Many of my best laid plans have gone amiss this year, and this week’s review is no exception. It was all sorted: Zoë had the day off and we’d decided to take an off peak train to a quiet restaurant I’ve always loved, to chance our arm and enjoy a wonderful, peaceful lunch. We knew it would be our last chance to do anything like that before the new variant swept the country and hibernation became the only sensible option. And I was literally putting my coat and my scarf on in the hall when the shout came from upstairs. “I can’t fucking believe it. I’ve tested positive.”
The week that followed was nothing like I expected, under virtual house arrest and watching with concern as my other half ached, shivered and sweltered, couldn’t sleep at night and catnapped fitfully during the day. When she was awake, the cough seemed to come from the depths of her soul. After an encouraging start, she was unable to taste a thing for over a week. There were regular checks of her blood oxygen levels, and her temperature, and every morning I did a lateral flow test. Every morning, surreally, it came back negative.
Equally surreally, according to government guidelines I was allowed to carry on going out and about, shopping, even eating in restaurants if I wanted to. Of course I didn’t, because that would be nuts, so with the exception of a ridiculous dash to four different pharmacies to pick up steroids for Zoë’s asthma I spent a week on the sofa, making lunch and dinner, making a steady stream of hot beverages, a veritable Laurence Nightingale. My main task, I tended to think, was not to appear as worried as I was. And I reckon I did a reasonable job of that, even if writing this lets the cat out of the bag.
But there was one more curveball. This review was meant to come out last Friday, but the night after I ordered this particular takeaway Zoë’s breathing got so bad that I had to call 111, to translate for her because she couldn’t complete a full sentence with the air in her lungs. And at midnight an ambulance turned up, incongruously outside our little terraced house and took her away.
And so began five anxious days of text messages back and forward, keeping everybody in the loop, hoping things would get better rather than worse. I had a couple of phone conversations with Zoë – no visiting in the Covid ward – but each time she ran out of puff and energy after about fifteen minutes. And sleeping at night was a challenge on a busy ward full of bleeps and general mayhem, so she grabbed rest where she could.
Every day I traipsed to the hospital with a bag full of the latest things she’d requested: biscuits; samosas; Lucozade; M&S sandwiches (even without a sense of taste the hospital food is diabolical, apparently). And every day a nurse would meet me at the door, take the tote bag from me and whisk it away. She was there on the other side but I couldn’t see her, so near and yet so far. And so I went home, to a house suddenly too big and too quiet, to self-medicate by eating chocolate and binging Game Of Thrones.
To cut a long story short, she was discharged this week and is resting at home. She’s recovered enough strength to be frustrated that she can’t do more (and to order me around extremely efficiently), but not enough that she can do much beyond directing operations from bed or from the sofa. And everybody has been so lovely – to her, to me, to both of us. I’ve been overwhelmed by the offers of help and expressions of sympathy, and I’m beyond glad to have her back where she belongs.
This virus is no joke, especially if you have underlying health conditions, and it’s likely Zoë contracted the older, less serious variant. So I hope you’re all careful this Christmas – although, as always, I really feel for the hospitality sector which has, yet again, been hung out to dry by the Tories. People are cancelling reservations in their droves, and there hasn’t been a whisper of financial support from the government. As if last year hadn’t been bad enough for them, they now face another December without the bookings that tide them over for the months ahead.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago when all this was just the ghost of Covid yet to come, I sat down at my computer and decided who to order a contactless Deliveroo dinner from to give me something to review and to give you something to read. Zoë didn’t join me, because all she could taste were very salty and very sweet things, so she ordered a sweet and sour chicken from Kokoro instead. I suspect that even with Covid she had a better meal than I did (whoops: cat out of the bag again).
I picked 7Bone because I quite fancied a burger and I’d heard decent reports of their takeaways, including ones saying that they travelled well. And it’s been a long time since I ate there – I’ve not been back since I went on duty over four years ago – so it felt like revisiting their food was long overdue. And their menu is good, if a little too wedded to the idea that “dirty” (or, in some cases and for some reason, “dirrrty”), is a Good Thing when it comes to food: a great range of snacks, a good variety of burgers and fried chicken sandwiches and plenty of options for vegetarians and vegans.
For someone used to eating at Honest, you could easily feel spoiled for choice here. The burgers are all under ten pounds, although you order fries separately. And there was a small section of Christmas specials. 7Bone, you might not be surprised to hear, spells Christmas “xxxmas”: I guess that’s its schtick. Anyway I chose a burger and three snacks, none of which was described as unhygienic, and my order came to just under thirty pounds, not including driver tip.
I always hate writing this next bit, but I’m afraid this delivery was not without problems. I ordered at about twenty to seven, and eventually when my order arrived I saw from the ticket (which also said something facile like I’m dirty – take me home!: somebody in their marketing department thinks it’s still 1997 and hasn’t cancelled their subscription to Loaded) that it was due to be collected from the restaurant at seven. My driver didn’t collect it until twenty-five past seven, and he took an impressive three minutes to get it to my front door. But most of it was lukewarm, so what went wrong?
At a guess, the driver shortage is starting to affect Deliveroo: I was told they had a rider for me at 19:08, and then at 19:13 Deliveroo announced that they were still trying to get a rider. “We’re delivering lots of orders right now” said the following status update – which, when you’re still waiting for yours to arrive, sounds a lot like rubbing it in. Deliveroo also does this deeply cheeky thing of moving the goalposts in real time, so the estimated time of arrival of your order gets later and later. And this means you can never chase them about it, because technically it’s not late. Even when the driver was en route the message in the app said “Great news! Your order should be with you by 20:04”. How it was great news that my driver might take forty minutes to complete a five minute drive was a mystery to me.
It was hard to escape the conclusion that the order had been sitting there waiting for a rider for the best part of half an hour, and the temperature of the food tended to back that up. And, as so often with complicated supply chains, it’s hard to work out where the blame lies. It’s not the rider’s fault – he took next to no time to get the food to me – but is it Deliveroo’s fault for not having enough riders? Or should the restaurant, once it became clear that the order wasn’t going to go out for some time, have cooked another one?
