“I bet the word most overused in restaurant reviews is nice,” said my old friend Mike. We were sitting in the Rising Sun’s courtyard, the sun blazing down, drinkers and diners packed into the al fresco space, our empty starter plates in front of us. The starters had been, well, nice.

“I used to have a friend who said that about everything. Yeah, it’s nice. He said that about beers, about restaurants, you name it. And it wasn’t that he liked everything, it’s just that he didn’t have opinions about anything. With hindsight, not a massive surprise that he was a LibDem.”

“You say it when something’s pleasant, but if something’s bad and you don’t want to say so, you’d also call it ‘nice’, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe, but the word I always overuse is lovely. When I write a review I go back, hit Ctrl-F and find every reference to lovely, try and reduce it to one per review.”

I do, in truth, not always succeed. Our philosophical discourse was interrupted by our very pleasant, distinctly overworked server coming to take our dishes away. “Did you enjoy your starter?” she said.

“Yes, thank you. It was lovely” I said. Mike raised an eyebrow as she walked away.

“See, you’ve used your one lovely up already.”

The Rising Sun is one of Reading’s biggest openings of the year, one of three big names to take a chance on a site in the town centre, and the last of the triad I’ve got round to reviewing, after Zia Lucia and Siren RG1. It opened at the end of June, and is owned by Heartwood Inns, the people who own Brasserie Blanc. They currently have about 20 pubs and backed by private equity, as so often seems the case, the Rising Sun is part of a eye-watering £100m investment aimed at almost doubling the size of their portfolio.

Heartwood Inns has restored the old Sun Inn on Castle Street, a pub I mainly remember for two things – having a bar billiard table and not being as much fun as the Brewery Tap, which was roughly opposite it. Apparently they’ve reverted to the previous name for the pub, although it does cause confusion given that Reading also boasts the Rising Sun Arts Centre; let’s hope the other Rising Sun, the old Tut N’ Shive pub at the end of Forbury Road, never makes a comeback.

I’d watched the renovation project taking shape as I walked past, either on my way to acupuncture or to Filter Coffee House. And it looked like they’d thrown money at the site until it had bounced off. Visiting on a very balmy midweek evening, I got to see the pub in full swing and it was really hard to deny that they’ve done an outstanding job. The courtyard, some of which is covered and some of which is made up of little sheltered booths, is an impressive space that manages to not feel in the middle of Reading at all: you certainly wouldn’t necessarily twig that Blue Collar Corner, and the skanky Broad Street Mall, are just the other side of the walled garden.

I’ve read some comments online saying that it feels like being in Spain: the weather helped, but I don’t think I’d go that far. It felt more like being outside Hotel du Vin in Henley or Brighton, a little bit of mega-grifters Muddy Stilettos‘ territory plonked in the centre of the Ding. The inside is every bit as fetching. I ate there the week it opened – on my own dollar I might add – and the dining room at the back of the pub is plush and sleek, even if the wallpaper felt a little over the top for my liking.

The other thing worth saying, because it’s something I find admirable about the Rising Sun, is that although it has a big outside space and a large dining room it’s clearly intended still to function as a pub, and the rooms closer to the front feel more like they are for drinking without eating.

Hats off to them for that, when so many food driven pubs get to the stage where you feel eating is compulsory. It’s a shame, though, that they didn’t have more interesting drinks to enjoy while you were there. The keg options were macro stuff like Camden Hells and Pravha, and even the cask choices were dreary old Doombar and Tribute: only Loddon’s Citra Quad was either local or interesting. The suggestion is that this crowd would rather have wine, a Spritz or a G&T, which struck me as a wasted opportunity.

We took our table outside, after some confusion where they decided they needed to clean it first and took a while to do so. Then I ordered a pint of cider, because it was very hot and I was very thirsty, and Mike decided he’d look at the wine list and take his time. And we waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, it took so long that I decided I’d scrap the cider and join Mike on the wine, so I had to walk inside and up to the bar to ask if we could change our order. I found my pint and a jug of tap water waiting on the bar, where they’d seemingly been for a while, so I gave up and went back to my table. They wouldn’t let me carry it myself, although it would have been quicker.

