Cerise

On February 28, 2014February 25, 2021 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

N.B. Although it’s hard to get a clear picture from the Roseate Hotel’s website, it seems that Cerise closed in early 2020 and has since reopened as The Reading Room. I will review that in due course – I reviewed their delivery offering here – but I’ve left this review up for posterity.

Cerise has been on my list to review for quite some time – mainly by reputation. And yet, in the run-up to visiting the strangest thing happened: I couldn’t find anyone who had eaten there. Everyone knew about it, of course, and some people had even had cocktails in the opulent basement bar, or a sneaky summertime glass of white in their secret garden. But the restaurant? A total blank. So I did some Googling, only to find the same thing: no reviews, not in blogs, not in guides, not in the papers. Apart from TripAdvisor, there was no evidence that anybody had been at all. I guess it’s always been awkward for them: the restaurant of the Forbury Hotel, right opposite a restaurant called Forbury’s, with the unfortunate consequence that people always think you’re talking about somewhere else. So, a restaurant everyone thinks is good but nobody has been to, the lesser-known member of Reading’s high end club. How could I resist a visit?

Actually, on arrival we spent more time in the opulent basement bar than I was expecting. Despite only two tables being seated in the whole restaurant we were asked to wait in the bar “for around ten minutes”, for reasons which weren’t made clear. We sat on the banquette, flicked through the wine list and ended up going for a Crozes Hermitages for £38. It was good, peppery and not too tannic – although given the dishes we eventually ordered, I rather wish we’d picked something more capable of standing up to them. We ended up staying there while we got the menus, read the menus, plea-bargained and made our choices, only taking our seats when they were close to serving our starters. I enjoyed that – I’m usually so wedded to the idea that you sit at the table, you give the waiter your order and you sit at the high-backed chair sipping your wine until the food arrives. It was nice to loaf, although I was still a bit incredulous that the waiting staff didn’t seat us right away.

The dining room in Cerise is in two halves – a small room along from the bar and a bigger room further through (opening out onto that secret garden I mentioned). On a quiet Monday night, they’d only opened the smaller room which can’t seat more than twenty people. I liked it – tasteful, well-lit, good chairs and nice big tables – although if I’d been at that table on a busy Saturday night I might have felt like I was sitting in a corridor. As it was, it worked well, giving the feeling of being in a smaller, more intimate place. There was bread at the table when we sat down and it was nice if not wildly exciting – two slices of granary, one of something poppy-seeded and (the most interesting) a sweeter onion bread. The butter was at the right temperature to spread, a small thing but something a depressingly large number of restaurants get wrong.

It’s a pet hate of mine when people say something is too beautiful to eat: nothing is too beautiful to eat, and if you really feel that way you should be in the Tate, not a restaurant. Having said that, the braised lamb shank terrine really was pretty – pieces of lamb, cubes of carrot, peas and big pieces of sweet leek, with another strip of leek around the outside. I did feel apprehensive about eating it, though, because I was expecting something coarser and all those chunks (such an unattractive word), bound together with jelly felt like a Damian Hirst starter at best and Pedigree Chum for poshos at worst.

All those fears dissipated with the first mouthful. Really there was very little jelly in it, just tender tasty meat and firm, fresh vegetables. The mint dressing drizzled around the perimeter was sweet and perfect and what I’d mistaken for cucumber were in fact little cubes of green waxy potato. Potato, lamb, vegetables, mint sauce… it was only by the end that I realised that what I was eating was a high end distillation of the kind of Sunday lunch enjoyed across the country every weekend. I won’t say it was deconstructed – because that’s a word nobody should see in a restaurant review – but I will say that it was delicious, which is far more important anyway.

The crab and salmon sausage was equally delicious (although, somehow, I found myself wishing they’d called it a “boudin”, because ‘salmon sausage’ just sounds plain wrong). Whatever you called it, it was delightful once you got your head round something with the texture of a sausage and the taste of fish. It came halved and resting on a little pile of cabbage which in turn was in a pool of dill sauce, peppered with tiny cubes of carrot. The sauce had a deep, salty flavour – so different from the sometimes insipid taste of dill paired with fish. On top was a little nest of salad shoots which didn’t really add anything to the dish (they never do, in my opinion) but looked pretty just the same.

The mains were an altogether more robust affair. What was described as “roasted crown of partridge, Brussels sprout’s and saffron risotto” had a lot more going on than that – so much so, in fact, that it was almost possible to forgive the wayward apostrophe. So there was partridge – gamey, nicely cooked on the outside, if ever so slightly tough – and there was a gorgeous risotto, strands of saffron visible in it, with just enough bite in the rice. But there was also what looked like a potato croquette, and there were smoky lardons, and smudges of pea pureé and a generous and intense jus. I was really impressed by just how many things were on the plate, all done well, without it becoming incoherent or too busy. It was, however, a very rich dish, and I can easily imagine that it would defeat someone less gluttonous than me.

