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
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Zoë and I were in town the Monday before our holiday, we’d finished all our errands and there was time to fit in lunch somewhere before taking the bus home to face the mountain of ironing and packing. Zoë wanted to go to Shed, which I could completely understand, and then it occurred to me – we could try out Notes, the first of the raft of hospitality businesses we’ve been promised on Station Hill, and I could get a review of it under my belt.
It was a muggy Saturday, the longest day of the year in fact, the mercury was nudging close to 30 degrees and, sipping my mocha outside C.U.P., I felt like the Only Living Boy In The Ding.
Scrolling Instagram all I could see was holiday snaps – people just back from Malaga and Cordoba, newlyweds honeymooning on a Greek island, someone I know on his annual holiday to Kalkan, spending three weeks in a little Turkish piece of paradise. The world had its out of office on, or at least it felt that way, and there I was, fresh from my haircut, halfway through a C.U.P. mocha, a little on the outside of things, looking in.
I wandered round town, but nothing lifted that feeling of dislocation. Station Hill was holding a mini festival to celebrate it opening – notwithstanding that it opened over four months ago – and the whole cut through from the station to Friar Street was lined with food stalls, drink stalls, music and crafts and hubbub. London coffee spot Notes, not yet open, had a stand selling coffee and another selling Aperol spritzes, and everywhere you looked there was someone else offering street food, largely vendors I’d not heard of.
The place was buzzing, although I put a picture up on Facebook and person after person said “if only they’d advertised it”. Still, it felt like everyone I know had somehow been spirited away out of town, and there I was, surrounded by people but alone. I thought of my wife, at the far end of the M4 busy at work, and all my friends dotted across this country and others, my brother on the other side of the world (this, by the way, is why I shouldn’t spend too much time on my own).
I could have grabbed lunch from one of the stalls, fetched a drink from Siren or the Purple Turtle’s pop-up bar, I could have participated. But something stopped me. It felt a little like a glossy celebration of house prices in Reading inching slightly further out of reach, it had a slight feeling of forced fun about it. But that’s just me: I’m not much of a joiner-in. Anyway, I had a lunch appointment to go to, one for which I was several years late. Time to get going.
Normally I ride the number 5 or 6 bus all the way up the hill, along Whitley Street and past the Whitley Pump roundabout, getting off at the nearest stop to my house and strolling home from there. But this time, in the sweltering, almost oppressive heat I alighted halfway up, where Silver Street becomes Mount Pleasant, and walked the rest of the way. And there it was, Pau Brasil, with its pretty cobalt blue door and its awning out. It had been a long, long time.
Back in 2004, over 20 years ago, long before Reading got Minas Café or De Nata, Brazilian café Pau Brasil opened on Mount Pleasant. It’s been trading there ever since, the culinary capital of Katesgrove before Katesgrove even got other restaurants. Back then the only nearby place I knew was a Chinese takeaway on Whitley Street called Tung Hing which I revered – it’s long since closed – and the closest I got to Pau Brasil was glorious scuzzy indie gigs at the Rising Sun Arts Centre, at the bottom of the hill.
I reviewed Pau Brasil in 2014, over ten years ago, and it’s safe to say that I didn’t completely get it, or love it the way I expected to. It’s one of my oldest reviews not to have been superseded, and I’ve wondered many times over the years whether I’d missed something about the place. I remember going with my ex-wife and leaving feeling like we just hadn’t grasped what made it special. She was indifferent about a banana and cheese toasted sandwich, I found the feijoada a tad wobbly.
We both wanted to like it, and came away still wanting to but not convinced that we’d managed it. “I’m not going to say that Pau Brasil is a bad restaurant” the conclusion said. “Sometimes I really regret choosing to give restaurants a rating, and this is one of those times.” This was back in 2014, when the end of one of my reviews arrived a lot sooner than it does nowadays.
Since I moved house last year, and Pau Brasil is a short downhill walk from my new abode, the place has been in my thoughts. I’ve caught myself musing, more than once, that a lunchtime visit was long overdue. Somehow this strangely stifling Saturday, with more than a hint of saudade about it, was the day to do it. If not then, when?
The welcome was warm and immediate, making me feel like I wasn’t a stranger. Pau Brasil has a deli, the counter and the kitchen downstairs and all its seating upstairs, and the first indication I had that the place has a devoted following was that I was asked if I had a reservation (there is no way to do so online, so I suspect regulars just do this when they stop in). Despite not having one, they managed to find room for me, so I headed up the stairs and was given the option of a couple of tables.
It’s a gorgeous room, far more homely and attractive than I remembered. It has a huge blue-shuttered window looking out on Mount Pleasant, letting in loads of light, and art all over the walls. One is painted a very fetching shade of red, one which made me think Why isn’t there an equivalent of Shazam for colours? only to find that firstly, there is, and secondly, I found it too fiddly to use. The furniture was simple and unpretentious, but nothing detracted from a certain serene energy.
A couple of tables were occupied when I got there, the big one with the plum view out of that window was already reserved. What I would say is that Pau Brasil has decided to prioritise space over packing diners in, which is to their credit, but it does make a couple of the tables on offer eccentric. I was given the option of a corner table where both seats faced the wall or a corner table where both seats faced the banister at the top of the stairs, and went for the latter because it had more natural light. Another option was to sit on a high stool up at a counter facing the wall – that fetching deep red wall, granted, but a wall nonetheless.
Back in 2014 I found Pau Brasil’s menu very tempting, and in 2025 that had not changed. It offered a range of salgadinhos, bite-sized snacks, for less than three pounds each, sandwiches for four pounds or a very compact selection of main courses for fourteen pounds (although you could have a smaller size for less). Just to spell out how remarkable that is, in ten years the mains have gone up from ten to fourteen pounds, I suspect the smaller dishes have barely budged in price: Pau Brasil seemed largely to be the land that inflation forgot.
I started out by asking my server – who I think, though I might be wrong, was half of a husband and wife team – whether they were in any danger of running out of pasteis de nata, having seen only a handful on display out front. He told me it was a risk and so I asked him to put one aside for me, for later. That potential pitfall swerved, I started out by ordering a couple of salgadinhos and a very cold beer.
And what a beer! On my bus out of town I’d texted Zoë saying I tell you what, if they have Super Bock I’m fucking having one. I arrived, I saw both it and Sagres in the fridge and my heart positively sang with joy. That iconic bottle came to my table, with a small, chilled glass, and those first malty sips made me feel less agitated, less irritated, somehow much happier to be solitary. Now I could settle down to people watching and relaxing, even if I had to crane my neck to do it.
