Tag: Maidenhead

Restaurant review: El Cerdo, Maidenhead

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews, Uncategorized2 Comments

Every year, without exception, you can reliably expect two things to happen in Reading’s hospitality scene. One is that there will be a raft of closures and new openings. Some years that ratio is pretty much one to one, others – like this year – it’s badly out of kilter, with far more places giving up the ghost than newcomers showing up to take their place. It’s tough out there, with no relief in sight. But the other thing that happens, every year without fail, is that none of those new openings will be a tapas bar.

I have complained about this so many times that it’s boring for all of us, so I won’t go on at length. But everywhere you look there’s a tapas bar, it seems, apart from Reading. Swindon has Los Gatos, Oxford has Arbequina. Newbury has Goat On The Roof, and Wokingham has Salty Olive. And Reading? Reading has next to sod all – unless you count Thames Lido, which I don’t, or Alto Lounge, which surely nobody should (Oh wow! Excited for this said the Chronicle‘s Facebook page this week, about the news that Alto Lounge had received permission from the council to double in size: that’s the Chronicle for you, excited about pretty much anything).

No, it’s never a tapas bar. Biryani joints are ten a penny, we went through a phase where we got three sushi restaurants in quick succession and momo are having a moment, but nobody wants to open a tapas bar. It’s a long, long time since La Tasca (which also wasn’t great) and six years since I Love Paella – not a tapas bar, but the closest thing we had – was unceremoniously booted out of the Fisherman’s Cottage. Is it a Brexit thing? Surely somebody feels like getting on the blower to renowned Bristol importer Mevalco and sorting this out, you might think, but every year nobody does.

And that’s what sends me scuttling off to the likes of Swindon, or Oxford, or Wokingham, trying to find the next best thing. Sometimes it works – Los Gatos is a little miracle – and sometimes I find myself somewhere like Sanpa, but I keep on trying because it’s a wonderful way to eat and I am always on the hunt for somewhere that brings a little hint of Granada or Málaga to unsung Berkshire. And that’s why this week I ended up at El Cerdo in Maidenhead, a ten minute walk from the train station, in the company of Katie, last seen last month sampling the glitzy splendour of Calico with me: inexplicably, after a dinner with me, she felt like repeating the experience.

Katie, it turned out, was on a proper journey of discovery, having never been to Maidenhead before. On the stroll through town to the restaurant I gave her a whistle stop tour of everything I knew about Maidenhead, which didn’t take long: former constituency of Theresa May, the infidelity capital of the U.K. (allegedly) and the town that, possibly because it was originally meant to be the terminus of the Elizabeth Line, was getting all the interesting things Reading didn’t.

That last one really is true – Maidenhead has a great independent craft beer bar in A Hoppy Place, wonderful pizza at Knead, an absolutely top notch town centre restaurant in Seasonality. And if some of the misfires, like Sauce and Flour, weren’t amazing, they at least showed that someone was trying. We walked past Sauce and Flour on the way to El Cerdo, and it was rammed, which shows how little I know about anything.

El Cerdo is by the canal, in the new development (the Waterside Quarter, apparently). “This looks so much like the Oracle it’s disconcerting” was Katie’s take, not without justification. The restaurant looked welcoming from the outside, and it wasn’t unpleasant on the inside but it had a feeling of “new build” that it couldn’t quite shake, a functional box rather than a cosy, appealing cocoon.

That’s not entirely their fault – it’s the hand they’ve been dealt with the space, and I liked the giant pig logo on one wall, past the handsome bar. But overall I felt it lacked a little character, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. After all, Knead has a very similar dining room, but somehow it still has a feeling of bustle and hubbub. I guess the open space with the pizza oven perhaps brought things together in a way that El Cerdo’s bar, attractive though it was, didn’t quite manage. A handful of tables were occupied when we got there, including one large group in the corner, but it was a quiet Tuesday night.

El Cerdo’s menu read well. It wasn’t so big as to be unwieldy, and was divided into logical sections – nibbles, cold tapas, meat, seafood and fish. They hadn’t given in to the temptation to do paella on the side, so there was just the one rice dish and a few types of tortilla. In the run up to my visit I’d looked at the menu at Los Gatos, just to benchmark prices, and El Cerdo was definitely more expensive: nearly everything was north of a tenner, with some dishes nudging twenty.

But the wine list was good, and exclusively Spanish, and although we were tempted by a txakoli – the slightly sparkling Basque white you rarely see on menus – we went for an albariňo. It was an excellent choice – crisp and clean but not bone dry, with a little fruit. Thirty-eight quid for a bottle that’s fifteen online, so not an oppressive mark-up, either.

Now, before we get started on the food – and because tapas is by definition small plates, we have a fair bit to run through – I want to get a couple of things out of the way. One is that I had an absolutely lovely evening, and that makes it far more tempting to see the food through the Albariño-tinted glasses of good company. The other is that your mileage at El Cerdo might very well vary from mine: Katie, I suspect, enjoyed most of the dishes more than I did.

And of course, your take on this kind of food will depend on how and where you’ve had it before. Despite loving tapas and small plates, it turned out that Katie had never been to Spain, although she’s rectifying that with a trip to Barcelona just before Christmas.

I on the other hand go to Andalusia most years – and yes, I know that makes me sound like the pretentious tosspot I am – and unfortunately that means that although I went hoping for the best, I was painfully aware of all the instances where the best simply didn’t materialise. El Cerdo’s website says, pretty plainly, “If a dish doesn’t taste like it does in Spain, then we won’t serve it”. Although it also says that El Cerdo has an “executive chef”, and in my experience very little good comes of having one of those in place of an actual chef.

The first sign that I was going to have to write this kind of review came with the accompaniment to those first sips of wine, a couple of gildas. A gilda is a very simple thing – a skewer of olives and pickled chillis, all brought together with a slim ribbon of salty anchovy. Named in homage to Rita Hayworth, it’s almost a perfect mouthful, and quite hard to get wrong. You could have really amazing olives, and truly best in class Cantabrian anchovies, but even an entry level one is going to be a delight.

Or it should be, providing you use salty anchovies. But it felt to me like these were made with boquerones, the softer, more vinegary Spanish anchovies without the saline tautness of the good stuff. Which in turn meant they were all out of kilter – all vinegar and no salt, and somehow fishier than they should have been as a result. I felt like a right killjoy thinking this, because Katie seemed to enjoy hers. But I knew it could, and should, have been better.

