For the last few years, at this time of year, I’ve been a proper harbinger of doom. Year after year since the pandemic I’ve written my annual round-up saying that although restaurants have dodged the Grim Reaper for 12 months, next year will be when it really starts to bite. It’s got to be a little annual tradition: write the cards, open the doors on the advent calendar, tell anybody who will listen that next year is going to be rather shit. I became, in my way, the Cassandra of Reading’s restaurant scene.
And most recently, pretty much this time last year, I screwed the pooch by saying this:
Fewer restaurants have closed this year than I expected, and I’m impressed that so many are hanging in there. I hope they all have a very busy festive season to keep them going through the drought that is January. And this time next year, having no doubt been proved wrong again, I’ll try to say something different.
Whoops. Because the chickens finally came home to roost in 2024, and it was bleak. Imagine the feelbad factor Reading suffered late last year, when the Grumpy Goat played chicken with its landlord and lost, only stretched out over an entire 365 days, and you get a vague idea of what this year has been like. It’s been brutal – a rate of closures like nothing I’ve seen in 11 years of doing this. It has affected restaurants of every kind – good and bad, indie and chain, at pretty much every price point. Nowhere has felt safe, because nowhere has been safe.
And also, just to front load all the gloom into this piece so that in a little while we can focus on happier things, next year doesn’t promise to be any better. I would be the first person to slag off the previous government and one of the last people to criticise the new government, but a budget that raises the minimum wage, raises employers’ contributions on National Insurance and cuts business rates relief has done nothing to prevent next year being worse for hospitality than this year has been.
Wait until January, when restaurants have passed their peak trading period and face a month of people skint, budgeting or detoxing, and we may see another flurry of announcements. So the first part of this round-up is going to read a bit like the obituaries column. Let’s run through the damage Reading’s suffered this year. Ho ho ho!
2024 was three days old when the Corn Stores announced that it was closing with immediate effect, and that site has been vacant ever since. I’m not sure how big a surprise this was – it never quite impressed with its steaks, its private membership club upstairs seemed to have limited appeal and its attempt during the pandemic to switch to a star-chasing fine dining restaurant was brave but ill-fated. Still, we’ll always have the whole parfait and brioche thing.
January featured some other significant closures too – Revolutions packed up on Station Road that month, finally mothballing one of my most incongruous positive reviews. Excellent Erleigh Road chippy Finn’s also pulled down the shutters that month, although in one of Reading’s more heartening developments it reopened in September under new management, with the same owners as Calcot’s Coriander Club and Avenue Deli.
The first month of the year saw two other closures. One was Woodley’s La’De Kitchen, although it did that weird thing where it closed and then reopened under a different name, Yaprak, still as a Turkish restaurant and apparently under the same ownership. This seems to have been a thing this year, because in June Veeno did something similar, reopening as Vino Vita; originally the menu also seemed indistinguishable from Veeno’s, although it now seems to have changed. Your guess, in both cases, is good as mine.
Finally in January, Smash ‘N’ Grab sold their business and gave up serving impeccable smashed burgers from their little hut on Cemetery Junction. That sale lurched into acrimony almost immediately, with Smash ‘N’ Grab’s owners – never the shy and retiring kind – taking to social media to claim that the new business had ripped off its menu. Things escalated, and people left the new owners one star Google reviews seemingly before a single burger had been served. All that was bad enough, but what really troubled me was the new joint’s name, Cozzy Bites. Did they expect you to turn up in a bikini?
Spring came, and the closures kept coming. I was really sad to see Barista & Beyond throw in the towel in February: I hope their intern Charlie goes on to bigger and better things. March saw us lose CiCi Noodle Bar on Queen Victoria Street and, just round the corner, Coco Di Mama. Two purveyors of carbs, gone in the space of a couple of weeks. Other people were probably sadder about Coco Di Mama than I was: I still remember Berkshire Live getting all excited last year about “Gran Formaggio cheese”, whatever that was, but the reports I heard were iffy at best.
At the end of March we had one of the weirder closures of the year. The Narrowboat, which only itself took over from Bel and the Dragon the previous summer, was no more as Fuller’s decided to use the building for training and development instead. One of Reading’s more distinctive spaces, with a spot by the river, it could have been fantastic but somehow never lived up to its potential. I imagine that also meant the end of its boat slash floating function room, the Majestic Bel, although it will live on in my memory as I use that epithet about certain people all the time.
