One of the big gaps in my coverage of restaurants, given the name of this blog, is my failure to review the plethora of highly-rated gastropubs in the countryside around Reading. Berkshire is a funny-shaped county, long and thin, and that means you can strike out into Oxfordshire to the north or Hampshire to the south as easily as you can head east towards Maidenhead or west to Newbury staying within county lines. And one of the reasons, I suspect, why central Reading has never attracted many special occasion restaurants is the embarrassment of riches to be found a short drive away.

I’ve done some of them in my time of course, like the Bell or the Bottle & Glass, but the vast majority remain on my to do list, or at least they would if I were able to drive. And that means that when Britain’s Top 50 Gastropubs publishes its annual list, as it did early this year, I scan it for pubs nearby and realise, ruefully, that I’m unlikely to review them. This year The Loch & The Tyne in Old Windsor, Tom Kerridge’s two pubs in Marlow and The Crown in Burchett’s Green remain on my “maybe one day” list.

Another strange phenomenon in the gastropubs nearby is a tendency for musical chairs where highly rated chefs move from one pub to another. So for instance Dominic Chapman, who earned a Michelin star at the Royal Oak at Paley Street, which I reviewed, then moved on to the Beehive in White Waltham, which I have visited but not reviewed (it was, by the way, not bad at all).

And then, nine years later, he sold up: by that time he had taken on The Crown at Burchett’s Green, which he took over from Michelin starred Simon Bonwick. Again, I ate at The Crown once under Bonwick and thought it was quite good and extremely expensive. Bonwick then pitched up at The Dew Drop Inn in Hurley, managing eighteen months there before moving on again: he now cooks upstairs at a pub in Marlow three times a week.

This happens all over: The Loch & Tyne in Old Windsor is run by Michelin starred Adam Handling, but before that it was called the Oxford Blue and run by a chap called Steven Ellis. Ellis has moved on to another spot, The Bailiwick in Englefield Green which just so happens to be my stepmother’s favourite restaurant in the whole world. Again, I’ve been and it’s really rather nice, especially the venison bon bons; if you ever go, get a portion to yourself.

So maybe one good reason not to review pubs in this part of the world is the amount of toing and froing that goes on, with almost as much transfer activity as the Premiership: even The Plough, which I loved, is on to another head chef since I visited, its third in two years.

One of the benefits of this phenomenon, though, is that sometimes you see welcome, familiar faces pop up in new places. And that brings us to the Pot Kiln in Frilsham, out in West Berkshire, nestled in the Yattendon Estate. This bit of the world, too, has always been sprinkled with good food pubs: the Royal Oak in Yattendon and the Bladebone Inn in Bucklebury are just two more to add to the list of Places I Like But Have Never Reviewed.

The Yattendon Estate now owns the Pot Kiln, as it does nearby Renegade Brewery and Vicar’s Game in Ashampstead. Before that, for a long time under chef Mike Robinson – who held a Michelin star at Fulham’s Harwood Arms – the Pot Kiln was already synonymous with game, all caught on the estate. I ate there once, when Robinson was at the helm, and thought it was rather enjoyable, the surroundings idyllic. But then Robinson got divorced, and his wife got custody of the pub, running it with her musician partner, the magnificently named Rocky Rockliff.

For whatever reason the Estate subsequently snapped up the pub and installed new management. But rather than pick one of the merry-go-round of local chefs and get them to do what the pub had always done, the Pot Kiln took a more interesting course of action. It decided that instead of offering mainstream pub fare or more generic modern British food it was going to serve a Basque-infused menu. A three quarters of a million pound refurb was carried out, including a new open kitchen and a parilla grill, and it reopened last summer.

The other interesting thing they did was appoint chef Nick Galer. Now, I knew Galer’s food from his very successful spell at the Miller Of Mansfield, a lovely pub I did manage to review six years ago, out in Goring. He left the pub three years later, when our old friends Stonegate decided to nearly double the rent, and after that he had an incongruous spell cooking at a nearby golf club, but the move to the Pot Kiln made sense. It’s been on my list ever since, and as my future brother-in-law Matt drove us through the winding lines of West Berkshire in the gathering gloom I realised that I had a real sense of curiosity about the meal that lay ahead.

