Tag: Pizza

Restaurant review: Mono Pizza, Basingstoke

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There’s an exhibition on at the Willis Museum in Basingstoke called I Grew Up 90s, and speaking as someone who tried and failed to grow up back then I felt I had to go and experience it, even if it was tantamount to enthusiastically massaging salt into the gaping wound of my middle age.

I never thought I would see the day when the Nineties came back into fashion, in much the same way no doubt that my parents rolled their eyes when kids decided to revive the Sixties. It had an air of ‘kill me now’ about it, as far as I was concerned. I can’t believe you like all that crap from back then people like me could reasonably say, although I now realise – with the perspective of thirty years’ distance – that what we really mean is Jesus, I am so old.

The Willis Museum is housed in the former town hall, an attractive building at the top of a gentle hill in the older part of Basingstoke, past the purgatory of Festival Place. On the way there a strip of street food stalls was doing a brisk trade – a sizeable queue outside the Thai stall suggested, as did the aromas, that it was decent – and in the market place outside voluble traders were flogging veg from trestle tables. The graceful early Victorian architecture was impressively incongruous, I thought, as I passed between the pillars of the entrance, ready to do some time travel.

Inside, the placard on the wall made an interesting case for the decade, depicting it as a strange bubble of time that history had forgotten. And I think there’s truth in that. It was a strangely innocent time, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the release of Nelson Mandela but before 9/11 and the credit crunch. In the Eighties we were scared of the bomb, or AIDS, but in the Nineties we weren’t scared of anything. We were lucky, but of course we didn’t know that.

The exhibition aimed to remind visitors of the Nineties through over 200 objects and artworks. It was the decade of Girl Power and Cool Britannia, the introductory blurb said. On the Internet we asked Jeeves, and on the streets we paged each other (incidentally, my favourite Easter egg of the time was that if you asked Jeeves “are you gay?” he always produced the result “I prefer the word jovial“: and to think people reckon they’re so original nowadays asking Siri to tell them a joke).

There were no smartphones, social media or reality TV to distract us, but we might occasionally have returned a tape late to Blockbusters, concluded the introduction. And wandering round it, feeling simultaneously old, young, comforted and sad I noticed they did have a huge Blockbuster logo on one wall, and a cabinet full of VHS tapes: Notting Hill; Ace Ventura; True Lies; Basic Instinct.

An HMV carrier bag was framed on another wall. “God, the number of those I must have handled” said Zoë, who worked there when the Nineties were already almost a decade in the rear view mirror, the shop still flogging CDs ahead of the death rattle caused by iPods, iPhones and streaming. I wondered how many times I’d come home from the Oracle on New Release Monday with one of those.

Other cabinets were full of reminders of other aspects of that forgotten age, trying hard to present it as halcyon. The Cadbury’s Spira bar – which I still miss, I don’t mind telling you – and a tub of Gino Ginelli ice cream. A giant foam finger from the original series of Gladiators. Cartman, Beavis and Butt-Head, arguably the most puerile firm of solicitors there never was. Purple Ronnie and the very first Nokias and Motorolas, a loaf of Mighty White and a recipe book for Chicken Tonight. The posters for Four Weddings, Reservoir Dogs and Trainspotting. A can of Tab Clear (“trial offer 23p”), a bottle of Two Dogs and a Hooch branded glass.

You could even buy a Tamagotchi from the gift shop, which reminded me that once in the Nineties, when my brother went to some insurance conference in Manchester overnight, he asked me to take care of his Tamagotchi which, of course, promptly died. I’m not sure what the electronic equivalent of getting another almost identical one from the pet shop was, but I remember fessing up to him in the Flier & Firkin – which is what the Oakford is now – and him taking it much more personally than I expected.

Standing there in the gift shop, seeing the packaging for ‘the original virtual reality pet’ I took a photo and sent it to him, knowing that even on the other side of the world in New South Wales, his Saturday night drawing to an end, he was one of the only people I knew who would understand what I was experiencing. Sorry again that I killed your Tamagotchi my message said. You’re forgiven came the response, hours later when I was fast asleep.

All that nostalgia left me badly needing to eat my feelings, and Zoë and I had plans for a late lunch at Mono Pizza, the Basingstoke restaurant highest on my radar. Now, at this point I need to apologise if you’re a reader living in Basingstoke, but my research on where to eat there resulted in fairly slim pickings. There’s taco spot El Bigote, which looks like it’s al fresco only, there’s Nigerian restaurant Afrizi, which I hear is rather good, and there’s Mono.

Beyond that, I didn’t find evidence of a burgeoning food culture in Basingstoke. I suspect Festival Place’s best days may be behind it, and the imminent closure of its Apple Store would suggest as much, but the presence of the likes of ASK Italian, Pizza Hut and Wimpy suggests that even Reading has it good compared to some places. By all means correct me if I’m wrong, because I really do love an underdog.

Anyway, Mono was the spot that jumped out at me. Run by married couple Timofei and Veronica Dragan, Mono took the tried and tested route to where it is now: starting out as a pizza van in late 2023, then parking up at a permanent pitch at Festival Place the following spring. And then, almost exactly two years later at the beginning of March, Mono moved to a permanent site just round the corner from the Willis Museum, taking over the ground floor of a handsome building in a spot that used to be a bar.

Plaudits followed when Mono – still a van at this stage – won Best Pizzeria last summer at something called Slice-o-Mania. Now, you can be sniffy about an event of that kind and say that it’s largely attended by people who think pizza is a separate food group, and you might have some justification for thinking that. But the fact remains that a huge amount of big names in the U.K. were there, and for an unsung food van from Hampshire, after trading for less than two years, to win big in that company is a truly impressive result.

