Takeaway review: Rosa’s Thai Café

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This might be hard to believe, but I’ve been writing this blog for coming up to eight years, and in that time many different people have joined me on duty, sitting the other side of the table from me as we’ve experienced both triumph and disaster. For the first three years of the blog, my regular dining companion was my ex-wife, but for the last four years I’ve had all sorts of plus ones as I’ve explored restaurants in Reading and beyond. 

Whether it’s my waspish mother (“Good view of the wheelie bins”), my friend Reggie (“Don’t tell them I drink Amstel, they’ll think I’m a right chump”), ex-Reading Buses CEO Martijn Gilbert eating a naan the size of his head or my delightful friend Jerry trying Japanese food for the first time in his sixties, they all add something to the experience – for me, anyway, if not for the reader. All in all, over twenty people have come out with me to review restaurants since this blog began. And there may well be more to come: I already have a poor unfortunate who has volunteered to accompany me when I get round to reviewing Wendy’s.

Nowadays, my most regular dining companion is of course my other half Zoë, especially this year when I’ve mostly reviewed takeaways. It’s safe to say that she’s build up rather a cult following over the last six months, to the extent where I get Tweets about it. “Hope there are some good Zoë quotes this week”, one reader has said to me – more than once – and recently my friend Graeme told me that he mainly reads the reviews for Zoë’s comments. “They belong on motivational dinner plates” he said. 

He has a fair point. Her greatest hits include referring to something as “artisan shit”, describing Pho’s legendary chicken fried rice as “hot as balls”, calling a hearty meal a “proper gut bash” (can’t you just see that round the edge of a piece of Emma Bridgewater?) and staging a revolt during our only attempt at a restaurant DIY kit (“Sixty pounds and they ask you to roll your own fucking dough”). That’s before we get on to her summing up Rizouq’s beautiful samosas as “fried, fresh as fuck and full of meat”, or savaging O Português’ grilled chicken as “a mirage… just a carcass covered in tasty skin”. 

I’m lucky to live with someone so endlessly quotable – I’ve long suspected I’m the true plus one in this partnership – although I should add that she writes beautifully on her own blog. Anyway, I’m sorry to have to tell you that this week’s meal is a solo effort. “I need some time off” she told me. “I’m never going to lose any weight eating a takeaway every week like this.” I tried my best to dissuade her – think of the readers I’ll haemorrhage, I told her – but when Zoë’s mind is made up it’s decidedly hard to change. “My jeans are saying pack it in” she added later. 

So, this week it’s a solo takeaway from Rosa’s Thai Café, the smallish London chain of Thai restaurants. It started as a privately owned Thai restaurant in Spitalfields before expanding to other London locations. Then – and this is a familiar story by now – it was the subject of a private equity-backed management buyout which installed an ex-director of Wahaca as chief executive and the former chief executive of Yo! Sushi as chairman. Good times! At the time, a managing partner at “investments specialists” Connection Capital said “Rosa’s Thai Café’s differentiated and well thought-through business model puts it in an excellent position to exploit growth opportunities, even with today’s macro-market headwinds”, and if that’s not a sentence that makes you peckish I don’t know what is.

Anyway, the rest follows a well-trodden path: Rosa’s Thai expanded to Leeds, to Liverpool, to Manchester and Birmingham. The only other Thai chain I can think of is Giggling Squid, and Rosa’s Thai is clearly trying to leapfrog them for national primacy. In their search for new growth opportunities (err, sites) they have turned to Deliveroo Editions, which means Reading is one of the only other places that gets to try out their food. So off I went to Deliveroo to see if the soul of that little restaurant in Spitalfields in 2008 was still alive in the menu today.

To their credit, the menu on Deliveroo is relatively compact, and largely the same as the one they offer in their restaurants, with the exception of a few starters. The mains are divided into noodle dishes on the one hand, and curries and what they call “wok stars” (lord, no) on the other. The prices are the same as those in the restaurants, which must mean there’s some loss leading going on given the cut Deliveroo invariably takes. Starters cluster around the seven pound mark and mains between nine and twelve, although you pay extra for rice. “Pick one each and try serving them at the centre of the table” says Rosa’s Thai’s Deliveroo page of the starters, seemingly under the impression that they’ve invented communal dining.

