Tag: Oxford

Pub review: The Port Mahon, Oxford

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The conventional wisdom is that food trends start out in London and, like the light from a dying star, by the time they reach Reading they are just memories of something that is no longer there. Something about the eternity it takes them to hobble down the M4 strips them of any interest or novelty value, and it’s the same for restaurant chains: with a few encouraging historical exceptions, like Honest or Pho, by the time anyone opens a branch in the RG1 postcode the Fonz, waterskis strapped on, has well and truly cleared the shark.

The truth is, if anything, more nuanced and even more cheerless than that. First of all, most food trends never become a thing anyway. Every January the broadsheet food Stattos, a wan bunch of gastronomic psephologists, proclaim what the big trends of the next 12 months will be, and the majority of them never come to pass. Just as life is what happens when you’re making other plans, food trends tend to ambush everybody: nobody sees most of them coming.

Secondly, most of them never make it to Reading. You could wait a lifetime for a small plates restaurant, a tapas spot, a natural wine bar, a chop house or anything else for that matter. I don’t know what it is about our mixture of attractive affordable buildings with plenty of outside space that catch the sun, our kindly and philanthropic landlords and our imaginative and not remotely complacent local authority, but for some reason entrepreneurs look at all that and say Nah, you’re all right. What spoilsports they are.

Instead we get a Cosy Club, and a Rosa’s Thai, and a Popeyes, and a Taco Bell, and a regular attack of the glums whenever we set foot inside the IDR. Lucky, lucky us. So it goes: head to Oxford, Swindon or Newbury for tapas, small plates or natural wine, because you’re not getting that stuff in Reading.

As a result we get our own micro trends which often seem to have nothing to do with what’s going on anywhere else, like the year we got a glut of sushi restaurants, or biryani places, or pizza spots. And the funny thing is, the result of everyone trying to jump on those bandwagons is that nothing is sustainable. Biryani Mama closed recently on St Mary’s Butts, and Biryani Boyzzz has been fined shitloads of cash for poor hygiene: perhaps all those Zs are reflective of the fact that they fell asleep at the wheel.

And remember our influx of great pizza restaurants last year? By all accounts Paesinos has sacked its chef, Amò is still closed due to challenges with the building for nearly five months and counting (read into that what you will) and since Dough Bros has changed hands it’s removed all pork and ‘nduja from its menu, leaving you instead with turkey ham and “spicy beef chunks”. Fair play to them, I suppose, but that’s not Dough Bros any more. All that’s left is Zi Tore, which is the gastronomic equivalent of Ringo being the last surviving Beatle.

This year’s Reading trends are, to me at least, profoundly depressing because they reflect a poverty of culinary imagination, of degradation disguised as progress. You might get excited about vans serving jacket potatoes, and Reading now has a couple, but I remember when the Broad Street Mall having a Spud-U-Like made it a figure of fun, not a lifestyle destination. Are we really meant to see this as an improvement? Did people ever really think “fuck an affordable bistro, what this town really needs is a jacket spud loaded with tuna and cheese?” I hope not.

The other Reading food trend this year has been the munch box, a phenomenon with its own Wikipedia page, highlighting its origins in Scotland (“the selection of foods included in some boxes has been criticised for being nutritionally poor” Wikipedia says, with a talent for understatement). So naturally, for the times when a baked potato is too cheap and cheerful and you want to splash out, why not go crazy and buy a munch box? Treat yourself.

“I’ve found the best munch box in Reading” said some goon on Instagram recently, coming to you live from a car park. That’s great: I’m sure the whole town will sleep easier now. It’s all very low rent, but that’s 2026 for you. Nobody can afford rent.

A trend which emerged last year in London was one I would dearly love to see in Reading: rotisserie chicken. The Observer called it about this time last year and, late to the party as ever, the Telegraph chimed in to that effect in January. Both mentioned London venues like Borough Market’s Café François and Shoreditch’s Knave Of Clubs along with Bébé Bob, which so underwhelmed me a couple of years ago. “The rise of luxe rotisserie chicken”, enthused the Observer. “How France’s most famous market food became a cult British hit” was the Telegraph‘s summary.

It’s true, though. Rotisserie chicken is huge on the continent, and nowhere to be seen in Blighty and I personally consider that a terrible pity. When I remember Montpellier, where the twice weekly food market under the aqueduct boasts multiple traders, all selling delectable looking chicken, I think it’s a great shame that it’s never caught on here. And that’s just markets, but the restaurants! When I recall the glories of eating at Montpellier’s Les Freres Poulard or Lisbon’s Bonjardim I wonder what’s taken this movement so long to even consider crossing the water.

So imagine my surprise earlier in the month when I discovered that this particular trend – with lightning speed, in the scheme of things – had bypassed Reading completely and taken root in Oxford. I’d just had lunch at Cuttlefish with my dear friend Jerry and, on the way to our pub for the afternoon, we walked past another pub, the Port Mahon. I’m incapable of doing that kind of thing without rubbernecking for a menu and there, on a sign out the front, it boasted ROTISSERIE CHICKEN and, come to think of it, OUR FAMOUS £5 NEGRONIS. They had me at the chicken, the negronis were just a bonus: I made a mental note to investigate further.

Back home I did some research and the pub looked promising. Although it’s been around since 1710, it seems that a couple of years ago it came under new ownership and, by the looks of it, decided to focus on food, taking on chef Paolo Cangiano. A new dining room followed last year, as did positive reviews on both of the main Oxford food websites. Although the majority of those visits were comped: Bitten Oxford extracted 3 free meals from the Port Mahon in the space of 7 months but, of course, all views remain their own.

Nonetheless I saw enough to nudge it to the top of my list so last week, on the most glorious Saturday the U.K. has seen so far this year, Zoë and I hopped on a train to investigate, stopping only to collect a lot of cheese in the Covered Market, sample one of Hamblin Bakery’s excellent sausage rolls and grab a pre-lunch coffee in Peloton Espresso’s wonderful back garden. Spring had well and truly arrived, and I’d had my first sunshine pints in the Last Crumb the weekend before, after a brilliant and buzzing readers lunch. So this is what al fresco life in Britain can be like, I remembered thinking.

The pub is actually very handsome. I think it’s a Greene King (although that isn’t necessarily an obstacle to doing amazing food) and the labyrinth of rooms inside, all on slightly different levels, is cosy and attractive, all bentwood chairs, pews and red curtains. On my wander through I managed to somehow miss the dedicated dining room completely, but from the pictures I’ve seen it’s also a lovely, grown-up space.

That makes the Port Mahon somewhere you could go for food or just for drinks, and from the interior I could easily imagine doing either. But we were greeted by Cangiano himself and asked where we fancied sitting, and the outside space called to us. Again, it’s surprisingly large and much of it catches the sun, and it was a thoroughly agreeable spot with bunting, covered areas and a real feeling of lightness and buzz.

It reminded me – in Oxford terms – of the sadly departed Jam Factory, which used to be one of my favourite spots to stop for a pint before catching a train home: I still miss that place. It also reminded me, to talk about Reading for a moment, that nowhere in Reading boasts outside seating this pleasing where you can also get really good food. The Nag’s has a great beer garden but limited food, Park House is pleasant enough for both but not stellar. That the Rising Sun is as good as it gets rather sums up the state of affairs: I haven’t updated my guide to al fresco dining in Reading since 2022, but perhaps I’ll just put up a page saying Don’t bother.

