Tag: indian

Restaurant review: Bagheera at the Spread Eagle

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

One of the best things to happen to Reading’s food scene during Covid wasn’t the influx of American chains blighting the town centre, complete with inexplicable queues for weeks. Rather it was the return of a welcome trend, with independent businesses setting up shop in the kitchens of established pubs, offering interesting menus in a way which minimised the commercial risk for all concerned. Everybody won, particularly Reading’s diners.

The notable proponents of this were in West Reading. At the Butler on Chatham Street you had Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen cooking up a storm, with beautiful dumplings, bronzed jerk chicken, moreish slabs of macaroni pie, plantain and so much more; I visited in the summer of 2021 and adored practically everything I ate. Further down the Oxford Road at the Spread Eagle, just next to Kensington Park, there was Banarasi Kitchen, offering an Indian menu with some regional specialities. I reviewed a takeaway from them early in 2021, and loved it.

All good things must come to an end, and by the end of last year both pubs had parted company with the businesses that had made them brilliant places to eat. At the Butler, it was Chef Stevie’s choice – he left to cook at Liquid Leisure in Windsor, only for the water park to close later that month in tragic circumstances. Now the Butler plays host to a business called The Toastily that serves toasties, breakfasts and that retro staple, the jacket spud. As for Chef Stevie, so far as I know he’s yet to turn up elsewhere, but if he ever does I will be there, ready and waiting to order.

The story with Banarasi Kitchen is a little more opaque, and began very curiously indeed. Last October the Spread Eagle made an announcement on Instagram. “We’re restructuring our management team” they proclaimed, language that sounded more IT and telecoms than hospitality. What did that mean for Banarasi Kitchen, somebody asked? It’s now called Bagheera, they said. But was it? Their next post had the old Banarasi Kitchen logo on it.

A couple of days later, the panther out of the bag, the pub said again that the restaurant would soon be known as Bagheera. Along with the new name came a new menu, new signage, a new chef and a new kitchen team. As further announcements came out, you could be forgiven for wondering whether we’d gone past the point of rebranding alone. The logo looked snazzy, the mock-ups of the dining room (or, as they put it, the “design concept” – more corporate speak) looked classy. Was this a conscious attempt to go upmarket?

Things continued to be baffling. In early November the pub confirmed that they had officially rebranded as Bagheera. But for some reason they didn’t announce their official opening until early December, even though they did continue posting about their menu and dishes during the intervening time. All clear as mud, but it seems that the business is one hundred per cent Bagheera now (although at the time of writing they still have the link to Banarasi Kitchen in their Instagram bio: go figure).

One of my biggest regrets last year is that I didn’t make it to Banarasi Kitchen before they closed, so I always had it in mind to visit Bagheera early in the New Year. There was something special about Banarasi Kitchen’s food, but once you’ve changed the name, the room, the menu and everyone in the kitchen, could any trace of Bagheera’s predecessor remain, hidden in some intangible way? I wanted to find out, so on a Saturday evening, nice and early, Zoë and I hopped on the trusty 17 bus and strolled up Wantage Road to check it out.

First things first, the “design concept” is actually really attractive. There’s a dedicated dining room on the left as you enter the pub, separated by an old-school sliding door, and it’s a distinctly luxe place in which to have a meal. The room is all wood panelling, deep green walls and gold accents, beautiful chandeliers. The chairs, in complementary green and gold, were tasteful and comfortable, proving that you can have both at once. The gold-edged tables were fetching and sturdy. The room had handsome big windows, and I can imagine it would be a lovely place to eat in the summer. It looked like they’d let one of the better contestants on Interior Design Masters loose on it, and I liked it a great deal.

When they announced a new menu as part of the rebrand, the Spread Eagle wasn’t kidding. Banarasi Kitchen’s menu had the Anglo-Indian dishes you might expect but the menu stretched further than that, offering more regional dishes like murg kori gassi, rye ke aloo and railway lamb. Bagheera’s menu is far more generic. They have a tandoor, and an Indo-Chinese section, but beyond that you have your jalfrezi, your korma, your rogan josh and your butter chicken. It’s to their credit that they don’t allow you to pick your protein with any of the curries, at least giving the suggestion that all the components have spent some quality time together rather than being thrown together at the last minute. But it’s not a menu that sets your mind racing; it struck me as interesting, when Banarasi Kitchen’s menu had been more rambling, to stick to the hits.

But first, drinks. Now, I’ll get all this moaning out of the way in one go so we can talk about the food. They don’t have any Indian beers on tap, which struck me as strange. They also didn’t have one of the gins on their list either, but when we did eventually get a couple of Tanqueray and tonics they came in big Beefeater branded glasses with – being charitable – a couple of tiny nuggets of ice in them. So they weren’t massively cold, and I got the impression a very small bottle of tonic had been used. Possibly between two. I found all this a tad weird, because when you eat in a pub you do rather expect them to have the drinks part down pat.

The same problem reared its ugly head further on in the meal when we ordered more drinks. Initially I’d asked about their draft cider, but that was off too. So instead we asked for the same again and this time the waiter brought two equally small, completely ice-free gin and tonics before explaining that one was Tanqueray and the other was Gordon’s. No explanation was offered, and we were left to guess which was which in a sort of blind taste, find the lady scenario.

Service at Bagheera could be a little like that, likeable enough but hapless. The main front of house was a charming, dapper, authoritative older man who clearly knew his job back to front and was brilliant with customers. The rest of the team, though, were wayward, bringing mismatched gins, dropping salad on the floor when they cleared our starters away and generally making me want to stage some kind of intervention.

I was hugely relieved when the starters turned out to be good, solid dishes. The best of them was the Punjabi fish fry, a generous portion of fish in a light bubbled batter that clung superbly to the flesh. It was quite possibly my favourite thing I ate at Bagheera, and good value at seven pounds. But being critical, because that’s what I do, it lacked a bit of spice and depth and the coriander chutney it came with was lacking some sharpness and definition. The whole thing lacked heat, too: I didn’t mind that, as it happened, but I had been expecting to find a little more going on.

The coriander chutney made a repeat appearance accompanying three firm, sizzling seekh kebabs in a skillet sitting, as they often do, on a bed of onions which became more golden and caramelised as we went along. I thought these were respectable, the texture finely balanced between coarse and crumbly with some decent heat. A couple of weeks before I’d been to House Of Flavours and sampled their seekh kebabs: Bagheera couldn’t quite come close to that standard, but it was by no means dreadful.

