Restaurant review: Cuttlefish, Oxford

On April 10, 2026April 10, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

“This should be lovely” said my dear friend Jerry as we took a table in the window at Cuttlefish, a couple of minutes’ walk away from the far side of Oxford’s Magdalen Bridge. “A fish restaurant!”

I was spending Good Friday with Jerry, in what I rather hoped would become an annual tradition – last year we spent it lunching at Gees – and as is habitual I had given him a range of options to choose from in advance. He passed on the London candidates I gave him: only the smaller plates appealed at Andrew Edmunds and The Hero, and the offal-heavy selection at Borough Market’s Camille was dismissed in a split second. That left Oxford, where Jerry was tempted by No. 1 Ship Street but thought, on balance, that Cuttlefish had more to tempt him.

All this worked out rather well, in truth. People have been bemoaning the lack of a fish restaurant in Reading for a long time – the easily pleased since Loch Fyne closed eight years ago and the more exacting since long before that. The nearest thing to it we have, I suppose, is Henley’s Shellfish Cow, but it always feels to me like a restaurant where they chose the name because they liked the pun and everything else followed from there.

Given that lacuna in Reading’s food scene a short hop to Oxford to see if there was anything suitable sounded like an excellent idea. Besides, after my last Oxford review there was a request to install Jerry as my permanent Oxford correspondent for all long boozy lunches: let it not be said that I never, ever give the people what they want. So Jerry and I rocked up at the start of the long weekend, the sun finally out, ready to investigate.

My preliminary research, however, had given me a bit of a sinking feeling, not that I told Jerry that. The fanciest thing about the website was Cuttlefish’s fetching logo, but lurking beyond that was a menu that seemed a little bit strange, a little bit cheap, a little too large and somewhat lacking in fish. Sure, they sold oysters and caviar and seafood platters, but for a fish and seafood place there appeared to be little fish on the menu.

Perhaps, I told myself, it was all in the daily specials depending what they could get that day. But it also felt a little all over the place, with classic fish and chips sitting uneasily next to squid ink spaghetti and “mixed seafood and chicken paella”.

Maybe some of that could be explained away as overlap with the La Cucina, the Italian restaurant next door under the same ownership. But that was before you got on to the five different types of burger, the steak frites, the brunch menu featuring eggs benedict and chorizo tortilla. Nothing about it shouted that Cuttlefish was a restaurant which had decided to focus on doing a few things very well.

That was sort of borne out by the dining room. It didn’t boast loads of jarring nauticalia, and the pictures on the walls were tasteful black and white numbers. But the Tolix chairs – would that I could go back in time and buy shares – felt low rent, as did the vinyl tableclothes meant, seemingly, to imitate planks of driftwood, which rather clashed with the attractive bare wooden floorboards. Never mind: we took a nice spot in the window and I wedged my arse into a Tolix. Behind Jerry, I could see that the paintwork of the bay windows was a little tired.

Service was lovely and friendly, but it started off shakily and never quite recovered. Jerry is a lovely and self-effacing man who always puts other people first, the kind who volunteers to take the crappy single bed in a communal Airbnb. Maybe it’s his Irish Catholic upbringing, but he is congenitally predisposed not to want his own way, to the point where he sometimes apologises even for having a preference.

I discovered this at lunch because, given that we were at a fish and seafood restaurant, I rather assumed that we’d be attacking a Picpoul de Pinet or an albariño, a riesling or a Chablis. Cuttlefish’s wine list, as you would expect, boasts all of those things, although it never gives a vintage and, in some cases, also neglects to mention the producer. But it was on this day, after years of friendship and several meals on duty, that I discovered that Jerry doesn’t especially care for white wine.

“I’m really sorry” he said, getting that apology in early. “But we can have white if you want.”

I stopped and thought. This was news to me, and I’ve been out for lunch with Jerry numerous times – including twice in Oxford – where I’ve pressed on and ordered a bottle of white without ever realising that Jerry only really enjoys red.

“No, don’t be silly! I’m not a purist about drinking white with fish.”

So we asked our server for help and that’s where our problems began. It felt like there was an unbridgeable language barrier between us, because I was unable to explain, somehow, that we wanted tips on which the lightest and fruitiest of the reds on the wine list was. It didn’t give many clues and there were no obvious candidates like, say, a Fleurie. It didn’t help that this part of East Oxford is a mobile reception not spot: no Vivino to come to the rescue.

“Do you mean the red wine that’s the least strong?” she said.

“No, I mean – which is the fruitiest. You know, not heavy. Which one would go best with fish?”

You’d expect the reds on this list to have been selected with this eventuality in mind, but perhaps not.

“Well, there is the Picpoul de Pinet” she said.

