When I announced on social media last month that I’d had a very enjoyable day eating and drinking my way round Swindon there was (admittedly a limited amount of) complete and utter astonishment. What? said one person, no doubt thinking I had been hacked. Good Lord! Where? said another.
A third, regular reader Trudy, was particularly interested, having recently moved to Swindon where, as fas as I’m aware, they don’t have a friendly neighbourhood restaurant blogger. I met Trudy at the recent ER readers’ lunch at Clay’s so I gave her a sneak preview of what this review is about to tell you: yes, there are places to eat and drink in Swindon, and they’re a lot better than you might expect.
I’m not kidding – Swindon has enough about it to justify a trip out west on the train. You have to do a thirty minute walk from the station, up a hill, but you are rewarded with Swindon’s Old Town which is a small but perfectly formed district full of nice shops, restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars. There’s an arts centre, and the Town Gardens, a beautiful Victorian park with a listed bandstand and a cafe (it also, according to the council’s website, hosts something called the “My Dad’s Bigger Than Your Dad Festival”: I love my dad dearly, but I’m not entering him in this any time soon).
Where had all this been hiding? You could almost imagine you were in a little town on the outskirts of the outskirts of the Cotswolds, and then I realised that I sort of almost was. And truly, I had a wonderful afternoon eating and drinking and making merry in the company of my friends Dave, who lives in Wootton Bassett but I suspect wishes he lived in Cirencester, and Al, who lives in Cirencester and so doesn’t have to.
We started out with a couple of outstanding coffees from the small, difficult to find but deeply charming Pour Bois – which I pronounced to Dave as if it was French before realising that of course it was pronounced poor boyz because we were in Swindon, not Montparnasse. My mistake: it’s not easy being Frasier Crane in a town full of Bob “Bulldog” Briscoes.
After lunch we wandered over to Ray’s, an ice cream parlour which is an Old Town institution, and sat on the wall opposite eating our ice creams in mute contentment. And then we wandered over to the Town Gardens, which – don’t hate me for saying this – slightly puts Forbury Gardens to shame, not least because it has a lovely little cafe serving superb coffee which was miles better than anything you could get from the equivalent kiosk in Reading. The beans are by local Light Bulb Coffee, and I also picked some up to try at home (it’s marvellous stuff).
After ice cream and coffee there was nothing for it but to try some beer. Did you know that Swindon has a nascent craft beer scene? I didn’t either, but it turns out it does, with several great venues dotted along the Old Town’s Devizes Road. We started out in Tap & Brew, local brewery Hop Kettle’s Swindon tap room, which served some stonking beers: my favourite was Kepler, a proper fruit explosion of a NEIPA so good that I bought a bottle to stash in my bag (it didn’t make it to the following weekend, that’s how good it was).
After that we had a short stumble to the Tuppenny, a lovely pub with an impressive selection of beer on keg – including both Double-Barrelled’s Parka and DEYA’s stupendous Steady Rolling Man as permanent fixtures – and a belting can fridge. I had some splendid pales, made a detour into sweet, indulgent stouts that tasted, by pure witchcraft, of battenburg or chocolate orange, and I rolled out to catch my train home totally convinced that Swindon’s Old Town could match any enclave Reading had to offer when it came to the finer things in life.
That’s all well and good, but I maintain that any day trip away has to be anchored around a meal, whether that’s dinner or lunch. And for Swindon, for me, that destination was never in doubt. So after our coffees at Pour Bois, and before our ice cream at Ray’s, Dave, Al and I headed to Los Gatos, in the heart of Old Town, to see if it still lived up to the billing it had in my mind as The Restaurant Worth Visiting Swindon For.
Los Gatos is a tapas restaurant, and it’s been going for nearly twenty years. I don’t get to Swindon often, but whenever I do I make sure I have lunch there. I’ve said before that tapas restaurants in this country tend to either be run by Spaniards, with mixed results, or by evangelical Brits who are trying to reimagine a tapas bar as its best possible self. Oxford’s Arbequina, Bristol’s Bar 44 and Bravas definitely fall into that category.
But Los Gatos, for me, feels more like it’s trying to recreate than perfect – and there’s nothing at all wrong with that, because some days a recreation of Malaga or Granada in England would be a wonderful thing in its own right. Despite that it, too, was founded and run by Brits and named in tribute to the legendary Malaga bar of the same name. Originally they had a site round the corner, but they moved to their current site a minute down the road and then, during lockdown, they sold up.
The new owners have expanded by taking the site next door, and this was my first visit since the pandemic so I was a tad discombobulated by it not looking how I remembered. But the fact remains that it’s really nicely done, and it helps that our table was in the original room, where I’ve eaten before. It is a really lovely space, with tasteful terrazzo marble-effect tables and – as there should be – stools up at the bar. The room had plenty of natural light, attractive dark beams and a blackboard full of wines and sherries by the glass.
I’m not going to go all Berkshire Live and tell you it was just like being in Malaga, but I have to say the overall effect wasn’t a million miles off. We started with a crisp glass of fino apiece – turns out there were three Frasier Cranes in town after all – and enjoyed the building buzz of a restaurant turning a very healthy trade at lunchtime. Again, I stopped to remind myself that I was in Swindon. In honesty, I did that more than once during the meal.
The joy of a place like Los Gatos is looking at the menu, wanting to order nearly everything and then realising that in a tapas restaurant, provided there are enough of you, you can have a decent stab at it. And Los Gatos’ menu is very much that kind of menu with most dishes around the seven pound mark, all of them tempting.
There’s plenty of cooking on display too, rather than an over-reliance on buying and slicing, so although you can get jamon or queso they’re a very small section of a large and diverting selection. Typical Andulucian dishes are well represented, like spinach with chickpeas or fried aubergine with honey, and I suspect you could quite happily bring a vegetarian here: perhaps one of the main indicators that you’re not in Spain is that they even make a little effort to accommodate vegans.
But Dave, Al and I were neither of those things, so as Dave sipped an Alhambra and Al and I tackled a beautifully fresh, fruity white from Jumilla – decent value at just over thirty pounds – we did one of the most enjoyable things you can do in a tapas restaurant. We chatted away, picked out our favourite dishes, haggled and scheduled, putting them in our first and second wave. As we did, I thought about how much I’d missed this kind of sociable eating, with these two. Of course, I didn’t tell them that then, because we’re men in the last gasps of our forties, but writing it here will have to suffice.
Our first set of dishes were all, without exception, winners – so much so that my usual anal urge to photograph everything pretty much deserted me. That’s bad news for both of us – me because I’ll have to rely on my immortal prose and you because you’ll have to read it. The very pick of the dishes was the hake in beer batter – it’s a fish beloved of the Spanish but Los Gatos bring as much out of it as anywhere I’ve been in Spain. Three huge chunks of the stuff, in the lightest batter, sprinkled liberally with flakes of salt was the perfect reintroduction to their food, and a deep, golden saffron mayo played nicely with it, perhaps more gently than a honking alioli would have done.
Everything seemed geared for three to share because we also got three superb croquetas – much more dense and substantial than I’m used to with more heft and less bechamel. That might not suit everyone, but it really suited me. If you came to Los Gatos as a pair or a four those two dishes would cause you serious problems, but the three of us felt very fortunate.
Jamon – Serrano rather than anything fancier – was decent and hand carved, with a good umami note and a nice marbling of fat. It didn’t perhaps have the really intensely savoury quality, or melting fat of the very best Spanish hams, but it was eight quid or so and far from stingy, so I wasn’t in the mood to complain. By that point in the lunch I wasn’t in the mood to complain about anything, not even Dave’s jokes.
I also loved the mushrooms in a cream and sherry sauce, achieving a precarious balance between glossy sweetness and the underlying savoury note just peeking through thanks to the oloroso. We didn’t order any bread for the sauce, though, which was a mistake. I’ve been doing this gig for ten years and I still make schoolboy errors like that.
Our greed was such that there were still two other dishes in our first order, and one was a dish I’ve loved at Los Gatos for a long time. Morcilla de Burgos came beautifully presented, two discs of earthy, fragrant black pudding sandwiching a glorious middle layer of sweet piquillo peppers, quail’s egg perched on top. The prettiest thing we ate all day, so naturally the one I didn’t photograph, but a really gorgeous morsel. Also possibly the hardest to share – or perhaps I just didn’t want to – so if you go to Los Gatos order your own personal portion. For my sake, if not for yours.
And last of all, because we had been carb-free up to that point – we ordered an arroz con pollo. I seem to recall that Los Gatos serves paella at the weekends, and this was a miniature version of that. I quite liked it, and I was glad to see it topped with beautifully done chicken thigh, but again it was probably one of the less shareable things we ordered. The rice did come in handy though, because that sherry and cream sauce had a very agreeable habit of sticking to every single grain, if you crossed the streams.
And then, not at all sated but the edges knocked off our hunger, we regrouped. We looked at our list of outstanding dishes and made our decisions – did we still want them? Was it enough? Was it too much? If I’d just been with Dave, a slim man who very much intends to stay that way, it might have been tricky to get them all past the committee stage, but Al – whippet thin despite eating like a horse – has been known to have two desserts, just because, so I knew I’d be safe.
If the second round of tapas wasn’t quite as impressive as the first, that was partly because we were no longer ravenous. Also, the dishes you absolutely cannot bear to miss out on always end up in the first round, so the bar is meant to be lower when you go back to the menu.
And probably the two weakest dishes were in this section, although I’m not sure either would have made my must-order list in the first place. Calamares were decent but unspecial, and not a patch on the ones you can get in Spain, and the black beans with pancetta and chorizo were surprisingly bland for a dish including two of the greatest cured meats known to man. I found my mind drifting to the cannelini beans at Bristol’s COR, zippy with lemon and topped with breadcrumbs, achieving so much more with fewer ingredients.
