Tag: restaurants

RYND

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

RYND closed in August 2016. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

My normal rule is not to review restaurants that have just opened. It’s not fair to judge a place in the first month when it’s finding its feet, and most restaurants in Reading don’t have a soft launch to phase themselves in. One minute they’re all boarded up with people beavering away inside, the next they’re open and the front of house and the kitchen are learning to work together to offer something seamless. It must be a steep curve, doing that with all those hungry, demanding customers at tables expecting everything to be perfect from day one.

My other rule is that I base my review on a single visit. In an ideal world it would be lovely to make multiple visits to a restaurant before writing a review, but life’s too short – especially if you want to read a new review every week. So instead they get one chance to impress and that’s it. Sometimes that can be a little unfair on restaurants: I’ve revisited some and found them to be better than I thought. Dolce Vita, for example, has constantly impressed me when I’ve gone back there and Bhel Puri House has become a reliable staple for a quick, interesting lunch. Sometimes it flatters places: Sushimania has never been anywhere near as good since as it was the time I went on duty.

All of this makes RYND a difficult review to write. In the interests of full disclosure, I went there “off duty” shortly after it opened and really liked it. I thought the food was interesting and well done and the service was excellent. But going back, just over a month after it opened, was like going to a different restaurant. What changed?

Well, the menu for a start. Sitting down I was presented with a different menu to the one I chose from on my previous visit – and, indeed, a different menu from the one on the website at the time of writing. The alterations were subtle but telling: no courgette fries any more, two of the burgers had come off the menu, one of the starters had been removed, you no longer have the option to order pulled pork as a main except as part of the upsold combo with chicken wings (odd, really: the menu boasts about how proud RYND is of its pulled pork but it’s not possible to order it on its own). The burgers that had been taken off were the basic options: a plain hamburger or a cheeseburger. The cheapest things on the old menu, as it happens.

That leads to the second change on the menu: the prices. Everything has been hiked in the month since the restaurant opened, the starters by around a pound and the main courses by between two and three pounds. All the burgers are now over a tenner, although in fairness to RYND you pay about the same for a burger at their closest competitors, the Oakford or Handmade Burger. Even so, it just felt a little cynical. Perhaps the initial prices were soft launch prices and RYND just decided not to tell anybody.

It wasn’t a brilliant first impression, but I put it to one side. After all, the prices weren’t necessarily unreasonable and RYND deserved to be judged on the food, the room and the service, just like any other restaurant. And the room, it has to be said, looks gorgeous. All that exposed brickwork and exposed light bulb filaments might be a trope that’s been done to death in London, Liverpool and Glasgow but in Reading it still makes a refreshing change to see somewhere so beautifully fitted out. It’s broken up nicely into lots of little sections with a long, atmospheric bar (when I went there were a row of very bearded chaps sitting at it, all check shirts and beanies, presumably having a craft beer and pretending to be in Williamsburg). The only drawback was the black banquette running round the room – it looked plush and comfy but was disturbingly like a church pew, with less give than Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow put together.

And the food? Well, the food is where RYND really fails to impress. Of the starters, hush puppies were pleasant enough – deep fried corn fritters with enough texture to just about compensate for the lack of taste, still a little too crumbly for my liking but quite nice paired with sweet, spicy, slightly smoky chilli jam (“quite nice”, with hindsight, may well have been the high point of the meal).

Puppies

The other starter, the chilli bowl, was poor: a very small skillet of slightly anonymous chilli with a little heat but not enough, too much bounce and nothing interesting going on. I was hoping for something slow-cooked and complex, but this was miles from that (I’m no cook but I can make better chilli than this at home, and when I’m saying that there’s definitely a problem). Worse still was the little metal bucket of tortilla chips which came with it. Tortilla chips must be one of the cheapest things RYND serves up, and yet the bucket was barely two-thirds full. Again, it felt cynical.

Chilli

Pulled pork was possibly the crowning disappointment. Pulled pork should be dry and sticky with some smoke and spice, but this was just wet. Not moist, not even damp, but plain wet. It came in a sesame seed bun (with a needless wooden skewer: it was nowhere near tall enough to need one of those) drowned in mayonnaise. There was, I’m told, cheese and barbecue sauce and coleslaw in it but it didn’t feel like that at all. It didn’t even really feel like pork – with all that finely shredded mulch in mayonnaise I felt more like I was eating Reading’s most expensive tuna melt. It was so sloppy that eating it tidily was almost impossible – every bite forced more of it out of the other end on to the tray (of course it’s a tray, just like they’d have in Williamsburg). It wasn’t a sandwich, it wasn’t a burger, I’m not really sure what it was. A mess, I guess.

