Category: Reviews

Restaurant review: Lapin, Bristol

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

This might come as a surprise to you – probably not – but for the best part of the last fifteen years my friends and I have regularly taken part in something called Poncefest. Nope, not a misprint. The idea was to take a day off, invariably a Friday, and go into London together for a bit of shopping, always for fragrance, followed by a fancy lunch somewhere, then falling into a pub before getting the train home. Something like the Finer Things Club from the American version of The Office, only even finer.

Having sacrificed whatever credibility I might have had with that opening paragraph, I may as well explain. So yes, these trips usually involved shopping at one of London’s great fragrance shops – Bloom or Les Senteurs – and then a gorgeous, drawn out lunch. We’ve done Medlar in Chelsea, Soho’s famous Andrew Edmunds, Portland in Fitzrovia, Calum Franklin’s renowned pies at Holborn Dining Room and doubtless other places I’ve forgotten. We’ve even been to Oxford, enjoying a very pleasant lunch at Pompette one Friday towards the end of the year, exchanging Christmas presents and cards and eating brilliantly.

The members of the Guild Of Ponces – because I’m afraid that’s what we call ourselves – have fluctuated over time. It started as Al, Dave, Jimmy and I, but then Jimmy fell by the wayside and my stepfather Ian decided to join our number. He chose to drop out after a while, but by then we had also recruited my friend James, a man who didn’t need to seek out the ponce life, because the ponce life found him.

Like the Spice Girls, we each have our own unique identity. Al is Sartorial Ponce, because he’s always immaculately dressed: the man’s had his colours done, for goodness’ sake. Dave is Reluctant Ponce, to denote the fact that he always complains about the whole affair but secretly loves it.

Jimmy, back in the day, was Pub Ponce, and in charge for picking the post-lunch boozer. Ian, who knows more about Apple products than many people who actually work there, was Tech Ponce, and James is Preppy Ponce – or Neophyte Ponce, a title our newest member always gets, like the Baby Of The House, or New Guy in Loudermilk.

I, of course, am Grand Master Ponce. Would you expect anything else by now? Mock all you like – I’m immune these days, thanks to my childhood years in chess club and Dungeons & Dragons club (both hobbies, too late for me, are cool now). I unapologetically love Poncefests. They’ve always been a lovely miniature escape in the year, when my friends and I can catch up, more than slightly aware of how ridiculous the premise is.

Anyway, that was all well and good, but then Covid happened, and it all went quiet for Poncefest. A risk averse eighteen months meant that I saw my fellow ponces sporadically, and never all at the same time. Even after things unlocked, for some reason we were never all in the same place at once. We were like the Beatles, or the Pythons, without the acrimony. I lunched with Dave and Al a few times – once even for this blog – but a Poncefest proved elusive.

Of course, all the ponces were there for my and Zoë’s joint stag and hen do last year in Bruges, and at the wedding too, but both were part of a bigger gathering rather than a reunion per se. And then James went and put a spanner in the works by being seconded to India for nine months, and those gatherings, now five years dormant, felt more of a distant prospect than ever. So I was absolutely delighted when he returned to Blighty in the spring and talk on our WhatsApp group (the logo is a picture of Niles and Frasier Crane holding up a sign saying WILL WORK FOR LATTES) turned to getting the band back together. Would it happen?

It may not surprise you to hear that it did, and one sunny Saturday morning at the start of May I found myself bimbling round sunny Clifton, really looking forward to a long overdue luncheon. I’d bumped into people I knew outside Hart’s Bakery, straight off the train, before taking a bus to Bristol’s prettiest, if most unreal district. I stopped for a latte in the sunshine outside a little kiosk called Can’t Dance Coffee, before walking in wonder through Birdcage Walk, too taken with the glimmer of the sun through the foliage to realise I was, in fact, going in the wrong direction.

After an amble through Clifton, past the spot where I was born – it’s now been turned into flats – I found myself ruminating on all the different paths my life might have taken, and how many of them involved me never having left Bristol, or leaving but coming back to live here. Too much time alone always has this effect on me, so I grabbed a bench in the Mall Gardens, put something relaxing on my headphones and got lost in my library book. Not long after Al joined me and, because old habits died hard, we stopped in Shy Mimosa, Bristol’s excellent perfume shop, before grabbing a coffee and a taxi to our lunch venue.

Lapin was back in the centre of the city, in Wapping Wharf, a part of Bristol I knew and knew of but had almost never eaten in, unless you count a slightly underwhelming pizza at Bristol institution Bertha’s. Most of it is shipping containers, stacked two storeys high, and it boasts some of Bristol’s biggest names. Bravas‘ sibling Gambas is there, as are the likes of Root and Box-E. This year it’s been bolstered with three big names: Gurt Wings, who opened at the start of the year, to an apparently shaky start; COR‘s younger sibling RAGÙ and Lapin, which is the second site behind the owners of Totterdown’s BANK.

I should stress, by the way, that all those irksome block capitals are their choice, not mine: I guess in a city with as many good restaurants fighting for punters’ cash maybe they feel the need to shout. In any event, I’d chosen Lapin for a couple of reasons – partly because as a French restaurant it seemed especially appropriate for such a gathering and partly because it was shiny and new. On the day we visited it had been open exactly a month, by which time it had already received not one but two reviews from Mark Taylor, Bristol’s resident Reach plc hack. I on the other hand gave it a month to settle in, because that’s what I do.

It was a very warm day and Wapping Wharf was full of people younger, thinner and less fearful of hangovers than me, many of them sitting outside either at Lapin or its neighbours Gambas and Cargo Cantina. The place had the glow of youth, of sunlight diffused through an Aperol Spritz, but because I partly wanted to get a sense for the room we sat inside. Dave was already there – slightly early, because he is Dave – and James joined us shortly after, slightly later than us, because he is James. The natural order was very much in place.

The dining room, by the way, is rather nice. I think the nicest thing I can say about it is that you could easily forget that you were eating in a few shipping containers joined together. I tend to associate them with street food or Boxpark, with places you don’t linger, so I was glad that they’d turned these into a very convivial space, and one where there was quite enough daylight coming in from the big floor to ceiling windows. It was pretty no-frills, but just tasteful enough: sage walls, framed retro prints, tasteful overhead lights, sturdy, timeless furniture. No Tolix chairs to jam my arse into, I’m delighted to say.

