Tag: Dave

Pub review: The Moderation

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In 2013, the first year of this blog, I reviewed the grand total of fourteen Reading restaurants (don’t hold it against me, I only started in August). And there must have been something about those very first venues, because the majority of them are still going strong: Picasso, The Warwick, The Lobster Room, Kyklos and Forbury’s are no longer with us but the other nine are still going over ten years later. I won’t list them all because I don’t want to jinx anything in the here and now – 2024 is hard enough as it is – but you get the idea: for those restaurants still to be trading, a decade on, is truly no mean feat.

But time has passed and those reviews have become increasingly out of date; they might have reflected what a restaurant was like back in those days, when I wasn’t yet forty and mistakenly thought I had the rest of my life figured out, but you couldn’t necessarily use them now with confidence. So over the last couple of years I’ve been gradually revisiting the survivors from the class of 2013 to write new reviews and see how it all went so gloriously right. And generally, with the exception of Zero Degrees, I’ve had some good meals in the process.

Not only that, but I’ve left some of those Reading institutions delighted that they’re still with us. In a world where everything seems to change beyond recognition, more and faster, with every passing day, I was relieved to find that London Street Brasserie, for instance, was still a reliable benchmark in the centre of town. I was pleased that Pepe Sale, at the time freshly under new management, was recognisable as the place I had so loved on my first ever review. And returning to Café Yolk I found that the slightly iffy brunch place I wrote off eleven years ago had blossomed into a polished and Instagrammable performer.

All those places were older and wiser, as you would expect: I, on the other hand, was probably just older, but you can’t win them all. And that brings us to the subject of this week’s review, The Moderation, a place I really should have revisited long before now. When I went there in December 2013 I remember thinking they’d had an off night, because I’d eaten there a few times before that visit and always enjoyed it. I tried to say something to that effect in my review, but ultimately I was a little underwhelmed.

Back then the Moderation was part of a little chain, under the name Spirit House, along with the Warwick Arms on Kings Road, now closed. I’m pretty sure that at one time or another that group also included The Queens Head up on Christchurch Green and even the Lyndhurst, in a far earlier incarnation. The theme with those places was that they did pub food with a sideline in Thai food, as was the fashion ten years ago, and when I went to the Moderation on duty I found it a little unspecial, not bad by any means perhaps not quite as good as the Warwick in the centre of town.

In the intervening ten years I’ve been back a few times, but only really for drinks. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Moderation’s garden, a natural suntrap that never seems to get the plaudits it deserves, but the location has always been a little tricky for me: if I’m in that area I’m probably at Phantom instead, and if I was crossing into Caversham I’d wind up at the Last Crumb. So despite being fond of the Moderation I’ve made it there rarely.

I’m also not sure I’d have been entirely welcome there anyway, because I blotted my copy book with them a few years ago. It was in the run up to the 2019 General Election, when the Tories had selected car crash candidate Craig Morley to fight Reading East and he turned up in the constituency, not a place he knew well by the sounds of it, with Sajid Javid for a spot of campaigning. They were photographed pulling pints behind the bar at the Mod before scooting over to the Caversham Butcher, presumably to massage some gammon, and I’m afraid I might have been less than my usual diplomatic self about that on social media.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of water under Caversham Bridge since then. Craig Morley is now just a surreal footnote in Reading’s history, I’ve been known to purchase the occasional sausage at the Caversham Butcher and I reckoned it was about time I reassessed the Moderation. After all, Alok Sharma visited But Is It Art in the summer of 2020, maskless, less than a week after displaying Covid symptoms in the House Of Commons, and I still buy all my birthday cards there. So last Saturday I headed there with my old friend Dave, visiting from sunny Swindon, to honour a reservation we’d made – in his name, just to be on the safe side.

I had forgotten just how big the Moderation is, and how well-proportioned. The main room is large and tasteful, and when we were there the tables were already filling up with people ready to watch sport. But there are also two other dining rooms, and we took a table at the one just off from the garden. I liked it a lot, and it was nice to be near the sunshine and a draught, although some of the chairs were showing their age and the ones we had were a tad makeshift. But even so the back dining room, with wall art depicting a school of fish and exposed bricks, was a really lovely spot.

Last Saturday, as you might remember, was the first day that’s felt even remotely like summer in over six months, and it was too sunny to sit outside. But I went and had a nosy and the Moderation’s outside space is as good as I remember. They’ve put astroturf down à la the Nag’s Head and some of the tables are under an awning, and it’s another decent spot in a pub blessed with very pleasant places to sit, eat and drink. I also made out heaters and a wooden bar with what looked like a pizza oven behind it: the Moderation has clearly planned for all seasons.

Another thing I wasn’t quite expecting was just how well the Moderation’s menu would read. That’s not faint praise or me being patronising, but they shared their spring menu on Instagram at the start of the month and the one I was handed had far more dishes on it. Not only that but it had a lot of dishes on it I really wanted to try, along with some I’ve never seen anywhere in Reading.

