City guide: Glasgow

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I first visited Glasgow over a decade ago, twice in quick succession, and came away thinking that it was absolutely one of my favourite cities I had ever been to. I loved the grand scale of its streets, the friendliness of its residents, its grit, its culture and its vitality. I’d been to Edinburgh several times before that and, truth be told, I thought Glasgow showed it up as a little pristine and joyless, chocolate-boxy and prissy.

On those two visits, I tried a bit of everything. I wandered round the People’s Palace, where the first exhibit I saw when I came up the stairs was a TV showing Rab C Nesbitt. I wandered up to the Necropolis and saw the beautiful vista of the city below.

My friend Nicola took me to the Barras Market, unlike any market I’d ever visited, trestle tables groaning with goods of debatable provenance. Inside, I reached a stall which could only be described as an Aladdin’s cave of pornography: every medium, every genre, almost a museum in its own right by the year 2014. I explored Merchant City and the West End too, all these very different parts of a captivating whole.

I went to see A Play, A Pie and A Pint in Oran Mor, the beautiful and iconic arts venue: back then it set you back a mere tenner to eat, drink and be culturally stimulated. I sat in the Three Judges at one end of the Byres Road on a Sunday afternoon and drank pints of stout while enjoying the delights of live jazz played by a bunch of septuagenarians with more get up and go and joie de vivre than I managed when I was half their age.

In the interval, one of the jazzmen told my friend Nicola and me how he’d gone on tour with Paolo Nutini, which had provided a nice little nest egg. We bought him a pint. Another gent wandered in off the street and tried to sell us supermarket meat from a carrier bag, still in its packaging, provenance again unknown. Truly all human life was there in Glasgow. I could live here, I remember thinking: the city, not the pub, although in truth probably both.

I drank cocktails in Chinaskis, and fancier cocktails on Blythswood Square – I was a cocktail drinker back then, far more than I am now – and every kind of booze in Nice N Sleazy on Sauchiehall Street, which Nicola told me absolutely had to be done if you were visiting Glasgow. It was like the Purple Turtle only brasher, and like everything else about the city I loved it.

And I ate, my goodness I ate. I ate in some magnificent restaurants which, to my pleasure and surprise, are still going strong today, institutions like Stravaigin, Number 16 and the Finnieston, along with some which to my equal sadness have closed, like Hanoi Bike Shop in the West End and Merchant City’s Guy’s. I came back from both visits saying that Glasgow was one of the best food cities I had ever been to. I swore to return and finally this month, over twelve years later, I did.

I was delighted to find that the city had lost none of its charms. It is still a marvellous, vibrant place with an awful lot to see and to do and, of course, brilliant places to eat and drink. It doesn’t, by and large, trouble the Michelin guide the way Edinburgh does, but its priorities feel different. It’s packed with great restaurants with beautiful dining rooms doing all manner of fascinating food and not so fussed about guide-chasing accolades.

It has old, ornate, gorgeous pubs – some of which are especially a joy for whisky lovers – and a coffee scene as good as anywhere’s. It has brilliant independent retail, particularly slightly out of the centre. And it has a perfectly circular metro system, the Subway, where your fares are capped at £3.40 for a day. It’s a pleasure to use.

Yet I came away from my four day visit frustrated that I had only scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg: my list of restaurants to visit next time was infinitely bigger than the list of the ones I managed to check off. I never made it to the Southside, which means I didn’t get to buy coffee and fragrance at Godshot, eat at Big Counter, knock back wine at Made Of Grapes or sample Errol’s Hot Pizza.

I also didn’t get to try the craft beer at Drygate or sample some of Glasgow’s most iconic boozers: places like the Pot Still, The Lismore, Scotia Bar, the Horseshoe. When I put it like that my FOMO kicks in and for a moment, despite having a lovely time, I feel like I barely went anywhere at all. I should have been up and about earlier, cramming in brunch, checking out the street art, spending the afternoon in a museum rather than having a delightful hotel siesta.

But that all would have required me to be a different, better person than the one I actually am (it would also have required me to not wake up hungover on any of my mornings, which was never realistically going to happen). And yet when I put pictures from my travels on Threads I got the most lovely comments from Glaswegians which fell into two categories, either Yes, isn’t Glasgow amazing? or When you put it like that Glasgow is actually amazing. I could identify with them: living in Reading makes you good at rooting for the underdog, if nothing else.

“I’m biased, obviously, but it’s the best” said one person. “Glasgow’s food is truly incredible!” added another. “You’ve chosen some excellent places” said a third, which was a huge compliment to my extensive research, as was “can confirm you went to the best spots”. Perhaps my favourite comment was “Never seen Glasgow in this way”: sometimes it’s lovely to have that experience, to have an outsider swoop in and highlight that your city is rather marvellous. But then I sense that Glasgow is a proud place, but not a boastful one.

So, all that road less travelled hogwash aside, let’s focus on the places in which I was lucky enough to eat, drink and shop. This city guide comes with the same caveat as my guides to Paris and Lisbon: I’m not pretending for a minute that this list is exhaustive, and even the multiple future visits I am planning could never make it so. It’s just a selection of restaurants, cafes and pubs that I loved on my recent trip, as kindly validated by some very agreeable people on Threads, and I hope it gives you some idea of where to start if you make your own journey to Glasgow, or makes you consider it as a candidate for your next city break.

I guarantee that if you do go, I’ll be deeply envious.

1. Brett

I did want to treat myself for at least one of my meals in Glasgow because, technically, the trip was partly to celebrate my wedding anniversary. Initially I considered Cail Bruich, the West End institution which is now Michelin starred, but eventually I decided instead to visit its less formal sibling Brett. It’s also on the Great Western Road, a great thoroughfare that reminded me of Bristol’s Whiteladies Road, but closer to the centre: let’s just say you know you’re in a fancy part of town when you alight from the metro and are almost immediately faced with a Farrow & Ball showroom.

