Pub review: The Punter, Oxford

On October 16, 2026October 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I took a slightly roundabout route to deciding where to review this week. It was always going to be somewhere in Oxford, but the initial plan was to visit the Old Bookbinders, a gorgeous backstreet pub in Jericho that has served up affordable French food for fifteen years, with my old friend Dave. But then at the beginning of the week I got the dreaded WhatsApp from him: struck down with a bug, only just back at work, he’d be in no fit state for eating or boozing at the weekend.

I briefly contemplated going there solo, but then I recalibrated: I could try out Permit Room, the Dishoom offshoot in the centre of Oxford, instead. Unlike most people I’ve met, I’ve never eaten in a Dishoom: I save no reservations dining for holidays. But everything I read suggested that, although Dishoom might not be what it once was, Permit Room was another kettle of fish entirely.

There were only five branches, and Oxford was graced with one: the kind of chain that Reading would so dearly love to attract but never does. I was sold. I made a reservation for lunch, did my research, pored over the menu. But I didn’t wind up eating at Permit Room.

So what happened? Well, my manager happened. I was in the office last Friday and on a break between poring over spreadsheets and crafting impeccably disappointed emails we got to chatting, as we often do, about Oxford, a place where I suspect we both frequently daydream about living. That usually involves shooting the breeze about where to get good coffee, or eat good food and he happened to mention The Punter to me. Had I heard about the changes there, he asked?

The Punter has an interesting history. There’s been a pub there for 150 years, but it reopened under that name a mere 15 years ago. Then, in the height of the pandemic, it decided to remake itself as an exclusively vegan and vegetarian gastropub. The following year it appointed chef Anthony Skeats, who previously cooked at a Michelin-starred pub in Oxfordshire, and plaudits followed. It made the Good Food Guide and even featured in the Sunday Times when it was reviewed by Charlotte Ivers, the paper’s then restaurant critic.

Ivers was very much the Liz Truss of broadsheet restaurant criticism – a massive Tory who didn’t do the job for long and whose reign now feels like an aberration. And her review of The Punter was a little on the lukewarm side, but it was still a rare appearance by an Oxford establishment in the national press.

But the reason my manager asked if I’d considered The Punter, he told me, was that it was serving meat and fish dishes again. A little research confirmed that the pub had rowed back from its bold new direction. Skeats left a couple of years ago, and in February the pub launched a new menu – still 60% vegetarian, they said, but now with fish dishes. Why the volte-face, you might ask? Was it because the market just wasn’t there for an entirely meat free venue, or was it something else?

Well, according to owner Tom Rainey it was partly due to government policy but mainly down to the closure of the Botley Road, a major thoroughfare which was pretty key to being able to reach the pub at all. Rainey said that this reduced footfall to the pub by 75%, if not more.

The Botley Road was closed so Network Rail could rebuild the nearby railway bridge and add an extra platform to the station. Which doesn’t sound an unreasonable thing to do, but what was unreasonable was the sheer duration of the closure: excellent local website the Oxford Clarion described it as having reopened “after 1,258 days and £237m”. Rainey, speaking to the local media, was more to the point: he called it “three and a half years of hell”.

It’s always tricky providing background like this because my Oxford readers already know all this and everybody else might not be that interested, but to put it in some kind of context for my Reading readers: you know how the Fisherman’s Cottage went through a phase of complaining to the Chronicle about the council cutting off access to the pub? Imagine that to the power of ten, being virtually inaccessible for over three years.

Anyway, I’d like to say that I cancelled my plans to go to Permit Room because I’m a sucker for the underdog. But the truth is that after my manager told me the news about the Punter I looked it up online, and I really fancied the menu. It looked clean and tempting, and I thought a little outing to the Punter might be a lovely way to spend a Saturday. The sample menu still had vegetarian stuff on it, but half of the dishes involved meat or fish. It was as if its time as a vegetarian pub was an embarrassing episode in its past it was trying, gradually, to forget. We’ve all been there, though. I booked a table.

If the rhetorical route to the Punter was circuitous the physical one couldn’t be much more direct, now that pesky bridge has been sorted. You leave the train station and rather than striking out towards Park End Street and the Westgate, you instead turn right and within five minutes you’ve crossed a pretty little bridge and find yourself on Osney Island, right by the river, walking down East Street, a beautiful run of terraced Victorian houses. It reminded me of the Village in Reading, an enclave so close to everything, yet magically removed. You are right by the station and yet you’re utterly in the middle of elsewhere, dreaming about living in one of those houses (I looked them up: we probably can’t afford to).

And there, on the corner with South Street, is the Punter, a ridiculously attractive redbrick pub with a decent looking outdoor space. I imagine Victorian side streets used to be awash with these: places like the Punter, and the Retreat in Reading, make a good case for the survival of the fittest. Boats went past on the Thames and a gaggle of men in Lycra, all repping the Oxford Cycling Club, were gathered outside in the sun, drinking pints of cask beer. It was awfully bucolic for somewhere so near the city centre: I realised I’d never been to Osney Island before in thirty-five years of coming to Oxford, and I felt I’d missed out.

The Punter is absolutely beautiful inside. It’s a corner plot with two rooms and I was in the bigger, even more gorgeous one. Window is a noun that’s yet to transform, horrifically, into a verb, but if it ever does you could do some terrific windowing here: the bright blue frames look out on the redbrick terraces and the water, the whole thing almost more glass than wall. Vibrant, likeable art hung between each window, and the overall effect was oddly magical.