There are decent vegan options, which you’d expect with Thai food, and most of them revolve around tofu although they do manage to slip in some “This Isn’t Chicken”, last seen on the Pho menu. I still don’t understand the name, because by definition you could use it to describe anything which isn’t chicken: Quorn, beef, Michael Gove, an air mattress, the list is endless. It’s a nice touch, though, that you can also order pumpkin crackers instead of prawn crackers.

Anyway, I ordered a main with jasmine rice and a couple of starters – partly for research and partly so Zoë could try some of the dishes to liven up her boring ready meal – and everything came to thirty-two pounds, not including rider tip. If that sounds expensive, bear in mind that I ordered two starters.

As so often with Deliveroo, things were very speedy indeed: I placed my order at ten past seven and less than fifteen minutes later it was on its way, with the rider taking a mere five minutes to get to my door. I’d say that’s right on the border between “quick” and “too quick”: I imagine as restaurants have reopened, the demand on takeaway services has declined. Everything came in a paper bag liberally stuck down with Deliveroo Editions stickers, and a handwritten note saying “Keep Calm And Curry On”, also asking me to leave a review on the app.

Now, with many takeaways I’ve ordered recently, including both the Thai meals I’ve had this year, the restaurant had not only popped a lid on but wrapped the whole thing in clingfilm first. If I thought that was an unnecessary belt and braces approach, the delivery from Rosa’s Thai proved me wrong: the bottom of the bag, and all the napkins, were liberally soaked with red curry sauce. Fortunately, there was still a lot of it in the cardboard container but as it turned out it was a telling sign – although Rosa’s Thai were delivery only, one of the things I took away from my meal was that they hadn’t quite given enough thought to how takeaways work.

The best example of that was the first starter I ordered, the pork skewers. These were probably the best thing I ate, as it happens. The pork was nicely tender with just one suspiciously bouncy bit, and that tenderness suggested there had been some marination, even if the supposed honey and soy hadn’t made it into the skewers. The tamarind dipping sauce they came with was worth the price of admission alone. I would have liked to see some evidence of char, of caramelisation on the pork, but more to the point the way they’d served this for takeaway was plain silly.

I accept that it’s never going to be quite as delicious as a takeaway dish as it would be taken straight off the grill and send to your table, but they could have given it a fighting chance by not serving it in a plastic coffin buried underneath a pile of chilled shredded cabbage and carrot like some gastronomic hostage situation. Even so, I liked it – as did Zoë who hoovered up one of the skewers. “This is good” she said. “But you know I love the porks.” (See? She just couldn’t stay away.)

Less successful were the sweetcorn patties. Normally I would have made a beeline for the chicken satay, but I checked myself because I always seem to order it and my reviews don’t always contain enough of interest for vegetarians, let alone the rest of you. So I veered off the beaten path, but I’m not sure it was worth it. The fritters were heavy and stodgy, not light and crispy, with a disconcerting habit of shedding stray kernels, like droppings, on the plate. Apparently the batter has red curry paste and kaffir lime in it, but they didn’t really make their presence felt. Worse was the sweet chilli sauce, which had so much sweetness and so little chilli that it felt like jam, and the whole thing was almost more like a dessert.

“This is when I could do with you weighing in, saying something like this is a fucking corn festival and a half.”

“I wouldn’t say that” said Zoë, trying her first forkful of a corn fritter. “It’s okay, actually. I feel like I’m getting some lemongrass.”

For my main course I’d gone for Rosa’s Thai’s chicken penang curry, one of two different red curries they do. It was nice, and if “nice” sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise it’s probably because I am. Everything was well cooked and well put together. The sauce had some heat, although it felt slightly lacking in depth. And it made a surprising amount of difference that the bamboo shoots were finely shredded – so different from the big planks of it you often get in Thai curries. But the overall feeling was one of inoffensive pleasantness. I don’t know why I expected a little more from Rosa’s Thai but I did, and when I didn’t get it I wondered who this restaurant really appealed to – diners or private equity firms.

So far from a terrible meal, all things considered, but here’s the problem: I just can’t think of the question to which “Rosa’s Thai” is the answer. If you want Thai food in Reading I would urge you to support Thai Table, which has been around for ages and, without fanfare, churns out reliably solid, lovely food. And if you want to try something exciting and new, I highly recommend ThaiGrr!, which really impressed me when I ordered from it recently. Crucially, both restaurants have properly thought about how to make delivery work, they have a better and more interesting range of starters and they’re just all-round more appealing.

