Category: Reviews

Restaurant review: Kolae, Borough

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How many of the U.K.’s 100 best restaurants have you been to? I ask because it’s a thing – the National Restaurant Awards – and it came out last week.

Looking through the list, I couldn’t help but feel I was letting the side down as a restaurant reviewer: my score was a measly 7.  Some of them, like Manteca, ranked among the best meals I’ve eaten in the course of writing this blog. But there were at least a couple in that list where I thought “really?” I was pleased to see Wilsons make the list but COR, which didn’t feature, is definitely better than at least a couple of the top 100 that I’ve been to. Still, as I’ve said in the past, the delight of reading a list like this largely lies in disagreeing with it. 

Anyway, as it happens my total only ticked up to 7 because I happened to visit Kolae, a regional Thai restaurant in Borough, the week before the awards were announced. It was ranked 27th, significantly higher than any of the other places I’ve been to, which is an impressive achievement given that it opened late last year. It’s the second restaurant from the team behind Shoreditch’s Som Saa and has very quickly surpassed it in terms of profile (it probably helps that, unlike Som Saa, it doesn’t have any problematic racist incidents in its history).

What this means is that a significant number of restaurant critics have reviewed the place already: Giles Coren for the Times, Tom Parker Bowles for the Mail On Sunday, Tim Hayward for the FT, Jimi Famurewa for the Evening Standard, and Lilly Subbotin for the Independent. Even a couple of restaurant bloggers have already got in on the act, so I can honestly say I’ve rarely, if ever, read as much about a restaurant before stepping through its front door as I had with Kolae.

And the acclaim was consistent, full-throated, verging on the hyperbolic. I mean, get a load of this: Famurewa said it was a “scintillating shot in the arm”, Parker Bowles that it made “the tastebuds tumescent and the gut giddy”. Hayward, the thinking person’s least favourite broadsheet reviewer, settled for the overblown “This has just reminded me why I eat”.

It wasn’t all like that – Giles Coren spent a large part of his review name-dropping Important People He Knew, as did one distinctly regional restaurant blogger – but the important thing was that there wasn’t a single word of dissent: Kolae, according to the consensus, was magnificent.

So it had been on my radar for a while, and an afternoon off in London ahead of a gig that evening – the exceptional Jessica Pratt at Islington’s Union Chapel – gave me a chance to check it out with Zoë. It’s literally just round the corner from Borough Market, a few doors down from Monmouth Coffee, and a pre-lunchtime stroll round the market made it clear just how much competition there was for Kolae to stand out amongst: not just from traders, but nearby restaurants like Barrafina, Berenjak and Bao.

It’s a handsome site, across three storeys, which apparently used to be a coach house in a previous life. I didn’t see the first or second floors, but the ground floor was lovely, all muted concrete and exposed brick. Everything was nicely proportioned: the tables were generously sized and well spaced, and even the bar stools followed suit, being even better padded than I am. So different from, for example, sitting cheek by jowl at Manteca. The Independent summed it up thus: “there’s no other way to say it, Kolae is cool”.

We arrived for a late lunch but even then the room was full of happy-looking diners. No outside space that I saw, really, but the exterior was quite fetching, to the extent where when we left a couple of people were taking pictures sitting in front of the restaurant and uploading them to the ‘gram. “But they haven’t even eaten here!” was Zoë’s baffled assessment.

The menu, on paper at least, looks like it can’t decide whether it’s a starters and mains or small plates restaurant. All the reviews I’ve read say it’s the latter, but the menu lists three things as “smaller” and the rest as “larger” and our server said we should probably plan on three of the larger plates between two. But it’s sort of structured as starters, mains and sides and so we approached it that way. I would say everything seemed reasonably priced, too, with the smaller plates costing about six pounds and the larger ones going from ten to eighteen.

But really, a lot was fluid: at least some of the larger plates felt more like starters or sides, and at least one of the sides, which we ended up ordering, was far more like a main in its own right. Perhaps all the dishes simply identified as food – if so, all power to them. We took it as an excuse to order pretty much everything we wanted and to risk being full. From what I’ve seen, many people who have reviewed Kolae have taken exactly that approach.

Now, before I tell you about everything we ate, I do have to mention heat. Because another thing my research indicated, time and again, was that the food at Kolae might be hotter than you’re used to. A few reviews don’t really talk about it – presumably because those people are hard as nails. But most go to town on it – in no particular order, the food apparently “jolts the senses like being woken at 4am by a sadistic drill instructor”, “blew my bloody head off”, is “blisteringly hot” or leaves you “teetering between burning pain and pure, unfiltered pleasure”.

Does that sound like fun to you? I have to say it didn’t really to me, so I did ask the server which dishes to absolutely steer clear of. There were about three of them. Everything we had was fine, so you won’t get any sub-Fifty Shades Of Grey hogwash in this review.

The first thing we ate was that first step outside the comfort zone. Fried prawn heads with turmeric and garlic were one of those things where you just have to suspend disbelief and give them a go, so we did. Zoë was reluctant approaching the first one but they were crunchy and distinctly moreish and that meant I didn’t have to polish off the rest on my own. I’m not sure how something from the sea could taste quite so earthy, but these did: I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed eating brains so much before, and almost certainly never will again. And yes, prawns do have brains. I know, because I Googled it.

