Devizes Road is about a thirty minute walk from Swindon’s unlovely train station, a building with a whiff of the gulag about it. Or you can take a bus, which winds its way uphill and will get you there in roughly ten. Once you reach your destination, you’re not in Kansas any more. You’re still in Swindon, but in Old Town. And Old Town’s different.
Devizes Road isn’t a looker. It’s not the pretty street in Old Town: that’s Wood Street, around the corner, lined with delis and wine shops, tapas bars and spots for lunch. Devizes Road is another kettle of fish. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fantastic place to drink beer, a road literally lined with wonderful spots in which to do precisely that.
You have the Hop Inn, possibly the founding father of Swindon’s craft beer scene, and on the other side of the road you have the Tuppenny, a pub of which I’m inordinately fond that has Parka and Steady Rolling Man in its permanent collection and a beer fridge its own Untappd listing refers to as the “fridge of dreams”.
There’s Tap & Brew, the superb brewpub of quietly excellent local brewery Hop Kettle, with a beer garden that’s marvellous in the sunshine. Hop Kettle also has an upstairs bar called The Eternal Optimist with a speakeasy feel, at the end of the road above the marvellous Los Gatos, a restaurant which in itself would provide ample excuse for a trip half an hour down the railway line,
I’m not finished. You can now drink at The Pulpit, the Swindon outpost for local Broadtown Brewery, a relatively new addition. And as of late last year another option is The Drink Valley, another brewpub and in fact that brewery’s second Swindon branch, having made a success of their first one in the town centre.
Were you keeping count? I make that six great beer spots in the space of a five minute walk, three of them brewpubs or brewery taps of some kind. Forget schlepping all the way to London and dragging yourself south of the river to experience a London brewery crawl, hot and crowded and absolutely rammed with Steve Zissou-style microbeanies. A quick train journey west and you can have an equally terrific time without troubling the capital – why endure the Bermondsey Beer Mile when you can enjoy the Swindon Booze Street?
Besides, a friend of mine was in a pub near Borough Market the other week where the most expensive beer on the list was a mind-boggling £20 a pint: Old Town is far, far kinder on the wallet. I was in Old Town, as I invariably am, to have lunch and beers with my old friend Dave. Dave initially wasn’t mad keen on being a dining companion on this blog but as time has passed it’s turned out that he enjoys it far more than he thought he would. This is a very Dave phenomenon.
But the winds of change are blowing through Devizes Road, and much is different from when I was here last on duty. Burger spot Pick Up Point, which I so enjoyed last year, has closed down. Ice cream parlour Ray’s is under new management, and finding its feet. And The Drink Valley, the venue for this week’s review, has opened two doors down from Tap & Brew, its second branch slap bang in the heart of Swindon’s budding craft beer scene.
First, we took advantage of another welcome development: during the day, Tap & Brew now plays host to excellent local roasters Light Bulb Coffee, and when I joined Dave there just after 11 the place was jumping. Somehow it seemed bigger than when I was there last but in truth it was just packed, every table occupied with the kind of hipsters, families and pursuers of the good life that Dave wasn’t entirely convinced lived in Swindon. And yet there they were, that Field Of Dreams principle in action.
So before lunch I enjoyed a couple of superb lattes and Dave and I began the process of catching up. It’s funny, there are friendships where you don’t see somebody for ages and when you do, it’s as if no time has passed. Dave and I have, at times over the last thirty plus years, had a friendship more like that but these days I see him most months, a combination of great company, his empty nest, our mutual love of beer and good times and our spouses being busy at weekends. And even though I see him frequently there’s never any shortage of things to discuss, in his life or mine.
So we talked about our respective families, his son at Durham, his work and mine (we always conclude, on balance, that working for a living isn’t all it’s cracked up to be) the triumphs of Liverpool Football Club – Dave’s other lifelong passion – and our plans to go on holiday together to Bruges this winter, for the first time in nearly ten years. I fully expect it to be something like a cross between The Trip and Last Of The Summer Wine.
The Drink Valley, a name which would appear to make no sense whatsoever, opened in the centre of Swindon first, and its thing was craft beer and Indian small plates. Dave tried to get me to review it back then and I was tempted, because Reading has never had anything approaching a desi pub and I think it’s a concept that could do well almost anywhere. But he never tried too hard to persuade me, because it was in the centre of Swindon and Dave doesn’t go there from choice. An upmarket sister branch in Old Town was a much easier sell.
It’s hard to get much intel on The Drink Valley – I’ll drop that The from now on, if that’s okay with you – ahead of a visit. Their website used to be under construction, with wording saying “coming soon”, and a picture of their original branch. Now it just advertises a summer festival that takes place next week. The two Facebook pages give you a rough idea of the menu but the two Instagram feeds, much as they list promotions, live music or new beers, fail miserably at what must surely be two of the main functions of Instagram: to show you what the room looks like and what the food looks like.
That’s such a wasted opportunity, especially with Drink Valley’s Old Town branch because it was really quite gorgeous and, I would say, a cut above the decor of any of its neighbours on Devizes Road. Sturdy but tasteful tables were ringed with comfy armchairs in pastel colours, a deep red banquette running along one wall. The walls and wood panels were a beautiful midnight blue (“why does this colour always look classy?”, Dave wondered) and the overall effect was really pleasing.
Craft beer often feels like a bit of a sacrifice – never mind the interior, taste the IPA – and I’m not sure I expected Swindon to be the place that rebutted the idea that you have to choose between substance and style. It felt like the middle of a restaurant/pub Venn diagram, somewhere that wasn’t quite a restaurant or a pub but could quite easily pass for either.
The selection of beers, though, would definitely suggest pub rather than restaurant. Five hand pumps, all serving cask beer brewed by Drink Valley, along with just shy of a dozen options on keg. Four of those were also brewed by Drink Valley and the others featured breweries I knew well, like Polly’s and Vault City, and a couple that were new to me.
The most expensive beer maxed out at £8.50 for a pint, but it was a 7.3% sour so I doubt you’d be guzzling the full 568ml anyway, unless you were well and truly on a mission. We started with a half each of Ceres, a very approachable pale from North Wales’ Polly’s, and started the serious business of reviewing the menu. It was an interesting mishmash of small and big plates, of pub food and more leftfield choices.
So, for instance, there were just the four mains, a couple of which – fish and chips, sirloin steak – were the kind of thing you’d get at good and bad pubs across the land. Five burgers, too, mostly conventional fare, although the “bulgogi burger” with bulgogi sauce and kimchi mayo nodded to food trends. A couple of sharing platters and some loaded fries and nachos also felt reasonably mainstream.
But then we looked at the nibbles and starters and many looked like they’d wandered in from a different menu, one that ranged from Spain to Italy to Morocco, before upping sticks and taking a long flight east. Not only that, but some of the things on it were so eccentric that it didn’t feel like a Brakes van could have been involved in their genesis.
Take the first of our small plates – clusters of shimeji mushrooms belted with bacon, cooked in what was apparently an ‘nduja butter until the bacon was crispy and the mushrooms nicely done. This was a real delight, and both Dave and I loved it. The ‘nduja didn’t come through strongly for me, but it did lend a sort of salty funk that reminded me of blue cheese. I thought it was a superior take on devils on horseback, Dave thought it was everything good about a full English in a little package.
Either way it was clever, fun and quite unlike anything I’ve had. By this point I was on small beer number three, having tried a slightly too bitter pale by Rotherham’s Chantry Brewery and then moved on to a passion fruit mojito sour by Vault City which was sweet, boozy and surprisingly good with this dish.
“Try this” I said to Dave, offering him a sip. “It’s the kind of thing where you’ll try it and tell me it might be perfectly nice, but it isn’t beer.”
Dave took a sip and said exactly that. Which pleased me enormously, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I disagreed with him.
Those bundles of joy cost five pounds fifty for three, although as so often I think Drink Valley should work on giving you even numbers of these things to increase sharing and reduce arguments. Equally good, and equally good value, was a little bowl of nuggets of chorizo, cooked in wine, with a great mixture of chewiness, caramelisation and punch. This is such a simple thing to do, and such a perfect thing to have on hand when you’re drinking beer. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever been to a craft beer place, in this country at least, which thinks to serve it.
Drink Valley made good progress towards a clean sweep on the first impression with a very serviceable dish of Moroccan fried cauliflower. The spicing on the coating was impeccable, nicely arid with plenty of interest, and the cragged and crinkled exterior was cooked beautifully. The mayo, speckled with sesame, was a perfect dip, although I didn’t necessarily get the promised mushroom in it. The only fault with this dish was that cooking it perfectly involved getting all bits of it right: for me, the cauliflower had steamed slightly inside its glorious housing, lacking just a little of the bite I’d want to see.
But again, at less than six pounds I didn’t feel remotely robbed. What we were eating here were perfect beer snacks, and I couldn’t think of anywhere in Reading that offered something comparable. Well, except Siren RG1 I suppose, but when I ate there you got a little less for an awful lot more money, and it wasn’t much cop. Had Drink Valley stumbled on something here? Further research was undoubtedly called for, but what about the main courses we’d promised ourselves we would order?
The final dish, though, was decisively brilliant. Dave had insisted on us ordering salt and pepper squid, because he thought it was a really good dish to benchmark with. I was a little resistant to the idea, because I agreed with him and suspected Drink Valley’s rendition would fall short. Well – and Dave reads the blog these days, so I know he’ll especially enjoy this bit – he was right, and I was wrong.
What we got, in fairness, was not salt and pepper squid as I understand it. It didn’t have that distinctive coating, the way the same order at, say, Kungfu Kitchen would have done. But we got something even better. Six pieces of squid, beautifully scored, in a crispy salt and pepper-free coating, fried and brought to our table fresh as you like with some charred lemon and a nicely tangy srirachi mayo.
And my goodness: if you’d told me before the visit that I’d have some of the best squid I can remember anywhere in a craft beer bar in Swindon I’d have replied that you must be on mushrooms. But, would you believe, that’s exactly what this was. So fresh and tender, no twang of rubber, coated so well, cooked spot on, intensely moreish and dippable. And you got six pieces for a crazy six pounds fifty – so affordable and easy to divide up, even if you resented giving away half.
It’s safe to say that at this point Drink Valley wasn’t in any way what I was expecting. And then Dave said something somewhat wonderful.
“You know what, mate, I could pass on the main courses. They all come with carbs, and I’m getting enough of that today with the beer. I could just go another round of small plates, instead.”
What a cracking idea, I said. Let’s do that.
“Won’t that interfere with your review?”
I thought about it briefly and made an executive decision that actually, it could be the making of it. Because you may or may not want to know about burgers, steaks or fish and chips, but you can get those anywhere. And if you go to Drink Valley, which I slightly hope at least one of you will, you can have those then, if that’s your thing. But I couldn’t think of anything better than eating more small plates like the ones we’d had, on a rainy Saturday afternoon with an old friend. So up I went to the bar to order our second wave.
When I did, I talked to the chap who’d served us both our food and our drinks. They’d been open almost bang on six months, he told me, and things were going well. He said the idea was that the original branch was craft beer and Indian food, whereas this follow-up was craft beer and Korean food: I didn’t challenge that, although I wasn’t sure the menu quite bore out that ambition.
He said that they brewed offsite and didn’t currently have a tap room, although in the fullness of time they wanted to can their beers and sell them more widely. I told him how great the squid was, and he told me it was his favourite dish on the menu. I got that little glow of pride from him that always comes with people giving a shit what they do, and in return I felt happiness that Dave and I were in with a fighting chance of being his most gluttonous customers that day.