Last of all, we ordered some onion bhajis. Zoë liked these more than I did – she’s a sucker for a bhaji – but I found them a little dense and stodgy, big unforgiving pellets rather than light, crispy, finely-spun things. They were perfectly pleasant dipped in a sort of date and tamarind confection that could easily have been HP sauce, but no more than that. Two of the starters came with pointless foliage – doesn’t Bagheera know we’re in the middle of a nationwide salad shortage? – and we didn’t eat it. As I said, thanks to the mishaps of our waiter some of it ended up on the floor anyway.

Main courses came about fifteen minutes later and continued a general trend of being perfectly reliable but quite unexciting. Zoë liked her chicken korma (“I’m the korma queen” she told me when she announced her intention to order it) and I enjoyed my forkful more than I expected to. I would never order it in a restaurant, probably because I’m a snob/terrible person/both, but it had a sweet nuttiness that was far from unpleasant. The chicken was impressively tender, especially for breast, but this was an extremely liquid dish, with a big gloopy pool of glossy sauce, too much really, left at the end.

I’d picked the lamb rogan josh, mainly because I was sold on the menu’s description of lamb marinated for six hours and slow cooked with chilli-infused oil. It’s a good blurb: it absolutely gets you thinking about texture and flavour, of time taken and a glorious end product. And it feels like I’ve said this about most of what I ate at Bagheera but, again, it was dependable without approaching mind-blowing. The lamb was tender, with no dodgy bouncy bits, but not falling-apart tender in the way you’d expect from long, slow cooking. And the flavour was, well, pardon my poverty of expression but it was okay. Just okay. No other word quite captures it.

Again, a gigantic lake of sauce was left at the end. And – sorry to use the C word, but I’m sure you were expecting me to bring them up at some point – I was reminded that when you eat food from Clay’s the sauce is the best bit. It’s to be swept up with bread, or mixed with forkfuls of rice, but however you get it in your mouth you make sure you taste every last molecule. Could I imagine feeling that desperate to squeeze every last drop of flavour out of any of the dishes from Bagheera? I only wish I could.

I suppose I should talk about sides, just to show that they were there. Jeera pilau was, according to the menu, “accentuated with cumin” but could have done with more of it. I didn’t mind my lachha paratha but it didn’t have the decadence, the layers I love in paratha – like the bhaji it was too compressed, too stodgy. And Zoë liked her keema nan, but she has a weakness for keema nan in general. “Again, it’s not as good as the one at House Of Flavours” was her considered verdict. That could, in hindsight, be the tl:dr version of this review.

What more can I say? The whole thing set us back just over eighty pounds, not including tip, and when I looked over the bill I saw that they’d charged us for double gins even though we’d ordered singles. Whether we got doubles is anybody’s guess, although it was hard to believe that those G&Ts could have been any smaller. We paid up and headed out to the bus stop in search of the Nag’s Head, where you can be pretty sure they don’t ever run out of cider.

The obvious thing to do is compare Bagheera to Banarasi Kitchen, but that’s not the right comparison. I loved the food I had from Banarasi Kitchen, and I thought their menu was more interesting – and out and out tastier. But I never ate at the Spread Eagle when Banarasi Kitchen were operating there, and restaurants are about more than the food. Reading’s history is full of pubs and kitchens parting company, sometimes in acrimonious circumstances, and you probably never learn the full story. So maybe the Spread Eagle saw Banarasi Kitchen doing so well, fancied a piece of the action and decided to take over the kitchen themselves. Perhaps the whole pub is under new management. Ultimately, it’s pointless to speculate.

But it’s a real pity is that Bagheera has such a beautiful dining room and such a grown-up brand but they’ve decided to use both those things to play it exceptionally safe. On that basis, it’s fairer to compare Bagheera to the likes of House Of Flavours, or Royal Tandoori, and I don’t think it emerges well from those comparisons. The food isn’t bad, not in the slightest, but it’s almost as if Bagheera has decided to leave the wow factor to the room and dish up an unadventurous, inoffensive set of dishes to eat in it. I wonder, in our crowded restaurant scene, how viable an approach that really is.

I might be doing Bagheera a massive disservice. Their vegetarian section looks like it could be where the real treasures can be found, and it’s possible that the Indo-Chinese dishes are where the kitchen really shines. Looking back over the menu I see many roads less travelled and dishes I could have tried instead. I don’t think we picked the staid, hackneyed dishes to fit a narrative I had in my head that big polished Bagheera had displaced plucky, authentic Banarasi Kitchen, but I at least have the self-awareness to see that on some level that might have happened.

So Bagheera probably does deserve another try at some point, but I have to admit that I still have reservations. When it comes to running the country, I am positively looking forward to someone boring but competent taking over. But in a restaurant, that just isn’t enough.

Bagheera at the Spread Eagle – 6.9
117 Norfolk Road, Reading, RG30 2EG
0118 9574507

https://bagheerarestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: The Biryani Lounge

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

The hardest bit of writing restaurant reviews, I’ve always found, is the start. It’s the bit where you have to find a hook to hang all the other words on. Why this place? Why this week? Why should you care? It’s especially hard when, after the meal, I ask myself some of those questions – or, even worse, what was I thinking? Or you can try to be topical, but I didn’t fancy writing about the week’s events, eating something lettuce-themed or shoehorning in a reference to exploring new pork markets. The news is depressing enough as it is.

I’ve started a couple of reviews in the last few months by talking about the unlikely food trends of 2022, or singing the praises of the number 17 bus. And this week we get the unholy love child of the two, as I delve into the world of Reading’s biryani restaurants. Because yes, it’s a thing, and a comparatively recent one at that. Biryani has always been there, on the fringes of the menu at most Indian restaurants, and I used to go leftfield from time to time and order one: I had a soft spot for Royal Tandoori’s lamb biryani, for instance. 

But in 2018, out of nowhere, Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen opened on London Street and elevated the dish to signature status. Their clay pot biryanis – meat always on the bone, cooked sealed and ceremoniously opened at the table – became a talking point. Customers could take the pots home with them afterwards, and photos cropped up on social media of them as plant pots, or utensil jars. And then, around the start of this year, not long before Clay’s announced that it was upping sticks and moving to Caversham, biryani restaurants started cropping up all over the place.

Well, not quite everywhere, but certainly in very specific parts of Reading. In West Reading, on the Oxford Road, we have Biryani Boyz – it actually has two zs, but I can’t bring myself to type both of them – and Biryanish. In the centre where ASK used to be, there’s Biryani Mama, which I mainly remember from their ill-advised job advert back in January desperately seeking a “Bartender Cum Waitress”: just imagine that on your cv. And then on the Wokingham Road there’s a second branch of Biryani Boyz and The Biryani Lounge, the subject of this week’s review. 

And what ties them together, of course, is that from west to east they can all be reached on the number 17: we may not have a Silk Road, but we can boast a Biryani Bus Route. So what prompts the decision to put biryani front and centre in these restaurants’ offerings, to make it eponymous? I decided it was worth further investigation.

