Tag: Reading

Restaurant review: Club India

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

This week’s review partly came about because of a gentleman called Andy Hayler. Now, you might not know who Hayler is, but in terms of food he’s something of a phenomenon.

The shadowy world of Michelin exists behind an impenetrable curtain, with nobody sure how they work or what dictates who gets listed, is awarded Bib Gourmands and stars – or, sometimes, has them taken away. Andy Hayler is the closest thing we have to a Michelin inspector working in plain sight. He has a blog, which has been around since the 90s, in which he has documented hundreds of meals in restaurants, giving each restaurant – and every dish – a mark out of 20.

I’ve rarely seen anything get lower than a 10, and very little approaches the top of his scale, but that’s because a fair amount of what Hayler has reviewed is at the highest end of dining. There was a time when he had eaten at every three starred restaurant in the entire world, although he stopped keeping up with Michelin when, as he puts it, they devalued what three stars should signify by giving them out in some territories to restaurants that were nowhere near the standards he had experienced elsewhere.

Hayler has a sort of cult, niche status in food. I’ve read a couple of pieces about him in recent years, both verging on hagiographies. He’s been described as “the best living food writer”, and I’ve read interviews that gush about his effortless recall and the esteem in which he is held by chefs and restaurateurs. He is the cognoscenti’s critic of choice and no mistake.

I think he attracts some of those plaudits because of what his reviews both are and aren’t. They don’t, in some senses, read like reviews at all, more like audits from someone scrupulous and meticulous who has forgotten more good meals than most of us will ever have. Although it doesn’t sound like he forgets many of them: why would you, when you document them all in such extensive detail?

I think the respect also comes from his refreshing lack of ego; Hayler would be the first to draw a distinction between himself and many restaurant reviewers. “I wouldn’t ever pretend I was any sort of fantastic prose master. I’m not trying to throw in a load of stuff about my journey to the restaurant and the trendy people on the table to the left” he has said, subtly throwing shade on half the piffle I come out with every week.

Don’t worry, there’s no way he meant me personally: in fact, he once described one of my pieces, about Maida Vale’s Paulette, as a “lovely review” which I found surprisingly touching. “Most of the newspaper critics want to be writers first, I want to focus on the food” he said more recently. I suspect the people who read him admire that purity of approach, and it does mean that when he thinks somewhere is dismal or overrated, which happens occasionally, it’s really very amusing.

What’s also admirable is that Hayler goes where he likes, reviews wherever he wants: money seems to be no object, and he doesn’t follow the fads. You won’t find him, for instance, reviewing Brasserie Constance, a restaurant operating out of Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage, unlike nearly every broadsheet critic over the last few weeks. Instead, his two or three reviews each week involve him going wherever he pleases, in London and abroad.

His two main weaknesses seem to be eating at the Ritz in particular and eating Indian food in general. Hayler is a regular visitor to Epsom’s Dastaan, and the little group of restaurants it has spawned in Surbiton, Richmond and Leeds. He’s also a frequent diner in Southall, and when he gave a warm review to Hounslow’s review of Crispy Dosa last November it caused a Mexican wave of regional bloggers checking out their nearest branch to touch the hem of his virtual garment (been there, done that – four years ago).

“If Mr Hayler thinks it is OK, it is a fair bet I will probably like it” one said. “You can be assured that if Andy says a restaurant is worth visiting then it really will be” said another. That’s proper soft power, and all from the opinion of a chap you mightn’t have heard of.

Hayler even came all the way west to Caversham last year to review Clay’s, something I’ve been waiting for him to do for a very long time. He gave it 14/20, which may not sound like a big deal but actually is. “Clays is a very impressive family-run restaurant, the food shows a lot of care, and the chefs are clearly putting some real effort into reproducing an authentic taste of India” he concluded, after paying particular tribute to Clay’s cabbage pakora, lamb chops and, of course, bhuna venison (Hayler also tried methi chicken, a dish he seems particularly to favour).

Seeing Clay’s reviewed by Hayler was like watching somebody you know being interviewed in the national news, and it made me proud. It didn’t make the local paper the way Grace Dent’s write-up had, but in its way it was every bit as significant. Hayler, as he said, is all about the food.

Now, by this point even my most supportive readers are probably thinking ‘this is an even more circuitous intro than usual, what has this got to do with anything?’ Well, I’ll tell you: every week Andy Hayler does a roundup on his blog, and every week the byline gives a couple of destinations. From South Kensington to Mayfair one might read, or From Piccadilly to Rome. Fancy restaurants and/or jetsetting are invariably involved. And then, at the start of the month, one made me do a double take. From Winnersh to West London, it said.

Winnersh? Our Winnersh?

It was not a misprint. Andy Hayler had come all the way to Winnersh to try out Club India, an Indian restaurant that opened back in July where the old Pheasant pub used to be. I mentioned that development when I reviewed Dolphin’s Caribbean, back in June, What I said, looking back, feels a little graceless, especially as they sent me a lovely email inviting me to a pre-launch event. I read the blurb and thought it sounded potentially interesting, but then again: Winnersh?

Andy Hayler had no such compunctions. Club India’s consultant chef had held two Michelin stars at his restaurant in San Francisco, although Hayler’s verdict on that place was that if a chef had gone there trying to pick up tips “he or she would either burst out laughing maniacally or seek to throttle any passing Michelin inspectors; possibly both”. But the head chef had headed up the kitchens at a couple of London restaurants Hayler really rated. So he went, he enjoyed it, he dished out scores out of 20 for all the dishes and, of course, he ordered methi chicken.

Overall he gave it the same rating, 14 out of 20, as Clay’s. “Club India was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, the food and service excellent, and at an affordable price. I wish I could say that more often these days” was his conclusion. That was good enough for me, so on a Friday night after a couple of pre-prandial beers in town Zoë and I hopped on the number 4 bus to go and see if Reading really did have a rival to Clay’s Kitchen, tucked away in – this may not be the last time I say this word slightly incredulously – Winnersh.

You can tell it’s a former pub, but the glow up is nice and, on the inside, pretty subtle and tasteful. The room I was in, at the front, was muted wallpaper and leather banquettes, but every room was slightly different and the one the other side of the bar from mine, with its tiled floor, was my favourite. When we got there around 7.30 it was already very busy with big groups and couples on dates, in full swing with a busy service ahead. Hayler said it could seat 70, which sounded about right, with outside space too.

I guess it’s easier to have more space than you need in this part of Reading than it is in Caversham, but in any case it was bustling on a Friday evening. The tables were more Winnersh than desi when I arrived, although I would say that balance shifted as the evening went on. It certainly felt like a restaurant that wanted to attract both demographics, and anybody else besides.

Our table had a good view of the room and of the very strong service. The man who seemed to be running the show, sporting an impressive man bun, thick white stripe right down the middle of his dark luxuriant beard, was a class act, but in fairness everyone who looked after us all evening was lovely, polite and enthusiastic, even the ones who seemed a little nervous. It had the swagger of a restaurant that had been there a lot longer than three months.

We started, as you might, with apéritifs and poppadoms – and if that seems like an incongruous pairing, Club India does a good job of making them feel like they go together. Zoë liked her negroni, although she wasn’t sure it tasted quite like a negroni and couldn’t put her finger on why. I had something called an Amber Signal, which I suspect featured in the Johnny Depp defamation case a few years back. It was a blend of Aperol, whisky and Drambuie and felt surprisingly grown up by my standards, something to sip slowly and mindfully. Both cocktails came in glam, exceptionally heavy-bottomed glasses that could have doubled as a paperweight or a murder weapon.

The poppadoms were splendid, by the way – warm, thin, greaseless and very hard to stop at just the one each, which is probably why we didn’t. But the chutneys were the thing: you pay £3.50 or so for these but they were all made by hand and far more interesting than the usual fare. The mango chutney was thick and rich with nigella, the raita so robust that I thought Greek yoghurt must have been involved. There was a mixed berry number which surprised, possibly mostly through novely value, and best of all an inspired shrimp chutney which we managed, being our best selves, to equitably divide despite the unworthy temptation to hog the lot.

The menu at Club India takes a long time to go from first read to decision, because you want to order most of it. It is the only restaurant I can think of in Reading with a tasting menu, at a very reasonable £45 a head, or £70 if you throw in the wine pairings, and if it had contained the dishes I’d really fancied from the à la carte you’d be reading about it right now: nevertheless, it sounded like really solid value.

