“This is weird,” said my old friend Dave as we gathered our stuff and prepared to leave Coffee Under Pressure, the drizzle persevering outside. “Normally I know where we’re going in advance when you take me to review somewhere, but today I have no idea.”
He’s right: Dave has become one of my most frequent dining companions, but usually when I eat somewhere out of town – in Oxford, Bath, Stroud or his hometown of Swindon. When that happens I give him a shortlist of places I’ve been wanting to visit, and let him have the final say. He’s not joined me on duty in Reading for a couple of years, and the criteria for Reading reviews are different: not so much where I really fancy, although sometimes I do, and more about where I really ought to cover.
On that basis, the subject of this week’s review is long overdue.
YY Supermarket has been a fixture on the Kings Road for several years now, thriving in a site that was the former home of the Warwick Arms and Bali Lounge; I used to drop in frequently to pick up my Lao Gan Ma, back when I lived in the Village. Then a couple of years ago they opened a restaurant in the back of the supermarket and it has done something no restaurant has done at that site for the longest time, namely flourished.
In the roll call of Reading’s cursed sites, that building occupies an exalted position, having seen off a bunch of places – the Biscuit & Barrel, Cardamom, The Aila, King’s Kitchen – none of which lasted long enough for me to review them. By contrast YY Restaurant is going strong, and has steadily built up a reputation as one of Reading’s best Chinese restaurants.
Its dim sum, made fresh rather than bought in and defrosted, has attracted particular praise. The really unusual thing about YY is this: I’ve not seen an awful lot of people talk about it online, but whenever it’s mentioned, it receives nothing but compliments. From normal people I mean, rather than somebody rambling about a ‘hidden gem’ that just so happens to have paid for their dinner.
In the run-up to my visit, as fate would have it, I had a comment on the blog from a reader, Chris. He had lived in Hong Kong for four years, he said, and he thought that YY served some of the best Cantonese food he’d eaten in the UK. “I intend to try a lot more of the menu during future visits (starting this weekend),” he said. It wasn’t a clincher – I’d already planned my visit to YY by then – but it definitely gave me reassurance that lunch was unlikely to be a duffer.
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Right, let’s hear it: did any of you have Didcot in the sweepstake? Thought not, which means that the jackpot rolls over for another week. Same time next Friday?
So yes, a curveball. A review from Didcot today. And I know that the obvious response from many of you will be why Didcot? To which I would answer, Why not? After all, it’s a mere thirteen minutes from Reading on regular fast trains, making it as easily accessible as the likes of Wokingham, and Maidenhead – both of which have featured on this blog more than once – and far easier to get to than Henley or Oxford.
I know that many people have bought tickets to Didcot Parkway without ever alighting to the platform, because it’s nothing if not a sweet spot for split ticketing, but who among us has ever ended our journey there and had a look around? But it would be worth it if Didcot was harbouring a terrific restaurant that justified an expedition, so the real question isn’t Why Didcot? but Is Django’s Smokehouse such a restaurant?
Django’s Smokehouse has a curious origin story. The building was the home of a Chinese restaurant called Chopsticks for over 20 years, and when Chopsticks’ owner tried to hand the business over to her son, 26-year-old Andy Lai, he decided that he wanted to turn it into a smokehouse. The idea had marinated with him throughout lockdown, and in 2022 Django’s Smokehouse opened its doors.
You could say it was a risk, but Lai was convinced he was on to something. Didcot was on the up, he thought – “in five years’ time people won’t recognise Didcot”, he said – and his experience of food festivals made him think that American barbecue was just the thing to fuel the town’s ascent. And he might have had a point, because this summer Django’s won Best International Restaurant at the 2026 Ox In A Box Awards, beating a very accomplished field including Oxford heavyweights Spiced Roots and Antep Kitchen, both of which I’ve reviewed.
Now, those awards are voted for by the public, and I’ve always been a little sceptical of those – I’m thinking of the massive annual data gathering exercise conducted by Prosecco-gargling permagrifters Muddy Stilettos here – but the fact remains that these particular awards receive tens of thousands of votes, and for a relatively unsung spot in Didcot of all places, which hasn’t even been reviewed by the local media, to come out on top points to a devoted fan following. It was enough for me, so on a cold and muggy Tuesday night I hopped on a train to Didcot, my unsplit ticket in my Apple Wallet.
I had no idea what the centre of Didcot would be like, and having now visited I consider myself none the wiser. The stroll from the train station into town felt strangely disconnected from civilisation and then suddenly I found myself walking along the perimeter of the Orchard Centre, Didcot’s answer to the Lexicon or the Westgate. The Christmas illuminations were up but unlit on Orchard Street, the pubs were done up for Halloween: retail and hospitality, I find, are annoyingly good at making you realise the year is drawing to a close.
Everything I passed made for a strange hotchpotch: a massive Cineworld and the swanky arts centre on one side of the road (it closes at 8.30pm), the biggest branch of Boswell’s I’ve ever seen and a very upmarket-looking outpost of Crispy Dosa on the other with, just after it, a colossal Ladbroke’s. It seemed as if all the buildings were on shuffle, and rounding the corner to approach Django’s Smokehouse I had to walk past a sizeable branch of PureGym. That felt like trolling, every bit as much as watching people take their driving lessons on the street where I live.
The welcome inside was warm and immediate, and made me feel less ridiculous about my pre-reserved table for one. It’s a big restaurant, when it needs to be: 150 covers across two floors, with a big dining room out back and another upstairs. The wall of the back room displayed Polaroids of customers who’ve passed and failed the restaurant’s “Danger Wings” challenge: Django’s website has a similar gallery for another of its eating challenges, featuring people who have gamely agreed for the restaurant to capture their attempts to clear their plates – successfully or less so – for posterity.
But on a Tuesday night, that shrunk down to the homely. All the customers there during my visit were in the front room, which was a surprisingly agreeable place to be. I was seated in the window looking in, at a table bigger than I needed, but there was a cosy and likeable feel to it. The cobwebs were up for spooky season, their award was proudly on display and menus advertised a Halloween bottomless brunch and “brisket for Christmas”. I liked it there, although that cosiness dissipated somewhat when a Deliveroo driver came in and the door behind him took ages to close.
That evening my company was a couple of tables for two and another lone diner, also with a reservation. I wonder if she was writing a blog, too. And like I said, service was just pitch perfect from beginning to end: I have a soft spot for anybody who calls me “lovely” and refuses to judge an order which verges on conspicuous consumption. They didn’t win that award for nothing, that’s for sure.
Django’s menu had something for everyone who is not vegetarian or vegan: half a dozen well-chosen starters and then an onslaught of smoked meats – five different kinds, although if you’re in a group you can mix things up with a sharing platter. There were also loaded fries, as seen all over TikTok all the bloody time, and, on the other side of the menu, a small selection of burgers: I’m not sure why you’d have a burger at a smokehouse, but I guess it takes all sorts. Prices were decent, too. Starters mostly came in under a tenner and only two of the main courses – the wagyu beef brisket and the beef short rib – would set you back over £20.
