Bar review: Bigfoot, Oxford

On February 6, 2026February 8, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

This might be the first time I’ve been able to say this in over 30 years of working for a living, but my boss – he doesn’t read this blog, so I can get away with admitting this – is one of my favourite people. He’s a few years older than me, but I suspect he’s hired in his image and our politics, our cultural references, our general outlook on life and our regular Guardian reading match up nicely. I couldn’t help but think of him the evening I stopped by Bigfoot, a little spot on Oxford’s Cowley Road specialising in cocktails and tacos.

The thing is, my boss – like me – is a big music fan, always on the hunt for new bands to listen to. Unlike most people I know, his taste in music didn’t stop in an arbitrary year, preserved in aspic, leaving him just listening to old favourites. His Spotify Unwrapped is interesting every December, and we often swap recommendations: without him I wouldn’t have discovered the loping lo-fi jangle of Talking Kind, or the weird and wonderful 70s Algerian funk (I’m not making this up) of Ahmed Malek.

Unlike me, my boss is still a regular gig-goer, especially in Oxford where he watches all sorts of bands in all kinds of ramshackle venues. He took his wife to see a band called Shit Present last year on her actual birthday, without a shred of irony, and she joined him without complaint. That’s quite some marriage, I imagine.

My boss reports a consistent phenomenon at those gigs. The band is invariably young, lean and hungry, in the foothills of its twenties and having the time of its life. And the audience? “They’re all 6 Music dads like me” he says, ruefully. It happens when he goes to see Bar Italia, or Stick In The Wheel, or some band I’ve never heard of playing music you could describe without irony as a soundscape. His ears like a challenge.

When I stopped in Bigfoot, I got an inkling of how he must feel. Because everybody in there was young, from the head honcho behind the bar with his beard/beanie/fisherman’s jumper combo to the friends catching up at the table in the window, to the chaps behind me who were mansplaining to one another about “the societal pressures on women” without any women at their table, as if they had a fucking clue. Outside, in the January cold, a table of four young women directed subtle evils towards me, the mouldy old fiftysomething nabbing one of the only spots inside all to myself.

Bigfoot opened in December 2023 and has consistently offered cocktails in general, and margaritas in particular, ever since, along with tacos. It has slightly bowed to market forces since, adding beer and wine to its menu, but otherwise has continued to plough this admirable, idiosyncratic furrow. I was in Oxford with some free time for a solo meal so I thought, Why not? I forewent a table for one at somewhere more obvious and slipped into the no reservation spot early doors to snag a table.

It helps that I love that part of Oxford so much. I occasionally read some rabid panic on Facebook from someone still complaining about 15 minute cities, and I think the main problem is their lack of imagination. Because on the Cowley Road, if you stand outside Bigfoot, you are within a 15 minute walk of the Magdalen Arms or the Chester Arms. Arbequina and Spiced Roots are mere minutes away. You can buy Oxford’s best coffee at The Missing Bean, or drink in Peloton Espresso, my favourite Oxford café. What’s to dislike?

Not only that, but just across the road is the Ultimate Picture Palace, the arthouse cinema where I saw stuff like Le Samourai, Betty Blue and Paris, Texas, over thirty years ago. You can browse music in Truck Records nearby, which also happens to do good coffee.

And a very short walk from Bigfoot there’s also the Star Inn on Rectory Road, where Oxford’s best beer garden is hibernating, waiting for spring, and DEYA’s Steady Rolling Man is always on tap. I had very much enjoyed Peloton and the Star before ambling into Bigfoot, as it happens, and I was hoping that Bigfoot would complete a beautiful OX4 trifecta.

I loved the interior, all scruffy and ineffably cool, spider lights and baskets of limes hanging from the ceiling, art on the walls. A couple of cramped tables in the window had bentwood stools, and along one side of the room were what looked like bespoke benches with narrow tile partitions between them serving as tables, just deep enough to accommodate a glass or a plate of tacos.

Their curves matched the undulations of the bar, and the whole thing had a feeling of otherness that I loved. I felt like I could be in Bairro Alto, the Realejo or the 11th arrondisement, somewhere far cooler than me or, in all honesty, most of prosperous Oxford. That’s the great thing about the Cowley Road, it’s the metaphorical two fingers up that says the rest of this city might be like a supersized version of Henley on Thames but not us, buster.

