Month: July 2024

Cafe review: DeNata Coffee & Co.

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

You can have a great network of informants, but sometimes there’s no substitute for getting out and about, keeping your eyes peeled. It’s a fact that our local journalists – what’s left of them, anyway – have forgotten, working from home. So last Saturday, after a very enjoyable lunch at Blue Collar and a coffee at Compound, my friend Dave and I took a wander down the Oxford Road to be virtuous and get some steps in ahead of a few afternoon beers at the Nag’s Head.

Much of what I saw was as expected. Traditional Romanesc are still there, in the spot where I had so many brilliant meals when it used to be Buon Appetito. Vampire’s Den, too (“is that really the only reference to Romania they thought people would get?” was Dave’s take). Oishi had definitely gone from “temporarily closed” to “never coming back in a million years” and Workhouse had been given a very attractive makeover, although the new store front didn’t seem to contain the name anywhere.

But there were, as there always seem to be, places that were news to me. Near the top of the Oxford Road, a place called AfrikInn was selling fufu, fried yam and jollof rice. SORRY WE’RE CLOSED TODAY SEE YOU TOMORROW said handwritten signs on the door and window. Further down, not far from Momo 2 Go, a place called Agnes’ Coffee Shop was open, selling coffee and Polish street food: the word Zapiekanki ran vertically down the brickwork, in a bigger font than the name of the café. I made a mental note of both.

But the place Dave and I were vaguely ambling to check out was Portuguese café DeNata, which opened in March this year, replacing – and this is where it gets confusing – Portuguese café Time 4 Coffee, which opened last August. It had been on my list for ages and although Dave and I were both full from lunch we figured an expedition to research pasteis de nata was a worthy pre-pint pursuit. Dave’s son has just come back from Lisbon on holiday, and hearing all about it made me very glad I had my own trip booked there later in the year.

We ordered a couple of pasteis, and the proprietor – instantly bright and personable – took great pride in showing me the menu; I chatted away with her for so long that poor Dave had to pay for the egg custard tarts. The owner asked me to follow DeNata on Facebook, and I dutifully promised I would. The place was bustling on a Saturday afternoon, and warm, but I didn’t pay it too much attention. Dave and I had a pub table to bag, after all, and a pastel de nata to inhale.

Anyway, the next day I left the house mid-morning, took a couple of buses and turned up at DeNata just before midday for lunch, to eat the meal you’re about to read about. So why did I do that?

Well, two reasons. First of all, the pastel de nata was one of the best I’ve had in this country and easily Lisbon standard – a beautiful cup of light, flaky pastry filled with wobbly, sweet, still-warm egg custard. Why had we been so stupid as to only buy two?

The other reason was that, looking at DeNata online, I got a strong suspicion that they were the real deal. Their menu, which I’d taken care to photograph on my flying visit, was a mixture of more mainstream café fare – pancakes, all day breakfasts, toasted sandwiches – and what the owner had endearingly described to me as “real food”. That’s where the embarrassment of riches could be found: classic Portuguese dishes like caldo verde, bacalhau à brás, feijoada, grilled chicken. Not only that, but they had the country’s two epic sandwiches on offer, the twin pillars of any Portuguese lunch, the francesinha and the bifana.

The menu would have been draw enough, but the social media was the clincher. Pictures of bifanas lined up ready to be eaten, of pasteis fresh out of the oven that day, of various daily specials, of delectable Jesuit pastries packed with frangipane cream. I’ve written before, I’m sure, about Portuguese food being an unjustly overlooked cuisine, but I’m also struck that nobody in Reading has ever quite got it right. Many years ago O Beirão had a crack at it, not entirely successfully, and more recently O Português had lasted a couple of years before going the same way (I should add that Brazilian establishments, in the shape of Pau Brasil and Minas Cafe, appear to have had more luck).

But what also struck me about DeNata, even from my passing interaction with them, was that unlike the likes of O Português this didn’t feel like a closed shop for Portuguese customers only. The owner seemed to have a genuine desire to introduce others to Portuguese food and that, to me, carried the echoes of great communicators like Clay’s Nandana, Geo Café’s Keti, the eponymous Kamal of Kamal’s Kitchen and, of course, Kungfu Kitchen’s inimitable Jo. And when you have someone like that determined to bring their national dishes to life you are, in my experience, on to a good thing.

Arriving on a Sunday just before lunchtime, the place was packed, to the point where only one table was free. It’s an interesting spot – looking at pictures DeNata seems to have inherited a lot of its furniture from its predecessors, but even though it wasn’t a massive room it still felt like one of two halves. To the right as you walk in, it’s a banquette and comfy chairs, a more English-looking café. But on the left, the unfussy tables and chairs on the marble-effect floor, the big TV mounted on the wall, you could have been in Lisbon. That feeling might have been enhanced by the fact that I’m pretty sure I was the only customer in there who wasn’t Portuguese, which is something I rather loved.

The counter was right ahead, with a big coffee machine and plenty of pastries on display. Behind it I could make out another cabinet full of petiscos and salgadinhos, and further back a small kitchen. A lot of good-looking food was packed into a small space – which is also, come to think of it, as good a description of DeNata’s menu as any. I took the last remaining table, just in front of the counter, sort of in both halves of the room and neither at the same time. It somehow seemed appropriate.

