Tag: burgers

Café review: Mac’s Deli

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

What were you doing when you were 21? If you’re a regular reader of this blog I imagine that, like me, you’ll have to cast your mind back to answer that question. In this sense I envy the generations after me, everything digitised, lives captured in hundreds of smartphone photos, people who can probably tell you exactly what they were doing on nearly every day of their twenty-second year.

Personally I was in my last year at university, frantically cramming for final exams I would dream about for years afterwards, navigating fraught relationships and sticking my head firmly in the sand about What Came Next and What I Would Do With My Life (thirty years of that now and counting, thank you very much).

My life was about to lose what little comfort and structure it had and, for me at least, most of the rest of that decade made up my wilderness years. I’m not sure I’d go back to being 21 if you paid me, despite all the people my age who will say “if only I knew then what I know now”. All they really mean is that they regret not getting laid more often, but we nearly all regret that.

I’ll tell you what I wasn’t doing when I was 21: I wasn’t starting my very first hospitality business, taking a massive gamble in a post-pandemic climate where the cards are stacked against restaurants, cafés and bars. But, nearly 30 years after I turned 21, that’s exactly what a chap called Mac Dsouza did.

That business was Filter Coffee House, on Castle Street, and it’s fair to say that it was an immediate success. I stopped by a couple of weeks after it opened, sampled its banana bun and was instantly smitten. So much so that about a week later, when I wrote a piece about Reading’s 50 best dishes to make 10 years of the blog, I managed to sneak that banana bun in there. I might have been relatively early on the bandwagon, but people were already talking about Dsouza’s café. By the time I reviewed it early in the New Year, its place in Reading’s affections was secured.

Dsouza, though, was not the sort to rest on his laurels. So even as the café kept trading, evolving, taking away its seating and moving to takeaway only he was working like a Trojan elsewhere. So he cropped up at Caversham’s Sunday markets to sell more coffee and treats, converting the RG4 crowd to his astonishing masala hot chocolate.

By then Filter Coffee House’s menu had expanded to include a range of affordable sandwiches, although I was more drawn to the specials they did at weekends. However you looked at it, what Dsouza achieved in a couple of years was quite something.

And what were you doing when you were 23, do you remember? I was back at my family home in a suburban terraced house in Woodley, temping in the cashier’s department of the insurance company where my brother worked. It was boring, and this was an office before smartphones, email and the internet so it’s hard to adequately convey quite how boring it was. But Labour had just put an end to eighteen years of Tory rule, and the joy was so extreme that it was almost tangible.

Despite earning fuck all, I always seemed to have enough money, possibly because my main aim at that point was to get drunk at the Bull & Chequers – midweek or weekends, back then nothing ever resulted in a hangover – and go clubbing. I was still impersonating an ostrich with reckless abandon, while my contemporaries became management consultants, solicitors and barristers. I was writing cheques for other people, putting files in alphabetical order and pretending to care what had happened in EastEnders when talking to Maureen or Eileen; everybody in my department was in their sixties, about to retire on the cusp of the information age.

When Mac Dsouza was 23 he opened his second business, Mac’s Deli. It’s not a deli at all, but a café squirrelled away on an industrial estate about a twenty minute walk from Theale station. It opened just over two months ago, and seemed to be a continuation of what he was offering at Filter Coffee House: coffee and a variety of sandwiches, this time mostly involving his own shokupan – Japanese milk bread – baked on the premises.

Dsouza documented every aspect of setting up his new business on Mac’s Deli’s Instagram page, so followers got to see the place coming together – logo first, then the fit out, then the countdown to opening. Since then Instagram has depicted an extraordinary-looking business where everything is made onsite, with even the sauces created by Dsouza rather than bought in. Weekend specials have run the gamut from 6 hour pulled pork to honey butter toast, a little nod to the legendary dish at London’s famous Arôme Bakery.

The menu at Mac’s Deli reminded me of all sorts of things. It was reminiscent of specialist sandwich slingers overseas like Montpellier’s Bravo Babette and Deli Corner, It felt a little Hackney, too, which I should add is a compliment. But it didn’t feel very Theale, which I should also add isn’t necessarily an insult. The location felt incongruous compared to everything else, and when people asked me if I planned to review Mac’s Deli I always said the same thing: “it looks very nice, but it’s a bit out of the way”.

What changed is that a couple of weeks ago my boss and I, on a Friday in the office not far from Mac’s Deli, decided to go scout out the place. So we went, we had lunch, we both absolutely loved it and I decided that I had to find a way to go back and visit on duty. I mentioned it to Zoë when I got home, showed her a photo of my sandwich and an executive decision was made: I was going back, in a couple of Saturdays time, and she was coming with me.

I doubt most people get to Mac’s Deli by taking the train to Theale and doing the flat, featureless 20 minute walk to the industrial estate. But we did, and if I didn’t already have some idea what the food would be like I might have given up halfway there. But at around that point, because Dsouza is no slouch, the signs for Mac’s Deli began appearing on fences with its distinctive winking sandwich logo and endearing font, a chequered stripe underneath, everything in blue and white.

This might sound like a silly thing to pick up on, but Mac’s Deli’s branding is so brilliantly done. Everything is that blue and white, from the billboards to the signage outside Unit 22 of the business park, to the framed prints on the walls. It’s so impressive, so fully-formed, and that branding and language even follows through to the tables and chairs and the beautiful striking wall, a solid block of Majorelle blue, behind the counter.

Don’t be fooled by the photo below, by the way: I took it after the lunch rush had gone but when we arrived, just after 1 o’clock, every single table was occupied. The room inside seats 18 people, and we only got in by squeezing on the end of the last table that wasn’t completely full. I hope the very nice couple who let us perch there have a great time on their trip to Bruges next Easter, whether they end up using my city guide or not.

Mac’s Deli’s menu largely revolves around bread, and making the most of that shokupan. So unless you want a salad or a “health bowl” (overnight oats and the like) you are picking between sandwiches or things on toast. The breakfast menu is half a dozen sandwiches, available all day, and the lunch menu adds another four, along with a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. The lunch sandwiches cost between £9 and £11 and come with home-made shoestring fries, the breakfast ones cost roughly £3 less and are a fries-free zone. I guess I can see the logic behind that.

The lady who took our order – service throughout was brilliant, by the way – apologised and said that we would be waiting a while. I expected that, to be honest, because the place was rammed and everyone there had arrived before us, so we waited patiently on our half of a table for four, rubbernecking as sandwich after sandwich arrived at neighbouring tables or, indeed, were brought to the couple at our table. They’d ordered two of the sandwiches we’d chosen, so Zoë got a very good idea of her impending good fortune.

The only slight quibble I had was that it would have been nice for our coffees to arrive while we were waiting on the sandwiches, but it was no biggie. They were really, really busy and I could see staff in the kitchen out back, including Mac himself. It was a veritable hive of activity.

Zoë had chosen the sandwich I tried on my previous visit to Mac’s Deli, the patty melt. Which is handy, because it means I can tell you what it’s like: otherwise I wouldn’t be able to, because it was so good that Zoë had no intention of sharing it with me. I’ve been saying for as many years as I can remember that a burger, ultimately, is just a sandwich. Well, that’s what this was, but saying it was just a sandwich was a bit like saying that Guernica was just a doodle.