Lapin’s menu was that especially challenging kind that felt like it contained no poor choices. Half a dozen starters, or a whole baked cheese to share, and another seven mains, again with three sharing options. On another day you would be reading about asparagus with sauce gribiche, confit duck with a spring cassoulet – whatever that is – Provençal fish stew or deep fried rabbit leg: the latter turned up at a neighbouring table towards the end of our meal and made me wish I could go back and start again.

Starters stopped just short of fifteen pounds, mains ranged more widely from just under twenty to just over thirty. The sharers were more expensive – côte de boeuf, for instance, clocking in at ninety-five pounds – sides were about a fiver, desserts just shy of a tenner. Little of that, in 2025, is especially shocking. The menu, under a section marked Accoutrements, gave you an option to add a spoon of caviar or a shaving of truffle to any of your dishes, and I was surprised by that: in a place defined by taste and tastefulness it felt – dare I say it? I guess I do – ever so slightly tacky.

But before the main event, drinks and nibbles. Lapin’s selection of apéritifs was tempting and extensive, and I think the four of us chose roughly in line with our ponciness. Al, easily the most refined, kept it classic with a Lillet Blanc. James and I, the next level down, had a cidre – Galipette – which was awfully nice, although now I’ve discovered you can buy it from Waitrose and Ocado I almost want to salute Lapin for their exorbitant markup. Dave, though, chose best with something called a demi peche, a keller pils with peach syrup. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it: Dave recreated it the following weekend at home, which was an exceptionally good idea.

We had a quartet of Comte gougères with that, and I thought they were decent but perhaps not too inspiring. The filling was good, the carpeting of finely grated cheese always welcome but the pastry itself lacked the lightness of touch it needed. At twelve pounds for these, I couldn’t help but compare them with the gorgeous cheddar curd fritters I’d had at Upstairs At Landrace a few weeks before, which had cost significantly less.

Now, when I review in a pair I always feel like I have to have something different to my dining companion, to present a range of dishes. That’s less of an issue in a bigger group, so as it turned out Dave and James ordered the same starters and mains, as did Al and I. Even at the time, I have to admit that I was thinking This is the life, I’m in a lovely restaurant with three of my favourite people, the wine is flowing… and I have less to write up than I might have done. Unworthy I know, but there it is.

Dave and James were pleased with their starter, I think. A puck of deep fried pig’s head was the good part, and the forkful I had was great. Plonking a forest floor of chicory and dandelion on top of it, though, was less successful. I don’t think either is really anybody’s favourite salad ingredient – not as pointless as frisée, but not far off – and the nicest croutons in the world aren’t going to redeem that.

Al’s and my starter was similarly along the right lines but not at its destination. I adore rillette, I adore rabbit, the prospect of rabbit rillette was a nailed-down choice for me. And it was pretty pleasant – clean and ascetic rather than punchy and rustic. I loved the carrot jam, and thought the dish could have stood a bit more of it. The bread, I’m sorry to say, was unremarkable. And somehow the whole thing combined to less than the sum of its parts, even with a few rogue cornichons secreted away.

This dish troubled me, if that isn’t a silly way to put it, because I should have loved it and I’m not sure why I didn’t. It felt too nice, too well-behaved, like an attempt to create a platonic ideal of a dish rather than the dish itself. As it happened, I was of course in France the week after I ate at Lapin, but it wasn’t the meals I had in Montpellier that came to mind when I weighed up this rabbit rillette. It was the unforced, unshowy kind of dishes I had earlier in the year, at Paulette.

We also, out of pure greed, ordered another starter to attack between the four of us. Duck liver parfait was, again, a pleasant, glossy little number, hiding in its ramekin under a layer of cherry. The menu called it “pickled stone fruit” but really, it wasn’t clear that any pickling had taken place. Again, this was nice rather than knockout – and, again, it highlighted that Lapin’s bread wasn’t the best. And that you could have done with more of it.

By this point, whatever misgivings I might have had about the starters, our meal was in full swing. There’s something lovely about that interplay with good friends – that mixture of catching up and reminiscing, of mild ribbing and in-jokes. All that was helped by an extremely good bottle of wine – a Languedoc white by Domaine Montplezy, not bone dry with notes of peach and citrus.

As it happens, I found that wine the following weekend in Montpellier at the wine shop round the corner from our B&B. We bought a bottle and again that means I got a good idea of Lapin’s markups, which are considerable. But perhaps that misses the point, and perhaps ordering a whole bottle of something does too: one of the things that is genuinely impressive about Lapin is that its whole wine list is available by the glass. Someone has spent a fair amount of money with Coravin, and it gives you an enviable range of choices compared to most restaurants I can think of.

If the starters were a little wobbly, the mains are where Lapin became far more sure-footed. My and Al’s skate wing was a really joyous plate of food, served in a vadouvin butter rather than the conventional beurre noisette that so often accompanies this fish. And that in itself was interesting – vadouvin is a mild curried sauce that originates from the French colonial period and you could almost taste in it the intersection between traditional and colonial French.

It wasn’t a conventional brown butter sauce dotted with capers, and instead came topped with monk’s beard, but in it you could sense some of the DNA it shared with the classic dish. It was little like those pavement cafés in Marrakesh’s Ville Nouvelle that, despite being stuck on the edge of northern Africa, feel like they carry some echo of Paris. I wouldn’t pick this over a more traditional rendition, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it.

James and Dave went for perhaps a more mainstream option from the menu, a whole truffle roasted poussin with a Madeira jus. This, to me, was probably a stronger choice – the truffle present but not dominating, the meat beautifully cooked and that jus setting off the whole shooting match. James very generously let me try some, and although I enjoyed it it didn’t make me wish I had ordered it.

That tells its own story, I guess, that I still wondered whether the real gem was elsewhere on the menu, undiscovered. But again, that might tell you more about me than Lapin: I can already picture Dave, at some point over the weekend, reading this review and thinking What is he going on about? That poussin was amazing.

