Restaurant review: Stop & Taste

On October 17, 2025October 19, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

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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Restaurant review: Vegivores

On August 9, 2024August 9, 2024 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Do you remember back when supper clubs were a thing? It was around the start of the last decade, and they were huge in places like London and Brighton before finally making it to Reading in something like 2011. The first one in Reading was called Friday Dinner Secrets and back in the day, long before I started writing this blog, I gave it a whirl. It was run by a very nice couple – he was British, she was Argentinian – in the very plush and fancy basement of their rather grand house off the Bath Road. You turned up with a bottle or two of wine and ended up round a table with complete strangers, united by very good food and, for the most part, excellent company.

Well, excellent company for me, anyway: I do sometimes wonder if it was quite as enjoyable for the poor unfortunates sitting near me and my ex-wife, especially if I was showing off and telling any of my most atrocious stories. Many years later, despite the recent advent of Timeleft, supper clubs still seem like a weird anomaly in the history of how people met via the internet and how people learned to juggle online personas and real world personalities – and like forums and message boards, they were swept away by social media. Why meet people in the flesh when you can talk to them from your living room without ever leaving your phone?

Anyway, Friday Dinner Secrets was good fun; I went a couple of times, and I enjoyed myself, but when the couple wound it up I remember thinking “that’s a shame” without being crestfallen. Many years later, when the blog was nearly five years old, I did something similar when I hosted my first ER readers’ lunch at Namaste Kitchen, on a cold Saturday in January. It felt odd to emerge from the cocoon of anonymity and meet about twenty people I’d only previously known as avatars, but it was surprisingly good fun; six years and nineteen lunches later, those events are still going strong and I’ve become enormously fond of many of the people who come to them, be they regulars or newcomers.

I’m always impressed by newcomers and especially newcomers who come along to a readers’ lunch on their tod, and I always try to make sure they sit with interesting, welcoming people. For many people, meeting strangers is their idea of hell (let alone eating in front of them) so it always feels like a vote of confidence when people decide to take a chance on coming to one of those events. And I was thinking about the whole concept of dining with strangers this week as I strolled up the Caversham Road, on my way to dinner at Vegivores with Paul, a man I’d never met.

I should give the context. I’m very aware that many of my recent reviews have been solo visits, and from a purely practical perspective they don’t give you as well-rounded a view of what a restaurant, café or pub is like to eat at. I know some blowhard restaurant reviewers pompously insist on eating in a restaurant multiple times before they write a review, like they’re working for the New York Times, but in reality many of us base it on a single visit. And if that’s just you, just one set of dishes, the stakes are high. It’s all or nothing. And that increases the risk that you’ll get lucky and order the best dishes in a middling place, or the mediocre outliers in a good one.

So I put it out on Twitter, a platform I’ve ironically since decided to leave, that I was in the market for some new dining companions. Would anyone be interested? To my surprise, a few people were, and so Paul and I swapped messages and agreed to meet up and see how it went, our own two-person supper club.

“Would it change your mind if I told you the venue I want to review is Vegivores?” I asked him. I’ve wanted to go back for some time, painfully aware that I reviewed it on a dreich January evening in 2020, months before the pandemic changed everything. But in those four years it had survived and flourished, expanding its Caversham site and eventually opening a second in Bournemouth. I wanted to check on it again, and I was aware that every time I’d looked at their menu I’d seen plenty of things I could happily have ordered.

“Does it matter that I’ve been there a few times and I really like it there?” came the reply.

“Not at all! Going there with a fan, if anything, would be a plus.”

So there we were, at half six on a weekday night, meeting outside, saying our hellos and heading in to grab a table. In advance of that I had a peek through our messages and interactions, trying to work out what I was letting myself in for. For better or worse, you probably have an idea what it might be like to go for a meal with me – from my reviews, my dreary political pontificating on social media, all the greats. But what was Paul like? A look at his social media showed that we shared plenty of political views – hardly a surprise, as I don’t tend to be followed, Pied Piper-style, by Tommy Robinson fanboys.

But also, I remembered that we’d swapped some messages the previous summer when Paul was going to Barcelona on holiday for a month. I sent some recommendations, and as part of that conversation he told me that he was a relatively recent Reading resident, and that the blog had been really useful when he first moved to town. He and his partner were both teachers, so they were fortunate enough to get a big European trip most summers. And we shared a love of Geo Café in general, Zezva’s pastries and Keti’s welcome in particular. I figured that could well be enough to base an evening on. And it’s weird that, even from knowing little things like that, meeting someone you don’t really know is surprisingly easy and not remotely awkward.

