This week, to mark ten years of Edible Reading, I’m looking back at the ten most significant Reading venues to open over the last decade. Not the “best”, although I think some of Reading’s best restaurants feature in this list. Not my favourites either, although, again, this list has some of my favourites in it. But rather I’m looking at the ones that were most significant, the most influential, the ones that changed hospitality in Reading in some way or put Reading on the map.
I should explain before I get started that, in general, I’m very suspicious of restaurant bloggers using words like “important” or “significant” in terms of restaurants. I think I’m suspicious of those adjectives in general, like critics loftily announcing that something is “the most important film of the year” or dullards on social media saying if you only read one thing today, make it this. But then I’ve never liked being told what to do.
I think restaurant bloggers, though, are very prone to this kind of behaviour. It brings out a certain preachy bossiness in people, or perhaps blogging attracts the preachy and the bossy. I know that to write you do have to at least slightly be comfortable with the sound of your own voice – I’m self-aware enough to know that – but this is a tendency in food writing that I just do not like at all.
Whether it’s pompous ol’ Jay Rayner telling people, in his dreary macho way, how to eat food (“There are big prawns, heads and shells intact, which is as it should be, this time in a rust-coloured broth heavy with smoky paprika. Give those heads a good suck. Call for more napkins.”) or self-inflated bloggers saying that a restaurant is “exactly what this city needs”, I just can’t be doing with it. Need is always the trigger word in these pronouncements. “This is a restaurant you need to know about” oozes one particularly bad restaurant blogger I know. Of course it is. And you need to get over yourself.
So generally I don’t do this, I just say “this is a restaurant I liked, you might like it too”. But then – laugh all you like – I’ve never had quite a big enough ego to play in the top division, and my life’s all the better for it. Ordinarily I would write something about my favourite restaurants, but hitting this arbitrary landmark has got me thinking about perspective and the decade just gone, so you get this piece, just the once. If you hate it, or your favourite places aren’t on it, or you think “what gives this guy the right to decide?” I can guarantee you that at least fifty per cent of me agrees with you.
As I said, there are many restaurants I like that don’t feature on this list because they haven’t had that effect. San Sicario is a great example, or Papa Gee: lovely restaurants, well worth a visit, two different examples of how to do Italian food really well, but neither has had a notable impact on Reading’s food and drink scene. And I’ve decided to restrict myself to things that have influenced Reading positively – if I hadn’t, somewhere like Chick-fil-A, the proof of concept that established Reading’s appetite for shoddy American chains, might have made my list.
But let’s keep it positive: these places changed Reading for the better. They’re loaded more towards the start of my ten years writing this blog, partly because restaurateurs (and landlords) have taken fewer risks since Covid came along and partly because I think you need a little time and perspective to gauge how a restaurant changes a place.
That said, a fair few of my near misses that almost made this list are more recent. ThaiGrr! and Tasty Greek Souvlaki, for instance: both emerged from the pandemic and both manage the achievement of being a triple threat, a restaurant that can manage eat in, takeaway and delivery with equal skill. You could make a case for either of them qualifying for this list. That’s equally true, in its way, of Blue Collar Corner, although I sense it’s still finding its way and deciding what kind of venue it wants to be, and the move from long-term, high quality traders to a constantly revolving cast is also still settling down.
Finally, a couple of other places that nearly made my list merit a mention. Fidget & Bob, despite its brilliance, is almost too idiosyncratic for a list like this: it cannot be imitated, it very much stands alone out on Kennet Island and so, for all its good points, it just misses out. The same goes for Geo Café. And finally, I did want to single out Siblings Home. It may not have been open all the time – or even regularly – and it couldn’t make a go of its spot on Hemdean Road but it definitely felt like a dress rehearsal for someone like The Collective, which does all that stuff even better, in a more polished way in a lovelier site.