Everything was unhurried, and my salgadinhos arrived about half an hour after I first took my seat. They looked so pretty on their plate, a symphony of blue, terra cotta, gold and red, and I found myself immediately wishing I had ordered more. I expected to like the salt cod fishcake, and it was no surprise that I did, but I was perhaps more surprised to find myself enjoying it every bit as much as I had its equivalent at De Nata.
Enjoy doesn’t even do it justice, I liked it an enormous amount. It had just enough comfort, just enough bite, it had a beautiful hit of salt from the bacalhau and it was golden, greaseless and a tactile pleasure to eat without cutlery. This kind of food is a proper gastronomic happy place for me and I could easily have inhaled two or three of them. Why had I spent the best part of a year with this on my doorstep without eating it?
My server had also brought some of Pau Brasil’s homemade chilli sauce and warned me, just as I had been warned in 2014, to use it extremely sparingly. My chilli tolerance has improved a lot in the last 11 years, so I was a little more cavalier than I would have been back then. It’s really very hot; my ability to take good, well-intentioned advice has probably not improved as much as it should have done over the same period.
The real star, though, was the chicken coxinha, a dome of airy dough stuffed with shredded chicken. I’d only ever had this dish at Minas Café, and I thought it was good. Eating it at Pau Brasil was to realise it could be superb. The rendition out in Whitley is a dense, solid affair, best tackled with cutlery. This by contrast was an ethereal gasp of a thing, the dough so light and the chicken at its core quite miraculous. Again, I could have easily eaten more and, again, I resolved to do so in the not too distant future.
From there, the pace slowed. Time seemed to pass slowly on Mount Pleasant, and in truth I was in no hurry. Tables came and went, and a group of three took the reserved table in the window. I watched as a giant plate of salgadinhos was brought over to them and they went to work, chatting and biting, dabbing chilli sauce and laughing. My portable fan whirred on the table, time became a trickle and I thought that all things considered, there were many worse places to be on a Saturday afternoon.
It proved a little tricky at that point to get attention to order more food, but eventually I did. The weekend special, which involved dried shrimp and sounded magnificent, had all but run out, and although it was tempting to order the feijoada I was determined for this meal not to be a carbon copy of my 2014 one. So I asked for the frango à Milanese and a Guaraná, Brazil’s national soft drink, having seen a can of it arrive at a neighbouring table.
This was where the gaps in the service felt a little bit more obvious, as we drifted past the lunch rush and into the afternoon. My beer was done and dusted, my glass of water had nearly run out too, but the soft drink showed no signs of arriving. Not only that, but my water had come with no ice, but then I saw the server bringing a load of ice to the bigger table. Half an hour in I was starting to feel a bit parched, so I got my server’s attention and asked if I could possibly have my drink before the food.
He apologised, clearly distracted rather than indifferent, and brought it over, and within five minutes my food had arrived too. The Guaraná, incidentally, was lovely: I would definitely drink it again on a hot day. I have a soft spot for slightly medicinal soft drinks, from chinotto to root beer, and this felt in the same family. It was also a splendid thirst quencher, and by then I was in need of one.
Did I like my main course as much? Well, yes and no. You couldn’t fault it for value, really: fourteen pounds for a complete, well-balanced plate of food felt like pretty good going. And it certainly had variety, too: a big, flattened, breaded chicken breast fillet had just enough crunch, and the coating adhered nicely.
There was plenty going on, from a well-dressed stripe of salad topped with tomatoes and very finely diced peppers to a little haystack of shoestring fries, from fortifying white rice to a heap of toasted cassava flour which added more interest and texture than I expected. Best of all were the beans, sticky and savoury with little nuggets of pork studded through them, I liked those a lot.
And yet I felt like something was missing, and I’m not sure what. It was wholesome, homely, hearty stuff but it perhaps didn’t wow me the way those salgadinhos had done. It was ever so slightly out of balance – there was a fair amount of rice left at the end, with nothing to pair it with – and the flavours were muted, subtle, well-mannered stuff. They brought more of the chilli sauce, but it ramped up the heat without necessarily lending another dimension.
I think overall, this is just how the Brazilian (and Portuguese) food I’ve had can sometimes be. It’s sturdy, and reliable, but it won’t knock your socks off – well, everything apart from the chilli sauce perhaps, although that’s too busy blowing your head off. The thing is, though, that I might never rave about a dish like Pau Brasil’s frango a Milanese, but in that moment, it was just what I was after. Also, I finished every scrap of my salad – which I never do – so that must count for something.
My main course done, there was one thing left to try. A coffee and a nata, just to test drive whether this was a coffee spot as much as a lunch spot or a snacks and beer spot. My coffee – I’d asked for a latte – arrived in one of those tall conical glasses I tend to associate with coffee before it got wanky, and it was pleasant, if slightly burnt-tasting. The table of regulars had theirs in smaller glasses, and at the end I asked my server what I should have asked for to get one of those. A media, he said, and I made a note. It wasn’t on the menu, so it paid to have the inside track for next time.
I’d asked my server whether they actually had a couple of nata handy and he did, so he brought me two. They weren’t flawless, but I did find myself wondering if this was the best day to judge them. The custard in them, although set, burst its banks somewhat when you tried to eat them, which I think was down to the heat of the day.
They were close enough, though, to remind me how much I love pasteis de nata, and dusted with cinnamon they made me feel very happy indeed, saudade banished for the time being. I’ll go back and try them in more clement weather. You may have noticed by now that I’ve mentioned going back a few times: I’m definitely going back.
All that remained was to go downstairs and pay at the counter, and at that point I saw another little example of brilliant service that endeared me to Pau Brasil. When I went to pay, my server told me that they’d put one extra nata aside for me, just in case I had two and decided it wasn’t enough. As it was I was replete and I passed on the offer, but I was oddly touched that they’d thought to do that.
My bill for all that food came to just under thirty-two pounds, not including tip. I’d been there pretty much two hours, unrushed and, by my standards, carefree. I couldn’t help but think of all of the places in the last eleven years that had chivvied me or made me feel like an inconvenience, taken far more of my money and given me far less of their time. I walked up the hill, in search of the relative coolness of my house, happy that I knew my neighbourhood just a little better.
