The concept of choice in restaurants, I’ve always thought, brings out the inner Goldilocks. Too wide a menu and paralysis sets in, but if it’s too narrow you can’t help feeling straitjacketed. It’s why restaurants that only offer one or two dishes: Le Relais de Venise with its entrecôte, or Burger & Lobster with its – well, you know – have never really caught on here.
I’m reminded of the immortal words of Peter Butterworth in Carry On Abroad, an evergreen favourite of mine, when his Spanish waiter Pepe comes out with the immortal words “of course you are having choices! You can having sausage and chippings, sausage and beans or beans and chippings. That’s choices”. And believe me, I don’t think anybody would have enjoyed dining at the Palace Hotel in Elsbels.
The only time we omnivores really think it’s acceptable to restrict our choices is when we go to a restaurant that offers variations on a theme: burger restaurants, pizza parlours, Nando’s. And yes, Nando’s does technically serve stuff that isn’t chicken but that’s hardly the point, because nobody goes there for that. If somebody at a table at Nando’s is eating a halloumi burger, you can be very confident that they don’t eat chicken and have been dragged there by some inconsiderate sod who does.
Then, of course, there’s the other occasion when we feel as if we have no choice: because there’s something on the menu that we must have, or always order. But those things, as I discovered when I counted down Reading’s top 50 dishes a couple of years ago, are hugely subjective. My wife might be unable to visit Kungfu Kitchen without ordering their deep fried fish, and believe me she is, but other people would mount an equally passionate case for the sweet and sour aubergine, or the lamb with cumin.
Besides, the better the restaurant – like KFK, or Clay’s – the less likely it is, really, that there’s a single must-order dish. What are the chances that a kitchen so skilful would produce just the one thing everybody has to eat? Pretty slim, if you ask me.
No, generally the concept that a restaurant has something you must try, a legendary dish in the making, is another by-product of hype, and usually comes out of the mouths of critics when they visit somewhere, soon after it opens. I’ve tried Brutto’s coccoli, Town’s saffron risotto and Kolae’s fried prawn heads, all acclaimed as instant classics when those venues opened, and they varied from quite nice to very good. Were any of them dishes those restaurants should be exclusively associated with? Not really. Two of them weren’t even the best thing I had in those meals, but it shifts newspapers to rave.
So no, restaurants that become synonymous with a single dish are rare in general, and I don’t think Reading has any to speak of. But that makes the subject of this week’s review even more unusual, because it does occupy that very niche territory. The Chester Arms is an Oxford pub just off the Iffley Road, east from Magdalen Bridge but a smidge closer to it than the Magdalen Arms. It has been under its current management for over ten years. And it’s very much famous for one thing in particular, its steak platter.
Now, it feels wrong to me for most restaurants to describe their own dishes as famous. I still remember the overblown, unsubstantiated hype for The Botanist’s hanging kebabs, for instance, which were more hanging than famous. It’s a bit like restaurants keeping a certificate in their window from over ten years ago, or restaurant bloggers describing themselves as ‘multi award-winning’ when they have, in fact, won none. Famous is something other people are meant to say about you, not how you describe yourself.
And yet in the Chester Arms’ case, you might make an exception. The pub’s homepage describes them as “home of the famous steak platter” and the dish has its own page on their website. It’s the creation of head chef Hamzah Taynaz – although Companies House makes it seem like he might have parted company with the pub over the summer – and it looks like a doozie: onglet cooked rare or medium rare, chips, béarnaise, cabbage with bacon, dressed salad. £50 for two people, or £70 for three, which on paper at least is impressive value; it was £30 and £45 back in 2015, but it’s been a bruising decade.
The thing, though, is this: I have been told to visit the Chester Arms numerous times, by people I know and by people who’ve tipped me off online. It’s been the place at the top of my Oxford to do list for quite a while – I would have reviewed it last month were it not for a medical misadventure – and every single person who has told me to go there has mentioned the steak platter. Some of them had eaten it, and raved about it. Others hadn’t, but left me in no doubt that if they did go there it’s exactly what they would order.
In fact, when I went to Arbequina last month I happened to be on the same train as someone I follow on Instagram, and when I messaged her to ask where she’d eaten in the city I was unsurprised to find that she had gone to the Chester Arms. “We had a great meal there” was her verdict. “It lived up to the hype for us.” So finally, last weekend, I got my chance to try it for size.
My plus one for this meal was my old friend and Oxford compadre Dave, and as we had a pre-lunch latte in Peloton Espresso’s very agreeable back garden I told him that this meal made him, with the exception of Zoë, my most capped plus one. Not bad going for a man who valiantly resisted joining me on duty until a couple of years ago, I told him.
“I thought you’d expect me to have opinions about everything!” he laughed. “And I’m too easy-going for that, I just want to eat nice food. But then I realised that actually you aren’t fussed about all that, so now I don’t mind tagging along.”
Dave was, I had to concede, probably correct. He likes to make much of how low maintenance he is, by which he means that he’ll generally do whatever you like and doesn’t have strong preferences. In the past I may have found that a tad frustrating, but as a dining companion for a restaurant reviewer, it turns out, it’s pretty much a dream CV. Besides, Dave quite rightly pointed out that for our forthcoming holiday to Bruges I had insisted on the dates, insisted on a hotel, changed my mind and picked another hotel and so on and so on, so maybe I quite liked having a low maintenance friend after all.
The Chester Arms is another of those lovely backstreet boozers I didn’t even know existed and like the Star off Cowley Road, it reminded me a little of Reading’s Nag’s Head and the Retreat, only built to a different scale. It was a big, handsome corner plot with a decent-sized garden and inside it was a very attractive room with wooden floorboards, large sturdy tables ringed by fetching booths and plenty of natural light. It was a properly gorgeous space which made me think, as so often, that I really missed the Lyndhurst.
Having said that, I do have to say that some of its tables were more equal than others. The place was absolutely packed – you have to book quite far in advance if you want a table – and without much in the way of soft furnishings, which made it a cacophonous place to be. The two tables nearest to us were the handsome ones for larger groups but our little table with unforgiving chairs, near the kitchen, next to a stack of high chairs, felt like one they put in the seating plan because they could, not because they should.
In fairness the table directly in front of me was possibly even worse. The large group settled in nearby was full of people who were young, exuberant and happy to be there. I love Dave dearly, but we could only manage one of those three. “They’re probably all catching up at the end of their summer holidays, ready for term to begin” he said equably, and I felt even older than usual.
The Chester Arms’ menu was compact in the way you’d expect when most people are there for the feature attraction: a handful of nibbles, only three starters to speak of and three main courses which were not the steak platter. One of them was a vegetarian mezze selection (“perfect as a starter to share, or to be enjoyed as a main for one”) which had, by the looks of it, strong Nando’s halloumi burger energy. The starters were under a tenner, all mains save the steak platter hovered around twenty pounds.
Now, to get this out of the way from the off, our service was brilliant from beginning to end. Our server was young, American, properly charming and looked after we two avuncular has-beens perfectly, and I can’t say enough good things about her. With one exception, which is that I saw a blackboard with specials being shown to other tables later in the afternoon but we were never told about it or given a chance to look at it. In an ideal world it just said, in big cursive script, Stop fooling yourself, we all know you’re having the steak platter but, as I didn’t see it, I can only guess.
Dave was reluctant to have a starter in case the steak platter turned out to be too much, which did make me wonder if some kind of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers situation was going on, but I managed to persuade him to share the most appealing starter with me. Actually it might have been the absolute best thing I ate all afternoon, so I half wished I’d just pressed on without him. Lamb koftas were a trio of plump nubbins, beautifully coarse and with just the faintest whiff of offal to them, really gorgeous stuff.
They came with flatbreads which felt bought in, but which were good nonetheless, a small stack of guindilla and what was described as green tahini. I’m not really sure what that was, because tahini is a paste with a very distinctive taste and texture and this was none of those things, and it didn’t have a particularly strong note of sesame, but I quite liked it anyway. Dave was unconvinced by it, but won over by the koftas. He let me have the spare one, because he’s a good egg, and even though they were almost more faggot than kofta it did make me wonder what a Chester Arms mixed grill would be like. That had better not have been on the specials menu.