The red on white menu by the bar screamed simplicity: four tacos, two of them vegetarian, all of them £2.80 a pop. They also do chips and dip, and burritos on Saturday but that’s your lot. Similarly, there were five margaritas, a couple of bottled boozy seltzers and a slightly confusing menu of what seemed to be beer and chaser combos. The beer choice was limited but considered: Modelo, the Mexican classic; the iconic American Pabst Blue Ribbon; and – this was an inspired choice – Mash Gang’s Chug IPA, one of the best AF beers made in the U.K. To complete a general feeling of bounty, the evening I was there three of the margaritas on offer were a fiver each.

I’m not a margarita aficionado but when in Rome and all that, so I gladly left my comfort zone and ordered Bigfoot’s classic, the textbook combination of tequila, agave, lime and salt. It came on the rocks – crisp, bracing and tasting every bit as boozy as I suspect it was. I don’t know which brand of tequila Bigfoot uses – I saw El Tequileño behind the bar, there might have been others – but this was the sort of cocktail I could easily see becoming habitual. Each sip, sharpened with a jag from that salted rim, was a delight.

Next time I’d be tempted to try a mezcal margarita; a look behind the bar revealed an impressive array, from multiple variants of Ojo de Tigre to La Higuera. The folks at Bigfoot are serious about being good at the narrow range of things they do.

The tacos didn’t so much subvert expectations as invert them. I expected my favourite to be the chicken thigh, but it was the most underpowered of the lot, the chipotle a little quiet, the mayo on them equally muted. White onion, too, felt like it was there to make up the numbers. But that’s not the same as saying it was bad, and if it hadn’t been outperformed by everything else on the menu maybe I would have been perfectly happy with it.

Far better were the carnitas tacos, with so much more going on: pork shoulder braised to a tangle, along with pickled red onion which provided the contrast missing from the chicken. The finishing touch – only knobbers call it a hero ingredient – was the pineapple, which made everything pop; you can argue about whether it belongs on a pizza if you want, not without justification, but it does belong in a taco. These were the wettest and messiest of the tacos, however carefully you fold them up and however precise your bite: more napkins might have been helpful.

The one I expected to like least and liked the best was the curveball, the oyster mushroom taco. Miso glazing gave it a very pleasing savoury depth and a meatiness that stopped me missing birria, or ropa vieja, or beef in any other guise; Bigfoot’s Instagram suggests they have been offering birria tacos as a special, but they weren’t on the night I visited. Of all the tacos I tried these were my favourites, with a zigzag of relatively subtle jalapeño crema and spring onion in a pick-up-sticks formation.

The tortillas were thick and soft, up to the task of holding everything in and piled high enough to introduce, nonetheless, an element of jeopardy. I don’t know if Bigfoot makes them, but a bowl of tortilla chips with salsa at a neighbouring table looked bought in: I decided not to give them a try.

I was having so much fun that I didn’t want to leave. The air was humming with the kind of great music that makes you reach for Shazam – or would do, if this part of Oxford wasn’t a mobile reception blackspot that somehow catapults you back to 1996. Outside the table of young women was playing cards, and I made a mental note to add card games to the list of things that became hip far too late for me, despite all my many hours playing cribbage on holiday after holiday in my thirties. One of the women peered balefully through the window at me. When is grandpa fucking off? the gaze seemed to say.

By this point, all the tables inside were occupied and the outside tables, too, were filling up. Where were these places when I was in my twenties, I wondered? When I was the right age to drink in these kinds of places either they didn’t exist or they did and I didn’t drink in them, most likely because I didn’t know about them.

The only place I could think of in Reading terms that had a feel anything like this was Bar Iguana, in the early Noughties. I remember going there once, nearly twenty-five years ago, and the bar staff were too busy kicking around a hacky sack to serve me. Even then I was too old for that bar, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Bigfoot was far more inclusive to the advanced in years, and the barman told me about a drink I’d eyed up heading to another table: the watermelon margarita, also on the specials menu. So naturally I had one and it was possibly more perilous than the classic margarita because it carried its alcohol content far less ostentatiously.

A chap at one of the other tables, trying to impress his date, asked the barman if it had cinnamon and star anise in it, and was very pleased with himself when it turned out that it did. I didn’t get any of that, but it was sweet and incapable of giving offence and probably dangerously boozy. The watermelon came through to the exclusion of anything else, but I quite liked that. At the end of the meal, I did dainty little watermelon burps all the way down the Cowley Road.

And I had more tacos, of course. I could claim this was to flesh out my research, but in truth it was because I liked them and to test the only one on the menu I hadn’t eaten. Nopales tacos came with cooked prickly pear cactus, refried beans, cheese and salsa roja and oddly, in some ways, they felt the most traditional ones I tried. The presence of cheese was welcome, and it turned out that cactus – or this cactus, anyway – had a texture a little like soft green peppers. I was glad I could say I’d tried it, but it didn’t outperform anything else on my little plate.

