Tag: Jerry

Restaurant review: Storia, Maidenhead

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Six years ago I wrote a piece on the blog, a listicle really, talking about the five things Reading still badly needed. Don’t worry, I won’t send you scurrying off to read it, but the tl:dr version is that, back in 2018, I thought Reading was still missing a proper cooked breakfast place, a tapas restaurant, a gelataria, a cafe that was simultaneously comfy, did good coffee and good food and, for want of a better expression, a “special occasion restaurant”.

Without going into detail, I personally would say that in the intervening six years we haven’t got a great deal closer to having any of those things. But that’s not why we’re talking about Storia in Maidenhead this week: we’re talking about Storia because when I posted about this on Facebook a couple of weeks ago somebody commented saying that, in addition, Reading was lacking a decent independent Italian restaurant. And that comment stopped me in my tracks because – you know what? – that person was right.

Granted, away from the town centre you have the likes of Vesuvio out west and Papa Gee north of the river. And in town you do have pizza options, in the shape of Sarv’s Slice and Zia Lucia. But the demise of Pepe Sale earlier in the year does mean that, for the first time in a very long time, all the Italian restaurants in the town centre are chains: the likes of Zizzi, Carluccio’s and Bella Italia have a stranglehold on central Reading. And the more recent trend of pasta specialists, starting in London with the likes of Padella and Bancone and now cropping up elsewhere, like Little Hollows in Bristol, has also passed Reading by completely: no, town’s short-lived dalliance with Coco Di Mama really doesn’t count.

The one exception, arguably, is Mama’s Way. But although I love it I’m not sure that a restaurant with a capacity of half a dozen (and I’m being generous) is really even in the same ballpark as what we lost when Pepe Sale closed. And the closest thing I can think of to Pepe Sale is miles away to the west – Newbury’s Mio Fiore is a downright lovely spot, but that can be a half hour train journey.

No, that person commenting on my Facebook post was spot on – it’s a big gap in the market in Reading, and it’s striking that nobody has rushed to fill it. Perhaps in the fullness of time Zi Tore, which is going to take over the Grumpy Goat’s site on Smelly Alley, will redress the balance. But it’s hard to get excited about a place boasting Italian street food when the last place to attempt that shtick was Wolf. So this week I decided to check out Maidenhead’s Storia, which had been recommended to me by more than one reader of the blog, in the company of my good friend Jerry (regular readers will be pleased to hear that his digestive issues are now a thing of the past).

The strange thing is that Maidenhead already has a perfectly acceptable if unexciting Italian restaurant in the shape of Sauce and Flour. And Storia is a stone’s throw from that, literally two minutes’ walk away. Not for the first time on a visit to Maidenhead I wondered it if was just rubbing it in that it had some of the things Reading still lacked. Tapas bar El Cerdo was testament to that, as were our very enjoyable pre-dinner drinks at A Hoppy Place. I even had to walk past a branch of Coppa Club on my way to Storia, although that’s maybe less enviable.

That said, Storia is independent but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a chain. It’s the only Berkshire outpost of a group of six restaurants, with others scattered across Surrey, Hertfordshire and, randomly, the edge of Essex. I think that showed in the polish of the place when we arrived – it’s a handsome building which was welcoming from the off and the service was very slick. It was a grown-up space, too, quite classy with good use of mirrors and lighting to make up for what I imagine, in daytime, is a relative lack of natural light.

The tables along the walls were the ones you really wanted, all plush banquettes, but actually I didn’t mind missing out on those because our generous-sized table gave us a great view of the big and buzzing dining room. The whole thing had a feel of affluent happiness about it. It was Friday night, the weekend had arrived and Storia was going to do its damnedest to make sure people thoroughly enjoyed it.

There was very little to dislike about the menu but, simultaneously, I was surprised by how unexciting it was. Storia plays it safe with a menu that very much replicates the likes of Coppa Club down the way with very little sign of quirk or anything especially regional: half a dozen starters, a “raw” section made of up carpaccio and a strangely conspicuous ceviche, some pasta dishes, half a dozen pizzas and as many secondi.

I found it disappointing that all the pasta dishes were priced, and presumably sized, as main courses only – which again, felt more like the stuff of the bigger chain restaurants. And pricing also felt very conventionally done: starters around ten pounds, everything else between fifteen and twenty.

