Month: September 2024

Restaurant review: Deccan House

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Last year, a couple of gentlemen called Jez and Ken came to a readers’ lunch I held at Clay’s, and they’ve been to every lunch I’ve organised since. They are great company, clearly great friends, both a little older than me. Jez has a line in impressively busy shirts and the personality to carry them off, which is something I envy.

My most recent readers’ lunch was also at Clay’s, and Jez mailed me to express his regret that he couldn’t make it. It was his birthday that day, he said and his wife was organising something for him. What he didn’t know was that his wife had organised something on another day, and had asked Ken to take him to the readers’ lunch as a birthday surprise. Ken asked me if I could find space for them both and happily I could, so he got to celebrate his birthday with sixty or so equally hungry Reading food fans. I love it when things like that come together.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this is that earlier in the year – about six months ago – I got messages from Jez and Ken, independent of one another, urging me to put Deccan House on my radar. It’s a little place on Cemetery Junction between the stained glass shop and Ye Babam Ye, ostensibly doing Hyderabadi food: Jez and Ken had gone for dinner there, and both of them were impressed. Jez said it was the first time he’d tried dosa (he sent me a picture, “with my glasses included for scale”). Ken said that although it was a very different proposition to Clay’s he had really enjoyed the food.

I always act on tip offs, even if sometimes it takes me longer than others. So, better late than never, I made it to Deccan House one evening this week to act on Jez and Ken’s recommendations. Now, my dining companion for this review is someone regular readers may remember from a few months back, namely my wife Zoë. Remember her? She hasn’t featured in these pages much in the last three months, because she managed to pick up a stress fracture in her metatarsal (“the Wayne Rooney injury”, as my friend Reggie sagely put it).

So she has spent most of the summer housebound, in a moon boot, on crutches, going for scans and appointments and physio, and dealing with it with her customary good humour. Good humour, I must say, that has waned as the recovery has taken longer than any of us wanted. It turns out – and this mightn’t surprise any of you who read this blog regularly – that I can be quite annoying to live with when you’re cooped up indoors most of the time. Who knew?

Anyway, I managed to convince her to come out of semi-retirement this week, because the stars aligned: it was still impossibly cold at home (and, it being September, we haven’t yet cracked and put the heating on), she couldn’t be arsed to cook for herself and, perhaps crucially, I managed to convince her that this would be worth leaving the house for, thanks to those glowing reports from Jez and Ken. So we hopped on the first of two buses – figuratively in my case, literally in hers – and headed for Cemetery Junction to see what was what.

Ken had told me in his mail that Deccan Hut “had more of a feel of a diner than a restaurant” and I could see what he meant. It was a bland but not unpleasant room with tables and red chairs on one side, and red-banquetted booths on the other – the latter, I suppose, being what gave it that diner-esque air. So far, so similar to the Indian and Nepalese restaurants of the Wokingham Road, the likes of Biryani Lounge or Yo Momoz. But this felt like it had a little more soul – it wasn’t brutally functional like the former, which resembles a crap zone from the Crystal Maze. Nor was it generically glitzy like the latter.

There were tasteful lampshades and nice prints up – stylised pictures of Indian cities on one wall, of Indian dishes on the other. And there was pretty loud music without much soft furnishing to soak it up: they did that thing I wish Indian restaurants wouldn’t, of playing Indian music until some white customers come in and then switching to crud like Ed Sheeran (he wouldn’t be in love with the shape of me, that’s for bloody sure).

Fortunately, they swapped back when more customers came in, a family of four, and sat at the next table. Until then we were the only punters, but there was a steady stream of Just Eat riders coming in to fill up their orange rucksacks, and the staff were reconfiguring a number of tables behind us in preparation for what looked like a sizeable group.

Another really encouraging thing about Deccan Lounge, that made me think it would be more promising than its Wokingham Road peers, was how concise the menu was. At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks, it wasn’t too big or too small. It looked, on paper, just right: a breakfast section with idly, some chaat, about a dozen starters, half a dozen curries, three biryani and a range of dosa. Now, that might still sound like a lot but it was nowhere near as compendious as a menu from Biryani Lounge with its twenty-five – yes, I counted them – types of biryani or Yo Momoz which has something like thirty starters. Yes, I counted those too.

No, by comparison this was a noise-cancelling menu, and I liked its simplicity. I also got a sense during my meal that this wasn’t just a chop and change, reconfigurable list of components, from eavesdropping on the table next to me talking to our server. One of them wanted chilli paneer, but without the sauce or the peppers: just the paneer. Was that possible? And our server said yes, everything was made fresh to order so they could have whatever they liked, however they wanted it – more hot or less hot, without this or that. Not only was that not too much trouble, but it said good things about what was going on in the kitchen.

But because I’m a basic bitch when it comes to chilli paneer, we had ours as the kitchen intended. And I’m really pleased about that, because it was a good indicator of the quality at Deccan House. I often order this dish, and like to think of myself as a bit of an aficionado. And for me, the best specimens in Reading are probably Bhel Puri House’s, which is dry and caramelised, crisp-edged and moreish, and Shree Krishna Vada Pav’s, which is sticky, savoury and punchy. I think that Deccan House’s rendition is up there with both of them.

