On paper at least, you wouldn’t expect me to think much of Cosy Club.
It’s Reading’s second significant chain opening of the year, following Rosa’s Thai back in January. Like Rosa’s Thai, Cosy Club is a smaller chain: just shy of 40 restaurants in total, the first of which opened all the way back in 2010. Unlike Rosa’s Thai, Cosy Club is a spin-off from a much larger chain – the Loungers group, which has in the region of 250 sites, 2 of which are in Caversham and Woodley.
Cosy Club’s thing is to be a more upmarket cousin of the likes of Alto Lounge, and its aim, at first, was to operate out of historic or listed buildings. So you could picture them pitching up in Reading sites like the one hopelessly wasted on Bill’s, but perhaps less so the spot they eventually chose, premises on the very edge of the Oracle previously occupied by Lakeland and before that, if your memory stretches back far enough, The Pier.
So, a chain which is the sequel to a pretty bang average chain, operating out of a site where I used to buy scented candles and, more recently, carpet cleaner or LocknLocks for my leftovers. It could be more auspicious, couldn’t it? And that’s before we get on to the coverage Cosy Club has received – or, to be more accurate, has paid for – from what you might generously describe as Reading’s media.
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Last year, I got Covid at the start of December and the rest of the month was a bit of a write-off, and although I enjoyed writing about the best restaurants of the year – who wouldn’t? – the experience was dulled by my still hanging out of my arse. It was like going round the supermarket when you’re really not hungry. This year has been another isolated Christmas at home, because Zoë came down with the flu just before Christmas Eve. So it’s been just the two of us, eating everything we’ve stocked up in the fridge, missing out on a plethora of family celebrations. On the plus side, we managed to watch the Gavin and Stacey finale: every cloud.
I’m still waiting to contract flu myself, and fully expect that it will turn up in time to torpedo New Year, or the annual trip to Bruges, But in the meantime I’ve just been sitting a fair distance from my poorly wife and sleeping with the window cracked open, mainlining chocolate and looking enviously at everybody’s lavish celebrations on Christmas Day. Everybody’s tables were groaning with roasted meat and bronzed spuds, and everyone looked so happy.
On Christmas Day afternoon as Zoë slept upstairs I watched The Holdovers and felt a real affinity for anybody else feeling alone on the big day. I put something on Threads to that effect: nobody responded to it, so I made another cup of tea and reached for more chocolate.
Anyway, all that means that writing up my annual awards this year is more like going round the supermarket when you’re fucking ravenous and everything looks good. Because I’ve eaten so well this year, in Reading and elsewhere in the U.K., at home and abroad. That makes narrowing things down fun but agonising, involves running through a list of all the brilliant things you’ve eaten but may not get to sample again.
It was after all the year I gave out two of my highest ever ratings in Reading (and one of my lowest), and a handful of very high ratings elsewhere, mostly in London, although a rare 9.0 came from elsewhere in England.
It was also a year of confounded expectations, where the places you expected to be good were mediocre or middling and some of the best meals I had were from unsung, hype-free places. I like that a lot, to be honest. The day you can guess a rating for a review before you even read the thing is the day that you’re doing something that could be replaced by AI – although, as food writer Andy Lynes discovered this year, that day may come sooner than you think.
So yes, as interesting a year in food as I’ve had in all my time writing this blog, and one with almost 50% more reviews than the previous year. That makes this year’s awards trickier in many respects, but also the shape of my life – getting married, moving house – has changed the places I eat and drink at regularly.
There may come a time when I’m just not qualified to judge this kind of thing any more, if I ever was, so perhaps this is better read as a list of my absolute favourites rather than some kind of weird tablets of stone declaring Reading’s best restaurants. Actually, put like that it should always have been read that way, so let’s hope it has been.
A lot of the great food I’ve eaten this year has been outside Reading and in the past I’ve limited the awards to Reading dishes, with two separate categories for the best non-Reading restaurants, in Berkshire and further afield. I’ve done that again this year, but it’s getting increasingly hard to take that approach. Because eating outside Reading is a salutary reminder that our town is falling behind the rising bar elsewhere: dishes like Quality Chop House’s cod roe with salt and vinegar doughnuts, Kolae’s biryani rice crackers or Lucky Lychee’s Marmite chicken would comfortably win hands down against most of their Reading rivals.
Maybe next year I’ll do things differently, in more ways than one. But until then, let’s celebrate the best of this year – and let me take the opportunity to wish you a very Happy New Year into the bargain. Last year I was at Double-Barrelled with my in-laws enjoying a very lively 90s party, this year I will be relaxing on the sofa watching something good with, hopefully, a bottle of something even better. But however you celebrate I hope you have a fantastic time, and that 2025 brings you everything you hope for.
STARTER OF THE YEAR: Chicken satay, The Moderation
One of Reading’s great dishes, I’m disappointed that it took me so long to realise the genius of the Moderation’s chicken satay and I ate it several times this year – exactly as many times, in fact, as I went to the Moderation. It was nowhere near as good when I first visited the Mod on duty, eleven years ago, but in that time they have got it as close to perfection as possible.
It makes you realise how disappointing this dish is elsewhere when you order it at the Moderation. Elsewhere, the chicken is worryingly uniform and regular, just a beige vehicle for peanut sauce. At the Moderation it’s gorgeous stuff with marination and a lick of char. And the peanut sauce isn’t just hot spicy Sun-Pat, it’s a beautiful and brooding thing with a little heat, even more gloriously chunky than I am. The attention to detail here is spot-on, and that even extends to the cup of lettuce, generously filled with little pickles.
In a year full of excellent starters, honourable mentions go to the mutton fry at Chilis, one of many great small plates offered by that restaurant, and the deliciously inventive kaleji poppers at Calcot’s Coriander Club.
CHAIN OF THE YEAR: Honest Burgers
Last year’s winners win it again this year because they remain the preeminent chain restaurant in town. In a year when we lost the likes of Brown’s and TGI Friday, more because of redevelopment than poor takings, Honest proved that you can still pack in diners by being a reliable, known quantity and not making many mistakes. It’s been a regular stop off for me in town when I get in on the train after a day at work, am eating on my own and want to take no risks.
That doesn’t make Honest sound exciting, because exciting it isn’t, but that’s no insult because I don’t think that’s what a successful chain in 2024 wants to be in the slightest. Although that said, they have widened their appeal even further to the likes of me by putting Two Flints’ excellent Santiago on tap and finally, in the Reading branch at least, offering chicken tenders.
The best illustration I can find of why Honest Burgers has won this award is this: I ate there just before Christmas, on my own, and I decided to try their Christmas burger with some tenders on the side. The burger was a little indifferent – it could have been hotter and the puck of deep fried camembert seemed to have leaked its molten contents, leaving just a crispy shell. The tenders were also warm rather than piping hot. The chips, all that said, were as good as they’ve ever been.
By Honest standards it was probably a 6 out of 10, far from the best Honest I’ve had over the years. And it was still better than most meals I could have had at any other chain restaurant in town.
Honourable mentions go to Pho, the eternal runner-up and itself a very reliable restaurant, and Zia Lucia, which may not be amazing but is perfectly serviceable and has truly excellent service. Next year I will do my best to try them both out, even when I’m just in the mood to go back to Honest.
LUNCH VENUE OF THE YEAR: DaNata Coffee & Co
Not living near the centre, and having a partner who no longer works in the town centre, has definitely narrowed my lunch experiences this year, so in the second half of the year that meant most of my lunches happened at weekends. Even so it was a happy Sunday over the summer when I wandered down the Oxford Road, and DeNata turned out to be a little glimmer of Portuguese paradise.
Everything I had was great, especially the salt cod pasteis and the feature attraction, a floury, soggy, spectacular bifana. Oh, and the pasteis de nata. So essentially everything I had was great, and when I go back next year I plan to make inroads into the rest of the menu to see if it makes me miss Lisbon even less. West Reading residents are a fortunate bunch.
