I imagine that you are reading this in the strange hinterland that is the time between Christmas and New Year. Whether you’re working, “working from home but not really” or have the time off, it’s a funny period when days lose their meaning, leftovers become meals, the fridge takes a lot of emptying and the liver takes a lot of punishment. It’s usually one of my favourite times of the year, even if it’s also a strange limbo. If nothing else, it’s the last seven days before I have to at least pretend to want to lose weight.

But if that is you, spare me a thought. Because this year (as you may already know) I’m at home convalescing from an impressively broken arm as I write this – or, rather, dictate it on my MacBook. Which means that my last few weeks have been like the week you’re going through now, and the next few weeks most likely will be too. Except I don’t get to do the socialising or the drinking with reckless abandon, although I still badly need to pretend to want to lose weight. Ideally, I need to genuinely want to lose weight, and not only that but I need to want to enough to actually do it. That’s a challenge at the best of times.

But this period lends itself well to reflection. So there’s no better time to look back on the year drawing to a close and ahead to the year to come. Traditionally, this annual blog post has been a bit gloomy, because ever since the pandemic either restaurants have been closing left right and centre or I’ve been saying “well, it might not have been so bad this year but just wait till next year: next year is going to be dreadful”. It’s always made for a cheery read, don’t you think?

So it might surprise you to find, as it has surprised me, that this year hasn’t been like that at all. I regularly read about London restaurants closing, or read essays from restaurateurs about how Rachel Reeves single-handedly hammered the final nail in their restaurant’s coffin (even though that is staggeringly reductive), but Reading has been weirdly buoyant in 2025. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our fair share of farewells, but this year that’s been far outweighed by the number of hellos. 

Some newcomers have jumped in the graves of recently departed favourites, but others have opened in sites that have been dormant for some time, or that weren’t previously restaurants at all. Where’s the money coming from? Why are people gambling on this in 2025 of all years, when the consensus seems to be that the dice are loaded against hospitality like never before? 

Search me. That requires the kind of socio-economic analysis you would get from Reading-on-Thames, not me. I just report the stuff, so with that in mind let’s have a look at this year’s comings and goings, to see if we can make any sense of it all. What’s the worst that can happen?

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It’s traditional for restaurants to bite the bullet in January, having banked their Christmas takings and come to the realisation that they don’t fancy three bitterly cold months when punters have no cash, are on diets, are taking part in Dry January etc. But the only restaurant to take that course of action this year was Bluegrass BBQ. I thought that was quite sad, as it happens, because although I know its quality was variable I always loved their breakfast. There is still a gap in the market for a restaurant doing a high-quality breakfast in the centre of Reading, and Bluegrass’ departure leaves Côte as the only serious alternative to Bill’s for the most important meal of the day.

Departures started to bite in the Oracle across the rest of the winter. Mission Burrito decided to close at the start of February, which again saddened me even though I had to be honest and say that I couldn’t remember the last time I ate there. Maybe that was the problem, perhaps nobody could. In March we lost Gordon Ramsay Street Burger – weirdly one of the most widely read restaurant reviews I’ve ever published – and I’m not sure it was really mourned by anyone who didn’t work there. 

When I went, I remember saying that it wasn’t as bad as you might expect but that it still couldn’t match the standard of Honest: its closure suggests that at least a few people agreed with me. Maybe things will get surreal next year – Jamie Oliver announced that he is reviving the Jamie’s Italian brand, all transgressions seemingly forgiven, and you wouldn’t bet against him returning to Reading. Maybe it can move into that giant site that has been vacant ever since Lemoni gave up the ghost, and we can all feel like there’s been a glitch in the Matrix.

There was far more openly expressed sadness at the very end of March when Munchees closed. And even though I never went, and the last time I saw the interior was when it featured briefly in Broadchurch, I did understand this one. It was one of the very last of a breed of caffs that used to be part of the fabric of Reading, along with the likes of Platters, Chelsea Coffee House and others I’ve forgotten. 

I used to be a regular at Platters, drinking frothy coffee out of a plastic beaker, smoking like a chimney, doing the crossword in a red top tabloid and occasionally treating myself to bacon and eggs on toast (if it was just after payday). What can I say? It was the Nineties. And if my taste evolved and poncified, to Coffee Republic and then to the likes of Workhouse, Tamp and C.U.P. it didn’t mean that I didn’t hope there would still be a place for those kinds of cafés. But businesses can’t coast on nostalgia, they have to survive on takings; this leaves Rafina on West Street as the last of a dying breed.

Spring and summer brought another spate of closures, although fewer than you might have expected. In May Sarv’s Slice quit the Biscuit Factory in a blaze of acrimony, making all sorts of allegations about the management interfering with their equipment. Apart from a few pop-ups at Double-Barrelled and the Nag’s Head, Reading has not seen them again, and probably won’t as they concentrate on their new base in Ealing: their reputation was also enhanced by an appearance on Saturday morning TV.

This is of course an enormous shame, but as we will see, Sarv may have made a very smart decision to get out of town just as a wave of new pizza challengers hit the town centre. But they will be missed, not only for their excellent Neapolitan pizzas but for the Detroit style pies; nobody in Reading has even tried to emulate those. 

I’ve no idea what’s going on at the Biscuit Factory, which seems to be limping on amid constant speculation that it will close, but at some point this year we also lost Compound Coffee from its ground floor, a terrible shame as it did probably the best coffee that end of town. Also in West Reading, we said goodbye to Romanian restaurant Vampire’s Den at some point around May or June; I never ate there, so I can’t tell you whether their name was the biggest of their problems.

And also in June, a rather sad development: The Cellar, the restaurant which rose from the ashes of Valpy Street (and appeared to have the same owner and most of the same staff) stopped trading. At the time I thought this was a terrible shame but now, at the end of the year, I’m rather more suspicious of businesses that quit under one name and reopen under another, for reasons which will become clear before too long.

As autumn turned to winter, we got a closure which might represent some kind of record. Peppito, the new pizza restaurant on the first floor of John Sykes’s development (the one that used to be called King’s Walk) closed in October. Nothing surprising about that, you might think – John Sykes’ tenants don’t have the best survival rate – but it is noteworthy because Peppito only opened at the end of May. A cryptic message on Instagram said that the restaurant would be “pausing operations for a while” because of “circumstances”. 