“No, I mean reds. That’s a white wine.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if I was expressing myself exceptionally poorly (if you’ve read enough of my reviews, you’ll know that sometimes happens). The pause lengthened into a silence, and I wondered if time was standing still. No: Jerry was still moving.

“I will get my colleague.”

By the time he arrived we’d given up and settled on a French malbec. This server smirked slightly as we ordered it, as if it was a bad choice, but really, by that point we’d done quite enough deciding and wanted to do some drinking.

It was called Beauté du Sud and the markup on it was reasonable to the point of baffling: £32 for a wine that will apparently set you back £25 retail. If I’d paid £25 for it retail I’d be beyond disappointed, but in a restaurant it wasn’t bad: not too heavy but perhaps a little jammy. Tom Gilbey would probably have had something to say about the sugar levels.

So by this point my hopes were not high, and that was compounded by another cardinal sin: our starters must have come out about five minutes after we ordered them, and you probably know by now how much I love that i.e. not very. But that’s almost the last bit of criticism you will hear from me, because from this point onwards – against all the signs and much to my bemused pleasure – nearly everything was rather good.

Take my calamari, for instance. They even looked pedestrian, and I was half expecting to wade my way through a bowl of breaded rubber bands. So imagine my surprise when I found they were delicious, lightly dusted with a coating that adhered, had crispness, and that they were tender without the slightest twang of elastic.

Dressed with liberally squeezed lemon and then dipped into a ramekin of golden aioli, they were the kind of dish the idea of this restaurant promised, a promise the reality of the restaurant looked as if it would renege on. It wasn’t the hugest portion for £9, but I liked it too much to care about that.

And would you believe that Jerry’s starter was equally good? He’d ordered crab, white and brown, with toast, and it was a simple and surprising – that word again – dish.

“This is so much nicer than those meagre pots you get at the supermarket” enthused Jerry, and he was right. I love the purity of white crabmeat but the dark meat is where the flavour is and this was rich and thought through, with a slowly building heat in the mix which, again, you might not expect. Even the tiger-striped block of toast was considered, was the perfect thing to load the stuff onto. I always think salads are padding in a dish like this, and this one definitely was, but even without it this felt like a very creditable way to spend £11.

By this point the restaurant was still less busy than you’d hope it to be on a long weekend, but there was a regular, if small, trickle of customers arriving and leaving. The people watching potential couldn’t match a spot in North Oxford, or down the Cowley Road, but Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so that didn’t matter.

We were having such a good natter that I didn’t even spend my time worrying that our mains would turn up as quickly as our starters did, so I was pleasantly surprised – yes, surprise once more – when they turned up a very agreeable half hour or so later.

That said, I wish they’d given mine a little longer. The blackboard propped up outside the restaurant had promised two specials but one had already gone by the time we turned up at half-one, so I chose the other, the octopus. And on paper this dish had everything I could have wanted: firm, roasted baby new potatoes with a flash of bronzed skin, a little carpet of still-crunchy samphire, a beautiful sauce with plenty of sweet cherry tomatoes.

It almost was, and could have been, a taste of the Mediterranean (of Greece, where the octopus is usually previously frozen because stocks have never quite recovered from all that madcap dynamite fishing they used to do).

But the problem was that octopus is a tricky beast to get right and, unlike everything else the kitchen tried, their sure touch deserted them here. It was a proper chewy workout for the jaws, more than I would have liked, and it made me apprehensive about my forthcoming dental appointment and the inevitable top up of masseter botox which would follow. If I showed my dentist a picture of this octopus, perhaps he’d give me slightly more this time.

Only the narrow end of the octopus, blackened and crispier, was easy to eat. Even having said all that, I liked the dish so much that I was prepared to be forgiving: to get so close to the perfect dish, somehow, made me celebrate the 90% they had achieved rather that the 10% where they had fallen short. The whole thing sang with summer flavours, made the crummy weather of the previous week feel like an optical illusion, and for £18 I thought that was no mean feat.

Jerry very much enjoyed his fritto misto, although I think it was more his thing than mine. One element, the calamari, was shared with my starter, but the other components were a couple of enormous prawns, some pieces of whiting and a lot of whitebait. You might, as Jerry does, like whitebait rather a lot, in which case I’m delighted for you, but I personally never eat anything that can beat me in a staring content. And whiting might be a perfectly worthy fish – the bit I had tasted decent enough – but somehow it felt a little basic to me.

Then again, this fritto misto was £15, so can you complain? Pricing at Cuttlefish was a little erratic, with many of the mains costing little more than some of the starters. I guess I had been conditioned to think it should have been more expensive, but then again it’s not like they were dishing up whole Dover soles or thick steaks of swordfish. I’d have liked it a little better, I think, if they had been.