But the à la carte was just too tempting – about a dozen starters, the same number of curries, some biryani dishes and plenty of vegetarian dishes which you could downsize to try as a side dish. They also had a separate vegan menu, so they could definitely make many of the vegetarian dishes without ghee. Starters ran the gamut from £5.50 to £15.95 and the most expensive main would set you back £18. Pricing, put that way, looked pretty reasonable – and although the obvious reference point for this restaurant, given my preamble, is Clay’s I also had Masakali in the back of my mind. Club India’s menu is far more streamlined than Masakali’s, and to my mind less expensive.

From this point on, you might find yourself wishing I adopted Andy Hayler’s much more concise method, because I’m afraid we very much went wild in the aisles picking a lot of dishes, ordering like the place might close down tomorrow. Andy Hayler might have said curry leaf calamari was good, the apricot glaze giving an extra dimension (13/20). I would say that I really loved this jumble of sticky ribbons of squid, somehow crispy and caramelised without succumbing to bounce or toughness. The menu says that it’s grandma’s recipe: I loved my grandmother very much, but I might have sacrificed her to the devil himself in return for one who could cook like this.

Just as terrific were the lamb chops, two glorious inverted commas of meat, best end blackened from the tandoor but still blushing on the inside. Up there with the best lamb chops I’ve had, and I’ve tried them at Clay’s, and at Didcot’s extraordinary Zigana’s Turkish Kitchen. At sixteen pounds you’d need them to be, but for me they delivered in spades and I was very glad we ordered them.

If you believed the menu, these came with coriander chutney and a smoked aubergine raita: it didn’t feel, from my recollection or looking at this photo, like that’s exactly what was going on. There was allegedly beetroot in the marinade, it felt like it had escaped into the smear on the plate. But to be honest whatever smudge of sauce you add, whatever spiralised veg and leaves you artfully zhuzh on top this stands or falls on the meat and the meat alone. Zoë, far more primal about these things than me, picked it up by the bone and gnawed until she could gnaw no more.

Completing our trio of starters was the only dish, apart from those poppadoms, that Andy Hayler and I both tried on our visits. 12 hour braised, spiced pulled pork rested, in a beautiful tangle, on an uttapam, a thicker, slightly spongy variant on dosa. I really wanted to try this dish for so many reasons – because it’s just absolutely up my alley, because Hayler raved about it, giving it a rare 15/20 and because I’d had something similar at a beer pairing lunch at Clay’s Kitchen last year, and that dish had been one of the best things I ate in 2024.

Did it come close? Yes. You would have struggled to put a poppadom between them, in terms of interest and quality. Clay’s version used minced pork rather than pulled pork, and there was something deeply texturally satisfying about Club India’s slow-perfected strands. Club India’s rendition had more whistles and bells, a coconut chutney, microshoots and fripperies. But if you stripped all that away, you just ended up with a small plate – from either restaurant – that would grace any starter menu, anywhere.

The spicing was a beaut, the coconut chutney went perfectly, I loved it from start to finish. We shared this, as we did the other two dishes, but I could gladly have polished one of these off solo. I could equally have said that about the other two dishes, too.

At this point the restaurant was at its liveliest, I had a gorgeous glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc on the go and I had that warm feeling that comes from knowing I’m eating at a discovery – no, not a hidden gem, but a find. The starters we’d eaten, for my money, were up there with most Indian restaurants I’d dined at, and at or around the quality I’d come to love at Clay’s.

Could Reading finally have another contender for the crown? I found myself, mid-meal, daydreaming about the rave review I would scurry home and write. Zoë was thinking that this was a place, not a million miles from Woodley, that she could persuade her parents to visit. And that wasn’t all. “Are you thinking this would be a suitable venue for one of your readers’ lunches?” she asked me. I had been doing exactly that.

So it saddens me to piss on the proverbial chips and say that the rest of the meal was a gentle descent from that summit. It didn’t end up in the slough of despond, but it settled somewhere that felt more like settling. And although that’s a shame, in the wider scheme, it doesn’t mean that anything we ate from there on in was bad, it just wasn’t quite as extraordinary.

Take the kadaknath chicken curry we’d ordered. One of the things I really liked about Club India’s range of curries was that it mixed up stuff you’d heard of – butter chicken, rogan josh, methi chicken and so on – with dishes I wasn’t familiar with. Kadakhath is a particular breed of Indian chicken that the menu says is particularly known for its gamey flavour, and Club India uses black leg chicken to get as close to that as possible. From that, I was hoping this would be a bit like Northern Spain’s pitu caleya, but this was pretty unremarkable. Breast rather than thigh, too, which reminded me how Clay’s approach to chicken curries is so different from everywhere in Reading.

That’s not to say I didn’t like it, or that I didn’t like the gravy, made with fenugreek and crushed peppercorn. I actually very much enjoyed its savoury, almost perfumed depth, those slight wintry hints of leather about it. But everything felt out of kilter. The chicken was submerged in a lake of the gravy, slightly unbalanced, and the gravy wasn’t quite interesting enough to carry things on its own, even dolloped onto some perfectly nice saffron and cumin pulao.

I’m sorry to keep mentioning Clay’s, but it was inevitable that I would in trying to benchmark somewhere like Club India. The gravies at Clay’s, each of those distinct, exceptional sauces, is so captivating that the meat is merely, in many cases, a vehicle. You clean up every last molecule in the bowl with your rice, with some bread, with your spoon, with a finger if you must. Club India didn’t quite reach that standard, which meant that the curries were just a little too wet.

Better, although still not quite there, was a curry described simply as Champaran meat. This was my favourite thing from this section of the meal, and the sauce again had depth and complexity. But what elevated this was the really terrific lamb, marinated overnight and with an almost unbeatable texture, leg at a guess, slow-cooked until it could cleave like kleftiko; this dish is cooked over charcoal in a sealed pot, which probably contributed greatly to how wonderful it was.

Again, I’d have liked it a little more sticky and a little less swimming, but that didn’t stop it being head and shoulders above most curries you’d get in Reading.

We ordered a couple of vegetable side dishes, one because I insisted and one because Zoë did. Mine was baby aubergine in a sauce with jaggery and tamarind, two of my very favourite things. And yes, a sauce that combined them was as sweet and tangy as you would expect, and I loved that. But I didn’t want a bowl of the stuff with two – just two – baby aubergines bobbing in it. And that, slightly unfortunately, is what I got.

Zoë on the other hand had put in a request for Club India’s okra stir fried with peppers and onions. If she was writing this review she would tell you that she really liked it, and for that matter that she really likes okra. But you are stuck with me, I’m afraid, and Clay’s thinly sliced, crispy take on okra is, I think, the only variant of this ingredient I have ever enjoyed. I feigned generosity telling Zoë she could finish this but she knew, deep down, that it was because I wasn’t a fan.

I will say this, though, Club India’s keema naan is the best I have ever had. This is another to file under ‘Zoë always orders it, and I nibble a bit without any great enthusiasm’. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve taken a bite and been confronted by weirdly scarlet, oddly bouncy mystery meat. That fate does not befall you at Club India: the meat lurking in the middle of a deliciously airy naan is properly belting stuff.

It made me want to try their sheekh kebab next time – and credit to Club India, not only do they list the provenance of some of their ingredients but the lamb for the Champaran meat comes from one place, namely North Wales, while the lamb for the sheekh kebab comes from Romney Marsh, completely the other end of the U.K. You do have to at least slightly admire that.

By this point we had checked the timetable for the bus back into town and realised that neither of the options – namely leaving in ten minutes or lingering at Club India for over an hour – were going to happen. So we embraced the concept of a taxi and rewarded ourselves with dessert. I was hoping the gajar halwa that Andy Hayler had rather enjoyed would be on the menu, but the compact selection of four had already moved on since then. It was the one area where Club India’s imagination felt like it had run out, because when one of the four options is a chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream I think, as an upmarket Indian restaurant, that you’re playing it far too safe.

Playing it safe rather defined my dessert, too. A mango cheesecake, a small dainty cylinder, was genuinely quite charming and went nicely with the diddy glass of dessert wine I’d ordered with it (a 50ml pour is on the small side, but it was £5 so it didn’t matter so much). But again, the menu promised a hint of chilli and if it was a hint it was too subtle for me. I’d have preferred a clanger of chilli, if we were picking between extremes, and it rather appeared that we were.