We had a while to catch up after that because each steak is cooked to order and takes, if the menu is to be believed, 45 minutes. So he sipped his pint of alcohol free Rothaus, and I had a pale from DEYA: we were both keeping our powder dry for a more substantial session post lunch. I didn’t know at the time – I learned this from Instagram after the fact – that landlady Becca Webb had just come back from a tasting tour in Bilbao with her wine suppliers, and if I had I might have paid closer attention to the wine list. Next time.
Anyway, Dave and I had a good old chinwag, if constantly drowned out by the relentless, unforgivable youngness of people at our neighbouring tables, as we struggled gamely with the heat from the nearby kitchen. The problem with a restaurant where everybody orders the same thing is that each time it comes out from the kitchen you perk up, think it’s yours and then realise it’s going to another table. But in a way it’s genius, because it raises your anticipation over and over again, and every passing platter looked amazing.
Besides, it distracted me from Dave giving me a litany of people he knew, roughly our age, who were either seriously or terminally ill. They don’t call your fifties ‘sniper’s valley’ for nothing, and after I’d heard about three of them my fight or flight health anxiety kicked in and I asked him, ever so nicely, to stop. Is this what we’ve got to look forward to? I wondered to myself.
I can’t imagine anybody’s life expectancy would be enhanced by what turned up at our table about half an hour after our starters, but just look at it. You’d shave a few days off the end of your life for one of these, wouldn’t you?
It’s difficult to give any kind of scale with a photograph like that but trust me, that serving plate was substantial. Our two serving plates were on the smaller side, but that just gave you an excuse to go back again and again: not for nothing did the pot of utensils on our table include forks, sharp knives and a little set of steak tongs.
Everything about this dish was bang on or thereabouts. The onglet was cooked beautifully medium rare and, in the main was buttery and absurdly easy to cut, any tension in the fibres expertly soothed away; I appreciated the irony of eating something that was better rested, most likely, than I will ever be. The béarnaise was ever so slightly thin with a slight hit of vinegar, but it hadn’t split and went very well with the steak; I might have liked a little more, between two, and a spoon to dish it up with but as quibbles go those were minor.
The other thing I loved, though, was how complete a dish this was and how every component brought something to the table. The heap of savoy cabbage shot through with lardons was truly joyous, the chips were thick, crunchy and surprisingly good. And even the salad, which I’d dismissed in the run-up as a makeweight, was not an afterthought. It was properly dressed, and it supplied the lightness and acidity that would otherwise have been missing from the platter.
Our server had asked us if we wanted to upgrade to the platter for three (“nice bit of upselling”, said Dave) but we’d decided not to, mostly because I thought if I was reviewing the place you’d want to know if a platter for two actually served two. And my verdict is that it does: we finished all our steak and most of everything else, and even in the time between finishing and our almost empty plates being taken away we were both picking with forks – dunking a chip in the béarnaise or trawling it through the juices from the onglet, or the good stuff that was left after you’d airlifted the cabbage away. If service had been less on it, I think our plate would have ended up clean as a whistle.
I tried to send a picture of the platter to Zoë – because she’d asked, even though I imagine it would have made her seethe with resentment – and failed, because the mobile signal in that part of Oxford is like taking a day trip to 1997. Perhaps it was for the best.
Our server asked if we fancied dessert, so I asked Dave if he fancied dessert – because I’d have looked like a right fat bastard scoffing one on my own – and I was hugely relieved when he decided to join me. Perhaps the bodysnatchers hadn’t troubled his house in Wootton Bassett after all. The dessert menu was also compact: three desserts, or ice cream with Pedro Ximenez, or a selection of ice creams, or an affogato.
Another thing to like very much about the Chester Arms was the very appealing selection of digestifs, and the options of red or white port, Sauternes or PX: I had another half of the pale instead, but on another day would have veered in the direction of something smaller and sweeter. The pale, by the way, was decent if piney: not DEYA’s iconic Steady Rolling Man but a reasonable stand-in. I’d have checked it in on Untappd, but I was in 1997 so it hadn’t been invented yet.
I was tempted by something ice cream based, but the server couldn’t tell me where the Chester Arms’ ice cream came from and I wasn’t invested or entitled enough to make her ask. So instead I went for my tried and tested choice, a tiramisu. It was about as different as possible from most of the ones I’ve had recently – not loose, airy and boozy like the tiramisu at, say, Paesinos or RAGÙ. It was more old school, by which I suppose I mean inauthentic: much firmer, much denser, crammed into that Duralex glass like they’d almost forgotten to say when.
And it was gorgeous. I’d forgotten that authentic is overrated, with all the honest-to-goodness Italian food cropping up in places like Reading and Bristol, but this was a delight from first spoon to last – far, far more cream than sponge but laced with Courvoisier and Frangelico. I loved it far more than I expected to, and it made me think again that the Chester Arms might be famous for its steak platter but it had made the canny choice of ensuring that none of the other items on the menu were an also-ran.
Dave had the crème brûlée, which is just one of those dishes I never personally order. I tried a spoonful of it and it, too, was right on the money: just enough warmth, the carapace just the right thickness, the cream vanilla-speckled and exemplary.
We didn’t tarry, because by that point it was incredibly warm and both of us fancied stretching our legs. Besides, I had promised to introduce Dave to the Star and his beloved Liverpool had finished playing, so the lack of mobile reception was no longer the positive nuisance it had been. My advice is that if you’re going to spend time somewhere with absolutely no phone signal, the best idea is to do it in the company of someone where you can talk for hours without feeling the need to check your phone. So that’s exactly what I did.
Our meal for two – two and a half courses each, one of them that steak platter, and a pint apiece came to just under £100, including a discretionary 12.5% service charge which was totally earned. When you think that half of that whole bill was down to a single dish that the pub endearingly describes as a “small steak”, you have to hand it to them.
I’m really glad I finally made it to the Chester Arms – partly because it’s been an ambition for such a long time and partly because it was fascinating to try a restaurant in this country which really is synonymous with the one dish, to see if that reputation is justified. And it absolutely is – if you like steak at all, you would have a ball hopping on a train to Oxford and making your way to the Chester Arms. And if you don’t, but you know someone who does, make sure the two of you take a friend with you: you can have the fish and chips and they can have the time of their lives.
I do find myself wondering though, still: what was on that specials board? But I know that it could have had skate wing on it, or fried chicken, or countless other things, and I still would have ordered the steak platter. So does the steak platter qualify as famous? Yes, I think it probably does.
But if I went back to the Chester Arms again, knowing what their kitchen is capable of, would I really still order the steak platter a second time? Also yes. I’d be even sadder, though, if they’d taken those lamb koftas off the menu, because it was the dish I’d want to order every time, if it was up to me. That’s choices.
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If you find yourself deciding to spend a city break in Oviedo, as I did, in the run-up to your holiday you will invariably be asked the same question by everybody you tell. Where? they will all say.
And you might well struggle, as I did, and wind up explaining that it’s sort of west of the Basque Country, but near the coast, in a region of Spain called Asturias that is still largely untroubled by tourists. You’ll probably, as I did, say that it’s famous for cider and blue cheese, and for fabada, a bean stew packed with pork which has a revered status in the city.
You might also mention that Oviedo features in the Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and that Woody Allen loves the city and that there’s even a statue of him which, this being continental Europe, nobody has defaced or pulled up and lobbed into the nearest body of water. Actually, you might not mention that, because you might not know it. I knew it and I never mentioned it, because advertising that you’re a Woody Allen fan just isn’t done these days.
But in the run up to your trip, if you’re asked, you’ll probably just say that it’s west of Bilbao and mention the cider. And people will generally say “okay” or “I’ve never heard of it” and all of you will get on with your respective lives.
Having returned from Oviedo, if asked, I would instead say, firstly, that it’s one of the best cities I’ve visited for food and drink. At the end of a holiday Zoë and I always play a game where we both list the five best things we’ve eaten on the trip. Sitting having a beer on our final day in Oviedo we had to conclude that it was rarely this difficult to narrow it down, and then we went and had one last dinner which, if anything, made it even more complicated.
Asturian cuisine – and yes, it does at least slightly revolve around fabada and cachopo, an enormous slab made of two pieces of veal, cheese in the middle, breaded and fried – is very hearty indeed. Forget going to Malaga or Granada and picking over lots of small dishes: in Oviedo even a main course might be big enough that two people can quite easily share it. I am rarely defeated by meals, but even I had to wave the white flag a couple of times in Oviedo.