Anyway Brett was a superb choice on every level, a classic example of a great neighbourhood restaurant whose only crime was not being in your neighbourhood. We had a wonderful table in the window with a great view of passers-by on one side and customers sitting up at the bar watching the open kitchen on the other (it also has a mezzanine, but I think the ground floor is the place to be).

Unlike some of the places on this list which are very much ‘order small plates to share and they’ll come in whatever order we decide’ – which you may or may not care for – Brett is very much a starters, mains and desserts kind of place, with an optional course which I very much recommend ordering. But really, everything was magnificent. I started with an outrageously good snack, a giant chicken wing boned and stuffed with haggis, sort of like a sausage roll if it was (a) amazing and (b) had the pastry swapped out for chicken.

It set the tone for a parade of stone cold brilliant dishes. Aged raw beef was like a tartare made with cecina, the whole thing punctuated with sweet, almost sharp apple and covered in shavings of ethical foie gras. That optional course I mentioned, which I think has been on the menu for ages, is linguini with a rich and salty mushroom XO sauce, topped with a single anchovy and a sheaf of crispy leeks, a foam of aged Parmesan on the side: not the easiest thing to eat, but quite the easiest thing to order.

The high standard continued for the rest of the meal. I liked my saddle of lamb with crispy lamb breast, cavolo nero and a bright green tomato salsa, but Zoë won the battle of the mains with an extraordinarily good dish of monkfish tail in brown butter, festooned with crispy Jerusalem artichoke, the sauce dotted with trout roe.

And then a dessert with a supplement, one you need to preorder: an absolutely faultless tarte tatin with vanilla ice cream and a sticky caramel sauce. I’ve seen other reviews say it’s a must-have but I don’t know: looking back at the menu I can’t help but wonder what the burnt honey and cardamom ice cream would have been like, and how it went with caviar.

But no matter, because Brett was just a wonderful meal from start to finish. The staff were bright, happy, authentic and brilliant at what they do, the room was wonderful – as we will see from the first four places on this list, Glasgow seems to specialise in stunning dining rooms – and the people watching was fantastic. I even enjoyed the willy-waving of the lone diner at the bar, trying to namedrop all the Michelin starred restaurants he’d been to in his conversation with the chef opposite him. There’s always one.

Brett’s à la carte is £59 for three courses, although if you’re anything like me and you have the snacks, the extra course, the supplementary dessert, welcome cocktails, a corking bottle of white and some really superb rosé dessert wine the damage will creep far higher into three figures, as it did for us. But it was worth every penny. Next time I go to Glasgow I might book Cail Bruich. But it’s hard to imagine I’ll enjoy it more than I did Brett.

Brett
321 Great Western Road, Glasgow, G4 9HR
https://www.brettrestaurant.co.uk

2. Corner Shop

Corner Shop is in Yorkhill, a bit of Glasgow I’d never previously visited, west of the more famous Finnieston and south of Kelvingrove, with its stunning art gallery, museum and park. It’s been open for a year but with its gorgeous, bright, almost midcentury dining room, its considered design and its thoughtful menu it has the air of a place that has been there far longer. It was, however, the source of one of my biggest disappointments of the trip.

The thing is, I had been admiring it and its well-curated social media, its gorgeous-looking menu, from afar for weeks in the run-up to my visit. And then we got there on a sunny Tuesday to find that they had just introduced a lunchtime menu del dia, £20 for two courses with only two choices of starter and main. Having eyed up their huge albondiga on a skewer, their squid pil pil, I was gutted.

But that shows what I know because that menu is both phenomenal and an outrageous steal, and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as bargains like, say, Quality Chop House‘s lunchtime offer. Plus, it’s only two courses if you decide it has to be. Once you’ve snaffled a pair of exemplary jamon croquetas with an apéritif and added on a puffy-crusted flatbread slathered with braised leeks and buried under an avalanche of cheese you really don’t feel like anything is missing.

That’s before we get on to the main attractions, a starter and main as delicious as they were plentiful and both superb value. The tenderest squid cut into ribbons came on stewed sweet onions, finessed with a textbook salsa verde and a bright lemon vinaigrette, and I could have eaten it all the live long day. Zoë’s in season asparagus looked gorgeous too, but there was no way I could forego the squid.

We both picked a standout main, though, an immensely generous pork chop sitting on a layer of spinach, the whole thing resting on a caramelised cauliflower purée that simply had no right being so savoury. I asked the restaurant on Instagram later what magic they had worked on it, wondering if something like miso had found its way in there, only to be told that the secret ingredient was what the secret ingredient always is: more butter than you could possibly imagine.

All that and a wine list full of treats by the glass in – I’ll be saying this a lot – one of the nicest dining rooms I’ve eaten in for a very long time. When I go back to Glasgow I will make sure I snag an evening booking at Corner Shop, but I hope their lunch menu has the success it deserves: by the end of my meal I was aggrieved on their behalf that they weren’t turning people away.

Corner Shop
45 Old Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, G3 8RF
https://www.cornershopglasgow.co.uk

3. Eleven Fifty Five

When I visited Finnieston back in 2014 that area was at the vanguard of Glasgow’s gastronomic advances. It’s still home to the Finnieston and Crabshakk, widely heralded as some of the best places in the city to enjoy fish and seafood. But I never made it to high end small plates restaurant The Gannet, on the same stretch, which closed last December after a brilliant 12 year run which included plaudits in the Guardian.

What that means is that I approached Eleven Fifty Five, its reincarnation in the same site with the same team, without any preconceptions or sadness about what had gone before. It had been open less than 3 months when I dined there on a Tuesday night, and if you’d told me it had been open for 12 months I would absolutely have believed you.