And all of my research suggested that Mono was an interesting proposition: that Dragan was from Naples, that he sourced all of his ingredients obsessively from Italy, all the things you’d really want to hear about this kind of establishment. I like a pizza as much as the next normal person, and the bottom has rather fallen out of Reading’s pizza scene since Sarv’s Slice left, Amò closed and reopened and Dough Bros changed hands, so as I approached Mono’s tasteful, sage green edifice I found myself rather hoping for the best.

The interior was really rather nice. Big, in a they-might-have-bitten-off-more-than-they-can-chew sort of a way, but nice nonetheless. It was all green walls and well-proportioned tables, with one panel of fake greenery and a few slightly random Welsh dressers dotted around the place. It worried me slightly how quiet it was, though: we were there admittedly after the lunchtime rush had passed, but apart from one table outside and a few occupied within it was almost empty. Maybe everyone was in the queue for Thai street food, or lost in the time machine just down the street.

Over an Aperol Spritz – not bad, perhaps slightly watery – we had a good squizz at the menu. It is, and this is a good thing, very stripped down, not like some pizza menus that go overboard on filler. One antipasti option, three panini, ten pizzas and nothing else: if you don’t fancy that, go elsewhere. And the pizza options were also very restrained – no wacky combinations and not even the anchovy, caper and olive combo that’s inevitably my first choice. There was a simplicity to it: pizza by a purist, for purists.

We began with the only starter on offer, the selection of antipasti to share. In a way, this is just a deconstruction of all the things you might see chucked on a base and scorched in the oven. But it’s a good fishing expedition if you want to get a picture of what a pizzeria’s raw materials are like: it proved to be very illuminating as far as Mono was concerned.

When you consider that this was £15.50 for two, it was ridiculously generous and enormously likeable. The Parma ham, with that slight sheen of the incarcerated in plastic, was pleasant but unmemorable. But everything else was better than it looked, better than I expected. A very good prosciutto cotto was miles better, really good quality and very tasty indeed. And the spicy salami, about which I had my reservations, was knockout stuff: coarse, not at all suspect and with an enormous chilli kick. Quite marvellous.

That’s before we get to the olives, which were good but not great, or the cherry tomatoes, sweet and bursting with contrast. Or the mozzarella. Hats off to Mono for not just wheeling out the ubiquitous burrata. I think I’ve always preferred mozzarella to burrata and I’m prepared to wait as long as it takes – it could be longer than a decade, the way things are going – for public opinion to catch up with me. But in many ways, the real bellwether was the bread – little squares of the stuff, like scraps of panino. They were light, airy, salty, just the ticket with any combination of the rest of the dish. In short, they boded well.

When my pizza, the ‘Pizza Rebby’, came out twenty minutes later it built on the potential of all that had gone before and synthesised it into a magical whole. That base was the final boss of dough, its evolutionary pinnacle, so light and well-done, so judiciously bubbled and blackened. I have got quite tired of the prevalence on social media of New York pizza, or New Haven pizza, or whatever “tavern style pizza” is, or London pizza. I’ve got tired of seeing mockneys on Instagram jabbering about how great it is. This. This is what good pizza looks like.

And the other cleverness of Mono is not just to have a small menu but not to do too much with any of those pizzas. This was not overloaded: potent clusters of punchy ‘nduja, translucent strips of pancetta gleaming away, ambrosial slivers of red onion, a surprisingly effective smattering of torn basil.

Zoë had chosen another classic, the Diavola, a variation on that theme with the spicy salami from earlier on taking the place of my pancetta. And, because it’s Zoë and she likes to tinker, she had asked to have gorgonzola added to it (“it’s the ‘Diavola plus'” she said to me, clearly pleased with her ingenuity). I would like to say that she was wrong, that she had offended the simplicity of Mono’s menu. But, because it’s Zoë, it elevated what was already an excellent pizza into a world-beater. The fire of both types of meat would have been enough – and again, you have to love Mono for refusing to touch hot honey with a twelve foot pole – but if it did need anything it was the pungent whack of salt from that blue cheese.

“I could come here every week” said Zoë, and I couldn’t agree more. I wasn’t sure, without that exhibition, that I had any other reason to visit Basingstoke: there’s nothing in the way of independent retail, one indie coffee shop, no craft beer. But you would travel for this.

We had to have dessert, and Mono’s menu is so concise that between us we ate everything on it. I’d asked what the “Mono pistachio” was and was told it was like a cross between an ice cream and a mousse. That doesn’t do it justice, and nor does the blurb on the menu that reads like a list of ingredients: pistachio cream with milk, pistachio paste, egg, cream, white chocolate and biscuit notes. So if you go, throw all that in the metaphorical bin and order it anyway.

What it actually is is something closer to a pistachio and white chocolate parfait, with a biscuit base, somehow at the middle of a Venn diagram of ice cream, cheesecake and doubtless many other treats. I adored it: it was delicious at first, rock hard and challenging to eat with the long, slender teaspoon. But as it softened, everything just came together. I had it with a pistachio cannolo which was maybe the least impressive thing I ate that day: the shell a little heavy but the filling miles more complex than my dessert. It was still more than decent. £7 for these two, would you believe.

Zoë loved her tiramisu, served grandly in a little chalice. It was relatively delicate, airy and boozy and she made quick work of it. It didn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of the very best – Paesino’s, say, or Ragù’s – but it was very, very close. “Besides, once you’ve had a heavy pizza you want something this light” she added. I’m told the hazelnut cannolo was also thoroughly agreeable.

