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Restaurant review: Amò Italian Street Food

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Amò closed in mid-December, apparently for maintenance, with no indication of when, or whether, it will reopen. I have left the review up for posterity.

In the good old days, where you stood on certain binary debates was simply a way of positioning you in the world. Cream first or jam first? Plain or milk chocolate Bounty? Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? Were you a fan of the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? All these things used just to be a form of triangulation, little points on a chart that, taken together, might give someone an idea of you (and, since you’re asking: cream first; milk chocolate; salt and vinegar; the Beatles; neither).

When did that all change? 2016, I suppose, when we all became Leave or Remain, indelibly stamped, and at every stage from that point forwards. We’re always asked what side we’re on, and now it’s not a useful piece of trivia but a necessary step to place yourself on one side or another of a yawning chasm. Are you pro- or anti-Israel? Do you think J.K. Rowling is a hero or a villain? How about Farage, or Trump? Did you believe in lockdowns, masks, vaccines? Did you leave Twitter or stay? If you left, did you go to Bluesky or Threads?

Like the Tower Of Babel, we’re now all scattered to the four winds, trying to find our tribe and arguing, endlessly, with the others. It’s not a bit of fun, any more. And this is all rich coming from me, because I’m painfully aware that I’m as polarising as most. Happily, Reading faces another tricky choice now that’s potentially just as difficult, but hopefully less divisive: Paesinos or Amò?

The two pizza places opened on Kings Road, two doors and three months apart, the latest in a weird series of rivals in very close proximity, following the example of Pho and Bánh Mì QB in Kings Walk or Iro Sushi and You Me Sushi on Friar Street. What is it with that? You must be very confident in your product to open so near to a direct competitor, like Bánh Mì QB did, but with Paesinos and Amò, Iro and You Me so little time separated both arrivals that it must be an unhappy coincidence. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a new business only to find that another one a lot like yours is doing exactly the same, a stone’s throw away.

Anyway, regular readers will know that I reviewed Paesinos a month ago with my Italian friend Enza (who is, just to confuse matters, an Amò superfan) and it received a glowing write up from me. But I knew, even as I was eating there, that I needed to prioritise visiting its neighbour, if only because Enza told me that it was as good as, if not better than, the restaurant I had so enjoyed. I couldn’t go with Enza, because she was so far from impartial, and this time I took my friend Jo, also of Italian descent, last seen checking out House Of Flavours with me.

Amò is, as I’ve said before, something of a joint venture between Madoo, the founding father of Reading’s Italian quarter which opened four and a half years ago, and Pulcinella Focaccia, a business that sold pizza and focaccia for delivery from premises out in Earley and has been trading for a couple of years; I’d never had food from the latter, but I’d heard plenty of good things. And arriving at Amò on a weekday evening I was struck that, in terms of branding and decor at least, it felt fully formed in a way that Paesinos didn’t so much, or Madoo for that matter.

Everything was tasteful and unfussy without being Spartan, with a bare wood floor and tables, seats and benches. It seated somewhere between fifteen and twenty people, so significantly more spacious than the likes of Mama’s Way or Paesinos, and it had a nicely calm feel to it. Amò’s logo was in the middle of a deep red swatch of paint on the wall behind the counter, and resting on that counter was possibly one of the most tempting displays in Reading.

Amò very cleverly changes up its offering around the time people start finishing work, so until 5pm you can try pizza al taglio or something from a changing array of Italian street food. They also, I think, offer focaccia sandwiches during the day, although most of them had gone when Jo and I turned up around half seven. After 5pm the sandwiches drop away but instead, alongside the slices of pizza and street food, you can order a whole pizza from a more varied menu.

The street food was all very tempting, all things that I would challenge anybody not to fancy eating. Arancini, croquettes, mozzarella bites and frittatini – fried pasta – were all tributes to the time-honoured method of coating something in breadcrumbs and frying it until it was golden, crispy and alluring. The lighter side of Amò’s offering is keenly priced, too. Most of the street food dishes are around a fiver, pizza by the slice is less than that and they do multibuys if you want two stuffed focacce or two slices of pizza. Whole pizzas top out at about fifteen pounds, unless you add sausage or Parma ham to one of the options.

And Amò’s pizza menu struck me as very clever, because – either by accident or design – it kept the overlap with its neighbour’s pizzas to a minimum. Amò has a list of the classics, of course, so you can have a margherita, or prosciutto cotto and mushroom, or sausage and friarielli. But on the other side of the small, laminated menu, you find loads of less conventional options, far more interesting than the kind of things you could find at Zia Lucia or even, dare I say it, Amò’s neighbours.

That meant pizza with a purple sweet potato base, topped with cacio e pepe cream, guanciale and sweet potato crisps, or pizza with a pistachio cream base and mortadella. Others had a truffle cream base, or pumpkin cream, or even a cavolo nero base (“it’s the gourmet version of the salsiccia e friarielli”, Enza had told me, when I was looking for recommendations).

You may find all of that a bit leftfield, or it might whet your appetite for wandering off Reading’s beaten pizza track. I think for me, though, it was neither: I chalked those up as things to try once I had road tested the classics.

But first, Jo and I had a chinotto each and ordered some of those smaller dishes to kick things off. And as we waited for them, she told me about her childhood holidays by the coast, near Salerno, buying balls of mozzarella as big as your head from some beachside hut and eating them with bread, nothing else required. It was brilliant, Jo said, but it did slightly ruin the mozzarella you can easily get in this country; like me, Jo considers it a seriously underrated cheese.

