Restaurant review: Arbequina, Oxford

On August 15, 2025August 18, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

Late last Saturday morning I was sitting outside Missing Bean on Turl Street with my great friend Jerry, drinking a gorgeous latte in the summer sun, about to tuck into a pain au chocolat with impeccable lamination; I remember thinking that, on a day like that, there felt like no better place to be than Oxford in the sunshine. The train up from Reading had been packed, and we’d stood in the vestibule making conversation with our fellow captives, two young polite Swedes with perfect teeth and an Australian who had fought her way there to the loo and, realising how spacious it was, was tempted to lock herself in there for the rest of the trip.

And when we got to Oxford – well, it was a Saturday in August and the weather was fine, so naturally the city was packed. A curious blend, throngs of tourists swarming round Radcliffe Square, the Bodleian and the Covered Market but also packs of graduands, in their gowns, on their way to the Sheldonian Theatre for their final rite of passage. The Oxford year isn’t like the calendar year and this all happened on the very outskirts of it – one academic year ended, another not quite ready to begin, the city reclaimed by residents before the whole thing started again in October.

Nonetheless, from where we were sitting the view was gorgeous, the food and drink were excellent and the people watching was close to unparalleled. I’d asked Jerry if he was free on the off chance at very short notice and had been delighted that he was, and at this point we were barely an hour into what would turn out to be another effortless nine hour chinwag, punctuated by this walk or that, this spot of shopping or another, lunch, coffee, beer garden, train home. Even at the start of the day, I knew it would be a good one: with Jerry, it always was.

But would it be a good lunch? I’d thought carefully about this, because although I always have a wonderful time with Jerry when he joins me for a review I cannot say, hand on heart, that we usually have a good meal. I’m not saying that he’s a jinx, far from it, but I feel guilty that he’s joined me for some of the most middling meals I’ve had for the blog in the last few years. He was the person I took to Zia Lucia for pizza that was nothing more than pleasant, and then he also came with me to Maidenhead’s Storia for much the same experience.

Then to cap it all, the last time we lunched it was in Oxford – at Gee’s, where £200 got you a lot of disappointment. Because Jerry is so lovely, he never resents us marring our time together with mediocre food, which makes him a far better person than me. But I still feel bad about it, and I decided after that lunch in Gee’s that Jerry, more than anyone who comes out on duty with me, deserved a nice one. But where to take him?

The thing is, places I review for the blog probably fall into three categories. There are the ones I expect in advance will be good: these are more likely to happen in places like Oxford, London or Bristol that support a large and thriving restaurant scene. And then there are the places I merely hope will be good, and that hope can run the whole spectrum from reckless optimism to wishful thinking. Don’t get me wrong: I always hope for the best but sometimes, especially in Reading, that hope can border on the blinkered or forlorn.

Originally I was going to take Jerry to the Chester Arms, out off the Iffley Road, which falls into the first category. It’s famous for one thing and one thing only – its enormous steak platter, which comes groaning with handmade chips, cabbage and streaky bacon and béarnaise sauce, which they have been serving up for over fifteen years. I’ve heard about it so many times but never managed to make it there, but as we were deciding where to go Jerry dropped the bombshell: he’d just had a dental implant, so needed something a little less taxing on the molars. Would I mind if we went somewhere else?

So the subject of this week’s review falls into the rarer third category: places I have been, that I remember liking, where the mixture of hope and expectation is more of a balancing act. You don’t so much expect they’ll be good, you more hope that they’re as good as you remember. And Arbequina, the tapas restaurant down the Cowley Road, definitely falls into that category. It’s been there nine years, very much blazing the trail in that part of Oxford, and after getting a rave review in the Guardian the year after it opened it’s stayed out of the limelight, even though it’s one of only two Oxford restaurants to be mentioned in the Michelin guide.

It’s quietly done its thing. No cookbook, no appearance on Saturday Kitchen or Great British Menu, just keeping going and keeping afloat. Growth has been steady and incremental: first it expanded into the neighbouring unit four years ago and then, earlier this year, it announced that it was crowdfunding to open a second site in Oxford’s Covered Market, The council had approached them with an offer – not something that would ever happen here in Reading – and so far the crowdfunder is just over half the way there, with the restaurant still hoping to open the new site later this year.

So yes, Arbequina has history. And I have history with it too, because I’ve been eating there, on and off, for the last eight years or more. Plenty pre-COVID, when I always adored it, but only once, for some reason, since the pandemic ended. That was three and a half years ago, and it sowed seeds of doubt that maybe Arbequina wasn’t the restaurant it used to be. But I should have checked in on it long before now, and ambling across Magdalen Bridge with Jerry, in good time for our lunch reservation, I found myself getting excited about a reunion with somewhere that used to be one of my favourite places.

It’s in the fun part of the Cowley Road, past the restaurants Florence Pugh’s dad used to own, past Spiced Roots, but just before brilliant café Peloton Espresso, or Truck Records, or – far further up – the turning into the food enclave of Magdalen Road. It’s a lovely site that has kept the old shop fronts from the chemist and watchmaker who used to trade there, the tasteful writing in orange sans serif on the glass the only sign of Arbequina’s name. The room inside is lovely, with unpretentious decor, a handful of tables, both low and high, and a long zinc bar where you can sit and watch all the work in the very small open kitchen.

But it was a Saturday in August, and the awning was out, and neither of us could think of anything finer than sitting out on the pavement watching the Cowley Road live and breathe, so we did exactly that. I ordered a rebujito from their cocktail menu – a drink I grew to love in lockdown but which I had for the first time at Arbequina, rather than in Andulusia – and Jerry joined me. It was fresh and zippy, a harmonious blend of the lemon, mint and that savoury note of fino.

The other thing we had right from the off, while we made up our minds about the rest, was Arbequina’s tortilla. I remembered it well enough to know that you simply had to order it, and I also knew from repeated personal experience that sharing a slice felt like a good idea right up to the point where it turned up and you could only eat half of it. So I insisted that we got a couple, and Jerry agreed – partly because he’s just a very agreeable cove and partly because I sold it as about as kind on his teeth as it’s possible to get.

But ‘kind’ undersells it, because it’s a positively indulgent treat and, however good anything else you eat at Arbequina might be, it always sets the standard for other dishes to beat. I had forgotten, over the last three and a bit years, just how good it is, but it was magnificent: so soft, only just structured on the outside and a glorious mess within.

Egg, potato, onions, thyme – that’s all there is to it, but of course that’s a hopelessly reductive way to describe a masterpiece. Jerry did better, dubbing it sumptuous. Why do I never use that word in reviews? Maybe I was waiting for this dish.

Because you could have tortilla in dozens of places, in Spain and in this country, and not approach the brilliance of this. Every forkful but the last was wonderful, and the last was wonderful yet heartbreaking. But I knew that at least not sharing it meant that last forkful took longer to arrive. It was so sweet, so exquisite that I thought I tasted things in it – maybe nutmeg, maybe cinnamon – that weren’t there.

When Ben, the manager who looked after us that day, took our empty dishes away he explained that there really was nothing else in there. The sweetness came from the onions, which were cooked for a mind-blowing twelve hours. When Jerry heard that he said “I don’t envy your gas bill” and the manager smiled. Jerry had accidentally hit on one of the reasons hospitality is so thankless right now, and he meant no harm by it.

That tortilla under our belts, it was time to take a serious look at the menu and plan our assault on it. Many of the dishes I remembered from previous visits – chicken thighs with romesco, or toast thickly spread with ‘nduja and honey – were no longer there, but the menu still read nicely. Just shy of twenty dishes, most of them at or adjacent to a tenner: only one approaching twenty quid and a last, Iberico tenderloin to share, closer to forty.

