Bar review: Bigfoot, Oxford

On February 6, 2026February 6, 2026 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bigfootoxford.com

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Restaurant review: Blip

On January 30, 2026January 30, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.blipburgers.com

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Restaurant review: Me Kong

On January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

When I ran through the trends in Reading’s food scene last year, two stood out: the proliferation of new, casual pizza restaurants and a similar blossoming of restaurants to cater to Reading’s Hongkonger community. Last week I explored the former at Smelly Alley’s Zi Tore so it only seemed fair, this week, to dive into the latter at Me Kong, the newest of these restaurants to open.

I identified some of these spots opening in 2025 – Woodley Food Stasian out in Woodley, Take Your Time where Dolce Vita used to be and the subject of this week’s review, which is tucked away behind Reading Library just down from The Blade next to the retro classic that is the Abbey Baptist Church. It’s a spot which somehow didn’t feel like it existed before Me Kong sprang up there: I can’t remember what, if anything, was there before.

But even that undersells the increase in restaurants catering to this market. After all Good Old Days Hong Kong, which I reviewed around this time last year, has been around since late 2023. Worse still, I missed out a couple of developments last year – YL Restaurant for one, which opened in the back of the supermarket that used to be the Warwick Arms a long time ago. And then there’s Soul Chill, a cafe that opened right opposite where I used to live on the corner of London Street and South Street. Its Google listing initially made it look like a bubble tea spot, but it boasts breakfast and lunch options.

All this, of course, springs from the introduction in January 2021 of the BNO Visa for Hongkongers, giving them the right to settle in the U.K. with a path to citizenship. Reading – always a multicultural, well-educated, polyglot place – has as a result both developed and embraced a significant Hongkonger community. With that come all the advantages of vibrancy, including – selfishly, for me – new and interesting places to eat.

Me Kong is a particular type of establishment, a cha chaan teng. These are “tea restaurants” that originated in Hong Kong in the Fifties, following on from the bing sutt, or ice room. Cha chaan tengs are often likened in print to the British greasy spoon or the American diner, but I think that’s more to try and find a term of cultural reference readers might understand. In reality they are a creature all their own, and a very eclectic one at that.

Food at a cha chaan teng is often described almost as a fusion of Chinese and European – another term often used is ‘soy sauce western’ – with dishes including Chinese ones with which you’d be familiar and more esoteric options like baked pork chop with ketchup, or macaroni soup topped with char siu. In Hong Kong cha chaan tengs are a great gastronomic leveller – swift, efficient and frequented by blue and white collar workers alike.

Plenty of my research suggested that cha chaan tengs are on the wane in Hong Kong, as for that matter greasy spoons are here, but it’s somehow fitting that a wave of them is opening in the U.K. Because I’ve read that when they first sprung up in Hong Kong in the Fifties it was because Hong Kong, run by the British, welcomed Chinese refugees. There are echoes of that, I suppose, in the situation now, seventy years later.

A taste of home, or nostalgia, makes perfect sense if you settle somewhere so far away from your roots, and last month I saw a few photos of customers queuing round the block to try Me Kong for the first time. But did this food also have the potential to win over a wider customer base?

Someone thought so ten years ago, when a restaurant literally called Cha Chaan Teng opened in Holborn, but the reviews were not good. Marina O’Loughlin, then writing in the Guardian, said the food gave her “the kind of clammy shame I’d feel if I woke up post-bender to find myself the fifth Mrs Gregg Wallace”, adding that “cha chaan tengs aren’t renowned for their cuisine”: what’s the opposite of a white saviour?

There is a difference, though. That restaurant was geared at customers of European descent, while Me Kong promises to be the real thing. So on a Tuesday lunchtime I pootled over with my great friend Jerry, who was especially interested in Me Kong because it’s probably the closest restaurant to his gorgeous, incredibly tasteful flat. Forget whether I liked it or not: I also wanted to see if Jerry could find a brilliant new local.

We got there around twenty past twelve and the place was already packed with a queue for tables, albeit one that hadn’t moved out onto the street. I will say though that although we as a nation like to think we’ve invented queuing, Me Kong has perfected it – quickly assessing each table size needed and gradually corralling us into different spots in the waiting area.

At the front there were counters showing off all of Me Kong’s baked goods – buns, pastries and the like – and so some of the people joining the queue were simply buying that stuff to take away. Nothing fazed Me Kong’s front of house, and after no more than five minutes we were ushered to a table.