So yes, the burger was outrageously good: a thick, crumbly patty of dry-aged beef, not pink in the middle but not needing to be either. Mac’s Deli buys its meat from Aubrey Allen – audaciously ambitious for a caff on an industrial estate – and that came across loud and clear. Remember all those debates about whether brioche is the right thing to contain a burger? Turns out the answer is to make excellent, almost-fluffy Japanese milk bread and then toast the outside so it holds everything together.

But there was still more, in the form of a sublime layer of caramelised onions, some American cheese and a house mayo with truffle and garlic which managed not to overpower everything else going on. Zoë, a lifelong vinegar hater, was not best pleased at the thick slabs of gherkin in the mix, mostly because they weren’t mentioned on the menu, but she picked every single one out and devoured everything else. “It’s okay” she told me, “there’s no contamination.”

She adored the patty melt, and having tried it on my exploratory trip to Mac’s Deli I could completely see why. For my money, this is not only the best burger you can buy in and around Reading but a ludicrous steal at £10.95, impeccable shoestring fries thrown in (more if you add bacon, which of course Zoë did). It was better than Honest, better than 7Bone, better than Monkey Lounge. In fairness the burgers may come close at Stop & Taste, or at Tilehurst newcomers Blip Burgers – owned by the people behind Zyka and The Switch – but Mac’s Deli’s patty melt will take some beating.

I had chosen the bacon (or Bae-Con, according to the menu) sando, and if it wasn’t quite as successful that doesn’t mean it wasn’t excellent. It was a much simpler affair, deploying the cheese and the garlic truffle mayo, swapping out the burger for a fried egg and bacon and omitting the shoestring fries. If you ate this sandwich and were then told that for an extra three quid you could have had the patty melt, I think you’d be filled with regret.

But some of the things that meant I wasn’t as wild about this sandwich were on me, not Mac’s Deli. They were up front that they were going to use that mayo and American cheese, and if I found the sandwich slightly claggy and one-note as a result, they weren’t to blame for that. I would sooner have had a slightly more conventional bacon sandwich – I’d love to see Mac’s take on brown sauce – or even one with something like gochujang that could provide the clichéd cut through slightly missing from this sando.

I’d also have liked smoked streaky bacon, and plenty of it, rather than back. But again, that’s more about me. I will say though that the egg was cooked exactly how I like it, the yolk fudgy rather than runny. Given that the menu promises the egg sunny side up, that might have been a happy accident.

One of the benefits of the sandwiches at Mac’s Deli is how sharable they are, coming in that blue gingham wrap – that colour scheme again – and sliced neatly into halves. That meant that for research purposes we could share another sandwich, the chicken caesar. There was an awful lot to like about this too, especially the chicken which was in craggy, fried tenders a million miles away from a sad, pale supermarket goujon.

So it was very much my kind of thing but again, the precise balance of flavours meant it wouldn’t be for everybody. Zoë found the caesar dressing too vinegary and, for what it’s worth, I agreed with her: that didn’t put me off it, but it did mean it slightly lacked the saltiness Caesar dressing should bring to the table. Part of that, I think, was because instead of being incorporated into the sandwich and the dressing the 30 month old Parmesan had been cropdusted over the whole shebang.

I get that this looks the part, makes for a very pleasing contribution to anybody’s Instagram grid, but for me it’s a little bit style over substance. Not only is it hard to stop the stuff going everywhere, but it meant that the flavour wasn’t completely integrated. It was however a very good advert for Mac’s Deli’s chicken caesar salad, which has all of that and bacon as standard, and the option to add extra fried chicken if you yourself are also feeling extra.

By this point the coffee had turned up, although we mostly drunk it at the end when we’d polished everything off. In my case that also included a pair of revelatory hashbrowns which I suspect had been bought in but which were elevated with a liberal dusting of rosemary salt which had a positively transformative effect. I’d love to see Mac make his own hash browns at some point: maybe that will be another weekend special, one day.

Coffee, by the way, was gorgeous – both my latte and Zoë’s flat white were impressively smooth. Bags of coffee by Square Mile, the roastery founded by patron saint of coffee James Hoffman, were on display next to the machine, although it was unclear whether they were also available to buy. But all this is a huge statement of intent – coffee by Square Mile, eggs by Beechwood Farm, meat by Aubrey Allen – and you have to hand it to Dsouza for that.

I didn’t want to leave without trying something sweet and was torn between the cookie, the brownie and the Basque cheesecake. The lady behind the counter steered me in the direction of the brownie and I’m so glad she did. I have no idea whether these are made on the premises or, as with Filter Coffee House, Mac’s Deli takes advantage of Berkshire’s network of excellent suppliers and bakers.

But whoever made that brownie knew exactly what they were doing: an outstanding brittle surface giving way to a dense, ganache-like core, the whole thing adding up to the best brownie I’ve had anywhere near Reading since the Grumpy Goat closed down. £2.50 for that, and I can’t remember the last time I spent £2.50 anywhere near so well anywhere else. The whole lunch – and bear in mind we shared three sandwiches between two – cost us £41.35.

On the walk back to Theale station, which felt nowhere near as long as the walk there had been, Zoë and I compared notes and enthused about our lunch. I have no idea why Dsouza picked that location, of all locations, for his sophomore album. Perhaps he knew something nobody else did about the demand for weapons grade sandwiches in Theale, or maybe the catering and storage facilities on that industrial estate allow him to supply to Filter Coffee House and leave the way open for further expansion.

But a smart person would put money on Dsouza knowing exactly what he’s doing, because the place was full when I went on a weekday and full when I turned up on a Saturday. Full of people who, like me during my visit, seemed unable to quite believe their good fortune. Mac’s Deli still feels like a bit of a mirage in that location – a sort of step-sibling to Stop & Taste in that respect – but if anybody eating there is pinching themselves it’s not because they want to wake up from a wonderful dream. They simply can’t believe it’s that good.

If Mac’s Deli was in the centre of Reading it would wipe the floor with many of its peers, so it might be better for all of them that it’s not. But perhaps the next one will be, because from the ambition Dsouza has displayed so far it’s hard to believe he’ll look at Filter Coffee House and Mac’s Deli and decide that such a small empire is enough for him.

Can you remember what you were doing when you were 25? Me neither. But I’m very interested to see what Mac Dsouza does in a couple of years, when he reaches that age. Until that day comes, he’s already given us an awful lot to enjoy.

Mac’s Deli – 8.5
Unit 22, Moulden Way, Calcot, RG7 4GB

https://www.instagram.com/macsdeli.uk/

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: The Boring Burger, Guildford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

After the news that cuddly Mark Zuckerberg was doing away with fact checkers, when the penny dropped that distinguishing between our tech overlords was a similar exercise to using the Bristol stool scale, I read a lot of stuff online about how blogs were making a comeback. Enough of pithily sharing whatever’s on your mind and giving your data away on a billionaire’s platform, they said: time to get back to the good old days when people put their thoughts, longform, on their own blogs. Taking back control – a concept we’ve learned by now can only lead to happier times ahead.

It would be lovely if that were true, but I have my doubts. I’ve been blogging, in one form or another, for over fifteen years and I was late to the party when I started, so you can imagine how behind the curve I am now, waiting for the whole thing to finally be back in fashion. What this world needs is more 3000 word reviews of restaurants is a sentence I’ve only ever heard in dreams. I’m under no illusions – I’m happy in my niche, but I know that’s exactly what it is: a niche.

