Restaurant review: The Devonshire, Soho

On February 20, 2026February 22, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Does the world need another review of the Devonshire, described by Esquire as “the buzziest pub in the world”? Quite possibly not, because since opening at the start of November 2023 everybody has been there, it seems, and it’s arguably all been said.

Most of the U.K.’s national restaurant critics have been – your Dents, Corens and Parker Bowleses – and so have a plethora of restaurant bloggers, from the good to the bad to the bad and ugly (some even paid). The Topjaw crew are regulars, and boss level grifter Toby “Eating With Tod” Inskip is too: he even took poor trusting Phil Rosenthal there when he visited the capital. Phil clearly hadn’t been warned by his researchers that he was sharing a platform with U.K. hospitality’s biggest Farage fan (yes, even more than William Sitwell).

The brainchild of celebrity pub landlord Oisin Rogers, Flat Iron founder Charlie Carroll and Fat Duck alumnus Ashley Palmer-Watts, the Devonshire is a place you might well know about even if all of London’s many other hyped openings have passed you by. Nowhere, I suspect, has cut through to the national consciousness outside the London hospitality bubble as effectively for as long as I can remember.

Its ascendancy has tied in with a renaissance in the popularity of Guinness – some people claim that it’s the best Guinness in London, although they also said that about the Guinea Grill, Rogers’ previous pub – and the birth of a class of drinkers that think loving Guinness is an acceptable substitute for having a personality.

It’s a game of two halves, the Devonshire. The diners eat upstairs on a menu of British pub classics, the drinkers congregate downstairs where the Guinnesses line up on the bar, all guaranteed to find a home. Reservations are almost impossible to snag – unless you’re famous, in which case space will always be found for you, possibly in the pleb-free private space behind the velvet rope. Turn up on the right night (by which I very much mean the wrong night) and Ed Sheeran might be contributing to an impromptu ceilidh: let’s hope for everybody’s sake that he doesn’t play Galway Girl.

Awards have followed on from all those critical plaudits. In its first full year the Devonshire was listed as the second best gastropub in the U.K. (that same year the Guinea Grill, previously in the top 100, vanished without trace). At the beginning of 2026, SquareMeal named it London’s 42nd best restaurant. The National Restaurant Awards, meanwhile, placed it as the 12th best restaurant in the country last summer. So people rate the food: Michelin’s new Bib Gourmands were announced at the start of February and the Devonshire wasn’t among them, but you could easily make a case that it’s one of the very few restaurants in London that doesn’t need any help from the tyre man to put bums on seats.

You could easily think that the approbation is universal, but it isn’t. One of the London food subreddits I frequent had a discussion about the Devonshire a few months ago, and I heard quite a lot of criticism. Style over substance, more than one person said. Glad someone else agrees – utterly forgettable food, said another. In all honestly I came away massively disappointed by pretty much everything else for the money spent and the hype said one person, adding that he would have been better off going to Hawksmoor. It’s just okay was another pithy summary.

The comment that stuck with me was this one: Not been myself but I’ve not known anyone come back saying it was worth the hype. Because I was trying to pick through and differentiate between people who had been and not been impressed and those who simply took against it because of the hype, the exclusivity, the difficulty involved in getting a table and the inherent contradiction behind pretending to be egalitarian and always finding space for the famous and influential. Now, I have sympathy with all those viewpoints, but what I wanted to know was whether the food and the experience justified jumping through all those hoops.

Anyway, you get a review of the Devonshire this week for two reasons. One is that last month the Devonshire was named as the best gastropub in the whole of the U.K., nicking the top spot after coming straight in at number two the previous year. The other is that, idly looking at their exceptionally user-unfriendly booking page I managed to find a table free for lunch at a not unreasonably late time and thought that this was a now or never opportunity. Time to chip in, seemingly after everybody else has had their say, to try to sift fact from hype.

The pub and the restaurant are fairly separate entities, so you go in through the ground floor, past the mass of Guinness drinkers, to the welcome desk at the end where they lead you up the stairs, past framed pictures of Kate Moss, Nigella, Marianne Faithfull, and into the set of dining rooms on the first floor. The pub itself does a good job of looking like it has been there forever, but it is a manufactured image: it might well say SOHO SINCE 1793 on the front but before they turned it back into a pub it was various things, including a restaurant owned by attempted comeback king Jamie Oliver.

The room I was in (the Chop Room, according to my bill) was a very pleasant, airy one with plenty of light coming in from the big windows, a Gilbert & George taking pride of place on the white brick wall. The clientele, as far as I could tell, was a real mix containing what looked to me like a fair proportion of gastronomic tourists: that’s no criticism, as I was one myself. I wondered how many of these people were regulars, and how many were drawn in by the buzz.

What can’t be denied, though, is that the Devonshire has made the decision to absolutely cram tables into those rooms. I was put at a table for two, in the middle of a row with a table on either side, the gap between them one even Kate Moss couldn’t have made it through. I asked if I could move to an end table, so at least one of my arms could move unobstructed and, after what felt like a lot of deliberation, it was decided that I could.

The last time I was in a dining room this cramped was undoubtedly in Paris, the kind of places where you need to ask your neighbours to leave their seats if you wanted to go to the loo. In fact, I’ve only ever had those experiences in Paris, before the Devonshire. I guess the benefit of the doubt would say that they want to accommodate as many of their clamouring prospective diners as possible.

Much has been made of the Devonshire’s no choice set lunch menu – prawn cocktail, skirt steak, chips and béarnaise sauce, sticky toffee pudding – which is indeed decent value at £29. But I didn’t come all that way to eat the set menu, and on the à la carte there is almost a second, slightly more expensive set menu hiding in there, consisting of the dishes everyone orders: the scallops, the beef cheek suet pudding and the chocolate mousse.

That’s a decent way to experience the menu which is still pretty affordable, although unless you’re ordering a gigantic t-bone steak or the wagyu ribeye prices aren’t stratospheric: most mains max out at £40 and only a couple of starters will set you back more than £15. I made my order, asked for a glass of biodynamic Alsatian riesling from the very attractive list of wines by the glass and sat back, looking forward to a long, leisurely Soho lunch. That didn’t happen, as we shall see.

I’m going to talk about all the food first and get it out of the way, because a lot of it was rather good and yet it didn’t stop it being a deeply disappointing experience. We’ll get to that. First off, the Devonshire will bring you lovely, salt-speckled soft little buns, dished up from a hot tray with tongs, as many times as you like, along with room-temperature butter. I held fire on eating mine, because I thought the bread would be useful with my starter, but when I asked one of the sparkling, friendly servers she told me there was no need to show such restraint.

I wanted the bread for my starter, the starter nearly everyone orders. Three fat scallops, lavished with batons of bacon, topped with crumb and bathed in a sauce bright with vinegar, were pretty much everything people said they would be. The scallops, grilled in the shell, were just the right texture, the firm side of jelly, and a joy to slice, dip, dab and devour. But everything else perfected the synthesis: a really extraordinary mixture of salt and vinegar, of soft and crunchy, a dish you could eat over and over again. Which, given that you got three of the blighters – not bad for £18 – is pretty much what you got to do.

I cleaned each of those shells with a judiciously torn piece of bread, and I thought that, in this case at least, the hype was simply an accurate description. Next time I go to the Nag’s Head and order a packet of Scampi Fries and Bacon Fries I will sandwich one of the former between two of the latter, eat it, close my eyes and remember that combination of flavours elevated to an iconic level.

I also tried the potted shrimp, which I liked an awful lot: a deceptively big portion of these with a comforting hug of nutmeg and a lid of soft, spreadable butter. It didn’t look like much at £14 but that pot was as packed with prawns as the room was with tables – well, almost. It made the three mingey pieces of stripe-tanned crustless Melba toast look a little inadequate: I would have liked more, and resorted to eating the last of the prawns with a fork. Still, there was a constant procession of more bread, so you couldn’t very well complain.

So far so good, but my main course – the ox cheek and Guinness steamed pudding – struck a bum note. It arrived with some ceremony, anointed with gravy at the table (“I always love doing this bit” said my server), and it looked: well, it looked about as attractive as this dish, a symphony of beiges and browns, can look. But it was when you cut into it that it started to disappoint.

Its walls were claggy and thick – now, I know that’s the nature of this particular beast, but the filling is meant to justify that. And here it just didn’t. The amorphous brown mass obviously had bone marrow in it, which gave it that intense, savoury, mouth-coating note. But the bits of beef cheek were small and not cooked enough to truly fall apart, so the whole thing felt like a stodgy trudge.

