I’ve talked about this before, but it helps when you’re writing a restaurant review to have some kind of hook, some reason why you decided, this week of all weeks, to check that particular venue out. Canny restaurants make that easy by having something about them, whether it’s in their branding, their social media or their USP – or, in London, by having a well-connected chef or owner.
In the case of M’s Smokehouse, which opened on the Basingstoke Road at the end of January, you’re spoiled for choice. Its Instagram describes it as the “First and Only Smokehouse in Reading”, which isn’t strictly true – remember Bluegrass BBQ? But Bluegrass closed last January, so the second half of that description is correct, for now at least. I don’t know about you, but I miss Bluegrass: a decent independent alternative in south Reading would be a find.
And there’s more. The smokehouse’s Instagram blurb also describes it as a “halal smokehouse”, and in that respect it is definitely a first: so no pulled pork or sausages, just brisket, burgers and fried chicken. Now, that kind of thing might enrage the swivel-eyed types who used to comment on my blog’s Facebook page, pretending to give a toss about animal welfare, but I thought it was worth checking it out.
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If you plan it right, one of the great joys of this restaurant reviewing lark is that no two weeks need be the same. One week you’ll be in the town centre trying out pizza and pasta, the next you’ll be a short walk away immersing yourself in the culture of Hong Kong tea restaurants. And the following week, you’ll find yourself all the way across town – in Tilehurst, no less – checking out a smash burger restaurant that opened towards the end of last year. Three very different restaurants, all in Reading, in three successive weeks: it’s hard to get bored when the range continues to be that eclectic.
It’s one of the many reasons I don’t envy influencers: if I had to eat pizza, burgers, fried chicken and fry-ups week in, week out – let alone film myself doing it – I reckon I’d be dead behind the eyes by Easter. But it makes sense that those genres are the stomping ground of the influencer, because they’re low value (the meals, not the influencers, I should add).
If the influencer is paying, which they sometimes do, a burger or a pizza isn’t a massive outlay. And if the restaurant is handing out free food, which they also sometimes do, it’s not a huge amount to spend trying to get more exposure. Both sides of that equation would probably tell you that everybody wins, or that at least that they both do.
I am lucky that what I do is partly funded through another model altogether, so I have far more freedom to pick and choose, and I’m accountable to the people who support my writing in a different and more interesting way. But I am mindful of my New Year’s Resolution last month to stop taking pot shots at influencers, so all I’ll say is the very best of luck to them with all that.
That’s all relevant this week – forcing me to put my resolution to the test nice and early in the year – because this week I reviewed Blip, the hot new smash burger restaurant from the folks behind Zyka and The Switch, and a lot of content creators got there well before me.
I don’t mean Reading’s usual suspects. I mean well-established content creators with tens of thousands of followers. One chap said that he made a 5 hour trip to Reading from London, despite Blip having a second branch in Croydon, to try what he said was “the first halal smash burger in the whole of Reading” (Reading residents, I hope, haven’t forgotten Smash N Grab quite so quickly). Another, with almost 300,000 Instagram followers, feasted on what looked like the entire menu from, it seemed, the back seat of his car. Some of the people reviewing Blip had also visited the likes of Mr T and new arrival Smoke & Pepper.
By my reckoning, looking through Instagram, roughly a dozen influencers have eaten at Blip’s Reading branch since it opened in October, all of them enthusing about the food. That’s close to one a week. Unfortunately, adherence to the ASA guidelines is so poor – as it’s always been – that it’s impossible to tell how many of them spent their own money at Blip.
That’s especially a shame because it tars them all with the same brush: if a content creator really did travel 5 hours to Reading to drop under £50 of his own money on smash burgers, that commitment deserves to be recognised. If that’s what happened, it’s a pity to lump him in with people who have been less transparent.
Blip’s early success has not necessarily been completely caused by the buzz on Instagram, though. In November, barely a month after they opened, Blip won best burger in the South-East in something called the British Burger Awards. Now, I’m a bit dubious about awards that lack transparency about how they are decided, and the U.K. already has the National Burger Awards which has been running for over a decade.
I’m even more dubious when the awards scheme’s website doesn’t list Blip as a finalist. When I posted about this on Facebook one of Blip’s owners commented saying that the awards were genuine, completely nominated by customers and no money changed hands in order to secure a place on the shortlist.
So, we have a burger restaurant that has won an award and received multiple plaudits online, but because it’s 2026 and food coverage is in a strange post-truth world it’s still not possible to be confident whether Blip is the genuine article or not. So who do you trust? Well, possibly dreary long form restaurant bloggers of over 12 years’ standing, who hop on a number 16 bus on a Sunday afternoon to go and try it out with their own money: it’s old school, but it might just work.