It was too hot a day for those £5 negronis, and a pint of something cold and refreshing was required. I was pleasantly surprised by the Port Mahon’s selection, so although it had macro lagers and ciders in spades there were just enough pales to make it interesting: the sessionable A Little Faith by Northern Monk and Pale Fire by Pressure Drop. The latter was our choice and it was absolutely what the moment demanded. The sun beat down, and our first sip – this was rather a late kick-off given a happy time at StageCraft the night before – made everything right, all grievances forgotten.

The Port Mahon has, I would say, pulled together a very pleasing menu. A good array of snacks, all of which lend themselves to sharing, five starters and eight mains sent out all the right signals about not trying to do too much, and if I hadn’t gone with rotisserie chicken on my mind I could have tried countless other dishes. Next time, perhaps I’ll try the meatball pappardelle or the butterflied seabream with orange and fennel salad. But it also gave me confidence that next time the menu might well be different: after all, this set of dishes was very different to the one I’d seen online.

You could potentially argue that the pricing was slightly wayward, with some of the snacks coming in more expensive than the starters, but I thought that was to suggest they were bigger portions to share. Again, a pub where you could drink great IPAs in the sunshine and keep yourself topped up on beer snacks sounded like something I would love in Reading. And nothing was expensive, really: starters maxed out at £8.50, only a couple of mains were north of £20.

One dish that seemed to have been on the Port Mahon’s menu since they reopened and Cangione came on board was the pub’s pork belly bites in soy, honey and sesame and, rotisserie chicken aside, they were the first name on the team sheet. They were a winner, a tumble of nicely caramelised cubes, fat rendered enough and the glaze sticky, sweet and potent with a slight building heat. I would have put these in the beer snacks section, personally, but what do I know about menu taxonomy?

Either way these were a real pleasure and the kind of dish any menu could find room for somewhere: about as different from their siblings last week at the Jolly Cricketers as I am from my sibling but, just like me and my own sibling, equally lovable. Also they were £8.50, so better value than either of us.

We also went for the buffalo cauliflower wings, from the snack section of the menu. These were a bit pricier at £12.50 but, as I’d suspected, very much sized to share. They were very close to spot on, but with something like this it’s human nature to focus on how they fall short. So I really loved the pub’s buffalo sauce, which had exactly the kind of acrid, vinegary heat I’m looking for. The little bits of what I thought were fried onion on top were a nice touch, along with a little verdant flash of herbs. And the cauliflower was nicely done, not too soft, not too unyielding.

If I’d known in advance that it would be a sort of mulch of cooked cauliflower in a superlative buffalo sauce I might have still ordered it and, as I did, I would have enjoyed it. But I’d like the coating to have crunch and to adhere, and for the whole thing to be tossed in the sauce at the end and brought to me tout suite before everything started to go awry and soggy. That didn’t happen here, I don’t think, and it was the only thing marring what would otherwise have been another perfect beer snack.

The chicken wings, at the same price, might have pulled this off better but I really couldn’t be doing with all the faff. I would have these again in the hope that the pub pulls them off, and if it didn’t I would be a little disappointed but, as I did this time, I would still eat every last morsel.

The biggest disappointment, for me, was the focaccia. It was, to be fair, only £4 but it was dense and doughy, no air, no crust and no crackle, just some spongey, cakelike cuboids that were a little bit too much like hard work. I’m not sure what the dip in the middle was: it looked like mayo but had a sizeable whack of vinegar. But the focaccia had a job to do anyway ensuring that not an iota of the buffalo sauce, or the soy and honey glaze, went to waste. No harm done, ultimately.

Service from everybody in the pub, from the chef to the cheery chap behind the bar to the servers who brought our food out, was bright and infectious, and the Port Mahon gave the impression of being a happy little brigade. We were asked whether we wanted our main course straight away or wanted to wait a while and – rather uncharacteristically, I guess – we told them to bring it on. That’s rotisserie chicken for you: it realigns the priorities.

Sometimes, when I eat on duty without Zoë, we play this little game where I send her pictures of my food and ask her to guess whether it was good or not. Let’s play it now: what do you reckon to this?

First things first: this is a really generous plate of chicken and gubbins for two people, for just over £32. I think the Port Mahon has taken a tip or two from the Chester Arms’ legendary steak platter without, like Headington’s Six Bells, ripping it off lock, stock and barrel. So you get everything you could possibly want on that steel plate, no need for sides or add-ons.

And everything that goes with it is corking: the big, handsome lettuce leaves pooled with Caesar dressing, the substantial croutons with just enough give, the little sunshine-yellow ramekin of what they call ‘Mahon mayo’ (surely Mahonnaise?), they’re all marvellous. You could almost make yourself a Caesar salad with this, although the menu already boasts one which also includes eggs, bacon and anchovies and a healthy dose of I-almost-wish-I’d-ordered-that.

But the Caesar salad would omit the chicken fat potatoes, and they really are very nice indeed. The texture of them was ideal, the crunch to fluff ratio almost impossible to fault. I’d have liked that chicken fat to make its presence more felt, I’d have liked them saltier, but I’d like many things I won’t get and that, in some way I don’t fully grasp, will eventually make me a better person. Possibly.

That’s all well and good, you’re asking, but what about the chicken? And well you might. Well, like a lot of it, it was a lot of the way there. The leg meat was a tiny bit tough, almost gamey, and there wasn’t perhaps as much of it as I’d hoped. But the succulence of the breast made up for that, and the flavour that had permeated it did too: I don’t know whether the Port Mahon brines it, but I got lemon and I enjoyed the green sauce that had been sparingly drizzled over it. All that was truly serviceable, and then some.

But the other thing it really missed, the thing that makes rotisserie chicken so miraculous, was crispy skin. If you get that right, a lot of the other stuff either falls into place or, more likely, just doesn’t seem so important. It was the single biggest thing that the Port Mahon needs to work on, whether that’s by rubbing with salt and lubricating with butter or any other form of chicken-centric witchcraft, but a rotisserie chicken with slightly elastic skin is one that hasn’t lived up to its potential. Trust me on this: as someone with a lifelong track record of not living up to mine, in the words of Jason Lee in Mallrats, we can smell our own.

The dessert menu just has three items on it, and despite the retro appeal of a raspberry ripple Arctic Roll, the chocolate tart got both our votes. What a strange dessert it turned out to be! I mean, it was delicious: the ganache rich and pleasingly irregular, the pastry dense if perhaps slightly underbaked. I really loved the boozy cherries, both of them, and the little heap of crème fraîche they perched on: crème fraîche would always be my accompaniment for a dessert this rich.

But the size of it was just so strange, such a thin sliver. I know it was only £6.50, and perhaps that’s how the Port Mahon keeps it at that price, but it felt jarring. Somebody had a protractor in that kitchen, and they liked it slightly more than they liked customers: considering the manifest generosity on display everywhere else on the menu, this felt like a blip.

I might have stayed longer and ordered more drinks but Oxford’s best beer garden, in the shape of the Star on Rectory Road, was beckoning and I was conscious that Zoë had never been there before. So we settled our bill – £95, including service charge – and were on our merry way.

The rest of the day was another reminder of everything that makes Oxford a great city – pints of Steady Rolling Man at the Star, a sneaky Swoon gelato on the way to the station and a beer at Tap Social in the Covered Market when we realised we had time before taking the train we wanted. I am very lucky that my Oxford reviews always do quite well in terms of readership, but then it’s never a chore to write about somewhere with such abundant charm.

