I’m under strict instructions to find some new dining companions. Dragging poor Zoë out on a weekly basis to accompany me to restaurant X or Y, with all the cashflow and calorific consequences that entails, is apparently getting, in her own immortal words “too much”. The cost of living with me crisis. So I was told in no uncertain terms that this week’s review would have to be a solo mission. Make some more bloody friends, seemed to be the unspoken subtext.
Which was fine: I woke up on Sunday morning, feeling a mite jaded after a day spent introducing friends – relatively new ones, as it happens – to the delights of Reading, to Double Barrelled and the Grumpy Goat, to our brilliant beer scene and the equally brilliant number 17 bus. You forget how great this town can be, and it’s always a tonic to see it in the eyes of somebody else, even if that does involve going all the way down the Oxford Road to an industrial estate near a big branch of Screwfix. Whatever: I slouched out of the house, a couple of paracetamol freshly gulped down, badly in need of brunch.
Nothing quite hits the spot like a full English when you’re hanging out of your arse, and I had Richfields, at the end of the Caversham Road, in my sights. I’d been there just over five years ago with a then friend of mine who used to accompany me on reviews, Costanza to my Seinfeld, and we’d both had lunch dishes, even though it was more of a breakfast place. “I’ll make an effort to go back there for brunch next year” I said, but next year came and I didn’t. Ditto for the year after, and then of course the world changed entirely. But I’d always felt I ought to give them another try, that my review was getting out of date, and a slightly hung over solo brunch date with myself presented a perfect opportunity.
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San Sicario closed in August 2023. i’ve left the review up for posterity.
“What was this place before it was Cozze?” said Zoe as we flipped through the menus at San Sicario, the newish Italian restaurant at the bottom of the Caversham Road which has replaced Cozze’s central Reading branch.
“How long have you got? Before Cozze it was a Mexican restaurant called Maracas. And before that it was another Italian place called Casa Roma. Casa Roma and Maracas were owned by the same people…”
“…and they changed it to Maracas because they could use all the letters from their old sign? You’ve told me that story before.”
I smiled, although I did wonder if it was a good thing to have reached the you’ve told me that story before stage in our relationship.
“Yes, and before that it was a Lebanese restaurant called El Tarboush. That wasn’t bad actually – this would have been around 2009. Before that it was a place called La Fontana, but they moved out to Twyford.”
“Another Italian?”
“More generic Mediterranean, really. And before that it was a restaurant called Chi’s Oriental Brasserie. Now that was a restaurant! It was run by a chap called Wayne Wong from Cardiff, of all places. I still remember their XO chilli prawns. They ended up moving to the spot where Buon Appetito is now. I did karaoke there once, would you believe.”
Suddenly I had memories of nights in that restaurant over twenty years ago. At the time, I was going out with a woman who took great pride in stealing a six inch, brushed steel soap dispenser from Chi’s Oriental Brasserie’s ladies’ toilets: it was, with hindsight, one of many indicators that we wanted different things out of life.
“It keeps defaulting to Italian, I suppose.”
“Sort of. I guess Italian is a go-to option in this country – it tends to be mid-priced, it’s easy to do multiple pizzas and pasta dishes. Even now we still tend as a nation to have Italian out and Chinese or Indian food for a takeaway.”
That doesn’t tell the whole story, though, because before this place was San Sicario it was San Carlo – same location, same owners, but a name they had to cease and desist from using barely a month after they opened last November because of a large national chain of Italian restaurants called San Carlo.
I felt for San Sicario when I heard that – a far from auspicious start in a site where, if history was anything to go by, the owners would need every lucky break they could get. That’s when I made a mental note to pay San Sicario a visit sooner, rather than later.
“It’s got to be better than Cozze, anyway.”
Zoe was right about that – Cozze, San Sicario’s predecessor, had been terrible. I still remembered my meal there, eating carbonara paler than Cate Blanchett. It was a mystery how they’d ever expanded to three branches.
The interior of San Sicario was especially jarring: the glassware might have been different – and rather fancy – but the furniture, the banquettes, the exposed brick-effect wallpaper and the faux Kandinsky wall art had all been inherited from Cozze. Literally inherited: they’d lightened up some of the colour scheme, but it was fundamentally exactly the same.
It was a big room, and the owners hadn’t really done anything to break it up into zones or to soften the noise – a room which really had to be full not to look a bit strange, although full it would have been deafening. On a Saturday lunchtime it was far from packed, with about three other tables occupied. Another three or so groups came for lunch after we sat down.
The first sign that this was a very different beast from Cozze came when I paid attention to the menu. I was never sure just how Italian a restaurant could be when it did chicken wings and burgers, but San Sicario’s menu left you in no doubt that it was a Proper Italian Restaurant. The menu was big – possibly too big – but it didn’t feel like it was chasing customers from Prezzo or Zizzi; the chef has cooked at Pepe Sale, and that felt far more the ballpark here.