Me Kong’s interior is really rather impressive, I think. On one level it’s a front room with booths, a back room with tables and a corridor connecting them. But that doesn’t even begin to do it justice, on many levels. They’ve gone all the way through the building, so the front looks out on Abbey Square and the back onto the Holybrook, and that results in a really lovely space where everything feels airy and beautifully lit.

Not only that, but it felt polished and finished in a way new establishments so often don’t: the colour of the wood panelled counter; the tasteful banquettes; the bright line drawings on the wall, everything seemed really considered. And the branding, from the menus to the cups to the napkin dispensers, was extremely well thought out. I got the impression this wasn’t their first rodeo: I’d be surprised if it was their first restaurant, for that matter. It felt fully formed.

I should also mention that Jerry and I were, at the point when we sat down, the only customers of European descent in the place. But I never felt conspicuous, because the staff were just so terrific from start to finish. One server explained to us that they really wanted to promote this kind of food, and I got that impression throughout the meal.

In fact, I’m jumping the gun by saying this but I’ve never been to a restaurant where the staff were quite so keen to tell you what the gorgeous-looking dish that had turned up at another table was (“that’s the braised eggplant with garlic sauce” one of them told me, as I admired a delectable-looking pot on my left).

Me Kong’s menu, on a ring-bound set of cards with that impressive branding, was a proper box of delights with an awful lot going on. One section featured noodles, either dry or in soup, along with five set meals, another common feature in a cha chaan teng. These gave you the option of some Hong Kong classics – ham macaroni soup, say, or char siu macaroni soup – paired with a bun and either fried egg or omelette.

A large section of rice dishes again led with a staple of the cha chaan teng, baked pork chop with cheese and tomato sauce on rice. Many of these dishes were more on the fusion side, so were perhaps more for purists. Another page of the menu featured four clay pot dishes and five stir fries, and another page of snacks offered dishes like deep fried chicken leg with curly fries – again, an authentic cha chaan teng choice – along with a full range of options from the bakery.

I would say that with the exception of that aubergine dish, which looked like it might have had minced pork in it, there wasn’t much for vegetarians here. The page marked Vegetables featured various green veg with garlic or oyster sauce, but would feel limited if that was your lot. There was, however, plenty here for the cost-conscious. The most expensive dish on the menu was south of £15, those set meals were less than a tenner.

Plenty of decisions for Jerry and I to make – but first, tea. Me Kong does sell alcohol (Sapporo on draft, or Guinness) but I really wanted to try the Hong Kong milk tea, another speciality of this kind of restaurant. It’s hard to describe but imagine a very strong cup of PG Tips, souped-up builder’s tea, served with condensed milk, a very pleasing shade of deep amber, and you wouldn’t be far off. I put a sugar in it, but on reflection wished I’d added more.

I don’t normally put a picture of a cup up on the blog, especially one where you can see so little, but: see what I mean about the branding?

I’d read online that Hong Kong milk tea is strained through a sock, or something like it (hopefully one exclusively used for this purpose), often multiple times, to achieve a particular level of smoothness. I can’t say whether a hosiery department was involved, but it did have a certain pleasing consistency. Maybe it was the note of Carnation, or the power of imagination, but whatever it was I enjoyed it.

Jerry originally wanted to try a yuen yueng, a blend of coffee and tea also particular to cha chaan tengs, but they didn’t have any Hong Kong coffee so he joined me in a tea. He liked it, but less than me: when we had a follow up drink I opted for more of the same, and he had an iced lemon tea – specifically requested as slightly less sweet on the excellent advice of the table next to me.

Before I talk about the food, I did want to say something about that. I’ve already said that the staff were really keen to explain other dishes and illuminate us on the cuisine of Hong Kong. But I’ve never eaten in a restaurant where that evangelism so extended to the other customers, too. During our meal the tables on either side of us were occupied by multiple parties – restaurants like this tend to be brisk – and so we got to rubberneck all manner of delights. Not only that, but the people ordering them were more than happy to tell us what they were.

All that meant that although we played it relatively safe with our order we saw more than enough to work out what to have next time. That macaroni soup topped with satay beef looked like an interesting, comforting order, but I was even more intrigued by a dome of rice crowned with an omelette draped over it, the whole thing then decorated with vertical strips of char siu. The traditional pork chop baked with cheese came in an earthenware dish, the kind you might associate with a lasagne, and I got a sufficiently good look to decide I’d leave that one to the experts.