All that leaves us in familiar territory this year on the blog, the slightly melancholy world of “if only it had been hot”. Take the burger: if it had been hot I think it could have been marvellous. I’d gone for the “Triple B”, which comes with blue cheese, bacon, bacon jam and truffle blue cheese dressing, and even lukewarm it was quite pleasant. To their credit, 7Bone allows you to either have a single burger pink or well done or two smashed patties. I’d gone for the latter, and it worked rather nicely. I mainly got the salty tang of blue cheese and little in the way of truffle, and the bacon jam was as inconsistently applied as the Covid regulations last year, but even so it wasn’t half bad. It made me want to go back and try it in their restaurant at some point next year, when hopefully it won’t take the best part of half an hour to get from the kitchen to my table.
Rather than go for the fries, I’d chosen the festive special, crispy fried roasties. I’m not sure how something can be fried and a roastie – surely you’re either one or the other – but these were smashed and fried potatoes dusted in sage salt and accompanied with a gloopy cheese sauce which I didn’t especially take to. The potatoes themselves were decent, though I wasn’t entirely convinced they were worth five pounds fifty. If only they’d been hot.
That said, the Korean fried chicken would not have been great even it had been piping hot. Gochujang, done right, has a beautiful taste which is simultaneously somehow sweet, hot, sour, spicy and savoury and I absolutely love it. This was the fake tan of gochujang – the colour was there but the taste was all wrong, just acrid, one-dimensional chilli. And while we’re on the subject, calling something fried chicken writes a cheque that promises crinkle and crunch, but this stuff couldn’t cash that cheque at all: texturally, it was a dud. I’m not a fan of restaurants turning “tender” from an adjective to a noun – it’s as bad, in its way, as “gifting” – but it does imply that the dish should at least be tender. This was as hard and unforgiving as Priti Patel. And even less appetising.
Last but not least, I had a snack which I had to order for smut value alone. I’d chosen “Coq skins” (it’s a shame they didn’t have the nerve to call them coq scratchings) because I’ve long felt that crispy skin is the absolute best part of a chicken. These were in danger of changing my mind, with an overwhelming taste of nothing but salt, salt and more salt, with a little underlying fat to make you feel profoundly icky afterwards. They could have shrivelled a slug at twenty paces. I didn’t eat many of these, because I didn’t want to do lasting damage to my love of chicken skin. Zoë, having finished off her Kokoro upstairs, probably could have tasted them, but I don’t think she’d have thanked me for the leftovers.
It might be for the best that the year is limping to an end, because I’m running out of ways to say fundamentally the same things: that a takeaway is not the best way to enjoy a restaurant’s food and that a delivery app is not the best way to order a takeaway. Those links in the chain mean there’s more that can go wrong, and if something does go wrong – which it does often – it’s harder to get somebody to take responsibility. In a restaurant if your food was lukewarm you’d send it back, but with deliveries that’s not really an option. In a restaurant, you wouldn’t pay. With a delivery, you already have. It’s a shame, because in the current climate we might all be ordering a lot more takeaways.
So on this evidence I would probably give 7Bone another try when it’s safe to go back and eat in, but I wouldn’t rush to order a delivery from them again. But, writing this in December 2021, I’m tempted to say “who cares?”. It’s just a takeaway, from a restaurant which was probably busy and stressed, in a climate where the cost of ingredients is going through the roof, inflation is going mad, it’s hard to get hold of drivers and all of a sudden hospitality businesses are losing customers left right and centre. So if you like burgers, maybe you should try 7Bone anyway: the burgers are decent, and you might have better luck than I did (just give those chicken strips a wide berth). But ultimately, I’m not sure a review like mine matters; this week, of all weeks, I’m reminded that there are far more important things in life.
7Bone 60 St Mary’s Butts, Reading, RG1 2LG 0118 9595106
I’m easily old enough to remember a time before delivery apps and dark kitchens, before the weird and wonderful world of restaurants running side hustles, diffusion brands or heat at home kits. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, for most people, takeaway meant a curry, a Chinese meal or fish and chips from the local chippy. The closest you got to fusion food was having curry sauce (or in my case, sweet and sour sauce from Woodley’s Hong Kong Garden – still going strong, would you believe) on your chips. They were, in all respects, simpler times.
And in those days, having a good takeaway nearby was like gold dust: if you discovered one close to home, you made the most of it. At the end of the last century I lived in Nottingham for a year, and just round the corner from my house in Sherwood was the most incredible Indian takeaway. The flavour has probably been enhanced with a powerful dusting of nostalgia, memory’s answer to MSG, but the Fridays when we got food from there and sat down in front of something from Blockbuster Video were happy evenings indeed.
I’ve never found anything comparable in Reading. I used to live just around the corner from Kings Chef on the London Road, and I had their Chinese takeaway from time to time but it largely left me unmoved. And back when it was open, I would happily wander over to the now sadly defunct Seaspray to grab fish and chips which were still hot when I got home. But doing restaurant reviews for eight years meant that, until the pandemic hit, I never had much cause to use takeaways. And now the proliferation of delivery services, third parties on bikes and scooters and all that means that there’s probably too much choice. You channel hop meals the way you channel hop TV programmes or, as I remember from my days on Tinder, actual human beings.
Ordering from Zyka, the subject of this week’s review reminded me slightly of the old days. No Deliveroo or Uber Eats for them, so you just have to contact them and tell them what you want. Although you can order online (and they even take Apple Pay), so it’s not quite as basic as getting a leaflet through your door and ringing them up. And why did I choose Zyka? I thought you’d never ask: it’s because it won an award recently.
Not at the British Curry Awards, which were announced this week and gave prizes to the likes of Benares in Berkeley Square and Cheltenham’s brilliant Prithvi (“we’re building back balti” said the Prime Minister in a by all accounts cringeworthy recorded message). And not at the English Curry Awards, which were awarded in October and where winners included Wokingham’s Mumbai, either. Zyka won at the Curry Life Awards, also held October, where they were one of twenty-one restaurants to win “Best Curry Restaurants Of The Year”. With hindsight, there are a lot of different curry awards and a lot of winners: perhaps they should have some kind of unification bout, like they do in the wrestling.