Dipping the admittedly very good duck fat chips into that slightly bland gravy wasn’t transformational: in fact, the chips were better on their own. And my firm, nutty peas with ribbons of white onion and more of those batons of bacon were pleasant enough but unexceptional: if it had had some cream in it, proper à la Française stuff, I would have liked it better. Perhaps I should have gone for the carrots, or the creamed leeks, but by this point – I’ll explain shortly – I was starting to feel apathetic about the road less travelled.

I had dessert, too, I should add. The Devonshire’s chocolate mousse is a very agreeable example of the genre, not the best I’ve had but not a million miles away from it. It came with a jug of cream, which I wasn’t sure it needed, and three beautifully boozy cherries. It needed more of those.

Throughout my meal I think one of the things I liked best about the Devonshire was the people watching. Despite it being the closest thing London has right now to the original Ivy, before it turned sour, I didn’t see any celebrities. Rather it was like being in Soho House, seeing people who thought their very presence there made them almost famous. A few tables along from me a table of tourists enjoyed their coffee and, it appeared, took some leftovers away in a cardboard box: good for them.

Directly opposite me were two men in gilets and quarter-zip jumpers, both practising exactly the same techniques of male pattern baldness concealment, who looked as if they’d come out of the same vat in quick succession. They were pally with the servers in a way I don’t think I’ve ever attempted and ordered the biggest piece of meat they could find on the menu, the way people who identify as alpha males do.

But my favourites were the two lovely gents who sat on my left, who had discovered the Devonshire on YouTube of all places and were very excited to be there. Gent A sipped his Guinness and said to Gent B “if that was your last beer you’d die a happy man”, shortly after saying “this is the highlight of my whole week”. They ordered the same things as me, but were slightly behind me so they got a preview of the scallops and the suet pudding because, as I said, there’s almost another set menu within that à la carte.

Not only had they done their research – read all the reviews, read all the articles and puff pieces – but they engaged in some strangely endearing willy waving about it all. “Do you know how many scallops they get through a week?” said Gent A. Gent B didn’t know, so Gent A told him. “I wonder where they come from?” said Gent B. “It’s Devon or Cornwall I think” said Gent A (I knew this one – it’s Devon – but I didn’t interject). Then Gent B asked if Gent A knew how many pints of Guinness the pub got through in a week, and the game of Top Trumps began again. If I’d known I’d be sitting next to them I wouldn’t have needed to research this review at all. I could have just surreptitiously recorded their conversation.

“That bacon, mate” said Gent A about his scallop dish. “It’s Iberico bacon, it’s aged for 5 years.”

I kept my counsel: maybe you can indeed age bacon for 5 years, but it sounded unlikely. But I got a picture from this of the kind of person the Devonshire might appeal to and how it has permeated beyond the London food scene, all the blogs praising Cocochine or Row On 5 or prognosticating about who’s going to get a Michelin star next. The Devonshire appeals to TikTokers, and people who get their food coverage from YouTube, and it’s as much for box-tickers, in its way, as some restaurants are for star chasers.

So all that said, I need to talk about why the Devonshire was so poor. This bit is always boring and forensic, and makes me thankful for the time stamps on iPhone pictures but here goes. I’ll try to be quick: God knows, the Devonshire did.

I arrived around 2pm, I ordered around five minutes past. Those scallops? They arrived literally five minutes later. Either, like the Guinness on the bar downstairs, they were sitting around waiting for a table to go to or they were cooked and rushed out to me pronto. Either way, that’s not what I wanted at all. Remember that extra dish of potted prawns? That wasn’t part of the plan: I was worried about the breakneck pace, so as I was finishing my scallops I flagged down a server. Could I have an extra dish between my starter and my main please, I asked? I’m really in no hurry, I told her.

The potted shrimp arrived less than five minutes after that conversation and I tried to eat them slowly, in the hope of putting the brakes on. My main course arrived no more than three minutes after I’d finished eating the potted shrimp. And I suppose I could have said something again at that point, but what good would it have done? Would I have said “I’m sorry, but can you take this away and make me a fresh one in about twenty minutes?”

Maybe some diners would do that. But it felt entitled to me, so I ate my main and took my punishment. All in all, from ordering my lunch to my main course arriving was twenty-five minutes at most. And as lovely as the servers were, that says to me that they’ve forgotten something very basic about what restaurants are about. The clue is in the word, hospitality. I read a florid think piece recently about the delights of the solo lunch, a subject I’ve also written about before, but there are no delights in feeling like you’re on a conveyor belt from start to finish. I’d have understood it better, perhaps, if I’d been on the set menu. But I wasn’t.

Those tables that are so in demand at the Devonshire are booked in 2 hour slots, but despite my best efforts to delay things just over an hour had elapsed from taking my seat to getting my bill. In that time I managed to spend £117, including an optional 12.5% service charge which, in the words of the menu, “goes to our amazing staff”. Were they amazing? Well, they were and they weren’t: I have felt less processed in many, many chain restaurants. Perhaps hospitality operates close to its best by being a well oiled machine, but it fails when it feels like a machine.

In some ways that’s what confused me the most: what was the point? Why spend all that money on doing the place up, the Gilbert & George, the hype, the geeking out about the provenance of the ingredients if you’re going to make diners feel like they’re in a bloody canteen? I get that as a solo diner it might have been easy for the kitchen to do my food earlier, less complex than coordinating logistics with multiple dishes at larger tables, but you’d expect any restaurant to manage flow better. Nothing about me, as a solo diner at 2pm, screamed let’s get this over with.

And that’s the sad thing – if I’d loved the food, which was mostly quite nice at best, maybe I too would be going on about where all the meat comes from, raving about the on-site butchery in the basement, regurgitating the many, many facts Gent A and Gent B threw at each other. Instead, the thing I took away from my meal at the Devonshire was that I felt managed and turned, a product rather than the customer. Maybe that’s how they churn so many tables, create that buzz, make all that money. Maybe that’s what they want, and they can be packed until the end of days delivering this kind of experience. But I wonder who, if they had a meal like mine, would go back.

Perhaps they weren’t always like this, and drift and complacency is now setting in. Who cares? You can only make one first impression in London: there are many more fish in the sea, and countless other restaurants there. As I left to scuttle to the Tube in the rain I spotted Brasserie Zedel and Kricket and ruefully thought that my money would have been better spent in either. I probably would have been there longer, and found it much easier to get a table in the first place.

For that matter, a five minute walk away you have the French House. When I think about my lunch at the French House last year, it was everything the Devonshire wasn’t; I had four courses in a restaurant above a pub that is a genuine institution, not an ersatz, invented one. I was there for two and a half happy hours, enjoying the legendary long lazy Soho lunch all the early reviews of the Devonshire claimed that it delivered. I had better food, at a better table, I had far more booze and I spent slightly less money. I’d go there again in a heartbeat, but I won’t trouble the Devonshire’s labyrinthine booking system again.

The best gastropub in the U.K.? Sorry, but no: it’s not even the best gastropub in London. Actually, scratch that. It’s not even the best gastropub in Soho.

The Devonshire – 7.0
17 Denman Street, London, W1D 7HW

https://www.devonshiresoho.co.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Me Kong

On January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

When I ran through the trends in Reading’s food scene last year, two stood out: the proliferation of new, casual pizza restaurants and a similar blossoming of restaurants to cater to Reading’s Hongkonger community. Last week I explored the former at Smelly Alley’s Zi Tore so it only seemed fair, this week, to dive into the latter at Me Kong, the newest of these restaurants to open.

I identified some of these spots opening in 2025 – Woodley Food Stasian out in Woodley, Take Your Time where Dolce Vita used to be and the subject of this week’s review, which is tucked away behind Reading Library just down from The Blade next to the retro classic that is the Abbey Baptist Church. It’s a spot which somehow didn’t feel like it existed before Me Kong sprang up there: I can’t remember what, if anything, was there before.

But even that undersells the increase in restaurants catering to this market. After all Good Old Days Hong Kong, which I reviewed around this time last year, has been around since late 2023. Worse still, I missed out a couple of developments last year – YL Restaurant for one, which opened in the back of the supermarket that used to be the Warwick Arms a long time ago. And then there’s Soul Chill, a cafe that opened right opposite where I used to live on the corner of London Street and South Street. Its Google listing initially made it look like a bubble tea spot, but it boasts breakfast and lunch options.

All this, of course, springs from the introduction in January 2021 of the BNO Visa for Hongkongers, giving them the right to settle in the U.K. with a path to citizenship. Reading – always a multicultural, well-educated, polyglot place – has as a result both developed and embraced a significant Hongkonger community. With that come all the advantages of vibrancy, including – selfishly, for me – new and interesting places to eat.

Me Kong is a particular type of establishment, a cha chaan teng. These are “tea restaurants” that originated in Hong Kong in the Fifties, following on from the bing sutt, or ice room. Cha chaan tengs are often likened in print to the British greasy spoon or the American diner, but I think that’s more to try and find a term of cultural reference readers might understand. In reality they are a creature all their own, and a very eclectic one at that.

