Tag: Greek

Restaurant review: Spitiko

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Having written about and celebrated Reading and its independent scene for nearly 13 years, one thing that has always irritated me is people who live to run the place down. You see them popping up on the comments section of the Reading Chronicle all the time, people who say that the town is all vape shops and money laundering, who hate the halal butchers and the global superstores and the mosque. 

We all know what’s behind that, and it’s not really about Reading: it’s about wanting to take the country back to some rose-tinted past that wasn’t even that crash hot first time around. One where women were paid sod all – if they had jobs at all – and where nobody could be gay, or trans, or brown. One with three TV channels and everything closed on Sundays. One where youngsters knew their place. 

It’s a land where those people still live in their heads, and if a country like that really existed I’d be all for them emigrating there. Reading – multicultural and vibrant – just happens to be in the crosshairs because it embodies so many things they’d change. But even though I despise that viewpoint, lately when I’ve gone into the centre of town I’ve felt weary, because the town I love is getting harder and harder to champion.

Rough sleepers are everywhere, begging feels more apparent than at any time I can remember. Friar Street is lined with vacant shop fronts and when new things open, they’re always chains and often the kind you wouldn’t choose. Shake Shack is on Broad Street now, next to Fat Face, and people who get excited about that kind of thing are beside themselves. 

Also new is Amorino, which I visited recently for a gelato. You had to order using a big touchscreen which tried to upsell you every step of the way: that irked me when the people sticking gelato in your paper tub were right there. My ice cream took ages because the member of staff doing it kept weighing it, adding a tiny amount more, weighing it again. Because, in case you’d forgotten, it’s 2026. 

But it tasted nice, even if eating it I realised that, for a long time, it had felt like Reading was always the bridesmaid, never the bride. We always got Amorino, never Swoon. We always got Wendy’s and Shake Shack, never Patty & Bun or Beefy Boys. Always the town, never the city. So for this week’s review I decided to visit the one part of Reading that seems fairly immune to the general worsening of things, and Friday night found Zoë and me in Spill, drinking pints of Parka ahead of a short amble along Prospect Street to Spitiko. 

Yes, that’s right: it was time for a date night in Caversham.

I got into all sorts of trouble a long time ago for asking the simple question Why isn’t Caversham nicer?, but whether you thought it was nice or not in 2017 is rather beside the point these days. Because since then – and especially since the pandemic, when people spent money closer to where they lived – Caversham has flourished in a way that the rest of Reading simply has not. 

It has acquired two excellent cafés, in the shape of Geo Café and The Collective. It boasts lifestyle stores and bakeries, bookshops and bars. It has a great pub with outside space in the shape of The Last Crumb, and one of Reading’s most distinctive restaurants in the form of Vegivores. And of course, to the detriment of the town centre it has arguably Reading’s best restaurant, Clay’s Kitchen.

Sitting in Spill with a beer, looking over at the outside tables filled with happy, prosperous people, Caversham had a certain affluent glow that you don’t generally see in the RG1 postcode. Friends were catching up, a couple were engaged in a fierce cribbage contest that reminded me of a former life. And seeing all that, drinking it in along with my cold pint of Parka, I got it: I understood why people in Caversham always seemed so happy with their lot in life. That was why Caversham residents, like wild swimmers or vegans, volunteered the information within five minutes of meeting you. Who can blame them?

Spitiko, technically, pre-dates Caversham’s renaissance. For many years 6 Prospect Street was home to Kyrenia, a Cypriot restaurant. Then at some point in 2016 it changed hands, and the new owner called it Ketty’s Taste Of Cyprus. Kyrenia’s legendary front of house Ihor left – the last time I saw him he was working at Papa Gee – and then, around the time of the pandemic, the restaurant rebranded again, this time to Spitiko – a Greek restaurant, rather than a Cypriot one.

I think one of the reasons I held fire on reviewing Spitiko for so long was that I loved Kyrenia so very much. I’ve written before about how it was one of the saddest closures in my time writing this blog, and talked at length about how often I went there. But it hasn’t been Kyrenia for a very long time, ten years or so, and it felt like time to try Spitiko afresh, as free of preconceptions as possible. 

That’s also why I will try, as best I can, not to use the K word again in this review. Because having started this review railing against them, I don’t want to be one of those awful people who thinks everything was infinitely better in the past.

Spitiko’s dining room was spacious and airy, with plain tables and chairs and a pale wooden floor. Huge paintings of the windmills of Mykonos and the blue-domed churches of Santorini took up one wall, a bouzouki was propped up on a window sill. The only other flash of colour was the distinctive Hellenic cyan edging the windows and doors. The ground floor dining room was doing reasonably well on a Friday night, with over half its tables occupied.

One thing we did realise right away, though, was that it was deafening. Whoever designed that dining room was either in their early twenties or had never tried to eat in it: the lack of soft furnishings or sound insulation made it an incredibly loud place to sit and eat. Every table had to keep talking louder because every table was struggling to be heard, an escalating state of affairs that made it a very difficult space in which to spend time. Zoë, who has a coping strategy in these circumstances, took out her hearing aids: I had no such luxury.

Spitiko’s menu covers a lot of ground, and blends both Greek and Cypriot specialities. Feta and halloumi both feature, and the restaurant serves sheftalia, which is distinctly Cypriot. But it calls its stuffed vine leaves dolmades, the Greek name, rather than koupepia, even though they contain mince which is more common in Cyprus. 

