You can have a great network of informants, but sometimes there’s no substitute for getting out and about, keeping your eyes peeled. It’s a fact that our local journalists – what’s left of them, anyway – have forgotten, working from home. So last Saturday, after a very enjoyable lunch at Blue Collar and a coffee at Compound, my friend Dave and I took a wander down the Oxford Road to be virtuous and get some steps in ahead of a few afternoon beers at the Nag’s Head.
Much of what I saw was as expected. Traditional Romanesc are still there, in the spot where I had so many brilliant meals when it used to be Buon Appetito. Vampire’s Den, too (“is that really the only reference to Romania they thought people would get?” was Dave’s take). Oishi had definitely gone from “temporarily closed” to “never coming back in a million years” and Workhouse had been given a very attractive makeover, although the new store front didn’t seem to contain the name anywhere.
But there were, as there always seem to be, places that were news to me. Near the top of the Oxford Road, a place called AfrikInn was selling fufu, fried yam and jollof rice. SORRY WE’RE CLOSED TODAY SEE YOU TOMORROW said handwritten signs on the door and window. Further down, not far from Momo 2 Go, a place called Agnes’ Coffee Shop was open, selling coffee and Polish street food: the word Zapiekanki ran vertically down the brickwork, in a bigger font than the name of the café. I made a mental note of both.
But the place Dave and I were vaguely ambling to check out was Portuguese café DeNata, which opened in March this year, replacing – and this is where it gets confusing – Portuguese café Time 4 Coffee, which opened last August. It had been on my list for ages and although Dave and I were both full from lunch we figured an expedition to research pasteis de nata was a worthy pre-pint pursuit. Dave’s son has just come back from Lisbon on holiday, and hearing all about it made me very glad I had my own trip booked there later in the year.
We ordered a couple of pasteis, and the proprietor – instantly bright and personable – took great pride in showing me the menu; I chatted away with her for so long that poor Dave had to pay for the egg custard tarts. The owner asked me to follow DeNata on Facebook, and I dutifully promised I would. The place was bustling on a Saturday afternoon, and warm, but I didn’t pay it too much attention. Dave and I had a pub table to bag, after all, and a pastel de nata to inhale.
Anyway, the next day I left the house mid-morning, took a couple of buses and turned up at DeNata just before midday for lunch, to eat the meal you’re about to read about. So why did I do that?
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The origin story for this week’s review goes all the way back to last December, and involves a chap called Chris.
I was at home recovering from Covid, minding my own business, and I saw that Chris had sent a message to the blog’s Facebook page containing a video of him and his mates having dinner on a Tuesday night at Masakali. It had just opened at the time. To be honest I was just relieved it wasn’t hatemail, but it was rather sweet to see the camera panning round a group of friends enjoying dinner together. “Just sending you a video message, which is a bit weird” Chris began, before telling me I really should try Masakali. “It’s the restaurant place opposite TGI Friday that always changes. Love you Edible Reading! Please come here before it closes!”
I took my time – I blame the Covid – but then of course I got round to it a few weeks back, and when I did a comment popped up on the Facebook post about it. “The video message outcome!”, Chris said to a friend, one of his fellow diners. I resolved to be a little bit quicker acting on Chris’ next recommendation – it seemed the least I could do – and I got my opportunity when he chipped in after my controversial visit to the mediocre Honesty at Thames Quarter.
Chris knew just how I could get over the disappointment of that meal. If I wanted a seriously good pain au chocolat, he said, I needed to get myself to U. Bakery in Crowthorne. It was a stone’s throw from the train station, so no fuss to get to. He sent me a message with more details, telling me that the owner Uri was from Tel Aviv and the range of baked goods included plenty of stuff you couldn’t get elsewhere. “I can tell you with certainty that you won’t be disappointed” he added. “If you don’t agree I’ll pay for your train fare!”
How could I argue with an endorsement like that? So I did my research, and made plans to hop on the Gatwick train last Saturday, just in time for lunch in Crowthorne. The homework I’d done backed up what Chris had told me: U. Bakery opened last spring, owner Uri Zilberman did indeed hail from Tel Aviv and he was keen to offer a menu inspired by the food he grew up with. That meant, among other things, challa and chocolate babka, neither of which you often see round these parts. The smelly, tired old Gatwick train was packed that morning, but I at least felt like I was taking it to go somewhere better.