The tectonic plates of food writing changed last weekend when gastro-blowhard (and life president of the Jay Rayner Appreciation Society) Jason Rayner signed off from the Observer after 26 years, with a review which was ostensibly of an Indian restaurant in Leicester but was really about how great he was and how much we’ll all miss him. Bless.

He replaces tedious Tim Hayward at the FT, who took his leave with a review showing his unerring talent to slip a repulsive sentence into every piece. “I’d compare it to some kind of ecclesiastical erection were it not so determinedly sensuous” he said. Of a restaurant. What’s the opposite of starting as you mean to go on?

But these moves, really, are just shunting deckchairs around on the Titanic of print journalism. So too is the announcement of a new website, Scribehound, amalgamating the output of 30 food writers so that for a monthly fee you get a bit of everything. “Why pay for all those Substacks?” said one of the contributors, making it clear who they’re gunning for.

No, the real opinion formers in food these days are working in short form video, on TikTok and Instagram. I’ve written about Toffjaw before with their nearly 800,000 Instagram followers, but even they pale into insignificance compared to the influencer Eating With Tod, who is followed by more than twice that number.

His real name is Toby Inskip, but “Eating With Toby” would give the game away too early that this is yet another posho telling people what to eat. For the uninitiated, Inskip is a ginger chap with a very excitable plummy voice who always sounds like he’s just about to run out of breath: his many detractors are probably disappointed that he never does. He goes to a range of places and invariably describes them all as the best of their kind in London/the United Kingdom/this galaxy, and he’s on record as saying that he won’t ever criticise anywhere. He’s not a reviewer, he says, his is a “recommendation page”, and by recommendation he means hyperbole.

Whether he pays for his meals or not is unclear, but you get a pretty good idea from a cursory scan through his Instagram what he’s about. With more raves than Ibiza and a seemingly endless supply of gurning at food, Inskip’s techniques are now ubiquitous across a whole genre of ladz reviewing food on TikTok and Instagram.

From the overload of superlatives to the ridiculously exaggerated come face that follows every single mouthful, as if each one is utterly consciousness-redefining, from finger-banging thin air, as if to say that’s what I’m talking about, to the orgasmic waggle of the fork, to the naff chef’s kiss at the end of the video, these techniques have been snapped up by dreary bloke after dreary bloke.

Inskip also misses his mouth. A lot. For someone who has made a putative career out of eating out, he doesn’t appear to be very good at it, so every bite of a burger or a pizza leaves a huge smear miles from the corner of his mouth in a way that makes me feel icky. It’s like watching a toddler. How far we have come, that back in 2014 not being able to eat a bacon sandwich properly disqualified a man from the highest office in the land and in 2025 lacking basic hand-eye coordination is a fast track to thousands of followers? It makes you think.

Anyway, this week’s review found me in Guildford eating at The Boring Burger, and it was largely because of Eating With Tod. He went there last April, as part of his ongoing quest to find Britain’s best burger, and was every bit as aerated as ever. He raved about chef-owner Jamie Kuhls’ “Michelin skill set” because he worked at Claridge’s, although no restaurant at Claridge’s has held a star for something like 7 years. “His attention to detail blows my mind” said Inskip, a man whose mind seems to be blown on a daily basis.

“I could literally just put on a pair of sunglasses and stare at these burgers all day” he said, accompanied by footage of him, sunglass free, holding a burger up and gazing with wonder before taking a bite, smearing sauce on his face and waving his hand in the air with orgiastic abandon. “The best part”, he concluded, “is when you’re ordering through UberEats you can get their brisket mac and cheese bites, and they’re rather bloody tasty”.

That’s the best part? Really? These influencers love to team up with delivery apps for even more free food, another smoking gun that they don’t really like restaurants all that much.

Now, I know I’ve been scathing about poor Eating With Tod – it’s like shooting fish in a barrel – and I could go on. But it cannot be denied that even though he’s a challenging watch, he gets a lot of information across in a short space of time. And looking at that burger, which was infinitely preferable to looking at his boat race, it did look very good. So the seed was planted… should I maybe give it a try?

Anyway, influencers are like buses: you wait ages and then two come along at once. Because last October Bos Finesse, Bristol’s answer to Eating With Tod, also ate at The Boring Burger. And that’s what swung it.

Bos Finesse – real name Oscar Bostock – is an ebullient Bristolian chap who wears a lot of streetwear and has a unique line in hyperbole. For what it’s worth I rather enjoy his contributions to the English language, although I worry terribly about his complexion and his colon, and not necessarily in that order. Bostock has amassed 85,000 Instagram followers and you can’t fault his commitment, eating at highly rated Bristol restaurants, random takeaways in the arse end of nowhere, street food joints, burger vans and even fans’ houses (he also likes Gurt Wings, so he can’t be all bad).

When Bostock went to The Boring Burger he cranked Eating With Tod’s hype-o-meter up to 11. “These might just be the sexiest burgers I’ve ever seen in my entire life” he enthused, before adding that “they aren’t messing about in here, mate”. Bostock also met the owner and said “when you hear about his portfolio of Michelin restaurants you don’t ask no further questions”, despite the obvious question being which ones are they then? Quite the evolution from just having a “Michelin skill set”.

But critical evaluation is not what influencers are about: Bostock grinned like a pig in shit as he was presented with a tray groaning with three different burgers and as many different side dishes and portions of fries. It made me wonder – is it like Masterchef and, after a couple of bites, is the rest eaten by the film crew? Anyway, Bostock loved it and awarded what, for him, might be the highest accolade possible. “Boring Burger: what a gaff” he said. That was it: I had to try it now, so off I went to Guildford on a sunny Saturday morning.

You might well know this already, but isn’t Guildford nice by the way? I don’t think I’d visited it since before the pandemic, and I’d forgotten what an agreeable place it is once you’ve crossed an IDR-style thoroughfare and cut through the decidedly retro Friary shopping centre. The other side of that is a rather fetching, gently sloping cobbled high street that reminded me of a cross between Winchester’s High Street and Windsor’s Peascod Street – or would do if the shops in the latter hadn’t all apparently closed and been replaced by phone repair and vape outlets.

No, Guildford is far more well-to-do than that and on its high street and the little lanes that slope off it you can find a who’s who of businesses Reading doesn’t have: Anthropologie; Coppa Club; Joe & The Juice; Le Creuset. At the bottom of the street a busker was doing a perfectly serviceable job of belting out Set Fire To The Rain by Adele, a song which never even tries to explain the impossibility of its title.

The lanes that head up to the castle have interesting stuff in them, too: I stopped at a very nice wine shop called Corkage and picked something up for later. Continuing my stroll I saw the Ivy and the Ivy Asia, and thought that Guildford definitely had some things Reading needn’t envy.

Boring Burger is up one of those lanes, just across from a Giggling Squid and two doors down from Meat The Greek, a souvlaki place I’ve always rather liked. The sun was shining and at about half-twelve all of its orange tables outside were already occupied, although it shares the terrace with its neighbours and so has fewer tables than you might think. Inside was a very no-frills long, thin room with about ten stools crammed together in a line, all facing the wall.

There was a self-service touchscreen at the front, which seemed a bit jarring, and quite a few orders were takeaways, either from the blokes waiting in the queue or the steady stream of delivery drivers. People must have heard about the best thing about the restaurant, those brisket mac and cheese bites.

