Every year, without exception, you can reliably expect two things to happen in Reading’s hospitality scene. One is that there will be a raft of closures and new openings. Some years that ratio is pretty much one to one, others – like this year – it’s badly out of kilter, with far more places giving up the ghost than newcomers showing up to take their place. It’s tough out there, with no relief in sight. But the other thing that happens, every year without fail, is that none of those new openings will be a tapas bar.

I have complained about this so many times that it’s boring for all of us, so I won’t go on at length. But everywhere you look there’s a tapas bar, it seems, apart from Reading. Swindon has Los Gatos, Oxford has Arbequina. Newbury has Goat On The Roof, and Wokingham has Salty Olive. And Reading? Reading has next to sod all – unless you count Thames Lido, which I don’t, or Alto Lounge, which surely nobody should (Oh wow! Excited for this said the Chronicle‘s Facebook page this week, about the news that Alto Lounge had received permission from the council to double in size: that’s the Chronicle for you, excited about pretty much anything).

No, it’s never a tapas bar. Biryani joints are ten a penny, we went through a phase where we got three sushi restaurants in quick succession and momo are having a moment, but nobody wants to open a tapas bar. It’s a long, long time since La Tasca (which also wasn’t great) and six years since I Love Paella – not a tapas bar, but the closest thing we had – was unceremoniously booted out of the Fisherman’s Cottage. Is it a Brexit thing? Surely somebody feels like getting on the blower to renowned Bristol importer Mevalco and sorting this out, you might think, but every year nobody does.

And that’s what sends me scuttling off to the likes of Swindon, or Oxford, or Wokingham, trying to find the next best thing. Sometimes it works – Los Gatos is a little miracle – and sometimes I find myself somewhere like Sanpa, but I keep on trying because it’s a wonderful way to eat and I am always on the hunt for somewhere that brings a little hint of Granada or Málaga to unsung Berkshire. And that’s why this week I ended up at El Cerdo in Maidenhead, a ten minute walk from the train station, in the company of Katie, last seen last month sampling the glitzy splendour of Calico with me: inexplicably, after a dinner with me, she felt like repeating the experience.

Katie, it turned out, was on a proper journey of discovery, having never been to Maidenhead before. On the stroll through town to the restaurant I gave her a whistle stop tour of everything I knew about Maidenhead, which didn’t take long: former constituency of Theresa May, the infidelity capital of the U.K. (allegedly) and the town that, possibly because it was originally meant to be the terminus of the Elizabeth Line, was getting all the interesting things Reading didn’t.

That last one really is true – Maidenhead has a great independent craft beer bar in A Hoppy Place, wonderful pizza at Knead, an absolutely top notch town centre restaurant in Seasonality. And if some of the misfires, like Sauce and Flour, weren’t amazing, they at least showed that someone was trying. We walked past Sauce and Flour on the way to El Cerdo, and it was rammed, which shows how little I know about anything.

El Cerdo is by the canal, in the new development (the Waterside Quarter, apparently). “This looks so much like the Oracle it’s disconcerting” was Katie’s take, not without justification. The restaurant looked welcoming from the outside, and it wasn’t unpleasant on the inside but it had a feeling of “new build” that it couldn’t quite shake, a functional box rather than a cosy, appealing cocoon.

That’s not entirely their fault – it’s the hand they’ve been dealt with the space, and I liked the giant pig logo on one wall, past the handsome bar. But overall I felt it lacked a little character, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. After all, Knead has a very similar dining room, but somehow it still has a feeling of bustle and hubbub. I guess the open space with the pizza oven perhaps brought things together in a way that El Cerdo’s bar, attractive though it was, didn’t quite manage. A handful of tables were occupied when we got there, including one large group in the corner, but it was a quiet Tuesday night.

El Cerdo’s menu read well. It wasn’t so big as to be unwieldy, and was divided into logical sections – nibbles, cold tapas, meat, seafood and fish. They hadn’t given in to the temptation to do paella on the side, so there was just the one rice dish and a few types of tortilla. In the run up to my visit I’d looked at the menu at Los Gatos, just to benchmark prices, and El Cerdo was definitely more expensive: nearly everything was north of a tenner, with some dishes nudging twenty.

But the wine list was good, and exclusively Spanish, and although we were tempted by a txakoli – the slightly sparkling Basque white you rarely see on menus – we went for an albariňo. It was an excellent choice – crisp and clean but not bone dry, with a little fruit. Thirty-eight quid for a bottle that’s fifteen online, so not an oppressive mark-up, either.

Now, before we get started on the food – and because tapas is by definition small plates, we have a fair bit to run through – I want to get a couple of things out of the way. One is that I had an absolutely lovely evening, and that makes it far more tempting to see the food through the Albariño-tinted glasses of good company. The other is that your mileage at El Cerdo might very well vary from mine: Katie, I suspect, enjoyed most of the dishes more than I did.

And of course, your take on this kind of food will depend on how and where you’ve had it before. Despite loving tapas and small plates, it turned out that Katie had never been to Spain, although she’s rectifying that with a trip to Barcelona just before Christmas.