As so often I felt a little pang for a childhood I didn’t have, listening to Jo. But then there was something to be said for sitting in a caravan in Devon, rain drilling on the roof, eating hog’s pudding cooked in a frying pan – always with tinned tomatoes on the side – watching Roland Rat on TV-am, knowing that the evening would be spent playing cards and watching reruns of Shogun (the original, not the superb remake). Maybe those memories would sound exotic to an Italian: on balance, though, I guessed not.

Amò’s mozzarella bites may not have been the size of my head, but they were gorgeous nonetheless. Crisp-crumbed spheres, golden but not overdone, the shell holding just-molten-enough mozzarella, they were a proper delight. I might have had them with something to dip them into, but it was a minor quibble with something so delightful. So was the fact that however carefully I ate them, with my hands at least, a little liquid sprayed out, leaving incriminating marks on my shirt. I was too happy to care, and the attentive staff quickly brought extra napkins.

At five pounds fifty for four, they could have been the bargain of the meal, if not the month, but for the fact that we also ordered two of the frittatini. These are yours for three pounds fifty, or six quid for two, and come in two flavours. If you go to Amò, my advice is to make sure you have one to yourself or, as Jo and I did, order one of each and share. They’re a bit fiddly to break up – that crisp carapace presents resistance when you’re relying on a wooden fork – but they reward the effort, with dividends.

They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form. And their form – big, irregular golden pucks – belied just how wonderful they were on the inside.

Picture an arancino, but instead of risotto rice visualise a cluster of little tubes of pasta, and rather than a molten core, imagine the whole thing bound together with sauce. In terms of taste, contrast, texture and sheer tactility I’m not sure I can think of anything finer, and writing this paragraph I am deeply aggrieved that I cannot eat one right this minute, or indeed by the end of the day.

This is where Amò are an especially smart bunch, because during the day you could pitch up, have a chinotto, a slice of pizza or a sandwich crammed with porchetta and provolone, and add one of these for a mere three pounds fifty. That’s almost the price of subscribing to this blog for a month and, although it pains me to say it, it’s even better value.

Jo and I both loved the meaty version but would you believe that the vegetarian option, with fried aubergine and tomato, was even better? Jo described it as like being “slapped in the face with flavour” and believe me, apart from that fried pasta, nothing or nobody would get away with slapping Jo in the face with anything. One of the best things I’ve eaten this year, no notes at all.

Jo was very keen to try one of the pizzas by the slice, with meatballs on it, so that turned up next, thoughtfully cut up to share, a meatball perched precisely in the centre of each quadrant. This too was cracking, although I suspect the base on the pizza al taglio is slightly different to that on the whole pizza. The meatballs, in particular, were excellent – coarse and lacking in suspicious, smooth bounciness. It also, by the looks of it, was only available by the slice so, again, well worth adding to a lunch order.

By this point, as our full-sized pizzas arrived, the carbs were taking their toll, and we were already prepared to ask if some of our leftovers could be boxed up – something that rarely happens to me, because it’s rare that my capacity is defeated by a restaurant.

Jo made it a few slices into hers, the piccantina, which was topped with salami, mushrooms and Gorgonzola. I didn’t try it, and from a cursory glance I thought the porcini were common or garden mushrooms, but Jo had no complaints. She’d told me earlier in the evening that she hadn’t had pizza for a while: Jo is on a monthly treatment regime where anything she eats the next day tastes vile and puts you off whatever you ate for the foreseeable future. One of those next days had involved pizza, and Amò’s piccantina resuscitated her love for the stuff. That in itself is no mean feat.

I on the other hand had deferred to Enza’s judgement and ordered the sausage and friarielli. As so often with white pizza, it had a bit more structural integrity, so less of the Neapolitan droop you might get with other pizzas. And the base was admirable, nicely puffy with plenty going for it. You couldn’t fault the generosity either, with nuggets of crumbled sausage very, very liberally deployed.

There was very little not to like about the pizza, and if I was clutching at straws I might say that I’d have liked the sausage to have more of a whack of fennel, but that’s a minor thing. It was so well orchestrated with the friarielli that it was impossible to argue: this was a pizza without complexity or variety that kept it focused and hit the target.

I managed about half of mine, and the staff were nice as pie about bringing a couple of boxes so we could take our leftovers home. Everything we had ordered – all that food, four cans of soft drink – came to fifty-five pounds, which is a steal, and then we went to the Allied for a debrief. Two pints of forgettable macro fizzy booze at the Allied set us back nearly sixteen pounds, which is very much not a steal.

For once, I can also report back on the leftovers. Jo had hers cold the next day – no slice for her beloved dog Diesel, this time – and sent me an iMessage: tastes even better this morning, cold from the box, outstanding! I on the other hand revived mine in the oven on my lunch break, working from home, and it was the best lunch I’d had in ages. I wasn’t sure if my slight lull that afternoon was down to the carbs or a Teams call that felt especially like a trudge. Let’s put it down to the latter.

Having talked about Amò for all these paragraphs, I know I should return to my opening theme and compare it to its neighbour Paesinos. But it’s not easy to do.

If they were top trumps cards, Amò would win in a number of categories. It’s more versatile, on account of having a focused lunch offering as well as pizzas in the evening. It has arguably a wider range of sides and small plates. It’s bigger, too, with far more potential to eat there in larger groups; if you go to Paesinos as a four, you either won’t get in or you’ll take up two-thirds of the restaurant. Its pizzas are more imaginative and unconventional, so more of a challenge to the Neapolitan hegemony elsewhere in town.

