Pappadams closed in November 2025 and is due to reopen as a new restaurant called Anjappar. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
I got an email from WordPress the other day confirming that they were renewing my domain name for another year and that, more than anything, reminded me that a significant anniversary was coming up: next month my blog turns 10 years old. What started as a little hobby has become, well, a slightly less little hobby but I can’t quite believe that a decade later I’m still reviewing restaurants and that people are still reading those reviews. There will be more about that in the weeks ahead – for which I apologise in advance – but it has left me in rather a reflective mood lately (and I apologise for that, too).
In the first year of the blog, back when Alt Reading and the Evening Post were still a thing, I published a total of 38 reviews of places in Reading. Of those 38 restaurants just over half are still trading today – a statistic which surprised me, although it does include the likes of Zero Degrees, Côte, Five Guys, Mission Burrito, Malmaison, Bel And The Dragon: chains who are still going, many years later.
But when I look back at the independent restaurants I visited in the first year of the blog, the ones that remain open in 2023, there are only three that I’ve never returned to since. Pau Brasil, although I know it has its fans, has never tempted me back. I’ve never got round to Coconut, although I did review their takeaway at the start of last year. And last but not least, there’s Pappadams, the subject of this week’s review.
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Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025. It no longer bakes on the premises, has an alcohol licence and previous manager Mohamad Skeik has left the business. I have marked this review as closed and will re-review Lebanese Flavours at some point.
It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.
And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.
But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.
Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.
Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.
Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?
At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.
I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.
Nothing had changed inside, at first glance, which I found oddly reassuring. Still the same battleship-grey walls, brightly lit wall art and chocolate-brown banquettes. Still the shawarma revolving away up front, still the signs of baking that gave the restaurant its name. So far, so familiar.
And Mohamad was still there, zipping about: now, in the interests of full disclosure Mohamad knows who I am, because I did a readers’ lunch at the restaurant back in 2019, but I doubt he would expect me to review the place again after eight intervening years. And I didn’t just spot Mohamad, I recognised a waitress who has been there since the very start, who left the restaurant to have a baby and came back, and that made me realise that this restaurant hadn’t just seen me through different phases in my life.
But also there, relaxed in a polo shirt, was Chander Ahuja, the owner of House Of Flavours. I’ve never met Ahuja, but I know him by sight and again, it’s possible he knew who I was. He came over and asked more than once what I made of the food, as did Mohamad. I don’t know whether that was anything to do with me writing the blog, or because it was my first visit after a long time away. I don’t know if it was because of a certain apprehensiveness about what customers made of the same-but-different Bakery House, or just excellent customer service. I’m just mentioning it, aware that it could have been any of those things.
The menu is exactly as it was, not spruced up, not reprinted. And really, they might want to consider reprinting it and raising their prices, because those prices have a distinctly 2015 feel about them. Maybe it’s a loss leader in this climate, or perhaps they’re waiting for new menus back from the printers but really, starters that cost a fiver or less and mains that weigh in around thirteen pounds feel like they merit a mention. If the quality is even close to what it was, I thought, Bakery House could be one of the biggest bargains in the town centre.
We did something I rarely do when re-reviewing a restaurant, namely ordering the dishes I would normally have if I was visiting Bakery House. That might sound like a counter-intuitive thing to do – surely it should be about striking out into the unknown? – but there was method to my madness. I’ve had some of these dishes so often it feels as if I know them like the back of my hand. It’s a kind of gastronomic close reading, I guess, and I thought it was the best way to assess whether Bakery House was a different proposition under the bonnet (that’s probably enough mixed metaphors for now).
The first indicators came with one of my very favourite Bakery House dishes, houmous kawarmah, houmus with spiced lamb. I could have closed my eyes and remembered its tastes and textures, but what came along was subtly different. The houmous was still glorious – thick and scoopable, with a hefty, welcome whack of tahini. But the lamb was… what had they done to the lamb?
Where before it would have been little nuggets, here it was fantastic caramelised slivers of the stuff, intense and moreish. I know what this dish is like when it’s good – years of practice – and this was as good as I could remember it. I looked over at Zoë as she loaded some onto a piece of pita and crammed it joyously in her mouth. There was a pause.
“Oh, hello” she said. Oh, hello indeed.
