb’s shtick is cooking things over fire, and I loved practically everything I ate, from spongy lamb meatballs with a proper whack of heat to a fluffy flatbread covered in feta and sobrasada. My absolute favourite thing was Sebb’s pakora, served with a little piccalilli and a snowdrift of Spenwood, one of Reading’s finest cheeses.
But we also found space to have one of Sebb’s signature dishes, a gigantic and not-remotely-phallic Texan hotlink, coarse and moreish, with gold sauce, a Caroline barbecue sauce with more than a hint of mustard, and some life-affirming pickles.
At the end we chatted to our server, who was delightful from start to finish, and he explained that the menu had only just changed with some dishes, like their lahmacun, coming off for the first time. I got the impression they were braced for a backlash from regulars, but all I saw was stuff to love: he did say, though, that the pakora and the hotlink had been there from the start and probably always would be.
Anyway, I think they have nothing to worry about. Sebb’s only picked up its Bib Gourmand this year, and on this evidence it just needs to carry on doing what it’s doing. I would love to have dinner there next time, and to emerge from its depths at night rather than blinking into the daylight: while you’re down there time does rather lose all meaning. Interestingly, when I posted pictures of my travels on Threads, prior to writing this guide, the one place that got the biggest, warmest, most immediate response was Sebb’s. I can 100% see why.
A happy set of circumstances led us to Shilling Brewing Company. The bus from the airport into the city stops a stone’s throw away and, as luck would have it, we stepped down from it just in time for lunch. And it had been recommended by friends who’d visited Glasgow not long before, so what were we to do?
It’s a really gorgeous, high-ceilinged space that once, before being defiled as a horror-themed pub called Frankenstein (just imagine) used to be a bank. And for ten years or so now it’s been Glasgow’s first central brewpub, offering four Shilling beers along with over twenty-five others from breweries across the U.K.
Whoever is picking their line-up has seriously good taste. Across two visits I enjoyed sours from Dundee’s Holy Goat and Somerset’s Yonder, a great pale by New Bristol Brewery, very far from home, and another by Weekend Project that I’d previously enjoyed at the Castle Tap, of all places, last summer.
That would be enough to earn a recommendation, but Shilling Brewing also has a kitchen knocking out pizzas and they are very, very good. In truth mine, with haggis and Irn Bru chilli jam, didn’t manage to transcend being a gimmick. But Zoë’s, honking with ‘nduja and blue cheese, was the real deal. I didn’t get to try Paesano, one of the contenders for the city’s best pizza, but I didn’t feel short changed.
Shilling set rather an unrealistic standard, in terms of beer, for the rest of the trip. It’s not a huge craft beer city – and the other craft pub, The Raven, was closed for refurbishment during my visit – but rather a city full of gorgeous pubs that prefer cask to keg. In that sense it reminded me a little of Belfast, although Belfast’s craft scene felt more developed. But, as we will see next, if the pub is good enough the beer can feel decidedly secondary.
The only time I crossed the Clyde was on my first night to go to the Laurieston, a pub Zoë and I had read much about and were keen to visit. It’s a flat roof pub next to a railway bridge, its name spelled out in a retro typeface on the front, and nothing about its exterior gives you much of a clue about just how special it is. As we approached it we saw a sign on the front, saying CASH ONLY and cursed, but a friendly chap sitting out front told us that there was a SPAR just up the road with an ATM at the back.
I had my card with me, and I took out some notes there, cursing under my breath the £1.75 charge for doing so. Who uses cash any more, or ATMs? On any other evening neither of us would have had our wallet, and I would have been writing about a different pub here. But fortunately, I’d brought my wallet and so I got to drink in one of the most incredible pubs I’ve ever visited.
The inside is quite amazing. Both rooms are, actually. The lounge bar, all red banquettes and plush chairs, wood panelling and tartan carpet, looks like a Martin Parr photograph brought to life. But it’s not a time capsule, as the array of art on the walls, some created and donated by patrons, shows. And that contrast is the Laurieston writ large, it looks in some ways like it probably always did but is a living, breathing thing, a pub that is bigger than every person that has ever drunk there and all their accumulated stories, but is also the encapsulation of them.
I liked the public bar even more, with its horseshoe bar and little formica tables, walls groaning with art and photos. The Laurieston isn’t a craft beer place – it is completely separate from such concepts – but it does offer a fair few beers by Fyne Ales including their totemic Jarl on cask. They also have Guinness on tap, at three different temperatures. The regular and extra cold are par for the course but the mythical middle tap is the one, serving the black stuff at cellar temperature, smoother than any nitro could ever be and a hundred times more enjoyable.
I only know about the middle tap because we sat up at the bar and got chatting to Michael next to us, an ex-military physiotherapist who lives in the Gorbals and drinks at the Laurieston fairly often. The absolute picture of welcome and charm, he bought Zoë and I our second drink in the pub and an hour later we were chatting away about all sorts, sharing jokes, talking beer, talking about Glasgow and how magical the Laurieston is.
Meanwhile a couple of emo twentysomethings came in, took the stools next to us and we all started talking about the gig they were off to. The old boy a few stools along from Michael joined in, and the next thing I knew the bar staff were telling Zoë and I where else to eat and drink in the city. A pub called The Griffin was mentioned, and an Eritrean restaurant on the Byres Road called Massawa, and Michael said there is a Lebanese restaurant called Damasqino on Saltmarket which is incredible.
By the time we wandered off, two hours later and three pints to the good, I had no idea why anybody would think Glasgow isn’t a friendly city, because I’ve rarely walked into any pubs I can think of and felt so welcome and included. And there was nothing special about me or Zoë – not in this way, anyway – this is just what the Laurieston is, and what it does. I liked it very much, although I’ll leave pontificating about what makes it so amazing to the likes of Pellicle. I just know that I wouldn’t go to an ATM for almost anything else.
