Tag: Jerry

Restaurant review: The Coconut Tree

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

Of all of Reading’s new restaurants, The Coconut Tree might be the one most people have asked me to review as soon as possible. Which is in itself interesting, because The Coconut Tree has already had more write-ups online than most of Reading’s new places – but the thing is, they’re all on Instagram. Remember all that talk last year about how hospitality was on its knees and taking free shit was plain immoral? Nature is definitely healing, because The Coconut Tree’s plan for its launch was very much as they used to be in the before times – find some local Instagrammers with over five thousand followers, bung them some PR copy to include in the social media coverage, sit back and watch.

And I don’t know about you, but I learned a lot. Admittedly, nearly all of it I could have learned just from reading their menu, but it’s dead useful to discover that the food is “fresh, tasty and full of flavour” (it would be a brave restaurant that said “you know what? Lots of our stuff is stale and bland”). And to discover, from multiple Instagram posts, that one of the cocktails is set on fire in front of you: the drinks in general, allegedly, are “banging”. Did I mention the “proper good vibes”, or the fact that it’s “cool” and “trendy”? Perhaps the best summary was that “the cuisine is insane”. Sri Lankan food: utter madness! 

Of course, what none of those posts covered in much detail was that their food was all free. Their booze, too. “There wasn’t a cocktail I didn’t like” said another influencer. I bet. “Nothing too specific, we’re quite happy for you to construct the post!” said one writeup, showing that the influencer had copied and pasted all the text from the PR company without reading it first. That one was a “paid partnership”: not only did they get free food but, presumably, they were also paid to do the copying and pasting. I can’t compete with those levels of polish, sadly, so instead you get my impressions of the place after I turned up on a weekday with my friend Jerry, two Sancho Panzas in search of a Don Quixote. 

“The service is wonderful!” Jerry enthused as I met him outside the restaurant. “I went inside to see if you were there already and the lady who greeted me was absolutely lovely.”

I never went to Zizzi, so I don’t know what it used to look like, but the Coconut Tree is pretty bright and lively with an open kitchen straight ahead and the rest of it broken up into zones (along with a bizarre waiting room area at the front which looks, in the nicest sense, like a waste of space). There was a mixture of low tables and high tables with stools – in an ideal world I’d have chosen the former, but the staff led us to the latter where we sat, somewhat incongruously, under a wicker canopy. The place was fuller than I was comfortable with, but we’d deliberately chosen to eat a late lunch, so the place thinned out pretty quickly.

The lady serving us, who was every bit as friendly and engaging as the one who had greeted Jerry, talked us through the concept – because, yes, The Coconut Tree is one of those places with a concept. I imagine that one day we’ll reach the stage where the concept is “you order a starter, a main and a dessert and we bring them to you in that order, spaced at reasonable intervals”, but for the time being “concept” often refers to places like The Coconut Tree where dishes are smaller, tapas-style for sharing and they turn up in whatever order the kitchen feels like sending them.

I know this sounds crotchety – and as an aside I’ve never understood how restaurants think smaller plates are perfect for sharing – but we gladly threw ourselves into it, ordering a selection of dishes and a couple of beers. It’s a pretty big menu with plenty of small plates, a handful of larger ones and of course hoppers, coconut milk pancakes which might be Sri Lanka’s best-known dish. Much of the menu is suitable for vegans, and nearly all of it is gluten free. Most of the small dishes range between four and seven pounds, a couple of the larger ones cost slightly more and they recommend you aim for three per person, so that’s exactly what we did.

Our beer arrived first. I reckon Jerry could have been persuaded to have a cocktail – or as they put it, cocotail (sic) – but I was being well behaved. Lion is a Sri Lankan lager which they’ve apparently been making in Sri Lanka since the 1880s. Despite that, and the fact that the brewery who make it are yet to be absorbed into AB InBev like so many others, it tasted pretty generic, and I thought it was an odd decision by the staff to pour it at the bar rather than bring the can to the table. It wasn’t quite cold enough – maybe the glass hadn’t been long out of a dishwasher.   

From this point onwards, unfortunately, it gets harder to be positive. Some of that, in fairness, was our fault: we arguably could have ordered a wider variety of dishes. Some is just one of those things: the staff got part of our order wrong and brought something we didn’t want. These things happen. But a lot of the problems were down to the kitchen. 