Food at a cha chaan teng is often described almost as a fusion of Chinese and European – another term often used is ‘soy sauce western’ – with dishes including Chinese ones with which you’d be familiar and more esoteric options like baked pork chop with ketchup, or macaroni soup topped with char siu. In Hong Kong cha chaan tengs are a great gastronomic leveller – swift, efficient and frequented by blue and white collar workers alike.

Plenty of my research suggested that cha chaan tengs are on the wane in Hong Kong, as for that matter greasy spoons are here, but it’s somehow fitting that a wave of them is opening in the U.K. Because I’ve read that when they first sprung up in Hong Kong in the Fifties it was because Hong Kong, run by the British, welcomed Chinese refugees. There are echoes of that, I suppose, in the situation now, seventy years later.

A taste of home, or nostalgia, makes perfect sense if you settle somewhere so far away from your roots, and last month I saw a few photos of customers queuing round the block to try Me Kong for the first time. But did this food also have the potential to win over a wider customer base?

Someone thought so ten years ago, when a restaurant literally called Cha Chaan Teng opened in Holborn, but the reviews were not good. Marina O’Loughlin, then writing in the Guardian, said the food gave her “the kind of clammy shame I’d feel if I woke up post-bender to find myself the fifth Mrs Gregg Wallace”, adding that “cha chaan tengs aren’t renowned for their cuisine”: what’s the opposite of a white saviour?

There is a difference, though. That restaurant was geared at customers of European descent, while Me Kong promises to be the real thing. So on a Tuesday lunchtime I pootled over with my great friend Jerry, who was especially interested in Me Kong because it’s probably the closest restaurant to his gorgeous, incredibly tasteful flat. Forget whether I liked it or not: I also wanted to see if Jerry could find a brilliant new local.

We got there around twenty past twelve and the place was already packed with a queue for tables, albeit one that hadn’t moved out onto the street. I will say though that although we as a nation like to think we’ve invented queuing, Me Kong has perfected it – quickly assessing each table size needed and gradually corralling us into different spots in the waiting area.

At the front there were counters showing off all of Me Kong’s baked goods – buns, pastries and the like – and so some of the people joining the queue were simply buying that stuff to take away. Nothing fazed Me Kong’s front of house, and after no more than five minutes we were ushered to a table.

Me Kong’s interior is really rather impressive, I think. On one level it’s a front room with booths, a back room with tables and a corridor connecting them. But that doesn’t even begin to do it justice, on many levels. They’ve gone all the way through the building, so the front looks out on Abbey Square and the back onto the Holybrook, and that results in a really lovely space where everything feels airy and beautifully lit.

Not only that, but it felt polished and finished in a way new establishments so often don’t: the colour of the wood panelled counter; the tasteful banquettes; the bright line drawings on the wall, everything seemed really considered. And the branding, from the menus to the cups to the napkin dispensers, was extremely well thought out. I got the impression this wasn’t their first rodeo: I’d be surprised if it was their first restaurant, for that matter. It felt fully formed.

I should also mention that Jerry and I were, at the point when we sat down, the only customers of European descent in the place. But I never felt conspicuous, because the staff were just so terrific from start to finish. One server explained to us that they really wanted to promote this kind of food, and I got that impression throughout the meal.

In fact, I’m jumping the gun by saying this but I’ve never been to a restaurant where the staff were quite so keen to tell you what the gorgeous-looking dish that had turned up at another table was (“that’s the braised eggplant with garlic sauce” one of them told me, as I admired a delectable-looking pot on my left).

Me Kong’s menu, on a ring-bound set of cards with that impressive branding, was a proper box of delights with an awful lot going on. One section featured noodles, either dry or in soup, along with five set meals, another common feature in a cha chaan teng. These gave you the option of some Hong Kong classics – ham macaroni soup, say, or char siu macaroni soup – paired with a bun and either fried egg or omelette.

A large section of rice dishes again led with a staple of the cha chaan teng, baked pork chop with cheese and tomato sauce on rice. Many of these dishes were more on the fusion side, so were perhaps more for purists. Another page of the menu featured four clay pot dishes and five stir fries, and another page of snacks offered dishes like deep fried chicken leg with curly fries – again, an authentic cha chaan teng choice – along with a full range of options from the bakery.

I would say that with the exception of that aubergine dish, which looked like it might have had minced pork in it, there wasn’t much for vegetarians here. The page marked Vegetables featured various green veg with garlic or oyster sauce, but would feel limited if that was your lot. There was, however, plenty here for the cost-conscious. The most expensive dish on the menu was south of £15, those set meals were less than a tenner.

Plenty of decisions for Jerry and I to make – but first, tea. Me Kong does sell alcohol (Sapporo on draft, or Guinness) but I really wanted to try the Hong Kong milk tea, another speciality of this kind of restaurant. It’s hard to describe but imagine a very strong cup of PG Tips, souped-up builder’s tea, served with condensed milk, a very pleasing shade of deep amber, and you wouldn’t be far off. I put a sugar in it, but on reflection wished I’d added more.

I don’t normally put a picture of a cup up on the blog, especially one where you can see so little, but: see what I mean about the branding?

I’d read online that Hong Kong milk tea is strained through a sock, or something like it (hopefully one exclusively used for this purpose), often multiple times, to achieve a particular level of smoothness. I can’t say whether a hosiery department was involved, but it did have a certain pleasing consistency. Maybe it was the note of Carnation, or the power of imagination, but whatever it was I enjoyed it.

Jerry originally wanted to try a yuen yueng, a blend of coffee and tea also particular to cha chaan tengs, but they didn’t have any Hong Kong coffee so he joined me in a tea. He liked it, but less than me: when we had a follow up drink I opted for more of the same, and he had an iced lemon tea – specifically requested as slightly less sweet on the excellent advice of the table next to me.

Before I talk about the food, I did want to say something about that. I’ve already said that the staff were really keen to explain other dishes and illuminate us on the cuisine of Hong Kong. But I’ve never eaten in a restaurant where that evangelism so extended to the other customers, too. During our meal the tables on either side of us were occupied by multiple parties – restaurants like this tend to be brisk – and so we got to rubberneck all manner of delights. Not only that, but the people ordering them were more than happy to tell us what they were.

All that meant that although we played it relatively safe with our order we saw more than enough to work out what to have next time. That macaroni soup topped with satay beef looked like an interesting, comforting order, but I was even more intrigued by a dome of rice crowned with an omelette draped over it, the whole thing then decorated with vertical strips of char siu. The traditional pork chop baked with cheese came in an earthenware dish, the kind you might associate with a lasagne, and I got a sufficiently good look to decide I’d leave that one to the experts.

Nicest of all were the lovely pair of civil engineers on my left. They worked in Thames Tower and had found out about the place and one, whose family were from Hong Kong, had decided to bring her colleague along to see if it recaptured the food of her memories.

She ordered a clay pot dish that I considered but been put off ordering because of the mystery meat component of “Chinese sausage”, and she even kindly let me sample a bit. It was delicious, with a sort of air dried texture like salami and a complex, fragrant flavour. I made a note not to let it deter me next time.

So yes, I chose the conventional option, the black bean chicken pot. But I am so happy that I did, because it was simply outstanding. A hefty pot full to bursting with boneless chicken thigh, skin on, cooked absolutely bang on so it was firm but had just enough give, no evidence of the velveting that can sometimes make chicken off-putting. Huge bits of spring onion, caramelised until heavenly, coexisted with all that chicken and extra goodies: little cubes of potent ginger and plenty of equally burnished nubbins of garlic.

But all that would be nothing without the sauce, a black bean sauce of ridiculous savoury depth, a glossy number with notes of Marmite which clung to everything: to the pot, to every crevice of chicken, to each layer of onion, each piece of ginger and garlic, every grain of steamed rice. This was deliciously viscous stuff, and I made it a mission to ensure that I left as little of it gleaming at the bottom of that black pot as I possibly could.

There is a part of me that is very tempted, just after noon on Friday when this review goes up, to find myself in that place again eating exactly this dish: it was that good.

Jerry had chosen every bit as well as me, going for the Singapore vermicelli with char siu and prawn. This was a magnificent one-stop shop, a very generous tangle of rice noodles tumbled through with chilli, prawns, strips of pork, beansprouts and fried egg. The menu described it as spicy, our server said it wasn’t so hot. Having tried a few forkfuls, I’d probably split the difference and say it was nicely challenging.

What saved it from chilli overload was a certain nuttiness, although I’m not sure where it came from. Perhaps it was the curry powder, an essential component of this dish which gives it its ochre hue. Professor Wikipedia advises me, pleasingly, that Singapore noodles have nothing to do with Singapore but are also a post-war Hong Kong creation.

