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.
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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.
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The conventional wisdom is that food trends start out in London and, like the light from a dying star, by the time they reach Reading they are just memories of something that is no longer there. Something about the eternity it takes them to hobble down the M4 strips them of any interest or novelty value, and it’s the same for restaurant chains: with a few encouraging historical exceptions, like Honest or Pho, by the time anyone opens a branch in the RG1 postcode the Fonz, waterskis strapped on, has well and truly cleared the shark.
The truth is, if anything, more nuanced and even more cheerless than that. First of all, most food trends never become a thing anyway. Every January the broadsheet food Stattos, a wan bunch of gastronomic psephologists, proclaim what the big trends of the next 12 months will be, and the majority of them never come to pass. Just as life is what happens when you’re making other plans, food trends tend to ambush everybody: nobody sees most of them coming.
Secondly, most of them never make it to Reading. You could wait a lifetime for a small plates restaurant, a tapas spot, a natural wine bar, a chop house or anything else for that matter. I don’t know what it is about our mixture of attractive affordable buildings with plenty of outside space that catch the sun, our kindly and philanthropic landlords and our imaginative and not remotely complacent local authority, but for some reason entrepreneurs look at all that and say Nah, you’re all right. What spoilsports they are.
Instead we get a Cosy Club, and a Rosa’s Thai, and a Popeyes, and a Taco Bell, and a regular attack of the glums whenever we set foot inside the IDR. Lucky, lucky us. So it goes: head to Oxford, Swindon or Newbury for tapas, small plates or natural wine, because you’re not getting that stuff in Reading.
As a result we get our own micro trends which often seem to have nothing to do with what’s going on anywhere else, like the year we got a glut of sushi restaurants, or biryani places, or pizza spots. And the funny thing is, the result of everyone trying to jump on those bandwagons is that nothing is sustainable. Biryani Mama closed recently on St Mary’s Butts, and Biryani Boyzzz has been fined shitloads of cash for poor hygiene: perhaps all those Zs are reflective of the fact that they fell asleep at the wheel.
And remember our influx of great pizza restaurants last year? By all accounts Paesinos has sacked its chef, Amò is still closed due to challenges with the building for nearly five months and counting (read into that what you will) and since Dough Bros has changed hands it’s removed all pork and ‘nduja from its menu, leaving you instead with turkey ham and “spicy beef chunks”. Fair play to them, I suppose, but that’s not Dough Bros any more. All that’s left is Zi Tore, which is the gastronomic equivalent of Ringo being the last surviving Beatle.
This year’s Reading trends are, to me at least, profoundly depressing because they reflect a poverty of culinary imagination, of degradation disguised as progress. You might get excited about vans serving jacket potatoes, and Reading now has a couple, but I remember when the Broad Street Mall having a Spud-U-Like made it a figure of fun, not a lifestyle destination. Are we really meant to see this as an improvement? Did people ever really think “fuck an affordable bistro, what this town really needs is a jacket spud loaded with tuna and cheese?” I hope not.
The other Reading food trend this year has been the munch box, a phenomenon with its own Wikipedia page, highlighting its origins in Scotland (“the selection of foods included in some boxes has been criticised for being nutritionally poor” Wikipedia says, with a talent for understatement). So naturally, for the times when a baked potato is too cheap and cheerful and you want to splash out, why not go crazy and buy a munch box? Treat yourself.
“I’ve found the best munch box in Reading” said some goon on Instagram recently, coming to you live from a car park. That’s great: I’m sure the whole town will sleep easier now. It’s all very low rent, but that’s 2026 for you. Nobody can afford rent.
A trend which emerged last year in London was one I would dearly love to see in Reading: rotisserie chicken. The Observer called it about this time last year and, late to the party as ever, the Telegraph chimed in to that effect in January. Both mentioned London venues like Borough Market’s Café François and Shoreditch’s Knave Of Clubs along with Bébé Bob, which so underwhelmed me a couple of years ago. “The rise of luxe rotisserie chicken”, enthused the Observer. “How France’s most famous market food became a cult British hit” was the Telegraph‘s summary.
It’s true, though. Rotisserie chicken is huge on the continent, and nowhere to be seen in Blighty and I personally consider that a terrible pity. When I remember Montpellier, where the twice weekly food market under the aqueduct boasts multiple traders, all selling delectable looking chicken, I think it’s a great shame that it’s never caught on here. And that’s just markets, but the restaurants! When I recall the glories of eating at Montpellier’s Les Freres Poulard or Lisbon’s Bonjardim I wonder what’s taken this movement so long to even consider crossing the water.
