Restaurant review: Upstairs At Landrace, Bath

On April 25, 2025April 23, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

I go to Bath too rarely to know it well, but often enough to wish I knew it better. Winding through the sun-bathed stone on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon with my old friend Dave, very much following his lead, I realise how rare it is for me to walk round a city with virtually no idea where I’m going. But Dave has been coming here for years, going all the way back to the best part of thirty years ago when he first met his wife and she was living here, so I put myself in his hands for a change and just enjoy the views, all of which are sensational.

I only have a vague understanding of the city – I know where the Royal Crescent is, and the train station, and Pulteney Bridge, sort of, but beyond that my inner satnav of how all these places join together is fuzzy at best. I’ve probably been to Bath something like four times in ten years, so I follow along like a clueless tourist while Dave takes me to his favourite coffee spot, a little off the beaten track, and a very good beer shop. And then we have a bit of a wander in the growing warmth of the day, and Dave tells me about all the green space in the city, the bookshops we could visit later and, crucially, where we might drink after lunch.

Eventually we walk up Walcot Street, one of the few parts of Bath I know a little better. I would say it’s one of Bath’s most beautiful streets, but in my experience they all are. But I know it from the cheese shop, which feels like it’s been there forever, and Picnic, a café I drank at last time I visited the city. Beyond that, I mostly navigate it by memories of places that are no longer there – a Scandi interiors store I shopped at a lifetime and a marriage ago, a craft beer bar called Brewed Boy that I drank at with Zoë and her friends James and Liz, before they became my friends too.

As we stroll, Dave points out landmarks from his memories in the city, places that have survived better than the ones I recall. One, Schwartz Bros, is a burger place that looks to have been trading for the best part of fifty years – Dave remembers it from courting his wife, and that was so long ago you probably still would have called it courting. But our destination for lunch is a place neither of us has been before: Upstairs at Landrace, the restaurant that sits, as its name suggests, on top of the city’s highly esteemed Landrace Bakery.

I’d wanted to go for ages, and when Dave and I were deciding where to meet up he picked Bath over Oxford or Reading, so I saw my chance. I gave him a few options, half expecting him to go for the wine and small plates of Corkage, or the Basque tapas of Pintxo, but was very pleasantly surprised when he plumped for Upstairs at Landrace, a place I’d always liked the look of.

It received some attention in the national press three years or so ago – I get the feeling national critics pick Bath for a review every couple of years when they fancy expensing a genteel day out – but had since settled back down to just doing its business. All the reviews I’d read talked about a simple, compact, beautifully executed menu and really, what more could you ask for when lunching with a very old friend? The menu changed daily, in fact, and both Dave and I kept an eye on it in the run-up to our trip, identifying dishes we would like to eat and hoping they’d still be on offer when the weekend came.

The restaurant is a wonderfully haphazard place. You go up the stairs and although the two dining rooms are both technically on the first floor they aren’t quite on the same level. You sense that everything in the building is higgledy-piggledy, few straight lines or right angles. We were given a table in the cosier of the two rooms, near the open kitchen, all sloping ceilings and sunlight squeaking in through the windows.

It was doing nicely when we got there, on a bright spring afternoon, and it got busier during our time there. It felt like a very agreeable place for lunch, and the fact that my seat gave me a prime opportunity to snoop on plates being whizzed from the kitchen to other tables didn’t exactly do any harm.

The menu was compact and, although a continuous list of dishes, was clearly designed, by price point, to be broken up into smallest, smaller and bigger. Our excellent server, who did a brilliant job all afternoon, talked us through the whole “small plates for sharing and bigger plates for you to have to yourself” concept and we listened to it the way you listen to the safety demonstration on an airplane, being respectful although we’d both heard it dozens of times before. After all, I suppose this plane might have varied from others we’d flown on in the past. It didn’t, though. It never does.

What that meant, in practice, was the compact menu all the critics had talked about – a couple of snacks, six artists formerly known as starters, three big plates for you to have on your own and one even bigger one for sharing. Just the one side dish, “Fairy Hill mixed leaf salad”, from a place whose leaves are apparently so good the provenance deserved to be listed: we didn’t try it to find out. The small plates were between eight and fourteen pounds, the bigger ones between twenty-four and thirty, the biggest fifty-eight.

All the versions of this menu Dave and I had tantalised ourselves with in the run-up, I can safely say, had more options I fancied on them than this one did. One of the most appealing dishes – involving duck, I think – had been replaced with a “Pembrokeshire cockle vongole”, which I’m sure many people would have loved but appealed to me about as much as the mixed leaf salad. Dave, who treats eating out as a chance to indulge, wanted a bit more red meat on there, but pretty much the only dish that fitted that bill was the ribeye, and we didn’t fancy it enough.

We contemplated our relatively bad fortune while eating an excellent slice each of the bakery’s bread – a nice touch that this was complimentary – with very good, golden room temperature butter and a drink. Dave told me on the walk to the restaurant that he had pretty much given up on wine in favour of beer (and I had mentally scratched a couple of bars off my list of places we could drink later on) so he had a bottled IPA from Gilt & Flint, a Devon brewery I’d never heard of who also, apparently, supply to triple Michelin starred The Ledbury. I had a sip: it was nice enough.

I, a little jaded from a session the previous evening at the Nag’s, was tempted by a wine from Wiltshire of all places but instead had a glass of table perry from Wilding. I know next to nothing about perry except that it’s apparently the best booze we all aren’t drinking yet, and unworthily I’d picked it mostly because it was a small glass of something alcoholic that wasn’t too strong. I don’t think that’s a slogan perry makers are going to scramble to adopt, but on this showing it didn’t have enough about it to generally make me choose it over a crisp white wine. I must try harder.

The first of our sharing plates was a study in simplicity. Four very good anchovies – by Pujadó Solano apparently, seventeen quid per pack online – came glimmering in a pool of unbeatable olive oil, sprinkled with oregano, the whole affair beautified with lemon zest. “Why do I never think of having anchovies with lemon zest?” said Dave. “I’m definitely doing that at home from now on”. Otherwise this was just about buying the best of everything and putting it together, and in that sense you could say that although it was special – and at twelve pounds you’d want it to be – it somehow wasn’t out of the ordinary.

What was out of the ordinary, though, was our server coming back with a basket of little cubes of sourdough so we could personally mop up every last soupçon of that bright, herby olive oil: that I loved.

Anyway, the anchovies were the last – the only – thing we ate that was merely quite good rather than extremely good. I had seen mentions of Upstairs’ cheddar curd fritters in other reviews, I seem to recall, and I’d seen enough of them on their way to other diners before I even placed an order that I knew I had to try them.

I wasn’t quite sure, even after eating them, how they managed to make fried cheese so airy, so ethereal and yet somehow they did. They were stupendous clouds of joy – as if someone had decided to make Wotsits entirely out of cheese, serve them piping hot and cover them in yet more cheese. Eight pounds for these, and I think Upstairs At Landrace needs to rethink this whole “small plates for sharing” concept, or expressly make an exception for the fritters. I otherwise couldn’t fault our server, but she should have said “have you considered having one of those each?” Shame on her.

Although you could just as easily have said the same about the third dish we shared, the cuttlefish and sausage salad. Rarely have four words so comprehensively undersold a dish as they did on the menu. I mean, yes, it was a salad and yes, it contained cuttlefish and sausage. But that didn’t begin to do justice to what I’m already sure will be one of the most enjoyable dishes I eat all year.

I suppose there isn’t room on a menu to say “huge quantities of precisely scored, superbly cooked, tender cuttlefish”, and no room to say “the warm, slightly caramelised discs of sausage, with the tiniest hint of offal, bring a welcome hint or earthiness and, let’s face it, red meat, to proceedings”. The menu didn’t go on to add “by the way, you’ll also have warm bits of waxy potato, and while we’re at it the dressing will be impeccable, with the sharpness of capers thrown in, into the bargain”.