The thing that made me happiest about these noodles was how much Jerry loved them. He told me he could happily see himself coming here of an evening, ordering these and sitting there taking it all in: he added that previously his go to had been the pad thai at Rosa’s Thai but that this was easily a rival for it. Getting people to eat at Me Kong instead of Rosa’s Thai is, I suppose, as good a mission statement for this blog as any: I’m glad it had that effect on my friend if nothing else.

But I can also see exactly what he meant about it being a space where you’d want to spend time. It was so busy, so beautifully efficient and well run, and so popular – with friends, with couples, with families. Small children were everywhere, but for a moment you could forget you were in the U.K. because they were, without exception, impeccably behaved.

The word that jumps out at me – that restaurants don’t always aim for and in any case don’t hit often enough – is fun. Everything about Me Kong was a riot, from its cheerful, charming staff to its delighted, curious kind customers. How could anybody experience that and not want to be part of it again?

Determined to cover as much of the menu as possible we stayed for some sweet treats and this was when, maybe, Me Kong’s sure touch faltered ever so slightly. I wanted to try the real staples here, so we started with a pineapple bun: no pineapple is involved, but it got the name because the sugar crust on top can, apparently, vaguely resemble a pineapple. I rather liked this – it reminded me of an iced bun, but with a crust rather than icing on top. Worth trying so you can say you’ve tried it, absolutely, but I don’t know when I’d feel a hankering for one again.

I really expected to love the French toast, another Hong Kong signature, but it didn’t quite hit the spot. Two slices of white bread, joined together with a thin mortar of punchy peanut butter, came fried and brought to the table with a little pack of Anchor butter to melt on top. Jerry said that those cultural references – Anchor butter, builder’s tea – added to that feeling of nostalgia, and I could see where he was coming from.

But for me this was just a little too stodgy, a little too light on the fun considering how many calories were involved. Ironically it needed to be more indulgent: the very nice civil engineer at the next table told me that often this was served with maple syrup, which would have utterly transformed it, but the server told me that they didn’t do tweaks or customisation for anybody, which I respected.

We didn’t finish it, because as an experience it was just a tad too grubby: I didn’t feel, as Marina O’Loughlin did, shame equivalent to waking up married to Gregg Wallace, but perhaps something comparable, like having a mucky dream about Nadine Dorries.

The last of our trio of desserts was a similar experience: I’d asked for an egg tart and been told that we’d have to wait twenty minutes for a fresh batch to come out of the oven. So we did, and when it came it was still warm and the pastry, buttery and short, was truly exemplary.

And yet I wanted to like the filling so much more than I did. I don’t know whether I was expecting the appealing wobble of a pastel de nata, or the nutmeg-dusted propriety of its English relative, but this was more egg white than egg yolk, somewhat lacking in richness and far more like blancmange that had found itself a very nice house. Again I wouldn’t order it again but I’m glad I tried it and for £1.70, only 10p less expensive than the pineapple bun, it was not an expensive mistake.

Our bill for everything came to just over £54, and there were two remarkable things about it. One is that if you order food they knock a very specific 51p off the price of each of your drinks, so they each cost £2.99. The second is that the service charge they add is only 8%: I questioned this with our server saying it wasn’t enough, and he laughed. “Next time you can tip a hundred pounds!” he said.

He also told me – and this might be useful to you, though it wasn’t to me – that if you spend over £40 they have a deal where you can get free parking at the Queens Road Car Park.

I hope the tip is so low because the staff there don’t need to rely on it to be fairly paid, because they very much deserve that. All of them were just terrific, and I know this has a strong whiff of and everyone stood up and clapped, but it’s true: practically every one of them said thank you to Jerry and I as we walked through the restaurant on our way out. I sent the pictures of our food to Zoë later as I was relaxing at Jerry’s with a cup of tea and a medicinal glass of red, and got exactly the reply I was expecting: perhaps you’ll take me some time soon.

This is precisely the kind of review, and the sort of restaurant, I wanted to kick off the year with. Me Kong is an absolute blast, brilliantly run and happens to do some excellent food, and I scoped out enough options on my first visit to give me plenty of food for thought on my second, third and fourth – if I can tear myself away from that chicken in black bean sauce, that is. It is already incredibly busy in a way most Reading restaurants in January would kill for, but I can see that continuing even after the novelty value has died off.

But what I also loved about it was how inclusive it was, how keen it was to tell its story far and wide. That spirit deserves to be returned in kind by Reading’s restaurant-goers. And it also made me a little proud of Reading: that our diverse, happy, tolerant town can still attract people like that and businesses like this, despite all the naysayers and bigots in the comments section of the Reading Chronicle.

I think if you read this blog you’re not like those people, and I think you’d find an awful lot to like at Me Kong. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the months ahead, I see some of you there. I certainly won’t be in Rosa’s Thai, that’s for sure.

Me Kong – 8.4
St Laurence House, Abbey Square, Reading, RG1 3AG
0118 3431543

https://www.facebook.com/MeKongReadingUK/

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Zi Tore

On January 16, 2026January 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

Unlike any restaurant reviewer I know of, I publish the list of restaurants I intend to visit. It’s regularly added to as places open and people tip me off about their favourite venues, in Reading or slightly further afield, and every time I review somewhere it drops off that list – until, maybe, many years later, the time is ripe for reappraisal. From the outside, it probably just looks like a bunch of restaurants, in alphabetical order.

But the reality, for me at least, is that it’s a nuanced to do list. It’s almost more of an in-tray, never more so than at the beginning of the year, and the order in which I tackle it depends on a number of factors. Because not all of those spots have anywhere approaching equal priority in my mind, and that dictates how quickly I get round to them. I’m aware, for instance, that it’s a fair old while since I visited Newbury or Wokingham on duty: over three years for the former, nearly three years for the latter. I ought to rectify that.

Then there are the new places that I really need to review, if only because they look interesting. If not for my accident I would have reviewed Pho 86 and Nua by now, and spots like Blip and Matteo Greek Grill & Bakery also merit investigation sooner rather than later, to see if smashed burgers can take off in Tilehurst or whether at last somebody can make a go of the old Colley’s Supper Rooms site. I’m curious myself about the answers to those questions, so I need to go exploring at some point.

And of course the accident currently factors into these things. So places near the top of the in-tray, for the time being, need to be fairly close to home and at least slightly lend themselves to eating with one hand; my motor skills are gradually improving with physio, but writing one of these reviews still involves wrangling with the delights of Apple Dictation, which understands what I’m saying about as often as my wife does when her hearing aids aren’t in.

Every to do list has that one thing on it that you should have done a very long time ago, the item that sticks out like a sore thumb and makes you feel guilty. And in my case that item, the subject of this week’s review, is Italian restaurant and cafe Zi Tore, the one which took the spot on Smelly Alley vacated by the Grumpy Goat back in October 2023: yes, it really has been that long since the Grumpy Goat shut. Hicks Baker weren’t quick off the mark getting someone to jump into this particular grave, but Zi Tore opened nearly a year ago with co-owner Paolo Lanzetta, a proud Neapolitan, in the kitchen.

The Reading Chronicle covered the story as only they could, getting the name of the restaurant wrong – it’s not ‘Zia Torre’ – and accidentally giving Lanzetta dual nationality. “It has always been my dream to open a restaurant like this so people can try authentic Italian and Nepalese cuisine” they misquoted him as saying: you can’t get the staff, can you? That’s our local paper for you though, they just don’t know their calzone from their momo.

All that means that I am very long overdue checking out one of the trailblazers of the Italian invasion that hit Reading in the first half of 2025. I’ve reviewed Paesinos, reviewed Amò – not without controversy – and failed to get to Peppito’s before it closed five months after opening. But Zi Tore remained the blind spot: I tried to get there early one evening in May, only to get turned away because they seemed to be closing early, but I’ve not been back since.

And everything I’ve heard since then has been good. I’ve had comments to the effect that they’re staying open later these days, feedback borne out by their later opening hours on Google. Long-standing reader Mansoor, a man I trust on many things, said that of all of Reading’s new restaurants last year Zi Tore was the one he ended up visiting most frequently. And my friend Enza, my authority on all matters Italian, has loved Zi Tore for a long time, especially their graffe.

I’ve also heard rumours that one of Amò’s pizza chefs, short of work now that the restaurant has been closed for over a month without explanation, had crossed town to start working at Zi Tore. So that was it: slap bang at the top of the 2026 in-tray. On a drizzly weekday, during a week that was originally meant to be time off but was now filled with medical appointments, Zoë and I wandered up Smelly Alley to finally give it a whirl.

