Tag: closed

Restaurant review: Dough Bros

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

In December 2025 Dough Bros changed hands and the new owners made changes to its menu, adding smashed burgers and removing ham, ‘nduja and presumably pepperoni with pork. In June 2026 it rebranded to Doughza. I have marked Dough Bros as closed, and kept the review up for posterity.

I moved house last week, and suddenly everything changed. My little slice of Reading, my walks, maps, routes and routines were no more. No more waking up in the Village and mooching into town for lunch, no more strolls round Reading Old Cemetery or Palmer Park, no more number 17s and Little Oranges buses, no more Retreat just round the corner. After seven years of East Reading life, it was time for something different.

So on moving day Zoë and I found ourselves standing, sleep-deprived, outside a large house that wasn’t quite ours yet, rented van parked up in the drive, waiting for the agent to arrive and check us in. Meanwhile, across town, movers were loading boxes into a far bigger van from a far smaller house that was no longer ours. The sun was blazing, and I strolled across Cintra Park to Greggs, of all places, to pick up coffee and pastries. This is my neighbourhood now, I thought to myself.

I’m writing this over a week later, after seven days of unpacking and tip slots and IKEA trips (I’d forgotten how depressing that place is) and everything is starting to take shape. A lot of the boxes are unpacked, the kitchen is in some kind of order and, best of all, we finally got a new bed – high off the ground, with a big firm mattress, like climbing on to a cloud at night. The walls are fresh-painted white, the blinds are new and Venetian and the rooms flood with summer sunlight.

And every morning I wake up and can’t quite believe I live here, in this new place.

There’s a clothes line in the garden, and I get to experience the meditative joys of hanging out the washing, taking it in when it’s been dried by the sun and smells of heaven. Let’s not talk about the huge rent hike, or the council tax band of this place, or the fact that I can’t afford to eat out quite so often: let’s just think about the smell of that washing from the line.

On our very first night, exhausted but with the rest of the week off to unpack and settle in, we wandered to pretty much our nearest restaurant, Kungfu Kitchen. Like me they moved recently, although a few doors down Christchurch Green maybe isn’t quite as big a shift as mine. And their new site is lovely and snazzy – especially the light feature projecting fish onto the floor – but it was also reassuring just how like their old place it was. The food was still outstanding, and the welcome was the same, because Jo and Steve do not change: I particularly enjoyed Jo frogmarching customers to the loo, proudly boasting that Kungfu Kitchen has the best toilets in the world. Her words, not mine.

But Kungfu Kitchen is only one of our nearest restaurants, and I popped into one of the others to take something home the following night, just before an England match, fresh from a purgatorial trip to the tip. Dough Bros opened in March at the top of Northumberland Avenue and has built up quite a following in three short months. It’s run by a couple of friends, one of whom also runs the neighbouring barber Short, Back & Vibes.

I stopped by on a sweltering hot day and picked up a couple of takeaway pizzas, and as I waited I chatted away with Robbie, one of the owners. He seemed to know his stuff when it came to pizza, and told me that he was a fan of Sarv’s Slice (“they use the same flour and tomatoes as us”, he said). But he also said that his pizza was a little different from Sarv’s, and different from the floppy Neapolitan style that’s taken over the U.K. I saw that in action as he took both my pizzas out of the oven, tapped the bottom and decided they needed a little longer.

I didn’t have to talk to Robbie for long to realise that he was a proper pizza obsessive, and as I watched him pipe ricotta onto one of the pizzas I found myself thinking that this place, if it lived up to my experience up to that point, could be something very special. Robbie said that business was picking up, although there were some quiet weeks, and that they were trying other channels, mainly Instagram, to get more customers.

I liked his candour, as evidenced when I asked whether Dough Bros made its own chicken tenders. “No, we buy those in. Pizza is the thing we’re passionate about here.” I respected that, and later on he gave me Dough Bros’ mission statement in one short, simple sentence. “We’re trying to transcend Whitley,” he said.

Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, or spoil what follows, I liked my pizza very much. It was significantly better than England’s ropy performance against Slovenia that night, and both of them were better than the torrent of dross that came out of the gob of ITV’s chief prattler Sam Matterface. I liked it so much that I recommended it to my sister-in-law when she came to visit the new house, and she collected a couple of pizzas to take home to the rest of the family.

And I even liked it so much that at the end of the week we ordered a couple more, this time via Deliveroo, which we ate on our big comfy sofas in the new house while watching the last televised debate between our old prime minister and the new guy: for some reason, I associated Dough Bros takeaways with stodgy bore draws.

When I put a picture up of my pizza on Instagram I got one of two responses. Either people said “that looks good, where is it from?” or “that’s from Dough Bros!” That, more than anything, made me think that Reading was divided into two camps: Dough Bros fans, and people who hadn’t been there yet. So this week, one night when Zoë was working a late shift, I ambled back across Cintra Park to have my pizza in for a change.

Dough Bros is near the end of a run of shops at the top of Northumberland Avenue, before it descends the hill into the heart of Whitley. Short Back & Vibes is next door, and brand new Indian restaurant Curry Rasoi is at the other end. Inside you get a clear idea that a lot of Dough Bros’ trade is probably takeaway, because it was on the basic side: a few no-frills tables and chairs on one side of the room, two booths on the other.

The ceiling tiles were black and white checkerboard, which gave the disconcerting feeling that the room was upside down. One wall had a couple of guitars mounted on it, the other had some framed LPs and various pieces of wall art which looked like they came from a section in Home Bargains called “I just opened a pizza restaurant”. I promise this is affectionate, by the way: I rather liked it. I felt like I could have been in America, by a dusty freeway, instead of in RG2.

The menu was extensive, but also interesting in terms of what was and wasn’t on it. Many of the tried and tested combinations weren’t offered – no capers, olives and anchovies for me – and the menu gave a refreshingly wide berth to some of the on-trend toppings you see everywhere. That means ‘nduja only crops up in a couple of places, there isn’t any burrata to be seen and even hot honey, which seems to be ubiquitous in pizza joints lately, is deployed sparingly.

