Month: January 2025

Restaurant review: Côte

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

Here’s what happened: I was making Friday night dinner plans with my friend Graeme and I said I’d give him some restaurants to choose from, a mixture of places I wanted to review (or re-review) and others I just fancied eating at. My text was all ready to send, and then I stopped for a minute and thought what about Côte? So I added Côte to the list of places I was due to re-review and pinged the message over to Graeme, fully expecting him to pick somewhere else.

Why don’t we do Côte? came the reply. I haven’t been for a while, and it’s such a good chain restaurant.

Appropriately Graeme’s reasons for choosing it were the same as mine for including it in my selection. The last time I went there was something like eighteen months ago, with my family, to celebrate my just having got engaged. But before that? I honestly couldn’t tell you. And yet before the pandemic I used to go an awful lot – it was one of my regular spots.

I do wonder whether the pandemic had something to do with it. Because when Covid struck national Côte did what many restaurants did, diversifying into heat at home options. But Côte did it differently to everybody else, and unlike nearly everybody else they are still doing it years later, when for most restaurants their schemes, entirely born out of necessity, were shelved ages go.

Côte decided to take advantage of the fact that many of its dishes were prepared in a central kitchen and then finished in the restaurant, turning what you could potentially see as a weakness into a Covid-era hidden strength. And it continues today: Côte At Home still offers many of the dishes you can get in their restaurants, portioned for two people, for decidedly less money.

Back when I was reviewing takeaways and meal kits, I reviewed Cote At Home. And the truth was that I didn’t know what to make of it: it was good value, and undeniably polished, and somehow occupied a completely new genre that wasn’t takeaway, wasn’t meal kits, wasn’t eating in restaurants and wasn’t ready meals. What on earth was it, then? I’m still not entirely sure.

But I can’t help feeling that Côte At Home, although it may have saved the chain from going under, slightly changed the way I thought about the restaurant. Because if many of Côte’s dishes were just glorified ready meals you could cook at home, was there still a point to going to the restaurant to eat them there, spending more money in the process? And if that was the case three years ago when the shockwaves from the pandemic started to subside, wasn’t it even more the case now, when eating out is more and more of a luxury?

I didn’t know the answers, and it felt like a return to Côte might provide them. Besides, it was a Friday night at the end of an incredibly long week at work, and I figured I’d earned a good meal, a catch up with a good friend and at least a bottle of wine, and I was hoping for an enjoyable evening irrespective of whether my visit also solved those bigger, thornier questions. After all, nobody can dissect stuff for its deeper meaning 24/7. Not even me.

I always forget how nice Côte’s dining room is. You could be forgiven, eating at one of its former neighbours – Brown’s, or TGI Friday – for thinking that these deep, largely windowless rooms are uniformly unlovely spaces. But Côte’s has always been both a luxe and comforting spot. The tables at the front, that catch the daylight when there is some, are great if you’re having brunch or lunch.

But the rest is equally agreeable once the sun’s gone down. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, there’s something about its banquettes, bentwood chairs, booths and clever lighting that makes it feel like a little oasis amid the Oracle Riverside’s brashness and bluster. I don’t think the room has changed in the ten plus years that I’ve been going there. It’s never needed to.

Graeme was already at a table when we got there, but otherwise the restaurant was close to empty.

“It’s worrying, isn’t it?” he said. “When I went past the burger place I thought it was closed, and even Nando’s was dead. Nando’s!”

“I guess January’s a very long month, and it’s the weekend before payday for most people.”

“I’m so glad we picked Côte though. Wine, meat and cheese – all the main food groups.”

We ordered a drink and began catching up while I tried to work out which of the items on the menu were least likely to have been produced in a central kitchen. I was looking forward to a cider – Côte always stocked proper, old-school Breton cidre – so I was disappointed to see that they’d switched to a brand called, of all things, “Sassy”. I had a beer instead.

If I’d looked at their website, which says that ‘SASSY brings a naughty nature to the world of Cider and sets out to premiumise this wonderful drink,’ with ‘one foot in the traditions of Normandy and the other striding towards the future of cider’ it would have made me doubly unlikely to try it. Apparently it’s “inspired by the cider served at Château de Sassy” which is, to my astonishment, a real place. Unlike premiumise, which is absolutely not a real verb.

The menu at Côte hasn’t changed significantly in over a decade, which again I find oddly comforting. Not for them attempts to modernise, introduce fusion flavours, or provide low calorie options. Prices are definitely higher than they used to be, which mainly signifies that it’s 2025: starters are between seven quid and a tenner, the mains approach the twenty pound mark but are careful, for the most part, not to overstep that.

All that said, Côte’s prix fixe is available all evening on weekdays, which I’m not sure was always the case. At eighteen pounds for two courses or twenty-two pounds for three, it’s roughly the price that LSB’s set menu used to be back in the day, another barometer of how eating out has got more costly in recent years. Côte was also offering some Alpine specials, a range of small plates which sorely tempted Graeme – especially the tartiflette, combining the holy trinity of spuds, bacon and cheese.

I was impressed by how resolutely French the wine list was. With the exception, of port, you won’t find a single wine on it from any other country. The one concession to modishness was a solitary orange wine, which seems also to be an Alpine special. Graeme gave to job of choosing to me and I was delighted to see a Alsatian producer on there, Trimbach, that I liked. I’ve always had their whites before, but their pinot noir was a real treat, with plenty of depth. At thirty-seven pounds, it was something like twice the retail value, a relative bargain.

People started trickling in and taking up tables as we had those beautiful first sips and carried on setting the world to rights. Graeme told me that the last time he’d been to Côte was something like a couple of years ago for his daughter’s eighteenth birthday, and I told him that I too had been here last for a family event.

“But that’s the thing about Côte” said Graeme. “I’ve been here for family events and with a big group of friends, or just with Amy, and it’s really, really good for all of them.”

