Takeaway review: Palmyra

On April 16, 2021April 16, 2021 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

One of the defining moments in the evolution of Reading’s restaurant scene happened in summer 2015 when a new place opened halfway up London Street, where a Nepalese restaurant used to be. I lived nearby at the time, and when I heard it was going to be called “Bakery House” I was excited: finally, Reading was going to get a decent bakery in the town centre! I was a bit nonplussed when it turned out instead to be a Lebanese restaurant, but then I saw that they baked all their own pitas and the name made more sense. And then I ate there, on duty for this blog, and I knew I was trying something special.

It wasn’t Reading’s first Lebanese restaurant: the ill-fated La Courbe, in Kings Walk, had that honour. And La Courbe’s food was very good indeed, but the whole approach was different. La Courbe looked like a grown-up restaurant, albeit a dated one, with square plates and sharp-edged furniture, where you effectively ate in a glass box and tried to ignore the smoke coming from the open kitchen. It had an extensive list of terrific wines from the Lebanon, and was determined to showcase that every bit as much as the food.

But Bakery House – although from the front it might have resembled a standard kebab joint – was a very different animal. It was more functional, and it had no alcohol licence, but it had infinitely more more heart and soul. It was often busy, with a hugely varied clientele, and remains one of my favourite places to go for a sit down lunch or have dinner with friends. Some of their dishes, like their boneless baby chicken, their lamb shawarma and their chicken livers, have pretty much attained iconic status.

One of my most enjoyable pre-Corona rituals – one I very much look forward to resuming, one day – was to spend the day in Nirvana Spa and then take a taxi to Bakery House for dinner. It sounds so decadent, over a year down the line. And before I started reviewing takeaways, that restaurant was the only reason I had the Deliveroo app on my phone.

Anyway, poor La Courbe was Betamax to Bakery House’s VHS: it closed less than a year after its rival opened, whereas Bakery House is still going strong (my 2015 review of the place remains one of the most widely read reviews on the blog). And since then, various restaurants have sprung up to try and take advantage of the increasing popularity of Lebanese food, without significant success. We still have Comptoir Libanais on the Oracle Riverside (I ate there once: never again), but Alona down the Wokingham Road barely made it to a year before closing down. Having eaten their shawarma, I can see why.

More recently, two more Lebanese restaurants have opened further from the town centre. Late in 2019 Lebanese Village opened just over Caversham Bridge, in the site that was previously occupied by Spanish non-tapas restaurant Picasso. I never got round to reviewing them before lockdown, although that’s largely because for much of that time their hygiene rating left something to be desired (they’ve fixed that now). And then in February 2020, possibly the worst imaginable time to open a restaurant, Palmyra opened at the top of the Oxford Road, opposite the Broad Street Mall.

The stories I’ve heard about Palmyra since then definitely suggested that it was worth investigating. A reliable source told me when they opened that the chefs were ex-Bakery House employees, and later that year I heard suggestions that the owners of Kobeda Palace might have a financial interest in the restaurant. That alone was enough of a pedigree to pique my interest, and then a reader told me on Twitter that she’d been a regular takeaway customer of Palmyra. “Brilliant customer service, food really tasty, gives Bakery House a run for their money” she said. “I know that’s fighting words” she added. Fighting words indeed, and only one way to find out if they were justified: time to fire up the phone and place an order.

Palmyra is on all the delivery apps (or you can order through their website which goes through Foodhub) but, as so often, the experience is slightly different through each one. I got as far as building a basket on JustEat, which offered 20% off on the night I was ordering, only to find that it wasn’t that specific about some of the dishes. So for instance, you could order shawarma but it wouldn’t let you specify lamb, chicken or mixed. It also wasn’t clear about what everything came with, so when you check out and it asks you whether you need rice, chips et cetera the only honest answer is I really don’t know. So if you like surprises, or getting 20% off is more important to you than knowing what shawarma you’re eating, JustEat is the one for you.