Honourable mentions go to two places. One is Tasty Greek Souvlaki, where a mixed gyros remains another of Reading’s most satisfying sandwiches, and the other is Blue Collar Corner. It can be quite vendor dependent but when it has someone decent there, like recent guest spots The Burger Society and Fornoza, it’s a wonderful spot for a weekend indulgence.
OUT OF TOWN RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR (BERKSHIRE): U. Bakery, Crowthorne
I ate out less in Berkshire than usual this year, and the field was less packed than it could have been because both my on duty visits to Maidenhead this year were so underwhelming. But in any year, in any field, U. Bakery would have been a very worthy winner. You could say it’s just a cafe, or just a bakery, but that would be completely missing what a great job owner Uri Zilberman has done in the two years since opening his Crowthorne venue.
Everything is so well realised – a beautifully put together spot, comfy and Scandi with excellent branding and cheery, ultra-competent staff. But all that wouldn’t mean much if the product wasn’t up to scratch and this is where U. Bakery excels. Brilliant baked goods, gorgeous and interesting sandwiches in outstanding pretzel baguettes, thoroughly acceptable coffee. Why Reading doesn’t have somewhere like this and has to slum it with GAIL’s – their pompous capitalisation, not mine – is a mystery. And U. Bakery’s Instagram is not only a great advertisement for what they do, but also a devilishly delicious virtual shop window.
Only one honourable mention in this category – Maidenhead must try harder – which is for the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence. My revisit this year was one of my happiest on duty meals in 2024, and I was delighted to find them still firing on all cylinders.
MAIN COURSE OF THE YEAR: Short rib green curry, The Moderation
I discovered this dish on a visit to the Moderation last month with my old friend Dave: he was my plus one when I reviewed the Mod earlier in the year and when he came to visit me again he picked it for lunch because he wanted to eat their nasi goreng again. I decided to take a punt on something new on the menu – possibly to atone for having the chicken satay and crispy squid yet again – so I thought I’d give the short rib Thai green curry a chance.
I couldn’t possibly have anticipated just how good it was. A giant slab of beef, slipping off the bone and breaking into strands, in a superlative green curry sauce, peppered with green tomato and nutty peas, it was possibly my biggest surprise of the year. I have thought about it many times since. I know that this was the year I reviewed Kolae, in Borough Market, the Thai restaurant raved about by every big nob in the food media. But on a dish against dish basis, I’m not sure I ate anything there I preferred to this number.
This was a year packed with runners-up, any of which could conceivably have won this award. Even narrowing it down to two honourable mentions is positively invidious, but since I must I should give a nod to The Cellar’s exemplary chicken Milanese and Clay’s Kitchen’s yakhni pulao, possibly the most complete plate of food on a menu shimmering with highlights.
CAFÉ OF THE YEAR: Coffee Under Pressure
A year where we lost Workhouse was a tough year, and many of us found we had to make new rituals for our caffeination. But it was less challenging for me because I have always loved C.U.P. on Blagrave Street, and this was the year it took pole position in my affections. Sitting up at the window became a little ritual – bleary eyed on a weekday morning with a latter before taking my commuter train to work, relaxed with a mocha at weekends as a special treat.
This is also the year I got married, and the place I had my last coffee as a nervous bridegroom on a Friday afternoon, my first coffee as a newlywed the following morning. If you’d asked me on New Year’s Day if I could imagine a town without Workhouse in the centre, I’d have said absolutely not. But after nine months in a Workhouse free town I’ve got my head around it. If C.U.P. shut, though, I would be devastated.
Honourable mentions go to Compound Coffee – who I fear for, given the ongoing rumours about the viability of the Biscuit Factory which houses them – and Filter Coffee, who are thoroughly lovely. It’s a pity the latter has given up what little seating it had, mind you.
OUT OF TOWN RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR (OUTSIDE BERKSHIRE): Lucky Lychee, Winchester
My find of this year, and easily as good as my find of any other year, Lucky Lychee does Malaysian food in a pub in Winchester and I am still completely at a loss as to why it has so far escaped the notice of national restaurant critics. It is absolutely extraordinary, the kind of spot you wish you could pick up and drop just round the corner from wherever you happen to live.
Everything I had there when I went was phenomenal – their chicken karaage, their sublime Penang pork rolls and a main course of dreams, fried chicken in a sticky honey and Marmite sauce which took the best of both and, through some magical alchemy, made it more delicious than either could possibly have been on its own. And yet I went away sad that I’d been too full to try the rendang, or a brunch roti crammed with spiced local sausage.
I know fewer people read my out of town reviews, and that they don’t always prompt people to head to the destination in question. But I’ve been so happy that a handful of readers have gone to Winchester on the basis of this review and reported back that they liked it as much as I did. Well, almost as much anyway: my old friend Dave took his wife there for brunch. “Really good” was his verdict. “It’s a nice place.” You’ll have to take my word for it that, coming from him, that’s an A minus. I loved it so much that I’m back there tomorrow for one last visit before the end of the year.
My honourable mentions in this category come both from London and much closer to home. Quality Chop House, a London institution, was almost as fantastic as everyone says it is (which is to say that it’s still pretty fantastic), and the Plough in Shiplake was classy, polished and really well executed.
SERVICE OF THE YEAR: The Coriander Club
I’ve had excellent service nearly everywhere I’ve gone on my travels this year, but I was especially impressed by the Coriander Club, where the owner simultaneously worked her socks off while charming mine off into the process.
If I ever wanted a contrast between service where people really care about you having a good time and where people aren’t really that bothered whether you do or not, you see it in the difference between going somewhere like the Coriander Club – where the owner is passionate about the place, passionate about her food and wants you to have a fantastic time – and somewhere like, say, Bombay Brothers where the service never seemed to entirely recover from the shock of having customers at all.
The Coriander Club, on the other hand, is delighted to have customers and wants to turn them into repeat customers. My experience is that they’re very good at it.
Honourable mentions in this category go to Dough Bros, whose compact but perfectly formed team gets service instinctively right, and Clay’s Kitchen, whose young and enthusiastic squad does a fantastic job making one of Reading’s biggest restaurants feel small and intimate.
DESSERT OF THE YEAR: Strawberry pavlova, The Cellar
You don’t see pavlovas much on menus these days: restaurants are much more likely to be lazy and put on Eton mess, its accident-prone sibling. But fortunately The Cellar isn’t lazy and the resulting dessert – a graceful oval of meringue, strawberries and cream, syrup and a knockout orb of basil sorbet – is so delicious that their efforts aren’t remotely wasted.
When I reviewed The Cellar, I said “I give out awards every year for Dessert Of The Year, so thank god I went to The Cellar this week or I might have been writing a post next month saying ‘or you can just pick up a bar of Cadbury’s Top Deck from the corner shop’.” It’s almost as if I knew this moment would come, and come it did.
Having said all that, a challenger turned up right at the end of the year when I thoroughly enjoyed Thames Lido’s chocolate mousse, a classic made slightly quirky with the addition of pink peppercorns. Another honourable mention goes to DeNata’s eponymous egg custard tarts – up there with Lisbon standards, if you ask me.
NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR: Dough Bros
I’ve so enjoyed watching Dough Bros taking Reading by storm this year from its little site on Northumberland Avenue, just down the road from sister business Short Back & Vibes. They cut hair there, but they don’t cut corners at Dough Bros; right from the off they’ve made exceptional pizza – with the best flour, the best tomatoes – and have quietly plugged away hoping that if they did their best, word would get out and they would achieve Dough Bros’ stated ambition. They would transcend Whitley.
Well, they have well and truly done that. They may have started the year hoping for the best, but they end it having achieved the best. It’s genuinely heartwarming to see their Instagram stories saying that they’ve sold out of bases, week night after week night, or to see their little spot, on the edge of town, packed out with pizza enthusiasts.
