Tag: Service

Restaurant review: Spiced Roots, Oxford

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Back in the first half of the nineties, when I was a student at Oxford, there was a famous restaurant down the Cowley Road called the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House. What made it famous, back then, was an urban myth that the menu didn’t have prices: instead, you paid what the proprietor decided you could afford. How he assessed that wasn’t entirely clear, but even though in those days I was constantly unkempt and dressed in easily the shittest clothes M&S and River Island had to offer I never felt like taking my chances, in case the meal turned out to be beyond my means.

Besides, as a student from a comprehensive school eating out in Oxford was pretty much always beyond my means. Instead I ate awful food served up by the college in halls, I nuked an occasional M&S ready meal – usually chilli con carne – in the microwave in the tiny kitchen in my college stairwell and, on high days and holidays, wandered to the chippy on Carfax for a life-affirming cod and chips. If we’d had a yearbook, which we didn’t, nobody would have nominated me as Most Likely To Write A Restaurant Blog.

No, eating out was for the trustafarians I was forced to rub shoulders with, where mummy and daddy owned half of Hampshire. Parents were always swooping in to take them to dinner at Gee’s, or the Old Parsonage, or Browns, back before Browns became just another Mitchell & Butler atrocity. I think my dad visited me once in three years and we had dim sum at a place called the Opium Den. This is fancy, I thought, and the experience was never repeated. It’s a Nando’s, now.

My fellow students, by and large an alien species, all lived down the Cowley Road in their second year in shared houses, cosplaying This Life, a few years before it hit the television. They fancied themselves as the Young Ones, even though they already had their dead eyes on careers as management consultants. They probably felt they were being postmodern, playing at being skint like they were playing at being part of the real world. And now, depressingly, many of them run the country, or run the civil service, or read the news on television. I wonder if any of them went to the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House, back in the day.

Anyway, the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House is closed now, or at least appears to be from a quick bit of online research. It certainly looked decidedly closed when I visited Oxford a few weekends ago with a lunchtime reservation at Spiced Roots, a much more happening, upmarket and highly regarded Caribbean restaurant two doors down from where Hi-Lo used to be. When I reviewed the Magdalen Arms, the same end of town, last year I asked whether anybody had Oxford recommendations for me. A reader mentioned Spiced Roots then, so I looked it up and the idea stuck in my head.

And this was my first chance to review it in 2023. It was my first visit to Oxford since last Christmas, and I’d forgotten how much I loved the place: having coffee at the Missing Bean; sloping off on a house envy tour of Jericho and north Oxford (it was harder to find a house you didn’t envy, really); stopping in the Covered Market to discover that Tap Social had opened a lovely little pub there; having post-Tap Social beer at Teardrop Bar because it was the original and best and otherwise I’d have felt disloyal; and buying all sorts of wonderful stuff from the Oxford Cheese Company, hoping it wouldn’t be too whiffy on the train home at the end of the day. 

Speaking of trains, one of life’s great mysteries is that a return ticket to London or Swindon from Reading costs you thirty quid for half an hour on the train, whereas Oxford is closer to a tenner for the same length of journey. One day someone will fix that discrepancy and we’ll all be screwed, but until then Oxford is about as good a day out from Reading by public transport as you could possibly hope for. I should review more restaurants in Oxford, really – it’s crazy that this is only my second – and maybe I will. Besides, since Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen closed last summer I’ve been missing really good Caribbean food: if Spiced Roots could deliver, it would be well worth the occasional trip.

Spiced Roots’ interior is that old favourite, a long thin dining room, and a compact one too that can’t have much more than twenty covers. We arrived for a late lunch, at two pm, and the place was nicely full by then, with a table of about a dozen people having a fantastic time. The mural on the wall reminded me somewhat of Reading’s Flavour Of Mauritius, but the real conversation point was the bar, done up beach hut style with a straw roof and sporting a mind-bogglingly huge range of rums. 

I found myself wondering if the evening was when this place really came into its own; Spiced Roots is only open for lunch on Saturdays, and even then it closes between lunch and dinner, so there’s only so much fun you can have. And that’s a particular shame because the cocktail menu was a small but wickedly diverting one. I had a dark ‘n’ stormy, tall and full of pep, probably the nicest I’ve ever tried. Zoë had a negroni made with Appleton 12 instead of gin, infused somehow with pimento smoke: I tried a sip and it provoked its own cocktail, a healthy mixture of trepidation and admiration.

