City guide: Oviedo

On September 23, 2025September 24, 2025 By ediblereadingIn TravelLeave a comment

If you find yourself deciding to spend a city break in Oviedo, as I did, in the run-up to your holiday you will invariably be asked the same question by everybody you tell. Where? they will all say.

And you might well struggle, as I did, and wind up explaining that it’s sort of west of the Basque Country, but near the coast, in a region of Spain called Asturias that is still largely untroubled by tourists. You’ll probably, as I did, say that it’s famous for cider and blue cheese, and for fabada, a bean stew packed with pork which has a revered status in the city.

You might also mention that Oviedo features in the Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and that Woody Allen loves the city and that there’s even a statue of him which, this being continental Europe, nobody has defaced or pulled up and lobbed into the nearest body of water. Actually, you might not mention that, because you might not know it. I knew it and I never mentioned it, because advertising that you’re a Woody Allen fan just isn’t done these days.

But in the run up to your trip, if you’re asked, you’ll probably just say that it’s west of Bilbao and mention the cider. And people will generally say “okay” or “I’ve never heard of it” and all of you will get on with your respective lives.

Having returned from Oviedo, if asked, I would instead say, firstly, that it’s one of the best cities I’ve visited for food and drink. At the end of a holiday Zoë and I always play a game where we both list the five best things we’ve eaten on the trip. Sitting having a beer on our final day in Oviedo we had to conclude that it was rarely this difficult to narrow it down, and then we went and had one last dinner which, if anything, made it even more complicated.

Asturian cuisine – and yes, it does at least slightly revolve around fabada and cachopo, an enormous slab made of two pieces of veal, cheese in the middle, breaded and fried – is very hearty indeed. Forget going to Malaga or Granada and picking over lots of small dishes: in Oviedo even a main course might be big enough that two people can quite easily share it. I am rarely defeated by meals, but even I had to wave the white flag a couple of times in Oviedo.

That might make it sound like it’s wall to wall gut-busters, but that doesn’t do the food justice. I had plenty of interesting, intelligent food across the city, and I also discovered – beyond the cider – great beer and coffee and a scene that had something for everyone. It was named Spain’s city of gastronomy last year, but even so it still feels like a relatively well-kept secret.

Not only that, but Oviedo is a handsome place. The old town is exceedingly pretty, steep streets meandering from one square to another, and there’s a beautiful cathedral, an imposing monastery and a picture perfect pastel-shaded food market. But there are also wide boulevards and, right in the centre, the Campo de San Francisco, the lungs of the city, a gorgeous and spacious park which lends itself gladly to a happy meander. On one side of its perimeter there are beautiful, brightly coloured houses on a sloping hill and you get a sense, almost, of another San Francisco.

Oviedo is not buzzy or boastful the way Malaga or even Barcelona is: it is a much more stately, sedate place and over the best part of a week I came to like it very much. It’s a grower not a shower, with nothing to prove, and it had a certain ease with itself that I very much admired. So different from many of the places I tend to visit on holiday – less scruffy, somehow more grown-up. On most of my holidays I come home with dozens of pictures of street art, snapped with my proper camera like the wannabe hipster I am. In Oviedo, there was comparatively little that I saw.

I must admit, though, that my first impressions of the city were distinctly mixed. The first day of my holiday, nothing went right. The shitty train to cruddy Gatwick decided to stop at Redhill and spit us all out with, it seems, no suggestions about how we should reach our final destination. Our plane sat on the runway for almost an hour because, and this appeared to be news to people, it needed a full tank to get to Spain and didn’t have one. The bus from Asturias airport felt like it took an eternity: the airport is far closer to Aviles than Oviedo, it turns out.

And then we decided to grab a late lunch on Calle Gascona, Oviedo’s famous cider boulevard, the one that features in every newspaper article about the place. Somehow it felt a little tired and unlovely, and grabbing a table outside at one of the places recommended by one of the broadsheets, a little too late for lunch, we felt like an inconvenience.

I won’t mention the place, although maybe I should, to encourage you not to go there, but it was not an experience for the ages. The croquetas were decent enough, the big slabs of cheese fridge-cold, the bread rock hard. A twenty Euro plate of calamari were thick bouncy straps of the stuff, no lightness or delicacy. And the American at the next table talked volubly and relentlessly at her tablemates, who appeared to be a captive audience. I think she might have been doing part of the Camino de Santiago, and I could picture her husband, back home, having a very pleasant fortnight in relative peace and tranquillity.

It turned out that she was a vet. I know this, because she mentioned it roughly half a dozen times in the space of thirty minutes, and as I dipped a piece of particularly rubbery squid through the crust on top of a purgatorial dish of alioli she started talking about prolapses and fistulas in more detail than I would personally have liked, i.e. in any detail at all. The squid bordered on inedible, the grey clouds overhead threatened rain. This doesn’t bode well, I thought to myself.

Anyway that was the last time I had a bad meal for a whole week, although it did put me off returning to Calle Gascona, and from that point onwards it was sunshine and strolls, coffee and cakes, beer and cider and terrific meal after terrific meal, and I was relieved to find that first experience a passing aberration, the exception that proved the rule, the rule being that Oviedo rules.

When I returned from holiday, thoroughly passionate about telling people why this grand yet modest city deserved more credit, I realised that because I’d been unable to find a decent guide to Oviedo in the run-up to my trip I’d just have to write one. So here it is, and I hope that if you’re considering an expedition to this most classy of cities – or have already decided on one, and have come here through the vagaries of Google looking for advice – it helps you to make the most of what I found to be a downright wonderful place.

And when you fly home, tell people that it’s not all about cider and blue cheese, because there’s miles more going on than that. Oviedo deserves a legion of ambassadors, and I for one am proud to be one. Fingers crossed this piece helps to create a few more.

1. La Corte de Pelayo

The evening after that awful lunch on Calle Gascona we had dinner at La Corte de Pelayo, on one corner of the Campo de San Francisco, and my holiday experienced the great reset.

It’s one of those places where from the moment you walk through the front door, you know that everything will be absolutely fine until the moment you leave: smooth, attentive service, a cosy, classic dining room and pockets of delighted diners everywhere you look. It’s been going for over 20 years, although that makes it a positive newborn compared to some of the businesses that feature in this city guide, and it had that air that it was probably exactly the same when it first opened and would be exactly the same in 2045. I loved that about it.

I was determined to immerse myself in Asturian food, so I ordered their fabada – which, I should add, is on the menu as a starter. I haven’t experienced anything quite like it: the pot of beans was brought to the table and ladled, with great ceremony, into the bowl in front of me before being set down on the table, in case I wanted a top up. The compango, a long plate with pork, pork sausage and morcilla, was placed nearby, looking for all the world like a carnivore’s idea of the best petit fours ever, for you to cut and add however you liked.

It was truly heavenly: the beans firm and creamy, the pork lending smoke and salt, the whole thing giving me complete clarity on why this dish, in this region at least, has attained a mythical status. I understood why every year they give out awards for the best fabada Asturiana (they also do this for cachopo, as we will see, and for Pote Asturiano for that matter), and why La Corte de Pelayo had been a finalist in those awards several times.

Don’t get me wrong, the meal had other dishes in it too. Zoë ate gorgeous jamon ibérico, sliced by hand as it should always be, and we shared some pixin, pieces of fried monkfish. She had secreto ibérico as a main, and I had an extraordinary shoulder of lamb, presented on the plate like one of those flying birds that adorned the walls of so many Seventies living rooms. There was an apple tart that made me very happy indeed, and a glass of ice cider – a drink I came to love far more than cider itself during my time in Oviedo.

But it was the fabada I have thought about countless times since. I put pictures of the meal on my Facebook page and a reader who knows Oviedo well told me to enjoy the city. I asked him if he had any recommendations and he said “I’m afraid you’ve been to the best place already!” I don’t know about that, because it turned out that there were many other superb meals to be had. But I didn’t order fabada again.