U. Bakery is literally two minutes’ walk from Crowthorne station and was very full when I got there. It’s a corner plot with tables outside on both sides, nearly all of which were occupied by couples and families enjoying the sun. Plenty of dog walkers, too, which was unsurprising with all the wide open space nearby. Inside I think the place seated about sixteen and again a lot of the tables were full, with a big queue in place, some waiting for tables, some grabbing loaves and coffee to go. The whole thing had that tasteful, muted, Scandi look to it – the baked goods were all on display under glass behind the counter and through a door to the left you could see the bakery, where everything on sale was produced.
The place was bright and sunny, light pouring in through the big windows, and had the happy bustle of success. And I thought to myself that Chris might be on to something, because I couldn’t think of anywhere in Reading that combined this kind of style and polish with goods baked on the premises. You had the Collective, which had this kind of aesthetic but bought their stuff in, or Geo Café, which made good pastries, but didn’t bake most of its own bread and had a more homely feel. Or, of course, there was Rise which has plenty of fans but has no space for customers to eat in.
No, on the face of it U. Bakery was the whole package – and racking my brain the only place I could think of that was anything like it was Exeter’s rather magical Exploding Bakery, just round the corner from its own train station. If you’d told me I could have something even a little like the Exploding Bakery a thirteen minute train journey from Reading I might have exploded myself, with jubilation. But anyway, looking good was less than half the battle: it was time to try the merchandise.
I’d been hoping to try the much vaunted pain au chocolat but by the time I got there, a smidge before noon, pretty much all the pastries were gone: I now understand from looking at U. Bakery’s Instagram that pastries in general and cruffins in particular shift fast after the bakery opens at 9am. But there was still an excellent range of sweet treats, many of which looked enormously tempting – Basque cheesecake, blueberry muffins, orange polenta cake and that babka. Easter being round the corner there were also hot cross buns and chocolate hot cross buns, although regrettably the latter still came with dried fruit which ruled them out for me.
A few savoury options were on display too – huge, spiralling feta swirls, filo bourekas stuffed with cheese. And then there was a range of sandwiches – mozzarella, gouda, tuna or roasted veg. They also sold big squares of rosemary focaccia, although I wasn’t quite sure why you’d pick one of these with no filling, or oil to dip it in. Whether by accident or design, nearly everything was vegetarian and the rest was pescatarian, and I heard the staff running some customers through a decent range of gluten free options including a potato sourdough which nearly made it home with me.
Prices struck me as hugely reasonable, especially when you got an idea of the work that went into everything, so cakes were between three and four pounds and those sandwiches were just shy of six pounds. I thought back to my trip to Honesty at the start of February, a place which on paper had claimed to be everything it seemed U. Bakery actually was, and I understood why Chris had told me to check out this place.
Of course, none of that would have mattered if the stuff from U. Bakery had been as underwhelming as Honesty’s output. But that never felt like it was going to happen, and once I took my order to the table I’d bagged and began to tuck in I was delighted that the hype was more than justified. My mozzarella sandwich was outstanding stuff. I sometimes think the clamour about burrata has relegated mozzarella to the status of also-ran, but great mozzarella is a wondrous thing, and the best thing you can do with it is serve it cold and fresh in thick discs, not heat it up, stretch it out and kill its magic.
Here it was its best self, and it came with gorgeous cherry tomatoes, red and yellow bombs of sweetness, some salad and a glug of balsamic vinegar which transformed it from components to a composition. But the thing I liked best of all about this sandwich, and there was plenty to choose from, is that the bread was the star of the show. It was a long, thin pretzel roll with that distinctive taste, the slightly glazed exterior and little salt crystals. It had the structure to stand up to all the goodies that had been put in it, not dry, not mushy from the balsamic, a great roll in harmony with a great filling.
What a sandwich! What a great way to spend just over a fiver and just under fifteen minutes on a train. Lunchtimes next week, I thought to myself, would be pretty dreary – and good luck finding anything of this quality in Reading for approaching the same price.
