The biggest trend in Reading’s food scene this year has been the proliferation of pizza places – Paesinos, Zí Tore, Amò and Peppito, all opening in the space of five months. In the space of a five minute walk, you could pass them all: you could do a pizza crawl of all four, if that’s your kind of thing. Everyone will have their favourite, or their own view of which is the best, and perhaps I will too once I’ve got round to the last couple on my to do list: one way or the other I’m sure my annual round-up and awards at the end of December will have something to say about all of that.

But if that competition is the most high-profile this year, there are a couple of smaller-scale rivalries, more under the radar, that have captured my attention every bit as much. Like the one between Vietnamese newcomers Pho 86, on St Mary’s Butts where County Deli used to be, and Thai restaurant Nua which opened just around the corner, in Bluegrass BBQ’s old home. They are competing not only with the established order – Pho and Thai Corner – but with each other, and they opened on the same day in July.

So that promises to be interesting, and I’ll do my damnedest to check them both out before the end of 2025. But even that’s not my favourite, because my favourite is the tightly-fought battle between two brand new restaurants, which opened a week apart, for Most Batshit Menu In Reading.

In the red corner you have Take Your Time, which opened in August at the top of Sykes’ Sweatshop (you probably know it better as Kings Walk) in the former Dolce Vita site, which sat vacant for over seven years. Take Your Time’s website says that it blends “Asian flavours with Western cuisine”, and Take Your Time’s menu interprets that as serving baked pork chop with an egg fried rice featuring tomato, pineapple and mozzarella, like someone put a Hawaiian pizza into Google Translate.

It also gives you the option of a chicken risotto (“chicken is slightly pink”), or “Hong Kong-style source [sic] stir fried spaghetti with pan fried ribeye steak”. Fusion? Confusion? Who knows. It would, any other time, be far and away the strangest menu I’ve read all year.

But then, a week later, Stop & Taste opened in Emmer Green in a ‘hold my beer’ scenario. Stop & Taste looked on the face of it like a standard eat in fast food place – visually difficult to distinguish from the likes of Basingstoke Road’s Kyaneez – mainly famous for having the most idiosyncratic Instagram account of all time – or Salt & Smash on Christchurch Green. But then I saw the menu and thought, and this is pretty much a verbatim transcript of my exact reaction, what the fuck is going on here?

Because Stop & Taste’s menu rivalled Take Your Time’s for eccentricity, for lack of an overarching theme. So yes, there were loads of burgers – obviously – but one of them involving tempura soft shell crab? And three different types of biryani, and oxtail tacos and fried shark bites? And a £25 lobster roll with “lobster tail poached in secret butter” and hand-minced beef patties and thick shakes and Sunday roasts made with fillet steak?

Take Your Time and Stop & Taste had two things in common – menus that invited an ADHD diagnosis and, paradoxically, names that seemed to extol the virtues of mindful eating. So I just had to visit one of them this week, and in the end I found myself taking a bus north of the river on a weekday evening. That menu at Stop & Taste was either madness or genius, and I just had to know which it was, shark bites and all.

Alighting from the bus I found Stop & Taste at the near end of a little parade of suburban shops, sandwiched between a Budgens and an off licence; if you want an idea of the passage of time the picture I found on Google Maps, from back in 2012, has branches of Blockbuster and Thresher further along. It reminded me of other suburban spots, like Coriander Club or, not too far away, Caversham Park Village’s Momo House.

But it also reminded me of my childhood in Woodley, of living round the corner from Hudson Road and of the independent supermarket where it felt like you could pick up anything, of buying sweets for a penny.

Back then, forty years ago, the best you could hope for in terms of food was fish and chips with curry sauce or a chow mein, and the idea that in the future we wouldn’t have jetpacks but would have ready access to birria tacos and soft shell crab would never have occurred to me. I do have to be honest, though, and say that if I’d appeared in a vision to 11 year old me, the ghost of dinners yet to come, and offered him the choice, he’d have picked the fancy food over the jetpack: I don’t know whether to be proud of him or ashamed.

Inside, the place was empty apart from a big table of kids who seemed to be having a lovely time but weren’t discernably eating any food: I think in all the time I was there one of them went up to the counter and ordered a giant milkshake, but that was it. I’m too old to even guess how old they were, so let’s just say they were Grange Hill age and leave it at that.

