Some restaurants wind up so indelibly linked with the buildings that become their homes that years later, long after they are gone, you still can’t imagine another menu outside, someone else trading behind those doors. Sometimes, no other restaurant even tries: ever since Dolce Vita left its spot on the top floor of Kings Walk nobody has taken its place, but even if they did, I don’t know how I’d feel eating somewhere that, to me, will always be Dolce Vita.
Sometimes the place stays the same but changes hands, with or without changing its name. At some point I should return to Namaste Kitchen, and people tell me it’s good, but without Kamal running the front of house and that magical menu of Nepalese small plates I’m not sure how I’d overcome the strangeness of dining there. I’ll do it, one day, and when I do the review will have to have a different preamble to this one, because this one’s taken.
Ditto Spitiko, where Kyrenia used to be. The site’s the same, the menu is similar, the furniture might be too, and Spitiko may well be a perfectly decent restaurant. But in my mind it will always be Kyrenia, the place where I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, where I’d always go for mezze and kleftiko, for a bottle of Naoussa Grand Reserva and Ihor’s twinkliest welcome. Its golden age was over fifteen years ago, yet I remember it like it was yesterday.
That’s before we get to the Lyndhurst, now under its third set of new management since they hosted guests for the very last time – my wedding guests, no less. This may sound silly, but I don’t feel ready to eat there again. Perhaps this sentimental streak should disqualify me as a restaurant reviewer. But on balance I don’t think so: these places get into our hearts, occupy a place in our affections, become part of our story. Not to feel that kind of thing is not to be alive.
But of course, nearly every restaurant was once somewhere else. Buon Appetito, that I still miss, may have become Traditional Romanesc, but before that it was Chi Oriental Brasserie. And again, when Chi closed I was devastated. You know where else Chi Oriental Brasserie used to live? The site that’s now Masakali. And I was sad when Chi left that spot on the TGI Friday roundabout, too, but I was equally forlorn when San Sicario, a wonderful restaurant, gave up the fight at that very location.
All these places come and go. They make your day one month and break your heart the next: that’s what getting attached to a restaurant can do to you. Worse still, throughout it all TGI Friday has been plugging away on the other side of that roundabout for as long as I can remember. I wonder if restaurants have their own version of that well-worn maxim that only the good die young.
All this might go some way towards explaining that although new-ish Indian restaurant Tanatan opened on London Street last December, it’s only on a week night in July, months later, that I went there with my oldest friend Mike for dinner. Because even though the site was an empty shell for over two years, before that it was Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen, and it’s still hard for me to think of it as anywhere else.
Clay’s, where I ate for the first time before it opened, where I celebrated birthdays – mine and theirs, as it happens – where I went on random evenings because it was just round the corner from my little house, where I ate with friends, family and visitors, where I held lunches for my readers. Few rooms contain as much of my personal history as that one, so I knew it would be odd to eat there again, to eat Indian food there at that, and to know that it was somewhere new.
Tanatan’s story is a curious one, by the way. In the run up to it opening, the Reading Chronicle trumpeted that it was a high end Indian restaurant which very much seemed like the natural successor to Clay’s. Not only that, but they claimed that it was the first U.K. branch of an upmarket Indian group of restaurants with its other branches in India and Dubai.
That all sounds magnificent, and Tanatan’s website contains a menu full of temptations. There’s only one hitch, which is that there’s no evidence at all that Reading’s Tanatan has any connection to that chain at all. It’s not mentioned on their website, and in fact Reading’s Tanatan, for a long time, didn’t have a website of its own. Now it does, but the menu bears about as much resemblance to the other Tanatan’s menu as I do to Jude Law.
It looks suspiciously as if the Chronicle had flagged the name, put two and two together and come up with five, which is a mistake not even the AI that writes most of its articles would make. So, what was this Tanatan, our RG-based restaurant, like? Was it a worthy successor to its precursor, or an attempt to hop on a bandwagon two years after the bandwagon rolled north, over the river? It was time to brave that all too familiar room and find out.
