Restaurant review: Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd

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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.

Gladly, at the start of this year I finally found an accomplice for my review. It was Liz, Reading’s elite level bellringer – her words, not mine – last seen exploring The Cellar with me the night Trump won re-election and the world turned to (even more) shit. I’m beginning to think Liz might be a lucky charm as I’m yet to have a bad meal with her on duty, so I made my way to Good Old Days at the appointed time with high hopes.

I should add, because unlike broadsheet critics I like to offer some practical help, that you can book online through their website, although it’s a little convoluted and you’re never sure it’s actually worked. You then get an email and texts which tell you that if you want to change your booking you have to call their mobile number, because you can’t amend it online. On the Wednesday night when we went, there was one other table with diners, who left shortly after I arrived at seven, and one other table seated that evening. So you may be able to turn up on spec: for some reason the Observer review doesn’t seem to have precipitated a tidal wave of demand.

It is indeed a very basic space, if not necessarily an inhospitable one. With just over a dozen covers, and most of the tables seating four people, it’s compact and resolutely unfancy. The walls were a mixture of municipal white tiling and faux wood panelling with just a few flashes of identity – a handful of framed pictures of dishes on one wall, and a framed copy of Rayner’s review on the other. It meant that he glared balefully down at us during our meal. Like the new President, it’s hard to find a photograph of Rayner where he’s smiling. Maybe he never does, or perhaps he thinks it gives him gravitas. At least the eyes didn’t follow you round the room.

I’d checked in advance and there was no alcohol licence, so I’d brought a bottle of white from home. When I asked we got two very basic tumblers, which did just fine. I was however glad that I’d also brought a corkscrew, because I wasn’t sure we’d otherwise have laid our hands on one. The menu was big – just under a hundred dishes – but somehow managed to feel compact, perhaps because they’d crammed it onto two sides of A4.

By Reading 2025 standards the prices were so reasonable that I wondered if I’d fallen through a timewarp – the vast majority of the dishes cost less than ten pounds, which meant that without an alcohol licence you could eat a lot of food for not much money. Maybe it was predominantly priced for takeaway but, not for the last time that evening, it made me think that Rayner was wrong and that this was a positive argument for bums on seats and eating close to the kitchen.

The menu leaned more Cantonese than Szechuan, so no offal and more of the dishes that, for me, bring back memories of my childhood in Woodley, of weekend treats at Hong Kong Garden in the shopping precinct coupled with the latest release from Blockbuster Video. It evoked those feelings of familiarity and wonder, because when you’re twelve these things are exotic and different, and a pancake with crispy duck is a magical world away from a Findus Crispy Pancake.

“Can you believe I’d never had Chinese food until I lived in China for a year?” said Liz. I knew she’d grown up in Cheltenham but even so, this surprised me; imagine doing it in reverse, having all the authentic stuff and then coming home to the Anglicised version.

We had plenty to natter about, and the wine was very nice, so before we got to haggling over our order we ordered some crispy dumplings with pork and vegetables. These were a neat, compact treat and they made me happy with anticipation for what was to follow – deep-fried, brittle, remarkable easy to pick up with the stainless steel chopsticks and dip in a little pot of sweet chilli sauce. Well, that’s what Liz did anyway, with her far more evolved chopstick skills: I on the other hand tended to drop mine in the sauce and then mount a cack-handed rescue mission.

We spent so long chatting while we ate our dumplings – about our respective Christmases and New Years, about the vicissitudes of Reading Buses which had made getting to the restaurant harder than it needed to be – that it took quite a while before we got down to the serious business of choosing our order. And that’s when it became apparent that Liz and I had certain philosophical differences when it came to food.

Getting to know someone is always a gradual thing; you try to be your best self and promote the version of you that you’d like to be all the time. And then, over successive meetings, you slowly reveal your true nature, if only because it’s too hard not to. What I’ve discovered, going on duty with different dining companions, is that this also happens in restaurants.

On my first meal with Liz we went to The Coriander Club, where we shared a couple of starters but then had our own personal mains. For the follow up we went to The Cellar, very much a starters/mains/desserts model. So it was only on this third meal, at a place where we would order and share several dishes, that I realised I had unwittingly gone to dinner with someone who regarded a plate of broccoli as a feature attraction.

“I have to have the broccoli with garlic sauce” said Liz. And actually, that made sense – this was a woman who had snuck aubergine, somehow, into both of our previous visits to restaurants. I mentally ticked off at least one of the carnivorous delights I’d spotted on the menu.

