Tag: Oxford

Restaurant review: Kopitiam, Oxford

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Here’s a question for you – if you had decided to have lunch at a restaurant, and you knew for a fact that it didn’t take reservations, when would you get there, all things being equal? Would you turn up when it opened, bang on noon, or would you arrive early and be at the front of the queue? Or would you aim for about half one, to capitalise on the end of the lunch rush? Would it bother you, or make you anxious, or would you be blasé about the whole thing? Would you have a backup plan?

This wasn’t a hypothetical situation, because last weekend I was in Oxford with my old friend Dave and his son Leo, and I was set on having lunch at Kopitiam, a Malaysian restaurant in Summertown that received a glowing review from Tom Parker Bowles in the Mail On Sunday last December. But it didn’t take bookings, and Summertown is about a forty minute walk from the centre, so what to do?

This highlighted something of a philosophical schism between Dave and me. He would gladly have been there before the clock struck noon, ready to take the first table in the whole restaurant. “I prepare for things precisely so I don’t get anxious” he explained, although I suspected we both did equal amounts of worrying about stuff, just at different times. For my part, I thought turning up around half twelve would be more than sufficient. I knew it was Saturday lunchtime, but how busy could the place be?

It grieves me to admit that Dave was right and I was wrong: turning up bang on half past, we found every table occupied and the restaurant heaving. There were two tables out front, both with the standard-issue Tolix chairs in place, but it wasn’t quite warm enough for that kind of thing. So we went over the road to the excellent Colombia Coffee Roasters, sipped a latte and I kept a restless eye on the footfall heading to and from Kopitiam.

“It’s okay mate, if it’s still full we can always just go to Pompette a few doors down, or the pizza place on this road” said Dave equably. I didn’t understand what was going on: why was he so chilled about this after he’d been proven right? Why wasn’t he saying I told you so, the way I would have done had our roles been reversed? Honestly, you’re friends with someone for over thirty years but some days it’s like you just don’t know them at all. Leo, just turned 18 and off to Durham at the end of the month to start his history degree, sensibly stayed out of this one, and got to work on his mocha instead.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end. Half an hour later we went back and a number of tables were unoccupied, so we ensconced ourselves. The fact that so many tables had cleared so quickly suggested this was a functional lunch spot, not somewhere to linger, but we were too happy to have found space to be bothered by that.

The room was functional too – but in a way that worked, with plain, standard issue chairs and tables, faux exposed brickwork wallpaper and brightly lit pictures of all the dishes up on the wall. Now normally this would set alarm bells ringing, but somehow Kopitiam pulled it off – the saturated photos had an almost Martin Parr feel to them. And equally importantly, they all looked like food you’d actually want to eat.

Kopitiam’s menu was a tad confusing. Or really I should say menus, because you got two with no real indication of the relationship between them. The smaller one looked more Malaysian, the larger more Chinese, but the titles of the two printed menus didn’t exactly explain why this was. The smaller menu had some pictures of the food, the bigger, more generic menu, did not.

Malaysian Street Food And Cafe said the bigger menu, incongruously above the prices for crispy duck, Thai green papaya salad, sesame prawn toasts and edamame. And the same dishes, appeared on both menus in some cases – but where they did, the pricing was not the same. Anyway, on examination the smaller menu looked to be the lunch menu, the larger one the dinner menu – Kopitiam’s website spelled this out, but at the time it was a head-scratcher.

That’s partly because nothing at Kopitiam was expensive, whichever menu you ordered from and whatever it was calling itself. Few starters cost more than eight pounds, most mains on the lunch menu didn’t get north of twelve. Even on the main menu dishes tended to jostle around the ten pound mark, although rice cost extra. It did prompt a lot of discussions and plea bargaining, though, around how to try the best of the menu and what might or might not be representative. I felt, in the back of my mind, like having the Chinese dishes would be copping out.

“Are we having starters as well?” asked Dave.

“You do remember who you’re having lunch with, don’t you?” I said. Honestly, you’re friends with someone for over thirty years and some days it’s like they don’t know you at all: I don’t think the words if it’s okay with you can we skip starters have ever left my lips in all the time I’ve known Dave. And Leo is an enthusiastic eater himself: I remember going to Dolce Vita with him and his dad, back when he was something like ten years old, and watching him charm the socks off the waiters by ordering the monkfish with squid ink pasta and finishing the lot (“we have many adults who don’t try that dish” said our server, rightly impressed).

Our starters came out as we sipped a fiery and enjoyable ginger beer apiece: Kopitiam has no alcohol licence, which didn’t bother me, but also didn’t have any Sarsi (a Malaysian take on root beer), which bothered me far more. They also do a plethora of other Malaysian drinks – kopi, teh tarik and Ying Yang, a blend of coffee and tea which I was tempted to order out of morbid curiosity alone.

First to arrive were lok bak, minced pork wrapped in bean curd skin and then fried until crispy. These were a tactile delight, little brittle-coated nuggets of joy crying out to be dipped in sweet chilli sauce and scoffed. Perfect for sharing, perfect for social eating, perfectly enjoyable. And if I’d never had anything like this before, as I suspect Dave and Leo hadn’t, I would have been waxing lyrical.

But the best can be the enemy of the good, and I kept casting my mind back to a very similar dish at Lucky Lychee the previous month. There the pork was coarse and crumbly, the sweet chilli sauce was home made rather than out of a bottle and I got more of the spicing: Lucky Lychee boasts a ten spice mix, compared to the five spices deployed by Kopitiam. It showed: the Winchester restaurant’s rendition was easily twice as good.

By far the single best thing we ordered was chosen because we saw it at the next table and had to have a piece of the action. It was impossibly rugged-looking fried chicken, and our neighbours somehow had the superhuman (or inhuman, depending on how you view such things) restraint to leave it there, in full view, for something like five minutes without making inroads into it.

I swear that our portion arrived and was dispatched before they finished theirs, and I wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed of that. But it was so, so good. It was half a dozen wings, in a crunchy, gnarled coating which had just the slightest hint of funk from the shrimp sauce used in the marinade. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of wings, especially when they’re sauced or tossed, because for me the reward to faff ratio is out of kilter. But these were an absolute joy to rend and gnaw, to the extent where I wondered if I was giving wings an unduly hard time.

“I think these are the crispiest wings I’ve ever had” said Dave. “I wish we’d ordered a portion each.”

“There’s nothing to stop us ordering more” I said. “We could have them for dessert. Did you know there’s a fish restaurant in Lisbon where you have a steak roll for dessert?”

Dave gave me an indulgent look that said, ever so nicely, why are you like this? But I knew I’d planted the seed about dessert chicken, so I left it at that.

Last of all, we tried a Malaysian staple, the roti canai. Now, I had high hopes for this after reading Tom Parker Bowles’ review. He said they were charred, chewy and as delicate as silk handkerchiefs. Leaving aside the fact that I’m not sure something can be all three of those things at once, Kopitiam’s roti were delicious but more like rolled-up balls of tissue – sorry for the image – than silk handkerchiefs. I liked them, and they were definitely greaseless, but in little clumps they weren’t the easiest to dip into a little bowl of an admittedly delicious curry sauce, with plenty of brooding depth.

