Vesuvio Pizzeria, an Italian restaurant in Tilehurst, opened back in May and I’ve been trying to fit in a visit ever since without quite managing it. I made a booking back in July, which I had to cancel, and then life got in the way and so it wasn’t until a couple of Saturdays ago that Zoë and I left the house, strolled to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill and hopped on Reading’s sweet chariot, the number 17, to boldly go where my blog, let’s be honest, has rarely gone before.
I’d heard few reports of Vesuvio, so had little to go on. In a bizarre twist that tells you everything you need to know about the Reading Chronicle, they reported faithfully on the fact that someone had applied to convert the old Coral bookies on the Norcot Road into an Italian restaurant. They practically foamed at the mouth when the restaurant applied for permission to serve food and drink until 2 in the morning, dubbing it a“showdown”. Why would anyone want to eat in a pizza restaurant at that time? and Why would a restaurant want to serve anybody who did? were just two of the questions the article made no effort to answer.
But since it opened? No coverage at all. I guess you can write the first two stories in your lounge in your pants without having to do any genuine journalism, whereas a restaurant review would require you to put some trousers on, leave the house and spend some actual money. Never mind, you’ve got me for that sort of thing now.
My pre-meal research was as inconclusive as they come: TripAdvisor seemed unimpressed, Google was gushing. The restaurant’s Instagram was sketchily updated and, being charitable, didn’t make the food look outstanding. Its website, such as it was, appeared to be made up entirely of stock photos, to the point where the pizzas all seemed to have different types of bases, some with flat, featureless crusts and others with the kind of bubbling and leopard spotting you see everywhere.
How were you possibly meant to know whose version of reality was correct, and whether you’d have a good meal at Vesuvio? Like I said, you’ve got me for that sort of thing.
Subscribe to continue reading
Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.
I don’t remember a time, any more, when I didn’t have a list of restaurants I really wanted to visit. Or, to be more accurate, multiple lists. And, if anything, the whole list thing is getting worse.
For instance, I have a London list. Two, actually, both on my phone. One of places in London I’ve always wanted to visit, like Quality Chop House or Chez Bruce, the proper bucket list. The second, more geared to what people reading a Reading restaurant blog might enjoy, is of places near Paddington where you could eat after a day in London while you wait for an off peak train. That list spans from Queen’s Park to the Edgware Road – although the Elizabeth Line might render it redundant, now you can easily reach so many places from Paddington.
Another list, a recent addition, covers restaurants in Oxford. And last but not least, which is where this week’s review comes in, I have a Bristol list. It remains a mystery to me that Bristol, home to England’s most interesting food scene, lacks the food coverage you might expect. There used to be a Reach journalist, whose reviews were much like all Reach restaurant reviews except about somewhere interesting: he left to go to another local website whose output is remarkably similar. There’s also a magazine which publishes restaurant reviews, pretty irregularly: think roughly once a month.
Beyond that? It’s somewhat tumbleweed central. Bristol used to have a fair few restaurant bloggers, but many seem to have quit or drifted into #ADs and #invites. Put it this way: since the start of last year I’ve reviewed six restaurants in the city, which makes me one of Bristol’s most prolific restaurant bloggers, and I don’t even live there. However you feel about my blog – and if you’re reading this I’m guessing either way you’re not a neutral – at least Reading has a regular restaurant blog. Many cities, often far bigger, can’t say the same.
This week’s review arose from a long-overdue return to Bristol, a flying visit at short notice which sent me scurrying to my list to find somewhere suitable. Little Hollows Pasta has been on that list for quite some time, and felt like the perfect choice. It’s in Redlands, just down the road from the lovely Wilsons and Good Chemistry’s The Good Measure, perhaps my favourite Bristol pub. It’s also a short walk from Whiteladies Road and Cotham Hill, one of the city’s nicest hubs of places to eat, drink and shop.
As the name suggests, it’s a pasta restaurant – a specialist like London’s Bancone or Padella – which started out in street food and supplying restaurants before opening its site a couple of years ago. This trend is edging closer to Reading – Maidenhead’s Sauce And Flour is probably the nearest comparable restaurant – but going through the front door, spying sheets of pasta hanging in the window, the attractive dining room reminded me just how badly Sauce & Flour had bungled the job of creating a convivial space.