The menu was simple, just the right size and written, all lower case, in that typewriter font used almost exclusively by dullards on their Instagram stories nowadays. It inspired confidence, with just five starters and eight mains, and pricing was gentle: three of the starters cost less than a fiver, none topped seven pounds. Only a couple of mains approached twenty quid, the remainder were closer to fifteen. Forget the old Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House approach of working out what you could afford – this was definitely affordable. We ordered three of the starters to share and a couple of mains, sat back, sipped our cocktails and felt all sense of hurry vanish.

That might have been just as well, because there was a bit of a wait. Our server came over and apologised, saying that there was only one of them in the kitchen. And that was of course fair enough, and that big table, all needing to be fed at the same time, would put a strain on a small outfit. But we were in no real rush so the cocktails passed, as they do, and we chatted about Oxford, I probably blethered on about the old days, and we sipped our water, mindful of all that pre-lunch beer. 

I wonder what the me of thirty years ago would say if you told him that on the other side of the century he would still be coming to this city, with money this time, having made his peace with all the things it did and didn’t do for him. He would probably be waiting for me to shut up so he could go have another row with his girlfriend or listen to the new Leonard Cohen album, or pretend to study, or – almost certainly his favourite pastime – mope. But I wish I could tell him that it would all be okay, that one day he’d evolve beyond M&S microwaveable chilli and eating cookie dough straight from the tub. I’d also tell him not to take his knees for granted, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing.

Our first starter was a little delight. I had missed out on jerk chicken as a main course, what with always giving my dining companion first dibs, but the jerk chicken spring rolls gave me an early indication of what I was missing. Two little cigarillos of filo pastry, packed with chicken and served on a smear of dark, fruity, savoury sauce they were simultaneously lovely and nowhere near enough. I suppose that’s what all starters, ultimately, are aiming for. I’d have liked more, or for them to be heftier, but the clue was in the pricing and for just shy of a fiver it was difficult to complain. We should just have ordered two portions, that’s all.

Even better, and genuinely delicious, was something called “trini doubles”. This is a Trinidadian speciality, curried chickpeas on a pair of baras, flat fried dough not entirely unlike a roti, and a quick scuttle to confer with Professor Wikipedia suggests that this dish, created in the Thirties, might be a Caribbean take on the Indian chole bhatura. Be that as it may, this was a gorgeous dish – floury, warm and comforting, and a forkful of the chickpeas folded into the starchy, slightly stodgy embrace of the bara was reason enough to be in Spiced Roots. That a little sweet, zingy, almost caramelised courgette, in the finest strips, was heaped on top just made me love the dish more. Again, this cost less than a fiver.

Last but not least, we’d also decided to try the grilled octopus superfood salad. It was perfectly pleasant – what octopus there was was nicely cooked, the salad was well dressed and the pineapple on top added good contrast. The menu described it as pineapple chow, which is apparently spiced and enhanced with garlic and hot sauce, but I just got sweetness, really. This dish was nice enough: subdued, well behaved but not earth shattering. But that’s my fault, I suspect, for ordering something described as a “superfood salad”, not theirs.

After waiting a little longer than I’d have chosen for our starters, the pendulum of iffy timing swung in the other direction: with that large table having finished their food our mains were brought out quick smart, barely ten minutes after we’d finished the previous course. Just one of those things, really, and I imagine they were trying to ensure we’d have time for dessert before they closed at half three. In any event we were on to a second drink by now, in my case a New Zealand sauvignon blanc which was decent but heftily marked up and in Zoë’s a lager called Banks from Barbados which I’m guessing tasted like most lagers.

My main course was a good illustration of Spiced Roots’ strengths and weaknesses, almost emblematic of the restaurant as a whole. I’d chosen the curry goat, my second choice of main, and it was a really superb dish. Probably the best goat I can remember eating (and I include Clay’s goat curry in that) beautifully spiced – with fifteen spices, if the menu is to be believed – in a thin, dark and potent sauce. There were a couple of chunks of potato but otherwise it was pretty much all sticky, tender goat. 

And yet the presentation was needlessly prissy. The curry was in a little vessel, the steamed rice in a separate bowl, there were a few random slices of plantain on the side and a salad which genuinely didn’t go and I’m not sure anyone eats. Were you meant to spoon the curry onto the rice, or gradually cross the streams while keeping the salad safe from harm? I ended up dumping the rice on the plate, pouring the curry on top and thinking that, rather than all the compartmentalisation, all I really wanted was a big steaming bowl of rice with plenty of curry on top – something earthy, hearty and unpretentious. I know Spiced Roots billed itself as fine Caribbean cuisine, but I don’t think that means you have to put obstacles between the food and the diners enjoying it.

