I’m of the firm opinion that everyone has at least one useful life lesson you could learn from them. Someone I used to know, for instance, was convinced that you could never go wrong taking champagne to somebody’s house: we didn’t agree on much, it turned out, but on this she had a point. My stepmother has a rule, a very wise one, that you should never buy her any Christmas or birthday present she has to dust. I sometimes give her champagne, which combines those two rules nicely.
A married couple I used to know had two excellent customs. One was that using the W word, talking about work, was strictly verboten on Sundays. The other was that, once in a while, one of them could play a joker and opt out of adult life for a whole day. The other one had to make all the decisions – where to go, what to do, what to watch, everything.
I’ve tried to introduce that latter rule into my own life, but without much success. Most of the time my spouse, tired from working to the core of the bone, doesn’t want to make decisions for anybody else. And when she does, she has a bad habit of making plans for me that I just don’t like.
“I think you should stay at home and pack for the move” was Zoë’s suggestion last Friday when I was facing another Saturday on my tod and asked her what I should get up to: I didn’t fancy that at all.
So on a whim, a solo Saturday stretching out in front of me, I thought “fuck it, I’ll go to Oxford”. I headed for the station, and was sitting in C.U.P. having a mocha and making my plans when Zoë texted me. I thought I’d have one last crack at abdicating responsibility.
“I’m going to Oxford but I’m torn between grabbing a late lunch at the Magdalen Arms or trying Sartorelli’s, that pizza place in the Covered Market. What do you think?”
“Have the pizza. You can review it.”
What happened next was a series of some of the happiest events. First, that moment when your train pulls up and it’s mostly empty, no standing in the aisle holding on to the back of someone’s chair, sitting on the luggage rack or slumped in the vestibule. Instead, a leisurely trundle through Oxfordshire, just me, my phone and the music in my headphones. As Larkin puts it, all sense of being in a hurry gone.
Getting off at Oxford I was struck that although it wasn’t quiet – it never is – it wasn’t crazily busy, and as I strolled in, up George Street and Ship Street, I thought how curious it was that I’ve never quite escaped this city, just up the train tracks from home, where I spent three years learning a lot about a little but precious little about life. That used to put me off the place, but now I’ve reached some kind of accommodation with it.
Another glad event followed as I entered the Covered Market. It was that wonderful coincidence that happens when you arrive somewhere very busy literally as somebody else is just leaving, and can jump into their place. So I got a plum spot outside Sartorelli’s at one of the long tables, just by being in the right place at exactly the right time: after that, the queue just grew and grew. If I’d got there five minutes earlier, or later, the day would have had a completely different shape.
The Covered Market has always been one of my favourite spots in Oxford, even back in the early Nineties when I used to stop there to pick up a lunchtime pie from a trader called Ma Baker (Boney M fans, I presume). But its character has been changing in recent years, with many of the traditional traders driven out by high rents: the butchers and fishmongers have left, and on this visit one of the old-school mens’ outfitters had a closing down sign in the window. The likes of Fasta Pasta, who used to do the best ciabatta in the world, are gone too.
But in their place a very different sort of trader is settling in to the market. Although they recently got a little tap room from Botley’s Tap Social, I first noticed the phenomenon a few years back with Teardrop, a micropub offering beer from Church Hanbrewery, a little brewery based out past Witney. They had half a dozen or so beers on cask and keg, and sold charcuterie and the like, and they had a few barrels and tables outside. And then there was a wine bar, Cellar Door, next to it – again, selling wine by the glass. And finally, there was Sartorelli’s along from that, setting up a little ecosystem – wine, beer and pizza all in one little corner of the market.
Sartorelli’s also sprung up out of Church Hanbrewery, first offering pizza at the brewery taproom before opening in the Covered Market in March 2022. And since it opened, every time I’ve been to the Covered Market – usually to buy cheese, or grab a latte from the excellent Colombia Coffee Roasters – I’ve gone past, thought the setup looked great, eyed the pizzas being devoured outside with no small degree of envy. And then sighed. because I had a lunch reservation somewhere else. But on this occasion I was in Oxford with no plans, and this space at a table outside had miraculously come free. When opportunity knocks like that, you don’t send it away.
The very kind couple next to me kept an eye on my stuff and I went up to order. The place was a bustle of activity, with a big wood-fired oven and a menu displayed on the wall that was simple almost to a fault. Fundamentally you can have a margherita for £8.50 and load it with whatever you fancy, at a cost of 50p per topping, or you can have one of their suggested combos. The menu explained that sartorelli means small tailor, and that as far as they were concerned you could tailor your pizza however you like.
I spotted one of the suggestions that mentioned anchovies, ordered it, paid £10.50 and scuttled back to my seat and my bag, gratified that they were still there. My tablemates then kindly agreed to keep looking after my bag while I went to Teardrop and ordered two thirds of their Teardrop Citra on keg. It cost just under four pounds and was absolutely gorgeous – cold, crisp and, I hoped, perfect pizza accompaniment. I went back to my table with my winnings, saw the queue beginning to build and felt like coming here for lunch was turning out to be a very smart decision on my part.
