Round-up: January

On February 7, 2014June 14, 2022 By ediblereadingIn News2 Comments

It seems like 2014 only just kicked off and here we are, busier than ever. Hopefully you all made it through to the end of the month with your resolutions intact (if you made any) and with your January pay packet not completely spent before you earned it. Clichés aside, January and February can be some of the leanest months for the fun stuff with the dark and rainy weather making everyone want to stay in – especially when the alternative is going out and paying extortionate amounts of money for a Valentine’s meal where romance is the one dish that is never reliably on the menu.

Despite harvest time being a long way away there’s been a bumper crop at Edible Reading. I’m really pleased to say traffic on the blog surprises me (in a good way) every month and I owe that to you lot, so thank you. Oh, and don’t be put off by this being a round-up – there’s lots happening in the Reading food scene that simply isn’t covered by the reviews. But let’s do the reviews first – here’s what you may have missed.

Barts, 6.2 – What a start to the New Year! Of course, you could read reviews in the local papers (where it gets covered at least every 6 months – why could this be?) but if you really want to know what its odd mixture of good service and mistake-laden food is like, check out the full ER review here.

Sweeney and Todd, 5.2 – The legendary pie shop has been drawing in the punters for over 30 years. Why? Search me. Bad boiled potatoes and “hot jelly” got the lowest mark from ER this month. See why here.

Bhel Puri House, 6.8 – Reading’s only vegetarian restaurant is easy to miss but worth seeking out for the chilli paneer alone. Click on the link here for the full lowdown on an excellent alternative to Reading’s sometimes monotonous lunch scene.

The Bull on Bell Street, 5.3 – This is what happens when a revamped boozer doesn’t have a kitchen to match its good looks. Such a shame. Have a drink but my advice is to give the food a miss. Go here for the full sorry story.

In other news (cue the shuffling of papers while I wait for the autocue to get to the cute hedgehog story at the end of the broadcast) there has been a flurry of new places opening or getting ready to open.

First of all, three months after I first mentioned it and a full four months after its promised opening date, Lebanese restaurant La Courbe has finally opened in King’s Walk, along with its adjoining wine and cocktail bar (on the side nearest The Mix, so perhaps they’ll get some overflow trade). First impressions, from a walk past, are mixed at best. The décor – lots of purple and pistachio, chrome, cream leather and square glass tables – is rather stuck in the 90s, and the restaurant space is basically a glass-fronted box with an open kitchen at the back. On the other hand, I’ve heard decent reports of the food. It will be nice to see if someone can finally make a go of one of those downstairs units in King’s Walk – I’ll be there to review it in due course.

Also after many months of “coming soon”, Buffalo Grill on the edge of the Broad Street Mall has opened, offering burgers, ribs and fajitas. Lots of stuff, in fact, that you can get in numerous other restaurants in Reading. Again, I know a couple of people who’ve been and the feedback I’ve had ranges from “never again” to “maybe again”. If enough people really want to know what it’s like, I might review it later in the year (I can’t pretend to be hugely enthusiastic, can you tell?)

Closer into town Crêpe Affaire has opened next to the “lovely hot dogs, nice and fresh” booth (which, I can solemnly assure you, I will never review – not even if all other restaurants in Reading close and it is the sole alternative to cooking at home). It looks very modish, with bare walls and pale oak and staff in little white hats. Fingers crossed it’s more than a one trick pony and lasts longer than the ill-fated cupcake shop a few doors down, on the edge of the Oracle, that closed not long before Crêpe Affaire opened. I have also discovered, in the course of writing this, that it’s very difficult to talk about this restaurant without getting “My Affair” by the late great Kirsty MacColl lodged in my head as an unshiftable earworm (thanks for that, Crêpe Affaire. Thanks a bunch.)

The other new place due to open is My Kitchen, in a skinny little unit on Queen Victoria Street. Again, the interior looks very now, all bare brick and funky chalkboards, and I’d guess it will be a lunch place but that’s all I can say. They have no website that I managed to track down: honestly, you try Googling “my kitchen Reading” and see if you have any more joy than I did (the curse of the town name that also happens to be a verb strikes again). The picture below is pretty much all we have to go on, but I’ll keep peering through the windows and will report back.

Of course, the flipside of new restaurants opening is existing restaurants closing, and sadly Kyklos, the Greek restaurant in King’s Walk, has closed this month. They didn’t quite make it to their first birthday, which is a real shame – when I reviewed it in October I thought the service was amazing but the food was patchy, and I was worried then that it was a large room which was never even remotely full. I’ve added a note to the review which is here.

Another piece of restaurant news relates to a change of personnel. Since the ER review of Forbury’s in November, chef Tom Kneale has announced on Twitter that he has left by mutual consent with immediate effect, to relocate to Bristol and spend more time with his family. Hopefully he will manage to find a new role where more of his creative ideas make it out of the kitchen in front of the diners. Normally I wouldn’t announce this – ER is much more interested in food than in chefs – but it does seem relevant in this case. I’ve also added a note to this review, too, which is here.