It didn’t break into sections, or flow quite the way that the menu at, say, RAGÙ did, but it had plenty of potential and so Jerry and I did what I’d done countless times before – made a list of things we definitely wanted to eat, broke it up into waves and decided to order and graze, little and often. And along with that we had a gorgeous white, an Asturian albariño blend with a certain bracing saline quality: I’d chosen it for no other reason than that I’m on holiday in Asturia soon, and fancied getting a sneak preview.

My verdict? Roll on next month. At £45 it was the most expensive white on a very compact list – four reds and four whites, mostly from Spain, and a bigger selection of natural wines from all over. But the markup was far from harsh, because I reckon it would cost you about £20 retail.

Sometimes things can be delicious because they’re simple, and Arbequina’s chorizo was a classic example. Sliced lengthways and cooked on the plancha until the outsides were caramelised and blackened, it was superlative stuff. Not cooked in wine or cider, not sliced and fancified, just cooked and served. I’d love to know where Arbequina buys it – it’s certainly not Brindisa, because theirs can be a bouncy horror compared to this.

It irked me that they gave you five of them, though, because that’s an especially tricky number to share. Well, with anybody but Jerry, anyway. “Go on, you have the last one” he said. He’s just lovely like that.

Almost as simple, even more beautiful to look at – and perfect for a sunny al fresco afternoon – Arbequina’s watermelon with jamon was a joyous dish. The melon was plump, sweet and vibrant, and very much the star of the show. But where it wasn’t quite as successful as, say, the similar dish I had at RAGÙ recently, was that the supporting players were perhaps hiding their lights under a bushel somewhat. The two bits of jamon folded on top felt slightly meagre, the honey and chilli rather lurked at the bottom of the plate, shunning the limelight.

But to be fair, if you’re comparing this with the dish at RAGÙ it’s only fair to also note that this was £8, and the Bristol restaurant’s version was over 50% more expensive.

Jerry was in no rush – I always forget that he’s not a trencherman like I am – so at this point we asked the manager if we could hold fire, sip our wine and come back to the menu. And he let us do exactly that, keeping us posted on when the kitchen would take last orders so we could have the leisurely lunch we had in mind. Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so we nattered about all sorts, only punctuated by Jerry having an almost Tourettes-like reaction to every single electric scooter going past. I love the multitudes people contain: Jerry is possibly the most affable person I know, but he really hates those electric scooters.

The one dish Jerry really wanted from the menu was Arbequina’s take on an Andalusian classic, berenjanas con miel, or fried aubergine with honey. Now, I wouldn’t have ordered this because I’ve never liked it in Spain – usually the aubergine is sliced thin and fried in a crispy batter, and drizzled in a dark sticky molasses that is a million miles from honey. It takes some doing, in my book, to make aubergine a good thing and this dish, whenever I’ve had it abroad, doesn’t pull it off.

But Arbequina’s version takes everything that could be good about that dish and junks the rest. So we got three soft, caramelised wedges of aubergine, drizzled with an ambrosial molasses without any sour, burnt note, the whole thing bathed in a mild whipped feta – almost more yoghurt than feta – and scattered with pomegranate and torn mint. Have I sold it to you? I hope so. Arbequina sold it to me, both literally and metaphorically. One to add to the vanishingly small list of aubergine dishes I actually like, most of which are on the menu at Kungfu Kitchen.

Our last two savoury dishes were, apart from the tortilla, the highlights of the whole thing for me. I am a terrible rubbernecker in restaurants and I kept seeing a dish go past to other tables which looked eminently snackable, a giant heap of fried, crispy, golden things. But I wasn’t sure what it was, and when I asked the manager I couldn’t explain it well enough – I blame the wine – to get him to tell me what the dish was. But then Jerry wanted the prawns, so it turns out we ordered it by accident.

So these, it turns out, are Sanlucar Crystal prawns – little critters, soft shell, fried in a golden coating, dusted with chilli and served with a generous dollop of alioli. Never had them in my life, now fully wondering where they’ve been for the last fifty-one years.

And again the funny thing is that like the aubergine, this wouldn’t normally be in my wheelhouse at all. I don’t like whitebait, can be squeamish about eating things whole. I’m not one of those macho restaurant bloggers who likes to wank on about sucking the head of a prawn – they try to channel Bourdain, but really they’re Swiss Toni – and, with the exception of one meal in Kolae I’ve managed to convince myself that I really don’t want to munch on a prawn’s brains.

So why did I love these so much? I really don’t know, but I did. I keep using the word fresh in this review, or it feels like I do, but that’s what they were – so fresh, so light, so simple, with that spritz of citrus, that whisper-quiet crunch and the ozonic tang of the sea. On the Cowley Road. Now, I love the Cowley Road but I’m not going to pretend for a minute that eating these prawns there was in any way a congruous thing to do.

I hadn’t especially wanted Arbequina’s patatas bravas – I often think they’re a way to needlessly bulk up meals in tapas restaurants – but I was drawn to their more exotic sibling on the menu. And it was another really wise choice: billed as crispy new potatoes with tonnato and salsa verde, it was a real humdinger. The slices of potato, thicker than crisps but very much sharing that lineage, were stellar, a triumph of texture.

The thick slick of tonnato was perfect for dipping and dredging: I didn’t get an enormous amount of tuna from it but I did get plenty of savoury saltiness, so I’m guessing anchovies played a part. And I don’t think salsa verde showed up to this dish at all. In its place, I suppose they had deconstructed it by instead scattering everything with salt, parley and lemon zest. I probably would have preferred a salsa verde, because I love the stuff. But I’d forgotten about the salsa verde when this dish turned up so instead I just thought isn’t adding lemon zest to this clever? They knew better than I did.

By this point we’d been there the best part of an hour and a half, in which time tables had come and gone but the restaurant had kept a happy trickling momentum of customers in the sunshine. The Americans at the table next to us ordered some of that tortilla, and inexplicably left some of it: we decided, on balance, that we didn’t know them well enough to offer to take it off their hands.

We both fancied something from the dessert menu, and I talked Jerry into a red dessert wine which came in a wide, low tumbler and was like nectar. I didn’t catch the name, and my bill doesn’t give the detail, but red dessert wines are always worth a try if you find one, and I suspected it would go better with the chocolate mousse even than a Pedro Ximenez.

Other desserts are available, of course. Arbequina was offering a panna cotta, a Basque cheesecake or the almond-rich wonder that is a Tarta de Santiago. But I think chocolate mousse should be on far more menus than it is, so whenever I see one I order it – and Jerry, being kind to his vulnerable gob, followed suit. It was, as so often, the perfect way to finish a meal.

I’ve had Arbequina’s chocolate mousse plenty of times, often enough to track its evolution. It used to be a dense quenelle of the stuff – drizzled with olive oil, scattered with coarse salt, served with a torta de aciete for good measure. But over time, Arbequina’s version of this dish has changed, become less uncompromising, dropped the olive oil and become, on the outside at least, more conventional.

But don’t be fooled: it might come in a glass, the torta de aciete may have been replaced with a dome of crème fraîche but the mousse is still theirs, and still sublime. The salt now runs through the whole thing rather than just finishing it off, and it works beautifully.

It was the right way to end a lunch that had been unassailable in its rightness. Our bill came to just under £175, including tip, and nothing about it had felt out of kilter or anything short of marvellous. We settled up with glad hearts, and were on our way – the grand total of a couple of doors down to have a post-lunch coffee outside Peloton Espresso.

But then another delightful discovery lay in store – a short walk down the Cowley Road and we came to Rectory Road and the Star, the best Oxford pub I’d never been to and another long overdue discovery. It was like a cross between the best things about the Retreat and the Nag’s Head, with a huge handsome beer garden and Steady Rolling Man on tap.