My pizza arrived just over ten minutes later, although I was having such a lovely time that I’d quite happily have waited longer. It came on a metal tray, à la The Last Crumb, but they’d sensibly put paper underneath it which also helped it stay warm longer. Sartorelli’s just gives you a pizza cutter, a napkin and some chilli and garlic oil, so if you’re a cutlery user, their pizza might challenge you. And this was the point where I realised I had completely missed the fact that, on the menu, my pizza was billed as coming with a “sprinkle of rocket”. It was a nice idea, but it was more than a sprinkle, and without cutlery it added a layer of complexity to eating the thing with your hands.
Initially I also wondered whether the rocket might have been used to camouflage the toppings, to conceal any caper or (especially) anchovy-related stinginess that was going on. But once I settled down to eating the pizza, I realised nothing could be further from the truth. It was liberally carpeted with tiny, punchy capers, had a respectable number of plump black olives and, most importantly, plenty of glorious, salty anchovies.
Not only that, but the base was excellent – especially the crust, all blistered, puffy and chewy. I was having an absolutely marvellous time: a bite of the pizza, a sip of the gorgeous beer, an unworthy look up at the queue, still growing, and I felt like I was properly winning at lunch.
I should have stayed for a dessert, really – it’s just ice cream, which they say is “hand crafted to a secret Sartorelli recipe” – but I had my eye on something from Swoon on the High later on, and I also felt guilty depriving punters of a seat. So I ambled off to the Oxford Cheese Company to pick something up for the evening, and then wandered out towards North Oxford in search of one of my favourite pubs in the whole wide world, the Rose And Crown.
I have broken one of the unspoken rules of restaurant reviewing by reviewing the same kind of establishment two weeks running. Last week was Zia Lucia, this week it’s Sartorelli’s: it’s the equivalent of putting two consecutive tracks on a mixtape by the same artist. But I think it’s very instructive in some ways because restaurants aren’t only about quality, or value, or service, or even convenience. They’re also about expectations, and whether they can surprise or delight.
So I expected Zia Lucia to be something special, and although you couldn’t fault their tomato sauce, or their Parma ham, the overall experience was a little underwhelming. And yet on a wooden stool, at a trestle table in the middle of the Covered Market I had a pizza from a place that didn’t shout or brag, but just did an absolutely marvellous job. Excellent craft beer from a place two doors down, a little people watching and hubbub, and an excellent lunch that, all told, set me back just under fifteen pounds.
Experiences like that are reason enough, if you find yourself at a loose end on a Saturday, to hop on a train and take your chances. I’m very glad I did. Besides, I’m asked quite often whether there’s anywhere decent to go for an informal, quickish lunch in Oxford, and now I have an answer for you. I may not have any great life lessons to impart to you – although my stepmother’s rule of thumb is a very good one – but you can usually rely on me for a restaurant recommendation.
It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that as a middle-aged man churning out two and a half thousand words a week about some restaurant or other, I’m about as far from the food and drink zeitgeist as it’s possible to be. Restaurant blogs have been dead for years, local papers too, and even the broadsheets are gradually fading away. Instagram influencers are passé too, even if Reading’s handful are still scrounging the occasional free meal (the latest from the Hilton in Kennet Island). Nope, apart from the occasional increasingly desperate Substack, food reviewing is all about TikTok and Instagram reels these days.
The most prominent is an account called Topjaw. Topjaw, for the uninitiated, consists of a posh bloke with floppy hair (who used to be a model) in front of the camera and a less photogenic bloke, presumably also posh, behind it. The posh bloke with floppy hair interviews restaurateurs in London getting vox pops about where they think you can find the best pizza, burgers, coffee and so on in the capital. He’s trying to perfect that fake almost-estuary accent posh people do when they’re trying to sound less posh, like Tony Blair used to do. He’s not managed it yet.
The usual suspects come up in those vox pops time and again – the Dalston bakery Dusty Knuckle, the Dexter burger at The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, the Soho hype factory that is new pub The Devonshire (a place where nobody can snag a reservation but there are mysteriously always tables available for celebrities, critics and, well, Topjaw). We’re never paid by any restaurant we feature, says their bio, although they’re not averse to doing paid partnerships with the likes of Bicester Village, of all places. They may not be paid a fee, but God knows if they pay for their food.
Still, all power to them: their format is quick and entertaining, and you find yourself watching it whether you like them or not. It’s already spawning imitators – mainly in Bristol, where you see some people trying the vox pop format – and maybe one day it will translate into a TV show for them, or a paid gig or an appearance on Strictly or I’m A Celebrity.
You might wonder what any of this has to do with Reading, so I should explain. A couple of months ago, during a bumper week of tosspots on Topjaw, they interviewed not only Ed Sheeran (who turns out to be as basic as you would expect) but also hereditary columnist and bigoted human bin fire Giles Coren. Coren was clearly desperate to appeal to a new demographic so was doing his usual dreary, sweary trying too hard schtick, only even more manic than usual.
But in the course of dispensing his tiresome opinions he happened to say that he thought the best pizza in London was done by Zia Lucia. “They have this charcoal base which apparently doesn’t make you fart” he added, not as hilariously as he intended. Hang on, I thought, haven’t they just opened in Reading?
