Sapana Home

On September 19, 2014September 18, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

Click here to read a more recent review of Sapana Home, from September 2026.

Go to Sapana Home, someone recommended on Twitter recently. Great dumplings, good curry and brilliant value. Well, I thought, how can you argue with that? In a single Tweet they’d conveyed easily as much information as you find in one of my reviews, so the least I could do was act on the tip-off.

It’s a low-key place at the end of Queen Victoria Street closest to the station, and the inside is unprepossessing and unpretentious. A long thin room, it has some little tables for two at the front and a couple which can seat four at the back near the counter (downstairs is bigger, but a bit like a cellar and not a room you’d want to eat in unless it was full and had some atmosphere). And Sapana wasn’t full when I got there around half-eight on a weekday night – although, unusually, it was almost full when I left.

There’s no website so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m so used to checking out menus before I go to a restaurant to review it that it was a strange experience seeing it for the first time in the restaurant and being expected to know what I wanted to eat pretty much there and then. The pressure! (Yes, yes, I know: this is how it is for most people in most restaurants pretty much all of the time).

That said, the menu at Sapana couldn’t be more helpful, as it not only describes the dishes but has lots of photos of the food. Yes, photographs. Normally, these conjure up the whiff of package holidays (and garishly saturated pictures of English breakasts. And flashbacks about holidays – and English breakfasts – I’d sooner forget) but in Sapana they were very useful because my experience of Nepalese food is limited and it was nice to know what you’re letting yourself in for.

So what was I letting myself in for? Well, momos for a start: all the reviews I’ve read mention them so it felt rude not to sample them. You get a choice of fillings and can either have them steamed (if you’re feeling virtuous), deep fried (if you’re not) or pan-fried (if you’re not but you want to kid yourself that you are). Mine were the latter, packed with chicken and every bit as good as everybody says – with hints of lemongrass and coconut, delicious with the spicy accompanying sauce. Generous, too: I think this helping was something like six pounds and easily divided between three without leaving anybody feeling short changed (their close relative, the gyoza, costs about the same over at Wagamama for half as many).

Of course, that didn’t stop the three of us sampling two other starters. Of those, the best was definitely sukuti bhatamas – dried buffalo meat in herbs and spices with soy beans, onions, garlic and chilli. The meat was in little intense crispy nuggets, somewhere between the texture of biltong and really good pork scratchings, in a very, very hot sauce, topped with crisp raw red onion. The beans with it were a little disconcerting: I was expecting them to be soft but quite a few were crunchy, hard even, but once I got my head round that I enjoyed the whole lot. It was topped with fresh coriander and served with a helping of sauce which was either the same as the one which came with the momos or too close for me to be able to tell the difference. Halfway through this dish the waitress thoughtfully brought over three glasses of water, not a moment too soon (that kind of thoughtful, polite service was repeated all evening).

The siu mai – pork dumplings – were less impressive. I was expecting a fluffy steamed pork bun type affair but these were gelatinous pork cylinders wrapped in a thin layer of wrinkled pastry. There wasn’t any flavour to them, either, unless you dipped them in the fiery chilli sauce that they came with. Partly my mistake, I suspect: if I’d done my homework better I’d have understood that Nepalese food had elements of dim sum in it, but never mind.

If the starters were a mixed bag, they were at least an interesting bunch – lots of fire and flavour, texture and contrasts. That’s what made the main courses baffling, because they were so bland by comparison. Two of us had thali, those metal compartmentalised plates that offer (in theory) the chance to try lots of different things. The reality was more the opportunity to experience a wide range of disappointments.

Dhal was stodgy and bland with an odd undertone of something like evaporated milk. Spinach was floppy and strangely flavourless. The vegetable curry, served crunchy and cold in a nutty sauce, was the pick of the bunch but there was nowhere near enough of it to save the day. The meat curry – not an awful lot of it – was watery and not very interesting, with enough shards of bone in the chicken and enough gristle in the lamb that you didn’t feel you could risk eating a piece without a thorough inspection (a process which, I’ve always thought, rather gets in the way of a relaxing meal).

