Café review: Minas Café

On December 1, 2023June 5, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

In late 2025 Minas Café changed hands and although the new owners haven’t changed the shop front yet the business is now called MJ Butequim. I have marked this venue as closed and will review MJ Butequim in due course.

I think it was Kierkegaard who said, very wisely, that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forward. And I think you could say the same about food trends: it’s easy to pontificate at the start of the year about what you think is going to happen, but the world of food is full of surprises and it’s far better to bide your time, get to the point where the New Year is around the corner and identify the patterns with the benefit of hindsight.

It doesn’t take much to form a food trend in Reading either, even if it is the U.K.’s largest town: two similar establishments opening in a year is a coincidence, three is a trend. So last year Reading had two main trends, I would say. The first was biryani places springing up all over the shop – Biryani Mama, Biryani Lounge, Biryani Boyzz and so on. Add in the ambiguously-named Biryanish and you definitely have yourself what passes for a trend. And of course there was the proliferation of sushi places – Intoku, Iro and You Me Sushi all opened in quick succession to challenge the primacy of Sushimania, Yo Sushi and grab and go chains like Kokoro and Itsu.

What about this year? Marugame Udon and Cici Noodle Bar opened weeks apart, but I’m not sure that’s quite enough. For me the biggest trend of the year has been a raft of interesting cafés, moving beyond the ubiquity of third-wave places like Compound or C.U.P. to offer something less generic and more regionally specific, potentially the antidote to all those “not another coffee place” bores out there (where will they go now Berkshire Live has kicked the bucket?).

So down the Oxford Road you have Time 4 Coffee, a cafe apparently offering pasteis da nata, Portuguese bread with chouriço and a range of other traditional dishes from that under-represented cuisine; I’ve not yet been, but it’s high on my list to review next year. On Castle Street Filter Coffee House is already making a name for itself with its authentic South Indian filter coffee and absolutely delicious banana buns, and continues to develop a big menu for such a little space, with intriguing specials available every Saturday morning.

And then finally we have the subject of this week’s review, Minas Cafe, which opened in April and is perhaps the most incongruous of the lot – a Brazilian café, no less, in Whitley, of all places. That I hadn’t been to check it out yet felt like it was verging on neglect, so last Sunday when I had the day to myself I hopped on the number 6 bus just before lunchtime and alighted by Buckland Road. Whitley was shrouded in a drizzly mist, the day murky and dreich: a less Brazilian scene was difficult to imagine.

Minas Café is tucked away just round the corner from the Basingstoke Road, and it looks unprepossessing, with a nice little outside space which would probably have been a lovely place to sit and watch the world on a more clement day. Inside it was a pretty unremarkable café but with a few signs that this was a little out of the ordinary. One wall was given over to all sorts of interesting produce – biscuits, cakes, hot sauce, you name it. A big TV was mounted on another showing concert footage from, at a guess, a Brazilian artist. The overall effect was fascinating, and reminiscent of Madoo, one of my favourite places, in that you were simultaneously in-Reading and not-quite-in-Reading.

So yes, it had a warm, welcoming feel to it, especially on a miserable day, and although only a couple of tables were occupied when I got there, it had a steady flow of customers throughout my time there. And a varied one too – one table of twentysomething Brits, a Brazilian family at another, and various solo diners turning up for a full English. Lots of people there gave the impression of being regulars, an excellent sign for a cafe yet to celebrate its first birthday.

I was limited in the research I could do before my visit because although Minas Café has a menu you can see there in the café, they don’t have a website and it’s surprisingly hard to track down online. Like a lot of cafés of this kind it hedges its bets to try and appeal to everybody, so the menu above the counter is all breakfasts and panini and omelettes. But on your way to the counter you get an idea, again, that there’s more interesting stuff going on. A whole display of salgados – Brazilian pastries – a dizzying array of them. A little bit overwhelmed, I ordered a latte and decided I needed to consider the options. The man behind the counter, a friendly chap with a huge mop of hair, took my order and I sat down to mull things over.

