20. Vegetable samosa, Cake & Cream

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.

• Click here for dishes 50-41
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This piece is part of Edible Reading at 10. See also:

• The 10 most significant restaurants of the last decade
• The 10 saddest closures of the last decade
• Edible Reading and me