Nicest of all were the lovely pair of civil engineers on my left. They worked in Thames Tower and had found out about the place and one, whose family were from Hong Kong, had decided to bring her colleague along to see if it recaptured the food of her memories.

She ordered a clay pot dish that I considered but been put off ordering because of the mystery meat component of “Chinese sausage”, and she even kindly let me sample a bit. It was delicious, with a sort of air dried texture like salami and a complex, fragrant flavour. I made a note not to let it deter me next time.

So yes, I chose the conventional option, the black bean chicken pot. But I am so happy that I did, because it was simply outstanding. A hefty pot full to bursting with boneless chicken thigh, skin on, cooked absolutely bang on so it was firm but had just enough give, no evidence of the velveting that can sometimes make chicken off-putting. Huge bits of spring onion, caramelised until heavenly, coexisted with all that chicken and extra goodies: little cubes of potent ginger and plenty of equally burnished nubbins of garlic.

But all that would be nothing without the sauce, a black bean sauce of ridiculous savoury depth, a glossy number with notes of Marmite which clung to everything: to the pot, to every crevice of chicken, to each layer of onion, each piece of ginger and garlic, every grain of steamed rice. This was deliciously viscous stuff, and I made it a mission to ensure that I left as little of it gleaming at the bottom of that black pot as I possibly could.

There is a part of me that is very tempted, just after noon on Friday when this review goes up, to find myself in that place again eating exactly this dish: it was that good.

Jerry had chosen every bit as well as me, going for the Singapore vermicelli with char siu and prawn. This was a magnificent one-stop shop, a very generous tangle of rice noodles tumbled through with chilli, prawns, strips of pork, beansprouts and fried egg. The menu described it as spicy, our server said it wasn’t so hot. Having tried a few forkfuls, I’d probably split the difference and say it was nicely challenging.

What saved it from chilli overload was a certain nuttiness, although I’m not sure where it came from. Perhaps it was the curry powder, an essential component of this dish which gives it its ochre hue. Professor Wikipedia advises me, pleasingly, that Singapore noodles have nothing to do with Singapore but are also a post-war Hong Kong creation.

The thing that made me happiest about these noodles was how much Jerry loved them. He told me he could happily see himself coming here of an evening, ordering these and sitting there taking it all in: he added that previously his go to had been the pad thai at Rosa’s Thai but that this was easily a rival for it. Getting people to eat at Me Kong instead of Rosa’s Thai is, I suppose, as good a mission statement for this blog as any: I’m glad it had that effect on my friend if nothing else.

But I can also see exactly what he meant about it being a space where you’d want to spend time. It was so busy, so beautifully efficient and well run, and so popular – with friends, with couples, with families. Small children were everywhere, but for a moment you could forget you were in the U.K. because they were, without exception, impeccably behaved.

The word that jumps out at me – that restaurants don’t always aim for and in any case don’t hit often enough – is fun. Everything about Me Kong was a riot, from its cheerful, charming staff to its delighted, curious kind customers. How could anybody experience that and not want to be part of it again?

Determined to cover as much of the menu as possible we stayed for some sweet treats and this was when, maybe, Me Kong’s sure touch faltered ever so slightly. I wanted to try the real staples here, so we started with a pineapple bun: no pineapple is involved, but it got the name because the sugar crust on top can, apparently, vaguely resemble a pineapple. I rather liked this – it reminded me of an iced bun, but with a crust rather than icing on top. Worth trying so you can say you’ve tried it, absolutely, but I don’t know when I’d feel a hankering for one again.

I really expected to love the French toast, another Hong Kong signature, but it didn’t quite hit the spot. Two slices of white bread, joined together with a thin mortar of punchy peanut butter, came fried and brought to the table with a little pack of Anchor butter to melt on top. Jerry said that those cultural references – Anchor butter, builder’s tea – added to that feeling of nostalgia, and I could see where he was coming from.

But for me this was just a little too stodgy, a little too light on the fun considering how many calories were involved. Ironically it needed to be more indulgent: the very nice civil engineer at the next table told me that often this was served with maple syrup, which would have utterly transformed it, but the server told me that they didn’t do tweaks or customisation for anybody, which I respected.

We didn’t finish it, because as an experience it was just a tad too grubby: I didn’t feel, as Marina O’Loughlin did, shame equivalent to waking up married to Gregg Wallace, but perhaps something comparable, like having a mucky dream about Nadine Dorries.