Michael summed it up best without meaning to as we were about to leave, pointing to a sign on the wall saying IT’S JUST A PUB. That’s it in a nutshell, he said. But the twinkle in his eye told me he didn’t entirely believe it, and for what it’s worth neither do I.
Outlier was on the edge of Merchant City, and we went there for coffee on our first morning in the city. It’s impossibly cool – I’m going to be saying that a lot, which exposes how uncool I am – all exposed brick, bare wood floors and tiled walls which have a touch of vintage Portmeirion pottery about them.
Add in floor to ceiling windows, heaps of natural light and a steady procession of the young and beautiful coming in for coffee and baked goods and you have another of those places that makes you understand why people go on bakery pilgrimages these days.
The coffee was excellent, Zoë’s cheese twist with chilli and hot honey even better. And I had a sausage roll full of dense, sage-infused pork that set me up nicely for the short wait until lunchtime (don’t judge, I was on holiday). But the more we looked at Outlier’s brunch menu the more it rankled with me that all our lunches and dinners were already booked up in the city. And then we looked at our flight time home, and the checkout time at our hotel and thought… breakfast on the last day?
So we did, and it was a capital idea. Zoë had a ham and cheese croissant – their pain au chocolat are epic too, by the way – but I really went for it with their conventional breakfast. A huge slice of toasted sourdough, crust surprisingly unlike cardboard, was topped with soft scrambled egg enhanced with caramelised onion, like a sort of reimagining of a tortilla. The bacon was smoked and streaky, as it always should be if you ask me, brushed with honey and grilled and the oyster mushrooms I’d asked for as a side were dry, meaty and remarkable.
But that’s not all: Outlier’s hash browns, a snip at a fiver, were sort of halfway between hash browns and Quality Chop House’s confit potatoes, salty golden bricks of shredded potato that defied both description and resistance. All that and a home-made brown sauce which was rich, fruity and many miles from the Houses Of Parliament. I don’t think I’ve ever had a breakfast with so many things going on, or so many imaginative things at that. It was almost – and I never say this – too much.
Next time I’m having the leek rice with Arbroath smokies, clearly their take on a kedgeree, and one of those cheese twists. And another pain au chocolat. And, and, and… I’m going to have to visit more than once again, aren’t I?
I first encountered Spitfire after my first coffee at Outlier: their roastery is on Osborne Street, which curves away from Saltmarket and ends up at Bare Bones (at the end of this list). We stopped by, bought some beans for home – they’re great, by the way – and I nabbed a takeaway latte which I loved. But we also discovered they had a bigger premises, an actual cafe, in Merchant City, so we resolved to go there the following morning.
I’m really glad we did: it’s another really handsome space – those Glaswegian buildings are big-boned, and they’re good bones at that – with a striking red white and blue colour scheme which carries through the whole space beautifully. Their coffee, as I already knew, is extremely good but I was also struck by the chance to tick off another item on the gastronomic checklist, a morning roll.
It was a corker: a floury bap crammed with soft black pudding, crispy back bacon and brown sauce, and it set me back just over a fiver (Zoë, a black pudding skeptic, said the Lorne sausage was equally fine). I really wanted to try a morning roll on this trip: I hear the dead fancy ones are to be had at Cottonrake Bakery, out on the Great Western Road, but Spitfire’s rendition made me very happy indeed.
Amulet, cyan-fronted and too cool for school, is out in Partick, just west of the Byres Road, and I actually visited it after Nowita, a couple of places down this list, which makes it slightly arse about face. Sorry about that.
It is in an area rich with cafés: just across the street you have Kaf, who some say are Glasgow’s best bakery, and Revival, who do coffee and vinyl, that classic hipster one-two. Further up you have Hyndland, an area which sports a branch of 1841, which some people think serves Glasgow’s best coffee. And the other side of the Byres Road you have Hinba, which also has its champions.
So competition is fierce, and within a 15 minute walk you have more top-notch coffee than you can find in the whole of Reading. That rather puts it all in perspective.
I didn’t go to those other places, so I can’t rank Amulet against them, but I did like it very much. It’s an attractive space – how many times have I said that now? – with exposed brick painted white and a big central island with stools, a few more in the window and a handful of low tables along one side. The welcome was friendly and the music was excellent, although I Shazamed one track to find it was by a band described as simultaneously post hardcore, punk and emo, which I took to mean that I was far too antediluvian to add it to my library.
On my visit there was no “handbrew” – I had to look it up, it means pourover and the like – because one of the team was at the London Coffee Festival, so I had to settle for a latte. It was up there with the other excellent coffee I had on this visit, without a shadow of a doubt.
The whole thing did make me roll my eyes a little, though, which just goes to show that as a fiftysomething scruffy grump I am not the kind of customer Amulet is that bothered about attracting. The hours painted on the front say 8-4 maybe in a way I found needlessly wacky, and lettering underneath said amulet is not a cafe.
‘Well, what the hell is it then?’ I wanted to ask someone, although I thought better of it because it was the definiition of a me problem. But I maintain that if it looks like a café, it sells you coffee for money like a café, it gives you somewhere to sit while you drink it like a café and plays you music like a café, in my book it’s a fucking café. For whatever my two pence is worth, I reckon Amulet is a very good one.
Laboratorio is just round the corner from Shilling Brewing Company, which means that they served my first latte of the holiday. It’s been open for nearly 13 years and is an excellent spot, although that didn’t surprise me because they get their hands on some seriously good beans: I recognised superb Barcelona roaster Nomad from my travels, and we made sure to pick some up to take home with us.
It’s an arresting if minimalist space inside, with a handful of tables and high stools up at the full length windows looking out on the world, and I can imagine it would be excellent for people watching on a good day or sheltering on a bad one. On this visit to Glasgow we got more bad weather than good, but a latte like Laboratorio’s would make that, and life in general, infinitely more bearable.