Although there were few diners when we started our meal, I was reassured to see a regular trickle of people coming in to eat. The couple who had been eating outside when we arrived came in to specifically tell Dragan how much they’d enjoyed their meal, that it was their second visit so far but it wouldn’t be their last.

Our bill came to something like £86 for three courses and a drink apiece, not including service. There might be cheaper options: Mono’s pizzas generally cost between £15 and £20 but believe me, you get what you pay for. And service, from a trio of servers including Dragan, was bright, friendly and really winning. At one point the phone rang and I heard them take a reservation for a large table, and I remember thinking that those people were in for a really terrific evening.

The Internet is full of people who will tell you that every pizza they eat is the Best. Pizza. Ever, or every burger the Best. Burger. Ever. It gets a bit much, it jades you and the biggest cardinal sin of all: it’s so boring. If everything is special then nothing is. So I don’t say this all the time, but here goes: Mono’s pizza is the best I can remember having in this country. Better than Papa Gee, Knead, Paesino, or Amò at its peak. Better than wonderful pizzas I’ve had in Bristol, or at Blue Collar, or from Sarv. It’s really that good.

That’s the funny thing about my visit to Basingstoke, a journey that simultaneously showed me life thirty years ago and gave me a glimpse of my future. Because in the Nineties, my idea of a great pizza was a San Marco from Misselbrook & Weston, the little supermarket nearest to my suburban Woodley home. They were kept in the freezer section, and I could pick one up for something ridiculous like £3, bung it in the oven and think I was eating like a king. If Future Me appeared in a vision to Nineties Me and offered him a single slice of Mono’s Pizza Rebby, I think Nineties Me’s brain might melt.

That’s the thing about the past: it can be a lovely place, but you can’t live there. Besides, the food is way better here in the present.

Mono Pizza – 8.7
27 London St, Basingstoke, RG21 7PG
01256 280093

https://monopizzabasingstoke.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Zi Tore

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

Unlike any restaurant reviewer I know of, I publish the list of restaurants I intend to visit. It’s regularly added to as places open and people tip me off about their favourite venues, in Reading or slightly further afield, and every time I review somewhere it drops off that list – until, maybe, many years later, the time is ripe for reappraisal. From the outside, it probably just looks like a bunch of restaurants, in alphabetical order.

But the reality, for me at least, is that it’s a nuanced to do list. It’s almost more of an in-tray, never more so than at the beginning of the year, and the order in which I tackle it depends on a number of factors. Because not all of those spots have anywhere approaching equal priority in my mind, and that dictates how quickly I get round to them. I’m aware, for instance, that it’s a fair old while since I visited Newbury or Wokingham on duty: over three years for the former, nearly three years for the latter. I ought to rectify that.

Then there are the new places that I really need to review, if only because they look interesting. If not for my accident I would have reviewed Pho 86 and Nua by now, and spots like Blip and Matteo Greek Grill & Bakery also merit investigation sooner rather than later, to see if smashed burgers can take off in Tilehurst or whether at last somebody can make a go of the old Colley’s Supper Rooms site. I’m curious myself about the answers to those questions, so I need to go exploring at some point.

And of course the accident currently factors into these things. So places near the top of the in-tray, for the time being, need to be fairly close to home and at least slightly lend themselves to eating with one hand; my motor skills are gradually improving with physio, but writing one of these reviews still involves wrangling with the delights of Apple Dictation, which understands what I’m saying about as often as my wife does when her hearing aids aren’t in.

Every to do list has that one thing on it that you should have done a very long time ago, the item that sticks out like a sore thumb and makes you feel guilty. And in my case that item, the subject of this week’s review, is Italian restaurant and cafe Zi Tore, the one which took the spot on Smelly Alley vacated by the Grumpy Goat back in October 2023: yes, it really has been that long since the Grumpy Goat shut. Hicks Baker weren’t quick off the mark getting someone to jump into this particular grave, but Zi Tore opened nearly a year ago with co-owner Paolo Lanzetta, a proud Neapolitan, in the kitchen.

The Reading Chronicle covered the story as only they could, getting the name of the restaurant wrong – it’s not ‘Zia Torre’ – and accidentally giving Lanzetta dual nationality. “It has always been my dream to open a restaurant like this so people can try authentic Italian and Nepalese cuisine” they misquoted him as saying: you can’t get the staff, can you? That’s our local paper for you though, they just don’t know their calzone from their momo.

All that means that I am very long overdue checking out one of the trailblazers of the Italian invasion that hit Reading in the first half of 2025. I’ve reviewed Paesinos, reviewed Amò – not without controversy – and failed to get to Peppito’s before it closed five months after opening. But Zi Tore remained the blind spot: I tried to get there early one evening in May, only to get turned away because they seemed to be closing early, but I’ve not been back since.

And everything I’ve heard since then has been good. I’ve had comments to the effect that they’re staying open later these days, feedback borne out by their later opening hours on Google. Long-standing reader Mansoor, a man I trust on many things, said that of all of Reading’s new restaurants last year Zi Tore was the one he ended up visiting most frequently. And my friend Enza, my authority on all matters Italian, has loved Zi Tore for a long time, especially their graffe.

I’ve also heard rumours that one of Amò’s pizza chefs, short of work now that the restaurant has been closed for over a month without explanation, had crossed town to start working at Zi Tore. So that was it: slap bang at the top of the 2026 in-tray. On a drizzly weekday, during a week that was originally meant to be time off but was now filled with medical appointments, Zoë and I wandered up Smelly Alley to finally give it a whirl.