That might make it sound like it’s wall to wall gut-busters, but that doesn’t do the food justice. I had plenty of interesting, intelligent food across the city, and I also discovered – beyond the cider – great beer and coffee and a scene that had something for everyone. It was named Spain’s city of gastronomy last year, but even so it still feels like a relatively well-kept secret.
Not only that, but Oviedo is a handsome place. The old town is exceedingly pretty, steep streets meandering from one square to another, and there’s a beautiful cathedral, an imposing monastery and a picture perfect pastel-shaded food market. But there are also wide boulevards and, right in the centre, the Campo de San Francisco, the lungs of the city, a gorgeous and spacious park which lends itself gladly to a happy meander. On one side of its perimeter there are beautiful, brightly coloured houses on a sloping hill and you get a sense, almost, of another San Francisco.
Oviedo is not buzzy or boastful the way Malaga or even Barcelona is: it is a much more stately, sedate place and over the best part of a week I came to like it very much. It’s a grower not a shower, with nothing to prove, and it had a certain ease with itself that I very much admired. So different from many of the places I tend to visit on holiday – less scruffy, somehow more grown-up. On most of my holidays I come home with dozens of pictures of street art, snapped with my proper camera like the wannabe hipster I am. In Oviedo, there was comparatively little that I saw.
I must admit, though, that my first impressions of the city were distinctly mixed. The first day of my holiday, nothing went right. The shitty train to cruddy Gatwick decided to stop at Redhill and spit us all out with, it seems, no suggestions about how we should reach our final destination. Our plane sat on the runway for almost an hour because, and this appeared to be news to people, it needed a full tank to get to Spain and didn’t have one. The bus from Asturias airport felt like it took an eternity: the airport is far closer to Aviles than Oviedo, it turns out.
And then we decided to grab a late lunch on Calle Gascona, Oviedo’s famous cider boulevard, the one that features in every newspaper article about the place. Somehow it felt a little tired and unlovely, and grabbing a table outside at one of the places recommended by one of the broadsheets, a little too late for lunch, we felt like an inconvenience.
I won’t mention the place, although maybe I should, to encourage you not to go there, but it was not an experience for the ages. The croquetas were decent enough, the big slabs of cheese fridge-cold, the bread rock hard. A twenty Euro plate of calamari were thick bouncy straps of the stuff, no lightness or delicacy. And the American at the next table talked volubly and relentlessly at her tablemates, who appeared to be a captive audience. I think she might have been doing part of the Camino de Santiago, and I could picture her husband, back home, having a very pleasant fortnight in relative peace and tranquillity.
It turned out that she was a vet. I know this, because she mentioned it roughly half a dozen times in the space of thirty minutes, and as I dipped a piece of particularly rubbery squid through the crust on top of a purgatorial dish of alioli she started talking about prolapses and fistulas in more detail than I would personally have liked, i.e. in any detail at all. The squid bordered on inedible, the grey clouds overhead threatened rain. This doesn’t bode well, I thought to myself.
Anyway that was the last time I had a bad meal for a whole week, although it did put me off returning to Calle Gascona, and from that point onwards it was sunshine and strolls, coffee and cakes, beer and cider and terrific meal after terrific meal, and I was relieved to find that first experience a passing aberration, the exception that proved the rule, the rule being that Oviedo rules.
When I returned from holiday, thoroughly passionate about telling people why this grand yet modest city deserved more credit, I realised that because I’d been unable to find a decent guide to Oviedo in the run-up to my trip I’d just have to write one. So here it is, and I hope that if you’re considering an expedition to this most classy of cities – or have already decided on one, and have come here through the vagaries of Google looking for advice – it helps you to make the most of what I found to be a downright wonderful place.
And when you fly home, tell people that it’s not all about cider and blue cheese, because there’s miles more going on than that. Oviedo deserves a legion of ambassadors, and I for one am proud to be one. Fingers crossed this piece helps to create a few more.
1. La Corte de Pelayo
The evening after that awful lunch on Calle Gascona we had dinner at La Corte de Pelayo, on one corner of the Campo de San Francisco, and my holiday experienced the great reset.
It’s one of those places where from the moment you walk through the front door, you know that everything will be absolutely fine until the moment you leave: smooth, attentive service, a cosy, classic dining room and pockets of delighted diners everywhere you look. It’s been going for over 20 years, although that makes it a positive newborn compared to some of the businesses that feature in this city guide, and it had that air that it was probably exactly the same when it first opened and would be exactly the same in 2045. I loved that about it.
I was determined to immerse myself in Asturian food, so I ordered their fabada – which, I should add, is on the menu as a starter. I haven’t experienced anything quite like it: the pot of beans was brought to the table and ladled, with great ceremony, into the bowl in front of me before being set down on the table, in case I wanted a top up. The compango, a long plate with pork, pork sausage and morcilla, was placed nearby, looking for all the world like a carnivore’s idea of the best petit fours ever, for you to cut and add however you liked.
It was truly heavenly: the beans firm and creamy, the pork lending smoke and salt, the whole thing giving me complete clarity on why this dish, in this region at least, has attained a mythical status. I understood why every year they give out awards for the best fabada Asturiana (they also do this for cachopo, as we will see, and for Pote Asturiano for that matter), and why La Corte de Pelayo had been a finalist in those awards several times.
Don’t get me wrong, the meal had other dishes in it too. Zoë ate gorgeous jamon ibérico, sliced by hand as it should always be, and we shared some pixin, pieces of fried monkfish. She had secreto ibérico as a main, and I had an extraordinary shoulder of lamb, presented on the plate like one of those flying birds that adorned the walls of so many Seventies living rooms. There was an apple tart that made me very happy indeed, and a glass of ice cider – a drink I came to love far more than cider itself during my time in Oviedo.
But it was the fabada I have thought about countless times since. I put pictures of the meal on my Facebook page and a reader who knows Oviedo well told me to enjoy the city. I asked him if he had any recommendations and he said “I’m afraid you’ve been to the best place already!” I don’t know about that, because it turned out that there were many other superb meals to be had. But I didn’t order fabada again.
Cocina Cabal, where I had lunch on my second day in Oviedo, was a thoroughly sophisticated spot. From the very start, when we waited by the gorgeous bar out front and had cold beer straight from the tank, to the bit where we were led into a tasteful, muted dining room and given a menu awash with temptations I liked it very much. It’s named after chef Vicente Cabal and most of the tables have a view of the open kitchen, although I had an even better view of my wife.
Everything was clever, pretty and carb-free – qualities I have aspired to for many years but seem fated never to attain – and although I found the plating somewhere between “fussy”, “geometric” and “designed by a serial killer” I thoroughly enjoyed all of what I ate. Octopus and stellar pork, edged with exceptionally light crackling, was a new take on surf and turf for me, and although I wasn’t entirely sure any of it went with celeriac purée or mango chutney I was happy to spend a few minutes eating (and completely failing to make sense of) it.
My veal with sweetbreads and salsify showed similarly worrying presentation, all parallel lines and artful smears, but I rather liked it, even if it could have done with more sweetbreads. But then, what dish couldn’t? Dessert was a white chocolate sphere full of passionfruit mousse that melted away when dark chocolate sauce was poured on it, an idea which I think was cutting edge quite some time ago, but I appreciated the execution all the same.
But perhaps the trick was in how you ordered. Zoë enjoyed two colossal ingots of foie gras with apple and Pedro Ximenez, and outrageously good suckling pig with a bright and moreish kumquat purée, so arguably the menu just had cheffier and less cheffy stuff, and I, ever the ponce, had skewed towards the former. Nevertheless it was a very good meal, and even pushing the boat out with wine and (more) ice cider it still cost us something like £160. When I consider some of the meals I’ve spent that on in the U.K. of late, I start to have dark thoughts.
Looking at Cocina Cabal’s menu again now, I see that their fabada was the best in the world back in 2022. Next time, I’m having that.
Although that fistula-ridden experience on my first day put me off Calle Gascona, it didn’t put me off sidrerias in general. It did, however, make me a bit more discerning about which ones to try, which is how we ended up at the more modern, more interesting La Puerta de Cimadevilla on Thursday lunchtime. On the edge of a pretty square in the old town, it was much less frowsty than some of its Gascona-based peers and was thoroughly fizzing with custom throughout my lunch there: we turned up early, without a reservation, but later on saw people getting turned away.