The overall choice was more American than Italian but even then there were some interesting curveballs designed by Dough Bros – one involved biltong, and might have tempted me but for the presence of sweetcorn. A couple involved a barbecue base rather than the classic tomato and again, appealed but perhaps for next time. And most tempting was the most oddball of all, the “Rogan”: Robbie had told me on a previous visit that it was based on a conversation between Joe Rogan and Elon Musk on a podcast about whether anchovies and pineapple was a genius pizza combo or an aberration.

Leaving aside the idea of ordering anything endorsed by a Covid vaccine denier, or social media’s single biggest tosspot, I think it sounds rather interesting, and I can’t rule out ordering it on another occasion. But I decided against it, and in the back of my mind I worried that ordering it would give out some weird signal that I really wanted to get drawn into a conversation about investing in crypto. I’ve lost track of the number of baristas over the years that have tried to give me the chat about crypto, come to think of it.

Anyway, for my sins I reordered the pizza I’d eaten the very first time I tried Dough Bros, the one which Zoë, stricken with pizza envy, had ordered the second time we tried Dough Bros. The Honey Honey was a comparatively simple affair – double pepperoni, ricotta and hot honey – but having tried it once I was very much in a hurry to try it again. My order, for a pizza and a can of elderflower lemonade (Dough Bros doesn’t have an alcohol licence) came to fifteen pounds fifty.

They don’t rush at Dough Bros, and nor should they. I was quite happy sipping my lemonade, looking out the full length windows at the summer evening outside, people watching and contemplating my new surroundings. I felt thoroughly transported, I thought I had a decent pizza on the way and nowhere in particular I needed to be any time soon. I was the only customer, and it seemed to be a quiet Tuesday: unlike my previous flying visit I didn’t see people turning up with their green Deliveroo backpacks, ready to find pizzas a new home.

When my pizza arrived, I remembered just how good they looked and how huge they were – fourteen inch, I think, a big, stretched, irregular wonder. This is not a pizza assembled with an eye on cost control, the way the likes of Franco Manca used to be, and the toppings were as generous as they were haphazard. It really was a beautiful thing, a symphony of red yellow and white, with a slight glimmer from the plentiful drizzling of hot honey. I’d enjoyed it at home, several minutes after it had come out of that oven, but I realised that this was the real deal: no delay, no messing about. Out of the oven, onto a plate lined with paper, sliced into eight and brought over without delay.

I sighed with happiness, and then I set about my task.

It’s kind of delightfully incongrous how on trend this little place near the edge of Whitley is, by the way. I read a piece in the Telegraph last week about how Neapolitan pizza was on its way out and American pizza was the hot new thing: crispier, more rigid pizza without that sloppy centre. It cited the much hyped Crisp Pizza W6 in Hammersmith as the vanguard of a new movement offering New York pizza, and mentioned other trailblazers in Hertfordshire, in Margate, in Brighton. But would you believe that you can also get exactly that kind of pizza here in Reading, on Northumberland Avenue? Me neither, but it turns out you can.

And it really was a beauty and, just as importantly, an utter joy to eat. Forget all those times you’ve gingerly picked up a piece of Neopolitan pizza to find the tip of the triangle drooping platewards. This was a rugged pizza, to be folded lengthways and devoured. The tomato sauce was deep and impeccable, the pepperoni a crispy guilty pleasure. And the little dabs of ricotta, offset with the slight tickling heat of the honey, made every bite slightly different but equally wonderful.

I can honestly say that it was one of my favourite things I’d eaten all year and as I’ve experienced a few times in the course of writing this blog – when visiting the likes of Clay’s, or Kungfu Kitchen, or Bakery House, or Namaste Kitchen for the first time – I had this feeling of real good fortune that of all the towns across England where these chaps could have opened their restaurant, they happened to pick Reading.

It bothered me a little that the restaurant was empty, although when I’d chatted to Robbie the week before he said it was generally very busy, and I felt that pull, familiar by now, that I wanted to do what I could about that.

There’s very little more to say: I had already settled up, so I told Robbie that it was marvellous and I prepared to make my way home through Cintra Park, full and happy, watching significantly more active people than me running, kicking balls and making the most of the long evenings. But before I did, Robbie asked my name and told me he remembered me from the previous week. I imagine he remembers all of his customers: he struck me as very good at that sort of thing.

So there you have it, that’s Dough Bros: a marvellous spot, and the unlikeliest of discoveries. If you live nearby, I recommend going. If you live further away, get a delivery and pop the oven on to pep it up when it arrives (if your oven is big enough to accommodate one of their whopping pizzas, that is). But either way, if you like pizza at all I think you might want to check it out. Whitley is very lucky to have them, but I do kind of hope that they manage to achieve their ambition and transcend the place. Fingers crossed that this review plays a small part in that.

Dough Bros – 8.4
87 Northumberland Avenue, Reading, RG2 7PT
07922 477519

https://www.instagram.com/doughbrospizza_reading/

Restaurant review: Bébé Bob, Soho

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Bébé Bob closed in March 2026. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m still true to the newcomer who started out reviewing neighbourhood Sardinian restaurant Pepe Sale all that time ago. Have I managed to keep my finger on the pulse of what Reading diners really want from a meal out, or has my head been turned by all those great meals, all that fine dining, all those plaudits and mentions in the national press? It was something that crossed my mind from time to time, especially as I was sitting in Soho House – my second Soho House of the afternoon – with my friend James, polishing off a carafe of Viognier, ready to scoot across town to Bébé Bob, a restaurant which sells rotisserie chicken at just under forty pounds a head.

If any of you are still reading after that opening paragraph, I feel I should explain: James suggested going to Soho House as he’d got membership a few weeks ago. And the chance to experience life on the other side of those discreet doors, to see how the other half lives – well, how could I resist? So I accompanied him, feeling quite the bumpkin, as he scanned in using the app on his phone and the woman on reception, ultra polite and polished, greeted us by name and explained the facilities, including various roof terraces and the cinema in the basement where they did regular screenings. I tried not to look too “Home Counties hick up in London for the day”, no doubt failing miserably.

