Month: October 2024

Restaurant review: Calico

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As I’ve said before, when I write a restaurant review I find it helps to have a hook. Why this place this week, out of all the restaurants out there? Why do I think you might want to read about this one? Sometimes it’s easy – with a new place, a change of management or an old place with a new chef, or somewhere that’s been mentioned in dispatches in the local or national press. Other times, it’s about the wider context: for instance the trend for biryani or sushi places in Reading.

But there always, ideally, needs to be something. I never assume I can just plonk a review up on the blog and expect people to read it no matter what: attention, like money, is a scant resource these days. Everybody’s got to earn it.

With Calico this week I was spoilt for choice, because I could think of three angles. The first is that Calico – technically “Calico Bar & Eatery”, but let’s not call it that because ‘Eatery’ is so naff – belongs to that niche club of Reading restaurants where everybody knows it exists, but nobody seems to know anyone who’s been. I’m sure some of you have, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never heard anybody talking about it. This is possibly the easiest “in” for a restaurant review, because you might want to know whether Calico is any cop; don’t worry, I will eventually get round to telling you that.

I think it may be a hotels thing, because other members of that select group include The Reading Room and, these days, Malmaison; Calico, you see, is the restaurant in the 1843 Hotel, which for as long as I could remember used to be Great Expectations. And that brings us to the second possible angle, because Great Expectations played an enormous part in my adult Reading life and I’ve still not entirely come to terms with the fact that it’s gone. So, does the thing that replaced Great Expectations constitute an upgrade?

Ah, Great Expectations. I spent many a post-work Friday in that pub drinking crappy booze – Crabbie’s Ginger Beer, if memory serves – with friends and colleagues, enjoying the faux Dickensian shopfronts (Mr Crabcrotch The Fishmonger or suchlike) and shooting the breeze. It was almost a sign of the passing seasons in Reading, as reliable as putting your clocks forward and back or going to the beer festival. In the summer you went to the Allied, in the winter Great X.

The cast of characters was different each time, but the location was the same, week after week. Behind that grand façade was a slightly naff, tatty pub, and if it didn’t really do food – except for that period when it served something like a dozen different kinds of cheesy chips – it was still the naff, tatty pub of choice. I knew in theory that it was also a hotel, but I only knew one person who ever stayed there and he told me it wasn’t an experience to repeat. I loved the irony of a place being called Great Expectations, and so comprehensively failing to meet them.

But as a watering hole it holds a special place in my heart, part of a Reading that is now gone forever, along with its former neighbour the Global Café and, further up the hill, the After Dark. And for over ten years I lived on London Street, and so all of those places were my locals, along with the post AD delights of Bodrum Kebab, before it closed, reopened as Chicken Base – which it absolutely was, by the way – and eventually became the first home of Clay’s.

So walking down to Calico on a gloomy October evening, looking up at the glowing windows of my old flat and wondering who lives there now, it felt weird that the world had moved on so very much, even though that’s what the world invariably does, whether you’re paying attention or not.

The third possible angle, by the way, was that this week my dining companion was the published poet, compère of Reading institution Poet’s Café and Caversham resident Katie Meehan, a long-standing reader of the blog who kindly responded to my appeal earlier in the year for people to join me for reviews. A bit of culture at last: as somebody who churns out prose with questionable literary value, I was hoping against hope to become highbrow by association. And at the risk of sounding a bit like Michael Parkinson, Katie’s collection, the splendidly named Dame Julie Andrews’ Botched Vocal Chord Surgery, came out last year and is available from Two Rivers Press and all reputable bookshops.

Katie, it turned out, had been to Calico before, but just for cocktails and snacks before Poet’s Café, which takes place just round the corner at South Street. So there went angle one, because it turned out that I knew someone who had eaten there after all. She told me that they’d just ordered from the side dishes section of the menu, tenderstem broccoli in ginger and chilli, masala fries. The latter are described as “Must Try Masala Fries” on the menu, and there must have been something to that because Katie was keen to order them again.

But before we could get round to the menu, there was the matter of smalltalk and introductions. And before that? Well, I think it takes you at least five minutes to get used to the room. I spent some of those five minutes wondering if it would be as odd an experience if you’d never been to Great Expectations, and on balance I think it pretty much would be.

I’m not sure any word does it justice quite so much as “glitzy”. It was completely unrecognisable from what it used to be, and more than slightly preposterous in a way I partly loved, and which partly made my teeth itch. The zebra crossing-striped floor worked with the dark walls and earth-toned upholstered chairs, but did it all also go with the circular dark green velvet banquetted booths and the neon sign on the wall? And did all that go with the neon-lit archways running through the middle of the room?

You couldn’t say that money hadn’t been spent on the facelift, but you equally couldn’t be sure how much of it was misspent. Of course, we were there on a Tuesday night, one of only four occupied tables, and I’m always struck that the thing most restaurants and bars need is people. That’s what brings spaces to life – literally, I suppose – and lets you see them as they were intended to be, their best self.

And yet I struggled to imagine what a full Calico would have felt like. We were seated at one of those swanky banquettes, because it was available, but I’m not sure how plum some of the tables would have felt if Calico had been heaving. It looked more like a bar than a restaurant, and more like a restaurant where you’d plough through a bottomless brunch in a pack than one where you’d enjoy a meal with a friend. I couldn’t but admire what they’d achieved with the space, but even now I couldn’t tell you whether I like it.

“The menu is kind of nuts” said Katie as we looked at what to order, and she was on the money about that. When I first saw the menu at Calico, a couple of years ago, I wondered if it was trying to be Reading’s first ever successful take on the desi pub concept. The interior partly dispels any illusions about that, and the menu crushes any that are left. It was probably 75% Indian and Indo-Chinese food – tikkas, sheekh kebabs, biryani and butter chicken. But the other 25% was just dishes picked seemingly at random: nachos, arancini, mushroom croquettes, prawn and crab linguini and so on.

“I don’t understand why they have an equivalent of Nando’s on the menu” said Katie, pointing out the roasted half-chicken smothered in garlic and butter.

“And it would have to be pretty good at twenty pounds” I said. The pricing was wayward like that all over the place. The starters were mostly between nine and twelve quid, and the curries went up to about seventeen pounds, but the more Western dishes were generally more expensive. And on the other side of the menu were all the items you sensed that Calico felt it needed to have on a menu – five different burgers, half a dozen naan bread pizzas. The overall effect was confused, and suggested an identity crisis, as if Calico didn’t know what kind of venue it wanted to be or what kind of restaurant it wanted to be, all at once.