The clientele was nearly all men, some of them dragging their partners along, and they all looked like they could easily be acolytes of Eating With Tod. If you can’t take a date, take a mate he always vacuously declaims at the end of his reviews: I, like the loser I am, had done neither.

The menu sensibly keeps it narrow. Four different permutations of beefburger, one chicken burger. Nothing vegetarian that I could see, although I’m pretty sure they used to do a portobello mushroom number. Most of the burgers are twelve pounds, though one with fifteen hour braised brisket costs more, as does having an extra smashed patty. Fries are an extra fiver, unless you jazz them up with bacon and cheese sauce or katsu sauce.

There are a couple of sides, mac and cheese bites – with gochujang, not brisket – or buttermilk chicken tenders, which I was always going to struggle to resist: once I saw them on the menu, in the immortal words of Bos Finesse, you don’t ask no further questions. I placed my order, gave them my name and then managed to find an actual low table with a banquette tucked away right at the back of the restaurant. I couldn’t quite believe my luck. A doubled up smashed burger, tenders and fries cost me twenty-eight pounds, and they told me it would be about fifteen minutes.

In reality it was half an hour, but I didn’t mind. It was fun to see the bustle behind the counter, the burgers turning up for the family of four who had camped out in a row at the end of the ledge. One thing all the influencers went on about was Boring Burger’s attention to detail: designing and making their own buns, making all their own sauces, hand-cutting fries every day the way Honest do. In fairness those influencers also talk with wonderment about restaurants “making everything from scratch”, I guess because some of the places they review don’t.

This is an exceptionally silly thing to say about a restaurant whose fame has entirely spread through a visual medium, but Boring Burger’s food really does look terrific when it lands at your table. The bun is burnished and glows, the fries are the perfect shade of golden, the tenders look gnarled and toothsome. I don’t know if I could have popped on my shades and stared at it all day, but fair play to Boring Burger: you eat with your eyes and in that respect you eat very well there. I could see why this stuff appeared in grid after grid.

But could it live up to that when you actually tasted the stuff? In the case of the burger, yes – a hundred times yes. I’d gone for the eponymous Boring Burger, their signature, and it was the best smash burger I’ve had in this country and one of the best I’ve had full stop. The patties were beautiful, especially at the edges where they were crinkled and crispy, the fabulous bits of burger overhanging the perimeter of the bun. Doubling up was probably overkill, but I felt like I ought to do it properly.

The dill pickle, sliced mandolin thin, added crunch and tartness, and the bun – toasted, another nice touch – was the perfect antidote for anybody tired of brioche. Eating With Tod said the buns “hold their shape like a bodybuilder”. Err, I guess. They definitely had the structural integrity to carry the show. No soggy mulch at the bottom as even happens sometimes with Honest’s more overloaded burgers.

Even the bacon – they dry age it themselves, apparently – was bang on. I don’t think I shared everyone else’s wide-eyed enthusiasm about the burger sauce, which was fine but no more, but honestly: this was one of the best burgers I’ve tried. I’ve had ones at this standard in France, but nothing to live up to it in the U.K. – neither Honest nor Reading’s much missed Smash N Grab came close.

That’s why it so disappoints me to say that Boring Burger’s golden touch deserted it with the rest of my order. Fries were meant to come with rosemary and tossed in confit garlic oil, and if they had done I imagine I’d have been as evangelical about them as I was the burger. But they just came, skin on, fried in oil with very little rosemary, which meant that they were about up there with Honest’s chips when Honest has a good day, which it doesn’t always.

For five pounds, on top of the price of the burger, I was hoping to see them glistening with garlic oil and honking of the stuff, so I was disappointed. This is the problem with hyping stuff, you see, it means that something that’s only thoroughly decent can still feel poor. It’s also, by the way, the problem with someone who only creates content to say that everything is absolutely bloody amazing all the time.

Even more disappointing were the tenders. Properly disappointing, and the gulf between style and substance is rarely so marked as this. On paper, and in the photo down there, they look like a profoundly good way to spend eight pounds fifty – huge, drizzled with sauce, bearing the promise of crunch and euphoria.

But they looked good in the way that some people’s lives look good on Instagram, purely cosmetically. Because the coating – wanky food bloggers call it the “dredge” – didn’t have herbs or spices in it. I’m not sure what it did have in it, because all it really tasted of was undercooked flour. Which was strange, because the texture was there, in the coating at least. Yet the chicken breast underneath was a little too firm, a little too easily parted from the shell housing it. It didn’t feel like it had been brined, or if it had something had gone amiss.

The sauces were a gochujang that felt red and anonymous with no funk or complexity and a miso mayo that just tasted of mayo. I was hoping to find something that challenged the primacy of Gurt Wings as the best chicken tenders I’ve ever tasted. Instead, I ate something that made me appreciate Honest Burgers. That wasn’t how that was meant to play out: looking good on camera is all very well, but it’s not everything.

It’s also worth noting that a combination of giant quantities and underwhelming quality meant that I did something I rarely do: I left food. I ate nearly all of the burger, maybe half of the fries and two of my tenders. That partly says that if you go to Boring Burger you should share those things, but it also says that I felt no wrench at all leaving three huge chicken tenders. That’s something that happens about as often as Michael McIntyre saying something funny.

As I left, noting ruefully that a table in the glorious sunshine outside had just come free, I was determined to find some other nice spots in Guildford just to flesh out this review and give you another reason to go there.

So I’m delighted to report that Guildford has a lovely little craft beer spot called Kerrera, down another little alley, where I sat with my people and enjoyed the fruits of them having a tap takeover by Bristol’s Left Handed Giant. They had a menu with very tempting-looking toasted sandwiches on it, and next time I might try them out: their social media is properly winning, and made me want to go back. I was delighted to see they were solidly booked that evening.

After that I walked across town to Canopy Coffee, an Australian owned café with a view overlooking the Waitrose car park. And I had a beautiful latte, in a very tasteful cup, watched people coming and going and thought that Guildford has easily enough going on to justify the forty-five minute, fifteen pound journey on the train. I’m glad I went, and really delighted that the day I visited the sun finally played ball. I didn’t take a date or a mate, but it was quality time nonetheless.

But is Boring Burger worth going to in its own right? Actually, if you like burgers, yes. Its burgers alone, for me, justified that trip and set a bar that I will mentally return to every time I have another burger for at least the next year. So if that’s your kind of thing I can unreservedly recommend the place. Just pair it with the wine bar, or the café, or the craft beer spot, rather than with fries or chicken tenders, and you’ll have a wonderful time.

I doubt any of the influencers who have covered Boring Burger will read this review, and if they did they probably wouldn’t understand a conclusion like this. That’s okay though, because I know by now that you will. It’s called nuance. They should look it up sometime.

The Boring Burger – 7.2
15 Chapel Street, Guildford, GU1 3UL
01483 374090

https://www.instagram.com/theboringburger

As of January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Bar review: Siren RG1

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews16 Comments

The closure of Pepe Sale last week – temporarily or permanently, nobody knows for sure – rounds off the most brutal six months I’ve ever experienced in covering Reading’s hospitality scene for over ten years. At every price point, with every kind of venue, whether your tastes are more Cici Noodle Bar or Coco Di Mama, the Lyndhurst or TGI Fridays we’ve seen unprecedented levels of closures in town. There will be bright spots ahead – I anticipate quite a lot of people celebrating on the fifth of July, for instance – but you wouldn’t bet against the second half of 2024 being as gruelling as the first.

