Believe it or not, some restaurants have opened in Reading this year that aren’t pizza restaurants. Granted, so far the culinary landscape has been dominated by Paesinos, Amò, Zi’Tore and Peppito’s (the latter last seen rounding up Reading’s influencers to gush away on Instagram), but there are still other things happening in town. Not masses, because it’s 2025, hospitality is on a knife edge and everybody is struggling to make money, but some nonetheless.
So we have national chain Rosa’s Thai on Jackson’s Corner, and Blue Collar Corner has taken on two permanent tenants in the form of Burger Society and Gurt Wings. Later in the year we are promised London coffee chain Notes, Japanese restaurant Kawaii from the people behind Osaka, a new café from the owners of Café Yolk and an Italian sister restaurant to Wokingham’s Ruchetta, all on Station Hill.
And of course, how could anybody forget our other big money arrival Cosy Club, which opened last month on the edge of the Oracle in the old Lakeland site? The Reading Chronicle went there, without paying of course, and admired it so much that they wrote an ‘honest food review’ that waited until the very end to admit that their food was gratis. “Before anyone starts moaning yes, this was a gifted experience,” concluded the article, “and like many other journalists who work for numerous publications, I was invited to try the food at a new restaurant.” Elton John was wrong: #AD seems to be the hardest word.
All that is going on in the centre, but there isn’t much of note out in the suburbs: Woodley has welcomed somewhere called “Woodley Food Stasian”, which specialises in dishes from Hong Kong and Vietnam and, at a guess, misspelling the word ‘station’.
More randomly still, Winnersh is about to welcome something called Club India where the Pheasant pub used to be, run by a chef who formerly worked at Wokingham’s Bombay Story and Sultan. It also boasts some kind of consultancy role for another chef who apparently held two Michelin stars in San Francisco and had another restaurant in Palo Alto. How involved he’ll be is anybody’s guess: San Francisco/Palo Alto/Winnersh isn’t a triumvirate you find on many websites.
Of course, both Woodley Food Stasian and Club India might be good, and at some point I might check them out. But so far, this year, it’s slim pickings: restaurateurs are not feeling like taking the plunge, and you can hardly blame them.
Last but not least, that brings us to the subject of this week’s review: Dolphin’s Caribbean Kitchen, which opened two months ago in the old 7Bone site on St Mary’s Butts. It takes its name from the nickname of owner Randolph Bancroft, who has run a catering business for about twenty years: I’m pretty sure I saw Dolphin’s with a gazebo at the street food markets in Bracknell, when I worked there what feels like a lifetime ago.
This restaurant in the town centre, though, is his first ever permanent site, and when he spoke to the local press about it you could sense his excitement. Reading had never had anything like Dolphin’s, he said, and although the climate was tough in hospitality, he added that he hoped good old-fashioned community spirit would help his restaurant to thrive. “By the grace of god, I will make it” he concluded.
Well, he’s right about one thing if nothing else – Reading hasn’t had a proper, sit-down Caribbean restaurant in as long as I can remember. We had Chef Stevie cooking out of the Butler for a glorious year or so, we have a place called Da Spottt – yes, three Ts, don’t act like it’s my fault – on the Oxford Road which apparently has erratic opening times, and we have Seasons doing takeaway nearby, their Cemetery Junction site having closed long ago.
And of course we have the OG – Perry’s, which has been trading next to Market Place for eons. It clearly has its fans, because when I re-reviewed it earlier in the year they all came out of the woodwork to say it was my fault for turning up an hour before it closed. Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of that, it tells its own story: Perry’s shuts at 7 and is unlicensed, so although it is a restaurant, it’s not a full on evening restaurant.
It’s weird, really: Reading has one of the biggest Bajan communities outside Barbados. When Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine used to cook at Blue Collar Corner the queue stretched almost to Chancellors Estate Agents every Friday. People would wait over half an hour for that jerk chicken: I know, I was one of them. And most of the time, I almost didn’t begrudge those thirty minutes in line. Their food was that good.
So the demand is there, but for some reason nobody has ever really tried to capitalise on it, before Dolphin’s came along. It felt well worth investigating, so I met Zoë off the train on Monday night and we went along to see if Bancroft had managed to fill that gap in the market.
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Earlier this year, the legendary London restaurant St John celebrated its 30th birthday, and to mark the occasion it went back in time, offering its 1994 menu on weekdays at, and perhaps this is the crucial part, 1994 prices. Reservations were snapped up in no time, no doubt by people who could easily afford the 2024 prices.
A similar thing happened closer to home in September when the Nag’s Head, mindful that it was about to increase its prices for the first time in a while, decided to take its customers back to 2007, when it first opened. For one night, ale, lager and cider were £2.50 a pint: I imagine they shifted a lot of booze that night, even if punters mostly paid for it the next day.
So the whole retro thing is very on trend, I thought to myself. How could I jump on this bandwagon? And then I realised – I could do something to mark the inception of my blog too, and combat rising inflation into the bargain.
I don’t mean money, because nobody was going to charge me 2013 prices. The only people paying the same amount for food now as they were eleven years ago are influencers, or “content creators” as they now like to call themselves. You know, the ones who ought to be using the hashtag #grifted. “I didn’t see a bill”, they frequently brag.
No, the inflation I’m talking about is word count: it’s no secret that my reviews nowadays are significantly longer and more detailed than they once were. I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Mark Twain, when he said that if he’d had more time he’d have written a shorter letter. There’s worse company to be in, as a writer. So how could I take you back to 2013 when this blog first began?
