Tag: Thai

Restaurant review: Kolae, Borough

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How many of the U.K.’s 100 best restaurants have you been to? I ask because it’s a thing – the National Restaurant Awards – and it came out last week.

Looking through the list, I couldn’t help but feel I was letting the side down as a restaurant reviewer: my score was a measly 7.  Some of them, like Manteca, ranked among the best meals I’ve eaten in the course of writing this blog. But there were at least a couple in that list where I thought “really?” I was pleased to see Wilsons make the list but COR, which didn’t feature, is definitely better than at least a couple of the top 100 that I’ve been to. Still, as I’ve said in the past, the delight of reading a list like this largely lies in disagreeing with it. 

Anyway, as it happens my total only ticked up to 7 because I happened to visit Kolae, a regional Thai restaurant in Borough, the week before the awards were announced. It was ranked 27th, significantly higher than any of the other places I’ve been to, which is an impressive achievement given that it opened late last year. It’s the second restaurant from the team behind Shoreditch’s Som Saa and has very quickly surpassed it in terms of profile (it probably helps that, unlike Som Saa, it doesn’t have any problematic racist incidents in its history).

What this means is that a significant number of restaurant critics have reviewed the place already: Giles Coren for the Times, Tom Parker Bowles for the Mail On Sunday, Tim Hayward for the FT, Jimi Famurewa for the Evening Standard, and Lilly Subbotin for the Independent. Even a couple of restaurant bloggers have already got in on the act, so I can honestly say I’ve rarely, if ever, read as much about a restaurant before stepping through its front door as I had with Kolae.

And the acclaim was consistent, full-throated, verging on the hyperbolic. I mean, get a load of this: Famurewa said it was a “scintillating shot in the arm”, Parker Bowles that it made “the tastebuds tumescent and the gut giddy”. Hayward, the thinking person’s least favourite broadsheet reviewer, settled for the overblown “This has just reminded me why I eat”.

It wasn’t all like that – Giles Coren spent a large part of his review name-dropping Important People He Knew, as did one distinctly regional restaurant blogger – but the important thing was that there wasn’t a single word of dissent: Kolae, according to the consensus, was magnificent.

So it had been on my radar for a while, and an afternoon off in London ahead of a gig that evening – the exceptional Jessica Pratt at Islington’s Union Chapel – gave me a chance to check it out with Zoë. It’s literally just round the corner from Borough Market, a few doors down from Monmouth Coffee, and a pre-lunchtime stroll round the market made it clear just how much competition there was for Kolae to stand out amongst: not just from traders, but nearby restaurants like Barrafina, Berenjak and Bao.

It’s a handsome site, across three storeys, which apparently used to be a coach house in a previous life. I didn’t see the first or second floors, but the ground floor was lovely, all muted concrete and exposed brick. Everything was nicely proportioned: the tables were generously sized and well spaced, and even the bar stools followed suit, being even better padded than I am. So different from, for example, sitting cheek by jowl at Manteca. The Independent summed it up thus: “there’s no other way to say it, Kolae is cool”.

We arrived for a late lunch but even then the room was full of happy-looking diners. No outside space that I saw, really, but the exterior was quite fetching, to the extent where when we left a couple of people were taking pictures sitting in front of the restaurant and uploading them to the ‘gram. “But they haven’t even eaten here!” was Zoë’s baffled assessment.

The menu, on paper at least, looks like it can’t decide whether it’s a starters and mains or small plates restaurant. All the reviews I’ve read say it’s the latter, but the menu lists three things as “smaller” and the rest as “larger” and our server said we should probably plan on three of the larger plates between two. But it’s sort of structured as starters, mains and sides and so we approached it that way. I would say everything seemed reasonably priced, too, with the smaller plates costing about six pounds and the larger ones going from ten to eighteen.

But really, a lot was fluid: at least some of the larger plates felt more like starters or sides, and at least one of the sides, which we ended up ordering, was far more like a main in its own right. Perhaps all the dishes simply identified as food – if so, all power to them. We took it as an excuse to order pretty much everything we wanted and to risk being full. From what I’ve seen, many people who have reviewed Kolae have taken exactly that approach.

Now, before I tell you about everything we ate, I do have to mention heat. Because another thing my research indicated, time and again, was that the food at Kolae might be hotter than you’re used to. A few reviews don’t really talk about it – presumably because those people are hard as nails. But most go to town on it – in no particular order, the food apparently “jolts the senses like being woken at 4am by a sadistic drill instructor”, “blew my bloody head off”, is “blisteringly hot” or leaves you “teetering between burning pain and pure, unfiltered pleasure”.

Does that sound like fun to you? I have to say it didn’t really to me, so I did ask the server which dishes to absolutely steer clear of. There were about three of them. Everything we had was fine, so you won’t get any sub-Fifty Shades Of Grey hogwash in this review.