Zi Tore has done a lovely job of the exterior and the frontage and the window, with arancini and pizza slices tantalisingly on display, draws you in nicely. But beyond the counter, I found the interior a little inhospitable. It’s difficult to describe it without harking back to the site’s Grumpy Goat days, but the back room on the ground floor, where all the beer used to live, was a slightly unlovely space with a handful of tables, starved of daylight or much ambience.

Upstairs was much better, although that also brought back memories of the site’s previous life. It’s a nice space with a fetching mini mezzanine looking out over Smelly Alley, and taking the bar out had definitely created more room. But even here the furniture felt functional and a little sterile, as if they’d bought it piecemeal.

One table with makeshift bench seating could accommodate six people, one of the plum spots up by the window had an actual bench and low table – great for coffee and cake, perhaps less so for lunch. It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, Arctic: an aircon unit in the ceiling was switched off, its remote on a nearby low table set to a random 30 degrees. It all felt a little spartan, not quite finished, even though the place was on the verge of celebrating its first birthday.

Zi Tore’s menu had the kind of concision that pleases restaurant reviewers: seven different Neapolitan pizzas, two types of pasta – ravioli or gnocchi – with one of three sauces, a lasagne and three smaller dishes under the heading “Street Food”. That was slightly marred by a separate paper pizza menu, a recent addition perhaps, with another half a dozen pizza options. Some felt like the kind of combinations you’d get at Amò, making me wonder if the departing chef had taken a few ideas with him.

Pricing was standard issue, with pizzas ranging from £10 for a margherita all the way up to £17 if you wanted porcini, roasted potatoes and sausage (typing this, that ensemble sounds rather good to me). Pasta dishes were between £12 and £15 depending on your shape and sauce of choice, and the smaller plates were less than a fiver. The other tempting dish, the pizza fritta, was a tenner and looked like a fish out of water in the street food section of the menu.

Cakes are not on the menu, so you have to go up to the display and ask at the counter: I didn’t indulge my sweet tooth on this occasion, but the cake I saw turning up at a neighbouring table looked thoroughly decent. I didn’t see any graffe – the loop-shaped potato doughnut beloved by my friend Enza – but perhaps they’re a weekend thing.

Zi Tore also doesn’t do table service, so you go up with your order and your table number and let them have it. I ordered a couple of coffees, a couple of small dishes, a pizza and a pasta dish: all that set me back just over £44, which felt like decent value. It was certainly comparable with its peers at Amò and Paesinos, although Zi Tore’s offering is slightly different from theirs.

It’s a shame to start the year with a regular complaint about timing, but I would have liked the coffees quickly – it was cold outside and almost as cold inside – and then the small dishes, then the main events. Zi Tore wasn’t hugely busy, with about four other tables on the go when we arrived, but in reality we waited what felt like quite a while and then everything turned up a matter of minutes apart.

No matter: the coffee, the starting point, wasn’t half bad. It arrived in those tall, almost-conical glasses I slightly associate with the last century, but my latte was very enjoyable and Zoë liked her mocha. In Reading’s coffee hierarchy this wasn’t competing with the likes of C.U.P. or Lincoln – or even trying to – but it was significantly better than Madoo‘s coffee, which has always been its Achilles heel.

Small plates, turning up twenty minutes after we ordered, were a mixed bag of realised and unrealised potential. I didn’t mind the sausage and friarelli arancino, just the one for £5, but it lacked a little pep. It was lukewarm, the shell had no real rigidity to it and inside the filling wasn’t brilliantly distributed: a big knot of dense sausage meat at the bottom, almost as if it had been placed there to stop the whole thing toppling over, like a Weeble.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, more that I knew better were out there: it didn’t match Amò’s but, on the other hand, it was far better than the ones at Vino Vita.

Far, far better was the montanara, a simple but exquisite treat, a pleasingly irregular, puffy oval of fried pizza dough topped simply with tomato, mozzarella and a solitary basil leaf. This was so enjoyable, and justified a visit to Zi Tore in its own right: there’s nowhere to hide when something has so few components, and it’s a great way to showcase how good your raw materials are. At £3.50, this is one of the Reading lunch scene’s bargains, and although we shared it between two – and it was big enough for you to do that – the wise move would be to come here and order one to yourself.

But the other wise move might be to order just that, because as I was eating it I did find myself thinking if only this was hot. It was fried pizza dough, I’m sure it was as hot as balls to begin with, and I wondered what had cooled it so: was it adding the toppings, or was it the fact that it sat around until everything else was ready or almost ready? Or could it have been that the upstairs was so Siberian that you couldn’t affort to wait until after your arancino to tuck into it? I think some benefit of the doubt is probably due here: I would go again and give this another try. Even on the upper reaches of what you could describe as ‘piping warm’ it was a very good choice.

The timestamps on my and Zoë’s photos tell me that our bigger dishes arrived less than five minutes later, and it’s good that we’d finished our smaller ones or there wouldn’t have been room on the table for everything. Zoë called shotgun on the pizza, and had ordered simply, the Diavola, a relatively classic pepperoni pizza with chilli.

First things first: it looked the part, and the rim was nicely speckled, blistered and spotted. This is, for better or worse, a very classic Neapolitan pizza, with all the pluses and minuses of that genre, still enjoying its moment in the sun in Reading as it is replaced with American interlopers and hybrids (and whatever ‘London-style pizza’ is) in the capital. That’s the extent to which I keep up with pizza trends, but in theory I’m still happy with the original forebear of all these mutations.

