Restaurant review: Mignonette, Richmond

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A couple of Fridays ago I was sitting outside a very pleasant café called Butter Beans, a minute away from Richmond’s beautifully refurbished Art Deco train station, experiencing what could safely be described as mixed emotions. I was happy, because I was about to have French food for lunch. But I was also sad, because I was not in France doing it.

I was supposed to be. It was the week of my annual big holiday and our plans, made right at the start of the year, were to return to Montpellier, arguably my favourite city in the world. We had booked the bed and breakfast we always stayed in, and the room we always stayed in, for that matter, and I had been daydreaming about a glass of wine or a cold beer out on the roof terrace before dinner. The city had decided – jolly decent of them, if you ask me – to organise a week-long craft beer festival to coincide exactly with my time there.

In a parallel universe you wouldn’t be reading this review, and I’d be sitting on a terrace somewhere (an hour ahead, you see) with a bottle of Languedoc white and a menu in front of me, no doubt being insufferable – well, even more so – on social media. But many of my holidays have come a cropper in the last twelve months, and this one was no exception: Zoë needed an operation on her back, and it was scheduled for the day after we’d come back from France. But in the run-up to the procedure she was in too much pain to catch a train to the airport, sit on a flight for three hours, sleep in an unfamiliar bed, the list goes on.

As the date of the holiday inexorably approached I knew that we would have to have The Conversation, so I mentally prepared myself. I stopped thinking about what restaurants to book, unfollowed various places on Instagram so I wouldn’t have to look at all the dishes I wouldn’t eat and all the fetching dining rooms I wouldn’t eat them in. I unfollowed the beer festival too, said nah nah nah I’m not listening to all the tap takeovers and events.

It was fine, I told myself. After all, when I broke my arm we cancelled a couple of trips away and Zoë, who is of course a far finer human being than I am, never made me feel guilty. There will be other times she said, and I know she meant it. She had given me the script nine months ago, and when we had The Conversation I faithfully followed it. And I meant every word, because that’s what marriage is about, but I have a feeling Zoë would have done a better job of hiding her devastation. Or perhaps she wouldn’t have been devastated, because she’s not unworthy like me.

I kept the week off though, convincing myself that a staycation might be nice. And I decided to treat myself on the Friday with a little solo excursion, lunch with a paperback, a day out on the train. Maybe it was the new series of Ted Lasso, perhaps it was something else, but I found myself eyeing up Richmond as an option. It was a leisurely direct train, taking almost exactly an hour, and there was a very appealing French restaurant a short walk away from the station: technically in Kew not Richmond, I suppose, but not worth splitting hairs over.

Mignonette has just celebrated its second birthday, and it’s safe to say that it’s had a decent couple of years. It won a Bib Gourmand from Michelin after it had been open barely six months, and although it hasn’t so far come to the attention of the broadsheet critics, it did receive a very positive writeup from restaurant guru Andy Hayler – who has featured on the blog before – when he paid it two visits in the first couple of months. “Already shaping up very nicely indeed” was his verdict.

It is owned by chef John McClements, who previously held a Michelin star at a restaurant in nearby Twickenham, and most of the coverage it garnered in the first few months focused on its value for money. Mignonette, you see, offers an extremely affordable prix fixe at lunchtime (“even less than Noble Rot’s” was one comment) and McClements, speaking to the Standard, made much of his attempts to keep costs down, running a lean ship in the kitchen and cutting out the middle man when sourcing ingredients.

“Reasonably priced” felt like a difficult concept to square with “just around the corner from Richmond station”, so I decided it merited a visit for that reason alone, if no other. Fortified by excellent caffeination, I made the short stroll in the sunshine. You couldn’t miss the place, with its tasteful sage frontage, racing green awning and micro-terrace with a couple of tables outside. It reminded me somehow of Chelsea’s Medlar, as if a distant relation, and that shared language made me strangely confident that a promising lunch was in the offing.

The one review I’ve found online of Mignonette was sniffy about the interior (“no expense has been incurred”, it sneered) but I thought it was absolutely fine. It’s a compact room with about thirty covers, although I think they have more space on another floor, and while it’s pretty plain and unadorned, I think I’d pick that over ersatz.

I do think a couple of the smaller tables are ones you wouldn’t want, especially the table for two crowbarred into the bay window, but I had no complaints. I had a great table with my back to the wall, plenty of space and an unimpeded view of the comings and goings of both the diners and the small, friendly and extremely efficient brigade of serving staff.

I don’t know what this says about the demographic of the area, but I was one of the youngest people in that dining room and I think we all know by now that I’m no spring chicken. Bloody boomers, eh? They were there taking advantage of the prix fixe when, generationally speaking, they’re the bastards most capable of paying for the à la carte. I guess being retired comes in really handy when you’re having your main meal at lunchtime.

Just how much of a bargain Mignonette’s set menu is came as a surprise to me, even though everything I’d read said as much. Initially I was disappointed that it was the only menu available: the à la carte comes out to play in the evening. But then I read it and any disappointment evaporated. It is – you may need to read this a couple of times and I promise it’s not a typo – £23 for 2 courses or £25 for 3. Normally that is done by using cheaper ingredients, or by just giving you two choices per course – one meat and one vegetarian, say, with an additional fish option if the restaurant is in a giving mood.

None of that was the case here. Five starters, five mains and five desserts to choose from, with foie gras, smoked salmon, jamon iberico, guinea fowl and lamb all making an appearance. And there were flashes of interest almost everywhere you looked: fermented fennel with one starter, seaweed salad with another, treacle-cured bacon or Merguez sausage cropping up with the mains, heather honey ice cream, pollen and kumquat paired with one of the desserts. I would have only found a prix fixe as attractive as this in a couple of my Montpellier haunts, and they would both have been more expensive.

Whichever permutation of dishes you eventually choose your meal begins, as mine did, with bread and butter. Two types of bread – one a lightly seeded loaf and the other a slice of baguette with an impeccable airy springiness. They came with Mignonette’s Marmite butter, which was the colour of a fudgy caramel and had a relatively subtle but unmistakeable umami depth. It might even convert people who think they hate Marmite, not that I’m among that tribe. A review I read was dubious about this being the default rather than a bog standard salted butter: some folk are just ingrates, if you ask me.