Our mains came out while we were still eating our starters. Now, this has happened to me before in a Malaysian restaurant, one called Wau in Newbury that I visited five years ago. And I complained about it in the review, and a few people told me I was being culturally ignorant and that in Malaysian cuisine everything tends to arrive at once. So I won’t moan about that again, even though it wouldn’t be my preferred way to eat. And I suppose it explains why a restaurant that’s full at noon can find room for you thirty minutes later, so swings and roundabouts.

Dave and Leo had both chosen noodle dishes, but more different noodle dishes would be hard to imagine, despite having some of the same ingredients. Dave ordered Kopitiam’s special ho fun with not one, not two, but all of the following: prawns, squid, fish cake and pork. All that and what the menu described as an “egg gravy” on top. Something was surely lost in translation, because the words “egg” and “gravy”, next to one another, don’t scream take my money to me. But Dave seemed to enjoy it.

“The texture is a little… well… it’s kind of like mucus.”

“You can’t say that! I can’t put that in the review.” I said, fully intending to put it in the review.

“Well, it’s tasty mucus.”

“This is the thing, though, with some cuisines I think” I pontificated. “It’s just about us not having frames of reference. So we are generally a bit put off by gelatinous food, but I guess that’s because we associate that texture with sweet stuff. And nobody eats things in savoury jelly any more, apart from pork pies. It’s a tricky one with this kind of food – and it will make this review difficult to write. If you rave on it’s cultural appropriation, if you sound like you don’t understand it you just come across like Nigel Farage.”

“Anyway, I’m not sure if that is a fishcake. It has the same texture as a scallop. Anybody who promises a fishcake and gives you a scallop is okay in my book.”

If Dave’s dish was our one Cantonese foray into the menu, Leo had chosen a Malaysian classic. Hokkien mee was wheat noodles rather than rice noodles, cooked in a darker, stickier sauce with the same mix of surf and turf and with, allegedly, the addition of fried pork lard, although that wasn’t visible to the naked eye. This looked more like it, and Leo polished it off without complaint. I didn’t try it, but I was struck that the noodles were broken and short, and I was grateful that I hadn’t ordered it because with my rudimentary chopstick skills I might well have ended up wearing half of it.

This is where, if I was a proper restaurant reviewer, I’d probably wank on about wok hei, whatever that is. But none of us are kidding ourselves that I am, so I won’t.

Originally I was going to have the beef rendang, because Dave had planned to order the Marmite chicken. But when he changed his mind it was up for grabs, and having enjoyed this dish so much at Lucky Lychee I wanted another bite of the cherry. And really, it was a similar experience to the lok bak – if I’d never had this dish before I probably would have loved it, but I knew how good it could be and so I knew that this fell short.

The texture was magnificent – we’d already established that Kopitiam could fry chicken like nobody’s business – so it wasn’t that. But the sauce was more honey than Marmite, more one note sweetness than harmonised salt and sugar. And there wasn’t a lot of it – what there was coated the chicken, and the chicken had all the crannies and crevices to make that happen, but that was your lot. What that meant was a few bites of reasonably enjoyable but dryish chicken, rendered drier by plain white rice, and not much else.

Partly my fault, perhaps, for ordering it from the lunch menu, and perhaps if I’d ordered a separate helping and a separate bowl of rice I wouldn’t have felt so diddled. But I don’t know, I still think at the end I would have had a whole expanse of naked rice, desperate to be covered with anything. I poured the rest of the sauce from the roti canai onto a little patch of rice and ate that. I left the rest.

“Are you okay mate? You haven’t eaten much of your rice” said Dave.

“There’s nothing to eat it with” I said, gesturing at my plate. Tell a lie: there was a little mound of undressed salad on the plate fighting it out with the rice to be the least appealing, like Robert Jenrick versus Kemi Badenoch. To my mind it was a dead heat.

Once we’d finished our mains I watched the seed I’d planted earlier playing out in Dave’s mind. He still wanted more chicken wings, but he also didn’t want to look like it was his idea.

“So I suppose we aren’t going to have more chicken wings now, are we.”

“We can have more chicken wings if you want them. Do you want more wings, Dave?”

“Well, I’ll have some if somebody else wants some.”

This is the dance you have to do with some people, and my dear old friend is one of them. Fortunately Leo is eighteen and slim and likes food and has no compunctions about it, so he said that yes, he would very much like more of the delicious chicken wings. So Dave flagged down our server, asked for some more and they arrived and we fell on them with no less gusto than the first portion. It was the perfect end to a thoroughly agreeable lunch.

I do have to say too that the service at Kopitiam is absolutely brilliant – I would say the majority of the customers in there were Chinese or Malaysian, but I didn’t feel like a sore thumb, or ever less than extremely well looked after. I guess once you’ve had the King’s stepson in there, you can easily manage plebs like me, one of my oldest friends and the apple of his eye. We settled up – our meal came to just over seventy-five pounds, not including service – and we headed off in the direction of the Rose And Crown on North Parade for a pint and a debrief.

Kopitiam, by the way, is on South Parade, which is further north than North Parade, one of those wonderful paradoxes you sometimes find, like Gary Oldman being younger than Gary Numan.

Whenever I travel a bit further for the blog, I’m aware that the stakes are higher and I try to pick places where I’m pretty certain I’ll have a great meal. “Hey, come and read about this place miles from Reading that isn’t really worth going to!” is not much of a sales pitch, and believe me, I know it. Generally I’ve had decent luck when I’ve travelled to Oxford on duty, and I’ve never reviewed a dud in the city. And I wish I could offer a more ringing endorsement of Kopitiam, but I don’t think I can.

Not that I’m saying Kopitiam is a dud. It’s not a bad restaurant, the service is brilliant and some of what I ate was excellent, but I don’t know that it’s worth travelling to Oxford to try unless you are really passionate about Malaysian food. And perhaps Malaysian food isn’t where they’re at their strongest: I saw items from the more Cantonese side of the menu turning up at other tables and the roast duck, skin all lacquered, invoked particular regret.

But also, if you do like Malaysian food and you’re taking a trip away from Reading I would say to take the train south-west, stop at Winchester and make your weekend by eating at Lucky Lychee. And if you’re in Oxford, better options exist. One of them, in the shape of Pompette, is literally the other side of the road. And you can book a table for whenever you like, which some people – and it turns out I’m one of them – seem rather to like. So there you have it. Kopitiam may not take reservations, but I’m afraid I had enough for the both of us.

Kopitiam – 7.0
Suffolk House, 19 South Parade, Summertown, Oxford, OX2 7HN
01865 454388

https://kopitiamoxford.co.uk

Restaurant review: Sartorelli’s, Oxford

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I’m of the firm opinion that everyone has at least one useful life lesson you could learn from them. Someone I used to know, for instance, was convinced that you could never go wrong taking champagne to somebody’s house: we didn’t agree on much, it turned out, but on this she had a point. My stepmother has a rule, a very wise one, that you should never buy her any Christmas or birthday present she has to dust. I sometimes give her champagne, which combines those two rules nicely. 

