Tag: restaurants

Restaurant review: The Royal Berkshire Hospital

On By ediblereadingIn None of the above, Reviews9 Comments

On the Wednesday afternoon, my second full day in hospital after the accident, I put some pictures up on Facebook. Nothing special, just a picture from my bed of Dorrell Ward, my left foot poking out, and a shaky, badly photographed picture of my lunch. Well, I never thought this would be my next forthcoming restaurant review my caption read. I know the English is clumsy but in my defence I was dictating it, because typing was too challenging at that point. Besides, I’d probably just had some morphine.

The comments were immediate, plentiful and properly lovely. A couple of the funny ones stuck with me. Chronicle hitman? said one: I replied that it was more likely to be a whack job by the owners of Vino Vita. Another said that is extreme lengths you’ve gone to to obtain a review. I had the comeback in my mind – no stone left unturned, I thought I would say – but looking at my Facebook page, it seems I never posted it. Perhaps the morphine had kicked in by then: I did spend quite a lot of the time asleep, at the rare times when sleep came easily, because that way everything hurt less.

But the thing is, on some level it is a gap that I’ve never reviewed the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Because you could make an argument that it is Reading’s largest restaurant: the trust employs 7500 people, admittedly across more sites than just the RBH, and has over 800 beds. Put that way, it’s hard to imagine that even Reading’s busiest conventional restaurant feeds more people in a week.

So I suppose, in a funny kind of way, this review is sort of overdue. During my four night stay in a place that doubles as Reading’s busiest restaurant, I begin to get an idea of what an unusual beast it is.

* * * * *

I wasn’t meant to wind up an inpatient in the Royal Berks. A whole chain of things had to go wrong for me to be in the place I was and make the decision I did.

First of all, I shouldn’t have been commuting home that Monday afternoon. The previous week I’ve been off with the cold that everyone has had, the cold that wiped us all out. And I only went into the office to catch up with my boss, only to find when I got there that he’d had to take the day off at short notice. If I’ve known I would have worked from home, and never made the fateful journey that led to me coming a cropper.

And my boss’s boss, seeing that I was less than 100%, told me to go home early. That played a part too. So I found myself getting off a train somewhere between four-thirty and five o’clock, cutting through Harris Arcade on my way to pick something up from the supermarket. If I’d been later, the arcade would have been closed and I wouldn’t have used it as a short cut. But all those things happened, one after another, and so a little before five I got to the Friar Street end of the arcade to find the shutter in front of the exit halfway down.

In my mind, I thought two things that weren’t necessarily true. I thought that if I headed back to the other end of the arcade, I might find that shutter down too, and then by the time I returned to where I was I’d be shut in the arcade. I also looked at the shutter in front of me and thought to myself I can squeeze under that. And in that respect, I was sort of right: I did manage to shimmy under the shutter.

The problem was that retaining my footing on the other side was completely beyond me.

I went unceremoniously flying, face first into a parked car. My glasses were smashed to pieces, my face bleeding and grazed. But that wasn’t the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was that my arm, in unbelievable pain, no longer felt like mine. I have had to tell this story more times than I can tell you: to friends, to family, to acquaintances, but also to every single NHS staff member who has spoken to me in any capacity since the accident. The first thing they ask you is to confirm your name and your date of birth. But the second thing they say, without fail, is so how did it happen?

I always start with it’s really embarrassing, followed by do you know the Harris Arcade in town?  My shame is then compounded by the fact that invariably, whoever I’m talking to knows exactly where I’m talking about: I can’t even make it sound less ridiculous an accident than it was. “I’ve never heard that one before” said the very nice man that took my first x-ray after I was discharged from hospital. Many of the reactions have been variations on that theme.

My wife has heard me tell the tale many times, and has given me tips on how to make it more entertaining which I refuse to follow. Stories in her family are currency, and sitting with them watching them trade anecdotes is one of my favourite things to do, an opportunity to relax and enjoy the show. Zoë tells me that to get a big laugh I should pretend that the shutter was literally rolling down as I reached it and that I chose in an instant to slide underneath it. 

But that makes me sound intrepid, or brave, or both. In reality, I’m just a dumb middle-aged man who made a bad decision and went down like an overweight sack of potatoes. The closest I’ve come to taking her advice is this: whenever I tell someone what happened I say I tried to get under the shutter like a shit Indiana Jones. Even that, I’m painfully aware, makes me sound cooler than I really am.

* * * * *

After the accident, in shock and in pain, unable to see, I am peeled off the pavement by Elliott and Alex.

Everyone likes to think that they would stop in circumstances like these, but I think we all know that most people don’t. Elliott and Alex do. They are second year students at the university, who just happen to be in town that afternoon. They ask if I’m okay, and it soon becomes apparent that I’m not. They help me to a bench outside M&S, near the statue of Queen Victoria. They call 999 and put me on the line. The call handler suggests that I should go to the minor injuries unit in Henley. Elliott and Alex are having none of that. I call my wife, still at work, and she picks up because she knows that I never call her when she’s at work.