It made me wonder, not for the last time that evening, whether I was just jaded. Because I saw loads of things I could eat but nothing I was dying to try, and that in turn made me think about San Sicario, which closed last year, and what a terrible pity that was. And it also made me think of the interesting, resolutely all-Italian wine lists at San Sicario and Pepe Sale: would they have been seen dead having, as Storia did, an Argentinian Malbec, a Chablis and a Rioja on there?

We ordered a bottle of Valpolicella at £42. They brought a posher bottle by mistake, one twenty pounds more expensive, and I just managed to stop them before they opened it. Our wine was quite nice, but throughout the meal I wondered what the costlier one would have been like.

Jerry loved his starter – a sardine bruschetta with two filleted sardines perched on a pile of roasted peppers and aubergine, punchy with harissa. It was a riot of colour, and ironically one of the best things about it was the bread – properly golden and grilled, the perfect vessel. I got to try a bit and I liked the sardines a lot – in fairness I always do – but the rest of the dish felt a little incongruous, like an attempt to do something North African rather than the more obvious caponata. I quite enjoyed it, but it made me crave caponata more than anything.

“I’m in Lisbon towards the end of the year. Would you like me to bring you back a couple of tins of sardines?”

“That would be marvellous!” beamed Jerry.

My starter was the best thing I ate all evening. Storia’s calamari was very, very good – fresh, not bouncy, with a crispy, craggy coating which felt like it had some polenta flour in the mix. The whole thing was lightly scattered with red chilli and the decision to serve it with black garlic aioli rather than its more prosaic sibling was an excellent one, even if the smear slightly detracted from the undeniable visual appeal. It made me wish that Storia did a fritto misto, or perhaps it made me wish that Storia was the kind of restaurant that had fritto misto on its menu.

The secondi on Storia’s menu, I’m sorry to say, are really stuff. Forget your lamb rump, your saltimbocca or your suckling pig, because you won’t find them here. Instead there’s a chicken Milanese, a grilled chicken breast dish with marsala, a couple of fish dishes, steak and a risotto. I suspect that, rather than a craving for carbs, is what sent Jerry and I scuttling for the pizza and pasta.

Jerry absolutely adored his pizza salsiccia, a very well-trodden combo of salami, ‘nduja, chilli and basil. Again, he was kind enough to let me try some and I had to agree that it was a very solid effort. Slightly better than Zia Lucia’s – and a darned sight less wet and floppy – and not quite as good as the finest examples from Sarv’s Slice. A bit wayward with the toppings and with a lot of crust, crust that wasn’t quite as puffy, airy or leopard-spotted as the very best examples.

It was a nice pizza, and if I ate in Storia again I might well order one. It was not, however, as good as the one you can get in Knead, a five minute walk away.

I’ve saved possibly the most disappointing until last. When it comes to pasta, I often find myself ordering a carbonara these days. There are probably two reasons for that. One is that it’s a very good benchmark and a sign of whether a kitchen knows its stuff: does it come out glorious and golden, or closer to the magnolia horror of Cozze? But an even better reason – durr! – is that when it’s good it’s one of the happiest, most comforting things you can eat. And now there was a nip in the air I found myself drawn to it, far more than some chicken and pesto concoction that had a whiff of Prezzo about it or a conchiglie dish with yet more of that harissa.

It could have lived up to that promise, and nearly did. The taglioni were beautifully al dente and toothsome, so easy to anchor with a spoon and swirl with a fork, capturing all the sauce you needed. The sauce was good stuff – no adulteration with cream or egg whites here – and topping it with a strip of crispy pancetta was a nice touch, if an obvious one.

But the other star of the show is guanciale, and it needed to be crispy nuggets of the stuff that disrupted all that unctuousness (I mean that in its true sense, by the way) with spikes of smokey salt. And this was underdone, a bit too bouncy, a bit too fatty, falling short. If this dish had been the platonic ideal of a carbonara the rating at the bottom would probably have been a whole point higher and I would be making plans to return before Christmas. But it wasn’t, so the search goes on.

We nearly ordered dessert, but we were that terrible combination of not hungry enough and not fussed enough. But we were having a lovely time, and we had wine left, so we did the next best thing and ordered coffee, just to keep the evening alive that little bit longer. Latte came in a walled glass and was really surprisingly good, so much better than I thought it would be.