That doesn’t mean that San Sicario didn’t sell pasta and pizza – far from it, they did – but the pasta was an interesting range of sauces and shapes rather than a boilerplate way of flogging the two in an almost infinite number of combinations (just typing this reminds me, by the way, how little I miss Wolf Italian Street Food). But there was also a reasonably priced set lunch menu, which they even offered on Saturdays, a specials menu with five additional dishes on it and a Valentine’s Day menu, which I assume they hadn’t got round to removing yet.
The main thing I thought, looking at the menu, was that these were classic dishes and combinations, and that if the restaurant could pull them off it would be the kind of restaurant Reading hasn’t had for some time. I know many people miss Dolce Vita, and others miss what Pepe Sale used to be before the original owners sold up. Some, for that matter, still talk about Nino’s. But really, I’m not sure Reading has had a truly classic Italian restaurant since Topo Gigio closed.
Our first dishes came as we were making inroads into a couple of very servicable drinks – a powerful negroni for her, a G&T made with fragrant Italian gin for me – and they made for an excellent start. According to the restaurant’s social media they make their own bread and focaccia every day, and they were both pretty decent, especially the focaccia which came sliced into little cubes, perfect for dipping in oil and balsamic vinegar, just enough salt scattered on the crust. We saved the bread for mopping, showing uncharacteristic foresight.
I picked the best of the starters, which is something I don’t get to say often enough. White crab meat came heaped onto what could have been crème fraîche or mascarpone, the whole thing sitting on a potato rosti. Simple, elegant, pristine flavours, and if the advertised watercress was nowhere to be seen I was hardly complaining, as it would have thrown the whole thing out of kilter.
It wasn’t perfect – the rosti could have done with more lightness and crispness, and felt more like a latke, and I had a few bits of shell in the crab – but none of that detracted from just how delightful it was. And could I think of anywhere else in Reading where this dish would end up on the menu? Not really.
That was one of the specials, as was Zoë’s starter. Calamarata, a shape of pasta I’ve never had before, are short thick rings of pasta thought to resemble calamari (they were obviously named by somebody who’d never eaten a packet of Hula Hoops, that’s all I’m saying). They were paired up with a tantalising-sounding ragu made with beef, lamb, pork and veal. Four different animals on one plate: just imagine!
For what it’s worth, I enjoyed this dish more than Zoë did – just as well because, as a generous-sized starter, I got to finish it. The sauce hugged the pasta better than I was expecting and I quite liked the ragu which was studded with tender meat. But I agreed with Zoë that the ragu was a little unbalanced – it was underseasoned, which meant the sharpness of the tomato was more prominent than it should have been. A carpet of parmesan couldn’t save it, although maybe it would have done if it had been a lot thicker.
A final starter sounded so good, and looked so good online, that we were greedy and ordered it to share. A pile of wild mushrooms – accurately described for once – was sticky and reduced, topped with a crispy breadcrumbed egg. The egg was cooked just right, with only a little over-wobbly egg white, and when cut open the yolk worked its magic spreading across the mushrooms, an edible sunrise.
Again, it was a dish so close to superb but not quite there – I wanted more savoury depth in the mushrooms, and that was missing. I didn’t mind that it was on the small side, and I didn’t mind that it was a tiny bit pricey (it was just under a tenner), but I did mind that. If the flavour had been spot on, none of that would have mattered in the slightest.
All that said, main courses were pretty good. Zoë’s lamb rump was expertly cooked, far better than at, say, London Street Brasserie, and four really generous slices of it were fanned out on top of a very creditable caponata with plenty of black olives, the whole thing bathed in jus. The salsa verde was denser than Owen Jones, but considerably more appetising (and like Owen Jones, a little went a very long way). This dish wasn’t cheap at just over twenty-five quid, but I thought it was probably about its money. Again, Zoë found it a smidge underseasoned. She might have been right.
Saltimbocca has always been one of my favourite dishes, and since Dolce Vita closed nearly five years ago I’ve never found one that came close. San Sicario’s, I’m pleased to say, did – three pieces of veal, topped with prosciutto and luxuriating in butter and sage is one of the loveliest, simplest plates of food you can eat. Again, I feel a bit like I’m kicking a puppy saying this but it needed more – more butter, more sage, more seasoning, more oomph. The courgettes it was served with were pleasant enough, and certainly not cooked to mulch, but they felt like a bit of a plod without plenty of that butter to trawl them through. In my mind I was hoping for courgette fritti, but it wasn’t to be.
