Tag: Reading

Restaurant review: Amò Italian Street Food

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Amò closed in mid-December, apparently for maintenance, with no indication of when, or whether, it will reopen. I have left the review up for posterity.

In the good old days, where you stood on certain binary debates was simply a way of positioning you in the world. Cream first or jam first? Plain or milk chocolate Bounty? Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? Were you a fan of the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? All these things used just to be a form of triangulation, little points on a chart that, taken together, might give someone an idea of you (and, since you’re asking: cream first; milk chocolate; salt and vinegar; the Beatles; neither).

When did that all change? 2016, I suppose, when we all became Leave or Remain, indelibly stamped, and at every stage from that point forwards. We’re always asked what side we’re on, and now it’s not a useful piece of trivia but a necessary step to place yourself on one side or another of a yawning chasm. Are you pro- or anti-Israel? Do you think J.K. Rowling is a hero or a villain? How about Farage, or Trump? Did you believe in lockdowns, masks, vaccines? Did you leave Twitter or stay? If you left, did you go to Bluesky or Threads?

Like the Tower Of Babel, we’re now all scattered to the four winds, trying to find our tribe and arguing, endlessly, with the others. It’s not a bit of fun, any more. And this is all rich coming from me, because I’m painfully aware that I’m as polarising as most. Happily, Reading faces another tricky choice now that’s potentially just as difficult, but hopefully less divisive: Paesinos or Amò?

The two pizza places opened on Kings Road, two doors and three months apart, the latest in a weird series of rivals in very close proximity, following the example of Pho and Bánh Mì QB in Kings Walk or Iro Sushi and You Me Sushi on Friar Street. What is it with that? You must be very confident in your product to open so near to a direct competitor, like Bánh Mì QB did, but with Paesinos and Amò, Iro and You Me so little time separated both arrivals that it must be an unhappy coincidence. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a new business only to find that another one a lot like yours is doing exactly the same, a stone’s throw away.

Anyway, regular readers will know that I reviewed Paesinos a month ago with my Italian friend Enza (who is, just to confuse matters, an Amò superfan) and it received a glowing write up from me. But I knew, even as I was eating there, that I needed to prioritise visiting its neighbour, if only because Enza told me that it was as good as, if not better than, the restaurant I had so enjoyed. I couldn’t go with Enza, because she was so far from impartial, and this time I took my friend Jo, also of Italian descent, last seen checking out House Of Flavours with me.

Amò is, as I’ve said before, something of a joint venture between Madoo, the founding father of Reading’s Italian quarter which opened four and a half years ago, and Pulcinella Focaccia, a business that sold pizza and focaccia for delivery from premises out in Earley and has been trading for a couple of years; I’d never had food from the latter, but I’d heard plenty of good things. And arriving at Amò on a weekday evening I was struck that, in terms of branding and decor at least, it felt fully formed in a way that Paesinos didn’t so much, or Madoo for that matter.

Everything was tasteful and unfussy without being Spartan, with a bare wood floor and tables, seats and benches. It seated somewhere between fifteen and twenty people, so significantly more spacious than the likes of Mama’s Way or Paesinos, and it had a nicely calm feel to it. Amò’s logo was in the middle of a deep red swatch of paint on the wall behind the counter, and resting on that counter was possibly one of the most tempting displays in Reading.

Amò very cleverly changes up its offering around the time people start finishing work, so until 5pm you can try pizza al taglio or something from a changing array of Italian street food. They also, I think, offer focaccia sandwiches during the day, although most of them had gone when Jo and I turned up around half seven. After 5pm the sandwiches drop away but instead, alongside the slices of pizza and street food, you can order a whole pizza from a more varied menu.

The street food was all very tempting, all things that I would challenge anybody not to fancy eating. Arancini, croquettes, mozzarella bites and frittatini – fried pasta – were all tributes to the time-honoured method of coating something in breadcrumbs and frying it until it was golden, crispy and alluring. The lighter side of Amò’s offering is keenly priced, too. Most of the street food dishes are around a fiver, pizza by the slice is less than that and they do multibuys if you want two stuffed focacce or two slices of pizza. Whole pizzas top out at about fifteen pounds, unless you add sausage or Parma ham to one of the options.

And Amò’s pizza menu struck me as very clever, because – either by accident or design – it kept the overlap with its neighbour’s pizzas to a minimum. Amò has a list of the classics, of course, so you can have a margherita, or prosciutto cotto and mushroom, or sausage and friarielli. But on the other side of the small, laminated menu, you find loads of less conventional options, far more interesting than the kind of things you could find at Zia Lucia or even, dare I say it, Amò’s neighbours.

That meant pizza with a purple sweet potato base, topped with cacio e pepe cream, guanciale and sweet potato crisps, or pizza with a pistachio cream base and mortadella. Others had a truffle cream base, or pumpkin cream, or even a cavolo nero base (“it’s the gourmet version of the salsiccia e friarielli”, Enza had told me, when I was looking for recommendations).

You may find all of that a bit leftfield, or it might whet your appetite for wandering off Reading’s beaten pizza track. I think for me, though, it was neither: I chalked those up as things to try once I had road tested the classics.

But first, Jo and I had a chinotto each and ordered some of those smaller dishes to kick things off. And as we waited for them, she told me about her childhood holidays by the coast, near Salerno, buying balls of mozzarella as big as your head from some beachside hut and eating them with bread, nothing else required. It was brilliant, Jo said, but it did slightly ruin the mozzarella you can easily get in this country; like me, Jo considers it a seriously underrated cheese.

As so often I felt a little pang for a childhood I didn’t have, listening to Jo. But then there was something to be said for sitting in a caravan in Devon, rain drilling on the roof, eating hog’s pudding cooked in a frying pan – always with tinned tomatoes on the side – watching Roland Rat on TV-am, knowing that the evening would be spent playing cards and watching reruns of Shogun (the original, not the superb remake). Maybe those memories would sound exotic to an Italian: on balance, though, I guessed not.

Amò’s mozzarella bites may not have been the size of my head, but they were gorgeous nonetheless. Crisp-crumbed spheres, golden but not overdone, the shell holding just-molten-enough mozzarella, they were a proper delight. I might have had them with something to dip them into, but it was a minor quibble with something so delightful. So was the fact that however carefully I ate them, with my hands at least, a little liquid sprayed out, leaving incriminating marks on my shirt. I was too happy to care, and the attentive staff quickly brought extra napkins.

At five pounds fifty for four, they could have been the bargain of the meal, if not the month, but for the fact that we also ordered two of the frittatini. These are yours for three pounds fifty, or six quid for two, and come in two flavours. If you go to Amò, my advice is to make sure you have one to yourself or, as Jo and I did, order one of each and share. They’re a bit fiddly to break up – that crisp carapace presents resistance when you’re relying on a wooden fork – but they reward the effort, with dividends.

They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form. And their form – big, irregular golden pucks – belied just how wonderful they were on the inside.

Picture an arancino, but instead of risotto rice visualise a cluster of little tubes of pasta, and rather than a molten core, imagine the whole thing bound together with sauce. In terms of taste, contrast, texture and sheer tactility I’m not sure I can think of anything finer, and writing this paragraph I am deeply aggrieved that I cannot eat one right this minute, or indeed by the end of the day.

This is where Amò are an especially smart bunch, because during the day you could pitch up, have a chinotto, a slice of pizza or a sandwich crammed with porchetta and provolone, and add one of these for a mere three pounds fifty. That’s almost the price of subscribing to this blog for a month and, although it pains me to say it, it’s even better value.

Jo and I both loved the meaty version but would you believe that the vegetarian option, with fried aubergine and tomato, was even better? Jo described it as like being “slapped in the face with flavour” and believe me, apart from that fried pasta, nothing or nobody would get away with slapping Jo in the face with anything. One of the best things I’ve eaten this year, no notes at all.

Jo was very keen to try one of the pizzas by the slice, with meatballs on it, so that turned up next, thoughtfully cut up to share, a meatball perched precisely in the centre of each quadrant. This too was cracking, although I suspect the base on the pizza al taglio is slightly different to that on the whole pizza. The meatballs, in particular, were excellent – coarse and lacking in suspicious, smooth bounciness. It also, by the looks of it, was only available by the slice so, again, well worth adding to a lunch order.