All that – seven tacos and two £5 margaritas – came to just under £34 including tip. I thanked the chap with the beard and the beanie effusively: far too effusively, probably, because I will never be cool. I expect he was grateful for my custom in the way the members of Bar Italia are grateful that my boss turns up to their Oxford gigs.

It felt like that embarrassing bit in In Bed With Madonna where Kevin Costner tells Madonna backstage on her Blonde Ambition tour that he thought her show was ‘neat’ and, after he leaves, she pretends to stick her fingers down her throat. At least I didn’t say Bigfoot was neat, or at least I don’t remember using those words.

Bigfoot doesn’t do dessert, but you have ice cream café George & Delila a few doors down – see what I mean about 15 minute cities – or you can, as I did, cross Magdalen Bridge, waft down The High and end up in Swoon Gelato. I sat at the front, in the window, with a salted caramel gelato feeling, as you do when you hit the OX1 postcode, a little less old and unhip. I didn’t mind all that anyway, but if I had the gelato would have made it all better.

I’m conscious that this review might be even more niche than usual for my Reading based readers. If you go to Oxford, you probably want a proper meal as part of a trip to the city, and stopping at a small, scuzzy bar that happens to do tacos may not really suit your purposes, unless you’re off to a gig nearby at the O2 Academy. They do lunch, I suppose, but only on Saturdays. So this one might have more appeal to locals, or that small section of my readership that lives in Oxford (or the Oxford subreddit, which is always so kind about my work).

But I thought all that and then thought sod it and decided to write it anyway. Because I keep coming back to what I said earlier on – if this bar was in Paris, or Lisbon, or Granada, and I’d visited it on a trip to one of those cities it would appear in the city guide I subsequently wrote. I would say that the place is charming and likeable, the tacos are very good and that it’s a fun place to hang out for a few drinks even if you then go on somewhere else.

I really loved it: admittedly, that was after two margaritas, and it’s possible that after three I’d have loved everyone and everything. Even so, I heartily recommend Bigfoot, if you’re anywhere near that area and in anything like the mood for what it does, especially if you combine it with Peloton and the Star, the other elements of that holy trinity. Getting old is no fun but, as friends always tell me, it beats the alternative. Finding spots like Bigfoot, however – even if it makes me feel a 6 Music dad at a happening gig – never, ever gets old.

Bigfoot – 8.1
98 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

https://bigfootoxford.com

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Takeaway review: Tortilla

On May 7, 2021May 5, 2021 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

When it comes to deliveries, all dishes may be equal but some dishes are more equal than others. I got to thinking about this after last week’s disappointing meal at Dhaulagiri Kitchen, when somebody replied on Twitter and said “I guess moving to takeaway has been tough for them”. I thought that was a curious take, because all of the problems with that meal had been in the kitchen, not on the journey from the kitchen to my house: everything was packed just fine, and arrived hot enough, it just didn’t taste that special.

It is true, though, that some dishes and cuisines lend themselves better to delivery than others. You’re on a hiding to nothing with pizza from the minute it leaves the oven, for example. And the more components you have to dish up separately, the more likely you’ll have a lukewarm plate at the end of it. With dishes where everything comes in one pot, you have a better chance that the whole thing will stay hot. This is why Kokoro is always such a good bet for delivery, and why restaurants like Zizzi and Pizza Express have set up separate brands on Deliveroo selling macaroni cheese or other pasta dishes in a tub.

It also explains the relative popularity of sandwiches – burgers, wraps and burritos – on delivery apps, and that in turn explains why I decided to give Tortilla a try this week. Burrito restaurant Tortilla is one of those smaller chains where the blurb on the website makes it sound like a small indie business (“we’re not part of a multi-franchise nor some big soulless restaurant group”) but my cursory research suggested a slightly different picture.

They had nearly forty branches, and had benefited from financial backing from the private equity group that controlled Yo! Sushi and from Santander – because if there’s one thing big business still seems to love, it’s the casual dining sector. Tortilla’s chairman used to run Pizza Express and had a proud track record of joining or founding hospitality businesses and then selling them off for pots of cash – more John Sykes than Jamie Oliver. So Tortilla maybe wasn’t a Taco Bell, but it certainly wasn’t a Mission Burrito either.

Tortilla was first announced as coming to Reading last February, although for obvious reasons it took a fair old while to open, not throwing its doors open until the end of October. It made the news last year, because it had to overcome objections from a neighbouring business, the dentist Reading Smiles, who were concerned about them having an alcohol licence, and about the risk of smells drifting into the dental practice. Tortilla’s response was that there was no risk of that, as almost no cooking actually took place on the premises – their beef and pork are “braised off-site”, which also enables them to open in smaller premises, like the Reading branch, without the need for extraction.

