Oakford Social Club

On February 6, 2015September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

First things first, Oakford Social Club (from hereon, just the Oakford, or my fingers will get sore) is part of a chain. I know it feels like the original hipster hangout – mismatched furniture, craft beer and live music – but it’s part of the “Castle” group of Mitchell and Butler, an “eclectic urban pub” according to their website (a group which also includes the Abbot Cook, out at Cemetery Junction). And the food at the Oakford is by “Ruby Jean’s Diner”, a chain within a chain found in a number of those pubs, offering a selection of Americana classics. Anyway, chains aside, the Oakford does what I have thought for a while is probably the best burger in Reading. Let’s not mess around and play games: I still think that.

RYND

On October 24, 2014August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

RYND closed in August 2016. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

My normal rule is not to review restaurants that have just opened. It’s not fair to judge a place in the first month when it’s finding its feet, and most restaurants in Reading don’t have a soft launch to phase themselves in. One minute they’re all boarded up with people beavering away inside, the next they’re open and the front of house and the kitchen are learning to work together to offer something seamless. It must be a steep curve, doing that with all those hungry, demanding customers at tables expecting everything to be perfect from day one.

My other rule is that I base my review on a single visit. In an ideal world it would be lovely to make multiple visits to a restaurant before writing a review, but life’s too short – especially if you want to read a new review every week. So instead they get one chance to impress and that’s it. Sometimes that can be a little unfair on restaurants: I’ve revisited some and found them to be better than I thought. Dolce Vita, for example, has constantly impressed me when I’ve gone back there and Bhel Puri House has become a reliable staple for a quick, interesting lunch. Sometimes it flatters places: Sushimania has never been anywhere near as good since as it was the time I went on duty.

All of this makes RYND a difficult review to write. In the interests of full disclosure, I went there “off duty” shortly after it opened and really liked it. I thought the food was interesting and well done and the service was excellent. But going back, just over a month after it opened, was like going to a different restaurant. What changed?

Well, the menu for a start. Sitting down I was presented with a different menu to the one I chose from on my previous visit – and, indeed, a different menu from the one on the website at the time of writing. The alterations were subtle but telling: no courgette fries any more, two of the burgers had come off the menu, one of the starters had been removed, you no longer have the option to order pulled pork as a main except as part of the upsold combo with chicken wings (odd, really: the menu boasts about how proud RYND is of its pulled pork but it’s not possible to order it on its own). The burgers that had been taken off were the basic options: a plain hamburger or a cheeseburger. The cheapest things on the old menu, as it happens.

That leads to the second change on the menu: the prices. Everything has been hiked in the month since the restaurant opened, the starters by around a pound and the main courses by between two and three pounds. All the burgers are now over a tenner, although in fairness to RYND you pay about the same for a burger at their closest competitors, the Oakford or Handmade Burger. Even so, it just felt a little cynical. Perhaps the initial prices were soft launch prices and RYND just decided not to tell anybody.

It wasn’t a brilliant first impression, but I put it to one side. After all, the prices weren’t necessarily unreasonable and RYND deserved to be judged on the food, the room and the service, just like any other restaurant. And the room, it has to be said, looks gorgeous. All that exposed brickwork and exposed light bulb filaments might be a trope that’s been done to death in London, Liverpool and Glasgow but in Reading it still makes a refreshing change to see somewhere so beautifully fitted out. It’s broken up nicely into lots of little sections with a long, atmospheric bar (when I went there were a row of very bearded chaps sitting at it, all check shirts and beanies, presumably having a craft beer and pretending to be in Williamsburg). The only drawback was the black banquette running round the room – it looked plush and comfy but was disturbingly like a church pew, with less give than Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow put together.

And the food? Well, the food is where RYND really fails to impress. Of the starters, hush puppies were pleasant enough – deep fried corn fritters with enough texture to just about compensate for the lack of taste, still a little too crumbly for my liking but quite nice paired with sweet, spicy, slightly smoky chilli jam (“quite nice”, with hindsight, may well have been the high point of the meal).