Normally closures are a part of life in hospitality, and for nearly every one there’s an equal and opposite newcomer. But that‘s slowed to a trickle this year, with only three significant new venues opening in Reading so far. The first is Zia Lucia, on St Mary’s Butts, which I recently reviewed here. And the most recent, which opened literally this week, is the Rising Sun on Castle Street, a fancy-looking gastropub by Heartwood Inns, a group which also owns Brasserie Blanc. Given that we’ve lost the The Corn Stores and Bel and The Narrowboat already in 2024, it’s a bold move.

But the single biggest opening of the year – which would have been the biggest opening of nearly any year – is Siren RG1, Siren Craft’s keenly awaited town centre taproom on Friar Street which opened in May. It’s been in the pipeline for some time and its arrival has generated the kind of excitement you only occasionally see in Reading without being associated with some American chain or other. For a town still grieving the loss of the Grumpy Goat, this felt like a reason to be cheerful.

It’s been very busy since it opened, which is heartening to see, and going there on duty as soon as it had bedded in was a high priority for me. Last week, meeting Zoë off the train after a hard day working in the big smoke, I finally managed to make it there for dinner.

Before I begin, for reasons that will become clear before too long, I have to take the unusual step of trying to convince you that I hadn’t taken against Siren RG1 before I even ate there. Part of that is because in the run up to their opening, I reacted slightly waspishly to their social media announcement that their new menu was going to centre around none other than burgers.

Really? I thought. It’s a tried and tested trope, but a trope nonetheless. Honest pairs local craft beer with burgers, the Phantom tap room now has 7Bone running the kitchen there. You could see Siren thinking it would work, but it didn’t feel like an exciting choice. Anyway, Siren ever so nicely replied to my Tweet pointing out that they would also be doing small plates and Sunday roasts. That made me feel a little snide and unworthy, so I decided to reserve judgment.

And then I’m afraid I did it again. Zoë and I tried to visit a couple of weeks after it had opened (I don’t normally do that, but such was its pull). And it was rammed and cacophonous, and they told me there was a 45 minute wait for food. So I went to Honest, which was almost empty, and had a lovely burger and some gorgeous beers from Two Flints and, because I can’t hold water, I Tweeted about that.

Again, Siren very graciously picked up on the Tweet and said how grateful they were to be so busy. They were right, whereas I – hot and tired after a long day capped by visiting my dad in hospital – just sounded like an entitled tosspot. Siren also said how much they liked Honest and Two Flints and, again, they were right with the implicit sentiment that we are lucky to have that as another option in town.

I’m getting all of this out of the way up front, and owning my utterances on the subject, for two reasons. One is because, even with all those things said, I think it’s marvellous that Siren has chosen to open a flagship site in the centre of town at such an awful time for hospitality. Like most people – apart from the at those prices you’ll find me in Wetherspoons instead merchants who comment on the Chronicle’s Facebook page – I would very much like it to succeed.

The other reason, which we’ll get to imminently, is that the food offering at Siren is incredibly disappointing, and if I’d just written the review without acknowledging all of the above some tiresome contrarian would have popped up and said “ah-ha! But you’ve had it in for them from the get-go, just look at this”. So there you have it: from here on in you can make up your own minds.

The interior of Siren RG1 is a big and impressive L-shaped space, broken into zones. The area to the far left felt like the dining room, although I think you could order from the food menu anywhere (it wasn’t entirely clear where table service started and bar service began). The central part, opposite the very striking bar, felt more for drinks, although I saw menus and saw customers eating there. And off to the right is a more casual area with high tables and stools, leading out to a partioned-off terrace which looked nothing special but which I imagine will come into its own now that the summer has finally decided to grace us with its presence.

We sat in the dining area and had table service throughout, although not before Zoë took a picture of the board so we knew which beers were on offer. Eighteen taps were given over to Siren’s beers as you’d expect, with plenty of Siren’s core range – Lumina, Yulu, Santo, Soundwave and the like. A further 7 lines featured “friends and local” breweries, again with familiar names like Double-Barrelled, Indie Rabble and Wiper & True. There’s also one cider, a couple of wines on draft and two cask pumps. As ranges go it slightly reminded me of the Nag’s, with less cask, or the Weather Station, but with fewer exciting guest beers, but nonetheless it was a very solid list.

Now, to cover the price thing: I really struggle with people who moan about the price of craft beer without considering the quality, not to mention the effort, work and thought that goes into running an innovative brewery in Britain in 2024. And I saw plenty of comments about this online, especially on the Reading Chronicle‘s Facebook page: my favourite was a comment that just said Bring back the Bugle ho yer England pub is it aloud, from a gentlemen who had obviously spent some time in a pub before putting pen to paper.

But I do have to say that Siren’s pricing seems sharp even if you are completely on board with craft beer costing more. The price list shows the price for the “largest size” without specifying what it is, but presuming it’s a pint some of the pricing seems eccentric even if you accept that the real SI unit for these beers is the two thirds. To give you a concrete example, Everyone, an excellent 5.2% pale from Double-Barrelled costs £8.50 a pint, on the steep side. Later in our meal Zoë had a half of an excellent pale from Track – it was lovely, but I think £6 for a half is again a little bit stiff even for people who regularly drink this stuff. I imagine I can expect some patient comments from somewhere telling me how and why I’m wrong: I probably am.

The food menu, for better or worse, is as Siren said it would be, nearly exclusively burgers and small plates. There are a handful of salads and some loaded fries options, but otherwise you had better fancy one of those two things. I can’t say that fazed us, but when we tried to order we had our first slightly surreal moment.

“You’re ordering some small plates and burgers, so I have to tell you it will all come out at the same time” said our server. Neither of us fancied that, because it just meant some of it would go cold when really we wanted to treat the menu as a starters and mains kind of proposition.

“What if we don’t want them to?”

“Well, I can have a word with the kitchen but I can’t guarantee it. We get busy later on.”

So in the end we just ordered our small plates, deciding that we’d order mains separately further along the evening. That was accepted without quibble, but the whole thing was still distinctly weird; the Wagamama approach of supplying all the dishes you’ve ordered in a timeline and sequence that only suits the restaurant is bad enough, but the only thing I can think of that’s worse is bringing out everything you’ve ordered all at once. But what I was most surprised by was that this policy was still in place over a month after opening and that nobody had challenged it before.

Anyway, about twenty-five minutes later our small plates came out and Siren RG1’s approach to starters and mains was no longer the most surprising thing about them. I’d had my eye on their sticky pork belly, glazed in a sauce using Broken Dream, their award winning stout, for quite some time so it was the first name on our team sheet. What arrived though was poorly executed, and incredibly disappointing. The fat was bouncy, the meat springy, the whole thing not rendered or cooked skilfully enough to get that contrast of textures right. And the glaze was unremarkable, offering no real depth or interest.