I don’t know what 2025 holds for Dough Bros, whether that’s expansion, or new menu items, or an alcohol license, or just them carrying on doing what they’re doing and consolidating their position. But whatever they do, I and a lot of people will be watching: it must be five years or so since I’ve seen a new Reading restaurant capture hearts and minds the way Dough Bros has. I’ve had their Honey Honey pizza – pepperoni, ricotta and hot honey – many times this year, and I have no doubt there will be more in the twelve months ahead. I count myself very lucky to live not too far away.
It’s a shame I can’t give this award to three different businesses. But DeNata Coffee & Co and The Cellar, both mentioned elsewhere in these awards, also made Reading a much better place this year, in marked contrast to the flashy, big money places that so underwhelmed in 2024.
TAKEAWAY OF THE YEAR: Gooi Nara
When I moved I had to try out other takeaway options, because I could no longer rely on food from the town centre, or from the north side of town, arriving hot or intact. In the process I had some truly dreadful experiences – some because things went cold, others because they went walkabout. My unimpressed conversations with Deliveroo customer service had a very 2021 feel about them.
I tried one of the renowned Katesgrove takeaways, Home Cooking on Highgrove Street, and I couldn’t believe how poor it was. Had Chinese takeaways changed, or had I changed? Were they bad, or had I been ruined by the hi-falutin’ stuff I was used to from Kungfu Kitchen?
As a last throw of the dice I placed an order with Gooi Nara, the Korean restaurant on Whitley Street, and I was blown away by how good it was. Gam-poong gi, crispy chicken in a hot, sticky sauce that clung to its crags and dimples. Chicken thigh in a deep, almost-sweet bulgogi sauce. Seafood pancakes and chicken dumplings, with a glorious dipping sauce of soy and sesame. All the containers with a little hole cut in the corner, so nothing steamed in its plastic casket.
I loved it so much I ordered again and again in the subsequent weeks, and it was always good, never disappointing. I even had their food on Christmas Eve: Gooi Nara’s sweet and sour chicken is a plastic tray crammed with those crispy, battered bits of chicken. The sauce – thin not gloopy, properly sweet and sharp with a really well-judged hit of vinegar – came in a separate tub, to add at the end. This is a new award, and I get it might be of limited use depending on where you live, but I was so impressed with Gooi Nara. So they get an award from me.
Honourable mentions in this category go to Dough Bros – their pizzas travel brilliantly, although they might be too massive for you to revive them in your oven – and You Me Sushi. Sushi is a great thing to order for delivery because it travels so well, and I’ve rather fallen in love with You Me Sushi’s stuff this year.
RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR: The Moderation
Surprised? Me too.
But really, The Moderation has given me so much joy this year, on every visit I’ve paid to it. Whether that was on duty with my old friend Dave at the beginning of spring, when I returned for a post work drink and to take advantage of their street food special on Wednesdays, the time I went back with Zoë because she read the review and felt aggrieved at missing out, or when I went back with Dave around the end of the year.
Every visit I’ve paid to the Moderation has been brilliant, and made me regret leaving it so long before I visited it again. It is a real asset to Reading, and one I probably closed my mind to for a while because of a pointless disagreement the landlord and I had somehow concocted between us. Free of that, I can now see the Moderation as it really is – an excellent Asian and pan-Asian restaurant in a pub’s clothing, with a menu that roves all over the place and never disappoints, and which changes often enough to prove that nobody there is complacent.
I’m sure many people will read this and say I told you so, or what took you so long? to which I can only say better late than never. I’ve had so many great meals in Reading this year, and Reading is still home to many great restaurants, despite 2024’s best efforts. But I can’t think of a more deserving winner this year than the Moderation. In the year that I spent a lot of time sad about losing one of the best restaurants Reading has ever had, I am very grateful to the Mod for doing such a good job of restoring my flagging faith.
Picking runners-up in this category feels even more redundant than in the others. But my two other favourite restaurants this year, both of which have fed me very well numerous times throughout 2024, are Dough Bros and Clay’s Kitchen. They are from completely different ends of Reading’s food spectrum, very different to one another and very different from the Moderation. But if you picture those three places on a metaphorical podium, I happen to think that image says quietly wonderful things about the U.K.’s largest town.
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Every year, without exception, you can reliably expect two things to happen in Reading’s hospitality scene. One is that there will be a raft of closures and new openings. Some years that ratio is pretty much one to one, others – like this year – it’s badly out of kilter, with far more places giving up the ghost than newcomers showing up to take their place. It’s tough out there, with no relief in sight. But the other thing that happens, every year without fail, is that none of those new openings will be a tapas bar.
I have complained about this so many times that it’s boring for all of us, so I won’t go on at length. But everywhere you look there’s a tapas bar, it seems, apart from Reading. Swindon has Los Gatos, Oxford has Arbequina. Newbury has Goat On The Roof, and Wokingham has Salty Olive. And Reading? Reading has next to sod all – unless you count Thames Lido, which I don’t, or Alto Lounge, which surely nobody should (Oh wow! Excited for this said the Chronicle‘s Facebook page this week, about the news that Alto Lounge had received permission from the council to double in size: that’s the Chronicle for you, excited about pretty much anything).
No, it’s never a tapas bar. Biryani joints are ten a penny, we went through a phase where we got three sushi restaurants in quick succession and momo are having a moment, but nobody wants to open a tapas bar. It’s a long, long time since La Tasca (which also wasn’t great) and six years since I Love Paella – not a tapas bar, but the closest thing we had – was unceremoniously booted out of the Fisherman’s Cottage. Is it a Brexit thing? Surely somebody feels like getting on the blower to renowned Bristol importer Mevalco and sorting this out, you might think, but every year nobody does.
And that’s what sends me scuttling off to the likes of Swindon, or Oxford, or Wokingham, trying to find the next best thing. Sometimes it works – Los Gatos is a little miracle – and sometimes I find myself somewhere like Sanpa, but I keep on trying because it’s a wonderful way to eat and I am always on the hunt for somewhere that brings a little hint of Granada or Málaga to unsung Berkshire. And that’s why this week I ended up at El Cerdo in Maidenhead, a ten minute walk from the train station, in the company of Katie, last seen last month sampling the glitzy splendour of Calico with me: inexplicably, after a dinner with me, she felt like repeating the experience.
Katie, it turned out, was on a proper journey of discovery, having never been to Maidenhead before. On the stroll through town to the restaurant I gave her a whistle stop tour of everything I knew about Maidenhead, which didn’t take long: former constituency of Theresa May, the infidelity capital of the U.K. (allegedly) and the town that, possibly because it was originally meant to be the terminus of the Elizabeth Line, was getting all the interesting things Reading didn’t.
That last one really is true – Maidenhead has a great independent craft beer bar in A Hoppy Place, wonderful pizza at Knead, an absolutely top notch town centre restaurant in Seasonality. And if some of the misfires, like Sauce and Flour, weren’t amazing, they at least showed that someone was trying. We walked past Sauce and Flour on the way to El Cerdo, and it was rammed, which shows how little I know about anything.
El Cerdo is by the canal, in the new development (the Waterside Quarter, apparently). “This looks so much like the Oracle it’s disconcerting” was Katie’s take, not without justification. The restaurant looked welcoming from the outside, and it wasn’t unpleasant on the inside but it had a feeling of “new build” that it couldn’t quite shake, a functional box rather than a cosy, appealing cocoon.
That’s not entirely their fault – it’s the hand they’ve been dealt with the space, and I liked the giant pig logo on one wall, past the handsome bar. But overall I felt it lacked a little character, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. After all, Knead has a very similar dining room, but somehow it still has a feeling of bustle and hubbub. I guess the open space with the pizza oven perhaps brought things together in a way that El Cerdo’s bar, attractive though it was, didn’t quite manage. A handful of tables were occupied when we got there, including one large group in the corner, but it was a quiet Tuesday night.