Well, yes, they have. Zia Lucia opened at the start of April on St Mary’s Butts, where ASK used to be, their first branch outside London. Their website talks about their origins in Islington over 15 years ago, and they also bandy around the slightly random stat that they are the world’s 38th best pizza chain (before you get too excited, Pizza Pilgrims finished 27 places above them and the Big Mamma Group, which Coren loathes, came third). Even so a first branch outside London, coming to a town that had lost Franco Manca and Buon Appetito, felt like it was worth investigating.
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The week after you get back from holiday is the absolute worst, isn’t it? One minute you’re loafing in the sun, you can have a lie in if you want to, your hardest morning decision is where to grab coffee and then where to have lunch, your post-lunch coffee, maybe a snack, your pre-prandial drink, your dinner, your post-dinner bar of choice. On and on it goes until you’re a modern-day lotus eater, free of cares, a flâneur and a gourmand, carefree and arguably in need of detox. Little, if anything, is finer than reaching that stage.
And then it’s over. The plane touches down at miserable old Shatwick, and you’re reintroduced to the M25. When you get home your clothes all need to be washed, the fridge is bare and there’s this thing called work you have to get up for at something ridiculous like half-seven in the morning. Just like that you’re back in a life of dreary cold packaged sandwiches and cobbling together a meal plan, of not drinking during the week, watching your calorie intake and hanging in there until payday.
And even though it’s May, it seems to be raining most of the time. I don’t care how much you might love your job: objectively speaking, if you compare it to a holiday there’s only ever going to be one winner. Why does anybody do it?
This year, for me at least, that comedown has been even more of a cliff edge than usual. Because not only was I back from holiday, but I was back from honeymoon – I got married, although I haven’t talked about it much – and my next trip away won’t involve planes, trains or automobiles but instead a white van and the removal men as I burn a week’s leave next month moving house.
So although Zoë and I did the supermarket shop as usual, with a sense of resignation, sticking to the plan wasn’t easy last week. Instead there were accidental takeaways, or wanders over to Bakery House or Honest, anything to make real life just a little more unreal, even if only for a short while. You could call it a transition phase, you could call it a soft landing. You could even call it a cry for help: probably it’s a little of all three.
On the plus side, it meant there was a slight role reversal. In the run up to my nuptials it was more difficult to persuade Zoë to come with me on duty, a combination of trying to shed that last couple of pre-marital pounds and save those last few pre-marital other pounds. Now that I’ve been elevated to the dizzy heights of husband? It turns out that Zoë can be persuaded to eat out during the week, especially if it happens to be her turn to cook.
I may have used this to my benefit, in truth. Bet you can’t be fucked to cook the salmons tonight I messaged her, as she was on the train back from London. How did you guess? came the reply. Failing at this, aren’t I. After a bit of plea bargaining – it was raining, so nowhere too far out of town (my wife does not like the rain), and nowhere that involved walking away from home only to head back (my wife also doesn’t like going back on herself) we settled for Chilis: central, a short walk from the station, potentially interesting.
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I don’t normally write reviews that are of places that have closed. It has that same whiff of smugness as reviewing drinks nobody can buy or plays that have finished their run: I’m going to make you feel bad about what you missed, they seem to say. My life is better than yours. It’s all very “if you know, you know” – another phrase I hate – only more “if you didn’t know, now you never will”.
But I’m making an exception to write about the Lyndhurst, which closed under the management of Dishon Vas and Sheldon Fernandes a couple of weeks ago, one final time. Because I don’t think anywhere that’s closed in Reading in all the time I’ve lived here – not the 3Bs, not Dolce Vita, not Mya Lacarte or the Grumpy Goat – has had this kind of effect on me, and I feel like trying to explain why. So I suppose this is for anyone who has been to the Lyndhurst in the last five years, which I expect might include a decent proportion of the people who read my blog.
Part of this is because I am feeling sentimental: as anyone who follows me on social media will know, because I haven’t stopped banging on about it, I got married a couple of Fridays ago. It was simply a perfect day. The sun shone for the first time in ages, the ceremony room in the Town Hall was serene and calm, my dear friend Jerry gave the most beautiful reading, and when I kissed my brand new bride the crowd packed into that room made a disproportionate amount of gleeful noise.
We turned round and there were our favourite people, the biggest small congregation you’ve ever seen in your life. My parents, my step-parents, my brother, his wife and his children. My boisterous, fantastic in-laws. Friends I had known for thirty or forty years, and people that had known my wife since she was at school. Newer friends, and friends who had been there since the very start of my relationship with Zoë. The friend that saved my life, time and again, in the darkest moments of my divorce. There was nothing but love and joy in that beautiful room.
A lot of the rest was a daze. An eruption of confetti on Blagrave Street, standing in a pack under the Maiwand Lion as our photographer corraled and marshalled us into groups, snapping and cajoling. Sipping a crisp glass of bubbly from nearby Veeno, being congratulated by passers-by. Everyone congratulates newlyweds, I’ve found: it’s a moving, life-affirming thing. A Reading Buses driver stopping us in the park to tell us it brought back memories of his own wedding – also in the Town Hall, also photographs in Forbury Gardens.
