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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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As of September 2026 Tanatan appears to be closed – possibly for maintenance, possibly for good.
Some restaurants wind up so indelibly linked with the buildings that become their homes that years later, long after they are gone, you still can’t imagine another menu outside, someone else trading behind those doors. Sometimes, no other restaurant even tries: ever since Dolce Vita left its spot on the top floor of Kings Walk nobody has taken its place, but even if they did, I don’t know how I’d feel eating somewhere that, to me, will always be Dolce Vita.
Sometimes the place stays the same but changes hands, with or without changing its name. At some point I should return to Namaste Kitchen, and people tell me it’s good, but without Kamal running the front of house and that magical menu of Nepalese small plates I’m not sure how I’d overcome the strangeness of dining there. I’ll do it, one day, and when I do the review will have to have a different preamble to this one, because this one’s taken.
Ditto Spitiko, where Kyrenia used to be. The site’s the same, the menu is similar, the furniture might be too, and Spitiko may well be a perfectly decent restaurant. But in my mind it will always be Kyrenia, the place where I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, where I’d always go for mezze and kleftiko, for a bottle of Naoussa Grand Reserva and Ihor’s twinkliest welcome. Its golden age was over fifteen years ago, yet I remember it like it was yesterday.
That’s before we get to the Lyndhurst, now under its third set of new management since they hosted guests for the very last time – my wedding guests, no less. This may sound silly, but I don’t feel ready to eat there again. Perhaps this sentimental streak should disqualify me as a restaurant reviewer. But on balance I don’t think so: these places get into our hearts, occupy a place in our affections, become part of our story. Not to feel that kind of thing is not to be alive.
But of course, nearly every restaurant was once somewhere else. Buon Appetito, that I still miss, may have become Traditional Romanesc, but before that it was Chi Oriental Brasserie. And again, when Chi closed I was devastated. You know where else Chi Oriental Brasserie used to live? The site that’s now Masakali. And I was sad when Chi left that spot on the TGI Friday roundabout, too, but I was equally forlorn when San Sicario, a wonderful restaurant, gave up the fight at that very location.
All these places come and go. They make your day one month and break your heart the next: that’s what getting attached to a restaurant can do to you. Worse still, throughout it all TGI Friday has been plugging away on the other side of that roundabout for as long as I can remember. I wonder if restaurants have their own version of that well-worn maxim that only the good die young.
All this might go some way towards explaining that although new-ish Indian restaurant Tanatan opened on London Street last December, it’s only on a week night in July, months later, that I went there with my oldest friend Mike for dinner. Because even though the site was an empty shell for over two years, before that it was Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen, and it’s still hard for me to think of it as anywhere else.
Clay’s, where I ate for the first time before it opened, where I celebrated birthdays – mine and theirs, as it happens – where I went on random evenings because it was just round the corner from my little house, where I ate with friends, family and visitors, where I held lunches for my readers. Few rooms contain as much of my personal history as that one, so I knew it would be odd to eat there again, to eat Indian food there at that, and to know that it was somewhere new.
Tanatan’s story is a curious one, by the way. In the run up to it opening, the Reading Chronicle trumpeted that it was a high end Indian restaurant which very much seemed like the natural successor to Clay’s. Not only that, but they claimed that it was the first U.K. branch of an upmarket Indian group of restaurants with its other branches in India and Dubai.
That all sounds magnificent, and Tanatan’s website contains a menu full of temptations. There’s only one hitch, which is that there’s no evidence at all that Reading’s Tanatan has any connection to that chain at all. It’s not mentioned on their website, and in fact Reading’s Tanatan, for a long time, didn’t have a website of its own. Now it does, but the menu bears about as much resemblance to the other Tanatan’s menu as I do to Jude Law.
It looks suspiciously as if the Chronicle had flagged the name, put two and two together and come up with five, which is a mistake not even the AI that writes most of its articles would make. So, what was this Tanatan, our RG-based restaurant, like? Was it a worthy successor to its precursor, or an attempt to hop on a bandwagon two years after the bandwagon rolled north, over the river? It was time to brave that all too familiar room and find out.