El Cerdo’s menu read well. It wasn’t so big as to be unwieldy, and was divided into logical sections – nibbles, cold tapas, meat, seafood and fish. They hadn’t given in to the temptation to do paella on the side, so there was just the one rice dish and a few types of tortilla. In the run up to my visit I’d looked at the menu at Los Gatos, just to benchmark prices, and El Cerdo was definitely more expensive: nearly everything was north of a tenner, with some dishes nudging twenty.
But the wine list was good, and exclusively Spanish, and although we were tempted by a txakoli – the slightly sparkling Basque white you rarely see on menus – we went for an albariňo. It was an excellent choice – crisp and clean but not bone dry, with a little fruit. Thirty-eight quid for a bottle that’s fifteen online, so not an oppressive mark-up, either.
Now, before we get started on the food – and because tapas is by definition small plates, we have a fair bit to run through – I want to get a couple of things out of the way. One is that I had an absolutely lovely evening, and that makes it far more tempting to see the food through the Albariño-tinted glasses of good company. The other is that your mileage at El Cerdo might very well vary from mine: Katie, I suspect, enjoyed most of the dishes more than I did.
And of course, your take on this kind of food will depend on how and where you’ve had it before. Despite loving tapas and small plates, it turned out that Katie had never been to Spain, although she’s rectifying that with a trip to Barcelona just before Christmas.
I on the other hand go to Andalusia most years – and yes, I know that makes me sound like the pretentious tosspot I am – and unfortunately that means that although I went hoping for the best, I was painfully aware of all the instances where the best simply didn’t materialise. El Cerdo’s website says, pretty plainly, “If a dish doesn’t taste like it does in Spain, then we won’t serve it”. Although it also says that El Cerdo has an “executive chef”, and in my experience very little good comes of having one of those in place of an actual chef.
The first sign that I was going to have to write this kind of review came with the accompaniment to those first sips of wine, a couple of gildas. A gilda is a very simple thing – a skewer of olives and pickled chillis, all brought together with a slim ribbon of salty anchovy. Named in homage to Rita Hayworth, it’s almost a perfect mouthful, and quite hard to get wrong. You could have really amazing olives, and truly best in class Cantabrian anchovies, but even an entry level one is going to be a delight.
Or it should be, providing you use salty anchovies. But it felt to me like these were made with boquerones, the softer, more vinegary Spanish anchovies without the saline tautness of the good stuff. Which in turn meant they were all out of kilter – all vinegar and no salt, and somehow fishier than they should have been as a result. I felt like a right killjoy thinking this, because Katie seemed to enjoy hers. But I knew it could, and should, have been better.
The jamon croquetas were a similar story. They weren’t terrible – easily better than the deep fried abominations I’d eaten at Sanpa – but nowhere near the quality of anything you would get in Spain. They were a little flabby, a little pale, a little lacking in the crisp shell you needed. And the bechamel inside was lacking silkiness and a proper hit of jamon. Perching a little slice of it on top of each croqueta just showed you, Jim Bowen-style, what you could have won.
Last time I went out with Katie at Calico, she took me out of my comfort zone by ordering more vegetarian dishes than I would personally have chosen, which probably meant that my review was useful to slightly more people than it would ordinarily have been. The same thing happened here, where Katie was stuck between two dishes, broccoli with almonds or hispi cabbage, that I would never have ordered in a million years.
I took against the former for containing coconut ajo blanco in order to be vegan – good luck convincing anybody that they’d serve that in Spain – and so hispi cabbage it was. And actually this turned out to be one of the better things we ordered, although possibly one of the less Spanish ones. The cabbage came topped with a caper and raisin purée, which was heavy on the raisin and light on the caper, and squiggled vigorously with what was apparently a cured egg yolk sauce.
Your guess is as good as mine: I certainly didn’t get cured egg yolk from it, partly because I don’t really know what a cured egg yolk would even taste like. The little pieces of fried kale on top were pleasant too, although it gave me flashbacks to the Lyndhurst, which always makes me sad. There was a real whack of lurking heat in this too, and all in all it was probably the cleverest thing we had. Not massive, and not cheap at just shy of a tenner, but with lots to recommend it.
One of the biggest crimes against Spanish food was what came next, something the menu described as our “lazy” or open tortillas. We picked the eponymous El Cerdo tortilla, with chorizo and black pudding, and it’s difficult to describe how underwhelmed I was by this. Lazy is about right, to the point where maybe the menu should have said “we can’t be arsed to make a tortilla”.
Now in fairness the server, who was excellent, asked us if we wanted it runny or medium, and maybe we should have gone for the former. But whether it was runny or medium, this wasn’t a tortilla. It was an omelette. An underseasoned one that had been cooked through, with four bits of chorizo plonked on top and some black pudding – the British kind, not gorgeous soft Spanish morcilla, lobbed in the middle. No softness, a little onion, no potato that I could discern. This dish frustrated me. I imagine it would have made a Spaniard angry.
We’d ordered dishes in waves, partly because El Cerdo, Wagamama-style, says that everything you order will come out when they feel like it and we didn’t want to be swamped with dishes in one hit only to find the evening over. El Cerdo said that you should aim for two to three dishes each, which we took to mean three each, and actually doing it this way helped because we got to spy on the table next to us – four lads who kept their coats on throughout for some reason – and swap one of our dishes for something they’d ordered.
That dish was another of the relative hits of the evening, pincho de pollo with crispy polenta and mojo rojo. It was a reasonably generous skewer – four substantial enough pieces of chicken with a weird treble clef of red sauce, resting on a rope bridge of crispy sticks of polenta. And again, it wasn’t terrible but I didn’t found myself wowed. The chicken was nicely enough done, but El Cerdo makes much of its charcoal oven and I didn’t feel this had the char I’d expect from such an impressive piece of kit. The polenta added contrast, but if it did indeed have Idiazabal cheese in it it was a whisper, not a shout.
And again, thirteen pounds for this – even by 2024 standards – felt steep. I thought back to the skewer of chicken I had at Kolae, earlier in the year. Different cuisine, of course, but in terms of technique, flavour and value it was worlds away from this. This felt like the kind of dish that might pleasantly surprise you at Alto Lounge, but only because your expectations were on the floor.
If you wanted more evidence that El Cerdo wasn’t capable of delivering a flawless plate of food, their monkfish in tempura with chickpeas was exactly that. Just as at Calico, Katie had talked me into ordering something with chickpeas and they were lovely – nutty, earthy, positively moreish. But what in god’s name was going on with the monkfish? Two slightly forlorn nuggets of the stuff in a batter that was not, by any stretch of the imagination, tempura. It had no crunch, no texture, and when you tried to cut through it it all fell away, leaving a dense little knot of woolly monkfish, a sad savoury parody of a profiterole.
It turned out that Katie had never had monkfish before. “It’s not usually like this” I told her, feeling like I had to do something to rescue monkfish’s reputation. I hope for Katie’s sake that her first visit to Spain is better than her first taste of monkfish. If it’s on a par, that means she’s had her pocket picked on Las Ramblas.
By this point I’m guessing neither of us really wants me to go on, but go on I must because there were a couple more dishes. Again, Katie quite liked the patatas bravas, which I think we’d picked to make sure we felt full at the end. And again, it wasn’t atrocious but I have never, ever had patatas bravas like this in Spain or indeed anywhere decent in the U.K.
The bravas sauce didn’t taste like bravas sauce, it was fruitier and lacked any kind of heat. The alioli, giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that’s what it was, was not unpleasant. But it needed more of both, and moreover the potatoes were wan specimens, technically cooked but lacking the golden hue and brittle texture that makes this dish a treat.
Writing this, I should let you know, is the weirdest experience. Because I had a really lovely evening but the more I think about the food the more surprised I am by that.
