Category: Reviews

Takeaway review: Biryani Boyzz

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A couple of things happened last weekend that got me thinking about the cost of food, and the concept of value for money. 

The first was a visit to Nirvana Spa, where the menu had been ravaged by Storm Shrinkflation. “I’m sure last time I had the halloumi salad there was more halloumi on it” said Zoe, shortly before looking up her picture of the dish from a previous visit and finding that yes, you used to get three bits of chargrilled halloumi whereas now it’s just two. For nine pounds. I would have sympathised more, but I was too busy looking at a single, tiny tranche of pork and chicken terrine, also nine pounds, and thinking “where’s the rest?” My dish, which wasn’t billed as a salad, had more salad on it than Zoë’s, which was.

It’s one matter to reduce portion size and another to increase prices but it takes a rare kind of chutzpah to, as Nirvana has, do both at once. I’d ordered a pizza as a main course, which was nine inches at most and cost all of sixteen pounds: I couldn’t help but compare it to a lunch at Buon Appetito a couple of weeks before. Food is becoming more expensive, and it’s going to become more expensive still. That’s not necessarily a problem, but you at least want to feel that it’s great quality, even if it’s not good value. At Nirvana, it just felt like they were milking a captive audience.

The second experience, at the other end of the spectrum, was this week’s takeaway, from Biryani Boyzz (yes, not one but two Zs). It’s where Punjab Grill used to be, at the top of the Oxford Road before you reach Harput Kebab, and I think it was owned by the same people as Kobeda Palace, Palmyra and Da Village, although I’m not sure if it still is. Biryani seems to be one of Reading’s new trends, with Biryani Boyzz out west and Biryani Mama (which is owned by the same people as Crispy Dosa) just opened last week in the old Ask site on St Mary’s Butts.

Incidentally, because I’m going to be typing the word “Boyzz” numerous times during this review – with gritted teeth I might add – I want to say that I truly hope abusing the letter Z in this manner is a trend that doesn’t catch on. I know Biryani Boyzz is a stone’s throw from the equally woefully named Ladz Barbers, but I think they ought to learn lessons from history: restaurants with gimmicky Zs in their name rarely do well in Reading. When Chennai Dosa changed its name to Chennai Dosa Artisanz, it was the beginning of the end for them, and the coffee shop Artizan on St Mary’s Butts doesn’t seem to have ever opened. In my taxi back from Nirvana I spotted a place on the Wokingham Road called “Milano’z Pizza”: doesn’t the word pizza provide enough Zs already?

Rant over. I’d been tipped off to Biryani Boyzz by one of my readers, who said that it had excellent reviews on Google. So I went had a look, and although the reviews on Deliveroo were less glowing it piqued my interest enough to give it a try. Besides, their eponymous dish, the chicken biryani, was a startling four pounds ninety-nine. Could it really be any cop at that price?

Biryani Boyzz’s – I hated typing that combination of letters, just so you know – menu is a mixture of Indian, Pakistani and Afghan dishes. Chapli kebab is on there, as it would be at Kobeda Palace or Da Village, but you can also order Lahori chane, butter chicken if you want something more mainstream, or paya, a stew made with lamb trotters, if you’re the adventurous kind. 

The main thing that brings the menu together is its affordability. Nothing costs more than a tenner, most of it is far less than that and, of course, that biryani stands out at just under a fiver. I had to try that, so we ordered it along with a selection of starters, a couple of curries and some rice. The whole lot came to forty-five pounds, not including rider tip: not much money for quite a lot of food. 

Fancy a drama-free delivery paragraph? Of course you do. So here it is: I placed my order around twenty-five past seven, I was told it would be about an hour and in reality it was with me in forty-five minutes or so. And the driver took just over five minutes to reach me from the restaurant. There you go: drama-free delivery paragraph ends. It was all perfectly packed and piping hot, just to further reduce the element of drama: if only the situation in Ukraine could de-escalate as rapidly.

We’d chosen three things which broadly classed as starters, and they turned out to be a bit of a motley crew. Chapli kebab, which came in a brown paper bag shiny with grease, was a far cry from the very good ones I’ve had at Da Village or, back in the day, Afghan. It didn’t have that lean, meaty muscularity I’ve always enjoyed, and the texture was a little sodden and pappy, as if it had been padded out with something. There were bits of tomato speckled in it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more. It cost three pounds: after placing the order I wish we’d added a second, but after finishing it I was glad we didn’t.

Chicken 65 was more like it, but I still came away from it liking but not loving the dish. My previous experience of the dish comes from its time on the menu at Clay’s, and I tried to put that rarefied version to the back of my mind while eating this. The flavour of it wasn’t bad, with a good whack of acrid heat but the chicken was in little pellets rather than bigger, more tender pieces and there was something slightly off-putting about that. 

I’d have liked it to feel drier and less glossy – and I know this dish isn’t big on vegetation but I couldn’t help thinking that if, say, Momo 2 Go did a version of this it would have had a flash of green from some curry leaves or some coriander, whereas this was a relentless tidal wave of day-glo terra cotta. We left some of it. “I’m not even sure it was chicken” was Zoë’s verdict: feel the burn.

The last of our starters was Afghan lamb chops, which weren’t bad but weren’t exciting either. Cooked through with no blush, these were old-school chops where you got a postage-stamp sized piece of meat that was largely redeemed by bathing it in raita. To put this in perspective, you got four small chops for seven pounds, so if it wasn’t great it at least wasn’t expensive: presumably at Nirvana Spa they’d have charged you fifteen pounds for that lot. Deliveroo claims this dish is “Popular”. But then so is the Caversham branch of Costa Coffee.

Did things improve with the main courses? Well, yes and no. The yes came in the unlikely form of the butter chicken: it’s not a dish I ever really order but Zoë requested it and it was better than I was expecting. The sauce had a good, smooth sweetness which made the rice more interesting even if, again, there was only limited evidence it had ever seen any vegetables, or even just some herbs. And again, the chicken was in small, homogeneous pieces and lacked the generosity I would associate with the likes of Royal Tandoori or House Of Flavours.