We’d also ordered a classic dish, chorizo cooked simply in wine, and it was the kind of thing that restored your faith in a restaurant, both in terms of their ability to buy the right stuff and then cook it spot on. If I knew where they got their chorizo from I’d place an order, because I’m fed up of trying to rustle dishes up with the slightly gristly nonsense you get from Brindisa these days. We could easily have ordered a second dish of this, and I rather wish we had.
We also ordered chicken livers, again in a sherry and cream sauce, and although I didn’t mind it I didn’t think, with hindsight, that it was different enough from the mushrooms to justify ordering both.
And our penultimate dish was the most expensive thing I found on the menu, Galician-style octopus. When I’ve had this in Spain it’s just octopus, heavy on the paprika – and the octopus for that matter – and although octopus is always a joy, it can be a tad one note. I really liked what Los Gatos did with the dish, serving it with new potatoes and capers almost as a hot salad. And the octopus was beautiful – tender and tasty with no bounce or toughness, which is by no means a given abroad, let alone here. I think Dave and Al let me have more than my fair share of this dish. They’re good like that.
And the final thing we ordered? Another portion of that hake. Take a look at the picture below and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.
Service was great. In the course of researching this review I chanced upon some online reviews that said that it wasn’t the same since the restaurant expanded, that a staff of two or three had become a legion and that something magical had been lost. Well, I guess we all sometimes feel that way when our favourites get big and successful but personally I thought the staff were terrific, very efficient, just friendly enough and I was quite happy with them not being overworked. I’m a bit of a pinko like that.
We might well have had dessert, but knowing that there was an ice cream parlour literally on the other side of the road curtailed any ambitions we had in that regard. I couldn’t talk either of them into a Pedro Ximenez either, because beer was calling too. Our meal came to just under fifty pounds a head, not including tip, which I thought was a steal for everything we had.
Ordinarily I start every review of a tapas restaurant by complaining that Reading doesn’t have a tapas restaurant and never really has. You could set your watch by it. So this time, for novelty value, I thought I could shoehorn it in at the end. But rather than say that, I just want to say that this kind of restaurant, and this kind of eating, is among my very favourite kind. Ordering everything, trying everything, sharing your joy and diminishing any disappointments – it really is one of the best ways to eat there is. And when you find somewhere that does it well, you’ll gladly travel to it.
In my case, that does seem to involve flying to Andalucia at least once a year, but I am really delighted that Los Gatos, a mere half hour train ride away, remains more than good enough as a substitute for that. The fact that around it has sprung up this magnificent little ecosystem of coffee, craft beer, green space and ice cream is the icing on the cake. Old Town, square mile for square mile, is arguably a lovelier spot than anywhere in Reading, I think – and, yes, that includes Caversham.
So if Spanish food is even remotely of interest to you, I highly recommend that you make your way to Swindon – despite the incredulity of everybody you tell at work – because it very much merits the journey. I think I prefer Los Gatos to Oxford’s Arbequina, much as I love Arbequina, and it edges out Newbury’s Goat On The Roof, too. I still need to make it to El Cerdo in Maidenhead, at some point, but I doubt somehow that I’ll love it quite the way I love Los Gatos.
And in terms of our closest Spanish restaurant, Wokingham’s Sanpa, put it this way: when I went back there earlier in the year I worried that the rating I gave it was far too harsh. Having now eaten at Los Gatos and seen what commited Brits can create as a temple to Spain, in an unfashionable town, I think that if anything I was far too generous. Go to Los Gatos instead: have a sherry, order that morcilla, send me a photo. I doubt I’ll enjoy many lunches more this year than the one I had there.
Although this guide dates from September 2023, it has been updated as the result of another visit in September 2024. I have added a number of restaurants and cafés, and tried to make clear whether each entry dates from 2023, 2024 or a combination of both. I have removed two entries from this list, Bar Aliatar and the Mercado de San Agustin, because I didn’t visit them in 2023 or 2024. But they are still in the original 2019 guide if you want to read about them.
Of all the city guides on my blog, the guide to Granada is the oldest and creakiest: it was written over four years ago and I’m very conscious that a combination of Covid and life making other plans meant that I hadn’t been able to return to the city, one of my favourite places on earth. It was only this month, finally, that I got to renew my acquaintance with it: it was every bit as happy an occasion as any post-Covid reunion I can think of.
The previous guide talks about my own history with Granada and I won’t rehash all that here – by all means read it if you’re interested – but instead, after four years away, I wanted to set the scene by talking about just what a magical city Granada is, and why it’s worth considering if you’re trying to decide where your next city break should be. Because I think there’s nowhere quite like Granada, and I’m going to have a stab at explaining why.
First of all, there’s the obvious stuff. By which I mean the Alhambra, an eternally beautiful place full of placid gardens, burbling fountains and stunning Moorish architecture, tiles and carvings and woodworking which will stay in your mind (and on your phone) for the rest of your days. To this day it remains pretty much the only tourist attraction I’ve ever visited to which hype cannot do justice. But the people who bus in on a coach, see the Alhambra and then sod off miss out on one of the most beautiful, and certainly the most interesting, cities I have ever been to.
The other obvious thing is tapas, and Granada’s tapas culture. Tapas isn’t unique to Granada, or even necessarily to Andalucia any more, and the word has been culturally appropriated by everyone trying to sell you not much food for rather a lot of money. But if those people ever went to Granada, if they had any shame, they might just die of it. In Granada free food with every drink is a way of life – and not just shitty lip service food but good, interesting little dishes. You could hop from one bar to the next living on whatever accompanies your caña of cold, crisp beer but often – and this is the genius of the place – it sends you scurrying to the menu. If that’s what you get for free, just how good could the other dishes on offer be? Maybe it’s just me, but that gets me every time.
But there’s more to Granada than the Alhambra and tapas – although that, alone, would be enough to justify a visit. It’s many cities rolled into one. You have the gorgeous whitewashed side streets and traversas of the Albaicin, the ancient Arab quarter of the city. There are miradors looking out on the hills the other side of the river, at the majesty of the Alhambra and the mountains beyond.
Connecting the Albaicin to the centre are steep streets lined with teterias, houses serving beautiful tea, fragrant with mint or spices. And then there’s the faux market of the Alcaiceria, a little grid of lanes which serves as a pocket version of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, only without the haggling. Beyond that there is the serene beauty of its cathedral and monasteries, and gorgeous tree lined squares where the birdsong is deafening as the evening begins.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s also the Realejo, a district full of street art and scruff, busy bars, craft beer and third wave coffee. And of course there’s the Carrera del Darro, possibly Granada’s most beautiful street, hugging the banks of the river, crossed by little bridges, before it opens out into the Paseo de los Tristes, a beautiful square which affords you a gorgeous view up to the Alhambra.
I could go on. The shopping is surprisingly good, the coffee scene has come on in leaps and bounds since I visited in 2019 and the more modern parts of the city, away from the cathedral or the main drag are full of great restaurants and bars, many of which are largely untroubled by tourists. Truly I love everything about the place, from the bollards in the shape of pomegranates (the symbol of the city) to the tiny red buses that crisscross its narrow streets. Have I convinced you yet?
If I haven’t, a few final extra things might. It always used to be tricky to get to, but Vueling flies there direct from Gatwick once a week – out on a Tuesday morning and back on a Saturday evening, the perfect duration for a city break with a day to pack beforehand and a day to reacclimatise afterwards. And last of all, I struggle to think of a better value city break. Even our best meals there came nowhere near to breaking the bank and not only does the beer come with food but things like coffee are unbelievably reasonably priced. A top notch, third wave latte will set you back less than two Euros. The shops and markets are full of things you can’t get at home – you know, niche stuff like fresh fruit and vegetables. Really, for my liking, it’s pretty close to heaven on earth.
This guide is completely revamped from its 2019 precursor. I have added a number of venues and taken a couple out – in the vast majority of cases where I’m recommending somewhere I recommended in 2019 I went there again on this trip and the writing (and, where possible, the picture) is brand new. There are only two recommendations carried over from 2019 which I did not get to revisit, and where this is the case I’ve clearly said so. I hope you find it useful, or at least enjoy reading it: all I can say is that I very much enjoyed living it.
1. Atelier Casa de Comidas
Atelier Casa de Comidas, a short walk from El Corte Inglés in the newer part of the city, received a Bib Gourmand from Michelin. And as so often that accolade, far more so than the overhyped Michelin star, is a reliable indicator that you’re going to have a fantastic meal.
It’s a beautiful, tasteful dining room and a menu full of temptations. In the evenings you can get a full tasting menu but I went for lunch in 2023 and everything I had was beautiful. I loved an appetiser of patatas bravas spiked and given a new lease of life with a hefty kick of kimchee and was in raptures about a phenomenal dish of nutty green peas in a rich, savoury broth with prawn foam, pickled prawns and fried prawn heads (not the kind of thing I’d normally eat, but enough to convert any doubter).
Pluma iberica – glazed almost like char siu – was up there with the best I have ever had and a dessert of chocolate ganache with ginger and rosemary was a fantastic way to end a meal. So why, even having had one of my lunches of the year, did I find myself thinking about the savoury croissant, loaded with slow-cooked oxtail, that my companions had had the sense to order and I hadn’t? C’est la vie, I suppose.
I should also mention that the restaurant had some of the best service I’ve experienced in a long time. The staff were trilingual (some speaking English and others speaking French when our English and Spanish respectively weren’t up to the task) and the sommelier was magnificent, picking us some outstanding cava, wine and sherries for all of our dishes. The single most expensive meal of the entire holiday, it cost barely more than fifty pounds a head.