We decided to have a dessert and there was one on the specials menu – a tangerine cake with white chocolate ganache and yuzu sorbet – which our server told us was perfect for sharing. So we also decided to have a dessert wine each, and identified a very nice-looking Pedro Ximenez on the wine list. So we ordered it, and our server came over apologetically. There was only enough left in the bottle for one glass – well, one and a half glasses, really. So what would we like to do?
Of course, as something approximating to a gentleman, I let Katie have that and went instead for a white dessert wine from Rueda. But when they came over, both were in very small glasses, both were the same size, and both looked bigger than they were because each of them had an ice cube lobbed in it.
“They weren’t the coldest, so I put an ice cube in them” explained our server.
This begged so many questions, like why aren’t you keeping your dessert wine in the fridge? or maybe you should have asked first?, let alone is that really what a glass of Pedro Ximenez looks like? or why didn’t you give her the rest of the bottle, were you saving that final half glass for Santa?
It was just baffling, and especially so because otherwise service was lovely all night. She told us they’d been open about a year and that although this week was quiet, things ramped up for the Christmas season after that and business was booming.
Last but not least, the dessert. It looked fancy, it looked cheffy and I can see that it was kind of designed for sharing. And leaving out the question of whether yuzu is remotely Spanish, the yuzu sorbet in the middle was easily the best and most enjoyable thing in the whole dish, resting on a sort of granola crumb. But there was nothing you could really describe as a white chocolate ganache, because neither the quenelles of something or other or the isosceles triangles of white chocolate fitted that bill.
But that wasn’t the most heinous failing: that was the cake. Dense didn’t even begin to describe it. You could work out your upper body trying to drive a spoon through that cube of stodge, and I felt like I did. There’s a chap called David who comes to my readers’ lunches whose job is to build machines that are used to test whether materials can withstand immense pressure. David would take a professional interest in that cake.
Because I seem to have spent most of this review pointing out places that do things better than El Cerdo, this feels like the right time to mention the pistachio cake I had last year at Manteca.
By this point, with the exception of a couple of chaps at the bar, we were the last table there so we settled up and made our way back to the station in the cold. Our meal, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just over a hundred and fifty pounds. Now, I think life in Britain has reached the point where it’s difficult to say “that’s expensive” any more because you’d end up saying that about most meals out.
But instead, we can at least talk about value: that’s more than my recent meals cost at Calico, at The Cellar, or Storia. My meal at Goat On The Roof cost a smidge more, admittedly two years ago, but El Cerdo can’t hold a candle to Goat On The Roof.
Granted, none of those restaurants are an exact match in terms of how many courses, how much booze and all that jazz, but the central point remains: El Cerdo does not feel like value. Not compared to any of those places, not compared to the tapas places you could eat at along the train tracks in Oxford or Swindon. So the search continues, and maybe next year I’ll rock up at Salty Olive having one last stab at finding great Spanish food a very short distance from Reading. Because if there’s one thing we can be fairly sure of, it’s that a tapas bar will not open in Reading next year.
But let’s close by looking on the bright side. For two years now I’ve been taking the train to Maidenhead, trying all these places and bemoaning the fact that Reading doesn’t have them. But actually, now, I’m beginning to think that my head was turned by Seasonality and Knead. Because outside those two, the new places I’ve eaten at in Maidenhead – the likes of Sauce and Flour, Storia and El Cerdo – don’t leave me thinking that we’re missing out. If there’s a market for box-ticking, slightly inauthentic, sterile restaurants and those restaurants want to go to Maidenhead instead, I’m all for it. I’m happy to hold out for something better. Even if experience tells me I might be waiting a very long time.
El Cerdo – 6.3 The Colonnade, Waterside Quarter, Maidenhead, SL6 1QG 01628 617412
This week’s review hasn’t quite gone according to plan. Originally I was going to review The Lyndhurst, which came under new management back in May. It’s fair to say that it’s had a chequered time since then, with the new landlords complaining vociferously to the Reading Chronicle, more than once, about what they said were false claims that they planned to turn the place into a sports bar.
The way they refuted that was interesting, I thought. We’re just installing a fruit machine, just like every other pub, they said. We’re just putting in a jukebox, like every other pub. Nuts, really. They’d replaced the managers of the best food pub Reading had ever seen, and their mission was to be just like everybody else. They missed the obvious point: if you’re just like everybody else, why should we drink at yours?
Anyway, I largely stayed out of it – because I know I could easily be seen as partial – but from their Facebook page they looked a lot like a sports bar to me. During Euro 2024 it was all badly generated AI images of three lions wearing England shirts and drinking pints of lager in a generic pub, or one especially tasteless – and arguably xenophobic – picture of a lion mauling a bull to coincide with the England-Spain match. But I’m probably just a woke snowflake, because I also winced when the pub described the rumours flying around as “Chinese whispers”.
They then decided to do food, so they put a menu up on Facebook and a few people – not me, I should add – were critical of it. “Please keep your comments to yourself” the pub said. Then they closed for nearly a week, not the first time they’d shut at very short notice. As previously, they blamed having work carried out, but it looked suspiciously like a sulk. All very strange, and I’ve lost track of the number of people who have messaged me saying what the fuck is going on at the Lyndhurst? My reply is invariably the same: God only knows.
But then at the end of July they announced that they’d taken on a new chef, Chef Roots. Now, I’ve never had his food but I know of him by reputation – he cooked for a while at the Roebuck, and at the Three Tuns, and in lockdown he ran a street food business called Pattie N’ Pulled which had its fans. I thought this was a very smart move by the new management – take on a known chef and try to recapture your reputation as a food pub. It all sounded very promising.
I was even prepared to overlook just how weird the menu the pub put out was. If anything in it was correct it was by accident, and every time you looked you spotted a different clanger. Some items were in a completely different font for no particular reason. The pricing was random – £11.96 here, £24.97 there, £4.60 somewhere else. And the spelling mistakes – oh my goodness. Buttet milk chicken, paremsan fries, oniom rings, triple cooled chips. It was all a bit Officer Crabtree.
So once I found out that Chef Roots was cooking at the Lyndhurst I was interested in going back, and I had a volunteer to come with me. That was none other than Matt, who made the very wise decision of proposing to my sister in law recently, which means he’s as good as family. So we agreed a date, when I was back from holiday. I was looking forward to it.
Then it all went tits up when I discovered that Chef Roots had barely lasted a week before moving on from the Lyndhurst, a development which the Lyndhurst decided not to report. And then more weirdness emanated from the pub. A recent Google review – one star, of course – was posted by a guy who was just verbally abused by the regulars as he walked past the smoking area with a friend and his dog. He put up footage from his phone which appeared to bear this out: it was a really uncomfortable watch.
And then someone posted on Reddit about the Lyndhurst’s Sunday lunch was, and she wasn’t pulling her punches. “Unseasoned. Small portions. Cold vegetables. Misleading menu. Said ‘homemade’ Yorkshire puddings and when I inquired about allergens the waitress brought out a frozen bag of Aldi’s own Yorkshire pudding” she said. “Actually speechless at how bad the food was.”
So I sent Matt a WhatsApp: Looks like we won’t be reviewing the Lyndhurst, the chef has already sacked it off. And Matt replied. Anywhere else we can review? Well, I can ride shotgun while you do it. And that’s when I thought of the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, a cosy pub I had loved when I first reviewed it nine years ago. I’d been back since, but not for a long time, and it felt ripe for a revisit. So this week Matt picked me up and we headed off down the A4 in search of dinner. It was the first time I’ve ever been chauffeured to a review in a Porsche, and I very quickly decided that I could get used to it.