Anyway, a fair few people have asked for this review, off the back of that award, so I figured it was about time. “They’ve been excellent for many years”, one person told me on Twitter, adding that they’d diversified by opening The Switch, a Tilehurst café which looks, on paper at least, like an attempt to create a West Reading equivalent of Café Yolk. “The menu doesn’t look that inspiring” said a friend of mine. “It’s not a patch on House Of Flavours” was another piece of feedback I heard: I guess if there was universal consensus I’d never need to review anything.
For what it’s worth, I think my friend was right about the menu. It’s pretty generic, with the same dishes you’d find anywhere else. Starters are mainly bhaji, samosas and a few options from the tandoor, and then there’s a tandoori section and largely the same curries offered with either lamb, chicken, seafood or vegetables and paneer. Another section is entitled “House Favourites”, which makes you think this might be where the specialities live, but no: that’s where you find your bhuna, dopiaza, korma, dansak and so on.
In fairness to Zyka, and I may end up saying this a few times in this review, it may well be very different if you eat in the restaurant. The menu makes a point of saying that they’ve selected the dishes on the takeaway menu to ensure that they travel well – and I understand this might make some dishes unsuitable but I was still a little surprised not to see something off the beaten track on the menu. Because they’ve won an award.
Anyway, my order for two people – poppadoms, a couple of starters, two mains, a vegetable side and some rice – came to a smidgen over fifty pounds. They charged three pounds for delivery and a nebulous extra quid under “surcharge”, whatever that means. I got a text saying that my meal would be with me in about an hour and then, just like in the old days, we sat back and waited.
He was at the door ten minutes later than predicted, but because I didn’t have the facility to endlessly, pointlessly track his whereabouts I just assumed it was because he’d left a little later than planned rather than because he got lost. And everything was piping hot and in a rather natty branded carrier bag. So far everything had gone like clockwork, and the only thing left was to eat the damned thing.
And that, I’m afraid, is where things didn’t quite come together. I’d chosen one of their curries that wasn’t generic, the murg haryali, chicken with mint and coriander: “a touch of sweetness and spice”, said the menu. I have fond memories of a similar, Kermit-green dish from Bhoj many years ago, aromatic and whiffy with garlic. This, I’m afraid, wasn’t that: it’s true that there was a bit of spice, but mostly there was sweetness – an odd, saccharine, artificial sweetness. You got the mint, but not really the coriander, and the chicken, tikka-tinged, was in big and slightly homogeneous pieces. I didn’t finish it, and it tasted a little – that word again – generic.
Zoë – and how many times have I had to write this in 2021? – ordered better than I did. Still giving carbs a relatively wide berth, she’d picked Zyka’s equivalent of a mixed grill, the Zyka mixed tandoori. This was fundamentally a huge plate of meat, with chicken and lamb tikka, an impressive quarter of a chicken, some prawns (“look, there’s a crustacean” was how Zoë chose to describe this development) and a seekh kebab. All lobster-red, so red it’s unreal, and all suffused with the deeply savoury notes that come from time well spent in a tandoor.
I had a bit – I enjoyed the chicken, I thought the lamb was on the tough side. “I love the meats. I’d order the meats again” was Zoë’s verdict after this meal, although in fairness she says that after nearly any meal in which meat plays a predominant role (sometimes it’s a little like living with Captain Caveman). She’d chosen bhindi bhaji, thinly sliced okra, to accompany her rhapsody in crimson, and she thought it was decent enough, “but a little bit underseasoned”. The menu had given me the option to have this dish “desi style” for an extra pound, saying this meant the dish was “a slightly spicier and more authentic take”. I didn’t go for that, and maybe I should have, but it’s a bit weird to have to pay extra to make it taste authentic. They do seem to like their surcharges at Zyka.
The two starters, repurposed as side dishes, were fine but again, no more than that. I think it’s pretty hard to fuck up an onion bhaji, so if I say that these were good I’m not sure it’s especially glowing praise. And the samosas were a little unremarkable – full of pellets of minced lamb and peas but without any overwhelming flavour. You got two of them for a fiver, and the following day on the way back from seeing my dentist I picked up two infinitely more enjoyable ones in the legendary Cake & Cream for under two quid. Cake & Cream, as far as I know, has not been nominated for any awards, but I’d give them “Samosa Of The Year” any day of the week. There were also some poppadoms, but they always taste the same in my experience – even a bad one is usually enjoyable, provided it’s not stale.
I don’t want to sound withering about Zyka. What I had wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t great either. And this is the problem with awards: back in 2011 when Petersham Nurseries, a restaurant in a garden centre near Richmond with plain tables and no whistles and bells, won a Michelin star the chef there, Skye Gyngell, said that she wished she could give it back. The expectations of her customers changed, and they wanted to eat at a kind of restaurant she never wanted hers to be. It got too much, and she quit the following year.
I get that expectation problem, admittedly on a different level, with Zyka. If they hadn’t won an award, maybe the upshot of this review would be “eh, it’s okay”. But because it has, it’s hard not to come away saying “how did they manage that?” I had a much more enjoyable takeaway from Banarasi Kitchen earlier in the year – which is equally well placed to serve West Reading, and much closer to you if you live across town. But the restaurant Zyka really made me miss was Bhoj. I ordered deliveries from Bhoj a few times, back in its golden age when it was still on the Oxford Road, and it never disappointed me.
I’m sure Zyka would have done brilliantly back in the days when I still had a Blockbuster Video card, when it was all leaflets folded into three and putting a call in from your landline (remember landlines?), shouting above the background noise. But the world moves on, and things change. There is so much choice, and it raises the standard: a rising tide, as I often say, lifts all boats. Although perhaps it’s a neighbourhood thing, and maybe if you’re a Tilehurst resident you count your lucky stars to have it just down the road.
I should close by giving them the benefit of the doubt – maybe you had to be there. Maybe their full, eat-in menu has all the imagination and execution that was missing from my meal this week. And I know a restaurant is so much more than the food, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their welcome is warm, their service superlative. I’ll make a point of checking them out in person in the New Year, and I look forward to them making me eat my words. But, for now at least, I’d rather eat elsewhere.