So we grabbed a table, carried on chattering, beers passed, tables of people – and the people watching opportunities they presented – came and went. We had nowhere to be, and every reason to linger. Really it was the best afternoon, and one of the best things about it was knowing that at last, Jerry had got the excellent meal he deserved. Finally, I got him a nice one.

Much later on, we retraced our steps, walking east to west through Oxford, the sun setting in the distance. The pavement outside Arbequina was even busier, with people about to have one kind of outstanding dinner or another. The Cowley Road was alive, the antithesis to the stuffiness we’d encountered right in the centre. “It’s bit like the Oxford Road isn’t it?” said Jerry as we sloped back towards Magdalen Bridge. And I replied that it’s what the Oxford Road could be like, with better landlords and more imaginative restaurateurs. Still, it’s nice to dream.

Arbequina – 8.9
72-74 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JB
01865 792777

https://arbequina.co.uk

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Restaurant review: El Cerdo, Maidenhead

On November 29, 2024November 29, 2024 By ediblereadingIn Reviews, Uncategorized2 Comments

Every year, without exception, you can reliably expect two things to happen in Reading’s hospitality scene. One is that there will be a raft of closures and new openings. Some years that ratio is pretty much one to one, others – like this year – it’s badly out of kilter, with far more places giving up the ghost than newcomers showing up to take their place. It’s tough out there, with no relief in sight. But the other thing that happens, every year without fail, is that none of those new openings will be a tapas bar.

I have complained about this so many times that it’s boring for all of us, so I won’t go on at length. But everywhere you look there’s a tapas bar, it seems, apart from Reading. Swindon has Los Gatos, Oxford has Arbequina. Newbury has Goat On The Roof, and Wokingham has Salty Olive. And Reading? Reading has next to sod all – unless you count Thames Lido, which I don’t, or Alto Lounge, which surely nobody should (Oh wow! Excited for this said the Chronicle‘s Facebook page this week, about the news that Alto Lounge had received permission from the council to double in size: that’s the Chronicle for you, excited about pretty much anything).

No, it’s never a tapas bar. Biryani joints are ten a penny, we went through a phase where we got three sushi restaurants in quick succession and momo are having a moment, but nobody wants to open a tapas bar. It’s a long, long time since La Tasca (which also wasn’t great) and six years since I Love Paella – not a tapas bar, but the closest thing we had – was unceremoniously booted out of the Fisherman’s Cottage. Is it a Brexit thing? Surely somebody feels like getting on the blower to renowned Bristol importer Mevalco and sorting this out, you might think, but every year nobody does.

And that’s what sends me scuttling off to the likes of Swindon, or Oxford, or Wokingham, trying to find the next best thing. Sometimes it works – Los Gatos is a little miracle – and sometimes I find myself somewhere like Sanpa, but I keep on trying because it’s a wonderful way to eat and I am always on the hunt for somewhere that brings a little hint of Granada or Málaga to unsung Berkshire. And that’s why this week I ended up at El Cerdo in Maidenhead, a ten minute walk from the train station, in the company of Katie, last seen last month sampling the glitzy splendour of Calico with me: inexplicably, after a dinner with me, she felt like repeating the experience.

Katie, it turned out, was on a proper journey of discovery, having never been to Maidenhead before. On the stroll through town to the restaurant I gave her a whistle stop tour of everything I knew about Maidenhead, which didn’t take long: former constituency of Theresa May, the infidelity capital of the U.K. (allegedly) and the town that, possibly because it was originally meant to be the terminus of the Elizabeth Line, was getting all the interesting things Reading didn’t.

That last one really is true – Maidenhead has a great independent craft beer bar in A Hoppy Place, wonderful pizza at Knead, an absolutely top notch town centre restaurant in Seasonality. And if some of the misfires, like Sauce and Flour, weren’t amazing, they at least showed that someone was trying. We walked past Sauce and Flour on the way to El Cerdo, and it was rammed, which shows how little I know about anything.

El Cerdo is by the canal, in the new development (the Waterside Quarter, apparently). “This looks so much like the Oracle it’s disconcerting” was Katie’s take, not without justification. The restaurant looked welcoming from the outside, and it wasn’t unpleasant on the inside but it had a feeling of “new build” that it couldn’t quite shake, a functional box rather than a cosy, appealing cocoon.

That’s not entirely their fault – it’s the hand they’ve been dealt with the space, and I liked the giant pig logo on one wall, past the handsome bar. But overall I felt it lacked a little character, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. After all, Knead has a very similar dining room, but somehow it still has a feeling of bustle and hubbub. I guess the open space with the pizza oven perhaps brought things together in a way that El Cerdo’s bar, attractive though it was, didn’t quite manage. A handful of tables were occupied when we got there, including one large group in the corner, but it was a quiet Tuesday night.

El Cerdo’s menu read well. It wasn’t so big as to be unwieldy, and was divided into logical sections – nibbles, cold tapas, meat, seafood and fish. They hadn’t given in to the temptation to do paella on the side, so there was just the one rice dish and a few types of tortilla. In the run up to my visit I’d looked at the menu at Los Gatos, just to benchmark prices, and El Cerdo was definitely more expensive: nearly everything was north of a tenner, with some dishes nudging twenty.

But the wine list was good, and exclusively Spanish, and although we were tempted by a txakoli – the slightly sparkling Basque white you rarely see on menus – we went for an albariňo. It was an excellent choice – crisp and clean but not bone dry, with a little fruit. Thirty-eight quid for a bottle that’s fifteen online, so not an oppressive mark-up, either.

Now, before we get started on the food – and because tapas is by definition small plates, we have a fair bit to run through – I want to get a couple of things out of the way. One is that I had an absolutely lovely evening, and that makes it far more tempting to see the food through the Albariño-tinted glasses of good company. The other is that your mileage at El Cerdo might very well vary from mine: Katie, I suspect, enjoyed most of the dishes more than I did.

And of course, your take on this kind of food will depend on how and where you’ve had it before. Despite loving tapas and small plates, it turned out that Katie had never been to Spain, although she’s rectifying that with a trip to Barcelona just before Christmas.

I on the other hand go to Andalusia most years – and yes, I know that makes me sound like the pretentious tosspot I am – and unfortunately that means that although I went hoping for the best, I was painfully aware of all the instances where the best simply didn’t materialise. El Cerdo’s website says, pretty plainly, “If a dish doesn’t taste like it does in Spain, then we won’t serve it”. Although it also says that El Cerdo has an “executive chef”, and in my experience very little good comes of having one of those in place of an actual chef.

The first sign that I was going to have to write this kind of review came with the accompaniment to those first sips of wine, a couple of gildas. A gilda is a very simple thing – a skewer of olives and pickled chillis, all brought together with a slim ribbon of salty anchovy. Named in homage to Rita Hayworth, it’s almost a perfect mouthful, and quite hard to get wrong. You could have really amazing olives, and truly best in class Cantabrian anchovies, but even an entry level one is going to be a delight.

Or it should be, providing you use salty anchovies. But it felt to me like these were made with boquerones, the softer, more vinegary Spanish anchovies without the saline tautness of the good stuff. Which in turn meant they were all out of kilter – all vinegar and no salt, and somehow fishier than they should have been as a result. I felt like a right killjoy thinking this, because Katie seemed to enjoy hers. But I knew it could, and should, have been better.

The jamon croquetas were a similar story. They weren’t terrible – easily better than the deep fried abominations I’d eaten at Sanpa – but nowhere near the quality of anything you would get in Spain. They were a little flabby, a little pale, a little lacking in the crisp shell you needed. And the bechamel inside was lacking silkiness and a proper hit of jamon. Perching a little slice of it on top of each croqueta just showed you, Jim Bowen-style, what you could have won.

Last time I went out with Katie at Calico, she took me out of my comfort zone by ordering more vegetarian dishes than I would personally have chosen, which probably meant that my review was useful to slightly more people than it would ordinarily have been. The same thing happened here, where Katie was stuck between two dishes, broccoli with almonds or hispi cabbage, that I would never have ordered in a million years.

