As I might have mentioned a couple of times lately, next week marks a significant date: 17th August is the tenth birthday of this blog. The first blog post went up on that day in 2013, setting out my stall and going on a little about Reading and what I hoped to bring to the table. My first Tweet, sent a couple of days before that, elicited a practically instant one word response from the then food editor of the then Reading Post. “Credentials?” it said. Even then, somebody was rattled.
In the beginning, to be honest, I wasn’t sure whether it would take off. Another Reading restaurant blog launched pretty much the same week as I did and, in an experience I would have many times over the next ten years, I kept a friendly eye on the competition just to see if the town was big enough for the both of us. And I’m sure it was, but that blog limped on for just over a year and quit.
It was the first, but by no means the last. Over time Alt Reading, Explore Reading, RdgNow, a blog about roast dinners, a blog about breakfasts and a couple of other blogs whose names escape me right now have come and gone. The most recent of them started up last summer: it managed two months.
By the end of 2014 the Reading Post had also given up the ghost, its website beginning the long process of decay and putrefaction that has led to its current state. And through all that, somehow, this blog has kept going – through divorce, redundancy, Brexit and whatever the other horseman of the apocalypse is calling itself these days. I know: I can’t quite believe it either.
Anyway, I hope you’ll allow me a little bit of trumpet blowing, today of all days, because I’m hugely proud of what my blog has achieved over the past ten years. Here’s a statistic that blows my mind: a few weeks ago, I published my up to date review of Bakery House. The blog got more hits that week than it received in the whole of 2013, when it used to look like this.
I always hoped it would be successful, and I always intended to carry on writing it as long as it was fun and there were people out there to read it. And it turns out there were: all of you, whether you’re new to the blog or long-standing readers, have played a massive role in that, and I can’t thank you enough.
The numbers, in hindsight, are pretty astonishing, to me at least. By my reckoning I’ve written over two hundred and fifty restaurant reviews, covering pretty much every kind of food Reading has to offer and nearly every kind of restaurant. I’ve reviewed the shiny new places and the grand stagers that have been in Reading far longer than my blog.
In some cases I’ve been to the same building again and again, as restaurant after restaurant has tried to make a go of the site, leaving strata of food history behind. I’ve now been doing this so long that, like painting the Forth Bridge, I’ve started going back to the places I reviewed in the early days, to see what’s changed.
I tend to think that following Reading’s food scene, over ten years, has been every bit as much of a rollercoaster as supporting any football club. It has changed beyond recognition in that time, with a plethora of great independent restaurants coming and going, a beer scene and a coffee scene springing up out of nothing and street food unmatched by anyone between here and London to the east and Bristol to the west.
And if you’re anything like me you’ll have experienced euphoria and despair as wonderful new places have come to town and some of Reading’s best restaurants, despite our best efforts, have closed down. In the weeks ahead I’ll be writing some articles about the most significant restaurants of the decade and the saddest closures, so stay tuned for that, but in the meantime I’m struck that it was also a decade of oddballs and strange flashes in the pan.
Is Reading a better place now for food and drink than it was back then? Five years ago, I would unquestionably have said yes but now, after Covid and a cost of living crisis created largely by the government I’m afraid I’m not so sure. We’ve seen the closure of many great independent restaurants, with others moving out of the town centre in search of bigger premises. The stranglehold of dodgy or unimaginative landlords still blights everywhere inside the IDR.
In 2013 I made a big thing of saying that there was more to Reading than chains. And look at us now: Wendy’s, Jollibee, Popeyes and Taco Bell. The struggle is real, and harder than ever before. But let’s not focus on that, because over the last ten years there has always been somewhere wonderful to find, if you were prepared to look.
As part of my birthday celebrations I plan to publish my list of Reading’s top 50 dishes, with which I expect you will all violently disagree, but in the meantime I’ll just say this: I’ve eaten a lot of fantastic food, sometimes in the unlikeliest places. I’ve eaten outstanding jerk chicken in a pub garden off Chatham Street, and excellent burgers on Cemetery Junction. I’ve found surprisingly good coffee in the hospital, and god’s own samosas down the Wokingham Road.
I’ve had superb sushi, epic full Englishes, magnificent fried chicken and inventive regional Indian food that was all kinds of drop-everything-and-rush-to-social-media wonderful. I’ve had the best Chinese food of my life in a former greasy spoon by the university. To paraphrase the great Roy Batty, I’ve eaten things you people wouldn’t believe. Except you probably would, because for ten years I’ve documented a lot of it.
And I’m very fortunate that you lot have read it, and still get in touch with me all the time to tell me that you’ve been somewhere on my recommendation and loved it, or tipped me off about somewhere you love that you think I might like too. That sort of engagement is the lifeblood of a blog like this, and it stops it feeling like screaming into the void.
In fairness, it’s never felt like that, not even on day one. You’ve all played a part in that, and I honestly think that in turn has contributed to developing Reading’s food culture and a perception – a quite valid one – that our beloved town quietly punches far above its weight when it comes to eating and drinking.
I felt proud too when my blog was mentioned in the national press, not once but twice, back in 2021, although it says something about the demise of print media that I didn’t rush out, either time, to buy a copy. It remains one of the highlights of the last ten years – that and the time that professional spine donor and serial opportunist Alok Sharma dubbed me an “anonymous troll” (honestly, so many people came out of the woodwork to say lovely things you would not believe).
But I felt even prouder – not for me, but for the restaurants concerned, and for the whole of Reading – when Reading restaurants started getting the recognition they deserved in the national press as we started to emerge from the pandemic. And the very pinnacle of that, of course, came when Clay’s Kitchen got a glowing review in the Guardian this year, a review that showed a real interest in understanding what made that restaurant and its story so special. Good old Grace Dent: she might have blocked me on Twitter, for reasons which genuinely escape me, but she was spot on about this one.
