Restaurant review: Town, Covent Garden

On July 18, 2025December 28, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Town – or, as it’s sometimes written, TOWN – is the hot new restaurant on Drury Lane, with celebrated chef Stevie Parle in the kitchen. It’s been open a couple of months, and has already had rave reviews from every quarter. Admittedly, some of those came with caveats. Giles Coren declared at the outset that he was friends with Jonathan Downey, one of the backers – a rare piece of transparency about vested interests in this sphere – and in the process revealed that Tom Parker Bowles is too (which means it’s quite possible that Parker Bowles is also friends with Coren: and to think we’re meant to trust these people’s tastes).

So yes, in the space of just over 6 weeks, almost every national restaurant critic we have – not William Sitwell, he was probably too busy campaigning for Nigel Farage – went to Town, literally and figuratively, to almost universal acclaim. Even that chap with the bouffant who writes for the Standard whose name escapes me went there (only kidding, he’s called David Ellis and I read somewhere that his earliest restaurant memories involve Quattro: he still goes with his family and gets limoncello on the house).

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, talking about Kolae or, more recently, Brutto: that even though London has many thousands of restaurants, and the rest of the U.K. many thousands more, you will find a handful of London restaurants every year that get written up by every single reviewer. Either because they offer something interesting and different or because the chef has a backstory or, more likely, is well-connected in the world of food.

All those channels and nothing new on: it’s all repeats. But it’s more important that they have their say on a significant new opening than it is to give readers a range of options, so they all race to file their copy and put their stamp on it first. Plus it’s much easier for them to get to than some godforsaken place out in the regions or, heaven forbid, the North. I suppose it’s handy if you really do want to go to that restaurant, because, like Metacritic, you can cobble together a composite view from those half a dozen pronouncements.

All this makes it look like I’m late hopping on a speeding bandwagon – which is both annoying and untrue, because I booked my table at Town a week before the first review of Town came out. And that’s not because I’m some kind of incredible trendwatcher with my ear to the ground: it’s because Zoë’s birthday was coming up and I asked her to choose a venue for the big day.

Initially she wanted a table at Lasdun, the Brutalist-inspired restaurant based in the National Theatre and run by the people behind superb Hackney pub the Marksman. But then, for reasons that were never explained, they contacted us to say that they weren’t offering lunch that Friday and would we like to move it to an evening booking? We didn’t, so we didn’t, and then a few weeks later Zoë said “I’ve decided: there’s this place opening called Town”.

And this is the difference, I suppose, between a punter and a would-be pundit. In the run up to our visit, every new review was great news for Zoë – someone else liked it! our meal is going to be excellent! – whereas I quietly facepalmed and channelled Brenda from Bristol. But never mind: everyone said it was excellent, so we spent the morning bimbling round Covent Garden before heading to Drury Lane, stopping for a couple of Belgian beers at Lowlander Grand Café, a place that feels like it’s been there for my entire restaurant-going life, before making our lunch reservation.

The interior of Town is gorgeous, and all the reviews have made much of that. Everything is very luxe, very glamorous, very Sixties – Tom Parker Bowles referenced Ken Adam, David Ellis suggested Mad Men – and the attention to detail is impressive. There are curved edges everywhere, from the rounded, tiled burgundy pillars to the beautiful chrome-edged ceiling lights. The photos I’d seen in advance also focussed on the feature in the centre of the dining room, a striking kelly green window into the open kitchen.

It really is stunning, but the single press photo – used in no less than three of the reviews – made it look like this is a huge centrepiece of the entire restaurant. And that’s not entirely true. We were sat in the middle section, and I had no complaints, but if your table was nearer the outside of the restaurant I think the place would have felt far less special. And I did wonder if, like the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David keeps being seated in the “ugly section”, there was a kind of centrifugal force going on here: the outer section had more boomers in it than a British Airways flight to Malaga.

The broadsheet reviewers won’t tell you that, of course, because they never get shit tables.

Town’s menu was a funny one: despite having plenty of dishes on it, little of it jumped out at me. Starters ranged from fifteen to twenty-five pounds, mains all the way from just over twenty all the way up to ninety, although the priciest ones were to share. But I was surprised by how untempted I was by it all on paper: some of that will be my preferences, not being wild about clams – which pop up twice – and feeling generally like having steak in a restaurant like this is a bit of a waste, even if it is Wildfarmed beef (Town goes to, well, town on its provenance, with butter and cheese coming from Parle’s brother’s dairy).

Vegetarians might have found things tricky too, with just one starter and two mains to choose from, one of them being the ubiquitous hispi cabbage. The reviews I’ve read waxed lyrical about the menu, but it was rare for me to find the choice difficult for all the wrong reasons, in some cases ordering the only thing that appealed rather than the thing that appealed most. The irony isn’t lost on me that vegetarians and vegans probably feel that way a lot of the time.

But before all that we had a negroni and a couple of things from the snack section of the menu. Town’s negroni goes firmly off piste with Somerset brandy and eau de vie instead of gin in the mix: I quite liked it but, as I had at Oxford’s Gees, found myself wondering why people tampered with the classics.

The introductory dishes on a menu are like the opening tracks on an album: every review mentions them, although it might not cover everything else. So I’d heard all about Town’s fried sage leaves with honey and chilli, and enjoyed them every bit as much as I expected to.

The trick here was to manage to make them truly snackable, moreish and sticky without making you reach for the hand sanitiser afterwards, and in that respect they worked very well. Sorry to mention Gees again but ironically their version, with anchovy in the middle, was even better (mind you, it was also the only good thing I ate at Gees).

But the dish everybody lost their shit about was the bread: potato sourdough which came not with butter but with a little bowl of dipping gravy. I’d read so much hyperbole about this dish that I almost had an invented memory of having eaten it myself: reading a plethora of reviews will do that to you.

It brought out the purple streak in reviewers: “we all need dipping gravy in our lives” was Jay Rayner’s take on it, while Giles Coren called it “show stopping”. Tom Parker Bowles said that it “coats the lips with a lustre of sweet fat” – just no, thanks – and Grace Dent didn’t try it. But that’s Dent all over: read her reviews carefully and she talks about far more dishes than she actually eats. I know people like that.

So did it live up to all that hype? Well, no. The gravy is indeed terrific: thin, glossy, beaded with beef fat with some soft, steeped garlic in it. But I tend to think if you’re going to dip some kind of food in a liquid, that something shouldn’t be wet too. And the sourdough was a soft, slightly underbaked ball of stodge that wasn’t really up to the job of acting as a vehicle. Sometimes the line between USP and gimmick is a thin one: you didn’t need VAR to work this one out.

I had a slight sense by this point that, as with the beautiful dining room, things had been designed more for form than for function and my starter backed this up. Again, many of the reviews have lavished praise on Town’s saffron risotto with roasted bone marrow and I was very excited to try it. And it’s clearly visually imposing, to have this kind of roundel of a dish with a bridge of bone crossing a pool of risotto.

Very Instagrammable, I’m sure, and a huge hit with the critics. Grace Dent said it was “sublime”, Jay Rayner “stupidly rich” and Giles Coren went on about a “huge canoe of fat, salty marrow” (fun fact: Coren is also a canoe, although a different kind). But this dish felt like it was for looking at, not eating. My bone was decidedly short on marrow, and once you’d worked it free and into the risotto, there was nowhere to put the bone, which rather got in the way of eating the bloody thing. You ended up playing some kind of weird gastronomic Poohsticks, pushing your risotto under the bone so you could get to it.

With all those reservations, was it worth it? Well, yes and no. I liked the risotto, which was saved from anonymity by a judicious hit of citrus, and what little marrow there was was indeed outrageously good. But as a dish, it felt performative rather than knockout. Seventeen quid for that: Giles Coren said that it would have done him for lunch or dinner on its own, but maybe he’s on some kind of appetite suppressant.

Far more successful was Zoë’s choice, charred baby gem lettuce with peas and Spenwood. Town appears to have dedicated itself to the worthy pursuit of making salad both warm and interesting, and this was a great leap forward in that field. I had a forkful, loved it, and didn’t resent the fact that Zoë had ordered it and I hadn’t. Mostly, in truth, because it was her birthday. Perhaps Town’s gift was that dishes which looked unassuming on paper turned out to be worldbeating in the flesh. Which was great and all that, but how would most people ever find that out?

The reviews I’ve read of Town talk about the service in glowing terms, and again that wasn’t entirely my experience. Perhaps I was there on a bad day for them, but it felt solicitous to a fault, as if they had over-resourced and wanted to look useful. So while we were still finishing our starters, they came over and plonked down the cutlery for our main courses, which just seemed odd. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then they made a similar, more annoying mistake later on: we’ll get to that.

But anyway, we were having a lovely time, in a lovely room, we were off work for the next week and a bit and there’s something about lunch in London on Friday, when most people are at work, that always feels like a little victory. And our table was decent, the company was superb – well, for me anyway – and the bottle of Albariño we were on was going down nicely. I knew at some point, when I wrote the place up, I would need to distil how much of the excellence was down to Town and how much was down to everything else, but that was a quandary for later.

