Pau Brasil

On August 1, 2014June 29, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

Click here to read a more recent review of Pau Brasil, from June 2025.

I so wanted to like Pau Brasil, probably more than any other place I’ve reviewed so far. So many people have urged me to try it, and on the approach up Mount Pleasant I could understand why – it’s a beautiful, two-storey, whitewashed building with vibrant cornflower-blue windows and doors, the Brazilian flag flying from the first floor balcony. I’d defy anybody to walk past it and not feel like going in, and on the day I visited the tables and chairs outside made it look even more inviting. It seems like it’s been dropped into that neighbourhood from a parallel dimension, only a few doors down from Whitley Street with its parade of takeaways and convenience stores.

Inside, the welcome was every bit as friendly as the façade. We took the table next to the balcony in the nice, airy upstairs room – it’s nothing fancy or special, mismatched furniture and basic tables, but a lovely bright space where I could easily imagine whiling away some time eating Brazilian food. The owner brought the blackboard with the daily specials and we sipped on peach and lemon tea, our ice cubes melting at breakneck speed, while we tried to decide what we wanted. And, as with all appealing menus, we wanted everything.

Pau Brasil offers a range of petiscos or salgados (the Portuguese equivalent of tapas) and they all looked good, so on the advice of the waitress we had the platter, a portion of bite sized petiscos to share. She cautioned us that it was on the small side, which wasn’t really true – whatever you might think of Pau Brasil you can’t fault them for their generosity.

When they arrived, they were the first indication that eating here might not be an unalloyed delight. The best of them was the salt cod fishcake – beautifully crisp outside, soft inside and nicely balanced between the salt cod and the potato used to bulk it out. If I’d just had these, and the surprisingly pleasant glass of white table wine I washed them down with (a snip at £3), it would have been a lovely afternoon snack – but the other petiscos weren’t in the same league.

The beef reminded me of a Lebanese kibbeh, nicely coarse but on the bland side. The chicken dumpling was a bit like a miniature Findus Crispy Pancake, with an orangey crispy coating filled with minced chicken which was perfectly okay but not exactly exciting. The prawn rissole was the same but filled with a sort of mayonnaise-y prawn dollop: pink, gooey, lacking in flavour. But the oddest thing was what the petiscos looked like: there was something about their uniformity of shape that made me wonder if they’d been made fresh on the premises. The chilli sauce they came with, however, was home made and had quite a kick. The tiniest dab was enough to give a whack of heat – I was glad that the waitress warned me that it was hot to save me from doing myself harm.

In the spirit of trying as many different things as possible we attacked the main courses from both ends of the menu, trying the lighter and heavier options. What can I say about the banana, cheese and cinnamon toasted sandwich? Put it this way: if you read that description and thought “I like the sound of that” then you’d probably like it, if you think it sounds wrong then it won’t be the dish for you. It was exactly the sum of its parts with no element of surprise. Decent, again, but the cheese was a bit too mild to balance out the sweet banana and the cinnamon wasn’t quite strong enough to make the whole thing interesting. The bread was plain white sliced and the whole thing had the overall feel of something I would make at home if I was in a hurry and short of ingredients.

Feijoada is the national dish of Brazil, so I felt it would be wrong not to try Pau Brasil’s version. It wasn’t going to win any beauty competitions – half the plate covered in brown mush, a quarter covered with rice and a quarter covered in greens, a beige pie chart – but I figured that wasn’t the important thing about a hearty stew like this. The problem was that it tasted largely how it looked. Well, that and the meat: hunting for bits of pork turned out to be quite a challenge. Most pieces were thick with gelatinous fat, very few were fat free and there weren’t a huge amount of them in the first place.

The rest of it was pleasant enough, but not very strongly flavoured. The beans weren’t bad, and the fat and some smokiness had at least made it into the sauce. The greens – salty, shredded and with just a little give remaining – were delicious, easily the best bit. But at the end I looked at the pile of wobbly leftovers at the edge of my plate and felt that, for ten pounds, it just wasn’t good enough.

Really wanting to like Pau Brasil meant I also really wanted to give them a chance to make things right with dessert; normally, when a main is that disappointing I would just settle up and leave. Pasteis de nata almost did the trick – delicious, warm custard in that gorgeous flaky nest of pastry, sweet cinnamon on top. They were quite, quite lovely (and a bargain at £1.30). Again, I could happily go there just for the pasteis, if I lived in the neighbourhood.

