One question I get asked from time to time is “why have you got it in for Caversham?”. And every time that happens I allow myself a little sigh and then explain that nothing could be further from the truth. I go on to say that this misconception stems from a review I wrote back in 2017, of a wine bar called the Tipsy Bean which is no longer there. In it I said that, given Caversham’s enviable location and comparative affluence, it ought to be nicer than it was. That was it, no more or less than that, but from the reaction you’d think I’d taken a colossal dump on the floor in the middle of Caversham Library. As I said, I still get asked about it now.

Since I wrote that piece in 2017, Caversham has managed to attract two excellent cafes in the shape of Geo Cafe and The Collective. A Spanish delicatessen, Serdio Ibericos, and Four Bears Books have both opened on Prospect Street. At the top of that road you have The Last Crumb, a lovely spot for an al fresco pint and pizza, and of course Prospect Street is also home to Clay’s Kitchen, one of Reading’s very best restaurants. And closer to Caversham’s centre I shouldn’t leave out the excellent and trailblazing Vegivores, or the artisan market that happens every Sunday. 

All of that has sprung up in the last six years, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that whether you like it or not, I just might have been right all along. And I always explain to Caversham residents that I wasn’t having a pop at the place. I was merely saying it didn’t have the retailers, coffee culture, good restaurants and independent businesses it deserved. I’m absolutely delighted that now it does. And I always know when I’m talking to a Caversham resident because living in Caversham is a bit like being a vegan or being into wild swimming: if you do it, you tend to tell strangers in the first five minutes.

If it sounds like I’m mocking anybody by saying that, believe me, it’s not without affection. Many other parts of Reading could learn a lot from Caversham in terms of civic pride and satisfaction with their lot in life. I mean, Caversham residents felt that way before Vegivores, The Collective, Clay’s, Geo Cafe and so on. They must feel thoroughly vindicated in 2024. Who can blame them?

Just to prove that I don’t have it in for Caversham, it plays a significant part in my own weekend routine. Currently Zoë works most Sundays, so provided I don’t have any plans, wake up at a sensible time and am not nursing a monster hangover I often wander across the river to the promised land. I’ll mooch over Christchurch Bridge or Reading Bridge – insert your hackneyed joke about bringing my passport here – and make my way to Geo Café for a coffee.

Once there I’ll sit inside when there’s space, which is rarely, and outside when it’s busy. Either way, over a latte I’ll pretend to read my paperback, tap away at my phone and enjoy catching snippets of all the conversations around me. People watching in Caversham is a very different experience to doing it in the likes of Workhouse or C.U.P., which again is a far from derogatory observation.

If the owner Keti is around I will try to cajole her into stopping at my table for a few minutes and filling me in on what she’s been up to, all her schemes and tribulations. One of the many things I love about Keti is her almost superhuman ability to have three conversations with you simultaneously, changing lanes between one and another without indicating: it keeps you sharper than any Sudoku.

But if Keti is away fighting fires elsewhere, which lately is more often than not, I’ll finish my coffee and amble over to the Artisan Market. I might grab some croquetas or a bocadillo from Miss Croquetas, who are the same people as Serdio Ibericos and, if I’m lucky, a masala hot chocolate from Filter Coffee.

I’ll look around and enjoy all the comings and goings. I’ll hope not to bump into anybody I know – not because I’m antisocial, but because I rarely look my best on a Sunday morning. And finally, once I’ve stretched my legs, caffeinated, had lunch and felt part of something, a little RG4 flâneur, I’ll wander home. Caversham’s rather nice these days. No wonder people like to go on about living there.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was walking to Caversham, probably for the first time in a while what with having been banjaxed by Covid, and I spotted an unfamiliar café on the ground floor of Thames Quarter, the apartment block the opposite site of the roundabout to the Thames Water building, where the BMW garage used to be. I’d dimly known that something was opening there, and I’d made a mental note to check up on it, but this was the first time I’d seen it in the flesh. It was called Honesty, which struck me as a brave name for a café. I resolved to go back at my earliest opportunity, and as it happens my earliest opportunity was last Sunday.