Reading’s part-time visiting academic and full time transphobe Julie Bindel recently wrote a laughable article in the Spectator – of course it was the Spectator – about how she couldn’t stand gastropubs. It was so full of bad, inaccurate observations that at first I mistook it for a Michael McIntyre routine, but Bindel’s central assertion, under the sophisticated and nuanced headline I hate gastropubs, was that pubs should stick to cheese sandwiches and Scotch eggs, and of course she had a swipe at sourdough and triple-cooked chips, because apparently it’s still 2010.

Just to generalise further about a world Bindel doesn’t actually live in, these pubs are apparently all staffed by “blokes with sleeve tattoos and beard oil”: it’s a wonder she didn’t throw in the word ‘new-fangled’ while she was at it. To be fair, her article also included the quote “As a rule, I am not a fan of pubs” which rather makes you wonder why the Spectator paid her to write an article that is essentially a big steaming heap of Bean Soup Theory.

Still, it’s nice to know that Bindel can be wrong on multiple topics: I guess the Brexiteer ghouls who read the Speccie lap all that up. The point is, call them pubs or call them gastropubs – who really cares? – but either way they are, in all their forms, a big part of how people eat in this country in 2026. And when they’re done well, they are terrific places to eat and drink, or just drink, or pick at snacks with a really good pint. Getting hung up on what you call them completely misses the point that they’re an essential element of food culture here.

Whether they are the centre of village life, like the Jolly Cricketers, or bravely trying to do something else with a centuries-old boozer like the Port Mahon, they matter. And even if the Port Mahon doesn’t get everything right, it does enough to deserve plenty of support while it works on the rest. I liked it a lot, I’m rooting for it and I’m sad that Reading, for all its pubs, doesn’t have anyone even trying to offer something like this.

That’s another food trend that hasn’t really bothered with our town. I’d love an excellent independent food pub, I would really love somewhere doing rotisserie chicken like the very best of the stuff on the continent. Both of them in a single venue? Don’t be ridiculous: it will never happen.

The Port Mahon – 7.7
82 St Clements St, Oxford, OX4 1AW

https://www.theportmahon.com

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Restaurant review: Cuttlefish, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

“This should be lovely” said my dear friend Jerry as we took a table in the window at Cuttlefish, a couple of minutes’ walk away from the far side of Oxford’s Magdalen Bridge. “A fish restaurant!”

I was spending Good Friday with Jerry, in what I rather hoped would become an annual tradition – last year we spent it lunching at Gees – and as is habitual I had given him a range of options to choose from in advance. He passed on the London candidates I gave him: only the smaller plates appealed at Andrew Edmunds and The Hero, and the offal-heavy selection at Borough Market’s Camille was dismissed in a split second. That left Oxford, where Jerry was tempted by No. 1 Ship Street but thought, on balance, that Cuttlefish had more to tempt him.

All this worked out rather well, in truth. People have been bemoaning the lack of a fish restaurant in Reading for a long time – the easily pleased since Loch Fyne closed eight years ago and the more exacting since long before that. The nearest thing to it we have, I suppose, is Henley’s Shellfish Cow, but it always feels to me like a restaurant where they chose the name because they liked the pun and everything else followed from there.

Given that lacuna in Reading’s food scene a short hop to Oxford to see if there was anything suitable sounded like an excellent idea. Besides, after my last Oxford review there was a request to install Jerry as my permanent Oxford correspondent for all long boozy lunches: let it not be said that I never, ever give the people what they want. So Jerry and I rocked up at the start of the long weekend, the sun finally out, ready to investigate.

My preliminary research, however, had given me a bit of a sinking feeling, not that I told Jerry that. The fanciest thing about the website was Cuttlefish’s fetching logo, but lurking beyond that was a menu that seemed a little bit strange, a little bit cheap, a little too large and somewhat lacking in fish. Sure, they sold oysters and caviar and seafood platters, but for a fish and seafood place there appeared to be little fish on the menu.

Perhaps, I told myself, it was all in the daily specials depending what they could get that day. But it also felt a little all over the place, with classic fish and chips sitting uneasily next to squid ink spaghetti and “mixed seafood and chicken paella”.

Maybe some of that could be explained away as overlap with the La Cucina, the Italian restaurant next door under the same ownership. But that was before you got on to the five different types of burger, the steak frites, the brunch menu featuring eggs benedict and chorizo tortilla. Nothing about it shouted that Cuttlefish was a restaurant which had decided to focus on doing a few things very well.

That was sort of borne out by the dining room. It didn’t boast loads of jarring nauticalia, and the pictures on the walls were tasteful black and white numbers. But the Tolix chairs – would that I could go back in time and buy shares – felt low rent, as did the vinyl tableclothes meant, seemingly, to imitate planks of driftwood, which rather clashed with the attractive bare wooden floorboards. Never mind: we took a nice spot in the window and I wedged my arse into a Tolix. Behind Jerry, I could see that the paintwork of the bay windows was a little tired.

Service was lovely and friendly, but it started off shakily and never quite recovered. Jerry is a lovely and self-effacing man who always puts other people first, the kind who volunteers to take the crappy single bed in a communal Airbnb. Maybe it’s his Irish Catholic upbringing, but he is congenitally predisposed not to want his own way, to the point where he sometimes apologises even for having a preference.

I discovered this at lunch because, given that we were at a fish and seafood restaurant, I rather assumed that we’d be attacking a Picpoul de Pinet or an albariño, a riesling or a Chablis. Cuttlefish’s wine list, as you would expect, boasts all of those things, although it never gives a vintage and, in some cases, also neglects to mention the producer. But it was on this day, after years of friendship and several meals on duty, that I discovered that Jerry doesn’t especially care for white wine.

“I’m really sorry” he said, getting that apology in early. “But we can have white if you want.”

I stopped and thought. This was news to me, and I’ve been out for lunch with Jerry numerous times – including twice in Oxford – where I’ve pressed on and ordered a bottle of white without ever realising that Jerry only really enjoys red.

“No, don’t be silly! I’m not a purist about drinking white with fish.”

So we asked our server for help and that’s where our problems began. It felt like there was an unbridgeable language barrier between us, because I was unable to explain, somehow, that we wanted tips on which the lightest and fruitiest of the reds on the wine list was. It didn’t give many clues and there were no obvious candidates like, say, a Fleurie. It didn’t help that this part of East Oxford is a mobile reception not spot: no Vivino to come to the rescue.

“Do you mean the red wine that’s the least strong?” she said.

“No, I mean – which is the fruitiest. You know, not heavy. Which one would go best with fish?”

You’d expect the reds on this list to have been selected with this eventuality in mind, but perhaps not.

“Well, there is the Picpoul de Pinet” she said.

“No, I mean reds. That’s a white wine.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if I was expressing myself exceptionally poorly (if you’ve read enough of my reviews, you’ll know that sometimes happens). The pause lengthened into a silence, and I wondered if time was standing still. No: Jerry was still moving.

“I will get my colleague.”

By the time he arrived we’d given up and settled on a French malbec. This server smirked slightly as we ordered it, as if it was a bad choice, but really, by that point we’d done quite enough deciding and wanted to do some drinking.

It was called Beauté du Sud and the markup on it was reasonable to the point of baffling: £32 for a wine that will apparently set you back £25 retail. If I’d paid £25 for it retail I’d be beyond disappointed, but in a restaurant it wasn’t bad: not too heavy but perhaps a little jammy. Tom Gilbey would probably have had something to say about the sugar levels.