Like my old friend, it was sweet without a hint of bitterness, and it made for the perfect end to a brilliant evening. The food had facilitated that, but never even threatened to upstage it; although in fairness I expect I could have a wonderful time with Jerry eating doner meat off a bin lid. Anyway, our meal came to just over a hundred pounds, not including tip: the service very much deserved a tip, so tip we did.

As I said earlier on, I wonder whether I am just jaded about the kind of thing Storia does, even though Storia does it very well indeed. If you want a mid-range, casual dining Italian meal which isn’t going to offend or disappoint anybody, some of which will be good and some of which will be quite nice, you can go to Storia and it will deliver exactly that.

On a good day, so will Coppa Club I imagine, or Zia Lucia. On a good day, Jamie’s Italian used to manage that too. Is that enough? I suppose for many people it will be, and if Storia does that, without fail, time and again, it will no doubt build up a happy and loyal customer base and do extremely well – as it has, I suspect, in Tring and Radlett, in Redhill and Shepperton. History has taught us that there’s definitely a place for that kind of thing.

I guess what Storia reminded me of, strangely, is Strada – remember Strada? – back when Strada only had two branches, before it was possessed by the dread spirit of private equity and went the way some promising small restaurants do. As I think I’ve said before, I used to go to the one in Richmond with an old friend of mine, long since lost in the mists of divorce, and I always loved it. I came away, every single time, wishing Reading had one.

But when it did, it was no longer the Strada I loved but just Zizzi with a different colour scheme. Storia isn’t that, yet it wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to see how it could get there. And maybe that’s what they’re aiming for – I hope not, but everybody needs to make money. Especially nowadays when the bastard stuff seems to be so very thin on the ground.

So it’s not Storia, it’s me. If you’re like me, you would probably enjoy your meal there. But if you’re anything like me, Storia might also leave you feeling that, even though there’s nothing technically wrong with it, you just want something more these days.

Storia – 6.9
11 Bridge Street, Maidenhead, SL6 8LR
01628 769350

https://www.storiarestaurants.co.uk/maidenhead

Restaurant review: Zia Lucia

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It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that as a middle-aged man churning out two and a half thousand words a week about some restaurant or other, I’m about as far from the food and drink zeitgeist as it’s possible to be. Restaurant blogs have been dead for years, local papers too, and even the broadsheets are gradually fading away. Instagram influencers are passé too, even if Reading’s handful are still scrounging the occasional free meal (the latest from the Hilton in Kennet Island). Nope, apart from the occasional increasingly desperate Substack, food reviewing is all about TikTok and Instagram reels these days. 

The most prominent is an account called Topjaw. Topjaw, for the uninitiated, consists of a posh bloke with floppy hair (who used to be a model) in front of the camera and a less photogenic bloke, presumably also posh, behind it. The posh bloke with floppy hair interviews restaurateurs in London getting vox pops about where they think you can find the best pizza, burgers, coffee and so on in the capital. He’s trying to perfect that fake almost-estuary accent posh people do when they’re trying to sound less posh, like Tony Blair used to do. He’s not managed it yet. 

The usual suspects come up in those vox pops time and again – the Dalston bakery Dusty Knuckle, the Dexter burger at The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, the Soho hype factory that is new pub The Devonshire (a place where nobody can snag a reservation but there are mysteriously always tables available for celebrities, critics and, well, Topjaw). We’re never paid by any restaurant we feature, says their bio, although they’re not averse to doing paid partnerships with the likes of Bicester Village, of all places. They may not be paid a fee, but God knows if they pay for their food.

Still, all power to them: their format is quick and entertaining, and you find yourself watching it whether you like them or not. It’s already spawning imitators – mainly in Bristol, where you see some people trying the vox pop format – and maybe one day it will translate into a TV show for them, or a paid gig or an appearance on Strictly or I’m A Celebrity.

You might wonder what any of this has to do with Reading, so I should explain. A couple of months ago, during a bumper week of tosspots on Topjaw, they interviewed not only Ed Sheeran (who turns out to be as basic as you would expect) but also hereditary columnist and bigoted human bin fire Giles Coren. Coren was clearly desperate to appeal to a new demographic so was doing his usual dreary, sweary trying too hard schtick, only even more manic than usual.