If that was my go-to order, our other starter was Zoë’s. She always picks arayes, flatbreads stuffed with minced veal, and is something of an expert on the stuff. And yes, the plates are a bit fancier now, and they’ve drizzled pomegranate molasses on top. But, as with the restaurant itself, the real changes were the ones going on under the surface. In the past, the veal could be a little homogeneous, a little smooth. This, though, was coarser, even more delicious. It felt like eating the dish in HD, the same experience I’d had with the houmous. Something was going on here, and I was pretty sure I liked it.
The real test, though, was to come, with the dish I most associated with Bakery House: farrouj massahab, the boneless baby chicken. I have eaten this at Bakery House many times, and in lockdown it was my delivery order of choice: why on earth spend that money on Nando’s when you can have this? In as far as a dish can be a friend, this was an old, old friend and seeing it come to the table (well, them: Zoë ordered it too) felt part meal, part reunion.
I may have more photos of Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken on my phone than of any other dish I’ve ordered in my life – more than Bhel Puri House’s chilli paneer, more than Sapana Home’s momo, more than Fidget & Bob’s full English, more than any of the cornucopia of delights you can get at Clay’s or Kungfu Kitchen. Like any poor woman dipping her toe in Tinder, my phone runneth over with cock pics. I have pictures of it looking overdone and a tad dry – the chicken, I should add – and pictures of it looking wan. There have been times when it’s been amazing, and times when it’s merely been quite good. It’s never been less than that. What was it to be this time?
Well, you can’t tell from the picture, which is why Instagram will never entirely kill food blogs like mine. But I’m overjoyed to tell you that it looked good and tasted even better. Marinated, golden, utterly crammed with heat and flavour it was, much like me after a day at Nirvana, its absolute best self. They’d got more of that spice into the meat than I remember, and the biggest dilemmas were which parts to eat first and which to save until last, and whether to dip in the potent chilli sauce or the pungent garlic sauce. Why had I gone without eating this for so long, and when could I realistically do it again without looking a bit weird? Was lunchtime the next day too soon?
It wasn’t just the chicken though, everything else had been subtly tweaked and elevated. The golden rice also had an unfamiliar jolt of heat and was beautifully done, clump free and the perfect accompaniment. And the salad – well, Bakery House has always done salad superbly and understood, as so few places do, that if you want people to eat it you have to dress it. And they had dressed it well, a riot of freshness, with plenty of tomato and pokey raw red onion.
I’ve often pontificated in the past that this dish is possibly the single best one stop shop, the finest everything-you-need-on-one-plate choice in the whole of Reading. I still stand by that: if anything it’s better than before, and a ludicrous steal at twelve pounds fifty. Just don’t get into a lift with anybody for about twenty-four hours after eating.
I’ve never really done dessert at Bakery House, although I know people who swear by it. But a little plate of mini baklava, sticky-sweet and just the right size to eat in one go, was a lovely touch, brought out as we were getting the bill. I’m pretty sure I saw these brought out to other tables after they’d finished their main course: I don’t think it was just me. All that was left was to settle up – our food, and a couple of superbly zingy fresh lemonades came to a baffling forty-two pounds, not including tip.
As I said, service was terrific throughout, although Bakery House has always excelled at that. It looked like a happy, harmonious ship when I was there that Sunday evening; it did a steady trade, although it was far from full, and the other customers appeared to be enjoying themselves almost as much as I was. The new owner looked relaxed, and as I waited for the bill I looked around, taking in the room where I’d eaten so many times and the wait staff who had been serving me since the year dot. And maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I was grateful and strangely moved that Bakery House was still here and relieved that its future appeared safe.
I was relieved, too, to have loved my meal quite as much as I did, and to know that the new ownership had nudged and subtly improved rather than overhauling or resting on laurels. Change a restaurant you like too much and it becomes something else, but if you never change it at all you run the risk that it becomes preserved in aspic as the world moves on. The history of Reading restaurants is full of places that did exactly that and then died out, and I hope I never find myself talking about Bakery House in that category. This felt like a much better course, to try to preserve Bakery House’s heyday with some judicious tinkering.
So there you have it – a timely, happy return to Bakery House, almost eight years after I first set foot through the doors. Much has changed in that time, me not least, and Bakery House is no longer the trailblazer it was. But if they play their cards right they could attain a status that has always eluded me, that of a true Reading institution. I had forgotten just how good Bakery House was. I’m not alone: I think maybe Bakery House had too, but now they’ve remembered, and they’re out to remind everybody. I’m happy to play my part in doing some reminding, too.