So imagine my surprise earlier in the month when I discovered that this particular trend – with lightning speed, in the scheme of things – had bypassed Reading completely and taken root in Oxford. I’d just had lunch at Cuttlefish with my dear friend Jerry and, on the way to our pub for the afternoon, we walked past another pub, the Port Mahon. I’m incapable of doing that kind of thing without rubbernecking for a menu and there, on a sign out the front, it boasted ROTISSERIE CHICKEN and, come to think of it, OUR FAMOUS £5 NEGRONIS. They had me at the chicken, the negronis were just a bonus: I made a mental note to investigate further.
Back home I did some research and the pub looked promising. Although it’s been around since 1710, it seems that a couple of years ago it came under new ownership and, by the looks of it, decided to focus on food, taking on chef Paolo Cangiano. A new dining room followed last year, as did positive reviews on both of the main Oxford food websites. Although the majority of those visits were comped: Bitten Oxford extracted 3 free meals from the Port Mahon in the space of 7 months but, of course, all views remain their own.
Nonetheless I saw enough to nudge it to the top of my list so last week, on the most glorious Saturday the U.K. has seen so far this year, Zoë and I hopped on a train to investigate, stopping only to collect a lot of cheese in the Covered Market, sample one of Hamblin Bakery’s excellent sausage rolls and grab a pre-lunch coffee in Peloton Espresso’s wonderful back garden. Spring had well and truly arrived, and I’d had my first sunshine pints in the Last Crumb the weekend before, after a brilliant and buzzing readers lunch. So this is what al fresco life in Britain can be like, I remembered thinking.
The pub is actually very handsome. I think it’s a Greene King (although that isn’t necessarily an obstacle to doing amazing food) and the labyrinth of rooms inside, all on slightly different levels, is cosy and attractive, all bentwood chairs, pews and red curtains. On my wander through I managed to somehow miss the dedicated dining room completely, but from the pictures I’ve seen it’s also a lovely, grown-up space.
That makes the Port Mahon somewhere you could go for food or just for drinks, and from the interior I could easily imagine doing either. But we were greeted by Cangiano himself and asked where we fancied sitting, and the outside space called to us. Again, it’s surprisingly large and much of it catches the sun, and it was a thoroughly agreeable spot with bunting, covered areas and a real feeling of lightness and buzz.
It reminded me – in Oxford terms – of the sadly departed Jam Factory, which used to be one of my favourite spots to stop for a pint before catching a train home: I still miss that place. It also reminded me, to talk about Reading for a moment, that nowhere in Reading boasts outside seating this pleasing where you can also get really good food. The Nag’s has a great beer garden but limited food, Park House is pleasant enough for both but not stellar. That the Rising Sun is as good as it gets rather sums up the state of affairs: I haven’t updated my guide to al fresco dining in Reading since 2022, but perhaps I’ll just put up a page saying Don’t bother.
It was too hot a day for those £5 negronis, and a pint of something cold and refreshing was required. I was pleasantly surprised by the Port Mahon’s selection, so although it had macro lagers and ciders in spades there were just enough pales to make it interesting: the sessionable A Little Faith by Northern Monk and Pale Fire by Pressure Drop. The latter was our choice and it was absolutely what the moment demanded. The sun beat down, and our first sip – this was rather a late kick-off given a happy time at StageCraft the night before – made everything right, all grievances forgotten.
The Port Mahon has, I would say, pulled together a very pleasing menu. A good array of snacks, all of which lend themselves to sharing, five starters and eight mains sent out all the right signals about not trying to do too much, and if I hadn’t gone with rotisserie chicken on my mind I could have tried countless other dishes. Next time, perhaps I’ll try the meatball pappardelle or the butterflied seabream with orange and fennel salad. But it also gave me confidence that next time the menu might well be different: after all, this set of dishes was very different to the one I’d seen online.
You could potentially argue that the pricing was slightly wayward, with some of the snacks coming in more expensive than the starters, but I thought that was to suggest they were bigger portions to share. Again, a pub where you could drink great IPAs in the sunshine and keep yourself topped up on beer snacks sounded like something I would love in Reading. And nothing was expensive, really: starters maxed out at £8.50, only a couple of mains were north of £20.
One dish that seemed to have been on the Port Mahon’s menu since they reopened and Cangione came on board was the pub’s pork belly bites in soy, honey and sesame and, rotisserie chicken aside, they were the first name on the team sheet. They were a winner, a tumble of nicely caramelised cubes, fat rendered enough and the glaze sticky, sweet and potent with a slight building heat. I would have put these in the beer snacks section, personally, but what do I know about menu taxonomy?