It’s funny: this sort of thing, cooking dishes in a central kitchen, goes on throughout chain restaurants and I’m sure we’ve all eaten those kinds of meals without necessarily being aware of it. But I had to work hard not to let this prejudice me against Tortilla. After all, I had a fantastic meal when I ordered a kilo of pre-cooked rib meat from The Rib Man and heated it up on my hob at home: potentially, surely this was no different?

And Tortilla seemed to be doing a tidy trade – every time I’d walked past the restaurant since lockdown relaxed in April the tables outside had people at them, taking part in our new national sport of gamely pretending the weather wasn’t shite. I couldn’t quite make up their mind about them on paper, so it was time to place an order with them and try to make up my mind about them in reality.

Tortilla is on all three delivery apps, although in typical fashion I only realised that once I had placed my order with Deliveroo. The menu is identical across all of them, and it largely revolves around burritos, naked burritos – that’s the contents of a burrito in a bowl, in case you have a thing against tortillas – and a few taco options. They don’t sell quesadillas or nachos for delivery, although they will sell you a DIY kit if you want to make them at home: I can’t imagine these are that popular, but life is full of surprises.

The process for ordering a burrito is remarkably like going down the line in Mission Burrito, so you have various tick boxes to pick which rice, beans, salsa and so on you want. We ordered on a Sunday evening, and they had run out of their coriander and lime rice and their guacamole, which slightly limited the options. Guacamole, incidentally, is one of the only things Tortilla makes on the premises, so it’s a particular shame they had run out. (Is it as bad as a pub running out of chips? Answers on a postcard.)

Tortilla offers the traditional fillings – carnitas, barbacoa beef and grilled chicken – along with grilled vegetables. The latter costs the same as a chicken burrito, which feels cheeky. They also serve a“vegan chilli no carne” – which has tempeh in it, although you have to go to Tortilla’s website to find that out. We ordered a couple of burritos and some tacos to share – I might have tried the tortilla chips too if they’d had any guacamole to go with them – and our meal came to just shy of thirty pounds, not including the rider tip. Tortilla’s burritos come in medium and large, with the large costing about the same as the one size offered by Mission Burrito.

Deliveries from the town centre always seem quicker and more reliable, and often come on a bike rather than in a car. This was no exception, and everything was pretty brisk: we ordered at twenty past seven, the rider was en route twenty minutes later and he took four minutes to reach our front door. When he did, he cheerfully told us that he was carrying two orders from Tortilla and so we’d have to give him our order number – that struck me as a little strange, but it hardly held things up. I wonder, if I’d been his second delivery, if I’d have been quite as happy.

Anyway, everything was hot and it was all present and correct. A number had been scrawled on one of the foil-packed burritos with a Sharpie, nothing on the other. It’s only after the meal, looking at the ticket in the bag, that I realised he had written numbers against each burrito so we could work out which was which. P for pork and B for beef might have been simpler.

This is where I also have to make a sad confession. Partly to work out which burrito was which and partly to make this review more photographically interesting, I cut my burrito in half, artfully arranged it on a plate so you could see the filling, placed it under a spotlight in the kitchen and took a picture of it. Or at least I thought I did, but looking at my camera roll it simply isn’t there. This puts a greater emphasis on my descriptive powers than any of us would like, and makes this review even less visually interesting than normal: I can only apologise. I asked for advice on Twitter, but it ranged from the impractical (courtroom style drawing please) to the sadistic (another thousand words, presumably?). I’ll spare you either option.

On to the burrito then. Mine was pulled beef with black beans, tomato rice and all the trimmings – cheese, sour cream, salsa verde, jalapeños and pickled red onions. Looking at all that, you’d have thought the biggest risk would be the flavours clashing, or being too much, but in reality the struggle was to get it to taste of anything. Really, it was almost symphonically bland. It was well packed – almost as if done by a machine, the meat firmly in the centre, so different to the haphazard arrangement of a Mission burrito – but nothing tasted of very much.

The beef had the texture but couldn’t back it up with the taste. The red onions were still crunchy and felt like they’d had only a passing acquaintance with vinegar. If there were any jalapeños in it, they’d been picked for their inoffensiveness. The list goes on: the tomato rice had a real feeling of Bachelor’s about it, and if the salsa verde, cheese and sour cream were even in there (and having eaten it, I’m not sure they were) they added even less to proceedings than Dido Harding. Or Dido herself, for that matter. When the best case scenario is that your meal is boring because they got your order wrong, and the worst case scenario is that it’s plain boring, matters are problematic.