Even better were biryani rice crackers, huge slabs of tactile delight with more than a trickle of nam jim, one of those dipping sauces which just has, and effortlessly combines, everything: sweetness, citrus and funky, salty fish sauce, infinitely more than the sum of its parts. This, for me, was the first of many moments at Kolae where I just thought: this isn’t quite like anything I’ve eaten before. Some of that is my own fault for my sheltered gastronomic life, but if anything that made me appreciate how high definition this food was.

The next few dishes, a mixture of small plates, large plates and specials, were variations on a theme and all linked with the name of the restaurant. Kolae is apparently a southern Thai technique which, as far as I can gather, involves marinating in coconut milk and spice, grilling over fire, re-marinating and re-grilling until what you get is glorious, deep and sticky.

The small plate displaying this technique was a couple of skewers with plump – or, if you get your kicks this way, “tumescent” – mussels threaded on them. I liked them, but perhaps having read so much hype about them I expected these eight mussels to be even more magnificent than they were. Worth it, perhaps, just for the novelty of seeing mussels served in such a different, faff-free way.

It was much, much more successfully deployed with chicken – in this case a huge, deboned chicken thigh which came on a skewer which surely could barely have carried its weight. This is where the technique was really at its best, the meat permeated with complexity and delight.

This kind of food makes fools of us reviewers because it exposes our narrow horizons and our limited vocabulary – I’ve seen it compared to yakitori, to laksa, to satay and to massaman. Better to be honest and say you can’t really sum up the smoke, sweetness, spice and comfort and just say that you should maybe order it so one day, you can compare other great dishes to it instead.

The third of our trilogy of skewers was bavette, topped with crispy onions. You get the idea by now, and although I enjoyed it, three different permutations of that concept was probably one too many. It was better value than the mussels, but not quite as good as the chicken.

At this point, the only question in my mind was where in the pantheon of greats Kolae would wind up nestling. The space was fantastic, the food had been eye-opening – just enough challenge, just enough fascination – and it was simply a wonderful place to be on a weekday afternoon. Every now and again flames leapt from a wok in the open kitchen, there was still hubbub even after the lunch rush had passed, and more was to come.

But that’s where things wobbled, if only slightly. Service had been wonderful, and when you got the attention of a server they couldn’t have been more helpful, but it proved increasingly difficult to flag them down. We’d finished a really gorgeous hazy IPA, Juicy Chug, by small London brewery Jiddler’s Tipple, which had gone beautifully with the small plates, but were keen to get some wine.

And we got there eventually, but if the staff had been more on it I daresay we would have drunk more. It’s a decent and interesting wine list, although the vast majority of the options by the glass were north of a tenner. I really loved my choice, a Greek malagousia and assyrtiko blend, but I think Zoë might have shaded it with her New Zealand riesling.

The first of the large plates that came out again demonstrated that this was a fluid menu where things overlapped and echoed other dishes. I’m not saying that the kale fritters were a replica of the biryani rice crackers from earlier in the meal, but they were definitely close siblings, both in terms of the crunch and complexity. This sauce was very different from the nam jim, but I got sweetness and chilli but maybe not the fermentation the menu suggested would be there. It was however another tactile triumph, although I’m not sure it really felt like a side. Perhaps I should have tried the sour mango salad with dried fish, but everything I’d read suggested that eating it would be a fast train to meltdown..

One of the absolute standout dishes of the meal was – surprise surprise – Zoë’s choice. Soy braised pork belly and ribs was outstanding, in a sauce that was far more about the tightrope between sweetness and saltiness, with heat, just this once, taken out of the equation. The sauce was just gorgeous, the meat was that perfect combination of caramelised and yielding, and it was if anything another dish I hadn’t expected – more poise than bombast, in a meal that had mostly been about very forceful flavours.

And this was where the wobble came in again. We’d ordered this and a second main, a prawn and stone bass curry, and we’d asked for a couple of bowls of rice to accompany them. Our server told us that one bowl of rice would easily be enough for both dishes, and that we could always order more if we wanted to. And maybe that might have been true, but it was very hard to judge when we were waiting something like ten minutes for that second dish to come out.

And this is the drawback of small plates and large plates, starters and mains: because, rightly or wrongly, we had ordered a main each and what this meant in practice was that I sat there like a lemon wondering if they’d forgotten my order. By the time it came out, most of the rice was gone. We ordered another one to go with the fish curry, but didn’t end up using most of it.

I waited so long for my main that I didn’t even get a photo of it, which would frustrate me more if it had been more exciting. It was okay but not extraordinary, and I wonder if the staff have had to manage expectations about the heat levels in the menu following some of those hype-laden reviews, because they told me that this dish was on the hot side and reality it was more restrained than I’d expected.

It was possibly the only thing I ate, up to that point, that tasted unspecial: was that because I’d had to wait so long for it, or just because it didn’t quite match the standard elsewhere? Who knows. All the other reviewers seem to have thought it was out of this world.

