Category: Reviews

Restaurant review: La’De Kitchen

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La’De Kitchen closed in January 2024, and is apparently reopening as a separate restaurant called Yaprak which is allegedly under the same management/ownership. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

It kind of feels as if I’ve reviewed La’De Kitchen, the Turkish restaurant in Woodley, already, even though I haven’t. That’s partly because it’s featured on the blog before, by virtue of a delicious takeaway I reviewed back in March 2021. And I have eaten there once, a couple of months after that. It was for a friend’s birthday, during that weird period in 2021 when you could eat outside but not inside, and we all shivered under blankets and tried to persuade ourselves we were having a marvellous time. I remember the food, though, as being excellent.

Returning this week was a recognition, I think, that of all my to do list it was the most glaring omission, the place I really should have reviewed by now. Zoë and I turned up nice and early on a weekday evening to find the place largely empty, although it gradually filled up during the course of our meal. That didn’t surprise me, because it has developed a reputation over the last couple of years.

Of course, and I say this as a former Woodley resident, the fact that it’s in Woodley, always a rather a desert for restaurants, must help. “I remember how excited Woodley was when it found out it was getting Bosco Lounge”, Zoë told me, which gives you an idea how low expectations were set.

But also, it’s just really nicely done. The interior is chic, and the place got buzzy as more tables were occupied. I could easily imagine that on a busy Friday or Saturday night, the cocktails flowing, plenty of bums on those tastefully upholstered seats, it would feel like a very upmarket place to spend an evening. Maybe not on a par with their branch in Pangbourne, but lovely even so.

That said, La’De Kitchen is in some respects a different beast to the restaurant I ordered my takeaway from back in 2021. Back then Berkshire was its brave new frontier as they expanded from their original Muswell Hill branch. Fast forward two years and Muswell Hill is closed. Instead, La’De has spread across the Home Counties – Newbury, Camberley, Sunningdale – with a rogue branch in Hereford, of all places. So was it a different proposition now, and had they kept what was magical intact as they’d grown? I had a feeling I was about to find out.

The menu, though, was largely unchanged from my previous visit. It’s the familiar mixture of cold and hot meze, food from the grill (endearingly described as “Charcoal Productions”), some Turkish specialities (including pide) and a handful of less Anatolian choices. Some of these, the pizzas, take advantage of their having a suitable oven. The other two, described as the “Ritzy La’De Burger” and the “Ritzy La’De Chicken Burger”, badly need a rebrand: nothing would knowingly choose to be described as ritzy, not even – well, especially – the Ritz.

It’s a shame that most of the sharing main courses, the mixed grills and what have you, are sized and priced to serve three to four people, as opposed to the two to three on the menu on their website, as that limited what we could try.

The first sign that all might not run smoothly came when we placed our order – a couple of cold meze, a pair of hot meze and a main course each. “Would you like all of that to come at the same time?” asked our server, which I found bizarre. Yes, having ordered this much food I would naturally like it all dumped on the table at once so some of it can go cold: that must have been what I had in mind. Maybe they get some customers in a real rush to hightail it to Showcase Cinema, but I didn’t think we had that air about us. “This might be too much food”, our server also said. Well, maybe not it it’s nicely paced I thought, but didn’t say out loud.

Personally I’d have liked my cold meze first, then the hot meze and then my mains. And perhaps I should have said that out loud, but I didn’t, so all four of our starters came pretty much at once. They were something of an exercise in frustration. Possibly the best of them was Cypriot garlic sausage, grilled and crisp-edged, coarse and tasty without any dubious whiff of mystery meat.

Genuinely, I really enjoyed this dish, and I’m sorry to go there but I’m afraid I must: four pretty small pieces of what was presumably a single sausage was seven pounds fifty. If anything, the photo above makes the dish look bigger than it actually was. A handful of scruffy salad, over-sweet with dressing and pomegranate seeds, doesn’t conceal how small this particular small plate was. I know food is getting more expensive and something has to be right at the edge of the spectrum for me to call it out, but that’s where this was. It got me thinking about the sujuk at the sadly-departed Cairo Café: still, maybe that’s why Cairo Café has gone and this place is still there.

The other starter was even more of a disappointment because it’s a dish I’ve had and loved from La’De Kitchen more than once. Chargrilled octopus looked the part, that alluring fractal spiral I always love seeing on a plate. But whether this wasn’t marinated or cooked before being finished on the grill, the end result was tough, rubbery and heavy going. It was also another dish with an overreliance on balsamic and pomegranate seeds, the whole thing a little sickly-sweet. Zoe tried a few pieces and gave up – if the octopus had been great this would have been a stroke of luck, but instead it was a chore.

