Over the last nine months or so, every time I’ve posted my to do list on social media and asked where people would like me to prioritise for a review the answer invariably comes back: Flavour Of Mauritius, please. That’s understandable, I think. First of all, there’s the inevitable air of novelty: Reading is excited about new places at the best of times (it’s a town, after all, that managed to get aerated about Jollibee’s) but the prospect of a Mauritian restaurant is bound to arouse the curiosity of the town’s gastronomic adventurers. What’s Mauritian food like, anyway?
The answer, it turns out, is an intriguing blend, with influences from India, China, Africa and France, resulting in dishes which are a complex cross-pollination of those influences. So some dishes, despite not seeming especially French, have French names – like the bol renversé or upside down bowl, which is far more Sino-Mauritian in character. But biryani is commonplace in Mauritian cuisine too.
“I stayed in Mauritius for a few nights en route to Réunion once” my well-travelled friend Mike told me on FaceTime over the weekend. “I think I remember eating a lot of Creole food.” Creole food, it turns out, is another speciality of Mauritian cuisine, including dishes like vendaye (fish with onions and mustard) and rougaille. To my shame, before I did my research and wrote this review I thought the latter was just something you might use to treat male pattern baldness.
There’s another reason why Flavour Of Mauritius has been so interesting to Reading folk. We all love a good back story, and Flavour Of Mauritius definitely has one. Husband and wife team Yogeetha and Mark Faulkner had been catering Mauritian food for some time, always with the dream of opening a restaurant one day. And then, when lockdown struck in 2020, and their events were being cancelled left right and centre, they put their talents to good use offering food to hospital workers at the NHS, the police, the fire service, you name it. All told, they delivered over three thousand meals.
Off the back of that, they took the plunge later that year and signed a lease to take over part of the old Standard Tandoori site on the Caversham Road. Standard closed early last year and finally, Flavour Of Mauritius opened over the summer. So – a cuisine not represented anywhere else in Reading, a husband and wife team and the realisation of a long-held ambition: no wonder I get asked to review it so often.
Arriving at their site around one o’clock on Saturday, I was disconcerted to find the place empty. Not just empty, but sort of closed-looking: no lights on, no music, no signs of anybody there. We loitered for a few minutes, and then a staff member came out from the kitchen and it was as if someone had put a coin in the meter: on came the lights, the music started and suddenly an empty room was a restaurant again.
They’ve done a nice job doing it up, I think. The walls are covered with bright colourful images, some of the brickwork has been painted too and the bar does look a little like a beach bar. They’ve converted part of the front to a kiosk, with a straw roof, selling Mauritian delicacies. I imagine at night, when the place is fuller, it could have a lovely atmosphere.
All that said the front of the restaurant, with light from the windows, felt like a better place to sit: I’m not sure I’d have wanted to be at the back where things seemed a little dingier. A couple more tables were taken during our lunch but truthfully, it was on the quiet side throughout and I was painfully aware that I might not be judging the ambience at its absolute best.
The menu was wide enough to offer choice but sensibly, didn’t feel overwhelming. Many of the starters are fritter-based (confusingly called gateau on the menu) although there are a few samosas and other bits and bobs: I was disappointed to see that the spicy chicken livers on the menu online hadn’t made it across to the hard copy. Mains are a real mixture of curries, biryani, fried rice, noodles, stir fry and a couple of Mauritian specialities. Nothing is expensive – few of the starters creep past a fiver and only a few mains cost more than a tenner.
Service was friendly and helpful, and the wait staff talked us through some of the dishes – recommending some fritters and explaining the difference between the plethora of rice dishes on offer. We started with a crisp cold beer – looking at something resembling a beach bar will do that to you – and I was delighted that they stocked Phoenix, Mauritius’ very own lager which has been made on the island since the Sixties. It was everything you want from that first beer, that almost-holiday feeling in a bottle. Would I be able to tell it apart from Peroni in a blind tasting? Probably not. Did I find it immeasurably cheering that they stocked it instead of Peroni? Absolutely.
I’ve just remembered that I should also mention the wine list, mainly because it’s surprisingly good. Most of it is thirty pounds and under with some whites that I imagine would pair very well with many of the dishes. It was especially welcome to see a few whites by New Zealand producer Greywacke, at sensible prices. The wine list was definitely better than it needed to be, and I’ll make inroads into it next time I go.
Our starters took a little while to come out, which I found a hugely reassuring sign. These felt like they were made there and then, not fished out of a freezer. We’d started with a selection of fritters, and they turned out to be an excellent choice. I’d seen lots of good reviews online of the cabbage fritters (gateau le choux, don’t you know) and they were completely justified – delicious, greaseless, crispy morsels like the bhaji’s slightly more well-to-do cousin.
And the chickpea fritters, the gateau piment were also very enjoyable, a crunchier, more rugged variation on falafel. They’d been recommended to me on Twitter, and I’m glad I took the advice. Both sets of fritters went nicely with a fresh mint chutney, with a little hot sauce in a dish on the side to give things edge. Each dish cost less than three pounds, which is a steal any way you want to look at it.