I know Upstairs At Landrace’s menu is in the still fashionable Ingredient A, Ingredient B, Ingredient C format that seems to annoy me more than most, but even at its most fulsome it wouldn’t capture that detail. I suppose that’s what restaurant reviewers are for.

But my goodness, how I loved this. If all salads were like this, or even half as good, I would eat salad all the time. I’ve always loved a warm potato salad, or any potato salad dressed with vinaigrette rather than drowned in mayonnaise, and I really adore cuttlefish, which you don’t see on menus anywhere near often enough. To find all of that coalescing in one glorious plate made me very happy indeed: forget JK Rowling’s recent lamentable cigar-based bigotry: this is what happens when a plan comes together. And the company was so good that I didn’t even resent sharing it.

Although Dave was a little sad about the paucity of meat on the menu, those nubbins of sausage aside, he did console himself with monkfish, one of the meatiest denizens of the sea. And again, trust in Upstairs At Landrace was richly rewarded: this was a phenomenally cooked, very generous piece of monkfish with a beautiful colour, effectively cut into medallions. It came on top of a primavera riot – leeks, peas, celery, all the good stuff, bathed in what was apparently a pastis butter.

I can’t verify that: I did try a little of the monkfish, which I thought was exceptional, but left the shrubbery to Dave. He adored this dish though, and didn’t feel like he had missed out one bit. This was possibly a dish you wished you’d held back bread for, although I’m sure our server would have brought a little more if Dave had asked nicely.

My main, on the other hand, was a symphony of a dish. Agnolotti filled with Jersey Royals could have been starch on starch overkill, but instead were little pockets of silky comfort, the pasta with just enough bite and the filling, pleasingly, with no bite at all. The whole shebang was positively awash with brown butter and wild garlic pesto, because of course it’s the season now, and if that wasn’t enough there was more wild garlic on top. And if that wasn’t enough there was a mountain of cheese, and if that wasn’t enough a dish with more of it was left at the table for you to sprinkle with abandon.

And it was, all in all, enough, and teetering on the brink of too much. But that brink, provided you stay on the right side of it, is where legendary dishes live, and this was one of my favourite things I’ve eaten in a long time. It was so well-judged, so well done, just the right size, everything in the right proportions, everything in exactly the right place. The pesto was so beautiful that I’d have bought a jar the size of my head if I could, the pasta so well done that it’s now, for me, the best thing you could possibly do with Jersey Royals.

I’ve had a few instances recently where the menu, on turning up at a restaurant, wasn’t quite the one I would personally have chosen and yet everything was amazing. I will make the most of those, because I know there’s some Newtonian law of dining whereby, when I review somewhere in the future, the menu will have loads of things I fancy on it, I’ll order them and they won’t be anywhere near as good as I wanted them to be. Buy now, pay later.

Dave and I were fuller but not stuffed, very happy indeed and I was on my second glass of perry, as my hangover became too distant a memory to stop me acquiring another one. The tables about us had ebbed and flowed, but the place had always seemed just comfortably less than rammed. Dave and I got to talking about the times he’s joined me on a review.

“What I find weird is when we go out and have a lovely meal and then weeks later I read your review and you weren’t blown away by the food. Because then I think: are you sitting there having lunch with me and not having that good a time?”

“It’s not that at all! I always enjoy having lunch with you but then when I look back on it, and weigh it all up, the food isn’t the best part of the experience.” I probably won’t be able to convince Dave, even after over thirty years of friendship, that however good the food is his company is usually the best bit.

“I suppose it’s better this way round, though” he replied. “I wouldn’t want you telling me during the meal that you don’t rate it that much.”

“Exactly! Nobody needs someone speaking their truth that way during dinner, it just ruins the whole event.”

“But so when you say this is a really good meal, do you mean that?” Dave wondered. “Or when you eventually write this one up am I going to find it’s got a middling mark?”

“Trust me, Dave. This is going to be a really good review.” There was a pause, and I knew that my old friend wouldn’t completely believe me until he saw it. Nonetheless, I said it again for emphasis. “It’s a really good meal.”

The other thing that happened before we made our assault on dessert was that Dave asked our server where the loos were and was directed towards a door on the same floor as us. He returned eager to share something.

“Mate, before we go you have to try that toilet.”

This was not something I heard every day.

“What’s so special about it?”

“You know how normally if a loo is up some stairs you go up the stairs and then open the door? In this place you open the door, and right in front of you is a staircase. A really steep one. And the loo is at the top and, well, you’re quite close to the edge of the stairs when you do your business.”

“Really?”

“You wouldn’t want to do that after a few drinks, trust me. I expected to see a boulder coming down the stairs at me like something out of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom.”

Upstairs At Landrace’s menu is at its most compact at the end: two desserts and a cheese course is your lot. We’d already had cheese to begin with and one of the desserts, the walnut tart, was a no-go – for me, because I’m generally not wild about walnuts and for Dave because, being allergic, he takes that one step further. That just left us with one option, rhubarb, meringue and cream. Maybe Upstairs At Landrace didn’t call it an Eton mess because they’d like to cancel Eton, in which case I sympathise entirely. Maybe it was a pavlova that had done a bad job of tackling those stairs.

Whatever the explanation was, though, it was a really terrific dessert which brought matters to a close in masterful fashion. The cream, from Ivy House Farm, near Bath, was thick and ambrosial, the rhubarb still had bite, and hadn’t been stewed into sticky submission. The meringue was just the right level of chewiness and the extra touch, toasted, flaked almonds, was the icing on the cake. Twelve pounds for this, so again not cheap but ultimately worth every penny. When I looked back on the meal, now that it was done, I didn’t think there had been a single misstep. That rarely happens.

After we’d finished, I took my life in my hands and ascended the staircase to the loo, which was every bit as vertiginous as Dave had warned me it would be: the very fancy hand soap was almost worth the climb in its own right. We thanked our server and chatted briefly to her about what a good meal it was, and she said that they had a lovely mixture of locals and regulars and out of towners like us who treated it as a destination restaurant.

We both did our best to be enthusiastic and grateful without coming across as creepy uncles, but ultimately as she went to fetch the card machine we knew, as always happens, that she was probably just wondering which of those pleasant middle-aged men was the top and which was the bottom. Our lunch for two came to one hundred and twenty-eight pounds, not including service: we didn’t have a lot to drink, but without alcohol it would have been fifty-five pounds a head.

Bath seemed even lovelier, if that were possible, after such a good lunch and so we did some more ambling, including a brief browse for books at Topping & Co, before having a couple of beers outside at Kingsmead Street Bottle, discovering in the course of drinking them, that it was nowhere near warm enough to sit outside. So we headed back across town and lucked out with a great table at The Raven, one of my favourite Bath pubs. I didn’t realise they had a beer brewed specifically for them by Bristol’s Arbor Ales, a really likeable pale, but once I discovered it I knew I was staying on that for the rest of the day. As my friendship with Dave taught me many moons ago, when you find something you really like, you stick with it.

So it turns out that, like the national restaurant critics I lightly ribbed at the start of this review, I have come to Bath twice in just under two years and both times I’ve had a very good, rather genteel time of it. But I think Upstairs At Landrace is worth going to Bath for all by itself – with or without the shopping, or the coffee, or the beers, or the old friend – because it’s supremely good at what it does.

I read an article about Upstairs At Landrace ages ago, in the Financial Times, that lumped it in with the Bristol restaurant Sonny Stores and breezily dismissed them both as part of a trend of a certain kind of restaurant that’s everywhere just now. Well, the main thing that writer was eating, it seems to me, is mushrooms. Because in reality, away from generic broadsheet sighing or sneering, restaurants as good and as clever as Upstairs At Landrace, places that manage to be sleek and refined without being sterile or soulless, are vanishingly rare. Maybe they’re ten a penny in somebody’s parallel universe, but they certainly aren’t in mine.

Oh, and for the benefit of Dave – who I know occasionally reads this – see that mark below? Told you. It was a really good meal.