And yet, from the bit of this pizza I tried, this wasn’t my favourite rendition of it in Reading. Everything was very loose and sloppy, more so than at Zi Tore’s rivals on the Kings Road, which meant the centre was like what I imagine sex with Rupert Murdoch must be like, a droopy challenge. I heard someone online say “if it ain’t messy it ain’t fun” at some point last year, and personally when it comes to food I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed more.

But there was other problems here. The dough would have been best in class in Reading back in the days when Franco Manca got us all excited, but with the competition from the class of ’25 it was mid table – and that’s before we get to Zia Lucia’s charcoal base and its almost mythical effects on punters’ innards.

And the pepperoni didn’t do it for me either – now, it might well have been pepperoni rather than salami, but for me the benefit of pepperoni is its narrower gauge, the amount you can fit on a pizza, all those little chalices of fat dotted across the surface. Six big discs arranged with geometric precision didn’t have quite the same curb appeal. Zoë told me she also expected more pizza and more bite – from actual chillies, rather than a dusting of chilli flakes.

Does this sound miserable? I’m so sorry if it does, because I was so hoping to like this. Especially as Zoë left about a third of it – which would not have happened at Amò or Paesinos – and, just as damningly, I didn’t take it off her hands. But I do feel more unsure in my judgment than usual, because people I like rate Zi Tore and I, too, really wanted to.

I’m afraid to say, though, that the pizza beat the pasta hands down. I’d chosen ravioli – made fresh every day onsite – rather than gnocchi, and the porcini mushroom sauce over the ragu on the recommendation of others. And again I wonder if my antennae were just out of kilter that day, because I did not like it at all.

Didn’t like any bit of it, actually. The ravioli, six very large specimens, had bottoms more thick and dense than Robert Jenrick, when I was hoping for lightness and delicacy. I also think they could have stood to be smaller, or for you to have fewer of them, although if I’d liked them you can bet I wouldn’t have said that. The filling was meant to be ricotta and parmesan, but all I got was ricotta and an aggressive blast of citrus. Not a light zing of the stuff, but the sort of brutal clubbing you associate with bathroom products.

I tried eating them without the sauce to check that my tastebuds weren’t playing up. But yes, again, an overdose of lemon. Perhaps if there had been less, and more balancing saltiness from the parmesan, which was completely missing in action, it might have worked. But as it was it didn’t, and it slugged it out with the mushroom sauce for dominance. Those two components simply couldn’t get along at all: perhaps I should have known that and not combined them but, if they didn’t go, why was it an option on the menu?

Might I have enjoyed this better if the sauce took centre stage, paired with gnocchi? I tried that on its own, too, and decided the answer was probably no. It felt somehow less than the sum of its parts, without any savoury depth from the mushrooms, which might have been porcini but I was not convinced. And again, the presentation of this was about taking a plate and trying to fill it to the perimeter with stuff, just because. I would have liked less: lighter, more delicate presentation but with punchier, better balanced flavours.

Again, the ultimate heckle. There were six ravioli. I wanted to stop after three, but thought that would seem rude: isn’t it strange how as a paying customer you can still feel like that? I contemplated leaving two on the plate but felt that even that would somehow be discourteous or ungrateful. So I ate another, and then decided I’d done my duty. I was undeniably full, make no mistake, but it had felt like a friend cooking for you in all the wrong ways.

I so wanted not to begin the year with a review like this, especially after all the hoo-ha last year every time I stepped into any Reading restaurant which was even vaguely Italian. I’m surprised, given the smear campaign I found out about, that I was even allowed on the premises at Zi Tore.

But the cosmos has well and truly taught me a lesson. I made the mistake of saying in my round up of 2025 that I might be better off giving every Italian restaurant a rating of 6.6 and saying it was ‘quite nice’ from now on, and fate rewarded me with this experience. Look at the rating below: you couldn’t make it up, but if I moved it a notch up or down I’d only be doing it so as not to look as if I was fulfilling a prophecy.

So I need to at least be more nuanced when I sum up Zi Tore than to say that it’s quite nice. That doesn’t reflect the complexity of the reality, anyway, and visiting the restaurant nearly a year after it opened you can’t put the things you aren’t wild about down to growing pains or opening before they’re ready. The experience I had there is the experience I was supposed to have.

It is fantastic that a hospitality business took the space vacated by the Grumpy Goat, and that there is still one oasis of food and drink on a run which used to be synonymous with food and is now full of mobile phone repair shops nobody seems to visit (and, to be fair, Reading’s finest branch of Timpson). It’s also fantastic that it’s independent, and laudable that Zi Tore makes everything onsite and offers options you can’t get elsewhere in town that have made at least one Italian I know ecstatic and a little less homesick.

And I can see that I would return to Zi Tore, believe it or not. I’m really sorry that I didn’t love the pizza or pasta, but one of those window seats on the mezzanine with a cup of coffee, a montanara and the chance to explore some of their cake after that would very much appeal to me. Especially as the service was so good, and happy and helpful. But I don’t know if Zi Tore will survive and make enough money if all its customers order like me, or whether it really wants just to be a café given the expansion of its pizza menu and its opening hours.

Fortunately for Zi Tore I suspect not all of its customers order like me, or think like me, and Reading is a big enough place that it might well carve out a large enough share of the market keeping at what it does. But the market may well contract further in 2026, and so I wish them the best of luck. At the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Amò, closed for over a month on Kings Road, will reopen. Ironically, it might be good news for Zi Tore if it doesn’t.

