Tag: restaurants

Restaurant review: Los Gatos, Swindon

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When I announced on social media last month that I’d had a very enjoyable day eating and drinking my way round Swindon there was (admittedly a limited amount of) complete and utter astonishment. What? said one person, no doubt thinking I had been hacked. Good Lord! Where? said another.

A third, regular reader Trudy, was particularly interested, having recently moved to Swindon where, as fas as I’m aware, they don’t have a friendly neighbourhood restaurant blogger. I met Trudy at the recent ER readers’ lunch at Clay’s so I gave her a sneak preview of what this review is about to tell you: yes, there are places to eat and drink in Swindon, and they’re a lot better than you might expect.

I’m not kidding – Swindon has enough about it to justify a trip out west on the train. You have to do a thirty minute walk from the station, up a hill, but you are rewarded with Swindon’s Old Town which is a small but perfectly formed district full of nice shops, restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars. There’s an arts centre, and the Town Gardens, a beautiful Victorian park with a listed bandstand and a cafe (it also, according to the council’s website, hosts something called the “My Dad’s Bigger Than Your Dad Festival”: I love my dad dearly, but I’m not entering him in this any time soon).

Where had all this been hiding? You could almost imagine you were in a little town on the outskirts of the outskirts of the Cotswolds, and then I realised that I sort of almost was. And truly, I had a wonderful afternoon eating and drinking and making merry in the company of my friends Dave, who lives in Wootton Bassett but I suspect wishes he lived in Cirencester, and Al, who lives in Cirencester and so doesn’t have to.

We started out with a couple of outstanding coffees from the small, difficult to find but deeply charming Pour Bois – which I pronounced to Dave as if it was French before realising that of course it was pronounced poor boyz because we were in Swindon, not Montparnasse. My mistake: it’s not easy being Frasier Crane in a town full of Bob “Bulldog” Briscoes.

After lunch we wandered over to Ray’s, an ice cream parlour which is an Old Town institution, and sat on the wall opposite eating our ice creams in mute contentment. And then we wandered over to the Town Gardens, which – don’t hate me for saying this – slightly puts Forbury Gardens to shame, not least because it has a lovely little cafe serving superb coffee which was miles better than anything you could get from the equivalent kiosk in Reading. The beans are by local Light Bulb Coffee, and I also picked some up to try at home (it’s marvellous stuff).

After ice cream and coffee there was nothing for it but to try some beer. Did you know that Swindon has a nascent craft beer scene? I didn’t either, but it turns out it does, with several great venues dotted along the Old Town’s Devizes Road. We started out in Tap & Brew, local brewery Hop Kettle’s Swindon tap room, which served some stonking beers: my favourite was Kepler, a proper fruit explosion of a NEIPA so good that I bought a bottle to stash in my bag (it didn’t make it to the following weekend, that’s how good it was).

After that we had a short stumble to the Tuppenny, a lovely pub with an impressive selection of beer on keg – including both Double-Barrelled’s Parka and DEYA’s stupendous Steady Rolling Man as permanent fixtures – and a belting can fridge. I had some splendid pales, made a detour into sweet, indulgent stouts that tasted, by pure witchcraft, of battenburg or chocolate orange, and I rolled out to catch my train home totally convinced that Swindon’s Old Town could match any enclave Reading had to offer when it came to the finer things in life.

That’s all well and good, but I maintain that any day trip away has to be anchored around a meal, whether that’s dinner or lunch. And for Swindon, for me, that destination was never in doubt. So after our coffees at Pour Bois, and before our ice cream at Ray’s, Dave, Al and I headed to Los Gatos, in the heart of Old Town, to see if it still lived up to the billing it had in my mind as The Restaurant Worth Visiting Swindon For.

Los Gatos is a tapas restaurant, and it’s been going for nearly twenty years. I don’t get to Swindon often, but whenever I do I make sure I have lunch there. I’ve said before that tapas restaurants in this country tend to either be run by Spaniards, with mixed results, or by evangelical Brits who are trying to reimagine a tapas bar as its best possible self. Oxford’s Arbequina, Bristol’s Bar 44 and Bravas definitely fall into that category.