Sorry, that ages me even more, doesn’t it? I mean Waterloo Road age. If they knew how lucky they were to live within easy access of shark bites as opposed to chips with curry sauce, they were far too cool to betray it.

Otherwise the interior looked pleasant if generic, not necessarily a place to linger. I quite liked the faux marble tiles on the wall, the ceiling panel covered in artificial flowers, bare bulbs hanging down. The chairs looked remarkably similar to ones I’ve seen in many other places, although I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. I wonder if there’s a starter kit new restaurants buy? The fire safety tags still hung from under the seat pads, and everything was still shiny and new.

At least I didn’t have to wedge my arse into a ubiquitous Tolix chair, so there was that. A brightly lit sign on the wall proclaimed MORE THAN A GUILTY PLEASURE and a sign up at the counter read DON’T TAKE LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY. NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE ANYWAY. Thought provoking stuff all round.

I wasn’t sure whether this boded well at all, any of it, but the menu, illuminated over the counter, made me think again. Something about it, in the flesh, inspired confidence in a way the version I’d seen online didn’t. Part of it was the surprisingly pleasing design: all red and white, clear fonts, oddly endearing icons of burger buns and taco shells with googly eyes. And part of it again, was that array of dishes. The randomness was there, but also I had a faint inkling that you don’t get the stuff to cater this menu from Brakes. They don’t sell shark, as far as I know.

Stop & Taste’s pricing, too, was pretty keen. Most of the starters maxed out at £8, unless you wanted lamb chops or tiger prawns, and the only main coming in over £14 was that lobster roll at £25: it would be interesting to know how many of those they sell. The biryani and Indo-Chinese dishes (because yes, they had them too), the fried chicken tenders and the chargrilled peri peri chicken were all less than a tenner. I was on my own, so I had to decide how best to try as much of the menu as I could.

Going up and ordering a couple of things to start me off, I got chatting to the chap who I think was the owner. He warned me that the menu was brand new so a couple of the dishes, birria tacos and chargrilled tiger prawns, weren’t available yet. He said they’d been open for two months and that so far business was good, although it was mainly limited to Emmer Green residents. They hadn’t leafleted yet, because they wanted to prioritise the local community before looking for customers further afield. He told me, again, about their Sunday roasts: a separate menu advertised rump of beef, fillet, roast chicken, the works.

Technically they were on delivery apps, he added, but he also said something that other business owners have said to me recently, that they were reluctant to do delivery because they knew that from the moment the food was popped in a bag and loaded on the back of a bike something was lost, and what you ate was a fifteen minute drive from what they intended. So it wouldn’t surprise me if, for now, many of their deliveries don’t go far beyond Emmer Green. That said, they took a order to deliver all the way out to Spey Road while I was there: based on what was to come I imagine it was a repeat customer.

Naturally I ordered the shark bites. How could I not? Zoë and I have this game we play when I review without her where I send her pictures of the dishes and ask her to guess whether or not they’re any cop. She saw the picture down there and replied. The bites look good.

But they didn’t just look good. They were an utter delight from beginning to end, a very generous lined cardboard box stuffed with crispy, gnarled nuggets of fried fish. The lightness of touch was betrayed by this: the coating was so light, so nicely crunchy, but if you tried to eat the nuggets with the wooden fork supplied they just fell apart. I’ve never had shark before – I know they used to sell it on Smelly Alley but I never picked any up – so I didn’t know what to expect, but actually the texture was perfect for this purpose: more woolly than flaky, but very pleasantly so.

Doing away with the niceties of cutlery I simply picked them up, dipped them in the mayo and smiled an awful lot. £5.99 for these, and one of the nicest things about reviewing Stop & Taste solo was not having to share them with another living soul. I don’t know how you could come here and not order these, unless you don’t like fish, but if you do visit Stop & Taste I highly recommend trying them – unless, of course, they have replaced them on the menu with something even better. It feels eminently possible that at some point they would.

Denied the opportunity to try the birria tacos – next time, I told myself – I instead sampled the oxtail tacos, which have been on their menu since they opened. Again, I was somewhere equidistant between surprise and joy. Everything worked, and everything felt considered, from the strands of oxtail at the bottom to the excellent guacamole, full of lime and, I suspect, coriander. Putting crispy onions on top was a genius touch, adding the contrast that otherwise would have been the only thing missing.

