Category: Reviews

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

Takeaway review: 7Bone

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Many of my best laid plans have gone amiss this year, and this week’s review is no exception. It was all sorted: Zoë had the day off and we’d decided to take an off peak train to a quiet restaurant I’ve always loved, to chance our arm and enjoy a wonderful, peaceful lunch. We knew it would be our last chance to do anything like that before the new variant swept the country and hibernation became the only sensible option. And I was literally putting my coat and my scarf on in the hall when the shout came from upstairs. “I can’t fucking believe it. I’ve tested positive.”

The week that followed was nothing like I expected, under virtual house arrest and watching with concern as my other half ached, shivered and sweltered, couldn’t sleep at night and catnapped fitfully during the day. When she was awake, the cough seemed to come from the depths of her soul. After an encouraging start, she was unable to taste a thing for over a week. There were regular checks of her blood oxygen levels, and her temperature, and every morning I did a lateral flow test. Every morning, surreally, it came back negative.

Equally surreally, according to government guidelines I was allowed to carry on going out and about, shopping, even eating in restaurants if I wanted to. Of course I didn’t, because that would be nuts, so with the exception of a ridiculous dash to four different pharmacies to pick up steroids for Zoë’s asthma I spent a week on the sofa, making lunch and dinner, making a steady stream of hot beverages, a veritable Laurence Nightingale. My main task, I tended to think, was not to appear as worried as I was. And I reckon I did a reasonable job of that, even if writing this lets the cat out of the bag.

But there was one more curveball. This review was meant to come out last Friday, but the night after I ordered this particular takeaway Zoë’s breathing got so bad that I had to call 111, to translate for her because she couldn’t complete a full sentence with the air in her lungs. And at midnight an ambulance turned up, incongruously outside our little terraced house and took her away.

And so began five anxious days of text messages back and forward, keeping everybody in the loop, hoping things would get better rather than worse. I had a couple of phone conversations with Zoë – no visiting in the Covid ward – but each time she ran out of puff and energy after about fifteen minutes. And sleeping at night was a challenge on a busy ward full of bleeps and general mayhem, so she grabbed rest where she could.

Every day I traipsed to the hospital with a bag full of the latest things she’d requested: biscuits; samosas; Lucozade; M&S sandwiches (even without a sense of taste the hospital food is diabolical, apparently). And every day a nurse would meet me at the door, take the tote bag from me and whisk it away. She was there on the other side but I couldn’t see her, so near and yet so far. And so I went home, to a house suddenly too big and too quiet, to self-medicate by eating chocolate and binging Game Of Thrones.

To cut a long story short, she was discharged this week and is resting at home. She’s recovered enough strength to be frustrated that she can’t do more (and to order me around extremely efficiently), but not enough that she can do much beyond directing operations from bed or from the sofa. And everybody has been so lovely – to her, to me, to both of us. I’ve been overwhelmed by the offers of help and expressions of sympathy, and I’m beyond glad to have her back where she belongs.

This virus is no joke, especially if you have underlying health conditions, and it’s likely Zoë contracted the older, less serious variant. So I hope you’re all careful this Christmas – although, as always, I really feel for the hospitality sector which has, yet again, been hung out to dry by the Tories. People are cancelling reservations in their droves, and there hasn’t been a whisper of financial support from the government. As if last year hadn’t been bad enough for them, they now face another December without the bookings that tide them over for the months ahead.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago when all this was just the ghost of Covid yet to come, I sat down at my computer and decided who to order a contactless Deliveroo dinner from to give me something to review and to give you something to read. Zoë didn’t join me, because all she could taste were very salty and very sweet things, so she ordered a sweet and sour chicken from Kokoro instead. I suspect that even with Covid she had a better meal than I did (whoops: cat out of the bag again).

I picked 7Bone because I quite fancied a burger and I’d heard decent reports of their takeaways, including ones saying that they travelled well. And it’s been a long time since I ate there – I’ve not been back since I went on duty over four years ago – so it felt like revisiting their food was long overdue. And their menu is good, if a little too wedded to the idea that “dirty” (or, in some cases and for some reason, “dirrrty”), is a Good Thing when it comes to food: a great range of snacks, a good variety of burgers and fried chicken sandwiches and plenty of options for vegetarians and vegans.

For someone used to eating at Honest, you could easily feel spoiled for choice here. The burgers are all under ten pounds, although you order fries separately. And there was a small section of Christmas specials. 7Bone, you might not be surprised to hear, spells Christmas “xxxmas”: I guess that’s its schtick. Anyway I chose a burger and three snacks, none of which was described as unhygienic, and my order came to just under thirty pounds, not including driver tip.