We had a couple of side dishes – Jerry because his main needed one and me because I’m greedy. My zucchini fritti were thick, soggy and under-battered, lacking salt or fun. Jerry’s french fries almost certainly came out of a packet and were served in the sort of miniature frying basket that dreary observational comics on Twitter used to slag off ad infinitum. I didn’t finish my courgette fries because they felt like empty calories. Jerry didn’t finish his frites because he just didn’t have room: I half expected him to apologise to our server for that.

After an impressive run I guess it was always a risk that the weird service would return and cause a dip, and so it did. We were asked if we wanted to order dessert, we asked if we could finish our wine first and were told “well, the kitchen is closing”. Nothing on Cuttlefish’s website says that it does that and, indeed, people were still taking tables shortly before that. But never mind: the dessert menu was full of staples like brownies, cheesecake and sticky toffee pudding and they did offer a glass of an unspecified Sauternes if you wanted to push the boat out, no pun intended.

Jerry went for ice cream, a classic Neapolitan trio of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. I don’t know if they were supplied by others or made by the restaurant, but they were as pleasing as their pastel shades might lead you to believe they would be. A couple of the scoops had ice crystals in them, which strangely left me with the impression they were less likely to be bought in, but either way it was a solidly nice and thoroughly unexciting dessert.

I picked from the specials, most of which were dessert with extra booze, be it a pastel de nata with a glass of port or an affogato with Frangelico on the side. I genuinely loved my two spheres of lemon sorbet with limoncello, and thoroughly enjoyed anointing the former with the latter. It felt like the kind of dessert you don’t see on menus much these days, a resolutely old school, tried and tested combo.

As it gradually melted to become the kind of Slush Puppy Oliver Reed would have considered a decidedly good time, I started to feel increasingly well disposed to Cuttlefish, despite its repeated efforts to stop me becoming so. £10 for this, and despite somehow costing more than the larger £7 selection of ice creams I couldn’t say I felt begrudging.

“This has been so nice” said Jerry. “So much better than those snouts and bollocks and trotters in London would have been.”

When our bill arrived it was only £113, not including tip, which did nothing at all to dissipate our collective goodwill. I think Jerry liked Cuttlefish more than I did, but Jerry is also a man who will take the single bedroom in an Airbnb to make his friends happy. In short, he’s just a spectacular human being. And yet I liked Cuttlefish too: I may be a crabby sod who needs to be worn down or won over, but I get there in the end. Once I do I’m as much of an advocate as anybody.

After that our afternoon took a happy, well-rehearsed trajectory. We wound our way to the Star Inn on Rectory Road, one of my two favourite Oxford pubs. Jerry sipped Asahi and I glugged Steady Rolling Man and, despite the utter lack of mobile reception, we got by the way people did in the days before smartphones, by simply chatting and gossiping and not looking things up when we didn’t know them, because there was no way of doing so.

We got into a chat with the academic at the next table, mainly because Jerry fell slightly in love with Nico, her greyhound, but he told himself it was okay that he couldn’t get away with dognapping Nico. “Greyhounds don’t lick”, he said to me. “I need a dog that’s going to show me proper affection.”

Nico’s owner told us stories about the fates faced by ex-racing greyhounds – she adopted him after an unsuccessful month-long career as a racing dog – and both of us came away from the conversation bitterly opposed to racing in all its forms. I have become a cat person in my middle age, but I’ll always make an exception for greyhounds.

It was in short a textbook Oxford outing, the kind to which I’ve become extraordinarily attached. I’m already looking forward to the next one, especially now I have a mandate from my readership to take Jerry out for lunch in the dreaming spires at every available opportunity.

I am increasingly aware lately that happiness can be fleeting, and you have to appreciate it as it happens, rather than simply realising further down the tracks with the benefit of hindsight. I had a brilliant time, and I don’t want these trips to Oxford – on Good Friday or otherwise – to ever come to an end. Fortunately, the city seems to have plans to keep me more than occupied.

En route to the Star I spotted a pub, the Port Mahon, which has decided to specialise in rotisserie chicken and mentally I made a note to put it near the top of my to do list. Once we got to the Star I couldn’t help but notice that they now have a permanent pizza trader. One who also serves a pint of dough balls in garlic butter and Parmesan: I saw them turn up at a neighbouring table, and it took all my strength not to order some. Next time. Or the time after that.

Cuttlefish – 7.4
36 St Clement’s Street, Oxford, OX4 1AB
01865 243003

https://www.cuttlefishoxford.co.uk

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Cosmo

On March 11, 2016September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews11 Comments

How do I sum up the experience of eating in Cosmo? How can I possibly distil such a complex experience, so many different types of food, into a single review? Well, maybe I should start at the end of the meal. There were four of us round the table (I know: people actually wanted to come with me!), looking at our largely empty plates, feeling a mixture of remorse and queasy fear about how our bodies would cope with what came next. Tim, chosen for this mission because he is one of the biggest gluttons I know, paused for a second and said “I don’t think this place is going to help anybody have a healthy relationship with food.”