And then I decided: this week I would review Perry’s, one of the final 2013 venues I’m yet to revisit for the blog. And I’d ensure my review was no more than 1634 words, the magic number I used back in 2013. So I’d better get started, hadn’t I, because I’ve used 363 of them already.
Perry’s had been there a fair old while when I first visited, and eleven years later it shows no signs of letting up. It occupies a spot on Reading’s High Street – yes, it has one, and it’s minuscule – next to the sadly departed Oxfam bookshop. I remember its previous incarnation as a kebab place, one I used to stop in drunk after Bohemian Night at the 3Bs every week, totally unaware that, most Wednesdays, the woman I’d end up marrying twenty years later was in there too, grabbing chips to eat on the last bus back to Woodley.
The interior, to my untrained eye, looked almost completely unchanged from my previous visit. It had fourteen covers, at plain wooden tables, and the walls were half-panelled with knotty pine. The bent plywood chairs – Arne Jacobsen on a budget – had been treated with some kind of muddy effect that made them look like they’d spent thirty years in a chainsmoker’s dining room.
To be honest, I’m not sure it looked much different from when it was the kebab shop, with the possible exception of the poster of Muhammad Ali on the wall. The only real evidence of the intervening years were the Covid-era stickers on the floor telling you to stand two meters clear of the next person in the queue. Even those are practically vintage now, and although Perry’s might well have a queue at lunchtime when I turned up just after 6pm, an hour before it was due to close, I was almost the only person there.
The board up at the counter lists what they serve, with a green sticker next to the dishes they are still offering at any given time. If you want proof that I’ve learned the square root of fuck all in eleven years, here it is: last time I reviewed Perry’s I said you’d be better off going at lunchtime when the selection is probably wider. And yet here I was, three houses, one job and one marriage later, doing exactly the same thing again: what a bonehead.
So I can’t tell you whether the jerk chicken could match the likes of Chef Stevie or Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine, I can’t wax lyrical about the ackee and saltfish and I didn’t get the option to brave the cow foot (which, let’s be honest, I would never have eaten in a million years). My choices were simple: fried chicken, stewed chicken, curried mutton or fried fish.
When I ascertained that the latter was boneless, I plumped for that – large, with rice and peas on the side. Again, I would have tried Perry’s macaroni pie, had that green sticker been next to it, but no such luck. I don’t know whether the selection is much wider at lunchtime: a better restaurant reviewer could probably tell you. I also had a can of grape soda, because that’s one thing I did learn from my previous review.
It arrived very quickly, at which point I realised I’d be on my way in no time. And actually, it made me wonder how I managed to get over 1500 words out of Perry’s last time. The fish was pleasant enough, but I wasn’t sure which was more of an achievement: frying fish in a way that left absolutely no crunch or texture, or giving it a seasoned coating decent enough that I nearly didn’t mind. But I tend to think fried fish should shatter, not bend, so I remained unconvinced.
The rice and peas, again, weren’t unpleasant and had a nice lurking heat that gathered over time. They were a lot more rice than peas, with a few rogue kidney beans scattered throughout. I’d have liked it drier. But it was the other kind of heat I found disconcerting: this was really, really piping hot. The kind of sudden, centralised heat that made me think it had been brought about by a microwave, not a saucepan.
There was also a sort of medley of veg, cabbage and carrots, which I didn’t mind. But I wondered, perhaps unworthily, if it had lived in a tin before winding up on my plate. The whole thing was on the bland side, despite pops of flavour from the ribbons of onion and sweet peppers piled on to the fish.
It wasn’t all bad, and I don’t mean to sound like it was. But a large portion seemed to mean that you got not quite enough fish and too much rice, and I left some of it. I finished my grape soda while slightly worrying, in the back of my mind, that Perry’s mightn’t take cards. It did: my bill came to thirteen pounds.
You didn’t have the option to tip, which was a shame because service was lovely. I got the impression they didn’t get many customers at that time in the evening, although a few people turned up to take food away. My meal done, I scurried off in the direction of a supermarket to pick up some chocolate prior to hopping on the bus. This is why I’ll never be thin: I should have been full from the meal, but I felt like something was missing. Food I enormously enjoyed, probably.
In some ways, eating at Perry’s was a strange timewarp experience. I’ve no doubt that it’s doing what it’s always done – the room’s the same, the menu is the same, and looking back at my old review even some of my comments about the fried fish are the same. Perhaps the only evidence of the passage of time is this – what cost me £13 in 2024 would have set me back £8 in 2013. And yet the rating at the bottom is lower than it was before. So, in the immortal words of Morrissey, has the world changed or have I changed?
A bit of both, I suspect. When I reviewed Perry’s all those years ago it was only the seventh restaurant I’d ever reviewed. I was so young – not yet forty! – and I knew nothing about Caribbean food. But since then, at Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen, or Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine, or even at Oxford’s Spiced Roots, I’ve discovered just how magnificent that food can be. All those places, for me at least, make Perry’s look distinctly entry level. And it doesn’t have to be that way – the enormous queues you used to see at Blue Collar are evidence of that.
But also, the world outside their little spot on High Street has changed beyond recognition in the last decade. Perry’s may still be on the affordable side, but for that money you can go round the corner to Honest and get a smashed burger, freshly cooked chips and a soft drink for almost the same money. Or go to Bakery House, or The Bap, or Shree Krishna Vada Pav, or Tasty Greek Souvlaki. All those places, for better or for worse, reflect how Reading eats in 2024. I’m not entirely sure that Perry’s does.