Either way these were a real pleasure and the kind of dish any menu could find room for somewhere: about as different from their siblings last week at the Jolly Cricketers as I am from my sibling but, just like me and my own sibling, equally lovable. Also they were £8.50, so better value than either of us.
We also went for the buffalo cauliflower wings, from the snack section of the menu. These were a bit pricier at £12.50 but, as I’d suspected, very much sized to share. They were very close to spot on, but with something like this it’s human nature to focus on how they fall short. So I really loved the pub’s buffalo sauce, which had exactly the kind of acrid, vinegary heat I’m looking for. The little bits of what I thought were fried onion on top were a nice touch, along with a little verdant flash of herbs. And the cauliflower was nicely done, not too soft, not too unyielding.
If I’d known in advance that it would be a sort of mulch of cooked cauliflower in a superlative buffalo sauce I might have still ordered it and, as I did, I would have enjoyed it. But I’d like the coating to have crunch and to adhere, and for the whole thing to be tossed in the sauce at the end and brought to me tout suite before everything started to go awry and soggy. That didn’t happen here, I don’t think, and it was the only thing marring what would otherwise have been another perfect beer snack.
The chicken wings, at the same price, might have pulled this off better but I really couldn’t be doing with all the faff. I would have these again in the hope that the pub pulls them off, and if it didn’t I would be a little disappointed but, as I did this time, I would still eat every last morsel.
The biggest disappointment, for me, was the focaccia. It was, to be fair, only £4 but it was dense and doughy, no air, no crust and no crackle, just some spongey, cakelike cuboids that were a little bit too much like hard work. I’m not sure what the dip in the middle was: it looked like mayo but had a sizeable whack of vinegar. But the focaccia had a job to do anyway ensuring that not an iota of the buffalo sauce, or the soy and honey glaze, went to waste. No harm done, ultimately.
Service from everybody in the pub, from the chef to the cheery chap behind the bar to the servers who brought our food out, was bright and infectious, and the Port Mahon gave the impression of being a happy little brigade. We were asked whether we wanted our main course straight away or wanted to wait a while and – rather uncharacteristically, I guess – we told them to bring it on. That’s rotisserie chicken for you: it realigns the priorities.
Sometimes, when I eat on duty without Zoë, we play this little game where I send her pictures of my food and ask her to guess whether it was good or not. Let’s play it now: what do you reckon to this?
First things first: this is a really generous plate of chicken and gubbins for two people, for just over £32. I think the Port Mahon has taken a tip or two from the Chester Arms’ legendary steak platter without, like Headington’s Six Bells, ripping it off lock, stock and barrel. So you get everything you could possibly want on that steel plate, no need for sides or add-ons.
And everything that goes with it is corking: the big, handsome lettuce leaves pooled with Caesar dressing, the substantial croutons with just enough give, the little sunshine-yellow ramekin of what they call ‘Mahon mayo’ (surely Mahonnaise?), they’re all marvellous. You could almost make yourself a Caesar salad with this, although the menu already boasts one which also includes eggs, bacon and anchovies and a healthy dose of I-almost-wish-I’d-ordered-that.
But the Caesar salad would omit the chicken fat potatoes, and they really are very nice indeed. The texture of them was ideal, the crunch to fluff ratio almost impossible to fault. I’d have liked that chicken fat to make its presence more felt, I’d have liked them saltier, but I’d like many things I won’t get and that, in some way I don’t fully grasp, will eventually make me a better person. Possibly.
That’s all well and good, you’re asking, but what about the chicken? And well you might. Well, like a lot of it, it was a lot of the way there. The leg meat was a tiny bit tough, almost gamey, and there wasn’t perhaps as much of it as I’d hoped. But the succulence of the breast made up for that, and the flavour that had permeated it did too: I don’t know whether the Port Mahon brines it, but I got lemon and I enjoyed the green sauce that had been sparingly drizzled over it. All that was truly serviceable, and then some.
But the other thing it really missed, the thing that makes rotisserie chicken so miraculous, was crispy skin. If you get that right, a lot of the other stuff either falls into place or, more likely, just doesn’t seem so important. It was the single biggest thing that the Port Mahon needs to work on, whether that’s by rubbing with salt and lubricating with butter or any other form of chicken-centric witchcraft, but a rotisserie chicken with slightly elastic skin is one that hasn’t lived up to its potential. Trust me on this: as someone with a lifelong track record of not living up to mine, in the words of Jason Lee in Mallrats, we can smell our own.