Bakery House – 8.1 82 London Street, Reading, RG1 4SJ 0118 3274040
Barista & Beyond closed in February 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
If I was giving out ratings for having a heartwarming backstory, it’s hard to imagine any business would finish above Barista & Beyond in my list. The café was set up by social enterprise Ways Into Work, which supports people with disabilities, those on the autism spectrum or with mental health challenges to get into work. It offers internships, including at the café, and a better cause is difficult to envisage. I’ve wanted to visit Barista & Beyond for some time, and I’ve been paying close attention to their social media, which I highly recommend following.
It tracks the creation of the space last year, them beginning to trade in November and, for reasons I didn’t entirely grasp, their grand opening in March. It paints a lovely picture of the business, which is just past the IDR, between the Oxford Road and Chatham Street, around the corner from Rise Bakehouse. Looking through Barista & Beyond’s Instagram I got a real picture of their mission to, as they put it, change lives one job at a time. It depicts a happy little spot, nicely fitted out, with pictures of bright smoothies in the sunlight and fresh, vibrant salads. It also features an interview with their intern, Charlie, which I defy you to watch without feeling at least a little moved: put it this way, he’s a lot wiser at eighteen than I was.
So I really wanted to go, and last weekend it reached the top of my to do list: Zoë and I headed west past the Broad Street Mall, but in truth I had a certain amount of trepidation. This is not an establishment I would enjoy giving a negative review to, so I wasn’t overjoyed about the possible risk of that. But there was also the equal and opposite danger, that I would patronise Barista & Beyond, measure them against different standards or pat them on the head for simply existing at all. I would hate to do that, and I doubt they would want a review like that. So I approached the front door hoping they did well, but determined not to say anything that could sound like “didn’t they do well”?
It really is a lovely spot, with an almost European feel, like you could be in Rotterdam or Ghent. They have plenty of outside space which catches the sun, so much so that we decided to eat inside. But the inside is lovely too – very spacious, with tables clustered along the walls and next to those full-length windows, white tiles and lime green banquettes. They haven’t chosen to pack people in, to the extent where the room can feel a little bit empty, but there was a steady stream of punters coming in to get takeaway coffees or the smoothies. I couldn’t blame them: the smoothies looked good.
The website says that everything is made fresh every day, and the display cabinet showed off sandwiches, salads and wraps. They serve breakfast before midday, which I was sadly too late for, but the range of options was good but not huge: three toasties, two wraps, a BLT and a couple of salads. I couldn’t see prices anywhere for the food, although their website does list them and only the breakfast is more than a fiver. I ordered a couple of sandwiches and two coffees which came to just under twenty pounds, presumably because they added VAT.
Coffees came first – a flat white and a latte – and were so hot that we left them to cool down, drinking them after our sandwiches. The flat white looked the part, with a fine foam, while the latte perhaps set lower expectations.
“I wonder if they’ve had training on how hot to get the milk” said Zoë. “At Workhouse the temperature is very carefully controlled, but here it feels like they might have heated it until it’s boiling and then poured it in.”
I agreed, and when I finally got round to sipping my latte I was prepared for the worst. But actually it was lovely: nicely balanced without the slightest scorched bitter note. I always think coffee in Reading falls into three different tiers – the top one is made up of the likes of C.U.P., Compound, Workhouse and the Grumpy Goat, the middle one is the chains that are mediocre but not terrible like Nero and Pret and then the bottom one is the awful burnt stuff you’re best off avoiding. Just to confound me, Barista & Beyond sits between that top and middle one – not as good as Compound a couple of minutes’ walk away but not miles off either. I couldn’t tell if this made me happy or relieved, but perhaps it didn’t matter.
Zoë ordered the chicken caesar wrap. It’s good that she did, because I wouldn’t have: to me, looking at it in the cabinet, the chicken seemed too thick, too uniform, too catering pack. But Zoë thought it was superb, the caesar dressing with a good thud of garlic and the whole thing really enjoyable.
She also pointed out, and she’s right, that Barista & Beyond makes wraps properly – nothing falling out of the bottom and yet no stodgy wodge of tortilla crumpled together at the bottom for you to wade through either. Many places whose wraps I enjoy don’t assemble them as carefully as Barista & Beyond. It’s also worth pointing out that your sandwich comes, standard issue, with a sizeable number of good quality ready salted crisps, and some salad: largely undressed, so not really my bag, but your mileage may vary.