We did, however, make an excellent choice of side. Potatoes were wonderfully bronzed cylinders, all crinkled edges that spoke of a far healthier relationship with fat than I’ve ever managed. They were more fondant potato than roast potato, and all the better for it. Three pounds fifty, too, which is ludicrous value. “This is a lot better than that medley of veg you get at Pepe Sale” said Zoë. I couldn’t agree more.
By this point the restaurant was as full as it was going to get at lunchtime, and it was interesting how that exposed some problems with the service and the space. We eventually ordered some wine – a glass of barbera for Zoë and a sauvignon blanc for me – after we finished our starters. Both were lovely, but by the time they’d arrived our mains were in front of us. We hadn’t specified what size we wanted, he hadn’t asked and he brought us large glasses, which isn’t really what we wanted.
We didn’t make anything of it, it wasn’t a biggie, but there were a few niggles like that. The waiter was absolutely lovely, and quite up front about his limited English – still, of course, infinitely better than my Italian – but there was just the one of him and he did seem to struggle a little with half a dozen tables demanding his attention. And the room was so big, and the tables were so spaced out, that it could be difficult to grab him when you needed him.
I would say desserts are San Sicario’s weak point. The menu sensibly only has half a dozen, but they don’t bowl you over. Having ordered tiramisu at practically every Italian restaurant I’ve reviewed since 2019 we gave it a miss this time, although it turned up at a neighbouring table and looked good. Zoë chose a cheesecake, and enjoyed it without ever going into raptures. It was billed as a vanilla lemon cheesecake with berry compote – talk about covering your bases – but actually it was a slab without compote and with a layer of fruit jelly on top. I didn’t try it, but tellingly I didn’t especially want to.
I’d picked an affogato, prompted by fond memories of the one Tamp Culture used to do back in the day. It was entry level – two scoops of vanilla ice cream that could have been Walls, a jug of burnt-tasting espresso and, allegedly, some amaretto. It looked like the ice cream might have had a few molecules of the stuff splashed over it, but not enough to taste of it. When a dessert is this simple, every aspect of it should be good. With this one, none of it really was.
Our bill for all that food, a couple of drinks each and a post-prandial espresso came to one hundred and thirty pounds, not including tip, and took a fair old while to conjure up. I actually think quite a lot of what we had was pretty decent value, and it’s also worth pointing out that for the time being the restaurant is offering 20% off food Tuesday to Thursday via their Facebook page. After we settled up we went to Phantom for a drink, and it was hosting some kind of punk pop festival which made me feel ancient – I’m old enough to remember Basket Case the first time round – so we hopped into a taxi, went to Double Barrelled and had a very pleasant couple of hours working our way through the pales on offer. A perfect Reading Saturday.
If it’s brave to open a restaurant in the winter of 2022, knowing everything we know, it’s especially brave to open the kind of restaurant San Sicario is. I think the lower end of the market, your Franco Mancas and Zizzis, are possibly better protected from the economic shocks of the moment than somewhere unapologetically upmarket like San Sicario. And that’s before you factor in that their site is enormous. That their site is in a location that’s not in town or in Caversham, with limited parking. That it’s a site that has proved to be a poisoned chalice for so many restaurants. Then consider all the faff and palaver of revealing your name in November and having to change it literally on the 3rd of January – talk about New Year, new you – and San Sicario starts to look positively heroic.
And yet I really hope they make a go of it. It’s truly encouraging to see somewhere trying to offer what Reading doesn’t have – a genuine, interesting, high-end Italian that doesn’t just pile up the pizza and pasta, lazy variations on a theme, and try to take easy money. Some of the dishes I had I simply wouldn’t have been able to get elsewhere in Reading, and the fundamentals of the restaurant are solid. They need to tighten up the service a little, and I’d like them to be a little more liberal with the seasoning, but in honesty there’s nothing wrong with San Sicario that a few more customers wouldn’t solve.
Restaurants run better busier, and if I’d been there on a Saturday night, all buzz and bustle, I suspect it could have been fun enough to quite make me forget the glory days of Chi’s Oriental Brasserie. I will be back, and I sincerely hope San Sicario breaks the duck of one of Reading’s unluckiest sites. After all across town, in an equally ill-starred space, their compatriots Madoo have proved that it can be done.
The Grumpy Goat closed in October 2023. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
As I will probably say many times more before the year is out – apologies in advance for that – my blog celebrates its tenth birthday this year. August 2023 will mark a full decade since this website was registered and the first blog post went up, promising weekly independent reviews of Reading restaurants. I’m still trying to decide whether to do anything to mark the occasion, although I’m well aware that it’s far more meaningful to me than it probably is to any of you.