“Is everything okay?” she asks me. No, I reply. My arm doesn’t work, I say.

Elliott and Alex call me an Uber to get me to the RBH. Getting into it is agony, but they keep talking to me, keep me in the room, keep me distracted. They call their friends and tell them they’re running late, and they ride with me to the hospital and wait with me until my wife arrives, having rushed back from work. These people don’t know me, don’t know anything about me, but they give up two hours of their evening to stay with a stranger, one who’s in excruciating pain and blind as a bat. They only go when they know that Zoë has got home, has picked up some stuff and is in a taxi on her way to me.

We swap phone numbers, and Elliott texts me several times over the weeks ahead. I am yet to persuade him to let me pay for the Uber, but I intend to keep trying. It is the first and probably the biggest kindness I experience, but by no means the last.

After they are gone, I squint at my phone held in my one good hand and wait for Zoë. From down the corridor I hear her at reception. “I’m looking for my husband” she says, and when asked to describe me, she says “he’s big and grey”. I make a mental note never to let her forget this, but I’m just so happy she’s there.

* * * * *

My first experience of the food on the ward, the day after I am admitted, is not the best. Despite the fact that I’m pretty much unable to move, arm in a cast, dosed up with codeine and morphine like clockwork, it hasn’t registered with me that eating with one hand is going to be extremely difficult. I order cornflakes for breakfast, and then realise that sitting up in my bed to eat them is something of which I’m simply not capable. I write that off, because oddly my appetite isn’t what it usually is, and decide I can save myself for lunch.

Lunch is a vegetable risotto, glistening strangely under artificial lights that give it almost an oversaturated look, like a Martin Parr photograph. I push a couple of forkfuls into my mouth and decide these are calories I can do without. Besides, I decide that it looks more like something deposited on a pavement after closing time than the sort of thing I’m used to in pubs and restaurants. At this point, I guess I’m thinking of the Royal Berks as like an all inclusive holiday: you can always sneak in food from elsewhere.

Zoë comes to visit me every day, and between us we soon learn the ecosystem of alternatives in the hospital. The top of the tree is the M&S – “that little Marks & Spencer is a godsend”, Zoë says to me, remembering all the vegetable samosas I smuggled in for her when she spent the best part of a week on the Covid ward. I have a bag of crispy chocolate clouds on my bedside table pretty much most of the time, the challenge being to eat them before the sweltering heat makes them unviable.

And then there’s the hierarchy of coffee. Back when I lived near the hospital I used to walk to AMT for their mochas, and on hot days I’d buy a Froffee, a coffee and ice cream milkshake, and drink it in Eldon Square Gardens, soaking up the sun. I was between jobs back then, and it broke up the afternoons. But AMT’s best days are behind it, and the mocha Zoë brings me one morning is genuinely undrinkable. 

Better, to my surprise, is Pumpkin: one afternoon my dear friend Jerry comes to visit me and fetches me a mocha from Pumpkin which is a hundred times better than AMT’s. He also brings me a copy of Viz and the latest Private Eye, which is the kind of thoughtful thing great friends do. I read them at night, by the light of my bedside lamp, after half nine when visiting hours are over and my knackered wife has gone home to get some rest. She keeps me company for 12 hours, every single day, and she never complains.

We aren’t used to spending nights apart, and of all of the things about this that might be one of the most upsetting. The lights are never completely off in the ward, because they’re always coming round to top up your drugs or check your blood pressure. But with my fan whirring, and the other noise abating, the Yves Klein blue curtains drawn around my bed, we send each other good night messages and pictures, and I try to quieten my mind by reading the magazines that Jerry has brought me.

When it comes to coffee the god tier is Jamaica Blue. I reviewed them, over seven years ago, but somehow I’d forgotten about their existence, or how good they were. On the morning of my discharge from hospital Zoë brings me one of their mochas, and for the first time in almost a week I am reminded of how wonderful a thing great coffee can be. It’s a small, tenuous link to my pre-accident life of little luxuries, of V60s at home or my latte at C.U.P, always at 8am, before hopping on the train to the office.

Even better than that, if such a thing is possible, is the milkshake Zoë brought me the previous afternoon from Jamaica Blue, an indulgence so lovely I could almost weep. Thick, cold, chocolatey, more fun than you would ever reasonably expect to have in a hospital. It tastes, to paraphrase Philip Larkin in another context, like an enormous yes.

* * * * *

If I didn’t rely on goodies from the M&S or from the hospital’s cafés as much as I could have done, there was a reason for that. The reason was that the food from the Royal Berks proved to be quite the surprise package.

The menus come round every morning, printed each day, a series of boxes and options to tick for the following day’s breakfast, lunch and dinner. The weeks are numbered, and the font at the top of the menu calls them Lunch and Supper, in Mistral, a typeface you know even if you don’t realise you do. It’s the one from the logo of Australian soap Neighbours, designed in the ‘50s, a beautiful cursive script that is simultaneously retro and timeless. I’ve always loved Mistral, and somehow it brings a tiny chink of sunlight into a room shrouded with blinds.

