Alexandra Langlais, the owner of Insta-friendly Erleigh Road institution Café Yolk has had a busy twelve months. In January she opened Donnington Deli opposite Yolk’s original branch in a spot formerly occupied by a car dealership, offering huge deli-style sandwiches with a free cold drink thrown in (or, if you’re cynical, a cold drink you might not want priced in). I went the morning they opened and, perhaps peevishly, was disappointed that they weren’t a deli and didn’t serve coffee; I wandered off to have an enjoyable brunch at Monty’s instead.
The deli thing was probably an overreaction – nobody criticises Calcot’s Avenue Deli, after all, for not being a deli – and I’m reliably informed that Donnington Deli has finally put coffee on the menu. But I ate there a couple of times in quick succession in its opening month and, despite being impressed with the handsome fit out, it wasn’t entirely my bag. Sometimes less is more, and Donnington Deli’s almost comically overstuffed and stodgy focaccias didn’t do it for me; the prevalence of turkey, surely everybody’s least favourite meat, on the menu was also a bit of a curveball.
I’ll be back at some point once it’s settled in to try Donnington Deli again but the place was doing a roaring trade and doesn’t need any help from me either way: Langlais clearly knows exactly what she’s doing, understands her market and is expanding her business in a careful, considered way, staying close to a community she knows well. It’s mind-blowing, really, to think that Café Yolk traded solidly for over 10 years before it even considered branching out.
The more interesting development, for me, was Yolk’s actual second branch, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, which opened on Cemetery Junction last July. It was a deliberately stripped-back sequel to its older sibling, with a far narrower menu and a greater emphasis on grab and go options. It particularly appealed to me because my favourite thing at Yolk was always the breakfast burger, and that’s what Baby Yolk has built its menu around.
But in that part of town, only open daytimes, Baby Yolk had proved challenging for me to get to for brunch or lunch, and it wasn’t clear how much capacity it had for eating in. Last week, with a rare Friday off, I found myself in that neck of the woods just in time for a late breakfast, so I decided it was a sign and made my way there to see how it measured up to the other establishments in the Yolk family.
I was reminded as I approached it that businesses don’t always prosper in this location. The spot where Smash N Grab used to be was now occupied by a South Indian business called Mallu Nest, but the little hut looked like it was being gutted and it wasn’t clear whether it would reopen as Mallu Nest or something else. And of course before that it spent something like a year being the preposterously named Cozzy Bites, a smash burger place whose menu was so similar to Smash N Grab’s that you wondered if the names of the burgers had formed part of the terms and conditions of sale.
Come to think of it, before Baby Yolk came out of its shell that site was Cemetery Junction hairdresser the Funky Barnet for over 20 years, which means that – lucky Yolk – their landlord is famous Reading philanthropist John Sykes. Let’s hope they get on better with Sykes than the Funky Barnet did, given that they notoriously went to the local paper during Covid to ensure his humane conduct reached a wider audience. All that and a busy charitable foundation too: let’s get Danyl Johnson to give that man a gold plated Pride Of Reading Lifetime Award!
Still, as long as Yolk keeps making money and avoiding any kind of global pandemic I’m sure they and their landlord will rub along nicely, until it comes time to renegotiate the rent at least. But can they do that in this little corner of the Junction? I got there just after 10am, and one customer was sitting in, although there was a steady trickle of both eat-in and takeaway customers during my time there.
I loved the interior and the way Baby Yolk was styled. From the sunshine-yellow awning and shopfront to the almost space-age white shelves, showcasing Yolk’s beans and reusable cups for sale, the colour scheme is clever and witty, is bright and pops. It’s rare that the interiors of Reading hospitality businesses look this coherent and thought through, and I really appreciated it. Baby Yolk was also far bigger than I expected inside, with a mixture of high and low tables, stools, chairs and bright yellow banquettes, probably seating about a dozen people. Outside a little terrace had room for half a dozen more, and could be lovely on a sunny day.
Baby Yolk’s menu keeps it simple: five “breakfast burgers”, although the pedants among us – okay, maybe just me – could argue about whether any of the ones that don’t involve a sausagemeat patty technically qualify as burgers at all. For meat eaters you can have either sausage and egg, bacon and egg or the holy trinity of all three, for vegetarians it means egg, cheese and avocado in a bun.
Vegans get the same thing, but with scrambled tofu subbed in for the egg: I had scrambled tofu once, in 2016, and have never sought to repeat the experience. Let’s just say it was a strange time in my life.
The entry level breakfast burgers are £7 each and costs rise from there to £8.90 for the vegan not-a-burger. There are various extras you can chuck in: some, like sauce and crispy onions, are free whereas others can add up to £3 to the end product. It felt a little unfair that the vegetarian and vegan options were the most expensive things on the menu, and it also doesn’t suggest Yolk is using the fanciest meat in their sandwiches.
The majority of the menu board was given over to a plethora of beverages: frappes, smoothies, iced drinks, teas, coffees, matcha and chai. There were also some baked goods up at the counter – muffins, cookies and the like – although their price wasn’t listed. A sausage and egg burger and a latte set me back £10.70, which felt pretty reasonable, and I nabbed a table in the bay window with a good view of the room. Five minutes later, my coffee and my foil-wrapped burger were in front of me.