In any event, you have an enormous amount of choices – something like twenty-five appetisers and nearly as many mains. You also have the option of choosing a meat, seafood or vegetarian meze selection, for between £31 and £36 a person, but we decided against that because it’s the kind of order I might have placed in this building in the past. So we picked a selection of starters to share, and a main each, and tried to make ourselves heard above the hubbub.

But first we ordered wine, and this was where the first alarm bells rang. Greek wine, very underrated, offers a great range of excellent whites and reds. If you’re at a restaurant with a good wine list, it’s always worth looking out for a xinomavro or an assyrtiko because they often punch above their weight. 

Spitiko, I’m afraid, is not that restaurant. They do have half a dozen reds and whites from Greece and Cyprus, but many are from a single producer. Nothing will set you back more than £30, but that means that most of the wines cost £10 retail. I looked most of them up on Vivino, the wine app, and I didn’t realise you could buy wines with ratings that low. So we ordered the best of a bad bunch, a bottle of Kouros Patras – straw-coloured, chilled and forgettable, if not actively offensive.

This is as good a point as any, by the way, to make reference to Spitiko’s greatest asset, the chap who looked after us. He was wiry, high-energy and full of charm – he told us he was Irish, although I didn’t get that from his accent – and he was undoubtedly the single best thing about eating there. I hope one day I bump into him again, at a better restaurant.

One thing I always associate with eating in Greece itself, rather than in a Greek restaurant here, is the wonderful sense of leisureliness that always accompanies food in a taverna. The air still has the warmth of the day, the al fresco tables around you are full of happy people, and later on your walk back to your room will be accompanied by the music of crickets and the glimmer of fireflies. 

Not so in Caversham, where our four starters were banged down in front of us about ten minutes after we ordered them. They were each, in their way, the epitome of middling.

First up there was houmous, adorned with a single olive and a meagre drizzle of an olive oil so yellow and pale that it couldn’t add any joy to proceedings. The houmous itself, scooped onto scorched, bought-in pitta bread, wasn’t actively unpleasant but had nothing about it to elevate it from stuff you could buy in a tub for £2 from any supermarket in the land. 

Here it was £6.25, and I did think the main thing you were probably paying for was the act of decanting. The menu talks about garlic, lemon juice, tahini: all things this should have contained but somehow tasted as if it had never seen.

Equally underwhelming, if not more so, were the dolmades. £7.25 got you three small ones, all in varying stages of falling apart. I didn’t have to cast my mind back far to think of better ones – for all their faults, the stuffed vine leaves at Antep Kitchen were far better than this – but also, they were meant to contain mince and if they did, subtle isn’t even close to the right word. But also these were served hot, and the speed, the heat and the texture all made me wonder if a microwave was involved. If it wasn’t, there would have to be another excuse for these being so disappointing.

Lamb kofta also couldn’t live up to the promise of seeing those words on the menu. What was going on here? Two worryingly uniform cylinders of dense, compacted meat, each cut into worryingly uniform halves. No irregularity, no char, no coarseness. There was no sign that these had been threaded onto a skewer, no sign that they had been formed by hand. No sign, in honesty, that they hadn’t come out of a packet. 

Last of all, one of the dishes I always make a beeline for in Greece, feta saganaki. Deep fried cheese should be a genuine treat, whether it comes with honey and sesame seeds to offset the saltiness or is brought to the table flaming, doused in ouzo. This was neither, it was just a slab with a bit of a tougher exterior but no real evidence of crispiness or contrast. How could you take feta, deep fry it and produce something that was so far from fun? It felt like a betrayal – of Greek food, of our hopes, of all that and more besides. 

There was sad salad on the side, as there was underneath the kofta and the dolmades. Technically I guess it was sadder salad, because it was all sad.

Could our main courses rescue matters? You mightn’t be amazed to hear that we found out pretty damned quick: fifteen minutes after our starters turned up, out came the mains. You may, however, be surprised to hear that I wasn’t as outraged as I could be. By this time I regarded the rest of the meal a bit like the way I think of a blood test: I knew it had to happen, but I didn’t mind getting it out of the way as fast as possible.

That wasn’t entirely fair, though, because the mains showed that Spitiko could cook – just not a whole dish, and not consistently.

Take my sheftalia – which are meant to be coarse sausages wrapped in caul fat. I was so looking forward to these, at the start of the meal anyway, and by the time they arrived they managed to surpass my successively lowered expectations. Unlike everything else so far, they felt made by hand – irregular, nicely stocky things with a crinkled exterior. And they tasted good. I’d had enough of Spitiko’s humdrum tzatziki by then, and fortunately these didn’t need it.

But even here, with one of the best things they did, they couldn’t nail the landing. First of all, sheftalia can be made with pork, beef or lamb and Spitiko’s menu promises pork. So why was one of the four clearly completely different? It tasted of beef and red wine, and I didn’t mind it at all but it was bizarre how it didn’t match the other three. If I’d had two of each, or the menu had said they were a mixture, I probably would have been delighted: without that, it just added to the sense of chaos.

And the accompaniments were barely worth bothering with. A fairly dull Greek salad with four cubes of oregano-speckled feta, no olives and – would any plate be complete without it? – more limp iceberg lettuce added very little. Even worse was a big helping of faintly yellow rice studded with eerily uniform bits of veg: peas, green beans and so on. Its texture was surprisingly clumpy and, again, it felt as likely to have been made by Batchelors. I ate all of my sheftalia, I snaffled the feta, I left most of the rest.

