City guide: Bordeaux

On July 21, 2023September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Travel1 Comment

I ended up on holiday in Bordeaux almost by accident. I was attending a wedding in a château in the Dordogne (even typing this, I feel I have to explain that this is just not the sort of thing I ever, ever do) on a Saturday, and wanted to make a holiday of it. So where to have a city break afterwards? I considered Biarritz and San Sebastián, even contemplated hopping on a train back to my old favourite Montpellier before choosing Bordeaux mainly because our flight home departed from there, and we had to drop a hire car there anyway. I’d never heard of anybody, really, who had spent any time there but surely it would be a nice place to spend a week?

Well, as you can probably tell from the fact that this feature even exists, it is indeed a very nice place to spend a week. France’s sixth biggest city, nestled in the curve of the Garonne, it has an awful lot to offer. A wonderful museum of wine (which I didn’t get round to visiting) and a number of galleries (ditto), but just as importantly a gorgeous historic centre – it’s the largest urban development to be recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in France, including Paris.

More to the point, wine bars are everywhere, to the extent where it’s almost worth having your main meal at lunchtime, taking advantage of the superb menus du jour, and then propping up a bar in the evening, eating small plates or charcuterie and enjoying an unbeatable selection of wines by the glass. As a way to while away the days, eating and drinking as the Bordelais do takes some beating, and it made life back in Blighty feel decidedly monochrome and humdrum. As I’ve said many times, Reading needs a great wine bar: Veeno simply doesn’t cut it.

It’s not perfect, I should add. The tram system was a little creaky and unreliable, and although my hotel was lovely it was in an area near the train station that verged on feeling unsafe after sunset and pretty scuzzy even in the mornings. If you go, stay in the historic centre. And choose your arrival and departure dates carefully: a lot of the good places are closed on Sundays and Mondays, and some of the wine bars don’t open on Tuesdays either.

I left having eaten and drunk superbly – and done some great people-watching and window-shopping into the bargain – but still feeling like I hadn’t completely got to the heart of the city. An eight hour wait in an airport almost completely lacking aircon, in thirty degree heat, thanks to BA flight delays also slightly marred my memories of the place. Bordeaux: great city, shitty airport (the tourist board can have that one for free).

But then something rather magical happened which made me see the city in a different light: totally by chance, my friends James and Liz had booked a long weekend there the week after I got home. Would I mind giving them some recommendations, they asked? So effectively much of this city guide was road tested before it was even written, and seeing pictures and iMessages from the places I had visited only a few days before brought it home to me: Bordeaux really is wonderful place.

Strip away the frustrations of the trams, or the location of my hotel, or the hellish journey home and I could see the city, through the eyes of my delighted friends, as it really was – a beautiful part of the world, and a destination in its own right for anyone who loves food and drink and being a flâneur. I never seem to see it talked about in the way that, say, Lyon is, but I wonder if that’s because the French don’t want everybody in on the secret. I’ve come to the conclusion that France keeps all the best wines, James said, after a beautiful lunch at Zéphirine, below. They might take that approach to cities, too.

Where to eat

1. Zéphirine

Zéphirine may have been the single best meal of the trip, a lovely, tasteful and spacious dining room where the nicest staff look after you and serve you the most beautiful food. They have an à la carte menu and a tasting menu, but the only difference is that with the former you pick your main course and with the latter they let you try all three. The former is more than enough food, including a raft of small plates to share, and costs a very reasonable sixty Euros.

Everything we had was fresh and gorgeous, with a real emphasis on outstanding local produce, to the extent that many of the things I remember were the vegetarian dishes. Ricotta piled onto airy lozenges of focaccia, topped with translucent discs of radish was an absolute joy, and duckling in a deep, olive-studded sauce was a miraculous thing. But the veg that came with it – tender, just-cooked carrots and potatoes totally permeated with flavour (“it’s seasoned to the core” was James’ verdict the following week, “I just don’t understand how”) – were, if anything, even better.

All that and we enjoyed our meal two tables down from Kyle MacLachlan – well dressed, painfully polite, fastidious and on his phone for much of the meal. I considered getting an autograph for my brother, who watched Dune so much as a teenager that he could recite the script verbatim, but thought better of it. I found out later, on Wikipedia, that MacLachlan owns a vineyard: I bet he loved Bordeaux.

Zéphirine
62 rue Abbé de l’Epée, 33000 Bordeaux
https://zephirine.fr

2. Echo

There are wine bars in both sections of this list, and whether they’re down as places to eat or to drink is often largely dictated by whether I mainly ate or drank there. But Echo, which was probably my favourite meal of the holiday, has a menu with starters, mains and desserts, and so although technically a wine bar felt more like a restaurant to me. It was an incredibly cool room packed with Bordeaux’s most beautiful types, although Zoë and I did spend much of the meal trying to work out whether the blustering Brit at the next table, a ruddy-faced spitting image of Stanley Johnson, was wearing a wig or not (my money was on it being a syrup).

More importantly, Echo had a superb wine list both by the bottle and the glass and a menu where you could gladly eat anything on it without suffering a dud dish. It featured quite a lot of fusion and slow food, and I particularly loved the vitello tonnato topped with – a genius idea, this – an XO sauce of enormous depth. That sauce also turned up in a tuna tataki, harmonising with rare sashimi-grade fish and an outrageously delicious lacquered aubergine. A buttery Breton biscuit crowned with a plume of lemon cream, criss-crossed with thyme emulsion, was quite the coup de grâce. It’s also worth noting that unlike most of the places on this list, Echo is open on both Sundays and Mondays. Lucky Bordeaux.