Upstairs At Landrace – 8.8
59 Walcot Street, Bath, BA1 5BN
01225 424722

https://landrace.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Ephesus Grill

On April 11, 2025April 11, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

A couple of Mondays back I was on the train home from work and Zoë and I had the “can’t be arsed to cook” conversation where gradually, one or the other of you oh-so-casually floats the topic of scrapping whatever’s in the weekly meal plan and doing something more interesting instead. Do you ever do this, either with a partner or just with yourself?

In my case, I always have to at least try and make it look like it’s Zoë’s idea, every bit as much as she’s trying to make it appear to be mine. I would say I’m more successful when I know it’s Zoë’s turn to cook: she no doubt would dispute that. But I usually get an impression, in those exploratory messages, that there’s potential to chuck the plans and structure out of the window and live a little. You have to celebrate these small wins, especially as the world continues to go from bad to worse.

In the olden days, by which I mean this time last year, the options were plentiful on a Can’t Be Arsed To Cook Day. Town was on my doorstep, and Zoë worked in the centre, and even more crucially to get home both of us had to walk past the Lyndhurst, God rest its soul, and – and this was the difficult part – not go in. So a year ago, the “can’t be arsed to cook” conversation was more straightforward, and often ended on Watlington Street with a Korean chicken burger, or some monkfish tacos.

Nowadays, in that strange no-man’s land that isn’t Katesgrove, isn’t Whitley and isn’t quite the university area, life is trickier. And it’s especially compounded by the fact that my poor wife is stuck at home again with a fractured bone in her foot – different bone, same foot – and so leaving the house together is a vanishingly rare occurrence, even with her immensely fetching moon boot on. Some of the gastronomic opportunities presented by our new neighbourhood, like Curry Rasoi down the way or Meme’s Kitchen down the hill on the Basingstoke Road, remain unexplored.

That means we have to resort, in the most part, to takeaways. And living further out from the centre we have, after a process of trial and error, got this down to something approaching a fine art. I’ve been disappointed by enough orders from the wrong side of the town centre to abandon those as options, because even if Google Maps says something is a nine minute drive away it can be far longer, and more painful, when Deliveroo in its infinite wisdom chooses to lump your order in with someone else’s and deliver theirs, halfway across town, first.

No, with the exception of sushi, which does not go cold – Iro Sushi and You Me Sushi have both done pretty well out of me since I moved house – we tend to keep it relatively local. That means the piping hot wonders of Dough Bros, just round the corner, or Gooi Nara, whose takeaway is so good I gave them an award. It means Bakery House or Hala Lebanese when hot grilled meat or baby chicken are the subject of the hankering, or Kungfu Kitchen if we’re really treating ourselves.

And on the nights when we want something spicy, it means a delivery from Deccan House on the junction, whose chicken pakora and chicken biryani make me very happy indeed, badly in need of a glass of milk and, for a few minutes at least, unable to see clearly through my watering eyes. Sometimes I miss the myriad of opportunities presented by town centre life, but actually having fewer options is fine provided you like them and you have enough. Besides, it’s a first world problem.

Anyway, that Monday could have been a Can’t Be Arsed To Cook Night like any other, but as I was standing on the platform waiting for my train home I had an idea and texted Zoë. How about you hop on the bus and meet me halfway at Ephesus Grill? I’d had good reports of the Turkish place on Whitley Street – I seem to remember somebody told me about it when I reviewed Shawarma earlier in the year – and it had been on my to do list for a while.

A few weeks back Zoë looked it up, found it had a good hygiene rating from the council and told me that if I ever reviewed it, she would like to join me. And I picked a good night to make my entreaty, because she took little or no persuading. I can’t remember whether it was her turn to cook, mind you.

Whitley Street is a funny little run, with plenty of places that would serve you food but not ones you would necessarily choose to use. It has one restaurant I very much like, Gooi Nara, but the rest is mostly permutations of takeaway food: Golden Rice for Chinese, a peri peri chicken restaurant, a Mr Cod, a burger spot called Grilla Kitchen and two pizza places called Presto and Uptown, for when you either feel in a hurry or, I guess, sophisticated.

At the top of that stretch sits the empty shell of Vel, which mysteriously closed after a fire last August, a month before a man was convicted of the murder of its former manager earlier that year. I guess we’ll never know whether those two events have any relationship to one another: Google says the restaurant is temporarily closed, but it feels like that ship has sailed.

Close to the bottom of Whitley Street, where the road forks into Southampton Street and Mount Pleasant, Ephesus Grill looks unprepossessing. The shop front randomly advertises KEBABS, BURGERS, PIZZAS, STEAKS and STEWS, possibly the only time I’ve seen a restaurant lead with those five. You can barely see in through the windows for the posters for funfairs and circuses, the ads for meal deals stuck up against the glass, prices updated with a Sharpie.

Yet when I stepped inside it seemed like something somewhere between a takeaway and a restaurant – more space than, say, the likes of Kings Grill but more transient in feel than somewhere such as Bakery House. The tables and chairs were basic but far from skanky, the overall effect of the wood panelling and exposed brickwork was nicer than I’d expected. A piece of artwork on one wall talked you through “The History Of Kebab”, various random stringed instruments were mounted around it. I rather liked it, and as my moonbooted beloved clomped through the door I was already checking out the menu above the counter.

It’s quite a big menu, and it was all over the place in more ways than one. I had a sneaking feeling, from looking at it, that not all of it would be good. That might have been a hunch, it might have come from feeling they were spreading themselves too thin or it might have just been a suspicion that came from reading items like the “Big Boy Burger” and “Mozerrela (sic) Sticks”.

Maybe I like an underdog, but I found that sloppiness strangely endearing. Besides, you had to slightly love the fact that the section marked Chicken & Fish listed a quarter of roast chicken and chips, chicken nuggets and chips or chicken wings and chips and literally nothing else. I don’t think that this is a place for vegetarians and vegans, even if they have curly fries – a blast from the past – on the menu.

But the place is called Ephesus Grill, so we decided to take it on face value and look at the Turkish dishes and those making use of the grill. The restaurant offers a dizzying array of different mixes of shish, doner and kofta, in wraps or without, and they tend to max out at fifteen pounds. It’s a little confusing what they do or don’t come with – in fact, they don’t seem to come with anything so chips are extra. There was also a small selection of starters – less than a dozen, hot and cold mezze – none of which cost more than a fiver, and a handful of other Turkish dishes, lamb shank, moussaka and the like.

They didn’t have my first choice of starter, sigara boregi, little crispy rolls filled with feta, so instead we picked a few other things, along with what the menu referred to as “Turkish Bread”. First to turn up were our halloumi and falafel, plonked on the counter for us to come up and collect. It was a glorious early evening, one of the first truly sunny days we’ve had, and diagonal rays of light illuminated the plate in front of us.

“This is like being on holiday” said Zoë, and as I sipped my Pepsi Max I could see what she meant. Later on, one of the staff would pop out the door and pull out the awning. I knew that beyond the window and those funfair posters was just Whitley Street and a couple of massive bins out on the pavement, but for a moment Ephesus Grill had that feeling of transportative otherness that always makes restaurants a tiny bit magical.

It wasn’t the okacbasi I went to in Kalkan once, where they served up crispy doner meat by weight and you sat in baking heat by the roadside, gasping for a cold Efe and feeling like you’d gone to heaven, but for a Monday evening at the tail end of March, it was close enough to be getting on with.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, possibly because I don’t want to report that the halloumi and falafel slightly shattered the illusion. I rather liked the halloumi, in thick hunks with that familiar almost-rubbery texture, but it felt like the grill hadn’t quite been the finishing school I’d hoped for. But I was dubious about the falafel full stop. There was no crisp exterior, no beautiful shell such as you’d encounter further down the hill on London Street.

Worse still, cutting one open I could see sweetcorn in it. This felt like something that had been shop bought, from a bad shop. I told Zoë she could have the rest of those with absolutely no regret. I did quite like the salad though, boasting both pickles and chillies, things Zoë was happy to leave to me in return for those slightly dodgy falafel.