By contrast, Little Hollows had this sorted – plain walls, simple, tasteful furniture and minimal decor, plenty of natural light. That said, the best tables were all for larger groups: those for customers dining in pairs, in a narrow strip right up against one wall, felt like the short straw. It’s a limitation of the space, I suppose, but we were probably at the worst table in the place; by the time we got there, the place was almost completely full.
The staff, friendly and on it from the get go, talked us through the menu. All the mains are pasta dishes and the small plates, we were told, were designed to be shared. We ordered a couple of negronis – one classic, one sbagliato – and some olives, and plea bargained the other dishes. I got my second choice of pasta, but was lucky to get my first choice of starter. We ordered three of those, prepared to be convinced that they were sharable but not entirely sure they would be.
The first fumble came when the olives we’d ordered to come with our aperitifs never materialised. We eventually flagged someone down, and they’d been forgotten, but they ended up coming at the same time as the small plates. They were good – glossy plump green specimens that slipped easily off the stone, marinated with a touch of lemon. We only ordered them because Zoë is on a new health kick where she has to consume thirty different vegetables a week: I’ve suggested she could get a lot of the way there by watching the Big Brother reboot, but apparently this isn’t a helpful contribution.
The small plate we opted to share, though, was excellent. Red mullet, filleted and simply cooked with a crispy skin and a warming sunset of piquillo pepper vinaigrette, this was a gorgeous little start to the meal, and the charred lemon was a nice touch. There were still a few bones in the mullet, but otherwise it was difficult to fault, a joyous thing. Would I rather have had it to myself? Probably. Do I wish we’d ordered some bread to mop up? Again, probably.
Although it was October when we visited, the weather was in the low twenties and the other two small plates had a feeling of warmer climes about them. Zoë had chosen burrata with peach and basil, the whole thing Ronsealed with a whack of balsamic dressing. The last time I tried a dish like this was in a market in Bordeaux, at the height of summer. This, I think, was better: the peaches just magnificent, the interplay of sweetness, sharpness and mollifying creaminess bang on. Burrata has reached the point now where newspapers have started sneering about it, which I’m sure makes them look dead clever, but done well it’s still a beauty. Again, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to try sharing this, but I was lucky to get a forkful.
My small plate was another variation on the whole salad with cheese motif. Ribbons of courgette, marinated apparently, undulated above a smudge of fresh whipped ricotta, spun with lemon. That would have been nice enough, but some leaves and a hard cheese – pecorino at a guess – had been plonked on top. I suppose when a dish isn’t a looker, as this wasn’t, it’s easier to share because you don’t mind messing it up. I really liked the flavours in this but on balance I’d rather have had the burrata and peaches – which, incidentally, is the name of the ridiculous pub I plan to open in the university area if I ever win the lottery.
By this point the negronis were done and dusted, the room was bustling and I could just about make out dishes arriving at other tables, wondering whether people had ordered better than me. I was on to a very enjoyable glass of a French white made from Gros Manseng, not a grape I know, although to get all Andy Hayler for a second £9 for a glass when a bottle will cost you £11 online is quite the markup. I was already getting the picture: that Little Hollows was a wonderful spot, a neighbourhood restaurant that caused its fair share of neighbourhood envy. But I also knew that to judge the place without trying the pasta would have been an act of gastronomic coitus interruptus.
The dish that had jumped out of the menu for me, naturally, was the one Zoë chose. Mafalde are pasta ribbons with wavy, crinkly edges – “like an octopus tentacle” was Zoë’s description – and Little Hollows served them with a ragu of pork and fennel sausage, parmesan and pangrattato. This was right up my alley, and a mouthful just confirmed how good it was – the fennel seeds lent an aromatic crunch, as did the breadcrumbs, and the sausage and parmesan gave it an intense saltiness.
I would have ordered this and eaten it all the live long day, but I don’t think Zoë was as taken as I was. She prefers to have pasta as a starter or an intermediate course rather than as the main attraction, doesn’t like putting all her golden-yolked eggs in that starchy basket. With a restaurant like Little Hollows, that’s kind of by design, and I didn’t think the portion was that hefty, but even so I enjoyed it more than she did.
It didn’t help that my main course, on paper one of my favourite things, just didn’t work. Puttanesca is one of my favourite sauces: that intoxicating blend of sweet tomato, salty anchovies and olives and punchy little capers, when it comes together, is almost unimprovable. I don’t care that it could be made from a store cupboard, because it’s usually made in restaurants by someone with access to a better store cupboard than you.