The bill came to pretty much thirty pounds, not including service. I spent more than you have to because I wanted to try a wide range of dishes, but as usual you could easily eat here for far less. Service was terrific throughout, to the extent where I started to worry about how to write this review about two minutes after I left.

I’m not going to say that Pau Brasil is a bad restaurant. It is a lovely place, staffed by friendly people, offering something completely different – proudly independent and clearly doing very well. It just happens to be a restaurant I can’t see myself visiting again. If I lived nearby, on a weekend afternoon I might grab one of those upstairs tables and have a coffee and a pastel, or some of those salt cod fishcakes, and read a book, maybe: I could imagine doing that. But too much of the food just wasn’t to my taste, and however nice a room is, however great the service is, the food is always going to be centre stage. If I want meat, sauce, rice and greens I can’t imagine I’d ever pick Pau Brasil over, for example, Perry’s (or even Shed, on Fridays). If I wanted a toasted sandwich I’d make my way to My Kitchen (or Shed, again).

Sometimes I really regret choosing to give restaurants a rating, and this is one of those times. I’m sure by now you’ve probably made a decision about whether Pau Brasil sounds like your sort of thing. The mark is an irrelevance. And you’ve probably also made a decision about whether it’s my sort of thing, and you’re probably right about that. All I can say is that on this occasion it’s given with a heavier heart than usual, because this is as close as I’ve come so far to wishing I could overlook disappointing food. Anyway, I’m sure no score from me will disappoint them half as much as that 7-1 scoreline, just under a month but almost a lifetime ago.

Pau Brasil – 6.1
89 Mount Pleasant, RG1 2TF
0118 9752333

https://www.facebook.com/paubrasiluk

The Catherine Wheel, Goring

On July 11, 2014June 30, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

The team running the Catherine Wheel departed in June 2016 so this review is no longer current. I’ve left it up for posterity.

This is probably rather a Michael Portillo way to start a restaurant review, but goodness, the train journey from Reading to Goring is rather lovely. From Tilehurst onwards the view gets prettier and prettier, all green fields and lush hills, the Thames on one side and the beauty of Basildon Park on the other. The names on the map have a touch of Watership Down about them: Harley Hill Wood; Harecroft Wood; Shooters Hill. My fellow passengers on the train looked particularly pleased to be commuting home from work, and surrounded by such splendour it was hard to blame them.

I was on my way to Goring because I’d had a tip-off: the Catherine Wheel, I was told, was a magical find in the country. Admittedly, the recommendation came from the pub itself but I decided that was no bad thing: if you can’t blow your own trumpet, why expect anybody else to blow it for you? So I got off the train, wandered over the footbridge and walked down Station Road, past house after house which – although physically close enough to touch – would always be a lottery win or an unexpected inheritance away.

First impressions were good: the Catherine Wheel is a proper old pub with no faux concessions to modernism, no Farrow & Ball facelift, no cynical gentrification. It was all low beams and dark furniture, rowing blades mounted on the wall. Another good sign was that many of the tables were booked when I arrived on a weekday evening – although the staff, friendly and efficient from start to finish, whisked us through the pub and found us somewhere to sit. It was a big, attractive, well lit table, albeit with a disturbingly tacky surface (it’s hard to completely enjoy a pint when you fear your bare elbows are going to stick to the table.)

I like to think I go to enough disappointing pubs these days to know a convincing menu when I see one, and the Catherine Wheel’s looked promising. Less than half a dozen starters, only slightly more mains and a handful of specials. The pub classics (fish and chips, steak, burgers) were all there but also some interesting touches: rabbit loin, crab tart, chimichurri sauce. If anything, I thought the starters were more inventive whereas the mains played it safe but even so, it felt a world away from the standard issue Mitchell & Butler pub menu.

First things first, though: a Scotch egg from the bar bites section of the menu. This took a reassuringly long time to arrive (“I’m sorry”, the waitress said, “but they take a while because they’re made fresh” – an apology nobody should ever have to make in a restaurant, if you ask me) and was worth the wait. It was billed as pork and chilli but seemed chilli-free to me: an irrelevant detail because the whole thing was truly magnificent. The pork was soft and herby, the egg spot on, the yolk still soft but not too runny, and the piccalilli simultaneously sweet and sharp. I ate it so enthusiastically that the gentlemen next to us ordered one as well; I don’t think they were disappointed, either.