I instead went for Deliveroo where I could specify what I wanted, although I did order some garlic and chilli sauce because I couldn’t tell whether they came as standard (it turns out they did, so I wound up with far more than I needed). That aside, the menu had plenty of old favourites that fans of Lebanese food would recognise: cold mezze, including houmous, moutabal and baba ghanoush; hot mezze such as chicken livers, falafel and kibbeh; dishes from the charcoal grill (shish and the like); shawarma and wraps. There were also a few burgers, which felt slightly incongruous.

Prices were very reasonable, with most starters stopping short of a fiver and main courses costing less than twelve pounds: on a par with Bakery House and slightly cheaper than Lebanese Village. I didn’t spot many dishes that I hadn’t seen before, but I decided to take a two-pronged approach, ordering starters I hadn’t heard of and main courses I knew and loved, trying to do a mixture of discovery and benchmarking against the tried and tested. Two starters and two mains, along with Deliveroo charges, came to thirty-six pounds, not including tip. And Palmyra look after the deliveries themselves, so you tip the restaurant rather than the rider (and you should always tip the rider, if you ask me).

Because Palmyra do the deliveries, Deliveroo tells you that the order has been received and when the rider is on their way, but beyond that you don’t get to track the delivery. I wasn’t even sure if they even confirmed that at first, because the food took a fair old while to leave the restaurant: I ordered at 7.15 and the app said it would be with me in forty minutes, but in reality the driver was on his way about an hour after I placed the order and it took him less than ten minutes to reach me.

He was lovely and friendly and apologised that it had taken a while. “We’ve been snowed under”, he said, and it wasn’t until later that I realised we’d ordered on the first day of Ramadan, about half an hour before the sun was due to set. No wonder they had their hands full. That made me prepared to overlook a lot – similarly our food wasn’t exactly piping hot, but I thought it was well worth making allowances. Everything came in recyclable foil and plastic, and portions looked like they’d be pretty generous.

Palmyra’s starters were probably the weakest part of the meal – not bad per se, but maybe not as exciting as they sounded on paper. Lamb sambusek were meant to be deep fried pastries filled with minced lamb, but they felt as if they had been baked rather than fried, pasties rather than pastries. Not that that’s a bad thing: I enjoyed the slightly doughy pastry, but the meat inside felt bland, especially considering the sheer amount of flavour Lebanese cuisine can usually get out of lamb. Maybe I have nobody to blame but myself; with hindsight, I look at some of the starters I order – these and samosas in particular – and I think I ought to be more versatile. Anyway, Zoë liked them more than I did, and so I didn’t fight her for the fifth one.

Similarly, I’d never seen shanklish on a menu, so I was intrigued. The menu described it as goats cheese topped with thyme and mixed with onion, pepper and tomato. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was pretty close to a Greek salad in practice, with cubes of cheese, onion, tomato and plenty of lettuce. If I’d known it was a salad, I mightn’t have ordered it. But more to the point, the cheese – the headliner – didn’t knock my socks off. It didn’t have a strong taste of goat, and the herb coating was very fine and a bit too mouth-coatingly gritty. It felt a lot more like feta, but with the salt mysteriously removed.

Having now done my research, I suspect that this was pretty authentic (with the exception of the iceberg lettuce), so just not my bag. But the salad itself was also carpet-bombed with herbs, to an extent where I found it offputting. You got salads with your main courses as well and these had the same problem, without the cheese to redeem matters: Bakery House’s salad accompaniment, always so well dressed, is far better.

The mains we ordered – boneless baby chicken and lamb shawarma – were definitely picked to compare with the market leader. Palymyra’s boneless chicken was close in standard, but fell ever so slightly short in a few respects: a little smaller, not quite as moist and without that wonderful smell of the chargrill when you took the lid off. But these are minor quibbles, and if it came second it certainly wasn’t second rate, with good flavour and plenty of evidence of marination. I’m also aware, too, that many people aren’t quite as greedy as I am and on the “enough is as good as a feast” principle Palmyra’s baby chicken is definitely a feast.