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“I bet the word most overused in restaurant reviews is nice,” said my old friend Mike. We were sitting in the Rising Sun’s courtyard, the sun blazing down, drinkers and diners packed into the al fresco space, our empty starter plates in front of us. The starters had been, well, nice.
“I used to have a friend who said that about everything. Yeah, it’s nice. He said that about beers, about restaurants, you name it. And it wasn’t that he liked everything, it’s just that he didn’t have opinions about anything. With hindsight, not a massive surprise that he was a LibDem.”
“You say it when something’s pleasant, but if something’s bad and you don’t want to say so, you’d also call it ‘nice’, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe, but the word I always overuse is lovely. When I write a review I go back, hit Ctrl-F and find every reference to lovely, try and reduce it to one per review.”
I do, in truth, not always succeed. Our philosophical discourse was interrupted by our very pleasant, distinctly overworked server coming to take our dishes away. “Did you enjoy your starter?” she said.
“Yes, thank you. It was lovely” I said. Mike raised an eyebrow as she walked away.
“See, you’ve used your one lovely up already.”
The Rising Sun is one of Reading’s biggest openings of the year, one of three big names to take a chance on a site in the town centre, and the last of the triad I’ve got round to reviewing, after Zia Lucia and Siren RG1. It opened at the end of June, and is owned by Heartwood Inns, the people who own Brasserie Blanc. They currently have about 20 pubs and backed by private equity, as so often seems the case, the Rising Sun is part of a eye-watering £100m investment aimed at almost doubling the size of their portfolio.
Heartwood Inns has restored the old Sun Inn on Castle Street, a pub I mainly remember for two things – having a bar billiard table and not being as much fun as the Brewery Tap, which was roughly opposite it. Apparently they’ve reverted to the previous name for the pub, although it does cause confusion given that Reading also boasts the Rising Sun Arts Centre; let’s hope the other Rising Sun, the old Tut N’ Shive pub at the end of Forbury Road, never makes a comeback.
I’d watched the renovation project taking shape as I walked past, either on my way to acupuncture or to Filter Coffee House. And it looked like they’d thrown money at the site until it had bounced off. Visiting on a very balmy midweek evening, I got to see the pub in full swing and it was really hard to deny that they’ve done an outstanding job. The courtyard, some of which is covered and some of which is made up of little sheltered booths, is an impressive space that manages to not feel in the middle of Reading at all: you certainly wouldn’t necessarily twig that Blue Collar Corner, and the skanky Broad Street Mall, are just the other side of the walled garden.
I’ve read some comments online saying that it feels like being in Spain: the weather helped, but I don’t think I’d go that far. It felt more like being outside Hotel du Vin in Henley or Brighton, a little bit of mega-grifters Muddy Stilettos‘ territory plonked in the centre of the Ding. The inside is every bit as fetching. I ate there the week it opened – on my own dollar I might add – and the dining room at the back of the pub is plush and sleek, even if the wallpaper felt a little over the top for my liking.
The other thing worth saying, because it’s something I find admirable about the Rising Sun, is that although it has a big outside space and a large dining room it’s clearly intended still to function as a pub, and the rooms closer to the front feel more like they are for drinking without eating.
Hats off to them for that, when so many food driven pubs get to the stage where you feel eating is compulsory. It’s a shame, though, that they didn’t have more interesting drinks to enjoy while you were there. The keg options were macro stuff like Camden Hells and Pravha, and even the cask choices were dreary old Doombar and Tribute: only Loddon’s Citra Quad was either local or interesting. The suggestion is that this crowd would rather have wine, a Spritz or a G&T, which struck me as a wasted opportunity.
We took our table outside, after some confusion where they decided they needed to clean it first and took a while to do so. Then I ordered a pint of cider, because it was very hot and I was very thirsty, and Mike decided he’d look at the wine list and take his time. And we waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, it took so long that I decided I’d scrap the cider and join Mike on the wine, so I had to walk inside and up to the bar to ask if we could change our order. I found my pint and a jug of tap water waiting on the bar, where they’d seemingly been for a while, so I gave up and went back to my table. They wouldn’t let me carry it myself, although it would have been quicker.