There was also a small specials menu featuring, among the smoked pigs in blankets and truffled macaroni cheese, a queasiness-inducing quadruple smashed burger, which sounds like the kind of thing Shaggy and Scooby eat halfway through not contributing to solving the mystery, high as a kite. There were only a couple of meat-free options, and the server told me that after a run at the weekend the restaurant was out of smoked barbecued jackfruit: I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending I’d have ordered it, otherwise.
No power on earth would have stopped me, though, from kicking off with some frickles. I’ve had frickles in many places, and they often fail by being too big, too sparsely battered, too watery. Django’s were an absolute treat: little tart bombs, ticking away in a light and brittle batter, waiting to detonate. I liked the sweet mustard dip they came with, but to be honest I’d have been happy with them on their own. I’d have been happy with them on their own twice, for that matter.
They were easily their money at £7.50 if you like pickles, and fried food, and I am fortunate enough to love both. Django’s menu is a little amorphous in the sense that a lot of the starters would work as sides and vice versa, but these were probably a genre apart even from that – the ideal beer snack. I wish something like this was available in pubs across Reading, or even just one pub, actually. I’d make it worth their while.
On that note it’s worth saying that Django’s serves wine and some good-looking cocktails but its beers on tap, classic Americana, are Budweiser and a sessionable IPA from Goose Island. Context is everything: if I’d ordered that IPA in a pub I’d have found it thin and middling, but when you need something to zhuzh up a palate being continually coated with glorious fat, over and over again, its lemony effervescence was, by accident or design, a super choice.
The pork belly burnt ends were less successful. Huge hunks of meat, striated like sandstone, they looked like they’d turn out to be a highlight of my month. But sometimes appearances can be deceiving, and I wanted these to be more fun to eat than they were. The meat lacked give, required the punctuation of those thick layers of fat to make a satisfactory whole. But what they really needed was to be glossy with sauce, something to offset and augment, and instead they had a thin drizzle.
Not only that, but a thin drizzle of something subtle, when this is not a cuisine that calls for or rewards subtlety. The menu says that it comes with gochujang aioli, and leaving aside for one moment the fact that gochujang aioli isn’t a thing that needs to exist, what little sauce there was managed not to taste of either. The menu calls these sticky, which is the last thing they were, and it’s a shame. I’d have loved them to just be smothered in gochujang, come to think of it, and authenticity be damned.
I seem to have ordered pork belly bites, or something like it, a few times this year on duty, but never has the gulf between potential and achievement been so difficult to bridge. You can also have the burnt ends as a main – see what I mean about that amorphous menu? – but if you go to Django’s, I’d advise against it.
But I was not unhappy. My seat was comfy, my beer was cold, my people-watching was up to scratch. A couple of regulars came in who had clearly reached the point of befriending the staff, and a little genuine warmth in a restaurant goes a long way. I was on to another half of that IPA, and whoever was in charge of the music was trying to appeal to has-beens like me: Everybody (Backstreet’s Back); Zombie; it was like Gen X FM had taken over the turntable, or I was back in the Bull and Chequers in Woodley as a callow 23-year-old, at the mercy of whoever had stuck a few quid in the jukebox.
The server had done that winning thing where I’d asked her for recommendations and she’d suggested the thing I was tempted to order, the flipside of the phenomenon where you pick something and they say “oh, good choice”. So the slow-smoked 7 hour beef short rib was her idea and mine: the menu even has an asterisk next to that dish, denoting one of the restaurant’s favourite dishes. If I didn’t like it, perhaps it would reflect on all of us.
And it was so huge, and so almost good, and so very huge. I quite liked it, possibly because God loves a trier and it nearly worked. It was a colossal piece of meat and yes, it did sort of slide off the bone. It had a black pepper rub, and a George Hamilton tan, and it didn’t take much for a fork to shred it nicely. I could see why people would love this, because I came close to loving it myself.
But the beef managed not to entirely be to my taste, in a few ways that may have been particular to me. The bits that were dry were a little too dry, not sauced enough, an issue I’d also encountered with the burnt ends. The server nicely brought me some of the restaurant’s own barbecue sauce, and it was very good, but the beef needed it I thought. And then there was the fat, which for me wasn’t rendered enough. It reminded me of the times I’ve eaten an undercooked beef cheek, and there in its core, not melted down, I’ve found a gooey blob of fat like the end product of a messy sneeze.
I know some people love beef fat, almost certainly love it more than I do, and this mightn’t be a deal breaker for many of you, but it slightly deterred me. I know that the comparison might be superficial at best, but I thought of the short rib curry that the Moderation serves, or the short rib dish on the menu at Clay’s, and I wanted this dish to live up to that potential. Not comparing apples with apples, or even beef with beef: different cooking methods, different ethoses, all that jazz, but it didn’t quite hit the spot for me. It wouldn’t put me off trying other things at Django’s, but at £28 I wanted this to be a knockout.
Still, the fries were excellent – especially after my hideous experience last week – and Django’s coleslaw, with plenty of red cabbage and a dressing that tasted more like a vinaigrette, was very enjoyable. I would have liked some pickles on the side to lend acidity but I can eat pickles pretty much any time, so I would say that.
I would have ordered some sides, but I figured I’d asked for quite enough food as it was. Besides, a lot of the sides looked as if they might be bought in: my server confirmed that the popcorn chicken was, and stuff like the mozzarella sticks sounded more Iceland than Kansas City.
The friendly chatter between the servers and their regulars meant it felt like it took a while to get my bill, but I didn’t mind. It was nice, on a cold and inhospitable night, to sip my beer a little longer and postpone the drab walk back to the station: I couldn’t find anywhere in Didcot to have a good pre-train pint anyway, as the Town That Untappd Forgot.
Eventually, during a break in their conversation, I asked if I could settle up. “I was just about to come check on you” my server said, and I honestly believed her. My food and drink – and make no mistake, I left that restaurant full – came to just over £62, including a 12.5% service charge.
While I was sitting there, in no particular hurry, I wondered whether the owner was right that Didcot would be unrecognisable in five years. He only had another year for that prophecy to come true, after all, and I guess when he said that he probably had no idea just how challenging those five years would be for all of us. People who open restaurants are dreamers, but if it wasn’t for their reckless, sometimes poorly-researched dreams, towns and cities across the U.K. would be infinitely poorer.
That was definitely true of Reading, but I reckoned it was true of Didcot too: I mean, I’d now spent about two hours there and I unilaterally decided that qualified me as an expert.