A married couple I used to know had two excellent customs. One was that using the W word, talking about work, was strictly verboten on Sundays. The other was that, once in a while, one of them could play a joker and opt out of adult life for a whole day. The other one had to make all the decisions – where to go, what to do, what to watch, everything. 

I’ve tried to introduce that latter rule into my own life, but without much success. Most of the time my spouse, tired from working to the core of the bone, doesn’t want to make decisions for anybody else. And when she does, she has a bad habit of making plans for me that I just don’t like. 

“I think you should stay at home and pack for the move” was Zoë’s suggestion last Friday when I was facing another Saturday on my tod and asked her what I should get up to: I didn’t fancy that at all. 

So on a whim, a solo Saturday stretching out in front of me, I thought “fuck it, I’ll go to Oxford”. I headed for the station, and was sitting in C.U.P. having a mocha and making my plans when Zoë texted me. I thought I’d have one last crack at abdicating responsibility. 

“I’m going to Oxford but I’m torn between grabbing a late lunch at the Magdalen Arms or trying Sartorelli’s, that pizza place in the Covered Market. What do you think?”

“Have the pizza. You can review it.”

What happened next was a series of some of the happiest events. First, that moment when your train pulls up and it’s mostly empty, no standing in the aisle holding on to the back of someone’s chair, sitting on the luggage rack or slumped in the vestibule. Instead, a leisurely trundle through Oxfordshire, just me, my phone and the music in my headphones. As Larkin puts it, all sense of being in a hurry gone. 

Getting off at Oxford I was struck that although it wasn’t quiet – it never is – it wasn’t crazily busy, and as I strolled in, up George Street and Ship Street, I thought how curious it was that I’ve never quite escaped this city, just up the train tracks from home, where I spent three years learning a lot about a little but precious little about life. That used to put me off the place, but now I’ve reached some kind of accommodation with it. 

Another glad event followed as I entered the Covered Market. It was that wonderful coincidence that happens when you arrive somewhere very busy literally as somebody else is just leaving, and can jump into their place. So I got a plum spot outside Sartorelli’s at one of the long tables, just by being in the right place at exactly the right time: after that, the queue just grew and grew. If I’d got there five minutes earlier, or later, the day would have had a completely different shape. 

The Covered Market has always been one of my favourite spots in Oxford, even back in the early Nineties when I used to stop there to pick up a lunchtime pie from a trader called Ma Baker (Boney M fans, I presume). But its character has been changing in recent years, with many of the traditional traders driven out by high rents: the butchers and fishmongers have left, and on this visit one of the old-school mens’ outfitters had a closing down sign in the window. The likes of Fasta Pasta, who used to do the best ciabatta in the world, are gone too.

But in their place a very different sort of trader is settling in to the market. Although they recently got a little tap room from Botley’s Tap Social, I first noticed the phenomenon a few years back with Teardrop, a micropub offering beer from Church Hanbrewery, a little brewery based out past Witney. They had half a dozen or so beers on cask and keg, and sold charcuterie and the like, and they had a few barrels and tables outside. And then there was a wine bar, Cellar Door, next to it – again, selling wine by the glass. And finally, there was Sartorelli’s along from that, setting up a little ecosystem – wine, beer and pizza all in one little corner of the market.

Sartorelli’s also sprung up out of Church Hanbrewery, first offering pizza at the brewery taproom before opening in the Covered Market in March 2022. And since it opened, every time I’ve been to the Covered Market – usually to buy cheese, or grab a latte from the excellent Colombia Coffee Roasters – I’ve gone past, thought the setup looked great, eyed the pizzas being devoured outside with no small degree of envy. And then sighed. because I had a lunch reservation somewhere else. But on this occasion I was in Oxford with no plans, and this space at a table outside had miraculously come free. When opportunity knocks like that, you don’t send it away.

The very kind couple next to me kept an eye on my stuff and I went up to order. The place was a bustle of activity, with a big wood-fired oven and a menu displayed on the wall that was simple almost to a fault. Fundamentally you can have a margherita for £8.50 and load it with whatever you fancy, at a cost of 50p per topping, or you can have one of their suggested combos. The menu explained that sartorelli means small tailor, and that as far as they were concerned you could tailor your pizza however you like.

I spotted one of the suggestions that mentioned anchovies, ordered it, paid £10.50 and scuttled back to my seat and my bag, gratified that they were still there. My tablemates then kindly agreed to keep looking after my bag while I went to Teardrop and ordered two thirds of their Teardrop Citra on keg. It cost just under four pounds and was absolutely gorgeous – cold, crisp and, I hoped, perfect pizza accompaniment. I went back to my table with my winnings, saw the queue beginning to build and felt like coming here for lunch was turning out to be a very smart decision on my part.

My pizza arrived just over ten minutes later, although I was having such a lovely time that I’d quite happily have waited longer. It came on a metal tray, à la The Last Crumb, but they’d sensibly put paper underneath it which also helped it stay warm longer. Sartorelli’s just gives you a pizza cutter, a napkin and some chilli and garlic oil, so if you’re a cutlery user, their pizza might challenge you. And this was the point where I realised I had completely missed the fact that, on the menu, my pizza was billed as coming with a “sprinkle of rocket”. It was a nice idea, but it was more than a sprinkle, and without cutlery it added a layer of complexity to eating the thing with your hands.

Initially I also wondered whether the rocket might have been used to camouflage the toppings, to conceal any caper or (especially) anchovy-related stinginess that was going on. But once I settled down to eating the pizza, I realised nothing could be further from the truth. It was liberally carpeted with tiny, punchy capers, had a respectable number of plump black olives and, most importantly, plenty of glorious, salty anchovies.

Not only that, but the base was excellent – especially the crust, all blistered, puffy and chewy. I was having an absolutely marvellous time: a bite of the pizza, a sip of the gorgeous beer, an unworthy look up at the queue, still growing, and I felt like I was properly winning at lunch.

I should have stayed for a dessert, really – it’s just ice cream, which they say is “hand crafted to a secret Sartorelli recipe” – but I had my eye on something from Swoon on the High later on, and I also felt guilty depriving punters of a seat. So I ambled off to the Oxford Cheese Company to pick something up for the evening, and then wandered out towards North Oxford in search of one of my favourite pubs in the whole wide world, the Rose And Crown.

I have broken one of the unspoken rules of restaurant reviewing by reviewing the same kind of establishment two weeks running. Last week was Zia Lucia, this week it’s Sartorelli’s: it’s the equivalent of putting two consecutive tracks on a mixtape by the same artist. But I think it’s very instructive in some ways because restaurants aren’t only about quality, or value, or service, or even convenience. They’re also about expectations, and whether they can surprise or delight.

