Pappadams closed in November 2025 and is due to reopen as a new restaurant called Anjappar. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
I got an email from WordPress the other day confirming that they were renewing my domain name for another year and that, more than anything, reminded me that a significant anniversary was coming up: next month my blog turns 10 years old. What started as a little hobby has become, well, a slightly less little hobby but I can’t quite believe that a decade later I’m still reviewing restaurants and that people are still reading those reviews. There will be more about that in the weeks ahead – for which I apologise in advance – but it has left me in rather a reflective mood lately (and I apologise for that, too).
In the first year of the blog, back when Alt Reading and the Evening Post were still a thing, I published a total of 38 reviews of places in Reading. Of those 38 restaurants just over half are still trading today – a statistic which surprised me, although it does include the likes of Zero Degrees, Côte, Five Guys, Mission Burrito, Malmaison, Bel And The Dragon: chains who are still going, many years later.
But when I look back at the independent restaurants I visited in the first year of the blog, the ones that remain open in 2023, there are only three that I’ve never returned to since. Pau Brasil, although I know it has its fans, has never tempted me back. I’ve never got round to Coconut, although I did review their takeaway at the start of last year. And last but not least, there’s Pappadams, the subject of this week’s review.
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Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025, although the menu and ownership are apparently unchanged.
It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.
And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.
But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.
Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.
Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.
Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?
At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.
I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.
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It’s strange to think that I took nine years to review anywhere in Maidenhead, and then went there three times last year in relatively quick succession. The Elizabeth Line is, of course, the main reason for that, making the place only twelve comfortable, air-conditioned minutes away. But the other reason, which is similar but not the same, is the effect the Elizabeth Line is having on Theresa May’s stomping ground.
Speaking of the great woman, here’s a true story: I was within spitting distance of the former Prime Minister last year when she was the mystery star guest at my secondary school’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. Fuck me, it’s Theresa May! I said as she walked past the bench where I was drinking warm cider out of a plastic glass (fortunately she didn’t try to, although I’m pretty sure she heard me).
As I’ve mentioned before, all sorts of interesting restaurants are proliferating in Maidenhead now it has these shiny new transport links, and many are the sort of places you might wish Reading had. A Hoppy Place has the best part of twenty beers on tap with a scale and central location that combines the best of the Nag’s Head and the Grumpy Goat. Seasonality, which I reviewed last year, is the kind of seriously good small independent modern European restaurant that has long eluded central Reading.
Sauce & Flour – still hate the name – might not have been my bag but even so it was undeniably bang on trend. El Cerdo, which opened recently, is building good word of mouth for its tapas (Reading town centre last had a tapas restaurant in 2016, if you’re keeping score).
And finally, getting to the point, there’s Knead, the subject of this week’s review and the reason I plonked my arse on that iconic moquette about half an hour after I closed my laptop for the week, pulling out of Reading Station with Zoë, a weekend of sunshine, food and company ahead of us. Within another half an hour we were sitting in the sun outside A Hoppy Place with a couple of cold beers, a packet of pork scratchings and one eye on the menu of our dinner venue. Life was good.
Knead’s story is a time-honoured one involving many of the elements you often see in independent hospitality businesses. Husband and wife team (check) Olivia and Simon Perry bought a van (check) in 2018. Four years of street food events (check), catering (check) and pop-ups (check) later, they decided to take things to the next level and move into a permanent spot. They carried out some crowdfunding last year (check) and finally, in December they opened their first restaurant in the middle of Maidenhead.
I don’t mean to sound dismissive or to brand that narrative as a cliché. Scrolling back in time all that way to 2018, seeing the whole thing unfolding in reverse like Memento, I was struck by how hard the Perrys had worked to get to where they are. This was no flash in the pan, no affectation or fad but the culmination of years of work. It made me really want them to do well. It made me think about whether, really, I’ve ever stuck at a dream even half so long. And, of course, it made me hungry.
Knead is on the ground floor of a new build, like A Hoppy Place, Barista & Beyond and, for that matter, Dee Caf and that gives it advantages it makes the most of – proper space outside, big double aspect windows and a surprisingly generous room. I loved the framed prints and the “hydroponic wall”, thick with basil, and if the tables were cheek by jowl the place was so buzzy and happy, filled with the promise of a new weekend, that I was really unbothered by that. At the next table, a couple were sharing a pizza: come to think of it, maybe behaviour like that is why they have to cram them in.