The duck confit “with mixed bean and wild mushroom cassoulet, orange essence” was also not for the faint-hearted, another big bold dish. The duck itself was exactly as you’d expect duck confit to be (though personally I prefer the skin to be crispier). The cassoulet base was a beautiful jumble of beans, lardons and wild mushrooms in another gloriously savoury, expertly reduced jus, a wonderful wintry stew. As with the duck skin I would have preferred the lardons to be crispy and, as with the partridge, I did find the dish a little overwhelming towards the end. Amongst all those deep flavours the orange essence was lost to me; maybe it was overpowered, although it didn’t feel as if the dish missed it.

The side dishes, with hindsight, were a mistake. Not because they were bad – the chips were good, with the right balance of crispiness and fluffiness and the honey roasted root vegetables were even better; sweet, slightly spiced with that slightly fuzzy stickiness that comes from cooking them properly. But they weren’t needed, and maybe the waitress should have pointed that out (in fairness, we were hungry and insistent and I’m not sure we would have taken no for an answer). Even so, service just wasn’t like that. I was surprised that it didn’t quite match up to the food – the waitress was polite and pleasant but her English didn’t seem brilliant and it didn’t feel like she knew her way round the menu. That side of the experience wasn’t as polished as you might expect, given everything the restaurant had got right.

I was nearly too full for dessert, but in the end the prospect of brown bread parfait, with caramelised pears and peanut brittle was too tempting to resist. Again, that spare description didn’t quite do it justice: the parfait was in a cylinder, the outside studded with tiny nuggets of peanut brittle. The caramelised pear was terrific, served in an espresso cup with a buttery crumble topping. But the thick toffee sauce alongside the parfait was what made it special – rich, decadent, thoroughly wicked (much, I like to think, like most of the people checking into the hotel upstairs).

Pricing at Cerise is remarkably consistent – most of the starters hover around the ten pound mark, most of the mains are twenty pounds and all the desserts are just under a tenner. The bill was £110 for two and a half courses each, two side dishes we really should have gone without and a bottle of very nice wine. I know that’s a lot, but I didn’t leave feeling cheated.

Special occasion prices, then. But was the food special occasion quality? I think, on balance, the answer to that is yes. The room could be a little nicer, the service needs to be a little more impressive but the food makes up for much of that. The word that keeps jumping out of the review is “rich” and I think that does it justice. It’s properly indulgent, over the top, powerful food – not too clever, but just clever enough to feel slightly different – and for that kind of meal, I can’t think of anywhere in Reading that offers anything similar. I can see myself going again – more readily than I can see myself going back to London Street Brasserie or Forbury’s – but I can also see myself not eating much the lunchtime before and rushing home afterwards to undo the top button on my jeans. But everyone needs a meal like that from time to time. Don’t they?

Cerise – 7.9
The Forbury Hotel, 26 The Forbury, RG1 3EJ
0118 9527770

http://www.theforburyhotel.co.uk/dine/cerise

La Courbe

On February 21, 2014August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

N.B. La Courbe appears to have closed in March 2016. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

First things first, La Courbe is not a great restaurant: there are just too many things wrong, even now almost two months after they finally opened. The room is a simple square with one wall of glass which makes dining there akin to being in one of David Blaine’s failed stunts, a spectacle for everyone who passes through King’s Walk to see (about four tables were occupied the night I was there, but if it had just been me I would have felt terribly self-conscious). And the view through that wall of glass if you’re a diner, apart from any gawping passers-by, is the side of a Burger King, hardly the most beautiful vista Reading has to offer.

Then there’s the decor, a peculiarly retro design of chrome, purple and pistachio that made me half expect Don Johnson to walk in with his linen suit sleeves rolled up. There are no soft furnishings, no art, nothing on the walls to distract the eye from the pistachio panelling. Everything is square – the tables (with, bizarrely, the exception of a single round table which is otherwise no different to the others), the chairs and every single plate or dish brought to our table throughout the meal.

The menu is confusing, with nothing to indicate whether the mezze is a really bad deal (£42 per person for some mezze and a main? Really?) or a really good deal (£42 for some mezze and a main for four people! Bargain!). Add to that the fact that the room is chilly – the door left permanently open – and occasionally murky with smoke from the open kitchen (which is presumably why said door is never shut) and you’d be right in thinking that this isn’t the kind of restaurant in which you want to relax and take in the ambience.

Oh, and did I mention how quick it all was? We were seated at around half eight, and with starters, mains and desserts we were out of the door at about quarter to ten. There seemed to be no understanding at all that an evening meal ought to take a reasonable part of the evening, and normally when I eat somewhere that serves you that fast it’s because they’re worried you might change your mind. It’s never a sign of confidence in the food.

So far, so bad, but then something happened that switched this review around altogether: I ate the food.