Zoë’s jerk chicken, if anything an even better dish, suffered the same problems. The chicken was really outstanding, you got a huge amount of it and it was smothered with a rich, brooding sauce. And the rice and peas were good, too – a much more suitable companion than the plain steamed rice that had accompanied the curry. But again, it would have been better to let the food speak for itself without the faff of serving it on a slate, with more of that salad and a cherry tomato artfully cut into a flower. It made me think of the simplicity of somewhere like Chef Stevie. This food looks beautiful because it is beautiful, it doesn’t need to be gussied up in this way.

But even with that moaning, this lot for sixteen pounds fifty was hard to argue with. We also ordered a side of macaroni pie (which the menu, again trying to be more fancy, calls mac and cheese) which was really lovely but probably not quite big enough to share. As it only cost four pounds I think that was more our mistake than theirs.

Service was excellent, and suitably apologetic about the delays getting us our starters, which really wasn’t a problem. But pacing overall was problematic: I almost felt like they were trying to make up for the slow starters by rushing the mains, even though that wasn’t really what we wanted. We weren’t moved enough by the dessert menu to go for the full three courses, and a latte was calling to me from neighbouring Peloton Espresso, so we grabbed the bill and ambled off to caffeinate. Our meal came to just over eighty-five pounds, not including service, which I thought was thoroughly decent value.

Sometimes, believe it or not, it’s the act of writing a review that crystallises how I feel about a restaurant. Sometimes I know the rating in my head and work back from there, and sometimes it’s the process of running through the highs and lows that makes me realise, on balance, what I really thought. I don’t always get that right, I’m sure, so occasionally as a reader you probably get to the end and think the rating doesn’t match the text. You might not be alone in that – sometimes I feel that way too – but when there’s a real mismatch it’s because I’ve found it hard to work out what I think.

And Spiced Roots, I think, is one of those cases. I loved the food, but there’s a certain disconnect at the heart of the restaurant which meant I couldn’t quite make up my mind about it. The value is excellent, in places, but the presentation didn’t match that or the style of food – which meant that, for instance, some of the starters were just too slender (although unarguably priced to match) and that the mains, where they needed to be hearty and unpretentious, felt a little too dolled up. 

And I think that also showed in the clientele, which was varied – some were from the Caribbean community and clearly enjoying the fantastic food, others were the same kind of diners you’d find in Arbequina, a couple of doors down, very much gastronomic tourists – like me and Zoë, in fairness. Overall I wasn’t sure what Spiced Roots wanted to be, authentic or rarefied, and as a result I wasn’t convinced it managed entirely to be either, let alone both. 

So I loved the food, and if it sounds like your kind of thing you should definitely try it, but as a restaurant it left me slightly puzzled. Maybe a Saturday lunchtime – the only day it opens for lunch – isn’t the best time to judge it, so perhaps you have to be there of an evening, attacking that cocktail menu with gusto. But it was awfully well behaved in a way I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t sure about. That might tell you more about me than the restaurant. It did make me wonder, too, what a night in the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House would have been like, at the height of its powers. It might well have cost me more than my meal at Spiced Roots did, but I suspect it could have had the soul and verve that Spiced Roots, for all its excellent qualities, slightly missed.

Spiced Roots – 8.0
64 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JB
01865 249888

https://spicedroots.com

Restaurant review: La’De Kitchen

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La’De Kitchen closed in January 2024, and is apparently reopening as a separate restaurant called Yaprak which is allegedly under the same management/ownership. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

It kind of feels as if I’ve reviewed La’De Kitchen, the Turkish restaurant in Woodley, already, even though I haven’t. That’s partly because it’s featured on the blog before, by virtue of a delicious takeaway I reviewed back in March 2021. And I have eaten there once, a couple of months after that. It was for a friend’s birthday, during that weird period in 2021 when you could eat outside but not inside, and we all shivered under blankets and tried to persuade ourselves we were having a marvellous time. I remember the food, though, as being excellent.

Returning this week was a recognition, I think, that of all my to do list it was the most glaring omission, the place I really should have reviewed by now. Zoë and I turned up nice and early on a weekday evening to find the place largely empty, although it gradually filled up during the course of our meal. That didn’t surprise me, because it has developed a reputation over the last couple of years.

Of course, and I say this as a former Woodley resident, the fact that it’s in Woodley, always a rather a desert for restaurants, must help. “I remember how excited Woodley was when it found out it was getting Bosco Lounge”, Zoë told me, which gives you an idea how low expectations were set.