Echo
18 rue de la Cours-des-Aides, 33000 Bordeaux
https://echocaveamanger.myportfolio.com

3. Yarra

The district of Chartrons is north of the historic centre, on the same side of the Garonne and just before you get to the futuristic statement piece that is the Cité du Vin. All the research I did suggested that this was the bobo capital of Bordeaux and so, predictably, I loved the place. Rue Notre Dame is full of restaurants, bars, cafés and boutiques, and an absurdly pretty place to wander from one of those to the next. It’s no coincidence that three of the places on this list sit on that single stretch. But Yarra, even in that exalted company, was rather special.

It’s unprepossesing out front but cavernous out back, a series of stone-walled rooms with mismatched furniture, cool by virtue of not trying too hard. But the real draw is out back, a gorgeous secluded courtyard where I quite happy could have spent an entire evening making like a Bordelais. As you can probably guess from the name, the owners are Australian. That shows in the welcome (“rain water or angry water?” asked our server to see if we wanted still or sparkling). It also shows in the wines, because although I had several crackers by the glass my favourite was a Yarra Valley Riesling.

All that would get it a place on this list but the small plates are more than the icing on the cake. I defy you to look at a menu like Yarra’s and not order something, even if like me you have dinner plans later that evening. Octopus tacos with, of all things, pineapple were a joyous find but my absolute favourite were the anchovy pintxos – salty anchovy, mozzarella, fennel and guindilla assembled on a thin slice of bread, bright with oil and pesto. Might sound like overkill, but without doubt one of the most happiness-inducing things I ate all week. That you got four of them for six Euros made something ridiculously good ridiculous value.

Yarra
18 rue Notre Dame, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/yarra_bordeaux/?hl=en

4. Lauza

We had lunch at Lauza, a place which managed to be sober and grown-up without being stuffy, and I liked it very much. On the very outer edge of the historic city and a stone’s throw from one of my favourite coffee places, Café Piha, it served a clever and satisfying lunch which was precise, well thought through and excellent value.

You can eat off the à la carte, but at lunchtime the trick is to team the starter and dessert from that menu with the plat du jour, which brings the whole thing in at a silly twenty-eight Euros. Given that the mains on the à la carte cost around thirty on their own, that’s a hard offer to refuse. I particularly enjoyed a tartare made of a mixture of veal and herring which ramped up the umami before smothering the whole thing in a delicious, comforting potato foam, and I envied Zoë’s dessert, a chocolate cremeux which looked even better than my selection of cheeses.

Lauza
5 rue de Hâ, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.lauza.fr/en/

5. Racines

Racines was even closer to the line between sober and stuffy, but managed just about to stay on the right side of it despite looking like a place that said “business lunch” more than casual meal. That might also derive from the location, slightly out of the historic centre and bang opposite a huge glass-fronted building which housed, as it turned out, a bank.

But that’s not entirely fair to Racines and it didn’t encounter me at my best: it was my final meal in Bordeaux and I’d just been told by my hotel that I’d need to rush it because no taxi driver wanted to brave the Tour De France disruption after three pm. The fact remains that Racines, owned by self-taught Scottish chef Daniel Gallacher, is an excellent place turning out formidable food.

The lunch menu gives you a choice of two starters, mains and desserts for a crazy thirty-two Euros and in terms of quality and quantity I thought it was even better than the comparably priced Lauza. A prawn tartare absolutely shone with citrus freshness but was perfected with a savoury bouillon with notes of Thai basil, and a substantial, sublimely cooked piece of hake was served with bergamot, sorrel and oyster cream in an exceptionally complex, well orchestrated dish.

And then all the whistles and bells fell away for a dessert which was just cherries, verbena and fromage blanc – simple, unshowy and beautiful; people talk about life being a bowl of cherries, but I didn’t know it could be this good. I left full, profoundly grateful for Racines’ great wine list and efficient aircon and slightly sad that I couldn’t try the full tasting menu available at dinner. I’ll just have to go back.

Racines
59 rue Georges Bonnac, 33000 Bordeaux
https://racines-bordeaux.com

6. Papouch

We discovered Papouch at the end of Rue Notre Dame on our amble through Chartrons early in the holiday and loved the look of the menu so much that we changed plans there and then to book it for our last night. It was a very smart choice. The staff – bright and infectiously friendly – moved another table out on to the pavement so we could enjoy the buzz of a warm al fresco Bordeaux evening. And all the food was simply gorgeous – all the menu is small plates for sharing and we did our best to have a crack at most of it.

That included wonders like new potatoes smashed and topped with kimchee, satay and a deep mushroom XO sauce. We also adored a khobez topped with yoghurt, mint, honey, cumin, a slow-cooked egg yolk and nuggets of an intense sausage something like merguez. And I really loved a dish they called “crispy rice spicy fish” that was like a cross between arancini, rice crackers and fishcakes, quite inimitable and a glorious surprise of a thing.

None of the dishes cost more than fifteen Euros, none was less than outstanding and I could have gone back the next night, ordered all the things I missed out on and doubtless had an equally magnificent evening. Only later did I realise, leafing through their Instagram, that the restaurant had barely been open a month. It has a bright future ahead of it.

Papouch
138 rue Notre Dame, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.papouch.fr

7. Brasserie Bordelaise

A lot of my Bordeaux restaurants were full of light, inventive and seasonal food, often light on the carbs. That, combined with clocking up nearly 20000 steps a day, meant that I put on less weight on this holiday than on most I can recall. But I picked somewhere more traditional for lunch with Zoë’s family, stopping in Bordeaux for the day before flying home from the family wedding, and it didn’t let me down.

Brasserie Bordelaise is a much more old-school choice, a surprisingly big restaurant with large, sturdy tables and large sturdy chairs where large sturdy people can eat large sturdy meals. And I absolutely loved that, helped along by a brigade of hard-working, charming staff.