The staff had originally kindly plonked me at the one table that looked out on the river, but I asked nicely if I could move so I could see the whole room, experience all that life and light. The Punter’s well-curated Instagram feed boasts that customers come for the river and end up looking at the walls. They’re not far from the truth.

The menu was different to the one I’d seen online, which was something of a curveball, but the overall balance of it was the same: roughly half the dishes involved meat and fish, and most of the rest were vegetarian rather than vegan. Starters mostly maxed out at a tenner, mains clustered in the low twenties. Although the staff who looked after me were charming, friendly and a credit to the place, one of them owned up that the menu had changed recently and that he couldn’t advise me on some of the dilemmas it gave me. Perhaps if it had been a little more bedded in I might have chosen better.

My lunch started superbly, though. A Scotch egg from the bar snacks menu was exemplary and – to my surprise – completely vegetarian. Pea and leek took the place of sausagemeat, and a stellar job they did of it. The flavour was interesting and complex, although the advertised truffle had taken the day off, the yolk was perfectly fudgy, the crumb faultlessly light and crisp. An excellent herb mayo completed a really joyous dish that felt its money at £8.

So often vegetarian or vegan food involves ultra processed ingredients, bad karaoke renditions of meat. This was far better and infinitely more interesting. It felt like it was invented not by a vegetarian but by a meat eater who cared for vegetarians, wanted them to know the pleasure of a really good Scotch egg without betraying their ideals. I wondered whether every dish had been like this during the pub’s all vegetarian era: if so, I rather wished they hadn’t changed.

Another thing to really like about the Punter was its wine list. They did have a good cask selection, and just the one interesting pale ale from Buckinghamshire’s XT Brewing, but a well-curated selection of wine – four whites, five reds – was on offer with all but one available by the glass and smaller 125ml glasses priced fairly. I can think of an awful lot of restaurants that could learn from the Punter and I loved my French pinot noir so much that I clocked up another glass. Sitting there in that room, feeling a blend of relaxation and anticipation, I decided that good things were in my future.

For my starter I was torn between the truffled rarebit and the salt and pepper squid, and my server steered me towards the latter. It was pleasant, but not quite there: bronzed, clenched fists of squid promised good texture, but under that coating they lacked the softness of the truly fresh – not bad, or even uniformly bouncy, but close enough to good that you knew they could have been better.

I liked the coating, but I don’t think it was salt and pepper. It felt like there might have been a bit of nigella seed in there, and it just about went with the mayo – which was described as sriracha aioli but I suspect was just sriracha mayo. As I write that up, describe that attempted fusion of China, Thailand and Spain, I’m aware that it sounds busy in theory. In practice it wasn’t, but it also wasn’t entirely successful.

Here’s a terrible secret, though: at this point I really didn’t care. Because the pub was so lovely, and the surroundings were so enchanting, and I was far too busy wishing I lived just round the corner to raise classic restaurant reviewer niggles like squid freshness. The cyclists kept wandering in to top up on pints of ale, the pub was slowly attracting more dog walkers.

A table of four women, all a few years younger than me, came in for their 1.30pm booking and were pure joy and camaraderie, enjoying an afternoon together and intending to make the most of it. Wine was ordered – not a bottle, the implication being that such excess would follow in due course – and they started catching up. There was something about that group that had the nicest energy: no willy-waving, no oxygen thievery, just good friends sharing stories, comparing notes, feeding off each other.

It was clear that eating at the Punter was a break from their well-trodden routine (“they know us at the usual place”, one of them conspiratorially admitted to the others) and benevolently looking on I found myself feeling sort of happy and kind of lonely. It made me want to round up all my brilliant male friends – the likes of Jerry, and Graeme, and Dave – and make them go to the pub with me, to try and build something a bit like what they had. But it was a good sort of lonely, if there’s such a thing, because I knew that I at least did have friends like that, even if they weren’t there right now.

Besides, what did I have to complain about? I was having a solo lunch in a gorgeous dining room, flooded with autumn sunshine. I could see the river from my table, and the pinot noir was delicious. And the people watching was superb: I got a little glow from seeing those four good friends set the world to rights, in a conversation that aced the Bechdel test.

I have had a difficult 12 months, with my accident and my surgery, losing my poor dad – who would have loved The Punter, like he loved everywhere – and my wife’s operation. And yet here I was, on the other side of some of that, in this little pocket of tranquil reflection. It truly is a good life, if you don’t weaken.

Then the fish and chips arrived and ruined all that.

Really, it wasn’t good. Can you tell from the photo? I nearly had the monkfish and bream stew, but my server couldn’t tell me anything about it. I almost ordered the ham hock and cheddar “open pie”, but he told me that it was a sort of casserole with a pastry lid and a layer of mashed potato on the bottom, which I thought sounded downright weird. So I picked fish and chips, a great benchmark of pub food and generally a safe bet even in the iffiest of pubs.

Yet every element of this had something wrong with it. The fish was not unpleasant – haddock, falling neatly into flakes, and the coating was suitably light. But it was a small, anaemic piece lacking the crinkles and crunch of really good batter: the squid had been better, in that respect. The crushed peas tasted of lemon, which crushed peas really shouldn’t do. The tartare sauce was just mayonnaise that had gone on an unsuccessful speed date with some chopped gherkin. I like tartare sauce, I think, to be cheap and nasty, to be napalm for the roof of your mouth the way good salt and vinegar crisps are.