It’s traditional to say “I love what you’ve done with the place” in circumstances like this, but arriving I was struck by how, really, Tanatan had done next to nothing with the room they had inherited. The walls were still that shade of tangerine that had ruined almost every photograph I’d ever taken, the metalwork at the top of the stairs still canary yellow. Terra cotta pots still hung from the mesh ceiling, the banquette I’d sat at countless times still ran along the right hand wall.
All that was new was the furniture – ugly, high-backed chairs on one side of the dining room, slightly unlovely booths on the other. The lack of a makeover surprised me somewhat, because the building had been vacant for so long between occupants. Did Tanatan open in a hurry, or were they trying to ride on the coat tails of their predecessor by hoping to be mistaken for them?
The room also had an unmistakeable, faintly frowsty smell of damp. Now, I didn’t know this but I bumped into a friend last week that told me that Clay’s, when it was open, had that slight odour too (“I always asked for a table upstairs”, he said). I never noticed it back then, but I guess two things that would have masked it were plenty of nice-smelling people and plates of fragrant food. And after all, even heating up a Clay’s At Home baghara rice could make your kitchen smell gorgeous for days. But on the night I visited Tanatan only one other table was occupied, although a couple of other diners came in after me.
Mike was already installed at a booth (“I got one with good lighting” he said, ever helpful) and – a nice touch, this – a bowl of complimentary poppadoms was on the table in front of us, with a greenish raita and a chutney that tasted of mango despite its colour being closer to ketchup. Both were lovely, and we ordered a pint of Kingfisher each as we chatted about how best to tackle the menu. In a nod to the more conventional curry house Tanatan offers Cobra and Kingfisher; I still haven’t worked out which I prefer, or what the difference even is.
Conventional also described Tanatan’s menu. The restaurant’s slogan is “where India’s spices dance”, and that might be true, but they’re not busting out any lesser-known moves. The menu was a step above the really entry level pick-your-sauce, pick-your-protein curry house, but only just. Korma, jalfrezi, dhansak and saag were all there, without much in the way of regional dishes; if you’re looking for something off the beaten track Tanatan might not be the place for you.
As so often nowadays, there was also a decent selection of Indo-Chinese dishes, although it didn’t have its own section on the menu. Starters ran in the main from six to ten pounds, mains stayed south of fourteen. The slightly disappointing range of the menu, though, wasn’t the main thing I noticed about it, because reading it truly made me feel like I was taking a day trip to the uncanny valley. Some of the menu items seemed to have been written by some kind of nightmarish fusion of Google Translate and ChatGPT.
For instance, I can’t think of any other reason why you would call onion bhajis Onions Crispy Fritters or chicken samosas Chicken Golden Crisp Pastry. In each case the dish’s actual name was written underneath in small print, after a prefix saying ‘Popular name’. If the name was that popular, why weren’t they just using it? It was like referring to Michael Caine as Maurice Micklewhite, only even weirder because at least that was Caine’s actual real name. But would anyone ever say, in real life, that they were gasping for a chicken golden crisp pastry?
It was so cack-handed that it was almost endearing, especially when the names of dishes took a turn for the chaotically poetic. I’ve heard chilli chicken called many things, especially Kamal’s Kitchen’s version the morning after, but The Fiery Phoenix? Actually, come to think of it that was a nicely euphemistic description of its consequences. And then there was my personal favourite: fish pakora was billed on the menu as Oceanic Crisp Delights, which sounds like the name of a Guided By Voices album track.
Anyway we began with some familiar but less mainstream dishes, for me to try and benchmark Tanatan – not just against Clay’s, but against plenty of Reading’s other Indian restaurants, the likes of Chilis, House Of Flavours and Deccan House. Chicken 65 is a go-to for me, and Tanatan’s rendition of it was a good statement of intent.