I often think the saddest thing about a small plate is when nobody wants to fight for the last remaining piece. But this was even worse – there were four or five cubes of pork belly and after I’d tried one I was more than happy to leave the rest to Zoë, who was equally unimpressed. We have been spoiled with pork belly dishes in Reading – for months the Lyndhurst did an outstanding one which showed how incredible it can be in the right hands, and Clay’s still does an almost unimprovable pork belly with jaggery and ginger. Both those kitchens understand how to get the very best out of that cut of meat: on this showing, Siren’s kitchen doesn’t.

Better, but still very flawed, were the cauliflower wings. Siren offers chicken or cauliflower wings as a small or large plate, and what was frustrating was how good the coating was – crunchy, salty and well-seasoned, giving the Colonel a run for his money. But the pieces were more the size of ostrich wings than chicken wings – huge slabs of cauliflower, with the knock on effect that they were far too firm, al dente verging on uncooked.

A missed opportunity here – if there had been more, but smaller pieces, with a better surface area ratio and with better cooked cauli underneath this could well have been a knockout dish. As it was, it was a great coating still in search of something worthwhile to coat. Perhaps the chicken wings would have been better, but I know a fair few people who would dispute the benefit of coating chicken wings in the first place, unless it’s with sauce.

Last but very much least, and easily the worst thing I tried that evening, were the chicken bites. I should have figured that out, really, from the description: crispy BBQ Korean chicken bites. It was muddled from the off – Korean chicken is a wonderful thing, so is Korean barbecue, but crispy BBQ Korean chicken just felt like throwing words together because they sounded good, rather than because they made sense.

If I’d had that suspicion before ordering, it was fully justified once the dish turned up. Here’s what we got.

Well, it was chicken. And I suppose the sizing was such that you could describe them as bites. But beyond that, any resemblance to anything described on the menu would have been hopeful at best. There was no evidence that a barbecue had been anywhere near them, let alone a Korean one. There was no evidence of Korean flavours anywhere to be seen, no unmistakeable whack of gochujang. And crispy was pushing it a great deal. Instead, you got some faintly soggy, stodgy chicken goujons in an unlovely batter with a stingy dribble of what tasted suspiciously like soy, topped with finely chopped spring onion.

What got to me about this dish, almost as much as its sheer mediocrity, was that it made me wonder about the thought processes of how this menu was put together and whether it had really involved a chef or rather just some consultancy or a focus group. It seemed to say “Korean food is really in right now, so lets have some crispy Korean chicken. No, crispy Korean barbecue chicken! No, we don’t know what that is either.” It felt to me like something you could buy at Iceland.

WIth that lot put away, and a growing sense of dread when I contemplated what kind of review this was going to be, we ordered a couple more beers and our main courses. In a way, having the starters and then a pause to reflect was a mixed blessing. Ordinarily I’d have ordered the chicken burger but given the small plate I’d endured – again, one we didn’t bother finishing – didn’t give me confidence that they cooked chicken well. Or I’d have been tempted by the beef burger with pulled pork, but the pork belly I’d had suggested the kitchen shouldn’t even be chatting pork up, let alone pulling it.

In the end, I nearly went for the beefburger with anchovy and mushroom ketchup, a nice nod to Cocks’s, the original Reading sauce from Victorian times. But our server told me I really should try the chicken burger and so I put my faith in her and followed her advice. And when it arrived, again, it was inconsistent and showed how close the line can be between getting it right and missing the mark. The coating was crunchy, crinkly and gnarly, but to me a little overcooked. And underneath, the chicken was still slightly bouncy, not breaking into shreds on collision with a ravenous set of incisors. This was soaked in buttermilk like the wings, but something had gone wrong here.

And it was a pity because it had the makings of an excellent burger. Arguably with tweaks to the chicken and the coating, given the nicely proportioned bun and the very well done buffalo sauce, this could be a chicken burger to rival the one at Honest. But as it was, again, the execution let it down. If you’re going to set out your stall to do the best burgers in town, a town which has seen many burger contenders come and go over the course of over a decade, you have to get it more right than this.

Zoë’s beefburger was easily the best dish of the night, although that was a low bar in this very fancy bar. She’d chosen the “Cheese Eyes” – no idea what that name is even meant to refer to – and it came not so much with a cheese skirt as the full fromage maxi dress, a truffled cheese sauce bursting its banks and escaping for the plate in every direction. Zoë absolutely loved this dish, from the patty to the cheese, to the truffle, to the onions and roasted garlic butter and beyond. I didn’t get to try any, but as I didn’t I asked what felt to me to be the most pertinent question.

“How does it compare to Honest?”

“This is every bit as good as Honest. I’d come here and have this again.”

Siren charges extra for fries, just under three quid, which potentially pushes the price point above Honest – although at least it gives you the option to order one portion between two, which is what we did. Siren’s fries, as it happens, are excellent: skin on, crispy and golden and thoroughly agreeable, even if they dish them up in a metal cup which just means they’ll go cold quicker. But none the less, I liked them a lot. I have no idea if they make them themselves, but it would be nice if they did.

We could have stayed for dessert – there are three on offer, which include a sticky toffee pudding with Broken Dream sauce and a cheescake – but I don’t think we could face it by that point. We’d seen enough, and been disappointed by enough, and already in the back of my mind I was thinking “oh brother, this review is going to involve going near a sacred cow” so I didn’t want to make matters worse by finding another thing not to like. I always rely on Zoë in these instances, my Jiminy Cricket, to rein me in if I’m going too far or saying something impolitic. But I asked, and she felt as underwhelmed by it as I had. Our meal for two, including a 12.5 service charge, came to just over eighty pounds. That’s a lot of money to spend eating food so middling.

So, did I convince you that I wanted Siren RG1 to be good and that I went without fixed ideas, as far as I was able? Maybe, maybe not, although I’d hope that after reading me for long enough you’ve seen enough instances where I expected something to be good and went away aghast, or turned up to a venue with no great expectations and left utterly delighted. If you do find me guilty, I have a number of other offences you’ll need to take into consideration. But the fact remains that, for me, even if you strip away the expectation and the hype, Siren RG1’s food needs to be a lot better than this.

It made me think – sorry to mention them again – that I wish Siren had someone like Sheldon Fernandes, formerly of the Lyndhurst, in their kitchen. He’s a man who instinctively knows how to do small plates and casual dining, and every rendition of anything even remotely like Siren’s menu I saw from the Lyndhurst’s kitchen was leagues ahead of this. Great burgers, flawless pork belly, Korean fried chicken that actually uses Korean flavours and cauliflower wings you’d flog your grandma to taste. By contrast, Siren’s food is exceptionally lacklustre.

But let’s not compare Siren to a business that’s no longer trading, because that helps nobody. What’s more of a concern is that not far from Siren are places that do much of this better. I’ve already mentioned Honest, but it’s worth doing so again: their chicken burger is far better than Siren’s, their beef burger apparently on a par. They don’t sell a huge amount of beers, but the ones they do are excellent and considerably more reasonably priced than Siren’s.

Even more concerning, though, is that although the beer offering isn’t even in the same ballpark as Siren’s, when it comes to food I would probably pick the Oakford Social Club over Siren. Their fried chicken is good, their range is decent and if they don’t take as many risks at least they don’t fail as singularly as Siren has with its chicken bites and its pork belly. And again, we’re back to where I came in: I was disappointed when Siren decided to centre on burgers and slightly mollified when they also had a focus on small plates. But this menu, with an okay burger and some iffy small plates, doesn’t bear out the quality that was promised by Siren’s social media enthusing about their painstaking research and love of burgers.