But in the course of dispensing his tiresome opinions he happened to say that he thought the best pizza in London was done by Zia Lucia. “They have this charcoal base which apparently doesn’t make you fart” he added, not as hilariously as he intended. Hang on, I thought, haven’t they just opened in Reading?

Well, yes, they have. Zia Lucia opened at the start of April on St Mary’s Butts, where ASK used to be, their first branch outside London. Their website talks about their origins in Islington over 15 years ago, and they also bandy around the slightly random stat that they are the world’s 38th best pizza chain (before you get too excited, Pizza Pilgrims finished 27 places above them and the Big Mamma Group, which Coren loathes, came third). Even so a first branch outside London, coming to a town that had lost Franco Manca and Buon Appetito, felt like it was worth investigating. 

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Restaurant review: The Coconut Tree

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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. 

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Café review: Monty’s Café

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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. 

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Oishi

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

Click here to read a more recent review of Oishi, from December 2025.

I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten somewhere quite as apologetic as Oishi, the new Japanese restaurant on the Oxford Road. I turned up on a Wednesday evening to find the place completely empty; I asked the waitress whether it was okay to have a table for two, and she mumbled something about how most people come in to get takeaway, or phone up for delivery. That didn’t feel like either a yes or no, but then she smiled, said “yes, sit anywhere” and gestured around her. It’s a Spartan room, but tasteful and nicely kitted out, and I took a table in the window, reasoning that if people walked past at least they’d know somebody was eating there and maybe they’d come in too.

There was further confusion when the menus were handed out. There’s no way of getting round this: they were takeaway menus, proudly advising that you could have free delivery within a three mile radius if you spent fifteen pounds (which, incidentally, is pretty reasonable). Not just takeaway menus, but takeaway menus for Oishi’s branch in Brentford: the telephone number had been scrubbed out and a Reading number written underneath it in scratchy blue biro. On the plus side, at least we weren’t in Brentford.

“Would you like a drink?” said the waitress.

“Do you have a drinks list?”

There was a pause, long enough for me to realise that there was no more a drinks list than there was a menu.

“We don’t serve alcohol.”

Well, I’ve had more promising starts to a meal out, I said to myself.

Anyway, that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First, the context: I’d wanted to visit Oishi ever since it opened in August. Reading has long needed a Japanese restaurant that could rival the likes of Misugo in Windsor or Kyoto Kitchen in Winchester, both of which are terrific. I’m also a fan of Oxford’s Taberu, and when they announced that they were opening a second branch down the Oxford Road I thought my prayers had been answered.

At first things went well: Taberu did the place up (previously the first home of sadly departed and much mourned Indian restaurant Bhoj – there was a lot of burnt orange to paint over) and began serving takeaway with the promise that they’d open as a proper eat-in restaurant later on. Then, somewhere along the line, it all went awry: opening as a full restaurant never happened, then Taberu closed completely and then, after much speculation, it reopened as Oishi. Oh well, at least they didn’t have to redecorate.

I especially wanted to try Oishi because I recently ordered food from Sen Sushi, Reading’s other Japanese restaurant at the opposite end of the 17 bus route, and I’d been so disappointed. Having sushi delivered on a Friday night felt like a massive treat, but what turned up was mediocre: oddly wan salmon sashimi, sinewy, badly-cut tuna sashimi, yakitori chicken skewers with a bonus knot of gristle. I wanted to support small independent businesses, but this wasn’t as good as Yo! Sushi.

My dining companion this week was my friend Jerry. Now, Jerry is a very dangerous man to go out with on a school night. He likes a drink, but he’s retired and consequently he never, ever has to get up for work the next day: many’s the time I’ve forgotten this fact and meandered home from Jerry’s flat of an evening, rather too much wine to the good, only to face a painful awakening the following morning (and a message from Jerry, fresh as a daisy, saying what a lovely evening it was). More significantly, and uniquely among people who have accompanied me on reviews, Jerry doesn’t actually read the blog, so I can say what I like about him without fear of reprisal: believe me, the temptation to claim that he sports a mohawk is considerable.