The birthday girl also chose the best main. It wasn’t even close. Pork came beautifully done, a charred crust masking perfect pinkness, a really deft piece of cooking. The menu said it came with “early season onions and burnt apple sauce”: in honesty I think the onions were close to burnt, but that’s never really a bad thing. The apple sauce, its Stygian tones matching the best bits of the pork and the onions, was quite glorious: I didn’t mind the mustard, but like most condiments it wasn’t Zoë’s bag. At thirty-two pounds, this was a relative bargain on Town’s menu and – and this is high praise – it reminded me of the sort of thing you can get at Quality Chop House.

Town was no slouch with its sides, either. Pink fir potatoes came coated and roasted in beef fat – they do like making the most of their cows at Town – and was bang on for flavour, although I’d have liked these to have a little more texture. Not at all a bad side dish, though.

Even better – by my reckoning, anyway – were the courgette fritti, a glorious mess of these served simply with a squeeze of lemon and a little of what I seem to recall was aioli. I loved these, but I do have to say they wouldn’t be for everyone: their saltiness was right at the upper limit of what I enjoy, and it’s eminently possible that I like salt more than you do. I wasn’t sure they went with anything, but they were so much fun that I also wasn’t sure they needed to.

Here’s how ridiculous the contortions I had to go through were: Zoë had picked the pork, which otherwise would have been my choice, and my two remaining options – that hispi cabbage, inexplicably, didn’t appeal – were the duck pappardelle or the Cornish lobster. I would order the pasta dish probably 99 times out of 100, but I’m very aware that this makes me a rather samey reviewer (fried chicken, anybody? Gobi Manchurian?) so, just this once, I strode confidently into the unknown.

Now, you might absolutely love lobster and so that picture below might look like heaven on a plate to you. I’ve often thought, sacrilegiously I’m sure, that it’s just a big prawn – scarred by The Lobster Room, perhaps – but I’ve also always wanted someone or something to change my mind. Town’s lobster is not, sadly, going to be the dish to do it.

It wasn’t dreadful. Some of the meat was a tad tough, took a little prizing away from the shell, but the XO sauce Town makes to go with it is absolutely stellar: savoury, intense, take-my-money-for-a-jar-of-the-stuff stuff. But where was the lardo? It’s not those white sheets you can see in the picture above: those were thin ribbons of some vegetable, celeriac at a guess. And artfully draping some foliage over proceedings, to make it look more like a still life than a £45 plate of food, didn’t fool me.

I was gratified to find it wasn’t just me, though. David Ellis ordered this dish just after they opened. “The kitchen is settling in” was his verdict on it: on this evidence, they haven’t got there yet.

After this we still had a little wine to drink, so we had a look at the dessert menu and enjoyed the room a little more, now it was less packed. And again, it wasn’t Town’s fault necessarily but the dessert menu didn’t really scratch me where I itched. I’m sure it would be a great menu for loads of you, that you’d make a beeline for the buttermilk pudding or the pandan milk cake, go crazy for the “coconut tapioca” that put me off ordering the mango with yoghurt sorbet. But by this point I’d given up on ordering something else just for the sake of it, so chocolate tart it was.

But before that I have to explain the other service mishap, which I’m afraid involves a little too much detail. I’m going to do it, though, because it illustrates how exactly Town was trying just a little too hard, and because I know if there’s one thing my readers love it’s me either coming a cropper or talking about a perceived bad experience.

So, because it was Zoë’s birthday they brought her out a little treat-sized portion of the chocolate tart, which she ate and loved. That was really kind of them. And because we loved it, we ordered a portion each, and so the staff brought out our cutlery. And then, before our dessert turned up, even though we were sitting there having a perfectly nice time, one of the over-attentive staff swooped on our table, totally unsolicited, and tried to clear the cutlery, which we actually needed, away, knocking the rest of my glass of wine over in the process.

So that was annoying, and they were perfectly nice and apologetic – although I did end up mopping it up myself – and then to say sorry they brought me a glass of the dessert wine Zoë had ordered over for me. Which, again, was kind, but I didn’t actually want it. So I topped up Zoë’s glass, at which point it transpired, as far as I could tell, that actually they hadn’t brought me the Coteaux du Layon Zoë had ordered but something cheaper. So I ended up soaked and irked, with a drink I didn’t want, having accidentally adulterated Zoë’s very nice drink, and feeling ungrateful into the bargain. Hey ho.

But yes, the chocolate tart was lovely, an oblong lozenge of indulgent ganache that tested your resolve, made you wield a fork with almost surgical precision, trying to make the experience last as long as possible. The black barley ice cream was pleasant, if surprisingly generic given that description, and even the raisins, soaked in Pedro Ximenez, were a lot of fun.

Would I have come away thinking that the base was so molecule-thin that it was hard to describe it as a tart if I wasn’t still pondering my spilled wine? Would I have noted that the hazelnut mentioned on the menu, like the lardo from earlier on, were nowhere to be seen on the plate? We’ll never know.

All that said and done I settled up, although not before taking advantage of Town’s facilities, which are exceptionally plush and luxurious and boast a gorgeous hand soap (I wish I’d remembered to take a picture). Our meal, including an optional ten per cent service charge, came to just under two hundred and ninety pounds.

I think, for what we had, that’s slightly on the steep side – but bear in mind I’m saying that from a perspective unlike that of most broadsheet reviewers who get to expense everything. But it was Zone 1, it was Covent Garden, so maybe that’s only to be expected. “Nobody gets out for under £80/head in central London any more for food you’d tell your friends about. Unless your friends like talking about pizza” was Giles Coren’s contribution on this subject, and who’s more relatable than Coren? Exactly.

If you found it easy to guess the rating on this one, having read all this, then have a gold star, because I’ve found it very difficult to assess. The room is great, though not as great as everyone said it would be. The menu I personally found more limited than I expected. The food was quite nice, but not as amazing as the reams of breathless prose devoted to it in the papers.

It’s very strange, this. I’m not an expert, but I imagine there are countless restaurants in London better than Town. Some of them may even have opened the same month as Town did. And yet nearly everybody who reviews restaurants for a living dropped in on this place within six weeks to say how great it was.

Does it do good things for the food scene in this country that our vanishingly small number of restaurant critics all go to the same restaurants? No. Am I part of the problem by reviewing the place as well? Not sure we’re comparing apples with apples really, but possibly, yes.

Never mind. Town is quite nice, and I suppose I’m glad I went there and tried it. Nothing I ate will feature in any list I make at the end of the year, but not everybody gets on the podium. You can be a decent restaurant without managing that. Would I go again, though? Well, between the places in London that I’ve loved and would dearly like to revisit and the restaurants in the capital burning a hole in my to do list, I think the answer to that is no.

But that’s just me. Giles Coren said he’d happily go there “every day, if that’s all right with them”. But his mate owns the place, so I’m guessing he gets some kind of discount. Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure: I do not know Jonathan Downey. Not only that, but I honestly have no idea who he is.

Town – 7.8
26-29 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5RL
020 35007515

https://www.town.restaurant

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Restaurant review: Snobby’s, Bristol

On July 11, 2025November 27, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Snobby’s, a wine bar and Italian small plates spot in Redland, has everything going for it, on paper. It is on one of Bristol’s most decorated gastronomic streets, opposite the critically acclaimed Dongnae and a few doors down from freshly Michelin starred Wilsons and Little Hollows, itself the holder of a Bib Gourmand. It’s received an approving write-up in the Financial Times and floppy-haired grifters Topjaw have featured the place.

It is, you would think, a safe bet. And yet it was at Snobby’s last week that I had arguably the worst – and definitely one of the strangest – experiences at any restaurant in nearly 12 years of eating out and writing about it. So, to channel my inner John Oliver, this week, let’s have a look at that. Because in the process I suspect we’ll find out a lot about what restaurants are supposed to be for, and what happens when they start to forget that.

So what went wrong? Well, it wasn’t the room, which is a really lovely space, all pale wood tables, Hans Wegner wishbone chairs and deep green wood panelling. You enter the dining room through a buzzy terrace, and it feels like a lovely spot to while away a couple of hours.

Zoë pointed out that the banquette sat a little too high, like it had been put in by a contestant on Interior Design Masters who never ate in restaurants, but it was a minor quibble. We arrived just after 8 and although many diners were al fresco there were still plenty in the dining room.

The problem wasn’t with the menu, either. It was a compact affair with a handful of nibbles and then seven dishes, priced between nine and twenty quid. The menu recommended two plates per person, adding Don’t forget to share!

As we were trying to decide our server kindly pointed out that they were running low on focaccia, so we decided to nab a portion before any more diners took their tables and snagged the last of it. It was delicious, salty stuff cut into cuboids, brilliant dipped in olive oil and balsamic. The salted almonds, glossy with oil, were equally good. This was a promising start, we thought, five minutes in. It was, with hindsight, the last point at which any of this felt normal.

So, by then it was time to order proper food; it must have been something like twenty past eight by then. Feeling like trying as much of the menu as we could, and being in no rush, we asked our server if we could order a few dishes to be going on with, and more after that.

“I’m afraid not” he said. “It’s just that the kitchen is closing soon.”

The exact time it shut was not specified, and we were too taken aback to ask for details. Was there no wiggle room on that, we asked? Apparently not – the thing was, he said, we were their last customers of the night. At twenty past eight. What happened to we might run out of focaccia?