I picked The Biryani Lounge for several reasons. One was that I’d already tried Biryani Boyz’s takeaway earlier in the year and I wasn’t seized by an insatiable curiosity to meet a bartender cum waitress. Another was that it has a nice backstory – four friends who met at college and university, opening a restaurant together. I also felt for it, given that rivals Biryani Boyz have opened a few doors down.

Last of all, the Google reviews were intriguing – all from Indian customers. And that’s the thing about biryani: it might be a curveball choice for many of us in a conventional Anglicised curry house, but it occupies an exalted place in Indian cuisine and everybody has strong opinions about what biryani should be like (and, for that matter, how much it should cost).

To describe The Biryani Lounge’s space as basic is probably being charitable. It’s a very bare room with a handful of neutral black tables and standard issue Tollix chairs, and menus up at the counter. Nobody was behind the counter when I got there, but after a couple of minutes someone came out.

“Do you do eat in?” I asked, because nothing apart from the sheer number of tables suggested that this was an option. After a pause, the lady confirmed that they did, so I placed my order. 

“It will take a while” she said, and I said that of course that was fine. They didn’t have any mango lassi, always my default in places like this, so I said some water would be fine (the water, by the way, never arrived). I took a picture of the room and sent it to my other half, who was sitting at home waiting for her Papa Gee to arrive courtesy of Deliveroo. It looks like a doctor’s waiting room she said, and I had no idea how right she would prove to be. It would be over forty minutes before I saw any food.

In that time I got to read the menu several times, so I can tell you all about it. There is a big biryani section, most of them costing six or seven pounds, but actually there were plenty of other dishes including a bunch of curries, tandoori dishes, starters and so on. The most expensive dishes were a tenner, but most things were far cheaper. I’m no judge of how authentic, or how authentically Hyderabadi, any of it was but it was interesting to see dishes on there – like cut mirchi, or Andhra chicken fry – that I’d only previously experienced in their rarefied forms at Clay’s.

During the forty minutes I was sitting there like a lemon, the main thing I saw was people coming in, picking up bags bulging with biryani and leaving. In some cases they’d clearly ordered ahead, in others they turned up, placed their order, paid and still hightailed it out of there before I was served. Nobody was eating in, although about half an hour in a group of gents turned up, placed a big order, paid cash, tried to split the change exactly and plonked themselves at the next table. I saw three plastic containers up at the counter, which could have been mine, but I assumed they must be part of a takeaway order that hadn’t been completed yet.

That time also gave me a chance to read, in full, the blurb occupying the whole of the opposite wall. Spices play a significant role in the way we cook and consume food around the world it said, quite laudably, before going on to list the health benefits of various spices. And that’s lovely in theory, but reading that star anise is “widely used in flatulence or gas like conditions”, that bay leaves can “treat digestive disorders such as heartburn or flatulence” or that cinnamon “Helps Fight Bacterial And Fungal Infections” doesn’t necessarily put you in the mood for a hearty dinner. It was less infomercial, more sponsored Facebook ad. Or what Holland & Barrett would be like if they were obsessed with farting.

About ten minutes after those plastic containers arrived on the counter, a member of staff realised they might have been mine. “Are you eating in?” he asked, in a way that suggested this rarely happened. When I said I was he gave me a tray and quite a lot of plastic spoons and forks. He then asked if I wanted a plate, which funnily enough I did, and a couple of minutes he brought me one.

I only say all this to illustrate that I don’t think The Biryani Lounge views itself as an eat in restaurant. That it has the feel of a waiting room is probably deliberate, nearly everyone probably collects and takes it home and that’s absolutely fine with me. Because although it felt deeply random to eat my dinner in that bare room, looking out at a big red Biffa on the Wokingham Road though the open door from plastic tubs with plastic cutlery, I’ve eaten in enough unlikely places to know that none of that matters an iota if the food is exquisite.

And I so wish it had been, so this could have been another one of those amazing finds. After all, some of the best meals I’ve had have been in places every bit as unprepossessing as The Biryani Lounge. But that’s where, sadly, the dream evaporated. Because my food was okay, I suppose, but nothing to get excited about.

A lot of the reviews I’d read criticised the biryani for being more like a pilaff and not like a biryani at all. And eating it I could see what they meant. I’d committed heresy by going for the “special chicken biryani” – special, in this context, meaning boneless – and it very much felt from the look of it like the chicken and the rice had been introduced at the last minute, a culinary Married At First Sight. The rice was pleasant enough, and comforting I suppose, but it lacked any complexity. It also lacked onions, mint and all the things I’ve been spoiled into thinking should be a feature of any good biryani. The chicken, on top, was in hard pellets with a curiously orange hue.

I’d chosen Andhra chicken fry because, foolishly, it had been one of my favourite things about Clay’s new menu. And although it was my favourite dish on the night it bore no resemblance to that. The chicken was on the bone – which was fair enough – but it didn’t want to leave the bone any time soon, and trying to ease it off with a plastic spoon and fork was beyond my powers of persuasion.

I didn’t see any evidence that any of it had been fried, but what rescued it was the gravy – hot, complex and shot through with curry leaves. This on its own with some plain rice would have been better than anything else I ate from The Biryani Lounge, if it wasn’t for the fact that more than once I had to spit out another shard of bone. Even so, the sauce was great: like a great movie star carrying a shit movie, I loved it but I wished I’d seen it in something else.

Last of all, the biggest disappointment, the gobi Manchurian. Again, this can be a wonderful dish and what makes it is a combination of three things: cauliflower with a bit of firmness, coating with a good crunch and a sauce that’s hot, sour and sweet all at once (and yes, Clay’s has perfected all three). The Biryani Lounge’s fell short across the board. Maybe it was that extra time spent steaming up at the counter in its plastic sarcophagus but, by the time I ate it, it was a mulchy, soggy affair with a sauce which had a little garlic and chilli heat but was nothing like the captivating dish it can be.

Quantities, by the way, were huge. My three dishes could easily have served two and came to just under seventeen pounds. I probably got halfway through all three of them before I thought nah, snapped the plastic lids back on, put them in a tote bag and headed off. I took the bus, but my nose ran all the way home. Back at my house I decanted a little more to see if it was any better in the comfort of my living room, and it wasn’t. I got the rest of the meat off the Andhra chicken fry and enjoyed the sauce, but that was it.

Sometimes, when I review restaurants, I get a very clear idea that I’m just not the target market for them. That’s all well and good: it doesn’t make them terrible restaurants or me a terrible customer. And I think The Biryani Lounge is a good example of that. I suspect it’s mainly a takeaway with a few tables just in case, and I don’t have any issue with that. Nor did I really mind the sterility of the room: it is what it is. The problem here is the food.