And that, believe it or not, makes me feel downcast. I hope Perry’s continues to do well, and I imagine it may; it has its clientele, it’s had them for a very long time and it doesn’t need an injection of new customers from a rave review by yours truly. But I wanted to love it, so I’m sad that I didn’t. And yet the funny thing is this: it turns out that when you feel like that, even though it might stir up complicated emotions in you, 1634 words is more than enough.
Back in the first half of the nineties, when I was a student at Oxford, there was a famous restaurant down the Cowley Road called the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House. What made it famous, back then, was an urban myth that the menu didn’t have prices: instead, you paid what the proprietor decided you could afford. How he assessed that wasn’t entirely clear, but even though in those days I was constantly unkempt and dressed in easily the shittest clothes M&S and River Island had to offer I never felt like taking my chances, in case the meal turned out to be beyond my means.
Besides, as a student from a comprehensive school eating out in Oxford was pretty much always beyond my means. Instead I ate awful food served up by the college in halls, I nuked an occasional M&S ready meal – usually chilli con carne – in the microwave in the tiny kitchen in my college stairwell and, on high days and holidays, wandered to the chippy on Carfax for a life-affirming cod and chips. If we’d had a yearbook, which we didn’t, nobody would have nominated me as Most Likely To Write A Restaurant Blog.
No, eating out was for the trustafarians I was forced to rub shoulders with, where mummy and daddy owned half of Hampshire. Parents were always swooping in to take them to dinner at Gee’s, or the Old Parsonage, or Browns, back before Browns became just another Mitchell & Butler atrocity. I think my dad visited me once in three years and we had dim sum at a place called the Opium Den. This is fancy, I thought, and the experience was never repeated. It’s a Nando’s, now.
My fellow students, by and large an alien species, all lived down the Cowley Road in their second year in shared houses, cosplaying This Life, a few years before it hit the television. They fancied themselves as the Young Ones, even though they already had their dead eyes on careers as management consultants. They probably felt they were being postmodern, playing at being skint like they were playing at being part of the real world. And now, depressingly, many of them run the country, or run the civil service, or read the news on television. I wonder if any of them went to the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House, back in the day.
Anyway, the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House is closed now, or at least appears to be from a quick bit of online research. It certainly looked decidedly closed when I visited Oxford a few weekends ago with a lunchtime reservation at Spiced Roots, a much more happening, upmarket and highly regarded Caribbean restaurant two doors down from where Hi-Lo used to be. When I reviewed the Magdalen Arms, the same end of town, last year I asked whether anybody had Oxford recommendations for me. A reader mentioned Spiced Roots then, so I looked it up and the idea stuck in my head.
And this was my first chance to review it in 2023. It was my first visit to Oxford since last Christmas, and I’d forgotten how much I loved the place: having coffee at the Missing Bean; sloping off on a house envy tour of Jericho and north Oxford (it was harder to find a house you didn’t envy, really); stopping in the Covered Market to discover that Tap Social had opened a lovely little pub there; having post-Tap Social beer at Teardrop Bar because it was the original and best and otherwise I’d have felt disloyal; and buying all sorts of wonderful stuff from the Oxford Cheese Company, hoping it wouldn’t be too whiffy on the train home at the end of the day.
Speaking of trains, one of life’s great mysteries is that a return ticket to London or Swindon from Reading costs you thirty quid for half an hour on the train, whereas Oxford is closer to a tenner for the same length of journey. One day someone will fix that discrepancy and we’ll all be screwed, but until then Oxford is about as good a day out from Reading by public transport as you could possibly hope for. I should review more restaurants in Oxford, really – it’s crazy that this is only my second – and maybe I will. Besides, since Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen closed last summer I’ve been missing really good Caribbean food: if Spiced Roots could deliver, it would be well worth the occasional trip.
Spiced Roots’ interior is that old favourite, a long thin dining room, and a compact one too that can’t have much more than twenty covers. We arrived for a late lunch, at two pm, and the place was nicely full by then, with a table of about a dozen people having a fantastic time. The mural on the wall reminded me somewhat of Reading’s Flavour Of Mauritius, but the real conversation point was the bar, done up beach hut style with a straw roof and sporting a mind-bogglingly huge range of rums.
I found myself wondering if the evening was when this place really came into its own; Spiced Roots is only open for lunch on Saturdays, and even then it closes between lunch and dinner, so there’s only so much fun you can have. And that’s a particular shame because the cocktail menu was a small but wickedly diverting one. I had a dark ‘n’ stormy, tall and full of pep, probably the nicest I’ve ever tried. Zoë had a negroni made with Appleton 12 instead of gin, infused somehow with pimento smoke: I tried a sip and it provoked its own cocktail, a healthy mixture of trepidation and admiration.
The menu was simple, just the right size and written, all lower case, in that typewriter font used almost exclusively by dullards on their Instagram stories nowadays. It inspired confidence, with just five starters and eight mains, and pricing was gentle: three of the starters cost less than a fiver, none topped seven pounds. Only a couple of mains approached twenty quid, the remainder were closer to fifteen. Forget the old Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House approach of working out what you could afford – this was definitely affordable. We ordered three of the starters to share and a couple of mains, sat back, sipped our cocktails and felt all sense of hurry vanish.