The point is, shop bought doesn’t have to be a bad thing, provided you buy well. Ephesus Grill’s houmous was a good example of this. I have no idea whether they make it on site, and they may well not, but it was still really good stuff. Even if you do buy it in, there’s nothing stopping you drizzling it with a slick of reddy-orange chilli oil and sprinkling it with spices, as Ephesus did, and if you do someone like me will turn up, eat it and thoroughly enjoy it.

The Turkish bread, by the way, was two huge round things that I thought, originally, would be like the balloons you used to get at La’De Kitchen. They were not, because they weren’t hollow bubbles. Tearing into one, it was dense, decidedly solid and very substantial. And actually, that made it miles more useful for scooping up houmous and chilli oil than any pitta could have been. It was a happy accident, but I was very glad of it.

Zoë’s main course was the “Ephesus Mixed”, a showcase of almost every meat the restaurant did. Again, a not ungenerous portion of lamb doner, both kinds of shish and a kofte. She really liked most of it, and the bits I tried were decent. I don’t remember getting any lamb shish, although she spoke highly of it, but the ribbons of doner had been shaved and crisped up nicely. The kofte was in an unusual shape – discs, rather than long cylinders – but none the worse for it. It was all thoroughly agreeable, especially with Ephesus Grill’s garlic sauce, which I found somewhat light on the garlic, but still not half bad.

This wasn’t bad value for thirteen pounds – although if you want a great analogy for how the last four years has royally shafted us, here it is: I did a little research online and this dish used to cost eight pounds fifty back then. Just imagine.

Another illustration that buying in really isn’t a crime was Ephesus’ fries. I didn’t take a photo, because fries nearly all look the same, but these were great – crispy, light, clearly fried there and then to order and plentifully scattered with salt. You can have them in cheese, or with a pitta (although really, why would you?) or you could have those oh so Nineties curly fries. But there was no point: these were unimprovable just as they were.

This doesn’t always happen, but I was the one who ordered best. I think I’d seen some reports somewhere that chicken shish was the thing to go for, so that’s what I did – an extra large, probably something like three skewers. And if you wanted proof that there are some good things you can’t get enough of, you couldn’t find better. Really big, gnarly bits of chicken, clearly well marinated and striped from the grill, packed with textural contrast and a sheer delight.

So often chicken shish, even at places I like, feels like a succession of factory assembled protein cuboids, but at Ephesus it was absolutely the real deal. I offered a couple to Zoë, because I felt bad that her choice hadn’t been 100% chicken shish as mine was. I think I had maybe been right about my reading of Ephesus’ menu – it offered too many things. The steaks, burgers and stews might be incredible, but eating this and planning a repeat occurrence, I already knew I’d probably never find out.

Ditto the dish a chap was having at the table next to ours that I couldn’t see on the menu, seemingly two bits of roasted chicken with what looked like slow-cooked potatoes. It might have been gorgeous, but to have it one day I would have to pass on the chicken shish. I know myself well enough to know that was unlikely to happen.

If you miss our direct bus home you either go round the houses or wait a while for the next one, so I sent Zoë rushing off to catch the imminent one stopping right outside and, taking my time, I soaked up the atmosphere, finished my drink and paid my bill. I saw quite a few people coming in to collect takeaways, and I think I also saw takeaways going out the door for delivery. It was a Monday night, but it was far from dead.

Service was brisk, no nonsense but far from unfriendly, and I did wonder whether a lot of their customer base might be Turkish. When I asked to pay up the lady I spoke to said, in limited English, that her colleague would have to do that. He called me “boss”, which just went to show how little he knew me. My meal for two, and you can safely say we over-ordered, cost just over forty-three pounds, and the chap waved away my attempts to add a tip to my card payment. I’ll have to carry some cash for that next time.

This week’s review is a proper study in contrasts. Last week I was at Orwell’s, which is about as different a restaurant from Ephesus Grill as you could hope to find: the amount I spent at Orwell’s on alcohol alone would buy you three big meals for two at Ephesus.

But the happy buzz you get from finding somewhere you like, believe it or not, is more universal than you might think. Ephesus is unpretentious, a million miles from fancy and you need to pick carefully and forego some of the whistles and bells of eating out in other places. But you are rewarded for all that with something that is, in its fashion, a quiet joy.

I should add one last thing: Ephesus’ shopfront advertises that it offers free delivery. I’m not sure that is entirely true, but I do know that later that week, when I was out with a friend, Zoë hopped on their website and ordered one of those chicken shishes. I don’t think it was because she couldn’t be arsed to cook, I think it was because she’d been hankering for that dish since she saw me eat it.

She took great pleasure in telling me when I got home that it was so big that she couldn’t finish it. She’s taken to calling the restaurant Oesophagus Grill, because that’s where that shish was heading. Apparently delivery costs a quid, the restaurant handles it itself without you having to give delivery apps a penny and it took less than fifteen minutes door to door before Zoë was reunited with the kebab of dreams.

So that’s made life easier and losing weight harder: the list of places who can feed me when I really can’t face toiling at the hob just got one restaurant bigger. But I do think that, even though their deliveries are excellent, I can see myself eating in that room again. I hope this persuades at least somebody to do the same. Besides, I am nobody’s boss – some days I’m not even sure I’m the boss of me – but it’s nice to be served by someone who’s happy to pretend.

Ephesus Grill – 7.3
19 Whitley Street, Reading, RG2 0EG
0118 9871890

https://ephesusreading.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Orwells, Shiplake

On April 4, 2025September 3, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

Writing about food – or, more specifically, writing about restaurants – is an enormous privilege. It costs money, and you need money to do it. It is absolutely no coincidence that most of the national broadsheet restaurant critics, nearly all men of course, are either descended from the aristocracy or other journalists. To the point where there isn’t much difference, to be honest: I heard Giles Coren described once as a “hereditary columnist” and, like my vague feelings of revulsion towards Coren, it has always stayed with me.

So how do people afford it? The most frequent route, for Instagrammers at least, is to accept free food in return for content. I’ve talked about that recently, so I won’t do it to death, but what surprises me is how little people on Instagram follow the ASA guidelines and declare things as #ADs or #gifted. Sometimes it’s down to ignorance, others down to wilful ignorance. Often it’s hard to tell. “I thought that was just a courtesy thing” said a content creator I swapped messages with recently. Err, well, how about giving your audience the courtesy of knowing that you didn’t pay for the food you just raved about?

“What if I went intending to pay and they wouldn’t let me?” he followed up, an oblique take on the eternal if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody around to hear it question. It doesn’t matter what you intended, it matters whether you put your hand in your pocket. I’m afraid it really is that simple.

But restaurant bloggers do this too, usually while criticising influencers and content creators, seemingly for the crime of being less subtle. They take free stuff all the time, and often don’t declare it either. They certainly wouldn’t break out the hashtags of shame, because that would let the cat out of the bag, so instead they resort to weasel words like “I didn’t see a bill”. Some restaurant bloggers are positively myopic where bills are concerned, but they still have good enough eyesight to say the food looks phenomenal. What are the chances?

But this is the problem: writing about food is an expensive business, so unless you are fantastically independently wealthy you need to find a way to keep doing it – whether that’s wealthy friends, or a patron, or in-laws you can stiff, or some other route. It’s why many restaurant bloggers drift into doing PR for restaurants they like on the side, so the line between the writer and the subject gets hopelessly blurred.

Again, I do kind of understand: I have made a few friends in the business since I started writing this blog (although, and this probably says something about my winning personality, not many) but I don’t review their restaurants. Stay in this game long enough though, and of course you risk compromising yourself. But what I don’t understand, given all the privilege entailed in being able to do this, is how little restaurant bloggers seem prepared to check or acknowledge their privilege.