So what went wrong? Well, a few things. The sauce was made with thick-gauged Datterini tomatoes, which meant that it never really cohered as a sauce. Nor did it really adhere to the pasta; I didn’t mind this being made with bucatini rather than spaghetti, but the bucatini was more al dente than I’d have chosen – about as flexible as me during a trip to the physio – and that didn’t help the dish coalesce either, lacking the option of twirling and trapping the good stuff in every forkful.
So in practice you ended up eating a lot of relatively plain pasta and then attacking the salty remnants at the bottom of the bowl. And they were nice enough, I suppose, but this dish is all about being more than the sum of its parts, and it wasn’t in this case. One to chalk up under missed opportunities: I ate it, not liking it as much as I could, while watching my other half eat a dish she also didn’t like as much as she could. And yet she still wouldn’t swap: rude.
Hey ho. We both had a glass of primitivo on the go by this point. A really good one – you couldn’t fault the wine list, and it was good to see the vast majority of it available by the glass – so we used that to put the brakes on and make a decision about dessert. When tiramisu is on the menu inevitably either Zoë goes for it or I will, but Little Hollows complicates things by offering you a standard and enhanced version, the latter laced with Frangelico and praline, a hazelnut flanker.
So Zoë ordered that and I went for the vegan chocolate mousse, and we had a couple of outstanding dessert wines into the bargain – a moscati d’Asti for her and a really cracking passito-style number from Crete for me. Would desserts cement our impression of the meal?
They sort of did but again, it was problematic. Zoë’s tiramisu looked the part but she had a spoonful and said “I think they’re brought us the standard one. Can you taste any hazelnut in this?”. So I tasted it and no, I couldn’t. I’m not a massive fan of hazelnut, or Frangelico, whereas Zoë adores the stuff, so between us you’d think one of us could pick them out. So we asked the wait staff, and they took it to the kitchen to check and came back and said yes, it definitely was the hazelnut version. Which I have to say made me feel pretty thick, but I tried more and I still thought, being charitable, that it was very light on the hazelnut.
My dessert wasn’t what I was expecting either. I knew a vegan chocolate mousse would be different, and I was expecting it to be darker, but what I wasn’t expecting was that it was completely lacking in aeration, the texture, bubble free, more like a cremeux than a mousse. I didn’t mind it, but the cognitive dissonance cancelled out some of the delight. The almond praline was more like a crunchy crumb and the marmalade on top had a lot of heavy lifting to do to offset that slick sweetness. Like a lot of what we’d eaten, it wasn’t quite there.
Never mind. It was lovely to be in Bristol, the sun was shining, the space felt like a celebration of everything that’s good about lunching on a Saturday and there was an excellent pub less than five minutes away. So we decided that, on balance, Little Hollows wasn’t half bad and we asked for the bill. There was one last twist in the tale when our server brought it.
“We’ve taken the tiramisu off the bill” he said. “It is the hazelnut tiramisu, but it turns out that it was missing the praline so it just had the Frangelico in it.” I didn’t really know what to make of that – I couldn’t see why they wouldn’t tell the truth but it was weird to dish something up which didn’t match the description on the menu and then, when we asked about the discrepancy, to say that it was our mistake. All very strange, but generous of them – it was after all a great tiramisu at full price, let alone gratis. Our bill, including gratuity, came to just shy of a hundred and fifty pounds.
There are always mixed feelings when I cross a restaurant off my list, especially when it’s a Bristol one. And I definitely have that with Little Hollows. I liked so much of what they did, and their basic concept is a brilliant one, so I’m disappointed not love my meal as much as I hoped. I’m sad, too, that I can’t bring my Reading readers another must-visit Bristol restaurant (so many of the highest ratings I’ve given out are to Bristolian establishments) or convince any Bristol readers out there that I am anywhere near the zeitgeist.
But in truth there’s also a degree of relief that the choice of where to eat in Bristol, for me at least, has got easier rather than more difficult. If I lived in Bristol I can imagine I would go back, but as an occasional visitor every restaurant like COR or Marmo that I leave itching to return makes it just that little bit harder to try somewhere new, to add to my stock of Bristol reviews. And again, it’s worth making the point that this shows the gulf between places like Bristol that attract the very best and my beloved Reading, that is still fighting the good fight to bring the right kind of restaurants to town.