I couldn’t quite work out what to have, and ten to midday felt a little early to order lunch, so I started with a coffee and another of those natas. Now, my latte came in one of those tall, almost conical cups that I generally associate with naff, burnt coffee, so I approached it with a hint of trepidation. But honestly, it was absolutely gorgeous – smooth, beautifully made, no bitter note at all. I guess with Workhouse just down the way your coffee has to be pretty good, but given everything I ate from here on in I would still say that DeNata’s coffee is much better than it strictly needs to be (it’s by Kingdom Coffee, which means I owe Kingdom an apology: turns out the issue is with the people making their coffee, not with their beans).

And the eponymous nata? So, so good. Again, still warm, still with plenty of wobble in the custard, an absolute delight that transported you in a matter of mouthfuls. Unable to believe quite how good it was I was torn between wolfing it down and ekeing it out, eventually opting for the former on the basis that I’d buy some to take home at the end of the meal. My only criticism was that maybe I’d have liked it ever so slightly more set, but I’m clutching at straws saying that.

When I’ve found myself in Lisbon, or Porto, I’ve been unable to pass a single day without eating at least one pastel. And when I’ve returned home I’ve tried, and invariably failed, to find something that even comes close to how glorious they are. That’s not to say they’re all awful here. You can get some reasonable ones in this country, if you look – Nata & Co. in Cardiff and Bath springs to mind – and you can get some okay ones in Reading. Tuga Pastries, from Swindon, who sell at the farmer’s market, are decent. But for my money, DeNata’s are probably the best I’ve had in the U.K. The owner, who was every bit as engaging and charming as she’d been the day before, pointed out the shaker full of cinnamon at my table. I made full use of it: again, an indicator that this was the real McCoy.

As I think I said last week, reviewing solo makes choices far more difficult, because a place gets fewer chances to impress and you have to think harder about a representative sample of the menu. I toyed with the idea of flame grilled chicken, or arroz de pato, but in the end I decided to hedge my bets with a couple of snacks followed by a sandwich. This is where DeNata blurs the edges between Portuguese and Brazilian food – a couple of coxinha, for instance, were on the snack menu, but I decided to go for one of my very favourite things, pasteis de bacalhau.

This was, as it turned out, an inspired choice. What turned up were two large fritters, golden yet greaseless, hot but just cool enough that you could eat them by hand. Inside they were impressively light with that welcome hit of bacalhau, saline but not overpowering. I love salt cod, something I always associate with being abroad, and I loved these. They, too, were better than many I’ve had in Portugal and, for that matter, infinitely better than the ones I remember from Pau Brasil, many years ago.

My sandwich choice was difficult but in the end I went for the bifana, lured by those enticing photos I’d seen. This mostly happens in independents, rarely in chains, but what came to my table looked almost exactly like the pictures online and every bit as alluring. A bifana, although there’s some variation across Portugal, is strips of pork cooked in a sauce of beer, garlic and paprika, loaded into a big soft floury roll and eaten like a hungry beast. Okay, that last bit probably only describes my assault on it, but I assure you the rest was very accurate.

And it really is one of the great sandwiches out there, and possibly the best sandwich you’ve never had: no wonder the bifana has been described as a matter of national pride to the Portuguese. Who can blame them? It makes tuna mayo or egg and cress look distinctly bobbins. The pork was tender and the sauce, although hard to describe, was captivating with the smokiness of paprika harmonising with the moreish tang of beer.

They don’t skimp on the sauce either, to the point where the bottom of my bap was getting a little soggy. But it’s an inspired choice of bread – big and capable enough to be gripped and devoured, to keep everything in without worrying about losing precious morsels. As with the pastel da nata, I’m not sure I ate it with an awful lot of poise or dignity, but I absolutely ate the shit out of it all the same.

I was having such a wonderful time that I quite forgot myself, forgot where I was, forgot the RG30 postcode, forgot that I had to work the next day. By this point that wave of customers had left and a new wave had arrived, all bom dia, adeus and obrigado. Everybody, coming and going, was Portuguese. One English couple came in, looked around, seemed overwhelmed and decided to leave.

“Are you saying we’ve come all the way here and now you want to go somewhere else?” said the boyfriend in an exasperated tone, and I know I should have interjected and said “No, stay! The pasteis are amazing and so’s everything else I’ve had”, but I felt self-conscious and I didn’t want to break the spell. I imagine they ended up at Workhouse and they probably had a lovely coffee, but they missed out all the same.

I could have stayed all afternoon, but I had promised to get home and bring some pasteis de nata with me, so I went back up to the counter, ordered a tube of four pasteis and settled my bill. It came to twenty-eight pounds, not including tip, but seven of that was the bounty I took home with me. The pasteis cost less than two pounds each, as did both of my salt cod fishcakes. The most expensive thing I had was my bifana, which cost less than eight pounds, and the most expensive thing on the entire menu, if you feel fancy, is a whole flame-grilled chicken. It’s yours for just under fourteen pounds.

Service was brilliant throughout by the way, every bit as it had been during my passing visit the day before. Even though it was a little Portuguese enclave plonked in the middle of the Oxford Road I didn’t feel like an outsider or a curiosity. I felt welcome, well looked after and well fed and it truly was a wrench to leave. I found it really hard to fault DeNata, and if I picked anything out it would be largely for the sake of it rather than because there’s anything I think they should change.

Well, maybe one thing: it was a bit toasty in there, for a summer day, but I imagine come winter it will be cosy and a positive haven from the cold, dreary Oxford Road outside. Most of all, the things I thought were missing were sheer potential rather than missed opportunities. DeNata is a wonderful place for a coffee, a cake, a snack, lunch or sheer people watching, immersion and escapism.