You also got a lot of rice, more rice than you could humanly eat, with a limp shard of poppadom on top – although the variant with chapati roti, which also included rice, was a much better bet. This all cost eight pounds – not a huge amount in the scheme of things for a main course, but it still didn’t feel like good value.

The other dish was chicken chow mein. A perfectly decent chow mein, freshly made with a decent amount of chicken, a few bits of shredded cabbage and carrot and noodles. Lots and lots of noodles. It didn’t seem to me to be any different to one I would get from a Chinese takeaway – no extra spice, no added flavour or exotic ingredients; just a plain chow mein. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this: like the siu mai, I felt this was probably my mistake. I’m never sure it should be possibly to order badly in a good restaurant, but I did have an increasing feeling that maybe I hadn’t given the place the opportunity to do itself justice.

That’s the main reason we ordered dessert, even though we weren’t hungry any more, but it didn’t really improve matters. The gulab jamun were a shadow of other versions I’ve had elsewhere in town. Instead of being squidgy, doughy balls, soaked in glorious sweetness, these were hard and very cold with minimal syrup. It was like they’d taken the dish I love and extracted all the fun. The other dessert was jeri, deep fried batter in sugar syrup. I was hoping for something reminiscent of doughnuts or churros (or even fritters), but instead it was just a maze of crispy tubes, the texture almost stale. Again, at two pounds it wasn’t by any means an expensive mistake, but it still felt like a mistake.

Dinner for three came to fifty-seven pounds, not including service, for three courses, a couple of soft drinks, a couple of glasses of wine, a mango lassi and a couple of cups of chai. So inexpensive, and yet I still can’t bring myself to wholeheartedly recommend Sapana Home. It’s a pity, because the service is really good, and they deserve loads of credit for making a go of it in such a central location, but too much of it just wasn’t to my taste. So yes, maybe I did order badly – it’s quite possible, because the menu is full of less conventional options I didn’t quite have the courage to try (chicken gizzard and lamb’s intestines, for instance). Or perhaps Nepalese food is generally bland; I’ve not had it enough to be able to say. Either way, I’m sorry that I can only partly endorse the tip I received on Twitter. I’d definitely go for the momos again at lunchtime, when I fancied something different (they really are very good, and worth a visit in their own right) but then I’d probably settle up and quit while I was ahead.

Sapana Home – 6.3
8 Queen Victoria Street, RG1 1TG
0118 9509898

https://sapanahomenepalese.com

The Three Tuns, Henley

On September 12, 2014October 10, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews12 Comments

Click here to read a more recent review of the Three Tuns, from 2025.

If you’ve been reading for a while you might have gathered that I’m a big fan of Reading. I think it has a lot to offer – although sometimes it only rewards those who make an effort – and I get quite annoyed at people who slate it. As a town is it what you make it. What it is missing, though, is a town centre pub that does really good food.

We have great pubs. What’s not to like about finding an empty booth in the back of the Hobgoblin (yes, I know it’s not called that any more but does anyone call it by its new name?) on Friday for a quick after work pint or getting a table outside at the Allied when the sun is shining and someone has apparently picked out all the prog rock tracks over 6 minutes long on the juke box (and there are a lot – the jukebox at the Allied seems to think music stopped somewhere in the mid 80s, with a few eccentric exceptions). We have some great restaurants. But what we don’t have is that combination of the two – somewhere to get a decent pint and a decent meal, preferably at a reasonable price. Possibly the closest, although it was still far from perfect, was the Lyndhurst Arms, but then that went and closed, which means I’ll never get to review their amazing stuffed pork belly (if you’ve ever tried it you’ll know I speak the truth) let alone go there after work again for a quick drink and end up staying for dinner.