The staff at La Puerta de Cimadevilla were lovely, and brought us much more into the whole cider-pouring experience, and it was a real joy to watch them pouring it from a great height into the corner of our wide-bottomed glasses in the traditional style, the practice of escanciar or ‘throwing’ the cider, in order to aerate it. Zoë was a little more sceptical – “they’ve all got one wet shoe” was her take on this venerable custom – but even she got into the swing of it, I think.
Incidentally, we saw next to no British tourists in our week in Oviedo and I wonder if the cider has something to do with it: imagine our nation of binge drinkers having to attract the attention of serving staff every time you wanted another sip of your drink. It would never catch on. The thing to pair cider with in these parts is blue cheese, and La Puerta de Cimadevilla’s cabrales croquetas, sweetened with honey and topped with a walnut, were a properly knockout combination.
But really, the reason we were there was to try the other pillar of Asturian gastronomy, the cachopo. La Puerta de Cimadevilla is proud of theirs, with no less than four different ones on their menu. Not only that, but they include two that have been decorated: the cachopo that was declared the best in Spain back in 2023 – there’s a poster proclaiming this on the outside of the restaurant, no less – and another that was a finalist as recently as this year.
We ordered the 2023 champion because you would, wouldn’t you? And I loved everything about it, from the slightly preposterous presentation to literally everything else. It comes on its own special bespoke board, loudly proclaiming that it is indeed the ‘El Capricho del Rey Ramiro I’ and, just as endearingly, the restaurant’s other celebrated cachopo has its own unique, subtly different board. I don’t know how you can’t slightly love a place that gets so proud of its achievements: it was certainly beyond me.
But more than that, it was simultaneously delicious and colossal. There is no question at all that you couldn’t take one of these down on your own, and even between two it almost proved beyond us. The restaurant has a whole separate page on its website talking about every painstaking element of this, from the meat that’s used to the paleta ibérica laid on top of it, from the mixture of cheeses in its gooey core to the blend of breadcrumbs, corn and cheese that make up its ultra-crunchy coating. There’s even chestnut purée in the mix somewhere, the kind of thing some dullards would describe as the hero ingredient, no doubt.
All that sounds great, but the proof is in that moment when you make your first inadequate incision into the gigantic slab of Asturian food history and understand the fuss. Before that, my only experience of this kind of dish was the Andalusian flamenquin, a cigar of pork loin, jamon and cheese that I used to think was the best breadcrumbed thing ever. The cachopo has forced me to revise my opinion somewhat, but I also suspect more research is necessary.
Equally brilliant and frustrating was the fact that the menu contained countless other things I would have loved to try that were rendered impossible by the sheer volume of cachopo you had to put away. Of all the restaurants in the guide I think this was the one Zoë most wanted to return to, to eat their tomatoes with bonito. The table next to me was so struck by a neighbouring table’s ensaladilla russa that they specifically asked what it was and I could see them making a mental note for next time. They even do a fabada – who doesn’t? – and you wouldn’t bet against it being marvellous.
The night I ate at Gloria, the heavens opened and the stars aligned: it was the one time during our stay in Oviedo that it properly chucked it down, which just so happened to be the night we had a reservation at the restaurant two minutes’ walk and a few doors down from our hotel.
Not just any restaurant, though. Chef Nacho Manzano has Oviedo’s only Michelin starred restaurant, NM, situated in the El Vasco mall, a huge shopping centre I really struggled to like. But Gloria is the restaurant he shares with his sister Esther, less showy but properly lovely. Strangely I can’t tell you what the main dining room looked like because we were seated in the front room, by the bar, with just one other table, occupied by a pair of friends catching up. But actually that made it feel intimate, like private dining almost, and if I was in the zone allocated to tourists I soon found I didn’t mind one bit.
Gloria’s was another of those menus – Oviedo seemed to be full of these – where the starters and main courses cost pretty much the same, leaving you with little or no idea how to structure a meal, what was to share and what was to eat on your own; I sometimes suspected that most of the servers in Oviedo thought we should share everything and couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t. But we were helped by a brilliant server at Gloria who very firmly told us when something was too big for us to order one apiece, and everything was so delicious that we ended up sharing it all anyway.
That meant, unusually, tuna two ways – an exquisite tataki just-cooked, dressed in impeccable extra virgin olive oil and strewn with garlic, and a hefty piece of loin halved and served blushing with gorgeous tomatoes sharpened with citrus, nutty beans like edamame and crispy onion. The former was maybe too delicate to share, the latter quite the opposite, and one of the best things I ate in the entire trip.
Our server talked us into splitting arroz con pitu de caleya between us, which was probably wise but did leave me wanting more at the end. Pitu de caleya, or roadside chicken, is a noted Asturian free-range chicken, and serving it with rice in this way is something Manzano reintroduced first at his three-starred restaurant Casa Marcial. If this was the diffusion line, it felt very far from being short changed: the rice was rich beyond measure with the juices from the chicken and the chicken itself – darker, leaner and gamier than the usual fare – was glorious.
Having been restrained thus far we earned the right to spoil ourselves for the rest of the meal, so we did. A cheeseboard full of Asturias’ finest completely redeemed the dismal Calle Gascona selection from our first meal in the city, and then a chocolate cremoso topped with the smoothest hazelnut ice cream, ringed with olive oil – yes, a whole one each – brought matters to a resoundingly successful conclusion. I probably don’t need, by now, to say that the latter was accompanied with another glass of ice cider but there you go, I’ve said so anyway.
The rain had died off by the time we walked back to our hotel to do some serious digesting. How could it have persisted, after a meal so good it had the power to banish pathetic fallacy?
Let’s get this bit out of the way first: no, I don’t know where the name comes from, yes, it sells the bean dish and no, I didn’t order it. So snigger if you must, but El Fartuquin was possibly the most traditional sidreria we ate at, and a very successful and popular one at that. The basement room looked like the picture above when we sat down at 9 on a Friday night, but within half an hour every table was packed. Everything about it had that assured air which seemed to permeate much of the city, and everybody was having a terrific time; I heard no English spoken anywhere.
If it was only solid by the standards of this holiday, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have been an outstanding meal in any other context. I really liked the pixin, nuggets of fried monkfish with a little pot of alioli, and I quite admired the brave plating choice to serve the skeleton of the monkfish next to it, like something cooked up by H.R. Giger, to leave you under no illusions about where those delectable morsels had come from.
I also rather enjoyed yet more pitu de caleya – I’d got a taste for it by then, you see – this time in a dark and potent stew which contained maybe a tad too much mustard for my personal liking, although I found a way to see past that. Zoë decided, more out of hope than expectation, to have her own personal cachopo and was even more defeated by it than she had been the last one. This is as good a point as any to reiterate that Asturias doesn’t do small portions: Oviedo would not, for instance, be an Ozempic-friendly city break.
I felt a little like El Fartuquin only really suffered by comparison with the other meals we had in Oviedo, rather than anywhere else, so it’s still one to consider if you find yourself in the city for an appreciable length of time and you’re disinclined to eat at the same place twice. I’d also add that, despite being a sidreria, it had an excellent list of reds, including many I’ve sampled on previous visits to Malaga. The kind pricing of wine in the city is another reason why the bill never stings anywhere near as much as it would back home.
We had lunch at El Ovetense on our final full day of the holiday and it was a place I discovered entirely by chance that very morning.
How it happened was this: we were still buzzing from a very happy evening spent drinking at Cerveceria Cimmeria (number 10 on this list, just down there) and, following them on Instagram, I saw that they’d shared a beautiful picture of the place on their Instagram stories. The person who took it was a very talented local food photographer – I forget her Instagram handle – and all the photos in her grid were of food she’d cooked herself with one exception, a couple of dishes from a place called El Ovetense. And they looked good. Drop-everything-change-your-plans good.
So I did some more research, fell well and truly down the rabbit hole and found an article from last year in El Pais which left me with no doubt in my mind that I needed to snag a table there. El Ovetense, in the old town, is technically a hotel restaurant, and has been trading since 1959. The founder’s daughters Natalia and Ana run the place now, and it has achieved legendary status for two dishes. So naturally, after turning up at noon to ask Ana nicely for a table on the terrace, only to be told that they didn’t open until 1pm, those dishes are exactly what we (eventually) ordered.