Our second wave of dishes was maybe not quite as successful as the first, but that’s always the way: you start out picking your must-haves, and trying to repeat your success always risks ordering an also-ran. For me the least successful dish we had were the pork ribs, roasted in miso and barbecue marinade. They were very close to greatness, but not quite close enough: they looked the part, and the marinade came through really well – and was rather interesting, at that.
But they weren’t big enough specimens and the meat took some pulling away from the bone, lacking substance and tenderness. Again, there was an odd number and I left the spare rib – pardon the pun – to Dave. He loves ribs, and is threatening to take me to a place in Bruges called Mozart where they do bottomless ribs: he told me, with great pride, how his son got through quite a few of them on his visit earlier in the year.
More successful was the wild mushroom bruschetta: two halves of toasted ciabatta roll topped with mushrooms that packed an impressive intensity of flavour, although – and I know this is a bugbear of mine – I really don’t think they were wild at all. I do wish people would stop making wild claims about their non-wild mushrooms, but I’ve been moaning about that for years and it shows no signs of abating. And while I’m moaning – everything we had at Drink Valley was excellent value, which made the nine pounds fifty conspicuously irrational pricing. Nothing this small is worth that, however good it tastes.
The remainder of our dishes restored the natural order. I had been sniffy about ordering the honey and mustard chipolatas, because in the immortal words of someone (I think it might have been John Inman), I don’t generally go near a sausage unless I’m confident of its provenance. To quote another famous person, my ex-wife used to say that cheap sausages are made up of, and this was her exact phrase, “eyelids and arseholes”.
I’ve always thought she was right about that but, again, Dave talked me into this one. And again – he’s going to be insufferable after this – he was right. The texture of these, in any other context, I might have found a little homogeneous but they were just coarse enough, just herby enough, just sticky enough to be a treat, especially dredged through the honey and mustard gathering at the bottom of the bowl. Also, just to say – these were allegedly cocktail sausages. I’d like to see the cocktail that went with them. It would be a tiki bowl and a half.
We also had something that, by this stage, was a bit of a variation on a theme. Strips of crispy chicken, served sizzling in a hot skillet, cooked in garlic butter, topped with slices of jalapeno and sitting on a bed of beansprouts and carrots. It’s a well-known fact that, unless you happen to find yourself in TGI Fridays, nothing that comes to your table sizzling can be entirely bad, and so it proved here.
The chicken was quite pleasant, but it came into its own towards the end of the dish when the bits we were slow getting to got crispy-crunchy, almost blackened. And by that point the julienned carrots and beansprouts, conversely, had softened and taken on the garlic butter, become a treat in their own right. This was a dish that required patience to get the best out of it. In that respect, I think I rather identified with it.
Oh, and we had some more squid. I couldn’t resist ordering that.
I’d like to tell you what Drink Valley’s dessert menu is like, but I mostly failed in that endeavour. They do a Basque cheesecake, like everybody else, and ice cream and a brownie and a chocolate orange torte, but none of that interested me and I had half an eye on ice cream at Ray’s later on. But they did have something that served as an excellent dessert: a chocolate caramel brownie stout, brewed by Drink Valley themselves. Two halves of it cost us £7.60, so less than two desserts would have cost, and it was twice as fun.
“Time for dessert, is it?” said the man behind the bar when I ordered these, and then he told me that when Drink Valley brewed it they invited staff to the brewery to test drive it. “I don’t remember much of that evening!” he told me, and after a half I could understand why. It was almost nitro-smooth, with a depth of flavour and thickness that belied its 7% strength. If they’d had it in cans, I’d have come away with a couple.
We were preparing to grab our brollies and go out and brave the heavy rain, and I was inwardly congratulating myself for how we’d tackled the menu when I saw our man heading past to an adjacent table with the fish and chips, made with batter using Drink Valley-brewed beer. I couldn’t help rubbernecking as it went past our table, an unbreakable bad habit of mine I’m afraid, and the chap gave me a little smile. Next time, it said. Next time indeed. Our meal – a total of nine small plates and seven halves of beer – had come to just under eighty-five pounds.
The rest of the day was every bit as winning as the start it got off to. I trudged mutinously round the Town Gardens with Dave while he literally stopped to smell the roses and told me how he and his wife had got into wandering along canals. “What have you become?” I said to him, adding “Do you know, I think you’re the only person I’d walk round a park in the pissing rain with when there are amazing pubs five minutes away?” It’s not Fleabag’s sister running through an airport, but it’s close.
After that, there was beer. Beer at the Tap & Brew, beer at the Hop Inn (Dave mentioned their Korean chicken burger was excellent: “now you tell me”, came my refrain). Then there was beer at the Tuppenny, and more beer at the Tuppenny, and then Dave’s wife kindly picked us up and gave me a lift to the station. And then the perfect end to a perfect day: catching the same train as my very own wife, coming back from Bristol with a tin of leftover goodies from the work bakesale. I maintain that the injection of sugar saved me from a brutal hangover – forget Dioralyte, I’m stocking up on cornflake cakes from now on.
Anyway, that’s enough about my minutiae: back to Drink Valley. I remember when I returned from Montpellier thinking that the French understood how to eat with beer in a way that had eluded us Brits. I had beer with karaage chicken, or padron peppers, or charcuterie and cheese and amazing bread, and all of it was magnificent. And what do we get in the U.K.? Inevitably it’s a street food trader – burgers, pizza or fried chicken, it’s nearly always one of those three – and you eat it on a bench or on your makeshift chair and think this is the life.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is. Those things can be great, and when I’m next at Double-Barrelled eating something from Anima E Cuore I won’t feel like I’m slumming it. But Drink Valley reminds me, in the words of Frank Costanza, that there had to be another way. How I would love somewhere comfy and stylish that does an excellent range of craft beer and has a menu optimised for exactly that. Snacking, sharing, small plates and huge amounts of variety. I don’t want to keep going on about them, but Drink Valley is at the standard I really hoped Siren RG1 would attain.
Siren RG1 might well get there, as I’ve said before. But in the meantime, if Drink Valley is thinking about opening that third site I would implore them to think big and move further east. Until they do, Reading has nothing to match Old Town for such a concentration of great places to drink. It turns out you can also caffeinate superbly there and, crucially, eat well too. I’ll be back, because it turns out that Swindon is a destination in a way Reading isn’t quite. Their tourist board can have that one for free.
The Drink Valley, Old Town – 7.8 53 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BG 07827 484649
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Believe it or not, some restaurants have opened in Reading this year that aren’t pizza restaurants. Granted, so far the culinary landscape has been dominated by Paesinos, Amò, Zi Tore and Peppito’s (the latter last seen rounding up Reading’s influencers to gush away on Instagram), but there are still other things happening in town. Not masses, because it’s 2025, hospitality is on a knife edge and everybody is struggling to make money, but some nonetheless.
So we have national chain Rosa’s Thai on Jackson’s Corner, and Blue Collar Corner has taken on two permanent tenants in the form of Burger Society and Gurt Wings. Later in the year we are promised London coffee chain Notes, Japanese restaurant Kawaii from the people behind Osaka, a new café from the owners of Café Yolk and an Italian sister restaurant to Wokingham’s Ruchetta, all on Station Hill.
And of course, how could anybody forget our other big money arrival Cosy Club, which opened last month on the edge of the Oracle in the old Lakeland site? The Reading Chronicle went there, without paying of course, and admired it so much that they wrote an ‘honest food review’ that waited until the very end to admit that their food was gratis. “Before anyone starts moaning yes, this was a gifted experience,” concluded the article, “and like many other journalists who work for numerous publications, I was invited to try the food at a new restaurant.” Elton John was wrong: #AD seems to be the hardest word.
All that is going on in the centre, but there isn’t much of note out in the suburbs: Woodley has welcomed somewhere called “Woodley Food Stasian”, which specialises in dishes from Hong Kong and Vietnam and, at a guess, misspelling the word ‘station’.
More randomly still, Winnersh is about to welcome something called Club India where the Pheasant pub used to be, run by a chef who formerly worked at Wokingham’s Bombay Story and Sultan. It also boasts some kind of consultancy role for another chef who apparently held two Michelin stars in San Francisco and had another restaurant in Palo Alto. How involved he’ll be is anybody’s guess: San Francisco/Palo Alto/Winnersh isn’t a triumvirate you find on many websites.
Of course, both Woodley Food Stasian and Club India might be good, and at some point I might check them out. But so far, this year, it’s slim pickings: restaurateurs are not feeling like taking the plunge, and you can hardly blame them.
Last but not least, that brings us to the subject of this week’s review: Dolphin’s Caribbean Kitchen, which opened two months ago in the old 7Bone site on St Mary’s Butts. It takes its name from the nickname of owner Randolph Bancroft, who has run a catering business for about twenty years: I’m pretty sure I saw Dolphin’s with a gazebo at the street food markets in Bracknell, when I worked there what feels like a lifetime ago.
This restaurant in the town centre, though, is his first ever permanent site, and when he spoke to the local press about it you could sense his excitement. Reading had never had anything like Dolphin’s, he said, and although the climate was tough in hospitality, he added that he hoped good old-fashioned community spirit would help his restaurant to thrive. “By the grace of god, I will make it” he concluded.
Well, he’s right about one thing if nothing else – Reading hasn’t had a proper, sit-down Caribbean restaurant in as long as I can remember. We had Chef Stevie cooking out of the Butler for a glorious year or so, we have a place called Da Spottt – yes, three Ts, don’t act like it’s my fault – on the Oxford Road which apparently has erratic opening times, and we have Seasons doing takeaway nearby, their Cemetery Junction site having closed long ago.
And of course we have the OG – Perry’s, which has been trading next to Market Place for eons. It clearly has its fans, because when I re-reviewed it earlier in the year they all came out of the woodwork to say it was my fault for turning up an hour before it closed. Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of that, it tells its own story: Perry’s shuts at 7 and is unlicensed, so although it is a restaurant, it’s not a full on evening restaurant.
It’s weird, really: Reading has one of the biggest Bajan communities outside Barbados. When Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine used to cook at Blue Collar Corner the queue stretched almost to Chancellors Estate Agents every Friday. People would wait over half an hour for that jerk chicken: I know, I was one of them. And most of the time, I almost didn’t begrudge those thirty minutes in line. Their food was that good.
So the demand is there, but for some reason nobody has ever really tried to capitalise on it, before Dolphin’s came along. It felt well worth investigating, so I met Zoë off the train on Monday night and we went along to see if Bancroft had managed to fill that gap in the market.
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Here’s a tip for you: if you want to discover how many Italians live in Reading just drop innocuously into conversation online, on a local Facebook page or the Reading subreddit, the question of Reading’s best pizza. Because if you do, Reading’s Italian contingent will come out of the woodwork. This calls for opinions, and they have plenty. They don’t fuck about, either.
“Being Italian and of partly Neapolitan descent, I am picky when it comes to pizza. Or better, I eat anything, but I know a good pizza from a bad one, and from a non-pizza” began Luca, on the Edible Reading Facebook page. He went on.
“The only real pizzas in Reading have been Papa Gee’s, for years. Then Sarv came, and Zia Lucia (both ok). I have recently tried Zi Tore and above all Paesinos, the latter is possibly the best in Reading. The chef and manager is Sicilian and has previously worked at the Thirsty Bear. However, Thirsty Bear make American style pizza, while Paesinos make real pizza.”
Another of my Italian readers, Franz, was more generous about the Thirsty Bear. “It’s just a different style” he said. “Italian pizza purists perhaps will take a bit to adapt (I’m Italian, but open minded). A slice of their TriBeCa, curly fries and a pint is hard to beat. It just makes me happy and satisfied.” Franz also had opinions about Zia Lucia, and its “horrible, plasticky” mozzarella.