And then there were the chips: my god, the chips. I am a little bit finicky about chips, and I won’t generally eat them if they don’t pass a short visual audit. You can make a case for skin-on chips, or skin-off, but for my money you can’t make a case for “suspicious black patches on”. These were just manky, and there were enough scuzzy ones – which I encountered early enough in proceedings – that it rather put me off the rest. If they were bought in, which I assume they were, the pub needs to buy better. If they weren’t, there are even fewer excuses.

Could dessert recover from that? Well, actually, yes. I’m so used to ordering chocolate mousse and it being a dollop of something loose and airy, usually drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and scattered with salt, that I’d forgotten the simple pleasures of the more orthodox rendition. This was a lozenge of denser, less bubbled mousse – you could wonder if they’d used something like gelatin, if the pub wasn’t still a little vegetarian – on a slab of chocolate sponge, a rubble of chocolate crumb on top, cherry sauce Spirographed around.

I loved it, and I was grateful to the pub for doing its best to stop me leaving full of sadness and resentment. It’s worth also adding that the pub gets its coffee from local Jericho Coffee Traders, and my latte was as good as any coffee I’ve had in a restaurant or pub for as long as I can remember. My bill came to £65, not including tip, and I told my server that I’d had a marvellous time. Which wasn’t a lie, even if those chips should have been taken across the road and drowned in the Thames.

I used to work with a chap called Phil, nearly 20 years ago, who looked like Sonic The Hedgehog and entertained me very much. He was also obsessed with shaving his scrotum and telling everybody about it, which is a story for another kind of blog entirely, and he’s now high up in project management somewhere, so thank goodness he doesn’t read this. But I was reminded of Phil, when I reflected on my meal at The Punter.

Here’s why: we all went out after work one evening for his birthday, and he decided he wanted to eat at Prezzo. I went, because I wasn’t always the gastronomically hyper-evolved being who is writing to you now. Phil looked at the menu and railed, entertainingly and at length, about the fact that it included a burger. What kind of Italian restaurant offers a burger, he ranted? And what kind of chump orders it?

You can probably guess what’s coming: the server came round, Phil ordered the burger and naturally he hated it. At the time I thought it was emblematic of Phil himself, to do something he knew he would dislike and then enjoy his chagrin more than he could ever have enjoyed his meal. But I did a Phil at The Punter, because if you look at the dishes I enjoyed – the Scotch egg, and that chocolate mousse – they were vegetarian. It was only when I wandered off track, ate the fish, that disappointment came looking for me.

I told you I saw the truffled rarebit go to another table, and it looked good. The braised Hispi cabbage with miso chimichurri that also went to that table? That looked good too. I bet the black garlic rigatoni and the celeriac steak, the porcini and pearl barley burger – all of them on the mains – were good too.

So don’t read as much as usual into the mark at the bottom of this page, because it arguably reflects as much on me as it does on The Punter. That afternoon, taken in by the menu and the cyclists and the pinot and the sunshine, I emulated Phil. I reckon vegetarians, and people who are prepared to put their prejudice to one side, will eat even better at the Punter than I did. Except for the fries: those fries were an affront.

It is one of the greatest contradictions of restaurants and pubs that you can have a wonderful time without having a wonderful meal, a brilliant afternoon or evening eating middling dishes. The Punter is great evidence of that. I really hope it recovers from its three and a half years of hell, and I have more than half a mind to go back. And bit of me hopes that they reverse their position on the whole vegetarian thing. It’s always better to do what you love, and if you stick at it I remain hopeful that you find the love you deserve in return.

The Punter – 7.2
7 South St, Oxford, OX2 0BE
01865 248832

https://www.thepunteroxford.co.uk

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Pub review: Brett’s Burgers at The Lyndhurst

On October 2, 2026October 2, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

From late 2019 until the spring of 2024 The Lyndhurst boasted some of the best food Reading has ever seen: varied, exceptional quality, ludicrous value. Since then, the pub has become a perfect encapsulation of many of the problems facing hospitality in general and pubs in particular.

I’m not known for my concision, but make yourself comfortable and I’ll try to run through the potted history of the pub since landlords Sheldon Fernandes and Dishon Vas moved on in May 2024. Here goes: first of all the pub was taken over by Becky Blissett, about a week after it had closed its doors. Blissett had a turbulent reign which mostly seemed to involve her complaining to the local papers about a perceived whispering campaign that the pub wasn’t as good as it used to be.

She was particularly rattled by what she said were false claims that she intended to turn the pub into a sports bar. Let’s take her word for it about that, but the main thing I remember from that time was the pub’s weird AI-generated posters on Facebook showing an anthropomorphised lion wearing a football shirt sinking a pint in a generic pub which looked nothing like the Lyndhurst, designed to get punters in to watch the Euros. But, you know, not a sports bar.

The pub was also known during that time for closing regularly at short notice – sometimes announced on social media, to be fair – and for a video someone added to a Google review showing some of the pub’s new regulars verbally abusing a couple of passers-by for the crime of walking their dog. As my wife liked to put it, the landlords went from caretakers to undertakers.

Five months later it was over and the pub was under new management again: rumour has it that Blissett received her marching orders on holiday. Because, make no mistake, the true villain of this story is the pubco, just like usual. They are the ones who hiked the rent, which forced out an enormously successful team doing exactly what pub landlords are supposed to do. The chaos that has followed since clearly demonstrates that they never, ever had a Plan B.