But I just found myself wishing it was open in the evening, that I could try some of those ribsticking Portuguese classics when the sun had gone down, with a cold Super Bock in front of me and maybe a Boavista match on the big TV. A few of those pasteis de bacalhau with the beer, and then duck and rice, or half a chicken. And then more beer, because places like this are crying out to be enjoyed with a beer (come to think of it, I did see a bottle go to another table when I was there, although I didn’t see beer on the menu).

But all that is me getting ahead of myself – maybe that will be their next venture, at some point in the future. Let’s instead concentrate on the here and now, where somehow, in the middle of the Oxford Road, this wonderful little bubble of not-Reading has materialised, seemingly out of nowhere. It is exactly the kind of place I hoped to discover when I started writing this blog many years ago and, many years on, it’s exactly the kind of discovery that redeems every Popeyes and Taco Bell.

And that, in turn, makes me hopeful that Reading still has the capacity to astound and enthrall, and to attract fascinating new places. Reading hasn’t had many new places open this year and many of the big names that have, like Zia Lucia and Siren RG1, have underwhelmed. But when you can still stumble upon the likes of Dough Bros, or a DeNata, I reckon we’re doing all right.

When I got home, the pasteis de nata were gone in less than an hour. I have strict instructions to forage for them again in the not too distant future.

DeNata Coffee & Co. – 8.5
377 Oxford Road, Reading, RG30 1HA

https://www.facebook.com/hellodenata

Restaurant review: Lucky Lychee, Winchester

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Even though Reading is my patch and always has been, I get asked for recommendations elsewhere fairly often. And my blog is more useful in that respect, I hope, than it used to be, with a number of reviews from beyond Berkshire and a series of European city guides you can consult to help with lunch, dinner or even coffee choices. I’m always encouraged when people tell me the city guides have come in handy: a friend told me a few weeks ago that she and her boyfriend were trying to pick somewhere for a holiday later in the year and she actually said “can’t we just go somewhere Edible Reading has been?” Few higher compliments exist.

Somewhat closer to home, I do like to have a few choice spots in my back pocket for the occasions when people ask for my help. If you want somewhere in London or Bristol, I can sort you out. Ditto Bath, Oxford, Exeter, even Swindon. But beyond that it gets sketchy. My last trips to Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow were so long ago that I’d struggle to know what’s hot and what’s not these days; I could suggest somewhere, but it would be based on research rather than personal experience. And as for the likes of Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham or Liverpool, forget it.

I’ve felt for a while, though, that Winchester was a gap in my repertoire that I ought to fix.

After all, it’s a lovely city, it’s a half hour train hop from Reading and it has plenty to do – excellent shopping, great coffee, good mooching opportunities, historic streets, pretty pubs and a gorgeous cathedral. For a long time my dining option of choice there was Michelin-starred pub the Black Rat, but the last time I went it really wasn’t great and when it subsequently lost its star I wasn’t hugely surprised. A couple of years ago it closed down, the owner citing spiralling energy bills.

And the last time I ate in Winchester it was at Rick Stein’s restaurant there, where I had a pleasant, well-mannered, expensive meal that felt a little like Hotel du Vin but ever so slightly better; Winchester has a Hotel du Vin of its own, which gives you some idea of the kind of place it is. But that was in January 2020, just before everything changed, and catching a whiffy, clapped-out Voyager train to Winchester last weekend I was struck that it had gone from being a city I knew moderately well to a passing acquaintance with whom I’d lost touch but was keen to reconnect.

I had a solo lunch reservation at Lucky Lychee, a restaurant which operated out of a Greene King pub called the Green Man, a fifteen minute walk from the train station and not far from the aforementioned Hotel du Vin. The brainchild of couple James Harris and Nicole Yeoh, it started out in street food and home delivery before getting a residency at another Winchester pub and then moving to the Green Man two years ago. Harris and Yeoh met in Malaysia, and their menu spans Malaysian, Thai and Chinese dishes.

I had discovered it through an Instagram post I stumbled on which was singing the praises of Lucky Lychee’s brunch roti wraps, a fusion of Malaysian and British food, and although the post was written by a person who used the word “sossidge”, there was something about the food that looked unmissable. Sometimes you can just look at a menu and suspect two things: first, that you’ll eat well, and secondly that you’ll find it impossible to decide exactly how you will eat well. Lucky Lychee’s menu was one of those, and I reached the front door of the pub with a heady blend of excitement and anticipation.

It helps that it’s such a handsome pub, all dark muted tones and wood panelling. The front room looked like a proper boozer, if a classy one, with high tables and sturdy leather-topped benches. Further through, near the fireplace, there were comfy booths and tastefully-upholstered sofas. But I was sat in what I imagine was the dining room, on a banquette, looking out on the whole thing, sunlight sneaking in through the windows. The table opposite me was occupied, with a couple making inroads into a tempting-looking lunch order, but otherwise it was pretty quiet. It was one o’clock on a Saturday not that far from payday. Had I made a mistake?

Not based on the looks of the menu, anyway. I actually think a weekend lunchtime might be the trickiest time to visit Lucky Lychee, because you have a selection of what are dubbed snacks but looked like starters and small plates, their lunch menu – a slimmed down version of their evening offering – and the brunch menu.

And that’s where it got really difficult. Because the lunch dishes – 8 hour rendang, tom yum king prawn fried rice and the like – looked extremely tempting. But it was the brunches that first drew me in and that selection was calling to me every bit as much. The idea of curry sausages and fennel cured smoked collar bacon, bound up in a flaky roti wrap with lime mayo and sweet chilli sauce sounded too good to miss. A great hangover cure too, and after a couple of bottles of red with my friend Jerry the night before it sounded just the ticket. What to do?