The blurb explained that the Moderation’s chef is Indonesian and the menu featured a lot of Indonesian classics along with dishes from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and beyond. I’m pretty sure that that chain of pubs run by Spirit House has now contracted to just the one, and it felt like the Moderation had used that opportunity to really hone and specialise.

There was still a section of traditional pub food, but it was a much smaller proportion of the menu than I remembered from previous visits. I found that very reassuring. At the risk of sounding like Jim Bowen unveiling a speedboat to an unsuccessful couple from Leicester, here are some of the dishes I could have ordered and written about: Hainanese chicken rice (a dish I’ve never seen on menus in Reading); short rib Panang curry; coconut curry with roti canai; and a beef rendang burger inspired by a disappointing McRendang burger at a branch of McDonalds in Kuala Lumpur. Over ten years of trading has taught the Moderation how to write a killer menu.

Our starters arrived as we’d just begun making inroads into a crisp pint of Cruzcampo: sometimes, on a hot day, there’s no drink quite like a European macro lager, especially when you can kid yourself that it’s almost your first al fresco beer of the year. I have a bad habit in Thai restaurants of ordering the sharing platter, and I can see I did that last time I reviewed the Moderation, but this time we were greedy and ordered three dishes to share instead.

First up was an absolutely magnificent chicken satay which put all other versions I’d tried in Reading to shame. Sticky marinated chicken, darkened, charred and irregular, was itching to be eased off a skewer and dipped in an astonishingly good peanut sauce with depth and coarse texture. This had technically been Dave’s choice, and I was very lucky that he was affable enough to share it.

I remember trying the Moderation’s chicken satay back in 2013, but this was night and day compared to that. A little lettuce cup containing acar awak, pickled vegetables, completed the picture: impressive attention to detail. I didn’t know when I would eat this dish again, but it was more likely to be in ten weeks than ten years.

The piece of bet hedging was starter number two, the salt and pepper squid. Dave had reservations about ordering this, because squid and calamari are so often disappointing in pubs and restaurants, so we agreed to order one to share. And of course it was outstanding – squid, not calamari, fresh, spiced and fried, like an upmarket reimagining of NikNaks, and hugely moreish.

Dave is more civilised than me and used cutlery, but I dived in with my fingers and dipped in the sweet chilli sauce. Maybe on some level I thought they really were next level NikNaks. I’d order these again, and it occurred to me that as a bona fide pub there would be nothing stopping you from coming here for beers with a friend and just ordering small plate after small plate, bar snack after bar snack.

One thing I really loved about the Moderation wasn’t just that they listed where each dish comes from, it was that sometimes the description said it all. So for instance, although the salt and pepper squid came from Singapore, and the chicken satay from Indonesia, the vegetable spring rolls are described as coming from Everywhere and the chilli crab and fish cakes as simply from The Moderation.

This is a smart way of saying that they were more like traditional fishcakes than spongy Thai fish cakes, although it maybe doesn’t fully do justice to how great they were – a fabulous brittle shell giving way to crumbly crabbiness.

“You really get the crab in this” said Dave. “And I bet they’ve used brown meat rather than white meat, for the flavour.”

I nodded in agreement, and decided I didn’t resent him having the other fishcake on account of him having been so generous with his satay. Over thirty years of friendship lets you reach that kind of equilibrium. Besides, he’d brought down some of his home-made honey, thyme and brie focaccia, so I owed him.

By this point I was at the stage I sometimes reach when I’m having a really fantastic meal, especially somewhere in Reading, where I was smiling beatifically, wondering when I could come here next and saying “this is really good, isn’t it?” over and over.

So it’s a shame to have to point out that my main course was the only thing we ate all day with shortcomings.

I’d chosen the beef rendang, which purely coincidentally is what I had at the Moderation all those years ago. And again, I have to say this was night and day compared to that. The sauce was really beautiful, sweet and warming: Dave said, rightly, that it could have done with a little more heat but I was prepared to overlook that.

I also tend to like the meat in this dish slow-cooked until it’s broken down, and the Moderation’s version isn’t like that with discrete chunks of beef. But that said, they were all soft, all obediently fell apart and there was no bounce or dodginess. I also loved the roti canai, so flaky you scattered shrapnel over the table and your fingers gleamed with oil as you ate.

So what went wrong? It was the little things, because the dish was slightly out of kilter. You got a lot of rice, and a lot of roti canai, and this dish needed more than that shallow pool of sauce to properly make the most of both. I’d rather have had more sauce and foregone the beansprouts and green beans, cold and crunchy on the side, nice though they were, just to have made the most of both those carbs. But I do have to say that these are minor quibbles. It was still an excellent dish.