We started with two dishes from their hot mezze menu. Maqaneq is a little dish of mini sausages “flambéed in butter and lemon”. What the menu doesn’t tell you is that this is a sophisticated version of the English cocktail sausage. These little sausages are juicy and meaty and lightly spiced so that the sweetness of the meat comes out. We ate them in tiny chunks (smiling smugly all the while) to eke them out and wrapped in slivers of pitta to make tiny sandwiches just so we didn’t finish them too quickly. The falafel were less of a surprise but still delicious – each hot little disc was crispy on the outside and fluffy inside and just herby enough to elevate them out of the ordinary.

We waited for our plates to be cleared but then suddenly the waitress was back with our main course, to be eaten off the same plates with the same chunky cutlery as before – another mark against them. We had gone for the mixed grill (just like the typical Brit on foreign shores). This was described quite plainly as “charcoal grilled selection of lamb, Kafta and chicken with Hommos and Tabouleh” (I swear I find another way to spell houmous every month, maybe it’s like the Eskimos having all those words for snow). It looked terrific, and it tasted even better. The chicken, marinated with ginger and garlic, was just perfect – tender on the inside yet caramelised on the outside, sticky and delicious. The lamb was also spot on, just the tiniest bit of pink in the middle of each piece, and had a hint of cinnamon. The lamb kofte (my spelling) was the least interesting of the meats but third place was no disgrace in this selection. Rather than being the very spicy kofte that I’m more familiar with, this had a subtle, almost buttery flavour and was soft and delicate.

The mixed grill came with two accompaniments. In one corner of the dish was some good (if unexciting) houmous with a pool of olive oil and some finely chopped tomatoes in the middle. In the other corner, just to offset all that meat, was an extremely good tabbouleh, singing with the fresh green flavours of parsley and mint, with plenty of lemon juice. It might even have been my favourite thing I ate that evening, and I don’t say that lightly. All in all, the mixed grill was a thing of wonder, square plates or no.

We didn’t feel quite up to a full bottle of red (which is a pity, because there’s a good selection of Lebanese reds including Chateau Musar, which I’ve loved in the past) so we plumped for a glass each of the Domaine des Tourelles, a Lebanese red which was full and fruity and a good foil to the spicy meats.

I didn’t really fancy dessert after that mammoth undertaking but there’s a sense of duty about doing ER reviews so we gamely went for it. The baklava, rather than being one big baklava oozing with honey, was a selection of the familiar pastries in different shapes with either pistachio or pine nut fillings. I really liked them – they were much less cloying than they can often be, subtler and more interesting. The mouhallabieh was not as successful. The waitress described it as a chilled rice pudding with rosewater and pistachio – which captures it quite well, but neglects to mention that it had either been chilled for some time or it had been set with gelatine which meant that the nice gritty rice texture was replaced by something far less enjoyable. Between us we managed about half of it but after a while a dish that gloopy and big became a bit of a burden so we left it unfinished.

Service throughout was warm and friendly, enthusiastic about the food and more than willing to make recommendations. Even so, the whole set-up seemed a little, well, amateurish. The speed with which the food came was the most obvious problem, but there were others too: we weren’t offered water at any stage (despite there being water glasses on seemingly every table but ours) and the till is down the corridor in the adjoining wine bar, so you have a bit of a wait once you’ve asked for the bill.

Ours, when it eventually arrived, was £57 for two people eating three courses and having a glass of wine each. I felt like this was a pretty good deal given how good the food was (the mixed grill for two is about twenty-four pounds, for instance). Even while I was eating there I was already planning a return visit with friends, albeit probably at lunchtime when a quick meal feels like less of a problem.

Rating this restaurant has been nigh-on impossible, to the extent where I’ve wondered why I give ratings at all. How can I possibly give a single mark out of ten which reflects somewhere that serves such great food in such a problematic venue? I’m not sure my eventual score truly sums up the mixed message that is La Courbe; I wanted to give them higher but I just can’t until they get their crinkles ironed out. But I want them to do well enough to get the time to do that, because I can forgive a lot of things when the food is this good. Maybe this isn’t the venue for a romantic, lingering meal for two or a big night out, but I can see how one day it could be. And if that means I have to eat a few platefuls of their spiced chicken – in the cold, on those square plates, with that appalling view – to give them the chance to work on getting it right, then it’s a cross I’ll just have to bear.

La Courbe – 7.3
9-11 Kings Walk, RG1 2HG
0118 9581585

www.lacourbe.co.uk

Bart’s

On January 10, 2014March 13, 2018 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Bart’s closed in February 2018. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I have a lot of sympathy for Bart’s: I visited them in the first week of 2014, one of the deadest times of the year for restaurants. If you’re a restaurant, all your potential customers are either enduring their first few days back in the office or making the most of the last precious time before work can no longer be avoided, still working through leftovers, groaning cupboards and packed fridges. And, of course, lots of your potential customers have resolutions in mind – spend less, eat less, exercise more – and none of those are exactly compatible with eating out.

