Can you believe that Thames Lido celebrated its seventh birthday this year? It was such an event – three articles in quick succession from the Guardian was a big deal in 2017 – and for many people it’s been a real statement piece, a special occasion restaurant that has seen off the likes of Forbury’s, Cerise and, at the start of this year, the Corn Stores. It put Reading on the map when nowhere else had, just before the two kitchens, Clay’s and Kungfu, arrived in town and changed everything.

And yet, as regular readers might know, I’ve always had a very chequered experience of Thames Lido. When I visited it on duty, over six years ago, I found things to like but wasn’t won over by the place as a whole. And on the occasions when I’ve been back, for a meal with friends or tapas by the pool, it has never completely convinced me. Consistency has consistently – irony of ironies – been the problem. There have been moments in every meal that impressed but always, somehow, an equal and opposite Newtonian disappointment.

The meal that stayed with me was one I had in the spring of 2021 with my family, just as I was emerging from a self-imposed Covid lockdown and tentatively eating outside again. We had tapas by the pool, and I had that experience – again – that some of the dishes were quite good and some were very much something and nothing. I made the mistake of posting about it on Instagram, and shortly after that I had a direct message from the head chef. It’s safe to say that dealing with criticism was not a strong suit of his.

“Looking through your account, your reviews are generally critical so may I suggest you don’t go out so much and cook a bit more at home?” he said. “I’m sure we’d all love to see the photos.”

Well, I didn’t take his advice – and I doubt he took mine in return that he might want to consider developing a thicker skin – except in one important respect, which is that I didn’t bother going back to Thames Lido after that. He left not long after those messages and for a while Thames Lido churned through head chefs like the U.K. got through Prime Ministers. I think it also had some kind of executive chef/”restaurant director” at the time – rarely a good thing – and the menu felt like it was focused more on buying and dishing up rather than cooking. So, much as others still loved the Lido, it well and truly fell off my radar.

And then, late last year, something happened which put them back on it. Out of the blue, I heard from the person handling Thames Lido’s PR, who told me that the restaurant had recently acquired a new head chef.

Nothing out of the ordinary there – it seemed to happen every few months at the time – but this time they had picked someone interesting. Thames Lido had gone for Iain Ganson, previously at the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence where he’d cooked with his brother Scott for the best part of twenty years. That made it somewhere I needed to revisit. Ganson’s food, like his brother’s, had always been exceptional and it had the potential to revitalise Thames Lido, which felt like it had been cosplaying founder Freddy Bird – not brilliantly, I might add – ever since he’d left.

So I politely turned down the PR’s very kind offers to attend pop-up guest nights at Thames Lido (and endure the horrors of what they described as “a little media table”) but I made a mental note that I had to go back before 2024 was out to find out whether the menu was remade in Ganson’s image or, like a covers band in a hotel lobby, he was playing somebody else’s hits. And finally, at the start of December at the beginning of a week off with Zoë, I made it there on a Tuesday lunchtime to try and find out the answer.

It remains probably Reading’s most attractive dining room – easily as striking a space as, say, Honest Burger’s, but far nicer to spend time in. All the tables are in the long strip running alongside the pool and even though I was there on a weekday lunchtime the place was very busy, although I couldn’t tell you how many of those people were on some kind of swim and dine package.

But also, what I loved was the sense of space – the tables for two by the windows are big, capable things with plenty of room to spread out, and diners aren’t crammed in. That, the high sloped ceiling, the spectacle of people puffing away in the pool outside and the slight whiff of chlorine made for a very conducive atmosphere. The whole thing exuded a certain sense of justifiable self-satisfaction: you know, the way Richard Osman does.

It was hard to prepare for this meal, because the menu on the website was for November and the menu up outside the restaurant, it turned out, was also out of date. Thames Lido actually offers two menus, a small plates one and a more traditional à la carte, but I wanted to get into the latter as potentially a better indicator of the effect Ganson’s year in the kitchen had had on the place.