Inside everything was ridiculously tasteful, the place filled with the buzz and clamour of a newborn London weekend. I tried to be insouciant, but of course I was meerkatting every time someone went past. Would I see a celebrity? (The answer, by the way, was no.) If anything, the interior was more stylish than some of the people who wandered past, distinctly nouveau, laden down with carriers bearing the logo or one designer or another. I entertained myself trying to guess their story; tech bro; footballer’s agent; lottery-winning fish out of water. What would people have thought James’ and my story was?

But anyway, if I sound sniffy I don’t mean to; it was a fascinating experience, made more fascinating by the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be repeated any time soon. But the chair was comfy, the sunlight flooding in from the roof terrace was welcome, the people watching was Olympic standard and the Viognier was crisp and peachy. I would be a hypocrite if I tried to claim I hadn’t had a wonderful time.

But in the course of writing this I did a bit of research and there were a couple of stories a few months ago saying that Soho House had lost its exclusivity and cachet – one of them in Tatler, no less, saying effectively that they’re admitting all sorts these days. That was in March, but I would say that even if it hadn’t happened by then, the club letting me through the door in April might have signified the moment it truly jumped the shark. The following week I sent James a meme on Instagram describing Soho House as “the Freemasons for influencers”: he didn’t dignify it with a response.

Anyway, I was the one that had chosen Bébe Bob for our dinner reservation, the second half of a one day chicken festival which commenced with disappointing fried chicken at Coqfighter. I thought I was on safer ground with Bébe Bob, an offshoot of Soho’s famous/infamous Bob Bob Ricard specialising in rotisserie chicken almost to the exclusion of everything else. Their website rather spells it out, Any main course the customer wants, as long as it’s chicken or chicken. It also rather splendidly says that Fashionwear is welcome, activewear is not.

Bébé Bob opened last October and has already attracted a raft of plaudits from the people who know about these things. Grace Dent went there at the start of the year and seemed to enjoy herself, even if she called it a “chicken and chips place that thinks it is ‘it'” and made a tired joke about Margo from The Good Life. And restaurant guru Andy Hayler – recently seen enjoying Clay’s Kitchen – visited in March, lavishing the chicken with, by his standards, fulsome praise: “it was a joy (16/20)”, he raved, presumably having a lie down in a darkened room afterwards.

All good omens, then. And I have to say, the interior of Bébé Bob was one of the most gorgeous, luxe spaces I’ve eaten in for as long as I could remember. They claim it’s inspired by the Golden Age, and I can kind of see that. Everything is chic, sleek and deco, plush and subtly lit, and you’ll struggle to find a sharp edge anywhere, from the curvy, velvety chairs to the rounded corners of the wood panelling. Impeccably tasteful, too, especially the art on the walls, Kandinsky squiggles in Mondrian colours. I loved the tiled floor too, reminiscent of Clarice Cliff, although research suggests they inherited that from Folie, the previous restaurant at this site.

But overall, the whole thing was enormous fun, grand but not po-faced, and you got a sense of being on a Cunard liner in the Thirties, going from somewhere glamorous to somewhere equally glamorous. I half expected the captain to announce that we would be docking at Biarritz on the hour, or Poirot to assemble everybody in the salon and reveal the identity of the murderer.

Bébé Bob’s menu does indeed live up to that promise of chicken main courses to the exclusion of all other – and just the two kinds, Vendée for nineteen pounds a pop, or Landais for thirty-nine. The former is “raised outside for most of its life”, which does rather make you wonder about the other less enjoyable parts, while the latter is corn and milk-fed, free-range and given more time and space, apparently developing a deeper flavour as a result. Could it be worth thirty-nine pounds, though?

Grace Dent never found out, because they’d run out when she went, while Andy Hayler, always one to throw money at a problem, ordered the Landais and said it was in a completely different league to anything you could get in this country. Our server, one of a brigade of charming and efficient servers, told us they only had one of the Landais left. We reserved it.

“We were always going to go for the expensive chicken, weren’t we?” said James. We’d spent the afternoon in Soho House drinking cocktails and wine after drinks at the French House. Of course we were.

The menu says that although chicken is the only main on offer, starters are “plentiful”. In reality there were six, one of which was a salad, although I guess I wasn’t counting the three varieties of caviar also available. Starters were between twelve and twenty-two quid and I suppose could have been described as timeless or retro, depending on your perspective: that’s why Grace Dent made that crack about Margo Leadbetter.

James decided to try the prawn cocktail, possibly the archetypal starter from days gone by, and seemed to like it but not love it. The Marie Rose apparently had quite a kick to it, although it wasn’t clear where from: the menu said that cognac was involved but that didn’t explain the heat.

I had been torn between egg mayonnaise and smoked salmon, so I asked our server for advice. He immediately came down on the side of the former. “It’s a lighter dish” he went on to explain. Well, happy days, I thought: it’s been a day of excess already and I had a wedding suit to slim into and only two weeks to do it. We even turned down the offer of bread, that’s how well behaved I was trying to be.

Well, I have to congratulate our server for his gift for understatement, because light doesn’t do it justice. It wasn’t egg mayonnaise as I’m used to, instead being a singly impeccable boiled egg, split open, each half adorned with a firm, salty Cantabrian anchovy. Under that, capers and herbs and a smudge of a delicious, punchy mayonnaise with a hefty hit of Dijon mustard. All very nice, but approaching amuse bouche levels for twelve pounds. I found myself wishing I hadn’t spurned the bread after all.

The thing is, whatever the quibbles about the food you couldn’t knock the location, the surroundings or the sense of occasion. We sipped our way through a very decent bottle of sauvignon blanc from the Loire, which was mentioned in Andy Hayler’s review. It was, in his own effusive words, “Forty-three pounds for a bottle that you can find in the high street for fourteen”. To give you an idea of the wine list, this was easily one of the cheapest wines on there – it was actually forty-four, but that’s inflation for you – and you could easily spend north of sixty quid without even necessarily meaning to.

