Tag: Graeme

Restaurant review: The French House, Soho

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

It would be easy to envy London-based restaurant reviewers, I think. Just imagine having such a broad canvas, such an embarrassment of riches, every kind of restaurant at every level, from the plush, spenny Mayfair spots A.A. Gill used to frequent to the unsung cash-only middle-of-nowhere places Vittles has made its speciality – and, I suppose, everywhere in between. Like Samuel Johnson almost said, imagine getting tired of the London restaurant scene! How jaded you would have to be.

And yet… I don’t know. I think there are huge consolations to being a gastronomic tourist in the capital. For a start, everyone writes about London restaurants. All the critics, all the Substackers, all the people jabbering to camera in their weird self-parodying voices on TikTok. It would be exhausting to be in that pack of misfits, let alone trying to keep pace with them.

It’s all about the urge to be first – to get to the new place before everybody else, or to get there at the same time but say it better. We have reached the point where various critics have visited, say, Josephine in Marylebone in recent weeks and come down solemnly on either side of the fence, saying it’s great or bobbins, as if they’re handing down Supreme Court judgments. And really, who cares?

Well, if you’re invested in it I’m sure you do but from a distance it feels like the kind of Inside Baseball stuff that only interests a small number of people. There are at least a couple of Substacks specially for those people, too: I imagine if you fancy a very niche printed word take on Gogglebox they’d be catnip to you.

No, I quite like being free of all that. I get it in Reading, that if a new place opens people want to know what it’s like and that makes me want to get there fairly soon after it opens; if you’re hankering for a review of Nua, or Pho 86 or even Take Your Time, the new spot that’s opened where Dolce Vita used to be, don’t worry. I will get to them, I promise.

But to have that feeling amplified to the max, to see all these hot new places and know you only have so many evenings, so much time, so many spare calories, so much money? I don’t envy any of them that, not even the ones whose decisions are made infinitely simpler by choosing the restaurants that bung them cash, free food or both.

Of course, there’s also the FOMO I always associate with big cities. It’s bad enough when I go on holiday to, say, Lisbon, and the infuriating brain that has unhelpfully held me hostage all my adult life – the one I struggle to quieten – looks at all the places on my narrowed-down shortlist before piping up about every single restaurant that didn’t make the cut. What about all of these?

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Lisbon, I ate well there and people tell me my city guide is very useful. But for each list of places I visit there is always an equal and opposite running order of the ones I didn’t choose, all taunting me with the possibility that they might have been even better. I copy-paste them into a new note entitled Next time when I get home, but mainly to try and fool myself.

So I am very comfortable with my relationship with reviewing London restaurants. I get to places I have always wanted to visit – a real mix of the old and new, no real guiding principle behind them except that I fancy them. Often it means things go brilliantly and I make a favourite new discovery, sometimes I’m underwhelmed by somewhere that has been hyped to high heaven (Chick ‘N’ Sours has since closed). But even that is as it should be: if I loved literally everywhere I went in London I’d be no better than Eating With Tod and the world of food doesn’t need another Toby Inskip. It already has one Toby Inskip too many.

All that explains why Monday morning found me outside Flat White on Berwick Street ahead of a lunch reservation in Soho, at the French House. David Schwimmer – all in black, bags under his eyes, baseball-capped, quiet and polite – had just been in there grabbing a coffee and the staff, who were probably discovering him on Netflix for the very first time, were decent enough not to act starstruck. And then someone even more celebrated crossed my path – my friend Graeme, my lunch companion that day, merrily wandering aimlessly through Soho after a morning spent shopping.

So off we walked to the French House together. Our lunch had been a spur of the moment thing: it was the last Bank Holiday before Christmas, and we were both at a loose end. His wife was away camping, mine was at work so we decided to indulge in one of life’s great joys, a leisurely lunch on a day when you’d ordinarily be at work, a Monday stolen back from the cosmos.

The French House is one of London’s great pubs, which means that it’s one of the world’s great pubs, and it’s been a favourite of mine for many years. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat downstairs in among the regular churn of Soho types, tourists and people passing through, drinking Breton cider and chatting away to those I already knew and, often, others I didn’t know from Adam.

I’ve introduced a fair few people to it over the years, too – including Graeme, who had never been – and I never tire of seeing them fall for it the way I have. The acclaimed Devonshire is an attempt to manufacture a classic in the laboratory – and don’t get me wrong, the people in that lab are experts and I’m sure they’ve done an outstanding job. But the French House is the real deal.

I won’t bore you with the trivia – all that stuff about de Gaulle getting drunk there in exile, or Dylan Thomas drinking there, or Lucian Freud. You can read about that anywhere, and my interest on that sunny day was mostly about the dining room upstairs. That too has a storied history, by the way.

Fergus Henderson cooked there over thirty years ago with his wife, before leaving to set up some unsung joint called St John. I ate there nearly fifteen years ago back when it was Polpetto, an offshoot of Russell Norman’s Polpo, just after it opened; celebrated chef Florence Knight was in the kitchen, near the start of her career. Then Polpetto moved elsewhere, and went the way of the rest of the Polpo empire, and that room above the pub lay dormant.

But seven years ago chef Neil Borthwick took it over, offering a pared-back menu of French classics, and I’ve pretty much wanted to eat there ever since. I’ve even booked it a couple of times, and then ended up having to cancel, or choosing to go elsewhere. The thing is, the French House is that unusual thing in this day and age: an almost homework-proof restaurant.

You won’t find a current menu online anywhere, and the restaurant’s website directs you to an Instagram feed with pictures of the latest menu. It last posted in May last year, so all you can get is a vague idea of the sort of things you might eat. So Graeme, a man with a sense of adventure, was the perfect wingman for this one. He also quite fancied lunching at venerable Mayfair pub The Guinea Grill (“it serves meat pies with sides of offal” was his rationale), but agreed that the French House would suit him just fine.

It’s the loveliest dining room, a small and peaceful space above the small and boisterous bar underneath. It has a strange kind of placid calm, all oxblood walls and wood panelling, tasteful black and white prints everywhere paying tribute to the pub’s past. I don’t think it seated more than 16 people and was almost full when we were there, with a second sitting coming along towards the end of our lunch. You could almost be anywhere, but you wouldn’t necessarily think the clamour of Balans, of Bar Italia, of Ronnie Scott’s, Bar Termini and all those branches of Soho House were the other side of those big, handsome windows.

The menu was handwritten and changed daily, another thing the Devonshire probably likes to pretend it invented. Here was a novel experience, my first chance to see an actual French House menu with today’s date on it, let alone one written in 2025. It was a thing of beauty, restrained and limited. Four starters and two mains, bolstered by a blackboard listing specials: two more starters, two more mains and a couple of bigger sharing dishes, a huge pork chop or a cote de bœuf.

When you handwrite a menu every day, I don’t really understand the logic of also having a blackboard, but perhaps the specials were in shorter supply and doing it that way saved them drawing a line through all sixteen menus.

The French House is also, by the way, far from being a prohibitively expensive place to eat. Most of the starters were £12 and the mains, excluding those sharers, were between £28 and £35. But before we were ready to make our choices we had an apéritif, a drink marked on the menu as Today’s Tipple.

I’d never heard of a Pousse Rapière before, but it turned out to be an orange cognac liqueur from Charente mixed with English sparkling wine and it was properly divine, like a Kir royal for ponces. I was very taken with it, and one of the two servers brought the bottle over to show us what was in it. “You can probably buy it in Gerry’s” she said, but sadly the Old Compton Street booze emporium was closed that day.

Although the menu changes every day, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any version of it that didn’t include Graeme’s starter. Sourdough toast came slathered in goat’s curd but then the pièce de résistance, the thing that propelled this dish into the stratosphere, was the entire bulb of confit garlic crowning the whole affair. You just had to ease out a clove – a process which took minimal effort, as far as I could see – smoosh it on your toast and curd and heaven was a forkful away. I always let my dining companion choose first, and Graeme nabbed this. But if he hadn’t, I would have ordered it and this paragraph would have been even more of a paean of praise.

I on the other hand chose from the specials menu and was rewarded with an equally worthy example of the genre known as great things with toast. The French House’s steak tartare was not only one of the best I’ve had but arguably the most classic. This is a dish I’ve enjoyed all over the place – at Marmo in Bristol, in Paris, Bruges and Montpellier, and usually everyone tries to put their spin on it, whether that’s relying on a fudgy, slow-cooked egg, smoking the beef or spiking the whole thing with gochujang.

But I think it’s at the French House that I had this dish at its most textbook. No whistles and bells, no twists or gimmicks. Just gorgeous beef with plenty of capers and, at a guess, finely chopped cornichons, that stupendous alchemy of salt and sharpness that makes this dish, at its best, an unalloyed pleasure. They did a larger version of this dish with frites, too, but I was happy to have the smaller option, streaked with rays of golden sunshine from that broken yolk, a perfect precursor to what lay ahead.