The jamon croquetas were a similar story. They weren’t terrible – easily better than the deep fried abominations I’d eaten at Sanpa – but nowhere near the quality of anything you would get in Spain. They were a little flabby, a little pale, a little lacking in the crisp shell you needed. And the bechamel inside was lacking silkiness and a proper hit of jamon. Perching a little slice of it on top of each croqueta just showed you, Jim Bowen-style, what you could have won.

Last time I went out with Katie at Calico, she took me out of my comfort zone by ordering more vegetarian dishes than I would personally have chosen, which probably meant that my review was useful to slightly more people than it would ordinarily have been. The same thing happened here, where Katie was stuck between two dishes, broccoli with almonds or hispi cabbage, that I would never have ordered in a million years.

I took against the former for containing coconut ajo blanco in order to be vegan – good luck convincing anybody that they’d serve that in Spain – and so hispi cabbage it was. And actually this turned out to be one of the better things we ordered, although possibly one of the less Spanish ones. The cabbage came topped with a caper and raisin purée, which was heavy on the raisin and light on the caper, and squiggled vigorously with what was apparently a cured egg yolk sauce.

Your guess is as good as mine: I certainly didn’t get cured egg yolk from it, partly because I don’t really know what a cured egg yolk would even taste like. The little pieces of fried kale on top were pleasant too, although it gave me flashbacks to the Lyndhurst, which always makes me sad. There was a real whack of lurking heat in this too, and all in all it was probably the cleverest thing we had. Not massive, and not cheap at just shy of a tenner, but with lots to recommend it.

One of the biggest crimes against Spanish food was what came next, something the menu described as our “lazy” or open tortillas. We picked the eponymous El Cerdo tortilla, with chorizo and black pudding, and it’s difficult to describe how underwhelmed I was by this. Lazy is about right, to the point where maybe the menu should have said “we can’t be arsed to make a tortilla”.

Now in fairness the server, who was excellent, asked us if we wanted it runny or medium, and maybe we should have gone for the former. But whether it was runny or medium, this wasn’t a tortilla. It was an omelette. An underseasoned one that had been cooked through, with four bits of chorizo plonked on top and some black pudding – the British kind, not gorgeous soft Spanish morcilla, lobbed in the middle. No softness, a little onion, no potato that I could discern. This dish frustrated me. I imagine it would have made a Spaniard angry.

We’d ordered dishes in waves, partly because El Cerdo, Wagamama-style, says that everything you order will come out when they feel like it and we didn’t want to be swamped with dishes in one hit only to find the evening over. El Cerdo said that you should aim for two to three dishes each, which we took to mean three each, and actually doing it this way helped because we got to spy on the table next to us – four lads who kept their coats on throughout for some reason – and swap one of our dishes for something they’d ordered.

That dish was another of the relative hits of the evening, pincho de pollo with crispy polenta and mojo rojo. It was a reasonably generous skewer – four substantial enough pieces of chicken with a weird treble clef of red sauce, resting on a rope bridge of crispy sticks of polenta. And again, it wasn’t terrible but I didn’t found myself wowed. The chicken was nicely enough done, but El Cerdo makes much of its charcoal oven and I didn’t feel this had the char I’d expect from such an impressive piece of kit. The polenta added contrast, but if it did indeed have Idiazabal cheese in it it was a whisper, not a shout.

And again, thirteen pounds for this – even by 2024 standards – felt steep. I thought back to the skewer of chicken I had at Kolae, earlier in the year. Different cuisine, of course, but in terms of technique, flavour and value it was worlds away from this. This felt like the kind of dish that might pleasantly surprise you at Alto Lounge, but only because your expectations were on the floor.

If you wanted more evidence that El Cerdo wasn’t capable of delivering a flawless plate of food, their monkfish in tempura with chickpeas was exactly that. Just as at Calico, Katie had talked me into ordering something with chickpeas and they were lovely – nutty, earthy, positively moreish. But what in god’s name was going on with the monkfish? Two slightly forlorn nuggets of the stuff in a batter that was not, by any stretch of the imagination, tempura. It had no crunch, no texture, and when you tried to cut through it it all fell away, leaving a dense little knot of woolly monkfish, a sad savoury parody of a profiterole.

It turned out that Katie had never had monkfish before. “It’s not usually like this” I told her, feeling like I had to do something to rescue monkfish’s reputation. I hope for Katie’s sake that her first visit to Spain is better than her first taste of monkfish. If it’s on a par, that means she’s had her pocket picked on Las Ramblas.

By this point I’m guessing neither of us really wants me to go on, but go on I must because there were a couple more dishes. Again, Katie quite liked the patatas bravas, which I think we’d picked to make sure we felt full at the end. And again, it wasn’t atrocious but I have never, ever had patatas bravas like this in Spain or indeed anywhere decent in the U.K.

The bravas sauce didn’t taste like bravas sauce, it was fruitier and lacked any kind of heat. The alioli, giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that’s what it was, was not unpleasant. But it needed more of both, and moreover the potatoes were wan specimens, technically cooked but lacking the golden hue and brittle texture that makes this dish a treat.

Writing this, I should let you know, is the weirdest experience. Because I had a really lovely evening but the more I think about the food the more surprised I am by that.

We decided to have a dessert and there was one on the specials menu – a tangerine cake with white chocolate ganache and yuzu sorbet – which our server told us was perfect for sharing. So we also decided to have a dessert wine each, and identified a very nice-looking Pedro Ximenez on the wine list. So we ordered it, and our server came over apologetically. There was only enough left in the bottle for one glass – well, one and a half glasses, really. So what would we like to do?

Of course, as something approximating to a gentleman, I let Katie have that and went instead for a white dessert wine from Rueda. But when they came over, both were in very small glasses, both were the same size, and both looked bigger than they were because each of them had an ice cube lobbed in it.

“They weren’t the coldest, so I put an ice cube in them” explained our server.

This begged so many questions, like why aren’t you keeping your dessert wine in the fridge? or maybe you should have asked first?, let alone is that really what a glass of Pedro Ximenez looks like? or why didn’t you give her the rest of the bottle, were you saving that final half glass for Santa?