On that basis, you’d have it down as a resounding victory for Amò and, for some of you, that might well be the case. On the other hand, Paesinos sticks to the classics, both for pizza and for its smaller dishes. I think its soft drink selection – and neither is licensed – is better and more interesting. The cannoli and tiramisu are worth the price of admission alone. And, speaking completely as a novice in these things, I think Paesinos’ dough and base may have the edge.

But the main reason why taking a Top Trumps approach doesn’t work is that Paesinos, for me, has a little something extra. There’s no Italian equivalent of je ne sais quoi, as far as I know, but there’s a small dash of magic in the smaller restaurant that means that rationally, although I know Amò has a huge amount going for it, it’s impossible to pick a winner.

So yes, I’ve reflected and reflected and it’s impossible to put a cigarette paper between these two places. The only thing you can put between them, it turns out, is another restaurant – called Just Momo, which helpfully doesn’t just do momo. So the rating down there reflects that: call it a cop out, if you will, but I stand by it.

Let’s not divide ourselves by being Team Amò or Team Paesinos, because as a town we can be better than that. Hopefully enough of you will pick each side that both places will continue to trade for years to come. Because the truth is that there’s one real winner in this contest, and that’s Reading.

Amò Italian Street Food – 8.6
2-4 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
07500 619775

https://amoitalianstreetfood.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Gees, Oxford

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In 2026 Gees appointed Nick Galer, formerly of The Miller Of Mansfield, as its new head chef which means this review is no longer current. I have kept it up for posterity and will re-review Gees in due course.

For my money, there are a few finer things in life than a long, leisurely Saturday lunch with a very good friend. Especially when you’re in a fetching room, in a beautiful city, faced with a cocktail, an appealing menu and excellent people watching opportunities. In fact, one of the only things finer than that is to do exactly what I’ve described above, but on a Friday, with four whole days off stretching out in front of you. So I was very happy indeed to find myself sitting in Gees’ gorgeous conservatory on Good Friday with my dear friend Jerry, Easter weekend only just beginning.

By this point, the day had already got off to a magnificent start. The train to Oxford was quiet, deserted almost, and it was the first time in as long as I could remember that it only took a couple of minutes to exit the station, a station whose abysmal design doesn’t seem to have significantly changed in the thirty or more years that I’ve been making that journey. We had a bimble round the Covered Market, we bought bread and cheese for later on, we had a beautiful latte in the Missing Bean on Turl Street, chatting away non-stop. 

Jerry and I had never been to Oxford together before, so we compared our experiences of the city over coffee, looking at the connections between his mental map of the place and mine. I thought how nice it was to introduce him to some of my favourite spots, particularly as if it wasn’t for Jerry (it’s a long story) I might not know Oxford half as well as I do. The weather could’ve been nicer – the day was dry yet overcast, which never paints Oxford’s buildings in their best light – but the company was unimprovable.

I had chosen Gees for our lunch because it had been on my to-do list for quite some time. A glorious spot on the Banbury Road mainly famous for its conservatory slash greenhouse dining room, there’s been a restaurant on the site for nearly forty years, a mind-boggling record. It started out as Raymond Blanc’s restaurant, with John Burton Race in the kitchen, then five years later it became Gees and has stayed that way ever since. It’s now part of The Oxford Collection, a small and exclusive group including The Old Bank and Old Parsonage hotels, and their respective restaurants.

That length of tenure means that Gees was already trading when I turned up at Oxford in 1992, sporting terrible spectacles and even worse clothes, to study my degree alongside some of the brightest people I have ever met (and some of the thickest too, would you believe). Not, of course, that I would’ve eaten there then. As I’ve said before, my meals out were limited to regular trips to the fish and chip shop on Carfax, and the rest of the time I was either heating up an M&S chili con carne in the microwave of our communal kitchen, or enjoying – and I use that word as loosely as humanly possible – the food in my college halls.

Many Oxford colleges have an excellent reputation for food, as it happens. They also have shitloads of land and investments, and in one case their own deer park. My college had none of those things, which is probably why they accepted the likes of me: the food there was purgatorial. So Gees was for a long time a kind of mythical place, the sort of restaurant other people went to, people with wealthy parents and substantial allowances. It wasn’t until much later, probably twenty years or so later, that I went there, just once.

That too was in another life, with my then wife and a bunch of our friends who turned out, when push came to shove, to be her friends. I don’t remember much about that meal, except that it was deeply convivial, but I do remember following it up with a lot of drinks in one place or another and stopping on the way to the station for a shameful KFC. I always intended to return to Gees, but somehow I never did.

I was quickly reminded, as we stepped through the door, what an attractive place it is. Most of the seating is indeed in that big conservatory, with its banquettes, leather-backed chairs and handsome tiled floor, and it makes for a great place to eat. Even on a cloudy day the room fills with light, and something about that light, the room’s airiness, the bustle of its supremely efficient staff and the chatter from prosperous neighbouring diners created a truly brilliant atmosphere. If I gave out ratings for rooms alone, Gees would take some beating. 

Gees’ menu is sort of modern European, with something from everywhere. Oysters and in-season Wye Valley asparagus were on offer, as were Serrano ham croquetas and braised octopus with romesco. But Italian dishes and ingredients tend to dominate – pizzetta, pasta, burrata, aubergine parmigiana, the list goes on. It’s as tempting a menu as any I’ve seen on my travels for a while, and on another day I could have ordered almost anything on it.