Starters were more of a mixed bag. Crab and lime tart with coriander was a dainty thing, delicious if a little delicate (I suppose, in its defence, most things would seem delicate after a Scotch egg but there you go). That said, everything about it was well done – the little disc of pastry was crumbly and buttery and the filling was generous with the crab. I thought it needed more lime and coriander to really make it stand out (crab can be rather a subtle ingredient) but it was still an accomplished, if soft-spoken, dish.

The poached pear, candied walnut and Stilton salad was exactly what it said it would be. The pears were soft enough to yield to the edge of a fork, the walnuts were deliciously sugary sweet and the Stilton was creamy smooth, all on top of a pile of bitter leaves dressed in a sweet (honey?) dressing. I would have liked the Stilton to be more tangy and salty (or just more) to balance out the sweetness in the rest of the salad but provided you could resign yourself to having a very sweet starter this was really tasty and more creative than most restaurants, let alone most pubs.

The mains were well paced and came just as I was beginning to hope they’d turn up. From the specials board, duck breast came pink and carved into thick slices with roasted new potatoes, carrot pureé, broccoli and gooseberry jam. It was a near miss, if a delicious one in places. The duck was well cooked – nicely pink in the middle – but not well seasoned. Similarly the potatoes felt like a carby but slightly flavourless onslaught; a few less, properly seasoned would have been miles better. The carrot puree was tasty but so much of it on the plate came across as a little bit Cow & Gate, and like the duck it went cold very quickly. The star of the show, without a doubt, was the gooseberry jam. I wasn’t expecting it to be red, but it had the tartness of gooseberry and – this was the masterstroke – a nice spike of chilli. It absolutely saved the plate in front of me (it was the Tim Howard of the food world: it could have saved almost anything). I’d probably have eaten it smeared on a mattress, that’s how good it was.

The honey and soy marinated salmon was a dish of two halves. The salmon was cracking – still soft and silky in the middle but crispy, salty and blackened on the outside. When it arrived I thought it was burned, but I soon realised it was very cleverly cooked indeed. The honey was a little lost in the salt but that was no bad thing after the sweetness of the starter. The disappointment was what was underneath it – a bland stir fry of noodles, pak choi, bean sprouts and mooli. There was literally nothing to make that interesting, and any mouthful without a piece of that delicious salmon was a sad mouthful indeed. Such a shame, as it was a dish which could so easily have been improved with some soy, garlic, chilli, ginger or ideally all four. I found myself wondering if the chef had accidentally left something out, but didn’t dare ask.

The problem with a fully booked restaurant is that you keep seeing dishes arrive at other tables which aren’t yours. So I can confirm that the pulled pork burger (with crackling, apple sauce and crunchy chips) looked so good that the man at the next table caught me staring at it. The fish and chips, which turned up to the delight of the sixtysomething lady across the way, was a piece of haddock so leviathan that she and her companion both oohed when it was plonked in front of her. I had a distinct whiff of the culinary road not travelled, to the extent that I briefly started to wonder whether I really ought to visit twice before writing a review, before snapping out of it.

Service deserves a mention, because the Catherine Wheel didn’t get a thing wrong in this respect. Our waitress was tireless, knowledgeable and enthusiastic and seemed to be working practically the whole pub. Watching her was an object lesson in how to work your socks off and make it look effortless (quite a contrast to the commuters on the train earlier, who I imagine had probably spent the whole day looking flat out busy while doing nothing at all). We were too full for dessert – which is a shame, because I had my eye on the cheeseboard (from the superb Grey’s of Pangbourne, no less). Besides, the train back to Reading might only take fifteen minutes but they start to get less frequent as you get closer to the end of the evening. So we settled up: the bill came to just under sixty pounds, not including service, for two starters, two mains, a small glass of perfectly pleasant Rioja and a couple of pints, not forgetting that terrific Scotch egg.

So is the Catherine Wheel a magical find in the country? I think so. My food wasn’t perfect but it was definitely interesting, and I saw enough of the dishes arriving at other tables to get an idea that the kitchen had a good balance of pub classics and something slightly more creative for people who wanted to wander a bit further off the beaten track. Looking at their Twitter feed made me want to go back on a sunny Sunday afternoon: jazz, barbecues, pizzas in the garden. It would be easy in a village so pretty to just crank out microwaved staples and make money out of your captive audience: it says a lot that the Catherine Wheel is trying to do more than that while still being a good, traditional pub. If I lived there, I’d feel very lucky to have it as a local. Although to be honest, if I lived there I’d probably feel lucky full stop. On the way back to the station, as we passed the village hall, I heard the sweet strains of an orchestra practising: as if Goring wasn’t idyllic enough already.