The dessert menu just has three items on it, and despite the retro appeal of a raspberry ripple Arctic Roll, the chocolate tart got both our votes. What a strange dessert it turned out to be! I mean, it was delicious: the ganache rich and pleasingly irregular, the pastry dense if perhaps slightly underbaked. I really loved the boozy cherries, both of them, and the little heap of crème fraîche they perched on: crème fraîche would always be my accompaniment for a dessert this rich.
But the size of it was just so strange, such a thin sliver. I know it was only £6.50, and perhaps that’s how the Port Mahon keeps it at that price, but it felt jarring. Somebody had a protractor in that kitchen, and they liked it slightly more than they liked customers: considering the manifest generosity on display everywhere else on the menu, this felt like a blip.
I might have stayed longer and ordered more drinks but Oxford’s best beer garden, in the shape of the Star on Rectory Road, was beckoning and I was conscious that Zoë had never been there before. So we settled our bill – £95, including service charge – and were on our merry way.
The rest of the day was another reminder of everything that makes Oxford a great city – pints of Steady Rolling Man at the Star, a sneaky Swoon gelato on the way to the station and a beer at Tap Social in the Covered Market when we realised we had time before taking the train we wanted. I am very lucky that my Oxford reviews always do quite well in terms of readership, but then it’s never a chore to write about somewhere with such abundant charm.
Reading’s part-time visiting academic and full time transphobe Julie Bindel recently wrote a laughable article in the Spectator – of course it was the Spectator – about how she couldn’t stand gastropubs. It was so full of bad, inaccurate observations that at first I mistook it for a Michael McIntyre routine, but Bindel’s central assertion, under the sophisticated and nuanced headline I hate gastropubs, was that pubs should stick to cheese sandwiches and Scotch eggs, and of course she had a swipe at sourdough and triple-cooked chips, because apparently it’s still 2010.
Just to generalise further about a world Bindel doesn’t actually live in, these pubs are apparently all staffed by “blokes with sleeve tattoos and beard oil”: it’s a wonder she didn’t throw in the word ‘new-fangled’ while she was at it. To be fair, her article also included the quote “As a rule, I am not a fan of pubs” which rather makes you wonder why the Spectator paid her to write an article that is essentially a big steaming heap of Bean Soup Theory.
Still, it’s nice to know that Bindel can be wrong on multiple topics: I guess the Brexiteer ghouls who read the Speccie lap all that up. The point is, call them pubs or call them gastropubs – who really cares? – but either way they are, in all their forms, a big part of how people eat in this country in 2026. And when they’re done well, they are terrific places to eat and drink, or just drink, or pick at snacks with a really good pint. Getting hung up on what you call them completely misses the point that they’re an essential element of food culture here.
Whether they are the centre of village life, like the Jolly Cricketers, or bravely trying to do something else with a centuries-old boozer like the Port Mahon, they matter. And even if the Port Mahon doesn’t get everything right, it does enough to deserve plenty of support while it works on the rest. I liked it a lot, I’m rooting for it and I’m sad that Reading, for all its pubs, doesn’t have anyone even trying to offer something like this.
That’s another food trend that hasn’t really bothered with our town. I’d love an excellent independent food pub, I would really love somewhere doing rotisserie chicken like the very best of the stuff on the continent. Both of them in a single venue? Don’t be ridiculous: it will never happen.
The Port Mahon – 7.7 82 St Clements St, Oxford, OX4 1AW
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There are many restaurants I would love to visit but know, realistically, that I never will. You only have so many hours in the day, weeks of annual leave and pounds in your current account. I may never eat in San Francisco, or New York. I might never get back to Montreal, a city I loved nearly twenty-five years ago, to eat my way round it.
Zoë and I try to do at least one trip every year to a place we’ve never been together: in 2024 that was Lisbon, last year Oviedo. This year – next month, in fact – it’s Glasgow: if you have any Glasgow recommendations, put them in the comments. But that’s slow progress, and the list of places I would like to go will see me out, even if I were to devote myself to that and nothing else.
In this country, right at the top of that list sits the Parkers Arms, a pub in Lancashire’s Forest of Bowland, a beautiful part of the country by all accounts. I would defy you to look at the Parkers Arms’ Instagram or read any of the many breathless reviews of the place online and not want to eat everything proprietor Stosie Madi cooks up, from pies to langoustine, from pasta to partridge. Clay’s owners Nandana and Sharat are enormous fans, and when people who cook that well admire somebody’s work you do rather sit up and pay attention.