Both bread and butter were replenished when I tore through them, which I found extremely winning. By this point I had a respectable £28 half bottle of Fleurie in front of me, along with my paperback (An Absence Of Cousins by Lore Segal: don’t bother, I feel like I’ve been reading it all year) and the sunny afternoon stretching out ahead. Everything was going very swimmingly indeed.

That trajectory was not remotely altered by a very fine starter. What was billed as a boudin of foie gras – ethical foie gras, the menu takes care to point out – was two glossy discs of the stuff, with a little sprinkle of salt, served with thick ribbons of duck. The latter was allegedly roasted, but I’m not sure exactly how roasted anything can be when its centre is quite so ruddy: that didn’t matter though, as it proved a marvellous counterpoint.

Hidden underneath were two little nuggets of sunshine which at first I took to be sundried tomatoes, but had a note of citrus that made me think they were possibly something like kumquat. And frisée, which is a leaf I generally cross the road to avoid. And a gorgeous dressing with a flourish of Pedro Ximenez that made me think that everybody who had tried to serve me frisée in the past had just been doing it wrong. This is the genius of French cuisine at its best, to me, if it can make frisée a treat.

If the starter was strong, the main was better. Knockout, in fact. Three thick slabs of Herdwick lamb, cooked impeccably, with an embarrassment of riches in support. A soft golden clove of garlic on top. To the side, a quenelle of dreamy pommes purée and two batons of delicious, just-firm-enough courgette. A semicircle of what could have been squash, or pumpkin, again cooked bang on, so soft it could have been confited.

Under the lamb, a phenomenal samphire pesto – a new one on me, but a superb advert for not just eating samphire with fish. And then one final treat: a nubbly little Merguez sausage, from the other side of the tracks to that blushing loin but providing exactly the heat, poke and contrast that catapulted this from a very polished plate of food to one of my dishes of the year.

A couple of months ago, in Cheltenham, I had an exceptional lamb dish as part of Le Champignon Sauvage’s à la carte menu. That menu was £92 for 3 courses. This dish was its equal in accomplishment and quality, on a menu where 3 courses sets you back £25. It is simply unbelievable that Mignonette can offer this range and quality at this price – I’m not sure how they can do that, or how sustainable it is, but I can tell you how wonderful it feels to be a beneficiary of that.

What I would also say about Mignonette’s lamb, before we move on, is that I can’t remember ever eating a dish quite so mindfully. Not just in the glass half empty sense of being aware of it coming to an end – although yes, that too – but in the sense that every forkful was considered, every permutation of components was tried and tasted. Just as you can order from a menu countless ways, it felt like you could eat this dish countless ways too. I loved it. I tore a little crust off my bread to mop up the final whispers of rosemary jus, before loading every last molecule of Marmite butter on to the remaining piece.

I felt a responsibility, as a table for one, to try and spend enough that the restaurant didn’t lose too much money by accommodating a lone diner. That’s my excuse for the alcohol on my final bill setting me back more than the food did. It’s my excuse for laying waste to a half bottle of red, and it’s the reason I ordered a glass of Pineau des Charantes to go with my dessert. It was a glorious pour of potent nectar, and I adored it. You need to at £18 a glass, and I know that on paper that’s ridiculous: in my defence, when the food is reasonably priced to the point of irrationality, it makes you do crazy things.

My dessert with that was a caramelised pear tarte tatin, and if it was the weakest thing I ate it was still miles from an ordeal. It was an individual tarte rather than a section of a larger whole, and something about it didn’t entirely work. The apples were scorching hot, the pastry not quite so: it felt as if they’d met late in proceedings, even though I knew that couldn’t be the case.

But these are not serious problems, not against the backdrop of such a brilliant meal. The sticky caramel sauce encircling the tarte was a thing of beauty, and the crème Chantilly, shot through with Calvados, was arrestingly good. I perhaps might have enjoyed the Earl Grey and honey crème brûlée better, or the Basque cheesecake with rhubarb, but there may be other times to weigh those up. I didn’t see any of them waft past to other tables, which gave me less to envy. Besides, technically this dessert cost £2.

The whole affair was brisk, which I might object to in other circumstances, but for a prix fixe – and a ludicrously priced one at that – I had no problem with it. I was asking for my bill just over an hour after I took my table, and the whole thing came to £78, including an optional 10% service charge. I occasionally say “but you could spend less”, sometimes less convincingly than others, but it’s definitely true here.

So yes, Mignonette is quite extraordinary. To put that set lunch in context, at home and away, it is considerably cheaper than London Street Brasserie, and miles better. Or if you want to compare apples with apples and talk about French restaurants, it’s also less expensive than Oxford’s Pierre Victoire – and much as I love that place it doesn’t come close to Mignonette in terms of quality.

A placid hour on the train, a ten minute walk and food so good that it’s verging on a giveaway, including dishes that hold their own against far pricier ones at acclaimed Michelin starred restaurants. Can you tell I quite liked the place? It is a destination restaurant in a neighbourhood restaurant’s clothing, and I really want to go back to try their à la carte one evening. This is my first review from Richmond, and much as I loved ambling round it I wouldn’t hold out for a sequel any time soon: if I’m in that part of the world, I’ll probably be eating at Mignonette.

The rest of my afternoon was quite lovely, since you asked. With the happy afterglow that a brilliant lunch and a little booze can give, I headed to Kiss The Hippo and had a fantastic latte before buying some beans to take home. I mooched around town window-shopping and remembering times, a lifetime ago, when I was a far more frequent visitor to Richmond.

I sat on a bench by the green and watched all the happy tourists pass by in their Richmond FC shirts, and I was far too replete with the milk of human kindness to judge them at all. And I stopped in a hugely likeable fragrance shop called Parfum Le Dance, because that’s the kind of thing I do, and sprayed countless bottles on strips of paper before taking my three favourites for a little walk, drying down on my wrists and hands. And then I went back to buy a bottle of something indulgent to remember the day by. Why not? I was on holiday after all.

It was, I reflected on the train home, a day out for the ages. Good French food, excellent coffee, people watching and fragrance shopping: I hadn’t missed Montpellier in the slightest.

Mignonette – 9.1
109 Kew Road, London, TW9 2PN
020 82401215

https://www.mignonettebistro.com

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Restaurant review: Sapana Home

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I meet Graeme off his train back from London. He is smartly dressed and layered up, because he has come from work and because he knows that it’s autumn. I am slightly parky in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, because I have the week off and am pretending it’s still summer. He is appropriately dressed, I am trying and failing to make denial a fashion choice: naturally he is too kind to point that out.

