This week’s review came about because of a comment on the Edible Reading Facebook page. I’d posted a link to my do list, as I regularly do, asking if there was anywhere on it that I should prioritise. Somebody chipped in and told me I should check out Shawarma Reading on West Street. “Their mixed shawarma with rice is great on a cold day”, their comment said.
That was all well and good, but the comment wasn’t from just anybody. It was from Mansoor.
Mansoor has been a reader of my blog for as long as I can remember, an early and vocal supporter of what I do. He came to the very first readers’ lunch at Namaste Kitchen, over seven years ago, bringing a blue Toblerone because I’d enthused about them on the blog. He told me that when he was first courting his wife, he used my blog for tips; despite that, it seems to have worked out nicely for him.
He was also one of my very first subscribers, when I launched that last month. “Lifetime subscription please” he said, which moved me more than I can say. And that’s despite the fact that Mansoor, his wife and his beautiful daughter have moved to Bristol now, which makes him one of my few readers who avidly looks forward to reviews from that part of the world rather than ones from the ‘Ding (don’t worry Mansoor, you’ll get some later in the year).
But that’s not why I give Mansoor’s words such weight. Back when he lived in Reading, Mansoor tipped me off about all kinds of places which went on to be favourites. He was the one who told me to check out La’De Kitchen, out in Woodley, and Rizouq on the Wokingham Road. And perhaps most life-changing of all, Mansoor told me once about a little spot doing samosas, also on the Wokingham Road, that I ought to investigate. Years later I still stop by Cake & Cream regularly for their epic samosas and pakoras, and have recommended them to countless others.
So when Mansoor says somewhere is good, I pay attention. And he first mentioned Shawarma to me at a readers’ lunch about eighteen months ago. “Give it six months, and I think it will be worth you reviewing it”, he said. Well, that six months had more than elapsed, and Mansoor’s initial “you might want to try it out” had morphed into a “go here”.
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Here’s what happened: I was making Friday night dinner plans with my friend Graeme and I said I’d give him some restaurants to choose from, a mixture of places I wanted to review (or re-review) and others I just fancied eating at. My text was all ready to send, and then I stopped for a minute and thought what about Côte? So I added Côte to the list of places I was due to re-review and pinged the message over to Graeme, fully expecting him to pick somewhere else.
Why don’t we do Côte? came the reply. I haven’t been for a while, and it’s such a good chain restaurant.
Appropriately Graeme’s reasons for choosing it were the same as mine for including it in my selection. The last time I went there was something like eighteen months ago, with my family, to celebrate my just having got engaged. But before that? I honestly couldn’t tell you. And yet before the pandemic I used to go an awful lot – it was one of my regular spots.
I do wonder whether the pandemic had something to do with it. Because when Covid struck national Côte did what many restaurants did, diversifying into heat at home options. But Côte did it differently to everybody else, and unlike nearly everybody else they are still doing it years later, when for most restaurants their schemes, entirely born out of necessity, were shelved ages go.
Côte decided to take advantage of the fact that many of its dishes were prepared in a central kitchen and then finished in the restaurant, turning what you could potentially see as a weakness into a Covid-era hidden strength. And it continues today: Côte At Home still offers many of the dishes you can get in their restaurants, portioned for two people, for decidedly less money.
Back when I was reviewing takeaways and meal kits, I reviewed Cote At Home. And the truth was that I didn’t know what to make of it: it was good value, and undeniably polished, and somehow occupied a completely new genre that wasn’t takeaway, wasn’t meal kits, wasn’t eating in restaurants and wasn’t ready meals. What on earth was it, then? I’m still not entirely sure.
But I can’t help feeling that Côte At Home, although it may have saved the chain from going under, slightly changed the way I thought about the restaurant. Because if many of Côte’s dishes were just glorified ready meals you could cook at home, was there still a point to going to the restaurant to eat them there, spending more money in the process? And if that was the case three years ago when the shockwaves from the pandemic started to subside, wasn’t it even more the case now, when eating out is more and more of a luxury?
I didn’t know the answers, and it felt like a return to Côte might provide them. Besides, it was a Friday night at the end of an incredibly long week at work, and I figured I’d earned a good meal, a catch up with a good friend and at least a bottle of wine, and I was hoping for an enjoyable evening irrespective of whether my visit also solved those bigger, thornier questions. After all, nobody can dissect stuff for its deeper meaning 24/7. Not even me.