Apparently the intent was to change the venue from a fine dining restaurant to a neighbourhood bistro, which I can completely understand: I sense that Glasgow is a city that will wrap its arms round a neighbourhood bistro but might not feel quite so strongly about a plating with tweezers establishment. And whatever it was before, what Eleven Fifty Five is now is a beautiful, very accomplished restaurant. It’s almost like the people running it have been doing this for ages.

It’s another standout space – as I keep saying, it seems, about everywhere. Another grown up, sophisticated dining room, impeccably furnished and beautifully lit, with tasteful comfortable furniture, attractive banquettes and booths, bare floors, wood panelling, exposed brick and blood-red walls. In that sense, I don’t remember many neighbourhood bistros looking half this fetching.

But the menu is where you know you’re not in fine dining territory: you are instead in fine pricing territory. A couple of magnificent pig’s head croquettes, magnanimously portioned things, for £7 to go with your negroni? Why not. A pile of deboned, smoked chicken wings striped with tarragon and topped with crispy shallots? That will set you back less than £15, as will a beautiful puck of white pudding topped with a quail’s egg, perched on mushrooms and draped with lardo, the distillation of an all day breakfast into an all smiles starter.

Mains are equally good value: Zoë had the best of it with a Himalayan salt aged ribeye with sauce Bordelaise, but I couldn’t complain about my lamb shoulder, braised to soft surrender, served with poached vegetables and crispy sweetbreads. There weren’t enough of the crispy sweetbreads – but there never are, and at £22 it was still very hard to quibble anything about that dish.

Cheeses, from Glasgow’s preeminent cheesemonger George Mewes, were unimpeachable, and the “chocolate bar” – praline, caramel, dark chocolate and a really terrific Guinness ice cream – is pretty much my idea of the perfect dessert. We pushed the boat out with a bottle of dessert wine into the bargain, and had a long and happy time trying, and failing, to be the last table to leave.

We had Kevin Dow looking after us – he has been running front of house for first The Gannet and now Eleven Fifty Five for over a decade – and to say service was silky-smooth would be an understatement. I absolutely adored my meal at Eleven Fifty Five, a class act that felt to me like an institution in the making. It makes you think, that Corner Shop is barely a year old and Eleven Fifty Five is only three months into this incarnation. That says to me that although Glasgow is already great, its best days may well still lie ahead.

Eleven Fifty Five
1155 Argyle Street, Glasgow, G3 8TB
https://www.bistroelevenfiftyfive.com

4. Margo

Here’s an illustration of the illusion of choice, Glasgow-style: there are four restaurants in Glasgow that all have a Michelin Bib Gourmand: Ox and Finch; Ka Pao; Margo; and Sebb’s. For all their differences – Ka Pao serves South-East Asian food, for instance, and Ox and Finch is more contemporary European – they are all small plates restaurants and they’re all owned by the same people. That isn’t of itself a bad thing, but it probably gives you a decent idea of what’s in vogue in Glasgow right now.

We ate at Margo on the first night, which was the place I most liked the look of on paper. And although I liked it, I liked it less than I expected to.

That’s not the room’s fault. I’ve said this already in this guide and I’ll say it again before we’re done but my goodness, the interior is beautiful. It’s dark and conspiratorial, simultaneously cosy and spacious, all gorgeous tables and even more luxe booths, and as sophisticated a dining room as I could recall – a position it held until the following night, I seem to remember.

It wasn’t the food either, because it was gorgeous stuff. Coppa came thick but expertly sliced, smoky and just waiting to be crinkled up and popped in your mouth. Really exceptional sticky merguez were topped with charred peppers and toasted seeds, curls of squid were served with thick slices of morteau sausage on a bed of Puy lentils.

The pricier plates had an awful lot to like about them too, whether it was a round of confit lamb shoulder with salsa verde or pork belly with crispy skin, morcilla and black garlic ketchup. Skate wing with kumquat was an intriguing combination of flavours I had never imagined, let alone eaten, and the single best thing we had was barbecued hispi cabbage. I know everybody sneers at hispi cabbage but this, charred and served with castelfranco and caesar dressing, was one of the nicest things I ate all week.

So what was the problem? I suppose it was that Margo, for all its talents, epitomised everything that irks me about small plates culture. Most of the plates, really, either weren’t big enough to share or didn’t lend themselves to being shared: when you’re dividing a single piece of morcilla in half something has gone wrong. Service was polite and friendly but maybe a tad cool, and asking to order in waves – my usual way of trying to apply structure to this kind of menu – was brushed off straight away as not an option.

That meant you were constantly loading half of a not very sharable dish onto a plate which was never changed, accumulating all the residue of dish after dish, sauce after sauce. And “they’ll come out when they’re ready” meant, it turns out, “they’ll all come out in the space of five minutes”: that old chestnut again. So although I liked Margo, and its food definitely deserves a mention here, it’s the one place in this guide where I would say: go if that’s your kind of thing, but consider the alternatives first.

Margo
68 Miller Street, Glasgow, G1 1DT
https://margo.restaurant

5. Sebb’s

Sebb’s is a basement bar and restaurant right next to Margo and, as we’ve established, owned by the same people. I didn’t really want to go to two places in the same empire but Zoë insisted because she thought there was something special about Sebb’s from her look at the menu.

Annoyingly, she was right.

Somehow everything Margo got wrong, Sebb’s got right. It’s instructive to think about why. First of all, the dishes were actually better suited to sharing and secondly, the service – which was warm and likeable and couldn’t do enough for you – was more than happy for us to order in bits and bobs as we went. The dishes are, on the whole, a little cheaper than Margo’s but with no discernible difference in quality. Sebb’s is more of a speakeasy, they have their own superb IPA on draft which is brewed for them by Pilot and it is, in short, an awful lot of fun.