My expectations of coffee in places like this – and indeed most of the coffees I’ve ever had in Portugal – were fairly low so I was absolutely delighted when my latte turned up and was bloody gorgeous, nicely balanced with no burnt note or bitterness. It just goes to show that you don’t have to wank around with latte art to make a marvellous coffee, and it had the effect, almost immediately, of making me want to try more stuff. So I went up to the counter again, had a proper look at the cornucopia behind the glass and pondered how I could possibly choose.

This was where the friendly chap sprung into action, talking me through everything. There were savoury pastries packed with ham, cheese and tomato, others with chicken and sweetcorn, a few with ground beef. All of them looked subtly different, all were golden under the lights. Some resembled pasties, some little buns, others looked like neat parcels of joy. There were rissoles, and croquetas and things that looked an awful lot like battered sausage.

“What do you recommend?” I asked. He smiled.

“Our two most popular are this, the coxinha – it’s made with chicken and cheese – and this one, the salgado with ground beef.”

“And which one should I have, out of those two?”

“The coxinha. It’s much more…” he paused, deciding on the right word. “Interesting.”

“Those croquetas look really good, how are they different?”

“The ones on the left are minced beef stuffed with cheese, and the ones on the right are just minced beef.”

“Which do you think is better?” I asked, although I think I knew it was a silly question, even as I asked it.

“Definitely the one with cheese.” Of course. I mean, what dish, really, isn’t improved with cheese? So the decision was made, and I went back to my coffee with a mixture of anticipation and curiosity. They arrived not long after – salgados are served cold not hot – and sitting there in front of me they looked like beige-brown bundles of wonder.

“Would you like something with them? Ketchup, mayonnaise or chili sauce?” I asked for chilli sauce and he brought two bottles over – again with a grin. “That one’s less hot, but that one has the flavour you want.”

To cut a long story short, it all had the flavour I wanted, and more besides. The croqueta was a wonderful thing – dense, crumbly beef with a core of stretchy, elastic cheese, something like mozzarella. A dish like this always carries the unspoken terror of bouncy mystery meat, and the first forkful can be a bit of a highwire act, but from that point onwards my fears were allayed and I knew that what was in store was nothing but delight. And my server was right – the first hot sauce, thin and tangy, was very good but the second one, thicker and more menacing, had a compelling punch.

The coxinha was weirder but no less interesting. In a teardrop shape it sort of resembled – to culturally appropriate and show that I was well outside my sphere of expertise – something somewhere between an arancino and an arepa. So it was a dome of dough, but once you cut through that you got a huge quantity of shredded chicken, with a little tomato and tang, and little clouds of soft cheese – again, like mozzarella but in its unmolten state. Had I ever had anything quite like it? Not really. Did I think that was a bit of a shame? Yes, it turns out I did. I dabbed my nose, aware that the second of those hot sauces could give Vicks Sinex a run for its money when it came to decongestant powers.

By this point I was having an absolutely super time. I was well fed but determined to have another latte, and my mind was turning to dessert. But more than that, and this is the magic of some places, I felt part of something. I felt like I could stay there for hours listening to the music, watching the waves of customers arriving, being well fed and moving on, replaced by other diners. A couple of solo diners had come in, taking tables and ordering brunches, and the family next to me was in full flow, the cadences of Portuguese filling the air. Apparently I was in Whitley in November, but you could have fooled me.

I went up and told the server how much I’d enjoyed both my salgados. I asked if they did traditional Brazilian dishes like feijoada, and he told me they had a daily special which they announced on Instagram. Feijoada was on Saturdays, he said, and today it was chicken parmigiana with mash. I was glad I’d gone for something a little smaller, but I saw it waft past my table later for one of the hard-working staff to have for lunch. It looked enormous and tempting. I made a mental note to return on a Saturday before too long.

“What do you recommend for dessert?” I said, by this point convinced that the staff here wouldn’t steer me wrong. “I see you have churros on, and I really love churros.”

He pointed me to the chiller cabinet next to the salgados, pointing out something with chocolate and coconut that looked like a tiramisu, giant chocolate truffles in little paper cups, flans that he told me had been made fresh that day.