La Corte de Pelayo
Calle San Francisco, 21
https://lacortedepelayo.com

2. Cocina Cabal

Cocina Cabal, where I had lunch on my second day in Oviedo, was a thoroughly sophisticated spot. From the very start, when we waited by the gorgeous bar out front and had cold beer straight from the tank, to the bit where we were led into a tasteful, muted dining room and given a menu awash with temptations I liked it very much. It’s named after chef Vicente Cabal and most of the tables have a view of the open kitchen, although I had an even better view of my wife.

Everything was clever, pretty and carb-free – qualities I have aspired to for many years but seem fated never to attain – and although I found the plating somewhere between “fussy”, “geometric” and “designed by a serial killer” I thoroughly enjoyed all of what I ate. Octopus and stellar pork, edged with exceptionally light crackling, was a new take on surf and turf for me, and although I wasn’t entirely sure any of it went with celeriac purée or mango chutney I was happy to spend a few minutes eating (and completely failing to make sense of) it.

My veal with sweetbreads and salsify showed similarly worrying presentation, all parallel lines and artful smears, but I rather liked it, even if it could have done with more sweetbreads. But then, what dish couldn’t? Dessert was a white chocolate sphere full of passionfruit mousse that melted away when dark chocolate sauce was poured on it, an idea which I think was cutting edge quite some time ago, but I appreciated the execution all the same.

But perhaps the trick was in how you ordered. Zoë enjoyed two colossal ingots of foie gras with apple and Pedro Ximenez, and outrageously good suckling pig with a bright and moreish kumquat purée, so arguably the menu just had cheffier and less cheffy stuff, and I, ever the ponce, had skewed towards the former. Nevertheless it was a very good meal, and even pushing the boat out with wine and (more) ice cider it still cost us something like £160. When I consider some of the meals I’ve spent that on in the U.K. of late, I start to have dark thoughts.

Looking at Cocina Cabal’s menu again now, I see that their fabada was the best in the world back in 2022. Next time, I’m having that.

Cocina Cabal
Calle Suárez de la Riva, 5
https://cocinacabal.com

3. La Puerta de Cimadevilla

Although that fistula-ridden experience on my first day put me off Calle Gascona, it didn’t put me off sidrerias in general. It did, however, make me a bit more discerning about which ones to try, which is how we ended up at the more modern, more interesting La Puerta de Cimadevilla on Thursday lunchtime. On the edge of a pretty square in the old town, it was much less frowsty than some of its Gascona-based peers and was thoroughly fizzing with custom throughout my lunch there: we turned up early, without a reservation, but later on saw people getting turned away.

The staff at La Puerta de Cimadevilla were lovely, and brought us much more into the whole cider-pouring experience, and it was a real joy to watch them pouring it from a great height into the corner of our wide-bottomed glasses in the traditional style, the practice of escanciar or ‘throwing’ the cider, in order to aerate it. Zoë was a little more sceptical – “they’ve all got one wet shoe” was her take on this venerable custom – but even she got into the swing of it, I think.

Incidentally, we saw next to no British tourists in our week in Oviedo and I wonder if the cider has something to do with it: imagine our nation of binge drinkers having to attract the attention of serving staff every time you wanted another sip of your drink. It would never catch on. The thing to pair cider with in these parts is blue cheese, and La Puerta de Cimadevilla’s cabrales croquetas, sweetened with honey and topped with a walnut, were a properly knockout combination.

But really, the reason we were there was to try the other pillar of Asturian gastronomy, the cachopo. La Puerta de Cimadevilla is proud of theirs, with no less than four different ones on their menu. Not only that, but they include two that have been decorated: the cachopo that was declared the best in Spain back in 2023 – there’s a poster proclaiming this on the outside of the restaurant, no less – and another that was a finalist as recently as this year.

We ordered the 2023 champion because you would, wouldn’t you? And I loved everything about it, from the slightly preposterous presentation to literally everything else. It comes on its own special bespoke board, loudly proclaiming that it is indeed the ‘El Capricho del Rey Ramiro I’ and, just as endearingly, the restaurant’s other celebrated cachopo has its own unique, subtly different board. I don’t know how you can’t slightly love a place that gets so proud of its achievements: it was certainly beyond me.

But more than that, it was simultaneously delicious and colossal. There is no question at all that you couldn’t take one of these down on your own, and even between two it almost proved beyond us. The restaurant has a whole separate page on its website talking about every painstaking element of this, from the meat that’s used to the paleta ibérica laid on top of it, from the mixture of cheeses in its gooey core to the blend of breadcrumbs, corn and cheese that make up its ultra-crunchy coating. There’s even chestnut purée in the mix somewhere, the kind of thing some dullards would describe as the hero ingredient, no doubt.

All that sounds great, but the proof is in that moment when you make your first inadequate incision into the gigantic slab of Asturian food history and understand the fuss. Before that, my only experience of this kind of dish was the Andalusian flamenquin, a cigar of pork loin, jamon and cheese that I used to think was the best breadcrumbed thing ever. The cachopo has forced me to revise my opinion somewhat, but I also suspect more research is necessary.

Equally brilliant and frustrating was the fact that the menu contained countless other things I would have loved to try that were rendered impossible by the sheer volume of cachopo you had to put away. Of all the restaurants in the guide I think this was the one Zoë most wanted to return to, to eat their tomatoes with bonito. The table next to me was so struck by a neighbouring table’s ensaladilla russa that they specifically asked what it was and I could see them making a mental note for next time. They even do a fabada – who doesn’t? – and you wouldn’t bet against it being marvellous.

La Puerta de Cimadevilla
Calle Cimadevilla, 21
https://lapuertadecimadevilla.es

4. Gloria

The night I ate at Gloria, the heavens opened and the stars aligned: it was the one time during our stay in Oviedo that it properly chucked it down, which just so happened to be the night we had a reservation at the restaurant two minutes’ walk and a few doors down from our hotel.

Not just any restaurant, though. Chef Nacho Manzano has Oviedo’s only Michelin starred restaurant, NM, situated in the El Vasco mall, a huge shopping centre I really struggled to like. But Gloria is the restaurant he shares with his sister Esther, less showy but properly lovely. Strangely I can’t tell you what the main dining room looked like because we were seated in the front room, by the bar, with just one other table, occupied by a pair of friends catching up. But actually that made it feel intimate, like private dining almost, and if I was in the zone allocated to tourists I soon found I didn’t mind one bit.

Gloria’s was another of those menus – Oviedo seemed to be full of these – where the starters and main courses cost pretty much the same, leaving you with little or no idea how to structure a meal, what was to share and what was to eat on your own; I sometimes suspected that most of the servers in Oviedo thought we should share everything and couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t. But we were helped by a brilliant server at Gloria who very firmly told us when something was too big for us to order one apiece, and everything was so delicious that we ended up sharing it all anyway.

That meant, unusually, tuna two ways – an exquisite tataki just-cooked, dressed in impeccable extra virgin olive oil and strewn with garlic, and a hefty piece of loin halved and served blushing with gorgeous tomatoes sharpened with citrus, nutty beans like edamame and crispy onion. The former was maybe too delicate to share, the latter quite the opposite, and one of the best things I ate in the entire trip.

Our server talked us into splitting arroz con pitu de caleya between us, which was probably wise but did leave me wanting more at the end. Pitu de caleya, or roadside chicken, is a noted Asturian free-range chicken, and serving it with rice in this way is something Manzano reintroduced first at his three-starred restaurant Casa Marcial. If this was the diffusion line, it felt very far from being short changed: the rice was rich beyond measure with the juices from the chicken and the chicken itself – darker, leaner and gamier than the usual fare – was glorious.

Having been restrained thus far we earned the right to spoil ourselves for the rest of the meal, so we did. A cheeseboard full of Asturias’ finest completely redeemed the dismal Calle Gascona selection from our first meal in the city, and then a chocolate cremoso topped with the smoothest hazelnut ice cream, ringed with olive oil – yes, a whole one each – brought matters to a resoundingly successful conclusion. I probably don’t need, by now, to say that the latter was accompanied with another glass of ice cider but there you go, I’ve said so anyway.

The rain had died off by the time we walked back to our hotel to do some serious digesting. How could it have persisted, after a meal so good it had the power to banish pathetic fallacy?