In Reading, Little Hollows would be a must visit. In Bristol, it’s merely a rather good restaurant in a city awash with knockouts. I hope the people who live in Bristol, and the ones who eat at Little Hollows, know how very lucky they are. In the meantime, if you live in Reading, you want an amazing puttanesca and don’t mind a short train ride, I have two words for you: Mio Fiore. Or if you love pasta go to London and visit Bancone. It’s much imitated but few restaurants, including Little Hollows, have quite matched it yet.
Little Hollows Pasta – 7.6 26 Chandos Road, Redland, Bristol, BS6 6PF 0117 9731254
Having stopped and reflected on ten years of writing restaurant reviews, followed by a trip to my favourite food city, followed by away fixtures down the M4 and up the train tracks, it’s time to return to business as usual: a review of somewhere in Reading. But is this a chance to begin a new era, to launch ER v3.0 with a bold new direction? A focus on the fine dining opportunities in the shires? A commitment to trying new restaurants the moment they open? A review clocking in at under a thousand words, just this once?
No, this week I’m reviewing a fried chicken joint. Why change the habit of a lifetime?
I must apologise, and not just to vegetarians, vegans and that one reader of mine who’s allergic to chicken. I know I eat a lot of chicken. At the last ER readers’ lunch in September at Clay’s Kitchen (opening course: kodi chips, made of chicken; penultimate course: ghee roast chicken) a number of people stopped me and said your top 50 had a lot of chicken in it, didn’t it? It’s indisputable. I even, earlier in the year, went to two London restaurantsin one day, in what my friend James and I dubbed ChickenFest. It’s set to become an annual event.
Some restaurant reviewers rave about lamb, some are beef-worshippers, many love pork in all its many forms. But my weakness is chicken, and particularly fried chicken. Maybe it’s a throwback to childhood, when the fast food my Canadian uncle dubbed “Kentucky Fried Duck” was the biggest treat in the world. Or maybe it’s no Proustian nonsense like that. Perhaps I just really like chicken.
God knows I’ve eaten, reviewed and raved about enough of it in ten years, whether it’s the Lyndhurst’s peerless karaage, Clay’s wonderful Payyoli chicken fry or a sinful, hangover-redeeming tub of sweet chilli chicken from Kokoro. Or, for that matter, Soju’s wonderful dak-gang jeong, the beautiful Korean fried chicken which made it into my top 10 last month after an emotional reunion with the stuff in the restaurant.
Korean flavours are a particular growth industry for fried chicken, it seems. Years ago the only place in the UK for Korean food, surreally, was New Malden, not far from Kingston, on account of it being one of the largest expat communities of Koreans in Europe. But over the last ten years it’s gradually gained a foothold – it was as long ago as 2014 that I first tried bibimbap, in Coconut of all places, and since then Soju and Gooi Nara have opened in town.
But Korean tastes, and specifically the unmistakeable taste of gochujang, have started to bleed into what you might call fusion food. Back when Gurt Wings was still at Blue Collar their JFC – a cross between popcorn chicken and karaage – comes “Lost In Translation”, drizzled in a combination of gochujang and sriracha mayo, sprinkled with togarashi and sesame seeds. You can call it cultural appropriation, you can say that geographically it’s all over the place with Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Thai influences, but whatever you call it you also have to call it delicious.
And it’s not just Gurt – not to be outdone, the Lyndhurst does fantastic chicken wings every Wednesday, coated in a potent gochujang sauce, and even though wings are about my least favourite way to consume chicken I still can’t get enough of them. I live in constant hope that the Lyndhurst will do a chicken thigh burger, with that same gochujang coating, cooked until tender but crispy. Maybe they’ll take the hint – I know they like a challenge – or maybe I’ll just have to ask them nicely to serve one at my wedding reception.
I suspect part of this is also due to the increasing cultural popularity of all things Korean. I don’t think everybody is suddenly watching Old Boy and Lady Vengeance, but Squid Game was massive a few years ago, not to mention the Oscars in 2020 for Parasite. And is it too reductive to say that it might have something to do with BTS?
I am more aware of that than some, because my future mother in law is fully paid-up ARMY and is just as likely to say that she purples you as anything else. If you have to look up either of those expressions then you’re where I was at the start of the year, but it’s been quite an education. She recently went to a kind of fan gathering in some halls of residence near Chichester, where any fears about meeting new people were eradicated through the steady application of inhibition-lifting soju, and apparently the whole affair was a roaring success. She talks about going to Korea soon, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens. If she does, I hope for all our sakes that she comes back: “once you Jimin, you can’t Jim out”, she likes to say.