Take the devil pork with pineapple, Jerry’s first choice from the menu. According to the menu it was spicy, sweet, tangy and sour. If only that were true: in reality it was acrid, blasting heat unsuccessfully lightened by huge chunks of pineapple, by far the predominant ingredient. The pork belly, supposedly “juicy”, was a few tough cubes here and there. This dish cost seven pounds, and I couldn’t help but think of the pork belly starter at Clay’s, where you get exponentially more pork belly, fantastically tender, fiery with ginger and sweet with jaggery and tamarind, for eight pounds fifty.

Even though I’ve only eaten Sri Lankan food a couple of times before, other dishes also came up short by comparison with other Reading places. The “Cheesy Colombo” was essentially like a paneer Manchurian, with plenty of sticky, chewy cubes of cheese. But again there wasn’t much subtlety, and an over-reliance on sweet, caramelised onions: for the same money, either one of the paneer dishes at Bhel Puri House is significantly better. The Coconut Tree’s menu describes this as “An off scale FAV!”, but given that it gives its hoppers the label “legendary” it’s maybe not one for self-deprecation: mind you, it also describes its Malay pickle as “a tropical pallet cleanser”, which makes it sound like Cillit Bang.

Speaking of the hopper, it was the one dish we ordered that I didn’t get to try. Jerry wanted one, and it did look pretty decent: relatively thin, with a just-cooked egg in the middle and clusters of sambol and more of that caramelised onion to mix together before you roll the whole thing up and eat it like a crêpe. Jerry enjoyed it: to be fair, I should point out that Jerry enjoyed our meal far more than I did.

The rest was meh. As I said, we ordered two dishes that were dangerously similar – my mistake for not paying attention – namely battered mushrooms and battered cuttlefish. The latter was the better of the two – the cuttlefish was fresh and tender, but the dish still lacked any crisp or crunch from the polenta batter. Instead the contents had steamed away inside the coating, and just for good measure they’d dumped some more caramelised onions on top.

The cuttlefish was meant to be spicy, but instead was more cloying from those ever-present onions. The mushrooms were like that but less interesting, another enamel dish of disappointment, like something you’d get from the ready meal aisle in a supermarket. Or Iceland. Underwhelming as these dishes were, they still deserve a better photo than this fuzzy one I managed to get of them: I can only apologise.

We ordered some yellow rice to go with our dishes, but none were saucy enough to need it. And given the spiel about dishes coming out as and when, it’s odd that everything came practically at once, very soon after we placed our order.

Well, everything apart from one dish. I’d really wanted to try the chicken kotthu because it’s always been one of my favourite South Indian dishes, that comforting mix of meat and carbs. But instead, the staff brought out a different kotthu dish from the one we’d ordered. They were nice as pie about taking it back, but we waited and waited for its replacement to arrive, to no avail. By the time we had finished all of our food and pretty much drained our beer we were ready to leave, so we asked for the bill. “Don’t you want your chicken kotthu?” said the waitress, and we had to say no. God knows what had happened to it – like I said, they were busy when we got there, but they got a lot quieter soon after.

I get no joy from saying all this, because all the staff were lovely, lively, friendly and seemed to be huge fans of the restaurant. At the moment, when hospitality staff are hard to get hold of, I think The Coconut Tree should do its utmost to hang on to the ones they have, but they deserve better food to bring to the table. Our bill came to twenty five pounds, including an optional ten per cent tip – and if that seems on the low side, that’s because The Coconut Tree is offering its own version of Eat Out To Help Out for the rest of this year, with fifty per cent off all food Monday to Wednesday. It seems harsh that The Coconut Tree is effectively halving its staff’s tips on those days, so our tip was based on the full amount: if you go there, you should consider doing that too.

“It’s very busy Monday to Wednesday” said our server. “Although it’s also packed Fridays and Saturdays to be honest, so Thursday’s the only quiet day. At weekends” – she pointed to the bizarre waiting area at the front, low stools and no tables – “we even have customers eating there, because we’re that full.” 

Having eaten at The Coconut Tree, I’m afraid I don’t understand why. I guess it’s a combination of all that money off and the fascination of the new. It would be easy to chalk this up as another example of a chain that jumped the shark shortly before opening in Reading, but I’ve been to the original branch in Cheltenham, a couple of years ago, and although my meal there was better than this one, it didn’t blow me away either. And this isn’t about Sri Lankan cuisine – I’ve eaten at Hoppers in Covent Garden and adored my meal there – which meant that when it came to The Coconut Tree I expected more all round: more inventiveness, more complexity. 