Dave picked a dish I know well from my Moderation-going days gone by, the nasi goreng, a dish it turned out he was rather partial to. I remember it being great, but I don’t remember it being quite this good, or this enviable. A huge mound of rice was shot through with chicken, veg and huge, plump prawns, and the forkful I had was marvellous. Again, it was a little light on the chilli heat but if anything that made it more comforting. But what really set this apart were the whistles and bells – prawn crackers, another little pile of acar awak, a fried egg and, lurking beneath it, another satay skewer.

“Mate, you get bonus satay!” was Dave’s reaction. Bonus satay indeed: Dave’s only criticism of this dish was that he’d have liked the yolk to be runny, but like my reservations about the rendang it was piffling in the scheme of things. The nasi goreng cost fifteen pounds: in the past I’ve described Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken as the perfect single plate of food in Reading, but in this I think it might have some serious competition.

By this point the pub was in full swing in what promised to be the busiest day of the year so far. The sun was blazing, it was shorts weather, people were beginning to gather outside and the front room was almost completely full. And I was sorely tempted to say fuck it to our other plans, migrate to the garden and have a Cruzcampo as nature intended, glowing in the sunshine. It so nearly happened that way, and there’s no doubt a parallel universe where it did.

But we were set on trying some beers at Phantom (perhaps after having a coffee at The Collective, because we aren’t getting any younger and need to pace ourselves) so we paid our bill and went on our way. Service was as friendly and charming at that point as it had been throughout, and the whole thing cost us sixty-seven pounds, not including tip.

I have to stress that I think the Moderation feels like one of Reading’s real bargains right now: none of the starters tops eight pounds, none of the mains costs more than eighteen. The desserts are all seven fifty and mostly stay traditional, so they didn’t tempt me on this occasion but I’d be surprised if they weren’t good.

Of all of the places I’ve revisited in the last couple of years, I think the Moderation might be my favourite of all. I was absolutely thrilled to see it thriving, to see such a broad and interesting menu and to find it executed so well. I expect all of you know this already and are wondering what took me so long, and I rather am too, but better late than never. Even so it feels like I don’t see people talking about the Moderation enough and I don’t know why, because my visit left me feeling quite converted to the place. Perhaps it has very loyal locals and regulars who are quite happy not to share it with knobbers like me: if so, I can hardly blame them.

But regardless of all that, their achievement feels significant. Without fuss or faff they have found their place in the fabric of Reading turning out excellent food and offering the kind of skilful, clever pan-Asian menu I haven’t really seen since the golden age of Tampopo. But I do have to say that much as I missed the Tampopo of 2015 when it closed, The Moderation of 2024 is better. I don’t know whether this review makes amends for my moaning about that photo op over four years ago, but even if I’m still persona non grata I will definitely be back. I might book a table under an assumed name though, just in case.

The Moderation – 8.2
213 Caversham Road, RG1 8BB
0118 9595577

https://www.themodreading.com

Restaurant review: Pick Up Point, Swindon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She thinks…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://thepickuppoint.com

Restaurant review: Chequers, Bath

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I hadn’t been to Bath since before the pandemic, so when arranging a leisurely weekend lunch with my old friend Dave it sprung to mind as a break from the norm. Especially as that norm largely involves him visiting me in Reading and complaining at length that Swindon has nothing anywhere near as good (a hypothesis I tested a few months back: it isn’t the whole story).

My relative ignorance of Bath is largely a consequence of the ridiculous train fares: it costs pretty much the same exorbitant amount to sit on the train for fifteen more minutes and get off at Temple Meads, so that’s what I’ve done every time. And otherwise I usually go to Oxford, which as we’ve established is cheap, convenient and full of good places to eat. But I’ve been hearing an increasing buzz about a number of interesting restaurants springing up in Bath, so I thought this would be an auspicious opportunity to try somewhere properly new for a change.

But where to go? Even a little research uncovered an embarrassment of riches. There’s the likes of Upstairs At Landrace and Beckford Bottle Shop and Canteen, which have attracted the attention of various broadsheet hacks, and Wilks, the formerly Michelin-starred former Bristol restaurant which has recently relocated. There’s excellent fish at the Scallop Shell, or wine and small plates at Corkage. And finally there’s Chequers (not The Chequers, if their website and social media are to be believed), a gastropub near the Royal Crescent that won a Bib Gourmand from Michelin this year. 

Well, I say finally but actually the list goes on and on: I could also have gone high end at The Elder or institution Menu Gordon Jones, or eaten more casually at any of Pintxo, Bath’s branch of Bosco Pizzeria, Yak Yeti Yak (which celebrates its twentieth birthday next year) or much-loved Italian Sotto Sotto. Why had I never reviewed anywhere in Bath before? And why didn’t it have a restaurant blog of its own? It was baffling.