You didn’t get a choice of rice or chips with the meat, so comes served with some lovely buttery rice speckled with wild grains, which had a subtle hint of something sweet and comforting, almost like vanilla. The rice was particularly good with the lamb shawarma, which was my favourite dish of the meal. This was a really hefty portion of lamb, in beautiful slices with just the right blend of meat, of fat and of wonderful caramelisation. There was quite a bit of clove on the nose, which brought on unwelcome flashbacks of the wobbly version at Alona, but once you started eating it the flavours all came together harmoniously, and the whole thing was pretty damned wonderful. Even slightly more warm than hot, it was a winner.

“It’s really good, but imagine eating a whole portion to yourself” said Zoë, unaware that I was imagining exactly that and making a mental note for next time. I also thought briefly that any leftovers would make for a fantastic sandwich filling before ruefully realising that I never have leftovers and that if I did, I might have a less depressing waist measurement. Leaving food, like going camping or overpaying your mortgage, just seemed to be something other people did: I knew from social media that there were people like that out there, in a better, more virtuous tribe than me.

Never mind, I thought, looking down at my plate, empty except for a little smudge of the (very good) chilli sauce and a few stray grains of rice. I hadn’t eaten much of the salad, but that wasn’t to my credit: I knew that was the bit you were meant to polish off. In fairness, we didn’t finish the pita breads either. They were pleasant enough, although I wouldn’t necessarily have put money on them being made in house. I should probably face the fact that La’De Kitchen’s wonderful balloon bread has ruined me for other pitas.

The thing I almost feel guilty about, in writing this review, is that I’ve mentioned Bakery House as many times as I’ve mentioned Palmyra. They were the spectre at this particular feast. But that’s what happens when a restaurant becomes the benchmark, the standard for others to reach. That’s the way of things, just as every Italian restaurant in Reading will be compared to Pepe Sale, or every street food venture will be weighed up against Blue Collar. The trailblazers are there to give the newcomers something to aim for, and to want to surpass.

Success breeds imitators: it’s always been the sincerest form of flattery. It proves you are good, and it tells you to be better. Because that’s the other thing: Bakery House will be looking at this newcomer, the way Bette Davis looks at Anne Baxter in All About Eve, not wanting to be superseded. After all, La Courbe was the future once, and look what happened to them. The tension between the established and the new is what drives everybody forward, stops people from resting on their laurels. Restaurants need that, or they get stale: I like to say that a rising tide lifts all boats, and being shaken from your complacency is no bad thing.

And I think Palmyra has enough about it to generate that tension: if we were playing Top Trumps I’d say that Bakery House won on the starters and edged it on one of the main courses, but Palmyra’s shawarma is a thing of beauty and worth the price of admission alone. But anyway, that binary way of looking at things does nobody any favours. If I lived in West Reading I would be absolutely delighted that Palmyra were at the top of the Oxford Road, and I would take full advantage of them being so well located for my end of town. Besides, you’re bound to avoid my rookie mistake of ordering from them on one of the busiest nights of the year. Even though I fell into that trap I have no complaints, and I imagine they made a lot of households very happy that night. They definitely did mine.

Palmyra
40 Oxford Road, Reading, RG1 7LA
0118 3277546

https://palmyralebanese.co.uk/index.php
Order via: Direct through the website, via Deliveroo, JustEat or Uber Eats

Round-up: One year of Edible Reading

On August 29, 2014June 28, 2015 By ediblereadingIn News2 Comments

A slightly different round-up this week; I’m not going to do the usual summary of past reviews. I’m not doing restaurant news this week either, because there isn’t much news: the places which are due to open (CAU, Rynd) are still due to open and nowhere has closed that I know of, unless you’re devastated that Reading has lost one of its two Bella Italias (and if you are, I’m not quite sure why you’re reading this). We do have a gluten free café opening on Cross Street, so there’s that I suppose, but that’s all. Instead, it’s a chance to round up a year in the life of Reading’s restaurant scene, because Edible Reading is one year old.