So I expected Zia Lucia to be something special, and although you couldn’t fault their tomato sauce, or their Parma ham, the overall experience was a little underwhelming. And yet on a wooden stool, at a trestle table in the middle of the Covered Market I had a pizza from a place that didn’t shout or brag, but just did an absolutely marvellous job. Excellent craft beer from a place two doors down, a little people watching and hubbub, and an excellent lunch that, all told, set me back just under fifteen pounds.

Experiences like that are reason enough, if you find yourself at a loose end on a Saturday, to hop on a train and take your chances. I’m very glad I did. Besides, I’m asked quite often whether there’s anywhere decent to go for an informal, quickish lunch in Oxford, and now I have an answer for you. I may not have any great life lessons to impart to you – although my stepmother’s rule of thumb is a very good one – but you can usually rely on me for a restaurant recommendation.

Sartorelli’s – 7.7
21, Covered Market, Oxford, OX1 3DZ

https://www.sartorellis.com/sartorellisoxford

Restaurant review: Pierre Victoire, Oxford

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I had to check because I thought my mind might be playing tricks, but there used to be a French restaurant chain called Pierre Victoire, the Côte of its day, thirty years ago. I remember eating in the Nottingham branch when I lived there at the turn of the last century, and I’m pretty sure Reading had one too. Perhaps readers with even longer memories than mine can correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall it was on St Mary’s Butts, where Favourite Chicken is now. Anyway, also around the turn of the century the chain went bust leaving just one outpost, on Little Clarendon Street in Oxford, as the only survivor.

And it’s still going strong.

It’s approaching its thirtieth birthday in a couple of years, and I can’t remember a time in my restaurant-going life, really, when it wasn’t there. It’s been an ever-present across the past two decades, constant as my life has shifted and changed, and I’ve had countless lunches and dinners there, with family and with friends. Back when I didn’t review places outside Reading, it was my venue of choice for eating in Oxford, especially pre-theatre before watching something at the wonderful Oxford Playhouse. But there were more than a few boozy evenings there too: I still remember the horror and confusion of an American friend I lost in the divorce, trying snails for the first time.

Just as my life has changed in that time, the topography of Oxford has too. Little Clarendon Street used to be the epicentre of Oxford, for me, where everything was going on. It had Pierre Victoire, a great little tapas place next door and ice cream café George & Davis opposite, a brilliant interiors shop called Central and another little shop across the way called Ottoman selling cool bits and bobs. At night it was criss-crossed with fairy lights, just a magnificent place to be.

And then the years intervened and other parts of Oxford got more interesting – Jericho just around the corner, Summertown further north, the explosion of interesting restaurants and coffee down the Cowley and Iffley roads. I found myself more likely to have lunch at Arbequina and coffee at Peloton, or to amble down North Parade before a reservation at Pompette. The Westgate, a shopping development that makes the Oracle look sad and tired, altered Oxford’s landscape too. Little Clarendon Street by contrast didn’t really change, both its biggest strength and weakness.

But in recent times the pendulum has swung back, and heading to Pierre Victoire last Saturday for a late solo lunch I was struck by the fact that Little Clarendon Street is having another moment. Central may have closed, but next door social enterprise and excellent café Common Ground was doing a roaring trade. Across the way, The Jericho Cheese Company was full of lactic treats to take home and newish bottle shop and restaurant Wilding, where the Café Rouge of my student days used to be, looked very tempting. And there, familiar and unchanged, was Pierre Victoire: I was surprised by how gladdened I was to see it.

Pierre Victoire only opens for lunch Friday to Sunday nowadays, and it’s a tribute to how popular the place is that when I rang in the week to make a lunch booking pretty much all they had left was a table at quarter to two. And the place was humming with life and conversation when I stepped through the front door. The ground floor dining room goes back a long way and I seem to remember they have another dining room upstairs, or they certainly used to. I’m pretty sure these bare brick walls predate any trend for exposed bricks: it’s that sort of place.

But the tables at the front, with daylight, are the plum ones. Mine, literally tucked behind the front door, had “table for one” written all over it but gave a great view of the room and the happy diners of North Oxford. A table for six was making a meal of settling their bill, and the staff were perfectly attentive and friendly, showing no frustration. A steady stream of diners came in even after me – some with bookings, others chancing their arm on spec. All of the latter were turned away: an establishment this busy at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon has cracked something which eludes many restaurants, including a lot of the ones I review.

Pierre Victoire offers a prix fixe menu for lunch and dinner, and they differ slightly in terms of how much choice you get and the type of dishes: for instance, duck confit is on the lunch menu, while it’s magret de canard for dinner. The price varies too – lunch is about twenty pounds for two courses and twenty-five for three, whereas dinner is closer to thirty and thirty-five. Back when Pierre Victoire was open for weekday lunches I think it was even more affordable, but back when Pierre Victoire was open for weekday lunches literally everything was more affordable: I’m not sure how helpful that comparison is, really.

In any event the menu was full of French classics, many of which I’ve tried over the years – onion soup, chicken liver parfait, moules, escargots, steak frites and so on. I was a little jaded after an evening on the wine with a friend the night before, so I swerved the wine list on this occasion and instead opted for a fortifying Orangina. It came in the classic, original bottle and I wondered, short of Perrier and Fanta Limon, whether any non-alcoholic drink had as great a capacity to transport you as Orangina does. My body needed the sugars, that was for certain. The staff also brought a jug of iced tap water without me having to ask. Either they do this as standard or I looked as off the pace as I felt: either way, it was appreciated.

The other thing they always bring without you having to ask at Pierre Victoire is bread. Not ubiquitous sourdough: sourdough has completely passed Pierre Victoire by, or rather it’s above such things. No, you get a little basket of cheap, plain baguette with some decent butter which came out of the fridge a little too recently. But it’s always ambrosial; like the Orangina, like the hubbub, there’s something of elsewhere about the whole thing. You’re simultaneously mentally very much in Oxford and across the Channel, both of which are pleasant experiences.

My normal order at Pierre Victoire would be the chicken liver parfait, which comes in a little sphere with brioche toast and sweet, sticky, jammy red onion. But I was trying to be less predictable for once, so I chose the one vegan dish on the menu, a fricasée of mushrooms. It came out mere minutes after I’d ordered – I’d forgotten how brisk, how well oiled a machine Pierre Victoire is at lunchtime – and was a lovely and delicate piece of work. The decision to put it in a little chalice of filo pastry was a clever one which added texture, as did resting the whole lot on what I assume was a splodge of butternut squash purée.

I wasn’t sure about the tangle of pea shoots – one or two restaurants I love tend to overuse these as punctuation and I wish they wouldn’t – but overall it worked nicely. The mushrooms themselves, a mixture of wild and button if the menu was to be believed, were in a sauce with cognac and a little sweetness, but I found it slightly thin. It needed the cosseting touch of cream, I reckoned. But then it wouldn’t have been vegan, and that was the box it was ticking on the menu. Even so it was polished off in minutes, and there was just enough bread to mop up the last of the sauce.