One of the biggest blows to Reading’s food and drink scene came on April Fool’s Day as Workhouse Coffee left its site on King Street. This one was a huge shock, as Workhouse changed the landscape of Reading’s coffee scene – some would say created it – many years ago. For my part, that’s the last time I give anyone a lifetime achievement award, as it’s clearly a jinx. I was there on its final day, and felt a real sense of grief.
It’s not entirely clear what happened on King Street. The landlord undoubtedly played a part (don’t they always) as there were reports that the site was in quite a state with the landlord unwilling to do work on it. A rather public falling out between owner Greg Costello and his right hand man probably didn’t help matters.
It wasn’t just independent businesses, though, that faced the chop this year. As the proposed development of the Oracle continued to progress, Reading’s chains took advantage of break points in their leases to stop trading. Last year that was Franco Manca and the Real Greek, this year Brown’s followed suit in April and TGI Friday in June. Some people might miss Brown’s, but it’s hard to imagine many tears being shed about TGI Fridays: I still wonder what the black mark was on that pint glass.
TGI’s UK operator went into administration later in the year, but the branch on the Caversham Road roundabout has been saved from the axe, so if you have a hankering for that Legendary Glaze you don’t have to give up hope just yet. That said, even the Chronicle struggled to like the food there.
The saddest closure of 2024, for me, was of course the Lyndhurst. I’ve written about this at length, but Sheldon, Dishon and the team catered my wedding in May as their last booking before closing the pub. I think I probably think about at least one of the pub’s dishes every single week, and look fondly back at the days when I could drop by after work for Korean chicken wings, or karaage, or monkfish tacos, or pork cheeks with plum sauce. It was a wonderful time, a bit of a golden age Reading may never see again.
And because I’m often asked what they’re up to – Dishon went back to Northampton to be with his family and the brilliant staff ended up all over the place: you may see Kushal if you ever eat at Bill’s. As for Sheldon, he is still in Reading and considering his next steps: I need to persuade someone with a kitchen to let him do a pop-up for a readers’ lunch next year. He’s dabbling in cidermaking and has done a charcuterie course, and when I went for a few drinks with him at Park House I learned a couple of things: first, that Sheldon’s fennel salami is easily as good as anything you could buy commercially, and secondly, don’t go drinking with Sheldon on a school night.
Normally I try and do this in chronological order – closures first, then openings – but the Lyndhurst slightly distorted the space-time continuum this year by closing, opening, closing and opening again. I’ve talked about this a little in my review of the Bell earlier in the year, but the pub was under new ownership a week after Sheldon and Dishon left.
In the inimitable words of my wife, the new landlords went from caretakers to undertakers as they put up a menu, took down a menu, got a new chef, lost their new chef within a week, closed multiple times at short notice for undisclosed reasons, went to the local papers multiple times to complain that everybody had it in for them and had a Google review published with video footage of the locals abusing passers-by. It was quite the five months, all told.
They got their marching orders in October (while they were on holiday abroad, if the rumours are to be believed) and a new landlord is now in place, offering food again. The rumours are that although he too is a holding landlord he might quite like to go temp to perm, so to speak. Let’s hope he does, and if he wants someone brilliant to run his refurbished kitchen I know just the person.
The other significant closure over the summer, another especially sad one, was Pepe Sale. It was the first restaurant I ever reviewed, and although it was never entirely the same after Toni and Samantha sold the business – more Italian, less Sardinian – it was still a real wrench to see the lights off and unread mail piling up the other side of the door. It might well also have been influenced by likely redevelopment of the Broad Street Mall but it meant the demise of one of central Reading’s longest-running restaurants. I will always remember my Saturday nights there, in its heyday, delighted because I’d managed to snag a portion of their famous suckling pig.
If the pace slowed in the second half of the year, there were still some significant farewells over the last six months. Doner & Gyros, though, was not one of them. It closed in July without ever, as far as I could tell, explaining what the difference between doner and gyros really was; given that the menu included such joys as a “Mexican doner” and a “Chicago gyro” I have a feeling they were just making it up as they went along.
A new, equally purgatorial looking restaurant, Mr T, is there now: place your bets on whether I wind up telling you, this time next year, that it has closed.
August also saw the demise of Valpy Street, although – as I discovered when I visited its replacement The Cellar last month – this was more a change of name than a wholesale change of identity. Something to do with shonky accountants apparently, but The Cellar seemed to be doing very nicely in the same spot with the same owner, the same chef and most of the same staff. A bit like that time street food traders Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine rebranded as the Bissy Tree and nobody was any the wiser.