Zyka 6 Park Lane, Tilehurst, Reading, RG31 5DL 0118 9427788
There is a parallel universe in which this week’s review is of ThaiGrrr!, the Thai place in Queens Walk whose takeaway I so enjoyed earlier in the year. I’d had a tip-off that the place was almost deserted early in the evening, and so I fully intended to pay it a visit and write it up properly. I’d like to live in that parallel universe. But in that parallel universe I didn’t walk into it and think “what in Christ’s name is that smell?”
And it wasn’t just me – Zoë looked at me and said “this place smells like our old cat’s litter tray”. We waited a minute and the stench – no other word would do – did not abate. And it didn’t feel like an odour to which one could, or would want to, acclimatise. I bumped into the person who’d suggested ThaiGrr! the following day at Blue Collar and told him of our experience. “That’s such a shame, it’s never smelled like that when I’ve gone there” he said. Maybe they were having problems with their drains: I imagine at some point I’ll go back and give it another try. A couple of tables were occupied, possibly by people who hadn’t yet realised that they had Covid.
There’s another parallel universe where, having passed on ThaiGrrr!, we walked home and ordered a takeaway for me to review this week. I’d rather like to live in that parallel universe too, but I’m afraid on the way back we walked past Zero Degrees and Zoë, not unreasonably, said “that place has been on your list to re-review for some time”. And looking in the window it was practically deserted. That made it a safe place to review but, with hindsight, I should have taken the hint; when a restaurant that’s been trading for nearly fifteen years is dead on a school night, there’s probably a reason for that.
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Mama’s Way, the minuscule Italian aperitivo bar and delicatessen on Duke Street, has been on my list to review since it opened earlier this year. In the summer I briefly toyed with trying to grab one of the three tall stools outside, looking out on the shell that used to be Panino and sipping an Aperol Spritz, but it never quite happened. Anyway, reviewing it as a takeaway is a far better bet. After all, it can only seat three people outside and three people inside – up at the window, provided they get on famously – and so your best chance of trying their food would be to get on Deliveroo, as I did this week.
It is a shame, because it’s a wonderful spot. There’s something very continental about a venue so tiny – wander through Bologna and you’d find loads of Aladdin’s caves like Mama’s Way, selling cheese, or pasta, or porchetta sandwiches through a hatch. And if we were in pre-Covid times I’d probably have stood at the bar, elbows at the ready, enjoying that feeling of being somewhere else. But it’s 2021, and I imagine many people wouldn’t want to experience eating in at Mama’s Way for the time being, so here I am to try the food out remotely for us all.
It is a real Aladdin’s cave, by the way – all manner of cheeses and charcuterie, biscuits and breadsticks, pandoro hanging from the ceiling in readiness for the festive season, bottles of wine on one side and an attractive array of digestifs behind the counter (they sell multiple brands of Amaro, one of my favourite drinks). They even stock chinotto, that exquisitely bitter soft drink you can’t get anywhere else. And in my limited experience of buying from Mama’s Way over the counter they have an excellent variety of Parmesan, some of it aged for as long as 72 months: it’s doubtless improved more over the last six years than I have.
Aside from doing food to eat in, and delivery food, and acting as a deli and wine shop they also have an online store, with free delivery if you spend over £29. Confusingly, they also sell “ready meals”, which include some of the same dishes as the Deliveroo options, so if you like something you’ve had as a takeaway you can, with a little foresight, spend half as much to heat it up at home yourself. This all makes sense – at a time like now you need to have as many hustles on the go as you can – but let’s get back to the point and talk about the takeaway.
The menu is relatively streamlined, and I imagine much of it is cooked up in the kitchen somewhere behind the counter. Starters mostly consist of cheese and/or charcuterie in some configuration or other, there are a couple of “build your own” pasta and sauce combinations and, strangely, four different soups. The rest is largely lasagne and pinsa, the Roman equivalent of pizza which is traditionally oval, made with a slightly different flour and has a slightly crunchier texture. Oh, and they also have a huge selection of their wine on Deliveroo, so if you fancy a forty quid bottle of Nebbiolo with your takeaway there’s nothing to stop you living the dream.
Starters tend to hover close to the ten pound mark, the lasagne and cannelloni are closer to twelve pounds and most of the pinse are between twelve and a rather steep seventeen pounds, although in fairness there are lots of interesting ingredients and combinations in that part of the menu, including lardo honey and walnuts, or Parma ham with the splendidly named squacquerone cheese (I’ve had it: it’s fantastic). I was having a takeaway on my own on a chilly night, so I decided to cover as many bases as possible by ordering pinsa, pasta and dessert. They were doing 20% off all food, so my bill came to twenty-five pounds, not including the rider tip.
Speaking of tips to riders, my main one to the guy who delivered my food would be “don’t store a hot pizza vertically”. Honestly, it was so ridiculous that it was more funny than disappointing: I’ve had many seamless delivery experiences this year, so I’m sorry to have to bring this up, but it does strike me as basic stuff and I’m not sure I’d be doing a decent job of this review if I didn’t mention it. Other than that, it was relatively smooth – I placed my order just after seven o’clock, it was en route twenty-five minutes later and it took about seven minutes to get to the house.
The fact that, say, the pizza was lukewarm or that the chilled dessert had been put in the same carrier bag as the hot lasagne is down to the restaurant, but the fact that my pizza had somewhat drifted in transit and that some of it was stuck irretrievably to the inside of the lid of the box is, sadly, down to the driver alone. Anyway, c’est la vie: I know the traditional curse is “may you live in interesting times” but an equally powerful one would be “may you spend far more of the year than you’d personally choose to trying to describe tepid pizzas on a restaurant blog”. Take it from me.
So, the tepid pizza then: it’s a real shame, because Mama’s Way use good ingredients and it does show in the taste. I’d picked a simple ‘nduja pizza and their ‘nduja is great – savoury, acrid crimson nuggets that pack a huge amount of flavour, far more so than boring supermarket ‘nduja. On this evidence I would buy ‘nduja from Mama’s Way, but I’m not sure that, on this showing I’d order a takeaway pinsa from them again. But I could tell, from what I ate, that if it had been hot it would have been formidable.