This is all about the classics, so some of us feasted on oysters while I had a cool, subtle and utterly delicious gazpacho. Next to me Zoë and her parents demolished a gorgeous-looking charcuterie board. I didn’t order that well – my roasted chicken main was probably the only misfire of the meal – but around me everybody else enthused over their bavette, fillet steak, beef cheek or steak tartare. This is the place to go for that kind of hearty, fortifying stuff; I remember looking at the menu to order my dessert and thinking wistfully about the cassoulet less travelled. By my in-laws-to-be had a wonderful lunch, and we made some brilliant memories, and I found that mattered much more.

Brasserie Bordelaise
50 rue Saint-Rémi, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.brasserie-bordelaise.fr

8. Buvette

On the night we’d set aside for wine bars and getting drunk, we struggled. This is probably a very British thing to say, but sometimes the wine bars had the foreplay to shagging ratio all wrong, telling customers at the next table about the range of wines on offer while you waited to be served to the extent where your stomach thought your throat had been cut (I know, this manages to make me sound both like a Philistine and a pisshead). We left one wine bar where an hour in we’d only had one glass apiece and stumbled into Buvette looking for refuge.

It was a good decision. It’s a stylish-looking spot with a good, buzzy atmosphere, nice high tables, a compact but appealing selection of wines by the glass and a range of small plates which rescued the evening. It reminded me a little of Malaga’s Casa Lola, one of my favourite places for eating and drinking, and everything we had was top notch. I especially enjoyed the goat’s cheese, drizzled with honey and surrounded by crumpled rosettes of speck and really top-notch tinned smoked tuna from a cannery called Pirate, perfect winkled out with a fork and popped onto thin slices of baguette.

Buvette
41 Cr d’Alsace-et-Lorraine, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/buvette_bordeaux/?hl=en-gb

9. Le Guet À Pan

Bordeaux has a couple of cool-looking food halls, one near the station and another, I seem to remember, up near the Cité du Vin. But the main food market, the Marché des Capucins, looks like something out of the Eighties and comes to life at lunchtime, becoming steadily busier and with more traders as the week goes on. Like a lot of these markets, it’s a mixture of produce and food traders with an embarrassment of riches – oysters at one place, moules at another, pintxos at a third.

I’ve been to many places like this, from Rotterdam’s Markthal to Barcelona’s Boqueria – my favourite remains Malaga’s peerless Atarazanas – but I’m not sure I’ve ever visited one as scruffily vibrant as the Marché des Capucins. I would have really struggled to decide where to eat, but I was lucky enough to stumble on a blog post by the excellent Lost In Bordeaux and so opted for Guet À Pan which had an appealing lunch menu. I wasn’t entirely sold on my truffled croque monsieur – the bread was a little hard and unyielding – but my starter, a pared-back trio of burrata, peaches and local tomatoes – was as enchanting as anything I ate all week. Reflecting on my lunch, Carrie Bradshaw style, I couldn’t help but wonder: maybe restaurant bloggers should be twinned, like towns? If so, bagsy me Bordeaux.

Le Guet À Pan
Place des Capucins, 33800 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/leguetapan/?hl=en

10. Henriette & Olga

I can’t go away on holiday in summer without seeking out ice cream or gelato, and Bordeaux was no exception. I saw plenty of places dotted around the centre but having done my research I zeroed in on Henriette & Olga and loved it so much that I went back another couple of times before the week was out. It’s very luxe, in a gorgeous spot on rue du Pas-Saint-Georges, one of my favourite Bordeaux streets, just opposite a very nice perfumery I never quite managed to visit.

Although it had a great range of flavours I couldn’t move beyond my two favourites, a chocolate which prioritised depth over sweetness and a caramel with indulgent, almost-burnt sugar and plenty of complexity; I blame the fact that the orange blossom honey and pine nut gelato was sold out every time I visited. Anyway, it was up there with the best gelato I’ve had anywhere else – in the UK, in Montpellier, even in Bologna, and I really loved the place. Delightful staff, too, and a lovely terrace out front if you fancy people watching.

Henriette & Olga
25 rue du Pas-Saint-Georges, 3300 Bordeaux
https://www.henrietteetolga.fr

Where to drink

1. L’Officine

I had a post-dinner drink at l’Officine one night and almost immediately filed it under I wish I’d spent an evening here. It was a lovely old-school wine bar, all simple wooden chairs, mosaic-tiled floor and honey-coloured stone walls, and it was absolutely rammed with people living the good life. It classed as one of my biggest regrets of the holiday, so I recommended it to James and Liz who promptly booked it for their Saturday night in the city (it’s bookable online, which is worth knowing).

So they went, and I saw their pictures of the other rooms in the bar, the ones I never graduated to, and their pictures of boards groaning with cheese and charcuterie and of tartines topped with cherry tomatoes and roasted peppers. Looking through, and wishing I was there, I was 90% delighted for them, 10% envious. That’s a good ratio for me, by the way: normally when I look at people’s holiday photos on Instagram it’s far closer to 30-70.

L’Officine
48 rue du Dr Albert Barraud, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.lofficinebordeaux.fr

2. Backyard – Brique House

Bordeaux isn’t really a beer destination in the same way as, say, Montpellier or Paris. There are the grand total of about two verified venues on Untappd for the city and finding craft beer was tricky. I guess on one level that should be no surprise for a city more synonymous with wine than arguably any other in the world, but I still thought there would be an active craft beer scene, perhaps smaller but more vociferous.