Talking of being creative, it seems that ER is having quite an influence on the local papers, despite just being a little blog. After almost six months of ER visiting, reviewing and recommending the best independent restaurants the Reading Post has crowdsourced a similar list using Twitter and published it with useful pithy remarks such as “upmarket Indian” and “suburban Thai”. Still, better late than never and it’s nice to see them supporting small local businesses. In unconnected news, the same week the Post reviewed Cleavers in Wokingham, an offshoot of large Italian chain Prezzo (this time hoping to be “the place for burgers, chicken and ribs” – as opposed, presumably, to all the other places). Still, there is one local business that can always rely on support – the Post also published a piece recently publicising a wine and canapés evening at Bart’s. They just can’t stay away!

Fortunately, there are other websites championing Reading’s independent scene. Alt Reading launched last week with a handsome, regularly updated website aiming to celebrate the best of Reading’s independent shops, restaurants and culture in all its forms. It’s just what Reading has needed for some time, and I’m really looking forward to seeing them develop the site over the months ahead. And I’d say that, I promise, even if they hadn’t been so complimentary about ER here (thanks guys!)

Right, I can see the hedgehog story approaching on the autocue so that’s definitely the end of this month’s round-up. Keep telling me – by email, by commenting, or on Twitter – where you want to see reviewed and I’ll add your suggestion to the list, which is here. In the meantime, tune in next Friday when there will be a new, unbiased, independent restaurant review for you. Just like always.

The Bull On Bell Street, Henley

On January 31, 2014December 2, 2020 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Regular readers (hello!) may recall that there’s very little I like more than a proper old pub, one of the many things Britain does exceptionally well. In fact, one of the only things I like more than a proper old pub is a proper old pub that does brilliant food. Berkshire has lots of these, tucked away in little hamlets, scattered away from the centre of Reading like electrons orbiting a nucleus, but every now and again you find one tucked away in a town centre too.

I had high hopes for The Bull On Bell Street, in the middle of Henley, when I chanced upon it last year. I’d stopped in there one Saturday for a decadent mid-afternoon snifter and been wowed by it; the refurbishment had been extremely tastefully done (all comfy old chairs and lashings of Farrow and Ball), the list of wines by the glass was very tempting and the wintry waft of woodsmoke was wonderful. I wanted to curl up in a chair with a good book (or, better still, a trashy one) and never leave, and I made a mental note to come back and try the food another time. And so, a weeknight in January, shortly after the payday that had felt so long in coming, I did.

We wound our way through the bar to the restaurant area at the back, and in doing so marvelled at the sheer size of the pub. It’s made up of two or three generously sized rooms which comprise the bar, but the two rooms at the back for dining were also both really big with beautiful tiled floors. The whole thing looked a bit like a posher, less tired Hotel Du Vin – nicely spaced tables on the right, appealing looking booths on the left, attractively lit with plush banquettes. We took one of those and the waitress handed us the suitably rustic looking menus (printed on rough brown paper, a restaurant cliché which has taken a surprisingly long time to reach us from London). She also brought some bread (with butter, sadly still hard from the fridge, and some oil and balsamic glaze) and tap water (in a nice big jug with a sprig of mint and a slice of lemon) without being asked, which I thought was a nice touch.

The menu was also promising. It wasn’t too big that you doubted their ability to cook it all, or so small that you felt hemmed in and without choice. I know you only need to find one dish to eat on a menu to make a place worth a visit but it’s one area where it’s nice to have difficult choices and both of us had trouble narrowing each course down from three or four likely candidates.

First things first, though: we ordered some wine from the list I’d found so appealing on my previous visit. Because one of us was driving we were limited to wines by the glass but, even so, the choices were good. The South African cabernet merlot was soft and eminently drinkable (if not the most complex red in the world) but the Chilean sauvignon blanc was lovely – zesty and very slightly sweet with hints of peach (it reminded me of a viognier, one of my favourite whites). Neither of them cost more than a fiver.

If you stopped reading there, you’d probably reach the conclusion that I’d had a fantastic evening. And, if I’d left the restaurant after the wine, I probably would have done. Regrettably though, however nice your furniture or tasty your wine, a restaurant stands or falls on its food and – for all the superficially promising signs – food turned out not to be the Bull’s strong suit.