“Who shares a pizza with restaurants struggling like they are right now?” I said, possibly louder than I intended, and Zoë gave me a look I know well, the one that silently says why do you have no indoor voice? I’d like to say I made a mental note there and then to order more food, but in truth that decision had been made hours before, as the train doors had closed.
Knead’s menu is good, small and pleasingly eccentric, by which I mean that it’s full of surprises. Half a dozen red pizzas, three white ones, a handful of nibbles and sides and a couple of sharing boards. That’s all, and many of the obvious pizza choices are missing – including the anchovy and caper combo I would normally pick on autopilot. Pizzas max out at thirteen pounds and everything is keenly priced – so again, what people are doing taking up a table and just eating the one pizza completely escapes me. I’m sorry, I won’t mention that again.
Another encouraging sign is that suppliers get a name check. Some, like Marlow Cheese Company or Agosti Gelato, who make their ice cream in Cookham, are local. Others like Islington’s Cobble Lane (who provide the cured meats) may not be but have a good reputation. I also absolutely loved Knead’s decision to stock beers by White Waltham’s Stardust Brewery, because I think nothing goes with pizza quite like beer. I had their Saaz Pilsner, which was crisp, bitter and rather nice, while Zoë tried their Optic IPA: a sip of hers made it clear that I’d made the wrong choice.
We started with Knead’s charcuterie sharing board, which clocks in at just under fifteen pounds, and it was easily the least impressive thing I ate all evening. This could and should have been an opportunity to showcase how well Knead buys, but it fell flat. The prosciutto had the sheen of something freshly decanted from plastic, the mortadella was – well, still something I’d never really choose to order. The salami was decent but unexceptional. Cobble Lane does lovely cured meats, but I’d be surprised if any of this came from them.
So with the charcuterie not exactly the star of the show, that left the rest. And the rest felt a little like padding. Artichoke hearts tasted thin and nothingy and had, I imagine, been fished out of a jar. Sundried tomatoes, bocconcini and olives were all perfectly unexceptionable, but you could get this in a plastic tub from M&S. And the “no waste focaccia” made from leftover dough was just sticks of pizza dough and not focaccia at all. Presentation just looked like everything had been shoved on a plate, an attempt to say “look how much you’re getting”.
I know I sound like I’m having a mither. But this kind of starter is one of my favourite things in the world when it’s done right, no better than something you can knock up yourself when it isn’t. In Reading, Mama’s Way does something similar that shows this up for the pale imitation it was. And at the Lyndhurst they’ve just introduced their own charcuterie board. For the same money you get generous quantities of three different types of charcuterie, all from Cobble Lane, and a thick slab of terrine, and they throw in a black pudding Scotch egg. I know that because I tried it the night before my visit to Knead. That’s how I know Knead was going through the motions.
But that’s not, I suspect, where Knead’s strengths lie, and perhaps they just have that dish on their menu because they think it’s something a pizzeria should have. Once we moved on to the pizzas themselves they became significantly more assured.
Mine, the “Sergeant Scoville” was that modish classic, the pizza with ‘nduja and some other stuff. In this case they hadn’t thrown the kitchen sink at it, so just ‘nduja, chillies and some hot honey from a London company called Dr Sting. Maybe my tolerance to heat has ramped up after years of Clay’s and Kungfu Kitchen, but I thought this was affably mild. The ‘nduja though, from Cobble Lane, was absolutely spot on with that almost-acrid, savoury punch, and they weren’t stingy with it. The hot honey got lost in the mix a little, but I’d love to see Knead pair it with some blue cheese.
Starting with the toppings, though, is a little arse about face because the fundamentals – the base and the tomato sauce – really were top-notch. A brilliantly chewy, speckled crust, a base that held together and a total package that wasn’t sloppy or untidy. Its closest peer in Reading these days would be Sarv’s Slice, which I really rather liked, but Knead’s pizza is a little bigger, a little better and a little better value. I also ordered a pesto mayo to dip my crust in, which I thought didn’t taste quite right. I subsequently realised from looking at the bill that it was vegan – given that neither pesto nor mayo should be vegan, I thought that was a tad disappointing.