Instead, you just get tin-eared humblebragging from people who aren’t even pretending to be relatable. “I eat out more often than you, so I know what I’m talking about” says one restaurant blogger who routinely promotes businesses he has worked for. “My lunch is better than yours” repeatedly boasts a second, who rarely sees a bill and appears to be about six months from a cirrhosis diagnosis. Classic car crash.

“I’m especially interested in submissions from writers who identify as working class” says a third, a double barrelled type who is currently in the twelfth week of a jaunt round Asia. Nice work, gang: keep on keeping it real!

So at this point, I should acknowledge my own privilege: I am extremely lucky that I can afford to do this, and very glad that I’ve never gone down the route of accepting free food from restaurants and reviewing it. At the start of this year, I asked if readers wanted to support the costs of what I do, and I was very fortunate that the response was positive. I said at the time that it would hopefully enable me to cover some of the costs of running this blog, and that it might allow me to write more, or different content. It has definitely done the former, and enabled me to get rid of ads on the blog, but what about the latter?

The reason I’m talking about this, today of all days, is because this week’s review is of Orwells, the widely acclaimed Shiplake restaurant that features in the Michelin guide, has received multiple accolades from the Good Food Guide and has been pursuing excellence for something like fifteen years. Its chef owners, married couple Ryan and Liam Simpson-Trotman, are regulars on James Martin’s ITV show Saturday Morning. It is probably the best, nearest restaurant I have never reviewed in nearly twelve years of doing this, and in honesty I would probably not have reviewed it if it wasn’t for the support this blog receives from subscribers.

That’s not to say that I couldn’t have afforded to, but I publish a review every week and in the old days, I could have reviewed two or three places, easily, with the money it would cost me to eat at Orwells. I try to cover a variety of places, at a variety of price points, and eating at Orwells would have scuppered that. So it has never made it to the top of my list – because I’m not one of those reviewers who “didn’t see a bill” – and it’s only now that I felt, on a Thursday night during a well-earned week off, that Zoë and I could hop in a taxi and head out to Binfield Heath to see what the fuss was about.

Incidentally, that’s also why this review is behind a paywall. It was made possible by people who subscribe to the blog, so being able to read it is the least they should get in return for their generous support. But also, be honest: if you’re thinking of going to Orwells and you want an opinion you can trust on whether it’s any good, you can afford to subscribe to this blog, for a month at least. If you can afford to eat at Orwells, you can afford that.

Restaurant review: Taste Tibet, Oxford

On March 28, 2025April 23, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Magdalen Road in Oxford is a 20 minute bus ride from the train station, out east, down the High and over Magdalen Bridge. It connects two of the three great thoroughfares of east Oxford, Cowley Road and Iffley Road, and you can walk from one end to the other in under 10 minutes. One side of it, at the Cowley Road end, is fairly unremarkable – a general store advertising Lycamobile, a letting agent, terraced houses of various vintages.

Only a huge shop called The Goldfish Bowl, advertising “EVERYTHING FOR THE FISHKEEPER” in big orange letters has even a hint of quirkiness. But then you reach the halfway mark, cross over to the Iffley Road side, and find yourself in Oxford’s most incongruous gastronomic microclimate.

Suddenly everything is very different, and both sides of Magdalen Road are full of independent outposts for food lovers. There’s Wild Honey, an “organic health store” advertising local produce, next to a little pink-awninged spot called The Magic Cafe. There’s a pub, The Rusty Bicycle, owned by the same group as Reading’s Last Crumb. Further down, there’s a little shop selling Scandinavian homewares – earthenware cups, sheepskin rugs, scented candles and room diffusers.

Just opposite that, plant-based café Green Routes stands next to Elle’s Deli, which used to be home to Oli’s Thai, for a long time Oxford’s most critically acclaimed restaurant (you had to book a table months in advance). The deli still serves Thai food, and people were sitting outside on a coldish Saturday morning eating it, but it also sells Superbon crisps, vermouth and jars of every kind of deliciousness from romesco to gochujang.

Travel a little further and you get to another cafe called the Larder, with attractive-looking loaves on sale in the window: again, on a day that wasn’t the warmest people were already sitting outside. And next to that, there’s the roastery for Oxford’s Missing Bean, who do some of my favourite coffee and supply to Reading’s Coffee Under Pressure. And then finally, at the southern end of Magdalen Road you reach the Magdalen Arms, which has long been one of my favourite places to eat in the city.

That little stretch of Magdalen Road seems to come out of nowhere, a strange and wonderful little oasis. Just imagine: in the space of five minutes, out in east Oxford, you can visit as many independent delis and cafes and bakeries as you can find inside Reading’s IDR. If anything, with its joggers and dog walkers, its air of bourgeois contentment, it was almost like a micro-Caversham.

At one point a mum cycled past me on some kind of cargo trike, a contraption with two wheels up front and a big box between them, her kid standing up in it and looking out on the world; the Cowley Road’s scruff and bustle was simultaneously a few minutes and a world away.

I found myself in this neck of the woods to check out Taste Tibet, a restaurant that’s been on my to do list for some time. It’s a no-reservations Tibetan restaurant, owned by married couple Yeshi Jampa and Julie Kleeman. They met in India, fell in love, and moved back to Oxford where Kleeman had a job with OUP. They started out running a street food stall over ten years ago, and during the pandemic they opened this spot on Magdalen Road. Since then success has followed, with a cookbook in 2022 and an honourable mention in that year’s Observer Food Monthly Awards as one of the best value eats in the South-East.

Not only that, but Taste Tibet also provides dozens of meals to vulnerable people in its community every week and its thoroughly charming website links with an excellent weekly blog, beautifully written by Kleeman, that is very frank about the challenges hospitality in general, and its little restaurant in particular, continue to face. I’d challenge you to read a couple of posts and not find yourself rooting for them: I certainly came away from it surprised by how invested I was in their project. As I got there at noon – because you can’t be too careful – Jampa was opening up and he cheerily told me to come on in.

The interior is a lovely, tasteful room but very much in a canteen style, which fits with the lack of reservations. Long tables and benches, which I imagine are communal at busy times, were like a posh reimagining of the furniture you find at every tap room in the land, but the overall effect was very pleasant. There were also seats up at the window, which tempted me, or facing the wall, which didn’t. Jampa told me to hang my coat up on the hooks, which I did at first, but given that the door was left open to attract passing trade I quickly changed my mind and put it back on.

The menu, which changes weekly, is up on a blackboard behind the counter, and many of the dishes are already cooked, in chafing dishes up at the counter. Taste Tibet cannily also offers frozen meals for its customers to enjoy at home, these are in a separate freezer near the front and are a clever way to make sure nothing is wasted. They also had a decent range of drinks, soft and alcoholic, including wines in cans. I was a little disappointed, as always, to see Brewdog as one of the options but I got myself a verbena-infused pale by Earth Ale, a little brewery just outside Abingdon, which I really enjoyed for its fresh citrus and slight bitterness.

On the day I visited, Taste Tibet was offering momo – four or eight, vegan or beef – and four curries, with a mix of sides. They also served a biryani, or a feast option where you got a couple of dishes, dal, rice and a solitary momo for about fifteen pounds. If that pricing sounds keen, it wasn’t unrepresentative -curries weren’t much over a tenner and rice only two pounds fifty. Sides clustered around the five pound mark and momo were four for eight pounds. I ordered some momo, a curry and rice: that, with a tip included, cost me thirty pounds. “I’m in no rush” I said, “so it’s okay to bring the momo out first and the curry after that.”

My momo came out five minutes later, and weren’t at all what I was expecting. Although momo apparently originate from Tibet rather than Nepal they’re so prevalent in Nepalese cuisine, and Nepalese cuisine is so prevalent in Reading, that I thought these would be a known quantity. And with that in mind, I thought four for eight pounds felt a bit steep. But Taste Tibet’s momo were a very different beast to the ones I’ve eaten at Sapana Home or Kamal’s Kitchen.