I think Zoë ordered better, although she mightn’t have agreed. Rasmalai tiramisu was, for me, far more imaginative and more in keeping with the rest of the menu. I’m not sure it was really reminiscent of either, more like the two had been put in separate machines and teleported into a blend, like something out of The Fly. But I liked it and envied Zoë, and the pleasingly squeaky sort-of-cheese in the base made it something you’d eat to experience, let alone to taste. For me that fusion, that experiment worked.

Zoë seemed to feel differently, but she does like okra and me, so there are already a couple of valid question marks against her judgment.

At the end of the night, Uber on the way, I settled the bill and found myself thinking it was generally decent value. We had a couple of aperitifs, a couple of dessert wines, I had a glass of white and then there was that onslaught – of poppadoms, of three starters, of curries and side dishes and rice and naan and dessert. We’re not going to play The Price Is Right, but when it came to £170, including a modest 10% service charge, I felt like I’d had a lot of evening for my cash. We were there nearly two and a half hours, enough time to watch multiple sittings come and go, and to watch the staff properly earning their money.

So where do you benchmark Club India, after a meal like that? Well, first of all: Winnersh and Woodley, that eastern edge of Reading, is very fortunate to have it on their doorstep. I think it will do very well, partly because it is indeed good and partly because nothing around there even comes close to it.

In terms of the kind of place it is, the most obvious comparison, for me, is Masakali; they are trying to be similar restaurants, but Club India far surpasses its predecessor on the Caversham Road.

Club India is the restaurant Masakali hopes to be when it grows up, and an illustration of the difference between having your menu dreamt up by a head chef, with some advice from a decorated chef in an advisory capacity on the one hand, and having your menu mechanically assembled by some kind of offshore committee slash agency on the other. Quality will out: Club India is way ahead of that competitor.

But as for the others? If everything else had managed to sustain the extraordinary quality of those starters, the arrival of Club India would be one of the big Reading food events of 2025. That it doesn’t is a pity, but it doesn’t change the fact that even Club India’s more ordinary dishes still feel like a cut above most places.

So if they don’t quite reach the level of Clay’s Kitchen, they should console themselves by knowing that they are in good company there, in a support group made up, pretty much, of every restaurant in Reading. But if you are comparing them to the next level down, the likes of Chilis, I think they can give a very good account of themselves.

So there you have it. I guess if I was Andy Hayler, I would have summed this up by saying, in his inimitable style, 12/20. But I’m not Andy Hayler, I’m me, and so I’ll conclude this review with that slightly enigmatic score below. It’s the only way I know.

Club India – 8.1
355 Reading Road, Winnersh, RG41 5LR
0118 3048701

https://www.clubindia.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Stop & Taste

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

The biggest trend in Reading’s food scene this year has been the proliferation of pizza places – Paesinos, Zí Tore, Amò and Peppito, all opening in the space of five months. In the space of a five minute walk, you could pass them all: you could do a pizza crawl of all four, if that’s your kind of thing. Everyone will have their favourite, or their own view of which is the best, and perhaps I will too once I’ve got round to the last couple on my to do list: one way or the other I’m sure my annual round-up and awards at the end of December will have something to say about all of that.

But if that competition is the most high-profile this year, there are a couple of smaller-scale rivalries, more under the radar, that have captured my attention every bit as much. Like the one between Vietnamese newcomers Pho 86, on St Mary’s Butts where County Deli used to be, and Thai restaurant Nua which opened just around the corner, in Bluegrass BBQ’s old home. They are competing not only with the established order – Pho and Thai Corner – but with each other, and they opened on the same day in July.

So that promises to be interesting, and I’ll do my damnedest to check them both out before the end of 2025. But even that’s not my favourite, because my favourite is the tightly-fought battle between two brand new restaurants, which opened a week apart, for Most Batshit Menu In Reading.

In the red corner you have Take Your Time, which opened in August at the top of Sykes’ Sweatshop (you probably know it better as Kings Walk) in the former Dolce Vita site, which sat vacant for over seven years. Take Your Time’s website says that it blends “Asian flavours with Western cuisine”, and Take Your Time’s menu interprets that as serving baked pork chop with an egg fried rice featuring tomato, pineapple and mozzarella, like someone put a Hawaiian pizza into Google Translate.

It also gives you the option of a chicken risotto (“chicken is slightly pink”), or “Hong Kong-style source [sic] stir fried spaghetti with pan fried ribeye steak”. Fusion? Confusion? Who knows. It would, any other time, be far and away the strangest menu I’ve read all year.

But then, a week later, Stop & Taste opened in Emmer Green in a ‘hold my beer’ scenario. Stop & Taste looked on the face of it like a standard eat in fast food place – visually difficult to distinguish from the likes of Basingstoke Road’s Kyaneez – mainly famous for having the most idiosyncratic Instagram account of all time – or Salt & Smash on Christchurch Green. But then I saw the menu and thought, and this is pretty much a verbatim transcript of my exact reaction, what the fuck is going on here?

Because Stop & Taste’s menu rivalled Take Your Time’s for eccentricity, for lack of an overarching theme. So yes, there were loads of burgers – obviously – but one of them involving tempura soft shell crab? And three different types of biryani, and oxtail tacos and fried shark bites? And a £25 lobster roll with “lobster tail poached in secret butter” and hand-minced beef patties and thick shakes and Sunday roasts made with fillet steak?

Take Your Time and Stop & Taste had two things in common – menus that invited an ADHD diagnosis and, paradoxically, names that seemed to extol the virtues of mindful eating. So I just had to visit one of them this week, and in the end I found myself taking a bus north of the river on a weekday evening. That menu at Stop & Taste was either madness or genius, and I just had to know which it was, shark bites and all.

Alighting from the bus I found Stop & Taste at the near end of a little parade of suburban shops, sandwiched between a Budgens and an off licence; if you want an idea of the passage of time the picture I found on Google Maps, from back in 2012, has branches of Blockbuster and Thresher further along. It reminded me of other suburban spots, like Coriander Club or, not too far away, Caversham Park Village’s Momo House.

But it also reminded me of my childhood in Woodley, of living round the corner from Hudson Road and of the independent supermarket where it felt like you could pick up anything, of buying sweets for a penny.

Back then, forty years ago, the best you could hope for in terms of food was fish and chips with curry sauce or a chow mein, and the idea that in the future we wouldn’t have jetpacks but would have ready access to birria tacos and soft shell crab would never have occurred to me. I do have to be honest, though, and say that if I’d appeared in a vision to 11 year old me, the ghost of dinners yet to come, and offered him the choice, he’d have picked the fancy food over the jetpack: I don’t know whether to be proud of him or ashamed.

Inside, the place was empty apart from a big table of kids who seemed to be having a lovely time but weren’t discernably eating any food: I think in all the time I was there one of them went up to the counter and ordered a giant milkshake, but that was it. I’m too old to even guess how old they were, so let’s just say they were Grange Hill age and leave it at that.

Sorry, that ages me even more, doesn’t it? I mean Waterloo Road age. If they knew how lucky they were to live within easy access of shark bites as opposed to chips with curry sauce, they were far too cool to betray it.

Otherwise the interior looked pleasant if generic, not necessarily a place to linger. I quite liked the faux marble tiles on the wall, the ceiling panel covered in artificial flowers, bare bulbs hanging down. The chairs looked remarkably similar to ones I’ve seen in many other places, although I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. I wonder if there’s a starter kit new restaurants buy? The fire safety tags still hung from under the seat pads, and everything was still shiny and new.

At least I didn’t have to wedge my arse into a ubiquitous Tolix chair, so there was that. A brightly lit sign on the wall proclaimed MORE THAN A GUILTY PLEASURE and a sign up at the counter read DON’T TAKE LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY. NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE ANYWAY. Thought provoking stuff all round.

I wasn’t sure whether this boded well at all, any of it, but the menu, illuminated over the counter, made me think again. Something about it, in the flesh, inspired confidence in a way the version I’d seen online didn’t. Part of it was the surprisingly pleasing design: all red and white, clear fonts, oddly endearing icons of burger buns and taco shells with googly eyes. And part of it again, was that array of dishes. The randomness was there, but also I had a faint inkling that you don’t get the stuff to cater this menu from Brakes. They don’t sell shark, as far as I know.