I keep thinking, too, that the bricks and mortar craft beer places I’ve been to – not the likes of Phantom or Double-Barrelled, but permanent sites – do this far better. In Bristol Small Bar, Left Handed Giant’s equivalent to Siren RG1, offers fried chicken from Wings Diner which is absolutely excellent. Next door they have taken over a place, Renato’s, that pairs beer with great pizza. Earlier this year I went to Mikkeller’s brewpub in Farringdon, where they offer outrageously good fried chicken by Lucky’s. The quality of the food at Siren RG1 doesn’t match any of those places: the issue isn’t that they’ve chosen largely to focus on one thing, just that they haven’t done it well.

I feel, more than usual, that I’m sticking my head above the parapet saying all this. And I expect that if Siren responds at all to this it will be in a reasonable and balanced way that makes me look (and feel) very small indeed. But I think I’m right on this one. They have a great spot, great beer and a great concept. They could do very nicely even just serving middling food. But I don’t think that will be enough – for me, for their customers and for Reading as a whole. But more importantly if I know anything about Siren, given what I’ve seen in over ten years of watching their brand, I don’t think it will be enough for them either.

Siren RG1 – 6.4
21 Friar Street, RG1 1HR
0118 4027573

https://www.sirencraftbrew.com/our-venues/reading-bar

Restaurant review: Pick Up Point, Swindon

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Pick Up Point closed in July 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

At the end of last summer, in a move which surprised me as much as anybody, I got on a train and went to boldly review where no blog had been before. Swindon, to be precise. I voyaged to Swindon’s Old Town and found a brilliant enclave of great coffee, craft beer, ice cream along with a Victorian park that made the Forbury look a tad lacking. And I also found, returning to Old Town institution Los Gatos, a superb tapas restaurant of exactly the kind Reading has always lacked. I loved the whole experience, and I promised myself I’d be back before too long.

It took me four months, but last weekend I found myself in Swindon again, alighting at its unloveable station and walking round the corner to grab a bus into Old Town, one bound for the splendidly named Middle Wichel. It wasn’t exactly the same personnel as last time – I was seeing my old friend Dave, but our mutual friend Al couldn’t join us. And it wasn’t the same itinerary, either: the last time I was in Swindon summer was rallying one final time and you could eat ice cream opposite Ray’s, have an al fresco coffee in the Town Gardens. On this visit, we had to forego those pleasures, but even the regret of having to do so reminded me how fetching Old Town is when the weather is fine.

Never mind. Many of the fundamentals were unchanged. I met Dave at the brilliant Pour Bois for a latte, and then we beetled off to the Hop Kettle tap room for the first of many gorgeous beers. Firmly ensconced, we proceeded to do what we’ve been doing on a regular basis for over thirty years, shooting the breeze about all sorts. I handed him his belated fiftieth birthday present and heard about his celebratory trip to Cologne, we talked about the rapidly solidifying plans for my wedding this year, and then we just got on to talking about everything and nothing: his family, my family, his work, my work, the future and the good old days.

It was all perfectly in harmony: no conversational heavy lifting to be done, and no awkward silences, just the latest instalment in a long, meandering conversation which has lasted all of my adult life. We both know where the bodies are buried, when to talk and when to listen, when to be serious and when to take the piss. It was lovely: when you have a friend that old, and that good, you can do that stuff anywhere. You could catch up in a Wetherspoons and still have a thoroughly agreeable time. But it struck me, as the hours flew by on that winter afternoon, that I would have struggled to think of a better venue for it than Old Town.

The other thing that was different about this visit to Swindon was that, much as I love Los Gatos, I had somewhere else in my sights for dinner. I’d been tipped off about Pick Up Point, a burger joint literally next door to Hop Kettle which is only open in the evenings. Chef Josh West started out cooking burgers at the tap room four years ago, but opened his own restaurant in late 2021. I couldn’t find out much about it online – Swindon might have even less local media than we do – but their well-curated Instagram made everything look terrific. The clincher though was that my Swindon man in the know, Donovan Rosema of excellent local roaster Light Bulb Coffee, rated the place. That was good enough for me.

It’s a very assured, very polished space. “This is more London than Swindon” was Dave’s verdict as we looked around, and I think that was a fair summary. With dark walls dressed with interesting art, an attractive zinc-topped bar, conspiratorial lighting, low tables and booths, it was more Brooklyn than Bassett. I think there was a second dining room out back, although I didn’t get a look at it. Having said all that, my one reservation about it was that the bit of the restaurant where they seated us had higher tables and – a bit of a bugbear of mine, this – backless stools. It felt a little like an afterthought compared to the lower tables elsewhere, and I did look enviously at the better stools up at the bar.

You might think this doesn’t really matter for casual dining, or that the dining room wasn’t designed for two men on either side of their fiftieth birthday, and you might have a point.

Pick Up Point knows how to put a menu together. I realised in the run up to this visit that the last time I reviewed a burger restaurant was Bristol’s Asado, just over a year ago, and since then I think I’ve only had burgers in Honest. And I like Honest, but their choice of burgers always feels limited, especially if you don’t fancy whatever special they have on. By contrast, Pick Up Point has half a dozen beefburgers, one chicken burger and one vegetarian or vegan option, along with a couple of specials. And they all have something a little different about them – one with pancetta and blue cheese, another with kimchi and gochujang. Even the names – “Cease & Desist”, “Heisenberger” – steered clear of the dreary ladz puns you sometimes get in this kind of establishment.

Burgers are between twelve and fourteen pounds, not including fries, so slightly more expensive than the likes of Honest. But the menu achieved what you always want a menu to manage: it intrigued me. And the sides on offer did too – not just fries, wings and slaw, although even those had interesting variations and additions. The wings were Korean, the slaw came with sweet chilli and coriander. I had looked at a menu online which suggested they did confit potatoes as well as fries, and I was very excited about trying that, but on the day something else was in its place. So we ordered that instead, along with another side and a couple of burgers.

Service was outstanding throughout, if endearingly amused that these two duffers had chanced upon their restaurant. Of course everybody was impossibly younger and cooler than me, but we’re reaching the stage where I could walk into most restaurants in Britain and that might be the case, so I’m trying not to lose too much sleep over it. I couldn’t persuade Dave to go crazy and have a rum punch (and the next morning I was very thankful that he talked me out of it) so I had a half of Kellerbier from Bristol’s Moor Beer and Dave, more sensible than me, went for a ginger beer.

Our food came out about twenty-five minutes after we sat down, which I thought was nicely paced. I had chosen the “Hand Of God”, which came with chimichurri and smoked paprika mayo, and I thought it was absolutely exceptional. The burger was tender, well seasoned and had a marvellous char to it, the chimichurri and the smoked paprika complemented it beautifully. It was so good, in fact, that it’s surprisingly difficult to write about: happiness, as they say, writes white. And I’m worried that some of the things I loved about it are going to sound like faint praise, but maybe you’ll read them and agree with me so here goes.

I loved the fact that it wasn’t messy, that nothing fell out, that I didn’t feel like I was playing food Jenga every time I took a bite, or pushing what was left out of the comforting embrace of the bun. I loved the fact that I could pick it up and eat it with my hands, the way you used to be able to do with all burgers before they became bloated parodies of themselves. Less is more, it turns out, and I was delighted to pay a little bit more for something that not only tasted fantastic but was a pleasure to eat. I think that’s what edgier restaurant reviewers mean when they say – prepare to cringe – that a dish “eats well”. It doesn’t eat well, you do. But I do appreciate the underlying sentiment.