I did however really enjoy Backyard, which is the Bordeaux outpost and tap room of Lille brewery Brique House. They had a great terrace looking out on the place des Quinconces which was sort of what the front terrace of the Oakford would look like if it was a hundred times more classy, they did very passable pizza with spicy sausage and splodges of ricotta, and I really enjoyed New Queen In Town (no doubt a reference to Zoë’s arrival in the city), their entry level IPA.

James and Liz also visited on their trip to Bordeaux – it’s open Sunday and Monday, which again is the exception rather than the rule – made inroads into the rest of their beer list and were very impressed. Oh, and if you do visit Backyard the interior has to be seen to be believed: the 90s really are back with a vengeance.

Backyard – Brique House
40 Allées d’Orléans, 33000 Bordeaux
https://briquehouse.com/taprooms/backyard-brique-house-4

3. Space Factory

If you wanted an illustration that craft beer is yet to gain a foothold in Bordeaux Space Factory, the only Untappd verified venue in the historic centre, is a great illustration of that. That’s not to say I didn’t like it – it had a certain stripped back charm with grungy lighting and a mixture of Tollix stools and reclaimed chairs, and all the craft beer lovers in there seemed to be having a lovely time. But it lacked the cool of, say, Paris’ Liquiderie or the polish of some of Montpellier’s burgeoning beer scene.

That said I still had a lovely time there and would cautiously recommend it if you tire of wine – although why would you? – and want a big glass of something cold and crisp. The evening I went there was a tap takeover by relatively local brewery Brasserie Jukebox, from just up the road in Cognac, another place synonymous with an alcoholic drink that isn’t beer. I rather enjoyed their stuff, as it goes.

Space Factory
5 rue Beaubadat, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.spacefactory33.com

4. Beer Trotter

Beer Trotter, a little bottle shop on Chartrons’ rue Notre Dame, was my favourite beer venue of the trip. It’s small and unassuming, it’s only open shop hours – so closed at lunchtime and after 7.30 at night – but it’s a really lovely, modest little place. They have an impressive range of beers from further afield in Europe – I spotted some I really wanted to try from Sofia, of all places – and they stock seemingly everything from local brewery Azimut Brasserie.

But what I really loved was that they had just the two beers on keg, and what they lacked in quantity they easily made up for in quality. I had an IPA from Basqueland Brewing, just over the border, which was probably the nicest beer I had on my holiday, but even more exciting – for Zoë more than me – was a proper beer white whale, Sang Bleu by Cantillon. Zoë raved about it to the owner, and between our French and his English we managed to cobble together an understanding that the man really loves his Belgian beers.

I left wishing I could have stayed longer, wishing too that my luggage had more room in it to cram with cans to take home but most of all thinking that when I come back to Bordeaux I plan to rent an Airbnb in Chartrons, find somewhere wonderful for lunch every day and then pop in for a tipple at Beer Trotter before my inevitable siesta.

Beer Trotter
84 rue Notre Dame, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/beertrotterbordeaux/?hl=en-gb

5. SIP Coffee Bar

Bordeaux has a small but excellent coffee scene, and during the week I think I managed to try out most of the key players. Probably my favourite of the bunch, although they were all good, was SIP which occupies a lovely spot on a street corner and has a lovely terrace which catches the sun – I very much enjoyed multiple lattes there watching the world go by. The inside is also very attractive in a midcentury-chic sort of way, and deceptively big with a rather fetching mezzanine floor.

They also serve a great-looking brunch menu, and although I didn’t try the food there I enviously saw very attractive dishes turning up at neighbouring tables (the pancakes with bacon and maple syrup looked especially tempting). Instead we settled for a pain au chocolat each from the bakery opposite, which was predictably brilliant.

The service was enthusiastic and hugely welcoming, but more than that it was a great advert for Bordeaux in general. When the chap realised this was our first visit and that we loved our coffee, he wrote a list of recommendations on a scrap of paper for us. It had four names on it – three of which we’d already visited and one of which we planned to go to before the end of our holiday. They also happen to be the last four entries on this list. But although I loved them all, SIP remained my favourite.

SIP Coffee Bar
69 Bis rue des Trois-Conils, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/sip_coffeebar/

6. Black List Café

Black List, just the other side of the Cathedral Saint-André from SIP and Space Factory, was a lovely little spot and again, did a knockout coffee. Little is the operative word here, because it’s a very chic, very long, very thin room with benches down one side and no room, really, to sit on the other. So you all sit side by side in a line sharing a view, which I found I rather liked, although it reminded me of drinking at Flat White on Berwick Street before third wave coffee had exploded in the UK and almost nobody knew what a flat white was.

Service, as in so many of these places, was outstanding and the coffee was nectar. I only subsequently found out, sadly too late, that they also have a “boutique de donuts” – what a beautiful trio of words – around the corner called Snickelfritz. Maybe it’s best for my waistline that I didn’t realise that in time, but I’d like to have found out whether they can give Pippin Doughnuts a run for their money.

Black List Café
27 place Pey Berland, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.instagram.com/blacklistcafe/?hl=en

7. Café Piha

Now, if we’re talking about sweet treats to accompany your coffee the prize for that surely has to go to Cafe Piha, which is just over the way from Lauza, on a very pretty street called rue des Ayres (which I assume has nothing to do with Pam Ayres, much as I wish it had). Cafe Piha does excellent coffee, its outside seating gives you a great view of the city’s comings and goings and the inside is beautifully airconditioned, even if the person in charge of the sound system likes reggae a lot more than I ever will.

But the other reason to go there is that they sell cookies from BATCH, a place a couple of doors down whose A-board boasts that they sell the city’s largest cookies. Well, that might be true – they make even a Ben’s Cookie look positively anaemic – but more importantly a better cookie is hard to imagine. Tectonic plates of biscuit, only faintly held together by huge seams of molten chocolate, they are both a struggle to eat tidily and a delight to eat messily.