It got that sticky, savoury spicing bang on, and was less disconcertingly scarlet than my photo makes it look: Apple hasn’t yet discovered a filter for This photo was taken in a bright orange room, can you make it look normal please? The chicken felt like it had been marinated in yoghurt to within an inch of its life, and if I had one criticism it was that the texture sometimes was so soft that you weren’t entirely confident it could be completely cooked. I would have liked it a little drier, with a tad more char, but the flavour was unarguable.
Our other starter, mirchi bhaji (unpopular name: crispy chilli fritters) was similar on paper to the cut mirchi I’ve had at Clay’s and Deccan House. In practice, though, it was different: the chillies, which were potent, had rather shrunk away in their jacket of spiced gram flour batter. But even with that said they were golden, crunchy, pretty fiery and immensely snackable and I enjoyed them a great deal with some more of that raita.
Despite it being a quiet night in the restaurant, pacing was leisurely and so it wasn’t until about forty minutes and another pint of Kingfisher later that our mains came out. But I was fine with that: Mike was back from his adoptive hometown of Madrid for a family visit, something he only does a few times a year, and even though I’d already seen him on this trip there was no shortage of stuff to chat about. There never is.
After all, we grew up, or rather didn’t, on the same street in suburban Woodley, over forty years ago. We played tennis in the road between our houses, the cracks in the tarmac serving as nets and baselines. We cycled to school together, bags slung unsafely over our shoulders. We went to university, dropped out (in his case), went back (also in his case) and have known each other for an exceptionally long time across all sorts of adventures and misadventures.
So, both still alive, both still relatively sane, it was a delight to sit there between courses and shoot the breeze – about his parents and mine, his brother and mine, about what the year had held so far and what lay ahead.
I thought the starters had held promise but not entirely delivered on it, and although I was hoping the mains would buck that trend they stayed firmly on it. Mangalorean prawn curry, one of the less generic dishes on the menu, went heavy on the coconut and had an interesting combination of heat and sweetness. But I found it disconcerting: a huge pool of extremely thick gravy, the consistency of Greek yoghurt, with surprisingly small prawns lurking in it.
The ratios felt all wrong, as did the lack of anything else like veg to break up what was texturally quite mulchy: if it wasn’t prawn, it was sauce, and usually it wasn’t prawn. This dish wasn’t what I expected in the slightest, but I’m not sure my expectations were the problem.
Our second choice was more successful. Again, trying to steer clear of anything even remotely interchangeable, we’d opted for the Andhra lamb keema, partly also because I have a real soft spot for keema curries and think they’re often the most underrated thing on an Indian menu. I think I was right about that at Tanatan, at least, because this was miles more enjoyable than the prawn number in every respect. The lamb was very coarsely minced, so much so that it could have been finely chopped rather than put through a mincer, and that texture worked in terms of distributing flavour and, just as crucially, fat.
The whole dish felt like a coherent whole in a way that the prawn curry hadn’t, and was so much more fun to load onto bread or to fold rice into. The rice, jeera rice by the way, was perfectly pleasant but very light on the cumin (you’ll have to take my word for that, because putting a photo of rice up feels pointless).
What I will say, though, is that a portion of rice at Tanatan is easily enough for two people to share with some bread, which is to their credit. Also, although this looks a very similar hue to the prawn curry in this photo they were reassuringly different: it’s the fault of those bloody orange walls again.
I’d read somewhere online that Tanatan’s Bombay aloo was worth ordering, and Tanatan offers smaller portions of some of its vegetable dishes as sides, so we gave it a go. This got everything right that the prawn dish had not, a thick, comforting and spicy panacea of a dish with hunks of potato with just enough floury give to them. Great news for vegetarians, yes, but to be honest great news for anybody eating at Tanatan: next time I’d order this as a main.
You would think that with a big portion of cumin flecked rice and a curry made predominantly of potatoes we had quite enough carbs to be going on with. And you would be right, but because we were greedy idiots we also decided to attack what was quite a substantial bread section on the menu. Nearly a dozen different types of naan, a few roti and half a dozen or so parathas is a lot, although I found it a bit strange that they had a keema paratha but no keema naan.