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If I asked most Reading residents to name Reading’s most famous restaurant, the chances are the majority of them would say either Kungfu Kitchen or Clay’s Kitchen. And that makes sense because those two, the Lennon and McCartney of Reading’s food scene, are the ones that have broken out into the national consciousness, as much as Reading ever does. If we had a round of Reading restaurants on Family Fortunes, asked 100 people to name a restaurant in Reading, those two would top the leaderboard. God knows what else would be on there – Sweeney Todd, probably, and a rogue vote for Munchees.
But that would only happen if you asked Reading residents, and is indicative of the bubble we live in. Because, last year at any rate, the most nationally known restaurant in Reading was Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd, a nondescript Cantonese restaurant just the other side of Reading Bridge. And the reason for that is that last February it was reviewed in the Observer by journalist, jazz musician, TV show judge, relentless self-publicist and life president of the Jay Rayner Appreciation Society, Mr Jason Rayner.
He raved about the place, and explained that the chef used to cook at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, and Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel. “It feels like finding a senior chef from the Ritz… doing their own thing in your local caff” he declaimed. The unspoken implication was that this was almost as extraordinary as finding the U.K.’s greatest restaurant reviewer doing his own thing in a Chinese restaurant most Reading folk had never heard of, slumming it for the greater good. Lucky us!
Now, don’t be fooled into thinking Rayner had come to Reading specifically to review Good Old Days. He was in Reading recording an episode of his Radio 4 series, and I suspect he decided to kill two birds with one stone before heading back to London: after all, if there’s one thing people like to moan about below the line on his reviews, it’s how many of them are of London restaurants.
That roving Radio 4 series must be a positive boon, as it gives Rayner an excuse to visit parts of the country he otherwise wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. And I think we can include Reading as one of those, given that he described Caversham as “Reading’s Latin Quarter, as nobody has ever called it”. Such a charmer. But anyway, it was close enough to the station and he had a friend who recommended it, so Good Old Days it was, rather than one of Reading’s more high profile restaurants.
And he did seem to enjoy it, sort of. He said that “if… you happen to live nearby, get the food to go. Because in truth Good Old Days is a takeaway that just happens to have a few tables.” And that’s the funny thing about Rayner’s review – it didn’t make me fall over myself to visit. And I don’t think it galvanised Reading either, because I still know relatively few people who have had a takeaway from Good Old Days and fewer still who have eaten in there. The ones who have, that I’ve spoken to, have told me that it was “nice”, or words to that effect. I’ve never had an oh my god, you really must go – can I come?
Especially that last bit. Despite it being on my to do list for almost a year, every time I mention it to someone in terms of joining me there on duty they ask if we can go somewhere else instead; people just didn’t seem to fancy the place. In that respect, Rayner’s review is a remarkable one – if you can praise food and still leave people lukewarm about going to a restaurant you definitely have some kind of skill, albeit not one most restaurant reviewers would want to develop.
Very few of the comments on the Observer review were from people in Reading, and what ones there were were evenly split between Don’t give the secret away and We went there on your recommendation and it was awful. So it looked like there was a gap in the market for a reliable review of Good Old Days, and I was happy to fill it.
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Zoë and I wound up in Bristol on the Saturday before Christmas because my friend James was having a barbecue to mark the end of what he refers to as the “grilling season”. Its boundaries are somewhat amorphous, because James likes to barbecue at almost any opportunity, but as far as I can gather the grilling season starts around Easter and ends at some point before New Year’s Eve. I can’t say that with any confidence though, because I wouldn’t put it past James to grill meat in the dead of winter too: it would make more sense to you, if you’d met him.
But anyway it was an evening do, and that left me with one final lunch in Bristol before the year was out. And rather than try the hot new place – assuming I knew where the hot new place was, of course – or one of the Bristol restaurants on my radar like Bank, Native Vine or The Clifton, I decided to go for a safe bet. What can I say: it was the end of the year, my last opportunity to eat on duty in 2024 and, just this once, I wanted a guarantee of what the festive season always promises, comfort and joy. So I chose Bosco Pizzeria, situated near the top of Whiteladies Road, before it meets The Downs.
I first went to Bosco the best part of a decade ago, when it was very much Bristol’s pizza pioneer, and although I hadn’t been back for some time I always had it down as a reliable banker for somewhere good to eat in the city. Since it first opened its fortunes had ebbed and flowed, opening a second branch in Clifton, closing it and reopening it, closing the Whiteladies Road branch due to Covid and then taking a long old time to reopen due to a fire. Other branches in Cheltenham and Bath had followed, and a sister restaurant called Pizzucci offering a more American, less Italian experience down the Gloucester Road.
