Can you believe that Thames Lido celebrated its seventh birthday this year? It was such an event – three articles in quick succession from the Guardian was a big deal in 2017 – and for many people it’s been a real statement piece, a special occasion restaurant that has seen off the likes of Forbury’s, Cerise and, at the start of this year, the Corn Stores. It put Reading on the map when nowhere else had, just before the two kitchens, Clay’s and Kungfu, arrived in town and changed everything.
And yet, as regular readers might know, I’ve always had a very chequered experience of Thames Lido. When I visited it on duty, over six years ago, I found things to like but wasn’t won over by the place as a whole. And on the occasions when I’ve been back, for a meal with friends or tapas by the pool, it has never completely convinced me. Consistency has consistently – irony of ironies – been the problem. There have been moments in every meal that impressed but always, somehow, an equal and opposite Newtonian disappointment.
The meal that stayed with me was one I had in the spring of 2021 with my family, just as I was emerging from a self-imposed Covid lockdown and tentatively eating outside again. We had tapas by the pool, and I had that experience – again – that some of the dishes were quite good and some were very much something and nothing. I made the mistake of posting about it on Instagram, and shortly after that I had a direct message from the head chef. It’s safe to say that dealing with criticism was not a strong suit of his.
“Looking through your account, your reviews are generally critical so may I suggest you don’t go out so much and cook a bit more at home?” he said. “I’m sure we’d all love to see the photos.”
Well, I didn’t take his advice – and I doubt he took mine in return that he might want to consider developing a thicker skin – except in one important respect, which is that I didn’t bother going back to Thames Lido after that. He left not long after those messages and for a while Thames Lido churned through head chefs like the U.K. got through Prime Ministers. I think it also had some kind of executive chef/”restaurant director” at the time – rarely a good thing – and the menu felt like it was focused more on buying and dishing up rather than cooking. So, much as others still loved the Lido, it well and truly fell off my radar.
And then, late last year, something happened which put them back on it. Out of the blue, I heard from the person handling Thames Lido’s PR, who told me that the restaurant had recently acquired a new head chef.
Nothing out of the ordinary there – it seemed to happen every few months at the time – but this time they had picked someone interesting. Thames Lido had gone for Iain Ganson, previously at the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence where he’d cooked with his brother Scott for the best part of twenty years. That made it somewhere I needed to revisit. Ganson’s food, like his brother’s, had always been exceptional and it had the potential to revitalise Thames Lido, which felt like it had been cosplaying founder Freddy Bird – not brilliantly, I might add – ever since he’d left.
So I politely turned down the PR’s very kind offers to attend pop-up guest nights at Thames Lido (and endure the horrors of what they described as “a little media table”) but I made a mental note that I had to go back before 2024 was out to find out whether the menu was remade in Ganson’s image or, like a covers band in a hotel lobby, he was playing somebody else’s hits. And finally, at the start of December at the beginning of a week off with Zoë, I made it there on a Tuesday lunchtime to try and find out the answer.
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Every year, without exception, you can reliably expect two things to happen in Reading’s hospitality scene. One is that there will be a raft of closures and new openings. Some years that ratio is pretty much one to one, others – like this year – it’s badly out of kilter, with far more places giving up the ghost than newcomers showing up to take their place. It’s tough out there, with no relief in sight. But the other thing that happens, every year without fail, is that none of those new openings will be a tapas bar.
I have complained about this so many times that it’s boring for all of us, so I won’t go on at length. But everywhere you look there’s a tapas bar, it seems, apart from Reading. Swindon has Los Gatos, Oxford has Arbequina. Newbury has Goat On The Roof, and Wokingham has Salty Olive. And Reading? Reading has next to sod all – unless you count Thames Lido, which I don’t, or Alto Lounge, which surely nobody should (Oh wow! Excited for this said the Chronicle‘s Facebook page this week, about the news that Alto Lounge had received permission from the council to double in size: that’s the Chronicle for you, excited about pretty much anything).
No, it’s never a tapas bar. Biryani joints are ten a penny, we went through a phase where we got three sushi restaurants in quick succession and momo are having a moment, but nobody wants to open a tapas bar. It’s a long, long time since La Tasca (which also wasn’t great) and six years since I Love Paella – not a tapas bar, but the closest thing we had – was unceremoniously booted out of the Fisherman’s Cottage. Is it a Brexit thing? Surely somebody feels like getting on the blower to renowned Bristol importer Mevalco and sorting this out, you might think, but every year nobody does.