I said in 2023 that when I went back to Granada this would be the first reservation I make. And so it proved, because on my final night in the city in 2024 we returned for the tasting menu. On this occasion the staff were not as trilingual, or even as bilingual, as I might have liked so I missed the nuance of some of the dishes but there was no mistaking the quality of the execution. It was a real fireworks display, from watermelon treated almost to have the taste and texture of meat, to a fantastic sea bass tartare with kimchi and caviar, to rudely pink Iberian pork, cooked superbly.
Atelier Casa de Comidas appears to have lost its Bib Gourmand since I went there first. But on the most recent display, they seem to have loftier goals in their sights.
I had another truly lovely lunch in 2023 at Betula Nana, a small chic restaurant just opposite Granada’s small and perfectly formed Botanical Gardens. It’s a great spot which reminded me a little of Bordeaux’s Echo, and its menu was also compact and bijou. But it was also brimming over with inventiveness and delicious flavours. I had huge envy for my companions’ squid ink tortilla, black as night, swimming in a garlic sauce and garlanded with clams, but had a starter, in the shape of a carpaccio of king oyster mushrooms with tiny nuggets of candied, caramelised beetroot which was unlike anything I could remember.
Main courses, if anything, induced more envy – my confit bacalao was a dish badly in need of some carbs, and I wished I’d gone for Zoë’s pork cheek curry, all retro Vesta flavours, the sauce seeping into a bed of potatoes crushed with olive oil, or Liz’s beautifully done tuna tataki. But that’s life. For dessert, because the four of us couldn’t decide, we ordered all three desserts – a wobbly tart, a gooey chocolate cake and a colossal tiramisu – and attacked them between us. Our lunch came to just over forty quid a head, helped by the fact that you can’t find a bottle on their wine list costing more than twenty Euros. I love this city.
Returning in 2024, I found that if anything Betula Nana had raised its game still further and everything I had was just terrific. I wouldn’t say the menu had changed drastically in the intervening year, but a cecina and fig salad was far more enjoyable than salad has any right to be, and squid in its own ink served on a pillow of basmati was a Stygian miracle. This time I chose more smartly, and the tuna tataki – an ever-present on menus on the continent – was one of the most memorable dishes of my trip. Betula Nana only has about 18 covers, seems to be busy every lunchtime and can only be booked by WhatsApp. But it’s well worth doing so.
Betula Nana Calle Málaga, 9, 18002 Granada
3. Bodegas Castañeda
Bodegas Castañeda, on a random weekday night nearly twenty-five years ago, was the first place I ever went in Granada. It was love at first sight – a long bar, all the beer and vermouth you could drink and a tapa with every single one. A different tapa every time, too, because they keep track. Since then I have never visited Granada without going back to Bodegas Castañeda, usually multiple times, and it’s invariably the first place I visit.
On my 2023 trip I went twice in one day – once mid-afternoon with Zoë to check that it was still heaven on earth, and then in the evening with Zoë, Liz and James because few better places exist to kick off an evening. It seems to be busier every time, and now they have a lot of tables in the alleyway outside, but I still prefer standing at the bar, bustling and jostling, and enjoying it for as long as I can.
That said, I went back in 2024 and again, sat in the alleyway, and for the first time got the sense that Castañeda was perhaps trading on past glories. The food was a little scruffier, a little lazier, a little underseasoned and lacking in finesse. The furniture was tatty, and I wondered whether my favourite place for a quarter of a century was being superseded, not just by the whippersnappers but also by the old stagers like Los Diamantes and Los Manueles which had expanded to multiple locations across the city while Castañeda, in the same place as ever, stood still.
Even saying all that, I know that the next time I go to Granada I will still go there, just to check in on it. It’s what you do with very old friends.
Like Bodegas Castañeda, I have been going to Taberna La Tana for a very long time. It is a fantastic place to drink wine and eat tapas, and for many years it was a relatively well kept secret. But Anthony Bourdain visited it in 2013 for an episode of Parts Unknown, and now that secret is out. That means it is always busy, which is no bad thing, but also that it is full of Americans, which may or may not be your idea of a good time.
On my previous visit to La Tana in 2019 it was still a place to arrive early and hug the bar – preferably at lunchtime when you could guarantee a space – and if you were really lucky and got practically the only table in the entire place you felt like the king of the world. But that has changed. In 2023 La Tana had plenty of tables in the alley outside and you could book them for a two hour early or late evening sitting. Somehow this didn’t feel very Granada, but I suppose it meant fewer people being turned away because it was full. So not the old magic but a new, different and equally valid kind of magic.
Returning the following year I found more change afoot. The front room now had tables in it too, and they had expanded further into the neighbouring room. Menus were on QR codes, and the whole thing felt brisker, slicker and more focused on maximising returns. And that’s all well and good – restaurants need to make money, and good restaurants deserve to survive, but I had a sense that the La Tana of 2024 felt a world away from the place I fell in love with over a decade ago.
Did it mean I didn’t have a brilliant evening? Absolutely not. The wine was exquisite (and having access to the whole list via a QR code was the right kind of progress), the guacamole was still the best I’ve ever had and La Tana’s tomates aliñado, tumbled in superb olive oil and studded with salt, were the best I had in the city. The anchovies and paletilla were outstanding, too.
If you’d never been to La Tana before and you visited it in this incarnation, you’d think it was the best thing since sliced ham, and you wouldn’t be a million miles off. But for those of us who have a longer acquaintance with La Tana, it’s a little more complex. It’s a wonderful place, but just not the same wonderful place I remember. I almost envy people discovering it for the first time, who never have to feel that tug of conflict between the old and the new.
We went to Rincón de Rodri on our last night in the city in 2023, a Friday night, and I had the best time there. It’s a seafood bar and restaurant – tall tables and the bar at the front, and more conventional tables at the back. We’d reserved a table for four, so we were at the back, and it was all a little faux nautical with blue and white striped walls. Only one other table was occupied, and I wondered if we’d made a bad choice.
But of course, it was because we turned up at half eight, when no sensible Spaniard would dine. And this restaurant is all Spaniards, to the point where they had to send over the only member of the serving staff who spoke any English. By half nine the place was rammed, and an absolute riot from start to finish.
And the food! The food was magnificent. From our opening tapa, slices of meltingly soft swordfish served with crisp white cabbage, to pert fried chipirones, golden and moreish sprinkled with freshly squeezed lemon and dipped in a thick, potent alioli, everything was fantastic. I particularly liked the hake, feather-light and impossible to resist, and a huge hunk of atun rojo, just-seared, still very pink in the middle, brought to a vacant neighbouring table and sliced thickly there and then, easily sashimi grade.
An outrageously good albarino was twenty-five Euros a bottle, and we ordered several. They brought us a shot of a liqueur the flavour of pionono, the cinnamon pastry particular to Granada, and it was like the best Baileys you’ve ever tasted. We rolled out having spent barely forty quid each, and I just wanted to do it again the following Friday night, and possibly every Friday night for the rest of my days.
At the front, the celebrations were barely getting started. Sitting at a table for four is the civilised thing to do – and, when you’re in group that size in Granada, the only way you can guarantee that you’ll get enough space – but I think the thing to do is go there as a pair and stand outside when it opens, angling for two stools at that bar and all the albarino and tapas you can manage.
I tried to do exactly that on this visit, only to find it was closed and that they were having work done inside. It was my single biggest disappointment of the trip, and I will be back there as soon as possible to rectify that.
Rincón de Rodri Calle Músico Vicente Zarzo, 3, 18002 Granada
6. Potemkin
When I first visited Potemkin, a little bar in the Realejo, it was a tapas bar that, possibly as a gimmick, served sushi – and sushi tapas – on Wednesdays. Well, they were obviously on to a good thing because when I made a point of returning five years ago I found they now serve sushi – and sushi tapas – all the time, along with some other Japanese dishes.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the novelty of ordering a beer or a gin and tonic and just randomly being brought a delicate plate of avocado maki. Or ordering a subsequent drink and getting a plate of some other sushi. Going with friends in 2023 I remembered why I had loved the place so much in the first place, and so we ordered some of their other dishes and found their sushi selection remarkably good (and, yet again, cracking value). The gyoza were some of the best I’ve had anywhere.
But more than that, the staff were just marvellous. When we turned up all the tables looked to be booked. But they said we could have one, just for the two of us, until ten pm. And then as our friends joined they found more space, and brought more chairs, and nothing was too much trouble. One of the people looking after us had spent two years living in London and wanted to practice her English and talk about it, and of course we congratulated her on living in the best city in the world.
At one point there was a spot of rain and with military precision the staff mobilised, grabbed umbrellas and put them up, and within two minutes everybody was back at their seats, ordering more drinks, getting more sushi. And, for the umpteenth time that week, I stopped and thought Can’t I just live here?
Returning in 2024, I decided I’d had enough of only using Potemkin for pre-dinner drinks, so we booked a table on the terrace and bedded in for the evening. Everything was as brilliant as I remembered and, unlike many places in Granada, the tapas doesn’t stop coming just because you’re also ordered from the main menu: maki after maki after maki.
Saint Germain, tucked away not far from the cathedral, is a cracking little bar, buzzy but conspiratorial. I’ve eaten inside, in a room with stools and a ledge, framed pictures all over the walls and not much else, and had a wonderful time. But on my most recent visit, as when I went in 2019, I was at one of the tables in the alleyway outside and I just had an enchanting time.