Your guess is as good as mine, but the one time I walked past Peppito it appeared to only have one table, which made it almost completely reliant on delivery apps. Given Sykes’ insatiable desire for rent, I’m not sure bunging a couple of pizzas to Readings resident influencers was ever going to overcome the site’s inherent shortcomings. “This isn’t goodbye – it’s a reset” said the Instagram post: okay, sure.

That brings us to the end of the year, and a few significant events. First of all Pappadams, which was taken over around March, completely rebranded and so ceased to be. That might be for the best, as I’ve heard reports from people who went there under the new management and said it wasn’t the restaurant it used to be, and not in a good way either. 

Another sad announcement came from Whitley, where Dough Bros announced that they would be serving their last pizzas on the 20th of December. Happily, a buyer has been found for that business so it will reopen under the same name in the New Year, and it’s looking to add smash burgers to its repertoire. Let’s hope the new owners are worthy custodians of its reputation.

It’s common for restaurants to announce their closure early in the New Year, but this year Bierhaus wasn’t fucking about. They filled their last steins on the Sunday before Christmas, bringing to an end a nine year spell on Queens Walk. There has been speculation about whether they will crop up elsewhere, and whether vacating the site has anything to do with the wider redevelopment of the Broad Street Mall: in any event this leaves that stretch looking even more desolate than usual, with Sushimania at one end and ThaiGrr! at the other.

Then we had the weirdest event of all: three days before Christmas, Phantom Brewery made an announcement that it was closing its sites in Reading and Henley and suspending brewing for the foreseeable future while it moved to a new location. It added, ominously, that it would “undergo a period of restructuring to ensure the appropriate foundations are in place for the next phase”.

This turned out to be a masterclass in how not to handle corporate comms. The announcement began with the text “as many of you know”, but it transpired in the comments that many people did not know. Not least the staff, some of whom found out that they were without a job three days before Christmas via social media, in a self-congratulatory post by their employer. They probably thought the brewery was the worst Phantom since the Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come.

Many suppliers were also taken by surprise, although they did say it explained why they hadn’t been able to get hold of anyone from Phantom for some time. It also didn’t answer their questions about why Phantom had continued to order from them, knowing that this development was in the offing. Those suppliers included 7Bone, who didn’t know until they read the announcement that they wouldn’t be cooking at the tap room that week.

Some comments on Phantom’s social media, increasingly drowned out by disgruntled employees and suppliers, naïvely wished the brewery all the best for its next steps. I wonder if those customers felt the same, though, once some eagle-eyed folks scoured Companies House and The Gazette to find a CCJ against Phantom, Phantom’s accounts badly overdue and the company in debt. Then somebody discovered that five days before the announcement the brewery was seeking to appoint liquidators. Fishy doesn’t come close.

It may be that we don’t see the brewery again but if we do, it will be interesting to see whether Reading’s tight-knit beer community forgives the owners for treating people so shoddily. I especially feel for the staff at both tap rooms, who have been terrific every time I’ve drunk at either. They deserve infinitely better than this. N.B. Phantom’s owner set up a new company in November whose nature of business is the “manufacture of beer” and renamed another company, Phantom Hospitality Group, to remove any reference to the brewery. Not suspicious at all.

You would hope that that would be the final closure of 2025, but would you believe that there was time for just one more? Hard to credit, but it’s true: just after Christmas, the Blagrave Arms announced that its New Year’s Eve drinks would be its last. Now, that might not come as such a surprise to those of you who, like me, occasionally look at the business section of Rightmove, where the pub had been listed for sale for some time. The Hop Leaf on Southampton Street is on there too, if you have £420,000 to spare.

Rightmove also gives you an idea of what to expect in 2026. Sweeney & Todd is still for sale, although that hardly classes as news because the owners have been trying to offload it for a very long time. But there’s also a listing for a restaurant in Caversham which requires you to sign an NDA for its identity but is clearly, from the details in the listing, Papa Gee.

Similarly, there is a day café for sale in south Reading. And by all means sign the NDA to get details if you know literally nothing about Reading, but otherwise it’s clear from the specifics in the publicly available brochure – especially its layout and limited opening hours – that it can only be one specific establishment on Kennet Island. Will my 2026 roundup confirm that either of these businesses has closed or changed hands? Place your bets.

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What a bummer! Let’s move on to happier news, and the glut of new hospitality businesses opening in Reading this year. I may not have captured all of them, but I do think this is most of them. And apologies in advance – it’s a lot.

January saw a number of places open in Reading. There was Paesinos, in the vanguard of the Italian invasion, which opened on King Street. Gurt Wings announced the start of a year long residency at Blue Collar Corner which was, to my mind at least, marred by consistency and staffing issues. It draws to an end on New Year’s Eve, so we will have to rely on pop-ups for our Gurt fix in 2026. The Lyndhurst re-re-opened, if that’s a thing, and have remained under the same management for a whole year, lending some badly needed continuity. 

And finally, of course, we got our first big name opening of the year when Rosa’s Thai took on their spot on the ground floor of the iconic Jackson’s Corner building. The fit out, by Quadrant Design, is very fetching indeed and every time I walk past it I’m glad it’s open, glad that it’s brought life to that corner of town, and pleased that people are inside having a good time. I am, in truth, equally pleased that I don’t have to eat there again.

In February the Burger Society announced that they were also taking on a residency at Blue Collar Corner: great news for fans of burgers, fried chicken and so on but maybe less good news for vegetarians, who would’ve found Blue Collar Corner slightly lacking in options. There was a slight impression that the market was struggling to attract traders, because the third spot was often taken by another street food business run by the Burger Society. It will be interesting to see what next year’s shake-up brings.

February also brought us the second of Reading’s four – count them, four – Italian restaurants in the town centre this year. Zi Tore, in the Grumpy Goat’s old home on Smelly Alley, opened daytimes only selling pizza, gnocchi and Italian baked goods. I’m yet to review it, because it turns out that they close earlier than advertised, but I’ll do my best to get there next year.

Because that wasn’t enough pizza for the RG1 postcode, in April we got Amò, literally a couple of doors down from Paesinos. Amò is a collaboration between the owners of Madoo and Earley-based Pulcinella Focaccia, and has more space than Paesinos with a very different menu and a different focus during the day. I liked both but, as we shall see, they didn’t necessarily like me back.

April also heralded the arrival of Dolphin’s in the town centre where 7Bone used to be, and rather interestingly Food Stasian in Woodley precinct, a no-frills restaurant in the old Adda Hut site offering, by the looks of it, a combination of Vietnamese and Hong Kong dishes. The arrival of restaurants to serve the Hongkonger community would be another trend this year, although most of the activity there was towards the end of 2025.

