As of October 2024 Filter Coffee House has changed its interior layout and so is now takeaway only.
Filter Coffee House, a tiny café on Castle Street offering authentic South Indian coffee, opened last August. It occupies a unit which as far as I can remember used to be home to a very small, rather unsuccessful produce store by the people behind Tamp Culture (remember them?). I found myself stopping in last year a couple of weeks after Filter Coffee House opened and, slightly bending my usual rule to wait a month, I talked about it on social media.
I couldn’t help it. I waxed lyrical on Instagram about their coffee and, in particular, their banana bun, a confection quite unlike anything I’d ever eaten before. Not quite sweet, not quite savoury but glazed, complex and moreish, it was not the kind of thing you eat and forget. Quite the contrary: you want to tell the world about it. I loved it so much that when I put together my list of Reading’s 50 best dishes last September, as part of the blog’s 10th birthday celebrations, I snuck it in at number 47. I called it a little miracle.
Maybe I was jumping the gun but I had a feeling it was going to be huge, and I wanted my admiration of that banana bun to be a matter of public record as soon as possible. Because there are few four word combinations in the English language quite as satisfying, if you ask me, as I told you so.
Anyway, the amount of praise that bun has garnered on social media since has borne out my hunch. But not only that, if you follow Filter Coffee House’s hugely winning Instagram feed you’ll see that they’ve really flourished in the last five months. The month after they opened they teamed up with nearby Rise to expand their range of baked goods. In October they introduced a menu of Saturday specials, and in November they brought in a sandwich menu.
In December, naturally, there was a Christmas menu – the “Mistle-Toast” is still available, if you’re tempted – and now Filter Coffee House also stocks goodies by Cocolico, Reading’s vegan pâtissière. The overall picture is one of constant forward movement and innovation, and it shows no signs of stopping: last Sunday, for the first time, they had a stall at Caversham’s Artisan Market.
And yet, shamefully, with one thing and another I had not been back since that first visit back in August. Of all the places I’d neglected in the latter half of 2023, sorting this one was right at the top of my list. So last Saturday, lured by that specials menu and fresh from the elation of having bought our wedding rings in town, Zoë and I sauntered over, keen to see how things had progressed.
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This guide has been extensively overhauled and updated as the result of another very happy and enjoyable visit to Málaga in March 2026, in which I revisited many of my old favourites but managed to find new candidates for you to eat and drink at. In most cases the text is either new or updated, but where it dates from my 2023 visit I have tried to make that clear. I hope you enjoy the guide.
Of all the city guides I’ve written since I put together a guide to Ghent back in 2018, the most popular have been the ones I’ve written on Málaga. The second edition of my Málaga guide, published in 2021, has had more page hits by far than any of my other city guides and is surprisingly evergreen, with more people reading it last year than the year before, or the year before that. I’ve had far more messages about it than I could ever have expected, often from readers on holiday literally working their way through it. It’s even been cited by other bloggers putting together their own highlights of the city.
By way of illustration, even on my trip to Málaga at the start of December 2023 one of my Instagram followers was in the city at the same time as me; I sent her some recommendations, and she had a fantastic dinner at Uvedoble. A couple of weeks before that, a regular reader sent me a picture of his first caña at Meson Iberico, having already told me that he’d checked out three more venues from my city guide. “The omnivore can’t go far wrong in a country where dried ham is used as a seasoning” read another message, accompanied by a picture of a plate of artichokes strewn with matchsticks of jamon. He has a point.
So why am I updating the guide now? A few reasons, really. One is that my latest visit managed to check in on most of my old favourites to establish that they are still standout options, but also gave me a chance to explore new discoveries which merit a mention. In addition, Málaga’s coffee scene seems to have expanded further in the last two years – with some venues expanding or relocating.
The other reason is a firmly-held belief that Málaga is, as a destination, growing and growing in popularity and feels, to me at least, like a city whose time has come. I have been visiting it for seven years and in that time I’ve perceived a real shift – the days when people would get off the plane and immediately catch a train west down the coast without ever troubling the city seem to be coming to an end. Increasingly I am aware of people selecting it as a destination and falling under its spell.
And it really isn’t hard to see why. It is Europe’s sunniest city, it’s temperate to visit even in the winter months, it has Moorish architecture, an incredible food market, art gallery after art gallery – what other city can boast the twin artistic patrons of Picasso and Antonio Banderas – a bustling port, a gorgeous and eccentric cathedral and, of course, a beach. And that’s before we get to the food: Málaga may not have the free tapas on offer in Granada, further north, but it makes up for that with many great and imaginative restaurants. Tapas is easy to find, and invariably good, but there’s more to Málaga than tapas. Hopefully this guide goes some way to showcasing that, but even so it still scratches the surface of one of my very favourite places.
Where to eat
1. Mesón Ibérico
Mesón Ibérico is my single favourite spot in Málaga to eat and if you could teleport me to any restaurant in the world tonight for dinner, there’s a better than evens chance that I’d pick it. Not just any place though: you go through the front door and on the left are all the conventional tables, with table service, for bigger groups. But no – the place to be, the reason I queue outside ahead of its 8.30pm opening time (with many other people) is for prized seats at the bar. There, with crowds behind you and all the cheffing and action ahead, you have one of the best spots in the world.
It’s such an immersive, brilliant experience that it would be worth doing even if the food was just okay. But it’s a million times better than that. The very best ham, thinly sliced, the fat liquefying on the tongue. A bed of grilled mushrooms scattered with more ham – that ham as a seasoning again – and thick, pink prawns, the perfect dish to forage from. Skewers of tender, spiced lamb with unimprovable skinny chips. Rich, buttery tuna belly fresh off the plancha dressed with lemon and a salad studded with sweet slices of fried garlic. I’m not sure Mesón Ibérico knows how to serve a bad dish: if they do, it’s not one I’ve ever ordered.
Towards the end of one meal there, I saw one of the men behind the bar, with great solemnity and ceremony, preparing a dish I wish I’d ordered. First he expertly chopped an enormous, bulbous tomato into chunks. Then he opened a jar of high grade Ortiz tuna, easing out the pieces and resting them on the tomato. He anointed the whole lot with good quality extra virgin olive oil, for about a full minute after the point where I thought surely he’ll stop now. Then he sprinkled salt, again for longer than I expected. When the dish was served up to some lucky diners I was tempted to applaud. Naturally, the next time I went I ate it.
I have introduced a lot of people, I think, to the magnificent spectacle and experience of Mesón Ibérico, and nobody has ever been disappointed. On my 2026 visit to Málaga one of my readers, a lovely chap called Alun who loved it so much he went three times in two days, messaged me to warn me that the queues were starting earlier and getting longer, and he was worried that I might miss out as he had, once. I took my place outside at 8pm – Zoë and I were third and fourth in the queue, behind a devotee from Austria and his friend – and I sent Alun a picture to reassure him.
It was every bit as brilliant as I remembered and hurtling through the greatest hits, superb bottle of red on the go, chatting with our outstanding server, shaved of head and resplendent of beard like a Spanish reboot of Spirited Away’s Kamaji, I decided there was nowhere better to eat in the whole world. Or not that I’d been to, anyway. So Zoë and I resolved to sack off our plans for the following evening and go to Meson Iberico two nights running.
On the second day we were at the front of the queue, took the same seats as before and there was one rule: we couldn’t order any of the same dishes as the previous night. So our first meal there was meat-heavy, with migas, breadcrumbs rich with pork fat, thin and lacy tortillitas de camarones, fat slices of mushroom from the plancha, topped with a fried egg. And our second was more from the sea with salt cod and cuttlefish croquetas, gambas pil-pil, cubes of fried salt cod, fatty tuna belly, a belting bottle of albariño.
I rarely eat in the same place twice on a holiday, and never on two successive nights, but the magic of Mesón Ibérico is that I was tempted to make my way there on a third, and a fourth. Of course, if I’d done that this might not be much of a guide, but I would have had a wonderful time.
The week after my trip to Málaga, a reader of mine was in the city for work, with one evening free to eat wherever she liked. I recommended standing outside Mesón Ibérico around 8pm, and although she sailed close to the wind and turned up just after a crowd descended on the queue she secured a fabled spot. “It’s amazing here!” was her verdict.”I don’t think I’ve eaten anywhere that had the same buzz and atmosphere.” Reading her excited messages – and gawping at photos of her food – brought me almost as much enjoyment as eating there had.
If Meson Iberico is my favourite place in Málaga, just about, I suspect that Gastroteca Can Emma, a little restaurant close to Malagueta beach, might be Zoë’s. It looks nondescript from outside, on a little side street off the main drag, but it happens to do properly unbeatable food. On previous visits I’ve been quite transfixed by their miniature croquetas, like the best Wotsits in the world, made out of real cheese. I have nearly always ordered one of the three – yes, three – mini hamburgers on the menu. And I always make a beeline for the arroz mare y monte – not quite a paella, per se, but a pan full of salty, savoury rice with prawns, squid, pork and a big pot of aioli on the side. I’ve almost never gone and not ordered it: it really is amazing.