I thought about it and I realised that it was true for me too. I’d been here with big groups and small groups, with a partner or on my own. I’d descended on it with a gang for a pre-beer festival brunch, back when Reading had a beer festival, and I’d taken up a sunlit table outside with the prix fixe, a bottle of cidre and a good book, back in the days when I lived in the centre and had a spouse who was overseas with work. It was hard, really, to think of an occasion which I hadn’t marked at Côte.

“Back in the early days of the blog when I first started doing features I did one about the best place for al fresco dining, and another about the best place for solo dining. And Côte ended up on both of them. Actually, with pretty much any feature I wrote – al fresco, solo, pre-theatre – it was hard not to pick Côte.”

This was the point when I began to worry. Because the review I really didn’t want to write was the one where the overarching narrative was this: Reading’s favourite chain used to be Côte, but then Honest and Pho came to town and everything changed. What we wanted from a chain became different, and Côte got sadder and sadder, a shadow of its former self, all on its own on the Oracle Riverside as each of its neighbours gradually gave up the ghost.

Don’t get me wrong, I still would have written that review if it had turned out to be that kind of meal. But my relief began when the starters arrived, and gradually became replaced with something else – if not euphoria, then definitely delight. I’m sorry if that removes the element of suspense, but I didn’t feel like leaving you hanging. And besides, I know a lot of you scroll down and look at the rating at the bottom first anyway, don’t you?

Graeme was set on the tartiflette from the moment he saw it on the menu, and it didn’t disappoint him. Côte’s menu says that its Alpine specials are small plates, but there was nothing small about this. It was an enormous bowl, filled with a brick of potatoes, cheese, onions and bacon and looking at it I was simultaneously sad I hadn’t ordered it and worried about how far I’d have made it through the meal if I had. 

That said, the forkful I tried was excellent.Everything was how you wanted it to be, from firm, almost waxy potatoes to the liberal quantities of Comte and Tomme de Savoie in the mix. Now, I’m always a bit dubious about people who refer to a single dish, especially a starter, as a “meal in itself”. Partly because I’ve never felt that way about any single dish, and partly because I feel it lacks ambition. But if you were ever going to say that about something that was supposed to be a starter, you’d say it about this.

“And the bacon is amazing” said Graeme. “Really smoky.”

I had chosen an old favourite of mine, the calamari, mindful that I wanted at least one thing you couldn’t eat from the Côte At Home menu. This is a dish I feel like I’ve ordered a lot in recent months and often, at the likes of Maidenhead’s Storia or Reading’s The Cellar, my main reaction to it has been relief that it wasn’t as bad as calamari can sometimes be. And when these arrived I wondered whether I’d be talking in those terms again – they seemed too big, too regular and homogeneous to be anything more than adequate.

And then I tasted them, and I felt bad about doubting Côte. Because they were far and away the best calamari I’ve had in a long time, belying their unassuming appearance. They were properly tender, no rubberiness whatsoever, cooked so the coating adhered, a real joy to eat and dip in what was apparently Provençal mayonnaise. Fair play to them for not pairing it with aioli like literally everybody else, but I seem to remember that Côte used to serve them with tartare sauce, which I always liked.

Graeme smiled, as did I. Any fears I had appeared to be unfounded: we were still in safe hands. And I wondered what was going on here – I must have had Côte’s calamari many times over the years, so was it that it had improved, or had I forgotten that it had always been this good?

Although the menu is extensive, Graeme had warned me in advance that it was pretty narrow for him, as far as main courses were concerned (“I only ever order the beef bourguignon or the Breton chicken”). That gave me a free hand, but I saw duck confit on the menu and I always find that hard to resist. Virtually impossible on a chilly winter evening miles from your last payday, so my choice was made.

When it arrived, a well-paced half hour or so after our starters, it was good but still the only misstep of the meal. The duck itself was beautiful – duck confit is one of my favourite things in the world (I ate it on my wedding day, after all) and I’ll never understand why more restaurants and pubs don’t offer it. And I liked the red cabbage it was served on: it probably wouldn’t ever have been my choice of accompaniment, but it went just fine. “It looks a bit forlorn, doesn’t it?” said Graeme, and he had a point, but that’s because the potato gratin came separately in a little cast iron casserole. It was a bit like a Tesco Value version of the tartiflette, but I liked it all the same.

But where this fell down was those plain weird orange segments that felt like they’d escaped from a tin. The menu talks about the whole thing being served with a bitter orange sauce, but there wasn’t a drop of sauce to be seen. Three bits of citrus fruit is no substitute for a sauce. It’s the rail replacement bus of sauces. It was irksome, but I still loved the duck.

Graeme, true to form, chose the bourguignon and, as with the tartiflette, I think he picked not only the thing that was perfect for him but the dish that was perfect for the occasion. A single slab of beef, an enormo-quenelle of mash and a sea of rich sauce, the kind of dish that keeps winter properly at bay. I didn’t try a forkful of this, but Graeme had no regrets about his choice.

It did mean that in one evening Graeme probably ate more potato than most people get in a week, but I imagine that suited him just fine. The man’s from Middlesbrough, for goodness’ sake, and he hasn’t lost the accent: so much so, in fact, that when he told me that last time he’d been to Côte I honestly thought he’d said the last time I went to court, which raised all sorts of interesting questions. Graham has not, as far as I know, been in court.

“It’s mental” said Graeme. “This is a main course, and I swear it’s about the same size as my tartiflette was.”

Graeme’s spud consumption was not helped by the fact that both of us saw confit potatoes on the menu as a side order and decided we needed to have some. I was wondering whether this would be anything like the legendary potatoes at Quality Chop House, much in vogue in recent years, and I made the mistake of describing them to Graeme, which meant that anything which turned up could only disappoint.

And they slightly did: there was no layering or pressing involved. Instead you got four cuboids of potato, nicely fried and golden, with a pot of serviceable béarnaise for dipping. They were like hash browns for Guardian readers, which meant that I rather liked them. Just over a fiver for these, and I should add that Graeme’s and my mains were the two most expensive on the menu. But crucially, nothing felt like bad value.

