Portuguese – Page 2 – Edible Reading

N.B. O Beirão closed in October 2015. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Dining at O Beirão is a little like eating out on holiday.

To start with it’s a bit of a trek, up out of town and then down the Basingstoke Road, where it’s all pretty Victorian houses and car dealers. With a location like this you have to want to visit, because there’s no chance of happening upon it. Then there’s the poor website with a few spelling and grammatical errors and, crucially, no mention of the opening hours. Checking this out for information can be misleading and you might turn up, like I did the first time I visited on duty, on a day when they’re not actually open, making the trek seem rather futile (thank goodness for the decent bus service, as there are no runners up to review round here). Then there’s the telly up in the corner of the room showing European football – Portuguese, of course – much like many little tavernas and bars on holiday. Finally, and this is not a good thing, after trekking out of town to visit O Beirão I dashed to the toilet to be greeted by a sign saying “Please do not flush toilet paper. Please put it in the bin”. It was Crete 2002 all over again.

Don’t let these things put you off, however. Inside this little slice of Portugal is really quite nice. Having turned up previously when the shutters are down it would be easy to dismiss it as a rough, out of town restaurant that won’t be around forever, but what’s actually behind the shutters is an adorable room filled with small tables with red gingham tablecloths and terracotta crockery (which includes the wine cups).

The menu is pretty short and hints at a double life. There is a pretty standard selection of lunchtime foods (omelettes, sandwiches, jacket potatoes – presumably to make the best of those car dealers wanting something decent for lunch) along with the authentically Portuguese dishes. Some of the main courses need to be ordered in advance – if only I’d known that I might have gone for one (the arroz de marisco sounds especially good, as does the suckling pig), but turning up on spec meant it wasn’t to be. Besides, they weren’t listed on the website either.

I started with pan fried mushrooms with garlic and onion, and morcela (Portuguese black pudding), both of which turned up in more terracotta pots. The mushrooms were respectable, fresh tasting and decently garlicky, though I would have preferred them more thoroughly cooked – they were a little flaccid, not at the wonderfully sticky stage of truly great fried mushrooms. The morcela – a generous helping – was again very much on the basic side. I’m a huge black pudding fan and I think I was expecting something soft, sweet and crumbly like Spanish morcilla but this wasn’t it – much firmer, much more like a hybrid between black pudding and chorizo. Again, I felt it could have been cooked a little bit better, and it was very hard to separate from the skin.

Both starters were accompanied with a basket of bread and butter and a small tub of shrimp paste (you can thank Google Translate for that nugget, otherwise I wouldn’t have had a clue what it was: Portuguese is not one of my strong points). There were two types of bread – the first, delicious and chewy, resembled sourdough in texture and was great dunked in the mushroom juices. The second was more like corn bread: shorter, sweeter and a little bit odd (especially with the shrimp paste – take my word for it, that’s a combo that shouldn’t be tried). Both starters were four pounds, which, to me, is on the borderline between “very reasonable” and “downright cheap”.

So far, so not bad. For a main course it would have been a crime not to order the frango assado (piri piri chicken), so I did. This is true Portuguese chicken (if you’re ever been to Portugal you’ll know what I mean) with a crispy skin, a lightly spiced kick and with meat pulling away from the bone easily. I asked for it medium and in truth it was a bit under-spiced for me, so I was splashing on a little extra piri piri sauce from the bottle on the table (which I loved and would quite happily have slipped in my pocket to bring home. No! Of course I didn’t!). Of course, it’s not possible to talk about piri piri chicken without mentioning Nando’s, so here goes: the heat was drier and more subtle in O Beirão’s version, and for what it’s worth I preferred it. On the side were an awful lot of fries (nothing special, and almost certainly not made on site but very good at soaking up the juices from the chicken) and a simple salad of lettuce, tomato and cucumber which I barely touched, truth be told. At the end of the meal I really wanted to pick up the chicken and get the last bits of the meat off with my bare hands but decorum got the better of me. I still regret that a little bit.

The other main course, bacalhau com natas, sounded intriguing. I love salt cod in all its forms, and I liked the idea of it being served with fried potatoes in a béchamel sauce. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to that promise. It felt a bit like a Portuguese take on fisherman’s pie, but the whole thing was far too creamy and bland: the béchamel drowned everything else out and, ironically for a dish built around salt cod, what it was really crying out for was some salt. Every mouthful just highlighted what a good choice the piri piri chicken had been, and I would have traded the whole lot for just another forkful of salted, crispy skin.