I always hate writing this next bit, but I’m afraid this delivery was not without problems. I ordered at about twenty to seven, and eventually when my order arrived I saw from the ticket (which also said something facile like I’m dirty – take me home!: somebody in their marketing department thinks it’s still 1997 and hasn’t cancelled their subscription to Loaded) that it was due to be collected from the restaurant at seven. My driver didn’t collect it until twenty-five past seven, and he took an impressive three minutes to get it to my front door. But most of it was lukewarm, so what went wrong?

At a guess, the driver shortage is starting to affect Deliveroo: I was told they had a rider for me at 19:08, and then at 19:13 Deliveroo announced that they were still trying to get a rider. “We’re delivering lots of orders right now” said the following status update – which, when you’re still waiting for yours to arrive, sounds a lot like rubbing it in. Deliveroo also does this deeply cheeky thing of moving the goalposts in real time, so the estimated time of arrival of your order gets later and later. And this means you can never chase them about it, because technically it’s not late. Even when the driver was en route the message in the app said “Great news! Your order should be with you by 20:04”. How it was great news that my driver might take forty minutes to complete a five minute drive was a mystery to me.

It was hard to escape the conclusion that the order had been sitting there waiting for a rider for the best part of half an hour, and the temperature of the food tended to back that up. And, as so often with complicated supply chains, it’s hard to work out where the blame lies. It’s not the rider’s fault – he took next to no time to get the food to me – but is it Deliveroo’s fault for not having enough riders? Or should the restaurant, once it became clear that the order wasn’t going to go out for some time, have cooked another one?

All that leaves us in familiar territory this year on the blog, the slightly melancholy world of “if only it had been hot”. Take the burger: if it had been hot I think it could have been marvellous. I’d gone for the “Triple B”, which comes with blue cheese, bacon, bacon jam and truffle blue cheese dressing, and even lukewarm it was quite pleasant. To their credit, 7Bone allows you to either have a single burger pink or well done or two smashed patties. I’d gone for the latter, and it worked rather nicely. I mainly got the salty tang of blue cheese and little in the way of truffle, and the bacon jam was as inconsistently applied as the Covid regulations last year, but even so it wasn’t half bad. It made me want to go back and try it in their restaurant at some point next year, when hopefully it won’t take the best part of half an hour to get from the kitchen to my table.

Rather than go for the fries, I’d chosen the festive special, crispy fried roasties. I’m not sure how something can be fried and a roastie – surely you’re either one or the other – but these were smashed and fried potatoes dusted in sage salt and accompanied with a gloopy cheese sauce which I didn’t especially take to. The potatoes themselves were decent, though I wasn’t entirely convinced they were worth five pounds fifty. If only they’d been hot.

That said, the Korean fried chicken would not have been great even it had been piping hot. Gochujang, done right, has a beautiful taste which is simultaneously somehow sweet, hot, sour, spicy and savoury and I absolutely love it. This was the fake tan of gochujang – the colour was there but the taste was all wrong, just acrid, one-dimensional chilli. And while we’re on the subject, calling something fried chicken writes a cheque that promises crinkle and crunch, but this stuff couldn’t cash that cheque at all: texturally, it was a dud. I’m not a fan of restaurants turning “tender” from an adjective to a noun – it’s as bad, in its way, as “gifting” – but it does imply that the dish should at least be tender. This was as hard and unforgiving as Priti Patel. And even less appetising.

Last but not least, I had a snack which I had to order for smut value alone. I’d chosen “Coq skins” (it’s a shame they didn’t have the nerve to call them coq scratchings) because I’ve long felt that crispy skin is the absolute best part of a chicken. These were in danger of changing my mind, with an overwhelming taste of nothing but salt, salt and more salt, with a little underlying fat to make you feel profoundly icky afterwards. They could have shrivelled a slug at twenty paces. I didn’t eat many of these, because I didn’t want to do lasting damage to my love of chicken skin. Zoë, having finished off her Kokoro upstairs, probably could have tasted them, but I don’t think she’d have thanked me for the leftovers.

It might be for the best that the year is limping to an end, because I’m running out of ways to say fundamentally the same things: that a takeaway is not the best way to enjoy a restaurant’s food and that a delivery app is not the best way to order a takeaway. Those links in the chain mean there’s more that can go wrong, and if something does go wrong – which it does often – it’s harder to get somebody to take responsibility. In a restaurant if your food was lukewarm you’d send it back, but with deliveries that’s not really an option. In a restaurant, you wouldn’t pay. With a delivery, you already have. It’s a shame, because in the current climate we might all be ordering a lot more takeaways.