But I’d always seen it as a sure thing, and a standout even as other pizza restaurants came and went in Bristol. I reckoned it was as good as Flour and Ash – the original one on the Cheltenham Road that Jay Rayner got worked up about that is, not the sanitised relaunched one on Whiteladies Road which I haven’t visited. And for my money it was better than the much-hyped Bertha’s on Wapping Wharf, which wasn’t quite as good as I’d expected it to be. I couldn’t definitively say it was the best pizza in Bristol: after all I don’t live there, and I’m yet to try the likes of Pizzarova or CanCanPizza, but I could say that it took some beating.
And it was a lovely, busy spot the Saturday before Christmas. They’d slightly rejigged it since I was last there, the front section buzzy and full of smaller tables, the one out back made up of booths for larger groups. You could sit up at the bar, which some people were doing, and it had that lovely air of a place where people, like me, were putting their cares to one side for a couple of hours and treating themselves. Christmas decorations were tasteful and muted, wreaths in the window, baubles running along the tops of the banquettes. My wife took a photo of me, sitting there all happy: I liked it enough to use it as a Facebook profile picture.
Bosco’s menu was split into sections – about half a dozen if you count salads, which personally I rarely do. Apart from salads there were cicchetti, a selection of meats and cheeses, plenty of permutations of pizza, a small range of pasta dishes priced as mains and a few bigger dishes (or, as they put it, “large plates”) – ribollita, parmigiana and what have you. It was, I reflected as I tried to make choices, exactly the kind of menu you always hope to see in mainstream Italian chains but never do. It struck me as the sort of place Maidenhead’s Storia was aiming to be. Zoë sipped a very good negroni, I sipped arguably an even better negroni sbagliato and gradually we honed our selection, sequencing them like a mix tape.
The first slight stutter came when we ordered. I said we’d like a couple of cicchetti, then a mixture of meats and cheeses, then our pizzas.
“We’ll bring out all the smaller dishes at the same time, is that okay?” said our server.
Now, I very much wanted to say no, actually, we’re really happy to be here and we’re in no rush so can we have the cicchetti first, then the other bits and then the pizza, like we asked for? And I would have done, but my wife gave me a look which very clearly said could you not be a restaurant reviewer, just this once? so I kept my mouth shut. It hasn’t stopped me mentioning it here, obviously, but it did irk me – what was the rush? It had that feel that Wagamama always has, that the kitchen’s convenience is the primary concern, not your experience.
And it did literally all come out at once, in the space of a couple of minutes, causing not just a sequencing problem but a logistical one too, the table barely big enough to hold five small plates at once. We prioritised the calamari, as the only hot dish we’d asked for, and it was decent but flawed. The thing I’m always watching out for here is the bounce and twang of squid that needed to be fresher, and Bosco avoided that pitfall. But in its place were brittle sticks of squid, almost like Clifton Nik-Naks, which managed to be both pale and overcooked. We squeezed the lemon, dipped in the aioli but neither could totally redeem the raw materials.
The anchovies also misfired. These were billed as coming with salted butter – as they had at Brutto – and focaccia, and almost did but didn’t quite. Instead they came with very good focaccia but swimming in extra virgin, oilier than a Bluesky reply guy, shallot finely diced on top. Is it wrong that I took against them for still having the skin on? Maybe, but it fooled me for a second into thinking these were more like vinegary boquerones than taut, salty anchovies. That wasn’t right – they were intensely salty – but somehow the texture of them didn’t feel quite as I expected.
It was either cognitive dissonance or cognitive disappointment, but I couldn’t work out which. Three anchovies for seven pounds felt a little steep, but I guess you were paying for the focaccia as well. And I liked the focaccia, as I said, and I know it wouldn’t have gone as well with butter as with olive oil. But the whole thing felt a tad disjointed.
Bosco has always excelled for cheese and charcuterie, and the menu gives you an appealing range of both which you can mix and match in the most middle class multibuy of all time. My favourite of the cheeses was the one I neglected to photograph, a gorgeous Robiolo which was soft but not stinky, complex without being overpowering. It was great with the focaccia, which begged the question of how you’d eat it if you hadn’t ordered the anchovies. Almost as good was a Gorgonzola dolce which I liked and Zoë loved – simultaneously sweet and salty and very well balanced.
But again, without the focaccia it might have been messy to eat. I know that this kind of thing – getting in nice cheeses and cured meats, keeping the former well and slicing the latter thinly – is more about buying than cooking, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that many Italian restaurants don’t do this very well. Bosco’s years of experience showed in this respect, in cultivating excellent suppliers, buying the best stuff from them and not mucking it up. It can’t be that easy: if it was, it wouldn’t be so rare.