Graeme had been keen to grab a bite to eat before we made a beeline for the pub, somewhere nice and quick, and I’d suggested Sapana Home because it was close to the station, en route to the Nag’s Head, cheap and cheerful. Besides, according to the geotagged photos on my phone I’d not eaten there in three and a half years. Never been. Would be up for that came Graeme’s reply, so Sapana Home it was.

Reading has had a Nepalese community for fifty years or so, and I expect it’s always had restaurants serving them. But Sapana Home, which opened in 2012, was the one that broke out and reached a wider audience – offering specifically Nepalese food rather than just being a Nepali take on a curry house like Standard Tandoori. By the time I reviewed Sapana, a couple of years later, it already had a reputation in Reading as somewhere central to go for good, affordable no-frills food.

It was, I expect, where many Reading folk had their first momo: it was certainly where I had mine. And from that seed grew a whole network of Nepalese restaurants. Namaste Kitchen for instance, followed by Namaste Momo and then Kamal’s Kitchen, all propelled by the charm of shy and retiring local legend Kamal Tamrakar. Dhaulagiri Kitchen up on Basingstoke Road, and its street food spin-off Momo Bros.

And that’s just for starters. There are plenty more, like Momo 2 Go, where you can eat in, Just Momo, which doesn’t just do momo, and Yo Momoz on the Wokingham Road, which doesn’t just misspell ‘momos’. What’s the collective noun for Nepalese restaurants? Regional bloggers in other cities lose their shit when they happen upon momo: here in Reading we could become blasé about them.

But it would be revisionist of me to say that it was love at first sight when I reviewed Sapana Home, 12 years ago. Because actually, when I went, I liked the momo but I was unmoved by the rest – the chow mein, the siu mai from over the border, the sukuti with soy beans, the thali and the strangely crispy jeli, deep fried batter in sugar syrup. I gave Sapana Home a pretty low rating: this was back when more people thought I was too harsh, as opposed to now when people tend to reckon I’m too kind. I said to go for the momo, settle up and quit while you’re ahead.

In the intervening years, I went back – always for the momo but often for other dishes – and I realised my view of Sapana Home was more and more unduly negative. In fairness this was before Nepalese food blossomed in Reading, and certainly before I first ate at Namaste Kitchen, but Sapana Home occupied a real place in my affections. I’ve written about it more than once – giving it all kinds of plaudits, nominating it as producing one of Reading’s 50 best dishes, saying it was the perfect place to eat solo. So how had it been over three years since I last walked through those doors?

The room itself hadn’t altered much: same tables, same chairs, same awkward shape on the ground floor with a table in the window, a couple at the back near the counter and one against the wall which felt like it would be nobody’s first choice of somewhere to eat. There is a room downstairs, too, but I’ve only eaten there when there’s been no other choice and I didn’t plan to depart from that habit of a lifetime in the name of research.

Any changes the restaurant had made, beyond replacing the bright, friendly blue and white frontage with a glossier black and yellow one, were subtle and incremental. You ordered and paid at the counter now, which definitely wasn’t the case when I last ate there, and the loud and incongruous commercial radio – I can honestly say that eating at Sapana was the only time I’d ever willingly listen to Heart FM – seemed to have been axed. The place wasn’t full when we turned up on a Thursday night, but there was a regular trickle of delivery drivers. Perhaps that was where Sapana did much of its trade.

Sapana’s menu was also much the same, which I found oddly comforting. This kind of food is not buffeted around by trends, so it still contained all the classics – momo cooked every which way, chow mein, chaats and puri, curries and thalis. The prices somehow felt frozen in time, too. Not at 2014 rates – ten momo cost a measly £6 then – but nowadays most of the momo max out at a tenner, and have done for years. Very few dishes cost more than that, and even the thalis were only £15.

How an independent restaurant bang in the middle of the town centre had kept prices so low felt like one of Reading’s great mysteries: did they have the luxury of RG1’s only kindly landlord?

The first thing we tried was a curiosity, a misfire and I think a mistake on my part. Graeme was drawn to the sel roti, a sweet rice doughnut. You can have two of them with a portion of alu dum, a slow-cooked potato curry, for just under a tenner but, mindful of how much other food we had ordered, I persuaded him to try one on its own. So essentially it’s thanks to me that we were presented with a doughy hoop that reminded me of a Turkish simit, only sweeter and more incongruous.

“I’m sorry, this is my fault” I said to Graeme. “This is like having dessert before the main course.”

“It is a bit strange, but I think it needs stuff to go with it, that you can sort of dip it in.”

Like a portion of potato curry, I thought to myself ruefully. Graeme tested the hypothesis by dipping it in a couple of the other dishes we had ordered. It did not seem to go with either, we were to discover. But this is another subversion of the savoury-sweet partition that Western palates are so prone to: this was not in a dessert section, it was in the vegetarian section, and if it’s intended to be eaten alongside other dishes perhaps my finding that strange was more a failure of my imagination.

That misstep aside, the other dishes were unfortunately easier to dislike on their merits. Chilli chicken has been a favourite of mine at Nepalese restaurants for many years, and the benchmark is the one you can get at Kamal’s Kitchen: it’s rich, punchy and will hurt you, in a good way. This was really a very long way from that, the chicken dry and tough, the peppers and onions without char or caramelisation, the sauce watery and one-note. I have absolutely no idea what a lemon wedge is doing on top of this dish, apart from having as little fun as we did eating the bloody thing.

And it’s not just the inevitable comparison with Kamal’s Kitchen’s rendition of chilli chicken. More instructive, though, was comparing it with Sapana Home’s in days gone by: a picture of the same dish, on my phone, ordered back in 2022 was like night and day. In that, the sauce was glossy, thickened, potent, coated everything. That was the kind of dish that would make you fight your dining companion for the last piece of chicken, the last glorious piece of red onion, the last sweet but fiery strip of yellow pepper.

By contrast in 2026, Graeme and I did not finish this dish. Nobody was clamouring to tear off another piece of the sel roti and trawl the depth of the dish for every last molecule of sauce.

Even stranger was a dish I’d never tried before, the sadheko pork. This was meant to be marinated pork belly in a tomato gravy, packed with chilli and spice. What it was instead was big wobbly sections of pork belly: to Sapana’s credit these did feel more like they’d been exposed to a primary heat source than the chicken, with more evidence of textural contrast.