So by this point my hopes were not high, and that was compounded by another cardinal sin: our starters must have come out about five minutes after we ordered them, and you probably know by now how much I love that i.e. not very. But that’s almost the last bit of criticism you will hear from me, because from this point onwards – against all the signs and much to my bemused pleasure – nearly everything was rather good.

Take my calamari, for instance. They even looked pedestrian, and I was half expecting to wade my way through a bowl of breaded rubber bands. So imagine my surprise when I found they were delicious, lightly dusted with a coating that adhered, had crispness, and that they were tender without the slightest twang of elastic.

Dressed with liberally squeezed lemon and then dipped into a ramekin of golden aioli, they were the kind of dish the idea of this restaurant promised, a promise the reality of the restaurant looked as if it would renege on. It wasn’t the hugest portion for £9, but I liked it too much to care about that.

And would you believe that Jerry’s starter was equally good? He’d ordered crab, white and brown, with toast, and it was a simple and surprising – that word again – dish.

“This is so much nicer than those meagre pots you get at the supermarket” enthused Jerry, and he was right. I love the purity of white crabmeat but the dark meat is where the flavour is and this was rich and thought through, with a slowly building heat in the mix which, again, you might not expect. Even the tiger-striped block of toast was considered, was the perfect thing to load the stuff onto. I always think salads are padding in a dish like this, and this one definitely was, but even without it this felt like a very creditable way to spend £11.

By this point the restaurant was still less busy than you’d hope it to be on a long weekend, but there was a regular, if small, trickle of customers arriving and leaving. The people watching potential couldn’t match a spot in North Oxford, or down the Cowley Road, but Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so that didn’t matter.

We were having such a good natter that I didn’t even spend my time worrying that our mains would turn up as quickly as our starters did, so I was pleasantly surprised – yes, surprise once more – when they turned up a very agreeable half hour or so later.

That said, I wish they’d given mine a little longer. The blackboard propped up outside the restaurant had promised two specials but one had already gone by the time we turned up at half-one, so I chose the other, the octopus. And on paper this dish had everything I could have wanted: firm, roasted baby new potatoes with a flash of bronzed skin, a little carpet of still-crunchy samphire, a beautiful sauce with plenty of sweet cherry tomatoes.

It almost was, and could have been, a taste of the Mediterranean (of Greece, where the octopus is usually previously frozen because stocks have never quite recovered from all that madcap dynamite fishing they used to do).

But the problem was that octopus is a tricky beast to get right and, unlike everything else the kitchen tried, their sure touch deserted them here. It was a proper chewy workout for the jaws, more than I would have liked, and it made me apprehensive about my forthcoming dental appointment and the inevitable top up of masseter botox which would follow. If I showed my dentist a picture of this octopus, perhaps he’d give me slightly more this time.

Only the narrow end of the octopus, blackened and crispier, was easy to eat. Even having said all that, I liked the dish so much that I was prepared to be forgiving: to get so close to the perfect dish, somehow, made me celebrate the 90% they had achieved rather that the 10% where they had fallen short. The whole thing sang with summer flavours, made the crummy weather of the previous week feel like an optical illusion, and for £18 I thought that was no mean feat.

Jerry very much enjoyed his fritto misto, although I think it was more his thing than mine. One element, the calamari, was shared with my starter, but the other components were a couple of enormous prawns, some pieces of whiting and a lot of whitebait. You might, as Jerry does, like whitebait rather a lot, in which case I’m delighted for you, but I personally never eat anything that can beat me in a staring content. And whiting might be a perfectly worthy fish – the bit I had tasted decent enough – but somehow it felt a little basic to me.

Then again, this fritto misto was £15, so can you complain? Pricing at Cuttlefish was a little erratic, with many of the mains costing little more than some of the starters. I guess I had been conditioned to think it should have been more expensive, but then again it’s not like they were dishing up whole Dover soles or thick steaks of swordfish. I’d have liked it a little better, I think, if they had been.

We had a couple of side dishes – Jerry because his main needed one and me because I’m greedy. My zucchini fritti were thick, soggy and under-battered, lacking salt or fun. Jerry’s french fries almost certainly came out of a packet and were served in the sort of miniature frying basket that dreary observational comics on Twitter used to slag off ad infinitum. I didn’t finish my courgette fries because they felt like empty calories. Jerry didn’t finish his frites because he just didn’t have room: I half expected him to apologise to our server for that.

After an impressive run I guess it was always a risk that the weird service would return and cause a dip, and so it did. We were asked if we wanted to order dessert, we asked if we could finish our wine first and were told “well, the kitchen is closing”. Nothing on Cuttlefish’s website says that it does that and, indeed, people were still taking tables shortly before that. But never mind: the dessert menu was full of staples like brownies, cheesecake and sticky toffee pudding and they did offer a glass of an unspecified Sauternes if you wanted to push the boat out, no pun intended.

Jerry went for ice cream, a classic Neapolitan trio of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. I don’t know if they were supplied by others or made by the restaurant, but they were as pleasing as their pastel shades might lead you to believe they would be. A couple of the scoops had ice crystals in them, which strangely left me with the impression they were less likely to be bought in, but either way it was a solidly nice and thoroughly unexciting dessert.

I picked from the specials, most of which were dessert with extra booze, be it a pastel de nata with a glass of port or an affogato with Frangelico on the side. I genuinely loved my two spheres of lemon sorbet with limoncello, and thoroughly enjoyed anointing the former with the latter. It felt like the kind of dessert you don’t see on menus much these days, a resolutely old school, tried and tested combo.

As it gradually melted to become the kind of Slush Puppy Oliver Reed would have considered a decidedly good time, I started to feel increasingly well disposed to Cuttlefish, despite its repeated efforts to stop me becoming so. £10 for this, and despite somehow costing more than the larger £7 selection of ice creams I couldn’t say I felt begrudging.

“This has been so nice” said Jerry. “So much better than those snouts and bollocks and trotters in London would have been.”

When our bill arrived it was only £113, not including tip, which did nothing at all to dissipate our collective goodwill. I think Jerry liked Cuttlefish more than I did, but Jerry is also a man who will take the single bedroom in an Airbnb to make his friends happy. In short, he’s just a spectacular human being. And yet I liked Cuttlefish too: I may be a crabby sod who needs to be worn down or won over, but I get there in the end. Once I do I’m as much of an advocate as anybody.

After that our afternoon took a happy, well-rehearsed trajectory. We wound our way to the Star Inn on Rectory Road, one of my two favourite Oxford pubs. Jerry sipped Asahi and I glugged Steady Rolling Man and, despite the utter lack of mobile reception, we got by the way people did in the days before smartphones, by simply chatting and gossiping and not looking things up when we didn’t know them, because there was no way of doing so.

We got into a chat with the academic at the next table, mainly because Jerry fell slightly in love with Nico, her greyhound, but he told himself it was okay that he couldn’t get away with dognapping Nico. “Greyhounds don’t lick”, he said to me. “I need a dog that’s going to show me proper affection.”

Nico’s owner told us stories about the fates faced by ex-racing greyhounds – she adopted him after an unsuccessful month-long career as a racing dog – and both of us came away from the conversation bitterly opposed to racing in all its forms. I have become a cat person in my middle age, but I’ll always make an exception for greyhounds.

It was in short a textbook Oxford outing, the kind to which I’ve become extraordinarily attached. I’m already looking forward to the next one, especially now I have a mandate from my readership to take Jerry out for lunch in the dreaming spires at every available opportunity.