Zi Tore has done a lovely job of the exterior and the frontage and the window, with arancini and pizza slices tantalisingly on display, draws you in nicely. But beyond the counter, I found the interior a little inhospitable. It’s difficult to describe it without harking back to the site’s Grumpy Goat days, but the back room on the ground floor, where all the beer used to live, was a slightly unlovely space with a handful of tables, starved of daylight or much ambience.

Upstairs was much better, although that also brought back memories of the site’s previous life. It’s a nice space with a fetching mini mezzanine looking out over Smelly Alley, and taking the bar out had definitely created more room. But even here the furniture felt functional and a little sterile, as if they’d bought it piecemeal.

One table with makeshift bench seating could accommodate six people, one of the plum spots up by the window had an actual bench and low table – great for coffee and cake, perhaps less so for lunch. It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, Arctic: an aircon unit in the ceiling was switched off, its remote on a nearby low table set to a random 30 degrees. It all felt a little spartan, not quite finished, even though the place was on the verge of celebrating its first birthday.

Zi Tore’s menu had the kind of concision that pleases restaurant reviewers: seven different Neapolitan pizzas, two types of pasta – ravioli or gnocchi – with one of three sauces, a lasagne and three smaller dishes under the heading “Street Food”. That was slightly marred by a separate paper pizza menu, a recent addition perhaps, with another half a dozen pizza options. Some felt like the kind of combinations you’d get at Amò, making me wonder if the departing chef had taken a few ideas with him.

Pricing was standard issue, with pizzas ranging from £10 for a margherita all the way up to £17 if you wanted porcini, roasted potatoes and sausage (typing this, that ensemble sounds rather good to me). Pasta dishes were between £12 and £15 depending on your shape and sauce of choice, and the smaller plates were less than a fiver. The other tempting dish, the pizza fritta, was a tenner and looked like a fish out of water in the street food section of the menu.

Cakes are not on the menu, so you have to go up to the display and ask at the counter: I didn’t indulge my sweet tooth on this occasion, but the cake I saw turning up at a neighbouring table looked thoroughly decent. I didn’t see any graffe – the loop-shaped potato doughnut beloved by my friend Enza – but perhaps they’re a weekend thing.

Zi Tore also doesn’t do table service, so you go up with your order and your table number and let them have it. I ordered a couple of coffees, a couple of small dishes, a pizza and a pasta dish: all that set me back just over £44, which felt like decent value. It was certainly comparable with its peers at Amò and Paesinos, although Zi Tore’s offering is slightly different from theirs.

It’s a shame to start the year with a regular complaint about timing, but I would have liked the coffees quickly – it was cold outside and almost as cold inside – and then the small dishes, then the main events. Zi Tore wasn’t hugely busy, with about four other tables on the go when we arrived, but in reality we waited what felt like quite a while and then everything turned up a matter of minutes apart.

No matter: the coffee, the starting point, wasn’t half bad. It arrived in those tall, almost-conical glasses I slightly associate with the last century, but my latte was very enjoyable and Zoë liked her mocha. In Reading’s coffee hierarchy this wasn’t competing with the likes of C.U.P. or Lincoln – or even trying to – but it was significantly better than Madoo‘s coffee, which has always been its Achilles heel.

Small plates, turning up twenty minutes after we ordered, were a mixed bag of realised and unrealised potential. I didn’t mind the sausage and friarelli arancino, just the one for £5, but it lacked a little pep. It was lukewarm, the shell had no real rigidity to it and inside the filling wasn’t brilliantly distributed: a big knot of dense sausage meat at the bottom, almost as if it had been placed there to stop the whole thing toppling over, like a Weeble.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, more that I knew better were out there: it didn’t match Amò’s but, on the other hand, it was far better than the ones at Vino Vita.

Far, far better was the montanara, a simple but exquisite treat, a pleasingly irregular, puffy oval of fried pizza dough topped simply with tomato, mozzarella and a solitary basil leaf. This was so enjoyable, and justified a visit to Zi Tore in its own right: there’s nowhere to hide when something has so few components, and it’s a great way to showcase how good your raw materials are. At £3.50, this is one of the Reading lunch scene’s bargains, and although we shared it between two – and it was big enough for you to do that – the wise move would be to come here and order one to yourself.

But the other wise move might be to order just that, because as I was eating it I did find myself thinking if only this was hot. It was fried pizza dough, I’m sure it was as hot as balls to begin with, and I wondered what had cooled it so: was it adding the toppings, or was it the fact that it sat around until everything else was ready or almost ready? Or could it have been that the upstairs was so Siberian that you couldn’t affort to wait until after your arancino to tuck into it? I think some benefit of the doubt is probably due here: I would go again and give this another try. Even on the upper reaches of what you could describe as ‘piping warm’ it was a very good choice.

The timestamps on my and Zoë’s photos tell me that our bigger dishes arrived less than five minutes later, and it’s good that we’d finished our smaller ones or there wouldn’t have been room on the table for everything. Zoë called shotgun on the pizza, and had ordered simply, the Diavola, a relatively classic pepperoni pizza with chilli.

First things first: it looked the part, and the rim was nicely speckled, blistered and spotted. This is, for better or worse, a very classic Neapolitan pizza, with all the pluses and minuses of that genre, still enjoying its moment in the sun in Reading as it is replaced with American interlopers and hybrids (and whatever ‘London-style pizza’ is) in the capital. That’s the extent to which I keep up with pizza trends, but in theory I’m still happy with the original forebear of all these mutations.

And yet, from the bit of this pizza I tried, this wasn’t my favourite rendition of it in Reading. Everything was very loose and sloppy, more so than at Zi Tore’s rivals on the Kings Road, which meant the centre was like what I imagine sex with Rupert Murdoch must be like, a droopy challenge. I heard someone online say “if it ain’t messy it ain’t fun” at some point last year, and personally when it comes to food I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed more.

But there was other problems here. The dough would have been best in class in Reading back in the days when Franco Manca got us all excited, but with the competition from the class of ’25 it was mid table – and that’s before we get to Zia Lucia’s charcoal base and its almost mythical effects on punters’ innards.

And the pepperoni didn’t do it for me either – now, it might well have been pepperoni rather than salami, but for me the benefit of pepperoni is its narrower gauge, the amount you can fit on a pizza, all those little chalices of fat dotted across the surface. Six big discs arranged with geometric precision didn’t have quite the same curb appeal. Zoë told me she also expected more pizza and more bite – from actual chillies, rather than a dusting of chilli flakes.

Does this sound miserable? I’m so sorry if it does, because I was so hoping to like this. Especially as Zoë left about a third of it – which would not have happened at Amò or Paesinos – and, just as damningly, I didn’t take it off her hands. But I do feel more unsure in my judgment than usual, because people I like rate Zi Tore and I, too, really wanted to.

I’m afraid to say, though, that the pizza beat the pasta hands down. I’d chosen ravioli – made fresh every day onsite – rather than gnocchi, and the porcini mushroom sauce over the ragu on the recommendation of others. And again I wonder if my antennae were just out of kilter that day, because I did not like it at all.

Didn’t like any bit of it, actually. The ravioli, six very large specimens, had bottoms more thick and dense than Robert Jenrick, when I was hoping for lightness and delicacy. I also think they could have stood to be smaller, or for you to have fewer of them, although if I’d liked them you can bet I wouldn’t have said that. The filling was meant to be ricotta and parmesan, but all I got was ricotta and an aggressive blast of citrus. Not a light zing of the stuff, but the sort of brutal clubbing you associate with bathroom products.

I tried eating them without the sauce to check that my tastebuds weren’t playing up. But yes, again, an overdose of lemon. Perhaps if there had been less, and more balancing saltiness from the parmesan, which was completely missing in action, it might have worked. But as it was it didn’t, and it slugged it out with the mushroom sauce for dominance. Those two components simply couldn’t get along at all: perhaps I should have known that and not combined them but, if they didn’t go, why was it an option on the menu?

Might I have enjoyed this better if the sauce took centre stage, paired with gnocchi? I tried that on its own, too, and decided the answer was probably no. It felt somehow less than the sum of its parts, without any savoury depth from the mushrooms, which might have been porcini but I was not convinced. And again, the presentation of this was about taking a plate and trying to fill it to the perimeter with stuff, just because. I would have liked less: lighter, more delicate presentation but with punchier, better balanced flavours.

Again, the ultimate heckle. There were six ravioli. I wanted to stop after three, but thought that would seem rude: isn’t it strange how as a paying customer you can still feel like that? I contemplated leaving two on the plate but felt that even that would somehow be discourteous or ungrateful. So I ate another, and then decided I’d done my duty. I was undeniably full, make no mistake, but it had felt like a friend cooking for you in all the wrong ways.

I so wanted not to begin the year with a review like this, especially after all the hoo-ha last year every time I stepped into any Reading restaurant which was even vaguely Italian. I’m surprised, given the smear campaign I found out about, that I was even allowed on the premises at Zi Tore.