The final Italian restaurant to try its luck in the town centre this year opened in May. That was Peppito, and we’ve already talked about their record breaking reign. But May was also the month that we got our second significant opening of the year, with the arrival of Cosy Club at the edge of the Oracle, where Lakeland used to live. Cosy Club also leaned heavily on influencers, or content creators, or whatever else you want to call them: I went, spent my own money, and rather wished I hadn’t.

Things didn’t let up over the summer, and an awful lot of places opened in that time. July brought Club India out in Winnersh, potentially the most exciting thing to happen to Winnersh since it got name checked in that episode of The Office. Café Yolk opened their second site, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, with more emphasis on grab and go, and, at long last, Lincoln Coffee finally opened its second site in the old Workhouse Coffee building on King Street. The makeover they’ve done, which I imagine took ages and cost a lot, is fantastic. And the influencers just love the food, which they did not pay for.

The same day that Lincoln Coffee opened, it was all going on around St Mary’s Butts. The old County Deli site, where Kate Winslet used to work pre-Titanic, opened as Pho 86, a third Vietnamese restaurant in town. It had a slightly ropey hygiene rating from the council at first, but a subsequent inspection in October has largely sorted that out. Also that very day, possibly the single busiest day in Reading’s restaurant history since the opening of the Oracle, Thai restaurant Nua took over where Bluegrass used to be.

Station Hill also welcomed its first new business at the end of July, when Notes opened its first branch outside London; I was very excited about this one, which meant the disappointment when I ate there was even greater. We should see Italian wine bar Angelo’s (from the people behind Wokingham’s Ruchetta, which has now rebranded as Angelo’s) and Japanese restaurant Kawaii, from the owners of Coconut and Osaka, open next year. I do wonder if the spate of bars and cafés on Station Hill is largely connected to the lack of extraction at that site: it’s a pity there are so few proper restaurants there.

Hong Kong restaurant Take Your Time opened in August, taking over one of Reading’s most mothballed sites, the former home of Dolce Vita. Those are big shoes to fill, and with Reading’s most noted philanthropist John Sykes as your landlord there is no doubt also a big rent to pay. Best of luck to them with that: their menu is best described as iconoclastic.

August also brought two of the most interesting and surprising establishments I reviewed all year, namely Stop & Taste out in Emmer Green, where an ex-private chef cooked whatever he damn well pleased in a place that looked from the outside like a bog-standard chicken shop, and Mac’s Deli in Theale. The latter was the effortless second album from Mac Dsouza, the owner of Filter Coffee House, an outstanding day café selling brilliant sandwiches made from top-notch ingredients, showcasing Dsouza’s very own Japanese milk bread. 

As so often, most of the interesting things in Reading’s food scene happened absolutely nowhere near the town centre. Why could that be, I wonder?

We’re on the home straight now, as autumn came to an end and winter began to bite. Indian restaurant Bagaara opened on the Shinfield Road in September, where Firezza used to be. October gave us Blip, a smash burger place in Tilehurst from the owners of The Switch and Zyka. The look and branding were a clear homage to bigger burger restaurants in London, and they won a slightly dubious award barely a month after opening, but the burgers might well be good. I’ll find out in the New Year.

In November, 1650 Coffee – no extractor fan required – also opened on Station Hill. The provenance of it is unclear: I’ve heard separately that it’s from the team behind Café Yolk and that it’s owned by one of the original founders of Yolk. Either way, you do have to be slightly impressed that the majority of units on Station Hill are being taken by independent businesses with some link to Reading.

Quite the contrast to that is Smoke & Pepper, which is part of a biggish chain and opened on the Butter Market in the place of Munchees. The best way to describe the food they do is to say that it’s a restaurant for influencers and teenagers: smash burgers, loaded fries, chicken tenders and so on. Basically if you don’t need cutlery to eat it, they sell it. 

And it might be fantastic, and at some point I’m sure I will find out, but the opening of another restaurant with the same kind of menu as Mr. T on the edge of the Broad Street Mall, accompanied by gushing about how it hits different, or slays, or slaps, or whatever the fuck passes for English in those Instagram videos really doesn’t make me yearn to pay it a visit. Sorry-not-sorry about that.

One of the happiest events of Reading’s food year happened at the very start of December. After giving up her office job to re-enter the world of hospitality, and after a trial run in a couple of locations in Reading, Naomi Lowe re-launched the Nibsy’s brand with Beryl, her deeply fetching cream-coloured trailer, berthed permanently outside Reading station, offering gluten-free sweet and savoury treats and excellent coffee on the go. 

This is really welcome news, whether you need to eat gluten-free or not, if only because the coffee alternatives near the station are Prêt, Costa and Notes, none of which are any great shakes. But it’s also lovely to see one of Reading hospitality’s great innovators return to the business, after far too long away.

December also saw Pappadams close and rebrand as Anjappar – still south Indian, but part of a much bigger chain of what I presume are franchises. It also brought queues around the block when Hong Kong restaurant Me Kong opened at the back of the Blade. Along with Take Your Time, it again showed a subtle shift in the kind of restaurants opening in Reading, along with a hint about the communities they might serve.

You would think that was the last of it, but actually that prize goes to Matteo Greek Food & Bakery which opened where O Português used to be, right next to Palmer Park, on the 20th December. Details about it are sketchy, but the owner appears to be Albanian which puts it in the company of restaurants like Quattro and Spitiko. It could be an interesting one to watch next year. 

Next year will also bring a new business where The Cellar used to be, called The Nook. Again, there’s not much information online yet (try googling “the nook Reading” and you just get loads of wholesome stuff about nice places to leaf through a paperback with a hot cuppa) but it sounds like it will be a coffee kiosk upstairs and God knows what downstairs. Time will tell, as it always does.

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So what have the main trends of 2025 been? Well, you can probably discern the obvious ones from what I’ve just written: a lot of pizza restaurants, relatively few big names chancing a town centre opening and, perhaps more of a curveball, a recent influx of restaurants aiming to cater for the Hong Kong community in Reading. But more widely, there are a couple of other trends that I’ve noticed as a restaurant reviewer.