The sides were a weird inversion of the natural order and a good example of how expectations can be completely confounded. The menu offers duck fat frites, and all four of us could think of nothing finer. But when we went to order four portions our server – who was excellent, as all the staff at Lapin were – suggested ever so nicely that this might be a bit monotonous and that we might want to mix it up a bit with some pomme purée.

So we did that, and were rewarded with an experience that is pretty much solely worth visiting Lapin to enjoy. The duck fat frites were decent rather than exceptional, but compared to the pomme purée they became more like “fuck that” frites. Because the pomme purée – no hint of hyperbole here I promise – was one of the best things I’ve eaten in years. Loaded with butter until it could take no more, than bathed in more brown butter, it took on a taste and texture that transcended savoury or sweet, almost with a note of toffee, or fudge.

Al told our server, when the empty dishes were taken away, that you could have served it as a dessert. He wasn’t far off: it was truly magnificent stuff.

Before dessert, three of us had an intermediate course, the Trou Normand. This is a Normandy tradition, a palate cleanser consisting of apple sorbet anointed with apple brandy. It was very good indeed, the sorbet smooth and hyper-real with the taste of apple.

The apple brandy, from Somerset, was excellent too. The menu said that you could add a glass of Calvados for an extra four pounds, although it wasn’t clear whether you would get Calvados on the side or whether the apple brandy would be swapped out for Calvados.

Whichever it was, the pricing of this felt a little awry: eight pounds felt like a lot, twelve in total for Calvados would have been like, well, like paying an extra thirteen pounds to dump a spoonful of caviar, randomly, on your main course.

Before dessert proper we’d also decided to push the boat out and order a bottle of dessert wine. Dave doesn’t do wine these days – he stayed on his demi peche during dinner – but he makes an exception for dessert wine. Again many of the dessert wines are available by the glass, and the menu pairs one with each of the desserts, but we couldn’t resist. Lapin also offered two really tempting bottles – a Rivesaltes Ambré 1978 for a slightly ridiculous amount or a 1992 vintage of the same wine for eighty pounds. Don’t judge, but we had the latter, and it was ambrosial.

Our server explained, in a “look what you could have won” kind of a way, that by most standards 1992 was still quite young for this wine but we were very happy with our choice nevertheless.

“1992, the year we met” said Dave to me, as we took our first heavenly sips. Suddenly I felt like however old the wine was, I was older still. But in any case there was much to celebrate, so I thoroughly enjoyed a wine as old as one of my oldest friendships. The wine has aged well, the friendship even better.

We tried a decent range of the desserts. I think on this occasion Al and I chose best with the St. Emilion au chocolat. I’ve never heard it called that before but it was an extremely nicely done ganache, a not ungenerous portion of it, topped, I think, with crumbled amaretti biscuit and served simply with terrific crème fraiche. I was always going to gravitate towards this dessert and, however good the others were, I would struggle not to order it again.

I think the other candidates were more workmanlike. Dave enjoyed the pain perdu with apple and vanilla ice cream, again crumbled with the good stuff to lend texture, with a shiny, sticky sauce. I expect if I ordered it I would have liked it too, and I imagine it went better with the dessert wine, in terms of colour coordination if for no other reason, than my overdose of chocolate did.

James ordered the Basque cheesecake, but neglected to take a picture. In fairness, you probably know what a Basque cheesecake looks like. Imagine one of those, with some rhubarb on the side. That’s what James had. He liked it, and Dave reminded me that it’s ridiculously easy to make which is why he never orders it in restaurants. I still have the WhatsApp message he sent me, with the recipe, favourited on my phone. One of these days.

Al is legendary for ordering two desserts, very much following in the footsteps of the great Nora Ephron who always held that this was one of the most important life lessons she ever learned. Technically if you count the Trou Normand and about a quarter of the Éclair Suzette we ordered to share between us, this meal constituted a personal best.

We’d ordered the éclair on the advice of our server and again, it had some nice touches – the candied orange on top, the Grand Marnier infused crème diplomat inside. But again, Lapin’s touch with the choux let it down. It was leaden rather than ethereal, and took some sawing through. As a finishing touch to the meal it summed up some of the inconsistencies, and gave me something to think about.

Our meal for four, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just shy of five hundred and twenty pounds. Now, after you’ve had your sharp intake of breath, I have to say that doesn’t feel like poor value, at all, for what we had. We had something like five courses each, and even then we threw in a couple of extra things to try. We had apéritifs and two bottles of wine, one of which was from the deeper end of the list.

All things considered, I think about one hundred and thirty pounds each isn’t at all bad, for the afternoon we had. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you should feel like you get this much living for it. It made me feel sad for my poor friend Jerry, parting with a hundred pounds for an infinitely less enjoyable meal at Gee’s not too long ago. Besides, expense be damned: this was Poncefest, it’s not like we were going to settle for a Happy Meal.

You might ask, given all that, why the rating down there is what it is. You might feel that this reads higher than that, or lower, and I would have some sympathy. When I think of meals I’ve had in Bristol, Lapin is really pretty good. But something stops it, for me, being in that upper echelon, with the likes of Caper and Cure, or Marmo. Or, if you’re comparing French meals with French meals, something prevents it reaching the standard of Paulette.

I keep coming back to that rabbit rillette, pretty close to being an eponymous dish for this restaurant. I keep remembering that it was nice and clean and pure and rarefied. And it’s not because Lapin is in a shipping container, because as I said the place managed to make me completely forget that. But Lapin, for all its excellent qualities, ever so slightly felt, to me, like a brilliant piece of cosplay, more than a French restaurant.

You could say that there’s nothing wrong with that, and I might agree. But that’s what stopped it, as far as I was concerned, attaining true greatness. I wouldn’t rule it out that at some point they will get there, and I imagine enough people in Bristol will rave about it to sustain it on that journey. In the meantime, it has a single dish that almost merits a pilgrimage, even if it’s a mere side, and it played host to a marvellous, long overdue reunion. When the ponces assemble next – in a suitably effete way, I can assure you – Lapin has set a standard we’ll be very lucky to exceed.