But I am not a driver, and if you live in this part of the country getting to Newton-In-Bowland is a challenge to put it lightly. By the looks of it, if I caught the bus from outside my house at just past 1 o’clock and absolutely everything went my way, I could be there just in time for dinner. I’d be absolutely broke, have nowhere to stay and no way to get home, but I guess I could just about do it.
Plus of course if I ate there once – me being me – I would be devastated at all the things on the menu I’d missed out on, and then I’d wonder how I could manage to do it again. Sadly the likes of Bruges and Málaga are quicker, easier and cheaper to get to than bits of our own country: that’s public transport for you.
But as it happens, Madi is indirectly responsible, via a strange chain of events, for this week’s review. For the last couple of years she’s been incredibly supportive of my writing, which I think she discovered through my slightly crabby review of Planque, Vittles‘ favourite London restaurant, and occasionally she’s recommended reviews of mine through her own social media. That led to me being followed on Instagram by the Jolly Cricketers, a pub in the Chilterns that I’ve always known of by reputation.
Then, one day last month, the Jolly Cricketers contacted me and asked if I’d ever consider reviewing them. Owner Amanda told me that she had run the pub, at the heart of its village, for coming up to eighteen years and said that any friend of the Parkers Arms was a friend of theirs. I said I would see what I could do, but that it wasn’t the easiest place to get to by public transport, and they said they completely understood. “Maybe one Friday you’ll find I’ve eaten at yours, when the review goes up”, I told them. “Maybe one day”, they said.
That did make me think. After all, the Jolly Cricketers was a darned sight easier to get to than the Parkers Arms, so perhaps I owed it to both pubs – and myself, of course – to make the bloody effort to get to the one I could reach. It was less than an hour in the car, or I could take a couple of trains. It took two hours, but what else was I going to do on a Saturday?
And then life took one of those unexpected turns. My dad died, and the venue we picked for his celebration of life – we didn’t, as a matter of policy, use the F word – was a lovely venue halfway between Beaconsfield and Gerrard’s Cross, deep in the Chilterns. When I looked it up on Google Maps, I couldn’t help but notice, because in the midst of death we are in life, a couple of minutes’ drive north of the venue… was that the village the Jolly Cricketers was in? It was, and so I booked a table for the day after my old man’s sendoff. I told myself it’s what he would have wanted.
By the time the day came, it was exactly what I needed. And that’s not to say that his sendoff the day before, the day he would have turned 80, hadn’t been lovely, because it was. The music, picked with expert assistance from Zoë, was spot on (a bit of Dylan, James Taylor, Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher and Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis). The pictures of my dad captured him just right: there he was looking suspiciously down the lens at me in one; holding one of his extensive collection of fountain pens in another; behind the wheel of his beloved Mustang in a third.
My brother Matthew, back from Australia, made a beautiful speech, and I read a poem my dad had written in anticipation of the day he left us, feeling like a pale imitation. And there were people from every stage of his life: his family, all the way back from his childhood in Bristol; friends from his badminton era; his tango era; his performance poetry era; neighbours; my mum and my stepfather, paying their respects.
It was as good an event as those events can possibly be, and when we had drinks afterwards in the nearby hotel it became clear that everybody had learned at least something new about my father, a complicated cryptic crossword of a man at the best of times. “I never knew about the poetry” said my cousin Wayne, sipping his cider from the bottle. “I didn’t know him that well” said a neighbour of his, “and after today, hearing all that, I wish I’d known him better.”
You and me both, I almost said, but I was glad that the celebration of his life had made people realise it was a life worth celebrating. Afterwards, when everyone had taken their leave Matthew, my stepmother Tricia, Zoë and I had a late meal in the hotel restaurant and agreed that we had done a good job of honouring his memory. The question of what next? hung there unspoken: that was for the future.
But when I woke up the following morning, wrestling with an unfamiliar shower in the hotel bathroom, it hit me: he was gone. He’d been gone already, of course, but now he was gone gone. And I felt that flatness everybody told me I would inevitably feel at some point. I congratulated past me on booking somewhere nice for lunch for this new phase, this unfamiliar landscape. Even if it hadn’t been what my dad would have wanted, it was what I needed.
But first my brother, Zoë and I did something rather magical. A short walk from the centre of Beaconsfield is Bekonscot, the oldest model village in the world. It’s close to celebrating its centenary, and I found it enormously touching that it had survived all this time, a little time capsule of Merrie England in the Thirties which managed to be wholesome and beautiful rather than some kind of billboard for the bullshit Britain Brexiteers want us to return to. My dad wasn’t even born when it welcomed its first visitors, and wouldn’t be for over sixteen years.
