Tag: Reading

Restaurant review: Chilis South Indian

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If you run a restaurant, and it does well enough – which I suppose is possible, even in these dicey times – eventually you’re going to think about your next move.

Admittedly, some proprietors are happy to stick where they are, perfect the site they are in. But many are bitten by the bug and, one way or another, they want more. Sometimes that will involve moving to a bigger site, the way Clay’s did for example, but for others opening restaurants is like having kids: despite all the sleepless nights, constant nagging worry and the endless drain on the finances, one simply isn’t enough.

For restaurateurs who reach this point there are a plethora of different options. The first is just to open a second branch, either in the same town or further afield. Margins being what they are, Reading no longer sees empires like the one Nino Bartolomei built in the Eighties and Nineties, so this is largely the domain of cafés these days: like our two branches of C.U.P. or of Lincoln; The Switch over in Tilehurst and out on Green Park; the twin Geo Cafés in the slightly more upmarket Caversham and Henley.

Some towns and cities are especially blessed, though, and develop hyperlocal independent chains – Bristol’s numerous outposts of Pizzarova spring to mind – but Reading simply doesn’t have the ecosystem for that. There was a time, pre-Covid, when I thought our town might get there, but now I doubt it ever will. And I say hyperlocal, but although all restaurant chains start that way that’s not where they all end up: both Franco Manca and Honest Burgers originated in the same Brixton market, before going on to experience very different fortunes on their journeys across the U.K.

Another option is to open another restaurant doing something different. Reading’s most successful exponent of this is arguably the team behind Coconut, now trading for well over a decade. Six years after Coconut opened, along came their second restaurant Osaka, in the Oracle, and at some point in the future we’ll hopefully see Kawaii, their difficult third album, which has been awaited on Station Hill since it was announced two years ago.

You could also include Café Yolk in that category: many years after they first began, they opened a smaller branch on Cemetery Junction and then, this year, a sandwich deli offering something totally distinct from all those brunches.

But my favourite in this genre, for sheer randomness, is “opening another restaurant very similar to one you already have, a couple of doors down from your original restaurant”. And, believe it or not, Reading has more than one of these.

So for instance you have Kungfu Kitchen, which mainly serves Szechuan food and – on the same run of shops, in Kungfu Kitchen’s old home – Happy Panda. It offers Cantonese food, dim sum and roast meats, but if you dine at either Jo will happily give you the menu from both and tell you to order whatever you like from either (when she’s not telling you exactly what to order anyway). If she needs to, she’ll just run something down from the other place.

I get that these menus are conceptually separate, but it’s still strange to see both places so close together. What was the rationale behind opening the second restaurant, I wonder? If the first one was rammed all the time perhaps it makes sense, but if not, don’t you just risk dividing your existing clientele between two almost adjacent dining rooms?

The other prime example is the subject of this week’s review. Indian restaurant Chilis opened in 2022 on the first floor of what I’m stubbornly choosing to still call King’s Walk, in the spot that used to host Art Of Siam; I reviewed it in 2024 and liked it a lot.

Then, early last year, they opened a second branch on the other side of the mall. It’s the old Bolan Thai site: if I was a Thai restaurant in Reading I’d start to worry that Chilis was coming for me next. And actually, Chilis had taken a hybrid of a few different approaches, because they started out with a big restaurant next to Newbury train station. They’ve also opened a random newsagent in Caversham, as you do.

So what’s the point of distinction between these two Reading restaurants whose front doors are literally a minute’s walk apart? Well, Chilis then rebranded the original as ‘Chilis Indian & Indo-Chinese Restaurant’ and the new arrival was ‘Chilis South Indian’. So potentially some difference, then: India’s a big place after all, with plenty of regional cuisine, and this moniker potentially encompassed the food of Kerala, Hyderabad and plenty more besides.

In an interview with the Chronicle, the owner made much of his Hyderabadi roots. His parents and grandparents were from there, he said, and they grew chillies on the family farm. But he also said that sometimes they got really big bookings that they couldn’t accommodate in their original site. “That’s why I opened in the same building” was his explanation. So: distinctive restaurant covering authentic regional cuisine, overflow car park for curry fans or both at the same time? I met my friend Graeme there on a Friday evening to investigate.

It’s not a bad space, as windowless dining rooms on the top floor of a mall go. I never ate there when it was Bolan Thai, or even Bengal Reef, but it’s quite tasteful, sleek and modern, all burgundy, cream and dark woods. Far nicer than the interior of the original Reading branch, which feels like it’s never evolved much from the restaurant it was before, aside from sticking a big flatscreen TV on one wall.

