Restaurant review: Vino Vita

On August 8, 2025August 6, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

Last year, in one of the more baffling developments in Reading’s food and drink scene, wine bar Veeno changed its name to Vino Vita. It wasn’t initially clear whether this was because the people running it had bought the business from Veeno or if something else was going on. If you read the details on Vino Vita’s website you’d be none the wiser. “We’ve rebranded, but our commitment to excellence remains unchanged” it said. “Join us as we start an exciting new chapter that expands our offerings and vision.”

More details emerged when the owners spoke to the Chronicle last month. “A big reason why we became independent was so we could have more say over the produce” said the restaurant’s Head Of Sales. “We developed our whole menu, and everything is done on site.” I remember reading the article and thinking that this potentially merited a revisit, but the main thing I took away was They have a head of sales? It felt like a role Veeno, a chain with 5 restaurants across England and Scotland, might need but that Vino Vita, a single spot opposite Forbury Gardens, probably didn’t.

So what were the differences, and had Vino Vita improved on the Veeno formula since taking their destiny into their own hands? The only way to be sure was to eat there – which clearly I did, because you’re reading this – but before that I carried out some research. Because I visited Veeno on duty nearly 8 years ago, not long after they opened, and at the time I would have said that there was plenty of room for improvement.

Vino Vita’s menu does indeed offer a slightly wider selection of dishes than Veeno’s, with more nibbles, bruschette, small plates and so on. It has about as many pasta dishes, although I’d say Vino Vita’s sound less interesting. The big difference, and again this is baffling, is the sheer volume of pizza: between conventional pizzas and Pinsa Romana, Vino Vita offers almost twice as many options as its estranged siblings.

Did Vino Vita move in this direction to compete directly with the likes of Mama’s Way, who clearly have superb access to produce? And if so, wouldn’t you maybe change course given that Reading has seen pizza place after pizza place open this year, at least two of them – Paesinos and Amò – being truly first class? I did wonder.

A couple of other strange things that came out of my homework. One was wine. Veeno’s selling point was that the wine was from their own vineyard: their selection was excellent, the vast majority of it was available by the glass and much of it was affordable. To give you an example, 7 of their 21 reds will set you back £30 or less. By contrast, Vino Vita’s 21 reds were more expensive – the cheapest was £29.95, the remainder all cost more than that.

It wasn’t clear where any of them came from either, because unlike Veeno, Vino Vita didn’t quote producers or vintages. It felt odd to split away from the parent company to offer greater choice, only for that choice to be more expensive and less informative. Like the name change, it had a hint of shadiness about it.

The other odd thing was something I discovered when making a reservation, because booking online with Vino Vita also raised some questions. The thing is, you don’t just book a table. You also have to tell them, and I’ve never seen this before, when you plan to give it back. Not only that, but you also have to say what you’re booking it for – is it for a meal or an Experience?

Yes, an Experience with a capital E, and the booking system asks you which one you want: Quattro Rossi, for example, Trip To Italy or Italian Afternoon Tea, without telling you what they are (they’re on a separate menu, but it’s odd that they don’t tell you as part of the booking Experience – sorry, I mean experience). And all those Experiences? Copied straight from Veeno. The grape didn’t fall very far from the vine, it seemed.

After all that research, I was in two minds about going to Vino Vita. Was it different enough? Was it promising enough? But one thing clinched it. Sometimes people specifically ask if they can join me for particular reviews: so for instance, when I get round to visiting Lebanese Flavours to discover whether the artist formally known as Bakery House has simply changed its name or changed for the worse, my friend Liz has called shotgun on that one.

Similarly, I can’t review Wendy’s unless it’s in the company of Kevin, a long-standing reader, because I promised him, and as he’s moved to the Cotswolds it won’t happen any time soon. In this case it was Zoë, my wife and number one dining companion, who put in a request specifically to go to Vino Vita, so I met her outside at the start of the weekend, to discover whether their commitment to excellence really did remain unchanged.

Our table wasn’t ready when we arrived, so we went out to the terrace to have a drink before our meal. It really is one of Reading’s most appealing al fresco spaces, a very pleasant spot opposite the park, strung with lights and convivial on a warm day. It was nice to spend time there before dinner, quitting as the evening became a little nippy, but it does help if you don’t mind passive smoking because there was a fair bit of that. Very Italian, I suppose.

It was, however, difficult to get attention. So by the time we did, and managed to place an order, and the nibbles came out, it was chilly enough that it felt like time to move inside. Vino Vita’s interior didn’t feel any different to when it was Veeno, and I’ve always found it a slightly disjointed set of spaces – some high tables, some low tables, a series of disconnected rooms that don’t entirely feel like they’re all part of the same establishment.

We were taken to a more conventional table to the right of the bar, in the room I’m pretty sure I ate in back in 2017. On a Friday night the place wasn’t rammed, although I suppose many of the customers were outside. Perhaps they seated all the people that had booked a table for an actual meal in the same room, and everyone else was off having their Experiences.

Our nibbles were disappointing, sub-pub stuff. I was hoping that salted almonds would be the kind of treats you get in Andalusia, burnished with oil and speckled with salt. These were out of a packet or a tub, dusty with salt and completely unremarkable. Even more nothingy were the taralli, dense little knots with the texture of sawdust. Really good taralli come spiked with fennel seeds and, with a crisp white wine, can be a delight. These weren’t really good taralli. Eight pounds for two ramekins of blandness.

We had a wine flight with these, the “VINO.VITA.BIO” which was three 70ml glasses of Vino Vita’s organic wines. The first, a verdicchio, was genuinely very enjoyable – and it was just as well that it was, because getting someone to bring some water to accompany those very dry snacks proved difficult. When we finally did manage it one of the staff brought a small bottle of water, a single glass and another glass full to the brim with ice. We had two perfectly good water glasses sitting on the table, which made it all a bit weird. “It’s funny” said Zoe. “They do have enough staff, it just feels like they don’t.”