Anyway, it took us ages to order because we got a bottle of wine and started nattering about all sorts. Social media is funny, in that you can follow someone for ages and have a sense that you know them, but then when you meet them all the blanks get filled in. So I discovered that Katie was from North Carolina, and had lived in the U.K. for ten years – first in Katesgrove, then out in Oxfordshire and finally back in Caversham. Like many residents north of the river she felt like she’d found her place, so we exchanged stories about all things RG4: Katie was a customer of Geo Café’s veg box scheme during lockdown, like so many.

We talked too about writing, and what her genre and mine might or mightn’t have in common. We agreed that all writing, fundamentally, was about the self: Katie’s poems tell those stories obliquely, partly for fear of offending anyone or appropriating their stories, whereas I tend to put it all out there with reckless abandon. I mean, it’s fundamentally all about the restaurant, but if you’ve been reading an author’s stuff for a while (as Katie had) I guess you pick up snippets of what they’re like.

“Absolutely!” said Katie. “It’s like with Taylor Swift, there’s the Edible Reading lore. I remember years ago, having conversations that said oh my god, Edible Reading is getting divorced!“

The idea of there being such a thing as Edible Reading lore was a bit like the interior of Calico: absolutely ridiculous, but that didn’t mean I was averse to it.

We’d agreed to share starters and Katie, who doesn’t eat huge amounts of meat, had zeroed in on the gobi Manchurian, being a fan of that dish in general. I am too, as it happens, so I was very interested to see how Calico fared on this first test. The answer was that they did very well: you got a sizeable portion of cauliflower, coated in sticky sauce, and unlike many renditions I’ve tried this had some crispiness to the coating, the cauliflower cooked but not overdone.

But the best thing was the sauce. It still had that sweetness that I associate with this dish, but also plenty of punch. You didn’t notice it at first, but by the time we’d polished off the lot I was surreptitiously dabbing my nose with my napkin. My benchmarks for this dish were Chilis in town and Clay’s across the river and again, this dish didn’t fall far short of either. “Can you believe I’ve never tried it at Clay’s?” said Katie, who lives just round the corner from it, so has very few excuses. This was a far cry from the cheesy chips of a decade ago, and it introduced another feeling of disconnection, to eat something so good in such an incongruous room.

Katie chose a lot better than I did. I had high hopes for paneer tikka, but what turned up was weirdly cheffy and ineffectual. Three bits of paneer, vaguely stacked à la Jenga, had the requisite colour and tone but the flavour from the marinade had not permeated, which made it feel like heavy going. Or at least it might have been heavy going had there been more of it, but those three pieces were awkward to share and, at twelve pounds, a bit too meagre.

So was the chutney – the menu promised coriander chutney but what you got was an insufficient artful squiggle, bisected with tamarind sauce. This felt like someone had put “Indian fine dining” into Midjourney and then decided to recreate whatever image it coughed out. And you can dump as many microherbs as you like on top of a dish like that, but it won’t save it. It led Katie and I to reminisce about the glory days of Bhoj, which must been not long after she moved to Reading. Their paneer was far from perfect, but it was a darned sight better than Calico’s. “It needs more sauce” was Katie’s pronouncement: I had to concur.

By this time I had seen dishes arrive at the table next to us, five women on one of those banquettes seemingly having a marvellous time and, as with the starters, I was struck that everything looked rather good. I rubbernecked to get a good look, because I can never stop myself doing that in restaurants, and even the naanza which wafted past me looked eminently worth ordering. And again I thought that what this restaurant needed was lighting that was more bright happy venue and less dive bar from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That feeling of disconnection, I could tell, was going to stay with me.

Mains took just long enough not to be too quick, something like twenty minutes. We’d decided to stay in the safety zone of the bulk of the menu rather than trying something in its outer reaches, and I think we were rewarded for that. Katie’s chana masala, another of her reference dishes, was a solid, decent choice – comforting, soothing stuff in another dry, reduced gravy. I didn’t think this had an enormous kick of heat, although it might have been hard to tell as our tastebuds might already have been tamed by the gobi Manchurian.

But either way, it was a very pleasing dish. I want to damn it with the faint praise of saying that it was better than it needed to be, or better than I expected, but that’s not it. It’s more that nothing about the Instagrammable glam of Calico really leads you to believe that there’s a creditable Indian restaurant ticking away under the bonnet. Perhaps that’s on me, or perhaps it’s true: it makes me wish I knew people who had been to Calico, apart from Katie, so I could decide if that’s wide of the mark.

Similarly, the lamb bhuna was a profoundly respectable choice. I had some misgivings because the menu gives you your choice of protein with this dish, which rather raises the suspicion that the meat and sauce have made one another’s acquaintance very late in the day. But be that as it may, there was nothing not to like here – the lamb was well cooked, presenting no resistance to the fork, and the sauce was the best kind, that hugs the meat rather than drowns it. In a way the high-sided black bowls Calico serves its curries in almost make it hard to see how much you get, but it was a more generous portion than it appeared at first. We saw all of it off.

Along with an unremarkable pilau rice we ordered Katie’s favourite, the masala fries. Were they really “must try”? I was unsure about that, but I’m glad I tried them. The fries were almost certainly bought in, and tossed in a red-orange sauce that had copious amounts of heat but also sweetness from what tasted, to me at least, like mango chutney.

All a bit baffling: the menu says that the sauce is Szechuan but I didn’t really get that. It felt more to me like a tangier version of the Manchurian sauce that had so lifted that cauliflower. It tasted great, but it borked the texture – somehow, despite being coated rather than drenched, the fries had lost the element of crispness they needed. That said, we still picked at them long after we’d finished the rest of the meal.

“See, this to me is the perfect snack to have with drinks” said Katie. “You order a beer or a cocktail and some of these.”

I could absolutely see where she was coming from, and again I found myself bemoaning – out loud – the fact that Reading has no pubs or bars with top notch beer snacks. Namaste Kitchen used to be that, years ago, and for that matter so was The Lyndhurst, but now the closest we have is Siren RG1, and in this context “closest” still means “nowhere near”. That’s a proper gap in the market, but not one Calico seemed interested in filling.

We ordered another glass of wine each and carried on chatting, and even though our evening was winding down it was still a little odd when the wait staff brought over our bill just before 10pm. I didn’t recall us asking for it, but I guess if nothing else it answered the question of whether Calico does desserts: they don’t. Our bill for two people came to just over one hundred and thirty-six pounds. I think Katie was a little taken aback by that, and so was I – one of those moments where everything adds up but you’re still surprised by just how much it adds up to.