The tomato sauce had a genuinely gorgeous fruity depth and the base, which was far thicker than the Neopolitan pizzas that are in vogue right now, was also excellent. Slightly randomly my order had included a couple of squares of bread in a paper bag: I’m not sure why, because they didn’t go with my lasagne and they sure as hell didn’t go with my tiramisu, but as a “look what you could have won” they were another salutary reminder that the raw materials Mama’s Way is using are promising. Eventually I admitted defeat, stuck the oven on and reheated the rest of my pizza. It was lovely, but if I wanted to heat up a pizza at home I’d probably just buy one from a supermarket at half the price.
If the pizza was frustrating, the lasagne was outright bad. It looked the part when I got it out of the bag, but what my picture fails to show is just how little ragu was involved in its construction. Have a look at the picture on Mama’s Way’s website, which suggests you’ll get four sheets of pasta with a generous layer of ragu in between each one. By contrast, what I had was, I think, six or seven layers of lasagne with next to no ragu anywhere to be seen. It was an odd kind of pasta millefeuille, which sounds more like a baddie from Harry Potter than anything you might want to eat.
The best bit of a lasagne is that crispy, cheesy bit right at the top – the corners, all caramelised – but that only works if plenty of cheese has been used and there’s hot ragu underneath. This was just a stodgy wedge of pure pasta, and the burnt bits were almost impossible to saw through. I threw half of it away. The sad thing is that what very little ragu there was tasted decent, with good depth of flavour – properly made, with finely chopped carrot in the mix. But when there’s that little of it on display, the fact that it tasted decent only made matters worse.
Deliveroo described this as a “lasagne Bolognese” (and, incidentally, the picture of this dish on Deliveroo also looks like it involves plenty of ragu). But if anybody served this up in Bologna they’d probably die of shame. The margins on this dish, even with a discount, must have been astronomical.
Just to add to the contrariness, one final twist in the tale – my tiramisu was lovely. Everything was in proportion with the perfect interplay of cream and sponge, booze and coffee, exactly as it should be. But again, it was a little on the small side at five pounds – not unreasonable with twenty per cent off, but I still couldn’t help but think of the giant slab of tiramisu you’d get at Buon Appetito for not much more. I think by that stage I was relieved that something was unequivocally good, even if it wasn’t unequivocally good value.
This meal felt like such a pity, and a proper wasted opportunity. You only have to spend a few minutes inside Mama’s Way to see that they have fantastic ingredients and produce, much of it impossible to get anywhere else in town. But somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong in terms of turning that into a menu that works and makes sense – for delivery, anyway.
If they ever get larger premises, I would rush to eat there and have one of those pinse fresh from the oven, or just enjoy some of their antipasti with a good bottle of red. With the right site, they could be Reading’s equivalent to Bristol’s cracking Bosco Pizzeria. But would I order takeaway from them again? Probably not: the memory of that brick of lasagne, 10% main course, 90% murder weapon, will cast a long shadow.
Never mind. It hasn’t diminished my enthusiasm for what they sell over the counter, or my respect for them trying to do something different and turn a profit from such a tiny spot. And I’ll be back for some of that ‘nduja, and some squacquerone (for the name alone, if nothing else), and I’m long overdue a bottle of chinotto for that matter. They also sell coppa, probably my favourite charcuterie of all time, and I can even see myself picking up some guanciale to use in my own ragu at some point. It might not be as good as theirs, but you get an awful lot more of it.
Mama’s Way 10-14 Duke Street, Reading, RG1 4RU 0118 3273802
A more up to date city guide to Malaga, from 2024, can be found here.
My previous guide to Málaga, from over two and a half years ago, was written at a very different time, after a holiday to the Spanish city with friends. It was, I enthused, a mini Barcelona that had it all: history; architecture; museums and galleries all over the place; a cracking food market; a beach; and food and drink that rivalled anything I’d had elsewhere.
I liked it so much that eight months later, while Zoë was on a beer drinking holiday with a group of her friends affectionately referred to as the “beer wankers”, I tried something I’d barely ever done before: I booked an Airbnb, booked some flights and took myself off there for a solo holiday. Zoë sent me pictures of her merry band, drinking lambic after lambic in cosy-looking bars or shivering in the town square, layered up to the max and probably turnt up to the max as well. I responded with well-lit pictures of sun-dappled tables, cold cañas of the local lager and fetching-looking food. It was November, it was twenty degrees and my shorts and walking sandals were enjoying one final hurrah before being packed away for six long months: what could possibly be bad about that?
Fast forward two difficult, turbulent years, and when we were picking the destination for our first holiday in aeons choosing Málaga was a quick and unanimous decision. And an excellent one: I don’t want to bang on about the C word too much, but there was something hugely comforting about spending four nights in a country where Covid rates were a tenth of what they are in the U.K., one where people wear masks indoors all the time without wanking on about being exempt or subjecting Twitter to their edgelord ramblings. They just do it: you know, because they’re not arseholes.
On our first night in a bar, the woman sitting along from us replaced her facemask between sips of her drink. Even I thought that was a little hardcore, but it did suggest that she at least gave a shit about the rest of us. Anyway, I had four brilliant days eating and drinking in the sunshine in the company of good friends, living as free from fear as I can remember, and I returned fatter, slightly more tanned and with plenty of photographs, most of them of food.
Originally I wasn’t going to write up this trip, but a fair few people have told me that they wanted to read this one and given that a few places have either closed or relocated since my last guide it felt like a good time. If you’re trying to work out where your next city break will be, this may help.
And if you don’t fancy a trip to Málaga, I’m awash with tips for my next destination following last weekend’s fabulous readers’ lunch: the most difficult decision is whether to prioritise the beauty of Potenza, the food of Montpellier or the craft beer of Kaunas. Every table seemed to have a different suggestion for the best city break you’ve never had. It might, with hindsight, turn out to have been a deeply expensive meal.