In September we also lost Bolan Thai on the top floor of Sykes’ Paradise and Adda Hut out in Woodley. I was sad about Adda Hut, because it was rare that Woodley gets a restaurant worth hopping on the bus for, and to lose two – Adda Hut and La’De Kitchen – in the same year felt like exceptionally bad luck. It’s a shame I didn’t get to try their mutton chops one last time.
And last of all, at the end of August, another era came to an end as l’Ortolan ceased trading. For a long time it was described as Reading’s only Michelin starred restaurant, although I was never convinced it really classed as being in Reading. And then it lost its star a couple of years ago, although people kept talking about it as if it still had one. But rightly or wrongly it was still considered to be the closest special occasion restaurant we had.
I was never completely amazed by it, and it always felt to me like people’s idea of fine dining twenty years ago rather than now. Even so, that site was once home to Nico Ladenis, and John Burton-Race, and all that is now firmly consigned to history; appropriately, l’Ortolan is that rare restaurant with a Wikipedia page, albeit not one that’s been kept up to date.
That was a pretty cheerless roll call, wasn’t it? But amidst all of that we did still see some new places opening, although nowhere near as many. Apart from the ones I’ve already mentioned, the three biggest and most significant, all in the town centre, had money thrown at them. First in April, we got the first branch of London pizza chain Zia Lucia outside the capital. It came with glowing references, taking over the old ASK site on St Mary’s Butts.
Then the following month Siren Craft opened its town centre taproom on Friar Street, in a storm of influencer hype. And completing the trilogy, Reading welcomed Heartwood Inns’ revamped Rising Sun on Castle Street in June. Again, considerable amounts of cash had been splashed on a very attractive refurb, creating a town centre beer garden to rival the likes of the Allied Arms.
The only problem with all three was how underwhelming they were. Zia Lucia was inoffensive, but maybe not good enough to compete with the likes of independent Sarv’s Slice on the other side of the Broad Street Mall. The Rising Sun was the kind of bland, safe fare you can rely on if you want to take family somewhere that looks fancy, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that you’d be better off at either London Street Brasserie or, for as long as it’s still there, Côte.
And Siren RG1 was such a disappointment – a perfect opportunity to offer a great urban taproom with beer snacks to match, but instead it took the safe option of offering pretty insipid burgers. It’s such a shame they didn’t snap Sheldon up when he left the Lyndhurst. In fairness, Siren’s owner responded to my review on the blog and I suspect they will turn it around, but I still found it entertaining when Siren RG1’s head chef responded to one of my Facebook posts about the Chronicle saying that their stuff was, and I quote, “better than somebody who has absolutely no understanding of hospitality or food doing reviews”. At least I too now know what it feels like to be savaged by the critics.
Even if Reading’s big name signings struggled to impress this year, it doesn’t mean it was all bad. Because there was all sorts of interesting stuff going on – as it often does – in the fringes. In March, Dough Bros started serving pizza on an unfashionable spot on Northumberland Avenue to absolutely no fanfare at all.
They end 2024 as one of the year’s biggest success stories, selling out every night, packed on weekday evenings and acclaimed by pretty much the whole of Reading, from the local paper to local businesses, from gurning influencers to yours truly. Here’s hoping they go from strength to strength next year (and finally sell that calzone I’ve been imploring them to put on the menu).
The same month, West Reading got its own spot of unshowy brilliance as Time 4 Coffee, a Portuguese café that wasn’t run by Portuguese owners, closed and was replaced with DeNata Coffee & Co, a Portuguese cafe that was. It was one of my favourite finds of the year, and a trip to Lisbon earlier in the month revealed that if DeNata’s egg custard tarts couldn’t match the very best that city had to offer, they were a lot closer to that standard than you might think. I plan to eat more of them next year.
Cafés seemed to be the order of the day as Whitley also gained Zotta Deli, just around the corner from 2023’s highlight Minas Café. My visit suggested there was plenty of potential there (and my mole Elizabeth tells me she has since spoken to Paolo who is actively working on the lasagne, which hopefully doesn’t mean that he’ll spit in mine next time round).
We also finally, in September, got the much vaunted sister business of Kungfu Kitchen, which had moved from its old spot on Christchurch Road to a bigger site a few doors down that used to be the home of Sizzling Spice. To say it was gradual would be to put it lightly, but I suspect everything took longer than Jo and Steven wanted it to.