But the cosmos has well and truly taught me a lesson. I made the mistake of saying in my round up of 2025 that I might be better off giving every Italian restaurant a rating of 6.6 and saying it was ‘quite nice’ from now on, and fate rewarded me with this experience. Look at the rating below: you couldn’t make it up, but if I moved it a notch up or down I’d only be doing it so as not to look as if I was fulfilling a prophecy.

So I need to at least be more nuanced when I sum up Zi Tore than to say that it’s quite nice. That doesn’t reflect the complexity of the reality, anyway, and visiting the restaurant nearly a year after it opened you can’t put the things you aren’t wild about down to growing pains or opening before they’re ready. The experience I had there is the experience I was supposed to have.

It is fantastic that a hospitality business took the space vacated by the Grumpy Goat, and that there is still one oasis of food and drink on a run which used to be synonymous with food and is now full of mobile phone repair shops nobody seems to visit (and, to be fair, Reading’s finest branch of Timpson). It’s also fantastic that it’s independent, and laudable that Zi Tore makes everything onsite and offers options you can’t get elsewhere in town that have made at least one Italian I know ecstatic and a little less homesick.

And I can see that I would return to Zi Tore, believe it or not. I’m really sorry that I didn’t love the pizza or pasta, but one of those window seats on the mezzanine with a cup of coffee, a montanara and the chance to explore some of their cake after that would very much appeal to me. Especially as the service was so good, and happy and helpful. But I don’t know if Zi Tore will survive and make enough money if all its customers order like me, or whether it really wants just to be a café given the expansion of its pizza menu and its opening hours.

Fortunately for Zi Tore I suspect not all of its customers order like me, or think like me, and Reading is a big enough place that it might well carve out a large enough share of the market keeping at what it does. But the market may well contract further in 2026, and so I wish them the best of luck. At the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Amò, closed for over a month on Kings Road, will reopen. Ironically, it might be good news for Zi Tore if it doesn’t.

Zi Tore – 6.6
7 Union Street, Reading, RG1 1EU
0118 9561531

https://www.zitore.co.uk

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Feature: The 2025 Edible Reading Awards

On January 9, 2026January 9, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Features4 Comments

You’ll have to forgive me, because in the normal run of events I announce my award winners at the end of the year, wrapping everything up in a bow so we can all get on with a fresh twelve months. I’m tardy this time, partly because writing these is still more laborious than it would normally be (I won’t go into all that again) and partly because, having dodged the flu/lurgy/Covid that Zoë invariably gets over Christmas most years, she’s managed to get clobbered with a chest infection instead, right on New Year’s Eve. So the house has become a little hospital ward in its own right, and writing has taken a back seat. Never mind: better late than never.

You’d think the extra deliberation time would make writing these awards easier, but if anything it’s had the opposite effect. It’s been a good year for Reading food, with plenty of good, interesting places opening in and around the town centre. But the majority of those new places – the best of them, anyway – are squarely in the casual dining sector, offering pizzas and burgers, the stuff that influencers tend to review. We’ve not had a similar rise in other kinds of restaurants, and when I asked on my Facebook page what people would like to see more of in 2026 the comments, all full of hope and optimism, made for quite a frustrating crib sheet of many of the things Reading still lacks.

No specialist fish restaurant, no proper gelato parlour, no Mexican restaurant. No Latin American cuisine of any kind, come to think of it (“it’s hard to get Samoan chop suey round here” said possibly the most niche comment I received). A lot of people identified that we still lack a tapas restaurant, something I’ve been moaning about since the earliest days of this blog, when we had a bad one. Many others wanted a good, independent Italian restaurant and a French bistro: French food is having a proper moment in London, but that has not extended this far west yet.

Some people wanted things which required the geography (and possibly the climate) of Reading to be different – more al fresco dining and rooftop bars – and others expressed more general aspirations we can all get behind. “Less greedy landlords” said one person and, not necessarily changing the subject, “less John Sykes” said another. Everybody wanted lower rents for independents, a utopia we’ve been waiting for long enough to know it won’t happen. One comment wanted to see “a realisation by landlords that it’s better to have a good tenant paying less than you’d like than to have an empty unit paying you nothing at all”: don’t we all? “I just want a decent bagel bakery” read one plaintive cry.

It’s hard not to feel discouraged, reading all that. And doubly so for me, because a reasonable proportion of my reviews last year were of places outside Reading, in the surrounding countryside or further afield, in Bristol, Oxford, Bath or London. And I know there’s a degree of cherry-picking going on – I don’t pick places a train ride away unless I’m confident they’ll be worth the journey – but the restaurants I’ve encountered on my travels often have what Reading lacks.

And I don’t see places like that opening in Reading, not on the evidence of last year or any year since 2018. We don’t have a pub like the Three Tuns, a bar like Newbury’s Parched, a restaurant like Seasonality, a bakery like U. Bakery or a tapas spot like Arbequina. We have pizza and burgers, and pizza and burgers have their place, but it’s starting to feel a tad lopsided.

So these awards have something of a split personality, because this year I’m giving out awards for dishes and restaurants in Reading, but also for those further afield. I’ve had some excellent food in Reading, but the very best of what I’ve eaten in most cases, as this list clearly shows, has involved some travel. I sincerely hope 2026 closes the gap.

That isn’t intended to imply that you can’t eat wonderful food in Reading. Because you really can, and narrowing the awards down to a winner and two honourable mentions has been difficult in many cases. To give you an idea, I couldn’t find room for dishes – all excellent – by Kungfu Kitchen, Pau Brasil, The Moderation, and Good Old Days among the final winners, and an extra week or two of head-scratching didn’t make that any easier. But if deciding between Reading dishes was difficult, possibly deciding between dishes outside Reading was just a little more fun; one was an agonising choice of who went where on the podium, the other a somewhat more satisfying wander down memory lane.

Anyway, without any further ado let’s get on with opening another year’s set of sealed envelopes. I hope you enjoy this, even if you find much to disagree with in it. Here’s hoping the decisions are even more problematic when this all comes round again at the end of the year.

STARTER OF THE YEAR (Reading): Frittatini, Amò Italian Street Food

Amò’s pasta fritti, breadcrumbed, fried pucks of pasta with either ragu or – even better – aubergine and tomato are not always available, but when they are, they’re an absolute must order. I can’t remember how many times I ate them last year, I just know that it wasn’t enough. “They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form” I said when I ate them for the first time. I know I’m not always right, and doubtless you do too, but I was right about that.

It saddens me a great deal that I couldn’t give this award out to either of the runners-up. Honourable mentions go to Oishi for its exquisite prawn and leek gyoza and Club India, the pride of Winnersh, for curry leaf calamari, an almost impossibly moreish dish.

Restaurant review: Club India

On October 24, 2025October 24, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

This week’s review partly came about because of a gentleman called Andy Hayler. Now, you might not know who Hayler is, but in terms of food he’s something of a phenomenon.

The shadowy world of Michelin exists behind an impenetrable curtain, with nobody sure how they work or what dictates who gets listed, is awarded Bib Gourmands and stars – or, sometimes, has them taken away. Andy Hayler is the closest thing we have to a Michelin inspector working in plain sight. He has a blog, which has been around since the 90s, in which he has documented hundreds of meals in restaurants, giving each restaurant – and every dish – a mark out of 20.

I’ve rarely seen anything get lower than a 10, and very little approaches the top of his scale, but that’s because a fair amount of what Hayler has reviewed is at the highest end of dining. There was a time when he had eaten at every three starred restaurant in the entire world, although he stopped keeping up with Michelin when, as he puts it, they devalued what three stars should signify by giving them out in some territories to restaurants that were nowhere near the standards he had experienced elsewhere.

Hayler has a sort of cult, niche status in food. I’ve read a couple of pieces about him in recent years, both verging on hagiographies. He’s been described as “the best living food writer”, and I’ve read interviews that gush about his effortless recall and the esteem in which he is held by chefs and restaurateurs. He is the cognoscenti’s critic of choice and no mistake.

I think he attracts some of those plaudits because of what his reviews both are and aren’t. They don’t, in some senses, read like reviews at all, more like audits from someone scrupulous and meticulous who has forgotten more good meals than most of us will ever have. Although it doesn’t sound like he forgets many of them: why would you, when you document them all in such extensive detail?

I think the respect also comes from his refreshing lack of ego; Hayler would be the first to draw a distinction between himself and many restaurant reviewers. “I wouldn’t ever pretend I was any sort of fantastic prose master. I’m not trying to throw in a load of stuff about my journey to the restaurant and the trendy people on the table to the left” he has said, subtly throwing shade on half the piffle I come out with every week.