The other starter, the chilli bowl, was poor: a very small skillet of slightly anonymous chilli with a little heat but not enough, too much bounce and nothing interesting going on. I was hoping for something slow-cooked and complex, but this was miles from that (I’m no cook but I can make better chilli than this at home, and when I’m saying that there’s definitely a problem). Worse still was the little metal bucket of tortilla chips which came with it. Tortilla chips must be one of the cheapest things RYND serves up, and yet the bucket was barely two-thirds full. Again, it felt cynical.

Pulled pork was possibly the crowning disappointment. Pulled pork should be dry and sticky with some smoke and spice, but this was just wet. Not moist, not even damp, but plain wet. It came in a sesame seed bun (with a needless wooden skewer: it was nowhere near tall enough to need one of those) drowned in mayonnaise. There was, I’m told, cheese and barbecue sauce and coleslaw in it but it didn’t feel like that at all. It didn’t even really feel like pork – with all that finely shredded mulch in mayonnaise I felt more like I was eating Reading’s most expensive tuna melt. It was so sloppy that eating it tidily was almost impossible – every bite forced more of it out of the other end on to the tray (of course it’s a tray, just like they’d have in Williamsburg). It wasn’t a sandwich, it wasn’t a burger, I’m not really sure what it was. A mess, I guess.

I did like the fries, though – flattened crinkle-cut slices like mutant McCoys, they were one of the better things I ate, especially dipped in the barbecue sauce. I think I’d probably describe the fries as quite nice.

The “smokehouse burger” was a run of the mill beef patty, a little bouncy in places as the chilli was. It was meant to come with barbecue sauce, mature Cheddar and crispy fried onions, but the onions were missing, substituted with a thick dollop of red onion marmalade so sweet and sticky that you could easily confuse it with dessert. The mini-pail of sweet potato fries on the side (I asked for these instead because I wanted to try them out) did little to lift the overpowering sugariness. In their defence, they were really good – crisp and light where sweet potato can often be a tad soggy and limp. With a different burger they would be worth the swap but with this one it all felt a little cloying. It just didn’t feel like an eleven pound main course, and until recently it wouldn’t have been one.

Service was pleasant and friendly: our waitress did have a crack at flogging us olives and recommending the most expensive main course, but that probably wouldn’t even have registered if I hadn’t already been irked by the menu so I won’t hold it against them. I should also mention the drinks – it was happy hour so I tried the spiced apple daiquiri which was pleasant but no more than that, and a 125ml glass of Portuguese red which was straightforward, uncomplicated and really easy to drink (hats off to RYND for offering small glasses of wine and pricing them fairly: many places don’t). The meal for two, two starters, two mains, those cocktails and a small glass of wine came to forty-six pounds, not including tip. Looking at the bill I saw the final piece of stealth margin maximisation – charged an extra pound for substituting sweet potato fries for standard fries, another thing the menu neglects to mention.

As you can probably tell, RYND got my back up from the start. But being dispassionate about it and trying to forget my earlier, better visit (and wider menu. And better pricing. Hmm. Suddenly there seems to be quite a lot to try to forget) I still can’t recommend it. Judging it on its merits, if I wanted this kind of food Blue’s Smokehouse does it many times better (and a little bit cheaper). And if I wanted this kind of food and didn’t want to leave Reading, I think I’d go to the Oakford which offers more, better burgers, again slightly more attractively priced. But I suspect RYND will do perfectly well all the same – it’s a kind of food people want to eat at the moment, the kind of place people want to eat it in and I imagine hipsters will enjoy telling each other that the Oakford is so last year.

Oh, one last thing: RYND is pronounced rynd as in quite nice rather than rynd as in cynical. But in reality it’s probably a bit of both.

RYND – 6.2
11 Castle Street, RG1 7SB
0118 9505555

http://ryndreading.com/

Malmaison

On August 8, 2014September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

So many elements go to make up a great restaurant, so many different things to get right, so many plates to spin at once. It’s fair to say that very few restaurants in Reading have perfected all of them. So you can go to a rather unimpressive room, like Bhoj, and have a knockout curry. You can go to Cerise and have beautiful food but be a little unmoved by the service. Or you could head to the Abbot Cook and sit in that wonderful room wading through their underwhelming food. This makes reviewing restaurants difficult: how do you weigh all of those different factors? But I always thought that the food comes first; if the food is great, nothing else can be that badly wrong. And I really believed that, too, right up until last week when I went to Malmaison for dinner.

