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, but it’s not clear what the menu is or whether they are still offering 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

https://www.facebook.com/lyndhurstreading

This post is exclusively for supporters of the blog – so if you’re reading this, thank you so much for subscribing.