Stop & Taste’s pricing, too, was pretty keen. Most of the starters maxed out at £8, unless you wanted lamb chops or tiger prawns, and the only main coming in over £14 was that lobster roll at £25: it would be interesting to know how many of those they sell. The biryani and Indo-Chinese dishes (because yes, they had them too), the fried chicken tenders and the chargrilled peri peri chicken were all less than a tenner. I was on my own, so I had to decide how best to try as much of the menu as I could.

Going up and ordering a couple of things to start me off, I got chatting to the chap who I think was the owner. He warned me that the menu was brand new so a couple of the dishes, birria tacos and chargrilled tiger prawns, weren’t available yet. He said they’d been open for two months and that so far business was good, although it was mainly limited to Emmer Green residents. They hadn’t leafleted yet, because they wanted to prioritise the local community before looking for customers further afield. He told me, again, about their Sunday roasts: a separate menu advertised rump of beef, fillet, roast chicken, the works.

Technically they were on delivery apps, he added, but he also said something that other business owners have said to me recently, that they were reluctant to do delivery because they knew that from the moment the food was popped in a bag and loaded on the back of a bike something was lost, and what you ate was a fifteen minute drive from what they intended. So it wouldn’t surprise me if, for now, many of their deliveries don’t go far beyond Emmer Green. That said, they took a order to deliver all the way out to Spey Road while I was there: based on what was to come I imagine it was a repeat customer.

Naturally I ordered the shark bites. How could I not? Zoë and I have this game we play when I review without her where I send her pictures of the dishes and ask her to guess whether or not they’re any cop. She saw the picture down there and replied. The bites look good.

But they didn’t just look good. They were an utter delight from beginning to end, a very generous lined cardboard box stuffed with crispy, gnarled nuggets of fried fish. The lightness of touch was betrayed by this: the coating was so light, so nicely crunchy, but if you tried to eat the nuggets with the wooden fork supplied they just fell apart. I’ve never had shark before – I know they used to sell it on Smelly Alley but I never picked any up – so I didn’t know what to expect, but actually the texture was perfect for this purpose: more woolly than flaky, but very pleasantly so.

Doing away with the niceties of cutlery I simply picked them up, dipped them in the mayo and smiled an awful lot. £5.99 for these, and one of the nicest things about reviewing Stop & Taste solo was not having to share them with another living soul. I don’t know how you could come here and not order these, unless you don’t like fish, but if you do visit Stop & Taste I highly recommend trying them – unless, of course, they have replaced them on the menu with something even better. It feels eminently possible that at some point they would.

Denied the opportunity to try the birria tacos – next time, I told myself – I instead sampled the oxtail tacos, which have been on their menu since they opened. Again, I was somewhere equidistant between surprise and joy. Everything worked, and everything felt considered, from the strands of oxtail at the bottom to the excellent guacamole, full of lime and, I suspect, coriander. Putting crispy onions on top was a genius touch, adding the contrast that otherwise would have been the only thing missing.

But also, and this sounds like a minor thing but it isn’t, this was really enjoyable to eat. At the risk of sounding Goldilocks and the three bears, it was just right – feasible to eat without unhooking your jaw, carrying out some very precarious biting or winding up with half of it down your shirt. I sometimes think the reason influencers always rave about burgers, pizzas and doughnuts is that they haven’t evolved to cutlery yet. Influencers would like Stop & Taste very much, but don’t hold that against the place.

While I was eating all this and mentally recalibrating many of my preconceptions, I paid attention to what was going on around me. A number of customers came in, and the owner remembered all of them by name – remembered what they had ordered last, asked what they thought of it, remembered that, for example, one chap liked his burger without cheese (he sat at the table next to me, headphones on, thoroughly enjoying it). The owner asked me if I liked my food, too, and whether I needed anything else.

I also saw orders for deliveries come in, and the owner telling the chef that they already had an order for ten biryanis on Saturday. I listened to the chef on the phone to a supplier and heard him talking to the owner about what they needed to buy in – beef cheek for the birria tacos, and more besides.

This will sound like a silly comparison, but because it’s autumn and I need cheering up I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls, and overhearing the conversation between the owner and the chef felt a bit like hearing Lorelai and Sookie St. James discussing ingredients. Stop & Taste wasn’t the Independence Inn, and Emmer Green isn’t Stars Hollow, not by a long chalk, but for a moment I got the same kind of warm feeling I get from that fictional small Connecticut town.

As I was deciding what to order next, a woman came in jonesing for a cookie fix and chatted to the chef. He said they didn’t have any Biscoff cookies left, but they did have red velvet. “It will change your life” he said, adding that they’re made for the restaurant by a friend. The customer said she’d had one before and that it was indeed life changing – “it’s when you get to the middle” she said – but she ended up leaving with two boxed cookies to take away and a large portion of fries. I made a mental note that dessert was on the cards.

But first, I had an appointment with that soft shell crab burger. I placed my order and the owner said “it will be about ten minutes” and I wished that, like that place at the top of Kings Walk, they would take their time. Nevertheless it turned up about ten minutes later as I was sipping my Diet Coke – no alcohol licence here – and I was very glad to see it.

Because it cost the same as all the other burgers I was worried that it would be relatively cheap, potentially clumsily priced for what ought to be a premium thing, but I needn’t have worried. The soft shell crab was beautifully fried, in golden but light batter, and fitted perfectly in a sesame seed bun; I was very glad to see this rather than the standard issue brioche. A single unshredded lettuce leaf was on top, adding yet more crunch, along with a square not of American plastic cheese but cheddar.

This was easy to eat with your hands, not an open-wide-push-everything-out-of-the-side number, perfectly proportioned for simple, enjoyable eating. Not cheap for what you got, but it was soft shell crab: it shouldn’t be. The one slight blot on the copybook was Stop & Taste’s lime and scotch bonnet mayo, which turns up in several places in the menu, including that spenny lobster roll. For me, and this might be personal taste, I found it a little too sour and tart. An aioli might have been nicer, and I think it would slightly brutalise the lobster.

These were minor quibbles in a dish I never expected to find in Emmer Green and had long given up on finding in Reading full stop. I should add that the fries, which I’m guessing were bought in, were excellent. Beautifully light, no stale oil, like everything else cooked there and then and thoroughly spot on. I left a fair amount of them, but that’s because I’d gorged myself on two starters and had plans for dessert. You get the dip of your choice with the fries but they made that choice for me, I think, and gave me garlic mayo: next time I want to try their chimichurri.

When I went up to order the inevitable cookie, on the basis that I’d heard rumours it was life-changing, I got talking to the chef, whose name is Anton. He told me that he’d been a private chef for ten years before taking on this job.

“I can speak Spanish, I can speak Mandarin, you name it” he told me.

“And now you speak fluent Emmer Green!”

“Something like that” he smiled.

Then he told me that everything they made was fresh, and it all fell into place: the menu wasn’t the way it was because it was nuts and all over the shop. It was the way it was because the man in the kitchen just cooked what he loved cooking and the owner gave him the freedom to do that.

At this point I slightly regretted coming to this review on my own: partly because I’d have liked an excuse to try the tenders, have a nibble of somebody else’s pulled short rib sandwich. But also because it was starting to take on a dreamlike quality. Did Stop & Taste really exist, or was it a mirage? If I came back would I find it was just the shell of a derelict branch of Blockbuster Video?

There was time for one last crack at the menu, that red velvet cookie. And my god, after that I understood why a lady had come in to grab biscuits to take home. It looked like a conventional cookie, albeit a colossal one, and it had a pleasing crumble at the perimeter, studded with chocolate chips. But as I worked my way to the core I discovered what the fuss was about because in the middle, completely enveloped in biscuit, was a thick disc of frosting. Frosting inside a biscuit! What a time to be alive!

This biscuit cost £4.99: it is not a cheap biscuit. If you go to Stop & Taste, have the biscuit.

Finally I went up one last time.

“I’m sorry, but I need to have another of those biscuits to take home, because if my wife doesn’t get to try one it’s more than my life’s worth.”

He grinned, in a way which suggested he’d been told that or something similar more than once . There was a pause, my card payment went through and I thought that I should ask him what I ought to order next time. Before I could say it out loud, he told me anyway.