After that Luca and Franz ended up having a fascinating conversation about whether you could find good pizza outside Italy. Franz thought it was easy to do, these days. Luca disagreed, but said you could even end up getting what he called “non-pizza” in Italy, unless you were in Campania or Sicily. Just to chuck in a curveball, the best pizza Franz ever had was in the Swedish city of Norrköping. “It was Neapolitan style and was excellent, but then they had a corner in the pizzeria that was all dedicated to Totti so that confused me from an allegiance perspective.”
I could have listened to Luca and Franz discuss these niceties all day: it seemed that if you asked two Italians you were likely to come out of the conversation with at least three opinions. Over on Reddit, other Italians were weighing in. “Zi Tore in Smelly Alley has taken the crown as the best pizza in town (in my humble, Italian, opinion)” said one. “And the pizza al taglio from Amò is even better.”
This is particularly topical because last week Sarv’s Slice announced that they were leaving the Biscuit Factory, after falling out with the owners both there and in Ealing. The reaction across the internet was one of huge sadness, coupled with genuine fear for the future of the venue. But this happens against a backdrop of Reading’s pizza scene exploding, so Sarv’s Slice might have quit while they were ahead: the market has become saturated since they opened in 2023, and even more so in the last six months or so.
Let’s run through the timeline. Last year Dough Bros opened out on Northumberland Avenue, and in the summer Zia Lucia opened in town. From then, things have only accelerated: at the start of the year Paesinos opened opposite Jackson’s Corner. Then Zi’Tore opened in February, in the old Grumpy Goat site. At the end of April, two doors down from Paesinos, Reading got Amò, a joint venture between the owners of Madoo and Pulcinella Focaccia, a pizza trader who operated from their home address out in Earley.
And believe it or not, last Wednesday another pizza restaurant, Peppito, opened on the first floor of Kings Walk, John Sykes’ restaurant sweatshop. The time between pizza restaurants opening in Reading appears to have some sort of half-life, so by the time this goes to press I wouldn’t be surprised if two more places had started trading, making all this out of date.
So the vexed subject of Reading’s best pizza isn’t something anybody, Italian or not, is going to settle in a hurry. But that’s no reason not to begin this important project, so last week I strolled down the hill from Katesgrove into town to check out Paesinos, the first of this year’s intake to start trading, on the Kings Road. I had a secret weapon, my very own Italian: my friend Enza was joining me to check this one out and see how it compared against Zi’Tore and Amò, both of which she’d researched extensively.
I was early, so I got to take in what must be one of Reading’s smallest dining rooms. Just three tables, each seating two people, although the table closest to the front door was so Lilliputian that it was hard to imagine adults sitting there, except to wait for a takeaway. A fridge hummed next to the counter, holding an interesting selection of soft drinks.
I spotted chinotto, one of my favourite things, and got one, with a plastic cup, while I waited. I’m used to the San Pellegrino version of this drink, that you can pick up in cans in Madoo. It’s dandelion and burdock’s older, more sophisticated cousin, wearing a rollneck and smoking a cigarette. But this bottled version, by Sicilian company Polara, was more nuanced, the rough edges smoothed off. I felt that all-too-familiar sensation, the gradual raising of expectations.
I looked through Paesinos’ menu. It was a single long laminated sheet with pizzas split into categories – classic, premium, signature, fusion – although the taxonomy they’d used was unclear to me. It certainly wasn’t pricing: most of the 13 inch, standard pizzas, were between thirteen and sixteen pounds whatever you ordered, many of them costing random amounts like £12.97, £13.96, £14.86. I liked the capriciousness of that.
They weren’t split into categories using any mindset I could understand. I could see something with “kebab chicken, jalapeños and buffalo sauce” being a fusion – or even a confusion – pizza, but a standard pizza bianca? Paesinos had attracted some commentary around its pizza Americana, topped with french fries and frankfurter: it might well be authentic, or authentically Sicilian, although I’d personally rather drink the bin juice from my food recycling after it’s been strained through Jay Rayner’s y-fronts. But whatever it was, surely it wasn’t “premium”?
All that said, there was something about the lack of polish in this menu that I liked. I could say it was trying to do too much, with its paneer and tandoori chicken, but nobody was making me order that stuff. In the core of it, ignoring the wackiness, there was a solid collection of options, many of them intriguing.
Then Enza arrived, and ordered a chinotto, and we got to catching up. Despite regularly exchanging messages, we realised we hadn’t seen one another in a very long time and there was plenty to discuss – her empty nest, my new house, all the life events and randomness that make you realise that you think you know what’s going on with someone via social media but that, really, you don’t.
The other thing I gathered, gradually, as we got to talking about Reading’s explosion of Italian restaurants, was that I was finally eating with someone even more determined to maintain their anonymity than me. Enza, it transpired, had been to Paesinos once before with her husband and very much enjoyed what they ate – the pizza “al portofoglio” or folded pizza for her (it translates as ‘wallet’), the tuna and red onion for him – but she was a far more frequent visitor to Amò a couple of doors down. So much so that she seemed to be furtively looking around, worried about being discovered, and lowered her voice when she mentioned Paesinos’ neighbours.
“I can’t help it!” she laughed. “I love it there. So much that I want to get involved. I keep telling them they should make the kind of pizzas you can only get in my part of Italy” – Enza’s from Potenza, in the ankle of Italy, halfway between Naples and Bari – “and if they do, I think I should get commission.” I offered to change her name for the purpose of this review, but she decided to let the chips fall where they may. At least they didn’t fall onto a pizza Americana, I suppose.
We started with appetisers, which meant a panzerotto each. Franz, on my Facebook page, had particularly recommended these, saying they were a speciality from Bari, where he came from. It was my first experience of Paesinos, and about as good a calling card as you could hope to encounter, a gorgeous crescent of fried dough filled with just enough mozzarella and tomato, too big to eat with your hands but not like a full-sized calzone. You got two for something silly like seven quid, and outstanding just about does them justice. As an introduction to the dough, too, it put down quite a marker. This huge, irregular pocket of joy made me very happy indeed.
“I tell you what, this is a lot bigger than the panzerotto I had in Montpellier” I said to Enza, between mouthfuls. She smiled.
“I wouldn’t say this is big by Italian standards. It is really good, though.”
In my mind I was thinking that I would come here and eat this again, but I was also remembering that the menu boasted pizza fritti, stuffed with ricotta and sopressata, and that I needed to try that. Enza also had a yen to sample the mozzarella in carrozza and maybe we should have tried that too, but I was put off by experiences of having it at Prezzo, many years ago, no doubt straight out of the freezer. I already had a reasonable idea that the only thing coming out of a freezer at Paesinos was the gelato.
“Would you say there’s never been a better time to be an Italian in Reading?”
“Absolutely!” said Enza, and then she told me a lovely story. I knew that she was a big fan of Zi Tore, on Smelly Alley, and especially their cakes, many of which were ones you just didn’t find in this country. But then Enza told me all about the graffe, a sort of fried doughnut made in a distinctive loop shape, sugared but made out of a mixture of flour and potatoes. They’re specific to Campania, where she was born, and growing up in Salerno they were a regular childhood treat.
And then, some years later, Enza wanders into a cafe hundreds of miles away that’s just opened in her adopted home town, the unlikeliest of places, and finds them there. Graffe. And when she told me about this: maybe it was her excitement, or how well she conveyed it, or perhaps I was just having a lovely time, but even I felt it. I was vicariously moved, and I remembered the power food has to transport and transform.
It’s one reason to envy Italians, because what would I feel nostalgic about? Ice Magic, the chocolate sauce that was no doubt filled with chemicals so it hardened into a shell when you poured it on ice cream? The way Nice N’ Spicy Nik Naks used to taste before they were fucked with? Different permutations of processed food, and the excitement of a Findus Crispy Pancake? No, Britain had nothing to compete with graffe. Little wonder that Enza sounded so full of joy, although it did make me ponder how many privations she’d suffered through years of living here.
If the panzerotto set up expectations, the pizza fulfilled them. I’d chosen the Siciliana, my reference pizza of olives, anchovies and capers. It’s sometimes called a Neopolitan, presumably because every part of Italy wants to claim the best ever pizza as theirs. Based on what I ate at Paesinos, I can hardly blame them. Everything was exactly as it should be – the right amounts, the right proportions, the right balance. The saltiest of anchovies, generously deployed without being overkill. Purple, perfumed olives. Little clusters of plump, sharp capers (Enza preferred them salted, but give me the vinegary hit any day).
The base was heavenly. Puffed at the rim, beautifully irregular, a proper Neapolitan style pizza that drooped in the middle, although it firmed up as it cooled down. “The dough is completely different towards the end of eating the pizza” said Enza, and she was spot on. I loved the way that she tore a little bit of her crust off and tried it, on its own, before making inroads, a little ritual, almost like a benediction. I followed suit, and again that allowed me to admire Paesinos’ dough before all that other stuff happened to it. It was better after, but pretty much perfect before.
Later on I asked the pizzaiolo, who was indeed Sicilian, whether most of their trade was takeaway and delivery, given Paesinos’ size. He said it was, but that those people, however good his pizza was, missed out ever so slightly. “It’s 100% when it leaves the oven” he said, “but when it gets delivered it can only ever be 90%.” I think he’s right, and explains better than I can why, when you read the rating at the bottom, you need to come here rather than fire up Deliveroo.
Enza also loved my pizza, and preferred it on balance to hers, which isn’t to say that she didn’t enjoy hers. She went for the “dolce amaro”, a white pizza (premium, not fusion) topped with walnuts, gorgonzola, honey and radicchio. “I know people back in Italy who would disown me for ordering this” she said. Maybe she was right but they ought to try it before they knock it.
This had everything: salty, sweet and bitter in gorgeous harmony. The gorgonzola was so punchy that you smelled it, got that agricultural tang as you lifted a slice up, before you ever took a bite. But the honey – how nice to have honey rather than hot honey on a pizza, for a change – softened its roar. The walnuts lent texture and the final piece of the jigsaw, radicchio with bite and bitterness, was the clinching evidence of intelligent design. All that and, as a white pizza, it was easier and less messy to eat than the Siciliana. I really enjoyed it: Enza thought it a little unbalanced and needing something else, possibly black pepper.
Later on, when we debriefed over a beer in Siren RG1, I asked Enza how authentic that pizza was and she very kindly said something I’d never thought of before that made me feel stupid, in a good way. “Of course it’s authentic” she said. “It’s authentic because somebody has made it.” All these combinations start out as curveballs at some point, but if nobody ever innovated you’d have a cuisine that’s set in aspic. It’s 2025: nobody willingly eats aspic any more.
Paesinos has a small section of desserts, plenty of them tempting, and we decided that in the interests of research we ought to try some. Enza’s no slouch, so she asked the pizzaiolo which ones were made by Paesinos. In a flash, without hesitating or deflecting, he told us: just the two, the tiramisu and the cannoli. In the case of the cannoli he bought the shells in, but the ricotta filling was all his own work. That was good enough for us, so Enza decided to road test the cannolo and I – such hardship – ordered the tiramisu.
We also ordered a couple more drinks. The chap who’d prepared our pizzas suggested we try a bottle of something called Spuma, so I did, and it was night and day with the chinotto but equally lovely in its way – sweet and fresh, sunshine in a bottle. I thought it had a taste of grape juice, but online research later suggested it was more complex than that, with rhubarb and elderflower, cloves and caramel. It beat a Fanta Limon, and I say that as a fan of Fanta Limon.