It was just baffling, and especially so because otherwise service was lovely all night. She told us they’d been open about a year and that although this week was quiet, things ramped up for the Christmas season after that and business was booming.

Last but not least, the dessert. It looked fancy, it looked cheffy and I can see that it was kind of designed for sharing. And leaving out the question of whether yuzu is remotely Spanish, the yuzu sorbet in the middle was easily the best and most enjoyable thing in the whole dish, resting on a sort of granola crumb. But there was nothing you could really describe as a white chocolate ganache, because neither the quenelles of something or other or the isosceles triangles of white chocolate fitted that bill.

But that wasn’t the most heinous failing: that was the cake. Dense didn’t even begin to describe it. You could work out your upper body trying to drive a spoon through that cube of stodge, and I felt like I did. There’s a chap called David who comes to my readers’ lunches whose job is to build machines that are used to test whether materials can withstand immense pressure. David would take a professional interest in that cake.

Because I seem to have spent most of this review pointing out places that do things better than El Cerdo, this feels like the right time to mention the pistachio cake I had last year at Manteca.

By this point, with the exception of a couple of chaps at the bar, we were the last table there so we settled up and made our way back to the station in the cold. Our meal, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just over a hundred and fifty pounds. Now, I think life in Britain has reached the point where it’s difficult to say “that’s expensive” any more because you’d end up saying that about most meals out.

But instead, we can at least talk about value: that’s more than my recent meals cost at Calico, at The Cellar, or Storia. My meal at Goat On The Roof cost a smidge more, admittedly two years ago, but El Cerdo can’t hold a candle to Goat On The Roof.

Granted, none of those restaurants are an exact match in terms of how many courses, how much booze and all that jazz, but the central point remains: El Cerdo does not feel like value. Not compared to any of those places, not compared to the tapas places you could eat at along the train tracks in Oxford or Swindon. So the search continues, and maybe next year I’ll rock up at Salty Olive having one last stab at finding great Spanish food a very short distance from Reading. Because if there’s one thing we can be fairly sure of, it’s that a tapas bar will not open in Reading next year.

But let’s close by looking on the bright side. For two years now I’ve been taking the train to Maidenhead, trying all these places and bemoaning the fact that Reading doesn’t have them. But actually, now, I’m beginning to think that my head was turned by Seasonality and Knead. Because outside those two, the new places I’ve eaten at in Maidenhead – the likes of Sauce and Flour, Storia and El Cerdo – don’t leave me thinking that we’re missing out. If there’s a market for box-ticking, slightly inauthentic, sterile restaurants and those restaurants want to go to Maidenhead instead, I’m all for it. I’m happy to hold out for something better. Even if experience tells me I might be waiting a very long time.

El Cerdo – 6.3
The Colonnade, Waterside Quarter, Maidenhead, SL6 1QG
01628 617412

https://elcerdo.co.uk/maidenhead/

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: Knead Neapolitan Pizza, Maidenhead

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

It’s strange to think that I took nine years to review anywhere in Maidenhead, and then went there three times last year in relatively quick succession. The Elizabeth Line is, of course, the main reason for that, making the place only twelve comfortable, air-conditioned minutes away. But the other reason, which is similar but not the same, is the effect the Elizabeth Line is having on Theresa May’s stomping ground.

Speaking of the great woman, here’s a true story: I was within spitting distance of the former Prime Minister last year when she was the mystery star guest at my secondary school’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. Fuck me, it’s Theresa May! I said as she walked past the bench where I was drinking warm cider out of a plastic glass (fortunately she didn’t try to, although I’m pretty sure she heard me).

As I’ve mentioned before, all sorts of interesting restaurants are proliferating in Maidenhead now it has these shiny new transport links, and many are the sort of places you might wish Reading had. A Hoppy Place has the best part of twenty beers on tap with a scale and central location that combines the best of the Nag’s Head and the Grumpy Goat. Seasonality, which I reviewed last year, is the kind of seriously good small independent modern European restaurant that has long eluded central Reading.

Sauce & Flour – still hate the name – might not have been my bag but even so it was undeniably bang on trend. El Cerdo, which opened recently, is building good word of mouth for its tapas (Reading town centre last had a tapas restaurant in 2016, if you’re keeping score).

And finally, getting to the point, there’s Knead, the subject of this week’s review and the reason I plonked my arse on that iconic moquette about half an hour after I closed my laptop for the week, pulling out of Reading Station with Zoë, a weekend of sunshine, food and company ahead of us. Within another half an hour we were sitting in the sun outside A Hoppy Place with a couple of cold beers, a packet of pork scratchings and one eye on the menu of our dinner venue. Life was good.

Knead’s story is a time-honoured one involving many of the elements you often see in independent hospitality businesses. Husband and wife team (check) Olivia and Simon Perry bought a van (check) in 2018. Four years of street food events (check), catering (check) and pop-ups (check) later, they decided to take things to the next level and move into a permanent spot. They carried out some crowdfunding last year (check) and finally, in December they opened their first restaurant in the middle of Maidenhead.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive or to brand that narrative as a cliché. Scrolling back in time all that way to 2018, seeing the whole thing unfolding in reverse like Memento, I was struck by how hard the Perrys had worked to get to where they are. This was no flash in the pan, no affectation or fad but the culmination of years of work. It made me really want them to do well. It made me think about whether, really, I’ve ever stuck at a dream even half so long. And, of course, it made me hungry.

Knead is on the ground floor of a new build, like A Hoppy Place, Barista & Beyond and, for that matter, Dee Caf and that gives it advantages it makes the most of – proper space outside, big double aspect windows and a surprisingly generous room. I loved the framed prints and the “hydroponic wall”, thick with basil, and if the tables were cheek by jowl the place was so buzzy and happy, filled with the promise of a new weekend, that I was really unbothered by that. At the next table, a couple were sharing a pizza: come to think of it, maybe behaviour like that is why they have to cram them in.

“Who shares a pizza with restaurants struggling like they are right now?” I said, possibly louder than I intended, and Zoë gave me a look I know well, the one that silently says why do you have no indoor voice? I’d like to say I made a mental note there and then to order more food, but in truth that decision had been made hours before, as the train doors had closed.