In most respects, 2013 was a year much like any other in Reading’s restaurant scene. Many of the establishments that opened that year have long since gone the way of the dodo – Kyklos, La Courbe and the Lobster Room, for instance, are now mere footnotes. And the landscape has changed significantly since those pre-Brexit days; some of the town’s institutions, like Mya Lacarte and the Reading Post, indelibly part of the fabric of the town back then, have since been consigned to the history books.
But my blog is not the only survivor of that year. Lincoln Coffee continues to trade on Kings Road and will celebrate a decade in December. A few minutes closer into town, House Of Flavours also hits the ten year mark this year. As does Five Guys: remember how excited everybody was about Five Guys, back in the day? And last but very much not least we have the Grumpy Goat, the subject of this week’s review.
Not that I would describe the Grumpy Goat as a survivor, because that doesn’t remotely do it justice. It has thrived over the last ten years, taking a chance on its little site in Harris Arcade well ahead of the growing interest in craft beer. Back then, two of its best selling breweries were Bingham’s and West Berkshire: neither is still going today. You have to remember that Grumpy Goat opened pre-Double-Barrelled, pre-Phantom, pre-Elusive Brewing, the year after Wild Weather started; Reading’s beer scene was in its infancy, to put it lightly.
Many years later the Grumpy Goat is one of the main players in a craft beer renaissance in Reading, plugged into all our local breweries, stocking fascinating stuff from further afield and running the hugely successful Craft Theory festival at South Street showcasing beers from Berkshire and beyond. In April, in collaboration with Blue Collar, it is bringing Cheese Feast back to Forbury Gardens for the first time since the pandemic.
It’s not just that, though. The Grumpy Goat outgrew its initial premises and in a bold step, and a boldly timed one at that, it moved across town to Smelly Alley in November 2020. You remember the winter of 2020, right? When Christmas was cancelled with about a week’s notice and we didn’t know what tier we were in? A brave time to open a much bigger shop, and no mistake.
Yet the Grumpy Goat got through that, and the following summer they started serving toasted sandwiches. They were everywhere on social media, it seemed – I saw photo after photo of golden crusts and oozing middles, all of which made me peckish. But they only had seating at a couple of barrels at that point, and for one reason or another I never got round to reviewing them.
And then the final piece of the jigsaw came last August, when the Grumpy Goat opened its long-promised upstairs bar, open daytimes and evenings, with plenty of seating and eight beers on draft. Shamefully I didn’t manage to visit it last year, but it was always high on my priority list for this one, so Zoë and I made a beeline there on Saturday to see how its toasties ranked in the pantheon of Great Reading Toasties, amid the likes of Shed and Madoo.
First things first, I love what they’ve done with the space. Whoever designed it has a terrific eye and it has a simple, sophisticated colour palette: gorgeous racing green panelling, crisp white tiles and dusky pink walls. It’s broken up into zones and split level – the big tables nearest the window have tasteful banquettes and the lower level, nearer the bar, is a mixture of high and low tables. When I saw pictures I wasn’t sure it would be a place to linger, but in the flesh it truly is. What’s more, it’s emphatically grown-up and really nicely done.
During the day, the menu mainly revolves around toasted sandwiches and a handful of cheese and charcuterie boards. They stop serving toasties at 4, and from 6 they add a handful of small plates to the options. All of this, again, seems well thought out and the choice is reassuringly compact. In the evening the items on the menu don’t feel like the main event – they’re something to have with beer – whereas at lunchtime it’s all about those toasties. It’s worth adding that for both the toasties and the cheeseboard, vegan options are available.
Prices, for the town centre, are slightly higher than average so a toastie will cost you between eight pounds and eight fifty, the boards are between ten and twelve. Bread and pastries are from Rise, and coffee is by Anonymous so the Grumpy Goat has done a bang-up job of teaming up with local independents.
Let’s start with the coffee, because it was revelatory. Anonymous not only provided the coffee but also trained the staff, and the end result was a latte which was right up there with any you can get in central Reading – glossy, beautifully made and wonderfully balanced. I don’t know whether the Grumpy Goat would necessarily want people using its upstairs as a cafe, but the coffee is worth a trip in its own right.
And credit to them for fully embracing Anonymous’ coffee – unlike, say, Café Yolk who started out using them before switching to the inferior Kingdom Coffee, no doubt for financial reasons. Speaking of financial reasons, the coffee was a little more expensive than at the likes of Workhouse but, for me, it was worth every penny.
On to the toasties, then. The menu lists five, one of them vegan, and there was a monthly special on too, although we didn’t try it. Zoë had earmarked The Blue, made with stilton, walnuts, apple and honey, before we even crossed the threshold and that probably tells you quite enough about it. I wasn’t offered a single bite, but the vocal enthusiasm it was greeted with was enough encouragement to order it next time, although I can take or leave walnuts. Similarly, if blue cheese isn’t for you I imagine you’ll give this a wide berth. All I can tell you is that it looked pretty good from where I was sitting.