Kolae’s menu only had two desserts on it, so naturally we ordered both: how could you resist the possibility that you might just eat the twenty-seventh best dessert in the country? Especially as there was a Coteaux du Layon on the menu, a dessert wine I can never see without ordering which always punches above the likes of a Sauternes (or even a Tokaji, for my money).

Zoë had the worst of it, with a dessert which left her baffled and ambivalent. Mango custard with sweet sticky rice and fresh coconut sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality was a little odd and neither one thing nor the other. The custard was pleasant enough, if not exactly singing with mango, but the layer of lukewarm rice – more claggy than sticky – left her a little cold. Looking at the reviews I’ve seen, Kolae only did one dessert for some time, and all their desserts have been kind-of permutations of what Zoë had (well, left some of) and what I ordered.

That suggests they might still be searching for the right dishes to end meals at the restaurant. On this evidence, perhaps they should keep looking.

I had the smaller, cheaper and better dessert, and arguably the more conventional one. A single sphere of coconut sorbet, gorgeously smooth, came crowned with a salted tea caramel, peanuts on the side. And again, it felt like a few good ideas in search of better execution: I liked the sorbet, I absolutely loved the caramel, I wanted the ratio of the two to be different. And just dumping peanuts next to it felt like an afterthought, when I’d have liked the whole thing to feel integrated.

As I said, previous reviews I’ve seen suggested that Kolae previously only offered one dessert which combined elements of these two. That process of evolution doesn’t feel like it’s concluded yet.

Still, we were full and happy with much to digest. At this point getting attention was a breeze, and our meal – a lot of food, three drinks apiece and a 12.5% service charge lobbed on – came to a hundred and sixty four pounds. I’ve seen a few reviews say that you could spend less, which you could, but I for one didn’t want to come away from the meal thinking anything along the lines of ‘I wonder what those chicken skewers would have tasted like?’

Hours later, after a hectic traipse round Selfridges and Liberty unsuccessfully trying to identify birthday presents, we sat in the very nice beer garden of a pub in Islington, drank two deeply expensive pints of Steady Rolling Man and talked about our meal. It’s always one of my favourite things about going on duty with Zoë, the post mortem, and few things accompany one as well as sunshine and an al fresco pint of Steady Rolling Man.

Our conclusions were fairly similar – that Kolae was extraordinary, and that we were glad we’d taken a punt on it. That the room was incredible, the location was brilliant and that there were many dishes on there the likes of which neither of us had ever had. If the overwhelming critical reaction did have a feel of mass hysteria about it, it didn’t detract from the fact that it was an excellent restaurant.

And yet, there were a few things that just stopped it from being truly great. The slightly disconnected service, for one, and the homogeneity of some of the menu. And the timing issues with the mains did really bug me: I get that when you bill things as large plates and say people might want to share them you may not guarantee they will all come out seconds apart, but a ten minute lag felt like a gaffe and really did take the sheen off what had otherwise been an excellent meal.

And then there were the desserts, the most underwhelming element of the whole thing. I don’t hold with all the tourists wafting round Borough Market with their naff standard issue strawberries swamped in chocolate, but I seem to remember a stall in the market offering raw milk ice cream. If I’d known what Kolae’s desserts would be like, I’d have gone there instead.

But these are, in the scheme of things, relatively minor quibbles. If you have a list of London restaurants you plan to get round to, and Kolae isn’t on it, I’d definitely recommend adding it. If you have any curiosity about this kind of food and this region, even if like me you might lack the experience or the vocabulary to express it, it’s well worth expanding your consciousness with a visit.

And if you’re slightly worried either by suggestions of apocalyptic chilli heat or the visceral horrors of munching on a plate of prawn heads, don’t worry: the former probably won’t materialise, and the latter isn’t mandatory. That’s just the hype talking – the hype that sells papers, results in reservations and gets a very good restaurant an elevated status as the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country, less than a year after it opened.

Is it the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country? I’m not sure about that. I’ve wondered, since eating there, whether it would make my top thirty meals of all time: it’s one of the highest ratings I’ve given out on this blog, but top thirty full stop? Maybe not. But the best is the enemy of the good – and whether or not Kolae is the best, the fact remains that it really is very good indeed. Just leave as many preconceptions as you can at home, and enjoy the ride.

Kolae – 8.7
6 Park Street, London, SE1 9AB

https://kolae.com

Restaurant review: Sartorelli’s, Oxford

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I’m of the firm opinion that everyone has at least one useful life lesson you could learn from them. Someone I used to know, for instance, was convinced that you could never go wrong taking champagne to somebody’s house: we didn’t agree on much, it turned out, but on this she had a point. My stepmother has a rule, a very wise one, that you should never buy her any Christmas or birthday present she has to dust. I sometimes give her champagne, which combines those two rules nicely. 

A married couple I used to know had two excellent customs. One was that using the W word, talking about work, was strictly verboten on Sundays. The other was that, once in a while, one of them could play a joker and opt out of adult life for a whole day. The other one had to make all the decisions – where to go, what to do, what to watch, everything. 

I’ve tried to introduce that latter rule into my own life, but without much success. Most of the time my spouse, tired from working to the core of the bone, doesn’t want to make decisions for anybody else. And when she does, she has a bad habit of making plans for me that I just don’t like. 