Part of that is because the wine list doesn’t have anything much south of thirty pounds a bottle. It also felt like a list that had been put together without any thought given to what might actually go with the dishes on the menu. Picpoul de Pinet and Italian pinot grigio might be perfectly good wines, although neither’s really to my taste, but with curry? So we ended up on a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which could just about stand up to our food, but was forty pounds a bottle. Maybe they’re more interested in selling cocktails: the drinks menu includes a lot of them

That included an optional 12.5% service charge and, more than usual, I wasn’t sure that the experience we’d had particularly justified that. It was especially surprising that they were so solicitous when it came to bringing the bill because before that, attracting attention sometimes felt something of a challenge on a very quiet night.

I’m writing this review the night after the meal and normally I might take a bit longer, mentally digest the experience and properly mull over what I made of it. But actually, I think even if I pondered the experience of eating at Calico for a couple of weeks I would still be as baffled as I am now. It reminds me of a couple of places in Reading, neither of them amazing. In terms of taking an old, neglected building and trying to give it a new Instagrammable spin, it’s a little like Market House, a spot that feels like it opened before it was ready and hasn’t felt ready ever since. I suppose it’s also, in that respect, similar to Honest Burgers, which shows how to do these things well.

But really, the place it reminded me of most was Masakali. Like the Caversham Road venue, it is trying to be an upmarket spot, almost an Indian brasserie. Like Masakali it has slightly focused, I suspect, on style over substance, and like Masakali it wants to be a place to see and be seen. The enormous cocktail list would tend to bear that out, as would Calico’s Saturday “Bottomluxx Lunch” (I must be too old for that kind of thing, because I read that wording on their website and wordlessly thought kill me now). I guess Coconut on St Mary’s Butts is a bit like that too, with its regular Instagram photo dump of the beautiful people having a phenomenally good weekend.

The problem with all that is that, against all appearances, the food at Calico is rather good. Better than at Masakali, I think, and despite all their attempts to hide the fact with smoke, mirrors, neon signs and curveball menu selections there is a pretty decent Indian restaurant hiding at the heart of the conundrum that is Calico. I’m not even sure they realise that though, because they’re still too busy haring around trying to be all sorts of things to all sorts of customers.

It must be working for them because they’ve been trading for two years now, but I find myself liking Calico despite all those things and partly in spite of them. As Katie said, the menu is nuts. As I’ve said, the room is nuts. I had three different angles to potentially write this review and it shows, because the ending is almost as muddled as that beginning. In the scheme of things, I can’t sum it up any better than this: I have no idea what Calico is all about, really, but it’s almost worth going just to see if you get the measure of it any better than I have.

You might eat surprisingly well in the process. I did.

Calico – 7.4
33 London Street, Reading, RG1 4PS
0118 9503925

https://www.1843reading.com/eat.html

Restaurant review: Manzano’s Peri Peri

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I was meeting my friend Graeme for the first time in a long time last Friday, and we were dead set on getting to the Nag’s in good time to bag a table, get through plenty of great beer and have a very long overdue catch up. But where to eat beforehand? We wanted somewhere quick and casual, not too pricey, and that end of town. And then I realised that this perfectly summed up Manzano’s, the once infamous peri peri chicken restaurant on the side of the Broad Street Mall.

I say once infamous because Manzano’s is the place that was forced to change its name. Twice. It originally opened as Fernando’s and something about it – I don’t know, maybe the name, possibly the cockerel logo, the chilli-pepper themed peri-o-meter or (and I know this is a stretch) the entire menu – attracted the attention of Nando’s, who asked them to cease and desist.

It reminded me a little bit of the kerfuffle in the Black Country years ago when a chap set up a chicken joint called Kent’s Tuck Inn Fried Chicken, and refused to back down when Colonel Sanders sent him a strongly worded letter. “It is called Kent’s because it is on Kent Street, and Tuck Inn because that’s what you do at a restaurant” said the owner. Good for him: the place is still trading today..

Initially Fernando’s tried to claim that its name had been inspired by ITV dating jamboree Take Me Out (which – don’t judge – I still miss) and the legendary island where the show sent happy couples. But eventually they crumbled and changed it to Fernandez. A small change, but one that kept the lawyers at bay. But there was more: pretty soon a restaurant called Fernandez Grillhouse in Loughborough came out of the woodwork, pointing out that its name and branding appeared to have been ripped off by the Reading venue. “I was in shock” said the owner of Fernando’s. Well quite: how unlucky can one guy be?

Aside from keeping the local websites, back when we had some, busy with news stories Manzano’s also hit the national news with their plight. They were even featured in an episode of Radio 4 series The Untold, narrated by the bizarre Cumbrian cooing of Grace Dent. Fame at last!

Anyway, it’s Manzano’s now. All that happened over five years ago and, apart from a little scuffle with the council about extractor fumes, the restaurant has been going about its business quietly and unobtrusively for a long time. It’s traded for seven years now, a degree of permanence you might not have expected after its rocky start. So although I never thought for a minute that we were about to have a life-changing meal, I expected it to be solid stuff.

I especially hoped it would be because Graeme, my dining companion this week, has suffered for my art in the past. I had a lovely meal with him at Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen, and another at The Goat On The Roof but the first time he joined me on a review, over four years ago, was for the horror of Taco Bell. We walked past it on our way to Manzano’s, both shuddering involuntarily.

Inside it’s a pretty stark and basic space – not ugly, but not remarkable. Yellow banquettes on one side, red on the other, the whole thing much less homely than a Nando’s would be. We plonked ourself on a red banquette, a slightly threadbare one where a very visible repair had been done to the seat cushion. On the opposite wall was some kind of weird word cloud, printed over and over. The room was almost empty when we got there, but started to fill up as the evening went on.

The two-sided menu showed that actually, the food offering had evolved beyond that of a simple peri-peri grillhouse. And I wasn’t sure, on balance, whether that was a good thing or not. So there was still peri-peri chicken: quarters, halves, whole chickens, wings and thighs. Unlike Nando’s there was no butterflied chicken breast, but Manzano’s still did wraps and pittas.

But beyond that there were the kind of fast food dishes you can pick up anywhere, including new arrival Mr T’s next door – beefburgers, fried chicken burgers and the kind of appetisers you might buy from Iceland. Mozzarella sticks, jalapeño bites, that kind of thing. Someone really liked both pineapple and smut, as evidenced by items on the menu called ‘Hawaiian Chick’ and ‘Hot Hawaiian’.

“I got in trouble at work recently when we were ordering pizza in and I told my colleagues that I could just go for a twelve inch Hawaiian” said Graeme. “I don’t think I quite got away with it.”

I pondered my many stories which are every bit as bad as this, and told Graeme one of the least incriminating, which is still too incriminating to put in print here. I have about half a dozen, and you get a special prize if you ever hear me tell all of them and collect the full set.