By comparison Rosa’s Thai, although by no means bad, falls a little short. And this isn’t about taking against Deliveroo, or Deliveroo Editions: VIP Very Italian Pizza is doing exactly the same kind of market research as Rosa’s Thai. It just so happens that they offer something a little better, more interesting and more distinctive: Rosa’s Thai, on the other hand, just isn’t the growth opportunity I was looking for. I’m taking a week off next week, so you won’t get a review until two Fridays’ time. I plan to spend the next week or so persuading Zoë to join me on my next on duty visit. Wish me luck.

Rosa’s Thai

https://deliveroo.co.uk/menu/reading/reading-editions/rosas-thai-editions-rea
Order via: Deliveroo only

Pub review: The Fisherman’s Cottage

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When I looked at my to do list to decide where to review this week, I had a shopping list of requirements. Somewhere relatively new or unknown, for starters. A venue with good outside space – because the weather is clement all of a sudden and I know that many people, like me, still feel more comfortable eating and drinking outside. Finally, I wanted to pick a place with an interesting story – either somewhere I reviewed a long time ago that has survived the pandemic, or somewhere that opened since the pandemic began.

I scanned the list several times, fruitlessly, and then I realised it had been staring me in the face all along: it was time to go back to the Fisherman’s Cottage. It ticks all those boxes. Down by the river, with tables out front and an attractive beer garden (complete with faux beach hut booths) out back, it is one of Reading’s best pubs in terms of outside space, much of which catches the sun. And it manages to be both new and unknown, kind of: it came under new ownership last year when it was taken over by Turkish chef and restaurateur Cigdem Muren Atkins.

To say she’s had a baptism of fire would be an understatement. The Fisherman’s Cottage reopened just in time to be hit by our second lockdown in November. They had a couple of weeks of trading in December before we went into Tier 3, or Tier 4, or whatever they called it back then, and then we had a third national lockdown which only began to lift in April. During that time, the Fisherman’s Cottage did its best to adapt and survive: there was a click and collect menu, and every weekend if you walked along the river you saw tables outside groaning with cakes and cookies, for sale to passers-by.

Their neighbour the Jolly Angler grabbed more headlines with its attempt to turn its back garden into a poolside beach bar, but the Fisherman’s Cottage kept plugging away all the same. And now we’re in a weird situation: the pub has been under its present management for over six months, but has only been able to operate as a pub for the past two. I know of a few people who have gone there for a drink, but nobody who has eaten there – so on a beautifully sunny evening, accompanied by my partner in crime Zoë, I strolled down the river to give it a whirl.

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Restaurant review: Crispy Dosa

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“Are you sure you don’t want to sit inside?” said the waitress, smiling as she handed us the menu. Like all of the service at Crispy Dosa it was friendly, kind and welcoming: the restaurant was filling up with happy families, all Indian as far as I could see, and she probably didn’t understand why Zoë and I had chosen to sit at a table outside on plastic chairs, opposite the Penta Hotel or in the wind tunnel of Thorn Street.

In other circumstances, I might have acquiesced. The inside of Crispy Dosa, from my cursory glance, looked like a nice space. It had plenty of banquetted booths (I’m not sure whether they were leather or leatherette: leatheresque, perhaps?) each one with a little patch sewn into it saying “CRISPY DOSA ❤️ YOU”. And the restaurant was, for a week night, buzzing: I saw a regular flow of people in and out, customers leaving, some carrying bags to take home and, of course, a steady in and out of delivery drivers.

By contrast, Crispy Dosa’s outside space is slightly unfortunate. On one of the hottest days of the year so far none of the tables caught the sun, and they felt a little like a consequence of necessity: they are, after all, how Crispy Dosa managed to trade for the first few weeks they were open, while they waited for indoor hospitality to be allowed again.

But I am not yet at the stage where I’m ready to eat and drink indoors and, with the exception of a post-vaccination celebratory brunch at Fidget & Bob last month, this was the first time I’d had an al fresco meal this year. So to say those plastic tables and chairs were a welcome sight would be quite an understatement; the waitress probably didn’t understand why we were so excited. So we sat outside, at the very beginning of West Reading, where things begin to get a little bit more lively – I’ve forgotten how much I enjoy people-watching – and for the first time in a long time I held a physical menu in my hand and decided what to order.