After that disappointing risotto, somehow I never have another entirely bad meal during my time in hospital. For lunch on my second full day, I have a beef curry with rice and chunks of potato and while I’m eating it, I realise that it’s actually quite good. Not just the absence of bad, although I would’ve settled for that, but decent. 

The meat isn’t soft, tender, falling apart as it would be in a Clay’s curry, and the spicing isn’t complex, or even front and centre, but it’s not bouncy, fatty or gristly. The waxy cubes of potato add something, and I find that even with a broken arm, even with a hot uncomfortable cast on me, even with the fan humming and the painkillers wearing off, this is a good meal.

And then, afterwards, an even happier surprise. An apple crumble where the base is sweet, stewed apple but more importantly, the ratio of crumble to fruit is beyond reproach. And by that I mean that it’s easily two thirds crumble, a huge and joyous permacrust of biscuit so thick that I’m fearful, with only one hand, of whether I’ll be able to force my spoon through it. I manage it somehow, and the rewards are considerable.

I include a picture of my lunch with a picture of my ward as I send that first Facebook post mentioning what’s happened to me and where I have found myself. The responses flood in wishing me well, but they also do something interesting that I didn’t expect: a lot of them talk about the food. Because, and I had no idea of this, the hospital makes all of its food from scratch, on the premises, and they serve it in the restaurant as well as serving it to the patients. They could so easily use the likes of Sodexo: how wonderful it is that they choose not to.

One commenter tells me that she used to be the patient services manager for the catering department. The hard work that goes into all of those recipes is outstanding she tells me, and I can well believe it. She also sends me a lovely message with a few tips about what you can and can’t do around the menu, catering life hacks; I thank her for them but decide not to do any of them, because I don’t want to be a diva. The staff start work at 6am every day, she tells me, and work for 14 hours to ensure feeding everybody in the hospital: Reading’s largest restaurant indeed.

So many people comment along those lines, about the food, about the staff, about what a wonderful place the Royal Berks is for people when they need care the most. One of comments says how lovely the hospital’s goulash and spicy lamb are, another recommends the “cultural and religious menu”, a tip that is echoed by Zoë from her time on the Covid ward. The menu just calls it a “ethnic meal”, but I order it multiple times and am never disappointed.

Somebody else tells me that she’s been a patient at the RBH on and off for 18 months. The food is one of the highlights she tells me. It sounds silly, but all these intersecting stories, this universality of experience makes me feel less alone, and less scared. It also reinforces that even if I have very limited experience of this hospital – this is the first time I’ve ever spent the night in a hospital since I was born – the RBH is at the centre of Reading life, and it touches everybody.

It was there when my wife was taken away from our house in an ambulance late at night for a prolonged stay on the Covid ward, in the depths of winter 2021. Both of my sisters-in-law were born there, so were both of my beautiful nieces. It’s the RBH that treated my father-in-law when he had cancer, and again when he had a heart attack. And that’s just my family – but from the pile of comments I got a clear impression that it was central to countless more families than mine.

I never quite get over not hating the food. The following day I have a beef stroganoff which again, is just downright comforting and nice. The little mini packets of biscuits are by Crawfords, and are really enjoyable with a cup of hospital tea; I allow myself two sugars while I’m in hospital, it seems only right. The ice cream is lovely too, despite not resembling any ice cream I would buy for myself on the outside. You almost need to eat it first, because by the time you finished your stroganoff or your keema curry – accompanied by a little pot of dal or vegetable curry – it is a texture almost like foam.

* * * * *

One of the comments on my Facebook page says NHS toast is up there. And there is truth in that, too: every morning my breakfast form requests white toast with butter and Marmite, and there is real comfort in eating that around 8am, when the ward starts to stutter to life and the shifts change over, when you give up hope of getting any more shut eye until the afternoon. 

With only one arm, I have to ask the nurses to butter my toast and put Marmite on it. Every morning I luck out, either getting a nurse who loves Marmite or, equally likely, one who has never tried the stuff. The tub they bring is generous, and it is generously slathered on. I eat it in silent gratitude, and then I attack my sweet white tea, a drink I haven’t had for the best part of a decade.

* * * * *

Everyone says this, but it’s true: the staff at the RBH are uniformly fantastic. From the people who butter my toast to the ones who help me adjust my bed, from John, the helpful nurse on my final morning who walks me to the loo and protects my dignity to the two T-level students who are spending the week helping out on my ward, who take my blood pressure across the four days with gradually increasing proficiency, everybody is amazing. From the porters who wheel me across the hospital in my bed for a CT scan to the staff who somehow managed to roll and transfer me from my bed into the scanner – while again protecting what little dignity I have – it’s impossible to express admiration or gratitude adequately for them. 