So why Chequers this week? Well, I’d like to say that it’s because I reviewed all the options and wanted somewhere classic and timeless, untouched by the ebbing tides of small plates, natural wine and craft beer. I’d like to say, as I have before, that the Bib Gourmand remains, in this country, far more useful than stars or the Top 100 Restaurants or Gastropubs or the proclamations of some blogging tosspot or other.

But in truth I went to Chequers (the lack of a The is going to get annoying, I can tell: we’ll get through it together) for a far simpler reason. I gave a list to my friend Dave, asked him to pick and he chose Chequers because it was the only only he had been to before. In hindsight, I probably should have predicted this outcome: Dave has raised risk aversion to an art form, never encountered an airport he didn’t want to arrive at four hours before his flight was scheduled to take off. He is a man who uses the L word constantly with his wife and all his close friends: unfortunately, it stands for logistics.

Anyway, from the outside it was hard to imagine it could be a bad choice. It’s in a particularly attractive part of the city, just off from the beautiful Georgian sweep of The Circus, and Rivers Street is so fetching that even before I’d set foot through the front door of Chequers I found myself wishing it was my local. And inside it was all tasteful and classy, wood-panelled walls in muted Farrow and Ball shades and a stunning parquet floor. I say I wished it was my local, but I couldn’t say whether it was one of those gastropubs that was still a pub, or whether you’d have to be eating to pay it a visit.

Not that it mattered in our case – my friends Dave, Al and I had made our way there with one thing on our mind: luncheon. We were given an especially nice table in a little three-sided nook off from one of the two dining rooms, with comfy banquettes and a nice view out across the pub.

The menu, too, was more cheffy than pubby. The only real concession to pub food was the presence of burger and chips or steak and chips, but other than that it was a real beauty pageant of great sounding dishes, all of which you could comfortably order. On any other day I could have been telling you about the octopus with romesco, or the thyme roasted bone marrow, the saag aloo fritters or the pork tenderloin with Stornaway black pudding. Starters jostled around the ten pound mark, mains ran a much wider gamut from seventeen to thirty.

So agonising choices all round, posed by a kitchen that seemed, on paper at least, to know exactly what it was doing. And although I’d say most of it was squarely Modern European, little hints – a ponzo cured yolk here, tamarind glazed oyster mushrooms there – spoke of a little culinary wanderlust.

Matters were further complicated by a specials board including roasted monkfish tail with sobrasada, or brill with seaweed butter. Fish courses were well represented in general and I should also add, because I never talk about this enough, that there were two credible meat-free options for both starters and mains, more than half of which appeared to be vegan.

We had plenty to catch up on, so it was some time before we got our shit together and placed our order. But in the meantime we occupied ourselves with a snack from the specials board, pork scratchings with apple compote. These were wonderful, light, Quaverish things which were somehow completely lacking in grease but still left your fingers shiny by the time you’d finished.

If I was being pedantic I’d say these were more pork rinds than pork scratchings, but it’s not like I was demanding a refund. The apple dip, almost a deep, fruity ketchup, went brilliantly. Our server had brought over a bottle of Fleurie, the fancy face of Beaujolais, and it was absolutely divine with enough complexity, we thought, to stand up to what we planned to order. We clinked glasses, with a good feeling about what lay ahead.

One thing Dave loves even more than logistics is venison, so when the menu offered multiple opportunities to eat it he was dead set on taking those opportunities. I might have inwardly rolled my eyes at him – predictable, risk averse Dave – and then he showed me up as the judgmental twat I am by ordering a phenomenal dish. A solitary venison faggot, deep and delicious, was plonked on a puddle of parsnip puree, itself ringed with jus, and crowned with parsnip crisps.

But the thing that made this so enviable was the salsa verde which anointed it. Venison with dark fruits or chocolate is a tried and tested way to tease out the characteristics of that singular meat. But salse verde? A new one on me, and downright brilliant. Dave claims he let me try some for completeness’ sake, for the review. But I think he just wanted to provoke starter envy.

I couldn’t complain too much, though, because Al and I had both plumped for an equally admirable dish. Lamb neck terrine (which we couldn’t help but pronounce as nectarine to our server, with predictably unamusing consequences) was a really wonderful, earthy choice. But that denseness was offset with a superb lightness of touch elsewhere.

Pea purée, all hyper-saturated colour and high-contrast flavour, was a perfect accompaniment. The terrine was studded with cubes of confit aubergine and the whole thing was set off with a tumble of girolles. The menu said they were pickled, but if they were it had been done very subtly. This cost nine pounds, and was every bit as tasty as it was decorous.

Now, normally my rule when I go on duty is to order something different from my companions. But I was feeling mutinous that day, no doubt a hangover from week after week of sitting across the table from Zoë watching her demolish my first choice on the menu, so for once I decided to go easy on myself and order the venison, as I knew Dave would do.