You could tell we were having a good time, because we threw caution to the wind when it came to dessert. They had a few traditional options on there – a Paris-Brest, or a crème caramel – although they also attracted Graeme’s ire with an piste macaron (“I’m not eating anything with yuzu in it”, he said). But perhaps more interesting was Côte’s cheese selection.

I remember back when I ate at Côte pre-pandemic and the cheese selection was a bit of an afterthought, three or four of them to choose from, which meant that I almost never had it. But nowadays Côte has really pushed the bâteau out when it comes to fromage – an impressive ten to choose from, all French, with the option to assemble a cheeseboard for sharing.

We did exactly that, and carried away by just how enjoyable Côte was we also ordered a bottle of dessert wine to go with it, a muscat from the Languedoc. I’d had it before, so I thought it was probably a banker but even so, it was so straw-coloured that I was relieved when it turned out to be just the thing, sweet and zippy. Fearing for the worst and ending up delighted seemed to be the theme of the evening, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

I won’t list all the cheeses, because Côte’s website does that, but you have a great range of soft and hard, of blue and goat, and it’s hard to go wrong. We ended up choosing eight of the ten, so we got an excellent selection. Highlights for me included both of the blues – we got Roquefort and Fourme d’Ambert, and our otherwise impeccable server didn’t tell us which was which – and the Delice de Bourgogne. I love a triple cream cheese, and always order one if spot it on a menu. It also gave me an opportunity to enlighten Graeme about one of my favourite life hacks, namely that a slab of triple cream cheese atop a ginger biscuit knocks the socks off many cheesecakes.

It also meant we got to enjoy a few slices of Côte’s baguette, which – at the risk of repetition – was also as good as I remembered. When my blog celebrated its first birthday, I wrote a list of the ten best things I’d eaten in that first year. Côte’s baguette made the list: like I said, Côte always seemed to nab a space on my lists.

“It’s funny, looking at that cheese down there and thinking about how much was on my cheeseboard over Christmas” said Graeme.

“I know what you mean. This is probably how much cheese you’re meant to have.”

All that cost seventeen pounds, which to me felt like a very reasonable thing for two people to share. By this point a couple of very companionable hours had passed, and all the nagging fears had been dispelled. Côte was doing very nicely on the last Friday before payday on the longest month of the year, and people were at most of the tables – a big group just behind me, the booths in front of me all occupied with people celebrating the weekend.

“It’s still a really good restaurant, isn’t it?” I said to Graeme as we contemplated getting the bill.

“Such a good restaurant.”

Our bill came to one hundred and seventy pounds, including tip. Now, I know that isn’t cheap – and by way of illustration, three courses, a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses of dessert wine would set you back roughly half that when I reviewed Côte eleven years ago. But we did go for it, and it is 2025, and you could eat there more cheaply if you wanted to. I know some people will see that number and just think it’s too expensive, but nowadays everything is. I had a lovely meal, I had brilliant company, I was in a gorgeous room looked after by very good, very hard-working people and I strongly believe that the people who make that happen should be recompensed for that.

I started this review wondering if Côte’s lockdown diversification had somehow cheapened what they do. But actually, I should have paid more attention – specifically to my own review of Côte At Home, where I said that although the food was nice at home, something was missing. And eating here again, after too long, I understood that. Because Côte truly fulfils the promise that many nationwide restaurants make but so few keep, and a meal here reminds you that restaurants are never just about the food.

I can’t tell you how glad I am that this review is that kind of review, and that I can remind myself, if not any of you, that Côte is a little special, in its way. This felt like the latest in a long chain of happy evenings in a restaurant for which I feel a surprising amount of affection.

And the truth is that Côte’s fate is far from certain: as I said earlier, its neighbours on either side of the canal have gradually turned out the lights and shut the doors as their leases have come up, conscious that the Oracle is going to be redeveloped and much of it turned into flats. That might well happen to Côte before too long.

It’s a good argument for eating there while we can. Nice though they are, it would be sad to have to travel to Newbury or Wokingham to be reminded of this place.

Côte – 8.0
9 The Riverside, The Oracle, Reading, RG1 2AG
0118 9591180

https://www.cote.co.uk/restaurant/reading

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Restaurant review: Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

If I asked most Reading residents to name Reading’s most famous restaurant, the chances are the majority of them would say either Kungfu Kitchen or Clay’s Kitchen. And that makes sense because those two, the Lennon and McCartney of Reading’s food scene, are the ones that have broken out into the national consciousness, as much as Reading ever does. If we had a round of Reading restaurants on Family Fortunes, asked 100 people to name a restaurant in Reading, those two would top the leaderboard. God knows what else would be on there – Sweeney Todd, probably, and a rogue vote for Munchees.

But that would only happen if you asked Reading residents, and is indicative of the bubble we live in. Because, last year at any rate, the most nationally known restaurant in Reading was Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd, a nondescript Cantonese restaurant just the other side of Reading Bridge. And the reason for that is that last February it was reviewed in the Observer by journalist, jazz musician, TV show judge, relentless self-publicist and life president of the Jay Rayner Appreciation Society, Mr Jason Rayner.

He raved about the place, and explained that the chef used to cook at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, and Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel. “It feels like finding a senior chef from the Ritz… doing their own thing in your local caff” he declaimed. The unspoken implication was that this was almost as extraordinary as finding the U.K.’s greatest restaurant reviewer doing his own thing in a Chinese restaurant most Reading folk had never heard of, slumming it for the greater good. Lucky us!

Now, don’t be fooled into thinking Rayner had come to Reading specifically to review Good Old Days. He was in Reading recording an episode of his Radio 4 series, and I suspect he decided to kill two birds with one stone before heading back to London: after all, if there’s one thing people like to moan about below the line on his reviews, it’s how many of them are of London restaurants.

