This week’s review partly came about because of a gentleman called Andy Hayler. Now, you might not know who Hayler is, but in terms of food he’s something of a phenomenon.
The shadowy world of Michelin exists behind an impenetrable curtain, with nobody sure how they work or what dictates who gets listed, is awarded Bib Gourmands and stars – or, sometimes, has them taken away. Andy Hayler is the closest thing we have to a Michelin inspector working in plain sight. He has a blog, which has been around since the 90s, in which he has documented hundreds of meals in restaurants, giving each restaurant – and every dish – a mark out of 20.
I’ve rarely seen anything get lower than a 10, and very little approaches the top of his scale, but that’s because a fair amount of what Hayler has reviewed is at the highest end of dining. There was a time when he had eaten at every three starred restaurant in the entire world, although he stopped keeping up with Michelin when, as he puts it, they devalued what three stars should signify by giving them out in some territories to restaurants that were nowhere near the standards he had experienced elsewhere.
Hayler has a sort of cult, niche status in food. I’ve read a couple of pieces about him in recent years, both verging on hagiographies. He’s been described as “the best living food writer”, and I’ve read interviews that gush about his effortless recall and the esteem in which he is held by chefs and restaurateurs. He is the cognoscenti’s critic of choice and no mistake.
I think he attracts some of those plaudits because of what his reviews both are and aren’t. They don’t, in some senses, read like reviews at all, more like audits from someone scrupulous and meticulous who has forgotten more good meals than most of us will ever have. Although it doesn’t sound like he forgets many of them: why would you, when you document them all in such extensive detail?
I think the respect also comes from his refreshing lack of ego; Hayler would be the first to draw a distinction between himself and many restaurant reviewers. “I wouldn’t ever pretend I was any sort of fantastic prose master. I’m not trying to throw in a load of stuff about my journey to the restaurant and the trendy people on the table to the left” he has said, subtly throwing shade on half the piffle I come out with every week.
Don’t worry, there’s no way he meant me personally: in fact, he once described one of my pieces, about Maida Vale’s Paulette, as a “lovely review” which I found surprisingly touching. “Most of the newspaper critics want to be writers first, I want to focus on the food” he said more recently. I suspect the people who read him admire that purity of approach, and it does mean that when he thinks somewhere is dismal or overrated, which happens occasionally, it’s really very amusing.
What’s also admirable is that Hayler goes where he likes, reviews wherever he wants: money seems to be no object, and he doesn’t follow the fads. You won’t find him, for instance, reviewing Brasserie Constance, a restaurant operating out of Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage, unlike nearly every broadsheet critic over the last few weeks. Instead, his two or three reviews each week involve him going wherever he pleases, in London and abroad.
His two main weaknesses seem to be eating at the Ritz in particular and eating Indian food in general. Hayler is a regular visitor to Epsom’s Dastaan, and the little group of restaurants it has spawned in Surbiton, Richmond and Leeds. He’s also a frequent diner in Southall, and when he gave a warm review to Hounslow’s review of Crispy Dosa last November it caused a Mexican wave of regional bloggers checking out their nearest branch to touch the hem of his virtual garment (been there, done that – four years ago).
“If Mr Hayler thinks it is OK, it is a fair bet I will probably like it” one said. “You can be assured that if Andy says a restaurant is worth visiting then it really will be” said another. That’s proper soft power, and all from the opinion of a chap you mightn’t have heard of.
Hayler even came all the way west to Caversham last year to review Clay’s, something I’ve been waiting for him to do for a very long time. He gave it 14/20, which may not sound like a big deal but actually is. “Clays is a very impressive family-run restaurant, the food shows a lot of care, and the chefs are clearly putting some real effort into reproducing an authentic taste of India” he concluded, after paying particular tribute to Clay’s cabbage pakora, lamb chops and, of course, bhuna venison (Hayler also tried methi chicken, a dish he seems particularly to favour).
Seeing Clay’s reviewed by Hayler was like watching somebody you know being interviewed in the national news, and it made me proud. It didn’t make the local paper the way Grace Dent’s write-up had, but in its way it was every bit as significant. Hayler, as he said, is all about the food.
Now, by this point even my most supportive readers are probably thinking ‘this is an even more circuitous intro than usual, what has this got to do with anything?’ Well, I’ll tell you: every week Andy Hayler does a roundup on his blog, and every week the byline gives a couple of destinations. From South Kensington to Mayfair one might read, or From Piccadilly to Rome. Fancy restaurants and/or jetsetting are invariably involved. And then, at the start of the month, one made me do a double take. From Winnersh to West London, it said.