Zoë’s kleftiko was a similar story. The lamb itself was good, tender, beautifully fatty and a cinch to ease away from the bone. I was allowed to try a bit, and it wasn’t half bad: ironically a far better deal than the very expensive equivalent I’d tried at Queen’s Park’s Carmel earlier in the year. I have had better kleftiko in Reading, although I’ve boxed myself into a corner whereby I can’t tell you where, but it was pretty decent.

But again, the stuff that came with the kleftiko was irrelevant rather than elevating. The roast potatoes looked like perfectly acceptable waxy specimens, with no real sign of roasting or glorious crisp shells. The vegetables – broccoli, carrots – were bland ballast. It’s perfectly fine to make the sheftalia or the kleftiko the centre of the dish, but the stuff on the perimeter should cheer, not heckle.

By this point some of the tables had left, the absolute racket had died down a little and I tried to find ways to look on the bright side. You should have tried this place back in the day, I said to Zoë, except of course back in the day it wasn’t this place. Just another one to file away in the long list of things I wish I’d discovered and experienced with my wife, thwarted by our chronology and the fact that we had to spend all those years living our lives and becoming the people we did so that we could meet and fall in love and, hopefully, live happily ever after. 

But as I keep saying in this review, you can’t live in the past – even if it was a past when I weighed five stone less, hadn’t lost loved ones, hadn’t broken my arm. The accumulation of damage, bad decisions and disappointment helps make you who you are: wish it away, and you wish you were somebody else. All far too deep to bring up at a date night in Caversham, I decided.

We would have had dessert, because the wine list included two Greek dessert wines, both of which I absolutely love. Our ever-charming server wandered off and came back effusive and apologetic: they’d run out of one, and they had about a glass of the other, but in a bottle which had been opened and not kept in the fridge. We waved it at us, we asked for the bill. £122 with a 12.5% service charge, which was the only element that felt like value. 

We called an Uber back to Katesgrove and ate ice cream in front of the telly, catching up on Top Of The Pops. It’s nice to go to Greece, it can even be nice to go to Caversham, but it’s nicer still to go home.

I really wanted to love Spitiko, and I really wanted to prove my hypothesis that bits of Reading are still getting better and better despite the naysayers. It’s tempting to feel deflated, and think that neither of those things happened. But I don’t know about that. I think it’s more the case that Caversham continues to flourish and buzz, and that places like Vegivores, Spill, Clay’s, even BKRY demonstrate that future. 

Put that way, Spitiko feels like part of the Caversham that predates all of that change. I hope they aren’t left behind, and that when their race is run one day there will be people who meet for dinner somewhere else, in that building or another one, and say “Remember Spitiko? That was a restaurant. God, the evenings we had there.” Sadly, though, I won’t be one of them.

Spitiko – 6.6
6 Prospect St, Reading, RG4 8JG
0118 9476444

https://spitiko.uk

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Café review: Mon Chéri Café & Bakery

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For childfree people like me, the tail end of August is possibly when you most keenly feel the disconnect between you and the rest of the world. At work everyone’s back from their holidays, preparing for the beginning of the academic year, already mourning their week or fortnight on a sunbed, by a pool or in a villa. My Instagram has been full of holidaymakers squeezing the last few drops out of the month. They have got excited, packed and prepared, touched down, drunk cold beers or glasses of rosé, topped up their tans, raced through some novels. And now they’re all coming back, like migrating birds, refreshed but, most likely, a little sad.

I’ve watched everybody embark and return, seen the Instagram posts and stories, and told myself each time that my time will eventually come. And it will, soon, but not quite yet: by the time you read this I will be hours away from setting my out of office and closing the laptop, but as I write this I’m running on fumes. The rhetoric at work will all be about how everybody is full of beans and ready to go, to close out the year: I am depleted, and ready to go to the airport. Our timelines won’t synchronise until I return, when we all prepare to put the clocks back, put the central heating back on, contemplate the end of the year.

Anyway, the last day of August found me with a day on my tod, feeling a little melancholy and looking for some feeling of escape. So I decided to make my way to Mon Chéri, the Greek café on West Street, to see some Hellenic sunshine might illuminate my mood. It opened at the end of last year, I think, and has been on my list ever since, but it’s taken a little while to reach the top of it.

And when I say Mon Chéri is open, I mean that it’s very open indeed: if Google is to be believed, they start trading at 6am every day, not closing until 8 in the evening. When I commute to work, my bus trundles down West Street around half-seven. Mon Chéri is always open by then, awning out, with some customers in already. Is any hospitality business in Reading open quite that long, with the exception of Gregg’s and Wetherspoons?

So. yes, I partly picked Mon Chéri this week because I’m so very ready for a holiday and, for me, Greece is the place I most powerfully associate with holidays, even now. The first time I ever left this country I was thirteen years old and my parents, heady with the rush of having remortgaged our suburban semi-detached, took us to Corfu to share a villa with some friends. I had never been on a plane, never known sunshine like it, was fascinated by the way Greek lemonade tasted different, couldn’t get enough of the music of the cicadas – when I could tear myself away from a book or my chess set, that is.

Early on in our stay we found a taverna, run by a chap called Tassos, and it was love at first sight. The food took forever to arrive, but nobody cared because we were sitting outside, on those balmy evenings, and my parents had access to a steady supply of Retsina. Tassos had an ancient stereo that played Greek music, but it was on the blink so it was always randomly speeding up or slowing down, some kind of weird bouzouki remix. The overall effect was of an establishment inches from collapse.