The French House’s wine list is a curious one in that there’s nothing that cheap on it but, simultaneously, a lot that isn’t ridiculously expensive (it also, refreshingly, contains a reasonable number of half bottles). I wish I’d taken a photo but it did seem like a lot of the bottles were £50, and the one we chose, an Alsatian pinot gris, definitely was.

It was by Famille Hugel, as were many of the other options, and for what it’s worth I found it delightful. It felt like a dangerously easy to drink white that could quite happily smudge the sharp edges of an afternoon, and both Graeme and I were more than in the mood for that.

It went superbly, I suspect, with Graeme’s main course which was another masterpiece of simplicity. Three muscular, golden lengths of monkfish tail, mostly off the bone, came resting on a little mat of steamed spinach, served with ribbons of fennel and a glossy purée: the menu suggested it was fennel, too, but Graeme wasn’t so sure about that.

Graeme loved this dish, and rhapsodised about it from start to finish. A bit of a flex, as people younger than me like to say, from someone who had been agitating in favour of a sturdy pie with an offal chaser, but that’s one thing I really like about Graeme: he, more than most people I know, properly contains multitudes.

The words describing my main leapt off the blackboard and onto my lips when the server asked us what we wanted to order. Well, two words did anyway, confit duck. I find it so hard not to order it in restaurants but my lack of imagination is rarely rewarded quite as profoundly as it was at the French House. A huge duck leg came with a bronzed carapace, some of the fat remaining underneath but much of it sacrificed to achieve the happy medium of yielding meat and skin like crackling.

So often confit duck doesn’t quite achieve that balance, or it does but it’s too small, or it doesn’t and it’s too small. Rarely is it as beautiful, and substantial, a wonder as this. I could eat this all the live long day, or perhaps more realistically once a week, but maybe it’s for the best that it’s a far more irregular treat in real life. It came on a rib-sticking pile of lentils shot through with carrot, celery, ambrosial lardons: there might even have been some braised lettuce in there, but that may have been my imagination playing tricks.

This was a complete plate of food in a way many dishes never are, to the point where I didn’t envy the neighbouring table the very attractive portion of frites they took delivery of partway through my eating this. Well, almost: I think I 90% didn’t envy them. 75%, perhaps.

Time spent with a good friend is a bit like a really happy dream, in some respects. When you look back you know you had a wonderful time but you can’t remember the specifics of what you said. So Graeme and I caught up on his house move, our families, the impressive women we’d fluked our way into marrying, his belief that he was still the best Doctor Who we’d never had.

We also shared a firm conviction that summer wasn’t over until it was over, frustrated by the widespread defeatist doom-mongering on social media that it was as good as autumn already. A lunch at the French House felt like a brilliant way to rage against the dying of the light brought about by the impending end of British Summer Time. See? I slipped in a Dylan Thomas reference after all.

I had read everywhere that you had to order the French House’s madeleines, but also that they were baked to order and took fifteen minutes, so I persuaded Graeme that we should order them and another dessert to tide us over while they were prepared. Oh, and a dessert wine to enjoy into the bargain. Again, our server gave us loads of brilliant advice about that section of the drinks menu and we ended up sipping a Petit Prince de Guillevic, which was a bit like a pommeau, made with eau de vie and cider.

It was heavenly, and transported me to the first time I tried pommeau, on a holiday to Normandy with my dad the best part of twenty-five years ago. It also reminded me that I have a bottle of a British equivalent, brought out this year by Herefordshire’s Little Pomona, in my garage and that I really should enjoy it before the clocks go back.

I gave Graeme first choice of desserts, not wanting a repeat of the chocolate mousse incident from three years ago, and he eschewed the chocolate mousse so I felt it was my duty to, well, chew it. It was truly glorious, a dense boozy sphere of the stuff redolent with rum and served with just the right amount of excellent crème fraîche to stop it being too much. By which I mean too much for most people: it was absolutely fine for me, but I loved the crème fraiche all the same.

What had prompted Graeme to risk dessert dissatisfaction and swerve that mousse? He was persuaded by our excellent server to try the dessert on the specials, a raspberry savarin. It was sold to him as a bit like a baba au rhum, only with raspberry liqueur instead of rum. I don’t think that necessarily did the dessert justice.

The thing is, a sponge soaked through with booze feels instinctively like it should be sodden, be heavy. That is, you might think, what you’re pricing in when you order this dish. But this was airier than any rum baba I’ve tried, the sponge almost float-away light, but still with raspberry coulis lurking at its epicentre. But before that you had that indulgent sponge, and raspberries ringing a heap of the lightest Chantilly cream.

This dish is absolutely not the kind of thing I would ever order, but after trying a spoonful of Graeme’s I can tell you that if I ever got the chance to eat a whole one of these I’d grab it swiftly with both hands. Maybe this time Graeme had performed a Jedi mind trick on me? You couldn’t say it was undeserved.

By this point most of the people who had started their lunches at the same time as us had settled up and moved on, which I always consider a little moment of triumph. The dating couple at the next table had ordered exactly the same combination of dishes as we had, him my choices and her Graeme’s. “See, you’re the women in this arrangement” I said to Graeme, enjoying the novelty value because, at least half of the time, I’m not even the man in my own marriage.

Most of the other tables left before us because they’d made the mistake of passing on the madeleines. In a meal full of showstoppers we’d left the very best till last, a board with six warm madeleines, all scalloped edges, dusted with icing sugar and served with a little ramekin of lemon curd that was somehow sunnier than the yolk on my steak tartare, sunnier even than the rays pouring in through the windows into that ravishing dining room.

Dipping those madeleines into the curd, biting, tasting, raving and repeating did something wonderful: it perfected a meal that had been pretty close to perfect anyway. These are worth visiting the French House for in their own right, but I’m not sure that’s saying much, because so was everything else.

After we had finished them Borthwick left the kitchen – so he’d been at the stoves that day – and walked past our table and both Graeme and I thanked him and went bananas about the madeleines in a way that was probably more enthusiastic than it was coherent.

Borthwick very graciously, with an air of someone who’d had this conversation many times, told us that they’d originally been the creation of a Kiwi he worked with in the kitchen who had a real genius for baking. Although he had since quit cooking to bring up his kids the madeleines stayed on the menu, kind of his legacy.

I have no idea what the chap’s name was, but I suspect many London diners owe him a debt of thanks. Eating these madeleines I could sort of understand how Proust got all those novels out of them. Graeme said they had ruined Waitrose madeleines for him, which is in its way equally high praise.

I was sad to ask for our bill and to leave, but I knew that you couldn’t stay in that gorgeous room and eat nothing when other people could make excellent use of those tables, and I was also aware that it was London and that other lovely tables lay downstairs and beyond, and that I could drink Breton cider at the ones downstairs and carry on probing Graeme’s credentials to be the next Doctor Who and the first from Middlesbrough (“lots of planets have a North-East”, he proudly told me later).

Our bill, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just over £226. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that this was as good value as any meal I’ve had on duty this year.

The rest of the day was every bit as agreeable: drinks in the French House, an amble through Trafalgar Square and down to the Embankment for a couple of companionable glasses of wine sat outside Gordon’s, while Graeme gazed lovingly at every single dog at every single neighbouring table. And then we headed back to Paddington for – shamefully – a little booze fuelled sustenance at Market Halls before our journeys home.

But the way to best put that lunch in perspective is to think about the messages I got from Graeme the following day. “There isn’t a single course of that meal I’m not still thinking about” he said. “It was so good.” I’ve thought about it, and he’s right: I reckon I’ve thought of every single course at least once a day since Monday and, in the case of those madeleines, several times a day. And I’ve also thought about Graeme’s order, and how I would have been just as happy if it had been mine. And the things neither of us ordered – the rillette, or the tomato and lovage salad, or those frites: I’m pretty sure I’d adore those too.

Best of all, now that I’ve been to the French House and loved it, the fact that I can’t see a menu online goes from a homework-proofing source of anxiety to a matter of constant wonder and delight. I don’t know what I would get there, but I know that I would like it. Put that way, the prospect of going there again, which I’m sure I will, feels like a piece of magic you rarely get in restaurants these days.

So I am very glad I picked the French House this week and that, free from the need to keep up with the Joneses of the London food media, I was completely at liberty to do so. Because the French House has that indefinable feeling of authenticity that was somehow lacking when I visited the likes of Lapin earlier in the year. It feels like the team behind Lapin have been to, and loved, places like the French House. But it feels like the team behind the French House have been to, and loved, France. That’s it. That’s the difference between good and great in a nutshell.