The last of our trio of desserts was a similar experience: I’d asked for an egg tart and been told that we’d have to wait twenty minutes for a fresh batch to come out of the oven. So we did, and when it came it was still warm and the pastry, buttery and short, was truly exemplary.

And yet I wanted to like the filling so much more than I did. I don’t know whether I was expecting the appealing wobble of a pastel de nata, or the nutmeg-dusted propriety of its English relative, but this was more egg white than egg yolk, somewhat lacking in richness and far more like blancmange that had found itself a very nice house. Again I wouldn’t order it again but I’m glad I tried it and for £1.70, only 10p less expensive than the pineapple bun, it was not an expensive mistake.

Our bill for everything came to just over £54, and there were two remarkable things about it. One is that if you order food they knock a very specific 51p off the price of each of your drinks, so they each cost £2.99. The second is that the service charge they add is only 8%: I questioned this with our server saying it wasn’t enough, and he laughed. “Next time you can tip a hundred pounds!” he said.

He also told me – and this might be useful to you, though it wasn’t to me – that if you spend over £40 they have a deal where you can get free parking at the Queens Road Car Park.

I hope the tip is so low because the staff there don’t need to rely on it to be fairly paid, because they very much deserve that. All of them were just terrific, and I know this has a strong whiff of and everyone stood up and clapped, but it’s true: practically every one of them said thank you to Jerry and I as we walked through the restaurant on our way out. I sent the pictures of our food to Zoë later as I was relaxing at Jerry’s with a cup of tea and a medicinal glass of red, and got exactly the reply I was expecting: perhaps you’ll take me some time soon.

This is precisely the kind of review, and the sort of restaurant, I wanted to kick off the year with. Me Kong is an absolute blast, brilliantly run and happens to do some excellent food, and I scoped out enough options on my first visit to give me plenty of food for thought on my second, third and fourth – if I can tear myself away from that chicken in black bean sauce, that is. It is already incredibly busy in a way most Reading restaurants in January would kill for, but I can see that continuing even after the novelty value has died off.

But what I also loved about it was how inclusive it was, how keen it was to tell its story far and wide. That spirit deserves to be returned in kind by Reading’s restaurant-goers. And it also made me a little proud of Reading: that our diverse, happy, tolerant town can still attract people like that and businesses like this, despite all the naysayers and bigots in the comments section of the Reading Chronicle.

I think if you read this blog you’re not like those people, and I think you’d find an awful lot to like at Me Kong. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the months ahead, I see some of you there. I certainly won’t be in Rosa’s Thai, that’s for sure.

Me Kong – 8.4
St Laurence House, Abbey Square, Reading, RG1 3AG
0118 3431543

https://www.facebook.com/MeKongReadingUK/

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Restaurant review: Zi Tore

On January 16, 2026January 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

Unlike any restaurant reviewer I know of, I publish the list of restaurants I intend to visit. It’s regularly added to as places open and people tip me off about their favourite venues, in Reading or slightly further afield, and every time I review somewhere it drops off that list – until, maybe, many years later, the time is ripe for reappraisal. From the outside, it probably just looks like a bunch of restaurants, in alphabetical order.

But the reality, for me at least, is that it’s a nuanced to do list. It’s almost more of an in-tray, never more so than at the beginning of the year, and the order in which I tackle it depends on a number of factors. Because not all of those spots have anywhere approaching equal priority in my mind, and that dictates how quickly I get round to them. I’m aware, for instance, that it’s a fair old while since I visited Newbury or Wokingham on duty: over three years for the former, nearly three years for the latter. I ought to rectify that.

Then there are the new places that I really need to review, if only because they look interesting. If not for my accident I would have reviewed Pho 86 and Nua by now, and spots like Blip and Matteo Greek Grill & Bakery also merit investigation sooner rather than later, to see if smashed burgers can take off in Tilehurst or whether at last somebody can make a go of the old Colley’s Supper Rooms site. I’m curious myself about the answers to those questions, so I need to go exploring at some point.

And of course the accident currently factors into these things. So places near the top of the in-tray, for the time being, need to be fairly close to home and at least slightly lend themselves to eating with one hand; my motor skills are gradually improving with physio, but writing one of these reviews still involves wrangling with the delights of Apple Dictation, which understands what I’m saying about as often as my wife does when her hearing aids aren’t in.