The reason I was in Partick wasn’t to grab coffee and listen to post-hardcore music at Amulet. It was because I’d heard good things about Nowita, an ice cream place opposite. I always aim to include one ice cream spot in my city guides, come hell or high water, and I didn’t want to let anybody down on this visit to Glasgow. Nowita is the creation of married couple Jill and Jamie Inkster, and it celebrates its fourth birthday this summer.
It’s bloody good, let me get that out of the way now. But Nowita makes you work for it. Its opening hours are slightly erratic: they weren’t open on Monday or Tuesday and on Wednesday, the day I dropped by, they didn’t start trading until 3pm. There’s no seating inside, just a solitary bench outside. And the day I visited, arriving 10 minutes after it opened, the rain had been constant, the clouds mutinous. It didn’t bode well for my Nowita experience at all.
There were ten flavours, all handmade by Jamie every week, and they were a fascinating mix of the staples – raspberry sorbet, vegan dark chocolate, strawberry ripple – and more leftfield options: cardamom and white chocolate or pineapple upside-down cake, anybody? But I kept it simple, placed my order and then something magical happened. The sun came out, the rain held off, the bench outside was vacant and welcoming. It was, I decided, a sign.
I tried one classic and one curveball, and both were exquisite. I liked Nowita’s salted caramel a great deal, getting the balance bang on with a very pleasing stripe of caramel, almost elastic, running through it. But the real eye opener for me was Nowita’s dark chocolate with chilli peanuts, deep and rich but with bite and spike coming through, both in terms of texture and temperature.
It made me wish I had been more experimental and tried some of the more left of centre flavours on offer. It made me wish I’d gone for three scoops instead of two. It made me wish they’d been open on Tuesday, too, but you can’t win them all.
When I went to Corner Shop I would quite have liked to try their dessert selection. But I think that option is best explored at dinner time, because I’m not sure how much dessert they’ll realistically shift at lunchtimes. The reason for that, a few doors down, is Tantrum Doughnuts.
Tantrum is one of the more famous places in this guide, because it appeared on Somebody Feel Phil, which means it doesn’t really need exposure from anyone. It’s been going for over 10 years, having started out at food markets, and although it now has a branch in the centre and on the Southside the one in Yorkhill is the original and the one I wanted to visit.
These are proper doughnuts, not the Krispy Kreme variants that still seem to be so popular in the U.K., and to have them in they’ll set you back between £2 and £5 depending on whether you’re going for a more spartan glazed ring or the full monty filled and topped with all manner of decadence. I had managed to save room after lunch for the ‘Chocolate Millionaire crémeux”, filled with chocolate and caramel, topped with more chocolate and finished with shortbread crumbs and chocolate pearls.
It was everything I hoped it would be, and then some: it reminded me of Pipp & Co doughnuts, back when they used to be better, only better even than that. I have no idea where the name comes from, unless it involves someone turning up to find that they’ve run out.
Bare Bones Chocolate is a bean to bar chocolatier – try saying that sentence a few times in a row after you’ve had a few – at the end of Osborne Street, just down from the Spitfire Espresso roastery. It sells an array of its tasteful, beautifully packaged, utterly delicious chocolate and – perhaps just as importantly – invites you to try before you buy from the thoughtfully arranged wooden bowls, using the tongs provided.
I’d like to say I bought so much chocolate because I felt guilty about wielding those tongs with abandon. But really, it’s because Bare Bones know what they are doing and their chocolate is almost improbably good. The milk chocolate, the reference bar, is exceptional. But the dark chocolate – not too dark, mind – with a hint of sea salt is one of the best bars I’ve ever sampled. Not too much sea salt, mind: do you see where this is going? Bare Bones, like I said, know exactly what they’re doing.
There’s a little table outside and they serve hot chocolate, which I’ll absolutely try next time. But more widely, Bare Bones realise that a shop just selling their six different chocolate bars would be a bit of a one note retail experience, so they have curated a selection of other lovely things – drinking chocolate, olive oil, blankets, greeting cards and so on – making it a genuinely idyllic place to wander and browse, pausing only to check another chocolate bar, just in case it needs to be added to your shopping bag.
The other thing worth saying about Bare Bones, which is a tribute to how good they are and how good some of the other places in this guide are, is that their chocolate is used across the city. If you order the chocolate nemesis at Margo? That’s made with their chocolate. If you have a mocha at Outlier – which, by the way, you absolutely should if you ask me – that is made with their chocolate too. That cross-pollination, that culinary scene where everything is supportive and interconnected, is as good a closing image of Glasgow as a food city as any I can think of.
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.
Alexandra Langlais, the owner of Insta-friendly Erleigh Road institution Café Yolk has had a busy twelve months. In January she opened Donnington Deli opposite Yolk’s original branch in a spot formerly occupied by a car dealership, offering huge deli-style sandwiches with a free cold drink thrown in (or, if you’re cynical, a cold drink you might not want priced in). I went the morning they opened and, perhaps peevishly, was disappointed that they weren’t a deli and didn’t serve coffee; I wandered off to have an enjoyable brunch at Monty’s instead.
The deli thing was probably an overreaction – nobody criticises Calcot’s Avenue Deli, after all, for not being a deli – and I’m reliably informed that Donnington Deli has finally put coffee on the menu. But I ate there a couple of times in quick succession in its opening month and, despite being impressed with the handsome fit out, it wasn’t entirely my bag. Sometimes less is more, and Donnington Deli’s almost comically overstuffed and stodgy focaccias didn’t do it for me; the prevalence of turkey, surely everybody’s least favourite meat, on the menu was also a bit of a curveball.
I’ll be back at some point once it’s settled in to try Donnington Deli again but the place was doing a roaring trade and doesn’t need any help from me either way: Langlais clearly knows exactly what she’s doing, understands her market and is expanding her business in a careful, considered way, staying close to a community she knows well. It’s mind-blowing, really, to think that Café Yolk traded solidly for over 10 years before it even considered branching out.