Service really was lovely, but there was an interesting moment when the servers approached the table next to us with their chicken, ready to serve it with ceremony and solemnity. Our neighbours were American – I’d already clocked that from the accent – but they’d obviously spent too much time in the U.K. I could tell that from their reaction to the arrival of their main course.

“Goodness, that’s very quick chicken” the woman said. This is the kind of thing an English person would say, when what they meant was why the hell are you bringing this out almost immediately after I’ve ordered? I’d expect that in Nando’s, not somewhere like this. Which is, to be fair, the kind of thing I’d expect an American to say when rushed in a British restaurant. When she instead decided to express passive-aggressive surprise I didn’t know whether to be impressed or disappointed; James and I did lean over, after the server had gone, to express our solidarity.

Maybe you only get the delay if you order the fancy pants chicken. That would explain why ours arrived about quarter of an hour after we’d finished our starters – although even that, come to think of it, felt a little bit quick. From the text on the menu nothing about this chicken’s life had been rushed, so it was a pity this part was. It deserved better. But you had to hand it to them for the ceremony – each of us had a breast and a leg reverently placed on our plate, a poultry yin and yang, with the oyster delicately popped in the middle. And finally, thick jus was drizzled from a little jug, anointing the whole lot: I now declare the most expensive chicken you’ll ever eat in your life, open.

I know you want to know what a thirty-nine pound portion of roast chicken tastes like. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s, err, nice. I didn’t get a stunning moment of clarity where I thought “this is why!” The meat was dense, and I’d like to think I perceived the epic intensity of flavour that the experts had picked up on, but I can’t say I could. These chickens are apparently bigger, from all that time spent living the life of Riley, eating corn and drinking milk in their own sweet time, but I can’t say I felt like there was a huge amount of meat. The skin was rather pleasant, but lacked that crispiness that would have made it top tier. I almost wish I’d been able to try both types of chicken side by side: perhaps then I would have realised what all this money bought you, but as it was I wasn’t sure I had.

By way of comparison, the best rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had – so far, at least – is in a renowned Lisbon restaurant called Bonjardim. There they rub the chicken with salt and lemon until the skin is almost like cracking. It’s outstanding stuff – I once went to Lisbon on holiday and ate there twice in one trip – and as it happens the following weekend James was on a short trip to Lisbon so I told him to check Bonjardim out. True to his word he sent me a photo that induced envy and hunger and made me curse my pre-wedding diet. This shat on Bébé Bob was his pithy review, delivered via iMessage. It cost him ten Euros.

It’s especially a shame because the peripherals were all terrific. The chicken jus almost made it all worthwhile, so deep and sticky and savoury. Which of course means there was nowhere near enough of it to go round: if it had been up to me there would have been a huge bowl of the stuff, and then I might gladly have foregone the chicken. I wondered if the chicken jus was specifically Landais chicken jus, not that it would have justified the thirty-nine quid,

Also excellent was the truffled cauliflower cheese – burnished and brilliantly moreish with a good whiff of truffle without being overpowering. It had to be good for nine quid, but it pretty much was. Although to be fair, by that point after a day in Soho I might have been anaesthetised to the point where the cost of things didn’t properly register with me. It’s only money, after all. And I rather liked the potatoes, which were roasted in chicken fat. They looked when they turned up like they might be a little anaemic, carvery-grade stuff, but feeling the golden shell crack under a knife I realised they were the real deal.

It felt like a little bit of a waste not having dessert, but we both felt like we’d dented our wallets enough and the Elizabeth Line was calling to us. In any event, I wouldn’t have called the dessert menu plentiful either, as out of the seven desserts on offer one was a pair of chocolate truffles, a second was a shot of lemon infused vodka and a third was lemon sorbet with – yes, you’ve guessed – a shot of vodka. That gives you four proper desserts, one of which is a brownie: no wonder we passed.

And that’s when we had that ouch moment that comes in some restaurants, the moment when even though all the prices are clearly displayed throughout and you know exactly what you’re ordering, the bill arrived. Our meal for two – a bottle of wine, two starters, two chickens, two sides and some mineral water – came to just over a hundred and ninety pounds, including service. We knew it would be that much, we ordered the holy grail of chicken, nobody mugged us in an alleyway, but still. We also both mentally tracked back many of the meals we’d ordered and loved over the last few years. The vast majority of them cost less than Bébé Bob.

So that was the end of ChickenFest 2024. We hopped on the train and headed back west full of chicken and equally full of questions. Was Bébé Bob a good restaurant, an average one or a bit of a rip-off? Even as I sit down to tap out the final paragraphs on this review I’m still not entirely sure. It’s a great example of how a restaurant is more than the sum of its parts because as theatre, as an experience, I loved Bébé Bob’s silliness. The starters were decent but small, the chicken was decent but too expensive. What does that amount to? What does it all mean?

Well, search me. I imagine ninety-five per cent of you will look at the mark at the bottom and think it doesn’t reflect the meal I had, but I don’t even know what I think of the meal I had, not even now. I’ve rarely been to a restaurant that so unapologetically makes you take it on its own terms. I’m glad I went once – it’s only money – but I can’t imagine I’d ever go again. If you went and had, in the immortal words of Franck Eggelhoffer, the cheaper chicken, you might emerge having spent less and still had a very creditable meal.

But is that the point, and even then would it be enough when you think of all the excellent restaurants a stone’s throw from Golden Square? Maybe not. Bébé Bob, like Soho House, is a peek into another world, a vision of a life where most of the people there have considerably more money than I do. It was fun to visit: I had a blast. But it was even nicer to come home afterwards.

