Some news for you at the start of 2025: as I mentioned recently, this year the blog will move to more of a subscription model. That will be a gradual change, I imagine, and I’m not sure where it will end up. But the costs of running a restaurant blog have gone up every year, as has the traffic to the blog, so I’ve reached the point where I feel like it’s reasonable to ask readers if they would like to contribute.

I know this is a contentious subject. Everything costs more, everybody has less money and – let’s be honest – we’re used to reading stuff on the internet for nothing. But there’s an increasing trend of writers moving to a subscription-based model, and I can see why. These aren’t people who are sticking four pictures, a Reel and some hashtag-laden word salad on Instagram and describing themselves as bloggers. These are proper writers who think that proper writing should be worth something. 

Don’t laugh, but I consider myself in that camp: this is about paying for writing, not for food.

When I mentioned this on social media I got an interesting mixture of responses. Some people were willing to subscribe to ER and pay a small monthly fee to keep the blog going (thank you, if you were one of those people!). More people were happy to subscribe but didn’t want to make a financial contribution. And quite a lot of you wanted the blog to stay on WordPress and remain free of charge. 

I understand. Free stuff is great. But this blog’s been free for eleven years, and in that time it’s hopefully entertained some of you on a regular basis. It might have steered you away from awful restaurants, helped you find some great ones or assisted when you’ve planned a city break. Even if you’ve not agreed with me when I’ve reviewed a restaurant, perhaps you’ve enjoyed disagreeing with me. I get that: I enjoy disagreeing with people too.

Some people expressed concerns about having to go elsewhere or sign up to another website or app to read the blog. I completely appreciate that, and I’m very reluctant to leave WordPress, which has been the home of ER since the beginning. Fortunately – and thanks to the reader who pointed me in the right direction – WordPress should have the functionality I need to make the changes I want.

Here’s how it will work – you’ll have the option for a monthly subscription to ER for £3, or a discounted annual subscription at £30. I hope that enough of you will want to support Edible Reading in one of those ways that the blog can cover its costs, and that money might also help me to create additional content (whether that’s features, interviews or something else).

For now, I’ll leave it a few weeks and see how that goes. But in the future, some reviews may well be available to paid subscribers only. Features might be, too. The readers’ lunches, an enormous success since they launched in 2018, remain open to all for the time being but again, they may also become subscriber only at some stage. 

A few bits of feedback I received stuck with me. One said “In principle I don’t tend to pay for content on social media”, and I wanted to say something about that. 

The promotion I do for my writing – whether it’s on Threads, or Facebook, or Instagram – yes, that’s all social media. But the blog isn’t. The blog is writing, and I do think writing is worth supporting. Just because the likes of Berkshire Live and the Chronicle have devalued that with cut and paste clickbait and websites laden with adverts, doesn’t mean we should all accept the lowest common denominator everywhere (incidentally, if the blog had paid subscribers the first thing I’d do is upgrade the WordPress plan and get rid of the ads – wouldn’t that be nice?)

Someone else said if my motive was to showcase and improve the Reading food scene this was a counterproductive move. I understand, but I don’t think promoting Reading and charging subscription fees are mutually exclusive. Reading UK gets money to do a dreadful job of promoting Reading’s independent scene; I’ve effectively been doing it as voluntary work for over a decade. During that time every single website like this one that somebody has set up has folded. Time to try something different.

I was having a conversation with a friend on WhatsApp and he said he thought this was a fair thing to do. “You’ve done your bit over the last 11 years,” he said, “now it has to work for you.” Then he said something that really hit home. 

“The point is that if people don’t pay for stuff then eventually it’ll cease to exist.”

I’ve said this so many times about restaurants – use it or lose it, the time-honoured mantra. And it’s been true time and again: there are wonderful restaurants in Reading, not enough people visit them and then everybody is so shocked when they close. I’d always meant to visit, people say, or I wish I’d gone more often. Why shouldn’t that also be true of this blog?

Of course, if nobody wants to support the blog in this way and all this falls flat on its face it will be back to the drawing board for me. I’ll have to reduce the output on the blog, for starters. It’s currently weekly, but it hasn’t always been: if you cast your mind back to before the pandemic reviews came out fortnightly. Or maybe it will be time to do something completely different.

I know there will be a few people reading this and actively wanting this gamble to fail. It would be nice to show them how wrong they are. But I still think that for a review or feature practically every week, £3 a month – less than the price of a coffee – or £30 a year represents decent value. I hope enough of you turn out to agree with me.

Here goes nothing. Click below if you want to show your support.

Happy New Year everybody! I hope that you’re keeping your resolutions, if you made any, and that you’re being kind to yourself if you’ve broken them. To be honest, in 2021, with things as they are, you could do a lot worse than giving yourself a year off borderline impossible targets for arbitrary self-improvement: most people, after all, get quite enough of that sort of thing in the workplace. 