However when I made a lunchtime visit there in 2023 I discovered that the kitchen’s talents extended far beyond that. Bao with cochinita pibil were a beautiful surprise and, better still, they served some of the best gyoza I’ve ever eaten – packed with prawns and glazed in a positively compelling, sticky sauce. I still had the arroz though, because if I hadn’t I would have regretted it. But, unusually for me, I went to Can Emma twice on my that visit to Málaga. The second trip, an evening visit, was with my dear friend Jerry and five of his closest friends to celebrate his seventieth birthday.
It was a happy accident – his first night in the city was our last night there and so I took it upon myself to find the perfect spot for the occasion. And Can Emma didn’t let me down, catering effortlessly for the vegetarian in our midst, keeping the wine flowing and even taking some photos of the group of us. On that visit I added sweetbreads to the list of things Gastroteca Can Emma did well and I opted for a different main course, secreta iberica with mango chutney. It was gorgeous, but I’m glad I’d already had the arroz that week. Jerry ordered the legendary arroz, though, and loved it. Happy birthday to him.
Although I loved having dinner there, there’s something about having a long lunch there with a crisp bottle of white which makes a random Wednesday into the best day of the week, so in 2026 I returned to do exactly that, sitting in their little gazebo out front and overjoyed to be reunited with one of my very favourite restaurants.
I’d like to say that we struck out into the undiscovered outer reaches of the menu, but we had the croquetas, we had the gyoza and, although I did branch out by trying crispy swirls of torreznos – the world’s best Frazzles made out of actual bacon – and a beautiful plate of confit leeks topped with tuna belly I did still finish on that arroz. Can you blame me? I only get to eat there every few years, after all.
Gastroteca Can Emma Calle Ruiz Blaser, 2
3. Mi Niña Lola
Back in 2019 I took a solo trip to Málaga and had a wonderful lunch on a hillside, on the route up to the Gibralfaro, Malaga’s fourteenth century fortress. It was a gorgeous restaurant called El Ambigu de la Coracha, and I always planned to return, so I was very sad to discover that it had closed. I was far happier, planning my return in 2026, to discover that a new restaurant, Mi Niña Lola, had taken over the space, so I made a lunch reservation. And I was happier still when I had lunch there with Zoë and discovered that, if anything, it was an even better restaurant than its predecessor.
The room is stylish and airy, the views beautiful – especially if you eat al fresco – and the service charming, warm and perfectly bilingual. But the food is what really impressed me. The menu takes a sort of modular approach, inviting you to build your own tasting menu through a combination of snacks, smaller and bigger plates and desserts and I would say everything is on the neater, more pristine side but that doesn’t stop it putting together some gorgeous and surprising combinations.
For me that meant a dogfish buñuelo – an ethereally light savoury doughnut – crowned with a miso mayo and bonito flakes which was deeply impressive, followed by cured bream served with an arresting green tomato gazpacho. It also meant some extraordinarily good beef with a sticky moscatel reduction, truffle and a complex purée of celery and plum. And it meant a gorgeous mango, mint and yuzu confection for dessert.
And what all that means is that I hope it’s still there next time I return to Málaga, so I can go there for dinner, watch the sunset and order even more courses.
I first visited Casa Lola in 2016 on my first trip to Málaga and since then it has grown like Topsy with multiple branches, including two on opposite sides of Plaza de Uncibay, and another set of restaurants called Pez Lola. But my heart belongs to the original branch on Calle Granada, a brilliantly buzzy taberna which is often full at lunchtime very shortly after opening.
It has become a tradition for me to go there on every trip, usually at the start of my first day in the city, and invariably I order some beautiful ham and a cold vermouth (they do one, chispazo, with Coke which I like even though I probably shouldn’t) and a selection of pintxos topped with prawns, salt cod or morcilla. But I also make sure I order the chicharrones fritos, cubes of deep fried pork belly which are simply a plate of salty heaven. They also do, to my surprise, some of the best croquetas I’ve had on any trip.
On my 2026 visit, nearly 10 years after I first ate there, I finally did something I’ve never done before at Casa Lola – I ate outside. It was quite educational: when you eat inside you’re insulated from the sheer size and persistence of the queue to get a table. And yet I know that when I go back, probably on my first afternoon, I will be in that queue again, the anticipation of the chispazo and chicharrones so strong that I can already almost taste them.
I visited Vertical, a natural wine bar in the old city, back in 2023 and I really liked it. I drank some lovely wine by the glass, I ate beef croquetas, tomato tartare and a pinsa Romana with gorgonzola and guanciale and I bought a couple of bottles of sticky ambrosia to take home, which I packed in my suitcase with particular care.
In the run up to my 2026 visit I heard various things to the effect that Vertical had opened a second branch, or possibly moved, it wasn’t entirely clear which at first. It seems in fact that they’ve relocated to a site closer to the historic centre and the Plaza de la Constituciòn. But, having had a brilliant evening there on my most recent visit, it seems more has changed than just the location.
The previous site had more inside space and less outside space, the new one focuses more, it seemed to me, on a little dining room where everyone sits communally at an extremely striking red-tiled horseshoe-shaped bar. And the experience feels considerably more bespoke and high end than it did in their old home. There’s still a menu of smaller and larger plates, but everything is expertly curated by the man behind the bar – you tell him what kind of wine you’d like with each thing you eat and, glass by glass, he gives you brilliant options and takes you further and further down the rabbit hole.
We ate superbly, feasting on knockout cured salmon and tuna tartare, shatter-crusted mollejas packed with cheese and sobrasada, the most delectable roasted leeks in a sweet but savoury almond sauce. It is, frustratingly, the Málaga restaurant where I seem to have the least photographs of my food, because I was so enamoured with the experience that, for an evening, I forgot that I would eventually be writing it up.
The problem with a meal like that, where you’re not picking from a wine list, is that you don’t really know how much your bill is going to wind up being. But the two of us were there for two and a half hours, eating and drinking, all that food and seven glasses of wine apiece, and it set us back about £170. When we went there in 2023 it cost about the same, and I’m sure we had less to drink. Would that everything in life was as inflation-proof as Vertical.
But the communal spirit at Vertical was just as lovely. Everybody around that bar felt like they were joined in some happy coincidence, ordering dishes because we saw them turn up somewhere on the horseshoe, enjoying superb wine recommendations that were never the same as our neighbours’, even when we were eating the same dishes. That was virtuoso service and no mistake. The Dutch couple along from us ordered croquetas, boasting that there was no way they could beat their beloved bitterballen. First they ate the croquetas. Then they ate their words.
Since this entry was written in 2023, Palodu has won a Michelin star – quite right, too.
Most of my meals, on my 2023 trip, were emphatically casual dining. That’s not to say that the flavours weren’t great or the presentation, in places, beautiful, but it does mark out Palodu, a recommendation from one of my Spanish followers on Instagram, as a very different proposition. Make no mistake, Palodu is aiming for a Michelin star and everything about it points to that. The room is hushed and stylish, the tables big and beautifully spaced. The service is attentive, the ratio of staff to diners close to one to one. From our table, Zoë could see the open kitchen and watch the ceremony of dishes being painstakingly prepared and plated: Palodu is a plates with tweezers kind of a restaurant.
That’s not normally my cup of tea – I like a meal like that a couple of times a year – but Palodu was brilliant at it and I’m so glad I picked it. Across fifteen courses, including snacks to start and petits fours to finish, we were treated to an array of techniques and combinations from a kitchen absolutely at the top of its game. I took photos but not notes, and for once I suspended my critical faculties and just immersed myself in the experience. It was a wonderful fever dream of food – of fish precisely and perfectly cooked, of tiny lamb meatballs in a terrific sauce, of squid cooked simply and presented with a rich slick of sauce and translucent slices of mushroom.
And the wine pairings (yes, it was a splurge) were phenomenal including, for one course, a 1981 Riesling extracted by Coravin which was one of those wines you only encounter a couple of times in your life. Almost as good as the local Moscatel that accompanied our two desserts – I loved it so much that I was delighted to find it on sale, a few days later, at Vertical, the previous entry on the list. We bought two bottles for the journey home, and packed them even more carefully than usual.
I think you would struggle to find a guide to Málaga anywhere on line that doesn’t tell you to eat at Uvedoble.
Mine have historically been no exception, and prior to this edition it was always number 1 on the list, the first name on the team sheet. I’ve been going for 10 years during which time its popularity has grown, it’s moved round the corner to bigger premises and embraced online booking. In 2021 I said it was the single best place to eat I’ve found in Málaga, in 2023 I said it might be the city’s cleverest tapas joint.
And yet on this visit I didn’t love it anywhere near so much, cementing some nagging doubts I had back in 2023. The experience was more brisk, a feeling of being processed rather than served. Some of the dishes are still stone cold crowd pleasers, like the little brioches packed with suckling pig with their caramelised brûlée top or the mini burgers laced with foie. You can’t go wrong ordering either of those, I maintain that.
But the rest of the meal didn’t live up to that. The octopus roll felt messy and perfunctory, the nest of squid ink fideua padded out, stingy on both the squid and the aioli. How had one of my favourite things to eat, ever, become a slog? And the boneless suckling lamb, always a beautiful cylinder of shredded heaven, was almost a flabby parody of itself, served on a drab gravel of couscous that could have come out of a packet.
