This might be hard to believe, but a couple of years ago I nearly ended up moving to Pangbourne.

Well, sort of. Zoë and I were quite happy in our little house in the Village, and then one day I got a call from our lettings agent. Those calls were never welcome events: they usually involved our landlord wanting to hike the rent, knowing that if we pointed out that there was a clause in our tenancy agreement we’d suddenly find her serving notice under it. But this time it was a courtesy call to let us know that our landlord was selling up. No specifics were given, but at some point in the not too distant future we would suddenly have two months to find somewhere new to live. 

We started looking immediately. And one of the places we looked at online, and asked to view in the flesh, was an attractive-looking flat in a converted property in Pangbourne, close to the station. That we considered Pangbourne at all probably tells you more about the state of the rental market in Reading than it does about the flat in question. Even so, in the time between putting in the enquiry and being told, naturally, that it had already gone I started to convince myself that living in Pangbourne might be rather nice.

I decided that an eight minute train into Reading was really no different to a bus ride to the centre of town. Besides, it might be fun to live away from the hubbub. Pangbourne was pretty and prosperous, it had a lovely butcher and a cheese shop. And I could still write the blog, couldn’t I? It would just mean evening trips into town, or eating at restaurants on my way home from the office. I could make it work, I told myself.

In the end, that was a parallel life I never got to live, and I wound up in my house in Katesgrove after all. But I couldn’t help wondering, as Zoe and I mooched round Pangbourne on a sunny Saturday, if I would have been happy there. The butcher, Green’s, is fantastic, with its old-school kiosk where you still pay for your bounty: their pork, apricot and chilli sausage roll made me very happy that evening, and their steak and Stilton pie knocks the spots off anything Sweeney’s can rustle up. And the cheese shop is marvellous – I left with a Comte, a triple cream, a very salty blue and a smoked goat’s cheese, along with all manner of crackers and biscuits.

Nino’s Italian Deli is a great spot to sit in the sunshine and watch the world meander past, and the cornucopia of goodies on the shelves was tempting, as were the hefty focaccia sandwiches. But the coffee, a tad bitter and burnt, couldn’t match Reading standards. Nor could it at Artichoke, a café slightly further out of the village. That said, it had friendly staff, a pleasant decked front terrace – albeit one with a view of a Londis – and an almost Mediterranean feel. I put a picture on Instagram, with the caption Costa del Pangbourne.

I hadn’t ventured to RG8, though, for some Sliding Doors-themed day trip to another part of my personal multiverse: I was in Pangbourne to check out No. 11 Bistro. It opened its doors to the public at the start of June, and if the blurb I’d read came straight out of central casting – it’s never poor quality produce from miles away knocked up with supreme indifference, is it? – it still sounded worthy of investigation.

It was, after all, an independent bistro from a restaurateur who had worked at London Street Brasserie and Marlow’s Hand & Flowers. Not bad going for a chap who first featured in Berkshire Live of all places back in 2014, plating up at The Kitchen in Reading College as a 16 year old head chef. I could only imagine how proud he must feel, opening his own place now.

A prospect like No. 11 would have sparked considerable interest had it opened in Reading: heaven knows people, including me, like to complain that the town centre lacks this kind of restaurant. However, as we’ve learned over the last few years, Reading doesn’t attract good independents often enough, so a trip to Pangbourne was in order. Time to seek out what Muddy Stilettos termed “a fun new dining experience” – or, as human beings tend to put it, a good meal.

No. 11 has taken the site which was occupied by Italian institution Nino’s Trattoria for 13 years, and the restaurant’s first Instagram post was nicely worded: Meston clearly recognised that Pangbourne residents would probably say he had big shoes to fill.

I never ate at Nino’s, but Meston has wisely left the attractive dining room largely as it was in its previous incarnation, simply changing the wood panelling from sage to oxblood. Otherwise it is as it was: handsome, well lit through the big windows. I was very happy to learn that they had aircon, and delighted that it was so effective: a few groups were out on the terrace, but even on the Costa del Pangbourne it was far too warm for such antics.

We had a genuinely magnificent negroni – Meston’s brother James is apparently in charge behind the bar, and on the basis of the negroni I would definitely check out the six signature cocktails on the drinks menu. It passed enjoyably as we scoured a menu which seemed determined not to make matters easy.

Provenance wasn’t really talked about, with the exception of bread from Birch, the bakery just up the road. But on paper it was the kind of streamlined menu I always like to see: seven starters, seven mains, most starters just over £10 and most mains under the £30 glass ceiling. That might make you wince, but that’s just eating out now and I imagine Pangbourne is no different in that respect to anywhere else, except that its residents are more likely to be able to afford it.