The thing is, I loved the Miller, and had some really successful meals there. But there were also a couple of times, especially one Christmas Day set meal, when I left somewhat peckish, and I’d heard similar reports from other people who had acted on my recommendation. A pub in the countryside offering tapas and the heartier food of Northern Spain, making good use of cooking over fire, could be an intriguing second act for Galer’s cooking.

In the summer, I imagine a review of the Pot Kiln would talk about just how beautiful its surroundings are, and what good outdoor space it has. But in grim, largely sunless March, before the clocks went forward, all I can say is how glad I was to be in the passenger seat next to an extremely competent driver and navigator. The pub itself looks classy and cosy – definitely one of those gastropubs that still operates as a pub – but the dining room of the restaurant, next to the open kitchen, was a little harder to love.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, because the tables were generous and the chairs comfy, but the lighting was a tad cold and the whole place had a certain feeling of sterility. It wasn’t for the lack of diners, because the room was reasonably well-occupied on a Monday night, including a large group which sang Happy Birthday later in the evening. But we grabbed a table for two with our back to all of that, both looking out on the open kitchen, and perhaps that was an error. Galer was not in the kitchen that night, although that didn’t seem to remotely affect the bustle of the staff beavering away.

The Pot Kiln’s menu read really well. There were ten tapas dishes, ranging in price from just over four to just over ten pounds, and eight mains, two of which were sharers. They started around twenty pounds and climbed from there. Half a dozen vegetable dishes, appearing out of sequence before the mains, completed the picture, although they appeared more to be sides than tapas. And actually, although I found plenty to potentially order on it, this menu wouldn’t suit vegetarians or vegans. Only one main for them, baked rice with cauliflower and capers, and four tapas options. In that sense, I suppose you could say it was quite authentically Spanish.

All that being the case, the drinks list surprised me. The local beers on offer highlight the owner’s connection to Renegade, the brewery formerly known as West Berks. But I thought there might be some Spanish sidra on offer, or at the very least some txakoli, the slightly sparkling wine which is one of the Basque country’s best exports. Not only wasn’t there any, but the wine list was dominated by other countries: less than half of the whites and about a third of the reds on offer came from Spain. It felt like some bet hedging was going on.

I decided to stick to the two Spanish whites available by the glass, starting with a Macabeo which was fresh, if slightly astringent. The Verdejo I moved on to later in the evening, not significantly more costly at eight pounds a glass, was much better: fuller, rounder, more interesting. Matt stuck to an alcohol free Asahi before then trying a mocktail with elderflower and ginger which he rated.

So, how many tapas dishes would you have ordered to share between two, not knowing how big they were or how large the mains after them would turn out to be? We opted for three, which I worried might be over-ordering: I suspect my appetite is bigger than Matt’s, or possibly it’s just that his manners are better than mine. But I needn’t have worried, because these were definitely tapa rather than media or racions.

First up, two mushroom croquetas, each topped with a thin slice of raw mushroom – this seems to be in vogue at the moment, although I’m not sure it added anything – resting on a puddle of thick mushroom ketchup.

I have to say, the taste of these was extraordinary. The concentration of savoury notes at the heart of those breadcrumbed spheres was something else, but better still was the depth of the ketchup. It had an awful lot going on – yet more umami, but also a very pleasant acetic spike in the mix. These were two really lovely croquetas. Two really lovely, rather small croquetas. Two really lovely, rather small croquetas that cost seven pounds fifty.

If you wanted any proof that the Pot Kiln, whatever else it might be good at, could do ketchup, the next tapa amply demonstrated this too. A pair of empañadas, with pleasingly dense pastry, had a filling of slow-cooked short rib and came with a blob of Kermit-coloured gherkin ketchup. The star of the show here was the ketchup – even Matt, who had been suspicious from the moment he spotted the word “gherkin”, tried some and declared himself a convert.

This dish was worth ordering for the ketchup alone, such a clever piece of work, something which captured the taste of gherkins in an almost photorealistic way despite being a puddle of green. It redeemed a multitude of sins, but did it redeem the fact that the two empañadas weren’t exactly bursting at the seams with strands of beef? Maybe.

Did it also redeem the fact that a pair of empañadas set you back eleven pounds? Maybe not. The philosophical struggle I had detected in the menu was between Spanish cuisine sending you away very full indeed and Galer’s cooking sometimes rarefying things to the point where they were a perfect, but tiny, distillation of themselves. On this evidence, the latter was winning out.

