Tag: Reading

Café review: Donnington Deli

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I don’t ordinarily review somewhere until it’s been open at least a month. That’s definitely the case here: Donnington Deli, the second offshoot of East Reading institution Café Yolk after 2025’s Baby Yolk, opened at the end of January, so you can’t say, eight months later, that I haven’t given it time to settle in.

That’s not the whole story, though, because I was in fact standing outside the door of Donnington Deli the very lunchtime it opened, genuinely excited to have a look round. I remember it was a bright Friday in January, and I was still in the early stages of recovering from my broken arm. I planned to do some shopping, have a coffee and maybe try a sandwich for lunch, but it wasn’t to be: I was disappointed that it was in fact just a sandwich shop, not a deli at all. I might have been even more miffed that they didn’t serve coffee.

I wandered up the road to Monty’s instead, and had a very agreeable brunch there. And I had a good old whinge about it all on social media, because I never learn to reserve judgment. It’s something I must work on next year: I know it drives my wife crackers at times. Anyway, I now see with the benefit of distance that being unimpressed that Donnington Deli wasn’t a deli was like being unhappy, all those years ago, when Bakery House turned out not to be a bakery. It misses the point somewhat, judging a book by its cover in that way.

I returned to Donnington Deli a couple of times the following month, tried two of their sandwiches and wasn’t entirely convinced. Their much-vaunted focaccia was dense, like a brick, and I thought the sandwiches were too big, not special enough. You got a free drink – not a coffee, because they still didn’t serve it – but it was something like cola or ginger beer through a siphon; I would rather have had a smaller, less expensive sandwich and paid extra for a drink I actually wanted, like a latte.

That was over six months ago, and I decided Donnington Deli needed a little more time – or, perhaps more accurately, that I did – before I visited on duty. I would leave it to find its feet, and prioritise other places instead. In the intervening months, Donnington Deli kept doing its thing. It was lauded by the usual suspects on Instagram with gormless, childlike wonder, but change was so incremental as to be unnoticeable. With one exception: coffee was introduced in April. See, I told you that was a mistake.

So why did I go back? It was a confluence of events: I had a Monday off, and the sun was out. Zoë’s convalescence from her operation was going well but I think she’d reached the stage, after a week of my fussing and cosplaying Laurence Nightingale, where “needing a rest” also included “needing a rest from me”. I thought a nice walk in the sunshine and a spot of lunch, a couple of hours out of the house, was just the ticket. So I meandered my way down the hill, ready to give Donnington Deli a look through fresh eyes.

It is a lovely space inside and out, and it’s come into its own in the summer months. The look and design, as with all of owner Alexandra Langlais’ spaces, is superbly done and it fills its street corner in a very striking fashion: racing green, perhaps in a subliminal hint to the building’s former purpose as a car dealership. The inside is plain and unfussy: a pale wood parquet floor with banquettes along its perimeter, that classy shade of green carried through to the counter and the menu boards suspended over it.

But the outside, which has come together in the months since opening, is also fetching and it’s where I sat on this visit. This was where you got your real people-watching opportunities seeing all the bustle of the Erleigh Road under way, all those lives momentarily intersecting with mine. Term hadn’t started yet, but the area still hummed with life – and this is, to some extent, Langlais’ achievement, because Café Yolk opposite has been drawing footfall to this part of town for well over a decade. It was a good mix of chairs and benches, sun and shade, and a really nicely done terrace.

Donnington Deli’s menu hasn’t changed significantly since it opened, with the exception that you can now get any of your sandwich fillings as a chopped salad instead. A total of ten sandwiches are on offer, all made fresh to order. Donnington Deli may be trying to emulate trendsetters like Sandwich Sandwich, producing overstuffed sarnies optimised for social media, but this isn’t quite as trailblazing as all that: that’s how sandwiches are made at Shed, or Pierre’s, and has been for many many years.

This might be me, but I was surprised by how little the selection offered by Donnington Deli appealed to me. It was like my experience at Mignonette a few weeks back – where every dish on the menu had some twist or feature that made it clamour to be chosen – only in reverse. Two of the ten sandwiches led with turkey, literally nobody’s favourite meat. Another couple featured balsamic glaze, which felt like a decidedly retro choice.

I also, in the interests of giving Donnington Deli the best possible chance, swerved all their sandwiches I’d already tried. That meant avoiding their pastrami sandwich, which had been crammed with pastrami to the point where it almost became a chore, with a wodge of sauerkraut which was lacking in acidity. Their chicken Caesar, too, with its strangely vinegary dressing and catering-pack bouncy bits of pink bacon rather than salty rashers.