Gloria
Calle Cervantes, 24
https://www.estasengloria.com

5. El Fartuquin

Let’s get this bit out of the way first: no, I don’t know where the name comes from, yes, it sells the bean dish and no, I didn’t order it. So snigger if you must, but El Fartuquin was possibly the most traditional sidreria we ate at, and a very successful and popular one at that. The basement room looked like the picture above when we sat down at 9 on a Friday night, but within half an hour every table was packed. Everything about it had that assured air which seemed to permeate much of the city, and everybody was having a terrific time; I heard no English spoken anywhere.

If it was only solid by the standards of this holiday, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have been an outstanding meal in any other context. I really liked the pixin, nuggets of fried monkfish with a little pot of alioli, and I quite admired the brave plating choice to serve the skeleton of the monkfish next to it, like something cooked up by H.R. Giger, to leave you under no illusions about where those delectable morsels had come from.

I also rather enjoyed yet more pitu de caleya – I’d got a taste for it by then, you see – this time in a dark and potent stew which contained maybe a tad too much mustard for my personal liking, although I found a way to see past that. Zoë decided, more out of hope than expectation, to have her own personal cachopo and was even more defeated by it than she had been the last one. This is as good a point as any to reiterate that Asturias doesn’t do small portions: Oviedo would not, for instance, be an Ozempic-friendly city break.

I felt a little like El Fartuquin only really suffered by comparison with the other meals we had in Oviedo, rather than anywhere else, so it’s still one to consider if you find yourself in the city for an appreciable length of time and you’re disinclined to eat at the same place twice. I’d also add that, despite being a sidreria, it had an excellent list of reds, including many I’ve sampled on previous visits to Malaga. The kind pricing of wine in the city is another reason why the bill never stings anywhere near as much as it would back home.

El Fartuquin
Calle Carpio, 19
https://elfartuquin.es

6. El Ovetense

We had lunch at El Ovetense on our final full day of the holiday and it was a place I discovered entirely by chance that very morning.

How it happened was this: we were still buzzing from a very happy evening spent drinking at Cerveceria Cimmeria (number 10 on this list, just down there) and, following them on Instagram, I saw that they’d shared a beautiful picture of the place on their Instagram stories. The person who took it was a very talented local food photographer – I forget her Instagram handle – and all the photos in her grid were of food she’d cooked herself with one exception, a couple of dishes from a place called El Ovetense. And they looked good. Drop-everything-change-your-plans good.

So I did some more research, fell well and truly down the rabbit hole and found an article from last year in El Pais which left me with no doubt in my mind that I needed to snag a table there. El Ovetense, in the old town, is technically a hotel restaurant, and has been trading since 1959. The founder’s daughters Natalia and Ana run the place now, and it has achieved legendary status for two dishes. So naturally, after turning up at noon to ask Ana nicely for a table on the terrace, only to be told that they didn’t open until 1pm, those dishes are exactly what we (eventually) ordered.

One was the pollo con ajillo – chicken with garlic – which doesn’t begin to explain how incredible this dish was. Tons of the crispiest jointed chicken, skin cooked until brittle, the whole thing issuing a siren song to be parted from the bone, came festooned with industrial quantities of crunchy fried garlic, the whole lot sitting on a layer of the finest chips, which slowly became permeated with all that garlic and all those juices as the meal went on. Seventeen Euros for this, and it could easily have served two on its own. Seventeen Euros! I could honestly weep.

But the other dish, which is even more the signature of the restaurant, is their jamon asado “Serafin style”, named after the restaurant’s founder Serafin Garcia. I never got to try jamon asado when I visited Granada last year, and I felt like I’d missed out at the time, but I know now fate was keeping me waiting for this, a rendition which I can’t imagine being surpassed.

Picture a plate groaning with gorgeous sliced ham – apparently there are 16 slices per portion, carved with a special knife so fine and sharp that it’s like playing the violin. Picture that ham draped over a rubble of crunchy potatoes, and then picture a rich sauce, somewhere between a jus and a gravy, poured liberally over it all. Only Natalia and Ana handle the preparation of this dish, and they cook up to 20 kilos of ham a day for the purpose. It is the kind of dish that not only the restaurant, but also the city, deserves to be famous for.

The ham, the spuds, that gravy, the many phenomenal forkfuls made up of those elements… it was, as with many dishes in Oviedo, not for the faint hearted but one for the memory banks and the record books. We also had yet more spuds, this time in a salty and arresting cabrales sauce and we didn’t need them, with all that other food and all those permeated potatoes, but we ate them all the same because they were as fantastic as everything else.

It is probably for the best that I discovered El Ovetense on my final day, completely by chance, because if I’d been there on my first day I might not have gone anywhere else and then you wouldn’t have this guide to read. But if you decide you want to visit Oviedo, this is the place to make sure you visit and these are the dishes to make sure you have. And yet, I found myself wondering – if they are this good, what other unsung gems are hiding further down the menu, when they stick two absolute showstoppers right at the top?

El Ovetense
Calle de San Juan, 6

7. Casa Fermin

My final meal in Oviedo – unless you count something wolfed down at the airport the next day, which I’d rather not – was at Casa Fermin, just down from La Corte de Pelayo and so very near to the park. It was, I suppose, the Big Fancy Meal of the holiday, and after lunch at El Ovetense I was worried our trip would end with a whimper rather than a bang.

I worried needlessly, because although Casa Fermin was very different to El Ovetense it was, in its way, as good a meal as any we had on the trip. The dining room looks a smidgen sterile in pictures but was actually a very striking one to which photographs possibly don’t do justice. The enormous tablecloths that get caught under your feet seem to be a Spanish thing – Cocina Cabal had these too – and they’re a bit Total Eclipse Of The Heart, but the space was peaceful, hushed, luxe and poised.

And the food was very good indeed, in the same kind of bracket as Cocina Cabal but with, for my money, everything taken up a notch. We eschewed the tasting menu for the à la carte and were again rewarded with a slightly confusing range of options where some dishes were small and clearly to be consumed solo, others were big and clearly designed to share and, well, with the rest it was anybody’s guess.

This, though, is where the serving staff really came into their own. We ordered a few individual things, a few dishes to share which were brought to the table already divided and what that meant, all in all, was that we kind of designed our own tasting menu with the help of our server, very much the best of both worlds.

So we had a croissant each, deeply flaky and buttery, crammed with tuna tartare and we shared a feather-light rectangle of brioche topped with a translucent film of Iberian pancetta and piled with caviar. An arroz con pulpo, similarly, was divided into two bowls and was extremely generous for two: god knows how they expected one person to polish that off as a starter and have room for everything else.

I lucked out, though, with the suckling pig. Pressed into the most divine oblong, the meat all succulent and the crackling onomatopoeically doing exactly that, it was superlative stuff. I liked the hazelnut pesto they served it with perfectly fine, but I loved the smoked pineapple purée, something I would never have anticipated in a hundred years and which was an eye-opener and a half. It even made me think that possibly, just possibly, there might be a place for pineapple on pizza, provided you smoked it first.

All of that went beautifully with a white wine from the Canary Islands which was complex with almost oxidised notes, and even though everyone at the surrounding tables seemed more classy, more genteel and an awful lot more Spanish I had an absolute whale of a time throughout my meal.

Dessert was the best way I could imagine to finish a week of miraculous meals, a sort of ice cream cheesecake made with a local cheese called Gamonèu; I’d forgotten how the Spanish love to include savoury notes in cheesecake, and this had a little pungent punch which elevated it far above the workaday. It came with a tiny moat of ice cider: I took this as a cue to have one final golden glass to match.

Casa Fermin
Calle San Francisco, 8
https://www.casafermin.com

8. Casa González Suárez

I had no real concept, before I went to Oviedo, of how different Asturias would be to Andalusia, where I’ve spent far more time. So I was expecting that, like Malaga or Granada, Oviedo would be awash with jamon shops with stacks of bocadillos in the window, ham shining under the spotlights, churrerias left right and centre and vermouth bars here and there.

Well, in my experience Oviedo is not like that. There is jamon, and I eventually chanced upon a couple of shops, and I didn’t make it to either branch of the only churreria, Churreria Guty, that I came across online. Next time, perhaps. And Oviedo is a cider city first, a wine city second and although it has a little grid of streets – the Ruta de los Vinos – around Calle Manuel Pedregal, I didn’t make it there either. I know, I know, what kind of a guide is this?