Previously I’d been there as a group of five, desperately trying to commandeer space, gradually nicking more stools, using one as a makeshift table. That might be your idea of fun – it was mine, many years ago – but for me a proper table in the dusk, reading menus by the light of our iPhones was much more like it.
Saint Germain has countless wines by the glass, and truly expert servers who will tell you you’ve absolutely picked the wrong one and you’d like something else better. They are, in my experience, correct without exception about that, because they know their wine list and their menu inside out, and have no qualms about ensuring that you make the most of both.
In the past I’ve adored Saint Germain’s chorizo cooked in honey, and I nearly ordered it on this visit, but the specials were calling to me: I don’t think Saint Germain has ever had specials on the menu before, and that fact alone was enough to make me sit up and take notice. And they were stunning: red tuna, surely sashimi grade and barely cooked, arranged in a ring around a gloriously verdant puck of avocado quite captivated me. Beef rib, cooked low and slow until it almost leapt from the bone, was even better, served with a sweet potato purée that rather changed my mind about sweet potato.
I thought we had enough room for the chorizo after that, but our server was just as authoritative about portions as he had been about our wine choices; he plonked down a piece of cheesecake for us to share, as if to say that’s your lot. So all that was left was to ask him for a couple of glasses of Pedro Ximénez to go with it. This time he didn’t suggest something else, so we at least got that right.
Saint Germain Calle Postigo Veluti, 4, 18001 Granada
8. Bar Minotauro
I first visited Minotauro in 2015, would you believe, with my old friend Dave. It’s a scruffy, lively bar just off Plaza Nueva, in the less beautiful bit of town and I really loved it – full of life, full of beer, no tourists, napkin art on the wall. It was how a bar manages to be cool without trying, which is of course the only way to be cool.
It wasn’t in my plans to return in 2023 but we had time for a caña at that end of town before a late lunch reservation so we went in and I’m so glad we did. It was its usual noisy, authentic self, full of locals getting beers in at the start of their Saturday. One table at the end, raucous and joyful, was a dozen ladies of different ages drinking and laughing. Not because they were a hen party or anything purgatorial like that, just because they were out for drinks.
I didn’t stay long enough to venture past the tapa, a little bagel full of just-fried steak and mayo, but even that had me looking at the menu and asking my companions if we could cancel lunch and stay here. They told me we couldn’t, we kept our reservation and went on to have the worst meal of the entire trip. The memories of that bagel, and the exquisite pleasure of saying I told you so were all I had to show for it.
I made sure we went back in 2024, for just the one, and a tubo of cold beer and another of those bagels cost less than 3 Euros. Enough said: next time I’m having lunch there.
Bar Minotauro Calle Imprenta, 6, 18010 Granada
9. Bar Lara
This place also falls into the category of “a quick drink before lunch” but it also happens to be in one of the prettiest squares in the city. Placeta de San Miguel Bajo is up in the Albaicin, just along from the Mirador de San Nicolas, the place to look out on the Alhambra. It is ringed by bars and restaurants on one side, with a beautiful, humble church at one end with a tall whitewashed tower. Take a seat on a terrace, drink your beer and watch those little red buses trundle past from time to time – it really is a fantastic spot.
In 2023 we did that at Bar Lara and, again, the tapas was so much better than it needed to be. The first, a beautiful plate of waxy sliced potatoes and green pepper, cooked in industrial quantities of olive oil with just enough salt, was one of the simplest, most effective things we ate all week. The second, little fried fish with diced tomatoes, was both gorgeous and generous. “This is going in the guide”, I said to Zoë. And it did.
Bar Lara Placeta de San Miguel Bajo, 4, 18010 Granada
10. Poetas Andaluces II
Poetas Andaluces was without question my favourite discovery of my 2024 visit. It has a more conventional restaurant out back, but I loved standing outside when it opened, sitting in the bar and eating and drinking for a happy, blessed evening. In that respect my approach to it was like the one I always take at Málaga’s outstanding Meson Iberico and Poetas Andaluces reminded me more of that wonderful spot than anywhere I’ve been in Granada.
It’s an asador, but unfortunately a lot of their most tempting-looking dishes – suckling pig, roast leg of lamb and what have you – all need to be ordered in advance, which I didn’t know. But even forced to slum it with the stuff you can order on the day I had a meal for the ages. Home-made pheasant pate and foie gras mi cuit were silky and opulent, a revuelto with mushrooms, jamon and garlic shoots quite blew me away. But best of all was rabo de toro expertly stripped off the bone at the table, sticky strands of oxtail mixed in with beautifully made chips and plonked in front of you, a dish of rich, robust comfort. I ate, I sipped an exceptional Ribera del Duoro, I sighed with joy.
The only way to perfect such a meal would be to finish it with a portion of chocolate mousse seemingly the size of my head and a big glass of Pedro Ximénez. And would you believe it? That’s exactly what happened.
I picked Bodega Los Tintos, a little joint tucked away just behind El Corte Inglés, based on a tip-off on Threads having originally intended to go to Casa Mol, a more modish place on the corner. And I loved it for lunch – a solid, unshowy spot with a great list of wines by the glass and the tapa of your choice with every glass. They do Seis E Seis, one of my favourite Spanish reds, and to have a glass with a huge piece of fried morcilla, served on a piece of bread (as if that made it any less over the top) at no extra charge was one of my favourite moments of my 2024 trip.
The stuff you had to pay for was also good, if more of a mixed bag. Strands of roasted peppers, ever so slightly blackened, with plenty of ventresca on top, was a delight, and I quite enjoyed the torreznos, little cubes of pork belly, even if they made me miss the chicharrones I always had in Malaga. But Bodegas Los Tintos’ berenjanas con miel are meant to be their best thing, and I wasn’t convinced: aubergine fried in thin discs rather than matchsticks was okay, but the oil didn’t feel the freshest. I ordered another glass of wine and consoled myself with some solimillo topped with blue cheese, also technically free. That’s the joy of small plates – if you don’t like one, another is always on the way.
Bodega Los Tintos Calle San Isidro, 24, 18005 Granada
12. Casa de Vinos La Brujidera
La Brujidera (it means something to do with witches, apparently) is a little spot round the back of Plaza Nueva and it has competition on its doorstep in the form of one of Granada’s many branches of Los Manueles. But I always favour the underdog, so on my 2024 visit I was waiting outside La Brujidera as it opened at half twelve, ready to grab one of its four tables that sit outside on that little sloping alleyway. I’d walked past it the night before, its lights glowing, I’d seen people eating, drinking and gesticulating and I’d felt that pang you sometimes get on holiday when you notice a spot and wish you’d spent your evening there. And I’m delighted to report that it was just as agreeable a place to stop for lunch in the sun.
The wine was beautiful – plenty available, again, by the glass – and if the menu leaned more towards buying well than cooking well the produce was good enough that I really didn’t care about that. Blue goat’s cheese provided a superbly intense hit of salt, the chorizo was very nice indeed and another goat’s cheese dish they brought out (which we didn’t order, though we weren’t complaining) teamed very agricultural goats cheese with the double whammy of sweet onion jam and crispy fried onion. A new one on me, but a decidedly good idea.
I’m pretty sure La Botillería used to be more a bar than a restaurant, tucked away in the border between the centre and the Realejo, but it seems to have pivoted more to sit down meals, and a very meat-heavy menu, since I went to Granada last, possibly because it has competition in the form of the extremely hip Rosario Varela next door.
I booked lunch at La Botillería on the very last day of my 2024 trip, hoping to sit outside and drink wine and eat racion after racion until I was full and happy. At that point I was going to go back to the hotel and snooze on the roof terrace until it was time for the taxi to the airport. And literally none of that happened: they stuck us inside, at possibly the room’s worst table, next to an unlovely pillar. At half-one, the place was empty. We ordered a handful of small plates to get started, thinking we’d order mains later, and when they were finished the server asked us if we wanted coffee or dessert. I felt so fat shamed that we shame-facedly asked for the bill and left: it was all distinctly anticlimactic.
So why is it in this guide at all, you might ask? Well, just for one reason: the salt cod tortilla pictured above is one of the best things I’ve ever eaten and easily my favourite tortilla of all time.
The tired tortilla you often get is cooked through, so all of it is either rubbery egg or waxy potato: nobody likes that. The next best thing, the kind you might get at somewhere like Oxford’s Arbequina is loose and liquid in the middle, a huge improvement on a solid brick but still not always what you want. But the talent to cook something like La Botillería’s, solid outside, gooey but not oozing in the middle, is quite something. Then pack it with phenomenal amounts of flaked bacalao, and you have one of the best things I ate on my holiday, or indeed all year.
So if you find yourself going to Granada, book a table inside of an evening at La Botillería, specifically ask not to be next to a pillar, make them take their time, and don’t let them fat shame you. And have the salt cod tortilla: as I know from personal experience, it’s reason enough to go to La Botillería all by itself.
I was so looking forward to Rincón de Rodri when I visited Granada in 2024, and when I turned up there at eight fifteen, ready to take my place at the front of the queue and grab a table by the bar I was quite nonplussed to find it closed for renovations. I had to find somewhere for dinner without reservations, and fast – but where? Then I remembered Puesto 43, a marisqueria just round the corner which had, until recently, been in the Michelin guide. Would it do as an alternative?
Well, it sort of did. It’s a nice, neutral space with white furniture and tiled walls – there are also tables in the square outside – and it has an extensive menu of fried and grilled fish, seafood and what have you. And I enjoyed a lot of what I had. Calamari maybe had a little too much bounce to be truly fresh, but the coating on it simply couldn’t be faulted. Huge steaks of hake, fried bone-in and served simply with aioli, were decent, though in both cases I would have liked a slice of lemon to zhuzh things up. And the red tuna, beautifully cooked and sprinkled with salt crystals, was as good as any I’ve had in Granada.