A word you’ll often see mentioned in reviews by content creators but practically never on this blog is ‘viral’. Partly that’s because I don’t chase trends, more that even now, years after 2020, it still feels too soon to use the word viral to denote a Good Thing. That might just be me. But in Blip’s case it is worth talking a little about this, because if it is indeed viral, it’s a virus that has already been through a couple of mutations.
In 2023, London welcomed a viral smash burger spot called Supernova with a limited, no frills menu and simple, stripped back black-on-white branding to match. Supernova was no reservations, with queues for the best part of an hour, because hype will do that. Supernova now has three locations across London, and it spawned London imitators: French smash burger chain Junk opened in Soho the following year with a remarkably similar aesthetic and offering an almost equally pared-back menu: they now have two branches.
Then last year Parisian smash burger specialists Dumbo opened their first branch in Shoreditch, to equal amounts of hype and a renewed appetite for queuing. It’s surprising, in a city that channel hops trends and restaurants like it’s nobody’s business, to find it has the attention span to fall for the same kind of restaurant three years running.
But that’s burgers for you. I have been waiting for the burger trend to die off for something like fifteen years (I remember reviewing newly arrived Five Guys in the first year of this blog and literally thinking enough already) and I am now resigned to the fact that I will give up the ghost before it does.
The reason for that history lesson is that this trend has taken less time to reach Reading than they normally do. Reading has its fair share of burger spots and smash burger spots, but none of them has been anywhere near as brazen as Blip is about cribbing from its elders. The font, the branding, the size and breadth of the menu at Blip are like a mash-up of Supernova and Junk, the style of photography on Blip’s Instagram feed is directly lifted from Dumbo’s. If you were being charitable you’d call it a homage. If you weren’t, you might describe it as larceny.
So that explained the plain monochrome interior, the blacks and whites and silvers. But it felt, as it so often does, like the budget ran out after paying the marketing department; the logo, the menu board, the branding on the cups and the paper lining the trays was spot on, but the basic tables, the Tolix stools and chairs felt like an afterthought.
Never mind: Blip seats something like a dozen people so perhaps they see most of their trade as takeaway and delivery. There was a decent banquette along one wall and that’s where I parked myself. Something was working, anyway, because it was empty when I arrived just before 1pm and full when I left half an hour later.
The other thing that didn’t make sense was Blip’s insistence that you order using a giant touch screen and pay at the counter. I just didn’t understand this given how small a restaurant it was, and it didn’t sound thought through given that the touchscreen asked you to give your table number: the tables, helpfully, aren’t numbered.
All that said, the touchscreens do helpfully walk you through what is, in fairness, a reasonably compact menu. The beef burger comes as classic, house or house special and there isn’t a huge amount to choose between them: classic has gherkins and ketchup, house has Blip’s own signature sauce and costs a pound more. The house special comes with beef bacon and caramelised onions. All the burgers come in small, medium and large which translates to one, two or three patties.
The purity and simplicity of places like Supernova, Junk and Dumbo has been slightly watered down, because there’s also a truffle burger, and a chicken burger, and a couple of hot dogs made with beef sausage. Sides are limited to fries, loaded fries and onion rings.I chose a classic medium with extra crispy onions, standard fries and a cold drink along with a couple of the sauces to enable fry dipping, and the meal deal Blip has, the workings of which were slightly beyond me, meant that came out at £13.45: not much, in the scheme of things. Less than five minutes later, out it came.
So, the burger first. Packed tightly into a paper wrapper, it looked the part, even if it wasn’t the high-rise masterwork you might expect from the pictures on the website: to be fair to Blip, burger-sellers have been posting misleading photos since the year dot. But it was an attractive specimen, patties and cheese crammed into a slightly puckered potato bun, the edges of those burgers nicely crazed and crispy. It felt like it had been designed to be edible, as in feasible to convey into your gob without needing two hands, cutlery or a flip-top head. I was happy about that.
It tasted excellent, more to the point. The beef is apparently dry aged, and the texture of it was a joy – the seasoning, too. I would say that the patties are slender, slightly thicker than very good bacon, but not by much. My research on the burger restaurants which ‘inspired’ Blip suggests that again, this is something they were seeking to emulate rather than the result of cost-cutting. What that does mean is that I showed too much restraint going for a medium: if you’re hungry, you should go large. If you’re normal and not on Mounjaro, you should avoid small.