Bébé Bob – 7.0
37 Golden Square, London, W1F 9LB
020 72421000

https://www.bebebob.com

Restaurant review: Masakali

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As of September 2026, Masakali appears to be closed. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I’ve been asked about Masakali, the Indian restaurant that replaced San Sicario at the bottom of the Caversham Road, ever since it opened last November. I had a fair few messages on social media saying that it looked interesting, and when I’ve put Twitter polls up asking which of Reading’s newest openings I should visit first it’s always picked up a lot of votes. Being an awkward sod I still reviewed Minas Café, Filter Coffee House and Hala Lebanese before getting round to Masakali, but better late than never: here, at last, is the review literally some of you wanted.

I can see why people noticed Masakali. Something about the polish of its website made people dispense with their usual cynicism about yet another restaurant opening at a site which sees a new occupant every few years. The branding felt completely realised, in a way we don’t often see with new independent restaurants here. Masakali means pigeon in Hindi, and the restaurant is apparently partly inspired by A.R. Rahman’s Bollywood song of the same name: some of that might just be marketing guff, but at least they were trying.

The other thing that stood out about Masakali was the menu. Generic Anglo-Indian curries were kept to a minimum, and instead everything looked – on paper at least – properly interesting. No mix and match proliferation of protein and sauce, instead a range of more singular dishes. A few interesting cultural cross-pollinations here and there, like kulcha stuffed with truffle ghee or a chaat apparently topped with Walker’s crisps, but otherwise a good range of regional Indian dishes.

Someone had done their homework. And you know the C word was going to come up eventually, so here it is: the whole thing felt like a land grab for customers of Clay’s Kitchen rather than, say, people who went to the Bina (assuming, of course, that people still go to the Bina).

Now, before I get into talking about the food, the room, the service there are a couple of things to disclose. The first is that Masakali contacted me not long after they opened, asking if I wanted to do a paid partnership with them (they did one with the Reading Chronicle, although it’s unclear what that involved, other than a Facebook post saying the restaurant was open). I declined, as I always do, but I asked the restaurant if this was their first venture and they told me that they were part of the same group as Biryani Lounge on the Wokingham Road.

This took me by surprise, as it’s difficult to imagine two more different Indian restaurants. I reviewed Biryani Lounge in 2022, finding it a sterile, no-frills kind of a place with functional tables and no drinks licence that sold biggish portions of unremarkable food. I didn’t hate it, far from it, but I wasn’t falling over myself to go back. The leap from a restaurant like Biryani Lounge to Masakali, deliberately positioning itself as Indian fine dining, was a sizeable one. What had prompted them branching out in this way, I wondered?

That’s where the second thing to disclose comes in. Masakali’s website used to contain a link to another company called Curry Fwd who they used to put the restaurant together. They’ve taken it down now, probably wisely, but it’s a fascinating discovery because Curry Fwd is essentially an external consultancy specialising in “India-inspired food concepts and hospitality projects, worldwide”. And their website is well worth looking at: if only because I for one had no idea such things even existed.

Curry Fwd can essentially handle every element of the restaurant, from designing the space to putting together and curating the menu. “Our knowhow and focus on regional Indian cuisine is your advantage”, their website says, along with “We are always digging up family recipes from moms and grandmas across India”. So if I thought the branding looked grown up, or the menu was full of interesting dishes, that was why: it had been put together by specialists, subcontracted by the owners.

When I first read that I was dubious. It wasn’t exactly AI, but it felt like the hospitality equivalent, constructing something in some way ungenuine. But then I thought about it some more. Did it really matter? After all, if you take a restaurant like Clay’s they still had help with their brand, and they’ve been open about that. They still had someone do the interior design of their new space in Caversham. How was this any different?

You could say this was an authenticity issue, but putting together a menu in this way, using experts working out of Kolkata, might arguably be more authentic than cobbling together the same dishes as every other Indian restaurant with an RG postcode. Maybe the restaurant didn’t have a backstory like Clay’s (couple move to Reading to realise their dream of cooking the food of Hyderabadi) or even Biryani Lounge’s (four university friends open a restaurant together to offer their favourite dishes). But did it need one, or was wanting to open a really good restaurant, make people happy and make some money narrative enough?

Perhaps the only real mistake Masakali had made was accidentally including the link to Curry Fwd on their website. Anyway, all those thoughts – acknowledging the preconceptions, challenging the preconceptions, trying not to let the preconceptions colour my evening – were whizzing around my head as Zoë and I, after a few pre-prandials at Phantom, made our way to the restaurant to see what the reality was like.

Whoever it is, whether it’s Masakali or Curry Fwd, they’ve done a nice job of making the place over. The room always had decent bones, if it risked being on the big, cavernous side, but it looks grown-up and classy, from the dark panelled walls to the faux-parquet floor and the mustard-coloured dining chairs. Again, the closest thing I could compare it to was Clay’s, and I liked some of the little touches like the pigeon-themed lights on the walls. I must say though, it’s hard to reconcile “Indian fine dining” with “why don’t you plonk yourself on this bench?”: fortunately there weren’t too many of them.

It was strange to think that the last time I’d been in that dining room was last May, for a readers’ lunch at San Sicario. The room was completely different back then, lighter and airier, less ostentatiously glam (Masakali’s bar is especially glitzy: their Bollywood-themed cocktails looked appealing). It’s weird how you can eat at a restaurant and nobody involved – the punters, the staff, the owners – knows that in three months time the place will be shuttered, and three months after that it will open as something else. It makes you think. In any event, the buzz at Masakali, which wasn’t rammed but was a long way from tumbleweed, made it seem in good health.

I’m apparently breaking the unwritten rules of restaurant review composition by going back and talking about the menu some more – clunky, many would say – but some of you seem to enjoy knowing what you can expect when you go to a restaurant and I quite like letting you know. I’m old fashioned like that. So yes, it generally avoids the standard issue but some of what’s on offer verges on fusion: I’ve already talked about the truffled kulcha, but there’s also a beetroot croquette with goats cheese aioli, if you want to culturally appropriate across continents.