Right, having said all that let’s get started on my preachy, bossy, self-important list. Please disagree violently in the comments field, because – this time of all times – that’s what the comments field is for.
10. Honest Burgers (2017-present)
Generally, this and the other lists I am publishing to mark the blog’s birthday don’t have much space for chains in them. My ten saddest closures won’t include the Pizza Express on St Mary’s Butts (although that was a pity, come to think of it) and it definitely won’t mention Pizza Hut in the Oracle. But it would be remiss not to include Honest Burgers here.
Because as a chain, moving to Reading, it did everything right. We were its first branch outside London, and it picked a beautiful, neglected building and restored it to its former glory – standing up at the top of those stairs, looking down, it’s hard to imagine a more attractive dining room. And it paid respect to Reading, making a burger with some of our finest local ingredients and brewing a house beer with Wild Weather (before they sodded off to Wales).
But also, it ended the non-stop debate over who did central Reading’s best burger. Before Honest there were pretenders: Bluegrass, 7Bone, RYND, Five Guys. After Honest the answer was pretty clear: it’s Honest. Now we can all get on with our lives, knowing that’s settled. And is it my imagination, or has the centre of Reading had fewer burger restaurants opening since as a result?
9. Bakery House (2015-present)
Bakery House really did come out of nowhere and when it opened back in 2015 it offered a kind of casual dining Reading hadn’t really seen. It wasn’t Reading’s first Lebanese restaurant – that was La Courbe, which opened at the end of 2013 – but it was the one that won hearts and minds, VHS to La Courbe’s Betamax.
Part of that was accessibility – no sharp-edged glass tables and fussy square plates, no wine list crammed with Lebanese classics. No wine list at all, actually, just soft drinks and fresh juice, ayran if you felt adventurous. But a lot was about how it made the food easy and fun. Some of their dishes, their shawarma and their boneless baby chicken, went on to be classics but there was always huge strength in depth in that menu, with great falafel, impeccable houmous, punchy little maqaneq and makdous, little aubergines stuffed with walnut.
It became one of those perfect all-purpose restaurants, which are rarer than you think: great for a solo dinner, a catch up with a friend or a big group (and surprisingly good for vegetarians, if you stick to the mezze). About the only thing you couldn’t do there was get drunk, and heaven knows Reading has quite enough places for that already.
Not only did the place become this brilliant one-size-fits-all restaurant but its influence can be seen in the popularity of other Lebanese restaurants in Reading and other grill houses that have more than a bit of Bakery House in their DNA. Can you imagine Tasty Greek Souvlaki without Bakery House paving the way? A recent acquisition by the owners of House Of Flavours has led to slightly swankier menus (and they’ve finally upped the prices a little) but hopefully it has also secured Bakery House’s future for the next ten years. The food’s still cracking, I’m happy to say.
8. Nibsy’s (2014-2021)
Nibsy’s blazed the trail in Reading in more ways than one. The most obvious, of course, is all about gluten: it’s hard to remember just how revolutionary a gluten-free cafe was back in 2014, whereas now restaurants, especially chains, are far more gluten conscious.
Moreover, few independents have been so spot on with their look and branding on day one. We’re used to plucky independents opening before they’re quite ready, to them not having the level of polish to let them compete with their well-backed, established rivals. Nibsy’s proved that it doesn’t have to be that way, and few independent restaurants – with the arguable exception of Clay’s – have got that quite so right.
None of that would have mattered a jot, naturally, if the food wasn’t up to scratch. But the other element of Nibsy’s genius was that food without gluten simply didn’t feel like going without. Particularly in terms of baking – glorious quiches and cakes, and Nibsy’s mini Bakewell tarts, a phenomenal treat I think about even now.
I even tried their mince pies one Christmas, and despite never being a fan of dried fruit they still came close to winning me over. Nibsy’s managed a feat that eludes many establishments like it: it proved that you could cater to dietary requirements without being worthy or joyless. That alone would justify a place on this list – another establishment, further down, definitely followed in its footsteps.