The other two wines in that flight, by the way, were also quite nice. One, a Nero d’Avola, was decent, perfumed and very enjoyable: it didn’t go with anything we ordered, but that might be because it was tasty and none of the food turned out to be. The third wine was a Frappato, which is a new one on me, and was also perfectly drinkable.

This is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who enjoy wines on the medium end of the spectrum said the blurb on the piece of paper which accompanied the wine flight: that quote is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who like their sentences to be completely devoid of meaning. As with the wine list, the piece of paper didn’t give useful details like producers or vintages, and you didn’t get to see the bottles or labels. Did that make for a premium experience, or Experience, when you were paying £17 for 210ml of wine?

We’d also ordered some garlic ciabatta, but our server accidentally brought over the bread selection instead. He was very apologetic, and ran off and made amends, but it was a useful exercise because the bread was a dreary-looking generic selection, none of which looked like it had been baked onsite or indeed anywhere exciting; I made a mental note not to order any of the numerous bruschetta options.

Instead we got what we’d originally ordered, four slightly sad triangles of ciabatta which had been sort of toasted, a little, inconsistently brushed with olive oil and scattered with parsley. There was some garlic there, but nowhere near the industrial quantities Italian food called for. Zoë thought this was okay, but she was being charitable. I thought that for six pounds I was having the kind of thing you could easily pick up at a supermarket.

The real crimes against Italian food, though, were to follow, in a meal where the longer it went on the worse it seemed to get. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate that than the first of the small plates we’d ordered. The menu promised stuffed courgette flowers, and I thought this would be a real test of whether they truly held all those lofty aspirations. Because a courgette flower, its head stuffed with ricotta and lemon zest, the whole thing fried in an almost translucent, lacy batter is one of the very best things you can eat.

It is serious cooking, and a menu offering it is making a claim to be serious about cooking. I still remember it being served by the Lyndhurst, when I held a readers’ lunch many years ago: Amy, the vegetarian on our table, had it all to herself and every omnivore envied her. It’s taking all my strength not to include a picture of it in this review, so you can see what it’s meant to look like. Instead, just look at that: three beige cylinders bearing no resemblance to courgette flowers at all. No light coating, instead a thick layer of stodge.

Inside, something that definitely wasn’t a courgette flower: I’m prepared to take their word for it that it was courgette, but only just. And inside that, some blend of cheeses that tasted of nothing. This was like some kind of continental reinterpretation of stuffed jalapeños you might pick up at Iceland, an affront to the promise of this dish. Providing some honey, the only thing that actually tasted of anything, didn’t rescue it. The price – £8.50 – rubbed salt in the wound.

The arancini were in the same vein. Veeno only did one kind, filled with ragu, whereas at Vino Vita you can choose between ragu, mushroom and truffle or ham and cheese. The mushroom and truffle ones didn’t taste of truffle in any way, being just claggy stodge with no crunch or crispness to the exterior. Plonking them on a shallow pool of tomato sauce, grating some cheese and unceremoniously dumping some basil in the middle neither elevated them nor disguised their inadequacy.

I’ve used that word, stodge, twice now, because nothing else encapsulates those dishes. Italian food at its best can embrace the wonder and comfort of carbs, but this seemed to prioritise filling the stomach and emptying the wallet with brutal efficiency. In fairness, these were billed as bite-sized and only cost £6, but they still weren’t worth it. When I went to Veeno, 8 years ago, I said that it felt like the kitchen was more interested in margins than food. Hold my beer, said Vino Vita.

Neither Zoë nor I managed to take a picture of one of our small plates, so you’ll have to both imagine it and take my word for it. If you read the title carpaccio of salmon and the description smoked salmon drizzled with a lemon and caper dressing and fresh rocket and think that, based on what you’ve heard so far, this is likely to be a small piece of smoked salmon draped over a hill of the kind of salad you get in a bag at the supermarket, domed to make it look like you’re getting more salmon than you are, meanly scattered with capers, you would be absolutely spot on. Give yourself a pat on the back.

This is me trying to find positives, believe it or not. But I don’t think even Pollyanna could find a positive in the final small plate, the caponata. Caponata is a wonderful thing, a cold, sweet and sour aubergine stew with olives, capers and pine nuts. It has a distinctive taste which I adore. It is not, as it was at Vino Vita, a bland mulch of aubergine and far too many tinned black olives, with no sweetness, sharpness or sourness. It didn’t even look like caponata, didn’t have that depth of colour, although you’d have to whip off all the pointless foliage that had been dumped on it to be absolutely sure.

You know who used to do a very enjoyable caponata, back in the day? Carluccio’s, of all places. You know who does the worst caponata I’ve ever tasted? That would be Vino Vita.

Now, you might just think I’m being curmudgeonly, so I have to say this in my defence: Zoë thought all of this was awful. Zoë, the woman who is able to tolerate me. Even she – especially she – found all these dishes unforgivably bad.

“There’s somebody in that kitchen who really hates Italy” was her conclusion.

“It definitely doesn’t feel like anybody in the kitchen’s ever been there.”

“What we’ve just had,” she added, “was a crap-paccio. A crap-paccio and a craponata.”

Irony of ironies, the bottle of white wine we were on by now was really very nice, with fruit and structure and, to my mind, even a little hint of licorice. And by this point we had a server who was really good and very personable, checking in on us and taking away our empties. At just over fifty pounds you’d want that bottle to be good – Vivino suggested its mark up was something like three times retail price – but however pleasant it was, I wasn’t sure how much of it you’d need to drink to make the food seem like a good idea. I was sure, though, that I wasn’t capable of putting that much wine away.