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Takeaway review: Pho

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I was having coffee with a friend this week, and he said something that made me think. We were having that time-honoured conversation about independents and chains, probably both saying things that we’d said dozens of times before, and discussing the frustration I always get walking through Caversham, seeing the huge queues outside Costa when better coffee is available in three different cafes all a couple of minutes walk away.

“I nearly put something on social media complaining about that sort of thing” he said, “but then I decided not to. Because if that’s happening, it’s a sign that independents still need to improve their offering.”

We talked about it a little more, but afterwards I found myself wondering whether it was true. Is it that all the people in Reading who flock to our many Costas, Caffe Neros and Starbucks know all about Workhouse, C.U.P., Lincoln and Tamp? Have they tried them and just decided they don’t like them? Do they prefer bigger, more sugary drinks, or is it that they have no idea the alternatives even exist? It’s easy, in an echo chamber on social media, waving our metaphorical pom-poms for indie businesses, to consider failing to use them unthinkable. And yet people still queue for the Caversham Costa: is it that they’re wrong, or more that we’re missing something?

Of course, like everything, it’s more nuanced than that. Maybe those customers are drawn by things like comfy seats and plentiful wi-fi, neither of which has ever been a priority for most of Reading’s independent cafés. Or perhaps it comes down to the consistency of a chain experience: I’ve been to Workhouse, for example and had very good coffees. But occasionally I’ve had iffy ones too. If I went to Nero, I’m pretty sure my coffee would be much more uniform – middling, but uniformly middling. Some people like that. Some people are risk averse, and after all, risk aversion is back in fashion. And all this is even more true of chain restaurants, especially ones where that uniformity is guaranteed by all the food being uniformly prepared in a central kitchen.

All this, in turn, got me thinking about my own attitude to chains and that, inexorably, made me think of Pho. Because back in the days before the pandemic, on the relatively rare occasions where I ordered a Deliveroo, Pho was one of the main restaurants I would order from. I never had a bad meal from them, and I had my favourite dishes of theirs that never let me down.

That’s probably more representative of most people’s takeaway experiences. It’s all very well ordering from a new restaurant every week to try them out, for the purposes of writing a review, but for most people the act of ordering a takeaway is meant to be one of self-care, with no surprises. It’s a present to yourself to take a night off cooking, and you don’t want to squander it. Trying to remove the element of disappointment is, I imagine, part of why some of you read this blog before you try somewhere new. So this week I decided to order from Pho, a bit of an old favourite, to try and work out whether my friend was right that independents still need to raise their game.

Pho, like its neighbour Honest Burger, is only on Deliveroo – and crucially, Deliveroo has been a big part of their offering ever since they opened. The majority of Pho’s restaurant menu is available for delivery, with a good range of starters and a mixture of mains which are either salads, the eponymous pho, curries, rice and noodle dishes. Starters hover around the six to seven pound mark, and mains cost between ten and thirteen pounds (this is another thing chains often get right: pricing that doesn’t exclude anybody).

I don’t write about vegetarian and vegan options often enough, but it’s worth pointing out that Pho’s menu has pretty impressive range in this respect, with dishes using vegetables, tofu or a chicken alternative – called “THIS isn’t chicken”, the Ronseal Quick-Drying Woodstain of soy-based products. I also don’t talk about gluten-free options enough – by which I mean ever – but again, Pho are very strong on this and the vast majority of items are gluten-free. And just to go for the hat trick of Things I Never Talk About, Pho has a kids’ menu too. This stuff is important, because this is what the best chains do well, designing a menu that has wide appeal. From my carnivorous, childless point of view I probably don’t pay that due respect often enough.

We ordered the things we always order, because this was an evening all about comfort and familiarity, and three starters and two mains came to forty-five pounds, not including rider tip. And, as so often with orders from the town centre, there were no real hiccups: we ordered at half-six, the rider was en route fifteen minutes later and he got to us in just under ten minutes, making another stop en route to my house. Everything was hot and everything was well packaged, in well-branded boxes, all of which were recyclable. Again, what this brought home is that delivery has never been a pandemic-mandated side hustle for Pho: it’s always been part of their business model, and I think that shows.