Sometimes customers at a neighbouring table would be so angry about the interminable wait that a blazing row would ensue. My parents’ friends Carol and Frank wanted the earth to open up and swallow them; my dad found it hilarious. We went every night, and by the end we were such regulars that after other customers complained, as they often did, Tassos would come to our table and say something to the effect of What was their problem?

As a trip, it had a lasting effect on me. It was the only time I remember my family going out for dinner more than once a year, and I think it made me fall in love with food and restaurants. Specifically, it made me love Greek food. My dad was keen that we enjoy ourselves but not go financially mad, so we were limited to the least expensive things on the menu, the souvlaki, the sofrito – veal in garlic – and the stifado. And I became addicted to the last of those, the rich stew of beef braised to surrender with tomatoes and soft, whole shallots. I can’t remember if it was Tassos’ wife or mother in the kitchen – or even his grandma – but whoever it was, the chef was a genius.

Since then I’ve been to Greece many times. I’ve done Rhodes, which I liked even more than Corfu, although I’ve only once managed to stay in Lindos, the bit of it I adored the most, once. I went to Kefalonia just after the Captain Corelli film, and had dinner with a pre-fame Simon Pegg, sporting a Beckhamesque mohawk, at the next table. I’ve stayed in Mykonos, which I loved despite a nagging feeling that I didn’t see the best of it. I’ve holidayed in beautiful, scruffy Athens, walking among the city’s ruins just before my first marriage went the same way.

And then there’s my very favourite part of Greece – Parga, just around the coast from Preveza airport, a beautiful harbour town full of winding lanes where you can completely forget about the world, sit in one of the many tavernas, eat fresh fish and drink sweet rosé and, for a little while at least, become a twenty-first century lotus eater. One one holiday there I took a boat trip to Corfu Town, strolled the Napoleonic esplanade of the Liston, felt the whole thing coming full circle.

All that said, I’ve not been to Greece in nearly a decade. At first it was Covid’s fault – my trip to Lindos, booked in hopeful ignorance at the start of 2020, was shifted back again and again until we accepted, reluctantly, that it just wouldn’t happen. But the world has gone back to normal since then, something has stopped me returning and I’m not sure what it is.

Analysis paralysis, possibly: I am never able to pick the island, pick the resort, pick the accommodation. I see everyone else going there and I envy their certitude but that magic combination of the right airport, the right flights, the right place to stay has never jumped out at me. I’ve contemplated Chania, or Agios Nikolaos, or going back to Parga, but I’ve always chickened out and booked a city break instead. For many years I wanted to go to Hydra – because Leonard Cohen – and someone I knew on Instagram who went every year even sent me her guide, but the sheer faff of getting there just put me off. You’d need to be there two weeks for that journey to be worth it, and I never take two weeks off.

So the closest I would get, this year at least, was Mon Chéri. It’s always saddened me that Greek food has never really gained a foothold, either in this country or in Reading: we had Kyrenia, which I revered, but since then it’s been Spitiko, which I ought to visit. We had The Real Greek, which left the Oracle before it could be pushed, and we still have Tasty Greek Souvlaki which is indeed tasty, and Greek(ish), but not the full taverna experience.

But Greece is better represented by cafés, with our branches of Coffee Under Pressure and now with Mon Chéri. And I truly love Greek cafés and bakeries – in Parga, most mornings began with breakfast at a place called the Green Bakery, on a sun-dappled terrace with coffee, pastry and a paradisiac, indolent day ahead. When I came in off the drizzle-spattered pavement of West Street, I guess that’s what I was hoping to recapture.

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Restaurant review: Tasty Greek Souvlaki

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Last year, when I emerged from my cocoon and began reviewing takeaways, my first choice was Tasty Greek Souvlaki on Market Place, the thriving restaurant occupying the site where MumMum used to be. It was the natural choice: it was the first (and arguably the most interesting) new restaurant to open in 2020, and one which had quickly embraced delivery as its best chance to ride out an extremely challenging year in hospitality. So I ordered my first on duty takeaway from them, and very nice it was too (you can read about it here). 

Tasty Greek Souvlaki is essentially a carnivore’s paradise, and the menu largely revolves around different quantities of different dead animals cooked in different ways: do you want them cut into cubes, threaded on a skewer and cooked on charcoal, or would you rather go for something a little more primal like chops? Or is your preference to have them pressed into a magical revolving pillar of constantly grilled elephant leg which is then shaved off in thin slivers and fried until crispy? Would you like it in a pitta or a toasted sandwich, with or without chips?

Some people would treat that series of decisions as one disgusted shudder after another. Those people, to be honest, are unlikely to eat at Tasty Greek Souvlaki, although I’m told the falafel wrap is decent (if not massively Greek). Personally, I found it too difficult to choose for a very different reason: I kind of wanted it all, so when I ordered takeaway I went for their mixed grill platter, which gives you exactly that. It was an embarrassment of carnivorous riches, it was a wonderful way of being transported to the Mediterranean without leaving your sofa. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a cardboard box absolutely crammed with every which kind of meat.

I loved it, and ever since then the Big Box Of Meat has been a regular fixture at my house – not too often, because I didn’t want to kill the magic, but every few months on a night when we couldn’t face the cooking. It was always hot, it always arrived quickly and it never let you down. And it cost something like twenty-six pounds, which was ridiculously affordable.

But it was bound to be far nicer in the restaurant itself, plucked from the grill, loaded on to a plate and brought to the table without delay, and so I’ve been looking forward to a proper on duty visit to Tasty Greek for a long old time. Last Saturday, Zoë and I turned up just after midday for an overdue reunion with possibly Reading’s finest meat feast.