In their defence, the place was very busy on what was pretty much the hottest day of the year so far. And actually, sipping my pint of Cornish Whatever-It-Was and watching the toing and froing it was apparent that the staff were working their socks off. It felt like the place needed a few more of them, but this space was built for a hot day and it was hard to imagine, even at a weekend, that they could possibly be more busy than this.
We ordered a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet, at a markup of nearly three times retail price, and pored over the menu. When it arrived it wasn’t as chilled as it needed to be – again, a consequence of being busy and that hot, hot day – and when we flagged someone down they very charmingly, very quickly brought us a wine cooler with ice in it. Not quite cold enough it was not quite there, but when it was colder and crisper it suited us just fine.
I remember looking at the Rising Sun’s menu in the run-up to them opening and thinking it looked a little unexciting: safe, beige, Middle England pretending to let its hair down sort of stuff. There were signs that it had been changed already since my first visit, but I stand by that. It’s all very Modern European, slightly Modern British but it wouldn’t scare anybody off. Like an upmarket Bill’s, you could say. So the starters were things like cheese soufflé, prawn cocktail, heritage tomato salad and ham hock terrine with very few signs of eccentricity or idiosyncracy. Most were at or close to ten pounds.
And then the mains were divided into sections that didn’t really seem to bear much relation to the dishes in them. The menu felt all over the place, with Merguez tagine next to bouillabaisse, a roasted pepper and aubergine tian – how often do you see the word tian on a menu any more? – further down. And then there was a section marked “Seasonal Favourites” which was a nice idea, but a pork and apricot roulade with Dauphinoise potato and hispi cabbage didn’t feel summery in the slightest.
There were steaks, presumably because people expect them, and a Classics section including a pie and a burger. It was a hard menu to choose from, but mostly because I felt like it had been pulled together by a committee. It all reminded me a little of Bel and the Dragon, and I hoped it wouldn’t underwhelm the way Bel always had.
Our starters arrived about forty minutes after we ordered, a wait that’s very much on the outer reaches of okay. I couldn’t talk Mike into a Scotch egg, one of the highlights of my meal at the Rising Sun in its opening week, but he did order a starter I’d had on that visit. Trout tartare was a refined, delicate, well-executed dish with plenty of trout on a base of avocado, the whole thing neatly topped with circles of pickled radish and a little heap of roe. A couple of slices of rye bread completed the picture, and Mike made pretty short work of it.
He thought, as I had in June, that it was a well constructed, pleasing, subtle plate of food. It was, in short, nice.
I am trying not to order the things I always order, so I chose the Morteau sausage salad rather than a terrine or a prawn cocktail. And it was interesting, so I’m glad I did. It was in some respects a classic brasserie salad – a pile of well-dressed endive, little nubbins of pancetta, a poached egg on top – Burford Brown, the menu said – which was good but, I think, could have done with being poached for slightly longer.
But what made it interesting, and almost more subversive than you’d guess from the menu, were the little touches. There were beautiful slabs of waxy potato, seemingly on the run from a Niçoise salad somewhere, but they had a welcome tang of vinegar which almost made me wonder if they were pickled. The crispy onions scattered on top, and the snips of chive, spoke of an attention to detail I hadn’t entirely been expecting. And the Morteau, cut into discs and fried until crisp, was a positive joy, supplying the salt the dish needed. It was a restrained, well behaved dish, mostly classic but with a few welcome twists. I rather enjoyed it: I cleaned my plate. But I’m struggling to describe it without using the N word.
If the two starters represented the understated, positive meaning of nice, the mains better illustrated nice as the adjective you use when you don’t want to be unkind. I’d chosen grilled prawns with black rice, prawn bisque, peas and broad beans. That does sound like a little taste of Andalusia here in the Home Counties, and I so wanted it to deliver. But what I got fell very far short.