Our starters were variations on a theme (one of my favourite Pho starters, beef wrapped in betel leaf, isn’t available on the delivery menu) and all were really pretty good. Pho’s spring rolls, filled with pork and plenty of crunchy vegetables, are wonderful things, surprisingly light and without any greasiness and I always find it hard not to order them. I particularly liked them with the soy and ginger dip we tried, but they were also very good dabbed in the nuoc cham, a sweet and sharp clear dip (with fish sauce in it, apparently, although it didn’t come across strongly). Zoë had a particular weakness for the peanut sauce, which was thick and rich, a culinary Tim Nice-But-Dim.

For my money, Pho’s giant crab, prawn and pork spring roll is even better. You just get one bigger one, cut into two for six pounds. It might sound like a lot to shell out, but it’s crammed with firm king prawns, white crabmeat and pork and is truly a king among spring rolls. This only comes with nuoc cham – interesting that they’re prescriptive with this starter, whereas with the others you can pick whatever sauce you like – but it’s honestly so good that the dips feel like a sideshow. And again, I felt that chain consistency at work: I’ve had this starter many times, it always tastes the same and it always tastes marvellous. That’s how it should be in all restaurants, in theory at least. But theory doesn’t always translate into practice.

Only the summer rolls slightly underwhelmed me. You got two of these, each cut in half, filled with those meaty prawns, shredded vegetables and vermicelli noodles. We ordered these mainly at Zoë’s request, and eating them felt a bit like reading literary fiction – you’re aware that it’s the correct thing to do, you know on some level that it’s the virtuous choice but none of that made it especially enjoyable. Two portions of fried spring rolls crammed with varying amounts of pork is a tough act to follow, and it may be that I’m just a Philistine, but these didn’t massively do it for me. 

That comes down to personal preference, I suspect. Looking back I wasn’t wild about summer rolls when I reviewed Pho, back in 2018, although I did prefer the versions at now-defunct MumMum when I went there later the same year. But each time I used the same sort of words – delicate here, subtle there. If you like delicate and subtle you’d probably love them: I am, let’s face it, neither delicate nor subtle and that probably explains why they didn’t provoke much passion in me.

Zoë’s regular main course at Pho is their Vietnamese chicken curry, and even the discovery that they recently added a new, spicier version to their menu didn’t deter her from ordering what she always has. To be honest, it was hard enough to persuade her to let me try a forkful so I could write about it. It was a lovely dish, with plenty of peanut and coconut and a clever mix of sweetness, fragrance and just enough heat – pretty mild, really, but hugely soothing. It came with “broken rice”, which looked remarkably unbroken to me, and felt like good value at twelve pounds. If I ever do go completely crazy and order something that isn’t my usual, I’d be tempted to go for the same dish but with strands of beef brisket instead.

My usual, though, is Pho’s com chien, chicken fried rice, by happy coincidence one of the cheapest main courses on the menu. I’ve written before about how much I love this dish, but I had almost forgotten how enjoyable it was. It’s a glorious mixture of rice, slivers of red onion, spring onion and plenty of shreds of chicken, with two star ingredients that lift it far above the usual. One is many, many flecks of chilli and the other is a smattering of tiny, chewy shell-on dried shrimps, every single one a little landmine of savoury joy. And what stops it from being dry, stodgy or boring is a little dish of dark, sweet sauce that you tip over it just before eating, binding the whole thing together and giving it a beautiful, glossy sheen.

“It’s a good dish” said Zoë, trying a forkful. “But it’s hot as balls.” She was right about that – it’s not for the faint-hearted, and my chilli tolerance has improved considerably since the first time I ever ate it, but it was a grateful pain, and a fantastic dish. I could eat it every week of my life and I’m not sure I would ever get bored.

So, what does this all tell us? My meal lived up to that intrinsic promise all chains make, that your meal should be relatively free of surprises: I enjoyed Pho every bit as much as I always have, and I’m not really sure I expected anything different. In that respect this review, probably more than any takeaway review I’ve written this year, comes the closest to depicting a meal I would have eaten off duty. But I’m not sure whether you can make that many sweeping generalisations about chains from my experience of Pho, because I’m not entirely convinced that Pho is representative of chains in general. 

On some levels, you can say it is: the focus on reasonable pricing, the ability to cover a wide range of dietary choices and age groups are absolutely what chains do superbly. But I also think that Pho are especially good at this: they feel to me a cut above most chains. They are lucky that Vietnamese food lends itself well to a vegan or a gluten-free diet, but they have worked hard to maximise their appeal.