And as it turns out Al went for the same thing too, which I think amused our server. She was brilliant throughout the lunch by the way – fantastic at looking after us, hugely engaging and clearly enthusiastic about Chequers and what it does. She twinkled indulgently at the three of us from start to finish, although whether it was from genuine entertainment or pity I suspect we will never know.

So was the venison good enough to justify three separate orders? Well, it depends rather who you ask. Dave loved it and demolished it without complaint, Al did too. I was slightly more circumspect. Although I’m not sure why because every component worked. On paper it was a smash hit, the loin beautifully cooked, still a ruddy pink where it should have been.

And the cavolo nero was a ferrous joy – it’s one of my favourite veg and a surefire sign that autumn is well under way, even if it was still warm outside in November. Little wedges of golden beetroot and scattered blackberries added earthiness and sweetness. But the real star of the show, billed as a hash brown of all things, was a hefty brick of shredded potato, pressed and fried until burnished and crispy, a proper golden wonder. I found myself enjoying this more than the venison, although I don’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one – like it or not, it was the spud I found myself ekeing out.

So why did I like it rather than love it? Well, believe it or not it was a little too restrained for me. The jus, such as it was, was gorgeous (black garlic was involved, apparently) but the dish needed more of it. Venison is a dry meat at the best of times and this needed more sauce to bring everything together. Without that it was a bunch of well-behaved elements badly in search of an overarching theme (maybe, one day, I’ll make it into Pseud’s Corner).

It was also, at thirty pounds, the most expensive dish on the menu: I couldn’t help thinking of the previous day, when dinner at the Lyndhurst had involved pheasant breast, a croquette of shredded pheasant leg, a slab of confit potato, parsnip puree and a lake of gravy for considerably less money. The Lyndhurst might never get a Bib Gourmand, but for quality and value they can comfortably beat at least one pub that’s got one.

The choice of desserts was more compact than that of mains and starters, and because we all fancied two desserts we picked one each and one to share. The one in the middle of the table was Chequers’ pavlova, made with Pernod roasted fig and granola. I have to say that I’m glad this was the one we shared, because if I’d had one to myself I would have wanted to order another dessert to make up for the disappointment.

I love Pernod, I love figs, I love the sweetness of roasted fennel. This should have been right up my alley, but the Pernod was overpowering, brutally harsh and bitter. I had a spoonful and told the others they were welcome to it. Such a pity, though, because the meringue and the Chantilly cream were both outstanding.

My own personal dessert, although better than that, still didn’t scale the heights. I’m a sucker for a chocolate cremeux, and Chequers’ rendition was a glossy marvel. But serving it with a giant nugget of honeycomb that I struggled to break up with a spoon, half fearing that it would wang across the room, wasn’t a helpful combination. Blackberries made another appearance, pickled this time, although they’d been pickled with the same diffident touch as the girolles earlier on.

Maybe I was getting curmudgeonly by this point but I also didn’t understand why they’d festooned the whole thing with foliage. It made it look like something you’d find on the forest floor, if somebody’s owner hadn’t bothered to clean it up.

This might be sour grapes, because Al and Dave ordered something I never order, sticky toffee pudding, and it was the best sticky toffee pudding I’ve only ever had a spoonful of. I sniffily thought it was overkill serving it with salted caramel and a brandy snap biscuit on top and stem ginger nestled in the brandy snap. Well, this just goes to show that I know the square root of fuck all, because it was a miraculous dessert – every element working on its own, but completely transfigured by juxtaposition. The salted caramel sauce alone was worth the price of admission alone, the best I can remember (and I’ve tried a fair few).

“Why do people only say cheers with drinks?” said Dave as, thin-lipped and resentful, I took a sip of my dessert wine. “People ought to say cheers after the first mouthful of a dessert like this.” Smug wanker, I thought.

All good things must come to an end, and once we had digested, discussed and cogitated it was time to settle up and make our way across the city in search of somewhere to drink more and talk nonsense. Even then, in the back of my mind, I was thinking that Chequers, with that table, that view and the prospect that if I stayed another hour I might be able to excuse ordering a sticky toffee pudding to myself, was a decidedly difficult place to leave.

But the beers and banquettes at Kingsmead Street Bottle were calling to us, so it was time to go. Our meal came to just over two hundred and twenty pounds, not including tip. You could spend less, I’m sure, if you didn’t order multiple desserts and a trio of glasses of late harvest Semillon, but I didn’t leave feeling mugged.

A really beautiful pub doing really wonderful food is one of life’s great pleasures, as is a Saturday lunchtime spent in one with old friends,a good bottle of red, gossip and food envy. In that sense, Chequers was only ever going to be a success. And yet I do find myself weighing it against other places with similar credentials. I liked it far better than the Black Rat in Winchester which lost a Michelin star and lost its way. I’m not sure I preferred it to Oxford’s Magdalen Arms, where the prices are a little less steep and the food a lot less pristine.