A bit too much textural contrast, actually. It was jarring to find pieces of bone studded throughout the pork belly, and I’m glad that Graeme made that mistake before me, because without him acting as the advance party this was the kind of dish that could cost me £12.50 at the till and considerably more at the dentist.

But even without that, the dish was a curious beast. There was no gravy of any kind, making the whole thing more like a dry fry. There was another ornamental lemon wedge, which I found very odd indeed. And I would say that the idea of citrus in this dish didn’t make sense, but if anything it was worse than that because someone had taken a heavy hand to the citrus already. I don’t know what exactly went into the marinade, but that pork tasted so much of lime that it was dangerously close to Toilet Duck territory. Again, we left a fair amount.

The rest of our meal hewed closer to Sapana Home’s traditional strengths, the reassuring carbs that Nepalese food does so well. I really enjoyed the chow mein, tumbled through with really enjoyable nuggets of sukuti (dried buffalo at a guess, although it could have been lamb). Graeme was not sure about the spicy sauce that came with it but to be fair, the first time I tried a Nepalese chow mein neither was I. It was only further down the line that I came to appreciate this spin on a dish that, previously, I had only ever eaten from a Chinese takeaway.

This was the kind of dish you could drop into Sapana Home for after work, to hunker over in the miserable months that are just around the corner. Thinking about it, there have been many times when I did exactly that.

I’ve saved the best ’til last: Sapana Home’s momo are still marvellous. We went for pan fried, as I usually do, stuffed with buffalo and they were easily the highlight of the meal. I really needed them to be good, because at that point my confidence in Sapana Home was wobbling and I didn’t want this to be one of those reviews, where I revisit a place to find that anything I liked about it was gone.

That wasn’t the situation here. The casing was still just the right thickness, with that glowing tan only pan-frying can induce. The filling was still generous, plumping each parcel out, and I think buffalo is worth the extra quid, even if it takes the cost of ten parcels of pleasure over the £9.99 rubicon. Sapana Home’s momo are still up there with the best of Reading’s momo peddlers, and if the chasing pack has caught up with Sapana in the fourteen years since it opened in the centre of town, it is still a tricky proposition to overtake.

All that, plus a couple of extremely tall and very good mango lassis, came to just shy of £60 including service. Sapana Home is still a relatively inexpensive place to eat fairly well, but I was struck that the two carb-based dishes remained the value propositions: I’m not sure anybody should go there to eat the other dishes we tried.

Over post-dinner pints at the Nag’s Head, I wondered whether I would ever go back to Sapana Home if my first impression of it in 2014 had been the same as Graeme’s that night. But then I realised, thinking more clearly, that that had been my impression the first time I ate at Sapana Home: the carbs were good, the momo were terrific and the rest felt like it wasn’t for me. It was only through returning and persevering that I found the other dishes to like on Sapana’s menu, although it felt sad and unfortunate that they let me down on this occasion.

But that’s the point about restaurants – they neither exist nor change in a vacuum. In 2014 Sapana was the only momo joint in town, and Reading’s gastronomic scene was in its infancy: no pizza explosion, no glut of sushi places, no high end chains like Honest and Pho changing the landscape. So in 2014, a spot like Sapana would get more chances to get it right than it might today, when money is tight and nobody goes to a restaurant – unless they’re an idiot like me – with an appetite for risk.

So in 2014 I visited Sapana Home, I wasn’t sure, and then I grew to love it. I went often for a long time and then I put it to the back of my mind for three years. Going back now I can see the nucleus of what I liked – it’s still there – but time moves on and I wonder whether Sapana might get left behind.

What will be interesting is to see if this sparks Graeme to go again, when he’s straight off the train after a long hard day and keen for carbs, and whether it’s the start of him having the kind of relationship with Sapana that I once had. My guess is that none of that will happen, because Reading is such a different place now. But I’ll ask him, next time we’re down the pub.

Sapana Home – 6.6
8 Queen Victoria St, Reading, RG1 1TG
0118 9509898

https://www.sapanahome.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Gees, Oxford

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The more observant among you, and my regular readers out there, might well wonder if the title of this week’s review is a mistake. Because I reviewed Gees, one of Oxford’s most venerable restaurants, in May last year. Normally when I re-review a restaurant it’s some time after my original visit, and I’ve never returned to any Oxford restaurants on duty. Why would I, when I’ve only really added the city to my patch in the last couple of years?

Besides, if you are a regular reader you may well remember that when I went to Gees I didn’t like it much. I loved the room, but nearly everything I ate betrayed its promise and was tricksy for the sake of it. That meant a negroni that didn’t taste like a negroni, a tonnato that wasn’t a tonnato, an affogato that wasn’t an affogato and a £200 bill for two that wasn’t a bargain. And there was salad, lots of salad. So much of it, in fact – many dishes padded out with the stuff – that I wondered whether I’d accidentally wandered into England’s most expensive salad bar.

So why on earth would I go back there at all, let alone so soon after that?

Well, to explain that I have to give the context, do the thing that makes these reviews so long/detailed/enjoyable/unbearable (delete as applicable). Because in May, Gees announced that it had appointed a new head chef and would reopen in June with a brand new menu following a refurbishment, their second in four years. The head chef in question – and this is what made it noteworthy – was none other than Nick Galer.

Galer is an interesting figure with a varied CV. He worked under Heston Blumenthal at the Crown in Bray, but came to my attention during his eight years at Goring’s The Miller Of Mansfield. I reviewed it in 2019 and absolutely loved it, although not all my repeat visits there were quite as successful. And then he left when the pubco, Stonegate, decided to raise the rent by an eye-watering amount, because making perfectly good businesses economically unviable seems to be the only thing Stonegate is good at.

Galer then took over the kitchen at a nearby golf club following a refurbishment – lucky golfers, I’d say – before finding a more permanent gig in 2024 taking over the Pot Kiln in Frilsham, which too had decided to reopen after a refurb. Yes, another refurb: something about Galer, it seems, really makes business owners want to spruce up the place.

The Pot Kiln decided to take a new approach with Galer at the helm, reinventing itself as a sort of Basque roadside grill. I reviewed it last March and I found a lot to like, although it felt like there was friction between some of Galer’s finer, fiddlier instincts and the kind of robust and generous cooking I expected given the concept. There was plenty of good food, though, and I expected that, with time, Galer and the Pot Kiln could iron that out.