They have also given a lot of thought to how they make delivery work, right from the outset, and they’re better at delivery than most restaurants I’ve reviewed this year (I didn’t order pho from them, mainly because it’s not really my cup of tea, but I imagine they’d find a way to get that right in transit as well). And they are meticulous in their approach to expanding: they try to understand the local market and make contact with people in the food scenes of towns and cities where they choose to open new restaurants. They do their homework. I can’t imagine Taco Bell gave any of that a moment’s thought.

I’ve always felt that there are good chains and bad chains, and good independents and bad independents. It’s never been more difficult for independents: without the financial reserves most chains have, they will have to fight harder to survive. And I can think of many independent restaurants over the years that were easily good enough to deserve to flourish, but failed. They needed exposure, they needed time and they needed people to give them a chance. It would help if our local media had written a fraction of the articles about any of those restaurants that they’ve rattled off in the last few months about our impending branch of Wendy’s (seven so far this year and counting), but them’s the breaks.

So yes, I know what my friend was driving at, that independents always have to try to improve their offering. But I also think that, in Reading at least, they feel more likely to try and do that than chains. Chains can rely on a steady stream of customers visiting them based on brand recognition alone, and they can much more easily become complacent as a result. The bottom line is that a good restaurant is a good restaurant, and a good restaurant should drive all restaurants to do better. And based on my meal this week I think that most restaurants – whoever owns them – could learn something from Pho.  

Pho
1-1a Kings Walk, Reading, RG1 2HG
0118 93914648

https://www.phocafe.co.uk/locations/reading/
Order via: Deliveroo only

Takeaway review: Wingstop

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One thing that always strikes me about Reading is that many of the people who proudly call it home weren’t born here. Whether you came here for university and never left, settled here for a job, ended up here because you found love or – like me – wound up in Reading because your parents moved here for one of those reasons back in the Eighties, Reading is full of countless stories about people who made a life here, on purpose or accidentally. Frequently it’s the latter – you always think that one day you’ll go somewhere else, but something about the place gets its hooks into you and somehow, magically, one day you realise that it’s your place. It’s where you belong.

Our independent restaurateurs and entrepreneurs are great examples of that. They all have a story to tell, whether it’s Blue Collar’s Glen Dinning coming here from nearby Didcot, just down the road, Nandana and Sharat of Clay’s settling here after living in India and London or Geo Café’s redoubtable Keti, who moved to the U.K. from Georgia and somehow found herself living, of all places, in Reading. Imagine a Reading in a parallel universe where all those people made different decisions and took their considerable talents elsewhere. Actually, don’t: it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I saw this too, back when I organised readers’ lunches, before the pandemic. ER readers are a fascinating bunch – and I’m not just saying this because they turn up to my lunches – and many of them have moved to Reading, sometimes fairly recently, and are finding their way, looking for their place in things. Reading has so much going on (it did, anyway, before the pandemic, and no doubt will again) and yet it’s not always obvious or easy to find. You have to put the work in. But it rewards the investment: a great and growing food scene, plenty of culture and theatre, history, architecture, wonderful pubs and plenty of breweries. We Reading folk are a lucky bunch.

For me, that mixture of our history and all those who positively choose to live here, roll their sleeves up and make it a better place is what makes Reading so special. It’s something that people who live to run the town down will never comprehend. They sneer about the mosque, or flytipping, or any of a hundred other petty niggles and they don’t see the town for what it really is: a well-educated, pro-Remain, anti-Tory, polyglot, highly skilled place full of possibility. Not perfect – nowhere is – but with plenty of character, and always wanting to be better.

There was a time, a while back, when Reading was especially attractive to a different kind of settler. We were first in the queue for all sorts of interesting businesses, drawn in by our proximity to London and our highly qualified workforce, even before Crossrail was a thing. I still remember Reading getting the first Bill’s outside West Sussex, and how exciting that was. Actually, my memory even goes back as far as our first Pret, and our first Carluccio’s: believe it or not, people were excited about those, too. 

But then we were in line for all sorts of other exciting restaurants – Honest Burgers and Pho chose to have some of their first branches outside the capital in RG1. It looked for a while as if Byron and Busaba would open here, too, and even London’s high-end Peruvian restaurant Ceviche, surreally, was touted for an outpost in Reading. We never got the Wahaca many people so badly wanted (or the branch of Le Pain Quotidien I quite fancied), but we got a Malmaison as a consolation prize. There was a period where Reading went from “it’s all just chains” to “we get the best chains”. With rents pricing many independents out of the town centre, it seemed as much as we could hope for.