Lapin – 8.6
Unit 14, Cargo 2, Museum St, Bristol, BS1 6ZA
0117 4084997

https://www.lapinbristol.co.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Gees, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

For my money, there are a few finer things in life than a long, leisurely Saturday lunch with a very good friend. Especially when you’re in a fetching room, in a beautiful city, faced with a cocktail, an appealing menu and excellent people watching opportunities. In fact, one of the only things finer than that is to do exactly what I’ve described above, but on a Friday, with four whole days off stretching out in front of you. So I was very happy indeed to find myself sitting in Gees’ gorgeous conservatory on Good Friday with my dear friend Jerry, Easter weekend only just beginning.

By this point, the day had already got off to a magnificent start. The train to Oxford was quiet, deserted almost, and it was the first time in as long as I could remember that it only took a couple of minutes to exit the station, a station whose abysmal design doesn’t seem to have significantly changed in the thirty or more years that I’ve been making that journey. We had a bimble round the Covered Market, we bought bread and cheese for later on, we had a beautiful latte in the Missing Bean on Turl Street, chatting away non-stop. 

Jerry and I had never been to Oxford together before, so we compared our experiences of the city over coffee, looking at the connections between his mental map of the place and mine. I thought how nice it was to introduce him to some of my favourite spots, particularly as if it wasn’t for Jerry (it’s a long story) I might not know Oxford half as well as I do. The weather could’ve been nicer – the day was dry yet overcast, which never paints Oxford’s buildings in their best light – but the company was unimprovable.

I had chosen Gees for our lunch because it had been on my to-do list for quite some time. A glorious spot on the Banbury Road mainly famous for its conservatory slash greenhouse dining room, there’s been a restaurant on the site for nearly forty years, a mind-boggling record. It started out as Raymond Blanc’s restaurant, with John Burton Race in the kitchen, then five years later it became Gees and has stayed that way ever since. It’s now part of The Oxford Collection, a small and exclusive group including The Old Bank and Old Parsonage hotels, and their respective restaurants.

That length of tenure means that Gees was already trading when I turned up at Oxford in 1992, sporting terrible spectacles and even worse clothes, to study my degree alongside some of the brightest people I have ever met (and some of the thickest too, would you believe). Not, of course, that I would’ve eaten there then. As I’ve said before, my meals out were limited to regular trips to the fish and chip shop on Carfax, and the rest of the time I was either heating up an M&S chili con carne in the microwave of our communal kitchen, or enjoying – and I use that word as loosely as humanly possible – the food in my college halls.

Many Oxford colleges have an excellent reputation for food, as it happens. They also have shitloads of land and investments, and in one case their own deer park. My college had none of those things, which is probably why they accepted the likes of me: the food there was purgatorial. So Gees was for a long time a kind of mythical place, the sort of restaurant other people went to, people with wealthy parents and substantial allowances. It wasn’t until much later, probably twenty years or so later, that I went there, just once.

That too was in another life, with my then wife and a bunch of our friends who turned out, when push came to shove, to be her friends. I don’t remember much about that meal, except that it was deeply convivial, but I do remember following it up with a lot of drinks in one place or another and stopping on the way to the station for a shameful KFC. I always intended to return to Gees, but somehow I never did.

I was quickly reminded, as we stepped through the door, what an attractive place it is. Most of the seating is indeed in that big conservatory, with its banquettes, leather-backed chairs and handsome tiled floor, and it makes for a great place to eat. Even on a cloudy day the room fills with light, and something about that light, the room’s airiness, the bustle of its supremely efficient staff and the chatter from prosperous neighbouring diners created a truly brilliant atmosphere. If I gave out ratings for rooms alone, Gees would take some beating. 

Gees’ menu is sort of modern European, with something from everywhere. Oysters and in-season Wye Valley asparagus were on offer, as were Serrano ham croquetas and braised octopus with romesco. But Italian dishes and ingredients tend to dominate – pizzetta, pasta, burrata, aubergine parmigiana, the list goes on. It’s as tempting a menu as any I’ve seen on my travels for a while, and on another day I could have ordered almost anything on it.

I think I read somewhere that Gees was influenced by the River Cafe, and I could imagine that in both the menu and the surroundings. Not that I’ve ever been to the River Cafe: for all the rave reviews I’ve read, paying nearly forty pounds for an asparagus starter has always been beyond my means; that said, I’m sure some of my Oxford contemporaries have been more than once. Gees’ asparagus was perhaps more keenly priced at under twelve pounds. Starters more generally weighed in at between ten and twenty pounds, pasta dishes close to twenty and main courses between eighteen and thirty-five. Not River Cafe levels, but not cheap either.

Another thing to love about an unhurried lunch is the possibility of an aperitif. So Jerry had something which the bill described as a “Bergamont Spritz”. It’s not in the drinks menu online, so I’m assuming it contained gin, some kind of sparkling wine, bergamot and – surely – a typo. I had something called a Contessa Negroni which swapped out Campari for Aperol in the classic, simple, three ingredient cocktail. You might wonder why this has never been done before, and now I can tell you: because it doesn’t taste as nice as a proper negroni.

That was all forgivable, though, because the bar snack we ordered to go with them was a real cracker – little dabs of anchovy sandwiched between two sage leaves, battered and fried. These were outrageously good, salty little treats and a really excellent idea. A far better idea than putting Aperol in a negroni, anyway. I wasn’t to realise, at that point, that my bar snack would be far and away the best thing either of us ate all day, so instead I sipped my cocktail, enjoyed the surroundings and felt pleased with the course the day was taking. At all the tables around me, people were doing much the same.

The problem is that after that, despite the room being lovely and our bottle of txakoli being cold, fresh and zippy it felt to me like Gee’s menu delivered wobble after wobble. Take my starter, which was described as venison tonnato. Now, I thought that sounded like an interesting idea: a vitello tonnato swapping our the veal for venison could, after all, possibly work. And it might still be an interesting idea, but it wasn’t in a million years what this dish was.