The Catherine Wheel – 7.2
Station Road, Goring-on-Thames, RG8 9HB
01491 872379

http://www.catherinewheelgoring.co.uk/

Coconut Bar & Kitchen

On July 4, 2014September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews

To read a more recent takeaway review of Coconut, click here.

I’ve been handed a free yakitori voucher as I pass Coconut more times than I’ve been chugged outside Marks and Spencer. In the two months since it opened, Coconut has done a sterling job of making people aware of where it is (on the Butts. Don’t laugh) and what it does (yakitori, apparently) so is this long enough for them to have settled in and found their feet? Of course, there’s only really one way to find out.

My Kitchen

On June 27, 2014August 22, 2017 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

My Kitchen closed in September 2016. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

When Cappuccina Café closed last month I confess that I kicked myself that I hadn’t visited it earlier. Independent places face a huge struggle to open, create a following and survive – something Reading’s many chains will never experience. So I regret the fact that I didn’t shout about Cappuccina Café sooner and visit more often (especially seeing as it turned out to be so good) and this week’s review is an attempt on my part not to make that mistake again.

I’ve been putting off reviewing My Kitchen, even though it’s been open for months, because of a disappointing visit shortly after it opened. But since then I’ve heard lots of accounts that suggest that they’ve found their feet (including rave reviews of some of their cakes), and their website makes all the right noises about local ingredients and freshly prepared food. So I went along desperately hoping that they could live up to all of that promise, and a little worried about the review I might have to write if they didn’t.

My Kitchen has a spot on one of the most beautiful streets in Reading; Queen Victoria Street has those beautiful red brick buildings on both side, wide pavements and a view of the fetching frontage of John Lewis. We loitered outside for long enough to get a table out on the street (quite a challenge in the sunny weather) and wandered in to order some lunch. Inside the cafe is a long counter with sandwiches, salads, soup and lots of cakes and above that a blackboard listing all the options. Along with the muted grey paintwork and mis-matched tables and chairs in the back it makes for an attractive space (although not one to spend time in on a summer’s day – it was punishingly hot in there).

I was impressed by the sheer range of options and I’m afraid, faced with all those choices, I rather froze like a rabbit in the headlights and broke one of the fundamental rules of reviewing: I ordered two things which were very similar indeed. So I should be telling you about the smoked salmon and horseradish baguette (which looked delicious) or the lentil soup, but instead you get to hear all about two toasted sandwiches. Sorry about that.

The goat’s cheese, red onion chutney and baby spinach panini was delicious: generously filled, the ratios all perfect and precise, salty-sweet and far too easy to hoover up. Granted, it’s never going to win any awards for originality, but it’s a classic for a reason. Toasted focaccia with halloumi, peppers and sweet chilli was also gorgeous – a lovely contrast between the soft, pillowy bread, the firm chewy halloumi and the crisp crunch of those peppers. If I was being critical I would have questioned whether it was really focaccia, and I would have said a tad more sweet chilli sauce would have really brought it alive, but I was enjoying it far too much to be critical.

To try and make amends for picking such similar sandwiches we also tried some sausage roll bites. It must be a sign of galloping food inflation that they’re described as “bites” because they looked like decent sized sausage rolls to me. They were terrific – not hot, and I’m quite glad they didn’t make a half-hearted attempt at heating them up. The pastry was spot on, light and buttery with a smattering of sesame seeds for decoration and the sausage meat inside was just wonderful – not suspiciously smooth, not offputtingly bouncy, just coarse and tasty, yielding herby porky perfection.

Drinks were good too, if more difficult to wax lyrical about. Twinings Earl Grey is Twinings Earl Grey, after all – although I did appreciate the attractive enamel teapot, which was a cracking pourer and contained enough for two cups. As regular readers will know, I’m not particularly a coffee fan but I’m told the latte was very nice indeed. (“not quite as good as Lincoln or Workhouse but a lot better than Picnic”, apparently). Actually, I liked the tableware in general – everything comes on those attractive white and blue enamelware plates which are very Labour And Wait, simultaneously very now and really rather timeless. It made me want to track them down and buy some for myself.

I couldn’t go without trying one of their cakes. Having seen people rave about the gluten free chocolate brownie I felt it was my duty to try one, and it was a smart move. It was probably the best brownie I’ve had in Reading, a wonderful contrast between the crisp, brittle exterior and the soft, slightly gooey inside. The website says they deliberately use less sugar in their cakes and I like to think I noticed that – the flavour was full and rich and didn’t rely on sweetness to get its point across. My only complaint is that I agreed to share it; I won’t make that mistake again.