I don’t know when this changed – at some point since 2016, when things started their slow dive into the slough of despond – but somewhere along the way we became the first in line for a very different kind of restaurant. We’re no longer a logical extension of London, more the landing ground for American chain restaurants. Five Guys in the Oracle was the harbinger for all that, but in the last few years the rate of change has accelerated. We got a Taco Bell, we got a Chick-Fil-A, we are getting a Wendy’s later this year. And for the latter two, Reading’s is (or was) the very first branch to open in the country. Are we Reading folk really a lucky bunch? Is this going to Make Reading Great Again? 

Anyway, Chick-Fil-A rightly closed in short order after boycotts and protests about their antediluvian approach to LGBT issues, and last month another chicken chain, Wingstop, opened in its place, that weird upstairs location at the front of the Oracle that also played host to vegan junk food restaurant Miami Burger. Wingstop is another huge American chain expanding into the U.K., and – guess what? – Reading’s is the first branch outside London. There have been queues outside since it opened (of customers, rather than protestors) and so I decided to order some on a miserable Monday night, partly out of morbid curiosity and partly because both Zoë and I have a long-standing love of fried chicken in pretty much all its forms.

Wingstop is only on Deliveroo, and their menu is pretty limited. Chicken comes three different ways – wings, “boneless” and tenders. The middle one is the most misleading – “boneless” implies boneless wings, and indeed the Wingstop website refers to them as boneless wings, and I was taken in by that. But the small print on Deliveroo, which I only read after the fact, points out that they are “100% all-white breast meat, 0% bones and 110% flavour”. So that’s nice. 

Effectively they mean that they’re nuggets, which are inherently boneless. But rather than be honest about that, Wingstop has chosen to commit the grammatical crime of converting the word “boneless” from an adjective to a noun. If I hadn’t been fooled I’d have ordered wings, even though they aren’t especially my bag, but there you have it. The real choice, such as it is, is what particular flavour you want one hundred and ten per cent of: Wingstop’s chicken comes in ten different flavours, from their original coating and their signature lemon and pepper all the way through to Mango Habanero or Brazilian Citrus Pepper. 

It wasn’t clear from Deliveroo whether these were a coating or that they were covered in sauce, although the Wingstop website suggests that six of them are “wet” and four of them are “dry”. I can see why they didn’t include this on Deliveroo: “wet and boneless” describes some people I’ve met over the years but hardly summons up images of anything I’d want to order from a restaurant. Anyway, you get two flavours with an order of nuggets or wings and one with chicken tenders, irrespective of how many you order.

We ordered some nuggets, some tenders and some fries and our order came to thirty-three pounds, not including rider tip. If that sounds like a lot, in fairness we did get a lot of nuggets and tenders, and two portions of loaded fries: on the other hand, if we’d given in to the temptation to get some churros for dessert we could have spent even more.

I suspect that many of you have an idea by now of the way this is going, even without a rating of the bottom of this for you to scroll down to. But you know far better than I did when I placed my order: I always try to go in with an open mind, and the prospect of a chain restaurant only doing a limited number of things did rather raise the hope that they might do them well. And, as I said before, I do have a real weakness for fried chicken – and that even includes KFC, or did until last year when I decided I’d rather try and support more independent businesses. 

Everything was quick and unfussy, which always makes this paragraph a short one. We ordered at ten past seven, the rider was on his way twenty-five minutes later and within another five minutes he was at the front door. He had two orders for Wingstop in his insulated bag, so bear in mind that if you live further out of town your rider might well make another stop before getting to you. I don’t know who was getting the other order but whoever they were, as it turned out, they have my sympathy.

Everything was in cardboard packaging which I imagine was recyclable, apart from the dips which were in little plastic tubs, and everything was hot. And now, because I can put it off no longer, let’s talk about how it tasted, and how little it tasted of.

The bonelesses (let’s call them nuggets from now on, or things will just get silly) were dull, dry little pellets of chicken with nothing much going for them. We had a dozen, which very quickly felt like too many, half in their original seasoning and half in “Louisiana rub”, which sounds like a skin condition you might pick up in New Orleans. The latter was meant to be dry, but they were coated in some kind of random hot sauce, for no discernible reason. They tasted mainly of acrid, slightly vinegary heat which did its best to conceal the lack of flavour underneath.