The first thing we ate was that first step outside the comfort zone. Fried prawn heads with turmeric and garlic were one of those things where you just have to suspend disbelief and give them a go, so we did. Zoë was reluctant approaching the first one but they were crunchy and distinctly moreish and that meant I didn’t have to polish off the rest on my own. I’m not sure how something from the sea could taste quite so earthy, but these did: I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed eating brains so much before, and almost certainly never will again. And yes, prawns do have brains. I know, because I Googled it.

Even better were biryani rice crackers, huge slabs of tactile delight with more than a trickle of nam jim, one of those dipping sauces which just has, and effortlessly combines, everything: sweetness, citrus and funky, salty fish sauce, infinitely more than the sum of its parts. This, for me, was the first of many moments at Kolae where I just thought: this isn’t quite like anything I’ve eaten before. Some of that is my own fault for my sheltered gastronomic life, but if anything that made me appreciate how high definition this food was.

The next few dishes, a mixture of small plates, large plates and specials, were variations on a theme and all linked with the name of the restaurant. Kolae is apparently a southern Thai technique which, as far as I can gather, involves marinating in coconut milk and spice, grilling over fire, re-marinating and re-grilling until what you get is glorious, deep and sticky.

The small plate displaying this technique was a couple of skewers with plump – or, if you get your kicks this way, “tumescent” – mussels threaded on them. I liked them, but perhaps having read so much hype about them I expected these eight mussels to be even more magnificent than they were. Worth it, perhaps, just for the novelty of seeing mussels served in such a different, faff-free way.

It was much, much more successfully deployed with chicken – in this case a huge, deboned chicken thigh which came on a skewer which surely could barely have carried its weight. This is where the technique was really at its best, the meat permeated with complexity and delight.

This kind of food makes fools of us reviewers because it exposes our narrow horizons and our limited vocabulary – I’ve seen it compared to yakitori, to laksa, to satay and to massaman. Better to be honest and say you can’t really sum up the smoke, sweetness, spice and comfort and just say that you should maybe order it so one day, you can compare other great dishes to it instead.

The third of our trilogy of skewers was bavette, topped with crispy onions. You get the idea by now, and although I enjoyed it, three different permutations of that concept was probably one too many. It was better value than the mussels, but not quite as good as the chicken.

At this point, the only question in my mind was where in the pantheon of greats Kolae would wind up nestling. The space was fantastic, the food had been eye-opening – just enough challenge, just enough fascination – and it was simply a wonderful place to be on a weekday afternoon. Every now and again flames leapt from a wok in the open kitchen, there was still hubbub even after the lunch rush had passed, and more was to come.

But that’s where things wobbled, if only slightly. Service had been wonderful, and when you got the attention of a server they couldn’t have been more helpful, but it proved increasingly difficult to flag them down. We’d finished a really gorgeous hazy IPA, Juicy Chug, by small London brewery Jiddler’s Tipple, which had gone beautifully with the small plates, but were keen to get some wine.

And we got there eventually, but if the staff had been more on it I daresay we would have drunk more. It’s a decent and interesting wine list, although the vast majority of the options by the glass were north of a tenner. I really loved my choice, a Greek malagousia and assyrtiko blend, but I think Zoë might have shaded it with her New Zealand riesling.

The first of the large plates that came out again demonstrated that this was a fluid menu where things overlapped and echoed other dishes. I’m not saying that the kale fritters were a replica of the biryani rice crackers from earlier in the meal, but they were definitely close siblings, both in terms of the crunch and complexity. This sauce was very different from the nam jim, but I got sweetness and chilli but maybe not the fermentation the menu suggested would be there. It was however another tactile triumph, although I’m not sure it really felt like a side. Perhaps I should have tried the sour mango salad with dried fish, but everything I’d read suggested that eating it would be a fast train to meltdown..

One of the absolute standout dishes of the meal was – surprise surprise – Zoë’s choice. Soy braised pork belly and ribs was outstanding, in a sauce that was far more about the tightrope between sweetness and saltiness, with heat, just this once, taken out of the equation. The sauce was just gorgeous, the meat was that perfect combination of caramelised and yielding, and it was if anything another dish I hadn’t expected – more poise than bombast, in a meal that had mostly been about very forceful flavours.

And this was where the wobble came in again. We’d ordered this and a second main, a prawn and stone bass curry, and we’d asked for a couple of bowls of rice to accompany them. Our server told us that one bowl of rice would easily be enough for both dishes, and that we could always order more if we wanted to. And maybe that might have been true, but it was very hard to judge when we were waiting something like ten minutes for that second dish to come out.

And this is the drawback of small plates and large plates, starters and mains: because, rightly or wrongly, we had ordered a main each and what this meant in practice was that I sat there like a lemon wondering if they’d forgotten my order. By the time it came out, most of the rice was gone. We ordered another one to go with the fish curry, but didn’t end up using most of it.