Winnersh? Our Winnersh?
It was not a misprint. Andy Hayler had come all the way to Winnersh to try out Club India, an Indian restaurant that opened back in July where the old Pheasant pub used to be. I mentioned that development when I reviewed Dolphin’s Caribbean, back in June, What I said, looking back, feels a little graceless, especially as they sent me a lovely email inviting me to a pre-launch event. I read the blurb and thought it sounded potentially interesting, but then again: Winnersh?
Andy Hayler had no such compunctions. Club India’s consultant chef had held two Michelin stars at his restaurant in San Francisco, although Hayler’s verdict on that place was that if a chef had gone there trying to pick up tips “he or she would either burst out laughing maniacally or seek to throttle any passing Michelin inspectors; possibly both”. But the head chef had headed up the kitchens at a couple of London restaurants Hayler really rated. So he went, he enjoyed it, he dished out scores out of 20 for all the dishes and, of course, he ordered methi chicken.
Overall he gave it the same rating, 14 out of 20, as Clay’s. “Club India was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, the food and service excellent, and at an affordable price. I wish I could say that more often these days” was his conclusion. That was good enough for me, so on a Friday night after a couple of pre-prandial beers in town Zoë and I hopped on the number 4 bus to go and see if Reading really did have a rival to Clay’s Kitchen, tucked away in – this may not be the last time I say this word slightly incredulously – Winnersh.
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As of September 2026 Tanatan appears to be closed – possibly for maintenance, possibly for good.
Some restaurants wind up so indelibly linked with the buildings that become their homes that years later, long after they are gone, you still can’t imagine another menu outside, someone else trading behind those doors. Sometimes, no other restaurant even tries: ever since Dolce Vita left its spot on the top floor of Kings Walk nobody has taken its place, but even if they did, I don’t know how I’d feel eating somewhere that, to me, will always be Dolce Vita.
Sometimes the place stays the same but changes hands, with or without changing its name. At some point I should return to Namaste Kitchen, and people tell me it’s good, but without Kamal running the front of house and that magical menu of Nepalese small plates I’m not sure how I’d overcome the strangeness of dining there. I’ll do it, one day, and when I do the review will have to have a different preamble to this one, because this one’s taken.
Ditto Spitiko, where Kyrenia used to be. The site’s the same, the menu is similar, the furniture might be too, and Spitiko may well be a perfectly decent restaurant. But in my mind it will always be Kyrenia, the place where I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, where I’d always go for mezze and kleftiko, for a bottle of Naoussa Grand Reserva and Ihor’s twinkliest welcome. Its golden age was over fifteen years ago, yet I remember it like it was yesterday.
That’s before we get to the Lyndhurst, now under its third set of new management since they hosted guests for the very last time – my wedding guests, no less. This may sound silly, but I don’t feel ready to eat there again. Perhaps this sentimental streak should disqualify me as a restaurant reviewer. But on balance I don’t think so: these places get into our hearts, occupy a place in our affections, become part of our story. Not to feel that kind of thing is not to be alive.
But of course, nearly every restaurant was once somewhere else. Buon Appetito, that I still miss, may have become Traditional Romanesc, but before that it was Chi Oriental Brasserie. And again, when Chi closed I was devastated. You know where else Chi Oriental Brasserie used to live? The site that’s now Masakali. And I was sad when Chi left that spot on the TGI Friday roundabout, too, but I was equally forlorn when San Sicario, a wonderful restaurant, gave up the fight at that very location.
All these places come and go. They make your day one month and break your heart the next: that’s what getting attached to a restaurant can do to you. Worse still, throughout it all TGI Friday has been plugging away on the other side of that roundabout for as long as I can remember. I wonder if restaurants have their own version of that well-worn maxim that only the good die young.
All this might go some way towards explaining that although new-ish Indian restaurant Tanatan opened on London Street last December, it’s only on a week night in July, months later, that I went there with my oldest friend Mike for dinner. Because even though the site was an empty shell for over two years, before that it was Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen, and it’s still hard for me to think of it as anywhere else.
Clay’s, where I ate for the first time before it opened, where I celebrated birthdays – mine and theirs, as it happens – where I went on random evenings because it was just round the corner from my little house, where I ate with friends, family and visitors, where I held lunches for my readers. Few rooms contain as much of my personal history as that one, so I knew it would be odd to eat there again, to eat Indian food there at that, and to know that it was somewhere new.