All that brings us, by a roundabout route, to The Bap, the new Korean fast food place on Market Square, occupying the site recently vacated by the ill-fated La’De Express (before that it was a Select Car Leasing shop opened in 2017 by “Reading FC chairman Sir John Madejski”: how times change). It’s The Bap’s third branch, after openings in Farnborough and Swindon according to the website, which could do with a little proof reading. Our Reading branch is located at the Market place where the heart of town in Reading it says. Err, fair enough. Oh, and “bap” means rice: this is very much not a sandwich shop.
Subscribe to continue reading
Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.
Back in the first half of the nineties, when I was a student at Oxford, there was a famous restaurant down the Cowley Road called the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House. What made it famous, back then, was an urban myth that the menu didn’t have prices: instead, you paid what the proprietor decided you could afford. How he assessed that wasn’t entirely clear, but even though in those days I was constantly unkempt and dressed in easily the shittest clothes M&S and River Island had to offer I never felt like taking my chances, in case the meal turned out to be beyond my means.
Besides, as a student from a comprehensive school eating out in Oxford was pretty much always beyond my means. Instead I ate awful food served up by the college in halls, I nuked an occasional M&S ready meal – usually chilli con carne – in the microwave in the tiny kitchen in my college stairwell and, on high days and holidays, wandered to the chippy on Carfax for a life-affirming cod and chips. If we’d had a yearbook, which we didn’t, nobody would have nominated me as Most Likely To Write A Restaurant Blog.
No, eating out was for the trustafarians I was forced to rub shoulders with, where mummy and daddy owned half of Hampshire. Parents were always swooping in to take them to dinner at Gee’s, or the Old Parsonage, or Browns, back before Browns became just another Mitchell & Butler atrocity. I think my dad visited me once in three years and we had dim sum at a place called the Opium Den. This is fancy, I thought, and the experience was never repeated. It’s a Nando’s, now.
My fellow students, by and large an alien species, all lived down the Cowley Road in their second year in shared houses, cosplaying This Life, a few years before it hit the television. They fancied themselves as the Young Ones, even though they already had their dead eyes on careers as management consultants. They probably felt they were being postmodern, playing at being skint like they were playing at being part of the real world. And now, depressingly, many of them run the country, or run the civil service, or read the news on television. I wonder if any of them went to the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House, back in the day.
Anyway, the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House is closed now, or at least appears to be from a quick bit of online research. It certainly looked decidedly closed when I visited Oxford a few weekends ago with a lunchtime reservation at Spiced Roots, a much more happening, upmarket and highly regarded Caribbean restaurant two doors down from where Hi-Lo used to be. When I reviewed the Magdalen Arms, the same end of town, last year I asked whether anybody had Oxford recommendations for me. A reader mentioned Spiced Roots then, so I looked it up and the idea stuck in my head.
And this was my first chance to review it in 2023. It was my first visit to Oxford since last Christmas, and I’d forgotten how much I loved the place: having coffee at the Missing Bean; sloping off on a house envy tour of Jericho and north Oxford (it was harder to find a house you didn’t envy, really); stopping in the Covered Market to discover that Tap Social had opened a lovely little pub there; having post-Tap Social beer at Teardrop Bar because it was the original and best and otherwise I’d have felt disloyal; and buying all sorts of wonderful stuff from the Oxford Cheese Company, hoping it wouldn’t be too whiffy on the train home at the end of the day.
Speaking of trains, one of life’s great mysteries is that a return ticket to London or Swindon from Reading costs you thirty quid for half an hour on the train, whereas Oxford is closer to a tenner for the same length of journey. One day someone will fix that discrepancy and we’ll all be screwed, but until then Oxford is about as good a day out from Reading by public transport as you could possibly hope for. I should review more restaurants in Oxford, really – it’s crazy that this is only my second – and maybe I will. Besides, since Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen closed last summer I’ve been missing really good Caribbean food: if Spiced Roots could deliver, it would be well worth the occasional trip.