I think I read somewhere that Gees was influenced by the River Cafe, and I could imagine that in both the menu and the surroundings. Not that I’ve ever been to the River Cafe: for all the rave reviews I’ve read, paying nearly forty pounds for an asparagus starter has always been beyond my means; that said, I’m sure some of my Oxford contemporaries have been more than once. Gees’ asparagus was perhaps more keenly priced at under twelve pounds. Starters more generally weighed in at between ten and twenty pounds, pasta dishes close to twenty and main courses between eighteen and thirty-five. Not River Cafe levels, but not cheap either.

Another thing to love about an unhurried lunch is the possibility of an aperitif. So Jerry had something which the bill described as a “Bergamont Spritz”. It’s not in the drinks menu online, so I’m assuming it contained gin, some kind of sparkling wine, bergamot and – surely – a typo. I had something called a Contessa Negroni which swapped out Campari for Aperol in the classic, simple, three ingredient cocktail. You might wonder why this has never been done before, and now I can tell you: because it doesn’t taste as nice as a proper negroni.

That was all forgivable, though, because the bar snack we ordered to go with them was a real cracker – little dabs of anchovy sandwiched between two sage leaves, battered and fried. These were outrageously good, salty little treats and a really excellent idea. A far better idea than putting Aperol in a negroni, anyway. I wasn’t to realise, at that point, that my bar snack would be far and away the best thing either of us ate all day, so instead I sipped my cocktail, enjoyed the surroundings and felt pleased with the course the day was taking. At all the tables around me, people were doing much the same.

The problem is that after that, despite the room being lovely and our bottle of txakoli being cold, fresh and zippy it felt to me like Gee’s menu delivered wobble after wobble. Take my starter, which was described as venison tonnato. Now, I thought that sounded like an interesting idea: a vitello tonnato swapping our the veal for venison could, after all, possibly work. And it might still be an interesting idea, but it wasn’t in a million years what this dish was.

Instead of thinly sliced venison, you got a piece of venison fillet, cooked through without pinkness, thickly sliced and drizzled with a pale sauce that contained absolutely no tuna. Not the slightest hint of it, not even a whisper of tuna. I don’t know what it tasted of – not a lot, really – but it meant that both the main ingredients of vitello tonnato were missing, replaced with things that were damage not homage. And then there was a big pile of salad, because this starter cost fifteen pounds and they had to find ways to distract a paying customer from realising that this wasn’t in any way what they had ordered.

Ordering a salad by mistake seemed to be quite an Oxford thing: I was reminded of a similar incident at Branca when I went there earlier in the year. I didn’t mind that then, because my stealth salad at Branca was still an excellent dish. This, not so much. If it had been called “venison salad with tonnato dressing”, while not 100% accurate, I’d have had fewer quibbles. Of course, if it had been called that I’d have ordered something else.

The problem is that not only is stealth salad seemingly an Oxford thing, it’s also – to paraphrase Dr Dre – a Gees thing. Jerry’s soft shell crab with saffron aioli was nice enough, but you get an idea even from the picture below of how diddy it was. Again, salad appeared mainly to be there to fill negative space, a kind of gastronomic find the lady deception. A different salad to that accompanying my starter, with shaved fennel and olive oil. Again, not mentioned on the menu but, in truth, a large part of proceedings. Jerry gave me a forkful of his crab. There was so little that I felt guilty taking it.

Jerry is on some kind of medication that reduces his appetite (although, gladly, not where booze is concerned). He quite enjoyed this, but I think you’d have to be on that medication to find it enough. And Jerry’s drug regime came in even handier with his main course: butterflied sardines, which apparently came with tomato, sumac pickled onions and chermoula.

I try not to talk about value much in restaurant reviews these days: things cost what they cost, and restaurants need to make money. So for me to mention it, pricing has to verge on the egregious and, at twenty-two pounds, that’s why I’m bringing it up here. Here they are in their glory, all five of them. This, to me, looks like a starter. Is that all there is? you might ask. Where’s the tomato?

Well have no fear, because this dish – the generosity never starts – came with tomatoes and radicchio. Rocket, too, to match the rocket dumped in the centre of the Maltese Cross of disappointment that was those sardines. Double rocket, the treat nobody ever asked for: still, it beats pea shoots, I suppose. Why did the menu not mention that this was yet another salad? Was Gees just a glorified salad bar, and nobody had told us? Was it north Oxford’s upmarket tribute to Harvester, Gregg Wallace’s favourite restaurant? It was a puzzle and no mistake.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling that really we had just ordered exceptionally badly, because the dishes arriving at other tables looked more like actual food. A tall, substantial burger was brought to one of our neighbours, with a decent-looking portion of chips. Lamb cutlets piled high on a plate were put in front of the chap next to him, although in fairness they were on top of some little gem lettuce and peas. See? Another salad.

My main gave Gees one last chance to dish up something more convincing. And I’ll say this for my chicken cacciatore: it was not a salad. But it wasn’t great either. The pool of stretchy polenta was pleasant enough: I would probably always choose mash over polenta, but the menu clearly advertised it, so I couldn’t complain. And I did really love the sauce my chicken came in: rich with tomato, sharp with capers, studded with judiciously-cooked carrots and celery, a vegetable I always think is underrated in this context.