PPBurger

I did like the fries, though – flattened crinkle-cut slices like mutant McCoys, they were one of the better things I ate, especially dipped in the barbecue sauce. I think I’d probably describe the fries as quite nice.

The “smokehouse burger” was a run of the mill beef patty, a little bouncy in places as the chilli was. It was meant to come with barbecue sauce, mature Cheddar and crispy fried onions, but the onions were missing, substituted with a thick dollop of red onion marmalade so sweet and sticky that you could easily confuse it with dessert. The mini-pail of sweet potato fries on the side (I asked for these instead because I wanted to try them out) did little to lift the overpowering sugariness. In their defence, they were really good – crisp and light where sweet potato can often be a tad soggy and limp. With a different burger they would be worth the swap but with this one it all felt a little cloying. It just didn’t feel like an eleven pound main course, and until recently it wouldn’t have been one.

Service was pleasant and friendly: our waitress did have a crack at flogging us olives and recommending the most expensive main course, but that probably wouldn’t even have registered if I hadn’t already been irked by the menu so I won’t hold it against them. I should also mention the drinks – it was happy hour so I tried the spiced apple daiquiri which was pleasant but no more than that, and a 125ml glass of Portuguese red which was straightforward, uncomplicated and really easy to drink (hats off to RYND for offering small glasses of wine and pricing them fairly: many places don’t). The meal for two, two starters, two mains, those cocktails and a small glass of wine came to forty-six pounds, not including tip. Looking at the bill I saw the final piece of stealth margin maximisation – charged an extra pound for substituting sweet potato fries for standard fries, another thing the menu neglects to mention.

As you can probably tell, RYND got my back up from the start. But being dispassionate about it and trying to forget my earlier, better visit (and wider menu. And better pricing. Hmm. Suddenly there seems to be quite a lot to try to forget) I still can’t recommend it. Judging it on its merits, if I wanted this kind of food Blue’s Smokehouse does it many times better (and a little bit cheaper). And if I wanted this kind of food and didn’t want to leave Reading, I think I’d go to the Oakford which offers more, better burgers, again slightly more attractively priced. But I suspect RYND will do perfectly well all the same – it’s a kind of food people want to eat at the moment, the kind of place people want to eat it in and I imagine hipsters will enjoy telling each other that the Oakford is so last year.

Oh, one last thing: RYND is pronounced rynd as in quite nice rather than rynd as in cynical. But in reality it’s probably a bit of both.

RYND – 6.2
11 Castle Street, RG1 7SB
0118 9505555

http://ryndreading.com/

Chennai Dosa

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

Chennai Dosa closed in June 2018. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Chennai Dosa has been on my list of places to review since the very beginning and it’s probably remiss that it’s taken me so long to get there. It seems to fall between countless stools in the Reading food scene; too big for lunch and too small for dinner, not expensive but not mega cheap, right in the centre but away from the main streets. Even so, it has carved out quite a niche by offering fast-ish food from south India, setting it apart from holy trinity of curry, rice and naan offered at Reading’s other – more Anglicised – Indian restaurants.

It would appear to be good at it, because visiting early on a week night I was pleased to see that it was busy; excellent news, because there are few things more uncomfortable than reviewing an empty restaurant (in fact, if anything, it was even busier when I left). The menu here is overwhelming for newcomers: nearly 150 dishes, a quite head-scratching amount. I was certain that I would have the dosa, as it would be churlish not to, but what else could I try to get a decent sample?

Starting with the “Gobi 65” turned out to be one of my better ideas. Small florets of broccoli (not the cauliflower advertised on the menu but I’ll overlook that on this occasion) marinated in spices and then fried were just gorgeous – light and spicy without being overly hot. They were the kind of fun vegetables that could almost persuade kids to eat their greens (and a lot more tasteful than their close relative, Eiffel 65 – an earworm I had for the rest of the evening thanks to Chennai Dosa).