And that’s what sends me scuttling off to the likes of Swindon, or Oxford, or Wokingham, trying to find the next best thing. Sometimes it works – Los Gatos is a little miracle – and sometimes I find myself somewhere like Sanpa, but I keep on trying because it’s a wonderful way to eat and I am always on the hunt for somewhere that brings a little hint of Granada or Málaga to unsung Berkshire. And that’s why this week I ended up at El Cerdo in Maidenhead, a ten minute walk from the train station, in the company of Katie, last seen last month sampling the glitzy splendour of Calico with me: inexplicably, after a dinner with me, she felt like repeating the experience.
Katie, it turned out, was on a proper journey of discovery, having never been to Maidenhead before. On the stroll through town to the restaurant I gave her a whistle stop tour of everything I knew about Maidenhead, which didn’t take long: former constituency of Theresa May, the infidelity capital of the U.K. (allegedly) and the town that, possibly because it was originally meant to be the terminus of the Elizabeth Line, was getting all the interesting things Reading didn’t.
That last one really is true – Maidenhead has a great independent craft beer bar in A Hoppy Place, wonderful pizza at Knead, an absolutely top notch town centre restaurant in Seasonality. And if some of the misfires, like Sauce and Flour, weren’t amazing, they at least showed that someone was trying. We walked past Sauce and Flour on the way to El Cerdo, and it was rammed, which shows how little I know about anything.
El Cerdo is by the canal, in the new development (the Waterside Quarter, apparently). “This looks so much like the Oracle it’s disconcerting” was Katie’s take, not without justification. The restaurant looked welcoming from the outside, and it wasn’t unpleasant on the inside but it had a feeling of “new build” that it couldn’t quite shake, a functional box rather than a cosy, appealing cocoon.
That’s not entirely their fault – it’s the hand they’ve been dealt with the space, and I liked the giant pig logo on one wall, past the handsome bar. But overall I felt it lacked a little character, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. After all, Knead has a very similar dining room, but somehow it still has a feeling of bustle and hubbub. I guess the open space with the pizza oven perhaps brought things together in a way that El Cerdo’s bar, attractive though it was, didn’t quite manage. A handful of tables were occupied when we got there, including one large group in the corner, but it was a quiet Tuesday night.
El Cerdo’s menu read well. It wasn’t so big as to be unwieldy, and was divided into logical sections – nibbles, cold tapas, meat, seafood and fish. They hadn’t given in to the temptation to do paella on the side, so there was just the one rice dish and a few types of tortilla. In the run up to my visit I’d looked at the menu at Los Gatos, just to benchmark prices, and El Cerdo was definitely more expensive: nearly everything was north of a tenner, with some dishes nudging twenty.
But the wine list was good, and exclusively Spanish, and although we were tempted by a txakoli – the slightly sparkling Basque white you rarely see on menus – we went for an albariňo. It was an excellent choice – crisp and clean but not bone dry, with a little fruit. Thirty-eight quid for a bottle that’s fifteen online, so not an oppressive mark-up, either.
Now, before we get started on the food – and because tapas is by definition small plates, we have a fair bit to run through – I want to get a couple of things out of the way. One is that I had an absolutely lovely evening, and that makes it far more tempting to see the food through the Albariño-tinted glasses of good company. The other is that your mileage at El Cerdo might very well vary from mine: Katie, I suspect, enjoyed most of the dishes more than I did.
And of course, your take on this kind of food will depend on how and where you’ve had it before. Despite loving tapas and small plates, it turned out that Katie had never been to Spain, although she’s rectifying that with a trip to Barcelona just before Christmas.
I on the other hand go to Andalusia most years – and yes, I know that makes me sound like the pretentious tosspot I am – and unfortunately that means that although I went hoping for the best, I was painfully aware of all the instances where the best simply didn’t materialise. El Cerdo’s website says, pretty plainly, “If a dish doesn’t taste like it does in Spain, then we won’t serve it”. Although it also says that El Cerdo has an “executive chef”, and in my experience very little good comes of having one of those in place of an actual chef.
The first sign that I was going to have to write this kind of review came with the accompaniment to those first sips of wine, a couple of gildas. A gilda is a very simple thing – a skewer of olives and pickled chillis, all brought together with a slim ribbon of salty anchovy. Named in homage to Rita Hayworth, it’s almost a perfect mouthful, and quite hard to get wrong. You could have really amazing olives, and truly best in class Cantabrian anchovies, but even an entry level one is going to be a delight.