Everyone has an off night, and god knows I’ve had enough in my time. If you’d never been to Uvedoble before, and you booked it while on a holiday to Málaga, you might come away as excited as I was in 2016. I hope that my response to it this year was just feeling jaded, but I fear not: I think a combination of stasis and believing its own hype might be at play now. I came away wishing I’d gone for the treble at Mesón Ibérico.
La Cosmo used to be the more accessible sibling restaurant to La Cosmopolita, which I loved but which closed in October 2025. I’m not sure why La Cosmopolita shut its doors after 15 years while La Cosmo remains as chef Dani Carnero’s non-starred outpost in the city (he also has Kaleja, which I am yet to visit). Perhaps its Bib Gourmand from Michelin holds the answer to that question.
It is smaller and more casual than La Cosmopolita was, the furniture more modern and more clinical. But all that said it is a really lovely place to eat, even if I maybe liked its departed relative slightly better. The menu is structured as starters/mains/desserts but it turns out that they expect you to share everything you order unless you tell them differently, which can make things tricky if one of you – hypothetically speaking, of course – is set on enjoying a dish all to themselves.
That’s especially challenging if you have a partner – hypothetically speaking still, of course – who has a tendency to order far better than you. Never mind. So I can tell you that Zoë’s leeks carbonara with cured egg yolk were a dizzyingly good piece of work, and so was her sirloin, super-tender cubes of beef dotted with baked potato in a surprisingly arty plate of food. I had to settle for an only slightly less excellent take on ensaladilla rusa with hake and stellar extra virgin olive oil and duck breast with a deep, if incongruous, barbecue sauce.
We both, however, ordered La Cosmo’s gilda, widely thought to be a must-order, which adds tuna belly and confit tomatoes to a tried and tested formula. It is indeed a standout – a 7 Euro standout, but a standout nonetheless.
Base9 is in a more residential part of Málaga, not far from the train station or, more importantly, its enormous and very appealing branch of department store El Corte Inglés (the top floor is a huge deli and food hall – I picked up some terrific dessert wine there, along with some melatonin from the pharmacy in the basement). Base9 has been going about three years and already has a Bib Gourmand, and based on my visit that’s no surprise.
It’s actually quite a small restaurant with bare brick walls and a semi-exposed kitchen, and its menu is priced and designed to be shared. But perhaps more unusually, in many cases they make that easy for you: so, for instance, if you order albondigas in an almond sauce, as we did, they will charge you for one portion but bring you two bowls, each with your own personal helping. If you’re dining with someone, still hypothetically speaking, who is a stickler for fairness, that could be a positive boon.
The dishes we had were, by and large, really excellent. The albondigas were great, as was presa ibérica with a green peppercorn sauce and little cubes of fried potato. My favourite was the rolled shoulder of lamb, positively glazed in a sauce so shiny you could almost see your face in it, the whole thing looking more like a dessert than a savoury course, more sticky toffee than caulfilower houmous.
Only Base9’s signature tortilla was a misstep for me – designed to be their take on the Japanese omurice, where a paper-thin layer of cooked egg is draped over the contents beneath, I thought it slightly prioritised technical excellence over the eating experience. It was the outlier though, the one piece of evidence that Base9 might not consider the Bib Gourmand recognition enough. It wouldn’t stop me returning to check in on their continuing evolution.
When it comes to ice cream, traditionalists go for Casa Mira, still going strong on Calle Marqués de Larios after more than a century. I’ve heard good things about the chain Bico de Xaedo, which had a branch literally a minute from my apartment in 2023. But my loyalties are with Freskitto which has two spots on Calle Granada – one a kiosk, the other with a handful of seats inside.
Service is superb, and Freskitto’s stuff really is top notch – closer in texture to gelato than ice cream and sheer joy to eat. I’ve pretty much narrowed my order down to a chocolate/dulce de leche combo, though I occasionally dabble with something else. Grabbing my paper cup and sitting just opposite, round the corner from El Pimpi, eating Freskitto’s beautiful ice cream and gazing up at the cloudless blue sky is one of my favourite Málaga memories.
On my 2026 visit I managed to go there nearly every day, but I did fit in one visit to Casa Mira to see if the above does it an injustice. Casa Mira, in any other city, would be the go-to spot for ice cream, but having tried it again I still say it can’t hold a candle to Freskitto.
Heladeria Freskitto Calle Granada, 55
11. Mercado Atarazanas
Not content with being a mini Barcelona, Málaga also boasts a mini Boqueria in the shape of the handsome and hugely likeable Mercado Atarazanas. You can buy pretty much anything there – from just-landed fish to pig’s trotters, from freshly sliced jamon to salted almonds shining with oil.
The real draw, for me, has always been Bar El Central in the corner of the market. You can stand up at the bar, drink your vermouth or your caña and get stuck into the incredible array of fresh fish and seafood under the counter, or have charcuterie, cheese and all the other main Spanish food groups. When I visited it last, four of us dined like kings for less than 100 Euros on tuna steaks, cooked simply, scattered with salt and served up with sensational tomatoes, on padron peppers and chicharrones de Cadiz, which were like a high definition porchetta.
But in 2026, inexplicably, El Central’s shutters were down all week. So instead we stood at the counter of its neighbour, Marisqueria El Yerno, with a cold beer and a procession of beautiful dishes – calamari, gambas pil-pil, tomatoes bathed in verdant olive oil and finished with buttery avocado, tuna perfected on the plancha and served with an intense band of rare red through the centre of every slice.
On my final morning in Málaga I went back to the market to buy some supplies and gifts to take back home, and I was relieved to find El Central was trading again, the owners having either returned from their holiday or recovered from their illness. It was excellent news, but it set me up for the mother of all dilemmas next time I visited Málaga: which of the two spots in the market do I lunch at now?
Mercado Central de Atarazanas Calle Atarazanas, 10
12. La Cheesequeria
La Cheesequeria, a cheesecake cafe on Calle Carreteria, was another recommendation from the Instagram follower that tipped me off about Palodu. And given how much I’d loved Palodu, I made a point of stopping off there in 2023 to pick up a slice of cheesecake to enjoy in the comfort of my apartment. It was a payoyo cheesecake and, at the time, I’d enjoyed one I had from now-closed Málaga restaurant La Cosmopolita slightly better: these days it might have no rival in the city.
La Cheesequeria does both sweet and savoury cheesecakes. I imagine the latter, some of them looking on the sweet side even for me, do very well locally but I was drawn to the savoury ones. Next time I’ll eschew the payoyo and go for a something with blue cheese – don’t knock it til you’ve tried it, blue cheesecake is out of this world – or the thing that nearly swayed me on this visit, a cheesecake made with 24 month aged Parmesan. That I can’t even imagine what that would taste like is, to me, reason enough to try it.
La Tranca remains one of my favourite bars in the whole wide world, a scruffy and vibrant place which welcomes anyone who wants to drink vermouth or beer, eat good food and enjoy people-watching amid a crowd who all have the same laudable priorities. The music is Spanish, and the LPs behind the bar are a retro anorak’s dream. I can honestly say that this is a happy place at the epicentre of a happy place: I’ve never spent any time there that was less than sublime.
Sadly, its fame, and the growing popularity of Málaga in general, mean that it’s harder and harder to find a space there unless you’re an early bird or have very sharp elbows: I managed to fit in a pre-lunch drink on my most recent visit to the city, but the time before a drink at La Tranca eluded me. That’s probably why they’ve opened a second bar just round the corner, and why people drink at Colmado 93, the bar across the road in the site that La Tranca outgrew.
Although you can drink beer or vermouth here my preferred drink is the aliñao, a mixture of vermouth, gin and soda which slips down dangerously easily. After a couple of them, you find your life goals slowly shifting from whatever they were before to “how can I buy an apartment within stumbling distance of La Tranca?”
And that’s without talking about the food – wonderful four cheese empanadas with a tang of blue cheese or some of the best jamon I had on my holiday, sliced there and then and presented glistening on a board, waiting to be pinched between fingers and devoured. And fried olives – did you know fried olives were a thing? Me neither, and now I feel quite devoutly that they should be a thing everywhere.
On a previous visit, we’d bumped into an Italian singer-songwriter who had a long and fascinating story of jet setting from one European city to the next, la dolce vita in action. A tad randomly, we all follow one another on Instagram now, so one time, when we returned to La Tranca, Zoë took a goofy selfie of the four of us and sent it to him. “That’s really sweet of you!” came the reply from elsewhere on the continent in next to no time. “Enjoy the journey in beautiful Málaga. I miss it.” It has that effect on you. So does La Tranca.
Antigua Casa de Guardia, like La Tranca, makes every single list of Málaga recommendations and has the crowd to match: when I visited the city in 2023 I tried several times to make it there for a drink to find the crowd just too huge, too impenetrable.
So again, the early bird pre-lunch snifter came to my aid and in 2026 I again found myself standing at that bar, next to Zoë, and I realised that you could hardly blame all those tourists for coming here. It remains, for me, the other place in Málaga to stop for a drink – a long thin room with a long thin bar where you pick from the sweet wines, sherries and vermouths in the barrels behind. They keep a running tab on your bar in chalk and as barely anything you can drink tops three Euros you do feel it’s rude not to stay for another, and another.