By this point, as our full-sized pizzas arrived, the carbs were taking their toll, and we were already prepared to ask if some of our leftovers could be boxed up – something that rarely happens to me, because it’s rare that my capacity is defeated by a restaurant.

Jo made it a few slices into hers, the piccantina, which was topped with salami, mushrooms and Gorgonzola. I didn’t try it, and from a cursory glance I thought the porcini were common or garden mushrooms, but Jo had no complaints. She’d told me earlier in the evening that she hadn’t had pizza for a while: Jo is on a monthly treatment regime where anything she eats the next day tastes vile and puts you off whatever you ate for the foreseeable future. One of those next days had involved pizza, and Amò’s piccantina resuscitated her love for the stuff. That in itself is no mean feat.

I on the other hand had deferred to Enza’s judgement and ordered the sausage and friarielli. As so often with white pizza, it had a bit more structural integrity, so less of the Neapolitan droop you might get with other pizzas. And the base was admirable, nicely puffy with plenty going for it. You couldn’t fault the generosity either, with nuggets of crumbled sausage very, very liberally deployed.

There was very little not to like about the pizza, and if I was clutching at straws I might say that I’d have liked the sausage to have more of a whack of fennel, but that’s a minor thing. It was so well orchestrated with the friarielli that it was impossible to argue: this was a pizza without complexity or variety that kept it focused and hit the target.

I managed about half of mine, and the staff were nice as pie about bringing a couple of boxes so we could take our leftovers home. Everything we had ordered – all that food, four cans of soft drink – came to fifty-five pounds, which is a steal, and then we went to the Allied for a debrief. Two pints of forgettable macro fizzy booze at the Allied set us back nearly sixteen pounds, which is very much not a steal.

For once, I can also report back on the leftovers. Jo had hers cold the next day – no slice for her beloved dog Diesel, this time – and sent me an iMessage: tastes even better this morning, cold from the box, outstanding! I on the other hand revived mine in the oven on my lunch break, working from home, and it was the best lunch I’d had in ages. I wasn’t sure if my slight lull that afternoon was down to the carbs or a Teams call that felt especially like a trudge. Let’s put it down to the latter.

Having talked about Amò for all these paragraphs, I know I should return to my opening theme and compare it to its neighbour Paesinos. But it’s not easy to do.

If they were top trumps cards, Amò would win in a number of categories. It’s more versatile, on account of having a focused lunch offering as well as pizzas in the evening. It has arguably a wider range of sides and small plates. It’s bigger, too, with far more potential to eat there in larger groups; if you go to Paesinos as a four, you either won’t get in or you’ll take up two-thirds of the restaurant. Its pizzas are more imaginative and unconventional, so more of a challenge to the Neapolitan hegemony elsewhere in town.

On that basis, you’d have it down as a resounding victory for Amò and, for some of you, that might well be the case. On the other hand, Paesinos sticks to the classics, both for pizza and for its smaller dishes. I think its soft drink selection – and neither is licensed – is better and more interesting. The cannoli and tiramisu are worth the price of admission alone. And, speaking completely as a novice in these things, I think Paesinos’ dough and base may have the edge.

But the main reason why taking a Top Trumps approach doesn’t work is that Paesinos, for me, has a little something extra. There’s no Italian equivalent of je ne sais quoi, as far as I know, but there’s a small dash of magic in the smaller restaurant that means that rationally, although I know Amò has a huge amount going for it, it’s impossible to pick a winner.

So yes, I’ve reflected and reflected and it’s impossible to put a cigarette paper between these two places. The only thing you can put between them, it turns out, is another restaurant – called Just Momo, which helpfully doesn’t just do momo. So the rating down there reflects that: call it a cop out, if you will, but I stand by it.

Let’s not divide ourselves by being Team Amò or Team Paesinos, because as a town we can be better than that. Hopefully enough of you will pick each side that both places will continue to trade for years to come. Because the truth is that there’s one real winner in this contest, and that’s Reading.

Amò Italian Street Food – 8.6
2-4 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
07500 619775

https://amoitalianstreetfood.co.uk

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Café review: Pau Brasil

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It was a muggy Saturday, the longest day of the year in fact, the mercury was nudging close to 30 degrees and, sipping my mocha outside C.U.P., I felt like the Only Living Boy In The Ding.

Scrolling Instagram all I could see was holiday snaps – people just back from Malaga and Cordoba, newlyweds honeymooning on a Greek island, someone I know on his annual holiday to Kalkan, spending three weeks in a little Turkish piece of paradise. The world had its out of office on, or at least it felt that way, and there I was, fresh from my haircut, halfway through a C.U.P. mocha, a little on the outside of things, looking in.

I wandered round town, but nothing lifted that feeling of dislocation. Station Hill was holding a mini festival to celebrate it opening – notwithstanding that it opened over four months ago – and the whole cut through from the station to Friar Street was lined with food stalls, drink stalls, music and crafts and hubbub. London coffee spot Notes, not yet open, had a stand selling coffee and another selling Aperol spritzes, and everywhere you looked there was someone else offering street food, largely vendors I’d not heard of.

The place was buzzing, although I put a picture up on Facebook and person after person said “if only they’d advertised it”. Still, it felt like everyone I know had somehow been spirited away out of town, and there I was, surrounded by people but alone. I thought of my wife, at the far end of the M4 busy at work, and all my friends dotted across this country and others, my brother on the other side of the world (this, by the way, is why I shouldn’t spend too much time on my own).

I could have grabbed lunch from one of the stalls, fetched a drink from Siren or the Purple Turtle’s pop-up bar, I could have participated. But something stopped me. It felt a little like a glossy celebration of house prices in Reading inching slightly further out of reach, it had a slight feeling of forced fun about it. But that’s just me: I’m not much of a joiner-in. Anyway, I had a lunch appointment to go to, one for which I was several years late. Time to get going.

Normally I ride the number 5 or 6 bus all the way up the hill, along Whitley Street and past the Whitley Pump roundabout, getting off at the nearest stop to my house and strolling home from there. But this time, in the sweltering, almost oppressive heat I alighted halfway up, where Silver Street becomes Mount Pleasant, and walked the rest of the way. And there it was, Pau Brasil, with its pretty cobalt blue door and its awning out. It had been a long, long time.

Back in 2004, over 20 years ago, long before Reading got Minas Café or De Nata, Brazilian café Pau Brasil opened on Mount Pleasant. It’s been trading there ever since, the culinary capital of Katesgrove before Katesgrove even got other restaurants. Back then the only nearby place I knew was a Chinese takeaway on Whitley Street called Tung Hing which I revered – it’s long since closed – and the closest I got to Pau Brasil was glorious scuzzy indie gigs at the Rising Sun Arts Centre, at the bottom of the hill.

I reviewed Pau Brasil in 2014, over ten years ago, and it’s safe to say that I didn’t completely get it, or love it the way I expected to. It’s one of my oldest reviews not to have been superseded, and I’ve wondered many times over the years whether I’d missed something about the place. I remember going with my ex-wife and leaving feeling like we just hadn’t grasped what made it special. She was indifferent about a banana and cheese toasted sandwich, I found the feijoada a tad wobbly.

We both wanted to like it, and came away still wanting to but not convinced that we’d managed it. “I’m not going to say that Pau Brasil is a bad restaurant” the conclusion said. “Sometimes I really regret choosing to give restaurants a rating, and this is one of those times.” This was back in 2014, when the end of one of my reviews arrived a lot sooner than it does nowadays.

Since I moved house last year, and Pau Brasil is a short downhill walk from my new abode, the place has been in my thoughts. I’ve caught myself musing, more than once, that a lunchtime visit was long overdue. Somehow this strangely stifling Saturday, with more than a hint of saudade about it, was the day to do it. If not then, when?