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Takeaway review: Smashing Plates

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Smashing Plates is no longer on Deliveroo Editions. If you want good gyros, you were always better off going to Tasty Greek Souvlaki.

Last month I had a very nice email from someone who worked as a commercial manager for Deliveroo Editions, telling me all about a new restaurant called Smashing Plates operating from Reading’s dark kitchen. And before we get started, let’s tackle the elephant in the room: I know, the name is a problem. It’s not as if it was my idea, so don’t shoot the messenger. Let’s all get that sigh, that cringe, that facepalm or weary shake of the head out of the way in unison right at the start of proceedings, and move on.

Anyway, the email described Smashing Plates as cool and “unorthodox” – only choosing to put inverted commas around the latter, as if the former was incontrovertible. Did I fancy running a competition for my followers, it asked? I could put a post on my Instagram telling people all about Smashing Plates, and if they liked my post, followed me and the restaurant and Deliveroo and tagged the person they really wanted to share the prize with then one lucky individual could win a £50 Deliveroo voucher to use at the restaurant of their choice. Did that sound like something I would be interested in? I mean, did it?

Did I want to give over my Instagram to pimping some restaurant I’d never even tried and ask my followers to give them and Deliveroo loads of free publicity just so that one solitary reader could win fifty quid? Hell no. Don’t get me wrong, I do run the occasional competition for readers, but I try and pick the partners for them carefully. I’m not that easily bought, or that cheaply. It struck me as especially weird that the prize was vouchers you didn’t even have to spend at the restaurant the competition was meant to promote. Who was doing the benefiting here – Smashing Plates or Deliveroo?

So I declined politely and no doubt they found many other Instagram accounts to team up with. In fact, I know they did: you don’t have to look far to find plenty of #ADs and #invites featuring the restaurant (although at least the social media posts declared them, unlike some prominent restaurant bloggers). But it did make me think about whether Smashing Plates was worth ordering, so I made a mental note to come back to them later. And here we are.

They’re almost a diffusion brand in themselves, launched by Neo Christodoulou, the co-founder of The Athenian (which itself was on Deliveroo in Reading a while back, if memory serves). Smashing Plates has opened in four venues across London, all of them previously branches of The Athenian, and has two dark kitchens, here and in Cambridge. 

I’d like to say that they have a distinct identity from the Athenian, but looking at both websites I’m none the wiser. The Athenian is all about using “the best ingredients, freshly and lovingly made to order”, they “source everything from our partners in Greece and here in the UK” and “environmental concerns are super important to us… we turn our cooking oils into biodiesel and our kitchens are powered by renewable energy”. 

Smashing Plates, on the other hand, says “The menu is seriously fresh and totally traceable. I know where every ingredient in every product has come from”, “our cooking oil… gets collected and turned into bio-diesel” and “everything is fresh, from start to finish”. Seriously – chalk and feta, these two. I wonder if they fell out and Christodoulou thought “I’ll show them… by copying their entire website”?

Smashing Plates’ delivery menu is small and centred on wraps and sides, gyros and souvlaki. It has slightly less range than their restaurant menu, but there’s enough choice that you don’t feel hemmed in. Perhaps significantly, real priority is given to vegetarians and vegans – so, for instance, you can have gyros with chicken, but pork isn’t on the menu and instead you can choose from halloumi, seitan or portobello mushroom. Most of the sides, for that matter, are vegetarian. They also do salads, loaded fries, skepasti (a gyros toastie) and a handful of desserts and if you fancy a Greek beer on the side you can get your Fix, literally and figuratively.

Nothing is too pricey, either – wraps and salads cost between seven and ten pounds, practically all of the sides are less than a fiver. I chose a wrap, a couple of sides and a dessert, which came to just over twenty pounds not including rider tip (they were doing 25% off food that night), sat back and waited.

Are you ready for the obligatory fuss-free delivery paragraph? Okay, here goes: I ordered just before eight o’clock on a weekday night, my driver was on his way twenty minutes later and in just over five minutes he was at my door. How far we’ve come from me obsessively checking the tracker and saying “why is he going down the Orts Road?” to Zoë as she rolls her eyes for the seventh time: perhaps this is what personal growth looks like. I particularly appreciated the fact that my hot food was in one bag and my cold food in another – if I’d known they were going to be that careful I might have ordered that Fix after all. Please drop us a review! was written on the bag in biro. How little they know, I thought.

Everything was hot and stayed hot throughout the faff of me taking it out of the bag, photographing it, photographing it again because one of my feet was in one of the photos and so on. The gyros – I’d gone for pork – was good but a little muted for my liking. It’s not possible to eat one without comparing it to Tasty Greek’s gyros wrap, and Smashing Plates’ version wasn’t quite at that level. The meat didn’t have that wonderful crispy caramelisation that comes from being exposed to a naked flame and then thinly sliced, and although it was still decent I knew I’d had better.

What was good though, was their signature smoked aubergine sauce. It made a surprisingly refreshing change not to have tzatziki in a gyros wrap and this supplied some badly needed depth of flavour – more sweet than smoky, in truth, but still welcome. I found myself thinking about Tasty Greek Souvlaki’s set-up and wondering whether an off the shelf dark kitchen on the edge of Caversham could match it. Maybe that’s why the gyros fell short. Perhaps, for that matter, it’s why they only offered one meat option for the gyros. Working within your limitations is all very well – I do it as a writer all the time, god knows – but in an ideal world other people don’t notice your limitations.

