Pub review: The Punter, Oxford

On October 16, 2026October 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

https://www.thepunteroxford.co.uk

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Café review: Donnington Deli

On October 9, 2026October 11, 2026 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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.

Donnington Deli – 6.6
37 Erleigh Road, Reading, RG1 5NB
0118 3131129

https://www.instagram.com/donningtondeli

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Pub review: Brett’s Burgers at The Lyndhurst

On October 2, 2026October 2, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

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.

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