“And… how do you feel about tofu?”

“Well, it’s not my favourite. I like Jo’s salt and pepper tofu at Kungfu Kitchen, but that’s probably as far as it goes.”

I looked on the menu, which had a very similar dish. Would Liz go for it?

“I’d really like the mapo tofu, if you don’t mind. I have such fond memories of it from China.”

The irony is that I know, rationally, that this is good for me. Because going for dinner with people who eat the same stuff as you is like recruiting in your image – it makes the world very homogeneous, and I’m occasionally conscious that I should introduce more variety into the things I order when I’m reviewing restaurants. I also know that probably, a proportion of you might be reading this and thinking at last, he’s actually going to talk about the kind of things I like. So I accepted my part vegetarian, part-tofu driven meal with good grace. Besides, it had been Liz’s birthday the day before, so I figured she was entitled to call the shots.

I did insist on sweet and sour chicken, though, which I suspect was to Liz what broccoli in garlic sauce would be to me. We placed our order, with a beef and black bean ho fun thrown in, and our server wandered off with the order, came back, and asked me to confirm it. Which I did, absolutely certain that they had captured everything we’d ordered.

The first dishes to arrive were the ones Liz had been craving. I don’t know whether it was the lighting, or the cooking, or the slightly recherché lino on the tables, but everything seemed to have an almost hypersaturated, Martin Parr feel about it. That definitely showed in the broccoli – enormous emerald-green florets, really only just cooked, glazed in a thickened, pungent sauce which coated every irregularity and lurked in a pool at the bottom of the bowl. Dragging a floret through the sauce and eating it I realised that, although I had to unhook my jaw, I was enjoying myself against my better judgement. Liz was beaming.

“This is exactly how I wanted it to be.”

The tofu, on the other hand – I’m not sure you’ll ever get a glowing writeup of a tofu dish from me, and this was not the occasion to change that habit of a lifetime. I’m yet to find anything with tofu in it that isn’t all wobble and no flavour, and although I know people talk about mapo tofu in glowing terms I still don’t understand why. You couldn’t fault the generosity, though. This dish was huge, in the way that things you have to wade through, like bad novels or to do lists at work, so often are.

“This isn’t quite as I expected” said Liz. “It should be much redder, and much hotter.”

And I got that – instead it was a sort of glossy ruddy-brown. And although there was minced pork in it, and little bits of mushroom, nothing really made its presence felt. And yet, as we worked through it I found it exerted a strange kind of hypnotic power. I liked it more and more, appreciated its subtleties more and more.

I remember when I reviewed The Imperial Kitchen there was a suggestion from some people that I just hadn’t “got” Cantonese food, that I had expected the crash-bang-wallop flavours of, say, Kungfu Kitchen and judged it harshly when they never turned up. Well, this may count as personal growth but maybe, just maybe, there’s something to that. I would never have ordered this dish in a million years, but I was perhaps quietly pleased that somebody had.

Now, having said all that I can wax lyrical about the dish I insisted on, because Good Old Days’ sweet and sour chicken made me very happy indeed. It’s hard to explain why it was so good, but I shall try nonetheless.

My memories of this dish, my good ones anyway, are all fuelled entirely by nostalgia. And nostalgia is wonderful, but these things only really taste amazing in the past, in your mind, inextricably linked to who you were back then. If you eat a Wagon Wheel now of course you’ll say they’ve shrunk, which they have, but you’ll also think they’re rubbish. Nice N’ Spicy NikNaks, these days, are neither nice nor spicy. Maybe they never were, but when I was sixteen I thought they were. I thought they were the shit.

Late last year I had a Chinese takeaway from a place near me and I chose sweet and sour chicken. And it was dreadful. All sweet, no sour, chicken smothered in jam and pineapple, a gloopy saccharine monstrosity. And Good Old Days’ rendition was completely unlike that. Beautifully coated chicken – thigh, not breast, in a sauce which looked the same as that but had subtlety and nuance, peppers with crunch, pineapple a welcome surprise.

But the thing is, if I had to guess, the sweet and sour chicken I had from that takeaway in December was probably exactly like the stuff I’d loved as a teenager at suburban Hong Kong Garden. Whereas that dish at Good Old Days tasted how I’d wanted to remember it tasting, even though it probably never had. I’d never eaten the real deal, and Good Old Days served the real deal. The difference wasn’t colossal, and yet it was everything.