But Los Gatos, for me, feels more like it’s trying to recreate than perfect – and there’s nothing at all wrong with that, because some days a recreation of Malaga or Granada in England would be a wonderful thing in its own right. Despite that it, too, was founded and run by Brits and named in tribute to the legendary Malaga bar of the same name. Originally they had a site round the corner, but they moved to their current site a minute down the road and then, during lockdown, they sold up.

The new owners have expanded by taking the site next door, and this was my first visit since the pandemic so I was a tad discombobulated by it not looking how I remembered. But the fact remains that it’s really nicely done, and it helps that our table was in the original room, where I’ve eaten before. It is a really lovely space, with tasteful terrazzo marble-effect tables and – as there should be – stools up at the bar. The room had plenty of natural light, attractive dark beams and a blackboard full of wines and sherries by the glass.

I’m not going to go all Berkshire Live and tell you it was just like being in Malaga, but I have to say the overall effect wasn’t a million miles off. We started with a crisp glass of fino apiece – turns out there were three Frasier Cranes in town after all – and enjoyed the building buzz of a restaurant turning a very healthy trade at lunchtime. Again, I stopped to remind myself that I was in Swindon. In honesty, I did that more than once during the meal.

The joy of a place like Los Gatos is looking at the menu, wanting to order nearly everything and then realising that in a tapas restaurant, provided there are enough of you, you can have a decent stab at it. And Los Gatos’ menu is very much that kind of menu with most dishes around the seven pound mark, all of them tempting.

There’s plenty of cooking on display too, rather than an over-reliance on buying and slicing, so although you can get jamon or queso they’re a very small section of a large and diverting selection. Typical Andulucian dishes are well represented, like spinach with chickpeas or fried aubergine with honey, and I suspect you could quite happily bring a vegetarian here: perhaps one of the main indicators that you’re not in Spain is that they even make a little effort to accommodate vegans.

But Dave, Al and I were neither of those things, so as Dave sipped an Alhambra and Al and I tackled a beautifully fresh, fruity white from Jumilla – decent value at just over thirty pounds – we did one of the most enjoyable things you can do in a tapas restaurant. We chatted away, picked out our favourite dishes, haggled and scheduled, putting them in our first and second wave. As we did, I thought about how much I’d missed this kind of sociable eating, with these two. Of course, I didn’t tell them that then, because we’re men in the last gasps of our forties, but writing it here will have to suffice.

Our first set of dishes were all, without exception, winners – so much so that my usual anal urge to photograph everything pretty much deserted me. That’s bad news for both of us – me because I’ll have to rely on my immortal prose and you because you’ll have to read it. The very pick of the dishes was the hake in beer batter – it’s a fish beloved of the Spanish but Los Gatos bring as much out of it as anywhere I’ve been in Spain. Three huge chunks of the stuff, in the lightest batter, sprinkled liberally with flakes of salt was the perfect reintroduction to their food, and a deep, golden saffron mayo played nicely with it, perhaps more gently than a honking alioli would have done.

Everything seemed geared for three to share because we also got three superb croquetas – much more dense and substantial than I’m used to with more heft and less bechamel. That might not suit everyone, but it really suited me. If you came to Los Gatos as a pair or a four those two dishes would cause you serious problems, but the three of us felt very fortunate.

Jamon – Serrano rather than anything fancier – was decent and hand carved, with a good umami note and a nice marbling of fat. It didn’t perhaps have the really intensely savoury quality, or melting fat of the very best Spanish hams, but it was eight quid or so and far from stingy, so I wasn’t in the mood to complain. By that point in the lunch I wasn’t in the mood to complain about anything, not even Dave’s jokes.

I also loved the mushrooms in a cream and sherry sauce, achieving a precarious balance between glossy sweetness and the underlying savoury note just peeking through thanks to the oloroso. We didn’t order any bread for the sauce, though, which was a mistake. I’ve been doing this gig for ten years and I still make schoolboy errors like that.

Our greed was such that there were still two other dishes in our first order, and one was a dish I’ve loved at Los Gatos for a long time. Morcilla de Burgos came beautifully presented, two discs of earthy, fragrant black pudding sandwiching a glorious middle layer of sweet piquillo peppers, quail’s egg perched on top. The prettiest thing we ate all day, so naturally the one I didn’t photograph, but a really gorgeous morsel. Also possibly the hardest to share – or perhaps I just didn’t want to – so if you go to Los Gatos order your own personal portion. For my sake, if not for yours.