The carnitas burrito was a subtly different shade of meh, but meh nonetheless. I actually liked the pork more – it was saltier and just more interesting – but it had its work cut out shining in a sea of mediocrity. When I have a burrito from Mission it’s a glorious mess – it drips, it’s tricky to tackle, it’s always a challenge, but it tastes of something. You get the highs and the lows. This, by contrast, was tidy and dull, a burrito on Prozac, all the edges neatly knocked off until you barely felt anything. Maybe that was the intention, and maybe the aim is to take customers away from Taco Bell: Tortilla is better than Taco Bell, but so’s eating corrugated cardboard topped with spam.

Only the tacos showed a hint of something better. Tortilla’s chicken is grilled rather than pulled, in little pieces – I actually quite enjoyed this, although it wouldn’t be everybody’s cup of tea. But the real winner here was the salsa roja – hot and punchy and adding a dimension of flavour that had been lacking everywhere else. But even the tacos, though they were better than the burritos, weren’t better than their peers.

The portion size was still a little underwhelming, especially when you compare it to the Lyndhurst’s outstanding chicken tinga tacos: there, you get four tacos for nine pounds, all so piled high with chicken that you can’t physically close them, and there is always plenty of guacamole. At Tortilla you get three barely-filled tacos for seven pounds fifty – I got the odd one, but mostly because Zoë had no interest in fighting me for it.

When I look at Tortilla’s footprint, I can see that it might do well in many of the locations where they’ve opened up. If it didn’t exist, it might be necessary to invent it. But this, I’m very proud to say, is Reading, and we do things differently here. We’re not like some of the identikit malls Tortilla has opened in, or the likes of Guildford; if they’d done their homework, they might have realised that Reading, of all places, doesn’t need a Tortilla.

And although there were a couple of things at Tortilla I didn’t mind – the grilled chicken, the salsa roja, the fact that it isn’t Taco Bell – the fact remains that it will never be close to the best option for Reading residents. A few weeks ago I went to Blue Collar and tried pork and charred pineapple tacos from their new vendor El Contador, and they were miles better than anything I had from Tortilla.

Likewise, if tacos are your thing, be they carnitas or jackfruit, you really do need to make a beeline for the Lyndhurst when they reopen. If you’re a burrito fan I think that Mission, in terms of quality, value and integrity, is streets ahead of Tortilla; writing this review has quite made me crave a Mission Burrito to remember how it’s done. And if you’re at home, and you want to order something delicious that will stay hot, cost around a tenner and make its way to your door in next to no time, a little bucket of Kokoro’s sweet chilli chicken hits the spot every time.

I do feel a little sad for Tortilla: it’s not exactly as if they’ve done anything wrong, but they’re not quite good enough. It’s not them, you see. It’s us.

Tortilla
4-6 Broad Street, Reading, RG1 2BH
https://www.tortilla.co.uk/locations/reading/

Order via: JustEat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats

Taco Bell

On February 7, 2020September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

I know many people scroll to the bottom of my reviews to check the rating and the summary, the tl;dr equivalent of slogging all the way through my deathless prose. I know, too, that some people think my reviews are too long; God knows how many people make it to the end of the middle section where I (finally) get round to telling you what the food tastes like.

Well, this will confuse plenty of those people – let’s start at the end for once. Taco Bell is bloody awful. Truly. Don’t eat there. I can’t think of a single good reason for visiting Taco Bell unless you’ve never been to one before and are genuinely curious about what it’s like. That was me before I did this review, so I tell you what: I’ll satisfy your curiosity and then you can save your money, your calories and your dignity and have a better meal somewhere else. Sound all right to you?

Pachangas, Henley

On January 15, 2016October 1, 2023 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

Pachangas closed permanently in September 2023. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

There are times when I think I’ve almost got the hang of this reviewing thing. In particular I think I’ve got to the stage where I have a reasonably good idea, from looking at a menu, of whether a restaurant is going to be good. Pachangas, a Mexican restaurant in Henley, scored so well on that front that I’d been looking forward to visiting it for some time. The menu made all the right noises: Oaxaca cheese, grilled cactus, slow-cooked pork marinated with chili, orange and tequila, sweet spicy mole (the chocolate and chilli sauce, not the short-sighted animal from Wind In The Willows). So different from Maracas in Reading, where the menu doesn’t really convince me that the owners have had a Damascene conversion from cooking Italian to Mexican food.