I’m also delighted to confirm that this dish had the same effect on Liz that her sodding tofu and broccoli had on me. She liked it in the way she hadn’t expected to, and I was simultaneously delighted to have gained a convert and disappointed that I couldn’t scoff the lot myself. As we ate dishes the other had picked and talked about TV (she loved Taskmaster, I’ve never watched it, I am hooked on The Traitors, she hasn’t seen a minute) I wondered if we were a very middle-class take on the Guardian’s “Dining Across The Divide” feature.

I’d love to tell you about the beef and black bean ho fun, but despite ordering and checking, it wasn’t what we got. First we discovered that they’d brought us a dish that was all beef and no noodles, then we discovered that it wasn’t black bean but black pepper. sauce

I was so taken aback that I didn’t get a photo, and so English that I didn’t say anything about it. But that’s me in general – on a recent holiday we swapped accommodation partway through because we really didn’t like our B&B, but rather than have it out with the owner we waited until he was out, got our luggage, legged it to another hotel and then sent him a long WhatsApp message apologising. It was excruciating; I told people at work that I’d accidentally done an escape room.

Anyway, that’s a round the houses way of saying we ate our beef in black pepper sauce and bloody liked it, because I’m not the strident type. And, again, it had the same subtle potency as Good Old Days’ other dishes – the sauce had a slow and steady depth, where I started out thinking “I wish this was black bean sauce” and ended up thinking “isn’t it nice to try something different?” I wasn’t so convinced by the texture of the beef – more sponge than fibre – but it was still a worthwhile discovery.

It also meant that, because our meal would otherwise have been carb free, we ordered some egg fried rice. Our meal badly needed that to bring it together, and I adored Good Old Days’ egg fried rice – fresh as you like, packed with golden egg and spring onion, a simple restorative pleasure. As with everything else you might associate with takeaway food, this showed that an elevated version did exist.

Again, it made me think that Jay Rayner was wrong – why have something glorious like this and pack it in a foil container, walk home with it or get someone to bring it to your house on a moped? This was how it should be eaten, there and then.

From that point onwards our meal was a companionable delight, spooning the rice into our bowls, deciding which of our mains to top it with and repeating until nearly everything was gone. We gave a thoroughly decent account of ourselves and I thought that this was Good Old Days’ quiet power, that the meal was so much more than the sum of its parts. Taken alone, any dish was decent, combined they made for something special – all humility, no boastfulness.

By the time we’d stopped eating and were ready to leave, a couple of the staff were having their post service meal at the table behind me, and the place was serene. I headed to the Siberian loo out back – disused shower in the corner, banana-shaped wet floor sign blocking it off – and on my way back I saw a table behind the counter with kids at it. We’d kept this family business waiting long enough for the evening to end, so we settled up. All in all, it cost fifty pounds, including tip.

On the walk back across Reading Bridge, Liz and I compared notes. She loved the place, would have rated it in the 9s, wanted to go back with a bigger group. I was more circumspect, thinking that this was one I’d need to reflect on. And as I have, I’ve decided that I liked Good Old Days more than I expected, that something about it transcended the individual dishes, that even when they weren’t quite my thing they deserved respect. There was something intangible about it which I very much liked.

Does that mean it made sense that, just over a year ago, it surprised almost everybody in Reading by finding itself in a national Sunday newspaper? Honestly, no. And honestly, I’m sure Good Old Days was as surprised by that as anybody else. Is Good Old Days Reading’s best restaurant, or Reading’s best Chinese restaurant? Probably not, although that’s not the be-all and end-all. But is it a strangely lovely thing that because a man with a weekly national newspaper column happened to be in Reading recording a radio programme and he decided, maybe perversely, to try a complete curveball Good Old Days found itself known about by thousands of people? Yes, actually. It is.

My face will never glower from the wall of a restaurant, on the byline of a printed, framed review. That’s not my fate. But for what it’s worth, I liked Good Old Days too.

Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd. – 8.2
66 George Street, Reading, RG4 8DH
07840 180080

https://goodolddayshongkongltd.com

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Restaurant review: Bosco Pizzeria, Bristol

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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.