The first thing to say about Baby Yolk’s breakfast burger is that despite what you might think it is not a McMuffin or even Fidget & Bob’s Kennet Island homage, the O’Muffin. Part of that is the obvious: it’s a bun, not a muffin. And part is because, instead of a fried egg, Baby Yolk tops its patty with a little omelette, as its elder sibling does. Less messy, and possibly a little less indulgent.
Unlike the breakfast burger at Café Yolk the egg here doesn’t make a break for it past the perimeter of the bun. But again, this is designed for convenience and eating on the go, not attacking at a table with cutlery to hand if you need it. I didn’t mind that, but the egg itself was underseasoned: it meant the rest of the burger had to do a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting.
Similarly the patty was pleasant, if ever so slightly anaemic. When you have this dish on Erleigh Road there’s more caramelisation, more crisping of the edges. Here everything was a single texture, a perfectly pleasant spongey puck of sausagemeat which, again, could have done with more salt. All that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy this, which is unfair: I did, and it was pretty much what I needed. But was it an upmarket reimagining of a Sausage & Egg McMuffin, or just a more expensive version in a nicer room?
What saved it, I suspect, were the extras. I’d gone for HP sauce and crispy onions and the latter in particular lifted and rescued what might otherwise have been a tad workmanlike. The onions were those ones you bought in a tub, but in a thick carpet between the bun and the patty, playing off the brown sauce, they made each mouthful better. I munched away contentedly, enjoying my bay window seat and watching the comings and goings of this interesting little café. Something about its simplicity, its deliberate lack of range, appealed to me: after all, the one thing Gordon Ramsay and restaurant critics have in common these days is a strongly held conviction that menus should not try to do too much.
When I reviewed Cafe Yolk last, nearly 5 years ago, a big draw was that they had started buying coffee from Anonymous Coffee. Then they binned it off, presumably on cost grounds, and used Kingdom Coffee instead: I discovered this one sad afternoon when my takeaway latte tasted worse than one you could have picked up from Costa or Nero.
It’s unclear whether Yolk have stuck with Kingdom or even if they now get their own branded coffee roasted by someone else: although I saw their canary-coloured bags on those white shelves I didn’t go over to investigate, and it’s not clear whether they were for sale or for display only. Whoever Baby Yolk get its coffee from, I was delighted to find that it was a really serviceable, smooth latte without bitterness: a tall, generous one too for £3.70, which is pretty much the going rate for a latte nearly anywhere right now.
It is also, with the possible exception of Monty’s, the only place even vaguely in East Reading that does a latte worth ordering. The residents of New Town are quite lucky, I would say. The commuters of New Town, too, as Baby Yolk opens at 7am. The coffee was so nice, and the spot so welcoming, that I stayed longer than I intended to, nursing my coffee and cursing my bad luck that even I couldn’t justify a research-focused piece of cake at 10.30am.
It’s typical that perhaps Yolk’s most unsung move turns out to be my favourite. Baby Yolk opened last year to a comparative lack of fanfare, and significantly less comment and interest than Donnington Deli attracted less than six months later. But for what it’s worth, of all three of Yolk’s outposts Baby Yolk was the one I enjoyed most. It got everything right: I liked the concept, loved the design and enjoyed the execution.
It’s not a menu with much in the way of replay value, which might prove to be a limiting factor longer term, but it may have just enough. Also, like all of Alexandra Langlais’ businesses, it is not so concerned about getting Reading residents to cross town, as I did, to go there. It is very much targeted at its community and that community is lucky to have someone living in it who has the drive and the vision to make it a better place in which to eat and drink, whatever your preferences might be.
Yolk’s website states “Please note our Baby Yolk location is takeaway only” and they ought to change that, because it might deter people from doing what I did, wandering over on the off-chance and having a really pleasant, tranquil time watching the world go by, both inside and outside the café, the comings and goings of one of my favourite little pockets of the Ding.
Sadly Reading Old Cemetery is still closed, but my breakfast reminded me of all my happy lockdown wanderings there in the summer of 2020, a lifetime ago. If Baby Yolk had been open back then I have no doubt I would have perched outside afterwards with a coffee, or taken one with me and drunk it by the war memorial. I thought of my friend Graeme, who can practically walk past Baby Yolk on his commute to work, and simultaneously felt jealous and happy for him.
It also made me miss my old house in the Village, a short walk from Baby Yolk, and all the working from home lunches I wouldn’t get to enjoy. Truth be told, it made me slightly begrudge living in Katesgrove, which could badly do with a place like this: good luck finding a drinkable latte round there. Still, Reading as a whole is better for this kind of spot, and I just hope they spring up in some of its other unsung or underserved barrios.
Until then, it’s better that a café like this is somewhere, anywhere, rather than nowhere. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we have to hope that Cafe Yolk’s flurry of activity in the last year might serve as a blueprint for other imaginative entrepreneurs. Until then, East Reading is the lucky part. As this review goes to print we’re about to experience our first true heatwave of the year, but even without that Baby Yolk is doing a decent job of making Cemetery Junction the sunny side of town.
Baby Yolk – 7.3
14 Wokingham Road, Reading, RG6 1JG
0118 3131128
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