And last of all, because we had been carb-free up to that point – we ordered an arroz con pollo. I seem to recall that Los Gatos serves paella at the weekends, and this was a miniature version of that. I quite liked it, and I was glad to see it topped with beautifully done chicken thigh, but again it was probably one of the less shareable things we ordered. The rice did come in handy though, because that sherry and cream sauce had a very agreeable habit of sticking to every single grain, if you crossed the streams.

And then, not at all sated but the edges knocked off our hunger, we regrouped. We looked at our list of outstanding dishes and made our decisions – did we still want them? Was it enough? Was it too much? If I’d just been with Dave, a slim man who very much intends to stay that way, it might have been tricky to get them all past the committee stage, but Al – whippet thin despite eating like a horse – has been known to have two desserts, just because, so I knew I’d be safe.

If the second round of tapas wasn’t quite as impressive as the first, that was partly because we were no longer ravenous. Also, the dishes you absolutely cannot bear to miss out on always end up in the first round, so the bar is meant to be lower when you go back to the menu.

And probably the two weakest dishes were in this section, although I’m not sure either would have made my must-order list in the first place. Calamares were decent but unspecial, and not a patch on the ones you can get in Spain, and the black beans with pancetta and chorizo were surprisingly bland for a dish including two of the greatest cured meats known to man. I found my mind drifting to the cannelini beans at Bristol’s COR, zippy with lemon and topped with breadcrumbs, achieving so much more with fewer ingredients.

We’d also ordered a classic dish, chorizo cooked simply in wine, and it was the kind of thing that restored your faith in a restaurant, both in terms of their ability to buy the right stuff and then cook it spot on. If I knew where they got their chorizo from I’d place an order, because I’m fed up of trying to rustle dishes up with the slightly gristly nonsense you get from Brindisa these days. We could easily have ordered a second dish of this, and I rather wish we had.

We also ordered chicken livers, again in a sherry and cream sauce, and although I didn’t mind it I didn’t think, with hindsight, that it was different enough from the mushrooms to justify ordering both.

And our penultimate dish was the most expensive thing I found on the menu, Galician-style octopus. When I’ve had this in Spain it’s just octopus, heavy on the paprika – and the octopus for that matter – and although octopus is always a joy, it can be a tad one note. I really liked what Los Gatos did with the dish, serving it with new potatoes and capers almost as a hot salad. And the octopus was beautiful – tender and tasty with no bounce or toughness, which is by no means a given abroad, let alone here. I think Dave and Al let me have more than my fair share of this dish. They’re good like that.

And the final thing we ordered? Another portion of that hake. Take a look at the picture below and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.

Service was great. In the course of researching this review I chanced upon some online reviews that said that it wasn’t the same since the restaurant expanded, that a staff of two or three had become a legion and that something magical had been lost. Well, I guess we all sometimes feel that way when our favourites get big and successful but personally I thought the staff were terrific, very efficient, just friendly enough and I was quite happy with them not being overworked. I’m a bit of a pinko like that.

We might well have had dessert, but knowing that there was an ice cream parlour literally on the other side of the road curtailed any ambitions we had in that regard. I couldn’t talk either of them into a Pedro Ximenez either, because beer was calling too. Our meal came to just under fifty pounds a head, not including tip, which I thought was a steal for everything we had.

Ordinarily I start every review of a tapas restaurant by complaining that Reading doesn’t have a tapas restaurant and never really has. You could set your watch by it. So this time, for novelty value, I thought I could shoehorn it in at the end. But rather than say that, I just want to say that this kind of restaurant, and this kind of eating, is among my very favourite kind. Ordering everything, trying everything, sharing your joy and diminishing any disappointments – it really is one of the best ways to eat there is. And when you find somewhere that does it well, you’ll gladly travel to it.

In my case, that does seem to involve flying to Andalucia at least once a year, but I am really delighted that Los Gatos, a mere half hour train ride away, remains more than good enough as a substitute for that. The fact that around it has sprung up this magnificent little ecosystem of coffee, craft beer, green space and ice cream is the icing on the cake. Old Town, square mile for square mile, is arguably a lovelier spot than anywhere in Reading, I think – and, yes, that includes Caversham.