In their defence, the place was very busy on what was pretty much the hottest day of the year so far. And actually, sipping my pint of Cornish Whatever-It-Was and watching the toing and froing it was apparent that the staff were working their socks off. It felt like the place needed a few more of them, but this space was built for a hot day and it was hard to imagine, even at a weekend, that they could possibly be more busy than this.

We ordered a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet, at a markup of nearly three times retail price, and pored over the menu. When it arrived it wasn’t as chilled as it needed to be – again, a consequence of being busy and that hot, hot day – and when we flagged someone down they very charmingly, very quickly brought us a wine cooler with ice in it. Not quite cold enough it was not quite there, but when it was colder and crisper it suited us just fine.

I remember looking at the Rising Sun’s menu in the run-up to them opening and thinking it looked a little unexciting: safe, beige, Middle England pretending to let its hair down sort of stuff. There were signs that it had been changed already since my first visit, but I stand by that. It’s all very Modern European, slightly Modern British but it wouldn’t scare anybody off. Like an upmarket Bill’s, you could say. So the starters were things like cheese soufflé, prawn cocktail, heritage tomato salad and ham hock terrine with very few signs of eccentricity or idiosyncracy. Most were at or close to ten pounds.

And then the mains were divided into sections that didn’t really seem to bear much relation to the dishes in them. The menu felt all over the place, with Merguez tagine next to bouillabaisse, a roasted pepper and aubergine tian – how often do you see the word tian on a menu any more? – further down. And then there was a section marked “Seasonal Favourites” which was a nice idea, but a pork and apricot roulade with Dauphinoise potato and hispi cabbage didn’t feel summery in the slightest.

There were steaks, presumably because people expect them, and a Classics section including a pie and a burger. It was a hard menu to choose from, but mostly because I felt like it had been pulled together by a committee. It all reminded me a little of Bel and the Dragon, and I hoped it wouldn’t underwhelm the way Bel always had.

Our starters arrived about forty minutes after we ordered, a wait that’s very much on the outer reaches of okay. I couldn’t talk Mike into a Scotch egg, one of the highlights of my meal at the Rising Sun in its opening week, but he did order a starter I’d had on that visit. Trout tartare was a refined, delicate, well-executed dish with plenty of trout on a base of avocado, the whole thing neatly topped with circles of pickled radish and a little heap of roe. A couple of slices of rye bread completed the picture, and Mike made pretty short work of it.

He thought, as I had in June, that it was a well constructed, pleasing, subtle plate of food. It was, in short, nice.

I am trying not to order the things I always order, so I chose the Morteau sausage salad rather than a terrine or a prawn cocktail. And it was interesting, so I’m glad I did. It was in some respects a classic brasserie salad – a pile of well-dressed endive, little nubbins of pancetta, a poached egg on top – Burford Brown, the menu said – which was good but, I think, could have done with being poached for slightly longer.

But what made it interesting, and almost more subversive than you’d guess from the menu, were the little touches. There were beautiful slabs of waxy potato, seemingly on the run from a Niçoise salad somewhere, but they had a welcome tang of vinegar which almost made me wonder if they were pickled. The crispy onions scattered on top, and the snips of chive, spoke of an attention to detail I hadn’t entirely been expecting. And the Morteau, cut into discs and fried until crisp, was a positive joy, supplying the salt the dish needed. It was a restrained, well behaved dish, mostly classic but with a few welcome twists. I rather enjoyed it: I cleaned my plate. But I’m struggling to describe it without using the N word.

If the two starters represented the understated, positive meaning of nice, the mains better illustrated nice as the adjective you use when you don’t want to be unkind. I’d chosen grilled prawns with black rice, prawn bisque, peas and broad beans. That does sound like a little taste of Andalusia here in the Home Counties, and I so wanted it to deliver. But what I got fell very far short.

The prawns, sanitised and shelled with the heads and tails left on, were okay if not remarkable. I wanted to see evidence that they’d been on a grill, but they were bland and unscathed. But the rice was what really let this dish down. I was hoping for proper arroz negro, with that distinctive, intense tang of squid ink, the whole thing salty and ozonic. I didn’t get that, so I suspect this was black rice where squid ink hadn’t played a part. But nor had this alleged prawn bisque, because what I really got was dull and cloying, with an almost-sweet taste to it. Worst of all, this wasn’t so much underseasoned as unseasoned full stop.