Every to do list has that one thing on it that you should have done a very long time ago, the item that sticks out like a sore thumb and makes you feel guilty. And in my case that item, the subject of this week’s review, is Italian restaurant and cafe Zi Tore, the one which took the spot on Smelly Alley vacated by the Grumpy Goat back in October 2023: yes, it really has been that long since the Grumpy Goat shut. Hicks Baker weren’t quick off the mark getting someone to jump into this particular grave, but Zi Tore opened nearly a year ago with co-owner Paolo Lanzetta, a proud Neapolitan, in the kitchen.

The Reading Chronicle covered the story as only they could, getting the name of the restaurant wrong – it’s not ‘Zia Torre’ – and accidentally giving Lanzetta dual nationality. “It has always been my dream to open a restaurant like this so people can try authentic Italian and Nepalese cuisine” they misquoted him as saying: you can’t get the staff, can you? That’s our local paper for you though, they just don’t know their calzone from their momo.

All that means that I am very long overdue checking out one of the trailblazers of the Italian invasion that hit Reading in the first half of 2025. I’ve reviewed Paesinos, reviewed Amò – not without controversy – and failed to get to Peppito’s before it closed five months after opening. But Zi Tore remained the blind spot: I tried to get there early one evening in May, only to get turned away because they seemed to be closing early, but I’ve not been back since.

And everything I’ve heard since then has been good. I’ve had comments to the effect that they’re staying open later these days, feedback borne out by their later opening hours on Google. Long-standing reader Mansoor, a man I trust on many things, said that of all of Reading’s new restaurants last year Zi Tore was the one he ended up visiting most frequently. And my friend Enza, my authority on all matters Italian, has loved Zi Tore for a long time, especially their graffe.

I’ve also heard rumours that one of Amò’s pizza chefs, short of work now that the restaurant has been closed for over a month without explanation, had crossed town to start working at Zi Tore. So that was it: slap bang at the top of the 2026 in-tray. On a drizzly weekday, during a week that was originally meant to be time off but was now filled with medical appointments, Zoë and I wandered up Smelly Alley to finally give it a whirl.

Zi Tore has done a lovely job of the exterior and the frontage and the window, with arancini and pizza slices tantalisingly on display, draws you in nicely. But beyond the counter, I found the interior a little inhospitable. It’s difficult to describe it without harking back to the site’s Grumpy Goat days, but the back room on the ground floor, where all the beer used to live, was a slightly unlovely space with a handful of tables, starved of daylight or much ambience.

Upstairs was much better, although that also brought back memories of the site’s previous life. It’s a nice space with a fetching mini mezzanine looking out over Smelly Alley, and taking the bar out had definitely created more room. But even here the furniture felt functional and a little sterile, as if they’d bought it piecemeal.

One table with makeshift bench seating could accommodate six people, one of the plum spots up by the window had an actual bench and low table – great for coffee and cake, perhaps less so for lunch. It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, Arctic: an aircon unit in the ceiling was switched off, its remote on a nearby low table set to a random 30 degrees. It all felt a little spartan, not quite finished, even though the place was on the verge of celebrating its first birthday.

Zi Tore’s menu had the kind of concision that pleases restaurant reviewers: seven different Neapolitan pizzas, two types of pasta – ravioli or gnocchi – with one of three sauces, a lasagne and three smaller dishes under the heading “Street Food”. That was slightly marred by a separate paper pizza menu, a recent addition perhaps, with another half a dozen pizza options. Some felt like the kind of combinations you’d get at Amò, making me wonder if the departing chef had taken a few ideas with him.

Pricing was standard issue, with pizzas ranging from £10 for a margherita all the way up to £17 if you wanted porcini, roasted potatoes and sausage (typing this, that ensemble sounds rather good to me). Pasta dishes were between £12 and £15 depending on your shape and sauce of choice, and the smaller plates were less than a fiver. The other tempting dish, the pizza fritta, was a tenner and looked like a fish out of water in the street food section of the menu.

Cakes are not on the menu, so you have to go up to the display and ask at the counter: I didn’t indulge my sweet tooth on this occasion, but the cake I saw turning up at a neighbouring table looked thoroughly decent. I didn’t see any graffe – the loop-shaped potato doughnut beloved by my friend Enza – but perhaps they’re a weekend thing.

Zi Tore also doesn’t do table service, so you go up with your order and your table number and let them have it. I ordered a couple of coffees, a couple of small dishes, a pizza and a pasta dish: all that set me back just over £44, which felt like decent value. It was certainly comparable with its peers at Amò and Paesinos, although Zi Tore’s offering is slightly different from theirs.

