I’m under strict instructions to find some new dining companions. Dragging poor Zoë out on a weekly basis to accompany me to restaurant X or Y, with all the cashflow and calorific consequences that entails, is apparently getting, in her own immortal words “too much”. The cost of living with me crisis. So I was told in no uncertain terms that this week’s review would have to be a solo mission. Make some more bloody friends, seemed to be the unspoken subtext.
Which was fine: I woke up on Sunday morning, feeling a mite jaded after a day spent introducing friends – relatively new ones, as it happens – to the delights of Reading, to Double Barrelled and the Grumpy Goat, to our brilliant beer scene and the equally brilliant number 17 bus. You forget how great this town can be, and it’s always a tonic to see it in the eyes of somebody else, even if that does involve going all the way down the Oxford Road to an industrial estate near a big branch of Screwfix. Whatever: I slouched out of the house, a couple of paracetamol freshly gulped down, badly in need of brunch.
Nothing quite hits the spot like a full English when you’re hanging out of your arse, and I had Richfields, at the end of the Caversham Road, in my sights. I’d been there just over five years ago with a then friend of mine who used to accompany me on reviews, Costanza to my Seinfeld, and we’d both had lunch dishes, even though it was more of a breakfast place. “I’ll make an effort to go back there for brunch next year” I said, but next year came and I didn’t. Ditto for the year after, and then of course the world changed entirely. But I’d always felt I ought to give them another try, that my review was getting out of date, and a slightly hung over solo brunch date with myself presented a perfect opportunity.
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Edible Reading 