“I think you should stay at home and pack for the move” was Zoë’s suggestion last Friday when I was facing another Saturday on my tod and asked her what I should get up to: I didn’t fancy that at all. 

So on a whim, a solo Saturday stretching out in front of me, I thought “fuck it, I’ll go to Oxford”. I headed for the station, and was sitting in C.U.P. having a mocha and making my plans when Zoë texted me. I thought I’d have one last crack at abdicating responsibility. 

“I’m going to Oxford but I’m torn between grabbing a late lunch at the Magdalen Arms or trying Sartorelli’s, that pizza place in the Covered Market. What do you think?”

“Have the pizza. You can review it.”

What happened next was a series of some of the happiest events. First, that moment when your train pulls up and it’s mostly empty, no standing in the aisle holding on to the back of someone’s chair, sitting on the luggage rack or slumped in the vestibule. Instead, a leisurely trundle through Oxfordshire, just me, my phone and the music in my headphones. As Larkin puts it, all sense of being in a hurry gone. 

Getting off at Oxford I was struck that although it wasn’t quiet – it never is – it wasn’t crazily busy, and as I strolled in, up George Street and Ship Street, I thought how curious it was that I’ve never quite escaped this city, just up the train tracks from home, where I spent three years learning a lot about a little but precious little about life. That used to put me off the place, but now I’ve reached some kind of accommodation with it. 

Another glad event followed as I entered the Covered Market. It was that wonderful coincidence that happens when you arrive somewhere very busy literally as somebody else is just leaving, and can jump into their place. So I got a plum spot outside Sartorelli’s at one of the long tables, just by being in the right place at exactly the right time: after that, the queue just grew and grew. If I’d got there five minutes earlier, or later, the day would have had a completely different shape. 

The Covered Market has always been one of my favourite spots in Oxford, even back in the early Nineties when I used to stop there to pick up a lunchtime pie from a trader called Ma Baker (Boney M fans, I presume). But its character has been changing in recent years, with many of the traditional traders driven out by high rents: the butchers and fishmongers have left, and on this visit one of the old-school mens’ outfitters had a closing down sign in the window. The likes of Fasta Pasta, who used to do the best ciabatta in the world, are gone too.

But in their place a very different sort of trader is settling in to the market. Although they recently got a little tap room from Botley’s Tap Social, I first noticed the phenomenon a few years back with Teardrop, a micropub offering beer from Church Hanbrewery, a little brewery based out past Witney. They had half a dozen or so beers on cask and keg, and sold charcuterie and the like, and they had a few barrels and tables outside. And then there was a wine bar, Cellar Door, next to it – again, selling wine by the glass. And finally, there was Sartorelli’s along from that, setting up a little ecosystem – wine, beer and pizza all in one little corner of the market.

Sartorelli’s also sprung up out of Church Hanbrewery, first offering pizza at the brewery taproom before opening in the Covered Market in March 2022. And since it opened, every time I’ve been to the Covered Market – usually to buy cheese, or grab a latte from the excellent Colombia Coffee Roasters – I’ve gone past, thought the setup looked great, eyed the pizzas being devoured outside with no small degree of envy. And then sighed. because I had a lunch reservation somewhere else. But on this occasion I was in Oxford with no plans, and this space at a table outside had miraculously come free. When opportunity knocks like that, you don’t send it away.

The very kind couple next to me kept an eye on my stuff and I went up to order. The place was a bustle of activity, with a big wood-fired oven and a menu displayed on the wall that was simple almost to a fault. Fundamentally you can have a margherita for £8.50 and load it with whatever you fancy, at a cost of 50p per topping, or you can have one of their suggested combos. The menu explained that sartorelli means small tailor, and that as far as they were concerned you could tailor your pizza however you like.

I spotted one of the suggestions that mentioned anchovies, ordered it, paid £10.50 and scuttled back to my seat and my bag, gratified that they were still there. My tablemates then kindly agreed to keep looking after my bag while I went to Teardrop and ordered two thirds of their Teardrop Citra on keg. It cost just under four pounds and was absolutely gorgeous – cold, crisp and, I hoped, perfect pizza accompaniment. I went back to my table with my winnings, saw the queue beginning to build and felt like coming here for lunch was turning out to be a very smart decision on my part.

My pizza arrived just over ten minutes later, although I was having such a lovely time that I’d quite happily have waited longer. It came on a metal tray, à la The Last Crumb, but they’d sensibly put paper underneath it which also helped it stay warm longer. Sartorelli’s just gives you a pizza cutter, a napkin and some chilli and garlic oil, so if you’re a cutlery user, their pizza might challenge you. And this was the point where I realised I had completely missed the fact that, on the menu, my pizza was billed as coming with a “sprinkle of rocket”. It was a nice idea, but it was more than a sprinkle, and without cutlery it added a layer of complexity to eating the thing with your hands.

Initially I also wondered whether the rocket might have been used to camouflage the toppings, to conceal any caper or (especially) anchovy-related stinginess that was going on. But once I settled down to eating the pizza, I realised nothing could be further from the truth. It was liberally carpeted with tiny, punchy capers, had a respectable number of plump black olives and, most importantly, plenty of glorious, salty anchovies.