I’ve spent much of the winter and spring watching Gilmore Girls and Zoë would quite like to live in Stars Hollow rather than Reading (although I’d run out of places to review very quickly). But Bekonscot might give it a run for its money: at the risk of channelling my inner Bill Bryson, it is an utterly magnificent place and I rather feel everybody should go there and experience the sense of wonder at least once.
Everywhere I looked the attention to detail was incredible – there was a railway with multiple stations, a cable car, a harbour, a pier, a gorgeous deco Tube station. A football match played out by the riverbank, the picture house advertised a motion picture starring Oscar Winna and Carrie Zmatik, folks danced round the maypole outside a handsome church, the little train chuffed from one stop to the next, adults and kids towered over every diorama, peering, fascinated, taking photos.
And there I was with my brother, on the first day of this new phase, going round a model village together, somehow a lot more adult than we had been a couple of days before, or the month before that. That makes it all sound sad, which it wasn’t completely, but it was poignant all the same. Would my dad have enjoyed Bekonscot? He was an engineer, he would have appreciated the precision. But the answer is that I didn’t know, and now I had no way of finding out: now that, that is sad.
It’s just over a five minute drive from Bekonscot to Seer Green, proudly proclaimed on the signs as “The Cherry Pie Village”. It really is a gorgeous place, and the Jolly Cricketers is in a beautiful spot one side of the churchyard. Even the church, in the sunshine, was delightful: tables and chairs out in case you wanted to stop and rest, a cafe inside with its own Instagram account. And the pub was a picture postcard perfect spot, wisteria running along the top of the racing green window frames. It could easily have belonged in Bekonscot too, if only it had been a lot smaller.
It was made up of two rooms, a larger bar and a smaller dining room, although I imagine you can eat in either. The staff told us it was a quiet lunchtime so we could sit anywhere, and they very kindly let us expand into a table that would ordinarily seat six, my brother, my stepmother, Zoë and me. Sun poured through the windows, and the cricketing theme was worn lightly: a ball on the mantelpiece, the menu broken into sections saying Warm Ups, Openers, Main Play. It was an extraordinarily handsome space, somehow a very classic dining room transplanted into a gorgeous old pub without remotely jarring.
One of the nice things about going to a place like the Jolly Cricketers in a large group is being freed of the tyranny of having to choose something different to everybody else. And – I can’t imagine why – all four of us were in the mood to eat our feelings that day, so we attacked every section of the menu and gave ourselves permission to order without fear of hesitation or repetition.
My brother had an alcohol free beer, Zoë and my stepmother tried the alcohol free gin and tonic and I, the sole drinker, regretted not being able to order a bottle from the wine list, especially because the pub stocked fascinating-looking natural wines from Woodfine, a winery in the village. I consoled myself during the meal with a Spanish Chardonnay which was extremely good and a Rioja which was even better. Even so I suspected that the real treats were further down the wine list – especially a Saperavi and a Xinomavro, both around the £50 mark.
Now, on to the food – and before you judge, I’d just like to say again that it was a very particular set of circumstances. First, the Scotch egg. We had two of these between the four of us and I absolutely adored it, the pork coarse and judiciously seasoned, the Burford Browns spilling golden secrets, a smattering of salt flakes to sprinkle on top. It took me back to the glory days of the Lyndhurst, and made me wish I had a pub doing food like this within walking distance. The yolk was a little runny for my stepmother’s personal taste, the lack of brown sauce or any other condiments won Zoë’s seal of approval: on balance, a palpable hit.
Even better were the cubes of crispy Chiltern pork in a cairn with a little bowl of apple sauce for dipping. These were simple, bronzed and moreish beyond measure, and if I ever sweep to power every licensed establishment will have to offer this dish or something like it. I doubt many would make it seem as easy as the Jolly Cricketers did, though: such simplicity, just pork, salt and apple.
I regret the fact that we only ordered one portion of these, and I stand by that despite the sheer quantity of what we got through, but it was indisputably excellent value at £8.50.
The last of our trio was padron peppers, ordered because Zoë loves them; my stepmother, not unreasonably, said “I can make those at home”, and I’ve always felt I can take or leave them.
But if you do like padron peppers, and plenty of people do, these were as good an example of the genre as you’ll find. I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of serving them with aioli, mainly because I’ve never seen that done before, but the padron pepper expert among us was very happy with them. Also £8.50 for these, which I found a tad strange: the crispy pork felt like a much better return on investment.
