Sam’s Wraps

On July 15, 2016August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

You can still eat Sam’s Wraps at their van on Broad Street or their kiosk in Forbury Gardens, but the shop closed in May 2017. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I’ve wanted to review Sam’s Wraps for some time. It’s a proper Reading success story, starting out as a van on Broad Street before expanding to also take over the café in Forbury Gardens. Then, this year, came the logical next step: they took over premises in the town centre on Cross Street, the one that isn’t Queen Victoria Street but runs parallel to it, a funny street full of barbers and salons (and A Stitch In Time, the alterations place which has a special place in my heart). I would have reviewed Sam’s Wraps sooner but every time I’ve tried has been a Sunday and, despite the claims of the sign on the door, it’s never been open when I’ve strolled up to it. Even approaching it on a Saturday lunchtime I was half expecting it to be shut, and delighted when it wasn’t.

It’s a basic but tasteful place – a few tables in the front section and then another room out back, nicely lit through a skylight, with attractive, functional furniture. You order at the counter looking up at the menu, then take your wrap through and get stuck in. And the menu is limited in a way which is also appealing. The clue’s in the name, but there is a range of hot wraps (jerk chicken, piri piri chicken, curry chicken) and cold wraps (the main ones I remember were prawn and something called “vegatarian”, spelling which mightn’t fill you with confidence). I had the jerk chicken, my companion wanted to try the prawn but they had sold out so she went for piri piri instead.

The experience is familiar to anyone who’s ever been to Mission Burrito – the staff toast a 12 inch flour tortilla in front of you and ask you if you’d like it spicy. If you say yes, they take less than a teaspoon of innocuous looking chilli relish and smear it a molecule thick across the tortilla (more on that later). Either way they then spoon a really generous portion of chicken – slow cooked, in little dice – into the wrap from the chafing dishes behind the counter. You then decide whether to add cheese before choosing from a plethora of other fillings: cucumber; red onion; finely diced pepper; iceberg lettuce; gherkins; and jalapeno. Finally, you pick a sauce and then they assemble the whole thing, secure it with two carefully placed cocktail sticks, like sandwich acupuncture, pop it on a plate and off you go with it.

What this basically means is that the two wraps we had were similar if not the same, and both were bloody gorgeous. They’re huge things, and impressive value at four pounds (cheese costs fifty pence extra), but what also impressed me was just how well they were filled and what good quality everything was. We had the piri piri chicken – smoky and slightly hot but not mouth-stingingly so – with cheese, beautiful crunchy fresh peppers, strips of cucumber and sweet chilli sauce and it was a delight from beginning to end. The jerk chicken, by contrast, was with Reggae Reggae Sauce, cheese, lettuce and sweet, cold slices of gherkin and was equally good, although because I had this wrap with a smidge of the chilli relish by the end my tastebuds had been thoroughly nuked and my tongue felt like it had been put in a vice, doused in petrol and set alight. If you like heat, have the chilli relish and enjoy yourself, but if you’re in two minds give it a wide berth. Either way I’m not sure the cheese really adds a lot, especially for fifty pence.

Oh, and I was dubious about how effective the cocktail sticks would be but the guys at Sam’s Wraps really do know what they’re doing, because they make it very easy to eat with your hands; also, once you get past a certain point in the wrap you can pull one out and feel ever so slightly like you’re playing Kerplunk.

I’m afraid that’s all there is to it, this week. I went to Sam’s Wraps, I tried two different wraps and they were absolutely splendid. I could tell you that I had a cup of Earl Grey which was nothing special. I could tell you that service, if a bit dour, was very efficient and well done; not much to do in a sandwich shop except explain and execute, but that was all present and correct. They even re-did the jerk chicken wrap after accidentally adding chilli sauce instead of Reggae Reggae (thank heavens they did, or it would have been hotter than the sun). I suppose I should tell you that the whole thing cost ten pounds thirty for two wraps and a solitary cup of tea, and that they really should sell bottles of milk if they’re going to serve anything with that chilli relish. But that’s it. Sam’s Wraps is not flashy, it’s not showy but it’s very good at what it does and without tapdancing it’s really rather terrific. If only the same could be said of this review.

Oh, and as I left I saw a big sign in the window saying “NOW OPEN SUNDAYS”. Bloody typical.

Sam’s Wraps – 7.6
8 Cross Street, RG1 1SN
0118 4379318

Sam’s Wraps

Smokin’ Billy’s

On July 8, 2016May 15, 2021 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

As of May 2021 Smokin’ Billy’s has not reopened and will apparently become a coffee shop. I’ve left this review up for posterity.