It was a compact menu – five snacks, five starters, five mains – and in truth, a slightly restrictive one. That probably says more about me, but given that two of the five starters and mains were either vegetarian or vegan, I felt a bit limited in my choice. The November menu I’d seen online had six starters and six mains, and it was surprising that knocking one off had such a constraining effect.

But the menu did feel like it had Ganson’s stamp on it – the scallops, an ever-present from the Freddy Bird days that have been on every Lido menu I’ve ever seen, were missing, and the dishes felt more like the British comfort he’d served up at the Bell than the wood-fired Mediterranean fare Thames Lido had been offering since its inception. Starters clustered around a tenner, which is par for the course these days, whereas mains were mostly between twenty-five and thirty pounds, taking them into London Street Brasserie territory.

We took a pretty conventional approach to the menu, ordering drinks and a couple of snacks, starters and mains. And we made it clear to our server, right from the start, that we were in no rush: that last bit, as we’ll see, was important. But it was also true. We had the day off, our first day off together in a very long time, at the start of a holiday week, and a long and bibulous lunch was something we’d both been looking forward to.

“I’ve wanted to come here for such a long time” said Zoë: ever since re-reviewing Thames Lido has been on my agenda, she’d called shotgun on it. So she sipped a negroni – Thames Lido plays it safe here with Campari, Martini rosso and Henley gin – and I started to make inroads into a bottle of Rioja from the bin ends section of the wine list. “You’re in luck, it’s the last one” said our server, who was right. It was also terrific value at just over thirty quid.

The first thing to show up was the bread, and very good it was too. I think I read somewhere that Thames Lido uses Stoke Row’s Imma Bakery for its bread, and that wouldn’t surprise me. You can also buy it at Geo Café, and it was excellent, open-crumbed stuff with a nice crust. It was perfect for tearing and dipping into olive oil and PX vinegar, the latter of which packed more punch than its wan appearance would have you believe. I would have liked a grassier olive oil, or really good salted butter, but that might just be me being me.

We had also ordered some jamon from the first section of the menu, and were expecting it to come with the bread. As I said, we wanted a leisurely lunch, so were hoping for snacks first, then starters, then mains. The first sign that not everything was going to follow the script came when our starters arrived next and then, at the same time, the jamon. I do wonder what the restaurant was thinking, sequencing things in this way.

“Should we tell them again that we’re not in a hurry?” said Zoë.

“No, it’s fine. We’ll just eat the jamon at the end, take our time with it, and that will slow things back down” I said. It won’t surprise anybody who has followed this blog, or knows anything about any of the times my wife and I have had a difference of opinion, to discover that I was wrong about this.

Anyway, on to our out of turn starters. Zoë had chosen a salad, Thames Lido’s take on pear, endive and Roquefort with local hero Barkham Blue subbed in for the French cheese. She loved it, loved the Barkham Blue, loved everything about it. It’s funny how living here sometimes makes you blasé towards the great local ingredients we have in Reading: I know what Barkham Blue is like, I know how good it is and I can buy it at the farmers’ market. So I don’t tend to order dishes that have it in.

Similarly, I would never have ordered Thames Lido’s cheeseboard because, great though Barkham Blue, Spenwood and Wigmore are, it would feel like having something in a restaurant that I can easily enjoy at home. But anyway, more fool me, because Zoë had a good and virtuous starter that, from the sound of it, elevated Barkham Blue by putting it in a brilliant context where it could be its even better self.

I had chosen what felt like a very Iain Ganson dish, game terrine with house pickles. And it was, again, a thoroughly decent choice. Imma’s bread, rubbed with oil and toasted, became a permatanned classic, even lighter and airier than before. And the house pickles were outstanding – not just cornichons, which I always love, but delightful slices of crunchy courgette. If Thames Lido sold them in jars I’d drop by and pick up half a dozen.

And the terrine was good, if not outstanding. It was very dense, but too clean and nice, too well-behaved. When I compare it to the hulking terrine you can get at the Bell, coarse, with a thick wrapping of bacon and shedloads of flavour, this seemed a tad ineffectual. It was that kind of dish but for the Muddy Stilettos set, slightly toned down and not better for it. So I liked it, I finished it, but I felt it didn’t deliver the hit of game, the hint of winter I was hoping for.