Not only that, but the base was excellent – especially the crust, all blistered, puffy and chewy. I was having an absolutely marvellous time: a bite of the pizza, a sip of the gorgeous beer, an unworthy look up at the queue, still growing, and I felt like I was properly winning at lunch.

I should have stayed for a dessert, really – it’s just ice cream, which they say is “hand crafted to a secret Sartorelli recipe” – but I had my eye on something from Swoon on the High later on, and I also felt guilty depriving punters of a seat. So I ambled off to the Oxford Cheese Company to pick something up for the evening, and then wandered out towards North Oxford in search of one of my favourite pubs in the whole wide world, the Rose And Crown.

I have broken one of the unspoken rules of restaurant reviewing by reviewing the same kind of establishment two weeks running. Last week was Zia Lucia, this week it’s Sartorelli’s: it’s the equivalent of putting two consecutive tracks on a mixtape by the same artist. But I think it’s very instructive in some ways because restaurants aren’t only about quality, or value, or service, or even convenience. They’re also about expectations, and whether they can surprise or delight.

So I expected Zia Lucia to be something special, and although you couldn’t fault their tomato sauce, or their Parma ham, the overall experience was a little underwhelming. And yet on a wooden stool, at a trestle table in the middle of the Covered Market I had a pizza from a place that didn’t shout or brag, but just did an absolutely marvellous job. Excellent craft beer from a place two doors down, a little people watching and hubbub, and an excellent lunch that, all told, set me back just under fifteen pounds.

Experiences like that are reason enough, if you find yourself at a loose end on a Saturday, to hop on a train and take your chances. I’m very glad I did. Besides, I’m asked quite often whether there’s anywhere decent to go for an informal, quickish lunch in Oxford, and now I have an answer for you. I may not have any great life lessons to impart to you – although my stepmother’s rule of thumb is a very good one – but you can usually rely on me for a restaurant recommendation.

Sartorelli’s – 7.7
21, Covered Market, Oxford, OX1 3DZ

https://www.sartorellis.com/sartorellisoxford

Restaurant review: Zia Lucia

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It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that as a middle-aged man churning out two and a half thousand words a week about some restaurant or other, I’m about as far from the food and drink zeitgeist as it’s possible to be. Restaurant blogs have been dead for years, local papers too, and even the broadsheets are gradually fading away. Instagram influencers are passé too, even if Reading’s handful are still scrounging the occasional free meal (the latest from the Hilton in Kennet Island). Nope, apart from the occasional increasingly desperate Substack, food reviewing is all about TikTok and Instagram reels these days. 

The most prominent is an account called Topjaw. Topjaw, for the uninitiated, consists of a posh bloke with floppy hair (who used to be a model) in front of the camera and a less photogenic bloke, presumably also posh, behind it. The posh bloke with floppy hair interviews restaurateurs in London getting vox pops about where they think you can find the best pizza, burgers, coffee and so on in the capital. He’s trying to perfect that fake almost-estuary accent posh people do when they’re trying to sound less posh, like Tony Blair used to do. He’s not managed it yet. 

The usual suspects come up in those vox pops time and again – the Dalston bakery Dusty Knuckle, the Dexter burger at The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, the Soho hype factory that is new pub The Devonshire (a place where nobody can snag a reservation but there are mysteriously always tables available for celebrities, critics and, well, Topjaw). We’re never paid by any restaurant we feature, says their bio, although they’re not averse to doing paid partnerships with the likes of Bicester Village, of all places. They may not be paid a fee, but God knows if they pay for their food.

Still, all power to them: their format is quick and entertaining, and you find yourself watching it whether you like them or not. It’s already spawning imitators – mainly in Bristol, where you see some people trying the vox pop format – and maybe one day it will translate into a TV show for them, or a paid gig or an appearance on Strictly or I’m A Celebrity.

You might wonder what any of this has to do with Reading, so I should explain. A couple of months ago, during a bumper week of tosspots on Topjaw, they interviewed not only Ed Sheeran (who turns out to be as basic as you would expect) but also hereditary columnist and bigoted human bin fire Giles Coren. Coren was clearly desperate to appeal to a new demographic so was doing his usual dreary, sweary trying too hard schtick, only even more manic than usual.

But in the course of dispensing his tiresome opinions he happened to say that he thought the best pizza in London was done by Zia Lucia. “They have this charcoal base which apparently doesn’t make you fart” he added, not as hilariously as he intended. Hang on, I thought, haven’t they just opened in Reading?

Well, yes, they have. Zia Lucia opened at the start of April on St Mary’s Butts, where ASK used to be, their first branch outside London. Their website talks about their origins in Islington over 15 years ago, and they also bandy around the slightly random stat that they are the world’s 38th best pizza chain (before you get too excited, Pizza Pilgrims finished 27 places above them and the Big Mamma Group, which Coren loathes, came third). Even so a first branch outside London, coming to a town that had lost Franco Manca and Buon Appetito, felt like it was worth investigating. 