But every rose has its thorn, and the thorn in this case was the chilli paneer. I think maybe I was expecting a dry chilli paneer, like the one you’d get at Bhel Puri House, whereas this was very much soft unfried cubes of paneer in a chilli sauce which took no prisoners and didn’t fuck around. My friend James has an expression for things that people like me think are hot but which wouldn’t make him bat an eyelid: he calls them “white people hot”. There’s no disgrace in that, per se: James classes Gurt Wings’ buffalo sauce as white people hot, although he’s never passed judgment on “The Gurt Locker”, their hottest sauce. I must take him to Kungfu Kitchen some time.

But it’s safe to say that Biryani Boyzz’s chilli paneer isn’t white people hot. It’s just hot. And not one of those clever, layered heats that builds momentum and pace as you work your way through a meal. No, it’s just really hot. Hot as in it makes your eyeballs leak with what might be tears, could be sweat or might just be a disgusting cocktail of both. Hot as in it clears out every sinus in your face while reaming your Eustachian tubes for good measure. 

Zoë said she thought there must be something like lime pickle in it and initially I disagreed, because I rather like lime pickle, but on reflection I thought she might be on to something because lurking under the brooding heat was something that could have been sour citrus. What do I know? If I’d had another couple of forkfuls I might not have been able to taste anything until the following Tuesday. The odd thing is that, in a treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen sort of way I admired Biryani Boyzz for doing something so uncompromising. It wasn’t for me, but there might well be customers out there who would love it. Reading the last few paragraphs, you probably know whether or not you’re one of them.

I’ve saved that five pound biryani til last, just so that this review has a little twist in the tale. You know what? I quite liked it. The chicken was on the bone, which of course it’s meant to be – and although you didn’t get huge amounts of it and it needed a little persuasion to get off the bone it was perfectly nice and the rice had some flavour – more, and better balanced, than the other dishes I’d tried. Did I mention that it was five pounds? And here we return to what I was saying at the start: something either has to be good value or good quality. Nirvana was neither, and Biryani Boyzz was one of them, in places. If Nirvana’s pizza had been something like a tenner, I’d have been quietly pleased, but if Biryani Boyzz’s biryani had been a tenner I’d have been nonplussed.

But cheap food for cheap food’s sake isn’t the holy grail some people like to think it is. Even ignoring that witless Berkshire Live article about how you can’t buy lunch in town for a quid any more (as everybody should), there can be a prevailing view in publications like Vittles that each time you get a dirt cheap meal in a restaurant you’re somehow sticking it to the man and getting one over on capitalism. But food ought to cost money, staff ought to cost money and everything ought to go through the books and be above board. I always worry that when food is cheap what you’re actually doing is just enabling a slightly different, equally unpleasant, flavour of capitalism.

Anyway, rarely have I been gladder that my takeaway reviews don’t come with a rating. Biryani Boyzz’s food is okay, and interesting in places, but I really don’t know where I’d put it if I had to find a place for it on a scale. And I’m not sure I’d order from them again, because I’d either spend more somewhere like Banarasi Kitchen or pay roughly the same amount at Momo 2 Go for very different cuisine. But I may not be Biryani Boyzz’s target market, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They didn’t lose me at that first Z, they didn’t even necessarily lose me at the second, but they probably lost me somewhere after that.

Biryani Boyzz
109 Oxford Road, Reading, RG1 7UD
0118 9573337

Order via: Deliveroo, Uber Eats

Restaurant DIY kit review: Andrew Edmunds at Dishpatch

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As of August 2022 Andrew Edmunds is no longer partnering with Dishpatch.

I wasn’t expecting to try out Dishpatch, the company which partners with high profile restaurants to offer heat at home delivery kits, again so soon after my recent disappointing experience. That I am is partly a tribute to their excellent customer service, because after I filled out their feedback form and gave them a somewhat lukewarm review they got in touch and very kindly offered me a money off voucher to use on a subsequent order. 

So I found myself flicking through the options online, wondering what would work well reheated at home. But what did I feel like? Was I in a paella or a rendang mood, was I drawn to osso bucco or sea trout en croûte? I eventually narrowed it down to two restaurants I’ve eaten at in real life. The first, Hoppers, did a kothu roti which sounded marvellous and struck me as hard to cock up at home on a hob. But I eventually went for the second, Andrew Edmunds, because of a lovely meal I had there about five years ago. 

I was talking to a friend recently and I told her that I’d been doing fine in January, apart from not feeling able to eat in restaurants, or drink in pubs, or sit outside because it was too fucking cold, or to see friends in the flesh, or go on holidays. Apart from all that, I said, I was having a ball. But one of the things I miss most is taking a Friday off with friends and catching a train to London for a day of shopping (for fragrance: don’t judge), good coffee, great pubs and – always the centrepiece of one of these occasions – a truly leisurely lunch somewhere. 

And one of those lunches took place in Andrew Edmunds, a beautifully ramshackle restaurant in Soho that has been doing its thing, largely unchanged, for the best part of forty years. Andrew Edmunds’ menu with Dishpatch – billed as “date night” to capitalise, I imagine, on our proximity to Valentine’s Day – was a very straightforward affair: a choice between two starters, two mains and two desserts, no add-ons or complications, for sixty-five pounds, although it cost me less than that. 

It struck me as refreshingly straightforward, with all the dishes being uber-convenient to prepare and serve, so I placed my order and thought no more about it. One of the nice things about services like Dishpatch, because of the lead times involved, is that it’s a bit like buying yourself a present, treating future you, in a way that takeaways never quite do.

Anyway, it all arrived according to plan on the Friday, and this time the delivery driver actually left it behind our recycling bin as he was meant to, rather than depositing it in front of a random house round the corner. As before it was all well packed – just the three cardboard boxes, one for each course. The cooking instructions in the box were for another restaurant entirely, but with everything available online that too was hardly a biggie.

Our starter was probably my favourite thing we ate that evening. It had been a choice between prawn cocktail and soup – neither of which involved doing anything technically complex – and we’d gone for the former. It was largely dishing up rather than cooking, with just one element, a few slabs of focaccia, needing to be finished off in the oven. Apart from that you just decanted your prawn cocktail, your lettuce and some pickled cucumbers and you were good to go.