And, of course, the nearest thing we have closer to home is the Lyndhurst: I’m sure if you picked it up and dropped it in Bath it would finally get the plaudits it always seems to miss out on. But nevertheless it’s impossible to dispute that Chequers has got so many things right, from the beauty of its dining room to the sheer quality of its welcome. And if I didn’t love everything I ate, I could appreciate that all of it, with the exception of that pavlova, was accomplished, clever and skilfully done.

So here goes one of those positive reviews that somehow, even so, isn’t quite positive enough: I thought Chequers was very good. I wouldn’t go to Bath just to eat there, but if I was in Bath, and I wasn’t in the business of constantly finding new places so I can write about them, I would definitely book another table. If ever you find yourself in Bath, I think you could do an awful lot worse.

Chequers – 8.3
50 Rivers St, Bath, BA1 2QA
01225 428924

https://chequersbath.net

Restaurant review: Los Gatos, Swindon

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When I announced on social media last month that I’d had a very enjoyable day eating and drinking my way round Swindon there was (admittedly a limited amount of) complete and utter astonishment. What? said one person, no doubt thinking I had been hacked. Good Lord! Where? said another.

A third, regular reader Trudy, was particularly interested, having recently moved to Swindon where, as fas as I’m aware, they don’t have a friendly neighbourhood restaurant blogger. I met Trudy at the recent ER readers’ lunch at Clay’s so I gave her a sneak preview of what this review is about to tell you: yes, there are places to eat and drink in Swindon, and they’re a lot better than you might expect.

I’m not kidding – Swindon has enough about it to justify a trip out west on the train. You have to do a thirty minute walk from the station, up a hill, but you are rewarded with Swindon’s Old Town which is a small but perfectly formed district full of nice shops, restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars. There’s an arts centre, and the Town Gardens, a beautiful Victorian park with a listed bandstand and a cafe (it also, according to the council’s website, hosts something called the “My Dad’s Bigger Than Your Dad Festival”: I love my dad dearly, but I’m not entering him in this any time soon).

Where had all this been hiding? You could almost imagine you were in a little town on the outskirts of the outskirts of the Cotswolds, and then I realised that I sort of almost was. And truly, I had a wonderful afternoon eating and drinking and making merry in the company of my friends Dave, who lives in Wootton Bassett but I suspect wishes he lived in Cirencester, and Al, who lives in Cirencester and so doesn’t have to.

We started out with a couple of outstanding coffees from the small, difficult to find but deeply charming Pour Bois – which I pronounced to Dave as if it was French before realising that of course it was pronounced poor boyz because we were in Swindon, not Montparnasse. My mistake: it’s not easy being Frasier Crane in a town full of Bob “Bulldog” Briscoes.

After lunch we wandered over to Ray’s, an ice cream parlour which is an Old Town institution, and sat on the wall opposite eating our ice creams in mute contentment. And then we wandered over to the Town Gardens, which – don’t hate me for saying this – slightly puts Forbury Gardens to shame, not least because it has a lovely little cafe serving superb coffee which was miles better than anything you could get from the equivalent kiosk in Reading. The beans are by local Light Bulb Coffee, and I also picked some up to try at home (it’s marvellous stuff).

After ice cream and coffee there was nothing for it but to try some beer. Did you know that Swindon has a nascent craft beer scene? I didn’t either, but it turns out it does, with several great venues dotted along the Old Town’s Devizes Road. We started out in Tap & Brew, local brewery Hop Kettle’s Swindon tap room, which served some stonking beers: my favourite was Kepler, a proper fruit explosion of a NEIPA so good that I bought a bottle to stash in my bag (it didn’t make it to the following weekend, that’s how good it was).

After that we had a short stumble to the Tuppenny, a lovely pub with an impressive selection of beer on keg – including both Double-Barrelled’s Parka and DEYA’s stupendous Steady Rolling Man as permanent fixtures – and a belting can fridge. I had some splendid pales, made a detour into sweet, indulgent stouts that tasted, by pure witchcraft, of battenburg or chocolate orange, and I rolled out to catch my train home totally convinced that Swindon’s Old Town could match any enclave Reading had to offer when it came to the finer things in life.

That’s all well and good, but I maintain that any day trip away has to be anchored around a meal, whether that’s dinner or lunch. And for Swindon, for me, that destination was never in doubt. So after our coffees at Pour Bois, and before our ice cream at Ray’s, Dave, Al and I headed to Los Gatos, in the heart of Old Town, to see if it still lived up to the billing it had in my mind as The Restaurant Worth Visiting Swindon For.

Los Gatos is a tapas restaurant, and it’s been going for nearly twenty years. I don’t get to Swindon often, but whenever I do I make sure I have lunch there. I’ve said before that tapas restaurants in this country tend to either be run by Spaniards, with mixed results, or by evangelical Brits who are trying to reimagine a tapas bar as its best possible self. Oxford’s Arbequina, Bristol’s Bar 44 and Bravas definitely fall into that category.