I’d chosen the tuna melt and also found much to enjoy. I don’t know if Barista & Beyond buy their bread from Rise round the corner, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had. For what it’s worth, I thought it was nicer bread than the stuff I remember last time I had a Tuna Turner at Shed, robust and grill-striped with a nice thick crust. It’s not possible to talk about tuna melts in Reading, really, without the spectre of the town’s most famous version on Merchant’s Place, and if Barista & Beyond’s fell short it wouldn’t be too hard to close the gap.
The menu talks about red onion, which would have made a huge difference, but there wasn’t any in my toastie. Something was needed to give contrast and crunch, whether that was red onion, capers or, as Shed also use, jalapeños. Any of that would have made this an even better tuna melt. But was it better than one you’d get out of plastic packaging at Costa, Starbucks or Pret? Of course it bloody was, and you get a heap of ready salted crisps thrown in for good measure. To come second to the Tuna Turner, in this town, is no disgrace, and I suspect this sandwich did exactly that.
Wanting to give the place more of a runout after our sandwiches, not quite ready to leave with our coffee approaching prime sipping temperature, I went up and ordered a couple of slabs of chocolate brownie. Again, I have no idea whether they were from Rise – I’m guessing not, but if they were they weren’t Rise’s best effort. Not terrible by any means, but too much reliance on sugar and not enough on cocoa, the texture a little one note without enough contract between the brittle and the fudgy. A couple of very gratifying chunks of chocolate made the occasional bite a joyous surprise, but it needed more.
I tried eating it with a fork, but soon abandoned that – the brownie didn’t have enough give, and I could already picture it flying across that wide open space. Still, you got two generous squares for six pounds, so not unreasonable value but not reaching the heights of brownies you can pick up at the Grumpy Goat, at Workhouse or at – I’m sorry, but this is true – Prêt A Sodding Manger. I was hoping these would give Barista & Beyond a little bounce to the rating at the end, but really they confirmed the decision I’d already made. I didn’t hang about to take a picture, though, so the brownie can’t have been that bad.
I’ve been putting off talking about the service, careful of walking that tightrope I mentioned at the start of this review, but here goes: it was superb. We were served by two different members of staff, one of whom was Charlie of Barista & Beyond’s Instagram fame. And perhaps it’s not possible to shed those preconceptions, or the first impression I’d got from watching that video, but he was just excellent. Nothing was any trouble, and every time he told me I was “very welcome” or to have a lovely day I was positive that he meant every word.
You don’t always get this in hospitality, talking to someone who comes across as absolutely loving their job, feeling lucky to do it and wanting to do it as well as they can. In turn I felt quite lucky to be looked after by Charlie and it made me think, far more than I expected to. I know hospitality is underpaid and undervalued, I know that it struggles to find people since the pandemic and that awful thing that some bigots voted for in 2016.
I know, fundamentally, that the solution to that is to pay people more, which restaurants can’t do for the same reasons they can’t charge more for food, because people seem to think it’s the one part of the economy that skips along carefree while our supermarket bills go through the roof. Go figure. And I can understand why the people that do work in cafés, particularly ones that serve crap coffee and pay dud wages, might not want to bring the sunshine day in, day out. But I didn’t get any of that from Charlie, and watching the other customers filing in to get coffees and smoothies I don’t think they did either.
Comparisons, at times like this, are necessary but can sound brutal. Does Barista & Beyond do the best coffee in the area? I’m afraid not: you need Compound Coffee for that. I suspect you can get better cakes at Rise, and Barista & Beyond’s sandwiches are solid but not in the top tier of Reading’s lunch choices. Barista & Beyond is a good café, not a great one, although it has potential. But it is a great idea, not a good one, and the service and the experience will stay with me long after I’ve forgotten ninety-nine per cent of the lunches I eat this year.
You may read all this and come away wanting to give it a try, to spend your money doing some good; I have a feeling that people who read my blog, like me, might not weigh all these factors as dispassionately as others do. I imagine that if you do visit, whoever they have behind the counter at that point, you may find it gives you food for thought. And that’s something you simply can’t find just anywhere. Have I avoided sounding patronising? I really don’t know, but I honestly hope so.
The Elizabeth Line has been a game changer when it comes to eating out: I’ve used it to reach three of the last four restaurants I’ve reviewed for the blog, all of them significantly easier to get to courtesy of the Tube’s new addition. It’s no coincidence, either, that last year I reviewed three restaurants in newly resurgent Maidenhead. Plenty of interesting options have become more accessible, which makes my job (not a real job, but you catch my drift) much more fun.