One was the pollo con ajillo – chicken with garlic – which doesn’t begin to explain how incredible this dish was. Tons of the crispiest jointed chicken, skin cooked until brittle, the whole thing issuing a siren song to be parted from the bone, came festooned with industrial quantities of crunchy fried garlic, the whole lot sitting on a layer of the finest chips, which slowly became permeated with all that garlic and all those juices as the meal went on. Seventeen Euros for this, and it could easily have served two on its own. Seventeen Euros! I could honestly weep.
But the other dish, which is even more the signature of the restaurant, is their jamon asado “Serafin style”, named after the restaurant’s founder Serafin Garcia. I never got to try jamon asado when I visited Granada last year, and I felt like I’d missed out at the time, but I know now fate was keeping me waiting for this, a rendition which I can’t imagine being surpassed.
Picture a plate groaning with gorgeous sliced ham – apparently there are 16 slices per portion, carved with a special knife so fine and sharp that it’s like playing the violin. Picture that ham draped over a rubble of crunchy potatoes, and then picture a rich sauce, somewhere between a jus and a gravy, poured liberally over it all. Only Natalia and Ana handle the preparation of this dish, and they cook up to 20 kilos of ham a day for the purpose. It is the kind of dish that not only the restaurant, but also the city, deserves to be famous for.
The ham, the spuds, that gravy, the many phenomenal forkfuls made up of those elements… it was, as with many dishes in Oviedo, not for the faint hearted but one for the memory banks and the record books. We also had yet more spuds, this time in a salty and arresting cabrales sauce and we didn’t need them, with all that other food and all those permeated potatoes, but we ate them all the same because they were as fantastic as everything else.
It is probably for the best that I discovered El Ovetense on my final day, completely by chance, because if I’d been there on my first day I might not have gone anywhere else and then you wouldn’t have this guide to read. But if you decide you want to visit Oviedo, this is the place to make sure you visit and these are the dishes to make sure you have. And yet, I found myself wondering – if they are this good, what other unsung gems are hiding further down the menu, when they stick two absolute showstoppers right at the top?
El Ovetense Calle de San Juan, 6
7. Casa Fermin
My final meal in Oviedo – unless you count something wolfed down at the airport the next day, which I’d rather not – was at Casa Fermin, just down from La Corte de Pelayo and so very near to the park. It was, I suppose, the Big Fancy Meal of the holiday, and after lunch at El Ovetense I was worried our trip would end with a whimper rather than a bang.
I worried needlessly, because although Casa Fermin was very different to El Ovetense it was, in its way, as good a meal as any we had on the trip. The dining room looks a smidgen sterile in pictures but was actually a very striking one to which photographs possibly don’t do justice. The enormous tablecloths that get caught under your feet seem to be a Spanish thing – Cocina Cabal had these too – and they’re a bit Total Eclipse Of The Heart, but the space was peaceful, hushed, luxe and poised.
And the food was very good indeed, in the same kind of bracket as Cocina Cabal but with, for my money, everything taken up a notch. We eschewed the tasting menu for the à la carte and were again rewarded with a slightly confusing range of options where some dishes were small and clearly to be consumed solo, others were big and clearly designed to share and, well, with the rest it was anybody’s guess.
This, though, is where the serving staff really came into their own. We ordered a few individual things, a few dishes to share which were brought to the table already divided and what that meant, all in all, was that we kind of designed our own tasting menu with the help of our server, very much the best of both worlds.
So we had a croissant each, deeply flaky and buttery, crammed with tuna tartare and we shared a feather-light rectangle of brioche topped with a translucent film of Iberian pancetta and piled with caviar. An arroz con pulpo, similarly, was divided into two bowls and was extremely generous for two: god knows how they expected one person to polish that off as a starter and have room for everything else.
I lucked out, though, with the suckling pig. Pressed into the most divine oblong, the meat all succulent and the crackling onomatopoeically doing exactly that, it was superlative stuff. I liked the hazelnut pesto they served it with perfectly fine, but I loved the smoked pineapple purée, something I would never have anticipated in a hundred years and which was an eye-opener and a half. It even made me think that possibly, just possibly, there might be a place for pineapple on pizza, provided you smoked it first.
All of that went beautifully with a white wine from the Canary Islands which was complex with almost oxidised notes, and even though everyone at the surrounding tables seemed more classy, more genteel and an awful lot more Spanish I had an absolute whale of a time throughout my meal.
Dessert was the best way I could imagine to finish a week of miraculous meals, a sort of ice cream cheesecake made with a local cheese called Gamonèu; I’d forgotten how the Spanish love to include savoury notes in cheesecake, and this had a little pungent punch which elevated it far above the workaday. It came with a tiny moat of ice cider: I took this as a cue to have one final golden glass to match.
I had no real concept, before I went to Oviedo, of how different Asturias would be to Andalusia, where I’ve spent far more time. So I was expecting that, like Malaga or Granada, Oviedo would be awash with jamon shops with stacks of bocadillos in the window, ham shining under the spotlights, churrerias left right and centre and vermouth bars here and there.
Well, in my experience Oviedo is not like that. There is jamon, and I eventually chanced upon a couple of shops, and I didn’t make it to either branch of the only churreria, Churreria Guty, that I came across online. Next time, perhaps. And Oviedo is a cider city first, a wine city second and although it has a little grid of streets – the Ruta de los Vinos – around Calle Manuel Pedregal, I didn’t make it there either. I know, I know, what kind of a guide is this?
So the closest I got was Casa González Suarez, a little spot celebrating its centenary this year. It served vermouth, and had a limited menu of ham, cheese and bocadillos, and it was the perfect place for a short, casual pit stop after the morning coffee and before the afternoon amble. The ham was cut by hand, and came on a paper plate – it wasn’t bad, but I’ve had better. The cheese, also on a paper plate, was more refrigerated than I’d have liked.
The vermouth, though, and the service were splendid, and I liked the room. Lunch for the two of us cost less than twenty quid. Asturias is almost different enough to Andalusia to be a different country – they worship different ways to eat a pig there – but I enjoyed my brief, affordable excursion to the south.
If Oviedo is cider first, wine second, where does that leave beer? Well, from my homework and exploration, in a limited number of very safe hands.
Cerveceria l’Artesana, on a street parallel to Calle Gascona, was a really fun and rather popular craft beer bar which very much lived up to the usual aesthetic of those places – a long thin corridor of a room with high tables against the wall, and a bigger room up the stairs at the back which had more room but less personality. I was heartened by how many people were in there on a Wednesday night, and I liked many of the beers I had.
Some of those, like piney pale ale La Vuestra, were brewed by the venue, and others, like a very drinkable DIPA called FOMO, are by other Spanish breweries – Bilbao’s Luagar in that case. An excellent can fridge gave me the chance to reacquaint myself with the Girona brewery Soma, whose beers I’d so enjoyed the previous year in Granada.
Having got there, we were having such a good time that we stayed for food. L’Artesana’s Instagram makes much of the fact that they make all their food on the premises, and I very much got that – everything was robust, substantial and frighteningly good value. Empañadas were Venezuelan rather than Argentinian, so made with corn dough rather than pastry, more like an arepa, and were colossal and stuffed with chicken. We got two for a price you’d gladly pay for one, and both were impressively sturdy.
Fingers de pollo (for some reason they preferred fingers to goujons when lifting a word from a foreign language) were actually really good chicken tenders, again absolutely whopping and brilliant dunked in a pot of moreish honey mustard dip. The only thing that defeated me was their burger. It cost something like twelve Euros and was a behemoth, and it was the first but not the last time I didn’t clear my plate in an Oviedo venue.
You couldn’t dispute the quality, and l’Artesana even makes its own buns and burger sauce, but it was a little too thick for me, and a little too pink in the middle: close to tartare, really, underneath the crust. Never mind. I would go back, I would pick dishes that looked more like snacks and beer food and I would still leave full and happy, wallet far from dented. It was another illustration that when it comes to what you should eat with craft beer, the U.K. still has plenty to learn.
My homework had identified Cerveceria Cimmeria as a place to try for beer, and early in my time in the city I clocked that it was on the same hill as La Gente – number 13 on this list – a few doors down. It was closed during the day, so it was impossible to tell what it would be like. There was a Löwenbräu sign outside, and the name of the pub was in that sort of Celtic, sort of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons font I remember well from my misspent teenage years. I couldn’t possibly have known, at that point, that I was gazing upon one of the best pubs I’ve ever had the luck to drink in.