It’s funny writing reviews and coming back to them many years later, some kind of weird Prisoner Of Azkaban wrinkle where you can see the past you, retrace your steps, watch yourself with fondness or embarrassment. You can both agree with and disagree with yourself all at once.
When I reviewed Pau Brasil in 2014 I said I could see myself going back there for a coffee and a nata, or a drink and some salt cod fishcakes. Although that wasn’t enough, apparently. “Too much of the food just wasn’t to my taste, and however nice a room is, however great the service is, the food is always going to be centre stage”, 2014 me said.
What on earth was his problem? I highly doubt Pau Brasil has changed that much in the last 11 years. A new lick of paint, perhaps, and art on the walls, but otherwise I expect it’s pretty close to the place I went in 2014. The prices are pretty close to 2014 prices, too. And yet I must have changed, because I look at past me and think that he missed the point in a big way.
A little oasis of otherness there halfway up Mount Pleasant, where you can have a coffee and a nata, or a cold Super Bock and the most terrific chicken cozinha. All that and it also does a hearty main, if you decide you want one. But you could never eat that, there, and still see it as a gem. What more did he want?
It is one of the marvellous things about being alive that you can change your mind, or realise you were wrong. I do each of those more often than you might think. It’s hard to tell, over a decade on, which has happened here, and I wouldn’t bet against it being a bit of both. Really, I have no idea.
But here’s something I do know. On a close, sticky Saturday afternoon, on the longest day of the year, when I felt like the only living boy in the ‘Ding, that little spot in the heart of Katesgrove gave me a happy, meditative couple of hours, with some enjoyable food and a delicious, badly-needed and much-anticipated cold beer. And for those two hours, as if by magic, I felt lucky, well looked after and reconnected: to the world in general and my home town in particular.
Money can’t buy that, as plenty of places in Reading prove. But choosing well where to spend it, it turns out, can.
Pau Brasil – 7.6 89 Mount Pleasant, Reading, RG1 2TF 0118 9752333
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It was my birthday about four weeks ago – 45 again, please don’t ask me for any documentary evidence – and I had everything mapped out. A couple of days off that week, and then the best part of the following week off into the bargain. We had an Airbnb booked in Bristol for the second week, just up the road from Wilsons and Little Hollows, and a packed itinerary of restaurants to visit, some of them for the blog and some of them just because.
I was all geared up for a week of waking up with nothing to do, of eating well and drinking well, a week of that feeling of being carefree and elsewhere, and I was so looking forward to it. I even had one day planned where we’d stay in our neighbourhood – a bacon sandwich at Wilsons Bread Shop for brunch, good coffee, a spot of mooching and lazing in the afternoon, dinner nearby and then drinks at the Good Measure, my favourite Bristol pub. It was going to be a glorious 24 hours where, just briefly, we could pretend we lived there.
It would have happened, too, but for one thing: my wife fractured a bone in her foot again, and was under strict medical advice to keep her steps to an absolute minimum. I had been running on fumes in the run-up to that mini break – we both had, really – and we were both devastated. We contemplated taking the train to Bristol, as originally planned, and taking taxis everywhere, seeing it as convalescing somewhere else, and my wishful thinking let me believe, for something like half an hour, that such a revised plan would work, would be a sensible use of time and money.
Deep down I knew we were just fooling ourselves. So the Airbnb booking was pushed out until later in the year, and I went in and individually cancelled every single restaurant booking, feeling my holiday dreams die a little more with every email confirmation. I knew it couldn’t be helped, and I knew it wasn’t Zoë’s fault, but I was in a funk. I should explain that this is a “having your birthday in March” thing: I lost two successive birthdays to Covid, the world locked down days before my birthday five years ago, so I felt like fate had already fucked with enough of my plans.
Anyway, after enough sulking Zoë and I hatched a plan: we would have a staycation instead. Not what people like to refer to as a staycation, where you go on holiday somewhere else in the country where you live, but a proper staycation where you sleep every night in your house but experience being on holiday in your home, for a change. We would do some of the things in and around Reading that we loved and others we never got round to, the week of my birthday and the week after, the only proviso being that they had to be places we could reach by bus or taxi.
So this week, instead of the usual review, you get a guide to my Reading staycation, a little What I Did On My Holidays piece. You get that for a couple of reasons. One is that so many people liked the idea that I just had to write it up. Plenty of you wanted to read this one, and someone commented on the Edible Reading Facebook page that she’d said something similar on a local group elsewhere. “I often think we should pretend we’re visiting, and spend the weekend enjoying fab coffee shops, the river and so on” she wrote, adding “We are lucky!”.
We are lucky, indeed. And the second reason why I’m writing this piece this week is that Reading, around the time that I had my staycation, had a bit of a moment where it featured in the national press more than once. First, the Sunday Times listed it as one of the Best Places To Live 2025. The writeup had a little bit of the obvious in it: the MERL got a mention, no doubt because of past glories, and the references to Paddington felt a tad clichéd. And I don’t know what Polaroids Thames Lido’s PR must be in possession of to ensure that they’re always mentioned in a piece of this kind, but mentioned they inevitably were.
Yet beyond that the Sunday Times actually managed to capture something of what makes our town special, even if they think the tap room in the town centre is run by a brewery called Silent Craft. I was especially pleased to see mentions of Blue Collar, the Harris Garden, Madoo and Mama’s Way. Someone had obviously done their research, and I speak as a source they might well have used for it. And I was thrilled to see Dough Bros, barely eight months after I reviewed them, being talked about in the national press. This felt like a writeup of Reading as it actually is, rather than the bland homogenised version Reading UK (or Reading CIC, or REDA, or whoever they are) is always droning on about.
A couple of weeks ago Reading appeared in the national papers again. The article in the The i Paper might have described it as an “average commuter town”, and spent a lot of time talking about Reading’s failed city centre bids and how easy it is to reach or leave, but even it managed to squeeze in mentions of Reading Museum, Phantom – which it said was “by the river”, for some reason – and Caversham Court Gardens. Okay, the QI klaxon still went off when the contractually obligated references to Thames Lido and the MERL popped up, as they always do, but as Reading’s most famous inmate once said, it’s still better to be talked about than not.
So, with all that said, here’s how I spent my staycation – spread across a couple of weeks – in Reading and its environs, only travelling by bus and taxi and still managing to fit in some of the very best things the town and the surrounding countryside have to offer. I hope it helps, and maybe it will tempt you to spend one of your next holidays in Reading, too. You could do an awful lot worse.