This leads me, eventually, onto this week’s review. Yes, it’s a pub with a reputation for good food but no, it’s not in Reading. Previous trips out to Henley have proven that this kind of pub is a beast usually only spotted in the countryside, preferring the fresh air and customers who are prepared to drive (or are lucky enough to live nearby) instead of folk who would rather take public transport and have a drink. The Three Tuns is a different animal altogether, though: it’s in Henley centre, right on the market square (a big tick for that) and you can get there from Reading on the train in about half an hour (a second, smaller, tick). Of course, from past experience that’s no guarantee that it’s any good, but I turned up full of optimism.

As a venue you could easily miss it. It’s a sliver of a building tucked between Machin’s the butcher and an anonymous clothes shop. Inside it’s broken up into a number of rooms, all wooden floored and low beamed. Our table was in the middle room where most of the diners end up, in a space seating about sixteen people.

The menu here is healthily short. Five or six starters, mains and desserts with most mains under fifteen pounds and if you fancy it there’s a “pub favourites” menu which offers two courses for sixteen quid. We started with a basket of bread. This came with a generous ramekin of gloriously rich sticky caponata (like Italian Branston and one of the nicest ways to eat aubergine, though that might not be saying much) and two discs of – admittedly rock hard – dill and lemon butter. Both were delicious, though it wasn’t long before our starters arrived so we didn’t quite get the chance to savour the bread. I’d specifically told the waitress we were in no hurry for anything, so this should have rung warning bells.

The buffalo mozzarella wrapped in prosciutto was perfect. It was deceptively large – a whole ball of mozzarella – served with a proper dressed salad with sun dried tomatoes, pine nuts and shavings of parmesan – just in case a whole mozzarella wasn’t cheese enough (like Tony Blackburn I can’t turn down extra cheese). The prosciutto was generous enough to really taste but had been stripped of most of those fatty bits on the edge that can double as unwelcome dental floss. Served on a little wooden board, as is the fashion these days, it was a bit tricky to eat but I managed, even rescuing a few scraps which fell quite literally overboard. Ten second rule and all that.

The salt cod croquettes, from the pub side of the menu, were just as good. Three plump croquettes, crispy yet soft inside, came with a little dish of beautifully yellow aioli. If anything I’d say the aioli looked more striking than it tasted, but it was still just what you wanted to dip a nice big forkful of croquette into. I know that croquettes, like fishcakes, can be a way for some kitchens to make lots of money flogging you what’s essentially mashed potato, but when it’s this good you just don’t mind – and, of course, salt cod is one of those ingredients where a little goes a long way. Clever stuff, and a bit of a culinary win-win.

The mains kept that standard up. Poached brill on a chorizo and butterbean cassoulet, from the specials menu, was a hit. My favourite part was the cassoulet itself, rich with tomato, a bountiful amount of chorizo giving the dish the salty, smoky taste that it needed. I could happily have eaten this without the fish – plain, poached fish is a bit like Orlando Bloom, lovely to look at but ultimately not very interesting (I guess I just like crispy skin and when it’s not there I feel a little short-changed). That said, it was generous to a fault – which definitely sets the Three Tuns apart from many restaurants who confuse “healthy” with “diet option”. It was perfectly cooked, but the seasoning was a tad strange – it was topped with dill, which might have gone with the fish but was jarring with the cassoulet.

The other dish was guinea fowl breast (“pan roasted”, apparently, which is a new one on me – I thought you pan fried and oven roasted things, but there you go) with potato hash, madeira jus and some of the nicest peas in the world. They came in a little casserole dish of their own, still with some bite, with big hunks of bacon, meat from the guinea fowl’s leg – a bit like confit duck – and braised lettuce which also still had some crispness. I could just eat a bowl of those peas now, I can tell you. Again, the supporting act was more interesting than the main event, but I didn’t mind: the guinea fowl was tasty enough (I have a soft spot for a chicken supreme, as it happens) but everything it came with turned it into a really satisfying dish. It even had me hankering for autumn, despite being on their summer a la carte.