It must be difficult working in a restaurant in early January. Bart’s only had two tables occupied for all the time I was there that evening, and I was at one of them. I bet they were wondering why they’d bothered opening at all. Was eating there similarly difficult? Well, yes and no.

Bart’s is a funny place, on the Wokingham Road between Cemetery Junction and Palmer Park. It’s a big restaurant, with a total of three dining rooms, one of which is used for private dining. On the night I visited, the main dining room was almost the only room that was lit, which led to an eerie feeling that you were eating in a restaurant which was only half-open. But the welcome was warm, the other diners (regulars, I think) looked happy and the room itself was comfy and not unattractive. The twinkling fairy lights behind my table lent everything a festive – if hyperactive – glow.

The service was lovely throughout: if my waiter was unhappy to be back at work so soon after New Year you would never have known, and he made conversation without sounding phony before leaving us to pick our way through the menu. It wasn’t a menu which filled me with excitement. I showed it to a friend before the visit and she said “that’s the kind of stuff you’d find in a Harvester” and that’s bang on: prawn cocktail, breaded mushrooms, steaks, lamb shanks, burgers, cheesecake and brownies, all present and correct. But that didn’t necessarily mean it would be bad, of course – those dishes are on menus for a reason, and well executed they can be delicious.

The wine list is short – a handful of wines by the glass – but all the ones we tried were delicious, and none of them cost more than a fiver. The Corbières was soft, fruity and unchallenging and the Graves was a little more peppery. I had a Chenin Blanc with my main course and that too was very serviceable. Another pleasant surprise came when the waiter brought over a couple of amuse bouches. They were an excellent start: guacamole topped with chives tasted fresher than I expected, and little cubes of chicken liver pate on slivers of Melba toast, along with some caramelised red onion, were also promising.

It was the last faultless course I saw from the kitchen, and therein lies the problem with Bart’s. If I was going to describe what they do, I’d say they make some really good food, they make some ordinary food, but the main thing they make are mistakes: too many mistakes, in fact.

The starters included the best dish of the night. The ribs were delicious: a reasonable portion, slathered in a sticky barbecue sauce and putting up no resistance to a fork, falling from the bone in meek surrender. I didn’t get much of the advertised paprika in the sauce but it was so delicious that I didn’t care. Even the salad was tasty – properly dressed (with a hint of rapeseed oil, I think) rather than just a pointless adornment.

The other starter was a let down – Bart’s describes its calamari as “overnight marinated, dusted in Chef’s special recipe flour and crispy fried”. It didn’t taste as if it had been marinated at all and the coating was nothing special, special recipe flour or no. There are better calamari to be had in many Reading restaurants – London Street Brasserie, Carluccio’s, Jamie’s Italian, even Bill’s – and cheaper calamari to be had almost anywhere. At that price – £8.50 for seven measly rings of squid – I did wonder what was in the marinade. Unicorn tears, perhaps.

The mains were also strewn with errors. The sea bream didn’t live up to the promise of the menu because, although the flesh on both generous portions of bream was cooked well, the skin was flaccid, not crispy as advertised. This was off-putting – not just because I love crispy fish skin, but also because it left me wondering exactly how this had been cooked. The mashed potato was meant to contain lemon, but I didn’t get any in what was a giant unfinishable mound of mash. I would have liked more haste, less speed, more lemon, less potato.

You can’t go to a grill house and not order a steak, so naturally I did. The twelve ounce sirloin was a gorgeous piece of meat, with very little fat or waste, well marbled and nicely seasoned. But – and this is an enormous but, in a steak restaurant – it was medium well rather than the medium rare I’d ordered. There’s no excuse for that – especially when the dish is your speciality and the one thing customers should be entitled to expect you to get right time after time. It’s not as if the kitchen was rushed off its feet, either.

What I hate most about getting a steak cooked wrong is that it gives you the most unpalatable choice of all: which is more important to you, eating at the same time as your friends or getting the dish you had ordered? To my shame, on this occasion I didn’t send it back, or complain. Maybe I was being charitable because I too had just worked on a day when I’d really rather not and I hadn’t exactly put in my most productive shift either.

The side dishes were a collection of mistakes expressed through the medium of vegetables. Sautéed potatoes weren’t anything of the kind, just baby new potatoes boiled and then flashed in the pan to have colour but no texture. Steamed broccoli with almond flakes were exactly that and nothing more. If the flakes had been toasted and the broccoli had been tossed in a little butter it might have been interesting, but as it was it was just florets, nuts and a strong sense of being underwhelmed.