Or it should be, providing you use salty anchovies. But it felt to me like these were made with boquerones, the softer, more vinegary Spanish anchovies without the saline tautness of the good stuff. Which in turn meant they were all out of kilter – all vinegar and no salt, and somehow fishier than they should have been as a result. I felt like a right killjoy thinking this, because Katie seemed to enjoy hers. But I knew it could, and should, have been better.
The jamon croquetas were a similar story. They weren’t terrible – easily better than the deep fried abominations I’d eaten at Sanpa – but nowhere near the quality of anything you would get in Spain. They were a little flabby, a little pale, a little lacking in the crisp shell you needed. And the bechamel inside was lacking silkiness and a proper hit of jamon. Perching a little slice of it on top of each croqueta just showed you, Jim Bowen-style, what you could have won.
Last time I went out with Katie at Calico, she took me out of my comfort zone by ordering more vegetarian dishes than I would personally have chosen, which probably meant that my review was useful to slightly more people than it would ordinarily have been. The same thing happened here, where Katie was stuck between two dishes, broccoli with almonds or hispi cabbage, that I would never have ordered in a million years.
I took against the former for containing coconut ajo blanco in order to be vegan – good luck convincing anybody that they’d serve that in Spain – and so hispi cabbage it was. And actually this turned out to be one of the better things we ordered, although possibly one of the less Spanish ones. The cabbage came topped with a caper and raisin purée, which was heavy on the raisin and light on the caper, and squiggled vigorously with what was apparently a cured egg yolk sauce.
Your guess is as good as mine: I certainly didn’t get cured egg yolk from it, partly because I don’t really know what a cured egg yolk would even taste like. The little pieces of fried kale on top were pleasant too, although it gave me flashbacks to the Lyndhurst, which always makes me sad. There was a real whack of lurking heat in this too, and all in all it was probably the cleverest thing we had. Not massive, and not cheap at just shy of a tenner, but with lots to recommend it.
One of the biggest crimes against Spanish food was what came next, something the menu described as our “lazy” or open tortillas. We picked the eponymous El Cerdo tortilla, with chorizo and black pudding, and it’s difficult to describe how underwhelmed I was by this. Lazy is about right, to the point where maybe the menu should have said “we can’t be arsed to make a tortilla”.
Now in fairness the server, who was excellent, asked us if we wanted it runny or medium, and maybe we should have gone for the former. But whether it was runny or medium, this wasn’t a tortilla. It was an omelette. An underseasoned one that had been cooked through, with four bits of chorizo plonked on top and some black pudding – the British kind, not gorgeous soft Spanish morcilla, lobbed in the middle. No softness, a little onion, no potato that I could discern. This dish frustrated me. I imagine it would have made a Spaniard angry.
We’d ordered dishes in waves, partly because El Cerdo, Wagamama-style, says that everything you order will come out when they feel like it and we didn’t want to be swamped with dishes in one hit only to find the evening over. El Cerdo said that you should aim for two to three dishes each, which we took to mean three each, and actually doing it this way helped because we got to spy on the table next to us – four lads who kept their coats on throughout for some reason – and swap one of our dishes for something they’d ordered.
That dish was another of the relative hits of the evening, pincho de pollo with crispy polenta and mojo rojo. It was a reasonably generous skewer – four substantial enough pieces of chicken with a weird treble clef of red sauce, resting on a rope bridge of crispy sticks of polenta. And again, it wasn’t terrible but I didn’t found myself wowed. The chicken was nicely enough done, but El Cerdo makes much of its charcoal oven and I didn’t feel this had the char I’d expect from such an impressive piece of kit. The polenta added contrast, but if it did indeed have Idiazabal cheese in it it was a whisper, not a shout.
And again, thirteen pounds for this – even by 2024 standards – felt steep. I thought back to the skewer of chicken I had at Kolae, earlier in the year. Different cuisine, of course, but in terms of technique, flavour and value it was worlds away from this. This felt like the kind of dish that might pleasantly surprise you at Alto Lounge, but only because your expectations were on the floor.
If you wanted more evidence that El Cerdo wasn’t capable of delivering a flawless plate of food, their monkfish in tempura with chickpeas was exactly that. Just as at Calico, Katie had talked me into ordering something with chickpeas and they were lovely – nutty, earthy, positively moreish. But what in god’s name was going on with the monkfish? Two slightly forlorn nuggets of the stuff in a batter that was not, by any stretch of the imagination, tempura. It had no crunch, no texture, and when you tried to cut through it it all fell away, leaving a dense little knot of woolly monkfish, a sad savoury parody of a profiterole.