Where to eat
1. Taberna Uvedoble
Still arguably the single best place to eat I’ve found in Málaga, Uvedoble relocated in 2021 to a bigger site, still close to the cathedral but just around the corner from its previous home. The menu is clever, modern and almost ridiculously easy to adapt to any group size or any event: nearly everything comes in small, medium or large so you can have one all to yourself or share it with your companions (or, for that matter, order a large and have it all to yourself).
The classics were all waiting for me when I returned, so I got to reacquaint myself with oxtail albondigas, the meat rich and falling apart, served on a bed of skinny chips. I also revisited the suckling pig brioche, topped with aioli and served like the most decadent savoury éclair imaginable. Asparagus came jenga-style with an artful smear of romesco, and little pucks of compressed, rolled lamb shoulder were phenomenal with couscous.
But my favourite dish there remains the fiduea, a dish Zoë simply refers to as “the nest”. A heap of squid ink noodles, as black as night, topped with gorgeous, pert baby squid and served with a pungent puddle of honking aioli. The first mouthful was close to a religious experience and I realised, sadly too late, that this was the dish where you should order a large and have it all to yourself.
Meson Iberico, in the Soho district near the modern art gallery, is almost the polar opposite of Uvedoble – a more traditional room, a more classic, less experimental menu – except for one thing: they both serve exceptional food. Meson Iberico’s menu is bigger and most things either come in a media or a racion.
It has a conventional dining room that you can reserve, and the four of us ate there on our last night having a really fantastic time surrounded by tables all occupied by Spanish speakers. But I had just as much fun on our first night, when it was just me and Zoë, standing outside when they opened at half eight and making our way to the bar (and if you don’t do that, good luck getting a seat). There you see all the bustle, watch the staff hard at work and really feel part of the spectacle, get an insight into how a great restaurant is a living, breathing thing.
Most of the food there is amazing, but I had a real soft spot for particular dishes. Spiced skewers of suckling lamb, served stunningly tender, came with a little pile of impeccable chips for a crazy four Euros. Morcilla was fragrant and perfect for grazing. And I absolutely adored the wild mushrooms, cooked simply in oil and garlic, the perfect advert for buying something good and mucking about with it as little as possible.
On our second trip there we ordered a huge plate of prawns, so sweet and plump, and made short work of them between the four of us. And the tortillitas de camarones, fritters studded with tiny shrimp, were the best I’ve eaten in the city. On my most recent visit in May 2022, the highlight was tender belly of tuna draped artfully across sweet roasted red peppers – quite possibly from a tin and a jar respectively, but no less delectable for that.
The find of my visit in 2019 was Gastroteca Can Emma, a small unsung restaurant close to Málagueta which was recommended to me by Owen Morgan, one of the owners of the Bar 44 chain which serves terrific Spanish food in Cardiff and Bristol. Morgan has been to Málaga often (I imagine research is one of the most enjoyable parts of his job) and if he says somewhere is good, you try it out. I’m so glad we did, because a two hour boozy lunch there became one of my happiest memories of the holiday.
As with Meson Iberico, we were the only non-Spaniards there and we were treated to a knockout meal with many, many highlights. Tortilla with wild mushrooms and a whisper of truffle was an earthy delight, and a plate of miniature jamon croquetas was a magnificent – and eminently shareable – treat. I surprised myself by ordering something close to paella as a main – arroz mar y monte – and I’m so glad I did because that rich, sticky rice, bursting with meat, squid and prawns, was the standout dish among standout dishes. But we also had a quartet of mollete de calamares, simple fried squid sandwiches which were as good as anything I have eaten this year.
When we arrived, a group of Spanish ladies had got there before us and were already starting on the wine. When we finally got up and waddled away hours later, more than replete, they were still ordering more food and more drink. We had a theory that they replaced one of the women every thirty minutes when we weren’t looking until, like culinary Sugababes, none of the original lineup remained. Be that as it may, they were lunching legends: can I be them when I grow up?
Gastroteca Can Emma Calle Ruiz Blaser, 2
4. Casa Lola
Deep in the old town, Casa Lola is a bit of a staple: I went there on my first ever visit to Málaga, and I’ve gone back every time since. We went for an early lunch on my first day in 2021 and the place had completely filled up within half an hour, so it’s clearly built up a reputation – a fact borne out by the presence of a couple of other Casa Lola spin-offs across the city.
Its success is completely deserved. As usual we had a selection of pintxos which were quite delicious (any meal which features bacalao is on to a winner in my book). But on this occasion we wandered more into the outer reaches of the menu and were richly rewarded – with spot on miniature veal burgers in little tiger bread buns, and with chicharrones, crunchy, chewy nuggets of belly pork which made pork scratchings look distinctly two-dimensional, whiskery and sad. As I took the first sip of my rebujito I was wishing I could never leave: by the end of it I was frantically Googling whether I could somehow claim asylum.
La Cosmopolita was the highlight of my most recent visit in May 2022 – a place I’d never been to before which quite won me over. Most of the restaurants I eat at in Málaga are fully paid up members of the “pick small plates and keep ordering in waves until you’re full up” school of thought, so to go somewhere like La Cosmopolita with a more conventional starters/mains/desserts model felt strangely grown up and classy.
But honestly, the dishes were as lovely and sophisticated as anything I’ve had in Málaga, and quite possibly more so. Tempura bacalao was a world away from anything else I’ve eaten in the city – the batter feather-light, the fish inside translucent, just-cooked and perfect. A crab omelette was more crab than omelette, all earthy, sweet and positively divine. Their run of form continued without any let up, and my main course – tender squid in a sauce with just enough sweet onion – was another high point of the trip.
But the best dish I had there, and possibly my best dish of the holiday, was a cheesecake made with payoyo, simultaneously sweet, salty and hopelessly compelling. I didn’t order it, so I just had a forkful of Zoë’s which filled me with equal parts ecstasy and regret for the rest of my time in Andalusia.