Instead of thinly sliced venison, you got a piece of venison fillet, cooked through without pinkness, thickly sliced and drizzled with a pale sauce that contained absolutely no tuna. Not the slightest hint of it, not even a whisper of tuna. I don’t know what it tasted of – not a lot, really – but it meant that both the main ingredients of vitello tonnato were missing, replaced with things that were damage not homage. And then there was a big pile of salad, because this starter cost fifteen pounds and they had to find ways to distract a paying customer from realising that this wasn’t in any way what they had ordered.

Ordering a salad by mistake seemed to be quite an Oxford thing: I was reminded of a similar incident at Branca when I went there earlier in the year. I didn’t mind that then, because my stealth salad at Branca was still an excellent dish. This, not so much. If it had been called “venison salad with tonnato dressing”, while not 100% accurate, I’d have had fewer quibbles. Of course, if it had been called that I’d have ordered something else.

The problem is that not only is stealth salad seemingly an Oxford thing, it’s also – to paraphrase Dr Dre – a Gees thing. Jerry’s soft shell crab with saffron aioli was nice enough, but you get an idea even from the picture below of how diddy it was. Again, salad appeared mainly to be there to fill negative space, a kind of gastronomic find the lady deception. A different salad to that accompanying my starter, with shaved fennel and olive oil. Again, not mentioned on the menu but, in truth, a large part of proceedings. Jerry gave me a forkful of his crab. There was so little that I felt guilty taking it.

Jerry is on some kind of medication that reduces his appetite (although, gladly, not where booze is concerned). He quite enjoyed this, but I think you’d have to be on that medication to find it enough. And Jerry’s drug regime came in even handier with his main course: butterflied sardines, which apparently came with tomato, sumac pickled onions and chermoula.

I try not to talk about value much in restaurant reviews these days: things cost what they cost, and restaurants need to make money. So for me to mention it, pricing has to verge on the egregious and, at twenty-two pounds, that’s why I’m bringing it up here. Here they are in their glory, all five of them. This, to me, looks like a starter. Is that all there is? you might ask. Where’s the tomato?

Well have no fear, because this dish – the generosity never starts – came with tomatoes and radicchio. Rocket, too, to match the rocket dumped in the centre of the Maltese Cross of disappointment that was those sardines. Double rocket, the treat nobody ever asked for: still, it beats pea shoots, I suppose. Why did the menu not mention that this was yet another salad? Was Gees just a glorified salad bar, and nobody had told us? Was it north Oxford’s upmarket tribute to Harvester, Gregg Wallace’s favourite restaurant? It was a puzzle and no mistake.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling that really we had just ordered exceptionally badly, because the dishes arriving at other tables looked more like actual food. A tall, substantial burger was brought to one of our neighbours, with a decent-looking portion of chips. Lamb cutlets piled high on a plate were put in front of the chap next to him, although in fairness they were on top of some little gem lettuce and peas. See? Another salad.

My main gave Gees one last chance to dish up something more convincing. And I’ll say this for my chicken cacciatore: it was not a salad. But it wasn’t great either. The pool of stretchy polenta was pleasant enough: I would probably always choose mash over polenta, but the menu clearly advertised it, so I couldn’t complain. And I did really love the sauce my chicken came in: rich with tomato, sharp with capers, studded with judiciously-cooked carrots and celery, a vegetable I always think is underrated in this context.

The chicken was the problem. I’m really partial to chicken thighs on the bone, but you have to achieve one of two things and ideally both. A crispy skin, if you can get that right, is a truly wondrous thing. But I would pass on that if the chicken is so well cooked that it flees the bone at speed, and breaks into strands. That’s when chicken thighs become properly magical. If Gees had achieved that the chicken, with that sauce and some of the polenta (if you must) would have made for splendid mouthful after splendid mouthful.

But to get both of those wrong, to have flaccid skin and firm, almost rubbery meat that needed to be prized away from the bone? That’s really not great. And to charge twenty-eight pounds for two undercooked chicken thighs that weren’t fit to grace the sauce they came in? Cheeky doesn’t even come close.

No side dish could rescue this sorry affair, though in Gees’ defence their braised leeks in feta and dill, served warm, were delightful. I’m no fan of dill, generally, yet I loved this dish and at six pounds it was better, and better value, than nearly anything else we ate. About the same size as those sardines too, come to think of it. It was a beautiful lipstick – applied to a pig, yes, but a beautiful lipstick nonetheless.

Would you have stayed for dessert? We nearly didn’t but felt like we had to see it through, like a disappointing box set. To Gees’ credit I asked who they bought their ice cream from and was told they made it in house. That probably swung it, and Jerry was delighted with his affogato, served with Pedro Ximenez.

I mean, again, if I’m being a stickler (which I am), if you swap the espresso for PX then what you have might be lovely but it’s no longer an affogato, just as the negroni wasn’t a negroni, the tonnato not a tonnato. Gees seemed to have taken Lewis Carroll, another Oxford type, very seriously when he wrote in Through The Looking Glass that “When I choose a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. Words, salad, word salad: it was all the same to Gees. Let’s call the whole thing off.

To close on a damp squib of faint praise, Gees’ ice cream is pleasant stuff. I tried vanilla and chocolate – don’t expect any leftfield flavours – and both were very good. Smooth, no ice crystals, plenty of specks in the vanilla and an excellent balanced depth in the chocolate. Two scoops for eight pounds didn’t feel like highway robbery, although it made the nine quid Gees charged for Jerry’s single scoop with a slug of Pedro Ximenez seem decidedly impudent.

What else is there to say? The whole meal, service included, came to two hundred pounds between the two of us, including an optional 13.5% service charge. The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one, because I had a lovely time and the best of company, the room is hard to fault and the service is excellent. You almost enter some kind of trance where despite the preponderance of foliage on the plate and the underwhelming nature of so much of what you eat, you still have a very nice time.

It was, food aside, as enjoyable a lunch as I’ve had this year. Just think how much of a riot we’d have had if the food was at the standard of somewhere like Upstairs At Landrace, a restaurant considerably more reasonably priced than Gees! And there’s the elephant in the conservatory, the question of cost and value. Because when the bill arrives the spell is broken, and you think about what a hundred pounds could buy you anywhere else.