Dave had gone for one of the specials, a Guinness rarebit burger. This was heftier – a half pounder smothered in the rarebit, resting on a huge slab of onion. This looked a bit more challenging to eat, or would have been for me anyway, but Dave ploughed through undeterred. He’d told me earlier that day that his latest blood test had suggested he needed to work on bringing his cholesterol down again, but happily he was taking a day off from that. “The way they’ve got the Guinness flavour into this is really clever” was his verdict. Dave is not the ideal person to review restaurants with because 9 times out of 10 we’ll order the same dish, which you can’t really do when you’re writing a place up. This was the 1 time out of 10 when we didn’t, and I was a smidge envious.

The two sides were glorious. First of all, in place of those confit potatoes they served smashed potatoes with aioli. Looking at the picture below, aioli with smashed potatoes might be a more accurate description, but it was another fabulous dish, the spuds with plenty of texture, the golden aioli with a pronounced honk of garlic and a little rosemary strewn for good measure. I think with hindsight, two side dishes might not have been enough. One of these certainly wasn’t.

Even better were the crispy pork belly bites. They were crispy where you wanted them to be and yielding where you didn’t, they came carpeted with sesame and coriander, sitting in a pool of soy and ginger and they were pretty much a perfect example of this kind of thing. I read an interview with the guy behind the Pick Up Point just as they opened where he said he was a tinkerer. “I’m always experimenting, the menu is likely to change hourly” he said. I doubt he still does that (who has the time?) but even if he does he should keep his mitts off this dish: it should stay on the menu in perpetuity.

There was only one item on the dessert menu, a chocolate mousse with whipped cream. I was enormously tempted by it, as I always am when it comes to chocolate mousse. But I abandoned any plans of eating it when I realised that Dave, like me, was wondering what the Korean chicken burger (the “Seoul Survivor”) tasted like and was prepared to split one with me. So we flagged down our server and asked – if she didn’t mind, and if it wasn’t too weird – if we could order one to share. She smiled indulgently at us.

“Of course, that’s no problem. I’ll get them to cut it in half for you too.”

As she walked away I looked at Dave and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking.

“She thinks…”

“…that we’re a couple? Yep. Happens every time.”

My picture of the Korean chicken burger is even worse than most of my burger photographs because it shows you nothing. You don’t get to see the magnificent crunchy, craggy coating or the chicken, breast not thigh in this case, underneath. You don’t get to see the kimchi properly, or the gochujang. Really, it’s just evidence that we ordered it and that, ever so nicely for the two weird middle aged men who seemed a little high on life, the kitchen did indeed neatly bisect it for us. But I promise you it did have all those things – crunch and give, fire and tang – and I thought it was really beautiful.

I did think about having the mousse after that, but I decided against it. I couldn’t persuade Dave, and I knew that I would have more joy talking him into a couple more beers at the Tuppenny next door. His loved ones were in London watching Depeche Mode at the O2, and as it happens my loved one was too, and I reckoned we had another couple of hours of catching up ahead of us, even if it would pass in the blink of an eye. Our dinner came to sixty pounds, not including tip, but bear in mind we ordered three burgers that came to about two thirds of that.

I often publish reviews of places outside Reading with a little trepidation. I know some people feel like they’re hoodwinked into reading them, or don’t really care about restaurants without an RG postcode or an 0118 phone number. And I end up trying to convince you of the relevance by bringing it all back home at the end. And I will do that, in a second, but really – Pick Up Point is worth going to Swindon for. Get the train on a Saturday, have a few beers beforehand and make the time to eat here. It’s a cracking thing to do – with friends, with loved ones, even on your own. I genuinely think you wouldn’t regret it.

But there’s another reason to recommend it, which is that I think Honest so dominates the burger landscape in Reading that we don’t get anywhere, really, like Pick Up Point. 7Bone is a greasier, sloppier, more American affair, but it’s moved to Phantom now, further out of town. Gordon Ramsey Street Burger is much more well behaved than the man itself, and better than I expected it to be, but it’s not exciting, nor is it independent. Some places, like the Lyndhurst, don’t specialise in burgers but happen to do some very good ones.

But Pick Up Point is genuinely a place the likes of which we don’t have in Reading, and the last time I had a burger in Reading that matched what Pick Up Point can do it was from the sadly departed Meat Juice, at Blue Collar. I would have hopped on a train to Swindon to try Meat Juice’s burgers again, I’ll gladly repeat the journey to go back to Pick Up Point. That I happen to have one of my oldest friends a few miles down the road is just the icing on the cake.

Pick Up Point – 8.0
52 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BG

https://thepickuppoint.com

Bar review: Monkey Lounge

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews

It wasn’t the most clement of evenings when I left my house and wandered through the streets of East Reading in search of Monkey Lounge, the subject of this week’s review. It was already dark at six o’clock, and there was a distinct, thin nip in the air – not see-your-breath cold, but close enough to remind you what see-your-breath cold feels like. It’s really not a reminder I wanted. And the leaves on the pavement of Erleigh Road, usually a golden autumnal carpet to rustle and crackle as you kick them up with your shoes, were a sad and sodden mulch, the last vestiges of a dreary day of stop and start rain. Make no mistake: summer is over, and autumn will be over soon, too. Where did 2022 go?

Monkey Lounge had been on my list for most of 2022 without ever quite reaching the top of it. It’s just along from Café Yolk, where Reading institution the Fruit Bat Bar used to be (I think I drank there once, over twenty years ago, waiting for my washing to finish in the launderette next door), but it opened back in 2020, the year when nobody in their right mind would have opened a bar or a restaurant. 

And yet it’s still going despite everything stacked against it. And that, for me at least, includes the name: it was originally called MNKY Lounge – yes, all capitals – but they’ve sensibly changed their name to the longer version. And no, they have nothing to do with the Lounge group which counts Caversham’s Alto and Woodley’s Bosco among its members (it’s a wonder the group hasn’t sent Monkey Lounge a strongly worded legal letter, to be honest).

Monkey Lounge first came to my attention properly at the start of the year when they sent me a message on Instagram. They said that they were well known in East Reading for their gourmet burgers and warm hospitality and wanted to know if one of my team wanted to try a complimentary meal there (bless them for thinking this blog is a team effort, but I’ve never been one of those saddoes who pretends to have multiple writers cobbling this together).

I declined, as I always do, but I did ask them to tell me more about their burgers. And that was that, because they never replied. But I’ve kept an eye on Monkey Lounge’s Instagram ever since. And I have to say, and I mean this with all kindness, that nothing about it would necessarily induce you to pop in for a meal. A lot of their Instagram feed is sports related, telling you which European football fixture you can watch next on their big screens, interspersed with the occasional picture of their food. 

And the food didn’t look bad, but it didn’t make you want to drop everything and make dinner plans. Although having said that the consistent message on Monkey Lounge’s social media, to be fair to them, is that they think they do Reading’s best burger. It’s a proud boast: the competition is fierce. It’s probably not true. But – and this was running through my mind as I dodged the giant puddles on London Road, and the cars planning to drench me with them – what if it was?

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.