The 21st of July last year might have seemed like a perfectly normal Monday to you, but in food and drink terms it was an eventful day for Reading. Lincoln Coffee finally opened its big new site on King Street, the one Workhouse had vacated the year before. A little way away, down Minster Street, Thai restaurant Nua opened in the spot given up by Bluegrass BBQ in January.
Both of those were expansions. Lincoln has retained its original site on the Kings Road (and indeed for a while it used to operate out of Reading Bridge House, back when having a coffee concession in an office building sounded like a capital idea). Nua has a site in High Wycombe and another in London, in an area its website describes as “Fitzorvia”. But the third hospitality business to throw its doors open on the 21st July? It was brand new, out of nowhere and a more interesting proposition.
That would be Pho 86, an independent Vietnamese restaurant that has sprung up in the site once occupied by The County Deli, most famously one of Kate Winslet’s first employers, that closed in 2010. After that it was Sonning Flowers for a while, and then a food shop called K&K Supermarket which sold Vietnamese ingredients, amongst others. It’s not clear whether the change of purpose coincided with a change of ownership.
Very little is clear, because it’s hard to find out much about Pho 86 online. I do know that they opened without an alcohol license, and with a hygiene score of 1 from the council, who inspected a week after they opened. Both those matters were covered in the local press, and things have moved on since then: alcohol is now available and the most recent hygiene rating, from last October, is a slightly less worrying 3. The Chronicle showed no curiosity about Pho 86’s backstory, however, so it’s hard to know whether this is the owners’ first rodeo.
And good luck figuring out from their website, because the blurb on it is so generic that it’s hard to believe that AI wasn’t involved. At Pho 86, we believe a great bowl of pho is more than just food — it’s comfort, culture, and connection it begins. It’s not X, it’s Y. It’s not been written by a human, it’s ChatGPT. Fair enough, I guess: times are tough for independent businesses, and hiring a copywriter is probably nowhere near the top of the to do list. It would have been nice to know more about them, but perhaps they’re letting their food do the talking.
So finally, after leaving it the best part of a year, I paid them a visit on a sunny Saturday lunchtime with Zoë. I might have made it earlier, if it wasn’t for the hygiene rating and the lack of booze, but another reason was Pho 86’s surprisingly old school approach to customers: no online booking, which is curiously retro in 2026. I should have phoned up, really, and made a booking, but it says something that I literally cannot remember the last time I did that, anywhere.
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There’s no such thing as Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay for restaurants, as far as I know. But if there was, the restaurant whose food I ate most last year is almost certainly Gooi Nara, the Korean restaurant on Whitley Street that has been there for something like ten years, if not more. And yet returning to it a couple of Saturdays ago for dinner with Zoë was the first time I’d set foot inside since I reviewed it in 2018.
The thing is, as regular readers will remember, I moved to Katesgrove a couple of years ago, which means that, along with Kungfu Kitchen, Gooi Nara is probably the closest restaurant to where I live. And what that means is that on the nights when neither of us can face cooking we know that a delivery driver won’t get lost, won’t drop other orders off en route to our house and can be trusted to turn up pronto with piping hot food from just round the corner. Over the last two years, between us, we’ve developed quite a Gooi Nara habit.
It’s no coincidence that they won my “takeaway of the year” award in 2024 – but my love of a Gooi Nara delivery has continued ever since. It is refined and perfected now to the point where Zoë and I order exactly the same thing almost every time: dakgangjeong, or Korean fried chicken, for her and tang su juk, chicken in sweet and sour sauce for me. The latter comes ready to assemble, one plastic container of gorgeous fried chicken and a tub of sweet, sharp sauce with orange and pineapple bobbing in it (I was skeptical too, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it). It has made me happy many, many times.