It’s not good, on a Wednesday night, to be the only people eating in a restaurant. Immediately alarm bells start to ring: what does everyone else know that I don’t? Is it bad? Is it safe? What am I doing here?

Another good question is what year is it?, because although it’s 2016 everywhere else, in Smokin’ Billy’s it seems to still be 1995: there are nachos and loaded potato skins on the menu and a five foot high fibreglass model of Marilyn Monroe near the bar. All very glory days of TGI Fridays, I guess, and so 90s that I expected to leave the place to see Café Iguana in full swing opposite (how I miss the Rome toasted sandwich with garlic and herb potato wedges), to be able to head to Edwards’ or Bar Oz down by the train station for a final drink.

The Marilyn theme wasn’t confined to the statue: there were pictures and quotes from Marilyn everywhere (along with random electric guitars and Norman Rockwell prints on the walls) a testament to Smokin’ Billy’s previous incarnation as Monroe’s. According to the nice chap at the bar it was renamed nearly two years ago but otherwise very little has actually changed – same menu, same décor, same chef.

Looking at the menu I could quite believe that it was two years old, judging by how sticky it was. Popping to the loos down the badly lit corridor at the back (no signs on the toilet doors, incidentally, which could be tricky after a couple of drinks) it was apparent that the stickiness extended to the floor – so much so, in fact, that I could see my footprints on the laminate. That said, the kitchen looked clean and the Score on the Door was five out of five (I won’t lie: I was crossing my fingers when I came back to order, hoping the rating wasn’t also two years old).

It would have been wrong not to order the potato skins – many things from the Nineties have been rightly consigned to the rubbish bin of history (Noel’s House Party, Mad Dog 20/20, every record ever released by Jimmy Nail) but I think the time is right for loaded potato skins to make a comeback. Sadly, Smokin’ Billy’s is not the right stage for it: we ordered them topped with barbecue chicken and expected a thin crispy potato skin, hollowed out and filled with good stuff. The topping, such as it was, was reasonably good (hard not to enjoy barbecue chicken and cheese), but when the thing your loaded potato skin is loaded with is, well, potato you’ve accidentally ordered jacket potato as a starter. And nobody wants that, surely?

Similarly the garlic mushroom and cheese quesadilla was more Ocean Colour Scene than Oasis. A Mexican toasted sandwich is a great idea in theory but this didn’t work in practice because the mushrooms were just a bit odd: leathery with a weirdly metallic aftertaste. I’m not sure how recently they’d been sautéed or whether that was the problem but something about them really wasn’t right. Hard to detect any other flavour in the quesadilla either, with the mushrooms singing so loudly and so very out of tune. Each starter, served on a massive plate which itself looked deeply 90s, came with a ramekin of sour cream topped with a slice of lime and sprinkled with paprika. Somehow the whole thing felt more Tex-Meh.

Another warning bell followed: the waiter cleared our plates away and offered to bring out our mains pretty much immediately. We managed to agree a five minute wait but I couldn’t help worrying and wondering that all that meant was that our mains were sitting on the pass gradually getting less appealing. After all, how could they be ready to come out straight away if they weren’t already ready? As it was, five minutes wasn’t enough to make me feel anywhere near prepared to eat more food: those jacket potatoes in disguise sat heavy on the stomach.

By this point my expectations were pretty close to the (sticky, laminate) floor, so I’m happy to report that the main courses were – if not exactly amazing – far better than I had feared. Pulled pork was pretty decent: served on the bottom half of a burger bun (a bit random, but never mind) the pork was properly shredded but with enough texture to see what it had been, and just about on the right side of moist and soggy, smoky and sickly-sweet. Only just, but I was expecting far worse.

It came with coleslaw (served in a lettuce leaf for no reason I can think of), sweet potato fries, mini sweetcorn cobs and onion rings. Most of it wasn’t half bad – the sweet potato fries, lovely and crispy, stood out and the onion rings were surprisingly good given that their uniform shape made me suspect they’d come out of a freezer. The corn on the cob though was actively awful: watery, chewy and – if I’m being really honest – strangely fishy-tasting. Not sure how you get that sort of flavour into a corn on the cob, by accident or design, but either way you really need to stop. I’d be surprised if it had been either fresh or freshly cooked. The orange slice on top of the pulled pork, however, was fresh. An baffling choice of garnish, I know, but at least it was easy to discard.