But everything at the Coconut Tree, in terms of flavour, is very much in primary colours – and bright ones at that, because I didn’t get any subtlety or nuance. Maybe that’s what all those influencers meant by “banging” and “insane”. Perhaps it will find its feet, but if you’re hoping this adds an exciting new dimension to Reading’s dining scene I reckon you may need to think again. I’ll probably give it another chance, to see if other dishes have the wow factor I missed – the goat curry’s meant to be the best thing I didn’t try – but I do wonder how it will fare once the novelty, and that fifty per cent discount, wear off.

I ought to point out, as I did earlier, that Jerry enjoyed the meal far more than I did. But what does Jerry know? He likes me, after all.

The Coconut Tree – 6.6
64 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3BJ
0118 3383921

https://www.thecoconut-tree.com/reading

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Café review: Monty’s Café

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

At the end of our lunch at Monty’s Café, the owner came over to our table with a little plate for my friend Jerry and me. It had a little macaroon and a baklava on it, a neat touch. So I asked him how long they’d been open, and he said that it was just about two years. And, as so often lately, I thought about what a gruelling two years that must have been for him. I thought that the summer of 2019 would have seemed so full of hope, because the beginning of things is always exciting. And the following winter might have been challenging, as winters often are, but then suddenly, as spring was almost around the corner the bombshell dropped that nothing would be normal again for a very long time. 

I was chatting to another friend recently who said “who opens a hospitality business in the middle of a pandemic?”. Well, yes – and yet some people do, even here in Reading. But I feel particular sympathy for businesses like Monty’s Cafe that open just before a pandemic and have to spend some of their first twelve months fighting especially hard to survive when, even in happier times, getting through the first year proves to be beyond many restaurants and cafés.

All that makes me particularly glad, and more than a little relieved, that I can find plenty of nice things to say about Monty’s Café. It’s a little café deep in the heart of Reading’s studenty area, at the other end of Hatherley Road to the considerably bigger – and busier – Café Yolk. For a long time I didn’t give it much thought because it seemed largely to be for takeaways, with limited space inside and out. But at some point over the last year or so they did some real work on their outside space, put a fetching grey fence around it and a covered canopy overhead, and the transformation was marked.

A while back when we had that insanely hot few weeks I remember strolling down Addington Road past Monty’s Café, seeing its terrace bathed in the sun and it looked like the kind of day café you get in Greece or Turkey, rather than just around the corner from the Royal Berks. And checking their menu added to that slight feeling of elsewhere – a mixture of brunches and Lebanese lunch dishes, where a dish was equally likely to come with cheap sliced white or pita bread. It made sense to differentiate themselves from Yolk, their more famous neighbours, and prices were considerably lower than Yolk’s too.

I turned up on a slightly less sunny afternoon with Jerry to find many of the outside tables taken, which gladdened me, by a mixture of friends lunching and solo diners tapping away on laptops over an espresso. It was a charming outside space, with a clear corrugated roof much like the one at Geo Café’s Orangery, and the furniture was tasteful. They also had an entirely contactless QR code-driven ordering process where you can fire up the website, pick everything you want and pay without ever having to go inside – very handy for people like me who have enjoyed table service in cafés and pubs and are in no hurry for it to end. 

The menu was pretty compact – looking at it, it was as if Early Café and Bakery House had had a child together. The small breakfast selection included falafel and halloumi, the sausages were lamb and the bacon was turkey. On the section marked “Sides”, moutabal, nachos and hash browns sat incongruously side by side. There was chicken shawarma and chicken tikka, and a range of sandwiches which involved taking almost everything Monty’s sold, with the exception of the hash browns, and sticking it in a wrap. If the menu had something of an identity crisis, it was nothing if not affordable. Nothing cost more than six pounds (not even the sole pizza on the menu, which had a section to itself).

We ordered a selection aiming to cover as much of the menu as we could, and the first thing to come out – our drinks – set the scene for what was to come. Lattes were huge things, easily some of the biggest I’ve seen in an independent Reading café, in sunshine-yellow mugs. If they weren’t quite at the quality of the Anonymous coffee sold at the end of Hatherley Road they were still pretty serviceable, and gladly free of that acrid note you often get at middling cafés. Fresh juices were similarly huge, and delicious. Mine sang with mango, while Jerry’s mint lemonade was enthusiastically received on the other side of the table; both felt like decent value at four pounds.

The moutabal was also enjoyable, and very keen value at just over three pounds fifty. Sometimes the smokiness can overpower moutabal but it was kept nicely in check, and there was a bit of a whiff from the judicious use of garlic. The whole thing was crowned with pomegranate seeds and a little pool of olive oil – the only thing that let it down was the standard-issue pita bread, which was a little thin and stiff for proper dipping. There wasn’t enough of it but we asked for a little more, Oliver-style, and it was brought over almost immediately, accompanied by a big smile.