The menu gave the option to have dishes on their own or as a meal. It wasn’t enormously clear from the menu, but a meal is one item, one side and one drink. The thing that made this more apparent was that they had both premium sides and drinks, which added £1.49 and £1 respectively to the price of your meal. To give you an idea, spicy rice and any kind of fries which didn’t just consist of potato were deemed to be an upgrade, as was having your soft drink in a bottle or going for the really posh shit. Yes, I’m talking about J20 which, it turns out is still a thing.

I always give my dining companion the first choice, and Graeme decided: he wanted half a dozen chicken thighs.

“And I want the loaded fries. I really love fries that are covered in…”

“…crap?”

Graeme smiled.

“Exactly. Crap.”

It only remained for me to find out how hot Graeme wanted his thighs, in a manner of speaking. Manzano’s has a spice-o-meter in the shape of a sauce bottle which in no way resembles Nando’s similar scale, for legal reasons. It isn’t exactly in ascending order, with garlic nestling between the traditionally wussy choices of lemon and herb and mango, but it does roughly the same thing. Graeme went for hot, although there is an even more extreme version, extra hot, in writing so dark you almost can’t make it out. Maybe it was to deter people.

We each upgraded our sides, because we fancy, but kept it real with the drinks: I got a Rio – remember them? – and a Pepsi Max and let Graeme choose. He went for the former, and waxed lyrical about how much he missed Lilt.

The food came out worryingly fast for my liking. I know we were nearly the only customers there and it wasn’t as if they had lots of orders to get through, but if it took five minutes I’d have been surprised. It meant our drinks came out after our food, which disappointed me as I was so looking forward to sniffing the bouquet of my Pepsi Max and letting the bubbles dance over the top of the glass. Only kidding: there was no glass.

Unless you want the King Kombo burger, which is the unholy fusion of a beefburger, fried chicken, halloumi fries and the grand total of four different sauces, all of Manzano’s fried chicken burgers seem to involve mayo whether you like it or not. I went for the BOSS Burger – yes, it’s in block capitals on the menu – which came topped with a hash brown and turkey bacon. It turned up looking, well, like the sum of its parts.

But what might have been even more tragic was my upgrade, the halloumi fries. All five of them. So to have these instead of a portion of fries I had paid thirty pence per pale, parallel fry. In The Untold, the owner of Fernando’s had told the BBC that customers increasingly were “visual eaters”, that things had to look good on the plate. These halloumi fries were not a good look.

Ironically, they were the tastiest thing. The nicest thing I can say about the burger is that it was clearly made of chicken – no chopped or shaped, reformed nonsense. But that’s probably where it ends. It wasn’t chicken thigh, which is the best thing to make chicken burgers with, and it was still a little regular and uniform, no crinkly, gnarled edges, no crunchy spiced coating. It actually did a very good job of tasting of nothing much.

“The hash brown is what’s going to make or break that” said Graeme, when I told him I was going to order this. He wasn’t 100% right, but it did lend a little interest. And turkey bacon wasn’t as bad as I feared it might be – I can completely understand why they offer it, but if you can eat proper bacon you wouldn’t ever willingly settle for this. I know this was called a BOSS Burger but eating it, I didn’t remotely feel like a boss.

Graeme’s chicken thighs were better, but that was as far as it went. By this point I had seen a plate of grilled chicken turn up at another table and it looked the part, so I already suspected that Graeme’s order played more to their strengths. But it was still wasn’t quite there. The thighs were a little dry, and it felt like most of the flavour was imparted by the muddy-brown hot sauce rather than by any kind of marination.

And also – sorry to mention Nando’s again, but they have somewhat begged the comparison – when you order chicken thighs at Nando’s they come skin on. The skin is easily the best bit, everybody knows that, as is the crispiness of its contact with the grill. Without that, these felt weirdly naked.

Graeme let me try one, which was the point at which I realised that Manzano’s idea of hot is really rather hot. I felt my eyes water slightly, and that familiar spiking on the tip of my tongue. I like Graeme a great deal, and he’s a lovely and generous man, but the fact that he offered me a second chicken thigh suggests that, apart from the heat, he wasn’t blown away. “What would the extra hot have been like?” he said. We agreed that it didn’t bear thinking about.

Graeme didn’t offer me any of his loaded fries, for which I can only thank my lucky stars because they were my idea of hell. Slightly wan-looking fries were topped with jalapeños and fried onions – so far so good – and then drowned in a dirty protest of banana yellow squirty cheese. These were called “fully loaded fries” on the menu: I think you’d probably have to be fully loaded to enjoy them.

We looked again at the menu and it said that these fries came topped with melted cheese. Whatever that was, it was not melted. It looked like it had never been, and would never be, solid: a phenomenon we both feared we might experience on our trips to the bathroom the following day.

We also had some coleslaw: I did take a photo of it, but I won’t put you through that. It looked like it was about five minutes away from developing a skin, and after a forkful each we abandoned it. One item on the menu, the “MSB”, is a fried chicken burger boasting what the menu refers to as “luxury coleslaw”. That might be different coleslaw to the stuff they expunged into a bowl for us: I hope to god that it was. This was many things, but it wasn’t luxurious.

The benefit of meals like this is that they’re over quickly, and that having paid up front you can just scarper without having to go through the rigmarole of saying “yes, it was nice” as your plates are cleared. Which I probably would have said, because I’m British, but it wasn’t. Our meal – two meal deals and both those high-falutin’ upgrades – came to just over thirty pounds.

“At least it wasn’t expensive” I said.

“Thirty pounds is expensive!” was Graeme’s reply.

“I don’t know if it is, really. It’s hard to get a meal, a side and a drink for much less than that these days. I think Nando’s probably costs more than that.”

“But is it cheaper than McDonalds, or KFC?” said Graeme, and as we made our way to the Nag’s I had to concede that he had a point. We passed Harput Kebab, which has chairs and tables, and I mentally totted up how much thirty quid would have bought you there. Perhaps at some point I should review Harput Kebab. I’ve had worse.

As you can tell, I didn’t like Manzano’s an awful lot. But what you might not realise is that I’m sad about that. Because when I listened to The Untold – which I did, it’s called research – I was grabbed by the David and Goliath nature of it. It was touching that the owner talked about his family business, his team, his foster kid at home. He talked about how Fernando’s was partly set up to support Reading’s Muslim community, and about the pressures of running the place during Ramadan in his first year. I wish the restaurant I’d eaten in was the restaurant he seemed to describe in his hopes and dreams.