So if Spanish food is even remotely of interest to you, I highly recommend that you make your way to Swindon – despite the incredulity of everybody you tell at work – because it very much merits the journey. I think I prefer Los Gatos to Oxford’s Arbequina, much as I love Arbequina, and it edges out Newbury’s Goat On The Roof, too. I still need to make it to El Cerdo in Maidenhead, at some point, but I doubt somehow that I’ll love it quite the way I love Los Gatos. 

And in terms of our closest Spanish restaurant, Wokingham’s Sanpa, put it this way: when I went back there earlier in the year I worried that the rating I gave it was far too harsh. Having now eaten at Los Gatos and seen what commited Brits can create as a temple to Spain, in an unfashionable town, I think that if anything I was far too generous. Go to Los Gatos instead: have a sherry, order that morcilla, send me a photo. I doubt I’ll enjoy many lunches more this year than the one I had there.

Los Gatos – 8.7
1-3 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BJ
01793 488450

https://www.losgatos.uk

Restaurant review: La’De Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://woodley.ladekitchen.com

Restaurant review: Pappadams

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Pappadams closed in November 2025 and is due to reopen as a new restaurant called Anjappar. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I got an email from WordPress the other day confirming that they were renewing my domain name for another year and that, more than anything, reminded me that a significant anniversary was coming up: next month my blog turns 10 years old. What started as a little hobby has become, well, a slightly less little hobby but I can’t quite believe that a decade later I’m still reviewing restaurants and that people are still reading those reviews. There will be more about that in the weeks ahead – for which I apologise in advance – but it has left me in rather a reflective mood lately (and I apologise for that, too).

In the first year of the blog, back when Alt Reading and the Evening Post were still a thing, I published a total of 38 reviews of places in Reading. Of those 38 restaurants just over half are still trading today – a statistic which surprised me, although it does include the likes of Zero Degrees, Côte, Five Guys, Mission Burrito, Malmaison, Bel And The Dragon: chains who are still going, many years later.

But when I look back at the independent restaurants I visited in the first year of the blog, the ones that remain open in 2023, there are only three that I’ve never returned to since. Pau Brasil, although I know it has its fans, has never tempted me back. I’ve never got round to Coconut, although I did review their takeaway at the start of last year. And last but not least, there’s Pappadams, the subject of this week’s review.

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Restaurant review: Bakery House

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Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025, although the menu and ownership are apparently unchanged.

It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.

And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.

But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.

Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.

Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.

Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?

At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.

I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.

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Restaurant review: Knead Neapolitan Pizza, Maidenhead

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

It’s strange to think that I took nine years to review anywhere in Maidenhead, and then went there three times last year in relatively quick succession. The Elizabeth Line is, of course, the main reason for that, making the place only twelve comfortable, air-conditioned minutes away. But the other reason, which is similar but not the same, is the effect the Elizabeth Line is having on Theresa May’s stomping ground.

Speaking of the great woman, here’s a true story: I was within spitting distance of the former Prime Minister last year when she was the mystery star guest at my secondary school’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. Fuck me, it’s Theresa May! I said as she walked past the bench where I was drinking warm cider out of a plastic glass (fortunately she didn’t try to, although I’m pretty sure she heard me).

As I’ve mentioned before, all sorts of interesting restaurants are proliferating in Maidenhead now it has these shiny new transport links, and many are the sort of places you might wish Reading had. A Hoppy Place has the best part of twenty beers on tap with a scale and central location that combines the best of the Nag’s Head and the Grumpy Goat. Seasonality, which I reviewed last year, is the kind of seriously good small independent modern European restaurant that has long eluded central Reading.

Sauce & Flour – still hate the name – might not have been my bag but even so it was undeniably bang on trend. El Cerdo, which opened recently, is building good word of mouth for its tapas (Reading town centre last had a tapas restaurant in 2016, if you’re keeping score).

And finally, getting to the point, there’s Knead, the subject of this week’s review and the reason I plonked my arse on that iconic moquette about half an hour after I closed my laptop for the week, pulling out of Reading Station with Zoë, a weekend of sunshine, food and company ahead of us. Within another half an hour we were sitting in the sun outside A Hoppy Place with a couple of cold beers, a packet of pork scratchings and one eye on the menu of our dinner venue. Life was good.