Jerry had chosen the brunch and added some turkey bacon as an extra, possibly for the novelty value. The whole thing was nicely put together with the baked beans in a ramekin, a move which suits the OCD tendencies of some people, myself included. Jerry went on to tell me that he wasn’t much of a fan of baked beans, or hash browns for that matter – which did make me wonder why he’d ordered this dish – but it all got gleefully demolished all the same. Again, there were nice little touches everywhere – something which might have been paprika dusted on the hash browns, chives snipped onto the eggs.

You notice these things, and if the yolks weren’t necessarily super-runny on both of the eggs it didn’t seem to matter in the grand scheme of things. I personally would have preferred better toast and butter, but you had to weigh that against the wonder that was Café Monty’s lamb sausages – brick-red, very much like merguez and packing a nice fiery heat. Jerry also let me try the turkey bacon, which was similar enough to real bacon to be a more than adequate substitute. But truly, it was all about the sausages. I could gladly have eaten a whole plate of them – and the menu does give you that option, so bear it in mind if you visit. Merguez for brunch: what’s not to like?

“This will fill me up for the rest of the day!” said Jerry, very happy with his life choices. “Honestly, as you get older you do find you just have less capacity for food.” 

“This is why you’re so much slimmer than me” I replied. Jerry has twenty years on me, and I’m still waiting for anything to affect my capacity for food or my gradually increasing waistline: we’re now reaching the stage where I’m holding out for a tapeworm. “Does that mean you won’t have room for a few pints at the Park House bar later on?”

“I can always find room for that” he beamed.

My falafel and halloumi wrap came beautifully presented, all neat and ready to eat in a little paper sleeve. Again, it was unshowy but quietly delightful, everything in balance. That said, I’d paid extra to add the halloumi, and I think it needed it – the falafel were pleasant enough but I didn’t get the feeling they’d been fried there and then and crammed into the wrap while still hot and crispy, so it needed the halloumi for contrast. But what made it was the crunch of Lebanese pickles, perfect purple strips adding texture and sharpness, the icing on the metaphorical cake. This dish cost me four pounds fifty – good luck getting anything as enjoyable for that price at the other end of Hatherley Road – and was worth every penny.

“This is marvellous” said Jerry, as the sun made a half-hearted attempt to emerge from behind the clouds. “I could see myself coming here with a book and just having a coffee and a read.”

I knew what he meant. There was something about the space, and the uniformly warm and happy welcome we’d got from all three of the staff looking after us, that I rather found gave me the feels. Put it this way: I knew from social media that the café had closed earlier in the week for a short three-day holiday and that this was their first day reopened, but nobody there showed even the slightest sign of having the back to work blues. On the contrary, they seemed overjoyed to have customers, in a way that made me positively warm to the whole shooting match.

Our bill for two came to twenty-nine pounds, not including tip, but it would be very easy to spend an awful lot less. We’d already paid right at the start, so we said a jolly farewell before ambling up the hill in the direction of the Harris Garden, largely so we could pretend to ourselves that we’d in some way earned the pints waiting for us in our not too distant future. “I didn’t bring a bottle of wine with me this week” said Jerry apologetically as we set off, and I did briefly wonder if he’d been replaced with a Jerry impersonator.

Short and sweet this week, then, which is absolutely the right way to sum up somewhere like Monty’s Café. I love a place that doesn’t have tickets on itself, that does things simply and well and somehow, through some sort of alchemy, creates somewhere unobtrusively lovely. No brashness, no showing off, just quiet competence. 

Monty’s Café serves as an excellent reminder, too, that however much you might love food, it’s never all about the food. It’s also about the welcome, and the space, and how a place makes you feel. So yes, I could find establishments in Reading that do better moutabal, or better coffee, or a better breakfast. But the best can be the enemy of the good.  And I don’t think, on the other hand, that I could find somewhere that does all those things, the way Monty’s Café does, in such an agreeable, sleepy little spot. 

It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts, to the point where whatever number I lob at the bottom of this review won’t really capture what I’m trying to say. Hopefully you’ll pay more attention to this paragraph than the rating, and if you’re in the area one lunchtime you’ll go there, see what I saw and leave, as I did, feeling that all was right with the world. Apparently, according to the menu, you can get those sausages in a wrap, with pomegranate molasses and halloumi, and chips on the side. Just imagine.

Monty’s Café – 7.3
41 Addington Road, Reading, RG1 5PZ.
0118 3272526

https://www.emontys.co.uk