My wife, grinning and clutching her beautiful bouquet, as happy as I was. Wandering round the Forbury desperately seeking shade, finding spots for photos. “Look into Zoë’s eyes” said the photographer, such easy and enjoyable instructions to follow. And then, at the end of all that, all of us marching to Friar Street to hop on a vintage Reading bus, driven by Tim Wale, the legend behind Tutts Clump cider. Reading institution Paul King turned up out of nowhere and took pictures before all of us, laughing and merry, were driven away to the venue for our celebration.
When I told people I was getting married a lot of people – especially on social media – said “no pressure for your venue, right?” or “I bet the food will have to be really good”. But I never worried about it, because my celebration was being hosted by the Lyndhurst. Of all the Is to dot and Ts to cross in the run up to the big day, of all the things that blindsided us on the home stretch, I never worried once about the food. The Lyndhurst was doing it: that was all I needed to know.
I was at the Lyndhurst for their first night under new ownership, back in the summer of 2019. I’d really liked the previous management and their clever, precise food, and when they left – because the pubco hiked the rent, I imagine – I wasn’t entirely sure the new landlords would be able to match that standard. I remember there being a crowd on the first night, all the regulars happy that their community pub was open again, and the place was packed and chaotic.
There was a rabbit in the headlights feel about it, and I had my gin and tonic with slight misgivings and no idea that I was spending my first evening in what would prove to be one of my favourite places on earth. I remember they put a sign up that suggested they were only serving dinner on Friday and Saturday nights, and I called it out on Twitter. Some random local online prat had a go at me for pointing it out, but the pub just said Thanks for letting us know, we’ll change it.
I didn’t know then that that was their style all over – humble, apologetic, unfailingly polite and always, always getting shit done. The sign got changed. And then I went back to try the food, and had quite the wake-up call. A beautiful Scotch egg, a very accomplished plate of pork belly, pig’s cheek and black pudding bonbons and perhaps most significantly, a bowl of chilli nachos, everything made from scratch, from the tortillas to the guacamole. These people really knew what they were doing, I realised.
The menu changed many, many times over the next five years. They even refreshed it in April, with barely a month remaining, because they never stopped tweaking and improving. But those nachos, which over time became emblematic of the Lyndhurst, never came off the menu, not once.
I read an article in the Guardian in the run-up to my wedding about how much weddings cost these days: one couple, American needless to say, spent five thousand dollars alone on their rehearsal dinner. I liked to joke as my wedding approached that Zoë and I had taken a less conventional approach to rehearsal dinners by instead going to the Lyndhurst pretty much every week for years. And for that matter, I also had a few rehearsals of the Lyndhurst’s mass catering skills: three readers’ lunches, each one more assured, if anything, than the last.
And all that was lovely in principle, but in practice it made decisions about the menu almost impossible. Looking back through the photos on my and Zoë’s phone, of every dish captured at the bottom of Watlington Street over the course of nearly five years, made it even more difficult. So many beautiful plates of food, from which to select just nine. How could you possibly choose?
But of course it also brought back so many happy memories. Braised oxtail, wrapped up in cabbage, enjoyed when they’d barely been open a month. Saddle of rabbit, stuffed with liver and rolled in Parma ham, the equal of anything you could get in Bologna. Their crispy-skinned supreme of chicken with soft leeks and the shiniest, most comforting morel sauce. The legendary – and enormous – porchetta sandwich which graced their menu in the spring of 2021. Their confit duck poutine, which occupied an exalted place on the menu, and in my affections, around the same time.
Even towards the end new classics took their place, making life even more difficult. The monkfish tacos, which became one of the Lyndhurst’s signature dishes – so delicious, so generous, so very difficult to roll up and eat, so crammed were they with perfectly executed monkfish. The Korean chicken thigh burger, seemingly invented to make it impossible for me to cook my own dinner ever again on a Monday. Or perhaps best of all, the pork belly with plums and fried onions, in a deep, glossy sauce redolent of hoi sin. It only arrived on the menu around the start of this year, but even so I lost track of the number of times I ordered it. Even now, writing this and thinking about it I get a pang of sadness that I won’t get to eat that dish again.
I’ve made a point of trying to take almost everyone I know to the Lyndhurst at some time or another over the last five years. My family, local friends, friends from out of town, colleagues on one occasion, even my brother on his last trip to the U.K. from the other side of the world (he insisted on trying the monkfish with Bombay potatoes, and left in raptures). So I had done my level best to make sure as many people as possible at the wedding already knew how good the Lyndhurst’s food was.
But my new in-laws had never been there, and nor had some of the other wedding guests, and I couldn’t help but feel happy and proud of the pub as the canapés came round. Little cones packed with tuna, crowned with a dab of mango. Black pudding croquettes which seemed super-dense, as if they were made of more black pudding than their shell could contain: my father-in-law, not always an easy man to please with food, devoured quite a lot. Little choux buns filled with mushroom, for the vegetarians, and polenta squares topped with butternut squash, for the vegans.
And a treat I first sampled at a reader’s lunch the previous year, beetroot macarons, sweet yet salty, with a judiciously chosen core of goats cheese. “Holy shit”, my Canadian cousin Luke said to me later. “I think those might be the best things I’ve ever tasted.” And Luke eats out a lot.