7. I Love Paella at the Fisherman’s Cottage (2016-2018)
Although they started out in street food and catering, my experience of I Love Paella actually began in 2015, when Workhouse Coffee’s Greg Costello invited them to cook out of his Oxford Road branch in the evenings. I went, I discovered that they didn’t charge corkage and I became hooked. And then they started trading out of the Horn, a surprising development, and became more like a restaurant – with access to a proper kitchen the range got wider, the dishes more imaginative. But they were there less than nine months and then they moved to the place which earned them their spot on this list, the Fisherman’s Cottage.
It was at the Fisherman’s Cottage that they became the place they were always meant to be: an innovative Spanish restaurant, if not one that ever quite reached the status of tapas bar. Their grilled goats cheese with tomato jam, their empanadas and especially their salt cod churros were like nothing the town had ever seen. And, as you’d expect, they served quite magnificent paella for two, studded with chicken thighs or thick with squid. Their talent in the kitchen, coupled with the Fisherman’s Cottage’s great selection of beer and outstanding, sun-drenched outside space, made them a proper destination restaurant in a way few Reading venues have managed to match.
More to the point, they were the blueprint for two different models in terms of Reading’s food scene. The first is pop-ups, so without I Love Paella there would have been no Caucasian Spice Box and Georgian Feast, no Chef Stevie. But also, they were the first business to make that move from street food to pop-ups, to go from cooking in the market to cooking in a bricks and mortar site. Other people followed in their footsteps, but I Love Paella did it first. Few did it better.
6. The Lyndhurst (2019-present)
In the course of running this blog, I have reviewed the Lyndhurst many times because it has changed hands so often. It used to be a Spirit House pub, owned by the same people as the Moderation. Then someone else ran it and took on a chef from London Street Brasserie, and it was good but not great. Then it came under new ownership again and the food got good – seriously good, and quite cheffy in places – and I had somewhere I loved eating just round the corner. And then, in 2019, they left the pub. Oh great, I thought, what are we going to get next?
Well, what we got next was a couple of unassuming chaps called Sheldon and Dishon. I went to the Lyndhurst on their opening night in 2019 and they seemed a little shellshocked, like they didn’t know what they had taken on. But over the months ahead, they proved again and again that looks can deceive. Because what they’ve built over the past four years is Reading’s only high quality, durable take on the gastropub concept.
And the food has got better and better and better. They never stop being a pub, or catering for people who want to eat in a pub. So they will do you a burger, which happens to be one of Reading’s best burgers, or fish and chips, or sausages and mash. But they’ll also do stunning pulled pork tacos, or black pudding Scotch eggs, or skate wing anointed with brown butter and capers, or rabbit stuffed with liver and wrapped in prosciutto.
And whatever a dish looks like the first time you order it, it will look and taste different the third, fourth or tenth time. Because they never stop trying to make things better, or perfect. They always hit better, they often hit perfect. They’ll do a burger night on Monday, Korean chicken wings on Wednesday and curry every Thursday, but then they’ll knock your socks off with something classically French. When my brother came over from Australia last year and I had lunch with him, I asked him where in Reading he wanted to eat. He didn’t hesitate before saying the Lyndhurst, and he loved it there.
They served us monkfish with curried Bombay potatoes and a gorgeous coriander chutney, and now if it ever shows up on their specials menu I order it and think of him. That’s the Lyndhurst for you, as good at making memories as anywhere I know. They are the one restaurant in Reading that never quite gets the credit it deserves, because the only thing they are bad at is blowing their own trumpet. But they are also one of the best restaurants Reading has, or has ever had.