If I’d chosen a curveball as a starter, I played safe for the main. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Pierre Victoire for lunch and not seen duck confit on the menu, and it’s rare for me not to order it there. I don’t understand why more places, especially pubs, don’t serve duck confit: it’s so easy to get right and such a joy to eat. There’s always plenty of meat, it always falls off the bone to the point where picking it clean is a meticulous delight and, done well, you get that crispy skin and that subcutaneous, glossy fat. Confit duck, as it happens, is one of the options on the menu for my wedding later in the year, and it will take all my strength not to pick it.

I really love how Pierre Victoire serves duck confit, too, with just the two accompaniments. A brick of rosti, which in this case was maybe a tiny bit too soggy and not crispy enough, and a bitter orange sauce which brought everything together beautifully. Good luck finding duck à l’orange anywhere on a menu these days – it’s one of those relics of the past, at least in this country – but Pierre Victoire’s smart, affordable take on it is all you really need.

It was a perfect, simple pleasure and it made me very glad to be at that table, in that room, in that restaurant, in that city, exactly where I should be. My paperback (an Anne Tyler I’d never read) stayed untouched throughout my meal because when I wasn’t eating, or taking pictures, I was too busy enjoying where I was. Watching the staff, so on it and so harmonious, always in control without being mechanical. And looking at my fellow diners, imagining their stories and their lives outside this little parcel of Saturday afternoon where we all happened to be in the same place.

As I said, Pierre Victoire is nothing if not efficient – I’d be surprised if I was the first customer at that table that lunch service, and I saw other tables turned while I was there. But they never made me feel processed, and I gave the dessert menu serious consideration before deciding to settle up. It’s more compact than the choice for the other two courses, and a crêpe au citron called to me, but not loud enough. My bill for the two courses and that iconic Orangina set me back twenty-two pounds fifty, not including tip. Pierre Victoire maybe isn’t the bargain it once was, but I’m not sure I want restaurants I like to be bargains any more. I want them to survive.

Don’t be fooled by the rating below (I know you’ve probably already scrolled down and checked). Yes, I gave Pierre Victoire a 7.3, but what I would say is that there are 7.3s and then there are 7.3s. There are the expensive restaurants where dinner or lunch costs you the best part of three figures and you think “well, it was okay”, and there are cheap and cheerful places where you come away thinking that your hosts have surpassed, or possibly even transcended, your expectations. And yet Pierre Victoire, would you believe, is neither of those things.

No, what Pierre Victoire is is that rarest of beasts, a truly consistent restaurant. I can honestly say that the last time I went there was every bit as good as this time – and not just that, but every bit as good in exactly the same way. The time before was too, and I dare say the next time will be as well. And there will be a next time, the next instalment in a series of meals that started something like twenty years ago and, if I’m lucky, will go on for many more.

Your mileage may vary, but for my money that’s worth a dozen culinary comets or flashes in the pan. I’d say that every town should have a place like Pierre Victoire, although travelling to Oxford is really no hardship. And I’d almost go one step further and say that every town should have a Pierre Victoire, but that’s dangerous nonsense: it is, as we know, how chains get started. Pierre Victoire doesn’t need that. It’s already been there, done that, got the t-shirt – and then moved on, a long time ago, to far better things.

Pierre Victoire – 7.3
9 Little Clarendon St, Oxford, OX1 2HP
01865 316616

https://pierrevictoire.co.uk

Restaurant review: Spiced Roots, Oxford

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Back in the first half of the nineties, when I was a student at Oxford, there was a famous restaurant down the Cowley Road called the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House. What made it famous, back then, was an urban myth that the menu didn’t have prices: instead, you paid what the proprietor decided you could afford. How he assessed that wasn’t entirely clear, but even though in those days I was constantly unkempt and dressed in easily the shittest clothes M&S and River Island had to offer I never felt like taking my chances, in case the meal turned out to be beyond my means.

Besides, as a student from a comprehensive school eating out in Oxford was pretty much always beyond my means. Instead I ate awful food served up by the college in halls, I nuked an occasional M&S ready meal – usually chilli con carne – in the microwave in the tiny kitchen in my college stairwell and, on high days and holidays, wandered to the chippy on Carfax for a life-affirming cod and chips. If we’d had a yearbook, which we didn’t, nobody would have nominated me as Most Likely To Write A Restaurant Blog.

No, eating out was for the trustafarians I was forced to rub shoulders with, where mummy and daddy owned half of Hampshire. Parents were always swooping in to take them to dinner at Gee’s, or the Old Parsonage, or Browns, back before Browns became just another Mitchell & Butler atrocity. I think my dad visited me once in three years and we had dim sum at a place called the Opium Den. This is fancy, I thought, and the experience was never repeated. It’s a Nando’s, now.

My fellow students, by and large an alien species, all lived down the Cowley Road in their second year in shared houses, cosplaying This Life, a few years before it hit the television. They fancied themselves as the Young Ones, even though they already had their dead eyes on careers as management consultants. They probably felt they were being postmodern, playing at being skint like they were playing at being part of the real world. And now, depressingly, many of them run the country, or run the civil service, or read the news on television. I wonder if any of them went to the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House, back in the day.

Anyway, the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House is closed now, or at least appears to be from a quick bit of online research. It certainly looked decidedly closed when I visited Oxford a few weekends ago with a lunchtime reservation at Spiced Roots, a much more happening, upmarket and highly regarded Caribbean restaurant two doors down from where Hi-Lo used to be. When I reviewed the Magdalen Arms, the same end of town, last year I asked whether anybody had Oxford recommendations for me. A reader mentioned Spiced Roots then, so I looked it up and the idea stuck in my head.

And this was my first chance to review it in 2023. It was my first visit to Oxford since last Christmas, and I’d forgotten how much I loved the place: having coffee at the Missing Bean; sloping off on a house envy tour of Jericho and north Oxford (it was harder to find a house you didn’t envy, really); stopping in the Covered Market to discover that Tap Social had opened a lovely little pub there; having post-Tap Social beer at Teardrop Bar because it was the original and best and otherwise I’d have felt disloyal; and buying all sorts of wonderful stuff from the Oxford Cheese Company, hoping it wouldn’t be too whiffy on the train home at the end of the day. 

Speaking of trains, one of life’s great mysteries is that a return ticket to London or Swindon from Reading costs you thirty quid for half an hour on the train, whereas Oxford is closer to a tenner for the same length of journey. One day someone will fix that discrepancy and we’ll all be screwed, but until then Oxford is about as good a day out from Reading by public transport as you could possibly hope for. I should review more restaurants in Oxford, really – it’s crazy that this is only my second – and maybe I will. Besides, since Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen closed last summer I’ve been missing really good Caribbean food: if Spiced Roots could deliver, it would be well worth the occasional trip.

