Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025. It no longer bakes on the premises, has an alcohol licence and previous manager Mohamad Skeik has left the business. I have marked this review as closed and will re-review Lebanese Flavours at some point.

It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.

And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.

But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.

Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.

Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.

Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?

At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.

I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.

Nothing had changed inside, at first glance, which I found oddly reassuring. Still the same battleship-grey walls, brightly lit wall art and chocolate-brown banquettes. Still the shawarma revolving away up front, still the signs of baking that gave the restaurant its name. So far, so familiar.

And Mohamad was still there, zipping about: now, in the interests of full disclosure Mohamad knows who I am, because I did a readers’ lunch at the restaurant back in 2019, but I doubt he would expect me to review the place again after eight intervening years. And I didn’t just spot Mohamad, I recognised a waitress who has been there since the very start, who left the restaurant to have a baby and came back, and that made me realise that this restaurant hadn’t just seen me through different phases in my life.

But also there, relaxed in a polo shirt, was Chander Ahuja, the owner of House Of Flavours. I’ve never met Ahuja, but I know him by sight and again, it’s possible he knew who I was. He came over and asked more than once what I made of the food, as did Mohamad. I don’t know whether that was anything to do with me writing the blog, or because it was my first visit after a long time away. I don’t know if it was because of a certain apprehensiveness about what customers made of the same-but-different Bakery House, or just excellent customer service. I’m just mentioning it, aware that it could have been any of those things.

The menu is exactly as it was, not spruced up, not reprinted. And really, they might want to consider reprinting it and raising their prices, because those prices have a distinctly 2015 feel about them. Maybe it’s a loss leader in this climate, or perhaps they’re waiting for new menus back from the printers but really, starters that cost a fiver or less and mains that weigh in around thirteen pounds feel like they merit a mention. If the quality is even close to what it was, I thought, Bakery House could be one of the biggest bargains in the town centre.

We did something I rarely do when re-reviewing a restaurant, namely ordering the dishes I would normally have if I was visiting Bakery House. That might sound like a counter-intuitive thing to do – surely it should be about striking out into the unknown? – but there was method to my madness. I’ve had some of these dishes so often it feels as if I know them like the back of my hand. It’s a kind of gastronomic close reading, I guess, and I thought it was the best way to assess whether Bakery House was a different proposition under the bonnet (that’s probably enough mixed metaphors for now).

The first indicators came with one of my very favourite Bakery House dishes, houmous kawarmah, houmus with spiced lamb. I could have closed my eyes and remembered its tastes and textures, but what came along was subtly different. The houmous was still glorious – thick and scoopable, with a hefty, welcome whack of tahini. But the lamb was… what had they done to the lamb?

Where before it would have been little nuggets, here it was fantastic caramelised slivers of the stuff, intense and moreish. I know what this dish is like when it’s good – years of practice – and this was as good as I could remember it. I looked over at Zoë as she loaded some onto a piece of pita and crammed it joyously in her mouth. There was a pause.

“Oh, hello” she said. Oh, hello indeed.

If that was my go-to order, our other starter was Zoë’s. She always picks arayes, flatbreads stuffed with minced veal, and is something of an expert on the stuff. And yes, the plates are a bit fancier now, and they’ve drizzled pomegranate molasses on top. But, as with the restaurant itself, the real changes were the ones going on under the surface. In the past, the veal could be a little homogeneous, a little smooth. This, though, was coarser, even more delicious. It felt like eating the dish in HD, the same experience I’d had with the houmous. Something was going on here, and I was pretty sure I liked it.

The real test, though, was to come, with the dish I most associated with Bakery House: farrouj massahab, the boneless baby chicken. I have eaten this at Bakery House many times, and in lockdown it was my delivery order of choice: why on earth spend that money on Nando’s when you can have this? In as far as a dish can be a friend, this was an old, old friend and seeing it come to the table (well, them: Zoë ordered it too) felt part meal, part reunion.

I may have more photos of Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken on my phone than of any other dish I’ve ordered in my life – more than Bhel Puri House’s chilli paneer, more than Sapana Home’s momo, more than Fidget & Bob’s full English, more than any of the cornucopia of delights you can get at Clay’s or Kungfu Kitchen. Like any poor woman dipping her toe in Tinder, my phone runneth over with cock pics. I have pictures of it looking overdone and a tad dry – the chicken, I should add – and pictures of it looking wan. There have been times when it’s been amazing, and times when it’s merely been quite good. It’s never been less than that. What was it to be this time?

Well, you can’t tell from the picture, which is why Instagram will never entirely kill food blogs like mine. But I’m overjoyed to tell you that it looked good and tasted even better. Marinated, golden, utterly crammed with heat and flavour it was, much like me after a day at Nirvana, its absolute best self. They’d got more of that spice into the meat than I remember, and the biggest dilemmas were which parts to eat first and which to save until last, and whether to dip in the potent chilli sauce or the pungent garlic sauce. Why had I gone without eating this for so long, and when could I realistically do it again without looking a bit weird? Was lunchtime the next day too soon?

It wasn’t just the chicken though, everything else had been subtly tweaked and elevated. The golden rice also had an unfamiliar jolt of heat and was beautifully done, clump free and the perfect accompaniment. And the salad – well, Bakery House has always done salad superbly and understood, as so few places do, that if you want people to eat it you have to dress it. And they had dressed it well, a riot of freshness, with plenty of tomato and pokey raw red onion.

I’ve often pontificated in the past that this dish is possibly the single best one stop shop, the finest everything-you-need-on-one-plate choice in the whole of Reading. I still stand by that: if anything it’s better than before, and a ludicrous steal at twelve pounds fifty. Just don’t get into a lift with anybody for about twenty-four hours after eating.

I’ve never really done dessert at Bakery House, although I know people who swear by it. But a little plate of mini baklava, sticky-sweet and just the right size to eat in one go, was a lovely touch, brought out as we were getting the bill. I’m pretty sure I saw these brought out to other tables after they’d finished their main course: I don’t think it was just me. All that was left was to settle up – our food, and a couple of superbly zingy fresh lemonades came to a baffling forty-two pounds, not including tip.

As I said, service was terrific throughout, although Bakery House has always excelled at that. It looked like a happy, harmonious ship when I was there that Sunday evening; it did a steady trade, although it was far from full, and the other customers appeared to be enjoying themselves almost as much as I was. The new owner looked relaxed, and as I waited for the bill I looked around, taking in the room where I’d eaten so many times and the wait staff who had been serving me since the year dot. And maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I was grateful and strangely moved that Bakery House was still here and relieved that its future appeared safe.

I was relieved, too, to have loved my meal quite as much as I did, and to know that the new ownership had nudged and subtly improved rather than overhauling or resting on laurels. Change a restaurant you like too much and it becomes something else, but if you never change it at all you run the risk that it becomes preserved in aspic as the world moves on. The history of Reading restaurants is full of places that did exactly that and then died out, and I hope I never find myself talking about Bakery House in that category. This felt like a much better course, to try to preserve Bakery House’s heyday with some judicious tinkering.

So there you have it – a timely, happy return to Bakery House, almost eight years after I first set foot through the doors. Much has changed in that time, me not least, and Bakery House is no longer the trailblazer it was. But if they play their cards right they could attain a status that has always eluded me, that of a true Reading institution. I had forgotten just how good Bakery House was. I’m not alone: I think maybe Bakery House had too, but now they’ve remembered, and they’re out to remind everybody. I’m happy to play my part in doing some reminding, too.

Bakery House – 8.1
82 London Street, Reading, RG1 4SJ
0118 3274040