Vegivores has expanded into the adjacent unit since I visited it four years ago, and is much more spacious without sacrificing what was quite a homely feel. The dining room’s a nice size, and they have a good outside space just next to Costa, a Caversham spot whose popularity remains one of Reading’s eternal mysteries. I thought it had good tables and bad tables, and the wooden bench along one wall looked a little unforgiving so we gave it a miss. An early misstep from the serving staff came when I asked if we could sit anywhere. “If you could sit at one of the smaller tables” she said, and on a quiet weekday night that felt a little unnecessary. Vegivores was a long way from being full, and during the course of the evening it never got much fuller, so it felt a bit unnecessary to stick us on a small table in anticipation of a packed night which never came.

We nattered away for quite a while without even getting to the menu, our drinks in front of us. Vegivores used to have beers by the likes of Siren on draft but now they have a pilsner made for them by local Mysterious Brewing, so I had some of that. And very nice it was too, crisp, clean and easy to sink, although – the ultimate trauma for any beer anorak – it wasn’t on Untappd so I wasn’t able to tell the world I’d tried it. Did it, in any meaningful sense, even exist? Paul tried Gasping Goose, a cider from Herefordshire makers Newton Court. We had some nibbles with this – some spiced seeds, which were a little something and nothing, fiddly to eat, and some really delicious spiced popcorn which was far nicer and, inexplicably, free.

As I’ve said, every time I’d looked at Vegivores’ menu over the past couple of years I’d seen plenty to like, so it felt like bad fortune that the night we visited I was less enamoured of it. I’ve always admired Vegivores’ inventiveness, and their refusal to simply make a meat dish with a meat substitute – tofu here, seitan there – but some of this is probably my prejudice against things dubbed as, for instance, “cheeze”. I’ve never had a vegan cheese substitute I liked, and I’ve probably been burned enough to stop trying. Pricing was pretty consistent with any mid-range casual dining place you care to name in Reading in 2024, with starters falling short of a tenner and most mains south of twenty quid

Even so, it was by no means a bad menu and it presented interesting choices. I always let my dining companion choose first, but when Paul picked a dish I wouldn’t have gone for it did open up various options. The drunken tofu knots with sesame, ginger and chilli, or masala butter hispi cabbage (an ingredient you see everywhere in the likes of Bristol and London but surprisingly rarely in Reading)? Decisions, decisions.

Paul had chosen one of the staples of the Vegivores menu, arguably one of their signatures, the gnocchi. In fairness, I can see why: the gnocchi looked great, with the caramelised, crispy, almost chewy edges that evidenced crowd-pleasing cooking. Throw in some cashew cheeze, pumpkin pesto, some sunblushed tomatoes – I miss chewy, intense sundried tomatoes, which you never seem to see any more – and you had a dish that might even have converted me to cheese substitutes. For my money, the balsamic glaze felt like an ingredient too much, but Paul had no complaints.

I’d gone for a starter that stood on its own two feet without needing meat, dairy or substitutes, Vegivores’ smashed peas. This was a proper treat, and undoubtedly my favourite thing I ate all evening. The peas had butter beans in the mix, although I wasn’t sure they added much except possibly bulk, but the freshness of the mint, basil and citrus – from preserved lemon, an ingredient I always love – properly elevated it.

Is it wrong that I partly ordered it to compare it to Nando’s “macho macho peas”? Possibly. But it emerged very well from that comparison. If I was quibbling, which we all know I often do, I would say the flatbreads were a little stodgy and lacking the rigidity for weapons grade dipping, I would say that I’d have loved to see far more of Vegivores’ home made crispy chilli oil and that scattering pea shoots over the flatbreads wasted the time of literally everybody concerned. But that’s all quibbling: it was a cracking dish, so just ignore me.

