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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Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025. It no longer bakes on the premises, has an alcohol licence and previous manager Mohamad Skeik has left the business. I have marked this review as closed and will re-review Lebanese Flavours at some point.
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.
Nothing had changed inside, at first glance, which I found oddly reassuring. Still the same battleship-grey walls, brightly lit wall art and chocolate-brown banquettes. Still the shawarma revolving away up front, still the signs of baking that gave the restaurant its name. So far, so familiar.
And Mohamad was still there, zipping about: now, in the interests of full disclosure Mohamad knows who I am, because I did a readers’ lunch at the restaurant back in 2019, but I doubt he would expect me to review the place again after eight intervening years. And I didn’t just spot Mohamad, I recognised a waitress who has been there since the very start, who left the restaurant to have a baby and came back, and that made me realise that this restaurant hadn’t just seen me through different phases in my life.
But also there, relaxed in a polo shirt, was Chander Ahuja, the owner of House Of Flavours. I’ve never met Ahuja, but I know him by sight and again, it’s possible he knew who I was. He came over and asked more than once what I made of the food, as did Mohamad. I don’t know whether that was anything to do with me writing the blog, or because it was my first visit after a long time away. I don’t know if it was because of a certain apprehensiveness about what customers made of the same-but-different Bakery House, or just excellent customer service. I’m just mentioning it, aware that it could have been any of those things.
The menu is exactly as it was, not spruced up, not reprinted. And really, they might want to consider reprinting it and raising their prices, because those prices have a distinctly 2015 feel about them. Maybe it’s a loss leader in this climate, or perhaps they’re waiting for new menus back from the printers but really, starters that cost a fiver or less and mains that weigh in around thirteen pounds feel like they merit a mention. If the quality is even close to what it was, I thought, Bakery House could be one of the biggest bargains in the town centre.
We did something I rarely do when re-reviewing a restaurant, namely ordering the dishes I would normally have if I was visiting Bakery House. That might sound like a counter-intuitive thing to do – surely it should be about striking out into the unknown? – but there was method to my madness. I’ve had some of these dishes so often it feels as if I know them like the back of my hand. It’s a kind of gastronomic close reading, I guess, and I thought it was the best way to assess whether Bakery House was a different proposition under the bonnet (that’s probably enough mixed metaphors for now).
The first indicators came with one of my very favourite Bakery House dishes, houmous kawarmah, houmus with spiced lamb. I could have closed my eyes and remembered its tastes and textures, but what came along was subtly different. The houmous was still glorious – thick and scoopable, with a hefty, welcome whack of tahini. But the lamb was… what had they done to the lamb?
Where before it would have been little nuggets, here it was fantastic caramelised slivers of the stuff, intense and moreish. I know what this dish is like when it’s good – years of practice – and this was as good as I could remember it. I looked over at Zoë as she loaded some onto a piece of pita and crammed it joyously in her mouth. There was a pause.
“Oh, hello” she said. Oh, hello indeed.
If that was my go-to order, our other starter was Zoë’s. She always picks arayes, flatbreads stuffed with minced veal, and is something of an expert on the stuff. And yes, the plates are a bit fancier now, and they’ve drizzled pomegranate molasses on top. But, as with the restaurant itself, the real changes were the ones going on under the surface. In the past, the veal could be a little homogeneous, a little smooth. This, though, was coarser, even more delicious. It felt like eating the dish in HD, the same experience I’d had with the houmous. Something was going on here, and I was pretty sure I liked it.
The real test, though, was to come, with the dish I most associated with Bakery House: farrouj massahab, the boneless baby chicken. I have eaten this at Bakery House many times, and in lockdown it was my delivery order of choice: why on earth spend that money on Nando’s when you can have this? In as far as a dish can be a friend, this was an old, old friend and seeing it come to the table (well, them: Zoë ordered it too) felt part meal, part reunion.