For a start, they were big: impossible to eat in one go, and challenging even in two. Crimped like jiaozi, they were steamed and made with dough that was thick verging on too thick, but that gave them structure and a pleasing, carby solidity. The beef inside – beef, not buffalo, although whether that’s the difference between East Oxford and Reading or Tibet and Nepal I couldn’t tell you – was properly lovely, coarse and delicious.

This came with a little handful of leaves whose main function was to serve as a bowl for a red sauce which was apparently a home-made chilli sauce: I found it a little meek. But what I did love was the bowl of a darker dipping sauce with a kick of soy. Again, I wonder if that’s the influence of Tibet, because I’ve never had Nepalese momo served with that, and it really did make me see the momo in a slightly different light. I can see the appeal of coming to Taste Tibet, as I used to with Sapana Home, and just going to town on the momo.

Later on, as I came to the end of my meal, couples and families were braving the outside tables and I saw big plates of momo going past on their way to the little terrace. Perhaps that was the way to do this place, or to come with a big group and try everything. One of the reasons I hadn’t ordered the “feast for one” was the presence of that single momo. It felt stingy, but looking at what had been put in front of me one would have been plenty, paired with an exploration of more of the menu.

My request that my curry come out after my momo had been taken a little too literally. Perhaps I should have said “after I’ve finished my momo”, although I didn’t think I’d needed to, but instead the rest of the meal arrived when I was halfway through what I thought was my starter. Really, though, that was me misjudging the place and its similarity to a canteen rather than a mistake on the restaurant’s part. Everything is there ready to dish up, and if you order something that’s exactly what they will do.

I had chosen Taste Tibet’s “famous chicken” because I took famous to mean signature, and I figured that if I was visiting a restaurant on my own I owed it to myself to check out the signature dish. And having eaten it I suspect it’s the restaurant, rather than the chicken, that is famous. It was a big portion with plenty of chicken, plenty of sauce. The chicken was all good and tender, and it was impossible to take exception to the dish.

But although not being offensive is a good thing, being inoffensive isn’t, and that’s what this was. Perhaps if my expectations had been lower I would have seen this as a comforting bowl of food, and celebrated what it was rather than noticing what it wasn’t. But this was like curry from a bygone age, before we got into regional food, started to discover the difference between Kerala and Hyderabad. It felt a bit like a Vesta curry, from forty years ago, and for something famous I expected more: I expected it to be famous for something.

How to make it more interesting, I wondered? I tried spooning in my perfectly cooked basmati rice – Taste Tibet serves both curry and rice in bowls that are just big enough for each, rather than giving you a plate to dish them up onto – but that bulked it without being transformative. I tried adding a spoonful of the dried chillis in a ramekin out on the table, but it lent an acrid pungency without elevating anything. The difference in heat levels was like the difference between sleeping on one pillow and two, going from not enough to too much.

I didn’t want to leave it like that, and I fancied dessert, so I went up to order the only thing on the blackboard that looked like afters. Chocolate tsampa truffles – as seen on TV! sounded absolutely like my sort of thing, and only cost three pounds. I was too full to have the chai that should have accompanied it, but never mind.

By this point the restaurant was far fuller, with people taking tables outside and the long table opposite me occupied by a group of impossibly young, animated east Oxford types. I looked on them indulgently, remembering a time over thirty years ago when that could have been me: not that I would have had the money to eat in a place like this.

Positively 4th Street was playing over the speakers, and I remembered that thirty years ago I loved that song, and suddenly it was back in vogue. Time can play unkind tricks, and all the things that made me so deeply unfashionable as a student – being a geek, listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, playing chess and Dungeons & fucking Dragons – are acceptable now, too late for me. Even some of the shit I wore back then might be in now, I thought.

I felt a little tug of envy and regret, and then I let it go. It was as close to Buddhism as I got in Taste Tibet.

The chocolate tsampa truffles, plural, turned out to be a truffle, singular. A big thing designed, like the momo, to be taken on in multiple bites. I enjoyed it and, again, it wasn’t what I thought it would be. Its texture wasn’t dense or glossy, being more gritty with a feel of granulated sugar to it. Again, that’s down to me for misunderstanding – tsampa was not something that flavoured the truffle, but instead is a kind of flour made from ground, roasted barley, so it was the thing lending that texture.

In any event, the truffle reminded me of the brigadeiros at Minas Café, and I liked it without entirely understanding it. That’s fine, by the way: now I’m in my fifties I realise that provided you like things you don’t always need to understand them.

The rest of my day in Oxford was positively joyous. I stopped at Missing Bean, which was absolutely packed, to buy beans for the weeks ahead; I’m drinking a cup of their coffee as I write this. I strolled down the Cowley Road, past its plethora of Turkish restaurants, past the now closed Gamekeeper that used to meet all my Dungeons & fucking Dragons-related needs as a teenager.

I stopped in Truck Records to get inspiration, I stopped in Peloton Espresso to get caffeination. I bought cheese in the Covered Market, had time for a beer in Tap Social before my train home. It really is a gorgeous city, and it says something about the place that Magdalen Road is one of its little oases but far from its only one.

As you may have gathered by now, although I liked Taste Tibet I wanted to like it an awful lot more than I did. And a bit of me wonders if I’m the one in the wrong. It is a gorgeous spot in a gorgeous neighbourhood in a gorgeous city. It has a great backstory, is clearly loved by the community it’s part of and does tireless and admirable work to support that community. It is run by a committed husband and wife, where he works in the kitchen and she advocates, powerfully and eloquently, online and in the media. They want to tell the stories of where he comes from, through food.

On paper, I should love it: it sounds like other restaurants I love, closer to home.

But perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps Taste Tibet makes perfect sense in its context, in that city, on that little stretch of food and drink heaven. Maybe it doesn’t need people like me travelling to and across Oxford to try it out. It’s a neighbourhood restaurant – its neighbourhood is lucky to have it, and it’s lucky to have found its place in things.

If I lived closer I’m sure I would go back, try other dishes, fill my freezer and become part of their story, as they would become part of mine. But other places have got there first, for me at least. My train home pulled in at Gare du Ding and I thought about Kamal’s Kitchen, my favourite Nepalese restaurant, a short walk from the northern entrance to the station.

Its dining room doesn’t have the stripped-back elegance of Taste Tibet, it doesn’t have a narrative the way Taste Tibet does. I think Kamal and his family do a magnificent job, but much as I’d love them to I can’t imagine them gracing the pages of Observer Food Monthly. They don’t write beautiful blog posts, they have no plans to produce a cookbook that I know of and they won’t be at Hay Literary Festival this year. They let their food do the talking, and for what it’s worth I think their momo beat Taste Tibet’s. A restaurant can succeed in so many ways, but food and service are always king.

Magdalen Road in Oxford is a really fantastic place, and I do dearly wish Reading was a little more like it. But I wouldn’t swap their restaurant with ours.

Taste Tibet – 7.0
109 Magdalen Road, Oxford, OX4 1RQ
01865 499318

https://tastetibet.com

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Restaurant review: The Pot Kiln, Frilsham

On March 21, 2025March 31, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

One of the big gaps in my coverage of restaurants, given the name of this blog, is my failure to review the plethora of highly-rated gastropubs in the countryside around Reading. Berkshire is a funny-shaped county, long and thin, and that means you can strike out into Oxfordshire to the north or Hampshire to the south as easily as you can head east towards Maidenhead or west to Newbury staying within county lines. And one of the reasons, I suspect, why central Reading has never attracted many special occasion restaurants is the embarrassment of riches to be found a short drive away.

I’ve done some of them in my time of course, like the Bell or the Bottle & Glass, but the vast majority remain on my to do list, or at least they would if I were able to drive. And that means that when Britain’s Top 50 Gastropubs publishes its annual list, as it did early this year, I scan it for pubs nearby and realise, ruefully, that I’m unlikely to review them. This year The Loch & The Tyne in Old Windsor, Tom Kerridge’s two pubs in Marlow and The Crown in Burchett’s Green remain on my “maybe one day” list.