So is Didcot worth going to, just to eat at Django’s Smokehouse? You’ll have your own view on that from what you’ve read but if you want to hear mine, the answer is: kind of. I wanted to like Django’s very much indeed, and parts of it I really did. The menu is admirable and interesting, the service is a shining credit to them.
I wish I could have unconditionally adored the food. I wish I’d been able to say “this took me back to when Blue’s Smokehouse opened in Bracknell”, or “if you miss Bluegrass BBQ this is the place for you” or even “close your eyes and you could almost be in Copenhagen, at Warpigs”. I can’t quite say any of those things, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t charmed in a quieter, less performative manner.
So yes, if you like barbecue, or you’re in the area, or you have a split ticket and feel like living dangerously, Django’s is ten minutes and a world away from the station. Is it the best restaurant in Didcot? I’m not sure about that. I have always revered Zigana Turkish Kitchen, slightly further out, a spot where you smell the charcoal a block before you reach the front door, where the Efe is cold and eating the lamb chops for the first time verges on an epiphany. And yet, for some reason, I’ve never reviewed it. So that’s settled, then: next time I’m in Didcot I will go there. Maybe you’ll win the sweepstake, that week.
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I took a slightly roundabout route to deciding where to review this week. It was always going to be somewhere in Oxford, but the initial plan was to visit the Old Bookbinders, a gorgeous backstreet pub in Jericho that has served up affordable French food for fifteen years, with my old friend Dave. But then at the beginning of the week I got the dreaded WhatsApp from him: struck down with a bug, only just back at work, he’d be in no fit state for eating or boozing at the weekend.
I briefly contemplated going there solo, but then I recalibrated: I could try out Permit Room, the Dishoom offshoot in the centre of Oxford, instead. Unlike most people I’ve met, I’ve never eaten in a Dishoom: I save no reservations dining for holidays. But everything I read suggested that, although Dishoom might not be what it once was, Permit Room was another kettle of fish entirely.
There were only five branches, and Oxford was graced with one: the kind of chain that Reading would so dearly love to attract but never does. I was sold. I made a reservation for lunch, did my research, pored over the menu. But I didn’t wind up eating at Permit Room.
So what happened? Well, my manager happened. I was in the office last Friday and on a break between poring over spreadsheets and crafting impeccably disappointed emails we got to chatting, as we often do, about Oxford, a place where I suspect we both frequently daydream about living. That usually involves shooting the breeze about where to get good coffee, or eat good food and he happened to mention The Punter to me. Had I heard about the changes there, he asked?
The Punter has an interesting history. There’s been a pub there for 150 years, but it reopened under that name a mere 15 years ago. Then, in the height of the pandemic, it decided to remake itself as an exclusively vegan and vegetarian gastropub. The following year it appointed chef Anthony Skeats, who previously cooked at a Michelin-starred pub in Oxfordshire, and plaudits followed. It made the Good Food Guide and even featured in the Sunday Times when it was reviewed by Charlotte Ivers, the paper’s then restaurant critic.
Ivers was very much the Liz Truss of broadsheet restaurant criticism – a massive Tory who didn’t do the job for long and whose reign now feels like an aberration. And her review of The Punter was a little on the lukewarm side, but it was still a rare appearance by an Oxford establishment in the national press.
But the reason my manager asked if I’d considered The Punter, he told me, was that it was serving meat and fish dishes again. A little research confirmed that the pub had rowed back from its bold new direction. Skeats left a couple of years ago, and in February the pub launched a new menu – still 60% vegetarian, they said, but now with fish dishes. Why the volte-face, you might ask? Was it because the market just wasn’t there for an entirely meat free venue, or was it something else?
Well, according to owner Tom Rainey it was partly due to government policy but mainly down to the closure of the Botley Road, a major thoroughfare which was pretty key to being able to reach the pub at all. Rainey said that this reduced footfall to the pub by 75%, if not more.
The Botley Road was closed so Network Rail could rebuild the nearby railway bridge and add an extra platform to the station. Which doesn’t sound an unreasonable thing to do, but what was unreasonable was the sheer duration of the closure: excellent local website the Oxford Clarion described it as having reopened “after 1,258 days and £237m”. Rainey, speaking to the local media, was more to the point: he called it “three and a half years of hell”.
It’s always tricky providing background like this because my Oxford readers already know all this and everybody else might not be that interested, but to put it in some kind of context for my Reading readers: you know how the Fisherman’s Cottage went through a phase of complaining to the Chronicle about the council cutting off access to the pub? Imagine that to the power of ten, being virtually inaccessible for over three years.
Anyway, I’d like to say that I cancelled my plans to go to Permit Room because I’m a sucker for the underdog. But the truth is that after my manager told me the news about the Punter I looked it up online, and I really fancied the menu. It looked clean and tempting, and I thought a little outing to the Punter might be a lovely way to spend a Saturday. The sample menu still had vegetarian stuff on it, but half of the dishes involved meat or fish. It was as if its time as a vegetarian pub was an embarrassing episode in its past it was trying, gradually, to forget. We’ve all been there, though. I booked a table.
If the rhetorical route to the Punter was circuitous the physical one couldn’t be much more direct, now that pesky bridge has been sorted. You leave the train station and rather than striking out towards Park End Street and the Westgate, you instead turn right and within five minutes you’ve crossed a pretty little bridge and find yourself on Osney Island, right by the river, walking down East Street, a beautiful run of terraced Victorian houses. It reminded me of the Village in Reading, an enclave so close to everything, yet magically removed. You are right by the station and yet you’re utterly in the middle of elsewhere, dreaming about living in one of those houses (I looked them up: we probably can’t afford to).
And there, on the corner with South Street, is the Punter, a ridiculously attractive redbrick pub with a decent looking outdoor space. I imagine Victorian side streets used to be awash with these: places like the Punter, and the Retreat in Reading, make a good case for the survival of the fittest. Boats went past on the Thames and a gaggle of men in Lycra, all repping the Oxford Cycling Club, were gathered outside in the sun, drinking pints of cask beer. It was awfully bucolic for somewhere so near the city centre: I realised I’d never been to Osney Island before in thirty-five years of coming to Oxford, and I felt I’d missed out.
The Punter is absolutely beautiful inside. It’s a corner plot with two rooms and I was in the bigger, even more gorgeous one. Window is a noun that’s yet to transform, horrifically, into a verb, but if it ever does you could do some terrific windowing here: the bright blue frames look out on the redbrick terraces and the water, the whole thing almost more glass than wall. Vibrant, likeable art hung between each window, and the overall effect was oddly magical.
The staff had originally kindly plonked me at the one table that looked out on the river, but I asked nicely if I could move so I could see the whole room, experience all that life and light. The Punter’s well-curated Instagram feed boasts that customers come for the river and end up looking at the walls. They’re not far from the truth.