I may have more photos of Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken on my phone than of any other dish I’ve ordered in my life – more than Bhel Puri House’s chilli paneer, more than Sapana Home’s momo, more than Fidget & Bob’s full English, more than any of the cornucopia of delights you can get at Clay’s or Kungfu Kitchen. Like any poor woman dipping her toe in Tinder, my phone runneth over with cock pics. I have pictures of it looking overdone and a tad dry – the chicken, I should add – and pictures of it looking wan. There have been times when it’s been amazing, and times when it’s merely been quite good. It’s never been less than that. What was it to be this time?
Well, you can’t tell from the picture, which is why Instagram will never entirely kill food blogs like mine. But I’m overjoyed to tell you that it looked good and tasted even better. Marinated, golden, utterly crammed with heat and flavour it was, much like me after a day at Nirvana, its absolute best self. They’d got more of that spice into the meat than I remember, and the biggest dilemmas were which parts to eat first and which to save until last, and whether to dip in the potent chilli sauce or the pungent garlic sauce. Why had I gone without eating this for so long, and when could I realistically do it again without looking a bit weird? Was lunchtime the next day too soon?
It wasn’t just the chicken though, everything else had been subtly tweaked and elevated. The golden rice also had an unfamiliar jolt of heat and was beautifully done, clump free and the perfect accompaniment. And the salad – well, Bakery House has always done salad superbly and understood, as so few places do, that if you want people to eat it you have to dress it. And they had dressed it well, a riot of freshness, with plenty of tomato and pokey raw red onion.
I’ve often pontificated in the past that this dish is possibly the single best one stop shop, the finest everything-you-need-on-one-plate choice in the whole of Reading. I still stand by that: if anything it’s better than before, and a ludicrous steal at twelve pounds fifty. Just don’t get into a lift with anybody for about twenty-four hours after eating.
I’ve never really done dessert at Bakery House, although I know people who swear by it. But a little plate of mini baklava, sticky-sweet and just the right size to eat in one go, was a lovely touch, brought out as we were getting the bill. I’m pretty sure I saw these brought out to other tables after they’d finished their main course: I don’t think it was just me. All that was left was to settle up – our food, and a couple of superbly zingy fresh lemonades came to a baffling forty-two pounds, not including tip.
As I said, service was terrific throughout, although Bakery House has always excelled at that. It looked like a happy, harmonious ship when I was there that Sunday evening; it did a steady trade, although it was far from full, and the other customers appeared to be enjoying themselves almost as much as I was. The new owner looked relaxed, and as I waited for the bill I looked around, taking in the room where I’d eaten so many times and the wait staff who had been serving me since the year dot. And maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I was grateful and strangely moved that Bakery House was still here and relieved that its future appeared safe.
I was relieved, too, to have loved my meal quite as much as I did, and to know that the new ownership had nudged and subtly improved rather than overhauling or resting on laurels. Change a restaurant you like too much and it becomes something else, but if you never change it at all you run the risk that it becomes preserved in aspic as the world moves on. The history of Reading restaurants is full of places that did exactly that and then died out, and I hope I never find myself talking about Bakery House in that category. This felt like a much better course, to try to preserve Bakery House’s heyday with some judicious tinkering.
So there you have it – a timely, happy return to Bakery House, almost eight years after I first set foot through the doors. Much has changed in that time, me not least, and Bakery House is no longer the trailblazer it was. But if they play their cards right they could attain a status that has always eluded me, that of a true Reading institution. I had forgotten just how good Bakery House was. I’m not alone: I think maybe Bakery House had too, but now they’ve remembered, and they’re out to remind everybody. I’m happy to play my part in doing some reminding, too.