And I really did enjoy the dish. Rather than a handful of bigger prawns you got plenty of muscular little shrimp, and the Marie Rose sauce had good sharpness and kick (I wondered if it had something like vodka in it, so I wasn’t surprised, on checking the ingredients, to find a little brandy in there). Rather than serving it in the traditional fashion, they gave you a little gem lettuce and advised you to scoop up the prawn cocktail with the leaves: I wasn’t sure whether this was a modish nod to places like Pho or just old-fashioned weirdness, but it worked reasonably well. And I loved the pickled cucumbers – sweet but not sharp, and a great contrast to everything else on the plate. 

Even the focaccia heated up better than I thought it would. It had some spelt flour in it, which might have gone some way to explaining why, and although it wasn’t sodden with olive oil as great focaccia often is, it went well with the dish and mopped up the rest of the sauce nicely. The problem here was the quantity, or lack thereof, of the dish. Looking at the pictures on Dishpatch’s website all I can say is that somebody has passed off two portions of this as one, because it felt on the miserly side. I guess this is another problem with heat at home meals: in a restaurant we have a clearer idea of what things should cost, and how big a portion should be. Here, I looked at what we’d been given and had no real idea whether it constituted value, or not, as part of a sixty-five pound meal. 

Our main course couldn’t have been much easier to cook. Confit duck and dauphinoise potatoes went into the oven, with some cavolo nero joining them for the last five minutes. And also, during those final five minutes, you heated some red cabbage and a red wine jus on the hob. There was a big old bag of red cabbage, and a tiny vacuum packed pouch of jus. Never mind,  I thought, it’s going to be one of those beautifully silky restaurant sauces where a little goes a long way.

The end result was every kind of disappointment. That’s especially a shame because the feature attraction, the confit duck, wasn’t half bad. I would have liked the skin crispier – or even just crisp, for that matter – so I think the cooking instructions were a tad out, but it was beautifully dense and meaty and there was no layer of fat lurking under the skin (although in fairness, if there had been I still would have made short work of it). The problem was everything else.

Dauphinoise potatoes are a wonderful thing, when done right. These weren’t. What you actually got was a slab of many-layered spud, some of it on the firm side of cooked, with none of the indulgence of cream or garlic that make this dish such an indulgence. I’m honestly not convinced this had ever seen a lick of cream or a clove of garlic: it was drier than an actuary. And that jus? It turned out to be one of those sauces where a little goes a very short distance. There was literally so little of it that I’m not sure why they bothered: here’s what you could have won, it seemed to say.

All this meant that the heavy lifting, in terms of moisture, came from the red cabbage. On the hob it had smelled beautifully wintry with all those mulled flavours of red wine, cloves and cinnamon going on. But with nothing else really happening on the plate it dominated to an extent that made it hard to enjoy anything. I left some of my dauphinoise, Zoë left a lot of her red cabbage. Sixty five pounds, I thought to myself. Was the meal going to feel like sixty five pounds’ worth, unless the dessert was either covered in gold leaf or the size of a basketball court? It felt like a long shot.

“That was so dry it was like something my dad could have cooked” said Zoë. I knew this was very far from a compliment: I’d learned early on in our relationship not to take nice sausages to a family barbecue unless you were comfortable with the idea that they’d wind up only identifiable from their dental records. Not just that, but if you ate one your dental records might themselves be changed forever. Zoë’s dad used to work in a Berni Inn when he was young: it’s not a great advert for the Berni Inn that they never figured out that he was colour blind.

Dessert returned to the trend of the starters – quite nice, but not big enough. We had a black forest gateau (“Is this a date night in the Seventies?” Zoë had said when she saw the menu) and it tasted terrific, laced with kirsch and chocolate nibs, cosseted with cream and topped with hugely moreish sour cherries. But where was the rest? We ate it, and then we had the chocolate truffles which came as an extra. I think they were meant to make you think “what a lovely touch!” but all they made me think was Sixty-five pounds. Oh, and they threw in a candle. Literally. There was a candle in there, because it was a date night. The picture on the website shows two candles, just to complete the false advertising. Sad to say, Zoë was genuinely excited about what she had convinced herself was a free candle. I on the other hand was wondering how long I could hold out before inhaling some chocolate from the kitchen cupboard.

Although I still fervently believe, in principle, that restaurant kits could play an important role in life and create an interesting new space equidistant between takeaways and eating in restaurants, I’m yet to have an experience that convinces me that that promise has been fulfilled. And restaurants have had coming up to two years to get this right, so it’s not encouraging that my two experiences this year have fallen flat. It’s quite possible that if I went to Andrew Edmunds and had dinner there my meal would cost far more than sixty-five pounds, even before you added a bottle of wine. But that’s only part of the point. The other thing to do is think about what sixty-five pounds could get you elsewhere, and that’s where the wheels really start to fall off.

This meal in particular brought that home because there was no complexity to it at all. Switch the oven on, put things in, take them out and serve them up, with a little extra mucking about on the hob. What I’ve described there, in essence, is a ready meal. And if a ready meal is going to cost sixty-five pounds it really has to feel like it’s worth every penny, which this really didn’t. To put this in perspective, you could buy stuff from COOK, squirrel it away in your freezer and have a meal which wasn’t far from this standard for a fraction of the price (their beef bourguignon is pretty decent, as is their lamb dupiaza). Or if you go to the next level above, Côte At Home will sell you two confit duck legs with accompanying gratin potato for seventeen pounds. I’ve not tried Côte At Home yet, I really ought to for the blog, but I imagine even if it isn’t as nice as what I ate from Andrew Edmunds it would be close enough when you consider the gulf in pricing.

And of course, the other thing to compare meals like this week’s with is food you can eat closer to home. The following night, thoroughly deflated after my Dishpatch disappointment, I ordered a delivery from the Lyndhurst. We had chicken wings, tangy with gochujang. We had a skate wing each, almost as big as our plates, with greens and baby new potatoes and a buttery sauce Grenobloise bursting with capers. And then we each had the most beautiful, boozy tiramisu. No doling it out in meagre carefully controlled portions between two plates: we had one each. It was just blissful, it was huge and it cost far, far less than sixty-five pounds. Staying in might well be the new going out, but staying in with Dishpatch just feels like the new going without.