The food up to that point had been so poor that it became partly about cutting our losses. The couple at the next table had paid up and gone leaving behind the best part of a bowl of anaemic-looking pasta – the mushroom tagliatelle, at a guess – and a blond, bland pizza. So we decided to try a Pinsa Romana, the airier Roman variant as popularised in Reading by Mama’s Way. In a way, I was trying to give Vino Vita one last chance, aware that if I had a conventional pizza and was comparing it to Amò or Paesinos it would be the final nail in the coffin.

But the final nail in the coffin was the Pinsa Romana. The Piccante promised, if the menu were to be believed, ‘nduja and oil, roasted peppers, burrata, rocket and basil. Like all the other promises, it was an empty one. The base was crunchy, dry as a bone with no airiness or give: Mama’s Way may buy their pinsa bases in, but they were miles better than this.

The pinsa had been pre-cut into eight miserly squares, and good luck finding ‘nduja on every one, because you wouldn’t. “Nigel Farage turns up to vote more often than ‘nduja turns up to this pizza” was Zoë’s verdict. Bland unlovely bits of burrata had been placed here and there – no oil, no discernible basil and no rocket.

In the rocket’s place, obscuring just how atrocious this pinsa was – which surely must have been the prime objective – somebody had thrown random salad on top of the whole affair. This was the last straw for Zoë. “It’s meant to have rocket on it, not the contents of a fucking bag of Florette”. The whole thing was so subpar that we followed our neighbours’ example.

It’s not even that this pinsa didn’t compare well to what you could get a short walk away at Paesinos or Amò, although it didn’t. It’s that it didn’t compare well to what you could get at Zia Lucia, or Zizzi, or Pizza Express. Or Marks, or Tesco, or Aldi, or the Co-Op. And if you bought one from a supermarket and took it home, you could dot it with ‘nduja yourself and even if it was from the chiller cabinet, heated up in your oven, it would be dozens of times better than this effort. It wouldn’t cost you £15.50, either, and for that money you can enjoy the best pizza Reading currently has to offer, minutes away on Kings Road.

Our server came over to check how our food was. We said “it was fine” almost in unison, the universal English euphemism for It was bad, but I can’t face a conversation about that. Our bill came to £166, including a 12.5% service charge. A bit of me wants to say that in Vino Vita’s defence, nearly ninety of that was on wine. But even if I do say that in their defence, the rest was indefensible.

Can you tell I wasn’t a fan? I don’t think I’ve written a review like this in ages, and certainly not of somewhere independent, and I don’t take pleasure in doing it. I’m reassured that Zoë, who is positivity personified, disliked it even more than I did – because yes, it turns out that’s possible. And I don’t know what offends me most about the place. The mediocrity is bad enough, the mediocrity coupled with the laziness is worse. To combine both those things with really iffy value, at a time when Reading’s Italian scene is having something of a renaissance, is woeful.

Worse still, it made me feel like that rebrand from Veeno to Vino Vita had something else behind it. A desire to make more from less, to cut corners and conceal charging a premium. Even some of the dishes that have been tweaked from Veeno’s menu to Vino Vita’s display this – Veeno does a bruschetta with capers and Sicilian dark tuna, Vino Vita’s boasts a tuna paté. What’s the Italian for Shippams?

But just as sad is this: with the Cellar gone and Vino Vita, well, like this, Reading still doesn’t have the wine bar with excellent food that has been missing ever since the Tasting House closed after lockdown. That gap in the market remains, and on this evidence Vino Vita isn’t even trying to fill it. Maybe Notes, just opened on Station Hill, will do better: it’s not as if it could do much worse. It is bad luck for Vino Vita that I review them the week after I had one of my meals of the year – also Italian, but miles better – at RAGÙ, but Vino Vita would be bad whoever you were comparing them to.

It might have been a little different if the service had been better – Apo, formerly of Dolce Vita and Pho, and one of Reading’s great front of house operators – works at Vino Vita, although he wasn’t on duty the night I went there. But the problems are squarely on the menu and in the kitchen, not elsewhere: you could forgive the slightly disjointed interior or the relatively expensive wine if everything else was firing on all cylinders, but it didn’t even get started.

If Paesinos or Amò had more space and an alcohol license, I’m not sure what the point of Vino Vita would be. In fact, if either of them did I think it would spell curtains for Vino Vita. I might be wrong, of course, because it seemed to be doing reasonably well the night I was there and that puff piece in the Chronicle made it sound like they were going from strength to strength. Be that as it may Vino Vita achieved something I would never have thought possible, despite nearly twelve years in the reviewing game. It made me miss Veeno, and that’s not a good thing.

Vino Vita – 4.6
Minerva House, 20 Valpy Street, Reading, RG1 1AR
0118 9505493

https://vinovita.bar

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Restaurant review: Amò Italian Street Food

On July 4, 2025July 4, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

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.

Amò is, as I’ve said before, something of a joint venture between Madoo, the founding father of Reading’s Italian quarter which opened four and a half years ago, and Pulcinella Focaccia, a business that sold pizza and focaccia for delivery from premises out in Earley and has been trading for a couple of years; I’d never had food from the latter, but I’d heard plenty of good things. And arriving at Amò on a weekday evening I was struck that, in terms of branding and decor at least, it felt fully formed in a way that Paesinos didn’t so much, or Madoo for that matter.

Everything was tasteful and unfussy without being Spartan, with a bare wood floor and tables, seats and benches. It seated somewhere between fifteen and twenty people, so significantly more spacious than the likes of Mama’s Way or Paesinos, and it had a nicely calm feel to it. Amò’s logo was in the middle of a deep red swatch of paint on the wall behind the counter, and resting on that counter was possibly one of the most tempting displays in Reading.

