Tag: closed

Restaurant review: The Cellar

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The Cellar closed in June 2025. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Here’s a question for you: when does a restaurant become a new restaurant?

Is it when the name changes, or when the chef changes, or when the owner does? Celebrated Reading restaurant Mya Lacarte changed chefs many times during its lifetime, but it always remained Mya. But with some restaurants, it can feel like a completely different place. Take Pepe Sale – the name and the room stayed the same, but without Toni in the kitchen and Marco or Samantha running the front of house, it might have been a decent Italian restaurant, on a good day, but it wasn’t Pepe Sale.

One of my favourite restaurants, back in the mists of time, was a place in Cheltenham called Lumiere. It was run by a married couple, a lovely, homely spot that did brilliant food, and I loved it. And then the owners decided to get out of hospitality and sold to another couple, one with a track record and aspirations. Fourteen years later, they won their first Michelin star. I’ve been since it changed hands, and I liked it well enough, but it wasn’t the same place I loved long ago.

I feel like this is especially a problem with pubs. When restaurants change hands, unless the new owners are buying a going concern the name often changes. But pubs can go through good phases and bad phases, new chefs and new concepts, all under the same name. Look at my reviews of all the pubs out on the way to Henley – the Pack Horse, the Pack Saddle, the Crown. Are any of them recognisably the same as they were when I reviewed them all that time ago? Almost certainly not.

The reason I’m starting out talking about this is that the subject of this week’s review also begs this question. Between 1996 and 2008 there used to be a restaurant on Valpy Street called Chronicles, and back then it was very much a peer of London Street Brasserie. It closed, and became an Italian restaurant and then, briefly, a truly woeful place called The Lobster Room. And then in 2015 Chronicles owner Andrew Norman decided to have another bite of the cherry and opened Valpy Street in that spot. New name, new era, new restaurant.

But in August Valpy Street closed after nearly nine years trading. Sadly this hasn’t been an isolated occurrence this year – restaurants have been dropping like flies in 2004 – and the announcement from Valpy Street listed the usual suspects: Covid, the cost of living, wage increases. But there was an additional horseman of the apocalypse in Valpy Street’s case: “accountancy errors”. War, famine, death, shonky accountants. It figures.

And so that was it for Valpy Street, but the following month another restaurant, The Cellar, opened in the same spot. The Chronicle had already reported that this was going to happen, and that some of the existing staff would transfer across to Valpy Street’s successor. And yet, if you have a look on Companies House, the director of The Cellar Ltd. is none other than… yes, it’s Andrew Norman, the proprietor of Valpy Street. 

So what’s all that about, and was the Cellar a new restaurant, or just a new name for an old one? I decided it was time to find out, so I booked a table on a week night and headed over to check it out, with my dining companion – and elite level campanologist, would you believe – Liz, last seen experiencing the exotic wonders of Calcot. 

I was a little early for our reservation, so I got a good look at the dining room. I can’t remember what it looked like as Valpy Street, and I didn’t have the sense to take a photo back then, so I couldn’t tell you how much it had changed. But I sense it wasn’t that much, probably because it didn’t need to. Despite being a basement restaurant the dining room was split level with another room, for drinkers, on the other side of the bar.

And everything was nicely done: gorgeous exposed brickwork – the real stuff, not faux nonsense – along with banquettes, muted panelling and comfy dining chairs. There wasn’t much in the way of soft furnishings to absorb the noise, and although it wasn’t busy on a Tuesday night the decibel level was high, mainly from a very chatty table of Americans who were here on business and celebrating, by my reckoning, for the final time for about four years.

Yet if you looked more closely, things about it weren’t quite right. My table, which was a perfectly nice table, had weird sloping edges which meant that when you looked at the wine glasses or jug of water you felt like either you were very drunk or they were about to fall off. The tables in the booths had been spaced out as if social distancing was still a thing, meaning anyone sitting at them risked scraping their elbow on some brickwork.

And speaking of elbows, the table was so sticky that, over the course of the evening, it took the skin off my elbow. If you left a napkin on it and pressed down, you left some of the napkin on the table. All a little strange, although I didn’t fully appreciate that until I got home and had to break out the Elastoplast.

Service was initially a little diffident. I think I spotted three or four servers over the course of the evening, but the young chap who showed me to my table then just leant against the wall and stared into space as I made more and more attempts to attract his attention to say that actually, I’d love a drink while I was waiting for my friend to arrive. He was absolutely lovely, but just seemed a little, well, green. (“Don’t be mean about him in the review, it’s probably his first week” was Liz’s take at the end of the evening.)

My wine arrived just as Liz did, which made me feel rude even though it wasn’t really my fault. The Cellar’s wine list is pretty interesting, partly because I couldn’t work out who they bought from. Some of it at least was available from Majestic, the popular choice with so many Reading restaurants over the years. But others, weirdly, only seemed to be available from a website that does thank you gifts for employees, so your guess is as good as mine.

I know all that, because I could Google it while I waited for Liz to arrive. Because, unusually for a basement restaurant with thick brick walls, there is actually mobile reception. Anyway, the list had a decent mix of old and new world, and if nothing was that cheap – glasses start around nine quid – that’s because nothing is any more. So I had a nero d’avola (Majestic) which I liked very much, and decided that I’d save the pleasures of the Malbec-Viognier blend (Hints of fynbos, rosemary and tobacco leaf, spiced or marinated red meats with a biltong coating, also Majestic) for another day.

I think after eleven years I’ve figured out that when it comes to wine, describing things as jammy or fruity or – if they’re dead expensive, “complex” or “fragrant” – is about as good as I get. I liked it, I ended up having a second glass. Liz ordered something neither of us had ever heard of, a Spanish white made with Airén, a grape that was a new one on me. It was from the weird corporate website, and Liz, who is better at this sort of thing than me, said it was really enjoyable, fruity but not acidic; speaking as someone who is frequently acidic but rarely fruity, I couldn’t really identify with it.

The Cellar’s menu was a bit of a dark horse, with hidden depths. At first sight, it looked pedestrian and safe, but if you kept looking you found all sorts of interesting ingredients and techniques hiding in plain sight. So there was pork rillette, which you might find somewhere like Côte, but they’d panéed it, for reasons which escape me. There was boeuf bourguignon, but repurposed into some kind of cottage pie – gîte pie? – to be different. Baba ganoush came with rum soaked raisins, pavlova with basil sorbet. A little subversion, in with the mainstream.

Small plates came in between eight and twelve pounds, although you could supersize them as large plates by paying more. And then there were main courses – which you’d hope were also large plates, unless they were even larger plates – which cost between eighteen and twenty-five pounds. These were divided into two sections, one of which was marked “classic” which, in this case, translates as “not cheffy”. Fish and chips I can see you might class as a classic, but green Thai curry? Hmm.

Anyway, all that sounds catty when it isn’t meant to. I liked the menu, like I liked the room, but like the room it still felt like a bit of a jumble. The sense of being a work in progress fitted more with it being a new place than just Valpy Street wearing glasses, a fake nose and moustache.

Having said all that, we played it safe with our starters and were maybe not rewarded for that. I chose salt and pepper squid knowing full well that calamari is something I’ve tried in many places over the years, from Vesuvio to Storia and beyond. And the Cellar’s rendition was good – or, at least, not bad. The salt and pepper didn’t come through strongly, but even if they weren’t super-fresh they were far from the nacky rubber bands you get in many places. The chilli was advertised but didn’t make its presence felt, the unadvertised leaves dumped on top were a nuisance.