But the owners of the pub seemed to think differently, because in March of this year they announced that they were junking the whole Basque thing and going back to pub food – the kind you could find just down the road at the Royal Oak in Yattendon, owned by the same people, or indeed countless other pubs in West Berkshire.

So no wonder Galer decided to jump ship, but him rematerialising at Gees was still the kind of plot twist that made you sit up and take notice. Because when I reviewed Gees and found it so disappointing, the comments I saw in the Oxford subreddit suggested I was far from alone. Phrases like “underwhelming” or “super average for the price” were bandied around, and the overall impression was that the restaurant had been an underachiever for some time.

So the scene was set: Gees is a restaurant that has never quite found its chef, and Galer is a chef who’s never quite found his home. Had they finally found each other?

Gees’ dining room has always been a properly handsome space, a Grade 2 listed late Victorian glasshouse with a real wow factor. And the changes the restaurant has made with its newest refurb only improve matters. The little terrace along the side of the glasshouse, for example, is now under cover, although I’m not sure why you’d choose to eat there rather than the main dining room.

But the most significant change is the dining room itself. The restaurant has put in a central section made up of very attractive curved, interconnecting banquettes, which gives everything a lovely flow and breaks up what was previously a huge room. It’s a clever enhancement: I liked the room before, but this really does feel like the missing piece. It was a dreary, rainy day outside – very much one of the first days of autumn – but the place was warm, snug and welcoming. It’s also worth saying that I was there on a Tuesday lunchtime but Gee’s was nicely busy: by the time I left, in the middle of the afternoon, some tables were on their second set of occupants.

Part of that popularity, I suspect, was down to a couple of factors, one being the buzz of a new chef a few months into the assignment. But also, Gees is proper all-day dining: it is open from 9 until late every single day of the week, and even serves brunch if you’re that way inclined. All that is a rarity in north Oxford where independent restaurants tend to either only open in the evening some days, not open at all, or both.

And the menu reflected that, because it read brilliantly. Gees is not offering cuisine linked to a particular country or even region, so is broadly Modern European but with flourishes beyond that: so alongside your pizzette and pasta, your grilled squid and venison loin you can also find salmon sashimi, tandoori quail and pork belly in bak kut teh, a Malaysian meat broth. I thought it was very clever stuff – it could easily have come across as a mess, but didn’t – with touches, to my mind, of Covent Garden’s Town, one of London’s biggest openings of 2025. When I showed it to Zoë later, she said it and the dining room struck her as an upmarket version of Bill’s: it was more of a compliment than it sounds.

Making choices, over a properly enjoyable pre-prandial Bramble (light on the advertised basil but none the worse for that) was very difficult indeed. But a choice to share three starters and maximise the options reaped serious dividends. First of all, the dish I couldn’t not order: haggis pakora were properly elevated, the tempura almost impossibly ethereal but the contents within just as robust as you’d hope, the whole thing balanced in a pyramid on a moat of decidedly Mediterranean minted yoghurt.

When I went to Glasgow earlier in the year this was the kind of dish I expected to find, and thus inevitably eat, but it eluded me. To instead discover it here, in genteel North Oxford, was a very pleasant surprise.

Every bit as delightful was one of Gees’ two pizzette, with Alsace bacon and caramelised onions. I had my reservations about this when it turned up, expecting the crust to be puffier, but it thoroughly proved me wrong: the base was joyous and light, roughened with semolina flour or the like, and the batons of bacon, golden slivers of allium and cheese harmonised superbly.

I wondered whether this might be a very current take on tartiflette for the calorie-conscious, but it was probably still too indulgent for that. If I wanted any illustration of the problems weight loss jabs present for restaurants, I got it at lunch: a lady at the next table ordered a pizzette as her main course – they really aren’t big – and ended up giving more than half of it to her grown-up kids.

To complete the pan-European globetrotting of the starters, the final one was more quintessentially British. Three pieces of bone marrow, topped generously with parsley crumb, came in a little cairn with a couple of pieces of sourdough toast. If this was my least favourite of the introductory plates, it was only by a whisker: I would have liked the marrow slightly more smooshable, but it tasted terrific.

Just as necessary, though, was the beautiful salad on the side: parsley, shallot and capers, everything you needed to counterpoint the marrow, which had the richness ill-informed people tend to mislabel as unctuous. This dish served as the best single illustration of how Gees had changed, from why is there so much salad with everything? to this is the perfect salad for this dish.

By this point a bottle of very good German riesling – dry but not aggressively so, with the faintest hint of effervescence – had been opened and I was watching the parade of dishes I could have tried make their way to other tables. The grilled squid and salmon sashimi looked especially good, and I realised I could easily have constructed a completely different meal here, shuffled the pack another way. And yet, in that moment, I wouldn’t have swapped anything I’d eaten for something I hadn’t ordered: no mean feat in a restaurant with such a wide and tempting menu: I took many things from my meal at Gees, but gladly FOMO wasn’t one of them.

I was drawn to many of the mains on Gees’ menu but in the end I went for something relatively basic, because the variety of it intrigued me. Gees serves a trio of sliders with a portion of beef fat chips, and they had sufficient range that I was curious about how well they’d be executed. The answer, in short, was ‘very’.

First up, a venison burger which managed to avoid the dry, crumbliness that meat can sometimes impart to a patty. Instead this had an impeccable crust and pleasing pinkness, all things savoury offset with red onion and a lozenge of foie gras. Every bit as good in a completely different way was Gees’ lamb slider, with a base of tzatziki so singing with mint that it was positively verdant: a ribbon of pickled cucumber on top was an outstanding figurative cherry.

Finally, chicken thigh – again with an impressively light crunchy coating – was served with kimchi and mayo. I think it was the least successful of the three, but again a bronze medal was nothing to be ashamed of when you looked at what else was on the podium. Honest Burgers has been doing a special recently where you can have three of their sliders with rosemary fries for something like £16: this, with three sliders properly gussied up and a helping of thick, crunchy beef fat chips, was £27.50. It felt like the upgrade was worth the money.