It was a generous portion with pieces of just-cooked pepper and onion, festooned with coriander and with that perfect combination in the paneer of bite, squidginess and those almost-burnt edges. But what made it was a deep and spiky sauce which lulled you into a false sense of security and then struck. Struck to the point where by the end of the dish you were trawling your remaining cubes through the sauce clinging to the bottom of the plate, determined not to waste any.

I know I’m doing a lot of comparing here, but I had a similar dish at Yo Momoz, a couple of weeks before Jez and Ken’s fateful dinner at Deccan House. Yo Momoz’s version is nowhere near as good, only slightly cheaper and a damned sight smaller.

Even more ludicrously priced was Deccan House’s chicken pakora. For seven pounds, you got a really substantial plate of superbly coated, superbly cooked chicken thigh with, again, plenty of zip to it. I didn’t know whether the heat came from the coating or from the glorious diced raw onion on top, but either way I wasn’t complaining. We raced through this and the paneer, but one thing I loved about Deccan House was that the two dishes came out one after the other, sequencing a meal rather than just plonking everything on the table at once.

The heat was such that Zoë had to stop before the end and leave me to polish off the last fiery forkfuls. We both took grateful slurps of a mango lassi which pleasantly surprised me with how thick and beautifully done it was. Again, unlike many of the more affordable Indian restaurants I’ve reviewed in Reading, its lassi was infinitely better than it needed to be.

The dosa, which they brought out almost as a palate cleanser before our main courses, was the best I’ve tried in Reading. I’ve eaten them in various places over the years – Chennai Dosa, as was, Vel before it mysteriously burned down, the town centre rivals Crispy Dosa and Madras Flavours – and I’m not sure I’ve ever really “got” it. Sometimes it’s been okay, but it’s never set my world alight the way dosa does for some people. But at Deccan House, I felt like I could see what the fuss was about.

This wasn’t about the dosa itself – yes, as usual it was a coppery tube of tactile delight that was perfect for dipping and scooping and making your fingers gleam, forcing you to ask for more napkins. That, with a dosa, is I suppose a given. But what set Deccan House’s dosa apart were the things you scooped up and dipped into. The masala was the most enjoyable I’ve had in Reading, that perfect mixture of smooth, comforting spiced mash, onion and the occasional firmer piece of floury spud. It didn’t have that off-putting note I’ve sometimes picked up elsewhere of something almost like condensed milk.

But I also loved everything else – the cooling coconut chutney was lovely, as it always is, and the tomato chutney had a prick of heat. I didn’t mind the sambar, although Zoë was mistrustful of it, as she is with most condiments. But the real pick for me was a peanut chutney which was quite unexpectedly brilliant. If I’d known how good it was earlier on in my voyage through this particular dosa, I’d have had even more of it. I could now see the benefits of living near Deccan House at lunchtime: a better, more fortifying autumnal lunch was hard to imagine.

Not long after we’d polished that off, and asked for a second lassi apiece, the mains came out. Now, normally I would mither about this and say it was all too damned quick, but because Deccan House had only ever brought out one dish at a time, it felt more like a conveyor belt of treats than being processed and sent packing. Besides, by this point they’d charmed me so disarmingly that I didn’t feel like mithering about anything.

Zoë’s mutton curry was, she told me, just what the doctor ordered. I assume she was talking figuratively, because the doctor has literally ordered her to stop walking around so much and give her foot a chance to recover. But it really did do the trick on a chilly September evening. Although the meat was on the bone, there wasn’t much bone to speak of and the meat had pretty much parted company with it already. It was in a glossy sauce: Zoë said that it wasn’t too hot, but that it was fragrant and comforting and spooning it onto rice flecked with cumin made her very happy indeed.

At the end, when Zoë was too full to go on, she told me I should try some of the sauce, so I dipped a spoon in. It was enjoyable stuff, and it contained plenty of little shreds of that mutton. Personally, had it not been for what little dignity I have left, I’d have grabbed the bowl and eaten the rest like soup. It was that good.

Of course it might not have been dignity. It might just have been that I was too full from my biryani. Now, I know you can’t really compare a £7.50 biryani from Deccan House with its £18 sibling over the river at Clay’s. So rather than do that, although it’s tempting, I’m going to compare it with the biryani I had at Biryani Lounge.

At Biryani Lounge, you get a load of rice with some chicken lobbed on top at the last minute, a culinary Married At First Sight. But at Deccan House you get a dish in layers. At the bottom are two pieces of delicious spiced chicken – on the bone, but keen to leave home the first chance they get. Then there was a gorgeous layer of spiced and sticky rice with all that flavour. And then on top, plain rice, onions and coriander.