I didn’t take a picture of my starter, even though I was sure I had. Can you believe I still make rookie mistakes like that after nearly thirteen years? I’m going to plead extenuating circumstances and tell you that my crispy squid was a knockout, beautifully fried, still tender, plenty of it. You could eat it with a fork, and I started out that way, but once it cooled enough for me to pick it up and dab it in a simple but exquisite dip of honey, soy and garlic I abandoned decorum and did exactly that.
This is a dish you see on pub menus fairly often, but you would struggle to find it executed as well as the Jolly Cricketers do: this would, I discovered, turn out to be a theme. The pub’s menu doesn’t lean too heavily on provenance, but it does say that fish and seafood come from Newlyn’s Flying Fish, a name I recognise which inherently inspires confidence.
My brother was torn but ended up going for the asparagus. He really enjoyed it, and it had plenty going on with sumac labneh, cherry tomatoes and olives, a moat of the most arresting-coloured extra virgin. I didn’t eat this, so I won’t sit in judgement too much, but just the four spears felt a little underbalanced and it didn’t look like the sourdough crumb made its presence felt. It was the most expensive starter on the menu at £12.50 and I was glad I hadn’t ordered it myself, but for all I know it probably – as wankers like to put it – “ate well”.
I think the people who really ate well – because repeat after me, dishes don’t eat well, people eat well – were Zoë and my stepmother, who went for the French onion soup. The pub had said recently on Instagram that it was back on the menu by popular demand, and that demand was echoed at my table. It really did look the part, a deep brown panacea packed with onion, topped with a hulking permacrust of molten cheese studded with epic croutons.
And in case that wasn’t enough for you, there was also a thick wodge of excellent bread speckled with caraway seeds: not necessarily that French, but a very welcome interloper. “It was maybe ever so slightly too sweet from the onions” Zoë told me later, “but that’s niggling. Besides, the cheese more than made up for it.”
By this point it looked like we might be the only lunchtime customers in the dining room that day (which goes to explain why the pub also offers a locals set menu lunchtimes and evenings during the week). But if anything, that just made the service even better, without ever being too much. We were always asked if we were happy with each course, just at the moment when we had finished our first mouthfuls and established that yes, we truly were.
Drinks kept coming as we needed them, and we were always asked whether we wanted more just at the point when one of us was thinking that more were in order. There is a real talent to this, especially to do it and make it seem telepathic, and that the Jolly Cricketers’ young and enthusiastic team was so very good at it was one of the many happy discoveries of our lunch.
Pacing was, too: it could be so easy when a kitchen isn’t mega-busy to get into a rat-a-tat rhythm and pepper you with course after course in quick succession. But the pub understood not to do that and actually, on that day of all days, the time and space we were given was one of my many favourite things. By the time our mains arrived, we were ready but not hankering – how could you hanker when we’d been determined to try so much of the menu? – but they were still a happy sight.
Three of us had chosen the pork belly – from Stockings Farm, less than ten minutes’ drive away – which makes my job far easier than it could have been. On paper it sounded like an unmissable dish: pork belly, crab cake, pak choi and a soy and garlic sauce, so many wonderful things coexisting on a plate. And if it wasn’t quite perfect it was close enough that I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but indulgent. Because it all worked, it just could have worked slightly better and come together a little more.
The pork was truly magnificent – a whopping striated slab of the stuff, crispy-edged but yielding at its core, some of the best pork belly I’ve had in as long as I can remember (or at least since the crispy pork earlier on). And the pak choi offered an excellent contrast, cooked absolutely bang on. But I would have liked the crab cake to be a little crispier too, a bit less crumbly and to have more of the ginger that was meant to feature. And it needed sauce to bring it together – a proper quantity of it, not a thin trickle that had made its way to the perimeter of the plate, like it was trying to make a break for it.
The crab cake was just a question of preference, but the lack of sauce meant that this dish, made of exceptional parts, didn’t quite cohere into a whole. It made me wish I’d kept the rest of my ramekin of soy, honey and ginger from the squid, because pouring that over this pork and the crabcake would have been the missing piece. Without it, what could have been a perfect dish had to settle for mere excellence.
We’d opted for a solitary portion of chunky chips to provide carbs, and in honesty the crabcake was spudded up enough that we probably didn’t need them. But thank goodness we ordered them anyway, because they were textbook: stubby and crunchy, beautifully done with a little side order of rustling scraps in the bottom of the bowl. My stepmother had a couple too, declaring them infinitely better than the fries that came with her main.
That main was a huge pot of mussels – Welsh, apparently – almost as much still life as treat, gently steaming in their bath of marinière sauce. They were pronounced triumphant and my stepmother worked through them with what looked to me like a combination of diligence and joy. You could have a smaller portion as a starter with what the menu winningly refers to as “mopping bread” or a larger one with fries.