The welcome was warm and immediate, making me feel like I wasn’t a stranger. Pau Brasil has a deli, the counter and the kitchen downstairs and all its seating upstairs, and the first indication I had that the place has a devoted following was that I was asked if I had a reservation (there is no way to do so online, so I suspect regulars just do this when they stop in). Despite not having one, they managed to find room for me, so I headed up the stairs and was given the option of a couple of tables.

It’s a gorgeous room, far more homely and attractive than I remembered. It has a huge blue-shuttered window looking out on Mount Pleasant, letting in loads of light, and art all over the walls. One is painted a very fetching shade of red, one which made me think Why isn’t there an equivalent of Shazam for colours? only to find that firstly, there is, and secondly, I found it too fiddly to use. The furniture was simple and unpretentious, but nothing detracted from a certain serene energy.

A couple of tables were occupied when I got there, the big one with the plum view out of that window was already reserved. What I would say is that Pau Brasil has decided to prioritise space over packing diners in, which is to their credit, but it does make a couple of the tables on offer eccentric. I was given the option of a corner table where both seats faced the wall or a corner table where both seats faced the banister at the top of the stairs, and went for the latter because it had more natural light. Another option was to sit on a high stool up at a counter facing the wall – that fetching deep red wall, granted, but a wall nonetheless.

Back in 2014 I found Pau Brasil’s menu very tempting, and in 2025 that had not changed. It offered a range of salgadinhos, bite-sized snacks, for less than three pounds each, sandwiches for four pounds or a very compact selection of main courses for fourteen pounds (although you could have a smaller size for less). Just to spell out how remarkable that is, in ten years the mains have gone up from ten to fourteen pounds, I suspect the smaller dishes have barely budged in price: Pau Brasil seemed largely to be the land that inflation forgot.

I started out by asking my server – who I think, though I might be wrong, was half of a husband and wife team – whether they were in any danger of running out of pasteis de nata, having seen only a handful on display out front. He told me it was a risk and so I asked him to put one aside for me, for later. That potential pitfall swerved, I started out by ordering a couple of salgadinhos and a very cold beer.

And what a beer! On my bus out of town I’d texted Zoë saying I tell you what, if they have Super Bock I’m fucking having one. I arrived, I saw both it and Sagres in the fridge and my heart positively sang with joy. That iconic bottle came to my table, with a small, chilled glass, and those first malty sips made me feel less agitated, less irritated, somehow much happier to be solitary. Now I could settle down to people watching and relaxing, even if I had to crane my neck to do it.

Everything was unhurried, and my salgadinhos arrived about half an hour after I first took my seat. They looked so pretty on their plate, a symphony of blue, terra cotta, gold and red, and I found myself immediately wishing I had ordered more. I expected to like the salt cod fishcake, and it was no surprise that I did, but I was perhaps more surprised to find myself enjoying it every bit as much as I had its equivalent at De Nata.

Enjoy doesn’t even do it justice, I liked it an enormous amount. It had just enough comfort, just enough bite, it had a beautiful hit of salt from the bacalhau and it was golden, greaseless and a tactile pleasure to eat without cutlery. This kind of food is a proper gastronomic happy place for me and I could easily have inhaled two or three of them. Why had I spent the best part of a year with this on my doorstep without eating it?

My server had also brought some of Pau Brasil’s homemade chilli sauce and warned me, just as I had been warned in 2014, to use it extremely sparingly. My chilli tolerance has improved a lot in the last 11 years, so I was a little more cavalier than I would have been back then. It’s really very hot; my ability to take good, well-intentioned advice has probably not improved as much as it should have done over the same period.

The real star, though, was the chicken coxinha, a dome of airy dough stuffed with shredded chicken. I’d only ever had this dish at Minas Café, and I thought it was good. Eating it at Pau Brasil was to realise it could be superb. The rendition out in Whitley is a dense, solid affair, best tackled with cutlery. This by contrast was an ethereal gasp of a thing, the dough so light and the chicken at its core quite miraculous. Again, I could have easily eaten more and, again, I resolved to do so in the not too distant future.

From there, the pace slowed. Time seemed to pass slowly on Mount Pleasant, and in truth I was in no hurry. Tables came and went, and a group of three took the reserved table in the window. I watched as a giant plate of salgadinhos was brought over to them and they went to work, chatting and biting, dabbing chilli sauce and laughing. My portable fan whirred on the table, time became a trickle and I thought that all things considered, there were many worse places to be on a Saturday afternoon.

It proved a little tricky at that point to get attention to order more food, but eventually I did. The weekend special, which involved dried shrimp and sounded magnificent, had all but run out, and although it was tempting to order the feijoada I was determined for this meal not to be a carbon copy of my 2014 one. So I asked for the frango à Milanese and a Guaraná, Brazil’s national soft drink, having seen a can of it arrive at a neighbouring table.

This was where the gaps in the service felt a little bit more obvious, as we drifted past the lunch rush and into the afternoon. My beer was done and dusted, my glass of water had nearly run out too, but the soft drink showed no signs of arriving. Not only that, but my water had come with no ice, but then I saw the server bringing a load of ice to the bigger table. Half an hour in I was starting to feel a bit parched, so I got my server’s attention and asked if I could possibly have my drink before the food.

He apologised, clearly distracted rather than indifferent, and brought it over, and within five minutes my food had arrived too. The Guaraná, incidentally, was lovely: I would definitely drink it again on a hot day. I have a soft spot for slightly medicinal soft drinks, from chinotto to root beer, and this felt in the same family. It was also a splendid thirst quencher, and by then I was in need of one.

Did I like my main course as much? Well, yes and no. You couldn’t fault it for value, really: fourteen pounds for a complete, well-balanced plate of food felt like pretty good going. And it certainly had variety, too: a big, flattened, breaded chicken breast fillet had just enough crunch, and the coating adhered nicely.

There was plenty going on, from a well-dressed stripe of salad topped with tomatoes and very finely diced peppers to a little haystack of shoestring fries, from fortifying white rice to a heap of toasted cassava flour which added more interest and texture than I expected. Best of all were the beans, sticky and savoury with little nuggets of pork studded through them, I liked those a lot.

And yet I felt like something was missing, and I’m not sure what. It was wholesome, homely, hearty stuff but it perhaps didn’t wow me the way those salgadinhos had done. It was ever so slightly out of balance – there was a fair amount of rice left at the end, with nothing to pair it with – and the flavours were muted, subtle, well-mannered stuff. They brought more of the chilli sauce, but it ramped up the heat without necessarily lending another dimension.

I think overall, this is just how the Brazilian (and Portuguese) food I’ve had can sometimes be. It’s sturdy, and reliable, but it won’t knock your socks off – well, everything apart from the chilli sauce perhaps, although that’s too busy blowing your head off. The thing is, though, that I might never rave about a dish like Pau Brasil’s frango a Milanese, but in that moment, it was just what I was after. Also, I finished every scrap of my salad – which I never do – so that must count for something.

My main course done, there was one thing left to try. A coffee and a nata, just to test drive whether this was a coffee spot as much as a lunch spot or a snacks and beer spot. My coffee – I’d asked for a latte – arrived in one of those tall conical glasses I tend to associate with coffee before it got wanky, and it was pleasant, if slightly burnt-tasting. The table of regulars had theirs in smaller glasses, and at the end I asked my server what I should have asked for to get one of those. A media, he said, and I made a note. It wasn’t on the menu, so it paid to have the inside track for next time.

I’d asked my server whether they actually had a couple of nata handy and he did, so he brought me two. They weren’t flawless, but I did find myself wondering if this was the best day to judge them. The custard in them, although set, burst its banks somewhat when you tried to eat them, which I think was down to the heat of the day.

They were close enough, though, to remind me how much I love pasteis de nata, and dusted with cinnamon they made me feel very happy indeed, saudade banished for the time being. I’ll go back and try them in more clement weather. You may have noticed by now that I’ve mentioned going back a few times: I’m definitely going back.

All that remained was to go downstairs and pay at the counter, and at that point I saw another little example of brilliant service that endeared me to Pau Brasil. When I went to pay, my server told me that they’d put one extra nata aside for me, just in case I had two and decided it wasn’t enough. As it was I was replete and I passed on the offer, but I was oddly touched that they’d thought to do that.