U. Bakery’s cinnamon bun was a triumph, too. More like a kanelbulle than a more ho-hum cinnamon swirl, it was a dense and sticky knot of sweet and lacquered joy. I tore into it and tore it apart, enjoying every mouthful. I think it’s possibly the best cinnamon bun I’ve had in this country, and up there with anything I can dimly remember from Copenhagen four years ago. It made me wish I’d got there earlier so I could try the pastries, although that would have meant sitting around like a lemon for quite some time until lunch. Maybe this was why all the Crowthorne residents sitting in the café looked so at ease with their life choices, because they didn’t have to rely on Great Western bloody Railways to get there.
If U. Bakery’s weakest link was its coffee, that’s not to say it wasn’t good. It came in an extremely tasteful cup, which by the looks of it they sell in the shop, and although my first sip made me think it had some lingering bitterness which might keep it out of the top tier, I found as I worked my way through it that it was a very creditable latte.
This is the point in the review where I wish I was telling you about the Basque cheesecake; I saw a portion go past to another table, simultaneously looking burnished and fluffy, and I thought is it greedy to go back up? And I nearly did, but I’m getting married in a couple of months and I keep telling myself that when I stand in the Town Hall, wearing a suit for the first time in something like five years, I’d ideally like to be ever so slightly less corpulent than I am now. It probably won’t happen, but I have to at least give myself a fighting chance.
Even so, I could easily see how you could settle in at U. Bakery for longer – grab another coffee, try one of those savoury snackettes or another cake, watch the line of people snaking in to collect their treasures. Everyone was so happy to be there, and the staff were uniformly all smiles and sunshine. I heard the spiel, obviously frequently delivered, explaining that you had to be there early for cruffins. One customer, walking away with an armful, said “it’s not for me, my wife’s in the car”, which may or may not have been true. On a warmer day, those tables outside would have looked mighty tempting, too.
All told, my bill came to just under twenty pounds, although that’s because I also picked up a little bag of chocolate chip shortbread to take home; I’d been under strict orders to bring something back with me. We ate them a couple of nights later in front of Interior Design Masters, and if you struggle to believe that a bag of six dense little shortbread biscuits, crumbly but with a hint of chewiness, shot through with plenty of dark chocolate, can be worth seven quid, all I’ll say is that U. Bakery might just change your mind. They just about changed mine.
The trains back from Crowthorne are hourly, so with time to kill I hopped next door to The Hive, which is more of a café by day and a craft beer bar by night, and sat there with a beer and a paperback. The Hive, like U. Bakery, is the kind of place Reading just doesn’t have – the closest was the Grumpy Goat, before it closed, although the new Siren Craft place due to open on Friar Street will change the landscape considerably.
It was a lovely place to while away the time, full of people watching opportunities (and, again, plenty of those people had dogs), there was outside space for when the weather was good and aside from the half dozen or so beers on keg the fridges were groaning with interesting stuff, some of it from breweries I’d never heard of. And I thought how curious it was – Crowthorne was kind of a one horse town, with just two places I might want to visit, but they happened to be side by side and between them, offering coffee, beer and baked goods, they ticked a lot of my personal boxes. The Hive also did food, including charcuterie boards, and I made a mental note for next time.
So there you have it – a very useful tip, from the man who sent me a random video three months ago. And I’m very grateful that he did, because otherwise I might never have heard about U. Bakery at all, let alone paid a visit. Having done so, I could appreciate why the people of Crowthorne might have been keeping it to themselves, but I don’t see why they should have all the fun. So thank you very much, Chris. You don’t have to reimburse the train fare, although I know you never expected that you’d need to. I might have to invoice you later in the year, though, to help support my baked goods habit as it careers out of control.
U. Bakery – 8.2 198 Duke’s Ride, Crowthorne, RG45 6DS
As of October 2024 Filter Coffee House has changed its interior layout and so is now takeaway only.
Filter Coffee House, a tiny café on Castle Street offering authentic South Indian coffee, opened last August. It occupies a unit which as far as I can remember used to be home to a very small, rather unsuccessful produce store by the people behind Tamp Culture (remember them?). I found myself stopping in last year a couple of weeks after Filter Coffee House opened and, slightly bending my usual rule to wait a month, I talked about it on social media.