I think some of our guests kept expecting the canapés to run out, because they didn’t know the Lyndhurst, but wave after wave passed through the room: no need to stand near the kitchen and grab them before they were demolished by others. No need to worry about that, or anything else. The Lyndhurst, their brilliant, well-oiled team, were completely in control. Why on earth would I worry?
The Lyndhurst opened in 2019, but within nine months or so they were plunged into the awful event we all now remember as 2020. Everywhere closed, from March to July, and when places reopened they faced a nervy, uncertain future. Many people, me included, were reluctant to go out. And then of course there was the superspreading folly of Eat Out To Help Out, followed by the many-tiered madness of various restrictions, all of which fell far short of what was really required.
I sometimes wonder how Sheldon and Dishon must have felt, celebrating the end of their first year in charge not knowing whether there would be a second. But if they ever lost hope it never showed, and although I liked the Lyndhurst a lot in 2019, it was in lockdown that I came to love them; I am lucky enough to live round the corner from the pub, and they carried on delivering to me, to my doorstep, throughout the winter of 2020.
It became a wonderful, comforting Saturday night ritual – place the order, transfer the money and then just as Strictly was about to begin there would be a knock at the door and there was Piotr holding a bag for us. If there were specials on we would invariably order them, but there was always a treat of some kind. I remember the asparagus in batter with romesco sauce, one of the best snacks of all time. I remember first the pork and then the lamb tacos, although any time the Lyndhurst did tacos was a time to cherish. I remember the beer can chicken, and the phenomenal ancho chile relish: I think I ended up with a jar of it in the fridge at one point, and used it on everything.
And I remember – how could I not? – the occasions when they had skate wing on. Classically cooked, golden and bathed in beurre noisette, scattered with capers and croutons, just waiting to be clumsily decanted on a plate and scoffed, with the simple joy of flipping the wing over at the halfway point. It might have been movie week on Strictly, or perhaps Halloween week or Blackpool week. But it was always, always Lyndhurst week.
One story I never told at the time, although I suppose I can now that Sheldon and Dishon have moved on, is that in the spring of 2021 I published a review of the Lyndhurst’s takeaway menu. I loved nearly everything I tried, but I did express a few reservations about a dish they’d just added to the menu, a chicken tikka naanza. Later that afternoon I got a message from them on Twitter: they’d been thinking about the feedback and they’d made a few tweaks as a result. Would I mind if they dropped one over so I could let them know what I thought?
Naturally I said yes, and just after five there was that knock at the door again. I split it in half and took half of it up to Zoë, who was in the spare room finishing her last conference call of the day. They’d pretty much made every change I’d suggested in the review and I know it’s me saying this, but it was damn near perfect.
One dish that the Lyndhurst never needed to change, not from day one, was their karaage chicken. I first had it in the spring of 2021 and to this day, however hard I’ve looked – and trust me, I’ve looked hard – I’ve never found a karaage anywhere else that matched it. It was my starter of choice, my first starter as a married man, and although it wasn’t the single best choice I had made that day it could well have been the second.
Although I was a takeaway customer of the Lyndhurst for quite some time, even after lockdowns eased and a lot of people went back into the pubs and restaurants, I wasn’t their last takeaway customer. That honour belonged to a chap at my office, who loves their curry night. He lives round the corner from the pub too, but with small kids he couldn’t eat in, much as he might have wanted to. So without fail every Thursday he would check Instagram, find out what the three curries on offer were, place his order and then go and collect it that evening.
Often I would be eating in and I would see him, we’d acknowledge each other, compare notes on which curry we were going for. I think he had the pint of beer that came with the curry – an outrageous bargain for twelve pounds, all in – but I can’t remember. But every week he was there, getting his curries, taking them. home. And every week the Lyndhurst was there, letting him: most other places would have said that the pandemic was over and they didn’t do that kind of thing any more, but not the Lyndhurst. Forget Eat Out To Help Out, they were helping him to stay home.
The last night that the Lyndhurst traded was a Thursday night, curry night. I wasn’t there because it was the night before my wedding: my fiancée (for one last night) and I went to London Street Brasserie, on the early bird set menu special, and had our first carbs and calories for quite some time. I drank English fizz and ate LSB’s excellent fish and chips, although I couldn’t finish the chips. So I didn’t make it to the Lyndhurst, but I’m pretty sure I know one person who did, one final time, for his family’s habitual takeaway.
And yes, what that also means is that my wedding day was the last day that the Lyndhurst was sort-of, kind-of open. I’d known that they were still trying to agree the rent with the pubco, and I knew that those negotiations didn’t look like they would end happily, but the Lyndhurst told me that one way or the other they would cater our wedding. The fact that they did means more to me than you can imagine, and it really felt like they were celebrating with us too. The pub, and the team, were such a big part of the wedding day that it was impossible to imagine it without them.
I found it equally impossible to pick main courses for our wedding meal. In the end we went for three options, any of which would have suited me down to the ground. Mine on the day was confit duck, the skin burnished, the meat underneath slumping helpfully from the bone, with Sarladaise potatoes, a smooth parsnip purée and the jus of the gods (the Lyndhurst had told me they could easily do a more cheffy duck dish, but this was the one I wanted).