Andrew Edmunds at Dishpatch

https://www.dishpatch.co.uk/menus/collection/restaurant/andrew-edmunds

Takeaway review: Momo 2 Go

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Of all the groups of people who have settled in Reading and made it their home, you could easily make an argument that few have done more to improve Reading’s food culture than our Nepalese community. I’m not talking about Standard Tandoori – I’m sure it had its day, and I know some people (the Dalai Lama included) probably mourn its passing more than I do. But perhaps more significantly, our Nepalese community is very much responsible for Reading’s love affair with the humble momo.

The godfather of the momo scene, of course, is Sapana Home which has been installed on Queen Victoria Street for many, many years. It is a terrific, completely uncompromising place in that it serves what it serves and has no interest at all in adapting its menu to more Western tastes, but it’s always warm and welcoming to people outside the Nepalese community who want to eat there. 

And who wouldn’t fall in love with momo? They’re tiny pockets of joy, you get ten of them for not very much and they’re hugely versatile, whether you want to be virtuous and have them steamed, indulgent and have them seared and caramelised in a pan or Glaswegian and eat the bastards deep fried. You can have momo in sticky chilli sauce, momo bathing in tomato gravy or momo bobbing in soup. National cuisines have been built on less, and although I know that pierogi, ravioli and gyoza have their ardent fans, momo have my heart.

For a while Sapana Home largely had the market sewn up. Sure, there was a pretender all the way out in Caversham Park Village and another at the top of the Basingstoke Road, but for most people momo meant Sapana Home. And then along came Namaste Kitchen, a game-changing restaurant in Katesgrove operating out of the Hook And Tackle pub. Its momo were fantastic, but it also showed that there was so much more to Nepalese food, whether it was exemplary chow mein, chewy, savoury dried mutton, beautiful gizzards or bara, thick lentil pancakes studded with spicy chicken. I went once and fell in love: Reading had never had it so good.

As it turned out it was too good to last, and within a year Namaste Kitchen’s dream team had split up. One of the owners, the legendary Kamal, left the business and the chef went back to Nepal. Namaste Kitchen kept trading, but it bought a tandoor and shifted its menu towards more traditional fare, slightly away from the dishes that made it famous. Kamal set up a new place, Namaste Momo, on the outskirts of Woodley in partnership with a chef from the Royal Tandoori. And the momo there were great, but there was still a friction between the Nepalese and more traditional sections of the menu. Namaste Kitchen was the Beatles of the Reading restaurant scene, and after it split up none of the solo projects quite recaptured their genius.

Fast forward to 2022 and Kamal has now left Namaste Momo as well. He’s in the middle of fitting out his new restaurant, Kamal’s Kitchen, on the Caversham Road: appropriately enough it occupies half of the space that used to be Standard Tandoori, a nice way of passing on the torch. If Kamal’s Kitchen turns out to even half as good as Namaste Kitchen was in its heyday it will be a fabulous place to have dinner. But today’s review is about a total curveball, a new pretender to the momo throne that has come out of nowhere: Momo 2 Go, a little joint down on the Oxford Road.

Momo 2 Go first came to my attention late last year, but by the looks of it it actually started trading, on the down low, last spring. It’s in a small site just before Reading West Station, with pictures of the dishes Blu-Tacked to the window, and despite the name it does have a handful of tables for dining in. But I fired up its website (they handle deliveries themselves and don’t currently use Deliveroo or JustEat: good for them) on Saturday night and decided to order a takeaway for two to stave off the winter blues.

Here’s something I really liked about Momo 2 Go’s menu – it was compact. Many of Reading’s Nepalese restaurants give you a plethora of choices, not including the huge number of ways you can customise your momo experience, and the stripped down simplicity of Momo 2 Go’s offer was a real breath of fresh air. You can have your momo steamed, in chilli sauce, in a tomato gravy or “fired” (which I assume is a typo), but that’s it. You can order chow mein or fried rice, and there’s a smallish section of sides, but that’s your lot. The water is not muddied with a crossover into more conventional Indian food or street food, there are no samosas, or chaat, or dosa. You go elsewhere for that, the menu says, and you come here for your momo. I wish more restaurants appreciated the feeling of confidence this approach instills, but I’ve been saying that for years and I’m probably not done saying it yet.

This also meant that between us Zoë and I could order a hefty cross-section of the menu – five dishes in total which came to just shy of forty pounds. That included two pounds fifty in service and delivery charges, which gives you an idea of pricing. None of the dishes costs more than a tenner and the majority are around seven pounds. We ordered at twenty to seven and the website said we’d be waiting around forty-five minutes. And pretty much bang on the dot our delivery arrived, brought to our door in a Mini which I suspect might have been driven by one of the owners. The greeting was smiley and friendly, the delivery prompt and piping hot: it’s easy to forget that most of the time, all the middle men like Just Eat and Uber Eats do is cock things up, and allow you to track how badly they’re cocking things up in something tangentially related to real time.

Our first two dishes were variations on a theme: Momo 2 Go’s chow mein, one portion with pork and the other with sukuti, dried meat usually made from buffalo or lamb. The first thing to say about this is that I’ve had chow mein from a fair few Nepalese restaurants and it’s often as beige as beige can be. But Momo 2 Go’s was pleasingly speckled with colour and life – a flash of red chilli here, a verdant glimpse of shredded cabbage or spring onion there. 

It felt fresh and vibrant, and teamed up with their impressively decongestant chutney (again, a step up from the one you get at Sapana Home) it reminded me that I think I prefer Nepalese chow mein to its Chinese cousin. But the real MVP was the sukuti – dense, chewy nuggets of savoury joy that transformed every forkful they stowed away on. I just wish there had been a few more of them – which might say that the dish was slightly out of balance, or might just say that I was greedy. The true answer’s probably at the midpoint, and besides, the dish was only eight pounds.

“You always complain that I order better than you, but I think you win this time” said Zoë. Her chow mein had pork in it (because asking Zoë to order something other than pork is to engage in a futile battle against centuries of Irish forebears) and for what it’s worth I thought it was quite nice. But it wasn’t the sukuti: Momo 2 Go sells sukuti on its own, for nine pounds (ten if you want it with beaten rice and pickles) and next time I’ll have to order a separate portion of the stuff to relive that wonderful moment when I took my first bite and knew that I’d picked a winner.