That might have been just as well, because there was a bit of a wait. Our server came over and apologised, saying that there was only one of them in the kitchen. And that was of course fair enough, and that big table, all needing to be fed at the same time, would put a strain on a small outfit. But we were in no real rush so the cocktails passed, as they do, and we chatted about Oxford, I probably blethered on about the old days, and we sipped our water, mindful of all that pre-lunch beer.
I wonder what the me of thirty years ago would say if you told him that on the other side of the century he would still be coming to this city, with money this time, having made his peace with all the things it did and didn’t do for him. He would probably be waiting for me to shut up so he could go have another row with his girlfriend or listen to the new Leonard Cohen album, or pretend to study, or – almost certainly his favourite pastime – mope. But I wish I could tell him that it would all be okay, that one day he’d evolve beyond M&S microwaveable chilli and eating cookie dough straight from the tub. I’d also tell him not to take his knees for granted, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing.
Our first starter was a little delight. I had missed out on jerk chicken as a main course, what with always giving my dining companion first dibs, but the jerk chicken spring rolls gave me an early indication of what I was missing. Two little cigarillos of filo pastry, packed with chicken and served on a smear of dark, fruity, savoury sauce they were simultaneously lovely and nowhere near enough. I suppose that’s what all starters, ultimately, are aiming for. I’d have liked more, or for them to be heftier, but the clue was in the pricing and for just shy of a fiver it was difficult to complain. We should just have ordered two portions, that’s all.
Even better, and genuinely delicious, was something called “trini doubles”. This is a Trinidadian speciality, curried chickpeas on a pair of baras, flat fried dough not entirely unlike a roti, and a quick scuttle to confer with Professor Wikipedia suggests that this dish, created in the Thirties, might be a Caribbean take on the Indian chole bhatura. Be that as it may, this was a gorgeous dish – floury, warm and comforting, and a forkful of the chickpeas folded into the starchy, slightly stodgy embrace of the bara was reason enough to be in Spiced Roots. That a little sweet, zingy, almost caramelised courgette, in the finest strips, was heaped on top just made me love the dish more. Again, this cost less than a fiver.
Last but not least, we’d also decided to try the grilled octopus superfood salad. It was perfectly pleasant – what octopus there was was nicely cooked, the salad was well dressed and the pineapple on top added good contrast. The menu described it as pineapple chow, which is apparently spiced and enhanced with garlic and hot sauce, but I just got sweetness, really. This dish was nice enough: subdued, well behaved but not earth shattering. But that’s my fault, I suspect, for ordering something described as a “superfood salad”, not theirs.
After waiting a little longer than I’d have chosen for our starters, the pendulum of iffy timing swung in the other direction: with that large table having finished their food our mains were brought out quick smart, barely ten minutes after we’d finished the previous course. Just one of those things, really, and I imagine they were trying to ensure we’d have time for dessert before they closed at half three. In any event we were on to a second drink by now, in my case a New Zealand sauvignon blanc which was decent but heftily marked up and in Zoë’s a lager called Banks from Barbados which I’m guessing tasted like most lagers.
My main course was a good illustration of Spiced Roots’ strengths and weaknesses, almost emblematic of the restaurant as a whole. I’d chosen the curry goat, my second choice of main, and it was a really superb dish. Probably the best goat I can remember eating (and I include Clay’s goat curry in that) beautifully spiced – with fifteen spices, if the menu is to be believed – in a thin, dark and potent sauce. There were a couple of chunks of potato but otherwise it was pretty much all sticky, tender goat.
And yet the presentation was needlessly prissy. The curry was in a little vessel, the steamed rice in a separate bowl, there were a few random slices of plantain on the side and a salad which genuinely didn’t go and I’m not sure anyone eats. Were you meant to spoon the curry onto the rice, or gradually cross the streams while keeping the salad safe from harm? I ended up dumping the rice on the plate, pouring the curry on top and thinking that, rather than all the compartmentalisation, all I really wanted was a big steaming bowl of rice with plenty of curry on top – something earthy, hearty and unpretentious. I know Spiced Roots billed itself as fine Caribbean cuisine, but I don’t think that means you have to put obstacles between the food and the diners enjoying it.
Zoë’s jerk chicken, if anything an even better dish, suffered the same problems. The chicken was really outstanding, you got a huge amount of it and it was smothered with a rich, brooding sauce. And the rice and peas were good, too – a much more suitable companion than the plain steamed rice that had accompanied the curry. But again, it would have been better to let the food speak for itself without the faff of serving it on a slate, with more of that salad and a cherry tomato artfully cut into a flower. It made me think of the simplicity of somewhere like Chef Stevie. This food looks beautiful because it is beautiful, it doesn’t need to be gussied up in this way.
But even with that moaning, this lot for sixteen pounds fifty was hard to argue with. We also ordered a side of macaroni pie (which the menu, again trying to be more fancy, calls mac and cheese) which was really lovely but probably not quite big enough to share. As it only cost four pounds I think that was more our mistake than theirs.
Service was excellent, and suitably apologetic about the delays getting us our starters, which really wasn’t a problem. But pacing overall was problematic: I almost felt like they were trying to make up for the slow starters by rushing the mains, even though that wasn’t really what we wanted. We weren’t moved enough by the dessert menu to go for the full three courses, and a latte was calling to me from neighbouring Peloton Espresso, so we grabbed the bill and ambled off to caffeinate. Our meal came to just over eighty-five pounds, not including service, which I thought was thoroughly decent value.