Let’s walk through the rest of the chaos. In November 2024 new landlord Jim Kelly stepped in. We’ll call him Landlord No. 2. Kelly was sort of a pubco-appointed firefighter who joined failing pubs to stabilise them, but speaking to the Chronicle it sounded like he was after a more long-term gig this time. “We have done so many, so now it’s time for us to stay and reap the benefits,” he said. So naturally he left the following January: what else did you expect?

Landlord No. 3 came on board at the start of 2025 and looking at the Lyndhurst’s social media from that point onwards, you can see them desperately trying everything to get people to drink in the pub. Gigs, DJ nights, sport, the veritable kitchen sink. For a long time, to the untrained eye, it looked like they’d given everything a whirl except offering really good food. Not that they didn’t serve food, because they did, but there was more chopping and changing on the menu than in the kitchen.

None of it seemed to take, because the food options became increasingly desperate. They launched a new menu in January 2025, and then some kind of tapas-style menu the following month. Later in the year they seemed to do a daily special under the title “Wots (sic) In The Pot”, including such delights as “sausage casserole” and “savoury mince & potatoe (sic)”. What other kind of mince is there?

Each of these things was announced with a new AI poster, because if there’s one thing that unites everybody who’s tried to make a go of the Lyndhurst since Fernandes and Vas left it’s a weakness for shitty AI art. Yes, I know pubs can’t make any money and they can’t afford to hire graphic designers. They can, however, afford to spell check the word ‘potato’. And they can afford to check whether what they put out makes sense, which for example their AI slogan We Put The Mmm In Our Curry manifestly didn’t.

The AI posters weren’t confined to food though: one celebrated Armed Forces Day, another particularly risible one marked VE Day by mocking up a picture of the Lyndhurst where it had mysteriously acquired an additional storey and moved somewhere completely different – a generic street in Belgravia, by the looks of it. They were flying about six Union flags, for that matter. I’m not sure when the Lyndhurst got so jingoistic: it felt like Landlord 3 was running the pub they were used to running in a new area, without checking first whether it fitted in at all.

For some reason the one pot classics didn’t do the job, so there were more culinary convulsions for the remainder of Landlord No. 3’s time at the helm. They set up a café on the terrace, to try and catch the morning trade. They decided to offer jacket spuds, that epitome of the high life, under the name “Loaded Kitchen”, and then they tried Yorkshire pudding wraps. And finally, at the start of this year, they had one last throw of the dice doing the one thing they had previously avoided: offering food people might actually want to eat.

So in January they gave their kitchen to a South African team, Smoked Oak, who had also popped up at the Nag’s Head. Smoked Oak offered Braai boards, boerewors rolls and, by all accounts, a killer potato salad. It looked decent: it was getting to the point, in fact, where I thought it was time to pay them a visit and check it out. So inevitably – you can see what’s coming, can’t you? – Landlord No. 3 left the pub in June. Of course they did. It was in danger of becoming some kind of success.

I sat out all those comings and goings, so why did last Friday find me strolling down Watlington Street to visit the Lyndhurst for the first time since Fernandes’ and Vas’ farewell bash, almost two and a half years ago? The answer is that when the Lyndhurst opened again last month, with Landlord No. 4, Stephen Williams, in charge, it announced a development that had people in Reading talking: the food in this latest incarnation would be by Brett’s Burgers.

Pub review: The Port Mahon, Oxford

On May 1, 2026June 12, 2026 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.theportmahon.com

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Pub review: The Jolly Cricketers, Seer Green

On April 24, 2026June 12, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

There are many restaurants I would love to visit but know, realistically, that I never will. You only have so many hours in the day, weeks of annual leave and pounds in your current account. I may never eat in San Francisco, or New York. I might never get back to Montreal, a city I loved nearly twenty-five years ago, to eat my way round it.

Zoë and I try to do at least one trip every year to a place we’ve never been together: in 2024 that was Lisbon, last year Oviedo. This year – next month, in fact – it’s Glasgow: if you have any Glasgow recommendations, put them in the comments. But that’s slow progress, and the list of places I would like to go will see me out, even if I were to devote myself to that and nothing else.

In this country, right at the top of that list sits the Parkers Arms, a pub in Lancashire’s Forest of Bowland, a beautiful part of the country by all accounts. I would defy you to look at the Parkers Arms’ Instagram or read any of the many breathless reviews of the place online and not want to eat everything proprietor Stosie Madi cooks up, from pies to langoustine, from pasta to partridge. Clay’s owners Nandana and Sharat are enormous fans, and when people who cook that well admire somebody’s work you do rather sit up and pay attention.

But I am not a driver, and if you live in this part of the country getting to Newton-In-Bowland is a challenge to put it lightly. By the looks of it, if I caught the bus from outside my house at just past 1 o’clock and absolutely everything went my way, I could be there just in time for dinner. I’d be absolutely broke, have nowhere to stay and no way to get home, but I guess I could just about do it.

Plus of course if I ate there once – me being me – I would be devastated at all the things on the menu I’d missed out on, and then I’d wonder how I could manage to do it again. Sadly the likes of Bruges and Málaga are quicker, easier and cheaper to get to than bits of our own country: that’s public transport for you.

But as it happens, Madi is indirectly responsible, via a strange chain of events, for this week’s review. For the last couple of years she’s been incredibly supportive of my writing, which I think she discovered through my slightly crabby review of Planque, Vittles‘ favourite London restaurant, and occasionally she’s recommended reviews of mine through her own social media. That led to me being followed on Instagram by the Jolly Cricketers, a pub in the Chilterns that I’ve always known of by reputation.