The chicken was the problem. I’m really partial to chicken thighs on the bone, but you have to achieve one of two things and ideally both. A crispy skin, if you can get that right, is a truly wondrous thing. But I would pass on that if the chicken is so well cooked that it flees the bone at speed, and breaks into strands. That’s when chicken thighs become properly magical. If Gees had achieved that the chicken, with that sauce and some of the polenta (if you must) would have made for splendid mouthful after splendid mouthful.

But to get both of those wrong, to have flaccid skin and firm, almost rubbery meat that needed to be prized away from the bone? That’s really not great. And to charge twenty-eight pounds for two undercooked chicken thighs that weren’t fit to grace the sauce they came in? Cheeky doesn’t even come close.

No side dish could rescue this sorry affair, though in Gees’ defence their braised leeks in feta and dill, served warm, were delightful. I’m no fan of dill, generally, yet I loved this dish and at six pounds it was better, and better value, than nearly anything else we ate. About the same size as those sardines too, come to think of it. It was a beautiful lipstick – applied to a pig, yes, but a beautiful lipstick nonetheless.

Would you have stayed for dessert? We nearly didn’t but felt like we had to see it through, like a disappointing box set. To Gees’ credit I asked who they bought their ice cream from and was told they made it in house. That probably swung it, and Jerry was delighted with his affogato, served with Pedro Ximenez.

I mean, again, if I’m being a stickler (which I am), if you swap the espresso for PX then what you have might be lovely but it’s no longer an affogato, just as the negroni wasn’t a negroni, the tonnato not a tonnato. Gees seemed to have taken Lewis Carroll, another Oxford type, very seriously when he wrote in Through The Looking Glass that “When I choose a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. Words, salad, word salad: it was all the same to Gees. Let’s call the whole thing off.

To close on a damp squib of faint praise, Gees’ ice cream is pleasant stuff. I tried vanilla and chocolate – don’t expect any leftfield flavours – and both were very good. Smooth, no ice crystals, plenty of specks in the vanilla and an excellent balanced depth in the chocolate. Two scoops for eight pounds didn’t feel like highway robbery, although it made the nine quid Gees charged for Jerry’s single scoop with a slug of Pedro Ximenez seem decidedly impudent.

What else is there to say? The whole meal, service included, came to two hundred pounds between the two of us, including an optional 13.5% service charge. The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one, because I had a lovely time and the best of company, the room is hard to fault and the service is excellent. You almost enter some kind of trance where despite the preponderance of foliage on the plate and the underwhelming nature of so much of what you eat, you still have a very nice time.

It was, food aside, as enjoyable a lunch as I’ve had this year. Just think how much of a riot we’d have had if the food was at the standard of somewhere like Upstairs At Landrace, a restaurant considerably more reasonably priced than Gees! And there’s the elephant in the conservatory, the question of cost and value. Because when the bill arrives the spell is broken, and you think about what a hundred pounds could buy you anywhere else.

I have to hand it to Gees because they are very popular and an awful lot of people have become very taken with the place. But unless we ordered very poorly, I do have to ask myself: how on earth did Gees manage that? I’m starting to feel bad for Jerry because whenever he comes out with me on duty, however nice a time we have, the food seems to be pricey and middling. Take Zia Lucia, or Storia in Maidenhead: the poor guy can’t catch a break. I will have to think much more carefully about our next meal out, because Jerry deserves some food as brilliant as he is.

To make amends, after we finished our lunch I took Jerry to the Rose & Crown on North Parade, my very favourite Oxford pub. We sat in the back room and polished off a couple of pints, and I told him how I used to drink there thirty years ago, and how it almost felt like it hadn’t changed a bit. A lovely international group – three French, one Slovenian – perched on the end of our table and we ended up in conversation about all sorts of things: the English; Brexit (always Brexit); where to eat in Montpellier; Oxford’s best restaurants, you name it. None of them mentioned Gees in that context, and I can’t say I blame them.

It was only later that I realised that the Rose & Crown, like Gees, has been under the same management since the Eighties, which means that those first drinks I had there, fresh out of university, were under the same landlords looking after me and my very good friend over thirty years later. That gave me a warm feeling in a way that nothing I ate that day managed, however lovely Gees seemed on paper. Forty years, whatever way you look at it, is one hell of an achievement, even in a city which has a track record of keeping establishments alive for many, many centuries. I am glad there are still institutions like Gees and the Rose & Crown in Oxford. But when I go back, only one of them is on my list for a return visit.

Gees – 6.5
61-63 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
01865 553540

https://www.geesrestaurant.co.uk

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.

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Restaurant review: The Pot Kiln, Frilsham

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In March 2026 the Pot Kiln has scrapped its Basque concept and reverted to offering pub food. Nick Galer left the pub in May 2026, so this review is no longer current. I’ve left it up for posterity.

One of the big gaps in my coverage of restaurants, given the name of this blog, is my failure to review the plethora of highly-rated gastropubs in the countryside around Reading. Berkshire is a funny-shaped county, long and thin, and that means you can strike out into Oxfordshire to the north or Hampshire to the south as easily as you can head east towards Maidenhead or west to Newbury staying within county lines. And one of the reasons, I suspect, why central Reading has never attracted many special occasion restaurants is the embarrassment of riches to be found a short drive away.