Speaking of winners, we’d chosen chicken choila as a side and again, I’m not sure I had especially high hopes. I thought it would be nice enough – it’s spiced, grilled chicken after all – but I’ve never had a choila in a Nepalese restaurant that was a feature attraction in its own right. But this was. A tub full of beautiful pieces of chicken thigh, cooked just right, not bouncy but with enough firmness left, blackened and coated with a sticky fieriness that started to make your eyes water by the end. 

I really loved this dish, so much that I don’t know how I could avoid ordering it again, except maybe to try the pork next time. We raced through, almost wordless with delight, and both offered the other the final huge, succulent piece of chicken. “No, you have it” said Zoë and, realising that if I refused one more time she would totally eat it I gratefully accepted her offer. I don’t remember whether she said at the time that it was fucking good – I know it’s the kind of thing she would say, but I don’t want to invent a memory. But either way I’m saying it myself, right now.

I’ve saved the momo til last, and ironically they were the dishes with the most room for improvement. But even then, they were still really very good indeed. Let’s start with the lamb chilli momo, which were the most problematic. Which is a pity, because all the elements were present and correct, almost. The chilli sauce was an absolute beauty – a glossy, hot, sour and sweet doozy that clung to every single momo. Kamal once told me that the secret ingredient in the chilli sauce at Namaste Kitchen was Heinz tomato ketchup, and this reminded me of that but with more of a barbecue sauce note. And the filling, coarse minced lamb, was extremely good. 

But the problem was that because of the way the momo had been assembled, there just wasn’t enough of the filling. Most of the momo I’ve eaten tend to be crimped along one side into a half-moon, like a gyoza, which means that the filling gets to take up plenty of space in the middle. But these momo had the dough gathered at the top, like a little pouch. Nothing wrong with that, of itself, but it meant that the filling was largely taken up with a heavy, stodgy knot of dough that didn’t leave enough room for the lamb (it’s also the reason I’ve never quite taken to khinkali, the momo’s Georgian cousin). Even so, what lamb there was and what dough there was, speared onto a crunchy piece of onion and taken for a swim in that sauce made for a very agreeable mouthful. 

The chicken fried (or fired, according to the menu) momo were also very good but not quite on the money. These were crimped the same way but the act of frying had formed little chimneys. I suspect they were deep fried rather than pan-seared, because Momo 2 Go doesn’t offer kothey momo, and the overall effect was ever so slightly tough. And again, if I wanted a little more filling it’s partly down to gluttony but also recognition that it was so good, singing as it did with fragrance and what felt like a hint of lemon grass. And again, even if they were a little knife-resistant and a little light on the chicken, they were still fairly stellar when dipped in the chutney.

Around this time last year I reviewed Banarasi Kitchen, in one of my first ever takeaway reviews. It really helped to discover somewhere brilliant, unassuming and under the radar early in the year, to remind me why I do this and reiterate that for every bland, disappointing meal and bandwagon-jumper there’s still the potential for somewhere to come out of nowhere and pleasantly surprise you. 

I don’t know if the glass is half full or half empty, and I do know – in the immortal words of Dolly Parton – that if you want the rainbow you’ve got to put up with the rain. But to fend off the occasional disillusionment I do need to feel, especially after a run including Zero Degrees, Zyka and 7Bone, that the next ThaiGrr! might be just round the corner. And that’s why I’m so delighted to have discovered Momo 2 Go this week – another modest but quietly accomplished place that gets so much right. I admire them for the concision of their menu and for sticking to their guns, and I could see plenty of little touches in what I ordered that tell me they care about their food. 

It’s ironic that the momo were possibly the weakest thing I had, but they were still pretty good and within touching distance of greatness. I can’t imagine it will be long before I order from them again, and I know I’ll face that agonising dilemma of choosing between the things I know I loved, and the unknowns I might like even better. There are far worse decisions to have on a night when you’re giving yourself a night off from doing the cooking. Try it, you’ll see.

Momo 2 Go
172 Oxford Road, Reading, RG1 7PL
0118 9586666

https://momo2go.co.uk
Order via: Restaurant website only

Takeaway review: Coconut Bar & Kitchen

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Despite the fact that I’ve written over two hundred reviews since I started this blog there are a fair few restaurants I’ve only eaten at once, in the course of writing the review, and not visited since. In some cases, it’s because they were truly awful: no power on earth could send me scuttling back to TGI Friday or make me brave the purgatorial multi-cuisine omnishambles that is Cosmo. In others, it’s not proved logistically possible: I would genuinely love to try Marmo again, but it will be a while before I can. And some restaurants have closed before I can revisit them – I still mourn the loss of Cappuccina Café, which tried to introduce Reading to bánh mì before Reading was ready for them.

In many other cases – the majority, at a guess – I’ve just never got round to it. Often they’re the middle-ranking places, the restaurants with a rating higher than 6.5 but lower than 7, which I liked but didn’t love. Or it’s because it’s a pub out in the shires, and it was enough of a faff getting there first time around. In my defence, I have a great excuse: I’m always out there investigating new restaurants, and there are only so many evenings available, only so much wiggle room in the budget, only so many spare calories unclaimed. In an ideal world I’d eat somewhere more than once before reviewing the place: in an ideal world people would pay for content online, and I’d be able to afford to. 

C’est la vie. But what it does mean is that there is a small but significant group of restaurants I reviewed years ago that are ripe for reappraisal. And Coconut, the subject of this week’s review, is as prime an example as you could hope for. I went in 2014, a couple of months after it opened, and had a pleasant but unremarkable meal: it got one of those like-but-don’t-love ratings and I thought no more about it. 

But Coconut proved to have more staying power than most. In the town centre alone it has outlasted the likes of Jamie’s Italian, Dolce Vita, Mangal, CAU, RYND and – less surprisingly – Smokin’ Billy’s. And in 2022 it’s still going strong and now has a spin-off, the beautifully turned out Osaka in Oracle’s old Café Rouge site. So this week I decided to give their takeaway food a whirl, to see if it was clear why they had survived where so many restaurants, including some I really loved, had failed.