The first is an increase in the number of influencers or content creators. To some extent, that’s possibly the biggest sign in everybody’s minds that the pandemic is very much ancient history. Back then, some influencers expressed concern about taking free food when the industry was in so much trouble. Despite the climate remaining challenging those concerns seem to have dissipated, so we see a lot more content on Instagram – some paid, some unpaid, some unpaid and declared, some unpaid and undeclared – not just in London, where this stuff makes the national news, but here in Reading.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there is an increasing willingness for brands to engage with those accounts. That Rosa’s Thai or Cosy Club would authorise the people handling their PR to dish out free meals isn’t a surprise. But to see smaller independent businesses – the likes of Amò, Blue Collar Corner or Fidget & Bob – doing likewise suggests that, like it or not, this form of coverage is now normalised. Businesses are making a calculation that this brings in more money than it costs, and whether the free food is declared or not (and in fairness it sometimes is) any concerns about credibility are not that business’ problem.

The other trend that I’ve definitely seen is an increasing – how best to put this? – prickliness from businesses about reviews. Maybe that is tied to businesses increasingly paying for coverage which they know will be positive, and maybe it’s not. Earlier in the month the Observer published an article querying whether the “vicious restaurant review” was on its way out. I don’t know about that: on the rare occasions when I do publish a review with a very low rating the page hits very much suggest that people still enjoy reading them.

But I will say that businesses are definitely engaging with those reviews in a very different way. You may recall that I reviewed Vino Vita earlier in the year. You might also recall that I thought the food was atrocious – rating 4.6 – and the whole experience something of a bin fire. What you may not know is the significant backlash I received as a result of publishing that review.

So Vino Vita’s Head Of Sales – still a real job, apparently – took to Instagram to post what she believed was a photo of me, describing me as a xenophobic narcissist and urging all hospitality businesses, especially Italian ones, to refuse to allow me on the premises. I also got some fan mail from a supporter of Vino Vita calling out my “lack of support for Reading’s businesses”. What else to expect from a man who only appreciates fish and chips, she asked? 

“I’ll make sure your face is known to every business you plan to visit in Reading – persona non grata” she signed off. Well isn’t that nice? At the time of writing, this boycott has so far failed to materialise: perhaps it will feature in a lot of restaurateurs’ New Year’s resolutions.

But what was really odd this year was that this kind of sensitivity was not limited to negative reviews. Even positive reviews received dissatisfied responses from the restaurants in question, as if you weren’t positive in the right way. For instance, I gave Paesinos – a restaurant I loved – a rating of 8.6, the highest I’d given out in the centre of Reading at the time. They blocked me on Instagram after reading a quote out of context about one item on their menu (to be fair, they subsequently read the whole review and relented).

Later in the year I reviewed Amò, which I also loved and also rated as 8.6. I then got an angry message on Instagram from one of the owners complaining that I’d spent the whole of my review talking about Paesinos, despite the fact that I had mainly been saying that it was almost impossible to choose between them and that they were both excellent. “You used my restaurant as a way to promote Paesinos” he said, rather epically missing the point.

The main lesson I’ve taken from all this is that maybe it’s best not to review Italian restaurants at all, or if I do not to give them a rating of 4.6 or 8.6. Perhaps I should just say that they’re all quite nice and give them 6.6, or just not bother. But even where a review is positive, I’ve had at least one occasion where the restaurateur thought it just wasn’t positive enough.

I reviewed one restaurant where I described a dish as ‘too well-behaved’. The restaurateur in question was so rattled by this that he wrote a whole blog post in which he said “what the fuck does that even mean?”, conveniently overlooking the fact that I’d explained exactly what it meant in that very paragraph. That was just part of a whole think piece that urged people to stop analysing food and just enjoy themselves: which is fine if you’re a punter, but is essentially arguing that people shouldn’t review restaurants at all (the blog in question, you might be surprised to hear, also reviews restaurants).

So it’s almost as if people in this climate, or people who run restaurants at least, want fewer people to review restaurants in general and for us to just accept bland uncritical gushing on TikTok or Instagram: nearly all the restaurants I’ve just mentioned gave free food to influencers in 2025. If you don’t like your food in a restaurant go home and cook for yourself, that think piece concluded. For me, this attitude is as good a reason as any for me to keep at it.

But it would be rank hypocrisy of me not to acknowledge at this point that I’m just as bad when it comes to taking pot shots at other people expressing their opinions of what they’ve eaten. 

I do have enough self-awareness to realise this, and it’s something I will be changing next year. So this is the last time you’ll hear me take a swipe at slack-jawed gormless influencers, with their toddler palates and mindless waggling fingers, smashing junk food into their gaping mouths and describing things as “sick” or “insane”, words only simpletons bandy about. 

It’s the last time I will criticise a restaurant blogger who constantly takes pot shots at those influencers on his social media, but was tacky enough to take a PR invite – food and accommodation, no less – for the first night of his actual honeymoon. And it’s the last time I will mock the unchecked privilege of a blogger who has claimed to cover the events in her city all year, while concealing the fact that she’s been on a hugely entitled gap year for practically all of 2025 and is probably writing that copy from a hammock in Ecuador.

Let them, as Mel Robbins likes to say. Grifters gonna grift. But it’s time to stop tilting at windmills because those battles are all over: I need to stop picking fights, stay in my lane and just do what I do, because that kind of competition is no competition at all. Don’t worry, I will still point out that the Chronicle is dogshit though, because some things don’t change. 

* * * * *

I just don’t need to do those things any more. The blog has had an absolutely terrific year, with traffic up from 2024 which I genuinely thought was not possible. That’s despite some of my blog traffic being lost to email subscriptions, a by-product of the blog moving partially to a subscription model at the beginning of the year.

And I do have to say something about that. It felt like a huge leap into the unknown when I published that post in January, and I was fully prepared to be laughed out of my corner of the Internet. That it didn’t happen, and that so many of you were prepared to put your hands in your pockets and support quality independent writing means more to me than you can know. 

I hope I’ve always made it clear that it wasn’t mandatory, and that much of the content on the blog would always be free to view, but I also hope those of you who have subscribed have felt that there was enough subscriber-only content to justify your support. I promise that it’s never, ever taken for granted.

That support has enabled me to do a number of things. First and foremost of course the blog is now ad-free, and will always remain so. That was literally the first thing I did. Secondly, it’s enabled me to widen the range of restaurants I review: I hope that I’ve got the balance right between Reading and outside Reading – although I plan to fine tune that in the New Year – but I certainly wouldn’t have reviewed Orwells for instance without the blog being on a subscription model.