I wasn’t quite so wowed by the third of our starters. We’d hoped to try the lamb samosas, but they were out of them (again, a reassuring sign) so we went for the fish pasties. These were little things filled with minced fish which felt a little too close to Shippams for my liking, and although a dab of that hot sauce improved matters I did feel it was probably concealing rather than augmenting the taste of the dish. This dish cost a smidge over four pounds: if you go to Flavour Of Mauritius, order more fritters instead.
There was a nice sociable pause between courses, enough to grab some more Phoenix, and I found myself looking forward to what came next. And, in the main, it lived up to the promise. Let’s start with the best dish first, the Mauritian fried noodles. We’d chosen these with chicken, but they ended up coming to the table with both chicken and egg (and no, I don’t know which came first).
Either way, it was an excellent dish – generous, rich, glossy and absolutely delicious. Everything was just right, and the sauce which coated every strand of every noodle was the star player: sweetly smoky, with more of ketjap manis than soy about it. It dialled up the contrast on everything else, making the chicken more tender, the ribbons of still-firm carrot bright and harmoniously sweet. You might think here he goes, enthusing about chow mein again, and if you do I’d say that (a) I don’t care and (b) at seven pounds fifty you’d be a fool not to order this.
The lamb stir fry was also excellent, with a plethora of veg. The lamb was the headline act here, though, rich and earthy and properly tasting of lamb, not some pale imitation. What I liked a lot about this dish was that I approached it expecting the sauce to be broadly similar to that in the noodle dish, and nothing could have been further from the truth: it still had that lustrous silkiness, true, but there was a good punch to it. If anything, the dish was on the drier side, which meant that there wasn’t enough for the rice to do: I imagine if you order one of their curries, you won’t have that problem.
The only duff note was the vendaye. This dish is served cold (you know, like revenge) but I found it extremely challenging. It was slightly tough pieces of fried fish, some containing a few more bones than I’d have liked, with almost-raw onion, coriander and a spice mix involving industrial quantities of mustard seed. The whole thing was dry in more ways than one. It needed a little moisture, some oil to make it less of a slog. “It’s not for me” said Zoë, almost immediately annexing the rest of the stir fried lamb.
But also, it almost felt dusty on the palate, and the mustard was overpowering. If you can’t get enough of mustard and raw onion, I can confidently say that all your Christmasses have come at once and you really should hightail it to Flavour Of Mauritius at your earliest opportunity. But this, to me, was what my friend Ivor likes to refer to as “advanced”. I fully expect that it’s nothing if not authentic, and I’m glad I can say I’ve tried it, but I’m equally glad I won’t have to try it again. It was also, weirdly, one of the most expensive dishes on the menu. Flavour Of Mauritius has octopus vendaye on the menu too, and I’m glad I didn’t mar my many happy octopus memories by ordering it.
Although service had been pretty attentive during the first part of our meal, it died away after we’d finished our mains. Despite there only being three tables, our finished dishes sat in front of us for quite some time. And that’s a real shame, because if they’d been whisked away I suspect we’d have ordered dessert – the dessert menu was full of interesting things – but the longer you wait the longer your mind has to register that your stomach is actually full.
By this point a chap who I imagine was the co-owner was doing the rounds and again, he was likeable, chatty and personable. If he’s running the front of house there and you were in the restaurant on a Friday or Saturday night, I can imagine the experience would be completely different: I can see myself going back, further down the line, to put that theory to the test. But as it was we got the bill, settled up and headed off to Phantom for some liquid dessert in the shape of a chocolate dipped pineapple imperial stout which rather knocked my socks off. Our meal came to sixty-two pounds, which includes an optional fifteen per cent tip: I saw some people on TripAdvisor bitching about that, but that’s TripAdvisor for you.
The place Flavour Of Mauritius reminds me most of in Reading is probably O Portugues: authentic, charming and a little rough around the edges. I think in both restaurants you could have a fantastic meal or a distinctly less fantastic one, because each menu contains pitfalls. In one, you could end up with that dusty vendaye, in the other there’s always a risk of a bowl of minuscule snails. And that’s where both places, where all restaurants, to be honest, could use someone like Kungfu Kitchen’s Jo, Geo Café’s Keti or Nandana at Clay’s – a great communicator who knows that food is all about stories, and that you need to bring an unfamiliar cuisine to life to win hearts, minds and stomachs.
It may be that on another night, Flavour Of Mauritius does that, but it was missing during my visit. But none the less, Flavour Of Mauritius has plenty of heart and I think it deserves support. Even if you just go for the fritters, some fried noodles and an ice cold Phoenix on your first visit, you could do a lot worse. And maybe you can explore the rest of the menu from there: I imagine it contains many pleasant surprises. They have a great back story, like I said. But now they need to do a little more to tell all those other stories.
Flavour Of Mauritius – 7.4
143-145 Caversham Road, Reading, RG1 8AU
0118 4375694
Edible Reading 
I am now really needing some noodles!😋