The menu was different to the one I’d seen online, which was something of a curveball, but the overall balance of it was the same: roughly half the dishes involved meat and fish, and most of the rest were vegetarian rather than vegan. Starters mostly maxed out at a tenner, mains clustered in the low twenties. Although the staff who looked after me were charming, friendly and a credit to the place, one of them owned up that the menu had changed recently and that he couldn’t advise me on some of the dilemmas it gave me. Perhaps if it had been a little more bedded in I might have chosen better.
My lunch started superbly, though. A Scotch egg from the bar snacks menu was exemplary and – to my surprise – completely vegetarian. Pea and leek took the place of sausagemeat, and a stellar job they did of it. The flavour was interesting and complex, although the advertised truffle had taken the day off, the yolk was perfectly fudgy, the crumb faultlessly light and crisp. An excellent herb mayo completed a really joyous dish that felt its money at £8.
So often vegetarian or vegan food involves ultra processed ingredients, bad karaoke renditions of meat. This was far better and infinitely more interesting. It felt like it was invented not by a vegetarian but by a meat eater who cared for vegetarians, wanted them to know the pleasure of a really good Scotch egg without betraying their ideals. I wondered whether every dish had been like this during the pub’s all vegetarian era: if so, I rather wished they hadn’t changed.
Another thing to really like about the Punter was its wine list. They did have a good cask selection, and just the one interesting pale ale from Buckinghamshire’s XT Brewing, but a well-curated selection of wine – four whites, five reds – was on offer with all but one available by the glass and smaller 125ml glasses priced fairly. I can think of an awful lot of restaurants that could learn from the Punter and I loved my French pinot noir so much that I clocked up another glass. Sitting there in that room, feeling a blend of relaxation and anticipation, I decided that good things were in my future.
For my starter I was torn between the truffled rarebit and the salt and pepper squid, and my server steered me towards the latter. It was pleasant, but not quite there: bronzed, clenched fists of squid promised good texture, but under that coating they lacked the softness of the truly fresh – not bad, or even uniformly bouncy, but close enough to good that you knew they could have been better.
I liked the coating, but I don’t think it was salt and pepper. It felt like there might have been a bit of nigella seed in there, and it just about went with the mayo – which was described as sriracha aioli but I suspect was just sriracha mayo. As I write that up, describe that attempted fusion of China, Thailand and Spain, I’m aware that it sounds busy in theory. In practice it wasn’t, but it also wasn’t entirely successful.
Here’s a terrible secret, though: at this point I really didn’t care. Because the pub was so lovely, and the surroundings were so enchanting, and I was far too busy wishing I lived just round the corner to raise classic restaurant reviewer niggles like squid freshness. The cyclists kept wandering in to top up on pints of ale, the pub was slowly attracting more dog walkers.
A table of four women, all a few years younger than me, came in for their 1.30pm booking and were pure joy and camaraderie, enjoying an afternoon together and intending to make the most of it. Wine was ordered – not a bottle, the implication being that such excess would follow in due course – and they started catching up. There was something about that group that had the nicest energy: no willy-waving, no oxygen thievery, just good friends sharing stories, comparing notes, feeding off each other.
It was clear that eating at the Punter was a break from their well-trodden routine (“they know us at the usual place”, one of them conspiratorially admitted to the others) and benevolently looking on I found myself feeling sort of happy and kind of lonely. It made me want to round up all my brilliant male friends – the likes of Jerry, and Graeme, and Dave – and make them go to the pub with me, to try and build something a bit like what they had. But it was a good sort of lonely, if there’s such a thing, because I knew that I at least did have friends like that, even if they weren’t there right now.
Besides, what did I have to complain about? I was having a solo lunch in a gorgeous dining room, flooded with autumn sunshine. I could see the river from my table, and the pinot noir was delicious. And the people watching was superb: I got a little glow from seeing those four good friends set the world to rights, in a conversation that aced the Bechdel test.
I have had a difficult 12 months, with my accident and my surgery, losing my poor dad – who would have loved The Punter, like he loved everywhere – and my wife’s operation. And yet here I was, on the other side of some of that, in this little pocket of tranquil reflection. It truly is a good life, if you don’t weaken.
Then the fish and chips arrived and ruined all that.
Really, it wasn’t good. Can you tell from the photo? I nearly had the monkfish and bream stew, but my server couldn’t tell me anything about it. I almost ordered the ham hock and cheddar “open pie”, but he told me that it was a sort of casserole with a pastry lid and a layer of mashed potato on the bottom, which I thought sounded downright weird. So I picked fish and chips, a great benchmark of pub food and generally a safe bet even in the iffiest of pubs.
Yet every element of this had something wrong with it. The fish was not unpleasant – haddock, falling neatly into flakes, and the coating was suitably light. But it was a small, anaemic piece lacking the crinkles and crunch of really good batter: the squid had been better, in that respect. The crushed peas tasted of lemon, which crushed peas really shouldn’t do. The tartare sauce was just mayonnaise that had gone on an unsuccessful speed date with some chopped gherkin. I like tartare sauce, I think, to be cheap and nasty, to be napalm for the roof of your mouth the way good salt and vinegar crisps are.
And then there were the chips: my god, the chips. I am a little bit finicky about chips, and I won’t generally eat them if they don’t pass a short visual audit. You can make a case for skin-on chips, or skin-off, but for my money you can’t make a case for “suspicious black patches on”. These were just manky, and there were enough scuzzy ones – which I encountered early enough in proceedings – that it rather put me off the rest. If they were bought in, which I assume they were, the pub needs to buy better. If they weren’t, there are even fewer excuses.
Could dessert recover from that? Well, actually, yes. I’m so used to ordering chocolate mousse and it being a dollop of something loose and airy, usually drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and scattered with salt, that I’d forgotten the simple pleasures of the more orthodox rendition. This was a lozenge of denser, less bubbled mousse – you could wonder if they’d used something like gelatin, if the pub wasn’t still a little vegetarian – on a slab of chocolate sponge, a rubble of chocolate crumb on top, cherry sauce Spirographed around.
I loved it, and I was grateful to the pub for doing its best to stop me leaving full of sadness and resentment. It’s worth also adding that the pub gets its coffee from local Jericho Coffee Traders, and my latte was as good as any coffee I’ve had in a restaurant or pub for as long as I can remember. My bill came to £65, not including tip, and I told my server that I’d had a marvellous time. Which wasn’t a lie, even if those chips should have been taken across the road and drowned in the Thames.
I used to work with a chap called Phil, nearly 20 years ago, who looked like Sonic The Hedgehog and entertained me very much. He was also obsessed with shaving his scrotum and telling everybody about it, which is a story for another kind of blog entirely, and he’s now high up in project management somewhere, so thank goodness he doesn’t read this. But I was reminded of Phil, when I reflected on my meal at The Punter.