But the main I almost wish I’d had, one final time, was that monkfish – a huge tranche of it, served on a heap of those addictive Bombay potatoes, a bright herb chutney and salad on the side. My wife had that, and I just looked on in awe and envy. My brother had it too, a wonderful gastronomic connection between his first and last meals at the Lyndhurst. So did my father-in-law: he cleaned his plate.
A couple of days after the wedding, I got a message on Facebook from a reader of my blog. He wanted to tell me something about the Lyndhurst.
He said that he’d recently gone to the Royal Berks and been told that he needed to be admitted for an emergency operation. But they said that he had just enough time to grab a meal before they would take him in. And so he went to the Lyndhurst, not far from RBH, and it just so happened that he was there in the week before they closed, eating there – just like I did – one final time. “It was a really meaningful experience” he said, “and I wouldn’t have done it without your review.”
It made me think of all the evenings that pub had made, and the fact that they probably didn’t know the half of it. Just for me alone, they had filled a very special place in my life for five years, in a way I’m not sure I’ve managed to explain. Don’t fancy cooking? Go to the Lyndhurst. Celebrating the start of a holiday? Dinner at the Lyndhurst. Back from holidays and feeling blue? The Lyndhurst it is. Finishing work at the same time as your other half, meeting in town and thinking “isn’t it burger night on Mondays?” Off to the Lyndhurst. Your brother’s last night in the country? Go on then.
But my reader’s story made me think of something else too. December 2021, when after over eighteen months on the run, playing it safe, not going into shops, not eating in restaurants, working from home, only socialising outdoors, waiting for the vaccine and the second vaccine and with the booster in touching distance, Zoë tested positive for Covid. And then she too spent time in the Berks, four fraught nights, and when she came out, after I met her outside the ward and slowly took her home, the Lyndhurst delivered me a simple order that night – just two beefburgers and chips. That was the beginning of the road to recovery, and one of my most meaningful experiences.
There was no way, though, that the beefburger was going to feature on the wedding menu. The Lyndhurst’s chocolate mousse, though, was another story. The first time it was on their menu, the first time we ordered and ate it, Zoë had that look in her eye. “We’re having that at our fucking wedding” she said. And so we did.
The rest of the evening was a riot – of my friend James’ home-brewed beer, of gin and tonic, of conversations with old friends out on the Lyndhurst’s patio. The heat and sun of the day had faded, the crowd had slightly thinned and everyone was sitting outside, chatting and mingling. My stepmother caught up with my schoolfriends, who she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. We took a last family photo before my brother and my sister-in-law headed off, their next flight a day away.
And there was more food – a buffet, of more food than I could conceive of eating. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d had more room for the charcuterie, for the chicken pakora, for every manner of bite-sized savoury delight. And because I’d asked them to, the Lyndhurst did a slider of their legendary Korean chicken burger, the dish they’d introduced in February which had made losing weight in the run-up to the wedding so challenging. I made sure I had one of those. A few people did: my mother-in-law took one home and had it the following morning for breakfast.
The next morning, town seemed to be an even more beautiful place than usual. I went and got a couple of coffees from C.U.P. to take them to our hotel, and the man behind the counter shook my hand and congratulated me. I told the hotel receptionist that my wife would be checking us out shortly – the first time I said “my wife”, the first of many. And we got to the Lyndhurst to take down the decorations, to find that the process of getting the pub ready to hand back was already taking place. A man was painting woodwork, the party was over.
Well, almost over. On the Saturday night there was a little farewell party for the pub and Zoë and I went in to say one last goodbye. Many of the regulars were there, faces I recognised from curry nights, or burger nights, or Friday nights. So many different stories intersecting with the pub the way mine had, so many different people who would miss Sheldon, Dishon and the team every bit as much as I would. When people talk about how pubs can be community hubs, they never mention how difficult it actually is to do, to manage that and still be inclusive, not some gammon pubman’s boys’ club. But the Lyndhurst did it.
And all the staff were there relaxing and chatting. Sheldon and Dishon, too, and I realised that I’d rarely seen them in the same place at once. Usually Dishon was running the front of house, Sheldon tucked away in the kitchen. But here they both were, casually dressed, laughing and, I hope, feeling the love. Dishon is moving back to Northamptonshire to be with his family, with a baby on the way. Sheldon told me he was looking forward to a break, to visiting his family in Mumbai, and after that who knows? Both of them looked like they were ready for a long rest, but proud of what they’d achieved. They should be.
I may have rarely seen Sheldon and Dishon together, but one of my favourite pictures is of the two of them, taken by a chap called Antonio, a local Instagrammer and neighbour who also loves the pub. It captures a moment, during service, of the two of them putting their heads together, of the front of house and kitchen meeting right at the point where the former ends and the latter begins. It captures something of the wonderful partnership that Reading was lucky to enjoy and, for me, something of what made the pub so magical. Neither of them had run a pub before that fateful day in the summer of 2019. Well, what a debut.