“So next time you come, you have to try our burger. I know everyone does a burger, but we buy the steak and mince it ourselves, here onsite. All our ketchup is home made, too. And you should order the lamb chops. We make our own mint sauce as well.”

So I started thinking about how easy it was to get to Emmer Green from the town centre. The challenge was finding a bus, but once you did it only took about twenty minutes. And then I pondered whether the people of Emmer Green knew yet how lucky they were, and decided that if I lived in Emmer Green I would very much enjoy lording it over Caversham about this.

My bill overall, for those two starters, that burger, a Diet Coke and my heavenly cookie came to just under £34. I ate quite a lot of food, entirely for research purposes I might add, but I would challenge anybody with a healthy appetite and/or healthy curiosity to go to Stop & Taste and not want to order a fair amount of the menu. I went on my way thanking them effusively, still not entirely sure how to do justice to the experience I’d had, and when Anton asked me to pop a review on Google I promised, not entirely dishonestly, that I would.

I don’t think I’ve encountered a surprise package quite like Stop & Taste this year, and I’d be amazed if I experience anything comparable next year. It still has a slight feeling of being a hallucination, although I will have to go back just to confirm that the whole thing wasn’t a figment of my imagination. On paper, a fast food(ish) restaurant offering burgers, tacos, lobster rolls and biryani shouldn’t make sense, but going there and experiencing it in person, I was astonished to find that somehow it did.

The easy thing would be to say, as restaurant reviewers like to do, that Stop & Taste is just what Emmer Green needs or, more grandly, that it’s just what Reading needs. I won’t do that, for a couple of reasons. First of all, what do I know? I don’t live in Emmer Green, for all I know its residents might be very happy with their current takeaway arrangements. Secondly, I’m long past pronouncing what Reading needs, because when I do that none of it happens anyway. I’m no kind of pundit, not really.

So instead I’ll say this: on that slightly cold, murky night in October, Stop & Taste was exactly what I needed. Not only because it fed me well and because I felt looked after. Not only because I got the rosy glow of watching a place looking to find its own spot in a community. Not only because of that cookie, either.

But also because it’s good to retain that capacity for curveballs, to occasionally still be surprised and to be reminded that even if you think you understand how everything works, now and again something will come along and teach you that even after 12 years you can’t judge a book by its cover. The jolt that prevents you becoming jaded is always necessary, and never comes a moment too soon. I’ll try and learn from that, but because it’s me I wouldn’t bet on it.

My bus dropped me at Reading Station just as Zoë hopped off the train from work. I was catching another bus home, she was heading to a CAMRA meeting, our clocks not quite synchronised yet. So I met her outside the station, all pleased with myself, and handed over the cardboard box with the red velvet cookie in it. I didn’t get the rapturous reception I was hoping for – where were my brownie points? – but I figured that it was because she hadn’t tasted it yet. Forty-five minutes later I was relaxing on the sofa when my phone pinged with a message from her. Just two words.

That cookie, it said.

Stop & Taste – 8.2
3 Milestone Way, Emmer Green, RG4 8XW
0118 3044981

https://www.instagram.com/stop._and_.taste/

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Café review: Notes Coffee

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews

Zoë and I were in town the Monday before our holiday, we’d finished all our errands and there was time to fit in lunch somewhere before taking the bus home to face the mountain of ironing and packing. Zoë wanted to go to Shed, which I could completely understand, and then it occurred to me – we could try out Notes, the first of the raft of hospitality businesses we’ve been promised on Station Hill, and I could get a review of it under my belt.

Zoë has been disappointed by shiny new things in Reading quite enough times, especially recently, and I suspect she had a Tuna Turner on her mind, and she was stubbornly refusing to budge. So I offered to buy her lunch, and that’s what sealed the deal.

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Café review: Mon Chéri Café & Bakery

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

For childfree people like me, the tail end of August is possibly when you most keenly feel the disconnect between you and the rest of the world. At work everyone’s back from their holidays, preparing for the beginning of the academic year, already mourning their week or fortnight on a sunbed, by a pool or in a villa. My Instagram has been full of holidaymakers squeezing the last few drops out of the month. They have got excited, packed and prepared, touched down, drunk cold beers or glasses of rosé, topped up their tans, raced through some novels. And now they’re all coming back, like migrating birds, refreshed but, most likely, a little sad.

I’ve watched everybody embark and return, seen the Instagram posts and stories, and told myself each time that my time will eventually come. And it will, soon, but not quite yet: by the time you read this I will be hours away from setting my out of office and closing the laptop, but as I write this I’m running on fumes. The rhetoric at work will all be about how everybody is full of beans and ready to go, to close out the year: I am depleted, and ready to go to the airport. Our timelines won’t synchronise until I return, when we all prepare to put the clocks back, put the central heating back on, contemplate the end of the year.

Anyway, the last day of August found me with a day on my tod, feeling a little melancholy and looking for some feeling of escape. So I decided to make my way to Mon Chéri, the Greek café on West Street, to see some Hellenic sunshine might illuminate my mood. It opened at the end of last year, I think, and has been on my list ever since, but it’s taken a little while to reach the top of it.

And when I say Mon Chéri is open, I mean that it’s very open indeed: if Google is to be believed, they start trading at 6am every day, not closing until 8 in the evening. When I commute to work, my bus trundles down West Street around half-seven. Mon Chéri is always open by then, awning out, with some customers in already. Is any hospitality business in Reading open quite that long, with the exception of Gregg’s and Wetherspoons?

So. yes, I partly picked Mon Chéri this week because I’m so very ready for a holiday and, for me, Greece is the place I most powerfully associate with holidays, even now. The first time I ever left this country I was thirteen years old and my parents, heady with the rush of having remortgaged our suburban semi-detached, took us to Corfu to share a villa with some friends. I had never been on a plane, never known sunshine like it, was fascinated by the way Greek lemonade tasted different, couldn’t get enough of the music of the cicadas – when I could tear myself away from a book or my chess set, that is.

Early on in our stay we found a taverna, run by a chap called Tassos, and it was love at first sight. The food took forever to arrive, but nobody cared because we were sitting outside, on those balmy evenings, and my parents had access to a steady supply of Retsina. Tassos had an ancient stereo that played Greek music, but it was on the blink so it was always randomly speeding up or slowing down, some kind of weird bouzouki remix. The overall effect was of an establishment inches from collapse.

Sometimes customers at a neighbouring table would be so angry about the interminable wait that a blazing row would ensue. My parents’ friends Carol and Frank wanted the earth to open up and swallow them; my dad found it hilarious. We went every night, and by the end we were such regulars that after other customers complained, as they often did, Tassos would come to our table and say something to the effect of What was their problem?

As a trip, it had a lasting effect on me. It was the only time I remember my family going out for dinner more than once a year, and I think it made me fall in love with food and restaurants. Specifically, it made me love Greek food. My dad was keen that we enjoy ourselves but not go financially mad, so we were limited to the least expensive things on the menu, the souvlaki, the sofrito – veal in garlic – and the stifado. And I became addicted to the last of those, the rich stew of beef braised to surrender with tomatoes and soft, whole shallots. I can’t remember if it was Tassos’ wife or mother in the kitchen – or even his grandma – but whoever it was, the chef was a genius.

Since then I’ve been to Greece many times. I’ve done Rhodes, which I liked even more than Corfu, although I’ve only once managed to stay in Lindos, the bit of it I adored the most, once. I went to Kefalonia just after the Captain Corelli film, and had dinner with a pre-fame Simon Pegg, sporting a Beckhamesque mohawk, at the next table. I’ve stayed in Mykonos, which I loved despite a nagging feeling that I didn’t see the best of it. I’ve holidayed in beautiful, scruffy Athens, walking among the city’s ruins just before my first marriage went the same way.

And then there’s my very favourite part of Greece – Parga, just around the coast from Preveza airport, a beautiful harbour town full of winding lanes where you can completely forget about the world, sit in one of the many tavernas, eat fresh fish and drink sweet rosé and, for a little while at least, become a twenty-first century lotus eater. One one holiday there I took a boat trip to Corfu Town, strolled the Napoleonic esplanade of the Liston, felt the whole thing coming full circle.

All that said, I’ve not been to Greece in nearly a decade. At first it was Covid’s fault – my trip to Lindos, booked in hopeful ignorance at the start of 2020, was shifted back again and again until we accepted, reluctantly, that it just wouldn’t happen. But the world has gone back to normal since then, something has stopped me returning and I’m not sure what it is.