Spiced Roots’ interior is that old favourite, a long thin dining room, and a compact one too that can’t have much more than twenty covers. We arrived for a late lunch, at two pm, and the place was nicely full by then, with a table of about a dozen people having a fantastic time. The mural on the wall reminded me somewhat of Reading’s Flavour Of Mauritius, but the real conversation point was the bar, done up beach hut style with a straw roof and sporting a mind-bogglingly huge range of rums. 

I found myself wondering if the evening was when this place really came into its own; Spiced Roots is only open for lunch on Saturdays, and even then it closes between lunch and dinner, so there’s only so much fun you can have. And that’s a particular shame because the cocktail menu was a small but wickedly diverting one. I had a dark ‘n’ stormy, tall and full of pep, probably the nicest I’ve ever tried. Zoë had a negroni made with Appleton 12 instead of gin, infused somehow with pimento smoke: I tried a sip and it provoked its own cocktail, a healthy mixture of trepidation and admiration.

The menu was simple, just the right size and written, all lower case, in that typewriter font used almost exclusively by dullards on their Instagram stories nowadays. It inspired confidence, with just five starters and eight mains, and pricing was gentle: three of the starters cost less than a fiver, none topped seven pounds. Only a couple of mains approached twenty quid, the remainder were closer to fifteen. Forget the old Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House approach of working out what you could afford – this was definitely affordable. We ordered three of the starters to share and a couple of mains, sat back, sipped our cocktails and felt all sense of hurry vanish.

That might have been just as well, because there was a bit of a wait. Our server came over and apologised, saying that there was only one of them in the kitchen. And that was of course fair enough, and that big table, all needing to be fed at the same time, would put a strain on a small outfit. But we were in no real rush so the cocktails passed, as they do, and we chatted about Oxford, I probably blethered on about the old days, and we sipped our water, mindful of all that pre-lunch beer. 

I wonder what the me of thirty years ago would say if you told him that on the other side of the century he would still be coming to this city, with money this time, having made his peace with all the things it did and didn’t do for him. He would probably be waiting for me to shut up so he could go have another row with his girlfriend or listen to the new Leonard Cohen album, or pretend to study, or – almost certainly his favourite pastime – mope. But I wish I could tell him that it would all be okay, that one day he’d evolve beyond M&S microwaveable chilli and eating cookie dough straight from the tub. I’d also tell him not to take his knees for granted, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing.

Our first starter was a little delight. I had missed out on jerk chicken as a main course, what with always giving my dining companion first dibs, but the jerk chicken spring rolls gave me an early indication of what I was missing. Two little cigarillos of filo pastry, packed with chicken and served on a smear of dark, fruity, savoury sauce they were simultaneously lovely and nowhere near enough. I suppose that’s what all starters, ultimately, are aiming for. I’d have liked more, or for them to be heftier, but the clue was in the pricing and for just shy of a fiver it was difficult to complain. We should just have ordered two portions, that’s all.

Even better, and genuinely delicious, was something called “trini doubles”. This is a Trinidadian speciality, curried chickpeas on a pair of baras, flat fried dough not entirely unlike a roti, and a quick scuttle to confer with Professor Wikipedia suggests that this dish, created in the Thirties, might be a Caribbean take on the Indian chole bhatura. Be that as it may, this was a gorgeous dish – floury, warm and comforting, and a forkful of the chickpeas folded into the starchy, slightly stodgy embrace of the bara was reason enough to be in Spiced Roots. That a little sweet, zingy, almost caramelised courgette, in the finest strips, was heaped on top just made me love the dish more. Again, this cost less than a fiver.

Last but not least, we’d also decided to try the grilled octopus superfood salad. It was perfectly pleasant – what octopus there was was nicely cooked, the salad was well dressed and the pineapple on top added good contrast. The menu described it as pineapple chow, which is apparently spiced and enhanced with garlic and hot sauce, but I just got sweetness, really. This dish was nice enough: subdued, well behaved but not earth shattering. But that’s my fault, I suspect, for ordering something described as a “superfood salad”, not theirs.

After waiting a little longer than I’d have chosen for our starters, the pendulum of iffy timing swung in the other direction: with that large table having finished their food our mains were brought out quick smart, barely ten minutes after we’d finished the previous course. Just one of those things, really, and I imagine they were trying to ensure we’d have time for dessert before they closed at half three. In any event we were on to a second drink by now, in my case a New Zealand sauvignon blanc which was decent but heftily marked up and in Zoë’s a lager called Banks from Barbados which I’m guessing tasted like most lagers.

My main course was a good illustration of Spiced Roots’ strengths and weaknesses, almost emblematic of the restaurant as a whole. I’d chosen the curry goat, my second choice of main, and it was a really superb dish. Probably the best goat I can remember eating (and I include Clay’s goat curry in that) beautifully spiced – with fifteen spices, if the menu is to be believed – in a thin, dark and potent sauce. There were a couple of chunks of potato but otherwise it was pretty much all sticky, tender goat. 

And yet the presentation was needlessly prissy. The curry was in a little vessel, the steamed rice in a separate bowl, there were a few random slices of plantain on the side and a salad which genuinely didn’t go and I’m not sure anyone eats. Were you meant to spoon the curry onto the rice, or gradually cross the streams while keeping the salad safe from harm? I ended up dumping the rice on the plate, pouring the curry on top and thinking that, rather than all the compartmentalisation, all I really wanted was a big steaming bowl of rice with plenty of curry on top – something earthy, hearty and unpretentious. I know Spiced Roots billed itself as fine Caribbean cuisine, but I don’t think that means you have to put obstacles between the food and the diners enjoying it.

Zoë’s jerk chicken, if anything an even better dish, suffered the same problems. The chicken was really outstanding, you got a huge amount of it and it was smothered with a rich, brooding sauce. And the rice and peas were good, too – a much more suitable companion than the plain steamed rice that had accompanied the curry. But again, it would have been better to let the food speak for itself without the faff of serving it on a slate, with more of that salad and a cherry tomato artfully cut into a flower. It made me think of the simplicity of somewhere like Chef Stevie. This food looks beautiful because it is beautiful, it doesn’t need to be gussied up in this way.

But even with that moaning, this lot for sixteen pounds fifty was hard to argue with. We also ordered a side of macaroni pie (which the menu, again trying to be more fancy, calls mac and cheese) which was really lovely but probably not quite big enough to share. As it only cost four pounds I think that was more our mistake than theirs.

Service was excellent, and suitably apologetic about the delays getting us our starters, which really wasn’t a problem. But pacing overall was problematic: I almost felt like they were trying to make up for the slow starters by rushing the mains, even though that wasn’t really what we wanted. We weren’t moved enough by the dessert menu to go for the full three courses, and a latte was calling to me from neighbouring Peloton Espresso, so we grabbed the bill and ambled off to caffeinate. Our meal came to just over eighty-five pounds, not including service, which I thought was thoroughly decent value.