“But if you have a sweet tooth, our passion fruit mousse was made today too. It’s really good.”

I didn’t need any further recommendation than that, and again he was absolutely spot on. The mousse de maracuja, to give it its proper name, was ethereally light, sweet but delicate and full of passion fruit. From above, it looked like sunshine, and on the spoon it tasted of it too. I adored it from start to finish, and as with all the best places I was torn between wanting to come back and try everything I had previously ordered and thinking if these dishes taste this magnificent, just what’s all the other stuff like?

I’m conscious that I haven’t told you how much anything costs, for the simple reason that apart from the lattes – a ludicrous two pounds sixty – I didn’t know how much any of it cost when I ordered it. I only found out when I went up at the end and paid. Two salgados, two lattes, that passion fruit mousse and a chocolate truffle – a brigadeiro – I took back for Zoë to try came to a baffling eighteen pounds. I would gladly have paid more.

That doesn’t include tip, and frustratingly they don’t seem to be set up to take tips by card, so I made a mental promise to come back with cash next time. And I’m really sorry I couldn’t tip, because the service was outstanding throughout – not just from the chap that talked me through what to order but from all four members of staff who worked so hard. If they weren’t serving, or in the kitchen, they were mopping the floor or keeping busy. I even got a little reward card, and they told me that every time I spent over ten pounds they’d stamp it. I don’t ever keep reward cards, but I kept this one.

I am so glad I visited Minas Café this week. I think I really needed to find somewhere excellent, and it came along just when I could have started to get disheartened. Reviewing places outside Reading is terrific, although I know it pisses off some of my readers, and it’s always great to try the very best, but it can be sobering when you look at how far Reading can be from that standard.

The whole town, or at least the whole of my echo chamber, is in sackcloth and ashes over the Grumpy Goat, and it’s easy to be deflated by what happened there. It’s easy to think that this is why we can’t have nice things, and that a town with our unique combination of venal landlords and unimaginative politicians will never cast off its shackles and live up to its potential.

So this week of all weeks, I needed to be reminded that there are always brave and imaginative things going on, always people who can make you believe again. You just have to look, and sometimes you just have to look that little bit harder, and that little bit further from the beaten track. I wandered back to the bus stop just outside Morrisons, only a few steps but somehow a world away, and I took the number 6 back into town with my faith in the world decidedly restored.

You don’t get a review next week, because I’m on holiday. I am going back to one of my favourite cities to eat and drink, to sit outside and to enjoy the blue skies of Andalusia. There will be tapas and wine and beer, and one last bit of R&R before the year limps to an end. But if any review is going to sit at the top of my blog for an extra week, and hopefully get a few more readers, this is the one for the job. I am looking forward to seeing the sun again, after what already feels like too long. But I also feel like I got a sneak preview of it in the unlikeliest of places, in a little cafe on Buckland Road.

Minas Café – 8.3
1a Buckland Road, Reading, RG2 7SP
07983 560430

https://www.instagram.com/minas_cafe/

Restaurant review: Vesuvio Pizzeria

On October 27, 2023October 12, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Vesuvio Pizzeria, an Italian restaurant in Tilehurst, opened back in May and I’ve been trying to fit in a visit ever since without quite managing it. I made a booking back in July, which I had to cancel, and then life got in the way and so it wasn’t until a couple of Saturdays ago that Zoë and I left the house, strolled to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill and hopped on Reading’s sweet chariot, the number 17, to boldly go where my blog, let’s be honest, has rarely gone before.

I’d heard few reports of Vesuvio, so had little to go on. In a bizarre twist that tells you everything you need to know about the Reading Chronicle, they reported faithfully on the fact that someone had applied to convert the old Coral bookies on the Norcot Road into an Italian restaurant. They practically foamed at the mouth when the restaurant applied for permission to serve food and drink until 2 in the morning, dubbing it a“showdown”. Why would anyone want to eat in a pizza restaurant at that time? and Why would a restaurant want to serve anybody who did? were just two of the questions the article made no effort to answer.