Another strange phenomenon in the gastropubs nearby is a tendency for musical chairs where highly rated chefs move from one pub to another. So for instance Dominic Chapman, who earned a Michelin star at the Royal Oak at Paley Street, which I reviewed, then moved on to the Beehive in White Waltham, which I have visited but not reviewed (it was, by the way, not bad at all).

And then, nine years later, he sold up: by that time he had taken on The Crown at Burchett’s Green, which he took over from Michelin starred Simon Bonwick. Again, I ate at The Crown once under Bonwick and thought it was quite good and extremely expensive. Bonwick then pitched up at The Dew Drop Inn in Hurley, managing eighteen months there before moving on again: he now cooks upstairs at a pub in Marlow three times a week.

This happens all over: The Loch & Tyne in Old Windsor is run by Michelin starred Adam Handling, but before that it was called the Oxford Blue and run by a chap called Steven Ellis. Ellis has moved on to another spot, The Bailiwick in Englefield Green which just so happens to be my stepmother’s favourite restaurant in the whole world. Again, I’ve been and it’s really rather nice, especially the venison bon bons; if you ever go, get a portion to yourself.

So maybe one good reason not to review pubs in this part of the world is the amount of toing and froing that goes on, with almost as much transfer activity as the Premiership: even The Plough, which I loved, is on to another head chef since I visited, its third in two years.

One of the benefits of this phenomenon, though, is that sometimes you see welcome, familiar faces pop up in new places. And that brings us to the Pot Kiln in Frilsham, out in West Berkshire, nestled in the Yattendon Estate. This bit of the world, too, has always been sprinkled with good food pubs: the Royal Oak in Yattendon and the Bladebone Inn in Bucklebury are just two more to add to the list of Places I Like But Have Never Reviewed.

The Yattendon Estate now owns the Pot Kiln, as it does nearby Renegade Brewery and Vicar’s Game in Ashampstead. Before that, for a long time under chef Mike Robinson – who held a Michelin star at Fulham’s Harwood Arms – the Pot Kiln was already synonymous with game, all caught on the estate. I ate there once, when Robinson was at the helm, and thought it was rather enjoyable, the surroundings idyllic. But then Robinson got divorced, and his wife got custody of the pub, running it with her musician partner, the magnificently named Rocky Rockliff.

For whatever reason the Estate subsequently snapped up the pub and installed new management. But rather than pick one of the merry-go-round of local chefs and get them to do what the pub had always done, the Pot Kiln took a more interesting course of action. It decided that instead of offering mainstream pub fare or more generic modern British food it was going to serve a Basque-infused menu. A three quarters of a million pound refurb was carried out, including a new open kitchen and a parilla grill, and it reopened last summer.

The other interesting thing they did was appoint chef Nick Galer. Now, I knew Galer’s food from his very successful spell at the Miller Of Mansfield, a lovely pub I did manage to review six years ago, out in Goring. He left the pub three years later, when our old friends Stonegate decided to nearly double the rent, and after that he had an incongruous spell cooking at a nearby golf club, but the move to the Pot Kiln made sense. It’s been on my list ever since, and as my future brother-in-law Matt drove us through the winding lines of West Berkshire in the gathering gloom I realised that I had a real sense of curiosity about the meal that lay ahead.

The thing is, I loved the Miller, and had some really successful meals there. But there were also a couple of times, especially one Christmas Day set meal, when I left somewhat peckish, and I’d heard similar reports from other people who had acted on my recommendation. A pub in the countryside offering tapas and the heartier food of Northern Spain, making good use of cooking over fire, could be an intriguing second act for Galer’s cooking.

In the summer, I imagine a review of the Pot Kiln would talk about just how beautiful its surroundings are, and what good outdoor space it has. But in grim, largely sunless March, before the clocks went forward, all I can say is how glad I was to be in the passenger seat next to an extremely competent driver and navigator. The pub itself looks classy and cosy – definitely one of those gastropubs that still operates as a pub – but the dining room of the restaurant, next to the open kitchen, was a little harder to love.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, because the tables were generous and the chairs comfy, but the lighting was a tad cold and the whole place had a certain feeling of sterility. It wasn’t for the lack of diners, because the room was reasonably well-occupied on a Monday night, including a large group which sang Happy Birthday later in the evening. But we grabbed a table for two with our back to all of that, both looking out on the open kitchen, and perhaps that was an error. Galer was not in the kitchen that night, although that didn’t seem to remotely affect the bustle of the staff beavering away.

The Pot Kiln’s menu read really well. There were ten tapas dishes, ranging in price from just over four to just over ten pounds, and eight mains, two of which were sharers. They started around twenty pounds and climbed from there. Half a dozen vegetable dishes, appearing out of sequence before the mains, completed the picture, although they appeared more to be sides than tapas. And actually, although I found plenty to potentially order on it, this menu wouldn’t suit vegetarians or vegans. Only one main for them, baked rice with cauliflower and capers, and four tapas options. In that sense, I suppose you could say it was quite authentically Spanish.

All that being the case, the drinks list surprised me. The local beers on offer highlight the owner’s connection to Renegade, the brewery formerly known as West Berks. But I thought there might be some Spanish sidra on offer, or at the very least some txakoli, the slightly sparkling wine which is one of the Basque country’s best exports. Not only wasn’t there any, but the wine list was dominated by other countries: less than half of the whites and about a third of the reds on offer came from Spain. It felt like some bet hedging was going on.

I decided to stick to the two Spanish whites available by the glass, starting with a Macabeo which was fresh, if slightly astringent. The Verdejo I moved on to later in the evening, not significantly more costly at eight pounds a glass, was much better: fuller, rounder, more interesting. Matt stuck to an alcohol free Asahi before then trying a mocktail with elderflower and ginger which he rated.

So, how many tapas dishes would you have ordered to share between two, not knowing how big they were or how large the mains after them would turn out to be? We opted for three, which I worried might be over-ordering: I suspect my appetite is bigger than Matt’s, or possibly it’s just that his manners are better than mine. But I needn’t have worried, because these were definitely tapa rather than media or racions.

First up, two mushroom croquetas, each topped with a thin slice of raw mushroom – this seems to be in vogue at the moment, although I’m not sure it added anything – resting on a puddle of thick mushroom ketchup.

I have to say, the taste of these was extraordinary. The concentration of savoury notes at the heart of those breadcrumbed spheres was something else, but better still was the depth of the ketchup. It had an awful lot going on – yet more umami, but also a very pleasant acetic spike in the mix. These were two really lovely croquetas. Two really lovely, rather small croquetas. Two really lovely, rather small croquetas that cost seven pounds fifty.

If you wanted any proof that the Pot Kiln, whatever else it might be good at, could do ketchup, the next tapa amply demonstrated this too. A pair of empañadas, with pleasingly dense pastry, had a filling of slow-cooked short rib and came with a blob of Kermit-coloured gherkin ketchup. The star of the show here was the ketchup – even Matt, who had been suspicious from the moment he spotted the word “gherkin”, tried some and declared himself a convert.

This dish was worth ordering for the ketchup alone, such a clever piece of work, something which captured the taste of gherkins in an almost photorealistic way despite being a puddle of green. It redeemed a multitude of sins, but did it redeem the fact that the two empañadas weren’t exactly bursting at the seams with strands of beef? Maybe.

Did it also redeem the fact that a pair of empañadas set you back eleven pounds? Maybe not. The philosophical struggle I had detected in the menu was between Spanish cuisine sending you away very full indeed and Galer’s cooking sometimes rarefying things to the point where they were a perfect, but tiny, distillation of themselves. On this evidence, the latter was winning out.

I minded all that less with the third tapa, but the fact remained that it too was small and perfectly formed. Two titchy triangular toasts, topped with tomato, finely chopped onion, oil, herbs and, from somewhere, a gorgeous supporting note of citrus. These too were this kind of thing – so often in Spain a huge piece of bread amply covered in their peerless tomatoes and salt – miniaturised to a lovely, exceptionally high end version of the same.