I waited so long for my main that I didn’t even get a photo of it, which would frustrate me more if it had been more exciting. It was okay but not extraordinary, and I wonder if the staff have had to manage expectations about the heat levels in the menu following some of those hype-laden reviews, because they told me that this dish was on the hot side and reality it was more restrained than I’d expected.

It was possibly the only thing I ate, up to that point, that tasted unspecial: was that because I’d had to wait so long for it, or just because it didn’t quite match the standard elsewhere? Who knows. All the other reviewers seem to have thought it was out of this world.

Kolae’s menu only had two desserts on it, so naturally we ordered both: how could you resist the possibility that you might just eat the twenty-seventh best dessert in the country? Especially as there was a Coteaux du Layon on the menu, a dessert wine I can never see without ordering which always punches above the likes of a Sauternes (or even a Tokaji, for my money).

Zoë had the worst of it, with a dessert which left her baffled and ambivalent. Mango custard with sweet sticky rice and fresh coconut sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality was a little odd and neither one thing nor the other. The custard was pleasant enough, if not exactly singing with mango, but the layer of lukewarm rice – more claggy than sticky – left her a little cold. Looking at the reviews I’ve seen, Kolae only did one dessert for some time, and all their desserts have been kind-of permutations of what Zoë had (well, left some of) and what I ordered.

That suggests they might still be searching for the right dishes to end meals at the restaurant. On this evidence, perhaps they should keep looking.

I had the smaller, cheaper and better dessert, and arguably the more conventional one. A single sphere of coconut sorbet, gorgeously smooth, came crowned with a salted tea caramel, peanuts on the side. And again, it felt like a few good ideas in search of better execution: I liked the sorbet, I absolutely loved the caramel, I wanted the ratio of the two to be different. And just dumping peanuts next to it felt like an afterthought, when I’d have liked the whole thing to feel integrated.

As I said, previous reviews I’ve seen suggested that Kolae previously only offered one dessert which combined elements of these two. That process of evolution doesn’t feel like it’s concluded yet.

Still, we were full and happy with much to digest. At this point getting attention was a breeze, and our meal – a lot of food, three drinks apiece and a 12.5% service charge lobbed on – came to a hundred and sixty four pounds. I’ve seen a few reviews say that you could spend less, which you could, but I for one didn’t want to come away from the meal thinking anything along the lines of ‘I wonder what those chicken skewers would have tasted like?’

Hours later, after a hectic traipse round Selfridges and Liberty unsuccessfully trying to identify birthday presents, we sat in the very nice beer garden of a pub in Islington, drank two deeply expensive pints of Steady Rolling Man and talked about our meal. It’s always one of my favourite things about going on duty with Zoë, the post mortem, and few things accompany one as well as sunshine and an al fresco pint of Steady Rolling Man.

Our conclusions were fairly similar – that Kolae was extraordinary, and that we were glad we’d taken a punt on it. That the room was incredible, the location was brilliant and that there were many dishes on there the likes of which neither of us had ever had. If the overwhelming critical reaction did have a feel of mass hysteria about it, it didn’t detract from the fact that it was an excellent restaurant.

And yet, there were a few things that just stopped it from being truly great. The slightly disconnected service, for one, and the homogeneity of some of the menu. And the timing issues with the mains did really bug me: I get that when you bill things as large plates and say people might want to share them you may not guarantee they will all come out seconds apart, but a ten minute lag felt like a gaffe and really did take the sheen off what had otherwise been an excellent meal.

And then there were the desserts, the most underwhelming element of the whole thing. I don’t hold with all the tourists wafting round Borough Market with their naff standard issue strawberries swamped in chocolate, but I seem to remember a stall in the market offering raw milk ice cream. If I’d known what Kolae’s desserts would be like, I’d have gone there instead.

But these are, in the scheme of things, relatively minor quibbles. If you have a list of London restaurants you plan to get round to, and Kolae isn’t on it, I’d definitely recommend adding it. If you have any curiosity about this kind of food and this region, even if like me you might lack the experience or the vocabulary to express it, it’s well worth expanding your consciousness with a visit.

And if you’re slightly worried either by suggestions of apocalyptic chilli heat or the visceral horrors of munching on a plate of prawn heads, don’t worry: the former probably won’t materialise, and the latter isn’t mandatory. That’s just the hype talking – the hype that sells papers, results in reservations and gets a very good restaurant an elevated status as the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country, less than a year after it opened.

Is it the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country? I’m not sure about that. I’ve wondered, since eating there, whether it would make my top thirty meals of all time: it’s one of the highest ratings I’ve given out on this blog, but top thirty full stop? Maybe not. But the best is the enemy of the good – and whether or not Kolae is the best, the fact remains that it really is very good indeed. Just leave as many preconceptions as you can at home, and enjoy the ride.