Here’s why: we all went out after work one evening for his birthday, and he decided he wanted to eat at Prezzo. I went, because I wasn’t always the gastronomically hyper-evolved being who is writing to you now. Phil looked at the menu and railed, entertainingly and at length, about the fact that it included a burger. What kind of Italian restaurant offers a burger, he ranted? And what kind of chump orders it?
You can probably guess what’s coming: the server came round, Phil ordered the burger and naturally he hated it. At the time I thought it was emblematic of Phil himself, to do something he knew he would dislike and then enjoy his chagrin more than he could ever have enjoyed his meal. But I did a Phil at The Punter, because if you look at the dishes I enjoyed – the Scotch egg, and that chocolate mousse – they were vegetarian. It was only when I wandered off track, ate the fish, that disappointment came looking for me.
I told you I saw the truffled rarebit go to another table, and it looked good. The braised Hispi cabbage with miso chimichurri that also went to that table? That looked good too. I bet the black garlic rigatoni and the celeriac steak, the porcini and pearl barley burger – all of them on the mains – were good too.
So don’t read as much as usual into the mark at the bottom of this page, because it arguably reflects as much on me as it does on The Punter. That afternoon, taken in by the menu and the cyclists and the pinot and the sunshine, I emulated Phil. I reckon vegetarians, and people who are prepared to put their prejudice to one side, will eat even better at the Punter than I did. Except for the fries: those fries were an affront.
It is one of the greatest contradictions of restaurants and pubs that you can have a wonderful time without having a wonderful meal, a brilliant afternoon or evening eating middling dishes. The Punter is great evidence of that. I really hope it recovers from its three and a half years of hell, and I have more than half a mind to go back. And bit of me hopes that they reverse their position on the whole vegetarian thing. It’s always better to do what you love, and if you stick at it I remain hopeful that you find the love you deserve in return.
The Punter – 7.2 7 South St, Oxford, OX2 0BE 01865 248832
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I don’t ordinarily review somewhere until it’s been open at least a month. That’s definitely the case here: Donnington Deli, the second offshoot of East Reading institution Café Yolk after 2025’s Baby Yolk, opened at the end of January, so you can’t say, eight months later, that I haven’t given it time to settle in.
That’s not the whole story, though, because I was in fact standing outside the door of Donnington Deli the very lunchtime it opened, genuinely excited to have a look round. I remember it was a bright Friday in January, and I was still in the early stages of recovering from my broken arm. I planned to do some shopping, have a coffee and maybe try a sandwich for lunch, but it wasn’t to be: I was disappointed that it was in fact just a sandwich shop, not a deli at all. I might have been even more miffed that they didn’t serve coffee.
I wandered up the road to Monty’s instead, and had a very agreeable brunch there. And I had a good old whinge about it all on social media, because I never learn to reserve judgment. It’s something I must work on next year: I know it drives my wife crackers at times. Anyway, I now see with the benefit of distance that being unimpressed that Donnington Deli wasn’t a deli was like being unhappy, all those years ago, when Bakery House turned out not to be a bakery. It misses the point somewhat, judging a book by its cover in that way.
I returned to Donnington Deli a couple of times the following month, tried two of their sandwiches and wasn’t entirely convinced. Their much-vaunted focaccia was dense, like a brick, and I thought the sandwiches were too big, not special enough. You got a free drink – not a coffee, because they still didn’t serve it – but it was something like cola or ginger beer through a siphon; I would rather have had a smaller, less expensive sandwich and paid extra for a drink I actually wanted, like a latte.
That was over six months ago, and I decided Donnington Deli needed a little more time – or, perhaps more accurately, that I did – before I visited on duty. I would leave it to find its feet, and prioritise other places instead. In the intervening months, Donnington Deli kept doing its thing. It was lauded by the usual suspects on Instagram with gormless, childlike wonder, but change was so incremental as to be unnoticeable. With one exception: coffee was introduced in April. See, I told you that was a mistake.
So why did I go back? It was a confluence of events: I had a Monday off, and the sun was out. Zoë’s convalescence from her operation was going well but I think she’d reached the stage, after a week of my fussing and cosplaying Laurence Nightingale, where “needing a rest” also included “needing a rest from me”. I thought a nice walk in the sunshine and a spot of lunch, a couple of hours out of the house, was just the ticket. So I meandered my way down the hill, ready to give Donnington Deli a look through fresh eyes.
It is a lovely space inside and out, and it’s come into its own in the summer months. The look and design, as with all of owner Alexandra Langlais’ spaces, is superbly done and it fills its street corner in a very striking fashion: racing green, perhaps in a subliminal hint to the building’s former purpose as a car dealership. The inside is plain and unfussy: a pale wood parquet floor with banquettes along its perimeter, that classy shade of green carried through to the counter and the menu boards suspended over it.
But the outside, which has come together in the months since opening, is also fetching and it’s where I sat on this visit. This was where you got your real people-watching opportunities seeing all the bustle of the Erleigh Road under way, all those lives momentarily intersecting with mine. Term hadn’t started yet, but the area still hummed with life – and this is, to some extent, Langlais’ achievement, because Café Yolk opposite has been drawing footfall to this part of town for well over a decade. It was a good mix of chairs and benches, sun and shade, and a really nicely done terrace.
Donnington Deli’s menu hasn’t changed significantly since it opened, with the exception that you can now get any of your sandwich fillings as a chopped salad instead. A total of ten sandwiches are on offer, all made fresh to order. Donnington Deli may be trying to emulate trendsetters like Sandwich Sandwich, producing overstuffed sarnies optimised for social media, but this isn’t quite as trailblazing as all that: that’s how sandwiches are made at Shed, or Pierre’s, and has been for many many years.
This might be me, but I was surprised by how little the selection offered by Donnington Deli appealed to me. It was like my experience at Mignonette a few weeks back – where every dish on the menu had some twist or feature that made it clamour to be chosen – only in reverse. Two of the ten sandwiches led with turkey, literally nobody’s favourite meat. Another couple featured balsamic glaze, which felt like a decidedly retro choice.
I also, in the interests of giving Donnington Deli the best possible chance, swerved all their sandwiches I’d already tried. That meant avoiding their pastrami sandwich, which had been crammed with pastrami to the point where it almost became a chore, with a wodge of sauerkraut which was lacking in acidity. Their chicken Caesar, too, with its strangely vinegary dressing and catering-pack bouncy bits of pink bacon rather than salty rashers.
It also meant avoiding the steak and cheese sandwich, which comes with a side of gravy. Zoë had ordered this on a previous visit and I thought it had a false advertising problem, being packed with something cold that you could describe as pastrami-adjacent. Here’s a hill I’ll die on: I think you should only be allowed to call it a steak sandwich you’re actually serving a steak – hot, off a grill or a griddle. Otherwise it’s a beef sandwich making promises it can’t possibly keep.