Coconut’s menu has changed a little since I visited. Back when it first opened it made a big thing of its yakitori, a genuinely interesting point of difference. But over the years the menu has moved away from that towards being a more generic pan-Asian menu (which reminded me of the sadly departed Tampopo, another restaurant Coconut has successfully seen off), so you have dishes from Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Korea side by side. It always surprises me when restaurants try to cover such a huge geographic area in a single menu – I can’t imagine someone offering a pan-European menu where fish and chips sits alongside paella, ragu, kleftiko and schnitzel – but maybe that’s just me being finicky.

That said, a menu like Coconut’s makes it easy to find something you think you might like, and plays it safe enough that relatively mainstream dishes abound – satay, pad Thai, katsu curry and so on (one dish was just called “Vietnam Beef”, which felt plain lazy). Pricing is keenly set for casual dining, so starters are largely at the seven pound mark and the vast majority of the mains are between eleven and twelve pounds. We ordered three starters and a couple of mains and our meal came to just under fifty pounds, not including rider tip.

It’s always nice to be able to talk about a hassle free delivery experience, and gladly that was the case here. I ordered at around twenty to eight on a Friday night, it was on its way forty minutes later and the driver took just over five minutes door to door – not too shabby at all. Everything was well packaged, much of the packaging was recyclable and it all arrived pretty hot, or at the very least hot enough. We’d used the standard delivery tactic of repurposing starters as side dishes, so we decanted everything as swiftly as we could, pausing only for the standard issue photo opportunities, and raced to the sofa to dive in. 

The starters were a mixed bunch. My favourite was the sticky chilli chicken, a generous portion of chicken with a nice whack of heat and good texture – just enough crunch and no suspiciously uniform bouncy pieces of chicken à la Wingstop’s infamous boneless wings. They were too hot for Zoë – or, to use her words, “hot as fuck” – and neither of us really grasped the wisdom of pairing them with wasabi mayonnaise but they were still enjoyable as they came. It’s only now, writing this review, that I have a feeling that I ought to order more imaginatively in 2022, because if you had a fiver for every time I’d ordered fried chicken (or chilli chicken, or fried chilli chicken) in 2021 this blog might fund itself: I’ll try harder in future.

The other two starters were middling, and I couldn’t help feeling I’d had similar or better elsewhere. I left the gyoza in their plastic-lidded box too long which meant they were a little too limp by the time we made inroads into them, and they were perfectly agreeable but not markedly different from those I’d had in other places. You got four for just under six pounds, which isn’t bad value until you start to consider ordering momo from literally anywhere else. Still, even a slightly limp gyoza stuffed with chicken and veg is not to be sniffed at, especially when dipped into a nice mixture of sesame and soy. God bless them for including a random chive for garnish.

Finally, Coconut’s pork spring rolls were rather nice – light rather than heavy or stodgy and with a passable amount of pork in the filling. In another town: a smaller, less prosperous town, one – more specifically – without a Pho, they would get a higher recommendation from me. But once you’ve enjoyed Pho’s crunchy, rugged spring rolls the bar is raised a fair bit higher, and for me Coconut’s homogeneous, sanitised rendition fell short. 

For the mains Zoë and I stayed on familiar territory, the better to compare Coconut’s dishes with the tried and tested. She chose the pork satay, or, as it’s described on the Deliveroo menu, the “Pork Indonesian Satay”. The menu likes to give you nationalities all over the shop, which explains the “Vietnam Beef”, the “Chicken Japan Katsu Curry” (to distinguish it, no doubt, from those sneaky Portuguese impersonators) and the “Japanese rice” you can order as a side dish.

Speaking of the rice, this was one of the frustrating things about the menu. All the curry dishes, and (obviously) the rice dishes come with rice. But the stir fries don’t mention rice at all, so you’re left with the unenviable choice of ordering a side you won’t need or not bothering and finding your meal arrives a rice-free zone. We did the former, so had an extra completely unnecessary portion of rice – Japanese rice, no less – for three pounds fifty. I’m sure it was just an omission, but the menu should say that all these dishes come with rice (and, given that nearly everything does, I’m not sure what the point is of having rice as a side dish).

Anyway, those quibbles aside Zoë really enjoyed the pork satay and from the forkful I had I could understand why. There was some nice depth of flavour and heat in it, the pork was tender with a little caramelisation and I was surprised, but not unpleasantly so, to see pineapple in there too. “This is as good as the curry I have from Pho, and possibly better” was Zoë’s verdict, and given how often she’s had that dish over the last twelve months it constituted high praise. “I would have it again”, she added. “You may not be a promoter, but I’m certainly a promoter of them porks.”

I’d love to be able to say that my nasi goreng (sorry, “Prawn Indonesian Nasi Goreng”) was also up there, but it was probably the biggest disappointment of the night. Leaving aside the fact that you were forced to choose between chicken and prawn when the whole point of nasi goreng is that it usually contains both, what really disappointed was the lack of flavour. The prawns were nice enough, big firm specimens, but the rice itself seemed to rely entirely on chilli heat without the complexity of ketjap manis or shrimp paste. That made it, once the prawns were out of the way, a bit of a one-dimensional slog. 

It was served with a fried egg on top – I’m sure this works miles better in the restaurant where the yolk is still runny, but understandably it had set on the journey to my house. And there were cherry tomatoes in it, which may or may not be authentic but either way felt plain weird. I’m sorry to use the P word again, but the fried rice dish at Pho is light years ahead of this. So, from my dim recollection of going there many moons ago, was the Moderation’s nasi goreng.

So not a terrible meal, but one I’m tempted to damn with faint praise by using adjectives like “decent” and “solid”. Bits of it were quite good, and none of it was bad, but is that enough? I’m sure it could be if you’re eating in the restaurant, enjoying the atmosphere and necking the odd cocktail, but as a takeaway experience it felt a tad flat, despite being reasonably accomplished.

I suppose the problem with being a pan-Asian restaurant is that you have to do what you do better than a wide range of different places. Your chilli chicken has to improve on Banarasi Kitchen’s, your gyoza are competing with Sushimania’s, and your spring rolls have their work cut out to be better than Pho’s. Your pad Thai needs to top Thai Table’s, and good luck doing squid better than ThaiGrr!’s. Perhaps that’s why the aim is solid reliability – that you’re never the best but you’re always far from the worst. Coconut easily achieves that, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not much of an ambition, let’s face it.