It’s been nice, too, to hold back some reviews, like those of Rosa’s Thai, Cosy Club and Henley’s Three Tuns, for subscribers to read. Archive reviews of open Reading restaurants are also now subscriber only, and if you are a subscriber, I’d love to hear from you if you have any other ideas about the blog. The inaugural subscriber drinks over the summer was enormous fun too, and I do have to apologise that my accident has forced me to postpone the drinks planned for Christmas. We’ll just have to do spring drinks instead.

But it’s been such a terrific year in so many respects. Five readers’ lunches, including the first ever at The Moderation which was simply a magnificent meal from start to finish. Every bit as phenomenal was the event at Clay’s Kitchen in October where Nandana put together a fever dream of a menu, reinventing, elevating or restoring to classic roots the Anglo Indian dishes we all remember from countless Bangladeshi curry houses in the U.K. 

Nandana’s onion bloom pakora, miso glazed chicken tikka, her lamb keema pie and her pork vindaloo will stay with me long after I forgot many of the things I’ve eaten this year: of all of the meals I had in 2025, this one might have felt like the greatest privilege of all.

It’s also been a brilliant year for food. I’ll cover the best of it when I give out my awards imminently, but I’ve given out some of my highest ratings ever this year. I don’t think that’s rampaging grade inflation, it’s more a reflection that I’ve been to some outstanding restaurants. In London that’s been places like Paulette and The French House, in Bristol the spectacular RAGÙ. Closer to home Orwell’s and the Three Tuns have both knocked my socks off, almost equally but in completely different ways. That’s the beauty of restaurants.

I also think, though, that Reading’s restaurants have improved. After a very long barren period, which largely coincided with the pandemic and its aftermath, this year we got Club India, Stop & Taste, Mac’s Deli, Amò and Paesinos, and I made it to a revitalised Oishi. Any other year any of those restaurants might be the event of the year: how lucky we are that 2025 is the year when they all happened. There’s never been a better time to be in Italian in Reading, my friend Enza likes to say (and she isn’t even part of the vendetta against me, not as far as I’m aware).

My year has ended in circumstances I could never have imagined at the beginning, with an accident, hospitalisation and an operation which has forced me to take the last month of the year very easy indeed. But even that has been an experience with plenty of beauty in it. I wrote about my time in the Royal Berks and the response from regular readers, newcomers, hospital staff and volunteers has been one of the most moving things I can remember in a very long time. But it also reminds me that food, and Reading, and this blog are all about connection.

So some of my favourite moments have been every time someone interacts with my content, to tell me I’m right, to tell me I’m wrong, to tell me they plan to check somewhere out or to tell me that they’ve checked somewhere out because of something I wrote. I’ve been sent photos by readers of them posing with the owners of restaurants I’ve recommended in a European city guide. I’ve had emails or WhatsApps or messages on Facebook with pictures of one of my favourite places to eat and drink, sometimes saying “look, I made it here!” and sometimes saying “guess where I am?” For the record, I usually guess correctly.

I’ve had messages from friends telling me that they are in some of my favourite cities – Granada more than once this year – and that they are eating or drinking in one of my beloved haunts. I’ve even had an email from an orthopaedic surgeon in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, telling me that my city guides to Montpellier and Paris led to him eating and drinking brilliant things in both cities. He emailed me again this week to say how sorry he was to hear about my accident. Those are the things that make this so worth doing, and as I get to the end of another year of doing it – my thirteenth, unbelievably – it makes me very grateful that I’ve had this experience and excited to see what next year has in store.

So it just remains for me to thank you for every word you’ve read (sorry there are so many this week), every like, comment or share, even every time you’ve read a piece by me and said – to yourself, under your breath or out loud – that I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, I appreciate it all. I hope you have a fantastic New Year’s Eve, however you are celebrating, and that 2026 brings you everything you could possibly hope for. 

You will hear from me again early next year, because I have some awards to announce. Behave yourself until then.

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

For the last few years, at this time of year, I’ve been a proper harbinger of doom. Year after year since the pandemic I’ve written my annual round-up saying that although restaurants have dodged the Grim Reaper for 12 months, next year will be when it really starts to bite. It’s got to be a little annual tradition: write the cards, open the doors on the advent calendar, tell anybody who will listen that next year is going to be rather shit. I became, in my way, the Cassandra of Reading’s restaurant scene.

And most recently, pretty much this time last year, I screwed the pooch by saying this:

Fewer restaurants have closed this year than I expected, and I’m impressed that so many are hanging in there. I hope they all have a very busy festive season to keep them going through the drought that is January. And this time next year, having no doubt been proved wrong again, I’ll try to say something different.

Whoops. Because the chickens finally came home to roost in 2024, and it was bleak. Imagine the feelbad factor Reading suffered late last year, when the Grumpy Goat played chicken with its landlord and lost, only stretched out over an entire 365 days, and you get a vague idea of what this year has been like. It’s been brutal – a rate of closures like nothing I’ve seen in 11 years of doing this. It has affected restaurants of every kind – good and bad, indie and chain, at pretty much every price point. Nowhere has felt safe, because nowhere has been safe.

And also, just to front load all the gloom into this piece so that in a little while we can focus on happier things, next year doesn’t promise to be any better. I would be the first person to slag off the previous government and one of the last people to criticise the new government, but a budget that raises the minimum wage, raises employers’ contributions on National Insurance and cuts business rates relief has done nothing to prevent next year being worse for hospitality than this year has been.

Wait until January, when restaurants have passed their peak trading period and face a month of people skint, budgeting or detoxing, and we may see another flurry of announcements. So the first part of this round-up is going to read a bit like the obituaries column. Let’s run through the damage Reading’s suffered this year. Ho ho ho!

2024 was three days old when the Corn Stores announced that it was closing with immediate effect, and that site has been vacant ever since. I’m not sure how big a surprise this was – it never quite impressed with its steaks, its private membership club upstairs seemed to have limited appeal and its attempt during the pandemic to switch to a star-chasing fine dining restaurant was brave but ill-fated. Still, we’ll always have the whole parfait and brioche thing.

January featured some other significant closures too – Revolutions packed up on Station Road that month, finally mothballing one of my most incongruous positive reviews. Excellent Erleigh Road chippy Finn’s also pulled down the shutters that month, although in one of Reading’s more heartening developments it reopened in September under new management, with the same owners as Calcot’s Coriander Club and Avenue Deli.