Never mind, we thought. We could order everything we wanted to try and at least control the order that our dishes came out in, so we could still experience something like the evening we had in mind. Would that be possible, we asked? Ah, that would happen naturally, the server said. The lamb dish we’d ordered was the thing that took most time to cook, about twelve minutes, whereas a couple of the small plates, served cold, would come out faster.

Now, you could take this to mean one of two things. One might be that the kitchen, being in the business of hospitality, understanding how to pace and sequence dishes to give diners an enjoyable meal, would space things out to maximise the enjoyment of their customers. Or it could mean that the first couple of small plates would come out almost immediately and the lamb dish twelve minutes after that. Can you guess which one happened here?

So yes, Zoë enjoyed her burrata dish, which arrived something like five minutes after we’d placed our order. It was more about buying than cooking, as this kind of dish often is, but everything was present, correct, nicely bought and displayed to its best advantage. The tomatoes, a bright array of red, yellow and green, were lovely and scattering the dish with more of those fried almonds was a nice touch, as was the slick of lush pesto anointing the whole shebang.

At exactly the same time, out came the monkfish crudo, which was less successful. It looked like a limpid pond of the stuff, micro coriander and thinly sliced radish floating on its surface, and I quite liked the orange and soya dressing and little spikes of some kind of seeds or peppercorns. But the monkfish felt too thick, coarse and meaty for the crudo treatment, and this, to me, just didn’t work.

I think it needed something more slight, translucent and refined, like the sea bass crudo I saw on the menu of another Bristol restaurant the following evening. But then maybe monkfish justified the price tag, at nearly seventeen pounds. At the price of a main in many restaurants you got a small plate here, whisked out mere minutes after we ordered it. Still, these two dishes had arrived close together, and the menu’s instructions said that we should remember to share, so perhaps it was okay.

Or it would have been if the next plate, a hot dish, hadn’t arrived literally two minutes later. Ricotta and parmesan gnudi – dumplings – came as a trio in an asparagus cream with more asparagus, petits pois and, allegedly, a miso butter.

I am not entirely sure that three dumplings encourages sharing, and I’m not sure it’s worth the best part of seventeen quid. But I’m equally sure that bringing it out at the same time that there are two other dishes already on the table hardly encourages sharing either. By the time Zoë got to trying any of this, it was lukewarm at best, as was her enthusiasm for the whole thing.

I nearly didn’t mention this, because it all happened so fast, but with all this going on and dishes turning up faster than we could make inroads into the dishes that preceded them, we also tried ordering some wine. The initial choice we’d gone for, we were told, was not cold enough, and so – amid the flurry of plates – we were also brought a possible alternative, which we didn’t massively like.

So we asked for an albariño, and the server who eventually brought it over was absolutely brilliant – enthusiastic about the wine, positive about the producer with loads of detail that brought it to life. It was the only example of great service we had all evening: Snobby’s should hang on to that person, and clone them if they can.

Meanwhile, with three dishes on our table and us struggling to eat them, along came the lamb dish we’d been told took twelve minutes to cook, approximately ten minutes after our first dishes turned up. You couldn’t fault the kitchen for efficiency, just for other things like understanding how meals are meant to work and the difference between a lovely meal out and Man v. Food.

And it’s such a pity, because the lamb dish showed, too, that you couldn’t fault the kitchen for talent. It was the nicest dish I had that night and one of the best things I ate all week – a slow-cooked, sticky, sumptuous cylinder of shoulder and leg, crying out to be pulled apart with a fork, resting on a moat of puréed cannelini beans and swimming in a decadent, reduced jus. Such a lovely dish, ruined by bringing it out as part of some kind of deranged conveyor belt.

Restaurant bloggers like to come out with a particularly wanky cliché where they say that restaurants take quality ingredients and “treat them with respect”. It’s empty nonsense, as if the alternative is to take them out, buy them a few drinks and then ghost them until the end of time.

But quite aside from that, treating ingredients with respect isn’t only about making a good dish out of them. It’s also about treating that dish with respect, serving it in a way that enables it to have its moment in the sun. That wasn’t happening here. And when you don’t treat your dishes with respect, guess what? You’re not really treating your customers with respect, either.

At the same time as the lamb, the arancino – that ideally we would have eaten closer to the start of the meal – had also materialised. Half an hour after we sat down, about fifteen minutes after we’d ordered, our five not that small dishes had all been brought to the table, leaving us scrambling to eat them before they went cold and moving our empties to the neighbouring unoccupied table for four (a minor gripe, but if they were going to bring it all out at once they could at least have put us on a table that could accommodate all that crockery: they had no other customers after all).

As for the arancino, Zoë had some and thought it was pleasant if unexceptional. It had scamorza in the middle, and a honk of truffle oil, but it was slightly big, stodgy and lacking in texture. She could only tackle a little of it and I decided that I’d rather eat the lamb, which I loved, than make inroads into the arancino.

Here’s the other thing: when a restaurant brings out five dishes – seventy-five pounds’ worth of food – in the space of ten minutes, not making any real effort to sequence them, you get too full to eat it all very quickly.

To emphasise how farcical this was, it was only around the point that the lamb and the arancino arrived that we finally got our bottle of wine. I thought it was rather nice, Zoë thought it too wasn’t quite cold enough. But we made up for that, because any residual warmth we had towards Snobby’s had well and truly vanished by then.

We struggled through some of the food, left half of the gnudi and half of the arancino, on account of it being too cold and our being too full. The plates were taken away without any questions in a strangely incurious fashion.

Normally this stage, when your empty dishes are taken away, is one for quiet and happy reflection. But instead, we both just gently fumed. You might expect that from me, but Zoë is as good-natured as they come, and this meal left her feeling positively aggrieved. It takes some going to piss her off, as her seven years and counting shacked up with me proves beyond reasonable doubt.

Chatting away about it, we couldn’t quite believe that we had been rushed through all those dishes at breakneck speed so that the kitchen could close – at twenty to nine, no less. And if the kitchen really did close early, perhaps Snobby’s should mention that to people making bookings at 8.15? Because they seemed quite happy to tell people making earlier bookings online that they only had the table for an hour and three quarters: it wasn’t as if this kind of communication was beyond them.

It got more ridiculous after that. Our food gone, and with a feeling that the wait staff were studiously avoiding asking us how it had been, we were left with the best part of a bottle of wine, with notes of stone fruit, citrus and… bleach? Yes, bleach: because at this point a strong waft of the stuff was emanating from the kitchen, obliterating any subtlety or enjoyment in the rest of our Albariño. Did the staff have a bus to catch?

Enough was enough, so we flagged down our server – the same chap who had told us the kitchen was closing and the food would come out as and when – to pay the bill and he asked us, in a perfunctory way, how it was. And that loosened the lid for both Zoë and I to say that no, actually, it hadn’t been all right. So we explained that we’d felt rushed, and not listened to, and that we couldn’t really understand how either the serving staff or the kitchen could have thought our evening was an experience anyone would willingly choose.

Zoë asked him, given that he’d previously told us the kitchen was closing, when exactly the kitchen shut. He said that it closed when the last customers had ordered. But, Zoë said, we were the last customers and we’d asked not to order all our food at once, so why were we railroaded into doing so? He had no answer to that.

Fair play to him: he listened, a little like a rabbit in the headlights, and at the end of it agreed to knock off our service charge. Which felt slightly like missing the point to me, because some of the service – especially the person who brought our wine – was excellent and really the problems were more fundamental than that. When two dishes had gone back to the kitchen half-finished, because the timing had been so completely out of kilter, a better step might have been to knock those off the bill.

And bless him, I’m sure he meant well when he said that he appreciated the feedback and that actually, it would help him in an ongoing debate he had been having with the kitchen. But what I took from that was that this had been an issue for a while, that it hadn’t been fixed, and that our crummy meal was collateral damage in the process of eventually resolving those problems.

I was delighted for their future customers who might benefit from that piece of learning, but it didn’t help us at all with our wasted evening. Our bill, with service knocked off, came to just short of one hundred and thirty-five pounds, for a meal that was over in something like thirty-five minutes. I know there is a risk, when you complain about an experience like this,that you might sound entitled. But really: would you have been happy with that?

The following day, I got an email from the owner of Snobby’s. I’d booked online and, having been tipped off by the staff, he contacted me via my email address. I explained to him what had gone wrong and, to his credit, he said that he needed to pick these points up with his staff. He said that he’d not been as close to the business in recent weeks, and that this was a timely reminder that he needed to do something about it. He didn’t refund anything, but did send me a voucher for the cost of the two dishes which we didn’t finish.

And that’s very decent, but I’m not sure I’d use that voucher, potentially throwing good money after bad. He said that he was sure I understood the pressure hospitality was under right now, and that the feedback would help them to survive in a competitive industry. I know that’s right, but the converse is also true: customers have less disposable income than ever before, and they simply won’t want to spend it on an experience like that. Eating out is more costly, so people do it less often, and when they do they don’t want to spend that kind of money and have an experience that feels sub-Wagamama.

The Bristol restaurateur Dan O’Regan (the owner of Lapin) writes a blog about running restaurants. In a recent piece he talked about kindness, saying that it’s “the only thing that’s ever made restaurants work”. He said that customers deserve warmth, and a feeling that they’re welcome, however much they are spending or whatever kind of meal they want to have.