Also, and this is a first, my terrine had a tiny bit of shot in it. Not complaining, by the way, just mentioning it because it was noteworthy.

“You’re the first person to get any shot since we put it on the menu” said our server. “You should buy a lottery ticket.” This is very much a way to try and convince unlucky people that they’re fortunate, much as people do when pigeons take a dump on you, but she was more right than she realised: if I’d lost a filling I’d probably need a small win on the lottery to pay for my dentist. As it was I dodged a bullet, so to speak.

So that left the jamon, that we’d been hoping to have at the start of the meal. The menu says that this is by Fisan, and is hard carved, and both of those things are true. But I think maybe I thought, wrongly, that this had been hand carved at Thames Lido, by someone at the restaurant, from a whopping leg of jamon. And that wasn’t true, sadly, because it had been carved by Fisan somewhere else, put into a packet in a tight spiral of slices, all pressed together, and sent to Thames Lido. And at the other end they had taken it out of that packet, put it on a plate and brought it out to us.

Should that matter? Perhaps not. This was still better than any jamon I’ve eaten in restaurants in Reading – mainly because you can never find any – and it still made your fingers slightly shine. But the experience of trying to pry the individual slices apart was a frustrating one, and this was just an elevated level of getting stuff out of packaging, when I thought the Lido would be closer to the experience I have abroad. Was this worth fifteen pounds? I don’t know that it was. I might feel differently, mind you, if it was brought when we expected it to be, had been in the right place in the playlist.

My hope that taking our time over the jamon would resolve the pacing issues in the meal were completely unfounded, because almost as soon as the empty plate was taken away, our mains turned up. I remembered the American lady I’d sat next to at Bébé Bob, earlier in the year, who said “that was very quick!” in a very similar situation, and was tempted to follow her example, but in the end I decided it wasn’t worth it.

“I told you we should have said something” said Zoë, and because I love her and I know how enjoyable saying I told you so can be, I couldn’t even hold it against her.

“You were right, you were right. It’s a lesson learned for next time.”

“It’s forty-five minutes after we sat down, we’ve already eaten two courses and our mains have just turned up. That’s not right.”

I was proud: more than six years after we got together, and over six months into our marriage, she sounded almost as much of a critic as me.

What especially makes it a pity is how good a dish that main was. But arriving in such a rushed fashion, after what were supposed to be two separate courses got crashed together, we were almost too full to enjoy it. Normally on duty I try to order something different from my dining companion, and I always let them choose first, but Thames Lido’s menu was too narrow for me to put myself through that. Maybe their channa masala with roast squash was a triumph, perhaps their roast cauliflower with lentils was too. But they both sounded worthy, while lamb rump with haggis sounded fun.

And fun it very much was. The rump was outstanding – cooked just so, perfectly pink with a salted crust. The haggis added savoury depth and texture. But all that was the kind of thing you could get at London Street Brasserie, where a dish like this with venison has been on their menu since time immemorial. The thing that lifted, elevated and perfected this dish was the celeriac and bacon purée that came with it.

Silky doesn’t even come close: it almost had the texture of a thick custard, beautifully glossy and impossible not to eat. And I don’t know how the kitchen had got the smoke of the bacon to permeate the whole thing – there was no bacon in sight, but the whole thing tasted of that transition from autumn to winter. Most of the time, I find I dislike this time of year: it’s dark when you get up, dark when you get home and the smart meter in the kitchen racks up in a manner I find deeply disturbing. But then you eat something like this, and you think that there are consolations. There are only a handful of shopping days left until Burns Night.

It disappoints me to say that the sides we ordered didn’t match that lofty standard. At places like Caper And Cure or COR in Bristol the side would probably be Pink Fir Apple potatoes, knobbly, irregular and roasted to scruffy crunchiness. Five new potatoes baked in their skins with a bit of yoghurt and harissa didn’t quite cut it, a sort of bourgeois Spudulike. There was also a hispi cabbage dish that Zoë liked more than I did – two wedges, grilled, with walnut butter. I found this inexplicably vinegary but given that the alternative was Swiss chard, a veg that Zoë asserts is “like a weed you’d find on your driveway”, it was our only chance to get one of our five a day.