Another thing I’m enormously proud of, over the last ten years, is the regular ER readers’ lunches. I held the first one in January 2018 at Namaste Kitchen, unsure if anybody would want to come and feeling, in truth, a little apprehensive about stepping out from behind the protective curtain of anonymity. I needn’t have worried: over five years on, I’ve organised fifteen of them across ten different restaurants, and by my reckoning the best part of a hundred and fifty people have come to one or more of them.
In that time people have gone from being readers to friends, I’ve had some brilliant post-lunch boozy conversations in pubs and taprooms and nursed some corking Sunday morning hangovers. I always find those events a little nervy as everybody turns up, taking a register like I’m organising a school trip, fretting about whether everybody is present and correct and the restaurant knows who the vegans are, who has allergies and intolerances. And then, at some point after everybody is seated, the first dishes come out and I can let myself enjoy the good-natured hubbub: a wonderful serene calm settles over me like a blanket and I realise it’s all going to be all right. Again.
And the food at those events, my goodness. Whether it’s the Lyndhurst cooking up a storm with dishes that haven’t ever quite made it onto their menus (their stuffed courgette flowers were a particular treat), Clay’s putting together a series of showstopping tasting menus, never repeating a dish, never skipping a beat or, in the early days, I Love Paella making a special rabo de toro empanada I still think about some days, the food has always been incredible. Every restaurant raises its game, wanting to make something special and show off what it can do, and my readers and I are a truly lucky bunch.
The last one, at San Sicario, featured an artichoke flan in a bagna cauda sauce which was the stuff of salty, savoury dreams, along with a faultless duck ragu draped over golden ribbons of pasta and a dish of ox cheek cooked in Barolo until it had given up the fight completely. I thought San Sicario was a good restaurant before that virtual trip to Piedmont, afterwards I was certain of it. The next readers’ lunch, at Clay’s for the first time since the pandemic, is a joint celebration of my ten years and their five, and I already know it will be magical.
But more than that, those events well and truly remind me of something very important about Reading. It is a wonderful place, with so much going on – so much music and drama, so much food and drink, coffee and beer. From Bohemian Night to Readifolk, from Shakespeare in the Abbey Ruins to Reading Rep at the Junction, from Bastille Day to Cheesefeast, from Workhouse to C.U.P., from Double-Barrelled to the Retreat we live in an incredible town, still, despite the best efforts of those American chains, our landlords and the council.
Yet with the demise of local media, and the slow death of hyperlocal websites, people don’t always know that. I see so many people at my lunches who want to love Reading but haven’t yet found their tribe, their place, their favourite spots. I hope my lunches help them do that, and I hope my blog helps people do that too. If it’s helped you at all in that way, at any point over the last ten years, then not a moment of the time I’ve spent writing it has been wasted.
While I’m thanking people, it would be remiss not to mention the unsung heroes of the blog – the people who come and keep me company on reviews, letting me taste their food and, sometimes, letting me drag them to places they’d possibly rather not visit. By my reckoning I’ve had an incredible twenty-seven different dining companions over the course of the blog, which makes me sound like a second-rate Doctor Who. Some just turn up once, some have become regular fixtures.
They all add something completely different to the experience, for me, and always have something to say, whether it’s my mum judging the crockery (or the bins), my friend Jerry eating Japanese food for the first time ever in his sixties or, most recently, Emma showing off an impressive talent for smut. I never did go to Wetherspoons with Matt Rodda, but maybe that’s one for the next ten years.
And of course, I do have to say a particular thank you to one person. To Zoë, my fiancée – I’m still not used to how lovely it feels to use that word – who has been an ever-present for over five years, uncomplainingly joining me at all kinds of restaurants, from the sublime to the ridiculous, for providing me with good photos and even better copy (and the occasional expletive-laden revolt), and of course for upping my own expletive count. I can honestly say that I don’t know if this blog would have kept going without her support and encouragement. Even if it had, it would have been an much poorer place without her playing such an active role in it.
Last but not least, even though this is starting to sound like an overlong speech at an awards ceremony, I do have to thank all of you, again, for giving me some of your time every week to read about a random restaurant, even one you might never go to. I never take it for granted, but it’s been a real privilege to do this week in, week out. Ten years, eh? I bet it must feel like you’ve spent that long just reading this.
Anyway, as I said, for the next few weeks the blog will be given over to some special anniversary content. I’ll be covering the ten most significant restaurants to open in Reading in the last ten years (spoiler alert, Lemoni won’t be on there) and the ten saddest goodbyes of the decade (spoiler alert, Lemoni won’t be on there either) and then, just to give you all something to take exception to, I’ll be listing my entirely subjective view of Reading’s 50 best dishes right now.
But after that, we’ll be right back to business as usual. There’s a new Brazilian café out in Whitley I’ve heard about, and a Portuguese cafe just opened down the Oxford Road. People are telling me the new Lebanese restaurant on the Wokingham Road is well worth trying, and only this week a Korean fried chicken joint opened on Market Place. It never stops. And, as we all know, these places aren’t going to review themselves, are they?
This piece is part of Edible Reading at 10. See also:
La’De Kitchen closed in January 2024, and is apparently reopening as a separate restaurant called Yaprak which is allegedly under the same management/ownership. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
It kind of feels as if I’ve reviewed La’De Kitchen, the Turkish restaurant in Woodley, already, even though I haven’t. That’s partly because it’s featured on the blog before, by virtue of a delicious takeaway I reviewed back in March 2021. And I have eaten there once, a couple of months after that. It was for a friend’s birthday, during that weird period in 2021 when you could eat outside but not inside, and we all shivered under blankets and tried to persuade ourselves we were having a marvellous time. I remember the food, though, as being excellent.