It turned out that Katie had never had monkfish before. “It’s not usually like this” I told her, feeling like I had to do something to rescue monkfish’s reputation. I hope for Katie’s sake that her first visit to Spain is better than her first taste of monkfish. If it’s on a par, that means she’s had her pocket picked on Las Ramblas.
By this point I’m guessing neither of us really wants me to go on, but go on I must because there were a couple more dishes. Again, Katie quite liked the patatas bravas, which I think we’d picked to make sure we felt full at the end. And again, it wasn’t atrocious but I have never, ever had patatas bravas like this in Spain or indeed anywhere decent in the U.K.
The bravas sauce didn’t taste like bravas sauce, it was fruitier and lacked any kind of heat. The alioli, giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that’s what it was, was not unpleasant. But it needed more of both, and moreover the potatoes were wan specimens, technically cooked but lacking the golden hue and brittle texture that makes this dish a treat.
Writing this, I should let you know, is the weirdest experience. Because I had a really lovely evening but the more I think about the food the more surprised I am by that.
We decided to have a dessert and there was one on the specials menu – a tangerine cake with white chocolate ganache and yuzu sorbet – which our server told us was perfect for sharing. So we also decided to have a dessert wine each, and identified a very nice-looking Pedro Ximenez on the wine list. So we ordered it, and our server came over apologetically. There was only enough left in the bottle for one glass – well, one and a half glasses, really. So what would we like to do?
Of course, as something approximating to a gentleman, I let Katie have that and went instead for a white dessert wine from Rueda. But when they came over, both were in very small glasses, both were the same size, and both looked bigger than they were because each of them had an ice cube lobbed in it.
“They weren’t the coldest, so I put an ice cube in them” explained our server.
This begged so many questions, like why aren’t you keeping your dessert wine in the fridge? or maybe you should have asked first?, let alone is that really what a glass of Pedro Ximenez looks like? or why didn’t you give her the rest of the bottle, were you saving that final half glass for Santa?
It was just baffling, and especially so because otherwise service was lovely all night. She told us they’d been open about a year and that although this week was quiet, things ramped up for the Christmas season after that and business was booming.
Last but not least, the dessert. It looked fancy, it looked cheffy and I can see that it was kind of designed for sharing. And leaving out the question of whether yuzu is remotely Spanish, the yuzu sorbet in the middle was easily the best and most enjoyable thing in the whole dish, resting on a sort of granola crumb. But there was nothing you could really describe as a white chocolate ganache, because neither the quenelles of something or other or the isosceles triangles of white chocolate fitted that bill.
But that wasn’t the most heinous failing: that was the cake. Dense didn’t even begin to describe it. You could work out your upper body trying to drive a spoon through that cube of stodge, and I felt like I did. There’s a chap called David who comes to my readers’ lunches whose job is to build machines that are used to test whether materials can withstand immense pressure. David would take a professional interest in that cake.
Because I seem to have spent most of this review pointing out places that do things better than El Cerdo, this feels like the right time to mention the pistachio cake I had last year at Manteca.
By this point, with the exception of a couple of chaps at the bar, we were the last table there so we settled up and made our way back to the station in the cold. Our meal, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just over a hundred and fifty pounds. Now, I think life in Britain has reached the point where it’s difficult to say “that’s expensive” any more because you’d end up saying that about most meals out.
But instead, we can at least talk about value: that’s more than my recent meals cost at Calico, at The Cellar, or Storia. My meal at Goat On The Roof cost a smidge more, admittedly two years ago, but El Cerdo can’t hold a candle to Goat On The Roof.
Granted, none of those restaurants are an exact match in terms of how many courses, how much booze and all that jazz, but the central point remains: El Cerdo does not feel like value. Not compared to any of those places, not compared to the tapas places you could eat at along the train tracks in Oxford or Swindon. So the search continues, and maybe next year I’ll rock up at Salty Olive having one last stab at finding great Spanish food a very short distance from Reading. Because if there’s one thing we can be fairly sure of, it’s that a tapas bar will not open in Reading next year.
But let’s close by looking on the bright side. For two years now I’ve been taking the train to Maidenhead, trying all these places and bemoaning the fact that Reading doesn’t have them. But actually, now, I’m beginning to think that my head was turned by Seasonality and Knead. Because outside those two, the new places I’ve eaten at in Maidenhead – the likes of Sauce and Flour, Storia and El Cerdo – don’t leave me thinking that we’re missing out. If there’s a market for box-ticking, slightly inauthentic, sterile restaurants and those restaurants want to go to Maidenhead instead, I’m all for it. I’m happy to hold out for something better. Even if experience tells me I might be waiting a very long time.