Sometimes, believe it or not, it’s the act of writing a review that crystallises how I feel about a restaurant. Sometimes I know the rating in my head and work back from there, and sometimes it’s the process of running through the highs and lows that makes me realise, on balance, what I really thought. I don’t always get that right, I’m sure, so occasionally as a reader you probably get to the end and think the rating doesn’t match the text. You might not be alone in that – sometimes I feel that way too – but when there’s a real mismatch it’s because I’ve found it hard to work out what I think.
And Spiced Roots, I think, is one of those cases. I loved the food, but there’s a certain disconnect at the heart of the restaurant which meant I couldn’t quite make up my mind about it. The value is excellent, in places, but the presentation didn’t match that or the style of food – which meant that, for instance, some of the starters were just too slender (although unarguably priced to match) and that the mains, where they needed to be hearty and unpretentious, felt a little too dolled up.
And I think that also showed in the clientele, which was varied – some were from the Caribbean community and clearly enjoying the fantastic food, others were the same kind of diners you’d find in Arbequina, a couple of doors down, very much gastronomic tourists – like me and Zoë, in fairness. Overall I wasn’t sure what Spiced Roots wanted to be, authentic or rarefied, and as a result I wasn’t convinced it managed entirely to be either, let alone both.
So I loved the food, and if it sounds like your kind of thing you should definitely try it, but as a restaurant it left me slightly puzzled. Maybe a Saturday lunchtime – the only day it opens for lunch – isn’t the best time to judge it, so perhaps you have to be there of an evening, attacking that cocktail menu with gusto. But it was awfully well behaved in a way I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t sure about. That might tell you more about me than the restaurant. It did make me wonder, too, what a night in the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House would have been like, at the height of its powers. It might well have cost me more than my meal at Spiced Roots did, but I suspect it could have had the soul and verve that Spiced Roots, for all its excellent qualities, slightly missed.
In August 2022 Chef Stevie announced that he was leaving the Butler and moving to Windsor. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
Opening and running a restaurant is hard work. You have to find premises, sort out a lease, decide your concept, pick your staff, choose your suppliers, design your menu, set up your social media, get people through the door, get them to come back, replace your staff when some of them leave. The list goes on.
That’s at the best of times, but the last year has hardly been that. Now you can add in navigating the complexities of furlough and bounceback loans, applying for grants, retaining your staff, getting your head round the rule of six, track and trace, “hygiene theatre” and having to close or reopen at the drop of the hat based on government fiat and what tier system is in use this week. And you can also bung in asking people nicely to wear masks so they don’t risk infecting your unvaccinated staff and closing because you have been pinged, or because your staff have and you don’t have enough left to be able to trade. It’s hard work. I sometimes wonder why anybody does it.
Most people dip their toe in the water rather than diving in at the deep end, and there are many ways to do that. One of the most common is to start out doing street food. Get a gazebo, go to some markets, build a reputation and one day you might open your own place. Take Vegivores, which has made a roaring success of its site in Caversham. But sometimes street food is the place that exposes the gap between your daydream of feeding adoring crowds and the harsh reality of getting up early in the morning only for everything to go wrong, as this touching post from a recent Blue Collar alumnus shows.
Another route is to use someone else’s premises, the “cuckoo” approach. One of the most successful exponents of this is Anonymous Coffee, who have had coffee machines in the Tasting House, Thames Tower, Curious Lounge and the Grumpy Goat without setting up permanent premises of their own. Many people in hospitality have taken this path, from Bench Rest serving food in the Tasting House to I Love Paella, operating out of a tiny kitchen in the Oxford Road branch of Workhouse Coffee. But the most obvious synergy, if you can ever forgive me for using that word in any context, is between chefs in search of a kitchen and pubs in search of a chef.
When this works, it’s a dream. The pub wants to serve food, but doesn’t want to cook it. The chef wants to cook, but doesn’t want his or her name on a lease quite yet. And so over the years we’ve been treated to I Love Paella cooking out of The Horn before graduating to the Fisherman’s Cottage and Caucasian Spice Box (now, of course, Geo Café) operating from the Turk’s Head and later from The Island, still one of the most surreal Reading establishments I’ve ever visited. I fondly remember I Love Paella’s salt cod churros, or Caucasian Spice Box’s ajika chicken, and I may not have loved The Horn or the Turk’s Head, but the food was so good that it didn’t matter.
I got wind recently that a similar arrangement was in place over on the edge of West Reading at the Butler in Chatham Street, where an outfit called Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen had popped up and was offering a full menu of Caribbean classics. I have fond memories of the Butler: it’s a handsome building which has stood proud for many years surrounded by the architectural chaos of the old Chatham Street car park with its curving Brutalist concrete walkway and the gleaming apartment buildings that have sprung up more recently, much like the house from Up. In this week’s scorching weather I couldn’t think of a better place to try, so I headed over with my friend Graeme, last seen enduring imaginable horrors at Taco Bell.
“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” I said as we made our way down Broad Street. In the run-up to our visit Graeme had steadfastly told me that he only wanted to find out on the day.
“No, I like a surprise. Anyway, we’re heading in the direction of KFC, so I can still dream.” Graeme has a love of the secret blend of herbs and spices that exceeds even mine: when he was recovering from Covid at the start of the year, the first thing he asked for when he was past the worst was a bucket of the Colonel’s finest.
“I have a good feeling about this place, don’t worry. I hope it will make amends for that quesadilla.”
“Nothing on earth can make up for that.”
I felt like pointing out that he did volunteer to come to Taco Bell, but I thought better of it. But Graeme’s mood lightened immediately when we rounded the bend of Chatham Street and he saw the board outside the Butler advertising Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen. “This is great! I love Caribbean food.”