Another surprise: the burger wasn’t bad either. I am no burger purist and I’m sure if you were you could find plenty wrong with this one – it was served medium-well according to the menu but I thought it was more cooked through than that. But it was pretty pleasant, with loads of cheese (cheddar, I think, rather than a yellow American slice), some decent bacon, more of the onion rings and a barbecue sauce which, as with the pulled pork and the barbecue chicken in the starter, was nearly too sweet and synthetic but just about on the right side of the line. The bun was allegedly a brioche and managed the feat of looking like one without tasting like anything of the kind, but I didn’t mind it.

Only those diabolical mushrooms from the quesadilla, making an unwelcome return appearance, wrecked proceedings. But also, I really liked the chips, against my better judgment. Again, their regular shape suggested they’d been chipped in a factory, stuck in a bag and bunged in the freezer but they’d been beautifully fried – crunchy-fluffy and perfect for dipping in some barbecue sauce. Was what I experienced enjoyment or relief? Tell the truth, I’m still not sure.

Service, from an idiosyncratically coiffed young man wearing what looked like a cravat, was friendly, chatty and personable. But we were the only customers so some of the lapses were hard to understand: it took a while to order, our mains were seemingly ready the moment our starters were finished yet after we finished our mains our mostly empty plates were in front of us for what felt like an eternity. I think he was chatting to his friend at the bar – which is lovely and all, but his friend wasn’t ordering food or paying a bill (an activity which also took longer than it should have done). And yet I quite liked the charming amateurism: as with everything else, I wanted to like Smokin’ Billy’s a little more than I actually could.

There was no drinks list (when I asked the waiter he said “but I can list all the drinks for you”, which kind of sums the place up) and when I got to the bar the selection of soft drinks was woeful (two flavours of J20, cans of red bull and fizzy drinks from the siphon). So I had tap water, which came in a jug with ice without having to be asked – although no water glasses, so I had to have it in a wine glass: yet more randomness. My companion had a pear cider, from a bottle (he didn’t trust the pumps). Both of us would probably have been a lot happier with a bottle of Hooch. Those were the days. The total bill came to forty pounds.

If I had gone to Smokin’ Billy’s in 1995 I would have thought it was amazing. The world was a more innocent place in the 90s and we were all so much more easily pleased. Ben’s Thai, Utopia, RG1, actual cinemas in town that weren’t grubby multiplexes, Orient Express down by the Antiques Centre, Trader’s Arcade… the list goes on and on. But in 2016 Reading is a more complex and discerning place, and although I was rooting for Smokin’ Billy’s I couldn’t help feeling that places elsewhere do these things a lot better. Bluegrass across the way has pulled pork sewn up. The Oakford does a better burger. Literally everywhere does better drinks. So if a friend or a colleague dragged me back to Smokin’ Billy’s although I might complain, I’d probably enjoy it while I was there, and tell myself I was being post-modern. But really, it made me glad to live in the now – still missing the 3Bs and Café Iguana, mind you, but delighted with how far Reading has come.

Smokin’ Billy’s – 6.5
61 St Mary’s Butts, RG1 2LG
0118 9573500

http://www.smokingbillys.co.uk/

Nirvana Spa, Sindlesham

On July 1, 2016January 1, 2021 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

I’ve never reviewed the French Horn in Sonning, for one specific reason. Not the prices, although when starters hover around the twenty pound mark and main courses edge closer to thirty it does get harder and harder to say “hang the expense”, convincingly at least. It’s not the faffiness of the menu, although the French Horn’s Habit of Capitalising Pretty Much Every Word does lend Proceedings a Weirdly Dickensian Feel. It’s not even the fact that the menu seems to have an asparagus with hollandaise sauce on it all year round at twenty quid (is it flying first class from Peru?).

No, the reason I haven’t gone to the French Horn is that I’m reliably informed it has a dress code, and I just don’t do dress codes. It feels like a throwback, and something about getting into my glad rags just really rankles. I mean, I’m the customer aren’t I? And it’s not like I’d turn up in a crop top or a string vest, hot pants or swimming shorts; I’ve eaten at lots of lovely restaurants just the right side of well turned out and never been turned away, but when somewhere pompously announces they have a Dress Code (those Dickensian capital letters again)? Count me out.

What that means is that Nirvana Spa is probably the only place I will ever review which does have a dress code. And when I say dress code, I mean that you eat your lunch or dinner in a lovely white fluffy robe, your towel nonchalantly draped over the back of your chair and – in my case – your trashy paperback perched on the table. And if you go on a warm day, like I did, you get to do all of this outside, beaming at everybody else, similarly attired. This must be a bit like how it feels to be in a cult, or live in California (or both), I’ve always thought.