The Abbot Cook

On April 18, 2014April 1, 2024 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

The Abbot Cook closed in April 2018 and is reopening later in the month as a new pub called the Hope & Bear. I’ve kept this review up for posterity.

The Abbot Cook is another of those pubs that falls into my “lovely old boozer” category. Since the end of its days as a tired student pub it’s been stripped back and refreshed to capture that shabby chic look that so many places have these days. At the Abbot Cook, though, it really works with the parquet wooden floors, fireplaces and sash windows. On a midweek night it’s busy enough to be buzzy but the music is still muted enough that you can have a conversation without yelling (yes, I know I sound old: I’m okay with that). The long bar offers plenty of decent draught beers plus just enough wines by the glass to make the choice a challenge. So the stage is set for a good performance. Right?

The first act didn’t come off too well. We picked a couple of conventional-sounding starters and shared because we couldn’t decide. The “roast chicken Caesar salad with croutons, anchovies and house Caesar dressing” was decent enough, if small, but crucially the anchovies were missing. I know a lot of people don’t love an anchovy but I think they’re an essential part of a Caesar salad, that salty tang that balances out the creamy dressing and makes ordering a salad worthwhile rather than just worthy. The rest of it was going through the motions, really, a handful of croutons, some decent roast chicken (cold, sadly, but you can’t have everything) and generous amounts of parmesan. But, in truth, all I really noticed was the anchovies that weren’t there.

The salt and pepper squid with lime mayonnaise also disappointed. It was hard to tell if the squid was fresh because it had been cooked to the point of brittle crunchiness. The lime in the mayonnaise was presumably in the same place as the anchovies, and the mayonnaise itself was suspiciously white and thin and tasted of not much. The little pile of pub salad on the end of the plate wasn’t dressed and seemed a little sad, as if it were just trying to make the plate look fuller. I’m not sure that this was any better than the sad excuse for calamari that was served up by the ill-fated Lobster Room; at least that was identifiably squid.

We picked mains from the specials board just because they sounded a bit more exciting than the meals on their normal menu (which is the usual array: lots of different kinds of burgers, fish and chips, fishcakes).

The “pan fried Atlantic cod supreme with bacon, spinach and puy lentils” was a good example of how to ruin a lovely piece of fish. The cod itself was fantastic – cooked just right and falling into big, thick flakes (I would have liked a crispier skin, but it was a minor detail). The rest of the dish let it down terribly: there was bacon, but not the small crispy smoky pieces which would have worked well. Instead, you got huge undercooked floppy slabs of the stuff. There were lentils and spinach, yes, but what the specials board neglected to say was that there was cream – a lot of cream. Not a cream sauce, just cream. A lake of unseasoned cream, in fact: my mouth felt coated with the stuff for hours afterwards.

The “chicken breast and Cornish brie in bacon, baby potatoes and red wine mustard sauce” was at least evidence that someone in the kitchen could cook. The stuffed chicken breast had a layer of sun dried tomatoes tucked into the brie through the middle and the bacon, this time, was cooked just right so that there were no rubbery strings. The potatoes had been pan-fried so that some of them were a little browned then a layer of steamed kale added before the whole lot was doused in a rich, creamy wholegrain mustard sauce. I didn’t get much in the way of red wine in there but it would have been overwhelmed by the mustard anyway. This is the sort of dish I would never cook at home because of the overwhelming calorie count: as a pub dish it was enjoyable, even if I was facing potato-geddon by attempting to finish it (I didn’t, but it was a close call).

We took advantage of the wide range of drinks and tried lots of different things, reinforcing my view that the Abbot Cook was a much better pub than it was a restaurant. A pint of Blue Moon was spot on – subtle and refreshing with a suitably metrosexual slice of orange sticking out of the rim. The Sangiovese (is it me, or is this a wine that has fallen out of fashion? I haven’t noticed it on a menu for a while) was nice for starters but was bettered by the much cheaper South African Chenin Blanc I followed it up with; crisp and fresh but not too dry (I prefer my whites on the off-dry side, although I like to think I stop well short of Blue Nun).