Knead’s story is a time-honoured one involving many of the elements you often see in independent hospitality businesses. Husband and wife team (check) Olivia and Simon Perry bought a van (check) in 2018. Four years of street food events (check), catering (check) and pop-ups (check) later, they decided to take things to the next level and move into a permanent spot. They carried out some crowdfunding last year (check) and finally, in December they opened their first restaurant in the middle of Maidenhead.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive or to brand that narrative as a cliché. Scrolling back in time all that way to 2018, seeing the whole thing unfolding in reverse like Memento, I was struck by how hard the Perrys had worked to get to where they are. This was no flash in the pan, no affectation or fad but the culmination of years of work. It made me really want them to do well. It made me think about whether, really, I’ve ever stuck at a dream even half so long. And, of course, it made me hungry.

Knead is on the ground floor of a new build, like A Hoppy Place, Barista & Beyond and, for that matter, Dee Caf and that gives it advantages it makes the most of – proper space outside, big double aspect windows and a surprisingly generous room. I loved the framed prints and the “hydroponic wall”, thick with basil, and if the tables were cheek by jowl the place was so buzzy and happy, filled with the promise of a new weekend, that I was really unbothered by that. At the next table, a couple were sharing a pizza: come to think of it, maybe behaviour like that is why they have to cram them in.

“Who shares a pizza with restaurants struggling like they are right now?” I said, possibly louder than I intended, and Zoë gave me a look I know well, the one that silently says why do you have no indoor voice? I’d like to say I made a mental note there and then to order more food, but in truth that decision had been made hours before, as the train doors had closed.

Knead’s menu is good, small and pleasingly eccentric, by which I mean that it’s full of surprises. Half a dozen red pizzas, three white ones, a handful of nibbles and sides and a couple of sharing boards. That’s all, and many of the obvious pizza choices are missing – including the anchovy and caper combo I would normally pick on autopilot. Pizzas max out at thirteen pounds and everything is keenly priced – so again, what people are doing taking up a table and just eating the one pizza completely escapes me. I’m sorry, I won’t mention that again.

Another encouraging sign is that suppliers get a name check. Some, like Marlow Cheese Company or Agosti Gelato, who make their ice cream in Cookham, are local. Others like Islington’s Cobble Lane (who provide the cured meats) may not be but have a good reputation. I also absolutely loved Knead’s decision to stock beers by White Waltham’s Stardust Brewery, because I think nothing goes with pizza quite like beer. I had their Saaz Pilsner, which was crisp, bitter and rather nice, while Zoë tried their Optic IPA: a sip of hers made it clear that I’d made the wrong choice.

We started with Knead’s charcuterie sharing board, which clocks in at just under fifteen pounds, and it was easily the least impressive thing I ate all evening. This could and should have been an opportunity to showcase how well Knead buys, but it fell flat. The prosciutto had the sheen of something freshly decanted from plastic, the mortadella was – well, still something I’d never really choose to order. The salami was decent but unexceptional. Cobble Lane does lovely cured meats, but I’d be surprised if any of this came from them.

So with the charcuterie not exactly the star of the show, that left the rest. And the rest felt a little like padding. Artichoke hearts tasted thin and nothingy and had, I imagine, been fished out of a jar. Sundried tomatoes, bocconcini and olives were all perfectly unexceptionable, but you could get this in a plastic tub from M&S. And the “no waste focaccia” made from leftover dough was just sticks of pizza dough and not focaccia at all. Presentation just looked like everything had been shoved on a plate, an attempt to say “look how much you’re getting”.

I know I sound like I’m having a mither. But this kind of starter is one of my favourite things in the world when it’s done right, no better than something you can knock up yourself when it isn’t. In Reading, Mama’s Way does something similar that shows this up for the pale imitation it was. And at the Lyndhurst they’ve just introduced their own charcuterie board. For the same money you get generous quantities of three different types of charcuterie, all from Cobble Lane, and a thick slab of terrine, and they throw in a black pudding Scotch egg. I know that because I tried it the night before my visit to Knead. That’s how I know Knead was going through the motions.

But that’s not, I suspect, where Knead’s strengths lie, and perhaps they just have that dish on their menu because they think it’s something a pizzeria should have. Once we moved on to the pizzas themselves they became significantly more assured.

Mine, the “Sergeant Scoville” was that modish classic, the pizza with ‘nduja and some other stuff. In this case they hadn’t thrown the kitchen sink at it, so just ‘nduja, chillies and some hot honey from a London company called Dr Sting. Maybe my tolerance to heat has ramped up after years of Clay’s and Kungfu Kitchen, but I thought this was affably mild. The ‘nduja though, from Cobble Lane, was absolutely spot on with that almost-acrid, savoury punch, and they weren’t stingy with it. The hot honey got lost in the mix a little, but I’d love to see Knead pair it with some blue cheese.