That roving Radio 4 series must be a positive boon, as it gives Rayner an excuse to visit parts of the country he otherwise wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. And I think we can include Reading as one of those, given that he described Caversham as “Reading’s Latin Quarter, as nobody has ever called it”. Such a charmer. But anyway, it was close enough to the station and he had a friend who recommended it, so Good Old Days it was, rather than one of Reading’s more high profile restaurants.

And he did seem to enjoy it, sort of. He said that “if… you happen to live nearby, get the food to go. Because in truth Good Old Days is a takeaway that just happens to have a few tables.” And that’s the funny thing about Rayner’s review – it didn’t make me fall over myself to visit. And I don’t think it galvanised Reading either, because I still know relatively few people who have had a takeaway from Good Old Days and fewer still who have eaten in there. The ones who have, that I’ve spoken to, have told me that it was “nice”, or words to that effect. I’ve never had an oh my god, you really must go – can I come?

Especially that last bit. Despite it being on my to do list for almost a year, every time I mention it to someone in terms of joining me there on duty they ask if we can go somewhere else instead; people just didn’t seem to fancy the place. In that respect, Rayner’s review is a remarkable one – if you can praise food and still leave people lukewarm about going to a restaurant you definitely have some kind of skill, albeit not one most restaurant reviewers would want to develop.

Very few of the comments on the Observer review were from people in Reading, and what ones there were were evenly split between Don’t give the secret away and We went there on your recommendation and it was awful. So it looked like there was a gap in the market for a reliable review of Good Old Days, and I was happy to fill it.

Gladly, at the start of this year I finally found an accomplice for my review. It was Liz, Reading’s elite level bellringer – her words, not mine – last seen exploring The Cellar with me the night Trump won re-election and the world turned to (even more) shit. I’m beginning to think Liz might be a lucky charm as I’m yet to have a bad meal with her on duty, so I made my way to Good Old Days at the appointed time with high hopes.

I should add, because unlike broadsheet critics I like to offer some practical help, that you can book online through their website, although it’s a little convoluted and you’re never sure it’s actually worked. You then get an email and texts which tell you that if you want to change your booking you have to call their mobile number, because you can’t amend it online. On the Wednesday night when we went, there was one other table with diners, who left shortly after I arrived at seven, and one other table seated that evening. So you may be able to turn up on spec: for some reason the Observer review doesn’t seem to have precipitated a tidal wave of demand.

It is indeed a very basic space, if not necessarily an inhospitable one. With just over a dozen covers, and most of the tables seating four people, it’s compact and resolutely unfancy. The walls were a mixture of municipal white tiling and faux wood panelling with just a few flashes of identity – a handful of framed pictures of dishes on one wall, and a framed copy of Rayner’s review on the other. It meant that he glared balefully down at us during our meal. Like the new President, it’s hard to find a photograph of Rayner where he’s smiling. Maybe he never does, or perhaps he thinks it gives him gravitas. At least the eyes didn’t follow you round the room.

I’d checked in advance and there was no alcohol licence, so I’d brought a bottle of white from home. When I asked we got two very basic tumblers, which did just fine. I was however glad that I’d also brought a corkscrew, because I wasn’t sure we’d otherwise have laid our hands on one. The menu was big – just under a hundred dishes – but somehow managed to feel compact, perhaps because they’d crammed it onto two sides of A4.

By Reading 2025 standards the prices were so reasonable that I wondered if I’d fallen through a timewarp – the vast majority of the dishes cost less than ten pounds, which meant that without an alcohol licence you could eat a lot of food for not much money. Maybe it was predominantly priced for takeaway but, not for the last time that evening, it made me think that Rayner was wrong and that this was a positive argument for bums on seats and eating close to the kitchen.

The menu leaned more Cantonese than Szechuan, so no offal and more of the dishes that, for me, bring back memories of my childhood in Woodley, of weekend treats at Hong Kong Garden in the shopping precinct coupled with the latest release from Blockbuster Video. It evoked those feelings of familiarity and wonder, because when you’re twelve these things are exotic and different, and a pancake with crispy duck is a magical world away from a Findus Crispy Pancake.

“Can you believe I’d never had Chinese food until I lived in China for a year?” said Liz. I knew she’d grown up in Cheltenham but even so, this surprised me; imagine doing it in reverse, having all the authentic stuff and then coming home to the Anglicised version.

We had plenty to natter about, and the wine was very nice, so before we got to haggling over our order we ordered some crispy dumplings with pork and vegetables. These were a neat, compact treat and they made me happy with anticipation for what was to follow – deep-fried, brittle, remarkable easy to pick up with the stainless steel chopsticks and dip in a little pot of sweet chilli sauce. Well, that’s what Liz did anyway, with her far more evolved chopstick skills: I on the other hand tended to drop mine in the sauce and then mount a cack-handed rescue mission.

We spent so long chatting while we ate our dumplings – about our respective Christmases and New Years, about the vicissitudes of Reading Buses which had made getting to the restaurant harder than it needed to be – that it took quite a while before we got down to the serious business of choosing our order. And that’s when it became apparent that Liz and I had certain philosophical differences when it came to food.

Getting to know someone is always a gradual thing; you try to be your best self and promote the version of you that you’d like to be all the time. And then, over successive meetings, you slowly reveal your true nature, if only because it’s too hard not to. What I’ve discovered, going on duty with different dining companions, is that this also happens in restaurants.

On my first meal with Liz we went to The Coriander Club, where we shared a couple of starters but then had our own personal mains. For the follow up we went to The Cellar, very much a starters/mains/desserts model. So it was only on this third meal, at a place where we would order and share several dishes, that I realised I had unwittingly gone to dinner with someone who regarded a plate of broccoli as a feature attraction.

“I have to have the broccoli with garlic sauce” said Liz. And actually, that made sense – this was a woman who had snuck aubergine, somehow, into both of our previous visits to restaurants. I mentally ticked off at least one of the carnivorous delights I’d spotted on the menu.