The move happened in June, and then in September the new venue (which is at their old site, keep up) opened as Kungfu Café, offering dim sum, roasted meats, hotpot and – because why not? – full English breakfast, eggs Benedict and pancakes. Then to complete the transition, at some point between late October and early December, it changed its name to Happy Panda Café. Jo’s plans for world domination, however, continue unabated, and when she finally converts the first floor of Kungfu Kitchen to a karaoke space we should all be very afraid.
Would you have bet on one of Reading’s most interesting new businesses this year opening in the Oracle, of all places? Me neither, but that’s what happened in October. The Oracle isn’t usually a hotbed for independent restaurants, unless you count the fever dream that was Lemoni, but Crêperie Les Dous Sourire, which has taken over from the Starbucks next to Vue, is an idiosyncratic enough beast to merit investigation early next year.
It prompted the usual dreary observations from the people who make the Chronicle‘s comments section such a Petri dish, moaning about the price of pancakes. But a proper crêperie in the Breton style, something to aspire to Paris’ magnificent Breizh Café, would be a wonderful thing, and it’s worth noting that Les Dous Sourire also does charcuterie and wine in the evenings. It might be just the thing to keep winter at bay.
There’s just time to mention a few other new businesses that opened in 2024, and a remarkable resurrection. Caversham got a brace of new places, with new bakery – and vowel-free zone – BKRY opening in September and its newest addition, Spill Bar, beginning to trade this month. There’s never been a better time to live in Caversham, and that’s before the news that Alto Lounge is doubling in size and has been given permission to serve booze until midnight. Why don’t Caversham residents talk more about how great it is? It’s a puzzler.
But also, after closing for renovations for – this is no exaggeration – over a year, Oxford Road’s Japanese restaurant Oishi came back from the dead in October. The excitement in that little part of the world was palpable, but the ripples spread across town because of the wider message, that all is not always lost, even when it seems like it is. Not every “temporarily closed” on Google becomes a “permanently closed”, and that’s a nice positive note in what has been such a challenging year.
Finally, and this one seems to have gone to press since I started writing this, Indian restaurant Tanatan has taken over Clay’s old home on London Street. I know this for a fact because Google tells me it’s open and there’s already a solitary five star Google review with a picture of balloons out front. They seem to have kept the orange colour scheme, so good luck to anybody taking photos of the food in there.
And that brings us to next year. We already have businesses queuing up to open in town, and knowing my luck more of them will announce their opening between now and this piece going to print. Lincoln Coffee is taking over Workhouse Coffee’s old spot on King Street, to which I can only say that I hope they’ve done their due diligence.
2025 should be the year we finally get a restaurant, Rosa’s Thai, on the ground floor of Jackson’s Corner, a building which is now owned by noted local philanthropist John Sykes. There has been talk of restaurants in that spot for many, many years and as the saga has dragged on the candidates to fill that space have got less and less impressive, and now it’s ho-hum Rosa’s Thai.
Oh well, leave it another year and maybe we’d have got something worse like a Cosy Club. Actually, scratch that: we’re getting one of those anyway, where Lakeland used to be on the edge of the Oracle.
We should also see the replacement for the Grumpy Goat, a brand new restaurant called Zi Tore promising Italian street food; let’s hope that goes better than the last place to try that. On the one hand, one of the three owners has cooked at Nino’s, Spitiko, Zizzi and Market House. On the other hand, another of them has run a few mobile phone businesses on Smelly Alley, so it’s safe to say that this one could go either way.
Finally, as Station Hill opens up – offering much easier pedestrian access to Siren RG1 into the bargain – we should get a couple of new food and drink businesses there too. I’m reliably informed that we can expect another restaurant from the team behind Coconut and Osaka, which is itself good news and shows a creditable commitment to picking indies.
But perhaps more significantly I’m also told we are getting a branch of Notes, the Covent Garden coffee outpost which offers wine and small plates in the evening. If this happens – and all those businesses that never came to Jackson’s Corner have taught me not to count my chickens – it would be a very interesting development and a challenge to lots of cafes and bars in town. I’ve always enjoyed the Notes on St Martin’s Lane, so I’ll be watching with interest. Besides, a cafe opening on the ground floor of a brand new development: what can possibly go wrong?