I on the other hand go to Andalusia most years – and yes, I know that makes me sound like the pretentious tosspot I am – and unfortunately that means that although I went hoping for the best, I was painfully aware of all the instances where the best simply didn’t materialise. El Cerdo’s website says, pretty plainly, “If a dish doesn’t taste like it does in Spain, then we won’t serve it”. Although it also says that El Cerdo has an “executive chef”, and in my experience very little good comes of having one of those in place of an actual chef.

The first sign that I was going to have to write this kind of review came with the accompaniment to those first sips of wine, a couple of gildas. A gilda is a very simple thing – a skewer of olives and pickled chillis, all brought together with a slim ribbon of salty anchovy. Named in homage to Rita Hayworth, it’s almost a perfect mouthful, and quite hard to get wrong. You could have really amazing olives, and truly best in class Cantabrian anchovies, but even an entry level one is going to be a delight.

Or it should be, providing you use salty anchovies. But it felt to me like these were made with boquerones, the softer, more vinegary Spanish anchovies without the saline tautness of the good stuff. Which in turn meant they were all out of kilter – all vinegar and no salt, and somehow fishier than they should have been as a result. I felt like a right killjoy thinking this, because Katie seemed to enjoy hers. But I knew it could, and should, have been better.

The jamon croquetas were a similar story. They weren’t terrible – easily better than the deep fried abominations I’d eaten at Sanpa – but nowhere near the quality of anything you would get in Spain. They were a little flabby, a little pale, a little lacking in the crisp shell you needed. And the bechamel inside was lacking silkiness and a proper hit of jamon. Perching a little slice of it on top of each croqueta just showed you, Jim Bowen-style, what you could have won.

Last time I went out with Katie at Calico, she took me out of my comfort zone by ordering more vegetarian dishes than I would personally have chosen, which probably meant that my review was useful to slightly more people than it would ordinarily have been. The same thing happened here, where Katie was stuck between two dishes, broccoli with almonds or hispi cabbage, that I would never have ordered in a million years.

I took against the former for containing coconut ajo blanco in order to be vegan – good luck convincing anybody that they’d serve that in Spain – and so hispi cabbage it was. And actually this turned out to be one of the better things we ordered, although possibly one of the less Spanish ones. The cabbage came topped with a caper and raisin purée, which was heavy on the raisin and light on the caper, and squiggled vigorously with what was apparently a cured egg yolk sauce.

Your guess is as good as mine: I certainly didn’t get cured egg yolk from it, partly because I don’t really know what a cured egg yolk would even taste like. The little pieces of fried kale on top were pleasant too, although it gave me flashbacks to the Lyndhurst, which always makes me sad. There was a real whack of lurking heat in this too, and all in all it was probably the cleverest thing we had. Not massive, and not cheap at just shy of a tenner, but with lots to recommend it.

One of the biggest crimes against Spanish food was what came next, something the menu described as our “lazy” or open tortillas. We picked the eponymous El Cerdo tortilla, with chorizo and black pudding, and it’s difficult to describe how underwhelmed I was by this. Lazy is about right, to the point where maybe the menu should have said “we can’t be arsed to make a tortilla”.

Now in fairness the server, who was excellent, asked us if we wanted it runny or medium, and maybe we should have gone for the former. But whether it was runny or medium, this wasn’t a tortilla. It was an omelette. An underseasoned one that had been cooked through, with four bits of chorizo plonked on top and some black pudding – the British kind, not gorgeous soft Spanish morcilla, lobbed in the middle. No softness, a little onion, no potato that I could discern. This dish frustrated me. I imagine it would have made a Spaniard angry.

We’d ordered dishes in waves, partly because El Cerdo, Wagamama-style, says that everything you order will come out when they feel like it and we didn’t want to be swamped with dishes in one hit only to find the evening over. El Cerdo said that you should aim for two to three dishes each, which we took to mean three each, and actually doing it this way helped because we got to spy on the table next to us – four lads who kept their coats on throughout for some reason – and swap one of our dishes for something they’d ordered.

That dish was another of the relative hits of the evening, pincho de pollo with crispy polenta and mojo rojo. It was a reasonably generous skewer – four substantial enough pieces of chicken with a weird treble clef of red sauce, resting on a rope bridge of crispy sticks of polenta. And again, it wasn’t terrible but I didn’t found myself wowed. The chicken was nicely enough done, but El Cerdo makes much of its charcoal oven and I didn’t feel this had the char I’d expect from such an impressive piece of kit. The polenta added contrast, but if it did indeed have Idiazabal cheese in it it was a whisper, not a shout.

And again, thirteen pounds for this – even by 2024 standards – felt steep. I thought back to the skewer of chicken I had at Kolae, earlier in the year. Different cuisine, of course, but in terms of technique, flavour and value it was worlds away from this. This felt like the kind of dish that might pleasantly surprise you at Alto Lounge, but only because your expectations were on the floor.