It also meant avoiding the steak and cheese sandwich, which comes with a side of gravy. Zoë had ordered this on a previous visit and I thought it had a false advertising problem, being packed with something cold that you could describe as pastrami-adjacent. Here’s a hill I’ll die on: I think you should only be allowed to call it a steak sandwich you’re actually serving a steak – hot, off a grill or a griddle. Otherwise it’s a beef sandwich making promises it can’t possibly keep.

Anyway, this happily meant that I probably ordered Donnington Deli’s best – and easily their most distinctive – sandwich, the mortadella. They brought it out to me with my bottle of ginger beer: Donnington Deli has stopped including a cheap soft drink with your order, which I think is a good thing. But in the majority of cases it hasn’t affected the price, which means you’re effectively paying more for less.

Anyway, my mortadella sandwich was £10.50, and you can see that this is very much aimed at visual eaters: it comes on the lined, branded tray, cut open to give you a good look the cross-section. It’s all about the cross-section these days: not that I’d know, sticking to my outdated early twenty-first century web-logging in a world increasingly awash with one minute videos and silly little microphones.

Let’s do the positives first, because there were a fair few. As a combination of flavours, it worked superbly: on that level, at least, it wasn’t overkill. The mortadella was enjoyably silky – I’ve never been a lover of the stuff but this did a solid job of converting me. I am however a huge fan of mozzarella, and I loved it here, seemingly torn and adding that cool creaminess. And best of all was Donnington Deli’s pistachio pesto, which balanced this out precisely and tasted delicious. A huge sheaf of rocket rounded out a sort of pastel tricolore thing going on.

There was just enough happening here, and I appreciated the idea. And yet there were problems with the execution. I still struggled with the bread: they’ve moved from focaccia to ciabatta and although it wasn’t the huge dense block of previous visits it still felt like heavy going.

Not only that, but it wasn’t up to the job of holding its contents – the first half of my sandwich I just about managed to eat, but by time I got to the second leg it was soggy, not holding together. Toasting the bread might have helped, but there’s little evidence that any of Donnington Deli’s food is exposed to a primary heat source: I guess that’s why they sell a beef sandwich, not a steak one.

I would have liked this to be less comically huge, better balanced and more focused on being feasible, let alone fun, to eat. I would want it smaller, and ideally less expensive, and perhaps that just means this kind of thing is not for me. I couldn’t help but be left with my initial suspicion that this is food to be looked at and photographed, but not so much to be consumed.

It reminded me of what it’s like to buy shoes as a man with size 12 feet: you cast your eye over a pair of shoes in a shop and they look really snazzy, but when they bring the size 12 version up from the basement your stylish footwear has mysteriously morphed into clown shoes. This sandwich, I’m afraid, was clown shoes.

I realise that I should have said something good, then something constructive, then finished on something good. But this is feedback about a sandwich, not a feedback sandwich: I’ve never been terribly proficient at the feedback sandwich.

To try the full gamut of Donnington Deli’s offerings I ordered a coffee and a cake and moved to a sunnier table to polish them off. I had initial misgivings about the latte – it started bitter, but as I worked my way through it either it tasted better and better or I came to terms with it. I’m still not sure which. I’d say it wasn’t as good as the coffee was at Café Yolk back when they bought beans from Anonymous Coffee, but better than the coffee I had at Yolk after they jogged Anonymous on.

They used to use Kingdom, they now sell their own beans: it’s anybody’s guess who roasts them for Yolk and Donnington Deli. I liked it, though – it might just be worth making a stop in east Reading for, although that’s also because that part of town is starved of good coffee. The millionaire shortbread, however, was unspecial: the chocolate a tad waxy, the caramel too molten. Perhaps there was just no pleasing me that day: the whole thing came to just over £20.

The reason for leaving it a month before I review somewhere new is, of course, to give them a chance to iron out their teething troubles. I reckon 99% of hospitality businesses, especially independents, open before they’re really ready and keep tinkering and fixing the snagging while they come to terms with beginning to trade.

The benefit of leaving it longer, as I did here, is that it gives a hospitality business proper space and time – not to iron out day one niggles, but to work out what it is and who it wants to be. And often, I’m sure, that is the case. But sometimes a business is authentically itself from day one, it knows what it aims to achieve and is set on doing exactly that.

In some ways, I suppose, it’s to Donnington Deli’s credit that I believe that’s precisely what has happened with them. Because the review I have written, eight months in, is remarkably similar to the one I might have produced if I’d visited it on duty in February. I think the range of sandwiches isn’t interesting enough, the execution feels unbalanced and, for my money, it is maximalist in a way that even I, a greedy sod, can’t buy into. I left a fair amount of my sandwich, which isn’t like me at all.