Returning on a week night, minutes after they opened, it was a revelation. A beautiful spot with some low tables in the window and along one side, a bar and stools taking up the other half of the room. Lovely wood panels, walls covered with beer swag and everything scrupulously clean. Twelve beers on offer – including one cask handpull – and a dizzying array of styles and breweries, from Spain and beyond. The lager was Löwenbräu, the cask beer was Shepherd Neame’s very own Bishop’s Finger, but beyond that it got really interesting.
That meant excellent IPAs from Spanish giant Garage, Asturian brewery Caleya and Malandar, from Cadiz. There was an imperial stout by renowned Basqueland Brewing and, from far further east, a delectable sour by Latvia’s Arpus and another corking pale from Berlin’s Fuerst Wiacek. Not only that, but Belgium was well represented with a Lindemans and the Straffe Hendrik Tripel on the board.
I don’t think I have ever seen such a canny but compact selection of beers, such a well balanced lineup of countries and styles where I wanted to try nearly all of it. I resolved to try nearly all of it.
I didn’t realise at the time, but now I do – Cimmeria is the kingdom featured in the Conan The Barbarian stories, which might have explained the font on the outside. The place was filling up with the kind of diverse craft beer drinking crowd you never see at these places in the U.K., and Def Leppard was playing on the stereo. It was how my corner of our sixth form common room would have been back in 1991 if (a) we had been cool; (b) we’d lost our virginity; and (c) we’d been allowed to drink on the premises.
I looked at Zoë, and I could tell she was in love with the place. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was the Leppard. It was probably, in truth, a bit of both. But I was in love with it too.
All that and snacks – a bowl of crisps, popcorn or nuts with each round, and a simple but effective menu of cheeses or empañadas. We ordered a mushroom and cheese empañada each and were told they wouldn’t come out for a while because they needed to be baked properly, which is exactly the answer you want to hear, and when they arrived they were gorgeous.
We liked Cimmeria so much that it was a huge wrench to leave for our dinner reservation, and we resolved there and then to move a few things around so we could do it all over again the following night. So the next evening we were stood outside at 7, when it opened, we grabbed the same table and it was, if anything, even better than before.
Cimmeria was following both Zoë and me on Instagram by then and one of the owners, who was charm personified, told us that we had been spending our time wisely from what she could see of our travels. That was lovely of her, but none of it was spent quite as wisely as those happy hours in Cimmeria.
We left for our final restaurant of the trip happy to have found possibly the only pub I’ve been to that comes close to rivalling Bruges’ magisterial ‘t Brugs Beertje and devastated that we’d only had two short evenings there.
Cimmeria celebrated its thirteenth birthday the month before we arrived in Oviedo. I wish it many, many more very happy returns – and, speaking of returns, I can’t wait to go there again.
El Lúpulo Feroz is on the outskirts of the city, out past Calle Gascona and the El Vasco mall, in the only bit of Oviedo I visited that felt decidedly residential. I wanted to try it as the third in my trilogy of craft beer places and I found that, aesthetically at least, it had much in common with l’Artesana. Their back room was a very attractive spot – blood red walls, beer memorabilia everywhere, from Belgium, Czechia and even dear old Blighty. It was oddly pleasing to see an illuminated Bass sign on the wall, the beer free from its usual connotations of little Englander pubman gammonistas.
Speaking of beer, the venue had a tap takeover by Danish brewery Amager Bryghus the night I visited, and I liked what I had. Oviedo has no verified Untappd venues for beer – not that kind of city, not yet – but I later discovered, once I’d got home, all the places I hadn’t made it to: Bär Berlin, Vivalabirra and the courageously named Cerveceria Lord Vader (let’s hope Disney never find out about that one). Plenty kept in reserve for, hopefully one day, an updated version of this guide.
I suspect that the coffee scene in Oviedo isn’t quite as advanced as in other Spanish cities I’ve visited. The Best Coffee app, a regular staple for me on my travels in the U.K. and overseas, drew a complete blank on the city, and even further research only threw up a handful of places. One, Pionero, was in the northwest of the city, the other side of the Campo de San Francisco from the old town and so very close to my hotel, which meant a couple of very happy contemplative coffees there in the mornings before heading off to explore.
It was a very nice spot with extremely friendly, helpful staff and although the inside was quite serviceable they had a couple of tables outside with a view out onto the street, and thus people-watching, so I tended to plonk myself there. No sunshine, really, so al fresco potential was strictly limited but all the same I found it a brilliant spot to start the day. Coffee was decent – definitely a step above the generic cafe con leche – if not top tier, but Pionero also roasts and sells beans to take home. I’m very looking forward to that first V60 with them.
La Gente is on Calle Martinez Vigil, the steep street by the monastery that is also home to Cerveceria Cimmeria. For both those reasons, it probably became my favourite street in the whole of Oviedo over the course of the week. La Gente has a lovely little terrace, overcoming the gradient of quite a challenging hill, and was far and away my favourite spot to sit, drink coffee and take in the surroundings.
I think I liked La Gente’s coffee slightly more than Pionero’s, possibly influenced slightly by the fact that their lattes are tall and generous, so more my personal thing than a cortado or a flat white. I found out from the owners of Cimmeria that La Gente had only opened at the start of the year, and what impressed me was just how part of the community it already felt, full of brunchers, chatters and even dog walkers (owners Kate and Andrew own a miniature schnauzer, Lando, who features in much of their branding).
They are brunch specialists, which means that if you go there around lunchtime you’ll struggle to get a seat and, if you’re not eating, you might well feel guilty about depriving them of a table with a higher spend. But the rest of the time it was just a brilliant space to sip latte and make a plan of attack for the day’s wandering, sightseeing and eating. The interior was absolutely lovely too, although it was a tad too warm to spend time in there.
I also liked the sense that as a business it was still evolving. On one visit I heard one of the owners and a member of staff discussing the menu for the season ahead, and I got the impression from the blurb and postings on social media that La Gente either offered, or was looking to offer, natural wine on selected evenings. Other than that, it’s worth pointing out that, like Pionero, La Gente closes pretty early during the week – so if. you do want an afternoon flat white make sure you get there before the shutters go down at 4pm.
One thing you can rely on from a city guide of mine is that if I go somewhere in summer, I’ll find somewhere for you to eat ice cream. To be honest, even in the less clement months I can usually snaffle one but on a sunny day in Oviedo my thoughts turned to tracking down a tarrina – that is to say a tub – of something cold and captivating.
Enter Diego Verdù, an Oviedo institution which has been trading for nearly 150 years; as we’ll see in the remainder of this list, the people who make sweet treats in the city have had a very long time to become excellent at it. Diego Verdù started out making turron, but by the 1930s it had also decided to turn its hand to ice cream. And thank goodness it did, because both of its branches – the very pretty almost-original premises on Calle de Cimadevilla and the second more modern one just down from the Woody Allen statue – sorted me right out on this trip.
All the flavours that I tried were magnificent although, as befits their vintage, most of them kept it fairly establishment. I loved their chocolate, and their pistachio, but the most leftfield I tried on this visit was chocolate with pimento which I thought downright bloody great. For all I know they may occasionally experiment with yuzu, cinnamon or even cabrales – just imagine – but I didn’t see any of that on my travels.
Sitting on a bench – both branches are takeaway only – and attacking a massive tub filled with two generous scoops for less than four quid, I was quite unbothered by that. Oviedo just isn’t the kind of city for off the wall stuff, and is none the poorer for it. Unlike with coffee, Oviedo is positively enlightened when it comes to helado, and both shops are open until 8.30pm. There’s also a little kiosk on the edge of the Campo de San Francisco, which boasts many benches perfect for sitting, eating and sighing.
Diego Verdù is not the only Oviedo institution that’s been brilliant for longer than any of us have been on the planet. Confiteria Camilo de Blas has been in the city since 1914, although they were trading in Leon for another forty years or so before that. The thing they are most famous for, and possibly the emblematic goodie most associated with Oviedo, is the carbayon.