Prices are pitched at the slightly higher end of average. Starters cluster either side of the ten pound mark, and curries max out at fifteen quid or so. And again – yes, I keep using the C word – some elements of the menu will be familiar to Clay’s-goers, like kale pakora, stuffed mirchi, baby aubergine in a peanut masala. In a town before Clay’s this would have been revolutionary, possibly even compared to House Of Flavours. In a post-Clay’s Reading, the main question it invites, like it or not, is I wonder if this will be as good as Clay’s?

I thought the starters we picked made a creditable start, as it happens. Mutton pepper fry was an enjoyable and generous plate – even the style of plate looks oddly familiar, come to think of it – which was just tender enough, sticky and interesting with a good whack of heat, dotted with the deep green of curry leaves to break up the brownness. I liked this more than Zoë did, I think, but I could happily have polished this off on my own. You don’t see enough mutton on menus in Reading, even in Indian restaurants, and this was decently cooked.

What we could agree on was the galli chicken pakora (cooked up no doubt – sorry about this pun – in a galli kitchen). I know I’m predictable going for some variant of fried chicken pretty much whenever I see it but this was great stuff – thigh meat, nicely spiced with a very pleasing texture.

But again, you saw that conflict where Masakali wanted to be high end, but weren’t completely sure what that entailed. I liked this dish but whacking four thick rings of raw red onion on top like a cack-handed take on the Olympic symbol wasn’t elevating the presentation. I have no idea what the dip was, even though I’d only had a handful of beers at Phantom beforehand, but I rather enjoyed it. The menu neglected to mention it completely.

Our other starter, because we were greedy and had three, came from a section entitled “Timeless Kebabs”. I know this will sound snarky, but I’m not sure how timeless a kebab can be. We had chosen something verging on fusion, a paneer tikka kebab with a basil chutney. In fairness the issue here was execution rather than the idea. It might well be that basil would go brilliantly in this context – it does with mozzarella after all – but the chutney itself was thin and watery, lacking the edge you would get elsewhere.

Just to compare Masakali to other Reading restaurants so this doesn’t get repetitive, Kamal’s Kitchen does a better chutney and the paneer tikka itself was probably just below the level of what you can get at the quietly understated Pappadam’s. But again this wasn’t a bad dish, and even if it didn’t entirely match the standard you can enjoy elsewhere it didn’t stop me rather liking it.

By this point the restaurant, while nowhere near full capacity, had the kind of vibrancy you want to see on a Saturday night. You want to be surrounded by people having a good time, people ordering cocktails for the hell of it, big groups attacking the menu with gusto, seemingly unconcerned about the hangover Sunday morning might bring. And the staff were on it – speedy, efficient and unobtrusive. The whole thing had that slight shimmer of success, and I didn’t really care at that point if it was curated or manufactured, if it missed a backstory or had been dreamed up in a meeting room in Kolkata, brainstormed on a whiteboard.

Our drinks, I should say, were a mixed bag. I don’t think it’s the strongest part of the restaurant’s offering, excluding the cocktails which might be lovely for all I know. It wasn’t a hugely inspiring wine list, although to their credit over half of it’s available by the glass, and my Pinotage was nice enough but not stellar. I thought Zoë’s mango lassi was passable, she found it a bit thin and synthetic. They offer pretty generic beer, certainly nothing to match the likes of Phantom just round the corner, but Zoë spotted one she’d never tried before called Lal Toofan, so she tried a half. Unimpressed, she left most of it.

My main course didn’t work out as I’d hoped, which was partly due to a mixup between me and my server. I was torn between two chicken dishes and when I asked her what the differences were, I didn’t get a very clear answer except that one was on the bone and the other wasn’t. I thought the one I picked, Andhra chicken, was the one off the bone but when it turned up it was clearly the other way round. Now, that isn’t necessarily a problem: I know many people swear by the flavour of chicken on the bone and I was fully prepared to get stuck in. But for this dish to work, there needed to be enough chicken and it needed to slip off the bone with minimal persuasion.

Neither of those were the case here, so instead you had a handful of small, stubborn little knots where what meat there was had to be persistently prised off. It’s especially a shame because the sauce itself – and there was plenty of it – was glossy, almost-fruity and with a little lurking fire. It maybe lacked the complexity of Reading’s finest examples, but it was no slouch. It was good poured onto my saffron pilau rice, I enjoyed dabbing the thin, slightly shiny butter naan in it. But it needed more chicken. I’ve read some reviews online by people who also ordered this dish and felt short changed: I think if the chicken is on the bone, it’s a pretty basic mistake not to say so on the menu.

Zoë curry was more my bag, although she said it carried too much heat for her liking. Mysore lamb curry was definitely more brooding and punchy than my main, and up my alley. And credit to Masakali because these two dishes were clearly discrete, rather than variations on a single base. That, and the tenderness of the lamb, made you feel like everything had spent time together as part of the cooking process rather than being awkwardly introduced at the last minute. But again, the sauce to meat ratio prioritised the former, as I think you can see from the photo.

By this point my mind was shuffling the Rolodex of Reading’s Indian restaurants, trying to work out what Masakali was similar to, superior to, worse than. If I’d gone with my expectations set by the buzz and the website, I might have been slightly underwhelmed. Knowing how the concept had been put together and that it was run by the people behind Biryani Lounge meant that, if anything, I was pleasantly surprised.

But what was the true experience, behind all that smoke and mirrors, free of preconception and counter-preconception? I decided to mull it over some more, and we settled up: our bill for three starters, two curries with rice, a naan and three drinks came to just under ninety-six pounds, including a ten per cent service charge. I know that because I saw a bill, and you should never trust a restaurant reviewer who doesn’t.

There are things, on reflection, that I do admire about Masakali. They’ve created a pleasing space and, whoever’s ideas the concept and the menu were, they’re not a bad concept or menu. I rated the service and there was much to like about some of the dishes, especially the starters. But beyond that I rather wish I liked them more. They are unfortunate to have arrived in Reading five years after Indian food, and food in Reading in general, changed hugely for the better. If you’d dropped Masakali in Reading in 2013 you might well have seen rave reviews (especially from the Reading Post: they were anybody’s for free scran). But Reading in 2023 is a different place, with higher standards.