Bosco Pizzeria – 7.6
96 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2QX
0117 9737978

https://www.boscopizzeria.co.uk

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Announcement

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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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Feature: The 2024 Edible Reading Awards

On By ediblereadingIn Features, Uncategorized4 Comments

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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2024: The Year In Review

On By ediblereadingIn Features12 Comments

For the last few years, at this time of year, I’ve been a proper harbinger of doom. Year after year since the pandemic I’ve written my annual round-up saying that although restaurants have dodged the Grim Reaper for 12 months, next year will be when it really starts to bite. It’s got to be a little annual tradition: write the cards, open the doors on the advent calendar, tell anybody who will listen that next year is going to be rather shit. I became, in my way, the Cassandra of Reading’s restaurant scene.

And most recently, pretty much this time last year, I screwed the pooch by saying this:

Fewer restaurants have closed this year than I expected, and I’m impressed that so many are hanging in there. I hope they all have a very busy festive season to keep them going through the drought that is January. And this time next year, having no doubt been proved wrong again, I’ll try to say something different.

Whoops. Because the chickens finally came home to roost in 2024, and it was bleak. Imagine the feelbad factor Reading suffered late last year, when the Grumpy Goat played chicken with its landlord and lost, only stretched out over an entire 365 days, and you get a vague idea of what this year has been like. It’s been brutal – a rate of closures like nothing I’ve seen in 11 years of doing this. It has affected restaurants of every kind – good and bad, indie and chain, at pretty much every price point. Nowhere has felt safe, because nowhere has been safe.

And also, just to front load all the gloom into this piece so that in a little while we can focus on happier things, next year doesn’t promise to be any better. I would be the first person to slag off the previous government and one of the last people to criticise the new government, but a budget that raises the minimum wage, raises employers’ contributions on National Insurance and cuts business rates relief has done nothing to prevent next year being worse for hospitality than this year has been.

Wait until January, when restaurants have passed their peak trading period and face a month of people skint, budgeting or detoxing, and we may see another flurry of announcements. So the first part of this round-up is going to read a bit like the obituaries column. Let’s run through the damage Reading’s suffered this year. Ho ho ho!

2024 was three days old when the Corn Stores announced that it was closing with immediate effect, and that site has been vacant ever since. I’m not sure how big a surprise this was – it never quite impressed with its steaks, its private membership club upstairs seemed to have limited appeal and its attempt during the pandemic to switch to a star-chasing fine dining restaurant was brave but ill-fated. Still, we’ll always have the whole parfait and brioche thing.

January featured some other significant closures too – Revolutions packed up on Station Road that month, finally mothballing one of my most incongruous positive reviews. Excellent Erleigh Road chippy Finn’s also pulled down the shutters that month, although in one of Reading’s more heartening developments it reopened in September under new management, with the same owners as Calcot’s Coriander Club and Avenue Deli.

The first month of the year saw two other closures. One was Woodley’s La’De Kitchen, although it did that weird thing where it closed and then reopened under a different name, Yaprak, still as a Turkish restaurant and apparently under the same ownership. This seems to have been a thing this year, because in June Veeno did something similar, reopening as Vino Vita; originally the menu also seemed indistinguishable from Veeno’s, although it now seems to have changed. Your guess, in both cases, is good as mine.

Finally in January, Smash ‘N’ Grab sold their business and gave up serving impeccable smashed burgers from their little hut on Cemetery Junction. That sale lurched into acrimony almost immediately, with Smash ‘N’ Grab’s owners – never the shy and retiring kind – taking to social media to claim that the new business had ripped off its menu. Things escalated, and people left the new owners one star Google reviews seemingly before a single burger had been served. All that was bad enough, but what really troubled me was the new joint’s name, Cozzy Bites. Did they expect you to turn up in a bikini?

Spring came, and the closures kept coming. I was really sad to see Barista & Beyond throw in the towel in February: I hope their intern Charlie goes on to bigger and better things. March saw us lose CiCi Noodle Bar on Queen Victoria Street and, just round the corner, Coco Di Mama. Two purveyors of carbs, gone in the space of a couple of weeks. Other people were probably sadder about Coco Di Mama than I was: I still remember Berkshire Live getting all excited last year about “Gran Formaggio cheese”, whatever that was, but the reports I heard were iffy at best.

At the end of March we had one of the weirder closures of the year. The Narrowboat, which only itself took over from Bel and the Dragon the previous summer, was no more as Fuller’s decided to use the building for training and development instead. One of Reading’s more distinctive spaces, with a spot by the river, it could have been fantastic but somehow never lived up to its potential. I imagine that also meant the end of its boat slash floating function room, the Majestic Bel, although it will live on in my memory as I use that epithet about certain people all the time.