But Los Gatos, for me, feels more like it’s trying to recreate than perfect – and there’s nothing at all wrong with that, because some days a recreation of Malaga or Granada in England would be a wonderful thing in its own right. Despite that it, too, was founded and run by Brits and named in tribute to the legendary Malaga bar of the same name. Originally they had a site round the corner, but they moved to their current site a minute down the road and then, during lockdown, they sold up.

The new owners have expanded by taking the site next door, and this was my first visit since the pandemic so I was a tad discombobulated by it not looking how I remembered. But the fact remains that it’s really nicely done, and it helps that our table was in the original room, where I’ve eaten before. It is a really lovely space, with tasteful terrazzo marble-effect tables and – as there should be – stools up at the bar. The room had plenty of natural light, attractive dark beams and a blackboard full of wines and sherries by the glass.

I’m not going to go all Berkshire Live and tell you it was just like being in Malaga, but I have to say the overall effect wasn’t a million miles off. We started with a crisp glass of fino apiece – turns out there were three Frasier Cranes in town after all – and enjoyed the building buzz of a restaurant turning a very healthy trade at lunchtime. Again, I stopped to remind myself that I was in Swindon. In honesty, I did that more than once during the meal.

The joy of a place like Los Gatos is looking at the menu, wanting to order nearly everything and then realising that in a tapas restaurant, provided there are enough of you, you can have a decent stab at it. And Los Gatos’ menu is very much that kind of menu with most dishes around the seven pound mark, all of them tempting.

There’s plenty of cooking on display too, rather than an over-reliance on buying and slicing, so although you can get jamon or queso they’re a very small section of a large and diverting selection. Typical Andulucian dishes are well represented, like spinach with chickpeas or fried aubergine with honey, and I suspect you could quite happily bring a vegetarian here: perhaps one of the main indicators that you’re not in Spain is that they even make a little effort to accommodate vegans.

But Dave, Al and I were neither of those things, so as Dave sipped an Alhambra and Al and I tackled a beautifully fresh, fruity white from Jumilla – decent value at just over thirty pounds – we did one of the most enjoyable things you can do in a tapas restaurant. We chatted away, picked out our favourite dishes, haggled and scheduled, putting them in our first and second wave. As we did, I thought about how much I’d missed this kind of sociable eating, with these two. Of course, I didn’t tell them that then, because we’re men in the last gasps of our forties, but writing it here will have to suffice.

Our first set of dishes were all, without exception, winners – so much so that my usual anal urge to photograph everything pretty much deserted me. That’s bad news for both of us – me because I’ll have to rely on my immortal prose and you because you’ll have to read it. The very pick of the dishes was the hake in beer batter – it’s a fish beloved of the Spanish but Los Gatos bring as much out of it as anywhere I’ve been in Spain. Three huge chunks of the stuff, in the lightest batter, sprinkled liberally with flakes of salt was the perfect reintroduction to their food, and a deep, golden saffron mayo played nicely with it, perhaps more gently than a honking alioli would have done.

Everything seemed geared for three to share because we also got three superb croquetas – much more dense and substantial than I’m used to with more heft and less bechamel. That might not suit everyone, but it really suited me. If you came to Los Gatos as a pair or a four those two dishes would cause you serious problems, but the three of us felt very fortunate.

Jamon – Serrano rather than anything fancier – was decent and hand carved, with a good umami note and a nice marbling of fat. It didn’t perhaps have the really intensely savoury quality, or melting fat of the very best Spanish hams, but it was eight quid or so and far from stingy, so I wasn’t in the mood to complain. By that point in the lunch I wasn’t in the mood to complain about anything, not even Dave’s jokes.

I also loved the mushrooms in a cream and sherry sauce, achieving a precarious balance between glossy sweetness and the underlying savoury note just peeking through thanks to the oloroso. We didn’t order any bread for the sauce, though, which was a mistake. I’ve been doing this gig for ten years and I still make schoolboy errors like that.

Our greed was such that there were still two other dishes in our first order, and one was a dish I’ve loved at Los Gatos for a long time. Morcilla de Burgos came beautifully presented, two discs of earthy, fragrant black pudding sandwiching a glorious middle layer of sweet piquillo peppers, quail’s egg perched on top. The prettiest thing we ate all day, so naturally the one I didn’t photograph, but a really gorgeous morsel. Also possibly the hardest to share – or perhaps I just didn’t want to – so if you go to Los Gatos order your own personal portion. For my sake, if not for yours.

And last of all, because we had been carb-free up to that point – we ordered an arroz con pollo. I seem to recall that Los Gatos serves paella at the weekends, and this was a miniature version of that. I quite liked it, and I was glad to see it topped with beautifully done chicken thigh, but again it was probably one of the less shareable things we ordered. The rice did come in handy though, because that sherry and cream sauce had a very agreeable habit of sticking to every single grain, if you crossed the streams.