I admire their single-mindedness of purpose, it’s just not a purpose I can rally behind. For this kind of thing, Mac’s Deli in Theale remains the place to beat: Donnington Deli feels more to me like a slick rebrand of somewhere like Pierre’s in Reading: the style is something else, but the substance needs to catch up. The fact that Yolk still has queues while Donnington Deli wasn’t the busiest on my visit might bear that out.

But I would sound a note of caution, because I was unmoved by Yolk when I first visited back in 2013 and it, still thriving and expanding, has clearly had the last laugh. I’m just one person, and you have to weigh my opinion carefully. What do I know, anyway? After all, there’s plenty of evidence that owner Alexandra Langlais might have a far better idea what kind of food the folks of East Reading are looking for than I do.

Donnington Deli – 6.6
37 Erleigh Road, Reading, RG1 5NB
0118 3131129

https://www.instagram.com/donningtondeli

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Pub review: Brett’s Burgers at The Lyndhurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Restaurant review: Sapana Home

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I meet Graeme off his train back from London. He is smartly dressed and layered up, because he has come from work and because he knows that it’s autumn. I am slightly parky in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, because I have the week off and am pretending it’s still summer. He is appropriately dressed, I am trying and failing to make denial a fashion choice: naturally he is too kind to point that out.

Graeme had been keen to grab a bite to eat before we made a beeline for the pub, somewhere nice and quick, and I’d suggested Sapana Home because it was close to the station, en route to the Nag’s Head, cheap and cheerful. Besides, according to the geotagged photos on my phone I’d not eaten there in three and a half years. Never been. Would be up for that came Graeme’s reply, so Sapana Home it was.

Reading has had a Nepalese community for fifty years or so, and I expect it’s always had restaurants serving them. But Sapana Home, which opened in 2012, was the one that broke out and reached a wider audience – offering specifically Nepalese food rather than just being a Nepali take on a curry house like Standard Tandoori. By the time I reviewed Sapana, a couple of years later, it already had a reputation in Reading as somewhere central to go for good, affordable no-frills food.

It was, I expect, where many Reading folk had their first momo: it was certainly where I had mine. And from that seed grew a whole network of Nepalese restaurants. Namaste Kitchen for instance, followed by Namaste Momo and then Kamal’s Kitchen, all propelled by the charm of shy and retiring local legend Kamal Tamrakar. Dhaulagiri Kitchen up on Basingstoke Road, and its street food spin-off Momo Bros.

And that’s just for starters. There are plenty more, like Momo 2 Go, where you can eat in, Just Momo, which doesn’t just do momo, and Yo Momoz on the Wokingham Road, which doesn’t just misspell ‘momos’. What’s the collective noun for Nepalese restaurants? Regional bloggers in other cities lose their shit when they happen upon momo: here in Reading we could become blasé about them.

But it would be revisionist of me to say that it was love at first sight when I reviewed Sapana Home, 12 years ago. Because actually, when I went, I liked the momo but I was unmoved by the rest – the chow mein, the siu mai from over the border, the sukuti with soy beans, the thali and the strangely crispy jeli, deep fried batter in sugar syrup. I gave Sapana Home a pretty low rating: this was back when more people thought I was too harsh, as opposed to now when people tend to reckon I’m too kind. I said to go for the momo, settle up and quit while you’re ahead.

In the intervening years, I went back – always for the momo but often for other dishes – and I realised my view of Sapana Home was more and more unduly negative. In fairness this was before Nepalese food blossomed in Reading, and certainly before I first ate at Namaste Kitchen, but Sapana Home occupied a real place in my affections. I’ve written about it more than once – giving it all kinds of plaudits, nominating it as producing one of Reading’s 50 best dishes, saying it was the perfect place to eat solo. So how had it been over three years since I last walked through those doors?

The room itself hadn’t altered much: same tables, same chairs, same awkward shape on the ground floor with a table in the window, a couple at the back near the counter and one against the wall which felt like it would be nobody’s first choice of somewhere to eat. There is a room downstairs, too, but I’ve only eaten there when there’s been no other choice and I didn’t plan to depart from that habit of a lifetime in the name of research.

Any changes the restaurant had made, beyond replacing the bright, friendly blue and white frontage with a glossier black and yellow one, were subtle and incremental. You ordered and paid at the counter now, which definitely wasn’t the case when I last ate there, and the loud and incongruous commercial radio – I can honestly say that eating at Sapana was the only time I’d ever willingly listen to Heart FM – seemed to have been axed. The place wasn’t full when we turned up on a Thursday night, but there was a regular trickle of delivery drivers. Perhaps that was where Sapana did much of its trade.