And everybody knows everybody, the porters greet each other as they pass in corridors, the way bus drivers do. The staff have an incredible spirit and I can only imagine the strain that is put under, every single day. At the time I’m simply emotional and grateful and full of feelings in a way that suggests that, the rest of the time, they’re probably buried further below the surface than they should be.  I’ve spent more of the last five weeks crying then I have the five years before that.

It’s only later on, when I get home, that I feel angry that things should be so difficult for the people that work there. During the pandemic, I always neglected to stand outside my house and bash a saucepan with a wooden spoon, to clap for carers. I found it performative, I felt like it had been suggested by a government that did not care for that sector one iota, and did nothing to protect it from the virus. I told people that I did my bit for the NHS by voting Labour. But now I realise that’s also performative, only in a different way, and just as bad. I resolve to donate to the Royal Berks’ charity when I get out, to support their extraordinary work.

* * * * *

Around Thursday lunchtime Melinda, one of the nurses looking after us that day, stops by my bed and asks me if I write this blog. She follows me on Facebook, and has seen the picture of my foot in the ward. I’d know that ward anywhere, she tells me. I own up, and we have a little chat about that, a touching little moment of connection which comes out of nowhere. I tell her that if she wants to feel really proud of where she works, she should go to my Facebook page and read the comments.

I mention this anecdote on Facebook a few days later when I’m convalescing at home, and someone else pops up in the comments. Me and that same nurse had this conversation in the staff kitchen and she showed me your post and that’s how I was introduced to your page she says. It’s nice to feel social media bringing people together, because there are so many reminders day in, day out of it doing precisely the opposite.

Later on Thursday afternoon, a doctor comes by to chat to me about my discharge the following day. The junior doctors are on strike tomorrow, and everything is being prepped in advance so I can check out without any undue delays. She asks how my time in hospital has been and as I’ve done here, as I’ve done with everybody who has asked since I got home, I pretty much gush about the amazing work that happens in the Royal Berks.

“I really hope you didn’t mind the food” she tells me. “We get quite a lot of complaints about that.”

“Actually I liked it” I reply. I think about it for a second, decide to blow my cover. “I write a restaurant blog in my spare time and the food here, and the way it is managed here has really impressed me.”

“You’re not Edible Reading, are you? I’m pretty sure I follow you.”

This might be the closest to fame that I’m ever going to get, but really I’m not at the epicentre of this story. The hospital is. Mine is just one of thousands of stories about this institution, one voice straining to be heard in a gigantic choir singing its praises. That is absolutely as it should be.

When I finally leave on the Saturday, gingerly shambling out into the daylight with Zoë to the car park where my father-in-law is waiting, my relationship with the RBH is far from over. There will be x-rays, they will fit a brace, they will do more x-rays, they will determine that the brace isn’t enough, and they will decide to operate. The fracture clinic is right next to Jamaica Blue: I grab a coffee to fortify myself before every appointment.

There will be a day when I sit there in the Day Surgery ward for seven hours, starving and anxious, while I watch everyone else go off for their surgery, come back and go home. There will be a conversation with the anaesthetists, where I only remember the beginning and then come round, groggy and in recovery, hours later. There will be that first phone call with Zoë afterwards, when I let her know that I’m still alive and enjoy the miracle of hearing her voice again. 

And there will be one more night in the hospital, back on Dorrell Ward. It might be a happy accident, or it might be deliberate, but they take me to the same ward and park my bed in the same bay. One of the nurses on duty was on duty when I first stayed in hospital. You again, she smiles. The next morning, the wife of the chap in the bed next to me comes over to talk to me and Zoë. “I’m so glad they put him in Dorrell” she tells us. “It’s the best ward in the hospital.”

I don’t know. Perhaps everybody says that. But it was hard not to feel like it was the best ward in the hospital, or that I was the best hospital in the country. Because they and their extraordinary staff took what would have been the most frightening, lonely and anxious week of my life and made it somehow a week of peace, care, healing and – let’s not forget – Marmite. 

So that’s my review of the Royal Berkshire Hospital. A place of peace, care, healing and Marmite. A place that is Reading’s biggest restaurant by accident, not design, and one that happens to be a restaurant many times better than it needs to be. It’s also the most paradoxical place I will ever review. Because obviously I sincerely hope I never eat there again, and I wouldn’t wish a meal there on my worst enemy. But if you do find yourself there, and many people do, every single year, I cannot say enough good things about it. The food’s not bad, either.

The Royal Berkshire Hospital
London Rd, Reading RG1 5AN
0118 3225111

https://www.royalberkshire.nhs.uk

You can support the Royal Berks charity here – I have made a donation, which is the least I can do after all those meals.

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Restaurant review: Oishi

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews

As followers on social media may already know, this will be my last conventional restaurant review for a short while. Last month I broke my arm in a nasty accident, and after a short stay in the Royal Berks, a brace, plenty of x-rays and an operation at the end of November I have been recovering at home.

As I’m currently housebound, with only one working arm, further restaurant reviews will have to wait, hopefully not too long. Thank you to everybody for the well wishes I’ve received since the incident: I’m very lucky to have such kind and supportive readers.

