Tag: indian

Restaurant review: Bombay Brothers

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I’m grateful for every single one of my readers, but there’s a special place in my affections for people who tip me off about places. Whether it’s my West Reading mole who keeps me posted on the comings and goings of the Oxford Road, my town centre informant who sends me pictures of shuttered restaurants and “coming soon” advertisements, or my other half who is always telling me about new businesses I’ve never even heard of springing up on Instagram, they form an invaluable network helping me keep track of where I ought to try next. I’d compare them to the Baker Street Irregulars, except they’re all very much adults and their catchment area extends far beyond Baker Street.

In particular I very much appreciate people who get in touch to tell me to try somewhere out, whether it’s already on my list or not. When I review somewhere new, there are always a few people who come out of the woodwork to tell me they’ve been going there for ages and it’s great, but only a fraction of those people ever pop up in my DMs raving about the place before I’ve been.

Maybe they like to keep the good places to themselves, maybe they assume I’ll get to them before too long. Or perhaps it doesn’t even cross their minds to contact me, which is fair enough. But it means that when people do recommend somewhere, I’m always especially grateful.

This week’s review came from a message like that, from a reader of the blog who told me to try Bombay Brothers, the Indian restaurant on the ground floor of Kings Walk which opened around the beginning of last year. She specifically raved about Bombay Brothers’ railway lamb, saying it reminded her of the one her grandma used to make. I couldn’t turn my nose up at a recommendation like that, so on a dreary July evening I hopped on the bus into town to give it a whirl.

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Restaurant review: Chilis

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The week after you get back from holiday is the absolute worst, isn’t it? One minute you’re loafing in the sun, you can have a lie in if you want to, your hardest morning decision is where to grab coffee and then where to have lunch, your post-lunch coffee, maybe a snack, your pre-prandial drink, your dinner, your post-dinner bar of choice. On and on it goes until you’re a modern-day lotus eater, free of cares, a flâneur and a gourmand, carefree and arguably in need of detox. Little, if anything, is finer than reaching that stage.

And then it’s over. The plane touches down at miserable old Shatwick, and you’re reintroduced to the M25. When you get home your clothes all need to be washed, the fridge is bare and there’s this thing called work you have to get up for at something ridiculous like half-seven in the morning. Just like that you’re back in a life of dreary cold packaged sandwiches and cobbling together a meal plan, of not drinking during the week, watching your calorie intake and hanging in there until payday.

And even though it’s May, it seems to be raining most of the time. I don’t care how much you might love your job: objectively speaking, if you compare it to a holiday there’s only ever going to be one winner. Why does anybody do it?

This year, for me at least, that comedown has been even more of a cliff edge than usual. Because not only was I back from holiday, but I was back from honeymoon – I got married, although I haven’t talked about it much – and my next trip away won’t involve planes, trains or automobiles but instead a white van and the removal men as I burn a week’s leave next month moving house.

So although Zoë and I did the supermarket shop as usual, with a sense of resignation, sticking to the plan wasn’t easy last week. Instead there were accidental takeaways, or wanders over to Bakery House or Honest, anything to make real life just a little more unreal, even if only for a short while. You could call it a transition phase, you could call it a soft landing. You could even call it a cry for help: probably it’s a little of all three.

On the plus side, it meant there was a slight role reversal. In the run up to my nuptials it was more difficult to persuade Zoë to come with me on duty, a combination of trying to shed that last couple of pre-marital pounds and save those last few pre-marital other pounds. Now that I’ve been elevated to the dizzy heights of husband? It turns out that Zoë can be persuaded to eat out during the week, especially if it happens to be her turn to cook.

I may have used this to my benefit, in truth. Bet you can’t be fucked to cook the salmons tonight I messaged her, as she was on the train back from London. How did you guess? came the reply. Failing at this, aren’t I. After a bit of plea bargaining – it was raining, so nowhere too far out of town (my wife does not like the rain), and nowhere that involved walking away from home only to head back (my wife also doesn’t like going back on herself) we settled for Chilis: central, a short walk from the station, potentially interesting.

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Café review: Filter Coffee House

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As of October 2024 Filter Coffee House has changed its interior layout and so is now takeaway only.

Filter Coffee House, a tiny café on Castle Street offering authentic South Indian coffee, opened last August. It occupies a unit which as far as I can remember used to be home to a very small, rather unsuccessful produce store by the people behind Tamp Culture (remember them?). I found myself stopping in last year a couple of weeks after Filter Coffee House opened and, slightly bending my usual rule to wait a month, I talked about it on social media.

I couldn’t help it. I waxed lyrical on Instagram about their coffee and, in particular, their banana bun, a confection quite unlike anything I’d ever eaten before. Not quite sweet, not quite savoury but glazed, complex and moreish, it was not the kind of thing you eat and forget. Quite the contrary: you want to tell the world about it. I loved it so much that when I put together my list of Reading’s 50 best dishes last September, as part of the blog’s 10th birthday celebrations, I snuck it in at number 47. I called it a little miracle. 

Maybe I was jumping the gun but I had a feeling it was going to be huge, and I wanted my admiration of that banana bun to be a matter of public record as soon as possible. Because there are few four word combinations in the English language quite as satisfying, if you ask me, as I told you so.

Anyway, the amount of praise that bun has garnered on social media since has borne out my hunch. But not only that, if you follow Filter Coffee House’s hugely winning Instagram feed you’ll see that they’ve really flourished in the last five months. The month after they opened they teamed up with nearby Rise to expand their range of baked goods. In October they introduced a menu of Saturday specials, and in November they brought in a sandwich menu.

In December, naturally, there was a Christmas menu – the “Mistle-Toast” is still available, if you’re tempted – and now Filter Coffee House also stocks goodies by Cocolico, Reading’s vegan pâtissière. The overall picture is one of constant forward movement and innovation, and it shows no signs of stopping: last Sunday, for the first time, they had a stall at Caversham’s Artisan Market. 

And yet, shamefully, with one thing and another I had not been back since that first visit back in August. Of all the places I’d neglected in the latter half of 2023, sorting this one was right at the top of my list. So last Saturday, lured by that specials menu and fresh from the elation of having bought our wedding rings in town, Zoë and I sauntered over, keen to see how things had progressed.

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Restaurant review: Pappadams

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Pappadams closed in November 2025 and is due to reopen as a new restaurant called Anjappar. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I got an email from WordPress the other day confirming that they were renewing my domain name for another year and that, more than anything, reminded me that a significant anniversary was coming up: next month my blog turns 10 years old. What started as a little hobby has become, well, a slightly less little hobby but I can’t quite believe that a decade later I’m still reviewing restaurants and that people are still reading those reviews. There will be more about that in the weeks ahead – for which I apologise in advance – but it has left me in rather a reflective mood lately (and I apologise for that, too).

In the first year of the blog, back when Alt Reading and the Evening Post were still a thing, I published a total of 38 reviews of places in Reading. Of those 38 restaurants just over half are still trading today – a statistic which surprised me, although it does include the likes of Zero Degrees, Côte, Five Guys, Mission Burrito, Malmaison, Bel And The Dragon: chains who are still going, many years later.

But when I look back at the independent restaurants I visited in the first year of the blog, the ones that remain open in 2023, there are only three that I’ve never returned to since. Pau Brasil, although I know it has its fans, has never tempted me back. I’ve never got round to Coconut, although I did review their takeaway at the start of last year. And last but not least, there’s Pappadams, the subject of this week’s review.

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Restaurant review: Bagheera at the Spread Eagle

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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).

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