The café is part of the Honesty Group, which comprises ten cafes, most of them in Berkshire, two pubs, both near Newbury and a cookery school. According to their website, the group is “a food business who care about their food, where it comes from, what is in it and how it is produced” and was founded ten years ago. It started out as a bakery, which they say has had to move a couple of times to accommodate increasing demand. But the website also talks about “our esteemed bread supplier”, so whatever they do bake it sounds like somebody else supplies their bread. (They also link to a laudable, if very earnest, manifesto on YouTube which in no way makes them sound like a cult.)

Inside it was a fairly featureless, functional space with nondescript but comfortable furniture, a banquette along one wall and a few posters on display extolling the benefits of their baked goods. “It all started with bread”, one of them said, which seemed a bit of a strange thing to say given that they outsource that now.

Another poster, with a stylised picture of a croissant on it, said that “Our pastries are human made by our skilled bakers”: I appreciated the gender neutral phrasing, but human made just sounded weird. A couple of high tables had power sockets and were clearly intended for working, a handful of tables were occupied on a Sunday lunchtime giving it a strangely airy, echoing feel. It sort of reminded me of Barista & Beyond, but without the obvious soul of that place.

The food offering isn’t huge, and it’s all geared around lunch. A chiller cabinet to one side had a bunch of prepacked panini, sandwiches and toasties along with a couple of breakfast baps, a sausage roll and a vegan sausage roll. The packaging screamed central kitchen, and they were almost Siberian levels of fridge-cold. “Please take the chosen wrapped food items over to the till” said the writing on the fridge, a sentence as far from poetry as it’s possible to be.

Given Honesty’s interest in provenance and treating suppliers fairly I found it striking that they didn’t mention anything about their suppliers at all. Most of the sandwiches were described as panini and had the kind of combinations you’d expect – tuna melts and the like – but a chicken Milanese panino and a sweet and sour chicken panino felt more way out there. The best before dates on a couple of the sandwiches were a day or more in the future, which makes ethical warriors Honesty less fresh than Pret A Manger. That felt jarring, too.

There was also a range of baked goods – croissants, pain au chocolat, millionaire shortbread, Victoria sponge and what have you. The pain au chocolat cost £3.75 and once I saw that I knew I had to have one, just so I could say what a £3.75 pain au chocolat tasted like. I ordered a toastie, a latte and a pain au chocolat which came to £12.95 in total.

“Would you like some coleslaw and salad with your toastie? It doesn’t cost extra.”

“That would be lovely, thank you.”

My server was lovely, but she seemed nonplussed when she turned up at my table about five minutes later with my toastie in a paper bag and my coffee in a takeaway cup.

“I’m sorry, did you want that to eat in?”

So she went off and decanted the toastie and returned with it in all its glory on the plate with my complimentary salad and coleslaw.

Now, to talk about my “chosen wrapped food item” first, it was workmanlike – not offensive, but far from amazing. I’d chosen feta, red pepper and rocket and it’s hard to get those flavours wrong. The roasted peppers were sweet and soft and the feta, which wasn’t stingy, gave the salt and balance the sandwich needed. Given how cold it was when it came out of the fridge they’d done a reasonable job of toasting it.

But if this sounds like faint praise that’s because it is. I certainly didn’t think my, this bread is amazing and clearly demonstrates the benefits of treating your supply chain with respect, decency and a fervour bordering on the religious. It was just bread. Ordinary bread that had been given a little time to sweat and go soggy in a brown paper bag.

The salad was completely undressed and so, to me at least, was a waste of space on the plate. And the coleslaw was a tiny dish of purple which added nothing except the fear that I might end up needing to get out the Vanish when I got home. Now, in fairness to Honesty this toastie cost six pounds; something comparable at Picnic would cost you just shy of a tenner (and for that price you could get a smashed burger at Honest), Pret is probably a tad more expensive than Honesty, I think Shed is too. But Picnic and Shed, whatever they might cost, both do toasted sandwiches many miles better than this.