Maybe he has moved on, and Manzano’s is owned by someone else now. It’s possible: I see that they’ve franchised and there’s now a Manzano’s in Bristol too. But I don’t see, personally, what Manzano’s offers that marks it out from either its small competitors like Roosters or the big bad, Reading’s two branches of Nando’s. Nando’s has nicer rooms, table service and, crucially, better and more enjoyable chicken. So Manzano’s falls between all those stools – not as good as its massive rival, arguably not as good as its peers and not even competitive at its price point.

A figure of speech I think about often, even though I’m not generally the vengeful type, is that living well is the best revenge. Manzano’s best revenge over Nando’s would have been to do what Nando’s does, but far better, with integrity, personal service and a backstory that some global franchise could never match. I’m really sorry that, somewhere along the way, Manzano’s appears to have lost interest in doing that.

When the owner of Fernando’s spoke to Radio 4, back in 2018, he had a simple explanation for the heavy-handed tactics from the national restaurant chain. “The only reason Nando’s has an issue with me is that my chicken’s better than theirs” he said. If only that were true.

Manzano’s Peri Peri – 5.1
41 Oxford Road, Reading, RG1 7QG
0118 3343338

https://manzanosperiperi.co.uk

Restaurant review: Storia, Maidenhead

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Six years ago I wrote a piece on the blog, a listicle really, talking about the five things Reading still badly needed. Don’t worry, I won’t send you scurrying off to read it, but the tl:dr version is that, back in 2018, I thought Reading was still missing a proper cooked breakfast place, a tapas restaurant, a gelataria, a cafe that was simultaneously comfy, did good coffee and good food and, for want of a better expression, a “special occasion restaurant”.

Without going into detail, I personally would say that in the intervening six years we haven’t got a great deal closer to having any of those things. But that’s not why we’re talking about Storia in Maidenhead this week: we’re talking about Storia because when I posted about this on Facebook a couple of weeks ago somebody commented saying that, in addition, Reading was lacking a decent independent Italian restaurant. And that comment stopped me in my tracks because – you know what? – that person was right.

Granted, away from the town centre you have the likes of Vesuvio out west and Papa Gee north of the river. And in town you do have pizza options, in the shape of Sarv’s Slice and Zia Lucia. But the demise of Pepe Sale earlier in the year does mean that, for the first time in a very long time, all the Italian restaurants in the town centre are chains: the likes of Zizzi, Carluccio’s and Bella Italia have a stranglehold on central Reading. And the more recent trend of pasta specialists, starting in London with the likes of Padella and Bancone and now cropping up elsewhere, like Little Hollows in Bristol, has also passed Reading by completely: no, town’s short-lived dalliance with Coco Di Mama really doesn’t count.

The one exception, arguably, is Mama’s Way. But although I love it I’m not sure that a restaurant with a capacity of half a dozen (and I’m being generous) is really even in the same ballpark as what we lost when Pepe Sale closed. And the closest thing I can think of to Pepe Sale is miles away to the west – Newbury’s Mio Fiore is a downright lovely spot, but that can be a half hour train journey.

No, that person commenting on my Facebook post was spot on – it’s a big gap in the market in Reading, and it’s striking that nobody has rushed to fill it. Perhaps in the fullness of time Zi Tore, which is going to take over the Grumpy Goat’s site on Smelly Alley, will redress the balance. But it’s hard to get excited about a place boasting Italian street food when the last place to attempt that shtick was Wolf. So this week I decided to check out Maidenhead’s Storia, which had been recommended to me by more than one reader of the blog, in the company of my good friend Jerry (regular readers will be pleased to hear that his digestive issues are now a thing of the past).

The strange thing is that Maidenhead already has a perfectly acceptable if unexciting Italian restaurant in the shape of Sauce and Flour. And Storia is a stone’s throw from that, literally two minutes’ walk away. Not for the first time on a visit to Maidenhead I wondered it if was just rubbing it in that it had some of the things Reading still lacked. Tapas bar El Cerdo was testament to that, as were our very enjoyable pre-dinner drinks at A Hoppy Place. I even had to walk past a branch of Coppa Club on my way to Storia, although that’s maybe less enviable.

That said, Storia is independent but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a chain. It’s the only Berkshire outpost of a group of six restaurants, with others scattered across Surrey, Hertfordshire and, randomly, the edge of Essex. I think that showed in the polish of the place when we arrived – it’s a handsome building which was welcoming from the off and the service was very slick. It was a grown-up space, too, quite classy with good use of mirrors and lighting to make up for what I imagine, in daytime, is a relative lack of natural light.

The tables along the walls were the ones you really wanted, all plush banquettes, but actually I didn’t mind missing out on those because our generous-sized table gave us a great view of the big and buzzing dining room. The whole thing had a feel of affluent happiness about it. It was Friday night, the weekend had arrived and Storia was going to do its damnedest to make sure people thoroughly enjoyed it.

There was very little to dislike about the menu but, simultaneously, I was surprised by how unexciting it was. Storia plays it safe with a menu that very much replicates the likes of Coppa Club down the way with very little sign of quirk or anything especially regional: half a dozen starters, a “raw” section made of up carpaccio and a strangely conspicuous ceviche, some pasta dishes, half a dozen pizzas and as many secondi.

I found it disappointing that all the pasta dishes were priced, and presumably sized, as main courses only – which again, felt more like the stuff of the bigger chain restaurants. And pricing also felt very conventionally done: starters around ten pounds, everything else between fifteen and twenty.

It made me wonder, not for the last time that evening, whether I was just jaded. Because I saw loads of things I could eat but nothing I was dying to try, and that in turn made me think about San Sicario, which closed last year, and what a terrible pity that was. And it also made me think of the interesting, resolutely all-Italian wine lists at San Sicario and Pepe Sale: would they have been seen dead having, as Storia did, an Argentinian Malbec, a Chablis and a Rioja on there?

We ordered a bottle of Valpolicella at £42. They brought a posher bottle by mistake, one twenty pounds more expensive, and I just managed to stop them before they opened it. Our wine was quite nice, but throughout the meal I wondered what the costlier one would have been like.

Jerry loved his starter – a sardine bruschetta with two filleted sardines perched on a pile of roasted peppers and aubergine, punchy with harissa. It was a riot of colour, and ironically one of the best things about it was the bread – properly golden and grilled, the perfect vessel. I got to try a bit and I liked the sardines a lot – in fairness I always do – but the rest of the dish felt a little incongruous, like an attempt to do something North African rather than the more obvious caponata. I quite enjoyed it, but it made me crave caponata more than anything.

“I’m in Lisbon towards the end of the year. Would you like me to bring you back a couple of tins of sardines?”

“That would be marvellous!” beamed Jerry.