Amò very cleverly changes up its offering around the time people start finishing work, so until 5pm you can try pizza al taglio or something from a changing array of Italian street food. They also, I think, offer focaccia sandwiches during the day, although most of them had gone when Jo and I turned up around half seven. After 5pm the sandwiches drop away but instead, alongside the slices of pizza and street food, you can order a whole pizza from a more varied menu.

The street food was all very tempting, all things that I would challenge anybody not to fancy eating. Arancini, croquettes, mozzarella bites and frittatini – fried pasta – were all tributes to the time-honoured method of coating something in breadcrumbs and frying it until it was golden, crispy and alluring. The lighter side of Amò’s offering is keenly priced, too. Most of the street food dishes are around a fiver, pizza by the slice is less than that and they do multibuys if you want two stuffed focacce or two slices of pizza. Whole pizzas top out at about fifteen pounds, unless you add sausage or Parma ham to one of the options.

And Amò’s pizza menu struck me as very clever, because – either by accident or design – it kept the overlap with its neighbour’s pizzas to a minimum. Amò has a list of the classics, of course, so you can have a margherita, or prosciutto cotto and mushroom, or sausage and friarielli. But on the other side of the small, laminated menu, you find loads of less conventional options, far more interesting than the kind of things you could find at Zia Lucia or even, dare I say it, Amò’s neighbours.

That meant pizza with a purple sweet potato base, topped with cacio e pepe cream, guanciale and sweet potato crisps, or pizza with a pistachio cream base and mortadella. Others had a truffle cream base, or pumpkin cream, or even a cavolo nero base (“it’s the gourmet version of the salsiccia e friarielli”, Enza had told me, when I was looking for recommendations).

You may find all of that a bit leftfield, or it might whet your appetite for wandering off Reading’s beaten pizza track. I think for me, though, it was neither: I chalked those up as things to try once I had road tested the classics.

But first, Jo and I had a chinotto each and ordered some of those smaller dishes to kick things off. And as we waited for them, she told me about her childhood holidays by the coast, near Salerno, buying balls of mozzarella as big as your head from some beachside hut and eating them with bread, nothing else required. It was brilliant, Jo said, but it did slightly ruin the mozzarella you can easily get in this country; like me, Jo considers it a seriously underrated cheese.

As so often I felt a little pang for a childhood I didn’t have, listening to Jo. But then there was something to be said for sitting in a caravan in Devon, rain drilling on the roof, eating hog’s pudding cooked in a frying pan – always with tinned tomatoes on the side – watching Roland Rat on TV-am, knowing that the evening would be spent playing cards and watching reruns of Shogun (the original, not the superb remake). Maybe those memories would sound exotic to an Italian: on balance, though, I guessed not.

Amò’s mozzarella bites may not have been the size of my head, but they were gorgeous nonetheless. Crisp-crumbed spheres, golden but not overdone, the shell holding just-molten-enough mozzarella, they were a proper delight. I might have had them with something to dip them into, but it was a minor quibble with something so delightful. So was the fact that however carefully I ate them, with my hands at least, a little liquid sprayed out, leaving incriminating marks on my shirt. I was too happy to care, and the attentive staff quickly brought extra napkins.

At five pounds fifty for four, they could have been the bargain of the meal, if not the month, but for the fact that we also ordered two of the frittatini. These are yours for three pounds fifty, or six quid for two, and come in two flavours. If you go to Amò, my advice is to make sure you have one to yourself or, as Jo and I did, order one of each and share. They’re a bit fiddly to break up – that crisp carapace presents resistance when you’re relying on a wooden fork – but they reward the effort, with dividends.

They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form. And their form – big, irregular golden pucks – belied just how wonderful they were on the inside.

Picture an arancino, but instead of risotto rice visualise a cluster of little tubes of pasta, and rather than a molten core, imagine the whole thing bound together with sauce. In terms of taste, contrast, texture and sheer tactility I’m not sure I can think of anything finer, and writing this paragraph I am deeply aggrieved that I cannot eat one right this minute, or indeed by the end of the day.

This is where Amò are an especially smart bunch, because during the day you could pitch up, have a chinotto, a slice of pizza or a sandwich crammed with porchetta and provolone, and add one of these for a mere three pounds fifty. That’s almost the price of subscribing to this blog for a month and, although it pains me to say it, it’s even better value.

Jo and I both loved the meaty version but would you believe that the vegetarian option, with fried aubergine and tomato, was even better? Jo described it as like being “slapped in the face with flavour” and believe me, apart from that fried pasta, nothing or nobody would get away with slapping Jo in the face with anything. One of the best things I’ve eaten this year, no notes at all.

Jo was very keen to try one of the pizzas by the slice, with meatballs on it, so that turned up next, thoughtfully cut up to share, a meatball perched precisely in the centre of each quadrant. This too was cracking, although I suspect the base on the pizza al taglio is slightly different to that on the whole pizza. The meatballs, in particular, were excellent – coarse and lacking in suspicious, smooth bounciness. It also, by the looks of it, was only available by the slice so, again, well worth adding to a lunch order.

By this point, as our full-sized pizzas arrived, the carbs were taking their toll, and we were already prepared to ask if some of our leftovers could be boxed up – something that rarely happens to me, because it’s rare that my capacity is defeated by a restaurant.

Jo made it a few slices into hers, the piccantina, which was topped with salami, mushrooms and Gorgonzola. I didn’t try it, and from a cursory glance I thought the porcini were common or garden mushrooms, but Jo had no complaints. She’d told me earlier in the evening that she hadn’t had pizza for a while: Jo is on a monthly treatment regime where anything she eats the next day tastes vile and puts you off whatever you ate for the foreseeable future. One of those next days had involved pizza, and Amò’s piccantina resuscitated her love for the stuff. That in itself is no mean feat.