Now, carbayon originally referred to a huge oak tree, beloved by and symbolic of the city, to the point that natives of Oviedo called themselves carbayones. It was felled in 1879 to make way for Calle Uria, the ‘modern’ street connecting the old town to the train station which is now home to department store El Corte Ingles. That’s progress for you. That tree, I suppose was the Metal Box Building of Oviedo (one for my Reading readers there) but in 1924, the mayor of Oviedo commissioned the confiteria to create a sweet treat and this new incarnation of the carbayon, an incredible sweet pastry named after the tree, was born. That is also progress for you.
And what a treat it is. A lozenge of puff pastry filled with almond cream and then topped with a glossy layer of an exceptionally sweet coating which, depending on who you Google, either involves egg yolk or egg whites or both. Either way it also includes a lot of sugar, and makes for a very satisfying shell. This is one for those of you with a sweet tooth, like me. Zoë and I picked a couple up from their second branch on Calle Jovellanos and inhaled them on a bench in the Plaza de la Constituciòn and they were, to my mind at least, unimprovable.
“It’s like a cross between a yum yum, a frangipane and an éclair” was Zoë’s verdict, and I made a mental note of her saying that because she summed it up better than I could. All that for about £2.80 each, so cheaper than a Picnic brownie and even more indulgent. My boss likes to quote Philip Pullman, repeating the definition of an éclair as a cake that is “long in shape but short in duration”: I brought him back a carbayon and he loved it, although he was even more delighted that it was far less short in duration.
The third of Oviedo’s amazing venerable confectioners is Confiteria Rialto, which celebrates its hundredth birthday next year. It also has two branches in the city centre and it also sells carbayones. But the thing it’s synonymous with is Moscovitas, thin almond biscuits half coated in chocolate, to the extent that even its domain name references Moscovitas, not Rialto.
When I put some pictures on Facebook regular reader Rodrigo – the chap who told me I’d eaten at Oviedo’s best restaurant on my first night – asked if I’d tried Rialto’s Moscovitas, and fortunately I was able to post a photo of me holding one of Rialto’s distinctive red and gold bags, containing two luxurious-looking boxes of the things. But actually, I didn’t try them until I got home, when I was glum about being back in Reading and wanted a taste of elsewhere.
And once I did, I was crestfallen that I’d limited myself to just the two boxes, because they were extraordinary. Every single one irregular, every single one made by hand, each one thin and light, with just enough crunch and just enough substance, each one making you want another. Imagine the most rarefied chocolate Hob Nobs you could imagine, square it and you still wouldn’t be close. Rodrigo also told me that he has a recipe for Moscovitas which approximates to the Rialto classic, and I churlishly pooh-poohed him. Now I’ve tried them, I may have to ask him nicely.
One last tip, which is both about Rialto and Oviedo more generally, is this: Asturias Airport does a better job than nearly any airport I’ve been to of celebrating the region it serves. So you can buy – and not at exorbitant prices either – some of the city’s greatest hits, whether that’s more carbayones from Camilo de Blas, beautiful ice cider, compangas and chorizo from Calle Gascona stalwarts Tierra Astur or, last but not least, more of those Moscovitas. So if you don’t get to Rialto, you can still pick some up for your journey home. If you do, can I trouble you to get an extra box for me?
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Zoë and I were in town the Monday before our holiday, we’d finished all our errands and there was time to fit in lunch somewhere before taking the bus home to face the mountain of ironing and packing. Zoë wanted to go to Shed, which I could completely understand, and then it occurred to me – we could try out Notes, the first of the raft of hospitality businesses we’ve been promised on Station Hill, and I could get a review of it under my belt.
For childfree people like me, the tail end of August is possibly when you most keenly feel the disconnect between you and the rest of the world. At work everyone’s back from their holidays, preparing for the beginning of the academic year, already mourning their week or fortnight on a sunbed, by a pool or in a villa. My Instagram has been full of holidaymakers squeezing the last few drops out of the month. They have got excited, packed and prepared, touched down, drunk cold beers or glasses of rosé, topped up their tans, raced through some novels. And now they’re all coming back, like migrating birds, refreshed but, most likely, a little sad.
I’ve watched everybody embark and return, seen the Instagram posts and stories, and told myself each time that my time will eventually come. And it will, soon, but not quite yet: by the time you read this I will be hours away from setting my out of office and closing the laptop, but as I write this I’m running on fumes. The rhetoric at work will all be about how everybody is full of beans and ready to go, to close out the year: I am depleted, and ready to go to the airport. Our timelines won’t synchronise until I return, when we all prepare to put the clocks back, put the central heating back on, contemplate the end of the year.
Anyway, the last day of August found me with a day on my tod, feeling a little melancholy and looking for some feeling of escape. So I decided to make my way to Mon Chéri, the Greek café on West Street, to see some Hellenic sunshine might illuminate my mood. It opened at the end of last year, I think, and has been on my list ever since, but it’s taken a little while to reach the top of it.
And when I say Mon Chéri is open, I mean that it’s very open indeed: if Google is to be believed, they start trading at 6am every day, not closing until 8 in the evening. When I commute to work, my bus trundles down West Street around half-seven. Mon Chéri is always open by then, awning out, with some customers in already. Is any hospitality business in Reading open quite that long, with the exception of Gregg’s and Wetherspoons?
So. yes, I partly picked Mon Chéri this week because I’m so very ready for a holiday and, for me, Greece is the place I most powerfully associate with holidays, even now. The first time I ever left this country I was thirteen years old and my parents, heady with the rush of having remortgaged our suburban semi-detached, took us to Corfu to share a villa with some friends. I had never been on a plane, never known sunshine like it, was fascinated by the way Greek lemonade tasted different, couldn’t get enough of the music of the cicadas – when I could tear myself away from a book or my chess set, that is.
Early on in our stay we found a taverna, run by a chap called Tassos, and it was love at first sight. The food took forever to arrive, but nobody cared because we were sitting outside, on those balmy evenings, and my parents had access to a steady supply of Retsina. Tassos had an ancient stereo that played Greek music, but it was on the blink so it was always randomly speeding up or slowing down, some kind of weird bouzouki remix. The overall effect was of an establishment inches from collapse.
Sometimes customers at a neighbouring table would be so angry about the interminable wait that a blazing row would ensue. My parents’ friends Carol and Frank wanted the earth to open up and swallow them; my dad found it hilarious. We went every night, and by the end we were such regulars that after other customers complained, as they often did, Tassos would come to our table and say something to the effect of What was their problem?
As a trip, it had a lasting effect on me. It was the only time I remember my family going out for dinner more than once a year, and I think it made me fall in love with food and restaurants. Specifically, it made me love Greek food. My dad was keen that we enjoy ourselves but not go financially mad, so we were limited to the least expensive things on the menu, the souvlaki, the sofrito – veal in garlic – and the stifado. And I became addicted to the last of those, the rich stew of beef braised to surrender with tomatoes and soft, whole shallots. I can’t remember if it was Tassos’ wife or mother in the kitchen – or even his grandma – but whoever it was, the chef was a genius.
Since then I’ve been to Greece many times. I’ve done Rhodes, which I liked even more than Corfu, although I’ve only once managed to stay in Lindos, the bit of it I adored the most, once. I went to Kefalonia just after the Captain Corelli film, and had dinner with a pre-fame Simon Pegg, sporting a Beckhamesque mohawk, at the next table. I’ve stayed in Mykonos, which I loved despite a nagging feeling that I didn’t see the best of it. I’ve holidayed in beautiful, scruffy Athens, walking among the city’s ruins just before my first marriage went the same way.
And then there’s my very favourite part of Greece – Parga, just around the coast from Preveza airport, a beautiful harbour town full of winding lanes where you can completely forget about the world, sit in one of the many tavernas, eat fresh fish and drink sweet rosé and, for a little while at least, become a twenty-first century lotus eater. One one holiday there I took a boat trip to Corfu Town, strolled the Napoleonic esplanade of the Liston, felt the whole thing coming full circle.
All that said, I’ve not been to Greece in nearly a decade. At first it was Covid’s fault – my trip to Lindos, booked in hopeful ignorance at the start of 2020, was shifted back again and again until we accepted, reluctantly, that it just wouldn’t happen. But the world has gone back to normal since then, something has stopped me returning and I’m not sure what it is.