I minded all that less with the third tapa, but the fact remained that it too was small and perfectly formed. Two titchy triangular toasts, topped with tomato, finely chopped onion, oil, herbs and, from somewhere, a gorgeous supporting note of citrus. These too were this kind of thing – so often in Spain a huge piece of bread amply covered in their peerless tomatoes and salt – miniaturised to a lovely, exceptionally high end version of the same.

Getting tomatoes this good in March is itself, after all, quite an achievement. If elevation was the intention, mission accomplished. But although I could well believe you wouldn’t get a better rendition in San Sebastian, I could imagine you wouldn’t get a smaller one, either. Six pounds fifty for this.

At this point I was, in truth, a little concerned that it would be one of those meals, where everything tasted amazing but you had to seriously over-order or leave without feeling replete.

But Matt and I had ordered the 12-hour lamb shoulder, intended for two or three people, and we’d been warned in advance that it took a while, so we moved on to our second drink and caught up – his job, my job, his household adjusting to the arrival of my second niece, the ins and outs of the family we were both lucky enough to have found ourselves part of. Matt has the sort of senior job that means you have to be good at talking to anyone and everyone, which makes him an excellent conversationalist, although it did leave me hoping his evening with me didn’t feel like work.

From our vantage point I could see that the lamb shoulder had spent most of its 12 hours cooked sous vide, so it was rescued from a plastic cocoon and finished in the oven. And when it was eventually brought to our table, bronzed, with a thick layer of crispy, salted fat, I thought it looked about as wonderful as could be. It was accompanied with a little pot of anchovy and garlic sauce, which had also been artfully squiggled around the plate in an unnecessary fashion. Our server – all the people who looked after us that night were excellent, by the way – started the process of testing the lamb off the bone and shredding it, doing just enough for us to dish up and leaving the rest of us to explore for ourselves.

It was absolutely glorious. Lamb is one of my favourite meats, and this must be one of my favourite ways to have it. I’ve had slow cooked shoulder before where the fattiness is to the fore, where it’s slicked with the stuff, a little too much. But this was gorgeous, almost like the best kleftiko there is, and the texture was spot on, with enough of everything: crispy shards, plenty of supremely tasty fat, both crunchy and wobbly, and piece after piece of shredded lamb, some moist, some dry, all brilliant.

The salt studded along the edge of the fat made those pieces an especially savoury delight, and although it didn’t slump off the bone the way some slow-cooked lamb can, it didn’t take an awful lot of persuasion. For some reason we’d been brought quite dinky plates, which meant that we had to keep coming back for more, but that was very far from an ordeal.

Matt wasn’t sure about the sauce, but I suspect he’s less of an anchovy fan than I am. Even being a huge lover of anchovies, I thought this was salty overkill: I’ve read other reviews that say this used to be served with a mint sauce, and I can see that, or salsa verde, offering the counterpoint this needed. It also worked out fortuitously, I think, that the bits I were drawn to, especially the fatty ones, were naturally the ones Matt might have passed on. We were a regular Jack and Mrs Sprat, and between us we polished off the lot.

At seventy pounds, I think this served two nicely but might have been stretched between three. But I liked it so much that for even for two I thought it represented agreeable value.

Meat requires potatoes, whether you’re in Thatcham or Bilbao, and torn between the enigmatically described “Spanish potatoes” and the Pot Kiln’s chips we went for the latter. Very good chips came speckled with crispy flecks of jamon and under a light dusting of Idiazabal, a Basque cheese. There was also, apparently, “Bravas seasoning”, which I imagine was another piece of refinement and deconstruction. Too much refinement, I fear, because nothing was really detectable. Still, good chips with cheese and jamon on them are always going to go down well with me, and these did.

All that was an overload of saltiness, and much as I loved that I was glad we had some contrast in the form of some carrots. These were beautiful, fresh, just-cooked things dusted in something which apparently contained chives but, to both of us, tasted strikingly of aniseed. The fact that these, really, were the only vegetable of the evening was Matt’s and my fault for ordering the way we did, but also felt quite authentically Spanish: finding anything with vegetables in it can often be a challenge there, in my experience. Not that I’ve ever tried that hard.