Sometimes, believe it or not, it’s the act of writing a review that crystallises how I feel about a restaurant. Sometimes I know the rating in my head and work back from there, and sometimes it’s the process of running through the highs and lows that makes me realise, on balance, what I really thought. I don’t always get that right, I’m sure, so occasionally as a reader you probably get to the end and think the rating doesn’t match the text. You might not be alone in that – sometimes I feel that way too – but when there’s a real mismatch it’s because I’ve found it hard to work out what I think.

And Spiced Roots, I think, is one of those cases. I loved the food, but there’s a certain disconnect at the heart of the restaurant which meant I couldn’t quite make up my mind about it. The value is excellent, in places, but the presentation didn’t match that or the style of food – which meant that, for instance, some of the starters were just too slender (although unarguably priced to match) and that the mains, where they needed to be hearty and unpretentious, felt a little too dolled up. 

And I think that also showed in the clientele, which was varied – some were from the Caribbean community and clearly enjoying the fantastic food, others were the same kind of diners you’d find in Arbequina, a couple of doors down, very much gastronomic tourists – like me and Zoë, in fairness. Overall I wasn’t sure what Spiced Roots wanted to be, authentic or rarefied, and as a result I wasn’t convinced it managed entirely to be either, let alone both. 

So I loved the food, and if it sounds like your kind of thing you should definitely try it, but as a restaurant it left me slightly puzzled. Maybe a Saturday lunchtime – the only day it opens for lunch – isn’t the best time to judge it, so perhaps you have to be there of an evening, attacking that cocktail menu with gusto. But it was awfully well behaved in a way I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t sure about. That might tell you more about me than the restaurant. It did make me wonder, too, what a night in the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House would have been like, at the height of its powers. It might well have cost me more than my meal at Spiced Roots did, but I suspect it could have had the soul and verve that Spiced Roots, for all its excellent qualities, slightly missed.

Spiced Roots – 8.0
64 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JB
01865 249888

https://spicedroots.com

Restaurant review: The Magdalen Arms, Oxford

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Can you believe that this is the first time I’ve ever reviewed a restaurant in Oxford? Crazy, I know: it’s half an hour away by train and probably the place most readers ask me to consider when it comes to casting my net a bit wider. And yet, for a variety of reasons, I’ve never gone there on duty. For a long time, it’s because there was no gap in the market. Not because Oxford has a thriving local press – they have an iffy Newsquest paper and website, just like we do – but because it had a superb restaurant blogger, In Oxford, Will Eat, and she did such a good job that I had no desire to step on her turf. 

Then she got a job in Brussels, and I considered expanding north, but shortly after that I got divorced and took some time out. And when I came back, about a year later, loads of new Reading restaurants had sprung up during my hibernation – so many, in fact, that I had my hands full catching up with them all. So I got that under control and my thoughts turned to Oxford again, and then bang: along came the pandemic. The works always seemed to have a spanner in them, to the point where I wondered if it just wasn’t meant to be.

But a couple of weeks back I decided that life was about as close to normal as it was likely to be any time soon, and Zoë and I had a Friday off together, and Oxford was calling to me. It’s a funny place, in lots of ways: I lived there for four years in the mid-Nineties and back then the gulf between town and gown was so pronounced that it felt like a bit like my ex-wife and I sharing a flat for five months while the divorce got sorted: a deeply uncomfortable, unsustainable cohabitation between two very different halves. As a student, if you walked into the wrong pub – I did it once on my first week at university, and never repeated the mistake – you could almost feel the threat of violence in the air. Mind you, at nineteen I probably provoked that response often.

Nowadays it’s a city far more at ease with itself, and walking its picturesque streets on a sunny Friday morning it seemed the far bigger problem was tourists, a group locals and students regard with equal levels of animosity. Oxford is an interesting place to compare with Reading, because it has a lot of the things Reading does not – an excellent covered market, nice little enclaves of independent shops, areas like Jericho (which is what Caversham wishes it was) or the Cowley Road (ditto, but for the Oxford Road). 

It has a more upmarket mall, too, in the shape of the Westgate, and better, fancier chains than the ones we get saddled with. Pizza Pilgrims, Shoryu, Mowgli and Le Pain Quotidien all operate there. Our branch of Leon got canned and people are eagerly awaiting the opening of Gail’s where Patisserie Valerie used to be: Oxford has played host to both for years. And last time I checked, Oxford didn’t have a Taco Bell or a Jollibee. How on earth do they cope?

But it’s not as simple as that, because spending time in Oxford makes you realise that despite all its chocolate-boxiness it lacks things that we take for granted here in Reading. Street food, for one – the Covered Market is great but Oxford has nothing like Blue Collar, and the market in Gloucester Green is much more variable. Craft beer is another shortcoming – Oxford specialises in a certain kind of pub, popular with tourists, cask spods and “pubmen” (they’re always men), but it’s a struggle to find anywhere that serves more interesting stuff since The Grapes, the West Berkshire pub on George Street, closed at the end of last year, with the notable exception of Teardop, a nanopub in the Covered Market. It closes at half-five.

And what about restaurants? Well, this is another area where Oxford has never been considered quite as good as it should be. It has some cracking restaurants, and I’ve paid them many visits over the years: modern Italian Branca in Jericho, lovely family-owned Pierre Victoire on fairy light-strewn Little Clarendon Street, bright bustling Arbequina dishing up tapas down the Cowley Road and swanky Pompette out in Summertown. But those seem to be the exception rather than the rule, and beyond that top tier there are a fair few places trading on past reputation and others that just couldn’t make a go of it. 

That last category tells a story all on its own, because I’ve eaten at so many lauded restaurants in Oxford that that didn’t survive. Places like The Oxford Kitchen (it won a Michelin star in 2018: now it’s a delicatessen), or Turl Street Kitchen, the Anchor or even The Rickety Press, before the pub was acquired by Dodo Pubs, the owners of our very own Last Crumb. It makes you think: we get our sackcloth and ashes out because Clay’s is moving to Caversham – well, those of us who don’t live in Caversham do, anyway – but Oxford has a bit of a track record of not being able to support good restaurants. What’s that all about?

(I should add that if by some chance you’re reading this and you live in Oxford and I’ve got the place completely wrong, please go easy on me. Let me know all the great places I’m missing in Oxford, in the comments, and I’ll make sure I add them to my to do list. And do accept my apologies: I too live somewhere where we’re used to being misjudged.)

Anyway, for my inaugural Oxford review – just as with my first ever Reading review all those years ago – I picked a proper happy place. And I couldn’t think of a better establishment to start with: the Magdalen Arms is a gastropub down the Iffley Road with impeccable credentials, part of a group which includes the legendary Anchor & Hope on Waterloo’s The Cut and, for many years, Great Queen Street just off Drury Lane, a sadly departed favourite of mine. It’s a bracing walk over Magdalen Bridge, or you can just hop on a bus outside Queens College and be there in just over five minutes.

The Magdalen Arms has been trading in its current incarnation for nearly thirteen years and has been reviewed glowingly in every broadsheet you care to name, although not for some time. It’s reached the stage, I suspect, where it’s been doing its thing consistently for so long that it’s just become part of the furniture, a position I can identify with. Even as far back as 2010 Matthew Norman in the Guardian said “Being the best restaurant in Oxford may not be a glittering accolade”, proving that smug tossers talking the city down is by no means a new phenomenon.