Sometimes we push the boat out and get some mandu, fried chicken dumplings, as well but otherwise those two and a couple of portions of rice are everything we need for a contented chomp in front of the telly after a hard day. I especially grew to love Gooi Nara when I was discharged from hospital and could only eat with one hand: I remember the first time I had their sweet and sour chicken after my accident I could only eat half, the rest popped in a LockNLock in the fridge. It was even better cold the next day: it remains the only occasion when I’ve had any leftovers at all.
That’s all well and good but I love their food so much, and always hear so many positive comments about it online, that it felt like we were doing them a disservice by only ever ordering the same two takeaway dishes. And my review was over eight years old, after all, so it felt like high time to go back. Early one Saturday evening Zoé and I took a short amble there, tracing the path of so many delivery riders in reverse, to check it out.
First things first: it was absolutely packed at 6.30pm on a Saturday evening. So much so that they could only just find room for us, tucked away at the very back with a great view of what was clearly a very successful restaurant. The decor didn’t feel like it had changed much in the intervening eight years: it still had a welcoming, homely feel, all wooden beams and faux slate walls.
The main difference, I would say, is just how well Gooi Nara appeared to be doing. It also started out very warm, and on a punishing day as the hot plate in the middle of our table got switched on it became even more sweltering.
In terms of the mix of customers, I would say that with the exception of the table next to ours later in the evening we were the only one exclusively made up of pasty Anglo-Saxons: I did envy my fellow WASPs at the other table who no doubt were getting an excellent introduction to the full gamut of the menu from people who knew exactly what to order.
It did appear, too, that Gooi Nara had a good reputation: I overheard a conversation at one of the big tables nearby to the effect that its occupants had converged at the restaurant from many places, some miles away. Maybe Gooi Nara filled that role for Southerners who couldn’t easily make it to New Malden, the Little Korea of the UK.
Gooi Nara’s menu has changed, I think, from when I visited it last. Back then I’m pretty sure it hedged its bets, with both a Korean and Japanese section, but now it’s all kind of thrown in together: edamame; takoyaki; agedashi tofu and pumpkin korokke feature, along with yaki soba and udon.
But the Korean elements of the menu are far more extensive, and the menu can be quite overwhelming with sections seemingly for everything: soup; rice; bibimbap; jeongol (or hotpot); noodles and of course Korean barbecue. The sides, to add to the confusion, appear at the very beginning, before everything they could conceivably be on the side of.
It made me wish I had my own food sherpa – is that cultural appropriation? – to guide me through the highlights of the menu, a feeling that only intensified as I saw some gorgeous dishes waft past to other tables. Was the delicious-looking tofu (I’m not even joking) that went to the table opposite the agedashi tofu, or the Korean doo-bu jeon? I decided on reflection it was the latter. And how good did the platter of various types of kimchi look when it arrived at the table next to me, a couple having one of the most Guardian conversations I’ve eavesdropped on in a very long time?
I came away from it all feeling silly and parochial, realising that really I only knew a handful of dishes on the menu and the various bits and bobs I’d ordered the best part of a decade ago. I was well aware that on this visit I would stay in my comfort zone, even if I’d insisted to Zoë that we couldn’t order any of the things we would invariably put in our takeaway order. So we ordered a couple of starters, a couple of mains and two items for the barbecue, and even then I’d say we played it extremely safe. We might have been outside it, but our comfort zone was only a short walk away.
Everything came if not all at once then really in a very short space of time. One minute we were necking our cold bottles of Cass, a perfectly decent lager I would struggle to tell apart from Asahi, Ha Noi or Singha in a blind taste test, let alone its Korean alternative Hite, and the next our grill was switched on and pretty much everything we’d ordered was cramming in on our table.
And the table looked big, but since the centre of it was given over to said grill you ended up playing the equivalent of those sliding tile puzzles trying to work out what could go where. Try to combine that with the timings of actually cooking some of your food and the whole experience became a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time, impressive training in multi-tasking. Forget my doing those six pointless LinkedIn games every morning: this would be much better at keeping me mentally sharp.