By this point the restaurant was a little busier, but still not very, and we were on to our second drink. It was a very nice place to be, looking out on to the precinct and in to the room, but I did think that I would have liked Vegivores to be busier: I’m sure they probably felt the same. But I was in no hurry for my food to arrive, and as we ate I heard a little more about Paul’s story. He trained to be a teacher in Bristol (“all I could afford was to go to Wetherspoons at the top of Park Street”) before moving to Reading, mainly because he had a friend who lived in Thatcham. By this point he had a girlfriend in Bristol, and they would alternate home and away weekend visits. Paul wanted to show her the best of Reading, which I imagine is where my blog hopefully came in handy.

At first, Paul wasn’t sure about Reading, he said. He thought it was a bit bland and featureless, and he wasn’t sold on living in Cemetery Junction and having post-work drinks at the Three Tuns on Fridays. But Reading cast its spell on him, by degrees, as it does with lots of people, and when he moved to Caversham it all fell into place. He moved in with his girlfriend – Reading 1, Bristol 0! – and became a regular at Geo Café, sometimes twice in one day at weekends, a love that only grew during lockdown. He told me how he and his girlfriend had a Saturday ritual where they would go, get coffee and pastries (Paul’s preference is for a cinnamon bun) and watch Saturday Kitchen. They were regulars at Papa Gee, to the point where the staff had decided they had a favourite table.

I loved this story, and what I possibly loved the most about it is that although it’s of course unique, I’ve heard variations of it over the years. People end up in Reading, by accident or happenstance, determined they won’t stay and convinced it won’t win them over. But the magic of Reading is that somehow, inexorably, you find your community, your place, and suddenly you love the place. One minute you’re thinking “maybe this will do”, the next you’re thinking “this will do nicely” and, if you’re not careful, you find yourself going out for dinner with a restaurant blogger because one day you read a Tweet and thought “why not?”. I rather liked that.

You might be able to tell by now that I probably enjoyed my evening far more than I enjoyed my food. My main course, the most expensive dish Vegivores does, was their black dal feast. Again, I picked it because it was authentically vegan without needing adjustment and again, it wasn’t quite there. The dal was earthy and comforting but I was hoping for more in terms of flavour and complexity. It was served thali-style, and the accompaniments didn’t do enough to lift it. The aloo jeera were perfectly pleasant potatoes, but didn’t quite have the same texture that had made the gnocchi so appealing. More problematic was the fact that the cumin was kept to a minimum.

And all the other gubbins, to me, didn’t quite work. The ribbons of red onion, also apparently with lemon, were acrid and sharp – I thought something sweeter, flash pickled, would have been better. The raita was sour rather than cooling, and although I loved the mango and cardamom chutney it didn’t feel like it went with anything else. Last of all, there was brown rice – you can have it with flatbread, but I switched given my starter – but there was a little too much of this. So it was all unbalanced, and I left a lot of my rice, along with most of the raita and the onion salad. Double carbs was also an interesting choice.

“I always feel bad talking about the price of dishes in my reviews, because it gets harder and harder to assess what fair pricing is and people need to accept that food is more expensive.” I said to Paul. “But this is twenty pounds, and I can think of a lot of better ways to spend twenty pounds on food.” It’s my own fault, really – Paul told me the burrito was good: I should have trusted his judgment.

I think Paul liked his main better than I liked mine, but again it wasn’t perfect. It was, however, bold and imaginative: a dark, fiery cluster of mushrooms and black beans with gochujang and garlic (“a lot of garlic”, said Paul, “this might be one of the most garlicky dishes I’ve had. That’s a good thing.”). Again, I thought it looked pretty decent, and I thought if I’d had my meal over again I might well have given it a try.

But again, it was unbalanced. Paul said the decision to serve it with a cold potato salad was an interesting one, and not unsuccessful. But the potato salad – a dense sphere of the stuff – though tasty, was dry, and the mushrooms, though sticky, were also dry, and that meant that the whole dish lacked a bit of contrast, a problem that couldn’t be rescued by draping some kale on top. Paul left about half of the potato, as I’d left half of my rice, and that meant that something in the kitchen was out of kilter.

But it was a good reminder that meals are about more than food, because I was having a very enjoyable evening. We compared notes on city breaks we’d loved, cities on our hit list (San Sebastien and Lyon featured, as they do with anyone who loves food) and our best meals in the U.K. Paul and his partner love a meal just round the corner at Papa Gee, but a few times a year they go to a proper destination restaurant: L’Enclume, in Cartmel, was mentioned as an almost religious experience.