Anyway, this happily meant that I probably ordered Donnington Deli’s best – and easily their most distinctive – sandwich, the mortadella. They brought it out to me with my bottle of ginger beer: Donnington Deli has stopped including a cheap soft drink with your order, which I think is a good thing. But in the majority of cases it hasn’t affected the price, which means you’re effectively paying more for less.
Anyway, my mortadella sandwich was £10.50, and you can see that this is very much aimed at visual eaters: it comes on the lined, branded tray, cut open to give you a good look the cross-section. It’s all about the cross-section these days: not that I’d know, sticking to my outdated early twenty-first century web-logging in a world increasingly awash with one minute videos and silly little microphones.
Let’s do the positives first, because there were a fair few. As a combination of flavours, it worked superbly: on that level, at least, it wasn’t overkill. The mortadella was enjoyably silky – I’ve never been a lover of the stuff but this did a solid job of converting me. I am however a huge fan of mozzarella, and I loved it here, seemingly torn and adding that cool creaminess. And best of all was Donnington Deli’s pistachio pesto, which balanced this out precisely and tasted delicious. A huge sheaf of rocket rounded out a sort of pastel tricolore thing going on.
There was just enough happening here, and I appreciated the idea. And yet there were problems with the execution. I still struggled with the bread: they’ve moved from focaccia to ciabatta and although it wasn’t the huge dense block of previous visits it still felt like heavy going.
Not only that, but it wasn’t up to the job of holding its contents – the first half of my sandwich I just about managed to eat, but by time I got to the second leg it was soggy, not holding together. Toasting the bread might have helped, but there’s little evidence that any of Donnington Deli’s food is exposed to a primary heat source: I guess that’s why they sell a beef sandwich, not a steak one.
I would have liked this to be less comically huge, better balanced and more focused on being feasible, let alone fun, to eat. I would want it smaller, and ideally less expensive, and perhaps that just means this kind of thing is not for me. I couldn’t help but be left with my initial suspicion that this is food to be looked at and photographed, but not so much to be consumed.
It reminded me of what it’s like to buy shoes as a man with size 12 feet: you cast your eye over a pair of shoes in a shop and they look really snazzy, but when they bring the size 12 version up from the basement your stylish footwear has mysteriously morphed into clown shoes. This sandwich, I’m afraid, was clown shoes.
I realise that I should have said something good, then something constructive, then finished on something good. But this is feedback about a sandwich, not a feedback sandwich: I’ve never been terribly proficient at the feedback sandwich.
To try the full gamut of Donnington Deli’s offerings I ordered a coffee and a cake and moved to a sunnier table to polish them off. I had initial misgivings about the latte – it started bitter, but as I worked my way through it either it tasted better and better or I came to terms with it. I’m still not sure which. I’d say it wasn’t as good as the coffee was at Café Yolk back when they bought beans from Anonymous Coffee, but better than the coffee I had at Yolk after they jogged Anonymous on.
They used to use Kingdom, they now sell their own beans: it’s anybody’s guess who roasts them for Yolk and Donnington Deli. I liked it, though – it might just be worth making a stop in east Reading for, although that’s also because that part of town is starved of good coffee. The millionaire shortbread, however, was unspecial: the chocolate a tad waxy, the caramel too molten. Perhaps there was just no pleasing me that day: the whole thing came to just over £20.
The reason for leaving it a month before I review somewhere new is, of course, to give them a chance to iron out their teething troubles. I reckon 99% of hospitality businesses, especially independents, open before they’re really ready and keep tinkering and fixing the snagging while they come to terms with beginning to trade.
The benefit of leaving it longer, as I did here, is that it gives a hospitality business proper space and time – not to iron out day one niggles, but to work out what it is and who it wants to be. And often, I’m sure, that is the case. But sometimes a business is authentically itself from day one, it knows what it aims to achieve and is set on doing exactly that.
In some ways, I suppose, it’s to Donnington Deli’s credit that I believe that’s precisely what has happened with them. Because the review I have written, eight months in, is remarkably similar to the one I might have produced if I’d visited it on duty in February. I think the range of sandwiches isn’t interesting enough, the execution feels unbalanced and, for my money, it is maximalist in a way that even I, a greedy sod, can’t buy into. I left a fair amount of my sandwich, which isn’t like me at all.
I admire their single-mindedness of purpose, it’s just not a purpose I can rally behind. For this kind of thing, Mac’s Deli in Theale remains the place to beat: Donnington Deli feels more to me like a slick rebrand of somewhere like Pierre’s in Reading: the style is something else, but the substance needs to catch up. The fact that Yolk still has queues while Donnington Deli wasn’t the busiest on my visit might bear that out.
But I would sound a note of caution, because I was unmoved by Yolk when I first visited back in 2013 and it, still thriving and expanding, has clearly had the last laugh. I’m just one person, and you have to weigh my opinion carefully. What do I know, anyway? After all, there’s plenty of evidence that owner Alexandra Langlais might have a far better idea what kind of food the folks of East Reading are looking for than I do.
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You really can’t make this stuff up, but after this review was published the Lyndhurst closed – again – and the landlord departed the pub. The staff working there have apparently taken over, and the menu is no longer by Brett’s Burgers. I’ve marked this as closed and might go back and review it again at some point but, you know, no rush.
From late 2019 until the spring of 2024 The Lyndhurst boasted some of the best food Reading has ever seen: varied, exceptional quality, ludicrous value. Since then, the pub has become a perfect encapsulation of many of the problems facing hospitality in general and pubs in particular.
I’m not known for my concision, but make yourself comfortable and I’ll try to run through the potted history of the pub since landlords Sheldon Fernandes and Dishon Vas moved on in May 2024. Here goes: first of all the pub was taken over by Becky Blissett, about a week after it had closed its doors. Blissett had a turbulent reign which mostly seemed to involve her complaining to the local papers about a perceived whispering campaign that the pub wasn’t as good as it used to be.
She was particularly rattled by what she said were false claims that she intended to turn the pub into a sports bar. Let’s take her word for it about that, but the main thing I remember from that time was the pub’s weird AI-generated posters on Facebook showing an anthropomorphised lion wearing a football shirt sinking a pint in a generic pub which looked nothing like the Lyndhurst, designed to get punters in to watch the Euros. But, you know, not a sports bar.
The pub was also known during that time for closing regularly at short notice – sometimes announced on social media, to be fair – and for a video someone added to a Google review showing some of the pub’s new regulars verbally abusing a couple of passers-by for the crime of walking their dog. As my wife liked to put it, the landlords went from caretakers to undertakers.
Five months later it was over and the pub was under new management again: rumour has it that Blissett received her marching orders on holiday. Because, make no mistake, the true villain of this story is the pubco, just like usual. They are the ones who hiked the rent, which forced out an enormously successful team doing exactly what pub landlords are supposed to do. The chaos that has followed since clearly demonstrates that they never, ever had a Plan B.