Kolae – 8.7
6 Park Street, London, SE1 9AB

https://kolae.com

Restaurant review: Thai Corner

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If I asked you to rattle off Reading’s longest-running restaurants, the chances are you’d mention London Street Brasserie. The Bina and Quattro too, over in Caversham. I’d expect you to talk about Pepe Sale, that’s a given. You might get bonus points for remembering McDonalds – the Friar Street one has been going since the Eighties – or for saying “of course, until recently there was also the branch of Pizza Hut in the Oracle”. Perhaps you’d bring up cafés like the Gorge or Rafina: the latter, in particular, is one of the last signs of pre-Oracle Reading, and hasn’t changed a huge amount in the intervening years. And, naturally, many of you might namedrop Sweeney & Todd, which has been trading for an incredible forty-four years, longer than some of you have been alive.

But would you remember Thai Corner?

The reason I ask is that often it slips my mind. It’s one of those places that feels like it has been there forever, and will be there forever, but that means it can fade into the background when you’re deciding what to eat, or talking about what Reading used to be like. By my reckoning it’s been open for nearly twenty years; I remember what was there before, an unspecial French place called Bistrot Vino, and I went there once for a Bohemian Night spinoff, but other than that it’s been Thai Corner for, well, forever.

I reviewed it back in 2014, when my blog was a mere six months old, and even then it was an old stager, having celebrated over a decade at the top of West Street. And by the time I reviewed it, it had probably already achieved that feat of fading into the background. Thai food has always been a reliable go to in this country – probably inauthentic, never amazing, rarely terrible – but it’s never had a moment where it was the hot new thing. And so Thai Corner, for those ten years and the eight that followed, has just carried on doing what it did best, whether you noticed or not.

Back before I started this blog it was a proper happy place for me, as frequently visited as the likes of Dolce Vita, and somewhere I could go on date nights or with friends visiting Reading for dinner. I had my staple dishes I always ordered – weeping tiger, sirloin steak with garlic and coriander, or pla chuchi, salmon steak with red curry sauce – and a red wine I always drank, and I never went away less than full or happy. It was a sure thing, in that way people think chains are, and I loved it there.

Anyway, the years moved on, and by the time I reviewed it for the blog I was a lapsed member of the congregation. I liked it just fine, although it didn’t knock my socks off, and my review at the time was full of faint praise in a way which, with hindsight, looks a tad condescending (so unlike me, I know). Haven’t you done well not to be closed yet? it seems to say. 2014 me had forgotten, I think, how much 2004 me liked the place. And 2022 me looked back at that and thought it was high time to go again. 

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Restaurant review: ThaiGrr!

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Regular readers will know that my reviews last year, like much of life in 2021, could best be described using that quintessentially post-pandemic word, “hybrid”. Unlike most years, when I’d traipse to a restaurant fortnightly and write about it, last year was a mixture of all sorts – takeaways, from new restaurants and old favourites, a first (unsuccessful) dabble with restaurant DIY kits and later, as the weather improved, “proper” restaurant reviews. 

Even those were an eclectic bunch. I made a point of revisiting some of the earliest restaurants I’d reviewed, with varying results. Some, like Pepe Sale and London Street Brasserie, held up nicely despite eight intervening years. Others, like Buon Appetito, had been transformed. And then there was Zero Degrees: pants then, pants now. I also reviewed a couple of places outside Reading, making it as far as Bristol and London. By 2021 standards, that was exotic stuff.

Then there were the new places in Reading. I tried to tick off as many as I could but timing, the vicissitudes of life under Covid and my personal approach to risk meant that many were al fresco visits. That made for a lovely time in the sunshine at O Português, a sublime meal at Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen and, towards the end of the year, a game attempt at shivering away outside Gordon Ramsay Street Burger. 

But it also meant that my first introduction to some of Reading’s most interesting new places was as takeaways – and however good a takeaway is, it can’t match eating in the restaurant. Part of that’s the atmosphere, the hubbub and people watching. But, more prosaically, there’s the basic fact that your food comes straight to your table from the kitchen, arranged on plates by someone who isn’t you, looking all nice.

So some of last year’s big names are still waiting for a “proper”review. I’m yet to eat at Tasty Greek Souvlaki, for instance, and I feel that’s long overdue. I managed to eat at La’De Kitchen once last year, back in early May when you could only sit outside and it wasn’t yet warm enough to comfortably do so, however many blankets they brought out. But I didn’t review it: I was happy just to be there at all. And, for that matter, too cold.

One of the most noteworthy of the Class of ’21 that I haven’t visited in the flesh is ThaiGrr!: I had their takeaway last May and was blown away by it all. They put so much thought into how they packaged for delivery that I wasn’t sure the gap between eating in and having takeaway would be as marked as it was for, say, Greek or Turkish food. But I was educated on this subject by a regular reader of mine who I bump into most weeks at Blue Collar. 

“You need to eat in” he said. “However good you think the fried chicken is at home, it’s miles better in the restaurant.” Given how much I’d liked it from the comfort of my own sofa this was a powerful incentive to pay ThaiGrr a visit, so on a Saturday lunchtime Zoë and I swung by to try it out. It’s in the less fashionable part of town round the back of the Broad Street Mall, on the same strip as Pepe Sale and Bierhaus. I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like the Broad Street Mall has been up and coming for as long as I can recall without ever having upped and came, so to speak. 