The contents of the menu might also have been tailored to the demographic: nearly all of it stayed firmly in classic territory, the pineapple and capsicum salsa with the scallops sticking out like a sore condiment. It felt a little – this isn’t necessarily a criticism – like LSB twenty years ago, and I was surprised, a little, by how many of the dishes identified as ‘seared’.

We struggled to choose starters, so decided to share three. And if each was effective individually, they somehow added up to less than the sum of their parts. Sticky pork belly bites are a dish with my and Zoë’s names on it in figurative Sharpie, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in recent reviews. No. 11’s treatment was very different to others I’ve had, and I liked it, while not being entirely convinced that others would.

Rather than have cubes of well rendered meat these were thick strips, almost like reimagined Bacon Fries, and had been cooked to be more crispy than tender. I like my smoked streaky cooked so it snaps rather than bends, so these were right up my alley, but I might be in the minority there. I really enjoyed them, though, and I loved the honey and soy – more honey than soy, really – with which they glistened. A creditable sort of Asian slaw completed the dish without feeling too much like padding.

I was also a big fan of No. 11’s salt and pepper squid. This dish is straight out of the Paul Clerehugh Book Of Classics, so I’m sure Meston learned it at London Street Brasserie. It was almost more snack than starter, in a good way: lots and lots of very narrow rings of squid, in a coating which for my money lacked that salt and pepper flavour but made up for it in texture.

I think I would have liked this even more with a squeeze of lemon and a dollop of golden aioli: it almost felt Andalusian, but serving it with sweet chilli sauce and more Asian slaw felt like a bit of a misstep. I was getting the feeling that the starter menu might mostly be fried stuff with salad.

And this is what I mean about the starters being collectively less than the sum of their parts. Because the thing I was most looking forward to, the maple glazed chicken thighs, was also fried stuff with salad. Another extremely pleasant variant of it, but fried stuff with salad nonetheless.

The meat had the right texture, whether that came from marination or not, but the coating lacked a little crispiness, ironically not a problem either the pork or the squid had. Plonking it on a carpet of little gem was far from objectionable, and the harissa mayonnaise had a nice heat to it, but these three dishes felt to me how I suspect some of my reviews must feel to you from time to time – paragraph after paragraph, all saying much the same thing.

Could we have ordered better? Possibly. But burrata and bruschetta both felt a bit bla, and I wasn’t in the mood for a chicken liver parfait. More to the point, three between two was about right in terms of size: I was glad I got to try a bit of all of them. If I’d been out with a bigger group, eating just the one starter on my own, I think I might have felt more underwhelmed. But then I do seem to be one of the only people in Reading who isn’t on Ozempic or Mounjaro: maybe No. 11 has judged its demographic wisely, and I just happen not to be in it.

It really was, however, a lovely place in which to spend a lazy Saturday lunchtime. The restaurant was sparsely occupied when we got there, but it gradually filled up and it was clear that at least some of those diners, already, were repeat customers. I could see why, because the service was really excellent – friendly, on it and very good at judging just how formal to be, or not be.

And the bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc we’d ordered was slipping down with genuine alacrity. No. 11’s wine list is good and pleasingly concise, with over half the wines available by the glass. Again, the restaurant played it safe. There was nothing orange, natural or from more esoteric countries on it, but I imagine it would be relatively hard to go wrong – unless you ordered an Italian pinot grigio, anyway.

It was all going so nicely, so I’m really sorry that the restaurant wobbled when it came to the mains. I’d been tempted by the herb crusted halibut, but my server told me they’d made some changes to it, doing away with the brown shrimp butter I’d so fancied. It speaks well of the kitchen that they’d identified a dish that wasn’t working and corrected course. But somewhere along the way that instinct had deserted them with my eventual choice, chicken supreme with a mushroom velouté.

First of all, with a dish like this you really need to get the skin crispy, and ideally crackling with salt. That hadn’t happened here, and although the chicken itself was judiciously cooked it did feel like the pièce de résistance was missing. The crushed potatoes it was perched on were quite nice, too, but at this point I bumped into the second, bigger problem with the dish.

Because it wasn’t a mushroom velouté by any stretch of the imagination. It was a white sauce with some mushrooms in it – perfectly decent mushrooms, including some oyster, but not ones that really lent flavour to the sauce itself. And the sauce still tasted very strongly of flour, which means that it hadn’t been cooked off. Such a basic, avoidable error.

I was sad to find this dish so middling, because everything up to this point had signalled real potential: potential that might be in need of refinement, but potential all the same. This, though, felt like the kind of mistake that would get drummed out of you at Reading College.

That dish cost £26.50, and didn’t feel its money. But Zoë’s main, the venison pavé, was pricier still at £31, which meant there was even less excuse for it to be subpar. The support acts did a good job: No. 11 makes a mean (if scrappy-looking) potato dauphinoise, their jus was decent, the Roscoff onion was a nice touch. The problem was the star of the show – here you are paying for the venison, and to cook it to beige rather than blushing felt dangerously close to being knocked up with supreme indifference after all.