5. Namaste Kitchen (2017-2018)
This particular incarnation of Namaste Kitchen burned more brightly and briefly than anywhere else on this list, but it makes the list for a number of reasons. Before Namaste Kitchen opened at the Hook & Tackle, Nepalese food was mainly represented by Sapana Home, a very solid traditional Nepalese restaurant that is still trading today. But Namaste Kitchen, and its truly exceptional food, was the moment when Nepalese food broke out in Reading and found wider appeal.
Part of that was because the food was just so bloody good – phenomenal paneer pakora, big rugged cubes of battered cheese with a sharp, spicy dip, chilli chicken with a huge punch of sweet, sour heat and potatoes glossy with ghee and peppered with cumin. But more to the point Namaste Kitchen has a good claim to be Reading’s first truly great small plates restaurant. Not only that, but it never entirely stopped being a pub – so you could go there for a meal, or for bar snacks while watching the football on a big screen.
I went many, many times over eight far too short months and then the adventure was over. The chef left, the owners parted company and one of them – the man in charge of their front of house – cashed out and left the business. But the story doesn’t end there because Namaste Kitchen was also Reading’s first introduction to that man, Kamal Tamrakar, and he had unfinished business with Nepalese food in this town.
First he moved to Namaste Momo, on the edge of Woodley, before again parting company with his business partners and moving on. But it proved to be third time lucky when he finally had the courage of his convictions and put his name over the door, opening Kamal’s Kitchen on Caversham Road in the spring of 2022. Kamal’s Kitchen is a fantastic restaurant, and it feels like he might finally have stopped wandering and settled down. But you never forget your first love, and that’s why Namaste Kitchen is on this list.
4. Vegivores (2019-present)
If you want a real Reading success story, Vegivores is it. They started out doing street food at Blue Collar but rather than take the well-trodden next step, popping up in a pub somewhere, they thought big. They opened permanent premises in Caversham, on the cusp of Covid. They survived, despite everything stacked against them, and they devoted their ingenuity to having a credible delivery option.
Then they reopened, and they expanded. And although owner Kevin Farrell has been outspoken about the challenges hospitality businesses face, and Vegivores has had to constantly adjust its opening hours accordingly, you wouldn’t bet against them going from strength to strength.
Like Nibsy’s, Vegivores has always been very clear about what it does without descending into worthiness. They don’t use the word vegan, although everything is plant-based. They don’t take the lazy route of processed meat substitutes, and everything they do is innovative and interesting.
I looked at their menu in the course of writing this piece and practically everything on the menu spoke to me: I am long overdue a visit. You could read their menu, plan a trip there, order, eat and only then realise that you’d had no meat. It’s like a magic trick. I know many Reading residents are hugely grateful that there’s one restaurant in Reading where they can eat literally everything on the menu, and that includes members of my family.
I haven’t been to Vegivores in far too long, but I was lucky enough to be at a wedding last month in Caversham Court Gardens where Vegivores was doing the catering. I had their Goan vegetable curry, and it was predictably terrific. Did I wish someone had snuck some chicken into it? Believe it or not, no.
3. House Of Flavours (2013-present)
I’m bending my rules ever so slightly to sneak in House Of Flavours: strictly speaking I think it opened in July 2013, the month before my blog began. But since my rule is that I never review anywhere in the first month I’m including it on a technicality, because it only became reviewable after I’d started.
But House Of Flavours, right from the very start of my decade of reviewing restaurants, marked a sea change in Reading. Before House Of Flavours, Indian restaurants were solid, reliable and almost completely interchangeable. I know many people will disagree with this, and say they had their favourites. And I’m sure they did. I know people raved about the Gulshan, or went to Standard Tandoori every month for their super dry fry and all that jazz. I get it: I used to love the Sardar Palace on Cemetery Junction, which had a completely bonkers interior and sold Châteauneuf du Pape for fifteen quid which I ordered even though it didn’t go with anything.
But I’m not kidding myself that Sardar Palace was magically different from the other places, it was just my favourite variation on that theme. Before then, people’s ideas of a fancy Indian restaurant was the Bina. And if you want to see what people thought was fancy, back then, go to the Bina now, because it hasn’t changed. But House Of Flavours was the moment when Indian food in this town started taking itself seriously.