I couldn’t help it. I waxed lyrical on Instagram about their coffee and, in particular, their banana bun, a confection quite unlike anything I’d ever eaten before. Not quite sweet, not quite savoury but glazed, complex and moreish, it was not the kind of thing you eat and forget. Quite the contrary: you want to tell the world about it. I loved it so much that when I put together my list of Reading’s 50 best dishes last September, as part of the blog’s 10th birthday celebrations, I snuck it in at number 47. I called it a little miracle.
Maybe I was jumping the gun but I had a feeling it was going to be huge, and I wanted my admiration of that banana bun to be a matter of public record as soon as possible. Because there are few four word combinations in the English language quite as satisfying, if you ask me, as I told you so.
Anyway, the amount of praise that bun has garnered on social media since has borne out my hunch. But not only that, if you follow Filter Coffee House’s hugely winning Instagram feed you’ll see that they’ve really flourished in the last five months. The month after they opened they teamed up with nearby Rise to expand their range of baked goods. In October they introduced a menu of Saturday specials, and in November they brought in a sandwich menu.
In December, naturally, there was a Christmas menu – the “Mistle-Toast” is still available, if you’re tempted – and now Filter Coffee House also stocks goodies by Cocolico, Reading’s vegan pâtissière. The overall picture is one of constant forward movement and innovation, and it shows no signs of stopping: last Sunday, for the first time, they had a stall at Caversham’s Artisan Market.
And yet, shamefully, with one thing and another I had not been back since that first visit back in August. Of all the places I’d neglected in the latter half of 2023, sorting this one was right at the top of my list. So last Saturday, lured by that specials menu and fresh from the elation of having bought our wedding rings in town, Zoë and I sauntered over, keen to see how things had progressed.
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I think it was Kierkegaard who said, very wisely, that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forward. And I think you could say the same about food trends: it’s easy to pontificate at the start of the year about what you think is going to happen, but the world of food is full of surprises and it’s far better to bide your time, get to the point where the New Year is around the corner and identify the patterns with the benefit of hindsight.
It doesn’t take much to form a food trend in Reading either, even if it is the U.K.’s largest town: two similar establishments opening in a year is a coincidence, three is a trend. So last year Reading had two main trends, I would say. The first was biryani places springing up all over the shop – Biryani Mama, Biryani Lounge, Biryani Boyzz and so on. Add in the ambiguously-named Biryanish and you definitely have yourself what passes for a trend. And of course there was the proliferation of sushi places – Intoku, Iro and You Me Sushi all opened in quick succession to challenge the primacy of Sushimania, Yo Sushi and grab and go chains like Kokoro and Itsu.
What about this year? Marugame Udon and Cici Noodle Bar opened weeks apart, but I’m not sure that’s quite enough. For me the biggest trend of the year has been a raft of interesting cafés, moving beyond the ubiquity of third-wave places like Compound or C.U.P. to offer something less generic and more regionally specific, potentially the antidote to all those “not another coffee place” bores out there (where will they go now Berkshire Live has kicked the bucket?).
So down the Oxford Road you have Time 4 Coffee, a cafe apparently offering pasteis da nata, Portuguese bread with chouriço and a range of other traditional dishes from that under-represented cuisine; I’ve not yet been, but it’s high on my list to review next year. On Castle Street Filter Coffee House is already making a name for itself with its authentic South Indian filter coffee and absolutely delicious banana buns, and continues to develop a big menu for such a little space, with intriguing specials available every Saturday morning.
And then finally we have the subject of this week’s review, Minas Cafe, which opened in April and is perhaps the most incongruous of the lot – a Brazilian café, no less, in Whitley, of all places. That I hadn’t been to check it out yet felt like it was verging on neglect, so last Sunday when I had the day to myself I hopped on the number 6 bus just before lunchtime and alighted by Buckland Road. Whitley was shrouded in a drizzly mist, the day murky and dreich: a less Brazilian scene was difficult to imagine.