The wine list at the Three Tuns is compact, too – a dozen or so whites and the same number of reds with half of those available by the glass. We picked a bottle of durif (an Australian number – also known as petit syrah, if the menu is to be believed) which was phenomenal. Rich, fruity and a bit smoky, it was dangerously easy to polish off a bottle between two. It went brilliantly with the guinea fowl and just about didn’t clash with the cassoulet, thanks to that chorizo. Pretty impressive for just under thirty pounds, too.

Service throughout was excellent. The staff manage that clever service trick of being really good at what they do and on top of everything while also making it look easy and casual. When asked about the dishes our waitress knew the menu inside out, and we also got the “oh yes, good choice” that everyone wants to hear when picking what to eat. I like to feel that the staff have a vested interest in what their customers order and it definitely felt the case here.

The kitchen, sadly, was not quite so perfect. Whilst the food was excellent it came out too quickly: not quite so fast that you wanted to make a scene, but quick enough to disappoint slightly because I’d turned up wanting to make a leisurely evening of it. I’m always surprised by how many good restaurants get this wrong, and it’s not as if they seemed to want to turn our table. You’d think waiting staff would realise something has gone wrong with the timing when they’re asking what dessert you want and you still have half a bottle of red wine left to drink. So we did what anyone in that position should do, and kept them waiting: red wine with fish might be a little dubious but red wine with dessert definitely isn’t on my to do list.

But, of course, we did have desserts because everything up to that point had tasted so good and they were worth the wait. The pot au chocolat was knockout – again, a generous portion of quite a dark, firm mousse, rich with orange zest, cardamom and just a little hint of chilli lurking under all that. Deceptively complicated and yet so simple-looking, it was one of the nicest desserts I’ve had all year. The (I think) rosemary shortbread on the side added nothing, but only because the flavours in the pot au chocolat were pretty much unimprovable. Even a glass of dessert wine couldn’t do it.

I also wanted to try the cheeseboard because it’s not something I order often enough in restaurants (partly because there’s so much to remember! Five different cheeses? Pasteurised and unpasteurised? Cow and goat? Will they notice if I make some notes on my phone?) The Three Tuns cleverly takes the less is more approach: just three top notch British cheeses, which makes it awfully hard to resist. Barkham Blue is a local classic (possibly the best blue cheese in the world), Lincolnshire Poacher (not so local) is a really cracking hard cheese and Stinking Bishop is famous for its whiff. On this occasion the Bishop was more like “been working on London and the Tube was a bit sweaty” than properly stinking and, if I’m honest, all the better for it. A bit younger and richer – and firmer – rather than beating you over the head with all that gooey stench. If I had criticisms (and sadly, I did) they were too cold to properly release all that flavour and the biscuits were a bit uninspired, but even so it was a generous helping and washed down with a glass of ten year old tawny it made for a great way to round things (and me) off.

Bread and butter, three courses, the cracking bottle of red and a couple of snifters with dessert came to a hundred and ten pounds, not including tip, so it may be a pub, but the prices aren’t quite pub prices. But is it worth it? Absolutely. Almost flawless food, a great wine list, brilliant service and one of the cosiest, nicest rooms I’ve eaten in in a very long time. Obviously there are a few things I’d change – I’d have liked my food to come out a little slower, I’d like there to be a direct train from Reading to Henley or, better still, I’d like to pick it up and drop it somewhere in the middle of Reading. But maybe part of the magic is that I can’t. So until Reading gets a pub that can do food of this standard, somewhere that is in the middle of town but feels like it’s out in the country, I’ll be back. Tons.