If we’d left then, and we nearly did, this would have been a different review. But, against all odds, Bart’s redeemed itself through its desserts, which were extraordinary. Warm caramelised rice pudding with sautéed mixed berries was divine – a deep pot of creamy rice pudding with a middle later of something like a berry jam. On the top was a nicely bruleéd layer of sugar which gave a fabulous toffee taste to the rice pudding.

The other dish was recommended by the waiter. Poached pear in almond soup sounded interesting on paper, and more adventurous than most of the dishes on the menu. When it turned up it was glorious. The pear – although not huge – was soft, dark and delicious with the red wine and port it had been poached in. The “almond soup” was probably better described as liquid marzipan, creamy, grainy and sweet. I complimented the waiter on it and he told me that the soup was the chef’s own creation – and he looked proud on his behalf. One last mistake though, because it was too asking too much to expect Bart’s not to make one: the supposedly cinnamon ice cream, which would have been perfect, was plain old vanilla.

At the end of the meal the manager came over and asked us if we’d liked the meal. Slightly won over by the desserts and the superb service we said yes, at which point he brought over a couple of complimentary nightcaps and a form for us to fill out to get a loyalty card. I was a bit fuzzy on the details by then but it seems like you can become a member to enjoy various undisclosed benefits (I didn’t sign up, so I’m afraid I’ll never find out what they are), as well as twenty per cent off your next bill. Our bill was a hundred pounds, including service, for two people, three courses each and five glasses of wine, and I thought that was okay but not amazing.

I’ve thought about the meal at Bart’s a lot and I still can’t quite make up my mind about it. You can probably tell. Some of the food was really good, the wine was great, it was a nice cosy room and the service was excellent. But there were so many mistakes, all over the place, from the minor to the major to the fundamental. A steak house that can’t cook steaks as ordered is getting the basics wrong, and no personable greeting when you arrive is ever going to make up for that.

I wasn’t expecting great things from Bart’s – I walked down the King’s Road with a growing sense of dread – but in the end, even though it wasn’t a brilliant meal, there were plenty of surprises. I wasn’t expecting the best of their food to be as good as it was, or for the service to be so good. What I really wasn’t expecting, though, was to come away from it disappointed that I couldn’t rate them more than I do. Maybe they were just having a bad day at the office and suffering from New Year blues, just like I was, and I can’t rule out going back later in the year to see if they can do better. But going three times in fifteen months, like the local paper did? No. Not unless you paid me.

Bart’s – 6.2
21 Wokingham Road, RG6 1LE
0118 9662268

http://www.bartsgrill.com/

The Plowden Arms, Shiplake

On November 29, 2013April 12, 2024 By ediblereadingIn Reviews13 Comments

The team at the Plowden Arms left the pub at the start of April 2017. The pub reopened under new management with a different menu, but then closed for good. As of spring 2024 it is now open as The Plough, reviewed here.

This week’s review is the first ever of a restaurant outside the RG1 postcode; scandalous I know, but there’s more to living in this little town than easy access to the Oracle, Friar Street and Broad Street. So rather than try another city centre restaurant I hopped in the car on a chilly weekday evening and made for the Plowden Arms, a proper little old pub on the road from Reading to Henley. I have to say, I love a good pub; it’s one of the things (along with queuing, not to mention sighing and shooting evil looks at queue jumpers) that Britain does better than anywhere else in the world.

The Plowden Arms has everything you expect from a classic English country pub: low beams, an open fire and a freezing loo (the better the pub, the worse the toilet in my experience). The fire was lit when we arrived, and the room was cosy, if a tad empty. There were only three occupied tables, and it was a bit sad to see they weren’t busier. Some pubs are really restaurants in disguise – all posh furniture and pretensions – and some pubs don’t really know what they want to be, like boozers going through a midlife crisis. The Plowden isn’t like that; for better or worse it is a pub that serves food, and the dark furniture and slightly uncomfortable banquettes were testimony to that.

We were greeted warmly and given menus but they only tell half the story at the Plowden. The blackboard up by the bar listed loads of specials – four starters and four mains, almost as many dishes as were on the printed menu. Our waitress – who was nothing short of charming all evening – told us that these change every couple of days. I can’t tell you what a good signal this sends out. It says that the chef is using what’s fresh and seasonal, being inventive, always changing and always improving things. Why don’t more restaurants do this? Even the most high end restaurants in the centre of Reading rarely offer more than one special.

Overall, it was one of those menus where you want to order everything and know you can’t. It’s worth pointing out how reasonable it is too – the starters hover around the £7.50 mark, few mains are over £15. Looking at the flip side of the printed menu made the choice even more difficult – a whole extra section of “Drinking accompaniments and simple dishes”, all of which were just as tempting again.

Whilst agonising over the menu we ordered one of the drinking accompaniments, a salt cod scotch egg, to give us something to snack on as we made up our minds. This was a lovely amuse bouche, if you like, nice runny yolk with a soft layer of fish and a tart, fresh tomato sauce underneath. A good start, although I confess I prefer a sausagemeat scotch egg for juiciness, and the salt cod (ironically) didn’t taste that strongly seasoned.