And then, not at all sated but the edges knocked off our hunger, we regrouped. We looked at our list of outstanding dishes and made our decisions – did we still want them? Was it enough? Was it too much? If I’d just been with Dave, a slim man who very much intends to stay that way, it might have been tricky to get them all past the committee stage, but Al – whippet thin despite eating like a horse – has been known to have two desserts, just because, so I knew I’d be safe.

If the second round of tapas wasn’t quite as impressive as the first, that was partly because we were no longer ravenous. Also, the dishes you absolutely cannot bear to miss out on always end up in the first round, so the bar is meant to be lower when you go back to the menu.

And probably the two weakest dishes were in this section, although I’m not sure either would have made my must-order list in the first place. Calamares were decent but unspecial, and not a patch on the ones you can get in Spain, and the black beans with pancetta and chorizo were surprisingly bland for a dish including two of the greatest cured meats known to man. I found my mind drifting to the cannelini beans at Bristol’s COR, zippy with lemon and topped with breadcrumbs, achieving so much more with fewer ingredients.

We’d also ordered a classic dish, chorizo cooked simply in wine, and it was the kind of thing that restored your faith in a restaurant, both in terms of their ability to buy the right stuff and then cook it spot on. If I knew where they got their chorizo from I’d place an order, because I’m fed up of trying to rustle dishes up with the slightly gristly nonsense you get from Brindisa these days. We could easily have ordered a second dish of this, and I rather wish we had.

We also ordered chicken livers, again in a sherry and cream sauce, and although I didn’t mind it I didn’t think, with hindsight, that it was different enough from the mushrooms to justify ordering both.

And our penultimate dish was the most expensive thing I found on the menu, Galician-style octopus. When I’ve had this in Spain it’s just octopus, heavy on the paprika – and the octopus for that matter – and although octopus is always a joy, it can be a tad one note. I really liked what Los Gatos did with the dish, serving it with new potatoes and capers almost as a hot salad. And the octopus was beautiful – tender and tasty with no bounce or toughness, which is by no means a given abroad, let alone here. I think Dave and Al let me have more than my fair share of this dish. They’re good like that.

And the final thing we ordered? Another portion of that hake. Take a look at the picture below and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.

Service was great. In the course of researching this review I chanced upon some online reviews that said that it wasn’t the same since the restaurant expanded, that a staff of two or three had become a legion and that something magical had been lost. Well, I guess we all sometimes feel that way when our favourites get big and successful but personally I thought the staff were terrific, very efficient, just friendly enough and I was quite happy with them not being overworked. I’m a bit of a pinko like that.

We might well have had dessert, but knowing that there was an ice cream parlour literally on the other side of the road curtailed any ambitions we had in that regard. I couldn’t talk either of them into a Pedro Ximenez either, because beer was calling too. Our meal came to just under fifty pounds a head, not including tip, which I thought was a steal for everything we had.

Ordinarily I start every review of a tapas restaurant by complaining that Reading doesn’t have a tapas restaurant and never really has. You could set your watch by it. So this time, for novelty value, I thought I could shoehorn it in at the end. But rather than say that, I just want to say that this kind of restaurant, and this kind of eating, is among my very favourite kind. Ordering everything, trying everything, sharing your joy and diminishing any disappointments – it really is one of the best ways to eat there is. And when you find somewhere that does it well, you’ll gladly travel to it.

In my case, that does seem to involve flying to Andalucia at least once a year, but I am really delighted that Los Gatos, a mere half hour train ride away, remains more than good enough as a substitute for that. The fact that around it has sprung up this magnificent little ecosystem of coffee, craft beer, green space and ice cream is the icing on the cake. Old Town, square mile for square mile, is arguably a lovelier spot than anywhere in Reading, I think – and, yes, that includes Caversham.

So if Spanish food is even remotely of interest to you, I highly recommend that you make your way to Swindon – despite the incredulity of everybody you tell at work – because it very much merits the journey. I think I prefer Los Gatos to Oxford’s Arbequina, much as I love Arbequina, and it edges out Newbury’s Goat On The Roof, too. I still need to make it to El Cerdo in Maidenhead, at some point, but I doubt somehow that I’ll love it quite the way I love Los Gatos. 

And in terms of our closest Spanish restaurant, Wokingham’s Sanpa, put it this way: when I went back there earlier in the year I worried that the rating I gave it was far too harsh. Having now eaten at Los Gatos and seen what commited Brits can create as a temple to Spain, in an unfashionable town, I think that if anything I was far too generous. Go to Los Gatos instead: have a sherry, order that morcilla, send me a photo. I doubt I’ll enjoy many lunches more this year than the one I had there.

Los Gatos – 8.7
1-3 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BJ
01793 488450

https://www.losgatos.uk