There have definitely been changes in the last year. As always, we’ve seen a steady churn of restaurants opening and closing: we’ve said goodbye to some, like Kyklos and the Lobster Room, and hello to others, like La Courbe and Coconut. I was sad about Kyklos – it never lived up to its potential, but some of the dishes were good and the service was excellent, and it would have been lovely to be able to eat Greek food (a really underrated cuisine) in the centre of town. The new boys are also a mixed bag – La Courbe does brilliant food but never quite feels like a restaurant, and Coconut isn’t quite distinctive enough to offer something different in a town with plenty of options already.

The more interesting arrivals have been in Reading’s cafés: with My Kitchen and Lincoln Coffee opening in the centre there have never been more alternatives to the hegemony of Coffee Corner. If you add in the other lunch possibilities, like Bhel Puri (another welcome opening in the last year), and the other contributors to Reading’s coffee scene (those lovely chaps at Tamp Culture), this is an area where things definitely feel like they’re changing for the better. I’m just sorry that Cappuccina Café, with its delicious banh mi and pasteis de nata, didn’t stay the course too.

There’s more to food culture than restaurants, and this too is one of the more promising signs over the last twelve months. Reading now has a top-notch wine merchant in the shape of the Tasting House, and The Grumpy Goat offers a mind-boggling range of beers and many of the area’s delicious cheeses. The recent spate of supper clubs in the area also shows that food has never been as important to Reading as it is today, and although we still don’t have enough street food at least we have the artisan market on Fridays, even if the opening hours are plain silly. It’s a start, anyway.

Anyway, I was wondering how else to best round up the year, and then I realised: I am totally out of step with the zeitgeist. Journalism these days is all about lists – you only have to read a Buzzfeed link to figure that out – and I haven’t done a single list all year! What was I thinking? So, without further ado, here’s how I’d like to sum up a year of Edible Reading, with a list. Reviewing restaurants is all about reviewing meals, evenings, experiences – and sometimes that misses the point that there can be great dishes tucked away even in middling meals. So to redress the balance, here for your delectation, in sort-of-alphabetical order, is a list of the ten best things I’ve eaten in the last year while reviewing restaurants for the blog. Zeitgeist here I come!

1. Yum gai yang, Art Of Siam. This salad is all about contrast (and not at all about leaves and lettuce). The chicken is perfectly soft and cooked and the vegetables seem to be purely there for texture as nothing, but nothing, stands up to the flavour of the dressing. It has tons of heat – enough chilli to require a glass of milk or at least a handkerchief – but also has the tartness of fresh limes to create a liquor in the bottom of the dish that’s worth spooning up because it is so fab. The flavour is super intense and salty and is enough to render even me speechless (or that might just be the chilli).

2. Lamb karahi, Bhoj. The little silver bowls of meat at Bhoj remind me of spice bowls in an eastern market which seems very apt for this dish. The lamb (and “juicy baby lamb” at that) has been cooked for so long that it falls apart into shreds at the lightest touch of a fork and the sauce is much drier than the usual British-Indian chunks-of-meat-in-an-orange-sauce affair. Here, it’s more a sticky, rich, spiced gravy with the odd cardamom pod for accidental-eating fun. Order one for yourself because you won’t want to share. I did, and I still regret it now.

3. Chilli paneer, Bhel Puri House. I could never turn vegetarian – it’s just not in my nature – but this dish at Reading’s only (to my knowledge) vegetarian restaurant is so good that adding bacon wouldn’t improve it. High praise indeed! The small cubes of paneer are marinated in chilli and fried. That’s it. But, my goodness, they’re so good! The layer of lettuce underneath is pointless and if you accidentally eat a green chilli thinking it’s a green bean (I mean, who would make such a mistake? erm…) you realise where all the heat comes from. Not so hot that it burns and tingles but enough to make every sticky cube worth fighting over.

4. Bread and butter, Côte. Bread. Such a simple thing, right? But at how many places in Reading can you get truly decent bread? A two quid basket of bread at Côte is six diagonal slices of what is arguably the best bread in Reading – crispy and slightly chewy on the outside, fluffy and malty on the inside. It’s served with a little pot of room temperature salted butter which melts as it goes onto the warm bread. If you’re canny it’s worth splitting each finger of bread into two to make the most of the surface area. It’s a perfect amuse bouche before getting down to the serious business of ordering (and when you do, Côte’s tuna niçoise also came close to making this list – just saying).