Much what I said when I visited the Bell in 2015 is equally true today, on face value at least: Waltham St Lawrence is still a pretty village and the pub is the jewel in its crown. It’s almost the platonic ideal of a village pub, and you got a whiff of woodsmoke as you walked in. But the one thing that was different was a slight change of the guard – back then it was run by twin brothers Iain and Scott Ganson, but last year Iain left to become the new head chef at Thames Lido. So was it business as usual at the Bell, or had things changed?
Paying it a visit on a Tuesday night it was almost empty with just a few regulars at the bar. “You can sit anywhere you like” said the chap after I told him we had a reservation, and although the front room was tempting we decided to go for the dining room, a less casual space up some stairs. Even so, that was stripped back and neutral – I seem to remember on a previous visit that there was feature wallpaper of some kind, but instead it was a calm, tasteful room. We were the only people in it, which gave my dinner date with my future brother-in-law a strangely intimate feel, like they’d opened just for us.
Still, we both enjoyed getting a word in edgeways for a change. I love my in-laws dearly, but the men in the family are like the men in Sex And The City: you might enjoy it when they crop up, but everybody knows they aren’t the feature attraction. It’s all about the women, one-upping one another with their increasingly funny stories, and the best thing you can do is enjoy the ride (or, if you’re my father-in-law, tidy up after everybody and/or hide in the garage). So here Matt and I were, talking for a whole evening in some strange inversion of the Bechdel Test.
The menu the night we visited was decidedly compact: four starters, three mains (one meat, one fish, one vegetarian) and three desserts. I seemed to remember from past experience that there used to be more on offer, and although I may have been wrong the evidence suggested we’d been unlucky that night: a picture on Instagram later in the week showed an additional main course that would have expanded the options a little. But no matter, although the menu was almost narrow enough to be constricting we both found things to order. Starters hovered around a tenner, mains were scattered more widely around the twenty pound mark.
But first, drink – and the first indication of interesting things at the Bell. They won Reading CAMRA Cider Pub Of The Year this year, and it showed, with a blackboard listing plenty of interesting choices including Tilehurst’s Seven Trees Cider. And the wine list was full of temptation, all of it available by the glass. I couldn’t choose between a couple and Ganson, who was behind the bar that night, kindly let me try some of each (even if the locals heckled him, saying that this was uncharacteristic generosity for a Scot). He even didn’t complain when I decided to go for a third instead, although they were all gorgeous, and let me try some of that. It was a Priorat, from Catalunya – Priorat is always worth trying, if you find it on a list – and I thought it was terrific at ten pounds a glass.
I seem to remember years ago having a conversation with the Bell on Twitter saying that more places should bring back the 125ml glass of wine, or the 250ml carafe. Well, although they do serve 125ml glasses they’ve gone one step further by using a Coravin for seemingly all of the bottles on the list. “It means we can offer about forty wines by the glass” said Ganson, which for me would almost be reason enough to visit the Bell on its own, especially if you have a nice chap driving you home in a Porsche.
“I’d also like a pint of bitter shandy please, which bitter do you recommend?”
“Hoppit” said Ganson without hesitation, and so Matt got a shandy made with Loddon’s finest, which he seemed to like.
Matt had the best of the starters, and I didn’t realise until much later that it was essentially the starter I’d ordered and enjoyed nine years ago. A slab of pigeon terrine came bound in bacon, served with a couple of beautifully burnished slices of griddled toast and – always the clincher – a trio of cornichons. Matt enjoyed this, but because his manners were impeccable he let me try some and I thought it was knockout – slightly gamey, the texture spot on, no hint of bounce or jelly to be seen. Matt also let me have all of his cornichons, but I think that was because he didn’t like them, rather than down to his impeccable manners.
I did less well, but only by a whisper. My selection of charcuterie from Cotswold-based Salt Pig had nearly everything you could hope for, and most of it was very enjoyable. Coarse rounds of chorizo, fatty ribbons of pancetta, superb pork collar. Only the spiced pork loin underwhelmed, and although I had enough cornichons, that was partly because I’d inherited Matt’s.
But it felt like something was missing, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I think a little griddled toast would have lifted this, or even some caperberries, or even more cornichons (although more cornichons, like more cowbell, is just my answer to many of life’s problems). WIthout that, it felt a little unbalanced. Looking back at the Bell’s menu I saw that it included something I’d missed, whipped lardo – also from Salt Pig, I presume – on toast. I wish I’d noticed that, because it would have been delicious. Especially if it came with cornichons.
By this point I was on to a second glass of wine. Ganson had suggested another Spanish red, this time from Bierzo, a single varietal Mencia, and it was every bit the equal of the Priorat. I found myself thinking that even though the same time last week I’d been in Granada, in thirty degree heat, sitting outside a bar enjoying cold beer and tapas there were consolations to autumn – red wine, woodsmoke and cosy pubs not least. Besides, Strictly was back on the telly.
My main course bridged the gap between my week in Andalusia and the increasingly autumnal feel of things back home. I rarely order risotto, and I almost never make it myself – who has the time to stand at a stove for thirty minutes? – but the Bell’s version was made with Isle Of Wight tomatoes and Spenwood, and better British ingredients are hard to imagine. I had been spoiled by the exceptional tomatoes you get on the continent, but the ones that come out of the Isle Of Wight are absolutely the next best thing.
And it was mollifying comfort on a plate, a rich dish of sticky, nutty rice, topped with tomatoes that had been roasted and slightly dried, liberally dusted with one of my favourite cheeses which just so happens to be made down the road in Spencer’s Wood, the closest thing Blighty gets to Parmesan. On paper, this was the perfect thing to make you happier about the nights drawing in and being able to see your breath in the air – a gentle but insistent bear hug of a dish.
It was almost perfect, but not quite. I would have liked it to have been a little more seasoned, for a bit more salt to balance out the sweetness of the tomatoes. But I only decided that in hindsight, looking at a completely denuded plate, and hindsight is always a wonderful thing. I can’t remember the last time I ordered a risotto in a restaurant, but I won’t be able to say that next time I do.
Matt chose the Bambi Burger, a dish which has been on the Bell’s menu every single time I’ve visited. He wasn’t sure about it, which is how Matt discovered that he maybe wasn’t wild about venison. That meant I got to try a fair amount of it, and for what it’s worth I really loved it. Venison is a challenging meat to make burgers with, on account of it being so lean and lacking in fat, so to make something so delicious that didn’t fall into the trap of being dry and crumbly was no mean feat.
And again, hats off to the Bell for having a decent, sturdy bun and griddling it to give it the extra heft it needed. If I came back to the Bell, and hopefully I will before too long, I would make a beeline for this. The skinny chips, I suspect, were bought in: it might have been nice to have something chunkier, but they did the job.
Both of us felt like we had permission to order dessert: Matt because his main hadn’t hit the spot and me because mine had. We both gravitated towards the sticky toffee pudding – not something I’d normally order, but as the other two choices were cheese and oatcakes or an affogato I did feel my hand had been forced. I was sorry not to see the beer ice cream the Bell always used to make, which for me was one of the most intriguing and idiosyncratic things they did, but you can’t win them all.
It’s another nice echo of my original visit, because sticky toffee pudding was on the table then too. I think that the Bell has spent the last nine years perfecting it, because I loved this. It was a deep, dense delight, swathed in a cracking toffee sauce and crowned with a sphere of glossy ice cream – no clotted cream or the like here – and it made me wonder how many great sticky toffee puddings I might have missed out on over the years because of my vague prejudice against hot desserts. It was fantastic, and it helped, as the whole evening had, make me feel a little less sad about the changing of the seasons.
I could have stayed and drunk wine and chatted away until they chucked us out. But I’m not sure how much fun that would have been for Matt, who was on the Diet Coke by then. Besides, he had to be in London for work the next day so I settled up and we were on our way. Our dinner – three courses and two drinks apiece – came to ninety-six pounds, not including tip, which I thought was as good value as anything is these days in 2024. We shared trade secrets on how to manage our in-laws all the way home, and if any of them happen to be reading this I absolutely promise I’m kidding.