Returning this week was a recognition, I think, that of all my to do list it was the most glaring omission, the place I really should have reviewed by now. Zoë and I turned up nice and early on a weekday evening to find the place largely empty, although it gradually filled up during the course of our meal. That didn’t surprise me, because it has developed a reputation over the last couple of years.
Of course, and I say this as a former Woodley resident, the fact that it’s in Woodley, always a rather a desert for restaurants, must help. “I remember how excited Woodley was when it found out it was getting Bosco Lounge”, Zoë told me, which gives you an idea how low expectations were set.
But also, it’s just really nicely done. The interior is chic, and the place got buzzy as more tables were occupied. I could easily imagine that on a busy Friday or Saturday night, the cocktails flowing, plenty of bums on those tastefully upholstered seats, it would feel like a very upmarket place to spend an evening. Maybe not on a par with their branch in Pangbourne, but lovely even so.
That said, La’De Kitchen is in some respects a different beast to the restaurant I ordered my takeaway from back in 2021. Back then Berkshire was its brave new frontier as they expanded from their original Muswell Hill branch. Fast forward two years and Muswell Hill is closed. Instead, La’De has spread across the Home Counties – Newbury, Camberley, Sunningdale – with a rogue branch in Hereford, of all places. So was it a different proposition now, and had they kept what was magical intact as they’d grown? I had a feeling I was about to find out.
The menu, though, was largely unchanged from my previous visit. It’s the familiar mixture of cold and hot meze, food from the grill (endearingly described as “Charcoal Productions”), some Turkish specialities (including pide) and a handful of less Anatolian choices. Some of these, the pizzas, take advantage of their having a suitable oven. The other two, described as the “Ritzy La’De Burger” and the “Ritzy La’De Chicken Burger”, badly need a rebrand: nothing would knowingly choose to be described as ritzy, not even – well, especially – the Ritz.
It’s a shame that most of the sharing main courses, the mixed grills and what have you, are sized and priced to serve three to four people, as opposed to the two to three on the menu on their website, as that limited what we could try.
The first sign that all might not run smoothly came when we placed our order – a couple of cold meze, a pair of hot meze and a main course each. “Would you like all of that to come at the same time?” asked our server, which I found bizarre. Yes, having ordered this much food I would naturally like it all dumped on the table at once so some of it can go cold: that must have been what I had in mind. Maybe they get some customers in a real rush to hightail it to Showcase Cinema, but I didn’t think we had that air about us. “This might be too much food”, our server also said. Well, maybe not it it’s nicely paced I thought, but didn’t say out loud.
Personally I’d have liked my cold meze first, then the hot meze and then my mains. And perhaps I should have said that out loud, but I didn’t, so all four of our starters came pretty much at once. They were something of an exercise in frustration. Possibly the best of them was Cypriot garlic sausage, grilled and crisp-edged, coarse and tasty without any dubious whiff of mystery meat.
Genuinely, I really enjoyed this dish, and I’m sorry to go there but I’m afraid I must: four pretty small pieces of what was presumably a single sausage was seven pounds fifty. If anything, the photo above makes the dish look bigger than it actually was. A handful of scruffy salad, over-sweet with dressing and pomegranate seeds, doesn’t conceal how small this particular small plate was. I know food is getting more expensive and something has to be right at the edge of the spectrum for me to call it out, but that’s where this was. It got me thinking about the sujuk at the sadly-departed Cairo Café: still, maybe that’s why Cairo Café has gone and this place is still there.
The other starter was even more of a disappointment because it’s a dish I’ve had and loved from La’De Kitchen more than once. Chargrilled octopus looked the part, that alluring fractal spiral I always love seeing on a plate. But whether this wasn’t marinated or cooked before being finished on the grill, the end result was tough, rubbery and heavy going. It was also another dish with an overreliance on balsamic and pomegranate seeds, the whole thing a little sickly-sweet. Zoe tried a few pieces and gave up – if the octopus had been great this would have been a stroke of luck, but instead it was a chore.
Were the cold meze better? Not really. Baba ganoush was probably the best of them, with a decent texture and an underlying note of smoke that told that particular aubergine’s origin story. But even then it was a little lacking in the complexity I was hoping for. But the real disappointment was the taramasalata: I’ve had this before from La’De Kitchen and I remember it being more a pastel shade, salty and moreish, a proper treat. This was Barbie-pink and one note, with more of Marie Rose than fish roe about it. As with the octopus Zoë tried a little and decided she couldn’t be doing with the calories. “It’s oddly sweet” she said, a theme across the starters. And I would say, in the main, that I’m a fussier eater than she is.
Here’s the really weird thing, though: one thing I’ve always loved about La’De Kitchen is its balloon bread – a beautiful inflated pita speckled with sesame seeds. When I ordered takeaway from that that first time, we had three of the blighters and I remember thinking that they were one of my favourite things about the meal. On this occasion – and bear in mind that we’d ordered two things you could reductively describe as a dip – they brought us one.
We broke it, we tore it, we dipped and spooned baba ganoush and taramasalata onto it, and then we thought “what can we do with the rest of these dips?” Did they expect us to eat taramasalata with a fork? So when the server swung by, we asked if we could have some more bread. Of course, of course, they said. It did not materialise.
By this point I was drinking my pint of Efe and Zoë was on a mocktail (“Safe Sex On The Beach” apparently, although good luck finding one without sewage in this country) the restaurant was slightly busier and I was adjusting my expectations. One of my favourite Turkish restaurants is Zigana in Didcot, and although I love the place I’d be the first to admit that their meze is hardly the main attraction: it’s only when your food has spent time on their charcoal grill that things start getting good. Perhaps La’De Kitchen would be the same.