It’s a shame to start the year with a regular complaint about timing, but I would have liked the coffees quickly – it was cold outside and almost as cold inside – and then the small dishes, then the main events. Zi Tore wasn’t hugely busy, with about four other tables on the go when we arrived, but in reality we waited what felt like quite a while and then everything turned up a matter of minutes apart.

No matter: the coffee, the starting point, wasn’t half bad. It arrived in those tall, almost-conical glasses I slightly associate with the last century, but my latte was very enjoyable and Zoë liked her mocha. In Reading’s coffee hierarchy this wasn’t competing with the likes of C.U.P. or Lincoln – or even trying to – but it was significantly better than Madoo‘s coffee, which has always been its Achilles heel.

Small plates, turning up twenty minutes after we ordered, were a mixed bag of realised and unrealised potential. I didn’t mind the sausage and friarelli arancino, just the one for £5, but it lacked a little pep. It was lukewarm, the shell had no real rigidity to it and inside the filling wasn’t brilliantly distributed: a big knot of dense sausage meat at the bottom, almost as if it had been placed there to stop the whole thing toppling over, like a Weeble.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, more that I knew better were out there: it didn’t match Amò’s but, on the other hand, it was far better than the ones at Vino Vita.

Far, far better was the montanara, a simple but exquisite treat, a pleasingly irregular, puffy oval of fried pizza dough topped simply with tomato, mozzarella and a solitary basil leaf. This was so enjoyable, and justified a visit to Zi Tore in its own right: there’s nowhere to hide when something has so few components, and it’s a great way to showcase how good your raw materials are. At £3.50, this is one of the Reading lunch scene’s bargains, and although we shared it between two – and it was big enough for you to do that – the wise move would be to come here and order one to yourself.

But the other wise move might be to order just that, because as I was eating it I did find myself thinking if only this was hot. It was fried pizza dough, I’m sure it was as hot as balls to begin with, and I wondered what had cooled it so: was it adding the toppings, or was it the fact that it sat around until everything else was ready or almost ready? Or could it have been that the upstairs was so Siberian that you couldn’t affort to wait until after your arancino to tuck into it? I think some benefit of the doubt is probably due here: I would go again and give this another try. Even on the upper reaches of what you could describe as ‘piping warm’ it was a very good choice.

The timestamps on my and Zoë’s photos tell me that our bigger dishes arrived less than five minutes later, and it’s good that we’d finished our smaller ones or there wouldn’t have been room on the table for everything. Zoë called shotgun on the pizza, and had ordered simply, the Diavola, a relatively classic pepperoni pizza with chilli.

First things first: it looked the part, and the rim was nicely speckled, blistered and spotted. This is, for better or worse, a very classic Neapolitan pizza, with all the pluses and minuses of that genre, still enjoying its moment in the sun in Reading as it is replaced with American interlopers and hybrids (and whatever ‘London-style pizza’ is) in the capital. That’s the extent to which I keep up with pizza trends, but in theory I’m still happy with the original forebear of all these mutations.

And yet, from the bit of this pizza I tried, this wasn’t my favourite rendition of it in Reading. Everything was very loose and sloppy, more so than at Zi Tore’s rivals on the Kings Road, which meant the centre was like what I imagine sex with Rupert Murdoch must be like, a droopy challenge. I heard someone online say “if it ain’t messy it ain’t fun” at some point last year, and personally when it comes to food I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed more.

But there was other problems here. The dough would have been best in class in Reading back in the days when Franco Manca got us all excited, but with the competition from the class of ’25 it was mid table – and that’s before we get to Zia Lucia’s charcoal base and its almost mythical effects on punters’ innards.

And the pepperoni didn’t do it for me either – now, it might well have been pepperoni rather than salami, but for me the benefit of pepperoni is its narrower gauge, the amount you can fit on a pizza, all those little chalices of fat dotted across the surface. Six big discs arranged with geometric precision didn’t have quite the same curb appeal. Zoë told me she also expected more pizza and more bite – from actual chillies, rather than a dusting of chilli flakes.

Does this sound miserable? I’m so sorry if it does, because I was so hoping to like this. Especially as Zoë left about a third of it – which would not have happened at Amò or Paesinos – and, just as damningly, I didn’t take it off her hands. But I do feel more unsure in my judgment than usual, because people I like rate Zi Tore and I, too, really wanted to.

I’m afraid to say, though, that the pizza beat the pasta hands down. I’d chosen ravioli – made fresh every day onsite – rather than gnocchi, and the porcini mushroom sauce over the ragu on the recommendation of others. And again I wonder if my antennae were just out of kilter that day, because I did not like it at all.