The more interesting development, for me, was Yolk’s actual second branch, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, which opened on Cemetery Junction last July. It was a deliberately stripped-back sequel to its older sibling, with a far narrower menu and a greater emphasis on grab and go options. It particularly appealed to me because my favourite thing at Yolk was always the breakfast burger, and that’s what Baby Yolk has built its menu around.
But in that part of town, only open daytimes, Baby Yolk had proved challenging for me to get to for brunch or lunch, and it wasn’t clear how much capacity it had for eating in. Last week, with a rare Friday off, I found myself in that neck of the woods just in time for a late breakfast, so I decided it was a sign and made my way there to see how it measured up to the other establishments in the Yolk family.
I was reminded as I approached it that businesses don’t always prosper in this location. The spot where Smash N Grab used to be was now occupied by a South Indian business called Mallu Nest, but the little hut looked like it was being gutted and it wasn’t clear whether it would reopen as Mallu Nest or something else. And of course before that it spent something like a year being the preposterously named Cozzy Bites, a smash burger place whose menu was so similar to Smash N Grab’s that you wondered if the names of the burgers had formed part of the terms and conditions of sale.
Come to think of it, before Baby Yolk came out of its shell that site was Cemetery Junction hairdresser the Funky Barnet for over 20 years, which means that – lucky Yolk – their landlord is famous Reading philanthropist John Sykes. Let’s hope they get on better with Sykes than the Funky Barnet did, given that they notoriously went to the local paper during Covid to ensure his humane conduct reached a wider audience. All that and a busy charitable foundation too: let’s get Danyl Johnson to give that man a gold plated Pride Of Reading Lifetime Award!
Still, as long as Yolk keeps making money and avoiding any kind of global pandemic I’m sure they and their landlord will rub along nicely, until it comes time to renegotiate the rent at least. But can they do that in this little corner of the Junction? I got there just after 10am, and one customer was sitting in, although there was a steady trickle of both eat-in and takeaway customers during my time there.
I loved the interior and the way Baby Yolk was styled. From the sunshine-yellow awning and shopfront to the almost space-age white shelves, showcasing Yolk’s beans and reusable cups for sale, the colour scheme is clever and witty, is bright and pops. It’s rare that the interiors of Reading hospitality businesses look this coherent and thought through, and I really appreciated it. Baby Yolk was also far bigger than I expected inside, with a mixture of high and low tables, stools, chairs and bright yellow banquettes, probably seating about a dozen people. Outside a little terrace had room for half a dozen more, and could be lovely on a sunny day.
Baby Yolk’s menu keeps it simple: five “breakfast burgers”, although the pedants among us – okay, maybe just me – could argue about whether any of the ones that don’t involve a sausagemeat patty technically qualify as burgers at all. For meat eaters you can have either sausage and egg, bacon and egg or the holy trinity of all three, for vegetarians it means egg, cheese and avocado in a bun.
Vegans get the same thing, but with scrambled tofu subbed in for the egg: I had scrambled tofu once, in 2016, and have never sought to repeat the experience. Let’s just say it was a strange time in my life.
The entry level breakfast burgers are £7 each and costs rise from there to £8.90 for the vegan not-a-burger. There are various extras you can chuck in: some, like sauce and crispy onions, are free whereas others can add up to £3 to the end product. It felt a little unfair that the vegetarian and vegan options were the most expensive things on the menu, and it also doesn’t suggest Yolk is using the fanciest meat in their sandwiches.
The majority of the menu board was given over to a plethora of beverages: frappes, smoothies, iced drinks, teas, coffees, matcha and chai. There were also some baked goods up at the counter – muffins, cookies and the like – although their price wasn’t listed. A sausage and egg burger and a latte set me back £10.70, which felt pretty reasonable, and I nabbed a table in the bay window with a good view of the room. Five minutes later, my coffee and my foil-wrapped burger were in front of me.
The first thing to say about Baby Yolk’s breakfast burger is that despite what you might think it is not a McMuffin or even Fidget & Bob’s Kennet Island homage, the O’Muffin. Part of that is the obvious: it’s a bun, not a muffin. And part is because, instead of a fried egg, Baby Yolk tops its patty with a little omelette, as its elder sibling does. Less messy, and possibly a little less indulgent.
Unlike the breakfast burger at Café Yolk the egg here doesn’t make a break for it past the perimeter of the bun. But again, this is designed for convenience and eating on the go, not attacking at a table with cutlery to hand if you need it. I didn’t mind that, but the egg itself was underseasoned: it meant the rest of the burger had to do a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting.
Similarly the patty was pleasant, if ever so slightly anaemic. When you have this dish on Erleigh Road there’s more caramelisation, more crisping of the edges. Here everything was a single texture, a perfectly pleasant spongey puck of sausagemeat which, again, could have done with more salt. All that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy this, which is unfair: I did, and it was pretty much what I needed. But was it an upmarket reimagining of a Sausage & Egg McMuffin, or just a more expensive version in a nicer room?
What saved it, I suspect, were the extras. I’d gone for HP sauce and crispy onions and the latter in particular lifted and rescued what might otherwise have been a tad workmanlike. The onions were those ones you bought in a tub, but in a thick carpet between the bun and the patty, playing off the brown sauce, they made each mouthful better. I munched away contentedly, enjoying my bay window seat and watching the comings and goings of this interesting little café. Something about its simplicity, its deliberate lack of range, appealed to me: after all, the one thing Gordon Ramsay and restaurant critics have in common these days is a strongly held conviction that menus should not try to do too much.
When I reviewed Cafe Yolk last, nearly 5 years ago, a big draw was that they had started buying coffee from Anonymous Coffee. Then they binned it off, presumably on cost grounds, and used Kingdom Coffee instead: I discovered this one sad afternoon when my takeaway latte tasted worse than one you could have picked up from Costa or Nero.