Oh, and the coppa was divine. Clearly sliced there and then, not exhumed from leaves of plastic, with that dryness and nuttiness that marks out the best specimens. This was the one thing that didn’t need bread at all, it just needed to be picked up and polished off, with or without a soupçon of cheese. The natural order had been restored, and I remembered just how good Bosco can be. We flagged someone down for another couple of sbagliatos: even though our reservation had been for a late lunch, the dining room showed no signs of thinning out.
Maybe the staff had got the message that we weren’t in a rush, or maybe they were just too busy to rush us, but there was a decent interval between our plethora of small plates and the main attraction.
Either way I was reminded, during that time, of lots of things: what a nice room it was, and how my many visits there had all been at different stages in my life, during a decade where almost everything about my life – what I did for a living, who I did it for, where I lived and who I lived there with – had changed, the only constant being this blog. I’d never been to Bosco with Zoë, and it made me happy to share this room with her at the end of a year itself full of changes.
I was also reminded, almost as much, just how nice a well made negroni sbagliato can be, but that’s probably beside the point.
Zoë and I reverted to type in ordering our mains, that comfort and joy thing again. Her pizza was the ventricina, a very Zoë choice with spicy salami, chilli oil and honey. She loved it, as I expected she would, and it showcased what Bosco did really well – an exemplary base, a chewy, bubbled crust with plenty of blistering, a deep tomato sauce, winningly fruity. This was as good an advert for Bosco as you could hope for, and at thirteen-fifty I thought it was solid value, especially benchmarked against restaurants closer to home like Zia Lucia.
That I didn’t enjoy my pizza as much just goes to show that you can get the fundamentals bang on and then fluff it with the whistles and bells. I too had asked for my archetypal pizza preference, sometimes called the Neopolitan and sometimes, as here, the Venetian. Either way, it’s the old anchovy, olive, caper trifecta and it’s always my go to when I visit a pizza place, providing it’s on.
The base was still exemplary, so was the sauce, so what went wrong here? A few things, really. The anchovies were unevenly distributed, Franco Manca style, leaving a reasonable amount of surface area salt-free. And the anchovies (skinless this time, to be fair) were too much fish and not enough salt, although that might have been a personal preference.
And what about the capers? Apparently they were fried in this case, which can work brilliantly – Buon Appetito used to do this – but they seemed anonymous. There weren’t enough of them, and what there were didn’t contribute the acetic sharpness I wanted. This pizza is meant to be all about salt and vinegar, but instead it was more fish and mild disappointment.
Hey ho. It wasn’t a bad pizza, it just wasn’t as good as I knew it could be. The slightly haphazard timing, coupled with our gluttony, meant we ate too much too quickly and were too full for dessert, so we settled up. Our meal, including two negronis apiece and an optional 12.5% service charge, came to just over one hundred and six pounds. I didn’t begrudge that: besides, they had Aesop handwash in their very fetching loos, and that stuff doesn’t pay for itself. We called up an Uber and prepared ourselves to have a few drinks with James and Liz ahead of the official end of the grilling season. Well, maybe after a nap to sleep off some of those carbs.
It was a lovely evening, incidentally. The beers flowed thick and fast – James is the man who has turned his garage into a micropub – and the conversation was enormous fun. We got to bed well after midnight, too tired for the traditional couples debrief. But during the gathering somebody who knows that I write this blog asked me if I’d gone anywhere on duty at lunchtime and I said yes, I’d been to Bosco.
“I hear it’s not as good as it used to be, would you agree with that?” I was asked.
And the binary answer, although the world’s always more complicated than binary answers, is yes, I do agree. On my previous visits, Bosco was the place you wish would open near you, the place that could teach every Italian chain a thing or two. On this visit, although it was still good, it was closer in quality to those chains at their very best. The gap had narrowed, and not because the chains have upped their game. This is the point, often combined with expansion, at which independent restaurants need to take care.
But anyway, on that night – and, writing this now – it didn’t seem to matter quite so much. It was a very agreeable lunch, if not a perfect one, tucked away at the end of the year. If you asked me where to go for a rock solid reliable pizza in Bristol, I would still probably pick Bosco; it’s earned that latitude, because we go way back. And if one opened in Reading, all the Sarv’s Slices and Dough Bros in the RG postcode wouldn’t stop me paying it a more than occasional visit. Next time you’re in Bristol, if you want an absolute banker, I think Bosco is still that.