Sometimes I review restaurants and I’ve had a bad day first. I love writing reviews, but it’s a bit like a job – admittedly a job I adore – and there are times when you go and your heart isn’t one hundred per cent in it. Things are crap at the office, or the car failed its MOT, or you’re out of sorts with a friend, or Britain has voted to leave the EU and you still have to go out, eat with an open mind, take photos and write hundreds of words about what it was like. Hopefully you can’t tell in the words or the rating, if I’ve done it properly.

Nirvana is the other way round, if anything – it’s hard not to be happy when your most difficult decisions that afternoon are whether to read Hello! or OK!, whether to have the honeycomb tiffin or the salted caramel ice cream in the Roman Room, whether to go to the hydrotherapy pool or snooze on the heated terra cotta loungers. How can you have a bad meal under those circumstances?

On the other hand, I went on a long-booked visit the Sunday after the referendum result, when there was a weird atmosphere across the country. That weekend was like waking up hungover with The Fear, not entirely sure what you’d said or done or to whom. To complete the irony, Nirvana’s owner had sent a controversial mail to members only that week “offering them the opportunity to read” an article he’d written about how Brexit was a very good thing (I half expected to arrive to find bunting everywhere). So, a happy place at a sad time: what would lunch be like?

The menu at Nirvana has two options – either all you can eat from the salad bar (which also features a number of hot options) for fourteen quid or the a la carte menu which has starters, sandwiches, salads and main courses. The salad bar is included if you visit as a day guest rather than a member and really, I ought to have eaten from it to give you a representative view. But I’m afraid I was in need of cheering up so I didn’t, although I can tell you from past experience that it’s not half bad (and especially impressive for vegetarians and vegans where it gives a range of choice you’d struggle to match elsewhere).

Instead I stuck to the menu, deciding to kick things off with a selection of artisan (everyone’s favourite ubiquitous, meaningless word) breads for two. I was denied the opportunity of doing this when they turned up at exactly the same time as the starters, but none the less they weren’t half bad, especially at less than two pounds. All warm, some slightly toasted, a good array with the dark malted one, studded with seeds, my particular favourite. Butter was at room temperature (which always helps) and it was nice to have olive oil and balsamic although, as so often, nowhere near enough.

The starters were less impressive. We’d both gone for salads and I wonder whether they had decided to prioritise virtue over taste. Smoked chicken salad was presented in a way almost deliberately calculated to underwhelm – a fan of smoked chicken on one side of the plate, your salad on the other. Not mixed at all, and the salad also appeared to be barely dressed at best. What’s a real shame about this is that it had potential to be a lovely starter if done better – the salad was full of firm peas and crunchy beans and would have been beautiful with a bit more dressing and the smoked chicken, although a tad wan and floppy, did set it all off nicely. I seem to recall that the menu at Nirvana specifically says that you can ask for your salad dressing to be left off completely; it’s a pity it doesn’t also give you the option to ask for it be glugged on with abandon.

Similarly, the baked smoked salmon salad was an exercise in restraint. A handful of salad leaves lightly dressed, topped with a thinly sliced radish (singular, I’m guessing) with a few chunks of salmon dotted round the edge. I was expecting a tangible piece of salmon rather than these chilly fragments and considering it was the most expensive starter on the menu (nine quid, since you ask) it felt miserly. It came with a wedge of lemon, just in case you weren’t feeling bitter enough, and a few de-seeded slices of chilli, mixed in as an afterthought. If I’d made this myself with bits from M&S it would have cost half as much and been twice as big. A shame, because what there was was nice, refreshing and light. I was just glad we ordered the bread.

After all that the main course was a beautiful, delicious surprise. Fillet steak came with a delicious, nutty pearl barley risotto which I adored. I’ve had pearl barley risotto quite a lot in Prague for some reason but it doesn’t seem to crop up on menus here much, a shame because it has much more about it than conventional risotto often does. There was also a solitary carrot – fair enough, I suppose – and two beautifully sweet, shallots which had been cooked into softness. The fillet itself was rare, exactly as requested (I went back to CAU recently and they, a specialist steak restaurant, still seem unable to get this right: Nirvana 1, CAU 0) and although I would have liked it to have a little more flavour, the texture was terrific. Finally, drawing everything together, what the menu described as “oxtail sauce”, rich strands of oxtail strewn on top of the fillet and all over the pearl barley risotto. Sixteen pounds fifty for that lot, and one of the most interesting ways I’ve had fillet steak for a very long time; if this dish had been on the menu at a restaurant near me I’d already be trying to contrive an excuse to go back.