I was so excited about going that not even a miserable day in January put me off my trip to Henley. Besides, I reasoned, even if it turned out to be a disappointment there were always consolations – the gorgeous chocolate in Gorvett and Stone for one, the delights of Machin’s (ostensibly a butcher but also selling fantastic cheese, smoked fish, terrific jamon iberico and countless other wonders – if only Reading had somewhere like this) for another. But mainly I was going for Pachangas: I re-read the menu on the bus, feeling like I was about to take a little gastronomic holiday.

Stepping out of the rain, half-mist, half-drizzle (is “mizzle” a word?) and into the restaurant I immediately felt like I’d made an excellent choice. This restaurant used to be the site of a pub called the Beer Tree which had Kozel on draft and a bewildering array of Belgian beers in the fridge; I used to love it back then but it was a bit crude and functional inside. Pachangas was a lot more inviting, all bright-coloured walls and cheery music. I got a warm welcome and was shown to a nice table: on my left I had a view of the rest of the dining room and on my right I could see the grey street outside, the rain intensifying. It felt like I might have been in the only sunshiny part of Henley that day.

The menu presented a couple of challenges. One was not hitting the cocktails in a big way – a wide range were available, not to mention numerous tequilas and several Mexican beers, along with something rather frightening called a michelada which seems to be a mixture of beer, lime juice and hot sauce (another time, perhaps). The other one, as I said, was narrowing it down when nearly everything looked worth a punt. Even the burger – in a tortilla wrap rather than a bun – appealed, bringing back happy memories of sadly departed Oracle restaurant Santa Fe (the unforgettable, dimly-remembered evenings I’ve had there!). The other thing that struck me about the menu was just how much of it was available gluten free – well worth knowing if you’re eating out with someone who doesn’t eat gluten.

After all the horse trading was complete, the orders had been placed and the wine was ordered we sat back in anticipation. I had high hopes, which if anything were justified by a little freebie to start with – two little gluten free rolls, still warm and filled with rich, elastic cheese. Just beautiful. But then, I smugly told myself, I knew it would be good because I knew a good menu when I saw it.

The first of the starters was further corroborative evidence. Calamares picantes were dusted with flour rather than battered and apparently shallow rather than deep fried and came sprinkled with chilli, coriander and beautifully whiffy slivers of fried garlic. The squid was among the best I can remember – so tender, free from any bounce or twang and clearly very fresh indeed. It was so good that I didn’t really mind that the coating didn’t entirely stick to it. All it meant was that at the end I had loads of little pieces of it to eat, fun-sized explosions of chilli, garlic and (I think) lime. Funny how sometimes, like the powder at the bottom of a packet of dry roasted peanuts, or the vinegary shards left when you’ve nearly finished your Chipsticks, the best bit comes at the last. There was also some kind of spiced dip like a mayonnaise, not mentioned on the menu, which didn’t add much and probably wasn’t really needed. I left most of it, but I didn’t feel like I’d missed out.

The other starter was where the problems began; the tamal pachangas were described as “handmade corn masa parcels filled with spiced pork and steamed in plantain leaf served with mole negro and fried plantain” which sounded delicious. Sadly the corn parcel (singular) was quite cakelike – thick, sweet and rather claggy. The pork inside wasn’t particularly spicy but then there was so little of it that it struggled to overcome the exterior. The mole sauce was also sweet but it did have a kick of chilli so that it wasn’t completely dull. The best bit, by far, was the fried plantain which came on the side, a bit like eating banana fritter without the batter – sweet and a little bit naughty – and it was really lovely with the mole sauce. But even so, the whole plate felt like I had ordered dessert by mistake, and not a terribly good dessert at that.

The starters had been so Jekyll and Hyde that I wondered quite what the mains would be like. I’d had my eye on the fish tacos since I first looked at the menu and when they turned up they seriously looked the part – three tacos, piled high, served in some kind of zigzag contraption intended to make them easier to eat. And you couldn’t argue with the volume – two big strips of fish in each one, a heap of spiced mayonnaise on top and some salad and guacamole underneath. The problem was that they were so very bland: the fish was described on the menu as halibut tempura and I can’t give the menu the benefit of the doubt without criticising the kitchen because they felt like standard goujons of an unremarkable white fish to me. The spiced mayonnaise, which might have been the same one that came with the squid, was not particularly spiced. If anything it felt like Thousand Island Dressing’s zany friend, the one who’s never invited to parties. It came with a relatively pleasant bowl of rice – I’m not sure why as there was nothing to eat the rice with – and didn’t come with black beans, despite the promise of the menu. The whole thing was piping hot and difficult to eat: nothing wrong with that when a dish is delicious and you want to devour every last mouthful, but when it’s all a bit blah it soon becomes a chore. The thing that disappointed me most, though, was how thoroughly this dish punctured my expectations.