The phenomenon you might not be aware of, though, is the same thing in reverse, that some people think the Elizabeth Line opens up Reading as a destination. The first time I became aware of that was an article on the Good Food Guide website last August called “Where to eat Indian food along London’s Elizabeth Line” by food writer Sejal Sukhadwala. In it, she said that the new line made it possible for food lovers to eat a panoply of different Indian dishes at restaurants from Canary Wharf to the ‘Ding: among her recommendations, at the end of the line, was our very own Madras Flavours.
Since then, it’s been on my list to review, even if the opening sentence – “It’s worth travelling to Reading specifically for this sparkling Tamil vegetarian located just past the beautiful town centre” – made me wonder whether she’d actually been to Reading.
My suspicions were further enhanced when three months later the same author published another article, this time in the FT, entitled “An Indian restaurant crawl along London’s Elizabeth Line”. Hats off to her for getting paid twice for the same idea, and clearly there were enough good restaurants en route to justify two articles, but again the bit about Reading didn’t ring true.
On that occasion, Sukhadwala recommended House Of Flavours, a solid choice. But do you recognise Reading from this description? “Walk past Reading’s beautiful Abbey Quarter, which houses a library and a medieval church, and in less than 10 minutes you’ll find an impressively varied concentration of fine Indian restaurants in and around Kings Road.”
I can be guilty of romanticising Reading, but even I found this somewhat florid. “It’s worth booking a long weekend in Reading to discover the town’s high-quality Indian restaurants”, it added. It’s welcome to see Reading praised in the national press but, really, has she ever been?
Anyway, the article worked because it got me thinking about a trip to Madras Flavours. Previously, all I’d known about the restaurant was its impressive Deliveroo sockpuppetry, when in 2021 it went by over 40 different names on delivery apps, including my favourites “Soul Chutney” and “Fatt Monk” (come to think of it, that article in the FT recommended a restaurant called Fatt Pundit: maybe they share a branding expert).
Two years on Madras Flavours has weathered the Covid storm, often looks busy – especially at weekends – and seemed ripe for a visit. So I headed there on a weekday evening with Emma, who comes to my readers’ lunches and foolishly volunteered her services. “If you ever want a vegetarian perspective on your dining experiences, I’d be happy to help” she’d said.
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Sarv’s Slice left its Reading premises in May 2025.
Now the thermometer has finally crept over twenty degrees a couple of times, now that the first al fresco pint of the year is in the recent past, now that we’ve had Cheesefeast and Eurovision my mind, like everybody’s in Reading, turns to summer. Back when we had a beer festival every May bank holiday weekend there was a clear demarcation point that said summer was on the way: the failure to hold one for the last few years has left us fending for ourselves.
But never mind – summer is on the way. And that’s got me thinking, lately, about how every summer has its own distinct identity, its own little chapter in the autobiographies we all carry around in our heads. 2016 was a bad year, all angst and anguish. 2018 was about the rush of new things and new happiness. 2020, with the long walks and the first tentative drinks outside, was the pastoral symphony (am I the only person nostalgic for 2020? I bet I’m not).
Not only that but, if you think about food anywhere near as much as I do, summers can also be defined by restaurants. During any phase of your life, the two wind up inextricably linked. For me, the summers of 2005 and 2006 were all about Santa Fe, on the riverside. At the end of the working week my then wife and I would grab a table in the window with our friends, looking out on what felt like the whole of Reading celebrating the weekend.
We would drink cocktails, so many and so frequently that they ended up giving us a silver 2 for 1 card. My drink of choice, horribly basic, was the Mudslide, with, I think, chocolate ice cream in it. It tasted devoid of booze. Eventually we would drift inside, grab a table and eat dinner. That was those two summers in a nutshell. I had only just turned 30, I was carefree, content in my job and when I think about those summers, I always think of Santa Fe.
Similarly, when I remember the summer of 2014, or 2015, it’s indelibly connected to Dolce Vita. By then those friends had become parents, or drifted away, but for me that child-free ritual of marking the end of the working week was still similar: make a beeline to Dolce Vita, order a bottle of wine and see what was on the specials menu. Order it if it looked good, have the saltimbocca or the monkfish if I didn’t fancy it. Whole months passed like this, punctuated by excellent, happy meals.