Zoë’s choice, which she out and out adored, was a white pizza. Now, I have friends who think these are against God and against nature, but I personally think there’s a time and a place for them. Based on Zoë’s reaction to this one, the place might be Knead and the time might be the next time I go to Knead.
In the “Hello Gourd-Geous” (when did wacky names move past craft beer and just become what everybody does?) the ‘nduja was still present and correct but harmonising with a completely different backing band. This time it was a sweet creamed pumpkin base spiked with blue cheese (“and there’s loads of blue cheese”, Zoë added). She had a sriracha mayo dip for her crust, which would have been overkill for me but suited her just fine.
Out of sheer greed – why have one pizza between two when you can have two and a half? – we also ordered the “Dreamy Garlic Bread” with mozzarella. I liked it, but it’s a silly name: when something involves quite this much garlic a better name might be something like the “Fucking Honking With Garlic Bread”. Given that they’re probably trying to appeal to families, maybe not.
Dessert rather had to be done, although the selection is on the slender side. I really wanted to try the gelato, which is made locally with milk from the fantastic Lacey’s Farm. I was also drawn to this because the flavours speak of more than a passing acquaintance with Italy – pistachio was a very creditable effort, and the chocolate was nicely bitter, not making the easy concession to pack in sweetness. But what I really loved was the fior di latte ice cream. Our default ice cream in this country is vanilla, as if we can’t accept that ice cream could just taste of itself. It takes confidence in your raw materials to make an ice cream like this, and I loved it. Only a handful of ice crystals in a couple of the scoops spoke of a few quality control issues.
Zoë had a scoop of that bitter chocolate ice cream – a generous one at that – on top of a fudgy, gluten free double chocolate brownie. Just as I have friends who think a white pizza isn’t a pizza, I have other friends who think a brownie isn’t really a dessert. I have more sympathy with the latter school of thought, but anyway Zoë loved it.
Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to sixty-eight pounds, not including tip. I do also have to call out the service which was excellent throughout: Knead has a young, enthusiastic team who were working their socks off on a busy Friday night and you really wouldn’t have known that the restaurant was barely six months old. It has that maturity which comes, I guess, of working on their concept and striving for this for such a long time. I left with a full stomach and that warm feeling that comes from spending your money in the right way, with the right people. Nothing is quite as good as excellent hospitality when it comes to delivering that.
All in all I really enjoyed Knead. The only real misstep was that charcuterie board at the start – and if Knead is going to offer something like that they should do it properly and have the courage of their convictions when it comes to actually using the charcutier who supplies the restaurant. For that matter if they want to keep it local Bray Cured, just down the road, do some of the best cured meats I’ve had in this country. But that gripe aside, Knead was very hard to fault. The pizzas were very accomplished – better, on balance, thank anything we have in Reading – and the commitment to local suppliers for cheese, gelato and beer is laudable.
To have this a twelve minute train ride away, with an excellent selection of beer and cider practically next door, makes Knead a very easy place to recommend on a Friday or Saturday night, or even in the week if you can’t be bothered to cook – which, in fairness, describes me most evenings. So Maidenhead has an excellent high end modern British restaurant, a great town centre craft beer venue and a cracking indie pizzeria. For all I know, it might have a destination tapas bar as well. While these places are opening in Maidenhead, Reading got a Popeyes. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Knead Neapolitan Pizza – 7.6 Unit A, Trinity Place, St Ives Road, Maidenhead, SL6 1SG 01753 973367
Barista & Beyond closed in February 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
If I was giving out ratings for having a heartwarming backstory, it’s hard to imagine any business would finish above Barista & Beyond in my list. The café was set up by social enterprise Ways Into Work, which supports people with disabilities, those on the autism spectrum or with mental health challenges to get into work. It offers internships, including at the café, and a better cause is difficult to envisage. I’ve wanted to visit Barista & Beyond for some time, and I’ve been paying close attention to their social media, which I highly recommend following.
It tracks the creation of the space last year, them beginning to trade in November and, for reasons I didn’t entirely grasp, their grand opening in March. It paints a lovely picture of the business, which is just past the IDR, between the Oxford Road and Chatham Street, around the corner from Rise Bakehouse. Looking through Barista & Beyond’s Instagram I got a real picture of their mission to, as they put it, change lives one job at a time. It depicts a happy little spot, nicely fitted out, with pictures of bright smoothies in the sunlight and fresh, vibrant salads. It also features an interview with their intern, Charlie, which I defy you to watch without feeling at least a little moved: put it this way, he’s a lot wiser at eighteen than I was.