* * * * *
So where did we start, on my birthday? At the Nag’s Head, of course.
The first drink of a holiday, for me at least, is always a wondrous moment. I eschew the airport Wetherspoons, although I’ve been known to have a pre-flight Nando’s or Wagamama, and nowadays I pass on drinking on the plane, too, because British Airways is no longer what it was. But there’s something about that very first drink when you reach your destination that’s special, that first ultra-cold lager or fortifying glass of vermut, glass of Brugse Zot or industrial strength Spanish gin and tonic. By that point all your cares have dissipated, and all that remains is relaxation and indulgence.
I didn’t see any reason why it should be any different on a staycation, so our first taxi dropped us on Russell Street. And because the sun was out, albeit briefly, we started our first beer in the garden out back before coming to terms with reality and moving back inside. I’ve talked at great length before – nearly everyone has – about how brilliant the Nag’s is: how it covers all bases, how it’s a perfect summer and winter pub, great on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, the best Reading Half Marathan and Bank Holiday Monday pub.
And that’s all true, but it wasn’t until I went there as part of my staycation that I realised another wonderful side of the pub I’d never experienced: boozing there with reckless abandon, on a school night, knowing you didn’t have to work the next day. You know, like people do when they’re on holiday.
It was at its very best that night – just busy enough, but not rammed with people watching the football, tables sufficiently occupied that it had a pleasing buzz but with no frustrating queue at the bar. Sometimes I forget, too, just how good the Nag’s Head’s beer list is, but lately it has had one of two brilliant session IPAs on keg most of the time – Sonoma by Manchester’s Track and Santiago by far more local Two Flints, from Windsor. Both are great, and both give you the nursery slopes to start on before it all goes downhill and you’re on the dank, stronger stuff you know you’ll regret the next day.
Perhaps best of all, we nabbed my favourite spot in the whole place – the little table for two, right up at the bar, next to the coat hooks. Perfect for sitting side by side and looking out on that room, seeing if you’ve spotted anybody you know – to greet or to blank, both are possible – and, of course, ideally suited for just standing up, getting someone’s attention and picking your next beer.
It was blissful, and on a night like that you can easily think that Reading could do without any other pubs, as long as it still had this one. And I could have stayed all night but, like the first few drinks of a holiday, the session was inevitably curtailed by dinner plans. We had a reservation for the first night of our holiday, my birthday, all the way across town.
* * * * *
I don’t get to eat at Clay’s anywhere near as often as I would like to, for a number of reasons. One is writing this blog – having to eat somewhere new most weeks means that, unlike many people, I can’t just go there because I feel like it (and no, I’m not asking for sympathy). Another is their location. I’m sure that the residents of Caversham are delighted to have them nearby, almost as delighted as they are merely to live in Caversham, but the truth is that when they were in the centre, and I was in the centre, they were a more frequent pit stop for me.
Even so, when it’s a special occasion they are the pre-eminent choice, for me and I suspect many others. When Zoë got a promotion last year, it was Clay’s we turned up at on the spur of the moment to celebrate, and for my birthday it was hard to imagine eating anywhere else in Reading. Going through those deep ochre doors to find it warm and bustling I felt excitement, as I always do, about the prospect of eating there. Because the menu at Clay’s, even excluding their regional specials, has so many good dishes on it that you could eat a different combination every time and never get bored, especially if you go there as infrequently as I do.
I’ve never reviewed Clay’s, for reasons I explained years ago when it opened, and to my surprise I still get people approaching me via social media occasionally, even now, explaining that they’re going there for the first time and asking what they should consider ordering. Very rarely has there been a restaurant where you could so easily get away with a non-committal “oh, it’s all good”, but even so I always feel like I have to respond, all the time painfully aware that you could ask a dozen people and get a dozen slightly different answers, none of which would be wrong.
So, for what it’s worth, here’s my answer: for starters I think it’s hard to look beyond five of their small plates. The bhooni kaleji, the chicken livers that have been on the menu since the very beginning, are outstanding – if you don’t like chicken livers they’ll convert you, and if you do like them they will ruin all others. The gobi Manchurian is the elevation of a dish which is quite good all across Reading, very good at Chilis but exquisite at Clay’s. They simply will not be outdone, you see, not by anyone.
Nandana and Sharat are fried chicken fans, as am I, and their Payyoli chicken fry is as good a rendition as you will get anywhere in Reading, including Gurt Wings. It comes dusted in a rich coconut crumb and served with tomato chutney, and although I always end up sharing it I also grumble silently that it’s too good to share: it helps that of all the small plates at Clay’s it must be the least small. I also resent sharing Clay’s pork belly, which is sweetened with jaggery, sharpened with ginger and cooked until it is sticky, rendered heaven, but I do it.
And finally, I would always tell you to try the cut mirchi chat. I have a real soft spot for this dish because I think I tried a prototype before it went on the menu, and it’s always for me been the most sharable, most snackable of all Clay’s starters: those slices of chilli and gram flour, crunchy and golden, moreish almost beyond belief. If you ask someone else, they’ll tell you to have the prawns, or the paneer majestic, or the lamb chops. And they’re right too, by the way, just differently right to me.
On this visit I decided to forego the pork belly – there were only two of us, after all – and although I regretted it I knew I was storing up a treat for next time. And if you asked me what I recommended from the main courses, I’d wax lyrical about Clay’s yakhni pulao, rice cooked in lamb bone broth, crowned with slow-cooked curried lamb. Or I’d tell you to go fancy and have the beef shin, cooked osso buco style and adorned with wild mushrooms.
If I was feeling old-school I’d recommend Nandana’s monkfish curry, sharper and more tart than her other dishes, made the way her mum does (although slightly less punchy than her mum’s version). And I would point out that the ghee roast chicken, the finest dish Clay’s ever made available to its home delivery customers, is on the menu in the restaurant, for now at least. I’d say that if you’ve never tried it you’re missing out.
But it was my birthday, and I was reminded that I ate at Clay’s before it was even born, so I had the bhuna venison, a dish I have been eating and loving now for nearly seven years. A couple of years ago I declared it Reading’s best dish, and eighteen intervening months have not changed my mind. But, because you can teach an old dog new tricks, on this visit I used a life hack I’d picked up from my friend Graeme, when we visited Clay’s earlier in the year for no other reason than because it was Friday.