Then, one day last month, the Jolly Cricketers contacted me and asked if I’d ever consider reviewing them. Owner Amanda told me that she had run the pub, at the heart of its village, for coming up to eighteen years and said that any friend of the Parkers Arms was a friend of theirs. I said I would see what I could do, but that it wasn’t the easiest place to get to by public transport, and they said they completely understood. “Maybe one Friday you’ll find I’ve eaten at yours, when the review goes up”, I told them. “Maybe one day”, they said.

That did make me think. After all, the Jolly Cricketers was a darned sight easier to get to than the Parkers Arms, so perhaps I owed it to both pubs – and myself, of course – to make the bloody effort to get to the one I could reach. It was less than an hour in the car, or I could take a couple of trains. It took two hours, but what else was I going to do on a Saturday?

And then life took one of those unexpected turns. My dad died, and the venue we picked for his celebration of life – we didn’t, as a matter of policy, use the F word – was a lovely venue halfway between Beaconsfield and Gerrard’s Cross, deep in the Chilterns. When I looked it up on Google Maps, I couldn’t help but notice, because in the midst of death we are in life, a couple of minutes’ drive north of the venue… was that the village the Jolly Cricketers was in? It was, and so I booked a table for the day after my old man’s sendoff. I told myself it’s what he would have wanted.

By the time the day came, it was exactly what I needed. And that’s not to say that his sendoff the day before, the day he would have turned 80, hadn’t been lovely, because it was. The music, picked with expert assistance from Zoë, was spot on (a bit of Dylan, James Taylor, Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher and Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis). The pictures of my dad captured him just right: there he was looking suspiciously down the lens at me in one; holding one of his extensive collection of fountain pens in another; behind the wheel of his beloved Mustang in a third.

My brother Matthew, back from Australia, made a beautiful speech, and I read a poem my dad had written in anticipation of the day he left us, feeling like a pale imitation. And there were people from every stage of his life: his family, all the way back from his childhood in Bristol; friends from his badminton era; his tango era; his performance poetry era; neighbours; my mum and my stepfather, paying their respects.

It was as good an event as those events can possibly be, and when we had drinks afterwards in the nearby hotel it became clear that everybody had learned at least something new about my father, a complicated cryptic crossword of a man at the best of times. “I never knew about the poetry” said my cousin Wayne, sipping his cider from the bottle. “I didn’t know him that well” said a neighbour of his, “and after today, hearing all that, I wish I’d known him better.”

You and me both, I almost said, but I was glad that the celebration of his life had made people realise it was a life worth celebrating. Afterwards, when everyone had taken their leave Matthew, my stepmother Tricia, Zoë and I had a late meal in the hotel restaurant and agreed that we had done a good job of honouring his memory. The question of what next? hung there unspoken: that was for the future.

But when I woke up the following morning, wrestling with an unfamiliar shower in the hotel bathroom, it hit me: he was gone. He’d been gone already, of course, but now he was gone gone. And I felt that flatness everybody told me I would inevitably feel at some point. I congratulated past me on booking somewhere nice for lunch for this new phase, this unfamiliar landscape. Even if it hadn’t been what my dad would have wanted, it was what I needed.

But first my brother, Zoë and I did something rather magical. A short walk from the centre of Beaconsfield is Bekonscot, the oldest model village in the world. It’s close to celebrating its centenary, and I found it enormously touching that it had survived all this time, a little time capsule of Merrie England in the Thirties which managed to be wholesome and beautiful rather than some kind of billboard for the bullshit Britain Brexiteers want us to return to. My dad wasn’t even born when it welcomed its first visitors, and wouldn’t be for over sixteen years.

I’ve spent much of the winter and spring watching Gilmore Girls and Zoë would quite like to live in Stars Hollow rather than Reading (although I’d run out of places to review very quickly). But Bekonscot might give it a run for its money: at the risk of channelling my inner Bill Bryson, it is an utterly magnificent place and I rather feel everybody should go there and experience the sense of wonder at least once.

Everywhere I looked the attention to detail was incredible – there was a railway with multiple stations, a cable car, a harbour, a pier, a gorgeous deco Tube station. A football match played out by the riverbank, the picture house advertised a motion picture starring Oscar Winna and Carrie Zmatik, folks danced round the maypole outside a handsome church, the little train chuffed from one stop to the next, adults and kids towered over every diorama, peering, fascinated, taking photos.

And there I was with my brother, on the first day of this new phase, going round a model village together, somehow a lot more adult than we had been a couple of days before, or the month before that. That makes it all sound sad, which it wasn’t completely, but it was poignant all the same. Would my dad have enjoyed Bekonscot? He was an engineer, he would have appreciated the precision. But the answer is that I didn’t know, and now I had no way of finding out: now that, that is sad.

It’s just over a five minute drive from Bekonscot to Seer Green, proudly proclaimed on the signs as “The Cherry Pie Village”. It really is a gorgeous place, and the Jolly Cricketers is in a beautiful spot one side of the churchyard. Even the church, in the sunshine, was delightful: tables and chairs out in case you wanted to stop and rest, a cafe inside with its own Instagram account. And the pub was a picture postcard perfect spot, wisteria running along the top of the racing green window frames. It could easily have belonged in Bekonscot too, if only it had been a lot smaller.