Tanatan’s story is a curious one, by the way. In the run up to it opening, the Reading Chronicle trumpeted that it was a high end Indian restaurant which very much seemed like the natural successor to Clay’s. Not only that, but they claimed that it was the first U.K. branch of an upmarket Indian group of restaurants with its other branches in India and Dubai.
That all sounds magnificent, and Tanatan’s website contains a menu full of temptations. There’s only one hitch, which is that there’s no evidence at all that Reading’s Tanatan has any connection to that chain at all. It’s not mentioned on their website, and in fact Reading’s Tanatan, for a long time, didn’t have a website of its own. Now it does, but the menu bears about as much resemblance to the other Tanatan’s menu as I do to Jude Law.
It looks suspiciously as if the Chronicle had flagged the name, put two and two together and come up with five, which is a mistake not even the AI that writes most of its articles would make. So, what was this Tanatan, our RG-based restaurant, like? Was it a worthy successor to its precursor, or an attempt to hop on a bandwagon two years after the bandwagon rolled north, over the river? It was time to brave that all too familiar room and find out.
It’s traditional to say “I love what you’ve done with the place” in circumstances like this, but arriving I was struck by how, really, Tanatan had done next to nothing with the room they had inherited. The walls were still that shade of tangerine that had ruined almost every photograph I’d ever taken, the metalwork at the top of the stairs still canary yellow. Terra cotta pots still hung from the mesh ceiling, the banquette I’d sat at countless times still ran along the right hand wall.
All that was new was the furniture – ugly, high-backed chairs on one side of the dining room, slightly unlovely booths on the other. The lack of a makeover surprised me somewhat, because the building had been vacant for so long between occupants. Did Tanatan open in a hurry, or were they trying to ride on the coat tails of their predecessor by hoping to be mistaken for them?
The room also had an unmistakeable, faintly frowsty smell of damp. Now, I didn’t know this but I bumped into a friend last week that told me that Clay’s, when it was open, had that slight odour too (“I always asked for a table upstairs”, he said). I never noticed it back then, but I guess two things that would have masked it were plenty of nice-smelling people and plates of fragrant food. And after all, even heating up a Clay’s At Home baghara rice could make your kitchen smell gorgeous for days. But on the night I visited Tanatan only one other table was occupied, although a couple of other diners came in after me.
Mike was already installed at a booth (“I got one with good lighting” he said, ever helpful) and – a nice touch, this – a bowl of complimentary poppadoms was on the table in front of us, with a greenish raita and a chutney that tasted of mango despite its colour being closer to ketchup. Both were lovely, and we ordered a pint of Kingfisher each as we chatted about how best to tackle the menu. In a nod to the more conventional curry house Tanatan offers Cobra and Kingfisher; I still haven’t worked out which I prefer, or what the difference even is.
Conventional also described Tanatan’s menu. The restaurant’s slogan is “where India’s spices dance”, and that might be true, but they’re not busting out any lesser-known moves. The menu was a step above the really entry level pick-your-sauce, pick-your-protein curry house, but only just. Korma, jalfrezi, dhansak and saag were all there, without much in the way of regional dishes; if you’re looking for something off the beaten track Tanatan might not be the place for you.
As so often nowadays, there was also a decent selection of Indo-Chinese dishes, although it didn’t have its own section on the menu. Starters ran in the main from six to ten pounds, mains stayed south of fourteen. The slightly disappointing range of the menu, though, wasn’t the main thing I noticed about it, because reading it truly made me feel like I was taking a day trip to the uncanny valley. Some of the menu items seemed to have been written by some kind of nightmarish fusion of Google Translate and ChatGPT.
For instance, I can’t think of any other reason why you would call onion bhajis Onions Crispy Fritters or chicken samosas Chicken Golden Crisp Pastry. In each case the dish’s actual name was written underneath in small print, after a prefix saying ‘Popular name’. If the name was that popular, why weren’t they just using it? It was like referring to Michael Caine as Maurice Micklewhite, only even weirder because at least that was Caine’s actual real name. But would anyone ever say, in real life, that they were gasping for a chicken golden crisp pastry?
It was so cack-handed that it was almost endearing, especially when the names of dishes took a turn for the chaotically poetic. I’ve heard chilli chicken called many things, especially Kamal’s Kitchen’s version the morning after, but The Fiery Phoenix? Actually, come to think of it that was a nicely euphemistic description of its consequences. And then there was my personal favourite: fish pakora was billed on the menu as Oceanic Crisp Delights, which sounds like the name of a Guided By Voices album track.