Not only that, but Jerry told me in the run up to our meal that he’d never had Japanese food before. Looking through the menu, I found myself wondering what the least intimidating dishes might be for a newcomer. The usual suspects are all present and correct – a small selection of sashimi, some sushi (maki, uramaki and hand rolls), some hot starters and a range of hot main courses – rice dishes, noodle dishes and ramen, mostly. In the end I decided to go for a sort of greatest hits: I could try and pretend this was to fully test the range of the menu, or to give Jerry the best possible introduction to Japanese food, but by now you’ve probably figured out that it was more to do with greed and hunger.

“Have you really never eaten Japanese food?”

“No, I haven’t! The closest I’ve ever got is Wagamama.”

Jerry’s education began with the classics. I have a real weakness for soft shell crab, so I ordered some soft shell crab uramaki (“I was going to put in a request for those!” he said excitedly) and they were one of the first dishes to turn up. The presentation was endearingly amateurish – I’m used to slightly more precision and focus on clean lines – but they looked good, coated in bright orange tobiko (fish roe, the wonderful stuff that pops under your teeth), plonked on a board with a small pile of ginger in one corner and a dab of wasabi in the other. They were nicely rolled with no gaps or ragged edges, and the addition of a little cucumber added a nice textural crunch. If I had a criticism it was about size (don’t let anybody ever tell you it’s not important) – I’m used to having the same dish at Misugo where it feels like a sea monster is trying to escape from the rice, whereas these were somewhat diddy by comparison. At eight pounds it was the single most expensive dish we had, and probably not quite worth that.

I also ordered tempura prawns, mainly to ease the culture shock for Jerry: most people have eaten something like this at some point in their lives, after all. They never amaze and they rarely disappoint, but actually I was quietly impressed by Oishi’s rendition. Often menus claim that it’s tempura batter but what you get is stodgy, or greasy, or you take one bite and the rest of the batter falls off. These were very nicely done indeed – light, delicate and lacking in oil. They came with a pretty anonymous dipping sauce.

“It’s all very clean-tasting, isn’t it?” said Jerry. By Jove, I thought, he’s got it.

Sashimi came next: a big test for me, especially after such an iffy experience at Sen Sushi. Oishi has a limited sashimi selection – no sea bass or mackerel here – so again I opted for the reference dishes, in this case tuna and salmon. The slices were beautifully marbled, nicely sized and well-cut, with beautiful colour to them, but again the presentation was a tad haphazard. There was no daikon and the fish was fanned out on what looked like seaweed, which slightly affected the flavour of the pieces at the bottom.

That was a pity, because otherwise the sashimi was quite beautiful. I know some people are funny about raw fish, but for me there’s something magical about salmon sashimi in particular – the almost glossy texture, the way it manages to be both oily and pure all at once. The tuna was just as good – firm, meaty and expertly cut, everything as it should be. I dipped mine lightly in soy sauce and rhapsodised, while Jerry – showing a leaning toward the ascetic that was news to me – ate his au naturel. Oh, and there were two random and completely pointless slices of lemon: if you need these, you probably shouldn’t be eating sashimi, and I imagine they’d give purists conniptions.

By this point, I was starting to feel like things might turn out rather nicely, although I was also increasingly aware that this might have been the longest I’d ever been in Jerry’s company without imbibing alcohol of some description. Not that it seemed to deter him in the slightest as he launched into a long and very entertaining story about going to a wedding in North Devon only to meet the village character, a lady of advanced years who had booted out her husband because of his failure to perform, exhausted the limited pool of locals via Tinder and ended up working in a massage parlour because she’d said, he told me, “I might as well get paid for it”. Where did he find these people? I wondered.

Jerry concluded his tale just as our – presumably slightly aghast – waitress turned up with the next dish, duck gyoza with a little dish of hoi sin for dipping. Now, these are a stable at the likes of Yo! Sushi and Wagamama, and Oishi’s were fairly similar to the gyoza you can get at those places, but even then there were little differences – some finely chopped cucumber, or possibly spring onion, in the filling just adding another dimension. Nice work.