It was made up of two rooms, a larger bar and a smaller dining room, although I imagine you can eat in either. The staff told us it was a quiet lunchtime so we could sit anywhere, and they very kindly let us expand into a table that would ordinarily seat six, my brother, my stepmother, Zoë and me. Sun poured through the windows, and the cricketing theme was worn lightly: a ball on the mantelpiece, the menu broken into sections saying Warm Ups, Openers, Main Play. It was an extraordinarily handsome space, somehow a very classic dining room transplanted into a gorgeous old pub without remotely jarring.

One of the nice things about going to a place like the Jolly Cricketers in a large group is being freed of the tyranny of having to choose something different to everybody else. And – I can’t imagine why – all four of us were in the mood to eat our feelings that day, so we attacked every section of the menu and gave ourselves permission to order without fear of hesitation or repetition.

My brother had an alcohol free beer, Zoë and my stepmother tried the alcohol free gin and tonic and I, the sole drinker, regretted not being able to order a bottle from the wine list, especially because the pub stocked fascinating-looking natural wines from Woodfine, a winery in the village. I consoled myself during the meal with a Spanish Chardonnay which was extremely good and a Rioja which was even better. Even so I suspected that the real treats were further down the wine list – especially a Saperavi and a Xinomavro, both around the £50 mark.

Now, on to the food – and before you judge, I’d just like to say again that it was a very particular set of circumstances. First, the Scotch egg. We had two of these between the four of us and I absolutely adored it, the pork coarse and judiciously seasoned, the Burford Browns spilling golden secrets, a smattering of salt flakes to sprinkle on top. It took me back to the glory days of the Lyndhurst, and made me wish I had a pub doing food like this within walking distance. The yolk was a little runny for my stepmother’s personal taste, the lack of brown sauce or any other condiments won Zoë’s seal of approval: on balance, a palpable hit.

Even better were the cubes of crispy Chiltern pork in a cairn with a little bowl of apple sauce for dipping. These were simple, bronzed and moreish beyond measure, and if I ever sweep to power every licensed establishment will have to offer this dish or something like it. I doubt many would make it seem as easy as the Jolly Cricketers did, though: such simplicity, just pork, salt and apple.

I regret the fact that we only ordered one portion of these, and I stand by that despite the sheer quantity of what we got through, but it was indisputably excellent value at £8.50.

The last of our trio was padron peppers, ordered because Zoë loves them; my stepmother, not unreasonably, said “I can make those at home”, and I’ve always felt I can take or leave them.

But if you do like padron peppers, and plenty of people do, these were as good an example of the genre as you’ll find. I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of serving them with aioli, mainly because I’ve never seen that done before, but the padron pepper expert among us was very happy with them. Also £8.50 for these, which I found a tad strange: the crispy pork felt like a much better return on investment.

I didn’t take a picture of my starter, even though I was sure I had. Can you believe I still make rookie mistakes like that after nearly thirteen years? I’m going to plead extenuating circumstances and tell you that my crispy squid was a knockout, beautifully fried, still tender, plenty of it. You could eat it with a fork, and I started out that way, but once it cooled enough for me to pick it up and dab it in a simple but exquisite dip of honey, soy and garlic I abandoned decorum and did exactly that.

This is a dish you see on pub menus fairly often, but you would struggle to find it executed as well as the Jolly Cricketers do: this would, I discovered, turn out to be a theme. The pub’s menu doesn’t lean too heavily on provenance, but it does say that fish and seafood come from Newlyn’s Flying Fish, a name I recognise which inherently inspires confidence.

My brother was torn but ended up going for the asparagus. He really enjoyed it, and it had plenty going on with sumac labneh, cherry tomatoes and olives, a moat of the most arresting-coloured extra virgin. I didn’t eat this, so I won’t sit in judgement too much, but just the four spears felt a little underbalanced and it didn’t look like the sourdough crumb made its presence felt. It was the most expensive starter on the menu at £12.50 and I was glad I hadn’t ordered it myself, but for all I know it probably – as wankers like to put it – “ate well”.

I think the people who really ate well – because repeat after me, dishes don’t eat well, people eat well – were Zoë and my stepmother, who went for the French onion soup. The pub had said recently on Instagram that it was back on the menu by popular demand, and that demand was echoed at my table. It really did look the part, a deep brown panacea packed with onion, topped with a hulking permacrust of molten cheese studded with epic croutons.

And in case that wasn’t enough for you, there was also a thick wodge of excellent bread speckled with caraway seeds: not necessarily that French, but a very welcome interloper. “It was maybe ever so slightly too sweet from the onions” Zoë told me later, “but that’s niggling. Besides, the cheese more than made up for it.”

By this point it looked like we might be the only lunchtime customers in the dining room that day (which goes to explain why the pub also offers a locals set menu lunchtimes and evenings during the week). But if anything, that just made the service even better, without ever being too much. We were always asked if we were happy with each course, just at the moment when we had finished our first mouthfuls and established that yes, we truly were.

Drinks kept coming as we needed them, and we were always asked whether we wanted more just at the point when one of us was thinking that more were in order. There is a real talent to this, especially to do it and make it seem telepathic, and that the Jolly Cricketers’ young and enthusiastic team was so very good at it was one of the many happy discoveries of our lunch.

Pacing was, too: it could be so easy when a kitchen isn’t mega-busy to get into a rat-a-tat rhythm and pepper you with course after course in quick succession. But the pub understood not to do that and actually, on that day of all days, the time and space we were given was one of my many favourite things. By the time our mains arrived, we were ready but not hankering – how could you hanker when we’d been determined to try so much of the menu? – but they were still a happy sight.