So to calibrate Masakali fairly I think it’s better than the likes of the Bina or the now-departed Standard Tandoori, although that isn’t the highest bar in the world. It doesn’t come close to Clay’s, over the bridge. I think the fairer comparison is somewhere like House Of Flavours, but Masakali doesn’t reach that level. It might, yet, but whether it will get anywhere near the grace period House Of Flavours enjoyed is another matter. Masakali isn’t revolutionary, or game-changing, but it has charm and potential, even if it partly achieved it by raiding the recipe books of a gaggle of unnamed Indian grandmas.

But I hope it makes a go of it, because I’m painfully aware that the last time I ate a meal where Masakali is right now it was in a restaurant living on borrowed time. Fingers crossed they escape the same fate.

Masakali – 7.1
93-97 Caversham Road, Reading, RG1 8AN
0118 3048858

https://www.masakali.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

Café review: Minas Café

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In late 2025 Minas Café changed hands and although the new owners haven’t changed the shop front yet the business is now called MJ Butequim. I have marked this venue as closed and will review MJ Butequim in due course.

I think it was Kierkegaard who said, very wisely, that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forward. And I think you could say the same about food trends: it’s easy to pontificate at the start of the year about what you think is going to happen, but the world of food is full of surprises and it’s far better to bide your time, get to the point where the New Year is around the corner and identify the patterns with the benefit of hindsight.

It doesn’t take much to form a food trend in Reading either, even if it is the U.K.’s largest town: two similar establishments opening in a year is a coincidence, three is a trend. So last year Reading had two main trends, I would say. The first was biryani places springing up all over the shop – Biryani Mama, Biryani Lounge, Biryani Boyzz and so on. Add in the ambiguously-named Biryanish and you definitely have yourself what passes for a trend. And of course there was the proliferation of sushi places – Intoku, Iro and You Me Sushi all opened in quick succession to challenge the primacy of Sushimania, Yo Sushi and grab and go chains like Kokoro and Itsu.

What about this year? Marugame Udon and Cici Noodle Bar opened weeks apart, but I’m not sure that’s quite enough. For me the biggest trend of the year has been a raft of interesting cafés, moving beyond the ubiquity of third-wave places like Compound or C.U.P. to offer something less generic and more regionally specific, potentially the antidote to all those “not another coffee place” bores out there (where will they go now Berkshire Live has kicked the bucket?).

So down the Oxford Road you have Time 4 Coffee, a cafe apparently offering pasteis da nata, Portuguese bread with chouriço and a range of other traditional dishes from that under-represented cuisine; I’ve not yet been, but it’s high on my list to review next year. On Castle Street Filter Coffee House is already making a name for itself with its authentic South Indian filter coffee and absolutely delicious banana buns, and continues to develop a big menu for such a little space, with intriguing specials available every Saturday morning.

And then finally we have the subject of this week’s review, Minas Cafe, which opened in April and is perhaps the most incongruous of the lot – a Brazilian café, no less, in Whitley, of all places. That I hadn’t been to check it out yet felt like it was verging on neglect, so last Sunday when I had the day to myself I hopped on the number 6 bus just before lunchtime and alighted by Buckland Road. Whitley was shrouded in a drizzly mist, the day murky and dreich: a less Brazilian scene was difficult to imagine.

Minas Café is tucked away just round the corner from the Basingstoke Road, and it looks unprepossessing, with a nice little outside space which would probably have been a lovely place to sit and watch the world on a more clement day. Inside it was a pretty unremarkable café but with a few signs that this was a little out of the ordinary. One wall was given over to all sorts of interesting produce – biscuits, cakes, hot sauce, you name it. A big TV was mounted on another showing concert footage from, at a guess, a Brazilian artist. The overall effect was fascinating, and reminiscent of Madoo, one of my favourite places, in that you were simultaneously in-Reading and not-quite-in-Reading.

So yes, it had a warm, welcoming feel to it, especially on a miserable day, and although only a couple of tables were occupied when I got there, it had a steady flow of customers throughout my time there. And a varied one too – one table of twentysomething Brits, a Brazilian family at another, and various solo diners turning up for a full English. Lots of people there gave the impression of being regulars, an excellent sign for a cafe yet to celebrate its first birthday.

I was limited in the research I could do before my visit because although Minas Café has a menu you can see there in the café, they don’t have a website and it’s surprisingly hard to track down online. Like a lot of cafés of this kind it hedges its bets to try and appeal to everybody, so the menu above the counter is all breakfasts and panini and omelettes. But on your way to the counter you get an idea, again, that there’s more interesting stuff going on. A whole display of salgados – Brazilian pastries – a dizzying array of them. A little bit overwhelmed, I ordered a latte and decided I needed to consider the options. The man behind the counter, a friendly chap with a huge mop of hair, took my order and I sat down to mull things over.

My expectations of coffee in places like this – and indeed most of the coffees I’ve ever had in Portugal – were fairly low so I was absolutely delighted when my latte turned up and was bloody gorgeous, nicely balanced with no burnt note or bitterness. It just goes to show that you don’t have to wank around with latte art to make a marvellous coffee, and it had the effect, almost immediately, of making me want to try more stuff. So I went up to the counter again, had a proper look at the cornucopia behind the glass and pondered how I could possibly choose.

This was where the friendly chap sprung into action, talking me through everything. There were savoury pastries packed with ham, cheese and tomato, others with chicken and sweetcorn, a few with ground beef. All of them looked subtly different, all were golden under the lights. Some resembled pasties, some little buns, others looked like neat parcels of joy. There were rissoles, and croquetas and things that looked an awful lot like battered sausage.

“What do you recommend?” I asked. He smiled.

“Our two most popular are this, the coxinha – it’s made with chicken and cheese – and this one, the salgado with ground beef.”

“And which one should I have, out of those two?”

“The coxinha. It’s much more…” he paused, deciding on the right word. “Interesting.”