I also wanted to check out the lighter options on the menu, so we ordered a pulled pork wrap. This was just lovely: the thin flour tortilla was rammed full of really good pulled pork (smoky and sweet without being sugary as it so often is) with fresh, crisp, contrasting coleslaw. I liked the fact that it was served warm, too – so different from a cold claggy sandwich. It cost as much as the salmon starter, but felt like considerably better value. It came with a small leafy salad I didn’t much care for with a squiggle of creamy dressing, but perhaps I was just saladed out by that point, if such a verb exists. It might not have looked much in comparison to the fillet steak, but I thoroughly enjoyed it all the same.

Nirvana isn’t the place to order a dessert; you’re there all day after all, and saving some room for an afternoon snack is one of the only ways to break up the delirious monotony of being a modern-day lotus eater. So we finished our drinks (a decent glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc for me and a rose cava for my companion), charged the meal to a membership card and ambled off in the direction of an outdoor jacuzzi. Two courses, that bread selection and a couple of drinks came to a smidge under fifty-five pounds. That doesn’t include service at Nirvana, but all the service there is smiley and friendly, on the informal side but none the worse for that. If they were elated or devastated about Brexit, they certainly didn’t give it away.

As I sat in the outdoor jacuzzi, wishing they let you drink bubbly in there, I did briefly wonder about whether you could separate Nirvana’s food from the overall experience of being at a spa for the day. I’m not sure. If you picked the restaurant up and plonked it somewhere else, aside from being perturbed that all your fellow diners were in robes, I think you would like but not love the food. Not just that, but some of the pricing seems strangely generous (that fillet steak main), some arbitrarily expensive (the smoked salmon starter). As so often, I wonder about the wisdom of giving a rating; I love being at Nirvana, I love eating there and yet eating there isn’t quite the point. But then I decided I’d thought about it quite long enough – the world outside appeared to be either taking back control or falling to pieces, depending on who you believe – and before long I would have to leave my hermetically sealed bubble and go back to it. I was glad my phone, with access to constant news, was stowed away in a locker.

Later on I did go to the hydrotherapy pool, by the way. Some of the massage jets weren’t working, and many of the handles you use to cling to the side were broken off. It’s been that way since the start of the year: it’s a shame the owner feels like he has better things to do than fix it.

Nirvana Spa – 7.3
Mole Road, Sindlesham, RG41 5DJ
0118 989 7500

https://nirvanaspa.co.uk/

Caffeine & Cocktails

On June 24, 2016July 13, 2021 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

N.B. Caffeine & Cocktails closed in July 2021. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

One thing I often complain about is big, bloated menus; huge things with a bewildering array of dishes leaving you to wonder how you can possibly avoid a dud. Indian restaurants and Chinese restaurants are especially prone to this, but actually it’s an issue in many restaurants. Like a CV, a menu should be short and to the point, it should advertise what you do well and it should never outstay its welcome. Just as nobody needs to hear about your Duke Of Edinburgh Award from umpteen years ago, I don’t think diners want a plethora of options knowing full well that the only way that kitchens can do them all is through the ping of the microwave or the sinister hum of the engine of the Brakes Brothers lorry. It’s no coincidence that the first thing Gordon Ramsay used to do in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares was slash the size of the menu (well, that and criticise people’s omelettes).

I mainly tell you this because, if it gets nothing else right, Caffeine & Cocktails succeeds admirably in this department. Six options for breakfast, three options for lunch, two for dinner. Breakfast until 11, lunch until 3, meat and cheese boards from 3 until 6. Over half of the choices are meat free. There’s an elegant simplicity to this that I wish other establishments would learn from (although paradoxically Dolce Vita, right above Caffeine & Cocktails, has a colossal menu and I’m still yet to have a bad meal there). I turned up right on the cusp of eleven am with a companion, ready to sample both the breakfast and lunch sections to give as full a picture as I could.

Caffeine & Cocktails used to be Mix bar, a place I never much liked with horrible garden furniture (nobody should have to sip a cocktail sitting on a huge faux marble bench) and a ludicrous “private area” behind an unnecessary velvet rope. Every time I used to walk past after last orders I could see the clientele standing outside, clanging away on cigarettes, a relentless doof-doof-doof noise coming from the Stygian depths within and it made me long for my bed with a nice cup of tea, a hot water bottle and Just A Minute on the iPlayer. In short, it made me feel ancient.