But since it opened? No coverage at all. I guess you can write the first two stories in your lounge in your pants without having to do any genuine journalism, whereas a restaurant review would require you to put some trousers on, leave the house and spend some actual money. Never mind, you’ve got me for that sort of thing now.

My pre-meal research was as inconclusive as they come: TripAdvisor seemed unimpressed, Google was gushing. The restaurant’s Instagram was sketchily updated and, being charitable, didn’t make the food look outstanding. Its website, such as it was, appeared to be made up entirely of stock photos, to the point where the pizzas all seemed to have different types of bases, some with flat, featureless crusts and others with the kind of bubbling and leopard spotting you see everywhere.

How were you possibly meant to know whose version of reality was correct, and whether you’d have a good meal at Vesuvio? Like I said, you’ve got me for that sort of thing.

Restaurant review: La’De Kitchen

On August 4, 2023February 4, 2024 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

La’De Kitchen closed in January 2024, and is apparently reopening as a separate restaurant called Yaprak which is allegedly under the same management/ownership. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

It kind of feels as if I’ve reviewed La’De Kitchen, the Turkish restaurant in Woodley, already, even though I haven’t. That’s partly because it’s featured on the blog before, by virtue of a delicious takeaway I reviewed back in March 2021. And I have eaten there once, a couple of months after that. It was for a friend’s birthday, during that weird period in 2021 when you could eat outside but not inside, and we all shivered under blankets and tried to persuade ourselves we were having a marvellous time. I remember the food, though, as being excellent.

Returning this week was a recognition, I think, that of all my to do list it was the most glaring omission, the place I really should have reviewed by now. Zoë and I turned up nice and early on a weekday evening to find the place largely empty, although it gradually filled up during the course of our meal. That didn’t surprise me, because it has developed a reputation over the last couple of years.

Of course, and I say this as a former Woodley resident, the fact that it’s in Woodley, always a rather a desert for restaurants, must help. “I remember how excited Woodley was when it found out it was getting Bosco Lounge”, Zoë told me, which gives you an idea how low expectations were set.

But also, it’s just really nicely done. The interior is chic, and the place got buzzy as more tables were occupied. I could easily imagine that on a busy Friday or Saturday night, the cocktails flowing, plenty of bums on those tastefully upholstered seats, it would feel like a very upmarket place to spend an evening. Maybe not on a par with their branch in Pangbourne, but lovely even so.

That said, La’De Kitchen is in some respects a different beast to the restaurant I ordered my takeaway from back in 2021. Back then Berkshire was its brave new frontier as they expanded from their original Muswell Hill branch. Fast forward two years and Muswell Hill is closed. Instead, La’De has spread across the Home Counties – Newbury, Camberley, Sunningdale – with a rogue branch in Hereford, of all places. So was it a different proposition now, and had they kept what was magical intact as they’d grown? I had a feeling I was about to find out.

The menu, though, was largely unchanged from my previous visit. It’s the familiar mixture of cold and hot meze, food from the grill (endearingly described as “Charcoal Productions”), some Turkish specialities (including pide) and a handful of less Anatolian choices. Some of these, the pizzas, take advantage of their having a suitable oven. The other two, described as the “Ritzy La’De Burger” and the “Ritzy La’De Chicken Burger”, badly need a rebrand: nothing would knowingly choose to be described as ritzy, not even – well, especially – the Ritz.

It’s a shame that most of the sharing main courses, the mixed grills and what have you, are sized and priced to serve three to four people, as opposed to the two to three on the menu on their website, as that limited what we could try.

The first sign that all might not run smoothly came when we placed our order – a couple of cold meze, a pair of hot meze and a main course each. “Would you like all of that to come at the same time?” asked our server, which I found bizarre. Yes, having ordered this much food I would naturally like it all dumped on the table at once so some of it can go cold: that must have been what I had in mind. Maybe they get some customers in a real rush to hightail it to Showcase Cinema, but I didn’t think we had that air about us. “This might be too much food”, our server also said. Well, maybe not it it’s nicely paced I thought, but didn’t say out loud.