It’s standing room only, with only a few high tables, so settling in for a prolonged session is probably beyond most people, but to stand there sipping from your copa and watching the bar staff, all of whom seem like they’ve been doing this for years, is a quintessential Málaga experience. Every time someone tips – which happens with a frequency I found touching, given that cash is dying – one of the staff rings a ball and, presumably, an angel gets their wings. Worth visiting an ATM for, if you ask me.
El Pimpi is also a Málaga institution, to the extent where including it in this guide sets off the QI klaxons. A huge, sprawling bar with lots of little rooms and corridors, and a lot of outside space looking out on the Alcazaba, I surprised by how much I liked it. It was touristy, but not to its detriment, and it had all the things Antigua Casa de la Guardia was lacking, like seats, and toilets you could actually bring yourself to use.
My glass of Pedro Ximenez had that sticky, syrupy quality and the richness of thoroughly coddled sultanas and I would happily have stayed for more. There’s always next time, as I increasingly told myself as my holiday drew to a close. Antonio Banderas, a native of Málaga, is a big fan (he allegedly owns an apartment overlooking the bar), so there are a lot of pictures of him on display. A lot. Many of the barrels are signed by celebrities – including, after he stopped by on his recent Channel 5 series about Andalusia, Michael Portillo of all people.
Every time I’ve come to Málaga I’ve visited Birras Deluxe, the craft beer spot on Plaza Merced, and each time I’ve liked it more and more. It came under new management before my 2021 visit and they’ve spent the intervening years making it better and better. It’s no longer the scruffy little spot it used to be, and its range of beers gets the balance bang on between Belgian classics, which used to dominate their list on keg, and up and coming Spanish breweries, both local ones like Attik Brewing and ones like Basqueland or Garage with a more international reputation.
In the past my choice of beer venue was an out and out choice between Birras Deluxe and La Madriguera, just around the corner. But La Madriguera didn’t impress me when I went there in 2023 and closed the following year, and one of the craft beer places they recommended in their farewell Instagram post, La Botica de la Cerveza, didn’t quite do it for me when I tried it in 2026.
Fortunately, the craft beer scene is pretty healthy and between Birras Deluxe and the next two spots on my list you’re pretty well served in Málaga if that’s what you’re into. My favourite thing about my most recent trip to Birras Deluxe, apart from quite uncharacteristically blowing something crazy like 40 Euros on an ultra-rare barrel-aged imperial stout, was the table of British boomers in the corner drinking spirits and insisting on splitting the bill using a calculator. Were they lost?
My favourite part of Málaga is Soho, the triangular neighbourhood south of the Alameda Principal, the other side of it from the old city. It is full of street art, it has a very cool modern art gallery which is meant to reopen in 2026 and a much less fancy but far more endearing museum of optical illusions called the Museo de la Imaginación of which I am very fond. It is home to some of the venues in this guide, principally Mesón Ibérico and Santa Coffee. But until my visit in 2026 I’d never found anywhere decent to drink there.
It has a big and lavish-looking Cruzcampo taproom called La Fabrica, and I’ve tried it numerous times without ever having a decent beer there, including on my most recent visit to Málaga. But I won’t be back there again now, because I’ve finally discovered El Rincon del Cervecero. Where has it been all my life?
It’s a brilliant, unfussy, and very friendly craft beer spot which combines an excellent list of beers on keg – most by local brewery La Reina del Soho on my visit – with an outstanding beer fridge full of goodies from breweries across Spain including old favourites Caleya (who I discovered on my visit to Oviedo) and Madrid’s Oso Brew Co, who were new to me. In fact, and not just because of the presence of Caleya’s beers, it reminded me of Oviedo’s outstanding Cerveceria Cimmeria, with the same enthusiastic service and, perhaps more tangentially, retro heavy metal soundtrack.
All that and El Rincon del Cervecero also gets the food right – free nibbles, Granada-style, with each round of drinks and a small menu of bar snacks to stop you wandering elsewhere in search of sustenance. I loved my mojama, lavished in olive oil and carpet-bombed with almonds and I also really enjoyed a plate of sheep’s cheese. When I go back I can see some jamon or a bocadillo in my future.
It was absolutely my single favourite discovery of my 2026 visit to Málaga, and feels like it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The good news is that I now have somewhere to drink while I’m waiting to queue outside Mesón Ibérico. The bad news is that it will be far, far harder to tear myself away in time.
I’d always overlooked Central Beers on visits to Málaga, thinking it was too big, too Belgian-focused, not quite authentic enough. That was my loss because I dropped in there twice in 2023 and both times it was excellent. It’s spacious, with plenty of big, sturdy tables. The table service is excellent and efficient. It’s a lovely place to while away an evening and the beer list is superb, featuring lots of breweries I’ve never heard of like Ireland’s Hopfully Brewing or the Basque country’s Laugar. If that isn’t enough, the fridge had a lot of strength in depth, including an imperial stout by French brewery Prizm, based not far from Montpellier, that might have been my beer of the holiday.
The other thing I loved about Central Beers was its surprisingly good and very broad menu featuring perfect beer food and bar snacks. Much of it is international in nature – more gyoza, again pretty impressive, or gnarled karaage chicken with a thick teriyaki-style sauce and slivers of apple. But the battered salt cod, served simply with aioli, brought it all back home. They also, and this is quite rare for Malaga, have a half-decent vegetarian offering which comes in handy if you’re out for dinner with someone who wants a little bit more than another portion of patatas bravas.
In the old days there were two places for churros in Málaga, Cafe Central and Casa Aranda. And then, tragically, at the start of 2022 Cafe Central closed because of a dispute with the landlord: how very Reading. It’s now a purgatorial looking “English-style pub” called “John Scott’s” owned by the Swedish company behind Kopparberg, which in my book makes it inauthentic in about half a dozen ways: if you’re tempted to visit it while you’re in Málaga, seek professional help.
Anyway, that just leaves Casa Aranda which fortunately is excellent. It’s grown and grown to the extent where it takes up a whole street and is beginning to spread round the corner: the waiters hang around at one end, managing an orderly queue to find you a table. Even though it looks rammed the process is impressively brisk, so you’re normally seated in no time. If you’re lucky, you’re outside with some sunshine, a view and some people watching opportunities. If you’re less fortunate you’re ushered into a slightly unlovely room.
Either way, the churros are champion. I go without fail on every visit to Málaga, usually multiple times.
Coffee chain Santa has grown, to the extent that it now has three branches – a big one near Atarazanas, a smaller one near the cathedral and my favourite, in Soho. There are usually seats outside, the people watching potential is exceptional and their coffee is solidly, reliably excellent. They also sell beans to take home and, at the time of writing this in 2026, I have a bag in my kitchen cupboard waiting its turn.
Although I’ve never eaten a full meal at Santa – because of all the places in this guide – the brunches look decent. More to the point I have a soft spot for their alfajores, a hefty, delicious biscuit with a middle layer of dulce de leche enrobed, as marketeers are wont to say, in chocolate. It shows a Wagon Wheel up for the piece of shit it sadly is.
Part of the continuing explosion in Málaga’s coffee scene, Next Level was new to me in 2023. Back then it had two branches, though it has since added a third on Calle Duende where El Ultimo Mono, one of my favourite coffee shops of previous visits, used to live.
The original branch on Calle Panaderos near the market, is more rough and ready whereas the second, which is a little more upmarket and has some excellent outside space, is on Calle San Juan and is all round a little nicer. Both, and this is the important bit, serve really impressive coffee: two top-drawer lattes cost a little over five pound back in 2023.
They also sell beans to take away, and the ones we bought, from Rotterdam’s Manhattan coffee roasters, might well have been the best coffee I had at home all year. Spain is very lucky that this thing called the Common Market allows them to buy the best coffee from anywhere in Europe without worrying about taxes and delays and paperwork. I can’t see it catching on here, more’s the pity.
Kima, which is not far from La Cheesequeria, was the underdog coffee house that I really grew to love on my 2023 trip to Málaga. Back then it was small, little more than a kiosk, with stools for three people inside. In reality the clientele often stand up at the counter and chat away to their barista until the next lot of customers come in, which I found really likeable.
It reminded me a lot of Mia Café, the next entry on this list, which I loved in their first, tiny home but took a while to like when they outgrew it and moved somewhere bigger. On my 2026 visit I discovered that history had repeated itself and Kima had moved a few doors down Calle Carreteria to a much bigger site with dusky-coloured, Instagram-friendly chairs. That’s success for you, and although I would have stopped to check it out it was absolutely packed, which rather vindicates their decision. All power to them: I will be back.
Mia used to be my favourite coffee spot in Málaga back in 2021, its pretty yellow awning bringing a flash of sunlight into the square it shared with the Church Of The Holy Martyrs Ciriaco and Paula. It had a little seating outside, and if you nabbed that you felt like you’d won the lottery: if not you just perched on the steps with one of Málaga’s finest lattes. When I went back in 2023 I was really sad to find that it had moved into a new spot in Soho, and when I went there I didn’t quite get it. Maybe without the magic of that location it wasn’t quite the total package, or maybe it was change resistant me not being able to get with the program: the latter is more than plausible.