But Smashing Plates was saved by the sides. Panko chicken bites were marinated with oregano and smoked paprika and they really weren’t mucking around when they said that: opening the box you got a wonderful herbal hit of oregano, a refreshing antidote to all the many times I’ve walked through Reading in the slipstream of someone smoking a massive joint.

It was chicken breast rather than thigh but it wasn’t dried out or bouncy and the coating was crunchy and genuinely delicious. You got a hell of a lot of chicken, the tzatziki it came with was pleasant, if underpowered on the garlic front, and I thoroughly enjoyed every bite. Looking in the box afterwards I found loads of little crunchy pieces of coating – yes, I ate them all with my fingers, with no shame – and not a jot of grease. If they could do all this for less than five pounds, what on earth was Wingstop’s excuse for being so crappy?

I also very much liked the courgette and feta bites, although it was a little odd to get only five of these for a fiver as opposed to so much chicken. The blurb calls them “fluffy” which, if anything, does them a slight disservice. The first ones I had, from the box at the start of the meal, almost had the silky texture of croquetas, with a nice tang from the feta. And actually, as they cooled if anything I appreciated them slightly more. The flavour came through better, and they firmed up so you could tell, from a bite, just how much courgette and cheese had been packed into them. 

Oh, and I had dessert too, a vegan chocolate brownie. If you decide to give Smashing Plates a try, give this a wide berth. It felt like supermarket quality at best: no real texture to speak of, no contrast between crumble and squidge, and a salted caramel topping that just felt like badly sunburnt sugar. Three pounds fifty, too – I know that’s the going rate for brownies at the likes of Workhouse or The Collective, but theirs are bigger, and better, than this. What were you thinking ordering a dessert from Deliveroo? you might be thinking. You might have a point.

Despite the brownie, I found I rather enjoyed Smashing Plates. It’s true that you can get slightly better gyros from Tasty Greek Souvlaki, but my chicken bites and halloumi and feta bites were properly enjoyable, and different from anything offered by Tasty Greek. If I ordered again I would have a gyros because I’d feel that I ought to, but it would largely be an excuse to go crazy and order all the sides. They do another that’s halloumi with sesame seeds and maple syrup which is calling to me: I love all three of those things, and I really want to experience the centre of that particular Venn diagram.

It helps, I’m sure, that my meal was better than I expected it to be. On the sofa in my comfies at the end of a forgettable day, waiting for Zoë to come home from a late shift, the weather positively Baltic outside, it brought me a little joy. And that’s the thing about takeaways – they don’t always have to hit the heights. Sometimes you just want one fewer problem. Sometimes it’s just about that little bit of self-care, treating yourself while you sit in front of Bake Off (I’m rooting for Giuseppe to win) or Strictly (Team John and Johannes all the way). That, to me, is a decidedly orthodox pleasure.

And the silliest thing of all is that if I’d taken Deliveroo up on that competition, I might never have written this review. Some of you might have found out about Smashing Plates, if you happened to be on Instagram, and one of you could have won fifty quid. But I expect you’d have spent it elsewhere, because you probably wouldn’t have the foggiest idea whether Smashing Plates was any good. And that’s the point of this blog. I don’t know why influencers do what they do, although naturally I wish them all the best. But I do know why I do this.

Smashing Plates

https://deliveroo.co.uk/menu/reading/reading-editions/smashing-plates-editions-rea
Order via: Deliveroo only

Lemoni

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

It became apparent in early 2021 that Lemoni was not going to reopen after the third national lockdown. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

It is, I think, a universal reaction when we taste something funny, or not quite right, or even plain bad, to seek a second opinion. Whether that’s saying “do you think this milk is still good?” when it’s a day past the use by date or asking “does this taste weird to you?” in a restaurant, we all do it. We like to share delicious food, providing we have enough of it to spare, but it’s when something’s awful that we really feel the need to share the pain.

I say this because I’ve had several people in the last three months ask me if I’ve been to Lemoni, the new Greek restaurant in the Oracle, or when I’m going – and not because they say the food is stellar. One message on Twitter said “OMFG, it was awful. Service took ages every time, when they arrived the flicking of long hair over food was… ugh”. Another, on Instagram, said it was so bad that they refused a discount because they wanted to leave as quickly as possible. “I never thought I’d say this” she added, “but I really miss Jamie’s Italian”. Someone else on Twitter said “I went there last weekend and I’m interested to hear your opinion”: sometimes what isn’t said shouts as loudly as what is.

As a result, despite my best efforts to stay positive, I approached my visit to Lemoni with a gradual mounting dread. On the one hand, people definitely wanted an impartial review. But on the other, looking at their website I had a real feeling of “must I?”. Part of that came from looking at the menu online, because the dishes at Lemoni were undeniably pricey. Sixteen pounds fifty for a moussaka, or for a chicken shish kebab? They’d have to be absolutely faultless to charge that much.

Matters weren’t helped by my other half sending me a picture which had been doing the rounds at her work, taken from Tripadvisor, of the lamb kebabs. They look as if they had been formed not by hand but by the combination of a colon and a sphincter, nature’s piping bag. As if to reinforce the point, one of her colleagues had effortlessly Photoshopped a single kebab into an image of a toilet bowl: it wasn’t even slightly incongruous, bobbing there.

Tripadvisor didn’t help in general, as it seemed polarised between glowing reviews (often from Greek users with very few other TA reviews) and mutinous rumblings from everybody else about poor value, indifferent food, terrible service. Who to believe?