Vegetable mandu were, if anything, even more enjoyable than the chicken ones which had been dropped off by a friendly rider so many times in the last two years. A bit more crinkly and expansive than their chicken equivalents, they had a pleasingly light, grease-free texture and a filling I could almost convince myself was virtuous. Gooi Nara’s dip of soy, sesame oil, sesame seeds and quite possibly something else beginning with S had a gladdening sharpness that complemented them very nicely indeed.
A quirk of Gooi Nara’s menu is that, if it is to be believed, you get 5 chicken dumplings or 5 prawn dumplings but a strangely non-committal “5-6” vegetable dumplings. Fortunately on this occasion we got a shareable, even number, but I’m pretty sure whenever I’ve ordered the chicken mandu I’ve been given 6 of those too. Go figure, pun not intended.
Also decent were the prawn tempura, which I would say were better than they looked. In the picture below they come across as a little wan, a tad too blond, but they had a real deft lightness and, again, next to no grease. The dip they came with, almost exactly the same as the one that accompanied the mandu, was still good but the dimensions of the vessel and the size and length of those prawns made it, practically speaking, a faff: it was a bit like trying to get a pool cue in a beer glass. £12.30 for these, so as much as both of the main courses we’d chosen.
By this point we’d also started to avail ourselves of the barbecue. Sam gyap sal, unadorned sliced pork belly, turned up looking a bit like those cheap bacon-flavoured corn snacks you can get in supermarkets, and I did wonder whether we should have gone for the spicy version, but it crisped up beautifully on the barbecue, that fat rendering and permeating just enough.
We chose the pork to cook first precisely because it wasn’t marinated the way our other barbecued meat was, to try and avoid cross-contamination. We had a couple of dishes of condiments to dip them in, and I failed to make a note of either, but one was definitely soy and the other was definitely not: I think it might have been ssamjang, the traditional sauce used with Korean barbecue containing gochujang and soy beans.
It was only later that I realised we should have ordered some lettuce to wrap the pork in: it’s hidden away, chronologically speaking, in the list of side dishes at the beginning of the menu.
My main – although the concept of a main slightly falls away when it all comes at once – was the chicken dolsot bibimbap, a dish I haven’t eaten in a long time. For the uninitiated, this is rice, chicken, veg and an egg yolk brought to the table in a hot stone bowl, so it keeps cooking and sizzling as you work your way through it. I broke up and dispersed the egg and made my way through it, and by the end some of the rice had reached the crispy state known in Korean as nurungji (I suppose the closest European equivalent is the delectable socarrat at the bottom of a paella).
I would have described this dish as a little nondescript, a tiny bit bland, if it weren’t for the squeezy plastic bottle of gochujang which came with it. The more of this I added, the more I enjoyed it, and the more I enjoyed it the more I added it: I do wonder how much you’re meant to use, and how much was left in that bottle when I was done, but it turned what could have been a trudge into a frolic.
The other thing that whole experience taught me was patience. Ordinarily I would have a moan – god knows you’ve probably readenough of them – about everything arriving at the same time and forcing me to choose what to eat first.
Eating in Gooi Nara that evening, among all that good-natured, deceptively well controlled bedlam, I realised that it was probably a very English mindset: that your food is at its best the moment it arrives at your table and it’s downhill from there, that it’s a scramble to eat it before it goes cold and that too many dishes at once guarantees disappointment.
But it didn’t feel that way here. Those prawns and dumplings sat there, keeping their freshly fried heat. The pork sizzled on the barbecue, with more on the plate waiting to take their place. Our second barbecued meat hadn’t even made it to the front of the queue. And my bibimbap was still hot, gradually perfecting its texture. What was the rush? Everything would be eaten in its own good time, in the right order, with no need for conniptions.