Anyway, I returned in 2026 for a morning coffee and I think with the benefit of distance I could see Mia’s new home for what it was – a likeable, scruffy spot, filled with excellent coffee and friendly staff. Much like the old one, truth be told: come to think of it, whenever I drank indoors at Mia’s old place I had to concede that it was a little rough and ready. By those standards, taken out of its picturesque home and moved to Málaga’s finest barrio, it made a lot more sense. So it is restored to this guide, and well worth a visit if you don’t fancy al fresco people-watching at Santa.
Mala Leche is just round the corner from one of Málaga’s three branches of Santa, but on a morning wander round the city its corner spot and outside space was so inviting that I decided to grab a latte there in the interests of research. They also sold alfajores, as Santa Coffee does, so I decided to try one – also, I should add, with investigative journalism as my sole motivation.
My latte was spot on, although I didn’t realise until my alfajor had turned up that they did two sizes, normal and extra large and I had inadvertently ordered the latter. So big you could only eat it with a fork I made a decent stab at it, aware the whole time that I must have looked like a right pig. At the end I was full of calories and the plate was full of crumbs, and I decided that on balance it had probably, just about, been worth the shame.
It turns out there are two branches, by the way: what is it with Málaga and these hugely successful micro-chains?
Speaking of micro chains, remember I told you that Málaga used to have an amazing churros place called Cafe Central, right in the middle of the city, now sadly departed? Well, it is survived by a sibling out towards Malagueta Beach, just around the corner from Gastroteca Can Emma, and it makes a wonderful spot for a pre-lunch caña, café con leche or both.
Although it might not be a café con leche. Cafe Central, back in its more central days, had a wonderful sliding scale depicted in tiles on its wall showing nine different types of coffee, from solo with no milk to nube, hot milk with a splash of coffee (a traditional cafe con leche would be a mitad). It was invented in the Fifties by owner José Prado, and is still commemorated on the wall of Cafe Central’s remaining branch. You can even buy framed prints of it to take home: I now have one in the kitchen.
Central’s coffee is better than I remember, and they now sell their own blend for consumption off the premises, proof that they continue to reinvent themselves, over a century after they began trading.
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One final bit of gastronomic navel gazing to close out the year: it feels like the blog has been a little (by which I mean “even”) more inward-looking than usual. That has a lot to do with the tenth birthday celebrations and a series of pieces covering Reading’s game-changing restaurants, its saddest closures – which of course went to print before the awful news from the Grumpy Goat – and Reading’s 50 best dishes. The latter in particular risks having some overlap with this year’s awards, so whatever you do don’t scurry off to read those posts just to point out that the gongs I’m giving out today don’t bear close enough relation to what I said in September; three months is a long time in Reading restaurant politics.
As I said in my round-up of 2023, it’s been another extraordinary and record-breaking year on the blog and although I’ve cast my net more widely this year, travelling to Oxford, London, Bristol and – no, this isn’t a typo – Swindon in search of good restaurants to review, there have still been an enormous amount of terrific dishes on display in Reading.
Some, sadly, were available when the year began but aren’t as it ends – the beautiful pizzas at Buon Appetito, for instance, Cairo Café’s cracking shawarma, the Reuben at the Grumpy Goat or San Sicario’s white crabmeat tumbled onto rosti. And other dishes were on menus but have since been whipped off to make way for the new (those troublemakers at the Lyndhurst are particularly prone to this, much to my chagrin).
But even with all that said, deciding these awards has been every bit as difficult as ever. Sometimes it’s hard enough to pick the best dish offered by a particular restaurant – especially with the likes of Reading’s holy trinity, Clay’s, Kungfu Kitchen and the Lyndhurst – let alone the best dish of the year in the whole of town. Those three restaurants, to me, still represent the apex of Reading’s food scene but, I have to say, there’s an awful lot of strength in depth when you consider all the other independent restaurants, pubs, cafés and bars in town.
And when Reading doesn’t quite have what you want, well, the Elizabeth Line is making it easier and easier to find it elsewhere; more people may commute into Reading for work than out of it, but I do still worry that, far from bringing the brightest and best to Reading, Crossrail might have the opposite effect. Maybe this time next year my awards will be a series of dispatches from Hounslow and Farringdon rather than Tilehurst and Woodley. Stranger things have happened.
But anyway, let’s celebrate the best of the year from a town which still, very much, contains the capacity to surprise and delight. And before I start opening virtual envelopes, let me also wish you all a very Happy New Year – whether you’re down the pub, living it up in a tap room, out for a fancy meal or sitting at home on the sofa watching When Harry Met Sally. Given that the latter is one of my very favourite ways to see out the year, top marks to any of you going down that route. Wherever you are and however you celebrate – or don’t – I shall raise a glass to all of you on Sunday night.
STARTER OF THE YEAR: Korean chicken wings, the Lyndhurst
I’ve had these a lot in 2023. There was a period when they were on the main menu – replacing the Lyndie’s karaage chicken, I was quite upset about that at the time – and then they just cropped up on Wednesdays when the pub does a portion of wings and a pint for a tenner. That, like so much the Lyndhurst does, is a bargain so ridiculous that you could be forgiven for wondering how they make money.
I have never been a big fan of chicken wings and the reward to faff ratio they seem to embody. They’re up there, for me, with stuff like crab and lobster where I want somebody else to go to the effort for me. And yet I am absolutely hooked on the Lyndhurst’s Korean wings. The sauce has that complex, savoury depth that only gochujang can offer and it’s remarkably easy to plough through ten of the blighters almost without noticing.
If they take these completely off the menu next year and put the karaage chicken back on I will be just as devastated, and then I’ll fall in love with the replacement all over again. Korean food is having a bit of a moment in Reading, with two new places opening in the second half of the year. But trust the Lyndhurst to do it first, and do it better. It’s just typical of them.
Honourable mentions go to Clay’s impeccable pork belly, which is far too nice to share even though I always seem to end up sharing it with someone when I go there, more’s the pity, and last year’s winner, Kamal’s Kitchen’s thhicheko aalu, which remains the best potato dish in town bar none.
CHAIN OF THE YEAR: Honest Burgers
When you consider that the main new chain to open in Reading this year was the deeply mediocre Popeyes, it’s perhaps no surprise that the main contenders for this award are the same as they were last year. But for me, this year, Honest has edged it for consistency. When I’m in town short of time, or coming back from work and not wanting to cook, I have found myself falling into Honest on a fair few occasions, often after a medicinal beer a few doors down at the Alehouse. And it never lets me down.
Honest is in danger of being forgotten these days, because it’s been part of the scenery so long. I can’t remember the last time I went when it was heaving, but it’s never empty either and it’s seen off arguably its closest competitor in the shape of 7Bone, which has given up on the town centre and now trades out of Phantom. But in any case I was always on Team Honest and this year, if anything, they’ve improved. Their chicken burger, after a slightly indifferent start, is now on a level with the rest of their menu and now that Wild Weather have upped sticks and moved to Wales the restaurant stocks beer from Windsor’s Two Flints instead, which if anything is a trade up.
Honourable mentions go to Pho, which is very reliable but possibly better as a takeaway option than to eat in, and Shree Krishna Vada Pav, which has become a very enjoyable part of my lunchtime regime.
LUNCH VENUE OF THE YEAR: Picnic
I have visited Picnic a lot more this year: it’s Zoë’s choice of lunch venue, especially when she’s cutting down on the carbs, because their weekly salad boxes hit the spot. Initially I joined her grudgingly, having a little moan about the prices, or the quality of the coffee.
But a lot has changed since I was a regular at Picnic – the coffee is at a different level now, and they’re the only place in Reading I know of that still uses beautiful Lacey’s milk. And the salads get more and more inventive and delicious, whether it’s sticky edged chorizo and butternut squash or warming, sublime chicken shawarma. Their toasties, which also nudge close to a tenner, are a little on the pricey side but they’re also executed superbly: one I had this year with burrata, ‘nduja and peppers, the outside properly buttered and bronzed, was up there with my favourite lunches of the year.
Honourable mentions go to Madoo, still one of my favourite places to while away a lunchtime (although their coffee needs to improve to match their toasties and cannoli) and Shree Krishna Vada Pav. If I’m in a real rush at lunchtime I’ll saunter over just to have one of their vada pav: glorious, affordable carb-on-carb high jinks.
OUT OF TOWN RESTAURANT OF YEAR (BERKSHIRE): Knead Neapolitan Pizza, Maidenhead
The frequency with which I have visited Knead this year has surprised even me. Fancy a quiet few weekend drinks at A Hoppy Place but need to line the stomach beforehand? Knead it is. Want to have lunch with my old friend before going to watch Maidenhead United serve up some absolutely dogshit football at York Road? Off to Knead, just round the corner, first. And when my Canadian relatives were in the country, and we wanted to find somewhere to meet halfway between Reading and their London Airbnb for beer, good food and a proper catch up, Knead fitted the bill superbly.
That makes it sound like the location was everything, but that doesn’t do the place justice. The service is terrific, the specials are great, the local beers by nearby White Waltham brewery Stardust are a treat and they get the basics very right. Much as I love some of the pizzas on offer in Reading there’s still a bit of me that would love to pick Knead up and drop it somewhere convenient in Reading – where O Portugues used to be, for example. They’ve now introduced an anchovy pizza, which pleases predictable me very much, but the “Hello Gourd-Geous” – with pumpkin, blue cheese and ‘nduja – is a knockout.