But there were still a few misfires. Tomatoes aliñado might have had the best tomatoes in the world but they needed more salt and a hefty glug of a really good olive oil to bring them to life. And our server – another of the genre Granada specialises in who tell you you’ve ordered the wrong thing – persuaded us to swap fried, battered bacalao for a different dish, salt cod on mash with garlic and chillies. It was a pleasant dish (although hard to photograph without making it look like someone had already thrown it up), but when the fried bacalao turned up at the next table I wanted to shake the guy. None the less, as a second choice Puesto 43 was first rate.
Puesto 43 Plaza de Gracia, 3, 18002 Granada
15. Capitán Amargo
Back in 2019 I went to Granada’s only craft beer bar, a place on Calle Molinos in the heart of the Realejo called Colagallo. I liked it very much – I had great beers, and the owner was very friendly – but I wondered how it would fare in a city where beer is cheap and always comes with free food. The place changed its name to Capitán Amargo and returning four years later I was really delighted to see it thriving. And in 2024 it became a regular pre-dinner spot: I got very attached to sitting outside, all the life and noise of Calle Molinos around me, as I drank beautiful beer in the epicentre of the Realejo.
Capitán Amargo has a selection which puts anywhere in Reading to shame – something like thirty lines, with an impressive range from across both Spain and Europe, along with a reasonably priced can fridge if you really can’t find anything you fancy on the wall (the likes of Thornbridge and our very own Siren Craft represent U.K. breweries)
I tried so much that I loved, especially on the most recent visit, from Spanish breweries I’d heard of – like Basqueland Brewing or Malaga’s Attik Brewing – along with a plethora of breweries I knew literally nothing about. So I enjoyed a magnificent dank DIPA from Valencia’s Sáez & Son and an immensely likeable hazy pale from SOMA, who are from Girona: the latter was probably my beer of the trip. But it didn’t stop there, with other beers by Castello Beer Factory (also near Valencia) and Pamplona’s Naparbier also represented.
Best of all, the owner was bright and personable and clearly delighted to see some beer enthusiasts in a city where Alhambra, much as I love it, is ever-present. Not to say that Capitán Amargo doesn’t serve Alhambra, because it does, but it’s a real treasure trove for beer lovers and a great advert for Spanish craft beer. When I visited in 2023 I was a little sniffy about the fact that the tapa on offer was a bowl of Bugles – proper dirty crisps – but, like everything else about the place, I got very attached to that.
There are only really two places to enjoy churros in Granada. One is Cafe Futbol, the Granadino institution which celebrated its hundredth birthday last year. The other is, well, anywhere else that isn’t as good as Cafe Futbol. The inside is that wonderful mixture of dated and timeless that institutions always nail, but on a sunny day you need to be in the plaza outside, admittedly under cover, attacking a cafe con leche and waiting for your churros to arrive.
The latter are the reason to come here and are as good as any I can recall bronzed, piping hot and a true indulgence. Why they’ve never caught on in the UK I will truly never know, but it makes them a holiday treat: it’s only what’s left of my willpower that stopped me having them every day. Round it off with a freshly squeezed zumo de naranja to give you possibly your main vitamin C of the day and you’re ready to explore the city – caffeinated, caloried and fully prepared for whatever it might throw at you. It was round the corner from my hotel in 2024, so I was there often.
There are plenty of ice cream places dotted around Granada, all boasting decent credentials, but Los Italianos on Gran Via is the one they queue for. It’s only open during the summer months, it’s ludicrously cheap – a large ice cream will set you back less than three quid – and it’s truly brilliant at what it does.
The queue is at the front off Gran Via, to pick up and go, but you can also get in round the back where they have a few tables for table service and often a shorter queue if you just want to take away. I love their two-stage method, beautifully old school, where you ask for a size from your cashier and get a token reflecting a small, medium or large. You then hand it to the person wielding the scoop, name your flavours and off you go.
They are good at all the classics, but their off piste options are just as special. So you can have chocolate or gianduja and they will be glossy and rich, and will make you very happy indeed. But if you want something with a little more cut-through on a hot day, their frozen yoghurt is outstandingly tangy and they do a pineapple flavoured ice cream which was smooth, sweet and utterly enchanting. It’s the best ice cream I’ve had in Spain and, appropriately enough given the name, it’s up there with the best I’ve had in Italy.
It can’t all be churros and ice cream, you know. Well, actually it can, and that would be just fine and dandy. But I chanced upon Odeimos on a walk back from the Albaicin in 2024 and its doughnuts looked so magnificent that I picked up a couple on a whim. It was absolutely worth it – mine had a sort of salted caramel cheesecake filling which was somehow fluffy and indecently good. My favourite doughnuts in Reading are from Pipp & Co (which used to be called Pippin Doughnuts), but the most recent ones I’ve had suggest they’ve rather lost their way: Odeimos’ knocked spots off them.
Odeimos Doughnut Shop Calle San Jerónimo, 10, 18001 Granada
19. Despiertoo
Despiertoo – it means “I woke up”, it seems – was my coffee shop of choice on my 2023 trip. It’s a nondescript spot between Plaza de Bib-Rambla and Plaza de le Trinidad, and the inside is very tasteful. They serve an excellent flat white (and, I’m told, an equally good iced latte), and even in 2024 a latte will only set you back a mind-boggling two Euros. It was, I must say, far busier in 2024 than it was the previous year, so its fame must be beginning to spread.
I should also add that Despiertoo roast on site and that if you like coffee at all and make it at home, I highly recommend taking some back to Blighty with you. I had some earlier in the year from my friend Mike who lives out there and it was easily the best coffee, from anywhere, that I’ve drunk at home all year, equally special in an Aeropress or a V60. I have three bags in the cupboard at the time of writing, which will make my mornings working from home infinitely more bearable.
La Finca is the coffee place I remember from my previous visit, but I don’t remember it being this good. I don’t remember it being in this spot either, so I wonder if it has moved since 2019. Either way its spot now, just off from the cathedral, is a superb one and it gets very busy as a result, with the inside routinely rammed and the handful of seats outside at a premium. That’s because they offer some of the best people watching in Granada, in my opinion. We turned up on a Saturday morning in 2023 just as a couple vacated the bench outside, so we swooped, ordered some lattes and enjoyed all the comings and goings, the tourists and the wanderers. Why would anyone give up such a perfect spot, we thought, so of course we ordered another coffee.
And their coffee was cracking, easily up there with the best I’ve had in Granada and definitely the equal of Despiertoo. They too sell beans, and I wish with hindsight that I’d picked some up. But Finca also excels in baked goods – the cinnamon buns and chocolate buns were the most attractive I saw in the city, and I might have had one too if it wasn’t for a double chocolate cookie, crumbly where it should have been crumbly, soft where it should have been soft and shot through with thick plates of chocolate. It was a magnificent way to while away an hour in Granada, a city crammed to bursting with world-beating ways to do so.
Noat was in my 2019 guide, but in 2023 it had moved house and I didn’t get to it, so I reluctantly took it out. Returning in 2024 I was determined to go there, and once I had I ended up going there nearly every morning. It’s on Plaza de los Girones, which despite its name is a lovely tree-lined street heading up to the Realejo, and it has three shady tables outside which is where you want to sit, with a ridiculously affordable latte, a wonderful view for people watching and time to contemplate. I did that a lot in September 2024, and I loved every minute.
Service is a little on the grumpy side, and based on my visits the clientele includes a high percentage of Americans. I’m not saying those two things are necessarily connected, by the way. But it’s possible.
Noat Coffee Plaza de los Girones, 4, Puerta 3, 18009 Granada
22. Perspectives
Perspectives is a little cafe right at the end of Calle Elvira, near the striking Puerta de Elvira on the edge of the Albaicin. I went a couple of times on my most recent trip, and both times my latte was beautifully made and excellent value. They sell beans on site too, and will tell you which ones your coffee has been made with.
On my first visit in 2024 I initially found the staff a tad sullen, the place was playing The Smiths – Granada maybe hasn’t got the memo about Morrissey, yet – and I wasn’t sure whether it was the café for me. But I think it must just have been my false (pardon the pun) perspective because when it came to settling up the staff were lovely and engaging and I resolved there and then to visit again.
And when I did they were playing cheerier music, there was a nice hubbub from the occupied tables and this seemed like a lovely little piece of sunshine in a part of the city I don’t always get to. They asked me to leave a Google review, but they’ll have to settle for this.
It’s also worth heading round the corner to Al Sur De Granada which sells local produce, gorgeous looking chocolate and natural wines. As I picked up some single variety extra virgin olive oil to take home, I noticed a very appealing menu on the wall. I’ll just have to come back to Granada. Again.
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Before we get started on the countdown of Reading’s 10 best dishes – apologies for the delayed start time, by the way, and for keeping you all hanging – I just wanted to say thank you for the fantastic response I’ve had to the series of posts to celebrate 10 years of the blog. I’ve had terrific feedback, some lovely mails, people contacting me to say they’ve made a pilgrimage to check out one of my top 50 dishes, all of the engagement has been marvellous, and very touching. One Reading restaurant who will remain nameless even dropped me a birthday cake, would you believe.
I now plan to celebrate the birthday properly – for the last time, I promise – at the forthcoming ER readers’ lunch and then I’m off on holiday. So you may see a couple of weeks without a post, but I’ll be back before the month is out with new reviews from strange and exotic new places (there’s this town called Swindon, you know – have you heard of it?). Anyway, without further ado here is the top 10. I hope you enjoy it, I hope it contains at least a couple of surprises and I hope it helps you build up a list of places to visit, or reinforces how much you like your own favourites.