Zi Tore – 6.6
7 Union Street, Reading, RG1 1EU
0118 9561531

https://www.zitore.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Amò Italian Street Food

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews

Amò reopened on 23rd July 2026 after closing in mid-December 2025, apparently for maintenance.

In the good old days, where you stood on certain binary debates was simply a way of positioning you in the world. Cream first or jam first? Plain or milk chocolate Bounty? Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? Were you a fan of the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? All these things used just to be a form of triangulation, little points on a chart that, taken together, might give someone an idea of you (and, since you’re asking: cream first; milk chocolate; salt and vinegar; the Beatles; neither).

When did that all change? 2016, I suppose, when we all became Leave or Remain, indelibly stamped, and at every stage from that point forwards. We’re always asked what side we’re on, and now it’s not a useful piece of trivia but a necessary step to place yourself on one side or another of a yawning chasm. Are you pro- or anti-Israel? Do you think J.K. Rowling is a hero or a villain? How about Farage, or Trump? Did you believe in lockdowns, masks, vaccines? Did you leave Twitter or stay? If you left, did you go to Bluesky or Threads?

Like the Tower Of Babel, we’re now all scattered to the four winds, trying to find our tribe and arguing, endlessly, with the others. It’s not a bit of fun, any more. And this is all rich coming from me, because I’m painfully aware that I’m as polarising as most. Happily, Reading faces another tricky choice now that’s potentially just as difficult, but hopefully less divisive: Paesinos or Amò?

The two pizza places opened on Kings Road, two doors and three months apart, the latest in a weird series of rivals in very close proximity, following the example of Pho and Bánh Mì QB in Kings Walk or Iro Sushi and You Me Sushi on Friar Street. What is it with that? You must be very confident in your product to open so near to a direct competitor, like Bánh Mì QB did, but with Paesinos and Amò, Iro and You Me so little time separated both arrivals that it must be an unhappy coincidence. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a new business only to find that another one a lot like yours is doing exactly the same, a stone’s throw away.

Anyway, regular readers will know that I reviewed Paesinos a month ago with my Italian friend Enza (who is, just to confuse matters, an Amò superfan) and it received a glowing write up from me. But I knew, even as I was eating there, that I needed to prioritise visiting its neighbour, if only because Enza told me that it was as good as, if not better than, the restaurant I had so enjoyed. I couldn’t go with Enza, because she was so far from impartial, and this time I took my friend Jo, also of Italian descent, last seen checking out House Of Flavours with me.

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Restaurant review: Paesinos

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As of April 2026 I’ve heard reports that Paesinos has parted company with its pizzaiolo, and that the quality has dipped as a result, so approach with caution.

Here’s a tip for you: if you want to discover how many Italians live in Reading just drop innocuously into conversation online, on a local Facebook page or the Reading subreddit, the question of Reading’s best pizza. Because if you do, Reading’s Italian contingent will come out of the woodwork. This calls for opinions, and they have plenty. They don’t fuck about, either.

“Being Italian and of partly Neapolitan descent, I am picky when it comes to pizza. Or better, I eat anything, but I know a good pizza from a bad one, and from a non-pizza” began Luca, on the Edible Reading Facebook page. He went on.

“The only real pizzas in Reading have been Papa Gee’s, for years. Then Sarv came, and Zia Lucia (both ok). I have recently tried Zi Tore and above all Paesinos, the latter is possibly the best in Reading. The chef and manager is Sicilian and has previously worked at the Thirsty Bear. However, Thirsty Bear make American style pizza, while Paesinos make real pizza.”

Another of my Italian readers, Franz, was more generous about the Thirsty Bear. “It’s just a different style” he said. “Italian pizza purists perhaps will take a bit to adapt (I’m Italian, but open minded). A slice of their TriBeCa, curly fries and a pint is hard to beat. It just makes me happy and satisfied.” Franz also had opinions about Zia Lucia, and its “horrible, plasticky” mozzarella.

After that Luca and Franz ended up having a fascinating conversation about whether you could find good pizza outside Italy. Franz thought it was easy to do, these days. Luca disagreed, but said you could even end up getting what he called “non-pizza” in Italy, unless you were in Campania or Sicily. Just to chuck in a curveball, the best pizza Franz ever had was in the Swedish city of Norrköping. “It was Neapolitan style and was excellent, but then they had a corner in the pizzeria that was all dedicated to Totti so that confused me from an allegiance perspective.”

I could have listened to Luca and Franz discuss these niceties all day: it seemed that if you asked two Italians you were likely to come out of the conversation with at least three opinions. Over on Reddit, other Italians were weighing in. “Zi Tore in Smelly Alley has taken the crown as the best pizza in town (in my humble, Italian, opinion)” said one. “And the pizza al taglio from Amò is even better.”

This is particularly topical because last week Sarv’s Slice announced that they were leaving the Biscuit Factory, after falling out with the owners both there and in Ealing. The reaction across the internet was one of huge sadness, coupled with genuine fear for the future of the venue. But this happens against a backdrop of Reading’s pizza scene exploding, so Sarv’s Slice might have quit while they were ahead: the market has become saturated since they opened in 2023, and even more so in the last six months or so.

Let’s run through the timeline. Last year Dough Bros opened out on Northumberland Avenue, and in the summer Zia Lucia opened in town. From then, things have only accelerated: at the start of the year Paesinos opened opposite Jackson’s Corner. Then Zi’Tore opened in February, in the old Grumpy Goat site. At the end of April, two doors down from Paesinos, Reading got Amò, a joint venture between the owners of Madoo and Pulcinella Focaccia, a pizza trader who operated from their home address out in Earley.