The first month of the year saw two other closures. One was Woodley’s La’De Kitchen, although it did that weird thing where it closed and then reopened under a different name, Yaprak, still as a Turkish restaurant and apparently under the same ownership. This seems to have been a thing this year, because in June Veeno did something similar, reopening as Vino Vita; originally the menu also seemed indistinguishable from Veeno’s, although it now seems to have changed. Your guess, in both cases, is good as mine.

Finally in January, Smash ‘N’ Grab sold their business and gave up serving impeccable smashed burgers from their little hut on Cemetery Junction. That sale lurched into acrimony almost immediately, with Smash ‘N’ Grab’s owners – never the shy and retiring kind – taking to social media to claim that the new business had ripped off its menu. Things escalated, and people left the new owners one star Google reviews seemingly before a single burger had been served. All that was bad enough, but what really troubled me was the new joint’s name, Cozzy Bites. Did they expect you to turn up in a bikini?

Spring came, and the closures kept coming. I was really sad to see Barista & Beyond throw in the towel in February: I hope their intern Charlie goes on to bigger and better things. March saw us lose CiCi Noodle Bar on Queen Victoria Street and, just round the corner, Coco Di Mama. Two purveyors of carbs, gone in the space of a couple of weeks. Other people were probably sadder about Coco Di Mama than I was: I still remember Berkshire Live getting all excited last year about “Gran Formaggio cheese”, whatever that was, but the reports I heard were iffy at best.

At the end of March we had one of the weirder closures of the year. The Narrowboat, which only itself took over from Bel and the Dragon the previous summer, was no more as Fuller’s decided to use the building for training and development instead. One of Reading’s more distinctive spaces, with a spot by the river, it could have been fantastic but somehow never lived up to its potential. I imagine that also meant the end of its boat slash floating function room, the Majestic Bel, although it will live on in my memory as I use that epithet about certain people all the time.

One of the biggest blows to Reading’s food and drink scene came on April Fool’s Day as Workhouse Coffee left its site on King Street. This one was a huge shock, as Workhouse changed the landscape of Reading’s coffee scene – some would say created it – many years ago. For my part, that’s the last time I give anyone a lifetime achievement award, as it’s clearly a jinx. I was there on its final day, and felt a real sense of grief.

It’s not entirely clear what happened on King Street. The landlord undoubtedly played a part (don’t they always) as there were reports that the site was in quite a state with the landlord unwilling to do work on it. A rather public falling out between owner Greg Costello and his right hand man probably didn’t help matters.

It wasn’t just independent businesses, though, that faced the chop this year. As the proposed development of the Oracle continued to progress, Reading’s chains took advantage of break points in their leases to stop trading. Last year that was Franco Manca and the Real Greek, this year Brown’s followed suit in April and TGI Friday in June. Some people might miss Brown’s, but it’s hard to imagine many tears being shed about TGI Fridays: I still wonder what the black mark was on that pint glass.

TGI’s UK operator went into administration later in the year, but the branch on the Caversham Road roundabout has been saved from the axe, so if you have a hankering for that Legendary Glaze you don’t have to give up hope just yet. That said, even the Chronicle struggled to like the food there.

The saddest closure of 2024, for me, was of course the Lyndhurst. I’ve written about this at length, but Sheldon, Dishon and the team catered my wedding in May as their last booking before closing the pub. I think I probably think about at least one of the pub’s dishes every single week, and look fondly back at the days when I could drop by after work for Korean chicken wings, or karaage, or monkfish tacos, or pork cheeks with plum sauce. It was a wonderful time, a bit of a golden age Reading may never see again.

And because I’m often asked what they’re up to – Dishon went back to Northampton to be with his family and the brilliant staff ended up all over the place: you may see Kushal if you ever eat at Bill’s. As for Sheldon, he is still in Reading and considering his next steps: I need to persuade someone with a kitchen to let him do a pop-up for a readers’ lunch next year. He’s dabbling in cidermaking and has done a charcuterie course, and when I went for a few drinks with him at Park House I learned a couple of things: first, that Sheldon’s fennel salami is easily as good as anything you could buy commercially, and secondly, don’t go drinking with Sheldon on a school night.

Normally I try and do this in chronological order – closures first, then openings – but the Lyndhurst slightly distorted the space-time continuum this year by closing, opening, closing and opening again. I’ve talked about this a little in my review of the Bell earlier in the year, but the pub was under new ownership a week after Sheldon and Dishon left.

In the inimitable words of my wife, the new landlords went from caretakers to undertakers as they put up a menu, took down a menu, got a new chef, lost their new chef within a week, closed multiple times at short notice for undisclosed reasons, went to the local papers multiple times to complain that everybody had it in for them and had a Google review published with video footage of the locals abusing passers-by. It was quite the five months, all told.

They got their marching orders in October (while they were on holiday abroad, if the rumours are to be believed) and a new landlord is now in place, offering food again. The rumours are that although he too is a holding landlord he might quite like to go temp to perm, so to speak. Let’s hope he does, and if he wants someone brilliant to run his refurbished kitchen I know just the person.

The other significant closure over the summer, another especially sad one, was Pepe Sale. It was the first restaurant I ever reviewed, and although it was never entirely the same after Toni and Samantha sold the business – more Italian, less Sardinian – it was still a real wrench to see the lights off and unread mail piling up the other side of the door. It might well also have been influenced by likely redevelopment of the Broad Street Mall but it meant the demise of one of central Reading’s longest-running restaurants. I will always remember my Saturday nights there, in its heyday, delighted because I’d managed to snag a portion of their famous suckling pig.

If the pace slowed in the second half of the year, there were still some significant farewells over the last six months. Doner & Gyros, though, was not one of them. It closed in July without ever, as far as I could tell, explaining what the difference between doner and gyros really was; given that the menu included such joys as a “Mexican doner” and a “Chicago gyro” I have a feeling they were just making it up as they went along.

A new, equally purgatorial looking restaurant, Mr T, is there now: place your bets on whether I wind up telling you, this time next year, that it has closed.

August also saw the demise of Valpy Street, although – as I discovered when I visited its replacement The Cellar last month – this was more a change of name than a wholesale change of identity. Something to do with shonky accountants apparently, but The Cellar seemed to be doing very nicely in the same spot with the same owner, the same chef and most of the same staff. A bit like that time street food traders Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine rebranded as the Bissy Tree and nobody was any the wiser.

In September we also lost Bolan Thai on the top floor of Sykes’ Paradise and Adda Hut out in Woodley. I was sad about Adda Hut, because it was rare that Woodley gets a restaurant worth hopping on the bus for, and to lose two – Adda Hut and La’De Kitchen – in the same year felt like exceptionally bad luck. It’s a shame I didn’t get to try their mutton chops one last time.