I’ve done some of them in my time of course, like the Bell or the Bottle & Glass, but the vast majority remain on my to do list, or at least they would if I were able to drive. And that means that when Britain’s Top 50 Gastropubs publishes its annual list, as it did early this year, I scan it for pubs nearby and realise, ruefully, that I’m unlikely to review them. This year The Loch & The Tyne in Old Windsor, Tom Kerridge’s two pubs in Marlow and The Crown in Burchett’s Green remain on my “maybe one day” list.

Another strange phenomenon in the gastropubs nearby is a tendency for musical chairs where highly rated chefs move from one pub to another. So for instance Dominic Chapman, who earned a Michelin star at the Royal Oak at Paley Street, which I reviewed, then moved on to the Beehive in White Waltham, which I have visited but not reviewed (it was, by the way, not bad at all).

And then, nine years later, he sold up: by that time he had taken on The Crown at Burchett’s Green, which he took over from Michelin starred Simon Bonwick. Again, I ate at The Crown once under Bonwick and thought it was quite good and extremely expensive. Bonwick then pitched up at The Dew Drop Inn in Hurley, managing eighteen months there before moving on again: he now cooks upstairs at a pub in Marlow three times a week.

This happens all over: The Loch & Tyne in Old Windsor is run by Michelin starred Adam Handling, but before that it was called the Oxford Blue and run by a chap called Steven Ellis. Ellis has moved on to another spot, The Bailiwick in Englefield Green which just so happens to be my stepmother’s favourite restaurant in the whole world. Again, I’ve been and it’s really rather nice, especially the venison bon bons; if you ever go, get a portion to yourself.

So maybe one good reason not to review pubs in this part of the world is the amount of toing and froing that goes on, with almost as much transfer activity as the Premiership: even The Plough, which I loved, is on to another head chef since I visited, its third in two years.

One of the benefits of this phenomenon, though, is that sometimes you see welcome, familiar faces pop up in new places. And that brings us to the Pot Kiln in Frilsham, out in West Berkshire, nestled in the Yattendon Estate. This bit of the world, too, has always been sprinkled with good food pubs: the Royal Oak in Yattendon and the Bladebone Inn in Bucklebury are just two more to add to the list of Places I Like But Have Never Reviewed.

The Yattendon Estate now owns the Pot Kiln, as it does nearby Renegade Brewery and Vicar’s Game in Ashampstead. Before that, for a long time under chef Mike Robinson – who held a Michelin star at Fulham’s Harwood Arms – the Pot Kiln was already synonymous with game, all caught on the estate. I ate there once, when Robinson was at the helm, and thought it was rather enjoyable, the surroundings idyllic. But then Robinson got divorced, and his wife got custody of the pub, running it with her musician partner, the magnificently named Rocky Rockliff.

For whatever reason the Estate subsequently snapped up the pub and installed new management. But rather than pick one of the merry-go-round of local chefs and get them to do what the pub had always done, the Pot Kiln took a more interesting course of action. It decided that instead of offering mainstream pub fare or more generic modern British food it was going to serve a Basque-infused menu. A three quarters of a million pound refurb was carried out, including a new open kitchen and a parilla grill, and it reopened last summer.

The other interesting thing they did was appoint chef Nick Galer. Now, I knew Galer’s food from his very successful spell at the Miller Of Mansfield, a lovely pub I did manage to review six years ago, out in Goring. He left the pub three years later, when our old friends Stonegate decided to nearly double the rent, and after that he had an incongruous spell cooking at a nearby golf club, but the move to the Pot Kiln made sense. It’s been on my list ever since, and as my future brother-in-law Matt drove us through the winding lines of West Berkshire in the gathering gloom I realised that I had a real sense of curiosity about the meal that lay ahead.

The thing is, I loved the Miller, and had some really successful meals there. But there were also a couple of times, especially one Christmas Day set meal, when I left somewhat peckish, and I’d heard similar reports from other people who had acted on my recommendation. A pub in the countryside offering tapas and the heartier food of Northern Spain, making good use of cooking over fire, could be an intriguing second act for Galer’s cooking.

In the summer, I imagine a review of the Pot Kiln would talk about just how beautiful its surroundings are, and what good outdoor space it has. But in grim, largely sunless March, before the clocks went forward, all I can say is how glad I was to be in the passenger seat next to an extremely competent driver and navigator. The pub itself looks classy and cosy – definitely one of those gastropubs that still operates as a pub – but the dining room of the restaurant, next to the open kitchen, was a little harder to love.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, because the tables were generous and the chairs comfy, but the lighting was a tad cold and the whole place had a certain feeling of sterility. It wasn’t for the lack of diners, because the room was reasonably well-occupied on a Monday night, including a large group which sang Happy Birthday later in the evening. But we grabbed a table for two with our back to all of that, both looking out on the open kitchen, and perhaps that was an error. Galer was not in the kitchen that night, although that didn’t seem to remotely affect the bustle of the staff beavering away.

The Pot Kiln’s menu read really well. There were ten tapas dishes, ranging in price from just over four to just over ten pounds, and eight mains, two of which were sharers. They started around twenty pounds and climbed from there. Half a dozen vegetable dishes, appearing out of sequence before the mains, completed the picture, although they appeared more to be sides than tapas. And actually, although I found plenty to potentially order on it, this menu wouldn’t suit vegetarians or vegans. Only one main for them, baked rice with cauliflower and capers, and four tapas options. In that sense, I suppose you could say it was quite authentically Spanish.