The prawns, sanitised and shelled with the heads and tails left on, were okay if not remarkable. I wanted to see evidence that they’d been on a grill, but they were bland and unscathed. But the rice was what really let this dish down. I was hoping for proper arroz negro, with that distinctive, intense tang of squid ink, the whole thing salty and ozonic. I didn’t get that, so I suspect this was black rice where squid ink hadn’t played a part. But nor had this alleged prawn bisque, because what I really got was dull and cloying, with an almost-sweet taste to it. Worst of all, this wasn’t so much underseasoned as unseasoned full stop.
So far I’ve compared the Rising Sun to Bill’s and Bel and the Dragon, but just to load on the comparisons: I’ve never had a consistently brilliant meal at Thames Lido, but this dish is the kind of thing they tend to put on their menu, and I’d put good money on their version being a lot better than this. It was twenty pounds: I’m so anaesthetised to rising prices than I no longer view that as expensive, but it still didn’t feel like good value.
Mike went for the dressed crab with chips and crab mayonnaise. It looked okay to me – I remember the Rising Sun’s chips being one of the things they did relatively well – but he was ready with the faint praise again when we’d both finished.
“What did you think?”
“Well, it sort of is what it is. I appreciate them going to all that trouble to get all the crab out, but, well…”
“Nice?”
“That’s the one.”
I felt like we ought to have dessert, just to try all of the menu, and I just about managed to talk Mike into it. I think he probably ordered better than I did, and his sticky toffee pudding came with the sort of glossy butterscotch sauce you can almost see your reflection in. It had Normandy crème fraîche on top – which I would always pick over clotted cream, personally – and Mike appeared to like it. It seemed to have a completely random biscuit sandwiched between the crème fraîche and the sponge, which the menu neglected to mention. And I know I’m bandying around a lot of comparisons in this review but was it as good as, say, London Street Brasserie‘s sticky toffee pudding? Probably not.
I’d chosen a Basque cheesecake, having been lured in by seeing pictures of it on the Rising Sun’s Instagram account. And again, it was perfectly pleasant but not pleasingly perfect. It wasn’t the biggest piece, and the texture was slightly woolly. Despite strawberries being everywhere right now, the grand total of one strawberry had been quartered and arranged artfully on the plate along with blueberries and a squiggle of coulis.
It didn’t feel like they were pushing the boat out and again, Reading is very well served for Basque cheesecake. North of the river, Geo Café sells a phenomenal one and next door to them, at Serdio Ibericos, you can find another almost definitive version. The texture is a dream, the portions are impressively huge, and they cost a lot less than the eight pounds fifty the Rising Sun is charging.
By the time we got the bill the place was slightly less packed and it was a calmer, more agreeable place to be. But even so neither of us felt like ordering another drink so we settled up and sloped off to the Allied for a post mortem. Our bill for two – three courses, one pint and a bottle of wine – came to just under one hundred and thirty pounds, including an optional ten per cent tip.
I’m sorry that this review is a tad lukewarm – I expect you’ve figured that out by now – and that the rating further down is equally lukewarm. I should do the positives first and say that it is a great site which is both comforting and upmarket, well thought out and well designed. I can add that none of the food was actively bad, and there were some things – that salad, the Scotch egg I had on my first visit – that I rather enjoyed.
But that’s all the positives done. Because when I read back through some of the places I’ve compared the Rising Sun to, not always favourably, they’re far from aspirational. Thames Lido, which has never really delivered. London Street Brasserie, which has a long track record but is hardly exciting. Bel and the Dragon, which had a great location but could never offer dishes to match it. Bill’s, which to me is where people go if they don’t really like food.
Mike summed it up. “This is somewhere I could take my parents” he said, and it does fit the bill as a completely safe, totally unexciting place where you could have an average-to-reasonably-decent meal where everybody can find something on the menu and nobody will be offended. But, and I have a feeling I’ve said this before: what kind of ambition is that? Because Bill’s already exists, and London Street Brasserie already exists and I’m not entirely sure there’s enough space in the market between those two for the Rising Sun to swoop in, get shedloads of customers and make a lot of money.
In fact at those prices, provided you were prepared to forego that outside space (which, in about a month, everyone will be for the best part of six months) I suspect you’d be better off spending slightly less money going to Côte while you still can, before they follow the likes of TGI Friday and Browns and shut up shop.