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Some news for you at the start of 2025: as I mentioned recently, this year the blog will move to more of a subscription model. That will be a gradual change, I imagine, and I’m not sure where it will end up. But the costs of running a restaurant blog have gone up every year, as has the traffic to the blog, so I’ve reached the point where I feel like it’s reasonable to ask readers if they would like to contribute.
I know this is a contentious subject. Everything costs more, everybody has less money and – let’s be honest – we’re used to reading stuff on the internet for nothing. But there’s an increasing trend of writers moving to a subscription-based model, and I can see why. These aren’t people who are sticking four pictures, a Reel and some hashtag-laden word salad on Instagram and describing themselves as bloggers. These are proper writers who think that proper writing should be worth something.
Don’t laugh, but I consider myself in that camp: this is about paying for writing, not for food.
When I mentioned this on social media I got an interesting mixture of responses. Some people were willing to subscribe to ER and pay a small monthly fee to keep the blog going (thank you, if you were one of those people!). More people were happy to subscribe but didn’t want to make a financial contribution. And quite a lot of you wanted the blog to stay on WordPress and remain free of charge.
I understand. Free stuff is great. But this blog’s been free for eleven years, and in that time it’s hopefully entertained some of you on a regular basis. It might have steered you away from awful restaurants, helped you find some great ones or assisted when you’ve planned a city break. Even if you’ve not agreed with me when I’ve reviewed a restaurant, perhaps you’ve enjoyed disagreeing with me. I get that: I enjoy disagreeing with people too.
Some people expressed concerns about having to go elsewhere or sign up to another website or app to read the blog. I completely appreciate that, and I’m very reluctant to leave WordPress, which has been the home of ER since the beginning. Fortunately – and thanks to the reader who pointed me in the right direction – WordPress should have the functionality I need to make the changes I want.
Here’s how it will work – you’ll have the option for a monthly subscription to ER for £3, or a discounted annual subscription at £30. I hope that enough of you will want to support Edible Reading in one of those ways that the blog can cover its costs, and that money might also help me to create additional content (whether that’s features, interviews or something else).
For now, I’ll leave it a few weeks and see how that goes. But in the future, some reviews may well be available to paid subscribers only. Features might be, too. The readers’ lunches, an enormous success since they launched in 2018, remain open to all for the time being but again, they may also become subscriber only at some stage.
A few bits of feedback I received stuck with me. One said “In principle I don’t tend to pay for content on social media”, and I wanted to say something about that.
The promotion I do for my writing – whether it’s on Threads, or Facebook, or Instagram – yes, that’s all social media. But the blog isn’t. The blog is writing, and I do think writing is worth supporting. Just because the likes of Berkshire Live and the Chronicle have devalued that with cut and paste clickbait and websites laden with adverts, doesn’t mean we should all accept the lowest common denominator everywhere (incidentally, if the blog had paid subscribers the first thing I’d do is upgrade the WordPress plan and get rid of the ads – wouldn’t that be nice?)
Someone else said if my motive was to showcase and improve the Reading food scene this was a counterproductive move. I understand, but I don’t think promoting Reading and charging subscription fees are mutually exclusive. Reading UK gets money to do a dreadful job of promoting Reading’s independent scene; I’ve effectively been doing it as voluntary work for over a decade. During that time every single website like this one that somebody has set up has folded. Time to try something different.
I was having a conversation with a friend on WhatsApp and he said he thought this was a fair thing to do. “You’ve done your bit over the last 11 years,” he said, “now it has to work for you.” Then he said something that really hit home.
“The point is that if people don’t pay for stuff then eventually it’ll cease to exist.”
I’ve said this so many times about restaurants – use it or lose it, the time-honoured mantra. And it’s been true time and again: there are wonderful restaurants in Reading, not enough people visit them and then everybody is so shocked when they close. I’d always meant to visit, people say, or I wish I’d gone more often. Why shouldn’t that also be true of this blog?
Of course, if nobody wants to support the blog in this way and all this falls flat on its face it will be back to the drawing board for me. I’ll have to reduce the output on the blog, for starters. It’s currently weekly, but it hasn’t always been: if you cast your mind back to before the pandemic reviews came out fortnightly. Or maybe it will be time to do something completely different.
I know there will be a few people reading this and actively wanting this gamble to fail. It would be nice to show them how wrong they are. But I still think that for a review or feature practically every week, £3 a month – less than the price of a coffee – or £30 a year represents decent value. I hope enough of you turn out to agree with me.
Here goes nothing. Click below if you want to show your support.
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