Bakery House – 8.1 82 London Street, Reading, RG1 4SJ 0118 3274040
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
The Elizabeth Line has been a game changer when it comes to eating out: I’ve used it to reach three of the last four restaurants I’ve reviewed for the blog, all of them significantly easier to get to courtesy of the Tube’s new addition. It’s no coincidence, either, that last year I reviewed three restaurants in newly resurgent Maidenhead. Plenty of interesting options have become more accessible, which makes my job (not a real job, but you catch my drift) much more fun.
The phenomenon you might not be aware of, though, is the same thing in reverse, that some people think the Elizabeth Line opens up Reading as a destination. The first time I became aware of that was an article on the Good Food Guide website last August called “Where to eat Indian food along London’s Elizabeth Line” by food writer Sejal Sukhadwala. In it, she said that the new line made it possible for food lovers to eat a panoply of different Indian dishes at restaurants from Canary Wharf to the ‘Ding: among her recommendations, at the end of the line, was our very own Madras Flavours.
Since then, it’s been on my list to review, even if the opening sentence – “It’s worth travelling to Reading specifically for this sparkling Tamil vegetarian located just past the beautiful town centre” – made me wonder whether she’d actually been to Reading.
My suspicions were further enhanced when three months later the same author published another article, this time in the FT, entitled “An Indian restaurant crawl along London’s Elizabeth Line”. Hats off to her for getting paid twice for the same idea, and clearly there were enough good restaurants en route to justify two articles, but again the bit about Reading didn’t ring true.
On that occasion, Sukhadwala recommended House Of Flavours, a solid choice. But do you recognise Reading from this description? “Walk past Reading’s beautiful Abbey Quarter, which houses a library and a medieval church, and in less than 10 minutes you’ll find an impressively varied concentration of fine Indian restaurants in and around Kings Road.”
I can be guilty of romanticising Reading, but even I found this somewhat florid. “It’s worth booking a long weekend in Reading to discover the town’s high-quality Indian restaurants”, it added. It’s welcome to see Reading praised in the national press but, really, has she ever been?
Anyway, the article worked because it got me thinking about a trip to Madras Flavours. Previously, all I’d known about the restaurant was its impressive Deliveroo sockpuppetry, when in 2021 it went by over 40 different names on delivery apps, including my favourites “Soul Chutney” and “Fatt Monk” (come to think of it, that article in the FT recommended a restaurant called Fatt Pundit: maybe they share a branding expert).
Two years on Madras Flavours has weathered the Covid storm, often looks busy – especially at weekends – and seemed ripe for a visit. So I headed there on a weekday evening with Emma, who comes to my readers’ lunches and foolishly volunteered her services. “If you ever want a vegetarian perspective on your dining experiences, I’d be happy to help” she’d said.
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I have a note on my phone which is just a list of London restaurants. I mean, doesn’t everyone?
Strictly speaking, it would be more accurate to say that I have a note on my phone which is two lists of London restaurants. The first is a set of restaurants near Paddington, and dates from the time early in 2020 when I thought it might be a good idea to branch out. I figured that many of us end up having to drag our feet in London to take an off peak train home and that some reliable restaurants people could visit in the meantime might prove a godsend.
It was a good idea in theory, but I only managed one before suddenly all of us were taking far fewer trains, and heading to London became a pipe dream. But the list’s still there, and one day I may get back on it, exploring the Malaysian restaurants around Paddington, the Lebanese joints on the Edgware Road, or just revisiting my favourite little side street Greek place in Maida Vale.
The second list is of all the London restaurants I’ve always wanted to review but never got round to. Some, like Rules and Noble Rot, I’ve been to before. But others are ones I’ve read about in newspapers or in blogs and told myself I’ll visit one day. Like the Wes Anderson-esque French stylings of Otto’s in Clerkenwell, or the little dining room above Soho’s French House where Neil Borthwick, Angela Hartnett’s husband, cooks a small menu of Gallic classics. They’re not all French, I should add: Smoking Goat, Kiln, Quality Chop House all get a look in. Even with all the casualties in hospitality, I know this list will only ever increase in size. One day, it will see me out.