The other starter of chicken varuval was equally successful, if quite substantial. Large pieces of chicken cooked with south Indian spices in a delicious, dry, deep red sauce, with peppers, onions and curry leaves. It had a depth of flavour – and a slow, building heat – that I would struggle to adequately describe but which would definitely made me order it again. The chicken, sometimes a bit dry in Indian restaurants, was beautifully soft and the sauce was richer than Donald Trump (and infinitely more palatable). Hearty food, this – so hearty than it could easily have passed itself off as a main course.

Chennai3

Speaking of the mains, they started to turn up before we’d finished off our starters, which I found irksome. I guess as a relatively informal dining experience Chennai Dosa takes the same approach as Wagamama in that your dishes arrive when they feel like it, but I wasn’t expecting that and it’s always been a bugbear of mine. Besides, why divide your menu into starters and mains if you’re going to bring them all at roughly the same time? That, coupled with the erratic service, meant that the mains arrived before one of the drinks – a pint of Kingfisher we had to ask for a total of four times. The irony: this must be the only Indian meal I’ve ever had in Reading where getting the waiter to bring beer to the table has proved difficult.

Of the mains, dal with paratha was pleasant verging on dull. The dal had curry leaves, small chunks of tomato and was speckled with nigella seeds and was tasty enough when scooped with a torn piece of buttery paratha but it lacked the richness and complexity of the chicken or the spice of the gobi. I guess I’m used to the intense, rich dal of places like House Of Flavours which is strong enough to stand as the main attraction, but this felt like a side dish pure and simple; my mistake, perhaps, rather than the kitchen’s.

Chennai4

The dosa, on the other hand, was delicious. What arrived at the table was a shiny stainless steel prison tray with a number of sauces, chutneys, sambar etc. on one side and a huge – and I mean huge – folded over crepe filled with curry on the other. The texture of the dosa was a thing of wonder – slightly crisp on the outside while being soft and pliable in the middle (a bit like the first pancake on Shrove Tuesday that the chef sneakily eats in the name of quality control). The filling was a huge helping of potato masala with an equally generous portion of spiced chicken on top. This is definitely the thing to order, I reckon, and everything about it was marvellous. The masala was a mixture of firm chunks of potato and gooey, comforting mash. The chicken was full of spices – cardamom, star anise and cinnamon all ended up on the side at the end – and again, the texture was exactly right. Add to that the part-crispy, part-spongy dosa to grab, scoop and dip and the range of sauces to mix things up with and you have something that’s part meal, part edible adventure playground. I loved it.

Chennai2

Despite feeling quite full I just cannot resist gulab jamun so dessert was inevitably on the cards. They’re a known quantity for me by now and Chennai Dosa’s were nice but unexceptional, delicious and unsurprising: warm, squidgy and with more syrup than, erm, Donald Trump (I really don’t know why he keeps cropping up. Sorry about that.) They were bettered though, by the honey and rose kulfi which was like a Mini Milk from heaven. If you can imagine a super creamy ice cream lollipop with subtle, grown-up honey and rose flavours then you’ll have a pretty good idea what this tasted like. At £2.25 I had half a mind to order another and eat it on the way home.

Chennai1

To drink we had a couple of disappointing mango lassis, a pint of Kingfisher – eventually – and a huge glass of red wine (unintentionally huge but I did drink it all) that came in a glass so chalky from the dishwasher that you could have written on a blackboard with it. Service was adequate but forgetful, though to be fair Chennai Dosa is as close to a canteen as it is a restaurant, with a snappy turnaround of diners and tables rarely occupied for more than 45 minutes at a time. The bill for three courses with drinks for two was thirty six pounds. I would say it was without tip but it seems there is no concept of tip here – the bill has to be paid in cash at the till and there’s no tip jar, let alone the idea of the “optional” service charge.

As so often, I was so keen to try everything Chennai Dosa had to offer that I’m pretty sure my experience wasn’t typical. I don’t think this is a three course starter, main, dessert kind of a place: it’s somewhere you can grab a quick tasty lunch or a quick tasty dinner and then be on your way. But for that it’s pretty close to unimprovable. The dosa in particular, at less than a fiver, is just perfect and made me think twice about spending close to that at countless other lunch places in town. The worst thing about eating here – apart for the interminable wait for drinks – was also the best incentive to come back: seeing all manner of different dishes arriving at other tables and wondering what they were. Next time I might pluck up the courage to go over and ask – right after I’ve finished some more of that Gobi 65. And got rid of that earworm, with mind bleach if necessary.