To finish we shared a slice of toffee biscuit cake. According to the O Beirão website all the desserts are made in house, though this looked a little too perfect for that to be true. This was a bit like tiramisu – layers of strangely firm, soft biscuit and what I think was crème patissiere, all with a toffee sauce on top. As enjoyable as it was the cream layers were slightly synthetic tasting, a little too sweet and thick. Of course we finished it but I would have preferred a pastel de nata to end the meal. That might be a bit of a cliché, but I absolutely love them. Impossible to tell whether O Beirão ever sells them, though (the wonders of that impenetrable website again).

The wine list here is pretty short (and yes, they do serve Mateus Rosé) and very reasonable. We had a half litre jug (and, as I’ve probably said countless times, I really wish more places would do carafes) of the house red and it cost just eight pounds. I thought it was smashing – juicy, jammy, fruity and great for drinking with spicy food. It’s also nice to see that all the wines on the list at O Beirão are Portuguese and none of them are over twenty pounds (the most expensive are just sixteen quid). They also do two perfectly respectable-looking ports by the glass – one vintage, one tawny – although I didn’t get to try them this time.

Service throughout was polite and friendly, with just the one black-clad waiter looking after the room. He was cheery and chatty although, truth be told, we didn’t need much looking after (it was the sort of quiet Friday night that makes me fear for a restaurant – only three tables of two all evening). The bill, for two and a half courses and a carafe of wine, was a touch under forty-five pounds, excluding service. Pretty hard to argue with that, I think, and although the bacalhau was a bit of a misfire a lot of it was good, all of it was cheap and most of it was both.

If I’m honest I went to O Beirão wanting to like it (once I’d got over the frustration of turning up on a Thursday evening to find the shutters down). Yes, the hours are odd – they’re only open in the evenings Friday to Sunday, although they do lunch every day. Yes, it is a bit of a pain to get there (though the number 6 bus stops right outside). And yes, you can’t flush your loo paper. But it really charmed me, and I think that shows that sometimes it’s not just about the room, or the service, or the food. Sometimes there’s some other indefinable quality, and O Beirão has that. Perhaps it’s that feeling of being elsewhere, a feeling many far more expensive, more polished restaurants throw money at manufacturing without success. For an independent Portuguese restaurant to open in Reading is no mean feat, let alone one in the relative obscurity of the Basingstoke Road. They’ve been there since the end of 2012 and I for one would like to see them stick around, even if it’s just for an alternative to the relentless march of Nando’s. Next time I’ll take some friends, pre-order something that takes a little longer to prepare and order a bottle of Mateus Rosé. Or several. Judge all you like, because I won’t care: I’ll be on holiday, after all.

O Beirão – 7.0
63 Basingstoke Road, RG2 0ER
0118 9759898

http://obeirao.co.uk/

N.B. Cappuccina Café closed in June 2014. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Cappuccina Café wins one accolade right from the off; I think it might have the ugliest view of any café or restaurant in Reading. From my seat, through the glass front window, I could make out “Sam 99p” on West Street, with its rather hyperbolic slogan Yes! Everything’s 99p or less (it’s hard to imagine anybody walking past and actually saying that). Still, Cappuccina Café isn’t unique in having a bad view. From Picnic you can see the tables outside Munchee’s which house some of Reading’s most glamorous smoking al fresco diners. From the terrace at London Street Brasserie I once made out somebody on the grassy bank opposite urinating against the bridge (stay classy, Reading). None the less, I wanted to make the visit because Cappuccina Café is a fusion of Vietnamese and Portuguese and you don’t see that every day – not in Reading, not anywhere.

First impressions were mixed. It’s a very long room with the counter at the front, the kitchen at the back and the two overstretched waiters constantly doing a long walk from one to the other and back again. Only one person was serving when I got there, and he didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind whether to take my order or attend to the large pile of dishes in plain view in the sink, a pile which made me a tad nervous about ordering anything at all. As it was, he ineffectually pottered around in the general vicinity of the sink before coming back to check what I wanted (I had half a mind to tell him to do the washing up first). Was their dishwasher broken?