But also, it’s just really nicely done. The interior is chic, and the place got buzzy as more tables were occupied. I could easily imagine that on a busy Friday or Saturday night, the cocktails flowing, plenty of bums on those tastefully upholstered seats, it would feel like a very upmarket place to spend an evening. Maybe not on a par with their branch in Pangbourne, but lovely even so.

That said, La’De Kitchen is in some respects a different beast to the restaurant I ordered my takeaway from back in 2021. Back then Berkshire was its brave new frontier as they expanded from their original Muswell Hill branch. Fast forward two years and Muswell Hill is closed. Instead, La’De has spread across the Home Counties – Newbury, Camberley, Sunningdale – with a rogue branch in Hereford, of all places. So was it a different proposition now, and had they kept what was magical intact as they’d grown? I had a feeling I was about to find out.

The menu, though, was largely unchanged from my previous visit. It’s the familiar mixture of cold and hot meze, food from the grill (endearingly described as “Charcoal Productions”), some Turkish specialities (including pide) and a handful of less Anatolian choices. Some of these, the pizzas, take advantage of their having a suitable oven. The other two, described as the “Ritzy La’De Burger” and the “Ritzy La’De Chicken Burger”, badly need a rebrand: nothing would knowingly choose to be described as ritzy, not even – well, especially – the Ritz.

It’s a shame that most of the sharing main courses, the mixed grills and what have you, are sized and priced to serve three to four people, as opposed to the two to three on the menu on their website, as that limited what we could try.

The first sign that all might not run smoothly came when we placed our order – a couple of cold meze, a pair of hot meze and a main course each. “Would you like all of that to come at the same time?” asked our server, which I found bizarre. Yes, having ordered this much food I would naturally like it all dumped on the table at once so some of it can go cold: that must have been what I had in mind. Maybe they get some customers in a real rush to hightail it to Showcase Cinema, but I didn’t think we had that air about us. “This might be too much food”, our server also said. Well, maybe not it it’s nicely paced I thought, but didn’t say out loud.

Personally I’d have liked my cold meze first, then the hot meze and then my mains. And perhaps I should have said that out loud, but I didn’t, so all four of our starters came pretty much at once. They were something of an exercise in frustration. Possibly the best of them was Cypriot garlic sausage, grilled and crisp-edged, coarse and tasty without any dubious whiff of mystery meat.

Genuinely, I really enjoyed this dish, and I’m sorry to go there but I’m afraid I must: four pretty small pieces of what was presumably a single sausage was seven pounds fifty. If anything, the photo above makes the dish look bigger than it actually was. A handful of scruffy salad, over-sweet with dressing and pomegranate seeds, doesn’t conceal how small this particular small plate was. I know food is getting more expensive and something has to be right at the edge of the spectrum for me to call it out, but that’s where this was. It got me thinking about the sujuk at the sadly-departed Cairo Café: still, maybe that’s why Cairo Café has gone and this place is still there.

The other starter was even more of a disappointment because it’s a dish I’ve had and loved from La’De Kitchen more than once. Chargrilled octopus looked the part, that alluring fractal spiral I always love seeing on a plate. But whether this wasn’t marinated or cooked before being finished on the grill, the end result was tough, rubbery and heavy going. It was also another dish with an overreliance on balsamic and pomegranate seeds, the whole thing a little sickly-sweet. Zoe tried a few pieces and gave up – if the octopus had been great this would have been a stroke of luck, but instead it was a chore.

Were the cold meze better? Not really. Baba ganoush was probably the best of them, with a decent texture and an underlying note of smoke that told that particular aubergine’s origin story. But even then it was a little lacking in the complexity I was hoping for. But the real disappointment was the taramasalata: I’ve had this before from La’De Kitchen and I remember it being more a pastel shade, salty and moreish, a proper treat. This was Barbie-pink and one note, with more of Marie Rose than fish roe about it. As with the octopus Zoë tried a little and decided she couldn’t be doing with the calories. “It’s oddly sweet” she said, a theme across the starters. And I would say, in the main, that I’m a fussier eater than she is.

Here’s the really weird thing, though: one thing I’ve always loved about La’De Kitchen is its balloon bread – a beautiful inflated pita speckled with sesame seeds. When I ordered takeaway from that that first time, we had three of the blighters and I remember thinking that they were one of my favourite things about the meal. On this occasion – and bear in mind that we’d ordered two things you could reductively describe as a dip – they brought us one.

We broke it, we tore it, we dipped and spooned baba ganoush and taramasalata onto it, and then we thought “what can we do with the rest of these dips?” Did they expect us to eat taramasalata with a fork? So when the server swung by, we asked if we could have some more bread. Of course, of course, they said. It did not materialise.