I on the other hand had deferred to Enza’s judgement and ordered the sausage and friarielli. As so often with white pizza, it had a bit more structural integrity, so less of the Neapolitan droop you might get with other pizzas. And the base was admirable, nicely puffy with plenty going for it. You couldn’t fault the generosity either, with nuggets of crumbled sausage very, very liberally deployed.

There was very little not to like about the pizza, and if I was clutching at straws I might say that I’d have liked the sausage to have more of a whack of fennel, but that’s a minor thing. It was so well orchestrated with the friarielli that it was impossible to argue: this was a pizza without complexity or variety that kept it focused and hit the target.

I managed about half of mine, and the staff were nice as pie about bringing a couple of boxes so we could take our leftovers home. Everything we had ordered – all that food, four cans of soft drink – came to fifty-five pounds, which is a steal, and then we went to the Allied for a debrief. Two pints of forgettable macro fizzy booze at the Allied set us back nearly sixteen pounds, which is very much not a steal.

For once, I can also report back on the leftovers. Jo had hers cold the next day – no slice for her beloved dog Diesel, this time – and sent me an iMessage: tastes even better this morning, cold from the box, outstanding! I on the other hand revived mine in the oven on my lunch break, working from home, and it was the best lunch I’d had in ages. I wasn’t sure if my slight lull that afternoon was down to the carbs or a Teams call that felt especially like a trudge. Let’s put it down to the latter.

Having talked about Amò for all these paragraphs, I know I should return to my opening theme and compare it to its neighbour Paesinos. But it’s not easy to do.

If they were top trumps cards, Amò would win in a number of categories. It’s more versatile, on account of having a focused lunch offering as well as pizzas in the evening. It has arguably a wider range of sides and small plates. It’s bigger, too, with far more potential to eat there in larger groups; if you go to Paesinos as a four, you either won’t get in or you’ll take up two-thirds of the restaurant. Its pizzas are more imaginative and unconventional, so more of a challenge to the Neapolitan hegemony elsewhere in town.

On that basis, you’d have it down as a resounding victory for Amò and, for some of you, that might well be the case. On the other hand, Paesinos sticks to the classics, both for pizza and for its smaller dishes. I think its soft drink selection – and neither is licensed – is better and more interesting. The cannoli and tiramisu are worth the price of admission alone. And, speaking completely as a novice in these things, I think Paesinos’ dough and base may have the edge.

But the main reason why taking a Top Trumps approach doesn’t work is that Paesinos, for me, has a little something extra. There’s no Italian equivalent of je ne sais quoi, as far as I know, but there’s a small dash of magic in the smaller restaurant that means that rationally, although I know Amò has a huge amount going for it, it’s impossible to pick a winner.

So yes, I’ve reflected and reflected and it’s impossible to put a cigarette paper between these two places. The only thing you can put between them, it turns out, is another restaurant – called Just Momo, which helpfully doesn’t just do momo. So the rating down there reflects that: call it a cop out, if you will, but I stand by it.

Let’s not divide ourselves by being Team Amò or Team Paesinos, because as a town we can be better than that. Hopefully enough of you will pick each side that both places will continue to trade for years to come. Because the truth is that there’s one real winner in this contest, and that’s Reading.

Amò Italian Street Food – 8.6
2-4 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
07500 619775

https://amoitalianstreetfood.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Rosa’s Thai

On March 7, 2025March 8, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews

Be honest: without scrolling to the bottom, do you have an idea which way this one is going to go?

On one hand Rosa’s Thai is a chain, and has come a long way from its origins as a single restaurant just off Brick Lane. It has close to fifty branches, from Leamington Spa to Liverpool, all that thanks to private equity and, more recently, a whopping £10m more funding from Barclays. And if there’s one thing private equity is good for, as chains from Bill’s to Strada have shown, it’s throttling the soul of an indie restaurant concept as it’s photocopied and plonked in any town and city where vultures like Hicks Baker can find a vacant site.

This is where I slip in the obligatory mention of Rosa’s Thai’s landlord in the old Jackson’s Corner building, noted local philanthropist and walking personification of the Pride Of Reading Awards, John Sykes. Has to be done, I’m afraid. And shall I point out that I had Rosa’s Thai’s Deliveroo Editions takeaway in lockdown and thought it was bang average? Possibly not.

Yet, on the other hand, there are chains and chains. Rosa’s Thai is probably closer to the likes of its near neighbours Honest Burgers and Pho than it is places like Jollibee or Taco Bell, more jewels in the crown than dog ends in the bin. The interior of Rosa’s Thai’s Reading site was dreamt up by local legends Quadrant Design, who did such a beautiful job of Reading’s branch of Honest. The menu, freed of the constraints of only being able to serve dishes that travel, looks interesting, with enough to pique your curiosity.

And let’s not forget, our local media went nuts about the place. I was invited to a soirée at Rosa’s Thai last month by the company handling their PR, and as I don’t do invites I thanked them kindly and said no. But who did pop up on the night of gratis grub? Why, it was our good friends the Reading Chronicle. Because as they put it “when the talented Saiphin Moore – the founder of Rosa’s Thai – offered me a seat at her exclusive opening supper club I would have been a fool to decline”. Or, as they didn’t put it, #AD or #INVITE, words which were conspicuously missing in action in all the social media posts the Chronicle did to promote Rosa’s Thai and its largesse.

Still, you can’t say Rosa’s didn’t get what they paid for, even if the Chronicle got what it didn’t pay for. “The experience begins as soon as you walk through the door when you are greeted by warm and friendly staff pleased to welcome you into the brand-new venue,” the reporter gushed, describing the experience everybody has entering almost any restaurant where you don’t order using a self-service touchscreen.