And we had another thing in common, sort of. Paul and his partner got engaged quite recently, and the wedding is in April – a civil ceremony at a register office in London, and a celebration in a pub. Not long ago that was me, so we compared notes about weddings, and wedding planning, and all the trials and tribulations that go with that.

Although it was a thoroughly agreeable evening, neither of us wanted dessert. One of the things about the kind of food Vegivores does is that it really does fill you up: a shame, because I’ve since been told that the desserts are the best bit, and if I’d tried one I might have loved Vegivores more than I did. But I have a feeling that my overall view of Vegivores from my previous visit hadn’t really changed: it was a restaurant to admire, and definitely to respect, but not one I personally loved.

“I will say” said Paul, “that none of the dishes make you miss meat. I didn’t eat either of my dishes thinking what this really needs is some chicken.” And he is definitely right, I think, but that’s not quite the same thing as stopping you from thinking I wish I was eating chicken instead. And that maybe was where Vegivores slightly fell short for me. There were things I really enjoyed, but – and I’m sure this is more a me thing than a problem for people in general – the menu still felt a little more like a straitjacket than a magical mystery tour.

Our bill came to seventy-five pounds, not including tip, and having paid we said our goodbyes before going our separate ways – Paul down Gosbrook Road, back to his fiancée, and me to the centre, to hop on a number 5 bus out to Katesgrove.

“I’ve realised I don’t know your name” said Paul, so of course I told him. “Thanks, in the run up to this Esme pointed out that I didn’t know. Are you looking forward to going out tonight with Edible Reading?“

On my walk back into town I thought about Vegivores, and that even if it wasn’t my cup of tea I felt happier to live in a town that had Vegivores in it. And I thought about Paul, and other people like him who find something in Reading that they didn’t even know they were looking for. And I thought that it was an appropriate night to go for dinner with him, because his story is the kind of story I associate with this town.

On a day where rumours had been flying round about ugly, racist right-wing demonstrations in town, of bigots gathering in Forbury Gardens, a place so symbolic of how Reading, brilliant and diverse, pulled together after tragedy, of those people threatening to march on anywhere with a mosque, I was glad I’d spend the evening doing something that reminded me that Reading is a warm, inclusive, diverse and rather special place. The march never materialised, and I had a properly lovely evening in which the food played a relatively small part. It turns out there’s a lot to be said for eating with strangers. Who’d have thought it?

Vegivores – 6.8
41 Church Street, Reading, RG4 8BA
0118 9472181

https://www.wearevegivores.com

Pub review: The Moderation

On April 19, 2024April 18, 2024 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

In 2013, the first year of this blog, I reviewed the grand total of fourteen Reading restaurants (don’t hold it against me, I only started in August). And there must have been something about those very first venues, because the majority of them are still going strong: Picasso, The Warwick, The Lobster Room, Kyklos and Forbury’s are no longer with us but the other nine are still going over ten years later. I won’t list them all because I don’t want to jinx anything in the here and now – 2024 is hard enough as it is – but you get the idea: for those restaurants still to be trading, a decade on, is truly no mean feat.

But time has passed and those reviews have become increasingly out of date; they might have reflected what a restaurant was like back in those days, when I wasn’t yet forty and mistakenly thought I had the rest of my life figured out, but you couldn’t necessarily use them now with confidence. So over the last couple of years I’ve been gradually revisiting the survivors from the class of 2013 to write new reviews and see how it all went so gloriously right. And generally, with the exception of Zero Degrees, I’ve had some good meals in the process.

Not only that, but I’ve left some of those Reading institutions delighted that they’re still with us. In a world where everything seems to change beyond recognition, more and faster, with every passing day, I was relieved to find that London Street Brasserie, for instance, was still a reliable benchmark in the centre of town. I was pleased that Pepe Sale, at the time freshly under new management, was recognisable as the place I had so loved on my first ever review. And returning to Café Yolk I found that the slightly iffy brunch place I wrote off eleven years ago had blossomed into a polished and Instagrammable performer.

All those places were older and wiser, as you would expect: I, on the other hand, was probably just older, but you can’t win them all. And that brings us to the subject of this week’s review, The Moderation, a place I really should have revisited long before now. When I went there in December 2013 I remember thinking they’d had an off night, because I’d eaten there a few times before that visit and always enjoyed it. I tried to say something to that effect in my review, but ultimately I was a little underwhelmed.