Zoë loved her main, I don’t think I would have done. I managed to persuade her not to have her regular takeaway order, her chicken gam-poong gi, but she ordered it with prawns instead. I was expecting this to be prawns curled up, little inverted commas in a crisp coating, tossed in the gorgeous spicy sauce that makes this dish such a crowd pleaser in my house.
Instead they were fully extended like an accusatory index finger, the tempura prawns from earlier on making a reappearance with some sauce thrown in. So deeply impractical in many of the same ways as that starter, and downright impossible to eat with rice. I didn’t order them, and I certainly wasn’t allowed to try them, so it doesn’t really matter. Zoë really enjoyed it, and maybe in the free-for-all of our meal overall it didn’t really matter that they weren’t quite what I thought they would be.
The dish they didn’t go with, or at least I thought they didn’t, was Gooi Nara’s special egg fried rice with vegetables and shrimp. Zoë, again, seemed to enjoy it but I thought it was a bit steep at £11, especially considering that you could get a bibimbap for roughly 50p more. Plus I got a bit squeezy bottle of gochunjang, let’s not forget, and this looked like it badly needed that or something like it.
Finally, as we flagged in the heat, a little John Lewis portable fans valiantly whirring away to almost no avail, we barbecued the last dish in our order. By sheer coincidence I’d actually ended up ordering something from my 2018 visit to Gooi Nara – the ju-mul luk, beef with garlic and sesame oil. It was smothered in marinade there on the plate, slices much thinner and better cut than I remembered from my last encounter, and it smelled pretty amazing before it was ever even exposed to heat. As it cooked, the aroma got more and more gorgeous: perhaps we’d saved the best til last.
Tasting it at the end of the process, I rather thought we could have done. Every single piece was buttery-soft, that marination doing its work with no notes, and although it might have been nice to enclose each piece in a lettuce leaf and enjoy that contrast, I rather wonder if the lettuce might have wilted as badly as I did towards the end of an hour in that hot, noisy, oddly glorious room. By some tragedy, Zoë found herself full halfway through my final spell as the commis chef of our table. I buckled up and finished the rest: it had to be done.
Gooi Nara’s menu only has two desserts, both of which are Japanese, but we were too hot and too full to attempt either of them. Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to £95, not including service, and of course we were more than happy to tip: even just watching the constant parade of staff back and forward to tables, carrying a huge array of fascinating dishes without ever breaking rhythm, juggling orders for customers and brown bags out to delivery drivers, filled me with admiration.
It made me think of all the Saturday nights when we’d fired up a delivery app and our food – perfect, beautifully packed, prompt and piping hot – had arrived in what seemed like no time. Every evening that happened, the restaurant might well have been as busy as it was that evening. We emerged into the sunlight on Whitley Street feeling like we’d spent just over an hour somewhere totally not-Katesgrove, but also arguably in Katesgrove’s very best restaurant. We also resolved that, delicious and convenient though a Gooi Nara takeaway always was, we needed to visit again far, far sooner.
Rating Gooi Nara this time has been quite difficult. I definitely enjoyed it more than the previous time I went, but I have a feeling that the limitations on the rating it receives on this occasion have more to do with me than with them. So whatever mark Gooi Nara gets as a restaurant, I think this might be a review where I, as a reviewer, might struggle to scrape a 7. I have a feeling that if I’d been bolder, gone further to the perimeter of the menu, I could have enjoyed it even more and it would have done even better.
In that sense it would have been nice if Gooi Nara had, in the way that great communicators like Kungfu Kitchen, Clay’s, Kamal’s Kitchen and the Moderation do, tried more to tell the story of their food and bring newcomers in. But really, that’s not mandatory, especially when a restaurant has been going for about 10 years and is doing very nicely without having to do any of that. So much as I might have enjoyed having a bit more guidance on how to attack the menu, that was definitely a me problem, not a Gooi Nara problem.