The Three Tuns, Henley – 8.4
01491 410138
5 Market Place, Henley on Thames, RG9 2AA

http://threetunshenley.co.uk/

King’s Grill

On August 22, 2014September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

Let’s start with the chicken. It’s glorious; straight off the grill, lightly charred on the outside yet tender inside from the marinade. It’s frustrating having to eat it with nothing but a plastic fork (even a plastic knife would have been something) but it’s so perfectly cooked that even a plastic fork can break it into smaller pieces. The lamb, if anything, is even better – juicy, savoury, no fat, no suspicious bounciness. The lamb kofte is just as good, minced but pleasingly coarse rather than turkey twizzler smooth, the herbs and seasoning bringing out every bit of the lamby goodness.

Art of Siam

On August 15, 2014August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

N.B. Art Of Siam closed in December 2015. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

I love eating out, really I do, but sometimes even I get a little jaded. The constant search for new places occasionally takes its toll, and from time to time Reading can feel like Indian after Italian after chain after chain. So for this week’s review I looked at the lovingly prepared, generously suggested list of dining options and I’m sorry to say that I really struggled to pick. The rain was bucketing down on and off and the thought of toddling over to Caversham or venturing out into the Berkshire countryside just didn’t appeal. What to do?

So I chose Art of Siam probably for all the wrong reasons; because it was conveniently central and because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d paid it a visit. I did make myself a promise this time, though: no starter platter, no pad Thai, no dishes that I’ve reviewed before in other places. I’m not always the most imaginative diner in a Thai restaurant, something even I know. This time, I told myself, it’s all going to be different. Besides, I imagine that any Thai restaurant worth its fish sauce will be able to rustle up a those dishes with the chef’s hands Thai’d (I know, I’m sorry) so it probably isn’t the best way to judge the kitchen.

On entering the almost empty restaurant on a rainy mid-week night I had conflicting feelings of comfort and trepidation. The dining room is the same as I remember from my first visit what must be ten years ago – beautiful wood panelling lining the walls, a scattering of Buddhas and a gorgeous wooden lattice covering the ceiling. Even the shuttered windows looking down on King’s Walk are attractive. Only a few things – like the rickety rattan chairs, several of them taped or repaired – make the room look a little tired. Apart from that, the effect is like stepping into a movie set; at once splendid and a tiny bit contrived. The tables are all set with branded Art of Siam plates (and wineglasses), elaborately folded cloth napkins and forks and spoons. It really is a gorgeous place to eat dinner – marred only if you get one of the seats overlooking the somewhat municipal corridor leading to the kitchen.

Service was quick, enthusiastic and a little, well, amateurish. In my quest to order something different for once I wanted plenty of advice only to find that the waitress didn’t really know her way around the menu. When I asked what was in some of the dishes, to help me choose, she suggested that one chicken dish contained onions and peppers, whereas another contained peppers and onions. Further questioning gave the impression that all the dishes were pretty much the same, in levels of vagueness if nothing else. When pressed she confessed that she had been working there for less than a week and so went off to ask the kitchen more about the dishes but even then, the answers didn’t make anything clearer.

Later on, what purported to be our mains turned up – except they bore no relation to what we had actually ordered. We looked at them slightly baffled for a minute or so and the waitress then swooped and carried them off to another table (which was especially galling as they looked delicious). The whole experience was friendly and pleasant but utterly chaotic, which left me thinking that the whole meal was going to be something of a lottery.

My sinking feeling didn’t last long, anyway, because – probably through luck more than judgment – the starters were very good indeed. The more conventional of them, toong tong, were essentially big fat wontons filled with minced chicken and prawn. So far, so conventional, but the filling was absolutely top notch. None of that disturbingly bouncy, gelatinous pinkness I’ve had at many other restaurants – instead, the filling was beautiful, dense and firm. The plum sauce they came with felt like an anonymous sweet dipping sauce, but it still added something to the dish (I was expecting plum sauce as you’d get in Chinese restaurants, probably wrongly, so was a tad disappointed). No starter in a Thai restaurant would be complete without a bit of vegetable sculpture so of course this was also accompanied with a flower made out of carrot. (I’ve never been hungry enough to eat one of these. Not yet, anyway.)