And believe it or not, last Wednesday another pizza restaurant, Peppito, opened on the first floor of Kings Walk, John Sykes’ restaurant sweatshop. The time between pizza restaurants opening in Reading appears to have some sort of half-life, so by the time this goes to press I wouldn’t be surprised if two more places had started trading, making all this out of date.

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Restaurant review: Bosco Pizzeria, Bristol

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Zoë and I wound up in Bristol on the Saturday before Christmas because my friend James was having a barbecue to mark the end of what he refers to as the “grilling season”. Its boundaries are somewhat amorphous, because James likes to barbecue at almost any opportunity, but as far as I can gather the grilling season starts around Easter and ends at some point before New Year’s Eve. I can’t say that with any confidence though, because I wouldn’t put it past James to grill meat in the dead of winter too: it would make more sense to you, if you’d met him.

But anyway it was an evening do, and that left me with one final lunch in Bristol before the year was out. And rather than try the hot new place – assuming I knew where the hot new place was, of course – or one of the Bristol restaurants on my radar like Bank, Native Vine or The Clifton, I decided to go for a safe bet. What can I say: it was the end of the year, my last opportunity to eat on duty in 2024 and, just this once, I wanted a guarantee of what the festive season always promises, comfort and joy. So I chose Bosco Pizzeria, situated near the top of Whiteladies Road, before it meets The Downs.

I first went to Bosco the best part of a decade ago, when it was very much Bristol’s pizza pioneer, and although I hadn’t been back for some time I always had it down as a reliable banker for somewhere good to eat in the city. Since it first opened its fortunes had ebbed and flowed, opening a second branch in Clifton, closing it and reopening it, closing the Whiteladies Road branch due to Covid and then taking a long old time to reopen due to a fire. Other branches in Cheltenham and Bath had followed, and a sister restaurant called Pizzucci offering a more American, less Italian experience down the Gloucester Road.

But I’d always seen it as a sure thing, and a standout even as other pizza restaurants came and went in Bristol. I reckoned it was as good as Flour and Ash – the original one on the Cheltenham Road that Jay Rayner got worked up about that is, not the sanitised relaunched one on Whiteladies Road which I haven’t visited. And for my money it was better than the much-hyped Bertha’s on Wapping Wharf, which wasn’t quite as good as I’d expected it to be. I couldn’t definitively say it was the best pizza in Bristol: after all I don’t live there, and I’m yet to try the likes of Pizzarova or CanCanPizza, but I could say that it took some beating.

And it was a lovely, busy spot the Saturday before Christmas. They’d slightly rejigged it since I was last there, the front section buzzy and full of smaller tables, the one out back made up of booths for larger groups. You could sit up at the bar, which some people were doing, and it had that lovely air of a place where people, like me, were putting their cares to one side for a couple of hours and treating themselves. Christmas decorations were tasteful and muted, wreaths in the window, baubles running along the tops of the banquettes. My wife took a photo of me, sitting there all happy: I liked it enough to use it as a Facebook profile picture.

Bosco’s menu was split into sections – about half a dozen if you count salads, which personally I rarely do. Apart from salads there were cicchetti, a selection of meats and cheeses, plenty of permutations of pizza, a small range of pasta dishes priced as mains and a few bigger dishes (or, as they put it, “large plates”) – ribollita, parmigiana and what have you. It was, I reflected as I tried to make choices, exactly the kind of menu you always hope to see in mainstream Italian chains but never do. It struck me as the sort of place Maidenhead’s Storia was aiming to be. Zoë sipped a very good negroni, I sipped arguably an even better negroni sbagliato and gradually we honed our selection, sequencing them like a mix tape.

The first slight stutter came when we ordered. I said we’d like a couple of cicchetti, then a mixture of meats and cheeses, then our pizzas.

“We’ll bring out all the smaller dishes at the same time, is that okay?” said our server.

Now, I very much wanted to say no, actually, we’re really happy to be here and we’re in no rush so can we have the cicchetti first, then the other bits and then the pizza, like we asked for? And I would have done, but my wife gave me a look which very clearly said could you not be a restaurant reviewer, just this once? so I kept my mouth shut. It hasn’t stopped me mentioning it here, obviously, but it did irk me – what was the rush? It had that feel that Wagamama always has, that the kitchen’s convenience is the primary concern, not your experience.

And it did literally all come out at once, in the space of a couple of minutes, causing not just a sequencing problem but a logistical one too, the table barely big enough to hold five small plates at once. We prioritised the calamari, as the only hot dish we’d asked for, and it was decent but flawed. The thing I’m always watching out for here is the bounce and twang of squid that needed to be fresher, and Bosco avoided that pitfall. But in its place were brittle sticks of squid, almost like Clifton Nik-Naks, which managed to be both pale and overcooked. We squeezed the lemon, dipped in the aioli but neither could totally redeem the raw materials.

The anchovies also misfired. These were billed as coming with salted butter – as they had at Brutto – and focaccia, and almost did but didn’t quite. Instead they came with very good focaccia but swimming in extra virgin, oilier than a Bluesky reply guy, shallot finely diced on top. Is it wrong that I took against them for still having the skin on? Maybe, but it fooled me for a second into thinking these were more like vinegary boquerones than taut, salty anchovies. That wasn’t right – they were intensely salty – but somehow the texture of them didn’t feel quite as I expected.

It was either cognitive dissonance or cognitive disappointment, but I couldn’t work out which. Three anchovies for seven pounds felt a little steep, but I guess you were paying for the focaccia as well. And I liked the focaccia, as I said, and I know it wouldn’t have gone as well with butter as with olive oil. But the whole thing felt a tad disjointed.