It’s a pity because the interior is quite handsome – smartish tables and chairs, a nice banquette along both sides of the room and tasteful tiled walls. There were plenty of cakes visible up at the counter and all of them looked distinctly tempting. I went on a Sunday lunchtime and it was full of families, most of them Asian – presumably Vietnamese, though I couldn’t tell for sure – all tucking into bowls of what I imagine were pho. Normally I’d take this as a good sign, but after recent experiences I approached things with a note of caution. The whole place did have the air of a crèche about it with plenty of kids roaming around – which ironically means this may be the most family-friendly place I’ve reviewed so far.

The general chaos continued well after I placed my order. One of the dishes I picked was bánh mì, the famous Vietnamese baguette which has been so popular in London over the last few years. It looked to me like the staff got a baguette out of the oven behind the counter, part assembled it behind the counter (next to the sink) and then took it all the way to the back of the restaurant, past my table, to add the rest of the ingredients. As a study in time and motion it was weird to put it lightly. To make matters worse, despite being (you’d hope) the easier to prepare of the two things I’d ordered it arrived a good couple of minutes after the other dish. By this stage we’d gone well past chaotic and were cantering into haphazard with reckless abandon.

When the bánh mì arrived I had waited so long, with such mounting despair, that I was expecting it to be indifferent. It should have been, because up to that point everything else was. To my surprise and relief, it was anything but. The barbecued pork was moist but not fatty, crispy, warm and utterly delicious. The menu said it was marinated in honey, five spice and lemongrass and I got all of that but especially the lemongrass. The shredded carrot (which I think was pickled), the little strips of cucumber and the daikon added crunch and yet more freshness, although the coriander seemed to be missing in action – a shame, because it would have fitted in perfectly. It was the kind of dish where you have a big grin after the first mouthful which lasts until well after the last, the sort of food that makes you shake your head in slow joy. It made me realise how underwhelming most sandwiches in Reading are – miserable clammy things, heavy and cold and soggy with mayo.

The grilled chicken with rice (com ga nuong) was so much more than the brief description would have you expect. The main attraction was a large leg of chicken which tasted like it, too, had been marinated in spices (including Chinese five spice and lemongrass) with a delicious crispy skin. For the size of the chicken leg there wasn’t a great deal of meat but what was there was moist and tasty, if a bit hard to get off the bone. On the side was a neat hillock of plain rice topped with a little pile of fried onions and a heap of pickled red cabbage and carrot which was just lovely with a forkful of chicken. The only out of place thing on the plate was the afterthought of salad, so forlorn and unloved that it just shouldn’t have been there.

I felt it would be wrong to leave without also sampling the Portuguese section of the menu, so I went up and ordered a couple of pasteis de nata for dessert. These came warmed – again, in an oven rather than a microwave – ready to be dusted with cinnamon and wolfed down. For me, a Portuguese egg custard tart is one of the seven culinary wonders of the world, ideally fresh out of the oven, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon and dispatched in two, maybe three mouthfuls at most. The pastry is light and flaky, the top golden brown and not quite burnt and the filling ever so slightly wobbly and flecked with vanilla. These weren’t like that – too firm, not warmed through enough, no icing sugar – but they were still pretty good, and a darned sight closer than I ever hoped to get in Reading, in a little spot on West Street with a prime view of the 99p shop. Pleasingly they were also ninety-five pence each, which makes them far better value than anything you could pick up in “Sam’s”.

The whole thing – bánh mì, chicken with rice, two tarts, a cup of tea and a soft drink – came to fourteen pounds. A comparable lunch would have cost just as much in Pret, Costa or Nero and wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good. To me, Cappuccina Café is part of something interesting happening to Reading’s lunch scene. All over the place independent cafes are springing up – from Lincoln down the King’s Road (coffee and bagels) to Arepas Caffe at the other end of West Street (Venezuelan food and churros), to Shed in Merchant’s Place (toasties and “Saucy Friday”) – not to forget the granddaddy, Picnic (salad and cakes). There’s no excuse any more for the laziness of going to the usual players on Coffee Corner. So yes, the service is iffy, the layout is a nightmare and they really need to fix their dishwasher, but with all that said I’ll still be going back to Cappuccina, and sooner rather than later. They have three other types of bánh mì and I fancy trying them all, collecting the Vietnamese equivalent of stickers in a Panini album.

Cappuccina Café – 7.0
16 West Street, RG1 1TT
0118 9572085

https://www.facebook.com/cappuccinacafe