My bill for all that food came to just under thirty-two pounds, not including tip. I’d been there pretty much two hours, unrushed and, by my standards, carefree. I couldn’t help but think of all of the places in the last eleven years that had chivvied me or made me feel like an inconvenience, taken far more of my money and given me far less of their time. I walked up the hill, in search of the relative coolness of my house, happy that I knew my neighbourhood just a little better.

It’s funny writing reviews and coming back to them many years later, some kind of weird Prisoner Of Azkaban wrinkle where you can see the past you, retrace your steps, watch yourself with fondness or embarrassment. You can both agree with and disagree with yourself all at once.

When I reviewed Pau Brasil in 2014 I said I could see myself going back there for a coffee and a nata, or a drink and some salt cod fishcakes. Although that wasn’t enough, apparently. “Too much of the food just wasn’t to my taste, and however nice a room is, however great the service is, the food is always going to be centre stage”, 2014 me said.

What on earth was his problem? I highly doubt Pau Brasil has changed that much in the last 11 years. A new lick of paint, perhaps, and art on the walls, but otherwise I expect it’s pretty close to the place I went in 2014. The prices are pretty close to 2014 prices, too. And yet I must have changed, because I look at past me and think that he missed the point in a big way.

A little oasis of otherness there halfway up Mount Pleasant, where you can have a coffee and a nata, or a cold Super Bock and the most terrific chicken cozinha. All that and it also does a hearty main, if you decide you want one. But you could never eat that, there, and still see it as a gem. What more did he want?

It is one of the marvellous things about being alive that you can change your mind, or realise you were wrong. I do each of those more often than you might think. It’s hard to tell, over a decade on, which has happened here, and I wouldn’t bet against it being a bit of both. Really, I have no idea.

But here’s something I do know. On a close, sticky Saturday afternoon, on the longest day of the year, when I felt like the only living boy in the ‘Ding, that little spot in the heart of Katesgrove gave me a happy, meditative couple of hours, with some enjoyable food and a delicious, badly-needed and much-anticipated cold beer. And for those two hours, as if by magic, I felt lucky, well looked after and reconnected: to the world in general and my home town in particular.

Money can’t buy that, as plenty of places in Reading prove. But choosing well where to spend it, it turns out, can.

Pau Brasil – 7.6
89 Mount Pleasant, Reading, RG1 2TF
0118 9752333

https://paubrasil.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Dolphin’s Caribbean Restaurant & Bar

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Believe it or not, some restaurants have opened in Reading this year that aren’t pizza restaurants. Granted, so far the culinary landscape has been dominated by Paesinos, Amò, Zi Tore and Peppito’s (the latter last seen rounding up Reading’s influencers to gush away on Instagram), but there are still other things happening in town. Not masses, because it’s 2025, hospitality is on a knife edge and everybody is struggling to make money, but some nonetheless.

So we have national chain Rosa’s Thai on Jackson’s Corner, and Blue Collar Corner has taken on two permanent tenants in the form of Burger Society and Gurt Wings. Later in the year we are promised London coffee chain Notes, Japanese restaurant Kawaii from the people behind Osaka, a new café from the owners of Café Yolk and an Italian sister restaurant to Wokingham’s Ruchetta, all on Station Hill.

And of course, how could anybody forget our other big money arrival Cosy Club, which opened last month on the edge of the Oracle in the old Lakeland site? The Reading Chronicle went there, without paying of course, and admired it so much that they wrote an ‘honest food review’ that waited until the very end to admit that their food was gratis. “Before anyone starts moaning yes, this was a gifted experience,” concluded the article, “and like many other journalists who work for numerous publications, I was invited to try the food at a new restaurant.” Elton John was wrong: #AD seems to be the hardest word.

All that is going on in the centre, but there isn’t much of note out in the suburbs: Woodley has welcomed somewhere called “Woodley Food Stasian”, which specialises in dishes from Hong Kong and Vietnam and, at a guess, misspelling the word ‘station’.

More randomly still, Winnersh is about to welcome something called Club India where the Pheasant pub used to be, run by a chef who formerly worked at Wokingham’s Bombay Story and Sultan. It also boasts some kind of consultancy role for another chef who apparently held two Michelin stars in San Francisco and had another restaurant in Palo Alto. How involved he’ll be is anybody’s guess: San Francisco/Palo Alto/Winnersh isn’t a triumvirate you find on many websites.

Of course, both Woodley Food Stasian and Club India might be good, and at some point I might check them out. But so far, this year, it’s slim pickings: restaurateurs are not feeling like taking the plunge, and you can hardly blame them.

Last but not least, that brings us to the subject of this week’s review: Dolphin’s Caribbean Kitchen, which opened two months ago in the old 7Bone site on St Mary’s Butts. It takes its name from the nickname of owner Randolph Bancroft, who has run a catering business for about twenty years: I’m pretty sure I saw Dolphin’s with a gazebo at the street food markets in Bracknell, when I worked there what feels like a lifetime ago.

This restaurant in the town centre, though, is his first ever permanent site, and when he spoke to the local press about it you could sense his excitement. Reading had never had anything like Dolphin’s, he said, and although the climate was tough in hospitality, he added that he hoped good old-fashioned community spirit would help his restaurant to thrive. “By the grace of god, I will make it” he concluded.

Well, he’s right about one thing if nothing else – Reading hasn’t had a proper, sit-down Caribbean restaurant in as long as I can remember. We had Chef Stevie cooking out of the Butler for a glorious year or so, we have a place called Da Spottt – yes, three Ts, don’t act like it’s my fault – on the Oxford Road which apparently has erratic opening times, and we have Seasons doing takeaway nearby, their Cemetery Junction site having closed long ago.

And of course we have the OG – Perry’s, which has been trading next to Market Place for eons. It clearly has its fans, because when I re-reviewed it earlier in the year they all came out of the woodwork to say it was my fault for turning up an hour before it closed. Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of that, it tells its own story: Perry’s shuts at 7 and is unlicensed, so although it is a restaurant, it’s not a full on evening restaurant.

It’s weird, really: Reading has one of the biggest Bajan communities outside Barbados. When Sharian’s Jamaican Cuisine used to cook at Blue Collar Corner the queue stretched almost to Chancellors Estate Agents every Friday. People would wait over half an hour for that jerk chicken: I know, I was one of them. And most of the time, I almost didn’t begrudge those thirty minutes in line. Their food was that good.

So the demand is there, but for some reason nobody has ever really tried to capitalise on it, before Dolphin’s came along. It felt well worth investigating, so I met Zoë off the train on Monday night and we went along to see if Bancroft had managed to fill that gap in the market.

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Restaurant review: Paesinos

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Here’s a tip for you: if you want to discover how many Italians live in Reading just drop innocuously into conversation online, on a local Facebook page or the Reading subreddit, the question of Reading’s best pizza. Because if you do, Reading’s Italian contingent will come out of the woodwork. This calls for opinions, and they have plenty. They don’t fuck about, either.

“Being Italian and of partly Neapolitan descent, I am picky when it comes to pizza. Or better, I eat anything, but I know a good pizza from a bad one, and from a non-pizza” began Luca, on the Edible Reading Facebook page. He went on.

“The only real pizzas in Reading have been Papa Gee’s, for years. Then Sarv came, and Zia Lucia (both ok). I have recently tried Zi Tore and above all Paesinos, the latter is possibly the best in Reading. The chef and manager is Sicilian and has previously worked at the Thirsty Bear. However, Thirsty Bear make American style pizza, while Paesinos make real pizza.”

Another of my Italian readers, Franz, was more generous about the Thirsty Bear. “It’s just a different style” he said. “Italian pizza purists perhaps will take a bit to adapt (I’m Italian, but open minded). A slice of their TriBeCa, curly fries and a pint is hard to beat. It just makes me happy and satisfied.” Franz also had opinions about Zia Lucia, and its “horrible, plasticky” mozzarella.