Because even if you strip out the ambience, and forget about whether something is or isn’t authentic, the food just didn’t soar. I would eat in pretty much any room if the food bowled me over, and although The Biryani Lounge’s food might be good by the standards of Reading’s biryani restaurants, it wasn’t for me. I like to think that isn’t solely because I’m a gentrified ponce who has had his head turned by the food at Clay’s, but I can’t rule out that possibility: if you read this blog, you probably can’t rule out that possibility either.

So if this review made you curious, by all means try it out. But I would say get it delivered, or turn up and collect. You may find you prefer eating it on your own sofa. Have the Andhra chicken fry, and devote the time to getting all the meat off those bones before you get stuck in. And order the Apollo Fish – for the name alone, because it’s an amazing name and I wish I’d ordered it for that exact reason. But for most of us, I think The Biryani Lounge mightn’t be our cup of tea, and I doubt that will bother them one bit. The only thing I do take issue with, slightly, is the name: why call yourself The Biryani Lounge if you aren’t a place people want to spend plenty of time, in comfort?

The Biryani Lounge – 6.2
89 Wokingham Road, RG6 1LH
0118 3757777

https://thebiryaniloungeonline.co.uk

Restaurant review: Shree Krishna Vada Pav

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

When it comes to food and drink, Reading is an especially interesting place. You may find this hard to believe at times, but it’s true.

I don’t mean all the stuff that’s obvious to you, especially if you’re a regular reader of this blog. I don’t mean our coffee culture, or our street food scene that’s the envy of towns for miles around. I don’t mean our two local breweries with taprooms, or excellent pubs like the Nag’s and the Castle Tap selling fantastic craft beer and cider. I don’t mean the jewels in our restaurant crown – places like Clay’s, the Lyndhurst, Kungfu Kitchen or Vegivores. I’m not even talking about our network of local producers and the independent shops, like Geo Café and the Grumpy Goat, which sell their stuff. You know all that already, although I suspect a lot of people who live here still don’t. 

No, I mean interesting in terms of the world outside our food-loving, indie-supporting echo chamber. Because a lot of businesses have clocked that Reading – with its university, its prosperous populace and its tech employers, just the right distance from London – is the perfect place for them to open another branch of their restaurant chain and make pots of cash. They have us down, mistakenly I like to think, as something of an Everytown, the perfect testbed for their particular flavour of the hospitality experience.

In fact, two very different types of businesses have Reading in their sights. The first, tapping into that affluent, well-educated demographic, are smaller, more targeted chains. They’ve often seen Reading as their first attempts to expand west (Honest, Pho) or east (The Coconut Tree), or just picked it as one of the first stops on a journey to nationwide ubiquity (Itsu). And this still continues, albeit to a lesser extent: we’re getting a Leon and a Wasabi this year, don’t forget.

But the second type is more interested in Reading as Everytown, and often we are the lucky Petri dish they squirt their pipette into before deciding whether to open branches elsewhere. And this is, I’m afraid, often an American thing. It’s no coincidence that Reading got one of the first Five Guys, got a Chick-Fil-A, albeit briefly, got a Taco Bell and a Wingstop and a Wendy’s and has a Popeyes on the way. Such is life: newly added to the Tube map, but somehow equidistant between London and the good ol’ United States. 

These big American chains with plenty of money are aided and abetted in their mission to slightly worsen Reading by our local media – which posted dozens of stories about Wendy’s, mainly because they were too dumb to think critically for even a split second about whether Reading getting the first Wendy’s in the U.K. was actually a Good Thing. But it also points to just how much is going on in Reading, and how interesting the battle will be between all these factions fighting it out for your money. No wonder Jonathan Nunn, the editor of Vittles, called our town a “fascinating anomaly”.

“Why is this the subject of your interminable preamble this week?”, I hear you say. I thought you’d never ask. The reason I talk about all of this is that the subject of this week’s review is that rare thing, a chain choosing to plonk a branch near the centre of town that people can get genuinely excited about. Because Shree Krishna Vada Pav, a small chain selling vegetarian Maharashtrian street food which started out in Hounslow and only has three branches outside the M25, comes here with an excellent reputation.

Eater London, which tirelessly covers everywhere worth eating outside Zone 1, has enthused about SKVP on numerous occasions. They classed it as one of London’s best Indian restaurants, and one of West London’s best value restaurants. And they said it served one of London’s finest sandwiches, on a list rubbing shoulders with greats like Beigel Bake’s salt beef bagel and Quo Vadis’ legendary smoked eel sandwich. Eater London aptly summed up what SKVP do as “carb-on-carb masterpieces”, and commented elsewhere that their dishes (carbs stuffed into a soft bap) had a “curious affinity with snack culture from the north of England and Scotland”. 

So you might not have heard of Shree Krishna Vada Pav, or you might not have known they were coming to Reading, but one way or the other this is a strangely big deal, despite the grand total of zero coverage in Berkshire Live or the Reading Chronicle. But who needs them anyway when you’ve got me, so this week I headed there on a Monday evening with Zoë to try as much of the menu as I could.

It’s at the edge of town, opposite the Back Of Beyond, and once you get past its Day-Glo orange exterior it’s fundamentally a very long thin room with a view of the kitchen and a corridor heading to the back – and presumably the loos – which seems to go on forever. (“I know” said Zoë. “I used to come here when it was Julia’s Meadow and I thought it was like the fucking TARDIS”). A panel down one wall gave a potted history of the chain which opened its first branch in 2010, although the founders go further back than that, having met at college in Mumbai at the turn of the century. I found all that oddly sweet, which is no doubt the desired effect.

Apart from that the interior was best described as functional – basic furniture, a mixture of tables for two and four and cutlery on the table. It looked very much like a fast food restaurant, albeit one with table service. The music was just the right side of overpowering, although I found I liked that.

“I don’t know how unbiased I can be” said Zoë as we took our seats. “Have we ever had a meal for the blog where I’ve been this fucking starving?”

She had a point. We got there around eight o’clock, having not eaten since a light lunch, and irrespective of how tempting the menu might be there was very much a strong urge to order nearly everything. That said, looking at the menu didn’t make that any easier. It was two things: cheap and huge, not necessarily in that order. It was split into sections, each of which contained an embarrassment of riches: a variety of pav and other bap-based dishes, some Indo-Chinese dishes, some chaat, some sandwiches and wraps, a section of “bites to enjoy” and some signature dishes marked as “SKVP recommends”. And the carb on carb struggle is real: if you want an onion bhajiya sandwich, this is the place for you.