Back then the Moderation was part of a little chain, under the name Spirit House, along with the Warwick Arms on Kings Road, now closed. I’m pretty sure that at one time or another that group also included The Queens Head up on Christchurch Green and even the Lyndhurst, in a far earlier incarnation. The theme with those places was that they did pub food with a sideline in Thai food, as was the fashion ten years ago, and when I went to the Moderation on duty I found it a little unspecial, not bad by any means perhaps not quite as good as the Warwick in the centre of town.

In the intervening ten years I’ve been back a few times, but only really for drinks. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Moderation’s garden, a natural suntrap that never seems to get the plaudits it deserves, but the location has always been a little tricky for me: if I’m in that area I’m probably at Phantom instead, and if I was crossing into Caversham I’d wind up at the Last Crumb. So despite being fond of the Moderation I’ve made it there rarely.

I’m also not sure I’d have been entirely welcome there anyway, because I blotted my copy book with them a few years ago. It was in the run up to the 2019 General Election, when the Tories had selected car crash candidate Craig Morley to fight Reading East and he turned up in the constituency, not a place he knew well by the sounds of it, with Sajid Javid for a spot of campaigning. They were photographed pulling pints behind the bar at the Mod before scooting over to the Caversham Butcher, presumably to massage some gammon, and I’m afraid I might have been less than my usual diplomatic self about that on social media.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of water under Caversham Bridge since then. Craig Morley is now just a surreal footnote in Reading’s history, I’ve been known to purchase the occasional sausage at the Caversham Butcher and I reckoned it was about time I reassessed the Moderation. After all, Alok Sharma visited But Is It Art in the summer of 2020, maskless, less than a week after displaying Covid symptoms in the House Of Commons, and I still buy all my birthday cards there. So last Saturday I headed there with my old friend Dave, visiting from sunny Swindon, to honour a reservation we’d made – in his name, just to be on the safe side.

I had forgotten just how big the Moderation is, and how well-proportioned. The main room is large and tasteful, and when we were there the tables were already filling up with people ready to watch sport. But there are also two other dining rooms, and we took a table at the one just off from the garden. I liked it a lot, and it was nice to be near the sunshine and a draught, although some of the chairs were showing their age and the ones we had were a tad makeshift. But even so the back dining room, with wall art depicting a school of fish and exposed bricks, was a really lovely spot.

Last Saturday, as you might remember, was the first day that’s felt even remotely like summer in over six months, and it was too sunny to sit outside. But I went and had a nosy and the Moderation’s outside space is as good as I remember. They’ve put astroturf down à la the Nag’s Head and some of the tables are under an awning, and it’s another decent spot in a pub blessed with very pleasant places to sit, eat and drink. I also made out heaters and a wooden bar with what looked like a pizza oven behind it: the Moderation has clearly planned for all seasons.

Another thing I wasn’t quite expecting was just how well the Moderation’s menu would read. That’s not faint praise or me being patronising, but they shared their spring menu on Instagram at the start of the month and the one I was handed had far more dishes on it. Not only that but it had a lot of dishes on it I really wanted to try, along with some I’ve never seen anywhere in Reading.

The blurb explained that the Moderation’s chef is Indonesian and the menu featured a lot of Indonesian classics along with dishes from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and beyond. I’m pretty sure that that chain of pubs run by Spirit House has now contracted to just the one, and it felt like the Moderation had used that opportunity to really hone and specialise.

There was still a section of traditional pub food, but it was a much smaller proportion of the menu than I remembered from previous visits. I found that very reassuring. At the risk of sounding like Jim Bowen unveiling a speedboat to an unsuccessful couple from Leicester, here are some of the dishes I could have ordered and written about: Hainanese chicken rice (a dish I’ve never seen on menus in Reading); short rib Panang curry; coconut curry with roti canai; and a beef rendang burger inspired by a disappointing McRendang burger at a branch of McDonalds in Kuala Lumpur. Over ten years of trading has taught the Moderation how to write a killer menu.

Our starters arrived as we’d just begun making inroads into a crisp pint of Cruzcampo: sometimes, on a hot day, there’s no drink quite like a European macro lager, especially when you can kid yourself that it’s almost your first al fresco beer of the year. I have a bad habit in Thai restaurants of ordering the sharing platter, and I can see I did that last time I reviewed the Moderation, but this time we were greedy and ordered three dishes to share instead.