5. Chips and mayonnaise, The Eldon Arms. A bowl of chips is another simple pleasure that’s often done terribly. Whilst the French fry has its place, proper chips should always be thick cut. In the Eldon the chips were served without pomp, without daft toppings or being put into a pointless gimmicky tiny frying basket: not affected, just bloody delicious. Thick cut, crispy on the outside and fluffy on the outside. Simple. Then served with a bowl of proper (there’s that word again) home made mayonnaise which had enough garlic in it to make enemies the next day but with no fanfare to announce its arrival because, in the chef’s eyes, it was just mayonnaise. It saddens me greatly that the Eldon is closed, and the burgers got all the plaudits but strangely it’s the chips I miss most.

6. Chicken lahsooni tikka, House Of Flavours. Chicken tikka is one of those dishes that has entered the British lexicon, a shorthand for Indian food that so often gets abused and made into something cheap. This, though, is nothing like the chicken tikka flavour you’d get in a Pot Noodle (and, regrettably, I know this for a fact because I had one recently – never again). The chicken, marinated in spice and yoghurt, is as soft as butter, as if it’s only just been cooked through, no more. The spices are rich and smooth and best of all, in my opinion, there’s lots of garlic too. A squeeze of fresh lemon juice over the top to give it a bit of zing and you have, I reckon, about as perfect as starter as can be.

7. Mixed grill, La Courbe. What’s not to like about a restaurant that can serve up meat in this many different ways and for them all to be really good? The lamb kofte is soft and herby, rather than hot. The chicken is marinated in ginger and cooked so the inside is soft but the outside is caramelised. The grilled lamb comes flavoured with cinnamon to give a slightly sweet taste and cooked so it’s just pink but still soft. The dollop of houmous on the side was surprisingly average, but the superb tabbouleh also deserves special mention: fresh, clean and green.

8. Tuna tartare, Malmaison. Like I said, even bad meals can contain brilliant dishes and despite the gloomy surroundings this dish shone brightly in the Malmaison firmament (only partly because of the glass plate they served it on). The tuna was super fresh and went perfectly with the avocado, truly ripe with that delicious buttery taste. The wasabi and slivers of pickled ginger on the side were perfect dotted onto a forkful of tuna and avocado, and the sesame dressing drizzled round the edge had a slight sticky sweetness which made it worth mopping up. If only the rest of the restaurant had lived up to the food.

9. Crab ravioli, Pepe Sale. As the first restaurant to get the ER treatment it pleases me greatly that Pepe Sale makes it onto this list. The crab ravioli is on the specials menu so often that it should become a standard, especially as it’s so good. The ravioli is perfectly cooked, just al dente, and made fresh that day on the marble counter just inside the door. The fluffy crab inside is more generous than it needs to be (but then that’s probably how Pepe Sale has maintained a loyal following for the past fifteen years). The tomato and cream sauce is rich but not overwhelming so a bowlful feels like a treat not an overindulgence. A year on, one of the first dishes I reviewed is still one of the very best.

10. Fried chicken, rice and peas, Perry’s. Perry’s, despite its size, is one of the more intimidating places I’ve eaten since I started ER. I’m glad I went in, though, because it does food that I would struggle to get anywhere else. The chicken is seasoned, coated in flour and fried and then served with a generous helping of rice and peas. Calling it rice and peas is one hell of an understatement, mind. This a side dish on the scale of your mum’s best stew – rice and peas cooked in stock, herbs and spices that are too numerous for me to identify. There’s plenty of chilli in there but the whole flavour is more sophisticated than plain old chilli suggests. Even if it wasn’t an amazing dish in its own right, I’d want it on this list because, more than anything, it symbolises food I would never have eaten if I hadn’t started this blog.

Getting that list down to just ten dishes was no mean feat – no room, sadly, for the ribs at Blue’s Smokehouse, the churros at Tampopo, the truffle ravioli at Ruchetta and countless others. It just goes to show how much good food is out there in and around Reading if you know where to look – and sometimes even if you don’t – despite our reputation as a clone town.