“And… how do you feel about tofu?”

“Well, it’s not my favourite. I like Jo’s salt and pepper tofu at Kungfu Kitchen, but that’s probably as far as it goes.”

I looked on the menu, which had a very similar dish. Would Liz go for it?

“I’d really like the mapo tofu, if you don’t mind. I have such fond memories of it from China.”

The irony is that I know, rationally, that this is good for me. Because going for dinner with people who eat the same stuff as you is like recruiting in your image – it makes the world very homogeneous, and I’m occasionally conscious that I should introduce more variety into the things I order when I’m reviewing restaurants. I also know that probably, a proportion of you might be reading this and thinking at last, he’s actually going to talk about the kind of things I like. So I accepted my part vegetarian, part-tofu driven meal with good grace. Besides, it had been Liz’s birthday the day before, so I figured she was entitled to call the shots.

I did insist on sweet and sour chicken, though, which I suspect was to Liz what broccoli in garlic sauce would be to me. We placed our order, with a beef and black bean ho fun thrown in, and our server wandered off with the order, came back, and asked me to confirm it. Which I did, absolutely certain that they had captured everything we’d ordered.

The first dishes to arrive were the ones Liz had been craving. I don’t know whether it was the lighting, or the cooking, or the slightly recherché lino on the tables, but everything seemed to have an almost hypersaturated, Martin Parr feel about it. That definitely showed in the broccoli – enormous emerald-green florets, really only just cooked, glazed in a thickened, pungent sauce which coated every irregularity and lurked in a pool at the bottom of the bowl. Dragging a floret through the sauce and eating it I realised that, although I had to unhook my jaw, I was enjoying myself against my better judgement. Liz was beaming.

“This is exactly how I wanted it to be.”

The tofu, on the other hand – I’m not sure you’ll ever get a glowing writeup of a tofu dish from me, and this was not the occasion to change that habit of a lifetime. I’m yet to find anything with tofu in it that isn’t all wobble and no flavour, and although I know people talk about mapo tofu in glowing terms I still don’t understand why. You couldn’t fault the generosity, though. This dish was huge, in the way that things you have to wade through, like bad novels or to do lists at work, so often are.

“This isn’t quite as I expected” said Liz. “It should be much redder, and much hotter.”

And I got that – instead it was a sort of glossy ruddy-brown. And although there was minced pork in it, and little bits of mushroom, nothing really made its presence felt. And yet, as we worked through it I found it exerted a strange kind of hypnotic power. I liked it more and more, appreciated its subtleties more and more.

I remember when I reviewed The Imperial Kitchen there was a suggestion from some people that I just hadn’t “got” Cantonese food, that I had expected the crash-bang-wallop flavours of, say, Kungfu Kitchen and judged it harshly when they never turned up. Well, this may count as personal growth but maybe, just maybe, there’s something to that. I would never have ordered this dish in a million years, but I was perhaps quietly pleased that somebody had.

Now, having said all that I can wax lyrical about the dish I insisted on, because Good Old Days’ sweet and sour chicken made me very happy indeed. It’s hard to explain why it was so good, but I shall try nonetheless.

My memories of this dish, my good ones anyway, are all fuelled entirely by nostalgia. And nostalgia is wonderful, but these things only really taste amazing in the past, in your mind, inextricably linked to who you were back then. If you eat a Wagon Wheel now of course you’ll say they’ve shrunk, which they have, but you’ll also think they’re rubbish. Nice N’ Spicy NikNaks, these days, are neither nice nor spicy. Maybe they never were, but when I was sixteen I thought they were. I thought they were the shit.

Late last year I had a Chinese takeaway from a place near me and I chose sweet and sour chicken. And it was dreadful. All sweet, no sour, chicken smothered in jam and pineapple, a gloopy saccharine monstrosity. And Good Old Days’ rendition was completely unlike that. Beautifully coated chicken – thigh, not breast, in a sauce which looked the same as that but had subtlety and nuance, peppers with crunch, pineapple a welcome surprise.

But the thing is, if I had to guess, the sweet and sour chicken I had from that takeaway in December was probably exactly like the stuff I’d loved as a teenager at suburban Hong Kong Garden. Whereas that dish at Good Old Days tasted how I’d wanted to remember it tasting, even though it probably never had. I’d never eaten the real deal, and Good Old Days served the real deal. The difference wasn’t colossal, and yet it was everything.

I’m also delighted to confirm that this dish had the same effect on Liz that her sodding tofu and broccoli had on me. She liked it in the way she hadn’t expected to, and I was simultaneously delighted to have gained a convert and disappointed that I couldn’t scoff the lot myself. As we ate dishes the other had picked and talked about TV (she loved Taskmaster, I’ve never watched it, I am hooked on The Traitors, she hasn’t seen a minute) I wondered if we were a very middle-class take on the Guardian’s “Dining Across The Divide” feature.

I’d love to tell you about the beef and black bean ho fun, but despite ordering and checking, it wasn’t what we got. First we discovered that they’d brought us a dish that was all beef and no noodles, then we discovered that it wasn’t black bean but black pepper. sauce

I was so taken aback that I didn’t get a photo, and so English that I didn’t say anything about it. But that’s me in general – on a recent holiday we swapped accommodation partway through because we really didn’t like our B&B, but rather than have it out with the owner we waited until he was out, got our luggage, legged it to another hotel and then sent him a long WhatsApp message apologising. It was excruciating; I told people at work that I’d accidentally done an escape room.

Anyway, that’s a round the houses way of saying we ate our beef in black pepper sauce and bloody liked it, because I’m not the strident type. And, again, it had the same subtle potency as Good Old Days’ other dishes – the sauce had a slow and steady depth, where I started out thinking “I wish this was black bean sauce” and ended up thinking “isn’t it nice to try something different?” I wasn’t so convinced by the texture of the beef – more sponge than fibre – but it was still a worthwhile discovery.

