Having written about and celebrated Reading and its independent scene for nearly 13 years, one thing that has always irritated me is people who live to run the place down. You see them popping up on the comments section of the Reading Chronicle all the time, people who say that the town is all vape shops and money laundering, who hate the halal butchers and the global superstores and the mosque. 

We all know what’s behind that, and it’s not really about Reading: it’s about wanting to take the country back to some rose-tinted past that wasn’t even that crash hot first time around. One where women were paid sod all – if they had jobs at all – and where nobody could be gay, or trans, or brown. One with three TV channels and everything closed on Sundays. One where youngsters knew their place. 

It’s a land where those people still live in their heads, and if a country like that really existed I’d be all for them emigrating there. Reading – multicultural and vibrant – just happens to be in the crosshairs because it embodies so many things they’d change. But even though I despise that viewpoint, lately when I’ve gone into the centre of town I’ve felt weary, because the town I love is getting harder and harder to champion.

Rough sleepers are everywhere, begging feels more apparent than at any time I can remember. Friar Street is lined with vacant shop fronts and when new things open, they’re always chains and often the kind you wouldn’t choose. Shake Shack is on Broad Street now, next to Fat Face, and people who get excited about that kind of thing are beside themselves. 

Also new is Amorino, which I visited recently for a gelato. You had to order using a big touchscreen which tried to upsell you every step of the way: that irked me when the people sticking gelato in your paper tub were right there. My ice cream took ages because the member of staff doing it kept weighing it, adding a tiny amount more, weighing it again. Because, in case you’d forgotten, it’s 2026. 

But it tasted nice, even if eating it I realised that, for a long time, it had felt like Reading was always the bridesmaid, never the bride. We always got Amorino, never Swoon. We always got Wendy’s and Shake Shack, never Patty & Bun or Beefy Boys. Always the town, never the city. So for this week’s review I decided to visit the one part of Reading that seems fairly immune to the general worsening of things, and Friday night found Zoë and me in Spill, drinking pints of Parka ahead of a short amble along Prospect Street to Spitiko. 

Yes, that’s right: it was time for a date night in Caversham.

I got into all sorts of trouble a long time ago for asking the simple question Why isn’t Caversham nicer?, but whether you thought it was nice or not in 2017 is rather beside the point these days. Because since then – and especially since the pandemic, when people spent money closer to where they lived – Caversham has flourished in a way that the rest of Reading simply has not. 

It has acquired two excellent cafés, in the shape of Geo Café and The Collective. It boasts lifestyle stores and bakeries, bookshops and bars. It has a great pub with outside space in the shape of The Last Crumb, and one of Reading’s most distinctive restaurants in the form of Vegivores. And of course, to the detriment of the town centre it has arguably Reading’s best restaurant, Clay’s Kitchen.

Sitting in Spill with a beer, looking over at the outside tables filled with happy, prosperous people, Caversham had a certain affluent glow that you don’t generally see in the RG1 postcode. Friends were catching up, a couple were engaged in a fierce cribbage contest that reminded me of a former life. And seeing all that, drinking it in along with my cold pint of Parka, I got it: I understood why people in Caversham always seemed so happy with their lot in life. That was why Caversham residents, like wild swimmers or vegans, volunteered the information within five minutes of meeting you. Who can blame them?

Spitiko, technically, pre-dates Caversham’s renaissance. For many years 6 Prospect Street was home to Kyrenia, a Cypriot restaurant. Then at some point in 2016 it changed hands, and the new owner called it Ketty’s Taste Of Cyprus. Kyrenia’s legendary front of house Ihor left – the last time I saw him he was working at Papa Gee – and then, around the time of the pandemic, the restaurant rebranded again, this time to Spitiko – a Greek restaurant, rather than a Cypriot one.

I think one of the reasons I held fire on reviewing Spitiko for so long was that I loved Kyrenia so very much. I’ve written before about how it was one of the saddest closures in my time writing this blog, and talked at length about how often I went there. But it hasn’t been Kyrenia for a very long time, ten years or so, and it felt like time to try Spitiko afresh, as free of preconceptions as possible. 

That’s also why I will try, as best I can, not to use the K word again in this review. Because having started this review railing against them, I don’t want to be one of those awful people who thinks everything was infinitely better in the past.

Spitiko’s dining room was spacious and airy, with plain tables and chairs and a pale wooden floor. Huge paintings of the windmills of Mykonos and the blue-domed churches of Santorini took up one wall, a bouzouki was propped up on a window sill. The only other flash of colour was the distinctive Hellenic cyan edging the windows and doors. The ground floor dining room was doing reasonably well on a Friday night, with over half its tables occupied.