Getting tomatoes this good in March is itself, after all, quite an achievement. If elevation was the intention, mission accomplished. But although I could well believe you wouldn’t get a better rendition in San Sebastian, I could imagine you wouldn’t get a smaller one, either. Six pounds fifty for this.

At this point I was, in truth, a little concerned that it would be one of those meals, where everything tasted amazing but you had to seriously over-order or leave without feeling replete.

But Matt and I had ordered the 12-hour lamb shoulder, intended for two or three people, and we’d been warned in advance that it took a while, so we moved on to our second drink and caught up – his job, my job, his household adjusting to the arrival of my second niece, the ins and outs of the family we were both lucky enough to have found ourselves part of. Matt has the sort of senior job that means you have to be good at talking to anyone and everyone, which makes him an excellent conversationalist, although it did leave me hoping his evening with me didn’t feel like work.

From our vantage point I could see that the lamb shoulder had spent most of its 12 hours cooked sous vide, so it was rescued from a plastic cocoon and finished in the oven. And when it was eventually brought to our table, bronzed, with a thick layer of crispy, salted fat, I thought it looked about as wonderful as could be. It was accompanied with a little pot of anchovy and garlic sauce, which had also been artfully squiggled around the plate in an unnecessary fashion. Our server – all the people who looked after us that night were excellent, by the way – started the process of testing the lamb off the bone and shredding it, doing just enough for us to dish up and leaving the rest of us to explore for ourselves.

It was absolutely glorious. Lamb is one of my favourite meats, and this must be one of my favourite ways to have it. I’ve had slow cooked shoulder before where the fattiness is to the fore, where it’s slicked with the stuff, a little too much. But this was gorgeous, almost like the best kleftiko there is, and the texture was spot on, with enough of everything: crispy shards, plenty of supremely tasty fat, both crunchy and wobbly, and piece after piece of shredded lamb, some moist, some dry, all brilliant.

The salt studded along the edge of the fat made those pieces an especially savoury delight, and although it didn’t slump off the bone the way some slow-cooked lamb can, it didn’t take an awful lot of persuasion. For some reason we’d been brought quite dinky plates, which meant that we had to keep coming back for more, but that was very far from an ordeal.

Matt wasn’t sure about the sauce, but I suspect he’s less of an anchovy fan than I am. Even being a huge lover of anchovies, I thought this was salty overkill: I’ve read other reviews that say this used to be served with a mint sauce, and I can see that, or salsa verde, offering the counterpoint this needed. It also worked out fortuitously, I think, that the bits I were drawn to, especially the fatty ones, were naturally the ones Matt might have passed on. We were a regular Jack and Mrs Sprat, and between us we polished off the lot.

At seventy pounds, I think this served two nicely but might have been stretched between three. But I liked it so much that for even for two I thought it represented agreeable value.

Meat requires potatoes, whether you’re in Thatcham or Bilbao, and torn between the enigmatically described “Spanish potatoes” and the Pot Kiln’s chips we went for the latter. Very good chips came speckled with crispy flecks of jamon and under a light dusting of Idiazabal, a Basque cheese. There was also, apparently, “Bravas seasoning”, which I imagine was another piece of refinement and deconstruction. Too much refinement, I fear, because nothing was really detectable. Still, good chips with cheese and jamon on them are always going to go down well with me, and these did.

All that was an overload of saltiness, and much as I loved that I was glad we had some contrast in the form of some carrots. These were beautiful, fresh, just-cooked things dusted in something which apparently contained chives but, to both of us, tasted strikingly of aniseed. The fact that these, really, were the only vegetable of the evening was Matt’s and my fault for ordering the way we did, but also felt quite authentically Spanish: finding anything with vegetables in it can often be a challenge there, in my experience. Not that I’ve ever tried that hard.

By this point, things had quietened down in the restaurant and we were almost the last people there. I almost felt guilty about keeping them by ordering dessert, but I also felt like we ought to try that part of the menu out.

The dessert menu is compact – five dishes and a selection of cheeses, and one of them, turron at five pounds fifty a piece, felt more like something to accompany a coffee than a dessert in its own right. Matt was tempted by the apple tart with apple sorbet and calvados syrup, but unsure: he liked apple, but did he like it that much?

I told him you couldn’t have too much of a good thing, so he went for it and I think he was rewarded with the better dessert. My spoonful, again, pointed to the kitchen’s technical gifts and command of flavours: each element a slightly different iteration of apple, prioritising sweetness, sharpness or booziness. I would have been happy, had I ordered this. But had I ordered it – and even though I didn’t – I would say it was more a cake than a tart.

My choice, on the other hand, was one of those disappointing examples of how a menu can say one thing and mean another. Rhubarb sorbet, gingerbread, cava paints a picture of those three elements in harmony, maybe equivalent amounts of each, and I was expecting that to be the case. Instead, in the Pot Kiln’s standard issue terra cotta pots, I got a dollop of (admittedly very good) rhubarb sorbet with a scattering of gingerbread crumbs, like snow that would not settle.

Cava was then poured over it, but the terra cotta pot wasn’t the right vessel for a dish like this. It just meant that you got a thin lake of booze at the bottom that you couldn’t spoon up. So essentially this was a rhubarb sorbet with whistles and bells that didn’t blow or ring. At eight pounds fifty, this felt like a lot to spend on a dish that didn’t entirely cohere.

All told we’d been enjoying the Pot Kiln’s hospitality for over two hours, and I was increasingly conscious that we were probably preventing them from shutting up shop in the restaurant. At this point the open kitchen was less of a selling point: it’s one thing when you see activity, vitality, prep, flames, dishing up, but perhaps another entirely when they are mopping the floor with one eye on the service after this one, the following day.

So we settled up and Matt prepared to effortlessly work wonders with his satnav, ease us out of deepest darkest West Berkshire and take us back to the bright lights of Reading. Our meal – three tapas dishes, that lamb and side dishes, a couple of desserts and a couple of drinks apiece – cost about one hundred and sixty-five pounds, which included an optional ten per cent service charge. Overall I thought that was reasonable value – fair in parts, good in others, questionable in a few.

That was something I pondered and weighed up in the week I took to mentally digest, between eating this meal and writing it up here. Because after those tapas dishes I was all ready to write my oh-so-slighly disappointed not-quite-a-peroration, in which I gently pointed out that “perfect for sharing” should translate as “this dish is big enough for two people to enjoy” rather than “this dish is made up of two individual, rather small, morsels”.

But then the main course completely subverted all that – it wasn’t cheap, but it was outrageously good. It was the kind of food I had been expecting to find at the Pot Kiln, but I don’t think I was expecting it to be bookended by things so different – by tapas dishes that worked wonders with flavour but left you wanting more in all the wrong ways on one side, by desserts that were a tad pedestrian on the other.

In the run up to this visit I wondered which would prevail – the big portions and big flavours of the Spanish food I’ve enjoyed in the past (notwithstanding that I’m yet to go to the Basque country, sadly) or the precise, distilled, excellent cooking that Nick Galer is so good at. And the answer, based on this visit, is that the Pot Kiln, not quite open a year yet, is still resolving that identity crisis.

There is plenty to enjoy here, and I enjoyed plenty of it, but “let’s open a Basque inn in the middle of beautiful countryside just outside Newbury” is a concept I can get behind. “Let’s do the most beautiful portions of tapas that take a classic idea and produce it in its smallest, purest form” is perhaps not.

So if you want tapas, I think you might be better off heading just down the road to Goat On The Roof. If you want ludicrously good meat cooked beautifully on an amazing piece of kit, you should go here. Because that’s the part of this meal I’ll still be thinking about in the months ahead, the part I’d passionately recommend to others, the part I am remembering now, with a grateful smile on my face. For what it’s worth, I hope that side of this particular see-saw gains the upper hand.

The Pot Kiln – 7.5
Chapel Lane, Frilsham, RG18 0XX
01635 201366

https://thepotkiln.co.uk

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