I don’t say any of this out of unkindness myself. I could have not written this review, which is after all telling you not to go somewhere you might well not have gone anyway. But I did, not to vent my spleen – fun though that might be – but because this experience encapsulates something of what restaurants are supposed to do and how jarring it can feel when they drift from their purpose.

And it felt to me like Snobby’s had completely forgotten what the purpose of restaurants was, namely to look after customers, to make them feel welcome and cared for, and to prioritise their convenience over the convenience of the kitchen. Because if a restaurant’s aim is to minimise inconvenience to its staff, or even if it comes across that way, I can’t help but feel that somebody, somewhere, has put the cart before the horse.

A restaurant that does that, I think, has forgotten what restaurants are for and what makes them such wonderful places. They betray the promise that great restaurants make, the covenant they have with the customers that love them. And a meal is never just the food. It’s the food, the room, the service, the timing. In restaurants, as in comedy, timing is everything. Get that wrong and it’s closer to tragedy.

Anyway, fingers crossed that future customers benefit from the disappointing evening I had. I would really like to see Snobby’s turn things around, because it’s a lovely spot and it’s capable of cooking some excellent food. They might be redeemed, and I really hope that they are. But my voucher, I suspect, won’t be any time soon.

Snobby’s – 5.9
6 Chandos Road, Redland, Bristol, BS6 6PE
0117 9070934

https://www.snobbys.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Amò Italian Street Food

On July 4, 2025January 7, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In the good old days, where you stood on certain binary debates was simply a way of positioning you in the world. Cream first or jam first? Plain or milk chocolate Bounty? Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? Were you a fan of the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? All these things used just to be a form of triangulation, little points on a chart that, taken together, might give someone an idea of you (and, since you’re asking: cream first; milk chocolate; salt and vinegar; the Beatles; neither).

When did that all change? 2016, I suppose, when we all became Leave or Remain, indelibly stamped, and at every stage from that point forwards. We’re always asked what side we’re on, and now it’s not a useful piece of trivia but a necessary step to place yourself on one side or another of a yawning chasm. Are you pro- or anti-Israel? Do you think J.K. Rowling is a hero or a villain? How about Farage, or Trump? Did you believe in lockdowns, masks, vaccines? Did you leave Twitter or stay? If you left, did you go to Bluesky or Threads?

Like the Tower Of Babel, we’re now all scattered to the four winds, trying to find our tribe and arguing, endlessly, with the others. It’s not a bit of fun, any more. And this is all rich coming from me, because I’m painfully aware that I’m as polarising as most. Happily, Reading faces another tricky choice now that’s potentially just as difficult, but hopefully less divisive: Paesinos or Amò?

The two pizza places opened on Kings Road, two doors and three months apart, the latest in a weird series of rivals in very close proximity, following the example of Pho and Bánh Mì QB in Kings Walk or Iro Sushi and You Me Sushi on Friar Street. What is it with that? You must be very confident in your product to open so near to a direct competitor, like Bánh Mì QB did, but with Paesinos and Amò, Iro and You Me so little time separated both arrivals that it must be an unhappy coincidence. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a new business only to find that another one a lot like yours is doing exactly the same, a stone’s throw away.

Anyway, regular readers will know that I reviewed Paesinos a month ago with my Italian friend Enza (who is, just to confuse matters, an Amò superfan) and it received a glowing write up from me. But I knew, even as I was eating there, that I needed to prioritise visiting its neighbour, if only because Enza told me that it was as good as, if not better than, the restaurant I had so enjoyed. I couldn’t go with Enza, because she was so far from impartial, and this time I took my friend Jo, also of Italian descent, last seen checking out House Of Flavours with me.

Amò is, as I’ve said before, something of a joint venture between Madoo, the founding father of Reading’s Italian quarter which opened four and a half years ago, and Pulcinella Focaccia, a business that sold pizza and focaccia for delivery from premises out in Earley and has been trading for a couple of years; I’d never had food from the latter, but I’d heard plenty of good things. And arriving at Amò on a weekday evening I was struck that, in terms of branding and decor at least, it felt fully formed in a way that Paesinos didn’t so much, or Madoo for that matter.

Everything was tasteful and unfussy without being Spartan, with a bare wood floor and tables, seats and benches. It seated somewhere between fifteen and twenty people, so significantly more spacious than the likes of Mama’s Way or Paesinos, and it had a nicely calm feel to it. Amò’s logo was in the middle of a deep red swatch of paint on the wall behind the counter, and resting on that counter was possibly one of the most tempting displays in Reading.

Amò very cleverly changes up its offering around the time people start finishing work, so until 5pm you can try pizza al taglio or something from a changing array of Italian street food. They also, I think, offer focaccia sandwiches during the day, although most of them had gone when Jo and I turned up around half seven. After 5pm the sandwiches drop away but instead, alongside the slices of pizza and street food, you can order a whole pizza from a more varied menu.

The street food was all very tempting, all things that I would challenge anybody not to fancy eating. Arancini, croquettes, mozzarella bites and frittatini – fried pasta – were all tributes to the time-honoured method of coating something in breadcrumbs and frying it until it was golden, crispy and alluring. The lighter side of Amò’s offering is keenly priced, too. Most of the street food dishes are around a fiver, pizza by the slice is less than that and they do multibuys if you want two stuffed focacce or two slices of pizza. Whole pizzas top out at about fifteen pounds, unless you add sausage or Parma ham to one of the options.

And Amò’s pizza menu struck me as very clever, because – either by accident or design – it kept the overlap with its neighbour’s pizzas to a minimum. Amò has a list of the classics, of course, so you can have a margherita, or prosciutto cotto and mushroom, or sausage and friarielli. But on the other side of the small, laminated menu, you find loads of less conventional options, far more interesting than the kind of things you could find at Zia Lucia or even, dare I say it, Amò’s neighbours.

That meant pizza with a purple sweet potato base, topped with cacio e pepe cream, guanciale and sweet potato crisps, or pizza with a pistachio cream base and mortadella. Others had a truffle cream base, or pumpkin cream, or even a cavolo nero base (“it’s the gourmet version of the salsiccia e friarielli”, Enza had told me, when I was looking for recommendations).

You may find all of that a bit leftfield, or it might whet your appetite for wandering off Reading’s beaten pizza track. I think for me, though, it was neither: I chalked those up as things to try once I had road tested the classics.

But first, Jo and I had a chinotto each and ordered some of those smaller dishes to kick things off. And as we waited for them, she told me about her childhood holidays by the coast, near Salerno, buying balls of mozzarella as big as your head from some beachside hut and eating them with bread, nothing else required. It was brilliant, Jo said, but it did slightly ruin the mozzarella you can easily get in this country; like me, Jo considers it a seriously underrated cheese.

As so often I felt a little pang for a childhood I didn’t have, listening to Jo. But then there was something to be said for sitting in a caravan in Devon, rain drilling on the roof, eating hog’s pudding cooked in a frying pan – always with tinned tomatoes on the side – watching Roland Rat on TV-am, knowing that the evening would be spent playing cards and watching reruns of Shogun (the original, not the superb remake). Maybe those memories would sound exotic to an Italian: on balance, though, I guessed not.

Amò’s mozzarella bites may not have been the size of my head, but they were gorgeous nonetheless. Crisp-crumbed spheres, golden but not overdone, the shell holding just-molten-enough mozzarella, they were a proper delight. I might have had them with something to dip them into, but it was a minor quibble with something so delightful. So was the fact that however carefully I ate them, with my hands at least, a little liquid sprayed out, leaving incriminating marks on my shirt. I was too happy to care, and the attentive staff quickly brought extra napkins.

At five pounds fifty for four, they could have been the bargain of the meal, if not the month, but for the fact that we also ordered two of the frittatini. These are yours for three pounds fifty, or six quid for two, and come in two flavours. If you go to Amò, my advice is to make sure you have one to yourself or, as Jo and I did, order one of each and share. They’re a bit fiddly to break up – that crisp carapace presents resistance when you’re relying on a wooden fork – but they reward the effort, with dividends.

They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form. And their form – big, irregular golden pucks – belied just how wonderful they were on the inside.

Picture an arancino, but instead of risotto rice visualise a cluster of little tubes of pasta, and rather than a molten core, imagine the whole thing bound together with sauce. In terms of taste, contrast, texture and sheer tactility I’m not sure I can think of anything finer, and writing this paragraph I am deeply aggrieved that I cannot eat one right this minute, or indeed by the end of the day.

This is where Amò are an especially smart bunch, because during the day you could pitch up, have a chinotto, a slice of pizza or a sandwich crammed with porchetta and provolone, and add one of these for a mere three pounds fifty. That’s almost the price of subscribing to this blog for a month and, although it pains me to say it, it’s even better value.

Jo and I both loved the meaty version but would you believe that the vegetarian option, with fried aubergine and tomato, was even better? Jo described it as like being “slapped in the face with flavour” and believe me, apart from that fried pasta, nothing or nobody would get away with slapping Jo in the face with anything. One of the best things I’ve eaten this year, no notes at all.