Anyway, I’ve been coming to the Magdalen Arms for longer than I can remember. Usually for the pie, which serves two and seems mandatory to order in most of the reviews I’ve ever read. Arriving on a clement summer afternoon the pub was every bit as handsome a place as I remembered. It’s a big old place made up of two huge rooms – a gorgeous one at the front with deep red walls and an almost continental feel, and another at the back which I’ve never taken to. Most of the customers on the day we visited were sitting outside, so we got a cracking table next to the window. I was surprised to see the place so quiet – on a Sunday lunchtime it tends to be heaving – and although I wasn’t complaining I was slightly concerned.

The Magdalen Arms’ menu has always been relatively compact, but seemed more narrow than I remembered. You had a choice of five starters and a couple of larger ones to share, and just the three main courses alongside two options for larger groups. It meant deciding was simultaneously easier and harder than usual, an interesting dilemma, and the fact that there was no pie on the menu – anyone would have thought it was the height of summer – forced us to pick a Plan B.

But while we made up our mind they brought us some squares of their exemplary focaccia and a shallow dish of deep green olive oil, all grass and pepper, and from that point onwards all decisions felt slightly de-risked. That feeling was reinforced by the arrival of a bottle of petite syrah, an agreeable chorus of red fruits and spice, and I remembered that there’s little better than a leisurely lunch on a Friday with your favourite person, the sun pouring through the window and the rest of the world at work. Returning to a restaurant you love is one of the nicest reunions there is, and I realised it must have been three years since I’d sat in that room and made those enviable choices. It was all going to be okay.

We started with something I’ve always eyed up but never ordered, a Spanish sharing plate. It came looking like a still life, and the best of it was very good indeed. Pan con tomate, toasted bread rubbed with tomato and herbs, was bright and summery and I could have eaten an awful lot more of it. And the manchego, if slightly fridge-cold, was perfect with a little lozenge of quince paste. Padron peppers were nicely blackened, too, although I personally like to see the blighters studded with salt. By contrast, these were slightly underpowered.

The least effective parts, for me, were two of the mainstays of Spanish food. Croquetas were a pleasing shape and size but the inside was coarse, not a silky bechamel, and had a strangely sweet tang to it. They were pepped up with a dab of romesco (served in those comical cardboard tubs used for hospital meds), but the romesco didn’t have the punch it needed. Similarly the tortilla was okay, but just okay – cooked through, a solid slab of eggs and carbs. I’ve been spoiled by its gooer sibling on the Cowley Road, but it did just fine.

We were on safer ground with cured meats, although again these would have been even better closer to room temperature. The Jamon was coarse and salty, with a beautiful dry texture and the lomo, which looked more like coppa, was equally delicious. And there seemed to be two different kinds of chorizo – both were gorgeous but one had that glorious alchemy of meat, fat and pimenton down pat. The plate was strewn with olives, although I did find myself wishing for something like some caperberries to add the sharpness that was missing.

But it was a thoroughly respectable thing to eat. It certainly could have served more people less greedy than Zoë and me, and felt like reasonable value at thirty-three pounds, just about. It did get me thinking, because this is one of my favourite kinds of dishes to share and many places in Reading try to offer something similar without quite getting it right: only Buon Appetito, with its ridiculously generous antipasto misto, gets close.

Normally I would order a different main to my dining partner, but the menu at the Magdalen Arms was so compact that when we wanted the same thing I decided neither of us should go without. I’m so glad I did, because the Magdalen Arms’ pigeon ragu with pappardelle was one of the nicest lunches I’ve had in a long time. The pasta was just right, with exactly the right amount of bite, a perfectly starchy vehicle for a wonderful ragu with celery and a little nip of what I thought might be fennel. 

The pigeon had largely been slow-cooked into strands, although a handful of more stubborn clumps remained, but it was really no hardship to polish off every mouthful. If you have just one plate at lunchtime, it’s difficult to imagine something nicer than this – that includes the Magdalen Arms’ pie, by the way – and at sixteen pounds it managed the unusual feat of being cheaper than our starter; the more I think about it, the more I think that starter was meant to be shared between more than two people.

Oh, and we also had some chips with aioli: they didn’t go with anything but it’s hard to pass up chips with aioli. The chips were great – I think the food blogger chip cliché is to wank on about “rustle and snap”, whatever the fuck that is – and although the aioli was good it came in another of those mingy paper cups and I had to ask for more. Not that it was any trouble: service was terrific from start to finish, just as it always is at the Magdalen Arms.

You would think, given everything I’ve said, that we passed on dessert. But you’d be misjudging how thorough (or how gluttonous) I am. My ice cream was excellent and again – bit of a theme here – hugely generous, with an enormo-scoop of a deep, bitter chocolate gelato and a pistachio ice cream which felt to me, both in terms of colour and flavour, to have more of a marzipan note to it. I love the stuff, so I was happy if I’d been missold.

Ice cream is another of those things Oxford does well and Reading does not, so the Magdalen Arms’ ice cream isn’t as good as the stuff you can get from Swoon Gelato on the High, but it’s still miles better than anything you can get in Reading. And to reverse the trend, the Magdalen Arms’ Basque cheesecake was nice enough – and the roasted apricots were a nice touch – but I’ve had better at Geo Café from the rather literally named Reading Loves Cheesecakes.

Replete, with the post-lunch fuzziness that comes from a good bottle of wine, I could have happily whiled the afternoon away there, watching afternoon smudge into evening and seeing the pub come to life again on a Friday night, buzzing with happy diners. But I had my eye on a coffee from the brilliant Missing Bean, who have a roastery literally around the corner, and that stroll back into the centre wasn’t going to get any easier.

So we settled up and went on our way. Our bill came to a hundred and twenty-three pounds, including a twelve and a half per cent service charge. Not cheap, but not unreasonable – and the menu does have a set lunch every day including a small glass of wine for twelve pounds: if Reading had an offer like that I would probably use it often. Come to think of it Pierre Victoire also does a killer set lunch, so perhaps this is another one to chalk up as something Oxford does far better.

So, no real surprises here; the nice thing about having a long relationship with a restaurant is that, unlike romantic relationships, there’s something rich and deep about reaching that stage where you move beyond infatuation and into comfortableness. I expected to have a good meal at the Magdalen Arms, and I did. I knew it might be amazing, which in honesty it wasn’t, but I could be absolutely certain it wouldn’t be mediocre. Restaurants and pubs like that are to be celebrated, wherever they are, and I knew for a fact when I left on that Friday afternoon that I would be back, and hopefully before too long. But just to compare Oxford and Reading one final time, would I swap it for the Lyndhurst? Not in a month of Sundays.

The Magdalen Arms – 7.7
243 Iffley Road, Oxford, OX4 1SJ
01865 243159

http://www.magdalenarms.co.uk