By this point I was drinking my pint of Efe and Zoë was on a mocktail (“Safe Sex On The Beach” apparently, although good luck finding one without sewage in this country) the restaurant was slightly busier and I was adjusting my expectations. One of my favourite Turkish restaurants is Zigana in Didcot, and although I love the place I’d be the first to admit that their meze is hardly the main attraction: it’s only when your food has spent time on their charcoal grill that things start getting good. Perhaps La’De Kitchen would be the same.

Our server came over and asked if we were ready for our mains, and we said why not. He gestured at our mostly uneaten baba ganoush and taramasalata, although he chose not to ask why we’d left so much. Funny, that.

“Would you like me to take those away?” “he asked.

“No thank you, but what I’d really like is some more bread to eat with them.”

“Of course, of course” came the reply. Of course, more bread never materialised. By this point I had rationalised to myself that, given that the two dips were either side of middling, he might have been unintentionally doing me a favour. Besides, all the more room for mains.

When I had my takeaway from La’De Kitchen all those years ago it was all about one dish: the pistachio adana, an impeccable lamb kofte studded with pistachio, a truly delicious masterpiece of grilling. Well, Zoë quite sensibly called shotgun on it for this visit and I have to hand it to her, because it was the one thing about La’De Kitchen that age has not withered.

If anything, it was better than before: what used to be a coating of pistachio has morphed into something more beautiful, a sort of hyper-real, hyper-green pistachio pesto which elevated it from great to greater still. Paired with gorgeous, nutty pearls of bulghur wheat (and more sticky-dressed, pomegranate-strewn salad: you can’t have everything) this really was a fantastic dish, albeit one keeping bad company. If everything we ate that night had even approached the quality of the pistachio adana, I would be firing up the hype machine and getting out my virtual megaphone: nothing even remotely did, but I still want to say that the restaurant is almost worth visiting for this dish alone.

I’m prepared to concede that I might have ordered badly, when it came to my main. I asked my server what distinguished the chicken Iskender from your common or garden shish, and he told me that it came served on a bed of pita with a spicy tomato sauce (called halep) and yoghurt. Should I have known from that what I was about to get? Perhaps. Perhaps I should have known that it was cubes of chicken and squares of pita in a cast iron skillet, with a spooge of slightly bland tomato sauce and a pile of yoghurt on top. If I’d known, I might have opted for something else.

But even judging it by the standards of the dish, it didn’t quite work. Unlike the plating of the adana, which gave you plenty of negative space, this was crammed into the skillet, making it fiddly to eat. I actually loved the squares of pita, which had enough about them to stand up to the sauce. But the chicken was firm – just the right side of bouncy – without being tender, and the sauce was unremarkable. It was almost like they’d taken all the glory of meat fresh off a charcoal grill, and wiped it out by drowning it in something bla. I probably ordered something I might not have chosen, but I still expected it to be better than this.

“What do you think?” said Zoë, who by this point had given me enough of her adana for me to realise a travesty had taken place.

“It’s, well… it’s not as good as yours. Meat and tomato sauce in a skillet feels like something I could have picked off the al forno section of the menu in a Prezzo.”

“You know this used to be a Prezzo, don’t you?”

Full but unfulfilled, we waited in vain to get somebody’s attention to pay our bill. The restaurant wasn’t hugely busy at this stage, but from the difficulty we had you’d think it was. All the time that blasted taramasalata and baba ganoush sat there on the table. It irked me, and yet I knew I’d dodged a bullet: I’m a big fan of eating my feelings, but not necessarily when those feelings are disappointment. Eventually we got our bill, and some time after that we managed to pay it. It said we’d had two lots of balloon bread, which by this point was just rubbing it in.

“That was the best part of a hundred quid!” said Zoë incredulously as we made our way to the bus stop, pausing only for a tactical foray into Waitrose to buy some chocolate to cheer ourselves up. “Seriously, you need to find some other people to do these fucking reviews with you.”

“I know, I know” I said. “The saddest thing is that we could have gone here” – I gestured at Adda Hut, which looked far quieter than La’De Kitchen had been – “and you’d have had a better meal. We’d have spent a lot less money, too.”

I am so sorry that I didn’t like La’De Kitchen more. I wonder if it’s them or me, if I caught them on a bad night or if something has happened to the genuinely exciting restaurant that opened in Woodley a few years ago. Is it the inevitable consequence of a chain growing, or what happens when you focus on margins? Either way I ordered a mixture of dishes I know well and some new things and only one dish – that pistachio adana – took me back to the beginning. 