When I started Edible Reading I did wonder if there was enough here to keep me going. A whole year of weekly reviews, the majority of them in central Reading, suggests that I may have been worrying unduly. Without a doubt, the best thing about the last year has been the involvement from everyone who reads the blog – commenting, passing on reviews, Retweeting and getting involved with the conversations. And even now, every time someone tells me they’ve tried and loved a restaurant after reading an Edible Reading review it absolutely makes my day. So please don’t forget to request places you’d like to see reviewed – and if you think I’m missing that one great dish that you order time and time again, add your two pence in the comments box.

Round-up: February and March

On March 28, 2014June 14, 2022 By ediblereadingIn NewsLeave a comment

Another bumper couple of months here at Edible Reading, so it seems like a good point to stop, take a breather and review what you may have missed, along with the latest selection of restaurant news. Are you sitting comfortably? Got a nice cup of tea to hand, or coffee if that’s your preference? Maybe a biscuit too, be it a Custard Cream or a Choco Leibniz? Excellent, then I’ll begin (but not without saying that, if it is a Choco Leibniz, you can colour me envious). Let’s start with a summary of the most recent reviews…

Thai Corner, 7.0 – One of Reading’s longest serving restaurants, Thai Corner is still plying a busy trade at the end of town which has never been that fashionable. Is it a timeless staple, or an anachronism running out of steam? I went to find out, and the review is here.

La Courbe, 7.3 – You’re eating from square plates on square glass tables, sitting on square dated furniture in a cold room with no soft furnishings, the door open most of the time and smoke coming from the open kitchen. How on earth did this place get a mark of 7.3? you might wonder. Click here to find out.

Cerise, 7.9 – Everyone knows Cerise is one of Reading’s best, fanciest, most expensive restaurants – and yet nobody seems to know anybody who has ever gone. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to find out if the hype was justified, and my verdict is here.

Côte, 7.8 – Why did I break my general rule and go review a chain restaurant? Are all chains bad, or all independent restaurants good? And where should you be heading for breading in Reading? These, and so many other questions, are inadequately answered here.

The Pack Horse, 5.1 – I suppose my run of good luck had to come to an end eventually and a rare jaunt out of Reading, down the road to Mapledurham, gave me the opportunity to write about bad tables, indifferent service, invisible hearing aids, the fight against wobbliness and meatballs in faggots’ clothing. Can a single review knit all that together? Check the review out here and let me know.

Mission Burrito, 6.7 – Reading’s fast food scene was always a straight out battle between burgers and KFC until Mission came along and offered something slightly different. Independent, small, friendly and offering something you can’t get elsewhere in Reading? Is there anything not to like? The review’s here.

So, on to the restaurant news (and don’t think I haven’t noticed you scoffing another biscuit – nothing escapes me, you know). First of all, Al Tarboush, the Lebanese restaurant opposite TGI Friday, has closed. It’s not clear why, but I heard mixed feedback in the aftermath on whether this was a terrible shame or no bad thing. It was on my list to review, and I’m a bit sad I won’t get the chance now to make up my own mind; another reminder that restaurants close all the time and you shouldn’t put off going to one you’re genuinely curious about. Reading still has a Lebanese restaurant, in the shape of La Courbe, which isn’t perfect but definitely deserves support.

The site is going to become a new Italian restaurant called Casa Roma and refurbs have just completed. Their website is under construction and can be found here. It’s a brave soul that looks at Reading and thinks “what this place really needs is a new Italian place, right at the edge of town, on a site with a history of closed restaurants and no car park” but, you know, best of luck to them.

I had heard rumours that the Lobster Room had also closed, and wandering past they appeared to be true: the menu boards had been taken down and the lights were off. However, a sign has now appeared stating that they reopen on the 4th of April. It’s not clear whether they’ve closed temporarily for repairs, for refurbishments or to improve their recipe for the most expensive ravioli in Reading (regular readers may remember that it held the dubious honour of having the lowest ER rating to date: the review is here).