I have to hand it to Gees because they are very popular and an awful lot of people have become very taken with the place. But unless we ordered very poorly, I do have to ask myself: how on earth did Gees manage that? I’m starting to feel bad for Jerry because whenever he comes out with me on duty, however nice a time we have, the food seems to be pricey and middling. Take Zia Lucia, or Storia in Maidenhead: the poor guy can’t catch a break. I will have to think much more carefully about our next meal out, because Jerry deserves some food as brilliant as he is.

To make amends, after we finished our lunch I took Jerry to the Rose & Crown on North Parade, my very favourite Oxford pub. We sat in the back room and polished off a couple of pints, and I told him how I used to drink there thirty years ago, and how it almost felt like it hadn’t changed a bit. A lovely international group – three French, one Slovenian – perched on the end of our table and we ended up in conversation about all sorts of things: the English; Brexit (always Brexit); where to eat in Montpellier; Oxford’s best restaurants, you name it. None of them mentioned Gees in that context, and I can’t say I blame them.

It was only later that I realised that the Rose & Crown, like Gees, has been under the same management since the Eighties, which means that those first drinks I had there, fresh out of university, were under the same landlords looking after me and my very good friend over thirty years later. That gave me a warm feeling in a way that nothing I ate that day managed, however lovely Gees seemed on paper. Forty years, whatever way you look at it, is one hell of an achievement, even in a city which has a track record of keeping establishments alive for many, many centuries. I am glad there are still institutions like Gees and the Rose & Crown in Oxford. But when I go back, only one of them is on my list for a return visit.

Gees – 6.5
61-63 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
01865 553540

https://www.geesrestaurant.co.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: House Of Flavours

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

It’s incredibly frustrating, in this day and age, when a restaurant doesn’t have a website. How are you supposed to figure out what you’re going to have, when you can’t spend at least fifteen minutes poring over the menu in advance of your visit?

And how can you tell when it opens and closes? You can try Google for that, of course, but different restaurants report trading hours in different ways – does closing at 8pm mean it closes at 8 sharpish, or that the kitchen closes at 8? If only they had a website you could use.

This all occurred to me last week, when I was going to visit Zi Tore, the newish Italian place on Smelly Alley that has taken the place of the much lamented Grumpy Goat. It has no website, although you can track down the menu if you try hard enough; an Italian friend of mine has been a few times and really rated it, not only encouraging me to visit but telling me all the best things to pick on the menu.

Google says that it shuts at 8, but I had done my homework here, too. Another friend was looking for somewhere quick and easy to eat in Reading a few weeks ago, prior to attending the quiz at the Allied and I suggested Zi Tore. “I wish they’d publish their opening hours somewhere” she said, not unreasonably. “I’d like to be assured that there will be delicious things available at 7pm.” But then she went (“it was completely dead”) and enjoyed the food. So that settled it.

I arranged to go there with Jo – who made a cameo appearance in this blog five years ago – safe in the knowledge that it would all work out fine. We met at Siren RG1 for a couple of beers, which was enough to persuade me that they hadn’t fixed their pricing issues from last year, and mooched over to Smelly Alley ready for pizza and pasta. Jo’s family is Italian, too, and she has strong opinions about Italian food: I was looking forward to seeing what happened when those views came into contact with Zi Tore’s dishes.

Can you see where this is going? Of course you can. We arrived at 7pm to find Zi Tore dead and the guy behind the counter turned us away. “Sorry, we close at half seven”, he said. Exasperating, really: if you want to just be a lunch place, be a lunch place. If you want to be a lunch place that does coffee in the afternoon, fair enough. But why offer pizza and pasta and close at half-seven, a full half hour earlier than you claim you do? I took a menu, so now I know exactly what they serve. It didn’t have opening times on it, either.

So there Jo and I were, standing on Union Street a couple of beers to the good like a prize pair of limoncellos. Where to go? Fortunately, I keep my to do list online, so it only took a few minutes poring over it on Union Street before we were on our way.

Some places, like Dolphin’s Caribbean Cuisine, haven’t been open long enough yet. Others, although high on my list of priorities, were already scheduled in with other people. And some, the likes of Jollibee or Biryani Mama, may even close before an evening comes where I consider dinner there and think “oh, go on then”. But there was a place I’d been keeping in my back pocket to to do this year, and Zi Tore downing tools gave me the perfect opportunity: back to House Of Flavours it was.

“I’m really sorry we won’t get to try somewhere Italian” I said to Jo as we headed down Broad Street.

“It’s okay” said Jo with a wolfish grin. “I am rather partial to a curry.”

It might be hard to remember a time before House Of Flavours occupied that spot, and many of you might not have a history with Reading that stretches back that far. It opened nearly 12 years ago, a month before I started this blog, and in that time it has played an enormous role in reshaping how people in Reading see Indian food.

A couple of years ago I named it as one of the most influential restaurants of the previous decade and when I visited it on duty, before my blog was even six months old, it got the highest rating I’d handed out in the town centre. I say this all the time, but I don’t know if Reading would have had the appetite for Clay’s without House Of Flavours paving the way. It was very much John The Baptist (or Deep Thought) in that respect.

And actually this is how far back my memories go with Reading – I remember that before it was House Of Flavours it was the original home of the short-lived Turkish restaurant Mangal, and a pub, and a tapas place. Mangal made me want to go to Istanbul on holiday, which I did, and the tapas place made me want to go to Granada, and I did that too. But that was mostly because I knew eating in those cities would be better than eating in those two restaurants.

Before that it was the original branch of bar slash restaurant Ha Ha – we’re talking over twenty years ago, now – and the only place Ha Ha ever made me want to go was back to Ha Ha. I loved that place: House Of Flavours’ loos still bear the original Ha Ha signage, which makes a toilet visit surprisingly nostalgic.

Anyway, visually I’m not sure House Of Flavours has changed much in that dozen years. It still has that handsome front room looking out onto the Kings Road, with the luxe comfy chairs and glass-topped tables with inlays of spices underneath. Further back it got a little more cavernous, but I’ve never knowingly sat in that part of the restaurant.