So on this evidence I would probably give 7Bone another try when it’s safe to go back and eat in, but I wouldn’t rush to order a delivery from them again. But, writing this in December 2021, I’m tempted to say “who cares?”. It’s just a takeaway, from a restaurant which was probably busy and stressed, in a climate where the cost of ingredients is going through the roof, inflation is going mad, it’s hard to get hold of drivers and all of a sudden hospitality businesses are losing customers left right and centre. So if you like burgers, maybe you should try 7Bone anyway: the burgers are decent, and you might have better luck than I did (just give those chicken strips a wide berth). But ultimately, I’m not sure a review like mine matters; this week, of all weeks, I’m reminded that there are far more important things in life.

7Bone
60 St Mary’s Butts, Reading, RG1 2LG
0118 9595106

https://7bone.co.uk
Order via: Deliveroo

Takeaway review: Zyka

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I’m easily old enough to remember a time before delivery apps and dark kitchens, before the weird and wonderful world of restaurants running side hustles, diffusion brands or heat at home kits. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, for most people, takeaway meant a curry, a Chinese meal or fish and chips from the local chippy. The closest you got to fusion food was having curry sauce (or in my case, sweet and sour sauce from Woodley’s Hong Kong Garden – still going strong, would you believe) on your chips. They were, in all respects, simpler times.

And in those days, having a good takeaway nearby was like gold dust: if you discovered one close to home, you made the most of it. At the end of the last century I lived in Nottingham for a year, and just round the corner from my house in Sherwood was the most incredible Indian takeaway. The flavour has probably been enhanced with a powerful dusting of nostalgia, memory’s answer to MSG, but the Fridays when we got food from there and sat down in front of something from Blockbuster Video were happy evenings indeed.

I’ve never found anything comparable in Reading. I used to live just around the corner from Kings Chef on the London Road, and I had their Chinese takeaway from time to time but it largely left me unmoved. And back when it was open, I would happily wander over to the now sadly defunct Seaspray to grab fish and chips which were still hot when I got home. But doing restaurant reviews for eight years meant that, until the pandemic hit, I never had much cause to use takeaways. And now the proliferation of delivery services, third parties on bikes and scooters and all that means that there’s probably too much choice. You channel hop meals the way you channel hop TV programmes or, as I remember from my days on Tinder, actual human beings.

Ordering from Zyka, the subject of this week’s review reminded me slightly of the old days. No Deliveroo or Uber Eats for them, so you just have to contact them and tell them what you want. Although you can order online (and they even take Apple Pay), so it’s not quite as basic as getting a leaflet through your door and ringing them up. And why did I choose Zyka? I thought you’d never ask: it’s because it won an award recently.

Not at the British Curry Awards, which were announced this week and gave prizes to the likes of Benares in Berkeley Square and Cheltenham’s brilliant Prithvi (“we’re building back balti” said the Prime Minister in a by all accounts cringeworthy recorded message). And not at the English Curry Awards, which were awarded in October and where winners included Wokingham’s Mumbai, either. Zyka won at the Curry Life Awards, also held October, where they were one of twenty-one restaurants to win “Best Curry Restaurants Of The Year”. With hindsight, there are a lot of different curry awards and a lot of winners: perhaps they should have some kind of unification bout, like they do in the wrestling. 

Anyway, a fair few people have asked for this review, off the back of that award, so I figured it was about time. “They’ve been excellent for many years”, one person told me on Twitter, adding that they’d diversified by opening The Switch, a Tilehurst café which looks, on paper at least, like an attempt to create a West Reading equivalent of Café Yolk. “The menu doesn’t look that inspiring” said a friend of mine. “It’s not a patch on House Of Flavours” was another piece of feedback I heard: I guess if there was universal consensus I’d never need to review anything.

For what it’s worth, I think my friend was right about the menu. It’s pretty generic, with the same dishes you’d find anywhere else. Starters are mainly bhaji, samosas and a few options from the tandoor, and then there’s a tandoori section and largely the same curries offered with either lamb, chicken, seafood or vegetables and paneer. Another section is entitled “House Favourites”, which makes you think this might be where the specialities live, but no: that’s where you find your bhuna, dopiaza, korma, dansak and so on. 

In fairness to Zyka, and I may end up saying this a few times in this review, it may well be very different if you eat in the restaurant. The menu makes a point of saying that they’ve selected the dishes on the takeaway menu to ensure that they travel well – and I understand this might make some dishes unsuitable but I was still a little surprised not to see something off the beaten track on the menu. Because they’ve won an award. 

Anyway, my order for two people – poppadoms, a couple of starters, two mains, a vegetable side and some rice – came to a smidgen over fifty pounds. They charged three pounds for delivery and a nebulous extra quid under “surcharge”, whatever that means. I got a text saying that my meal would be with me in about an hour and then, just like in the old days, we sat back and waited.