Manteca has been on that second list for quite a while. It started with a brief spell on Heddon Street (not far from where Casa do Frango is now) before spending some time in Soho and then relocating to Shoreditch’s Curtain Road in late 2021. At every step critics and bloggers have had nothing but praise for it, and looking at the menu in the run-up to my visit it was easy to see why. They make their own pasta on site – so far, so Padella and Bancone – but also specialise in nose to tail eating and make their own salumi, so nothing gets wasted.
The acclaim was so universal that this felt as close to a sure thing as you could get, so I made a lunch reservation for the Saturday of May’s last long weekend, so Zoë and I could try it out after a shopping expedition. Arriving a little late – finding your way there from Liverpool Street can be a bit of a horror show if you get lost in the Broadgate Centre – the welcome was warm and forgiving.
It’s a sizeable site, although you’d never know it was a Pizza Express in a previous life, and they pack them in, with the overall effect that you can barely hear yourself think (would-be restaurant inspector and all-round gastro-spod Andy Hayler complained that it was “like eating in a nightclub” – as if he’d know), and once you’re wedged into your table you’re going nowhere in a hurry. Our server initially tried to seat us at a dingy, unloved table right at the back, far from daylight, and when I asked if we could instead have a nicer table near the window she seemed taken aback, as if the idea had never occurred to her.
The menu’s brilliant at creating agonising dilemmas, more than nearly any restaurant I can remember. There are snacks and nibbles, small plates and a handful of pasta dishes – fewer than you might expect. Small plates are around a tenner, pasta closer to fifteen. Finally, there were some bigger dishes which came in at thirty pounds plus.
Our server explained that pretty much everything was designed for sharing. She also talked us out of ordering two of the large plates once she’d taken the rest of the order, a fact for which I was very grateful further down the line. I sipped a gorgeous cocktail made with Amaro and lemonade – how did I not know that was a thing? – while Zoë, as is her habit these days, tried (and loved) her negroni.
We started with a few snacks while we made up our mind and they contained the only dud of the meal. Focaccia was, to my mind, nothing of the kind, being dry and stodgy and only having a whisper of oil in it. The top crust was great, but that was the tip of the iceberg. And the iceberg was dense and heavy going. I should add that Zoë loved it, but she’d spent the week on a carb-free diet so she might just have been euphoric to be eating bread again.
Much better were the fried olives, little breaded spheres of sausage meat and olives that I could have eaten all the live long day. At three pounds each, though, you might be broke before you were full. Nonetheless, this was the first hint that something special was in store, a hint which quickly gathered momentum, becoming a firmly held conviction.
I’d seen the first of our starters on Manteca’s very distracting Instagram page, along with a caption that said it was only on the menu when they had the right cuts to make it. Ciccioli was lean pork, braised in rendered fat and then pressed into a cake and fried to a burnished crisp. It fell apart under the fork, eager to be dabbed with the sweet-sharp apple mostarda on the side. More than just the acceptable face of mystery meat, this was a symphony of flavour and texture and I wish I’d had one all to myself: if you go, and it’s on the menu, order it.
Less successful, possibly because it’s a dish that happens to share my porn star name, was hogget sausage. I liked but didn’t love it: knowing that Manteca does all its butchery on site reassured me that this was packed with the good stuff, but the texture was still smoother and closer to saveloy than I’d personally choose. The flavour more than made up for it, the whole thing draped in wild garlic leaves, because ’tis the damn season. Probably should have kept some of that slab of bread to mop up the juices – maybe that’s what the restaurant had in mind for it.
I think I read somewhere that Manteca used to do their pasta courses in a small and large, but they’ve done away with that now and a portion is very respectable size – enough for you to eat as a main, if you’re no fun, or a beautiful stepping stone between the smaller and larger plates. Manteca’s brown crab cacio e pepe is so fêted that it might be the closest thing the restaurant has to a signature dish, so naturally I ordered it.