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Takeaway review: ThaiGrr!

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One of the many things I’ve missed about reviewing restaurants over the past fourteen months is getting to try new places soon after they’ve opened. It’s fun to be one of the first people to check out a restaurant, and I know that at least a few readers wait to see whether I’ve enjoyed somewhere before deciding whether to pay it a visit – which is a huge compliment, and very much appreciated. But with one thing or another, I wasn’t able to do any of that last year. 

Maybe I should have started reviewing takeaways sooner, rather than waiting until 2021. As it was, I didn’t get to try the food at Tasty Greek Souvlaki or Banarasi Kitchen until many months after they opened their doors: it also meant I had to sit on the sidelines and watch while people told me how good it was. It was another thing to envy, along with all the people I knew who managed to fit in a foreign holiday last year, or a UK holiday (which, by the way, isn’t a staycation: that’s a hill I’m willing to die on), and even all the people who ate in restaurants and drank in pubs over the summer, free of the fear I couldn’t escape.

That makes this week’s review one I’ve particularly looked forward to. ThaiGrr! – yes, with an exclamation mark like Westward Ho!, although I’ll leave it out from this point onwards or this review might sound like I’m on amphetamines – opened last month at the Oxford Road end of Queens Walk. It’s the first of no doubt many new openings as part of the overall regeneration of the Broad Street Mall, although definitely not the last: I’ve heard interesting rumours, for instance, about a Greek restaurant opening there this summer. 

I was on a photographic mooch around West Reading a couple of weeks ago, checking out Rise Bakehouse and Cult Antiques and Coffee, the new café on Tilehurst Road. Because I was in that general area, I took a detour past ThaiGrr to have a look. It had gamely stuck a couple of tables outside, braving the wind tunnel that is Queens Walk. But the inside looked a little like a slightly bigger Kokoro, an unfussy place where you grab and go, or eat inside but with no whistles and bells. The menu felt geared towards that kind of eating, too – or takeaway – with a few starters and a reasonably compact list of mains all served with rice.

ThaiGrr has almost no footprint online, having seemingly sprung up from nowhere. Their website doesn’t tell you anything about their story, and all I could find from Googling was a company set up last year from an anonymous address in North London, and three directors with no previous positions. So it would appear, from a cursory glance at least, to be that rare thing – a completely independent restaurant appearing out of nowhere.

When I looked at the menu on ThaiGrr’s website I felt a little underwhelmed, mainly because I saw sweet and sour chicken and beef in oyster sauce very close to the top. That felt a lot like playing it safe. But when I had a closer look on Deliveroo I realised that wasn’t representative at all: the balance leant much more towards Thai dishes, with a specials section which could only be ordered after 2.30pm. Main courses, with rice included, ranged from just under ten pounds to twelve pounds, which made me think this would probably be a one-pot, Kokoro-style arrangement. 

There were also half a dozen sides or starters, clocking in between four and seven pounds. It was genuinely difficult to narrow it down so we ended up ordering two mains and three sides, hedging our bets, reasoning that something was bound to be relatively disappointing. That, as it turned out, was a mistake – albeit one with happy consequences. Our order came to just shy of forty pounds, not including rider tip.

As so often with meals from the centre of town, everything happened like clockwork. We placed our order around quarter past seven, the driver was en route twenty minutes or so later and he took less than ten minutes to get to my front door. He pulled up in his car and took the paper bag out of his insulated bag, which he hadn’t bothered to zip up. Fortunately everything was pretty much still hot, although I was glad I didn’t live further out because it mightn’t have stayed that way for long.

ThaiGrr’s packaging felt like they had really thought through what would survive delivery best. Everything came in cardboard tubs with plastic lids and the majority of the dishes had also been cling-wrapped for extra insulation. I was most impressed with the curries: the curry and jasmine rice were packaged separately within a single tub with the former in a cling-wrapped plastic container. So it wasn’t a Kokoro-type model after all: another mistake on my part. Dished up in a bowl it was a good portion size – generous but not gigantic. You wouldn’t leave any, but you didn’t have to spend fifteen pounds buying a curry and rice on the side either.

That’s quite enough talking about packaging for one week, because I’d much rather enthuse about how beautiful my dinner was. Nothing I ate was less than very good, and much of it was if anything better than that. My main, moo pad prik, was fantastic: plenty of pork belly, the perfect balance of flesh and fat, in a superb sauce that zinged with kaffir lime and with punchy heat and just enough sweetness. 