Fast forward the best part of a decade and last summer, for me, was the summer of Buon Appetito. I would meet Zoë in town after work and, unless either of us had a better idea, we would amble down the Oxford Road, comparing notes about our day. And we would end up sitting outside at Buon Appetito’s welcoming patio, a Negroni for her and an Aperol Spritz for me, and we’d luxuriate in that feeling of work being over, for the time being at least. I say “unless either of us had a better idea”, but of course the best idea of all was to have dinner at Buon Appetito. That’s the siren song a restaurant has when it becomes synonymous with your summer.
I write all that with some sadness, because something funny is going on at Buon Appetito. Their social media lies dormant, the doors shuttered, no signs of life. I’ve heard stories of people turning up, with or without bookings, to find the restaurant abandoned and unlit with no sign or announcement. And I’ve heard various rumours: some say the closure’s a temporary blip, others strongly suggest we won’t see them again. My own Instagram message to them, sent four weeks ago, remains unread.
I guess that’s what led me to the Biscuit Factory on a weekday afternoon last week, to see if Sarv’s Slice offered a viable alternative for al fresco pizza in the sunshine. Sarv’s Slice has an interesting history: Reading first encountered them at Market Place as part of Blue Collar’s weekly events, and when Blue Collar Corner opened last year Sarv’s Slice was one of its four permanent traders on a year’s contract. I think I ate their food once, with my friend Graeme, and was very taken with their carbonara special (maybe it’s heresy to do this on a pizza, but I liked it too much to care).
When their stint at Blue Collar Corner ended they didn’t rest on their laurels, and in March they announced their new home at the Biscuit Factory, where they’re in residence Wednesday to Sunday. On paper it’s a perfect match. The Biscuit Factory has wonderful coffee downstairs by Compound – and, top tip, it’s pretty much the only place in Reading to get decent coffee after 6pm – but the food offering has been a bit patchy. Something casual, the next step up from street food, would seem like the perfect option for eating before one of the Biscuit Factory’s events. And they even have some outside space: the omens were promising.
I’ve never actually been to the Biscuit Factory for any of their events – judge away, I know I should have – but I know the upstairs space from the occasional West Reading coffee. It’s a plain, anonymous space, and pretty big, but not unwelcoming for that. There was stand up comedy on the night I went, a table of people who seemed to be doing an art class, and plenty of others still on the banquette that runs along two sides of the back room, tapping away on laptops or, in one case, playing what looked like a fiercely competitive game of Uno.
I’ve never set foot in the Biscuit Factory without feeling slightly too old for it, but even so I liked it. It has what old duffers like me refer to as a “lovely energy”, and even the pale birch panelled walls felt nicely neutral rather than cheap. The outside space, where I ate my pizza, is surprisingly attractive, all yellows and burnt orange, with an oddly gorgeous view past the Penta Hotel down the Oxford Road. It reminded me of my sentimental attachment to West Reading: I always think that if you don’t like West Reading, you don’t really like Reading. I do wish it was non-smoking, though: the ashtrays at every table and people sneaking out to clang away on a fag felt jarring.
Sarv’s Slice has a small menu, which is as it should be. Just the seven pizzas without a huge amount of variation, truth be told. You can have a marinara with no cheese, or a margherita with fior di latte, or the same thing with buffalo mozzarella. You can have a pepperoni pizza, or one with both pepperoni and ‘nduja, and you can have a mushroom pizza either with olives or with ham. I admire their stripped-down approach: I could say it reduces the replay value, but I always went to Buon Appetito and ordered one of two pizzas, so I’m the last person to criticise.
Often they have squares of deeper pan Detroit-style pizza on their specials, which seem to be where their more creative side comes out, but on this visit the only special was the Napoli, with olives, capers and anchovies. I was hardly complaining: that’s pretty much my go-to pizza anywhere. Sides are limited to garlic bread – I’ve never understood the appeal of this when you’re about to eat a bread-based main course – and parmesan truffle fries. Naturally I ordered the latter, and my bill came to eighteen pounds fifty. As at Blue Collar Corner, they give you a buzzer which goes off when your food is ready.
I nabbed a table out on the terrace (terrace? balcony?) and made inroads into a beer. You have to buy these from the bar separately, but laudably they had a good local range from the likes of Double-Barrelled and Phantom. Mine was from Phantom, and not up to their usual standard, but it was a warm day and I was sitting outside so I was prepared to overlook a lot.