Chennai Dosa – 7.0
11-13 Kings Road, RG1 3AR
0118 9575858

http://www.chennaidosa.com/

Mr Chips

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

Mr Chips closed due to a fire in August 2023 and is yet to reopen.

Here’s an interesting fact for you: according to their website, Mr Chips is the first traditional fish and chip shop in the centre of Reading for 20 years. I think they’re right, too – before that there was Harry Ramsden’s, now a sad derelict space under the Travelodge at the top of the Oxford Road – but I can’t think of anywhere else.

Come to think of it, you don’t see many fish and chip restaurants in general. Every pub will do fish and chips, many restaurants will too but a place devoted to fish and chips? No, when people want fish and chips they generally head to their favourite chippy (and we could have a heated debate about the merits of the Jolly Fryer, Seaspray and the 555 Fish Bar but, on second thoughts, let’s not) and then carry it home and have it on their laps in front of the telly. Just me? Even in London, eat in fish and chip restaurants are one of those trends that didn’t quite catch on: so is Mr Chips a trailblazer, or is it trying to service a market that doesn’t really exist?

It’s definitely a chippy that has a few seats rather than a fish and chip restaurant. There is a bar in the window with a few uncomfortable seats that are part stool, part pogo stick, and a couple of tables along the side of the long thin room (at the back were some big sacks of potatoes – an encouraging sign, I thought). Apart from that? Well, you’re in a chippy. The usual glass fronted cabinet is there, full of battered sausages and Pukka Pies and the menu behind the counter offers the usual suspects – cod, haddock, mushy pea fritters, curry sauce – along with the occasional curveball. So you can also order “crab claws”, which from the picture on the wall appear to be nothing of the kind, and – if you’ve always wanted to try one without venturing north of the border – a deep fried Mars Bar.

I tried haddock (because that’s what I generally have from the chippy) and skate wing (for what can only be described as the “George Mallory reason”). Sitting at one of the little tables, drinking my can of cream soda and waiting for my fish to be cooked I did feel a little silly, as clearly most of Mr Chips’ customers treat it as a conventional chippy – drop in, pick up their food and then go. I felt equally silly trying to hack through freshly fried batter with an inadequate plastic knife and fork – although it’s a compliment to the batter to say that when I tried to get a plastic knife through it I rather suspected that the knife would break first.

Anyway, enough of these quibbles: what was it like? The skate was odd – I’ve never ordered it in a chip shop before and I can safely say I probably won’t again. A lot of that is about the fish, not the fryer: the challenge of getting the batter and the flesh away from the cartilage was a little too much like hard work, and not quite worth the effort. But it didn’t feel like brilliant quality skate, either – perhaps I’ve been spoiled by all those pristine white fillets in restaurants but this was a little brown and forlorn, with some of the skin left on. Having said all that, the batter was just gorgeous – light, crispy and salty it broke away in fragments like shards of edible glass. The skate was freshly cooked, possibly because it’s not something most people order, but I do wonder if the batter would have been as good if I’d chosen something that had been sitting in the cabinet.

Fish

The haddock didn’t seem quite as crisp – I’m not sure whether it was cooked with the skate or taken out of the cabinet – but it was still respectable. The fish was flaky and perfectly cooked and the best bits of the batter had that bubbly crispness that reminds me of really good school dinners. On balance I liked it better than the skate, because when you’re eating comfort food there’s no point in leaving your comfort zone.

The chips were pretty decent chip shop chips. A little wan for my liking, although that might be a matter of personal taste, and with no crispy little fragments at the bottom to resist the softening effect of vinegar and make for the perfect final sour-salty-crunchy mouthful, but clearly from good quality potatoes and rather tasty. I didn’t try the curry sauce or the sweet and sour sauce (I rather regret that now, but teaming them with the skate wing in particular felt plain wrong) but the tomato sauce on the table was too sharp and vinegary to be Heinz. I didn’t mind, but ketchup purists might.