Anyway we began with some familiar but less mainstream dishes, for me to try and benchmark Tanatan – not just against Clay’s, but against plenty of Reading’s other Indian restaurants, the likes of Chilis, House Of Flavours and Deccan House. Chicken 65 is a go-to for me, and Tanatan’s rendition of it was a good statement of intent.
It got that sticky, savoury spicing bang on, and was less disconcertingly scarlet than my photo makes it look: Apple hasn’t yet discovered a filter for This photo was taken in a bright orange room, can you make it look normal please? The chicken felt like it had been marinated in yoghurt to within an inch of its life, and if I had one criticism it was that the texture sometimes was so soft that you weren’t entirely confident it could be completely cooked. I would have liked it a little drier, with a tad more char, but the flavour was unarguable.
Our other starter, mirchi bhaji (unpopular name: crispy chilli fritters) was similar on paper to the cut mirchi I’ve had at Clay’s and Deccan House. In practice, though, it was different: the chillies, which were potent, had rather shrunk away in their jacket of spiced gram flour batter. But even with that said they were golden, crunchy, pretty fiery and immensely snackable and I enjoyed them a great deal with some more of that raita.
Despite it being a quiet night in the restaurant, pacing was leisurely and so it wasn’t until about forty minutes and another pint of Kingfisher later that our mains came out. But I was fine with that: Mike was back from his adoptive hometown of Madrid for a family visit, something he only does a few times a year, and even though I’d already seen him on this trip there was no shortage of stuff to chat about. There never is.
After all, we grew up, or rather didn’t, on the same street in suburban Woodley, over forty years ago. We played tennis in the road between our houses, the cracks in the tarmac serving as nets and baselines. We cycled to school together, bags slung unsafely over our shoulders. We went to university, dropped out (in his case), went back (also in his case) and have known each other for an exceptionally long time across all sorts of adventures and misadventures.
So, both still alive, both still relatively sane, it was a delight to sit there between courses and shoot the breeze – about his parents and mine, his brother and mine, about what the year had held so far and what lay ahead.
I thought the starters had held promise but not entirely delivered on it, and although I was hoping the mains would buck that trend they stayed firmly on it. Mangalorean prawn curry, one of the less generic dishes on the menu, went heavy on the coconut and had an interesting combination of heat and sweetness. But I found it disconcerting: a huge pool of extremely thick gravy, the consistency of Greek yoghurt, with surprisingly small prawns lurking in it.
The ratios felt all wrong, as did the lack of anything else like veg to break up what was texturally quite mulchy: if it wasn’t prawn, it was sauce, and usually it wasn’t prawn. This dish wasn’t what I expected in the slightest, but I’m not sure my expectations were the problem.
Our second choice was more successful. Again, trying to steer clear of anything even remotely interchangeable, we’d opted for the Andhra lamb keema, partly also because I have a real soft spot for keema curries and think they’re often the most underrated thing on an Indian menu. I think I was right about that at Tanatan, at least, because this was miles more enjoyable than the prawn number in every respect. The lamb was very coarsely minced, so much so that it could have been finely chopped rather than put through a mincer, and that texture worked in terms of distributing flavour and, just as crucially, fat.
The whole dish felt like a coherent whole in a way that the prawn curry hadn’t, and was so much more fun to load onto bread or to fold rice into. The rice, jeera rice by the way, was perfectly pleasant but very light on the cumin (you’ll have to take my word for that, because putting a photo of rice up feels pointless).
What I will say, though, is that a portion of rice at Tanatan is easily enough for two people to share with some bread, which is to their credit. Also, although this looks a very similar hue to the prawn curry in this photo they were reassuringly different: it’s the fault of those bloody orange walls again.
I’d read somewhere online that Tanatan’s Bombay aloo was worth ordering, and Tanatan offers smaller portions of some of its vegetable dishes as sides, so we gave it a go. This got everything right that the prawn dish had not, a thick, comforting and spicy panacea of a dish with hunks of potato with just enough floury give to them. Great news for vegetarians, yes, but to be honest great news for anybody eating at Tanatan: next time I’d order this as a main.
You would think that with a big portion of cumin flecked rice and a curry made predominantly of potatoes we had quite enough carbs to be going on with. And you would be right, but because we were greedy idiots we also decided to attack what was quite a substantial bread section on the menu. Nearly a dozen different types of naan, a few roti and half a dozen or so parathas is a lot, although I found it a bit strange that they had a keema paratha but no keema naan.
