I’ve been asked about Masakali, the Indian restaurant that replaced San Sicario at the bottom of the Caversham Road, ever since it opened last November. I had a fair few messages on social media saying that it looked interesting, and when I’ve put Twitter polls up asking which of Reading’s newest openings I should visit first it’s always picked up a lot of votes. Being an awkward sod I still reviewed Minas Café, Filter Coffee House and Hala Lebanese before getting round to Masakali, but better late than never: here, at last, is the review literally some of you wanted.
I can see why people noticed Masakali. Something about the polish of its website made people dispense with their usual cynicism about yet another restaurant opening at a site which sees a new occupant every few years. The branding felt completely realised, in a way we don’t often see with new independent restaurants here. Masakali means pigeon in Hindi, and the restaurant is apparently partly inspired by A.R. Rahman’s Bollywood song of the same name: some of that might just be marketing guff, but at least they were trying.
The other thing that stood out about Masakali was the menu. Generic Anglo-Indian curries were kept to a minimum, and instead everything looked – on paper at least – properly interesting. No mix and match proliferation of protein and sauce, instead a range of more singular dishes. A few interesting cultural cross-pollinations here and there, like kulcha stuffed with truffle ghee or a chaat apparently topped with Walker’s crisps, but otherwise a good range of regional Indian dishes.
Someone had done their homework. And you know the C word was going to come up eventually, so here it is: the whole thing felt like a land grab for customers of Clay’s Kitchen rather than, say, people who went to the Bina (assuming, of course, that people still go to the Bina).
Now, before I get into talking about the food, the room, the service there are a couple of things to disclose. The first is that Masakali contacted me not long after they opened, asking if I wanted to do a paid partnership with them (they did one with the Reading Chronicle, although it’s unclear what that involved, other than a Facebook post saying the restaurant was open). I declined, as I always do, but I asked the restaurant if this was their first venture and they told me that they were part of the same group as Biryani Lounge on the Wokingham Road.
This took me by surprise, as it’s difficult to imagine two more different Indian restaurants. I reviewed Biryani Lounge in 2022, finding it a sterile, no-frills kind of a place with functional tables and no drinks licence that sold biggish portions of unremarkable food. I didn’t hate it, far from it, but I wasn’t falling over myself to go back. The leap from a restaurant like Biryani Lounge to Masakali, deliberately positioning itself as Indian fine dining, was a sizeable one. What had prompted them branching out in this way, I wondered?
That’s where the second thing to disclose comes in. Masakali’s website used to contain a link to another company called Curry Fwd who they used to put the restaurant together. They’ve taken it down now, probably wisely, but it’s a fascinating discovery because Curry Fwd is essentially an external consultancy specialising in “India-inspired food concepts and hospitality projects, worldwide”. And their website is well worth looking at: if only because I for one had no idea such things even existed.
Curry Fwd can essentially handle every element of the restaurant, from designing the space to putting together and curating the menu. “Our knowhow and focus on regional Indian cuisine is your advantage”, their website says, along with “We are always digging up family recipes from moms and grandmas across India”. So if I thought the branding looked grown up, or the menu was full of interesting dishes, that was why: it had been put together by specialists, subcontracted by the owners.
When I first read that I was dubious. It wasn’t exactly AI, but it felt like the hospitality equivalent, constructing something in some way ungenuine. But then I thought about it some more. Did it really matter? After all, if you take a restaurant like Clay’s they still had help with their brand, and they’ve been open about that. They still had someone do the interior design of their new space in Caversham. How was this any different?
You could say this was an authenticity issue, but putting together a menu in this way, using experts working out of Kolkata, might arguably be more authentic than cobbling together the same dishes as every other Indian restaurant with an RG postcode. Maybe the restaurant didn’t have a backstory like Clay’s (couple move to Reading to realise their dream of cooking the food of Hyderabadi) or even Biryani Lounge’s (four university friends open a restaurant together to offer their favourite dishes). But did it need one, or was wanting to open a really good restaurant, make people happy and make some money narrative enough?
Perhaps the only real mistake Masakali had made was accidentally including the link to Curry Fwd on their website. Anyway, all those thoughts – acknowledging the preconceptions, challenging the preconceptions, trying not to let the preconceptions colour my evening – were whizzing around my head as Zoë and I, after a few pre-prandials at Phantom, made our way to the restaurant to see what the reality was like.