Knead’s menu is good, small and pleasingly eccentric, by which I mean that it’s full of surprises. Half a dozen red pizzas, three white ones, a handful of nibbles and sides and a couple of sharing boards. That’s all, and many of the obvious pizza choices are missing – including the anchovy and caper combo I would normally pick on autopilot. Pizzas max out at thirteen pounds and everything is keenly priced – so again, what people are doing taking up a table and just eating the one pizza completely escapes me. I’m sorry, I won’t mention that again.

Another encouraging sign is that suppliers get a name check. Some, like Marlow Cheese Company or Agosti Gelato, who make their ice cream in Cookham, are local. Others like Islington’s Cobble Lane (who provide the cured meats) may not be but have a good reputation. I also absolutely loved Knead’s decision to stock beers by White Waltham’s Stardust Brewery, because I think nothing goes with pizza quite like beer. I had their Saaz Pilsner, which was crisp, bitter and rather nice, while Zoë tried their Optic IPA: a sip of hers made it clear that I’d made the wrong choice.

We started with Knead’s charcuterie sharing board, which clocks in at just under fifteen pounds, and it was easily the least impressive thing I ate all evening. This could and should have been an opportunity to showcase how well Knead buys, but it fell flat. The prosciutto had the sheen of something freshly decanted from plastic, the mortadella was – well, still something I’d never really choose to order. The salami was decent but unexceptional. Cobble Lane does lovely cured meats, but I’d be surprised if any of this came from them.

So with the charcuterie not exactly the star of the show, that left the rest. And the rest felt a little like padding. Artichoke hearts tasted thin and nothingy and had, I imagine, been fished out of a jar. Sundried tomatoes, bocconcini and olives were all perfectly unexceptionable, but you could get this in a plastic tub from M&S. And the “no waste focaccia” made from leftover dough was just sticks of pizza dough and not focaccia at all. Presentation just looked like everything had been shoved on a plate, an attempt to say “look how much you’re getting”.

I know I sound like I’m having a mither. But this kind of starter is one of my favourite things in the world when it’s done right, no better than something you can knock up yourself when it isn’t. In Reading, Mama’s Way does something similar that shows this up for the pale imitation it was. And at the Lyndhurst they’ve just introduced their own charcuterie board. For the same money you get generous quantities of three different types of charcuterie, all from Cobble Lane, and a thick slab of terrine, and they throw in a black pudding Scotch egg. I know that because I tried it the night before my visit to Knead. That’s how I know Knead was going through the motions.

But that’s not, I suspect, where Knead’s strengths lie, and perhaps they just have that dish on their menu because they think it’s something a pizzeria should have. Once we moved on to the pizzas themselves they became significantly more assured.

Mine, the “Sergeant Scoville” was that modish classic, the pizza with ‘nduja and some other stuff. In this case they hadn’t thrown the kitchen sink at it, so just ‘nduja, chillies and some hot honey from a London company called Dr Sting. Maybe my tolerance to heat has ramped up after years of Clay’s and Kungfu Kitchen, but I thought this was affably mild. The ‘nduja though, from Cobble Lane, was absolutely spot on with that almost-acrid, savoury punch, and they weren’t stingy with it. The hot honey got lost in the mix a little, but I’d love to see Knead pair it with some blue cheese.

Starting with the toppings, though, is a little arse about face because the fundamentals – the base and the tomato sauce – really were top-notch. A brilliantly chewy, speckled crust, a base that held together and a total package that wasn’t sloppy or untidy. Its closest peer in Reading these days would be Sarv’s Slice, which I really rather liked, but Knead’s pizza is a little bigger, a little better and a little better value. I also ordered a pesto mayo to dip my crust in, which I thought didn’t taste quite right. I subsequently realised from looking at the bill that it was vegan – given that neither pesto nor mayo should be vegan, I thought that was a tad disappointing.

Zoë’s choice, which she out and out adored, was a white pizza. Now, I have friends who think these are against God and against nature, but I personally think there’s a time and a place for them. Based on Zoë’s reaction to this one, the place might be Knead and the time might be the next time I go to Knead.

In the “Hello Gourd-Geous” (when did wacky names move past craft beer and just become what everybody does?) the ‘nduja was still present and correct but harmonising with a completely different backing band. This time it was a sweet creamed pumpkin base spiked with blue cheese (“and there’s loads of blue cheese”, Zoë added). She had a sriracha mayo dip for her crust, which would have been overkill for me but suited her just fine.

Out of sheer greed – why have one pizza between two when you can have two and a half? – we also ordered the “Dreamy Garlic Bread” with mozzarella. I liked it, but it’s a silly name: when something involves quite this much garlic a better name might be something like the “Fucking Honking With Garlic Bread”. Given that they’re probably trying to appeal to families, maybe not.

Dessert rather had to be done, although the selection is on the slender side. I really wanted to try the gelato, which is made locally with milk from the fantastic Lacey’s Farm. I was also drawn to this because the flavours speak of more than a passing acquaintance with Italy – pistachio was a very creditable effort, and the chocolate was nicely bitter, not making the easy concession to pack in sweetness. But what I really loved was the fior di latte ice cream. Our default ice cream in this country is vanilla, as if we can’t accept that ice cream could just taste of itself. It takes confidence in your raw materials to make an ice cream like this, and I loved it. Only a handful of ice crystals in a couple of the scoops spoke of a few quality control issues.

Zoë had a scoop of that bitter chocolate ice cream – a generous one at that – on top of a fudgy, gluten free double chocolate brownie. Just as I have friends who think a white pizza isn’t a pizza, I have other friends who think a brownie isn’t really a dessert. I have more sympathy with the latter school of thought, but anyway Zoë loved it.

Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to sixty-eight pounds, not including tip. I do also have to call out the service which was excellent throughout: Knead has a young, enthusiastic team who were working their socks off on a busy Friday night and you really wouldn’t have known that the restaurant was barely six months old. It has that maturity which comes, I guess, of working on their concept and striving for this for such a long time. I left with a full stomach and that warm feeling that comes from spending your money in the right way, with the right people. Nothing is quite as good as excellent hospitality when it comes to delivering that.

All in all I really enjoyed Knead. The only real misstep was that charcuterie board at the start – and if Knead is going to offer something like that they should do it properly and have the courage of their convictions when it comes to actually using the charcutier who supplies the restaurant. For that matter if they want to keep it local Bray Cured, just down the road, do some of the best cured meats I’ve had in this country. But that gripe aside, Knead was very hard to fault. The pizzas were very accomplished – better, on balance, thank anything we have in Reading – and the commitment to local suppliers for cheese, gelato and beer is laudable.