All that being the case, the drinks list surprised me. The local beers on offer highlight the owner’s connection to Renegade, the brewery formerly known as West Berks. But I thought there might be some Spanish sidra on offer, or at the very least some txakoli, the slightly sparkling wine which is one of the Basque country’s best exports. Not only wasn’t there any, but the wine list was dominated by other countries: less than half of the whites and about a third of the reds on offer came from Spain. It felt like some bet hedging was going on.

I decided to stick to the two Spanish whites available by the glass, starting with a Macabeo which was fresh, if slightly astringent. The Verdejo I moved on to later in the evening, not significantly more costly at eight pounds a glass, was much better: fuller, rounder, more interesting. Matt stuck to an alcohol free Asahi before then trying a mocktail with elderflower and ginger which he rated.

So, how many tapas dishes would you have ordered to share between two, not knowing how big they were or how large the mains after them would turn out to be? We opted for three, which I worried might be over-ordering: I suspect my appetite is bigger than Matt’s, or possibly it’s just that his manners are better than mine. But I needn’t have worried, because these were definitely tapa rather than media or racions.

First up, two mushroom croquetas, each topped with a thin slice of raw mushroom – this seems to be in vogue at the moment, although I’m not sure it added anything – resting on a puddle of thick mushroom ketchup.

I have to say, the taste of these was extraordinary. The concentration of savoury notes at the heart of those breadcrumbed spheres was something else, but better still was the depth of the ketchup. It had an awful lot going on – yet more umami, but also a very pleasant acetic spike in the mix. These were two really lovely croquetas. Two really lovely, rather small croquetas. Two really lovely, rather small croquetas that cost seven pounds fifty.

If you wanted any proof that the Pot Kiln, whatever else it might be good at, could do ketchup, the next tapa amply demonstrated this too. A pair of empañadas, with pleasingly dense pastry, had a filling of slow-cooked short rib and came with a blob of Kermit-coloured gherkin ketchup. The star of the show here was the ketchup – even Matt, who had been suspicious from the moment he spotted the word “gherkin”, tried some and declared himself a convert.

This dish was worth ordering for the ketchup alone, such a clever piece of work, something which captured the taste of gherkins in an almost photorealistic way despite being a puddle of green. It redeemed a multitude of sins, but did it redeem the fact that the two empañadas weren’t exactly bursting at the seams with strands of beef? Maybe.

Did it also redeem the fact that a pair of empañadas set you back eleven pounds? Maybe not. The philosophical struggle I had detected in the menu was between Spanish cuisine sending you away very full indeed and Galer’s cooking sometimes rarefying things to the point where they were a perfect, but tiny, distillation of themselves. On this evidence, the latter was winning out.

I minded all that less with the third tapa, but the fact remained that it too was small and perfectly formed. Two titchy triangular toasts, topped with tomato, finely chopped onion, oil, herbs and, from somewhere, a gorgeous supporting note of citrus. These too were this kind of thing – so often in Spain a huge piece of bread amply covered in their peerless tomatoes and salt – miniaturised to a lovely, exceptionally high end version of the same.

Getting tomatoes this good in March is itself, after all, quite an achievement. If elevation was the intention, mission accomplished. But although I could well believe you wouldn’t get a better rendition in San Sebastian, I could imagine you wouldn’t get a smaller one, either. Six pounds fifty for this.

At this point I was, in truth, a little concerned that it would be one of those meals, where everything tasted amazing but you had to seriously over-order or leave without feeling replete.

But Matt and I had ordered the 12-hour lamb shoulder, intended for two or three people, and we’d been warned in advance that it took a while, so we moved on to our second drink and caught up – his job, my job, his household adjusting to the arrival of my second niece, the ins and outs of the family we were both lucky enough to have found ourselves part of. Matt has the sort of senior job that means you have to be good at talking to anyone and everyone, which makes him an excellent conversationalist, although it did leave me hoping his evening with me didn’t feel like work.

From our vantage point I could see that the lamb shoulder had spent most of its 12 hours cooked sous vide, so it was rescued from a plastic cocoon and finished in the oven. And when it was eventually brought to our table, bronzed, with a thick layer of crispy, salted fat, I thought it looked about as wonderful as could be. It was accompanied with a little pot of anchovy and garlic sauce, which had also been artfully squiggled around the plate in an unnecessary fashion. Our server – all the people who looked after us that night were excellent, by the way – started the process of testing the lamb off the bone and shredding it, doing just enough for us to dish up and leaving the rest of us to explore for ourselves.

It was absolutely glorious. Lamb is one of my favourite meats, and this must be one of my favourite ways to have it. I’ve had slow cooked shoulder before where the fattiness is to the fore, where it’s slicked with the stuff, a little too much. But this was gorgeous, almost like the best kleftiko there is, and the texture was spot on, with enough of everything: crispy shards, plenty of supremely tasty fat, both crunchy and wobbly, and piece after piece of shredded lamb, some moist, some dry, all brilliant.

The salt studded along the edge of the fat made those pieces an especially savoury delight, and although it didn’t slump off the bone the way some slow-cooked lamb can, it didn’t take an awful lot of persuasion. For some reason we’d been brought quite dinky plates, which meant that we had to keep coming back for more, but that was very far from an ordeal.

Matt wasn’t sure about the sauce, but I suspect he’s less of an anchovy fan than I am. Even being a huge lover of anchovies, I thought this was salty overkill: I’ve read other reviews that say this used to be served with a mint sauce, and I can see that, or salsa verde, offering the counterpoint this needed. It also worked out fortuitously, I think, that the bits I were drawn to, especially the fatty ones, were naturally the ones Matt might have passed on. We were a regular Jack and Mrs Sprat, and between us we polished off the lot.