By this point, things had quietened down in the restaurant and we were almost the last people there. I almost felt guilty about keeping them by ordering dessert, but I also felt like we ought to try that part of the menu out.

The dessert menu is compact – five dishes and a selection of cheeses, and one of them, turron at five pounds fifty a piece, felt more like something to accompany a coffee than a dessert in its own right. Matt was tempted by the apple tart with apple sorbet and calvados syrup, but unsure: he liked apple, but did he like it that much?

I told him you couldn’t have too much of a good thing, so he went for it and I think he was rewarded with the better dessert. My spoonful, again, pointed to the kitchen’s technical gifts and command of flavours: each element a slightly different iteration of apple, prioritising sweetness, sharpness or booziness. I would have been happy, had I ordered this. But had I ordered it – and even though I didn’t – I would say it was more a cake than a tart.

My choice, on the other hand, was one of those disappointing examples of how a menu can say one thing and mean another. Rhubarb sorbet, gingerbread, cava paints a picture of those three elements in harmony, maybe equivalent amounts of each, and I was expecting that to be the case. Instead, in the Pot Kiln’s standard issue terra cotta pots, I got a dollop of (admittedly very good) rhubarb sorbet with a scattering of gingerbread crumbs, like snow that would not settle.

Cava was then poured over it, but the terra cotta pot wasn’t the right vessel for a dish like this. It just meant that you got a thin lake of booze at the bottom that you couldn’t spoon up. So essentially this was a rhubarb sorbet with whistles and bells that didn’t blow or ring. At eight pounds fifty, this felt like a lot to spend on a dish that didn’t entirely cohere.

All told we’d been enjoying the Pot Kiln’s hospitality for over two hours, and I was increasingly conscious that we were probably preventing them from shutting up shop in the restaurant. At this point the open kitchen was less of a selling point: it’s one thing when you see activity, vitality, prep, flames, dishing up, but perhaps another entirely when they are mopping the floor with one eye on the service after this one, the following day.

So we settled up and Matt prepared to effortlessly work wonders with his satnav, ease us out of deepest darkest West Berkshire and take us back to the bright lights of Reading. Our meal – three tapas dishes, that lamb and side dishes, a couple of desserts and a couple of drinks apiece – cost about one hundred and sixty-five pounds, which included an optional ten per cent service charge. Overall I thought that was reasonable value – fair in parts, good in others, questionable in a few.

That was something I pondered and weighed up in the week I took to mentally digest, between eating this meal and writing it up here. Because after those tapas dishes I was all ready to write my oh-so-slighly disappointed not-quite-a-peroration, in which I gently pointed out that “perfect for sharing” should translate as “this dish is big enough for two people to enjoy” rather than “this dish is made up of two individual, rather small, morsels”.

But then the main course completely subverted all that – it wasn’t cheap, but it was outrageously good. It was the kind of food I had been expecting to find at the Pot Kiln, but I don’t think I was expecting it to be bookended by things so different – by tapas dishes that worked wonders with flavour but left you wanting more in all the wrong ways on one side, by desserts that were a tad pedestrian on the other.

In the run up to this visit I wondered which would prevail – the big portions and big flavours of the Spanish food I’ve enjoyed in the past (notwithstanding that I’m yet to go to the Basque country, sadly) or the precise, distilled, excellent cooking that Nick Galer is so good at. And the answer, based on this visit, is that the Pot Kiln, not quite open a year yet, is still resolving that identity crisis.

There is plenty to enjoy here, and I enjoyed plenty of it, but “let’s open a Basque inn in the middle of beautiful countryside just outside Newbury” is a concept I can get behind. “Let’s do the most beautiful portions of tapas that take a classic idea and produce it in its smallest, purest form” is perhaps not.

So if you want tapas, I think you might be better off heading just down the road to Goat On The Roof. If you want ludicrously good meat cooked beautifully on an amazing piece of kit, you should go here. Because that’s the part of this meal I’ll still be thinking about in the months ahead, the part I’d passionately recommend to others, the part I am remembering now, with a grateful smile on my face. For what it’s worth, I hope that side of this particular see-saw gains the upper hand.

The Pot Kiln – 7.5
Chapel Lane, Frilsham, RG18 0XX
01635 201366

https://thepotkiln.co.uk

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