After that Luca and Franz ended up having a fascinating conversation about whether you could find good pizza outside Italy. Franz thought it was easy to do, these days. Luca disagreed, but said you could even end up getting what he called “non-pizza” in Italy, unless you were in Campania or Sicily. Just to chuck in a curveball, the best pizza Franz ever had was in the Swedish city of Norrköping. “It was Neapolitan style and was excellent, but then they had a corner in the pizzeria that was all dedicated to Totti so that confused me from an allegiance perspective.”

I could have listened to Luca and Franz discuss these niceties all day: it seemed that if you asked two Italians you were likely to come out of the conversation with at least three opinions. Over on Reddit, other Italians were weighing in. “Zi Tore in Smelly Alley has taken the crown as the best pizza in town (in my humble, Italian, opinion)” said one. “And the pizza al taglio from Amò is even better.”

This is particularly topical because last week Sarv’s Slice announced that they were leaving the Biscuit Factory, after falling out with the owners both there and in Ealing. The reaction across the internet was one of huge sadness, coupled with genuine fear for the future of the venue. But this happens against a backdrop of Reading’s pizza scene exploding, so Sarv’s Slice might have quit while they were ahead: the market has become saturated since they opened in 2023, and even more so in the last six months or so.

Let’s run through the timeline. Last year Dough Bros opened out on Northumberland Avenue, and in the summer Zia Lucia opened in town. From then, things have only accelerated: at the start of the year Paesinos opened opposite Jackson’s Corner. Then Zi’Tore opened in February, in the old Grumpy Goat site. At the end of April, two doors down from Paesinos, Reading got Amò, a joint venture between the owners of Madoo and Pulcinella Focaccia, a pizza trader who operated from their home address out in Earley.

And believe it or not, last Wednesday another pizza restaurant, Peppito, opened on the first floor of Kings Walk, John Sykes’ restaurant sweatshop. The time between pizza restaurants opening in Reading appears to have some sort of half-life, so by the time this goes to press I wouldn’t be surprised if two more places had started trading, making all this out of date.

So the vexed subject of Reading’s best pizza isn’t something anybody, Italian or not, is going to settle in a hurry. But that’s no reason not to begin this important project, so last week I strolled down the hill from Katesgrove into town to check out Paesinos, the first of this year’s intake to start trading, on the Kings Road. I had a secret weapon, my very own Italian: my friend Enza was joining me to check this one out and see how it compared against Zi’Tore and Amò, both of which she’d researched extensively.

I was early, so I got to take in what must be one of Reading’s smallest dining rooms. Just three tables, each seating two people, although the table closest to the front door was so Lilliputian that it was hard to imagine adults sitting there, except to wait for a takeaway. A fridge hummed next to the counter, holding an interesting selection of soft drinks.

I spotted chinotto, one of my favourite things, and got one, with a plastic cup, while I waited. I’m used to the San Pellegrino version of this drink, that you can pick up in cans in Madoo. It’s dandelion and burdock’s older, more sophisticated cousin, wearing a rollneck and smoking a cigarette. But this bottled version, by Sicilian company Polara, was more nuanced, the rough edges smoothed off. I felt that all-too-familiar sensation, the gradual raising of expectations.

I looked through Paesinos’ menu. It was a single long laminated sheet with pizzas split into categories – classic, premium, signature, fusion – although the taxonomy they’d used was unclear to me. It certainly wasn’t pricing: most of the 13 inch, standard pizzas, were between thirteen and sixteen pounds whatever you ordered, many of them costing random amounts like £12.97, £13.96, £14.86. I liked the capriciousness of that.

They weren’t split into categories using any mindset I could understand. I could see something with “kebab chicken, jalapeños and buffalo sauce” being a fusion – or even a confusion – pizza, but a standard pizza bianca? Paesinos had attracted some commentary around its pizza Americana, topped with french fries and frankfurter: it might well be authentic, or authentically Sicilian, although I’d personally rather drink the bin juice from my food recycling after it’s been strained through Jay Rayner’s y-fronts. But whatever it was, surely it wasn’t “premium”?

All that said, there was something about the lack of polish in this menu that I liked. I could say it was trying to do too much, with its paneer and tandoori chicken, but nobody was making me order that stuff. In the core of it, ignoring the wackiness, there was a solid collection of options, many of them intriguing.

Then Enza arrived, and ordered a chinotto, and we got to catching up. Despite regularly exchanging messages, we realised we hadn’t seen one another in a very long time and there was plenty to discuss – her empty nest, my new house, all the life events and randomness that make you realise that you think you know what’s going on with someone via social media but that, really, you don’t.

The other thing I gathered, gradually, as we got to talking about Reading’s explosion of Italian restaurants, was that I was finally eating with someone even more determined to maintain their anonymity than me. Enza, it transpired, had been to Paesinos once before with her husband and very much enjoyed what they ate – the pizza “al portofoglio” or folded pizza for her (it translates as ‘wallet’), the tuna and red onion for him – but she was a far more frequent visitor to Amò a couple of doors down. So much so that she seemed to be furtively looking around, worried about being discovered, and lowered her voice when she mentioned Paesinos’ neighbours.

“I can’t help it!” she laughed. “I love it there. So much that I want to get involved. I keep telling them they should make the kind of pizzas you can only get in my part of Italy” – Enza’s from Potenza, in the ankle of Italy, halfway between Naples and Bari – “and if they do, I think I should get commission.” I offered to change her name for the purpose of this review, but she decided to let the chips fall where they may. At least they didn’t fall onto a pizza Americana, I suppose.

We started with appetisers, which meant a panzerotto each. Franz, on my Facebook page, had particularly recommended these, saying they were a speciality from Bari, where he came from. It was my first experience of Paesinos, and about as good a calling card as you could hope to encounter, a gorgeous crescent of fried dough filled with just enough mozzarella and tomato, too big to eat with your hands but not like a full-sized calzone. You got two for something silly like seven quid, and outstanding just about does them justice. As an introduction to the dough, too, it put down quite a marker. This huge, irregular pocket of joy made me very happy indeed.

“I tell you what, this is a lot bigger than the panzerotto I had in Montpellier” I said to Enza, between mouthfuls. She smiled.

“I wouldn’t say this is big by Italian standards. It is really good, though.”

In my mind I was thinking that I would come here and eat this again, but I was also remembering that the menu boasted pizza fritti, stuffed with ricotta and sopressata, and that I needed to try that. Enza also had a yen to sample the mozzarella in carrozza and maybe we should have tried that too, but I was put off by experiences of having it at Prezzo, many years ago, no doubt straight out of the freezer. I already had a reasonable idea that the only thing coming out of a freezer at Paesinos was the gelato.

“Would you say there’s never been a better time to be an Italian in Reading?”

“Absolutely!” said Enza, and then she told me a lovely story. I knew that she was a big fan of Zi Tore, on Smelly Alley, and especially their cakes, many of which were ones you just didn’t find in this country. But then Enza told me all about the graffe, a sort of fried doughnut made in a distinctive loop shape, sugared but made out of a mixture of flour and potatoes. They’re specific to Campania, where she was born, and growing up in Salerno they were a regular childhood treat.

And then, some years later, Enza wanders into a cafe hundreds of miles away that’s just opened in her adopted home town, the unlikeliest of places, and finds them there. Graffe. And when she told me about this: maybe it was her excitement, or how well she conveyed it, or perhaps I was just having a lovely time, but even I felt it. I was vicariously moved, and I remembered the power food has to transport and transform.

It’s one reason to envy Italians, because what would I feel nostalgic about? Ice Magic, the chocolate sauce that was no doubt filled with chemicals so it hardened into a shell when you poured it on ice cream? The way Nice N’ Spicy Nik Naks used to taste before they were fucked with? Different permutations of processed food, and the excitement of a Findus Crispy Pancake? No, Britain had nothing to compete with graffe. Little wonder that Enza sounded so full of joy, although it did make me ponder how many privations she’d suffered through years of living here.