Beyond that, it felt like a shadow of its former self. I found myself thinking you’d be better off at Bakery House, or Tasty Greek Souvlaki, or even catching the train to Didcot and giving Zigana a whirl. Or trying Istanbul Mangal in Tilehurst Village, or the new Lebanese place down the Wokingham Road. I truly wish it wasn’t so, but them’s the breaks. But we’ll always have that pistachio adana, so perhaps the trick is to go there, order that, cut your losses and leave. It’s an extraordinary dish, and without it this rating would have been far lower. It’s worth making a pilgrimage just for that. For now, at least.

La’De Kitchen – 6.7
61-63 Crockhamwell Road, Woodley, RG5 3JP
0119 9692047

https://woodley.ladekitchen.com

Restaurant review: Pappadams

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Pappadams closed in November 2025 and is due to reopen as a new restaurant called Anjappar. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I got an email from WordPress the other day confirming that they were renewing my domain name for another year and that, more than anything, reminded me that a significant anniversary was coming up: next month my blog turns 10 years old. What started as a little hobby has become, well, a slightly less little hobby but I can’t quite believe that a decade later I’m still reviewing restaurants and that people are still reading those reviews. There will be more about that in the weeks ahead – for which I apologise in advance – but it has left me in rather a reflective mood lately (and I apologise for that, too).

In the first year of the blog, back when Alt Reading and the Evening Post were still a thing, I published a total of 38 reviews of places in Reading. Of those 38 restaurants just over half are still trading today – a statistic which surprised me, although it does include the likes of Zero Degrees, Côte, Five Guys, Mission Burrito, Malmaison, Bel And The Dragon: chains who are still going, many years later.

But when I look back at the independent restaurants I visited in the first year of the blog, the ones that remain open in 2023, there are only three that I’ve never returned to since. Pau Brasil, although I know it has its fans, has never tempted me back. I’ve never got round to Coconut, although I did review their takeaway at the start of last year. And last but not least, there’s Pappadams, the subject of this week’s review.

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Restaurant review: Bakery House

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Bakery House rebranded as Lebanese Flavours in March 2025, although the menu and ownership are apparently unchanged.

It’s strange to find myself writing about Bakery House again. In 2015 when I reviewed it, not long after it opened, it was a genuinely game-changing restaurant in Reading – an authentic, uncompromising Lebanese restaurant with no alcohol licence, the perfect counterpoint to the grown-up La Courbe in town which offered a huge selection of Lebanese wine. From the front you could be fooled into thinking Bakery House was a kebab joint, but out back you were treated to gorgeous, gorgeous food. And plenty of people thought so: Bakery House prospered, while La Courbe (with lovely John Sykes as its landlord) withered and died.

And prosper it really did, becoming part of the fabric of town in a way few restaurants manage. You could easily make a case that Bakery House is one of the most significant Reading restaurants of the last ten years. The first couple of times that I ran the World Cup Of Reading Restaurants on Twitter, it was the runner-up: if Clay’s hadn’t had the temerity to open the previous summer, I’m sure it would have won the title in 2019.

But also, Bakery House is part of my story: I can’t think of any other restaurant, not even Dolce Vita, that has kept me company through so many different phases of my life. I remember eating there with my ex-wife shortly after it opened, or grabbing takeaway from there to eat in front of the telly at home, a few doors down. I had a girlfriend after that who went there with her family every Sunday without fail, the restaurant part of her rituals, the wait staff fussing over her kids.

Another partner met my mother for the first time sitting on the wall outside my crummy transitional post-divorce flat, eating a Bakery House shawarma wrap. And then I got together with Zoë, and it was one of the first Reading restaurants I took her to. One of our rituals would be to go to Nirvana Spa on a Sunday and then, rather than cook, to stroll over to Bakery House. Their food was always the perfect bookend to a carefree day, and given that Zoë often works at the weekend those days were particularly special.

Anyway, enough about me: you probably have your own Bakery House stories and I’m sure they’re far more interesting than mine. But apart from some lockdown deliveries, I haven’t eaten in Bakery House since the pandemic. And a couple of those deliveries were a bit wayward – little things, like the boneless baby chicken maybe being not quite as succulent as usual, or the rice that was meant to accompany it going missing in action.

Then I started to hear vague rumblings that the place wasn’t quite as good as it once was, and truth be told I started to worry. I had always blindly assumed that Bakery House would survive the twin storm of Covid and the Tory-induced cost of living crisis. What if I was wrong?

At the end of May I heard an intriguing piece of news from Mansoor, a regular reader of the blog. He told me that Bakery House had been bought by the owners of House Of Flavours. He’d been told there were no plans to change the menu or the chefs, and I was pleased to hear that the manager Mohamad Skeik, who I interviewed for the blog back in lockdown, was staying in position.