Analysis paralysis, possibly: I am never able to pick the island, pick the resort, pick the accommodation. I see everyone else going there and I envy their certitude but that magic combination of the right airport, the right flights, the right place to stay has never jumped out at me. I’ve contemplated Chania, or Agios Nikolaos, or going back to Parga, but I’ve always chickened out and booked a city break instead. For many years I wanted to go to Hydra – because Leonard Cohen – and someone I knew on Instagram who went every year even sent me her guide, but the sheer faff of getting there just put me off. You’d need to be there two weeks for that journey to be worth it, and I never take two weeks off.

So the closest I would get, this year at least, was Mon Chéri. It’s always saddened me that Greek food has never really gained a foothold, either in this country or in Reading: we had Kyrenia, which I revered, but since then it’s been Spitiko, which I ought to visit. We had The Real Greek, which left the Oracle before it could be pushed, and we still have Tasty Greek Souvlaki which is indeed tasty, and Greek(ish), but not the full taverna experience.

But Greece is better represented by cafés, with our branches of Coffee Under Pressure and now with Mon Chéri. And I truly love Greek cafés and bakeries – in Parga, most mornings began with breakfast at a place called the Green Bakery, on a sun-dappled terrace with coffee, pastry and a paradisiac, indolent day ahead. When I came in off the drizzle-spattered pavement of West Street, I guess that’s what I was hoping to recapture.

The interior had nothing of the Ionian Sea about it, which wasn’t to say that I disliked it. The plush dusky pink chairs and marble-effect tables were actually quite tasteful, although on a clement day – which this wasn’t – you’d want to be out on the terrace, under the awning, taking it all in. But actually, from the next set of tables back, looking out, you had much the same experience.

So I could see the tables under the shelter of the awning, all smoking and chatting and drinking their freddoes, and beyond that all the comings and goings of West Street, a richer pageant than I’d expected. Did it matter that the horizon had Mleczko Delikatesy on it rather than some cerulean vanishing point where the sea met the sky? It should have done, but I found I didn’t mind. The music was both Greek and relentless, and I rather loved the overall effect.

I asked at the counter if there was a menu and my server pointed to the coffee menu on the wall. Otherwise, it was a case of looking in the cabinets, under the fluorescent lights, and deciding what you fancied. Most of the space was taken up with sweet stuff – some very Greek, like big triangles of baklava sitting in a sticky puddle of honey, or kataifi with its golden combover. Others were more generic – red velvet cake, croissants, individual portions of millefeuille or tiramisu. If you had a sweet tooth, you would feel spoiled for choice.

When I asked about savoury options, she told me it was “Greek breakfast” and pointed to the smaller cabinet in front of her. That was mostly the kind of pastries I used to so love at the Green Bakery all those years ago – cheese pies, sausage pies and the like. I was tempted by a peinirli – a boat-shaped pizza a little like a Turkish pide, or a Georgian acharuli khachapuri – but in the end I decided the right thing to try was the classic, the spanakopita, the spinach and feta filo pie I must have eaten dozens of times on holiday. I asked for a latte with it and prepared for some top notch people watching.

I found it strange that the spanakopita came in a paper bag, with no plate, but I reasoned that it was after all finger food and I didn’t want to be like David Cameron, eating his hot dog with a knife and fork. But actually once I started tucking into it, it made even less sense. The filo pastry is meant to be light stuff – a quick Google found flowery phrases like “shatteringly crisp” and “perfectly flaky”. What it shouldn’t be, which this was, is tough. It’s supposed to release its contents joyously, but this pastry felt like it was trying to protect them. When somewhere describes itself as a café and bakery, that’s not ideal.

I soldiered on with it, but even as you moved past that overly chewy perimeter it didn’t reward perseverance. The filling – and filling suggests more generous contents than were actually the case – was thin, bland stuff. I so wanted to like this, and a good example of this Greek classic would be a very welcome discovery in town, but it was beyond me. So was finishing it. I could feel the slight coating of grease on my fingers and I became very aware of empty calories. I’m almost reluctant to say this, because I don’t want to cause a diplomatic incident, but C.U.P.’s spanakopita is miles better.

Mon Chéri’s coffee can’t match C.U.P.’s either, but on this occasion you aren’t comparing like with like. Mon Chéri has no interest in doing third wave stuff, so instead it offers a more classic option bought in from Hausbrandt, a company I’d never heard of. Would it surprise you to hear that I quite liked it, though? It had that slightly rugged, almost-burnt taste of less fancy coffee, but was perfectly drinkable and I could imagine it giving just the jolt you needed first thing in the morning. It reminded me of the coffee at De Nata, which is not a criticism.

By then I was nicely settled and enjoying myself more than I thought I might, despite that pastry failing to live up completely to either my expectations or my memories. But perhaps that wasn’t important: I had a lovely comfy seat, Europop was wafting through the room and life’s tapestry was parading past. I decided it wouldn’t be right to judge Mon Chéri on a pastry and a coffee alone, so I went up again to get something sweet and – because I was thoroughly getting into the swing of things – a freddo. I remembered sitting out on a square in Athens once, loving how much everyone just sat and chatted and drank coffee seemingly all afternoon long. Maybe the freddo was the way to pull that look off in Reading.

I decided to go for the mosaiko, a chocolate and biscuit confection which reminded me a little bit of tiffin and my server – a different chap this time, friendly and authoritative – told me which kind of freddo I wanted, espresso rather than cappuccino. He was excellent, as was his colleague from earlier on, which made me love the place even more and widen the gulf between how much I liked being there and what I made of the food.

It turns out that mosaiko is effectively a Greek take on chocolate salami, a no-bake slab of dark chocolate and biscuit. You might say that only an idiot goes to a place that describes itself as a café and bakery and orders that, and in my defence I would say that yes, I probably am an idiot but, to be fair, the spanakopita had been baked and that was no great shakes.

Anyway, the mosaiko was everything I should like, on paper. All either chocolate or biscuit and, in theory, more chocolate than biscuit, like those enormous chocolate-coated Bourbons M&S sells that are like Penguins on steroids. But again, the theory and the practice weren’t on the same page. This time you had to use a knife and fork, teasing through the fault lines of the biscuits to find a place to cut, producing a solid wodge to eat without sending the rest careening across the room.

And once you’d done all that, it just felt resolutely unspecial. The biscuit was soft rather than crisp and buttery, as if it had gone a little stale before meeting its fate. And the chocolate was very basic and flat, oddly chewy with no richness at all. The whole thing made for a strangely homogeneous slab of what should have been indulgent but was nothingy instead. I think this cost just shy of a fiver. Those M&S chocolate coated Bourbons are something like three quid.

Again, the irony was that I really enjoyed the freddo. It would put hairs on your chest and was best sipped slowly, but it was a lot of fun and it had been sweetened, as I’d asked, really nicely.

I felt like the most indecisive traitor of all time as I thanked my server, got my bill and settled up. Two coffees, a pastry and that mosaiko cost me £14.20, and whatever you think of the quality you do have to also bear in mind how easy it would be to rack up a bill that size at Picnic, or Gail’s, or any of Reading’s many other more chichi cafés. Was I airbrushing the bad bits of my time at Mon Chéri because I wanted to like them and, even more, because I really wanted to be on holiday in Greece? Or did it have something going for it that the wonky food couldn’t completely outweigh?

I’m still not sure, but I hope this is a salutary counterpoint to the rare times when I go somewhere like Vino Vita and put the boot in. I don’t enjoy going to bad places, writing bad reviews or leaving bad ratings. I especially don’t enjoy it when it’s somewhere that I really wanted to like, that has created a lovely little spot in one of Reading’s less salubrious places which plenty of people clearly love. It feels churlish to say yes, but the cakes and pastries, and I wish I wasn’t doing it, but if I gave it a rave review I’d be leading at least some of you to dietary disappointment.

But if I just say but the cakes and pastries that misses the fact that Mon Chéri has real charm, that I liked it there, and that maybe I could forego eating there just to have a coffee, and enjoy that view, and feel like part of something. Perhaps I need to go back and try some of the other stuff, even if it looks very generic indeed, to give it more of a chance. Sometimes writing reviews is very easy and sometimes, somewhere like this comes along and I wish I hadn’t made the decision, many years ago, to be reductive about restaurants and cafés to one decimal place.