I didn’t have high hopes for dessert after all that, so we hedged our bets and shared a salted caramel and chocolate tart. Again, the menu was being a bit economical with the truth: the base was crushed biscuit rather than pastry so I’d say it was a cheesecake rather than a tart. The caramel taste wasn’t particularly strong but the top was scattered with coarse salt crystals which worked really well with the dark chocolate ganache. The website for the Abbot Cook doesn’t say if the desserts are home-made or not. I’d love to be wrong, but I suspect it’s the latter and the plate is just dressed with that irritating zig zag of out-of-a-squeezy-bottle chocolate sauce to make it look otherwise. It’s a shame that one of the nicest things I had that evening probably had the least to do with the kitchen.

The service doesn’t quite compare to other restaurants because there is no table service. Staff at the bar were always really friendly and clearly happy to chat to customers, but service at the table was a bit more lackadaisical with the waiter, if you’d call him that, checking up on us quite late into each dish while calling us “guys” or, even worse, “friend”. I wonder if he thought he was in Hoxton or Brick Lane rather than Cemetery Junction: still, he was very smiley.

In all the bill came to sixty pounds for two starters, two mains, one dessert and four drinks; indifferent food representing indifferent value for money.

The Abbot Cook is another example of that sad genre I see an awful lot of: an attractive pub doing unremarkable food. It’s such a handsome place, in an area which is short of nice places to drink, but I struggle to think of it as a destination for food in its own right. I guess the food is good enough to eat there if pressed by a friend, but no more than that. It’s a real shame: the interior deserves better, and I remember when it first opened that it really seemed to have some culinary aspirations (although, in fairness, they are currently running monthly events matching food with beer which suggest a bit more ambition). These days the menu seems to be more about burgers and fried chicken which is aimed more at the student clientele of their previous incarnation. As one of the few pubs in Reading that has a decent garden (albeit on the sometimes very busy London Road) I know I’ll be back there for a summertime drink, but I’m no hurry to eat there again. Not until they sort their act out.

The Abbot Cook – 6.0
153 London Road, RG1 5DE
0118 9354095

http://www.theabbotcookreading.co.uk/

The Eldon Arms

On April 4, 2014August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

N.B. The Eldon Arms stopped serving food in May 2014. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

This week, not for the first time, I found myself thinking about how different the restaurant scenes are in Reading and London.

For the last few years London has been obsessed with burgers (a fixation it’s only just starting to recover from now) but Reading has never quite been gripped by burger fever in the same way. There was a slight frisson of excitement when Five Guys opened, but now it’s just part of the furniture and not even particularly full when I’ve walked past. The only people who got into the swing were one of our local papers. For a while it was a running joke that whatever restaurant it reviewed, one of the diners would order a burger – whether it was in a pub, an Italian restaurant or a brasserie. If an Indian restaurant had put a burger on the menu I expect they would have ordered it there, too (can you even imagine what that would look and taste like? I shudder to think).

Personally, I’ve never understood the appeal: a burger is all well and good, but ultimately it’s just a burger. A glorified sandwich, and by and large, I get enough of those at lunchtime not to want another one in the evening. Also, I’ve never really understood why people would order a burger in a restaurant which offers so many other things. I’ve never looked at a menu and thought You know what? I think I’ll go for the burger today. When I’m in the mood for a burger, I know that before even leaving the house.

Anyway, all this is just preamble to the surprising fact that I went to the Eldon Arms and, without ever intending to, may have ordered the best burger in Reading.

I’d heard encouraging things about the food at the Eldon Arms and remembered thinking “Really?” It’s not somewhere that’s ever stood out in my mind, a little backstreet pub tucked behind Eldon Square, a slightly scruffy old man pub which never quite had the range of drinks or the eccentricity to compete with the Retreat, or the polish to match the Abbot Cook. But I was told that it was under new management and that the food was worth a visit, so I figured a wander across town was in order.