All the dishes were cracking, too. Sebb’s shtick is cooking things over fire, and I loved practically everything I ate, from spongy lamb meatballs with a proper whack of heat to a fluffy flatbread covered in feta and sobrasada. My absolute favourite thing was Sebb’s pakora, served with a little piccalilli and a snowdrift of Spenwood, one of Reading’s finest cheeses.

But we also found space to have one of Sebb’s signature dishes, a gigantic and not-remotely-phallic Texan hotlink, coarse and moreish, with gold sauce, a Caroline barbecue sauce with more than a hint of mustard, and some life-affirming pickles.

At the end we chatted to our server, who was delightful from start to finish, and he explained that the menu had only just changed with some dishes, like their lahmacun, coming off for the first time. I got the impression they were braced for a backlash from regulars, but all I saw was stuff to love: he did say, though, that the pakora and the hotlink had been there from the start and probably always would be.

Anyway, I think they have nothing to worry about. Sebb’s only picked up its Bib Gourmand this year, and on this evidence it just needs to carry on doing what it’s doing. I would love to have dinner there next time, and to emerge from its depths at night rather than blinking into the daylight: while you’re down there time does rather lose all meaning. Interestingly, when I posted pictures of my travels on Threads, prior to writing this guide, the one place that got the biggest, warmest, most immediate response was Sebb’s. I can 100% see why.

Sebb’s
68b Miller Street, Glasgow, G1 1DT
https://sebbs.com

6. Shilling Brewing Company

A happy set of circumstances led us to Shilling Brewing Company. The bus from the airport into the city stops a stone’s throw away and, as luck would have it, we stepped down from it just in time for lunch. And it had been recommended by friends who’d visited Glasgow not long before, so what were we to do?

It’s a really gorgeous, high-ceilinged space that once, before being defiled as a horror-themed pub called Frankenstein (just imagine) used to be a bank. And for ten years or so now it’s been Glasgow’s first central brewpub, offering four Shilling beers along with over twenty-five others from breweries across the U.K.

Whoever is picking their line-up has seriously good taste. Across two visits I enjoyed sours from Dundee’s Holy Goat and Somerset’s Yonder, a great pale by New Bristol Brewery, very far from home, and another by Weekend Project that I’d previously enjoyed at the Castle Tap, of all places, last summer.

That would be enough to earn a recommendation, but Shilling Brewing also has a kitchen knocking out pizzas and they are very, very good. In truth mine, with haggis and Irn Bru chilli jam, didn’t manage to transcend being a gimmick. But Zoë’s, honking with ‘nduja and blue cheese, was the real deal. I didn’t get to try Paesano, one of the contenders for the city’s best pizza, but I didn’t feel short changed.

Shilling set rather an unrealistic standard, in terms of beer, for the rest of the trip. It’s not a huge craft beer city – and the other craft pub, The Raven, was closed for refurbishment during my visit – but rather a city full of gorgeous pubs that prefer cask to keg. In that sense it reminded me a little of Belfast, although Belfast’s craft scene felt more developed. But, as we will see next, if the pub is good enough the beer can feel decidedly secondary.

Shilling Brewing Company
92 W George Street, Glasgow, G2 1PJ
https://shillingbrewingcompany.co.uk

7. The Laurieston

The only time I crossed the Clyde was on my first night to go to the Laurieston, a pub Zoë and I had read much about and were keen to visit. It’s a flat roof pub next to a railway bridge, its name spelled out in a retro typeface on the front, and nothing about its exterior gives you much of a clue about just how special it is. As we approached it we saw a sign on the front, saying CASH ONLY and cursed, but a friendly chap sitting out front told us that there was a SPAR just up the road with an ATM at the back.

I had my card with me, and I took out some notes there, cursing under my breath the £1.75 charge for doing so. Who uses cash any more, or ATMs? On any other evening neither of us would have had our wallet, and I would have been writing about a different pub here. But fortunately, I’d brought my wallet and so I got to drink in one of the most incredible pubs I’ve ever visited.

The inside is quite amazing. Both rooms are, actually. The lounge bar, all red banquettes and plush chairs, wood panelling and tartan carpet, looks like a Martin Parr photograph brought to life. But it’s not a time capsule, as the array of art on the walls, some created and donated by patrons, shows. And that contrast is the Laurieston writ large, it looks in some ways like it probably always did but is a living, breathing thing, a pub that is bigger than every person that has ever drunk there and all their accumulated stories, but is also the encapsulation of them.

I liked the public bar even more, with its horseshoe bar and little formica tables, walls groaning with art and photos. The Laurieston isn’t a craft beer place – it is completely separate from such concepts – but it does offer a fair few beers by Fyne Ales including their totemic Jarl on cask. They also have Guinness on tap, at three different temperatures. The regular and extra cold are par for the course but the mythical middle tap is the one, serving the black stuff at cellar temperature, smoother than any nitro could ever be and a hundred times more enjoyable.

I only know about the middle tap because we sat up at the bar and got chatting to Michael next to us, an ex-military physiotherapist who lives in the Gorbals and drinks at the Laurieston fairly often. The absolute picture of welcome and charm, he bought Zoë and I our second drink in the pub and an hour later we were chatting away about all sorts, sharing jokes, talking beer, talking about Glasgow and how magical the Laurieston is.

Meanwhile a couple of emo twentysomethings came in, took the stools next to us and we all started talking about the gig they were off to. The old boy a few stools along from Michael joined in, and the next thing I knew the bar staff were telling Zoë and I where else to eat and drink in the city. A pub called The Griffin was mentioned, and an Eritrean restaurant on the Byres Road called Massawa, and Michael said there is a Lebanese restaurant called Damasqino on Saltmarket which is incredible.