When I ordered the brownie the lady behind the counter said “ooh, good choice!” before dishing it up. I really liked that: enthusiasm counts for an awful lot. And I got a lot of enthusiasm from My Kitchen – the service was as welcoming as the food. Even with a queue of customers behind me the staff were friendly and chatty, and when they brought my sandwiches out they smiled. A little thing, maybe, but have lunch in some of the other places in town and check out how rarely it happens. All told two sandwiches, two sausage roll bites, a slice of chocolate brownie and two hot drinks came to just under £17. In fairness I went a bit mad and over-ordered so I could try things out, but in general prices are comparable to My Kitchen’s competitors on Coffee Corner.

I’m hugely relieved to be able to say that I really liked My Kitchen. In many ways they are following in the footsteps of Picnic, which celebrated its seventh birthday earlier this month (a mind-boggling fact in itself: I can’t imagine Reading before Picnic came along) but if Reading can have that many Caffe Neros it can definitely accommodate another place in the same mould as Picnic. I think I might even prefer My Kitchen, although it’s probably some form of weird Redingensian heresy to say so.

I’m not sure they are serving food that’s out-of-this-world inventive, but that’s not what they’re about – they’re about doing simple things well, and I’m all for that. It’s nice to have somewhere else to go for a quick sandwich or a slice of rejuvenating cake, and I really hope there’s a market for that because My Kitchen is the kind of place Reading needs, even if Reading doesn’t necessarily realise that. Or perhaps they do know it: when I visited, there was a scrum for the seating and I had to wait to grab a table outside. Fifty yards down Queen Victoria Street, two forlorn people were all that could be seen sitting outside Starbucks. Maybe the tide is turning after all. Just maybe.

My Kitchen – 7.5
29 Queen Victoria Street, RG1 1TG
07403 588399

http://www.mykitchenandcoffee.co.uk/

Pappadams

On June 20, 2014November 25, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

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

Planning which restaurants to review involves considerable deliberation here at ER HQ. Imagine me with a little rake pushing figurines round a map of Reading (and wearing a tricorn hat! I must buy a tricorn hat) and you wouldn’t be far from the truth. Should I review a pub this week? An Indian restaurant? A lunch place? Somewhere cheap, somewhere fancy? Time to go out of town?

This week’s review was meant to be of a pub. First I was going to review the Queen’s Head, but I checked the menu and it was exactly the same as the Moderation’s, which I’ve already reviewed, and I didn’t think a review which said “I went out of my way to have different things to last time but, you know, it’s pretty much the same” would excite anyone. Then I was going to review the Lyndhurst, but the menu didn’t inspire me (there’s something about the word goujon, and the way it’s used by English pubs, that undermines all the gastronomic beauty of the French language) and nor did the rather surly welcome behind the bar. So anyway, it was meant to be a pub this week but no dice: instead you get Pappadams.

Pappadams is a little place down the King’s Road, after the library but before you get to the architectural wonder that is King’s Point. It’s a small room which can’t seat more than thirty people, although there’s another bigger room upstairs (“we’ve got the World Cup on up there if you want to watch”, the waiter told us conspiratorially; it didn’t lure me up there). It’s handsome enough, if basic – square tables, nice comfy chairs, cloth napkins – with the huge glass front covered with a beaded curtain so you don’t feel like you’re eating in a goldfish bowl. When I got there on a Tuesday evening it was about half-full – mostly with Indian couples and friends.

I wouldn’t know a South Indian dish from a North Indian dish from an anglicised Indian dish, but the waiter was excellent at navigating us through the options and offering lots of advice, particularly on some of the Keralan specialities on offer. I found the menu quite endearing, with sections marked “from our fisherman’s net”, “from our vegetable garden” and “from our butcher’s farm” (a butcher and a farmer, I guess that’s one way of cutting out the middle man). The dishes are rated on the time-honoured chilli scale, although eccentrically things are either rated with zero, two, three or four chillies (only one dish, “Lamb Dragon” had four chillies – it sounds more like a masterpiece of genetic engineering than an actual main course, or maybe it’s both).

Starters were delicious although I couldn’t shake the feeling, maybe as a result of reviewing other Indian restaurants, that I’d had the same kind of things ever so slightly better elsewhere. Paneer shashlik was lovely, big squares of cheese, charred and chewy around the edges, sizzling on a plate with peppers and onions. The lamb tikka was less successful: the flavour was perfect, deep and intense, soaking into the sizzling onions underneath, but the texture was more tough than tender, requiring a lot more cutting and a little more chewing than I’d hoped.