There was further silence and the rest of us tried to digest what he had said (trying to digest, it turned out, would be a theme over the next forty-eight hours).

“I don’t really feel like I’ve eaten in a restaurant this evening.” Tim went on. “I just feel like I’ve spent time smashing food into my mouth.”

I looked down at the leftovers on my plate – a solitary Yorkshire pudding stuffed with crispy duck and topped with hoi sin (it was my friend Ben’s idea and it sounded like a brilliant plan at the time) and started to laugh hysterically. It might have been all the sugar in the Chinese food, the sweet white crystals on top of the crispy seaweed, but I felt, in truth, a little delirious.

Happy Diner

On January 29, 2016August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Happy Diner closed, by all accounts, over the summer of 2017. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I’ve always felt that when I go to a Chinese restaurant I am missing something important about how to order. I don’t speak Mandarin so the special menu (or the beautiful back pages of a menu) for real Chinese people to order from are lost on me. Instead it seems like every Chinese restaurant is selling the same dishes and with a few notable exceptions – cue my inevitable mention of sadly-departed Reading institution Chi – the experience is always the same; great starters, more crispy duck than is strictly wise and then adequate mains, all served by incredibly polite staff who somehow make the experience feel a little like I’m eating in a library.

Since I started this blog I don’t think I’ve made any progress with Chinese food at all. And it’s not like I don’t know that Chinese food can be wonderful – I still have vivid food daydreams about a sizzling chicken dish I had in Chinatown, rich with a slick savoury sauce, bubbling in a stone pot also containing seemingly a hundred pungent garlic cloves – but here in the provinces we don’t seem to get anything like that. I know it might be my fault, watching food arrive at other tables and wondering “what have they ordered? Have they picked better than me?” before returning to my prawn toasts, satay, disappointment.

Stepping into Happy Diner on a school night didn’t give me the sense that this review was going to be the one to change all that. If anything, the large, chevron-shaped room felt more like a conference centre than a restaurant. There were the obligatory sofas at the front for folk collecting takeaways, there was a fish tank filled with beautiful shimmering koi and then there was a large, long room with Chinese murals (of varying quality) on the walls. The tables were heavily draped and the chairs were the padded metal-framed ones which always – along with excitable uncles and Come On bloody Eileen – remind me of wedding receptions. And yes, it was like eating in a library: only two or three other tables were occupied, all spread out in that big space. Presumably this was done to give people privacy, but it felt a little isolating to me.

After polishing off the mandatory polystyrene prawn crackers with sweet chilli sauce I was even less convinced this was going to be The One. We started with a couple of dishes that, in retrospect, weren’t the most well-balanced. The “smoke dry spicy chicken happy diner style” resembled Chinese chicken nuggets; slivers of chicken, about the size of whitebait, that had been lightly dusted then fried. It was hard to detect any smokiness and they certainly weren’t dry – the paper doily (yes, a doily! How long is it since you’ve seen one of those?) they were served on was sheer with the amount of oil it had soaked up. So if they weren’t smoky and they weren’t dry, what were they? Mainly sugary: even the finely chopped green chilli on top tasted candied and sweet rather than adding the jolt it so badly needed. Oh, and huge – a pile so gigantic that we left close to half. Even then that meant we ate quite a lot. They were curiously addictive, but in the same way that Percy Pigs are.

The other starter, salt and chilli squid, was similarly problematic. Done well this is one of the best things in the world, but Happy Diner’s version didn’t quite get there. The squid was nicely soft, the batter was light and again, the pile of squid was massive but, again, blandness was the order of the day. What didn’t help was that the pieces of squid themselves were equally gigantic – so big that I either had to pick up a bit and try to bite it (not the most delicate of operations) or pop a whole piece in and try not to choke or burn my tongue. Smaller, crispier bits of squid would have been lovely, but this was just a big fluffy cloud of frustration. The best bit was the mixture of the little crunchy salty bits of batter and the (hotter this time) chillies. It made me glad my companion had opted for cutlery, because I was never going to scoop up that delicious goodness with my amateurish chopstick skills.