I hadn’t realised how much outside space the Butler has, but it turns out there’s quite a lot. There were plenty of tables out front in the unforgiving sun, a happy few of them sporting parasols, and initially I though it might have been fun to eat dinner with the background hum of the Chatham Street traffic. But I found out when I went in to grab a menu that there was a courtyard out back, a lovely little sloping space with a little more shade, and so our decision was made.
The pub and the kitchen run separately, so you order your drinks at the bar and your food out back, where the kitchen operates out of a different building. The menu immediately presents a couple of problems: one is that you sort of want to eat everything, the other is that because the three most iconic mains can be served in small or large sizes ordering everything is almost a realistic possibility. None of the large mains come in over fourteen pounds, most of them are closer to eleven, and there are both vegetarian and vegan options in the form of macaroni pie and a sweet potato curry respectively.
The “sides and nibbles” section is brilliantly flexible, giving you the option to order starters, have extras with your main course or even, potentially, just go for a sort of Caribbean tapas where you try it all. The majority of them hover around the six pound mark. We sort of went for a mixture of all three of those approaches – although it soon became apparent that Graeme’s appetite was even bigger than mine, which pretty much makes him my ideal dining companion (on the walk over he was complaining about having gone up to a thirty-six inch waist in recent months: if I ever slimmed down to a thirty-six I’d probably go on a week-long bender to celebrate).
“We have to have plantain as one of our starters” he said.
“I’ve always struggled with plantain. I think it’s because I went off bananas in 1999, the year I did the cabbage soup diet so I could fit into my suit for my brother’s wedding.”
Graeme gave me an indulgent look, as if he couldn’t work out which of those two sentences was the most moronic.
“Okay, we can skip the plantain, but we have to have some of the handmade patties.”
“Salt fish?”
“Exactly.”
We narrowed it down to just the four starters and two mains and I wandered over to Stevie and his partner, who were sitting at one of the pub tables waiting for orders. It transpired that they didn’t have any patties, and after a little more to-ing and fro-ing our order was placed.
“My friend thinks we’re going to still be hungry after this lot” I said, and she laughed.
“He hasn’t seen our portions.”
Our food came to forty-eight pounds, not including tip, and once I’d got that sorted Graeme wandered into the bar and got us a couple of very satisfying pints of Neck Oil. Really, it was perfect. The sun was shining, I had good company, a cold beer was in front of me and food was on the way. I had that feeling that this could be my next favourite place: it doesn’t often happen, maybe once every couple of years, but I could feel that familiar, dangerous sensation of my expectations gradually rising. Only what appeared to be a gathering of Reading’s Socialist Worker Party in the corner was slightly incongruous. What were socialists doing picking a pub whose name was the embodiment of servitude to the ruling classes? I guess the hard left has never been known for its sense of humour.
Our starters were uniformly excellent, even if the salt fish patties had to wait for another time. I’ve always struggled with chicken wings, but these were magnificent stuff – ten of the blighters for seven pounds, all wonderfully crispy, all yielding plenty of meat and all bloody delicious. The menu describes them as “dark rum glazed”, and that wasn’t quite true: instead they came unglazed with the dark rum sauce lurking at the bottom of the foil tray. It might have been a happy accident, but I preferred it that way – less messy, more crunchy and you could still dredge bits of chicken through the sauce and fully appreciate how sweet and boozy it was; I wouldn’t be surprised if that sauce had turned out to be 90% rum.
“Those are magnificent” said Graeme as we made inroads into the big pile of napkins that had also been brought to our table. We’d also gone for the most expensive of the starters, coconut island shrimp. These were coated in panko breadcrumbs and coconut and served with a little tub of scotch bonnet aioli. I really enjoyed these too – the texture was more fluffy than firm, but you got a good helping of plump prawns. They could have done with more of the aioli, which I liked, but our cutlery basket also had a trio of hot sauces with it so we tried them with the Baron sauce which was almost luminous yellow and very hot indeed.
“I could come here and eat these starters tapas-style every day” said Graeme, and I couldn’t have agreed more: I was already beginning to wonder when (it was no longer an if) I’d be back. That decision was vindicated by our third starter, some truly beautiful beef and jerk pork dumplings which skipped the velvet rope and headed straight for my mind palace of happy food memories. The texture of these was spot on – the filling firm and fiery, the dumpling caramelised on one side – and plonking them in the dark soya dip was hugely satisfying. Everything went perfectly with a cold IPA, too: on a hot day like that, I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be.
I felt that our mains continued the momentum nicely, although Graeme wasn’t quite so sure. I’d let him pick first and he’d chosen the curry goat, which arrived in a massive portion, on the bone. Initially I’d wondered whether the plastic cutlery – more hygiene theatre – would be up to the job, but Graeme deftly demonstrated that keeping the meat on the bone would have been more of a challenge.
“I don’t know what I think of it. It’s not quite a chip shop curry sauce, but it’s quite sweet.”
I was allowed to try a bit and for what it was worth, I loved it. There was definitely a fruitiness to it, but also a heat that slowly built, and the meat was stunningly tender. It was great to see some sprigs of thyme in there too, adding a little complexity. That said, I’ve always had a sweet tooth, so maybe this was more my kind of thing than Graeme’s, although he did tell me that in a previous job he came into contact with lots of Caribbean families and was always being given Caribbean home cooking to try, so perhaps he’d been spoilt by that. In any case, any issues with a slight lack of heat were easily rectified with a slug of that highlighter-yellow hot sauce, and all was well.