First up was an absolutely magnificent chicken satay which put all other versions I’d tried in Reading to shame. Sticky marinated chicken, darkened, charred and irregular, was itching to be eased off a skewer and dipped in an astonishingly good peanut sauce with depth and coarse texture. This had technically been Dave’s choice, and I was very lucky that he was affable enough to share it.

I remember trying the Moderation’s chicken satay back in 2013, but this was night and day compared to that. A little lettuce cup containing acar awak, pickled vegetables, completed the picture: impressive attention to detail. I didn’t know when I would eat this dish again, but it was more likely to be in ten weeks than ten years.

The piece of bet hedging was starter number two, the salt and pepper squid. Dave had reservations about ordering this, because squid and calamari are so often disappointing in pubs and restaurants, so we agreed to order one to share. And of course it was outstanding – squid, not calamari, fresh, spiced and fried, like an upmarket reimagining of NikNaks, and hugely moreish.

Dave is more civilised than me and used cutlery, but I dived in with my fingers and dipped in the sweet chilli sauce. Maybe on some level I thought they really were next level NikNaks. I’d order these again, and it occurred to me that as a bona fide pub there would be nothing stopping you from coming here for beers with a friend and just ordering small plate after small plate, bar snack after bar snack.

One thing I really loved about the Moderation wasn’t just that they listed where each dish comes from, it was that sometimes the description said it all. So for instance, although the salt and pepper squid came from Singapore, and the chicken satay from Indonesia, the vegetable spring rolls are described as coming from Everywhere and the chilli crab and fish cakes as simply from The Moderation.

This is a smart way of saying that they were more like traditional fishcakes than spongy Thai fish cakes, although it maybe doesn’t fully do justice to how great they were – a fabulous brittle shell giving way to crumbly crabbiness.

“You really get the crab in this” said Dave. “And I bet they’ve used brown meat rather than white meat, for the flavour.”

I nodded in agreement, and decided I didn’t resent him having the other fishcake on account of him having been so generous with his satay. Over thirty years of friendship lets you reach that kind of equilibrium. Besides, he’d brought down some of his home-made honey, thyme and brie focaccia, so I owed him.

By this point I was at the stage I sometimes reach when I’m having a really fantastic meal, especially somewhere in Reading, where I was smiling beatifically, wondering when I could come here next and saying “this is really good, isn’t it?” over and over.

So it’s a shame to have to point out that my main course was the only thing we ate all day with shortcomings.

I’d chosen the beef rendang, which purely coincidentally is what I had at the Moderation all those years ago. And again, I have to say this was night and day compared to that. The sauce was really beautiful, sweet and warming: Dave said, rightly, that it could have done with a little more heat but I was prepared to overlook that.

I also tend to like the meat in this dish slow-cooked until it’s broken down, and the Moderation’s version isn’t like that with discrete chunks of beef. But that said, they were all soft, all obediently fell apart and there was no bounce or dodginess. I also loved the roti canai, so flaky you scattered shrapnel over the table and your fingers gleamed with oil as you ate.

So what went wrong? It was the little things, because the dish was slightly out of kilter. You got a lot of rice, and a lot of roti canai, and this dish needed more than that shallow pool of sauce to properly make the most of both. I’d rather have had more sauce and foregone the beansprouts and green beans, cold and crunchy on the side, nice though they were, just to have made the most of both those carbs. But I do have to say that these are minor quibbles. It was still an excellent dish.

Dave picked a dish I know well from my Moderation-going days gone by, the nasi goreng, a dish it turned out he was rather partial to. I remember it being great, but I don’t remember it being quite this good, or this enviable. A huge mound of rice was shot through with chicken, veg and huge, plump prawns, and the forkful I had was marvellous. Again, it was a little light on the chilli heat but if anything that made it more comforting. But what really set this apart were the whistles and bells – prawn crackers, another little pile of acar awak, a fried egg and, lurking beneath it, another satay skewer.

“Mate, you get bonus satay!” was Dave’s reaction. Bonus satay indeed: Dave’s only criticism of this dish was that he’d have liked the yolk to be runny, but like my reservations about the rendang it was piffling in the scheme of things. The nasi goreng cost fifteen pounds: in the past I’ve described Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken as the perfect single plate of food in Reading, but in this I think it might have some serious competition.