In the end I decided to postpone the decision by ordering snacks and seeing how I felt after that. But first I ordered a drink. Lucky Lychee boasts a fascinating range of low intervention wines, but postponing the hair of the dog for the time being I decided to try an iced Milo, allegedly a popular chocolate malt drink in Malaysia. It was nice enough, though the ice took some time to get the overall experience below lukewarm. Perhaps the glass was straight out of the dishwasher: either way, it may well have been thoroughly authentic but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just spent four pounds fifty on a Nesquik.

That was the last – the only – misfire of the entire meal, and everything after that was so terrific as to render it insignificant. Chicken karaage was a decent portion for eight pounds fifty, and if it ever so slightly lacked crunch, the flavour that had permeated the chicken thighs, from soy, oyster sauce and rice wine, more than made up for it.

Mayo is a frequent accompaniment for karaage but rarely is it anywhere near as good as Lucky Lychee’s, which was positively awash with citrus. I kept going back and forward between this and my second small plate, trying to figure out which I liked the best.

I think though, on balance, the second small plate was ever better. Billed as Penang pork spring rolls it was really nothing of the kind. I mean, technically it was, but the ratio of dense, delicious meat to wafer-thin, greaseless pastry made it something closer to a sausage roll (or, if you’re three, “sossidge roll”) that was all sausage and no roll.

But that’s not all, because the meat was beautiful – shot through with tiny dice of carrot and, I think, spring onion. The menu said that it was marinated in a 10 spice powder and I could well believe it, because I’m not sure I’ve ever had anything like it.

I’m conscious that this is my third solo review in a row – and yes, I might be auditioning for some additional dining companions. It meant I ordered slightly more food than I strictly needed, to try and give the menu a fair run out. But I was as pleased as Punch not to have to share these spring rolls with any other fucker. They were mine and mine alone, and it was a beautiful moment.

My server, who was downright lovely throughout, gave me a little time after my starters were cleared to make my decision. As I mulled it over, I ordered a glass of white wine, a German riesling which turned out to have plenty of zip and pith, and a little honey. And the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t decide: brunch or lunch? Buttery roti or something with rice?

It wasn’t easy but in the end, believe it or not, I was thinking of you lot. I decided you’d find an idea of Lucky Lychee’s dinner and lunch options more useful than a brunch, however good. So I forwent that roti stuffed with good things, and decided that if I walked away disappointed it was all your fault.

Gladly, nothing was your fault and my main course was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve eaten all year. Billed as honey Marmite chicken, it wasn’t a combination I’d ever considered or even heard of, although a Google suggests that it is indeed a dish eaten in China and Malaysia. But honestly, it was such a phenomenal combination. The chicken, thigh again, was in a crispy, craggy coating, studded with sesame seeds, and it had all the textural interest that the karaage had only just failed to bring to the table. But what made this dish, and made it one I’ve thought about many times since, was the sauce.

What a sauce! You might not like Marmite, you might not like honey – for what it’s worth I love both of them – but this sauce from Lucky Lychee managed to completely transcend either Marmite or honey, being infinitely more than the sum of those things. So you had the huge, salty savoury depth that came from the Marmite (and, apparently, a bit of oyster sauce) and the almost smoky sweetness from the honey, dovetailing and transforming in a way that was nothing less than magical.

Add in some just-cooked peppers and a sprinkling of peanuts and you had one of the most intensely moreish dishes I’ve eaten in well over a year. Put it this way – last month I ate at Kolae, one of the most hyped restaurants in London right now, and I had some of the most fascinating dishes I’ve sampled in a long old time. But nothing there matched the joyousness of this honey Marmite chicken.

I spooned, and then scraped, every last bit of sauce onto my fluffy jasmine rice, I cleaned my plate as best I could without abandoning decorum, and I wondered when I could eat this dish again. I love fried chicken, which ultimately this dish was, but I couldn’t remember trying anything quite like it.

By this point I was gratified to see that a few more people had taken tables in the pub. A young couple came in, him with a London Review Of Books canvas tote, her with one bearing the logo of Shakespeare & Co, the legendary bohemian Paris bookshop, and took the table near the window that had been occupied by others when I came in. I smiled at them – I’m not sure when I reached the age where I’m twinkly and avuncular, but sadly that point has come – and then I peeked nosily as they ordered from the brunch menu.

One of them had ordered a roti that was served absolutely stuffed with beef rendang, and as I saw it come to the table I realised there was nothing for it: I was just going to have to return, sooner rather than later. I realised my mistake hadn’t been to order lunch instead of brunch, it had been not to order brunch, find some excuse to loiter around Winchester for five hours and then go back for dinner. Never mind – I was already planning multiple return visits, with a pretty good idea of at least one person, miffed to have missed out on this trip, who would insist on trying it out.

Lucky Lychee does have a dessert menu, but on this occasion it didn’t have enough to tempt me. It’s mostly ice cream and affogato, with just two more interesting options – a banana spring roll and a piña colada crème brûlée. I had it mind to possibly grab an ice cream from Chococo, across town, so I decided to settle up and amble to Coffee Lab for a latte. My bill came to just under forty-eight pounds, not including tip. The most expensive thing I had was the honey Marmite chicken, which was under fifteen pounds. It would be hard, I think, to spend fifty pounds on lunch better than this.