The French House – 9.4
49 Dean Street, London, W1 5BG
020 74372477

https://www.frenchhousesoho.com

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Restaurant review: Côte

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

Here’s what happened: I was making Friday night dinner plans with my friend Graeme and I said I’d give him some restaurants to choose from, a mixture of places I wanted to review (or re-review) and others I just fancied eating at. My text was all ready to send, and then I stopped for a minute and thought what about Côte? So I added Côte to the list of places I was due to re-review and pinged the message over to Graeme, fully expecting him to pick somewhere else.

Why don’t we do Côte? came the reply. I haven’t been for a while, and it’s such a good chain restaurant.

Appropriately Graeme’s reasons for choosing it were the same as mine for including it in my selection. The last time I went there was something like eighteen months ago, with my family, to celebrate my just having got engaged. But before that? I honestly couldn’t tell you. And yet before the pandemic I used to go an awful lot – it was one of my regular spots.

I do wonder whether the pandemic had something to do with it. Because when Covid struck national Côte did what many restaurants did, diversifying into heat at home options. But Côte did it differently to everybody else, and unlike nearly everybody else they are still doing it years later, when for most restaurants their schemes, entirely born out of necessity, were shelved ages go.

Côte decided to take advantage of the fact that many of its dishes were prepared in a central kitchen and then finished in the restaurant, turning what you could potentially see as a weakness into a Covid-era hidden strength. And it continues today: Côte At Home still offers many of the dishes you can get in their restaurants, portioned for two people, for decidedly less money.

Back when I was reviewing takeaways and meal kits, I reviewed Cote At Home. And the truth was that I didn’t know what to make of it: it was good value, and undeniably polished, and somehow occupied a completely new genre that wasn’t takeaway, wasn’t meal kits, wasn’t eating in restaurants and wasn’t ready meals. What on earth was it, then? I’m still not entirely sure.

But I can’t help feeling that Côte At Home, although it may have saved the chain from going under, slightly changed the way I thought about the restaurant. Because if many of Côte’s dishes were just glorified ready meals you could cook at home, was there still a point to going to the restaurant to eat them there, spending more money in the process? And if that was the case three years ago when the shockwaves from the pandemic started to subside, wasn’t it even more the case now, when eating out is more and more of a luxury?

I didn’t know the answers, and it felt like a return to Côte might provide them. Besides, it was a Friday night at the end of an incredibly long week at work, and I figured I’d earned a good meal, a catch up with a good friend and at least a bottle of wine, and I was hoping for an enjoyable evening irrespective of whether my visit also solved those bigger, thornier questions. After all, nobody can dissect stuff for its deeper meaning 24/7. Not even me.

I always forget how nice Côte’s dining room is. You could be forgiven, eating at one of its former neighbours – Brown’s, or TGI Friday – for thinking that these deep, largely windowless rooms are uniformly unlovely spaces. But Côte’s has always been both a luxe and comforting spot. The tables at the front, that catch the daylight when there is some, are great if you’re having brunch or lunch.

But the rest is equally agreeable once the sun’s gone down. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, there’s something about its banquettes, bentwood chairs, booths and clever lighting that makes it feel like a little oasis amid the Oracle Riverside’s brashness and bluster. I don’t think the room has changed in the ten plus years that I’ve been going there. It’s never needed to.

Graeme was already at a table when we got there, but otherwise the restaurant was close to empty.

“It’s worrying, isn’t it?” he said. “When I went past the burger place I thought it was closed, and even Nando’s was dead. Nando’s!”

“I guess January’s a very long month, and it’s the weekend before payday for most people.”

“I’m so glad we picked Côte though. Wine, meat and cheese – all the main food groups.”

We ordered a drink and began catching up while I tried to work out which of the items on the menu were least likely to have been produced in a central kitchen. I was looking forward to a cider – Côte always stocked proper, old-school Breton cidre – so I was disappointed to see that they’d switched to a brand called, of all things, “Sassy”. I had a beer instead.

If I’d looked at their website, which says that ‘SASSY brings a naughty nature to the world of Cider and sets out to premiumise this wonderful drink,’ with ‘one foot in the traditions of Normandy and the other striding towards the future of cider’ it would have made me doubly unlikely to try it. Apparently it’s “inspired by the cider served at Château de Sassy” which is, to my astonishment, a real place. Unlike premiumise, which is absolutely not a real verb.

The menu at Côte hasn’t changed significantly in over a decade, which again I find oddly comforting. Not for them attempts to modernise, introduce fusion flavours, or provide low calorie options. Prices are definitely higher than they used to be, which mainly signifies that it’s 2025: starters are between seven quid and a tenner, the mains approach the twenty pound mark but are careful, for the most part, not to overstep that.

All that said, Côte’s prix fixe is available all evening on weekdays, which I’m not sure was always the case. At eighteen pounds for two courses or twenty-two pounds for three, it’s roughly the price that LSB’s set menu used to be back in the day, another barometer of how eating out has got more costly in recent years. Côte was also offering some Alpine specials, a range of small plates which sorely tempted Graeme – especially the tartiflette, combining the holy trinity of spuds, bacon and cheese.

I was impressed by how resolutely French the wine list was. With the exception, of port, you won’t find a single wine on it from any other country. The one concession to modishness was a solitary orange wine, which seems also to be an Alpine special. Graeme gave to job of choosing to me and I was delighted to see a Alsatian producer on there, Trimbach, that I liked. I’ve always had their whites before, but their pinot noir was a real treat, with plenty of depth. At thirty-seven pounds, it was something like twice the retail value, a relative bargain.

People started trickling in and taking up tables as we had those beautiful first sips and carried on setting the world to rights. Graeme told me that the last time he’d been to Côte was something like a couple of years ago for his daughter’s eighteenth birthday, and I told him that I too had been here last for a family event.

“But that’s the thing about Côte” said Graeme. “I’ve been here for family events and with a big group of friends, or just with Amy, and it’s really, really good for all of them.”

I thought about it and I realised that it was true for me too. I’d been here with big groups and small groups, with a partner or on my own. I’d descended on it with a gang for a pre-beer festival brunch, back when Reading had a beer festival, and I’d taken up a sunlit table outside with the prix fixe, a bottle of cidre and a good book, back in the days when I lived in the centre and had a spouse who was overseas with work. It was hard, really, to think of an occasion which I hadn’t marked at Côte.

“Back in the early days of the blog when I first started doing features I did one about the best place for al fresco dining, and another about the best place for solo dining. And Côte ended up on both of them. Actually, with pretty much any feature I wrote – al fresco, solo, pre-theatre – it was hard not to pick Côte.”

This was the point when I began to worry. Because the review I really didn’t want to write was the one where the overarching narrative was this: Reading’s favourite chain used to be Côte, but then Honest and Pho came to town and everything changed. What we wanted from a chain became different, and Côte got sadder and sadder, a shadow of its former self, all on its own on the Oracle Riverside as each of its neighbours gradually gave up the ghost.

Don’t get me wrong, I still would have written that review if it had turned out to be that kind of meal. But my relief began when the starters arrived, and gradually became replaced with something else – if not euphoria, then definitely delight. I’m sorry if that removes the element of suspense, but I didn’t feel like leaving you hanging. And besides, I know a lot of you scroll down and look at the rating at the bottom first anyway, don’t you?

Graeme was set on the tartiflette from the moment he saw it on the menu, and it didn’t disappoint him. Côte’s menu says that its Alpine specials are small plates, but there was nothing small about this. It was an enormous bowl, filled with a brick of potatoes, cheese, onions and bacon and looking at it I was simultaneously sad I hadn’t ordered it and worried about how far I’d have made it through the meal if I had. 

That said, the forkful I tried was excellent.Everything was how you wanted it to be, from firm, almost waxy potatoes to the liberal quantities of Comte and Tomme de Savoie in the mix. Now, I’m always a bit dubious about people who refer to a single dish, especially a starter, as a “meal in itself”. Partly because I’ve never felt that way about any single dish, and partly because I feel it lacks ambition. But if you were ever going to say that about something that was supposed to be a starter, you’d say it about this.

“And the bacon is amazing” said Graeme. “Really smoky.”

I had chosen an old favourite of mine, the calamari, mindful that I wanted at least one thing you couldn’t eat from the Côte At Home menu. This is a dish I feel like I’ve ordered a lot in recent months and often, at the likes of Maidenhead’s Storia or Reading’s The Cellar, my main reaction to it has been relief that it wasn’t as bad as calamari can sometimes be. And when these arrived I wondered whether I’d be talking in those terms again – they seemed too big, too regular and homogeneous to be anything more than adequate.

And then I tasted them, and I felt bad about doubting Côte. Because they were far and away the best calamari I’ve had in a long time, belying their unassuming appearance. They were properly tender, no rubberiness whatsoever, cooked so the coating adhered, a real joy to eat and dip in what was apparently Provençal mayonnaise. Fair play to them for not pairing it with aioli like literally everybody else, but I seem to remember that Côte used to serve them with tartare sauce, which I always liked.