When the starters arrived there was definitely a bit of food envy and I also fancied stealing the vintage plates. The beetroot and blue cheese pithivier, from the specials menu, was the favourite. I know beetroot and goat’s cheese has become a menu cliché across the country, but pairing beetroot with blue cheese was a masterstroke – the sweet beetroot against the salty tang of the blue cheese was a fantastic combination, and one I wasn’t used to. The pastry was crumbly and buttery, and I simultaneously wished the dish had been twice as big and knew that the flavours were so rich and intense that more would have been overwhelming.

The other starter, from the a la carte menu, was billed as “hashed lamb with charred bread” and is apparently based on a dish by Mrs Beeton. It was less successful, although that might be partly because I didn’t quite know what to expect. What I got was a Kilner jar of slow cooked pieces of lamb in a rich dark gravy with what looked like haricot beans. The charred bread was toast, for better or for worse. The lamb was topped by tiny fronds of little salad which didn’t add much. All in all it was more interesting than it was delicious, though I didn’t mind it. I was expecting something a little less sloppy and more spreadable, so maybe the mistake was mine. It was probably the only misfire of the evening.

The mains were also a study in contrasts. The slow cooked ham hock with mashed potatoes and a sherry and mushroom sauce (from the a la carte) was huge. I mean, absolutely enormous. The ham hock was a whole hock, bone and all, the size of a lamb shank – so big that it was almost intimidating when set down in front of me. The meat was perfect – soft, pink, no hint of grim wobbliness – and it fell away from the bone with convenient cleanness. The mash was one of the best I’ve tasted – rich, creamy and smooth, the texture just right. The sauce was equally impressive, somehow both sweet and salty, bringing the whole dish together. It was all very substantial but also the kind of dish you can’t bring yourself to stop eating, even if you’re ready to pop by the end.

The other main, from the set menu, was sea trout with celeriac pureé, samphire, new potatoes and a clam and chive cream sauce. Sounds like a lot of different things going on but it was as delicate and precise as the ham hock was hearty and primitive. Every component was perfect, and every component worked with the rest – the sizeable fillet fresh, subtle and falling into flakes, the little bundle of samphire underneath it with just enough crunch, the sauce again creamy and intense – powerful enough to set off against the trout without drowning what can be quite an understated fish. This is a kitchen that knows how to do sauces so good that you slightly regret the fact that this is a restaurant that doesn’t bring you bread to mop up the rest with. That’s about the only criticism I can come up with about the mains, which tells you a lot.

Sadly driving meant we couldn’t make the most of the wine list. The wines by the glass – between us we had a Chilean merlot and a French pinot noir – were safe and tasty but not wildly exciting. It’s not by any means a big wine list and this did seem a little jarring given the undoubted quality of the food they are serving. Perhaps this is another sign that this is a pub that serves food rather than a restaurant, but I still felt a little disappointed by that.

When the first two courses are that good, dessert is inevitable. As I’ve said previously, I do like a school dinner dessert and that made it impossible to resist the jam roly poly. It was exactly how you would want it to be – a classic example of the genre, only ever so slightly refined. So the slice was lovely and dense, the poly (the roly? where does the name come from anyway? I bet the Plowden Arms probably knows) was beautifully jammy and not overly sweet, but the slice was also just the right size and the custard surrounding it was wonderfully light, almost like a crème anglaise. This was like a school dinner at a school much better than the one I’d gone to.

Again, the other dessert was about as different as you can get. It was described as chocolate mousse and gingerbread biscuit with hazelnut and orange cream but it was so much more than that. The cream was between layers of ginger biscuit, like a dense millefeuille, and gave me the hugely satisfying experience of whacking it with a spoon until the biscuit (not too dense, not too delicate) broke up into bits small enough to eat. The chocolate mousse wasn’t really mousse. Instead it was a dark quenelle of what seemed more like ganache – intense, smooth, glossy. Like the pithivier it was a portion which looked too small before you started it but which you realised was just right once you’d finished it. This is no mean feat in a kitchen, every bit as much of a talent as changing your menu several times a week or making sauces that knock people’s socks off.

I haven’t said enough about the service, which was lovely: friendly and informal but also knowledgeable and polished. Everything about how we were looked after was spot on – from laying and relaying the table to serving from one side without leaning over you (it might sound like a small thing but it’s one of my pet hates). By the end I was sorry to leave and faintly aggrieved that there were so few diners that night.

The bill for three courses for two people (plus that scotch egg), three glasses of wine and numerous soft drinks was £80. I don’t know anywhere in town where I could eat that quality (and quantity!) of food for that amount, though of course it’s tempered a little by the effort of getting out into the sticks. That said, by the end of the meal I was itching to come back and already planning a return visit – it’s the sort of place where I could easily see myself settling in by the open fire with the Sunday papers.