Three of us had chosen the pork belly – from Stockings Farm, less than ten minutes’ drive away – which makes my job far easier than it could have been. On paper it sounded like an unmissable dish: pork belly, crab cake, pak choi and a soy and garlic sauce, so many wonderful things coexisting on a plate. And if it wasn’t quite perfect it was close enough that I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but indulgent. Because it all worked, it just could have worked slightly better and come together a little more.

The pork was truly magnificent – a whopping striated slab of the stuff, crispy-edged but yielding at its core, some of the best pork belly I’ve had in as long as I can remember (or at least since the crispy pork earlier on). And the pak choi offered an excellent contrast, cooked absolutely bang on. But I would have liked the crab cake to be a little crispier too, a bit less crumbly and to have more of the ginger that was meant to feature. And it needed sauce to bring it together – a proper quantity of it, not a thin trickle that had made its way to the perimeter of the plate, like it was trying to make a break for it.

The crab cake was just a question of preference, but the lack of sauce meant that this dish, made of exceptional parts, didn’t quite cohere into a whole. It made me wish I’d kept the rest of my ramekin of soy, honey and ginger from the squid, because pouring that over this pork and the crabcake would have been the missing piece. Without it, what could have been a perfect dish had to settle for mere excellence.

We’d opted for a solitary portion of chunky chips to provide carbs, and in honesty the crabcake was spudded up enough that we probably didn’t need them. But thank goodness we ordered them anyway, because they were textbook: stubby and crunchy, beautifully done with a little side order of rustling scraps in the bottom of the bowl. My stepmother had a couple too, declaring them infinitely better than the fries that came with her main.

That main was a huge pot of mussels – Welsh, apparently – almost as much still life as treat, gently steaming in their bath of marinière sauce. They were pronounced triumphant and my stepmother worked through them with what looked to me like a combination of diligence and joy. You could have a smaller portion as a starter with what the menu winningly refers to as “mopping bread” or a larger one with fries.

I think, with the benefit of hindsight, my stepmother would have liked the bigger portion with a few slabs of that caraway-speckled bread. But hindsight is always perfect and probably, if we’re being brutally honest, we could all find more laudable uses for it than ordering better at lunch. I said that making mistakes when you order in a restaurant is an essential part of making sure you can find reasons to return and I believe that, even if it’s positively glass half full by my standards.

We split 3-1 on dessert, too, but before that we asked our server about the whole cherry pie thing: why was the village famous for that?

“Do you want the nice answer, or the honest one?” she said. I do love a situation where those two answers are not the same, so of course I asked for the latter. And she told us that Seer Green used to have, for some reason, mass graves and that the cherry orchards were planted on top of those, although the sanitised version was just that the village really loved cherries and had become famous for exporting them to London. She also told us that the cherry pie on the menu was a speciality, and I promise the story behind the village’s nickname was not why we swerved it.

Zoë couldn’t resist crumble, having seen it on the menu, and she rhapsodised about her order. It was apple and blackberry, topped with a gorgeous golden rubble of biscuit, served with an ice cream resplendent with vanilla specks. It prompted a big discussion at the table about the acceptable crumble to fruit ratio: I, conditioned by the Royal Berks no doubt, thought it should be 2:1, while my stepmother would have preferred it the other way round. Zoë, ever the moderate, liked it best 50:50. Which was this, I asked her later? My stepmother would have loved it, she told me.

The rest of us had the Basque cheesecake, unusually with chocolate sauce rather than fruit. The slightly warm, exceptionally rich dark chocolate sauce made this dessert, but without it it would have been rather like Snoop Dogg, i.e. slightly too baked for my liking. I like a Basque cheesecake to retain a little wobble, this was a very solid affair. That might have been a conscious choice given the accompaniment, but I wasn’t sure.

Similarly, the menu paired this with a manzanilla, which might have worked if it was just the cheesecake, but the chocolate sauce was crying out for a PX, or a dessert wine of some kind. The menu suggests pairings for all the desserts but none of them are anything sticky: I have struggled to find fault with the Jolly Cricketers, but I’d love it if they fixed that.

We didn’t really want the afternoon to end, in this beautiful pub in this beautiful part of the world on the first day of a strange new phase. So we had coffee – which was extremely good, something I never expected – and eventually, with a heavy heart, we settled up. Lunch for four, pretty much four courses with plenty of drinks and coffee, came to £310 with a 10% service charge thrown in.

I was chatting to our server and she asked where we came from, so I explained that we were from all over, really: Reading, Windsor, New South Wales, and told her why we’d been in the area. And she was so lovely and so sorry for our loss, which happens a lot lately, and I told her not to be sorry. Because I couldn’t think of a better place to be on that day, or better people to be there with.

If I lived near the Jolly Cricketers I would be there all the time, and if a pub like the Jolly Cricketers was near me I might not write a blog any more. It would exert a pull like the Lyndhurst, and you’d find me there whenever I’d had a hard day. And there is a carpe diem message here going back to the very beginning of this: if there’s a restaurant you keep meaning to visit, go there. One day it might not be there, or you might not be. And if there’s a person you keep meaning to call, or take down the pub, or go to that restaurant with, do that too.

My dad would have loved The Jolly Cricketers. It’s a crying shame he wasn’t there that day. But he was, really, wasn’t he? At least in a few of the ways that matter.