Sapana’s menu was also much the same, which I found oddly comforting. This kind of food is not buffeted around by trends, so it still contained all the classics – momo cooked every which way, chow mein, chaats and puri, curries and thalis. The prices somehow felt frozen in time, too. Not at 2014 rates – ten momo cost a measly £6 then – but nowadays most of the momo max out at a tenner, and have done for years. Very few dishes cost more than that, and even the thalis were only £15.

How an independent restaurant bang in the middle of the town centre had kept prices so low felt like one of Reading’s great mysteries: did they have the luxury of RG1’s only kindly landlord?

The first thing we tried was a curiosity, a misfire and I think a mistake on my part. Graeme was drawn to the sel roti, a sweet rice doughnut. You can have two of them with a portion of alu dum, a slow-cooked potato curry, for just under a tenner but, mindful of how much other food we had ordered, I persuaded him to try one on its own. So essentially it’s thanks to me that we were presented with a doughy hoop that reminded me of a Turkish simit, only sweeter and more incongruous.

“I’m sorry, this is my fault” I said to Graeme. “This is like having dessert before the main course.”

“It is a bit strange, but I think it needs stuff to go with it, that you can sort of dip it in.”

Like a portion of potato curry, I thought to myself ruefully. Graeme tested the hypothesis by dipping it in a couple of the other dishes we had ordered. It did not seem to go with either, we were to discover. But this is another subversion of the savoury-sweet partition that Western palates are so prone to: this was not in a dessert section, it was in the vegetarian section, and if it’s intended to be eaten alongside other dishes perhaps my finding that strange was more a failure of my imagination.

That misstep aside, the other dishes were unfortunately easier to dislike on their merits. Chilli chicken has been a favourite of mine at Nepalese restaurants for many years, and the benchmark is the one you can get at Kamal’s Kitchen: it’s rich, punchy and will hurt you, in a good way. This was really a very long way from that, the chicken dry and tough, the peppers and onions without char or caramelisation, the sauce watery and one-note. I have absolutely no idea what a lemon wedge is doing on top of this dish, apart from having as little fun as we did eating the bloody thing.

And it’s not just the inevitable comparison with Kamal’s Kitchen’s rendition of chilli chicken. More instructive, though, was comparing it with Sapana Home’s in days gone by: a picture of the same dish, on my phone, ordered back in 2022 was like night and day. In that, the sauce was glossy, thickened, potent, coated everything. That was the kind of dish that would make you fight your dining companion for the last piece of chicken, the last glorious piece of red onion, the last sweet but fiery strip of yellow pepper.

By contrast in 2026, Graeme and I did not finish this dish. Nobody was clamouring to tear off another piece of the sel roti and trawl the depth of the dish for every last molecule of sauce.

Even stranger was a dish I’d never tried before, the sadheko pork. This was meant to be marinated pork belly in a tomato gravy, packed with chilli and spice. What it was instead was big wobbly sections of pork belly: to Sapana’s credit these did feel more like they’d been exposed to a primary heat source than the chicken, with more evidence of textural contrast.

A bit too much textural contrast, actually. It was jarring to find pieces of bone studded throughout the pork belly, and I’m glad that Graeme made that mistake before me, because without him acting as the advance party this was the kind of dish that could cost me £12.50 at the till and considerably more at the dentist.

But even without that, the dish was a curious beast. There was no gravy of any kind, making the whole thing more like a dry fry. There was another ornamental lemon wedge, which I found very odd indeed. And I would say that the idea of citrus in this dish didn’t make sense, but if anything it was worse than that because someone had taken a heavy hand to the citrus already. I don’t know what exactly went into the marinade, but that pork tasted so much of lime that it was dangerously close to Toilet Duck territory. Again, we left a fair amount.

The rest of our meal hewed closer to Sapana Home’s traditional strengths, the reassuring carbs that Nepalese food does so well. I really enjoyed the chow mein, tumbled through with really enjoyable nuggets of sukuti (dried buffalo at a guess, although it could have been lamb). Graeme was not sure about the spicy sauce that came with it but to be fair, the first time I tried a Nepalese chow mein neither was I. It was only further down the line that I came to appreciate this spin on a dish that, previously, I had only ever eaten from a Chinese takeaway.

This was the kind of dish you could drop into Sapana Home for after work, to hunker over in the miserable months that are just around the corner. Thinking about it, there have been many times when I did exactly that.

I’ve saved the best ’til last: Sapana Home’s momo are still marvellous. We went for pan fried, as I usually do, stuffed with buffalo and they were easily the highlight of the meal. I really needed them to be good, because at that point my confidence in Sapana Home was wobbling and I didn’t want this to be one of those reviews, where I revisit a place to find that anything I liked about it was gone.