By the time we wandered off, two hours later and three pints to the good, I had no idea why anybody would think Glasgow isn’t a friendly city, because I’ve rarely walked into any pubs I can think of and felt so welcome and included. And there was nothing special about me or Zoë – not in this way, anyway – this is just what the Laurieston is, and what it does. I liked it very much, although I’ll leave pontificating about what makes it so amazing to the likes of Pellicle. I just know that I wouldn’t go to an ATM for almost anything else.

Michael summed it up best without meaning to as we were about to leave, pointing to a sign on the wall saying IT’S JUST A PUB. That’s it in a nutshell, he said. But the twinkle in his eye told me he didn’t entirely believe it, and for what it’s worth neither do I.

The Laurieston
58 Bridge Street, Glasgow, G5 9HU
https://www.instagram.com/thelauriestonbar

8. Outlier

Outlier was on the edge of Merchant City, and we went there for coffee on our first morning in the city. It’s impossibly cool – I’m going to be saying that a lot, which exposes how uncool I am – all exposed brick, bare wood floors and tiled walls which have a touch of vintage Portmeirion pottery about them.

Add in floor to ceiling windows, heaps of natural light and a steady procession of the young and beautiful coming in for coffee and baked goods and you have another of those places that makes you understand why people go on bakery pilgrimages these days.

The coffee was excellent, Zoë’s cheese twist with chilli and hot honey even better. And I had a sausage roll full of dense, sage-infused pork that set me up nicely for the short wait until lunchtime (don’t judge, I was on holiday). But the more we looked at Outlier’s brunch menu the more it rankled with me that all our lunches and dinners were already booked up in the city. And then we looked at our flight time home, and the checkout time at our hotel and thought… breakfast on the last day?

So we did, and it was a capital idea. Zoë had a ham and cheese croissant – their pain au chocolat are epic too, by the way – but I really went for it with their conventional breakfast. A huge slice of toasted sourdough, crust surprisingly unlike cardboard, was topped with soft scrambled egg enhanced with caramelised onion, like a sort of reimagining of a tortilla. The bacon was smoked and streaky, as it always should be if you ask me, brushed with honey and grilled and the oyster mushrooms I’d asked for as a side were dry, meaty and remarkable.

But that’s not all: Outlier’s hash browns, a snip at a fiver, were sort of halfway between hash browns and Quality Chop House’s confit potatoes, salty golden bricks of shredded potato that defied both description and resistance. All that and a home-made brown sauce which was rich, fruity and many miles from the Houses Of Parliament. I don’t think I’ve ever had a breakfast with so many things going on, or so many imaginative things at that. It was almost – and I never say this – too much.

Next time I’m having the leek rice with Arbroath smokies, clearly their take on a kedgeree, and one of those cheese twists. And another pain au chocolat. And, and, and… I’m going to have to visit more than once again, aren’t I?

Outlier
38 London Road, Glasgow, G1 5NB
https://www.instagram.com/outlier.gla

9. Spitfire Espresso

I first encountered Spitfire after my first coffee at Outlier: their roastery is on Osborne Street, which curves away from Saltmarket and ends up at Bare Bones (at the end of this list). We stopped by, bought some beans for home – they’re great, by the way – and I nabbed a takeaway latte which I loved. But we also discovered they had a bigger premises, an actual cafe, in Merchant City, so we resolved to go there the following morning.

I’m really glad we did: it’s another really handsome space – those Glaswegian buildings are big-boned, and they’re good bones at that – with a striking red white and blue colour scheme which carries through the whole space beautifully. Their coffee, as I already knew, is extremely good but I was also struck by the chance to tick off another item on the gastronomic checklist, a morning roll.

It was a corker: a floury bap crammed with soft black pudding, crispy back bacon and brown sauce, and it set me back just over a fiver (Zoë, a black pudding skeptic, said the Lorne sausage was equally fine). I really wanted to try a morning roll on this trip: I hear the dead fancy ones are to be had at Cottonrake Bakery, out on the Great Western Road, but Spitfire’s rendition made me very happy indeed.

Spitfire Espresso
55 High Street, Glasgow, G1 1LX
https://spitfireespresso.com/pages/locations

10. Amulet

Amulet, cyan-fronted and too cool for school, is out in Partick, just west of the Byres Road, and I actually visited it after Nowita, a couple of places down this list, which makes it slightly arse about face. Sorry about that.

It is in an area rich with cafés: just across the street you have Kaf, who some say are Glasgow’s best bakery, and Revival, who do coffee and vinyl, that classic hipster one-two. Further up you have Hyndland, an area which sports a branch of 1841, which some people think serves Glasgow’s best coffee. And the other side of the Byres Road you have Hinba, which also has its champions.

So competition is fierce, and within a 15 minute walk you have more top-notch coffee than you can find in the whole of Reading. That rather puts it all in perspective.

I didn’t go to those other places, so I can’t rank Amulet against them, but I did like it very much. It’s an attractive space – how many times have I said that now? – with exposed brick painted white and a big central island with stools, a few more in the window and a handful of low tables along one side. The welcome was friendly and the music was excellent, although I Shazamed one track to find it was by a band described as simultaneously post hardcore, punk and emo, which I took to mean that I was far too antediluvian to add it to my library.

On my visit there was no “handbrew” – I had to look it up, it means pourover and the like – because one of the team was at the London Coffee Festival, so I had to settle for a latte. It was up there with the other excellent coffee I had on this visit, without a shadow of a doubt.

The whole thing did make me roll my eyes a little, though, which just goes to show that as a fiftysomething scruffy grump I am not the kind of customer Amulet is that bothered about attracting. The hours painted on the front say 8-4 maybe in a way I found needlessly wacky, and lettering underneath said amulet is not a cafe.

