The thing that struck me last week when I walked into Eatnua Thai Street Food (I’ll call it Nua from now on, if you don’t mind), the restaurant that opened last summer in the spot previously occupied by Bluegrass BBQ, was just how little they’d done with the place. Granted there was art up here and there, but otherwise it looked exactly as it had at the beginning of January 2025, just before the Bluegrass chain went into liquidation.

It had the same layout and the same grey walls. A neon sign saying Thai Street Food had been put in the place of the one that used to say No Shigging (it’s an American barbecue thing, apparently). The same furniture, too: the tables and chairs in the front room and out back on the terrace seemed identical, as far as I could remember. Even the banquetted booths were the same, which I noticed when I took a seat opposite my friend Liz. The pleather on my side was cracked and torn, revealing the tired foam underneath. Had Nua picked this place up in a fire sale or something?

As first impressions went it was an odd one. Six months or so had elapsed between Bluegrass going belly up and Nua taking over the site, so I was surprised they’d done next to nothing to put their stamp on it. Maybe the rent was too attractive to pass up, or money was tight and they wanted somewhere they could just walk into and start trading. But the restaurant has operating on Gun Street for over a year now, so I was surprised that it still had the feel of a kitchen that had popped up in somebody else’s restaurant rather than a fully-formed establishment in its own right.

Anyway, none of that might matter if everything else was on the money. Nua opened on the same day last year as Pho 86 and Lincoln Coffee, but is a different animal to both. Lincoln was an additional branch of an existing Reading business, Pho 86 a brand new independent restaurant. Nua on the other hand, although independent, is the fifth link in a small chain with other restaurants in London, High Wycombe, Kingston and Watford.

Its website describes it as “award winning” and it turns out they have won some awards, although how much that means to you will depend on whether you consider LUXlife Magazine, who crowned it ‘Best Thai Restaurant 2025’, an authority in these matters. Personally I always find these random awards – with so little transparency around how to enter, how they’re decided, whether money changes hands – a tad shady. It doesn’t help that nominations for those awards are handled by a company called AI Global Media, who potentially might want to reconsider their slogan Content You Can Trust.