I am increasingly aware lately that happiness can be fleeting, and you have to appreciate it as it happens, rather than simply realising further down the tracks with the benefit of hindsight. I had a brilliant time, and I don’t want these trips to Oxford – on Good Friday or otherwise – to ever come to an end. Fortunately, the city seems to have plans to keep me more than occupied.

En route to the Star I spotted a pub, the Port Mahon, which has decided to specialise in rotisserie chicken and mentally I made a note to put it near the top of my to do list. Once we got to the Star I couldn’t help but notice that they now have a permanent pizza trader. One who also serves a pint of dough balls in garlic butter and Parmesan: I saw them turn up at a neighbouring table, and it took all my strength not to order some. Next time. Or the time after that.

Cuttlefish – 7.4
36 St Clement’s Street, Oxford, OX4 1AB
01865 243003

https://www.cuttlefishoxford.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Pompette, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

This review begins, as a couple of mine have before, outside the Missing Bean on Turl Street in Oxford, a little before noon. I have grabbed a couple of seats outside on the cramped little benches, my dear friend Jerry is inside ordering lattes and pain au chocolat. It will rain later, but the morning is still surprisingly bright, fresh and clement. Loads of people are enjoying their coffee al fresco, sharing in the sharp and long-awaited happiness of being able to do so, all contented smiles and budging up to make room for others. Those that aren’t are just walking past, adding to the rich pageant of an Oxford morning when it feels like spring is within touching distance.

Jerry and I have met in Reading station, just next to the ticket machines, and been those annoying people in our train carriage nattering and catching up – his holiday in Gran Canaria, my continuing convalescence – all the way to Oxford, the first thirty minutes of a conversation that, all told, will go on for about twelve hours unabated. Jerry and I are in Oxford to explore somewhere new for lunch, and all is right with the world.

That makes this the third instalment of a trilogy of Saturday lunches with Jerry in Oxford. It began indifferently last spring, when we braved Gees, a restaurant that turned out to be the city’s largest, most expensive salad bar (fun fact: the owner was recently charged with murdering his centenarian mother).

It continued in the summer when we sat outside Arbequina on the Cowley Road, drinking Asturian white wine in the sunshine and enjoying one of my meals of the year. It was meant to conclude in November at Pompette, the French restaurant out in Summertown, but the weekend of our reservation I was sleeping at home, freshly discharged from hospital.

So it’s surprisingly emotional to have it back in the calendar and to see it happen, to sit on the train with my friend, to drink coffee with him in one of my happy places, lunch just around the corner. The welcome blast of sunshine suggests that winter is nearly over, that nature is healing, but I am healing too.

Pompette celebrates its eighth birthday this year, and in that time has cemented itself as one of the only restaurants in Oxford to get any visibility outside the city. It got glowing write ups in the national press shortly after opening, and since has made its way into the Michelin guide and the Good Food Guide. The critics stop reviewing places after a while, but the guides always keep score, and Pompette was again listed last year by the Good Food Guide as one of Britain’s 100 best local restaurants. It’s in good company, along with the likes of Clay’s, Upstairs At Landrace, Paulette and overall winner – and one of my favourite discoveries of all my time writing this blog – Lucky Lychee.

I have eaten at Pompette a couple of times, but not for something like five years. I went the winter after it opened with a group of my friends known as the Guild Of Ponces and thoroughly enjoyed it (to read about a meal we had at a less convincing French restaurant, click here) and then I took Zoë there the summer after the pandemic. We had a lunch there that was good but flawed, and at the time I decided not to write it up: after all, it was 2021 and it didn’t feel like the right time to say “here’s a hit and miss meal only a train and bus ride away”. Who would have cared?

But Pompette always hovered high on my Oxford to do list, and as Jerry and I ambled through the door bang on time for our reservation I was reminded why. It’s a big space but a very, very attractive one, split into two large dining rooms with space up at the bar and a private dining room upstairs. It’s impossible not to love, with the exposed brickwork, calming deep blue walls, gorgeous framed prints and handsome furniture: even the shelves of merch – cookbooks and tote bags – are appealing.

You would think the sheer scale of it would make it feel vast and impersonal, but I was impressed by how little that was the case. It takes some doing to create a sense of intimacy in a dining room built to these proportions, but our little table in the window was nicely spaced from our neighbours. Shortly after we were seated, just after one o’clock, a group of speculative diners was turned away: at the time I didn’t understand it because the room was still sparsely populated, but before long nearly every table in our half of the restaurant was occupied.

And they had multiple lunchtime sittings, too: a studious group left the table for four next to us just after we left and a lively, fun pair of middle-aged couples swiftly took their place, bedding in for an even boozier lunch than mine and Jerry’s. By then Jerry and I had already kicked off proceedings – a manzanilla for him and something called a Picon Bière for me, a half of Méteor with orange bitters in it, an Aperol for the Untappd classes.

I absolutely loved it, and like the demi pêche my friend Dave discovered last year, or the panaché I loved in Montpellier it gave me a new-found respect for the ways the French have worked out to make beer all fancy. We toasted one another’s good health over a little bowl of almonds, gleaming with oil and dotted with salt, just like the ones I’m used to buying in Malaga.

Pompette’s menu is ostensibly French – chef Pascal Wiedemann hails from the Alsace, although he made his name in London at French restaurants Racine and Terroirs – but it wanders well beyond the Alsace and, to be honest, beyond France’s borders too. I’ve had vitello tonnato there before, and the menu the day Jerry and I visited boasted stracciatella, pumpkin gnocchi with Gorgonzola, boquerones with Manchego and croquetas; in that sense it’s almost the same ball park as the sleek pan-European fare at Branca. There’s also hispi cabbage, which very much places it as a restaurant in the U.K. in 2026.

But the spine of the menu is Gallic: cod brandade, pot au feu, jambon de Bigorre and cervelle de canut, a Lyonnais dip made from fromage blanc, speak to that. And that’s the other thing I would stress about Pompette: don’t read too much into the menu on their website. Jerry and I agreed on the train up that it looked, from our research, pretty limited but was boosted on the day by a trio of very tempting specials. Without that, if you couldn’t find anything you liked, you might end up resorting to steak, which always feels to me like something of a fallback in very good restaurants.

The years have ravaged the pricing: when I look at the picture of my receipt from 2021 the main course was shy of £20, whereas nearly everything is £30 or more now. But none of that feels like it matters so much when something knocks it out of the park, and that’s exactly how I felt about my starter. A puck of boudin noir came encased in bronzed but fluffy brioche, the whole thing moated with the kind of thick, reduced sauce you can almost see your face in. A little wedge of beautiful quince was a fig leaf to wellness, dusted with espelette pepper which I thought the dish could probably do without.

But really, this was one of those plates where, for as long as it’s in front of you and some of it remains, the world is a kind and happy place. When I think about what it was like, I can only remember eating anything comparable in France and when I described it to my boss the following week – he is a keen Oxford fan, especially of the Daunt Books just round the corner from Pompette – he said “so it was sort of like an incredibly middle-class hot dog, then”. Well, no. No but also yes.

Jerry was determined to conquer the gastronomic spectre of his trip to Gran Canaria, where he trudged through a very disappointing fish soup, so he braved Pompette’s soupe de poisson. But, spoiler alert, no bravery is really required when you order somewhere like Pompette. At Pompette, it is all about everything – from the cooking to the eating to the meal itself – taking absolutely as long as it needs to take, of perfecting over time and distilling to an epitome.