One of the biggest blows to Reading’s food and drink scene came on April Fool’s Day as Workhouse Coffee left its site on King Street. This one was a huge shock, as Workhouse changed the landscape of Reading’s coffee scene – some would say created it – many years ago. For my part, that’s the last time I give anyone a lifetime achievement award, as it’s clearly a jinx. I was there on its final day, and felt a real sense of grief.

It’s not entirely clear what happened on King Street. The landlord undoubtedly played a part (don’t they always) as there were reports that the site was in quite a state with the landlord unwilling to do work on it. A rather public falling out between owner Greg Costello and his right hand man probably didn’t help matters.

It wasn’t just independent businesses, though, that faced the chop this year. As the proposed development of the Oracle continued to progress, Reading’s chains took advantage of break points in their leases to stop trading. Last year that was Franco Manca and the Real Greek, this year Brown’s followed suit in April and TGI Friday in June. Some people might miss Brown’s, but it’s hard to imagine many tears being shed about TGI Fridays: I still wonder what the black mark was on that pint glass.

TGI’s UK operator went into administration later in the year, but the branch on the Caversham Road roundabout has been saved from the axe, so if you have a hankering for that Legendary Glaze you don’t have to give up hope just yet. That said, even the Chronicle struggled to like the food there.

The saddest closure of 2024, for me, was of course the Lyndhurst. I’ve written about this at length, but Sheldon, Dishon and the team catered my wedding in May as their last booking before closing the pub. I think I probably think about at least one of the pub’s dishes every single week, and look fondly back at the days when I could drop by after work for Korean chicken wings, or karaage, or monkfish tacos, or pork cheeks with plum sauce. It was a wonderful time, a bit of a golden age Reading may never see again.

And because I’m often asked what they’re up to – Dishon went back to Northampton to be with his family and the brilliant staff ended up all over the place: you may see Kushal if you ever eat at Bill’s. As for Sheldon, he is still in Reading and considering his next steps: I need to persuade someone with a kitchen to let him do a pop-up for a readers’ lunch next year. He’s dabbling in cidermaking and has done a charcuterie course, and when I went for a few drinks with him at Park House I learned a couple of things: first, that Sheldon’s fennel salami is easily as good as anything you could buy commercially, and secondly, don’t go drinking with Sheldon on a school night.

Normally I try and do this in chronological order – closures first, then openings – but the Lyndhurst slightly distorted the space-time continuum this year by closing, opening, closing and opening again. I’ve talked about this a little in my review of the Bell earlier in the year, but the pub was under new ownership a week after Sheldon and Dishon left.

In the inimitable words of my wife, the new landlords went from caretakers to undertakers as they put up a menu, took down a menu, got a new chef, lost their new chef within a week, closed multiple times at short notice for undisclosed reasons, went to the local papers multiple times to complain that everybody had it in for them and had a Google review published with video footage of the locals abusing passers-by. It was quite the five months, all told.

They got their marching orders in October (while they were on holiday abroad, if the rumours are to be believed) and a new landlord is now in place, offering food again. The rumours are that although he too is a holding landlord he might quite like to go temp to perm, so to speak. Let’s hope he does, and if he wants someone brilliant to run his refurbished kitchen I know just the person.

The other significant closure over the summer, another especially sad one, was Pepe Sale. It was the first restaurant I ever reviewed, and although it was never entirely the same after Toni and Samantha sold the business – more Italian, less Sardinian – it was still a real wrench to see the lights off and unread mail piling up the other side of the door. It might well also have been influenced by likely redevelopment of the Broad Street Mall but it meant the demise of one of central Reading’s longest-running restaurants. I will always remember my Saturday nights there, in its heyday, delighted because I’d managed to snag a portion of their famous suckling pig.

If the pace slowed in the second half of the year, there were still some significant farewells over the last six months. Doner & Gyros, though, was not one of them. It closed in July without ever, as far as I could tell, explaining what the difference between doner and gyros really was; given that the menu included such joys as a “Mexican doner” and a “Chicago gyro” I have a feeling they were just making it up as they went along.

A new, equally purgatorial looking restaurant, Mr T, is there now: place your bets on whether I wind up telling you, this time next year, that it has closed.

August also saw the demise of Valpy Street, although – as I discovered when I visited its replacement The Cellar last month – this was more a change of name than a wholesale change of identity. Something to do with shonky accountants apparently, but The Cellar seemed to be doing very nicely in the same spot with the same owner, the same chef and most of the same staff. A bit like that time street food traders Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine rebranded as the Bissy Tree and nobody was any the wiser.