So the closest I got was Casa González Suarez, a little spot celebrating its centenary this year. It served vermouth, and had a limited menu of ham, cheese and bocadillos, and it was the perfect place for a short, casual pit stop after the morning coffee and before the afternoon amble. The ham was cut by hand, and came on a paper plate – it wasn’t bad, but I’ve had better. The cheese, also on a paper plate, was more refrigerated than I’d have liked.

The vermouth, though, and the service were splendid, and I liked the room. Lunch for the two of us cost less than twenty quid. Asturias is almost different enough to Andalusia to be a different country – they worship different ways to eat a pig there – but I enjoyed my brief, affordable excursion to the south.

Casa González Suárez
Calle Ramón y Cajal
https://casagonzalezsuarez.com

9. Cerveceria l’Artesana

If Oviedo is cider first, wine second, where does that leave beer? Well, from my homework and exploration, in a limited number of very safe hands.

Cerveceria l’Artesana, on a street parallel to Calle Gascona, was a really fun and rather popular craft beer bar which very much lived up to the usual aesthetic of those places – a long thin corridor of a room with high tables against the wall, and a bigger room up the stairs at the back which had more room but less personality. I was heartened by how many people were in there on a Wednesday night, and I liked many of the beers I had.

Some of those, like piney pale ale La Vuestra, were brewed by the venue, and others, like a very drinkable DIPA called FOMO, are by other Spanish breweries – Bilbao’s Luagar in that case. An excellent can fridge gave me the chance to reacquaint myself with the Girona brewery Soma, whose beers I’d so enjoyed the previous year in Granada.

Having got there, we were having such a good time that we stayed for food. L’Artesana’s Instagram makes much of the fact that they make all their food on the premises, and I very much got that – everything was robust, substantial and frighteningly good value. Empañadas were Venezuelan rather than Argentinian, so made with corn dough rather than pastry, more like an arepa, and were colossal and stuffed with chicken. We got two for a price you’d gladly pay for one, and both were impressively sturdy.

Fingers de pollo (for some reason they preferred fingers to goujons when lifting a word from a foreign language) were actually really good chicken tenders, again absolutely whopping and brilliant dunked in a pot of moreish honey mustard dip. The only thing that defeated me was their burger. It cost something like twelve Euros and was a behemoth, and it was the first but not the last time I didn’t clear my plate in an Oviedo venue.

You couldn’t dispute the quality, and l’Artesana even makes its own buns and burger sauce, but it was a little too thick for me, and a little too pink in the middle: close to tartare, really, underneath the crust. Never mind. I would go back, I would pick dishes that looked more like snacks and beer food and I would still leave full and happy, wallet far from dented. It was another illustration that when it comes to what you should eat with craft beer, the U.K. still has plenty to learn.

Cerveceria l’Artesana
Calle Santa Clara, 8
https://www.instagram.com/lartesana_oviedo/?hl=en

10. Cerveceria Cimmeria

My homework had identified Cerveceria Cimmeria as a place to try for beer, and early in my time in the city I clocked that it was on the same hill as La Gente – number 13 on this list – a few doors down. It was closed during the day, so it was impossible to tell what it would be like. There was a Löwenbräu sign outside, and the name of the pub was in that sort of Celtic, sort of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons font I remember well from my misspent teenage years. I couldn’t possibly have known, at that point, that I was gazing upon one of the best pubs I’ve ever had the luck to drink in.

Returning on a week night, minutes after they opened, it was a revelation. A beautiful spot with some low tables in the window and along one side, a bar and stools taking up the other half of the room. Lovely wood panels, walls covered with beer swag and everything scrupulously clean. Twelve beers on offer – including one cask handpull – and a dizzying array of styles and breweries, from Spain and beyond. The lager was Löwenbräu, the cask beer was Shepherd Neame’s very own Bishop’s Finger, but beyond that it got really interesting.

That meant excellent IPAs from Spanish giant Garage, Asturian brewery Caleya and Malandar, from Cadiz. There was an imperial stout by renowned Basqueland Brewing and, from far further east, a delectable sour by Latvia’s Arpus and another corking pale from Berlin’s Fuerst Wiacek. Not only that, but Belgium was well represented with a Lindemans and the Straffe Hendrik Tripel on the board.

I don’t think I have ever seen such a canny but compact selection of beers, such a well balanced lineup of countries and styles where I wanted to try nearly all of it. I resolved to try nearly all of it.

I didn’t realise at the time, but now I do – Cimmeria is the kingdom featured in the Conan The Barbarian stories, which might have explained the font on the outside. The place was filling up with the kind of diverse craft beer drinking crowd you never see at these places in the U.K., and Def Leppard was playing on the stereo. It was how my corner of our sixth form common room would have been back in 1991 if (a) we had been cool; (b) we’d lost our virginity; and (c) we’d been allowed to drink on the premises.

I looked at Zoë, and I could tell she was in love with the place. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was the Leppard. It was probably, in truth, a bit of both. But I was in love with it too.

All that and snacks – a bowl of crisps, popcorn or nuts with each round, and a simple but effective menu of cheeses or empañadas. We ordered a mushroom and cheese empañada each and were told they wouldn’t come out for a while because they needed to be baked properly, which is exactly the answer you want to hear, and when they arrived they were gorgeous.

We liked Cimmeria so much that it was a huge wrench to leave for our dinner reservation, and we resolved there and then to move a few things around so we could do it all over again the following night. So the next evening we were stood outside at 7, when it opened, we grabbed the same table and it was, if anything, even better than before.

Cimmeria was following both Zoë and me on Instagram by then and one of the owners, who was charm personified, told us that we had been spending our time wisely from what she could see of our travels. That was lovely of her, but none of it was spent quite as wisely as those happy hours in Cimmeria.

We left for our final restaurant of the trip happy to have found possibly the only pub I’ve been to that comes close to rivalling Bruges’ magisterial ‘t Brugs Beertje and devastated that we’d only had two short evenings there.

Cimmeria celebrated its thirteenth birthday the month before we arrived in Oviedo. I wish it many, many more very happy returns – and, speaking of returns, I can’t wait to go there again.

Cerveceria Cimmeria
Calle Martínez Vigil, 8
https://www.instagram.com/cimmeria_oviedo/?hl=en

11. El Lúpulo Feroz

El Lúpulo Feroz is on the outskirts of the city, out past Calle Gascona and the El Vasco mall, in the only bit of Oviedo I visited that felt decidedly residential. I wanted to try it as the third in my trilogy of craft beer places and I found that, aesthetically at least, it had much in common with l’Artesana. Their back room was a very attractive spot – blood red walls, beer memorabilia everywhere, from Belgium, Czechia and even dear old Blighty. It was oddly pleasing to see an illuminated Bass sign on the wall, the beer free from its usual connotations of little Englander pubman gammonistas.

Speaking of beer, the venue had a tap takeover by Danish brewery Amager Bryghus the night I visited, and I liked what I had. Oviedo has no verified Untappd venues for beer – not that kind of city, not yet – but I later discovered, once I’d got home, all the places I hadn’t made it to: Bär Berlin, Vivalabirra and the courageously named Cerveceria Lord Vader (let’s hope Disney never find out about that one). Plenty kept in reserve for, hopefully one day, an updated version of this guide.

El Lúpulo Feroz
Calle Indefonso Sánchez del Rio, 8
https://www.instagram.com/ellupuloferoz/?hl=en

12. Pionero Coffee Roasters

I suspect that the coffee scene in Oviedo isn’t quite as advanced as in other Spanish cities I’ve visited. The Best Coffee app, a regular staple for me on my travels in the U.K. and overseas, drew a complete blank on the city, and even further research only threw up a handful of places. One, Pionero, was in the northwest of the city, the other side of the Campo de San Francisco from the old town and so very close to my hotel, which meant a couple of very happy contemplative coffees there in the mornings before heading off to explore.