It also meant that, because our meal would otherwise have been carb free, we ordered some egg fried rice. Our meal badly needed that to bring it together, and I adored Good Old Days’ egg fried rice – fresh as you like, packed with golden egg and spring onion, a simple restorative pleasure. As with everything else you might associate with takeaway food, this showed that an elevated version did exist.

Again, it made me think that Jay Rayner was wrong – why have something glorious like this and pack it in a foil container, walk home with it or get someone to bring it to your house on a moped? This was how it should be eaten, there and then.

From that point onwards our meal was a companionable delight, spooning the rice into our bowls, deciding which of our mains to top it with and repeating until nearly everything was gone. We gave a thoroughly decent account of ourselves and I thought that this was Good Old Days’ quiet power, that the meal was so much more than the sum of its parts. Taken alone, any dish was decent, combined they made for something special – all humility, no boastfulness.

By the time we’d stopped eating and were ready to leave, a couple of the staff were having their post service meal at the table behind me, and the place was serene. I headed to the Siberian loo out back – disused shower in the corner, banana-shaped wet floor sign blocking it off – and on my way back I saw a table behind the counter with kids at it. We’d kept this family business waiting long enough for the evening to end, so we settled up. All in all, it cost fifty pounds, including tip.

On the walk back across Reading Bridge, Liz and I compared notes. She loved the place, would have rated it in the 9s, wanted to go back with a bigger group. I was more circumspect, thinking that this was one I’d need to reflect on. And as I have, I’ve decided that I liked Good Old Days more than I expected, that something about it transcended the individual dishes, that even when they weren’t quite my thing they deserved respect. There was something intangible about it which I very much liked.

Does that mean it made sense that, just over a year ago, it surprised almost everybody in Reading by finding itself in a national Sunday newspaper? Honestly, no. And honestly, I’m sure Good Old Days was as surprised by that as anybody else. Is Good Old Days Reading’s best restaurant, or Reading’s best Chinese restaurant? Probably not, although that’s not the be-all and end-all. But is it a strangely lovely thing that because a man with a weekly national newspaper column happened to be in Reading recording a radio programme and he decided, maybe perversely, to try a complete curveball Good Old Days found itself known about by thousands of people? Yes, actually. It is.

My face will never glower from the wall of a restaurant, on the byline of a printed, framed review. That’s not my fate. But for what it’s worth, I liked Good Old Days too.

Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd. – 8.2
66 George Street, Reading, RG4 8DH
07840 180080

https://goodolddayshongkongltd.com

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Restaurant review: Bosco Pizzeria, Bristol

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Zoë and I wound up in Bristol on the Saturday before Christmas because my friend James was having a barbecue to mark the end of what he refers to as the “grilling season”. Its boundaries are somewhat amorphous, because James likes to barbecue at almost any opportunity, but as far as I can gather the grilling season starts around Easter and ends at some point before New Year’s Eve. I can’t say that with any confidence though, because I wouldn’t put it past James to grill meat in the dead of winter too: it would make more sense to you, if you’d met him.

But anyway it was an evening do, and that left me with one final lunch in Bristol before the year was out. And rather than try the hot new place – assuming I knew where the hot new place was, of course – or one of the Bristol restaurants on my radar like Bank, Native Vine or The Clifton, I decided to go for a safe bet. What can I say: it was the end of the year, my last opportunity to eat on duty in 2024 and, just this once, I wanted a guarantee of what the festive season always promises, comfort and joy. So I chose Bosco Pizzeria, situated near the top of Whiteladies Road, before it meets The Downs.

I first went to Bosco the best part of a decade ago, when it was very much Bristol’s pizza pioneer, and although I hadn’t been back for some time I always had it down as a reliable banker for somewhere good to eat in the city. Since it first opened its fortunes had ebbed and flowed, opening a second branch in Clifton, closing it and reopening it, closing the Whiteladies Road branch due to Covid and then taking a long old time to reopen due to a fire. Other branches in Cheltenham and Bath had followed, and a sister restaurant called Pizzucci offering a more American, less Italian experience down the Gloucester Road.

But I’d always seen it as a sure thing, and a standout even as other pizza restaurants came and went in Bristol. I reckoned it was as good as Flour and Ash – the original one on the Cheltenham Road that Jay Rayner got worked up about that is, not the sanitised relaunched one on Whiteladies Road which I haven’t visited. And for my money it was better than the much-hyped Bertha’s on Wapping Wharf, which wasn’t quite as good as I’d expected it to be. I couldn’t definitively say it was the best pizza in Bristol: after all I don’t live there, and I’m yet to try the likes of Pizzarova or CanCanPizza, but I could say that it took some beating.

And it was a lovely, busy spot the Saturday before Christmas. They’d slightly rejigged it since I was last there, the front section buzzy and full of smaller tables, the one out back made up of booths for larger groups. You could sit up at the bar, which some people were doing, and it had that lovely air of a place where people, like me, were putting their cares to one side for a couple of hours and treating themselves. Christmas decorations were tasteful and muted, wreaths in the window, baubles running along the tops of the banquettes. My wife took a photo of me, sitting there all happy: I liked it enough to use it as a Facebook profile picture.

Bosco’s menu was split into sections – about half a dozen if you count salads, which personally I rarely do. Apart from salads there were cicchetti, a selection of meats and cheeses, plenty of permutations of pizza, a small range of pasta dishes priced as mains and a few bigger dishes (or, as they put it, “large plates”) – ribollita, parmigiana and what have you. It was, I reflected as I tried to make choices, exactly the kind of menu you always hope to see in mainstream Italian chains but never do. It struck me as the sort of place Maidenhead’s Storia was aiming to be. Zoë sipped a very good negroni, I sipped arguably an even better negroni sbagliato and gradually we honed our selection, sequencing them like a mix tape.

The first slight stutter came when we ordered. I said we’d like a couple of cicchetti, then a mixture of meats and cheeses, then our pizzas.