2024 is shaping up to be a year of changes. I got married, the Lyndhurst did a beautiful job of hosting our celebration and now they have moved on. Things happen quickly, and last Friday the Lyndhurst reopened under new management, a lady who previously ran a pub in Theale. There’s talk of it being more of a sports bar than it was in previous incarnations; locals have wished her well, and I’m sure they will all be in to check it out. I will too, and I’m conscious that when Sheldon and Dishon took the pub over I would have been the first to say they had big shoes to fill.
But fill them they did, and life moves on. And now it’s time for me and Zoë to move on, too: next month we’ll be leaving the Village, where I’ve lived so happily for seven years. So it wasn’t just greeting married life, or bidding farewell to the Lyndhurst, but the start of a period of loving living here, with all its quirks, but knowing that it will come to an end.
Everything does eventually, I suppose, but it’s important to recognise how good things are while you’re living them, rather than only later when you look back. But I will always remember the Village, and those five halcyon years when it had the best village pub anybody could hope for. I’ll remember the two men that made it happen, and that brilliant sunny day in May when the whole world was at its absolute best.
Last May, in a bit of a departure for the blog, I reviewed two chicken places in London back to back: Portuguese Casa do Frango, just off Regent Street, and fried chicken specialists Chick ‘N’ Sours in Covent Garden. It was a day of excess with my good friend – and chicken obsessive, naturally – James, in what we dubbed ChickenFest, and we resolved at the start of the year to make it an annual event. That’s how we ended up, on a Friday in April, perched at a table in Soho, ready to do it all over again.
We had wound up in Coqfighter, because my research had suggested that it was very much an equivalent of Chick ‘N’ Sours. It started out in Boxpark, both in Croydon and Shoreditch, before opening a bricks and mortar site five years ago – on Beak Street, which is presumably an accident but a happy accident nonetheless. The reviews I’d seen had been complimentary, although more than one was comped, and they led me to expect a more stripped-down menu than at Chick ‘N’ Sours, but one done very well. Coqfighter also boasts an Instagram feed that would make most people ravenous: it certainly had that effect on me.
In the course of writing this review I went back and looked at quite a few reviews from other people, and it’s strange that literally not a single one told you anything about the room. I wonder why that is, because for me it was the wrong side of the line between functional and dysfunctional. The façade was pitch black, and beyond it the front room was very unprepossessing, One wall was gleaming white metro tiles, the other a vague terra cotta, but everything else was black too.
The furniture was also strange: little black tables, each with a couple of low little black backless stools. There was a second room out back, but it was further from the daylight and far dingier, so we decided against it. From Google image searches the tables used to be longer, communal things: that may or may not be your idea of hell, but I just felt far too old for these kind of seats. Where were you meant to put your coat? I never thought a restaurant would make me feel nostalgic about wedging my well-padded posterior into the ubiquitous Tolix chair, but Coqfighter managed it.
Coqfighter’s menu is more Honest Burgers than Chick ‘N’ Sours, all main courses and sides, no starters. Chicken came in all its permutations: burgers, wings, tenders, fried on the bone and a couple of half roast chicken options. Sides, unless they were also made of chicken – which the best sides might well be, come to think of it – consisted of a couple of types of fries, two different kinds of sweetcorn, coleslaw and a cucumber and sesame salad.
Not inspirational stuff, and I certainly didn’t see anything to rival Chick ‘N’ Sours’ profoundly good chicken toasts. But if you like fried chicken, as James and I surely did, there was plenty here to appreciate. Keenly priced, too: the most expensive dishes were twelve pounds or thereabouts, sides roughly a fiver. Coqfighter’s beer is made by Orbit, so we both had a two-thirds of their house lager and a couple of sodas while we made up our mind. The beer, really, was indistinguishable from a good macro lager like the one I’d had at the Moderation a couple of weeks before. The sodas were a surprise hit – James loved his raspberry lemonade and my sour cherry soda, more sweet than sour, was a real delight.
We ran into headwinds when we placed our order, or rather tried to. I’d earmarked a burger, so I ordered that with no problem. But James fancied the Thai style half roast chicken, Coqfighter’s take on gai yang with soy, ginger and lemongrass, only to be told by our server that it wouldn’t be ready for another forty-five minutes. This was at a quarter to one: were we happy to wait? We weren’t, so James went for his second choice, a two piece of drumstick and thigh on the bone with miso butter gravy.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t do that any more. We’re meant to be taking it off the menu.”
I have to say our server was lovely, friendly and attentive and she later told us, when we were settling up, that it was only her second day in the job. And I did feel for her, sent out to have difficult conversations with customers about how one section of the menu wasn’t available at lunchtime while another dish wasn’t available full stop. Nonplussed, James picked his third and fourth choices instead, and although he was ultra polite, as he always is, I could tell he was a little unimpressed.
Still, you can only order from the menu in front of you on the day and you can only review what you’ve ordered. With that in mind, I think I got the best of things with the chicken burger. The texture was spot on, the coating crunchy and crenellated, and I’m always happy to see a sesame seed bun rather than brioche. The menu doesn’t say whether it was thigh or breast but I think it was the former, which would always be my preference. And the plus of it being fairly compact was that you could actually pick it up and eat it without disgracing yourself or having to resort to the infra dig spectacle of using a knife and fork.