I also didn’t try the bubble tea – and I barely even know what it is, despite having Googled – but it would be remiss not to mention it as it’s a big part of what Mr Chips does (it even forms part of their website address, for goodness’ sake). So at the front are a wide range of, well, fruit flavoured balls you can lob into one of about twenty types of fruity or milky tea. Just writing all that makes me feel about three hundred: what’s wrong with just offering a red and a blue Slush Puppie, eh?

Service was neither rude nor effusive, but that’s fine. It’s a chippy, not the latest entry in the Michelin Guide. It was better than the service in the Reading branch of Harry Ramsden over twenty years ago, if that counts for anything, but from memory I’m not sure it does.

Dinner for two – two fish, two small chips and a couple of soft drinks – came to just over fifteen pounds. Exactly what you’d pay in a chippy, in fact, and if that looks on the expensive side it’s because the skate was about six quid. (I wanted to do a “sick squid” pun there but thought better of it: besides, squid is on the menu and you can get eight squid for three quid, at which point it stops being a joke and starts being a tongue twister.)

I don’t think that Mr Chips does enough to break that pattern that fish and chips is something you pick up and take home. In fairness to them, I’m not sure they’re trying to: it felt like a chippy that lets you eat in rather than an upmarket London joint like Kerbisher and Malt. It does decent, reasonably priced fish and chips, and if you were in town of an evening, in a hurry to eat something quick and you fancied fish and chips it would be the place to go. If I was, I would. But here’s the problem: how often is that really going to happen, do you think?

Mr Chips – 6.5
33 Oxford Road, RG1 7QG
0118 9582 666

http://www.mrchipsandbubbleteareading.co.uk/

Sapana Home

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Click here to read a more recent review of Sapana Home, from September 2026.

Go to Sapana Home, someone recommended on Twitter recently. Great dumplings, good curry and brilliant value. Well, I thought, how can you argue with that? In a single Tweet they’d conveyed easily as much information as you find in one of my reviews, so the least I could do was act on the tip-off.

It’s a low-key place at the end of Queen Victoria Street closest to the station, and the inside is unprepossessing and unpretentious. A long thin room, it has some little tables for two at the front and a couple which can seat four at the back near the counter (downstairs is bigger, but a bit like a cellar and not a room you’d want to eat in unless it was full and had some atmosphere). And Sapana wasn’t full when I got there around half-eight on a weekday night – although, unusually, it was almost full when I left.

There’s no website so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m so used to checking out menus before I go to a restaurant to review it that it was a strange experience seeing it for the first time in the restaurant and being expected to know what I wanted to eat pretty much there and then. The pressure! (Yes, yes, I know: this is how it is for most people in most restaurants pretty much all of the time).

That said, the menu at Sapana couldn’t be more helpful, as it not only describes the dishes but has lots of photos of the food. Yes, photographs. Normally, these conjure up the whiff of package holidays (and garishly saturated pictures of English breakasts. And flashbacks about holidays – and English breakfasts – I’d sooner forget) but in Sapana they were very useful because my experience of Nepalese food is limited and it was nice to know what you’re letting yourself in for.

So what was I letting myself in for? Well, momos for a start: all the reviews I’ve read mention them so it felt rude not to sample them. You get a choice of fillings and can either have them steamed (if you’re feeling virtuous), deep fried (if you’re not) or pan-fried (if you’re not but you want to kid yourself that you are). Mine were the latter, packed with chicken and every bit as good as everybody says – with hints of lemongrass and coconut, delicious with the spicy accompanying sauce. Generous, too: I think this helping was something like six pounds and easily divided between three without leaving anybody feeling short changed (their close relative, the gyoza, costs about the same over at Wagamama for half as many).

1409688981.569270.71

Of course, that didn’t stop the three of us sampling two other starters. Of those, the best was definitely sukuti bhatamas – dried buffalo meat in herbs and spices with soy beans, onions, garlic and chilli. The meat was in little intense crispy nuggets, somewhere between the texture of biltong and really good pork scratchings, in a very, very hot sauce, topped with crisp raw red onion. The beans with it were a little disconcerting: I was expecting them to be soft but quite a few were crunchy, hard even, but once I got my head round that I enjoyed the whole lot. It was topped with fresh coriander and served with a helping of sauce which was either the same as the one which came with the momos or too close for me to be able to tell the difference. Halfway through this dish the waitress thoughtfully brought over three glasses of water, not a moment too soon (that kind of thoughtful, polite service was repeated all evening).