And I’m afraid the toastie was the high point of the meal. The pain au chocolat was a huge thing and came served with a knife and fork, which said to me that nobody working behind the counter has ever eaten a pain au chocolat before. That’s probably why they were all thin.

But its size was the only thing going for it. There was plenty of evidence of lamination, but that didn’t explain why it felt so stodgy, such heavy going. The chocolate was a little artificially sweet. I wanted to be able to taste the butter that had been crammed into this, and I couldn’t. If you’re going to eat something containing this many calories, you have to be able to do it without regret. I regretted.

And again, you need to look at Honesty’s peers to get a picture of where they sit in the pecking order. Sitting in Honesty watching a very sluggish trickle of people going in and coming out, I was aware that a brisk fifteen minute walk would take me into Caversham, where Geo Café’s chocolate roll would blow this clean out of the water eleven times out of ten. It’s a heavier, denser creation but it’s packed with dark chocolate and lacquered with butter.

Or if you walked ten minutes back into town you could reach Gail’s. The chairman of Gail’s may be an awful human being – his views on Covid lockdowns, climate change and culture wars rather indicate that he is – and Gail’s might be a million miles from the wide-eyed mission statement of Honesty, but if you’re judging on results you’d pick Gail’s pain au chocolat over Honesty’s every single time. Not quite Geo Café, not quite Gail’s – in terms of both the sandwich and the pastry, that seemed to sum Honesty up.

If the coffee had been good it might have redeemed matters, but no such luck. It was truly diabolical: scorched, bitter and undrinkable. I think I used to be a lot more forgiving of bad coffee in cafés, but since I started making coffee at home using an Aeropress or a V60 I’m less inclined to be. If I can make a better coffee in my kitchen something has gone wrong, and the worst coffee I’ve ever made at home was a lot better than the offering from Honesty. It cost me just over three pounds to find that out. I sipped it, I grimaced, I chucked a couple of sugar cubes into it to see if that would make it tolerable, and it didn’t. So I left the coffee, and I left Honesty.

This is the lowest rating I’ve given out in quite some time and honestly – no pun intended – I take no pleasure in it. But I keep thinking of Honesty’s competitors, in town or in Caversham, and I can’t see how it compares favourably to any of them. In Caversham, in the shape of Geo Café and The Collective, you have businesses streets ahead of this place. Back in town you have C.U.P., Workhouse or Shed. But as I said, even Gail’s is better than Honesty and I’m not entirely sure that the likes of Pret or even Costa wouldn’t be too.

Later on when I showed Zoë the picture of my sandwich she said “that looks like something you’d get at the John Lewis café”. But I think even that affords it praise it doesn’t deserve. And besides, if you have your sandwich in John Lewis you have shops and cafés and life and bustle all around you. If you have it at Honesty you’re in an empty room looking out on a roundabout and the Brutalism of the station car park. I love a bit of Brutalism, but this was too much even for me.

Worse even than that is the fact that the reality of Honesty falls so short of the lofty ideals of their mission statement. I don’t know if they intended to extend to a point where they’re offering mediocre prepacked sandwiches, overpriced pastry and god awful coffee, but that’s where they’ve ended up. And when I say they sound like they’ve come a long way from their humble origins, that’s not necessarily a good thing. They want to be ethical, virtuous and wholesome, but the whole thing feels like it was designed by a committee, not a commune. I guess they’d describe it as “human made”.

I do wonder whether having a captive audience upstairs will be enough to keep Honesty alive, and I hope for their sake that their landlord has cut them a very attractive deal for the first year. Because I genuinely don’t see who their target market is: it’s not people in Caversham, and it’s not people in central Reading. And unless their food and drink were leagues better than they are right now, it will never be those people. They had better pray that Thames Water has a very bad canteen, and employees who can’t be arsed to walk far on their lunch breaks.

Honesty at Thames Quarter – 6.2
2 Napier Road, Reading, RG1 8FT
07500 319397

https://honestygroup.co.uk/coffee-shops/honesty-thames-quarter-reading