By this point we’d got chatting with our chef, and he told us a little more about the desserts. Normally he imported the cannoli shells from Palermo, he said, but on this occasion he’d had to get them from Catania instead. That meant they’d be more brittle, smoother, less bubbled. He apologised, as if this wasn’t optimal, when discussing the difference between going to the trouble to buy these things from two different Sicilian cities. I admired that focus, that he felt there was an important distinction to be drawn between the best and the merely excellent.
And goodness, but it was exquisite. If this was the second-tier shell, I’d like to try the very best out of sheer curiosity. Beautifully presented – I loved the outline in icing sugar of the wooden spoon, as if at a crime scene – it was an utter joy. Initially Enza tried to press me to have half, using the ultra sharp knife our chef had brought to our table, but I convinced her to just let me try a section from one end. It was so delectable that I almost wished I’d taken up Enza’s offer. The ricotta was so light, so smooth, the chocolate chips it was studded with were so very generous. It made the ones at Madoo, for instance, feel pedestrian.
Everything was imported, we were told, either from Italy or specifically from Sicily. Enza loved it: I’m not making this up, but she honestly did exclaim Mamma mia (I nearly did too, and I was born in Bristol).
There was a story behind the tiramisu, and he told us that too. It was his fiancée’s recipe – she works at the Thirsty Bear – but she only finally let him have it once he opened Paesinos, despite them having been together for twelve years, despite the fact that they were getting married towards the end of the year. Many tiramisu recipes just used egg yolk, he said, but this one included egg white too, to give a lighter texture. The only other tweak was a little vanilla, to offset the flavour of the egg yolk.
It was another tour de force, and he also went to great trouble to tell me it was a bigger portion than you got elsewhere around town. He’d weighed the rival tiramisu you could get in other places, and weighed his, and his was more substantial. It was the best tiramisu I’ve had in Reading, and honestly I can’t remember eating a better one anywhere else. No wonder he was marrying his fiancée: if I had ready access to somebody who could knock one of these out, I’d be the size of a house.
The strangest thing happened after that: we had eaten, we’d drunk (no alcohol, Paesinos is unlicensed) and we ought to have headed straight off to compare notes over a beer. But I was in the company of two Italians, and they talked food, compared notes, discussed recipes, the best places to buy mascarpone, where he sourced his ingredients from. And like that conversation on my Facebook page at the start of this review, I could have listened all night. Being in the company of people whose passion for food verges on obsession – the real meaning of obsession, not that social media meaning that just means “I like this” – was infectious.
In the process I learned a few other things. Paesinos had been open nearly six months, and things were going well. Our chap knew the people at Mama’s Way, loved it there, didn’t see any of this explosion of Italian spots as competition. A rising tide truly did lift all boats, and the slow spread of Reading’s Little Italy round the corner to become a Not So Little Italy felt like a beautiful thing. Eventually we settled up. Our bill for everything came to just under sixty pounds; there was no option to tip – it’s almost as if they just didn’t expect anybody to – so I made a second card payment for that.
If I was giving advice to Paesinos – not that I’m qualified to – it would probably be to lose the things at the periphery of their menu, the pizzas with chicken kebab or paneer, the chicken nuggets, the peri peri fries. I think I saw somewhere online that they had burgers “coming soon”, and a look at their website suggests that they now indeed do a range of burgers. I don’t think they need any of that, but what do I know? Maybe their delivery customers will lap that up.
But actually, if I was giving advice to Paesinos it would be to carry on doing exactly what they’re doing. I cannot think of a pizza I’ve enjoyed so much in a long time, and I can’t think of a Neopolitan-style pizza I’ve liked as much in longer still. What a small, unassuming delight Paesinos is, and what a mind-boggling prospect it is that there’s a healthy debate, under way right now, about whether our town has places to eat pizza that are even better than it is.
I’m not qualified to weigh in on that: I’ve not visited its rivals yet, I’m not a fully paid up pizza obsessive and I’m about as far from Italian as it’s possible to be. So take this as my ill-informed, incomplete, English opinion: this might not be the best pizza in Reading, but if it isn’t, the place that can beat this is going to be one hell of a restaurant. Either way it’s the best pizza I’ve had in Reading, I think. I can’t wait to test out its competition. Even more so, I can’t wait to go back.
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This might come as a surprise to you – probably not – but for the best part of the last fifteen years my friends and I have regularly taken part in something called Poncefest. Nope, not a misprint. The idea was to take a day off, invariably a Friday, and go into London together for a bit of shopping, always for fragrance, followed by a fancy lunch somewhere, then falling into a pub before getting the train home. Something like the Finer Things Club from the American version of The Office, only even finer.
Having sacrificed whatever credibility I might have had with that opening paragraph, I may as well explain. So yes, these trips usually involved shopping at one of London’s great fragrance shops – Bloom or Les Senteurs – and then a gorgeous, drawn out lunch. We’ve done Medlar in Chelsea, Soho’s famous Andrew Edmunds, Portland in Fitzrovia, Calum Franklin’s renowned pies at Holborn Dining Room and doubtless other places I’ve forgotten. We’ve even been to Oxford, enjoying a very pleasant lunch at Pompette one Friday towards the end of the year, exchanging Christmas presents and cards and eating brilliantly.
The members of the Guild Of Ponces – because I’m afraid that’s what we call ourselves – have fluctuated over time. It started as Al, Dave, Jimmy and I, but then Jimmy fell by the wayside and my stepfather Ian decided to join our number. He chose to drop out after a while, but by then we had also recruited my friend James, a man who didn’t need to seek out the ponce life, because the ponce life found him.
Like the Spice Girls, we each have our own unique identity. Al is Sartorial Ponce, because he’s always immaculately dressed: the man’s had his colours done, for goodness’ sake. Dave is Reluctant Ponce, to denote the fact that he always complains about the whole affair but secretly loves it.
Jimmy, back in the day, was Pub Ponce, and in charge for picking the post-lunch boozer. Ian, who knows more about Apple products than many people who actually work there, was Tech Ponce, and James is Preppy Ponce – or Neophyte Ponce, a title our newest member always gets, like the Baby Of The House, or New Guy in Loudermilk.
I, of course, am Grand Master Ponce. Would you expect anything else by now? Mock all you like – I’m immune these days, thanks to my childhood years in chess club and Dungeons & Dragons club (both hobbies, too late for me, are cool now). I unapologetically love Poncefests. They’ve always been a lovely miniature escape in the year, when my friends and I can catch up, more than slightly aware of how ridiculous the premise is.
Anyway, that was all well and good, but then Covid happened, and it all went quiet for Poncefest. A risk averse eighteen months meant that I saw my fellow ponces sporadically, and never all at the same time. Even after things unlocked, for some reason we were never all in the same place at once. We were like the Beatles, or the Pythons, without the acrimony. I lunched with Dave and Al a few times – once even for this blog – but a Poncefest proved elusive.
Of course, all the ponces were there for my and Zoë’s joint stag and hen do last year in Bruges, and at the wedding too, but both were part of a bigger gathering rather than a reunion per se. And then James went and put a spanner in the works by being seconded to India for nine months, and those gatherings, now five years dormant, felt more of a distant prospect than ever. So I was absolutely delighted when he returned to Blighty in the spring and talk on our WhatsApp group (the logo is a picture of Niles and Frasier Crane holding up a sign saying WILL WORK FOR LATTES) turned to getting the band back together. Would it happen?
It may not surprise you to hear that it did, and one sunny Saturday morning at the start of May I found myself bimbling round sunny Clifton, really looking forward to a long overdue luncheon. I’d bumped into people I knew outside Hart’s Bakery, straight off the train, before taking a bus to Bristol’s prettiest, if most unreal district. I stopped for a latte in the sunshine outside a little kiosk called Can’t Dance Coffee, before walking in wonder through Birdcage Walk, too taken with the glimmer of the sun through the foliage to realise I was, in fact, going in the wrong direction.
After an amble through Clifton, past the spot where I was born – it’s now been turned into flats – I found myself ruminating on all the different paths my life might have taken, and how many of them involved me never having left Bristol, or leaving but coming back to live here. Too much time alone always has this effect on me, so I grabbed a bench in the Mall Gardens, put something relaxing on my headphones and got lost in my library book. Not long after Al joined me and, because old habits died hard, we stopped in Shy Mimosa, Bristol’s excellent perfume shop, before grabbing a coffee and a taxi to our lunch venue.
Lapin was back in the centre of the city, in Wapping Wharf, a part of Bristol I knew and knew of but had almost never eaten in, unless you count a slightly underwhelming pizza at Bristol institution Bertha’s. Most of it is shipping containers, stacked two storeys high, and it boasts some of Bristol’s biggest names. Bravas‘ sibling Gambas is there, as are the likes of Root and Box-E. This year it’s been bolstered with three big names: Gurt Wings, who opened at the start of the year, to an apparently shaky start; COR‘s younger sibling RAGÙ and Lapin, which is the second site behind the owners of Totterdown’s BANK.
I should stress, by the way, that all those irksome block capitals are their choice, not mine: I guess in a city with as many good restaurants fighting for punters’ cash maybe they feel the need to shout. In any event, I’d chosen Lapin for a couple of reasons – partly because as a French restaurant it seemed especially appropriate for such a gathering and partly because it was shiny and new. On the day we visited it had been open exactly a month, by which time it had already received not one but two reviews from Mark Taylor, Bristol’s resident Reach plc hack. I on the other hand gave it a month to settle in, because that’s what I do.
It was a very warm day and Wapping Wharf was full of people younger, thinner and less fearful of hangovers than me, many of them sitting outside either at Lapin or its neighbours Gambas and Cargo Cantina. The place had the glow of youth, of sunlight diffused through an Aperol Spritz, but because I partly wanted to get a sense for the room we sat inside. Dave was already there – slightly early, because he is Dave – and James joined us shortly after, slightly later than us, because he is James. The natural order was very much in place.
The dining room, by the way, is rather nice. I think the nicest thing I can say about it is that you could easily forget that you were eating in a few shipping containers joined together. I tend to associate them with street food or Boxpark, with places you don’t linger, so I was glad that they’d turned these into a very convivial space, and one where there was quite enough daylight coming in from the big floor to ceiling windows. It was pretty no-frills, but just tasteful enough: sage walls, framed retro prints, tasteful overhead lights, sturdy, timeless furniture. No Tolix chairs to jam my arse into, I’m delighted to say.
Lapin’s menu was that especially challenging kind that felt like it contained no poor choices. Half a dozen starters, or a whole baked cheese to share, and another seven mains, again with three sharing options. On another day you would be reading about asparagus with sauce gribiche, confit duck with a spring cassoulet – whatever that is – Provençal fish stew or deep fried rabbit leg: the latter turned up at a neighbouring table towards the end of our meal and made me wish I could go back and start again.
Starters stopped just short of fifteen pounds, mains ranged more widely from just under twenty to just over thirty. The sharers were more expensive – côte de boeuf, for instance, clocking in at ninety-five pounds – sides were about a fiver, desserts just shy of a tenner. Little of that, in 2025, is especially shocking. The menu, under a section marked Accoutrements, gave you an option to add a spoon of caviar or a shaving of truffle to any of your dishes, and I was surprised by that: in a place defined by taste and tastefulness it felt – dare I say it? I guess I do – ever so slightly tacky.
But before the main event, drinks and nibbles. Lapin’s selection of apéritifs was tempting and extensive, and I think the four of us chose roughly in line with our ponciness. Al, easily the most refined, kept it classic with a Lillet Blanc. James and I, the next level down, had a cidre – Galipette – which was awfully nice, although now I’ve discovered you can buy it from Waitrose and Ocado I almost want to salute Lapin for their exorbitant markup. Dave, though, chose best with something called a demi peche, a keller pils with peach syrup. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it: Dave recreated it the following weekend at home, which was an exceptionally good idea.