Strangely the dish of seasonal greens we’d ordered on the side was spot on: consistency and timing were the problems across the piece. The restaurant could get parts of the whole right, but nailing it all at the same time seemed to be beyond them.

It was instructive to review this restaurant the week after I’d gone to Angelo’s: in both cases the restaurant was new, filled a gap in the market and had the potential to excite. In both cases dishes were priced to a level where the restaurant really couldn’t afford to make a hash of them. In Angelo’s case the highwire act had worked, but No. 11 hadn’t quite pulled it off. Restaurant dishes are more expensive than they used to be and the £20 Rubicon for main courses was crossed a long time ago. That ship has sailed, but you can’t simply charge £31 for a dish and execute it like that without losing some of your target market.

With everything up to that point comparatively scattergun, the choice to order dessert wasn’t so much about being the decider, more about gathering further evidence. Again, No. 11’s menu is compact and on the safe side: an Eton mess; a cheesecake; a brownie; a sticky toffee pudding; a cheeseboard. So I thought we were in pedestrian territory, and then No. 11 lobbed in a killer curveball by serving up one of my desserts of the year so far.

I had been dead set to try the cheesecake, which Zoë didn’t fancy (“white chocolate’s not real chocolate, it’s just sugar” was her take) but then I saw a sticky toffee pudding being carried to one of the outside tables and, despite not being my usual order by a long shot, something about it called to me. Was it that connection to London Street Brasserie again, knowing that it was always the reliable thing to order there? I’m not sure, but No. 11’s rendition is one of the best sticky toffee puddings I’ve ever eaten, anywhere.

The pudding was the perfect temperature, warm not hot, with just enough moistness, crumbliness and squidge. The exceptionally generous moat of toffee sauce – rich with burnt sugar notes, so glossy you could see your face in it – was simply impossible to fault. And the huge sphere of clotted cream on top? Utter, decadent heaven: “would you rather have it with ice cream?” my server had asked, and I had said no with a note of incredulity I forgot to conceal. Who wouldn’t want a massive globe of clotted cream on top of a dessert like this? Heathens and vegans, that’s who. Nobody else.

Honestly, forget the cheese shop and the bakery, don’t worry about the butcher’s pies and pasties, banish all thoughts of the slightly average coffee from your mind. This justified a trip to Pangbourne, all by its sweet self.

It couldn’t possibly have been as good, and I know some people think a chocolate brownie is a cake with no place on a dessert menu, but Zoë felt equally strongly about her dessert. It was, apparently, excellent, still warm and pleasingly fudgy inside. It’s not clear whether No. 11 makes its own ice cream or buys it in, but either way it also met with Zoë’s approval, speckled with plenty of vanilla seeds.

I’m sure it was lovely, but if you read this review and pick the brownie over the sticky toffee pudding I think you might be beyond my help. Either that or I haven’t done a good enough job of describing it. I tend to stay away from what I think of as school dinners dessert: anything warm, anything with custard or dried fruits and so on, but my god, that sticky toffee pudding. Did I mention that I rather liked it?

Our bill came to just shy of £200. You could spend less there, but it all adds up, from the £13 negronis to the £40 bottle of white – from the cheaper half of the wine list – to the £9 desserts, which come to think of it were probably the best value of the entire meal. It included a 12.5% service charge, and that was the area where it felt like the restaurant had been open far longer than a month: my server told us they’d make sure the wine list had a dessert wine on it by the time I ate there again, and I have every confidence that they’ll do exactly that.

So No. 11 was a little bit less expensive than Angelo’s, the subject of last week’s review, but I couldn’t help comparing the two again. Because they are both trying to do similar things, to bring something new to the centre of a community, to fill a gap. In Angelo’s case it’s opening an Italian restaurant in a location that badly needs one, conversely in No. 11’s it’s replacing an Italian restaurant which, over many years, became Pangbourne’s favourite place to eat.

They’re both tough assignments in their own way, and if No. 11 was a little uneven I think you have to show some understanding: it’s the owner’s first restaurant, not the sequel to an original that has been flourishing for years. I saw enough to think that they will get there, if they’re blessed with a patient clientele. I hope that Pangbourne supports it and this is all the beginning of a beautiful symbiotic relationship.

I never ended up living in Pangbourne and I probably never will, although it’s a very agreeable place to spend a Saturday lunchtime. But if I had, I suspect I’d have wound up at No. 11 more than once. Never mind: I’ll always have this one pleasant afternoon, when my real life ever so slightly converged with a different one that might have been mine but wasn’t. And I’ll always remember that sticky toffee pudding.

No. 11 Bistro – 7.4
11 Reading Road, Pangbourne, RG8 7LR
0118 9841333

https://www.no11restaurant.co.uk

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