After we finished our starters, something happened which happens very rarely in Reading restaurants. The waiter came back, asked if we’d enjoyed our dishes and asked how long we wanted to wait before the kitchen started cooking our mains. Why don’t more restaurants do this? I’ve lost count of the number of times my main arrives hot on the heels of my starter, leaving me with half a bottle of wine to polish off while telling waiters, with an increasingly rictus grin, that yes, I would like dessert but no, I don’t plan to order it until I’ve the rest of the wine in front of me, wine that was only there because they’d been in such a hurry to feed me. Even if Pappadams didn’t get brownie points from me for anything else, they’d get some for that alone. Service was excellent throughout. Early on I was asked if we’d like to move across to a bigger, better, freshly vacated table – another thing not enough waiters consider. They may not have won me over by inviting me to watch the nil-nil draw in the Mexico-Brazil match, but otherwise they didn’t put a foot wrong.

Mains were, well, divisive. We took advice from the waiter and went for two Keralan specialities. Fish mappas was an anonymous white fish (I’d put my money on tilapia, but not with any great confidence) in a sauce of coconut milk dotted with nigella seeds. I liked the sauce – so different from a Thai sauce, lacking that slightly cloying sweetness they can sometimes have – but the fish wasn’t for me. I like my fish to be firm, to flake, to have a little give but not too much. This was softer and mushier than I personally like it, but that might be a matter of personal taste. It all got finished, but that was more to do with the person opposite me.

The other dish, cochin kozhi curry, was even more divisive because I couldn’t quite decide whether I loved it or just liked it. A chicken dish, this too was made with coconut, although the sauce couldn’t have been much more different to the sauce that came with the fish. It was dark where the other was light, thicker and stickier where the other was more liquid. It had proper smokiness (almost with those notes of leather Jilly Goolden has spent a career trying to kid us into thinking she can spot in a glass of Rioja) and lots of clever aromatic flavours that came through a little further on. But here’s the problem: it was really, really salty. I could just about manage it (although it did cause me to gulp my mango lassi towards the end) but I can imagine other people would be put off by it. The chicken, unlike the fish, had the texture just right: putting up just enough fight and then falling apart under a fork. Both mains felt a little mean on the meat to sauce ratio, with a big bowl of sauce left over at the end after time spent fishing for the meat.

The side dishes were unremarkable. Rice with cumin was a little bland (although, compared to those sauces, most things would have been) and the paratha was thick and heavy compared to others I’ve devoured in recent months. Like so much of what I had that evening it was good, but I was left remembering that I’ve had better.

Where I’ve not had worse for a while was the wine. The house red was perfectly decent (no notes of leather – even Jilly Goolden would have struggled to locate them, I imagine). The white, on the other hand tasted slightly peculiar and not especially like wine (an achievement, I know). If I’d opened the bottle at home I would have poured it down the sink and I’ve rarely had wine that bad in a restaurant. After that we switched to other drinks – Cobra and mango lassi, more reliable staples. The lassi came with pistachio crumbled on top – a lovely touch, I thought. We didn’t stop for dessert (too full for gulab jamun, this time at least) and the whole thing came to just under £50, not including tip.

I feel for Pappadams. If you picked it up and plonked it in any of a dozen other towns it might well be the best Indian restaurant there. It just has the misfortune to be down the road from House Of Flavours and in the same town as Bhoj, and it strikes me as caught a little between the two. The prices and the décor are more like Bhoj, the location puts it firmly in competition with House Of Flavours. If you made Top Trumps cards of all three restaurants, I’m not sure Pappadams would win in any category (although it would come close on service). But that doesn’t quite do the place justice, because although the best is the enemy of the good the fact remains that Pappadams is a good restaurant. I can see myself going there when I fancy Indian food and don’t want the faff of House Of Flavours or the schlep to Bhoj.

As I left the waiter asked me if I wouldn’t mind putting a review on TripAdvisor if I’d enjoyed my meal, in a way that struck me as well rehearsed. I can understand why: it’s a packed market, and restaurateurs need all the help they can get. I didn’t, but I’m sure other people will. I hope they do, too.

Pappadams – 7.2
74 Kings Road, RG1 3BJ
0118 9585111

http://www.pappadamsreading.co.uk/

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Tag: Service