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Barista & Beyond closed in February 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
If I was giving out ratings for having a heartwarming backstory, it’s hard to imagine any business would finish above Barista & Beyond in my list. The café was set up by social enterprise Ways Into Work, which supports people with disabilities, those on the autism spectrum or with mental health challenges to get into work. It offers internships, including at the café, and a better cause is difficult to envisage. I’ve wanted to visit Barista & Beyond for some time, and I’ve been paying close attention to their social media, which I highly recommend following.
It tracks the creation of the space last year, them beginning to trade in November and, for reasons I didn’t entirely grasp, their grand opening in March. It paints a lovely picture of the business, which is just past the IDR, between the Oxford Road and Chatham Street, around the corner from Rise Bakehouse. Looking through Barista & Beyond’s Instagram I got a real picture of their mission to, as they put it, change lives one job at a time. It depicts a happy little spot, nicely fitted out, with pictures of bright smoothies in the sunlight and fresh, vibrant salads. It also features an interview with their intern, Charlie, which I defy you to watch without feeling at least a little moved: put it this way, he’s a lot wiser at eighteen than I was.
So I really wanted to go, and last weekend it reached the top of my to do list: Zoë and I headed west past the Broad Street Mall, but in truth I had a certain amount of trepidation. This is not an establishment I would enjoy giving a negative review to, so I wasn’t overjoyed about the possible risk of that. But there was also the equal and opposite danger, that I would patronise Barista & Beyond, measure them against different standards or pat them on the head for simply existing at all. I would hate to do that, and I doubt they would want a review like that. So I approached the front door hoping they did well, but determined not to say anything that could sound like “didn’t they do well”?
It really is a lovely spot, with an almost European feel, like you could be in Rotterdam or Ghent. They have plenty of outside space which catches the sun, so much so that we decided to eat inside. But the inside is lovely too – very spacious, with tables clustered along the walls and next to those full-length windows, white tiles and lime green banquettes. They haven’t chosen to pack people in, to the extent where the room can feel a little bit empty, but there was a steady stream of punters coming in to get takeaway coffees or the smoothies. I couldn’t blame them: the smoothies looked good.
The website says that everything is made fresh every day, and the display cabinet showed off sandwiches, salads and wraps. They serve breakfast before midday, which I was sadly too late for, but the range of options was good but not huge: three toasties, two wraps, a BLT and a couple of salads. I couldn’t see prices anywhere for the food, although their website does list them and only the breakfast is more than a fiver. I ordered a couple of sandwiches and two coffees which came to just under twenty pounds, presumably because they added VAT.
Coffees came first – a flat white and a latte – and were so hot that we left them to cool down, drinking them after our sandwiches. The flat white looked the part, with a fine foam, while the latte perhaps set lower expectations.
“I wonder if they’ve had training on how hot to get the milk” said Zoë. “At Workhouse the temperature is very carefully controlled, but here it feels like they might have heated it until it’s boiling and then poured it in.”
I agreed, and when I finally got round to sipping my latte I was prepared for the worst. But actually it was lovely: nicely balanced without the slightest scorched bitter note. I always think coffee in Reading falls into three different tiers – the top one is made up of the likes of C.U.P., Compound, Workhouse and the Grumpy Goat, the middle one is the chains that are mediocre but not terrible like Nero and Pret and then the bottom one is the awful burnt stuff you’re best off avoiding. Just to confound me, Barista & Beyond sits between that top and middle one – not as good as Compound a couple of minutes’ walk away but not miles off either. I couldn’t tell if this made me happy or relieved, but perhaps it didn’t matter.
Zoë ordered the chicken caesar wrap. It’s good that she did, because I wouldn’t have: to me, looking at it in the cabinet, the chicken seemed too thick, too uniform, too catering pack. But Zoë thought it was superb, the caesar dressing with a good thud of garlic and the whole thing really enjoyable.
She also pointed out, and she’s right, that Barista & Beyond makes wraps properly – nothing falling out of the bottom and yet no stodgy wodge of tortilla crumpled together at the bottom for you to wade through either. Many places whose wraps I enjoy don’t assemble them as carefully as Barista & Beyond. It’s also worth pointing out that your sandwich comes, standard issue, with a sizeable number of good quality ready salted crisps, and some salad: largely undressed, so not really my bag, but your mileage may vary.