“We’ll bring out all the smaller dishes at the same time, is that okay?” said our server.

Now, I very much wanted to say no, actually, we’re really happy to be here and we’re in no rush so can we have the cicchetti first, then the other bits and then the pizza, like we asked for? And I would have done, but my wife gave me a look which very clearly said could you not be a restaurant reviewer, just this once? so I kept my mouth shut. It hasn’t stopped me mentioning it here, obviously, but it did irk me – what was the rush? It had that feel that Wagamama always has, that the kitchen’s convenience is the primary concern, not your experience.

And it did literally all come out at once, in the space of a couple of minutes, causing not just a sequencing problem but a logistical one too, the table barely big enough to hold five small plates at once. We prioritised the calamari, as the only hot dish we’d asked for, and it was decent but flawed. The thing I’m always watching out for here is the bounce and twang of squid that needed to be fresher, and Bosco avoided that pitfall. But in its place were brittle sticks of squid, almost like Clifton Nik-Naks, which managed to be both pale and overcooked. We squeezed the lemon, dipped in the aioli but neither could totally redeem the raw materials.

The anchovies also misfired. These were billed as coming with salted butter – as they had at Brutto – and focaccia, and almost did but didn’t quite. Instead they came with very good focaccia but swimming in extra virgin, oilier than a Bluesky reply guy, shallot finely diced on top. Is it wrong that I took against them for still having the skin on? Maybe, but it fooled me for a second into thinking these were more like vinegary boquerones than taut, salty anchovies. That wasn’t right – they were intensely salty – but somehow the texture of them didn’t feel quite as I expected.

It was either cognitive dissonance or cognitive disappointment, but I couldn’t work out which. Three anchovies for seven pounds felt a little steep, but I guess you were paying for the focaccia as well. And I liked the focaccia, as I said, and I know it wouldn’t have gone as well with butter as with olive oil. But the whole thing felt a tad disjointed.

Bosco has always excelled for cheese and charcuterie, and the menu gives you an appealing range of both which you can mix and match in the most middle class multibuy of all time. My favourite of the cheeses was the one I neglected to photograph, a gorgeous Robiolo which was soft but not stinky, complex without being overpowering. It was great with the focaccia, which begged the question of how you’d eat it if you hadn’t ordered the anchovies. Almost as good was a Gorgonzola dolce which I liked and Zoë loved – simultaneously sweet and salty and very well balanced.

But again, without the focaccia it might have been messy to eat. I know that this kind of thing – getting in nice cheeses and cured meats, keeping the former well and slicing the latter thinly – is more about buying than cooking, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that many Italian restaurants don’t do this very well. Bosco’s years of experience showed in this respect, in cultivating excellent suppliers, buying the best stuff from them and not mucking it up. It can’t be that easy: if it was, it wouldn’t be so rare.

Oh, and the coppa was divine. Clearly sliced there and then, not exhumed from leaves of plastic, with that dryness and nuttiness that marks out the best specimens. This was the one thing that didn’t need bread at all, it just needed to be picked up and polished off, with or without a soupçon of cheese. The natural order had been restored, and I remembered just how good Bosco can be. We flagged someone down for another couple of sbagliatos: even though our reservation had been for a late lunch, the dining room showed no signs of thinning out.

Maybe the staff had got the message that we weren’t in a rush, or maybe they were just too busy to rush us, but there was a decent interval between our plethora of small plates and the main attraction.

Either way I was reminded, during that time, of lots of things: what a nice room it was, and how my many visits there had all been at different stages in my life, during a decade where almost everything about my life – what I did for a living, who I did it for, where I lived and who I lived there with – had changed, the only constant being this blog. I’d never been to Bosco with Zoë, and it made me happy to share this room with her at the end of a year itself full of changes.

I was also reminded, almost as much, just how nice a well made negroni sbagliato can be, but that’s probably beside the point.

Zoë and I reverted to type in ordering our mains, that comfort and joy thing again. Her pizza was the ventricina, a very Zoë choice with spicy salami, chilli oil and honey. She loved it, as I expected she would, and it showcased what Bosco did really well – an exemplary base, a chewy, bubbled crust with plenty of blistering, a deep tomato sauce, winningly fruity. This was as good an advert for Bosco as you could hope for, and at thirteen-fifty I thought it was solid value, especially benchmarked against restaurants closer to home like Zia Lucia.

That I didn’t enjoy my pizza as much just goes to show that you can get the fundamentals bang on and then fluff it with the whistles and bells. I too had asked for my archetypal pizza preference, sometimes called the Neopolitan and sometimes, as here, the Venetian. Either way, it’s the old anchovy, olive, caper trifecta and it’s always my go to when I visit a pizza place, providing it’s on.

The base was still exemplary, so was the sauce, so what went wrong here? A few things, really. The anchovies were unevenly distributed, Franco Manca style, leaving a reasonable amount of surface area salt-free. And the anchovies (skinless this time, to be fair) were too much fish and not enough salt, although that might have been a personal preference.

And what about the capers? Apparently they were fried in this case, which can work brilliantly – Buon Appetito used to do this – but they seemed anonymous. There weren’t enough of them, and what there were didn’t contribute the acetic sharpness I wanted. This pizza is meant to be all about salt and vinegar, but instead it was more fish and mild disappointment.

Hey ho. It wasn’t a bad pizza, it just wasn’t as good as I knew it could be. The slightly haphazard timing, coupled with our gluttony, meant we ate too much too quickly and were too full for dessert, so we settled up. Our meal, including two negronis apiece and an optional 12.5% service charge, came to just over one hundred and six pounds. I didn’t begrudge that: besides, they had Aesop handwash in their very fetching loos, and that stuff doesn’t pay for itself. We called up an Uber and prepared ourselves to have a few drinks with James and Liz ahead of the official end of the grilling season. Well, maybe after a nap to sleep off some of those carbs.