Let’s walk through the rest of the chaos. In November 2024 new landlord Jim Kelly stepped in. We’ll call him Landlord No. 2. Kelly was sort of a pubco-appointed firefighter who joined failing pubs to stabilise them, but speaking to the Chronicle it sounded like he was after a more long-term gig this time. “We have done so many, so now it’s time for us to stay and reap the benefits,” he said. So naturally he left the following January: what else did you expect?
Landlord No. 3 came on board at the start of 2025 and looking at the Lyndhurst’s social media from that point onwards, you can see them desperately trying everything to get people to drink in the pub. Gigs, DJ nights, sport, the veritable kitchen sink. For a long time, to the untrained eye, it looked like they’d given everything a whirl except offering really good food. Not that they didn’t serve food, because they did, but there was more chopping and changing on the menu than in the kitchen.
None of it seemed to take, because the food options became increasingly desperate. They launched a new menu in January 2025, and then some kind of tapas-style menu the following month. Later in the year they seemed to do a daily special under the title “Wots (sic) In The Pot”, including such delights as “sausage casserole” and “savoury mince & potatoe (sic)”. What other kind of mince is there?
Each of these things was announced with a new AI poster, because if there’s one thing that unites everybody who’s tried to make a go of the Lyndhurst since Fernandes and Vas left it’s a weakness for shitty AI art. Yes, I know pubs can’t make any money and they can’t afford to hire graphic designers. They can, however, afford to spell check the word ‘potato’. And they can afford to check whether what they put out makes sense, which for example their AI slogan We Put The Mmm In Our Curry manifestly didn’t.
The AI posters weren’t confined to food though: one celebrated Armed Forces Day, another particularly risible one marked VE Day by mocking up a picture of the Lyndhurst where it had mysteriously acquired an additional storey and moved somewhere completely different – a generic street in Belgravia, by the looks of it. They were flying about six Union flags, for that matter. I’m not sure when the Lyndhurst got so jingoistic: it felt like Landlord 3 was running the pub they were used to running in a new area, without checking first whether it fitted in at all.
For some reason the one pot classics didn’t do the job, so there were more culinary convulsions for the remainder of Landlord No. 3’s time at the helm. They set up a café on the terrace, to try and catch the morning trade. They decided to offer jacket spuds, that epitome of the high life, under the name “Loaded Kitchen”, and then they tried Yorkshire pudding wraps. And finally, at the start of this year, they had one last throw of the dice doing the one thing they had previously avoided: offering food people might actually want to eat.
So in January they gave their kitchen to a South African team, Smoked Oak, who had also popped up at the Nag’s Head. Smoked Oak offered Braai boards, boerewors rolls and, by all accounts, a killer potato salad. It looked decent: it was getting to the point, in fact, where I thought it was time to pay them a visit and check it out. So inevitably – you can see what’s coming, can’t you? – Landlord No. 3 left the pub in June. Of course they did. It was in danger of becoming some kind of success.
I sat out all those comings and goings, so why did last Friday find me strolling down Watlington Street to visit the Lyndhurst for the first time since Fernandes’ and Vas’ farewell bash, almost two and a half years ago? The answer is that when the Lyndhurst opened again last month, with Landlord No. 4, Stephen Williams, in charge, it announced a development that had people in Reading talking: the food in this latest incarnation would be by Brett’s Burgers.
Now I don’t know much about Brett’s, but people with good memories who have lived in Reading for a very long time reacted to this news online as if it was the Second Coming. Brett’s was a burger joint that used to be at the very end of Friar Street, just round the corner from where Thai Corner is now. It closed in 1998, after almost 20 years’ trading, and is still one of the places folk of a certain vintage are most likely to mention when the conversation turns to Reading restaurants we have loved and lost.
The early buzz online was mixed, but a lot of it was positive. The suggestion was that the original owner of Brett’s was involved in some fashion, and people said the menu included old favourites – The Mexican, with chilli relish, or The Hawaiian, with jerk sauce and pineapple – they remembered from days gone by. Some customers didn’t see what the fuss was about, but others were very complimentary. It was damned close to the Brett’s they remembered, some said: it took them right back to their childhood. Could Reading finally have a neighbourhood boozer specialising in great burgers for the first time since the golden age of the Eldon Arms? I very much wanted to find out.
It was strange sitting in that pub again, but that’s entirely a me thing: the last time I spent any considerable time there was my wedding day, and it’s a room I spent a long time in over the course of five all too short years. Ever the model tenants, Fernandes and Vas gave the place a lick of paint before handing it back, and I wouldn’t be surprised if successive landlords hadn’t really tampered with it since.
So it was the same but different: the blue accents on the pillars and panels were more cobalt, less muted, but otherwise it was a place I felt I knew well. The furniture – the pews and tables – had been rearranged slightly, but only a little. The room looked larger and airier than before, but I wonder how much of that was about layout and how much was a product of footfall; on a Friday after work in previous years the place would have been packed, but on this occasion a handful of other tables were taken. I plonked myself just along from where I had my first meal as a married man.
The Lyndhurst’s menu – surprise, surprise! – has been put together with the help of AI. It’s not the horror show you’d have seen under the previous three landlords, and it at least features a tasteful black and white image of the front of the pub, but it still contains errors here and there: Brett’s has mysteriously lost one of its Ts; burgers come with “fries, onion, lettuce, pickles and fries”; and calling something ‘smokey aioli mayo’ is surely tautologous.
All that nit-picking aside, it’s the kind of menu people like me otherwise find little to complain about. It doesn’t try to do too much: three nibbles, three mains which aren’t burgers, five sides. All those things play second fiddle to the central attraction: a dozen different permutations of burger. Eleven of them can be beef, chicken or meat-free. One is a fish sandwich involving “buttered haddock”, which I’m guessing is a typo.
But really, Brett’s only does two kinds of burgers: ones that cost £17 and ones that cost £19. The latter are the burgers that involve either cheese, or bacon, or both. I would say this is ambitious pricing – not excessive, but if you pitch your burger about £5 more expensive than the offer at Honest Burgers you set a high bar for yourself. The menu could do more to justify that price – talk provenance, for instance – but it chooses not to. So the Brett’s (or even Bret’s) brand has to do a lot of heavy lifting: could it manage that, and were there enough people left in Reading for whom that would even resonate?
Just to say this from the off, service on my visit was absolutely brilliant. I wasn’t sure whether you ordered at the bar these days, but Rachael told me to sit down and took my order at the table. She was friendly, likeable, superbly attentive and very good indeed.
She checked whether I was enjoying my food, gave me recommendations and even came over following my order to mention that the burger I’d chosen had an ingredient in it – Stilton – that wasn’t listed on the menu. Was that okay, she asked, and did I want to leave it out or pick something else? Whatever problems this iteration of the pub might have, the welcome is not one of them.