That wasn’t the situation here. The casing was still just the right thickness, with that glowing tan only pan-frying can induce. The filling was still generous, plumping each parcel out, and I think buffalo is worth the extra quid, even if it takes the cost of ten parcels of pleasure over the £9.99 rubicon. Sapana Home’s momo are still up there with the best of Reading’s momo peddlers, and if the chasing pack has caught up with Sapana in the fourteen years since it opened in the centre of town, it is still a tricky proposition to overtake.

All that, plus a couple of extremely tall and very good mango lassis, came to just shy of £60 including service. Sapana Home is still a relatively inexpensive place to eat fairly well, but I was struck that the two carb-based dishes remained the value propositions: I’m not sure anybody should go there to eat the other dishes we tried.

Over post-dinner pints at the Nag’s Head, I wondered whether I would ever go back to Sapana Home if my first impression of it in 2014 had been the same as Graeme’s that night. But then I realised, thinking more clearly, that that had been my impression the first time I ate at Sapana Home: the carbs were good, the momo were terrific and the rest felt like it wasn’t for me. It was only through returning and persevering that I found the other dishes to like on Sapana’s menu, although it felt sad and unfortunate that they let me down on this occasion.

But that’s the point about restaurants – they neither exist nor change in a vacuum. In 2014 Sapana was the only momo joint in town, and Reading’s gastronomic scene was in its infancy: no pizza explosion, no glut of sushi places, no high end chains like Honest and Pho changing the landscape. So in 2014, a spot like Sapana would get more chances to get it right than it might today, when money is tight and nobody goes to a restaurant – unless they’re an idiot like me – with an appetite for risk.

So in 2014 I visited Sapana Home, I wasn’t sure, and then I grew to love it. I went often for a long time and then I put it to the back of my mind for three years. Going back now I can see the nucleus of what I liked – it’s still there – but time moves on and I wonder whether Sapana might get left behind.

What will be interesting is to see if this sparks Graeme to go again, when he’s straight off the train after a long hard day and keen for carbs, and whether it’s the start of him having the kind of relationship with Sapana that I once had. My guess is that none of that will happen, because Reading is such a different place now. But I’ll ask him, next time we’re down the pub.

Sapana Home – 6.6
8 Queen Victoria St, Reading, RG1 1TG
0118 9509898

https://www.sapanahome.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Eatnua Thai Street Food

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews

The thing that struck me last week when I walked into Eatnua Thai Street Food (I’ll call it Nua from now on, if you don’t mind), the restaurant that opened last summer in the spot previously occupied by Bluegrass BBQ, was just how little they’d done with the place. Granted there was art up here and there, but otherwise it looked exactly as it had at the beginning of January 2025, just before the Bluegrass chain went into liquidation.

It had the same layout and the same grey walls. A neon sign saying Thai Street Food had been put in the place of the one that used to say No Shigging (it’s an American barbecue thing, apparently). The same furniture, too: the tables and chairs in the front room and out back on the terrace seemed identical, as far as I could remember. Even the banquetted booths were the same, which I noticed when I took a seat opposite my friend Liz. The pleather on my side was cracked and torn, revealing the tired foam underneath. Had Nua picked this place up in a fire sale or something?

As first impressions went it was an odd one. Six months or so had elapsed between Bluegrass going belly up and Nua taking over the site, so I was surprised they’d done next to nothing to put their stamp on it. Maybe the rent was too attractive to pass up, or money was tight and they wanted somewhere they could just walk into and start trading. But the restaurant has operating on Gun Street for over a year now, so I was surprised that it still had the feel of a kitchen that had popped up in somebody else’s restaurant rather than a fully-formed establishment in its own right.

Anyway, none of that might matter if everything else was on the money. Nua opened on the same day last year as Pho 86 and Lincoln Coffee, but is a different animal to both. Lincoln was an additional branch of an existing Reading business, Pho 86 a brand new independent restaurant. Nua on the other hand, although independent, is the fifth link in a small chain with other restaurants in London, High Wycombe, Kingston and Watford.

Its website describes it as “award winning” and it turns out they have won some awards, although how much that means to you will depend on whether you consider LUXlife Magazine, who crowned it ‘Best Thai Restaurant 2025’, an authority in these matters. Personally I always find these random awards – with so little transparency around how to enter, how they’re decided, whether money changes hands – a tad shady. It doesn’t help that nominations for those awards are handled by a company called AI Global Media, who potentially might want to reconsider their slogan Content You Can Trust.

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Restaurant review: No. 11 Bistro, Pangbourne

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

This might be hard to believe, but a couple of years ago I nearly ended up moving to Pangbourne.

Well, sort of. Zoë and I were quite happy in our little house in the Village, and then one day I got a call from our lettings agent. Those calls were never welcome events: they usually involved our landlord wanting to hike the rent, knowing that if we pointed out that there was a clause in our tenancy agreement we’d suddenly find her serving notice under it. But this time it was a courtesy call to let us know that our landlord was selling up. No specifics were given, but at some point in the not too distant future we would suddenly have two months to find somewhere new to live. 