Don’t worry, there’s no way he meant me personally: in fact, he once described one of my pieces, about Maida Vale’s Paulette, as a “lovely review” which I found surprisingly touching. “Most of the newspaper critics want to be writers first, I want to focus on the food” he said more recently. I suspect the people who read him admire that purity of approach, and it does mean that when he thinks somewhere is dismal or overrated, which happens occasionally, it’s really very amusing.

What’s also admirable is that Hayler goes where he likes, reviews wherever he wants: money seems to be no object, and he doesn’t follow the fads. You won’t find him, for instance, reviewing Brasserie Constance, a restaurant operating out of Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage, unlike nearly every broadsheet critic over the last few weeks. Instead, his two or three reviews each week involve him going wherever he pleases, in London and abroad.

His two main weaknesses seem to be eating at the Ritz in particular and eating Indian food in general. Hayler is a regular visitor to Epsom’s Dastaan, and the little group of restaurants it has spawned in Surbiton, Richmond and Leeds. He’s also a frequent diner in Southall, and when he gave a warm review to Hounslow’s review of Crispy Dosa last November it caused a Mexican wave of regional bloggers checking out their nearest branch to touch the hem of his virtual garment (been there, done that – four years ago).

“If Mr Hayler thinks it is OK, it is a fair bet I will probably like it” one said. “You can be assured that if Andy says a restaurant is worth visiting then it really will be” said another. That’s proper soft power, and all from the opinion of a chap you mightn’t have heard of.

Hayler even came all the way west to Caversham last year to review Clay’s, something I’ve been waiting for him to do for a very long time. He gave it 14/20, which may not sound like a big deal but actually is. “Clays is a very impressive family-run restaurant, the food shows a lot of care, and the chefs are clearly putting some real effort into reproducing an authentic taste of India” he concluded, after paying particular tribute to Clay’s cabbage pakora, lamb chops and, of course, bhuna venison (Hayler also tried methi chicken, a dish he seems particularly to favour).

Seeing Clay’s reviewed by Hayler was like watching somebody you know being interviewed in the national news, and it made me proud. It didn’t make the local paper the way Grace Dent’s write-up had, but in its way it was every bit as significant. Hayler, as he said, is all about the food.

Now, by this point even my most supportive readers are probably thinking ‘this is an even more circuitous intro than usual, what has this got to do with anything?’ Well, I’ll tell you: every week Andy Hayler does a roundup on his blog, and every week the byline gives a couple of destinations. From South Kensington to Mayfair one might read, or From Piccadilly to Rome. Fancy restaurants and/or jetsetting are invariably involved. And then, at the start of the month, one made me do a double take. From Winnersh to West London, it said.

Winnersh? Our Winnersh?

It was not a misprint. Andy Hayler had come all the way to Winnersh to try out Club India, an Indian restaurant that opened back in July where the old Pheasant pub used to be. I mentioned that development when I reviewed Dolphin’s Caribbean, back in June, What I said, looking back, feels a little graceless, especially as they sent me a lovely email inviting me to a pre-launch event. I read the blurb and thought it sounded potentially interesting, but then again: Winnersh?

Andy Hayler had no such compunctions. Club India’s consultant chef had held two Michelin stars at his restaurant in San Francisco, although Hayler’s verdict on that place was that if a chef had gone there trying to pick up tips “he or she would either burst out laughing maniacally or seek to throttle any passing Michelin inspectors; possibly both”. But the head chef had headed up the kitchens at a couple of London restaurants Hayler really rated. So he went, he enjoyed it, he dished out scores out of 20 for all the dishes and, of course, he ordered methi chicken.

Overall he gave it the same rating, 14 out of 20, as Clay’s. “Club India was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, the food and service excellent, and at an affordable price. I wish I could say that more often these days” was his conclusion. That was good enough for me, so on a Friday night after a couple of pre-prandial beers in town Zoë and I hopped on the number 4 bus to go and see if Reading really did have a rival to Clay’s Kitchen, tucked away in – this may not be the last time I say this word slightly incredulously – Winnersh.

You can tell it’s a former pub, but the glow up is nice and, on the inside, pretty subtle and tasteful. The room I was in, at the front, was muted wallpaper and leather banquettes, but every room was slightly different and the one the other side of the bar from mine, with its tiled floor, was my favourite. When we got there around 7.30 it was already very busy with big groups and couples on dates, in full swing with a busy service ahead. Hayler said it could seat 70, which sounded about right, with outside space too.

I guess it’s easier to have more space than you need in this part of Reading than it is in Caversham, but in any case it was bustling on a Friday evening. The tables were more Winnersh than desi when I arrived, although I would say that balance shifted as the evening went on. It certainly felt like a restaurant that wanted to attract both demographics, and anybody else besides.

Our table had a good view of the room and of the very strong service. The man who seemed to be running the show, sporting an impressive man bun, thick white stripe right down the middle of his dark luxuriant beard, was a class act, but in fairness everyone who looked after us all evening was lovely, polite and enthusiastic, even the ones who seemed a little nervous. It had the swagger of a restaurant that had been there a lot longer than three months.

We started, as you might, with apéritifs and poppadoms – and if that seems like an incongruous pairing, Club India does a good job of making them feel like they go together. Zoë liked her negroni, although she wasn’t sure it tasted quite like a negroni and couldn’t put her finger on why. I had something called an Amber Signal, which I suspect featured in the Johnny Depp defamation case a few years back. It was a blend of Aperol, whisky and Drambuie and felt surprisingly grown up by my standards, something to sip slowly and mindfully. Both cocktails came in glam, exceptionally heavy-bottomed glasses that could have doubled as a paperweight or a murder weapon.

The poppadoms were splendid, by the way – warm, thin, greaseless and very hard to stop at just the one each, which is probably why we didn’t. But the chutneys were the thing: you pay £3.50 or so for these but they were all made by hand and far more interesting than the usual fare. The mango chutney was thick and rich with nigella, the raita so robust that I thought Greek yoghurt must have been involved. There was a mixed berry number which surprised, possibly mostly through novely value, and best of all an inspired shrimp chutney which we managed, being our best selves, to equitably divide despite the unworthy temptation to hog the lot.

The menu at Club India takes a long time to go from first read to decision, because you want to order most of it. It is the only restaurant I can think of in Reading with a tasting menu, at a very reasonable £45 a head, or £70 if you throw in the wine pairings, and if it had contained the dishes I’d really fancied from the à la carte you’d be reading about it right now: nevertheless, it sounded like really solid value.

But the à la carte was just too tempting – about a dozen starters, the same number of curries, some biryani dishes and plenty of vegetarian dishes which you could downsize to try as a side dish. They also had a separate vegan menu, so they could definitely make many of the vegetarian dishes without ghee. Starters ran the gamut from £5.50 to £15.95 and the most expensive main would set you back £18. Pricing, put that way, looked pretty reasonable – and although the obvious reference point for this restaurant, given my preamble, is Clay’s I also had Masakali in the back of my mind. Club India’s menu is far more streamlined than Masakali’s, and to my mind less expensive.

From this point on, you might find yourself wishing I adopted Andy Hayler’s much more concise method, because I’m afraid we very much went wild in the aisles picking a lot of dishes, ordering like the place might close down tomorrow. Andy Hayler might have said curry leaf calamari was good, the apricot glaze giving an extra dimension (13/20). I would say that I really loved this jumble of sticky ribbons of squid, somehow crispy and caramelised without succumbing to bounce or toughness. The menu says that it’s grandma’s recipe: I loved my grandmother very much, but I might have sacrificed her to the devil himself in return for one who could cook like this.

Just as terrific were the lamb chops, two glorious inverted commas of meat, best end blackened from the tandoor but still blushing on the inside. Up there with the best lamb chops I’ve had, and I’ve tried them at Clay’s, and at Didcot’s extraordinary Zigana’s Turkish Kitchen. At sixteen pounds you’d need them to be, but for me they delivered in spades and I was very glad we ordered them.

If you believed the menu, these came with coriander chutney and a smoked aubergine raita: it didn’t feel, from my recollection or looking at this photo, like that’s exactly what was going on. There was allegedly beetroot in the marinade, it felt like it had escaped into the smear on the plate. But to be honest whatever smudge of sauce you add, whatever spiralised veg and leaves you artfully zhuzh on top this stands or falls on the meat and the meat alone. Zoë, far more primal about these things than me, picked it up by the bone and gnawed until she could gnaw no more.

Completing our trio of starters was the only dish, apart from those poppadoms, that Andy Hayler and I both tried on our visits. 12 hour braised, spiced pulled pork rested, in a beautiful tangle, on an uttapam, a thicker, slightly spongy variant on dosa. I really wanted to try this dish for so many reasons – because it’s just absolutely up my alley, because Hayler raved about it, giving it a rare 15/20 and because I’d had something similar at a beer pairing lunch at Clay’s Kitchen last year, and that dish had been one of the best things I ate in 2024.