Analysis paralysis, possibly: I am never able to pick the island, pick the resort, pick the accommodation. I see everyone else going there and I envy their certitude but that magic combination of the right airport, the right flights, the right place to stay has never jumped out at me. I’ve contemplated Chania, or Agios Nikolaos, or going back to Parga, but I’ve always chickened out and booked a city break instead. For many years I wanted to go to Hydra – because Leonard Cohen – and someone I knew on Instagram who went every year even sent me her guide, but the sheer faff of getting there just put me off. You’d need to be there two weeks for that journey to be worth it, and I never take two weeks off.
So the closest I would get, this year at least, was Mon Chéri. It’s always saddened me that Greek food has never really gained a foothold, either in this country or in Reading: we had Kyrenia, which I revered, but since then it’s been Spitiko, which I ought to visit. We had The Real Greek, which left the Oracle before it could be pushed, and we still have Tasty Greek Souvlaki which is indeed tasty, and Greek(ish), but not the full taverna experience.
But Greece is better represented by cafés, with our branches of Coffee Under Pressure and now with Mon Chéri. And I truly love Greek cafés and bakeries – in Parga, most mornings began with breakfast at a place called the Green Bakery, on a sun-dappled terrace with coffee, pastry and a paradisiac, indolent day ahead. When I came in off the drizzle-spattered pavement of West Street, I guess that’s what I was hoping to recapture.
The interior had nothing of the Ionian Sea about it, which wasn’t to say that I disliked it. The plush dusky pink chairs and marble-effect tables were actually quite tasteful, although on a clement day – which this wasn’t – you’d want to be out on the terrace, under the awning, taking it all in. But actually, from the next set of tables back, looking out, you had much the same experience.
So I could see the tables under the shelter of the awning, all smoking and chatting and drinking their freddoes, and beyond that all the comings and goings of West Street, a richer pageant than I’d expected. Did it matter that the horizon had Mleczko Delikatesy on it rather than some cerulean vanishing point where the sea met the sky? It should have done, but I found I didn’t mind. The music was both Greek and relentless, and I rather loved the overall effect.
I asked at the counter if there was a menu and my server pointed to the coffee menu on the wall. Otherwise, it was a case of looking in the cabinets, under the fluorescent lights, and deciding what you fancied. Most of the space was taken up with sweet stuff – some very Greek, like big triangles of baklava sitting in a sticky puddle of honey, or kataifi with its golden combover. Others were more generic – red velvet cake, croissants, individual portions of millefeuille or tiramisu. If you had a sweet tooth, you would feel spoiled for choice.
When I asked about savoury options, she told me it was “Greek breakfast” and pointed to the smaller cabinet in front of her. That was mostly the kind of pastries I used to so love at the Green Bakery all those years ago – cheese pies, sausage pies and the like. I was tempted by a peinirli – a boat-shaped pizza a little like a Turkish pide, or a Georgian acharuli khachapuri – but in the end I decided the right thing to try was the classic, the spanakopita, the spinach and feta filo pie I must have eaten dozens of times on holiday. I asked for a latte with it and prepared for some top notch people watching.
I found it strange that the spanakopita came in a paper bag, with no plate, but I reasoned that it was after all finger food and I didn’t want to be like David Cameron, eating his hot dog with a knife and fork. But actually once I started tucking into it, it made even less sense. The filo pastry is meant to be light stuff – a quick Google found flowery phrases like “shatteringly crisp” and “perfectly flaky”. What it shouldn’t be, which this was, is tough. It’s supposed to release its contents joyously, but this pastry felt like it was trying to protect them. When somewhere describes itself as a café and bakery, that’s not ideal.
I soldiered on with it, but even as you moved past that overly chewy perimeter it didn’t reward perseverance. The filling – and filling suggests more generous contents than were actually the case – was thin, bland stuff. I so wanted to like this, and a good example of this Greek classic would be a very welcome discovery in town, but it was beyond me. So was finishing it. I could feel the slight coating of grease on my fingers and I became very aware of empty calories. I’m almost reluctant to say this, because I don’t want to cause a diplomatic incident, but C.U.P.’s spanakopita is miles better.
Mon Chéri’s coffee can’t match C.U.P.’s either, but on this occasion you aren’t comparing like with like. Mon Chéri has no interest in doing third wave stuff, so instead it offers a more classic option bought in from Hausbrandt, a company I’d never heard of. Would it surprise you to hear that I quite liked it, though? It had that slightly rugged, almost-burnt taste of less fancy coffee, but was perfectly drinkable and I could imagine it giving just the jolt you needed first thing in the morning. It reminded me of the coffee at De Nata, which is not a criticism.
By then I was nicely settled and enjoying myself more than I thought I might, despite that pastry failing to live up completely to either my expectations or my memories. But perhaps that wasn’t important: I had a lovely comfy seat, Europop was wafting through the room and life’s tapestry was parading past. I decided it wouldn’t be right to judge Mon Chéri on a pastry and a coffee alone, so I went up again to get something sweet and – because I was thoroughly getting into the swing of things – a freddo. I remembered sitting out on a square in Athens once, loving how much everyone just sat and chatted and drank coffee seemingly all afternoon long. Maybe the freddo was the way to pull that look off in Reading.
I decided to go for the mosaiko, a chocolate and biscuit confection which reminded me a little bit of tiffin and my server – a different chap this time, friendly and authoritative – told me which kind of freddo I wanted, espresso rather than cappuccino. He was excellent, as was his colleague from earlier on, which made me love the place even more and widen the gulf between how much I liked being there and what I made of the food.
It turns out that mosaiko is effectively a Greek take on chocolate salami, a no-bake slab of dark chocolate and biscuit. You might say that only an idiot goes to a place that describes itself as a café and bakery and orders that, and in my defence I would say that yes, I probably am an idiot but, to be fair, the spanakopita had been baked and that was no great shakes.
Anyway, the mosaiko was everything I should like, on paper. All either chocolate or biscuit and, in theory, more chocolate than biscuit, like those enormous chocolate-coated Bourbons M&S sells that are like Penguins on steroids. But again, the theory and the practice weren’t on the same page. This time you had to use a knife and fork, teasing through the fault lines of the biscuits to find a place to cut, producing a solid wodge to eat without sending the rest careening across the room.
And once you’d done all that, it just felt resolutely unspecial. The biscuit was soft rather than crisp and buttery, as if it had gone a little stale before meeting its fate. And the chocolate was very basic and flat, oddly chewy with no richness at all. The whole thing made for a strangely homogeneous slab of what should have been indulgent but was nothingy instead. I think this cost just shy of a fiver. Those M&S chocolate coated Bourbons are something like three quid.
Again, the irony was that I really enjoyed the freddo. It would put hairs on your chest and was best sipped slowly, but it was a lot of fun and it had been sweetened, as I’d asked, really nicely.
I felt like the most indecisive traitor of all time as I thanked my server, got my bill and settled up. Two coffees, a pastry and that mosaiko cost me £14.20, and whatever you think of the quality you do have to also bear in mind how easy it would be to rack up a bill that size at Picnic, or Gail’s, or any of Reading’s many other more chichi cafés. Was I airbrushing the bad bits of my time at Mon Chéri because I wanted to like them and, even more, because I really wanted to be on holiday in Greece? Or did it have something going for it that the wonky food couldn’t completely outweigh?
I’m still not sure, but I hope this is a salutary counterpoint to the rare times when I go somewhere like Vino Vita and put the boot in. I don’t enjoy going to bad places, writing bad reviews or leaving bad ratings. I especially don’t enjoy it when it’s somewhere that I really wanted to like, that has created a lovely little spot in one of Reading’s less salubrious places which plenty of people clearly love. It feels churlish to say yes, but the cakes and pastries, and I wish I wasn’t doing it, but if I gave it a rave review I’d be leading at least some of you to dietary disappointment.
But if I just say but the cakes and pastries that misses the fact that Mon Chéri has real charm, that I liked it there, and that maybe I could forego eating there just to have a coffee, and enjoy that view, and feel like part of something. Perhaps I need to go back and try some of the other stuff, even if it looks very generic indeed, to give it more of a chance. Sometimes writing reviews is very easy and sometimes, somewhere like this comes along and I wish I hadn’t made the decision, many years ago, to be reductive about restaurants and cafés to one decimal place.
So there you go, that’s Mon Chéri: pick the bones out of that one. I don’t know, maybe I just need a holiday. Where in Greece should I go next year? You strike me as the kind of people who might have some excellent suggestions.
Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.
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