Just as this became the epitome of the perfect Oxford lunch with Jerry, the soup was its best self, utterly reduced and concentrated, so deep in flavour that you needed a metaphorical diving suit. Jerry adored it. I didn’t try it, although if I’d had a spoon handy I’d have given it a go, but even after it was finished that aroma, intense with fish and lightly coaxed with aniseed, stayed with me, making me wish I’d ordered it. The rouille, Gruyère and croutons were all present and correct, and Jerry made me try a bit of the crouton because he couldn’t believe its lightness. I did as I was asked. I couldn’t believe it either.

By this point we were slightly ahead of the table next to us, so we got to earwig on their conversation with the serving staff, who without exception were absolutely at the top of their game. The server told our neighbours that although you felt like there ought to be shellfish of some kind in that soup, there was none: but they used every single bit of the fish, guts and all, to produce that extraordinary flavour.

At this point we were caught by our neighbours paying far too much attention, which led to some good-natured bickering across the rest of a very happy lunch. One of the couples were locals – and very lucky to be, too – and their friends were up from Oxford. One was a lawyer who occasionally worked in Reading, so I made sure to recommend Clay’s to her. Our interest in their advice from the wait staff was eventually mirrored by their interest in seeing what Jerry’s and my food looked like, and by the end I think they were half tempted to join us in the pub for a post-prandial debrief. Anyway, two of them ordered the soup and both of them loved it.

One of the chaps at my table couldn’t persuade his friend to order the special Jerry and I had, which meant I felt bad when it turned up and was spectacular: he had to settle for sharing an enormous pork chop instead, which looked like a more than serviceable consolation prize.

But fortune favoured me and Jerry, in the shape of the most beautifully cooked duck breast swimming in a thick, glossy bigarade sauce – more of that bitter orange from my apéritif – and festooned with rind. Again, Pompette’s preturnatural talent with sauces was deployed to stunning effect: I think of all the cuisines out there French is my favourite, and it’s because of things like this. They are the clincher.

It turned out that Jerry was trying to lay ghosts to rest with this order as well, having cooked duck at home a while back and found that it came out tougher than Tom Hardy after a crash course of anabolic steroids. By contrast this was pink, the fat soft and moreish, the skin crisped and burnished, every contrasting texture timed and rested to be spot on all at once. “I bet this duck had a fantastic life” mused Jerry. Not as fantastic as ours right now, I thought.

The accoutrements with this were also bang on. I have never much liked endive, but Pompette has the talent many great restaurants do, where it can win you over on ingredients you thought you didn’t care for. This, braised and blackened, was a perfect foil. If I had one criticism it was that the splodge of celeriac purée, great though it was, was pretty small.

But on the other hand the thing on this plate you wanted to be huge was, and that was the croquette of duck leg. The picture down there doesn’t do justice to how big this was, or how substantial, how dense, how utterly crammed with shredded duck leg, herbs, salt, fat and nothing else. The duck breast was in the middle of the table, but this was the star of the show. And this main, to share, was £60 for two.

Ironically, the reason the gents at the table next to us didn’t order the duck special was that the dissenter didn’t like the sound of the duck leg croquette. I told his friend that he should consider making new friends. There was a pause, and I worried I’d gone too far, and then he spoke.

“Thank you!” he said.

By this point we had polished off a bottle of red that was a new one on me, a Vinsobres from the Rhone Valley. The wine list was absolutely magnificent, and will part you from plenty of money if your resolve weakens for a moment. Our server recommended a handful of reds from Jura’s legendary producer Tony Bornard, and they all sounded right up my alley, but I struggled with spending £100 on one: to Pompette’s credit, most of them are £50 retail so that markup is positively encouraging. But again, our server was superb at navigating us to something more kindly priced – £54, with a more conventional markup – but quite exquisite. We swirled it in huge, fishbowl-like glasses, and enjoyed every drop.

Pompette’s dessert menu is small – just the three options, plus a cheeseboard, with suggested wine pairings for all of them. I always give dining companions the first choice, but I was delighted that I could easily have ordered any of them. Once Jerry had chosen I was torn between the rhubarb and custard tart or the kirsch choux bun with warm chocolate sauce, and my server made the clever point that the latter had been on Pompette’s menu since day one so would always be there for me, whereas rhubarb had a season. I was sold. This argument also worked on the neighbouring table, roughly as we were settling up.

It was an absolute joy – a mild custard with just enough wobble, an acceptably thin pastry base and a gorgeous lacquered, almost tiled top level of rhubarb. I’m not used to being given a knife and fork for dessert but this dish did need it, because the rhubarb still had fibre and resistance, and otherwise would have slid clean off the rest.

But having a proper cross-section, as was intended, you realised what a precise balance of sweet and sharp it was. A puddle of crème fraîche next to it was topped with a splodge of rhubarb compote stewed beyond the point of resistance. See, it can also be like this, it seemed to say. I had this with the Jurançon they recommended for Jerry’s dessert, because it interested me more than the suggested pairing. £12 for the tart, £6 for a small glass of golden dessert wine, absolutely zero complaints.

Jerry went for a seemingly less French choice, a slab of sticky ginger cake with a coconut and rum sorbet slowly melting on it. This was perhaps French by way of Guadaloupe, and for me the best and most interesting thing about it was a glorious wedge of roast pineapple. Jerry liked it, and was determined to have dessert over cheese (with hindsight, I should have pointed out that they weren’t mutually exclusive), but the sorbet was the weak point for him. I think he was right – it was all coconut and very little rum, and something sharper might have worked better.

I know comparisons can come across as invidious, but I couldn’t help but view my companionable, libatious, drawn-out lunch at Pompette through the lens of my whistle stop tour of Hypeland at The Devonshire, the subject of last week’s review. This meal was less expensive – including tip our snacks, apéritif, three courses, bottle of wine and glasses of dessert wine set us back just over £216, slightly less costly than the Devonshire. Pompette’s room was nicer and more spacious, the service absolutely faultless.

And it was the kind of meal I wanted, a celebration of lunch, of good company, of having nowhere to go and eating in a restaurant with no desire whatsoever to move you along. The best part of three hours passed in a flash, and at the end of it we availed ourselves of the very tasteful loos and gorgeous-smelling hand soap and made our way back out into North Oxford knowing we’d had a lunch for the ages. Daunt Books followed, and then racing the rain to North Parade, our second Parade of the day, where the back room of the Rose & Crown had a table with our name on it and crisp cider behind the bar. It was, as days go, pretty unimprovable.

Reading doesn’t have anywhere like Pompette, despite the fact that Caversham would very much like to be Reading’s Summertown, or Jericho. That Reading can’t attract this kind of place is one of the eternal mysteries which I fully expect to be bemoaning until either I get bored or you do (let’s be honest: you’ll get bored first). That Oxford is a 30 minute train ride away, and Pompette is a short bus ride from the city centre is something, on the other hand, you will never hear me complain about.

I’ll almost leave the last word to Jerry this week. “It would be a perfect special occasion restaurant” he said. He’s too modest to appreciate that every lunch with him, for me at least, is a special occasion. But he does read this blog, so now he knows.

Pompette – 9.0
7 South Parade, Oxford, OX2 7JL
01865 311166

https://www.pompetterestaurant.co.uk

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Bar review: Bigfoot, Oxford

On 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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Pub review: The Chester Arms, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

The concept of choice in restaurants, I’ve always thought, brings out the inner Goldilocks. Too wide a menu and paralysis sets in, but if it’s too narrow you can’t help feeling straitjacketed. It’s why restaurants that only offer one or two dishes: Le Relais de Venise with its entrecôte, or Burger & Lobster with its – well, you know – have never really caught on here.