The standout dish though – not just among the starters but in the whole meal – was yum gai yang, or chicken salad. I’ve never had Thai salad before because, well, it’s salad, but this was in a different league. It was salad in the sense that it wasn’t served with a thick hot sauce, not in the sense of lettuce and tomato and celery. Instead I got slices of warm, freshly grilled chicken dressed with lemongrass, galangal, chilli and lime juice. The bits and bobs of vegetables it came with were merely for texture because it was all about the amazing dressing which was the perfect balance of hot and sour – just the right side of bearable heat and just the right side of enjoyable sharpness.

Maybe it’s just my lack of imagination in Thai restaurants, in fact I’m sure it is, but I’ve not had anything like this before. It was absolutely stunning – a dish I keep thinking about, remembering and wanting to have again, even though it made my lips ever so slightly numb, made my tongue blaze and made me order a cooling glass of milk. It was a funfair ride of a dish – I was shaken at the end but a little bit of me, in the back of my mind, was shouting “Again! Again!”

Mains could never live up to that, but to their credit they weren’t far off. Pla chu chi, lightly battered white fish in a red curry sauce, was one of the biggest dishes I’ve been served in a long time. The sauce was a good one, although a little less generous than I’d have liked – especially after such a fiery starter – so not much to tip onto the rice (I’ve long thought the best bit of most Thai meals is that mixture of sauce and rice you end up with towards the end of the meal). In amongst the fish were slices of chilli big enough to kill a small child plus a dollop of coconut milk on top – just in case you hadn’t realised this was a rich and unhealthy dish.

Gai phad bai kraprao, despite the long name, was probably the simplest dish I had: chicken stir fried with fresh chilli and Thai basil (and onions and peppers, not that that marked it out from the other chicken dishes on the menu by the sounds of it). Even so it was lovely with everything done just right: thin, tender slivers of chicken, soft sweet onions and a sauce which was more interesting than I was expecting, savoury and salty with a note almost of something like aniseed. Again, it was light on the sauce – I admire them for not drowning their main courses with gloopy sauce but it did leave me feeling my coconut rice (pleasant but unremarkable) was a tad underdressed.

The only real misfire was the other side dish; fried noodles turned out to be wide, flat, almost completely undressed, clumpy noodles which transformed into rubber bands within minutes of being brought to the table. I’m still not convinced that they really were fried, because they felt more like they’d been steamed into a state of abject surrender, but the waitress assured me they were. I pretty much left them, although I had quite enough food so it wasn’t a tragedy (the waitress offered to take them back to the kitchen and get them to re-fry them so I could take them home, which is very sweet but does rather miss the point).

The wine served here is allegedly exactly the same as in Thai Corner which makes me wonder if Monsoon Valley has managed to secure the only shipping containers that make it safely across to the UK. I say allegedly as it wasn’t the smooth easy drinking red I am used to from Monsoon Valley but after a couple of chilli-soaked slices of chicken it hardly mattered. It was just enough to take the edge off without getting silly on a school night. The total bill for two starters, two mains, two side dishes, two glasses of wine (and one absolutely indispensable glass of milk) was forty-three pounds excluding service – a steal for the quality of food and the boundless flavours on offer.

If I didn’t review restaurants, and I’d been going out that rainy midweek night, I’d have gone somewhere tried and tested. I’d have had something I often order and I’m sure I’d have liked it well enough. And some nights that’s what you want, something comfortable and reliable. But I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad that – for all its Italians and Indians and chains – Reading’s restaurants still have the capacity to surprise and that by going somewhere you’d taken for granted and forgotten all about, by taking a chance on something you wouldn’t normally order in a million years, you can still be ambushed by a wonderful meal. I hope you try it some time, if not in Art Of Siam then somewhere else. Either way, make the most of this because heaven knows, you won’t find me recommending the salad very often.