I will publish content on the blog in the meantime, my physical condition and the limitations of Apple dictation willing, so stay tuned for that. I will try to spare you a piece on “meals you can eat at home with one hand”, (although I get the impression that genre’s less niche than you might think). For now, I hope you enjoy this review, which is of the last restaurant I visited before the accident: I’m very glad that it was at least a gorgeous meal.

For my money, the saddest words you can find when you Google a restaurant are these: temporarily closed.

They should mean one thing, but they so frequently mean another. You should be able to take them at face value, deduce that the proprietors are taking a well-earned rest, or enjoying their summer holidays. But frequently they mean quite the opposite: the restaurant has closed for good, but it hasn’t been officially confirmed yet. Those two words are like light reaching you from a dead star, a misleading proof of life.

In Reading I’ve seen this happen many times. O Português was marked as temporarily closed for several months, a Facebook post by the restaurant saying something like “be back soon” before it eventually shut for good. The same went for Buon Appetito: people turned up for reservations, only to find the place locked and bolted, no sign up and nothing on social media. The only two-word commentary anywhere? Temporarily closed.

It’s frustrating that so many restaurants fail to announce their own departure. I appreciate that it must be desperately sad when a business fails, that people are out of jobs and in some cases, an independent restaurateur’s dreams have withered and died. Perhaps telling customers, or prospective customers, is the least of their worries. But it’s a shame for customers too, especially if you’ve grown fond of a place: their closure, done that way, denies you closure.

Going temp to perm on your Google listing is the equivalent of leaving a job under a cloud. Far better to close the way the Grumpy Goat did, with one last Saturday to drink the place dry, or as Dough Bros did with its recent announcement, telling punters they had until just before Christmas to get their pizza fix.

It’s especially agonising when it’s somewhere you love. My stepmother’s favourite place to eat is a pub called the Bailiwick, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. It was stricken with the curse of temporary closure last month, with nothing on social media. Worse still, they were listed as permanently closed on OpenTable. When they subsequently posted that they would reopen, with more limited hours, having been “given a second chance” my stepmother was elated. Temporary closure, after all, is so rarely that.

It does happen sometimes in Reading, to be fair. Biryani Mama on St Mary’s Butts looked very shut, claimed they were closed for renovations (an excuse I’ve heard before from restaurants that never reopen) but, true to their word, they’re now trading again. But I have never, in all my days reviewing restaurants, seen a restaurant come back from the dead the way Oishi did.

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Restaurant review: Club India

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winnersh? Our Winnersh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.clubindia.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Stop & Taste

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And now you speak fluent Emmer Green!”

“Something like that” he smiled.

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

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

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

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

Finally I went up one last time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That cookie, it said.

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

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

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Restaurant review: Ciao Bella, Bloomsbury

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Family-run trattoria Ciao Bella is at the top of Lamb’s Conduit Street, not far from the British Museum. These days that street is about as affluent as they come, home to the original branch of restaurant Noble Rot and its offshoot wine shop Shrine To The Vine and to the likes of Honey & Co, La Fromagerie, Aesop, Sunspel and fancy umbrella sellers London Undercover.

It’s brimming with possibility. You can have a latte outside Knockbox Coffee in the sunshine, or sip a pint at the Perseverance, where acclaimed Nunhead pizza traders Dinner For One Hundred operate out of the kitchen. It truly is as likeable as street as you’ll find in the capital.

I’m guessing it wasn’t, though, back in 1983 when Ciao Bella first opened. Yet over forty years later it sits at the head of, but somehow separate from, all that gentrification. Because Ciao Bella is that rare thing, a restaurant beloved by those in the know but rarely talked about by everyone else. Ten years ago, back when Marina O’Loughlin was restaurant critic for the Guardian, she listed it as one of her 50 favourite U.K. restaurants.

“This 30 year old trouper packs ’em in night after night” she said and although – as so often with O’Loughlin – this approval had a touch of the performative about it, you couldn’t say she wasn’t consistent. Last year, writing in the FT about life post-retirement as a restaurant critic, under the headline At last, I can eat in places I actually like she said that she was still dining at Ciao Bella, and had recently lunched there three Fridays running. “Every visit is an event, a celebration” she is on record as saying.

It wasn’t just O’Loughlin, though. When Oisin Rogers, celebrity publican and Topjaw fanboy, published his list of his 55 favourite restaurants last year, surfing the wave of his post-Devonshire popularity, he also found room for Ciao Bella. He described it as the “quintessential family-run trattoria… full of jollity and chaos”.

The impression I got of Ciao Bella, doing my research, is that it will never trouble Michelin or the Good Food Guide but remains on many hospitality insiders’ shortlists. “If you don’t like it, you’re a snob” said one regular, interviewed by the now defunct London edition of Eater a few years ago. There was a similar comment in Harden’s: “anyone who doesn’t love Ciao Bella is mad”. Talk about a sure thing.