I’m reminded of the immortal words of Peter Butterworth in Carry On Abroad, an evergreen favourite of mine, when his Spanish waiter Pepe comes out with the immortal words “of course you are having choices! You can having sausage and chippings, sausage and beans or beans and chippings. That’s choices”. And believe me, I don’t think anybody would have enjoyed dining at the Palace Hotel in Elsbels.

The only time we omnivores really think it’s acceptable to restrict our choices is when we go to a restaurant that offers variations on a theme: burger restaurants, pizza parlours, Nando’s. And yes, Nando’s does technically serve stuff that isn’t chicken but that’s hardly the point, because nobody goes there for that. If somebody at a table at Nando’s is eating a halloumi burger, you can be very confident that they don’t eat chicken and have been dragged there by some inconsiderate sod who does.

Then, of course, there’s the other occasion when we feel as if we have no choice: because there’s something on the menu that we must have, or always order. But those things, as I discovered when I counted down Reading’s top 50 dishes a couple of years ago, are hugely subjective. My wife might be unable to visit Kungfu Kitchen without ordering their deep fried fish, and believe me she is, but other people would mount an equally passionate case for the sweet and sour aubergine, or the lamb with cumin.

Besides, the better the restaurant – like KFK, or Clay’s – the less likely it is, really, that there’s a single must-order dish. What are the chances that a kitchen so skilful would produce just the one thing everybody has to eat? Pretty slim, if you ask me.

No, generally the concept that a restaurant has something you must try, a legendary dish in the making, is another by-product of hype, and usually comes out of the mouths of critics when they visit somewhere, soon after it opens. I’ve tried Brutto’s coccoli, Town’s saffron risotto and Kolae’s fried prawn heads, all acclaimed as instant classics when those venues opened, and they varied from quite nice to very good. Were any of them dishes those restaurants should be exclusively associated with? Not really. Two of them weren’t even the best thing I had in those meals, but it shifts newspapers to rave.

So no, restaurants that become synonymous with a single dish are rare in general, and I don’t think Reading has any to speak of. But that makes the subject of this week’s review even more unusual, because it does occupy that very niche territory. The Chester Arms is an Oxford pub just off the Iffley Road, east from Magdalen Bridge but a smidge closer to it than the Magdalen Arms. It has been under its current management for over ten years. And it’s very much famous for one thing in particular, its steak platter.

Now, it feels wrong to me for most restaurants to describe their own dishes as famous. I still remember the overblown, unsubstantiated hype for The Botanist’s hanging kebabs, for instance, which were more hanging than famous. It’s a bit like restaurants keeping a certificate in their window from over ten years ago, or restaurant bloggers describing themselves as ‘multi award-winning’ when they have, in fact, won none. Famous is something other people are meant to say about you, not how you describe yourself.

And yet in the Chester Arms’ case, you might make an exception. The pub’s homepage describes them as “home of the famous steak platter” and the dish has its own page on their website. It’s the creation of head chef Hamzah Taynaz – although Companies House makes it seem like he might have parted company with the pub over the summer – and it looks like a doozie: onglet cooked rare or medium rare, chips, béarnaise, cabbage with bacon, dressed salad. £50 for two people, or £70 for three, which on paper at least is impressive value; it was £30 and £45 back in 2015, but it’s been a bruising decade.

The thing, though, is this: I have been told to visit the Chester Arms numerous times, by people I know and by people who’ve tipped me off online. It’s been the place at the top of my Oxford to do list for quite a while – I would have reviewed it last month were it not for a medical misadventure – and every single person who has told me to go there has mentioned the steak platter. Some of them had eaten it, and raved about it. Others hadn’t, but left me in no doubt that if they did go there it’s exactly what they would order.

In fact, when I went to Arbequina last month I happened to be on the same train as someone I follow on Instagram, and when I messaged her to ask where she’d eaten in the city I was unsurprised to find that she had gone to the Chester Arms. “We had a great meal there” was her verdict. “It lived up to the hype for us.” So finally, last weekend, I got my chance to try it for size.

My plus one for this meal was my old friend and Oxford compadre Dave, and as we had a pre-lunch latte in Peloton Espresso’s very agreeable back garden I told him that this meal made him, with the exception of Zoë, my most capped plus one. Not bad going for a man who valiantly resisted joining me on duty until a couple of years ago, I told him.

“I thought you’d expect me to have opinions about everything!” he laughed. “And I’m too easy-going for that, I just want to eat nice food. But then I realised that actually you aren’t fussed about all that, so now I don’t mind tagging along.”

Dave was, I had to concede, probably correct. He likes to make much of how low maintenance he is, by which he means that he’ll generally do whatever you like and doesn’t have strong preferences. In the past I may have found that a tad frustrating, but as a dining companion for a restaurant reviewer, it turns out, it’s pretty much a dream CV. Besides, Dave quite rightly pointed out that for our forthcoming holiday to Bruges I had insisted on the dates, insisted on a hotel, changed my mind and picked another hotel and so on and so on, so maybe I quite liked having a low maintenance friend after all.

The Chester Arms is another of those lovely backstreet boozers I didn’t even know existed and like the Star off Cowley Road, it reminded me a little of Reading’s Nag’s Head and the Retreat, only built to a different scale. It was a big, handsome corner plot with a decent-sized garden and inside it was a very attractive room with wooden floorboards, large sturdy tables ringed by fetching booths and plenty of natural light. It was a properly gorgeous space which made me think, as so often, that I really missed the Lyndhurst.

Having said that, I do have to say that some of its tables were more equal than others. The place was absolutely packed – you have to book quite far in advance if you want a table – and without much in the way of soft furnishings, which made it a cacophonous place to be. The two tables nearest to us were the handsome ones for larger groups but our little table with unforgiving chairs, near the kitchen, next to a stack of high chairs, felt like one they put in the seating plan because they could, not because they should.

In fairness the table directly in front of me was possibly even worse. The large group settled in nearby was full of people who were young, exuberant and happy to be there. I love Dave dearly, but we could only manage one of those three. “They’re probably all catching up at the end of their summer holidays, ready for term to begin” he said equably, and I felt even older than usual.

The Chester Arms’ menu was compact in the way you’d expect when most people are there for the feature attraction: a handful of nibbles, only three starters to speak of and three main courses which were not the steak platter. One of them was a vegetarian mezze selection (“perfect as a starter to share, or to be enjoyed as a main for one”) which had, by the looks of it, strong Nando’s halloumi burger energy. The starters were under a tenner, all mains save the steak platter hovered around twenty pounds.

Now, to get this out of the way from the off, our service was brilliant from beginning to end. Our server was young, American, properly charming and looked after we two avuncular has-beens perfectly, and I can’t say enough good things about her. With one exception, which is that I saw a blackboard with specials being shown to other tables later in the afternoon but we were never told about it or given a chance to look at it. In an ideal world it just said, in big cursive script, Stop fooling yourself, we all know you’re having the steak platter but, as I didn’t see it, I can only guess.

Dave was reluctant to have a starter in case the steak platter turned out to be too much, which did make me wonder if some kind of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers situation was going on, but I managed to persuade him to share the most appealing starter with me. Actually it might have been the absolute best thing I ate all afternoon, so I half wished I’d just pressed on without him. Lamb koftas were a trio of plump nubbins, beautifully coarse and with just the faintest whiff of offal to them, really gorgeous stuff.