By this point the pub was in full swing in what promised to be the busiest day of the year so far. The sun was blazing, it was shorts weather, people were beginning to gather outside and the front room was almost completely full. And I was sorely tempted to say fuck it to our other plans, migrate to the garden and have a Cruzcampo as nature intended, glowing in the sunshine. It so nearly happened that way, and there’s no doubt a parallel universe where it did.

But we were set on trying some beers at Phantom (perhaps after having a coffee at The Collective, because we aren’t getting any younger and need to pace ourselves) so we paid our bill and went on our way. Service was as friendly and charming at that point as it had been throughout, and the whole thing cost us sixty-seven pounds, not including tip.

I have to stress that I think the Moderation feels like one of Reading’s real bargains right now: none of the starters tops eight pounds, none of the mains costs more than eighteen. The desserts are all seven fifty and mostly stay traditional, so they didn’t tempt me on this occasion but I’d be surprised if they weren’t good.

Of all of the places I’ve revisited in the last couple of years, I think the Moderation might be my favourite of all. I was absolutely thrilled to see it thriving, to see such a broad and interesting menu and to find it executed so well. I expect all of you know this already and are wondering what took me so long, and I rather am too, but better late than never. Even so it feels like I don’t see people talking about the Moderation enough and I don’t know why, because my visit left me feeling quite converted to the place. Perhaps it has very loyal locals and regulars who are quite happy not to share it with knobbers like me: if so, I can hardly blame them.

But regardless of all that, their achievement feels significant. Without fuss or faff they have found their place in the fabric of Reading turning out excellent food and offering the kind of skilful, clever pan-Asian menu I haven’t really seen since the golden age of Tampopo. But I do have to say that much as I missed the Tampopo of 2015 when it closed, The Moderation of 2024 is better. I don’t know whether this review makes amends for my moaning about that photo op over four years ago, but even if I’m still persona non grata I will definitely be back. I might book a table under an assumed name though, just in case.

The Moderation – 8.2
213 Caversham Road, RG1 8BB
0118 9595577

https://www.themodreading.com

Restaurant review: Lebanese Village

On January 27, 2023October 12, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews

The reason behind this week’s review is simple: I got a tip-off. About chicken livers.

It came off the back of the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants I ran on Twitter just after Christmas – congratulations to Kungfu Kitchen for winning the title, by the way – when I received a message from a reader. She and her partner had been debating the merits of the various competitors, and they’d agreed that in their considered opinion the closest rival to surprise package Tasty Greek Souvlaki was not Bakery House but in fact Lebanese Village on Caversham Bridge. It served some of the best Lebanese food she’d ever eaten, she said, and their chicken livers were second to none.

It was appropriate, too, because I never liked chicken livers before I tried Lebanese food. Actually, it would be closer to the truth to say that I didn’t know I liked them until then. But the first time I had them, at Bakery House, experienced that contrast of caramelisation and silkiness unlike anything else, with sweet, sticky fried onions and a whisper of pomegranate molasses, I was hooked. And that was just the start of it – then I tried the chicken livers at Clay’s, dark and delicious, dusted with an intriguing spice mix including, of all things, dried mango and I became even more of a convert.

Then there were the happy occasions when the Lyndhurst served them – simply, on sourdough toast with a bright pesto. By then chicken livers were well and truly one of my favourite things, so the idea that somewhere in Reading served a reference version I’d yet to try was an aberration I needed to remedy, as soon as possible. So on what felt like the coldest night of the year so far, Zoë and I schlepped off to Caversham Bridge, stopping only for a fortifying beer at the warm, welcoming, wintry Greyfriar.

I’ve written about Reading’s history with Lebanese restaurants before, so I risk rehashing all that here. But in the early days, back in 2015, we had two and they were about as different as could be. La Courbe was a grown-up restaurant with sharp furniture, square plates, fancy glasses and an extensive list of Lebanese wines (true story, on my second or third visit there the English waitress, when clearing our glasses away, said “it’s not bad is it, the Lesbianese wine?”: bless her). And then came Bakery House, closer to the kind of thing you’d see on the Edgware Road, more informal, more casual, with no alcohol licence.