I’d chosen The Classic, because I thought it was as good a place to begin as any. This was all about simplicity, so there were just the two ingredients – toasted Winchester cheese (one of my favourite hard cheeses) and candied jalapeños from the Preservation Society. The Grumpy Goat sells the latter, incidentally, by the jar and I highly recommend taking some home as, in my experience, they pep up pretty much everything.
It has to be said that the Grumpy Goat believe in doing a limited number of things extremely well, and if more restaurants and cafés adopted this approach the world would be an infinitely better place. So it was impossible to fault the toastie – perfectly done, burnished on the outside and a molten mess in the middle. Not for them the lukewarm centre or the schoolboy error of sticking a napkin underneath it.
In a way, it has to be perfect because it’s so visually unprepossessing – and although the bread is local sourdough it somehow looks a little unspecial, which is a pity. But the flavours were knockout; I might have liked more candied jalapeños, but I can eat the bastard things out of a jar, so my view on this is probably not to be trusted. Was it worth eight pounds? That’s a tricky one. Who knows what’s worth anything any more? Personally, I was more than happy to pay eight pounds for it.
And in that Reading toastie hall of fame, it definitely earns a spot on the podium. The best cheese toasties I’ve ever had were from a pair of sisters who used to knock them up at Blue Collar’s events under the catchy name of Gourmet Cheese Toasties. This was pretty close – perhaps not quite as big, rugged and hefty but still a deeply, deeply enjoyable lunch. I wasn’t sure about the celery with it: it made me wish for some pickled celery, really, to add a little sharpness, but the toastie was fantastic none the less.
We’d saved room for dessert so we had a couple of chocolate brownies, also made by Rise with the genius addition of a little of Siren Craft’s award winning Broken Dream breakfast stout. If I’ve had a better brownie in Reading, I honestly can’t remember it – this was a generous, fudgy, indulgent slab of sublimity with just the faintest whisper of coffee from the beer. Yours for three pounds thirty, and a steal at that price.
All told, our coffee, toasties and brownies came to just over thirty quid. In terms of Reading’s indies, that price probably puts it in the same bracket as Shed and Picnic, with better coffee than both and better value than the latter. Service was extremely good, very likeable and largely from owners Anne-Marie, who was working behind the bar, and Charlie who was behind the counter downstairs.
I did also try some of the beers, so for completeness’ sake I should mention that too. I loved the fact that everything was available in thirds or two-thirds – no big bloating pints here – and that there’s always an alcohol free option on the wall. I tried Elusive’s Brave Noise, which was a little too harshly piney for my liking, and a beautiful sessionable pale from Herefordshire’s Odyssey, a microbrewery I’d never heard of, before finishing off with a third of Good King Henry, a stunning imperial stout which set off that brownie perfectly.
Imperial stouts in particular always amaze me – that you can get a third of a pint of something so carefully and superbly made for less than the cost of a glass of crappy wine in most pubs. That said, the Grumpy Goat looks to have an excellent selection of wine too (although most of it by the bottle only) and if you want a beer from downstairs there’s a modest surcharge to drink it in. We were pretty much the first customers at noon and by the time we reluctantly headed back out onto Smelly Alley, a couple of hours later, every table was occupied and buzzing. Nearly every one had taken delivery of multiple cheese toasties.
I suspect many of you have already been to the Grumpy Goat, and so your reaction to this review might be a combination of what took you so long? and didn’t I say it was great? If so, well done: you win. Even so I was delighted to love the place as much as I did. If this was the end goal – and given the Grumpy Goat’s ambitions so far you wouldn’t bet that it is – it’s the culmination of ten skilful, patient years.
They’ve spent that time building a customer base and a huge amount of loyalty, experimenting, branching out, finding producers and partners, innovating through lockdown, expanding despite the dismal headwinds and finally, not a moment too soon, creating a beautiful space slap bang in the centre of town that isn’t a pub, isn’t a bar, isn’t a shop and isn’t a café. Why limit yourself, when you can do all four things so well at the same time?
So hats off to the Grumpy Goat for what really is an impressive achievement: it’s hard not to argue that the Grumpy Goat is easily the most significant thing that happened to Reading’s food scene back in 2013. As a fellow survivor of that year, I have to hand it to them.