Personally I’d have liked my cold meze first, then the hot meze and then my mains. And perhaps I should have said that out loud, but I didn’t, so all four of our starters came pretty much at once. They were something of an exercise in frustration. Possibly the best of them was Cypriot garlic sausage, grilled and crisp-edged, coarse and tasty without any dubious whiff of mystery meat.

Genuinely, I really enjoyed this dish, and I’m sorry to go there but I’m afraid I must: four pretty small pieces of what was presumably a single sausage was seven pounds fifty. If anything, the photo above makes the dish look bigger than it actually was. A handful of scruffy salad, over-sweet with dressing and pomegranate seeds, doesn’t conceal how small this particular small plate was. I know food is getting more expensive and something has to be right at the edge of the spectrum for me to call it out, but that’s where this was. It got me thinking about the sujuk at the sadly-departed Cairo Café: still, maybe that’s why Cairo Café has gone and this place is still there.

The other starter was even more of a disappointment because it’s a dish I’ve had and loved from La’De Kitchen more than once. Chargrilled octopus looked the part, that alluring fractal spiral I always love seeing on a plate. But whether this wasn’t marinated or cooked before being finished on the grill, the end result was tough, rubbery and heavy going. It was also another dish with an overreliance on balsamic and pomegranate seeds, the whole thing a little sickly-sweet. Zoe tried a few pieces and gave up – if the octopus had been great this would have been a stroke of luck, but instead it was a chore.

Were the cold meze better? Not really. Baba ganoush was probably the best of them, with a decent texture and an underlying note of smoke that told that particular aubergine’s origin story. But even then it was a little lacking in the complexity I was hoping for. But the real disappointment was the taramasalata: I’ve had this before from La’De Kitchen and I remember it being more a pastel shade, salty and moreish, a proper treat. This was Barbie-pink and one note, with more of Marie Rose than fish roe about it. As with the octopus Zoë tried a little and decided she couldn’t be doing with the calories. “It’s oddly sweet” she said, a theme across the starters. And I would say, in the main, that I’m a fussier eater than she is.

Here’s the really weird thing, though: one thing I’ve always loved about La’De Kitchen is its balloon bread – a beautiful inflated pita speckled with sesame seeds. When I ordered takeaway from that that first time, we had three of the blighters and I remember thinking that they were one of my favourite things about the meal. On this occasion – and bear in mind that we’d ordered two things you could reductively describe as a dip – they brought us one.

We broke it, we tore it, we dipped and spooned baba ganoush and taramasalata onto it, and then we thought “what can we do with the rest of these dips?” Did they expect us to eat taramasalata with a fork? So when the server swung by, we asked if we could have some more bread. Of course, of course, they said. It did not materialise.

By this point I was drinking my pint of Efe and Zoë was on a mocktail (“Safe Sex On The Beach” apparently, although good luck finding one without sewage in this country) the restaurant was slightly busier and I was adjusting my expectations. One of my favourite Turkish restaurants is Zigana in Didcot, and although I love the place I’d be the first to admit that their meze is hardly the main attraction: it’s only when your food has spent time on their charcoal grill that things start getting good. Perhaps La’De Kitchen would be the same.

Our server came over and asked if we were ready for our mains, and we said why not. He gestured at our mostly uneaten baba ganoush and taramasalata, although he chose not to ask why we’d left so much. Funny, that.

“Would you like me to take those away?” “he asked.

“No thank you, but what I’d really like is some more bread to eat with them.”

“Of course, of course” came the reply. Of course, more bread never materialised. By this point I had rationalised to myself that, given that the two dips were either side of middling, he might have been unintentionally doing me a favour. Besides, all the more room for mains.

When I had my takeaway from La’De Kitchen all those years ago it was all about one dish: the pistachio adana, an impeccable lamb kofte studded with pistachio, a truly delicious masterpiece of grilling. Well, Zoë quite sensibly called shotgun on it for this visit and I have to hand it to her, because it was the one thing about La’De Kitchen that age has not withered.