It was a gorgeous, simple plate of soothing sustenance which didn’t outstay its welcome. The pasta – strozzapreti in this instance – was terrific, al dente almost to the point of squeakiness. And the crab didn’t dominate, playing nicely with the cheese and pepper to create something beautifully emulsified and far greater than the sum of its parts: if anything, the foremost note was a brilliant tingle of lemon that prevented it from cloying. Like most of my experience, it thoroughly justified the hype.
Wild garlic made another appearance in Zoë’s pasta. Chitarra, a sort of square spaghetti, if you can imagine that, was positively luminous with wild garlic, its edges fringed with racing green wild garlic olive oil. An egg yolk nested in the centre and although it looked slow-cooked and fudgy, once nudged with a knife sunrise spread across the plate. I didn’t try any, because it struck me as a messy thing to reach across the table and eat, but Zoë loved it. She tasted citrus in this too – lime, she thought, although that might have been synaesthesia because it was just so very green.
The one thing that doesn’t tell you about those two pasta dishes – one of the few frustrations of eating at Manteca – is that they came to the table ten minutes apart. When Manteca said their dishes were intended to be shared I assumed they couldn’t mean the pasta because nobody shares pasta, except in Lady And The Tramp. Perhaps they honestly thought we’d share the first pasta dish and then share the second, but they’d also said, in a Wagamama-esque spiel, that dishes from the same section of the menu would come out together.
Does it matter? On many levels, not really. We were having a lovely time, by this point we’d ordered a beautiful bottle of an Australian pinot noir/syrah blend and all was well with the world. But it’s always weird to sit there while your dining companion watches you eat and then have your roles reversed: it’s why I so rarely send steak back in a restaurant. More to the point, we only had the table for two hours – less, because we’d showed up a little late, so you’d think they’d be tighter on time. As it was, because they didn’t rush us through the pasta, which they should have done, things got more frantic at the end.
But this was the only misstep in a meal where even if we were slightly processed, it never felt like it. Manteca’s front of house team were quite fantastic from start to finish, working in one of the busiest, buzziest restaurants I’ve eaten in for a very long time. Also, given the acoustics, their hearing must be exceptional – for the first half of the meal Zoë and I probably had to repeat almost fifty per cent of everything we said.
Arguably, the best way to deal with the challenging noise levels is to dish up food so good it renders customers speechless. I think that might have been Manteca’s plan, and they achieved it admirably with the next set of dishes. Grilled duck breast, pink and tender underneath caramelised skin, was superb, and pairing it with sausage – I think also made from duck, but I might be wrong – was a masterstroke. But the thing that made the dish, for me, was the preserved quince that came with it: fruity, ever so slightly chewy, a fantastic foil for all that meat. It reminded me, ever so slightly, of Georgian fruit leather (don’t knock it til you’ve tried it) and I’d choose it over red cabbage any day. We were approaching full by the end of this dish, but we heroically soldiered on.
The accompaniments were a mixed bag. Grilled greens were a wan medley of cauliflower and chard, and although they tasted decent the texture was too limp for my liking. A thousand times better – and again, almost reason to visit on its own – were the pink fir potatoes, cooked until golden and crispy and smothered in something the restaurant calls “salumi brown butter” – little crunchy nuggets of meat, herbs and fat. I could have eaten these on their own and left the restaurant a happy man, but being able to pair them with duck, or sausage, or use them to soak up the pool of juices at the bottom of the plate, was nothing short of heavenly.
By this point we were decidedly full but still up for attacking the dessert menu, possibly with something from the restaurant’s extensive list of amaros, once we’d finished our bottle of red. Our minds were concentrated wonderfully by our server telling us we had less than twenty-five minutes before they needed the table, so we were forced to accelerate matters.