Jo was very keen to try one of the pizzas by the slice, with meatballs on it, so that turned up next, thoughtfully cut up to share, a meatball perched precisely in the centre of each quadrant. This too was cracking, although I suspect the base on the pizza al taglio is slightly different to that on the whole pizza. The meatballs, in particular, were excellent – coarse and lacking in suspicious, smooth bounciness. It also, by the looks of it, was only available by the slice so, again, well worth adding to a lunch order.

By this point, as our full-sized pizzas arrived, the carbs were taking their toll, and we were already prepared to ask if some of our leftovers could be boxed up – something that rarely happens to me, because it’s rare that my capacity is defeated by a restaurant.

Jo made it a few slices into hers, the piccantina, which was topped with salami, mushrooms and Gorgonzola. I didn’t try it, and from a cursory glance I thought the porcini were common or garden mushrooms, but Jo had no complaints. She’d told me earlier in the evening that she hadn’t had pizza for a while: Jo is on a monthly treatment regime where anything she eats the next day tastes vile and puts you off whatever you ate for the foreseeable future. One of those next days had involved pizza, and Amò’s piccantina resuscitated her love for the stuff. That in itself is no mean feat.

I on the other hand had deferred to Enza’s judgement and ordered the sausage and friarielli. As so often with white pizza, it had a bit more structural integrity, so less of the Neapolitan droop you might get with other pizzas. And the base was admirable, nicely puffy with plenty going for it. You couldn’t fault the generosity either, with nuggets of crumbled sausage very, very liberally deployed.

There was very little not to like about the pizza, and if I was clutching at straws I might say that I’d have liked the sausage to have more of a whack of fennel, but that’s a minor thing. It was so well orchestrated with the friarielli that it was impossible to argue: this was a pizza without complexity or variety that kept it focused and hit the target.

I managed about half of mine, and the staff were nice as pie about bringing a couple of boxes so we could take our leftovers home. Everything we had ordered – all that food, four cans of soft drink – came to fifty-five pounds, which is a steal, and then we went to the Allied for a debrief. Two pints of forgettable macro fizzy booze at the Allied set us back nearly sixteen pounds, which is very much not a steal.

For once, I can also report back on the leftovers. Jo had hers cold the next day – no slice for her beloved dog Diesel, this time – and sent me an iMessage: tastes even better this morning, cold from the box, outstanding! I on the other hand revived mine in the oven on my lunch break, working from home, and it was the best lunch I’d had in ages. I wasn’t sure if my slight lull that afternoon was down to the carbs or a Teams call that felt especially like a trudge. Let’s put it down to the latter.

Having talked about Amò for all these paragraphs, I know I should return to my opening theme and compare it to its neighbour Paesinos. But it’s not easy to do.

If they were top trumps cards, Amò would win in a number of categories. It’s more versatile, on account of having a focused lunch offering as well as pizzas in the evening. It has arguably a wider range of sides and small plates. It’s bigger, too, with far more potential to eat there in larger groups; if you go to Paesinos as a four, you either won’t get in or you’ll take up two-thirds of the restaurant. Its pizzas are more imaginative and unconventional, so more of a challenge to the Neapolitan hegemony elsewhere in town.

On that basis, you’d have it down as a resounding victory for Amò and, for some of you, that might well be the case. On the other hand, Paesinos sticks to the classics, both for pizza and for its smaller dishes. I think its soft drink selection – and neither is licensed – is better and more interesting. The cannoli and tiramisu are worth the price of admission alone. And, speaking completely as a novice in these things, I think Paesinos’ dough and base may have the edge.

But the main reason why taking a Top Trumps approach doesn’t work is that Paesinos, for me, has a little something extra. There’s no Italian equivalent of je ne sais quoi, as far as I know, but there’s a small dash of magic in the smaller restaurant that means that rationally, although I know Amò has a huge amount going for it, it’s impossible to pick a winner.

So yes, I’ve reflected and reflected and it’s impossible to put a cigarette paper between these two places. The only thing you can put between them, it turns out, is another restaurant – called Just Momo, which helpfully doesn’t just do momo. So the rating down there reflects that: call it a cop out, if you will, but I stand by it.

Let’s not divide ourselves by being Team Amò or Team Paesinos, because as a town we can be better than that. Hopefully enough of you will pick each side that both places will continue to trade for years to come. Because the truth is that there’s one real winner in this contest, and that’s Reading.

Amò Italian Street Food – 8.6
2-4 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
07500 619775

https://amoitalianstreetfood.co.uk

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Café review: Pau Brasil

On June 27, 2025June 28, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

It was a muggy Saturday, the longest day of the year in fact, the mercury was nudging close to 30 degrees and, sipping my mocha outside C.U.P., I felt like the Only Living Boy In The Ding.

Scrolling Instagram all I could see was holiday snaps – people just back from Malaga and Cordoba, newlyweds honeymooning on a Greek island, someone I know on his annual holiday to Kalkan, spending three weeks in a little Turkish piece of paradise. The world had its out of office on, or at least it felt that way, and there I was, fresh from my haircut, halfway through a C.U.P. mocha, a little on the outside of things, looking in.

I wandered round town, but nothing lifted that feeling of dislocation. Station Hill was holding a mini festival to celebrate it opening – notwithstanding that it opened over four months ago – and the whole cut through from the station to Friar Street was lined with food stalls, drink stalls, music and crafts and hubbub. London coffee spot Notes, not yet open, had a stand selling coffee and another selling Aperol spritzes, and everywhere you looked there was someone else offering street food, largely vendors I’d not heard of.

The place was buzzing, although I put a picture up on Facebook and person after person said “if only they’d advertised it”. Still, it felt like everyone I know had somehow been spirited away out of town, and there I was, surrounded by people but alone. I thought of my wife, at the far end of the M4 busy at work, and all my friends dotted across this country and others, my brother on the other side of the world (this, by the way, is why I shouldn’t spend too much time on my own).

I could have grabbed lunch from one of the stalls, fetched a drink from Siren or the Purple Turtle’s pop-up bar, I could have participated. But something stopped me. It felt a little like a glossy celebration of house prices in Reading inching slightly further out of reach, it had a slight feeling of forced fun about it. But that’s just me: I’m not much of a joiner-in. Anyway, I had a lunch appointment to go to, one for which I was several years late. Time to get going.

Normally I ride the number 5 or 6 bus all the way up the hill, along Whitley Street and past the Whitley Pump roundabout, getting off at the nearest stop to my house and strolling home from there. But this time, in the sweltering, almost oppressive heat I alighted halfway up, where Silver Street becomes Mount Pleasant, and walked the rest of the way. And there it was, Pau Brasil, with its pretty cobalt blue door and its awning out. It had been a long, long time.

Back in 2004, over 20 years ago, long before Reading got Minas Café or De Nata, Brazilian café Pau Brasil opened on Mount Pleasant. It’s been trading there ever since, the culinary capital of Katesgrove before Katesgrove even got other restaurants. Back then the only nearby place I knew was a Chinese takeaway on Whitley Street called Tung Hing which I revered – it’s long since closed – and the closest I got to Pau Brasil was glorious scuzzy indie gigs at the Rising Sun Arts Centre, at the bottom of the hill.

I reviewed Pau Brasil in 2014, over ten years ago, and it’s safe to say that I didn’t completely get it, or love it the way I expected to. It’s one of my oldest reviews not to have been superseded, and I’ve wondered many times over the years whether I’d missed something about the place. I remember going with my ex-wife and leaving feeling like we just hadn’t grasped what made it special. She was indifferent about a banana and cheese toasted sandwich, I found the feijoada a tad wobbly.

We both wanted to like it, and came away still wanting to but not convinced that we’d managed it. “I’m not going to say that Pau Brasil is a bad restaurant” the conclusion said. “Sometimes I really regret choosing to give restaurants a rating, and this is one of those times.” This was back in 2014, when the end of one of my reviews arrived a lot sooner than it does nowadays.

Since I moved house last year, and Pau Brasil is a short downhill walk from my new abode, the place has been in my thoughts. I’ve caught myself musing, more than once, that a lunchtime visit was long overdue. Somehow this strangely stifling Saturday, with more than a hint of saudade about it, was the day to do it. If not then, when?

The welcome was warm and immediate, making me feel like I wasn’t a stranger. Pau Brasil has a deli, the counter and the kitchen downstairs and all its seating upstairs, and the first indication I had that the place has a devoted following was that I was asked if I had a reservation (there is no way to do so online, so I suspect regulars just do this when they stop in). Despite not having one, they managed to find room for me, so I headed up the stairs and was given the option of a couple of tables.

It’s a gorgeous room, far more homely and attractive than I remembered. It has a huge blue-shuttered window looking out on Mount Pleasant, letting in loads of light, and art all over the walls. One is painted a very fetching shade of red, one which made me think Why isn’t there an equivalent of Shazam for colours? only to find that firstly, there is, and secondly, I found it too fiddly to use. The furniture was simple and unpretentious, but nothing detracted from a certain serene energy.

A couple of tables were occupied when I got there, the big one with the plum view out of that window was already reserved. What I would say is that Pau Brasil has decided to prioritise space over packing diners in, which is to their credit, but it does make a couple of the tables on offer eccentric. I was given the option of a corner table where both seats faced the wall or a corner table where both seats faced the banister at the top of the stairs, and went for the latter because it had more natural light. Another option was to sit on a high stool up at a counter facing the wall – that fetching deep red wall, granted, but a wall nonetheless.