From that point, the meal at Rosa’s Thai sounded like one culinary orgasm after another. The calamari apparently created a “burst of flavour on the taste buds”. “This first-time diner was salivating over the creamy and rich Massaman Beef Curry,” the reporter went on – surely TMI – before saying that “the curry offers just enough spice to have your tastebuds tingling”. But there was more. “After a taste of all the famous dishes… my taste buds were tingling with both the breathtaking flavours and spices.”

So much tingling, so little time: maybe that’s why they were too flustered to call it out as an advert for Rosa’s Thai. Presumably somebody had to pour the reporter into a taxi at the end of the meal. So I’m not sure why I’m even bothering to write this. Rosa’s Thai clearly has “exquisite food” and “supreme service”: the Chronicle says so, and they would know.

So, a chain backed by private equity, John Sykes as a landlord, an interesting menu, a beautiful fit out and the local paper couldn’t say enough good things about it. Which way was this one going to go? If you have a good idea of that already, you’re doing infinitely better than I was when I turned up with Zoë on a weekday evening to check it out.

Restaurant review: Calico

On October 25, 2024October 24, 2024 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

As I’ve said before, when I write a restaurant review I find it helps to have a hook. Why this place this week, out of all the restaurants out there? Why do I think you might want to read about this one? Sometimes it’s easy – with a new place, a change of management or an old place with a new chef, or somewhere that’s been mentioned in dispatches in the local or national press. Other times, it’s about the wider context: for instance the trend for biryani or sushi places in Reading.

But there always, ideally, needs to be something. I never assume I can just plonk a review up on the blog and expect people to read it no matter what: attention, like money, is a scant resource these days. Everybody’s got to earn it.

With Calico this week I was spoilt for choice, because I could think of three angles. The first is that Calico – technically “Calico Bar & Eatery”, but let’s not call it that because ‘Eatery’ is so naff – belongs to that niche club of Reading restaurants where everybody knows it exists, but nobody seems to know anyone who’s been. I’m sure some of you have, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never heard anybody talking about it. This is possibly the easiest “in” for a restaurant review, because you might want to know whether Calico is any cop; don’t worry, I will eventually get round to telling you that.

I think it may be a hotels thing, because other members of that select group include The Reading Room and, these days, Malmaison; Calico, you see, is the restaurant in the 1843 Hotel, which for as long as I could remember used to be Great Expectations. And that brings us to the second possible angle, because Great Expectations played an enormous part in my adult Reading life and I’ve still not entirely come to terms with the fact that it’s gone. So, does the thing that replaced Great Expectations constitute an upgrade?

Ah, Great Expectations. I spent many a post-work Friday in that pub drinking crappy booze – Crabbie’s Ginger Beer, if memory serves – with friends and colleagues, enjoying the faux Dickensian shopfronts (Mr Crabcrotch The Fishmonger or suchlike) and shooting the breeze. It was almost a sign of the passing seasons in Reading, as reliable as putting your clocks forward and back or going to the beer festival. In the summer you went to the Allied, in the winter Great X.

The cast of characters was different each time, but the location was the same, week after week. Behind that grand façade was a slightly naff, tatty pub, and if it didn’t really do food – except for that period when it served something like a dozen different kinds of cheesy chips – it was still the naff, tatty pub of choice. I knew in theory that it was also a hotel, but I only knew one person who ever stayed there and he told me it wasn’t an experience to repeat. I loved the irony of a place being called Great Expectations, and so comprehensively failing to meet them.

But as a watering hole it holds a special place in my heart, part of a Reading that is now gone forever, along with its former neighbour the Global Café and, further up the hill, the After Dark. And for over ten years I lived on London Street, and so all of those places were my locals, along with the post AD delights of Bodrum Kebab, before it closed, reopened as Chicken Base – which it absolutely was, by the way – and eventually became the first home of Clay’s.

So walking down to Calico on a gloomy October evening, looking up at the glowing windows of my old flat and wondering who lives there now, it felt weird that the world had moved on so very much, even though that’s what the world invariably does, whether you’re paying attention or not.

The third possible angle, by the way, was that this week my dining companion was the published poet, compère of Reading institution Poet’s Café and Caversham resident Katie Meehan, a long-standing reader of the blog who kindly responded to my appeal earlier in the year for people to join me for reviews. A bit of culture at last: as somebody who churns out prose with questionable literary value, I was hoping against hope to become highbrow by association. And at the risk of sounding a bit like Michael Parkinson, Katie’s collection, the splendidly named Dame Julie Andrews’ Botched Vocal Chord Surgery, came out last year and is available from Two Rivers Press and all reputable bookshops.

Katie, it turned out, had been to Calico before, but just for cocktails and snacks before Poet’s Café, which takes place just round the corner at South Street. So there went angle one, because it turned out that I knew someone who had eaten there after all. She told me that they’d just ordered from the side dishes section of the menu, tenderstem broccoli in ginger and chilli, masala fries. The latter are described as “Must Try Masala Fries” on the menu, and there must have been something to that because Katie was keen to order them again.

But before we could get round to the menu, there was the matter of smalltalk and introductions. And before that? Well, I think it takes you at least five minutes to get used to the room. I spent some of those five minutes wondering if it would be as odd an experience if you’d never been to Great Expectations, and on balance I think it pretty much would be.

I’m not sure any word does it justice quite so much as “glitzy”. It was completely unrecognisable from what it used to be, and more than slightly preposterous in a way I partly loved, and which partly made my teeth itch. The zebra crossing-striped floor worked with the dark walls and earth-toned upholstered chairs, but did it all also go with the circular dark green velvet banquetted booths and the neon sign on the wall? And did all that go with the neon-lit archways running through the middle of the room?