“Have the keema biryani on the side, instead of the usual baghara rice”, he said. “Life changing.”
I did, and it was, and now I can’t imagine ever doing otherwise.
I have never been one of those people who goes to restaurants and takes home leftovers. I’ve always envied those people their limited appetites, or their restraint, while also wondering if they’re maybe a tad parsimonious. But on this occasion we quit while we were ahead, making room for Clay’s amazing peanut butter ice cream and a glass of dessert wine. We rolled into a taxi clutching a little plastic tub full of leftovers – some ghee roast chicken, some bhuna venison, some keema biryani. The first meal of a holiday is always special, but even having a staycation this felt as special as any dinner I’ve had away.
The following lunchtime, nursing a moderate to severe hangover and fresh from the series finale of Severance, I reheated it all in a saucepan for the two of us for lunch. The kitchen went from smelling of reed diffusers to smelling amazing in the space of five minutes, and if that jumble of flavours didn’t go I can honestly say I would never have noticed. You don’t get this luxury when you holiday abroad, I thought to myself.
* * * * *
On the Friday night, hangover largely under control, I did something I don’t do nearly often enough: I went to the theatre. I’ve always loved Progress, the proudly independent theatre on the Mount, and despite moving into the neighbourhood last year I’ve not visited anywhere near as frequently as I ought. So months ago I booked tickets for Zoë and I to watch Lovesong, Abi Morgan’s bittersweet portrait of a 40 year marriage.
As an aside, I should say that although Progress is a five minute walk from my house it’s a surprisingly difficult distance to travel by taxi. You feel faintly embarrassed even asking, and Zoë had to explain the situation to her cab driver, waggling the moonboot lest she be judged as too posh to push. But once you’re there, Progress really is quite a charming place – a little bar, full of affluent, cultured patrons and an auditorium with seats that are surprisingly comfy and spacious.
Does it ruin the overall effect to say that I didn’t love Lovesong? Probably, although I thought a couple of the performances were excellent. Some of that, I think, was down to it being a bit of a bummer: a play which ends with the husband counting out the pills so his ill wife can take her own life – sorry about the spoilers – is never going to give you that Friday feeling. It reminds me of the time when I sat down with Zoë to watch Vertigo, having told her what an incredible film it was, to be met with blank rage when the credits rolled.
“You didn’t tell me it was going to end like that!”
“What did you expect? He wasn’t going to run through the streets to get to the airport just in time to deliver a big speech and stop her getting on the plane. It’s not that kind of film.”
Honestly, she was furious: I’ve never made that mistake again.
But Lovesong, well, it induced symptoms akin to Vertigo. We took the comically short taxi journey home dead set on eating chocolate in front of the television and watching something slightly more uplifting. Like the news. Even so, I recommend adding some culture to a Reading staycation, because mine wouldn’t have been the same without it. And I can’t recommend the whole Progress Theatre experience highly enough – in fact I’ve already booked a ticket for the comedy next month, to watch the splendidly named Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. I honestly can’t wait.
* * * * *
My final meal out of the first leg of my staycation was one of the biggest treats of all, Gurt Wings at Blue Collar Corner. I have been eating Gurt’s food since they first turned up at Blue Collar in Market Place, and I remember Glen telling me how good they were before he even landed them as a semi-regular trader. I recall trekking to Market Place regularly during lockdown, back when Glen wasn’t even allowed seating, and eating my chicken on the little concrete posts opposite Picnic.
I even remember eating their slightly obscene chicken burger special, served in an iced doughnut with a strip of candied bacon on top. They did it once a year, and I reckoned once a year was enough – until I had it two years in succession, and realised that once in a lifetime was probably enough. And of course, I remember going there after Zoë was discharged from the Royal Berks with Covid, in the winter of 2021, and them giving me a big portion of chicken for her, telling me to run like the wind and get it back to her.
That kind of thing makes you a fan. I have followed the hokey cokey of Gurt opening permanently at Blue Collar Corner, then pulling out, then coming back for special occasions. In that time I’ve eaten their chicken in Bristol, from time to time, and watched them open a permanent site in Bristol’s Wapping Wharf, team up with seemingly every influencer known to man, expand their fleet and start popping up at exotic locations like Royal Wootton Bassett and finally, in January, coming to Blue Collar Corner again, back for good, Gary Barlow style.
And even though I can now have them whenever I like it doesn’t, yet, make their food feel any less special. Besides, eating it when you’re on holiday – even if it’s a Saturday when everybody else is off work too – did feel a little different, sitting on the benches, people watching and waiting for the buzzer to go off. I decided to be clever and try one of Gurt’s two influencer-inspired specials – god knows why they’ve never asked to do a collab with me – strips loaded with garlic butter and festooned with Parmesan. It was a departure from my almost habitual order – popcorn chicken “Lost In Translation”, with gochujang and sriracha – and I enjoyed it, but not enough not to slightly regret not sticking to my guns.
It helped that we had the huge blocks of halloumi too, covered in habanero chilli syrup and crumbled honeycomb. That made everything better. Afterwards I put a picture of my food up and someone, online, said the chicken to tater tot ratio seemed all wrong. My instinct was to jump to Gurt’s defence, but looking back through my many photos of Gurt’s chicken strips I had to concede that the commenter had a point.
But that’s 2025 all over: you get less, for more, and if you decide to be outraged by it you’re not only hurting yourself but the businesses you love. There are times to be aggrieved by shrinkflation – I feel a bit stabby every time I buy a 90g bar of chocolate – but when you’re on holiday is not one of them.
Our commitment to using buses to spare Zoë’s foot was so total that we then did something ridiculous. We walked from Blue Collar to the very top of the Oxford Road, just so we could get the number 1 bus from Newbury. We did that because that bus terminates halfway up Blagrave Street, a stone’s throw from C.U.P. And we did that so we could sit in our time-honoured seats up at the window, on those fetching leather stools, drinking mocha and looking out on the town.
It was a Saturday, and opposite our seats we could see the Town Hall, and the entrance we’d emerged from ten months ago, into a swarm of confetti, newlywed, dazed and happy. I always love sitting there when married couples come out, mobbed by their friends and relatives, and I remember that glorious sunny day last year when that was me. I often holiday in the same places – Malaga, Bruges, Granada, Montpellier – and some of that is about going back to places that hold such happy memories for me. It turns out that a staycation in Reading is like that, too.