My starter was the best thing I ate all evening. Storia’s calamari was very, very good – fresh, not bouncy, with a crispy, craggy coating which felt like it had some polenta flour in the mix. The whole thing was lightly scattered with red chilli and the decision to serve it with black garlic aioli rather than its more prosaic sibling was an excellent one, even if the smear slightly detracted from the undeniable visual appeal. It made me wish that Storia did a fritto misto, or perhaps it made me wish that Storia was the kind of restaurant that had fritto misto on its menu.

The secondi on Storia’s menu, I’m sorry to say, are really stuff. Forget your lamb rump, your saltimbocca or your suckling pig, because you won’t find them here. Instead there’s a chicken Milanese, a grilled chicken breast dish with marsala, a couple of fish dishes, steak and a risotto. I suspect that, rather than a craving for carbs, is what sent Jerry and I scuttling for the pizza and pasta.

Jerry absolutely adored his pizza salsiccia, a very well-trodden combo of salami, ‘nduja, chilli and basil. Again, he was kind enough to let me try some and I had to agree that it was a very solid effort. Slightly better than Zia Lucia’s – and a darned sight less wet and floppy – and not quite as good as the finest examples from Sarv’s Slice. A bit wayward with the toppings and with a lot of crust, crust that wasn’t quite as puffy, airy or leopard-spotted as the very best examples.

It was a nice pizza, and if I ate in Storia again I might well order one. It was not, however, as good as the one you can get in Knead, a five minute walk away.

I’ve saved possibly the most disappointing until last. When it comes to pasta, I often find myself ordering a carbonara these days. There are probably two reasons for that. One is that it’s a very good benchmark and a sign of whether a kitchen knows its stuff: does it come out glorious and golden, or closer to the magnolia horror of Cozze? But an even better reason – durr! – is that when it’s good it’s one of the happiest, most comforting things you can eat. And now there was a nip in the air I found myself drawn to it, far more than some chicken and pesto concoction that had a whiff of Prezzo about it or a conchiglie dish with yet more of that harissa.

It could have lived up to that promise, and nearly did. The taglioni were beautifully al dente and toothsome, so easy to anchor with a spoon and swirl with a fork, capturing all the sauce you needed. The sauce was good stuff – no adulteration with cream or egg whites here – and topping it with a strip of crispy pancetta was a nice touch, if an obvious one.

But the other star of the show is guanciale, and it needed to be crispy nuggets of the stuff that disrupted all that unctuousness (I mean that in its true sense, by the way) with spikes of smokey salt. And this was underdone, a bit too bouncy, a bit too fatty, falling short. If this dish had been the platonic ideal of a carbonara the rating at the bottom would probably have been a whole point higher and I would be making plans to return before Christmas. But it wasn’t, so the search goes on.

We nearly ordered dessert, but we were that terrible combination of not hungry enough and not fussed enough. But we were having a lovely time, and we had wine left, so we did the next best thing and ordered coffee, just to keep the evening alive that little bit longer. Latte came in a walled glass and was really surprisingly good, so much better than I thought it would be.

Like my old friend, it was sweet without a hint of bitterness, and it made for the perfect end to a brilliant evening. The food had facilitated that, but never even threatened to upstage it; although in fairness I expect I could have a wonderful time with Jerry eating doner meat off a bin lid. Anyway, our meal came to just over a hundred pounds, not including tip: the service very much deserved a tip, so tip we did.

As I said earlier on, I wonder whether I am just jaded about the kind of thing Storia does, even though Storia does it very well indeed. If you want a mid-range, casual dining Italian meal which isn’t going to offend or disappoint anybody, some of which will be good and some of which will be quite nice, you can go to Storia and it will deliver exactly that.

On a good day, so will Coppa Club I imagine, or Zia Lucia. On a good day, Jamie’s Italian used to manage that too. Is that enough? I suppose for many people it will be, and if Storia does that, without fail, time and again, it will no doubt build up a happy and loyal customer base and do extremely well – as it has, I suspect, in Tring and Radlett, in Redhill and Shepperton. History has taught us that there’s definitely a place for that kind of thing.

I guess what Storia reminded me of, strangely, is Strada – remember Strada? – back when Strada only had two branches, before it was possessed by the dread spirit of private equity and went the way some promising small restaurants do. As I think I’ve said before, I used to go to the one in Richmond with an old friend of mine, long since lost in the mists of divorce, and I always loved it. I came away, every single time, wishing Reading had one.

But when it did, it was no longer the Strada I loved but just Zizzi with a different colour scheme. Storia isn’t that, yet it wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to see how it could get there. And maybe that’s what they’re aiming for – I hope not, but everybody needs to make money. Especially nowadays when the bastard stuff seems to be so very thin on the ground.

So it’s not Storia, it’s me. If you’re like me, you would probably enjoy your meal there. But if you’re anything like me, Storia might also leave you feeling that, even though there’s nothing technically wrong with it, you just want something more these days.

Storia – 6.9
11 Bridge Street, Maidenhead, SL6 8LR
01628 769350

https://www.storiarestaurants.co.uk/maidenhead

Restaurant review: The Drapers Arms, Islington

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

I was meeting Aileen, a very dear old friend, in London for lunch and she gave me carte blanche to pick wherever I wanted. “You’re the food expert”, her message said. “You choose.” And I have to say, that was more difficult than usual; I have a list of London places I want to get round to, but lots of them didn’t seem right for this. I didn’t want us to sit at a cramped table somewhere in Soho, elbows battling, or up at a bar watching an open kitchen. I might go to the edgy places with my cousin Luke, but lunch with Aileen required somewhere in the image of our friendship: comfortable, classy, unrushed with a long history. Somewhere worth celebrating.

Aileen and I, you see, have been friends for well over a decade. Long before I started writing this blog I used to write another – not about restaurants, about something else – and somehow Aileen chanced upon it. And somehow, I’m not even sure how, we went from writer and reader to firm friends. I don’t think I could possibly have appreciated at the time how fortunate I was about that. Because a few years later my marriage and my life imploded and things got almost impossibly hard and Aileen, arguably more than anyone, was the person who kept me together.

In the dark moments when nobody else was there, or (more likely) they had all gone to sleep, Aileen showed up for me time and time again. She always had the same mantra, which I railed against but over time discovered was true: this is a phase. It’s a phase, and it will pass. And it was, and it did, and she never once said I told you so, even though she could have done.

I like to tell people that she saved my life, and she likes to reply that I’m talking nonsense. She might be right, because she nearly always is, but if we hadn’t become friends I don’t know who or where I would be now: I almost certainly wouldn’t be here.