So what problems did it have? The sausage roll on the snacks menu, for one. A good sausage roll in a pub is one of the finest things there is, and can be a great way to get drinkers to try some of the pub’s food without necessarily ordering a full meal. A gateway drug, so to speak. This really wasn’t that: slightly soggy pastry, which felt like it was pre-rolled, slumped over a bouncy, homogeneous core of sausagemeat which lacked coarseness, crumbliness, herbs or seasoning. This, if anything, was more a gateway drug to me finally going on a diet.
To appropriate the joke at the start of Annie Hall: and such small portions! For £7 this was not a lot of sausage roll to be disappointed by. The Lyndhurst is especially unfortunate to be serving this up during a golden age of sausage rolls in Reading. I’m not on some Instagram mission to find Reading’s best version, because I can think of better things to do with my time, but I do know that the sausage roll you can buy at Nibsy’s, outside the station, absolutely knocks spots off this one. It’s cheaper, it’s bigger, it’s miles better and it happens to be gluten free.
Nibsy’s sausage roll comes with a spicy mayo, which I’m not entirely sure it needs, whereas at the Lyndhurst it’s supposed to be accompanied by “whole grain”. I assume that means mustard, but what actually turned up was a glass ramekin which was almost as big as the sausage roll, filled with a sort of honey mustard gloop. The sausage roll did not need this: what it needed was to be better.
But none of that would matter in the slightest if the burger which followed was a triumphant return to form which simultaneously resurrected two brands – those of Brett’s and the Lyndhurst – in one audacious swoop. And I would really like, at this point, to be telling you that that is exactly what happened, but if I’ve learned one thing about restaurants after reviewing them for thirteen years it’s that they very rarely conform to a convenient narrative.
I had chosen the True Brit, which came with bacon, onion, ‘smokey aioli mayo’ (so smoky aioli, then) and the rogue unadvertised Stilton. Brett’s, possibly because it’s reviving a brand from 1998, doesn’t believe in smashed burgers – maybe they don’t know they exist – so you get one fat patty and all the trimmings. A lot of trimmings.
I saw a review of Brett’s on Instagram which gibbered on about simplicity being the big selling point of Brett’s burgers. Nothing fancy, nothing extra, just a good basic burger, it said. And I have to disagree with that, because this burger was overloaded – far too much going on, and it made it surprisingly hard to enjoy.
So the lake of aioli was one extremely strong note, an enormous quantity of thick back bacon – back bacon has no place, if you ask me, in a burger – was another. The Stilton, with a faint sulphurous whiff, was a third. Each one yelling at the others, a proper din. Thick slices of raw red onion on top of the whole shooting match completed an elevation that meant you really needed a flip top head to try and eat the thing. But the overall effect was just salt, salt and more salt: so much so that I almost had to sip my cider after every bite just to wash that away.
And everything was overloaded to the point where the roll couldn’t cope with it: I’ve seen a few people lauding the fact that Brett’s doesn’t use a brioche, but instead uses a big white cob. That might be because they’re still in 1998 and brioche buns haven’t been invented yet, but it’s not a bad move. They just need to use one that can structurally hold up to what they’re lobbing in it: even toasting it might have helped with that.
Having said all of that, here’s the redeeming feature: get past all those whistles and bells, all the unnecessary flourishes, and at the core of the dish there was an excellent patty screaming let me out. It was hard to get a good taste of it with so much culinary smothering under way, but it was a really good burger which achieved the perfect balance of a hugely pleasing crust and a juicy centre. If you go to Brett’s, I’d advise you to avoid my mistake and go for the simplest thing they do, the American: just a burger with relish, no jazz hands of any kind.
Ironically, given that the menu mentions that the dish includes fries twice I wish it had also specified that the burger includes tomato, so I could have asked them to leave it out. I am not in the business of giving restaurants advice, and if I was I doubt they’d listen to me anyway, but I do think the Lyndhurst should look at that menu in general, in terms of what it says and doesn’t say, but also in terms of whether it has the balance right.
I would also advise them to buy conventional bottles of vinegar, from someone like Sarsons, in a shaker rather than a weird cheapo bottle from a supermarket which looks like it will be a shaker and then tips a downpour of vinegar all over your fries. It could be user error but I suspect the fries from Brett’s, although probably bought in, would be pretty good if you didn’t accidentally drown them in an acetic tsunami. I love salt and vinegar, but this meal managed to combine too much salt and too much vinegar.
I didn’t finish my burger, although I did use a knife and fork to try and eat as much of the patty as I could. I didn’t finish my fries either. And I felt guilty about that, so before finishing my pint of cider I tried to artfully arrange the leftovers to make it look as if I’d eaten as much as possible.
“It was lovely” I said to Rachael as she came to take my plate away. “It was just so big.”
“We get a lot of people say that” she said. This did not surprise me. When the bill came it amounted to £32, not including tip.
I didn’t come to bury Brett’s, or the Lyndhurst, but it’s harder to praise them than I would like. I can imagine that these burgers – in the 90s, at 90s prices – might have been revelatory. Even so, it’s a bold move to try and relaunch a brand that’s been gone for almost 30 years, relying on people having incredible powers of recall. Bolder still to assume that you can dust off what you did back then, when your only job was to be better than Burger King or a kebab van, and that it will still wow people the way it used to.
There is a danger of Brett’s being some kind of culinary Austin Powers, released from cryogenic suspension to find that the world has moved on. Because it has. Reading contains many burgers that I’m sure are worse than Brett’s, and ones – like those at Wendy’s or Shake Shack – that I wouldn’t feel like supporting even if they were good. But it also contains Honest Burgers, and 7Bone. And Reading doesn’t have any burgers I can think of that are more expensive than Brett’s.
Maybe the demographic that remembers Brett’s will be enough to sustain them, and will be prepared to spend big to experience that sweet nostalgia. But they might not be prepared to do it more than once. As I reminded myself recently when I visited Basingstoke, of all places, the Nineties were a very different time, and a lot of things that we thought were great then don’t have quite the same lustre now. I mean, back in the Nineties Reading had a Wimpy: Basingstoke, for instance, still does.
What might save Brett’s is a couple of things: the quality of that patty, which needs to be showcased a little better, and the excellent service at the Lyndhurst. The other stuff you can tweak, if you get the time, but those are the things you have to get right from the off. I have my fingers crossed, because although I have no relationship with Brett’s as a brand, the Lyndhurst itself is an institution I’m very much attached to. I would like to see it back to being a brilliant neighbourhood pub doing good food. It doesn’t have to be magical, it doesn’t even have to be fancy, it just has to be good.
When this latest development at the Lyndhurst came up on Reddit one comment just said I’ll wait until the next reopening in October. It got downvoted, but I could see where that person was coming from: I just hope they turn out to be wrong.
Brett’s Burgers at The Lyndhurst – 6.7 88-90 Queens Road, Reading, RG1 4DG 0118 9503888
