I don’t ordinarily review somewhere until it’s been open at least a month. That’s definitely the case here: Donnington Deli, the second offshoot of East Reading institution Café Yolk after 2025’s Baby Yolk, opened at the end of January, so you can’t say, eight months later, that I haven’t given it time to settle in.
That’s not the whole story, though, because I was in fact standing outside the door of Donnington Deli the very lunchtime it opened, genuinely excited to have a look round. I remember it was a bright Friday in January, and I was still in the early stages of recovering from my broken arm. I planned to do some shopping, have a coffee and maybe try a sandwich for lunch, but it wasn’t to be: I was disappointed that it was in fact just a sandwich shop, not a deli at all. I might have been even more miffed that they didn’t serve coffee.
I wandered up the road to Monty’s instead, and had a very agreeable brunch there. And I had a good old whinge about it all on social media, because I never learn to reserve judgment. It’s something I must work on next year: I know it drives my wife crackers at times. Anyway, I now see with the benefit of distance that being unimpressed that Donnington Deli wasn’t a deli was like being unhappy, all those years ago, when Bakery House turned out not to be a bakery. It misses the point somewhat, judging a book by its cover in that way.
I returned to Donnington Deli a couple of times the following month, tried two of their sandwiches and wasn’t entirely convinced. Their much-vaunted focaccia was dense, like a brick, and I thought the sandwiches were too big, not special enough. You got a free drink – not a coffee, because they still didn’t serve it – but it was something like cola or ginger beer through a siphon; I would rather have had a smaller, less expensive sandwich and paid extra for a drink I actually wanted, like a latte.
That was over six months ago, and I decided Donnington Deli needed a little more time – or, perhaps more accurately, that I did – before I visited on duty. I would leave it to find its feet, and prioritise other places instead. In the intervening months, Donnington Deli kept doing its thing. It was lauded by the usual suspects on Instagram with gormless, childlike wonder, but change was so incremental as to be unnoticeable. With one exception: coffee was introduced in April. See, I told you that was a mistake.
So why did I go back? It was a confluence of events: I had a Monday off, and the sun was out. Zoë’s convalescence from her operation was going well but I think she’d reached the stage, after a week of my fussing and cosplaying Laurence Nightingale, where “needing a rest” also included “needing a rest from me”. I thought a nice walk in the sunshine and a spot of lunch, a couple of hours out of the house, was just the ticket. So I meandered my way down the hill, ready to give Donnington Deli a look through fresh eyes.
It is a lovely space inside and out, and it’s come into its own in the summer months. The look and design, as with all of owner Alexandra Langlais’ spaces, is superbly done and it fills its street corner in a very striking fashion: racing green, perhaps in a subliminal hint to the building’s former purpose as a car dealership. The inside is plain and unfussy: a pale wood parquet floor with banquettes along its perimeter, that classy shade of green carried through to the counter and the menu boards suspended over it.
But the outside, which has come together in the months since opening, is also fetching and it’s where I sat on this visit. This was where you got your real people-watching opportunities seeing all the bustle of the Erleigh Road under way, all those lives momentarily intersecting with mine. Term hadn’t started yet, but the area still hummed with life – and this is, to some extent, Langlais’ achievement, because Café Yolk opposite has been drawing footfall to this part of town for well over a decade. It was a good mix of chairs and benches, sun and shade, and a really nicely done terrace.
Donnington Deli’s menu hasn’t changed significantly since it opened, with the exception that you can now get any of your sandwich fillings as a chopped salad instead. A total of ten sandwiches are on offer, all made fresh to order. Donnington Deli may be trying to emulate trendsetters like Sandwich Sandwich, producing overstuffed sarnies optimised for social media, but this isn’t quite as trailblazing as all that: that’s how sandwiches are made at Shed, or Pierre’s, and has been for many many years.
This might be me, but I was surprised by how little the selection offered by Donnington Deli appealed to me. It was like my experience at Mignonette a few weeks back – where every dish on the menu had some twist or feature that made it clamour to be chosen – only in reverse. Two of the ten sandwiches led with turkey, literally nobody’s favourite meat. Another couple featured balsamic glaze, which felt like a decidedly retro choice.
I also, in the interests of giving Donnington Deli the best possible chance, swerved all their sandwiches I’d already tried. That meant avoiding their pastrami sandwich, which had been crammed with pastrami to the point where it almost became a chore, with a wodge of sauerkraut which was lacking in acidity. Their chicken Caesar, too, with its strangely vinegary dressing and catering-pack bouncy bits of pink bacon rather than salty rashers.
It also meant avoiding the steak and cheese sandwich, which comes with a side of gravy. Zoë had ordered this on a previous visit and I thought it had a false advertising problem, being packed with something cold that you could describe as pastrami-adjacent. Here’s a hill I’ll die on: I think you should only be allowed to call it a steak sandwich you’re actually serving a steak – hot, off a grill or a griddle. Otherwise it’s a beef sandwich making promises it can’t possibly keep.