Bakery House won the war. It’s still going today, and has proved the more influential blueprint for Lebanese food in Reading: Palmyra and the not-too-sadly departed Alona are very much in that mould. La Courbe lasted a couple of years, though whether that’s because of their business acumen or the fact that they had John Sykes as a landlord we’ll never know. The owner moved on to run a Lebanese night at a café in Pangbourne for a little while, and then disappeared without trace. But I hope history is a kinder to La Courbe, because their food was absolutely terrific. Their skewers of lamb and chicken, their lamb koftas were, in truth, a level above anything that came off the grill at Bakery House, wonderful though Bakery House is. I still remember their taboulleh.

Looking at the menu at Lebanese Village in the run-up to my visit I wondered which kind of restaurant it would turn out to be. It sold alcohol – two Lebanese beers and a decent selection of Lebanese wine, including a couple I’d tried at La Courbe. The menu was more limited than Bakery House’s and potentially less casual, with no shawarma, no boneless baby chicken, fewer mezze. And I’d heard good things about Lebanese Village from a few people, so was it going to be the spiritual successor to La Courbe?

Restaurant review: Papa Gee

On September 30, 2022September 28, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

As a restaurant reviewer, however assiduously you do your research, however good you think you are at reading the runes of a menu to try and figure out whether a Brakes lorry regularly pulls up outside the crime scene, however much you trawl through Tripadvisor or other blogs – good luck finding those, by the way – restaurants always retain the capacity to surprise.

You can expect somewhere to be good, all the signs can say it will be, but there’s always a possibility that you’ll wind up with an underwhelming meal if you’re lucky, an out-and out-duffer if you’re not. This is especially the case when hype is involved. Or plain gratitude that a place has opened at all, either because a big name is gracing a town with its presence or because the town in question is a wasteland for decent places to eat.

The more refreshing phenomenon is when it happens the other way round, when you go to an unspecial-looking restaurant with no particular expectations only to discover that you have a proper find on your hands. That realisation that dawns gradually throughout the meal, that sense of hold on, this is really good, is one of my favourite things about restaurants, and about reviewing them. It’s happened to me a fair few times, but one that’s always stayed with me was the March evening over seven years ago when I crossed the threshold of Papa Gee.

Papa Gee, back in 2015, was an Italian restaurant on the Caversham Road, on the ground floor of the Rainbows Lodge Hotel. I’d never heard of anyone who had been to Papa Gee, and at the time I knew people who lived in Little Wales, the maze of streets on the other side of the Caversham Road named after Cardiff, Swansea, Newport. Every time I walked past Papa Gee, probably en route to a booking at Mya Lacarte, the place seemed closed.

Inauspicious was putting it lightly. So nobody was more surprised than me when I found Papa Gee wasn’t some kind of white elephant but was instead a hugely creditable little restaurant doing belting pizzas, rather nice pasta and antipasti, a family business with owner and Neapolitan Gaetano Abete, the eponymous Papa Gee, in the kitchen. I had a splendid evening, although arguably the cherry on the cake was not having to stay in the hotel upstairs afterwards.

I walked away with my faith in the world somewhat restored, and it turned out to be one of the most delightful curveballs of the very early days of this blog. And the weird thing is, people definitely went to Papa Gee before I reviewed it. It’s not as if I discovered the place: it had decent writeups on TripAdvisor and had been trading for over ten years. It’s just that I’d never met a Papa Gee customer, back then. Maybe they didn’t want the rest of us finding out.

I was worried about Papa Gee after that, because the owners of Rainbows Lodge sold the building to the Easy Hotel chain a couple of years later and the restaurant was out on its ear. But then they announced what, with the benefit of hindsight, was a perfect move – and in October 2017 they took over the old Mya Lacarte site on Prospect Street, closer to the action in Caversham.

It was a brave move to open slap bang opposite Quattro, Caversham’s long-serving Italian restaurant, and the conditions got even tougher a couple of years later when the Last Crumb, also offering pizza, opened at the top of the road where the Prince Of Wales used to be. And yet here we are in 2022 and, post-pandemic, Papa Gee is still going.

And that’s partly why they’re the subject of this week’s review. The thing is, I’d never visited them in their new home and I was starting to feel bad about that; I didn’t want them to be continually on my to do list only to find, one day, that they’d closed before I’d got round to visiting. So I made my way there with Zoë on a Friday evening, post work, the weekend stretching out ahead waiting to be filled with units and calories. Like the very first time I visited Papa Gee, a lifetime ago, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.

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