One thing we did realise right away, though, was that it was deafening. Whoever designed that dining room was either in their early twenties or had never tried to eat in it: the lack of soft furnishings or sound insulation made it an incredibly loud place to sit and eat. Every table had to keep talking louder because every table was struggling to be heard, an escalating state of affairs that made it a very difficult space in which to spend time. Zoë, who has a coping strategy in these circumstances, took out her hearing aids: I had no such luxury.

Spitiko’s menu covers a lot of ground, and blends both Greek and Cypriot specialities. Feta and halloumi both feature, and the restaurant serves sheftalia, which is distinctly Cypriot. But it calls its stuffed vine leaves dolmades, the Greek name, rather than koupepia, even though they contain mince which is more common in Cyprus. 

In any event, you have an enormous amount of choices – something like twenty-five appetisers and nearly as many mains. You also have the option of choosing a meat, seafood or vegetarian meze selection, for between £31 and £36 a person, but we decided against that because it’s the kind of order I might have placed in this building in the past. So we picked a selection of starters to share, and a main each, and tried to make ourselves heard above the hubbub.

But first we ordered wine, and this was where the first alarm bells rang. Greek wine, very underrated, offers a great range of excellent whites and reds. If you’re at a restaurant with a good wine list, it’s always worth looking out for a xinomavro or an assyrtiko because they often punch above their weight. 

Spitiko, I’m afraid, is not that restaurant. They do have half a dozen reds and whites from Greece and Cyprus, but many are from a single producer. Nothing will set you back more than £30, but that means that most of the wines cost £10 retail. I looked most of them up on Vivino, the wine app, and I didn’t realise you could buy wines with ratings that low. So we ordered the best of a bad bunch, a bottle of Kouros Patras – straw-coloured, chilled and forgettable, if not actively offensive.

This is as good a point as any, by the way, to make reference to Spitiko’s greatest asset, the chap who looked after us. He was wiry, high-energy and full of charm – he told us he was Irish, although I didn’t get that from his accent – and he was undoubtedly the single best thing about eating there. I hope one day I bump into him again, at a better restaurant.

One thing I always associate with eating in Greece itself, rather than in a Greek restaurant here, is the wonderful sense of leisureliness that always accompanies food in a taverna. The air still has the warmth of the day, the al fresco tables around you are full of happy people, and later on your walk back to your room will be accompanied by the music of crickets and the glimmer of fireflies. 

Not so in Caversham, where our four starters were banged down in front of us about ten minutes after we ordered them. They were each, in their way, the epitome of middling.

First up there was houmous, adorned with a single olive and a meagre drizzle of an olive oil so yellow and pale that it couldn’t add any joy to proceedings. The houmous itself, scooped onto scorched, bought-in pitta bread, wasn’t actively unpleasant but had nothing about it to elevate it from stuff you could buy in a tub for £2 from any supermarket in the land. 

Here it was £6.25, and I did think the main thing you were probably paying for was the act of decanting. The menu talks about garlic, lemon juice, tahini: all things this should have contained but somehow tasted as if it had never seen.

Equally underwhelming, if not more so, were the dolmades. £7.25 got you three small ones, all in varying stages of falling apart. I didn’t have to cast my mind back far to think of better ones – for all their faults, the stuffed vine leaves at Antep Kitchen were far better than this – but also, they were meant to contain mince and if they did, subtle isn’t even close to the right word. But also these were served hot, and the speed, the heat and the texture all made me wonder if a microwave was involved. If it wasn’t, there would have to be another excuse for these being so disappointing.

Lamb kofta also couldn’t live up to the promise of seeing those words on the menu. What was going on here? Two worryingly uniform cylinders of dense, compacted meat, each cut into worryingly uniform halves. No irregularity, no char, no coarseness. There was no sign that these had been threaded onto a skewer, no sign that they had been formed by hand. No sign, in honesty, that they hadn’t come out of a packet. 

Last of all, one of the dishes I always make a beeline for in Greece, feta saganaki. Deep fried cheese should be a genuine treat, whether it comes with honey and sesame seeds to offset the saltiness or is brought to the table flaming, doused in ouzo. This was neither, it was just a slab with a bit of a tougher exterior but no real evidence of crispiness or contrast. How could you take feta, deep fry it and produce something that was so far from fun? It felt like a betrayal – of Greek food, of our hopes, of all that and more besides. 

There was sad salad on the side, as there was underneath the kofta and the dolmades. Technically I guess it was sadder salad, because it was all sad.