This dish didn’t really need anything else, but I’d ordered the zucchini fritti anyway because I find them hard to resist on a menu. Credit to Gees for using both yellow and green courgettes here, but I wanted to like these better than I did. They were limp, the coating patchy, and although they delivered a salty hit the taste couldn’t overcome the texture. They could have done with a dip, and if I’d thought I might have shelled out for some aioli but even so the courgettes were so wan that it would have been like, to borrow an old phrase, playing snooker with a rope.

I didn’t get to try a forkful of my dining companion’s main on this occasion, but the ribeye was beautifully cooked – still pink but with plenty of caramelisation, served with a bronzed banana shallot, more of those beef fat chips and a chimichurri with just enough spikiness to sharpen the focus. I’m told the runner beans, in a black pepper butter, were excellent too.

Gees’ dessert menu is a model of restraint: four desserts, an ice cream of the day made on the premises or a cheeseboard. But my companion and I were both drawn to one, the chocolate mousse, and so we ordered a couple of those along with some Moscato d’Asti, a gorgeous little treat at £6 a glass.

Now, when Bitten Oxford reviewed the revamped Gees – their second comped visit in under a year – they had some reservations about the chocolate mousse. “It wasn’t quite the right consistency, it needed to be a bit more airy” was their conclusion. Well, they may have got their food for free but they weren’t entirely barking up the wrong tree. Because it is not a mousse and I have no idea why it’s billed as one on the dessert menu.

What it is, in fact, is a chocolate cremeux. And not just any chocolate cremeux but, pretty much, the outrageously good chocolate cremeux I first had at the Miller Of Mansfield over seven years ago. It is a Nick Galer classic, right down to the superb sesame tuile delicately laid on top of it, and to eat it again after far too long made me very happy indeed. It was like being reunited with a good friend after far too long apart, and ruefully discovering that the years had been kinder to them than they were to you.

I also found discovering that thread of continuity strangely comforting: Galer’s career has taken many twists and turns since he opened the Miller Of Mansfield 12 years ago, and he’s wound up in all kinds of places serving all kinds of dishes and cuisines. And yet here, for me at least, is where I came in, where I first encountered and loved his food. It tied my whole meal up with a neat little bow, as the best desserts do, but this one had an extra bit of resonance just for me. Is it possible to be moved by a dessert? I hope the answer is yes, because otherwise I might care about this kind of thing more than is healthy.

Having almost tied my review up in a neat little bow too, I just need to add that the bill for all that came to £285. That includes a 15% service charge – that’s inflation for you – which was annoying enough to note but not sufficiently annoying that I wanted to pay less. Service was the kind of excellent that shouldn’t need that kind of quasi-mandatory recompense, but maybe in North Oxford it does. Either way I felt like New Gees was a significantly better use of money than Old Gees, which tells its own story. All that was left to do was bimble round the shops, stop for a pint in the Rose & Crown, one of my favourite pubs in the world, and catch the train home.

I don’t want to jinx it by saying this, but I hope that Nick Galer and Gees are at the beginning of a very long and beautiful friendship, now that they’ve found one another. If you ate at Gees without knowing any of the context or the backstory you would have a very good meal, and I suspect the group you went with would all find something to eat and enjoy in a menu which has been assembled with precision and intelligence to appeal to almost everybody, vegans excepted. This is where Zoë’s comparison with Bill’s is a good one, and it’s nice to see an independent restaurant stepping up to excel at what chain restaurants do annoyingly well.

But if you know any of the history – as an Oxford resident, a lover of Oxford or someone who has followed the trajectory of Nick Galer’s career – this is an even happier ending than that. Oxford has got its flagship restaurant back, Gees has got its mojo back and Galer is back where he belongs, in a kitchen belonging to a place that has invested in him. And for the rest of us, we get a very reliable place to eat in Oxford, in one of the most attractive dining rooms I can think of. With a bit of luck, Gees could become the institution it always should have been.

I hope I don’t have to re-review Gees for years and years. But I plan to go back – off duty, thankfully – many, many times.

Gees – 8.7
61-63 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
01865 553540

https://www.geesrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Eatnua Thai Street Food

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The thing that struck me last week when I walked into Eatnua Thai Street Food (I’ll call it Nua from now on, if you don’t mind), the restaurant that opened last summer in the spot previously occupied by Bluegrass BBQ, was just how little they’d done with the place. Granted there was art up here and there, but otherwise it looked exactly as it had at the beginning of January 2025, just before the Bluegrass chain went into liquidation.

It had the same layout and the same grey walls. A neon sign saying Thai Street Food had been put in the place of the one that used to say No Shigging (it’s an American barbecue thing, apparently). The same furniture, too: the tables and chairs in the front room and out back on the terrace seemed identical, as far as I could remember. Even the banquetted booths were the same, which I noticed when I took a seat opposite my friend Liz. The pleather on my side was cracked and torn, revealing the tired foam underneath. Had Nua picked this place up in a fire sale or something?

As first impressions went it was an odd one. Six months or so had elapsed between Bluegrass going belly up and Nua taking over the site, so I was surprised they’d done next to nothing to put their stamp on it. Maybe the rent was too attractive to pass up, or money was tight and they wanted somewhere they could just walk into and start trading. But the restaurant has operating on Gun Street for over a year now, so I was surprised that it still had the feel of a kitchen that had popped up in somebody else’s restaurant rather than a fully-formed establishment in its own right.

Anyway, none of that might matter if everything else was on the money. Nua opened on the same day last year as Pho 86 and Lincoln Coffee, but is a different animal to both. Lincoln was an additional branch of an existing Reading business, Pho 86 a brand new independent restaurant. Nua on the other hand, although independent, is the fifth link in a small chain with other restaurants in London, High Wycombe, Kingston and Watford.

Its website describes it as “award winning” and it turns out they have won some awards, although how much that means to you will depend on whether you consider LUXlife Magazine, who crowned it ‘Best Thai Restaurant 2025’, an authority in these matters. Personally I always find these random awards – with so little transparency around how to enter, how they’re decided, whether money changes hands – a tad shady. It doesn’t help that nominations for those awards are handled by a company called AI Global Media, who potentially might want to reconsider their slogan Content You Can Trust.

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Restaurant review: Mono Pizza, Basingstoke

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There’s an exhibition on at the Willis Museum in Basingstoke called I Grew Up 90s, and speaking as someone who tried and failed to grow up back then I felt I had to go and experience it, even if it was tantamount to enthusiastically massaging salt into the gaping wound of my middle age.