Eating it was almost an act of gastronomic archeology, digging through the layers to get to the good stuff, getting it onto your plate and stripping the meat from the bones until they were clean as a whistle. It came with salad, which you didn’t need at all, and raita – which I also thought was unnecessary, the whole thing being more soothing and warming than flat-out hot the way the starters had been. But there was another interesting sauce made, I think, with cashew that had some sweetness and heat, and I very much enjoyed drizzling that onto my plate and throwing it into the mix.

Biryani is everywhere in Reading, and sometimes I look at the prices at places like Biryanish and Biriyani Boyzz and think how can it be good at those prices? With Deccan House, I thought how can something so good cost this little? As a dish, it almost summed up how different Deccan House was from many of the mid-table, mid-price, distinctly mid options out there.

Our server was downright lovely all evening, checking if we liked everything, worrying that it was too hot (it wasn’t) and explaining what the whistles and bells were with the dosa and the biryani. She also talked us out of ordering the Mysore masala dosa on grounds of extreme heat, for which I suspect I should be thankful. She told us they’d been open for about a year, and that things were going pretty well.

She also said that we should come back at weekends, when Deccan House does a desi breakfast buffet and some kind of Andhra thali later in the day, and by the end of the meal I found myself wondering how quickly I could find a Saturday to do just that. Our bill – three starters, two mains, four mango lassis – came to fifty-seven pounds, and my only frustration was that our server told us they didn’t take tips by card. Next time, I shall have to get something out of the cashpoint on my way there, because it didn’t feel right to let service like that go unrewarded. She did ask if we could maybe write a review, and I very much enjoyed promising that I would.

My biggest regret, now that I’ve visited Deccan House, is that I took far too long to pick up on the recommendation to go there. I blame little things like getting married and moving house, all of which have made 2024 a very different year to most. But I’m so glad I finally got round to it, because it restored my faith in a kind of restaurant I was beginning to think Reading just didn’t do well. We have a smattering of excellent Nepalese restaurants, but a lot of the more affordable, more casual Indian restaurants in town – usually down the Wokingham or Oxford Road – feel like they’re bandwagon jumpers. They’re cheap, yes, but they feel like an exercise in margins rather than a labour of love.

By contrast, Deccan House feels more authentic. I don’t mean in terms of the cuisine – I couldn’t begin to tell you whether it’s authentically Hyderabadi or not. But I mean that it’s authentically a restaurant, in that it cares about food and about customers, about creating a happy space where you get to take an hour or two out of your day-to-day life, be well fed and well looked after. In East Reading, that’s rarer than you think (actually, it’s getting rarer in Reading full stop) and in that sense Deccan House reminded me more of Hala Lebanese, a very happy discovery from the start of the year with which it has plenty in common.

So there you have it – if you live anywhere near Deccan House, I think you might like it. I had to take the grand total of four buses, and I definitely did. I will be back, although next time I might just treat myself to a half hour walk down the hill. It turns out that, despite being fans of my blog, Jez and Ken have impeccable taste. Next time I see them at a readers’ lunch, I must remember to thank them.

Deccan House – 7.8
215 London Road, Reading, RG1 3NY
0118 3749035

https://www.deccanhouse.co.uk

Pub review: The Bell, Waltham St Lawrence

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews, Uncategorized2 Comments

This week’s review hasn’t quite gone according to plan. Originally I was going to review The Lyndhurst, which came under new management back in May. It’s fair to say that it’s had a chequered time since then, with the new landlords complaining vociferously to the Reading Chronicle, more than once, about what they said were false claims that they planned to turn the place into a sports bar.

The way they refuted that was interesting, I thought. We’re just installing a fruit machine, just like every other pub, they said. We’re just putting in a jukebox, like every other pub. Nuts, really. They’d replaced the managers of the best food pub Reading had ever seen, and their mission was to be just like everybody else. They missed the obvious point: if you’re just like everybody else, why should we drink at yours?

Anyway, I largely stayed out of it – because I know I could easily be seen as partial – but from their Facebook page they looked a lot like a sports bar to me. During Euro 2024 it was all badly generated AI images of three lions wearing England shirts and drinking pints of lager in a generic pub, or one especially tasteless – and arguably xenophobic – picture of a lion mauling a bull to coincide with the England-Spain match. But I’m probably just a woke snowflake, because I also winced when the pub described the rumours flying around as “Chinese whispers”.

They then decided to do food, so they put a menu up on Facebook and a few people – not me, I should add – were critical of it. “Please keep your comments to yourself” the pub said. Then they closed for nearly a week, not the first time they’d shut at very short notice. As previously, they blamed having work carried out, but it looked suspiciously like a sulk. All very strange, and I’ve lost track of the number of people who have messaged me saying what the fuck is going on at the Lyndhurst? My reply is invariably the same: God only knows.

But then at the end of July they announced that they’d taken on a new chef, Chef Roots. Now, I’ve never had his food but I know of him by reputation – he cooked for a while at the Roebuck, and at the Three Tuns, and in lockdown he ran a street food business called Pattie N’ Pulled which had its fans. I thought this was a very smart move by the new management – take on a known chef and try to recapture your reputation as a food pub. It all sounded very promising.