As you’ve probably gathered, I truly adored Lucky Lychee. And weirdly, just as with Bombay Brothers last week, I came away feeling that I hadn’t seen the restaurant at its absolute best. With Bombay Brothers that was driven by a faint hope that surely it could be better than that, but with Lucky Lychee it was more an awareness that, phenomenal though my meal was, I suspected they were capable of even more.

I need to go back – to try the brunch menu, to work my way through the other snacks, the curry puffs and sesame prawn toasts, and to try the full gamut of their main courses at dinner time. Char siu with honey rhubarb glaze has my name on it, as does the Guinness chicken with lychees. And that rendang.

Who am I kidding? I want to try all of it – and rarely have I come away from a restaurant so simultaneously delighted with everything I had and frustrated that I wasn’t able to polish off more. The other thing I kept thinking was that this is a restaurant operating out of a Greene King pub. So I cast my mind over all of Reading’s Greene King pubs – the Roebuck, the Palmer Tavern, the Outlook and so on – and thought how sad it was that none of them had done anything this bold. Another one to chalk up under I wish Reading had something like this.

Don’t get me wrong, its closest equivalent is the Moderation, a fine pub. But Lucky Lychee was properly next level stuff. As so often, going away from Reading reminds you of the things Reading is still missing. Maybe we’ll get a top notch Malaysian restaurant at some point, but I’m not holding my breath. On the plus side, I now have somewhere to recommend whenever anybody asks me where’s good in Winchester. But this is the drawback: how am I ever going to review anywhere else in the city, if it means missing out on eating at Lucky Lychee?

Lucky Lychee – 9.0
The Green Man, 53 Southgate St, Winchester, SO23 9EH

https://www.luckylychee.uk

Restaurant review: Bombay Brothers

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

I’m grateful for every single one of my readers, but there’s a special place in my affections for people who tip me off about places. Whether it’s my West Reading mole who keeps me posted on the comings and goings of the Oxford Road, my town centre informant who sends me pictures of shuttered restaurants and “coming soon” advertisements, or my other half who is always telling me about new businesses I’ve never even heard of springing up on Instagram, they form an invaluable network helping me keep track of where I ought to try next. I’d compare them to the Baker Street Irregulars, except they’re all very much adults and their catchment area extends far beyond Baker Street.

In particular I very much appreciate people who get in touch to tell me to try somewhere out, whether it’s already on my list or not. When I review somewhere new, there are always a few people who come out of the woodwork to tell me they’ve been going there for ages and it’s great, but only a fraction of those people ever pop up in my DMs raving about the place before I’ve been.

Maybe they like to keep the good places to themselves, maybe they assume I’ll get to them before too long. Or perhaps it doesn’t even cross their minds to contact me, which is fair enough. But it means that when people do recommend somewhere, I’m always especially grateful.

This week’s review came from a message like that, from a reader of the blog who told me to try Bombay Brothers, the Indian restaurant on the ground floor of Kings Walk which opened around the beginning of last year. She specifically raved about Bombay Brothers’ railway lamb, saying it reminded her of the one her grandma used to make. I couldn’t turn my nose up at a recommendation like that, so on a dreary July evening I hopped on the bus into town to give it a whirl.

It’s strange how busy Kings Walk (now apparently called The Village) is these days, and even on a Tuesday night many of its restaurants were doing nicely. Pho looked very crowded, and a fair number of tables were occupied at Fluffy Fluffy, the pancake place opposite. Soju was rammed, and reaping the rewards of doubling its capacity. Even Ding Tea, which is open until a mind boggling half nine at night, was doing a tidy trade; I didn’t go upstairs, but from past experience Chilis, on the top floor, would have been equally bustling.

But at the back of Kings Walk, it was a different story. Jieli Hotpot was closed, as was My Warsaw. And then there was Bombay Brothers. The lights were on, and a man stood outside forlornly waiting to wave people in. But going inside, at just before seven, only one table was occupied. And the interior was a tad strange.

It felt to me like a restaurant that was designed to be full, glitzy and in your face – the way Coconut always seems to be on a Friday night, according to its Instagram account – but without customers it just felt odd. The tables were closely packed into the featureless room in a way that suggested that if it had been full, it wouldn’t have been fun. The chairs looked the part, kind of, but seemed narrow and unforgiving. The music was exceptionally loud, given that I had just increased the total occupancy of the room by 50%, and there was a weirdly synthetic smell in the air.

I was seated at a small table for two by the window. Which was fine, I guess, but I think they could have got away with giving me a bigger table. In the course of my time there – which, as we will see, wasn’t very long – the other table left and a table for four came in. They were far from busy. My server, who was absolutely lovely but if anything seemed a little shaken by having customers, brought over a little wireless table lamp and explained to me that you could change the colour by tapping the top. I saw these quite a lot on my travels in Montpellier a few months ago, but I didn’t see anyone try so hard to turn it into a selling point.

Bombay Brothers’ menu is large and comprehensive, but also quite baffling. There was the standard menu, a set dinner menu (which at £21 for two courses, rice and naan felt like tempting value) and then a little blackboard plonked at the table with specials on it. This was a longish list of additional dishes, most of which you could find in any Indian restaurant, without prices on it.

The drinks menu was incomplete – the two draft beers I could clearly see at the bar weren’t listed anywhere, and nor were the two types of cider I ended up choosing from. I’m well aware that it’s difficult not to sound snippy when you’re critical in this way, but it just felt like the restaurant probably had enough time on its hands to sort mistakes like that.