I was so happy to find the Bell still close to its best self, and if I’d have liked a little more breadth to the menu that was easily outweighed by the pluses – the service, that beautiful spot, the woodsmoke and the exceptional range of wine and cider. For many years, when people have asked me where they could have dinner a little drive away from Reading, the Bell has made my list – a list which shrunk when the Miller Of Mansfield closed, grew when I so enjoyed The Plough earlier in the year.
But we were getting to the point where I was recommending the Bell without having any recent experience to go on, and I felt like a fraud doing that. I’m very happy to have sorted that, and pleased that I can renew my endorsement. That I had a properly agreeable evening and a ride in a Porsche just added to my joy. Reading may have one fewer pub that does really great food and makes you feel welcome. But there are consolations to be found elsewhere, just as there are with the end of summer.
The Bell – 8.0 The Street, Waltham St Lawrence, RG10 0JJ 0118 9341788
I still remember the first time I gave out a really good rating on this blog. It was towards the end of 2013, when we were all a lot younger and more carefree, and my blog had been running for just over three months. I wasn’t drunk on the power (next to nobody read the blog in those days) but even so giving out a rating in the high 8s felt like a proper stake in the ground. This is my kind of thing, that rating was saying. Go here on my recommendation and I promise you won’t regret it.
Ten years on, unlike a lot of restaurant reviewers who think their pronouncements should be on tablets of stone – why do so many of them write like they’re on coke? – it still feels like a big thing to say. And a presumptuous one, too: for me, that trepidation about writing a rave review has never quite gone away. Nor has the euphoric relief when anybody visits a restaurant on the back of one of my reviews and tells me they didn’t hate it, let alone loved it. I know the blog’s free, so nobody can ask for a refund, but I can’t give anybody back the money they’ve wasted on a bad meal.
The recipient of that first rave rating, a rating that wasn’t beaten for two whole years, was a gorgeous pub called the Plowden Arms in Shiplake. Run by married couple Matt and Ruth Woodley, it was the most beautiful spot – snug in the winter, with a fantastic garden in a little corner of South Oxfordshire for the summer. The crockery was vintage before everyone jumped on the chintz and retro bandwagon, the menu revived classics from the pages of Mrs Beeton and there was 20s jazz playing all the time. I adored it, and I went there often – with friends, with my partner, with my family, with anybody I could persuade to head to Shiplake.
Just over three years later, the Woodleys left the pub. It reopened under new management, but it wasn’t the same. You looked at the menu and thought that food was just something the management thought it should offer, all function and no passion. It was the first in a long string of disappointments, of places that had the temerity to close despite my loving them. Since then there’s been Dolce Vita and Buon Appetito, and soon there will be the Lyndhurst, but that first one stung. I wish I’d gone more often. As Andy Bernard says in The Office – the funnier version – I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.
When it closed two years later, I wasn’t surprised. It sat vacant by the side of the road, and for a while it looked like it would just be the latest pub to turn into accommodation, the latest community to lose a hub and gain a handful of extra residents with nowhere to drink. It was empty throughout Covid, but then in summer 2021 there was an interesting development: the owners of nearby Orwells announced that they had saved it from near-certain demolition and were going to open it as The Plough in early 2022.
That news was welcomed beyond the narrow confines of Shiplake: Orwells has a lot of fans, and I’m sure they liked the idea of a more affordable, more casual venture from the same people. But then something strange happened in 2022. The Plough didn’t open early that year and at some point – I suspect we’ll never know exactly why – Orwells dropped out of the picture. But the Plough did open, just before Christmas 2022, owned instead by Canadian-born Jill Sikkert, her first hospitality business after a career in interior design. Last month she appointed a new chef, Charlotte Vincent, who has been on Great British Menu and got one of her previous venues into the prestigious Top 50 Gastropubs list four years ago.
All very impressive: who needs Orwells anyway? But I would be the first to admit that the revitalised Plough isn’t the kind of venue I would normally review. A lot of that’s down to accessibility: I know that the countryside around Reading has plenty of food pubs which ordinarily would interest people, like the Dew Drop Inn at Hurley, the Crown at Burchett’s Green or even the Wellington Arms at Baughurst. But as a non-driver who relies on public transport they don’t generally fit my catchment area, so you’re more likely to hear about restaurants near a train station, like Seasonality.
Besides, you don’t need me for those kind of places because they’re the province of the website Muddy Stilettos, which you may know. They love rural gastropubs, and they gush about them in their weirdly infantilised language where things are “yummy” or “scrumptious” and go in their “tummies”, where food and drink are summed up as “scoff and quaff”. Apparently if you like this kind of restaurant you also like twee: I even read one review which referred to something called a “Michelin twinkler”, presumably this is awarded when your scoff and quaff are particularly yummy and scrumptious. Goody gumdrops!
If I say more about Muddy Stilettos – especially that their annual awards are an exercise in epic grift where they get small businesses slogging away to promote their website while giving back nothing in return – I’ll probably get in trouble, so let’s move on. I found myself reviewing the Plough because a very good friend got me one of their vouchers for my birthday last year, so Zoë and I finally found an opportunity to get there on Good Friday, at the end of our holiday, literally days before it expired. So I suppose, technically, I only paid for part of my bill: I wonder if that gives me something in common with Muddy Stilettos?
The makeover the Plough has received is quite something. In its previous incarnation it looked like a pub, like a beloved local that also happened to serve food. Now it is a really gorgeous series of rooms – you can tell Sikkert has a background in interiors – that take advantage of the pub’s good bones, its bricks and beams and parquet floors, but create something much more luxe. That said, the chairs looked better suited to lounging than dining, but that’s probably just me being a bit old-fashioned.
We were seated in a room I remembered well, having eaten in it many times when it was the Plowden Arms, and yet it felt completely familiar and totally different all at once. Even though it was the end of March there was still a nip in the air and the fire was burning, and it felt properly comforting: I can’t wait for summer to come, but I’ll miss the smell of woodsmoke.
The menu is written in that way that was modish a few years back, listing ingredients but nothing else: sea trout pastrami, mussel, apple gremolata, that kind of thing. I know this annoys some people but it didn’t bother me – it was more detailed than other examples I’ve seen and, besides, a little element of surprise when you order dishes can add to the experience. Perhaps I’m just getting soft.
As is the fashion there were snacks, starters, mains and desserts – most of the snacks just over a fiver, the starters just over a tenner, the mains between twenty and twenty six pounds, desserts a tenner. You’ll have your own views about whether that’s steep, but I compared it to what things cost at London Street Brasserie these days and decided to judge it at the end, not the outset.
There’s also a no-choice set lunch menu, twenty-seven fifty for three courses, which didn’t overlap with the main menu. But in honesty I think if you’re going to only offer one option on a menu it has to be more interesting than the likes of swede and carrot soup, so I gave it a miss. The Plough could learn from the likes of Quality Chop House, whose set lunch costs about the same and seriously makes you consider swerving the à la carte. Besides, that voucher was burning a hole in my satchel – in for a penny, in for a pounding, as my fiancée likes to delicately put it.
We got some snacks while we made up our mind about everything else, and they were the first indicator that it wouldn’t all be plain sailing. Homemade focaccia/blue cheese butter was the first thing we tried. Now, I don’t object to minimalist wording provided there isn’t anything significant in the dish it neglects to mention, and so long as what you’re told will be there is actually present and correct.
So the menu really should have said homemade bread/garlic butter, because that, weirdly, is what I got. The picture below is one of the dullest ever to grace my blog, but I put it there for a reason, to demonstrate that this bread wasn’t springy or spongy or aerated. It wasn’t open-crumbed at all. It wasn’t permeated with olive oil, it didn’t have salt or rosemary or anything else to zhuzh it up. The reason it was none of those things is that it wasn’t focaccia.