It was properly swish, genuinely upmarket and interesting. And the chain reaction it set off actually had more consequences than you might think. It didn’t just create a culture where Clay’s – upmarket, swish and interesting – could flourish, but also one where regional Indian food could thrive in this town, rather than just your bog standard dopiazas and jalfrezis. So without House Of Flavours I’m not sure you’d see, for better or for worse, our dosa joints and our biryani places, our street food, the Coconut Tree and Shree Krishna Vada Pav.
You might think I’m over-egging it, or that this is too high up on the list, but I have to disagree. Cast your mind back and think about Indian food in Reading before House Of Flavours came along. It made it a genuine proposition as a meal out for food lovers as well as lovers of curry, and that rising tide has lifted a lot of boats since then.
I don’t go anywhere near as often as I’d like, but I was there last year with my family when my brother visited from Australia, and I popped in there recently for dinner after work with Zoë. Both times it was still excellent, properly enjoyable and completely packed. Good for them. They don’t get talked about enough when people discuss Reading’s great restaurants, and I hope this goes some way to redressing the balance.
2. Kungfu Kitchen (2018-present)
You could argue that Kungfu Kitchen wouldn’t qualify for this list for similar reasons to Fidget & Bob, or Geo Café. But Kungfu Kitchen’s inimitability is its greatest strength. It can’t be imitated because Jo and Steve cannot be imitated, as anybody who has ever eaten there will tell you. No Reading restaurant is quite as in the image of its owner as this one, and it’s a huge part of why it attracts such affection.
Reading had authentic Chinese food before KFK, but it was on a separate menu, not in English, the implication being that if you weren’t Chinese you wouldn’t want to order it. I still remember going into a Chinese restaurant on the Wokingham Road called Home Taste, asking if they had an English menu and being laughed out of the place.
By contrast Jo, the great communicator, sees it as her role to demystify authentic Chinese food. And to tell you to order different dishes. And to tell you to order less food. She just likes telling people what to do in general, truth be told. And KFK is still going while Home Taste has long since closed, which tells its own story.
In fact if you think of Chinese food in Reading, you think of KFK: most restaurants in this town would give their eye teeth to be so synonymous with their chosen cuisine. But they’re progressive, too: if you get a table there Steve will inevitably talk you through all of Double-Barrelled’s new releases, stowed away in their very well-stocked beer fridge.
But that’s not all. It’s also worth mentioning that Kungfu Kitchen put Reading well and truly on the map in 2021 when Tom Parker Bowles of the Mail On Sunday paid them a visit and published his review.
Prior that the last Reading restaurant to be reviewed in the papers was Thames Lido. No surprise there, as that group is well-connected and the chef patron has featured in the Guardian many times (although the paper’s hapless description of the Lido as “just off the Reading ring road” suggests a limited knowledge of the place). Before that? You have to go back to 2010, when Mya Lacarte featured in the Telegraph.
But Kungfu Kitchen did it entirely on merit, and that write up made a lot of people very happy, me included. They clearly didn’t have the foggiest who Tom Parker Bowles was, and it’s safe to say from his review that he got the full KFK treatment. Which of course he loved: I imagine he found it either refreshing, or bracing, or both.
1. Clay’s Kitchen (2018-present)
Come on, of course it’s Clay’s. Who did you think it was going to be, Chopstix? Wendy’s? Doner & Gyros?
I would argue that no restaurant is quite as indelibly associated with Reading, and no restaurant has received anywhere near as much national acclaim as Clay’s. In fact, I’d go further and say that doesn’t just hold true for the last ten years, but for as long as I can remember. The roll call of national food writers who have tried and loved Clay’s food is a who’s who of the great and the good (and William Sitwell). Tom Parker Bowles, Grace Dent, Jay Rayner and Fay Maschler have all waxed lyrical about their cooking. You’d just need Giles Coren to complete the set, but every day Giles Coren deigns not to come to Reading is, in my book, a day to celebrate.