So there you go, that’s Mon Chéri: pick the bones out of that one. I don’t know, maybe I just need a holiday. Where in Greece should I go next year? You strike me as the kind of people who might have some excellent suggestions.

Mon Chéri Café & Bakery – 6.6
18 West Street, Reading, RG1 1TT
0118 3533761

https://www.instagram.com/monchericafebakery/

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

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Restaurant review: Vino Vita

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

Last year, in one of the more baffling developments in Reading’s food and drink scene, wine bar Veeno changed its name to Vino Vita. It wasn’t initially clear whether this was because the people running it had bought the business from Veeno or if something else was going on. If you read the details on Vino Vita’s website you’d be none the wiser. “We’ve rebranded, but our commitment to excellence remains unchanged” it said. “Join us as we start an exciting new chapter that expands our offerings and vision.”

More details emerged when the owners spoke to the Chronicle last month. “A big reason why we became independent was so we could have more say over the produce” said the restaurant’s Head Of Sales. “We developed our whole menu, and everything is done on site.” I remember reading the article and thinking that this potentially merited a revisit, but the main thing I took away was They have a head of sales? It felt like a role Veeno, a chain with 5 restaurants across England and Scotland, might need but that Vino Vita, a single spot opposite Forbury Gardens, probably didn’t.

So what were the differences, and had Vino Vita improved on the Veeno formula since taking their destiny into their own hands? The only way to be sure was to eat there – which clearly I did, because you’re reading this – but before that I carried out some research. Because I visited Veeno on duty nearly 8 years ago, not long after they opened, and at the time I would have said that there was plenty of room for improvement.

Vino Vita’s menu does indeed offer a slightly wider selection of dishes than Veeno’s, with more nibbles, bruschette, small plates and so on. It has about as many pasta dishes, although I’d say Vino Vita’s sound less interesting. The big difference, and again this is baffling, is the sheer volume of pizza: between conventional pizzas and Pinsa Romana, Vino Vita offers almost twice as many options as its estranged siblings.

Did Vino Vita move in this direction to compete directly with the likes of Mama’s Way, who clearly have superb access to produce? And if so, wouldn’t you maybe change course given that Reading has seen pizza place after pizza place open this year, at least two of them – Paesinos and Amò – being truly first class? I did wonder.

A couple of other strange things that came out of my homework. One was wine. Veeno’s selling point was that the wine was from their own vineyard: their selection was excellent, the vast majority of it was available by the glass and much of it was affordable. To give you an example, 7 of their 21 reds will set you back £30 or less. By contrast, Vino Vita’s 21 reds were more expensive – the cheapest was £29.95, the remainder all cost more than that.

It wasn’t clear where any of them came from either, because unlike Veeno, Vino Vita didn’t quote producers or vintages. It felt odd to split away from the parent company to offer greater choice, only for that choice to be more expensive and less informative. Like the name change, it had a hint of shadiness about it.

The other odd thing was something I discovered when making a reservation, because booking online with Vino Vita also raised some questions. The thing is, you don’t just book a table. You also have to tell them, and I’ve never seen this before, when you plan to give it back. Not only that, but you also have to say what you’re booking it for – is it for a meal or an Experience?

Yes, an Experience with a capital E, and the booking system asks you which one you want: Quattro Rossi, for example, Trip To Italy or Italian Afternoon Tea, without telling you what they are (they’re on a separate menu, but it’s odd that they don’t tell you as part of the booking Experience – sorry, I mean experience). And all those Experiences? Copied straight from Veeno. The grape didn’t fall very far from the vine, it seemed.

After all that research, I was in two minds about going to Vino Vita. Was it different enough? Was it promising enough? But one thing clinched it. Sometimes people specifically ask if they can join me for particular reviews: so for instance, when I get round to visiting Lebanese Flavours to discover whether the artist formally known as Bakery House has simply changed its name or changed for the worse, my friend Liz has called shotgun on that one.

Similarly, I can’t review Wendy’s unless it’s in the company of Kevin, a long-standing reader, because I promised him, and as he’s moved to the Cotswolds it won’t happen any time soon. In this case it was Zoë, my wife and number one dining companion, who put in a request specifically to go to Vino Vita, so I met her outside at the start of the weekend, to discover whether their commitment to excellence really did remain unchanged.

Our table wasn’t ready when we arrived, so we went out to the terrace to have a drink before our meal. It really is one of Reading’s most appealing al fresco spaces, a very pleasant spot opposite the park, strung with lights and convivial on a warm day. It was nice to spend time there before dinner, quitting as the evening became a little nippy, but it does help if you don’t mind passive smoking because there was a fair bit of that. Very Italian, I suppose.

It was, however, difficult to get attention. So by the time we did, and managed to place an order, and the nibbles came out, it was chilly enough that it felt like time to move inside. Vino Vita’s interior didn’t feel any different to when it was Veeno, and I’ve always found it a slightly disjointed set of spaces – some high tables, some low tables, a series of disconnected rooms that don’t entirely feel like they’re all part of the same establishment.

We were taken to a more conventional table to the right of the bar, in the room I’m pretty sure I ate in back in 2017. On a Friday night the place wasn’t rammed, although I suppose many of the customers were outside. Perhaps they seated all the people that had booked a table for an actual meal in the same room, and everyone else was off having their Experiences.

Our nibbles were disappointing, sub-pub stuff. I was hoping that salted almonds would be the kind of treats you get in Andalusia, burnished with oil and speckled with salt. These were out of a packet or a tub, dusty with salt and completely unremarkable. Even more nothingy were the taralli, dense little knots with the texture of sawdust. Really good taralli come spiked with fennel seeds and, with a crisp white wine, can be a delight. These weren’t really good taralli. Eight pounds for two ramekins of blandness.

We had a wine flight with these, the “VINO.VITA.BIO” which was three 70ml glasses of Vino Vita’s organic wines. The first, a verdicchio, was genuinely very enjoyable – and it was just as well that it was, because getting someone to bring some water to accompany those very dry snacks proved difficult. When we finally did manage it one of the staff brought a small bottle of water, a single glass and another glass full to the brim with ice. We had two perfectly good water glasses sitting on the table, which made it all a bit weird. “It’s funny” said Zoe. “They do have enough staff, it just feels like they don’t.”

The other two wines in that flight, by the way, were also quite nice. One, a Nero d’Avola, was decent, perfumed and very enjoyable: it didn’t go with anything we ordered, but that might be because it was tasty and none of the food turned out to be. The third wine was a Frappato, which is a new one on me, and was also perfectly drinkable.

This is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who enjoy wines on the medium end of the spectrum said the blurb on the piece of paper which accompanied the wine flight: that quote is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who like their sentences to be completely devoid of meaning. As with the wine list, the piece of paper didn’t give useful details like producers or vintages, and you didn’t get to see the bottles or labels. Did that make for a premium experience, or Experience, when you were paying £17 for 210ml of wine?

We’d also ordered some garlic ciabatta, but our server accidentally brought over the bread selection instead. He was very apologetic, and ran off and made amends, but it was a useful exercise because the bread was a dreary-looking generic selection, none of which looked like it had been baked onsite or indeed anywhere exciting; I made a mental note not to order any of the numerous bruschetta options.

Instead we got what we’d originally ordered, four slightly sad triangles of ciabatta which had been sort of toasted, a little, inconsistently brushed with olive oil and scattered with parsley. There was some garlic there, but nowhere near the industrial quantities Italian food called for. Zoë thought this was okay, but she was being charitable. I thought that for six pounds I was having the kind of thing you could easily pick up at a supermarket.

The real crimes against Italian food, though, were to follow, in a meal where the longer it went on the worse it seemed to get. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate that than the first of the small plates we’d ordered. The menu promised stuffed courgette flowers, and I thought this would be a real test of whether they truly held all those lofty aspirations. Because a courgette flower, its head stuffed with ricotta and lemon zest, the whole thing fried in an almost translucent, lacy batter is one of the very best things you can eat.

It is serious cooking, and a menu offering it is making a claim to be serious about cooking. I still remember it being served by the Lyndhurst, when I held a readers’ lunch many years ago: Amy, the vegetarian on our table, had it all to herself and every omnivore envied her. It’s taking all my strength not to include a picture of it in this review, so you can see what it’s meant to look like. Instead, just look at that: three beige cylinders bearing no resemblance to courgette flowers at all. No light coating, instead a thick layer of stodge.