It was, instead, perfectly serviceable bread. And as for the butter – well, we went from the blue cheese in this must be very subtle to there’s no blue cheese at all in this, is there? before ending up at isn’t this garlic butter? The menu wasn’t just economical with words, it was a little economical with the truth too.
The second snack was a lot more enjoyable. I’ll do away with the stripped down wording from here on in, but this was a clump of battered, fried enoki mushrooms, strewn with shoots, more mushrooms (pickled, I think, but my mind might be playing tricks) and a little Walnut Whip of mushroom ketchup. This was far more like it – wild mushrooms cropped up in a few places on the Plough’s menu, and the mushroom ketchup, lending gorgeous depth, was the star of the show.
But at the risk of nit picking again, the ratio of the enoki to batter was so out of kilter that I felt like I was eating a savoury churro that just happened to have a tiny bit of mushroom in the middle. That said, if it had been described as that on the menu I might still have ordered it. Anyway, it was only a fiver.
The starters proper were more successful, and started to give me an idea of what the kitchen could do. My pork terrine wasn’t bad – a slab of pork, bound up with jamon iberico and strewn with gubbins – cups of onion with thyme crumb nestling in them, and more of those little shoots. I would have preferred some acidity in the mix – a piccalilli, or some caperberries – and without them it was nice but a little well behaved for my liking. A tad too fridge-cold, clean and pristine where it needed to be gutsy.
This came with what was billed as sourdough bread – I wasn’t sure it was sourdough but if anything, it was more open-textured than the focaccia had been. This dish felt sanitised, but it would probably have been a hit with the Muddy Stilettos crowd – every time I read a review by them, the reviewer practically apologises for having three courses and makes a tired joke about undoing the top button of her trousers. I never feel like I have to apologise to you lot for ordering too much food: it’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of you all.
Zoë had chosen scallops, a couple of plump specimens in a puddle of dashi beurre blanc, topped with some kind of sea vegetable whose name I’m sure I used to know but have since forgotten. I wouldn’t have ordered this – I’m not sure beurre blanc is improved by cross-pollinating it with dashi – but Zoë really enjoyed it. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to try any, and when I asked her for a more detailed critique she said “I fucking loved it, I’d order it again, what more do you want from me?”.
This will please fans of her expletives, and I know there are a few of you out there, but probably isn’t of practical help. She did eventually tell me under cross-examination that the scallops were beautifully cooked, the contrasting textures managed just right, but that’s all I have for you.
At this point I was feeling slightly underwhelmed, but the Plough rescued things with two exemplary and very different main courses. Fish and chips – just described as “day boat fish”, so I have no idea what it was – was outstanding. A thick cylinder of pearlescent, just-cooked fish was hugged by brilliant, almost ethereal batter. I was allowed to try a bit and it was miles better than I’d been expecting, and weirdly it made me think of my dad. He has a bit of a habit of ordering fish and chips in fancy restaurants, so I’ve seen him try it at Rick Stein’s place in Padstow, at the Beehive in White Waltham and in my opinion, the Plough’s rendition was better than either of those.
The accompaniments were bang on too – excellent peas which were crushed rather than mushy, and a tartare sauce Zoë could tolerate, which meant that it wasn’t quite vinegary enough for me. Having it with fries, although that was clearly communicated on the menu, felt a little strange to me. They were very good fries but, in an inversion of how I feel every time I look in the mirror these days, I’d sooner they had been chunky rather than skinny.
If that covers the pub classics end of the menu, my choice was cheffier and one of the best plates of food I’ve eaten this year. Lamb rump was just stellar – thick and tender, accurately seasoned, the perfect shade of pink with just the most beautiful stripe of fat, the kind of thing I could eat all day. It came with a little of everything wonderful – more onion, this time smoked, chewy and delectable nubbins of Jerusalem artichoke, a sweet and glossy puree, a little jus and, by the looks of this picture, some extra virgin olive oil thrown in for good measure.
Oh, and I neglected to mention my other favourite part of this dish – described as hash browns, they were a couple of golden pyramids of pressed and fried potato that were worth the price of admission by themselves. I truly loved this dish, and it single-handedly justified the trip to Shiplake. A few forkfuls in and that dense non-focaccia and the slightly timid terrine were completely forgotten. All was forgiven: this dish was twenty-six pounds and, I reckon, worth every penny. Even looking down at the picture I can remember how happy it made me.
As it was a little light on the veg I’d ordered some green beans on the side with pickled chilli and soy sauce. They were well enough executed, the beans with a little bite, but I didn’t think they quite worked: the sauce didn’t adhere, so you ended up with a pool of the stuff at the bottom. I’ll go for the ubiquitous hispi cabbage next time.
We both wanted dessert, which is a good sign, and we both wanted the same dessert. So we had it, unrepentantly and without loosening any garments. Again, it was good but not perfect and again, it wasn’t quite as billed. It was allegedly a dark chocolate cheesecake but, for my money, it wasn’t in any way dark. And texturally I didn’t think it entirely worked – that huge layer of chocolate was a tad gelatinous, the base so heavy and thick that you couldn’t get a spoon through it without risking injury to passers-by.
And again, it was a pity because the minor details were all excellent, from the chocolate soil on top to the blobs of yuzu gel and – especially – the warming, boozy cherries. I finished it, because it’s rude not to, but I would have liked something slimmer and more refined. That is something I often say when I look in the mirror, come to think of it.
Replete and satisfied, we asked for our bill and prepared for the trip home. And it would be remiss of me not to mention at this point that – more than once on my visit to the Plough – Zoë had raved about the bathrooms. “Seriously, you have to go to the loo before we leave” she said. “I think they’re some of the best restaurant toilets I’ve ever seen.” So I did, and they were indeed very chic and the handwash smelled magnificent. But, just as with Zoë and those effing scallops, that’s all I can remember. I wish I’d taken a picture.
Our bill for all that food, a non-alcoholic cocktail called a tropical something or other which Zoë found too sweet (and at nine pounds, a little too rich) and a couple of bottles of sparkling mineral water – because I was on antibiotics – came to a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, including a 12.5% service charge. And it feels like an insult to shoehorn the service in here, between the loos and the conclusion, because it was faultless from start to finish. We had just the right level of attention, enthusiasm and smiles from the moment we were greeted to the point where we said goodbye and went out the front door. It made me think what a boon this place must be to genuine locals, although if you live in Shiplake I imagine you had enough to be smug about even before the Plough came along.
I’ve ummed and aahed since about what I made of the Plough, on balance. In the debit column, some of the dishes were underpowered or didn’t work, and the feng shui menu didn’t always reflect what turned up on the plate. I suppose I compare it in some ways to the robust, magical cooking of somewhere like the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, and it doesn’t quite match that standard. But on the other hand, some of the dishes were exceptional, especially the mains, and the little touches with much of the food show an imagination which quite won me over. And then there’s the room, the welcome, that open fire and – yes, let’s mention them again – those bathrooms.
But the main thing I took from my trip to the Plough was a feeling of being in really capable hands, of a menu that could please almost anybody and managed to walk that very fine line where it was accessible and clever. That’s not an easy balance to strike, and many chefs or restaurants, despite their best intentions, end up falling clumsily on one side or the other. That the Plough has avoided that pitfall, and that the team have created somewhere so universal but sophisticated is a more skilful trick than you might think.
“This is the kind of place we could take your dad and stepmum” said Zoë in the car on the way back to Reading, and that’s as good a summary of its appeal as I can think of: it might mean more if you’d met them, but hopefully you get the drift. I think you could take anybody here for a meal – either for a special occasion or for no reason – and have a properly charming time.
This might not read like an out and out rave, I may not have talked about tummies or the fact that they might be awarded a Michelin twinkler at some point, but regular readers will know that this is me saying I was quietly impressed. This is my kind of thing. Hopefully, if you go here on my recommendation, you won’t regret it.
Edible Reading 