Graeme smiled, as did I. Any fears I had appeared to be unfounded: we were still in safe hands. And I wondered what was going on here – I must have had Côte’s calamari many times over the years, so was it that it had improved, or had I forgotten that it had always been this good?

Although the menu is extensive, Graeme had warned me in advance that it was pretty narrow for him, as far as main courses were concerned (“I only ever order the beef bourguignon or the Breton chicken”). That gave me a free hand, but I saw duck confit on the menu and I always find that hard to resist. Virtually impossible on a chilly winter evening miles from your last payday, so my choice was made.

When it arrived, a well-paced half hour or so after our starters, it was good but still the only misstep of the meal. The duck itself was beautiful – duck confit is one of my favourite things in the world (I ate it on my wedding day, after all) and I’ll never understand why more restaurants and pubs don’t offer it. And I liked the red cabbage it was served on: it probably wouldn’t ever have been my choice of accompaniment, but it went just fine. “It looks a bit forlorn, doesn’t it?” said Graeme, and he had a point, but that’s because the potato gratin came separately in a little cast iron casserole. It was a bit like a Tesco Value version of the tartiflette, but I liked it all the same.

But where this fell down was those plain weird orange segments that felt like they’d escaped from a tin. The menu talks about the whole thing being served with a bitter orange sauce, but there wasn’t a drop of sauce to be seen. Three bits of citrus fruit is no substitute for a sauce. It’s the rail replacement bus of sauces. It was irksome, but I still loved the duck.

Graeme, true to form, chose the bourguignon and, as with the tartiflette, I think he picked not only the thing that was perfect for him but the dish that was perfect for the occasion. A single slab of beef, an enormo-quenelle of mash and a sea of rich sauce, the kind of dish that keeps winter properly at bay. I didn’t try a forkful of this, but Graeme had no regrets about his choice.

It did mean that in one evening Graeme probably ate more potato than most people get in a week, but I imagine that suited him just fine. The man’s from Middlesbrough, for goodness’ sake, and he hasn’t lost the accent: so much so, in fact, that when he told me that last time he’d been to Côte I honestly thought he’d said the last time I went to court, which raised all sorts of interesting questions. Graham has not, as far as I know, been in court.

“It’s mental” said Graeme. “This is a main course, and I swear it’s about the same size as my tartiflette was.”

Graeme’s spud consumption was not helped by the fact that both of us saw confit potatoes on the menu as a side order and decided we needed to have some. I was wondering whether this would be anything like the legendary potatoes at Quality Chop House, much in vogue in recent years, and I made the mistake of describing them to Graeme, which meant that anything which turned up could only disappoint.

And they slightly did: there was no layering or pressing involved. Instead you got four cuboids of potato, nicely fried and golden, with a pot of serviceable béarnaise for dipping. They were like hash browns for Guardian readers, which meant that I rather liked them. Just over a fiver for these, and I should add that Graeme’s and my mains were the two most expensive on the menu. But crucially, nothing felt like bad value.

You could tell we were having a good time, because we threw caution to the wind when it came to dessert. They had a few traditional options on there – a Paris-Brest, or a crème caramel – although they also attracted Graeme’s ire with an piste macaron (“I’m not eating anything with yuzu in it”, he said). But perhaps more interesting was Côte’s cheese selection.

I remember back when I ate at Côte pre-pandemic and the cheese selection was a bit of an afterthought, three or four of them to choose from, which meant that I almost never had it. But nowadays Côte has really pushed the bâteau out when it comes to fromage – an impressive ten to choose from, all French, with the option to assemble a cheeseboard for sharing.

We did exactly that, and carried away by just how enjoyable Côte was we also ordered a bottle of dessert wine to go with it, a muscat from the Languedoc. I’d had it before, so I thought it was probably a banker but even so, it was so straw-coloured that I was relieved when it turned out to be just the thing, sweet and zippy. Fearing for the worst and ending up delighted seemed to be the theme of the evening, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

I won’t list all the cheeses, because Côte’s website does that, but you have a great range of soft and hard, of blue and goat, and it’s hard to go wrong. We ended up choosing eight of the ten, so we got an excellent selection. Highlights for me included both of the blues – we got Roquefort and Fourme d’Ambert, and our otherwise impeccable server didn’t tell us which was which – and the Delice de Bourgogne. I love a triple cream cheese, and always order one if spot it on a menu. It also gave me an opportunity to enlighten Graeme about one of my favourite life hacks, namely that a slab of triple cream cheese atop a ginger biscuit knocks the socks off many cheesecakes.

It also meant we got to enjoy a few slices of Côte’s baguette, which – at the risk of repetition – was also as good as I remembered. When my blog celebrated its first birthday, I wrote a list of the ten best things I’d eaten in that first year. Côte’s baguette made the list: like I said, Côte always seemed to nab a space on my lists.

“It’s funny, looking at that cheese down there and thinking about how much was on my cheeseboard over Christmas” said Graeme.

“I know what you mean. This is probably how much cheese you’re meant to have.”

All that cost seventeen pounds, which to me felt like a very reasonable thing for two people to share. By this point a couple of very companionable hours had passed, and all the nagging fears had been dispelled. Côte was doing very nicely on the last Friday before payday on the longest month of the year, and people were at most of the tables – a big group just behind me, the booths in front of me all occupied with people celebrating the weekend.

“It’s still a really good restaurant, isn’t it?” I said to Graeme as we contemplated getting the bill.

“Such a good restaurant.”

Our bill came to one hundred and seventy pounds, including tip. Now, I know that isn’t cheap – and by way of illustration, three courses, a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses of dessert wine would set you back roughly half that when I reviewed Côte eleven years ago. But we did go for it, and it is 2025, and you could eat there more cheaply if you wanted to. I know some people will see that number and just think it’s too expensive, but nowadays everything is. I had a lovely meal, I had brilliant company, I was in a gorgeous room looked after by very good, very hard-working people and I strongly believe that the people who make that happen should be recompensed for that.

I started this review wondering if Côte’s lockdown diversification had somehow cheapened what they do. But actually, I should have paid more attention – specifically to my own review of Côte At Home, where I said that although the food was nice at home, something was missing. And eating here again, after too long, I understood that. Because Côte truly fulfils the promise that many nationwide restaurants make but so few keep, and a meal here reminds you that restaurants are never just about the food.

I can’t tell you how glad I am that this review is that kind of review, and that I can remind myself, if not any of you, that Côte is a little special, in its way. This felt like the latest in a long chain of happy evenings in a restaurant for which I feel a surprising amount of affection.

And the truth is that Côte’s fate is far from certain: as I said earlier, its neighbours on either side of the canal have gradually turned out the lights and shut the doors as their leases have come up, conscious that the Oracle is going to be redeveloped and much of it turned into flats. That might well happen to Côte before too long.

It’s a good argument for eating there while we can. Nice though they are, it would be sad to have to travel to Newbury or Wokingham to be reminded of this place.

Côte – 8.0
9 The Riverside, The Oracle, Reading, RG1 2AG
0118 9591180

https://www.cote.co.uk/restaurant/reading

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Restaurant review: Manzano’s Peri Peri

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I was meeting my friend Graeme for the first time in a long time last Friday, and we were dead set on getting to the Nag’s in good time to bag a table, get through plenty of great beer and have a very long overdue catch up. But where to eat beforehand? We wanted somewhere quick and casual, not too pricey, and that end of town. And then I realised that this perfectly summed up Manzano’s, the once infamous peri peri chicken restaurant on the side of the Broad Street Mall.

I say once infamous because Manzano’s is the place that was forced to change its name. Twice. It originally opened as Fernando’s and something about it – I don’t know, maybe the name, possibly the cockerel logo, the chilli-pepper themed peri-o-meter or (and I know this is a stretch) the entire menu – attracted the attention of Nando’s, who asked them to cease and desist.

It reminded me a little bit of the kerfuffle in the Black Country years ago when a chap set up a chicken joint called Kent’s Tuck Inn Fried Chicken, and refused to back down when Colonel Sanders sent him a strongly worded letter. “It is called Kent’s because it is on Kent Street, and Tuck Inn because that’s what you do at a restaurant” said the owner. Good for him: the place is still trading today..

Initially Fernando’s tried to claim that its name had been inspired by ITV dating jamboree Take Me Out (which – don’t judge – I still miss) and the legendary island where the show sent happy couples. But eventually they crumbled and changed it to Fernandez. A small change, but one that kept the lawyers at bay. But there was more: pretty soon a restaurant called Fernandez Grillhouse in Loughborough came out of the woodwork, pointing out that its name and branding appeared to have been ripped off by the Reading venue. “I was in shock” said the owner of Fernando’s. Well quite: how unlucky can one guy be?

Aside from keeping the local websites, back when we had some, busy with news stories Manzano’s also hit the national news with their plight. They were even featured in an episode of Radio 4 series The Untold, narrated by the bizarre Cumbrian cooing of Grace Dent. Fame at last!