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Restaurant review: Chilis

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The week after you get back from holiday is the absolute worst, isn’t it? One minute you’re loafing in the sun, you can have a lie in if you want to, your hardest morning decision is where to grab coffee and then where to have lunch, your post-lunch coffee, maybe a snack, your pre-prandial drink, your dinner, your post-dinner bar of choice. On and on it goes until you’re a modern-day lotus eater, free of cares, a flâneur and a gourmand, carefree and arguably in need of detox. Little, if anything, is finer than reaching that stage.

And then it’s over. The plane touches down at miserable old Shatwick, and you’re reintroduced to the M25. When you get home your clothes all need to be washed, the fridge is bare and there’s this thing called work you have to get up for at something ridiculous like half-seven in the morning. Just like that you’re back in a life of dreary cold packaged sandwiches and cobbling together a meal plan, of not drinking during the week, watching your calorie intake and hanging in there until payday.

And even though it’s May, it seems to be raining most of the time. I don’t care how much you might love your job: objectively speaking, if you compare it to a holiday there’s only ever going to be one winner. Why does anybody do it?

This year, for me at least, that comedown has been even more of a cliff edge than usual. Because not only was I back from holiday, but I was back from honeymoon – I got married, although I haven’t talked about it much – and my next trip away won’t involve planes, trains or automobiles but instead a white van and the removal men as I burn a week’s leave next month moving house.

So although Zoë and I did the supermarket shop as usual, with a sense of resignation, sticking to the plan wasn’t easy last week. Instead there were accidental takeaways, or wanders over to Bakery House or Honest, anything to make real life just a little more unreal, even if only for a short while. You could call it a transition phase, you could call it a soft landing. You could even call it a cry for help: probably it’s a little of all three.

On the plus side, it meant there was a slight role reversal. In the run up to my nuptials it was more difficult to persuade Zoë to come with me on duty, a combination of trying to shed that last couple of pre-marital pounds and save those last few pre-marital other pounds. Now that I’ve been elevated to the dizzy heights of husband? It turns out that Zoë can be persuaded to eat out during the week, especially if it happens to be her turn to cook.

I may have used this to my benefit, in truth. Bet you can’t be fucked to cook the salmons tonight I messaged her, as she was on the train back from London. How did you guess? came the reply. Failing at this, aren’t I. After a bit of plea bargaining – it was raining, so nowhere too far out of town (my wife does not like the rain), and nowhere that involved walking away from home only to head back (my wife also doesn’t like going back on herself) we settled for Chilis: central, a short walk from the station, potentially interesting.

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Restaurant review: Bébé Bob, Soho

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Sometimes I wonder if I’m still true to the newcomer who started out reviewing neighbourhood Sardinian restaurant Pepe Sale all that time ago. Have I managed to keep my finger on the pulse of what Reading diners really want from a meal out, or has my head been turned by all those great meals, all that fine dining, all those plaudits and mentions in the national press? It was something that crossed my mind from time to time, especially as I was sitting in Soho House – my second Soho House of the afternoon – with my friend James, polishing off a carafe of Viognier, ready to scoot across town to Bébé Bob, a restaurant which sells rotisserie chicken at just under forty pounds a head.

If any of you are still reading after that opening paragraph, I feel I should explain: James suggested going to Soho House as he’d got membership a few weeks ago. And the chance to experience life on the other side of those discreet doors, to see how the other half lives – well, how could I resist? So I accompanied him, feeling quite the bumpkin, as he scanned in using the app on his phone and the woman on reception, ultra polite and polished, greeted us by name and explained the facilities, including various roof terraces and the cinema in the basement where they did regular screenings. I tried not to look too “Home Counties hick up in London for the day”, no doubt failing miserably.

Inside everything was ridiculously tasteful, the place filled with the buzz and clamour of a newborn London weekend. I tried to be insouciant, but of course I was meerkatting every time someone went past. Would I see a celebrity? (The answer, by the way, was no.) If anything, the interior was more stylish than some of the people who wandered past, distinctly nouveau, laden down with carriers bearing the logo or one designer or another. I entertained myself trying to guess their story; tech bro; footballer’s agent; lottery-winning fish out of water. What would people have thought James’ and my story was?

But anyway, if I sound sniffy I don’t mean to; it was a fascinating experience, made more fascinating by the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be repeated any time soon. But the chair was comfy, the sunlight flooding in from the roof terrace was welcome, the people watching was Olympic standard and the Viognier was crisp and peachy. I would be a hypocrite if I tried to claim I hadn’t had a wonderful time.

But in the course of writing this I did a bit of research and there were a couple of stories a few months ago saying that Soho House had lost its exclusivity and cachet – one of them in Tatler, no less, saying effectively that they’re admitting all sorts these days. That was in March, but I would say that even if it hadn’t happened by then, the club letting me through the door in April might have signified the moment it truly jumped the shark. The following week I sent James a meme on Instagram describing Soho House as “the Freemasons for influencers”: he didn’t dignify it with a response.