Were the cold meze better? Not really. Baba ganoush was probably the best of them, with a decent texture and an underlying note of smoke that told that particular aubergine’s origin story. But even then it was a little lacking in the complexity I was hoping for. But the real disappointment was the taramasalata: I’ve had this before from La’De Kitchen and I remember it being more a pastel shade, salty and moreish, a proper treat. This was Barbie-pink and one note, with more of Marie Rose than fish roe about it. As with the octopus Zoë tried a little and decided she couldn’t be doing with the calories. “It’s oddly sweet” she said, a theme across the starters. And I would say, in the main, that I’m a fussier eater than she is.

Here’s the really weird thing, though: one thing I’ve always loved about La’De Kitchen is its balloon bread – a beautiful inflated pita speckled with sesame seeds. When I ordered takeaway from that that first time, we had three of the blighters and I remember thinking that they were one of my favourite things about the meal. On this occasion – and bear in mind that we’d ordered two things you could reductively describe as a dip – they brought us one.

We broke it, we tore it, we dipped and spooned baba ganoush and taramasalata onto it, and then we thought “what can we do with the rest of these dips?” Did they expect us to eat taramasalata with a fork? So when the server swung by, we asked if we could have some more bread. Of course, of course, they said. It did not materialise.

By this point I was drinking my pint of Efe and Zoë was on a mocktail (“Safe Sex On The Beach” apparently, although good luck finding one without sewage in this country) the restaurant was slightly busier and I was adjusting my expectations. One of my favourite Turkish restaurants is Zigana in Didcot, and although I love the place I’d be the first to admit that their meze is hardly the main attraction: it’s only when your food has spent time on their charcoal grill that things start getting good. Perhaps La’De Kitchen would be the same.

Our server came over and asked if we were ready for our mains, and we said why not. He gestured at our mostly uneaten baba ganoush and taramasalata, although he chose not to ask why we’d left so much. Funny, that.

“Would you like me to take those away?” “he asked.

“No thank you, but what I’d really like is some more bread to eat with them.”

“Of course, of course” came the reply. Of course, more bread never materialised. By this point I had rationalised to myself that, given that the two dips were either side of middling, he might have been unintentionally doing me a favour. Besides, all the more room for mains.

When I had my takeaway from La’De Kitchen all those years ago it was all about one dish: the pistachio adana, an impeccable lamb kofte studded with pistachio, a truly delicious masterpiece of grilling. Well, Zoë quite sensibly called shotgun on it for this visit and I have to hand it to her, because it was the one thing about La’De Kitchen that age has not withered.

If anything, it was better than before: what used to be a coating of pistachio has morphed into something more beautiful, a sort of hyper-real, hyper-green pistachio pesto which elevated it from great to greater still. Paired with gorgeous, nutty pearls of bulghur wheat (and more sticky-dressed, pomegranate-strewn salad: you can’t have everything) this really was a fantastic dish, albeit one keeping bad company. If everything we ate that night had even approached the quality of the pistachio adana, I would be firing up the hype machine and getting out my virtual megaphone: nothing even remotely did, but I still want to say that the restaurant is almost worth visiting for this dish alone.

I’m prepared to concede that I might have ordered badly, when it came to my main. I asked my server what distinguished the chicken Iskender from your common or garden shish, and he told me that it came served on a bed of pita with a spicy tomato sauce (called halep) and yoghurt. Should I have known from that what I was about to get? Perhaps. Perhaps I should have known that it was cubes of chicken and squares of pita in a cast iron skillet, with a spooge of slightly bland tomato sauce and a pile of yoghurt on top. If I’d known, I might have opted for something else.

But even judging it by the standards of the dish, it didn’t quite work. Unlike the plating of the adana, which gave you plenty of negative space, this was crammed into the skillet, making it fiddly to eat. I actually loved the squares of pita, which had enough about them to stand up to the sauce. But the chicken was firm – just the right side of bouncy – without being tender, and the sauce was unremarkable. It was almost like they’d taken all the glory of meat fresh off a charcoal grill, and wiped it out by drowning it in something bla. I probably ordered something I might not have chosen, but I still expected it to be better than this.

“What do you think?” said Zoë, who by this point had given me enough of her adana for me to realise a travesty had taken place.

“It’s, well… it’s not as good as yours. Meat and tomato sauce in a skillet feels like something I could have picked off the al forno section of the menu in a Prezzo.”

“You know this used to be a Prezzo, don’t you?”

Full but unfulfilled, we waited in vain to get somebody’s attention to pay our bill. The restaurant wasn’t hugely busy at this stage, but from the difficulty we had you’d think it was. All the time that blasted taramasalata and baba ganoush sat there on the table. It irked me, and yet I knew I’d dodged a bullet: I’m a big fan of eating my feelings, but not necessarily when those feelings are disappointment. Eventually we got our bill, and some time after that we managed to pay it. It said we’d had two lots of balloon bread, which by this point was just rubbing it in.