The original seasoning was probably the best of the bunch, but even then it was surprisingly bland: it tasted much the way that Colonel Sanders’ unique blend of herbs and spices would taste after going through the wash half a dozen times. It brought to mind really good fried chicken, but only in the sense that you’d eat it and then think “this is nothing like really good fried chicken”. We dipped the nuggets in a blue cheese dip which had a faint, unwelcome whiff of acetone and a ranch dressing which answered the question “what would mayonnaise without a personality taste like?”

We’d ordered the tenders in lemon and pepper, which is supposedly Wing Stop’s trademark coating (not especially fun fact: the UK master franchise is called Lemon Pepper Holdings). They tasted, to me at least, like something you might buy from a supermarket and crisp up on a baking tray in the oven, on autopilot, daydreaming about eating something better. And that’s the worst thing, because I suspect they were nutritionally far worse for you than that. I really resent wasted empty calories at the best of times, but this just felt like a waste in every sense.

And this really was salty, so salty that you could almost feel your oesophagus starting to wrinkle like a slug under the onslaught of sodium chloride. Everything was so greasy, too. With both the nuggets and the tenders it didn’t feel like the restaurant had properly shaken them off before putting them in the box, to the extent where there was a grim slick of oil on the paper lining the bottom, and the pieces closest to it were actually soggy rather than crispy.

I haven’t mentioned the chips, so to give credit where it’s due: these were outstanding. Only kidding! They were cruddy as well. I’d chosen the “buffalo ranch” fries, which were dusted with a hot red powder which tasted as if it might be made from depleted uranium, more of that screechingly sharp hot sauce and, just for fun, the ranch dressing I’d felt so ambivalent about. Again, they were crudely salty, as if getting them to taste of salt constituted making them taste of something. The cheese fries were allegedly “smothered with aged cheddar cheese”. Looking at the picture, I would say “smothered” is poetic licence and that mature cheddar cheese doesn’t melt like that or take on that weirdly synthetic, plastic sheen.

I didn’t like Wingstop much. Can you tell? Aside from the ten gimmicky flavours, the crimes against grammar and the slightly disingenuous menu, I think the most damning thing about it is that whatever it was aiming to be, it failed. Truly it was neither one thing nor the other. If you decide, one night, that you have a real hankering after lemon and pepper chicken, you’d be better off with Nando’s. If you wanted salty, crinkly-edged pieces of fried chicken, Wingstop is nowhere near as good as even the most ordinary KFC. It almost made me wish I’d tried Chick-Fil-A: they might have been rampantly homophobic but I can’t imagine their food was duller than Wingstop’s.

And that’s just talking about the chains. The joy of Reading is that we don’t have to settle for chain restaurants. Bluegrass BBQ does reasonably good fried chicken, and on the occasions where the Lyndhurst has it on the menu theirs is superb. Even Kungfu Kitchen has dabbled with fried chicken in the past and yes, theirs was also miles better than Wingstop. But I’ve saved the best til last. If you get yourself to Blue Collar on a Friday lunchtime, shortly after this review comes out in fact, you can join the queue for Gurt Wings and get the best fried chicken in Reading. 

They’re here every week and if wings are your thing they absolutely have you covered. They also do beautiful chicken tenders and, at the moment, cups full of soy marinated crispy Japanese popcorn chicken thigh. They make all their own sauces, and their buffalo and blue cheese will make you weep with gratitude (although my personal favourite is the habanero syrup). Four tenders and a shedload of deeply addictive tater tots will set you back nine pounds. For much the same price you can have three iffy tenders from Wingstop and a portion of underwhelming fries.

Gurt Wings are based in Swindon and most of their beat is markets and pubs in Wiltshire and Bristol. But best of all, and bringing us full circle, they always spend Fridays in Reading. And that’s because Glen Dinning, that chap from Didcot I mentioned at the start of this review, decided to set up the best street food market for miles around here in Reading – and that decision, years later, brought us Gurt Wings. See? All is not lost. You just have to remember that for every Wingstop, there’s an equal and opposite Gurt Wings, gravitating towards this town just like all of us. Maybe Reading’s still got it, after all.

Wingstop
24a The Oracle, Reading, RG1 2AH
0118 3212699

https://www.wingstop.co.uk
Order via: Deliveroo only