I’m also not entirely convinced that the naan in particular aren’t just the same naan turning up in a variety of slightly different outfits. We chose the signature garlic and chilli naan and although I quite liked it, especially the scattering of punchy sliced green chilli, the texture was round and uniform, the whole thing lacking in bubbles, blisters or fluffiness.
We also tried paratha with mint. Initially when I ordered this our server wasn’t entirely sure they had it, and wandered off to the kitchen before returning and saying that it would be no problem. I assume that what he meant was that the kitchen hadn’t run out of mint, because what we got was a paratha scattered with mint. If there is more to Tanatan’s breads than this you wouldn’t know it, and although this was serviceable it again lacked the flaky butteriness of the very best examples. It wasn’t hugely up to the job of dipping – you couldn’t fault the naan for that – and I didn’t feel an impetus to finish mine.
We kept eating until we could tackle no more, at which point, despite the very kind offer of our server, there wasn’t enough left of anything to be worth boxing up. Over two hours had passed by this point and somehow, in that time, I had stopped eating in the place that used to be Clay’s and had finished up eating in Tanatan.
Despite any quibbles about the décor or the odour, that was very much a good thing: I had expected to feel a little sad dining here (still not going back to the Lyndhurst any time soon) but in reality it made me feel far happier about the circle of life that is restaurants outgrowing buildings, if they’re lucky, and being replaced by something new. Some of that was down to our server Tarak, who was tremendous throughout. He was enthusiastic, attentive, explained bits of the menu to us – the concept of chaat was a new one on Mike – and apologetic about the food taking a while, even though we were in no hurry.
As we were settling up I asked him about Tanatan, and impressively he told me that although it opened late last year he had only been there a month. This was the owners’ second restaurant, their first being a place called India Rasoi in Chorleywood. When I asked him why they’d chosen Reading for a sequel the answer was prosaic: one of the three partners lives here. People pick places to open their restaurants for all kinds of reasons, and that’s as good a reason as any. Our bill for two starters, two mains, two pints apiece, rice and breads came to just shy of eighty-two pounds not including tip, which Tarak absolutely deserved.
I’ve had some grief about recent reviews – it’s a story for another time – for comparing places to one another, for visiting Venue A and partly framing it in terms of how it measures up to Venue B. But I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because restaurants don’t exist in a vacuum and reviews of them have to sit in a wider context. You cannot talk about Tanatan, really, without talking about its peers, because if you don’t the review just drifts in mid-air, not answering the obvious question. Is it better than X, or Y?
If you don’t answer that question, you dodge the question altogether. It would only make sense not to talk about other Indian restaurants if Reading didn’t have any, and that will never happen. And even if it did, you’d still want to know whether to go here or to take the train to Newbury, or Wokingham, or Maidenhead. So comparisons are inescapable, and good restaurants have nothing to fear from them.
But I’m not going to compare Tanatan to Clay’s, even though I started this review talking about the previous tenants of 45 London Street. That would be pointless: you can’t compare anywhere in Reading to Clay’s, not in terms of Indian food, not in terms of profile or polish, barely in terms of quality at all. I wish more places came closer. And if Tanatan takes custom from other restaurants, despite its orange walls and the very limited makeover it’s given its dining room, it will be from its competitors in the town centre, not from the other side of the Thames.
So actually you need to decide whether you’ll eat at Tanatan – besides satisfying your curiosity or laying your own post-Clay’s ghosts to rest – instead of its neighbour Calico, or Royal Tandoori at the bottom of the road, House Of Flavours round the corner or Chilis in Kings Walk. For me right now, the last of those is the standout in a crowded field, with the others battling it out for the silver medal.
Time will tell where Tanatan finds itself in that chasing pack, and I would love to see it take more risks, widen that menu and, ideally, lose those chairs. But it has a fighting chance, because it gets a few things very right and service is one of them. If they ever do well enough to take a break, my advice to them is to get someone in to redecorate. If it lives up to its potential, you could get all the glow you need from the food, rather than the walls.
It’s incredibly frustrating, in this day and age, when a restaurant doesn’t have a website. How are you supposed to figure out what you’re going to have, when you can’t spend at least fifteen minutes poring over the menu in advance of your visit?
And how can you tell when it opens and closes? You can try Google for that, of course, but different restaurants report trading hours in different ways – does closing at 8pm mean it closes at 8 sharpish, or that the kitchen closes at 8? If only they had a website you could use.