Finally, what I suppose you’d class as our main courses arrived. I’d given Jerry first choice, after talking him through the options, and he’d gone for chicken katsu curry. “It’s sort of breadcrumbed chicken breast and rice and a curry sauce, but it’s not a really hot spicy sauce.” I said. “It’s kind of mild and creamy, you know, like a chip shop curry sauce.” I think that latter reference is what sealed it, and when it was placed in front of Jerry I realised I had inadvertently described it perfectly. It was indeed some rice, some breaded chicken and some curry sauce, all separate, practically deconstructed you could say. I used to have a friend called Fiona who had to eat every component of her meal separately – first the potatoes, then the veg, then the meat, never crossing the gastronomic streams (well, it takes all sorts). All I can say is that Fiona would have loved Oishi’s chicken katsu curry, although I wasn’t so sure about the self-assembly aspect myself.

None the less, as before, Oishi may not have got the presentation right but the content was very good indeed. The chicken was just right – a brilliant juxtaposition of crispy and tender – and although the breadcrumbs mightn’t have been panko it was far too tasty for me to care. The sauce was sweetly mild but a very long way from inoffensive, and the rice was, well, rice. I personally would have poured the sauce over the rice and chicken and had at it, but Jerry ended up dipping the chicken and forkfuls of the rice into the sauce like some kind of exotic fondue; I found it far too endearing to correct him. Oh, there was also some salad but I don’t think Jerry touched it. I kind of found that endearing too.

My main course was teriyaki chicken, and I so enjoyed it. It was a very generous portion of chicken thigh in a bowl, on top of a bed of plain rice and at first I had reservations because it looked perfectly sticky but I thought everything underneath would be dry. How wrong I was: all the teriyaki sauce had percolated through the grains of rice, leaving a glorious sweet reservoir at the bottom that simply made everything delicious. Not only that, but the dish had plenty of other stuff going on – the crunch of beansprouts, carrots and red onion, every mouthful perfect in contrasts of flavour and texture. And the chicken, although I might have liked it absolutely piping hot, was beautifully cooked. This dish was on the menu at six pounds fifty and I couldn’t believe what superb value it was – a feeling that was only marginally dented by being charged seven pounds fifty for it when the bill arrived.

Service was truly lovely thoughout – the lady who served us was so friendly and polite (after the baffled and diffident start) that it truly saddened me that there were no other customers eating in the night that we went. There was a regular stream of deliveries going out the door, and a couple turned up to pick some food up towards the end of our visit, but even so it felt forlorn to be the only people sitting there enjoying such good food. “We did have some tables in before you arrived”, the waitress told us and I fervently hoped that was the case.

Everything we ate that night, along with a Diet Coke (for Jerry: what do you take me for?) and a pomegranate green tea (for me: that’s what you should take me for) came to fifty pounds, not including tip. None of the dishes we had cost more than eight pounds and many – the katsu, the teriyaki chicken, both sets of sashimi – felt like impressive value. We left with warm – if sober – goodbyes and an steadfast conviction that we’d be back before long, which is exactly how you want to feel at the end of a trip to a restaurant.

“Wasn’t it lovely?” said Jerry, clearly a convert to Japanese food.

“It really was. Now shall we have a debrief at the Nag’s?”

“Absolutely!”

Independent restaurants, in my experience, rarely get everything right on day one, week one, or month one. Very few spring forth fully-formed and fully-realised in the way that, say, Bakery House or Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen did. They make mistakes, they learn, they correct. Early adopters are helping with the beta testing, and it’s a high wire for small restaurants: do you open before you’re totally prepared, or do you wait until everything is perfect? Taberu waited until it was ready for eat in customers which never came, and then it closed. Oishi has done it the other way round: it’s serving customers without necessarily being confident about how to do it.

And this is where we come in. Because when places like Oishi open, what they really need is customers. Not just any punters, but customers who are prepared to overlook the glitches, the lack of booze, the slightly scruffy presentation and the rather apologetic approach. But look at what you get in return: beautifully cut, delicious sashimi. Tender chicken thighs in sweet sticky sauce with the freshness of finely cut carrots. Spot on katsu curry. But more than that, you get the knowledge that you’re doing your bit, helping that restaurant to grow and evolve, to serve a community and improve a town. I think that’s a pretty good deal: but I would, because I like to think that I’m that kind of customer. I reckon some of you might be, too.


Oishi – 8.0
314 Oxford Road, RG30 1AD
0118 9599991

https://www.oishi-reading.co.uk/