It’s possibly an indicator of how you should eat here that the handful of curries are squirreled away in the furthest corner of the menu, and ordering any of them never occurred to me. But also the pricing positively implores you to order lots of things and share them – the most expensive dishes are around six pounds but most are less than that. I took this as encouragement to take an approach much like the numbers game from Countdown: a couple from the top and the rest from anywhere else. We ordered – please don’t judge – eight dishes in total and our bill came to just under thirty-two pounds. That didn’t include any drinks, because SKVP didn’t have any mango lassi and we didn’t especially fancy anything else: there is, unsurprisingly, no alcohol license.

I do have to say that although the set-up says fast food, ours was far from that. We ordered at ten past eight, and it wasn’t until half an hour later that food started coming to our table. That’s not a problem of itself, but it’s worth mentioning because the restaurant ostensibly closes at nine. And weirder still, the customers kept coming: we were by no means the last table seated or the last people to get their food. I’m pretty sure that SKVP has been busy from the day it opened, and on this showing that’s not going to change any time soon. I should also mention at this point that the staff were quite brilliant, although clearly under the cosh. 

We ordered a lot of food – if you go, you don’t need to order anywhere near as much as we did – and it all came to the table over the space of five minutes. Again, I’m not complaining but it was an odd approach to bring nothing for half an hour and then literally every single thing. I would have preferred a steady stream of dishes, but that might just be me. But don’t be fooled into thinking that low prices mean small portions: you’ll get very full very fast if you make the same mistake we did.

Your challenge, if you go, will be narrowing it down. We had to try the vada pav – it’s in the name, after all – and although I liked it I’m not sure I loved it or preferred it to Bhel Puri House’s version. It really is a carb overload: fried potato served in a cheap white floury bap with a variety of chutneys. I think you kind of have to have it, but I don’t know if I’d have it again – the chutneys were excellent, sharpening and and elevating it, but the potato was a little too much stodge and not enough crunch. Zoë had the version with cheese (plastic hamburger cheese, I think) and she absolutely loved it. That might be the Irish in her.

“Can you believe this only costs two pounds?” I said.

“It’s a bit of old veg though, innit?” came the response, between mouthfuls. Did I mention that we were both ravenous?

More successful (and, frankly, slightly insane) was the “aloo bomb”. I’d wanted the paneer bomb – the sandwich, incidentally, lauded by Eater London as one of the capital’s peerless butties – but it was off the menu that night so they subbed it for the aloo bomb. It’s hard to do justice to this but essentially it’s a spiced potato sandwich that has been battered and fried and it’s every bit as nuts as that description makes it sound: Glaswegians, it turns out, aren’t the only people who will batter anything. 

A portion comes in two triangles so you only need one between two but it’s well worth ordering, if only to tick it off. It struck me as a vegetarian cousin of Gurt Wings’ infamous chicken burger in a glazed donut with candied bacon on top: you’d want to try it once to say you’ve had it, but you mightn’t order it again for at least twelve months.  Who am I kidding? When I go back that paneer bomb has my name on it.

Possibly the best dish was that reliable staple, the chilli paneer. Reading has always been spoilt for this by Bhel Puri House, where the tricky decision is whether to have chilli paneer, paneer Manchurian or – as I have on occasion, again, please don’t judge – both of them. SKVP’s version is beautifully pitched between the two – a little hot, sweet and savoury all at once, staying on that highwire without putting a foot wrong. The paneer was just caramelised enough without being crispy or burnt and this was one dish where, even though we were full to bursting, we made it a personal mission to ensure that not a forkful remained.

“You could come here and have a portion of that to yourself and a vada pav and that would be you sorted” said Zoë. “You could come here for lunch when you’re working from home, you lucky bastard.”

I’d be lying if I pretended the idea hadn’t crossed my mind, although they’ve have to take less than half an hour to bring it.

If the other dishes were less successful, it was still just the difference between rather good and very good. I quite liked the onion bhajiya, I really liked the red onion studded throughout them and I adored the little fried green chillies they were festooned with. But although greaseless they were a tad dried out for my liking: what they really needed was a chutney of some kind. And fried momo were more doughy than their Nepalese cousins, and probably didn’t bring enough to the table. But once you’ve had a spiced potato masala in a deep fried sandwich and a samosa, a third carby vehicle for it is probably overkill by anyone’s standards.

The samosas, by the way, were excellent. My benchmark for these is Cake & Cream up on the Wokingham Road (where they’ve recently gone up in price to a still-ludicrous seventy pence). But I reckon SKVP’s match them nicely, with a filling flecked with chilli that starts out gently hot before going on to clear out every tube you have from the neck up. You can have them on your own – you get four for a ridiculous three pounds fifty – but we had them bundled with a really delicious, deeply savoury and soothing chickpea curry which was one of the milder, less aggressively hot dishes of the evening. Five pounds fifty for this lot, if you can believe it.

I don’t know to be impressed or faintly disgusted with myself that we ate so much of what we’d ordered but eventually we admitted defeat, although not before picking away at the last peppers and spring onions from the chilli paneer. We waddled out into the night, and headed to the back room of the Retreat for a bottle of chocolate stout and a post-meal debrief: I wouldn’t say it was the stuff of Shakespeare, as it mostly consisted of us saying “I’m so full” to one another after a suitably pregnant pause, but it was a debrief nonetheless. The pause probably seemed less pregnant than I did.

It probably won’t surprise you, now that we’ve got to the end, to scroll a little bit further down and see the rating. I loved SKVP. I didn’t care that it took half an hour to turn up, I didn’t care that I missed out on that paneer bomb and, perhaps most significantly, I didn’t care in the slightest that I’d had a meat free evening. It gets an unqualified thumbs up from me, and I imagine a lot of you would enjoy it, even if it’s just for a quickish bite to eat at lunchtime, or before the pub (good luck catching it at a quiet time, though). And I suspect that my selections from this menu were probably pretty mainstream and tame: I look forward to trying more of it.

SKVP’s closest equivalent is Bhel Puri House – which I still love, don’t get me wrong – but it strikes me as offering something very different to Reading’s other vegetarian Indian restaurants, Madras Flavours and Crispy Dosa, both of which focus their menus elsewhere. And SKVP also achieves that underrated thing which not enough restaurants succeed in pulling off: it’s fun. Fun from start to finish, fun looking through the menu, fun picking too much stuff, fun eating somewhere unlike the rest of Reading, fun eating a deep fried potato sandwich. One hundred per cent fun. It was even almost fun lying in bed that night, feeling like a python slowly digesting a mongoose it had swallowed whole. Almost.

So maybe Reading’s story isn’t written yet. And that’s an encouraging thing to realise, that with big U.K. chains to the left and bigger U.S. chains to the right we still have the chance to be stuck in the middle with our independent heroes, our restaurants and pubs, breweries and cafés, producers and shops. And in that happy place, I like to think there’s also still room for someone like SKVP – an occasional epic, incongruous, glorious curveball.