Anyway, I was the one that had chosen Bébe Bob for our dinner reservation, the second half of a one day chicken festival which commenced with disappointing fried chicken at Coqfighter. I thought I was on safer ground with Bébe Bob, an offshoot of Soho’s famous/infamous Bob Bob Ricard specialising in rotisserie chicken almost to the exclusion of everything else. Their website rather spells it out, Any main course the customer wants, as long as it’s chicken or chicken. It also rather splendidly says that Fashionwear is welcome, activewear is not.

Bébé Bob opened last October and has already attracted a raft of plaudits from the people who know about these things. Grace Dent went there at the start of the year and seemed to enjoy herself, even if she called it a “chicken and chips place that thinks it is ‘it'” and made a tired joke about Margo from The Good Life. And restaurant guru Andy Hayler – recently seen enjoying Clay’s Kitchen – visited in March, lavishing the chicken with, by his standards, fulsome praise: “it was a joy (16/20)”, he raved, presumably having a lie down in a darkened room afterwards.

All good omens, then. And I have to say, the interior of Bébé Bob was one of the most gorgeous, luxe spaces I’ve eaten in for as long as I could remember. They claim it’s inspired by the Golden Age, and I can kind of see that. Everything is chic, sleek and deco, plush and subtly lit, and you’ll struggle to find a sharp edge anywhere, from the curvy, velvety chairs to the rounded corners of the wood panelling. Impeccably tasteful, too, especially the art on the walls, Kandinsky squiggles in Mondrian colours. I loved the tiled floor too, reminiscent of Clarice Cliff, although research suggests they inherited that from Folie, the previous restaurant at this site.

But overall, the whole thing was enormous fun, grand but not po-faced, and you got a sense of being on a Cunard liner in the Thirties, going from somewhere glamorous to somewhere equally glamorous. I half expected the captain to announce that we would be docking at Biarritz on the hour, or Poirot to assemble everybody in the salon and reveal the identity of the murderer.

Bébé Bob’s menu does indeed live up to that promise of chicken main courses to the exclusion of all other – and just the two kinds, Vendée for nineteen pounds a pop, or Landais for thirty-nine. The former is “raised outside for most of its life”, which does rather make you wonder about the other less enjoyable parts, while the latter is corn and milk-fed, free-range and given more time and space, apparently developing a deeper flavour as a result. Could it be worth thirty-nine pounds, though?

Grace Dent never found out, because they’d run out when she went, while Andy Hayler, always one to throw money at a problem, ordered the Landais and said it was in a completely different league to anything you could get in this country. Our server, one of a brigade of charming and efficient servers, told us they only had one of the Landais left. We reserved it.

“We were always going to go for the expensive chicken, weren’t we?” said James. We’d spent the afternoon in Soho House drinking cocktails and wine after drinks at the French House. Of course we were.

The menu says that although chicken is the only main on offer, starters are “plentiful”. In reality there were six, one of which was a salad, although I guess I wasn’t counting the three varieties of caviar also available. Starters were between twelve and twenty-two quid and I suppose could have been described as timeless or retro, depending on your perspective: that’s why Grace Dent made that crack about Margo Leadbetter.

James decided to try the prawn cocktail, possibly the archetypal starter from days gone by, and seemed to like it but not love it. The Marie Rose apparently had quite a kick to it, although it wasn’t clear where from: the menu said that cognac was involved but that didn’t explain the heat.

I had been torn between egg mayonnaise and smoked salmon, so I asked our server for advice. He immediately came down on the side of the former. “It’s a lighter dish” he went on to explain. Well, happy days, I thought: it’s been a day of excess already and I had a wedding suit to slim into and only two weeks to do it. We even turned down the offer of bread, that’s how well behaved I was trying to be.

Well, I have to congratulate our server for his gift for understatement, because light doesn’t do it justice. It wasn’t egg mayonnaise as I’m used to, instead being a singly impeccable boiled egg, split open, each half adorned with a firm, salty Cantabrian anchovy. Under that, capers and herbs and a smudge of a delicious, punchy mayonnaise with a hefty hit of Dijon mustard. All very nice, but approaching amuse bouche levels for twelve pounds. I found myself wishing I hadn’t spurned the bread after all.

The thing is, whatever the quibbles about the food you couldn’t knock the location, the surroundings or the sense of occasion. We sipped our way through a very decent bottle of sauvignon blanc from the Loire, which was mentioned in Andy Hayler’s review. It was, in his own effusive words, “Forty-three pounds for a bottle that you can find in the high street for fourteen”. To give you an idea of the wine list, this was easily one of the cheapest wines on there – it was actually forty-four, but that’s inflation for you – and you could easily spend north of sixty quid without even necessarily meaning to.

Service really was lovely, but there was an interesting moment when the servers approached the table next to us with their chicken, ready to serve it with ceremony and solemnity. Our neighbours were American – I’d already clocked that from the accent – but they’d obviously spent too much time in the U.K. I could tell that from their reaction to the arrival of their main course.

“Goodness, that’s very quick chicken” the woman said. This is the kind of thing an English person would say, when what they meant was why the hell are you bringing this out almost immediately after I’ve ordered? I’d expect that in Nando’s, not somewhere like this. Which is, to be fair, the kind of thing I’d expect an American to say when rushed in a British restaurant. When she instead decided to express passive-aggressive surprise I didn’t know whether to be impressed or disappointed; James and I did lean over, after the server had gone, to express our solidarity.