Pairing this with black garlic aioli (not just any aioli) is seemingly a very now combination – Storia did this too – but I wasn’t sure how this went with a salt and pepper coating. In any case the aioli had a weird sweetness, like salad cream, with no garlic punch. I think I’d rather have had sweet chilli sauce. But the oddest thing, again contributing to that slight jarring feeling, was how this was served, in a high-sided bowl sitting on a board. This made eating it, and dipping it into an even smaller ramekin of aioli, a bit of a palaver.

Liz had gone even more classic, with baked camembert. This is a dish it’s hard to get wrong, in many ways – buy a Camembert, bake it properly and off you go – and the Cellar managed that without missteps. I got to try a bit, and for what it’s worth I thought it was decent – nice to see it scored and generously studded with rosemary, even if the white wine and honey glaze didn’t really made its presence felt. At least they hadn’t adulterated it with onion jam or suchlike. But Liz wasn’t entirely convinced.

“I guess you sort of know what you’re getting with that, though” I said. “What more could they have done?”

“It’s these things” said Liz, pointing to the insubstantial, brittle crostini on the plate. “It needs really good, crusty bread to dip.”

I think she was right. The crostini snapped if you dipped them, couldn’t bear the weight if you loaded molten cheese onto them. They looked bought in, and if they weren’t then they could have saved time by doing that. But Liz was right, this dish was a baguette away from living its best life.

At this point, even though the lighting was lovely, the conversation was absorbing and free-flowing and the Americans had scarpered, I was getting that sinking feeling that my evening was going to be better than my meal. So it gives me huge pleasure, and no small sense of relief, to say that this was where the Cellar turned a corner and the rest of the evening was a little choreographed sequence of successes.

Take my main. I’m not sure what possessed me to order a chicken Milanese, a dish I’ve occasionally ordered but rarely enjoyed and really, only associated with Carluccio’s back when it was good. But it turned up and not only looked the part but was a hugely enjoyable affair all round. There’s not much to this dish but, like the Cellar’s menu, it was full of surprises.

So the chicken was a little thicker than I’d expect, not beaten flat, and was beautifully tender and superbly done. The coating could so easily have been blah old breadcrumbs, but was given a real flash of interest with Parmesan in the mix. The fried egg was absolutely terrific, spilling its yolk the way I spill gossip – freely and with joy.

I wasn’t entirely convinced by the hasselback potato – it didn’t feel like garlic or rosemary had really made their way to the centre of that particular maze – but the gremolata was also a delight. I’m not entirely convinced it was really a sauce, but more of a thick parsley pesto. But it had zing, and you could smear it on a piece of chicken or a sliver of potato, and it made everything better. I don’t mean to damn The Cellar with faint praise, but I’m not sure I’ve been more pleasantly surprised by a dish this year.

And then there was Liz’s dish. Liz doesn’t eat as much meat as I do – few people do, I suspect – and had chosen a vegetarian starter and a vegan main. I’m so glad she did, because that vegan main was a triumph, with loads going on. A slice of baked aubergine (“I really love aubergine”, Liz said, and I remembered that we’d had some at the Coriander Club, too) was served on a slick of butter bean purée.

But that was the Cellar just getting started, because on top of that you had a very good quenelle of baba ghanoush, and others of something I mistook for tapenade but the menu swears blind is mushroom duxelles. So much going on there, so many interesting flavours to mix and match.

But the Cellar understood that the dish still wasn’t complete without some textural contrast. So it was scattered with seeds and dusted with a potent dukkah, and because that still wasn’t enough, the crowning glory – crisp-edged cubes of panisse, chickpea fritters. I love panisse, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on a menu in Reading. I was very happy with the Cellar for doing it.

“This is really good” said Liz, offering me a forkful that confirmed that it absolutely was. So much going on, so much work and thought, but without it being overblown or overdone, or all those flavours and textures getting lost in a shouting match. And I thought that this was how you should do vegan food, to make it a destination dish where nobody in their right mind could eat it and miss meat. I was also thinking, in the back of my mind, finally, my vegan readers are going to get something out of a review for once.

Liz had her eye on the madeleines on the dessert menu, possibly because they came with lavender honey, but I managed to talk her into dessert. And perhaps more impressively, because Liz is firmly in the “one glass of wine on a school night, and possibly even a Friday night” school of thought, I managed to talk her into a dessert wine too. They only had one, a late harvest sauvignon/viognier blend, and 50ml is a bit of a stingy pour (if you’re me, or just right if you’re Liz) but it was a beautiful sip of pure sunshine and reminded me how much I love dessert wines, and how rarely I have them.

Liz’s head had been turned by the sticky toffee pudding and, again, it was really very nicely done. Reminiscent of the likes of London Street Brasserie, who have been flogging sticky toffee puddings for longer than I’ve been writing about them, it had great texture – how on earth do you describe that now everybody has cancelled the word “moist”? – and a moat of deep, rich sauce. The vanilla ice cream was already giving up the fight, which was inevitable, and I personally would have preferred clotted cream, but that’s my gluttony more than anything. Liz loved it, and my only regret was that after that she didn’t have space to raid those madeleines.

I tried the pavlova. I have a real soft spot for a pavlova – it always says that a restaurant can be arsed in a way that Eton mess never does – and the Cellar’s was a blissful piece of work. An elegant oval of chewy meringue, housing a core of cream and vanilla, ringed with macerated strawberries and syrup. A little reminder of the summer we never had, a gastronomic time capsule of a time that didn’t quite exist. And right at its centre, that verdant sphere of basil sorbet, which was truly extraordinary.

I give out awards every year for Dessert Of The Year, so thank god I went to The Cellar this week or I might have been writing a post next month saying “or you can just pick up a bar of Cadbury’s Top Deck from the corner shop”. I let Liz try a spoonful, and she had dessert envy. I’m so used to being the one that suffers from that that I didn’t even remember to gloat.

By this time everyone else had left, and we were still nattering until it got to about ten o’clock, over three hours after we started, and we both felt guilty about keeping the staff from their homes. All the people who served us were brilliant, and when one of them came over with the card reader I asked her how long they’d been going for.

“It’s just over a month” she said, “but of course we were Valpy Street before that.”

I asked how similar the Cellar was to Valpy Street, and she told me that most of the staff were the same and, crucially, the team in the kitchen was unchanged. She was very good at not saying much more than that, but I sensed again the involvement of the First Accountant Of The Apocalypse.

“How’s business going?” I said, aware that a Tuesday night in November mightn’t be the best yardstick of that.

“It’s okay, we’re getting there. But we were closed for about five weeks, and you worry that people forget about you.”

Our bill for two people – three courses apiece and five glasses of wine in total – came to just over one hundred and thirty-five pounds, including tip. And personally, for a very enjoyable evening in a lovely room with great company and some genuinely interesting dishes, I thought that was more than okay. Because when a restaurant gets a lot of things right, it wins you over. You still remember the other stuff – the glasses on the piss at the edge of the table, the waiter vacantly ignoring me at the start, the plaster I had to put on my elbow at the end of the night – but you don’t care.

The Cellar lived up to the promise of its name, an attractive, intimate, convivial space, tucked away from the bustle of Blagrave Street, of the buses, the commuters and the revellers. And I found myself really rather fond of it. We made our way out into the night, the air now sharp and wintry. Liz liberated her Brompton and headed back to West Reading, and I made my way to Market Place to play my favourite game, Bus Home Roulette: would it be the 5, the 6 or the 21? Did I feel lucky?

I realise, now I’ve got to the end, that I didn’t answer my own question. When does a restaurant become a new restaurant? I can’t help you, in this case: I have a feeling it might take someone who knew Valpy Street a lot better than I did to tell you that. But I can tell you this, instead: the staff might be the same, the owner might be the same, the chef might be the same. For all I know the menu might be the same, and those sticky tables too. But my respect for the place? Now that’s another matter. That definitely is new.