Shree Krishna Vada Pav – 8.1
97 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3DD
07900 345120

https://skvp.co.uk

Takeaway review: Zyka

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I’m easily old enough to remember a time before delivery apps and dark kitchens, before the weird and wonderful world of restaurants running side hustles, diffusion brands or heat at home kits. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, for most people, takeaway meant a curry, a Chinese meal or fish and chips from the local chippy. The closest you got to fusion food was having curry sauce (or in my case, sweet and sour sauce from Woodley’s Hong Kong Garden – still going strong, would you believe) on your chips. They were, in all respects, simpler times.

And in those days, having a good takeaway nearby was like gold dust: if you discovered one close to home, you made the most of it. At the end of the last century I lived in Nottingham for a year, and just round the corner from my house in Sherwood was the most incredible Indian takeaway. The flavour has probably been enhanced with a powerful dusting of nostalgia, memory’s answer to MSG, but the Fridays when we got food from there and sat down in front of something from Blockbuster Video were happy evenings indeed.

I’ve never found anything comparable in Reading. I used to live just around the corner from Kings Chef on the London Road, and I had their Chinese takeaway from time to time but it largely left me unmoved. And back when it was open, I would happily wander over to the now sadly defunct Seaspray to grab fish and chips which were still hot when I got home. But doing restaurant reviews for eight years meant that, until the pandemic hit, I never had much cause to use takeaways. And now the proliferation of delivery services, third parties on bikes and scooters and all that means that there’s probably too much choice. You channel hop meals the way you channel hop TV programmes or, as I remember from my days on Tinder, actual human beings.

Ordering from Zyka, the subject of this week’s review reminded me slightly of the old days. No Deliveroo or Uber Eats for them, so you just have to contact them and tell them what you want. Although you can order online (and they even take Apple Pay), so it’s not quite as basic as getting a leaflet through your door and ringing them up. And why did I choose Zyka? I thought you’d never ask: it’s because it won an award recently.

Not at the British Curry Awards, which were announced this week and gave prizes to the likes of Benares in Berkeley Square and Cheltenham’s brilliant Prithvi (“we’re building back balti” said the Prime Minister in a by all accounts cringeworthy recorded message). And not at the English Curry Awards, which were awarded in October and where winners included Wokingham’s Mumbai, either. Zyka won at the Curry Life Awards, also held October, where they were one of twenty-one restaurants to win “Best Curry Restaurants Of The Year”. With hindsight, there are a lot of different curry awards and a lot of winners: perhaps they should have some kind of unification bout, like they do in the wrestling. 

Anyway, a fair few people have asked for this review, off the back of that award, so I figured it was about time. “They’ve been excellent for many years”, one person told me on Twitter, adding that they’d diversified by opening The Switch, a Tilehurst café which looks, on paper at least, like an attempt to create a West Reading equivalent of Café Yolk. “The menu doesn’t look that inspiring” said a friend of mine. “It’s not a patch on House Of Flavours” was another piece of feedback I heard: I guess if there was universal consensus I’d never need to review anything.

For what it’s worth, I think my friend was right about the menu. It’s pretty generic, with the same dishes you’d find anywhere else. Starters are mainly bhaji, samosas and a few options from the tandoor, and then there’s a tandoori section and largely the same curries offered with either lamb, chicken, seafood or vegetables and paneer. Another section is entitled “House Favourites”, which makes you think this might be where the specialities live, but no: that’s where you find your bhuna, dopiaza, korma, dansak and so on. 

In fairness to Zyka, and I may end up saying this a few times in this review, it may well be very different if you eat in the restaurant. The menu makes a point of saying that they’ve selected the dishes on the takeaway menu to ensure that they travel well – and I understand this might make some dishes unsuitable but I was still a little surprised not to see something off the beaten track on the menu. Because they’ve won an award. 

Anyway, my order for two people – poppadoms, a couple of starters, two mains, a vegetable side and some rice – came to a smidgen over fifty pounds. They charged three pounds for delivery and a nebulous extra quid under “surcharge”, whatever that means. I got a text saying that my meal would be with me in about an hour and then, just like in the old days, we sat back and waited.

He was at the door ten minutes later than predicted, but because I didn’t have the facility to endlessly, pointlessly track his whereabouts I just assumed it was because he’d left a little later than planned rather than because he got lost. And everything was piping hot and in a rather natty branded carrier bag. So far everything had gone like clockwork, and the only thing left was to eat the damned thing.

And that, I’m afraid, is where things didn’t quite come together. I’d chosen one of their curries that wasn’t generic, the murg haryali, chicken with mint and coriander: “a touch of sweetness and spice”, said the menu. I have fond memories of a similar, Kermit-green dish from Bhoj many years ago, aromatic and whiffy with garlic. This, I’m afraid, wasn’t that: it’s true that there was a bit of spice, but mostly there was sweetness – an odd, saccharine, artificial sweetness. You got the mint, but not really the coriander, and the chicken, tikka-tinged, was in big and slightly homogeneous pieces. I didn’t finish it, and it tasted a little – that word again – generic.

Zoë – and how many times have I had to write this in 2021? – ordered better than I did. Still giving carbs a relatively wide berth, she’d picked Zyka’s equivalent of a mixed grill, the Zyka mixed tandoori. This was fundamentally a huge plate of meat, with chicken and lamb tikka, an impressive quarter of a chicken, some prawns (“look, there’s a crustacean” was how Zoë chose to describe this development) and a seekh kebab. All lobster-red, so red it’s unreal, and all suffused with the deeply savoury notes that come from time well spent in a tandoor. 

I had a bit – I enjoyed the chicken, I thought the lamb was on the tough side. “I love the meats. I’d order the meats again” was Zoë’s verdict after this meal, although in fairness she says that after nearly any meal in which meat plays a predominant role (sometimes it’s a little like living with Captain Caveman). She’d chosen bhindi bhaji, thinly sliced okra, to accompany her rhapsody in crimson, and she thought it was decent enough, “but a little bit underseasoned”. The menu had given me the option to have this dish “desi style” for an extra pound, saying this meant the dish was “a slightly spicier and more authentic take”. I didn’t go for that, and maybe I should have, but it’s a bit weird to have to pay extra to make it taste authentic. They do seem to like their surcharges at Zyka.

The two starters, repurposed as side dishes, were fine but again, no more than that. I think it’s pretty hard to fuck up an onion bhaji, so if I say that these were good I’m not sure it’s especially glowing praise. And the samosas were a little unremarkable – full of pellets of minced lamb and peas but without any overwhelming flavour. You got two of them for a fiver, and the following day on the way back from seeing my dentist I picked up two infinitely more enjoyable ones in the legendary Cake & Cream for under two quid. Cake & Cream, as far as I know, has not been nominated for any awards, but I’d give them “Samosa Of The Year” any day of the week. There were also some poppadoms, but they always taste the same in my experience – even a bad one is usually enjoyable, provided it’s not stale.