If the panzerotto set up expectations, the pizza fulfilled them. I’d chosen the Siciliana, my reference pizza of olives, anchovies and capers. It’s sometimes called a Neopolitan, presumably because every part of Italy wants to claim the best ever pizza as theirs. Based on what I ate at Paesinos, I can hardly blame them. Everything was exactly as it should be – the right amounts, the right proportions, the right balance. The saltiest of anchovies, generously deployed without being overkill. Purple, perfumed olives. Little clusters of plump, sharp capers (Enza preferred them salted, but give me the vinegary hit any day).

The base was heavenly. Puffed at the rim, beautifully irregular, a proper Neapolitan style pizza that drooped in the middle, although it firmed up as it cooled down. “The dough is completely different towards the end of eating the pizza” said Enza, and she was spot on. I loved the way that she tore a little bit of her crust off and tried it, on its own, before making inroads, a little ritual, almost like a benediction. I followed suit, and again that allowed me to admire Paesinos’ dough before all that other stuff happened to it. It was better after, but pretty much perfect before.

Later on I asked the pizzaiolo, who was indeed Sicilian, whether most of their trade was takeaway and delivery, given Paesinos’ size. He said it was, but that those people, however good his pizza was, missed out ever so slightly. “It’s 100% when it leaves the oven” he said, “but when it gets delivered it can only ever be 90%.” I think he’s right, and explains better than I can why, when you read the rating at the bottom, you need to come here rather than fire up Deliveroo.

Enza also loved my pizza, and preferred it on balance to hers, which isn’t to say that she didn’t enjoy hers. She went for the “dolce amaro”, a white pizza (premium, not fusion) topped with walnuts, gorgonzola, honey and radicchio. “I know people back in Italy who would disown me for ordering this” she said. Maybe she was right but they ought to try it before they knock it.

This had everything: salty, sweet and bitter in gorgeous harmony. The gorgonzola was so punchy that you smelled it, got that agricultural tang as you lifted a slice up, before you ever took a bite. But the honey – how nice to have honey rather than hot honey on a pizza, for a change – softened its roar. The walnuts lent texture and the final piece of the jigsaw, radicchio with bite and bitterness, was the clinching evidence of intelligent design. All that and, as a white pizza, it was easier and less messy to eat than the Siciliana. I really enjoyed it: Enza thought it a little unbalanced and needing something else, possibly black pepper.

Later on, when we debriefed over a beer in Siren RG1, I asked Enza how authentic that pizza was and she very kindly said something I’d never thought of before that made me feel stupid, in a good way. “Of course it’s authentic” she said. “It’s authentic because somebody has made it.” All these combinations start out as curveballs at some point, but if nobody ever innovated you’d have a cuisine that’s set in aspic. It’s 2025: nobody willingly eats aspic any more.

Paesinos has a small section of desserts, plenty of them tempting, and we decided that in the interests of research we ought to try some. Enza’s no slouch, so she asked the pizzaiolo which ones were made by Paesinos. In a flash, without hesitating or deflecting, he told us: just the two, the tiramisu and the cannoli. In the case of the cannoli he bought the shells in, but the ricotta filling was all his own work. That was good enough for us, so Enza decided to road test the cannolo and I – such hardship – ordered the tiramisu.

We also ordered a couple more drinks. The chap who’d prepared our pizzas suggested we try a bottle of something called Spuma, so I did, and it was night and day with the chinotto but equally lovely in its way – sweet and fresh, sunshine in a bottle. I thought it had a taste of grape juice, but online research later suggested it was more complex than that, with rhubarb and elderflower, cloves and caramel. It beat a Fanta Limon, and I say that as a fan of Fanta Limon.

By this point we’d got chatting with our chef, and he told us a little more about the desserts. Normally he imported the cannoli shells from Palermo, he said, but on this occasion he’d had to get them from Catania instead. That meant they’d be more brittle, smoother, less bubbled. He apologised, as if this wasn’t optimal, when discussing the difference between going to the trouble to buy these things from two different Sicilian cities. I admired that focus, that he felt there was an important distinction to be drawn between the best and the merely excellent.

And goodness, but it was exquisite. If this was the second-tier shell, I’d like to try the very best out of sheer curiosity. Beautifully presented – I loved the outline in icing sugar of the wooden spoon, as if at a crime scene – it was an utter joy. Initially Enza tried to press me to have half, using the ultra sharp knife our chef had brought to our table, but I convinced her to just let me try a section from one end. It was so delectable that I almost wished I’d taken up Enza’s offer. The ricotta was so light, so smooth, the chocolate chips it was studded with were so very generous. It made the ones at Madoo, for instance, feel pedestrian.

Everything was imported, we were told, either from Italy or specifically from Sicily. Enza loved it: I’m not making this up, but she honestly did exclaim Mamma mia (I nearly did too, and I was born in Bristol).

There was a story behind the tiramisu, and he told us that too. It was his fiancée’s recipe – she works at the Thirsty Bear – but she only finally let him have it once he opened Paesinos, despite them having been together for twelve years, despite the fact that they were getting married towards the end of the year. Many tiramisu recipes just used egg yolk, he said, but this one included egg white too, to give a lighter texture. The only other tweak was a little vanilla, to offset the flavour of the egg yolk.

It was another tour de force, and he also went to great trouble to tell me it was a bigger portion than you got elsewhere around town. He’d weighed the rival tiramisu you could get in other places, and weighed his, and his was more substantial. It was the best tiramisu I’ve had in Reading, and honestly I can’t remember eating a better one anywhere else. No wonder he was marrying his fiancée: if I had ready access to somebody who could knock one of these out, I’d be the size of a house.

The strangest thing happened after that: we had eaten, we’d drunk (no alcohol, Paesinos is unlicensed) and we ought to have headed straight off to compare notes over a beer. But I was in the company of two Italians, and they talked food, compared notes, discussed recipes, the best places to buy mascarpone, where he sourced his ingredients from. And like that conversation on my Facebook page at the start of this review, I could have listened all night. Being in the company of people whose passion for food verges on obsession – the real meaning of obsession, not that social media meaning that just means “I like this” – was infectious.

In the process I learned a few other things. Paesinos had been open nearly six months, and things were going well. Our chap knew the people at Mama’s Way, loved it there, didn’t see any of this explosion of Italian spots as competition. A rising tide truly did lift all boats, and the slow spread of Reading’s Little Italy round the corner to become a Not So Little Italy felt like a beautiful thing. Eventually we settled up. Our bill for everything came to just under sixty pounds; there was no option to tip – it’s almost as if they just didn’t expect anybody to – so I made a second card payment for that.

If I was giving advice to Paesinos – not that I’m qualified to – it would probably be to lose the things at the periphery of their menu, the pizzas with chicken kebab or paneer, the chicken nuggets, the peri peri fries. I think I saw somewhere online that they had burgers “coming soon”, and a look at their website suggests that they now indeed do a range of burgers. I don’t think they need any of that, but what do I know? Maybe their delivery customers will lap that up.

But actually, if I was giving advice to Paesinos it would be to carry on doing exactly what they’re doing. I cannot think of a pizza I’ve enjoyed so much in a long time, and I can’t think of a Neopolitan-style pizza I’ve liked as much in longer still. What a small, unassuming delight Paesinos is, and what a mind-boggling prospect it is that there’s a healthy debate, under way right now, about whether our town has places to eat pizza that are even better than it is.

I’m not qualified to weigh in on that: I’ve not visited its rivals yet, I’m not a fully paid up pizza obsessive and I’m about as far from Italian as it’s possible to be. So take this as my ill-informed, incomplete, English opinion: this might not be the best pizza in Reading, but if it isn’t, the place that can beat this is going to be one hell of a restaurant. Either way it’s the best pizza I’ve had in Reading, I think. I can’t wait to test out its competition. Even more so, I can’t wait to go back.

Paesinos – 8.6
Unit 4, 2 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
0118 2068806

https://paesinos.com

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Restaurant review: House Of Flavours

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

It’s incredibly frustrating, in this day and age, when a restaurant doesn’t have a website. How are you supposed to figure out what you’re going to have, when you can’t spend at least fifteen minutes poring over the menu in advance of your visit?