I think if restaurants want an indicator that they’ve brought out the food too quickly – although there’s no evidence that Thames Lido was paying attention – it’s the words “yes, I’d like dessert but we need to finish our wine first”.

And this is what annoys me about the breakneck speed of some restaurants, because it’s a false economy of time: the restaurant wasn’t going to get us off the table any quicker, it just meant that we were sitting there with no food and a lot of wine to get through. By this point the room had thinned out and tables that had been seated after us had already been turned, and again, it struck me as weird. Thames Lido is one of Reading’s more expensive restaurants: what about that would suggest that anybody is in a hurry?

The dessert menu also felt a little limited, and again we ended up picking the same thing. I would never normally do that, but it’s the end of the year so I reckon I’ve earned the right. Besides, although I admire Iain Ganson for sticking to his Scottish roots and putting a clootie dumpling on the menu, no power on earth was going to make me order it. So we both went for the chocolate mousse: with a glass of Moscato d’Asti for me, and some kind of tiramisu dessert cocktail for Zoë.

And again, timing was lightning fast: I get that these are premade, and sit chilled, in glasses, in the fridge but they were whipped out of that fridge and on our table before you could say “not again“. And that meant that we sat waiting for our drinks to come out before getting stuck in. And again, the trend was repeated – a great dish, just a shame that the experience that surrounded you eating it didn’t quite mesh. It was a beautiful chocolate mousse – airy and indulgent, topped with caramelised almonds and the ingredient that made it pop, a sprinkling of potent pink peppercorns. I’ve never had that pairing, and it was really clever, lifting the whole thing from something you enjoyed to something you remembered.

Zoë was unconvinced by her tiramisu cocktail. “I’m not sure why I went for it” was her post mortem. “I should have had another negroni”, and my moscato d’Asti was a little on the flat side. It was a shame that they were the last things we had in the meal, those and a sense that it had been a good meal but not a great one.

With a 12.5% tip chucked on, our bill came to just over two hundred and five pounds, and if we hadn’t slammed on the brakes I think we’d have been out of there in something like an hour and a quarter. It’s a long time since I’ve felt a restaurant got the timing so badly wrong, ironically probably at Malmaison, which Thames Lido has definitely replaced as Reading’s idea of a special occasion restaurant.

For me at least, Thames Lido is a really interesting place with which to close out another year of reviewing restaurants. It’s probably one of the businesses most likely to survive whatever hell 2025 has in store, and in the last 7 years it has definitely been one of the spots people here talk about when they think of Reading’s defining restaurants. And I enjoyed my meal a lot, and much more than any of my previous visits to the place: I think hiring Iain Ganson was a very shrewd move by the restaurant and they should let him cook whatever he likes however he likes. If they continue to give him that free rein, I think it will work out nicely for all concerned.

And yet that inconsistency remains. On previous visits I’ve liked some dishes but not others, or had a pleasant meal but imperfect service. On this visit the food was so much better and more uniformly good and interesting, and the service was charming. But timing issues like these, at the top end of the pricing spectrum, feel so basic that a restaurant that’s been trading for 7 years should have ironed them out long before now. And that’s such a shame, because when you’re spending that kind of money in a space so beautiful the whole of your experience should match that.

So I don’t think I’m going to get invited to the little media table any time soon, but there you have it. It serves, if nothing else, as a salutary lesson that restaurants have a lot to get right, and that it’s a real job of work getting all of those things spot on every single time. Especially with people like me carping from the sidelines. So despite all that, I’m very pleased that I ate at Thames Lido, and the best of what they can do is something I’ll carry with me into the New Year. It feels to me, probably for the first time in a long time, like they are in safe hands.

Thames Lido – 7.4
Napier Road, Reading, RG1 8FR
0118 2070640

https://www.thameslido.com