To have this a twelve minute train ride away, with an excellent selection of beer and cider practically next door, makes Knead a very easy place to recommend on a Friday or Saturday night, or even in the week if you can’t be bothered to cook – which, in fairness, describes me most evenings. So Maidenhead has an excellent high end modern British restaurant, a great town centre craft beer venue and a cracking indie pizzeria. For all I know, it might have a destination tapas bar as well. While these places are opening in Maidenhead, Reading got a Popeyes. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Knead Neapolitan Pizza – 7.6
Unit A, Trinity Place, St Ives Road, Maidenhead, SL6 1SG
01753 973367

https://www.knead.pizza

Restaurant review: Seasonality, Maidenhead

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I get a fair few requests to recommend somewhere to eat in Reading. And when I do, I can usually come up with something: if you tell me how central it needs to be, your budget, what kind of food you like and how many of your party are vegans, or vegetarians, or coeliacs, I can find you somewhere suitable. It’s very rare that I’m completely stumped. 

But there is an exception to that, which I suppose you could best describe as the Special Occasion Restaurant. It used to be called fine dining, before that phrase became a term of abuse. But special occasion restaurant probably sums it up better – somewhere you want to go to spoil yourself, or treat someone, or celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, engagements or exam results. Yet even describing it that way makes me realise what a niche and endangered species it might be.

The thing is, a lot of restaurants can make an occasion feel special. It’s what they’re meant to do – the good ones, anyway. And isn’t special occasion dining a concept that has outlived its usefulness, as eating out becomes a special occasion, full stop? After all, we’ve staggered through two and a bit years of Bad Times, and summer has come to an end just in time for Even Worse Times to hove into view. I mark a special occasion these days by bunging the central heating on.

That said, it’s too early to say whether the latest coming storm will hit all of hospitality, or whether parts of the sector will fare better than others. Casual dining might be protected, in terms of demand, although it will have less of a buffer against rising costs. Chains may have enough of a war chest to see them through, as they did in the pandemic. But what about the top end? Is this a luxury people will forego, or will people ring-fence those kinds of meals? I imagine many restaurants, both new and well-established, are asking themselves those questions with some anxiety, especially with their peak trading period a month away.

I have to say, though, that even before the pandemic Reading never really boasted that sort of restaurant. In the town centre, the closest we had were places like Forbury’s (which, back when it was good, was very good), Cerise and London Street Brasserie. Only the latter is still going, although it’s not always felt quite special enough, I think. Further out of town we had Mya Lacarte which, in its early years, was terrific but faded away and closed. And I suppose we have Thames Lido. The location is special, if nothing else.

So for that kind of meal, people have always gone further afield – to London, which isn’t far in the scheme of things, or to one of the pretty pubs between here and London that trouble the Michelin and the Good Food Guides. Or out Henley way, for dinner at somewhere like Orwell’s: not Henley itself, mind you, as its upmarket restaurant Crockers closed its doors for the last time last month. “People won’t pay for fine dining but restaurants like Côte Brasserie do really well here” said the owner. “I have never been so badly disrespected as I was in Henley”: someone’s not going to get tapped up by the tourist board any time soon.

So where do I recommend, these days? Well, my go to used to be the Miller Of Mansfield in Goring – very pretty, terrific food and accessible by train if you all want to drink – but then it closed at the start of January: the cause of death was a greedy landlord, as usual (N.B. it’s since reopened under very different management). Since then I’ve struggled a bit, telling people there are better options further afield; the last time someone asked me, I suggested Goat On The Roof.

So that’s the thinking behind this week’s review – could Maidenhead’s Seasonality be a suitable option? The compact family-owned restaurant, run by husband and wife team Wesley and Francesca Smalley, got a rave review in the Guardian back in July and that, combined with the short sample menu on their website, made it look like an intriguing prospect. I never need much persuasion to hop on the Elizabeth Line, stopping only for a pre-prandial pale at A Hoppy Place, so I booked a table for Friday night with some anticipation. Could I finally find somewhere of a standard similar to places like Marmo and Caper & Cure without having to trek over to Bristol?

Seasonality was a short walk from the train station and, at first glance at least, was pretty unassuming. The dining room’s best feature were the big windows that I imagine let plenty of light in, but by nightfall, without that glow, the place was neutral and a little spartan. The only exception to the muted furniture was a weird-looking marble bar area, a little like a kitchen island, where you could perch side by side on bar stools and stare at the wall together: they tried to seat us there but I politely asked if perhaps we could have a conventional table instead.

The evening improved from there, and Seasonality do one thing of which I approve heartily, seating couples at adjacent corners rather than opposite one another so you both get a good view of the space. The place was quiet when we arrived, but by the end of our meal every table was occupied (except that weird kitchen island – another couple was seated there but made a break for a real table the moment one became vacant).

“It’s a bit dark” said Zoë, who is always better at critiquing the decor than I am. “I don’t understand why none of the lights are on over the window seats.”

The menu was a mixed bag – attractive but small. Based on the name (not a huge fan of the name, incidentally) I imagine the menu changes at least four times a year but I hope they tinker with it more frequently than that because otherwise it has decidedly limited replay value. Three starters, three mains, three desserts. A few snacks to start you off and a couple of sides. Starters just under a tenner, most mains twenty-five quid, desserts the same price as the starters. That’s your lot. 

On the plus side, that means that in this review you’ll read about the majority of what was on offer, but the minus is that if you enjoy the delicious agony of narrowing it down, or if you’re a vegetarian or a vegan, or find that the menu happens to contain one of your flat-out no-nos this might not be for you. I gave Zoë the first pick of each course, because manners, and I was delighted that in at least one case she went for the option I fancied least, giving me at least the illusion of choice.

The wine list was small and perfectly formed too – something like four reds and four whites, maxing out at forty quid. Ironically this is an area where I often think less is more, so I was happy with that and our bottle of Morgon, which was about thirty two pounds, had plenty of fruit and just enough about it to bridge the gap between the mains we went for. But before all that we started with a couple of things from the “snacks” section of the menu. The bread was lovely: two quadrants of a little loaf, still warm from a little gentle toasting and spot on with a pat of cultured butter (from Ampersand, who used to supply butter to Geo Café).