And how can you tell when it opens and closes? You can try Google for that, of course, but different restaurants report trading hours in different ways – does closing at 8pm mean it closes at 8 sharpish, or that the kitchen closes at 8? If only they had a website you could use.

This all occurred to me last week, when I was going to visit Zi Tore, the newish Italian place on Smelly Alley that has taken the place of the much lamented Grumpy Goat. It has no website, although you can track down the menu if you try hard enough; an Italian friend of mine has been a few times and really rated it, not only encouraging me to visit but telling me all the best things to pick on the menu.

Google says that it shuts at 8, but I had done my homework here, too. Another friend was looking for somewhere quick and easy to eat in Reading a few weeks ago, prior to attending the quiz at the Allied and I suggested Zi Tore. “I wish they’d publish their opening hours somewhere” she said, not unreasonably. “I’d like to be assured that there will be delicious things available at 7pm.” But then she went (“it was completely dead”) and enjoyed the food. So that settled it.

I arranged to go there with Jo – who made a cameo appearance in this blog five years ago – safe in the knowledge that it would all work out fine. We met at Siren RG1 for a couple of beers, which was enough to persuade me that they hadn’t fixed their pricing issues from last year, and mooched over to Smelly Alley ready for pizza and pasta. Jo’s family is Italian, too, and she has strong opinions about Italian food: I was looking forward to seeing what happened when those views came into contact with Zi Tore’s dishes.

Can you see where this is going? Of course you can. We arrived at 7pm to find Zi Tore dead and the guy behind the counter turned us away. “Sorry, we close at half seven”, he said. Exasperating, really: if you want to just be a lunch place, be a lunch place. If you want to be a lunch place that does coffee in the afternoon, fair enough. But why offer pizza and pasta and close at half-seven, a full half hour earlier than you claim you do? I took a menu, so now I know exactly what they serve. It didn’t have opening times on it, either.

So there Jo and I were, standing on Union Street a couple of beers to the good like a prize pair of limoncellos. Where to go? Fortunately, I keep my to do list online, so it only took a few minutes poring over it on Union Street before we were on our way.

Some places, like Dolphin’s Caribbean Cuisine, haven’t been open long enough yet. Others, although high on my list of priorities, were already scheduled in with other people. And some, the likes of Jollibee or Biryani Mama, may even close before an evening comes where I consider dinner there and think “oh, go on then”. But there was a place I’d been keeping in my back pocket to to do this year, and Zi Tore downing tools gave me the perfect opportunity: back to House Of Flavours it was.

“I’m really sorry we won’t get to try somewhere Italian” I said to Jo as we headed down Broad Street.

“It’s okay” said Jo with a wolfish grin. “I am rather partial to a curry.”

It might be hard to remember a time before House Of Flavours occupied that spot, and many of you might not have a history with Reading that stretches back that far. It opened nearly 12 years ago, a month before I started this blog, and in that time it has played an enormous role in reshaping how people in Reading see Indian food.

A couple of years ago I named it as one of the most influential restaurants of the previous decade and when I visited it on duty, before my blog was even six months old, it got the highest rating I’d handed out in the town centre. I say this all the time, but I don’t know if Reading would have had the appetite for Clay’s without House Of Flavours paving the way. It was very much John The Baptist (or Deep Thought) in that respect.

And actually this is how far back my memories go with Reading – I remember that before it was House Of Flavours it was the original home of the short-lived Turkish restaurant Mangal, and a pub, and a tapas place. Mangal made me want to go to Istanbul on holiday, which I did, and the tapas place made me want to go to Granada, and I did that too. But that was mostly because I knew eating in those cities would be better than eating in those two restaurants.

Before that it was the original branch of bar slash restaurant Ha Ha – we’re talking over twenty years ago, now – and the only place Ha Ha ever made me want to go was back to Ha Ha. I loved that place: House Of Flavours’ loos still bear the original Ha Ha signage, which makes a toilet visit surprisingly nostalgic.

Anyway, visually I’m not sure House Of Flavours has changed much in that dozen years. It still has that handsome front room looking out onto the Kings Road, with the luxe comfy chairs and glass-topped tables with inlays of spices underneath. Further back it got a little more cavernous, but I’ve never knowingly sat in that part of the restaurant.

There was also a hat-wearing chap standing in front of the bar, playing guitar and singing: I have to say that I clocked him and immediately thought we should be eating somewhere else, but as it turned out he wasn’t loud at all. Besides, he couldn’t compete with the hubbub: House Of Flavours was reasonably busy on a Tuesday night, especially in that front room.

House Of Flavours’ menu has changed subtly in the last twelve years. Much of what I ordered on my visit then you can’t order there now, but it doesn’t feel like a drastically different place. The main concession to changing tastes is an Indo-Chinese section which I’m pretty sure was not there back in the day, no doubt influenced by the growing interest in those dishes, itself caused by spots like Bhel Puri House doing them well. So House Of Flavours’ owners have done a canny job, tweaking here and there without overhauling anything.

A reasonable proportion of the dishes, in the section marked “Old Favourites”, are the kind of things you find all over the place, in Reading and beyond. But the section of signature dishes has a range of less generic options, and it’s also worth saying that House Of Flavours’ range of vegetarian dishes, on paper at least, is very interesting and not stuff from elsewhere on the menu with the star of the show swapped out for something less formerly sentient.

Irrespective of all that, nearly all the curries are thirteen or fourteen pounds, unless you want to go crazy and order the “lobster tak-a-tak” – in which case, and I mean this with kindness, you might have a tiny bit more money than sense.

Now, before I tell you about what we ate I just need to get something off my chest, something that has always made me feel a little like I’m not a complete, well-rounded person. Here goes: in Indian restaurants you always seem to have a choice between Cobra and Kingfisher, and it’s always presented as some kind of defining choice, like the Beatles or the Stones, BBC or ITV, Coke or Pepsi, VHS or Betamax. As if there’s some kind of correct and incorrect answer, as if your decision Says Something About You.

Am I missing something? Because to me they seem to taste almost exactly the same and yet, depending on who I’m with, I sometimes feel like I get the silent nod of approval or eye roll of judgment when I pick – always at random – the right or wrong one. You can all chip in, in the comments, and tell me that I’m wrong and one is clearly better than the other. On this occasion, I ordered Kingfisher and it tasted exactly like Cobra. Or was it the other way round?

(I just checked the receipt: it was Kingfisher.)

We started with poppadoms, because many people think that a conventional Indian meal has to begin that way. House Of Flavours is upmarket enough to charge you £1.99 per person and give you one each, neatly split in half, rather than asking you how many you want and letting you load up before the main event. They were perfectly nice, although they used to do seeded ones and those seem to have fallen by the wayside. They came with a very good mango chutney with a little out and out sweetness sacrificed for complexity, a decent raita, spiced onions and a deeply anonymous pale pink sauce neither of us warmed to.

“It looks a bit like Thousand Island dressing” I said. Jo spooned some on to a shard of poppadom.

“I think Thousand Island dressing would be better. At least it would taste of something.”

“I miss lime pickle, myself.”

By this point the soloist in front of the bar had moved on to a couple of songs we recognised. Sit Down by James was one, although in this context it sounded as if he was trying to talk people out of leaving. Shortly after he launched into Half The World Away, the classic Oasis B-side. I thought it was possibly his best performance of the evening. Jo, on the other hand, sings in a band, and I could tell she was judging his efforts the way I was going to judge the food: not unkindly, but critically all the same.

We’d picked a selection of things to share, and they were easily the best stuff we ate all evening. House Of Flavours offers three different sharing platters but Jo isn’t a massive fan of fish and neither of us wanted a vegetarian selection, however sumptuous, so the “Gourmet Sharer Platter” it was. The name might be a tad naff, but what was brought to our table absolutely was not.

It was a real treat: two different types of chicken, one chicken tikka and a more beige number which had clearly seen plenty of yoghurt, paneer and a couple of seekh kebabs, all cooked in the tandoor. This took me back to my first trip to House Of Flavours all that time ago, eating their lahsooni chicken tikka and being in raptures. That dish is no longer on the menu, although there’s a big tandoor section if you’re in a larger group and want to mix and match. But for two people, this was both excellent and plentiful, especially for twenty-two quid.