El Tapeo de Cervantes was one of my favourite restaurants in recent visits to Málaga, and if it didn’t quite reach that standard this time around, it still got pretty close. The original dining room is snug and cosy, and if you eat there you really feel like you’re in on one of the best secrets there is. On my 2021 visit we were in the larger, less charming dining room next door, although if I’d never been to the restaurant before I’m sure I would have been enraptured.
The food is still excellent, although they do that confusing thing of having a main menu and a sizeable specials menu with a degree of overlap between the two. Everything comes in medium or large, and some of the dishes were marvellous – secreto iberico with pineapple is combination you shouldn’t love as much as you do, and pig’s cheek stew on chips is like an Andalusian take on the Belgian classic stoverij. But a couple of the dishes – sweetbreads and octopus – were served a little too similarly on smoked mash, and some of the things we tried felt lacking in heft, tasty though they were. It’s still worth a visit, especially if you’re in Málaga for long enough, but perhaps no longer the first name on the list.
Meson Mariano is a traditional, family-run restaurant, all dark wood and beams, a million miles away from the clean contemporary look of Taberna Uvedoble. My holiday companions were a little (well, a lot) younger than me and when we went to Meson Mariano they were in a state best described as “visibly impaired”. Regrettably, that meant we didn’t order the full three courses – but it also means that they were so full that I managed to try a little bit of everybody’s meal and confirm my suspicion that Meson Mariano was a very good restaurant indeed.
The salt cod was beautiful, either served fried with tons of garlic or cooked in tomato with potato, but the meat was the real high point, whether it was shoulder of lamb on the bone (though so tender that it didn’t stay there for long) or bang-on sirloin with an astonishingly good goats cheese sauce. When I go back, I’ll try the deep-fried goats cheese starter: I remember it fondly from a previous visit.
Restaurante Meson Mariano Calle Granados, 2
8. Mercado Atarazanas
Not content with being a mini Barcelona, Málaga also boasts a mini Boqueria in the shape of the handsome and hugely likeable Mercado Atarazanas. You can buy pretty much anything there – from just-landed fish to pig’s trotters, from freshly sliced jamon to salted almonds shining with oil.
But the real draw, for me, is Central Bar in the corner of the market. There you can stand up at the bar, drink your vermouth or your caña and get stuck into the incredible array of fresh fish and seafood under the counter, or have charcuterie, cheese and all the other main Spanish food groups. On my 2021 visit we had tuna steaks, cooked simply, scattered with salt and served up with sensational tomatoes and padron peppers, another exemplary illustration that less is often more.
But it wasn’t just about the fish: chicharrones de Cadiz were utterly delicious but a completely different kettle of pork to their Casa Lola cousins – less scratchings, more a high definition porchetta with fat that practically dissolved in the mouth. The four of us lunched like kings for just over a hundred Euros, and my only regret is that I didn’t find a way to go there every day.
Mercado Central de Atarazanas Calle Atarazanas, 10
9. Heladeria Freskitto
A lot of guides to Málaga single out Casa Mira, the legendary ice cream parlour on Calle Marqués de Larios which has been keeping Malagueños cool for over a hundred years. And don’t get me wrong, it’s dead good, but my preference is Freskitto, a stone’s throw from the Picasso Museum. It’s a hole in the wall which does ambrosial helado the equal of anything I’ve tasted in Italy.
I love their dark, intense chocolate, their dulce de leche is a smooth buttery caramel without any salt muddying the waters, I have fond memories of their cinnamon ice cream and on this visit I heard good things about their Nutella and pistachio flavours from my companions. The texture has that splendid elasticity that marks out continental ice cream from its British sibling, and the taste is phenomenal. That Málaga is a city where you can eat and drink outside, have ice cream and pick up insect bites in November is as good an advertisement for the place as I can think of.
Heladeria Freskitto Calle Granada, 55
Where to drink
1. La Tranca
La Tranca remains one of my favourite bars in the whole wide world, a scruffy and vibrant place which welcomes anyone who wants to drink vermouth or beer, eat good food and enjoy people-watching amid a crowd who all have the same laudable priorities. The music is Spanish, and the LPs behind the bar are a retro anorak’s dream. I can honestly say that this is a happy place at the epicentre of a happy place, and all my visits in 2021 and 2022 were superb fun.
Although you can drink beer or vermouth here my preferred drink is the aliñao, a mixture of vermouth, gin and soda which slips down dangerously easily. After a couple of them, you find your life goals slowly shifting from whatever they were before to “how can I buy an apartment within stumbling distance of La Tranca?” And that’s without talking about the food – wonderful four cheese empanadas with a tang of blue cheese or some of the best jamon I had on my holiday, sliced there and then and presented glistening on a board, waiting to be pinched between fingers and devoured. And fried olives – did you know fried olives were a thing? Me neither, and now I feel quite devoutly that they should be a Thing everywhere.
On a previous visit, we’d bumped into an Italian singer-songwriter who had a long and fascinating story of jet setting from one European city to the next, la dolce vita in action. A tad randomly, we all follow one another on Instagram now, so when we returned to La Tranca in 2021 Zoë took a goofy selfie of the four of us and sent it to him. “That’s really sweet of you!” came the reply from elsewhere on the continent in next to no time. “Enjoy the journey in beautiful Málaga. I miss it.” It has that effect on you, you see.
This has always been, for me, the other place in Málaga to stop for a drink – a long thin room with a long thin bar where you pick from the sweet wines, sherries and vermouths in the barrels behind. They keep a running tab on your bar in chalk and as barely anything you can drink tops two Euros you do feel it’s rude not to stay for another, and another.
It’s standing room only, with only a few high tables, so settling in for a prolonged session is probably beyond most people, but to stand there sipping from your copa and watching the bar staff, all of whom feel like they’ve been doing this for years, is a quintessential Málaga experience.
Málaga has a surprisingly strong craft beer scene, and Birra Deluxe up on Plaza de la Merced became a firm favourite on this trip for a post-dinner beer or two. It used to be called something else, but it came under new ownership recently and they’ve properly spruced the place up, making it a decidedly agreeable place to try beers and shoot the breeze.