I was even prepared to overlook just how weird the menu the pub put out was. If anything in it was correct it was by accident, and every time you looked you spotted a different clanger. Some items were in a completely different font for no particular reason. The pricing was random – £11.96 here, £24.97 there, £4.60 somewhere else. And the spelling mistakes – oh my goodness. Buttet milk chicken, paremsan fries, oniom rings, triple cooled chips. It was all a bit Officer Crabtree.

So once I found out that Chef Roots was cooking at the Lyndhurst I was interested in going back, and I had a volunteer to come with me. That was none other than Matt, who made the very wise decision of proposing to my sister in law recently, which means he’s as good as family. So we agreed a date, when I was back from holiday. I was looking forward to it.

Then it all went tits up when I discovered that Chef Roots had barely lasted a week before moving on from the Lyndhurst, a development which the Lyndhurst decided not to report. And then more weirdness emanated from the pub. A recent Google review – one star, of course – was posted by a guy who was just verbally abused by the regulars as he walked past the smoking area with a friend and his dog. He put up footage from his phone which appeared to bear this out: it was a really uncomfortable watch.

And then someone posted on Reddit about the Lyndhurst’s Sunday lunch was, and she wasn’t pulling her punches. “Unseasoned. Small portions. Cold vegetables. Misleading menu. Said ‘homemade’ Yorkshire puddings and when I inquired about allergens the waitress brought out a frozen bag of Aldi’s own Yorkshire pudding” she said. “Actually speechless at how bad the food was.”

So I sent Matt a WhatsApp: Looks like we won’t be reviewing the Lyndhurst, the chef has already sacked it off. And Matt replied. Anywhere else we can review? Well, I can ride shotgun while you do it. And that’s when I thought of the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, a cosy pub I had loved when I first reviewed it nine years ago. I’d been back since, but not for a long time, and it felt ripe for a revisit. So this week Matt picked me up and we headed off down the A4 in search of dinner. It was the first time I’ve ever been chauffeured to a review in a Porsche, and I very quickly decided that I could get used to it.

Much what I said when I visited the Bell in 2015 is equally true today, on face value at least: Waltham St Lawrence is still a pretty village and the pub is the jewel in its crown. It’s almost the platonic ideal of a village pub, and you got a whiff of woodsmoke as you walked in. But the one thing that was different was a slight change of the guard – back then it was run by twin brothers Iain and Scott Ganson, but last year Iain left to become the new head chef at Thames Lido. So was it business as usual at the Bell, or had things changed?

Paying it a visit on a Tuesday night it was almost empty with just a few regulars at the bar. “You can sit anywhere you like” said the chap after I told him we had a reservation, and although the front room was tempting we decided to go for the dining room, a less casual space up some stairs. Even so, that was stripped back and neutral – I seem to remember on a previous visit that there was feature wallpaper of some kind, but instead it was a calm, tasteful room. We were the only people in it, which gave my dinner date with my future brother-in-law a strangely intimate feel, like they’d opened just for us.

Still, we both enjoyed getting a word in edgeways for a change. I love my in-laws dearly, but the men in the family are like the men in Sex And The City: you might enjoy it when they crop up, but everybody knows they aren’t the feature attraction. It’s all about the women, one-upping one another with their increasingly funny stories, and the best thing you can do is enjoy the ride (or, if you’re my father-in-law, tidy up after everybody and/or hide in the garage). So here Matt and I were, talking for a whole evening in some strange inversion of the Bechdel Test.

The menu the night we visited was decidedly compact: four starters, three mains (one meat, one fish, one vegetarian) and three desserts. I seemed to remember from past experience that there used to be more on offer, and although I may have been wrong the evidence suggested we’d been unlucky that night: a picture on Instagram later in the week showed an additional main course that would have expanded the options a little. But no matter, although the menu was almost narrow enough to be constricting we both found things to order. Starters hovered around a tenner, mains were scattered more widely around the twenty pound mark.

But first, drink – and the first indication of interesting things at the Bell. They won Reading CAMRA Cider Pub Of The Year this year, and it showed, with a blackboard listing plenty of interesting choices including Tilehurst’s Seven Trees Cider. And the wine list was full of temptation, all of it available by the glass. I couldn’t choose between a couple and Ganson, who was behind the bar that night, kindly let me try some of each (even if the locals heckled him, saying that this was uncharacteristic generosity for a Scot). He even didn’t complain when I decided to go for a third instead, although they were all gorgeous, and let me try some of that. It was a Priorat, from Catalunya – Priorat is always worth trying, if you find it on a list – and I thought it was terrific at ten pounds a glass.

I seem to remember years ago having a conversation with the Bell on Twitter saying that more places should bring back the 125ml glass of wine, or the 250ml carafe. Well, although they do serve 125ml glasses they’ve gone one step further by using a Coravin for seemingly all of the bottles on the list. “It means we can offer about forty wines by the glass” said Ganson, which for me would almost be reason enough to visit the Bell on its own, especially if you have a nice chap driving you home in a Porsche.