MAIN COURSE OF THE YEAR: Monkfish tacos, The Lyndhurst
The Lyndhurst has always done tacos well – I fondly remember their shredded pork tacos, in the latter half of 2020 – but the monkfish tacos on their menu until recently were just outrageously good, a high end re-imagining of fish tacos at a crazily approachable price. Generosity doesn’t even come close – each taco was crammed with two huge pieces of monkfish in the lightest of batters, with guacamole, hot sauce and lightly pickled red onions. They were so crammed that rolling them up and eating them was a feat beyond me: I’d have needed bigger hands and a far bigger gob.
Although I’m sad that the Lyndhurst has taken them off the menu – though they may still crop up on the specials menu – it was probably for the best, for my imagination and my bank balance. Because there were many weekday evenings where Zoë and I would begin a conversation, me on the train home and her finishing her shift, and it was only a matter of time before one of us cracked and said “or we could just have monkfish tacos tonight”. Perhaps if it had been on the menu for less time I would have reviewed even more restaurants in 2023. As it is, I am nothing but grateful that I got to enjoy it so many times.
This was an exceptionally hard category to judge and either of my honourable mentions could easily have won it on any other year. One was Clay’s yakhni pulao, a dish which started as a special and graduated to the main menu, a mound of rice cooked in broth and marrow and coronated with a sticky lamb curry, the perfect synthesis of Nandana’s and Sharat’s skills in the kitchen and, somehow, as emblematic of their partnership as the restaurant itself. The other was Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken, a dish which, like Bakery House, is every bit as good as you remember.
CAFE OF THE YEAR: Workhouse Coffee
Despite losing Tamp a few years back and, of course, no longer being able to drink Anonymous Coffee at the Grumpy Goat, Reading remains a superlative place to drink great coffee. And Workhouse is very much the eminence grise of Reading’s coffee scene. For my money it still does Reading’s best latte and even if it’s in a tricky spot with a troublesome landlord and a guano spattered courtyard which isn’t the outside space it once was, it remains a strangely magical place to sit with a contemplative coffee.
I have lost track of the number of coffees I’ve had there – first thing in the morning on my way home from acupuncture, at lunchtime grabbing half an hour with Zoë or on a weekend, pretending to read a paperback while constantly hitting refresh on Twitter. It never lets you down and the service – from Steve, Kirsty, Rachel or any of the rest of their happy brigade – is always terrific. I saw recently on social media that the Oxford Road branch was even open briefly on Christmas morning, which gave me a little proud glow. We’re lucky to have Workhouse, even if sometimes it’s easy to overlook because it’s been there so long.
Honourable mentions go to C.U.P., and in particular its Blagrave Street branch which I really do love, and to Minas Café out in Whitley. I can see myself having more coffees there next year.
OUT OF TOWN RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR (OUTSIDE BERKSHIRE): COR, Bristol
COR was my meal of the year, a rare example of me going somewhere before it was discovered by every Tom, Dick and even bigger Dick. I loved it when I went there in February and reviewed the place, and I made sure that when I went back to Bristol I dragged Zoë and some other friends there. It not only gives small plates restaurants a good name, but everything is so beautifully executed that you could eat three different meals there on three successive nights, never repeat yourself and never have anything short of magnificent.
I know I get occasional stick for reviewing places outside Reading, but you don’t quite know what Reading is missing until you go somewhere like COR and then it does come remarkably into focus: we are missing places like this. I think of everywhere I’ve reviewed in 2023 COR is the one I would most recommend without reservation or qualification, and I would love Reading to have more restaurants even half as good. At my most recent readers’ lunch a couple of the guests told me they’d gone out of their way to visit it earlier that year: that gave me almost as much pleasure as eating there myself did.
Honourable mentions go to Manteca – the best meal out I’ve had in London for many years – and to the gorgeous Los Gatos in Swindon. There may not be a huge amount of reasons to visit Swindon, but when one of them is Los Gatos you don’t need any others.
SERVICE OF THE YEAR; London Street Brasserie
Earlier in the year I had a Saturday to myself and I decided to have a solo lunch, sit at a table for one, sip a glass of red and read Olive Kitteridge between courses. Ironically I only went to LSB because the Lyndhurst was closed for a private function, and they happened to have a table available online there and then. And then I went, and they put me at the best table in the whole restaurant – the big round one in the corner with a view of the whole ground floor – and they were unfailingly lovely from start to finish.
I am absolutely certain they didn’t know who I was, not that I’m anyone. I was just some random Joe who as good as came in off the street and the treatment I had was just fantastic throughout. From my excellent vantage point, I could see that I was literally nothing special. Every table got that attention from a really hard-working, happy team, and I think if you can make a solo diner feel as welcome and looked after as a boisterous, bustling table for six you have the knack of something really important, something not enough restaurants can do. My meal was good but not great – I might well have eaten better at the Lyndhurst, and certainly cheaper – but as an experience it was hard to beat.
It really saddens me to only be able to give this award to one restaurant. Vesuvio and Minas Café, in very different but equally valid ways, are both worthy runners-up in this category. And I have to mention Barista & Beyond here too, because the service (and the experience) there made me think hard about hospitality and how lucky we are that some businesses are so good at it.
DESSERT OF THE YEAR: Peanut butter ice cream, Clay’s Kitchen
Many years ago I held a readers’ lunch at Clay’s and I had one guest at it, a lady called Alessia, who couldn’t eat any of the desserts Clay’s usually does because of her allergies. Nandana made a vegan peanut butter ice cream, just for her, and it was so phenomenal that everybody else had dessert envy. That’s the genius of Clay’s, that they can cater for restrictions and make something which made everyone else feel like they were missing out. Nandana gave me a little bowl of it to try that day, I had a few spoonfuls and then I passed the bowl around because I felt guilty that I had tasted it and others hadn’t.
Fast forward to September, at a lunch to celebrate ten years of the blog, and I asked Nandana to make it again, on the menu for everybody this time. She did, and it was such a hit that it’s now on the main menu so everybody can experience what first Alessia, then some other guests at that lunch, and then a bunch of other diners years later got to try. It is a glossy, rich and beautiful thing and very richly deserves this award. And before any of you say but it’s just ice cream or words to that effect: try it first.
This is another category with entries positively jostling for the top spot. My runners up are Minas Café’s gorgeous, sweet and sunny passion fruit mousse and Sarv’s Slice’s outstanding tiramisu.
NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR: Sarv’s Slice
I quite liked Sarv’s Slice last year when it was a semi-permanent trader at Blue Collar, and I particularly liked their carbonara pizza. I thought it was a clever move for them to take up residence at the Biscuit Factory: I rather liked my pizza there when I visited on duty. But I don’t think I could have realised, at that point, what a boon they are for Reading.
Their pizzas have got better and better – keeping the classics superb but then adding specials which nudge up the quality, pizza by pizza. The carbonara made a brief comeback, but even better was a Spanish special with aioli, confit garlic potatoes and chorizo piperade: a number of Italians who follow the ER Facebook page were up in arms, but I say they were missing out. And then further through the year Sarv’s Slice started turning out Detroit style pizzas – deep pan beauties with an airy base and crispy, cheesy edges. By that point my warm feelings towards Sarv’s Slice had morphed into a full-on love affair. The Biscuit Factory is lucky to have them, as are we.
Honourable mentions in this category go to Minas Café, which to be honest deserves some kind of award just for being Minas Café, and to Vesuvio which really pleasantly surprised me when I went to review it back in October, with no particular expectations.
RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR: Clay’s Kitchen
Clay’s has always been a phenomenal restaurant, right from the start. Some places take a while to find their feet but Clay’s, in terms of the food, had everything spot on from day one. Five years later, they are the restaurant that has put Reading on the map – more than Kungfu Kitchen, despite its brilliance, more than the Lyndhurst, which never gets the credit it deserves, and way more than the Lido, which has burned through chefs and made the most of its connections to the broadsheets but never really lived up to its potential.
But Clay’s wins this award this year because, to me, this year it became the restaurant Nandana and Sharat always wanted it to be. The big, tasteful, buzzy, classy space in the heart of Caversham, with that open kitchen, the gorgeous high tables, that skylight making all the dishes photogenic, the wonderful drinks menu and all those marvellous dishes.
There isn’t any menu in Reading that can quite match Clay’s for quality and depth. And even if I was just talking about their main menu, that would be true. But this was the year that Clay’s also launched a world-beating small plates menu which can match anything you’d get in Bristol or London and, for a while, their equally gorgeous brunch menu. For the time being, Clay’s has scaled back to its standard menu (although, Clay’s being Clay’s, they had a separate Christmas menu, and a separate menu for Christmas Day, and another for New Year’s Eve) but as a statement of intent it showed you exactly what Clay’s is about.
It would grace any town or city in this country, and that Reading has it should be a source of enormous pride. I have loved every meal and every dish I’ve had on Prospect Street this year – and I know I’ve been there far less frequently than many of its adoring fans. But, like them, I can’t wait to see what Clay’s comes up with in 2024.