The Cellar – 7.7
17-19 Valpy Street, Reading, RG1 1AR
0118 3049011

https://www.thecellarreading.co.uk

Restaurant review: Pick Up Point, Swindon

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Pick Up Point closed in July 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

At the end of last summer, in a move which surprised me as much as anybody, I got on a train and went to boldly review where no blog had been before. Swindon, to be precise. I voyaged to Swindon’s Old Town and found a brilliant enclave of great coffee, craft beer, ice cream along with a Victorian park that made the Forbury look a tad lacking. And I also found, returning to Old Town institution Los Gatos, a superb tapas restaurant of exactly the kind Reading has always lacked. I loved the whole experience, and I promised myself I’d be back before too long.

It took me four months, but last weekend I found myself in Swindon again, alighting at its unloveable station and walking round the corner to grab a bus into Old Town, one bound for the splendidly named Middle Wichel. It wasn’t exactly the same personnel as last time – I was seeing my old friend Dave, but our mutual friend Al couldn’t join us. And it wasn’t the same itinerary, either: the last time I was in Swindon summer was rallying one final time and you could eat ice cream opposite Ray’s, have an al fresco coffee in the Town Gardens. On this visit, we had to forego those pleasures, but even the regret of having to do so reminded me how fetching Old Town is when the weather is fine.

Never mind. Many of the fundamentals were unchanged. I met Dave at the brilliant Pour Bois for a latte, and then we beetled off to the Hop Kettle tap room for the first of many gorgeous beers. Firmly ensconced, we proceeded to do what we’ve been doing on a regular basis for over thirty years, shooting the breeze about all sorts. I handed him his belated fiftieth birthday present and heard about his celebratory trip to Cologne, we talked about the rapidly solidifying plans for my wedding this year, and then we just got on to talking about everything and nothing: his family, my family, his work, my work, the future and the good old days.

It was all perfectly in harmony: no conversational heavy lifting to be done, and no awkward silences, just the latest instalment in a long, meandering conversation which has lasted all of my adult life. We both know where the bodies are buried, when to talk and when to listen, when to be serious and when to take the piss. It was lovely: when you have a friend that old, and that good, you can do that stuff anywhere. You could catch up in a Wetherspoons and still have a thoroughly agreeable time. But it struck me, as the hours flew by on that winter afternoon, that I would have struggled to think of a better venue for it than Old Town.

The other thing that was different about this visit to Swindon was that, much as I love Los Gatos, I had somewhere else in my sights for dinner. I’d been tipped off about Pick Up Point, a burger joint literally next door to Hop Kettle which is only open in the evenings. Chef Josh West started out cooking burgers at the tap room four years ago, but opened his own restaurant in late 2021. I couldn’t find out much about it online – Swindon might have even less local media than we do – but their well-curated Instagram made everything look terrific. The clincher though was that my Swindon man in the know, Donovan Rosema of excellent local roaster Light Bulb Coffee, rated the place. That was good enough for me.

It’s a very assured, very polished space. “This is more London than Swindon” was Dave’s verdict as we looked around, and I think that was a fair summary. With dark walls dressed with interesting art, an attractive zinc-topped bar, conspiratorial lighting, low tables and booths, it was more Brooklyn than Bassett. I think there was a second dining room out back, although I didn’t get a look at it. Having said all that, my one reservation about it was that the bit of the restaurant where they seated us had higher tables and – a bit of a bugbear of mine, this – backless stools. It felt a little like an afterthought compared to the lower tables elsewhere, and I did look enviously at the better stools up at the bar.

You might think this doesn’t really matter for casual dining, or that the dining room wasn’t designed for two men on either side of their fiftieth birthday, and you might have a point.

Pick Up Point knows how to put a menu together. I realised in the run up to this visit that the last time I reviewed a burger restaurant was Bristol’s Asado, just over a year ago, and since then I think I’ve only had burgers in Honest. And I like Honest, but their choice of burgers always feels limited, especially if you don’t fancy whatever special they have on. By contrast, Pick Up Point has half a dozen beefburgers, one chicken burger and one vegetarian or vegan option, along with a couple of specials. And they all have something a little different about them – one with pancetta and blue cheese, another with kimchi and gochujang. Even the names – “Cease & Desist”, “Heisenberger” – steered clear of the dreary ladz puns you sometimes get in this kind of establishment.

Burgers are between twelve and fourteen pounds, not including fries, so slightly more expensive than the likes of Honest. But the menu achieved what you always want a menu to manage: it intrigued me. And the sides on offer did too – not just fries, wings and slaw, although even those had interesting variations and additions. The wings were Korean, the slaw came with sweet chilli and coriander. I had looked at a menu online which suggested they did confit potatoes as well as fries, and I was very excited about trying that, but on the day something else was in its place. So we ordered that instead, along with another side and a couple of burgers.

Service was outstanding throughout, if endearingly amused that these two duffers had chanced upon their restaurant. Of course everybody was impossibly younger and cooler than me, but we’re reaching the stage where I could walk into most restaurants in Britain and that might be the case, so I’m trying not to lose too much sleep over it. I couldn’t persuade Dave to go crazy and have a rum punch (and the next morning I was very thankful that he talked me out of it) so I had a half of Kellerbier from Bristol’s Moor Beer and Dave, more sensible than me, went for a ginger beer.

Our food came out about twenty-five minutes after we sat down, which I thought was nicely paced. I had chosen the “Hand Of God”, which came with chimichurri and smoked paprika mayo, and I thought it was absolutely exceptional. The burger was tender, well seasoned and had a marvellous char to it, the chimichurri and the smoked paprika complemented it beautifully. It was so good, in fact, that it’s surprisingly difficult to write about: happiness, as they say, writes white. And I’m worried that some of the things I loved about it are going to sound like faint praise, but maybe you’ll read them and agree with me so here goes.

I loved the fact that it wasn’t messy, that nothing fell out, that I didn’t feel like I was playing food Jenga every time I took a bite, or pushing what was left out of the comforting embrace of the bun. I loved the fact that I could pick it up and eat it with my hands, the way you used to be able to do with all burgers before they became bloated parodies of themselves. Less is more, it turns out, and I was delighted to pay a little bit more for something that not only tasted fantastic but was a pleasure to eat. I think that’s what edgier restaurant reviewers mean when they say – prepare to cringe – that a dish “eats well”. It doesn’t eat well, you do. But I do appreciate the underlying sentiment.

Dave had gone for one of the specials, a Guinness rarebit burger. This was heftier – a half pounder smothered in the rarebit, resting on a huge slab of onion. This looked a bit more challenging to eat, or would have been for me anyway, but Dave ploughed through undeterred. He’d told me earlier that day that his latest blood test had suggested he needed to work on bringing his cholesterol down again, but happily he was taking a day off from that. “The way they’ve got the Guinness flavour into this is really clever” was his verdict. Dave is not the ideal person to review restaurants with because 9 times out of 10 we’ll order the same dish, which you can’t really do when you’re writing a place up. This was the 1 time out of 10 when we didn’t, and I was a smidge envious.

The two sides were glorious. First of all, in place of those confit potatoes they served smashed potatoes with aioli. Looking at the picture below, aioli with smashed potatoes might be a more accurate description, but it was another fabulous dish, the spuds with plenty of texture, the golden aioli with a pronounced honk of garlic and a little rosemary strewn for good measure. I think with hindsight, two side dishes might not have been enough. One of these certainly wasn’t.

Even better were the crispy pork belly bites. They were crispy where you wanted them to be and yielding where you didn’t, they came carpeted with sesame and coriander, sitting in a pool of soy and ginger and they were pretty much a perfect example of this kind of thing. I read an interview with the guy behind the Pick Up Point just as they opened where he said he was a tinkerer. “I’m always experimenting, the menu is likely to change hourly” he said. I doubt he still does that (who has the time?) but even if he does he should keep his mitts off this dish: it should stay on the menu in perpetuity.