You couldn’t say that money hadn’t been spent on the facelift, but you equally couldn’t be sure how much of it was misspent. Of course, we were there on a Tuesday night, one of only four occupied tables, and I’m always struck that the thing most restaurants and bars need is people. That’s what brings spaces to life – literally, I suppose – and lets you see them as they were intended to be, their best self.

And yet I struggled to imagine what a full Calico would have felt like. We were seated at one of those swanky banquettes, because it was available, but I’m not sure how plum some of the tables would have felt if Calico had been heaving. It looked more like a bar than a restaurant, and more like a restaurant where you’d plough through a bottomless brunch in a pack than one where you’d enjoy a meal with a friend. I couldn’t but admire what they’d achieved with the space, but even now I couldn’t tell you whether I like it.

“The menu is kind of nuts” said Katie as we looked at what to order, and she was on the money about that. When I first saw the menu at Calico, a couple of years ago, I wondered if it was trying to be Reading’s first ever successful take on the desi pub concept. The interior partly dispels any illusions about that, and the menu crushes any that are left. It was probably 75% Indian and Indo-Chinese food – tikkas, sheekh kebabs, biryani and butter chicken. But the other 25% was just dishes picked seemingly at random: nachos, arancini, mushroom croquettes, prawn and crab linguini and so on.

“I don’t understand why they have an equivalent of Nando’s on the menu” said Katie, pointing out the roasted half-chicken smothered in garlic and butter.

“And it would have to be pretty good at twenty pounds” I said. The pricing was wayward like that all over the place. The starters were mostly between nine and twelve quid, and the curries went up to about seventeen pounds, but the more Western dishes were generally more expensive. And on the other side of the menu were all the items you sensed that Calico felt it needed to have on a menu – five different burgers, half a dozen naan bread pizzas. The overall effect was confused, and suggested an identity crisis, as if Calico didn’t know what kind of venue it wanted to be or what kind of restaurant it wanted to be, all at once.

Anyway, it took us ages to order because we got a bottle of wine and started nattering about all sorts. Social media is funny, in that you can follow someone for ages and have a sense that you know them, but then when you meet them all the blanks get filled in. So I discovered that Katie was from North Carolina, and had lived in the U.K. for ten years – first in Katesgrove, then out in Oxfordshire and finally back in Caversham. Like many residents north of the river she felt like she’d found her place, so we exchanged stories about all things RG4: Katie was a customer of Geo Café’s veg box scheme during lockdown, like so many.

We talked too about writing, and what her genre and mine might or mightn’t have in common. We agreed that all writing, fundamentally, was about the self: Katie’s poems tell those stories obliquely, partly for fear of offending anyone or appropriating their stories, whereas I tend to put it all out there with reckless abandon. I mean, it’s fundamentally all about the restaurant, but if you’ve been reading an author’s stuff for a while (as Katie had) I guess you pick up snippets of what they’re like.

“Absolutely!” said Katie. “It’s like with Taylor Swift, there’s the Edible Reading lore. I remember years ago, having conversations that said oh my god, Edible Reading is getting divorced!“

The idea of there being such a thing as Edible Reading lore was a bit like the interior of Calico: absolutely ridiculous, but that didn’t mean I was averse to it.

We’d agreed to share starters and Katie, who doesn’t eat huge amounts of meat, had zeroed in on the gobi Manchurian, being a fan of that dish in general. I am too, as it happens, so I was very interested to see how Calico fared on this first test. The answer was that they did very well: you got a sizeable portion of cauliflower, coated in sticky sauce, and unlike many renditions I’ve tried this had some crispiness to the coating, the cauliflower cooked but not overdone.

But the best thing was the sauce. It still had that sweetness that I associate with this dish, but also plenty of punch. You didn’t notice it at first, but by the time we’d polished off the lot I was surreptitiously dabbing my nose with my napkin. My benchmarks for this dish were Chilis in town and Clay’s across the river and again, this dish didn’t fall far short of either. “Can you believe I’ve never tried it at Clay’s?” said Katie, who lives just round the corner from it, so has very few excuses. This was a far cry from the cheesy chips of a decade ago, and it introduced another feeling of disconnection, to eat something so good in such an incongruous room.

Katie chose a lot better than I did. I had high hopes for paneer tikka, but what turned up was weirdly cheffy and ineffectual. Three bits of paneer, vaguely stacked à la Jenga, had the requisite colour and tone but the flavour from the marinade had not permeated, which made it feel like heavy going. Or at least it might have been heavy going had there been more of it, but those three pieces were awkward to share and, at twelve pounds, a bit too meagre.

So was the chutney – the menu promised coriander chutney but what you got was an insufficient artful squiggle, bisected with tamarind sauce. This felt like someone had put “Indian fine dining” into Midjourney and then decided to recreate whatever image it coughed out. And you can dump as many microherbs as you like on top of a dish like that, but it won’t save it. It led Katie and I to reminisce about the glory days of Bhoj, which must been not long after she moved to Reading. Their paneer was far from perfect, but it was a darned sight better than Calico’s. “It needs more sauce” was Katie’s pronouncement: I had to concur.

By this time I had seen dishes arrive at the table next to us, five women on one of those banquettes seemingly having a marvellous time and, as with the starters, I was struck that everything looked rather good. I rubbernecked to get a good look, because I can never stop myself doing that in restaurants, and even the naanza which wafted past me looked eminently worth ordering. And again I thought that what this restaurant needed was lighting that was more bright happy venue and less dive bar from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That feeling of disconnection, I could tell, was going to stay with me.