Art of Siam – 7.7
2A/3A The Walk, King Street, RG1 2HG
01189 512600

http://www.artofsiamuk.com/reading/aboutus.php

Malmaison

On August 8, 2014May 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

Click here to read a more recent review of Malmaison, from May 2026.

So many elements go to make up a great restaurant, so many different things to get right, so many plates to spin at once. It’s fair to say that very few restaurants in Reading have perfected all of them. So you can go to a rather unimpressive room, like Bhoj, and have a knockout curry. You can go to Cerise and have beautiful food but be a little unmoved by the service. Or you could head to the Abbot Cook and sit in that wonderful room wading through their underwhelming food. This makes reviewing restaurants difficult: how do you weigh all of those different factors? But I always thought that the food comes first; if the food is great, nothing else can be that badly wrong. And I really believed that, too, right up until last week when I went to Malmaison for dinner.

Because the food at Malmaison really is great; I didn’t try anything I didn’t like. Take the starters, for instance. Tuna tartare was both beautiful and delicious: a delicate roundel of chopped tuna on a bed of chopped avocado with a soy dressing drizzled round the edge (which tasted more of sesame than the advertised lime but was none the worse for it) with a few neat slices of pickled ginger and a squirt of gentle wasabi, like a wasabi mayonnaise. This was just delightful; fresh, zesty and with the other flavours not overwhelming the fish. Not an ungenerous portion, either, when it would be easy to make this kind of dish stingily nouveau. It was impossible to take a picture because of the glass plate but who cares? Food’s there to be eaten, not photographed, and this was perfect.

The fritto misto was almost as good: beautiful prawns, the most tender squid I’ve had in Reading and some really tasty pieces of yellow courgette in a light, greaseless batter. Good enough, I’d say, to eat on their own – which might be just as well because I wasn’t wild on the sweet chilli sauce they came with. That felt more of an Asian, tempura-influenced choice when I was hoping for some aioli or even a fresh salsa verde to plunge my food into. But none the less, it was gorgeous – and again, not the mean portion I was expecting (I have to say, I went to Malmaison with some preconceptions: that my food would be pretty, prissy and pricey).

Could the kitchen keep it up with the main courses? As it turns out, yes they could. The “le French” burger was similarly lovely. Served in a glazed brioche bun with a decently rough patty of beef, still pink in the middle, this was how burgers should be. Despite the slices of brie and the caramelised onions this managed not to be sloppy – just juicy from the meat – and the sweet and salty flavours worked beautifully. It was also, and this almost never happens nowadays, possible to actually eat it with your hands.

The accompanying skin-on frites were perfectly decent, though I got the impression the staff aren’t used to serving vinegar as it came in a ramekin with a teaspoon and was of the white wine persuasion rather than good old Sarson’s. On the side was the tiniest copper saucepan with a tomato ketchup in it of unknown origin (it had green bits in but tasted like Heinz to me). It was rather unnecessary for this burger, so I wondered if it was there to meet expectation, rather than to actually eat. Still, it didn’t detract from what was a top notch dish: it was sixteen pounds, which I know is a lot, but it just about felt on the right side of the border between extravagantly indulgent and “they saw me coming”. Just.

The sea bass was a conventional, safe brasserie dish but there’s no harm in keeping things simple and everything about it worked: two nice pieces of fish, cooked well (no crispy skin though, which was a bit of a shame) served with a delicate mix of firm, smoky, good quality chorizo, mussels, sautéed new potatoes and vinaigrette. This was closer to the sort of food I was expecting at Malmaison: Jack Lemmon to the burger’s Walter Matthau, granted, but I liked it a lot.

So, you’ve read this far and you might be thinking about booking a table, right? Well, get to the end before you make up your mind, because literally everything else about this restaurant made me want never to return. Let’s start with the cardinal sin. The waiter came to the table after we’d finished our starters and took the plates away. About two minutes later they returned with our main courses.