The core menu definitely featured some Maharashtrian dishes – vada pav, chicken Kolhapuri, Chowpatty bhel puri and fish Koliwada all made an appearance. But other regions, like Hyderabad, were name checked and as is pretty much mandatory these days there was of course a large Indo-Chinese section. For me, the menu felt large and scattergun, and I wish they’d had the courage to live up to the backstory on their website, by zeroing in on dishes from Mumbai.

On the plus side, I didn’t detect any of the strange consultancy so prevalent in Masakali’s menu: no Walker’s crisps here. Like Chilis upstairs, pricing was on a continuum where starters didn’t really cost appreciably less than the mains. Perhaps this is a thing now.

My starter was the best thing I ate, and was pretty promising. Achari chicken tikka was as tender as billed, but still had a little char where it was needed. Plenty of yoghurt in the marinade, I suspect, and the texture was hard to fault. It looked the part too, I liked the fact that it came with a properly dressed salad and came out beautifully plated, without some kind of sizzling gimmick. But I wanted bolder flavours: the menu talks about ginger playing a starring role but I didn’t get a lot of it. And the chutney that came with it was watery and bland, not singing with mint and coriander as one from Clay’s or, say, Kamal’s Kitchen would do.

Even so I rather enjoyed this, and the cider I’d ordered – Peacock, an Indian collaboration with Aspall which was allegedly designed to complement spicy food – went nicely with it. When another server, the chap that had been standing outside trying to lure people in, took my plate away he said “it wasn’t too spicy, was it?” which seemed to me to be part of the problem. I’d have liked it to be unapologetically spicy, rather than have this kind of question as my empty plate was taken away. “No, it was nice. Spicy isn’t a problem” I said, but I’m not sure whether he heard me or believed me.

Now, at this point I have to mention possibly the biggest problem with Bombay Brothers – and frustratingly, one of the easiest ones to fix. I reckon my starter came out no more than ten minutes after I placed my order, which to me is on the quick side.

I feel like I’ve said this many times before on this blog, but although I understand that when a restaurant has very few customers it’s tempting to bang out orders fast it’s a temptation they ought to resist. People don’t go to a restaurant to be rushed in this way, or at least not a restaurant of the kind I’m assuming Bombay Brothers is trying to be. If I wanted to eat that quickly I would go to Shree Krishna Vada Pav, or Marugame Udon, or any of a number of other places in Reading. And I’d spend a lot less money in the process.

And I’m afraid it didn’t stop there because honestly, no more than five minutes after my starter plate had been whipped away, along came my main. And again, I’m trying to be constructive rather than chippy or snarky, but a restaurant that has been open since early 2023 has had quite long enough not to be making this kind of mistake. But never mind, because this was the railway lamb. Did it live up to all that promise?

Unfortunately not. It looked attractive – to Bombay Brothers’ credit presentation is not a weak suit – but it flattered to deceive. The sauce managed that rare combination of being oily and watery at the same time, and although it did have some heat I didn’t find it compelling in the way that dishes from Clay’s, Chili’s or Pappadams are.

But also, you had to like the sauce a lot because there wasn’t much meat: I think I counted half a dozen pieces of lamb cloaked in that sauce. Perfectly pleasant pieces of lamb, but not especially big ones. But what was even weirder is that there were about four big pieces of bone in there, too. It was striking, because the menu hadn’t mentioned that the railway lamb was on the bone.

But the thing is, it wasn’t. All the pieces of lamb – all six of them – were floating around unattached to the bone, and the pieces of bone didn’t have any meat on them. I’ve had curry off the bone, I’ve had curry on the bone. I know this probably marks me out as a flavour heathen, but the former is my preference. But curry with the bone? That’s a new one on me. If that had had the effect that the gravy was thickened and boosted by all those shreds of slow cooked lamb, I might have been all for it. But that wasn’t the case.

All in all, from taking my seat to finishing my main, thirty minutes had passed. And that might have been okay if the food was an absolute steal, or if it was utterly magnificent: well, maybe only if it was a steal, because it’s a crying shame to rush magnificent food. But the truth is that this was neither, and as I asked for my bill – which came as swiftly as everything else – I found myself wondering what Bombay Brothers was like at its absolute best, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t seen that.

My dinner came to thirty-six pounds, not including tip. That’s just over a pound a minute.

I really hate writing reviews like this, because I’ve read so many indifferent reviews of independent restaurants that have a sneering tone – Bristol reviewers specialise in this – and sneering is the last thing I would want to do. But it’s hard not to see all the problems with Bombay Brothers rather than the potential. The room lacks homeliness, comfiness or charm. The music needs to be turned down. The menu – or rather multiple menus – feel large and unfocused. And the timing issues, for me, are one of the most basic mistakes you can make. I’m trying to be constructive in pointing these things out, I promise, but it feels like a lot to sort out.

And I was hoping I could say something to the effect of “But never mind! All that can be fixed, but the food is amazing”. But I can’t, sadly: the food I had was a mixture of the quite nice and the nowhere near good enough. I should say, in the interests of balance, that this is one review where I really wish I hadn’t been dining solo, because two different starters and two different mains could have revealed a very different restaurant, and I might well have been wrong. I might well be wrong anyway: it’s been known to happen.

But I worry for Bombay Brothers. Because when you’re in a mall with Chilis upstairs and Bhel Puri House round the corner, on a road which also boasts Pappadams, Madras Flavours, House Of Flavours and Shree Krishna Vada Pav, you simply have to be better than this.

Even the person who recommended Bombay Brothers and that railway lamb to me – and I feel profoundly sorry that I didn’t agree with her about it – told me that she only went to Bombay Brothers in the first place because Chilis was full. I fear that tells its own story. And the thing is, it’s true that Bombay Brothers may get some new customers that way. But I’m not sure, on this showing, that they’ll be able to hang on to them.