I can safely say that I struggled to pick a favourite. The paneer was better than it looked, with just enough caramelisation despite its slight paleness. But a lot of this subverted appearances: you’d expect the golden chicken tikka to be better than its albino sibling, but in terms of taste the latter won out.

Because I never shy from difficult decisions, I’d say on balance the lamb seekh kebab was the outright winner. Coarse, earthy, superbly cooked and, uniquely among these four, seething with heat. Perfect with the mint and coriander chutney, which for me won out over a slightly more muted dip with yoghurt. If more of the options had been fiery, that might have come into its own.

We had onion bhajis with that, rather than as a side with our mains. That was partly to introduce some variety and mostly because I think there’s little sadder than taking delivery of an onion bhaji when you’re too full to do it justice. I rather liked it – light and airy rather than dense, but managing not to fall apart. It’s a fine balance, and so often bhajis can either be stodge or a fast disintegrating fritter. House Of Flavours got this right. I also enjoyed the sauce that came with it, which I suspect had some date and tamarind in it. You know, the way HP Sauce does.

At this point, I felt like all was right with the world and the travails of Zi Tore’s optional opening hours were less an unpleasant memory, more a convenient way to begin a review of somewhere else. Jo and I were having a good natter about all sorts, and the evening was passing very easily. Jo used to work with my wife, so we always find plenty of different perspectives to share, and we’ve both lived in Reading for a very long time, so know enough of the same crowd to be able to gossip about literally dozens of people.

By this point the man on the guitar had reverted to some kind of consonant-free wailing, like Chris Martin with his knob stuck in a zipper. It was the kind of thing the late, great Robin Williams used to refer to as one giant vowel movement. But, in the immortal words of W.H. Auden, it was not an important failure: everyone was having a lovely time, and we were too. I was already thinking at the point, at some stage in the future, when I sat down at my MacBook and wrote a heart-warming piece about how House Of Flavours has still got it.

Then the mains turned up.

And they weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great either. I had chosen the pistachio chicken because it’s been a signature of the restaurant for a very long time and I think I’ve maybe only ever had it once. The menu says that although it was a mild curry it was full of “bold flavours and textures” and I, usually suspicious of a korma or a pasanda, thought this was something I’d like to experience.

In terms of bold textures it was a couple of pieces of chicken, a supreme at a guess, bone still on, that had been cooked in a tandoor, cut into chunks and then submerged almost totally in the sauce. It looked, I’m sorry to say, like a cat had hurled on it. I don’t know how you made a dish like this more visually appealing – that may be impossible but if it is, I think you at least need to find a way of making it less unappealing.

I could have forgiven that if the taste had lived up to the billing. Heat isn’t everything, and a mild curry is not a crime, but in the absence of heat I wanted some complexity, and that wasn’t here at all.

One of the ways in which House Of Flavours blazed a trail in Reading is that F word, Flavours. Everyone uses it now, so you have Madras Flavours, Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours, Palmyra rebranded as Afghan Flavours. More flavours than a Peter Andre megamix. But House Of Flavours did it first, a long time ago, so they of all people ought to know that if you have that word in your name your dishes have to taste of something.

The only thing worse than no flavour is the wrong flavour, and that was Jo’s lot when it came to main courses. Initially she had wanted her reference dish, lamb tikka masala, but the menu only had chicken tikka masala on it.

“That’s okay, I’ll just ask them to make it with lamb” said Jo, unwisely, and so I launched into the Gospel According To Clay’s. I told Jo that Indian restaurants that just swapped out interchangeable meats with the same base sauce were the way Indian restaurants used to be years ago, but that it was better for each dish to have a distinct start and end point, its own mix of spices and, crucially, the meat and the gravy getting to know each other properly.

You can probably imagine how dull that was for Jo to sit through, and you can probably also imagine how smug I was when our server told Jo that, no, she could only have the tikka masala with chicken. So she did, and it was not a great advert for the meat and the gravy getting to know each other better.

The chicken was, in fact, really lovely. But the sauce was that kind of brick red, orange concoction that didn’t feel a million miles from a base sauce: irony of ironies. And it was sweet – strangely sweet, without any heat to pep it up. What had gone wrong? Jo had talked, on the way to the restaurant, about how she always over-ordered at Indian restaurants, got something to take home for her (or even her beloved dog Diesel). This was a double whammy: she left some, but didn’t want a doggy bag.

The realisation I came to, in eating all this, was that House Of Flavours had lost its way a little, and it was instructive to look at what it was good at and compare it with its competitors. I always say about Clay’s – still the quintessential Indian restaurant in this or any town, even if I’m friends with the owners – that the gravy is king and the meat, really, is secondary.

You could fish every piece of tender, melting chicken thigh out of their ghee roast chicken and you would still eat the gravy with your fingers if necessary. I’ve had it at home before, as part of their delivery range, and licked the spoon I’ve used to dish it up.

But by contrast at House Of Flavours, protein is the master and the sauce is just something to have it bobbing in. That’s why the starters were so good, and why the meat in our mains could have been great, if it hadn’t come bathed in an afterthought. It’s such a pity, but they’d almost be better off calling themselves House Of Meats. It’s not a sexy name, but it might set expectations better.

This was also the problem with the sides. I rather liked the keema naan, although I’ve rarely met one I didn’t. And the rice, packed with mushrooms, was pleasant: it might have been more than that if the advertised cumin had come out to play.

But these accompaniments, however great they are, come to life in the presence of a great sauce. And where there isn’t a great sauce, they are just things you mix with or dip in an underwhelming sauce, aware that they are somehow diminished by the act. I so wanted to love my meal. I so wanted not to write paragraphs like this.

There wasn’t much more to say, and dessert was out of the question. So we finished our beers, still none the wiser about how they differed from Cobra, and got the bill from our excellent server. Dinner for two came to eighty-four pounds, not including tip: when I went there in 2013 we had one more course and a couple more drinks and paid twenty pounds less. So it goes. I still don’t think House Of Flavours is terrible value, if you pick the right things. But that’s assuming there are right things to pick.

There must be: our starters were great, and the place was packed. The thing is, though, that long-lived restaurants exist in a continuum, and ever since I published my first review of House Of Flavours in 2013 people have been popping up at regular intervals to tell me I was wrong.

“Will not be going back” said one comment, the April after I reviewed it, back in 2014. “Hard to believe it is the same place” said another detractor, the following April. “The worst kind of inauthentic ‘Indian'”, he went on. “I will not be returning.” Saying I was wrong about House Of Flavours seemed to be an occasional thing. Two years later another commenter weighed in. “I’ve been there twice and been very disappointed both times” he said. Even back in 2019 people were still stopping by to tell me House Of Flavours had gone downhill. “Disappointed by my recent visit” said a fourth person.

Maybe this writeup is just the latest in a line of perspectives that House Of Flavours isn’t quite as amazing as it was in the heyday of 2013. I suspect it will have the same effect on the restaurant as all of those comments, though: House Of Flavours will not be dented by this review, and that’s probably as it should be. You may well have your own opinions about it already, and they mightn’t be altered by this either.

But I hope mine was not a representative experience, because I would very much like House Of Flavours to still be there in another twelve years, even if I have stopped reviewing restaurants by then. I always thought it was much closer to Clay’s than it was the likes of Standard Tandoori or the Bina, but time stands still for nobody, and unless it’s careful it might converge with the likes of those restaurants. Even in the town centre it has competition: Chilis, always excellent, is snapping at its heels.

I don’t mind being wrong. It’s an occupational hazard of reviewing restaurants and putting your opinion out there every week. But I don’t often hope to be wrong quite as much as this. Besides, it has a website, it closes when it says it will and it doesn’t turn hungry people away at just gone 7pm. In that respect, if in no other, it can still teach some of our newcomers a thing or two.

House Of Flavours – 7.0
32-36 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
0118 9503500

https://house-of-flavours.co.uk

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