Back in 2014 I found Pau Brasil’s menu very tempting, and in 2025 that had not changed. It offered a range of salgadinhos, bite-sized snacks, for less than three pounds each, sandwiches for four pounds or a very compact selection of main courses for fourteen pounds (although you could have a smaller size for less). Just to spell out how remarkable that is, in ten years the mains have gone up from ten to fourteen pounds, I suspect the smaller dishes have barely budged in price: Pau Brasil seemed largely to be the land that inflation forgot.

I started out by asking my server – who I think, though I might be wrong, was half of a husband and wife team – whether they were in any danger of running out of pasteis de nata, having seen only a handful on display out front. He told me it was a risk and so I asked him to put one aside for me, for later. That potential pitfall swerved, I started out by ordering a couple of salgadinhos and a very cold beer.

And what a beer! On my bus out of town I’d texted Zoë saying I tell you what, if they have Super Bock I’m fucking having one. I arrived, I saw both it and Sagres in the fridge and my heart positively sang with joy. That iconic bottle came to my table, with a small, chilled glass, and those first malty sips made me feel less agitated, less irritated, somehow much happier to be solitary. Now I could settle down to people watching and relaxing, even if I had to crane my neck to do it.

Everything was unhurried, and my salgadinhos arrived about half an hour after I first took my seat. They looked so pretty on their plate, a symphony of blue, terra cotta, gold and red, and I found myself immediately wishing I had ordered more. I expected to like the salt cod fishcake, and it was no surprise that I did, but I was perhaps more surprised to find myself enjoying it every bit as much as I had its equivalent at De Nata.

Enjoy doesn’t even do it justice, I liked it an enormous amount. It had just enough comfort, just enough bite, it had a beautiful hit of salt from the bacalhau and it was golden, greaseless and a tactile pleasure to eat without cutlery. This kind of food is a proper gastronomic happy place for me and I could easily have inhaled two or three of them. Why had I spent the best part of a year with this on my doorstep without eating it?

My server had also brought some of Pau Brasil’s homemade chilli sauce and warned me, just as I had been warned in 2014, to use it extremely sparingly. My chilli tolerance has improved a lot in the last 11 years, so I was a little more cavalier than I would have been back then. It’s really very hot; my ability to take good, well-intentioned advice has probably not improved as much as it should have done over the same period.

The real star, though, was the chicken coxinha, a dome of airy dough stuffed with shredded chicken. I’d only ever had this dish at Minas Café, and I thought it was good. Eating it at Pau Brasil was to realise it could be superb. The rendition out in Whitley is a dense, solid affair, best tackled with cutlery. This by contrast was an ethereal gasp of a thing, the dough so light and the chicken at its core quite miraculous. Again, I could have easily eaten more and, again, I resolved to do so in the not too distant future.

From there, the pace slowed. Time seemed to pass slowly on Mount Pleasant, and in truth I was in no hurry. Tables came and went, and a group of three took the reserved table in the window. I watched as a giant plate of salgadinhos was brought over to them and they went to work, chatting and biting, dabbing chilli sauce and laughing. My portable fan whirred on the table, time became a trickle and I thought that all things considered, there were many worse places to be on a Saturday afternoon.

It proved a little tricky at that point to get attention to order more food, but eventually I did. The weekend special, which involved dried shrimp and sounded magnificent, had all but run out, and although it was tempting to order the feijoada I was determined for this meal not to be a carbon copy of my 2014 one. So I asked for the frango à Milanese and a Guaraná, Brazil’s national soft drink, having seen a can of it arrive at a neighbouring table.

This was where the gaps in the service felt a little bit more obvious, as we drifted past the lunch rush and into the afternoon. My beer was done and dusted, my glass of water had nearly run out too, but the soft drink showed no signs of arriving. Not only that, but my water had come with no ice, but then I saw the server bringing a load of ice to the bigger table. Half an hour in I was starting to feel a bit parched, so I got my server’s attention and asked if I could possibly have my drink before the food.

He apologised, clearly distracted rather than indifferent, and brought it over, and within five minutes my food had arrived too. The Guaraná, incidentally, was lovely: I would definitely drink it again on a hot day. I have a soft spot for slightly medicinal soft drinks, from chinotto to root beer, and this felt in the same family. It was also a splendid thirst quencher, and by then I was in need of one.

Did I like my main course as much? Well, yes and no. You couldn’t fault it for value, really: fourteen pounds for a complete, well-balanced plate of food felt like pretty good going. And it certainly had variety, too: a big, flattened, breaded chicken breast fillet had just enough crunch, and the coating adhered nicely.

There was plenty going on, from a well-dressed stripe of salad topped with tomatoes and very finely diced peppers to a little haystack of shoestring fries, from fortifying white rice to a heap of toasted cassava flour which added more interest and texture than I expected. Best of all were the beans, sticky and savoury with little nuggets of pork studded through them, I liked those a lot.

And yet I felt like something was missing, and I’m not sure what. It was wholesome, homely, hearty stuff but it perhaps didn’t wow me the way those salgadinhos had done. It was ever so slightly out of balance – there was a fair amount of rice left at the end, with nothing to pair it with – and the flavours were muted, subtle, well-mannered stuff. They brought more of the chilli sauce, but it ramped up the heat without necessarily lending another dimension.

I think overall, this is just how the Brazilian (and Portuguese) food I’ve had can sometimes be. It’s sturdy, and reliable, but it won’t knock your socks off – well, everything apart from the chilli sauce perhaps, although that’s too busy blowing your head off. The thing is, though, that I might never rave about a dish like Pau Brasil’s frango a Milanese, but in that moment, it was just what I was after. Also, I finished every scrap of my salad – which I never do – so that must count for something.

My main course done, there was one thing left to try. A coffee and a nata, just to test drive whether this was a coffee spot as much as a lunch spot or a snacks and beer spot. My coffee – I’d asked for a latte – arrived in one of those tall conical glasses I tend to associate with coffee before it got wanky, and it was pleasant, if slightly burnt-tasting. The table of regulars had theirs in smaller glasses, and at the end I asked my server what I should have asked for to get one of those. A media, he said, and I made a note. It wasn’t on the menu, so it paid to have the inside track for next time.

I’d asked my server whether they actually had a couple of nata handy and he did, so he brought me two. They weren’t flawless, but I did find myself wondering if this was the best day to judge them. The custard in them, although set, burst its banks somewhat when you tried to eat them, which I think was down to the heat of the day.

They were close enough, though, to remind me how much I love pasteis de nata, and dusted with cinnamon they made me feel very happy indeed, saudade banished for the time being. I’ll go back and try them in more clement weather. You may have noticed by now that I’ve mentioned going back a few times: I’m definitely going back.

All that remained was to go downstairs and pay at the counter, and at that point I saw another little example of brilliant service that endeared me to Pau Brasil. When I went to pay, my server told me that they’d put one extra nata aside for me, just in case I had two and decided it wasn’t enough. As it was I was replete and I passed on the offer, but I was oddly touched that they’d thought to do that.

My bill for all that food came to just under thirty-two pounds, not including tip. I’d been there pretty much two hours, unrushed and, by my standards, carefree. I couldn’t help but think of all of the places in the last eleven years that had chivvied me or made me feel like an inconvenience, taken far more of my money and given me far less of their time. I walked up the hill, in search of the relative coolness of my house, happy that I knew my neighbourhood just a little better.

It’s funny writing reviews and coming back to them many years later, some kind of weird Prisoner Of Azkaban wrinkle where you can see the past you, retrace your steps, watch yourself with fondness or embarrassment. You can both agree with and disagree with yourself all at once.

When I reviewed Pau Brasil in 2014 I said I could see myself going back there for a coffee and a nata, or a drink and some salt cod fishcakes. Although that wasn’t enough, apparently. “Too much of the food just wasn’t to my taste, and however nice a room is, however great the service is, the food is always going to be centre stage”, 2014 me said.

What on earth was his problem? I highly doubt Pau Brasil has changed that much in the last 11 years. A new lick of paint, perhaps, and art on the walls, but otherwise I expect it’s pretty close to the place I went in 2014. The prices are pretty close to 2014 prices, too. And yet I must have changed, because I look at past me and think that he missed the point in a big way.

A little oasis of otherness there halfway up Mount Pleasant, where you can have a coffee and a nata, or a cold Super Bock and the most terrific chicken cozinha. All that and it also does a hearty main, if you decide you want one. But you could never eat that, there, and still see it as a gem. What more did he want?

It is one of the marvellous things about being alive that you can change your mind, or realise you were wrong. I do each of those more often than you might think. It’s hard to tell, over a decade on, which has happened here, and I wouldn’t bet against it being a bit of both. Really, I have no idea.

But here’s something I do know. On a close, sticky Saturday afternoon, on the longest day of the year, when I felt like the only living boy in the ‘Ding, that little spot in the heart of Katesgrove gave me a happy, meditative couple of hours, with some enjoyable food and a delicious, badly-needed and much-anticipated cold beer. And for those two hours, as if by magic, I felt lucky, well looked after and reconnected: to the world in general and my home town in particular.