There was only one item on the dessert menu, a chocolate mousse with whipped cream. I was enormously tempted by it, as I always am when it comes to chocolate mousse. But I abandoned any plans of eating it when I realised that Dave, like me, was wondering what the Korean chicken burger (the “Seoul Survivor”) tasted like and was prepared to split one with me. So we flagged down our server and asked – if she didn’t mind, and if it wasn’t too weird – if we could order one to share. She smiled indulgently at us.

“Of course, that’s no problem. I’ll get them to cut it in half for you too.”

As she walked away I looked at Dave and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking.

“She thinks…”

“…that we’re a couple? Yep. Happens every time.”

My picture of the Korean chicken burger is even worse than most of my burger photographs because it shows you nothing. You don’t get to see the magnificent crunchy, craggy coating or the chicken, breast not thigh in this case, underneath. You don’t get to see the kimchi properly, or the gochujang. Really, it’s just evidence that we ordered it and that, ever so nicely for the two weird middle aged men who seemed a little high on life, the kitchen did indeed neatly bisect it for us. But I promise you it did have all those things – crunch and give, fire and tang – and I thought it was really beautiful.

I did think about having the mousse after that, but I decided against it. I couldn’t persuade Dave, and I knew that I would have more joy talking him into a couple more beers at the Tuppenny next door. His loved ones were in London watching Depeche Mode at the O2, and as it happens my loved one was too, and I reckoned we had another couple of hours of catching up ahead of us, even if it would pass in the blink of an eye. Our dinner came to sixty pounds, not including tip, but bear in mind we ordered three burgers that came to about two thirds of that.

I often publish reviews of places outside Reading with a little trepidation. I know some people feel like they’re hoodwinked into reading them, or don’t really care about restaurants without an RG postcode or an 0118 phone number. And I end up trying to convince you of the relevance by bringing it all back home at the end. And I will do that, in a second, but really – Pick Up Point is worth going to Swindon for. Get the train on a Saturday, have a few beers beforehand and make the time to eat here. It’s a cracking thing to do – with friends, with loved ones, even on your own. I genuinely think you wouldn’t regret it.

But there’s another reason to recommend it, which is that I think Honest so dominates the burger landscape in Reading that we don’t get anywhere, really, like Pick Up Point. 7Bone is a greasier, sloppier, more American affair, but it’s moved to Phantom now, further out of town. Gordon Ramsey Street Burger is much more well behaved than the man itself, and better than I expected it to be, but it’s not exciting, nor is it independent. Some places, like the Lyndhurst, don’t specialise in burgers but happen to do some very good ones.

But Pick Up Point is genuinely a place the likes of which we don’t have in Reading, and the last time I had a burger in Reading that matched what Pick Up Point can do it was from the sadly departed Meat Juice, at Blue Collar. I would have hopped on a train to Swindon to try Meat Juice’s burgers again, I’ll gladly repeat the journey to go back to Pick Up Point. That I happen to have one of my oldest friends a few miles down the road is just the icing on the cake.

Pick Up Point – 8.0
52 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BG

https://thepickuppoint.com

Restaurant review: A.B.O.E., Bristol

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A.B.O.E. closed in August 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Last Friday I found myself in Bristol enjoying a badly-needed long weekend away. Our train pulled into Temple Meads, half an hour late, and Zoë and I wheeled our suitcases into the centre, three days of eating, drinking and excellent company ahead of us. But before we checked into our hotel, before we did almost anything, I had lunch on my mind and only one candidate to provide it. We made a pilgrimage to the Apple Cider Barge and there, next door, in its distinctive black and red was Gurtrina, the van belonging to fried chicken supremos and Reading legends Gurt Wings. How could I kick off my minibreak anywhere else?

By my reckoning it’s over six months since Gurt Wings stopped coming to Blue Collar – something to do with the council being difficult, if I remember rightly – and the reunion with their magnificent food was all the sweeter for all that deprivation and delayed gratification. In my time away the buffalo sauce had become just a little more piquant, the blue cheese saltier and tangier. The sun came out, the bench we were perched on positively glowed and we polished off our food in wordless joy. Truly, it would have been worth a trip to Bristol just for that.

Afterwards James Mitchell – the man behind Gurt, also known to his many fans as Uncle Gurty – came over and the three of us caught up and shot the breeze. I told him where we were planning to eat in the city, he mentioned a few places he’d heard were good and then he did something I wasn’t expecting. He went out of his way to tell me somewhere especially good I should check out.

“You need to get yourself to Oboe” he said.

“What, like the musical instrument?”

“No, A.B.O.E. It stands for ‘A Bit Of Everything’. The chef is a guy called Seb Merry who was on Masterchef, and he’s so passionate about his food. The whole team are brilliant. They do the best Bloody Mary I’ve had – it’s not on the menu, but if you ask they’ll make it for you. And they have this fried chicken dish – well, it’s not like our fried chicken but it’s amazing, it’s more like a croquette but you’d have to try it. And they do this incredible dessert, have a look at this.”

He fired up his phone and showed me a picture of a dessert which was all chocolate and caramel, thick slabs of each. I’ve rarely seen a photograph I wanted to eat more.

After our chat we went on our way and stopped in the Small Bar for the first beer of the holiday but that glowing endorsement weighed on my mind. If the man who does the best fried chicken you’ve ever tasted tells you that a restaurant does amazing fried chicken, and more besides… could I really let a trip to Bristol pass without investigating? But anyway, there’s no way they would have a table free the following night, I thought. But then I checked, and they had. So I texted my friends James and Liz, sent them the website. 

I know the four of us are booked somewhere else tomorrow night, but Mr Gurt Wings says this place is incredible. What do you reckon, stick or twist?

James, a keen fan of Bristol’s restaurant scene, responded almost immediately. Let’s take a risk and twist, he said, and that was that. Bookings were made and cancelled, and the next night Zoë and I clambered off the bus halfway up the Whiteladies Road, ready to take our chances.

The interior was tasteful, all muted green paint, wall art and pillars. There was a mezzanine floor, although there didn’t seem to be anyone seated there on a Saturday night, and the whole place had a pleasing buzz. It sort of looked as if it could have been part of the Loungers Group in a previous life (I checked: it wasn’t) but none the less it was a pleasant dining room with tables companionably close without being crammed in.

It was also almost completely full and our server whisked us to a table right at the back, far too big for our party of four. He explained that a table for four near the front had slightly outstayed their welcome, and although they’d paid the bill they hadn’t yet left the premises. He told us, quite charmingly I thought, that he didn’t feel like acting the heavy with them given how much they had spent.

Then he asked if Zoë and I wanted a cocktail on the house while we waited. So Zoë had a negroni, made with rosemary vermouth, which she raved about and I asked for that off-menu Bloody Mary. I knew it would be good when the server didn’t ask me how spicy I wanted it: they just did their job and made it, and it was magnificent.

All in all, we were waiting ten minutes with our cocktails, hardly anything to complain about. By then James and Liz had arrived, more drinks had been ordered and we had taken our table nearer to the front of the restaurant, with a good view of other tables, dishes wafting past and the staff – just the two of them, that I could see – working non-stop.

The menu is the kind that makes jaded restaurant bloggers roll their eyes – no starters, no main courses, just snacks and small plates. The menu suggests two snacks and four small plates between two, which I suppose gives you an idea of whether they’re starters or mains. Now, I can be as critical of small plates venues as the next person and I’ve always found it counterintuitive that restaurants tell you to share small plates. I also thought that A.B.O.E.’s pricing was a little out of keeping with the small plates concept – snacks mostly cost just over five pounds, but the small plates ranged from fourteen to twenty-two pounds and that for me, at the risk of doing an accidental Partridge, is the kind of price I expect to pay for a big plate.