I don’t want to sound withering about Zyka. What I had wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t great either. And this is the problem with awards: back in 2011 when Petersham Nurseries, a restaurant in a garden centre near Richmond with plain tables and no whistles and bells, won a Michelin star the chef there, Skye Gyngell, said that she wished she could give it back. The expectations of her customers changed, and they wanted to eat at a kind of restaurant she never wanted hers to be. It got too much, and she quit the following year. 

I get that expectation problem, admittedly on a different level, with Zyka. If they hadn’t won an award, maybe the upshot of this review would be “eh, it’s okay”. But because it has, it’s hard not to come away saying “how did they manage that?” I had a much more enjoyable takeaway from Banarasi Kitchen earlier in the year – which is equally well placed to serve West Reading, and much closer to you if you live across town. But the restaurant Zyka really made me miss was Bhoj. I ordered deliveries from Bhoj a few times, back in its golden age when it was still on the Oxford Road, and it never disappointed me.

I’m sure Zyka would have done brilliantly back in the days when I still had a Blockbuster Video card, when it was all leaflets folded into three and putting a call in from your landline (remember landlines?), shouting above the background noise. But the world moves on, and things change. There is so much choice, and it raises the standard: a rising tide, as I often say, lifts all boats. Although perhaps it’s a neighbourhood thing, and maybe if you’re a Tilehurst resident you count your lucky stars to have it just down the road. 

I should close by giving them the benefit of the doubt – maybe you had to be there. Maybe their full, eat-in menu has all the imagination and execution that was missing from my meal this week. And I know a restaurant is so much more than the food, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their welcome is warm, their service superlative. I’ll make a point of checking them out in person in the New Year, and I look forward to them making me eat my words. But, for now at least, I’d rather eat elsewhere.

Zyka
6 Park Lane, Tilehurst, Reading, RG31 5DL
0118 9427788

https://www.zyka.co.uk
Order via: Direct from the restaurant

Restaurant review: Crispy Dosa

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“Are you sure you don’t want to sit inside?” said the waitress, smiling as she handed us the menu. Like all of the service at Crispy Dosa it was friendly, kind and welcoming: the restaurant was filling up with happy families, all Indian as far as I could see, and she probably didn’t understand why Zoë and I had chosen to sit at a table outside on plastic chairs, opposite the Penta Hotel or in the wind tunnel of Thorn Street.

In other circumstances, I might have acquiesced. The inside of Crispy Dosa, from my cursory glance, looked like a nice space. It had plenty of banquetted booths (I’m not sure whether they were leather or leatherette: leatheresque, perhaps?) each one with a little patch sewn into it saying “CRISPY DOSA ❤️ YOU”. And the restaurant was, for a week night, buzzing: I saw a regular flow of people in and out, customers leaving, some carrying bags to take home and, of course, a steady in and out of delivery drivers.

By contrast, Crispy Dosa’s outside space is slightly unfortunate. On one of the hottest days of the year so far none of the tables caught the sun, and they felt a little like a consequence of necessity: they are, after all, how Crispy Dosa managed to trade for the first few weeks they were open, while they waited for indoor hospitality to be allowed again.

But I am not yet at the stage where I’m ready to eat and drink indoors and, with the exception of a post-vaccination celebratory brunch at Fidget & Bob last month, this was the first time I’d had an al fresco meal this year. So to say those plastic tables and chairs were a welcome sight would be quite an understatement; the waitress probably didn’t understand why we were so excited. So we sat outside, at the very beginning of West Reading, where things begin to get a little bit more lively – I’ve forgotten how much I enjoy people-watching – and for the first time in a long time I held a physical menu in my hand and decided what to order.

I picked Crispy Dosa for my first restaurant review in over a year for a few reasons. One is that I knew they had outside space. Another is that I had a feeling dosas wouldn’t travel well if I’d ordered them as a takeaway dish. But most significantly, on the day I visited them they were Reading’s newest restaurant, having opened at the end of April. They have two other branches, in Hounslow and Greenford, and they opened here with relatively little fanfare – mainly because they missed out on all the publicity that comes with opening over forty different sock puppet restaurants on delivery apps. What can I say? I like an underdog.

Reading has had a bit of a love affair with South Indian food over the last twelve years. First Chennai Dosa opened on Whitley Street in 2009, and proved so popular that people were queuing to get in (they didn’t take cash, which at the time was noteworthy: these days you’d steer clear unless a restaurant accepted cards). Then Chennai Dosa moved to the old Casa site, just over from Reading Library, and Cafe Madras took their place on Whitley Street.

There have been more musical chairs in recent times. Chennai Dosa became “Chennai Dosa Artisanz”, a transformation which mostly seemed to mean that they added a couple of quid to every dish on the menu, and then it closed, leaving that site vacant for nearly three years until Madras Flavours opened there this year, also offering southern Indian food. And Cafe Madras closed too, to be replaced by Vel, another southern Indian restaurant. So the market is clearly there, and the question is whether it’s big enough to support a third restaurant (and, I suppose, whether Crispy Dosa is the third restaurant for the job).

Crispy Dosa is entirely vegetarian, and its menu is a mixture of South Indian dishes (specifically dosa and uthappam, its thicker sibling) and Indo-Chinese dishes you’d find on the menu somewhere like Bhel Puri House. There’s also a selection of curries and noodle dishes, if you want something more conventional. But the centre of the menu is definitely the dosa options which span three sections, “Dosa Corner”, “Special Dosa” and “Chef Recommended Dosa”. I’m not sure what adjective to use out of reasonable, affordable and cheap, but nearly all the dishes cost less than nine pounds and many are significantly less expensive. We ordered a few starters to share, and a main course each, and sat back and waited.

But first, I got to reacquaint myself with mango lassi. I love this drink, and I hadn’t had one in a long time; it’s not something you really add to a JustEat basket. Crispy Dosa’s version was lovely, a bright orange slurp of tropical sweetness, and it took a reassuringly long time to arrive. The wait staff apologised for the delay, something they repeatedly did and didn’t need to: they also came out to tell us our starters were on the way, when there wasn’t any rush.

Our starters were taken from different sections of the menu, a hodgepodge designed to sample a wider range of dishes. The first, the Madras crispy masala potato slice, was the most disappointing. I’ve been spoiled by Bhel Puri House’s bhajia, slices of potato in a crispy batter, beautifully spiced and served with a bright carrot chutney. This dish, by contrast, felt like a bare minimum way to live up to the description on the menu.