The transformation is sleek and striking. It’s a long thin room with attractive parquet-effect tables, clubbable Chesterfields, a dark concrete floor, indoor trees, gorgeous herringbone tiled walls and industrial light fittings. It really is quite lovely without trying too hard (unlike, say, RYND) and a surprisingly pleasant place to while away time. Only one thing lets it down, and that’s the dreary sexism of the graffiti in the toilets. Marriage is a workshop… where husband works and wife shops”, said one quote in the gents’. Why did the Mexican push his wife down the stairs? Tequila said another. It feels a bit like they invited Donald Trump to the loos with some chalk and told him to go crazy, and that crassness really lets the side down. The irony – they have the most beautiful Aesop handwash at the sink, but you still leave the bathroom feeling unclean. The ladies’ toilets, if less positively offensive, are equally lazily stereotypical with references to diets, cocktails and Taylor Swift.

Anyway, let’s talk about the food. Caffeine & Cocktails only does three sandwiches and I went for “The Cheesy One”, a mixture of cheddar, Comté and Emmental with onion chutney and mustard, mainly because I’d been a couple of times shortly after opening, ordered that sandwich and always been impressed. Something about that mixture of cheeses, when toasted, really works – the gooey elasticity of the Emmental, the punch of the mature cheddar and the grit of the Comté is a holy trinity, perfected by the sweet chutney and the tangy mustard. So I was saddened to find that when my sandwich turned up it completely failed to live up to my happy memories – it was barely hot at all, the cheeses were still cold at the centre of the sandwich, the flavours failing to come alive.

It was definitely meant to be toasted, I could tell that by touching the bread, but clearly a half-arsed job had been done. It wasn’t that it had been cooked and left lying around, it had just never been cooked properly in the first place. And although there were quite a few tables occupied on a weekend morning, it’s not like they were rushed off their feet. Such a sad waste of potential: without the transformative power of the grill the sourdough, which should have been slightly charred, oiled outside and oozing within, was just a chewy, anticlimactic wedge. If I’d never had it before, I would have been disappointed. As it was, I spent the rest of my lunch wondering whether I was more or less disappointed because I knew how good it could be.

The toasted sourdough also made an appearance in the other dish I ordered, from the breakfast menu. This time it was topped with “smashed” avocado (how very Shoreditch, 2014) with feta and tomatoes. Studded through the avocado were a few pieces of chopped red chilli but even with this the dish was lacking in oomph and needed something – a touch of lime, some salt, mint, or a lot more chilli – to elevate it from quick make at home breakfast to something with more flair. That’s maybe a little harsh – the topping was nice, not ungenerous and the cherry tomatoes added beautiful sweetness. But the bigger problem was the bread – toasted sourdough really wasn’t (unless it had been wearing factor 50 at the time) so what should have been light and crispy was instead soft, tough and somehow dried out. Another attempt to find a great breakfast in Reading ended unsuccessfully, I’m sorry to say.

The drinks were a mixed bag. Loose tea is apparently from Good & Proper (Caffeine & Cocktails, Good & Proper… what is it with all these ampersands, I wonder?) and I’m sure it’s both those things but if you order Earl Grey you get a stump teapot full of hot water and a solitary bag of Twinings on the side. Basic verging on just not good enough, I’d say. Coffee is from Monmouth, and I’m reliably informed that the latte, while oddly thin and watery, tasted very nice. It was however, in keeping with all of the food, just not hot enough. The weird sugar, a mixture of white and brown cubes and lumps, also didn’t fill me with confidence. Lunch for two – a sandwich, a breakfast, a tea and two lattes – came to seventeen pounds. Service was nice and friendly, and maybe I should have given them the opportunity to prove how good it was by sending my food back, but I just couldn’t face it. I guess you’re more forgiving when it’s just a sandwich, or maybe the hassle just doesn’t feel worth it.

I’m inclined to be forgiving with Caffeine & Cocktails. I didn’t have the best of visits, but I’ve been enough times to know that they had an off-day when I turned up on duty. And there are definitely positives: it’s independent; it’s stylish without sacrificing comfort; it has that clever, sensibly compact menu. On the other hand, if you only do a few things you have to do them well. There just aren’t any excuses. I really wish they’d been on song because that toasted sandwich, at four pounds, is far better than anything you could get at Pret or Picnic for the same money (especially if you dip the corner of it in a little pool of their very tasty, beetroot-purple, sugar-free ketchup). It clearly adds something to Reading’s food and drink culture, to the extent where I even found myself wondering whether its cocktails could finally replace the sadly departed Sahara. So despite the misfire I’ll be back to give them another chance. I’ll pass on using the bathroom, though.