And then there was the wider mystery – who were Lemoni anyway? Hard to tell from social media, that’s for sure: there was a glut of very polished Instagram activity when the restaurant was about to open, but since then the silence has been deafening. Trying to get any background was challenging – the suggestion had been that this was their second restaurant but from what I could glean from Companies House the first restaurant, in Southampton, had gone into liquidation before the Reading branch opened.

How did an independent business with no real footprint come out of nowhere to take on the Oracle’s biggest restaurant site, quite possibly paying an annual rent in the high six figures? How was it going to survive in such a competitive site, even (or especially) charging those prices? There was only one way to get to the bottom of it: I was going to have to go there myself.

I felt bad about asking anybody to accompany me, but in the end my mother and my stepfather gamely agreed to come along: sometimes you really do need the unconditional commitment only family can truly provide. So, despite my stepfather’s wistful looks askance at the entrance to Royal Tandoori, we walked up to Lemoni on a warm summer’s evening to take our chances.

The welcome at the door was bright and friendly, and we walked up through the stairs and through the restaurant to take a table out on the upstairs balcony, one of Reading’s better al fresco spaces. The transformation from when the restaurant was Jamie’s Italian was marked, and very nicely done: the upstairs and downstairs are both very tasteful, airy spaces with plenty of natural light, grown-up looking marble-topped tables and grey tweedy banquettes. I didn’t eat inside, but I liked the look of it – I did wonder though just how much sound would be absorbed on a busy Friday or Saturday night and whether the restaurant would feel quite as welcoming on a darker winter’s evening.

The first big surprise came when the menus arrived, because the prices have been reduced significantly since April (although Lemoni has neglected to change its website to reflect this). Mains in particular had come down by between three and five pounds per dish – badly needed, because many of the dishes skirted around the twenty pound mark which felt very expensive for this kind of food. This means that Lemoni must be the first restaurant I’ve encountered to do a soft opening in reverse: still, at least it showed they were learning from their mistakes.

We ordered a few drinks, namely a Mythos for my stepfather, a Menebrea – the Italian beer which is becoming Peroni for people who think they’re too good for Peroni – for my mother and some sparkling mineral water (don’t judge) for me. Nearly all the waiting staff, all dressed all in black, seemed to be Greek and they certainly looked efficient, darting from table to table; maybe they’d also learned from some of that early criticism.

We decided to share some of the starters to begin with – these all vary between about five and eight pounds, although they charge extra for pitta which felt cheeky to me. How else did they expect you to eat houmous or taramasalata, exactly? The taramasalata, incidentally, was one of the best starters we had – brighter pink than I’m led to believe it should be but punchy all the same. I especially liked the addition of some salted capers on top, but I suspect they were more popular with me than with my mother. “It doesn’t taste that fishy” was her feedback – my stepfather and I disagreed, but she had taken against the dish and that was that.

The spanakopita was a hit with all of us – light filo pastry with just enough crunch housing a beautifully molten mixture of feta, spinach and mint. The other two starters, though, were the relative duds. Saganaki is one of my favourite Greek starters and done well it’s a glorious, indulgent thing. The menu chose not to specify which cheese it was (which perhaps should have been a warning bell) but it’s usually feta and this didn’t feel like feta at all. Whatever it was, it was a lukewarm block of cheese with a leathery texture which had no give whatsoever. The “homemade tomato jam” might just have been able to paper over the cracks of this dish, but there was nowhere near enough of it.

The last starter arrived after the other three, and before the side plates we’d had to ask for twice. Mashed fava beans topped with calamari were a pleasing shade of yellow and had a earthy, if subtle, taste. But I couldn’t help wishing it was hot rather than lukewarm and it also needed some pita to do it justice. Our first helping of pita – tasty, topped with something like cayenne pepper or paprika along with dried oregano but far too little of it – had already vanished by then and it took multiple attempts to flag someone down to ask for more. By the time it arrived we still just about needed it, but the moment had passed.

“That dish is bland” said my mother, pointing accusingly at the fava beans.

“It’s okay – it could do with a bit more seasoning” I said.

“Well, it’s not unpleasant” she added, the implication clearly being that not unpleasant was not good enough. I could see what she meant, but I was more disappointed that paying two pounds extra got your fava bean purée topped with precisely four tiny bits of squid. Maybe I’ve inherited her critical faculties.

Having struggled to get our side plates and struggled to get extra pita bread, we then found we were left alone with our leftovers in front of us for some time. This gave my mother enough time to do some detective work.

“Our placemats are by John Lewis” she said. “They have the tag on them.”

I inspected them. This was indeed the case.

“And the labels are still on the underside of our side plates.”

I wasn’t sure how my mother had clocked this – nothing gets past her – but lifting up my snazzy rippled white plate it was true. Sophie Conran for Portmeiron, no less, and that stuff isn’t cheap; these aren’t plates you’d want to smash at a wedding.

“It’s weird, isn’t it? It’s like they’ve picked this stuff up at a department store because money’s no object.” And again, I found myself wondering where the money came from to open this massive restaurant out of nowhere and kit it out with a lovely new refit, John Lewis placemats and Sophie Conran crockery. At this point my stepfather outlined his theory on the matter: sadly, I’ve had to omit it from the review but I’m sure you could come up with your own ideas.

I was jogged out of this reverie by the fact that as our plates were taken away the main courses were plonked in front of us, supervised by an older man who looked as if he might be the owner. The overall effect was a little menacing, especially as my stepfather had ordered the “chicken skewer” which comes to the table on a long and potentially dangerous skewer fresh from the grill. The skewer was served on a bed of undressed, pointless rocket with some soft-looking roasted potatoes, a cold couscous salad and some kind of dip. I tried some of the chicken and it wasn’t unpleasant but there was no real sign that it had been marinated. At fourteen pounds it was still more expensive than the same dish at Bakery House, with nowhere near the same whistles and bells.