It was a huge honour for me that she was at my wedding earlier in the year, a wedding that might not have happened had I not met her. Late in the evening, when the guests were thinning out, we sat together outside the Lyndhurst and had a good old gas, as if the intervening months had never happened. And the next morning I managed to catch her in the hotel bar before she headed home to Milton Keynes, and that easy, joyous conversation was one of my highlights of the whole weekend. I told her we should do lunch in London soon. So we agreed to, and all I had to do was find somewhere suitable for the occasion.

I ended up choosing the Drapers Arms in Islington, because it just felt right. It’s been going for well over twenty years, one of the generation of London gastropubs that includes the celebrated Anchor & Hope near Waterloo, and in that time it has become an institution. It held a Bib Gourmand from Michelin for much of the last decade, losing it in 2018, but it still featured in this year’s list of the U.K.’s top 100 gastropubs. But the thing that most cements its status as an institution is that nobody talks about it online, because nobody needs to. You won’t find a recent review of it online, and the London restaurant bloggers stopped name checking it a long time ago.

All that meant that although I’ve always wanted to go, I didn’t have a very clear idea what to expect. Aileen and I wandered there, strolling up Camden Passage and looking at all the stalls and boutiques, before heading across to Upper Street and then ambling off the main drag, onto side streets filled with houses you wished you lived in. On the way I went past various restaurants I’d heard of – the likes of Bancone clone Noci, Alsatian brasserie Bellanger and regional specialists Hainan House – all of which have been reviewed by somebody a darned sight more recently than the Drapers Arms has.

It’s a handsome, imposing building, a three-storey, powder blue beauty, and going in the front room was flooded with sunshine from the windows and glass-panelled doors. There were unoccupied tables at the front, and I was hoping our reservation was at one of them, but instead we were led to a room further back which was dingier and less agreeable. Almost every table was taken, and we were seated at possibly the worst one there – equidistant from the terrace at the back or those big windows out front, starved of sunshine.

I plonked myself on a Thonet-style bentwood chair that didn’t entirely feel as if it could deal with my weight at the start of the meal, let alone the end. Around us all the tables were packed with loud, lively, chattering groups, and there was nothing to soak up the sound. I took a picture of the room much later on, which makes it look nicer than it was.

But maybe all that is a tad grumpy. After all it was busy, which you want somewhere to be, and the fact remained that it was an extremely attractive pub, even if we had the restaurant equivalent of the worst house on a good street. I especially loved the emerald-coloured bar, and a print on the wall advertising HP Sauce in the proper bottles.

“Mark brought some home from the supermarket recently in a squeezy plastic bottle and I made him take it back” said Aileen, talking about her husband. “It doesn’t taste the same when it’s not in a glass bottle. I reckon it’s thinner, too.” This, I realised, was one of many reasons why I loved the woman.

The menu changes every day and they publish it on the website, so it was much as I’d expected. It’s curious how some menus present you with very difficult choices while some, despite making all the right noises, are devoid of dilemmas. I would say that, however well it read, the Drapers Arms menu was the latter. Nine starters, all of which seemed to be either gutsy and rustic or, for my money, a little too virtuous. It was all a tad binary for me. You had the same number of mains, although four of them – the fun ones – were to be shared between two.

That made the whole thing a little more restrictive than I’d have liked and if you didn’t like offal or bone marrow, both of which made an appearance, I think you might have found things trickier still. Starters generally clustered between eight and fifteen pounds, mains started just shy of twenty but climbed, for the sharing dishes, up to ninety quid.

While we weighed things up Aileen ordered a negroni and I asked for a Bloody Mary, we clinked glasses and celebrated the prospect of a long lunch with a great friend. They didn’t ask me how spicy I wanted the Bloody Mary, which gave me confidence that it would be good. It was both spicy and very, very good.

It had been far too long since I’d had lunch with Aileen, and I didn’t realise that she was excited about featuring in the blog. “I’ve wanted to do this for ages!” she said. “And I don’t want you using a pseudonym for me, either.” Chatting away, I realised that we both had many of the same criteria when it came to restaurants getting a gold star or nul points. When our bread turned up, it turned out we both had a bugbear about fridge cold butter (Aileen checked it and thought it was okay, for my money it was still a little on the cold side).

My starter was a bisque, and Aileen rested her hand briefly against the outside of the bowl. “I don’t like it when hot food comes in a cold dish” she said. I hadn’t ever considered it, but she had a point.

The problem with the bisque, though, wasn’t one of temperature per se. It was a tasty dish where almost everything worked, but it wasn’t quite the sum of its parts. I loved the depth of the bisque and the crab meat tumbled through it. Spiking the whole thing with dots of deep green oil and red flecks of espelette pepper gave the whole thing contrast and depth.

The problem, and I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, was the octopus: there were a few pieces in the bisque and I just wasn’t sure, in terms of flavour or texture, whether they added enough to be worth it. This dish was fifteen pounds, and I couldn’t help thinking it might have been better, and been better value, without the octopus.

“Another thing that annoys me, while we’re at it” I said to Aileen, “is dishes like soup appearing in shallow bowls like this. It just means it’s really hard to get to all of it, and it goes cold quicker.”

“I agree with that” said Aileen. I cleaned up the rest of my bisque with some of the bread, which was fulfilling one of its most noble purposes: the edible jay cloth for sauce removal. The bread was okay, by the way: two big slices of sourdough and two pieces of baguette is hardly highway robbery for three pounds, but it wasn’t the most exciting.

Aileen’s starter was the kind of dish I would never order in a million years, and a great advert for bringing people with you to review restaurants whose tastes are not the same as yours. It was a bean salad with coriander, chillies and datterini tomatoes, served in a sort of filo pastry basket. Aileen loved it – the flavours worked well and the beans had a nice amount of bite. I had a forkful, which confirmed that it was indeed the kind of dish I would never order in a million years. I didn’t feel like there was anything bringing a fun factor to the plate, but that probably tells you more about me. It also felt steep at eleven quid.

Aileen is planning to retire at the end of the year, and was telling me how she plans to take over more of the cooking from her husband. This dish struck me as having a hint of Ottolenghi about it, and Aileen said she’d tried making some of his recipes. I’ve never followed her example: in my experience, they always seem to involve lots of ingredients and hours of processes, so perhaps they’re best left to the retired.

“Have you ever been to an Ottolenghi?” she said.

“Yes, just the once. I was at this event to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Cable Street Riots, because my then girlfriend knew someone who was in a Yiddish marching band.” This sentence, by the way, sums up perfectly how very strange my life was in the latter half of 2016.