Didn’t like any bit of it, actually. The ravioli, six very large specimens, had bottoms more thick and dense than Robert Jenrick, when I was hoping for lightness and delicacy. I also think they could have stood to be smaller, or for you to have fewer of them, although if I’d liked them you can bet I wouldn’t have said that. The filling was meant to be ricotta and parmesan, but all I got was ricotta and an aggressive blast of citrus. Not a light zing of the stuff, but the sort of brutal clubbing you associate with bathroom products.

I tried eating them without the sauce to check that my tastebuds weren’t playing up. But yes, again, an overdose of lemon. Perhaps if there had been less, and more balancing saltiness from the parmesan, which was completely missing in action, it might have worked. But as it was it didn’t, and it slugged it out with the mushroom sauce for dominance. Those two components simply couldn’t get along at all: perhaps I should have known that and not combined them but, if they didn’t go, why was it an option on the menu?

Might I have enjoyed this better if the sauce took centre stage, paired with gnocchi? I tried that on its own, too, and decided the answer was probably no. It felt somehow less than the sum of its parts, without any savoury depth from the mushrooms, which might have been porcini but I was not convinced. And again, the presentation of this was about taking a plate and trying to fill it to the perimeter with stuff, just because. I would have liked less: lighter, more delicate presentation but with punchier, better balanced flavours.

Again, the ultimate heckle. There were six ravioli. I wanted to stop after three, but thought that would seem rude: isn’t it strange how as a paying customer you can still feel like that? I contemplated leaving two on the plate but felt that even that would somehow be discourteous or ungrateful. So I ate another, and then decided I’d done my duty. I was undeniably full, make no mistake, but it had felt like a friend cooking for you in all the wrong ways.

I so wanted not to begin the year with a review like this, especially after all the hoo-ha last year every time I stepped into any Reading restaurant which was even vaguely Italian. I’m surprised, given the smear campaign I found out about, that I was even allowed on the premises at Zi Tore.

But the cosmos has well and truly taught me a lesson. I made the mistake of saying in my round up of 2025 that I might be better off giving every Italian restaurant a rating of 6.6 and saying it was ‘quite nice’ from now on, and fate rewarded me with this experience. Look at the rating below: you couldn’t make it up, but if I moved it a notch up or down I’d only be doing it so as not to look as if I was fulfilling a prophecy.

So I need to at least be more nuanced when I sum up Zi Tore than to say that it’s quite nice. That doesn’t reflect the complexity of the reality, anyway, and visiting the restaurant nearly a year after it opened you can’t put the things you aren’t wild about down to growing pains or opening before they’re ready. The experience I had there is the experience I was supposed to have.

It is fantastic that a hospitality business took the space vacated by the Grumpy Goat, and that there is still one oasis of food and drink on a run which used to be synonymous with food and is now full of mobile phone repair shops nobody seems to visit (and, to be fair, Reading’s finest branch of Timpson). It’s also fantastic that it’s independent, and laudable that Zi Tore makes everything onsite and offers options you can’t get elsewhere in town that have made at least one Italian I know ecstatic and a little less homesick.

And I can see that I would return to Zi Tore, believe it or not. I’m really sorry that I didn’t love the pizza or pasta, but one of those window seats on the mezzanine with a cup of coffee, a montanara and the chance to explore some of their cake after that would very much appeal to me. Especially as the service was so good, and happy and helpful. But I don’t know if Zi Tore will survive and make enough money if all its customers order like me, or whether it really wants just to be a café given the expansion of its pizza menu and its opening hours.

Fortunately for Zi Tore I suspect not all of its customers order like me, or think like me, and Reading is a big enough place that it might well carve out a large enough share of the market keeping at what it does. But the market may well contract further in 2026, and so I wish them the best of luck. At the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Amò, closed for over a month on Kings Road, will reopen. Ironically, it might be good news for Zi Tore if it doesn’t.

Zi Tore – 6.6
7 Union Street, Reading, RG1 1EU
0118 9561531

https://www.zitore.co.uk

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Feature: The 2025 Edible Reading Awards

On January 9, 2026January 9, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Features4 Comments

You’ll have to forgive me, because in the normal run of events I announce my award winners at the end of the year, wrapping everything up in a bow so we can all get on with a fresh twelve months. I’m tardy this time, partly because writing these is still more laborious than it would normally be (I won’t go into all that again) and partly because, having dodged the flu/lurgy/Covid that Zoë invariably gets over Christmas most years, she’s managed to get clobbered with a chest infection instead, right on New Year’s Eve. So the house has become a little hospital ward in its own right, and writing has taken a back seat. Never mind: better late than never.

