It’s incredibly frustrating, in this day and age, when a restaurant doesn’t have a website. How are you supposed to figure out what you’re going to have, when you can’t spend at least fifteen minutes poring over the menu in advance of your visit?

And how can you tell when it opens and closes? You can try Google for that, of course, but different restaurants report trading hours in different ways – does closing at 8pm mean it closes at 8 sharpish, or that the kitchen closes at 8? If only they had a website you could use.

This all occurred to me last week, when I was going to visit Zi Tore, the newish Italian place on Smelly Alley that has taken the place of the much lamented Grumpy Goat. It has no website, although you can track down the menu if you try hard enough; an Italian friend of mine has been a few times and really rated it, not only encouraging me to visit but telling me all the best things to pick on the menu.

Google says that it shuts at 8, but I had done my homework here, too. Another friend was looking for somewhere quick and easy to eat in Reading a few weeks ago, prior to attending the quiz at the Allied and I suggested Zi Tore. “I wish they’d publish their opening hours somewhere” she said, not unreasonably. “I’d like to be assured that there will be delicious things available at 7pm.” But then she went (“it was completely dead”) and enjoyed the food. So that settled it.

I arranged to go there with Jo – who made a cameo appearance in this blog five years ago – safe in the knowledge that it would all work out fine. We met at Siren RG1 for a couple of beers, which was enough to persuade me that they hadn’t fixed their pricing issues from last year, and mooched over to Smelly Alley ready for pizza and pasta. Jo’s family is Italian, too, and she has strong opinions about Italian food: I was looking forward to seeing what happened when those views came into contact with Zi Tore’s dishes.

Can you see where this is going? Of course you can. We arrived at 7pm to find Zi Tore dead and the guy behind the counter turned us away. “Sorry, we close at half seven”, he said. Exasperating, really: if you want to just be a lunch place, be a lunch place. If you want to be a lunch place that does coffee in the afternoon, fair enough. But why offer pizza and pasta and close at half-seven, a full half hour earlier than you claim you do? I took a menu, so now I know exactly what they serve. It didn’t have opening times on it, either.

So there Jo and I were, standing on Union Street a couple of beers to the good like a prize pair of limoncellos. Where to go? Fortunately, I keep my to do list online, so it only took a few minutes poring over it on Union Street before we were on our way.

Some places, like Dolphin’s Caribbean Cuisine, haven’t been open long enough yet. Others, although high on my list of priorities, were already scheduled in with other people. And some, the likes of Jollibee or Biryani Mama, may even close before an evening comes where I consider dinner there and think “oh, go on then”. But there was a place I’d been keeping in my back pocket to to do this year, and Zi Tore downing tools gave me the perfect opportunity: back to House Of Flavours it was.