I imagine if you left them to cool they’d be even better, although I never had the patience for that, and although you can buy them to take away two doors down there was something about polishing one off with a silky, poised latte that, to me, made for a perfect mid-afternoon pick me up. You know, on the afternoons when I wasn’t in an ice cream parlour or sipping a rare lambic beer.

Café Piha
69 rue des Ayres, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.cafepiha.com/coffee-shop-bordeaux/

8. KURO Espresso Bar

KURO (they do seem to like block capitals in Bordeaux) was the first place I had coffee in the city, and after three days of challenging café au lait – or nothing at all – in the Dordogne it was an emotional moment to be reunited with the good stuff. It has a lovely spot just down from the opera house, round the corner from Backyard, and I can’t tell you how grateful I was that it was quite that good, after slumming it for what felt like ages. If you do stop there for a coffee I also recommend a spot of wine shopping at L’Intendant, an incredible shop built around a spiral staircase where the wines just get grander and more tempting as you go along. I came home with a 2016 Pomerol, only slightly irked that I didn’t have the money and the space in my luggage to properly ransack the place..

KURO Espresso Bar
5 rue Mautrec, 33000 Bordeaux
https://kuroespressobar.wixsite.com/website

9. L’Alchimiste

Last but not least, L’Alchemiste was the coffee place I didn’t get round to until my final day. It’s arguably the godfather of the Bordeaux coffee scene and, unlike the majority of the cafés in this list, they roast their own beans. And if I didn’t love it quite as much as the others that might have said more about me – harried on my last day, rushing down a coffee before my hastily moved-forward lunch at Racines – than it did about L’Alchemiste itself.

What I will say is that my coffee was outstanding, although I never expected anything less, and that their terrace out front, on the absurdly pretty rue du Vielle Tour, just up from the eighteenth century Porte Dijeaux, is a marvellous place to sip, observe and wish you had just another couple of days in the city. That last bit – well, that might just have been me, too.

L’Alchimiste
12 rue de la Vielle Tour, 33000 Bordeaux
https://www.alchimiste-cafes.com/alchimiste/espaces/

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Restaurant review: Bakery House

On July 14, 2023October 12, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025, although the menu and ownership are apparently unchanged.

It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.

And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.

But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.

Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.

Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.

Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?

At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.

I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.

Restaurant review: Knead Neapolitan Pizza, Maidenhead

On June 30, 2023November 12, 2023 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

It’s strange to think that I took nine years to review anywhere in Maidenhead, and then went there three times last year in relatively quick succession. The Elizabeth Line is, of course, the main reason for that, making the place only twelve comfortable, air-conditioned minutes away. But the other reason, which is similar but not the same, is the effect the Elizabeth Line is having on Theresa May’s stomping ground.

Speaking of the great woman, here’s a true story: I was within spitting distance of the former Prime Minister last year when she was the mystery star guest at my secondary school’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. Fuck me, it’s Theresa May! I said as she walked past the bench where I was drinking warm cider out of a plastic glass (fortunately she didn’t try to, although I’m pretty sure she heard me).

As I’ve mentioned before, all sorts of interesting restaurants are proliferating in Maidenhead now it has these shiny new transport links, and many are the sort of places you might wish Reading had. A Hoppy Place has the best part of twenty beers on tap with a scale and central location that combines the best of the Nag’s Head and the Grumpy Goat. Seasonality, which I reviewed last year, is the kind of seriously good small independent modern European restaurant that has long eluded central Reading.

Sauce & Flour – still hate the name – might not have been my bag but even so it was undeniably bang on trend. El Cerdo, which opened recently, is building good word of mouth for its tapas (Reading town centre last had a tapas restaurant in 2016, if you’re keeping score).

And finally, getting to the point, there’s Knead, the subject of this week’s review and the reason I plonked my arse on that iconic moquette about half an hour after I closed my laptop for the week, pulling out of Reading Station with Zoë, a weekend of sunshine, food and company ahead of us. Within another half an hour we were sitting in the sun outside A Hoppy Place with a couple of cold beers, a packet of pork scratchings and one eye on the menu of our dinner venue. Life was good.

Knead’s story is a time-honoured one involving many of the elements you often see in independent hospitality businesses. Husband and wife team (check) Olivia and Simon Perry bought a van (check) in 2018. Four years of street food events (check), catering (check) and pop-ups (check) later, they decided to take things to the next level and move into a permanent spot. They carried out some crowdfunding last year (check) and finally, in December they opened their first restaurant in the middle of Maidenhead.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive or to brand that narrative as a cliché. Scrolling back in time all that way to 2018, seeing the whole thing unfolding in reverse like Memento, I was struck by how hard the Perrys had worked to get to where they are. This was no flash in the pan, no affectation or fad but the culmination of years of work. It made me really want them to do well. It made me think about whether, really, I’ve ever stuck at a dream even half so long. And, of course, it made me hungry.

Knead is on the ground floor of a new build, like A Hoppy Place, Barista & Beyond and, for that matter, Dee Caf and that gives it advantages it makes the most of – proper space outside, big double aspect windows and a surprisingly generous room. I loved the framed prints and the “hydroponic wall”, thick with basil, and if the tables were cheek by jowl the place was so buzzy and happy, filled with the promise of a new weekend, that I was really unbothered by that. At the next table, a couple were sharing a pizza: come to think of it, maybe behaviour like that is why they have to cram them in.

“Who shares a pizza with restaurants struggling like they are right now?” I said, possibly louder than I intended, and Zoë gave me a look I know well, the one that silently says why do you have no indoor voice? I’d like to say I made a mental note there and then to order more food, but in truth that decision had been made hours before, as the train doors had closed.