We had a quartet of Comte gougères with that, and I thought they were decent but perhaps not too inspiring. The filling was good, the carpeting of finely grated cheese always welcome but the pastry itself lacked the lightness of touch it needed. At twelve pounds for these, I couldn’t help but compare them with the gorgeous cheddar curd fritters I’d had at Upstairs At Landrace a few weeks before, which had cost significantly less.
Now, when I review in a pair I always feel like I have to have something different to my dining companion, to present a range of dishes. That’s less of an issue in a bigger group, so as it turned out Dave and James ordered the same starters and mains, as did Al and I. Even at the time, I have to admit that I was thinking This is the life, I’m in a lovely restaurant with three of my favourite people, the wine is flowing… and I have less to write up than I might have done. Unworthy I know, but there it is.
Dave and James were pleased with their starter, I think. A puck of deep fried pig’s head was the good part, and the forkful I had was great. Plonking a forest floor of chicory and dandelion on top of it, though, was less successful. I don’t think either is really anybody’s favourite salad ingredient – not as pointless as frisée, but not far off – and the nicest croutons in the world aren’t going to redeem that.
Al’s and my starter was similarly along the right lines but not at its destination. I adore rillette, I adore rabbit, the prospect of rabbit rillette was a nailed-down choice for me. And it was pretty pleasant – clean and ascetic rather than punchy and rustic. I loved the carrot jam, and thought the dish could have stood a bit more of it. The bread, I’m sorry to say, was unremarkable. And somehow the whole thing combined to less than the sum of its parts, even with a few rogue cornichons secreted away.
This dish troubled me, if that isn’t a silly way to put it, because I should have loved it and I’m not sure why I didn’t. It felt too nice, too well-behaved, like an attempt to create a platonic ideal of a dish rather than the dish itself. As it happened, I was of course in France the week after I ate at Lapin, but it wasn’t the meals I had in Montpellier that came to mind when I weighed up this rabbit rillette. It was the unforced, unshowy kind of dishes I had earlier in the year, at Paulette.
We also, out of pure greed, ordered another starter to attack between the four of us. Duck liver parfait was, again, a pleasant, glossy little number, hiding in its ramekin under a layer of cherry. The menu called it “pickled stone fruit” but really, it wasn’t clear that any pickling had taken place. Again, this was nice rather than knockout – and, again, it highlighted that Lapin’s bread wasn’t the best. And that you could have done with more of it.
By this point, whatever misgivings I might have had about the starters, our meal was in full swing. There’s something lovely about that interplay with good friends – that mixture of catching up and reminiscing, of mild ribbing and in-jokes. All that was helped by an extremely good bottle of wine – a Languedoc white by Domaine Montplezy, not bone dry with notes of peach and citrus.
As it happens, I found that wine the following weekend in Montpellier at the wine shop round the corner from our B&B. We bought a bottle and again that means I got a good idea of Lapin’s markups, which are considerable. But perhaps that misses the point, and perhaps ordering a whole bottle of something does too: one of the things that is genuinely impressive about Lapin is that its whole wine list is available by the glass. Someone has spent a fair amount of money with Coravin, and it gives you an enviable range of choices compared to most restaurants I can think of.
If the starters were a little wobbly, the mains are where Lapin became far more sure-footed. My and Al’s skate wing was a really joyous plate of food, served in a vadouvin butter rather than the conventional beurre noisette that so often accompanies this fish. And that in itself was interesting – vadouvin is a mild curried sauce that originates from the French colonial period and you could almost taste in it the intersection between traditional and colonial French.
It wasn’t a conventional brown butter sauce dotted with capers, and instead came topped with monk’s beard, but in it you could sense some of the DNA it shared with the classic dish. It was little like those pavement cafés in Marrakesh’s Ville Nouvelle that, despite being stuck on the edge of northern Africa, feel like they carry some echo of Paris. I wouldn’t pick this over a more traditional rendition, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it.
James and Dave went for perhaps a more mainstream option from the menu, a whole truffle roasted poussin with a Madeira jus. This, to me, was probably a stronger choice – the truffle present but not dominating, the meat beautifully cooked and that jus setting off the whole shooting match. James very generously let me try some, and although I enjoyed it it didn’t make me wish I had ordered it.
That tells its own story, I guess, that I still wondered whether the real gem was elsewhere on the menu, undiscovered. But again, that might tell you more about me than Lapin: I can already picture Dave, at some point over the weekend, reading this review and thinking What is he going on about? That poussin was amazing.
The sides were a weird inversion of the natural order and a good example of how expectations can be completely confounded. The menu offers duck fat frites, and all four of us could think of nothing finer. But when we went to order four portions our server – who was excellent, as all the staff at Lapin were – suggested ever so nicely that this might be a bit monotonous and that we might want to mix it up a bit with some pomme purée.
So we did that, and were rewarded with an experience that is pretty much solely worth visiting Lapin to enjoy. The duck fat frites were decent rather than exceptional, but compared to the pomme purée they became more like “fuck that” frites. Because the pomme purée – no hint of hyperbole here I promise – was one of the best things I’ve eaten in years. Loaded with butter until it could take no more, than bathed in more brown butter, it took on a taste and texture that transcended savoury or sweet, almost with a note of toffee, or fudge.
Al told our server, when the empty dishes were taken away, that you could have served it as a dessert. He wasn’t far off: it was truly magnificent stuff.
Before dessert, three of us had an intermediate course, the Trou Normand. This is a Normandy tradition, a palate cleanser consisting of apple sorbet anointed with apple brandy. It was very good indeed, the sorbet smooth and hyper-real with the taste of apple.
The apple brandy, from Somerset, was excellent too. The menu said that you could add a glass of Calvados for an extra four pounds, although it wasn’t clear whether you would get Calvados on the side or whether the apple brandy would be swapped out for Calvados.
Whichever it was, the pricing of this felt a little awry: eight pounds felt like a lot, twelve in total for Calvados would have been like, well, like paying an extra thirteen pounds to dump a spoonful of caviar, randomly, on your main course.
Before dessert proper we’d also decided to push the boat out and order a bottle of dessert wine. Dave doesn’t do wine these days – he stayed on his demi peche during dinner – but he makes an exception for dessert wine. Again many of the dessert wines are available by the glass, and the menu pairs one with each of the desserts, but we couldn’t resist. Lapin also offered two really tempting bottles – a Rivesaltes Ambré 1978 for a slightly ridiculous amount or a 1992 vintage of the same wine for eighty pounds. Don’t judge, but we had the latter, and it was ambrosial.
Our server explained, in a “look what you could have won” kind of a way, that by most standards 1992 was still quite young for this wine but we were very happy with our choice nevertheless.
“1992, the year we met” said Dave to me, as we took our first heavenly sips. Suddenly I felt like however old the wine was, I was older still. But in any case there was much to celebrate, so I thoroughly enjoyed a wine as old as one of my oldest friendships. The wine has aged well, the friendship even better.
We tried a decent range of the desserts. I think on this occasion Al and I chose best with the St. Emilion au chocolat. I’ve never heard it called that before but it was an extremely nicely done ganache, a not ungenerous portion of it, topped, I think, with crumbled amaretti biscuit and served simply with terrific crème fraiche. I was always going to gravitate towards this dessert and, however good the others were, I would struggle not to order it again.
I think the other candidates were more workmanlike. Dave enjoyed the pain perdu with apple and vanilla ice cream, again crumbled with the good stuff to lend texture, with a shiny, sticky sauce. I expect if I ordered it I would have liked it too, and I imagine it went better with the dessert wine, in terms of colour coordination if for no other reason, than my overdose of chocolate did.
James ordered the Basque cheesecake, but neglected to take a picture. In fairness, you probably know what a Basque cheesecake looks like. Imagine one of those, with some rhubarb on the side. That’s what James had. He liked it, and Dave reminded me that it’s ridiculously easy to make which is why he never orders it in restaurants. I still have the WhatsApp message he sent me, with the recipe, favourited on my phone. One of these days.
Al is legendary for ordering two desserts, very much following in the footsteps of the great Nora Ephron who always held that this was one of the most important life lessons she ever learned. Technically if you count the Trou Normand and about a quarter of the Éclair Suzette we ordered to share between us, this meal constituted a personal best.
We’d ordered the éclair on the advice of our server and again, it had some nice touches – the candied orange on top, the Grand Marnier infused crème diplomat inside. But again, Lapin’s touch with the choux let it down. It was leaden rather than ethereal, and took some sawing through. As a finishing touch to the meal it summed up some of the inconsistencies, and gave me something to think about.
Our meal for four, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just shy of five hundred and twenty pounds. Now, after you’ve had your sharp intake of breath, I have to say that doesn’t feel like poor value, at all, for what we had. We had something like five courses each, and even then we threw in a couple of extra things to try. We had apéritifs and two bottles of wine, one of which was from the deeper end of the list.
All things considered, I think about one hundred and thirty pounds each isn’t at all bad, for the afternoon we had. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you should feel like you get this much living for it. It made me feel sad for my poor friend Jerry, parting with a hundred pounds for an infinitely less enjoyable meal at Gee’s not too long ago. Besides, expense be damned: this was Poncefest, it’s not like we were going to settle for a Happy Meal.
You might ask, given all that, why the rating down there is what it is. You might feel that this reads higher than that, or lower, and I would have some sympathy. When I think of meals I’ve had in Bristol, Lapin is really pretty good. But something stops it, for me, being in that upper echelon, with the likes of Caper and Cure, or Marmo. Or, if you’re comparing French meals with French meals, something prevents it reaching the standard of Paulette.
I keep coming back to that rabbit rillette, pretty close to being an eponymous dish for this restaurant. I keep remembering that it was nice and clean and pure and rarefied. And it’s not because Lapin is in a shipping container, because as I said the place managed to make me completely forget that. But Lapin, for all its excellent qualities, ever so slightly felt, to me, like a brilliant piece of cosplay, more than a French restaurant.
You could say that there’s nothing wrong with that, and I might agree. But that’s what stopped it, as far as I was concerned, attaining true greatness. I wouldn’t rule it out that at some point they will get there, and I imagine enough people in Bristol will rave about it to sustain it on that journey. In the meantime, it has a single dish that almost merits a pilgrimage, even if it’s a mere side, and it played host to a marvellous, long overdue reunion. When the ponces assemble next – in a suitably effete way, I can assure you – Lapin has set a standard we’ll be very lucky to exceed.
Lapin – 8.6 Unit 14, Cargo 2, Museum St, Bristol, BS1 6ZA 0117 4084997
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With the exception of Bruges, Montpellier is the city I’ve visited most in the last three years. I went pretty much on a whim back in 2022 and loved the place – so much so that I went again later in the year for my big summer holiday. And I loved the city so much that, less than two years later, it wound up being the place where Zoë and I went on honeymoon last May. We both loved that so much that we went back again this year, that same week in May, for another idyllic week eating, drinking, soaking up the sun, people watching and taking photographs.
All of this only happened because at one of the lunches I organise for readers of this blog, regular readers Phil and Kath waxed lyrical about Montpellier, giving me the clear impression that it was the best city break I’d never had. They’d stopped there almost by chance themselves, years back, and become regular visitors as a result. They got the bug. Having had that conversation with them I became a regular visitor myself, and here I am writing this. I got the bug, too. So be warned: if you get to the end of this guide you too might end up developing a fun, if costly, habit.