There was also a hat-wearing chap standing in front of the bar, playing guitar and singing: I have to say that I clocked him and immediately thought we should be eating somewhere else, but as it turned out he wasn’t loud at all. Besides, he couldn’t compete with the hubbub: House Of Flavours was reasonably busy on a Tuesday night, especially in that front room.

House Of Flavours’ menu has changed subtly in the last twelve years. Much of what I ordered on my visit then you can’t order there now, but it doesn’t feel like a drastically different place. The main concession to changing tastes is an Indo-Chinese section which I’m pretty sure was not there back in the day, no doubt influenced by the growing interest in those dishes, itself caused by spots like Bhel Puri House doing them well. So House Of Flavours’ owners have done a canny job, tweaking here and there without overhauling anything.

A reasonable proportion of the dishes, in the section marked “Old Favourites”, are the kind of things you find all over the place, in Reading and beyond. But the section of signature dishes has a range of less generic options, and it’s also worth saying that House Of Flavours’ range of vegetarian dishes, on paper at least, is very interesting and not stuff from elsewhere on the menu with the star of the show swapped out for something less formerly sentient.

Irrespective of all that, nearly all the curries are thirteen or fourteen pounds, unless you want to go crazy and order the “lobster tak-a-tak” – in which case, and I mean this with kindness, you might have a tiny bit more money than sense.

Now, before I tell you about what we ate I just need to get something off my chest, something that has always made me feel a little like I’m not a complete, well-rounded person. Here goes: in Indian restaurants you always seem to have a choice between Cobra and Kingfisher, and it’s always presented as some kind of defining choice, like the Beatles or the Stones, BBC or ITV, Coke or Pepsi, VHS or Betamax. As if there’s some kind of correct and incorrect answer, as if your decision Says Something About You.

Am I missing something? Because to me they seem to taste almost exactly the same and yet, depending on who I’m with, I sometimes feel like I get the silent nod of approval or eye roll of judgment when I pick – always at random – the right or wrong one. You can all chip in, in the comments, and tell me that I’m wrong and one is clearly better than the other. On this occasion, I ordered Kingfisher and it tasted exactly like Cobra. Or was it the other way round?

(I just checked the receipt: it was Kingfisher.)

We started with poppadoms, because many people think that a conventional Indian meal has to begin that way. House Of Flavours is upmarket enough to charge you £1.99 per person and give you one each, neatly split in half, rather than asking you how many you want and letting you load up before the main event. They were perfectly nice, although they used to do seeded ones and those seem to have fallen by the wayside. They came with a very good mango chutney with a little out and out sweetness sacrificed for complexity, a decent raita, spiced onions and a deeply anonymous pale pink sauce neither of us warmed to.

“It looks a bit like Thousand Island dressing” I said. Jo spooned some on to a shard of poppadom.

“I think Thousand Island dressing would be better. At least it would taste of something.”

“I miss lime pickle, myself.”

By this point the soloist in front of the bar had moved on to a couple of songs we recognised. Sit Down by James was one, although in this context it sounded as if he was trying to talk people out of leaving. Shortly after he launched into Half The World Away, the classic Oasis B-side. I thought it was possibly his best performance of the evening. Jo, on the other hand, sings in a band, and I could tell she was judging his efforts the way I was going to judge the food: not unkindly, but critically all the same.

We’d picked a selection of things to share, and they were easily the best stuff we ate all evening. House Of Flavours offers three different sharing platters but Jo isn’t a massive fan of fish and neither of us wanted a vegetarian selection, however sumptuous, so the “Gourmet Sharer Platter” it was. The name might be a tad naff, but what was brought to our table absolutely was not.

It was a real treat: two different types of chicken, one chicken tikka and a more beige number which had clearly seen plenty of yoghurt, paneer and a couple of seekh kebabs, all cooked in the tandoor. This took me back to my first trip to House Of Flavours all that time ago, eating their lahsooni chicken tikka and being in raptures. That dish is no longer on the menu, although there’s a big tandoor section if you’re in a larger group and want to mix and match. But for two people, this was both excellent and plentiful, especially for twenty-two quid.

I can safely say that I struggled to pick a favourite. The paneer was better than it looked, with just enough caramelisation despite its slight paleness. But a lot of this subverted appearances: you’d expect the golden chicken tikka to be better than its albino sibling, but in terms of taste the latter won out.

Because I never shy from difficult decisions, I’d say on balance the lamb seekh kebab was the outright winner. Coarse, earthy, superbly cooked and, uniquely among these four, seething with heat. Perfect with the mint and coriander chutney, which for me won out over a slightly more muted dip with yoghurt. If more of the options had been fiery, that might have come into its own.

We had onion bhajis with that, rather than as a side with our mains. That was partly to introduce some variety and mostly because I think there’s little sadder than taking delivery of an onion bhaji when you’re too full to do it justice. I rather liked it – light and airy rather than dense, but managing not to fall apart. It’s a fine balance, and so often bhajis can either be stodge or a fast disintegrating fritter. House Of Flavours got this right. I also enjoyed the sauce that came with it, which I suspect had some date and tamarind in it. You know, the way HP Sauce does.

At this point, I felt like all was right with the world and the travails of Zi Tore’s optional opening hours were less an unpleasant memory, more a convenient way to begin a review of somewhere else. Jo and I were having a good natter about all sorts, and the evening was passing very easily. Jo used to work with my wife, so we always find plenty of different perspectives to share, and we’ve both lived in Reading for a very long time, so know enough of the same crowd to be able to gossip about literally dozens of people.

By this point the man on the guitar had reverted to some kind of consonant-free wailing, like Chris Martin with his knob stuck in a zipper. It was the kind of thing the late, great Robin Williams used to refer to as one giant vowel movement. But, in the immortal words of W.H. Auden, it was not an important failure: everyone was having a lovely time, and we were too. I was already thinking at the point, at some stage in the future, when I sat down at my MacBook and wrote a heart-warming piece about how House Of Flavours has still got it.

Then the mains turned up.