It’s unclear whether Yolk have stuck with Kingdom or even if they now get their own branded coffee roasted by someone else: although I saw their canary-coloured bags on those white shelves I didn’t go over to investigate, and it’s not clear whether they were for sale or for display only. Whoever Baby Yolk get its coffee from, I was delighted to find that it was a really serviceable, smooth latte without bitterness: a tall, generous one too for £3.70, which is pretty much the going rate for a latte nearly anywhere right now.
It is also, with the possible exception of Monty’s, the only place even vaguely in East Reading that does a latte worth ordering. The residents of New Town are quite lucky, I would say. The commuters of New Town, too, as Baby Yolk opens at 7am. The coffee was so nice, and the spot so welcoming, that I stayed longer than I intended to, nursing my coffee and cursing my bad luck that even I couldn’t justify a research-focused piece of cake at 10.30am.
It’s typical that perhaps Yolk’s most unsung move turns out to be my favourite. Baby Yolk opened last year to a comparative lack of fanfare, and significantly less comment and interest than Donnington Deli attracted less than six months later. But for what it’s worth, of all three of Yolk’s outposts Baby Yolk was the one I enjoyed most. It got everything right: I liked the concept, loved the design and enjoyed the execution.
It’s not a menu with much in the way of replay value, which might prove to be a limiting factor longer term, but it may have just enough. Also, like all of Alexandra Langlais’ businesses, it is not so concerned about getting Reading residents to cross town, as I did, to go there. It is very much targeted at its community and that community is lucky to have someone living in it who has the drive and the vision to make it a better place in which to eat and drink, whatever your preferences might be.
Yolk’s website states “Please note our Baby Yolk location is takeaway only” and they ought to change that, because it might deter people from doing what I did, wandering over on the off-chance and having a really pleasant, tranquil time watching the world go by, both inside and outside the café, the comings and goings of one of my favourite little pockets of the Ding.
Sadly Reading Old Cemetery is still closed, but my breakfast reminded me of all my happy lockdown wanderings there in the summer of 2020, a lifetime ago. If Baby Yolk had been open back then I have no doubt I would have perched outside afterwards with a coffee, or taken one with me and drunk it by the war memorial. I thought of my friend Graeme, who can practically walk past Baby Yolk on his commute to work, and simultaneously felt jealous and happy for him.
It also made me miss my old house in the Village, a short walk from Baby Yolk, and all the working from home lunches I wouldn’t get to enjoy. Truth be told, it made me slightly begrudge living in Katesgrove, which could badly do with a place like this: good luck finding a drinkable latte round there. Still, Reading as a whole is better for this kind of spot, and I just hope they spring up in some of its other unsung or underserved barrios.
Until then, it’s better that a café like this is somewhere, anywhere, rather than nowhere. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we have to hope that Cafe Yolk’s flurry of activity in the last year might serve as a blueprint for other imaginative entrepreneurs. Until then, East Reading is the lucky part. As this review goes to print we’re about to experience our first true heatwave of the year, but even without that Baby Yolk is doing a decent job of making Cemetery Junction the sunny side of town.
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.
This week’s review came about because several weeks ago I ate at Bill’s – and yes, if you don’t mind, I’d like to explain that statement. It wasn’t my choice, I should start by saying that. My Canadian cousin Claire was visiting the country for the first time in nearly forty years, her two twentysomething kids in tow, and my mother had chosen Bill’s as the venue for lunch.
Sometimes I wonder if she does this kind of thing to troll me – she likes a bit of Carluccio’s, too – but actually, once I was there, I sort of understood why. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest buildings, overlooking the churchyard of Reading Minster, and she tends to pick it when we have visiting Canadian relatives making the trip to town. They enjoy eating in a building older than their country, I think, and knowing that right outside is a church many hundreds of years older even than that.
And indeed that proved to be true. My cousin Claire and her kids were struck by the history of things, albeit more than a little jetlagged and already in sensory overload given how exponentially busy central London is compared to their bucolic pocket of provincial Ontario. But we had a lovely time, and Bill’s menu – which plays it safe and then some – suited everybody from my vegan mum to my aunt, whose dietary choices often seem shrouded in mystery, and to Ava, Claire’s daughter who apparently almost exclusively eats chicken tenders and fries.
My aunt ate avocado on toast without complaint, Ava had a chicken burger and everybody seemed happy. Both my first cousins once removed, James and Ava, were charming, polite – well, they are Canadian – and interested, and gave me hope that the future of humanity might not be hurtling in a downward spiral to despair after all.
Although I looked them both up on Instagram the next day: James’ Instagram bio pronounced Just roll me up and smoke me when I die, while Ava’s simply said My lil titties my fat belly. That reminded me that they might have been cordial to duffers like me but they were still Gen Z, and I remained many times older than I liked to think I was.
Anyway, the point is that I expected to dislike Bill’s and to resent spending money there – I’d not been since I reviewed it over ten years ago – so I was surprised to find that not only was the room nice, the company convivial and the service charming but the food was better than inoffensive.
I had an enjoyable chicken schnitzel that they’d thrown the kitchen sink at – fried eggs, capers, pink pickled onions, gherkins and coleslaw – and it was rather nice, along with fries which I approached with dread but finished with enthusiasm. Dessert was a chocolate and salted caramel tart and, again, if it wasn’t life-altering it was still remarkably above average. Perhaps my mother knew best after all: I’m sure she would say so, in any event.
My experience at Bill’s got me thinking about the other restaurants I’d put in that bracket – reviewed them many years ago, not been impressed, never went back – and made me wonder whether any were ripe for reappraisal. After a look through my list, because many restaurants fitting that description are no longer trading, I found the perfect candidate: Malmaison.
Subscribe to continue reading
Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.
Here are just some of the many reasons why I should not be reviewing the Wokingham branch of Nando’s this week.