That’s not to say that all those rave reviews say that the food is brilliant – or, indeed, that any of them do. But they all suggest that it’s good enough, and that the overall experience of eating there is hugely more than the sum of its parts. They talk about the buzzy dining room, the legendary terrace with its blue canopies and its people-watching possibilities, the live pianist every night, the huge unpretentious portions, the seafood pasta decanted from a bag into your bowl tableside.

I’ve always understood that great restaurants are about so much more than the food – something Reading-based readers might recognise as the Dolce Vita effect – and, with that in mind, I would challenge you to read almost anything in the public domain about Ciao Bella and not at least slightly want to eat there. It all definitely had that effect on me. It had been on my to do list for a really long time, and on the last Saturday in September I zig-zagged up Lamb’s Conduit Street, window-shopping in the sunshine, on my way to a lunch reservation with my old friend Aileen.

The terrace always comes up in reviews of Ciao Bella and on a slightly warmer day I might have fancied eating outside, but I really liked the look of the dining room on the ground floor. It’s an unfussy space, its walls groaning with framed black and white pictures with a heavy reliance on the films of Fellini. There’s Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, almost connecting in the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita. Just along from that is a picture of the director’s wife, Giulietta Massina, in La Strada. It felt like the room in which all those stories I’d read – of long boozy lunches or chaotic evenings with accompaniment on the piano – took place.

So I was disappointed to be led to the sunshine-yellow basement, which was empty when I arrived, and plonked in the corner, at a table where my right elbow felt like it would be knocking against the wall for the entire meal. On my left I had a great view of the men’s toilets. The waiter conspiratorially told me it was a good seat because I could “see all the pretty girls coming in”, which I’m sure he meant in a vaguely twinkly way but which came across as on the borderline between cheesy and due for cancellation. Maybe I looked like an ornithologist, but I don’t think so.

Rooms benefit from people, it has to be said, and it was a better space by the end of our meal when every table was occupied. But it was still a slightly unlovely one, and I felt like I was in some kind of gastronomic overflow car park, in the room put aside for tourists. I’m used to having that experience in, say, Paris, but it was strange to have it happen in London.

In Ciao Bella’s defence, I think I’ve read somewhere that the basement is usually used for private parties but it seemed on that Saturday that the converse might have applied: when we left there was a wedding Routemaster parked outside on the pavement and I suspect a wedding was being celebrated on the ground floor. I can’t blame them for that: if they had the numbers to escape from the canary-coloured cellar they should have seized that opportunity with both hands. But away from daylight and ambience, I couldn’t help wondering what might have been.

By this point Aileen had arrived and we attacked a very serviceable, almost medicinal, negroni apiece. It was, after all, negroni week – or, to give it its full name, ‘Instagram bores going on about negroni week’. Ciao Bella’s was bang on, no whistles or bells, no flourishes, just a route one approach to dropping that soft, orange filter over the rest of the day. I liked it a great deal.

As we tried without success to get round to the menu, Aileen filled me in on what she’d been up to, which included commencing a grand project with a friend to do twenty-six city breaks over the next ten years or so, proceeding in reverse alphabetical order. Never let it be said that Aileen hadn’t found ways to fill her retirement, not that she sounded very retired from all the side hustles she had taken on since leaving her main job. I learned that Zagreb – where else would it have started? – was very nice, although the cathedral isn’t quite finished yet following the earthquake.

I also discovered that Aileen planned to go back there when it was completed, so I tried pointing out that repeat visits would just make her project almost impossible to finish. Apparently it’s Ypres next, but do pop any suggestions for other destinations in the comments. I’m sure Aileen will read them. X will be particularly challenging, I’m guessing: my suggestion was that she could just about stretch it to Aix en Provence on a technicality. Do you think that’s cheating?

Ciao Bella’s menu, on a single outsized sheet of card, was as pleasingly retro as its website. Its contents were, too: this felt like the menu at every neighbourhood Italian since time immemorial, a proper, old-school selection of dishes. It took me back to places from my past – Pepe Sale circa 2009, or my dad’s erstwhile favourite Sasso in Kingsclere. It reminded me, too, that this kind of spot isn’t seen as frequently as it once was: a quote in that Eater article, tellingly, said “what’s nice about Ciao Bella is that it’s still there. One by one, other restaurants like it have been shut down”.

What that meant in practice was that starters were between £6 and £16, pizzas about £15 if you wanted one and pasta priced all over the place, although you could have a smaller portion of pasta for about £12. It meant that mains were between £20 and £30, a price point that used to mean fancy and now just means ‘get used to it’. It meant mozzarella in breadcrumbs, and Parma ham with melon, aubergine parmigiana, veal with lemon sauce or fried scampi. It meant that the modern affectations of Italian food were largely unnoticed by Ciao Bella: burrata appeared on one pizza, ‘nduja on one starter, neither anywhere else.