El Cerdo – 6.3 The Colonnade, Waterside Quarter, Maidenhead, SL6 1QG 01628 617412
The Cellar closed in June 2025. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
Here’s a question for you: when does a restaurant become a new restaurant?
Is it when the name changes, or when the chef changes, or when the owner does? Celebrated Reading restaurant Mya Lacarte changed chefs many times during its lifetime, but it always remained Mya. But with some restaurants, it can feel like a completely different place. Take Pepe Sale – the name and the room stayed the same, but without Toni in the kitchen and Marco or Samantha running the front of house, it might have been a decent Italian restaurant, on a good day, but it wasn’t Pepe Sale.
One of my favourite restaurants, back in the mists of time, was a place in Cheltenham called Lumiere. It was run by a married couple, a lovely, homely spot that did brilliant food, and I loved it. And then the owners decided to get out of hospitality and sold to another couple, one with a track record and aspirations. Fourteen years later, they won their first Michelin star. I’ve been since it changed hands, and I liked it well enough, but it wasn’t the same place I loved long ago.
I feel like this is especially a problem with pubs. When restaurants change hands, unless the new owners are buying a going concern the name often changes. But pubs can go through good phases and bad phases, new chefs and new concepts, all under the same name. Look at my reviews of all the pubs out on the way to Henley – the Pack Horse, the Pack Saddle, the Crown. Are any of them recognisably the same as they were when I reviewed them all that time ago? Almost certainly not.
The reason I’m starting out talking about this is that the subject of this week’s review also begs this question. Between 1996 and 2008 there used to be a restaurant on Valpy Street called Chronicles, and back then it was very much a peer of London Street Brasserie. It closed, and became an Italian restaurant and then, briefly, a truly woeful place called The Lobster Room. And then in 2015 Chronicles owner Andrew Norman decided to have another bite of the cherry and opened Valpy Street in that spot. New name, new era, new restaurant.
But in August Valpy Street closed after nearly nine years trading. Sadly this hasn’t been an isolated occurrence this year – restaurants have been dropping like flies in 2004 – and the announcement from Valpy Street listed the usual suspects: Covid, the cost of living, wage increases. But there was an additional horseman of the apocalypse in Valpy Street’s case: “accountancy errors”. War, famine, death, shonky accountants. It figures.
And so that was it for Valpy Street, but the following month another restaurant, The Cellar, opened in the same spot. The Chronicle had already reported that this was going to happen, and that some of the existing staff would transfer across to Valpy Street’s successor. And yet, if you have a look on Companies House, the director of The Cellar Ltd. is none other than… yes, it’s Andrew Norman, the proprietor of Valpy Street.
So what’s all that about, and was the Cellar a new restaurant, or just a new name for an old one? I decided it was time to find out, so I booked a table on a week night and headed over to check it out, with my dining companion – and elite level campanologist, would you believe – Liz, last seen experiencing the exotic wonders of Calcot.
I was a little early for our reservation, so I got a good look at the dining room. I can’t remember what it looked like as Valpy Street, and I didn’t have the sense to take a photo back then, so I couldn’t tell you how much it had changed. But I sense it wasn’t that much, probably because it didn’t need to. Despite being a basement restaurant the dining room was split level with another room, for drinkers, on the other side of the bar.
And everything was nicely done: gorgeous exposed brickwork – the real stuff, not faux nonsense – along with banquettes, muted panelling and comfy dining chairs. There wasn’t much in the way of soft furnishings to absorb the noise, and although it wasn’t busy on a Tuesday night the decibel level was high, mainly from a very chatty table of Americans who were here on business and celebrating, by my reckoning, for the final time for about four years.
Yet if you looked more closely, things about it weren’t quite right. My table, which was a perfectly nice table, had weird sloping edges which meant that when you looked at the wine glasses or jug of water you felt like either you were very drunk or they were about to fall off. The tables in the booths had been spaced out as if social distancing was still a thing, meaning anyone sitting at them risked scraping their elbow on some brickwork.
And speaking of elbows, the table was so sticky that, over the course of the evening, it took the skin off my elbow. If you left a napkin on it and pressed down, you left some of the napkin on the table. All a little strange, although I didn’t fully appreciate that until I got home and had to break out the Elastoplast.
Service was initially a little diffident. I think I spotted three or four servers over the course of the evening, but the young chap who showed me to my table then just leant against the wall and stared into space as I made more and more attempts to attract his attention to say that actually, I’d love a drink while I was waiting for my friend to arrive. He was absolutely lovely, but just seemed a little, well, green. (“Don’t be mean about him in the review, it’s probably his first week” was Liz’s take at the end of the evening.)