10. Pistachio adana, La’De Kitchen
My recent visit to La’De Kitchen established two things in my mind. One was that it wasn’t quite the restaurant it used to be, which is a bit of a pity. But the other was that it still boasted, in the form of its mythical pistachio adana, a dish that on its day could beat almost any other in Reading. It’s a glorious lamb kofte with bulghur wheat and salad, and what used to be a crust of crumbled pistachio has morphed, for the better, into something like a rich, bright green pistachio pesto which renders the very good sublime. Worth the price of admission alone, and worth a journey out to the suburban splendour of Woodley Precinct.
9. Dak-gang jeong, Soju
I raved about this dish back in 2018 when I visited Soju (or The Soju, or whatever it’s called) and I put it on my end of year list. And then, in truth, I forgot about Soju completely: I always had a list of restaurants to review and when I revisited anywhere it was usually one of my cast iron favourites. Somehow, that was never Soju.
Yet when I was putting my long list together, this dish nagged at the corners of my mind. If it was as good as I recalled, it belonged in the 50. But was it as good as I recalled? So Zoë and I went back to Soju about three weeks ago. The restaurant is in the middle of expanding to the room next door and feels a bit like eating in a big empty room rather than eating in a restaurant.
But this list is about dishes, not restaurants, and the Korean fried chicken at Soju isn’t as good as I remember. It’s miles better. It succeeds where Market Place newcomer The Bap fails, because it’s not just bland sweetness but it has the force and complexity of well deployed gochujang. It sings with the stuff, and in truth it’s every bit as good as the sadly departed Gurt Wings’ JFC. I wish I’d had a portion to myself, which isn’t a mistake I’ll make again. With all due respect to my future mother-in-law, a fully paid up member of BTS’s Army (it’s all about Jimin, apparently), this is one of the best things to come out of Korea.
8. Gobi manchurian, Clay’s Kitchen
One to add to the long long list of “Clay’s will ruin other versions of this dish for you”, their gobi Manchurian takes an Indo-Chinese staple and perfects it. The signs were always there that Clay’s was capable of this – back when they did a similar dish with baby corn it converted me, a lifelong baby corn hater, into an ardent fan. But really, this dish is at or near the pinnacle. Just enough sweetness, just enough heat, just enough crunch, just enough firmness in the cauli.
If get all four of those things absolutely on the money at the same time you’ve created one of the best starters of all time. Simple, you might think: and yet only Clay’s manages all four. Gobi Manchurian elsewhere is either sweet or soggy or off-centre in some other way. If you’ve had it at Clay’s, you’ll notice that when you eat it anywhere else. But then if you have it at Clay’s, you might not bother ordering it anywhere else.
7. Ajika chicken wrap, Geo Café
I have been saying for years that Georgian food is the great undiscovered wonder of world cuisine, and it may be that I pop my clogs before that ever comes to pass. But, possibly uniquely in the U.K., Reading folk already know that because of the tireless efforts of Geo Café.
From street food to pub pop-ups to that residency on the Island, Reading’s weirdest venue, to respectability on Prospect Street, they have always been perfect ambassadors for the food of their home. If you’ve ever been to a supper club and heard owner Keti waxing lyrical about qvevris, wine and walnuts you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
But even if you haven’t, even if you’ve never nibbled a khachapuri stuffed with gooey, stretchy cheese (or, like me, reheated it in the oven next day and – sacrilege alert – served it with Branston) you may well have had arguably their most revered dish, the ajika chicken wrap. Always chicken thigh, always smothered in ajika, Georgia’s hot, pungent, slightly acrid spiced sauce that expands your palate and horizons with every bite. Always mollified with the claggy comfort of bazhe, Georgia’s walnut sauce, the two components yin and yang in one of the best sandwiches you’ll ever eat.
If you’ve had one, you don’t forget it. If you’ve had one, you’ll have another. And if Geo Café ever pop up with their trailer at a street food event, order this dish there: the chicken coming off a hot grill, charred and indecently good, elevates a great dish still higher.
6. Boneless baby chicken, Bakery House
In the pantheon of Reading dishes, Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken has occupied a rarefied position for many, many years. I have been known to say that it’s the single best plate of food in Reading, the one dish that has everything you need without having to get sides or extras or whistles and bells. Since I revisited and re-reviewed Bakery House not long ago, to check in on it following its acquisition by the owners of House Of Flavours, I have ordered this dish a few times to check whether it is still as it was.
Actually, I did that the first time I went back. After that, I realised it was still exceptional and I ordered it every subsequent time because I loved it. It’s beautifully spiced, beautifully grilled, almost completely boneless and a joy in every single way. Sprinkled with just-squeezed lemon juice and stabbed with a fork, topped with spicy rice or a little of their impeccably dressed salad, dabbed with garlic or chilli sauce it is one of my favourite things to eat in Reading, or anywhere. Full stop, the end.
This piece is going up on Friday, and I had it on Tuesday. What more can I tell you? If Reading’s dishes were listed like buildings, this would be Grade 1.
5. Xinjiang shredded chicken, Kungfu Kitchen
I know what you’re thinking, another chicken dish? This is the last one, I promise. But it couldn’t be more different from the others in this top 10, and I have a particular passion for it which verges on the evangelical. It is, in its way, quite unlike anything else in the top 50.
This dish is cold, shredded chicken, like roast chicken in texture. And all it contains, apart from that, are chillis, cucumber, coriander, sesame seeds and a bright red spiced oil that clings to every nook and cranny of every component. This is a perfect introduction to the dark side of Jo’s menu, to Szechuan pepper that kills you with kindness, that turns up the heat but numbs the tongue so you carry on, as if compelled, until you’ve eaten it all. This dish is a brute. It will hurt you, ever so nicely, and you’ll find you like it. If I say more I’ll turn into one of those tedious food writers who talks about food as if they want to fuck the stuff, so I’ll leave it there.
Zoë can’t eat this dish, she says it triggers her asthma. All the more for me.
4. Deep fried fish in spicy hot pot, Kungfu Kitchen
Speaking of my fiancée, this is her favourite dish in Reading, and if you eat it after the Xinjiang chicken you’ll think it’s the blandest thing going. It’s not, but it’s an equally clever and fascinating set of Szechuan flavours, the deck shuffled and dealt ever so slightly differently. I don’t know how Kungfu Kitchen cooks fish as perfectly as this. It is crisp and craggy outside but inside it is only, only just cooked, soft and pearlescent.
It’s also hotter than the sun, and stays that way for a while when it reaches your table. If you order it along with the lamb with cumin (number 11, if you remember) the trick is to eat the lamb before it cooks through and then descend on the fish when it won’t burn your mouth. But if you have the restraint for that you’re a better human being than me. You’re probably a better human being than me anyway.
This has the same kind of heat as the shredded chicken, but it builds differently and reaches a calmer crescendo. It is, however, no less fascinating. When Zoë was discharged from hospital with Covid, we had a delivery of this the following night. When she devoured the lot, I knew we would be okay.
3. Thhicheko aalu, Kamal’s Kitchen
“You’re giving the number 3 spot to a load of old spuds?” said Zoë when I told her my final rankings. She said that firmly tongue in cheek, but besides she knows how much I love this dish. It was brand new on Kamal’s menu when he opened his new place and, for me at least, it was love at first taste.
These are pressed potatoes, and I’m not entirely sure what that means or how he does it, but they are flattened discs of potato with the perfect crunch and crust outside, the fluffy core within. You can have all the triple-cooked chips in the world, I really don’t care, but just leave me these. They come coated in a spice mix which actually has more in common with KFK’s Szechuan cuisine than you might expect, with that same medicinal numbing effect. I’ve never had a dish like this before, I probably never will again, but every day that Reading residents can walk into a restaurant and eat this is a day to cherish.
2. Chilli beef nachos, The Lyndhurst
At the start of this process, I said that only dishes currently available in Reading were eligible for the list. I said that was harsh on the Lyndhurst, because they change their menu so frequently. And since I started publishing this list, with two dishes by the Lyndhurst on it (beetroot croquettes and chocolate mousse, in case you’ve forgotten), the pub has rewarded me by announcing that they both come off the menu tomorrow to be replaced by something new. You couldn’t make it up.
I am confident they won’t do the same with this dish, because it has been on their menu since day one. It has survived every iteration of the menu, and in fact I had it when I first tried the Lyndhurst’s food, when I visited their new incarnation four years ago to review it. I loved it at the time, although I had some moaning quibble about it being messy. I was talking out of my arse: it’s a stone cold classic and I have enjoyed it many, many times.
I can’t remember if the Lyndhurst makes its own tortilla chips, but it feels like they do. If they don’t, they buy them in superbly. The chilli though, slow-cooked so every strand of beef is in high definition, is all their own work. So is the guacamole they adorn it with. I’ve always said this dish tells you everything you need to know about the Lyndhurst – they make this incredible chilli but just for one dish. They don’t stick it on top of a burger, or lob it on a baked potato, or serve it in its own right just with rice. They make an incredible chilli, day in day out, solely for this dish on the starters section of their menu.
And it’s too good to merely be a starter. You can have it as a starter, or you can have it to share, or you can have it as your main with a pint after a hard day at work, or you could just order it for a group of you because you’re down the pub, and still alive, and it’s a Wednesday. It still costs less than a tenner, which in itself is a bit ludicrous, and it has brought me an awful lot of happiness over four years. When they redecorated the pub recently they missed a trick not putting up a blue plaque.