At seventy pounds, I think this served two nicely but might have been stretched between three. But I liked it so much that for even for two I thought it represented agreeable value.

Meat requires potatoes, whether you’re in Thatcham or Bilbao, and torn between the enigmatically described “Spanish potatoes” and the Pot Kiln’s chips we went for the latter. Very good chips came speckled with crispy flecks of jamon and under a light dusting of Idiazabal, a Basque cheese. There was also, apparently, “Bravas seasoning”, which I imagine was another piece of refinement and deconstruction. Too much refinement, I fear, because nothing was really detectable. Still, good chips with cheese and jamon on them are always going to go down well with me, and these did.

All that was an overload of saltiness, and much as I loved that I was glad we had some contrast in the form of some carrots. These were beautiful, fresh, just-cooked things dusted in something which apparently contained chives but, to both of us, tasted strikingly of aniseed. The fact that these, really, were the only vegetable of the evening was Matt’s and my fault for ordering the way we did, but also felt quite authentically Spanish: finding anything with vegetables in it can often be a challenge there, in my experience. Not that I’ve ever tried that hard.

By this point, things had quietened down in the restaurant and we were almost the last people there. I almost felt guilty about keeping them by ordering dessert, but I also felt like we ought to try that part of the menu out.

The dessert menu is compact – five dishes and a selection of cheeses, and one of them, turron at five pounds fifty a piece, felt more like something to accompany a coffee than a dessert in its own right. Matt was tempted by the apple tart with apple sorbet and calvados syrup, but unsure: he liked apple, but did he like it that much?

I told him you couldn’t have too much of a good thing, so he went for it and I think he was rewarded with the better dessert. My spoonful, again, pointed to the kitchen’s technical gifts and command of flavours: each element a slightly different iteration of apple, prioritising sweetness, sharpness or booziness. I would have been happy, had I ordered this. But had I ordered it – and even though I didn’t – I would say it was more a cake than a tart.

My choice, on the other hand, was one of those disappointing examples of how a menu can say one thing and mean another. Rhubarb sorbet, gingerbread, cava paints a picture of those three elements in harmony, maybe equivalent amounts of each, and I was expecting that to be the case. Instead, in the Pot Kiln’s standard issue terra cotta pots, I got a dollop of (admittedly very good) rhubarb sorbet with a scattering of gingerbread crumbs, like snow that would not settle.

Cava was then poured over it, but the terra cotta pot wasn’t the right vessel for a dish like this. It just meant that you got a thin lake of booze at the bottom that you couldn’t spoon up. So essentially this was a rhubarb sorbet with whistles and bells that didn’t blow or ring. At eight pounds fifty, this felt like a lot to spend on a dish that didn’t entirely cohere.

All told we’d been enjoying the Pot Kiln’s hospitality for over two hours, and I was increasingly conscious that we were probably preventing them from shutting up shop in the restaurant. At this point the open kitchen was less of a selling point: it’s one thing when you see activity, vitality, prep, flames, dishing up, but perhaps another entirely when they are mopping the floor with one eye on the service after this one, the following day.

So we settled up and Matt prepared to effortlessly work wonders with his satnav, ease us out of deepest darkest West Berkshire and take us back to the bright lights of Reading. Our meal – three tapas dishes, that lamb and side dishes, a couple of desserts and a couple of drinks apiece – cost about one hundred and sixty-five pounds, which included an optional ten per cent service charge. Overall I thought that was reasonable value – fair in parts, good in others, questionable in a few.

That was something I pondered and weighed up in the week I took to mentally digest, between eating this meal and writing it up here. Because after those tapas dishes I was all ready to write my oh-so-slighly disappointed not-quite-a-peroration, in which I gently pointed out that “perfect for sharing” should translate as “this dish is big enough for two people to enjoy” rather than “this dish is made up of two individual, rather small, morsels”.

But then the main course completely subverted all that – it wasn’t cheap, but it was outrageously good. It was the kind of food I had been expecting to find at the Pot Kiln, but I don’t think I was expecting it to be bookended by things so different – by tapas dishes that worked wonders with flavour but left you wanting more in all the wrong ways on one side, by desserts that were a tad pedestrian on the other.

In the run up to this visit I wondered which would prevail – the big portions and big flavours of the Spanish food I’ve enjoyed in the past (notwithstanding that I’m yet to go to the Basque country, sadly) or the precise, distilled, excellent cooking that Nick Galer is so good at. And the answer, based on this visit, is that the Pot Kiln, not quite open a year yet, is still resolving that identity crisis.

There is plenty to enjoy here, and I enjoyed plenty of it, but “let’s open a Basque inn in the middle of beautiful countryside just outside Newbury” is a concept I can get behind. “Let’s do the most beautiful portions of tapas that take a classic idea and produce it in its smallest, purest form” is perhaps not.

So if you want tapas, I think you might be better off heading just down the road to Goat On The Roof. If you want ludicrously good meat cooked beautifully on an amazing piece of kit, you should go here. Because that’s the part of this meal I’ll still be thinking about in the months ahead, the part I’d passionately recommend to others, the part I am remembering now, with a grateful smile on my face. For what it’s worth, I hope that side of this particular see-saw gains the upper hand.

The Pot Kiln – 7.5
Chapel Lane, Frilsham, RG18 0XX
01635 201366

https://thepotkiln.co.uk

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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

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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