It was a very nice spot with extremely friendly, helpful staff and although the inside was quite serviceable they had a couple of tables outside with a view out onto the street, and thus people-watching, so I tended to plonk myself there. No sunshine, really, so al fresco potential was strictly limited but all the same I found it a brilliant spot to start the day. Coffee was decent – definitely a step above the generic cafe con leche – if not top tier, but Pionero also roasts and sells beans to take home. I’m very looking forward to that first V60 with them.

Pionero Coffee Roasters
Calle Marqués de Pidal
https://www.pionerocoffee.com

13. La Gente Café

La Gente is on Calle Martinez Vigil, the steep street by the monastery that is also home to Cerveceria Cimmeria. For both those reasons, it probably became my favourite street in the whole of Oviedo over the course of the week. La Gente has a lovely little terrace, overcoming the gradient of quite a challenging hill, and was far and away my favourite spot to sit, drink coffee and take in the surroundings.

I think I liked La Gente’s coffee slightly more than Pionero’s, possibly influenced slightly by the fact that their lattes are tall and generous, so more my personal thing than a cortado or a flat white. I found out from the owners of Cimmeria that La Gente had only opened at the start of the year, and what impressed me was just how part of the community it already felt, full of brunchers, chatters and even dog walkers (owners Kate and Andrew own a miniature schnauzer, Lando, who features in much of their branding).

They are brunch specialists, which means that if you go there around lunchtime you’ll struggle to get a seat and, if you’re not eating, you might well feel guilty about depriving them of a table with a higher spend. But the rest of the time it was just a brilliant space to sip latte and make a plan of attack for the day’s wandering, sightseeing and eating. The interior was absolutely lovely too, although it was a tad too warm to spend time in there.

I also liked the sense that as a business it was still evolving. On one visit I heard one of the owners and a member of staff discussing the menu for the season ahead, and I got the impression from the blurb and postings on social media that La Gente either offered, or was looking to offer, natural wine on selected evenings. Other than that, it’s worth pointing out that, like Pionero, La Gente closes pretty early during the week – so if. you do want an afternoon flat white make sure you get there before the shutters go down at 4pm.

La Gente Café
Calle Martínez Vigil, 6
https://www.instagram.com/la_gente_cafe/?hl=en

14. Diego Verdù

One thing you can rely on from a city guide of mine is that if I go somewhere in summer, I’ll find somewhere for you to eat ice cream. To be honest, even in the less clement months I can usually snaffle one but on a sunny day in Oviedo my thoughts turned to tracking down a tarrina – that is to say a tub – of something cold and captivating.

Enter Diego Verdù, an Oviedo institution which has been trading for nearly 150 years; as we’ll see in the remainder of this list, the people who make sweet treats in the city have had a very long time to become excellent at it. Diego Verdù started out making turron, but by the 1930s it had also decided to turn its hand to ice cream. And thank goodness it did, because both of its branches – the very pretty almost-original premises on Calle de Cimadevilla and the second more modern one just down from the Woody Allen statue – sorted me right out on this trip.

All the flavours that I tried were magnificent although, as befits their vintage, most of them kept it fairly establishment. I loved their chocolate, and their pistachio, but the most leftfield I tried on this visit was chocolate with pimento which I thought downright bloody great. For all I know they may occasionally experiment with yuzu, cinnamon or even cabrales – just imagine – but I didn’t see any of that on my travels.

Sitting on a bench – both branches are takeaway only – and attacking a massive tub filled with two generous scoops for less than four quid, I was quite unbothered by that. Oviedo just isn’t the kind of city for off the wall stuff, and is none the poorer for it. Unlike with coffee, Oviedo is positively enlightened when it comes to helado, and both shops are open until 8.30pm. There’s also a little kiosk on the edge of the Campo de San Francisco, which boasts many benches perfect for sitting, eating and sighing.

Diego Verdù
Calle Milicias Nacionales, 5/Calle Cimadevilla, 7
https://www.diegoverdu.com

15. Camilo de Blas

Diego Verdù is not the only Oviedo institution that’s been brilliant for longer than any of us have been on the planet. Confiteria Camilo de Blas has been in the city since 1914, although they were trading in Leon for another forty years or so before that. The thing they are most famous for, and possibly the emblematic goodie most associated with Oviedo, is the carbayon.

Now, carbayon originally referred to a huge oak tree, beloved by and symbolic of the city, to the point that natives of Oviedo called themselves carbayones. It was felled in 1879 to make way for Calle Uria, the ‘modern’ street connecting the old town to the train station which is now home to department store El Corte Ingles. That’s progress for you. That tree, I suppose was the Metal Box Building of Oviedo (one for my Reading readers there) but in 1924, the mayor of Oviedo commissioned the confiteria to create a sweet treat and this new incarnation of the carbayon, an incredible sweet pastry named after the tree, was born. That is also progress for you.

And what a treat it is. A lozenge of puff pastry filled with almond cream and then topped with a glossy layer of an exceptionally sweet coating which, depending on who you Google, either involves egg yolk or egg whites or both. Either way it also includes a lot of sugar, and makes for a very satisfying shell. This is one for those of you with a sweet tooth, like me. Zoë and I picked a couple up from their second branch on Calle Jovellanos and inhaled them on a bench in the Plaza de la Constituciòn and they were, to my mind at least, unimprovable.

“It’s like a cross between a yum yum, a frangipane and an éclair” was Zoë’s verdict, and I made a mental note of her saying that because she summed it up better than I could. All that for about £2.80 each, so cheaper than a Picnic brownie and even more indulgent. My boss likes to quote Philip Pullman, repeating the definition of an éclair as a cake that is “long in shape but short in duration”: I brought him back a carbayon and he loved it, although he was even more delighted that it was far less short in duration.

Camilo de Blas
Calle Jovellanos, 7/Calle Santa Susana, 8
https://camilodeblas.es

16. Confiteria Rialto

The third of Oviedo’s amazing venerable confectioners is Confiteria Rialto, which celebrates its hundredth birthday next year. It also has two branches in the city centre and it also sells carbayones. But the thing it’s synonymous with is Moscovitas, thin almond biscuits half coated in chocolate, to the extent that even its domain name references Moscovitas, not Rialto.

When I put some pictures on Facebook regular reader Rodrigo – the chap who told me I’d eaten at Oviedo’s best restaurant on my first night – asked if I’d tried Rialto’s Moscovitas, and fortunately I was able to post a photo of me holding one of Rialto’s distinctive red and gold bags, containing two luxurious-looking boxes of the things. But actually, I didn’t try them until I got home, when I was glum about being back in Reading and wanted a taste of elsewhere.

And once I did, I was crestfallen that I’d limited myself to just the two boxes, because they were extraordinary. Every single one irregular, every single one made by hand, each one thin and light, with just enough crunch and just enough substance, each one making you want another. Imagine the most rarefied chocolate Hob Nobs you could imagine, square it and you still wouldn’t be close. Rodrigo also told me that he has a recipe for Moscovitas which approximates to the Rialto classic, and I churlishly pooh-poohed him. Now I’ve tried them, I may have to ask him nicely.

One last tip, which is both about Rialto and Oviedo more generally, is this: Asturias Airport does a better job than nearly any airport I’ve been to of celebrating the region it serves. So you can buy – and not at exorbitant prices either – some of the city’s greatest hits, whether that’s more carbayones from Camilo de Blas, beautiful ice cider, compangas and chorizo from Calle Gascona stalwarts Tierra Astur or, last but not least, more of those Moscovitas. So if you don’t get to Rialto, you can still pick some up for your journey home. If you do, can I trouble you to get an extra box for me?

Confiteria Rialto
Calle San Francisco, 12/Calle Bermúdez de Castro, 2
https://www.moscovitas.com/en/home-2/

(Click here to read more city guides.)

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

The Last Crumb

On November 22, 2019September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

Reading’s pub scene has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in the second half of 2019, despite pubs closing day in day out all over the country. The Lyndhurst reopened under new management and is now dishing up some really impressive food: last week I went there and had saddle of rabbit, stuffed with chicken liver and wrapped in Parma ham, up there with any rabbit dish I’ve had in Bologna. Then the Retreat was saved from an uncertain fate by a buy-out and is going from strength to strength with a new wine list, a far bigger presence online and, thankfully, the magnificent Brian still behind the bar.