It was a lovely evening, incidentally. The beers flowed thick and fast – James is the man who has turned his garage into a micropub – and the conversation was enormous fun. We got to bed well after midnight, too tired for the traditional couples debrief. But during the gathering somebody who knows that I write this blog asked me if I’d gone anywhere on duty at lunchtime and I said yes, I’d been to Bosco.

“I hear it’s not as good as it used to be, would you agree with that?” I was asked.

And the binary answer, although the world’s always more complicated than binary answers, is yes, I do agree. On my previous visits, Bosco was the place you wish would open near you, the place that could teach every Italian chain a thing or two. On this visit, although it was still good, it was closer in quality to those chains at their very best. The gap had narrowed, and not because the chains have upped their game. This is the point, often combined with expansion, at which independent restaurants need to take care.

But anyway, on that night – and, writing this now – it didn’t seem to matter quite so much. It was a very agreeable lunch, if not a perfect one, tucked away at the end of the year. If you asked me where to go for a rock solid reliable pizza in Bristol, I would still probably pick Bosco; it’s earned that latitude, because we go way back. And if one opened in Reading, all the Sarv’s Slices and Dough Bros in the RG postcode wouldn’t stop me paying it a more than occasional visit. Next time you’re in Bristol, if you want an absolute banker, I think Bosco is still that.

Bosco Pizzeria – 7.6
96 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2QX
0117 9737978

https://www.boscopizzeria.co.uk

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Announcement

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Some news for you at the start of 2025: as I mentioned recently, this year the blog will move to more of a subscription model. That will be a gradual change, I imagine, and I’m not sure where it will end up. But the costs of running a restaurant blog have gone up every year, as has the traffic to the blog, so I’ve reached the point where I feel like it’s reasonable to ask readers if they would like to contribute.

I know this is a contentious subject. Everything costs more, everybody has less money and – let’s be honest – we’re used to reading stuff on the internet for nothing. But there’s an increasing trend of writers moving to a subscription-based model, and I can see why. These aren’t people who are sticking four pictures, a Reel and some hashtag-laden word salad on Instagram and describing themselves as bloggers. These are proper writers who think that proper writing should be worth something. 

Don’t laugh, but I consider myself in that camp: this is about paying for writing, not for food.

When I mentioned this on social media I got an interesting mixture of responses. Some people were willing to subscribe to ER and pay a small monthly fee to keep the blog going (thank you, if you were one of those people!). More people were happy to subscribe but didn’t want to make a financial contribution. And quite a lot of you wanted the blog to stay on WordPress and remain free of charge. 

I understand. Free stuff is great. But this blog’s been free for eleven years, and in that time it’s hopefully entertained some of you on a regular basis. It might have steered you away from awful restaurants, helped you find some great ones or assisted when you’ve planned a city break. Even if you’ve not agreed with me when I’ve reviewed a restaurant, perhaps you’ve enjoyed disagreeing with me. I get that: I enjoy disagreeing with people too.

Some people expressed concerns about having to go elsewhere or sign up to another website or app to read the blog. I completely appreciate that, and I’m very reluctant to leave WordPress, which has been the home of ER since the beginning. Fortunately – and thanks to the reader who pointed me in the right direction – WordPress should have the functionality I need to make the changes I want.

Here’s how it will work – you’ll have the option for a monthly subscription to ER for £3, or a discounted annual subscription at £30. I hope that enough of you will want to support Edible Reading in one of those ways that the blog can cover its costs, and that money might also help me to create additional content (whether that’s features, interviews or something else).

For now, I’ll leave it a few weeks and see how that goes. But in the future, some reviews may well be available to paid subscribers only. Features might be, too. The readers’ lunches, an enormous success since they launched in 2018, remain open to all for the time being but again, they may also become subscriber only at some stage. 

A few bits of feedback I received stuck with me. One said “In principle I don’t tend to pay for content on social media”, and I wanted to say something about that. 

The promotion I do for my writing – whether it’s on Threads, or Facebook, or Instagram – yes, that’s all social media. But the blog isn’t. The blog is writing, and I do think writing is worth supporting. Just because the likes of Berkshire Live and the Chronicle have devalued that with cut and paste clickbait and websites laden with adverts, doesn’t mean we should all accept the lowest common denominator everywhere (incidentally, if the blog had paid subscribers the first thing I’d do is upgrade the WordPress plan and get rid of the ads – wouldn’t that be nice?)

Someone else said if my motive was to showcase and improve the Reading food scene this was a counterproductive move. I understand, but I don’t think promoting Reading and charging subscription fees are mutually exclusive. Reading UK gets money to do a dreadful job of promoting Reading’s independent scene; I’ve effectively been doing it as voluntary work for over a decade. During that time every single website like this one that somebody has set up has folded. Time to try something different.

I was having a conversation with a friend on WhatsApp and he said he thought this was a fair thing to do. “You’ve done your bit over the last 11 years,” he said, “now it has to work for you.” Then he said something that really hit home. 

“The point is that if people don’t pay for stuff then eventually it’ll cease to exist.”

I’ve said this so many times about restaurants – use it or lose it, the time-honoured mantra. And it’s been true time and again: there are wonderful restaurants in Reading, not enough people visit them and then everybody is so shocked when they close. I’d always meant to visit, people say, or I wish I’d gone more often. Why shouldn’t that also be true of this blog?

Of course, if nobody wants to support the blog in this way and all this falls flat on its face it will be back to the drawing board for me. I’ll have to reduce the output on the blog, for starters. It’s currently weekly, but it hasn’t always been: if you cast your mind back to before the pandemic reviews came out fortnightly. Or maybe it will be time to do something completely different.

I know there will be a few people reading this and actively wanting this gamble to fail. It would be nice to show them how wrong they are. But I still think that for a review or feature practically every week, £3 a month – less than the price of a coffee – or £30 a year represents decent value. I hope enough of you turn out to agree with me.

Here goes nothing. Click below if you want to show your support.

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