‘Well, what the hell is it then?’ I wanted to ask someone, although I thought better of it because it was the definiition of a me problem. But I maintain that if it looks like a café, it sells you coffee for money like a café, it gives you somewhere to sit while you drink it like a café and plays you music like a café, in my book it’s a fucking café. For whatever my two pence is worth, I reckon Amulet is a very good one.

Amulet
38 Mansfield Street, Glasgow, G11 5QW
https://www.instagram.com/amuletamuletamuletamuletamulet

11. Laboratorio Espresso

Laboratorio is just round the corner from Shilling Brewing Company, which means that they served my first latte of the holiday. It’s been open for nearly 13 years and is an excellent spot, although that didn’t surprise me because they get their hands on some seriously good beans: I recognised superb Barcelona roaster Nomad from my travels, and we made sure to pick some up to take home with us.

It’s an arresting if minimalist space inside, with a handful of tables and high stools up at the full length windows looking out on the world, and I can imagine it would be excellent for people watching on a good day or sheltering on a bad one. On this visit to Glasgow we got more bad weather than good, but a latte like Laboratorio’s would make that, and life in general, infinitely more bearable.

Laboratorio Espresso
93 W Nile Street, Glasgow, G1 2SH
https://laboratorioespresso.com/index.html

12. Nowita Ice Cream

The reason I was in Partick wasn’t to grab coffee and listen to post-hardcore music at Amulet. It was because I’d heard good things about Nowita, an ice cream place opposite. I always aim to include one ice cream spot in my city guides, come hell or high water, and I didn’t want to let anybody down on this visit to Glasgow. Nowita is the creation of married couple Jill and Jamie Inkster, and it celebrates its fourth birthday this summer.

It’s bloody good, let me get that out of the way now. But Nowita makes you work for it. Its opening hours are slightly erratic: they weren’t open on Monday or Tuesday and on Wednesday, the day I dropped by, they didn’t start trading until 3pm. There’s no seating inside, just a solitary bench outside. And the day I visited, arriving 10 minutes after it opened, the rain had been constant, the clouds mutinous. It didn’t bode well for my Nowita experience at all.

There were ten flavours, all handmade by Jamie every week, and they were a fascinating mix of the staples – raspberry sorbet, vegan dark chocolate, strawberry ripple – and more leftfield options: cardamom and white chocolate or pineapple upside-down cake, anybody? But I kept it simple, placed my order and then something magical happened. The sun came out, the rain held off, the bench outside was vacant and welcoming. It was, I decided, a sign.

I tried one classic and one curveball, and both were exquisite. I liked Nowita’s salted caramel a great deal, getting the balance bang on with a very pleasing stripe of caramel, almost elastic, running through it. But the real eye opener for me was Nowita’s dark chocolate with chilli peanuts, deep and rich but with bite and spike coming through, both in terms of texture and temperature.

It made me wish I had been more experimental and tried some of the more left of centre flavours on offer. It made me wish I’d gone for three scoops instead of two. It made me wish they’d been open on Tuesday, too, but you can’t win them all.

Nowita Ice Cream
51 Hyndland Street, Glasgow, G11 5QF
https://www.nowita.co.uk

13. Tantrum Doughnuts

When I went to Corner Shop I would quite have liked to try their dessert selection. But I think that option is best explored at dinner time, because I’m not sure how much dessert they’ll realistically shift at lunchtimes. The reason for that, a few doors down, is Tantrum Doughnuts.

Tantrum is one of the more famous places in this guide, because it appeared on Somebody Feel Phil, which means it doesn’t really need exposure from anyone. It’s been going for over 10 years, having started out at food markets, and although it now has a branch in the centre and on the Southside the one in Yorkhill is the original and the one I wanted to visit.

These are proper doughnuts, not the Krispy Kreme variants that still seem to be so popular in the U.K., and to have them in they’ll set you back between £2 and £5 depending on whether you’re going for a more spartan glazed ring or the full monty filled and topped with all manner of decadence. I had managed to save room after lunch for the ‘Chocolate Millionaire crémeux”, filled with chocolate and caramel, topped with more chocolate and finished with shortbread crumbs and chocolate pearls.

It was everything I hoped it would be, and then some: it reminded me of Pipp & Co doughnuts, back when they used to be better, only better even than that. I have no idea where the name comes from, unless it involves someone turning up to find that they’ve run out.

Tantrum Doughnuts
27 Old Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, G3 8RD
https://tantrumdoughnuts.com

14. Bare Bones Chocolate

Bare Bones Chocolate is a bean to bar chocolatier – try saying that sentence a few times in a row after you’ve had a few – at the end of Osborne Street, just down from the Spitfire Espresso roastery. It sells an array of its tasteful, beautifully packaged, utterly delicious chocolate and – perhaps just as importantly – invites you to try before you buy from the thoughtfully arranged wooden bowls, using the tongs provided.

I’d like to say I bought so much chocolate because I felt guilty about wielding those tongs with abandon. But really, it’s because Bare Bones know what they are doing and their chocolate is almost improbably good. The milk chocolate, the reference bar, is exceptional. But the dark chocolate – not too dark, mind – with a hint of sea salt is one of the best bars I’ve ever sampled. Not too much sea salt, mind: do you see where this is going? Bare Bones, like I said, know exactly what they’re doing.

There’s a little table outside and they serve hot chocolate, which I’ll absolutely try next time. But more widely, Bare Bones realise that a shop just selling their six different chocolate bars would be a bit of a one note retail experience, so they have curated a selection of other lovely things – drinking chocolate, olive oil, blankets, greeting cards and so on – making it a genuinely idyllic place to wander and browse, pausing only to check another chocolate bar, just in case it needs to be added to your shopping bag.