There was also a small specials menu, and even that made me feel nostalgic for those evenings at Pepe Sale, a lifetime ago, when Marco would materialise at your table and talk you through the options that evening. By this point, however underwhelming that yellow room was, I was disposed to like Ciao Bella a lot. It seemed to be transmitting from a time when life was very much more straightforward, and disappointment less abundant. I guess this must be the dragon Reform voters spend their whole lives unsuccessfully chasing.

But we were in 2025, where disappointment is rarely far away, and it came quickly in the shape of Aileen’s starter. Breadcrumbed mushrooms stuffed with spinach and ricotta weren’t the kind of thing I’d order, mainly because they always felt like a dish you could pick up in the chiller cabinet at M&S, or Iceland for that matter. They came sauceless and strangely burnt in places, plonked on a plate with a lemon wedge in the middle and pointless distraction from the dregs of a bag of Florette, in a presentation that screamed from the rooftops will this do?

“Taste this” said Aileen, in a manner that was a long way from oh my goodness, you have to try this. “It’s sort of wet: it makes me think it’s been frozen.”

I wasn’t sure about that, but it was middling in the extreme, if such a thing is possible. The filling was watery and bland, the layer of mushroom itself very thin.

“And it’s dry, it needs something else – a sauce, or a dip, or something. How does it manage to be wet and dry at the same time?” Aileen wondered out loud. “And what’s the point of those bits of undressed salad?”

So many questions, and so few answers. The late Shirley Conran famously once said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom: I suspect she might have thought it was too short to eat these, too. This cost £11. I was about to say something pithy about that, but putting the price there on the page, unembellished, makes the point.

I fared better, but better’s a relative term. Pappardelle with lamb ragu was on the specials menu and it was good but far from special. The thick ribbons of pasta were decent enough, but cooked past al dente until they were more slump than spring, and the lamb in the ragu battled against an overly sharp note of tomato, as if everything hadn’t had enough time to form a lasting relationship. The diced carrots were too substantial, too, standing out where they should have blended in, a long way from sofrito.

Better really is a relative term, and I couldn’t help looking at this dish in other relative terms, too. If I’d been served this at, say, Tilehurst’s Vesuvio I might have been pleasantly surprised. Something this good at Cozze would have been a miracle. But on Lamb’s Conduit Street, in a restaurant older than my wife that’s lauded by food insiders far and wide? It just felt ordinary.

Everything was a little rushed, too – I know I complain about this fairly often, sometimes at length, but the pacing here felt like the restaurant was trying to get ahead of a rush they knew was coming; perhaps it was another impact of having a wedding celebration upstairs. But it meant that our starters must have come out ten minutes or so after we picked them, when we were barely into our negronis, and that meant that a leisurely lunch, the kind so mythologised at Ciao Bella, was out of the window.

So we downgraded our expectations and picked a half bottle of Aglianico from the wine list. To be fair to Ciao Bella it was perfectly pleasant and far from poor value at £15, and I was delighted to see a few half bottles on the menu. Maybe they are to cater for the kind of lunch we turned out to be having. Our mains turned up about fifteen minutes after the starter plates were taken away, if that. Aileen expressed audible surprise that they were so quick, too taken aback to be completely English about it.

I had chosen an old favourite, and something I rarely see on menus, veal saltimbocca. In keeping with the whole nostalgic theme, I suppose, because back when Dolce Vita was at the height of its powers, something like ten years ago, I could have eaten this dish every Friday night for the rest of my life. Some months, to be honest, it felt like I did.

This did just enough to transport me, if only momentarily. That veal, slight and tender, wrapped in Parma ham and served with that sauce singing with white wine triggered plenty of happy memories. And if there wasn’t quite enough sage perhaps it didn’t matter, just like perhaps it didn’t matter that the accompaniment was five little cubes of potato, some veg which probably didn’t come out of a tin but somehow felt like it had and yet more of that bloody bag of Florette. For a moment, I felt like maybe Ciao Bella had worked its magic at last, and none of that mattered.

But sadly, there was one thing that did matter, and Aileen summed it up when describing her main.

“It’s such a shame this isn’t hot.”

She was absolutely right. It felt like the worst of both worlds, really: if your dish is going to emerge from the kitchen in record time you might complain about being turned but at least your meal should be piping hot. But for it to turn up so quickly and be lukewarm? It just felt like adding insult to injury, as if they’d cooked it at the same time as the starters and then just left it lying around on the pass until the earliest possible moment when it could be carted to the table.

Otherwise Aileen would have been absolutely delighted with her gamberoni, I imagine: plump prawns swimming in a sauce which looked almost identical to the one that came with my saltimbocca but which was clearly chock-a-block with garlic. But what was identical were those five cubes of spud, that mixed veg by numbers, that pointless, perfunctory scattering of salad from a bag. What was identical was that feeling of expecting more.

My dish cost £19.50, Aileen’s was £22.50. Neither was so expensive as to leave you feeling like you’d been mugged, but even so that word, ordinary, hovered in the air again.