The Grumpy Goat – 8.3 7 Union Street, RG1 1EU 0118 9581765
Of all my features on the blog, the one about solo dining is one of the oldest and, as a result, the most out of date. The first edition was written in 2015 and, back then, I ate on my own out of necessity rather than choice; I make a reasonable case for the joys of dining alone, but looking back I’m not entirely sure my heart was in it. And if you want an idea of how much that piece has dated, the mentions of I Love Paella, Dolce Vita and Tasting House very much root it in the distant past. As possibly does the fact that I mentioned Yo! Sushi as one of my choices – I still have a soft spot for sitting up at the belt but, the last time I went there, there was next to nothing on it.
By contrast, my 2018 feature on eating alone is much more enthusiastic about the experience, with the slightly irritating fervour of someone who’s just come back from a gap year. If you’re single, for instance, and eat alone in restaurants frequently I can see you might find the solo tourism of that piece somewhat grating. Look at all the fun I’ve had living like you in Oxford and Paris! it seems to say. I mean, I did have fun, but I was on holiday. And nearly anyone can enjoy eating in restaurants on holiday.
The other thing that dates the second edition of my solo dining recommendations is the preponderance of chains in it. Four of my six choices were chains, and in the piece I talked about how solo dining suited the rise of what I called the Good Chain – the smaller, smarter chains making their way to Reading. I said that it was a shame that independent restaurants hadn’t quite perfected the art of welcoming solo diners.
Well, five years have passed and either I was wrong, or things have changed or my priorities have. Arguably it’s a mixture of all three, but when I look at Reading now it’s much easier to recommend a plethora of independents across all styles, types and price points. That makes me very happy indeed, because you can pop into a Côte or a Franco Manca anyplace, whereas most of the names on this list are significantly more exclusive.
That in its own would be a good enough reason to refresh this list, but I do find that my relationship with solo dining has reached a happy medium at long last – it’s not a torture where you have to fake it til you make it, but neither is it something you have to profess to love in a manner that screams of overcompensation.
I’ve had some lovely solo lunches and dinners at many of the places on this list: having a partner who works weekends and doesn’t always want to join me for reviews means that eating on my own is a bigger part of my life than it used to be. And actually, reviewing places solo or having a leisurely Saturday lunch with a book has become a welcome part of my balanced diet of restaurant experiences. So that’s another reason this piece is probably long overdue.
The perfect place for solo dining has to meet a number of different criteria, I think, and they’re not the same ones by which we judge all restaurants and cafés. It helps if the room is comfortable, not clinical (that, for instance, rules out the otherwise excellent ThaiGrr! for me). The food needs to lend itself to eating alone – so either a limited choice menu where you won’t get FOMO or small plates where you can treat yourself to several without having to share. That, for instance, is why Kungfu Kitchen isn’t on this list: it’s a wonderful place but having to limit yourself to a single dish there is something akin to torture.
Also, and this might just be me, I like my solo dining spots to have some people watching potential. Not so much, necessarily, that I’m drawn in – I don’t mean “talk to the neighbouring table” stuff, but I like to feel like I’m part of something a little bigger than me.
And finally, there’s the service. Service has to be one of two things – either properly welcoming and celebratory of the solo diner, as many of the best places are, or (and this is nearly as good) completely indifferent. I mean places that don’t care whether there are one or four or fifteen of you, but where you won’t get the look of pity every five minutes like they’re waiting for your imaginary friend to vacate the seat opposite you and a real one to take their place.
Not too much to ask, is it? Fortunately, I can think of ten places that achieve most, if not all of those criteria. And, although this rather goes without saying, they all do gorgeous food as well. Let’s get started.
1. Buon Appetito
Buon Appetito closed in April 2023. Mama’s Way makes an excellent alternative.
Pizza is one of the most FOMO-proof things you can eat: how envious can you really get that someone at your table is having roughly the same thing as you, just with a different permutation of toppings? That makes it perfect for solo dining, and as I’ve said before on numerous occasions Buon Appetito’s is arguably the finest in town, with one of Reading’s best outside spaces.
But the other thing that makes Buon Appetito ideal for solo dining, aside from the wonderful (heated) terrace, or that leopard-spotted crust, is the service: always warm and genuine, however big or small your party is. A pizza, a spritz, some people-watching and that welcome: could you ask for more?
I loved Cairo Café when I went there on duty last year, and I always felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t made it back for a return visit. And then the weekend before Christmas, I went there for a solo lunch. Town was packed, and Gail’s and Pret were both rammed. Off the beaten track, at the less fashionable end, Cairo Café was sleepy and quiet.
I had their formidable chicken shawarma wrap and some very good falafel and houmous, and enjoyed a meditative meal where I felt quite transported from the bustle, the last minute-shopping, all the ways that Reading can be a bit much sometimes. Cairo Café did that precious thing for me, and fed me well, and my New Year’s wish for them is that they find themselves busier in 2023.