Whoever it is, whether it’s Masakali or Curry Fwd, they’ve done a nice job of making the place over. The room always had decent bones, if it risked being on the big, cavernous side, but it looks grown-up and classy, from the dark panelled walls to the faux-parquet floor and the mustard-coloured dining chairs. Again, the closest thing I could compare it to was Clay’s, and I liked some of the little touches like the pigeon-themed lights on the walls. I must say though, it’s hard to reconcile “Indian fine dining” with “why don’t you plonk yourself on this bench?”: fortunately there weren’t too many of them.
It was strange to think that the last time I’d been in that dining room was last May, for a readers’ lunch at San Sicario. The room was completely different back then, lighter and airier, less ostentatiously glam (Masakali’s bar is especially glitzy: their Bollywood-themed cocktails looked appealing). It’s weird how you can eat at a restaurant and nobody involved – the punters, the staff, the owners – knows that in three months time the place will be shuttered, and three months after that it will open as something else. It makes you think. In any event, the buzz at Masakali, which wasn’t rammed but was a long way from tumbleweed, made it seem in good health.
I’m apparently breaking the unwritten rules of restaurant review composition by going back and talking about the menu some more – clunky, many would say – but some of you seem to enjoy knowing what you can expect when you go to a restaurant and I quite like letting you know. I’m old fashioned like that. So yes, it generally avoids the standard issue but some of what’s on offer verges on fusion: I’ve already talked about the truffled kulcha, but there’s also a beetroot croquette with goats cheese aioli, if you want to culturally appropriate across continents.
Prices are pitched at the slightly higher end of average. Starters cluster either side of the ten pound mark, and curries max out at fifteen quid or so. And again – yes, I keep using the C word – some elements of the menu will be familiar to Clay’s-goers, like kale pakora, stuffed mirchi, baby aubergine in a peanut masala. In a town before Clay’s this would have been revolutionary, possibly even compared to House Of Flavours. In a post-Clay’s Reading, the main question it invites, like it or not, is I wonder if this will be as good as Clay’s?
I thought the starters we picked made a creditable start, as it happens. Mutton pepper fry was an enjoyable and generous plate – even the style of plate looks oddly familiar, come to think of it – which was just tender enough, sticky and interesting with a good whack of heat, dotted with the deep green of curry leaves to break up the brownness. I liked this more than Zoë did, I think, but I could happily have polished this off on my own. You don’t see enough mutton on menus in Reading, even in Indian restaurants, and this was decently cooked.
What we could agree on was the galli chicken pakora (cooked up no doubt – sorry about this pun – in a galli kitchen). I know I’m predictable going for some variant of fried chicken pretty much whenever I see it but this was great stuff – thigh meat, nicely spiced with a very pleasing texture.
But again, you saw that conflict where Masakali wanted to be high end, but weren’t completely sure what that entailed. I liked this dish but whacking four thick rings of raw red onion on top like a cack-handed take on the Olympic symbol wasn’t elevating the presentation. I have no idea what the dip was, even though I’d only had a handful of beers at Phantom beforehand, but I rather enjoyed it. The menu neglected to mention it completely.
Our other starter, because we were greedy and had three, came from a section entitled “Timeless Kebabs”. I know this will sound snarky, but I’m not sure how timeless a kebab can be. We had chosen something verging on fusion, a paneer tikka kebab with a basil chutney. In fairness the issue here was execution rather than the idea. It might well be that basil would go brilliantly in this context – it does with mozzarella after all – but the chutney itself was thin and watery, lacking the edge you would get elsewhere.
Just to compare Masakali to other Reading restaurants so this doesn’t get repetitive, Kamal’s Kitchen does a better chutney and the paneer tikka itself was probably just below the level of what you can get at the quietly understated Pappadam’s. But again this wasn’t a bad dish, and even if it didn’t entirely match the standard you can enjoy elsewhere it didn’t stop me rather liking it.
By this point the restaurant, while nowhere near full capacity, had the kind of vibrancy you want to see on a Saturday night. You want to be surrounded by people having a good time, people ordering cocktails for the hell of it, big groups attacking the menu with gusto, seemingly unconcerned about the hangover Sunday morning might bring. And the staff were on it – speedy, efficient and unobtrusive. The whole thing had that slight shimmer of success, and I didn’t really care at that point if it was curated or manufactured, if it missed a backstory or had been dreamed up in a meeting room in Kolkata, brainstormed on a whiteboard.