Buffalo

The siu mai – pork dumplings – were less impressive. I was expecting a fluffy steamed pork bun type affair but these were gelatinous pork cylinders wrapped in a thin layer of wrinkled pastry. There wasn’t any flavour to them, either, unless you dipped them in the fiery chilli sauce that they came with. Partly my mistake, I suspect: if I’d done my homework better I’d have understood that Nepalese food had elements of dim sum in it, but never mind.

Siu mai

If the starters were a mixed bag, they were at least an interesting bunch – lots of fire and flavour, texture and contrasts. That’s what made the main courses baffling, because they were so bland by comparison. Two of us had thali, those metal compartmentalised plates that offer (in theory) the chance to try lots of different things. The reality was more the opportunity to experience a wide range of disappointments.

Dhal was stodgy and bland with an odd undertone of something like evaporated milk. Spinach was floppy and strangely flavourless. The vegetable curry, served crunchy and cold in a nutty sauce, was the pick of the bunch but there was nowhere near enough of it to save the day. The meat curry – not an awful lot of it – was watery and not very interesting, with enough shards of bone in the chicken and enough gristle in the lamb that you didn’t feel you could risk eating a piece without a thorough inspection (a process which, I’ve always thought, rather gets in the way of a relaxing meal).

You also got a lot of rice, more rice than you could humanly eat, with a limp shard of poppadom on top – although the variant with chapati roti, which also included rice, was a much better bet. This all cost eight pounds – not a huge amount in the scheme of things for a main course, but it still didn’t feel like good value.

Thali

The other dish was chicken chow mein. A perfectly decent chow mein, freshly made with a decent amount of chicken, a few bits of shredded cabbage and carrot and noodles. Lots and lots of noodles. It didn’t seem to me to be any different to one I would get from a Chinese takeaway – no extra spice, no added flavour or exotic ingredients; just a plain chow mein. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this: like the siu mai, I felt this was probably my mistake. I’m never sure it should be possibly to order badly in a good restaurant, but I did have an increasing feeling that maybe I hadn’t given the place the opportunity to do itself justice.

Chow mein

That’s the main reason we ordered dessert, even though we weren’t hungry any more, but it didn’t really improve matters. The gulab jamun were a shadow of other versions I’ve had elsewhere in town. Instead of being squidgy, doughy balls, soaked in glorious sweetness, these were hard and very cold with minimal syrup. It was like they’d taken the dish I love and extracted all the fun. The other dessert was jeri, deep fried batter in sugar syrup. I was hoping for something reminiscent of doughnuts or churros (or even fritters), but instead it was just a maze of crispy tubes, the texture almost stale. Again, at two pounds it wasn’t by any means an expensive mistake, but it still felt like a mistake.

Jeri

Dinner for three came to fifty-seven pounds, not including service, for three courses, a couple of soft drinks, a couple of glasses of wine, a mango lassi and a couple of cups of chai. So inexpensive, and yet I still can’t bring myself to wholeheartedly recommend Sapana Home. It’s a pity, because the service is really good, and they deserve loads of credit for making a go of it in such a central location, but too much of it just wasn’t to my taste. So yes, maybe I did order badly – it’s quite possible, because the menu is full of less conventional options I didn’t quite have the courage to try (chicken gizzard and lamb’s intestines, for instance). Or perhaps Nepalese food is generally bland; I’ve not had it enough to be able to say. Either way, I’m sorry that I can only partly endorse the tip I received on Twitter. I’d definitely go for the momos again at lunchtime, when I fancied something different (they really are very good, and worth a visit in their own right) but then I’d probably settle up and quit while I was ahead.

Sapana Home – 6.3
8 Queen Victoria Street, RG1 1TG
0118 9509898

https://sapanahomenepalese.com

Round-up: the year in similes

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I’m sorry, but there’s no new review this week. The thing is, I’m off on holiday and going to restaurants in another country tends to make going to restaurants in Reading rather an impossibility. And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to read reviews of What I Ate On My Holiday (besides, it’s quite nice to eat off duty once in a while and not have to make mental notes of everything. Trust me on this.) So please accept my apologies, but this is the first break from reviewing I’ve had since last Christmas and I figured a break would do me good.