The next course – no surprises here – was the crispy duck. I knew this would be too much food, but I’m biologically programmed not to turn crispy duck down. I had a sinking feeling from the moment it turned up. You know that wonderful moment when the waiter crushes the duck under a spoon and starts to shred it? That beautiful cracking noise as the skin gives way and breaks? This was more of a dull squelch, and at that point I knew that this would be duck but it wouldn’t be crispy. Normally when the crispy duck arrives, I’m like a kid in a sweet shop (I want that bit! No, that bit! Oh, and that bit!) but here it was more of an effort to find pieces that would perfect my pancake. First world problems I know, but the whole thing about crispy duck is that it’s never, ever like this. There was definite eking required, in fact, to stretch this out to six pancakes, and the last one I had was just spring onions, cucumber and hoi sin (in the immortal words of Roy Walker, good but not right). The rest of the trimmings were much the same as in any Chinese restaurant but at the end of the course, instead of scooping up the delicious fragments with our fingers we were left with a sad and flabby pile of skin.

The main courses arrived similarly swiftly and didn’t lift things; again, it felt like perhaps we’d ordered the wrong things rather than the dishes we picked being actively bad. King prawns in black bean sauce was probably the best (least worst?) of the evening, with plenty of fat prawns in a watery sauce which tasted better than it looked with discernible black bean, a decent hit of garlic and lots of crisp squares of red and green pepper and big pieces of onion. If I’d had it on a Saturday night in front of Take Me Out I’d probably have been satisfied, but somehow here it still felt like it wasn’t quite good enough.

I was hoping the other main would either take me back to my teenage years or show me exactly how a good Chinese restaurant really does sweet and sour chicken. It wasn’t quite the battered balls of my youth (and yes, I know how wrong that sounds) but it wasn’t much of an improvement on that either. The batter the chicken came in was soggy rather than crispy, the sauce was again thin and watery rather than coating the chicken (it wasn’t that indistinct, to be honest, from the stuff we were dipping our prawn crackers in not that long before). The vegetables in the sauce gave me a strong sense of déjà vu, too; crisp squares of red and green pepper and big pieces of onion (did a black cat just walk by?). Oh, and some pineapple, obviously. It made me miss Orient Express, which used to be next to Keegan’s bookshop, which used to be opposite what Shed used to be, and even writing that sentence makes me feel very old indeed and makes me realise how long it is since I’ve had lovely Chinese food in Reading.

On the side we had plain noodles which, not beating about the bush here, tasted a bit odd. Sort of salty but not NaCl salty. I can’t even explain how they were wrong, but they just weren’t good. My fault, perhaps, for not going with the more traditional rice, but I’m just not a fan of plain white rice and it felt like overkill to order egg fried rice as well. We left a lot of the main courses – this is of course traditional in Chinese restaurants, but it would have been nice to feel even a little regret at doing so.

Drinks were a glass of house red wine (described simply as “Italian”) which was decent enough and a couple of bottles of Tsingtao. Service throughout was very polite, friendly, efficient and ever so slightly distant, much as I expected it to be. We were far too full for the dentist-bothering delights of dessert (toffee apple, anybody?) so we munched on the mint imperials that came with the bill – crumbly rather than hard, which made me irrationally happy – instead. The total was fifty-four pounds excluding service. We wished them a Happy New Year as we left and, not for the first time, I felt like a fraud being polite to someone when I hadn’t much enjoyed eating in their restaurant.

So am I any the wiser? Probably not. I still feel like I don’t know what to order, I still don’t have the courage to venture into the more esoteric reaches of the menu (perhaps I’d take more risks if I hadn’t read David Sedaris’ entertaining essay on the perils of eating in China: I’d quote some, but a single sentence of his would show all of this up). Is it my fault that I didn’t like Happy Diner? Quite possibly; you can probably make your own mind up about that. But be that as it may, there’s one question it all comes down to, the main question really when you review a restaurant: would I go back? I stepped out of the door with Mya Lacarte on my right, I strolled down Prospect Street past Kyrenia with its lights glowing, a laughing table of eight in the window and Ihor leaning on the bar and I thought no, I can’t see when I ever would.

Happy Diner – 6.2
3 Prospect Street, RG4 8JB
0118 9483488

http://happydiner-reading.webs.com/

The Square, Henley

On October 9, 2015October 12, 2015 By ediblereadingIn Reviews12 Comments

I like to think, by now, that I’ve got a pretty good idea what people are interested in reading about on ER. You love a hatchet job, you want to hear about restaurants and cafés in the centre of Reading and, perhaps more than anything, you like the discoveries: places you’ve never heard of or would never have considered going to which get good reviews. You’re not so fussed about places that are too far away and you don’t much like wishy-washy reviews where I like somewhere but don’t love it. Am I close?

So, with all that in mind I headed off to Henley (bad) to review somewhere that I was hoping would be a bit of a find (good). Well, to spoil the ending for those of you who don’t scroll down and back up again, it wasn’t a find. But don’t worry, because it was so bafflingly bad that you might stick around anyway to read the rest of the review (good for you, regrettably bad for me).