I didn’t know how I felt about that news – on one level I was relieved that Bakery House’s survival seemed assured, on another I felt bad that it might have been in question and that I hadn’t known. But also, was it really business as usual at Bakery House? I wanted to find out, so a few Sundays ago, after a relaxing day spent poolside at Nirvana, Zoë and I strolled down South Street to resurrect our pre-Covid tradition.

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Café review: Barista & Beyond

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Barista & Beyond closed in February 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

If I was giving out ratings for having a heartwarming backstory, it’s hard to imagine any business would finish above Barista & Beyond in my list. The café was set up by social enterprise Ways Into Work, which supports people with disabilities, those on the autism spectrum or with mental health challenges to get into work. It offers internships, including at the café, and a better cause is difficult to envisage. I’ve wanted to visit Barista & Beyond for some time, and I’ve been paying close attention to their social media, which I highly recommend following.

It tracks the creation of the space last year, them beginning to trade in November and, for reasons I didn’t entirely grasp, their grand opening in March. It paints a lovely picture of the business, which is just past the IDR, between the Oxford Road and Chatham Street, around the corner from Rise Bakehouse. Looking through Barista & Beyond’s Instagram I got a real picture of their mission to, as they put it, change lives one job at a time. It depicts a happy little spot, nicely fitted out, with pictures of bright smoothies in the sunlight and fresh, vibrant salads. It also features an interview with their intern, Charlie, which I defy you to watch without feeling at least a little moved: put it this way, he’s a lot wiser at eighteen than I was.

So I really wanted to go, and last weekend it reached the top of my to do list: Zoë and I headed west past the Broad Street Mall, but in truth I had a certain amount of trepidation. This is not an establishment I would enjoy giving a negative review to, so I wasn’t overjoyed about the possible risk of that. But there was also the equal and opposite danger, that I would patronise Barista & Beyond, measure them against different standards or pat them on the head for simply existing at all. I would hate to do that, and I doubt they would want a review like that. So I approached the front door hoping they did well, but determined not to say anything that could sound like “didn’t they do well”?

It really is a lovely spot, with an almost European feel, like you could be in Rotterdam or Ghent. They have plenty of outside space which catches the sun, so much so that we decided to eat inside. But the inside is lovely too – very spacious, with tables clustered along the walls and next to those full-length windows, white tiles and lime green banquettes. They haven’t chosen to pack people in, to the extent where the room can feel a little bit empty, but there was a steady stream of punters coming in to get takeaway coffees or the smoothies. I couldn’t blame them: the smoothies looked good.

The website says that everything is made fresh every day, and the display cabinet showed off sandwiches, salads and wraps. They serve breakfast before midday, which I was sadly too late for, but the range of options was good but not huge: three toasties, two wraps, a BLT and a couple of salads. I couldn’t see prices anywhere for the food, although their website does list them and only the breakfast is more than a fiver. I ordered a couple of sandwiches and two coffees which came to just under twenty pounds, presumably because they added VAT.

Coffees came first – a flat white and a latte – and were so hot that we left them to cool down, drinking them after our sandwiches. The flat white looked the part, with a fine foam, while the latte perhaps set lower expectations.

“I wonder if they’ve had training on how hot to get the milk” said Zoë. “At Workhouse the temperature is very carefully controlled, but here it feels like they might have heated it until it’s boiling and then poured it in.”

I agreed, and when I finally got round to sipping my latte I was prepared for the worst. But actually it was lovely: nicely balanced without the slightest scorched bitter note. I always think coffee in Reading falls into three different tiers – the top one is made up of the likes of C.U.P., Compound, Workhouse and the Grumpy Goat, the middle one is the chains that are mediocre but not terrible like Nero and Pret and then the bottom one is the awful burnt stuff you’re best off avoiding. Just to confound me, Barista & Beyond sits between that top and middle one – not as good as Compound a couple of minutes’ walk away but not miles off either. I couldn’t tell if this made me happy or relieved, but perhaps it didn’t matter.

Zoë ordered the chicken caesar wrap. It’s good that she did, because I wouldn’t have: to me, looking at it in the cabinet, the chicken seemed too thick, too uniform, too catering pack. But Zoë thought it was superb, the caesar dressing with a good thud of garlic and the whole thing really enjoyable.