This was lip-tingling stuff, and it made me realise just how often Thai food in Reading restaurants has next to no chilli heat at all. The menu gave this dish a rating of one chilli, but if anything it felt closer to two to me (although that said, my tolerance for chilli has got a lot higher since I discovered Clay’s and Kungfu Kitchen). The sauce coated rather than drenched the jasmin rice, but if anything that slight stickiness made it even more addictive. When I order from ThaiGrr again – and on this showing it’s going to be pretty soon – I’ll struggle not to pick this again. Looking at the restaurant’s Instagram feed, I see that this dish started out as a special and was promoted to the main menu: it’s hard not to love a restaurant that does that sort of thing.

My other half Zoë had gone for the green chicken curry (“I have a lot of benchmarks for this dish”, she told me) and I got to try a little of it, although it was difficult to tear myself away from my dish to do so. I liked it, although I’m not sure green curry would ever be close to the top of my list to order. The chicken was tender and well done and the sauce had just enough heat and funk to it: “it’s quite heavy on the fish sauce”, Zoë said. This had a two chilli rating for heat on the menu, but for my money it was milder than my dish.

Many of the hotter dishes – spicy minced pork with basil leaves, or crispy chicken salad with rice – are in the specials section of the menu, and I fully expect to wind up posting pictures of these on my Instagram in the coming weeks. It’s dangerous to know that something so tasty and so affordable is a mere half an hour away on any given evening, especially when you just can’t face cooking.

We’d gone for three side dishes (the menu, very much with delivery in mind, doesn’t call them starters) and again, these ran the wonderful gamut between rather good and excellent. The weakest was the chicken satay, but even this was a very creditable dish (even if my attempts to dish out the sauce from its little plastic tub make the end product look like a dirty protest). I would have liked the chicken to look more like it had made contact with a grill, but the taste and texture were difficult to fault and the sauce itself had a very pleasing nutty depth. Four skewers for six pounds felt like good value, too.

I was more taken with the crispy squid. The texture was spot on – no bounce or rubberiness that would have given away a lack of freshness – it had retained that crispiness in transit, and it was joyous dipped in sweet chilli sauce. Again, I wasn’t sure that it was especially spicy but I was happy overlooking that because I was enjoying myself so much. For my money, this was some of the best salt and pepper squid I’ve had in Reading, and I’ve tried it pretty much anywhere that sells it, from Pho to Kungfu Kitchen. It felt like a reasonable portion for seven pounds, although you might, as I did, slightly wish you had it all to yourself.

Last but very much not least, we had also ordered ThaiGrr’s fried chicken, apparently their house speciality. This also cost seven pounds and was a ridiculously generous tub with six pieces of jointed chicken, bone in, with huge shards of crispy skin and tender meat underneath. The whole thing was liberally studded with fried garlic and I absolutely loved it, but really, they could just sell the skin in a tub and they’d make pretty decent money out of me. If none of that makes you feel peckish – assuming that fried chicken is your cup of tea, of course – then just have a look at the picture below. Maybe it will succeed where I’ve failed. 

The bones were literally the only thing from our entire order that ended up in the food recycling bin (thanks again, Reading Borough Council). I believe that classifies this particular meal as, to use Zoë’s immortal words, “a proper gut bash”. Honestly, you should hear the things she says that she won’t allow me to include in these reviews (they invariably involve some Anglo-Saxon and a wonderful, if expletive, turn of phrase).

I don’t know which is better about ThaiGrr, that they delighted me (which they very much did) or that they surprised me. The latter is possibly the rarer experience: I looked at ThaiGrr’s premises, and their menu, and I expected an experience a lot like Kokoro.  That’s no bad thing, I should add: I like Kokoro very much. But what I got instead is what ThaiGrr looked like it might be but which I also thought was too good to be true – a proper little independent restaurant that keeps changing its menu, adding specials and experimenting. 

ThaiGrr is also the first new restaurant I’ve seen in this pandemic era that has obviously thought hard about gearing its menu for delivery. The food is better than you’d expect from such a no-frills place, but it’s also better than it needs to be. It will be interesting to see what kind of restaurant they become, when eating in is allowed again from next week, just as it will be interesting to see what becomes of the Broad Street Mall.

The area around there will change, too, with the advent of Blue Collar Corner in the summer. Perhaps the centre of gravity in Reading will begin to change and finally shift away from the Oracle, with its sometimes slightly soulless chains. But all that is for the future: for now, ThaiGrr is pretty brave to have opened first, currently in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a gamble that pays off.

I think ThaiGrr’s is probably the best-executed Thai food I’ve had in Reading. Thai food is always a cuisine I’ve enjoyed, but often struggled to love. I think it shows, too: some of my reviews of Thai restaurants over the years are among the most pedestrian I’ve ever written. ThaiGrr could well change my feelings about Thai food – and I’ll definitely give them a chance to, because I was planning my second order before I’d even finished eating the first. I even found, by the end of proceedings, that I liked the name more than I thought I would. So hats off to ThaiGrr! for being one of my best discoveries of the year so far. I left the exclamation mark in this time. I reckon they’ve earned it. 