“I’d also like a pint of bitter shandy please, which bitter do you recommend?”

“Hoppit” said Ganson without hesitation, and so Matt got a shandy made with Loddon’s finest, which he seemed to like.

Matt had the best of the starters, and I didn’t realise until much later that it was essentially the starter I’d ordered and enjoyed nine years ago. A slab of pigeon terrine came bound in bacon, served with a couple of beautifully burnished slices of griddled toast and – always the clincher – a trio of cornichons. Matt enjoyed this, but because his manners were impeccable he let me try some and I thought it was knockout – slightly gamey, the texture spot on, no hint of bounce or jelly to be seen. Matt also let me have all of his cornichons, but I think that was because he didn’t like them, rather than down to his impeccable manners.

I did less well, but only by a whisper. My selection of charcuterie from Cotswold-based Salt Pig had nearly everything you could hope for, and most of it was very enjoyable. Coarse rounds of chorizo, fatty ribbons of pancetta, superb pork collar. Only the spiced pork loin underwhelmed, and although I had enough cornichons, that was partly because I’d inherited Matt’s.

But it felt like something was missing, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I think a little griddled toast would have lifted this, or even some caperberries, or even more cornichons (although more cornichons, like more cowbell, is just my answer to many of life’s problems). WIthout that, it felt a little unbalanced. Looking back at the Bell’s menu I saw that it included something I’d missed, whipped lardo – also from Salt Pig, I presume – on toast. I wish I’d noticed that, because it would have been delicious. Especially if it came with cornichons.

By this point I was on to a second glass of wine. Ganson had suggested another Spanish red, this time from Bierzo, a single varietal Mencia, and it was every bit the equal of the Priorat. I found myself thinking that even though the same time last week I’d been in Granada, in thirty degree heat, sitting outside a bar enjoying cold beer and tapas there were consolations to autumn – red wine, woodsmoke and cosy pubs not least. Besides, Strictly was back on the telly.

My main course bridged the gap between my week in Andalusia and the increasingly autumnal feel of things back home. I rarely order risotto, and I almost never make it myself – who has the time to stand at a stove for thirty minutes? – but the Bell’s version was made with Isle Of Wight tomatoes and Spenwood, and better British ingredients are hard to imagine. I had been spoiled by the exceptional tomatoes you get on the continent, but the ones that come out of the Isle Of Wight are absolutely the next best thing.

And it was mollifying comfort on a plate, a rich dish of sticky, nutty rice, topped with tomatoes that had been roasted and slightly dried, liberally dusted with one of my favourite cheeses which just so happens to be made down the road in Spencer’s Wood, the closest thing Blighty gets to Parmesan. On paper, this was the perfect thing to make you happier about the nights drawing in and being able to see your breath in the air – a gentle but insistent bear hug of a dish.

It was almost perfect, but not quite. I would have liked it to have been a little more seasoned, for a bit more salt to balance out the sweetness of the tomatoes. But I only decided that in hindsight, looking at a completely denuded plate, and hindsight is always a wonderful thing. I can’t remember the last time I ordered a risotto in a restaurant, but I won’t be able to say that next time I do.

Matt chose the Bambi Burger, a dish which has been on the Bell’s menu every single time I’ve visited. He wasn’t sure about it, which is how Matt discovered that he maybe wasn’t wild about venison. That meant I got to try a fair amount of it, and for what it’s worth I really loved it. Venison is a challenging meat to make burgers with, on account of it being so lean and lacking in fat, so to make something so delicious that didn’t fall into the trap of being dry and crumbly was no mean feat.

And again, hats off to the Bell for having a decent, sturdy bun and griddling it to give it the extra heft it needed. If I came back to the Bell, and hopefully I will before too long, I would make a beeline for this. The skinny chips, I suspect, were bought in: it might have been nice to have something chunkier, but they did the job.

Both of us felt like we had permission to order dessert: Matt because his main hadn’t hit the spot and me because mine had. We both gravitated towards the sticky toffee pudding – not something I’d normally order, but as the other two choices were cheese and oatcakes or an affogato I did feel my hand had been forced. I was sorry not to see the beer ice cream the Bell always used to make, which for me was one of the most intriguing and idiosyncratic things they did, but you can’t win them all.

It’s another nice echo of my original visit, because sticky toffee pudding was on the table then too. I think that the Bell has spent the last nine years perfecting it, because I loved this. It was a deep, dense delight, swathed in a cracking toffee sauce and crowned with a sphere of glossy ice cream – no clotted cream or the like here – and it made me wonder how many great sticky toffee puddings I might have missed out on over the years because of my vague prejudice against hot desserts. It was fantastic, and it helped, as the whole evening had, make me feel a little less sad about the changing of the seasons.

I could have stayed and drunk wine and chatted away until they chucked us out. But I’m not sure how much fun that would have been for Matt, who was on the Diet Coke by then. Besides, he had to be in London for work the next day so I settled up and we were on our way. Our dinner – three courses and two drinks apiece – came to ninety-six pounds, not including tip, which I thought was as good value as anything is these days in 2024. We shared trade secrets on how to manage our in-laws all the way home, and if any of them happen to be reading this I absolutely promise I’m kidding.