It really was just sliced potatoes which had indeed been fried (although not all of them were enormously crispy) with some spice powder dusted on top. They were meant to come with sriracha, but instead we got what tasted suspiciously like ketchup. I guess if you’re South Indian both of those sauces are equally inauthentic, but I expected something a little more than sliced potatoes and tomato sauce. It looks quite nice in the picture, mind you.

The gobi 65 was better. You got a fairly generous helping of small florets of cauliflower, cooked but still with a little nutty firmness, in a spiced batter, along with some decorative fanned-out slices of red onion (Zoë thought they really added something, although she’d happily eat raw red onion for fun: I gave them a miss). But these were pretty good, and more interesting than the sliced potato. Again, I was baffled that it came with ketchup – had they given this to us because they thought it was the kind of thing we’d enjoy, or was it standard issue? It might have benefited from something to dip it in – a whole dish of it got a bit dry – but Heinz? Really?

This was even more of a no-no where my dining companion was concerned. She dislikes almost anything with vinegar in it – I always get a black look when I open a jar of pickles – and has a visceral loathing of tomato ketchup which took me some time to fully grasp. Early in our courtship, down the pub with friends, I placed a bottle of ketchup in front of her on the table and watched in shock as instantly, in a single unthinking reflex action, she picked it up and chucked over her shoulder, clean into the river (if it had been any other establishment they might have barred us, but to my shame we were in the Back Of Beyond: I’m sure they’ve seen worse). I’m allowed ketchup with fish and chips, but I have to take the plate through to the kitchen and rinse it the moment I’m finished: she claims she can smell ketchup at great distances.

Fortunately our third starter came with an assortment of chutneys, which were also handy for starters one and two. Medhu vada are doughnut shaped fritters made from urad dal that are often eaten as breakfast or a snack in South India: I’d never had them before, but enjoyed them a great deal. You got a couple for just over three pounds – they looked a little lonesome on that big steel tray – and they had a nice texture, crispy on the outside, doughy without being too heavy. I expected a little more in terms of spicing and curry leaves, but as a vehicle for the chutneys and sambar I thought they worked nicely.

“It’s the chutney I judge these places by” a friend of mine had said to me earlier in the week. “We haven’t found any good ones in the UK so far.” Although I quite enjoyed Crispy Dosa’s chutneys I suspected they might have left her underwhelmed. The coriander chutney was probably the best of the lot but it didn’t quite have the zing I’d have liked. The coconut one was pleasant, and the sambar, although thin, had a pleasing heat to it. But the red chutney felt a little lacking in oomph, and I didn’t make great inroads into that.

Our main courses arrived while we were tackling the tail end of our starters. I’d forgotten just how huge a dosa looks when it’s plonked in front of you – you need the superwide lens on an iPhone to fit it all in – and how attractive a dish it is. I’d gone for the ghee podi masala dosa, and it was burnished on the outside and glossy with ghee inside, sprinkled with a dry powder made from lentils which gave it a savoury kick (the closest thing I can compare it to – let’s insult two cultures at once, shall we? – was the shrapnel at the bottom of a packet of dry roasted peanuts).

It was terrific finger food, and probably worked better with the chutneys and sambar than the medhu vada had. Only the potato masala let the side down – for me it was too creamy and bland with a strange note of something like condensed milk, and didn’t have enough in the way of spice. I finished my meal feeling full, so I didn’t lose too much sleep over leaving some of it, but portions at Crispy Dosa are so generous that I probably could have skipped the masala completely. Maybe I’ll branch out next time.

Another good candidate for next time was Zoë’s choice, from the “Chef Recommended Dosa” section, otherwise known as the “What Other Things On The Menu Could We Stuff Into A Dosa?” section. I suspect this bit of the menu would give purists conniptions – Szechuan noodles in a dosa doesn’t sound anything but weird – but Zoë’s paneer Manchurian dosa was very good indeed and worked well as a dish. It came rolled and cut into segments, much more like a traditional sandwich, and the paneer in it was firm, tangy and pretty tasty stuff. I wasn’t entirely convinced this dish needed the chutneys, as it managed perfectly well in its own right, a thoroughly enjoyable dish.

“It reminds me of a quesadilla, and I fucking love a quesadilla” said Zoë, handily proving that I wasn’t the only person not averse to a spot of cultural appropriation: arguably the restaurant started it by giving us tomato ketchup, anyway.

If we had had a better idea of portion size, and maybe paced ourselves a little better, we might have saved room for dessert. I have a soft spot for kulfi, it was the perfect evening for it and Crispy Dosa does a pistachio kulfi that I imagine I’d have enjoyed. Another one to notch up for next time, I think. We were probably there about an hour in total – ever so slightly on the brisk side, but understandable for the kind of restaurant Crispy Dosa is – during which time the Oxford Road gradually got louder, crazier and more watchable.

“It’s nice to have another spot that’s perfect for a quick meal before heading to the Nag’s” said Zoë. “This place and ThaiGrr! will come in handy for that.”

“Good point. That’s been a gap in the market since Tuscany and the Jolly Fryer closed down.”

“I know” she smiled. “You should mention that in your review.”

Our dinner for two – three starters, two mango lassis and two dosas – came to just over thirty-five pounds, not including tip. That’s not bad value, and you could easily spend less and come away full. Service was excellent throughout, and I did find myself rooting for them despite the occasional misstep. We were the only table outside, but they worked very hard to make us feel like we hadn’t been forgotten. It’s been such a difficult year for restaurants, and Crispy Dosa has hardly opened at an auspicious time, but it felt like there was a decency and integrity to what they did.

Reviewing restaurants again means putting ratings at the bottom, which means the usual hoo-ha about people thinking my reviews are too harsh, or too generous, or that the mark is too low or too high to match the words. I’m not sure I’ve missed that; the current feedback seems to be that I’m too harsh, though no doubt it will swing around before too long. But I liked Crispy Dosa, perhaps more than I enjoyed the sum total of the dishes. Some were good, some were middling but all were reasonably priced enough that you can explore, make mistakes, revisit.

Perhaps my spectacles are a little rose-tinted by just how wonderful it was to sit outside a restaurant again. But I don’t think so: I think Crispy Dosa is a decent, solid restaurant which adds something to Reading, especially if you live on the west side of town, or especially if you’re vegetarian. I’m glad it’s decided to open here, and that paneer Manchurian has my name on it at some point in the not too distant future. It’s no longer the latest restaurant to open in Reading – that honour passed this week to some burger place on Friar Street – so it will just have to settle for being the latest restaurant I’ve reviewed. Small consolation, I know, but them’s the breaks.

Crispy Dosa – 7.0
60 Oxford Road, Reading, RG1 7LT
0118 3273670

https://www.crispydosarestaurant.co.uk