If anything, it was better than before: what used to be a coating of pistachio has morphed into something more beautiful, a sort of hyper-real, hyper-green pistachio pesto which elevated it from great to greater still. Paired with gorgeous, nutty pearls of bulghur wheat (and more sticky-dressed, pomegranate-strewn salad: you can’t have everything) this really was a fantastic dish, albeit one keeping bad company. If everything we ate that night had even approached the quality of the pistachio adana, I would be firing up the hype machine and getting out my virtual megaphone: nothing even remotely did, but I still want to say that the restaurant is almost worth visiting for this dish alone.

I’m prepared to concede that I might have ordered badly, when it came to my main. I asked my server what distinguished the chicken Iskender from your common or garden shish, and he told me that it came served on a bed of pita with a spicy tomato sauce (called halep) and yoghurt. Should I have known from that what I was about to get? Perhaps. Perhaps I should have known that it was cubes of chicken and squares of pita in a cast iron skillet, with a spooge of slightly bland tomato sauce and a pile of yoghurt on top. If I’d known, I might have opted for something else.

But even judging it by the standards of the dish, it didn’t quite work. Unlike the plating of the adana, which gave you plenty of negative space, this was crammed into the skillet, making it fiddly to eat. I actually loved the squares of pita, which had enough about them to stand up to the sauce. But the chicken was firm – just the right side of bouncy – without being tender, and the sauce was unremarkable. It was almost like they’d taken all the glory of meat fresh off a charcoal grill, and wiped it out by drowning it in something bla. I probably ordered something I might not have chosen, but I still expected it to be better than this.

“What do you think?” said Zoë, who by this point had given me enough of her adana for me to realise a travesty had taken place.

“It’s, well… it’s not as good as yours. Meat and tomato sauce in a skillet feels like something I could have picked off the al forno section of the menu in a Prezzo.”

“You know this used to be a Prezzo, don’t you?”

Full but unfulfilled, we waited in vain to get somebody’s attention to pay our bill. The restaurant wasn’t hugely busy at this stage, but from the difficulty we had you’d think it was. All the time that blasted taramasalata and baba ganoush sat there on the table. It irked me, and yet I knew I’d dodged a bullet: I’m a big fan of eating my feelings, but not necessarily when those feelings are disappointment. Eventually we got our bill, and some time after that we managed to pay it. It said we’d had two lots of balloon bread, which by this point was just rubbing it in.

“That was the best part of a hundred quid!” said Zoë incredulously as we made our way to the bus stop, pausing only for a tactical foray into Waitrose to buy some chocolate to cheer ourselves up. “Seriously, you need to find some other people to do these fucking reviews with you.”

“I know, I know” I said. “The saddest thing is that we could have gone here” – I gestured at Adda Hut, which looked far quieter than La’De Kitchen had been – “and you’d have had a better meal. We’d have spent a lot less money, too.”

I am so sorry that I didn’t like La’De Kitchen more. I wonder if it’s them or me, if I caught them on a bad night or if something has happened to the genuinely exciting restaurant that opened in Woodley a few years ago. Is it the inevitable consequence of a chain growing, or what happens when you focus on margins? Either way I ordered a mixture of dishes I know well and some new things and only one dish – that pistachio adana – took me back to the beginning.

Beyond that, it felt like a shadow of its former self. I found myself thinking you’d be better off at Bakery House, or Tasty Greek Souvlaki, or even catching the train to Didcot and giving Zigana a whirl. Or trying Istanbul Mangal in Tilehurst Village, or the new Lebanese place down the Wokingham Road. I truly wish it wasn’t so, but them’s the breaks. But we’ll always have that pistachio adana, so perhaps the trick is to go there, order that, cut your losses and leave. It’s an extraordinary dish, and without it this rating would have been far lower. It’s worth making a pilgrimage just for that. For now, at least.

La’De Kitchen – 6.7
61-63 Crockhamwell Road, Woodley, RG5 3JP
0119 9692047

https://woodley.ladekitchen.com

Restaurant review: Pappadams

On July 28, 2023November 25, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

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.

Restaurant review: Bakery House

On July 14, 2023October 27, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

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. As of September 2026, Lebanese Flavours appears to be closed: I have marked this review as closed, too and may review Lebanese Flavours at some point if it reopens.

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

Edible Reading

Tag: Reading