I was so happy to find the Bell still close to its best self, and if I’d have liked a little more breadth to the menu that was easily outweighed by the pluses – the service, that beautiful spot, the woodsmoke and the exceptional range of wine and cider. For many years, when people have asked me where they could have dinner a little drive away from Reading, the Bell has made my list – a list which shrunk when the Miller Of Mansfield closed, grew when I so enjoyed The Plough earlier in the year.

But we were getting to the point where I was recommending the Bell without having any recent experience to go on, and I felt like a fraud doing that. I’m very happy to have sorted that, and pleased that I can renew my endorsement. That I had a properly agreeable evening and a ride in a Porsche just added to my joy. Reading may have one fewer pub that does really great food and makes you feel welcome. But there are consolations to be found elsewhere, just as there are with the end of summer.

The Bell – 8.0
The Street, Waltham St Lawrence, RG10 0JJ
0118 9341788

https://thebellwalthamstlawrence.co.uk

Restaurant review: Kopitiam, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

Here’s a question for you – if you had decided to have lunch at a restaurant, and you knew for a fact that it didn’t take reservations, when would you get there, all things being equal? Would you turn up when it opened, bang on noon, or would you arrive early and be at the front of the queue? Or would you aim for about half one, to capitalise on the end of the lunch rush? Would it bother you, or make you anxious, or would you be blasé about the whole thing? Would you have a backup plan?

This wasn’t a hypothetical situation, because last weekend I was in Oxford with my old friend Dave and his son Leo, and I was set on having lunch at Kopitiam, a Malaysian restaurant in Summertown that received a glowing review from Tom Parker Bowles in the Mail On Sunday last December. But it didn’t take bookings, and Summertown is about a forty minute walk from the centre, so what to do?

This highlighted something of a philosophical schism between Dave and me. He would gladly have been there before the clock struck noon, ready to take the first table in the whole restaurant. “I prepare for things precisely so I don’t get anxious” he explained, although I suspected we both did equal amounts of worrying about stuff, just at different times. For my part, I thought turning up around half twelve would be more than sufficient. I knew it was Saturday lunchtime, but how busy could the place be?

It grieves me to admit that Dave was right and I was wrong: turning up bang on half past, we found every table occupied and the restaurant heaving. There were two tables out front, both with the standard-issue Tolix chairs in place, but it wasn’t quite warm enough for that kind of thing. So we went over the road to the excellent Colombia Coffee Roasters, sipped a latte and I kept a restless eye on the footfall heading to and from Kopitiam.

“It’s okay mate, if it’s still full we can always just go to Pompette a few doors down, or the pizza place on this road” said Dave equably. I didn’t understand what was going on: why was he so chilled about this after he’d been proven right? Why wasn’t he saying I told you so, the way I would have done had our roles been reversed? Honestly, you’re friends with someone for over thirty years but some days it’s like you just don’t know them at all. Leo, just turned 18 and off to Durham at the end of the month to start his history degree, sensibly stayed out of this one, and got to work on his mocha instead.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end. Half an hour later we went back and a number of tables were unoccupied, so we ensconced ourselves. The fact that so many tables had cleared so quickly suggested this was a functional lunch spot, not somewhere to linger, but we were too happy to have found space to be bothered by that.

The room was functional too – but in a way that worked, with plain, standard issue chairs and tables, faux exposed brickwork wallpaper and brightly lit pictures of all the dishes up on the wall. Now normally this would set alarm bells ringing, but somehow Kopitiam pulled it off – the saturated photos had an almost Martin Parr feel to them. And equally importantly, they all looked like food you’d actually want to eat.

Kopitiam’s menu was a tad confusing. Or really I should say menus, because you got two with no real indication of the relationship between them. The smaller one looked more Malaysian, the larger more Chinese, but the titles of the two printed menus didn’t exactly explain why this was. The smaller menu had some pictures of the food, the bigger, more generic menu, did not.

Malaysian Street Food And Cafe said the bigger menu, incongruously above the prices for crispy duck, Thai green papaya salad, sesame prawn toasts and edamame. And the same dishes, appeared on both menus in some cases – but where they did, the pricing was not the same. Anyway, on examination the smaller menu looked to be the lunch menu, the larger one the dinner menu – Kopitiam’s website spelled this out, but at the time it was a head-scratcher.

That’s partly because nothing at Kopitiam was expensive, whichever menu you ordered from and whatever it was calling itself. Few starters cost more than eight pounds, most mains on the lunch menu didn’t get north of twelve. Even on the main menu dishes tended to jostle around the ten pound mark, although rice cost extra. It did prompt a lot of discussions and plea bargaining, though, around how to try the best of the menu and what might or might not be representative. I felt, in the back of my mind, like having the Chinese dishes would be copping out.

“Are we having starters as well?” asked Dave.