It does feel though like a city not many people know about, not an obvious candidate for a trip in the same way as Paris, Nice, Bordeaux or Lyon might be. So here’s my attempt to sell it to you: it is an absolute beauty, with a gorgeous old city full of winding lanes and sun-washed squares, wide palm tree-lined boulevards with trams whooshing past. It is a fantastic juxtaposition of old and new, with all that grandeur coexisting with a young, vibrant, metropolitan populace and a lively craft beer scene. It has wine, if you like that, and natural wine, if you like that too.
It has its own Arc de Triomphe and a fantastic neoclassical district, Antigone, built in the Eighties, which looks like it has been there for centuries. It has scruffy street art and plenty of fine art, it has galleries and churches and a thoroughly charming botanical garden. It has little squares like Place de la Canourgue filled with green space, lined by mansions and pavement cafes, and it has Les Arceaux, a grid of little streets under a huge and handsome aqueduct. The food market there during the week is a phenomenal plethora of everything you could want to eat and drink, at night people play skittles in the square or dine outside La Cigale.
It has two excellent indoor markets too, and those trams – in an impressive four-line network that is free for residents and a crazy twenty Euros a week for the rest of us – cover plenty of the city, heading almost all the way to the sea out east. I have never in all my time in Montpellier felt like going somewhere else, but if you do the trains are quick and easy to the likes of Nimes and Avignon – or the port of Sète, which remains on my list to visit some day.
My sales pitch doesn’t scratch the surface. I’ve not mentioned the street food scene at Marche du Lez, or gone into detail about the paintings at Musee Fabre, nor have I mentioned the rue de l’Ancien Courrier, possibly the most beautiful shopping street I have ever seen, like the Marais transplanted somewhere that is nearly always sunny, nearly always warm. I’ve not talked about the splendour of the Promenade de Peyrou, the attractive square with an incredibly photogenic water tower at one end, the Arc de Triomphe at the other.
I could go on and on, but I suspect the rest of this city guide will be long enough as it is. Because apart from Montpellier just being the most amazing place to be: to be a flâneur, to amble and loaf, to sit in the sun and watch the city living and breathing with a mixture of admiration and envy, it is also a stupendous place to eat and drink. And that of course is my focus, why I keep going back and why I’m writing a guide to some of its (many) best bits for a third time. So let’s get on with that, and hopefully once I’m done you’ll want to go there too: easyJet flies there directly from Gatwick, although if you’re time rich you could take the train there from Paris, which would also make it easier to bring back all manner of food and drink.
My previous guide to Montpellier was a bit of a halfway house, written in 2022 and updated in 2024. This one is almost completely overhauled, which means that unless I visited a place in 2024 or this month (or both) I’ve taken it out of the guide.
Many places I’ve left out might well still be good, but I can’t 100% vouch for them. If you’re a completist, you might want to consider Pastis, Reflet d’Obione, Green Lab or Le Reservoir from that guide. I’ve also removed a few places that I revisited in 2025 but didn’t like as much or that, with hindsight, have been supplanted by better options – like l’Artichaut and Popular Brewing.
Where an entry in this guide dates from 2024 I’ve made that clear, otherwise the recommendation is as fresh as they come, at the time of writing. This guide has fewer entries than the previous edition, but I know it’s still a long list. I did seriously consider slimming it down further, but in the end I didn’t: everything in here is worthy of its place.
Two other things before I get started. First of all, although this guide distinguishes between places to eat and places to drink, this is Montpellier and so the two can’t easily be separated. You can drink wonderful stuff at all of the restaurants and often eat cracking food at the bars, so the whole list is worth considering. I had some of my best meals at lunchtime, followed by an evening eating small plates in a bar.
Secondly, I’ve had a few people ask me where to stay in Montpellier. I think the old city can be tricky, because rooms are often cramped and/or expensive, and I never found an Airbnb I liked enough, despite the many advantages that come with having a kitchen and a fridge – although I suppose if I’d been eating stuff from the markets every day this guide wouldn’t exist.
I stay at Les 4 Etoiles, a guesthouse in Les Arceaux, and I can honestly say I wouldn’t recommend anywhere else. The welcome from Pierre is absolutely faultless, the breakfast – fresh fruit juice, freshly made fruit salad, baguette and pastries from a nearby bakery, good coffee – is marvellous, the rooms are wonderful and the little roof terrace comes into its own on a sunny day with a good book and a cold drink. Not only that, but the neighbourhood really does feel like a village close to the heart of the city: six minutes by tram, or a fifteen minute walk away from the centre.
I am already trying to work out when I can return. And when I do, I plan to fill some of the gaps in this guide: further research into Montpellier’s many wine bars is in order, along with a serious deep dive into the patisserie scene, something I promised last time but which is still overdue. I’m not currently in a position to judge between the varying merits of Maison Bonnaire, Clara Jung, Maison l’Oeuf and Scholler, but fingers crossed next time I will be.
Where to eat
1. Bistro Urbain
Bistro Urbain is a lovely little spot in the Écusson, the old city, and when I visited it in 2024 I had possibly my meal of the trip. I still think about the asparagus tartlet I ate there, and the magret de canard, skin seared, pink-centred, served with a terrine of courgette and rhubarb, a curveball ingredient the kitchens of Montpellier like to chuck in to a savoury course to keep you on your toes. I vowed to go there for dinner the next time I visited the city, to do it properly.
I did exactly that, and I had a wonderful meal although, in truth, it just reinforced that lunchtime diners get an astounding deal in this city because the menu didn’t differ hugely, in size, width or quality. The main difference seemed to be that two courses was not an option, so you chose between four – with a very generous amuse bouche and a choice of fish or meat main, or the “menu Pandore” where you got both main courses, but slightly less of each.
I did the latter and although I loved my meal I suspect that next time I would keep it simple. Ravioli of pork with some kind of fermented asparagus panna cotta was 40% good and 60% interesting, and I rather liked the slow-cooked tuna, given a pop with confit lemon and complexity by the addition of smoked haddock. But the other main, the shredded beef with another exceptional courgette terrine – what this restaurant can do with the humble courgette! – wild garlic, wholegrain mustard and a deep, intense jus was so marvellous that I wished I’d just had a bigger portion of that.
In that respect the menu Pandore was aptly named: at the end you kind of wished you hadn’t opened the box. But they made amends with a ludicrously moreish baba au rhum, at its heart a glossy and spiced chai ice cream that gave an old stager a new lease of life. Dinner for two with an excellent bottle of wine came to one hundred and fifty pounds – one of our only pricey meals of the trip but a steal for cooking of this quality.
I am pretty sure Bistro Urbain had a Bib Gourmand when I was deciding to visit them the first time and have lost it since. Based on my visit, that’s about as mystifying as everything else the inspectors do (how Newbury’s Woodspeen or Bristol’s Paco Tapas got a star remains beyond me: both have since been removed).
If Bistro Urbain was my discovery of 2024, I can say without hesitation that Mahé was my discovery of 2025. It’s a little out of the way – I ended up getting there by taking a combination of a tram and a bus – and if it wasn’t worth the detour I wouldn’t waste a moment in telling you so. But no, it is an exceptional place and I’m certain that if it was right in the centre it would be even busier and cost a darned sight more.
Mahé really is one hell of a restaurant. From the roadside, just down from the bus stop, it looks like an unexceptional, squat, concrete structure. What you don’t see until you go in is not only an extremely tasteful dining room but, beyond that, an absolutely gorgeous terrace that captures the sun, a place to completely escape from the noise beyond and, in my experience, any cares you might have.
The menu, at lunchtime, is a crazy forty Euros for three courses and this isn’t the kind of disappointing menu of compromises you’d expect at the likes of, say, London Street Brasserie. Mahé, like Bistro Urbain, gives you a narrow range of choices but that narrowness doesn’t make it any easier. I forewent the chance to eat crab ravioli – one of my favourite things – or pork with black garlic houmous and lacquered aubergine, and it would have hurt a lot more if everything I’d eaten hadn’t been so delectable.
First off, a raft of bang-on asparagus completely buried by its precious cargo of quail – enormously generous amounts of the stuff – covered in shaved foie gras and covered in a muscat reduction, the whole thing beautified with edible flowers. Dishes like this are why French restaurants bring you excellent bread, and no butter.
Even better was to follow with an astounding piece of veal, cooked pink, served with rosemary glazed carrots, a buttery pomme purée and morels that had soaked up a deep, delicious jus like sponges. This dish on its own was worth forty Euros, and might have cost it elsewhere, that it came with two friends in tow at that price almost beggared belief.
Dessert was a classic example of this region’s ingredients allowed to shine without too much mucking about: layer on layer of the lightest, most delicate pastry trapping an indulgent crème mousseline, singing with orange blossom. And under that? Loads and loads of the sweetest, brightest strawberries, quite possibly from the market I’d attended in wonder and envy that morning.
Mahé has interesting opening hours – closed two days a week, only open for lunch two days a week, only open for dinner one day a week. Only on Thursdays and Fridays can you pick a daytime or evening slot. Next time I go to Montpellier I will be sorely tempted to eat there twice.
I’ll never forget the first thing I ate at Ébullition, back in 2022. It was September, the tail end of the summer, and my starter was a kind of symphony of tomatoes. In the U.K. it would have been called something naff like “textures of tomato” or “tomatoes three ways” but it was just an astounding love letter to a fruit that, somehow, is only ever magical when eaten on the continent: confit tomatoes, tomato sorbet and so on. I can’t remember the rest, but I’ll always remember how that dish made me feel.
I had the a la carte on that occasion, and then last year I had the tasting menu. I would say, actually, that both are equally valid ways to eat there. The former puts more risk on individual courses – but makes you feel like you’ve hit the jackpot when they’re good, as my rolled veal with citrus, jus and liquorice was – the latter is a proper three hour experience but has all the benefits and drawbacks of a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it approach to dishes.
I didn’t go back this year, and writing this now it’s one of my regrets. I’m not the kind of restaurant reviewer to appoint myself Michelin inspector – I leave those pronouncements to the really pompous ones – but when I wrote about Ébullition in 2022 I said their food felt a whisper away from Michelin star status. So I was absolutely delighted when I read that they’d won one this year. Far better than many starred restaurants I’ve visited in the U.K., and well worth a visit if you go to Montpellier.
Cigale was the first place I visited on my 2024 visit to Montpellier. It was a recommendation from Pierre when we checked in after a freakishly early flight from Gatwick, the kind where your airport taxi picks you up so early it’s barely worth going to sleep at all. It was just around the corner from our B&B and we sat outside, exhausted and newlywed in the blazing sunshine and had an extremely good lunch.
This year we returned for lunch on Sunday, a day when Cigale is resolutely open but many places in Montpellier are not. It was the one day of our trip when the heavens opened, a necessary clearing of the air: before that it was almost-warm and overcast with threatening clouds, after that it was nothing but sunshine. That meant that we got to eat inside, something I suspect rarely happens at Cigale, and check out their unobtrusively cool dining room which is great without ever trying too hard.
The food was every bit as good as I remembered. Haddock fritters with yoghurt, mint and coriander felt like they were a few courgettes away from being full-on Greek, but they were outrageously good all the same. It was chucking it down outside, but all sunshine on the plate. I followed it up with a steak tartare, every bit as good as the one I ate there the previous year, but Zoë had an even more covetable dish – a huge, craggy Milanese with a generous amount of Roquefort sauce on top. All that and great wine by the glass. Or, if you’re Zoë, Tripel Karmeliet on draft for a ridiculous seven Euros fifty for a pint.