The other thing worth saying about Bare Bones, which is a tribute to how good they are and how good some of the other places in this guide are, is that their chocolate is used across the city. If you order the chocolate nemesis at Margo? That’s made with their chocolate. If you have a mocha at Outlier – which, by the way, you absolutely should if you ask me – that is made with their chocolate too. That cross-pollination, that culinary scene where everything is supportive and interconnected, is as good a closing image of Glasgow as a food city as any I can think of.

Bare Bones Chocolate
111 King Street, Glasgow, G1 5RB
https://bareboneschocolate.co.uk/

(Click here to read more city guides.)

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Café review: Baby Yolk

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Alexandra Langlais, the owner of Insta-friendly Erleigh Road institution Café Yolk has had a busy twelve months. In January she opened Donnington Deli opposite Yolk’s original branch in a spot formerly occupied by a car dealership, offering huge deli-style sandwiches with a free cold drink thrown in (or, if you’re cynical, a cold drink you might not want priced in). I went the morning they opened and, perhaps peevishly, was disappointed that they weren’t a deli and didn’t serve coffee; I wandered off to have an enjoyable brunch at Monty’s instead.

The deli thing was probably an overreaction – nobody criticises Calcot’s Avenue Deli, after all, for not being a deli – and I’m reliably informed that Donnington Deli has finally put coffee on the menu. But I ate there a couple of times in quick succession in its opening month and, despite being impressed with the handsome fit out, it wasn’t entirely my bag. Sometimes less is more, and Donnington Deli’s almost comically overstuffed and stodgy focaccias didn’t do it for me; the prevalence of turkey, surely everybody’s least favourite meat, on the menu was also a bit of a curveball.

I’ll be back at some point once it’s settled in to try Donnington Deli again but the place was doing a roaring trade and doesn’t need any help from me either way: Langlais clearly knows exactly what she’s doing, understands her market and is expanding her business in a careful, considered way, staying close to a community she knows well. It’s mind-blowing, really, to think that Café Yolk traded solidly for over 10 years before it even considered branching out.

The more interesting development, for me, was Yolk’s actual second branch, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, which opened on Cemetery Junction last July. It was a deliberately stripped-back sequel to its older sibling, with a far narrower menu and a greater emphasis on grab and go options. It particularly appealed to me because my favourite thing at Yolk was always the breakfast burger, and that’s what Baby Yolk has built its menu around.

But in that part of town, only open daytimes, Baby Yolk had proved challenging for me to get to for brunch or lunch, and it wasn’t clear how much capacity it had for eating in. Last week, with a rare Friday off, I found myself in that neck of the woods just in time for a late breakfast, so I decided it was a sign and made my way there to see how it measured up to the other establishments in the Yolk family.

I was reminded as I approached it that businesses don’t always prosper in this location. The spot where Smash N Grab used to be was now occupied by a South Indian business called Mallu Nest, but the little hut looked like it was being gutted and it wasn’t clear whether it would reopen as Mallu Nest or something else. And of course before that it spent something like a year being the preposterously named Cozzy Bites, a smash burger place whose menu was so similar to Smash N Grab’s that you wondered if the names of the burgers had formed part of the terms and conditions of sale.

Come to think of it, before Baby Yolk came out of its shell that site was Cemetery Junction hairdresser the Funky Barnet for over 20 years, which means that – lucky Yolk – their landlord is famous Reading philanthropist John Sykes. Let’s hope they get on better with Sykes than the Funky Barnet did, given that they notoriously went to the local paper during Covid to ensure his humane conduct reached a wider audience. All that and a busy charitable foundation too: let’s get Danyl Johnson to give that man a gold plated Pride Of Reading Lifetime Award!

Still, as long as Yolk keeps making money and avoiding any kind of global pandemic I’m sure they and their landlord will rub along nicely, until it comes time to renegotiate the rent at least. But can they do that in this little corner of the Junction? I got there just after 10am, and one customer was sitting in, although there was a steady trickle of both eat-in and takeaway customers during my time there.

I loved the interior and the way Baby Yolk was styled. From the sunshine-yellow awning and shopfront to the almost space-age white shelves, showcasing Yolk’s beans and reusable cups for sale, the colour scheme is clever and witty, is bright and pops. It’s rare that the interiors of Reading hospitality businesses look this coherent and thought through, and I really appreciated it. Baby Yolk was also far bigger than I expected inside, with a mixture of high and low tables, stools, chairs and bright yellow banquettes, probably seating about a dozen people. Outside a little terrace had room for half a dozen more, and could be lovely on a sunny day.

Baby Yolk’s menu keeps it simple: five “breakfast burgers”, although the pedants among us – okay, maybe just me – could argue about whether any of the ones that don’t involve a sausagemeat patty technically qualify as burgers at all. For meat eaters you can have either sausage and egg, bacon and egg or the holy trinity of all three, for vegetarians it means egg, cheese and avocado in a bun.

Vegans get the same thing, but with scrambled tofu subbed in for the egg: I had scrambled tofu once, in 2016, and have never sought to repeat the experience. Let’s just say it was a strange time in my life.

The entry level breakfast burgers are £7 each and costs rise from there to £8.90 for the vegan not-a-burger. There are various extras you can chuck in: some, like sauce and crispy onions, are free whereas others can add up to £3 to the end product. It felt a little unfair that the vegetarian and vegan options were the most expensive things on the menu, and it also doesn’t suggest Yolk is using the fanciest meat in their sandwiches.

The majority of the menu board was given over to a plethora of beverages: frappes, smoothies, iced drinks, teas, coffees, matcha and chai. There were also some baked goods up at the counter – muffins, cookies and the like – although their price wasn’t listed. A sausage and egg burger and a latte set me back £10.70, which felt pretty reasonable, and I nabbed a table in the bay window with a good view of the room. Five minutes later, my coffee and my foil-wrapped burger were in front of me.