Knead’s menu is good, small and pleasingly eccentric, by which I mean that it’s full of surprises. Half a dozen red pizzas, three white ones, a handful of nibbles and sides and a couple of sharing boards. That’s all, and many of the obvious pizza choices are missing – including the anchovy and caper combo I would normally pick on autopilot. Pizzas max out at thirteen pounds and everything is keenly priced – so again, what people are doing taking up a table and just eating the one pizza completely escapes me. I’m sorry, I won’t mention that again.

Another encouraging sign is that suppliers get a name check. Some, like Marlow Cheese Company or Agosti Gelato, who make their ice cream in Cookham, are local. Others like Islington’s Cobble Lane (who provide the cured meats) may not be but have a good reputation. I also absolutely loved Knead’s decision to stock beers by White Waltham’s Stardust Brewery, because I think nothing goes with pizza quite like beer. I had their Saaz Pilsner, which was crisp, bitter and rather nice, while Zoë tried their Optic IPA: a sip of hers made it clear that I’d made the wrong choice.

We started with Knead’s charcuterie sharing board, which clocks in at just under fifteen pounds, and it was easily the least impressive thing I ate all evening. This could and should have been an opportunity to showcase how well Knead buys, but it fell flat. The prosciutto had the sheen of something freshly decanted from plastic, the mortadella was – well, still something I’d never really choose to order. The salami was decent but unexceptional. Cobble Lane does lovely cured meats, but I’d be surprised if any of this came from them.

So with the charcuterie not exactly the star of the show, that left the rest. And the rest felt a little like padding. Artichoke hearts tasted thin and nothingy and had, I imagine, been fished out of a jar. Sundried tomatoes, bocconcini and olives were all perfectly unexceptionable, but you could get this in a plastic tub from M&S. And the “no waste focaccia” made from leftover dough was just sticks of pizza dough and not focaccia at all. Presentation just looked like everything had been shoved on a plate, an attempt to say “look how much you’re getting”.

I know I sound like I’m having a mither. But this kind of starter is one of my favourite things in the world when it’s done right, no better than something you can knock up yourself when it isn’t. In Reading, Mama’s Way does something similar that shows this up for the pale imitation it was. And at the Lyndhurst they’ve just introduced their own charcuterie board. For the same money you get generous quantities of three different types of charcuterie, all from Cobble Lane, and a thick slab of terrine, and they throw in a black pudding Scotch egg. I know that because I tried it the night before my visit to Knead. That’s how I know Knead was going through the motions.

But that’s not, I suspect, where Knead’s strengths lie, and perhaps they just have that dish on their menu because they think it’s something a pizzeria should have. Once we moved on to the pizzas themselves they became significantly more assured.

Mine, the “Sergeant Scoville” was that modish classic, the pizza with ‘nduja and some other stuff. In this case they hadn’t thrown the kitchen sink at it, so just ‘nduja, chillies and some hot honey from a London company called Dr Sting. Maybe my tolerance to heat has ramped up after years of Clay’s and Kungfu Kitchen, but I thought this was affably mild. The ‘nduja though, from Cobble Lane, was absolutely spot on with that almost-acrid, savoury punch, and they weren’t stingy with it. The hot honey got lost in the mix a little, but I’d love to see Knead pair it with some blue cheese.

Starting with the toppings, though, is a little arse about face because the fundamentals – the base and the tomato sauce – really were top-notch. A brilliantly chewy, speckled crust, a base that held together and a total package that wasn’t sloppy or untidy. Its closest peer in Reading these days would be Sarv’s Slice, which I really rather liked, but Knead’s pizza is a little bigger, a little better and a little better value. I also ordered a pesto mayo to dip my crust in, which I thought didn’t taste quite right. I subsequently realised from looking at the bill that it was vegan – given that neither pesto nor mayo should be vegan, I thought that was a tad disappointing.

Zoë’s choice, which she out and out adored, was a white pizza. Now, I have friends who think these are against God and against nature, but I personally think there’s a time and a place for them. Based on Zoë’s reaction to this one, the place might be Knead and the time might be the next time I go to Knead.

In the “Hello Gourd-Geous” (when did wacky names move past craft beer and just become what everybody does?) the ‘nduja was still present and correct but harmonising with a completely different backing band. This time it was a sweet creamed pumpkin base spiked with blue cheese (“and there’s loads of blue cheese”, Zoë added). She had a sriracha mayo dip for her crust, which would have been overkill for me but suited her just fine.

Out of sheer greed – why have one pizza between two when you can have two and a half? – we also ordered the “Dreamy Garlic Bread” with mozzarella. I liked it, but it’s a silly name: when something involves quite this much garlic a better name might be something like the “Fucking Honking With Garlic Bread”. Given that they’re probably trying to appeal to families, maybe not.

Dessert rather had to be done, although the selection is on the slender side. I really wanted to try the gelato, which is made locally with milk from the fantastic Lacey’s Farm. I was also drawn to this because the flavours speak of more than a passing acquaintance with Italy – pistachio was a very creditable effort, and the chocolate was nicely bitter, not making the easy concession to pack in sweetness. But what I really loved was the fior di latte ice cream. Our default ice cream in this country is vanilla, as if we can’t accept that ice cream could just taste of itself. It takes confidence in your raw materials to make an ice cream like this, and I loved it. Only a handful of ice crystals in a couple of the scoops spoke of a few quality control issues.

Zoë had a scoop of that bitter chocolate ice cream – a generous one at that – on top of a fudgy, gluten free double chocolate brownie. Just as I have friends who think a white pizza isn’t a pizza, I have other friends who think a brownie isn’t really a dessert. I have more sympathy with the latter school of thought, but anyway Zoë loved it.

Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to sixty-eight pounds, not including tip. I do also have to call out the service which was excellent throughout: Knead has a young, enthusiastic team who were working their socks off on a busy Friday night and you really wouldn’t have known that the restaurant was barely six months old. It has that maturity which comes, I guess, of working on their concept and striving for this for such a long time. I left with a full stomach and that warm feeling that comes from spending your money in the right way, with the right people. Nothing is quite as good as excellent hospitality when it comes to delivering that.

All in all I really enjoyed Knead. The only real misstep was that charcuterie board at the start – and if Knead is going to offer something like that they should do it properly and have the courage of their convictions when it comes to actually using the charcutier who supplies the restaurant. For that matter if they want to keep it local Bray Cured, just down the road, do some of the best cured meats I’ve had in this country. But that gripe aside, Knead was very hard to fault. The pizzas were very accomplished – better, on balance, thank anything we have in Reading – and the commitment to local suppliers for cheese, gelato and beer is laudable.

To have this a twelve minute train ride away, with an excellent selection of beer and cider practically next door, makes Knead a very easy place to recommend on a Friday or Saturday night, or even in the week if you can’t be bothered to cook – which, in fairness, describes me most evenings. So Maidenhead has an excellent high end modern British restaurant, a great town centre craft beer venue and a cracking indie pizzeria. For all I know, it might have a destination tapas bar as well. While these places are opening in Maidenhead, Reading got a Popeyes. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Knead Neapolitan Pizza – 7.6
Unit A, Trinity Place, St Ives Road, Maidenhead, SL6 1SG
01753 973367

https://www.knead.pizza

Café review: Barista & Beyond

On June 23, 2023February 29, 2024 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Barista & Beyond closed in February 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

If I was giving out ratings for having a heartwarming backstory, it’s hard to imagine any business would finish above Barista & Beyond in my list. The café was set up by social enterprise Ways Into Work, which supports people with disabilities, those on the autism spectrum or with mental health challenges to get into work. It offers internships, including at the café, and a better cause is difficult to envisage. I’ve wanted to visit Barista & Beyond for some time, and I’ve been paying close attention to their social media, which I highly recommend following.

It tracks the creation of the space last year, them beginning to trade in November and, for reasons I didn’t entirely grasp, their grand opening in March. It paints a lovely picture of the business, which is just past the IDR, between the Oxford Road and Chatham Street, around the corner from Rise Bakehouse. Looking through Barista & Beyond’s Instagram I got a real picture of their mission to, as they put it, change lives one job at a time. It depicts a happy little spot, nicely fitted out, with pictures of bright smoothies in the sunlight and fresh, vibrant salads. It also features an interview with their intern, Charlie, which I defy you to watch without feeling at least a little moved: put it this way, he’s a lot wiser at eighteen than I was.

So I really wanted to go, and last weekend it reached the top of my to do list: Zoë and I headed west past the Broad Street Mall, but in truth I had a certain amount of trepidation. This is not an establishment I would enjoy giving a negative review to, so I wasn’t overjoyed about the possible risk of that. But there was also the equal and opposite danger, that I would patronise Barista & Beyond, measure them against different standards or pat them on the head for simply existing at all. I would hate to do that, and I doubt they would want a review like that. So I approached the front door hoping they did well, but determined not to say anything that could sound like “didn’t they do well”?

It really is a lovely spot, with an almost European feel, like you could be in Rotterdam or Ghent. They have plenty of outside space which catches the sun, so much so that we decided to eat inside. But the inside is lovely too – very spacious, with tables clustered along the walls and next to those full-length windows, white tiles and lime green banquettes. They haven’t chosen to pack people in, to the extent where the room can feel a little bit empty, but there was a steady stream of punters coming in to get takeaway coffees or the smoothies. I couldn’t blame them: the smoothies looked good.

The website says that everything is made fresh every day, and the display cabinet showed off sandwiches, salads and wraps. They serve breakfast before midday, which I was sadly too late for, but the range of options was good but not huge: three toasties, two wraps, a BLT and a couple of salads. I couldn’t see prices anywhere for the food, although their website does list them and only the breakfast is more than a fiver. I ordered a couple of sandwiches and two coffees which came to just under twenty pounds, presumably because they added VAT.

Coffees came first – a flat white and a latte – and were so hot that we left them to cool down, drinking them after our sandwiches. The flat white looked the part, with a fine foam, while the latte perhaps set lower expectations.

“I wonder if they’ve had training on how hot to get the milk” said Zoë. “At Workhouse the temperature is very carefully controlled, but here it feels like they might have heated it until it’s boiling and then poured it in.”

I agreed, and when I finally got round to sipping my latte I was prepared for the worst. But actually it was lovely: nicely balanced without the slightest scorched bitter note. I always think coffee in Reading falls into three different tiers – the top one is made up of the likes of C.U.P., Compound, Workhouse and the Grumpy Goat, the middle one is the chains that are mediocre but not terrible like Nero and Pret and then the bottom one is the awful burnt stuff you’re best off avoiding. Just to confound me, Barista & Beyond sits between that top and middle one – not as good as Compound a couple of minutes’ walk away but not miles off either. I couldn’t tell if this made me happy or relieved, but perhaps it didn’t matter.

Zoë ordered the chicken caesar wrap. It’s good that she did, because I wouldn’t have: to me, looking at it in the cabinet, the chicken seemed too thick, too uniform, too catering pack. But Zoë thought it was superb, the caesar dressing with a good thud of garlic and the whole thing really enjoyable.