The staff are really friendly and full of recommendations, which meant that we got to try draft beer from local brewery Attik Brewing and some cans from their superb selection which features prominent Spanish breweries like Basqueland Brewing and Barcelona’s Garage Beer Co, along with other beers from harder to find breweries like Zagreb’s The Garden Brewery. My beer of the entire holiday was a chocolate macaroon imperial stout from Basqueland which will live long in the memory – chocolate upon chocolate upon chocolate, the perfect liquid dessert.
My favourite place for churros used to be Café Central on Plaza de la Constitucion, which was one of those grand old cafés that feels like it’s always been there and will always be there. So I was positively shocked to arrive in Málaga in May 2022 to find that the place had closed in January after an incredible 102 years of trading. The usual story of capitalist greed, I’m afraid – the man who had run it for most of his life was ready to retire, and fell out with the other two owners of the building. Rumour has it it might become a McDonalds, yet another reminder that capitalism is very far from a good thing.
So where to go instead? Well, the other big name for churros in Malaga is Casa Aranda, a whippersnapper that’s only been around since 1932. It seems to have expanded further every time I go to Málaga – aided no doubt by the demise of its nearest competitor – and now seems to take up the majority of Calle Herreria del Rey, either with tables out on the pavement or little rooms inside where you can get your churros fix.
None of it is a natural sun trap the way Café Central was, but over a couple of trips there it won me over. The churros are every bit as good (especially dabbed in sugar for the perfect combination of sugar, salt, crunch and grit), the cafe con leche – milk poured at the table, as it should be – is excellent and the whole experience is oddly comforting. I wish them many years of strong trading and kind landlords: I don’t think I could face having to change churro supplier twice in a lifetime.
If you want a “proper” coffee, by which I suppose I mean a Workhouse/C.U.P. cup of coffee, Mia does the best coffee I found in Málaga. It’s essentially another hole in the wall, but the coffee is sublime, made with care and precision and served in attractive cups, sunshine-yellow to match the awning outside. They appeared to be renovating the place when I visited in May 2022 which meant there were limited tables inside. But no matter – it’s in a lovely little part of the city right next door to the hammam, and you can sit on the steps of the beautiful church opposite and watch the city come to life in the morning.
I wanted some coffee to take home with me, and Mia stocks coffee from Barcelona’s excellent Nomad (and, on my most recent visit, their own blend). When I told the member of staff that I brew with an Aeropress she lit up enthusing about the Aeropress method. It turns out that the Spanish heat of the World Aeropress Championships was taking place the following week, and that a barista from Mia was going to be there flying the flag. Based on what I saw, I fancied their chances. I left with a nice warm glow and a bag of beans for later on.
El Pimpi is a Málaga institution, and I’m ashamed to say that I’d never visited it prior to this trip. A huge, sprawling bar with lots of little rooms and corridors, and a lot of outside space looking out on the Alcazaba, I surprised by how much I liked it. It was touristy, but not to its detriment, and it had all the things Antigua Casa de la Guardia was lacking, like seats, and toilets you could actually bring yourself to use.
My glass of Pedro Ximenez had that sticky, syrupy quality and the richness of thoroughly coddled sultanas and I would happily have stayed for more. There’s always next time, as I increasingly told myself as my holiday drew to a close. Antonio Banderas, a native of Málaga, is a big fan (he allegedly owns an apartment overlooking the bar), so there are a lot of pictures of him on display. A lot.
La Madriguera is the other Spanish craft beer place in Málaga, on a street full of surprises. The bar two doors down called “Jamones”, with a logo based on the Ramones, seemed to have shut down when I went in November 2021, so I was delighted to see that it had reopened when I returned six months later. Conversely, the ice cream joint called “Dick Town” which specialised in genitalia-themed ice creams and labial waffles was open last November but, in a triumph of taste and decency, had closed by the following May. Thank heavens.
Anyway, I was delighted to see La Madriguera thriving, and it gave me the opportunity to try yet more local beer with interesting stuff on tap from Spain and beyond. I managed to check out IPAs from a variety of Spanish breweries – Bonvivant who were local, Attik Brewing from Torremolinos, Cerveza Espiga from Catalunya and Bilbao’s Drunken Bros. On my previous visit to La Madriguera I’d been really sorry to miss out on the food – it all looked great, and their chef has worked in some of Málaga’s best known tapas places, including KGB. So this time I made sure I ordered some fried chicken to accompany my pre-dinner beers, and it was predictably brilliant. Next time I plan to make an evening of it there.
El Ultimo Mono translates as “the last monkey”, for reasons I still haven’t managed to figure out since I last visited Málaga. This was my go to place for coffee on the move on previous visits to Málaga, but like other venues in this guide it has moved location since I was there last. Its new home, tucked off a main street, slightly lacked the charm of its old one, but it’s got a little outside space and actually it had developed quite a nice cosy feel in the time between visits.
Anyway, the coffee is still rather nice and a sensible size for drinking on the go. And if you have it in, it comes in the most beautiful cups: I very nearly went up to the counter and asked where they’d got them from. A reminder of some of the stark differences between England and Spain came when I paid: even with the pound hardly storming against the Euro, two coffees here cost about the same as a single coffee from the likes of Workhouse.
El Ultimo Mono Calle Duende, 6
9. Santa Coffee Soho
Soho, the triangular district south of the Alameda Principal, east of the river and west of the sea, is one of my very favourite parts of Málaga – full of good bars, restaurants and street art, home to both Meson Iberico and CAC, the modern art gallery. And Santa Coffee’s outpost there is a brilliant place to drink a latte and watch the great and the good bustling past. There’s also a branch close to the Mercado de Atarazanas, but the one in Soho captured my heart.
Santa was Málaga’s first micro-roastery, so you can buy beans on the premises, and lattes are a ridiculously affordable two Euros apiece with coffee from El Salvador, Ethiopia and Rwanda on my most recent visit. The food is also surprisingly good. I had a cracking savoury crepe with jamon iberico, parmesan and rocket on my final morning in the city but by then I’d become positively hooked on their alfajores – a sort of chocolate-coated dulce de leche biscuit slash cake which is what a Wagon Wheel would taste like in heaven.
Edible Reading 