THE ER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD – Greg Costello, Workhouse Coffee
What is there to say about Greg Costello that hasn’t already been said? Well, I imagine many others are far better qualified to pay tribute to him than I am, but none the less, here goes: when Greg set up Workhouse Coffee, back in the mists of time, Reading was a very different place. There was no coffee scene, and coffee in Reading still meant Costa, Coffee Republic and the retro delights of places like Platters and Chelsea Coffee House. And although the landscape has changed enormously, Workhouse has never lost its place at the heart of things. It remains Reading’s landmark coffee shop, and has influenced countless others – Tamp, Anonymous and C.U.P. would not have existed, but for Workhouse.
That Greg is still visible (well, let’s be honest, hard to miss) in Workhouse is quite an achievement, especially as in the same time he’s done other jobs in coffee like working for Nude. I read a recent review of Gordon Ramsay’s three star London restaurant by food spod Andy Hayler where he called out that Workhouse supply their coffee. “Coffee was from speciality coffee roaster Workhouse Coffee in Reading and was very pleasant” he said, and if you’ve read Hayler as much as I have you’d know that such faint praise is as good as him jizzing in his y-fronts. It made me strangely proud of Workhouse, and Reading, and yet this isn’t something Costello goes on about at all.
He is a complicated and iconoclastic character, which I rather love. My favourite story about Greg – a man who perhaps shouldn’t be allowed near his company’s social media – is when I did a Tweet about Workhouse Coffee back in 2019. I said that you had to hand it to them: that they didn’t have wi-fi, didn’t have a loo, didn’t publish a price list and didn’t take card payments under a fiver. I said I admired their “take it or leave it” approach to customers. Greg responded in classic irascible fashion, missing the point that really, I was paying him a compliment. Because all those whistles and bells, that other cafés might have, were beside the point compared to the quality of Workhouse’s product.
As someone who also occasionally divides opinion – surely not, I hear you say – I recognise a kindred spirit in Greg and I can’t think of a more appropriate recipient for my first ever ER Achievement Award. Not that it will mean anything to him at all: I suspect he either won’t react at all to getting this award or will shrug and say it’s worthless. In this, as in many things, he’s probably right. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve it.
It’s a shame to start this piece with an apology, but I’m afraid I’ll have to. Normally when I sit down to sum up the year nearly gone, as is traditional by now, I’m fairly chipper: the working year is close to done and dusted, the presents are all bought and good times, socialising and shedloads of booze are just around the corner. By contrast as I write this I’m still recovering from Covid – which I’ve managed to catch for the first time ever, unfashionably late, in December 2023 – I’ve not left the house in a week and have only just reached the stage where the coughing isn’t stopping me from getting to sleep, although my sense of smell isn’t quite what it was yet. Ho ho ho!
So this year the Christmas break can’t come soon enough, although I might well spend it under a blanket watching old episodes of Frasier or one of my favourite not-quite-a-Christmas-movie movies, The Apartment. Even the thought of opening a bottle of wine or an imperial stout, right now, makes me feel a tad queasy and, with the exception of chocolate, food has somewhat lost its lustre. What better mood to accompany a look back at 2023 in the world of Reading and its restaurants, eh? Precisely.
I always feel like a bit of an Eeyore writing these roundups, or I have since the pandemic, because it seems like every year I basically say well, fewer restaurants have closed this year than I expected but mark my words, next year reality is going to bite and the bounceback loans have to be paid off and the bills go through the roof. Next year is going to be grim.
And here we are, December 2023, and I’m delivering that speech again. 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.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t lose hospitality businesses in 2023, or that we didn’t lose some really cherished ones, but looking at the numbers it could have been an awful lot worse. First of all we lost O Portugues, the Iberian outpost on the edge of Palmer Park, in the weirdest way: they shut their doors in March, put an update on Facebook to the effect that it wasn’t goodbye forever and they just never returned. Google still has it marked as temporarily closed, but it’s been temporarily closed for most of the year.
The following month, the same thing happened on the west side of town: Buon Appetito’s lights went out, and stories began to spread of people turning up for reservations to find the place closed with no sign of what was going on. It, too, was temporarily closed. Rumours swirled around of issues with the landlord, or the building, but five months later something new opened in that building and so we knew Buon Appetito was gone for good. I was desperately sad about that one – it made my list of the ten saddest closures of the last ten years.
Also in April we said goodbye to Cairo Café, and that also really saddened me. I wish I’d been there more often, and I wish others had been there more often too. It reminded me of the closure, many years before, of Cappuccina Café a few doors down, both of them a constant reminder that however hard you try or however good a business is, sometimes things just don’t work out. A shawarma place is there now, and at some point I should bring myself to review it.
Another restaurant that has been temporarily closed for a very long time is Oishi, the Japanese restaurant down the Oxford Road. They announced on Facebook in June that they were closing for renovations, but with every passing month the site looks less renovated and more derelict, panels in the windows patched up with boards. They may come back next year, but then so might Philip Schofield.
Who else? Well, Bel and the Dragon finally gave up being a waste of one of Reading’s loveliest spots in July and now Fullers pub The Narrowboat trades in its place. The menu doesn’t look hugely different from that at the Three Guineas in town, but if they pull it off it could be a lovely spot, especially when summer comes around again.
Perhaps even more significantly, August was the month that Oracle neighbours Franco Manca and The Real Greek decided to jump before they were pushed by the ongoing redevelopment work. It’s a funny illustration of the Joni Mitchell principle: I’d never really considered stopping into Franco Manca for a quick post-work dinner, until I couldn’t. August was also the month that Mr Chips, fresh from a refurb, was badly damaged by one of several fires seen in the town centre in the second half of the year. It too is – those two words again – “temporarily closed”.
The other really sad closure of 2023, for me, was San Sicario, which didn’t make it to a year in that ill-starred spot on the roundabout at the bottom of the Caversham Road. There is something unjust about the fact that Cozze, serving awful food, managed to limp on in that spot for years while San Sicario didn’t even get to blow out a solitary candle on its first birthday. I always thought it was a good restaurant with the potential to be a great one, and maybe one day when all the flats are built in that part of town it will be able to support a place like San Sicario. Until then, people will just mutter about the site being cursed, and how there’s no parking. As we’ll see shortly, someone has already stepped up to give the site another whirl.
But of course, the most significant closure of the year, the one that got all of town talking and pondering whether we deserved nice things, was the shock closure of the Grumpy Goat at the end of October. I say “all of town”, but more than anything it illustrated that the food and drink social media echo chamber isn’t necessarily representative of the town as a whole: for all the devastated comments on Berkshire Live’s Facebook posts about this there were always a few saying “I hadn’t heard of that place.” But for once, the closure wasn’t down to the business lacking customers: the Goat was always busy, and seemed to be thriving, but the owners put it all down to the landlord.
That in itself led to a lot of lively debate on social media: surely the landlord couldn’t chuck them out with a week’s notice? Could they? Is that what actually happened? I suspect we won’t know how or why negotiations broke down between the Grumpy Goat and the landlord, but either way it’s tragic that Reading lost its most vital, modern, independent and inclusive business within the IDR. Anyone who liked good beer, great cheese, wonderful toasties, brilliant coffee or even just feeling proud to live in a town that could offer all those things in such a tasteful, well-executed space was immeasurably poorer when November began. And I can’t blame anyone for looking at Reading in the aftermath of that closure and feeling like a light had gone out.
But if you wanted any illustration that 2023 was still, against the odds, a year with more growth than shrinkage, look at the many and diverse businesses that opened over the last twelve months, ready to give it their best shot. Right at the end of 2022 Calico opened in what used to be Great Expectations, now Hotel 1843, offering an interesting (if strange) fusion menu of Indian dishes and pub food. I need to make my way there to see if it works, and when I do I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist the “Magic Mushroom Croquettes”, even if they can only disappoint.
Perhaps more typical of the class of 2023 were chains in the town centre, filling big units and making Reading just that little bit more like everywhere else. So in February we got Popeyes, which probably excited a lot of people but left me unmoved, and Coco Di Mama, which is owned by the same people as Zizzi and, to me, offers about the same amount of excitement. Berkshire Live went there in April and was hugely excited about the food offering there. “As is normal with Italian cuisine, it was topped with a hearty helping of Gran Formaggio cheese and a few green leaves” said the article: ah, that world-renowned Gran Formaggio cheese nobody has ever heard of.
The other big site to fall under the control of a chain was the old Pizza Hut site on the Riverside, which reopened as Marugame Udon in April. It holds an almost unique accolade in that I went there earlier in the year with a view to reviewing it, walked in, thought What the fuck, this is like a school canteen followed by Nah and then left. I promise next year I’ll try harder. Infinitely more welcoming was the hugely enjoyable Cici Noodle Bar which opened on Queen Victoria Street in February – I loved it, when I went.
Fortunately, most of the other restaurants and cafés that opened this year were independent, and far more interesting prospects. From Pasibrzusek, offering Polish food on the Hemdean Road to Minas Café’s brilliant Brazilian in Whitley, from Traditional Romanesc operating out of Buon Appetito’s old home to Portuguese Time 4 Coffee on the Oxford Road, Reading still has a procession of plucky independent places trying to convert people to new cuisines and new ways of eating.
And as the town centre gets that little less imaginative and less interesting, things crop up on the outskirts of town to compensate. Tilehurst, for instance, got the very credible Vesuvio Pizzeria, which manages to give casual, mid-priced Italian dining a good name. Meanwhile down the Wokingham Road Hala Lebanese opened in the spot once occupied by the less impressive Alona. East Reading has needed a good neighbourhood restaurant for a very long time: could this be it?