Writing all this makes me really want to eat all manner of dishes, but the problem is that it doesn’t necessarily make me want to order them from Coconut. It also makes me miss Tampopo – and I imagine long time readers of my blog who used to go there have probably had similar thoughts by now. Last of all, it makes me think about how enjoyable a Reading restaurants edition of Top Trumps would be (“for fuck’s sake, I’ve got Zero Degrees”). Someone ought to make one. If they did, Coconut wouldn’t be the worst card in the pack to hold, but you’d often find yourself giving it away.

Coconut Bar & Kitchen
62-63 St Mary’s Butts, Reading, RG1 2LG
0118 9598877

http://www.coconutbarkitchen.co.uk
Order via: Deliveroo

Restaurant DIY kit review: Marksman at Dishpatch

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As of August 2022, Marksman is no longer partnering with Dishpatch.

Despite all the great meals I had last year, as 2022 begins I can’t help remembering the one that got away. In early December, Zoë had a weekday free and we were going to take an off peak train to Oxford to chance our arm with a quiet, off peak lunch at one of my favourite places, the Magdalen Arms. Back when I was a student nearly three decades ago, the the pub was a bit of a dive bar but, crucially, it had American pool tables and so my friend Dave and I would occasionally slope off across Magdalen Bridge for a few frames there (I invariably lost: Dave never plays a game he knows he won’t win).

In the intervening years much of that end of Oxford has gentrified, so the Cowley Road now has a great tapas restaurant in the shape of Arbequina and a wonderful cafe called Peloton Espresso. And down the Iffley Road, just past the spot where Roger Bannister first broke the four minute mile, the Magdalen Arms has been transformed into a fantastic gastropub, part of a small group including the Anchor & Hope on The Cut, one of the longest-running and most fêted exponents of that genre. It has a great menu which bursts at the seams with temptation but the main reason to go there, as far as I’m concerned, is their pie.

It comes to the table in an enamel dish, suet crust pastry still bubbling, and whether the filling is beef or chicken, the end result is always ecstasy.  It serves three hungry people or two lucky, greedy ones and it remains one of the finest things I’ve ever eaten in any pub or restaurant, anywhere. I generally agree with people who say that if a pie only has a pastry lid it’s really just a stew wearing a hat, but if anything can change my mind it’s the pie at the Magdalen Arms. That trip to Oxford was kiboshed by Zoë testing positive for Covid, so it wasn’t to be. But once her recovery was well under way we both agreed that we have some unfinished business with that pie.

The only pie that ever came close to the Magdalen Arms’ was one I had in the summer of 2019. I’d just been made redundant, in circumstances that meant I was in no hurry to get another job, and this being pre-Covid I had plenty of better things to do than looking for one. So I spent a very enjoyable afternoon wandering round Shoreditch, dipping in and out of design shops, drinking lattes in edgy cafés as if I belonged there, and after work I met up with Ian, a former colleague of mine who had also hopped on the Redundancy Express but only made it as far as an office near Old Street. 

We stood outside the Bricklayers Arms, enjoying our pints in plastic glasses, congratulating one another on our escape and enjoying all the people-watching Hoxton has to offer on a summer evening. We got chatting to a chap who knew the area well and when we told him we hadn’t decided where to have dinner, he told us to make a pilgrimage to the Marksman, a pub fifteen minutes further out into Hackney. So we did, and in a midcentury modern-styled dining room above the pub I had one of the best meals I’d had in as long as I could remember. 

I remember a crumpet smeared with salsa verde and topped with translucent strips of barely-cooked pancetta. There was Welsh rarebit on the dessert menu – because it was that kind of place – and I ordered it, because I’m that kind of person. But best of all was the pie, another enamel dish topped with a burnished crust, underneath it strand after strand of chicken thigh infused with tarragon. By the end of the meal I began to wonder whether I too could cope with commuting to a job in London, if the post-work gastronomic options were that good. It seemed to be suiting Ian nicely.

Two and a half years later, that meal crossed my mind again when I was on the website for Dishpatch, who offer heat at home meals from a variety of well-regarded London restaurants. Because lo and behold, there was a meal kit from the Marksman, the centrepiece of which was a pie. Not That Pie – this one was beef, rather than chicken, but a pie nonetheless. The winter was in full swing, Omicron was too and there are only so many times you can be slightly disappointed by a takeaway before you fancy a break, so I thought Fuck it and pulled the trigger on an order. It was that dead zone between Christmas and New Year, and I thought it would be nice to have something to look forward to in January.

I ordered the feature attraction with all the sides, extras and add-ons, which came to seventy-three pounds, not including shipping. More than a takeaway would cost, but potentially less than a meal in their restaurant might be. My only previous experience of reviewing a restaurant DIY kit, early in 2021, had been very hit and miss, but I thought it was time to give the concept another try.  After all, eating in a restaurant still felt like a somewhat distant prospect.

The box arrived last Friday in the appointed slot, although DPD kindly delivered it to a house round the corner and we had to retrieve it from their recycling bin: nice to know that, even with a heat at home kit, there’s scope to struggle with the delivery experience. But Dishpatch were beyond reproach when it came to packaging : everything was packed with ice and insulated with the same Woolcool lining Clay’s uses for its heat at home option. It was all clearly labelled, well boxed up and vacuum-packed.  A fancy-looking brochure gave you all the cooking instructions and, laudably, a separate sheet explained that all of the packaging was either recyclable or compostable.

The following night we opened a bottle of wine and set about cooking and demolishing as much of our order as possible. Again, you can’t fault Marksman for making it as easy as possible and the instructions for nearly all of it were the same – heat a baking tray to two hundred degrees, line it with parchment and cook each dish for however long it needs. And this reminded me of the edge heat at home options have over conventional takeaways – the opportunity to take your time and eat everything in an order, to experience starters, mains and desserts again without having to leave the house or scramble to eat it all before something gets cold.

First up we tried one of the extras, the truffle sausage roll. A mere twenty-five minutes in the oven and what came out was glorious – bronzed and beautiful, the sausagemeat coarse and herby. I thought the truffle in it was on the subtle side – more of a whisper than a honk – but I enjoyed it far too much to feel cheated. “That’s the best sausage roll I’ve ever had” was Zoë’s verdict, and casting my mind back I struggled to think of one better, although the one I sampled last year from Wokingham’s Blue Orchid Bakery came a close second. That said, this one was eight pounds: I did find myself wishing I’d had the foresight to order two.