Could our main courses rescue matters? You mightn’t be amazed to hear that we found out pretty damned quick: fifteen minutes after our starters turned up, out came the mains. You may, however, be surprised to hear that I wasn’t as outraged as I could be. By this time I regarded the rest of the meal a bit like the way I think of a blood test: I knew it had to happen, but I didn’t mind getting it out of the way as fast as possible.

That wasn’t entirely fair, though, because the mains showed that Spitiko could cook – just not a whole dish, and not consistently.

Take my sheftalia – which are meant to be coarse sausages wrapped in caul fat. I was so looking forward to these, at the start of the meal anyway, and by the time they arrived they managed to surpass my successively lowered expectations. Unlike everything else so far, they felt made by hand – irregular, nicely stocky things with a crinkled exterior. And they tasted good. I’d had enough of Spitiko’s humdrum tzatziki by then, and fortunately these didn’t need it.

But even here, with one of the best things they did, they couldn’t nail the landing. First of all, sheftalia can be made with pork, beef or lamb and Spitiko’s menu promises pork. So why was one of the four clearly completely different? It tasted of beef and red wine, and I didn’t mind it at all but it was bizarre how it didn’t match the other three. If I’d had two of each, or the menu had said they were a mixture, I probably would have been delighted: without that, it just added to the sense of chaos.

And the accompaniments were barely worth bothering with. A fairly dull Greek salad with four cubes of oregano-speckled feta, no olives and – would any plate be complete without it? – more limp iceberg lettuce added very little. Even worse was a big helping of faintly yellow rice studded with eerily uniform bits of veg: peas, green beans and so on. Its texture was surprisingly clumpy and, again, it felt as likely to have been made by Batchelors. I ate all of my sheftalia, I snaffled the feta, I left most of the rest.

Zoë’s kleftiko was a similar story. The lamb itself was good, tender, beautifully fatty and a cinch to ease away from the bone. I was allowed to try a bit, and it wasn’t half bad: ironically a far better deal than the very expensive equivalent I’d tried at Queen’s Park’s Carmel earlier in the year. I have had better kleftiko in Reading, although I’ve boxed myself into a corner whereby I can’t tell you where, but it was pretty decent.

But again, the stuff that came with the kleftiko was irrelevant rather than elevating. The roast potatoes looked like perfectly acceptable waxy specimens, with no real sign of roasting or glorious crisp shells. The vegetables – broccoli, carrots – were bland ballast. It’s perfectly fine to make the sheftalia or the kleftiko the centre of the dish, but the stuff on the perimeter should cheer, not heckle.

By this point some of the tables had left, the absolute racket had died down a little and I tried to find ways to look on the bright side. You should have tried this place back in the day, I said to Zoë, except of course back in the day it wasn’t this place. Just another one to file away in the long list of things I wish I’d discovered and experienced with my wife, thwarted by our chronology and the fact that we had to spend all those years living our lives and becoming the people we did so that we could meet and fall in love and, hopefully, live happily ever after. 

But as I keep saying in this review, you can’t live in the past – even if it was a past when I weighed five stone less, hadn’t lost loved ones, hadn’t broken my arm. The accumulation of damage, bad decisions and disappointment helps make you who you are: wish it away, and you wish you were somebody else. All far too deep to bring up at a date night in Caversham, I decided.

We would have had dessert, because the wine list included two Greek dessert wines, both of which I absolutely love. Our ever-charming server wandered off and came back effusive and apologetic: they’d run out of one, and they had about a glass of the other, but in a bottle which had been opened and not kept in the fridge. We waved it at us, we asked for the bill. £122 with a 12.5% service charge, which was the only element that felt like value. 

We called an Uber back to Katesgrove and ate ice cream in front of the telly, catching up on Top Of The Pops. It’s nice to go to Greece, it can even be nice to go to Caversham, but it’s nicer still to go home.

I really wanted to love Spitiko, and I really wanted to prove my hypothesis that bits of Reading are still getting better and better despite the naysayers. It’s tempting to feel deflated, and think that neither of those things happened. But I don’t know about that. I think it’s more the case that Caversham continues to flourish and buzz, and that places like Vegivores, Spill, Clay’s, even BKRY demonstrate that future. 

Put that way, Spitiko feels like part of the Caversham that predates all of that change. I hope they aren’t left behind, and that when their race is run one day there will be people who meet for dinner somewhere else, in that building or another one, and say “Remember Spitiko? That was a restaurant. God, the evenings we had there.” Sadly, though, I won’t be one of them.

Spitiko – 6.6
6 Prospect St, Reading, RG4 8JG
0118 9476444

https://spitiko.uk

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