1. It’s Nando’s.
Everybody knows what eating at Nando’s is like: everyone will have an opinion about it already. This review won’t change anybody’s mind, because those minds were made up ages ago. In the opening paragraphs of a review I usually give the context, explain a restaurant’s history and all that. How long it has been around, what it does, what makes it special, all that jazz. It’s one of the things that makes the preambles to these reviews so fucking long, which I know so many of you love.
But what’s the point?
It’s Nando’s for Christ’s sake, it has its own Wikipedia page. You can look at that if you’re interested, and read about its 40 year history, its 450 branches in the U.K., yadda yadda. You can repeat the niche pedantic point I sometimes reach for, if you like, that Nando’s is technically South African rather than Portuguese. But you won’t do any of that, I’m guessing. Because it’s Nando’s, and everybody knows what eating at Nando’s is like, don’t they?
2. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is reviewing Nando’s in this day and age.
Why would you review somewhere that feels like it’s been part of the rich tapestry of British life forever? When it first opened here, John Major was Prime Minister, and what feels like an eternity later its only role in the national conversation is to be like Debenhams or Woolworths, there and taken for granted until one day it’s gone and missed, presumably by people who never spent money there.
The last time Nando’s got significant attention in the national media was 15 years ago. Miranda Sawyer wrote an article for the Observer in 2010 trying to claim that Nando’s was cool, and a burgeoning phenomenon. If that fact alone doesn’t make you feel ancient, and it certainly does me, the cultural figures she name-dropped were Tinchy Stryder and Tulisa from N-Dubz. And they weren’t even the Debenhams and Woolworths of popular music, then or ever.
Oh, and it got reviewed in the Guardian the following year by John Lanchester, the novelist who had a brief stint as the paper’s restaurant critic. He got stick at the time, but I quite enjoyed his stuff, partly because it read like C-3PO with an expense account. “I’ve been to Nando’s literally a billion times” he said, pre-dating the trend of using the word literally to mean something other than literally by literally a few years; just a guess, but I don’t think he had.
Since then Nando’s has barely troubled the broadsheets, except for Jay Rayner popping up occasionally to say that he doesn’t mind it, presumably to try hoodwink readers into thinking he’s a man of the people. The Observer published something to celebrate the chain’s thirtieth birthday, but that’s probably it until 2032. Meanwhile the chain ploughs on, without publicity, as one of the few restaurant groups in the United Kingdom that doesn’t need publicity at all.
3. Everybody has a Nando’s order.
If we do have to have identity cards – and the notion does seem to be making a comeback – I think they should contain two other pieces of info apart from your name, date of birth etc. There should be a square with a colour on it, the Farrow & Ball shade that corresponds to exactly how you like your cup of tea: just think how much time and embarrassment that would save when you visit friends and family. And there should be a little box that lists your Nando’s order.
Because everyone seems to have one, and I don’t think they deviate from it often. Every now and again we’ll try something wacky, have the pitta or the rainbow slaw or (god forbid) lemon and herb but we invariably revert to our core order. I don’t know how many combinations you can put together from the main components of the Nando’s menu, but it must be a lot: John Lanchester would probably say it’s literally billions.
So for instance the box on my ID card would say Four chicken thighs, medium, spicy rice, macho peas, halloumi on the side. Because 99% of the time, in a Nando’s, that’s what I’ll order. I didn’t, this week, just to mix things up and at least pretend to explore the menu, but the rest of the time you could put money on me eating this.
Other people, like my wife, will extol the virtues of the broccoli, and I have friends who think chicken doesn’t count if it’s not on the bone. Some far out types would even have the wing roulette on their regular order. But my point remains: the restaurant lacks any element of surprise, and what you eat there lacks it too. So why review the place?
I know some people don’t drink tea, or don’t like Nando’s. I was on a conference call last week and, to break the ice, I asked people what their Nando’s order is. “I can’t stand the place” said one of the otherwise perfectly agreeable chaps, safe in the comfort of his home office. I guess we can put those types in the same category as conscientious objectors.
By the way, the other advantage of my ID card proposal is that, finally, we could work out who’s ordering the chicken livers. That would be the equivalent of having AB- blood, only rarer.
4. It isn’t even a Reading branch.
I know, I know: Wokingham. I can just hear the cries of “it’s called Edible Reading, for god’s sake” – haven’t heard those for a while, come to think of it. And despite having eaten Nando’s all over the place, from London to Gatwick to Bath, it’s true that I have a soft spot for one of Reading’s branches. The one on Friar Street, not the cacophonous enormous space of the Oracle Riverside, even though the latter is the first Nando’s I ever visited, converted by my ex-wife.
I rather like the Friar Street branch’s small and gallant attempt at some outside space, its homeliness and lack of polish compared to its larger counterpart. But it also faces an uncertain future because I suspect that, like Cosmo, it will be swept away by redevelopment. So although it was tempting, were I to review a Nando’s, to visit that one, it felt like a surefire way not to future-proof a review.
(Sorry. You get a long overdue Reading review next time.)
5. It wasn’t even my first Nando’s that week.
I’m not joking. Two days before my visit to the Wokingham branch of Nando’s, I found myself at a work offsite event on a business park at the far end of the Basingstoke Road, and for lunch our big cheese took us to Nando’s. By this time my visit to Wokingham was already in the diary, but what could I do? Say “I’m sorry but I can’t, I’m keeping my powder dry”? For Nando’s?
So the eight of us crossed the road to the Reading Gate branch of Nando’s, which is a huge, featureless glass box on the outside and strikingly spacious inside, with a second floor and everything. It felt like one of the biggest Nando’s I’ve ever visited, and the website Rate Your Nando’s – it’s honestly a thing – gives it an average rating of 4.42 out of 5 (I felt gratified to see that my favourite branch on Friar Street, with a rating of 4.73, is currently considered the fourth best in the country).