If you wanted more evidence that El Cerdo wasn’t capable of delivering a flawless plate of food, their monkfish in tempura with chickpeas was exactly that. Just as at Calico, Katie had talked me into ordering something with chickpeas and they were lovely – nutty, earthy, positively moreish. But what in god’s name was going on with the monkfish? Two slightly forlorn nuggets of the stuff in a batter that was not, by any stretch of the imagination, tempura. It had no crunch, no texture, and when you tried to cut through it it all fell away, leaving a dense little knot of woolly monkfish, a sad savoury parody of a profiterole.

It turned out that Katie had never had monkfish before. “It’s not usually like this” I told her, feeling like I had to do something to rescue monkfish’s reputation. I hope for Katie’s sake that her first visit to Spain is better than her first taste of monkfish. If it’s on a par, that means she’s had her pocket picked on Las Ramblas.

By this point I’m guessing neither of us really wants me to go on, but go on I must because there were a couple more dishes. Again, Katie quite liked the patatas bravas, which I think we’d picked to make sure we felt full at the end. And again, it wasn’t atrocious but I have never, ever had patatas bravas like this in Spain or indeed anywhere decent in the U.K.

The bravas sauce didn’t taste like bravas sauce, it was fruitier and lacked any kind of heat. The alioli, giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that’s what it was, was not unpleasant. But it needed more of both, and moreover the potatoes were wan specimens, technically cooked but lacking the golden hue and brittle texture that makes this dish a treat.

Writing this, I should let you know, is the weirdest experience. Because I had a really lovely evening but the more I think about the food the more surprised I am by that.

We decided to have a dessert and there was one on the specials menu – a tangerine cake with white chocolate ganache and yuzu sorbet – which our server told us was perfect for sharing. So we also decided to have a dessert wine each, and identified a very nice-looking Pedro Ximenez on the wine list. So we ordered it, and our server came over apologetically. There was only enough left in the bottle for one glass – well, one and a half glasses, really. So what would we like to do?

Of course, as something approximating to a gentleman, I let Katie have that and went instead for a white dessert wine from Rueda. But when they came over, both were in very small glasses, both were the same size, and both looked bigger than they were because each of them had an ice cube lobbed in it.

“They weren’t the coldest, so I put an ice cube in them” explained our server.

This begged so many questions, like why aren’t you keeping your dessert wine in the fridge? or maybe you should have asked first?, let alone is that really what a glass of Pedro Ximenez looks like? or why didn’t you give her the rest of the bottle, were you saving that final half glass for Santa?

It was just baffling, and especially so because otherwise service was lovely all night. She told us they’d been open about a year and that although this week was quiet, things ramped up for the Christmas season after that and business was booming.

Last but not least, the dessert. It looked fancy, it looked cheffy and I can see that it was kind of designed for sharing. And leaving out the question of whether yuzu is remotely Spanish, the yuzu sorbet in the middle was easily the best and most enjoyable thing in the whole dish, resting on a sort of granola crumb. But there was nothing you could really describe as a white chocolate ganache, because neither the quenelles of something or other or the isosceles triangles of white chocolate fitted that bill.

But that wasn’t the most heinous failing: that was the cake. Dense didn’t even begin to describe it. You could work out your upper body trying to drive a spoon through that cube of stodge, and I felt like I did. There’s a chap called David who comes to my readers’ lunches whose job is to build machines that are used to test whether materials can withstand immense pressure. David would take a professional interest in that cake.

Because I seem to have spent most of this review pointing out places that do things better than El Cerdo, this feels like the right time to mention the pistachio cake I had last year at Manteca.

By this point, with the exception of a couple of chaps at the bar, we were the last table there so we settled up and made our way back to the station in the cold. Our meal, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just over a hundred and fifty pounds. Now, I think life in Britain has reached the point where it’s difficult to say “that’s expensive” any more because you’d end up saying that about most meals out.

But instead, we can at least talk about value: that’s more than my recent meals cost at Calico, at The Cellar, or Storia. My meal at Goat On The Roof cost a smidge more, admittedly two years ago, but El Cerdo can’t hold a candle to Goat On The Roof.

Granted, none of those restaurants are an exact match in terms of how many courses, how much booze and all that jazz, but the central point remains: El Cerdo does not feel like value. Not compared to any of those places, not compared to the tapas places you could eat at along the train tracks in Oxford or Swindon. So the search continues, and maybe next year I’ll rock up at Salty Olive having one last stab at finding great Spanish food a very short distance from Reading. Because if there’s one thing we can be fairly sure of, it’s that a tapas bar will not open in Reading next year.

But let’s close by looking on the bright side. For two years now I’ve been taking the train to Maidenhead, trying all these places and bemoaning the fact that Reading doesn’t have them. But actually, now, I’m beginning to think that my head was turned by Seasonality and Knead. Because outside those two, the new places I’ve eaten at in Maidenhead – the likes of Sauce and Flour, Storia and El Cerdo – don’t leave me thinking that we’re missing out. If there’s a market for box-ticking, slightly inauthentic, sterile restaurants and those restaurants want to go to Maidenhead instead, I’m all for it. I’m happy to hold out for something better. Even if experience tells me I might be waiting a very long time.

El Cerdo – 6.3
The Colonnade, Waterside Quarter, Maidenhead, SL6 1QG
01628 617412

https://elcerdo.co.uk/maidenhead/