I’m also not entirely convinced that the naan in particular aren’t just the same naan turning up in a variety of slightly different outfits. We chose the signature garlic and chilli naan and although I quite liked it, especially the scattering of punchy sliced green chilli, the texture was round and uniform, the whole thing lacking in bubbles, blisters or fluffiness.
We also tried paratha with mint. Initially when I ordered this our server wasn’t entirely sure they had it, and wandered off to the kitchen before returning and saying that it would be no problem. I assume that what he meant was that the kitchen hadn’t run out of mint, because what we got was a paratha scattered with mint. If there is more to Tanatan’s breads than this you wouldn’t know it, and although this was serviceable it again lacked the flaky butteriness of the very best examples. It wasn’t hugely up to the job of dipping – you couldn’t fault the naan for that – and I didn’t feel an impetus to finish mine.
We kept eating until we could tackle no more, at which point, despite the very kind offer of our server, there wasn’t enough left of anything to be worth boxing up. Over two hours had passed by this point and somehow, in that time, I had stopped eating in the place that used to be Clay’s and had finished up eating in Tanatan.
Despite any quibbles about the décor or the odour, that was very much a good thing: I had expected to feel a little sad dining here (still not going back to the Lyndhurst any time soon) but in reality it made me feel far happier about the circle of life that is restaurants outgrowing buildings, if they’re lucky, and being replaced by something new. Some of that was down to our server Tarak, who was tremendous throughout. He was enthusiastic, attentive, explained bits of the menu to us – the concept of chaat was a new one on Mike – and apologetic about the food taking a while, even though we were in no hurry.
As we were settling up I asked him about Tanatan, and impressively he told me that although it opened late last year he had only been there a month. This was the owners’ second restaurant, their first being a place called India Rasoi in Chorleywood. When I asked him why they’d chosen Reading for a sequel the answer was prosaic: one of the three partners lives here. People pick places to open their restaurants for all kinds of reasons, and that’s as good a reason as any. Our bill for two starters, two mains, two pints apiece, rice and breads came to just shy of eighty-two pounds not including tip, which Tarak absolutely deserved.
I’ve had some grief about recent reviews – it’s a story for another time – for comparing places to one another, for visiting Venue A and partly framing it in terms of how it measures up to Venue B. But I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because restaurants don’t exist in a vacuum and reviews of them have to sit in a wider context. You cannot talk about Tanatan, really, without talking about its peers, because if you don’t the review just drifts in mid-air, not answering the obvious question. Is it better than X, or Y?
If you don’t answer that question, you dodge the question altogether. It would only make sense not to talk about other Indian restaurants if Reading didn’t have any, and that will never happen. And even if it did, you’d still want to know whether to go here or to take the train to Newbury, or Wokingham, or Maidenhead. So comparisons are inescapable, and good restaurants have nothing to fear from them.
But I’m not going to compare Tanatan to Clay’s, even though I started this review talking about the previous tenants of 45 London Street. That would be pointless: you can’t compare anywhere in Reading to Clay’s, not in terms of Indian food, not in terms of profile or polish, barely in terms of quality at all. I wish more places came closer. And if Tanatan takes custom from other restaurants, despite its orange walls and the very limited makeover it’s given its dining room, it will be from its competitors in the town centre, not from the other side of the Thames.
So actually you need to decide whether you’ll eat at Tanatan – besides satisfying your curiosity or laying your own post-Clay’s ghosts to rest – instead of its neighbour Calico, or Royal Tandoori at the bottom of the road, House Of Flavours round the corner or Chilis in Kings Walk. For me right now, the last of those is the standout in a crowded field, with the others battling it out for the silver medal.
Time will tell where Tanatan finds itself in that chasing pack, and I would love to see it take more risks, widen that menu and, ideally, lose those chairs. But it has a fighting chance, because it gets a few things very right and service is one of them. If they ever do well enough to take a break, my advice to them is to get someone in to redecorate. If it lives up to its potential, you could get all the glow you need from the food, rather than the walls.