“Oh! That’s very quick.” I said. The waiter gave me what was probably a blank look but might have been him mistakenly accepting my congratulations.

What do you do at this point? You can’t send it away, so you don’t have any choice but to sit there and eat it. But it just prompted other questions, like: were they cooking our mains the moment we started eating our starters? Was someone standing at the door to the kitchen watching us with a stopwatch? If I’d chewed a bit slower would my main course have been sitting there on the pass for ages? However you looked at it, this was plain poor: the Malmaison is not, from the menu – dishes and prices – somewhere you go for a quick meal. If I’m spending that kind of money I want to be there for a couple of hours, whereas if I want my meal to take forty minutes I’ll go somewhere else and I’ll spend a lot less. I could make excuses for them – it was a Sunday, they weren’t busy – but really, this was inexcusable. It’s called the hospitality business, and having two courses on a conveyor belt in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Game Of Thrones feels pretty inhospitable to me. Besides, just because I ordered a burger doesn’t make it fast food.

I might have told them this if the waiters had shown any interest in my experience, but they didn’t. In fact service in general had a completely disengaged feel: no smiles, no friendliness, no connection at all. I genuinely think there were people sitting at the bus stop outside London Camera Exchange, visible from my table, who had as much interest in me having a good meal that night as the serving staff at Malmaison. This is one of Reading’s few higher end restaurants and, again, when I’m spending that kind of money on food I at least want to feel liked. I want to feel like the staff care about the food and the customers (or can pretend well enough to convince me, that’s fine too). I want it to be a pleasure talking to the staff: many of Reading’s excellent restaurants – Pepe Sale, Dolce Vita, Mya Lacarte, Kyrenia… I could go on – get this right, but I’ve had better service in a lot of chain restaurants than I did at Malmaison. (It’s a real pity because based on past experience, the staff in the bar are completely the opposite.)

Countless other people have complained about the darkness in Malmaison but, even so, it’s worth repeating. The room is dark. The walls are dark. The tables are dark. It makes eating (and photographing) the food an extra challenge, even though we managed to pick a table with some overhead lighting. The chairs are big and squidgy, so much so that when sitting I ended up with my knees higher than my thighs and it felt like the table was up under my chin. This is not conducive to a comfortable, relaxed meal. And there’s no atmosphere at all – which takes some doing in such Stygian surroundings. It has the feel of a restaurant which relies largely on expense accounts, which makes no sense when the food is so good.

I suppose I should talk about wine and dessert. The wine list is cleverly structured and priced and one of the things that’s done well. We had a half litre carafe of a Brazilian Riesling/pinot grigio blend which was really nice; off dry, fruity and juicy with a touch of apples. It would have been nice to try more from their wine list – and we probably would have done if they hadn’t been in such a phenomenal hurry to get shot of us. Similarly, after eating two courses in quick succession we were too full for dessert, although in any case the menu wasn’t too inspiring, being the usual mix of ice cream, sticky toffee pudding, crème bruleé, cheesecake and other bog standard box tickers.

The bill was seventy-five pounds including a discretionary tip of 10% that isn’t really discretionary unless service is bad enough for you to make an exhibition of yourself in front of other diners. The whole process, beginning to end, of eating at Malmaison took approximately fifty minutes. So, is good food enough to justify overlooking all the other faults in a restaurant? I’m sure you’ve read all this and decided for yourself, but put it this way: I can’t imagine circumstances in which I’d go back. As I tried to get out of my almost-sat-on-the-floor-chair the couple at the next table joked about how uncomfortable the furniture was, and we shared a little moment about what an odd room it was. I think they enjoyed their experience more than I did, although their food if anything arrived even faster than ours. That was the most interaction we’d had the whole time I was in Malmaison, which by my reckoning makes it just mal.

Malmaison – 6.5
18-20 Station Rd, RG1 1JX
0844 693 0660

https://www.malmaison.com/locations/reading/brasserie/

Edible Reading

Tag: Service