The first thing to say about Baby Yolk’s breakfast burger is that despite what you might think it is not a McMuffin or even Fidget & Bob’s Kennet Island homage, the O’Muffin. Part of that is the obvious: it’s a bun, not a muffin. And part is because, instead of a fried egg, Baby Yolk tops its patty with a little omelette, as its elder sibling does. Less messy, and possibly a little less indulgent.

Unlike the breakfast burger at Café Yolk the egg here doesn’t make a break for it past the perimeter of the bun. But again, this is designed for convenience and eating on the go, not attacking at a table with cutlery to hand if you need it. I didn’t mind that, but the egg itself was underseasoned: it meant the rest of the burger had to do a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting.

Similarly the patty was pleasant, if ever so slightly anaemic. When you have this dish on Erleigh Road there’s more caramelisation, more crisping of the edges. Here everything was a single texture, a perfectly pleasant spongey puck of sausagemeat which, again, could have done with more salt. All that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy this, which is unfair: I did, and it was pretty much what I needed. But was it an upmarket reimagining of a Sausage & Egg McMuffin, or just a more expensive version in a nicer room?

What saved it, I suspect, were the extras. I’d gone for HP sauce and crispy onions and the latter in particular lifted and rescued what might otherwise have been a tad workmanlike. The onions were those ones you bought in a tub, but in a thick carpet between the bun and the patty, playing off the brown sauce, they made each mouthful better. I munched away contentedly, enjoying my bay window seat and watching the comings and goings of this interesting little café. Something about its simplicity, its deliberate lack of range, appealed to me: after all, the one thing Gordon Ramsay and restaurant critics have in common these days is a strongly held conviction that menus should not try to do too much.

When I reviewed Cafe Yolk last, nearly 5 years ago, a big draw was that they had started buying coffee from Anonymous Coffee. Then they binned it off, presumably on cost grounds, and used Kingdom Coffee instead: I discovered this one sad afternoon when my takeaway latte tasted worse than one you could have picked up from Costa or Nero.

It’s unclear whether Yolk have stuck with Kingdom or even if they now get their own branded coffee roasted by someone else: although I saw their canary-coloured bags on those white shelves I didn’t go over to investigate, and it’s not clear whether they were for sale or for display only. Whoever Baby Yolk get its coffee from, I was delighted to find that it was a really serviceable, smooth latte without bitterness: a tall, generous one too for £3.70, which is pretty much the going rate for a latte nearly anywhere right now.

It is also, with the possible exception of Monty’s, the only place even vaguely in East Reading that does a latte worth ordering. The residents of New Town are quite lucky, I would say. The commuters of New Town, too, as Baby Yolk opens at 7am. The coffee was so nice, and the spot so welcoming, that I stayed longer than I intended to, nursing my coffee and cursing my bad luck that even I couldn’t justify a research-focused piece of cake at 10.30am.

It’s typical that perhaps Yolk’s most unsung move turns out to be my favourite. Baby Yolk opened last year to a comparative lack of fanfare, and significantly less comment and interest than Donnington Deli attracted less than six months later. But for what it’s worth, of all three of Yolk’s outposts Baby Yolk was the one I enjoyed most. It got everything right: I liked the concept, loved the design and enjoyed the execution.

It’s not a menu with much in the way of replay value, which might prove to be a limiting factor longer term, but it may have just enough. Also, like all of Alexandra Langlais’ businesses, it is not so concerned about getting Reading residents to cross town, as I did, to go there. It is very much targeted at its community and that community is lucky to have someone living in it who has the drive and the vision to make it a better place in which to eat and drink, whatever your preferences might be.

Yolk’s website states “Please note our Baby Yolk location is takeaway only” and they ought to change that, because it might deter people from doing what I did, wandering over on the off-chance and having a really pleasant, tranquil time watching the world go by, both inside and outside the café, the comings and goings of one of my favourite little pockets of the Ding.

Sadly Reading Old Cemetery is still closed, but my breakfast reminded me of all my happy lockdown wanderings there in the summer of 2020, a lifetime ago. If Baby Yolk had been open back then I have no doubt I would have perched outside afterwards with a coffee, or taken one with me and drunk it by the war memorial. I thought of my friend Graeme, who can practically walk past Baby Yolk on his commute to work, and simultaneously felt jealous and happy for him.

It also made me miss my old house in the Village, a short walk from Baby Yolk, and all the working from home lunches I wouldn’t get to enjoy. Truth be told, it made me slightly begrudge living in Katesgrove, which could badly do with a place like this: good luck finding a drinkable latte round there. Still, Reading as a whole is better for this kind of spot, and I just hope they spring up in some of its other unsung or underserved barrios.

Until then, it’s better that a café like this is somewhere, anywhere, rather than nowhere. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we have to hope that Cafe Yolk’s flurry of activity in the last year might serve as a blueprint for other imaginative entrepreneurs. Until then, East Reading is the lucky part. As this review goes to print we’re about to experience our first true heatwave of the year, but even without that Baby Yolk is doing a decent job of making Cemetery Junction the sunny side of town.

Baby Yolk – 7.3
14 Wokingham Road, Reading, RG6 1JG
0118 3131128

https://www.cafeyolk.com

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Restaurant review: Malmaison

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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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Restaurant review: Nando’s, Wokingham

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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.

Nando’s – 6.7
29 Market Place, Wokingham, RG40 1AP
0118 9773220

https://www.nandos.co.uk/restaurants/wokingham

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Pub review: The Port Mahon, Oxford

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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

https://www.theportmahon.com

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