Money can’t buy that, as plenty of places in Reading prove. But choosing well where to spend it, it turns out, can.

Pau Brasil – 7.6
89 Mount Pleasant, Reading, RG1 2TF
0118 9752333

https://paubrasil.co.uk

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Pub review: The Drink Valley, Old Town, Swindon

On June 20, 2025June 21, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Devizes Road is about a thirty minute walk from Swindon’s unlovely train station, a building with a whiff of the gulag about it. Or you can take a bus, which winds its way uphill and will get you there in roughly ten. Once you reach your destination, you’re not in Kansas any more. You’re still in Swindon, but in Old Town. And Old Town’s different.

Devizes Road isn’t a looker. It’s not the pretty street in Old Town: that’s Wood Street, around the corner, lined with delis and wine shops, tapas bars and spots for lunch. Devizes Road is another kettle of fish. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fantastic place to drink beer, a road literally lined with wonderful spots in which to do precisely that.

You have the Hop Inn, possibly the founding father of Swindon’s craft beer scene, and on the other side of the road you have the Tuppenny, a pub of which I’m inordinately fond that has Parka and Steady Rolling Man in its permanent collection and a beer fridge its own Untappd listing refers to as the “fridge of dreams”.

There’s Tap & Brew, the superb brewpub of quietly excellent local brewery Hop Kettle, with a beer garden that’s marvellous in the sunshine. Hop Kettle also has an upstairs bar called The Eternal Optimist with a speakeasy feel, at the end of the road above the marvellous Los Gatos, a restaurant which in itself would provide ample excuse for a trip half an hour down the railway line,

I’m not finished. You can now drink at The Pulpit, the Swindon outpost for local Broadtown Brewery, a relatively new addition. And as of late last year another option is The Drink Valley, another brewpub and in fact that brewery’s second Swindon branch, having made a success of their first one in the town centre.

Were you keeping count? I make that six great beer spots in the space of a five minute walk, three of them brewpubs or brewery taps of some kind. Forget schlepping all the way to London and dragging yourself south of the river to experience a London brewery crawl, hot and crowded and absolutely rammed with Steve Zissou-style microbeanies. A quick train journey west and you can have an equally terrific time without troubling the capital – why endure the Bermondsey Beer Mile when you can enjoy the Swindon Booze Street?

Besides, a friend of mine was in a pub near Borough Market the other week where the most expensive beer on the list was a mind-boggling £20 a pint: Old Town is far, far kinder on the wallet. I was in Old Town, as I invariably am, to have lunch and beers with my old friend Dave. Dave initially wasn’t mad keen on being a dining companion on this blog but as time has passed it’s turned out that he enjoys it far more than he thought he would. This is a very Dave phenomenon.

But the winds of change are blowing through Devizes Road, and much is different from when I was here last on duty. Burger spot Pick Up Point, which I so enjoyed last year, has closed down. Ice cream parlour Ray’s is under new management, and finding its feet. And The Drink Valley, the venue for this week’s review, has opened two doors down from Tap & Brew, its second branch slap bang in the heart of Swindon’s budding craft beer scene.

First, we took advantage of another welcome development: during the day, Tap & Brew now plays host to excellent local roasters Light Bulb Coffee, and when I joined Dave there just after 11 the place was jumping. Somehow it seemed bigger than when I was there last but in truth it was just packed, every table occupied with the kind of hipsters, families and pursuers of the good life that Dave wasn’t entirely convinced lived in Swindon. And yet there they were, that Field Of Dreams principle in action.

So before lunch I enjoyed a couple of superb lattes and Dave and I began the process of catching up. It’s funny, there are friendships where you don’t see somebody for ages and when you do, it’s as if no time has passed. Dave and I have, at times over the last thirty plus years, had a friendship more like that but these days I see him most months, a combination of great company, his empty nest, our mutual love of beer and good times and our spouses being busy at weekends. And even though I see him frequently there’s never any shortage of things to discuss, in his life or mine.

So we talked about our respective families, his son at Durham, his work and mine (we always conclude, on balance, that working for a living isn’t all it’s cracked up to be) the triumphs of Liverpool Football Club – Dave’s other lifelong passion – and our plans to go on holiday together to Bruges this winter, for the first time in nearly ten years. I fully expect it to be something like a cross between The Trip and Last Of The Summer Wine.

The Drink Valley, a name which would appear to make no sense whatsoever, opened in the centre of Swindon first, and its thing was craft beer and Indian small plates. Dave tried to get me to review it back then and I was tempted, because Reading has never had anything approaching a desi pub and I think it’s a concept that could do well almost anywhere. But he never tried too hard to persuade me, because it was in the centre of Swindon and Dave doesn’t go there from choice. An upmarket sister branch in Old Town was a much easier sell.

It’s hard to get much intel on The Drink Valley – I’ll drop that The from now on, if that’s okay with you – ahead of a visit. Their website used to be under construction, with wording saying “coming soon”, and a picture of their original branch. Now it just advertises a summer festival that takes place next week. The two Facebook pages give you a rough idea of the menu but the two Instagram feeds, much as they list promotions, live music or new beers, fail miserably at what must surely be two of the main functions of Instagram: to show you what the room looks like and what the food looks like.

That’s such a wasted opportunity, especially with Drink Valley’s Old Town branch because it was really quite gorgeous and, I would say, a cut above the decor of any of its neighbours on Devizes Road. Sturdy but tasteful tables were ringed with comfy armchairs in pastel colours, a deep red banquette running along one wall. The walls and wood panels were a beautiful midnight blue (“why does this colour always look classy?”, Dave wondered) and the overall effect was really pleasing.

Craft beer often feels like a bit of a sacrifice – never mind the interior, taste the IPA – and I’m not sure I expected Swindon to be the place that rebutted the idea that you have to choose between substance and style. It felt like the middle of a restaurant/pub Venn diagram, somewhere that wasn’t quite a restaurant or a pub but could quite easily pass for either.

The selection of beers, though, would definitely suggest pub rather than restaurant. Five hand pumps, all serving cask beer brewed by Drink Valley, along with just shy of a dozen options on keg. Four of those were also brewed by Drink Valley and the others featured breweries I knew well, like Polly’s and Vault City, and a couple that were new to me.

The most expensive beer maxed out at £8.50 for a pint, but it was a 7.3% sour so I doubt you’d be guzzling the full 568ml anyway, unless you were well and truly on a mission. We started with a half each of Ceres, a very approachable pale from North Wales’ Polly’s, and started the serious business of reviewing the menu. It was an interesting mishmash of small and big plates, of pub food and more leftfield choices.

So, for instance, there were just the four mains, a couple of which – fish and chips, sirloin steak – were the kind of thing you’d get at good and bad pubs across the land. Five burgers, too, mostly conventional fare, although the “bulgogi burger” with bulgogi sauce and kimchi mayo nodded to food trends. A couple of sharing platters and some loaded fries and nachos also felt reasonably mainstream.

But then we looked at the nibbles and starters and many looked like they’d wandered in from a different menu, one that ranged from Spain to Italy to Morocco, before upping sticks and taking a long flight east. Not only that, but some of the things on it were so eccentric that it didn’t feel like a Brakes van could have been involved in their genesis.

Take the first of our small plates – clusters of shimeji mushrooms belted with bacon, cooked in what was apparently an ‘nduja butter until the bacon was crispy and the mushrooms nicely done. This was a real delight, and both Dave and I loved it. The ‘nduja didn’t come through strongly for me, but it did lend a sort of salty funk that reminded me of blue cheese. I thought it was a superior take on devils on horseback, Dave thought it was everything good about a full English in a little package.

Either way it was clever, fun and quite unlike anything I’ve had. By this point I was on small beer number three, having tried a slightly too bitter pale by Rotherham’s Chantry Brewery and then moved on to a passion fruit mojito sour by Vault City which was sweet, boozy and surprisingly good with this dish.

“Try this” I said to Dave, offering him a sip. “It’s the kind of thing where you’ll try it and tell me it might be perfectly nice, but it isn’t beer.”

Dave took a sip and said exactly that. Which pleased me enormously, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I disagreed with him.

Those bundles of joy cost five pounds fifty for three, although as so often I think Drink Valley should work on giving you even numbers of these things to increase sharing and reduce arguments. Equally good, and equally good value, was a little bowl of nuggets of chorizo, cooked in wine, with a great mixture of chewiness, caramelisation and punch. This is such a simple thing to do, and such a perfect thing to have on hand when you’re drinking beer. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever been to a craft beer place, in this country at least, which thinks to serve it.

Drink Valley made good progress towards a clean sweep on the first impression with a very serviceable dish of Moroccan fried cauliflower. The spicing on the coating was impeccable, nicely arid with plenty of interest, and the cragged and crinkled exterior was cooked beautifully. The mayo, speckled with sesame, was a perfect dip, although I didn’t necessarily get the promised mushroom in it. The only fault with this dish was that cooking it perfectly involved getting all bits of it right: for me, the cauliflower had steamed slightly inside its glorious housing, lacking just a little of the bite I’d want to see.