My Kitchen, mentioned in the last round-up, has now opened. It’s open until 7pm serving coffee, sandwiches, salads and cakes – I’ve not been yet but it would be good to see another independent competing in the market for lunch trade and taking some business away from all of Reading’s Costas, Neros and Starbucks. Their website doesn’t seem to work (always a bit awkward when businesses don’t get that right) but they do Tweet, here.

We have one other restaurant opening in the offing: the old Glo site on St Mary’s Butts is going to reopen as Coconut Bar And Kitchen. They’re currently recruiting for chefs and claim that they will offer an experience based on genuine street food from across the Far East. It sounds an awful lot like Tampopo to me but a lot will depend, as always, on the execution. Again, no website yet and the Twitter feed – here – isn’t really worth looking at yet. The same goes for the Facebook page, so it’s very much a case of watching this space and seeing what happens.

Also worth mentioning: nominations have opened for the Reading Retail Awards. There are categories for best coffee shop, best lunchtime venue and best restaurant and the defending champions are Whittington’s Tea Barge, Tutu’s Ethiopian Table and Côte respectively. If you want to nominate your favourite place, the form is here.

Finally, in the last round-up I mentioned Alt Reading, a new publication covering all aspects of independent life in Reading. They were kind enough to interview me recently for the site and asked me a variety of questions around why I set the blog up, what I look for when I review a restaurant and how I’d like to see Reading’s food scene change. I’m very lucky that they asked me such interesting questions and luckier still that they didn’t ask me anything really difficult, like my favourite cheese (it it Barkham Blue? or a really salty crumbly mature cheddar? a creamy buffalo mozzarella, torn and served with fresh tomatoes? I wish I’d never started this now). Anyway, for those of you who are interested the interview can be found here.

Right, that’s all for another month. See you all again next Friday for another impartial, reliable review of a Reading restaurant – and if you have somewhere you want me to review, you probably know the drill by now.

La Courbe

On February 21, 2014August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

N.B. La Courbe appears to have closed in March 2016. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

First things first, La Courbe is not a great restaurant: there are just too many things wrong, even now almost two months after they finally opened. The room is a simple square with one wall of glass which makes dining there akin to being in one of David Blaine’s failed stunts, a spectacle for everyone who passes through King’s Walk to see (about four tables were occupied the night I was there, but if it had just been me I would have felt terribly self-conscious). And the view through that wall of glass if you’re a diner, apart from any gawping passers-by, is the side of a Burger King, hardly the most beautiful vista Reading has to offer.

Then there’s the decor, a peculiarly retro design of chrome, purple and pistachio that made me half expect Don Johnson to walk in with his linen suit sleeves rolled up. There are no soft furnishings, no art, nothing on the walls to distract the eye from the pistachio panelling. Everything is square – the tables (with, bizarrely, the exception of a single round table which is otherwise no different to the others), the chairs and every single plate or dish brought to our table throughout the meal.

The menu is confusing, with nothing to indicate whether the mezze is a really bad deal (£42 per person for some mezze and a main? Really?) or a really good deal (£42 for some mezze and a main for four people! Bargain!). Add to that the fact that the room is chilly – the door left permanently open – and occasionally murky with smoke from the open kitchen (which is presumably why said door is never shut) and you’d be right in thinking that this isn’t the kind of restaurant in which you want to relax and take in the ambience.

Oh, and did I mention how quick it all was? We were seated at around half eight, and with starters, mains and desserts we were out of the door at about quarter to ten. There seemed to be no understanding at all that an evening meal ought to take a reasonable part of the evening, and normally when I eat somewhere that serves you that fast it’s because they’re worried you might change your mind. It’s never a sign of confidence in the food.

So far, so bad, but then something happened that switched this review around altogether: I ate the food.

We started with two dishes from their hot mezze menu. Maqaneq is a little dish of mini sausages “flambéed in butter and lemon”. What the menu doesn’t tell you is that this is a sophisticated version of the English cocktail sausage. These little sausages are juicy and meaty and lightly spiced so that the sweetness of the meat comes out. We ate them in tiny chunks (smiling smugly all the while) to eke them out and wrapped in slivers of pitta to make tiny sandwiches just so we didn’t finish them too quickly. The falafel were less of a surprise but still delicious – each hot little disc was crispy on the outside and fluffy inside and just herby enough to elevate them out of the ordinary.