Anyway, it’s Manzano’s now. All that happened over five years ago and, apart from a little scuffle with the council about extractor fumes, the restaurant has been going about its business quietly and unobtrusively for a long time. It’s traded for seven years now, a degree of permanence you might not have expected after its rocky start. So although I never thought for a minute that we were about to have a life-changing meal, I expected it to be solid stuff.

I especially hoped it would be because Graeme, my dining companion this week, has suffered for my art in the past. I had a lovely meal with him at Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen, and another at The Goat On The Roof but the first time he joined me on a review, over four years ago, was for the horror of Taco Bell. We walked past it on our way to Manzano’s, both shuddering involuntarily.

Inside it’s a pretty stark and basic space – not ugly, but not remarkable. Yellow banquettes on one side, red on the other, the whole thing much less homely than a Nando’s would be. We plonked ourself on a red banquette, a slightly threadbare one where a very visible repair had been done to the seat cushion. On the opposite wall was some kind of weird word cloud, printed over and over. The room was almost empty when we got there, but started to fill up as the evening went on.

The two-sided menu showed that actually, the food offering had evolved beyond that of a simple peri-peri grillhouse. And I wasn’t sure, on balance, whether that was a good thing or not. So there was still peri-peri chicken: quarters, halves, whole chickens, wings and thighs. Unlike Nando’s there was no butterflied chicken breast, but Manzano’s still did wraps and pittas.

But beyond that there were the kind of fast food dishes you can pick up anywhere, including new arrival Mr T’s next door – beefburgers, fried chicken burgers and the kind of appetisers you might buy from Iceland. Mozzarella sticks, jalapeño bites, that kind of thing. Someone really liked both pineapple and smut, as evidenced by items on the menu called ‘Hawaiian Chick’ and ‘Hot Hawaiian’.

“I got in trouble at work recently when we were ordering pizza in and I told my colleagues that I could just go for a twelve inch Hawaiian” said Graeme. “I don’t think I quite got away with it.”

I pondered my many stories which are every bit as bad as this, and told Graeme one of the least incriminating, which is still too incriminating to put in print here. I have about half a dozen, and you get a special prize if you ever hear me tell all of them and collect the full set.

The menu gave the option to have dishes on their own or as a meal. It wasn’t enormously clear from the menu, but a meal is one item, one side and one drink. The thing that made this more apparent was that they had both premium sides and drinks, which added £1.49 and £1 respectively to the price of your meal. To give you an idea, spicy rice and any kind of fries which didn’t just consist of potato were deemed to be an upgrade, as was having your soft drink in a bottle or going for the really posh shit. Yes, I’m talking about J20 which, it turns out is still a thing.

I always give my dining companion the first choice, and Graeme decided: he wanted half a dozen chicken thighs.

“And I want the loaded fries. I really love fries that are covered in…”

“…crap?”

Graeme smiled.

“Exactly. Crap.”

It only remained for me to find out how hot Graeme wanted his thighs, in a manner of speaking. Manzano’s has a spice-o-meter in the shape of a sauce bottle which in no way resembles Nando’s similar scale, for legal reasons. It isn’t exactly in ascending order, with garlic nestling between the traditionally wussy choices of lemon and herb and mango, but it does roughly the same thing. Graeme went for hot, although there is an even more extreme version, extra hot, in writing so dark you almost can’t make it out. Maybe it was to deter people.

We each upgraded our sides, because we fancy, but kept it real with the drinks: I got a Rio – remember them? – and a Pepsi Max and let Graeme choose. He went for the former, and waxed lyrical about how much he missed Lilt.

The food came out worryingly fast for my liking. I know we were nearly the only customers there and it wasn’t as if they had lots of orders to get through, but if it took five minutes I’d have been surprised. It meant our drinks came out after our food, which disappointed me as I was so looking forward to sniffing the bouquet of my Pepsi Max and letting the bubbles dance over the top of the glass. Only kidding: there was no glass.

Unless you want the King Kombo burger, which is the unholy fusion of a beefburger, fried chicken, halloumi fries and the grand total of four different sauces, all of Manzano’s fried chicken burgers seem to involve mayo whether you like it or not. I went for the BOSS Burger – yes, it’s in block capitals on the menu – which came topped with a hash brown and turkey bacon. It turned up looking, well, like the sum of its parts.

But what might have been even more tragic was my upgrade, the halloumi fries. All five of them. So to have these instead of a portion of fries I had paid thirty pence per pale, parallel fry. In The Untold, the owner of Fernando’s had told the BBC that customers increasingly were “visual eaters”, that things had to look good on the plate. These halloumi fries were not a good look.

Ironically, they were the tastiest thing. The nicest thing I can say about the burger is that it was clearly made of chicken – no chopped or shaped, reformed nonsense. But that’s probably where it ends. It wasn’t chicken thigh, which is the best thing to make chicken burgers with, and it was still a little regular and uniform, no crinkly, gnarled edges, no crunchy spiced coating. It actually did a very good job of tasting of nothing much.

“The hash brown is what’s going to make or break that” said Graeme, when I told him I was going to order this. He wasn’t 100% right, but it did lend a little interest. And turkey bacon wasn’t as bad as I feared it might be – I can completely understand why they offer it, but if you can eat proper bacon you wouldn’t ever willingly settle for this. I know this was called a BOSS Burger but eating it, I didn’t remotely feel like a boss.

Graeme’s chicken thighs were better, but that was as far as it went. By this point I had seen a plate of grilled chicken turn up at another table and it looked the part, so I already suspected that Graeme’s order played more to their strengths. But it was still wasn’t quite there. The thighs were a little dry, and it felt like most of the flavour was imparted by the muddy-brown hot sauce rather than by any kind of marination.

And also – sorry to mention Nando’s again, but they have somewhat begged the comparison – when you order chicken thighs at Nando’s they come skin on. The skin is easily the best bit, everybody knows that, as is the crispiness of its contact with the grill. Without that, these felt weirdly naked.

Graeme let me try one, which was the point at which I realised that Manzano’s idea of hot is really rather hot. I felt my eyes water slightly, and that familiar spiking on the tip of my tongue. I like Graeme a great deal, and he’s a lovely and generous man, but the fact that he offered me a second chicken thigh suggests that, apart from the heat, he wasn’t blown away. “What would the extra hot have been like?” he said. We agreed that it didn’t bear thinking about.

Graeme didn’t offer me any of his loaded fries, for which I can only thank my lucky stars because they were my idea of hell. Slightly wan-looking fries were topped with jalapeños and fried onions – so far so good – and then drowned in a dirty protest of banana yellow squirty cheese. These were called “fully loaded fries” on the menu: I think you’d probably have to be fully loaded to enjoy them.

We looked again at the menu and it said that these fries came topped with melted cheese. Whatever that was, it was not melted. It looked like it had never been, and would never be, solid: a phenomenon we both feared we might experience on our trips to the bathroom the following day.

We also had some coleslaw: I did take a photo of it, but I won’t put you through that. It looked like it was about five minutes away from developing a skin, and after a forkful each we abandoned it. One item on the menu, the “MSB”, is a fried chicken burger boasting what the menu refers to as “luxury coleslaw”. That might be different coleslaw to the stuff they expunged into a bowl for us: I hope to god that it was. This was many things, but it wasn’t luxurious.

The benefit of meals like this is that they’re over quickly, and that having paid up front you can just scarper without having to go through the rigmarole of saying “yes, it was nice” as your plates are cleared. Which I probably would have said, because I’m British, but it wasn’t. Our meal – two meal deals and both those high-falutin’ upgrades – came to just over thirty pounds.

“At least it wasn’t expensive” I said.

“Thirty pounds is expensive!” was Graeme’s reply.

“I don’t know if it is, really. It’s hard to get a meal, a side and a drink for much less than that these days. I think Nando’s probably costs more than that.”

“But is it cheaper than McDonalds, or KFC?” said Graeme, and as we made our way to the Nag’s I had to concede that he had a point. We passed Harput Kebab, which has chairs and tables, and I mentally totted up how much thirty quid would have bought you there. Perhaps at some point I should review Harput Kebab. I’ve had worse.

As you can tell, I didn’t like Manzano’s an awful lot. But what you might not realise is that I’m sad about that. Because when I listened to The Untold – which I did, it’s called research – I was grabbed by the David and Goliath nature of it. It was touching that the owner talked about his family business, his team, his foster kid at home. He talked about how Fernando’s was partly set up to support Reading’s Muslim community, and about the pressures of running the place during Ramadan in his first year. I wish the restaurant I’d eaten in was the restaurant he seemed to describe in his hopes and dreams.