“There was a march, and a demonstration, and lots of placards and Jeremy Corbyn was one of the people making a speech. It was so boring that we sloped off to the Ottolenghi in Spitalfields and they managed to fit us in. It was all right, but it felt like a glorified salad bar.”

This starter, to me, felt like the kind of thing you’d have at a glorified salad bar.

But no matter. Both of us had chosen far more substantial mains and had ordered a bottle of Gamay to go with them: initially I thought Aileen might have insisted on just having wines by the glass, but that negroni had persuaded her to throw caution to the wind. It was thirty-one pounds, so very much at the shallow end of the wine list, but the list went deeper than at many restaurants.

“That one said 300, and for a moment I thought it was the price” said Aileen.

“No, that is the price.”

“But this is a pub!”

“Well, yes. And no.”

My main course was a sure sign that summer was long gone and that winter, as Leonard Cohen once put it, was tuning up. Lamb faggot and celeriac purée sounded like a glorious, fortifying treat and I was very glad Aileen hadn’t stuck a pin in it, because I always let my dining companions choose first. On paper it was beautiful, and at first sight it was every bit as appealing – a huge faggot, a splodge of mash, a moat of sticky gravy and one accent of not-beige, a crowning garnish of kalette tops. It was a dish to be enjoyed in a cosy pub, even one with three hundred pound bottles of wine on offer.

Things only went slightly awry when I ate the damned thing. The faggot had a terrific, coarse, crumbly texture and the celeriac purée was one of the nicest, silkiest ones I can remember. The kalette was a revelation – still firm, with a zip of mint that the dish badly needed. But the faggot was really heavy on the offal, to the point where it was a little too intense, a bit much even for me. I liked it at the time, and I finished it, but it sort of stayed with me for the rest of the day, in the way you don’t want.

Aileen had gone for my second choice from the menu, a beef and mushroom pie with a suet crust – or, for the purists among you, a stew with a lid. It came without accompaniments, so I was glad we’d also ordered chips and veg. It was placed on the table, and Aileen asked if it came with gravy (she is from Nottingham, after all). We were told, very nicely, that it did not.

At first, Aileen wasn’t sure about the whole affair but I think she warmed to it – the beef was all at the bottom but there was a fair amount of it, tender and breaking into strands. There was carrot and mushroom in there too, and she loved the green beans she’d ordered on the side, just-cooked and topped with crispy shallots. But even though this wasn’t a pie for sharing it was strange that it didn’t come with anything, including a plate to dish it up onto.

It reminded me very much of some of the great gastropub pies I’ve tried in the past, at Hackney’s The Marksman or The Magdalen Arms in Oxford, but it didn’t look quite as alluring as either of those. Still, it was eighteen pounds, one of which goes to Action Against Hunger, so you couldn’t really complain.

“That was lovely” said Aileen. “It needed gravy though.”

I’ve realised I didn’t get any pictures of the green beans or the chips. The chips were skin on (I thought that might be one Aileen’s list of restaurant no-nos, but apparently not) and clearly made in-house. And they were pleasant, but perhaps a little limp and unremarkable. I wanted that contrast of brittle crunch and fluff – and I didn’t care how many times they had to be cooked in order to achieve it – but these weren’t quite there. They were a decent vehicle for the last of my gravy, even so.

Our meal had been a little haphazardly timed – we didn’t get our bottle of wine almost until our mains turned up, so once they’d been eaten we had a lot of wine left. And service was brilliant at this point, leaving us in peace while we finished it and continued our epic conversation. I saw pictures of Aileen’s twins at their prom and wondered, as I’m sure she did, where the time had gone and how the little girls I’d first met all those years ago were suddenly sixteen.

Aileen in turn saw pictures of my wedding, and in between flicking through them and chatting about all sorts we caught up in the way that is such a tonic – a proper state of the nation natter encompassing work, family, friends, the past and the future. And I loved the Drapers Arms for this if for nothing else, for enabling this kind of afternoon.

Eventually, the wine was polished off and the dining room almost empty: I felt strangely proud of the fact that we’d outlasted all our fellow diners. So we got round to ordering dessert, along with a tea for Aileen and a bitter, middling latte for me. That section of the menu was very compact – a duo of cheeses and three desserts – and again, catered to people with different preferences to mine (I’ll eat most things, but I’ve never warmed to custard). So we both went for the lime posset and, like so much of what I’d eaten, it was nearly there.

As with my main course, almost everything was how you would want it to be. The strawberries on top were plump and sweet, the syrup they were in sticky and ambrosial. The shortbread was reassuringly irregular and crumbly: I saved mine to the very end. And the sharpness of lime in the posset worked so well, a welcome variation on a theme. But here’s the problem: the posset wasn’t properly set. Some of it was, but the rest was just liquid and hard to eat tidily, part dessert and part drink. So at the end of proceedings, you got a dish that was something like a synecdoche, a pretty good summary of the meal as a whole.

Our meal for two, including service charge, came to pretty much bang on one hundred and eighty pounds. And if that sounds like a lot, I’d say it could easily have been more. Our wine was distinctly entry level and we had, by accident rather than design, ordered the two cheapest mains on the menu. You could easily come away with a far more dented wallet than we did, although if you had an afternoon as terrific as the one I’d had you’d be fortunate indeed.

We wandered, full and happy, back to Angel tube station to go our separate ways. I could have talked for hours, but the idea of eating another mouthful or drinking another drop was more than either of us could contemplate (“I’m not sure I’ll even eat tomorrow” was Aileen’s verdict, although if she’s anything like me I’m sure she managed it). London looked beautiful in the autumn sun, and all around us Islington was gearing up for a busy Saturday night. We, on the other hand, were both dead set on being installed on our respective sofas by the time Strictly began.

When I think about the Drapers Arms, the thing I keep coming back to is that everything was good, and some of it was very good, but none of it was spot on. I imagine they have better days than they did the day I visited, I imagine there are nicer tables than the one we sat at, and iterations of that menu that would have suited me better. But I’ve had many far worse experiences, too, in countless places. So where does that leave you?

Yes, it was good but not perfect. And when it turns out like that you have to resort to your gut feel, try and weigh up all those almost intangible incidentals that define a meal. Because restaurant reviewers may not always tell you this – in fact many never talk about it at all – but there’s so much more to a meal than food, the room, or even service. I wish I’d liked everything a little more, and yet at the same time I know it will be hard to top as one of my favourite lunches of the year. So the Drapers Arms could have been better, but nonetheless I’m still really glad I went there. Happy that I ticked it off my list, and delighted that I chose it to host such a brilliant afternoon.

The Drapers Arms – 7.5
44 Barnsbury Street, London, N1 1ER
020 76190348

https://www.thedrapersarms.com