Better still was the other snack – sheets of lardo dotted with figs, grapes, sunflower seeds and micro herbs. This was the moment when I realised the evening would be nothing if not interesting. The salty whack of that lardo tempered and toyed with by a whole palette of other flavours and influences – the bright sweetness of fruit, the freshness of little leaves of mint – was a true delight, and unlike anything else I’ve tried this year. Besides, look at it: it’s like an edible Kandinsky. 

More fascination was to follow, not least because Zoë’s starter, which I’d dismissed as very much not my bag, knocked it out of the park. “Tunworth Cheese Soup” hadn’t appealed to me – a soup, made of cheese? – but more fool me: what turned up was a soothing bowl of lactic lusciousness, comforting but not too heavy, scattered with the crunchiest croutons and finished with verdant spots of olive oil. I used to have a friend who said she never ordered soup in a restaurant because every mouthful was exactly the same. Ordinarily I would have agreed with her, but with this masterpiece that was rather the point.

By comparison my starter felt like a good idea not executed right. On paper a potato and Jerusalem artichoke fondant with mushroom ketchup sounded right up my alley, but the flavours and textures of this dish were out of whack. Maybe it was the balance of the potato and the artichoke, but the whole thing had an oddly spongey feel to it without any crunch or crispness. The outside had no upside.

That made it feel a bit like a vegetarian fishcake, and there was nowhere near enough umami punch from the underpowered mushroom ketchup to lift it. Only the fennel, which I thought might be pickled, broke up the beige and reminded me of Bristol’s lovely Caper & Cure where I last had it. The starter we didn’t try was bergamot cured trout with oyster custard: only three options on the menu and I’d picked the wrong one.

Mains reassured me that my starter was a blip. Mine was a beautifully cooked piece of hake topped with tightly curled, muscular brown shrimp and served on top of a ribbolita of coco beans, croutons and cavolo nero – more broth than sauce but still absolutely bewitching stuff. I thought I detected more of that fennel chucked into the mix, which I found a little strange – the dish didn’t need it and with a menu so small it seemed odd to have duplication.

Similarly the “Cookham greens” we ordered as a side – a tranche of cabbage a bit like a hot wedge salad – was drizzled with a dressing or sauce that looked very similar to the one that had adorned my starter. But even with those minor quibbles, the hake was a great dish. Could I think of anywhere in Reading that served food like this? Not really.

Zoë’s main showed more of that imagination and skill and again, had one truly impressive component. Venison was really nicely done, although pairing it with radicchio made it feel, and look, surprisingly insubstantial. But what saved the day was the other element of the dish, a bowl of salty, savoury, spiced venison keema topped with – another genius touch – something called “crispy potato” which, to me, had the feel of puffed rice (unless of course it was meant to be puffed rice, in which case the potato had gone AWOL).

The forkfuls of this I was allowed might have been my absolute high point of the meal, yet even so those two separate parts, the fillet and the keema, didn’t cohere into a single dish so in that sense, enthralling though it was in places, it didn’t entirely work. Seasonality does a set lunch Wednesday to Friday for a ridiculously reasonable £18 and when I last checked it included a roe deer keema pie and hispi cabbage: now that I could eat every week for the rest of my life.

The wine list included a few dessert wines so once we’d finished our mains and our bottle of red we grabbed a Sauternes and a Pedro Ximenez (both impeccable) and ordered dessert. Again, Zoë had first choice and again she chose better – a slab of cake studded with hazelnuts, surrounded by a moat of deep chocolate sauce and crowned with a sphere of smooth, indulgent nut butter ice cream was just a superb plate of food. I wouldn’t necessarily thank you for a sticky toffee pudding but I might well beg you for one of these.

Despite seeing them mangled on Bake Off the other week (they’re a favourite of Brexiteer ghoul Prue Leith) I didn’t really fancy îles flottantes so I opted for the other option – the vicissitudes of a tiny menu again – the crème brûlée. Now, I must say that this is something I almost never order because I can nearly always find something I’d rather eat. 

It’s a blessing that I did, though, because it was the nicest I’ve had in ages. It had perfect texture, a wonderful note of tonka and a little freshness from the fig leaf – so much more to it than plain old vanilla – and a caramelised lid with a perfect snap and a wonderful burnt sweetness. I’d forgotten how enjoyable that first tap of the spoon can be, and everything that comes after. I also liked the palmier unceremoniously dumped on top of it but, again, it didn’t really go and felt like two desserts uneasily merged into one.

I haven’t talked much about service, but it was good and friendly if perhaps slightly lacking in polish. Little things like not taking cutlery away, or not bringing it out, along with just a general feeling that they were very agreeable but slightly on the green side. At one point the chef came out and talked to a few tables, which was wonderful to see, and I got the impression that a fair few of Seasonality’s customers are regulars. I can see why, too. 

Our bill – for four courses, a bottle of wine and a couple of dessert wines – came to a hundred and seventy pounds, which included a twelve and a half per cent service change. Grace Dent’s review in the Guardian said that a meal including drinks and service at Seasonality costs around forty pounds a head: either prices have rocketed in just over three months, or Grace Dent is on mushrooms. I know which my money’s on.

So does Seasonality do enough to become a serious prospect for Reading residents wanting to treat themselves? Yes and no. There are a fair few things in the latter column. The service needs more polish, the room is a little unspecial. The narrowness of the menu is going to be a big problem for some people, and I saw lots of little quirks that need ironing out – dishes that didn’t completely work, or didn’t come together, a certain amount of duplication which felt jarring across such a small menu.

Yet despite that Seasonality has a real charm and real skill that thoroughly won me over and made me want to come back sooner rather than later. There is imagination and talent on display in spades across that menu – in that phenomenal lardo dish, in the depths of that Tunworth soup, in my majestic hake or Zoë’s wonderful hazelnut cake. Those real highs, those fireworks, make me think that it would definitely do you a turn if you wanted to go somewhere different to celebrate – especially if you were getting there by train.

So although it’s not yet the finished article, I think Seasonality has more than enough showstoppers and jawdroppers to merit a visit. I keep thinking about the very best of what we had and trying to imagine anywhere in Reading that can quite match it, and the answer is that I can’t. The high points reminded me far more of places in Bristol than in Reading, and anybody that reads the blog will know how much of a compliment that is. So I will be recommending this a lot in future, because it proves something I’ve long suspected. You don’t need a special occasion to eat at some restaurants. Some restaurants are the special occasion in their own right, all by themselves.