The pub looks good – recently redecorated, it’s all clean white walls, although the furniture is still the classic pub chairs and tables that were there before. There is a good range of real ales on draught along with a couple of real ciders if you prefer still and rustic to fizzy and cold. The menu is a small affair: burgers on one side, pizzas, wraps and sandwiches on the other. I’d heard stories about the food being made from scratch and about the chef going out to get extra chickpeas from the supermarket because he’d run out of falafel (to be honest, that’s the story that made me decide to try the Eldon Arms).

This won’t be a long review, because we both had burgers and chips. So I can’t tell you whether the wraps are good, or the chicken and chorizo pizza (although I’m tempted to go back and give it a whirl). I can’t even tell you whether the falafel merited that dash to the supermarket. But I can tell you about the burgers.

Although they’re not served pink they’re delicious all the same – a healthy size without being freakishly huge, clearly decent meat, properly seasoned, hand-made in appearance. Everything about them was good quality without being faddish: no over the top brioche, just a good firm bun strong enough to stand up to its contents with what looked like a little dusting of semolina flour on top. The cheese was grated mature cheddar – I expected not to enjoy this, being a devotee of the cheap plastic orange American slice, but actually that strong flavour worked very well with the beef. The iceberg was thinly sliced, crisp rather than limp translucent ribbons of window dressing. The onion rings, tucked under the lid, were outstanding – so huge I had to take them out and eat them separately. The batter was light and crispy without being greasy, and when you bit into the ring the rest of the onion stayed in place (so often not the case, sadly, with inferior onion rings). A cheeseburger cost six pounds, and felt like good value at that price.

The other burger was the same but with pulled pork added, which cost two pounds more. Pulled pork, like beefburgers, has become devalued by its increasing popularity. M&S does pulled pork sandwiches now, a cold claggy parody of really good pulled pork. Everywhere seems to serve it with burgers nowadays and often it’s an underwhelming piece of edible bandwagon jumping. But the pulled pork at the Eldon is the real deal – slow-cooked for twenty-four hours until it’s just a mass of sticky, savoury strands in that barbecue sauce, sweet but not cloying. The menu also has a pulled pork roll which skips the beef and cheese completely and concentrates on the star of the show (and when I go back, I think I might have it).

I could be critical and say that some relish or a few gherkins might have been nice, but that’s only a minor quibble with the benefit of hindsight. At the time I was eating, I can honestly say there wasn’t a single thing I’d change. And that doesn’t happen very often.

The chips also merit a mention as they are probably the best pub chips I can remember having in Reading. Chips have also been ruined by food fad after food fad: skin on, fat, skinny, “hand cut”, dusted in parmesan and covered in truffle oil like cheap perfume, chefs have put potatoes through all manner of terrible things in the name of dining trends. The Eldon just does really good chips that don’t need to sing and dance about how impressive they are: crispy where they should be, fluffy where they should be, salty and tasty and unbelievable value at two pounds for a bowl big enough to easily serve two. And I love the fact that the menu doesn’t feel the need to tell me whether they’re double cooked or triple cooked – because they’re well cooked, and that’s all I need to know. They also come with the pub’s home-made mayonnaise, which is to Hellman’s what The West Wing is to The Only Way Is Essex.

There’s no need here for the staff to overdo things but they are lovely all the same – friendly, welcoming and happy to chat. The food is served on chunky white plates with paper napkins and fuss free cutlery because this is, essentially, fuss free food, no messing about. It just happens to be bloody good fuss free food.

Two burgers, chips and a couple of pints came to twenty-four pounds, although the potential ongoing costs of returning to the Eldon Arms can’t be entirely ignored. So yes, it was just a sandwich. And yes, it’s a trend whose moment has passed, a culinary hurricane that almost missed Reading completely. Despite that, I loved this place. I said at the start of the review that I know I’m in the mood for a burger before I even leave the house, and that’s still true. But thanks to the Eldon Arms, that might be happening a lot more often – and, when it does, I know exactly where I’ll be going.

The Eldon Arms – 8.0
19 Eldon Terrace, RG1 4DX
0118 9573857

http://www.eldonarmsreading.co.uk/

Edible Reading

Tag: burgers