Our server came over and asked if we were ready for our mains, and we said why not. He gestured at our mostly uneaten baba ganoush and taramasalata, although he chose not to ask why we’d left so much. Funny, that.
“Would you like me to take those away?” “he asked.
“No thank you, but what I’d really like is some more bread to eat with them.”
“Of course, of course” came the reply. Of course, more bread never materialised. By this point I had rationalised to myself that, given that the two dips were either side of middling, he might have been unintentionally doing me a favour. Besides, all the more room for mains.
When I had my takeaway from La’De Kitchen all those years ago it was all about one dish: the pistachio adana, an impeccable lamb kofte studded with pistachio, a truly delicious masterpiece of grilling. Well, Zoë quite sensibly called shotgun on it for this visit and I have to hand it to her, because it was the one thing about La’De Kitchen that age has not withered.
If anything, it was better than before: what used to be a coating of pistachio has morphed into something more beautiful, a sort of hyper-real, hyper-green pistachio pesto which elevated it from great to greater still. Paired with gorgeous, nutty pearls of bulghur wheat (and more sticky-dressed, pomegranate-strewn salad: you can’t have everything) this really was a fantastic dish, albeit one keeping bad company. If everything we ate that night had even approached the quality of the pistachio adana, I would be firing up the hype machine and getting out my virtual megaphone: nothing even remotely did, but I still want to say that the restaurant is almost worth visiting for this dish alone.
I’m prepared to concede that I might have ordered badly, when it came to my main. I asked my server what distinguished the chicken Iskender from your common or garden shish, and he told me that it came served on a bed of pita with a spicy tomato sauce (called halep) and yoghurt. Should I have known from that what I was about to get? Perhaps. Perhaps I should have known that it was cubes of chicken and squares of pita in a cast iron skillet, with a spooge of slightly bland tomato sauce and a pile of yoghurt on top. If I’d known, I might have opted for something else.
But even judging it by the standards of the dish, it didn’t quite work. Unlike the plating of the adana, which gave you plenty of negative space, this was crammed into the skillet, making it fiddly to eat. I actually loved the squares of pita, which had enough about them to stand up to the sauce. But the chicken was firm – just the right side of bouncy – without being tender, and the sauce was unremarkable. It was almost like they’d taken all the glory of meat fresh off a charcoal grill, and wiped it out by drowning it in something bla. I probably ordered something I might not have chosen, but I still expected it to be better than this.
“What do you think?” said Zoë, who by this point had given me enough of her adana for me to realise a travesty had taken place.
“It’s, well… it’s not as good as yours. Meat and tomato sauce in a skillet feels like something I could have picked off the al forno section of the menu in a Prezzo.”
“You know this used to be a Prezzo, don’t you?”
Full but unfulfilled, we waited in vain to get somebody’s attention to pay our bill. The restaurant wasn’t hugely busy at this stage, but from the difficulty we had you’d think it was. All the time that blasted taramasalata and baba ganoush sat there on the table. It irked me, and yet I knew I’d dodged a bullet: I’m a big fan of eating my feelings, but not necessarily when those feelings are disappointment. Eventually we got our bill, and some time after that we managed to pay it. It said we’d had two lots of balloon bread, which by this point was just rubbing it in.
“That was the best part of a hundred quid!” said Zoë incredulously as we made our way to the bus stop, pausing only for a tactical foray into Waitrose to buy some chocolate to cheer ourselves up. “Seriously, you need to find some other people to do these fucking reviews with you.”
“I know, I know” I said. “The saddest thing is that we could have gone here” – I gestured at Adda Hut, which looked far quieter than La’De Kitchen had been – “and you’d have had a better meal. We’d have spent a lot less money, too.”
I am so sorry that I didn’t like La’De Kitchen more. I wonder if it’s them or me, if I caught them on a bad night or if something has happened to the genuinely exciting restaurant that opened in Woodley a few years ago. Is it the inevitable consequence of a chain growing, or what happens when you focus on margins? Either way I ordered a mixture of dishes I know well and some new things and only one dish – that pistachio adana – took me back to the beginning.
Beyond that, it felt like a shadow of its former self. I found myself thinking you’d be better off at Bakery House, or Tasty Greek Souvlaki, or even catching the train to Didcot and giving Zigana a whirl. Or trying Istanbul Mangal in Tilehurst Village, or the new Lebanese place down the Wokingham Road. I truly wish it wasn’t so, but them’s the breaks. But we’ll always have that pistachio adana, so perhaps the trick is to go there, order that, cut your losses and leave. It’s an extraordinary dish, and without it this rating would have been far lower. It’s worth making a pilgrimage just for that. For now, at least.
Pappadams closed in November 2025 and is due to reopen as a new restaurant called Anjappar. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
I got an email from WordPress the other day confirming that they were renewing my domain name for another year and that, more than anything, reminded me that a significant anniversary was coming up: next month my blog turns 10 years old. What started as a little hobby has become, well, a slightly less little hobby but I can’t quite believe that a decade later I’m still reviewing restaurants and that people are still reading those reviews. There will be more about that in the weeks ahead – for which I apologise in advance – but it has left me in rather a reflective mood lately (and I apologise for that, too).
In the first year of the blog, back when Alt Reading and the Evening Post were still a thing, I published a total of 38 reviews of places in Reading. Of those 38 restaurants just over half are still trading today – a statistic which surprised me, although it does include the likes of Zero Degrees, Côte, Five Guys, Mission Burrito, Malmaison, Bel And The Dragon: chains who are still going, many years later.