So I really wanted to go, and last weekend it reached the top of my to do list: Zoë and I headed west past the Broad Street Mall, but in truth I had a certain amount of trepidation. This is not an establishment I would enjoy giving a negative review to, so I wasn’t overjoyed about the possible risk of that. But there was also the equal and opposite danger, that I would patronise Barista & Beyond, measure them against different standards or pat them on the head for simply existing at all. I would hate to do that, and I doubt they would want a review like that. So I approached the front door hoping they did well, but determined not to say anything that could sound like “didn’t they do well”?
It really is a lovely spot, with an almost European feel, like you could be in Rotterdam or Ghent. They have plenty of outside space which catches the sun, so much so that we decided to eat inside. But the inside is lovely too – very spacious, with tables clustered along the walls and next to those full-length windows, white tiles and lime green banquettes. They haven’t chosen to pack people in, to the extent where the room can feel a little bit empty, but there was a steady stream of punters coming in to get takeaway coffees or the smoothies. I couldn’t blame them: the smoothies looked good.
The website says that everything is made fresh every day, and the display cabinet showed off sandwiches, salads and wraps. They serve breakfast before midday, which I was sadly too late for, but the range of options was good but not huge: three toasties, two wraps, a BLT and a couple of salads. I couldn’t see prices anywhere for the food, although their website does list them and only the breakfast is more than a fiver. I ordered a couple of sandwiches and two coffees which came to just under twenty pounds, presumably because they added VAT.
Coffees came first – a flat white and a latte – and were so hot that we left them to cool down, drinking them after our sandwiches. The flat white looked the part, with a fine foam, while the latte perhaps set lower expectations.
“I wonder if they’ve had training on how hot to get the milk” said Zoë. “At Workhouse the temperature is very carefully controlled, but here it feels like they might have heated it until it’s boiling and then poured it in.”
I agreed, and when I finally got round to sipping my latte I was prepared for the worst. But actually it was lovely: nicely balanced without the slightest scorched bitter note. I always think coffee in Reading falls into three different tiers – the top one is made up of the likes of C.U.P., Compound, Workhouse and the Grumpy Goat, the middle one is the chains that are mediocre but not terrible like Nero and Pret and then the bottom one is the awful burnt stuff you’re best off avoiding. Just to confound me, Barista & Beyond sits between that top and middle one – not as good as Compound a couple of minutes’ walk away but not miles off either. I couldn’t tell if this made me happy or relieved, but perhaps it didn’t matter.
Zoë ordered the chicken caesar wrap. It’s good that she did, because I wouldn’t have: to me, looking at it in the cabinet, the chicken seemed too thick, too uniform, too catering pack. But Zoë thought it was superb, the caesar dressing with a good thud of garlic and the whole thing really enjoyable.
She also pointed out, and she’s right, that Barista & Beyond makes wraps properly – nothing falling out of the bottom and yet no stodgy wodge of tortilla crumpled together at the bottom for you to wade through either. Many places whose wraps I enjoy don’t assemble them as carefully as Barista & Beyond. It’s also worth pointing out that your sandwich comes, standard issue, with a sizeable number of good quality ready salted crisps, and some salad: largely undressed, so not really my bag, but your mileage may vary.
I’d chosen the tuna melt and also found much to enjoy. I don’t know if Barista & Beyond buy their bread from Rise round the corner, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had. For what it’s worth, I thought it was nicer bread than the stuff I remember last time I had a Tuna Turner at Shed, robust and grill-striped with a nice thick crust. It’s not possible to talk about tuna melts in Reading, really, without the spectre of the town’s most famous version on Merchant’s Place, and if Barista & Beyond’s fell short it wouldn’t be too hard to close the gap.
The menu talks about red onion, which would have made a huge difference, but there wasn’t any in my toastie. Something was needed to give contrast and crunch, whether that was red onion, capers or, as Shed also use, jalapeños. Any of that would have made this an even better tuna melt. But was it better than one you’d get out of plastic packaging at Costa, Starbucks or Pret? Of course it bloody was, and you get a heap of ready salted crisps thrown in for good measure. To come second to the Tuna Turner, in this town, is no disgrace, and I suspect this sandwich did exactly that.