But also, and this sounds like a minor thing but it isn’t, this was really enjoyable to eat. At the risk of sounding Goldilocks and the three bears, it was just right – feasible to eat without unhooking your jaw, carrying out some very precarious biting or winding up with half of it down your shirt. I sometimes think the reason influencers always rave about burgers, pizzas and doughnuts is that they haven’t evolved to cutlery yet. Influencers would like Stop & Taste very much, but don’t hold that against the place.

While I was eating all this and mentally recalibrating many of my preconceptions, I paid attention to what was going on around me. A number of customers came in, and the owner remembered all of them by name – remembered what they had ordered last, asked what they thought of it, remembered that, for example, one chap liked his burger without cheese (he sat at the table next to me, headphones on, thoroughly enjoying it). The owner asked me if I liked my food, too, and whether I needed anything else.

I also saw orders for deliveries come in, and the owner telling the chef that they already had an order for ten biryanis on Saturday. I listened to the chef on the phone to a supplier and heard him talking to the owner about what they needed to buy in – beef cheek for the birria tacos, and more besides.

This will sound like a silly comparison, but because it’s autumn and I need cheering up I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls, and overhearing the conversation between the owner and the chef felt a bit like hearing Lorelai and Sookie St. James discussing ingredients. Stop & Taste wasn’t the Independence Inn, and Emmer Green isn’t Stars Hollow, not by a long chalk, but for a moment I got the same kind of warm feeling I get from that fictional small Connecticut town.

As I was deciding what to order next, a woman came in jonesing for a cookie fix and chatted to the chef. He said they didn’t have any Biscoff cookies left, but they did have red velvet. “It will change your life” he said, adding that they’re made for the restaurant by a friend. The customer said she’d had one before and that it was indeed life changing – “it’s when you get to the middle” she said – but she ended up leaving with two boxed cookies to take away and a large portion of fries. I made a mental note that dessert was on the cards.

But first, I had an appointment with that soft shell crab burger. I placed my order and the owner said “it will be about ten minutes” and I wished that, like that place at the top of Kings Walk, they would take their time. Nevertheless it turned up about ten minutes later as I was sipping my Diet Coke – no alcohol licence here – and I was very glad to see it.

Because it cost the same as all the other burgers I was worried that it would be relatively cheap, potentially clumsily priced for what ought to be a premium thing, but I needn’t have worried. The soft shell crab was beautifully fried, in golden but light batter, and fitted perfectly in a sesame seed bun; I was very glad to see this rather than the standard issue brioche. A single unshredded lettuce leaf was on top, adding yet more crunch, along with a square not of American plastic cheese but cheddar.

This was easy to eat with your hands, not an open-wide-push-everything-out-of-the-side number, perfectly proportioned for simple, enjoyable eating. Not cheap for what you got, but it was soft shell crab: it shouldn’t be. The one slight blot on the copybook was Stop & Taste’s lime and scotch bonnet mayo, which turns up in several places in the menu, including that spenny lobster roll. For me, and this might be personal taste, I found it a little too sour and tart. An aioli might have been nicer, and I think it would slightly brutalise the lobster.

These were minor quibbles in a dish I never expected to find in Emmer Green and had long given up on finding in Reading full stop. I should add that the fries, which I’m guessing were bought in, were excellent. Beautifully light, no stale oil, like everything else cooked there and then and thoroughly spot on. I left a fair amount of them, but that’s because I’d gorged myself on two starters and had plans for dessert. You get the dip of your choice with the fries but they made that choice for me, I think, and gave me garlic mayo: next time I want to try their chimichurri.

When I went up to order the inevitable cookie, on the basis that I’d heard rumours it was life-changing, I got talking to the chef, whose name is Anton. He told me that he’d been a private chef for ten years before taking on this job.

“I can speak Spanish, I can speak Mandarin, you name it” he told me.

“And now you speak fluent Emmer Green!”

“Something like that” he smiled.

Then he told me that everything they made was fresh, and it all fell into place: the menu wasn’t the way it was because it was nuts and all over the shop. It was the way it was because the man in the kitchen just cooked what he loved cooking and the owner gave him the freedom to do that.