And last of all, at the end of August, another era came to an end as l’Ortolan ceased trading. For a long time it was described as Reading’s only Michelin starred restaurant, although I was never convinced it really classed as being in Reading. And then it lost its star a couple of years ago, although people kept talking about it as if it still had one. But rightly or wrongly it was still considered to be the closest special occasion restaurant we had.

I was never completely amazed by it, and it always felt to me like people’s idea of fine dining twenty years ago rather than now. Even so, that site was once home to Nico Ladenis, and John Burton-Race, and all that is now firmly consigned to history; appropriately, l’Ortolan is that rare restaurant with a Wikipedia page, albeit not one that’s been kept up to date.

That was a pretty cheerless roll call, wasn’t it? But amidst all of that we did still see some new places opening, although nowhere near as many. Apart from the ones I’ve already mentioned, the three biggest and most significant, all in the town centre, had money thrown at them. First in April, we got the first branch of London pizza chain Zia Lucia outside the capital. It came with glowing references, taking over the old ASK site on St Mary’s Butts.

Then the following month Siren Craft opened its town centre taproom on Friar Street, in a storm of influencer hype. And completing the trilogy, Reading welcomed Heartwood Inns’ revamped Rising Sun on Castle Street in June. Again, considerable amounts of cash had been splashed on a very attractive refurb, creating a town centre beer garden to rival the likes of the Allied Arms.

The only problem with all three was how underwhelming they were. Zia Lucia was inoffensive, but maybe not good enough to compete with the likes of independent Sarv’s Slice on the other side of the Broad Street Mall. The Rising Sun was the kind of bland, safe fare you can rely on if you want to take family somewhere that looks fancy, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that you’d be better off at either London Street Brasserie or, for as long as it’s still there, Côte.

And Siren RG1 was such a disappointment – a perfect opportunity to offer a great urban taproom with beer snacks to match, but instead it took the safe option of offering pretty insipid burgers. It’s such a shame they didn’t snap Sheldon up when he left the Lyndhurst. In fairness, Siren’s owner responded to my review on the blog and I suspect they will turn it around, but I still found it entertaining when Siren RG1’s head chef responded to one of my Facebook posts about the Chronicle saying that their stuff was, and I quote, “better than somebody who has absolutely no understanding of hospitality or food doing reviews”. At least I too now know what it feels like to be savaged by the critics.

Even if Reading’s big name signings struggled to impress this year, it doesn’t mean it was all bad. Because there was all sorts of interesting stuff going on – as it often does – in the fringes. In March, Dough Bros started serving pizza on an unfashionable spot on Northumberland Avenue to absolutely no fanfare at all.

They end 2024 as one of the year’s biggest success stories, selling out every night, packed on weekday evenings and acclaimed by pretty much the whole of Reading, from the local paper to local businesses, from gurning influencers to yours truly. Here’s hoping they go from strength to strength next year (and finally sell that calzone I’ve been imploring them to put on the menu).

The same month, West Reading got its own spot of unshowy brilliance as Time 4 Coffee, a Portuguese café that wasn’t run by Portuguese owners, closed and was replaced with DeNata Coffee & Co, a Portuguese cafe that was. It was one of my favourite finds of the year, and a trip to Lisbon earlier in the month revealed that if DeNata’s egg custard tarts couldn’t match the very best that city had to offer, they were a lot closer to that standard than you might think. I plan to eat more of them next year.

Cafés seemed to be the order of the day as Whitley also gained Zotta Deli, just around the corner from 2023’s highlight Minas Café. My visit suggested there was plenty of potential there (and my mole Elizabeth tells me she has since spoken to Paolo who is actively working on the lasagne, which hopefully doesn’t mean that he’ll spit in mine next time round).

We also finally, in September, got the much vaunted sister business of Kungfu Kitchen, which had moved from its old spot on Christchurch Road to a bigger site a few doors down that used to be the home of Sizzling Spice. To say it was gradual would be to put it lightly, but I suspect everything took longer than Jo and Steven wanted it to.

The move happened in June, and then in September the new venue (which is at their old site, keep up) opened as Kungfu Café, offering dim sum, roasted meats, hotpot and – because why not? – full English breakfast, eggs Benedict and pancakes. Then to complete the transition, at some point between late October and early December, it changed its name to Happy Panda Café. Jo’s plans for world domination, however, continue unabated, and when she finally converts the first floor of Kungfu Kitchen to a karaoke space we should all be very afraid.

Would you have bet on one of Reading’s most interesting new businesses this year opening in the Oracle, of all places? Me neither, but that’s what happened in October. The Oracle isn’t usually a hotbed for independent restaurants, unless you count the fever dream that was Lemoni, but Crêperie Les Dous Sourire, which has taken over from the Starbucks next to Vue, is an idiosyncratic enough beast to merit investigation early next year.

It prompted the usual dreary observations from the people who make the Chronicle‘s comments section such a Petri dish, moaning about the price of pancakes. But a proper crêperie in the Breton style, something to aspire to Paris’ magnificent Breizh Café, would be a wonderful thing, and it’s worth noting that Les Dous Sourire also does charcuterie and wine in the evenings. It might be just the thing to keep winter at bay.

There’s just time to mention a few other new businesses that opened in 2024, and a remarkable resurrection. Caversham got a brace of new places, with new bakery – and vowel-free zone – BKRY opening in September and its newest addition, Spill Bar, beginning to trade this month. There’s never been a better time to live in Caversham, and that’s before the news that Alto Lounge is doubling in size and has been given permission to serve booze until midnight. Why don’t Caversham residents talk more about how great it is? It’s a puzzler.

But also, after closing for renovations for – this is no exaggeration – over a year, Oxford Road’s Japanese restaurant Oishi came back from the dead in October. The excitement in that little part of the world was palpable, but the ripples spread across town because of the wider message, that all is not always lost, even when it seems like it is. Not every “temporarily closed” on Google becomes a “permanently closed”, and that’s a nice positive note in what has been such a challenging year.

Finally, and this one seems to have gone to press since I started writing this, Indian restaurant Tanatan has taken over Clay’s old home on London Street. I know this for a fact because Google tells me it’s open and there’s already a solitary five star Google review with a picture of balloons out front. They seem to have kept the orange colour scheme, so good luck to anybody taking photos of the food in there.