But anyway – perhaps it was the charm of the welcome, or the edge-softening effect of that Bloody Mary, but I found I was prepared to suspend my disbelief. So we bartered about the snacks we wanted to ourselves and the small plates we were reluctantly prepared to share, I popped it all down on a note on my phone and when our server came back we ordered with military precision.

“I just need to tell you,” he said, “that the steak tartare is a small portion, so it isn’t really suitable for sharing”.

“That’s okay, that’s for me” said James, in a manner that suggested he had never really considered sharing it with anyone.

That does James a huge disservice because when it arrived, although it was indeed too petite to share, he insisted that I try a forkful of the tartare. It was made with dry-aged bavette, and I have to say it was pretty impressive with plenty of savoury depth. Not the very best tartare I’ve ever had – that honour still goes to Paris’ superlative Double Dragon – but pretty close. Certainly it compared well with a similar dish across town at Marmo, although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure about the stuff, allegedly taleggio, on top.

Zoë and Liz both went for the pumpkin croquette: A Bit Of Everything definitely applies geographically if in no other way, with this dish having hints of Japanese korroke. But unlike the croquettes at, say, Caper And Cure where you get four little spheres, A.B.O.E. goes for broke with a single enormo-croquette loaded with cheese and horseradish. Again, I was allowed a forkful and again it induced a reasonable amount of envy. Zoë in particular raved about this dish. I probably would have liked more, smaller croquettes to capitalise on the surface area but I couldn’t deny that the flavour of the thing was outstanding.

To continue the globetrotting, my snack was A.B.O.E.’s take on poutine. Rather than fries, it was cuboids of confit potato, à la Quality Chop House, buried in Parmesan with a jug of thick, intense, almost-sweet jus to trickle over the whole affair. Enormously enjoyable stuff: I imagine dreary types might complain that this wasn’t poutine, but it was a darned sight nicer than most poutine I’ve had. Besides, I knew exactly what it would be like because I’d checked out the restaurant’s Instagram in advance (it’s called research, you know).

The first of the small plates to come out was that fried chicken dish so beloved by the man behind Gurt Wings – high praise indeed, from an expert in the field. Well, he was right to say that A.B.O.E.’s rendition was nothing like his. It was surprisingly hard to describe, but it’s important to try because otherwise all you have to go on is the photo below, which looks on the scatological side. It was somewhere between a boudin and a ballotine, a cylinder of tightly compressed chicken thigh bound in a crispy coating, the whole thing smothered in a sticky curried sauce.

Did it work? Well, yes, we all thought it did. As with the pumpkin croquette, I personally would rather have had more, smaller pieces to maximise the surface area. The coating didn’t have as much crunch as I’d have liked, and came away under a knife rather than adhering to the chicken beneath. But you couldn’t argue with the flavours, or the note of citrus that danced through it. Uncle Gurty had not steered me wrong – and no, it didn’t look like fried chicken, much in the way that the poutine didn’t look like poutine. That was sort of the whole point.

I’d had my eye on the barbecued squid with galangal, but it became a must-order when our server, the charming Italian chap who had sorted out our welcome cocktails, told me they’d run out of the clams it was meant to come with. Their solution, he told me, was just to give you more squid. That was good enough for me, and the dish was tender and fragrant with a nicely building heat. Another of those dishes you slightly resented sharing, which in hindsight is a decent description of literally everything we ate.

The most expensive dish on the menu – so naturally we ordered two of these – was the short rib beef agnolotti. Nearly twenty-two pounds a portion, and for me a fascinating misfire. My companions all loved it so I was the lone dissenter, but for me the agnolotti themselves were overcooked, which made the whole dish a bit limp and mulchy.

Everything on the plate was good: the celeriac, apparently with aged beef fat, the glorious beef in the filling and a powerful mole verde, although we didn’t get the advertised goats cheese. As with everything else we tried, the flavour was unimpeachable but for me, the texture let this one down. But I may well have been wrong: certainly everybody else thought so.

Red mullet is James’ favourite fish on earth so he had to order a portion of that, and I got enough of a taste to appreciate that it was, like everything else, very skilfully done. I’m a sucker for braised lettuce, a relatively conventional pairing, but putting mustard – a delicious mustard, at that – in the mix was the sort of clever and unexpected touch Merry seems to specialise in.

The last of our small plates was an outrageously delicious one: barbecued cod with leeks wrapped in nori and two sauces – one of which, studded with ultra-salty nuggets of chicken skin, was one of the most compelling things I’ve eaten in some time. Again, this was at the north end of the price list and I can see you could argue it wasn’t an enormous amount of food for twenty pounds. But it was exceptional, one of the best-cooked pieces of fish I can remember served alongside a sauce with a proper, clobbering heft. James and Liz left a bit of theirs, and I waited as long as I could bear it before saying “would you mind if I finish that?”

Although service was brilliant, there were only two people working front of house (and, just as gobsmacking, I understand there were only two people in the kitchen). If there had been more, or they’d been less busy, we might have got to a second bottle of wine but instead we took our time with the one we had, a beautiful Minervois which sort of went with some of the dishes. It’s a small wine list, six white and six red, about half of them available by the glass.

Our server asked what we made of the food and checked what we’d ordered. He said it was a shame we hadn’t gone for the celeriac cacio e pepe and we said that it hadn’t quite made the cut. So he decided to send a plate of it out to us anyway, which was very kind and completely unexpected. It really was a beautiful dish – ribbons of just-cooked celeriac taking the place of pasta, more sweet and comforting cubes of celeriac and little mushrooms dotted throughout. Clever and imaginative, like everything else, and in its way every bit as enjoyable as the cacio e pepe I’d raved about earlier in the year at Manteca.

“Isn’t it great?” said our server as he took the empty plate away. “I shouldn’t like it, because I’m Italian and making this without pasta is, well…” He shrugged at that point to indicate that he knew full well the dish was culinary heresy. “And I’m not just Italian, I’m from Rome. But the chef is right, and it’s just so good.”

The menu also recommends that you share one dessert between two people. I don’t know if it was our greed, or the small plates not being quite big enough, but we disregarded that and ordered one apiece. Mine and Zoë’s was the dish I’d seen in the photo on Uncle Gurty’s phone the previous day. Dubbed the Rolo Finesse, it was about the most high-end Rolo you can imagine – a thick wobbly layer of something partway between caramel and toffee, gloriously indulgent with just the slightest hint of miso. Beneath that, a thick stripe of a chocolate cremeux that was almost more like ganache, and beneath that a crunchy base.

That would have been enough, but malted milk ice cream on the side and more little nubbins of that crunchy chocolate holding it in place elevated this to god tier. If I’ve had a better dessert this year I can’t remember it, and if I have a better one next year I’ll be very surprised indeed. I can’t tell you how delighted I was that this one of the only plates I didn’t have to share.

James and Liz both opted for the tiramisu and again, were generous enough to let me try it. It was – no surprises by now – excellent: light yet moreish, a far more elegant way to finish a meal than the whopping slab I’d just eaten. I’ve tried a few Bristol tiramisu over the last couple of years – Sonny Stores and Little Hollows spring to mind – and for my money this was better than either.

As we sat there in the afterglow of a brilliant meal, ready to pay and slope off to the Good Measure for a post-prandial beer, we discussed A.B.O.E. in the wider context of a city full of phenomenal restaurants. We knew it was good, but just how good was it? James thought it was better than Wilsons, but he’s been burned by going there after my rave review, eating a meal which was almost completely devoid of carbs and leaving hungry: it’s made him an avid detractor. Zoë liked it even more than COR, which is pretty much the most exalted praise you can award in Bristol.