Those were the pluses. But the downside of it being compact was that it didn’t resemble any pictures of Coqfighter’s burgers I’d seen, either on their social media or other reviews. Usually the chicken offered a huge amount of elevation and poked out untidily from either side of the bun as if the bun simply couldn’t contain it, the extraneous bits practically asking to be nibbled. No such joy here. I’d chosen the honey ginger buffalo burger, thinking that it combined three of my favourite things in one magical sauce, but the end result was out of kilter, more sweetness than bite. And what was it with the sauce oozing out on to the plate like a perforated egg yolk? It just made it soggier than it should have been.
James’ tenders, which are the kind of thing I always order in places like this, also looked the part but couldn’t convincingly play the part. They were nearly there but not quite, and it was all about the texture. “The seasoning of these is actually spot on” said James, “but they don’t have the crunch. They needed a little longer in the fryer.” I thought James was being fair: my instant reaction, to be honest, was that KFC does these every bit as well,
This is also the point to mention the dips because we went crazy with these and again, they promised so much but didn’t live up to it. So we had a Korean hot sauce which tasted neither hot nor Korean, and a Korean barbecue sauce which was about as Korean as I am. Neither had ever been anywhere near any gochujang, as far as I could tell: is it just the fashion now to dub things Korean when they’re nothing of the sort? Neither of these was any better than the contents of a little plastic cuboid tub from KFC or McDonalds. We also had a sambal mayo which I imagine did both sambal and mayo a disservice, and some kind of ranch thing.
“I’m pretty sure I saw them all coming out plastic bottles” was James’ observation: he had a better view of that than I did. None of them livened up the chips, which were bought in and dreary. I spotted a few grey patches on mine, which made me leave a fair amount of them, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out. Apparently they are “tossed in our house shake”, but their house shake appeared to be some kind of acrid combination of paprika and dust.
James had also gone for the wings, because he believes that chicken on the bone is always the best way to check any restaurant’s chicken. He didn’t mind these, and they were tossed not sauced – he has firmly held beliefs that this is The Only Way – but had the same kind of feedback as me about the honey ginger buffalo sauce, It tried to be three things at once and failed at all of them.
We agreed to compare notes properly on our debrief in the pub, but even from the conversation we had in the restaurant, the expressions and raised eyebrows, I had an inkling we were on the same page. Keen to get on with our day and put any disappointment behind us we settled up: it came to sixty pounds, including tip.
After a wander and a shop, we grabbed a table at the French House and a large bottle of Breton cider and carried out the post mortem. It was mid-afternoon, the time I like the French House best, and the pub was starting to fill with the kind of characters who only seem to exist in the French House at three in the afternoon. Where did they live the rest of the time? I’d missed Soho, it had been far too long.
“The funny thing is, they were doing a lot of Deliveroo” said James. “I think I must have seen eight different riders turn up in the time we’ve been having lunch.” He was right, and at least a couple had been the same rider twice – either that, or it was a glitch in the Matrix.
“In fairness, if you could eat one of those burgers at your desk you’d probably feel like you were winning at life.” I said. I had a momentary flashback to a time many years and a lifetime ago when a colleague and I picked up a family bucket from KFC, took it back to work and ate it at our desks. It was worth the funny looks we got from the people in the lift. Perhaps we should have offered them a drumstick.
“I just think about Bristol,” said James, “and the chicken at Wings Diner. It’s miles better than this.”
“And I know you didn’t rate the branch of Eat The Bird that’s opened in Bristol, but the one in Exeter was also a different level to Coqfighter.”
“I think Chick ‘N’ Sours is better than this, too.”
I took a glug of my cider and weighed up the pros and cons. I thought about that sesame chicken toast, and how nearly a year on I still remembered it.
“I think you’re right.”
So there you have it: on a simplistic level this is Bristol 1, London 0 but to bring it back to Reading – where I live – Coqfighter isn’t good enough to justify a trip to London, not even if you’re a chicken-fixated eccentric on an annual pilgrimage like James and me. It does highlight, though, that Reading is still missing someone who does this really well: that’s why, when I did my guide to how to avoid chains last week, I didn’t propose an alternative to KFC.
There’s good fried chicken at Clay’s, at Soju, at The Bap, but there’s nothing in the genre of Southern fried chicken to write home about (and yes, I’ve tried Popeyes). You only get that when Gurt Wings comes to town, which is about once a month. I think the new Siren tap room is missing a trick not specialising in this: instead they’re leading with burgers, which feels more of a 2014 Big Idea than a 2024 one. Still, I’m sure they know what they’re doing.
Never mind. Just as the best way to cope with the post holiday blues is to book the next one, the best way to handle this disappointment was also to look to the future. So James and I talked it over, over a second bottle of Breton cider, and decided: next year we’re going to widen the scope of ChickenFest to include duck. We’ll call it PoultryFest, we’ve got it all figured out. The thing is, as we wandered through Chinatown I saw some fine specimens in the windows of several restaurants, and I figured it was time to diversify. It’s important, after all, not to get too set in your ways.
Edible Reading 