I’d chosen the tuna melt and also found much to enjoy. I don’t know if Barista & Beyond buy their bread from Rise round the corner, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had. For what it’s worth, I thought it was nicer bread than the stuff I remember last time I had a Tuna Turner at Shed, robust and grill-striped with a nice thick crust. It’s not possible to talk about tuna melts in Reading, really, without the spectre of the town’s most famous version on Merchant’s Place, and if Barista & Beyond’s fell short it wouldn’t be too hard to close the gap.
The menu talks about red onion, which would have made a huge difference, but there wasn’t any in my toastie. Something was needed to give contrast and crunch, whether that was red onion, capers or, as Shed also use, jalapeños. Any of that would have made this an even better tuna melt. But was it better than one you’d get out of plastic packaging at Costa, Starbucks or Pret? Of course it bloody was, and you get a heap of ready salted crisps thrown in for good measure. To come second to the Tuna Turner, in this town, is no disgrace, and I suspect this sandwich did exactly that.
Wanting to give the place more of a runout after our sandwiches, not quite ready to leave with our coffee approaching prime sipping temperature, I went up and ordered a couple of slabs of chocolate brownie. Again, I have no idea whether they were from Rise – I’m guessing not, but if they were they weren’t Rise’s best effort. Not terrible by any means, but too much reliance on sugar and not enough on cocoa, the texture a little one note without enough contract between the brittle and the fudgy. A couple of very gratifying chunks of chocolate made the occasional bite a joyous surprise, but it needed more.
I tried eating it with a fork, but soon abandoned that – the brownie didn’t have enough give, and I could already picture it flying across that wide open space. Still, you got two generous squares for six pounds, so not unreasonable value but not reaching the heights of brownies you can pick up at the Grumpy Goat, at Workhouse or at – I’m sorry, but this is true – Prêt A Sodding Manger. I was hoping these would give Barista & Beyond a little bounce to the rating at the end, but really they confirmed the decision I’d already made. I didn’t hang about to take a picture, though, so the brownie can’t have been that bad.
I’ve been putting off talking about the service, careful of walking that tightrope I mentioned at the start of this review, but here goes: it was superb. We were served by two different members of staff, one of whom was Charlie of Barista & Beyond’s Instagram fame. And perhaps it’s not possible to shed those preconceptions, or the first impression I’d got from watching that video, but he was just excellent. Nothing was any trouble, and every time he told me I was “very welcome” or to have a lovely day I was positive that he meant every word.
You don’t always get this in hospitality, talking to someone who comes across as absolutely loving their job, feeling lucky to do it and wanting to do it as well as they can. In turn I felt quite lucky to be looked after by Charlie and it made me think, far more than I expected to. I know hospitality is underpaid and undervalued, I know that it struggles to find people since the pandemic and that awful thing that some bigots voted for in 2016.
I know, fundamentally, that the solution to that is to pay people more, which restaurants can’t do for the same reasons they can’t charge more for food, because people seem to think it’s the one part of the economy that skips along carefree while our supermarket bills go through the roof. Go figure. And I can understand why the people that do work in cafés, particularly ones that serve crap coffee and pay dud wages, might not want to bring the sunshine day in, day out. But I didn’t get any of that from Charlie, and watching the other customers filing in to get coffees and smoothies I don’t think they did either.
Comparisons, at times like this, are necessary but can sound brutal. Does Barista & Beyond do the best coffee in the area? I’m afraid not: you need Compound Coffee for that. I suspect you can get better cakes at Rise, and Barista & Beyond’s sandwiches are solid but not in the top tier of Reading’s lunch choices. Barista & Beyond is a good café, not a great one, although it has potential. But it is a great idea, not a good one, and the service and the experience will stay with me long after I’ve forgotten ninety-nine per cent of the lunches I eat this year.
You may read all this and come away wanting to give it a try, to spend your money doing some good; I have a feeling that people who read my blog, like me, might not weigh all these factors as dispassionately as others do. I imagine that if you do visit, whoever they have behind the counter at that point, you may find it gives you food for thought. And that’s something you simply can’t find just anywhere. Have I avoided sounding patronising? I really don’t know, but I honestly hope so.
Edible Reading 