Everybody conformed to type, almost, and everybody ordered their usual. Tom, our youngest team member and not even thirty yet, ordered the fino pitta, hot, and I made a hackneyed joke about him getting home and popping his moist toilet tissue in the fridge. My boss, not a regular visitor and slightly thrown by the menu, had something called a “garlic churrasco burger” which they might have introduced since I ate at Nando’s last a couple of years ago.
There were a few curveballs, because I work with interesting folk. Our big cheese insisted on having a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup at the table – I guess it takes all sorts – and we had to stage an intervention to stop my colleague Natasha ordering the halloumi burger. Their ID cards would be on the quirky side, I think.
Afterwards we all concluded that it had been an enjoyable lunch, which had entirely lived up to expectations without ever threatening to exceed them. We went back to our meeting room to carry on achieving those pesky deliverables.
Even though it was a Thursday in a business park on the edge of Reading, the sun shining, this unspectacular, boxy branch of Nando’s was packed. We queued for ten minutes or so before they found us a table. If Nando’s has jumped the shark, nobody had told the people eating in there.
6. They treat chickens very badly indeed.
This should probably be top of the list, and for many of you I suspect it would be. In February Nando’s, along with a number of other restaurant chains including KFC, Popeyes and Wingstop, pulled out of something called the Better Chicken Commitment. And as animal welfare standards go, this was a minimal one: you could treat your chickens appallingly and still meet the requirements of the BCC.
It didn’t specify what you could feed your chickens, or that you had to let them roam outdoors, or that you wouldn’t pump them full of growth hormones. It was a very low bar, and the likes of Nando’s decided they still wanted to limbo under it.
The sticking point was that the BCC also required all those restaurants to swear off using what have been described in the media as ‘Frankenchickens’, a strain of chickens like the Ross 308 engineered to reach maturity sooner in order that they can be killed and eaten quicker. If you thought kids grew up too fast these days, spare a thought for the Frankenchickens: ready to be eaten in a mere 35 days. And they aren’t a fun 35 days, either – these breeds have higher rates of organ failure, muscle disease, premature death.
Here’s the most shameful thing of all: I know about this because hereditary columnist Giles Coren, of all people, wrote a column about it in the Times a couple of months ago. Nando’s might be a national institution but when you’re on the same side of the argument as Taco Bell and Frankie & Benny’s and you’re enabling Giles Coren to comfortably take the moral high ground, a period of reflection might be in order.
Here is the reason why you get a review of Nando’s this week.
1. My friend Jerry had never been to one before.
It’s true, I found the one person who had never been to Nando’s, my dear friend Jerry. I don’t even know how it came up but we were chatting over a pint after a very successful review in Oxford and he let slip that he had got all the way to a happy and fruitful retirement without once troubling a branch of Nando’s. That was that: I resolved there and then that he would pop his peri peri cherry, I’d be there when it happened and I’d write it up for the blog.
It would be an adventure! Besides, I was fascinated by the concept that any adult could make it to 2026 without ever setting foot in one. Forget what I thought of the place, what would Jerry make of it?
Picking Wokingham, though, was serendipity. Jerry is currently the artistic director of the Wokingham Theatre, and they were putting on one of my favourite plays, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? So Zoë and I booked tickets – I talked her into it by claiming that it was a romantic comedy – Jerry agreed to join us and we decided on an early dinner at Nando’s before strolling to the theatre.
I’ve always liked the interior of the Wokingham branch. The front room is more bog standard but I have happy memories of the space at the back with its skylight and bold tiled wall, so I was glad we were seated there. We were there at 6, and the place was still quietish: by the time we left the tables along that tiled wall were all occupied by big groups. Nobody there thought Nando’s had jumped the shark either.
Normally in my reviews there’s a bit where I talk generally about the menu, how much everything costs and so forth. Is it all right if I skip that bit this week, and we take it on trust that you know all that? Excellent. I had downloaded the Nando’s app specially for this visit – like another British institution, Wetherspoons, they try to minimise the amount of time you spend on your feet – so after a bit of plea bargaining and talking Jerry through what was good and what wasn’t, I placed our order. The whole lot came to just shy of £120.
We ordered the majority of what Nando’s classes as starters, even though I expect many regulars don’t bother. Peri peri nuts were surprisingly bland and lacking in crunch, and padded out with macadamias, which I’ve always struggled to like. They didn’t feel like incredible value at £5.25 but, perhaps more significantly, because Nando’s lists this for everything it serves, you know that a portion contains nearly 800 calories. They felt unnecessary on multiple levels.
More reliable was that ever-present, Nando’s houmous with peri-peri drizzle. Nando’s houmous was about as good as the stuff you’d get in Marks, and the drizzle added a nice piquancy, even if the contents of the bowl started to look like a clumsily popped zit. The pitta wasn’t a great advert for ordering anything that’s served in one, being doughy, stodgy and manifestly ill-suited to dipping. Loading houmous on to a pitta with a fork felt against God and against nature, but we had no real choice.
This too was nearly 800 calories, more calorific than eating half a chicken. I don’t know if that’s a good advert for putting calorie counts on menus, but it’s not a good advert for Nando’s starters. The menu actually includes an item called “Dare To Share” where you can order three starters for just over £12: I’ve never considered ordering starters, or sharing them, an especially daring act so I’m not sure what they’re driving at there. What risk are you running exactly, besides obesity?
Nando’s halloumi fries came as a moderately tanned miniature jenga stack of five pieces of halloumi. You had to hand it to Nando’s for giving you a prime number of these, almost intended to make things difficult.
If you’ve never had halloumi before, or only had Nando’s halloumi, I imagine you’d be quite pleased with these. But I couldn’t help but compare them to the far superior ones at Honest Burgers where four larger, better halloumi fries cost you less. They’re also organic, served with a cracking chipotle jam rather than a hypersweet chilli jam, and somehow, magically, contain fewer calories. I promise this is the last time I’ll mention calories: I’m not that kind of writer and I’m hoping you’re not that kind of reader.