Maybe he has moved on, and Manzano’s is owned by someone else now. It’s possible: I see that they’ve franchised and there’s now a Manzano’s in Bristol too. But I don’t see, personally, what Manzano’s offers that marks it out from either its small competitors like Roosters or the big bad, Reading’s two branches of Nando’s. Nando’s has nicer rooms, table service and, crucially, better and more enjoyable chicken. So Manzano’s falls between all those stools – not as good as its massive rival, arguably not as good as its peers and not even competitive at its price point.

A figure of speech I think about often, even though I’m not generally the vengeful type, is that living well is the best revenge. Manzano’s best revenge over Nando’s would have been to do what Nando’s does, but far better, with integrity, personal service and a backstory that some global franchise could never match. I’m really sorry that, somewhere along the way, Manzano’s appears to have lost interest in doing that.

When the owner of Fernando’s spoke to Radio 4, back in 2018, he had a simple explanation for the heavy-handed tactics from the national restaurant chain. “The only reason Nando’s has an issue with me is that my chicken’s better than theirs” he said. If only that were true.

Manzano’s Peri Peri – 5.1
41 Oxford Road, Reading, RG1 7QG
0118 3343338

https://manzanosperiperi.co.uk

Restaurant review: Goat On The Roof, Newbury

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I was late arriving for my reservation at Goat On The Roof: one thing I haven’t missed in the two and a half years since the pandemic is the panic caused by trying to get somewhere on time when our rail network refuses to play ball. There were no strikes on that bright sunny evening, but I stood by the departures board watching trains being repeatedly pushed back or cancelled. I texted Graeme, who was joining me for dinner, saying it was touch and go. “Let me know if it all goes tits up” he said, a man whose own plans had also been wrecked by the railways one too many times.

In the end I found a seat on seemingly the only train heading west in the foreseeable future and gazed out of the window as Reading turned into West Berkshire, the train trundled past the sixties flats of Southcote and out into the countryside. This was my commute every day for about a year, and although I never missed the job in Newbury I always liked how contemplative the journey could be.

I liked the landmarks, too. The weird Harrods warehouse plonked by the tracks in Thatcham, looking deeply incongruous. The business parks of Theale, far from the cutting edge. Midgham, so bucolic with the lovely Rowbarge just round the corner. And the slightly vulgar view of the racecourse, a sign that your voyage was nearly over. I felt like a modern-day Philip Larkin in The Whitsun Weddings, albeit without the racism, the womanising, the enormous jazz collection.

Alighting at Newbury I remembered how much I liked the place and how enjoyable it had been to knock around town after work. Their main outside space in the Market Place, was occupied by a Bill’s and a Wetherspoons, but it still looked very fetching on a summer’s evening. Besides, what did Reading have in a similar location? An overflow car park for O’Neills, defiling the space where the 3Bs used to be.

Graeme was already at Goat On The Roof when I arrived, hot, flustered and en retard, but he’d grabbed a table and had a gin and tonic on the go, because he’s no fool. Walking over to join him I was struck by what a tasteful room it was: good furniture, plain panelled walls, art dotted here and there. The site used to be Japanese restaurant Arigato, and before that it was a bank – that shows in the proportions of the room, the almost full-length windows bathing the room in light.

I was worried that the lack of soft furnishings would make it a deafening room in which to spend an evening, but actually it wasn’t problematic. And it could easily have been, because the place was pretty much full on a Friday evening: not bad going for a restaurant which opened less than three months ago.

While we peered at our menus, the owner came over and asked whether we’d eaten there before. When we said we hadn’t, he proceeded to “explain the concept”: now, this normally induces some eye-rolling but Goat On The Roof’s concept is an interesting one and goes some way to explaining why this week’s review is from Newbury rather than somewhere closer to home. 

They were a British tapas restaurant, he said, and that meant a reliance on British ingredients, ideally organic, sustainable and as local as possible. And that feels like an intriguing idea: we have some great ingredients in this country, and some magnificent producers, but many restaurants don’t bang that drum as loudly as they could. It’s an apposite idea in the wake of Brexit, too, with many ingredients trickier and costlier to import than ever, so if this turned out to be a well-executed, well-considered stratagem rather than a gimmick it could make for an excellent meal. Besides, I’ve been moaning for years that Reading didn’t have a credible tapas restaurant, and for some outrageous reason nobody had deemed this sufficient incentive to open one.

Anyway, the concept was all well and good but what were we going to eat? The menu did an excellent job of selling practically every dish, and I was pleased to see that it was already different from the one I’d seen online. It was divided into sections for nibbles, vegetable dishes, fish, meat and cheese and prices varied quite widely: most of the meat dishes, for instance, were north of a tenner whereas veg dishes were closer to seven pounds. 

“Do you have any questions about the menu?” asked the owner.

“Yes, what’s the ‘Barbed Dart’?” said Graeme.

“It’s a quail’s egg, red pepper and anchovy threaded onto a skewer. You put it in your mouth and pull the skewer out and eat it all in one go, and it’s an explosion of flavours. Don’t eat the skewer too though” – he said this in a manner which suggested it was well-rehearsed – “That bit’s very important.”

After he’d left us to our deliberations, Graeme leaned forward. 

“I like all of those things, but I’m not sure I can be bothered with it.”  

“I feel the same! So I guess we agree on some dishes for our first wave and hold some back for a second wave. That cabbage with black garlic and pangrattato sounds nice, or perhaps the tomatoes with pesto.”

“I suppose I could be a grown up and eat tomatoes. I hated them as a child, and I’ve only got used to them recently.”

“But these are from the Isle Of Wight” I pontificated. “They’re sort of legendary, they’re some of the only tomatoes we grow in this country that taste of anything.”

“I’m quite comfortable with us not ordering anything from the vegetables section, you know.” 

Again, I remembered why Graeme was one of my favourite dining companions: I must invite him to join me more often. I also remembered that Graeme’s wife was a vegetarian – although apparently a recent holiday in Madeira had turned her into a pescatarian – so he was probably looking forward to an evening going off the rails.

But first, wine. Goat On The Roof’s wine list was a superb, fascinating thing, Everything was European, British wine was well represented and there was a strong selection of orange wines and natural wines (would you have put money on Newbury, of all places, becoming a hotbed for natural wine?). Prices started at twenty-five pounds and climbed sharply after that, although a good proportion were available by the glass. On another day I might have tried the Welsh Pet Nat or an Austrian red, but Graeme had seen something that caught his eye.

“They have a Grüner Veltliner on the list, and I really love a Grüner.”

That was good enough for me, and the fact that it was a natural wine swung it for sheer curiosity. The natural wines I’ve tried have always been on the challenging side, with more funk than I’d personally choose, but this one’s cloudiness belied a wonderfully fresh, balanced wine. Before I’d finished the first glass I’d made a mental note to seek it out, and within a couple of days I’d taken delivery of a couple of bottles. That’s how good it was. (One of the websites where I found it said “you can neck it from a mug if you want, such is the vibrancy of the wine” – no: it’s good, but not so good that you’d abandon your standards.)

Our first wave of dishes was an excellent start. Anchovies, from Cornwall apparently, were marinated boquerones-style rather than salty, but they had a real zippiness to them, lifted with lemon, mint and chilli and completed with custard-yellow oil. It was a deceptively dense portion – although Goat On The Roof’s plates are far from ugly their general principle is to pile things high. Neither of were quibbling though, and the bread we’d ordered – workmanlike, not exceptional – saw more of the oil than the butter which came with it. Hats off, too, that the butter was at room temperature.

Also piled high on a plate rather than painstakingly spread out on a board was the fennel salami. Again this made the portion look smaller than it was, so maybe not the most considered approach, but the salami was perfectly coarse and laced with fennel and I liked it very much. Their charcuterie comes from Trealy Farm, a relatively big name which used to supply to Mitchell & Butler pubs back in the day. Even so, it was gorgeous stuff: I looked them up online when I got home, too. 

I suspect Trealy Farm also provided the lardo which came draped on top of a scallop ceviche, a dish from the specials menu. Graeme was impressed with this dish, but I was more circumspect. The quality of the scallops was top notch, and it had a wonderful cleanness which was almost led astray enough by the lardo. But it needed more of the advertised gremolata to add contrast and colour – without that it was a little too white, a little too pure.

The last of our initial quartet was a classic tapas dish, ham and cheese croquettes. Graeme was drawn to this because they’d used Old Winchester, a fantastic cheese that can rival any manchego, and I thought these were well done – a smooth, glossy béchamel with just enough ham to lend another dimension. I used the last of my bread to scoop up the snowdrift of grated cheese left in the dish.

Our second wave of orders was even more successful than the first, and chanced upon three stone cold classics on the menu. The first of these was Goat On The Roof’s take on patatas bravas (which of course they call “Crispy Potatoes, Spiced Tomato Sauce, Garlic Mayo”, presumably because their concept precludes speaking foreign on the menu wherever possible). 