“That was the best part of a hundred quid!” said Zoë incredulously as we made our way to the bus stop, pausing only for a tactical foray into Waitrose to buy some chocolate to cheer ourselves up. “Seriously, you need to find some other people to do these fucking reviews with you.”

“I know, I know” I said. “The saddest thing is that we could have gone here” – I gestured at Adda Hut, which looked far quieter than La’De Kitchen had been – “and you’d have had a better meal. We’d have spent a lot less money, too.”

I am so sorry that I didn’t like La’De Kitchen more. I wonder if it’s them or me, if I caught them on a bad night or if something has happened to the genuinely exciting restaurant that opened in Woodley a few years ago. Is it the inevitable consequence of a chain growing, or what happens when you focus on margins? Either way I ordered a mixture of dishes I know well and some new things and only one dish – that pistachio adana – took me back to the beginning. 

Beyond that, it felt like a shadow of its former self. I found myself thinking you’d be better off at Bakery House, or Tasty Greek Souvlaki, or even catching the train to Didcot and giving Zigana a whirl. Or trying Istanbul Mangal in Tilehurst Village, or the new Lebanese place down the Wokingham Road. I truly wish it wasn’t so, but them’s the breaks. But we’ll always have that pistachio adana, so perhaps the trick is to go there, order that, cut your losses and leave. It’s an extraordinary dish, and without it this rating would have been far lower. It’s worth making a pilgrimage just for that. For now, at least.

La’De Kitchen – 6.7
61-63 Crockhamwell Road, Woodley, RG5 3JP
0119 9692047

https://woodley.ladekitchen.com

Restaurant review: Pappadams

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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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Restaurant review: Bakery House

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Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025. It no longer bakes on the premises, has an alcohol licence and previous manager Mohamad Skeik has left the business. I have marked this review as closed and will re-review Lebanese Flavours at some point.

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.

Nothing had changed inside, at first glance, which I found oddly reassuring. Still the same battleship-grey walls, brightly lit wall art and chocolate-brown banquettes. Still the shawarma revolving away up front, still the signs of baking that gave the restaurant its name. So far, so familiar.

And Mohamad was still there, zipping about: now, in the interests of full disclosure Mohamad knows who I am, because I did a readers’ lunch at the restaurant back in 2019, but I doubt he would expect me to review the place again after eight intervening years. And I didn’t just spot Mohamad, I recognised a waitress who has been there since the very start, who left the restaurant to have a baby and came back, and that made me realise that this restaurant hadn’t just seen me through different phases in my life.

But also there, relaxed in a polo shirt, was Chander Ahuja, the owner of House Of Flavours. I’ve never met Ahuja, but I know him by sight and again, it’s possible he knew who I was. He came over and asked more than once what I made of the food, as did Mohamad. I don’t know whether that was anything to do with me writing the blog, or because it was my first visit after a long time away. I don’t know if it was because of a certain apprehensiveness about what customers made of the same-but-different Bakery House, or just excellent customer service. I’m just mentioning it, aware that it could have been any of those things.

The menu is exactly as it was, not spruced up, not reprinted. And really, they might want to consider reprinting it and raising their prices, because those prices have a distinctly 2015 feel about them. Maybe it’s a loss leader in this climate, or perhaps they’re waiting for new menus back from the printers but really, starters that cost a fiver or less and mains that weigh in around thirteen pounds feel like they merit a mention. If the quality is even close to what it was, I thought, Bakery House could be one of the biggest bargains in the town centre.

We did something I rarely do when re-reviewing a restaurant, namely ordering the dishes I would normally have if I was visiting Bakery House. That might sound like a counter-intuitive thing to do – surely it should be about striking out into the unknown? – but there was method to my madness. I’ve had some of these dishes so often it feels as if I know them like the back of my hand. It’s a kind of gastronomic close reading, I guess, and I thought it was the best way to assess whether Bakery House was a different proposition under the bonnet (that’s probably enough mixed metaphors for now).

The first indicators came with one of my very favourite Bakery House dishes, houmous kawarmah, houmus with spiced lamb. I could have closed my eyes and remembered its tastes and textures, but what came along was subtly different. The houmous was still glorious – thick and scoopable, with a hefty, welcome whack of tahini. But the lamb was… what had they done to the lamb?

Where before it would have been little nuggets, here it was fantastic caramelised slivers of the stuff, intense and moreish. I know what this dish is like when it’s good – years of practice – and this was as good as I could remember it. I looked over at Zoë as she loaded some onto a piece of pita and crammed it joyously in her mouth. There was a pause.

“Oh, hello” she said. Oh, hello indeed.