We started looking immediately. And one of the places we looked at online, and asked to view in the flesh, was an attractive-looking flat in a converted property in Pangbourne, close to the station. That we considered Pangbourne at all probably tells you more about the state of the rental market in Reading than it does about the flat in question. Even so, in the time between putting in the enquiry and being told, naturally, that it had already gone I started to convince myself that living in Pangbourne might be rather nice.

I decided that an eight minute train into Reading was really no different to a bus ride to the centre of town. Besides, it might be fun to live away from the hubbub. Pangbourne was pretty and prosperous, it had a lovely butcher and a cheese shop. And I could still write the blog, couldn’t I? It would just mean evening trips into town, or eating at restaurants on my way home from the office. I could make it work, I told myself.

In the end, that was a parallel life I never got to live, and I wound up in my house in Katesgrove after all. But I couldn’t help wondering, as Zoe and I mooched round Pangbourne on a sunny Saturday, if I would have been happy there. The butcher, Green’s, is fantastic, with its old-school kiosk where you still pay for your bounty: their pork, apricot and chilli sausage roll made me very happy that evening, and their steak and Stilton pie knocks the spots off anything Sweeney’s can rustle up. And the cheese shop is marvellous – I left with a Comte, a triple cream, a very salty blue and a smoked goat’s cheese, along with all manner of crackers and biscuits.

Nino’s Italian Deli is a great spot to sit in the sunshine and watch the world meander past, and the cornucopia of goodies on the shelves was tempting, as were the hefty focaccia sandwiches. But the coffee, a tad bitter and burnt, couldn’t match Reading standards. Nor could it at Artichoke, a café slightly further out of the village. That said, it had friendly staff, a pleasant decked front terrace – albeit one with a view of a Londis – and an almost Mediterranean feel. I put a picture on Instagram, with the caption Costa del Pangbourne.

I hadn’t ventured to RG8, though, for some Sliding Doors-themed day trip to another part of my personal multiverse: I was in Pangbourne to check out No. 11 Bistro. It opened its doors to the public at the start of June, and if the blurb I’d read came straight out of central casting – it’s never poor quality produce from miles away knocked up with supreme indifference, is it? – it still sounded worthy of investigation.

It was, after all, an independent bistro from a restaurateur who had worked at London Street Brasserie and Marlow’s Hand & Flowers. Not bad going for a chap who first featured in Berkshire Live of all places back in 2014, plating up at The Kitchen in Reading College as a 16 year old head chef. I could only imagine how proud he must feel, opening his own place now.

A prospect like No. 11 would have sparked considerable interest had it opened in Reading: heaven knows people, including me, like to complain that the town centre lacks this kind of restaurant. However, as we’ve learned over the last few years, Reading doesn’t attract good independents often enough, so a trip to Pangbourne was in order. Time to seek out what Muddy Stilettos termed “a fun new dining experience” – or, as human beings tend to put it, a good meal.

No. 11 has taken the site which was occupied by Italian institution Nino’s Trattoria for 13 years, and the restaurant’s first Instagram post was nicely worded: Meston clearly recognised that Pangbourne residents would probably say he had big shoes to fill.

I never ate at Nino’s, but Meston has wisely left the attractive dining room largely as it was in its previous incarnation, simply changing the wood panelling from sage to oxblood. Otherwise it is as it was: handsome, well lit through the big windows. I was very happy to learn that they had aircon, and delighted that it was so effective: a few groups were out on the terrace, but even on the Costa del Pangbourne it was far too warm for such antics.

We had a genuinely magnificent negroni – Meston’s brother James is apparently in charge behind the bar, and on the basis of the negroni I would definitely check out the six signature cocktails on the drinks menu. It passed enjoyably as we scoured a menu which seemed determined not to make matters easy.

Provenance wasn’t really talked about, with the exception of bread from Birch, the bakery just up the road. But on paper it was the kind of streamlined menu I always like to see: seven starters, seven mains, most starters just over £10 and most mains under the £30 glass ceiling. That might make you wince, but that’s just eating out now and I imagine Pangbourne is no different in that respect to anywhere else, except that its residents are more likely to be able to afford it.

The contents of the menu might also have been tailored to the demographic: nearly all of it stayed firmly in classic territory, the pineapple and capsicum salsa with the scallops sticking out like a sore condiment. It felt a little – this isn’t necessarily a criticism – like LSB twenty years ago, and I was surprised, a little, by how many of the dishes identified as ‘seared’.