Bombay Brothers – 6.2
3-4 Kings Walk, Kings Street, RG1 2HG
0118 9566666

https://bombaybrothers.co.uk

Restaurant review: Dough Bros

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

I moved house last week, and suddenly everything changed. My little slice of Reading, my walks, maps, routes and routines were no more. No more waking up in the Village and mooching into town for lunch, no more strolls round Reading Old Cemetery or Palmer Park, no more number 17s and Little Oranges buses, no more Retreat just round the corner. After seven years of East Reading life, it was time for something different.

So on moving day Zoë and I found ourselves standing, sleep-deprived, outside a large house that wasn’t quite ours yet, rented van parked up in the drive, waiting for the agent to arrive and check us in. Meanwhile, across town, movers were loading boxes into a far bigger van from a far smaller house that was no longer ours. The sun was blazing, and I strolled across Cintra Park to Greggs, of all places, to pick up coffee and pastries. This is my neighbourhood now, I thought to myself.

I’m writing this over a week later, after seven days of unpacking and tip slots and IKEA trips (I’d forgotten how depressing that place is) and everything is starting to take shape. A lot of the boxes are unpacked, the kitchen is in some kind of order and, best of all, we finally got a new bed – high off the ground, with a big firm mattress, like climbing on to a cloud at night. The walls are fresh-painted white, the blinds are new and Venetian and the rooms flood with summer sunlight.

And every morning I wake up and can’t quite believe I live here, in this new place.

There’s a clothes line in the garden, and I get to experience the meditative joys of hanging out the washing, taking it in when it’s been dried by the sun and smells of heaven. Let’s not talk about the huge rent hike, or the council tax band of this place, or the fact that I can’t afford to eat out quite so often: let’s just think about the smell of that washing from the line.

On our very first night, exhausted but with the rest of the week off to unpack and settle in, we wandered to pretty much our nearest restaurant, Kungfu Kitchen. Like me they moved recently, although a few doors down Christchurch Green maybe isn’t quite as big a shift as mine. And their new site is lovely and snazzy – especially the light feature projecting fish onto the floor – but it was also reassuring just how like their old place it was. The food was still outstanding, and the welcome was the same, because Jo and Steve do not change: I particularly enjoyed Jo frogmarching customers to the loo, proudly boasting that Kungfu Kitchen has the best toilets in the world. Her words, not mine.

But Kungfu Kitchen is only one of our nearest restaurants, and I popped into one of the others to take something home the following night, just before an England match, fresh from a purgatorial trip to the tip. Dough Bros opened in March at the top of Northumberland Avenue and has built up quite a following in three short months. It’s run by a couple of friends, one of whom also runs the neighbouring barber Short, Back & Vibes.

I stopped by on a sweltering hot day and picked up a couple of takeaway pizzas, and as I waited I chatted away with Robbie, one of the owners. He seemed to know his stuff when it came to pizza, and told me that he was a fan of Sarv’s Slice (“they use the same flour and tomatoes as us”, he said). But he also said that his pizza was a little different from Sarv’s, and different from the floppy Neapolitan style that’s taken over the U.K. I saw that in action as he took both my pizzas out of the oven, tapped the bottom and decided they needed a little longer.

I didn’t have to talk to Robbie for long to realise that he was a proper pizza obsessive, and as I watched him pipe ricotta onto one of the pizzas I found myself thinking that this place, if it lived up to my experience up to that point, could be something very special. Robbie said that business was picking up, although there were some quiet weeks, and that they were trying other channels, mainly Instagram, to get more customers.

I liked his candour, as evidenced when I asked whether Dough Bros made its own chicken tenders. “No, we buy those in. Pizza is the thing we’re passionate about here.” I respected that, and later on he gave me Dough Bros’ mission statement in one short, simple sentence. “We’re trying to transcend Whitley,” he said.

Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, or spoil what follows, I liked my pizza very much. It was significantly better than England’s ropy performance against Slovenia that night, and both of them were better than the torrent of dross that came out of the gob of ITV’s chief prattler Sam Matterface. I liked it so much that I recommended it to my sister-in-law when she came to visit the new house, and she collected a couple of pizzas to take home to the rest of the family.

And I even liked it so much that at the end of the week we ordered a couple more, this time via Deliveroo, which we ate on our big comfy sofas in the new house while watching the last televised debate between our old prime minister and the new guy: for some reason, I associated Dough Bros takeaways with stodgy bore draws.

When I put a picture up of my pizza on Instagram I got one of two responses. Either people said “that looks good, where is it from?” or “that’s from Dough Bros!” That, more than anything, made me think that Reading was divided into two camps: Dough Bros fans, and people who hadn’t been there yet. So this week, one night when Zoë was working a late shift, I ambled back across Cintra Park to have my pizza in for a change.

Dough Bros is near the end of a run of shops at the top of Northumberland Avenue, before it descends the hill into the heart of Whitley. Short Back & Vibes is next door, and brand new Indian restaurant Curry Rasoi is at the other end. Inside you get a clear idea that a lot of Dough Bros’ trade is probably takeaway, because it was on the basic side: a few no-frills tables and chairs on one side of the room, two booths on the other.

The ceiling tiles were black and white checkerboard, which gave the disconcerting feeling that the room was upside down. One wall had a couple of guitars mounted on it, the other had some framed LPs and various pieces of wall art which looked like they came from a section in Home Bargains called “I just opened a pizza restaurant”. I promise this is affectionate, by the way: I rather liked it. I felt like I could have been in America, by a dusty freeway, instead of in RG2.