Our second starter – you’ve got to love heat at home kits for taking the shame out of ordering two starters – was an interesting beast. What looked like plain bread rolls were in fact milk buns crammed with curried lamb, served with a yoghurt dip. It’s billed as an Anglicised version of the char siu bun, although the more famous version served at the pub is beef and horseradish instead. I liked it, and it was definitely the most interesting thing I ate from the menu, but it still seemed a tad modest and unassuming. I expected some lacquer on the buns, perhaps, or more oomph from the filling. The best thing about it was the fantastic yoghurt dip, bursting with lime and a lick of salt, topped with crispy curry leaves – but would it have killed them to give you more of it? This cost twelve pounds, and although I enjoyed it it still felt like slightly too much for slightly too little.

I had a sinking feeling that the pie would underwhelm as I prepped it to go in the oven. For once it wasn’t about the faff of cooking it, because it couldn’t have been simpler: they provided you with an enamel dish, the pastry was ready-rolled and ready to drape on top, there was even a little sachet of eggwash to brush over the top. No, the problem was the filling. The pictures on Dishpatch’s website show the platonic ideal of a pie, the golden crust and the rich sauce underneath, a tangle of slow-cooked beef, broken up into fine ribbons, the sauce rich and sticky. Inside my vacuum-packed bag? Three – yes, I counted – dense nuggets of beef. That was it.

The Dishpatch website talks about the beef in some detail. “We keep the meat in big chunks when slow-braising so that they really hold the moisture”, says the co-founder. I can understand that, but you would think that in the process of making the filling they’d then shred the stuff so you reaped the benefits. Instead, there they were, floating in the sauce as if they’d been introduced to it literally at the last minute. Imagine a pie where each quarter contained a solitary piece of meat, and one quarter contained no meat at all. I don’t have to imagine it, because I ate it: it felt like a very expensive, not very impressive ready meal.

It was a real pity, because the sauce was delicious and you really got the rich softness of the onions in there (slow cooked in beef fat for over an hour, apparently). There was a beautiful savoury, salty note too that had me checking the list of ingredients for anchovies. But with no meat to bulk it up, it felt a bit watery. And the three bits of beef you did get weren’t “super succulent” (I’m quoting the Dishpatch website again), just dense and needing a fair bit of aggression with a knife and fork to break them up. I suppose you could describe them as big, but only in relative terms: one had a rich vein of unappealing fat in it, too. A bad pie, as I learned many years ago at Sweeney & Todd, is worse than no pie at all, because it’s a betrayal of the beautiful concept of pie itself. I’m afraid this was a bad pie.

I should also mention the cost. This was thirty-five pounds, and my only comparable experience of heat at home, really, is ordering vacuum-packed curries from Clay’s. For the money I spent on this pie and an accompanying pressed potato side dish, you could pick up two curries from Clay’s and two portions of rice and end the meal replete and enraptured. By my reckoning, you’d get twice as much food. Whether this means that Marksman is overpriced or Clay’s an absolute steal I’m not sure. Probably the latter, although the truth might be somewhere between the two.

The pressed potato side dish, by the way, was disappointing. That word again. The blurb sold it beautifully – thinly sliced potatoes layered, pressed and fried until crisp, what could possibly be bad about that? – and I was hoping it would be a heat at home equivalent of the legendary confit potato they serve at Quality Chop House in Farringdon. But it came out wan rather than crispy, and lacking in flavour. It didn’t help that it was drowned – literally and figuratively – by that sauce, the pie-filling-that-wasn’t-a-filling. In the course of researching this I discovered that Quality Chop House does its own heat at home option where a pie for two costs seventeen pounds: perhaps I should review them next.

That was all the meh I could take for one night, so we saved dessert for the following evening. Again, it sounded magical on paper – chocolate puddings with a salt toffee sauce and plenty of Jersey cream. Again, it was incredibly easy to cook. You just eased the puddings out of their foil cases and baked them in the oven with a dollop of the sauce on top while you heated the rest on the hob. 

And again, they just came out badly. They sunk in the oven to flattened discs with an impregnable caramel perma-crust on top, sad parodies of the glossy pictures in the brochure. The sauce hadn’t thickened, so it pretty much had the same texture as the cream, and the end result was a chewy puck submerged in a lukewarm lake of something which combined the worst aspects of cream and a salt caramel sauce. Twelve pounds for something Gü, it pains me to say, does better. This is the one dish I couldn’t bring myself to take a photo of: it just looked too forlorn.

The strange thing about this experience is that I can’t really fault Dishpatch. Unlike the likes of Deliveroo and Uber Eats they take responsibility for the food they sell, so after I filled out my survey they sent me a lovely email and gave me a partial refund. And their packaging and delivery was spot on: they run a very polished operation. The problem was with the food, and for once I can properly compare like with like, because I’ve eaten in the Marksman. My meal there a few years back was beautiful, but this was nowhere near the same quality for broadly the same cost. It’s like the joke that kicks off Annie Hall: “This food is terrible.” “I know, and such small portions.”

Of course, it isn’t really that simple. I know, rationally, that heat at home kits have different overheads to absorb: fancy packaging, vacuum-packing kit, training, the cost of a delivery supplier and so on. The problem DIY kits like this one have is that even though you know all that, on a gut level it still feels like you’re paying restaurant prices for a substandard home experience. Perhaps I haven’t found the right ones yet, Clay’s excepted. 

On the plus side, it leaves plenty of room for improvement in 2022. But for now, my second brush with restaurant delivery kits left me feeling surprisingly appreciative of conventional takeaways, with all their wayward drivers drifting down the IDR away from my bloody house, all the timing issues, the lukewarm pizzas I’ve endured and all the other vicissitudes I grappled with last year. It left me feeling almost nostalgic, even. If nothing else, your disappointment is (a) instant and (b) cheaper. If I’m to have disappointments this year, and statistically it seems likely, I’d like them to be as instant, and as cheap, as possible. It’s not much of a mission statement, but the last couple of years have taught me to manage my expectations.

The Marksman at Dishpatch

https://www.dishpatch.co.uk/menus/collection/restaurant/marksman