Bosco has always excelled for cheese and charcuterie, and the menu gives you an appealing range of both which you can mix and match in the most middle class multibuy of all time. My favourite of the cheeses was the one I neglected to photograph, a gorgeous Robiolo which was soft but not stinky, complex without being overpowering. It was great with the focaccia, which begged the question of how you’d eat it if you hadn’t ordered the anchovies. Almost as good was a Gorgonzola dolce which I liked and Zoë loved – simultaneously sweet and salty and very well balanced.

But again, without the focaccia it might have been messy to eat. I know that this kind of thing – getting in nice cheeses and cured meats, keeping the former well and slicing the latter thinly – is more about buying than cooking, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that many Italian restaurants don’t do this very well. Bosco’s years of experience showed in this respect, in cultivating excellent suppliers, buying the best stuff from them and not mucking it up. It can’t be that easy: if it was, it wouldn’t be so rare.

Oh, and the coppa was divine. Clearly sliced there and then, not exhumed from leaves of plastic, with that dryness and nuttiness that marks out the best specimens. This was the one thing that didn’t need bread at all, it just needed to be picked up and polished off, with or without a soupçon of cheese. The natural order had been restored, and I remembered just how good Bosco can be. We flagged someone down for another couple of sbagliatos: even though our reservation had been for a late lunch, the dining room showed no signs of thinning out.

Maybe the staff had got the message that we weren’t in a rush, or maybe they were just too busy to rush us, but there was a decent interval between our plethora of small plates and the main attraction.

Either way I was reminded, during that time, of lots of things: what a nice room it was, and how my many visits there had all been at different stages in my life, during a decade where almost everything about my life – what I did for a living, who I did it for, where I lived and who I lived there with – had changed, the only constant being this blog. I’d never been to Bosco with Zoë, and it made me happy to share this room with her at the end of a year itself full of changes.

I was also reminded, almost as much, just how nice a well made negroni sbagliato can be, but that’s probably beside the point.

Zoë and I reverted to type in ordering our mains, that comfort and joy thing again. Her pizza was the ventricina, a very Zoë choice with spicy salami, chilli oil and honey. She loved it, as I expected she would, and it showcased what Bosco did really well – an exemplary base, a chewy, bubbled crust with plenty of blistering, a deep tomato sauce, winningly fruity. This was as good an advert for Bosco as you could hope for, and at thirteen-fifty I thought it was solid value, especially benchmarked against restaurants closer to home like Zia Lucia.

That I didn’t enjoy my pizza as much just goes to show that you can get the fundamentals bang on and then fluff it with the whistles and bells. I too had asked for my archetypal pizza preference, sometimes called the Neopolitan and sometimes, as here, the Venetian. Either way, it’s the old anchovy, olive, caper trifecta and it’s always my go to when I visit a pizza place, providing it’s on.

The base was still exemplary, so was the sauce, so what went wrong here? A few things, really. The anchovies were unevenly distributed, Franco Manca style, leaving a reasonable amount of surface area salt-free. And the anchovies (skinless this time, to be fair) were too much fish and not enough salt, although that might have been a personal preference.

And what about the capers? Apparently they were fried in this case, which can work brilliantly – Buon Appetito used to do this – but they seemed anonymous. There weren’t enough of them, and what there were didn’t contribute the acetic sharpness I wanted. This pizza is meant to be all about salt and vinegar, but instead it was more fish and mild disappointment.

Hey ho. It wasn’t a bad pizza, it just wasn’t as good as I knew it could be. The slightly haphazard timing, coupled with our gluttony, meant we ate too much too quickly and were too full for dessert, so we settled up. Our meal, including two negronis apiece and an optional 12.5% service charge, came to just over one hundred and six pounds. I didn’t begrudge that: besides, they had Aesop handwash in their very fetching loos, and that stuff doesn’t pay for itself. We called up an Uber and prepared ourselves to have a few drinks with James and Liz ahead of the official end of the grilling season. Well, maybe after a nap to sleep off some of those carbs.

It was a lovely evening, incidentally. The beers flowed thick and fast – James is the man who has turned his garage into a micropub – and the conversation was enormous fun. We got to bed well after midnight, too tired for the traditional couples debrief. But during the gathering somebody who knows that I write this blog asked me if I’d gone anywhere on duty at lunchtime and I said yes, I’d been to Bosco.

“I hear it’s not as good as it used to be, would you agree with that?” I was asked.

And the binary answer, although the world’s always more complicated than binary answers, is yes, I do agree. On my previous visits, Bosco was the place you wish would open near you, the place that could teach every Italian chain a thing or two. On this visit, although it was still good, it was closer in quality to those chains at their very best. The gap had narrowed, and not because the chains have upped their game. This is the point, often combined with expansion, at which independent restaurants need to take care.

But anyway, on that night – and, writing this now – it didn’t seem to matter quite so much. It was a very agreeable lunch, if not a perfect one, tucked away at the end of the year. If you asked me where to go for a rock solid reliable pizza in Bristol, I would still probably pick Bosco; it’s earned that latitude, because we go way back. And if one opened in Reading, all the Sarv’s Slices and Dough Bros in the RG postcode wouldn’t stop me paying it a more than occasional visit. Next time you’re in Bristol, if you want an absolute banker, I think Bosco is still that.

Bosco Pizzeria – 7.6
96 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2QX
0117 9737978

https://www.boscopizzeria.co.uk

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