We struggled to choose starters, so decided to share three. And if each was effective individually, they somehow added up to less than the sum of their parts. Sticky pork belly bites are a dish with my and Zoë’s names on it in figurative Sharpie, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in recent reviews. No. 11’s treatment was very different to others I’ve had, and I liked it, while not being entirely convinced that others would.

Rather than have cubes of well rendered meat these were thick strips, almost like reimagined Bacon Fries, and had been cooked to be more crispy than tender. I like my smoked streaky cooked so it snaps rather than bends, so these were right up my alley, but I might be in the minority there. I really enjoyed them, though, and I loved the honey and soy – more honey than soy, really – with which they glistened. A creditable sort of Asian slaw completed the dish without feeling too much like padding.

I was also a big fan of No. 11’s salt and pepper squid. This dish is straight out of the Paul Clerehugh Book Of Classics, so I’m sure Meston learned it at London Street Brasserie. It was almost more snack than starter, in a good way: lots and lots of very narrow rings of squid, in a coating which for my money lacked that salt and pepper flavour but made up for it in texture.

I think I would have liked this even more with a squeeze of lemon and a dollop of golden aioli: it almost felt Andalusian, but serving it with sweet chilli sauce and more Asian slaw felt like a bit of a misstep. I was getting the feeling that the starter menu might mostly be fried stuff with salad.

And this is what I mean about the starters being collectively less than the sum of their parts. Because the thing I was most looking forward to, the maple glazed chicken thighs, was also fried stuff with salad. Another extremely pleasant variant of it, but fried stuff with salad nonetheless.

The meat had the right texture, whether that came from marination or not, but the coating lacked a little crispiness, ironically not a problem either the pork or the squid had. Plonking it on a carpet of little gem was far from objectionable, and the harissa mayonnaise had a nice heat to it, but these three dishes felt to me how I suspect some of my reviews must feel to you from time to time – paragraph after paragraph, all saying much the same thing.

Could we have ordered better? Possibly. But burrata and bruschetta both felt a bit bla, and I wasn’t in the mood for a chicken liver parfait. More to the point, three between two was about right in terms of size: I was glad I got to try a bit of all of them. If I’d been out with a bigger group, eating just the one starter on my own, I think I might have felt more underwhelmed. But then I do seem to be one of the only people in Reading who isn’t on Ozempic or Mounjaro: maybe No. 11 has judged its demographic wisely, and I just happen not to be in it.

It really was, however, a lovely place in which to spend a lazy Saturday lunchtime. The restaurant was sparsely occupied when we got there, but it gradually filled up and it was clear that at least some of those diners, already, were repeat customers. I could see why, because the service was really excellent – friendly, on it and very good at judging just how formal to be, or not be.

And the bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc we’d ordered was slipping down with genuine alacrity. No. 11’s wine list is good and pleasingly concise, with over half the wines available by the glass. Again, the restaurant played it safe. There was nothing orange, natural or from more esoteric countries on it, but I imagine it would be relatively hard to go wrong – unless you ordered an Italian pinot grigio, anyway.

It was all going so nicely, so I’m really sorry that the restaurant wobbled when it came to the mains. I’d been tempted by the herb crusted halibut, but my server told me they’d made some changes to it, doing away with the brown shrimp butter I’d so fancied. It speaks well of the kitchen that they’d identified a dish that wasn’t working and corrected course. But somewhere along the way that instinct had deserted them with my eventual choice, chicken supreme with a mushroom velouté.

First of all, with a dish like this you really need to get the skin crispy, and ideally crackling with salt. That hadn’t happened here, and although the chicken itself was judiciously cooked it did feel like the pièce de résistance was missing. The crushed potatoes it was perched on were quite nice, too, but at this point I bumped into the second, bigger problem with the dish.

Because it wasn’t a mushroom velouté by any stretch of the imagination. It was a white sauce with some mushrooms in it – perfectly decent mushrooms, including some oyster, but not ones that really lent flavour to the sauce itself. And the sauce still tasted very strongly of flour, which means that it hadn’t been cooked off. Such a basic, avoidable error.

I was sad to find this dish so middling, because everything up to this point had signalled real potential: potential that might be in need of refinement, but potential all the same. This, though, felt like the kind of mistake that would get drummed out of you at Reading College.

That dish cost £26.50, and didn’t feel its money. But Zoë’s main, the venison pavé, was pricier still at £31, which meant there was even less excuse for it to be subpar. The support acts did a good job: No. 11 makes a mean (if scrappy-looking) potato dauphinoise, their jus was decent, the Roscoff onion was a nice touch. The problem was the star of the show – here you are paying for the venison, and to cook it to beige rather than blushing felt dangerously close to being knocked up with supreme indifference after all.