ThaiGrr!
1D Queens Walk, Broad Street Mall, Reading, RG1 7QF
07999 941665

http://www.thaigrr.co.uk/
Order via: Deliveroo only

Takeaway review: Thai Table

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Can you believe it’s two months since I announced that I was going to start reviewing takeaways? January properly dragged – even more than most Januaries, and that’s saying a lot – but the weeks feel like they’ve whipped by since I settled into my regular routine of research, ordering, eating, digesting and writing. As we sit on the cusp of the next phase of whatever this year will turn out to be, I realise I’m running out of time to review takeaways before restaurants (or, at least, those restaurants lucky enough to have sufficient outside space to be vaguely profitable) open again. And after that, you might be off eating in those, or you might still want to read about takeaways. Who knows? The future has never felt harder to predict.

My original plan was to try and check out places that had opened since I stopped writing reviews last March, and places that I’d never had a chance to review because they only did takeaway. And it’s been a real journey of discovery since then – square pizzas from the Shinfield Road, beautiful dal from West Reading, stunning grilled meats from suburban Woodley, not to mention woeful burgers from a hotel that ought to know better. And, because they deserve to be shouted about, I also found time to sample delicious and imaginative food from the pub just round the corner from my house. 

But I realise there’s one category of takeaway I’ve not managed to cover so far, and that’s places that have always done takeaway but that, for whatever reason, just never occur to people as an option. Under the radar restaurants.

This time last year, when the restaurants had just been told to close, because I really wanted to do something to help, I started a Twitter thread listing local businesses and how they were adapting. It took off, and I was constantly updating it: this business was doing free delivery, that business had moved to call and collect. Things changed on a daily basis as restaurants, cafés, pubs and breweries were forced to adapt and fight for survival. I bet they all look back, reflect on the fact that was a year ago, and feel incredibly tired.

When I did the thread, I got a reply from Thai Table, the Thai restaurant in Caversham just down from the Griffin. They delivered to a wide range of Reading postcodes, they said. Thai Table does takeaway, I thought. Who knew? So I added them to the thread and they very politely thanked me. They’ve only ever written four Tweets, and half of them were either asking me for help or thanking me for it. 

They stuck out like a sore thumb in the thread – everybody else was pivoting here and there, setting up webshops, looking at new ways of doing business. By contrast, the mention of Thai Table wasn’t about innovation, it was just a quiet reminder. We’re still here, it said. Don’t forget about us. So Thai Table crossed my mind last weekend when I was deciding what to eat and review this week. I’d always enjoyed their food when I ate in the restaurant, and I remembered their awfully nice Tweet from a year ago. 

The other thing that occurred to me is that, with takeaways, geography is key. When I reviewed restaurants where I’d eaten in, the chances are you could probably get to them, but with deliveries it all hinges on whether you’re in the catchment area. And so far I’ve covered central Reading, and south east and west, but I hadn’t reviewed anywhere north of the river. So it was high time I got a delivery from Caversham: it felt like the very least I could do for my many avid readers there.

Thai Table’s menu is a classic Thai menu with few surprises and lots of old favourites, and although a handful of dishes are marked as specialities I didn’t see anything on there I haven’t seen on menus elsewhere. There is a star rating for heat where one star means mild, three stars means hot and so on: a fair few have zero stars, and it wasn’t clear whether that meant extra mild or bland. I suspected it wouldn’t be the kind of scorchingly hot authentic Thai food you might get at Oli’s Thai in Oxford, Som Saa in Spitalfields or The Heron in Paddington, but that didn’t bother me – sometimes menus like this are about comfort and familiarity, rather than trailblazing and sinus razing. There’s also a gluten free and vegetarian menu, which I assume means they omit fish sauce for the latter.

Thai Table handles deliveries itself, covering a relatively wide range of RG postcodes, and isn’t on any delivery apps, so you can either order on their website or go fully old school and ring them up. I decided to phone, mainly because my browser told me that their website wasn’t secure, and because their website warned of potentially long waiting times on Friday and Saturday nights I put my call in just after six o’clock. It was clearly a well-oiled machine, and after I had placed my order I was told someone would call me back in a few minutes to take my payment – no doubt freeing up the hotline for the next takeaway order. 

We ordered two mains, two portions of rice and three starters and the whole thing came to just over fifty pounds, which included a delivery charge. Our food would be about fifty minutes, they said, and everything about the process made me feel like I was in safe hands.

It’s no coincidence that every time I’ve ordered direct from the restaurant delivery has worked like a charm, and this was no exception. Around forty minutes after placing my order, there was a ring on the doorbell and a friendly driver handed over my branded carrier bag. Everything was perfectly hot, and everything came in recyclable plastic tubs. Another sign that Thai Table know what they’re doing with this stuff: they had put clingfilm over the tubs before snapping on the lids, just an extra precaution to prevent any disasters. It sounds like a small thing, but I appreciated the thoughtfulness, just as I loved the little slip in my bag detailing, with little infographics, all the extra steps the restaurant had taken to ensure the safety of its employees and its customers.