They came with flatbreads which felt bought in, but which were good nonetheless, a small stack of guindilla and what was described as green tahini. I’m not really sure what that was, because tahini is a paste with a very distinctive taste and texture and this was none of those things, and it didn’t have a particularly strong note of sesame, but I quite liked it anyway. Dave was unconvinced by it, but won over by the koftas. He let me have the spare one, because he’s a good egg, and even though they were almost more faggot than kofta it did make me wonder what a Chester Arms mixed grill would be like. That had better not have been on the specials menu.

We had a while to catch up after that because each steak is cooked to order and takes, if the menu is to be believed, 45 minutes. So he sipped his pint of alcohol free Rothaus, and I had a pale from DEYA: we were both keeping our powder dry for a more substantial session post lunch. I didn’t know at the time – I learned this from Instagram after the fact – that landlady Becca Webb had just come back from a tasting tour in Bilbao with her wine suppliers, and if I had I might have paid closer attention to the wine list. Next time.

Anyway, Dave and I had a good old chinwag, if constantly drowned out by the relentless, unforgivable youngness of people at our neighbouring tables, as we struggled gamely with the heat from the nearby kitchen. The problem with a restaurant where everybody orders the same thing is that each time it comes out from the kitchen you perk up, think it’s yours and then realise it’s going to another table. But in a way it’s genius, because it raises your anticipation over and over again, and every passing platter looked amazing.

Besides, it distracted me from Dave giving me a litany of people he knew, roughly our age, who were either seriously or terminally ill. They don’t call your fifties ‘sniper’s valley’ for nothing, and after I’d heard about three of them my fight or flight health anxiety kicked in and I asked him, ever so nicely, to stop. Is this what we’ve got to look forward to? I wondered to myself.

I can’t imagine anybody’s life expectancy would be enhanced by what turned up at our table about half an hour after our starters, but just look at it. You’d shave a few days off the end of your life for one of these, wouldn’t you?

It’s difficult to give any kind of scale with a photograph like that but trust me, that serving plate was substantial. Our two serving plates were on the smaller side, but that just gave you an excuse to go back again and again: not for nothing did the pot of utensils on our table include forks, sharp knives and a little set of steak tongs.

Everything about this dish was bang on or thereabouts. The onglet was cooked beautifully medium rare and, in the main was buttery and absurdly easy to cut, any tension in the fibres expertly soothed away; I appreciated the irony of eating something that was better rested, most likely, than I will ever be. The béarnaise was ever so slightly thin with a slight hit of vinegar, but it hadn’t split and went very well with the steak; I might have liked a little more, between two, and a spoon to dish it up with but as quibbles go those were minor.

The other thing I loved, though, was how complete a dish this was and how every component brought something to the table. The heap of savoy cabbage shot through with lardons was truly joyous, the chips were thick, crunchy and surprisingly good. And even the salad, which I’d dismissed in the run-up as a makeweight, was not an afterthought. It was properly dressed, and it supplied the lightness and acidity that would otherwise have been missing from the platter.

Our server had asked us if we wanted to upgrade to the platter for three (“nice bit of upselling”, said Dave) but we’d decided not to, mostly because I thought if I was reviewing the place you’d want to know if a platter for two actually served two. And my verdict is that it does: we finished all our steak and most of everything else, and even in the time between finishing and our almost empty plates being taken away we were both picking with forks – dunking a chip in the béarnaise or trawling it through the juices from the onglet, or the good stuff that was left after you’d airlifted the cabbage away. If service had been less on it, I think our plate would have ended up clean as a whistle.

I tried to send a picture of the platter to Zoë – because she’d asked, even though I imagine it would have made her seethe with resentment – and failed, because the mobile signal in that part of Oxford is like taking a day trip to 1997. Perhaps it was for the best.

Our server asked if we fancied dessert, so I asked Dave if he fancied dessert – because I’d have looked like a right fat bastard scoffing one on my own – and I was hugely relieved when he decided to join me. Perhaps the bodysnatchers hadn’t troubled his house in Wootton Bassett after all. The dessert menu was also compact: three desserts, or ice cream with Pedro Ximenez, or a selection of ice creams, or an affogato.

Another thing to like very much about the Chester Arms was the very appealing selection of digestifs, and the options of red or white port, Sauternes or PX: I had another half of the pale instead, but on another day would have veered in the direction of something smaller and sweeter. The pale, by the way, was decent if piney: not DEYA’s iconic Steady Rolling Man but a reasonable stand-in. I’d have checked it in on Untappd, but I was in 1997 so it hadn’t been invented yet.

I was tempted by something ice cream based, but the server couldn’t tell me where the Chester Arms’ ice cream came from and I wasn’t invested or entitled enough to make her ask. So instead I went for my tried and tested choice, a tiramisu. It was about as different as possible from most of the ones I’ve had recently – not loose, airy and boozy like the tiramisu at, say, Paesinos or RAGÙ. It was more old school, by which I suppose I mean inauthentic: much firmer, much denser, crammed into that Duralex glass like they’d almost forgotten to say when.

And it was gorgeous. I’d forgotten that authentic is overrated, with all the honest-to-goodness Italian food cropping up in places like Reading and Bristol, but this was a delight from first spoon to last – far, far more cream than sponge but laced with Courvoisier and Frangelico. I loved it far more than I expected to, and it made me think again that the Chester Arms might be famous for its steak platter but it had made the canny choice of ensuring that none of the other items on the menu were an also-ran.

Dave had the crème brûlée, which is just one of those dishes I never personally order. I tried a spoonful of it and it, too, was right on the money: just enough warmth, the carapace just the right thickness, the cream vanilla-speckled and exemplary.

We didn’t tarry, because by that point it was incredibly warm and both of us fancied stretching our legs. Besides, I had promised to introduce Dave to the Star and his beloved Liverpool had finished playing, so the lack of mobile reception was no longer the positive nuisance it had been. My advice is that if you’re going to spend time somewhere with absolutely no phone signal, the best idea is to do it in the company of someone where you can talk for hours without feeling the need to check your phone. So that’s exactly what I did.

Our meal for two – two and a half courses each, one of them that steak platter, and a pint apiece came to just under £100, including a discretionary 12.5% service charge which was totally earned. When you think that half of that whole bill was down to a single dish that the pub endearingly describes as a “small steak”, you have to hand it to them.

I’m really glad I finally made it to the Chester Arms – partly because it’s been an ambition for such a long time and partly because it was fascinating to try a restaurant in this country which really is synonymous with the one dish, to see if that reputation is justified. And it absolutely is – if you like steak at all, you would have a ball hopping on a train to Oxford and making your way to the Chester Arms. And if you don’t, but you know someone who does, make sure the two of you take a friend with you: you can have the fish and chips and they can have the time of their lives.

I do find myself wondering though, still: what was on that specials board? But I know that it could have had skate wing on it, or fried chicken, or countless other things, and I still would have ordered the steak platter. So does the steak platter qualify as famous? Yes, I think it probably does.

But if I went back to the Chester Arms again, knowing what their kitchen is capable of, would I really still order the steak platter a second time? Also yes. I’d be even sadder, though, if they’d taken those lamb koftas off the menu, because it was the dish I’d want to order every time, if it was up to me. That’s choices.

The Chester Arms – 8.4
19 Chester St, Oxford, OX4 1SN
01865 790438

https://chesterarmsoxford.co.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

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