But when I look back at the independent restaurants I visited in the first year of the blog, the ones that remain open in 2023, there are only three that I’ve never returned to since. Pau Brasil, although I know it has its fans, has never tempted me back. I’ve never got round to Coconut, although I did review their takeaway at the start of last year. And last but not least, there’s Pappadams, the subject of this week’s review.
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I ended up on holiday in Bordeaux almost by accident. I was attending a wedding in a château in the Dordogne (even typing this, I feel I have to explain that this is just not the sort of thing I ever, ever do) on a Saturday, and wanted to make a holiday of it. So where to have a city break afterwards? I considered Biarritz and San Sebastián, even contemplated hopping on a train back to my old favourite Montpellier before choosing Bordeaux mainly because our flight home departed from there, and we had to drop a hire car there anyway. I’d never heard of anybody, really, who had spent any time there but surely it would be a nice place to spend a week?
Well, as you can probably tell from the fact that this feature even exists, it is indeed a very nice place to spend a week. France’s sixth biggest city, nestled in the curve of the Garonne, it has an awful lot to offer. A wonderful museum of wine (which I didn’t get round to visiting) and a number of galleries (ditto), but just as importantly a gorgeous historic centre – it’s the largest urban development to be recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in France, including Paris.
More to the point, wine bars are everywhere, to the extent where it’s almost worth having your main meal at lunchtime, taking advantage of the superb menus du jour, and then propping up a bar in the evening, eating small plates or charcuterie and enjoying an unbeatable selection of wines by the glass. As a way to while away the days, eating and drinking as the Bordelais do takes some beating, and it made life back in Blighty feel decidedly monochrome and humdrum. As I’ve said many times, Reading needs a great wine bar: Veeno simply doesn’t cut it.
It’s not perfect, I should add. The tram system was a little creaky and unreliable, and although my hotel was lovely it was in an area near the train station that verged on feeling unsafe after sunset and pretty scuzzy even in the mornings. If you go, stay in the historic centre. And choose your arrival and departure dates carefully: a lot of the good places are closed on Sundays and Mondays, and some of the wine bars don’t open on Tuesdays either.
I left having eaten and drunk superbly – and done some great people-watching and window-shopping into the bargain – but still feeling like I hadn’t completely got to the heart of the city. An eight hour wait in an airport almost completely lacking aircon, in thirty degree heat, thanks to BA flight delays also slightly marred my memories of the place. Bordeaux: great city, shitty airport (the tourist board can have that one for free).
But then something rather magical happened which made me see the city in a different light: totally by chance, my friends James and Liz had booked a long weekend there the week after I got home. Would I mind giving them some recommendations, they asked? So effectively much of this city guide was road tested before it was even written, and seeing pictures and iMessages from the places I had visited only a few days before brought it home to me: Bordeaux really is wonderful place.
Strip away the frustrations of the trams, or the location of my hotel, or the hellish journey home and I could see the city, through the eyes of my delighted friends, as it really was – a beautiful part of the world, and a destination in its own right for anyone who loves food and drink and being a flâneur. I never seem to see it talked about in the way that, say, Lyon is, but I wonder if that’s because the French don’t want everybody in on the secret. I’ve come to the conclusion that France keeps all the best wines, James said, after a beautiful lunch at Zéphirine, below. They might take that approach to cities, too.
Where to eat
1. Zéphirine
Zéphirine may have been the single best meal of the trip, a lovely, tasteful and spacious dining room where the nicest staff look after you and serve you the most beautiful food. They have an à la carte menu and a tasting menu, but the only difference is that with the former you pick your main course and with the latter they let you try all three. The former is more than enough food, including a raft of small plates to share, and costs a very reasonable sixty Euros.
Everything we had was fresh and gorgeous, with a real emphasis on outstanding local produce, to the extent that many of the things I remember were the vegetarian dishes. Ricotta piled onto airy lozenges of focaccia, topped with translucent discs of radish was an absolute joy, and duckling in a deep, olive-studded sauce was a miraculous thing. But the veg that came with it – tender, just-cooked carrots and potatoes totally permeated with flavour (“it’s seasoned to the core” was James’ verdict the following week, “I just don’t understand how”) – were, if anything, even better.
All that and we enjoyed our meal two tables down from Kyle MacLachlan – well dressed, painfully polite, fastidious and on his phone for much of the meal. I considered getting an autograph for my brother, who watched Dune so much as a teenager that he could recite the script verbatim, but thought better of it. I found out later, on Wikipedia, that MacLachlan owns a vineyard: I bet he loved Bordeaux.
There are wine bars in both sections of this list, and whether they’re down as places to eat or to drink is often largely dictated by whether I mainly ate or drank there. But Echo, which was probably my favourite meal of the holiday, has a menu with starters, mains and desserts, and so although technically a wine bar felt more like a restaurant to me. It was an incredibly cool room packed with Bordeaux’s most beautiful types, although Zoë and I did spend much of the meal trying to work out whether the blustering Brit at the next table, a ruddy-faced spitting image of Stanley Johnson, was wearing a wig or not (my money was on it being a syrup).
More importantly, Echo had a superb wine list both by the bottle and the glass and a menu where you could gladly eat anything on it without suffering a dud dish. It featured quite a lot of fusion and slow food, and I particularly loved the vitello tonnato topped with – a genius idea, this – an XO sauce of enormous depth. That sauce also turned up in a tuna tataki, harmonising with rare sashimi-grade fish and an outrageously delicious lacquered aubergine. A buttery Breton biscuit crowned with a plume of lemon cream, criss-crossed with thyme emulsion, was quite the coup de grâce. It’s also worth noting that unlike most of the places on this list, Echo is open on both Sundays and Mondays. Lucky Bordeaux.