I never thought I would see the day when the Nineties came back into fashion, in much the same way no doubt that my parents rolled their eyes when kids decided to revive the Sixties. It had an air of ‘kill me now’ about it, as far as I was concerned. I can’t believe you like all that crap from back then people like me could reasonably say, although I now realise – with the perspective of thirty years’ distance – that what we really mean is Jesus, I am so old.

The Willis Museum is housed in the former town hall, an attractive building at the top of a gentle hill in the older part of Basingstoke, past the purgatory of Festival Place. On the way there a strip of street food stalls was doing a brisk trade – a sizeable queue outside the Thai stall suggested, as did the aromas, that it was decent – and in the market place outside voluble traders were flogging veg from trestle tables. The graceful early Victorian architecture was impressively incongruous, I thought, as I passed between the pillars of the entrance, ready to do some time travel.

Inside, the placard on the wall made an interesting case for the decade, depicting it as a strange bubble of time that history had forgotten. And I think there’s truth in that. It was a strangely innocent time, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the release of Nelson Mandela but before 9/11 and the credit crunch. In the Eighties we were scared of the bomb, or AIDS, but in the Nineties we weren’t scared of anything. We were lucky, but of course we didn’t know that.

The exhibition aimed to remind visitors of the Nineties through over 200 objects and artworks. It was the decade of Girl Power and Cool Britannia, the introductory blurb said. On the Internet we asked Jeeves, and on the streets we paged each other (incidentally, my favourite Easter egg of the time was that if you asked Jeeves “are you gay?” he always produced the result “I prefer the word jovial“: and to think people reckon they’re so original nowadays asking Siri to tell them a joke).

There were no smartphones, social media or reality TV to distract us, but we might occasionally have returned a tape late to Blockbusters, concluded the introduction. And wandering round it, feeling simultaneously old, young, comforted and sad I noticed they did have a huge Blockbuster logo on one wall, and a cabinet full of VHS tapes: Notting Hill; Ace Ventura; True Lies; Basic Instinct.

An HMV carrier bag was framed on another wall. “God, the number of those I must have handled” said Zoë, who worked there when the Nineties were already almost a decade in the rear view mirror, the shop still flogging CDs ahead of the death rattle caused by iPods, iPhones and streaming. I wondered how many times I’d come home from the Oracle on New Release Monday with one of those.

Other cabinets were full of reminders of other aspects of that forgotten age, trying hard to present it as halcyon. The Cadbury’s Spira bar – which I still miss, I don’t mind telling you – and a tub of Gino Ginelli ice cream. A giant foam finger from the original series of Gladiators. Cartman, Beavis and Butt-Head, arguably the most puerile firm of solicitors there never was. Purple Ronnie and the very first Nokias and Motorolas, a loaf of Mighty White and a recipe book for Chicken Tonight. The posters for Four Weddings, Reservoir Dogs and Trainspotting. A can of Tab Clear (“trial offer 23p”), a bottle of Two Dogs and a Hooch branded glass.

You could even buy a Tamagotchi from the gift shop, which reminded me that once in the Nineties, when my brother went to some insurance conference in Manchester overnight, he asked me to take care of his Tamagotchi which, of course, promptly died. I’m not sure what the electronic equivalent of getting another almost identical one from the pet shop was, but I remember fessing up to him in the Flier & Firkin – which is what the Oakford is now – and him taking it much more personally than I expected.

Standing there in the gift shop, seeing the packaging for ‘the original virtual reality pet’ I took a photo and sent it to him, knowing that even on the other side of the world in New South Wales, his Saturday night drawing to an end, he was one of the only people I knew who would understand what I was experiencing. Sorry again that I killed your Tamagotchi my message said. You’re forgiven came the response, hours later when I was fast asleep.

All that nostalgia left me badly needing to eat my feelings, and Zoë and I had plans for a late lunch at Mono Pizza, the Basingstoke restaurant highest on my radar. Now, at this point I need to apologise if you’re a reader living in Basingstoke, but my research on where to eat there resulted in fairly slim pickings. There’s taco spot El Bigote, which looks like it’s al fresco only, there’s Nigerian restaurant Afrizi, which I hear is rather good, and there’s Mono.

Beyond that, I didn’t find evidence of a burgeoning food culture in Basingstoke. I suspect Festival Place’s best days may be behind it, and the imminent closure of its Apple Store would suggest as much, but the presence of the likes of ASK Italian, Pizza Hut and Wimpy suggests that even Reading has it good compared to some places. By all means correct me if I’m wrong, because I really do love an underdog.

Anyway, Mono was the spot that jumped out at me. Run by married couple Timofei and Veronica Dragan, Mono took the tried and tested route to where it is now: starting out as a pizza van in late 2023, then parking up at a permanent pitch at Festival Place the following spring. And then, almost exactly two years later at the beginning of March, Mono moved to a permanent site just round the corner from the Willis Museum, taking over the ground floor of a handsome building in a spot that used to be a bar.

Plaudits followed when Mono – still a van at this stage – won Best Pizzeria last summer at something called Slice-o-Mania. Now, you can be sniffy about an event of that kind and say that it’s largely attended by people who think pizza is a separate food group, and you might have some justification for thinking that. But the fact remains that a huge amount of big names in the U.K. were there, and for an unsung food van from Hampshire, after trading for less than two years, to win big in that company is a truly impressive result.

And all of my research suggested that Mono was an interesting proposition: that Dragan was from Naples, that he sourced all of his ingredients obsessively from Italy, all the things you’d really want to hear about this kind of establishment. I like a pizza as much as the next normal person, and the bottom has rather fallen out of Reading’s pizza scene since Sarv’s Slice left, Amò closed and reopened and Dough Bros changed hands, so as I approached Mono’s tasteful, sage green edifice I found myself rather hoping for the best.

The interior was really rather nice. Big, in a they-might-have-bitten-off-more-than-they-can-chew sort of a way, but nice nonetheless. It was all green walls and well-proportioned tables, with one panel of fake greenery and a few slightly random Welsh dressers dotted around the place. It worried me slightly how quiet it was, though: we were there admittedly after the lunchtime rush had passed, but apart from one table outside and a few occupied within it was almost empty. Maybe everyone was in the queue for Thai street food, or lost in the time machine just down the street.