Mains took just long enough not to be too quick, something like twenty minutes. We’d decided to stay in the safety zone of the bulk of the menu rather than trying something in its outer reaches, and I think we were rewarded for that. Katie’s chana masala, another of her reference dishes, was a solid, decent choice – comforting, soothing stuff in another dry, reduced gravy. I didn’t think this had an enormous kick of heat, although it might have been hard to tell as our tastebuds might already have been tamed by the gobi Manchurian.

But either way, it was a very pleasing dish. I want to damn it with the faint praise of saying that it was better than it needed to be, or better than I expected, but that’s not it. It’s more that nothing about the Instagrammable glam of Calico really leads you to believe that there’s a creditable Indian restaurant ticking away under the bonnet. Perhaps that’s on me, or perhaps it’s true: it makes me wish I knew people who had been to Calico, apart from Katie, so I could decide if that’s wide of the mark.

Similarly, the lamb bhuna was a profoundly respectable choice. I had some misgivings because the menu gives you your choice of protein with this dish, which rather raises the suspicion that the meat and sauce have made one another’s acquaintance very late in the day. But be that as it may, there was nothing not to like here – the lamb was well cooked, presenting no resistance to the fork, and the sauce was the best kind, that hugs the meat rather than drowns it. In a way the high-sided black bowls Calico serves its curries in almost make it hard to see how much you get, but it was a more generous portion than it appeared at first. We saw all of it off.

Along with an unremarkable pilau rice we ordered Katie’s favourite, the masala fries. Were they really “must try”? I was unsure about that, but I’m glad I tried them. The fries were almost certainly bought in, and tossed in a red-orange sauce that had copious amounts of heat but also sweetness from what tasted, to me at least, like mango chutney.

All a bit baffling: the menu says that the sauce is Szechuan but I didn’t really get that. It felt more to me like a tangier version of the Manchurian sauce that had so lifted that cauliflower. It tasted great, but it borked the texture – somehow, despite being coated rather than drenched, the fries had lost the element of crispness they needed. That said, we still picked at them long after we’d finished the rest of the meal.

“See, this to me is the perfect snack to have with drinks” said Katie. “You order a beer or a cocktail and some of these.”

I could absolutely see where she was coming from, and again I found myself bemoaning – out loud – the fact that Reading has no pubs or bars with top notch beer snacks. Namaste Kitchen used to be that, years ago, and for that matter so was The Lyndhurst, but now the closest we have is Siren RG1, and in this context “closest” still means “nowhere near”. That’s a proper gap in the market, but not one Calico seemed interested in filling.

We ordered another glass of wine each and carried on chatting, and even though our evening was winding down it was still a little odd when the wait staff brought over our bill just before 10pm. I didn’t recall us asking for it, but I guess if nothing else it answered the question of whether Calico does desserts: they don’t. Our bill for two people came to just over one hundred and thirty-six pounds. I think Katie was a little taken aback by that, and so was I – one of those moments where everything adds up but you’re still surprised by just how much it adds up to.

Part of that is because the wine list doesn’t have anything much south of thirty pounds a bottle. It also felt like a list that had been put together without any thought given to what might actually go with the dishes on the menu. Picpoul de Pinet and Italian pinot grigio might be perfectly good wines, although neither’s really to my taste, but with curry? So we ended up on a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which could just about stand up to our food, but was forty pounds a bottle. Maybe they’re more interested in selling cocktails: the drinks menu includes a lot of them

That included an optional 12.5% service charge and, more than usual, I wasn’t sure that the experience we’d had particularly justified that. It was especially surprising that they were so solicitous when it came to bringing the bill because before that, attracting attention sometimes felt something of a challenge on a very quiet night.

I’m writing this review the night after the meal and normally I might take a bit longer, mentally digest the experience and properly mull over what I made of it. But actually, I think even if I pondered the experience of eating at Calico for a couple of weeks I would still be as baffled as I am now. It reminds me of a couple of places in Reading, neither of them amazing. In terms of taking an old, neglected building and trying to give it a new Instagrammable spin, it’s a little like Market House, a spot that feels like it opened before it was ready and hasn’t felt ready ever since. I suppose it’s also, in that respect, similar to Honest Burgers, which shows how to do these things well.

But really, the place it reminded me of most was Masakali. Like the Caversham Road venue, it is trying to be an upmarket spot, almost an Indian brasserie. Like Masakali it has slightly focused, I suspect, on style over substance, and like Masakali it wants to be a place to see and be seen. The enormous cocktail list would tend to bear that out, as would Calico’s Saturday “Bottomluxx Lunch” (I must be too old for that kind of thing, because I read that wording on their website and wordlessly thought kill me now). I guess Coconut on St Mary’s Butts is a bit like that too, with its regular Instagram photo dump of the beautiful people having a phenomenally good weekend.

The problem with all that is that, against all appearances, the food at Calico is rather good. Better than at Masakali, I think, and despite all their attempts to hide the fact with smoke, mirrors, neon signs and curveball menu selections there is a pretty decent Indian restaurant hiding at the heart of the conundrum that is Calico. I’m not even sure they realise that though, because they’re still too busy haring around trying to be all sorts of things to all sorts of customers.

It must be working for them because they’ve been trading for two years now, but I find myself liking Calico despite all those things and partly in spite of them. As Katie said, the menu is nuts. As I’ve said, the room is nuts. I had three different angles to potentially write this review and it shows, because the ending is almost as muddled as that beginning. In the scheme of things, I can’t sum it up any better than this: I have no idea what Calico is all about, really, but it’s almost worth going just to see if you get the measure of it any better than I have.

You might eat surprisingly well in the process. I did.

Calico – 7.4
33 London Street, Reading, RG1 4PS
0118 9503925

https://www.1843reading.com/eat.html

Restaurant review: Bakery House

On July 14, 2023October 12, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025, although the menu and ownership are apparently unchanged.

It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.

And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.

But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.

Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.

Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.

Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?

At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.

I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.

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