The Jolly Cricketers – 8.8
24 Chalfont Road, Seer Green, HP9 2YG
01494 676308

https://thejollycricketers.co.uk

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Pub review: The Three Tuns, Henley

On October 10, 2025October 10, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

Can you believe it’s the best part of a decade since I reviewed anywhere in Henley? I didn’t realise that until I sat down to write this review, and I was so surprised that I thought it was a mistake. But no, there it was: June 2016, a visit to the Little Angel, just over Henley Bridge from the not-so-little Angel On The Bridge with its popular riverside terrace. I quite liked the place, and ate there again a couple of years later at a friend’s wedding reception, but even so I’ve not written up a Henley restaurant or café for nearly ten years.

Was it a lack of options, general neglect or just one of those things? I’m not entirely sure, but I do remember keeping a vague eye on Henley and although a couple of new places have sprung up since my last trip on duty none of them had tempted me quite enough: the Hart Street Tavern is meant to be decent, but I seem to recall that it’s run by the same team as the Bottle & Glass, so I wasn’t in a mad rush to scarper to Henley to check it out. And there’s Shellfish Cow, I suppose, a sister restaurant to Wallingford’s surf and turf specialists, but again I just wasn’t sufficiently curious. A dodgy pun doesn’t necessarily make for a great restaurant.

I remember taking a solo trip to Henley almost exactly a year ago. I must have been influenced by my public transport-loving wife, because I did it mostly to try out the brand new Aqua, Reading Buses’ number 28 which now runs frequently from Friar Street to Bell Street, winding through Playhatch and Shiplake, picking you up from Berkshire and dropping you off in Oxfordshire, a world away.

Once there, I’d found myself completely at a loss as to where to lunch.

My finger was nowhere near the pulse, so all I really knew was that I didn’t fancy going back to anywhere I’d reviewed in the past. I could have gone to Geo Café, of course, on the off-chance that my friend Keti, the owner, was there but I felt like I should show some sense of adventure. A wander round Henley, which was still as pretty as ever, suggested that most of the options were starters-mains-desserts places rather than spots for a light lunch.

I was almost stumped, and I ended up in a café slash deli just down from the Town Hall, opposite where Henley used to have an utterly preposterous Harrods café, a place which simultaneously managed to seem posh and lower the tone, the way new money can.

Although the Harrods café closed some time ago, my lunch venue was clearly its spiritual successor. I had a solitary crumpet, the diameter of a coffee cup, topped with some smoked salmon and a poached egg. For fun, I put the picture on social media and asked people to play The Price Is Right: it cost me an eye-watering £12, and at least half of the guesses I got thought it would come to even more than that. It was middling, the coffee was worse. Afterwards I strolled to Geo Café and, over far better coffee, resolved that a sense of adventure was overrated.

But Henley’s scene isn’t as stagnant as you might think. Echoes, an outpost of Phantom Brewing, has opened there and does very good beer, served by an enthusiastic team. Flyte, a bar offering a combination of tacos and cocktails, opens next month. Last March Dominic Chapman, the Michelin starred chef formerly of the Royal Oak at Paley Street and the Beehive at White Waltham opened his eponymous restaurant in the Relais hotel at the bottom of Hart Street. Little by little, things are starting to change in Henley.

And then there’s the Duke, a curious beast, a pub which opened in January where Mexican restaurant Pachangas used to be. It started trading at the beginning of the year, and an article in the Henley Standard made all the right noises about everything being cooked over fire, an emphasis on small plates and all that other stuff everybody says.

At first all went well, and they paid for a London blogger to come up and review what looked like a surprisingly stingy selection of dishes from the menu. He enthused, giving it an 8/10 which probably would have been a 6 or a 7 if the food hadn’t been free, but since then the menu seemed to have drifted closer and closer to the mainstream, and then last week the pub abruptly announced on social media that it was shutting until further notice “to rebuild our team”, which suggests that all is not going swimmingly.

Neither the Duke nor Restaurant Dominic Chapman has troubled the guide books or restaurant inspectors, which made it even more of a curveball when last month Michelin added sixteen venues to its guide and one of them was in Henley. Out of nowhere, seemingly, they had listed the Three Tuns, the pub on the market place next to superlative Henley butcher Gabriel Machin. Part-owned by the butcher, too, as it was a joint venture between Machin’s owner Barry Wagner and Nigel Sutcliffe, who runs the also-listed Oarsman in Marlow.

The intent was to take advantage of that fantastic produce, to be a sort of chophouse in the Oxfordshire town. As for the Three Tuns’ success this year, meteoric only just does it justice: it reopened in May, and in September it was listed by Michelin. Nobody knows exactly what brings restaurants to the attention of the inspectors – who still seem to have a blind spot where Clay’s is concerned – but however it happened, being noticed after four months is exceptional going.

When I learned that, I resolved that I needed to get there as soon as possible. But it also gladdened me enormously, because the pub used to be a favourite of mine ten years ago, when it was run by Mark and Sandra Duggan, and I ate there frequently in another life, reviewing it in 2014. The last time I went, just before the Duggans left the pub, was with Zoë, just after we got together. I remember having an exquisite Caesar salad, so good it was bittersweet.

Because I was glad Zoë got to try it before it changed hands, but sad about all the meals we wouldn’t have there. And that listing in Michelin raised my hopes that, much like my blog, it too could have a second era that surpassed its first. So Zoë and I alighted from the Aqua last Saturday and went to investigate, stopping at Echoes on the way for a few pre-prandial pales and a very happy chance encounter with readers Steve and Tracy.

I should add that Zoë insisted, by the way – both on joining me for this one and on taking the bus to get to Henley. Neither of these facts will surprise regular readers.

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