“That dip is salad cream” said my mother, looking none too impressed.

“I think it’s more like burger sauce” I said. “The menu says it’s ‘Lemoni mayonnaise sauce’, apparently.”

“Well it tastes like salad cream to me.”

“It’s not going to be a glass half full evening, is it?” said my stepfather philosophically as he attacked the rest of his main, undeterred by any resemblance to Heinz’s finest. I had ordered the classic kebab, and I was delighted to discover that they no longer looked like the Photoshopped horror I’d been sent via Whatsapp. If anything, these were uncannily regular cylinders of meat – a mixture of beef and lamb, apparently – and I wasn’t sure whether I enjoyed them or if I was just relieved that they weren’t worse. They were nicely seasoned and although they were a little on the smooth and homogeneous side for my liking they weren’t unpleasant. They came with a yoghurt thicker and more pointless than Dominic Raab, and a tomato sauce which lacked any spice or heat at all. Nice chips, to be fair, but apart from that this was another dish that Bakery House does miles better for less.

Even if the glass had been half full up to that point, it pretty much emptied when my mum started eating her pastichio, a sort of Greek lasagne which serves as an alternative to moussaka.

“This is sweet. It’s as sweet as a dessert. And there’s nowhere near enough mince. It’s just a sweet tomato sauce and some pasta. And the cheese! Well, it doesn’t taste cheesy.”

I tried some. You couldn’t knock her brevity: it would take me a whole paragraph to say a lot less.

“I think it tastes sweet because there’s definitely cinnamon in that tomato sauce.” I said, trying to put a brave face on it. Who was I trying to kid? The dish was a duffer.

It didn’t help that the accompanying Greek salad also didn’t pass muster. “It’s a nice olive” my mother said, “but it needs company.” A pity, because the feta was lovely and, again, I thought adding capers was a nice touch. But it’s difficult to argue with somebody saying that a Greek salad needs to contain more than one solitary olive.

We stayed for dessert, because I desperately wanted to give Lemoni one more chance. The big thing here is loukoumades, Greek doughnuts, so I ordered them with Greek honey and crushed walnuts. They were nicely irregularly-shaped, so obviously made by hand, but that’s as far as the plusses went. They were heavy, stodgy things, the shell not crisp and the inside a million miles from a fluffy cloud of joy. The honey was in a lake at the bottom rather than drizzled over the doughnuts, and the whole thing was heavy going. We didn’t finish them.

“Doughnuts ought to be a delight” said my mother, who by this point was turning into a one-woman Greek chorus of disapproval. “You should want to race through them.”

My stepfather’s bougatsa, custard in filo pastry, was better but still not right. I liked the custard very much, but this pastry didn’t have the same lightness of touch as our starters had had. Sawing through it with a knife felt like a slog. “It’s a bit tough” said – well, I’m sure you can guess who said that.

It won’t surprise you to hear that we also had to ask for the bill twice. Lemoni was busier than I expected on a Wednesday evening – the sun was still shining, the big screen on the Riverside was showing Wimbledon, people were sitting in the deckchairs on the opposite bank watching it and the beach bar was full of the kind of people who like the beach bar. It was a glorious evening, and if our meal had been better maybe we’d have been happy to sit there and digest and chat away with all the time in the world. All the best Greek food I’ve had – usually on holiday, but also in restaurants like Maida Vale’s scruffy Tsiakkos & Charcoal, or Notting Hill’s upmarket Mazi – is best eaten in a leisurely fashion, while you daydream of being somewhere in the Cyclades. But in this case, we just wanted to settle up and sod off.

Eventually, we flagged someone down and our bill – four starters, three mains, two desserts, two beers and some mineral water – came to ninety pounds, not including tip. Not hugely expensive, in the scheme of things, but when you consider that we barely drank it’s still a fair amount to spend on something so middling.

“You could come here and have quite a good meal” said my stepfather, “if you happen to order just the right things. Or if you ordered badly it would be terrible.” I nodded in agreement: I’d seen huge plates of what looked like home-made crisps turn up at other tables and I was thinking that if I’d just ordered those and some houmous I probably would have had a better, cheaper time.

So, there you have it: Lemoni isn’t the horror show I half expected, which just goes to show that anybody who reviews a new restaurant in the first month is making an error of judgment. But, even after three months of working on the pricing, the menu and the service it’s still deeply unspecial. Not better than Bakery House, not better than The Real Greek, not better than Kyrenia in its heyday. I don’t say that with any joy or any axe to grind – it would be a wonderful thing for the prime pitch in the heart of the Oracle to be occupied by a brilliant, distinctive, smartly-priced and well-run independent restaurant. But Lemoni is not that restaurant.

My closing thought about Lemoni was the saddest of all, because what my visit really did was make me think about Dolce Vita. Dolce Vita paid less rent than Lemoni, it charged more than Lemoni, it was busier than Lemoni, it did better food, it had better service and it closed for good last year. If Dolce Vita couldn’t make a go of it with so much in its favour, who would bet on Lemoni seeing out the year? More to the point: just imagine how wonderful Reading would be if a restaurant like Dolce Vita had occupied a spot like the one Lemoni has. How I wish we lived in a town like that.

Lemoni – 6.2
Unit 1, The Riverside, The Oracle, RG1 2AG
0118 9585247

https://reading.lemoniuk.com/