La Cigale is one of those places that is always open and always busy, true cuisine non-stop. In the morning the terrace is full of paper-reading, coffee-drinking smokers, it is packed at lunch but even in the evening, on a warm day, it buzzes long after the sun has gone down. It is well worth a visit, wherever in the city you’re staying, before exploring the beautiful backstreets of Les Arceaux. I increasingly daydream about living there, getting my meat from the butcher, my fish from the fishmonger, my cheese from the cheesemonger and most of my other needs met by La Cave des Arceaux, the superb wine shop on pretty rue Marioge.
It has taken me over three years of coming to Montpellier to finally get round to visiting La Morue, a fish and seafood restaurant. That’s despite Phil and Kath raving about it, and Pierre repeatedly marking its location on the Montpellier map he gives us at the start of every holiday. Well, more fool me, because it’s a marvellous little spot.
It’s a very fetching place just along from Place de la Canourgue, with tables that catch the sun and a gorgeous, intricate awning that casts just enough shade. But if you do have to move in, as we did when the sun got too much, it’s an equally attractive dining room with bare tables, wicker shades and memorabilia from nearby Sète on the walls. I’ve not yet visited Sète on any of my visits to Montpellier, but after eating at La Morue I am resolved to.
The menu is largely fish and seafood and everything I had was properly outstanding. Chipirones, baby squid, were far and away the best I’ve had and even better than any of the many specimens I’ve sampled on numerous trips to Andalusia. The coating was irresistible, beautifully seasoned, the squid was tender and the lake of aioli plonked on top left me honking for the rest of the day, as you would want it to.
Zoë’s truffle risotto with grilled scallops was also exceptionally good, but I only had eyes for the ray wing. Two of them turned up on the place, luxuriating in a perfect beurre noisette, golden and crinkled at the edges, scattered with capers and samphire, and I absolutely couldn’t have been happier. A little earthenware dish of potatoes, tomatoes, courgette and yes, still more aioli was a wonderful accompaniment, but I would have been happy just with those wings.
Service was brilliant, the albariño was crisp and delicious and I sat there soaking it up, wanting to build a time machine to go back to 2022 me and tell him not to be an idiot and to go to La Morue toute suite. My lunch there felt like a holiday within a holiday – a kind of Inception-esque experience, but a really enjoyable one.
La Morue 23 rue du Palais des Guilhem
6. Rosemarie
Rosemarie occupies one of the loveliest, most sun-struck spots in the Écusson, not far from the church of Saint Roch. I didn’t make it there until 2024, a fact entirely connected to the fact that they only recently embraced online bookings and, prior to that, their phone just rang and rang. It’s probably because they were so busy, because they occupy one of the loveliest etc. etc., but finally welcoming the internet a quarter of the way through the century is a very welcome development, for me at least.
Eating there last year I was stuck that the food was a lot better than it needed to be, given their enviable spot. I liked my jambon, speckled with almonds, very much and I loved my squid ragout with red Camargue rice and olives. Returning this year the standard didn’t dip at all, and if Rosemarie’s fish croquettes didn’t quite reach the standard of the fritters at La Cigale, the apple millefeuille fell a little short of the dessert at Mahé, the food was still good enough, especially combined with the location, to make it an excellent choice.
Besides, my panzerotto, stuffed with chicken and olives, was joyous. And my main course, a slab of lamb shoulder soaked in jus, topped with lemon and resting on a spelt risotto was even better, the meat falling apart even faster than my resolve not to race through a bottle of white in the sunshine.
In other cities, you could dismiss a restaurant like Rosemarie as just standard tourist bait and maybe, even in Montpellier, it is that. But nevertheless, it’s still rather good.
My favourite street in Montpellier isn’t its prettiest or its most photogenic. It doesn’t have stone glowing in the sun, or bunting strung overhead. Rue du Faubourg du Courreau is a dusty, scruffy road that connects the edge of Les Arceaux with the boulevards at the perimeter of the old city. At its eastern end there’s a craft beer shop, and a bakery called Flour that is almost the cliché of Instagrammable but, because this is Montpellier, still does amazing cookies. At the western end it has Lebanese restaurants and cafes where men sit outside in the late afternoon, smoking and drinking coffee. Halfway down, somewhere between those things, you’ll find Les Freres Poulards.
It does loads of other stuff on its menu, and when I sat outside last week I’m pretty sure some of my neighbouring tables were eating food from the Italian restaurant opposite – the lasagne looked good, I couldn’t help noticing – but if you go to Les Freres Poulards you’re going for the rotisserie chicken. It really is extremely good, and you get a whole chicken, a well-dressed salad, plenty of flawless frites and a little pot of jus for just over forty Euros.
The chicken lacks the whistles and bells of, say, Bonjardim, but for my money is almost as good – so tender, the skin salted, crispy and as life-affirming as it is lifespan-shortening. But you’ll eat it and really not care about that, and wonder at how everything parts company with the bone so easily. The range of starters is very small – on one visit I had herring and fried potato, which I loved, on another a couple of fried eggs in a skillet, served simply with a strip of bronzed bacon and plenty of thyme. Both were great, but you come here for the chicken. And I always do.
Les Freres Poulards 27 rue du Faubourg du Courreau
8. Le Couperet
Le Couperet is an unusual beast, a smokehouse tucked away in the old city. I first went in 2022, and although I had a blast it rather passed in a blur. I had been to two different beer spots (both in this article) already by then, taking part in the by now regular tradition of, as Zoë puts it, “tearing the arse out of it” on the first night of a holiday. I resolved to go back, but it wasn’t until this trip that I got to try it again.
It is still a really lovely little spot, and although it has tables in the street outside on this occasion I ate in the dining room, which is altogether more tasteful than you might expect with none of the ersatz Americana that blights these kinds of restaurants in the U.K. (that said, I still wish I could go back in time and buy shares in whoever it is that makes Tolix chairs).
Le Couperet’s menu is streamlined and efficient, and if anything makes this a quicker, more casual dining experience, so well suited to drinks elsewhere afterwards. It has a handful of starters, and then the main event is a “planque” with one kind of dead animal per person and as many sides as you think you can handle. And my goodness, but you do get a lot of very nice food: this meal, of all the meals of the trip, was the one deserving of the epithet Zoë gives to big portions: a gut bash (the language of Shakespeare is safe in my wife’s hands).
Don’t be fooled, though, into thinking this is quantity 1, quality 0. Everything I had was extremely enjoyable. I loved my giant pile of ribbon-thin smoky pastrami, plonked on a puddle of spiced mayo and topped with a few pickles in case Vitamin C is something you remotely care about. And then everything on that planque was spot on. There was a massive slab of smoked pork belly, crispy where it should be, meaty where it should be, wobbly where it should be – if only I could say the same about myself – knockout beef ribs, garlic bread stuffed with cheese, smoked baked potatoes with sour cream, a very creditable coleslaw.
The staff work like trojans and the chap behind the counter, who seemed to be on his own, was even more industrious, serving a whole room of happy diners with impressive energy in what must have been a very hot kitchen. They even apologised for keeping us waiting for our mains, which says to me that they are used to customers eating in a hurry. That’s a shame, because it was food worth taking time over.
At the end, when we paid, I said that we’d not been for a few years and asked how they were doing. The chef, moonlighting as a cashier, told me they had had a really tough year last year, but they seemed to be bouncing back. It made me think, as I often do about restaurants, that if you miss out on a place in one visit it might not be there for the next. I’m glad they are still around: I’ll return, and fingers crossed this persuades someone, out there in the ether, to try them too.
Burgers are as popular in Montpellier as they are in the U.K., and the old city offers a number of options. Other places on this list, like Broc’Cafe and La Barbote, do their own versions. But I visited Hop Smash, a little spot just down the way from the church of Saint Roch, in both 2022 and 2024 and both times I had a magnificent burger. At the time, I think it was possibly the best smashed burger I’d ever had, and even now I’m not sure it’s yet been surpassed.
I do think they have shrunk them from two patties to one, and when I strolled past this year I couldn’t see any option on their menu to double up, but even so they have spot on caramelisation and crinkled, crispy edges and are an excellent quick, casual option for drinks before a night out or lunch on the run. Their fries with feta and Cajun spices are also surprisingly good and the beers – brewed especially for the restaurant, if I remember rightly – are much better than they need to be.
Bravo Babette, a self-styled “sandwich social club” near the botanical gardens, is part of a new generation of Montpellier hospitality businesses I’ve seen cropping up in the last year or two. Like Deli Corner, a sandwich joint near the church of Saint Roch, it has irreverent branding and concentrates on doing a few things really well. One of them is comms in general and social media in particular. Another, it turns out, is sandwiches.
Everything is made in house – which you should be able to guarantee but can’t always, with sandwiches – and the attention to detail is quite something. My sandwich, the Domi, crammed panko-crumbed chicken breast, tonkatsu sauce and pickled red cabbage into a sturdy brioche from nearby Maison Bonnaire. But the star of the show was a kaffir lime mayo that took this combination from familiar to exceptional. Zoê’s choice, stracciatella with prosciutto cotto and pesto, was more conventional but no less worthy.
Add in the fact that you can get a side of roasted new potatoes slathered in chimichurri and a home made lemonade in a very decent meal deal and you have a winner on your hands. Bravo indeed.
When it comes to ice cream, I know some people rate Padova, the gelateria in the old city. I’ve been, and it’s quite nice, but it has one significant problem, which is that it isn’t Les Glaces MPL.
Les Glaces MPL is in one of the indoor food markets of Montpellier, and it does some of the best ice cream I’ve had. I like to make multiple visits on a trip, so I can try the conventional stuff at least once but also give the leftfield flavours a go. So the salted caramel and the milk chocolate are as good as any – and better than Padova’s – and if you love ice cream as I do Les Glaces MPL is a must-visit for that.
But I also have a soft spot for some of the curveballs. On my visit last year I adored the clever heat of a chocolate ice cream laced with piment d’espelette, and previously I’ve loved their strawberry, mint and basil sorbet. This time, I tried an orange zest confection that was part ice cream, part marmalade, all wonderful, and a rosemary ice cream which I mostly tried so I could say I’d eaten rosemary ice cream. When I go back, because I will go back, I will hope they have their black sesame ice cream back on, because it’s one of my favourite things to eat in the whole of Montpellier.
This bakery is just down from the Arc de Triomphe, and on nearly every visit I have ever paid it there’s been a queue out onto rue Eugène Lisbonne. Bizarrely, on this visit I had no such trouble both times I went to Des Rèves Et Du Pain. I have no idea why, but I wasn’t complaining. It certainly wasn’t because of a drop-off in quality: their pain au chocolat is the equal of anything I’ve had in Paris, which means it’s the equal of anything I’ve had anywhere.
I can’t vouch for their patisserie, and my intel suggests there are better places in the city for that, but they also do the most incredible savoury stuff. On our final day, we went there to try and find something for a light lunch on our roof terrace before the sad taxi trundle to the airport. We were rewarded with utterly gorgeous focaccia, filled with a pea pesto, feta and walnuts, which was somehow like the Mediterranean and sunshine in sandwich form.
“Stuff from Pret is going to seem pretty shit after this, isn’t it?” I said. Zoë nodded sagely, although we both knew it was as close to a rhetorical question as you were going to get.
I have always loved Broc’Café, a grand spot right opposite the Jardin des Plantes where you can sit on the pavement and watch the trams go by. But I think it was only on this trip that I really fully appreciated how good it was.
It is always busy and bustling, but always seems to have space. It has an exceptionally good beer list for somewhere that isn’t a craft beer spot per se, with beers on tap by Brasserie Le Detour and Prizm, who are probably my favourite local brewery. Hopstand, a 6% IPA by the former, is increasingly a regular at many places, making it Montpellier’s answer to Parka or Steady Rolling Man. On one visit there I had a beautiful cider with pineapple, again by a local producer and a wonderful surprise package.