I reviewed Thai Table back in 2015, but one of its dishes, the massaman beef, made such an impression on me that three years later, when I published a list of Reading’s 10 must-try dishes, it made the cut. I felt it was incumbent on me to try it again, so I made a beeline for it when I placed my order. It was a ridiculously generous portion of beef, wavy-cut chunks of waxy potato and sweet onion in a glossy sauce, so much that it almost spilled over the high sides of my bowl. 

It had stuck in my memory as an indulgent, cossetting dish but actually, if anything, it was more interesting than I remembered. So of course every forkful of fragrant coconut rice soaked in that silky sauce was gorgeous, but the whole thing was shot through with star anise, giving it an extra dimension that stopped it being cloying. I thought it could do with ever so slightly more chilli heat, but it was so luxurious (and faintly soporific) that I couldn’t complain. I’d been concerned that the colossal hunks of beef bobbing in the sauce might be too tough, but every single one passed the two forks test with flying colours. And I’d forgotten how much I love coconut rice, too, right up until the moment when I took the lid off the container and that wonderful aroma rapidly came into focus.

Zoë had stayed traditional with a green chicken curry, and I was allowed a forkful (“but that’s all, I’m not sharing”). It had considerably more punch from the chilli and crunch from the bamboo shoots, and the chicken was tender, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out by sticking with my choice. It was a decent effort, and probably healthier by virtue of containing more veg (the courgettes had the same crenellations as the potato in my curry), but I would have liked it to have a little more richness and oomph. I was graciously permitted to approach the bowl again with my fork to try some of the rice and sauce – for me, always the best bit of eating Thai food – and that was enjoyable enough to make me think I might have judged it harshly.

The problem with takeaways, as I’ve said before, is that it isn’t that practical to eat two separate courses – you’re bound to have one of them past its best, or kept warm when it should have been eaten there and then – so often starters find themselves promoted to side dishes, as happened here. The first of the starters was ribs, which came in a deep, dark sauce without much chilli heat but with a hint of peanut and what felt like braised lettuce swimming around at the bottom. The meat fell cleanly off the bone with three of the ribs, while the fourth was a distinctly more cartilaginous affair. 

“The ribs definitely win the starters”, said Zoë: I, saddled with that slightly gristly fourth one, was less certain. The ribs were definitely better, though, than the fish cakes. I know their slightly squeaky, rubbery texture isn’t for everyone but they really do need to be eaten piping hot for it not to be disconcerting. I like fishcakes, or at least I seem to remember that I always have, but these didn’t really do it for me.

My pick of the starters was probably the Northern Thai sausage, which was a single sausage (homemade, apparently) cut into diagonal slices. It was more fragrant than hot, with a good whack of lemongrass. I enjoyed it, although three starters definitely turned out to be a starter too many, especially with such generous mains. 

But I couldn’t help comparing it to the Thai sausage cooked up by street food traders Porco at the Blue Collar-hosted final of the UK Street Food Awards last year. That – so aromatic, coarse and perfectly spiced – was one of the most magnificent things I’d ever tasted, whereas this was slightly diminished even by its memory. But that’s Blue Collar for you: they excel at gradually making conventional restaurant food suffer by comparison, cuisine by cuisine and dish by dish. It would be easy to hold it against them, if they weren’t so good.

This week’s meal, as much as any takeaway I’ve had, has been truly educational when it comes to the difference between eating in and eating at home. Because if I had eaten this food on duty in a restaurant, in some parallel world where the pandemic never happened, I might have spent my time looking at what was missing. I might have said that the food wasn’t particularly inventive or revolutionary, or that it didn’t bowl me over. I might say, as I’ve said reviewing many Thai restaurants in and around Reading over the last seven years, that it all felt somewhat much of a muchness. 

But here’s the thing: in this world, in March 2021, I found it all really quite lovely. It’s nice, sometimes, to play it safe. It’s fun to enjoy a meal without surprises, good or bad, and to know exactly what you’re getting. In a world where so much has changed, some of it beyond recognition, it can be hugely reassuring to be reminded that not everything has. And on that Saturday night, I felt grateful that Thai Table were there, still doing what they’d always done, working their socks off (and taking all those extra precautions) so I could sit there in my comfies and be transported by the alchemy of coconut, beef and star anise. 

So there you have it – they’re not on Deliveroo or Uber Eats, they’re not gurning away on Instagram Stories, they’re not doing anything but cooking very pleasant food and driving it round to your house. If you live in their catchment area, and you fancy taking a night off juggling what’s in the fridge and the cupboards, checking your best before dates, you could do an awful lot worse than giving them a call. They probably won’t ever see this review, and they may never Tweet again, but I’m strangely delighted that they contacted me a year ago with that simple message: We’re still here. Please don’t forget about us. I’m glad, too, that I didn’t.

Thai Table
8 Church Road, Reading, RG4 7AD
0118 9471500

https://www.thaitable.co.uk
Order via: Direct with the restaurant, online or by phone