The dessert menu is skeletal, with just three options. Zoë’s choice, a chocolate choux bun filled with chocolate cremoso, tasted very nice indeed but I was delighted I hadn’t ordered it because I’m not sure I could have pretended to you that I could taste the “whey caramel” it apparently contained, or even for that matter tell you what whey caramel tastes like.
I’m also delighted I didn’t order it because the dish I did order, pistachio cake, was one of the finest desserts I’ve ever had. There was an awful lot going on here, all of it good on its own yet better together. The cake, which could so easily have been stodgy or unremarkable, had a beautifully dense texture with flashes of salt and pistachio in every spoonful. The ribbons of candied, pickled fennel on top added a fragrant sweetness that never overpowered: I’d have liked more of them, but fennel always has that effect on me. And the preturnaturally smooth pistachio ice cream was as good as anything I’ve had in Italy – or for that matter at Clay’s, who do a mean pistachio ice cream these days. Resting the sphere on a handful of salted, roasted pistachios, though, was an inspired touch.
Zoë had a spoonful, and her reaction was immediate: “you win”. If we’d had our table for longer, I think she’d have ordered one as a second dessert. It’s rare for me to rave about dessert, rarer still to do it about a dessert with no chocolate in it, but I’ve thought about this every day since my lunch at Manteca, wondering quite how they elevated something seemingly so everyday to a dessert so extraordinary.
As we were tight for time, there was no digestif. But there was still room for one last delight, so along with the bill we asked for a couple of pieces of beef fat fudge to send us on our way. I’m not always sure about beef fat in desserts – I still remember a beef fat caramel I had at an otherwise excellent restaurant in Cardiff for which no word other than “minging” will do – but this lent a certain glossiness while omitting the overtly bovine notes. It was one pound fifty for a generous cube, deftly sprinkled with salt, and it took all my strength not to ask them to make me up a box. I wasn’t hungry any more, but I knew I would be later. Or rather, I wouldn’t be hungry but I’d have made enough room for more of that fudge. Another time, perhaps.
Our bill for all that food, a couple of aperitifs and that gorgeous bottle of red – which I liked so much that before the end of the meal I’d tracked it down and ordered a few bottles online – came to just over two hundred and fifteen pounds, including service charge. You could eat there for less, and have less fun, but honestly, when you have a meal this good it costs what it costs, and you don’t give a shit. We emerged blinking into the Shoreditch sunshine, and made a beeline for the Mikkeller bar for a beer and a post match debrief. Our ratings are usually a gnat’s crotchet apart, but for this one they were identical.
You can see that rating just a few paragraphs below, but what’s more important is to talk about just how good Manteca was. Because the truth is, back when I used to eat in London more often – but wasn’t reviewing those restaurants – they never quite lived up to my expectations. To the point where I worried that I was becoming semi-professionally underwhelmed. So I did the likes of St John or Quo Vadis, the places everybody likes, and I wondered what I was missing.
I sometimes think that London has to survive on a bubble of hype because if it wasn’t for that, people would wonder why they’re paying such unsustainable amounts of money to live and work there. And indeed my two recent visits to highly rated London restaurants, Casa do Frango and Chick ‘N’ Sours, left me equally ambivalent. So I can’t tell you how happy I was to eat somewhere that not only justified the hype but made me want to add to it, to lend my voice to the chorus of voices shouting about how special Manteca is. Though hopefully you’ve been reading my blog long enough to know that I don’t really do hype. I’m just as likely to walk away from somewhere critically acclaimed feeling nonplussed as I am delirious with joy, if not more so.
So there you have it: Manteca served up one of my favourite lunches of the last ten years and is well and truly one restaurant ticked off my “places I must get to in London” list. Although it doesn’t make matters easier because now, when I try and work through the other restaurants on it, I’ll always be thinking, in the back of my mind, or I could just go back to Manteca. Anyway, hopefully you’ve read this and might add it to your own version of that list. I’m still kidding myself that everyone has one, because in my echo chamber they probably do.
Edible Reading 