Also distinctly ordinary were the courgette fritti, which were very thick batons which left your fingers shining with oil. I’ve had some gorgeous versions of this dish over the years – at Town, or at Battersea’s downright terrific Antica Osteria Bologna. The more I think about it, the more I think that everything I’ve heard about Ciao Bella and how magnificent it is emphatically applies to Antica Osteria Bologna. That is the restaurant people say Ciao Bella is. Ciao Bella, I’m afraid, is not.

We’d partly ordered a half bottle of red because we didn’t see ourselves staying the course at Ciao Bella but the dessert menu came along, and our wine was nearly finished, so we thought that we may as well give the restaurant one last chance to turn things around. It was, ironically, the area where I found Ciao Bella strongest, although the dessert menu does essentially say that only three of the desserts are homemade: possibly their most famous dessert, lemon sorbet served inside an actual lemon, is apparently not.

We ordered two of the three homemade desserts and I would say they were the – best? least disappointing? most acceptable? – things that we ate. My tiramisu wasn’t going to win any awards but it was a classic example of this dish – a thick wodge buried in cocoa, deeply boozy savoiardi biscuits and mascarpone in distinctly agreeable harmony. If everything else had been at the standard of this, I’d have liked the place far more. Still, better to finish on a high I suppose than begin brightly and plummet from there.

Similarly Aileen’s panna cotta, served in the shape of an old-school jelly mould, had a satisfying wobble and was crowned with a nicely done fruit couli. The dessert menu blurb is far too literal where the panna cotta is concerned – not sure “popular creamy white dessert made with sugar, gelatine and vanilla” is really selling it to anybody – but thankfully Ciao Bella is better at making panna cotta than it is at describing it.

The whole dessert experience rather summed Ciao Bella up. At £8.50 and £7.50 apiece these dishes weren’t expensive. But they arrived about five minutes after we ordered them, which is plain silly. I was catching up with a very good friend I hadn’t seen in a year, we’d been chatting so much that it took ages for us to place our order. Absolutely nothing about us, as a table, said “we’re in a hurry”.

It was nice of our waiter – who I do have to say was charming, in that very well-practiced way you might expect of an old stager – to ask if we wanted coffee, but by then we were ready to cough up and seek out somewhere else for the rest of our afternoon. Our bill came to just under £140, including an 11% optional service charge (this very specific uplift, deliberately picked to fall between the traditional 10% and the more common 12.5%, seemed strange). It was hard to feel happy with it or angry with it. It was what it was, as the meal was what it was.

Sitting outside Noble Rot, across the way, afterwards with a very nice bottle of red, making the most of the fact that it was still warm enough to do so, we agreed that the meal at Ciao Bella had been a tricky one. Even though both of us felt our meal could have been far better we didn’t feel aggrieved in the way that we might have done.

I’ve thought and thought about it since, and I’m still not sure entirely why. Of course, I had a lovely lunch with a very precious friend, and we both agreed that it could have happened anywhere and we would have had an excellent time. So there is that, but I can’t give a good rating every time I have lunch with Aileen just because I’m having lunch with Aileen: my credibility can do without that kind of dent.

So what was it? Did some of Ciao Bella’s magic transfer to us, by osmosis from the better, buzzier room upstairs, or slip through the cracks in the ceiling? I really don’t know. Objectively Ciao Bella was deeply average. If you had an Italian restaurant like it in your neighbourhood you might go, and you might go often enough to become a regular. You might form the kind of relationship with it where you overlook off days and look forward to seeing your favourite waiters or ordering your favourite dish.

But it is, as others have said, the kind of restaurant that is slowly dying out in the U.K., replaced by pizza places that only do pizza, pasta places that only do pasta and the abomination that is mid-price casual dining trying to devalue Italian food with all its horrendous Zizzis, Prezzos and Bella Italias. Maybe I just felt a little warm echo of some of the restaurants I’ve loved over the years that are no longer with us, and maybe some of that goodwill reflected on Ciao Bella, although it might not have deserved it.

Yet although it wasn’t my cup of tea, I can imagine it might hold that place in the affections of others, and I do envy them, both what they have and what I’ve lost. It’s funny, sometimes I can read reviews of restaurants in places I will never go, enjoy the writing, know I’ll never go there and feel that reading the review was enough, that it was as close to dining in that restaurant as I need to get. I sort of hope, on some level, that this review serves that purpose for you, even if the meal wasn’t entirely for me.

So if you’re the sentimental sort, you’re in London a lot, and you want to do your bit to prop up an institution, one of the last of its kind, if you’re prepared to overlook some bad tables, some middling dishes and some lukewarm food you might find, after you’ve invested enough time and money, that Ciao Bella is a restaurant you can truly fall in love with. For the rest of us, it might be better just to know that this place exists for its people, that there are places like that out there for everybody, and that in time we will all find ours.

Ciao Bella – 6.4
86-90 Lamb’s Conduit St, London, WC1N 3LZ
020 72422119

https://ciaobellarestaurant.co.uk

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

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