The district of Chartrons is north of the historic centre, on the same side of the Garonne and just before you get to the futuristic statement piece that is the Cité du Vin. All the research I did suggested that this was the bobo capital of Bordeaux and so, predictably, I loved the place. Rue Notre Dame is full of restaurants, bars, cafés and boutiques, and an absurdly pretty place to wander from one of those to the next. It’s no coincidence that three of the places on this list sit on that single stretch. But Yarra, even in that exalted company, was rather special.
It’s unprepossesing out front but cavernous out back, a series of stone-walled rooms with mismatched furniture, cool by virtue of not trying too hard. But the real draw is out back, a gorgeous secluded courtyard where I quite happy could have spent an entire evening making like a Bordelais. As you can probably guess from the name, the owners are Australian. That shows in the welcome (“rain water or angry water?” asked our server to see if we wanted still or sparkling). It also shows in the wines, because although I had several crackers by the glass my favourite was a Yarra Valley Riesling.
All that would get it a place on this list but the small plates are more than the icing on the cake. I defy you to look at a menu like Yarra’s and not order something, even if like me you have dinner plans later that evening. Octopus tacos with, of all things, pineapple were a joyous find but my absolute favourite were the anchovy pintxos – salty anchovy, mozzarella, fennel and guindilla assembled on a thin slice of bread, bright with oil and pesto. Might sound like overkill, but without doubt one of the most happiness-inducing things I ate all week. That you got four of them for six Euros made something ridiculously good ridiculous value.
We had lunch at Lauza, a place which managed to be sober and grown-up without being stuffy, and I liked it very much. On the very outer edge of the historic city and a stone’s throw from one of my favourite coffee places, Café Piha, it served a clever and satisfying lunch which was precise, well thought through and excellent value.
You can eat off the à la carte, but at lunchtime the trick is to team the starter and dessert from that menu with the plat du jour, which brings the whole thing in at a silly twenty-eight Euros. Given that the mains on the à la carte cost around thirty on their own, that’s a hard offer to refuse. I particularly enjoyed a tartare made of a mixture of veal and herring which ramped up the umami before smothering the whole thing in a delicious, comforting potato foam, and I envied Zoë’s dessert, a chocolate cremeux which looked even better than my selection of cheeses.
Racines was even closer to the line between sober and stuffy, but managed just about to stay on the right side of it despite looking like a place that said “business lunch” more than casual meal. That might also derive from the location, slightly out of the historic centre and bang opposite a huge glass-fronted building which housed, as it turned out, a bank.
But that’s not entirely fair to Racines and it didn’t encounter me at my best: it was my final meal in Bordeaux and I’d just been told by my hotel that I’d need to rush it because no taxi driver wanted to brave the Tour De France disruption after three pm. The fact remains that Racines, owned by self-taught Scottish chef Daniel Gallacher, is an excellent place turning out formidable food.
The lunch menu gives you a choice of two starters, mains and desserts for a crazy thirty-two Euros and in terms of quality and quantity I thought it was even better than the comparably priced Lauza. A prawn tartare absolutely shone with citrus freshness but was perfected with a savoury bouillon with notes of Thai basil, and a substantial, sublimely cooked piece of hake was served with bergamot, sorrel and oyster cream in an exceptionally complex, well orchestrated dish.
And then all the whistles and bells fell away for a dessert which was just cherries, verbena and fromage blanc – simple, unshowy and beautiful; people talk about life being a bowl of cherries, but I didn’t know it could be this good. I left full, profoundly grateful for Racines’ great wine list and efficient aircon and slightly sad that I couldn’t try the full tasting menu available at dinner. I’ll just have to go back.
We discovered Papouch at the end of Rue Notre Dame on our amble through Chartrons early in the holiday and loved the look of the menu so much that we changed plans there and then to book it for our last night. It was a very smart choice. The staff – bright and infectiously friendly – moved another table out on to the pavement so we could enjoy the buzz of a warm al fresco Bordeaux evening. And all the food was simply gorgeous – all the menu is small plates for sharing and we did our best to have a crack at most of it.
That included wonders like new potatoes smashed and topped with kimchee, satay and a deep mushroom XO sauce. We also adored a khobez topped with yoghurt, mint, honey, cumin, a slow-cooked egg yolk and nuggets of an intense sausage something like merguez. And I really loved a dish they called “crispy rice spicy fish” that was like a cross between arancini, rice crackers and fishcakes, quite inimitable and a glorious surprise of a thing.
None of the dishes cost more than fifteen Euros, none was less than outstanding and I could have gone back the next night, ordered all the things I missed out on and doubtless had an equally magnificent evening. Only later did I realise, leafing through their Instagram, that the restaurant had barely been open a month. It has a bright future ahead of it.
A lot of my Bordeaux restaurants were full of light, inventive and seasonal food, often light on the carbs. That, combined with clocking up nearly 20000 steps a day, meant that I put on less weight on this holiday than on most I can recall. But I picked somewhere more traditional for lunch with Zoë’s family, stopping in Bordeaux for the day before flying home from the family wedding, and it didn’t let me down.
Brasserie Bordelaise is a much more old-school choice, a surprisingly big restaurant with large, sturdy tables and large sturdy chairs where large sturdy people can eat large sturdy meals. And I absolutely loved that, helped along by a brigade of hard-working, charming staff.
This is all about the classics, so some of us feasted on oysters while I had a cool, subtle and utterly delicious gazpacho. Next to me Zoë and her parents demolished a gorgeous-looking charcuterie board. I didn’t order that well – my roasted chicken main was probably the only misfire of the meal – but around me everybody else enthused over their bavette, fillet steak, beef cheek or steak tartare. This is the place to go for that kind of hearty, fortifying stuff; I remember looking at the menu to order my dessert and thinking wistfully about the cassoulet less travelled. By my in-laws-to-be had a wonderful lunch, and we made some brilliant memories, and I found that mattered much more.