Our drinks, I should say, were a mixed bag. I don’t think it’s the strongest part of the restaurant’s offering, excluding the cocktails which might be lovely for all I know. It wasn’t a hugely inspiring wine list, although to their credit over half of it’s available by the glass, and my Pinotage was nice enough but not stellar. I thought Zoë’s mango lassi was passable, she found it a bit thin and synthetic. They offer pretty generic beer, certainly nothing to match the likes of Phantom just round the corner, but Zoë spotted one she’d never tried before called Lal Toofan, so she tried a half. Unimpressed, she left most of it.
My main course didn’t work out as I’d hoped, which was partly due to a mixup between me and my server. I was torn between two chicken dishes and when I asked her what the differences were, I didn’t get a very clear answer except that one was on the bone and the other wasn’t. I thought the one I picked, Andhra chicken, was the one off the bone but when it turned up it was clearly the other way round. Now, that isn’t necessarily a problem: I know many people swear by the flavour of chicken on the bone and I was fully prepared to get stuck in. But for this dish to work, there needed to be enough chicken and it needed to slip off the bone with minimal persuasion.
Neither of those were the case here, so instead you had a handful of small, stubborn little knots where what meat there was had to be persistently prised off. It’s especially a shame because the sauce itself – and there was plenty of it – was glossy, almost-fruity and with a little lurking fire. It maybe lacked the complexity of Reading’s finest examples, but it was no slouch. It was good poured onto my saffron pilau rice, I enjoyed dabbing the thin, slightly shiny butter naan in it. But it needed more chicken. I’ve read some reviews online by people who also ordered this dish and felt short changed: I think if the chicken is on the bone, it’s a pretty basic mistake not to say so on the menu.
Zoë curry was more my bag, although she said it carried too much heat for her liking. Mysore lamb curry was definitely more brooding and punchy than my main, and up my alley. And credit to Masakali because these two dishes were clearly discrete, rather than variations on a single base. That, and the tenderness of the lamb, made you feel like everything had spent time together as part of the cooking process rather than being awkwardly introduced at the last minute. But again, the sauce to meat ratio prioritised the former, as I think you can see from the photo.
By this point my mind was shuffling the Rolodex of Reading’s Indian restaurants, trying to work out what Masakali was similar to, superior to, worse than. If I’d gone with my expectations set by the buzz and the website, I might have been slightly underwhelmed. Knowing how the concept had been put together and that it was run by the people behind Biryani Lounge meant that, if anything, I was pleasantly surprised.
But what was the true experience, behind all that smoke and mirrors, free of preconception and counter-preconception? I decided to mull it over some more, and we settled up: our bill for three starters, two curries with rice, a naan and three drinks came to just under ninety-six pounds, including a ten per cent service charge. I know that because I saw a bill, and you should never trust a restaurant reviewer who doesn’t.
There are things, on reflection, that I do admire about Masakali. They’ve created a pleasing space and, whoever’s ideas the concept and the menu were, they’re not a bad concept or menu. I rated the service and there was much to like about some of the dishes, especially the starters. But beyond that I rather wish I liked them more. They are unfortunate to have arrived in Reading five years after Indian food, and food in Reading in general, changed hugely for the better. If you’d dropped Masakali in Reading in 2013 you might well have seen rave reviews (especially from the Reading Post: they were anybody’s for free scran). But Reading in 2023 is a different place, with higher standards.
So to calibrate Masakali fairly I think it’s better than the likes of the Bina or the now-departed Standard Tandoori, although that isn’t the highest bar in the world. It doesn’t come close to Clay’s, over the bridge. I think the fairer comparison is somewhere like House Of Flavours, but Masakali doesn’t reach that level. It might, yet, but whether it will get anywhere near the grace period House Of Flavours enjoyed is another matter. Masakali isn’t revolutionary, or game-changing, but it has charm and potential, even if it partly achieved it by raiding the recipe books of a gaggle of unnamed Indian grandmas.
But I hope it makes a go of it, because I’m painfully aware that the last time I ate a meal where Masakali is right now it was in a restaurant living on borrowed time. Fingers crossed they escape the same fate.
Masakali – 7.1
93-97 Caversham Road, Reading, RG1 8AN
0118 3048858
Edible Reading 