“Those croquetas look really good, how are they different?”

“The ones on the left are minced beef stuffed with cheese, and the ones on the right are just minced beef.”

“Which do you think is better?” I asked, although I think I knew it was a silly question, even as I asked it.

“Definitely the one with cheese.” Of course. I mean, what dish, really, isn’t improved with cheese? So the decision was made, and I went back to my coffee with a mixture of anticipation and curiosity. They arrived not long after – salgados are served cold not hot – and sitting there in front of me they looked like beige-brown bundles of wonder.

“Would you like something with them? Ketchup, mayonnaise or chili sauce?” I asked for chilli sauce and he brought two bottles over – again with a grin. “That one’s less hot, but that one has the flavour you want.”

To cut a long story short, it all had the flavour I wanted, and more besides. The croqueta was a wonderful thing – dense, crumbly beef with a core of stretchy, elastic cheese, something like mozzarella. A dish like this always carries the unspoken terror of bouncy mystery meat, and the first forkful can be a bit of a highwire act, but from that point onwards my fears were allayed and I knew that what was in store was nothing but delight. And my server was right – the first hot sauce, thin and tangy, was very good but the second one, thicker and more menacing, had a compelling punch.

The coxinha was weirder but no less interesting. In a teardrop shape it sort of resembled – to culturally appropriate and show that I was well outside my sphere of expertise – something somewhere between an arancino and an arepa. So it was a dome of dough, but once you cut through that you got a huge quantity of shredded chicken, with a little tomato and tang, and little clouds of soft cheese – again, like mozzarella but in its unmolten state. Had I ever had anything quite like it? Not really. Did I think that was a bit of a shame? Yes, it turns out I did. I dabbed my nose, aware that the second of those hot sauces could give Vicks Sinex a run for its money when it came to decongestant powers.

By this point I was having an absolutely super time. I was well fed but determined to have another latte, and my mind was turning to dessert. But more than that, and this is the magic of some places, I felt part of something. I felt like I could stay there for hours listening to the music, watching the waves of customers arriving, being well fed and moving on, replaced by other diners. A couple of solo diners had come in, taking tables and ordering brunches, and the family next to me was in full flow, the cadences of Portuguese filling the air. Apparently I was in Whitley in November, but you could have fooled me.

I went up and told the server how much I’d enjoyed both my salgados. I asked if they did traditional Brazilian dishes like feijoada, and he told me they had a daily special which they announced on Instagram. Feijoada was on Saturdays, he said, and today it was chicken parmigiana with mash. I was glad I’d gone for something a little smaller, but I saw it waft past my table later for one of the hard-working staff to have for lunch. It looked enormous and tempting. I made a mental note to return on a Saturday before too long.

“What do you recommend for dessert?” I said, by this point convinced that the staff here wouldn’t steer me wrong. “I see you have churros on, and I really love churros.”

He pointed me to the chiller cabinet next to the salgados, pointing out something with chocolate and coconut that looked like a tiramisu, giant chocolate truffles in little paper cups, flans that he told me had been made fresh that day.

“But if you have a sweet tooth, our passion fruit mousse was made today too. It’s really good.”

I didn’t need any further recommendation than that, and again he was absolutely spot on. The mousse de maracuja, to give it its proper name, was ethereally light, sweet but delicate and full of passion fruit. From above, it looked like sunshine, and on the spoon it tasted of it too. I adored it from start to finish, and as with all the best places I was torn between wanting to come back and try everything I had previously ordered and thinking if these dishes taste this magnificent, just what’s all the other stuff like?

I’m conscious that I haven’t told you how much anything costs, for the simple reason that apart from the lattes – a ludicrous two pounds sixty – I didn’t know how much any of it cost when I ordered it. I only found out when I went up at the end and paid. Two salgados, two lattes, that passion fruit mousse and a chocolate truffle – a brigadeiro – I took back for Zoë to try came to a baffling eighteen pounds. I would gladly have paid more.

That doesn’t include tip, and frustratingly they don’t seem to be set up to take tips by card, so I made a mental promise to come back with cash next time. And I’m really sorry I couldn’t tip, because the service was outstanding throughout – not just from the chap that talked me through what to order but from all four members of staff who worked so hard. If they weren’t serving, or in the kitchen, they were mopping the floor or keeping busy. I even got a little reward card, and they told me that every time I spent over ten pounds they’d stamp it. I don’t ever keep reward cards, but I kept this one.

I am so glad I visited Minas Café this week. I think I really needed to find somewhere excellent, and it came along just when I could have started to get disheartened. Reviewing places outside Reading is terrific, although I know it pisses off some of my readers, and it’s always great to try the very best, but it can be sobering when you look at how far Reading can be from that standard.

The whole town, or at least the whole of my echo chamber, is in sackcloth and ashes over the Grumpy Goat, and it’s easy to be deflated by what happened there. It’s easy to think that this is why we can’t have nice things, and that a town with our unique combination of venal landlords and unimaginative politicians will never cast off its shackles and live up to its potential.

So this week of all weeks, I needed to be reminded that there are always brave and imaginative things going on, always people who can make you believe again. You just have to look, and sometimes you just have to look that little bit harder, and that little bit further from the beaten track. I wandered back to the bus stop just outside Morrisons, only a few steps but somehow a world away, and I took the number 6 back into town with my faith in the world decidedly restored.

You don’t get a review next week, because I’m on holiday. I am going back to one of my favourite cities to eat and drink, to sit outside and to enjoy the blue skies of Andalusia. There will be tapas and wine and beer, and one last bit of R&R before the year limps to an end. But if any review is going to sit at the top of my blog for an extra week, and hopefully get a few more readers, this is the one for the job. I am looking forward to seeing the sun again, after what already feels like too long. But I also feel like I got a sneak preview of it in the unlikeliest of places, in a little cafe on Buckland Road.

Minas Café – 8.3
1a Buckland Road, Reading, RG2 7SP
07983 560430

https://www.instagram.com/minas_cafe/