I’ve had patatas bravas in a lot of places, and Goat On The Roof’s are right up there with the best. Often they’re just not crispy enough, or they used to be but they wilted under the onslaught of a lake of bravas sauce and aioli. These were absolutely spot on – incredible texture, not overdressed and perfectly balanced. At five pounds seventy they’re also arguably the best value on the menu: if you go, insist on having one to yourself.

Also exceptional was the pork belly with rhubarb compote. The pork, fried until crispy, reminded me a lot of chicharrones I’ve had in Malaga, so skilfully cooked that you didn’t mind in the slightest about spearing a cube that was more fat than flesh. I’ve not had pork with rhubarb before but having tried it I wonder why it took me so long – the sharp tartness of the rhubarb being exactly what was needed, harmonising with the pork rather than drowning it out. Again, small plates for sharing are all very well but order one of these, tell your companions they wouldn’t like it and eat it all on your own: whoever you’re at dinner with will get over it.

The last standout dish was the soused mackerel – a gorgeous piece of fish cooked as little as they could get away with, with a quenelle of relatively restrained horseradish cream (and a pointless piece of something like melba toast). This was very much the kind of dish where you took as small a forkful as you could each time and savoured every bite, and the fact that Graeme and I shared one between two is a tribute to our powers of restraint. 

We also had the chorizo (the menu does speak foreign here, presumably because “Deep Red Paprika Sausage” would have looked weird and wrong) cooked in cider. It came with a hen’s egg – they were oddly specific about that – which was soft boiled and rolled in some kind of crumb. I liked this dish, probably because the chorizo was also from Trealy Farm and they’re very good at what they do, but at eleven pounds fifty it felt a little on the sharp side. But again, it was good enough that you didn’t hold a grudge.

The dessert selection was much narrower. I’ve always held that you can share your small plates all you like but dessert is meant to be your own personal kingdom: if people are good, or lucky, they can have a forkful but any more is pushing it. I gave Graeme first choice and after much deliberation he chose what I thought was a gorgeous dessert – local strawberries, shiny and sticky with maceration, a perfect sphere of sorrel sorbet perched on top. The forkful I had was properly beautiful, and I’d ordered it I wouldn’t have complained.

Graeme did, but that’s more because my order, the chocolate mousse, was phenomenal. This seems to be a staple in tapas restaurants and many places – Arbequina in Oxford, or Bar 44 in Bristol – do it extremely well. But often it will be poshed up with salt or olive oil, a thin bit of toast or some torta de aciete. By contrast Goat On The Roof plays it very straight – and if their mousse isn’t going to win any prizes for aesthetics it more than makes up for it with the taste. It was a glorious swirl of milk and white chocolate with a handful of raspberries and I can happily confirm that it’s the perfect way to end a meal.  Not that we did end the meal there, because we had some fudge as a petit four (the vanilla one was okay, the coffee one cracking) but you get the general idea. 

Our meal – a couple of gin and tonics, all those small plates, a stonking bottle of wine, desserts and fudge came to just shy of a hundred and sixty pounds, including an optional twelve and a half per cent service charge. Service, incidentally, was excellent: it’s a very young, very enthusiastic, very positive team and they have the enthusiasm that comes with starting something new and very accomplished which is quite unlike anything Newbury has, or Reading for that matter.

After our meal we repaired to the excellent Catherine Wheel which has lovely outside space and, more importantly, a little outdoor bar selling over fifty kinds of gin. We nabbed the last free table and proceeded to drink really rather a lot of gin while Graeme berated me about my good luck in the dessert sweepstake.

“You did a Jedi mind trick on me, admit it.”

“It was more like Derren Brown. Did you not notice that in the run up to ordering I kept talking about the sorrel sorbet? Sorrel sorbet. Sorrel sorbet.”

Graeme grimaced, but I could tell he wasn’t really resentful. Probably. Besides, it was time to try another gin; I told him to surprise me and when he came back with a strawberry and balsamic concoction I couldn’t tell whether it was reward or revenge. A few gins later we weaved our way to the station for the last train home at the end of an evening well spent.

So why isn’t the rating down there higher, you might ask? The honest answer is I’m not entirely sure. Part of it’s the cost. Small plates restaurants do this – the prices of every dish are always clearly advertised, and nobody’s holding a gun to your head. And yet at the end there’s always a moment where the bill arrives and you wonder how you spent quite that much. 

But also, Goat On The Roof was almost too polished. That’s what gives away how British it is. That’s not a bad thing per se, and if Goat On The Roof feels like it’s been there firing on all cylinders for a lot longer than three months that reflects very well on them, but it slightly lacked the exuberance I associate with tapas at its best. I’ll go back, I’m sure, but I’m not desperate to get it in the calendar. Although, on the other hand, pork belly with rhubarb compote.

The next day, I got a text from Graeme.

“I still think you used some kind of Jedi mind trick on me.”

“This is not the dessert you’re looking for”, I replied.

He sent me the applause emoji in response. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if, on the other side of the phone screen, he felt like telling me to fuck off. 

Goat On The Roof – 7.7
1 Bridge Street, Newbury, RG14 5BE
01635 580015

https://goatontheroof.co.uk

Pub review: Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen at The Butler

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

In August 2022 Chef Stevie announced that he was leaving the Butler and moving to Windsor. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Opening and running a restaurant is hard work. You have to find premises, sort out a lease, decide your concept, pick your staff, choose your suppliers, design your menu, set up your social media, get people through the door, get them to come back, replace your staff when some of them leave. The list goes on. 

That’s at the best of times, but the last year has hardly been that. Now you can add in navigating the complexities of furlough and bounceback loans, applying for grants, retaining your staff, getting your head round the rule of six, track and trace, “hygiene theatre” and having to close or reopen at the drop of the hat based on government fiat and what tier system is in use this week. And you can also bung in asking people nicely to wear masks so they don’t risk infecting your unvaccinated staff and closing because you have been pinged, or because your staff have and you don’t have enough left to be able to trade. It’s hard work. I sometimes wonder why anybody does it.

Most people dip their toe in the water rather than diving in at the deep end, and there are many ways to do that. One of the most common is to start out doing street food. Get a gazebo, go to some markets, build a reputation and one day you might open your own place. Take Vegivores, which has made a roaring success of its site in Caversham. But sometimes street food is the place that exposes the gap between your daydream of feeding adoring crowds and the harsh reality of getting up early in the morning only for everything to go wrong, as this touching post from a recent Blue Collar alumnus shows.

Another route is to use someone else’s premises, the “cuckoo” approach. One of the most successful exponents of this is Anonymous Coffee, who have had coffee machines in the Tasting House, Thames Tower, Curious Lounge and the Grumpy Goat without setting up permanent premises of their own. Many people in hospitality have taken this path, from Bench Rest serving food in the Tasting House to I Love Paella, operating out of a tiny kitchen in the Oxford Road branch of Workhouse Coffee. But the most obvious synergy, if you can ever forgive me for using that word in any context, is between chefs in search of a kitchen and pubs in search of a chef.

When this works, it’s a dream. The pub wants to serve food, but doesn’t want to cook it. The chef wants to cook, but doesn’t want his or her name on a lease quite yet. And so over the years we’ve been treated to I Love Paella cooking out of The Horn before graduating to the Fisherman’s Cottage and Caucasian Spice Box (now, of course, Geo Café) operating from the Turk’s Head and later from The Island, still one of the most surreal Reading establishments I’ve ever visited. I fondly remember I Love Paella’s salt cod churros, or Caucasian Spice Box’s ajika chicken, and I may not have loved The Horn or the Turk’s Head, but the food was so good that it didn’t matter.

I got wind recently that a similar arrangement was in place over on the edge of West Reading at the Butler in Chatham Street, where an outfit called Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen had popped up and was offering a full menu of Caribbean classics. I have fond memories of the Butler: it’s a handsome building which has stood proud for many years surrounded by the architectural chaos of the old Chatham Street car park with its curving Brutalist concrete walkway and the gleaming apartment buildings that have sprung up more recently, much like the house from Up. In this week’s scorching weather I couldn’t think of a better place to try, so I headed over with my friend Graeme, last seen enduring imaginable horrors at Taco Bell.

“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” I said as we made our way down Broad Street. In the run-up to our visit Graeme had steadfastly told me that he only wanted to find out on the day.

“No, I like a surprise. Anyway, we’re heading in the direction of KFC, so I can still dream.” Graeme has a love of the secret blend of herbs and spices that exceeds even mine: when he was recovering from Covid at the start of the year, the first thing he asked for when he was past the worst was a bucket of the Colonel’s finest.

“I have a good feeling about this place, don’t worry. I hope it will make amends for that quesadilla.”

“Nothing on earth can make up for that.” 

I felt like pointing out that he did volunteer to come to Taco Bell, but I thought better of it. But Graeme’s mood lightened immediately when we rounded the bend of Chatham Street and he saw the board outside the Butler advertising Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen. “This is great! I love Caribbean food.”