I almost went to The Square a few months back on my last visit to Henley, but the blinds were ominously drawn. At the time, I worried that it had closed down and I’d missed my chance to try out this attractive looking Portuguese place in a prime location on the market square. It later transpired that I’d worried unduly (they’re just closed on Tuesdays). I took that to be a good sign, signifying that they were doing well enough to give the staff a day off. More fool me: sadly when I went back this time, it was open.

Inside it wasn’t exactly busy – four other tables were occupied when we turned up on Saturday night, peak time for any restaurant. That probably should have rung some alarm bells, as should the fact that when I phoned to book a table at very short notice the chap on the other end of the phone didn’t even need to take a name. I must have been having an off night, because I sat down, Spidey senses resolutely tingle-free. Perhaps I was deceived by the surroundings: it’s actually quite a nice dining room, with dark wood tables and floor, the walls hung with fishing nets filled with shells, sea-themed pictures around the room. That makes it sound like Old Gregg’s boudoir, but in reality it was more rustic fisherman chic.

The menu was bewilderingly big, with large sections for fish, seafood and meat dishes. Again, I took encouragement from one of the waiters coming out with a good-looking platter of fresh fish and shellfish to show what was on offer. There was also a section of speciality dishes for a minimum of two people to share, all described as “rice pots”. I asked one of the waiters to tell me a bit more about those and even now I’m struggling to remember what he told me (a combination of his mumbling and the vagueness of his response). They sounded a bit like paella, and he particularly recommended the lobster version (“we put a lot in”, he said), so in the end we went for that. We were told this would take thirty-five minutes to cook, so he practically sprinted to the kitchen to tell them before coming back to take the rest of our order. Maybe, with hindsight, he was worried that we might change our mind.

We ordered some bread with sardine and tuna paté to tide us over and this is where it all started to go wrong. I don’t normally photograph the bread, but here I just had to. I was expecting a basket of crusty bread with a couple of small ramekins of paté. What arrived was seven anaemic slices of what looked like part-baked supermarket baguette with some catering packs of butter and paté. The “paté” was Portugal’s answer to Shippam’s (something I’ve not eaten since about 1985), smooth to the point of being unidentifiable. In fairness, even if it wasn’t pleasant I suppose it was authentic: it’s almost exactly what I was served at O Beirão, Reading’s Portuguese restaurant. But there it was free, and here I was paying three pounds for the dubious privilege.

What The Square also seemed to miss was that the bread was completely insufficient for the spreads it came with. I would have minded the three quid less if I could actually have eaten it all but there was so little bread that doing so was impossible without piling the paté ludicrously high. I just hope the restaurant has a cat who could make use of the leftovers. Not terribly appealing: I prayed that the starters were going to be an improvement.

They weren’t. First up was the chouriço assado, described as “flame grilled Portuguese sausage, served in traditional cookware”. I was hoping for something a bit like Spanish chorizo cooked in wine, all salty and coarse with those delicious brick-red juices at the bottom. I was very far from correct. What I got instead was simply awful: a gigantic horseshoe of chorizo, served on a pot in the shape of a rowboat which is quite hard to describe. It sort of rested on the “seat” with some liquid underneath – I dread to think what – which had been set alight to flambée the sausage (flambée the sausage, come to think of it, sounds like a euphemism for something unspeakable) just before it reached the table.

The outside was slightly charred in places but the real problems came when I cut into it. Not that that was easy, because it was served on a flipping boat shaped pot with no suitable surfaces on which to do the deed. I sawed away (trying to rest the sausage on the seat) and chewed a couple of slices for a few minutes, although it felt like longer. It was both grisly and gristly. I inflicted a slice on my companion, who unsurprisingly didn’t thank me for it. The next slice was almost entirely a big white globule of fat and that, I’m sorry to say, is where I gave up. All the metaphors I could use to describe this dish would remind you – very quickly – of whatever you ate last, so let’s leave it at that. I put down my knife and fork and waited to see if anyone came to check on us. They didn’t.

The other dish was king prawns wrapped in Portuguese bacon and pan fried. It was four decent sized prawns cooked nicely and indeed wrapped in bacon. The heads and tails came off cleanly and the prawns tasted of their component parts, no more, no less. There were also a couple of needless sections of red, green and yellow pepper. This wasn’t bad by comparison with the chouriço, but you could say the same about a Fray Bentos. I was hoping for some juices, but there weren’t any. I didn’t mop-up the non-existent juices with the remaining bread they hadn’t given me.