When I think back on it, more than anything, I think the most impressive thing about the Plowden was the sheer range of cooking on display. I felt like we almost sampled two different meals – one hearty, warming and enormous, one clever, dainty and delicate. To find a restaurant that can do one of those things is a wonderful discovery, to find a cosy pub that can manage both is verging on miraculous. So yes, I loved the Plowden Arms. Can you tell? Food this good, this reasonably priced, this clever and this well served should be eaten by a lot more people, and I hope if nothing else my review might help to do something about that.

The Plowden Arms – 8.7
Shiplake Cross, Henley On Thames, RG9 4BX
0118 9402794

http://www.plowdenarmsshiplake.co.uk/

Forbury’s

On November 15, 2013April 12, 2019 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

To everybody’s surprise, Forbury’s closed in April 2019. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

It’s hard to believe that Forbury’s is less than 10 years old; it’s integral to the Reading restaurant scene and one of the few serious challengers to established restaurants like London Street Brasserie and Pepe Sale, both of which I’ve already reviewed. It’s always been a conservative, if reliable, place and, despite chefs coming, going and (in one case) coming back again it feels like the food on offer hasn’t hugely changed from one year to the next – good, technically proficient French food in one of Reading’s most sophisticated rooms, and a wine list full of opulent treats and slightly more economical delightful surprises.

All that has changed though, recently, with the arrival of new head chef Tom Kneale. Based on Tom’s Twitter feed – which also gives a fascinating insight into just how hard running a kitchen can be – it looks like he is determined to shake up Forbury’s and add some edge to all that Gallic sophistication. First, in the culinary equivalent of Tony Blair scrapping Clause Four, he took the salt and pepper off the tables (apparently only three diners asked for them to be returned). Then pictures of all sorts of interesting new creations began to appear. An amuse bouche of black pudding with chocolate and crab on crispy chicken skin? A starter of raw tuna, crispy pork skin and lemon emulsion? I was sold: nowhere in Reading is doing anything quite that imaginative so I reckoned I owed it to myself (and you, of course) to go and check it out.

I really like the outside space at Forbury’s. Obviously it truly comes into its own in the summer but as the dark evenings draw in the outside lights twinkle like an early Christmas tree and the restaurant looks properly inviting. On stepping inside it seemed like nothing and everything had changed; the decor and layout were all exactly as they’d always been, but nearly all the front of house staff were new faces. A clean sweep from the new broom?

The menu had definitely changed, too. It sounds like a minor thing but the set price “market menu” is now on a separate piece of paper, giving the a la carte a little more prominence. In the starters, there were some signs of the new dishes making it through onto the menu – the “63c duck egg with onion broth, compote and foraged wild mushrooms”, for instance – but the mains still seemed very similar to the Forbury dishes of old. Perhaps, I thought, it would all be about the execution. Although I was sorely tempted to order everything off the a la carte, I thought it was only fair to try out both menus to give you an idea what to expect at either price point. Besides, the market menu has always struck me as a good deal if you’re looking for fine dining in Reading: the price has, naturally, slowly risen over the years (it’s now £23 for three courses) but it’s still great value and, unlike Forbury’s closest natural competition (Mya Lacarte, London Street Brasserie) the set menu is available all week, the only restriction being that you can’t order off it after 7.30pm on a Saturday.

The amuse bouche didn’t betray any signs of the new approach. Sweet white onion and apple velouté was pleasant, and an interesting combination, but it was very much the kind of amuse bouche Forbury’s has always done. It was also one of the starters on the market menu, so it didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary – in fact I’d have felt a bit cheated if I’d ordered it from the set. Perhaps it was my fault; based on those Twitter pictures I’d been expecting black pudding, chocolate, crispy skin, all kinds of miniature treats and nothing in an espresso cup is going to match up to that.

They do manage the timing of a meal superbly at Forbury’s, and the starters arrived just when you wanted them to – not so soon that you felt turned, not so late that you were considering asking nicely for more bread. It sounds like something you should be able to take for granted, but so many restaurants get it wrong. “Home-made pork pie with house pickles and salad” from the set menu was lovely, if exactly what you would expect. The meat was perhaps a little coarser than I’d personally like (no jelly though, which is always a relief) the pastry somehow lacked the lardy crispness of a properly great pork pie. The smear of English mustard was a nice touch, if a tad generous, and the little thicket of salad leaves was really delicious – lightly dressed and sweet, which was a lovely contrast to the pie. The pie managed to both be heavy and small, which made me feel a little ungrateful on several levels all at once. Cornichons had a nice crunch but were largely indistinguishable from the ones in a jar in my fridge (maybe that’s why they were called “house pickles”).