Personally if I’d ordered the curry goat I would have been delighted. Instead I had to slum it with the jerk chicken, and by slum it I mean lord it. The menu claims that the chicken is marinated for twenty-four hours and drum-cooked with pimento wood, and it really looked the part: that beautiful bronzed colour and all that phenomenal crispy skin. It felt like I had the best part of a whole chicken in front of me, and the taste was superb – smokey, almost leathery, with depth of flavour that can only come from time very well spent. Eating it, there in that courtyard, off a paper plate with a plastic knife and fork I felt transported, in the best possible sense. It reminded me, in some way I couldn’t place, of eating grilled meat at a roadside ocakbasi in Turkey, of being somewhere else.
“It wasn’t bad”, Graeme said later, but I do think it was a tiny bit on the dry side.”
“I didn’t have that problem, most of it was perfectly soft.”
“That’s because you deliberately gave me a dry bit” he said. “And it was a bit without skin.”
He might have been joking, he probably was, but many a true word’s spoken in jest and I didn’t quite know him well enough yet to judge. Was I just a bad sharer?
The accompaniments were also terrific – rice and peas, all present and correct, along with a tangy tangle of pickled escovitch peppers and onions, and sticky slices of plantain which completely converted me to the stuff (“didn’t I tell you?” Graeme said, enjoying it every bit as much as I would have). But the other real beauty was the side of macaroni pie we’d ordered on the side, a glorious claggy, cheesy, comforting dish with a splendid crunchy crust. Before I ate it I questioned just how interesting it would be to have a main course of the stuff: afterwards I could well understand the appeal.
Our meal finished, both of us surprisingly full, we finished our beers and headed off to the Nag’s for the post match analysis. I would have been tempted to stay for the people watching alone – by this point a chap had turned up and greeted virtually everybody in the courtyard with the term “comrade” – but Graeme, a centrist like myself, had seen enough.
On the way out I stopped to tell Stevie’s partner just how much we’d enjoyed our food. She had done a top notch job of looking after us all evening and she seemed really pleased with the feedback, although she accepted it with the serene confidence of somebody who knows their food is good. They’d been trading for a couple of months, she told me, and things were going well, especially as the Butler was hardly known as a food pub. She said they were going to go on Deliveroo from the following day, and we promised to recommend the food to as many people as we could.
I’m sorry, as usual, to have gone on so long. But for once I feel slightly less guilty, because I wanted to try and capture the excitement of the meal I had. Seeing someone starting out, at the beginning of a journey, not knowing where it will take them or their food is exciting. And it’s exciting to get to try it early on in that process. It takes me back to all my favourite discoveries in all the time I’ve spent writing this blog, and it reminds me that Reading’s food scene never loses its ability to surprise – that there’s always potential for the next thing to be the next big thing. And when that happens, you just know it. That scorching evening on Chatham Street, I knew it.
When I got home and explained how good my meal was to Zoë, she expressed her chagrin that she’d missed out on this one. And then we got our diaries out and tried to work out when we could visit it next. The chances are pretty strong that I’ll have been there again by the time any of you make it to the Butler. Next time I want to try those patties, the roti and the chicken curry (and everything I had on this visit, even though I know that’s impossible). If you get there before me and order any of the things I didn’t try, please tell me how good they were. Make me jealous: you know you want to.
Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen – 8.1 The Butler, 85-91 Chatham Street, Reading, RG1 7DS 07780 829127
A newer review of this restaurant exists, from November 2024. Click here to read it.
Today’s restaurant has no website, almost no reviews anywhere, and even if you walked right past it you could be forgiven for not knowing it exists. And yet Perry’s, the Caribbean restaurant next to the Oxfam Bookshop on Market Place, has been there for a very long time. Shamefully, the reason I’ve never eaten there isn’t that I hadn’t noticed it, even though that would be understandable. I notice restaurants wherever I go, like a sixth sense, and when I do I always have to wander over and read the menu. No, I knew all about Perry’s, and I avoided it because every time I’ve been outside, I’ve looked through the window and felt intimidated.
It’s a funny balance, isn’t it? If you see a Chinese restaurant full of Chinese people (like China Palace) or an Indian restaurant full of Indian people (like Chennai Dosa), it’s unmistakeably promising, but only up to a point. Beyond that, and maybe it’s just me, it starts to feel like you aren’t meant to be there, like you wouldn’t fit in. It conjures up images of that famous scene in An American Werewolf In London, or some of the pubs I was warned not to enter during my first year at university. So I’m a little embarrassed to admit that, like countless people in Reading, I too have walked past Perry’s without going in, hundreds of times – not because it didn’t appeal, but because I was too chicken.
Edible Reading has changed all that for me – I suppose I partly see it as my duty to go to lots of new, different places, and sometimes that involves leaving my comfort zone. The review requests that people send are all taken seriously, so my friend and I found ourselves in Perry’s this week for an early evening meal – although, as I discovered, I suspect that eating in Perry’s in the evening is slightly missing the point.
The menu on the front door is slightly misleading. It lists a number of Caribbean dishes (salt fish and ackee, curried mutton, barbecued chicken, brown chicken stew, rice and peas, macaroni pie, I could go on – and I’m half tempted to given that they don’t have a website) but in fact what gets served varies from day to day. We didn’t know this when we arrived but soon figured it out looking at the blackboard next to the counter. It lists all the dishes, but the ones that are still available have a green sticker next to them. Perry’s closes at 8, and when we got there – with just over an hour remaining – there weren’t many green stickers left.