Anyway, this happily meant that I probably ordered Donnington Deli’s best – and easily their most distinctive – sandwich, the mortadella. They brought it out to me with my bottle of ginger beer: Donnington Deli has stopped including a cheap soft drink with your order, which I think is a good thing. But in the majority of cases it hasn’t affected the price, which means you’re effectively paying more for less.
Anyway, my mortadella sandwich was £10.50, and you can see that this is very much aimed at visual eaters: it comes on the lined, branded tray, cut open to give you a good look the cross-section. It’s all about the cross-section these days: not that I’d know, sticking to my outdated early twenty-first century web-logging in a world increasingly awash with one minute videos and silly little microphones.
Let’s do the positives first, because there were a fair few. As a combination of flavours, it worked superbly: on that level, at least, it wasn’t overkill. The mortadella was enjoyably silky – I’ve never been a lover of the stuff but this did a solid job of converting me. I am however a huge fan of mozzarella, and I loved it here, seemingly torn and adding that cool creaminess. And best of all was Donnington Deli’s pistachio pesto, which balanced this out precisely and tasted delicious. A huge sheaf of rocket rounded out a sort of pastel tricolore thing going on.
There was just enough happening here, and I appreciated the idea. And yet there were problems with the execution. I still struggled with the bread: they’ve moved from focaccia to ciabatta and although it wasn’t the huge dense block of previous visits it still felt like heavy going.
Not only that, but it wasn’t up to the job of holding its contents – the first half of my sandwich I just about managed to eat, but by time I got to the second leg it was soggy, not holding together. Toasting the bread might have helped, but there’s little evidence that any of Donnington Deli’s food is exposed to a primary heat source: I guess that’s why they sell a beef sandwich, not a steak one.
I would have liked this to be less comically huge, better balanced and more focused on being feasible, let alone fun, to eat. I would want it smaller, and ideally less expensive, and perhaps that just means this kind of thing is not for me. I couldn’t help but be left with my initial suspicion that this is food to be looked at and photographed, but not so much to be consumed.
It reminded me of what it’s like to buy shoes as a man with size 12 feet: you cast your eye over a pair of shoes in a shop and they look really snazzy, but when they bring the size 12 version up from the basement your stylish footwear has mysteriously morphed into clown shoes. This sandwich, I’m afraid, was clown shoes.
I realise that I should have said something good, then something constructive, then finished on something good. But this is feedback about a sandwich, not a feedback sandwich: I’ve never been terribly proficient at the feedback sandwich.
To try the full gamut of Donnington Deli’s offerings I ordered a coffee and a cake and moved to a sunnier table to polish them off. I had initial misgivings about the latte – it started bitter, but as I worked my way through it either it tasted better and better or I came to terms with it. I’m still not sure which. I’d say it wasn’t as good as the coffee was at Café Yolk back when they bought beans from Anonymous Coffee, but better than the coffee I had at Yolk after they jogged Anonymous on.
They used to use Kingdom, they now sell their own beans: it’s anybody’s guess who roasts them for Yolk and Donnington Deli. I liked it, though – it might just be worth making a stop in east Reading for, although that’s also because that part of town is starved of good coffee. The millionaire shortbread, however, was unspecial: the chocolate a tad waxy, the caramel too molten. Perhaps there was just no pleasing me that day: the whole thing came to just over £20.
The reason for leaving it a month before I review somewhere new is, of course, to give them a chance to iron out their teething troubles. I reckon 99% of hospitality businesses, especially independents, open before they’re really ready and keep tinkering and fixing the snagging while they come to terms with beginning to trade.
The benefit of leaving it longer, as I did here, is that it gives a hospitality business proper space and time – not to iron out day one niggles, but to work out what it is and who it wants to be. And often, I’m sure, that is the case. But sometimes a business is authentically itself from day one, it knows what it aims to achieve and is set on doing exactly that.
In some ways, I suppose, it’s to Donnington Deli’s credit that I believe that’s precisely what has happened with them. Because the review I have written, eight months in, is remarkably similar to the one I might have produced if I’d visited it on duty in February. I think the range of sandwiches isn’t interesting enough, the execution feels unbalanced and, for my money, it is maximalist in a way that even I, a greedy sod, can’t buy into. I left a fair amount of my sandwich, which isn’t like me at all.
I admire their single-mindedness of purpose, it’s just not a purpose I can rally behind. For this kind of thing, Mac’s Deli in Theale remains the place to beat: Donnington Deli feels more to me like a slick rebrand of somewhere like Pierre’s in Reading: the style is something else, but the substance needs to catch up. The fact that Yolk still has queues while Donnington Deli wasn’t the busiest on my visit might bear that out.
But I would sound a note of caution, because I was unmoved by Yolk when I first visited back in 2013 and it, still thriving and expanding, has clearly had the last laugh. I’m just one person, and you have to weigh my opinion carefully. What do I know, anyway? After all, there’s plenty of evidence that owner Alexandra Langlais might have a far better idea what kind of food the folks of East Reading are looking for than I do.
Donnington Deli – 6.6
37 Erleigh Road, Reading, RG1 5NB
0118 3131129
https://www.instagram.com/donningtondeli
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