He was at the door ten minutes later than predicted, but because I didn’t have the facility to endlessly, pointlessly track his whereabouts I just assumed it was because he’d left a little later than planned rather than because he got lost. And everything was piping hot and in a rather natty branded carrier bag. So far everything had gone like clockwork, and the only thing left was to eat the damned thing.

And that, I’m afraid, is where things didn’t quite come together. I’d chosen one of their curries that wasn’t generic, the murg haryali, chicken with mint and coriander: “a touch of sweetness and spice”, said the menu. I have fond memories of a similar, Kermit-green dish from Bhoj many years ago, aromatic and whiffy with garlic. This, I’m afraid, wasn’t that: it’s true that there was a bit of spice, but mostly there was sweetness – an odd, saccharine, artificial sweetness. You got the mint, but not really the coriander, and the chicken, tikka-tinged, was in big and slightly homogeneous pieces. I didn’t finish it, and it tasted a little – that word again – generic.

Zoë – and how many times have I had to write this in 2021? – ordered better than I did. Still giving carbs a relatively wide berth, she’d picked Zyka’s equivalent of a mixed grill, the Zyka mixed tandoori. This was fundamentally a huge plate of meat, with chicken and lamb tikka, an impressive quarter of a chicken, some prawns (“look, there’s a crustacean” was how Zoë chose to describe this development) and a seekh kebab. All lobster-red, so red it’s unreal, and all suffused with the deeply savoury notes that come from time well spent in a tandoor. 

I had a bit – I enjoyed the chicken, I thought the lamb was on the tough side. “I love the meats. I’d order the meats again” was Zoë’s verdict after this meal, although in fairness she says that after nearly any meal in which meat plays a predominant role (sometimes it’s a little like living with Captain Caveman). She’d chosen bhindi bhaji, thinly sliced okra, to accompany her rhapsody in crimson, and she thought it was decent enough, “but a little bit underseasoned”. The menu had given me the option to have this dish “desi style” for an extra pound, saying this meant the dish was “a slightly spicier and more authentic take”. I didn’t go for that, and maybe I should have, but it’s a bit weird to have to pay extra to make it taste authentic. They do seem to like their surcharges at Zyka.

The two starters, repurposed as side dishes, were fine but again, no more than that. I think it’s pretty hard to fuck up an onion bhaji, so if I say that these were good I’m not sure it’s especially glowing praise. And the samosas were a little unremarkable – full of pellets of minced lamb and peas but without any overwhelming flavour. You got two of them for a fiver, and the following day on the way back from seeing my dentist I picked up two infinitely more enjoyable ones in the legendary Cake & Cream for under two quid. Cake & Cream, as far as I know, has not been nominated for any awards, but I’d give them “Samosa Of The Year” any day of the week. There were also some poppadoms, but they always taste the same in my experience – even a bad one is usually enjoyable, provided it’s not stale.

I don’t want to sound withering about Zyka. What I had wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t great either. And this is the problem with awards: back in 2011 when Petersham Nurseries, a restaurant in a garden centre near Richmond with plain tables and no whistles and bells, won a Michelin star the chef there, Skye Gyngell, said that she wished she could give it back. The expectations of her customers changed, and they wanted to eat at a kind of restaurant she never wanted hers to be. It got too much, and she quit the following year. 

I get that expectation problem, admittedly on a different level, with Zyka. If they hadn’t won an award, maybe the upshot of this review would be “eh, it’s okay”. But because it has, it’s hard not to come away saying “how did they manage that?” I had a much more enjoyable takeaway from Banarasi Kitchen earlier in the year – which is equally well placed to serve West Reading, and much closer to you if you live across town. But the restaurant Zyka really made me miss was Bhoj. I ordered deliveries from Bhoj a few times, back in its golden age when it was still on the Oxford Road, and it never disappointed me.

I’m sure Zyka would have done brilliantly back in the days when I still had a Blockbuster Video card, when it was all leaflets folded into three and putting a call in from your landline (remember landlines?), shouting above the background noise. But the world moves on, and things change. There is so much choice, and it raises the standard: a rising tide, as I often say, lifts all boats. Although perhaps it’s a neighbourhood thing, and maybe if you’re a Tilehurst resident you count your lucky stars to have it just down the road. 

I should close by giving them the benefit of the doubt – maybe you had to be there. Maybe their full, eat-in menu has all the imagination and execution that was missing from my meal this week. And I know a restaurant is so much more than the food, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their welcome is warm, their service superlative. I’ll make a point of checking them out in person in the New Year, and I look forward to them making me eat my words. But, for now at least, I’d rather eat elsewhere.

Zyka
6 Park Lane, Tilehurst, Reading, RG31 5DL
0118 9427788

https://www.zyka.co.uk
Order via: Direct from the restaurant