The Rising Sun has a superb outside space, and they probably have a couple of months of goodwill as people are drawn in by the novelty and the sheer quality of the refurb. But, much like Zia Lucia and Siren RG1, I fear that they don’t have anywhere near enough about them to keep customers coming back. I worry that nice restaurants – and the Rising Sun is nothing if not nice – risk finishing last.
The Rising Sun – 6.8 16 Castle Street, Reading, RG1 7RD 0118 3049936
Pappadams closed in November 2025 and is due to reopen as a new restaurant called Anjappar. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
I got an email from WordPress the other day confirming that they were renewing my domain name for another year and that, more than anything, reminded me that a significant anniversary was coming up: next month my blog turns 10 years old. What started as a little hobby has become, well, a slightly less little hobby but I can’t quite believe that a decade later I’m still reviewing restaurants and that people are still reading those reviews. There will be more about that in the weeks ahead – for which I apologise in advance – but it has left me in rather a reflective mood lately (and I apologise for that, too).
In the first year of the blog, back when Alt Reading and the Evening Post were still a thing, I published a total of 38 reviews of places in Reading. Of those 38 restaurants just over half are still trading today – a statistic which surprised me, although it does include the likes of Zero Degrees, Côte, Five Guys, Mission Burrito, Malmaison, Bel And The Dragon: chains who are still going, many years later.
But when I look back at the independent restaurants I visited in the first year of the blog, the ones that remain open in 2023, there are only three that I’ve never returned to since. Pau Brasil, although I know it has its fans, has never tempted me back. I’ve never got round to Coconut, although I did review their takeaway at the start of last year. And last but not least, there’s Pappadams, the subject of this week’s review.
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Adda Hut closed at some point in the summer of 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
This week you get a simple, straightforward review of a simple, straightforward restaurant. But before that, I’d like to apologise to any of my readers in Woodley.
Because I’ve never reviewed anywhere in Woodley, in the best part of ten years. It’s one of those satellites of Reading that has escaped my attention. I made it out to Lower Earley – just the once, back in 2014 – although I can’t see myself going back any time soon. And this year, finally, I reviewed somewhere in Tilehurst, long an omission. But Woodley has never been on my radar. I’ve reviewed more places in Bristol than in Earley, Woodley and Tilehurst put together, a fact I know delights so many of you.
I assure you it’s not because I’ve taken against Woodley. In fact, I’ve always had warm memories of the place. The thing is, I grew up there – or pretended to – and it was the first place I lived when my family moved to Reading in the early Eighties. So I have happy memories of mucking around on the airfield, and walking the dog round Dinton Pastures, of going up the precinct and spending my pocket money in Beatties, the games shop. Of buying my teenage diaries from the Newscentre (and filling them with awful shite) and of buying new pairs of shoes every year from Milwards in time for the start of the school year. (You’d be better off wearing the boxes, my mum said most years: size twelves, you see).
I came back to Woodley after university and lived there until the late nineties and, with my schoolfriends who were also marooned there, we would go to the Bull & Chequers and drink to forget that we were stranded in suburbia. It was forever 1996, and someone in that pub liked to put enough money in the jukebox to play What’s The Story, Morning Glory? in full, from beginning to end. And that was nightlife: if you didn’t like it, you caught a coach to Utopia. Or on summer nights you could walk across Ashenbury Park to drink at the Land’s End and pretend you were in the countryside. And back then, I can’t even say I was that dissatisfied. That was enough, for a while.
Anyway, I thought Woodley’s role in my life was over and done, preserved in aspic, but then something happened which I didn’t expect: I got together with Zoë. She grew up on the same streets as I did, a few years later, and her parents still live there. So my past became, to some extent, my present and I saw Woodley afresh, through different eyes. And actually that was properly lovely. After all, it was an excellent place to grow up, and for all I know it still is. If I could tell eighteen year old me that he’d still be walking home past Bulmershe School in the summer of 2022 he’d probably have been horrified, but life is full of surprises.