Then came the enchilada mole poblano. I was expecting to see two fat corn tortillas, filled with chicken and sauce and, most importantly, flavour. After all, that’s what the menu led me to expect. What arrived instead was the Mexican version of a chicken and cheese toasted sandwich; rather than two big fat cylinders I got three sad, flat little tortillas with shredded chicken and melted cheese inside and a swoosh of mole across the top. That was it. No flavour or spice in the chicken at all. This time round even the mole – a complex, intense mix of seventeen ingredients according to the menu – didn’t seem to have any chilli in it, let alone anything else other than chocolate. The tortillas, sadly, were just boring – sub-Old El Paso, in fact. It came with more of the rice (which tasted mostly of garlic) and refried beans (which tasted mostly of mashed bean). My guest was a member of the Anti-Coriander Brigade – I hear there are more of them than you might think – so had asked them to leave it out, but I couldn’t help wondering if they’d left everything out just to be safe. Including the flavour.

I did like the sweet potato fries (“Pachanga fries”) we ordered as a side: sweet potato can be a tricky vegetable, but they’d managed to get the fries perfectly crispy. But let’s face it, if the fries are the high point you’ve either had amazing fries or a pretty iffy meal, and these fries weren’t amazing.

We had a glass of red wine each. The Chilean merlot was nicely smooth and smoky and the Mexican syrah – Mexican wine does exist, believe it or not – was drinkable but unremarkable. Both were about a fiver a glass (in hindsight, maybe I should have had a “Bloody Pirate”, a Bloody Mary made with rum rather than vodka, instead). The best bit of the experience was undoubtedly the service which was lovely throughout: both the waiters that looked after us were friendly, knowledgeable and checked up on us just often enough without it feeling over the top. I’m no expert but their accents sounded South American at least and very possibly Mexican which gave me confidence (the second best bit of the experience, incidentally, was that you have to go through a saloon door to get to the loo – what’s not to like about that?)

I nearly gave Pachangas a chance to redeem itself through dessert (I had my eye on the churros) but a combination of fullness and disappointment made me rule it out. The total bill for two courses and a glass of wine each was fifty-nine pounds, excluding service.

Something magical has happened several times while writing Edible Reading where I’ve gone to an unprepossessing restaurant with no real expectations and gone away thoroughly delighted and surprised. Pachangas is a rare example of the opposite phenomenon – and I suppose it had to happen eventually – where everything looks good on paper but it just didn’t come together. The food didn’t quite live up to the menu: sometimes literally, in that what you ordered and what you got weren’t quite the same thing. But more generally the menu made wonderful promises about flavour which the kitchen just didn’t keep. Whether they’re playing it safe because they’re in Henley, or whether they just have a gift for writing which isn’t matched by their cooking I don’t know. Either way, it’s a salutary lesson for me at the start of the year that I’m not quite as good a judge of menus as I thought I was. But after all, if you could tell how good a restaurant was just by looking at the menu, who’d need restaurant reviews?

Pachangas – 6.6
30 Duke Street, Henley-on-Thames, RG9 1UP
01491 413000

http://www.pachangas.co.uk/

Mission Burrito

On March 21, 2014February 3, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Mission Burrito closed in February 2025. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Sometimes you just don’t want a sit down three course meal (this even happens to me – believe it or not). Sometimes you’re off to the cinema or out down the pub and you just want something quick, easy and tasty. And for years, in central Reading, your only real choice was who made your burger and whether it was chicken or beef – three McDonalds, three Burger Kings and a KFC are testimony to that. That all changed when Mission opened on the Oracle Riverside and gave diners another option which wasn’t griddled or fried and didn’t come with fries: the brave new world of burritos.

Mission is a mini-chain that started in Oxford and has slowly expanded – first to Reading and then further west to Cardiff via Bath and Bristol (someone there must really like the M4). It always makes me proud, as a Reading resident, when places decide to expand to Reading first; back in the days when Bill’s was new it felt exciting and cool that they opened here. But Bill’s is a big chain pretending to be a cuddly independent whereas Mission, for now at least, feels like the real deal, an independent that had a good idea, did well and has grown gradually and organically. But is it any good?

The plot that Mission has in the Oracle isn’t very big – it can be a bit of a squeeze to get a seat and the queue sometimes stretches out the door (a promising sign in itself) but it turns out Sunday afternoons are fairly quiet so I got there and had no trouble getting served or finding a seat. The room is pretty unremarkable – space along one side to queue until you’re up at the counter, and plain dark wood tables with long benches. Get in, get your food, eat your food and go. And that’s fine: I never understood when McDonald’s started introducing what looked like Arne Jacobsen chairs. Who eats a burger in one of those? (Not Arne Jacobsen, that’s for sure.)