I took against the former for containing coconut ajo blanco in order to be vegan – good luck convincing anybody that they’d serve that in Spain – and so hispi cabbage it was. And actually this turned out to be one of the better things we ordered, although possibly one of the less Spanish ones. The cabbage came topped with a caper and raisin purée, which was heavy on the raisin and light on the caper, and squiggled vigorously with what was apparently a cured egg yolk sauce.

Your guess is as good as mine: I certainly didn’t get cured egg yolk from it, partly because I don’t really know what a cured egg yolk would even taste like. The little pieces of fried kale on top were pleasant too, although it gave me flashbacks to the Lyndhurst, which always makes me sad. There was a real whack of lurking heat in this too, and all in all it was probably the cleverest thing we had. Not massive, and not cheap at just shy of a tenner, but with lots to recommend it.

One of the biggest crimes against Spanish food was what came next, something the menu described as our “lazy” or open tortillas. We picked the eponymous El Cerdo tortilla, with chorizo and black pudding, and it’s difficult to describe how underwhelmed I was by this. Lazy is about right, to the point where maybe the menu should have said “we can’t be arsed to make a tortilla”.

Now in fairness the server, who was excellent, asked us if we wanted it runny or medium, and maybe we should have gone for the former. But whether it was runny or medium, this wasn’t a tortilla. It was an omelette. An underseasoned one that had been cooked through, with four bits of chorizo plonked on top and some black pudding – the British kind, not gorgeous soft Spanish morcilla, lobbed in the middle. No softness, a little onion, no potato that I could discern. This dish frustrated me. I imagine it would have made a Spaniard angry.

We’d ordered dishes in waves, partly because El Cerdo, Wagamama-style, says that everything you order will come out when they feel like it and we didn’t want to be swamped with dishes in one hit only to find the evening over. El Cerdo said that you should aim for two to three dishes each, which we took to mean three each, and actually doing it this way helped because we got to spy on the table next to us – four lads who kept their coats on throughout for some reason – and swap one of our dishes for something they’d ordered.

That dish was another of the relative hits of the evening, pincho de pollo with crispy polenta and mojo rojo. It was a reasonably generous skewer – four substantial enough pieces of chicken with a weird treble clef of red sauce, resting on a rope bridge of crispy sticks of polenta. And again, it wasn’t terrible but I didn’t found myself wowed. The chicken was nicely enough done, but El Cerdo makes much of its charcoal oven and I didn’t feel this had the char I’d expect from such an impressive piece of kit. The polenta added contrast, but if it did indeed have Idiazabal cheese in it it was a whisper, not a shout.

And again, thirteen pounds for this – even by 2024 standards – felt steep. I thought back to the skewer of chicken I had at Kolae, earlier in the year. Different cuisine, of course, but in terms of technique, flavour and value it was worlds away from this. This felt like the kind of dish that might pleasantly surprise you at Alto Lounge, but only because your expectations were on the floor.

If you wanted more evidence that El Cerdo wasn’t capable of delivering a flawless plate of food, their monkfish in tempura with chickpeas was exactly that. Just as at Calico, Katie had talked me into ordering something with chickpeas and they were lovely – nutty, earthy, positively moreish. But what in god’s name was going on with the monkfish? Two slightly forlorn nuggets of the stuff in a batter that was not, by any stretch of the imagination, tempura. It had no crunch, no texture, and when you tried to cut through it it all fell away, leaving a dense little knot of woolly monkfish, a sad savoury parody of a profiterole.

It turned out that Katie had never had monkfish before. “It’s not usually like this” I told her, feeling like I had to do something to rescue monkfish’s reputation. I hope for Katie’s sake that her first visit to Spain is better than her first taste of monkfish. If it’s on a par, that means she’s had her pocket picked on Las Ramblas.

By this point I’m guessing neither of us really wants me to go on, but go on I must because there were a couple more dishes. Again, Katie quite liked the patatas bravas, which I think we’d picked to make sure we felt full at the end. And again, it wasn’t atrocious but I have never, ever had patatas bravas like this in Spain or indeed anywhere decent in the U.K.

The bravas sauce didn’t taste like bravas sauce, it was fruitier and lacked any kind of heat. The alioli, giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that’s what it was, was not unpleasant. But it needed more of both, and moreover the potatoes were wan specimens, technically cooked but lacking the golden hue and brittle texture that makes this dish a treat.

Writing this, I should let you know, is the weirdest experience. Because I had a really lovely evening but the more I think about the food the more surprised I am by that.

We decided to have a dessert and there was one on the specials menu – a tangerine cake with white chocolate ganache and yuzu sorbet – which our server told us was perfect for sharing. So we also decided to have a dessert wine each, and identified a very nice-looking Pedro Ximenez on the wine list. So we ordered it, and our server came over apologetically. There was only enough left in the bottle for one glass – well, one and a half glasses, really. So what would we like to do?

Of course, as something approximating to a gentleman, I let Katie have that and went instead for a white dessert wine from Rueda. But when they came over, both were in very small glasses, both were the same size, and both looked bigger than they were because each of them had an ice cube lobbed in it.

“They weren’t the coldest, so I put an ice cube in them” explained our server.

This begged so many questions, like why aren’t you keeping your dessert wine in the fridge? or maybe you should have asked first?, let alone is that really what a glass of Pedro Ximenez looks like? or why didn’t you give her the rest of the bottle, were you saving that final half glass for Santa?

It was just baffling, and especially so because otherwise service was lovely all night. She told us they’d been open about a year and that although this week was quiet, things ramped up for the Christmas season after that and business was booming.

Last but not least, the dessert. It looked fancy, it looked cheffy and I can see that it was kind of designed for sharing. And leaving out the question of whether yuzu is remotely Spanish, the yuzu sorbet in the middle was easily the best and most enjoyable thing in the whole dish, resting on a sort of granola crumb. But there was nothing you could really describe as a white chocolate ganache, because neither the quenelles of something or other or the isosceles triangles of white chocolate fitted that bill.

But that wasn’t the most heinous failing: that was the cake. Dense didn’t even begin to describe it. You could work out your upper body trying to drive a spoon through that cube of stodge, and I felt like I did. There’s a chap called David who comes to my readers’ lunches whose job is to build machines that are used to test whether materials can withstand immense pressure. David would take a professional interest in that cake.

Because I seem to have spent most of this review pointing out places that do things better than El Cerdo, this feels like the right time to mention the pistachio cake I had last year at Manteca.

By this point, with the exception of a couple of chaps at the bar, we were the last table there so we settled up and made our way back to the station in the cold. Our meal, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just over a hundred and fifty pounds. Now, I think life in Britain has reached the point where it’s difficult to say “that’s expensive” any more because you’d end up saying that about most meals out.

But instead, we can at least talk about value: that’s more than my recent meals cost at Calico, at The Cellar, or Storia. My meal at Goat On The Roof cost a smidge more, admittedly two years ago, but El Cerdo can’t hold a candle to Goat On The Roof.

Granted, none of those restaurants are an exact match in terms of how many courses, how much booze and all that jazz, but the central point remains: El Cerdo does not feel like value. Not compared to any of those places, not compared to the tapas places you could eat at along the train tracks in Oxford or Swindon. So the search continues, and maybe next year I’ll rock up at Salty Olive having one last stab at finding great Spanish food a very short distance from Reading. Because if there’s one thing we can be fairly sure of, it’s that a tapas bar will not open in Reading next year.

But let’s close by looking on the bright side. For two years now I’ve been taking the train to Maidenhead, trying all these places and bemoaning the fact that Reading doesn’t have them. But actually, now, I’m beginning to think that my head was turned by Seasonality and Knead. Because outside those two, the new places I’ve eaten at in Maidenhead – the likes of Sauce and Flour, Storia and El Cerdo – don’t leave me thinking that we’re missing out. If there’s a market for box-ticking, slightly inauthentic, sterile restaurants and those restaurants want to go to Maidenhead instead, I’m all for it. I’m happy to hold out for something better. Even if experience tells me I might be waiting a very long time.

El Cerdo – 6.3
The Colonnade, Waterside Quarter, Maidenhead, SL6 1QG
01628 617412

https://elcerdo.co.uk/maidenhead/

Restaurant review: Los Gatos, Swindon

On September 29, 2023November 19, 2023 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

When I announced on social media last month that I’d had a very enjoyable day eating and drinking my way round Swindon there was (admittedly a limited amount of) complete and utter astonishment. What? said one person, no doubt thinking I had been hacked. Good Lord! Where? said another.

A third, regular reader Trudy, was particularly interested, having recently moved to Swindon where, as fas as I’m aware, they don’t have a friendly neighbourhood restaurant blogger. I met Trudy at the recent ER readers’ lunch at Clay’s so I gave her a sneak preview of what this review is about to tell you: yes, there are places to eat and drink in Swindon, and they’re a lot better than you might expect.

I’m not kidding – Swindon has enough about it to justify a trip out west on the train. You have to do a thirty minute walk from the station, up a hill, but you are rewarded with Swindon’s Old Town which is a small but perfectly formed district full of nice shops, restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars. There’s an arts centre, and the Town Gardens, a beautiful Victorian park with a listed bandstand and a cafe (it also, according to the council’s website, hosts something called the “My Dad’s Bigger Than Your Dad Festival”: I love my dad dearly, but I’m not entering him in this any time soon).

Where had all this been hiding? You could almost imagine you were in a little town on the outskirts of the outskirts of the Cotswolds, and then I realised that I sort of almost was. And truly, I had a wonderful afternoon eating and drinking and making merry in the company of my friends Dave, who lives in Wootton Bassett but I suspect wishes he lived in Cirencester, and Al, who lives in Cirencester and so doesn’t have to.

We started out with a couple of outstanding coffees from the small, difficult to find but deeply charming Pour Bois – which I pronounced to Dave as if it was French before realising that of course it was pronounced poor boyz because we were in Swindon, not Montparnasse. My mistake: it’s not easy being Frasier Crane in a town full of Bob “Bulldog” Briscoes.

After lunch we wandered over to Ray’s, an ice cream parlour which is an Old Town institution, and sat on the wall opposite eating our ice creams in mute contentment. And then we wandered over to the Town Gardens, which – don’t hate me for saying this – slightly puts Forbury Gardens to shame, not least because it has a lovely little cafe serving superb coffee which was miles better than anything you could get from the equivalent kiosk in Reading. The beans are by local Light Bulb Coffee, and I also picked some up to try at home (it’s marvellous stuff).

After ice cream and coffee there was nothing for it but to try some beer. Did you know that Swindon has a nascent craft beer scene? I didn’t either, but it turns out it does, with several great venues dotted along the Old Town’s Devizes Road. We started out in Tap & Brew, local brewery Hop Kettle’s Swindon tap room, which served some stonking beers: my favourite was Kepler, a proper fruit explosion of a NEIPA so good that I bought a bottle to stash in my bag (it didn’t make it to the following weekend, that’s how good it was).

After that we had a short stumble to the Tuppenny, a lovely pub with an impressive selection of beer on keg – including both Double-Barrelled’s Parka and DEYA’s stupendous Steady Rolling Man as permanent fixtures – and a belting can fridge. I had some splendid pales, made a detour into sweet, indulgent stouts that tasted, by pure witchcraft, of battenburg or chocolate orange, and I rolled out to catch my train home totally convinced that Swindon’s Old Town could match any enclave Reading had to offer when it came to the finer things in life.

That’s all well and good, but I maintain that any day trip away has to be anchored around a meal, whether that’s dinner or lunch. And for Swindon, for me, that destination was never in doubt. So after our coffees at Pour Bois, and before our ice cream at Ray’s, Dave, Al and I headed to Los Gatos, in the heart of Old Town, to see if it still lived up to the billing it had in my mind as The Restaurant Worth Visiting Swindon For.

Los Gatos is a tapas restaurant, and it’s been going for nearly twenty years. I don’t get to Swindon often, but whenever I do I make sure I have lunch there. I’ve said before that tapas restaurants in this country tend to either be run by Spaniards, with mixed results, or by evangelical Brits who are trying to reimagine a tapas bar as its best possible self. Oxford’s Arbequina, Bristol’s Bar 44 and Bravas definitely fall into that category.

But Los Gatos, for me, feels more like it’s trying to recreate than perfect – and there’s nothing at all wrong with that, because some days a recreation of Malaga or Granada in England would be a wonderful thing in its own right. Despite that it, too, was founded and run by Brits and named in tribute to the legendary Malaga bar of the same name. Originally they had a site round the corner, but they moved to their current site a minute down the road and then, during lockdown, they sold up.

The new owners have expanded by taking the site next door, and this was my first visit since the pandemic so I was a tad discombobulated by it not looking how I remembered. But the fact remains that it’s really nicely done, and it helps that our table was in the original room, where I’ve eaten before. It is a really lovely space, with tasteful terrazzo marble-effect tables and – as there should be – stools up at the bar. The room had plenty of natural light, attractive dark beams and a blackboard full of wines and sherries by the glass.

I’m not going to go all Berkshire Live and tell you it was just like being in Malaga, but I have to say the overall effect wasn’t a million miles off. We started with a crisp glass of fino apiece – turns out there were three Frasier Cranes in town after all – and enjoyed the building buzz of a restaurant turning a very healthy trade at lunchtime. Again, I stopped to remind myself that I was in Swindon. In honesty, I did that more than once during the meal.

The joy of a place like Los Gatos is looking at the menu, wanting to order nearly everything and then realising that in a tapas restaurant, provided there are enough of you, you can have a decent stab at it. And Los Gatos’ menu is very much that kind of menu with most dishes around the seven pound mark, all of them tempting.

There’s plenty of cooking on display too, rather than an over-reliance on buying and slicing, so although you can get jamon or queso they’re a very small section of a large and diverting selection. Typical Andulucian dishes are well represented, like spinach with chickpeas or fried aubergine with honey, and I suspect you could quite happily bring a vegetarian here: perhaps one of the main indicators that you’re not in Spain is that they even make a little effort to accommodate vegans.

But Dave, Al and I were neither of those things, so as Dave sipped an Alhambra and Al and I tackled a beautifully fresh, fruity white from Jumilla – decent value at just over thirty pounds – we did one of the most enjoyable things you can do in a tapas restaurant. We chatted away, picked out our favourite dishes, haggled and scheduled, putting them in our first and second wave. As we did, I thought about how much I’d missed this kind of sociable eating, with these two. Of course, I didn’t tell them that then, because we’re men in the last gasps of our forties, but writing it here will have to suffice.

Our first set of dishes were all, without exception, winners – so much so that my usual anal urge to photograph everything pretty much deserted me. That’s bad news for both of us – me because I’ll have to rely on my immortal prose and you because you’ll have to read it. The very pick of the dishes was the hake in beer batter – it’s a fish beloved of the Spanish but Los Gatos bring as much out of it as anywhere I’ve been in Spain. Three huge chunks of the stuff, in the lightest batter, sprinkled liberally with flakes of salt was the perfect reintroduction to their food, and a deep, golden saffron mayo played nicely with it, perhaps more gently than a honking alioli would have done.

Everything seemed geared for three to share because we also got three superb croquetas – much more dense and substantial than I’m used to with more heft and less bechamel. That might not suit everyone, but it really suited me. If you came to Los Gatos as a pair or a four those two dishes would cause you serious problems, but the three of us felt very fortunate.

Jamon – Serrano rather than anything fancier – was decent and hand carved, with a good umami note and a nice marbling of fat. It didn’t perhaps have the really intensely savoury quality, or melting fat of the very best Spanish hams, but it was eight quid or so and far from stingy, so I wasn’t in the mood to complain. By that point in the lunch I wasn’t in the mood to complain about anything, not even Dave’s jokes.

I also loved the mushrooms in a cream and sherry sauce, achieving a precarious balance between glossy sweetness and the underlying savoury note just peeking through thanks to the oloroso. We didn’t order any bread for the sauce, though, which was a mistake. I’ve been doing this gig for ten years and I still make schoolboy errors like that.

Our greed was such that there were still two other dishes in our first order, and one was a dish I’ve loved at Los Gatos for a long time. Morcilla de Burgos came beautifully presented, two discs of earthy, fragrant black pudding sandwiching a glorious middle layer of sweet piquillo peppers, quail’s egg perched on top. The prettiest thing we ate all day, so naturally the one I didn’t photograph, but a really gorgeous morsel. Also possibly the hardest to share – or perhaps I just didn’t want to – so if you go to Los Gatos order your own personal portion. For my sake, if not for yours.

And last of all, because we had been carb-free up to that point – we ordered an arroz con pollo. I seem to recall that Los Gatos serves paella at the weekends, and this was a miniature version of that. I quite liked it, and I was glad to see it topped with beautifully done chicken thigh, but again it was probably one of the less shareable things we ordered. The rice did come in handy though, because that sherry and cream sauce had a very agreeable habit of sticking to every single grain, if you crossed the streams.

And then, not at all sated but the edges knocked off our hunger, we regrouped. We looked at our list of outstanding dishes and made our decisions – did we still want them? Was it enough? Was it too much? If I’d just been with Dave, a slim man who very much intends to stay that way, it might have been tricky to get them all past the committee stage, but Al – whippet thin despite eating like a horse – has been known to have two desserts, just because, so I knew I’d be safe.

If the second round of tapas wasn’t quite as impressive as the first, that was partly because we were no longer ravenous. Also, the dishes you absolutely cannot bear to miss out on always end up in the first round, so the bar is meant to be lower when you go back to the menu.

And probably the two weakest dishes were in this section, although I’m not sure either would have made my must-order list in the first place. Calamares were decent but unspecial, and not a patch on the ones you can get in Spain, and the black beans with pancetta and chorizo were surprisingly bland for a dish including two of the greatest cured meats known to man. I found my mind drifting to the cannelini beans at Bristol’s COR, zippy with lemon and topped with breadcrumbs, achieving so much more with fewer ingredients.

We’d also ordered a classic dish, chorizo cooked simply in wine, and it was the kind of thing that restored your faith in a restaurant, both in terms of their ability to buy the right stuff and then cook it spot on. If I knew where they got their chorizo from I’d place an order, because I’m fed up of trying to rustle dishes up with the slightly gristly nonsense you get from Brindisa these days. We could easily have ordered a second dish of this, and I rather wish we had.

We also ordered chicken livers, again in a sherry and cream sauce, and although I didn’t mind it I didn’t think, with hindsight, that it was different enough from the mushrooms to justify ordering both.

And our penultimate dish was the most expensive thing I found on the menu, Galician-style octopus. When I’ve had this in Spain it’s just octopus, heavy on the paprika – and the octopus for that matter – and although octopus is always a joy, it can be a tad one note. I really liked what Los Gatos did with the dish, serving it with new potatoes and capers almost as a hot salad. And the octopus was beautiful – tender and tasty with no bounce or toughness, which is by no means a given abroad, let alone here. I think Dave and Al let me have more than my fair share of this dish. They’re good like that.

And the final thing we ordered? Another portion of that hake. Take a look at the picture below and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.

Service was great. In the course of researching this review I chanced upon some online reviews that said that it wasn’t the same since the restaurant expanded, that a staff of two or three had become a legion and that something magical had been lost. Well, I guess we all sometimes feel that way when our favourites get big and successful but personally I thought the staff were terrific, very efficient, just friendly enough and I was quite happy with them not being overworked. I’m a bit of a pinko like that.

We might well have had dessert, but knowing that there was an ice cream parlour literally on the other side of the road curtailed any ambitions we had in that regard. I couldn’t talk either of them into a Pedro Ximenez either, because beer was calling too. Our meal came to just under fifty pounds a head, not including tip, which I thought was a steal for everything we had.

Ordinarily I start every review of a tapas restaurant by complaining that Reading doesn’t have a tapas restaurant and never really has. You could set your watch by it. So this time, for novelty value, I thought I could shoehorn it in at the end. But rather than say that, I just want to say that this kind of restaurant, and this kind of eating, is among my very favourite kind. Ordering everything, trying everything, sharing your joy and diminishing any disappointments – it really is one of the best ways to eat there is. And when you find somewhere that does it well, you’ll gladly travel to it.

In my case, that does seem to involve flying to Andalucia at least once a year, but I am really delighted that Los Gatos, a mere half hour train ride away, remains more than good enough as a substitute for that. The fact that around it has sprung up this magnificent little ecosystem of coffee, craft beer, green space and ice cream is the icing on the cake. Old Town, square mile for square mile, is arguably a lovelier spot than anywhere in Reading, I think – and, yes, that includes Caversham.

So if Spanish food is even remotely of interest to you, I highly recommend that you make your way to Swindon – despite the incredulity of everybody you tell at work – because it very much merits the journey. I think I prefer Los Gatos to Oxford’s Arbequina, much as I love Arbequina, and it edges out Newbury’s Goat On The Roof, too. I still need to make it to El Cerdo in Maidenhead, at some point, but I doubt somehow that I’ll love it quite the way I love Los Gatos.

And in terms of our closest Spanish restaurant, Wokingham’s Sanpa, put it this way: when I went back there earlier in the year I worried that the rating I gave it was far too harsh. Having now eaten at Los Gatos and seen what commited Brits can create as a temple to Spain, in an unfashionable town, I think that if anything I was far too generous. Go to Los Gatos instead: have a sherry, order that morcilla, send me a photo. I doubt I’ll enjoy many lunches more this year than the one I had there.

Los Gatos – 8.7
1-3 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BJ
01793 488450

https://www.losgatos.uk

I Love Paella at The Horn

On May 20, 2016August 4, 2023 By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

I Love Paella moved from The Horn to The Fisherman’s Cottage in November 2016, and left the Fisherman’s Cottage in July 2018. I’ve left this review up for posterity.

My restaurant of the year last year wasn’t a gorgeous old country pub, or a sleek brasserie or some Michelin starred faff factory. No, it was one man and his paella pan, operating out of the Oxford Road branch of Workhouse Coffee weekends and some nights, offering a small but perfectly formed range of dishes – empanada, tortilla, salads, seafood paella – in a little, informal space. You could take your own bottle, you could sit up at the high central bar gassing with your friends, you could order bits and bobs until you were replete and when you went up to settle the bill it was always a fraction of what you expected to pay. I loved it, and when I gave it my award I said “It’s a proper success story, and I sense that there’s still more to come.”

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that a rave review from me looked like something of a kiss of death, and so it came to pass that early in the New Year I started getting reports that people tried to go to I Love Paella to find the windows ominously unlit. I myself trekked down the Oxford Road to take a friend there for the first time only to have my worst suspicions confirmed. No sign of life, the shutters down. Soon after, I Love Paella announced that it was leaving Workhouse Coffee with further announcements to follow. I know it’s not all about me, honestly I do, but I couldn’t help thinking The curse of Edible Reading strikes again.

Fast forward to March, and it turned out that my fears were unfounded. In a surprising announcement, I Love Paella confirmed that it would be taking up residence in The Horn, the Castle Street pub which had previously never really featured on my to do list of Reading’s nightspots. Photos appeared on Twitter of a spick and span new kitchen and huge new paella pans, menus began to appear online and a launch date was announced.

I went shortly after it opened but I played it safe, ordering the things I would have ordered in the old premises. I had a lovely meal – although everything came out very slowly – but I knew that it was too soon and that I had to give them time to settle in. So I’ve been watching all the plaudits on Twitter, biding my time and finally, nearly two months on, I made my way there to try the place out properly. I felt a bit nervous, to be honest: would my favourite restaurant be all grown up in its new home, or would it have overextended itself?

I’m a restaurant reviewer, not a pub reviewer, so I’ll leave the detailed descriptions of The Horn to others. Friends who have been have always expressed vague suspicion, but all I can say is that I thought it looked like quite a nice boozer. The room on the left is lighter, with tall tables and stools and windows all along one wall. On the right is a more traditional room with a couple of biggish tables, and up a step is a smaller room with a few little tables. I wouldn’t have had a problem eating at any of them, although the table I initially sat at did have that disconcertingly sticky varnish I always fear could remove multiple layers of skin in one go. I’ve been told before that it’s a pub for sports fans, and there were a couple of screens showing a possibly (though how would I know?) crucial match between some overpaid men in red and overpaid men in blue, but on a Wednesday night it was largely empty.

The menu is much wider than the one ILP used to offer at Workhouse Coffee and I was determined to order lots of the new dishes to see whether they were truly taking advantage of the improved kitchen facilities. This meant passing up the empanadas, although never without regret, and – particularly disappointing, this – the grilled goat’s cheese with tomato jam. So the starters I chose had a double burden to bear: they had to be good, and they had to be better than my happy memories of meals from 2015. Could they pull it off?

In a word, yes. Chicken bravas was the most vanilla of them but still thoroughly successful. Beautiful cubes of fried potato came topped with a piquant bravas sauce and a healthy dollop of pungent aioli, the whole thing pimped with crisp shards of chicken thigh (the menu says there’s rosemary in there, but if there was I didn’t taste it). A lovely, starchy, spicy start to the meal – although if I had one criticism I thought it could have done with a little more bravas sauce. There was still a pitched battle over the last few pieces of chicken, though, and nothing was left.

If the chicken bravas was good, the other two starters were great. Croquetas are exactly the sort of thing I always wanted to see ILP doing and these were as good as any I’ve had in Spain or indeed anywhere else in the UK. Beautifully presented – I know people have a bit of a beef with food on slate but it’s never bothered me – these were two gorgeous crunchy shells full of a perfect béchamel with Roquefort (always very popular in Spain for some reason). Some blue cheese dishes never really get started, others beat you over the head with salt, but this managed to steer the perfect course between those two extremes. I wish I’d ordered a whole portion to myself. I’ve had sidra and cabrales in Madrid, experienced that perfect contrast between crisp fresh apple and stinky, agricultural cheese, and I never thought I’d have an equally joyous experience on a street corner in central Reading with a perfect croqueta and a bottle of Bulmers. Life can be full of wonderful, random surprises.

Last but not least, an innovative starter that combined two of my very favourite things, and a dish so popular that the bar staff had to check after I ordered it that they weren’t sold out. Salt cod churros sounded so fantastic on paper that I simply had to know what a fusion of those two things would look and taste like. The answer is that they look a bit like churros but taste like the best fish fingers in Christendom. I have a huge soft spot for salt cod and again, there was lots in these – no excessive padding out with pointless potato – but also little green spikes of chive in the mix. There was more of the aioli, but somehow it tasted a little different with the churros. Almost like tartare sauce, although I think that was probably a culinary trick of the light.

You order and pay at the bar, and our dishes were brought out one after another in a way that was very well paced. I’m sure it helps that I think we were the only customers eating in the pub that night, so I can’t guarantee how they will manage in the busier times they deserve, but it does mean I get to say lots of nice things about the service which was a pleasure from start to finish. The bar staff were lovely and friendly, they chatted as they brought things out, they took compliments back to the kitchen (pretty much every time we finished a dish, to be honest) and they seemed almost to glow with pride at the food being served up in their pub. Quite right, too.

I couldn’t very well go to I Love Paella without sampling the eponymous dish, so a pan of chicken paella was the last thing brought out, resting on a wooden board on the table. It’s quite a daunting prospect, even between two people – a sea of rich, dark, glossy rice with chicken thighs poking up from the surface. It looked terrific, and it tasted even better: the stock had reduced perfectly, coating the ever so slightly nutty plump grains of rice, the whole thing lip-smackingly savoury and salty. The chicken, as in the bravas, was crisp where it needed to be and tender everywhere else, and broke easily into strands to mix with the rest.

But there was more to it than met the eye, because it was also studded with cannellini beans, flat green beans, peppers and onion, making every forkful a fresh epiphany. Towards the end, you could scrape the metal spoon along the base of the paella pan liberating the best bits of all, caramelised, almost crunchy rice. My companion ate less than half. I, being both greedy and in raptures, ate more than half but even so there was a little left. Not quite enough to take with us, although the bar staff went to great pains to remind me that they could package up anything I couldn’t quite eat. Next time I might just go on my own, pig out and still have loads for the next day to make my colleagues green with envy as they make do with our subpar canteen (if that makes me sound like a bad person – and it probably does – all I can say is that you haven’t tried this paella; you can tell me off once you have, if you still want to).

I didn’t have dessert: the only options were brownie and cheesecake, and I was too full for either. Normally that wouldn’t bother me in the slightest (they’re pretty basic offerings) but the menu specifically says they are homemade, so if you do have a sweet tooth I wouldn’t rule them out and I imagine they’d be good. Personally, if I’d had more room I’d have been tempted to have some manchego, but that’s possibly just me. The whole thing, including those two very welcome bottles of Bulmers, came to just over forty-two pounds.

I was so disappointed when I Love Paella closed, and I remember saying so to them on Twitter. They told me not to worry and said that they had big plans. I should have believed them; that will teach me for doubting. I said I was nervous about reviewing I Love Paella, and that’s true. If it had been disappointing or inconsistent I’d have been writing this review constructively but critically, with a very heavy heart.

I’d particularly have been dreading this bit at the end, where I have to tie it all up. So it’s with a mixture of joy and relief that I get to say this: go. Go to the Horn, whenever you can, and eat this food. And if you’re worried about the Horn not being your kind of place, get people to go with you. Let’s make it our kind of place, stage a pitch invasion if you like, because a pub that does food of this quality in this location should be our kind of place (and if it really bothers you, I reckon I Love Paella might be one of the only good reasons to use Deliveroo – if you happen to have the right postcode). Personally I’ll be back at the Horn, pretty soon. In fact, I’ll even sit through Everpool playing London Irish or whoever they are, if that’s what it takes to enjoy dishes like this.

I Love Paella at The Horn – 8.4
2 Castle Street, RG1 2LS
0118 9574794

http://ilovepaella.co.uk/

I Love Paella

On July 3, 2015July 22, 2022 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

N.B. I Love Paella stopped operating out of Workhouse Coffee in January 2016. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

There are a number of places in Reading that people have asked me to review that aren’t quite restaurants: a couple of supper clubs, for instance, or the training restaurant at Reading College. I’ve so far not reviewed them because I’m not sure how useful it would be to write about a menu that changes at every single sitting. Who’s to say that one visit would be representative of what’s on offer? With Reading College in particular it also seems a little unfair to review chefs in training – I wouldn’t have wanted to share my GCSE coursework with the outside world, let alone have some snooty blogger bitch about my handwriting, my meandering essays or my poorly drawn graphs.

I Love Paella is that most unusual of things here in Reading: a pop-up restaurant. It operates out of the Oxford Road branch of Workhouse Coffee as part of a laudable project by Workhouse to encourage independent businesses. It’s slightly different from the supper clubs, though, in that it has regular opening hours (from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon) and a reasonably stable menu. They’ve not been going long but their enthusiasm on Twitter is infectious, so I thought that if Workhouse can do its bit to support little start-ups, the least I could do is to hop on a trusty number 17 bus one evening and head west to check it out.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must also confess I also had a sneaky side trip to the new improved enormo-Lidl (other supermarkets are available) next to Reading West station, because a friend had recommended their £8 Pouilly Fumé to me. They didn’t have any but I was extremely tempted by some retro biscuits. Have you forgotten how good Gold Bars taste?

The seating inside, as you’d expect, is more suited to coffee drinkers than to people stopping for an evening meal, with mini tables and stools along the windows and a big, high bar area in the middle, but it’s comfortable enough. I Love Paella doesn’t have a license so – having done our homework – we took along our own bottle of wine (not from Lidl, I might add) which the waiter gladly opened for us. I say waiter, but let’s call him the owner – he was the only person we saw working there all evening, and I got the distinct impression that I Love Paella is a one man operation.

The menu is, well, confusing. There’s a blackboard by the counter which lists all the options, except that I suspect they weren’t doing some of them that night, and there were a few specials which weren’t on the blackboard – and we ordered a couple of these because they sounded so good. I got the impression that the owner genuinely decides to cook and try new things on a weekly basis, which is brilliant, but just to be slightly hyper-critical I would have thought the whole point of having a blackboard is that you can easily update it whenever you need to. Being hyper-critical might become a bit of a theme during this review because, as I was to discover, finding anything to criticise at I Love Paella is quite the challenge.

That said, I should also point out that the name, I Love Paella, is a tad misleading. It’s one thing on the menu but the rest of the menu is a mixture of salads, montaditos (small sandwiches) and coques (I felt too awkward asking for one, and good luck Googling one – it turns out they’re a bit like tacos). I pretty much wanted to order everything but showed a little bit of restraint – not much though, as you’ll see when I run through what arrived. The pacing was beautifully done, just as it should be for this kind of dining, so items arrived here and there, just as we’d finished one dish and were ready to move on to the next. I liked being able to watch the rest of the Oxford Road go by, drink my wine and meander through the food on offer – a nice contrast from having tapas in Andalucia where you’re normally rammed at a bar, sherry in one hand, wielding your elbow like a deadly weapon (which, as it happens, mine is).

First up was the goat’s cheese salad, recommended by the owner: a generous plate of frisée, lambs lettuce, radicchio, walnuts and cherry tomatoes with balsamic glaze and a huge slice of pan fried goat’s cheese on top. Not the most complex dish in the world, and very much the sum of its parts but that didn’t make it any less tasty; the combination of the sweet glaze, the walnuts and that creamy, slightly oozy cheese was particularly lovely. A big part of me wanted to see the log of cheese that slice had come from but I was jolted from my reveries about a giant caber made out of cheese by the arrival of the next dish.

Pulled pork empanada doesn’t do it justice. I’m so bored of pulled pork I can’t even tell you – it’s everywhere. Even at Reading’s street food festival last month everybody was flogging the stuff. I just want to see some unpulled pork (and some unsalted caramel while we’re at it). But the point is that I Love Paella’s pork was a million miles away from the sweet, sticky, saturated America version you can find everywhere. Instead it was fine shredded strands with clever spice and heat, Private Eye to most places’ Take A Break. The pastry was gorgeous too, a corn shell which reminded me of the empanadas I once had at Arepas Caffe – but this was miles better than that, light and golden and slightly sticky underneath. It was absolutely crammed with filling, and even then I bitterly resented having to share it with someone else (when you go – and I hope you do – have one to yourself).

Next up was the legendary paella (which we did order two of – it is the name of the establishment, after all). This may not have matched the heights of the empanada but not much does – it came in a cute miniature paella pan, a decent portion of vividly yellow rice with prawns, lots of pieces of squid and a solitary mussel with a wedge of lemon and the crowning glory, a dollop of extremely good aioli. I’m sure paella experts – and I’m not one – would have an opinion about whether it should have had chicken in it, or chorizo, or peppers. But who really wants to go to dinner with a paella expert? Just imagine. Speaking as a relative novice I loved it. The squid was lovely – firm and yielding, not at all rubbery. The rice still had some nutty bite to it and the flavour was beautiful. But the highlight of the dish had to be spearing one of those prawns, dipping it in the aioli, eating and grinning. I did that quite a lot.

Next up was the enigmatically named “Cuban sandwich”. This, truth be told, was really just another vehicle for that fabulous pulled pork – a toasted panini with pulled pork and cheese. The panini was nice and crisp, the cheese was melted (something you should be able to take for granted with a panini but isn’t always the case) and the pulled pork was just as spicy, rich and tender as before. If this had been the first dish I ate I’d have fallen a little bit in love, but as it was it just reminded me that I should have ordered another empanada. What’s the Spanish for l’esprit d’escalier?

I could have – should have – stopped there, but the problem with ordering all your food right at the start is that restaurants have a nasty habit of bringing it out and expecting you to eat it. So I had to soldier on through the final dish. It didn’t even have a name: I got the impression it was something dreamed up on the day because the owner had some extra chorizo to use and was looking for something tasty to make. Oh my goodness. This was a long piece of puff pastry studded with small pieces of chorizo and cheese and then baked into melty-submission. It was like a particularly suave sausage roll – rich and piquant and very, very decadent. It might have lacked the sophistication of the empanada but, in terms of pure happiness, it was right up there.

Service throughout was friendly and enthusiastic, with the owner patiently explaining the dishes that weren’t on the menu as well as the ones that were. When the restaurant was busy he was run off of his feet bringing over plates or assembling take away bags but it was still a far warmer welcome than I’ve had from many well-established restaurants and most chains (a lot of them should head over to I Love Paella and pick up some tips – like how to actually look pleased to have customers, for a start). The total bill for one salad, four small dishes and two small paellas was just over twenty-five pounds (it’s worth noting here that they don’t take cards and all the ATMs within 100 yards or so charge for withdrawals, so take cash with you). Admittedly, we brought our own wine and I don’t think we were charged corkage but by any standards you care to name that’s an absolute steal.

So, here’s the hyper-critical bit: I don’t like the name. I just don’t feel like it really sums up what the place is about. I’d like to have seen more variety in the menu. Very little of it felt like true tapas; I’d have loved to see the kitchen serve up some garbanzos con espinacas, or some tortilla, or a selection of really good jamon. And I also wasn’t quite sure if this was a lunch venue or an evening venue – most of the dishes felt more like lunch dishes, so if you want to explore I Love Paella you might be better off doing that on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. It was nowhere near busy the evening I went, with a few tables and a couple of people dropping in to pick up takeaways.

When I talked to the owner he said he had plans to widen the range of food and hopefully expand the opening hours. But to do that he needs customers which, of course, is where we all come in. I really hope he gets them, because – and I’m sure you figured this out some time ago – I absolutely loved I Love Paella. It’s not just that the dishes were so tasty, although they were. It’s not that the service was so good. It’s not even the fact that I felt so at home sitting at my table, drinking my wine and daydreaming of Seville or Barcelona (no mean feat in RG30, let’s be honest). What really struck me about I Love Paella is how consistent it was. Everything was good, it’s a small menu, it changes fairly regularly and I just felt utterly confident that I could have ordered anything on it and had an excellent meal. That’s down to many things, but it doesn’t feel like beginner’s luck to me.

I Love Paella – 8.2
Workhouse Coffee, 335 Oxford Road, RG30 1AY
07707 641694

http://ilovepaella.co.uk/