The starters were both squarely on the border between underwhelming and downright disappointing. The “smoked haddock pot, rosemary and garlic” was not at all what I expected. I thought it was going to be a type of potted haddock affair, all butter and spices. Instead, I got a miniature fisherman’s pie, with a thick layer of haddock, mashed potato and a cheesy topping. There was no sign of rosemary or garlic anywhere, or indeed any seasoning. Or flavour, save for the smokiness of the haddock. The board (it’s always on a board these days, isn’t it?) had a little white jug with a cream coloured sauce in it. I dipped the tines of my fork in to try and taste it and it tasted of nothing. When I asked the waitress to remind me what it was she revealed it to be “butter sauce”. No sign of the rosemary or garlic there, either, more beurre blank than beurre blanc. It was almost too bland to criticise – a fitting accompaniment to the Mumford And Sons, Coldplay and Adele being pumped through the speakers at a volume I wasn’t personally happy with (although, in my case, that’s any volume above “muted”).

The other starter was described as “smoked duck ragu” but, when it arrived, betrayed the delicious promise of those three words. I’m not sure how it could be described as a ragu: no tomato, no finely chopped meat, no glorious sticky consistency. Instead, it was pasta, slices of smoked duck, some kind of bland jus and some finely diced courgettes. It was simultaneously exactly the sum of its parts and miles, miles less than that. When I’d asked the waitress told me the pasta was pappardelle and maybe some of it was meant to be, but some of it was definitely tagliatelle. To avoid any complications which might have been caused by the varying widths, all of it had been boiled into flaccid submission. I’d never really considered having smoked duck in pasta before my meal at the Bull, and I can confidently say that thanks to the kitchen there I never will again.

The mains were no better. “Pan fried chicken breast, parsnip mash potato, St James cabbage, cauliflower cheese and cream chicken sauce” was pretty much exactly that. The chicken (as you can see from my picture) was massive – I think it had been working out – with a limp skin and no signs of any seasoning. The cabbage was nicely cooked, in fairness, and did indeed have creamy sauce but it didn’t taste of chicken. I’m not sure the chicken did either. The parsnip mash potato was bland and lumpy, neither mashed nor containing any discernible parsnip. All in all, the overall effect was that of eating average food with a heavy cold: nothing tasted of anything.

I should exempt the cauliflower cheese from that criticism, because it was terrific – the cauliflower cooked but still firm, the sauce rich and cheesy with a delicious slightly chewy crust on the top. But it wasn’t enough to redeem such a forgettable dish. I didn’t finish it: there didn’t seem any point, when every mouthful was the culinary equivalent of the One Show.

The other dish sounded interesting: seared salmon with roasted fennel, chestnut mushroom, salt baked celeriac and watercress. What turned up, as so often that evening, was anything but. It takes real skill to cook salmon so it’s still slightly pink but the skin is salty and crispy, and on this evidence it’s skill that the Bull’s kitchen just doesn’t possess. Again, there was no real sign of seasoning at all. But worse still, the vegetables were woeful. I did catch a bit of mushroom, and a plenty of watercress, and some celery – quite a lot of celery, in fact – but the salt baked celeriac and fennel were harder to find. I got an occasional sliver of celeriac, a momentary flash of fennel, but in reality it was almost as if the kitchen had put just enough of each in there to tantalise you with what the dish could have tasted like if it had been done properly. Again there was no sauce, no flavour, nothing to excite any palate. I’m a long way from the best cook in the world, but if I wanted a badly cooked salmon steak on top of an indifferent underseasoned stir fry even I could knock that up at home, and it would cost a lot less than fifteen pounds.

“Shall I bring you the dessert menu?” said the waitress, taking away the two plates and scrupulously failing to notice how much food was left.

“No thanks, we’ll just get the bill.”

This was not queried, which sums up the service in general. Our waitress was pleasant enough, although she got increasingly brusque as the restaurant got more and more busy; the place was packed, especially for a Tuesday night (I can only assume most of the diners had heavy colds already). She was however very robotic, something I only noticed when I saw another waiter serving the table opposite us; he seemed to understand what the dishes were and how to sell them, whereas she was just reading off a shopping list. Her lack of enthusiasm made a lot more sense once I’d eaten the food, but by then it was too late. Two courses for two people, including one glass of wine each, cost us fifty-six pounds and two hours of my life.

I’m cross that I went to the Bull. I’m cross that I left Reading for such a nothingy meal, and disappointed with myself for picking so badly – because ultimately, reviewing somewhere out of town that isn’t worth going to is almost like no review at all. If I review a restaurant in Reading and say it’s good, maybe you’ll go. If I say it’s bad, perhaps you’ll stay away. But a bad restaurant in Henley? Effectively I’m telling you not to go somewhere that you probably wouldn’t have visited anyway, and this review is all any of us have to show for it. Never mind, I’ll learn from this so as to serve you better: next time I won’t be taken in by beautiful pubs with new paint jobs, and I’ll remember that if a kitchen doesn’t know how to season its food then the whole place is simply not worth its salt.

The Bull On Bell Street – 5.3
57-59 Bell Street, Henley-on-Thames, RG9 2BA
01491 576554

http://www.bullonbell.co.uk/home

The Plowden Arms, Shiplake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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