She also pointed out, and she’s right, that Barista & Beyond makes wraps properly – nothing falling out of the bottom and yet no stodgy wodge of tortilla crumpled together at the bottom for you to wade through either. Many places whose wraps I enjoy don’t assemble them as carefully as Barista & Beyond. It’s also worth pointing out that your sandwich comes, standard issue, with a sizeable number of good quality ready salted crisps, and some salad: largely undressed, so not really my bag, but your mileage may vary.

I’d chosen the tuna melt and also found much to enjoy. I don’t know if Barista & Beyond buy their bread from Rise round the corner, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had. For what it’s worth, I thought it was nicer bread than the stuff I remember last time I had a Tuna Turner at Shed, robust and grill-striped with a nice thick crust. It’s not possible to talk about tuna melts in Reading, really, without the spectre of the town’s most famous version on Merchant’s Place, and if Barista & Beyond’s fell short it wouldn’t be too hard to close the gap.

The menu talks about red onion, which would have made a huge difference, but there wasn’t any in my toastie. Something was needed to give contrast and crunch, whether that was red onion, capers or, as Shed also use, jalapeños. Any of that would have made this an even better tuna melt. But was it better than one you’d get out of plastic packaging at Costa, Starbucks or Pret? Of course it bloody was, and you get a heap of ready salted crisps thrown in for good measure. To come second to the Tuna Turner, in this town, is no disgrace, and I suspect this sandwich did exactly that.

Wanting to give the place more of a runout after our sandwiches, not quite ready to leave with our coffee approaching prime sipping temperature, I went up and ordered a couple of slabs of chocolate brownie. Again, I have no idea whether they were from Rise – I’m guessing not, but if they were they weren’t Rise’s best effort. Not terrible by any means, but too much reliance on sugar and not enough on cocoa, the texture a little one note without enough contract between the brittle and the fudgy. A couple of very gratifying chunks of chocolate made the occasional bite a joyous surprise, but it needed more.

I tried eating it with a fork, but soon abandoned that – the brownie didn’t have enough give, and I could already picture it flying across that wide open space. Still, you got two generous squares for six pounds, so not unreasonable value but not reaching the heights of brownies you can pick up at the Grumpy Goat, at Workhouse or at – I’m sorry, but this is true – Prêt A Sodding Manger. I was hoping these would give Barista & Beyond a little bounce to the rating at the end, but really they confirmed the decision I’d already made. I didn’t hang about to take a picture, though, so the brownie can’t have been that bad.

I’ve been putting off talking about the service, careful of walking that tightrope I mentioned at the start of this review, but here goes: it was superb. We were served by two different members of staff, one of whom was Charlie of Barista & Beyond’s Instagram fame. And perhaps it’s not possible to shed those preconceptions, or the first impression I’d got from watching that video, but he was just excellent. Nothing was any trouble, and every time he told me I was “very welcome” or to have a lovely day I was positive that he meant every word.

You don’t always get this in hospitality, talking to someone who comes across as absolutely loving their job, feeling lucky to do it and wanting to do it as well as they can. In turn I felt quite lucky to be looked after by Charlie and it made me think, far more than I expected to. I know hospitality is underpaid and undervalued, I know that it struggles to find people since the pandemic and that awful thing that some bigots voted for in 2016.

I know, fundamentally, that the solution to that is to pay people more, which restaurants can’t do for the same reasons they can’t charge more for food, because people seem to think it’s the one part of the economy that skips along carefree while our supermarket bills go through the roof. Go figure. And I can understand why the people that do work in cafés, particularly ones that serve crap coffee and pay dud wages, might not want to bring the sunshine day in, day out. But I didn’t get any of that from Charlie, and watching the other customers filing in to get coffees and smoothies I don’t think they did either.

Comparisons, at times like this, are necessary but can sound brutal. Does Barista & Beyond do the best coffee in the area? I’m afraid not: you need Compound Coffee for that. I suspect you can get better cakes at Rise, and Barista & Beyond’s sandwiches are solid but not in the top tier of Reading’s lunch choices. Barista & Beyond is a good café, not a great one, although it has potential. But it is a great idea, not a good one, and the service and the experience will stay with me long after I’ve forgotten ninety-nine per cent of the lunches I eat this year.

You may read all this and come away wanting to give it a try, to spend your money doing some good; I have a feeling that people who read my blog, like me, might not weigh all these factors as dispassionately as others do. I imagine that if you do visit, whoever they have behind the counter at that point, you may find it gives you food for thought. And that’s something you simply can’t find just anywhere. Have I avoided sounding patronising? I really don’t know, but I honestly hope so.

Barista & Beyond – 7.0
5 Alfred Street, Reading, RG1 7AT
07749 497412

https://www.baristaandbeyond.co.uk

Restaurant review: Iro Sushi

On June 16, 2023October 12, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews

Three sushi restaurants opened in Reading last year, and Iro Sushi is the last one I’ve got round to reviewing. I managed Intoku last summer, where I thought the food was excellent but everything around the food – service, timing, polish – had gone missing in action (some of our food had, too). Then a couple of months ago I went to You Me Sushi, where I was very pleasantly surprised by some decent sushi and sashimi, albeit in a slightly sterile environment. But it was only last weekend, on a scorching Saturday, that I finally made it to Iro.

Even then, shamefully, it wasn’t my first choice for this week’s review. I was originally going to a town centre venue I thought was ripe for reappraisal, but as the day got hotter and hotter I realised I needed something cooler and subtler. So Zoë and I ambled up Queen Victoria Street hoping that the window seats at Iro Sushi were free, and felt very lucky when we discovered that they were. An A-board outside advertised “CHICKEN KASTU CURRY”: I hoped it wasn’t a portent.