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.

Django’s Smokehouse – 7.3
126 Broadway, Didcot, OX11 8AB
01235 813333

https://djangossmokehouse.co.uk

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