So far I’ve compared the Rising Sun to Bill’s and Bel and the Dragon, but just to load on the comparisons: I’ve never had a consistently brilliant meal at Thames Lido, but this dish is the kind of thing they tend to put on their menu, and I’d put good money on their version being a lot better than this. It was twenty pounds: I’m so anaesthetised to rising prices than I no longer view that as expensive, but it still didn’t feel like good value.

Mike went for the dressed crab with chips and crab mayonnaise. It looked okay to me – I remember the Rising Sun’s chips being one of the things they did relatively well – but he was ready with the faint praise again when we’d both finished.

“What did you think?”

“Well, it sort of is what it is. I appreciate them going to all that trouble to get all the crab out, but, well…”

“Nice?”

“That’s the one.”

I felt like we ought to have dessert, just to try all of the menu, and I just about managed to talk Mike into it. I think he probably ordered better than I did, and his sticky toffee pudding came with the sort of glossy butterscotch sauce you can almost see your reflection in. It had Normandy crème fraîche on top – which I would always pick over clotted cream, personally – and Mike appeared to like it. It seemed to have a completely random biscuit sandwiched between the crème fraîche and the sponge, which the menu neglected to mention. And I know I’m bandying around a lot of comparisons in this review but was it as good as, say, London Street Brasserie‘s sticky toffee pudding? Probably not.

I’d chosen a Basque cheesecake, having been lured in by seeing pictures of it on the Rising Sun’s Instagram account. And again, it was perfectly pleasant but not pleasingly perfect. It wasn’t the biggest piece, and the texture was slightly woolly. Despite strawberries being everywhere right now, the grand total of one strawberry had been quartered and arranged artfully on the plate along with blueberries and a squiggle of coulis.

It didn’t feel like they were pushing the boat out and again, Reading is very well served for Basque cheesecake. North of the river, Geo Café sells a phenomenal one and next door to them, at Serdio Ibericos, you can find another almost definitive version. The texture is a dream, the portions are impressively huge, and they cost a lot less than the eight pounds fifty the Rising Sun is charging.

By the time we got the bill the place was slightly less packed and it was a calmer, more agreeable place to be. But even so neither of us felt like ordering another drink so we settled up and sloped off to the Allied for a post mortem. Our bill for two – three courses, one pint and a bottle of wine – came to just under one hundred and thirty pounds, including an optional ten per cent tip.

I’m sorry that this review is a tad lukewarm – I expect you’ve figured that out by now – and that the rating further down is equally lukewarm. I should do the positives first and say that it is a great site which is both comforting and upmarket, well thought out and well designed. I can add that none of the food was actively bad, and there were some things – that salad, the Scotch egg I had on my first visit – that I rather enjoyed.

But that’s all the positives done. Because when I read back through some of the places I’ve compared the Rising Sun to, not always favourably, they’re far from aspirational. Thames Lido, which has never really delivered. London Street Brasserie, which has a long track record but is hardly exciting. Bel and the Dragon, which had a great location but could never offer dishes to match it. Bill’s, which to me is where people go if they don’t really like food.

Mike summed it up. “This is somewhere I could take my parents” he said, and it does fit the bill as a completely safe, totally unexciting place where you could have an average-to-reasonably-decent meal where everybody can find something on the menu and nobody will be offended. But, and I have a feeling I’ve said this before: what kind of ambition is that? Because Bill’s already exists, and London Street Brasserie already exists and I’m not entirely sure there’s enough space in the market between those two for the Rising Sun to swoop in, get shedloads of customers and make a lot of money.

In fact at those prices, provided you were prepared to forego that outside space (which, in about a month, everyone will be for the best part of six months) I suspect you’d be better off spending slightly less money going to Côte while you still can, before they follow the likes of TGI Friday and Browns and shut up shop.

The Rising Sun has a superb outside space, and they probably have a couple of months of goodwill as people are drawn in by the novelty and the sheer quality of the refurb. But, much like Zia Lucia and Siren RG1, I fear that they don’t have anywhere near enough about them to keep customers coming back. I worry that nice restaurants – and the Rising Sun is nothing if not nice – risk finishing last.

The Rising Sun – 6.8
16 Castle Street, Reading, RG1 7RD
0118 3049936

https://risingsunreading.com