Personally I’m aiming to follow the excellent example set by my friend Dave who succinctly said “New Year’s Resolution: stay alive”. That’s as ambitious as I plan to be this year, and anything beyond that is a bonus. That said, I did tell myself I would try and write something this year, especially in this third lockdown when we all have plenty of time on our hands – enough, who knows, that you might even fancy reading a weekly blog post from me. 

I did wonder about several different options. I briefly thought about bringing back last year’s series of interviews – there are plenty of interesting people in Reading’s food and drink scene (and beyond) that I never got round to quizzing. And I did wonder about doing another series of diaries, but I think they were probably a little niche by the end. Besides, there are only so many times (and only so many different ways) that you can ponder the eternal verities while shuffling round the Harris Garden for the three hundredth time. 

I also considered doing a series of short pieces in praise of particular aspects of Reading and Reading life – you know, to provide the unrelenting positivity with which I am so strongly associated. I even got as far as drawing up a list of candidates for that one: perhaps another time.

But really, that would be like turning up to a gig and playing nothing but songs off the new album that hasn’t come out yet, when everybody wants to hear the hits: the overwhelming response on social media has been that people want me to review Reading’s takeaway options, so takeaway reviews you shall have. The first one will go up at half-eleven next Friday, and I’ll try and put one up every week until the lockdown is over, everybody has lost interest or I’ve contracted botulism, whichever happens first.

Early in the first lockdown, I decided against reviewing takeaways. I said that it wasn’t a level playing field to compare them against eat in restaurants, and that I would feel bad about writing negative reviews. The best part of a year later, I think the landscape has changed enough that it’s worth a go. Takeaways and deliveries have become a big part of most restaurants’ revenue streams over the last twelve months, and they’ve had plenty of time to get good at it, pick a delivery partner or build their own ordering and fulfilment capability. 

And actually, I think the point of reviews is as important as ever: you want to know whether a restaurant constitutes a good use of your money. I still believe that we should be protecting the independents we want to survive, but it seems unfair to draw a line at the start of the pandemic and say that none of the restaurants that has opened since should be supported. It’s very brave to open a new business in times like these: those restaurants deserve consideration, too.

So, here are the general principles. I’ll review a different restaurant each week, and I will try and use a range of different delivery providers – so a mixture of ordering through Deliveroo, JustEat, Uber Eats and (where possible) direct via the restaurant. I’ll only review deliveries, not collection takeaways: mainly because a delivery service that can deliver to me is more likely to be able to deliver to you too, whereas if I traipsed over to e.g. Finn’s to pick up some fish and chips it’s quite possible that lots of people reading wouldn’t be close enough to have the same luxury. 

I know geography will be a problem, and that some restaurants I review won’t necessarily deliver to you, depending on where you’re reading from: that is, I’m afraid, the nature of the beast.

In the majority of cases, I’ll try and review places that haven’t previously been reviewed on the blog. The emphasis on deliveries also opens up some options I couldn’t have previously reviewed – whether that’s the Caversham Park Village Association delivering Caribbean food every Friday and Saturday, or Flavours Of Mauritius which is currently delivery only, or even somewhere like Rizouq down the Wokingham Road which is just too small to eat in anyway. 

I will try to prioritise independent businesses, although I may well also want to try some chain options which come out of dark kitchens, like Shake Shack and Burger & Lobster. And further down the line I don’t rule out trying heat at home meals (as offered by Clay’s, and numerous other high profile national restaurants), although for the time being I’ll be prioritising local restaurants because I want to try and keep my money in the local economy where possible. Let’s see how we go, and how long this lockdown lasts.

My takeaway reviews won’t operate on the same rating scale as the restaurant reviews, because you’re not comparing apples with apples. I’m still making up my mind whether to use ratings at all, but whether I do or not I will try and make sure the review covers things like how long it takes to get to me, whether it’s hot (the most crucial thing of all, obviously) and whether the packaging is wasteful or efficient, recyclable and so on. Sometimes when a delivery meal is disappointing it’s hard to know whether that’s the fault of, for example, the restaurant or the Deliveroo driver: so things won’t always be cut and dried but, as always, I’ll try to be fair.

I’ve had a brilliant response on social media when I put out feelers about reviewing takeaways, and as a result I’ve had plenty of great suggestions and am building up a pretty good to do list that will easily keep me occupied for the rest of lockdown. But I’m always open to more, so if you have any places you’d like to see reviewed please feel free to comment here, or on Twitter or Facebook, or just by dropping me an email – ediblereading@gmail.com.

Does that sound like a plan to you? Excellent. See you back here next week for the first review.