* * * * *
For the second leg of my staycation, the following week, there were some chores to do. Despite having moved last summer there were still boxes to unpack, order to impose on chaos, shit to get done. I am not someone who enjoys doing those things in my time off – I moan, grumble and gripe (“when else are you going to do it, then?” Zoë asks, and then I gripe some more because I don’t have an answer). But I agreed to it, just this once, on the basis that we interspersed it with treats. And the treat I had very firmly in mind – for the first morning of the staycation, no less – was a trip to Fidget & Bob.
Fidget & Bob has changed quite a lot from the place I visited and reviewed seven years ago. Back then it stayed open til early evening, and its weekly char siu was the stuff of legend. Its scrambled eggs, too: I still think about those. But it took a cautious approach during Covid, and since then it has honed what it does to remain excellent at it, just within carefully constrained limits.
These days it’s closed Sundays and Mondays, and the rest of the week it shuts just after lunch. And Fidget & Bob’s social media is self-effacing almost to a fault: they easily spend as much time promoting their weekly delivery of excellent doughnuts from Pipp & Co as they do talking about their own gorgeous sandwiches. That is, to be fair, typical of them: they’ve always been really good, they just don’t necessarily shout about it.
In the old days I would have gone there for brunch on a Sunday, but my chances to visit it are far fewer than they once were, so my staycation presented an opportunity that I absolutely seized with both hands. And it was lovely to sit in that room again – not quite as diehard as the people outside in the plaza – and drink Fidget & Bob’s terrific coffee.
So many memories are attached to that place: it was there, for example, that I went for a celebratory lunch after having my first Covid vaccine, crammed into a room at the Madejski Stadium with people in my demographic. “I reckon it’s the first time I’ve been in a room with so many people my age in a very long time” said my friend Mike when he had the same experience. “And all I could think was, do I look that tired?“
But the big draw at Fidget & Bob is, and possibly always was, the O’Muffin, their take on the sausage and egg McMuffin. I miss their square pucks of sausage meat, served as part of a brunch with their superlative scrambled eggs, but I understand why they stopped offering that. And the O’Muffin is far from a consolation prize. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest brunches, that floury muffin bursting at the seams with sausagemeat, fried egg, American cheese.
It is one of my favourite things to eat, just as going out for brunch is one of my favourite things to do on holiday. I personally like to dip mine in a little pool of HP, much to Zoë’s horror. I also like to have it with hash browns, a coffee, another coffee and, ideally, a brownie. And, precisely because I was on holiday, that was exactly how I had it.
* * * * *
I went to Orwell’s during my staycation. You might well already know that, because I’ve written about it.
I’m not going to repeat all that, but it did make me think about the benefits of a staycation. Because if I went on holiday, if I did a city break somewhere, I would plan loads of meals out. Some would be casual, some would be higher end. But often on holiday I might push the boat out for one of my meals and go somewhere fancy – Palodu in Malaga, for example, Parcelles in Paris, Bruut in Bruges or Michelin starred Reflet d’Obione in Montpellier. And yet, in this country, I wouldn’t necessarily do that: I seem to associate that kind of meal with going on holiday.
So here is another benefit of a staycation in Reading: giving yourself permission to do those things, the things that might otherwise be inextricably linked with going abroad. Maybe this is just me, and you’re all much better at allowing yourselves those luxuries. But, for me at least, it was lovely to be on holiday in Reading and to think right, what do I never get to do, and where have I always meant to go? As thought experiments go, it was an especially enjoyable one. Like my commenter said, all the way back at the start of this piece, it’s nice to pretend you’re visiting.
* * * * *
On the Friday, the post chores treat was a trip to Geo Café in Caversham. One chore, which was all Zoë and for which I take no credit, was to get our garage looking like this.
I don’t know when I got a garage that looks like a branch of Oddbins: it just kind of happened. I used to have a basement at the old house, and Zoë moved in and then next thing I knew she was buying racks off eBay and turning it into a beer repository. Then came the fridge, humming away and full of IPAs. I knew there were also boxes and crates of lambics under an old coffee table, ageing better than I have, but I’m not sure I realised the enormity of it.
And then we moved house, and moving the booze was an ordeal. So many boxes, so many bags and bags for life. Beers Zoë bought years ago, whole crates of Orval she was ageing “for an experiment”. Several bottles of gin we’d got as presents but not started drinking. And of course the wine – wine bought on trips away, wine bought on holiday, a couple of wines left over from our wedding, bottles of fizz given to us as gifts.
“Don’t worry, I’ll build you something” my father-in-law said to Zoë when he saw the space we had in the garage. And I believed him: my father-in-law is like a cross between the Wombles and MacGyver, he picks stuff up on his travels and is just very good at turning them into tangible things. One day he arrived with a bunch of wood, and the next thing you knew he had constructed this bespoke booze storage. Shortly after we moved in last year somebody tried to break into our garage – unsuccessfully, I might add. If someone managed it now I think we’d find them the next morning, comatose.
During the staycation we made a conscious attempt to make inroads into our stock levels, moving stuff into the fridge for drinking, picking some beers we’ve wanted to try for a while, opening one of the nicest white wines in our collection on a beautiful warm day. Didn’t even scratch the surface.
* * * * *
Another advantage staycations have over holidays – or not, depending on how you see these things – is the chance to catch up with friends. So I was delighted to make it over to Geo Café on a warm sunny afternoon, sit in the Orangery and have a good natter up with Keti, my friend who owns the place. Talking to Keti is one of my absolute favourite things to do, catching up on the comings and goings of Caversham and Henley life, hearing about her family and her kids.
It’s also a great way to keep yourself mentally sharp: Keti usually has three conversations with you simultaneously, and will effortlessly change lane from one to another seemingly at random, forcing you to keep up. It’s more effective, I suspect, than doing Sudoku. So Zoë and I stretched our legs out in the Orangery, drinking beautiful coffee and hearing all Keti’s news. I had an utterly marvellous plate of bacon and eggs – I may have been slightly hungover again, but what are holidays for? – and felt thoroughly fortified by the whole experience. It was, as people say, good for the soul. Seeing Keti’s new dog, who was absolutely adorable, was good for the soul too.