Wanting to give the place more of a runout after our sandwiches, not quite ready to leave with our coffee approaching prime sipping temperature, I went up and ordered a couple of slabs of chocolate brownie. Again, I have no idea whether they were from Rise – I’m guessing not, but if they were they weren’t Rise’s best effort. Not terrible by any means, but too much reliance on sugar and not enough on cocoa, the texture a little one note without enough contract between the brittle and the fudgy. A couple of very gratifying chunks of chocolate made the occasional bite a joyous surprise, but it needed more.
I tried eating it with a fork, but soon abandoned that – the brownie didn’t have enough give, and I could already picture it flying across that wide open space. Still, you got two generous squares for six pounds, so not unreasonable value but not reaching the heights of brownies you can pick up at the Grumpy Goat, at Workhouse or at – I’m sorry, but this is true – Prêt A Sodding Manger. I was hoping these would give Barista & Beyond a little bounce to the rating at the end, but really they confirmed the decision I’d already made. I didn’t hang about to take a picture, though, so the brownie can’t have been that bad.
I’ve been putting off talking about the service, careful of walking that tightrope I mentioned at the start of this review, but here goes: it was superb. We were served by two different members of staff, one of whom was Charlie of Barista & Beyond’s Instagram fame. And perhaps it’s not possible to shed those preconceptions, or the first impression I’d got from watching that video, but he was just excellent. Nothing was any trouble, and every time he told me I was “very welcome” or to have a lovely day I was positive that he meant every word.
You don’t always get this in hospitality, talking to someone who comes across as absolutely loving their job, feeling lucky to do it and wanting to do it as well as they can. In turn I felt quite lucky to be looked after by Charlie and it made me think, far more than I expected to. I know hospitality is underpaid and undervalued, I know that it struggles to find people since the pandemic and that awful thing that some bigots voted for in 2016.
I know, fundamentally, that the solution to that is to pay people more, which restaurants can’t do for the same reasons they can’t charge more for food, because people seem to think it’s the one part of the economy that skips along carefree while our supermarket bills go through the roof. Go figure. And I can understand why the people that do work in cafés, particularly ones that serve crap coffee and pay dud wages, might not want to bring the sunshine day in, day out. But I didn’t get any of that from Charlie, and watching the other customers filing in to get coffees and smoothies I don’t think they did either.
Comparisons, at times like this, are necessary but can sound brutal. Does Barista & Beyond do the best coffee in the area? I’m afraid not: you need Compound Coffee for that. I suspect you can get better cakes at Rise, and Barista & Beyond’s sandwiches are solid but not in the top tier of Reading’s lunch choices. Barista & Beyond is a good café, not a great one, although it has potential. But it is a great idea, not a good one, and the service and the experience will stay with me long after I’ve forgotten ninety-nine per cent of the lunches I eat this year.
You may read all this and come away wanting to give it a try, to spend your money doing some good; I have a feeling that people who read my blog, like me, might not weigh all these factors as dispassionately as others do. I imagine that if you do visit, whoever they have behind the counter at that point, you may find it gives you food for thought. And that’s something you simply can’t find just anywhere. Have I avoided sounding patronising? I really don’t know, but I honestly hope so.
Three sushi restaurants opened in Reading last year, and Iro Sushi is the last one I’ve got round to reviewing. I managed Intoku last summer, where I thought the food was excellent but everything around the food – service, timing, polish – had gone missing in action (some of our food had, too). Then a couple of months ago I went to You Me Sushi, where I was very pleasantly surprised by some decent sushi and sashimi, albeit in a slightly sterile environment. But it was only last weekend, on a scorching Saturday, that I finally made it to Iro.
Even then, shamefully, it wasn’t my first choice for this week’s review. I was originally going to a town centre venue I thought was ripe for reappraisal, but as the day got hotter and hotter I realised I needed something cooler and subtler. So Zoë and I ambled up Queen Victoria Street hoping that the window seats at Iro Sushi were free, and felt very lucky when we discovered that they were. An A-board outside advertised “CHICKEN KASTU CURRY”: I hoped it wasn’t a portent.
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Edible Reading 