Some of those writers tried Clay’s national home delivery service, their terrific idea which got them through lockdown when their small restaurant on London Street just wasn’t up to the job of staying open during the pandemic. But Parker Bowles and Dent have both been to and reviewed Clay’s, one at their old home and one at their new one, and both have seen what Reading has known for a very long time, that Clay’s is very special indeed.
It is astonishing in itself that Nandana is self-taught, that she has reached the standard she has through work, painstaking research and a culinary mind absolutely fizzing with ideas. But Clay’s has reframed so much of what we think of as a superb restaurant in Reading, to the point where you could almost bisect the decade at 2018, as pre-Clay’s and post-Clay’s. To achieve that is one thing, but over the past five years Clay’s has made and remade itself many times – first its cosy spot on London Street, serving dishes unlike anything Reading had seen, then its grander new home in Caversham with a mixture of old and new dishes, favourites and specials.
And then, because they don’t believe in resting on their laurels, a completely separate small plates menu which is somehow India infused with Andalusia, turning those high tables into more of a tapas restaurant than Reading has known before. You may not believe that, but I honestly do: their butter chicken croquettes, their crispy chickpeas, their wild boar sliders have more than a little in common with dishes you would get in one of my favourite Malaga restaurants. Those two separate menus mean that Clay’s is not one of Reading’s best restaurants, but somehow two of them.
And their food is extraordinary. A stroll through their finest dishes over the past five years is a stroll through some of the best food Reading has ever experienced. From the kodi chips of their first twelve months to the glorious stuffed squid on the menu when they reopened post-pandemic, from the delight of trying their cut mirchi chat for the first time to their most recent dish, a pulao of rice cooked in bone broth crowned with sticky, savoury lamb, the perfect synthesis of Nandana’s and Sharat’s skills in the kitchen. Even their least excellent dishes are head and shoulders above most things you could try in this town. Or further afield: I’ve eaten Michelin starred Indian food, at Mayfair’s Gymkhana, and I’m telling you now that Clay’s is miles better.
This is the point where I always say “Take my opinion with a pinch of salt, though, because I would class Nandana and Sharat as friends”. I’ve been saying that since the very start, when I did a competition with them, just after they opened, and explained why I wouldn’t be reviewing them. It’s amazing how many people think I have written a review of Clay’s – I never have, for the reasons I’ve already given, but it’s a source of sadness for me even now that I never got to, that I don’t have a record on my blog, from years ago, telling the world what everyone in Reading now knows full well, that there’s something magical about Clay’s.
But I do feel a bit less like giving that disclaimer today. Not because it’s no longer true – Nandana and Sharat are still friends – but because by any standard Clay’s is so significant that my judgment would be more questionable if they didn’t top this list than if they did. It’s a Hobson’s choice, but there you have it. But more to the point, I think many of Clay’s customers have a similar tale about how Nandana and Sharat have become friends.
The group of people who booked a table, in secret, in their basement to celebrate Clay’s first birthday. The countless customers with stories of kindness from Clay’s either on their deliveries, back in the bad times, or remembering and recognising them and their stories from visit after visit. The celebrations they have hosted and shared in, and the customers who go far more regularly than me – some of them every week. The fact that their first ever customer is their lucky charm and has to be the first to visit their new sites or try new dishes. The fact that they named a dish on their menu after him.
There are so many of those stories, and it’s not for me to tell them all. But if you want to understand how a restaurant can change and be changed by a place, and how that can be the beginning of a proper love affair, Clay’s is the place to consider. Reading is lucky to have it. But I have a feeling it was lucky to find Reading, too.
This piece is part of Edible Reading at 10. See also:
Edible Reading 