Some of them, sadly, weren’t even true: there was no macaroni pie, despite a green sticker to the contrary. I was a bit gutted by this, even though I wasn’t 100% sure what macaroni pie was, because I liked the sound of it. I was assuming – correctly as it turns out – that it’s a bit like macaroni cheese, which would have made it a Good Thing in my book. So, by the time we got to Perry’s it was a fairly straightforward choice: barbecue chicken, fried chicken, fried fish or oxtail, accompanied by either rice and peas or plain rice. The only other choice is whether you have a small or large portion.
Even writing this, I do wonder whether this is really such a tragedy. I’d rather go to a restaurant which has a limited range of dishes and owns up when it sells out, rather than a restaurant with dozens and dozens of main courses, leaving you wondering how any chef can possibly cook all of them without getting something out of a jar. Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,
Perry himself was behind the counter on this occasion and, apart from two other diners, we were the only people in the place. I asked him about the difference between the large and small portions and he waved a medium plate (which is apparently small) and a full sized dinner plate (which is large – and believe me, it was) at us. So, that’s the difference: that and the grand total of an extra quid.
The seating at Perry’s is pretty basic – the right side of uncomfortable, but not somewhere you’d settle in for a long meal. The whole thing has the feel of a cafeteria about it, which meant I wasn’t really sure what happened next. Should we wait at the counter? Would we be called up, like at a crappy coffee shop? Would they bring it over? Again, I realised that Perry’s wasn’t quite like most of the restaurants I eat in, and that gave me that little flash of feeling outside my comfort zone again. I wasn’t even sure how long we’d be waiting before our meals arrived.
In the end, Perry brought the food over in about ten minutes. The small portion of fried fish was seriously tasty stuff, and really not small at all – a light fried coating on a couple of decent sized chunks of what I think was salted cod. It was a little chewy, and not really crispy, although I don’t know enough to be able to say whether that was down to the time of day or how it had been cooked. The large portion of chicken was also delicious – three pieces of chicken served on the bone, coated in a fine layer of seasoning. Again, it wasn’t crispy and it was slightly on the tough side, and again I can’t tell you if that’s how it should be. I can tell you, though, that we both really liked it, and by the end all the bones were very effectively stripped, a little mass grave on a sideplate.
The rice and peas was the revelation, for me: rice cooked in spices, herbs and stock with kidney beans mixed in, with just enough heat to make you blow your nose but not enough to blow your mind. We spent a bit of time trying and failing to work out exactly what was in there – there was definitely some chilli, definitely some thyme (I know that because I had a naked stem tucked in my rice), plenty of onion, but beyond that we weren’t sure. Something had to give it that tangy, almost fruity flavour, but what was it? I still don’t know now, but whatever it was it made the rice so tasty that I even used it to accompany the little fresh salad on the side – iceberg lettuce, tomato and some thinly sliced cucumber. It might not sound significant, but it is: I never eat the token salad garnish.
There’s no alcohol licence, so it’s all soft drinks. In our case, it was pineapple soda (because I’ve never tried it before) and grape soda (which I’m told is surprisingly tasty, once you get used to it). We decided to pass on a soft drink called “Bigga” on this occasion, despite all the puerile potential for mirth it would have offered.
When we’d finished we weren’t sure what the normal procedure was. Perry was busy in the kitchen – cleaning up, presumably, as no other customers came in while we were in there. Since there were no other customers finishing up there was nobody to copy. In the end we took our plates up to the counter – again, not quite sure if we were in a restaurant or a canteen – and we ended up having our bill totted up by the woman at the other table, who we’d mistakenly thought was another customer (I think that means we may have been their only customers that night). The total for two dishes and two cans of drink was £16, which made me wonder if we’d been undercharged.
If you’ve gathered from the previous paragraphs that I still don’t quite know what to make of Perry’s, you would be spot on. Both dishes were delicious but I couldn’t help feeling that I’d missed the boat by visiting early evening on a weeknight – the range of options was limited and the place was empty, so there was no buzz or chatter. The building used to be a kebab shop, in a previous incarnation, and it still feels like it’s very much a functional place – walk in, get fed, walk out.
That said, if you’re in the mood for a quick meal Perry’s could be perfect for you. The food was really tasty, and it’s something you can’t get anywhere else in the centre of Reading. I’m told, too, that grape soda could prove to be quite habit forming. And the service, if basic, was really warm and friendly – when I was pondering what “ground food” (also on the blackboard but bereft of a green sticker) was, the lady at the other table told me in great detail. It turns out that it’s like a savoury doughnut made from yams, and it sounds pretty magnificent to me.
All told, I’m glad that I got over my preconceptions (and over the threshold). This would be a sad town indeed if you could walk past an interesting looking restaurant and not go in just because you’re too busy sticking to the tried and tested, and in a way that’s what Edible Reading is all about. So yes, Perry’s isn’t the place for an epic drawn out dinner. It’s not a place for going mad with the wine list, or for that matter drinking at all. It’s not a place, either, where you’re going to have a starter or a dessert. But having said all that, next time I walk past Perry’s on a Saturday lunchtime, when it’s packed with diners and I don’t feel quite so nervous, I think I might just go in. Maybe you should too.
Perry’s – 6.7 7 High St (off Market Place), RG1 2EA
0118 9594001
Edible Reading 