You’d think the extra deliberation time would make writing these awards easier, but if anything it’s had the opposite effect. It’s been a good year for Reading food, with plenty of good, interesting places opening in and around the town centre. But the majority of those new places – the best of them, anyway – are squarely in the casual dining sector, offering pizzas and burgers, the stuff that influencers tend to review. We’ve not had a similar rise in other kinds of restaurants, and when I asked on my Facebook page what people would like to see more of in 2026 the comments, all full of hope and optimism, made for quite a frustrating crib sheet of many of the things Reading still lacks.

No specialist fish restaurant, no proper gelato parlour, no Mexican restaurant. No Latin American cuisine of any kind, come to think of it (“it’s hard to get Samoan chop suey round here” said possibly the most niche comment I received). A lot of people identified that we still lack a tapas restaurant, something I’ve been moaning about since the earliest days of this blog, when we had a bad one. Many others wanted a good, independent Italian restaurant and a French bistro: French food is having a proper moment in London, but that has not extended this far west yet.

Some people wanted things which required the geography (and possibly the climate) of Reading to be different – more al fresco dining and rooftop bars – and others expressed more general aspirations we can all get behind. “Less greedy landlords” said one person and, not necessarily changing the subject, “less John Sykes” said another. Everybody wanted lower rents for independents, a utopia we’ve been waiting for long enough to know it won’t happen. One comment wanted to see “a realisation by landlords that it’s better to have a good tenant paying less than you’d like than to have an empty unit paying you nothing at all”: don’t we all? “I just want a decent bagel bakery” read one plaintive cry.

It’s hard not to feel discouraged, reading all that. And doubly so for me, because a reasonable proportion of my reviews last year were of places outside Reading, in the surrounding countryside or further afield, in Bristol, Oxford, Bath or London. And I know there’s a degree of cherry-picking going on – I don’t pick places a train ride away unless I’m confident they’ll be worth the journey – but the restaurants I’ve encountered on my travels often have what Reading lacks.

And I don’t see places like that opening in Reading, not on the evidence of last year or any year since 2018. We don’t have a pub like the Three Tuns, a bar like Newbury’s Parched, a restaurant like Seasonality, a bakery like U. Bakery or a tapas spot like Arbequina. We have pizza and burgers, and pizza and burgers have their place, but it’s starting to feel a tad lopsided.

So these awards have something of a split personality, because this year I’m giving out awards for dishes and restaurants in Reading, but also for those further afield. I’ve had some excellent food in Reading, but the very best of what I’ve eaten in most cases, as this list clearly shows, has involved some travel. I sincerely hope 2026 closes the gap.

That isn’t intended to imply that you can’t eat wonderful food in Reading. Because you really can, and narrowing the awards down to a winner and two honourable mentions has been difficult in many cases. To give you an idea, I couldn’t find room for dishes – all excellent – by Kungfu Kitchen, Pau Brasil, The Moderation, and Good Old Days among the final winners, and an extra week or two of head-scratching didn’t make that any easier. But if deciding between Reading dishes was difficult, possibly deciding between dishes outside Reading was just a little more fun; one was an agonising choice of who went where on the podium, the other a somewhat more satisfying wander down memory lane.

Anyway, without any further ado let’s get on with opening another year’s set of sealed envelopes. I hope you enjoy this, even if you find much to disagree with in it. Here’s hoping the decisions are even more problematic when this all comes round again at the end of the year.

STARTER OF THE YEAR (Reading): Frittatini, Amò Italian Street Food

Amò’s pasta fritti, breadcrumbed, fried pucks of pasta with either ragu or – even better – aubergine and tomato are not always available, but when they are, they’re an absolute must order. I can’t remember how many times I ate them last year, I just know that it wasn’t enough. “They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form” I said when I ate them for the first time. I know I’m not always right, and doubtless you do too, but I was right about that.

It saddens me a great deal that I couldn’t give this award out to either of the runners-up. Honourable mentions go to Oishi for its exquisite prawn and leek gyoza and Club India, the pride of Winnersh, for curry leaf calamari, an almost impossibly moreish dish.

STARTER OF THE YEAR (Reading): Frittatini, Amò Italian Street Food

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