That’s all well and good, but when the pub in question undergoes a more dramatic makeover people can be a little sniffier. The Eldon Arms closed and reopened in September as the Weather Station, with a few locals lamenting the loss of the name. I’ve been a few times since the reincarnation and it does some interesting beers, although sitting on a hard stool and using a barrel for a table is maybe designed for customers far younger and cooler than me: I soon found myself longing for a proper seat, which is around the point where I sloped off to the Retreat.

Finally, Caversham’s Prince Of Wales, at the top of Prospect Street, was acquired by Dodo Pubs who have spent a fair bit of time and money rebranding it as the Last Crumb. This provoked more complaints about losing the name, which I found harder to understand: surely there are quite enough pubs around the country called the Prince Of Wales? (I bet nobody would have objected it had been called the Duke Of York). Anyway, it’s not as if the people up in arms had frequented the pub back when it was the Prince Of Wales – everything I’d ever heard about the place suggested you wouldn’t go in unless you were up to date on your tetanus jabs.

I was delighted by the news that Dodo Pubs had taken on the Prince Of Wales, because I’ve always been a fan of the Rickety Press, their outpost in north Oxford’s Jericho – a lovely pub that does a good range of beers and ciders and very credible pizzas and burgers. When my Canadian family came to visit the U.K. earlier in the year and we went for a day trip to Oxford, I booked us in to the Rickety Press knowing it would suit everyone – craft enough for my twentysomething cousin and unpretentious enough for my 80 year old uncle. We had a lovely meal there, and I found myself wishing there was somewhere similar in Reading. And then my wish was granted, so my other half Zoë and I headed over on a weekday night to see whether the Last Crumb lived up to the promise of its sibling.

Thirsty Bear

On October 6, 2017September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

The great lost ER review – the one none of you ever got to read – was of Smash, the craft beer, pizza and ping pong establishment on Gun Street. It’s a long sad story but essentially I went, I wrote the review and when I stopped reviewing because my circumstances changed it would have been inappropriate to publish it.

It’s a pity I never got to formally warn people not to go to Smash, but I suppose I can make amends now by saying that when I went the service was poor, they got the beers wrong, they got the pizzas wrong, when they got the pizzas right the pizzas were still very, very much wrong and that “barbecue pulled chicken fries” are a unique culinary hell I hope I never have to revisit (pulled? the chicken had barely even been chatted up). The TL:DR version of that review would just have said Don’t go to Smash: I gave it a rating of 4.0. I’m sorry you’ll never get to read it – I suppose it was my Edwin Drood, or – this one is for geek completists only – my Shada.

Anyway, now you’re all done Googling that, why have I decided to review Thirsty Bear and risk another diabolical craft beer and pizza experience? Well, I didn’t go without reservations, that’s true, but a bit of research suggested that even if Thirsty Bear was bad, it would at least be a different flavour of bad to the hipster-milking horrors of Smash.

7Bone Burger Co.

On August 11, 2017October 3, 2023 By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

As of October 2023, 7Bone has closed its site on St Mary’s Butts and is planning to reopen in Phantom’s Tap Room. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I had it all figured out: I would go to 7Bone with my friend Ben, the biggest carnivore I know. A man who smokes his own burnt ends, a man who cooks gigantic barbecues in his back garden but omits the usual step of inviting people to help him eat the food. A man who, for years, had an annual Halloween festival at his house where he cooked the biggest piece of roast pork he could fit in his oven (he called it “Porkfest”: he has many skills but is never going to work in marketing). A man to whom Bluegrass BBQ has almost become a second living room. How, in all conscience, could I ask anybody else to try out Reading’s newest burger joint with me?

I say newest, but if there’s one thing you can guarantee it’s that it won’t be Reading’s newest burger joint forever, or indeed for long. The popularity of burgers, always baffling to me, shows no sign of abating. We’re going to get a Byron and an Honest Burgers, facing off at each other by Jackson’s Corner. Deliveroo Editions has just opened, giving you the opportunity to have Gourmet Burger Kitchen delivered to your house (provided you live in the RG1 postcode, anyway) from some shadowy central facility that I can’t picture without thinking of the headquarters of The Initiative in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. So 7Bone needs to impress, because its competitors are already waiting in the wings.

The week before our trip to 7Bone, Ben messaged me.

“I have decided that I’ll eat one of the vegetarian burgers.”

“This is a joke, isn’t it?” I replied. It had to be: Ben had no truck with vegetarianism (in fact I think he may even class it as a disease).

“Nope. I want to see if the falafel burger is any good, and if a committed carnivore like me thinks it’s good I’ll be doing your readers a huge service.”

I would have been a lot more impressed with Ben’s devotion to public service if I hadn’t noticed the following night that he was tagged at 7Bone on Facebook with his wife Lisa, no doubt eating his own body weight in dead animal. I picked him up on it when I turned up and took my seat opposite him. He sipped his beer and shrugged.

“What can you do? The kids wanted to go there.”

I wanted to point out that, funnily enough, Ben’s kids have never tried to drag him into an Itsu, but I decided it wasn’t worth picking him up on it. Instead I ordered a cider (Angry Orchard – American, apparently, crisp, off-dry and thoroughly enjoyable) then looked through the menu in the company of arguably Reading’s foremost expert: Ben probably knows more about that menu than most of 7Bone’s staff.

“That’s what Lisa had last time.” he said, pointing to the ‘Peter Green’ (a burger with chilli, cheese, mustard and jalapenos), “Or you could always have the ‘Robert Johnston’, that’s awesome.”

I found the names confusing. I could have understood if it was called Robert Johnson, although I still wouldn’t have associated selling your soul to the devil at a crossroads, with a penchant for truffled garlic mushrooms. And I could see that Peter Green was a blues guitarist, but if the theme was guitarists, what was the rationale for calling one of the burgers ‘Prince Charles Is Overrated’? (Overrated as a guitarist? I didn’t even know he played.) No wonder I felt a little lost.

There was also far too much dirt on the menu for my liking: here a “dirty spread”, there a “dirty spread”, everywhere a “dirty spread”. What with that, the “dirty slaw”, the “deep gravy” (what was it doing, quoting Sartre?) and the “naked raunch salad” the whole menu felt a bit unnecessarily pornographic. It reminded me of something my friend Tim said when I told him I was going to 7Bone.

“I can’t stand the way restaurants like 7Bone call everything dirty. They say ‘dirty’ but I just see ‘unhygienic’. Why would anywhere boast about that?”

Well, quite. Anyway, I ordered the ‘Robert Johnston’ (whoever he is – Wikipedia has a number of suggestions, none of which sound likely to crop up on a burger menu) and Ben ordered the ‘Juicy Boris’ – more smut! – the aforementioned falafel burger.

“So, you’re having a Boris Johnson.” said our utterly charming waitress, accidentally mangling and conflating our orders.

“That’s right.” said Ben, “I’m going to pop Boris’ juicy balls in my mouth.”

She seemed nonplussed by this. Then I suggested that if they ever did a ‘Boris Johnson’ they could put onion straws on top of the burger to simulate the hair and that’s when she accidentally knocked over my cider (it might have been the only way she could think of to stop us both talking).

They do a “red basket deal” at 7Bone where you get a burger and one of a set list of sides for a tenner, so Ben and I went for that – onion straws for him, chilli cheese fries for me. But because we both saw other sides we fancied, we also ordered some chicken fried halloumi and some truffled macaroni cheese (sorry, I just can’t call it ‘mac n’ cheese’ and besides, as Ben pointed out, mac n’ cheese will always be synonymous with Joey Tribbiani and that crime-fighting robot).

“That’s a lot of food” smiled our waitress, who by now had replaced my bottle of cider and apologised profusely. “I reckon if you finish all that I should give you twenty pounds.”

I advised her not to put that bet on the table: I’ve only ever seen Ben defeated by food once, and that was when I took him to Caucasian Spice back in the good old days when they cooked at the Turk’s.

“And I did the burger challenge at the Oracle.” said Ben, referring to that Kua ‘Aina thing they’re doing on the Riverside at the moment.

“Did you win?” asked the waitress.