Spiced Roots’ interior is that old favourite, a long thin dining room, and a compact one too that can’t have much more than twenty covers. We arrived for a late lunch, at two pm, and the place was nicely full by then, with a table of about a dozen people having a fantastic time. The mural on the wall reminded me somewhat of Reading’s Flavour Of Mauritius, but the real conversation point was the bar, done up beach hut style with a straw roof and sporting a mind-bogglingly huge range of rums.
I found myself wondering if the evening was when this place really came into its own; Spiced Roots is only open for lunch on Saturdays, and even then it closes between lunch and dinner, so there’s only so much fun you can have. And that’s a particular shame because the cocktail menu was a small but wickedly diverting one. I had a dark ‘n’ stormy, tall and full of pep, probably the nicest I’ve ever tried. Zoë had a negroni made with Appleton 12 instead of gin, infused somehow with pimento smoke: I tried a sip and it provoked its own cocktail, a healthy mixture of trepidation and admiration.
The menu was simple, just the right size and written, all lower case, in that typewriter font used almost exclusively by dullards on their Instagram stories nowadays. It inspired confidence, with just five starters and eight mains, and pricing was gentle: three of the starters cost less than a fiver, none topped seven pounds. Only a couple of mains approached twenty quid, the remainder were closer to fifteen. Forget the old Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House approach of working out what you could afford – this was definitely affordable. We ordered three of the starters to share and a couple of mains, sat back, sipped our cocktails and felt all sense of hurry vanish.
That might have been just as well, because there was a bit of a wait. Our server came over and apologised, saying that there was only one of them in the kitchen. And that was of course fair enough, and that big table, all needing to be fed at the same time, would put a strain on a small outfit. But we were in no real rush so the cocktails passed, as they do, and we chatted about Oxford, I probably blethered on about the old days, and we sipped our water, mindful of all that pre-lunch beer.
I wonder what the me of thirty years ago would say if you told him that on the other side of the century he would still be coming to this city, with money this time, having made his peace with all the things it did and didn’t do for him. He would probably be waiting for me to shut up so he could go have another row with his girlfriend or listen to the new Leonard Cohen album, or pretend to study, or – almost certainly his favourite pastime – mope. But I wish I could tell him that it would all be okay, that one day he’d evolve beyond M&S microwaveable chilli and eating cookie dough straight from the tub. I’d also tell him not to take his knees for granted, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing.
Our first starter was a little delight. I had missed out on jerk chicken as a main course, what with always giving my dining companion first dibs, but the jerk chicken spring rolls gave me an early indication of what I was missing. Two little cigarillos of filo pastry, packed with chicken and served on a smear of dark, fruity, savoury sauce they were simultaneously lovely and nowhere near enough. I suppose that’s what all starters, ultimately, are aiming for. I’d have liked more, or for them to be heftier, but the clue was in the pricing and for just shy of a fiver it was difficult to complain. We should just have ordered two portions, that’s all.
Even better, and genuinely delicious, was something called “trini doubles”. This is a Trinidadian speciality, curried chickpeas on a pair of baras, flat fried dough not entirely unlike a roti, and a quick scuttle to confer with Professor Wikipedia suggests that this dish, created in the Thirties, might be a Caribbean take on the Indian chole bhatura. Be that as it may, this was a gorgeous dish – floury, warm and comforting, and a forkful of the chickpeas folded into the starchy, slightly stodgy embrace of the bara was reason enough to be in Spiced Roots. That a little sweet, zingy, almost caramelised courgette, in the finest strips, was heaped on top just made me love the dish more. Again, this cost less than a fiver.
Last but not least, we’d also decided to try the grilled octopus superfood salad. It was perfectly pleasant – what octopus there was was nicely cooked, the salad was well dressed and the pineapple on top added good contrast. The menu described it as pineapple chow, which is apparently spiced and enhanced with garlic and hot sauce, but I just got sweetness, really. This dish was nice enough: subdued, well behaved but not earth shattering. But that’s my fault, I suspect, for ordering something described as a “superfood salad”, not theirs.
After waiting a little longer than I’d have chosen for our starters, the pendulum of iffy timing swung in the other direction: with that large table having finished their food our mains were brought out quick smart, barely ten minutes after we’d finished the previous course. Just one of those things, really, and I imagine they were trying to ensure we’d have time for dessert before they closed at half three. In any event we were on to a second drink by now, in my case a New Zealand sauvignon blanc which was decent but heftily marked up and in Zoë’s a lager called Banks from Barbados which I’m guessing tasted like most lagers.