The waiter returned to clear the plates and looked baffled by the almost entirely uneaten sausage. I tried to explain what I hadn’t liked about it. Doing so briefly was something of a challenge. He shrugged. I was worried that I hadn’t explained properly, so I had another go. More shrugging. The plate was taken away, with no apology or offer to take it off the bill or anything else. Then he asked whether I wanted to order something else, but with no indication as to whether I’d be paying for that or not. We then reached a consensus that, as the main course was quite big, I probably wouldn’t need a starter. The whole thing was a truly bizarre interchange. It was rendered even more bizarre by him asking if we wanted to keep our half-finished tubs of tuna and sardine paté: as there was no bread left I’m not sure what he thought we were going to do with them.

On to the main event then – the lobster rice pot, at forty-five pounds for two one of the priciest things on the menu. We were brought lobster crackers and those little picky-outy-lobster-bit tools (apologies for blinding you with technical terms) and I realised that I had naively expected the kitchen to do some of the hard work for us. My mistake, I suppose. Anyway, the large pot was brought to the table and the waiter ladled out a portion for each of us.

The lobster, admittedly, was good. Very fresh and, when it was eventually possible to pick up the shell (which was as hot as Hades, of course), generally the flesh came away very easily. The meat was tender and delicate and it did look to me like we had a whole lobster between us. That’s where the good news ends. The rice, fluffy long grain, had been cooked for too long so there was no bite there. The sauce was a generic stock with some coriander to try and give it a bit of freshness.

I’m beginning to sympathise with the trouble the waiter had describing it, but I suppose he could hardly have said “it’s a very bland rice dish with some lobster in it”. I can though, because that’s what it was. Was it a forty-five pound dish? Put it this way – at the peerless Bird In Hand in Sonning Common I could have a whole lobster to myself for twenty-seven pounds, so to pay roughly the same for half a (not very big) lobster and some flavourless rice seems cynical. If this is a signature dish, you have to worry about the restaurant’s handwriting.

To drink we had an Appletiser (for the driver) and a very nice smoky glass of Portuguese red. If the restaurant had been good I would have regretted not being able to mount a concerted assault on the wine list. If it had been good we would have had a dessert and I would have wanted a port – a lovely rich vintage, or a sweet, subtle tawny. As it was, much as the meal could only have been improved with alcohol, I was glad we could cut our losses and leave.

As so often, the moment I started to actively dislike the food the waiter tried a little harder to be nice. In the early stages he seemed to struggle to communicate, whether that was describing the menu or explaining what we could do about The Dismal Sausage. After that he was a lot more attentive, asking whether everything was okay with the main course, whether we needed any more drinks, whether we wanted dessert and so on. But of course the damage was done by then – and most of the damage was done in the kitchen rather than front of house. Proof that their intentions were better than their delivery came when the bill arrived; dinner for two came to sixty three pounds (the chouriço had been taken off).

So there you have it: this week I went out of town to a restaurant which I hoped would be a find and turned out to be a disaster. And this is definitely not about Portuguese food, which is probably what frustrates me the most. Portuguese cuisine deserves a better ambassador than The Square: Lisbon is an absolutely incredible city full of great cured meat, fantastic fish and seafood, and magnificent cheeses, not to mention the stunning wine. Having been there I don’t understand why it doesn’t have as good a culinary reputation as any European capital. I can only imagine it’s because of places like The Square. I want to be kind, but everything I ate was either iffy or average. Every average thing I ate was expensive. And worst of all? I’ve just spent two thousand words telling you not to go somewhere you’ve never heard of and wouldn’t visit anyway. That sticks in my throat even more than the chouriço did.

The Square – 4.9
10 Market Place, Henley-on-Thames, RG9 2AH
01491 578681

http://thesquarehenley.com/

The Fisherman’s Cottage

On September 25, 2015June 8, 2021 By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

N.B. The Fisherman’s Cottage closed in May 2016. It reopened under new management and until summer 2018 I Love Paella operated out of the kitchen. The pub’s management left in the summer of 2020 and it is now under new management. I’ve left this review up for posterity.

The Fisherman’s Cottage really is a lovely pub – so much so, in fact, that one of the biggest dangers of reviewing it as a place to eat was the risk that I’d let its obvious charms as a pub cloud my judgment. The family who own it did a splendid job of doing it up prior to opening last December and the building (Grade 2 listed, apparently) really stands out on the canalside. With the beautiful white front, big conservatory and chi-chi beach huts out the back, it feels like it belongs somewhere swanky by the Thames, not a stone’s throw from Orts Road.

I went, believe it or not, because the blurb on their website really struck a chord with me. They have a little kitchen, it said, and they aim to keep things simple and do things well. They don’t want to be a restaurant or a gastropub, they’re happy being a pub that does some popular classics. I think that’s an admirable goal, and I wanted to see whether they achieved it; so many restaurants feel like they’re trying to do everything at once, or they simply don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. And that’s crucial, especially for new restaurants, because if they don’t get that right, some of them don’t get to grow up at all.