We had plans to be at Loddon Brewery that afternoon, but Keti refused to let us call a taxi. “Zezva will drive you” she said, in a way that suggested she wouldn’t hear anything to the contrary, from Zezva or from us. And so Zezva drove us out to Dunsden Green in the sunshine in his lipstick-red BMW, a recent acquisition of which he was very proud, and we settled into the leather seats and enjoyed south Oxfordshire whooshing past. A frequent part of holidays, for me, is finding my favourite café: but I did that in Reading, to be honest, long ago.
* * * * *
I had never been to Loddon before, so this is where you can all shout at the screen that you’ve known for a very long time that it’s extremely nice and question, with some justification, what took me so long.
It’s a beautiful spot, in the middle of nowhere, and I can see that for those of you who live nearby, or like yomping across the countryside from Emmer Green, dogwalking or otherwise, it must feel like a blessed place. It has a little farm shop – not extensively stocked, but nice all the same – and tables outside, and sitting there with a cold pint of Citra Quad, on a day just warm enough to allow for it, I got why the place is held in such reverence.
That weather didn’t last, but heading inside to their covered terrace if anything I liked it even better. “It reminds me of Buon Appetito” said Zoë, and I could see that, could see how the sun-dappled terrace and clear corrugated roof conjured up memories of the courtyard where I’d had so many memorable meals in the summer of 2022.
Loddon is kind of a craft beer tap room reimagined for affluent, rural, cask beer types. I don’t say that as a criticism, but at mid-afternoon on a Friday in March I was possibly the second youngest person there, and I was drinking with the youngest.
All that changed around five, and the demographic became fascinating: people finishing landscaping work nearby, coming in wearing their uniforms; young couples; mums with their kids, taking advantage of the boardgames stored inside. I loved how random it seemed, although I’m sure if I knew the place and the area better all those connections would make sense, and not be happenstance.
I’d also wanted to go to Loddon because I wanted to try the food. It used to be done by an outfit called Proper Takeout, but they now had a permanent site at the tap yard, and had rebranded themselves Proper Kitchen. They do different dishes on different days of the week – burgers on Thursdays, pizza on Saturdays, roasts on Sundays and so on. But on Fridays it was fish and chips, and I very much fancied checking it out.
The team behind Proper Kitchen are James Alcock, who used to work at Mya Lacarte and Thames Lido, and Nick Drew, who used to be head chef at Thames Lido. I rather offended him when he worked there, which I wrote about here, but fortunately for me he didn’t seem to recognise me when I went up and placed our order. If he did he was too professional to say, and if he gobbed in my tartar sauce it was too delicious for me to notice.
Almost everything we had from Proper Kitchen, would you believe, was knockout. Some of the best fish and chips I’ve had for a long time, combining pearlescent, flaky fish with light, lacy batter, the whole thing served on a pile of extremely good chips. The tartar sauce had that great combination of comfort and bite, and the battered halloumi, three thick squares of the stuff, was possibly my favourite thing of all. Only the frickles – big and watery, the batter just a tiny bit too sparse – slightly let the side down, but I was far too happy with everything else to care.
The taxi we booked to bring us home was late getting to Dunsden Green – I think they’d given the job to someone right in the middle of town, which forced us to spend an extra half hour there. It was about as far from a hardship as I could imagine: I went up to the bar, got us a final half each to finish on, and we sat there enjoying ourselves, aware that everybody else’s evening was several pints away from coming to an end.
* * * * *
Would you be put off eating somewhere if it only had four dishes on the menu? This issue reared its ugly head on our final dinner of the staycation, when a taxi whizzed us down the A4 to the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, one of my favourite pubs. Zoë has been there without me, for something to do with Reading CAMRA, and I went there last year without her to review it. But we’d not eaten there together since before the pandemic, and a holiday afforded a chance to remedy that.
But everything went wrong. We’d initially booked for lunch, but ten minutes before our cab was due to arrive we discovered a leak under the kitchen sink. So we needed to do something about that, and the booking and the cab were rearranged for the evening. It is a beautiful pub, and although the sun had gone down by the time we got there it was still a gorgeous, cosy place with that whiff of woodsmoke.
And yes, there were only four main courses on the menu, but that didn’t matter because one of them was made of magic words: 12 hour slow cooked lamb shoulder and so really, it didn’t matter what any of the other choices were. Except that our waiter sauntered over and, by way of introduction, told us they had run out of the lamb shoulder. No matter, we thought: the Bell’s venison burger was magnificent, and always on the menu, so the fallback option would do nicely.
Then the waiter wandered back and advised us that actually, they had also sold out of the venison burger. So a cancelled and reorganised booking and a pricey taxi later, I was presented with a choice between the fish course and a vegetarian risotto. Normally I get hangry when I don’t know where I’m going to eat on holiday but this was a new one on me: getting hangry because I wasn’t wild about either of my two possible dishes. If it hadn’t been for the sixty minute round trip, I’d probably have gone elsewhere.
But that just shows how little I know, because despite that setback I had the most fantastic meal. It started with the Bell’s selection of beers – a gorgeous IPA on keg by Mad Squirrel Brewery, and an even better one on cask by Swindon’s Hop Kettle, a brewery I love but whose stuff I never seem to see anywhere. And then, ordering from the menu, even with those limitations, everything was beyond top notch.
That meant sourdough toast golden and shining with melted whipped lardo, great charcuterie with a cairn of cornichons, all mine, in the middle of the plate. It meant a pigeon Caesar salad – who knew there was such a thing – which was a riot of game bird, immaculately dressed lettuce, bronzed croutons and lashings of grated cheese. And it meant the risotto I had been so sniffy about, a stodgy, starchy puddle of the stuff which combined elasticity and comfort, shot through with the first of the season’s asparagus, perked up with lemon and blanketed with Spenwood. Who needs twelve-hour slow cooked lamb shoulder anyway?
And then, because it was right at the very beginning of spring and because the Bell is very good at it, a sticky toffee pudding. It turns out that it’s okay to go to a place that only has two choices on the menu, provided it’s as trustworthy as the Bell. I shall never doubt them again, if only because Zoë said I told you so more than once on the taxi ride home.
* * * * *
I never like the final day of a holiday. Zoë likes to have a bit of a last day in our destination, leaving your bags with the hotel and taking one last wander before a late afternoon flight. For me, I can never enjoy that – although I’ve tried – so I would rather get up and go, taxi to the airport after checkout and have some of the day at home.