Strangely the dish of seasonal greens we’d ordered on the side was spot on: consistency and timing were the problems across the piece. The restaurant could get parts of the whole right, but nailing it all at the same time seemed to be beyond them.

It was instructive to review this restaurant the week after I’d gone to Angelo’s: in both cases the restaurant was new, filled a gap in the market and had the potential to excite. In both cases dishes were priced to a level where the restaurant really couldn’t afford to make a hash of them. In Angelo’s case the highwire act had worked, but No. 11 hadn’t quite pulled it off. Restaurant dishes are more expensive than they used to be and the £20 Rubicon for main courses was crossed a long time ago. That ship has sailed, but you can’t simply charge £31 for a dish and execute it like that without losing some of your target market.

With everything up to that point comparatively scattergun, the choice to order dessert wasn’t so much about being the decider, more about gathering further evidence. Again, No. 11’s menu is compact and on the safe side: an Eton mess; a cheesecake; a brownie; a sticky toffee pudding; a cheeseboard. So I thought we were in pedestrian territory, and then No. 11 lobbed in a killer curveball by serving up one of my desserts of the year so far.

I had been dead set to try the cheesecake, which Zoë didn’t fancy (“white chocolate’s not real chocolate, it’s just sugar” was her take) but then I saw a sticky toffee pudding being carried to one of the outside tables and, despite not being my usual order by a long shot, something about it called to me. Was it that connection to London Street Brasserie again, knowing that it was always the reliable thing to order there? I’m not sure, but No. 11’s rendition is one of the best sticky toffee puddings I’ve ever eaten, anywhere.

The pudding was the perfect temperature, warm not hot, with just enough moistness, crumbliness and squidge. The exceptionally generous moat of toffee sauce – rich with burnt sugar notes, so glossy you could see your face in it – was simply impossible to fault. And the huge sphere of clotted cream on top? Utter, decadent heaven: “would you rather have it with ice cream?” my server had asked, and I had said no with a note of incredulity I forgot to conceal. Who wouldn’t want a massive globe of clotted cream on top of a dessert like this? Heathens and vegans, that’s who. Nobody else.

Honestly, forget the cheese shop and the bakery, don’t worry about the butcher’s pies and pasties, banish all thoughts of the slightly average coffee from your mind. This justified a trip to Pangbourne, all by its sweet self.

It couldn’t possibly have been as good, and I know some people think a chocolate brownie is a cake with no place on a dessert menu, but Zoë felt equally strongly about her dessert. It was, apparently, excellent, still warm and pleasingly fudgy inside. It’s not clear whether No. 11 makes its own ice cream or buys it in, but either way it also met with Zoë’s approval, speckled with plenty of vanilla seeds.

I’m sure it was lovely, but if you read this review and pick the brownie over the sticky toffee pudding I think you might be beyond my help. Either that or I haven’t done a good enough job of describing it. I tend to stay away from what I think of as school dinners dessert: anything warm, anything with custard or dried fruits and so on, but my god, that sticky toffee pudding. Did I mention that I rather liked it?

Our bill came to just shy of £200. You could spend less there, but it all adds up, from the £13 negronis to the £40 bottle of white – from the cheaper half of the wine list – to the £9 desserts, which come to think of it were probably the best value of the entire meal. It included a 12.5% service charge, and that was the area where it felt like the restaurant had been open far longer than a month: my server told us they’d make sure the wine list had a dessert wine on it by the time I ate there again, and I have every confidence that they’ll do exactly that.

So No. 11 was a little bit less expensive than Angelo’s, the subject of last week’s review, but I couldn’t help comparing the two again. Because they are both trying to do similar things, to bring something new to the centre of a community, to fill a gap. In Angelo’s case it’s opening an Italian restaurant in a location that badly needs one, conversely in No. 11’s it’s replacing an Italian restaurant which, over many years, became Pangbourne’s favourite place to eat.

They’re both tough assignments in their own way, and if No. 11 was a little uneven I think you have to show some understanding: it’s the owner’s first restaurant, not the sequel to an original that has been flourishing for years. I saw enough to think that they will get there, if they’re blessed with a patient clientele. I hope that Pangbourne supports it and this is all the beginning of a beautiful symbiotic relationship.

I never ended up living in Pangbourne and I probably never will, although it’s a very agreeable place to spend a Saturday lunchtime. But if I had, I suspect I’d have wound up at No. 11 more than once. Never mind: I’ll always have this one pleasant afternoon, when my real life ever so slightly converged with a different one that might have been mine but wasn’t. And I’ll always remember that sticky toffee pudding.

No. 11 Bistro – 7.4
11 Reading Road, Pangbourne, RG8 7LR
0118 9841333

https://www.no11restaurant.co.uk

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