One thing that has changed is that, at long last, Woodley has a few potentially interesting restaurants. Not that I ate out in Woodley as a kid – the treat was a takeaway from Hong Kong Garden, and a VHS from the video store next door if you were lucky – and for many years it was that or Red Rose, the solitary Indian restaurant (it’s still going). When the George, a bog standard Chef & Brewer pub, opened on the edge of town it was genuinely a source of excitement.
But nowadays Woodley has the highly rated La’De Kitchen, right opposite the Waitrose. It has a surviving branch of Cozze which has outlived the one in the centre of Reading. There’s a fancy-looking takeaway pizza place that looks a cut above Papa John’s and a dessert shop doing waffles, sundaes and milkshakes. And last but not least there’s Adda Hut, the subject of this week’s review.
I picked it because it just looked different enough to be worth a try – its website talked about serving the food of Kolkata, and its menu was relatively small and focused, a bhuna and dhansak-free zone. My very old friend Mike, a drinking buddy from those Bull & Chequers days, was home staying with his parents for the tail end of the year, so he joined me there on a dismal, sodden evening, the shopping precinct lashed with wind and rain.
It truly was an inhospitable evening, the kind where nobody in their right mind sets foot out of doors, but even so it was jarring to arrive in an empty restaurant. I mean completely empty: one table was occupied by a couple of members of staff, one tapping away on a laptop and the other staring into space, but otherwise it was as dead as they come. It’s hard to judge a restaurant when it’s completely devoid of atmosphere – especially when it’s not their fault – but for what it’s worth I quite liked the room, all muted colours, wood panels and twinkling lights. We were the only customers all night, although I was relieved to see a steady stream of Deliveroo pickups.
As I said, it’s quite a narrow menu and that’s the first thing that alerted me that it might not be generic stuff. Ten or so starters, labelled “Calcutta Street Food”, a dozen meat and fish curries and a good range of vegetarian dishes. Two biryanis, which by central Reading standards is a starvation diet. But also, everything just looked a little out of the ordinary – lots of meat on the bone, plenty of fish dishes and many things I’ve just not seen anywhere else.
It’s a dry restaurant, although they don’t charge corkage if you want to bring a bottle, so I had a very enjoyable mango lassi and we shared a jug of tap water – the decadence! – while we made up our minds. One of the two staff members, who had the air of being the owner, came over and answered our questions about the menu, making suggestions and recommendations and pointing out specialities. I would say we played it fairly safe but fortune might favour the brave, especially if you like fish on the bone as the menu has rather a lot of that.
I really enjoyed both our starters. Their speciality is Calcutta Fish Fry, but instead we went for the fish pakora and I don’t feel like I missed out at all. It was an impressively generous helping of fish in a light and only slightly spicy coating, with just the right amount of crunch. A crazy amount of food for six pounds, and a real plate of joy. It came with a sort of acrid mustard dip which I started out actively disliking but ended up constantly dabbing more pakora into, unable to make up my mind. Mustard sauce and mustard gravy appear multiple times on the menu, so perhaps that too is a Kolkatan speciality.
Even better, and my star of the night, were the mutton chops. Now, the description here is misleading. The wait staff told me that rather than being chops they were in fact croquettes of minced mutton and potato, breaded and fried. That made me expect something a little more like the mutton rolls I’ve had before but what turned up was bigger, better and nothing like that at all.
Instead they were huge bronzed spheres, looking like arancini on steroids, with a permacrust which gave way under pressure. But if they looked like arancini, what they resembled more than anything was a Scotch egg where the kitchen has dispensed with the annoying faff of including an actual egg. Instead you just got a warming filling of lightly spiced mutton, almost haggis-like, and the whole thing was quietly beautiful. It came with two dips – a thin, red, spicy one which I loved and another which I would put good money on being ketchup.
“That was really good, and just big enough” said Mike. “I’ve got room for the mains.” This is why Mike is thin, and I am not: those starters were generous, but if they’d been twice as big I’d have had no complaints. By this point in the evening we’d spent the princely sum of twelve pounds.