“I was three chips away from finishing it within the ten minutes” he said, glowing with pride. I couldn’t tell whether the waitress was feeling amusement or pity, or whether she was wondering whether she could pass off knocking over two drinks as an accident.

I paid the room a little more attention while I was waiting for the food to turn up. It was very much from the 2017 restaurant lookbook – square tables, school chairs, naked walls, exposed concrete and bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Ben and I were easily the oldest people there and the banquette along one wall provided (with the exception of my belly) the only softness in the room. Sometimes this look feels considered – you might like it or hate it, but thought has gone into it. With 7Bone, it felt a little unfinished: especially the ceiling, which looks like they literally couldn’t be bothered to finish it off. Despite all this, I didn’t dislike it half as much as I expected to, although I wouldn’t have wanted to be there on a packed weekend evening.

On to the food, then. The big hit of the evening, for me, was the southern fried halloumi: strips of nicely seasoned and coated halloumi, delicious with the accompanying barbecue dip. The texture was perfect, the taste was brilliant and it was only later that I realised that, despite being made of cheese, they were the only thing that wasn’t cloying and mouth-coating. They do a veggie burger made with southern fried halloumi (the ‘Dirty Linda’, obviously) and I’d be tempted to have it if I went again.

Other sides were a mixed bag. Chilli cheese fries were decent enough fries with “steak chilli” (which looked suspiciously like normal mince to me) and smothered in a lake of American cheese. I would have liked more chilli – because it was actually rather nice – and less and different cheese. Some cheddar on top would have been perfect – to me, there’s a place for yellow plastic American cheese but it’s not on chips. The jalapenos on top added almost the only sharpness of the meal.

Ben loved his truffled macaroni cheese, pronouncing it “better than Grillstock in Bristol” (allegedly another restaurant which has defeated Ben through the power of portion size). I didn’t like it much – I didn’t think the truffle came through as strongly as it could and again, there was just so much cheese: a slick puddle of cheese, all texture and no taste. I’d have liked more truffle, less cheese and maybe something like breadcrumbs on top to give more texture. And, before you point it out, I’m well aware that observations like that might mainly give away that I’m just not the target market for an American style burger joint. Ben’s onion straws were very nice, I thought – crispy and not soggy (although he did squirt a big pool of mayonnaise next to them, so not for long). I’m not sure I’d have wanted a whole plate of them, but I enjoyed nicking a couple.

Finally, the burger. Well, I quite liked it – but not without reservations. The bun, which disappointed me on my only previous visit to 7Bone, wasn’t half bad. They are proud of it, from the look of their website, and proud that it’s not a brioche, and I can understand why because it stood up well to its contents. The burger was also very good, cooked slightly pink, the texture excellent, and I also liked the fact that the whole thing wasn’t so ridiculously huge that you couldn’t try and eat it with your hands.

But goodness, it was all so wet. With the American cheese, the truffle mayo and the garlic mushrooms in there, each bite pushed the remaining contents past the edge of the bun, making the whole thing more and more difficult to tackle. What I would really have liked was just a classic bacon cheeseburger with some tomato relish and gherkins, but that doesn’t even feature on the 7Bone menu. And the stuff in my burger didn’t compensate for the mess factor by tasting amazing – everything felt a bit bland to me, the truffle and garlic barely breaking through. Maybe my tastebuds were just too coated in cheese and grease to notice anything else by that point.

Ben handily had pretty much the same burger, but with falafel instead of beef. The falafel I quite liked – good texture and taste and possibly better equipped to resist (I probably mean “complement” but really, it was relentless) the cheese and the mayo. Ben loved it, but I think he loves practically everything about 7Bone.

“You’re missing the point.” he said to me between mouthfuls. “These aren’t meant to be dry burgers. They’re American style, like Sloppy Joes.”

“You did pretty well.” said our waitress as she took away our nearly empty plates. Ben finished almost all of his; I couldn’t polish off all my fries – or more precisely, I just didn’t want to. Ben pretended to have gone easy on her to save her the indignity of shelling out twenty quid, and we got talking. She was visiting the Reading branch on secondment, doing some fact finding in preparation for 7Bone opening a new site in Eastbourne (quite what the blue rinse brigade will make of “dirty raunch salad” I’m not sure, but that I’d like to see). Anyway, she did a brilliant job of looking after us from start to finish: if anything, the thing I’ll most take away from 7Bone – apart from the incongruous sight of Ben eating falafel entirely of his own volition – is the truly excellent service we received. Our bill, for two beers (Longboard – I had a sip of Ben’s and really liked it), one cider, two basket meals and two extra sides, came to forty quid, not including tip.

I sometimes worry that with places like 7Bone (or Franco Manca, last week) my review might boil down to “if this is your kind of thing, you’ll probably like it”. I suppose all reviews come down to that, but I’m more aware of it when I have reservations about a place. So, I didn’t massively like 7Bone, and I’ve been thinking a lot about exactly why that is, and whether it’s about them doing what they do badly or me just not liking what they do. It’s true that I’m not the biggest burger evangelist in Reading, and it’s true that I’m probably of an age and demographic where the quirkiness of the menu will bring me out in hives.

But the thing is, I like that informal style of dining, for all its flaws – I like Bluegrass, and I quite enjoyed Franco Manca. And I do like the occasional burger: the weekend before this visit I was in London visiting the Design Museum with my family and afterwards we stopped at Byron for dinner. The experience wasn’t perfect, but in terms of the room, the menu and the execution it was streets ahead of 7Bone. By contrast 7Bone felt a bit too deliberately edgy, a bit too noisy, a bit too pile ’em high sell ’em cheap and, crucially for me anyway, just a little too greasy. Don’t get me wrong – it’s far from terrible, but I don’t think I would go back in a hurry. And if I were them I would be looking nervously over my shoulder, because when the London chains hit Reading we may find out once and for all whether Reading really does have an infinite capacity for burgers. But what do I know? My friend Ben loved it, and he even slummed it with the falafel.

7Bone Burger Co. – 6.6
60 St Mary’s Butts, RG1 2LG
0118 9952094

http://www.7bone.co.uk/reading.php

Franco Manca

On July 28, 2017September 2, 2023 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

Franco Manca closed in Summer 2023. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I’ve long enjoyed referring to Reading as “Zone 8”, and one of the most significant developments in Reading’s restaurant scene during my time away was this description becoming less and less of a joke. Reading’s always been a chain magnet, but the latest wave of new and imminent arrivals has a distinct whiff of the capital about it: The Real Greek, The Botanist and Comptoir Libanais are already here; Pho, Honest Burger and Byron are on their way. A big Pret has sprung up just opposite the train station, too: by the time Crossrail gets here, people might alight at Reading and be unaware that they’re not in Kansas (or possibly Camden) anymore.

The one I was most excited about was the arrival of Franco Manca. For years I’ve been complaining that Reading could do with a really good pizzeria to rival the likes of Bosco in Bristol or The Hearth in Lewes. Then I discovered Papa Gee and found that I didn’t feel quite so deprived but even so, Franco Manca (along with the likes of Leon and Le Pain Quotidien) remained one of the chains I most wanted to see make it out west to Reading. I’ve been going to Franco Manca, in Brixton and Battersea, for many years and I’ve always loved their sourdough pizzas, gorgeous burrata and short unfussy wine list.

Initially they were going to open in the basement of Jackson’s, which I thought was a magnificent idea and a terrific way to bring a buzz to one of Reading’s most iconic buildings. But I guess they lost patience or got an offer they couldn’t refuse, because instead they have taken the Oracle’s shekel and opened where the Debenham’s restaurant – never reviewed on the blog, due to what I can only describe as a shocking oversight – used to be. It’s right next to The Real Greek, which extends the riverside and creates a little enclave for shoppers and diners to descend upon (it’s working, too: when I tried to book The Real Greek for a Saturday night to take my family out for dinner I was told it was already solidly booked.)

The space outside is nicely used and if the weather had been better I’d have been sorely tempted to eat in the sunshine, but I visited on an inclement weekday so I found myself waiting for a table to become available (in the spirit of another London trend coming our way, Franco Manca doesn’t take bookings). I managed to nab a table in the corner of the room, nearest the window, which gave me a good look at the room. It’s a big space: all square tables, wooden school-effect chairs and bare lightbulbs, the walls covered in what appeared to be upcycled pallets, no soft furnishings and nothing to absorb sound.