In September we also lost Bolan Thai on the top floor of Sykes’ Paradise and Adda Hut out in Woodley. I was sad about Adda Hut, because it was rare that Woodley gets a restaurant worth hopping on the bus for, and to lose two – Adda Hut and La’De Kitchen – in the same year felt like exceptionally bad luck. It’s a shame I didn’t get to try their mutton chops one last time.

And last of all, at the end of August, another era came to an end as l’Ortolan ceased trading. For a long time it was described as Reading’s only Michelin starred restaurant, although I was never convinced it really classed as being in Reading. And then it lost its star a couple of years ago, although people kept talking about it as if it still had one. But rightly or wrongly it was still considered to be the closest special occasion restaurant we had.

I was never completely amazed by it, and it always felt to me like people’s idea of fine dining twenty years ago rather than now. Even so, that site was once home to Nico Ladenis, and John Burton-Race, and all that is now firmly consigned to history; appropriately, l’Ortolan is that rare restaurant with a Wikipedia page, albeit not one that’s been kept up to date.

That was a pretty cheerless roll call, wasn’t it? But amidst all of that we did still see some new places opening, although nowhere near as many. Apart from the ones I’ve already mentioned, the three biggest and most significant, all in the town centre, had money thrown at them. First in April, we got the first branch of London pizza chain Zia Lucia outside the capital. It came with glowing references, taking over the old ASK site on St Mary’s Butts.

Then the following month Siren Craft opened its town centre taproom on Friar Street, in a storm of influencer hype. And completing the trilogy, Reading welcomed Heartwood Inns’ revamped Rising Sun on Castle Street in June. Again, considerable amounts of cash had been splashed on a very attractive refurb, creating a town centre beer garden to rival the likes of the Allied Arms.

The only problem with all three was how underwhelming they were. Zia Lucia was inoffensive, but maybe not good enough to compete with the likes of independent Sarv’s Slice on the other side of the Broad Street Mall. The Rising Sun was the kind of bland, safe fare you can rely on if you want to take family somewhere that looks fancy, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that you’d be better off at either London Street Brasserie or, for as long as it’s still there, Côte.

And Siren RG1 was such a disappointment – a perfect opportunity to offer a great urban taproom with beer snacks to match, but instead it took the safe option of offering pretty insipid burgers. It’s such a shame they didn’t snap Sheldon up when he left the Lyndhurst. In fairness, Siren’s owner responded to my review on the blog and I suspect they will turn it around, but I still found it entertaining when Siren RG1’s head chef responded to one of my Facebook posts about the Chronicle saying that their stuff was, and I quote, “better than somebody who has absolutely no understanding of hospitality or food doing reviews”. At least I too now know what it feels like to be savaged by the critics.

Even if Reading’s big name signings struggled to impress this year, it doesn’t mean it was all bad. Because there was all sorts of interesting stuff going on – as it often does – in the fringes. In March, Dough Bros started serving pizza on an unfashionable spot on Northumberland Avenue to absolutely no fanfare at all.

They end 2024 as one of the year’s biggest success stories, selling out every night, packed on weekday evenings and acclaimed by pretty much the whole of Reading, from the local paper to local businesses, from gurning influencers to yours truly. Here’s hoping they go from strength to strength next year (and finally sell that calzone I’ve been imploring them to put on the menu).

The same month, West Reading got its own spot of unshowy brilliance as Time 4 Coffee, a Portuguese café that wasn’t run by Portuguese owners, closed and was replaced with DeNata Coffee & Co, a Portuguese cafe that was. It was one of my favourite finds of the year, and a trip to Lisbon earlier in the month revealed that if DeNata’s egg custard tarts couldn’t match the very best that city had to offer, they were a lot closer to that standard than you might think. I plan to eat more of them next year.

Cafés seemed to be the order of the day as Whitley also gained Zotta Deli, just around the corner from 2023’s highlight Minas Café. My visit suggested there was plenty of potential there (and my mole Elizabeth tells me she has since spoken to Paolo who is actively working on the lasagne, which hopefully doesn’t mean that he’ll spit in mine next time round).

We also finally, in September, got the much vaunted sister business of Kungfu Kitchen, which had moved from its old spot on Christchurch Road to a bigger site a few doors down that used to be the home of Sizzling Spice. To say it was gradual would be to put it lightly, but I suspect everything took longer than Jo and Steven wanted it to.