At this point I slightly regretted coming to this review on my own: partly because I’d have liked an excuse to try the tenders, have a nibble of somebody else’s pulled short rib sandwich. But also because it was starting to take on a dreamlike quality. Did Stop & Taste really exist, or was it a mirage? If I came back would I find it was just the shell of a derelict branch of Blockbuster Video?

There was time for one last crack at the menu, that red velvet cookie. And my god, after that I understood why a lady had come in to grab biscuits to take home. It looked like a conventional cookie, albeit a colossal one, and it had a pleasing crumble at the perimeter, studded with chocolate chips. But as I worked my way to the core I discovered what the fuss was about because in the middle, completely enveloped in biscuit, was a thick disc of frosting. Frosting inside a biscuit! What a time to be alive!

This biscuit cost £4.99: it is not a cheap biscuit. If you go to Stop & Taste, have the biscuit.

Finally I went up one last time.

“I’m sorry, but I need to have another of those biscuits to take home, because if my wife doesn’t get to try one it’s more than my life’s worth.”

He grinned, in a way which suggested he’d been told that or something similar more than once . There was a pause, my card payment went through and I thought that I should ask him what I ought to order next time. Before I could say it out loud, he told me anyway.

“So next time you come, you have to try our burger. I know everyone does a burger, but we buy the steak and mince it ourselves, here onsite. All our ketchup is home made, too. And you should order the lamb chops. We make our own mint sauce as well.”

So I started thinking about how easy it was to get to Emmer Green from the town centre. The challenge was finding a bus, but once you did it only took about twenty minutes. And then I pondered whether the people of Emmer Green knew yet how lucky they were, and decided that if I lived in Emmer Green I would very much enjoy lording it over Caversham about this.

My bill overall, for those two starters, that burger, a Diet Coke and my heavenly cookie came to just under £34. I ate quite a lot of food, entirely for research purposes I might add, but I would challenge anybody with a healthy appetite and/or healthy curiosity to go to Stop & Taste and not want to order a fair amount of the menu. I went on my way thanking them effusively, still not entirely sure how to do justice to the experience I’d had, and when Anton asked me to pop a review on Google I promised, not entirely dishonestly, that I would.

I don’t think I’ve encountered a surprise package quite like Stop & Taste this year, and I’d be amazed if I experience anything comparable next year. It still has a slight feeling of being a hallucination, although I will have to go back just to confirm that the whole thing wasn’t a figment of my imagination. On paper, a fast food(ish) restaurant offering burgers, tacos, lobster rolls and biryani shouldn’t make sense, but going there and experiencing it in person, I was astonished to find that somehow it did.

The easy thing would be to say, as restaurant reviewers like to do, that Stop & Taste is just what Emmer Green needs or, more grandly, that it’s just what Reading needs. I won’t do that, for a couple of reasons. First of all, what do I know? I don’t live in Emmer Green, for all I know its residents might be very happy with their current takeaway arrangements. Secondly, I’m long past pronouncing what Reading needs, because when I do that none of it happens anyway. I’m no kind of pundit, not really.

So instead I’ll say this: on that slightly cold, murky night in October, Stop & Taste was exactly what I needed. Not only because it fed me well and because I felt looked after. Not only because I got the rosy glow of watching a place looking to find its own spot in a community. Not only because of that cookie, either.

But also because it’s good to retain that capacity for curveballs, to occasionally still be surprised and to be reminded that even if you think you understand how everything works, now and again something will come along and teach you that even after 12 years you can’t judge a book by its cover. The jolt that prevents you becoming jaded is always necessary, and never comes a moment too soon. I’ll try and learn from that, but because it’s me I wouldn’t bet on it.

My bus dropped me at Reading Station just as Zoë hopped off the train from work. I was catching another bus home, she was heading to a CAMRA meeting, our clocks not quite synchronised yet. So I met her outside the station, all pleased with myself, and handed over the cardboard box with the red velvet cookie in it. I didn’t get the rapturous reception I was hoping for – where were my brownie points? – but I figured that it was because she hadn’t tasted it yet. Forty-five minutes later I was relaxing on the sofa when my phone pinged with a message from her. Just two words.

That cookie, it said.

Stop & Taste – 8.2
3 Milestone Way, Emmer Green, RG4 8XW
0118 3044981

https://www.instagram.com/stop._and_.taste/

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