Caffeine & Cocktails – 7.0
Unit 5, The Walk, RG1 2HG
0118 3485103

http://www.caffeineandcocktails.co.uk/

The Little Angel, Henley

On June 17, 2016January 1, 2021 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I was really sad when I heard the news a few weeks back that the Lyndhurst had closed down, another casualty in the ongoing battle between landlords and pubcos. One thing Reading still lacks is a decent range of town centre pubs that do good food. It’s not all terrible: we have the Moderation (although it’s hit and miss, and a bit out of town); the Nag’s Head (just for the pulled pork rolls really, but they’re dead good); and of course I Love Paella at The Horn, but I had high hopes that the Lyndhurst might be that place. Well, it turns it out it wasn’t. Even before it closed it never quite got there, it lost its chef and despite its shiny refurbishment the last couple of times I went I felt like it had stopped trying.

I daydream that one day Reading could get an establishment like Bristol’s brilliant Bank Tavern, a place that still looks like a well-worn boozer but does a small range of beautiful dishes. But days like today that seems a long way off, so this week I headed to Henley, home of the wonderful Three Tuns, to see if lightning really could strike twice in the same place.

The Little Angel is not to be confused with the more well-known Angel on the Bridge in the centre of town (the one with the tourists, plastic cups and a nerve shredding seating area suspended over the river). The Little Angel is just the other side of that bridge, where the road forks between Wargrave and Remenham, yards from the boat clubs and the areas where most of the Henley Regatta excitement happens (if you class that sort of thing as exciting).

The pub itself is an attractive white building with a large conservatory painted in a muted olive green. We originally decided to sit in the conservatory – it was a hot day, and the open doors were very welcome – but eventually decided to move because it was such an ugly room. Maybe at night, filled with people and with the Moroccan lanterns hanging from the ceiling it might have been a lovely place, but daylight didn’t improve it. Instead you saw the mismatched tables and chairs, the scruffy unattractive tablecloths and got a slight sense of decline. It wasn’t inviting.

Back in the main pub itself things were much nicer, although still rather empty, and we got to have a good look at the menu. It had just enough flashes of variation – turmeric, cardamom and cinnamon spiced rice, aromatic duck broth, harissa marinated chicken – to lift it from the usual pub fare of pork belly, burgers, sausage and mash. Annoyingly, in the couple of weeks since I visited the menu has now changed completely: frustrating to experience as a reviewer, but good to see as a diner (although really, you ought to change your menu more than once every five months if your website is going to talk about your love of seasonal food). There were, in the pub’s defence, a couple of specials up on the board.

Originally we were tempted to start with a sharing platter but neither of them quite grabbed us enough, because they seemed to be one or two nice things from the starters section with a lot of padding (houmous, baby chipolatas, the kind of stuff you find in the “picnic” section of Marks & Sparks).

Instead I went for one of the more interesting-sounding starters on the menu. Spiced squash and goat’s cheese samosa was nice if not wildly exciting: two small samosas which tasted mainly of goat’s cheese, possibly because squash is too delicate a flavour to compete with all that salt. The pastry was thin and crisp with the sort of fluffy cheesiness inside that you’d expect from hot goat’s cheese. I was really expecting this to be lifted by the accompanying curried cauliflower purée, served as an arty smear on the side. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Unfortunately it didn’t bring enough punch to be worth adding – not enough spice, not enough flavour, lacking the courage of its convictions. Toasted almond flakes, always a welcome addition, brought a bit of much needed texture but even so it was hard to feel enthusiastic about the whole thing.

The chicken and guinea fowl terrine was also a dish beset with problems. There’s a fine line between subtle and clean-tasting on the one hand and bland on the other. I’m still not entirely sure which side of it the terrine fell on – there was a bit of tarragon, which I loved, but overall it was still a bit dry and softly-spoken for me. Drier still because the advertised focaccia really wasn’t focaccia. None of that moist, cakelike feel, no drizzled oil, no lovely oozy toasted texture. It was just bread. The last possible salvation, the balsamic fruit chutney, wasn’t really chutney. It was a small ramekin almost exclusively full of raisins (which I personally don’t like).

Also, I don’t normally complain about how dishes are served – slates, boards, they’re all fine with me – but I do like to have enough space to actually eat the blasted thing. No such joy here – all of it was crammed on to a small board as if it had been forced to walk the plank, and it was difficult to press your dry terrine on to your dry toast before sprinkling it with dry raisins without getting some overboard. If that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, it’s because it wasn’t.