It was seven pounds fifty. Now that I clearly wasn’t completely prepared to overlook, as I’ve mentioned it here. Is that a lot? I suppose it would be for a pint at the Nag’s, but I’ve never understood how restaurants are allowed to treble the cost of wine but we expect to get beer for less. Who knows what too expensive even means any more, these days? Everything is too expensive, even the electricity you charged your phone with so you could read this; just think, if I was less prolix you’d literally save money.
My buzzer went off in less than ten minutes and carrying my goodies to my table it was hard not to be impressed, on first sight, by the pizza. The crust was suitably bubbled and blistered, and the whole thing had a satisfying irregularity to it. And there was much to like about it – a beautiful base, an excellent sweet tomato sauce, plenty of cheese. The whole thing held together well and was a pleasure to eat. But the devil was in the detail, and if I’m being critical – which it turns out I am – it could have done with more of its star players. The purple, fragrant olives were great but it was light on the capers and, more sadly, one quadrant was an entirely anchovy-free zone.
But none the less it was an excellent pizza, and I spent a bit of time afterwards trying to decide where it ranked in Reading’s pizza pantheon. Nicer than the likes of Franco Manca, if more expensive. Roughly the same price as Buon Appetito had been, but svelte by comparison. Easily as likeable as the pinsa at Mama’s Way, albeit a very different beast, with the advantage that the base wasn’t bought in. Overall? Right up there. More expensive than it used to be at Blue Collar Corner, but I imagine all their costs have soared in the last twelve months.
That said, my advice would be to avoid the fries. They were bought in – which is fine, only a knobber objects to that – but if you’re going to buy in, you have to buy well. This week I had an al fresco dinner at Park House and although the chips were clearly bought in, they totally hit the spot and there was nothing to dislike about them. Sarv’s Slice’s fries, on the other hand, were a tad skanky, too many grey patches and bits I wanted to leave. They’d been given enough truffle oil to smell of truffle but, somehow, not enough to carry through into the flavour.
And the Parmesan: well, I suppose technically there was a little, but almost too little to see, let alone taste. I’m used to Parmesan fries at places like the Last Crumb, where the cheese all falls to the bottom and your challenge is to actually get it on your fries. I expected to reach the bottom of the cup to find a motherlode of Parmesan, like that glorious bit of chocolate at the base of a Cornetto cone, but it wasn’t to be. Not that I finished the fries anyway. They stayed on the table, whiffing away.
The good news is that with the money you save not buying the fries – six pounds, honesty! – you can get some tiramisu instead. I ordered Sarv’s Slice’s only dessert after finishing my pizza and grabbed a second buzzer. The wait was about five minutes for this too, and worth every second. It was a gorgeous, boozy, thick indulgent slab of the stuff, for only five pounds, and it was probably my favourite thing about the whole meal. It was strange eating it with a wooden spoon – those things are synonymous with failure for a reason – but honestly, it was an utter delight. If I’d known how good it would be I’d have grabbed a coffee from Compound to enjoy with it, but instead I picked one up as I was leaving, strolling home, latte in hand.
As you’ve no doubt gathered, with the exception of those fries I found Sarv’s Slice hugely likeable and I think it has found its perfect home at the Biscuit Factory. The staff are downright lovely and very friendly, and it nicely fills a gap in Reading’s food scene, offering something like Blue Collar’s ultra-casual dining in a different setting. And if I sound like I have reservations, or faint praise, I really don’t. But it’s important to recognise Sarv’s Slice’s limitations – because they do, and they operate within them superbly.
They’re not aiming to be a full on restaurant, at this stage, but instead just offer really good food you can eat informally in a hurry. Perfect pre-theatre dining, if you’re unfortunate enough to go to the Hexagon for something, or a meal you can enjoy before watching a film at the Biscuit Factory itself. So, good for cultured types. For a heathen like me, they fit into the same bracket as, say, ThaiGrr!, as a great way to have an excellent meal before moving on for a few beers at the Nag’s Head.
Back in the day, I used to go for Tuscany for that kind of thing, and then it became Buon Appetito. Sarv’s Slice is a very good successor to those places, and you’ll eat well there. It’s not the widest menu in the world, but for what they aspire to it doesn’t need to be. What Sarv’s Slice isn’t, much as I liked it, is the place that will define my gastronomic summer. But that’s okay, because I’ll keep looking and I’ll find mine in the end. I hope you find yours, too.
Edible Reading 