My wine arrived just as Liz did, which made me feel rude even though it wasn’t really my fault. The Cellar’s wine list is pretty interesting, partly because I couldn’t work out who they bought from. Some of it at least was available from Majestic, the popular choice with so many Reading restaurants over the years. But others, weirdly, only seemed to be available from a website that does thank you gifts for employees, so your guess is as good as mine.
I know all that, because I could Google it while I waited for Liz to arrive. Because, unusually for a basement restaurant with thick brick walls, there is actually mobile reception. Anyway, the list had a decent mix of old and new world, and if nothing was that cheap – glasses start around nine quid – that’s because nothing is any more. So I had a nero d’avola (Majestic) which I liked very much, and decided that I’d save the pleasures of the Malbec-Viognier blend (Hints of fynbos, rosemary and tobacco leaf, spiced or marinated red meats with a biltong coating, also Majestic) for another day.
I think after eleven years I’ve figured out that when it comes to wine, describing things as jammy or fruity or – if they’re dead expensive, “complex” or “fragrant” – is about as good as I get. I liked it, I ended up having a second glass. Liz ordered something neither of us had ever heard of, a Spanish white made with Airén, a grape that was a new one on me. It was from the weird corporate website, and Liz, who is better at this sort of thing than me, said it was really enjoyable, fruity but not acidic; speaking as someone who is frequently acidic but rarely fruity, I couldn’t really identify with it.
The Cellar’s menu was a bit of a dark horse, with hidden depths. At first sight, it looked pedestrian and safe, but if you kept looking you found all sorts of interesting ingredients and techniques hiding in plain sight. So there was pork rillette, which you might find somewhere like Côte, but they’d panéed it, for reasons which escape me. There was boeuf bourguignon, but repurposed into some kind of cottage pie – gîte pie? – to be different. Baba ganoush came with rum soaked raisins, pavlova with basil sorbet. A little subversion, in with the mainstream.
Small plates came in between eight and twelve pounds, although you could supersize them as large plates by paying more. And then there were main courses – which you’d hope were also large plates, unless they were even larger plates – which cost between eighteen and twenty-five pounds. These were divided into two sections, one of which was marked “classic” which, in this case, translates as “not cheffy”. Fish and chips I can see you might class as a classic, but green Thai curry? Hmm.
Anyway, all that sounds catty when it isn’t meant to. I liked the menu, like I liked the room, but like the room it still felt like a bit of a jumble. The sense of being a work in progress fitted more with it being a new place than just Valpy Street wearing glasses, a fake nose and moustache.
Having said all that, we played it safe with our starters and were maybe not rewarded for that. I chose salt and pepper squid knowing full well that calamari is something I’ve tried in many places over the years, from Vesuvio to Storia and beyond. And the Cellar’s rendition was good – or, at least, not bad. The salt and pepper didn’t come through strongly, but even if they weren’t super-fresh they were far from the nacky rubber bands you get in many places. The chilli was advertised but didn’t make its presence felt, the unadvertised leaves dumped on top were a nuisance.
Pairing this with black garlic aioli (not just any aioli) is seemingly a very now combination – Storia did this too – but I wasn’t sure how this went with a salt and pepper coating. In any case the aioli had a weird sweetness, like salad cream, with no garlic punch. I think I’d rather have had sweet chilli sauce. But the oddest thing, again contributing to that slight jarring feeling, was how this was served, in a high-sided bowl sitting on a board. This made eating it, and dipping it into an even smaller ramekin of aioli, a bit of a palaver.
Liz had gone even more classic, with baked camembert. This is a dish it’s hard to get wrong, in many ways – buy a Camembert, bake it properly and off you go – and the Cellar managed that without missteps. I got to try a bit, and for what it’s worth I thought it was decent – nice to see it scored and generously studded with rosemary, even if the white wine and honey glaze didn’t really made its presence felt. At least they hadn’t adulterated it with onion jam or suchlike. But Liz wasn’t entirely convinced.
“I guess you sort of know what you’re getting with that, though” I said. “What more could they have done?”
“It’s these things” said Liz, pointing to the insubstantial, brittle crostini on the plate. “It needs really good, crusty bread to dip.”
I think she was right. The crostini snapped if you dipped them, couldn’t bear the weight if you loaded molten cheese onto them. They looked bought in, and if they weren’t then they could have saved time by doing that. But Liz was right, this dish was a baguette away from living its best life.