I’ve been to many restaurants where the starters were amazing, my hopes got raised and then a mediocre main turned up. That’s the nature of starters, it’s easier for them to leave you wanting more. But I’ve rarely experienced it the other way round, where an iffy starter gives way to an outstanding main, so by this stage it felt like our hopes had been way too high. We got as far as checking the train timetable to make sure we wouldn’t be caught in Henley for too long and planned a quick exit ready to be back in Reading for a digestif (well, pint) in the Allied before last orders. It felt like the Little Angel was going to be another lacklustre out of town pub no one would bother to go to, a review no one would want to read.

Then something remarkable happened: our mains arrived.

Harissa chicken was an interesting alternative to piri piri chicken, a supreme of chicken, juicy and yielding, the skin crisp but not overly so and the coating tasty but not fiery. A deceptively simple, nice thing. It came with chorizo dauphinoise, a new one on me and a salutary lesson in how to do something useful and tasty with the thin slices of catering chorizo that can so often feel like a let down. Here, discs of it were slipped between the layers of the dauphinoise, releasing their brick-red juices and adding an extra dimension. The potatoes were still a little dry (maybe the whole thing needed a tad more cream) but I liked it. Shredded mange tout, sitting underneath the whole affair, were really lovely – barely cooked, lots of crunch and sweetness and coated in something like chilli oil to add some heat (a side dish, of more mange tout with beans, shallot and chilli, was very similar). Not a hugely sophisticated dish, and possibly something you could recreate easily at home, but well thought out and well balanced.

The other dish was the find of the whole meal, and nothing like what I expected from the menu. “Braised, shredded lamb and rosemary parcel” was the description, and if that wasn’t entirely accurate I have some sympathy because I too find this dish incredibly hard to describe. Parcel suggests it’s wrapped in something (generally pastry, I suppose), but what I got instead was a big dome of shredded lamb (shoulder, I’d guess), rosemary, potatoes and vegetables, bounded by itself. What was it? I still don’t know. Not quite a faggot, not quite a steamed pudding, not quite a meatball, not quite like anything I’ve ever eaten. What it was, though, was delicious. Huge, hearty, tasty and utterly bewildering. It came with a lovely, rich, sticky jus, a sweet smudge of puréed carrot and plenty of heritage carrots – thick, perfectly cooked, a riot of orange and purple to stop the dish being relentlessly brown. I’m sometimes critical of websites like Alt Reading for reviewing plays you can no longer see, so I feel a bit bad about enthusing about this dish: again I find myself cursing the Little Angel for changing their menu so recently, because I wish some of you could have tried this.

So, iffy starters, terrific mains… and the desserts? Well, I’m afraid we’ll never know: I chickened out. I almost wanted to retain that element of suspense, and I couldn’t quite bear the idea that the lamb parcel might turn out to have been a gorgeous fluke. A shame in some ways, as again the desserts looked more interesting than run of the mill; I was especially pleased to see no chocolate brownie on there, always such a lazy choice for kitchens (although guess what? They’ve since added one on the new menu). So we settled up – dinner for two, two courses and a glass of wine each was fifty-three pounds, excluding tip. The wines in question were a Chilean chardonnay – perfect for the sunny evening; cold, crisp and easy to drink – and a cherry-packed Malbec. Service was respectable, with a very chatty, friendly bar manager and a slightly shy waitress actually doing the fetching and carrying.

If the Little Angel was in Reading, it would be a lovely place to go on a weekday evening or a Friday night. Reasonably priced (starters around the seven pound mark, mains for thirteen), comfy, a menu showing signs of imagination. Forming a relationship with a regular restaurant is like a friendship – the first impression is good, you enjoy that first meeting, you want to know more and then eventually you’re prepared to overlook an off night. And I can see that if the Little Angel was nearby that could definitely happen: yes, the starters were a little disappointing, but inconsistency isn’t the worst thing to level at a kitchen when it’s also capable of moments of magic like that lamb parcel. Even out of town, I can see that it would be worth a trip if you’re out that way (and you like the look of their new menu, of course). Most of all, this makes me sad that Reading doesn’t have that kind of place quite yet: casual dining is still too much a market cornered by the chains. So next time I have a weekday evening free, off duty, and I want to eat out you’ll probably find me at The Horn. Eating paella. Doing my bit.

The Little Angel – 7.0
Remenham Lane, Henley-on-Thames, RG9 2LS
01491 411008

http://www.thelittleangel.co.uk/

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