By this point Jerry and I were well into a glass of South African sauvignon blanc each (and I thought he didn’t like white wine) which was perfectly unobjectionable and a snip at just over £7 for a 250ml can. Zoë was on an AF beer – Nando’s stocks Beavertown’s Lazer Crush – and we also had some water and a bottomless Diet Coke on the go.
About 15 minutes after our starters all our variations on a theme came to the table with brutal efficiency. Zoë ordered a fino pitta with medium fries, spicy rice and some rainbow slaw: the latter was my mistake, as she’d wanted the macho peas. It was, I’m told, absolutely like every other fino pitta Zoë has had in the past, because that is what Nando’s do. If I went to Nando’s for dinner tonight and ordered this dish, this is what it would look and taste like.
Because Jerry and Zoë had both ordered chicken thighs, I went for the butterflied chicken breast. Back in the old days Nando’s didn’t do chicken thighs, and the butterflied chicken breast was my go to order. It was perfectly pleasant, maybe slightly dry and lacking the textural contrast and char you get from the thighs.
To try and order things I didn’t usually order, I’d asked for this as “Sweet Heat” rather than my usual Medium. The menu boasts that this is “BBQ for the bold” and is only available for a limited time. Hobble don’t walk to a Nando’s to try it would be my advice: what did I say about how people stray from their regular order and then go back to what they know? That evening, that was me.
I also had the spicy rice, which I always order: it was slightly clumpy in a manner that raised questions but otherwise tasted exactly like every spicy rice I have ever had in the past and every one I will have in the future. The same could be said of the garlic bread, a diamond-shaped ciabatta roll halved and toasted. It had magic powers: it didn’t taste much of garlic in the moment but gave unsubtle reminders for the rest of the evening. Just as it always does: you’re getting the idea by now, I imagine.
Jerry chose the boneless thighs, my usual selection, and ploughed through them with a gusto I found oddly touching. It reminded me that I’ve wished, many times, that I could forget I’d ever read one of my favourite books or listened to one of my favourite bands so I could experience the joy of discovering them all over again, a sort of benevolent Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind where you forget not to forget but so you can be reminded.
Would I use that power to wipe the memory of my first ever Nando’s? Of course not, but watching Jerry love his chicken and wonder where it had been all his life was the next best thing, I suppose. He was our very own Miranda: o brave new world, that has such restaurants in it. Jerry chose to pair this with more of that garlic bread and another relatively new innovation from Nando’s, the “Portuguese tomato salad”. Those tomatoes could be Portuguese, but I’d be amazed if they were.
We ordered two sides, one of which was negligible and the other of which was significant. First, Nando’s macaroni cheese, which allegedly comes “with a crunchy, garlicky peri-peri crumb topping”. It does not, really. It’s a ramekin of claggy blandness with some flavourless pale rubble on top: order it if you like macaroni cheese enough to eat average macaroni cheese, otherwise don’t bother. Who am I trying to fool? It’s already either part of your regular Nando’s order or it isn’t.
Our second side was a whole chicken.
I know, it sounds a bit Henry VIII and we didn’t really need it, but I insisted because I wanted Jerry – who am I kidding, all of us, especially me – to try the product without whistles, bells, pitta, butterflying, filleting or general fucking around. Actually, for me this was probably the best thing in the whole meal and something I don’t usually think to order. Fairly plump and generous, the meat rich and not dried out, the skin scored and scorched.
Maybe this is where it all started out and Nando’s lost its way with all the variations on a theme it had to introduce over the following thirty-four years to hold people’s interest. But eating this I almost remembered what eating there the first time could be like.
Poor Jerry couldn’t tackle much of this, because he’d experienced Nando’s overload, but I made inroads into it on his behalf. It felt rude not to. A whole chicken on its own will set you back just over £17 and paradoxically, I thought it was the best value of anything we ate all evening. And yes, I’m aware that calling it a side order is an understatement and a half.
So what did we all come away making of Nando’s? Zoë said during our meal that it had aspired to a status a little like the NHS: people in the U.K. had come to expect that it would always be there, be accessible at the point of demand and be available fairly close to where they lived.
I wondered if she’d oversold it, but I looked up the most godforsaken places I’ve ever visited in this country – Runcorn and Great Yarmouth – and the former has a Nando’s a couple of miles away in Widnes. If you live in Great Yarmouth you have to go all the way to Norwich, but if I lived in Great Yarmouth I’d be looking to buy a one way ticket to Norwich at my earliest convenience.
Jerry loved it. “I’ll be going there again, or at least the Reading one” he told me later. I can well believe it, although there’s always a risk he was just being nice.
And me? Well, it remains in a particular niche – I imagine I might fancy one of my own volition every couple of years, if I can get past my misgivings about their particular brand of animal cruelty. But if a friend proposed eating there I would rarely say no, and if a work offsite happened to include a lunch there I’d feel like that was a pleasant surprise.
I imagine that, like the NHS or like Woolworths or Debenhams, I will appreciate knowing it’s there until one day the grim realities of the public finances and market forces mean it no longer is. On this evidence, though, I think that day may still be decades away, unless people start caring about chicken welfare a lot more than they do today.
So there you have it, the review of Nando’s that literally nobody needed – except maybe Jerry, but he was there anyway. I realised afterwards that I can easily count the number of bad Nando’s I’ve had on the fingers of one hand. I can count the number of amazing Nando’s I’ve had on the fingers of one hand, too: bad and amazing just aren’t what they do. Or perhaps it’s truer to say that I’ve had bad or amazing times at Nando’s, but the food had nothing to do with it in either case. Whatever. On that basis this time, with two of my very favourite people, had to be one of the best.
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.
Edible Reading 