We waited for our plates to be cleared but then suddenly the waitress was back with our main course, to be eaten off the same plates with the same chunky cutlery as before – another mark against them. We had gone for the mixed grill (just like the typical Brit on foreign shores). This was described quite plainly as “charcoal grilled selection of lamb, Kafta and chicken with Hommos and Tabouleh” (I swear I find another way to spell houmous every month, maybe it’s like the Eskimos having all those words for snow). It looked terrific, and it tasted even better. The chicken, marinated with ginger and garlic, was just perfect – tender on the inside yet caramelised on the outside, sticky and delicious. The lamb was also spot on, just the tiniest bit of pink in the middle of each piece, and had a hint of cinnamon. The lamb kofte (my spelling) was the least interesting of the meats but third place was no disgrace in this selection. Rather than being the very spicy kofte that I’m more familiar with, this had a subtle, almost buttery flavour and was soft and delicate.

The mixed grill came with two accompaniments. In one corner of the dish was some good (if unexciting) houmous with a pool of olive oil and some finely chopped tomatoes in the middle. In the other corner, just to offset all that meat, was an extremely good tabbouleh, singing with the fresh green flavours of parsley and mint, with plenty of lemon juice. It might even have been my favourite thing I ate that evening, and I don’t say that lightly. All in all, the mixed grill was a thing of wonder, square plates or no.

We didn’t feel quite up to a full bottle of red (which is a pity, because there’s a good selection of Lebanese reds including Chateau Musar, which I’ve loved in the past) so we plumped for a glass each of the Domaine des Tourelles, a Lebanese red which was full and fruity and a good foil to the spicy meats.

I didn’t really fancy dessert after that mammoth undertaking but there’s a sense of duty about doing ER reviews so we gamely went for it. The baklava, rather than being one big baklava oozing with honey, was a selection of the familiar pastries in different shapes with either pistachio or pine nut fillings. I really liked them – they were much less cloying than they can often be, subtler and more interesting. The mouhallabieh was not as successful. The waitress described it as a chilled rice pudding with rosewater and pistachio – which captures it quite well, but neglects to mention that it had either been chilled for some time or it had been set with gelatine which meant that the nice gritty rice texture was replaced by something far less enjoyable. Between us we managed about half of it but after a while a dish that gloopy and big became a bit of a burden so we left it unfinished.

Service throughout was warm and friendly, enthusiastic about the food and more than willing to make recommendations. Even so, the whole set-up seemed a little, well, amateurish. The speed with which the food came was the most obvious problem, but there were others too: we weren’t offered water at any stage (despite there being water glasses on seemingly every table but ours) and the till is down the corridor in the adjoining wine bar, so you have a bit of a wait once you’ve asked for the bill.

Ours, when it eventually arrived, was £57 for two people eating three courses and having a glass of wine each. I felt like this was a pretty good deal given how good the food was (the mixed grill for two is about twenty-four pounds, for instance). Even while I was eating there I was already planning a return visit with friends, albeit probably at lunchtime when a quick meal feels like less of a problem.

Rating this restaurant has been nigh-on impossible, to the extent where I’ve wondered why I give ratings at all. How can I possibly give a single mark out of ten which reflects somewhere that serves such great food in such a problematic venue? I’m not sure my eventual score truly sums up the mixed message that is La Courbe; I wanted to give them higher but I just can’t until they get their crinkles ironed out. But I want them to do well enough to get the time to do that, because I can forgive a lot of things when the food is this good. Maybe this isn’t the venue for a romantic, lingering meal for two or a big night out, but I can see how one day it could be. And if that means I have to eat a few platefuls of their spiced chicken – in the cold, on those square plates, with that appalling view – to give them the chance to work on getting it right, then it’s a cross I’ll just have to bear.

La Courbe – 7.3
9-11 Kings Walk, RG1 2HG
0118 9581585