Did it come close? Yes. You would have struggled to put a poppadom between them, in terms of interest and quality. Clay’s version used minced pork rather than pulled pork, and there was something deeply texturally satisfying about Club India’s slow-perfected strands. Club India’s rendition had more whistles and bells, a coconut chutney, microshoots and fripperies. But if you stripped all that away, you just ended up with a small plate – from either restaurant – that would grace any starter menu, anywhere.

The spicing was a beaut, the coconut chutney went perfectly, I loved it from start to finish. We shared this, as we did the other two dishes, but I could gladly have polished one of these off solo. I could equally have said that about the other two dishes, too.

At this point the restaurant was at its liveliest, I had a gorgeous glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc on the go and I had that warm feeling that comes from knowing I’m eating at a discovery – no, not a hidden gem, but a find. The starters we’d eaten, for my money, were up there with most Indian restaurants I’d dined at, and at or around the quality I’d come to love at Clay’s.

Could Reading finally have another contender for the crown? I found myself, mid-meal, daydreaming about the rave review I would scurry home and write. Zoë was thinking that this was a place, not a million miles from Woodley, that she could persuade her parents to visit. And that wasn’t all. “Are you thinking this would be a suitable venue for one of your readers’ lunches?” she asked me. I had been doing exactly that.

So it saddens me to piss on the proverbial chips and say that the rest of the meal was a gentle descent from that summit. It didn’t end up in the slough of despond, but it settled somewhere that felt more like settling. And although that’s a shame, in the wider scheme, it doesn’t mean that anything we ate from there on in was bad, it just wasn’t quite as extraordinary.

Take the kadaknath chicken curry we’d ordered. One of the things I really liked about Club India’s range of curries was that it mixed up stuff you’d heard of – butter chicken, rogan josh, methi chicken and so on – with dishes I wasn’t familiar with. Kadakhath is a particular breed of Indian chicken that the menu says is particularly known for its gamey flavour, and Club India uses black leg chicken to get as close to that as possible. From that, I was hoping this would be a bit like Northern Spain’s pitu caleya, but this was pretty unremarkable. Breast rather than thigh, too, which reminded me how Clay’s approach to chicken curries is so different from everywhere in Reading.

That’s not to say I didn’t like it, or that I didn’t like the gravy, made with fenugreek and crushed peppercorn. I actually very much enjoyed its savoury, almost perfumed depth, those slight wintry hints of leather about it. But everything felt out of kilter. The chicken was submerged in a lake of the gravy, slightly unbalanced, and the gravy wasn’t quite interesting enough to carry things on its own, even dolloped onto some perfectly nice saffron and cumin pulao.

I’m sorry to keep mentioning Clay’s, but it was inevitable that I would in trying to benchmark somewhere like Club India. The gravies at Clay’s, each of those distinct, exceptional sauces, is so captivating that the meat is merely, in many cases, a vehicle. You clean up every last molecule in the bowl with your rice, with some bread, with your spoon, with a finger if you must. Club India didn’t quite reach that standard, which meant that the curries were just a little too wet.

Better, although still not quite there, was a curry described simply as Champaran meat. This was my favourite thing from this section of the meal, and the sauce again had depth and complexity. But what elevated this was the really terrific lamb, marinated overnight and with an almost unbeatable texture, leg at a guess, slow-cooked until it could cleave like kleftiko; this dish is cooked over charcoal in a sealed pot, which probably contributed greatly to how wonderful it was.

Again, I’d have liked it a little more sticky and a little less swimming, but that didn’t stop it being head and shoulders above most curries you’d get in Reading.

We ordered a couple of vegetable side dishes, one because I insisted and one because Zoë did. Mine was baby aubergine in a sauce with jaggery and tamarind, two of my very favourite things. And yes, a sauce that combined them was as sweet and tangy as you would expect, and I loved that. But I didn’t want a bowl of the stuff with two – just two – baby aubergines bobbing in it. And that, slightly unfortunately, is what I got.

Zoë on the other hand had put in a request for Club India’s okra stir fried with peppers and onions. If she was writing this review she would tell you that she really liked it, and for that matter that she really likes okra. But you are stuck with me, I’m afraid, and Clay’s thinly sliced, crispy take on okra is, I think, the only variant of this ingredient I have ever enjoyed. I feigned generosity telling Zoë she could finish this but she knew, deep down, that it was because I wasn’t a fan.

I will say this, though, Club India’s keema naan is the best I have ever had. This is another to file under ‘Zoë always orders it, and I nibble a bit without any great enthusiasm’. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve taken a bite and been confronted by weirdly scarlet, oddly bouncy mystery meat. That fate does not befall you at Club India: the meat lurking in the middle of a deliciously airy naan is properly belting stuff.

It made me want to try their sheekh kebab next time – and credit to Club India, not only do they list the provenance of some of their ingredients but the lamb for the Champaran meat comes from one place, namely North Wales, while the lamb for the sheekh kebab comes from Romney Marsh, completely the other end of the U.K. You do have to at least slightly admire that.

By this point we had checked the timetable for the bus back into town and realised that neither of the options – namely leaving in ten minutes or lingering at Club India for over an hour – were going to happen. So we embraced the concept of a taxi and rewarded ourselves with dessert. I was hoping the gajar halwa that Andy Hayler had rather enjoyed would be on the menu, but the compact selection of four had already moved on since then. It was the one area where Club India’s imagination felt like it had run out, because when one of the four options is a chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream I think, as an upmarket Indian restaurant, that you’re playing it far too safe.

Playing it safe rather defined my dessert, too. A mango cheesecake, a small dainty cylinder, was genuinely quite charming and went nicely with the diddy glass of dessert wine I’d ordered with it (a 50ml pour is on the small side, but it was £5 so it didn’t matter so much). But again, the menu promised a hint of chilli and if it was a hint it was too subtle for me. I’d have preferred a clanger of chilli, if we were picking between extremes, and it rather appeared that we were.

I think Zoë ordered better, although she mightn’t have agreed. Rasmalai tiramisu was, for me, far more imaginative and more in keeping with the rest of the menu. I’m not sure it was really reminiscent of either, more like the two had been put in separate machines and teleported into a blend, like something out of The Fly. But I liked it and envied Zoë, and the pleasingly squeaky sort-of-cheese in the base made it something you’d eat to experience, let alone to taste. For me that fusion, that experiment worked.

Zoë seemed to feel differently, but she does like okra and me, so there are already a couple of valid question marks against her judgment.

At the end of the night, Uber on the way, I settled the bill and found myself thinking it was generally decent value. We had a couple of aperitifs, a couple of dessert wines, I had a glass of white and then there was that onslaught – of poppadoms, of three starters, of curries and side dishes and rice and naan and dessert. We’re not going to play The Price Is Right, but when it came to £170, including a modest 10% service charge, I felt like I’d had a lot of evening for my cash. We were there nearly two and a half hours, enough time to watch multiple sittings come and go, and to watch the staff properly earning their money.

So where do you benchmark Club India, after a meal like that? Well, first of all: Winnersh and Woodley, that eastern edge of Reading, is very fortunate to have it on their doorstep. I think it will do very well, partly because it is indeed good and partly because nothing around there even comes close to it.

In terms of the kind of place it is, the most obvious comparison, for me, is Masakali; they are trying to be similar restaurants, but Club India far surpasses its predecessor on the Caversham Road.

Club India is the restaurant Masakali hopes to be when it grows up, and an illustration of the difference between having your menu dreamt up by a head chef, with some advice from a decorated chef in an advisory capacity on the one hand, and having your menu mechanically assembled by some kind of offshore committee slash agency on the other. Quality will out: Club India is way ahead of that competitor.

But as for the others? If everything else had managed to sustain the extraordinary quality of those starters, the arrival of Club India would be one of the big Reading food events of 2025. That it doesn’t is a pity, but it doesn’t change the fact that even Club India’s more ordinary dishes still feel like a cut above most places.

So if they don’t quite reach the level of Clay’s Kitchen, they should console themselves by knowing that they are in good company there, in a support group made up, pretty much, of every restaurant in Reading. But if you are comparing them to the next level down, the likes of Chilis, I think they can give a very good account of themselves.

So there you have it. I guess if I was Andy Hayler, I would have summed this up by saying, in his inimitable style, 12/20. But I’m not Andy Hayler, I’m me, and so I’ll conclude this review with that slightly enigmatic score below. It’s the only way I know.

Club India – 8.1
355 Reading Road, Winnersh, RG41 5LR
0118 3048701

https://www.clubindia.co.uk

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

STARTER OF THE YEAR (Reading): Frittatini, Amò Italian Street Food

Subscribe to continue reading