The move happened in June, and then in September the new venue (which is at their old site, keep up) opened as Kungfu Café, offering dim sum, roasted meats, hotpot and – because why not? – full English breakfast, eggs Benedict and pancakes. Then to complete the transition, at some point between late October and early December, it changed its name to Happy Panda Café. Jo’s plans for world domination, however, continue unabated, and when she finally converts the first floor of Kungfu Kitchen to a karaoke space we should all be very afraid.

Would you have bet on one of Reading’s most interesting new businesses this year opening in the Oracle, of all places? Me neither, but that’s what happened in October. The Oracle isn’t usually a hotbed for independent restaurants, unless you count the fever dream that was Lemoni, but Crêperie Les Dous Sourire, which has taken over from the Starbucks next to Vue, is an idiosyncratic enough beast to merit investigation early next year.

It prompted the usual dreary observations from the people who make the Chronicle‘s comments section such a Petri dish, moaning about the price of pancakes. But a proper crêperie in the Breton style, something to aspire to Paris’ magnificent Breizh Café, would be a wonderful thing, and it’s worth noting that Les Dous Sourire also does charcuterie and wine in the evenings. It might be just the thing to keep winter at bay.

There’s just time to mention a few other new businesses that opened in 2024, and a remarkable resurrection. Caversham got a brace of new places, with new bakery – and vowel-free zone – BKRY opening in September and its newest addition, Spill Bar, beginning to trade this month. There’s never been a better time to live in Caversham, and that’s before the news that Alto Lounge is doubling in size and has been given permission to serve booze until midnight. Why don’t Caversham residents talk more about how great it is? It’s a puzzler.

But also, after closing for renovations for – this is no exaggeration – over a year, Oxford Road’s Japanese restaurant Oishi came back from the dead in October. The excitement in that little part of the world was palpable, but the ripples spread across town because of the wider message, that all is not always lost, even when it seems like it is. Not every “temporarily closed” on Google becomes a “permanently closed”, and that’s a nice positive note in what has been such a challenging year.

Finally, and this one seems to have gone to press since I started writing this, Indian restaurant Tanatan has taken over Clay’s old home on London Street. I know this for a fact because Google tells me it’s open and there’s already a solitary five star Google review with a picture of balloons out front. They seem to have kept the orange colour scheme, so good luck to anybody taking photos of the food in there.

And that brings us to next year. We already have businesses queuing up to open in town, and knowing my luck more of them will announce their opening between now and this piece going to print. Lincoln Coffee is taking over Workhouse Coffee’s old spot on King Street, to which I can only say that I hope they’ve done their due diligence.

2025 should be the year we finally get a restaurant, Rosa’s Thai, on the ground floor of Jackson’s Corner, a building which is now owned by noted local philanthropist John Sykes. There has been talk of restaurants in that spot for many, many years and as the saga has dragged on the candidates to fill that space have got less and less impressive, and now it’s ho-hum Rosa’s Thai.

Oh well, leave it another year and maybe we’d have got something worse like a Cosy Club. Actually, scratch that: we’re getting one of those anyway, where Lakeland used to be on the edge of the Oracle.

We should also see the replacement for the Grumpy Goat, a brand new restaurant called Zi Tore promising Italian street food; let’s hope that goes better than the last place to try that. On the one hand, one of the three owners has cooked at Nino’s, Spitiko, Zizzi and Market House. On the other hand, another of them has run a few mobile phone businesses on Smelly Alley, so it’s safe to say that this one could go either way.

Finally, as Station Hill opens up – offering much easier pedestrian access to Siren RG1 into the bargain – we should get a couple of new food and drink businesses there too. I’m reliably informed that we can expect another restaurant from the team behind Coconut and Osaka, which is itself good news and shows a creditable commitment to picking indies.

But perhaps more significantly I’m also told we are getting a branch of Notes, the Covent Garden coffee outpost which offers wine and small plates in the evening. If this happens – and all those businesses that never came to Jackson’s Corner have taught me not to count my chickens – it would be a very interesting development and a challenge to lots of cafes and bars in town. I’ve always enjoyed the Notes on St Martin’s Lane, so I’ll be watching with interest. Besides, a cafe opening on the ground floor of a brand new development: what can possibly go wrong?