Over an Aperol Spritz – not bad, perhaps slightly watery – we had a good squizz at the menu. It is, and this is a good thing, very stripped down, not like some pizza menus that go overboard on filler. One antipasti option, three panini, ten pizzas and nothing else: if you don’t fancy that, go elsewhere. And the pizza options were also very restrained – no wacky combinations and not even the anchovy, caper and olive combo that’s inevitably my first choice. There was a simplicity to it: pizza by a purist, for purists.

We began with the only starter on offer, the selection of antipasti to share. In a way, this is just a deconstruction of all the things you might see chucked on a base and scorched in the oven. But it’s a good fishing expedition if you want to get a picture of what a pizzeria’s raw materials are like: it proved to be very illuminating as far as Mono was concerned.

When you consider that this was £15.50 for two, it was ridiculously generous and enormously likeable. The Parma ham, with that slight sheen of the incarcerated in plastic, was pleasant but unmemorable. But everything else was better than it looked, better than I expected. A very good prosciutto cotto was miles better, really good quality and very tasty indeed. And the spicy salami, about which I had my reservations, was knockout stuff: coarse, not at all suspect and with an enormous chilli kick. Quite marvellous.

That’s before we get to the olives, which were good but not great, or the cherry tomatoes, sweet and bursting with contrast. Or the mozzarella. Hats off to Mono for not just wheeling out the ubiquitous burrata. I think I’ve always preferred mozzarella to burrata and I’m prepared to wait as long as it takes – it could be longer than a decade, the way things are going – for public opinion to catch up with me. But in many ways, the real bellwether was the bread – little squares of the stuff, like scraps of panino. They were light, airy, salty, just the ticket with any combination of the rest of the dish. In short, they boded well.

When my pizza, the ‘Pizza Rebby’, came out twenty minutes later it built on the potential of all that had gone before and synthesised it into a magical whole. That base was the final boss of dough, its evolutionary pinnacle, so light and well-done, so judiciously bubbled and blackened. I have got quite tired of the prevalence on social media of New York pizza, or New Haven pizza, or whatever “tavern style pizza” is, or London pizza. I’ve got tired of seeing mockneys on Instagram jabbering about how great it is. This. This is what good pizza looks like.

And the other cleverness of Mono is not just to have a small menu but not to do too much with any of those pizzas. This was not overloaded: potent clusters of punchy ‘nduja, translucent strips of pancetta gleaming away, ambrosial slivers of red onion, a surprisingly effective smattering of torn basil.

Zoë had chosen another classic, the Diavola, a variation on that theme with the spicy salami from earlier on taking the place of my pancetta. And, because it’s Zoë and she likes to tinker, she had asked to have gorgonzola added to it (“it’s the ‘Diavola plus'” she said to me, clearly pleased with her ingenuity). I would like to say that she was wrong, that she had offended the simplicity of Mono’s menu. But, because it’s Zoë, it elevated what was already an excellent pizza into a world-beater. The fire of both types of meat would have been enough – and again, you have to love Mono for refusing to touch hot honey with a twelve foot pole – but if it did need anything it was the pungent whack of salt from that blue cheese.

“I could come here every week” said Zoë, and I couldn’t agree more. I wasn’t sure, without that exhibition, that I had any other reason to visit Basingstoke: there’s nothing in the way of independent retail, one indie coffee shop, no craft beer. But you would travel for this.

We had to have dessert, and Mono’s menu is so concise that between us we ate everything on it. I’d asked what the “Mono pistachio” was and was told it was like a cross between an ice cream and a mousse. That doesn’t do it justice, and nor does the blurb on the menu that reads like a list of ingredients: pistachio cream with milk, pistachio paste, egg, cream, white chocolate and biscuit notes. So if you go, throw all that in the metaphorical bin and order it anyway.

What it actually is is something closer to a pistachio and white chocolate parfait, with a biscuit base, somehow at the middle of a Venn diagram of ice cream, cheesecake and doubtless many other treats. I adored it: it was delicious at first, rock hard and challenging to eat with the long, slender teaspoon. But as it softened, everything just came together. I had it with a pistachio cannolo which was maybe the least impressive thing I ate that day: the shell a little heavy but the filling miles more complex than my dessert. It was still more than decent. £7 for these two, would you believe.

Zoë loved her tiramisu, served grandly in a little chalice. It was relatively delicate, airy and boozy and she made quick work of it. It didn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of the very best – Paesino’s, say, or Ragù’s – but it was very, very close. “Besides, once you’ve had a heavy pizza you want something this light” she added. I’m told the hazelnut cannolo was also thoroughly agreeable.

Although there were few diners when we started our meal, I was reassured to see a regular trickle of people coming in to eat. The couple who had been eating outside when we arrived came in to specifically tell Dragan how much they’d enjoyed their meal, that it was their second visit so far but it wouldn’t be their last.

Our bill came to something like £86 for three courses and a drink apiece, not including service. There might be cheaper options: Mono’s pizzas generally cost between £15 and £20 but believe me, you get what you pay for. And service, from a trio of servers including Dragan, was bright, friendly and really winning. At one point the phone rang and I heard them take a reservation for a large table, and I remember thinking that those people were in for a really terrific evening.

The Internet is full of people who will tell you that every pizza they eat is the Best. Pizza. Ever, or every burger the Best. Burger. Ever. It gets a bit much, it jades you and the biggest cardinal sin of all: it’s so boring. If everything is special then nothing is. So I don’t say this all the time, but here goes: Mono’s pizza is the best I can remember having in this country. Better than Papa Gee, Knead, Paesino, or Amò at its peak. Better than wonderful pizzas I’ve had in Bristol, or at Blue Collar, or from Sarv. It’s really that good.

That’s the funny thing about my visit to Basingstoke, a journey that simultaneously showed me life thirty years ago and gave me a glimpse of my future. Because in the Nineties, my idea of a great pizza was a San Marco from Misselbrook & Weston, the little supermarket nearest to my suburban Woodley home. They were kept in the freezer section, and I could pick one up for something ridiculous like £3, bung it in the oven and think I was eating like a king. If Future Me appeared in a vision to Nineties Me and offered him a single slice of Mono’s Pizza Rebby, I think Nineties Me’s brain might melt.

That’s the thing about the past: it can be a lovely place, but you can’t live there. Besides, the food is way better here in the present.

Mono Pizza – 8.7
27 London St, Basingstoke, RG21 7PG
01256 280093

https://monopizzabasingstoke.co.uk

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