Maybe you only get the delay if you order the fancy pants chicken. That would explain why ours arrived about quarter of an hour after we’d finished our starters – although even that, come to think of it, felt a little bit quick. From the text on the menu nothing about this chicken’s life had been rushed, so it was a pity this part was. It deserved better. But you had to hand it to them for the ceremony – each of us had a breast and a leg reverently placed on our plate, a poultry yin and yang, with the oyster delicately popped in the middle. And finally, thick jus was drizzled from a little jug, anointing the whole lot: I now declare the most expensive chicken you’ll ever eat in your life, open.

I know you want to know what a thirty-nine pound portion of roast chicken tastes like. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s, err, nice. I didn’t get a stunning moment of clarity where I thought “this is why!” The meat was dense, and I’d like to think I perceived the epic intensity of flavour that the experts had picked up on, but I can’t say I could. These chickens are apparently bigger, from all that time spent living the life of Riley, eating corn and drinking milk in their own sweet time, but I can’t say I felt like there was a huge amount of meat. The skin was rather pleasant, but lacked that crispiness that would have made it top tier. I almost wish I’d been able to try both types of chicken side by side: perhaps then I would have realised what all this money bought you, but as it was I wasn’t sure I had.

By way of comparison, the best rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had – so far, at least – is in a renowned Lisbon restaurant called Bonjardim. There they rub the chicken with salt and lemon until the skin is almost like cracking. It’s outstanding stuff – I once went to Lisbon on holiday and ate there twice in one trip – and as it happens the following weekend James was on a short trip to Lisbon so I told him to check Bonjardim out. True to his word he sent me a photo that induced envy and hunger and made me curse my pre-wedding diet. This shat on Bébé Bob was his pithy review, delivered via iMessage. It cost him ten Euros.

It’s especially a shame because the peripherals were all terrific. The chicken jus almost made it all worthwhile, so deep and sticky and savoury. Which of course means there was nowhere near enough of it to go round: if it had been up to me there would have been a huge bowl of the stuff, and then I might gladly have foregone the chicken. I wondered if the chicken jus was specifically Landais chicken jus, not that it would have justified the thirty-nine quid,

Also excellent was the truffled cauliflower cheese – burnished and brilliantly moreish with a good whiff of truffle without being overpowering. It had to be good for nine quid, but it pretty much was. Although to be fair, by that point after a day in Soho I might have been anaesthetised to the point where the cost of things didn’t properly register with me. It’s only money, after all. And I rather liked the potatoes, which were roasted in chicken fat. They looked when they turned up like they might be a little anaemic, carvery-grade stuff, but feeling the golden shell crack under a knife I realised they were the real deal.

It felt like a little bit of a waste not having dessert, but we both felt like we’d dented our wallets enough and the Elizabeth Line was calling to us. In any event, I wouldn’t have called the dessert menu plentiful either, as out of the seven desserts on offer one was a pair of chocolate truffles, a second was a shot of lemon infused vodka and a third was lemon sorbet with – yes, you’ve guessed – a shot of vodka. That gives you four proper desserts, one of which is a brownie: no wonder we passed.

And that’s when we had that ouch moment that comes in some restaurants, the moment when even though all the prices are clearly displayed throughout and you know exactly what you’re ordering, the bill arrived. Our meal for two – a bottle of wine, two starters, two chickens, two sides and some mineral water – came to just over a hundred and ninety pounds, including service. We knew it would be that much, we ordered the holy grail of chicken, nobody mugged us in an alleyway, but still. We also both mentally tracked back many of the meals we’d ordered and loved over the last few years. The vast majority of them cost less than Bébé Bob.

So that was the end of ChickenFest 2024. We hopped on the train and headed back west full of chicken and equally full of questions. Was Bébé Bob a good restaurant, an average one or a bit of a rip-off? Even as I sit down to tap out the final paragraphs on this review I’m still not entirely sure. It’s a great example of how a restaurant is more than the sum of its parts because as theatre, as an experience, I loved Bébé Bob’s silliness. The starters were decent but small, the chicken was decent but too expensive. What does that amount to? What does it all mean?

Well, search me. I imagine ninety-five per cent of you will look at the mark at the bottom and think it doesn’t reflect the meal I had, but I don’t even know what I think of the meal I had, not even now. I’ve rarely been to a restaurant that so unapologetically makes you take it on its own terms. I’m glad I went once – it’s only money – but I can’t imagine I’d ever go again. If you went and had, in the immortal words of Franck Eggelhoffer, the cheaper chicken, you might emerge having spent less and still had a very creditable meal.

But is that the point, and even then would it be enough when you think of all the excellent restaurants a stone’s throw from Golden Square? Maybe not. Bébé Bob, like Soho House, is a peek into another world, a vision of a life where most of the people there have considerably more money than I do. It was fun to visit: I had a blast. But it was even nicer to come home afterwards.

Bébé Bob – 7.0
37 Golden Square, London, W1F 9LB
020 72421000

https://www.bebebob.com