The irony about it being such a tricky year for local businesses is that, on a personal level, it’s been a fantastic year for the blog. It was the year I clocked up what felt like more Reading reviews and plenty more from elsewhere, especially London, and the year that four of the most successful pieces I published were features, whether that’s on how to avoid the big chains, the very best things about Reading, or guides to the great beer cities of Belgium or the sunniest city in Europe. I know some of you read all of the posts and some of you are only really interested of reviews of places in Reading, but whichever camp you fall into I appreciate you reading this year.

I don’t generally talk about traffic because it’s a little vulgar, the blog equivalent of talking about salary. But this year has broken all records, as did the year before and the year before that. This year, the scale of that has taken me aback, with almost twice as many people reading as in 2023. So as is traditional, I do have to say a massive thank you to everybody who reads, comments, shares or even sends a link to a friend with a message saying “why is he such a wanker?”. They all count, and everything that puts my writing in front of more people is hugely appreciated by me.

This is also the year when I widened my list of reviewing companions, and I’m very grateful to everybody who answered that call, whether it was my old friend Jerry, my very good friend Graeme (who suffered terribly for my art), or my younger, cooler Canadian cousin. Or newer friends like elite level campanologist Liz, poet Katie and Paul, the lovely teacher who endured my company at Vegivores with only a small amount of obvious bafflement. Having people to come out and review restaurants with me enables me to keep the blog going – it would be a bit boring if it was just me dining on my tod all the time – so it makes a huge difference.

And speaking of not dining alone, I’m also grateful to everybody who came to an ER readers’ lunch this year, and apologetic to anybody I wasn’t able to fit in. Every time I have one I’m reminded that I’m incredibly lucky to have such brilliant readers, and I always enjoy seeing them realise how much they have in common, making friends and discovering connections. The next one is already in the diary for next year and, like a concert promoter, I’ve had to add an extra date due to exceptional demand.

Finally of course, I have to thank my wife Zoë, who for over six years has been my number one dining companion and without whom this blog wouldn’t still be going. She has to endure every review before you get to read it, she’s still usually the one eating the food, and she’s also the person who tells me on a regular basis that I can’t write X, that putting Y in is unnecessary or that saying Z is going too far (which she’s also done with this piece, believe it or not).

However iffy a year is, if at some point during that year you get hitched to your emotional forever home, it’s really hard to have many complaints. I certainly don’t.

Next year I will need to make some decisions about the blog, as I’ve said a few times recently on social media. Money is tight for everybody, and that includes me, and reviewing a new place every week at my own cost has been a brilliant experience but maybe isn’t a sustainable one in 2025. I don’t want to go down the route of taking ads or sponsorship, or accepting freebies from restaurants, so I will be taking some of the festive season to think about moving to Substack and giving people the option of subscribing and, if they want to, contributing via subscription fees.

I don’t know yet what that means in terms of whether parts of the blog will only be available to paid subscribers, whether I offer other things to paid subscribers – like readers’ events, be they lunches or socials – or whether I simply continue to offer the blog for free but reduce my output to fortnightly. Plenty for me to think about, and maybe stuff for you to think about too.

I’ve agonised about this for some time, because it feels like getting out a begging bowl. But then I read something – on Reddit, believe it or not – that said that begging was the wrong analogy. The more accurate comparison, somebody said, would be with busking, and when I read that I got it. I’ve been busking for eleven years, and in all that time I’ve given away all of my writing for nothing and have never taken a freebie in return for coverage.

Hopefully I’ve given you some entertainment, I’ve saved you some money on bad food and, if I’ve done my job properly, I’ve steered you towards spending it at places which deserve it, and which have given you great meals and memories as a result. Put that way, I feel like maybe it is the time to ask for something in return. Tell me how wrong and tin-eared I am in the comments: I can take it.

All of that’s for the future, though. For now, you get one more post before the end of the year, when I announce the winners of the 2024 ER Awards. It’s one last opportunity to celebrate the high points of a year which has been quite unlike any other, exactly the year I thought we’d have in 2021, 2022 and 2023 but not in 2024.

But, for now at least, thank you for sitting through all this, and I hope you have a wonderful Christmas however you choose to spend it – with family, with friends, alone, at home or at work. And if you don’t celebrate it at all, I hope you enjoy some peace and quiet and good food and drink. One last tip: if you want good food, don’t want to cook and want a day that is somehow un-Christmassy, I’m reliably informed by my family that Madras Flavours is open on the 25th and serving up dosas, just like any other day. Food for thought, if you want an escape from turkey and the King’s speech.

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