At this point, even though the lighting was lovely, the conversation was absorbing and free-flowing and the Americans had scarpered, I was getting that sinking feeling that my evening was going to be better than my meal. So it gives me huge pleasure, and no small sense of relief, to say that this was where the Cellar turned a corner and the rest of the evening was a little choreographed sequence of successes.
Take my main. I’m not sure what possessed me to order a chicken Milanese, a dish I’ve occasionally ordered but rarely enjoyed and really, only associated with Carluccio’s back when it was good. But it turned up and not only looked the part but was a hugely enjoyable affair all round. There’s not much to this dish but, like the Cellar’s menu, it was full of surprises.
So the chicken was a little thicker than I’d expect, not beaten flat, and was beautifully tender and superbly done. The coating could so easily have been blah old breadcrumbs, but was given a real flash of interest with Parmesan in the mix. The fried egg was absolutely terrific, spilling its yolk the way I spill gossip – freely and with joy.
I wasn’t entirely convinced by the hasselback potato – it didn’t feel like garlic or rosemary had really made their way to the centre of that particular maze – but the gremolata was also a delight. I’m not entirely convinced it was really a sauce, but more of a thick parsley pesto. But it had zing, and you could smear it on a piece of chicken or a sliver of potato, and it made everything better. I don’t mean to damn The Cellar with faint praise, but I’m not sure I’ve been more pleasantly surprised by a dish this year.
And then there was Liz’s dish. Liz doesn’t eat as much meat as I do – few people do, I suspect – and had chosen a vegetarian starter and a vegan main. I’m so glad she did, because that vegan main was a triumph, with loads going on. A slice of baked aubergine (“I really love aubergine”, Liz said, and I remembered that we’d had some at the Coriander Club, too) was served on a slick of butter bean purée.
But that was the Cellar just getting started, because on top of that you had a very good quenelle of baba ghanoush, and others of something I mistook for tapenade but the menu swears blind is mushroom duxelles. So much going on there, so many interesting flavours to mix and match.
But the Cellar understood that the dish still wasn’t complete without some textural contrast. So it was scattered with seeds and dusted with a potent dukkah, and because that still wasn’t enough, the crowning glory – crisp-edged cubes of panisse, chickpea fritters. I love panisse, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on a menu in Reading. I was very happy with the Cellar for doing it.
“This is really good” said Liz, offering me a forkful that confirmed that it absolutely was. So much going on, so much work and thought, but without it being overblown or overdone, or all those flavours and textures getting lost in a shouting match. And I thought that this was how you should do vegan food, to make it a destination dish where nobody in their right mind could eat it and miss meat. I was also thinking, in the back of my mind, finally, my vegan readers are going to get something out of a review for once.
Liz had her eye on the madeleines on the dessert menu, possibly because they came with lavender honey, but I managed to talk her into dessert. And perhaps more impressively, because Liz is firmly in the “one glass of wine on a school night, and possibly even a Friday night” school of thought, I managed to talk her into a dessert wine too. They only had one, a late harvest sauvignon/viognier blend, and 50ml is a bit of a stingy pour (if you’re me, or just right if you’re Liz) but it was a beautiful sip of pure sunshine and reminded me how much I love dessert wines, and how rarely I have them.
Liz’s head had been turned by the sticky toffee pudding and, again, it was really very nicely done. Reminiscent of the likes of London Street Brasserie, who have been flogging sticky toffee puddings for longer than I’ve been writing about them, it had great texture – how on earth do you describe that now everybody has cancelled the word “moist”? – and a moat of deep, rich sauce. The vanilla ice cream was already giving up the fight, which was inevitable, and I personally would have preferred clotted cream, but that’s my gluttony more than anything. Liz loved it, and my only regret was that after that she didn’t have space to raid those madeleines.
I tried the pavlova. I have a real soft spot for a pavlova – it always says that a restaurant can be arsed in a way that Eton mess never does – and the Cellar’s was a blissful piece of work. An elegant oval of chewy meringue, housing a core of cream and vanilla, ringed with macerated strawberries and syrup. A little reminder of the summer we never had, a gastronomic time capsule of a time that didn’t quite exist. And right at its centre, that verdant sphere of basil sorbet, which was truly extraordinary.
I give out awards every year for Dessert Of The Year, so thank god I went to The Cellar this week or I might have been writing a post next month saying “or you can just pick up a bar of Cadbury’s Top Deck from the corner shop”. I let Liz try a spoonful, and she had dessert envy. I’m so used to being the one that suffers from that that I didn’t even remember to gloat.
By this time everyone else had left, and we were still nattering until it got to about ten o’clock, over three hours after we started, and we both felt guilty about keeping the staff from their homes. All the people who served us were brilliant, and when one of them came over with the card reader I asked her how long they’d been going for.