On the night we’d set aside for wine bars and getting drunk, we struggled. This is probably a very British thing to say, but sometimes the wine bars had the foreplay to shagging ratio all wrong, telling customers at the next table about the range of wines on offer while you waited to be served to the extent where your stomach thought your throat had been cut (I know, this manages to make me sound both like a Philistine and a pisshead). We left one wine bar where an hour in we’d only had one glass apiece and stumbled into Buvette looking for refuge.
It was a good decision. It’s a stylish-looking spot with a good, buzzy atmosphere, nice high tables, a compact but appealing selection of wines by the glass and a range of small plates which rescued the evening. It reminded me a little of Malaga’s Casa Lola, one of my favourite places for eating and drinking, and everything we had was top notch. I especially enjoyed the goat’s cheese, drizzled with honey and surrounded by crumpled rosettes of speck and really top-notch tinned smoked tuna from a cannery called Pirate, perfect winkled out with a fork and popped onto thin slices of baguette.
Bordeaux has a couple of cool-looking food halls, one near the station and another, I seem to remember, up near the Cité du Vin. But the main food market, the Marché des Capucins, looks like something out of the Eighties and comes to life at lunchtime, becoming steadily busier and with more traders as the week goes on. Like a lot of these markets, it’s a mixture of produce and food traders with an embarrassment of riches – oysters at one place, moules at another, pintxos at a third.
I’ve been to many places like this, from Rotterdam’s Markthal to Barcelona’s Boqueria – my favourite remains Malaga’s peerless Atarazanas – but I’m not sure I’ve ever visited one as scruffily vibrant as the Marché des Capucins. I would have really struggled to decide where to eat, but I was lucky enough to stumble on a blog post by the excellent Lost In Bordeaux and so opted for Guet À Pan which had an appealing lunch menu. I wasn’t entirely sold on my truffled croque monsieur – the bread was a little hard and unyielding – but my starter, a pared-back trio of burrata, peaches and local tomatoes – was as enchanting as anything I ate all week. Reflecting on my lunch, Carrie Bradshaw style, I couldn’t help but wonder: maybe restaurant bloggers should be twinned, like towns? If so, bagsy me Bordeaux.
I can’t go away on holiday in summer without seeking out ice cream or gelato, and Bordeaux was no exception. I saw plenty of places dotted around the centre but having done my research I zeroed in on Henriette & Olga and loved it so much that I went back another couple of times before the week was out. It’s very luxe, in a gorgeous spot on rue du Pas-Saint-Georges, one of my favourite Bordeaux streets, just opposite a very nice perfumery I never quite managed to visit.
Although it had a great range of flavours I couldn’t move beyond my two favourites, a chocolate which prioritised depth over sweetness and a caramel with indulgent, almost-burnt sugar and plenty of complexity; I blame the fact that the orange blossom honey and pine nut gelato was sold out every time I visited. Anyway, it was up there with the best gelato I’ve had anywhere else – in the UK, in Montpellier, even in Bologna, and I really loved the place. Delightful staff, too, and a lovely terrace out front if you fancy people watching.
I had a post-dinner drink at l’Officine one night and almost immediately filed it under I wish I’d spent an evening here. It was a lovely old-school wine bar, all simple wooden chairs, mosaic-tiled floor and honey-coloured stone walls, and it was absolutely rammed with people living the good life. It classed as one of my biggest regrets of the holiday, so I recommended it to James and Liz who promptly booked it for their Saturday night in the city (it’s bookable online, which is worth knowing).
So they went, and I saw their pictures of the other rooms in the bar, the ones I never graduated to, and their pictures of boards groaning with cheese and charcuterie and of tartines topped with cherry tomatoes and roasted peppers. Looking through, and wishing I was there, I was 90% delighted for them, 10% envious. That’s a good ratio for me, by the way: normally when I look at people’s holiday photos on Instagram it’s far closer to 30-70.
Bordeaux isn’t really a beer destination in the same way as, say, Montpellier or Paris. There are the grand total of about two verified venues on Untappd for the city and finding craft beer was tricky. I guess on one level that should be no surprise for a city more synonymous with wine than arguably any other in the world, but I still thought there would be an active craft beer scene, perhaps smaller but more vociferous.
I did however really enjoy Backyard, which is the Bordeaux outpost and tap room of Lille brewery Brique House. They had a great terrace looking out on the place des Quinconces which was sort of what the front terrace of the Oakford would look like if it was a hundred times more classy, they did very passable pizza with spicy sausage and splodges of ricotta, and I really enjoyed New Queen In Town (no doubt a reference to Zoë’s arrival in the city), their entry level IPA.
James and Liz also visited on their trip to Bordeaux – it’s open Sunday and Monday, which again is the exception rather than the rule – made inroads into the rest of their beer list and were very impressed. Oh, and if you do visit Backyard the interior has to be seen to be believed: the 90s really are back with a vengeance.
If you wanted an illustration that craft beer is yet to gain a foothold in Bordeaux Space Factory, the only Untappd verified venue in the historic centre, is a great illustration of that. That’s not to say I didn’t like it – it had a certain stripped back charm with grungy lighting and a mixture of Tollix stools and reclaimed chairs, and all the craft beer lovers in there seemed to be having a lovely time. But it lacked the cool of, say, Paris’ Liquiderie or the polish of some of Montpellier’s burgeoning beer scene.
That said I still had a lovely time there and would cautiously recommend it if you tire of wine – although why would you? – and want a big glass of something cold and crisp. The evening I went there was a tap takeover by relatively local brewery Brasserie Jukebox, from just up the road in Cognac, another place synonymous with an alcoholic drink that isn’t beer. I rather enjoyed their stuff, as it goes.