Seasonality – 8.7
26 Queen Street, Maidenhead, SL6 1HZ
07507 714087

https://www.seasonality.co.uk

Restaurant review: Sauce And Flour, Maidenhead

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One of my oldest friends lives in Swindon. Someone has to. Whenever he comes to Reading he enjoys our street food, our craft beer and our shopportunities and he complains to me – at length – that it didn’t have to turn out like this. He reckons that there was a time, back in the Nineties when all that money hadn’t decided where to coalesce, when it Could Have Been Swindon. They had a House Of Fraser, well before the Oracle opened, and that designer outlet everyone used to get so excited about. And Reading – Heelas aside, of course – was a bit of a wasteland in the mid-Nineties. Things could have been very different. 

But the retail and hospitality gods smiled on Reading and, like many of us, they sneered at Swindon. We got the big names and the investment and Swindon, over the few decades, withered and died. It’s not all terrible: Darkroom Espresso is a great place to grab a coffee, Los Gatos in the old town is a tapas restaurant Reading would be lucky to have and a few doors down Rays does thoroughly likeable ice cream. But there’s a reason people who live in Swindon go to Bath, Oxford or Cirencester at the weekend, just as people from those places don’t pop over to Swindon of a Saturday.

The reason I’m starting a review of a place in Maidenhead talking about Swindon is that lately I’ve been looking at what’s going on in Maidenhead and starting to wonder if we might find ourselves in the Swindon role at some point in the coming years. Because although it’s early days, the businesses beginning to come to prominence in Maidenhead are the kind that you’d want to see in Reading instead of – hooray – a branch of Popeyes or our twentieth Costa Coffee. 

Take A Hoppy Place, a credible, nicely fitted out craft beer bar a five minute walk from the train station with close to twenty beers and ciders on cask and keg. Last time I went it was doing a roaring trade and making the most of its outside space, and it was a wonderful place to while away a few hours. And although Reading has a brilliant craft beer scene – bolstered by the new addition of the Grumpy Goat’s upstairs bar – there’s nothing on that scale in the town centre. 

And then there’s Seasonality, which recently got a rave review in The Guardian. It started in lockdown as a deli also selling heat at home meals, and has since morphed into a restaurant offering an interesting and inventive menu. It’s tasteful, gorgeous looking and independent: you could count the number of restaurants like that which have opened in Reading in the last couple of years on the fingers of one stump. With the winter we have looming, and the town’s famously charmless landlords, can you imagine one trying their luck here in the next twelve months?

Finally, the subject of this week’s review which might be the most interesting of the lot. Flour and Sauce opened in March as part of Maidenhead’s Waterside Quarter and seems, on paper at least, to be an example of a London trend that hasn’t so far made it this far west, the pasta restaurant. And by that I mean that, from a look at the menu, it seems to be modelled on Borough Market’s famous Padella and the hugely influential Bancone along with more recent imitators.

Those places – offering starters, a selection of pasta and not much else – have been one of my favourite trends of the last few years. They’ve given dishes like silk handkerchiefs with confit egg yolk or bucatini cacio e pepe iconic status and at their best they make for fantastic mid-priced casual restaurants. Throw in a negroni to start and a decent dessert at the end and you have the blueprint for a marvellous lunch or dinner: I’ve eaten at the original Bancone in Covent Garden a few times and never had a meal there that was less than splendid. So was Maidenhead boasting an example of this very London trend by virtue of its place on the Elizabeth Line? I wanted to find out.

It looked gorgeous from the outside, all white columns and full length windows. And it had the feeling of a fully realised concept, with clear branding, although something was niggling and bringing out my inner Mary Portas. Was it the name? Somehow it felt like it should be Flour And Sauce, both in chronological and alphabetical order. And the slogan – Wine Meats Dine – might have worked as a pun, but it didn’t seem to descibe what they actually did.

Going inside and taking my table brought out my inner Michelle Ogundehin. It was a big deep room but everything was somehow disconnected. The furniture didn’t match, but not in a charming way or even a calculated one, more as if they’d run out of stuff. I saw three different types of chair, one of which was the ubiquitous Tollix I associate with far cheaper food and greater discomfort.

Likewise the lampshades didn’t match, but not in a way that made sense – including the ones over the window seats which looked like grass skirts humping a lightbulb. There were some cheap shelving units from Ikea along one wall and a completely incongruous pine Welsh dresser at the back. It all felt thrown together, as if they’d opened in a hurry – and of course it might well have been. The faux marble wallpaper along one wall, already slightly peeling at the joins, might have gone on in a hurry too.

“It’s funny” said Zoë. “You walk in and think ‘this is nice’ but then the longer you look at it the more jarring it gets.”

I don’t think it helps that we got arguably the worst table in the place. The restaurant wasn’t really broken into zones, and we had the last free table – right at the front, near the open door. It was a bit chilly, and with people traipsing past in either direction it felt like eating in a corridor – especially when at one point a large group decided to stand right next to our table and chat to a couple eating up at the window for the best part of ten minutes. The window seats, by the way, are probably the best place to sit if you’re in a pair: the counter is lovely and deep, and you get a great view (and, therefore, superb people watching opportunities).

The menu was a little like the room – superficially attractive, but the closer you looked the more you wondered. At places like Bancone, the array of pasta dishes all involve different types of pasta which gives you a much wider range of choices. By contrast nearly all the pasta dishes at Sauce And Flour revolved around relatively similar shapes, and not too many of them, so you had multiple permutations of pappardelle, tagliatelle, linguine and bucatini which made up all but one of the pasta dishes on offer (the exception was a penne dish: what kind of a monster orders penne from choice?). I was hoping to see some ravioli, something like trofie or orechiette, a little more variety.

And while I’m whinging, the drinks list was irksome too. A reasonable selection of wine, but only one of each colour available by the glass. Come in a group or don’t bother, that seemed to say. And the pricing of the solitary red, white and rosé were absolutely nuts: the menu sold wine in 125ml and 250ml glasses with no option in between. And if you did decide you wanted a small glass of wine they stung you, with most of them costing only two pounds less than the large glass (I mean, you could say the large glasses were a relative bargain, but I suppose I’m a bit more large-glass-half-empty).