But again, at less than six pounds I didn’t feel remotely robbed. What we were eating here were perfect beer snacks, and I couldn’t think of anywhere in Reading that offered something comparable. Well, except Siren RG1 I suppose, but when I ate there you got a little less for an awful lot more money, and it wasn’t much cop. Had Drink Valley stumbled on something here? Further research was undoubtedly called for, but what about the main courses we’d promised ourselves we would order?

The final dish, though, was decisively brilliant. Dave had insisted on us ordering salt and pepper squid, because he thought it was a really good dish to benchmark with. I was a little resistant to the idea, because I agreed with him and suspected Drink Valley’s rendition would fall short. Well – and Dave reads the blog these days, so I know he’ll especially enjoy this bit – he was right, and I was wrong.

What we got, in fairness, was not salt and pepper squid as I understand it. It didn’t have that distinctive coating, the way the same order at, say, Kungfu Kitchen would have done. But we got something even better. Six pieces of squid, beautifully scored, in a crispy salt and pepper-free coating, fried and brought to our table fresh as you like with some charred lemon and a nicely tangy srirachi mayo.

And my goodness: if you’d told me before the visit that I’d have some of the best squid I can remember anywhere in a craft beer bar in Swindon I’d have replied that you must be on mushrooms. But, would you believe, that’s exactly what this was. So fresh and tender, no twang of rubber, coated so well, cooked spot on, intensely moreish and dippable. And you got six pieces for a crazy six pounds fifty – so affordable and easy to divide up, even if you resented giving away half.

It’s safe to say that at this point Drink Valley wasn’t in any way what I was expecting. And then Dave said something somewhat wonderful.

“You know what, mate, I could pass on the main courses. They all come with carbs, and I’m getting enough of that today with the beer. I could just go another round of small plates, instead.”

What a cracking idea, I said. Let’s do that.

“Won’t that interfere with your review?”

I thought about it briefly and made an executive decision that actually, it could be the making of it. Because you may or may not want to know about burgers, steaks or fish and chips, but you can get those anywhere. And if you go to Drink Valley, which I slightly hope at least one of you will, you can have those then, if that’s your thing. But I couldn’t think of anything better than eating more small plates like the ones we’d had, on a rainy Saturday afternoon with an old friend. So up I went to the bar to order our second wave.

When I did, I talked to the chap who’d served us both our food and our drinks. They’d been open almost bang on six months, he told me, and things were going well. He said the idea was that the original branch was craft beer and Indian food, whereas this follow-up was craft beer and Korean food: I didn’t challenge that, although I wasn’t sure the menu quite bore out that ambition.

He said that they brewed offsite and didn’t currently have a tap room, although in the fullness of time they wanted to can their beers and sell them more widely. I told him how great the squid was, and he told me it was his favourite dish on the menu. I got that little glow of pride from him that always comes with people giving a shit what they do, and in return I felt happiness that Dave and I were in with a fighting chance of being his most gluttonous customers that day.

Our second wave of dishes was maybe not quite as successful as the first, but that’s always the way: you start out picking your must-haves, and trying to repeat your success always risks ordering an also-ran. For me the least successful dish we had were the pork ribs, roasted in miso and barbecue marinade. They were very close to greatness, but not quite close enough: they looked the part, and the marinade came through really well – and was rather interesting, at that.

But they weren’t big enough specimens and the meat took some pulling away from the bone, lacking substance and tenderness. Again, there was an odd number and I left the spare rib – pardon the pun – to Dave. He loves ribs, and is threatening to take me to a place in Bruges called Mozart where they do bottomless ribs: he told me, with great pride, how his son got through quite a few of them on his visit earlier in the year.

More successful was the wild mushroom bruschetta: two halves of toasted ciabatta roll topped with mushrooms that packed an impressive intensity of flavour, although – and I know this is a bugbear of mine – I really don’t think they were wild at all. I do wish people would stop making wild claims about their non-wild mushrooms, but I’ve been moaning about that for years and it shows no signs of abating. And while I’m moaning – everything we had at Drink Valley was excellent value, which made the nine pounds fifty conspicuously irrational pricing. Nothing this small is worth that, however good it tastes.

The remainder of our dishes restored the natural order. I had been sniffy about ordering the honey and mustard chipolatas, because in the immortal words of someone (I think it might have been John Inman), I don’t generally go near a sausage unless I’m confident of its provenance. To quote another famous person, my ex-wife used to say that cheap sausages are made up of, and this was her exact phrase, “eyelids and arseholes”.

I’ve always thought she was right about that but, again, Dave talked me into this one. And again – he’s going to be insufferable after this – he was right. The texture of these, in any other context, I might have found a little homogeneous but they were just coarse enough, just herby enough, just sticky enough to be a treat, especially dredged through the honey and mustard gathering at the bottom of the bowl. Also, just to say – these were allegedly cocktail sausages. I’d like to see the cocktail that went with them. It would be a tiki bowl and a half.

We also had something that, by this stage, was a bit of a variation on a theme. Strips of crispy chicken, served sizzling in a hot skillet, cooked in garlic butter, topped with slices of jalapeno and sitting on a bed of beansprouts and carrots. It’s a well-known fact that, unless you happen to find yourself in TGI Fridays, nothing that comes to your table sizzling can be entirely bad, and so it proved here.

The chicken was quite pleasant, but it came into its own towards the end of the dish when the bits we were slow getting to got crispy-crunchy, almost blackened. And by that point the julienned carrots and beansprouts, conversely, had softened and taken on the garlic butter, become a treat in their own right. This was a dish that required patience to get the best out of it. In that respect, I think I rather identified with it.

Oh, and we had some more squid. I couldn’t resist ordering that.

I’d like to tell you what Drink Valley’s dessert menu is like, but I mostly failed in that endeavour. They do a Basque cheesecake, like everybody else, and ice cream and a brownie and a chocolate orange torte, but none of that interested me and I had half an eye on ice cream at Ray’s later on. But they did have something that served as an excellent dessert: a chocolate caramel brownie stout, brewed by Drink Valley themselves. Two halves of it cost us £7.60, so less than two desserts would have cost, and it was twice as fun.

“Time for dessert, is it?” said the man behind the bar when I ordered these, and then he told me that when Drink Valley brewed it they invited staff to the brewery to test drive it. “I don’t remember much of that evening!” he told me, and after a half I could understand why. It was almost nitro-smooth, with a depth of flavour and thickness that belied its 7% strength. If they’d had it in cans, I’d have come away with a couple.

We were preparing to grab our brollies and go out and brave the heavy rain, and I was inwardly congratulating myself for how we’d tackled the menu when I saw our man heading past to an adjacent table with the fish and chips, made with batter using Drink Valley-brewed beer. I couldn’t help rubbernecking as it went past our table, an unbreakable bad habit of mine I’m afraid, and the chap gave me a little smile. Next time, it said. Next time indeed. Our meal – a total of nine small plates and seven halves of beer – had come to just under eighty-five pounds.

The rest of the day was every bit as winning as the start it got off to. I trudged mutinously round the Town Gardens with Dave while he literally stopped to smell the roses and told me how he and his wife had got into wandering along canals. “What have you become?” I said to him, adding “Do you know, I think you’re the only person I’d walk round a park in the pissing rain with when there are amazing pubs five minutes away?” It’s not Fleabag’s sister running through an airport, but it’s close.

After that, there was beer. Beer at the Tap & Brew, beer at the Hop Inn (Dave mentioned their Korean chicken burger was excellent: “now you tell me”, came my refrain). Then there was beer at the Tuppenny, and more beer at the Tuppenny, and then Dave’s wife kindly picked us up and gave me a lift to the station. And then the perfect end to a perfect day: catching the same train as my very own wife, coming back from Bristol with a tin of leftover goodies from the work bakesale. I maintain that the injection of sugar saved me from a brutal hangover – forget Dioralyte, I’m stocking up on cornflake cakes from now on.

Anyway, that’s enough about my minutiae: back to Drink Valley. I remember when I returned from Montpellier thinking that the French understood how to eat with beer in a way that had eluded us Brits. I had beer with karaage chicken, or padron peppers, or charcuterie and cheese and amazing bread, and all of it was magnificent. And what do we get in the U.K.? Inevitably it’s a street food trader – burgers, pizza or fried chicken, it’s nearly always one of those three – and you eat it on a bench or on your makeshift chair and think this is the life.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is. Those things can be great, and when I’m next at Double-Barrelled eating something from Anima E Cuore I won’t feel like I’m slumming it. But Drink Valley reminds me, in the words of Frank Costanza, that there had to be another way. How I would love somewhere comfy and stylish that does an excellent range of craft beer and has a menu optimised for exactly that. Snacking, sharing, small plates and huge amounts of variety. I don’t want to keep going on about them, but Drink Valley is at the standard I really hoped Siren RG1 would attain.

Siren RG1 might well get there, as I’ve said before. But in the meantime, if Drink Valley is thinking about opening that third site I would implore them to think big and move further east. Until they do, Reading has nothing to match Old Town for such a concentration of great places to drink. It turns out you can also caffeinate superbly there and, crucially, eat well too. I’ll be back, because it turns out that Swindon is a destination in a way Reading isn’t quite. Their tourist board can have that one for free.

The Drink Valley, Old Town – 7.8
53 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BG
07827 484649

https://www.instagram.com/thedrinkvalleyoldtown/

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