But there is something to be said, at the end of a holiday, for revisiting your favourite places before you start the sad journey back. And a staycation made that so much easier, and gave me the chance to right the biggest wrong of the week into the bargain. So Sunday lunchtime, mini-jetlagged from the clocks going forward, found us back at Blue Collar Corner, and this time I placed the Gurt order I should have made the first time.
They might be called Gurt Wings, but for me it’s always been about their JFC, their popcorn chicken. It’s the most generous, the most delicious and the most photogenic thing they do – chicken thigh, marinated in soy, fried up and then bathed in gochujang, striped with sriracha mayo and speckled with sesame. I remember the dark days before Gurt did popcorn chicken, and I remember trying an early prototype and thinking: yes, this. This is what you should be doing.
I am delighted they’ve never taken it off the menu since, and it will be months before I go to Gurt, order something else and realise, again, that I shouldn’t have strayed from the true path. Some places you visit on holiday have a signature dish, and if you ignore that you might as well not eat there at all. Afterwards we took that bus across town again, and had one more mocha in the window at C.U.P. It’s odd: normally I am sad about returning from holiday but happy to be reunited with my creature comforts, my stuff, my bed. How strange, and strangely welcome, to have a holiday where you’re never parted from them.
* * * * *
One final postscript before I take my leave of you this week.
A couple of days ago I was tagged on Instagram by a couple, readers and subscribers to the blog, who were on holiday in Bruges. They had been using my guide to the city, and I saw a picture of De Kelk, one of my favourite Bruges bars. I sent one of them a message to see how they were getting on, and I got the loveliest messages back. They’d eaten at a Bruges restaurant I loved, Bij Koen en Marijke, on the previous night and I was sent a picture of the two of them posing with Marijke. Marijke was beaming: everybody looked like they were having a marvellous time.
But the loveliest part was the next bit. My reader told me that she’d been eating at the restaurant with her husband and they got talking to a couple at the next table, who were from Sydney. They asked the Australian couple how they’d chanced upon Bij Koen en Marijke and – and I promise I’m not making this up – they were told “we found it on a great blog called Edible Reading”. How nice is that? That somehow out there in the universe, halfway across Europe, two couples who read my blog, living continents apart, both ended up in the same cracking restaurant on an April evening in Bruges. It’s a small world, sometimes.
I am pretty sure that people – from all kinds of places, not just Reading – use my guides to Bruges, Malaga and Granada to help them have a delicious holiday in those cities. And that makes me very proud indeed. But I know that if I published a piece called “City guide: Reading” it wouldn’t get anywhere near the same footfall (it would also be dishonest, of course, because wishing Reading was a city doesn’t make it so). So nobody will ever chance upon this piece of writing and decide, from somewhere else in the U.K. or Europe, to plan their next holiday in Reading. And that’s fine: those articles in the Sunday Times or The i Paper aren’t going to have that effect, either. I know people are missing out, but I won’t be able to convince them.
So the only people I might be able to persuade to have a holiday in Reading are those among you – and I knew many of you reading this will fall into this category – who already live here. And for what it’s worth, having done it, I heartily recommend a staycation in Reading. Stay in your own bed, plan to really make the most of spending time here without having to go to work, make time to revisit your favourites or discover something new. I’m so glad I gave it a shot, and it won’t be the last time I do. See our town slightly through the eyes of an outsider and you might fall in love with it a little, all over again. I certainly did.
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About five years ago, a very nice lady called Elizabeth came to the last ER readers’ lunch of the year, at Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen, back when it used to be on London Street. I assumed she must have had a terrible time for some reason, as she never came to another. But then this year she returned, attending one at Clay’s new home in Caversham, and the most recent lunch at Kungfu Kitchen’s new home. She’s brought both her husband and her son to lunches this year, so I guess perhaps she likes them after all.
Elizabeth is American, and her accent has that drawl of somewhere in the southern states, although I’ve never asked exactly where. And at my lunch in the summer I discovered that Elizabeth and I were as good as neighbours. Because, just like Kungfu Kitchen, I moved house this year and it turns out that Elizabeth lives just around the corner from me – in, I might add, a really handsome-looking house. She lives so nearby, in fact, that she told me that if she’d known when I was going on holiday she’d have taken my bins out for me: I was reminded of something the great Barry Crocker sang, nearly forty years ago.
Anyway a couple of weeks back I got an email from Elizabeth, telling me I should review Zotta Deli. It was on my radar already, an institution run by father and son Rocco and Paolo Zottarelli. It made the local news this year when it announced that it was closing its Winnersh premises in July after 10 years trading there, relocating to a new site on the Basingstoke Road, just opposite the holy trinity of Aldi, the Victoria Cross pub and that massive Morrisons. Now Reading residents, they opened their doors in their new spot at the end of September: all the best people seem to be moving house this year.
I knew people who raved about Zotta as a deli, and I have a feeling it used to supply arancini to the likes of Shed, but the move from Winnersh to Whitley was more than an alphabetical one: Zotta was also changing angle somewhat, going from being a pure deli to a spot where you could eat and drink, as well as picking up produce to take home. So a combination of Mama’s Way and Madoo, you could say, just around the corner from Minas Café and Whitley’s legendary New City Fish Bar.
The comparison with Minas Café was an apt one, and part of the reason why I was so keen to get to Zotta before the year was out. Because despite all the money owners have chucked at Siren RG1 and The Rising Sun in the town centre, the gems of the last couple of years in Reading have been far more likely to be found in the less fashionable parts of town, on the Oxford Road or Northumberland Avenue.
And in particular, they were more likely to be discovered in a new breed of cafés like Minas and DeNata Coffee & Co offering proudly regional food, with a crowd-pleasing full English on the side, just to keep the locals happy. After all, that was a model that had worked well in Reading ever since Kungfu Kitchen took over the old Metro Café on Christchurch Green in 2018, keeping the breakfast menu going while cooking up authentic Szechuan dishes into the bargain. And look what happened to them.
So Elizabeth already had my interest, but she also told me that she was a big fan of Zotta’s lasagne. “They’ve just moved, and a good review from you might help”, she added. “I’ll even drop you off there sometime if you want.” I could hear Barry Crocker clearing his throat again. Now, I may not be as motivated by altruism as I should be, but I’m definitely motivated by lasagne. So on a drab and overcast Saturday afternoon I hopped on a number 6 bus and made my way down the Basingstoke Road with carbs and comfort uppermost in my mind.
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