1. Bhuna venison, Clay’s Kitchen
I don’t know what I can say about this dish that hasn’t already been said, but here goes nothing: when Clay’s launched in the summer of 2018 this was the dish that raised eyebrows, possibly the clearest statement of intent that, when it came to eating Indian food in Reading, you weren’t in Bangladesh any more. A bhuna, but with… venison?
Clay’s social media, in the build up to their opening, explained that a bhuna was cooked in its juices and so was a drier, thicker curry than the gloopy soup people were used to in Reading, with its heavy reliance on tinned tomatoes and generic garam masala. But how could that work, a dry curry with venison which, for all its many merits, can be on the dry side itself? Well, be that as it may I remember visiting, eating it and thinking “no, they really know what they’re doing”.
And they really, really do. This dish, which has never come off their menu, which was the first name on their team sheet when they put together their Clay’s At Home menu, has become emblematic of Clay’s and its approach to food. Take something your customers think they know, and make it better. Use that stepping stone to introduce your diners to things further and further away from the known until, like climbing a mountain, you can look back and see where you’ve been. Such a beautiful vista! And yet the first step in that magnificent voyage was this dish.
And it really is stunning. I had it recently and it has stood the test of time like few other things (certainly better than I have). It is still rich, still complex, still tender, still poised and balanced. It is simply a class act, and ironically probably the dish – more even so than biryani – people most associate with Clay’s. One of my oldest friends would probably nominate this as his death row dish. His teenage son loves it as much as he does. I like the idea that they’ve bonded through Clay’s beautiful food.
Being lucky enough to know Nandana a little bit, the irony is that I imagine she could have mixed feelings about this dish topping the list. Because as a constant innovator, she is always on to the next thing, the next dish, the next combination of flavours. The idea that the first dish she ever served is the one she is remembered for might frustrate her, like a band with a new album out that is expected to play the hits.
I do have sympathy with that, but sometimes you need to know when you’ve created a classic. The world doesn’t have another song like Yesterday. Reading doesn’t have another dish quite like this venison bhuna.
The decisions get really difficult from this point on. But picking the vegetable samosas from Cake & Cream, a little bakery just off the Wokingham Road, has never been a difficult decision. Their assorted pakora, sold by weight, are marvellous but the samosas, for me, are next level. They’re old school triangles rather than Punjabi pyramids, but they’re outstanding and, as far as I can tell, made and cooked to order.
You wait there in that bare front room, watching people come and go collecting their preorders and their cakes, knowing that soon it will be your turn and you’ll get a plastic bag full of piping hot samosas to carry off home. They’ll give you one or two little plastic tubs of hot sauce, although the masala filling is flecked with chilli and has plenty of heat of its own. Apart from that it’s just the magical three Ps, potatoes, peas and pastry. They have a minimum order for card purchases, but if you stock up and throw some pakora in it’s easy to get over the threshold. I buy some to treat myself after a trip to my dentist, just up the road, and I get envious looks on the number 17 home.
19. Fried chicken, ThaiGrr!
I love fried chicken in all its forms, which is by now a matter of public record. But in a town with plenty of options ThaiGrr’s fried chicken really does stand out. It’s jointed chicken on the bone, you get plenty of it in a portion and the brittle crispiness of the skin, itself scattered with fried garlic, is one of those mouthfuls that makes the world seem, if just for a minute, like a blessed and blissful place. I first discovered it as a delivery and I thought it was pretty good, but you have to have it in the restaurant where it’s out of the fryer, on to the plate and in front of you in no time. I’ve only ever been to ThaiGrr! without ordering it once. I regretted it almost immediately.
18. Beetroot and peanut croquette, The Lyndhurst
This used to be on the Lyndhurst’s specials menu and then it got promoted, so now it’s a regular fixture and, for me, it’s the pick of their current starters. You get two huge, pillowy croquettes, breadcrumbs fried to a crisp, with a really clever mixture of deep, earthy beetroot and peanut along with a soupçon of heat. Throw in a trio of accompaniments – a bright herb chutney, a carrot chutney and a deep sauce with tamarind like high octane HP – and you have a gorgeous plate of food which I’ve ordered an awful lot over the past few months. And, because the Lyndhurst never wastes their time or yours, even the salad is perfectly sized, perfectly dressed and eminently worth eating.
17. Pork belly, Clay’s Kitchen
Who had number 17 in the sweepstake as the first time Clay’s made an appearance in this list? If that’s you, pat yourself on the back. Their pork belly was a new addition to the menu when Clay’s opened at London Street, post-Covid, and it’s been a mainstay ever since. It’s sumptuous stuff – few restaurants can cook pork belly half as well as Clay’s do – and the flavour of it is truly off the scale. I’ve always adored any dish with jaggery in it, and here it gives a sticky-sweetness that marries beautifully with belly pork.
Underneath it all, there’s the hum of ginger, knocking the edge off and lending the heat that makes it a three-dimensional, fully realised dish. One day I’ll have a plate of this to myself, but short of going to dinner with a vegetarian I’m not sure how that will ever happen. My serving suggestion is to have it with a dry white wine to cut through all that indulgence. Actually, I’m just saying that to sound like I know what I’m talking about: my real serving suggestion is to order two portions.
16. Challoumi wrap, Purée
Forget “Sam’s Wraps”, if you’re in the centre of Reading at lunchtime this is the wrap you want, from Sam Adaci’s big green food truck just outside the Boots on Broad Street. Everything he does is good – including his magnificent falafel made and fried to order – but my heart belongs to his Challoumi wrap. Loads and loads of superbly spiced chicken, cooked and finished on the hot plate, just enough heat and charred edges, is laden into a sizeable flatbread with salad, pickles, garlic sauce, chilli sauce and halloumi.
It’s hard to eat tidily – it’s more a tube than a wrap in fairness, without a closed end – but you’ll find yourself scavenging for every last mouthful. I sincerely hope he raises his prices shortly after receiving this accolade (I think he reads the blog: Sam, sort it out) but as this went to press you can get one of these for six pounds fifty. If you’ve never tried one and this even remotely sounds like your kind of thing – and unless you’re vegetarian or vegan I’m not sure how it couldn’t be – you owe it to yourself to make a pilgrimage to Broad Street to check it out. Tell him I sent you: he’s the unfailingly cheerful chap up at the hot plate, working like an absolute Trojan.
15. Chicken chilli, Kamal’s Kitchen
I first encountered Kamal’s chicken chilli when I ate at Namaste Kitchen, and it was the beginning of a long love affair. It was hot – properly hot, not just what my friend James calls “white people hot” – with an almost-fruity acrid sauce like nothing else I’d had: Kamal later told me that the secret ingredient was Heinz tomato ketchup.
I missed it for a long time, but when Kamal opened his eponymous restaurant on Caversham Road I was delighted to find that, if anything, he’d managed to improve it further over the intervening years. It really is an intoxicating, addictive dish and it still has enough bite, in more ways than one, to hold your attention and simply refuse to let go. When I held a readers’ lunch at Kamal’s Kitchen, last summer, it was the star of the show. Afterwards we went to Phantom for post lunch beers and I lost count of the number of people who said “fuck me, that chicken chilli”, or words to that effect.
14. Mini raj kachori, Clay’s Kitchen
One thing I really love about Clay’s is its determination to make the best version of any dish they decide to cook. You see it across their menu, and it makes me a tedious restaurant reviewer when I visit other Indian restaurants in town. You could probably make a very good drinking game from ER reviews, and I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody already has. Lengthy preamble that has nothing to do with the restaurant: two fingers. Breaks the 2000 word mark again: two fingers. Moan about Reading Borough Council, à propos of nothing: two fingers. Say “it’s okay, but Clay’s does it better”: down your drink in one.
So yes, this dish, the mini raj kachori from Clay’s small plates menu, is phenomenal. And yes, it’s a superior reimagining of the kind of dishes you can get at Bhel Puri House, or Shree Krishna Vada Pav. It’s a crisp pastry shell, like a hollow bubbled crisp, crammed with a spicy mixture of potato and pulses, cool with mint, vibrant with heat, drizzled with tamarind and yoghurt and sev. But where Bhel Puri House’s, or SKVP’s equivalent are prosaic but fun, this is a symphonic, epic dish without a gastronomic hair out of place. Everything on Clay’s small plates menu is miraculous in its own way, but this one’s my favourite.
13. Sweet and sour aubergine, Kungfu Kitchen
Who had number 13 in the sweepstake as the first time Kungfu Kitchen made an appearance in this list? Nothing like a running joke, right? But I imagine many ardent fans of KFK will be outraged that this dish doesn’t rank even higher. It is an absolute cracker, a dish which completely transcends its description. I’ve not yet met anybody who dislikes aubergine that has tried this dish and not made an exception for it.
Ditto for people who aren’t fond of sweet and sour, because KFK’s dish is genuinely sweet and sour rather than most sweet and sour dishes, which are actually sweet and even sweeter. So this is more complex and nuanced than that – it is absolutely beautiful and I think pretty much everybody who has ever tried it at KFK has it on their shortlist of must-order items.
I have photos of the vast majority of the dishes in my top 50, but this one eludes me. That’s because when it’s plonked down on the table I never, ever have time to get my phone out before someone at my table has grabbed a spoon and started dishing it up. Who can blame them?
12. Cut mirchi chat, Clay’s Kitchen
We’re now at the point in the list where I could write great gushing love letters to every single dish, and I’m trying to rein myself in. But really, this dish is one of my favourite things you can eat in Reading and even sitting down to write about it makes me realise it’s far too long since I ate it last – not since the 9th of June, the day of that rave review in the Guardian, in fact. It’s hard to describe, harder still to do justice to. It’s a chilli, wrapped in a glorious crunchy coating (including, at a guess, gram flour), fried and cut into slices.