The food looks excellent, too, and seeing burgers arrive at other tables had me rubbernecking like a motherfucker. But on one occasion, having missed out on a proper lunch and wanting a mid-afternoon snack, we went for a little slate of charcuterie, cheese, houmous, cornichons and excellent bread and it was just the perfect thing at the perfect time. I think it cost about fifteen Euros too, which made it a steal.
Two other noteworthy things about Broc’Café: one is that the staff, who work their socks off, are without exception lovely, friendly, helpful and a credit to the place. The second is that although you order through them, you can pay at the end using the QR code on your table – and tip, for that matter – before being on your way without an eternal delay waiting to flag someone down. I saw this as a couple of places in Montpellier, but I don’t remember seeing it in the U.K. It’s almost as if there are some trust issues, I’d say.
La Barbote, just round the corner from the station, is the eminence grise of Montpellier’s craft beer scene, the trailblazer that was there before the proliferation of beer across the city. It is a brewpub, and with the exception of some bottles from the likes of wild fermentation specialists Sacrilege, everything they sell on site is brewed on site.
Their beer is really lovely, and in a virtuosic array of styles. I’ve had IPAs there, DIPAs, sours and imperial stouts, and loved them all. And that doesn’t do them justice, because those are just the styles I’ll drink: on my visit this month they also had a kolsch, a triple, an altbier, a witbier with fennel, an Earl Grey pale ale and something only referred to as a “wild strong ale” (I’ll take their word for it that it was both).
La Barbote is a big space and the demographic there could teach some U.K. craft spots a thing or too – a huge range of ages, properly diverse in every way and about as far from your Brexitty “pubman” saving cask one warm flat pint at a time as is possible to imagine.
Did I mention the food? The food is great too. I always have the karaage chicken there, and if it wasn’t quite as amazing as on previous visits it was still up there with most karaage I’ve had in the U.K. – plenty of it, too, although maybe in bigger, less gnarled pieces than I’m used to. I’ve always looked enviously at the burgers arriving at other tables but been heading on somewhere else, but on this visit it was our spot for the evening so I enjoyed their classic smashed burger. It wasn’t quite at the standard of Hop Smash, but it wasn’t far off.
When I wrote up La Barbote last I finished with Zoë’s verdict that it was how Zero Degrees would be if it wasn’t shit. To give another frame of reference, and be more topical, Siren RG1 can only wish it was as good as La Barbote.
Le Discopathe is opposite Les Freres Poulards, I have been going there for three years now and I love it very much. It specialises in craft beer and vinyl, it has upgraded its tables to rid itself of the trestle and benches so beloved by every tap yard and street food vendor and those tables catch the sun from lunchtime onwards. And, unlike most of Montpellier’s great beer places which open at 5pm, Le Discopathe is open from noon so it’s perfect for a quality beer in the sun.
On this most recent trip I visited more than once and became even more attached to sitting outside with a beer on the go, watching the world go by and occasionally getting into random conversations with people at neighbouring tables. It is one of my favourite Montpellier people-watching spots, and it would get into this guide for that alone. But the beer is really good too – usually about half a dozen options on keg, all local, although on this visit I couldn’t stray far from Brasserie Le Detour’s excellent, mega-reliable Hopstand.
It is great in the afternoon, great in the early evening, great after sundown when those tables pack with bobo types. It’s just great, I can’t stress this highly enough. The only sad thing about the tables inside is that it’s too loud to hear yourself think, although every time Zoë went inside – without exception – she heard something she really wanted to Shazam. Fortunately, you can get the same experience by keeping tabs on Le Discopathe’s excellent Instagram account, where they post banger après banger, après banger.
Hopulus, like La Barbote, is a brewpub and, like La Barbote, it exclusively serves its own beer, but the resemblances largely end there. Hopulus, in the heart of the old city, must be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever drunk craft beer, all vaulted ceilings, sturdy wooden furniture and honey-coloured stone. It’s an outstanding place, and it really helps that their beers – again, ever-changing and in an array of styles – are extremely good.
What I also love about Hopulus though is the way it challenges the link, a link that sometimes has a feeling of inevitability, between craft beer and pizza/burgers/fried chicken/other street food tropes. Because at Hopulus beer is paired, as is equally valid, with cheese and charcuterie, to triumphant effect. Sitting down with a gorgeous IPA, great bread, a salami, a nutty Comte and an entire Brillat Savarin was a transcendent experience. And that’s before you get on to their cailette, a beautiful pork faggot brought to the table just asking to be sliced thickly and enjoyed slowly.
Partway through this embarrassment of riches I wasn’t sure whether I was having one of the best meals of my trip or creating an exquisite still life. From the look of the photo above, I’m by no means convinced that they’re mutually exclusive.
There are two branches of Couleurs de Bières. The bigger one in the south is in Port Marianne, a sort of modern district which feels a little like Montpellier’s answer to Kennet Island: I’ve been to Port Marianne, but only during the day. Its northern sibling, though, is a cracking little bar. It’s opposite the exotically named Stade Philippidès, and there’s something about watching people running round the track that really puts you in the mood for a cold, crisp beer.
It’s a good example of how Montpellier’s beer scene has evolved even in the time I’ve been going there. When I first visited in 2022 the beers felt more Belgian, with only a couple of beers by local ZooBrew. But returning last year, the list of beers on keg – 8 in total – was much more French, with local breweries really well showcased. It also pairs very nicely with Drapeau Rouge, the next place on this list, if you’re planning a crawl.
I’d seen Drapeau Rouge on my summer 2022 visit to Montpellier, but it wasn’t until last year that I managed to pay it a visit. It’s a gorgeous brewpub in Boutonnet, a district a short walk from the old city, with eleven taps, including beers from many of Montpellier’s breweries and a couple brewed by the venue itself. It’s not the comfiest venue in the world, with many of those trestle benches beloved by anyone who’s been to a tap room or a street food market, but I loved sitting outside with a sour and feeling like I was in a part of Montpellier the tourists would never see.
I didn’t get to it this year, which means it is on the note on my phone entitled “Montpellier: next time”. I still want to give their food a go, if only because their website charmingly states that they aim to provide what they call “pub food” de qualité. I bet they do a better job of it than a bloody Wetherspoons microwave and by the looks of the menu, I’ll be on the frites loaded with smoked, spiced pulled pork, or topped with Belgian beef stew..
Montpellier is awash with wine and wine bars, and as we’ve established has more than its fair share of places where you can drink good and interesting beer. Is there space, too, for natural wine? The owners of Plein Sud seem to think so, and on the showing of my two visits there I very much agree with them. And the service there is so good, and so winning, that I think they could convince even the most hardened cynic.
It’s another of those beautiful spaces, all stone and wood, not far from Hopulus, with a few tables in the square outside. But really the rooms are so gorgeous – and were nicely cool on a warm spring evening – that I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. Places like Plein Sud remind me very much of Bristol, to the point where I wonder if the owners of, say, Native Vine or Marmo have been to their ilk to pick up tips. Little things like the decor, the prints on the wall and the personalised wine glasses make me think they may well have done.
Plein Sud has half a dozen natural wines by the glass – a mix of white, red, orange and pet nat – along with a couple of mixed fermentation beers from Sacrilege, cannily spotting the overlap in the Venn diagram between these two genres of booze. A lot of natural wine still gets a bad name in this country (good luck finding any in Reading, for instance) but I really enjoyed everything I had. I especially enjoyed the pet nat, a little number called Tohu-Bohu that was hard enough to order sober, let alone after a few glasses.
Plein Sud also has a lovely compact menu of stuff to eat while you explore the wine list. More compact than at Hopulus, for example, but still just big enough that you have choices and those choices aren’t straightforward. I loved the coarse rilletes, served with good bread and a handful of cornichons, and a Beaufort cheese with almost toffee notes to harmonise with the grit.
But the more imaginative stuff was if anything even better. Carpaccio of blue meat radish, carpeted with feta and bathed in really good extra virgin olive oil was a revelation, and I loved the puck of goats cheese with oil, smoked salt and spring onions. But Zoë’s favourite, as it had been on our previous visit, was something called the ‘Dome Plein Sud’, a tower of fromage blanc and goats cheese sandwiching a layer of excellent pesto, crowned with sundried tomatoes and toasted nuts. We left convinced we could recreate it at home, and irked that no U.K. supermarket was interested in saving us the trouble.
Wine bar Les Enfant Rouges was recommended by Pierre, the owner of our B&B, and like all his other recommendations it was utterly reliable. It spans both sides of a busy street in the old city and we only paid it a flying visit in 2024, there for a little while before dinner elsewhere. But the selection of wines by the glass was so good, the staff so accommodating and welcoming and the small plates menu so tempting that I regret not fitting it in during my trip this year.
I fear that my guide does a better job catering for beer and coffee lovers than it does for wine lovers, something I will have to rectify next time around. For what it’s worth, if you do want to do any research of your own when you visit Montpellier, my to do list of wine bars includes the following: Hotel Pinard; GlouGlou; Chez Pinot; and Les Canons.
I think that previous versions of this guide had more coffee places in them, and there are more coffee places in Montpellier than I seemed to remember on this month’s visit. But really, for me, it’s simple: I went to Cafe BUN on rue des Étuves, just down from Place de la Comédie. A lot. And I highly recommend you do too. They have some space outside, the service is excellent and the coffee is exceptional. They roast their own, and once you’ve had it you don’t really look elsewhere.
Do you still want another suggestion? Okay, here goes: if you don’t fancy that go to the second branch of Café BUN, on Boulevard du Jeu de Paume. It has more seats outside, they catch the sun splendidly and you can watch the trams go past. All around that street are concept stores and little boutiques selling things you’ll want to bring home with you. The inside is much more spacious and bustling, and it has a better loo. Oh, and you can buy beans there to take home. I have a couple of unopened bags in my kitchen as I write this, and I know when they’re opened that a little bit of me – a very grateful bit – will be transported back to the city, even if only momentarily.
Café BUN 5 rue des Étuves/32 Boulevard du Jeu de Paume https://cafebun.fr
10. Coldrip
The only other place I’d recommend for coffee is Coldrip, a sort of Australian-style brunch cafe in a very attractive square not far from the Musée Fabre. Their coffee is really not half bad, and Zoë has a real weakness for their mocha, which comes with a little pot of Chantilly cream. But really, I recommend Coldrip for the brunches. On previous visits I’ve had their crispy chicken burger, which was downright terrific, and pancakes stacked high with bacon where they leave a big old jug of maple syrup at the table for you to dispense with extreme prejudice. Again, this quality, this lack of stinginess, can come as a surprise after visiting enough cafés in the U.K.
On this occasion, though, I chose the avocado toast, to live up to my stereotypical role as a sybarite who is not yet on the housing ladder. Again, it was a beaut of a dish: great bread, which to be fair you start to take for granted in France, plenty of avocado, feta, pink pickled onions, quite a lot of top notch streaky bacon, a very well-poached egg and a cornucopia of seeds scattered with abandon. This dish made me realise that, with the exception of The Switch, nowhere back home does this dish half so well.
Coldrip is justly very successful, and has opened a second branch in Port Marianne: I tried to go there but Coldrip was closed, adding further weight to my theory that it was the Kennet Island of Montpellier.
But the original branch was busy when I went, and to be honest it always seems to be: we queued to get a table at lunchtime, and as we enjoyed our meal there were still people waiting to be seated. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was like that until mid to late afternoon every day, and it’s richly deserved. Other people may be very excited about our one or two extra branches of Café Yolk in the offing, but I would trade both of them, without hesitation, for a single Coldrip.
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