The menu was extensive, but also interesting in terms of what was and wasn’t on it. Many of the tried and tested combinations weren’t offered – no capers, olives and anchovies for me – and the menu gave a refreshingly wide berth to some of the on-trend toppings you see everywhere. That means ‘nduja only crops up in a couple of places, there isn’t any burrata to be seen and even hot honey, which seems to be ubiquitous in pizza joints lately, is deployed sparingly.

The overall choice was more American than Italian but even then there were some interesting curveballs designed by Dough Bros – one involved biltong, and might have tempted me but for the presence of sweetcorn. A couple involved a barbecue base rather than the classic tomato and again, appealed but perhaps for next time. And most tempting was the most oddball of all, the “Rogan”: Robbie had told me on a previous visit that it was based on a conversation between Joe Rogan and Elon Musk on a podcast about whether anchovies and pineapple was a genius pizza combo or an aberration.

Leaving aside the idea of ordering anything endorsed by a Covid vaccine denier, or social media’s single biggest tosspot, I think it sounds rather interesting, and I can’t rule out ordering it on another occasion. But I decided against it, and in the back of my mind I worried that ordering it would give out some weird signal that I really wanted to get drawn into a conversation about investing in crypto. I’ve lost track of the number of baristas over the years that have tried to give me the chat about crypto, come to think of it.

Anyway, for my sins I reordered the pizza I’d eaten the very first time I tried Dough Bros, the one which Zoë, stricken with pizza envy, had ordered the second time we tried Dough Bros. The Honey Honey was a comparatively simple affair – double pepperoni, ricotta and hot honey – but having tried it once I was very much in a hurry to try it again. My order, for a pizza and a can of elderflower lemonade (Dough Bros doesn’t have an alcohol licence) came to fifteen pounds fifty.

They don’t rush at Dough Bros, and nor should they. I was quite happy sipping my lemonade, looking out the full length windows at the summer evening outside, people watching and contemplating my new surroundings. I felt thoroughly transported, I thought I had a decent pizza on the way and nowhere in particular I needed to be any time soon. I was the only customer, and it seemed to be a quiet Tuesday: unlike my previous flying visit I didn’t see people turning up with their green Deliveroo backpacks, ready to find pizzas a new home.

When my pizza arrived, I remembered just how good they looked and how huge they were – fourteen inch, I think, a big, stretched, irregular wonder. This is not a pizza assembled with an eye on cost control, the way the likes of Franco Manca used to be, and the toppings were as generous as they were haphazard. It really was a beautiful thing, a symphony of red yellow and white, with a slight glimmer from the plentiful drizzling of hot honey. I’d enjoyed it at home, several minutes after it had come out of that oven, but I realised that this was the real deal: no delay, no messing about. Out of the oven, onto a plate lined with paper, sliced into eight and brought over without delay.

I sighed with happiness, and then I set about my task.

It’s kind of delightfully incongrous how on trend this little place near the edge of Whitley is, by the way. I read a piece in the Telegraph last week about how Neapolitan pizza was on its way out and American pizza was the hot new thing: crispier, more rigid pizza without that sloppy centre. It cited the much hyped Crisp Pizza W6 in Hammersmith as the vanguard of a new movement offering New York pizza, and mentioned other trailblazers in Hertfordshire, in Margate, in Brighton. But would you believe that you can also get exactly that kind of pizza here in Reading, on Northumberland Avenue? Me neither, but it turns out you can.

And it really was a beauty and, just as importantly, an utter joy to eat. Forget all those times you’ve gingerly picked up a piece of Neopolitan pizza to find the tip of the triangle drooping platewards. This was a rugged pizza, to be folded lengthways and devoured. The tomato sauce was deep and impeccable, the pepperoni a crispy guilty pleasure. And the little dabs of ricotta, offset with the slight tickling heat of the honey, made every bite slightly different but equally wonderful.

I can honestly say that it was one of my favourite things I’d eaten all year and as I’ve experienced a few times in the course of writing this blog – when visiting the likes of Clay’s, or Kungfu Kitchen, or Bakery House, or Namaste Kitchen for the first time – I had this feeling of real good fortune that of all the towns across England where these chaps could have opened their restaurant, they happened to pick Reading.

It bothered me a little that the restaurant was empty, although when I’d chatted to Robbie the week before he said it was generally very busy, and I felt that pull, familiar by now, that I wanted to do what I could about that.

There’s very little more to say: I had already settled up, so I told Robbie that it was marvellous and I prepared to make my way home through Cintra Park, full and happy, watching significantly more active people than me running, kicking balls and making the most of the long evenings. But before I did, Robbie asked my name and told me he remembered me from the previous week. I imagine he remembers all of his customers: he struck me as very good at that sort of thing.

So there you have it, that’s Dough Bros: a marvellous spot, and the unlikeliest of discoveries. If you live nearby, I recommend going. If you live further away, get a delivery and pop the oven on to pep it up when it arrives (if your oven is big enough to accommodate one of their whopping pizzas, that is). But either way, if you like pizza at all I think you might want to check it out. Whitley is very lucky to have them, but I do kind of hope that they manage to achieve their ambition and transcend the place. Fingers crossed that this review plays a small part in that.

Dough Bros – 8.4
87 Northumberland Avenue, Reading, RG2 7PT
07922 477519

https://www.instagram.com/doughbrospizza_reading/