“You do remember who you’re having lunch with, don’t you?” I said. Honestly, you’re friends with someone for over thirty years and some days it’s like they don’t know you at all: I don’t think the words if it’s okay with you can we skip starters have ever left my lips in all the time I’ve known Dave. And Leo is an enthusiastic eater himself: I remember going to Dolce Vita with him and his dad, back when he was something like ten years old, and watching him charm the socks off the waiters by ordering the monkfish with squid ink pasta and finishing the lot (“we have many adults who don’t try that dish” said our server, rightly impressed).

Our starters came out as we sipped a fiery and enjoyable ginger beer apiece: Kopitiam has no alcohol licence, which didn’t bother me, but also didn’t have any Sarsi (a Malaysian take on root beer), which bothered me far more. They also do a plethora of other Malaysian drinks – kopi, teh tarik and Ying Yang, a blend of coffee and tea which I was tempted to order out of morbid curiosity alone.

First to arrive were lok bak, minced pork wrapped in bean curd skin and then fried until crispy. These were a tactile delight, little brittle-coated nuggets of joy crying out to be dipped in sweet chilli sauce and scoffed. Perfect for sharing, perfect for social eating, perfectly enjoyable. And if I’d never had anything like this before, as I suspect Dave and Leo hadn’t, I would have been waxing lyrical.

But the best can be the enemy of the good, and I kept casting my mind back to a very similar dish at Lucky Lychee the previous month. There the pork was coarse and crumbly, the sweet chilli sauce was home made rather than out of a bottle and I got more of the spicing: Lucky Lychee boasts a ten spice mix, compared to the five spices deployed by Kopitiam. It showed: the Winchester restaurant’s rendition was easily twice as good.

By far the single best thing we ordered was chosen because we saw it at the next table and had to have a piece of the action. It was impossibly rugged-looking fried chicken, and our neighbours somehow had the superhuman (or inhuman, depending on how you view such things) restraint to leave it there, in full view, for something like five minutes without making inroads into it.

I swear that our portion arrived and was dispatched before they finished theirs, and I wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed of that. But it was so, so good. It was half a dozen wings, in a crunchy, gnarled coating which had just the slightest hint of funk from the shrimp sauce used in the marinade. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of wings, especially when they’re sauced or tossed, because for me the reward to faff ratio is out of kilter. But these were an absolute joy to rend and gnaw, to the extent where I wondered if I was giving wings an unduly hard time.

“I think these are the crispiest wings I’ve ever had” said Dave. “I wish we’d ordered a portion each.”

“There’s nothing to stop us ordering more” I said. “We could have them for dessert. Did you know there’s a fish restaurant in Lisbon where you have a steak roll for dessert?”

Dave gave me an indulgent look that said, ever so nicely, why are you like this? But I knew I’d planted the seed about dessert chicken, so I left it at that.

Last of all, we tried a Malaysian staple, the roti canai. Now, I had high hopes for this after reading Tom Parker Bowles’ review. He said they were charred, chewy and as delicate as silk handkerchiefs. Leaving aside the fact that I’m not sure something can be all three of those things at once, Kopitiam’s roti were delicious but more like rolled-up balls of tissue – sorry for the image – than silk handkerchiefs. I liked them, and they were definitely greaseless, but in little clumps they weren’t the easiest to dip into a little bowl of an admittedly delicious curry sauce, with plenty of brooding depth.

Our mains came out while we were still eating our starters. Now, this has happened to me before in a Malaysian restaurant, one called Wau in Newbury that I visited five years ago. And I complained about it in the review, and a few people told me I was being culturally ignorant and that in Malaysian cuisine everything tends to arrive at once. So I won’t moan about that again, even though it wouldn’t be my preferred way to eat. And I suppose it explains why a restaurant that’s full at noon can find room for you thirty minutes later, so swings and roundabouts.

Dave and Leo had both chosen noodle dishes, but more different noodle dishes would be hard to imagine, despite having some of the same ingredients. Dave ordered Kopitiam’s special ho fun with not one, not two, but all of the following: prawns, squid, fish cake and pork. All that and what the menu described as an “egg gravy” on top. Something was surely lost in translation, because the words “egg” and “gravy”, next to one another, don’t scream take my money to me. But Dave seemed to enjoy it.

“The texture is a little… well… it’s kind of like mucus.”

“You can’t say that! I can’t put that in the review.” I said, fully intending to put it in the review.

“Well, it’s tasty mucus.”

“This is the thing, though, with some cuisines I think” I pontificated. “It’s just about us not having frames of reference. So we are generally a bit put off by gelatinous food, but I guess that’s because we associate that texture with sweet stuff. And nobody eats things in savoury jelly any more, apart from pork pies. It’s a tricky one with this kind of food – and it will make this review difficult to write. If you rave on it’s cultural appropriation, if you sound like you don’t understand it you just come across like Nigel Farage.”

“Anyway, I’m not sure if that is a fishcake. It has the same texture as a scallop. Anybody who promises a fishcake and gives you a scallop is okay in my book.”