Ordering involves all manner of choices. There are three types of dish – burritos, fajitas (which are like burritos but with vegetables instead of rice) or tacos, which are three soft flour tortillas rather than the rigid corn shells so beloved by Old El Paso (and so impossible to eat). There are then three types of filling – beef, chicken or pork. Or if you fancy paying through the nose for a dish with no meat, or are vegetarian and therefore have no choice, there’s vegetables. Then you pick your extras – guacamole or cheese (which cost extra) or pico de gallo and sour cream (which don’t). Finally, just to crank up the number of different types of combinations, you pick from one of three different sauces with varying degrees of heat. The possibilities, as Eddie Izzard used to say on that TV advert about recycling, are endless.

I make it sound really complex but it really isn’t too bad and the staff behind the counter, running a factory line all doing different parts of the process, are very friendly and efficient and in next to no time I was at my table tucking into my choice.

The burritos are big – a twelve inch tortilla liberally stuffed with rice, pinto beans (which had been “cooked in bacon” according to the staff, although I’m not sure what that entails), guacamole and the slow cooked beef. Rolled up and served in foil, it wasn’t possible to eat tidily unless you kept most of the foil in place. It’s not a delicate dainty meal but it wasn’t half bad: I loved the beef, rich and cooked until it had no fight left in it, and the beans, although not really tasting of bacon per se, were smoky and tasty. The guacamole was a little more disappointing – huge chunks of avocado, too coarse if anything, not distributed evenly throughout the burrito. The chipotle sauce didn’t come through at all, leaving me wondering if I’d asked for the wrong one or if the staff just hadn’t glugged on enough. The cheese didn’t register. But I suppose these could be viewed as fussy quibbles about what was basically a big edible pillowcase stuffed with a lot of quite good things (they also do a smaller version, presumably for lunchtime and less ambitious eaters, and a larger version – presumably for Eric Pickles).

The tacos are three thinner six inch discs which are assembled but left open. I had two with chicken and one with pork – just to cover all the bases, you understand – topped with lettuce, sour cream, cheese and a smidge of chipotle salsa. These were also delicious, if almost impossible to eat – you end up trying to roll the edges together but end up with a big sloppy tube, dripping sauce from both ends. (Sounds lovely, doesn’t it: who doesn’t enjoy a big sloppy dripping tube?) The chicken was particularly good, cooked until it was falling apart and perfect with the note of heat from the chipotle sauce it had been roasted in. The cheese, again, was a bit lost in the mix so you could easily leave it out and save yourself the princely sum of thirty pence but the sour cream worked well, offsetting the heat from the salsa. The carnitas was less exciting than the chicken: drier and lacking in flavour with no hint of the thyme or orange zest it had apparently been cooked with.

Dotted around the tables were bottles of hot sauce (because some people really like not being able to feel their lips) and big piles of paper napkins (because some people really don’t like to be covered in sauce). I avoided the former, because I’m not that kind of person, and enthusiastically embraced the latter, for similar reasons. That said, I did add a little hot sauce to my last taco and very nice it was too, even if it did require the use of yet another paper napkin. If you are on the fastidious side this might not be for you but if you like getting stuck in and don’t mind reaching the end of a meal looking like you need to be hosed down Mission might be right up your alley.

Drinks options are, unsurprisingly, limited but the Modelo, in a bottle, was exactly as you’d expect. The frozen margarita was I think a better choice – zesty and zingy without the rough edge that tequila can sometimes have, and surprisingly refreshing after the richness of the food.

Dinner for two came to almost exactly twenty pounds and the burritos, fajitas and tacos come in at just under the six pound mark: I was in two minds about whether this was good value (and I still am) although I am pretty sure it represents iffy value for money if you’re a vegetarian. If a vegetarian has to endure a burrito restaurant the very least you can do is give the poor sods free cheese and guacamole, and even that seems a bit stingy.

On reflection, I liked Mission but maybe not as much as I should have done. The food is good, the value isn’t unreasonable, the service is very pleasant and they have a clear proposition. They’re exactly the kind of independent place Reading needs and they do what they do very well. But I was left with the feeling that if a friend said “let’s go to Mission before the cinema” I wouldn’t object, but I’d be unlikely to suggest going there myself. It’s funny how sometimes a place just doesn’t grab you: I guess, like the sauce in my burrito, I felt a little warmth, but not quite enough.

Mission Burrito – 6.7
15A The Riverside Level, The Oracle Centre, RG1 2AG
0118 9511999

http://missionburrito.co.uk/

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