I loved it, but I wasn’t sure how to place it. The flavours had been exceptional, the service some of the best I’ve had this year. But those small plates were priced on the keen side. It required further reflection, I decided. Our bill, not including the two comped cocktails and that extra celeriac dish, came to just over three hundred pounds, including a 12.5% service charge which the staff more than earned. As we paid up, James told our server how much he’d enjoyed it.

“Way better than Wilsons” he said. He always takes pleasure in saying that.

“Thank you!” she replied. And then, before we put on our coats and made our exit, she came back.

“I know this is cheeky, but I passed your compliments on to the chef, and he asked if there was any way you could write a review saying you thought the food was better than Wilson’s? It’s really high praise.”

“Don’t worry” I said, “I’m sure one of us will.”

The funny thing is that since my meal, which I’ve thought about many times, I’ve discovered, while writing this review, that A.B.O.E. has a bit of a controversial reputation. I’ve read a review online, best characterised as a tad sneering, that criticised A.B.O.E., partly for some of the dishes but mainly, it seems, because they linked up heavily with influencers just after they opened around the start of the year. One influencer in particular, a chap the Rolo Finesse is named after as it happens, came in for particular criticism.

Well, I can sort of see both sides of that. I’ve always felt a bit icky about influencers myself, especially ones who don’t declare ads or invites, although that criticism in my experience comes better from people who don’t take free or heavily discounted food themselves.

And looking at the influencer in question’s output, I did feel about three thousand years old. Saying that it’s, and I quote, “non stop grub-a-dubdub” at A.B.O.E. is the kind of expression that makes me want to sigh all the remaining air out of my lungs, as is the observation that “every component on your plate will SLAP so hard you won’t even know what month you were born in”. Let’s not even get into the bit where he described A.B.O.E.’s roast beef as “more tender than your nan’s left arm” or their cauliflower cheese as “so peng I could have cried”.

But the point is, much as it might pain me to admit it, the guy is not wrong (well, except maybe about my nan’s left arm). I, rather, would say that the staff work their socks off and are brilliant at what they do, I would say that every element of every dish has been given serious thought and cooked with enormous skill and that, irrespective of how or whether it slaps, let alone how hard, A.B.O.E. has a very talented kitchen doing fascinating things. I guess if you put what I said into an English-to-influencer Google Translate it might end up as roughly what he said.

I can always tell when I’ve really, really enjoyed my meal because I actively look forward to writing it up, to trying to put into words what I’ve experienced. In that sense A.B.O.E. is a restaurant blogger’s dream, and I feel lucky to be a Bristol outsider because it means that, free of all that infighting and beef I can just judge the food and the experience, and say that both were terrific. The list of places I need to go back to in Bristol gets longer and longer, which makes reviewing restaurants there difficult. But as long as they keep that dessert on the menu – which I suspect they will, if only because it pisses off all the right people – I can very much see myself returning.

A.B.O.E. – 9.4
109 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2PB
0117 9466144

https://www.aboebristol.com

Restaurant review: Cici Noodle Bar

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Cici Noodle Bar closed in March 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

When I was younger, I loved the weekend when the clocks went back. Even though I had all the time in the world, that extra hour in bed felt like a gift from the cosmos. And now I’m uncomfortably ensconced in middle age I realise that the bonus sixty minutes aren’t remotely worth all the consequences: dark mornings when you go to work, dark evenings when you head home, drear and dreich everywhere. And the extra hour? I think I spent at least a quarter of it resetting the clocks and the time on the oven. It’s a crappy tradeoff.

I read online somewhere recently that we have to wait until something like next March before the sun sets after 6pm again. I looked at my phone, hoped I’d read it wrong, realised I hadn’t and just thought: please, god, no. I have one more holiday planned this year, to Malaga in December where the sun will still be shining, the sky still a striking photogenic shade of blue. The quality of light alone, I know, will lift my spirits. Is it wrong to check the weather there once a day without fail?

I know some people love autumn, love the chillier days, love crunching golden leaves underfoot – to be fair, who doesn’t love that? – love the slide into mulled wine, Strictly on the telly, preparing for Christmas and hibernation. Maybe other years I would too, but this year feels like it’s been an especially gruelling one: much of the time I find I’m just tired, and ready for it to end. Every month the stagger to payday feels a little more like running on fumes.

Back when I was married (last time, not next time) my in-laws had a wonderful phrase for feeling a little bit blue, possibly for no tangible reason. The can’t help its, they called it: you had a case of the can’t help its. I’ve carried on using that ever since, and it’s seemed very appropriate lately, more often than I’d like. And all the things that fix it – a beer during the week, a bar of chocolate munched in front of Bake Off – work on one level, but on another I know they’re just sticking plasters. Sticking plasters that make me fatter, more lethargic and probably, in the longer term, sadder. And social media, of course, is full of people who look as if they’re having a marvellous time.

So this week I left the house on a Friday evening looking for comfort, for a solo dinner before Zoë finished a late shift in town. And comfort – when it doesn’t mean chocolate, for me anyway – often means carbs. There’s something soothing and cosseting about carbs that, on some nights, little can touch. That’s why I made a beeline for Cici Noodle Bar, which opened about eight months ago on Queen Victoria Street in the space formerly occupied by the unlamented Donuterie. I hadn’t heard much about the place, but everything I had heard was good.

Cici closes at half eight, so it’s more a lunch or quick early dinner option like Kokoro next door. Arriving at around half seven I was greeted with a completely empty room and nobody behind the counter, a veritable Marie Celeste. It’s a pleasant enough space, but more functional than fun: if I could go back in time I’d buy some shares in whoever makes Tolix chairs, because it’s more noteworthy now when you turn up to a casual dining place and they don’t have masses of the bastard things. But even so, I didn’t mind it – the pillar box red chairs and black walls had a pleasing look to them. It just needed what all restaurants need really, people.

I was about to give up when a chap came in from the back room.

“Are you still serving?”

“Yes, sure” he said. Apart from a few subsequent Deliveroo drivers and a lady who turned up to get takeaway, I think I was to be his last customer of the evening. I placed my order, clarified that he brought it over and I didn’t have to go and collect it and then I went to sit at the high table up at the window. From there I looked out on Queen Victoria Street in the darkness, people scurrying to the station to head home after a hard day at work, or heading in the opposite direction towards the Oracle, their evenings about to begin. Maybe it was the fluorescent light, or that feeling of solitude in a crowd but I felt a like a cut price, low rent Redingensian Rick Deckard. A boy can dream, anyway.

Cici Noodle Bar’s menu, you may be unsurprised to hear, revolves almost exclusively around their hand pulled noodles. You can have them in broth, as ramen (the difference between these two isn’t really explained) or as they come. That’s pretty much it, barring a handful of sides, and most of their noodle dishes cost around a tenner. All very straightforward, and that kind of streamlined menu always inspires confidence in me.

I’ve never really got things like ramen – I tend to agree with the restaurant blogger Katie Low who once said they combine all the drawbacks of soup and of noodles without the benefits of either – so I went for a dish described as “dry noodles with beef brisket”. As you can maybe see from the picture below, it was emphatically a sauce free zone – I don’t think I was necessarily prepared for quite how dry it was. Noodles, pak choi, plenty of hefty chunks of beef, some coriander and a few translucent slices of radish. That was all. Had I made a mistake?

As it turned out, I hadn’t. I don’t always have the most nuanced palate, and I can sometimes equate subtle with boring. I tend to like crash bang wallop flavours like XO or gochujang, blue cheese or anchovies. Load up the salt or umami and I tend to be a happy man. So to slow down, strip back and taste this dish was really quite a revelation. The noodles were lovely – thick, somewhere between soba and udon, with just enough bite to make them interesting. The greenery added crunch, contrast and aromatics.