Chilis South Indian is nicer than that, and seemed to be doing a very good job of looking after a sizeable group when I arrived and nabbed a table. It was half-six, so early doors, but customers did start to trickle in as my meal progressed. I do wonder how many of them had booked this specific branch of Chilis, or were coming here because the other one was full, or even thought this was the other branch. Perhaps I should have gone from table to table and conducted a straw poll.

Speaking of research, this is where I would normally pop in a paragraph about the menu and regular readers know exactly how that pans out. I would say that the menu is made up of this and that, maybe come out with something fatuous about authenticity or spot some typos and then say that starters range from X quid to Y quid. You know, practically useful information that is never going to aspire to literary brilliance: for all I know you might skip that paragraph every week.

But this week, because I have kidded myself that this kind of devotion to detail is partly what you come here for, I went one step further: the night before my meal, I made a spreadsheet. I wanted to understand, you see, what the Venn diagram of New Chilis and Old Chilis looked like. Was it choice, or the illusion of choice? So I looked at the menu for Chilis South Indian and its older sibling, trying to work out how big an overlap there was.

Chilis South Indian’s menu has over a hundred dishes on it: mind-boggling, really. Now granted, some of those are generic stuff like rice and naan, and they do a number of different types of dosa each of which comes something like seven or eight different ways, so it’s probably a little bloated by that. The Chilis Indo-Chinese menu has around a hundred dishes on it too.

To Chilis’ credit, about three quarters of the Chilis South Indian’s menu is unique to the restaurant. Again, that number is stretched out by all the vada, dosas and idly that don’t appear on the Indo-Chinese menu (rather randomly kothu parotta, from Tamil Nadu, is on the Indo-Chinese menu but not the South Indian one: go figure). But another way to look at it is that these two restaurants between them, owned by the same people, a stone’s throw apart, offer the best part of one hundred and fifty dishes. How could they all be good, or distinctive? How could they all not rely on many common elements, like a base sauce?

I explained this to Graeme when he arrived and to his credit he listened and humoured me – without lapsing into a coma, I might add – as we both took introductory sips of the second cheapest wine by glass on the menu (a sauvignon blanc, perfectly pleasant). He even managed to conceal what must have been pity when I told him I’d made a huge note on my phone of all the dishes unique to Chilis South Indian and would he mind if we only ordered from that list, pretty please?

In honesty I think he was just happy to have finally finished the working week, although it might have clinched it when I told him the note on my phone included three separate fried chicken dishes. The other dishes specific to this restaurant were scattered across the menu but, as I’ve said, idly, vada and dosas were all well represented and there was also a section, called “Street Food Specials”, which was made up exclusively of vegetarian small plates that might well appeal to many of my readers.

Oh, and one dish was called “Govan Fish Curry”: I’m hoping that’s a misprint of a dish from Goa, rather than some exotic Glaswegian variant. Sorry, couldn’t resist spotting the typo.

So, first up, some of that fried chicken. Which turned out, really, not to be: kopi vepadu is an Andhra-style chicken fry, and is meant to be deeply spiced with a crispy exterior. Pleasant though this was, it wasn’t that: instead it was big chunks of chicken breast coated in a sticky sauce which was more like a paste. This wasn’t bad, but even at this stage I had the feeling that, given the rest of our order, we ran the risk of seeing those same pieces of chicken presented a variety of ways.

“This chicken is a little overdone” was Graeme’s verdict, not without justification. The problem here, really, is how difficult Clay’s has made it for any Indian restaurant in Reading to live up to any dish they’ve ever put on their menu. Clay’s did an Andhra-style fried chicken which is an absolute knockout, so crispy-coated but tender that you fight to share it with others while feeling you have a civic duty to do so. That dish is many, many times better than this one. I knew it, Graeme knew it, neither of us said it out loud.

Our second chicken dish – yes, we ordered two – was different but the same. In a way it was instructive to order both, to experience how they felt much of a muchness. Ironically chicken sukkah is not fried, but it came out exactly the same as the dish that was supposed to be: those standard issue bits of chicken again, again coated in a dry masala. I actually liked this dish more, I think: the chicken at least had a little caramelisation, and was fierier and slightly more interesting.

But it wasn’t nicer enough to justify ordering both. The coconut on top just reminded me of my mum’s attempts at Patak or the like from the Eighties, of bringing out a little bowl of dessicated coconut and another of chopped banana, because we were apparently fancy and that’s what fancy people dumped on top of their curries. What a strange voyage for all of us, to spend forty years going from that to Clay’s, let alone this.