The irony about it being such a tricky year for local businesses is that, on a personal level, it’s been a fantastic year for the blog. It was the year I clocked up what felt like more Reading reviews and plenty more from elsewhere, especially London, and the year that four of the most successful pieces I published were features, whether that’s on how to avoid the big chains, the very best things about Reading, or guides to the great beer cities of Belgium or the sunniest city in Europe. I know some of you read all of the posts and some of you are only really interested of reviews of places in Reading, but whichever camp you fall into I appreciate you reading this year.
I don’t generally talk about traffic because it’s a little vulgar, the blog equivalent of talking about salary. But this year has broken all records, as did the year before and the year before that. This year, the scale of that has taken me aback, with almost twice as many people reading as in 2023. So as is traditional, I do have to say a massive thank you to everybody who reads, comments, shares or even sends a link to a friend with a message saying “why is he such a wanker?”. They all count, and everything that puts my writing in front of more people is hugely appreciated by me.
This is also the year when I widened my list of reviewing companions, and I’m very grateful to everybody who answered that call, whether it was my old friend Jerry, my very good friend Graeme (who suffered terribly for my art), or my younger, cooler Canadian cousin. Or newer friends like elite level campanologist Liz, poet Katie and Paul, the lovely teacher who endured my company at Vegivores with only a small amount of obvious bafflement. Having people to come out and review restaurants with me enables me to keep the blog going – it would be a bit boring if it was just me dining on my tod all the time – so it makes a huge difference.
And speaking of not dining alone, I’m also grateful to everybody who came to an ER readers’ lunch this year, and apologetic to anybody I wasn’t able to fit in. Every time I have one I’m reminded that I’m incredibly lucky to have such brilliant readers, and I always enjoy seeing them realise how much they have in common, making friends and discovering connections. The next one is already in the diary for next year and, like a concert promoter, I’ve had to add an extra date due to exceptional demand.
Finally of course, I have to thank my wife Zoë, who for over six years has been my number one dining companion and without whom this blog wouldn’t still be going. She has to endure every review before you get to read it, she’s still usually the one eating the food, and she’s also the person who tells me on a regular basis that I can’t write X, that putting Y in is unnecessary or that saying Z is going too far (which she’s also done with this piece, believe it or not).
However iffy a year is, if at some point during that year you get hitched to your emotional forever home, it’s really hard to have many complaints. I certainly don’t.
Next year I will need to make some decisions about the blog, as I’ve said a few times recently on social media. Money is tight for everybody, and that includes me, and reviewing a new place every week at my own cost has been a brilliant experience but maybe isn’t a sustainable one in 2025. I don’t want to go down the route of taking ads or sponsorship, or accepting freebies from restaurants, so I will be taking some of the festive season to think about moving to Substack and giving people the option of subscribing and, if they want to, contributing via subscription fees.
I don’t know yet what that means in terms of whether parts of the blog will only be available to paid subscribers, whether I offer other things to paid subscribers – like readers’ events, be they lunches or socials – or whether I simply continue to offer the blog for free but reduce my output to fortnightly. Plenty for me to think about, and maybe stuff for you to think about too.
I’ve agonised about this for some time, because it feels like getting out a begging bowl. But then I read something – on Reddit, believe it or not – that said that begging was the wrong analogy. The more accurate comparison, somebody said, would be with busking, and when I read that I got it. I’ve been busking for eleven years, and in all that time I’ve given away all of my writing for nothing and have never taken a freebie in return for coverage.
Hopefully I’ve given you some entertainment, I’ve saved you some money on bad food and, if I’ve done my job properly, I’ve steered you towards spending it at places which deserve it, and which have given you great meals and memories as a result. Put that way, I feel like maybe it is the time to ask for something in return. Tell me how wrong and tin-eared I am in the comments: I can take it.
All of that’s for the future, though. For now, you get one more post before the end of the year, when I announce the winners of the 2024 ER Awards. It’s one last opportunity to celebrate the high points of a year which has been quite unlike any other, exactly the year I thought we’d have in 2021, 2022 and 2023 but not in 2024.
But, for now at least, thank you for sitting through all this, and I hope you have a wonderful Christmas however you choose to spend it – with family, with friends, alone, at home or at work. And if you don’t celebrate it at all, I hope you enjoy some peace and quiet and good food and drink. One last tip: if you want good food, don’t want to cook and want a day that is somehow un-Christmassy, I’m reliably informed by my family that Madras Flavours is open on the 25th and serving up dosas, just like any other day. Food for thought, if you want an escape from turkey and the King’s speech.
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