Beer Trotter, a little bottle shop on Chartrons’ rue Notre Dame, was my favourite beer venue of the trip. It’s small and unassuming, it’s only open shop hours – so closed at lunchtime and after 7.30 at night – but it’s a really lovely, modest little place. They have an impressive range of beers from further afield in Europe – I spotted some I really wanted to try from Sofia, of all places – and they stock seemingly everything from local brewery Azimut Brasserie.
But what I really loved was that they had just the two beers on keg, and what they lacked in quantity they easily made up for in quality. I had an IPA from Basqueland Brewing, just over the border, which was probably the nicest beer I had on my holiday, but even more exciting – for Zoë more than me – was a proper beer white whale, Sang Bleu by Cantillon. Zoë raved about it to the owner, and between our French and his English we managed to cobble together an understanding that the man really loves his Belgian beers.
I left wishing I could have stayed longer, wishing too that my luggage had more room in it to cram with cans to take home but most of all thinking that when I come back to Bordeaux I plan to rent an Airbnb in Chartrons, find somewhere wonderful for lunch every day and then pop in for a tipple at Beer Trotter before my inevitable siesta.
Bordeaux has a small but excellent coffee scene, and during the week I think I managed to try out most of the key players. Probably my favourite of the bunch, although they were all good, was SIP which occupies a lovely spot on a street corner and has a lovely terrace which catches the sun – I very much enjoyed multiple lattes there watching the world go by. The inside is also very attractive in a midcentury-chic sort of way, and deceptively big with a rather fetching mezzanine floor.
They also serve a great-looking brunch menu, and although I didn’t try the food there I enviously saw very attractive dishes turning up at neighbouring tables (the pancakes with bacon and maple syrup looked especially tempting). Instead we settled for a pain au chocolat each from the bakery opposite, which was predictably brilliant.
The service was enthusiastic and hugely welcoming, but more than that it was a great advert for Bordeaux in general. When the chap realised this was our first visit and that we loved our coffee, he wrote a list of recommendations on a scrap of paper for us. It had four names on it – three of which we’d already visited and one of which we planned to go to before the end of our holiday. They also happen to be the last four entries on this list. But although I loved them all, SIP remained my favourite.
Black List, just the other side of the Cathedral Saint-André from SIP and Space Factory, was a lovely little spot and again, did a knockout coffee. Little is the operative word here, because it’s a very chic, very long, very thin room with benches down one side and no room, really, to sit on the other. So you all sit side by side in a line sharing a view, which I found I rather liked, although it reminded me of drinking at Flat White on Berwick Street before third wave coffee had exploded in the UK and almost nobody knew what a flat white was.
Service, as in so many of these places, was outstanding and the coffee was nectar. I only subsequently found out, sadly too late, that they also have a “boutique de donuts” – what a beautiful trio of words – around the corner called Snickelfritz. Maybe it’s best for my waistline that I didn’t realise that in time, but I’d like to have found out whether they can give Pippin Doughnuts a run for their money.
Now, if we’re talking about sweet treats to accompany your coffee the prize for that surely has to go to Cafe Piha, which is just over the way from Lauza, on a very pretty street called rue des Ayres (which I assume has nothing to do with Pam Ayres, much as I wish it had). Cafe Piha does excellent coffee, its outside seating gives you a great view of the city’s comings and goings and the inside is beautifully airconditioned, even if the person in charge of the sound system likes reggae a lot more than I ever will.
But the other reason to go there is that they sell cookies from BATCH, a place a couple of doors down whose A-board boasts that they sell the city’s largest cookies. Well, that might be true – they make even a Ben’s Cookie look positively anaemic – but more importantly a better cookie is hard to imagine. Tectonic plates of biscuit, only faintly held together by huge seams of molten chocolate, they are both a struggle to eat tidily and a delight to eat messily.
I imagine if you left them to cool they’d be even better, although I never had the patience for that, and although you can buy them to take away two doors down there was something about polishing one off with a silky, poised latte that, to me, made for a perfect mid-afternoon pick me up. You know, on the afternoons when I wasn’t in an ice cream parlour or sipping a rare lambic beer.
KURO (they do seem to like block capitals in Bordeaux) was the first place I had coffee in the city, and after three days of challenging café au lait – or nothing at all – in the Dordogne it was an emotional moment to be reunited with the good stuff. It has a lovely spot just down from the opera house, round the corner from Backyard, and I can’t tell you how grateful I was that it was quite that good, after slumming it for what felt like ages. If you do stop there for a coffee I also recommend a spot of wine shopping at L’Intendant, an incredible shop built around a spiral staircase where the wines just get grander and more tempting as you go along. I came home with a 2016 Pomerol, only slightly irked that I didn’t have the money and the space in my luggage to properly ransack the place..
Last but not least, L’Alchemiste was the coffee place I didn’t get round to until my final day. It’s arguably the godfather of the Bordeaux coffee scene and, unlike the majority of the cafés in this list, they roast their own beans. And if I didn’t love it quite as much as the others that might have said more about me – harried on my last day, rushing down a coffee before my hastily moved-forward lunch at Racines – than it did about L’Alchemiste itself.
What I will say is that my coffee was outstanding, although I never expected anything less, and that their terrace out front, on the absurdly pretty rue du Vielle Tour, just up from the eighteenth century Porte Dijeaux, is a marvellous place to sip, observe and wish you had just another couple of days in the city. That last bit – well, that might just have been me, too.
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Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025, although the menu and ownership are apparently unchanged.
It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.
And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.
But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.
Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.
Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.
Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?
At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.
I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.
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