Could mains live up to that? They came pretty close. Mike wanted to try the tawa mutton curry, and it looked the part with a thick, brick red gravy. And the gravy was the absolute best bit. I loved it – deep and sticky, with thin ribbons of slow-cooked onion that suggested someone had taken their time over elements of our meal. If I’d just had that gravy with rice and bread I’d have been a happy camper, and in that respect it reminded me of some of the very best Indian food I’ve had.
And the mutton wasn’t bad, but I was expecting slow-cooked meat that broke into strands whereas this was leaner, more tender but perhaps slightly less interesting. We practically finished it all, though. I left one piece of mutton which was bouncier than I liked, but between us we polished off every molecule of sauce.
What I liked about the fish curry we also ordered was that although it looked decidedly similar to the mutton curry – you might have struggled to pick them apart in a lineup – the taste was distinctly different. This was a thinner, sharper sauce studded with nigella seeds, and big wodges of skin-on filleted fish that easily broke up into smaller pieces. Equally intriguing, although the mutton had the edge, but best of all I honestly felt like these two dishes had different start and end points. Obviously you never really know what goes on in a kitchen, but I didn’t feel like Adda Hut was using gallons of chopped tomatoes and packets of curry powder.
When the sauce is that good, you need to have vehicles for it. Steamed rice was – well, it was steamed rice, you don’t need me to tell you about that – but they also serve an interesting range of breads. No naan here, but paratha and puri stuffed with peas or lentils. We ordered the latter and I absolutely loved it with both curries – just a smear of lentil inside the bubble of bread, but still beautiful torn into pieces and loaded with the last of that gravy. Spice levels were slow and subtle, which is not the same as bland: I was still dabbing my nose by the end.
Our bill for all of that, including a service charge, came to just over forty-five pounds. And when the bill arrived I wished I’d tried more – given their desserts a chance, or ordered a cauliflower curry on the side. I felt bad that their one table of the evening hadn’t spent more money. But I suppose what I’m really saying is that I knew there were things I could order next time.
“How long have you been here?” I asked as the man I thought was the owner came to take our payment.
“Just over a year.”
“And how’s Woodley treating you?”
“Pretty well, actually. The weekends are manic.”
That relieved me, and we headed out into the miserable squall for a post dinner drink at Bosco Lounge – somehow going to the Bull & Chequers would have been a nostalgic step too far. Bosco Lounge was buzzing, still sending food to tables at half eight, and a large group at some nearby tables appeared to be doing some kind of art class. We had a debrief where we both concluded that Adda Hut was rather nice in its quiet, unshowy way and that we’d positively warmed to the place.
Later on I ventured back out into the relentlessly hammering rain to catch my bus, and the lights were still on in Adda Hut, although the chairs were stacked and they were giving up for the night. Bosco Lounge had felt fuller than it deserved to be, and when I passed Cozze it was still doing decent trade. By contrast Adda Hut felt quieter than it should have been, and that didn’t feel right.
I started this review with an apology to my Woodley readers, but I hope I have enough of them to give Adda Hut a try, even if I don’t necessarily manage to persuade the rest of you to head out in the direction of RG5. Because as I rushed past it brolly up, on that miserable evening, I found myself oddly grateful to this little outpost that had served me and my old friend some decent, interesting food on a night when many restaurants would have been eyeing the front door and waiting to close. A hard winter is coming, and not every restaurant will survive it. I very much hope Adda Hut does.
Regular readers might remember that I first attempted to review Brewdog about three months ago, unsuccessfully as it happens. I came, I saw, I was told they couldn’t even take orders for at least thirty minutes and I sodded off. To the Real Greek instead, in fact, where I had a surprisingly enjoyable meal with my friend Steve. He still messages me occasionally just to talk about sausage (the one at the Real Greek I should say, although I think Steve has a soft spot for most sausages, so to speak).
I decided I would leave Brewdog for another day when my frustration had subsided and I’d forgotten some of the faux wackiness which had slightly got my back up – the almost illegible menu and the zany pun-ridden dish names like “Hail Seitan” and “Clucky This Time”. So I turned up with my old friend Mike on a Monday night to check it out, hoping for better luck this time.
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