If that was my go-to order, our other starter was Zoë’s. She always picks arayes, flatbreads stuffed with minced veal, and is something of an expert on the stuff. And yes, the plates are a bit fancier now, and they’ve drizzled pomegranate molasses on top. But, as with the restaurant itself, the real changes were the ones going on under the surface. In the past, the veal could be a little homogeneous, a little smooth. This, though, was coarser, even more delicious. It felt like eating the dish in HD, the same experience I’d had with the houmous. Something was going on here, and I was pretty sure I liked it.

The real test, though, was to come, with the dish I most associated with Bakery House: farrouj massahab, the boneless baby chicken. I have eaten this at Bakery House many times, and in lockdown it was my delivery order of choice: why on earth spend that money on Nando’s when you can have this? In as far as a dish can be a friend, this was an old, old friend and seeing it come to the table (well, them: Zoë ordered it too) felt part meal, part reunion.

I may have more photos of Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken on my phone than of any other dish I’ve ordered in my life – more than Bhel Puri House’s chilli paneer, more than Sapana Home’s momo, more than Fidget & Bob’s full English, more than any of the cornucopia of delights you can get at Clay’s or Kungfu Kitchen. Like any poor woman dipping her toe in Tinder, my phone runneth over with cock pics. I have pictures of it looking overdone and a tad dry – the chicken, I should add – and pictures of it looking wan. There have been times when it’s been amazing, and times when it’s merely been quite good. It’s never been less than that. What was it to be this time?

Well, you can’t tell from the picture, which is why Instagram will never entirely kill food blogs like mine. But I’m overjoyed to tell you that it looked good and tasted even better. Marinated, golden, utterly crammed with heat and flavour it was, much like me after a day at Nirvana, its absolute best self. They’d got more of that spice into the meat than I remember, and the biggest dilemmas were which parts to eat first and which to save until last, and whether to dip in the potent chilli sauce or the pungent garlic sauce. Why had I gone without eating this for so long, and when could I realistically do it again without looking a bit weird? Was lunchtime the next day too soon?

It wasn’t just the chicken though, everything else had been subtly tweaked and elevated. The golden rice also had an unfamiliar jolt of heat and was beautifully done, clump free and the perfect accompaniment. And the salad – well, Bakery House has always done salad superbly and understood, as so few places do, that if you want people to eat it you have to dress it. And they had dressed it well, a riot of freshness, with plenty of tomato and pokey raw red onion.

I’ve often pontificated in the past that this dish is possibly the single best one stop shop, the finest everything-you-need-on-one-plate choice in the whole of Reading. I still stand by that: if anything it’s better than before, and a ludicrous steal at twelve pounds fifty. Just don’t get into a lift with anybody for about twenty-four hours after eating.

I’ve never really done dessert at Bakery House, although I know people who swear by it. But a little plate of mini baklava, sticky-sweet and just the right size to eat in one go, was a lovely touch, brought out as we were getting the bill. I’m pretty sure I saw these brought out to other tables after they’d finished their main course: I don’t think it was just me. All that was left was to settle up – our food, and a couple of superbly zingy fresh lemonades came to a baffling forty-two pounds, not including tip.

As I said, service was terrific throughout, although Bakery House has always excelled at that. It looked like a happy, harmonious ship when I was there that Sunday evening; it did a steady trade, although it was far from full, and the other customers appeared to be enjoying themselves almost as much as I was. The new owner looked relaxed, and as I waited for the bill I looked around, taking in the room where I’d eaten so many times and the wait staff who had been serving me since the year dot. And maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I was grateful and strangely moved that Bakery House was still here and relieved that its future appeared safe.

I was relieved, too, to have loved my meal quite as much as I did, and to know that the new ownership had nudged and subtly improved rather than overhauling or resting on laurels. Change a restaurant you like too much and it becomes something else, but if you never change it at all you run the risk that it becomes preserved in aspic as the world moves on. The history of Reading restaurants is full of places that did exactly that and then died out, and I hope I never find myself talking about Bakery House in that category. This felt like a much better course, to try to preserve Bakery House’s heyday with some judicious tinkering.

So there you have it – a timely, happy return to Bakery House, almost eight years after I first set foot through the doors. Much has changed in that time, me not least, and Bakery House is no longer the trailblazer it was. But if they play their cards right they could attain a status that has always eluded me, that of a true Reading institution. I had forgotten just how good Bakery House was. I’m not alone: I think maybe Bakery House had too, but now they’ve remembered, and they’re out to remind everybody. I’m happy to play my part in doing some reminding, too.

Bakery House – 8.1
82 London Street, Reading, RG1 4SJ
0118 3274040

Restaurant review: Knead Neapolitan Pizza, Maidenhead

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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

https://www.knead.pizza

Café review: Barista & Beyond

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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.

Barista & Beyond – 7.0
5 Alfred Street, Reading, RG1 7AT
07749 497412

https://www.baristaandbeyond.co.uk