What this means is that, even tucked away in a corner, the experience was a cacophonous one. I’d come to Franco Manca with my friend Tim and the whole evening was marked by both of us constantly having to lean across the table and say “What?” “Pardon?” or “I’m really sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to repeat that. Again.” The irony: here we were in a room full of young chatty diners and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more geriatric. It’s the first time I’ve seriously considered taking an ear trumpet to a restaurant (although, depressingly, I doubt it will be the last).

The menu is a short one – a small range of starters (or “Bites”) and seven pizzas, two without a tomato base. The specials board lists some extra starters, two special pizzas – one meat, one vegetarian – and an array of extra toppings. I was a bit confused by the flip side of the menu which talks about all of Franco Manca’s ingredients but doesn’t make it clear whether you can order those as extra toppings or not, but maybe I’m just getting old and finding hidden complications in a very simple menu (an unwelcome theme is emerging here: have you noticed?).

While we waited for our order to arrive, Tim and I enjoyed something from the compact and bijou drinks list. There are a handful of wines, two beers and one cider (described as “No Logo”, presumably a tribute to Naomi Klein’s late 90s anti-consumerist classic). I had the cider, which was pleasant – sparkling and cold but with a slightly agricultural hint. The waiter brought it over without a glass and I had to ask him to come back with one, but not before my request was met with a slightly vacant look. Perhaps all the hip gunslingers drink straight from the bottle (and, for that matter, can understand every word spoken by the person opposite them).

Tim, last seen on this blog enduring the culinary Vietnam of a trip to Cosmo, is a Beer Expert. He has forgotten more about beer than I’ve ever known (although that’s not saying a lot: he probably forgets more about beer in a single day than I’ve learned in a lifetime). So I’m well used to him putting on his Serious Beer Tasting Face, taking a sip, knotting his eyebrows, smacking his lips afterwards and pronouncing it “okay, I suppose”, as he did here.

“Of course, they say it’s no logo but it’s by Shepherd Neame”, he added. “It might go better with the food, to be fair.” I nodded sagely, pretending to understand what he was talking about – a look I’ve perfected over many evenings spent hearing Tim wax lyrical about the Citra hop (whatever that is: I thought it was a dance from the Twenties, but apparently not).

My starter was uncomplicated and delicious, a wooden board with four thick, generous slices of coppa and a ball of mozzarella perched on some salad. I yield to nobody in my love of mozzarella served before it’s been ruined by heat – so cold, clean and fresh-tasting! – and this was a pretty joyous example. I also love coppa, beautifully marbled pork shoulder which I’ve always found more interesting than Parma ham (how I miss the days when you could buy it from the deli counter at Carluccio’s). Again, this one was damned fine. And you could quibble about how this was a triumph of buying or assembly rather than of cooking if you really were so minded, but to me it was a triumph of eating, which is far more important. Decent value at six pounds, too.

“You’re going to describe that as ‘generous to a fault’, aren’t you?” said Tim. “You always say that in your reviews.”

“Well I’m not now.” I said; later I looked back, and it appears that I do indeed always say that.

Tim was faced with something altogether more baffling. The specials board had described it as “Gloucester old spot baked sausage”, which could potentially give you the impression that what turned up might resemble, you know, sausages. But the use of the singular, with hindsight, was a clue. Instead, what Tim got was a slab of sausage meat that had been baked with a tomato sauce and dolloped with what might have been crème fraiche. The sausage meat was lovely – coarse and shot through, I think, with a smidge of fennel. But it was an odd dish and I’m not sure Tim would have ordered it if it had been more accurately described (perhaps as middle class sausage McMuffin only without the muffin, or Millennial meatloaf). Half the fun of sausages is the contrast in texture between outside and inside (I like mine like mummified fingers, personally) and that was missing here. Tim looked enviously at my starter, and I gave him some coppa and mozzarella to apologise for ordering better than him. If anything, I think it made matters worse.

The pizzas took longer to arrive than I expected, which was no bad thing although it was characterised by a bit more ineffectual service. I’d ordered a dip for my crust (or “cornicione” as the Franco Manca menu likes to call it) and there was some general chaos about which one I’d gone for – pesto, since you asked – which even led to the manager having to come over and ask me what I’d ordered. She was quite brilliant, bright and personable – but if anything, that just highlighted that the rest of the service had been a bit… well… I’m struggling to find a more appropriate word than “gormless”, so let’s just leave that there.

If I won the battle of the starters, I think Tim did better on pizza. His was a pretty classic combination – tomato sauce, mozzarella, and (according to the menu) both dry and semi-dry chorizo. And it looked good, although I did have some reservations; maybe I’m just greedy but it felt a little light on chorizo and what chorizo there was was so unevenly distributed that it looked like it had been dropped onto the pizza from a great height by someone with their eyes shut. Again, I wondered if I just wasn’t cut out for this new devil-may-care attitude and perhaps literally nobody else would be bothered by this. What can’t be denied, though, is that it was tasty: the crust was bubbled, blistered and light, the base top notch.

“Can you tell the difference between the two types of chorizo?” I said to Tim as he hoovered up his final mouthful.

“Yes.” he said. “One of them is short and fat and the other one is wide and thin.”

“Helpful stuff, Tim. I’ll make sure I put that in the review.”

My pizza, by contrast, just didn’t work. I went for one without a tomato sauce base and instead it came with yellow tomatoes, buffalo ricotta and spicy lamb sausage. It looked unbalanced to me when they put it down in front of me and it tasted unbalanced too: the tomatoes were sweet, the ricotta was sweet and although the sausage – something a bit like merguez – was genuinely fiery and delicious there just wasn’t enough of it to counteract everything else. Again, everything looked assembled at random and in this case it made for quite an unattractive pizza, with the sausage unpleasantly reminiscent of droppings and the ricotta looking disconcertingly like cuckoo spit (hungry yet?). The pesto dip was an excellent idea but in execution it just lacked enough salt and parmesan to offset the oil.

On a previous trip to Franco Manco just after it opened I had been absolutely enchanted by a lemon and rosemary cake with Greek yoghurt and honey, which has to be one of the nicest things I’ve eaten this year. I tell you this because, in keeping with the rest of the evening, they had taken it off the menu for this visit. So we skipped dessert, cut our losses, paid up and beetled off to the pub. The bill came to just under forty-two pounds for two, without tip. Both pizzas, and this will give you a clue as to Franco Manca’s popularity, clocked in at around eight pounds.

When I go for dinner on duty with a companion, I like to play little game at the end. We text our rating out of 10 to each other simultaneously, like some kind of digital gunfight, and compare notes. Tim’s rating was nothing special: he wasn’t impressed with Franco Manca. He said the food was good but not good enough to overcome the room and the service. He’d sooner go to Papa Gee, he said, and of course I felt a little bit proud of him for that. It quite outweighed his shortcomings when it came to describing chorizo, which after all is a niche skill in anybody’s book.

It might surprise you, based on everything that’s gone before, that I feel a little more kindly disposed to Franco Manco than Tim was. Restaurants are good at different things, and some restaurants can be good despite excelling at something which isn’t necessarily my thing. And there is a lot to be said for Franco Manca if you’re grabbing a quick meal in the centre of town, or you’re on a budget, or if you really like pizza. Or if you’re considerably younger than me (many people are, these days), wear a snapback indoors and don’t mind raising your voice to have even a rudimentary conversation with your mates. Or, now I come to think of it, if you want to eat somewhere good in the Oracle which isn’t Cote. The pizza, as long as you pick the right one, is good enough to overcome a multitude of sins, and next time I go I’ll stick to the tried and tested classic of anchovies, olives, capers and basil. Personally, I can see myself heading there at lunchtime on a sunny day, or having an early dinner there before ambling off to the cinema or Tuesday Music Club at the Global Cafe, full and happy, ear trumpet stowed away in my satchel.

Franco Manca – 6.8
The Oracle, RG1 2AT
0118 9952086

http://www.francomanca.co.uk/restaurants/reading/