My main course was a good illustration of Spiced Roots’ strengths and weaknesses, almost emblematic of the restaurant as a whole. I’d chosen the curry goat, my second choice of main, and it was a really superb dish. Probably the best goat I can remember eating (and I include Clay’s goat curry in that) beautifully spiced – with fifteen spices, if the menu is to be believed – in a thin, dark and potent sauce. There were a couple of chunks of potato but otherwise it was pretty much all sticky, tender goat.
And yet the presentation was needlessly prissy. The curry was in a little vessel, the steamed rice in a separate bowl, there were a few random slices of plantain on the side and a salad which genuinely didn’t go and I’m not sure anyone eats. Were you meant to spoon the curry onto the rice, or gradually cross the streams while keeping the salad safe from harm? I ended up dumping the rice on the plate, pouring the curry on top and thinking that, rather than all the compartmentalisation, all I really wanted was a big steaming bowl of rice with plenty of curry on top – something earthy, hearty and unpretentious. I know Spiced Roots billed itself as fine Caribbean cuisine, but I don’t think that means you have to put obstacles between the food and the diners enjoying it.
Zoë’s jerk chicken, if anything an even better dish, suffered the same problems. The chicken was really outstanding, you got a huge amount of it and it was smothered with a rich, brooding sauce. And the rice and peas were good, too – a much more suitable companion than the plain steamed rice that had accompanied the curry. But again, it would have been better to let the food speak for itself without the faff of serving it on a slate, with more of that salad and a cherry tomato artfully cut into a flower. It made me think of the simplicity of somewhere like Chef Stevie. This food looks beautiful because it is beautiful, it doesn’t need to be gussied up in this way.
But even with that moaning, this lot for sixteen pounds fifty was hard to argue with. We also ordered a side of macaroni pie (which the menu, again trying to be more fancy, calls mac and cheese) which was really lovely but probably not quite big enough to share. As it only cost four pounds I think that was more our mistake than theirs.
Service was excellent, and suitably apologetic about the delays getting us our starters, which really wasn’t a problem. But pacing overall was problematic: I almost felt like they were trying to make up for the slow starters by rushing the mains, even though that wasn’t really what we wanted. We weren’t moved enough by the dessert menu to go for the full three courses, and a latte was calling to me from neighbouring Peloton Espresso, so we grabbed the bill and ambled off to caffeinate. Our meal came to just over eighty-five pounds, not including service, which I thought was thoroughly decent value.
Sometimes, believe it or not, it’s the act of writing a review that crystallises how I feel about a restaurant. Sometimes I know the rating in my head and work back from there, and sometimes it’s the process of running through the highs and lows that makes me realise, on balance, what I really thought. I don’t always get that right, I’m sure, so occasionally as a reader you probably get to the end and think the rating doesn’t match the text. You might not be alone in that – sometimes I feel that way too – but when there’s a real mismatch it’s because I’ve found it hard to work out what I think.
And Spiced Roots, I think, is one of those cases. I loved the food, but there’s a certain disconnect at the heart of the restaurant which meant I couldn’t quite make up my mind about it. The value is excellent, in places, but the presentation didn’t match that or the style of food – which meant that, for instance, some of the starters were just too slender (although unarguably priced to match) and that the mains, where they needed to be hearty and unpretentious, felt a little too dolled up.
And I think that also showed in the clientele, which was varied – some were from the Caribbean community and clearly enjoying the fantastic food, others were the same kind of diners you’d find in Arbequina, a couple of doors down, very much gastronomic tourists – like me and Zoë, in fairness. Overall I wasn’t sure what Spiced Roots wanted to be, authentic or rarefied, and as a result I wasn’t convinced it managed entirely to be either, let alone both.
So I loved the food, and if it sounds like your kind of thing you should definitely try it, but as a restaurant it left me slightly puzzled. Maybe a Saturday lunchtime – the only day it opens for lunch – isn’t the best time to judge it, so perhaps you have to be there of an evening, attacking that cocktail menu with gusto. But it was awfully well behaved in a way I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t sure about. That might tell you more about me than the restaurant. It did make me wonder, too, what a night in the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House would have been like, at the height of its powers. It might well have cost me more than my meal at Spiced Roots did, but I suspect it could have had the soul and verve that Spiced Roots, for all its excellent qualities, slightly missed.
Edible Reading 