And they weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great either. I had chosen the pistachio chicken because it’s been a signature of the restaurant for a very long time and I think I’ve maybe only ever had it once. The menu says that although it was a mild curry it was full of “bold flavours and textures” and I, usually suspicious of a korma or a pasanda, thought this was something I’d like to experience.

In terms of bold textures it was a couple of pieces of chicken, a supreme at a guess, bone still on, that had been cooked in a tandoor, cut into chunks and then submerged almost totally in the sauce. It looked, I’m sorry to say, like a cat had hurled on it. I don’t know how you made a dish like this more visually appealing – that may be impossible but if it is, I think you at least need to find a way of making it less unappealing.

I could have forgiven that if the taste had lived up to the billing. Heat isn’t everything, and a mild curry is not a crime, but in the absence of heat I wanted some complexity, and that wasn’t here at all.

One of the ways in which House Of Flavours blazed a trail in Reading is that F word, Flavours. Everyone uses it now, so you have Madras Flavours, Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours, Palmyra rebranded as Afghan Flavours. More flavours than a Peter Andre megamix. But House Of Flavours did it first, a long time ago, so they of all people ought to know that if you have that word in your name your dishes have to taste of something.

The only thing worse than no flavour is the wrong flavour, and that was Jo’s lot when it came to main courses. Initially she had wanted her reference dish, lamb tikka masala, but the menu only had chicken tikka masala on it.

“That’s okay, I’ll just ask them to make it with lamb” said Jo, unwisely, and so I launched into the Gospel According To Clay’s. I told Jo that Indian restaurants that just swapped out interchangeable meats with the same base sauce were the way Indian restaurants used to be years ago, but that it was better for each dish to have a distinct start and end point, its own mix of spices and, crucially, the meat and the gravy getting to know each other properly.

You can probably imagine how dull that was for Jo to sit through, and you can probably also imagine how smug I was when our server told Jo that, no, she could only have the tikka masala with chicken. So she did, and it was not a great advert for the meat and the gravy getting to know each other better.

The chicken was, in fact, really lovely. But the sauce was that kind of brick red, orange concoction that didn’t feel a million miles from a base sauce: irony of ironies. And it was sweet – strangely sweet, without any heat to pep it up. What had gone wrong? Jo had talked, on the way to the restaurant, about how she always over-ordered at Indian restaurants, got something to take home for her (or even her beloved dog Diesel). This was a double whammy: she left some, but didn’t want a doggy bag.

The realisation I came to, in eating all this, was that House Of Flavours had lost its way a little, and it was instructive to look at what it was good at and compare it with its competitors. I always say about Clay’s – still the quintessential Indian restaurant in this or any town, even if I’m friends with the owners – that the gravy is king and the meat, really, is secondary.

You could fish every piece of tender, melting chicken thigh out of their ghee roast chicken and you would still eat the gravy with your fingers if necessary. I’ve had it at home before, as part of their delivery range, and licked the spoon I’ve used to dish it up.

But by contrast at House Of Flavours, protein is the master and the sauce is just something to have it bobbing in. That’s why the starters were so good, and why the meat in our mains could have been great, if it hadn’t come bathed in an afterthought. It’s such a pity, but they’d almost be better off calling themselves House Of Meats. It’s not a sexy name, but it might set expectations better.

This was also the problem with the sides. I rather liked the keema naan, although I’ve rarely met one I didn’t. And the rice, packed with mushrooms, was pleasant: it might have been more than that if the advertised cumin had come out to play.

But these accompaniments, however great they are, come to life in the presence of a great sauce. And where there isn’t a great sauce, they are just things you mix with or dip in an underwhelming sauce, aware that they are somehow diminished by the act. I so wanted to love my meal. I so wanted not to write paragraphs like this.

There wasn’t much more to say, and dessert was out of the question. So we finished our beers, still none the wiser about how they differed from Cobra, and got the bill from our excellent server. Dinner for two came to eighty-four pounds, not including tip: when I went there in 2013 we had one more course and a couple more drinks and paid twenty pounds less. So it goes. I still don’t think House Of Flavours is terrible value, if you pick the right things. But that’s assuming there are right things to pick.

There must be: our starters were great, and the place was packed. The thing is, though, that long-lived restaurants exist in a continuum, and ever since I published my first review of House Of Flavours in 2013 people have been popping up at regular intervals to tell me I was wrong.

“Will not be going back” said one comment, the April after I reviewed it, back in 2014. “Hard to believe it is the same place” said another detractor, the following April. “The worst kind of inauthentic ‘Indian'”, he went on. “I will not be returning.” Saying I was wrong about House Of Flavours seemed to be an occasional thing. Two years later another commenter weighed in. “I’ve been there twice and been very disappointed both times” he said. Even back in 2019 people were still stopping by to tell me House Of Flavours had gone downhill. “Disappointed by my recent visit” said a fourth person.

Maybe this writeup is just the latest in a line of perspectives that House Of Flavours isn’t quite as amazing as it was in the heyday of 2013. I suspect it will have the same effect on the restaurant as all of those comments, though: House Of Flavours will not be dented by this review, and that’s probably as it should be. You may well have your own opinions about it already, and they mightn’t be altered by this either.

But I hope mine was not a representative experience, because I would very much like House Of Flavours to still be there in another twelve years, even if I have stopped reviewing restaurants by then. I always thought it was much closer to Clay’s than it was the likes of Standard Tandoori or the Bina, but time stands still for nobody, and unless it’s careful it might converge with the likes of those restaurants. Even in the town centre it has competition: Chilis, always excellent, is snapping at its heels.

I don’t mind being wrong. It’s an occupational hazard of reviewing restaurants and putting your opinion out there every week. But I don’t often hope to be wrong quite as much as this. Besides, it has a website, it closes when it says it will and it doesn’t turn hungry people away at just gone 7pm. In that respect, if in no other, it can still teach some of our newcomers a thing or two.

House Of Flavours – 7.0
32-36 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
0118 9503500

https://house-of-flavours.co.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Upstairs At Landrace, Bath

On 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

As of January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Ephesus Grill

On 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

As of January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE