This week’s review came about because of a comment on the Edible Reading Facebook page. I’d posted a link to my do list, as I regularly do, asking if there was anywhere on it that I should prioritise. Somebody chipped in and told me I should check out Shawarma Reading on West Street. “Their mixed shawarma with rice is great on a cold day”, their comment said.
That was all well and good, but the comment wasn’t from just anybody. It was from Mansoor.
Mansoor has been a reader of my blog for as long as I can remember, an early and vocal supporter of what I do. He came to the very first readers’ lunch at Namaste Kitchen, over seven years ago, bringing a blue Toblerone because I’d enthused about them on the blog. He told me that when he was first courting his wife, he used my blog for tips; despite that, it seems to have worked out nicely for him.
He was also one of my very first subscribers, when I launched that last month. “Lifetime subscription please” he said, which moved me more than I can say. And that’s despite the fact that Mansoor, his wife and his beautiful daughter have moved to Bristol now, which makes him one of my few readers who avidly looks forward to reviews from that part of the world rather than ones from the ‘Ding (don’t worry Mansoor, you’ll get some later in the year).
But that’s not why I give Mansoor’s words such weight. Back when he lived in Reading, Mansoor tipped me off about all kinds of places which went on to be favourites. He was the one who told me to check out La’De Kitchen, out in Woodley, and Rizouq on the Wokingham Road. And perhaps most life-changing of all, Mansoor told me once about a little spot doing samosas, also on the Wokingham Road, that I ought to investigate. Years later I still stop by Cake & Cream regularly for their epic samosas and pakoras, and have recommended them to countless others.
So when Mansoor says somewhere is good, I pay attention. And he first mentioned Shawarma to me at a readers’ lunch about eighteen months ago. “Give it six months, and I think it will be worth you reviewing it”, he said. Well, that six months had more than elapsed, and Mansoor’s initial “you might want to try it out” had morphed into a “go here”.
That alone would have been incentive enough, but then I saw a thread on this exact subject on the Reading sub-Reddit. Somebody had posted specifically asking whether Shawarma was good, and where else you might go for its eponymous speciality. The usual suspects – Bakery House, Hala Lebanese and Monty’s – all came up, and their relative merits were debated. But as for Shawarma itself? Well, most people hadn’t gone there. Of those that had, one person said it was good shit, another said it was not good and, the implication seemed to be, shit.
It was time to pitch in on the debate, so I hopped off the train after work on a Monday evening, keen to make up my own mind. But before I got to Shawarma Reading, I went on a little expedition through the very newest part of Reading. Because that evening the pedestrian route had finally been opened up from Station Hill to Friar Street, past all the new apartments. I think it might have been the first night you could cut through, and I kept on walking, along with a handful of other dazed pedestrians, half expecting to find a dead end at any moment.
But it never came, so there I was in this brave new world, checking out the tasteful lighting and no doubt exorbitantly priced flats, seeing the spots where London coffee chain Notes and new Japanese restaurant Kawaii – from the team behind Coconut and Osaka – would be setting up shop. And it was all very agreeable; it certainly beat walking past Zorba’s and Wendy’s, and Siren RG1‘s location made a lot more sense now you can reach it quickly and directly from the station. So did the writing at the front saying that they offered ‘Train Beers’, come to think of it.
Nursing a pre-dinner IPA there I found myself thinking that, for the first time ever, it felt like I’d walked through the Reading of the future, the Reading that the excellent Reading-on-Thames always writes about. In the time I’ve been writing this blog Oxford has opened the Westgate, Newbury has acquired a fancy shopping quarter and Maidenhead is awash with flats and new restaurants, its very own Waterside Quarter. And what has Reading got in that time?
A little bit skankier, I’d say. And looking out from Siren RG1 on the likes of McDonalds, Lola Lo, garish convenience stores and 99p shops, knowing that a bookie and an amusement arcade were just down the road, it did feel like the dividing line between the old and new couldn’t have been much starker. My beer finished, I walked past the Hope Tap, where I imagine you can get two pints for what I spent in Siren. That shawarma was calling to me.
On my way there, I realised that this was probably the year that I would have to revisit a number of sites that held bittersweet memories for me. Many places, once they close, stay vacant for some time – take the spot where Dolce Vita used to be, for example, a long-empty monument to John Sykes’ avarice. But this year I need to try Tanatan, where Clay’s used to live, and at some point go back to the Lyndhurst. Now I live in Katesgrove it’s long overdue that I visit Namaste Kitchen again. It’s been under different management, after all, for nearly six years.
In many of these cases, I’ve put off returning because I know that however good the food is, it might be tinged with sadness, and I don’t want to let that colour my judgment. And of course, that’s the case with Shawarma Reading, because before it was Shawarma it was Cairo Café, a little spot which I liked a great deal. But I last went to Cairo Café over two years ago, and it’s been Shawarma for over eighteen months. Time to lay the ghost.
I was surprised at first that it managed to feel even smaller than Cairo Café had. Part of that is because of all the kit and caboodle Shawarma has, the two vertical spits revolving inexorably at the front, behind the counter, one for chicken and one for lamb. Cairo Café did its cooking out back, so more of the front room was given over to tables. By contrast, Shawarma had two tables for two, and I was lucky that one was vacant when I was there.
This was far more utilitarian than homely – they’d kept Cairo Café’s dove grey metro tiles, but the rest was chrome and bland ash effect panels. In fairness, when you have the capacity for four people, it would almost be rubbing it in to look like a place where people would want to linger. I heard the distinctive tone of Deliveroo and Just Eat orders landing while I was there, and I suspect that most of Shawarma’s trade is takeaway.
What was surprising about the interior was that it didn’t quite chime with the menu. Because aside from the feature attraction, Shawarma offers a reasonably full Lebanese menu at prices very close to those you’d pay at Bakery House. Shawarma features heavily, as you’d expect, but there are also shish kebabs, mixed grills, koftas, wraps, hot and cold mezze. Main courses were just under fifteen pounds, wraps closer to seven and the starters between five and eight. It felt a little jarring to have this big menu crammed, TARDIS-like, into this small room, but it also intrigued me. And besides, Mansoor rarely steered me wrong.
I ordered a starter and a main and, of course, they came virtually at the same time. And again, this highlighted that you were somewhere that was more quick and cheerful than a place for a drawn-out meal. And again, I thought that this fitted the room but maybe not the prices. Because I simultaneously felt like I had to benchmark Shawarma against the likes of Bakery House but also somewhere like King’s Grill, and it felt like a bit of neither and both.
Anyway, enough comparisons: let’s talk about the food. I loved my falafel – I saw them being formed and fried in front of me so they were as fresh as you like. And they really were gorgeous: light rather than dense, with an excellent sesame-studded shell. The garlic sauce, in a little paper hospital pill cup, was gentle rather than honking, but nice enough: I might have preferred something tahini-based with them, but I wasn’t complaining. And best of all, a decent accompaniment of pickles, including those almost unreal purple ones that I particularly love: they always look photoshopped in pictures, but I assure you they weren’t.
Okay, I haven’t given up comparisons. These were as good a set of falafel as I’ve had anywhere in Reading, and up there with the likes of those at Sam Adaci’s excellent green van Purée, always a welcome sight on Broad Street. Ideally I’d have enjoyed them before my main turned up, but you can probably tell by now that all that tells you more about me, and my inability to get a read on this place, than it does about Shawarma.
I had to go for shawarma as a main, because of Mansoor’s tip off and because – durr – it’s literally the name of the restaurant, even if the logo is a very cheery-looking bow-tied chicken tipping a top hat, seemingly unaware that its friends and family are being served up to punters on a daily basis. I would have had rice with it, but they were inexplicably out of rice, so chips it was. I had a good view of all the ceremony of shawarma, the careful slicing and shaving, collecting it all in that little pan, and it did make me peckish. I guess even that adjective, most likely, is a little insensitive to chickens.
I’d asked for a mix, and it gave me a good picture of Shawarma’s strengths and weaknesses. Generally with shawarma I tend to prefer lamb to chicken: I’d certainly say that Bakery House’s lamb is stronger than its chicken, for instance, as is Hala Lebanese’s. But with Shawarma it was the other way round. Now that could be entirely psychological, because I’ve seen videos on Shawarma’s Instagram showing them painstakingly layering marinated chicken thigh upon thigh, creating a monumental column of meat, and it’s hard not to be impressed by that.
But in reality, both it and the lamb were very serviceable indeed. Both were piles of shredded meat, glistening in a way that seemed entirely unnecessary – could have been oil, could have been a little pomegranate molasses, could have just been sheer juiciness – and both were very enjoyable loaded onto a fork and then speared onto a chip. The chips, by the way, were about as good as bought-in chips get, fried there and then and decanted onto a plate, all brittle rustling, dusted in something I imagined was sumac.
In that sense, Mansoor was absolutely right. Working through a plate of that meat and those chips, dipping in more of that garlic sauce and a chilli sauce that again was pleasant but not especially pungent was a fun, almost meditative experience. It was cold and dark outside, and I found myself thinking again about old Reading and new Reading. Because West Street used to have Vicar’s on it, and Reading’s original branch of Primark, and a Fopp I loved visiting on the way back from the farmer’s market, back when Fopp was a thing. I’d go there and buy CDs and DVDs, back when CDs and DVDs were a thing too.
But now the centre of gravity has changed, and that end of town is a very different place. Two peri-peri establishments a couple of doors apart, a fishmonger and that butcher that got closed down by the council’s environmental health team, much to the delight of the gammons and ghouls that haunt the comments section of the Reading Chronicle. I’m not for a second saying that this part of town is worse or better than it was, but the gulf between this Reading and the Reading of Station Hill, of urban tap rooms and branches of Notes feels so big you could be in two different towns. And I do miss Beijing Noodle House, come to think of it: still, we’ll always have Rafina.
But none of that detracts from the fact that Shawarma is an asset to West Street, and that it would have been at any time in West Street’s history. If I was being ultra-critical, I’d say that I personally like my shawarma sliced more thinly, a little more caramelised and crisp-edged than this was. But I didn’t feel like being ultra critical, and anyway Mansoor was right, as he often is: a plate of their mixed shawarma is a positive tonic on a cold evening. I did it, as he said I should, so I speak from experience.
That said, I actually think the trick is to have what I saw the owner preparing for a takeaway order. ‘Shawarma bites’ was a wrap packed with shawarma, very carefully rolled and assembled, crisped up in a sandwich press and then cut into slices, a bit like a Turkish beyti without the tomato and yoghurt plonked on top. I mentally made a note to have that next time, and I also made a mental note that there had to be a next time so I could eat it.
The owner, by the way, was lovely. When I settled up – twenty pounds, not including tip – I told him I’d really enjoyed it and that I would be back. He asked me to leave a review on Google, in a way that seemed well practiced, and I said “don’t worry, I’ll write you a review”. That’s well practiced too: I just don’t put it on Google.
As you’ve probably gathered, I couldn’t work out what to make of Shawarma: looks like a takeaway, priced like a restaurant, something somewhere between the two that either has something for anyone or nothing for everybody. And yet I liked it nonetheless. I will go there again on a cold evening, or avail myself of one of the tables they put outside when the weather improves.
And the contrarian in me, the person that loves the underdog, feels like we all have a responsibility to make sure that even if Reading does become awash with gleaming apartments and plush chains, there’s always room for something different. For the Sheds, the Sapana Homes and the Sarv’s Slices: and that’s just the Ss. And I really hope there is always space for places like Shawarma – another S – a tiny shawarma joint, doing its thing quietly and thoughtfully. Just around the corner from all that jazz, yet somehow a world away.
Reading is better for keeping hold of that, I reckon. It’s no good gaining all those shiny things, after all, if you end up losing your soul.
Shawarma Reading – 7.2
13 West Street, Reading, RG1 1TT
0118 9505625
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