She also pointed out, and she’s right, that Barista & Beyond makes wraps properly – nothing falling out of the bottom and yet no stodgy wodge of tortilla crumpled together at the bottom for you to wade through either. Many places whose wraps I enjoy don’t assemble them as carefully as Barista & Beyond. It’s also worth pointing out that your sandwich comes, standard issue, with a sizeable number of good quality ready salted crisps, and some salad: largely undressed, so not really my bag, but your mileage may vary.

I’d chosen the tuna melt and also found much to enjoy. I don’t know if Barista & Beyond buy their bread from Rise round the corner, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had. For what it’s worth, I thought it was nicer bread than the stuff I remember last time I had a Tuna Turner at Shed, robust and grill-striped with a nice thick crust. It’s not possible to talk about tuna melts in Reading, really, without the spectre of the town’s most famous version on Merchant’s Place, and if Barista & Beyond’s fell short it wouldn’t be too hard to close the gap.

The menu talks about red onion, which would have made a huge difference, but there wasn’t any in my toastie. Something was needed to give contrast and crunch, whether that was red onion, capers or, as Shed also use, jalapeños. Any of that would have made this an even better tuna melt. But was it better than one you’d get out of plastic packaging at Costa, Starbucks or Pret? Of course it bloody was, and you get a heap of ready salted crisps thrown in for good measure. To come second to the Tuna Turner, in this town, is no disgrace, and I suspect this sandwich did exactly that.

Wanting to give the place more of a runout after our sandwiches, not quite ready to leave with our coffee approaching prime sipping temperature, I went up and ordered a couple of slabs of chocolate brownie. Again, I have no idea whether they were from Rise – I’m guessing not, but if they were they weren’t Rise’s best effort. Not terrible by any means, but too much reliance on sugar and not enough on cocoa, the texture a little one note without enough contract between the brittle and the fudgy. A couple of very gratifying chunks of chocolate made the occasional bite a joyous surprise, but it needed more.

I tried eating it with a fork, but soon abandoned that – the brownie didn’t have enough give, and I could already picture it flying across that wide open space. Still, you got two generous squares for six pounds, so not unreasonable value but not reaching the heights of brownies you can pick up at the Grumpy Goat, at Workhouse or at – I’m sorry, but this is true – Prêt A Sodding Manger. I was hoping these would give Barista & Beyond a little bounce to the rating at the end, but really they confirmed the decision I’d already made. I didn’t hang about to take a picture, though, so the brownie can’t have been that bad.

I’ve been putting off talking about the service, careful of walking that tightrope I mentioned at the start of this review, but here goes: it was superb. We were served by two different members of staff, one of whom was Charlie of Barista & Beyond’s Instagram fame. And perhaps it’s not possible to shed those preconceptions, or the first impression I’d got from watching that video, but he was just excellent. Nothing was any trouble, and every time he told me I was “very welcome” or to have a lovely day I was positive that he meant every word.

You don’t always get this in hospitality, talking to someone who comes across as absolutely loving their job, feeling lucky to do it and wanting to do it as well as they can. In turn I felt quite lucky to be looked after by Charlie and it made me think, far more than I expected to. I know hospitality is underpaid and undervalued, I know that it struggles to find people since the pandemic and that awful thing that some bigots voted for in 2016.

I know, fundamentally, that the solution to that is to pay people more, which restaurants can’t do for the same reasons they can’t charge more for food, because people seem to think it’s the one part of the economy that skips along carefree while our supermarket bills go through the roof. Go figure. And I can understand why the people that do work in cafés, particularly ones that serve crap coffee and pay dud wages, might not want to bring the sunshine day in, day out. But I didn’t get any of that from Charlie, and watching the other customers filing in to get coffees and smoothies I don’t think they did either.

Comparisons, at times like this, are necessary but can sound brutal. Does Barista & Beyond do the best coffee in the area? I’m afraid not: you need Compound Coffee for that. I suspect you can get better cakes at Rise, and Barista & Beyond’s sandwiches are solid but not in the top tier of Reading’s lunch choices. Barista & Beyond is a good café, not a great one, although it has potential. But it is a great idea, not a good one, and the service and the experience will stay with me long after I’ve forgotten ninety-nine per cent of the lunches I eat this year.

You may read all this and come away wanting to give it a try, to spend your money doing some good; I have a feeling that people who read my blog, like me, might not weigh all these factors as dispassionately as others do. I imagine that if you do visit, whoever they have behind the counter at that point, you may find it gives you food for thought. And that’s something you simply can’t find just anywhere. Have I avoided sounding patronising? I really don’t know, but I honestly hope so.

Barista & Beyond – 7.0
5 Alfred Street, Reading, RG1 7AT
07749 497412

https://www.baristaandbeyond.co.uk