I will be back, and when I do I will try some more esoteric dishes: if you have any recommendations drop them in the comments. In the meantime, I suspect another paper bag with my regular takeaway order lurks in my not too distant future. Eat-in, delivery: get yourself a restaurant that can do it all.
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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.
Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.
This week’s review came about because several weeks ago I ate at Bill’s – and yes, if you don’t mind, I’d like to explain that statement. It wasn’t my choice, I should start by saying that. My Canadian cousin Claire was visiting the country for the first time in nearly forty years, her two twentysomething kids in tow, and my mother had chosen Bill’s as the venue for lunch.
Sometimes I wonder if she does this kind of thing to troll me – she likes a bit of Carluccio’s, too – but actually, once I was there, I sort of understood why. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest buildings, overlooking the churchyard of Reading Minster, and she tends to pick it when we have visiting Canadian relatives making the trip to town. They enjoy eating in a building older than their country, I think, and knowing that right outside is a church many hundreds of years older even than that.
And indeed that proved to be true. My cousin Claire and her kids were struck by the history of things, albeit more than a little jetlagged and already in sensory overload given how exponentially busy central London is compared to their bucolic pocket of provincial Ontario. But we had a lovely time, and Bill’s menu – which plays it safe and then some – suited everybody from my vegan mum to my aunt, whose dietary choices often seem shrouded in mystery, and to Ava, Claire’s daughter who apparently almost exclusively eats chicken tenders and fries.
My aunt ate avocado on toast without complaint, Ava had a chicken burger and everybody seemed happy. Both my first cousins once removed, James and Ava, were charming, polite – well, they are Canadian – and interested, and gave me hope that the future of humanity might not be hurtling in a downward spiral to despair after all.
Although I looked them both up on Instagram the next day: James’ Instagram bio pronounced Just roll me up and smoke me when I die, while Ava’s simply said My lil titties my fat belly. That reminded me that they might have been cordial to duffers like me but they were still Gen Z, and I remained many times older than I liked to think I was.
Anyway, the point is that I expected to dislike Bill’s and to resent spending money there – I’d not been since I reviewed it over ten years ago – so I was surprised to find that not only was the room nice, the company convivial and the service charming but the food was better than inoffensive.
I had an enjoyable chicken schnitzel that they’d thrown the kitchen sink at – fried eggs, capers, pink pickled onions, gherkins and coleslaw – and it was rather nice, along with fries which I approached with dread but finished with enthusiasm. Dessert was a chocolate and salted caramel tart and, again, if it wasn’t life-altering it was still remarkably above average. Perhaps my mother knew best after all: I’m sure she would say so, in any event.
My experience at Bill’s got me thinking about the other restaurants I’d put in that bracket – reviewed them many years ago, not been impressed, never went back – and made me wonder whether any were ripe for reappraisal. After a look through my list, because many restaurants fitting that description are no longer trading, I found the perfect candidate: Malmaison.
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I’ve talked about this before, but it helps when you’re writing a restaurant review to have some kind of hook, some reason why you decided, this week of all weeks, to check that particular venue out. Canny restaurants make that easy by having something about them, whether it’s in their branding, their social media or their USP – or, in London, by having a well-connected chef or owner.
In the case of M’s Smokehouse, which opened on the Basingstoke Road at the end of January, you’re spoiled for choice. Its Instagram describes it as the “First and Only Smokehouse in Reading”, which isn’t strictly true – remember Bluegrass BBQ? But Bluegrass closed last January, so the second half of that description is correct, for now at least. I don’t know about you, but I miss Bluegrass: a decent independent alternative in south Reading would be a find.
And there’s more. The smokehouse’s Instagram blurb also describes it as a “halal smokehouse”, and in that respect it is definitely a first: so no pulled pork or sausages, just brisket, burgers and fried chicken. Now, that kind of thing might enrage the swivel-eyed types who used to comment on my blog’s Facebook page, pretending to give a toss about animal welfare, but I thought it was worth checking it out.
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Edible Reading 