From the a la carte the “Brixham crab, dill oil, shallot ketchup and watercress” looked less appealing. I was expecting something like a tian but this was altogether soggier, claggier and less delicate. There were little blobs of what was billed as shallot ketchup but my palate must have been playing tricks on me because I got a lot of citrus and not much dill or shallot. This all sounds very harsh, so I should add that although it wasn’t what I was expecting it was very tasty indeed. The small heap of watercress on top, though, added little to the experience.

At this point it’s worth mentioning the one obvious big difference at Forbury’s: the staff. Forbury’s has always offered that wonderful, unobtrusive service that the French, when they get it right, are so brilliant at. You know the sort: the waiting staff are right on hand whenever you want anything, top up your glass when it’s getting low but the rest of the time you don’t even notice them. It’s this last bit that’s the real skill, and it’s also where the new team have a bit of work to do: our glasses, for instance, were regularly topped up, whether we wanted that done or not.

Unfortunately, the solicitousness didn’t end there. To give you another example, two minutes after our starters arrived we were asked if we were enjoying them. Fair enough, although waiters always seem to appear to do this when you have your mouth full. Less than two minutes later we were asked again about our starters by a different person. That same person asked again as she was taking our empty plater away, just in case she had forgotten our original reply. The overall effect was more of neediness than service. What doesn’t help is that the waiting staff didn’t seem to be divided into sections: everyone seemed to cover every table, so they didn’t know what you had or hadn’t already been asked. Maybe this is exceptional as we were there on a week night, maybe it just shows how keen the staff are: either way it needs to be toned down a little.

We weren’t asked about the mains quite so frequently, thank goodness. “Haunch of venison with swede, purple kale, mushrooms and cherries” (from the a la carte) was simple, well executed and delicious. The venison was a generous portion, pink and tender, resting on a bed of pureed swede with a few kale leaves in between. The cherries were cooked into a jam-like state and then reformed into tiny perfect domes on the plate, a lovely piece of technique on what was otherwise quite a straightforward dish. This nearly brought out the best in the venison, although overall I found the whole thing a little on the sweet side. Luckily the waitress had suggested some duck fat chips, served in the ubiquitous little frying basket, which made the meal feel complete.

Pan fried sea bream with herb crushed potatoes, salsa verde and green beans, from the market menu, was less successful. The fish was a beautiful fat piece of bream, cooked so the flesh flaked under a fork and the skin crackled under a knife. The rest of the dish didn’t give it the support it so deserved. The potatoes appeared to have resisted the crushing process largely unscathed, the promised salsa verde just didn’t show up at all and overall it felt like a dish that could have been so much more with only a few little changes.

All of this was washed down with a very reasonable bin end – an Australian pinot noir at £35, “Cruel Mistress”, which was gorgeous. It had more complexity to it than some of its New Zealand siblings and just about worked with most of what we had ordered – enough substance to stand up to the venison without drowning out the bream (yes, I know people say you shouldn’t drink red with fish, but I’m a heathen about this sort of thing).

For dessert we didn’t fancy anything off the set menu so we went wild and ordered from the a la carte. This turned out to be a very good idea; the desserts were the high point of the meal.

The fig and honey tart with vanilla ice cream was delightful. It was served in a deep bowl and the topping was part bakewell, part macaroon – lovely, light, chewy and meringue-like, it had me scraping the edges of the bowl with my spoon. The honey was almost undetectable but that didn’t take anything away from what was essentially a very well done school dinner type dessert. I love a hot pudding (although I’m not sure I was expecting one from Forbury’s) so this was perfect for me.

The Valrhona chocolate mousse with mango sorbet and chocolate soil was glorious – deep, dark, rich and bitter, and completely transformed by the gritty crunch of the chocolate soil. It didn’t need the mango sorbet, although it was so green and fresh that I wasn’t going to turn it down. The only slightly bum note was the microshoots of coriander strewn across it. I tried enough to decide it didn’t work and left the rest, but it didn’t detract from one of the best desserts I’ve had this year.

I sense, from my visit, that Forbury’s is still a work in progress. Dinner for two, including one bottle of wine, came in just shy of £100 and I thought it was good value. The thing is, I had a lovely meal, with more hits than misses, but it wasn’t the meal I was expecting. There’s a sense of nervousness about the service and a little bit of risk averseness about the food. I can understand why – it must be difficult, stepping into a local institution like Forbury’s, and getting the balance right between evolution and revolution – and I saw enough to think that they’ll get there, but my overriding impression was frustration that they haven’t moved a little bit quicker.

The most telling thing about the meal? Just after I paid, I spotted something on the table which I’d previously missed: the salt and pepper mills were there in front of me. Next time I go, and there will be a next time, I hope they’re gone for good.

Forbury’s – 7.1
1 Forbury Square, RG1 3BB
01189 574044

http://forburys.co.uk/

Edible Reading

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