And that brings us to next year. We already have businesses queuing up to open in town, and knowing my luck more of them will announce their opening between now and this piece going to print. Lincoln Coffee is taking over Workhouse Coffee’s old spot on King Street, to which I can only say that I hope they’ve done their due diligence.

2025 should be the year we finally get a restaurant, Rosa’s Thai, on the ground floor of Jackson’s Corner, a building which is now owned by noted local philanthropist John Sykes. There has been talk of restaurants in that spot for many, many years and as the saga has dragged on the candidates to fill that space have got less and less impressive, and now it’s ho-hum Rosa’s Thai.

Oh well, leave it another year and maybe we’d have got something worse like a Cosy Club. Actually, scratch that: we’re getting one of those anyway, where Lakeland used to be on the edge of the Oracle.

We should also see the replacement for the Grumpy Goat, a brand new restaurant called Zi Tore promising Italian street food; let’s hope that goes better than the last place to try that. On the one hand, one of the three owners has cooked at Nino’s, Spitiko, Zizzi and Market House. On the other hand, another of them has run a few mobile phone businesses on Smelly Alley, so it’s safe to say that this one could go either way.

Finally, as Station Hill opens up – offering much easier pedestrian access to Siren RG1 into the bargain – we should get a couple of new food and drink businesses there too. I’m reliably informed that we can expect another restaurant from the team behind Coconut and Osaka, which is itself good news and shows a creditable commitment to picking indies.

But perhaps more significantly I’m also told we are getting a branch of Notes, the Covent Garden coffee outpost which offers wine and small plates in the evening. If this happens – and all those businesses that never came to Jackson’s Corner have taught me not to count my chickens – it would be a very interesting development and a challenge to lots of cafes and bars in town. I’ve always enjoyed the Notes on St Martin’s Lane, so I’ll be watching with interest. Besides, a cafe opening on the ground floor of a brand new development: what can possibly go wrong?

The irony about it being such a tricky year for local businesses is that, on a personal level, it’s been a fantastic year for the blog. It was the year I clocked up what felt like more Reading reviews and plenty more from elsewhere, especially London, and the year that four of the most successful pieces I published were features, whether that’s on how to avoid the big chains, the very best things about Reading, or guides to the great beer cities of Belgium or the sunniest city in Europe. I know some of you read all of the posts and some of you are only really interested of reviews of places in Reading, but whichever camp you fall into I appreciate you reading this year.

I don’t generally talk about traffic because it’s a little vulgar, the blog equivalent of talking about salary. But this year has broken all records, as did the year before and the year before that. This year, the scale of that has taken me aback, with almost twice as many people reading as in 2023. So as is traditional, I do have to say a massive thank you to everybody who reads, comments, shares or even sends a link to a friend with a message saying “why is he such a wanker?”. They all count, and everything that puts my writing in front of more people is hugely appreciated by me.

This is also the year when I widened my list of reviewing companions, and I’m very grateful to everybody who answered that call, whether it was my old friend Jerry, my very good friend Graeme (who suffered terribly for my art), or my younger, cooler Canadian cousin. Or newer friends like elite level campanologist Liz, poet Katie and Paul, the lovely teacher who endured my company at Vegivores with only a small amount of obvious bafflement. Having people to come out and review restaurants with me enables me to keep the blog going – it would be a bit boring if it was just me dining on my tod all the time – so it makes a huge difference.

And speaking of not dining alone, I’m also grateful to everybody who came to an ER readers’ lunch this year, and apologetic to anybody I wasn’t able to fit in. Every time I have one I’m reminded that I’m incredibly lucky to have such brilliant readers, and I always enjoy seeing them realise how much they have in common, making friends and discovering connections. The next one is already in the diary for next year and, like a concert promoter, I’ve had to add an extra date due to exceptional demand.

Finally of course, I have to thank my wife Zoë, who for over six years has been my number one dining companion and without whom this blog wouldn’t still be going. She has to endure every review before you get to read it, she’s still usually the one eating the food, and she’s also the person who tells me on a regular basis that I can’t write X, that putting Y in is unnecessary or that saying Z is going too far (which she’s also done with this piece, believe it or not).

However iffy a year is, if at some point during that year you get hitched to your emotional forever home, it’s really hard to have many complaints. I certainly don’t.

Next year I will need to make some decisions about the blog, as I’ve said a few times recently on social media. Money is tight for everybody, and that includes me, and reviewing a new place every week at my own cost has been a brilliant experience but maybe isn’t a sustainable one in 2025. I don’t want to go down the route of taking ads or sponsorship, or accepting freebies from restaurants, so I will be taking some of the festive season to think about moving to Substack and giving people the option of subscribing and, if they want to, contributing via subscription fees.

I don’t know yet what that means in terms of whether parts of the blog will only be available to paid subscribers, whether I offer other things to paid subscribers – like readers’ events, be they lunches or socials – or whether I simply continue to offer the blog for free but reduce my output to fortnightly. Plenty for me to think about, and maybe stuff for you to think about too.

I’ve agonised about this for some time, because it feels like getting out a begging bowl. But then I read something – on Reddit, believe it or not – that said that begging was the wrong analogy. The more accurate comparison, somebody said, would be with busking, and when I read that I got it. I’ve been busking for eleven years, and in all that time I’ve given away all of my writing for nothing and have never taken a freebie in return for coverage.

Hopefully I’ve given you some entertainment, I’ve saved you some money on bad food and, if I’ve done my job properly, I’ve steered you towards spending it at places which deserve it, and which have given you great meals and memories as a result. Put that way, I feel like maybe it is the time to ask for something in return. Tell me how wrong and tin-eared I am in the comments: I can take it.

All of that’s for the future, though. For now, you get one more post before the end of the year, when I announce the winners of the 2024 ER Awards. It’s one last opportunity to celebrate the high points of a year which has been quite unlike any other, exactly the year I thought we’d have in 2021, 2022 and 2023 but not in 2024.

But, for now at least, thank you for sitting through all this, and I hope you have a wonderful Christmas however you choose to spend it – with family, with friends, alone, at home or at work. And if you don’t celebrate it at all, I hope you enjoy some peace and quiet and good food and drink. One last tip: if you want good food, don’t want to cook and want a day that is somehow un-Christmassy, I’m reliably informed by my family that Madras Flavours is open on the 25th and serving up dosas, just like any other day. Food for thought, if you want an escape from turkey and the King’s speech.

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.