Starting with the toppings, though, is a little arse about face because the fundamentals – the base and the tomato sauce – really were top-notch. A brilliantly chewy, speckled crust, a base that held together and a total package that wasn’t sloppy or untidy. Its closest peer in Reading these days would be Sarv’s Slice, which I really rather liked, but Knead’s pizza is a little bigger, a little better and a little better value. I also ordered a pesto mayo to dip my crust in, which I thought didn’t taste quite right. I subsequently realised from looking at the bill that it was vegan – given that neither pesto nor mayo should be vegan, I thought that was a tad disappointing.

Zoë’s choice, which she out and out adored, was a white pizza. Now, I have friends who think these are against God and against nature, but I personally think there’s a time and a place for them. Based on Zoë’s reaction to this one, the place might be Knead and the time might be the next time I go to Knead.

In the “Hello Gourd-Geous” (when did wacky names move past craft beer and just become what everybody does?) the ‘nduja was still present and correct but harmonising with a completely different backing band. This time it was a sweet creamed pumpkin base spiked with blue cheese (“and there’s loads of blue cheese”, Zoë added). She had a sriracha mayo dip for her crust, which would have been overkill for me but suited her just fine.

Out of sheer greed – why have one pizza between two when you can have two and a half? – we also ordered the “Dreamy Garlic Bread” with mozzarella. I liked it, but it’s a silly name: when something involves quite this much garlic a better name might be something like the “Fucking Honking With Garlic Bread”. Given that they’re probably trying to appeal to families, maybe not.

Dessert rather had to be done, although the selection is on the slender side. I really wanted to try the gelato, which is made locally with milk from the fantastic Lacey’s Farm. I was also drawn to this because the flavours speak of more than a passing acquaintance with Italy – pistachio was a very creditable effort, and the chocolate was nicely bitter, not making the easy concession to pack in sweetness. But what I really loved was the fior di latte ice cream. Our default ice cream in this country is vanilla, as if we can’t accept that ice cream could just taste of itself. It takes confidence in your raw materials to make an ice cream like this, and I loved it. Only a handful of ice crystals in a couple of the scoops spoke of a few quality control issues.

Zoë had a scoop of that bitter chocolate ice cream – a generous one at that – on top of a fudgy, gluten free double chocolate brownie. Just as I have friends who think a white pizza isn’t a pizza, I have other friends who think a brownie isn’t really a dessert. I have more sympathy with the latter school of thought, but anyway Zoë loved it.

Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to sixty-eight pounds, not including tip. I do also have to call out the service which was excellent throughout: Knead has a young, enthusiastic team who were working their socks off on a busy Friday night and you really wouldn’t have known that the restaurant was barely six months old. It has that maturity which comes, I guess, of working on their concept and striving for this for such a long time. I left with a full stomach and that warm feeling that comes from spending your money in the right way, with the right people. Nothing is quite as good as excellent hospitality when it comes to delivering that.

All in all I really enjoyed Knead. The only real misstep was that charcuterie board at the start – and if Knead is going to offer something like that they should do it properly and have the courage of their convictions when it comes to actually using the charcutier who supplies the restaurant. For that matter if they want to keep it local Bray Cured, just down the road, do some of the best cured meats I’ve had in this country. But that gripe aside, Knead was very hard to fault. The pizzas were very accomplished – better, on balance, thank anything we have in Reading – and the commitment to local suppliers for cheese, gelato and beer is laudable.

To have this a twelve minute train ride away, with an excellent selection of beer and cider practically next door, makes Knead a very easy place to recommend on a Friday or Saturday night, or even in the week if you can’t be bothered to cook – which, in fairness, describes me most evenings. So Maidenhead has an excellent high end modern British restaurant, a great town centre craft beer venue and a cracking indie pizzeria. For all I know, it might have a destination tapas bar as well. While these places are opening in Maidenhead, Reading got a Popeyes. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Knead Neapolitan Pizza – 7.6
Unit A, Trinity Place, St Ives Road, Maidenhead, SL6 1SG
01753 973367

https://www.knead.pizza