Graeme specifically wanted to try the ghee podi idly, because he had fond memories of them from spending time in India. Graeme used to go every year with work, spending time in very rural India: he entertained me with his stories of near-death experience with various terrifying-sounding forms of wildlife. He stayed in a tent he had to put up himself, and while he was there he ate idly a lot: he said that Chilis South Indian were very close in quality to the ones he’d had there. He liked their light, spongy texture and all the bits and bobs you could spoon over them or dip them in.

The one time I went to India with work was to train a bunch of people we were outsourcing to. This was nearly twenty years ago, when it was all the rage. I touched down and checked into the hotel only to find that my colleagues back in Blighty hadn’t finished writing the training, and doing so proved beyond them for the whole of my time in India.

I essentially spent a week either loafing by the hotel pool or discovering that our £25 a night subsistence allowance let you eat like a king in Bangalore. I went to the Sheraton for their poolside Afghan barbecue and it still ranks as one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, anywhere.

I found the idly pretty dull.

Graeme is a better person than me, though, so if this sounds at all like your kind of thing I’d trust his judgement.

By now our evening was in full swing and I realised it was a long time since I’d done this kind of thing: eat perfectly serviceable Indian food with a very good friend as a precursor to going to the pub to drink and talk nonsense.

It felt like what life used to be like twenty years ago, rather than now, and it turned out I’d really missed that. Graeme told his stories about harrowing encounters with the local fauna, I told him that when I’d returned from India I was so sick I’d said my final farewells to my ex-wife, we moved on to work and gossip, war stories, trials and tribulations.

We even had a rather enjoyable bottle of white: Chilis wine list is so non-specific as to be ridiculous but they ought to do something about that, because the wine is nicer than you might expect. What was billed just as ‘Viognier £32.95’ was in fact a perfectly decent South African number – 2026 vintage, would you believe – that would set you back £16 in Laithwaites. Not life changing, but not bad.

I’m going to canter through the rest in an effort not to bore anybody – you or me – more than I have to. An Andhra spicy chicken curry was the same cubes of chicken as before, in a gravy that was wetter than either of the starters but not noticeably different from them. Graeme was equally unimpressed by this. “This chicken has been added to the sauce at the last minute” he said, cutting a cube open to show its milk-white core. “And it’s overcooked, too.”

Graeme preferred the lamb curry, the rara gosht. Normally this contains both chunks of lamb and minced lamb, but this was just pieces of lamb submerged beneath a gravy that, again, was different from the others but in the same way that the Kardashians are different from one another: maybe if you’re a devotee you can tell them all apart, but for me they all rather blurred into one.

I’ve had better curries at Chilis’ other branch, I thought. But have I, really? If I went back would I feel indifferent about that, too?

We had this with a paneer biryani, because if there’s one life lesson I’ve taken from Graeme – and I learned it with him at Clay’s – it’s that biryani is a perfectly acceptable alternative to a side of rice when you’re eating Indian food. Having had Chilis South Indian’s biryani, I think maybe that lesson is more appropriate for Clay’s than for restaurants like this. It was just bland rice with mostly albino cubes of paneer in it, only a few of them showing evidence of caramelisation.

Our meal for two, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just under £145. And the service, by the way, was really good. I’d sort of expect that, as the sequel to a really successful restaurant that’s always looked after me well, but it wasn’t enough to change my overwhelming view of Chilis South Indian.

It feels like a really long time since I’ve had to write a review like this, but back in the day – pre-divorce, when I reviewed somewhere new in Reading literally every week – I had to write them a lot. Reviews of places that are fine. Not damned fine, not mighty fine, not fine dining, not fine and dandy: just fine. Because that’s what Chilis South Indian is, and what I think Indian restaurants in Reading used to be most of the time. Not distinctive, not interesting, not repugnant. Just decent, competent and a little generic.

The irony of it is this: this restaurant only exists – in its strangely-chosen, illogical location – because the restaurant it spun off from was so good. But somehow, Chilis South Indian manages to diminish them both. Not only is it unspecial, but its very presence makes its sibling unspecial too. Why go to one, when you could just go to the other? And when two restaurants become Ant and Dec in that way, the natural next question follows inexorably from that: why go to either? Chilis South Indian is not a terrible restaurant. But having eaten there, I no longer know the answer to that question.

Chilis South Indian – 6.5
The Village, King’s Walk, King Street, Reading, RG1 2HG
0118 3047578

https://www.chilisrestaurant.co.uk

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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

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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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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