Nowadays it comes to the table all fancy, covered in finely diced tomato, pomegranate seeds and crispy sev, but I remember this dish when it made its debut at London Street when it was less glamorous but no less delicious. It never needed the makeover, although it looks beautiful now, because it was a knockout from day one. Like many of Clay’s starters and small plates, it’s absolutely perfect for sharing which just reinforces the kind of place Clay’s is, where meals are all about shared experiences. I just love that. The menu describes it as “a childhood favourite snack”: and to think I had to make do with Nice N’ Spicy Nik Naks.
11. Lamb with cumin, Kungfu Kitchen
I had this dish on my second ever visit to Kungfu Kitchen, and I could have told you then that it would be one of Reading’s 50 best dishes four years later, barring any disasters like Kungfu Kitchen burning to the ground. I found it very difficult to imagine I’d ever live in a town where there were fifty dishes better than this, and if I did I imagine Kungfu Kitchen would still be behind more than one or two of them.
It’s deceptively simple – ribbons of almost-pink lamb, fried as little as they can get away with, with onions, chillies, coriander and sesame seeds. But the devil is in the detail, in that sauce, reduced and clinging to every crinkle of the meat, rich with cumin, deep, delicious and unlike anything else.
Well: I say that, but I remember trying a similar dish, a couple of years previously, at Memory Of Sichuan. Memory Of Sichuan is not a bad restaurant at all, but comparing their dish to KFK’s is like comparing a Rolf Harris painting to a Turner. One last thing – this is a dish to attack on arrival, to wolf down. You want that lamb almost still bleating, before it continues to cook through and those fibres toughen. Think of it as a licence for gluttony.
I expected something from House Of Flavours to make it onto my list, but I always thought it would be the chicken pistachio, the dish everybody talks about. And then I went back to House Of Flavours earlier this year and although I tried the chicken pistachio (and it was very nice, too) this dish is the one that really caught my attention.
From the Indo-Chinese section of their menu, the Chicken Buhari – better known as Chicken 65 – isn’t lumps of meat bobbing in sauce but a richer, thicker, stickier affair, chicken coated in yoghurt and spices and fried into spiced, moreish wonder. I have a sneaking feeling it doesn’t really work as a main course, and it’s too big to eat as a starter, so your best bet is to persuade somebody to add it to your order and share. Although the downside to that, of course, is that you have to share it.
29. Chocolate mousse, The Lyndhurst
I am a huge fan of chocolate mousse, and although it turns up regularly on the continent – I could have had it every night in Paris back in March – it seems to be harder to spot on menus here in the U.K. I’ve had lovely versions further afield, in Bristol or in Newbury, but until recently you had to go to Côte to get your fix here in Reading.
Gladly, the Lyndhurst must have somehow heard my unspoken prayer, because they recently added one to their dessert menu and now you don’t need to leave town in order to eat a superlative example. You get a phenomenal, generous dollop of the stuff and although the presentation varies – sometimes it’s with red fruits and coulis, sometimes it’s not – the thing that doesn’t change is that it comes sandwiched between two slabs of outrageously good peanut and sesame brittle, which is delicious and not so brittle that it endangered my composite fillings.
28. Jerk chicken, rice and peas, Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine
If you go to Blue Collar on a Friday – the original market, not the permanent site, there’s only one time when you won’t see a massive queue outside Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine, and that’s when they haven’t got round to serving yet. After that, you need to be prepared to wait a while. Some of that is due to the speed with which they do things, because nobody rushes those guys. But a lot of it, too, is down to demand. And it’s justified: people queue across Market Place for a reason.
The pick of their menu, for me, is the jerk chicken – a lot of it, hacked into chunks, tanned on the outside and tender underneath, smothered with hot sauce and served up on a bed of rice and peas, with coleslaw and iceberg lettuce so you can feel slightly more virtuous. It really is so, so good, and I miss the times when I was a gentleman of leisure because I used to eat it far more often. These days, when you can be waiting half an hour to get to the front of that line, not so much.
27. Chapli kebab, Kobeeda Palace
A bit like the incident at House Of Flavours that started this section of my list, Kobeda Palace’s appearance in my top 50 is a bit of a curveball. I’ve been enthusing about their karahi chicken ever since I first visited the place back in 2016 and I fully expected it to grace the higher echelons of this hit parade. So I went back to Kobeda Palace last month with Zoë, for research purposes you understand, ordered half a kilo of the stuff and… well, I liked it but I didn’t love it. Not to worry, because I had ample dishes on my longlist that could have squeaked into this rundown and it would have been none the poorer for it.
But what I didn’t reckon on was how much I’d love the dish I ordered that night just to make up the numbers, Kobeda Palace’s chapli kebab. A flattened disc of lamb, shot through with fiery chillies, all crispy-edged and harbouring a glowering heat, it was just crying out to be wrapped in naan and dipped into one of the three chutneys they brought to the table. Smash burgers may be all the rage, but it turns out Kobeda Palace has well and truly been there, done that and got the t-shirt. If I hadn’t liked it so much, I might have had the presence of mind to take a photo.
26. Thalassery mutton curry, Pappadams
I enjoyed this dish so much I ordered it two times in quick succession, less than a fortnight apart. Pappadams’ mutton curry is a proper bear hug of a thing, with slow-cooked, rugged chunks of tender mutton in a thick, sticky sauce that is more warming comfort than aggressive heat for heat’s sake. This is one to bear in mind as we move into autumn and the air has that thinner, sharper feel to it, and eating a bowl of this would be a great way to cancel out the gloom of the shortening days.
25. The Regular, Smash N Grab
I love Smash N Grab. I love what they do, and I love the way they pluckily carry on from their little hut on Cemetery Junction, dealing with their belligerent neighbour and all the challenges their location brings. But they don’t get on my list because I find myself rooting for the underdog, having read through their social media. They get on my list because their burgers are the absolute business.
A lot of people complain about the modern trend of burgers to build up rather than out, a thick, Scooby Doo-style sandwich with more tiers than a wedding cake, impossible to eat. Smash N Grab has clearly thought about that because although their burgers are immense they are wide rather than tall, built around their excellent smashed burgers. Although they have many variations on the theme their original and best makes my list: The Regular, two of those patties, ribbons of sweet, caramelised onion, gooey American cheese and their own burger sauce. I personally like to add mushrooms to mine, your mileage may vary. It’s impossible to eat one tidily, but it’s also impossible to eat one without a smile on your face.
24. ThaiGrr!’s Roar, Thai Grr!
ThaiGrr!’s menu can be a bit of an intimidating one, once you step away from the red curry, green curry, pad Thai and massaman that make up the core of their menu. Beyond that the choice starts to get bewildering, especially when you factor in the number of different permutations of minced pork or minced chicken – as a salad, with aubergines, with fried egg, the list goes on. What you actually want, in my experience, is ThaiGrr!’s Roar, their eponymous dish.
Most of their standard mains are all there ready and waiting to be dished up, as at somewhere like Kokoro, whereas their specials they cook for you there and then. And of them, ThaiGrr!’s roar is the finest I’ve had – a potent dish of minced pork, with lemongrass, shrimp paste and kaffir lime, Thai food with the stabilisers off. Despite the four chillies on the menu, I find it’s not as overpowering as I initially feared but you do get a huge spectrum of flavour and, as you approach the end, a lingering desire to do it all over again.
23. Chocolate roll, Geo Café
Geo Café used to bake everything – bread, baguettes, pastries, you name it. At some point they stopped doing bread, which I believe they buy in, but the baguettes and the pastries, fashioned by co-owner Zezva’s own fair hands, continued. And it’s just as well they did, or the residents of Caversham might have staged the most middle-class revolt you’ve ever seen.
Everyone has their favourite, and I’m sure some of you are reading this and saying You fool, what about the pistachio medialuna or how could you overlook their cardamom buns? I know, I know, pipe down, they’re all good. But my vote goes to the chocolate roll, a hulking great distant cousin of the pain au chocolat which is bigger, burlier and denser, beautifully lacquered and buttery, packed with deep, dark chocolate. It’s a brooding thing, in the image of its creator, but like its creator it’s also a bit of a sweetie.
22. Kothey chicken momo, Sapana Home
Happiness is still a plate of Sapana Home’s pan fried momo, all to yourself, with a mango lassi, listening to the music on the radio and watching people amble down Queen Victoria Street. You used to be able to get all that for a tenner, but although it costs more now it’s still very keen value. Other momo are available, and all their momo are available cooked several different ways, but the slightly caramelised crust of the pan-fried variant edges it for me.
I’ve had this dish so many times – in good times and bad, with friends and alone – and in as far as a dish can keep you company, you couldn’t hope for better company than this. My favourite momo, of the ten, is number four: the headlong rush of the first three has passed, you’re properly appreciating them and you haven’t yet reached the terrible sadness of the final two. It’s a metaphor for something, but I don’t know what.
21. Mezze box, Fink
My pick of all the permanent fixtures at Blue Collar, Fink is consistently superb and its mezze box is the way to eat everything they do so well in one convenient package. So you get a couple of pert, vinegary stuffed vine leaves, couscous and olives, some foliage, three different sauces of varying heats – all of which are bloody marvellous – and the topping or toppings of your choice.
I tend to go for their chicken shawarma, which is beautifully spiced and seasoned thigh meat, cooked bang on, and their falafel which are as good as anybody’s in town, with the possible exception of Purée. All that and you can almost convince yourself that this, because it’s sort of, almost a salad, is the healthy option. Since Gurt Wings left Blue Collar this is my order of choice every Friday. Back when Gurt was still trading in Reading, it was my order of choice every Wednesday.
Edible Reading 