This all occurred to me last week, when I was going to visit Zi Tore, the newish Italian place on Smelly Alley that has taken the place of the much lamented Grumpy Goat. It has no website, although you can track down the menu if you try hard enough; an Italian friend of mine has been a few times and really rated it, not only encouraging me to visit but telling me all the best things to pick on the menu.
Google says that it shuts at 8, but I had done my homework here, too. Another friend was looking for somewhere quick and easy to eat in Reading a few weeks ago, prior to attending the quiz at the Allied and I suggested Zi Tore. “I wish they’d publish their opening hours somewhere” she said, not unreasonably. “I’d like to be assured that there will be delicious things available at 7pm.” But then she went (“it was completely dead”) and enjoyed the food. So that settled it.
I arranged to go there with Jo – who made a cameo appearance in this blog five years ago – safe in the knowledge that it would all work out fine. We met at Siren RG1 for a couple of beers, which was enough to persuade me that they hadn’t fixed their pricing issues from last year, and mooched over to Smelly Alley ready for pizza and pasta. Jo’s family is Italian, too, and she has strong opinions about Italian food: I was looking forward to seeing what happened when those views came into contact with Zi Tore’s dishes.
Can you see where this is going? Of course you can. We arrived at 7pm to find Zi Tore dead and the guy behind the counter turned us away. “Sorry, we close at half seven”, he said. Exasperating, really: if you want to just be a lunch place, be a lunch place. If you want to be a lunch place that does coffee in the afternoon, fair enough. But why offer pizza and pasta and close at half-seven, a full half hour earlier than you claim you do? I took a menu, so now I know exactly what they serve. It didn’t have opening times on it, either.
So there Jo and I were, standing on Union Street a couple of beers to the good like a prize pair of limoncellos. Where to go? Fortunately, I keep my to do list online, so it only took a few minutes poring over it on Union Street before we were on our way.
Some places, like Dolphin’s Caribbean Cuisine, haven’t been open long enough yet. Others, although high on my list of priorities, were already scheduled in with other people. And some, the likes of Jollibee or Biryani Mama, may even close before an evening comes where I consider dinner there and think “oh, go on then”. But there was a place I’d been keeping in my back pocket to to do this year, and Zi Tore downing tools gave me the perfect opportunity: back to House Of Flavours it was.
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As I’ve said before, when I write a restaurant review I find it helps to have a hook. Why this place this week, out of all the restaurants out there? Why do I think you might want to read about this one? Sometimes it’s easy – with a new place, a change of management or an old place with a new chef, or somewhere that’s been mentioned in dispatches in the local or national press. Other times, it’s about the wider context: for instance the trend for biryani or sushi places in Reading.
But there always, ideally, needs to be something. I never assume I can just plonk a review up on the blog and expect people to read it no matter what: attention, like money, is a scant resource these days. Everybody’s got to earn it.
With Calico this week I was spoilt for choice, because I could think of three angles. The first is that Calico – technically “Calico Bar & Eatery”, but let’s not call it that because ‘Eatery’ is so naff – belongs to that niche club of Reading restaurants where everybody knows it exists, but nobody seems to know anyone who’s been. I’m sure some of you have, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never heard anybody talking about it. This is possibly the easiest “in” for a restaurant review, because you might want to know whether Calico is any cop; don’t worry, I will eventually get round to telling you that.
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There’s a neat symmetry to proceedings this week. Last week I found myself in London, on a bus to parts unknown and this week, although I’m back in Reading, it was a very similar experience. Because I was on the trusty number 1 bus heading out west to Calcot. Yes, Calcot. Have you ever been there, apart from to visit IKEA, unless you happen to live there? Did you know Calcot has restaurants?
Well, for a long time it didn’t. And then in the summer of 2020, The Avenue Deli opened in a little run of shops. The name was a bit confusing, because from what I could see it was definitely a café and brunch spot, not a deli. But despite that, and despite opening in the worst summer for hospitality since records began, it built up a decent reputation: I suspect that, like Tilehurst’s The Switch, it benefitted from serving a community that doesn’t have anything else remotely like it.
But then last November, The Avenue announced that an Indian restaurant, The Coriander Club, was opening next door. The implication was that the two businesses were connected, a shared owner presumably, and The Coriander Club talked about offering an authentic taste of Punjabi cuisine. And since then the word of mouth has been good, and the restaurant’s well-maintained Instagram feed paints an interesting picture of food very much on the western edge of Reading.
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