“It’s just over a month” she said, “but of course we were Valpy Street before that.”
I asked how similar the Cellar was to Valpy Street, and she told me that most of the staff were the same and, crucially, the team in the kitchen was unchanged. She was very good at not saying much more than that, but I sensed again the involvement of the First Accountant Of The Apocalypse.
“How’s business going?” I said, aware that a Tuesday night in November mightn’t be the best yardstick of that.
“It’s okay, we’re getting there. But we were closed for about five weeks, and you worry that people forget about you.”
Our bill for two people – three courses apiece and five glasses of wine in total – came to just over one hundred and thirty-five pounds, including tip. And personally, for a very enjoyable evening in a lovely room with great company and some genuinely interesting dishes, I thought that was more than okay. Because when a restaurant gets a lot of things right, it wins you over. You still remember the other stuff – the glasses on the piss at the edge of the table, the waiter vacantly ignoring me at the start, the plaster I had to put on my elbow at the end of the night – but you don’t care.
The Cellar lived up to the promise of its name, an attractive, intimate, convivial space, tucked away from the bustle of Blagrave Street, of the buses, the commuters and the revellers. And I found myself really rather fond of it. We made our way out into the night, the air now sharp and wintry. Liz liberated her Brompton and headed back to West Reading, and I made my way to Market Place to play my favourite game, Bus Home Roulette: would it be the 5, the 6 or the 21? Did I feel lucky?
I realise, now I’ve got to the end, that I didn’t answer my own question. When does a restaurant become a new restaurant? I can’t help you, in this case: I have a feeling it might take someone who knew Valpy Street a lot better than I did to tell you that. But I can tell you this, instead: the staff might be the same, the owner might be the same, the chef might be the same. For all I know the menu might be the same, and those sticky tables too. But my respect for the place? Now that’s another matter. That definitely is new.
Earlier this year, the legendary London restaurant St John celebrated its 30th birthday, and to mark the occasion it went back in time, offering its 1994 menu on weekdays at, and perhaps this is the crucial part, 1994 prices. Reservations were snapped up in no time, no doubt by people who could easily afford the 2024 prices.
A similar thing happened closer to home in September when the Nag’s Head, mindful that it was about to increase its prices for the first time in a while, decided to take its customers back to 2007, when it first opened. For one night, ale, lager and cider were £2.50 a pint: I imagine they shifted a lot of booze that night, even if punters mostly paid for it the next day.
So the whole retro thing is very on trend, I thought to myself. How could I jump on this bandwagon? And then I realised – I could do something to mark the inception of my blog too, and combat rising inflation into the bargain.
I don’t mean money, because nobody was going to charge me 2013 prices. The only people paying the same amount for food now as they were eleven years ago are influencers, or “content creators” as they now like to call themselves. You know, the ones who ought to be using the hashtag #grifted. “I didn’t see a bill”, they frequently brag.
No, the inflation I’m talking about is word count: it’s no secret that my reviews nowadays are significantly longer and more detailed than they once were. I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Mark Twain, when he said that if he’d had more time he’d have written a shorter letter. There’s worse company to be in, as a writer. So how could I take you back to 2013 when this blog first began?
And then I decided: this week I would review Perry’s, one of the final 2013 venues I’m yet to revisit for the blog. And I’d ensure my review was no more than 1634 words, the magic number I used back in 2013. So I’d better get started, hadn’t I, because I’ve used 363 of them already.
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As I’ve said before, when I write a restaurant review I find it helps to have a hook. Why this place this week, out of all the restaurants out there? Why do I think you might want to read about this one? Sometimes it’s easy – with a new place, a change of management or an old place with a new chef, or somewhere that’s been mentioned in dispatches in the local or national press. Other times, it’s about the wider context: for instance the trend for biryani or sushi places in Reading.
But there always, ideally, needs to be something. I never assume I can just plonk a review up on the blog and expect people to read it no matter what: attention, like money, is a scant resource these days. Everybody’s got to earn it.
With Calico this week I was spoilt for choice, because I could think of three angles. The first is that Calico – technically “Calico Bar & Eatery”, but let’s not call it that because ‘Eatery’ is so naff – belongs to that niche club of Reading restaurants where everybody knows it exists, but nobody seems to know anyone who’s been. I’m sure some of you have, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never heard anybody talking about it. This is possibly the easiest “in” for a restaurant review, because you might want to know whether Calico is any cop; don’t worry, I will eventually get round to telling you that.
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Edible Reading 