I think, with the benefit of hindsight, my stepmother would have liked the bigger portion with a few slabs of that caraway-speckled bread. But hindsight is always perfect and probably, if we’re being brutally honest, we could all find more laudable uses for it than ordering better at lunch. I said that making mistakes when you order in a restaurant is an essential part of making sure you can find reasons to return and I believe that, even if it’s positively glass half full by my standards.
We split 3-1 on dessert, too, but before that we asked our server about the whole cherry pie thing: why was the village famous for that?
“Do you want the nice answer, or the honest one?” she said. I do love a situation where those two answers are not the same, so of course I asked for the latter. And she told us that Seer Green used to have, for some reason, mass graves and that the cherry orchards were planted on top of those, although the sanitised version was just that the village really loved cherries and had become famous for exporting them to London. She also told us that the cherry pie on the menu was a speciality, and I promise the story behind the village’s nickname was not why we swerved it.
Zoë couldn’t resist crumble, having seen it on the menu, and she rhapsodised about her order. It was apple and blackberry, topped with a gorgeous golden rubble of biscuit, served with an ice cream resplendent with vanilla specks. It prompted a big discussion at the table about the acceptable crumble to fruit ratio: I, conditioned by the Royal Berks no doubt, thought it should be 2:1, while my stepmother would have preferred it the other way round. Zoë, ever the moderate, liked it best 50:50. Which was this, I asked her later? My stepmother would have loved it, she told me.
The rest of us had the Basque cheesecake, unusually with chocolate sauce rather than fruit. The slightly warm, exceptionally rich dark chocolate sauce made this dessert, but without it it would have been rather like Snoop Dogg, i.e. slightly too baked for my liking. I like a Basque cheesecake to retain a little wobble, this was a very solid affair. That might have been a conscious choice given the accompaniment, but I wasn’t sure.
Similarly, the menu paired this with a manzanilla, which might have worked if it was just the cheesecake, but the chocolate sauce was crying out for a PX, or a dessert wine of some kind. The menu suggests pairings for all the desserts but none of them are anything sticky: I have struggled to find fault with the Jolly Cricketers, but I’d love it if they fixed that.
We didn’t really want the afternoon to end, in this beautiful pub in this beautiful part of the world on the first day of a strange new phase. So we had coffee – which was extremely good, something I never expected – and eventually, with a heavy heart, we settled up. Lunch for four, pretty much four courses with plenty of drinks and coffee, came to £310 with a 10% service charge thrown in.
I was chatting to our server and she asked where we came from, so I explained that we were from all over, really: Reading, Windsor, New South Wales, and told her why we’d been in the area. And she was so lovely and so sorry for our loss, which happens a lot lately, and I told her not to be sorry. Because I couldn’t think of a better place to be on that day, or better people to be there with.
If I lived near the Jolly Cricketers I would be there all the time, and if a pub like the Jolly Cricketers was near me I might not write a blog any more. It would exert a pull like the Lyndhurst, and you’d find me there whenever I’d had a hard day. And there is a carpe diem message here going back to the very beginning of this: if there’s a restaurant you keep meaning to visit, go there. One day it might not be there, or you might not be. And if there’s a person you keep meaning to call, or take down the pub, or go to that restaurant with, do that too.
My dad would have loved The Jolly Cricketers. It’s a crying shame he wasn’t there that day. But he was, really, wasn’t he? At least in a few of the ways that matter.
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I’ve talked about this before, but it helps when you’re writing a restaurant review to have some kind of hook, some reason why you decided, this week of all weeks, to check that particular venue out. Canny restaurants make that easy by having something about them, whether it’s in their branding, their social media or their USP – or, in London, by having a well-connected chef or owner.
In the case of M’s Smokehouse, which opened on the Basingstoke Road at the end of January, you’re spoiled for choice. Its Instagram describes it as the “First and Only Smokehouse in Reading”, which isn’t strictly true – remember Bluegrass BBQ? But Bluegrass closed last January, so the second half of that description is correct, for now at least. I don’t know about you, but I miss Bluegrass: a decent independent alternative in south Reading would be a find.
And there’s more. The smokehouse’s Instagram blurb also describes it as a “halal smokehouse”, and in that respect it is definitely a first: so no pulled pork or sausages, just brisket, burgers and fried chicken. Now, that kind of thing might enrage the swivel-eyed types who used to comment on my blog’s Facebook page, pretending to give a toss about animal welfare, but I thought it was worth checking it out.
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