But the star of the show, with this dish, was the brisket. It’s too easy to wear out superlatives in this game, but this was easily some of the most tender beef I’ve eaten anywhere, surrendering to a fork – I was too much of a heathen to eat it with chopsticks – falling into flakes almost the way fish would. It had a surprising depth of flavour, too: maybe I was imagining it, overcompensating for the simplicity of everything else but I thought I detected something like star anise. Either way it was properly delicious. Even the few bits of fat there were, wobbly and gelatinous, were a glossy, moreish delight rather than a bouncy ordeal.

The other transformative component, though, was on the side. There were standard issue bottles of soy and vinegar but also, in a blue and white pot, there was laoganma, crispy chilli in oil, and a little teaspoon with which to dispense it. And dispense it I did, a little at first, then more and then more, the brick red savoury joy colouring everything in the dish and completing the experience. For those of you who haven’t had laoganma, which included me until recently, it’s made with chilli but not quite as punchy as you might fear, the whole thing given a sublime extra dimension with the addition of fermented black beans that lend extraordinary depth.

Without laoganma – it translates as “old godmother”, would you believe – my noodles were a very good dish. With it, they became great. By the end, as I dispatched those last nubbins of chilli-flecked brisket, I was dabbing my nose and pondering the possibilities: laoganma smudged on cheese on toast! Pastrami and laoganma sandwiches! Laoganma eaten out of the jar with a spoon! But although it elevated the dish, I did have to remind myself that the dish was pretty impressive already. What would the spicy chicken noodles be like, I wondered? Next time, I thought.

I wish I could be equally enthusiastic about the gyoza, but they fell a little flat. They tasted too much of the oil they had been fried in, and the oil tasted like it had done too much frying already. Perhaps that’s just the consequence of being their last customer on a Friday night, but it was a real shame because the gyoza themselves could have been good. I poured some soy and vinegar into the dish, which served to highlight the oil floating on the bottom of it, and made the best of a bad job.

Service was nice and friendly although the man behind the counter did wander off for long periods of time. That didn’t bother me at all, but another customer came in after me to order some food to take home and she nearly gave up after waiting for nearly five minutes with nobody behind the counter. “It’s really good, it’s worth waiting for!” I said between mouthfuls of brisket, persuading her to stay until the server returned. I’m glad I did, and hopefully she enjoyed her meal as much as I did mine.

But I suspect that, at the end of a long shift, the server was just keen to go home. That’s perfectly understandable, really. I also sense that he hadn’t been working there long – when he came to take my bowl away I told him how much I’d enjoyed my food and asked how long Cici Noodle Bar had been there, pretty standard restaurant small talk, but he didn’t know. My bill came to a stupidly reasonable fifteen pounds, not including service.

And it wasn’t until later when I checked my bank statement that I realised my payment had been made to Donuterie: if this was a case of Donuterie’s owner turning their hand to something else when the doughnut business failed they’d definitely done a far better job of it than, for example, that time that Italian restaurant Casa Roma rebranded as Maracas. Cici Noodle Bar, weirdly, felt a little like what that site should have been all along.

I’ve walked past Cici Noodle Bar, on the way home from work, a few times since I visited for this review and every time I’ve been really heartened to see customers in there. I really like what they do, and it definitely takes its place in the great pantheon of Reading noodle dishes like the exemplary chow meins at Kamal’s Kitchen and Sapana Home, not to mention the much missed duck noodles at Beijing Noodle House, the West Street institution that fed so many happy Reading diners on an affordable night out, many years ago. It could be the spiritual heir to the latter.

I’m yet to visit the obvious benchmark for Cici Noodle Bar, Marugame Udon which opened in March in the Oracle where Pizza Hut used to be. I got as far as walking through the door with Zoë, seeing that the layout was more like a cafeteria than a restaurant, thinking “sod this” and leaving again.

No doubt I will review it at some point, or at least I ought to. But even once I do I suspect my loyalties will probably lie with Cici Noodle Bar – slightly less polished, perhaps slightly less slick but delicious, independent and brave. It was warming, surprising and it definitely staved off the can’t help its, for a while at least. Or perhaps it was the laoganma: I must pick some up so I can carry out some controlled experiments in the comfort of my own kitchen.

Cici Noodle Bar – 7.5
27 Queen Victoria Street, RG1 1SY
0118 9090872

https://cicinoodles.com

Restaurant review: La’De Kitchen

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La’De Kitchen closed in January 2024, and is apparently reopening as a separate restaurant called Yaprak which is allegedly under the same management/ownership. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

It kind of feels as if I’ve reviewed La’De Kitchen, the Turkish restaurant in Woodley, already, even though I haven’t. That’s partly because it’s featured on the blog before, by virtue of a delicious takeaway I reviewed back in March 2021. And I have eaten there once, a couple of months after that. It was for a friend’s birthday, during that weird period in 2021 when you could eat outside but not inside, and we all shivered under blankets and tried to persuade ourselves we were having a marvellous time. I remember the food, though, as being excellent.

Returning this week was a recognition, I think, that of all my to do list it was the most glaring omission, the place I really should have reviewed by now. Zoë and I turned up nice and early on a weekday evening to find the place largely empty, although it gradually filled up during the course of our meal. That didn’t surprise me, because it has developed a reputation over the last couple of years.

Of course, and I say this as a former Woodley resident, the fact that it’s in Woodley, always a rather a desert for restaurants, must help. “I remember how excited Woodley was when it found out it was getting Bosco Lounge”, Zoë told me, which gives you an idea how low expectations were set.

But also, it’s just really nicely done. The interior is chic, and the place got buzzy as more tables were occupied. I could easily imagine that on a busy Friday or Saturday night, the cocktails flowing, plenty of bums on those tastefully upholstered seats, it would feel like a very upmarket place to spend an evening. Maybe not on a par with their branch in Pangbourne, but lovely even so.

That said, La’De Kitchen is in some respects a different beast to the restaurant I ordered my takeaway from back in 2021. Back then Berkshire was its brave new frontier as they expanded from their original Muswell Hill branch. Fast forward two years and Muswell Hill is closed. Instead, La’De has spread across the Home Counties – Newbury, Camberley, Sunningdale – with a rogue branch in Hereford, of all places. So was it a different proposition now, and had they kept what was magical intact as they’d grown? I had a feeling I was about to find out.

The menu, though, was largely unchanged from my previous visit. It’s the familiar mixture of cold and hot meze, food from the grill (endearingly described as “Charcoal Productions”), some Turkish specialities (including pide) and a handful of less Anatolian choices. Some of these, the pizzas, take advantage of their having a suitable oven. The other two, described as the “Ritzy La’De Burger” and the “Ritzy La’De Chicken Burger”, badly need a rebrand: nothing would knowingly choose to be described as ritzy, not even – well, especially – the Ritz.

It’s a shame that most of the sharing main courses, the mixed grills and what have you, are sized and priced to serve three to four people, as opposed to the two to three on the menu on their website, as that limited what we could try.

The first sign that all might not run smoothly came when we placed our order – a couple of cold meze, a pair of hot meze and a main course each. “Would you like all of that to come at the same time?” asked our server, which I found bizarre. Yes, having ordered this much food I would naturally like it all dumped on the table at once so some of it can go cold: that must have been what I had in mind. Maybe they get some customers in a real rush to hightail it to Showcase Cinema, but I didn’t think we had that air about us. “This might be too much food”, our server also said. Well, maybe not it it’s nicely paced I thought, but didn’t say out loud.