For me, the west side of town remains where the more intriguing businesses seem to be materialising. Aside from Vesuvio, Time 4 Coffee and Traditional Romanesc, there’s also the enormously likeable Barista & Beyond, not to mention Sarv’s Slice which has taken up residence upstairs at the Biscuit Factory and, over the space of nine months, made a very convincing claim to offer Reading’s best pizza. By those standards Caversham looks positively stagnant, although I was delighted to see Spanish deli Serdio Ibericos, fresh from its short-lived stint at the Collective, opening next door to Geo Café this month.
2023 was also the year when Korean food continued to increase its presence in Reading. In August The Bap opened where La’De Express used to be, offering a range of Korean fried chicken and bibimbap, and for my money they offer another excellent low cost, speedy casual dining option in town. And at the end of the year AKA BBQ Station, an all you can eat Korean barbecue restaurant, opened where Pizza Express used to be on St Mary’s Butts: I’m not sure I see the logic of calling a restaurant AKA (okay, it’s also known as that, but what’s its actual name?) but it could provide something a cut above the likes of Soju, providing it doesn’t fall into the trap of being a lot like Cosmo.
The other new openings of 2023 are all interesting in their own ways. Jieli Hotpot opened in Sykes’ Paradise in August, just down from Banh Mi QB, continuing to turn that mall into a fascinating little enclave of Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese restaurants (Fluffy Fluffy, offering Japanese pancakes, also opened there in August). Say what you like about John Sykes – say, for example, that he’s Reading’s answer to Henry F. Potter – but you can’t deny that something is afoot in the place formerly known as Kings Walk.
And then last but not least, two other intriguing establishments opened in Reading this year. In August, Filter Coffee House, possibly Reading’s tiniest café, opened on Castle Street offering Indian filter coffee, baked goods (including their already renowned banana buns – somebody hopped on that bandwagon nice and early) and now an interesting range of street food snacks on Saturdays. Watching them go from strength to strength through their thoroughly charming Instagram account has been one of the rays of social media sunshine in the second half of 2023: I plan to go back there and review it properly early in the new year.
And lastly, the new opening that provoked a lot of interest came with barely a month of the year remaining. Masakali, which apparently means “pigeon” in Hindi, opened where San Sicario used to be and offers a menu of Indian dishes not quite like anywhere else in Reading. Some of the dishes would appear to show the influence of Clay’s, some – like a samosa chaat with “Walker’s Crisps” – seem to be sui generis.
Does the fact that the restaurant is owned by the same people as Reading’s slightly pedestrian Biryani Lounge make it less appealing? How about the fact that the menu has apparently been designed by an external consultancy company who, according to their website, “are always digging up family recipes from moms and grandmas across India”? Your guess is as good as mine: I’ll have a better idea once I’ve reviewed it, before too long I hope. Since writing this, I’ve also discovered that The Coriander Club opened on 6th December in Calcot, also offering what looks like higher end Indian food (their menu was designed by another, different, consultancy company: is this a thing now?)
Aside from that, I suppose there are a few other things to call out from the year. One was that Thames Lido, which at one point was burning through chefs like the U.K. burned through Prime Ministers, made an interesting choice this year by appointing Iain Ganson, formerly of the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence. I’ve always loved Ganson’s food, and I’ve always found the Lido hugely inconsistent, so this will be an interesting one to watch next year. So far the menus I’ve seen look like standard Lido fare, but time will tell whether Ganson spends his time there singing someone else’s tunes or creating his own melodies. Having said, several times, that I wouldn’t go back to the Lido again I guess now I’ll just have to.
And of course, I couldn’t let a round-up of the year pass without noting, again, that this was the year that Clay’s finally got that review in the Guardian, a rave writeup from Grace Dent which managed to capture exactly what makes Reading’s favourite restaurant so very special. I wonder if remembering Nandana’s and Sharat’s food was the final straw that caused her to walk out on I’m A Celebrity? I guess we’ll never know.
The other big closure of the year, of course, was Berkshire Live. It announced that it was closing on 30th November, leaving the Reading Chronicle and, I suppose, Rdg Today as the only conventional news sources in town. Now, you would probably expect me to have a good old pop at Berkshire Live at this point – and believe me, it’s tempting – but really it’s a cause for sadness more than anything. I feel for the journalists who need to find new work, and it’s typical of Reach plc to make people redundant the payday before Christmas.
But I also think that what Berkshire Live became wasn’t good for anybody – not for people who wanted to read about Reading, not for journalists who surely wanted to write decent copy rather than regurgitating shit from TripAdvisor or solemnly announcing, on Facebook, that Walkers had discontinued beef and onion crisps. Whether you liked the Evening Post or not, you couldn’t deny that it served a community. The website Reach plc turned that into over eight miserable years was a sad parody of what it used to be: I hope everyone involved finds better, more fulfilling jobs in the new year.
And last of all, because I was bound to talk about this before the end, this was the year that Edible Reading turned ten years old. I have gone on about that quite long enough already in a series of articles in August and September, but I’ve been enormously touched that this was another record breaking year on the blog with more readers and page hits than ever before.
I know that I’ve written more reviews this year from London, Maidenhead, Oxford, Bath and Bristol (and yes, even Swindon), so I’m especially heartened that many of the most popular reviews of the year are the ones from further afield. It’s one in the eye for that “you’re meant to be Edible Reading” dullard who pops up in my comments about once a year.
So I am incredibly grateful for that, and for all your support, and for everybody who has read a review, Retweeted a review or commented (even to say “you’re meant to be Edible Reading”). I’m grateful to everybody who’s joined me on a review, or come to a readers’ lunch, or sent me an email to tell me to review somewhere, or thank me for reviewing somewhere.
I am grateful, now more than ever, for every single time someone tells me they put their faith in me and one of my reviews, went somewhere for lunch or dinner and loved it. Just as much as an independent business is moved every time you put your hand in your pocket and support it, an independent blogger is moved every time you vote with your feet and trust his or her recommendations. So thank you very much, for all of that.
Doing this roundup has been a thought-provoking wander through the last twelve months. Things aren’t as bad as they can seem, and for every Grumpy Goat or Cairo Café that closes there is a Minas Café or a Filter Coffee House or a Vesuvio Pizzeria to redress the balance. The battle for the soul of Reading hasn’t been lost yet, however deflating some of the closures can feel, and we can all do our bit.
And in my case, that means getting to some of the many places that opened this year so that, this time next year, I’m not talking about a bunch of places and constantly saying “of course, I’m yet to try it out”. So I will neglect Reading a little less next year, even if I can’t promise to go to Doner & Gyros.
It just remains for me to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas – however you celebrate, whoever you celebrate with and whatever you eat. Personally I’ll be at home in post-Covid isolation with Clay’s At Home warming up on the hob and an enormous amount of chocolate for afters. I’ll be back next Friday with the 2023 Edible Reading Awards, but until then I hope you all have a fantastic, happy festive period. God bless us, every one.
I think it was Kierkegaard who said, very wisely, that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forward. And I think you could say the same about food trends: it’s easy to pontificate at the start of the year about what you think is going to happen, but the world of food is full of surprises and it’s far better to bide your time, get to the point where the New Year is around the corner and identify the patterns with the benefit of hindsight.
It doesn’t take much to form a food trend in Reading either, even if it is the U.K.’s largest town: two similar establishments opening in a year is a coincidence, three is a trend. So last year Reading had two main trends, I would say. The first was biryani places springing up all over the shop – Biryani Mama, Biryani Lounge, Biryani Boyzz and so on. Add in the ambiguously-named Biryanish and you definitely have yourself what passes for a trend. And of course there was the proliferation of sushi places – Intoku, Iro and You Me Sushi all opened in quick succession to challenge the primacy of Sushimania, Yo Sushi and grab and go chains like Kokoro and Itsu.
What about this year? Marugame Udon and Cici Noodle Bar opened weeks apart, but I’m not sure that’s quite enough. For me the biggest trend of the year has been a raft of interesting cafés, moving beyond the ubiquity of third-wave places like Compound or C.U.P. to offer something less generic and more regionally specific, potentially the antidote to all those “not another coffee place” bores out there (where will they go now Berkshire Live has kicked the bucket?).
So down the Oxford Road you have Time 4 Coffee, a cafe apparently offering pasteis da nata, Portuguese bread with chouriço and a range of other traditional dishes from that under-represented cuisine; I’ve not yet been, but it’s high on my list to review next year. On Castle Street Filter Coffee House is already making a name for itself with its authentic South Indian filter coffee and absolutely delicious banana buns, and continues to develop a big menu for such a little space, with intriguing specials available every Saturday morning.
And then finally we have the subject of this week’s review, Minas Cafe, which opened in April and is perhaps the most incongruous of the lot – a Brazilian café, no less, in Whitley, of all places. That I hadn’t been to check it out yet felt like it was verging on neglect, so last Sunday when I had the day to myself I hopped on the number 6 bus just before lunchtime and alighted by Buckland Road. Whitley was shrouded in a drizzly mist, the day murky and dreich: a less Brazilian scene was difficult to imagine.
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