Inside, it’s equally tastefully done and nicely broken up into sections. There’s a lovely snug off to the left and the conservatory (tastefully lit with a very “now” array of suspended bulbs) off to the right, a clever mix of high tables with stools and low tables with chairs, some for drinking and some for eating. Nothing quite matches but everything looks very well put together and nicely judged. The area out the back really is attractive – I feel sad for them that they haven’t had a good enough summer to make the most of it – although the recurring whiff of fag smoke from outside every time the conservatory door was open did put a slight crimp in proceedings.

It’s not as small a menu as you might think, but it does stay very much on safe and familiar ground. There are about ten starters, a few sharing platters and a set of mains which revolve around burgers, fish and chips, gammon and scampi. The previous landlord of the Fisherman’s Cottage flirted with doing Thai food and the new owners have continued that tradition, so there’s also a small selection of Thai mains – red curry, green curry and massaman lamb. The menu isn’t available online and, in truth, there’s nothing about it that would make you desperate to try it. But I still had that blurb in the back of my mind: there’s nothing wrong with doing the classics well.

I nearly didn’t have a starter, because the options – breaded garlic mushrooms, breaded mozzarella sticks, plaice goujons and the like – all felt a tad Iceland. But I relented and ordered the garlic bread and, when it came, I was pleasantly surprised. It was nothing fancy or posh, but was clearly home-made – cheese on toasted baguette with the agricultural honk of shedloads of garlic. There was plenty of it for three pounds, too (just as well, because if you didn’t share it with friends they wouldn’t fancy sitting downwind of you for long).

I decided to try both halves of the menu for the main courses. Red Thai chicken curry was enormous – a gigantic bowl of the stuff served with prawn crackers and plain boiled rice. You couldn’t quibble the portion size and there was plenty to enjoy: tender, well-cooked chicken, a sauce with the right mix of heat and sweetness, lovely soft shallots, crunchy strips of carrot and big, crude chunks of courgette. Again it felt like home-made food worth paying money for, but what stopped it going from good to great was the aubergine – so much of it, possibly a whole aubergine in fact, big cubes of watery aubergine with a faint taste of cold tea. By the end, looking ruefully at the makeshift cairn of aubergine left in the bowl, I wished they’d given me a slightly smaller, better balanced dish.

The fish and chips was surprisingly good. The fish was a good size, big but not daunting. Not only that, but the batter was truly excellent; nicely crisp, lots of crunch and super light, among the best pub fish I can recall eating in Reading. The chips were decent if not stellar (crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside but very regularly shaped – everyone knows the best bit of a bag of chips is the crunchy shrapnel at the end) but when dipped in the peas or a squirt of mayonnaise they were exactly what I wanted. The peas were rather runny – not your gastropub “crushed” pea affair – but nicely minty and fresh tasting. More than anything else I had, this fitted with what I’d read on the website – no showing off, just a straightforward dish done properly.

Service was friendly and enthusiastic – the bar staff were full of recommendations about what was good from the menu and clearly proud of the pub and their food. Drinks very much lived up to the ethos that this is a pub, not a restaurant or a gastropub: lots of ale on tap and a very palatable Orchard Pig cider on draft which I liked a lot. The wine wasn’t so successful – the reds were mid-level supermarket stuff (Wolf Blass, Casillero del Diablo and the like). It was nice enough, and so was the New Zealand sauvignon blanc, but none of it had any element of surprise. I know, I know, it’s a pub: and yet the beautiful, high-quality wineglasses felt like they should be filled with something slightly more special. Dinner for two – one starter, two mains (which were each a tenner) and a couple of drinks each came to just under forty pounds.

As I said at the start, the Fisherman’s Cottage is a cracking pub. I can imagine you’d have a very good time if you wandered down the canal from town one sunny evening and stopped there for a few pints and a chat with friends, especially if they have jazz in the conservatory, or if the weather’s nice and you manage to grab one of those beach huts. And if you happened to be there and you happened to order some food I’m pretty sure you’d have a pleasant meal.

I wouldn’t make a pilgrimage to eat there, but perhaps that misses the point. Because it turns out you can’t divorce the place to eat from the pub: it’s all part of what the owners are trying to do. They said it themselves – the Fisherman’s Cottage isn’t a gastropub, it isn’t a restaurant, it’s just a really good pub that does good honest food. I think New Town’s very fortunate to have it (especially when you consider the main alternative, the disappointing Abbot Cook). So no, the Fisherman’s Cottage isn’t trying to be something it’s not, and it knows exactly what it wants to be when it grows up. In its quiet, only-slightly-ambitious way, I think it succeeds.

The Fisherman’s Cottage – 7.0
Canal Way, Newtown, RG1 3HJ
0118 9560432

http://www.thefishermanscottagereading.co.uk/

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