The irony wasn’t lost on me: I’ve moaned for years that not enough restaurants sell wine in 125ml glasses, and here I was in a place where it was one of the only options. But it felt badly thought out. There were two beers on offer, those ubiquitous macro lagers Peroni and Moretti. I took another look, thought fuck this and ordered a large bottle of San Pellegrino.

Would the food redeem matters? Some of it came close. We started with some thoroughly decent dishes from the starters menu and for a while I thought my tetchiness would be held in check. The pick of the bunch – of the whole meal, in fact – were the short rib beef croquettes: three beautiful specimens crisp of shell and packed with soft, yielding, slow-cooked beef. They were perched in a little moat of spiced mayonnaise which might have had a kiss of ‘nduja, and each had a slice of pickle draped on top which was more sweet than tart and tied things together nicely.

There were three of these and I let Zoë have the spare because she was so underwhelmed by the next starter, although I didn’t like it much better. Squid – “body and tentacles” according to the menu, which I think is TMI – was meant to come fried with ‘nduja but was actually in a thin, vinegary sauce with capers and no heat or seasoning. All the squid was bouncier than you’d like, and just made me think wistfully of better squid I’ve had in the not too distant past. It came with a long transverse slice of focaccia toast which was so rock hard that trying to cut it with a knife and fork left me worrying that half of it would ping off and hit the next table. A pointless blob of squid ink mayo perched on it, looking like a dirty protest.

Finally, I wasn’t sure what “warm buttermilk garlic bun & parmesan” would turn out to be, and the answer is essentially this: four giant dough balls. They were about as nice as giant dough balls can be, strewn with Parmesan and rosemary, and I squidged a piece into the sauce that came with the squid to verify that yes, it really was that dull.

Mains were better but, and this is rather a theme, not exactly as billed. My linguine puttanesca was solid, I think. The ribbons had just enough pleasing bite and the sauce, a combination of all my favourite things, worked well. It had the note of acidity from the capers, a pleasant hum of chilli in the background and beautiful, plump olives. I felt like it needed more anchovy, but then I feel that way about the world in general so this dish was hardly an isolated incident. I’d paid extra to have some yellowfin tuna in the mix and I think I spotted a couple of forkfuls, but that was it. Not bad at all, and not bad value at fourteen pounds, but in the wider context of the whole meal it was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Zoë’s dish, slow-cooked duck ragu with tagliatelle, had sounded good on paper and she enjoyed it, but from what I tasted it didn’t quite work. Again, the menu was misleading: this didn’t feel like a ragu at all, and the pieces of duck leg I ate didn’t have that tenderness I associate with slow cooked sauces. This hadn’t been reduced for a long time in red wine and tomatoes, it was a white ragu if anything, but it felt like the duck had been added to the white wine and mascarpone right at the end.

And it tasted pleasant enough, but if I’d ordered it I’d have been disappointed: perhaps the kitchen’s other ragus – one made with beef shin, the other with pork and ‘nduja – showed off their skills better. Zoë couldn’t finish it – you can’t fault the portion size – but by the end the sauce had pretty much solidified which made it a challenge. I will say this for Sauce And Flour, though: both pasta dishes had the welcome crunch of judiciously added pangrattato, and it’s hard to completely take against a restaurant that does that.

We decided to try dessert, to give the place a fair crack of the whip. They too were pretty representative of the whole Sauce And Flour experience. Zoë’s tiramisu was decent, and she loved the mascarpone and the leftfield inclusion of Kahlua, but it was a lot more cream than sponge. It didn’t dampen her ardour for Buon Appetito’s magical pistachio tiramisu, put it that way.

I went for the cheese selection and for one person, for seven pounds, I thought it was generous. They have a big deli counter just along from the open kitchen so you can see the staff cutting and preparing the cheese plate, and maybe if I’d had better eyesight I could have worked out what they were. But with the exception of a gorgeous, crumbly Parmesan with decent age which I left until last, I have no idea what they were because the wait staff just plonked them down and sodded off (the menu doesn’t say, either).

The others were a mix of a soft cheese that might have been Brie but possibly wasn’t, a hard cheese that could have been pecorino but probably wasn’t and a couple of other cheeses which honestly could have been anything. Maybe it was the adrenalin, or maybe I was just high on life and drunk on San Pellegrino but I have absolutely no idea. I do know that they came with crackers which tasted a lot like water biscuits and a little dish of something the menu just calls “jam” which tasted of surprisingly little.

Not telling us what the cheeses were was pretty consistent with service in general: it wasn’t unpleasant or rude, just distinctly brisk and disinterested. Maybe it’s because they were busy, but it lacked warmth – and I’m not just saying that because I was sitting by the open door. For me, that was arguably the biggest drawback about Sauce And Flour because it’s the thing – over and above the quirks of the menu or that sore thumb Welsh dresser – that badly needs to be fixed. Our meal came to just over sixty-seven pounds, and included a ten per cent service charge I’m not entirely sure was warranted.

On the train home, Zoë and I mused about exactly what had been missing from our evening.

“The room wasn’t that bad, and some of the food was very good, but great service would absolutely transform that place” she said. And she’s right. Sauce And Flour is a curious beast. It looks, on paper, like an attempt to recreate those specialist pasta restaurants in the capital, but scratch the surface and I have a horrible feeling that it’s actually just a reasonable Italian restaurant with a more limited menu. Like the faux marble wallpaper, it might look the part from a distance but underneath, it’s already peeling. So we can relax: Reading isn’t missing out, not this time anyway. If you want to leave town to eat superb Italian food, take a train to Mio Fiore.

What it really made me think about was the glory days of Dolce Vita, at the height of its powers. I loved Dolce Vita, but let’s be honest: the room wasn’t the best in Reading, and a fair amount of the food didn’t quite live up to its reputation (mainly, ironically, the pasta and pizza dishes). But because of the service, you never cared about that. You’d go back time and again, and it always felt like having friends cooking for you. And if I’d gone to Dolce Vita and there had only been one wine by the glass, I wouldn’t have given a shit; I don’t think I ever went there without ordering a bottle anyway. Trends or no trends, Reading doesn’t need a Sauce And Flour. But there will always be room for another Dolce Vita.

Sauce And Flour – 7.0
4A High Street, Maidenhead, SL6 1QJ
07516 948421

https://www.sauceandflour.com