Personally I’d have liked my cold meze first, then the hot meze and then my mains. And perhaps I should have said that out loud, but I didn’t, so all four of our starters came pretty much at once. They were something of an exercise in frustration. Possibly the best of them was Cypriot garlic sausage, grilled and crisp-edged, coarse and tasty without any dubious whiff of mystery meat.

Genuinely, I really enjoyed this dish, and I’m sorry to go there but I’m afraid I must: four pretty small pieces of what was presumably a single sausage was seven pounds fifty. If anything, the photo above makes the dish look bigger than it actually was. A handful of scruffy salad, over-sweet with dressing and pomegranate seeds, doesn’t conceal how small this particular small plate was. I know food is getting more expensive and something has to be right at the edge of the spectrum for me to call it out, but that’s where this was. It got me thinking about the sujuk at the sadly-departed Cairo Café: still, maybe that’s why Cairo Café has gone and this place is still there.

The other starter was even more of a disappointment because it’s a dish I’ve had and loved from La’De Kitchen more than once. Chargrilled octopus looked the part, that alluring fractal spiral I always love seeing on a plate. But whether this wasn’t marinated or cooked before being finished on the grill, the end result was tough, rubbery and heavy going. It was also another dish with an overreliance on balsamic and pomegranate seeds, the whole thing a little sickly-sweet. Zoe tried a few pieces and gave up – if the octopus had been great this would have been a stroke of luck, but instead it was a chore.

Were the cold meze better? Not really. Baba ganoush was probably the best of them, with a decent texture and an underlying note of smoke that told that particular aubergine’s origin story. But even then it was a little lacking in the complexity I was hoping for. But the real disappointment was the taramasalata: I’ve had this before from La’De Kitchen and I remember it being more a pastel shade, salty and moreish, a proper treat. This was Barbie-pink and one note, with more of Marie Rose than fish roe about it. As with the octopus Zoë tried a little and decided she couldn’t be doing with the calories. “It’s oddly sweet” she said, a theme across the starters. And I would say, in the main, that I’m a fussier eater than she is.

Here’s the really weird thing, though: one thing I’ve always loved about La’De Kitchen is its balloon bread – a beautiful inflated pita speckled with sesame seeds. When I ordered takeaway from that that first time, we had three of the blighters and I remember thinking that they were one of my favourite things about the meal. On this occasion – and bear in mind that we’d ordered two things you could reductively describe as a dip – they brought us one.

We broke it, we tore it, we dipped and spooned baba ganoush and taramasalata onto it, and then we thought “what can we do with the rest of these dips?” Did they expect us to eat taramasalata with a fork? So when the server swung by, we asked if we could have some more bread. Of course, of course, they said. It did not materialise.

By this point I was drinking my pint of Efe and Zoë was on a mocktail (“Safe Sex On The Beach” apparently, although good luck finding one without sewage in this country) the restaurant was slightly busier and I was adjusting my expectations. One of my favourite Turkish restaurants is Zigana in Didcot, and although I love the place I’d be the first to admit that their meze is hardly the main attraction: it’s only when your food has spent time on their charcoal grill that things start getting good. Perhaps La’De Kitchen would be the same.

Our server came over and asked if we were ready for our mains, and we said why not. He gestured at our mostly uneaten baba ganoush and taramasalata, although he chose not to ask why we’d left so much. Funny, that.

“Would you like me to take those away?” “he asked.

“No thank you, but what I’d really like is some more bread to eat with them.”

“Of course, of course” came the reply. Of course, more bread never materialised. By this point I had rationalised to myself that, given that the two dips were either side of middling, he might have been unintentionally doing me a favour. Besides, all the more room for mains.

When I had my takeaway from La’De Kitchen all those years ago it was all about one dish: the pistachio adana, an impeccable lamb kofte studded with pistachio, a truly delicious masterpiece of grilling. Well, Zoë quite sensibly called shotgun on it for this visit and I have to hand it to her, because it was the one thing about La’De Kitchen that age has not withered.

If anything, it was better than before: what used to be a coating of pistachio has morphed into something more beautiful, a sort of hyper-real, hyper-green pistachio pesto which elevated it from great to greater still. Paired with gorgeous, nutty pearls of bulghur wheat (and more sticky-dressed, pomegranate-strewn salad: you can’t have everything) this really was a fantastic dish, albeit one keeping bad company. If everything we ate that night had even approached the quality of the pistachio adana, I would be firing up the hype machine and getting out my virtual megaphone: nothing even remotely did, but I still want to say that the restaurant is almost worth visiting for this dish alone.

I’m prepared to concede that I might have ordered badly, when it came to my main. I asked my server what distinguished the chicken Iskender from your common or garden shish, and he told me that it came served on a bed of pita with a spicy tomato sauce (called halep) and yoghurt. Should I have known from that what I was about to get? Perhaps. Perhaps I should have known that it was cubes of chicken and squares of pita in a cast iron skillet, with a spooge of slightly bland tomato sauce and a pile of yoghurt on top. If I’d known, I might have opted for something else.

But even judging it by the standards of the dish, it didn’t quite work. Unlike the plating of the adana, which gave you plenty of negative space, this was crammed into the skillet, making it fiddly to eat. I actually loved the squares of pita, which had enough about them to stand up to the sauce. But the chicken was firm – just the right side of bouncy – without being tender, and the sauce was unremarkable. It was almost like they’d taken all the glory of meat fresh off a charcoal grill, and wiped it out by drowning it in something bla. I probably ordered something I might not have chosen, but I still expected it to be better than this.

“What do you think?” said Zoë, who by this point had given me enough of her adana for me to realise a travesty had taken place.

“It’s, well… it’s not as good as yours. Meat and tomato sauce in a skillet feels like something I could have picked off the al forno section of the menu in a Prezzo.”

“You know this used to be a Prezzo, don’t you?”

Full but unfulfilled, we waited in vain to get somebody’s attention to pay our bill. The restaurant wasn’t hugely busy at this stage, but from the difficulty we had you’d think it was. All the time that blasted taramasalata and baba ganoush sat there on the table. It irked me, and yet I knew I’d dodged a bullet: I’m a big fan of eating my feelings, but not necessarily when those feelings are disappointment. Eventually we got our bill, and some time after that we managed to pay it. It said we’d had two lots of balloon bread, which by this point was just rubbing it in.

“That was the best part of a hundred quid!” said Zoë incredulously as we made our way to the bus stop, pausing only for a tactical foray into Waitrose to buy some chocolate to cheer ourselves up. “Seriously, you need to find some other people to do these fucking reviews with you.”

“I know, I know” I said. “The saddest thing is that we could have gone here” – I gestured at Adda Hut, which looked far quieter than La’De Kitchen had been – “and you’d have had a better meal. We’d have spent a lot less money, too.”

I am so sorry that I didn’t like La’De Kitchen more. I wonder if it’s them or me, if I caught them on a bad night or if something has happened to the genuinely exciting restaurant that opened in Woodley a few years ago. Is it the inevitable consequence of a chain growing, or what happens when you focus on margins? Either way I ordered a mixture of dishes I know well and some new things and only one dish – that pistachio adana – took me back to the beginning. 

Beyond that, it felt like a shadow of its former self. I found myself thinking you’d be better off at Bakery House, or Tasty Greek Souvlaki, or even catching the train to Didcot and giving Zigana a whirl. Or trying Istanbul Mangal in Tilehurst Village, or the new Lebanese place down the Wokingham Road. I truly wish it wasn’t so, but them’s the breaks. But we’ll always have that pistachio adana, so perhaps the trick is to go there, order that, cut your losses and leave. It’s an extraordinary dish, and without it this rating would have been far lower. It’s worth making a pilgrimage just for that. For now, at least.

La’De Kitchen – 6.7
61-63 Crockhamwell Road, Woodley, RG5 3JP
0119 9692047

https://woodley.ladekitchen.com