Inside, something that definitely wasn’t a courgette flower: I’m prepared to take their word for it that it was courgette, but only just. And inside that, some blend of cheeses that tasted of nothing. This was like some kind of continental reinterpretation of stuffed jalapeños you might pick up at Iceland, an affront to the promise of this dish. Providing some honey, the only thing that actually tasted of anything, didn’t rescue it. The price – £8.50 – rubbed salt in the wound.

The arancini were in the same vein. Veeno only did one kind, filled with ragu, whereas at Vino Vita you can choose between ragu, mushroom and truffle or ham and cheese. The mushroom and truffle ones didn’t taste of truffle in any way, being just claggy stodge with no crunch or crispness to the exterior. Plonking them on a shallow pool of tomato sauce, grating some cheese and unceremoniously dumping some basil in the middle neither elevated them nor disguised their inadequacy.

I’ve used that word, stodge, twice now, because nothing else encapsulates those dishes. Italian food at its best can embrace the wonder and comfort of carbs, but this seemed to prioritise filling the stomach and emptying the wallet with brutal efficiency. In fairness, these were billed as bite-sized and only cost £6, but they still weren’t worth it. When I went to Veeno, 8 years ago, I said that it felt like the kitchen was more interested in margins than food. Hold my beer, said Vino Vita.

Neither Zoë nor I managed to take a picture of one of our small plates, so you’ll have to both imagine it and take my word for it. If you read the title carpaccio of salmon and the description smoked salmon drizzled with a lemon and caper dressing and fresh rocket and think that, based on what you’ve heard so far, this is likely to be a small piece of smoked salmon draped over a hill of the kind of salad you get in a bag at the supermarket, domed to make it look like you’re getting more salmon than you are, meanly scattered with capers, you would be absolutely spot on. Give yourself a pat on the back.

This is me trying to find positives, believe it or not. But I don’t think even Pollyanna could find a positive in the final small plate, the caponata. Caponata is a wonderful thing, a cold, sweet and sour aubergine stew with olives, capers and pine nuts. It has a distinctive taste which I adore. It is not, as it was at Vino Vita, a bland mulch of aubergine and far too many tinned black olives, with no sweetness, sharpness or sourness. It didn’t even look like caponata, didn’t have that depth of colour, although you’d have to whip off all the pointless foliage that had been dumped on it to be absolutely sure.

You know who used to do a very enjoyable caponata, back in the day? Carluccio’s, of all places. You know who does the worst caponata I’ve ever tasted? That would be Vino Vita.

Now, you might just think I’m being curmudgeonly, so I have to say this in my defence: Zoë thought all of this was awful. Zoë, the woman who is able to tolerate me. Even she – especially she – found all these dishes unforgivably bad.

“There’s somebody in that kitchen who really hates Italy” was her conclusion.

“It definitely doesn’t feel like anybody in the kitchen’s ever been there.”

“What we’ve just had,” she added, “was a crap-paccio. A crap-paccio and a craponata.”

Irony of ironies, the bottle of white wine we were on by now was really very nice, with fruit and structure and, to my mind, even a little hint of licorice. And by this point we had a server who was really good and very personable, checking in on us and taking away our empties. At just over fifty pounds you’d want that bottle to be good – Vivino suggested its mark up was something like three times retail price – but however pleasant it was, I wasn’t sure how much of it you’d need to drink to make the food seem like a good idea. I was sure, though, that I wasn’t capable of putting that much wine away.

The food up to that point had been so poor that it became partly about cutting our losses. The couple at the next table had paid up and gone leaving behind the best part of a bowl of anaemic-looking pasta – the mushroom tagliatelle, at a guess – and a blond, bland pizza. So we decided to try a Pinsa Romana, the airier Roman variant as popularised in Reading by Mama’s Way. In a way, I was trying to give Vino Vita one last chance, aware that if I had a conventional pizza and was comparing it to Amò or Paesinos it would be the final nail in the coffin.

But the final nail in the coffin was the Pinsa Romana. The Piccante promised, if the menu were to be believed, ‘nduja and oil, roasted peppers, burrata, rocket and basil. Like all the other promises, it was an empty one. The base was crunchy, dry as a bone with no airiness or give: Mama’s Way may buy their pinsa bases in, but they were miles better than this.

The pinsa had been pre-cut into eight miserly squares, and good luck finding ‘nduja on every one, because you wouldn’t. “Nigel Farage turns up to vote more often than ‘nduja turns up to this pizza” was Zoë’s verdict. Bland unlovely bits of burrata had been placed here and there – no oil, no discernible basil and no rocket.

In the rocket’s place, obscuring just how atrocious this pinsa was – which surely must have been the prime objective – somebody had thrown random salad on top of the whole affair. This was the last straw for Zoë. “It’s meant to have rocket on it, not the contents of a fucking bag of Florette”. The whole thing was so subpar that we followed our neighbours’ example.

It’s not even that this pinsa didn’t compare well to what you could get a short walk away at Paesinos or Amò, although it didn’t. It’s that it didn’t compare well to what you could get at Zia Lucia, or Zizzi, or Pizza Express. Or Marks, or Tesco, or Aldi, or the Co-Op. And if you bought one from a supermarket and took it home, you could dot it with ‘nduja yourself and even if it was from the chiller cabinet, heated up in your oven, it would be dozens of times better than this effort. It wouldn’t cost you £15.50, either, and for that money you can enjoy the best pizza Reading currently has to offer, minutes away on Kings Road.

Our server came over to check how our food was. We said “it was fine” almost in unison, the universal English euphemism for It was bad, but I can’t face a conversation about that. Our bill came to £166, including a 12.5% service charge. A bit of me wants to say that in Vino Vita’s defence, nearly ninety of that was on wine. But even if I do say that in their defence, the rest was indefensible.

Can you tell I wasn’t a fan? I don’t think I’ve written a review like this in ages, and certainly not of somewhere independent, and I don’t take pleasure in doing it. I’m reassured that Zoë, who is positivity personified, disliked it even more than I did – because yes, it turns out that’s possible. And I don’t know what offends me most about the place. The mediocrity is bad enough, the mediocrity coupled with the laziness is worse. To combine both those things with really iffy value, at a time when Reading’s Italian scene is having something of a renaissance, is woeful.

Worse still, it made me feel like that rebrand from Veeno to Vino Vita had something else behind it. A desire to make more from less, to cut corners and conceal charging a premium. Even some of the dishes that have been tweaked from Veeno’s menu to Vino Vita’s display this – Veeno does a bruschetta with capers and Sicilian dark tuna, Vino Vita’s boasts a tuna paté. What’s the Italian for Shippams?

But just as sad is this: with the Cellar gone and Vino Vita, well, like this, Reading still doesn’t have the wine bar with excellent food that has been missing ever since the Tasting House closed after lockdown. That gap in the market remains, and on this evidence Vino Vita isn’t even trying to fill it. Maybe Notes, just opened on Station Hill, will do better: it’s not as if it could do much worse. It is bad luck for Vino Vita that I review them the week after I had one of my meals of the year – also Italian, but miles better – at RAGÙ, but Vino Vita would be bad whoever you were comparing them to.

It might have been a little different if the service had been better – Apo, formerly of Dolce Vita and Pho, and one of Reading’s great front of house operators – works at Vino Vita, although he wasn’t on duty the night I went there. But the problems are squarely on the menu and in the kitchen, not elsewhere: you could forgive the slightly disjointed interior or the relatively expensive wine if everything else was firing on all cylinders, but it didn’t even get started.

If Paesinos or Amò had more space and an alcohol license, I’m not sure what the point of Vino Vita would be. In fact, if either of them did I think it would spell curtains for Vino Vita. I might be wrong, of course, because it seemed to be doing reasonably well the night I was there and that puff piece in the Chronicle made it sound like they were going from strength to strength. Be that as it may Vino Vita achieved something I would never have thought possible, despite nearly twelve years in the reviewing game. It made me miss Veeno, and that’s not a good thing.

Vino Vita – 4.6
Minerva House, 20 Valpy Street, Reading, RG1 1AR
0118 9505493

https://vinovita.bar

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