The standard disclaimer at this point: Geo Café’s owners Keti and Zezva, almost uniquely among Reading’s hospitality scene, are friends of mine and I always say this when mentioning the place. But if you go there for brunch or lunch you soon realise that Keti is everybody’s friend, and that makes eating there feel like being at the epicentre of a little community. That’s heartwarming, interesting and affords enormous people-watching potential. I love sitting out in their Orangery, hearing all sorts of very Caversham conversations, but the buzz and bustle of the inside is marvellous (even if I always feel guilty for taking up a table for two all by myself).
The food at Geo Café – never rushed, always beautifully done – makes it one of my favourite places to lunch. God knows I’ve talked about their ajika chicken wrap more times than I can count but their brunches – scrambled Beechwood Farm eggs on sourdough with crispy bacon and, if you ask nicely, a smidge of green ajika – are also truly best in class. Get there early before they’ve run out of Zezva’s pastries – the pistachio croissant is good, the chocolate roll even better. They also do one of Reading’s best coffees, something for which they don’t get anywhere near enough credit.
The great survivor on this list, Honest remains the chain most Reading folk are prepared to make an exception for. To me, it remains an exceptionally reliable town centre spot for a solo lunch or dinner, especially after work or en route to the pub. They have a decent selection of beers, their core range of burgers is solid and has been bolstered by the addition of a decent fried chicken option, and every now and again one of their monthly specials is a belter.
I know some people moan about the service but I’ve never found it less than excellent, although I don’t tend to go during peak times. And as a space, it’s hard to beat one of the booths at the front, looking out the window or into the restaurant at what remains one of Reading’s most sensitively restored buildings. Reading may have better burgers, but the centre doesn’t have many better restaurants for singleton diners.
Kokoro would seem to be the exception to many of the criteria I laid out at the start of this piece. The inside is a little clinical, you could argue. The people-watching potential, unless you really enjoy gazing upon a steady stream of Deliveroo drivers, is limited. And all of that’s true – when it’s warm and you can sit outside on Queen Victoria Street, Kokoro is a much better prospect.
But Kokoro still makes my list for one dish and one dish alone, their sweet chilli chicken. You get a decent sized tub of it with rice for around a tenner and on its day it is the perfect pre-pub dinner for one. It is also, and I have a horrible feeling I’ve said this before, the perfect hungover Sunday lunchtime kill or cure option. It hasn’t failed me yet.
The team behind the Lyndhurst left in May 2024, and the new management does not offer the lunch menu covered below.
It wouldn’t be a piece of mine without a plug for the Lyndhurst sneaking in, you might say, and you’d have a point. But hear me out, because the Lyndhurst is an absolutely fantastic place for a solo meal. At weekend lunchtimes nabbing a table and having their steak frites with a glass of red and a good book is an experience not to be missed (not that I always have the restraint to skip a starter – this is the Lyndhurst, after all). But their new venture is even more tempting – a weekday lunch menu which effectively gives you a choice of four plats du jour, any of them with a soft drink or a coffee, all for a tenner.
This has to be one the best value offerings anywhere in town, and since they launched it I’ve been a practically weekly visitor. And yes, that means you can get the above jaw-dropping pork schnitzel, resting on beautiful potatoes in a caper butter sauce, and a very serviceable latte, for ten pounds. Pay up front and you can have the whole thing done and dusted – just about – in time to be back at work before your lunch hour is up. They’d deserve a place on this list for that menu alone: that it’s actually the cherry on top tells you everything you need to know.
I went on about Madoo a lot last year, and it seems repetitive to rehash it all here. But for the uninitiated, Reading’s Italian cafe is one of my favourite places for a solo lunch. You can pick your choice of carb and filling, or have one of the readymade sandwiches behind the counter, and it’s very hard to go wrong once they’re toasted to perfection and brought to your table. Make sure you save room for the cannoli, while you’re at it, because they’re unmissable: they even do miniature ones, if you want to pretend to be virtuous.
Possibly my favourite thing about Madoo, more even than the food, is that real sense of community you get there, from the Europop to the amount of Italian spoken at neighbouring tables, not to mention all the gesticulation and lust for life. The thought that people go to Costa instead of this place is enough to kill your buzz completely. Madoo is worth a visit just to experience that little enclave – on Via Del Duca, would you believe – in the heart of Reading.
Bar food is a particular sub-genre of solo dining that I especially love: sitting at a table, nursing a cold beer, eating something casual and watching the world around you (or even, believe it or not, the football) is one of life’s pleasures. And I particularly enjoyed doing that last year at Monkey Lounge, one of the real surprise packages of my 2022. The burger is far better than I expected it to be, the atmosphere is convivial and just the right side of disreputable, the beer is very cold (if somewhat lacking in variety) and the chicken wings, tossed in their own buffalo sauce and face-meltingly spiky, are worth the price of admission alone.