The classic comes relatively light on accoutrements, but the cheese and the ketchup added what they needed to: my optional crispy onions felt like they’d come out of a plastic tub rather than been made onsite and didn’t feel worth the extra trouble or expense for anyone. The gherkins – I’m 100% on Team Gherkin – were extremely welcome, pleasingly thick-cut.
Now, you might ask why I didn’t go for one of the fancier options. Here’s why: I thought their entry-level burger was the best way to judge the quality of the patties without having them struggle to be heard over the hubbub of house sauce, or truffle mayo. The one exception is that I would have had bacon, if it was on offer. I am as sympathetic to a burger serving halal beef as the next person, probably more so given the occasional comments about halal on my Facebook page from Islamophobes pretending to give a shit about animal welfare. All power to restaurants like Blip for sticking to their guns. But I’ve eaten enough beef bacon to know that it’s no substitute for the real thing: you’d only eat it if you had no other choice.
Similarly, I had my fries unloaded. If the house sauce or the truffle mayo turned out to be bad, paying an extra £1.50 to have your fries drowned in either would feel like a terrible mistake. So instead I had them as they came, with a little steel dish of house sauce and truffle mayo on the side.
Blip’s fries are pretty good, I think: skin on, nicely crispy, perhaps not as salty as they should have been. If Blip makes them onsite, they’ve done a reasonable job of chipping. If they don’t, they’ve done a very respectable job of buying. It was a generous portion for three quid, too: they came completely overspilling from the Blip branded cardboard cup, that wasn’t clumsiness on my part.
Are either of the sauces worth it given that they give you a sachet of Heinz ketchup and mayo – the only two sauces not made onsite – for nothing? I don’t know about that. The house sauce was generically tangy without knocking my socks off, the truffle mayo a little sweet, its funk slightly artificial.
Maybe I should have had the intestinal fortitude to order the homemade naga sauce, so I could tell you that it bangs or what have you, but what I thought those fries really needed was more salt and a carpet bombing of Sarson’s. Someone on Reddit once accused me of being “a cranky old bloke who will downrate a place for boomer reasons”: times like this I think he might have a point.
Oh, and I had a drink of course. A can of diet cola – a brand called Ice X Pro which sounds like it could be the name of a very cheap deodorant or a very expensive four-bladed razor, or indeed anything else. I’ve never had it before, I’ll probably never have it again, it tasted like supermarket own brand coke and I’ve wasted enough words on it already.
The drawback of solo reviews is that I can’t tell you about the onion rings or the chicken burger, and my reluctance to slather a piece of burnt Basque cheesecake with an enormous slick of chocolate sauce means I can’t tell you about the dessert offering.
I’m sure there are videos of people eating some of those dishes, trying to get their microphone as close to their mandibles as possible and telling you all about the ASMR of the crunch. But for what it’s worth, if I came back to Blip I would be tempted to try them. I’d also be tempted to have a triple burger, though, and to share some fries with whoever came with me.
It is an if, because Blip is in Tilehurst and that means that for many people in Reading, trying their burger will involve either making a special journey or experiencing it with the gradual degradation of quality that comes with every single minute on the back of a scooter. One of the things about places like Supernova, Dumbo and Junk is that they are in the heart of Soho where there is loads going on, where that meal forms a small part of a night out or a day in the capital. In that sense, Blip would have made more sense in, say, the spot vacated by Mission Burrito than it does where it is. But then the rent would have been prohibitive, which I doubt it is in RG31.
So if you live in Tilehurst you’re looking increasingly lucky, I reckon. You have great brunch at The Switch, you have a pleasant casual Italian in Vesuvio, you have a wonderful café in the shape of Dee Caf, you have Zyka and Istanbul Mangal which I’m yet to check out. And you have Blip – which, despite copying restaurants which took off in the West End of London, does a thoroughly respectable job of making the western end of Reading a lot more attractive. Give yourself a pat on the back for moving somewhere that increasingly looks only a superb pub away from being one of Reading’s most surprising enclaves.
For the rest of us, it will depend on how much you like burgers. I wouldn’t travel five hours to eat one, even if Blip paid me to do it, but I might hop on the 17 now and again. Is it the best burger in Reading? I’ll leave those pronouncements to others, partly because I went and said that Mac’s Deli‘s patty melt was possibly Reading’s best burger less than a month ago and I feel a little like I let myself down even expressing an opinion. But it’s a decidedly good burger, and if it foreshadows an acceleration in the speed with which food trends make it to our Berkshire backwater I am all for it.
Blip – 7.3 8 Park Lane, Tilehurst, Reading, RG31 5DL
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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.
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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.
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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.
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