If Dave’s dish was our one Cantonese foray into the menu, Leo had chosen a Malaysian classic. Hokkien mee was wheat noodles rather than rice noodles, cooked in a darker, stickier sauce with the same mix of surf and turf and with, allegedly, the addition of fried pork lard, although that wasn’t visible to the naked eye. This looked more like it, and Leo polished it off without complaint. I didn’t try it, but I was struck that the noodles were broken and short, and I was grateful that I hadn’t ordered it because with my rudimentary chopstick skills I might well have ended up wearing half of it.

This is where, if I was a proper restaurant reviewer, I’d probably wank on about wok hei, whatever that is. But none of us are kidding ourselves that I am, so I won’t.

Originally I was going to have the beef rendang, because Dave had planned to order the Marmite chicken. But when he changed his mind it was up for grabs, and having enjoyed this dish so much at Lucky Lychee I wanted another bite of the cherry. And really, it was a similar experience to the lok bak – if I’d never had this dish before I probably would have loved it, but I knew how good it could be and so I knew that this fell short.

The texture was magnificent – we’d already established that Kopitiam could fry chicken like nobody’s business – so it wasn’t that. But the sauce was more honey than Marmite, more one note sweetness than harmonised salt and sugar. And there wasn’t a lot of it – what there was coated the chicken, and the chicken had all the crannies and crevices to make that happen, but that was your lot. What that meant was a few bites of reasonably enjoyable but dryish chicken, rendered drier by plain white rice, and not much else.

Partly my fault, perhaps, for ordering it from the lunch menu, and perhaps if I’d ordered a separate helping and a separate bowl of rice I wouldn’t have felt so diddled. But I don’t know, I still think at the end I would have had a whole expanse of naked rice, desperate to be covered with anything. I poured the rest of the sauce from the roti canai onto a little patch of rice and ate that. I left the rest.

“Are you okay mate? You haven’t eaten much of your rice” said Dave.

“There’s nothing to eat it with” I said, gesturing at my plate. Tell a lie: there was a little mound of undressed salad on the plate fighting it out with the rice to be the least appealing, like Robert Jenrick versus Kemi Badenoch. To my mind it was a dead heat.

Once we’d finished our mains I watched the seed I’d planted earlier playing out in Dave’s mind. He still wanted more chicken wings, but he also didn’t want to look like it was his idea.

“So I suppose we aren’t going to have more chicken wings now, are we.”

“We can have more chicken wings if you want them. Do you want more wings, Dave?”

“Well, I’ll have some if somebody else wants some.”

This is the dance you have to do with some people, and my dear old friend is one of them. Fortunately Leo is eighteen and slim and likes food and has no compunctions about it, so he said that yes, he would very much like more of the delicious chicken wings. So Dave flagged down our server, asked for some more and they arrived and we fell on them with no less gusto than the first portion. It was the perfect end to a thoroughly agreeable lunch.

I do have to say too that the service at Kopitiam is absolutely brilliant – I would say the majority of the customers in there were Chinese or Malaysian, but I didn’t feel like a sore thumb, or ever less than extremely well looked after. I guess once you’ve had the King’s stepson in there, you can easily manage plebs like me, one of my oldest friends and the apple of his eye. We settled up – our meal came to just over seventy-five pounds, not including service – and we headed off in the direction of the Rose And Crown on North Parade for a pint and a debrief.

Kopitiam, by the way, is on South Parade, which is further north than North Parade, one of those wonderful paradoxes you sometimes find, like Gary Oldman being younger than Gary Numan.

Whenever I travel a bit further for the blog, I’m aware that the stakes are higher and I try to pick places where I’m pretty certain I’ll have a great meal. “Hey, come and read about this place miles from Reading that isn’t really worth going to!” is not much of a sales pitch, and believe me, I know it. Generally I’ve had decent luck when I’ve travelled to Oxford on duty, and I’ve never reviewed a dud in the city. And I wish I could offer a more ringing endorsement of Kopitiam, but I don’t think I can.

Not that I’m saying Kopitiam is a dud. It’s not a bad restaurant, the service is brilliant and some of what I ate was excellent, but I don’t know that it’s worth travelling to Oxford to try unless you are really passionate about Malaysian food. And perhaps Malaysian food isn’t where they’re at their strongest: I saw items from the more Cantonese side of the menu turning up at other tables and the roast duck, skin all lacquered, invoked particular regret.

But also, if you do like Malaysian food and you’re taking a trip away from Reading I would say to take the train south-west, stop at Winchester and make your weekend by eating at Lucky Lychee. And if you’re in Oxford, better options exist. One of them, in the shape of Pompette, is literally the other side of the road. And you can book a table for whenever you like, which some people – and it turns out I’m one of them – seem rather to like. So there you have it. Kopitiam may not take reservations, but I’m afraid I had enough for the both of us.

Kopitiam – 7.0
Suffolk House, 19 South Parade, Summertown, Oxford, OX2 7HN
01865 454388

https://kopitiamoxford.co.uk