That said, I didn’t want to leave you without a post this week. I wanted to put something up. I’ve already reviewed the ten best dishes of the last year, so what else could I do? Fortunately, racking my brain and re-reading the reviews from past twelve months, something occurred to me. I use a lot of similes, don’t I? I thought. This was only reinforced by reading the reviews of some of my favourite dishes: it’s true. I seem to love similes like… someone who really likes similes, like… well… similes fail me, put it that way. So why not sit back, enjoy the year in similes… ready?

Bread
“The toast was thinner, whiter and cheaper than Miley Cyrus.”
(Café Yolk)

Burrito
“The chipotle sauce didn’t come through at all, leaving me wondering if I’d asked for the wrong one or if the staff just hadn’t glugged on enough. The cheese didn’t register. But I suppose these could be viewed as fussy quibbles about what was basically a big edible pillowcase stuffed with a lot of quite good things (they also do a smaller version, presumably for lunchtime and less ambitious eaters, and a larger version – presumably for Eric Pickles).”
(Mission Burrito)

Chicken
“I didn’t finish it: there didn’t seem any point, when every mouthful was the culinary equivalent of the One Show.”
(The Bull On Bell Street)

Cocktail
“The “Bloody Caesar” – a Bloody Mary variant featuring clamato juice, lime, horseradish and sherry – was all citrus and no tomato, thinner, sharper and more joyless than Gillian McKeith.”
(Bel And The Dragon)

Feijoada
“It wasn’t going to win any beauty competitions – half the plate covered in brown mush, a quarter covered with rice and a quarter covered in greens, a beige pie chart”
(Pau Brasil)

Flatbread
“…you also have the flatbread it’s all served on – gradually soaking up that sauce and those juices, waiting until enough meat is gone that you can roll it up, like a magic carpet, and eat it without dignity, savouring all those flavours and maybe, just maybe, dripping a bit of sauce into the bottom of your polystyrene container.”
(King’s Grill)

Gooseberry jam
“The star of the show, without a doubt, was the gooseberry jam. I wasn’t expecting it to be red, but it had the tartness of gooseberry and – this was the masterstroke – a nice spike of chilli. It absolutely saved the plate in front of me (it was the Tim Howard of the food world: it could have saved almost anything). I’d probably have eaten it smeared on a mattress, that’s how good it was.”
(The Catherine Wheel)

Kachori chaat
“It was in many ways so alien to what I normally try in restaurants that I felt a little bit as if I’d just eaten the national dish of the Moon.”
(Bhel Puri House)

Lamb terrine
“I did feel apprehensive about eating it, though, because I was expecting something coarser and all those chunks (such an unattractive word), bound together with jelly felt like a Damian Hirst starter at best and Pedigree Chum for poshos at worst.”
(Cerise)

Noodles
“The only real misfire was the other side dish; fried noodles turned out to be wide, flat, almost completely undressed, clumpy noodles which transformed into rubber bands within minutes of being brought to the table.”
(Art Of Siam)

Omelette
“A good omelette is thick, seasoned, gooey in the middle, folded over and full of wonderful things. What I got instead was a thin frittata, no seasoning, cooked completely through and rolled into some kind of surreal egg spliff.”
(Cafe Yolk)

Onions
“Onions are as cheap as can be, so how could they possibly be one of the tastiest things I ate all evening? But it’s true, I promise: sizzling, continuing to cook at the table, soft and sweet, spicy and caramelised, coated in all those juices. They were incredible, and we pounced on them like yummy mummies hitting the Boden website come sale time.”
(Bhoj)

Ribs
“The meat practically jumped off the bone without needing any encouragement, leaving the bone as white and dry as the Queen’s Speech.”
(Blue’s Smokehouse)

Roast suckling pig
“The crackling – light, salty and sinful – was how I imagine Quavers would taste in heaven.”
(Bel And The Dragon)

Sea bass
“This was closer to the sort of food I was expecting at Malmaison: Jack Lemmon to the burger’s Walter Matthau, granted, but I liked it a lot.”
(Malmaison)

Of course, to use yet another simile, you might feel that reading this post is a bit like sitting down to an episode of Friends to find that you’re watching that one that pretends to be a new episode but is actually made up of loads of clips of previous episodes that you’ve already seen (you know the one I’m talking about). If so, I’m not sure I can blame you – so tune in next Friday when I’ll have a brand new review for you. Just like a restaurant reviewer.