It actually makes me wish I liked sport more – no mean feat – or, failing that, that my sports-loving friends lived in the neighbourhood. Next time I have an evening on my tod and nowhere to review, I’m off down the Erleigh Road.
Sapana Home made my last iteration of this list, with a big old sentimental blurb about what a pivotal role it had played in my life during my divorce, dating and gradual rehabilitation into polite society (a process many might argue remains a work in progress). But then I didn’t go there for many months because of the pandemic, never ordered their stuff through Deliveroo and almost, shamefully, forgot about the place. Going back for a quick dinner late last year I was reminded how much I loved it.
The momo – pan-fried, for me – are a must-order, the rest of the stuff is fine if you want more food but as a solo diner, a plate of their momo and a mango lassi, the radio on in the background and the kindly staff fussing about all around you makes for as wonderful a meal as it has at any time in the last ten years. Did you realise Sapana Home has been going for over a decade? Me neither.
The only drawback of going to Tasty Greek Souvlaki on your own is that you can’t order the mixed grill and have to slum it with a plate of gyros, or souvlaki or what have you. But in all other respects it is the perfect spot for the solo diner. The tables for two are much more manageable as a solo diner, the food is wonderful, the service is superb and if you’re sitting out the front on a clement evening you get to see what feels like the whole of Reading wandering past.
When summer is on the way it will come into its own even more, if that’s possible: when you order a bottle of Fix they bring a frosted glass with it, and suddenly Greece doesn’t feel so many hundreds of miles away.
The reason behind this week’s review is simple: I got a tip-off. About chicken livers.
It came off the back of the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants I ran on Twitter just after Christmas – congratulations to Kungfu Kitchen for winning the title, by the way – when I received a message from a reader. She and her partner had been debating the merits of the various competitors, and they’d agreed that in their considered opinion the closest rival to surprise package Tasty Greek Souvlaki was not Bakery House but in fact Lebanese Village on Caversham Bridge. It served some of the best Lebanese food she’d ever eaten, she said, and their chicken livers were second to none.
It was appropriate, too, because I never liked chicken livers before I tried Lebanese food. Actually, it would be closer to the truth to say that I didn’t know I liked them until then. But the first time I had them, at Bakery House, experienced that contrast of caramelisation and silkiness unlike anything else, with sweet, sticky fried onions and a whisper of pomegranate molasses, I was hooked. And that was just the start of it – then I tried the chicken livers at Clay’s, dark and delicious, dusted with an intriguing spice mix including, of all things, dried mango and I became even more of a convert.
Then there were the happy occasions when the Lyndhurst served them – simply, on sourdough toast with a bright pesto. By then chicken livers were well and truly one of my favourite things, so the idea that somewhere in Reading served a reference version I’d yet to try was an aberration I needed to remedy, as soon as possible. So on what felt like the coldest night of the year so far, Zoë and I schlepped off to Caversham Bridge, stopping only for a fortifying beer at the warm, welcoming, wintry Greyfriar.
I’ve written about Reading’s history with Lebanese restaurants before, so I risk rehashing all that here. But in the early days, back in 2015, we had two and they were about as different as could be. La Courbe was a grown-up restaurant with sharp furniture, square plates, fancy glasses and an extensive list of Lebanese wines (true story, on my second or third visit there the English waitress, when clearing our glasses away, said “it’s not bad is it, the Lesbianese wine?”: bless her). And then came Bakery House, closer to the kind of thing you’d see on the Edgware Road, more informal, more casual, with no alcohol licence.
Bakery House won the war. It’s still going today, and has proved the more influential blueprint for Lebanese food in Reading: Palmyra and the not-too-sadly departed Alona are very much in that mould. La Courbe lasted a couple of years, though whether that’s because of their business acumen or the fact that they had John Sykes as a landlord we’ll never know. The owner moved on to run a Lebanese night at a café in Pangbourne for a little while, and then disappeared without trace. But I hope history is a kinder to La Courbe, because their food was absolutely terrific. Their skewers of lamb and chicken, their lamb koftas were, in truth, a level above anything that came off the grill at Bakery House, wonderful though Bakery House is. I still remember their taboulleh.
Looking at the menu at Lebanese Village in the run-up to my visit I wondered which kind of restaurant it would turn out to be. It sold alcohol – two Lebanese beers and a decent selection of Lebanese wine, including a couple I’d tried at La Courbe. The menu was more limited than Bakery House’s and potentially less casual, with no shawarma, no boneless baby chicken, fewer mezze. And I’d heard good things about Lebanese Village from a few people, so was it going to be the spiritual successor to La Courbe?
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