I hadn’t realised how much outside space the Butler has, but it turns out there’s quite a lot. There were plenty of tables out front in the unforgiving sun, a happy few of them sporting parasols, and initially I though it might have been fun to eat dinner with the background hum of the Chatham Street traffic. But I found out when I went in to grab a menu that there was a courtyard out back, a lovely little sloping space with a little more shade, and so our decision was made. 

The pub and the kitchen run separately, so you order your drinks at the bar and your food out back, where the kitchen operates out of a different building. The menu immediately presents a couple of problems: one is that you sort of want to eat everything, the other is that because the three most iconic mains can be served in small or large sizes ordering everything is almost a realistic possibility. None of the large mains come in over fourteen pounds, most of them are closer to eleven, and there are both vegetarian and vegan options in the form of macaroni pie and a sweet potato curry respectively.

The “sides and nibbles” section is brilliantly flexible, giving you the option to order starters, have extras with your main course or even, potentially, just go for a sort of Caribbean tapas where you try it all. The majority of them hover around the six pound mark. We sort of went for a mixture of all three of those approaches – although it soon became apparent that Graeme’s appetite was even bigger than mine, which pretty much makes him my ideal dining companion (on the walk over he was complaining about having gone up to a thirty-six inch waist in recent months: if I ever slimmed down to a thirty-six I’d probably go on a week-long bender to celebrate).

“We have to have plantain as one of our starters” he said.

“I’ve always struggled with plantain. I think it’s because I went off bananas in 1999, the year I did the cabbage soup diet so I could fit into my suit for my brother’s wedding.”

Graeme gave me an indulgent look, as if he couldn’t work out which of those two sentences was the most moronic.

“Okay, we can skip the plantain, but we have to have some of the handmade patties.”

“Salt fish?”

“Exactly.”

We narrowed it down to just the four starters and two mains and I wandered over to Stevie and his partner, who were sitting at one of the pub tables waiting for orders. It transpired that they didn’t have any patties, and after a little more to-ing and fro-ing our order was placed. 

“My friend thinks we’re going to still be hungry after this lot” I said, and she laughed.

“He hasn’t seen our portions.”

Our food came to forty-eight pounds, not including tip, and once I’d got that sorted Graeme wandered into the bar and got us a couple of very satisfying pints of Neck Oil. Really, it was perfect. The sun was shining, I had good company, a cold beer was in front of me and food was on the way. I had that feeling that this could be my next favourite place: it doesn’t often happen, maybe once every couple of years, but I could feel that familiar, dangerous sensation of my expectations gradually rising. Only what appeared to be a gathering of Reading’s Socialist Worker Party in the corner was slightly incongruous. What were socialists doing picking a pub whose name was the embodiment of servitude to the ruling classes? I guess the hard left has never been known for its sense of humour.

Our starters were uniformly excellent, even if the salt fish patties had to wait for another time. I’ve always struggled with chicken wings, but these were magnificent stuff – ten of the blighters for seven pounds, all wonderfully crispy, all yielding plenty of meat and all bloody delicious. The menu describes them as “dark rum glazed”, and that wasn’t quite true: instead they came unglazed with the dark rum sauce lurking at the bottom of the foil tray. It might have been a happy accident, but I preferred it that way – less messy, more crunchy and you could still dredge bits of chicken through the sauce and fully appreciate how sweet and boozy it was; I wouldn’t be surprised if that sauce had turned out to be 90% rum.

“Those are magnificent” said Graeme as we made inroads into the big pile of napkins that had also been brought to our table. We’d also gone for the most expensive of the starters, coconut island shrimp. These were coated in panko breadcrumbs and coconut and served with a little tub of scotch bonnet aioli. I really enjoyed these too – the texture was more fluffy than firm, but you got a good helping of plump prawns. They could have done with more of the aioli, which I liked, but our cutlery basket also had a trio of hot sauces with it so we tried them with the Baron sauce which was almost luminous yellow and very hot indeed.

“I could come here and eat these starters tapas-style every day” said Graeme, and I couldn’t have agreed more: I was already beginning to wonder when (it was no longer an if) I’d be back. That decision was vindicated by our third starter, some truly beautiful beef and jerk pork dumplings which skipped the velvet rope and headed straight for my mind palace of happy food memories. The texture of these was spot on – the filling firm and fiery, the dumpling caramelised on one side – and plonking them in the dark soya dip was hugely satisfying. Everything went perfectly with a cold IPA, too: on a hot day like that, I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be.

I felt that our mains continued the momentum nicely, although Graeme wasn’t quite so sure. I’d let him pick first and he’d chosen the curry goat, which arrived in a massive portion, on the bone. Initially I’d wondered whether the plastic cutlery – more hygiene theatre – would be up to the job, but Graeme deftly demonstrated that keeping the meat on the bone would have been more of a challenge.

“I don’t know what I think of it. It’s not quite a chip shop curry sauce, but it’s quite sweet.”

I was allowed to try a bit and for what it was worth, I loved it. There was definitely a fruitiness to it, but also a heat that slowly built, and the meat was stunningly tender. It was great to see some sprigs of thyme in there too, adding a little complexity. That said, I’ve always had a sweet tooth, so maybe this was more my kind of thing than Graeme’s, although he did tell me that in a previous job he came into contact with lots of Caribbean families and was always being given Caribbean home cooking to try, so perhaps he’d been spoilt by that. In any case, any issues with a slight lack of heat were easily rectified with a slug of that highlighter-yellow hot sauce, and all was well.

Personally if I’d ordered the curry goat I would have been delighted. Instead I had to slum it with the jerk chicken, and by slum it I mean lord it. The menu claims that the chicken is marinated for twenty-four hours and drum-cooked with pimento wood, and it really looked the part: that beautiful bronzed colour and all that phenomenal crispy skin. It felt like I had the best part of a whole chicken in front of me, and the taste was superb – smokey, almost leathery, with depth of flavour that can only come from time very well spent. Eating it, there in that courtyard, off a paper plate with a plastic knife and fork I felt transported, in the best possible sense. It reminded me, in some way I couldn’t place, of eating grilled meat at a roadside ocakbasi in Turkey, of being somewhere else.

“It wasn’t bad”, Graeme said later, but I do think it was a tiny bit on the dry side.”

“I didn’t have that problem, most of it was perfectly soft.”

“That’s because you deliberately gave me a dry bit” he said. “And it was a bit without skin.”

He might have been joking, he probably was, but many a true word’s spoken in jest and I didn’t quite know him well enough yet to judge. Was I just a bad sharer?

The accompaniments were also terrific – rice and peas, all present and correct, along with a tangy tangle of pickled escovitch peppers and onions, and sticky slices of plantain which completely converted me to the stuff (“didn’t I tell you?” Graeme said, enjoying it every bit as much as I would have). But the other real beauty was the side of macaroni pie we’d ordered on the side, a glorious claggy, cheesy, comforting dish with a splendid crunchy crust. Before I ate it I questioned just how interesting it would be to have a main course of the stuff: afterwards I could well understand the appeal.

Our meal finished, both of us surprisingly full, we finished our beers and headed off to the Nag’s for the post match analysis. I would have been tempted to stay for the people watching alone – by this point a chap had turned up and greeted virtually everybody in the courtyard with the term “comrade” – but Graeme, a centrist like myself, had seen enough. 

On the way out I stopped to tell Stevie’s partner just how much we’d enjoyed our food. She had done a top notch job of looking after us all evening and she seemed really pleased with the feedback, although she accepted it with the serene confidence of somebody who knows their food is good. They’d been trading for a couple of months, she told me, and things were going well, especially as the Butler was hardly known as a food pub. She said they were going to go on Deliveroo from the following day, and we promised to recommend the food to as many people as we could.

I’m sorry, as usual, to have gone on so long. But for once I feel slightly less guilty, because I wanted to try and capture the excitement of the meal I had. Seeing someone starting out, at the beginning of a journey, not knowing where it will take them or their food is exciting. And it’s exciting to get to try it early on in that process. It takes me back to all my favourite discoveries in all the time I’ve spent writing this blog, and it reminds me that Reading’s food scene never loses its ability to surprise – that there’s always potential for the next thing to be the next big thing. And when that happens, you just know it. That scorching evening on Chatham Street, I knew it.

When I got home and explained how good my meal was to Zoë, she expressed her chagrin that she’d missed out on this one. And then we got our diaries out and tried to work out when we could visit it next. The chances are pretty strong that I’ll have been there again by the time any of you make it to the Butler. Next time I want to try those patties, the roti and the chicken curry (and everything I had on this visit, even though I know that’s impossible). If you get there before me and order any of the things I didn’t try, please tell me how good they were. Make me jealous: you know you want to.

Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen – 8.1
The Butler, 85-91 Chatham Street, Reading, RG1 7DS
07780 829127

https://www.facebook.com/ChefStevieAnderson