Pub review: The Jolly Cricketers, Seer Green

On April 24, 2026April 24, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

There are many restaurants I would love to visit but know, realistically, that I never will. You only have so many hours in the day, weeks of annual leave and pounds in your current account. I may never eat in San Francisco, or New York. I might never get back to Montreal, a city I loved nearly twenty-five years ago, to eat my way round it.

Zoë and I try to do at least one trip every year to a place we’ve never been together: in 2024 that was Lisbon, last year Oviedo. This year – next month, in fact – it’s Glasgow: if you have any Glasgow recommendations, put them in the comments. But that’s slow progress, and the list of places I would like to go will see me out, even if I were to devote myself to that and nothing else.

In this country, right at the top of that list sits the Parkers Arms, a pub in Lancashire’s Forest of Bowland, a beautiful part of the country by all accounts. I would defy you to look at the Parkers Arms’ Instagram or read any of the many breathless reviews of the place online and not want to eat everything proprietor Stosie Madi cooks up, from pies to langoustine, from pasta to partridge. Clay’s owners Nandana and Sharat are enormous fans, and when people who cook that well admire somebody’s work you do rather sit up and pay attention.

But I am not a driver, and if you live in this part of the country getting to Newton-In-Bowland is a challenge to put it lightly. By the looks of it, if I caught the bus from outside my house at just past 1 o’clock and absolutely everything went my way, I could be there just in time for dinner. I’d be absolutely broke, have nowhere to stay and no way to get home, but I guess I could just about do it.

Plus of course if I ate there once – me being me – I would be devastated at all the things on the menu I’d missed out on, and then I’d wonder how I could manage to do it again. Sadly the likes of Bruges and Málaga are quicker, easier and cheaper to get to than bits of our own country: that’s public transport for you.

But as it happens, Madi is indirectly responsible, via a strange chain of events, for this week’s review. For the last couple of years she’s been incredibly supportive of my writing, which I think she discovered through my slightly crabby review of Planque, Vittles‘ favourite London restaurant, and occasionally she’s recommended reviews of mine through her own social media. That led to me being followed on Instagram by the Jolly Cricketers, a pub in the Chilterns that I’ve always known of by reputation.

Then, one day last month, the Jolly Cricketers contacted me and asked if I’d ever consider reviewing them. Owner Amanda told me that she had run the pub, at the heart of its village, for coming up to eighteen years and said that any friend of the Parkers Arms was a friend of theirs. I said I would see what I could do, but that it wasn’t the easiest place to get to by public transport, and they said they completely understood. “Maybe one Friday you’ll find I’ve eaten at yours, when the review goes up”, I told them. “Maybe one day”, they said.

That did make me think. After all, the Jolly Cricketers was a darned sight easier to get to than the Parkers Arms, so perhaps I owed it to both pubs – and myself, of course – to make the bloody effort to get to the one I could reach. It was less than an hour in the car, or I could take a couple of trains. It took two hours, but what else was I going to do on a Saturday?

And then life took one of those unexpected turns. My dad died, and the venue we picked for his celebration of life – we didn’t, as a matter of policy, use the F word – was a lovely venue halfway between Beaconsfield and Gerrard’s Cross, deep in the Chilterns. When I looked it up on Google Maps, I couldn’t help but notice, because in the midst of death we are in life, a couple of minutes’ drive north of the venue… was that the village the Jolly Cricketers was in? It was, and so I booked a table for the day after my old man’s sendoff. I told myself it’s what he would have wanted.

By the time the day came, it was exactly what I needed. And that’s not to say that his sendoff the day before, the day he would have turned 80, hadn’t been lovely, because it was. The music, picked with expert assistance from Zoë, was spot on (a bit of Dylan, James Taylor, Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher and Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis). The pictures of my dad captured him just right: there he was looking suspiciously down the lens at me in one; holding one of his extensive collection of fountain pens in another; behind the wheel of his beloved Mustang in a third.

My brother Matthew, back from Australia, made a beautiful speech, and I read a poem my dad had written in anticipation of the day he left us, feeling like a pale imitation. And there were people from every stage of his life: his family, all the way back from his childhood in Bristol; friends from his badminton era; his tango era; his performance poetry era; neighbours; my mum and my stepfather, paying their respects.

It was as good an event as those events can possibly be, and when we had drinks afterwards in the nearby hotel it became clear that everybody had learned at least something new about my father, a complicated cryptic crossword of a man at the best of times. “I never knew about the poetry” said my cousin Wayne, sipping his cider from the bottle. “I didn’t know him that well” said a neighbour of his, “and after today, hearing all that, I wish I’d known him better.”

You and me both, I almost said, but I was glad that the celebration of his life had made people realise it was a life worth celebrating. Afterwards, when everyone had taken their leave Matthew, my stepmother Tricia, Zoë and I had a late meal in the hotel restaurant and agreed that we had done a good job of honouring his memory. The question of what next? hung there unspoken: that was for the future.

But when I woke up the following morning, wrestling with an unfamiliar shower in the hotel bathroom, it hit me: he was gone. He’d been gone already, of course, but now he was gone gone. And I felt that flatness everybody told me I would inevitably feel at some point. I congratulated past me on booking somewhere nice for lunch for this new phase, this unfamiliar landscape. Even if it hadn’t been what my dad would have wanted, it was what I needed.

But first my brother, Zoë and I did something rather magical. A short walk from the centre of Beaconsfield is Bekonscot, the oldest model village in the world. It’s close to celebrating its centenary, and I found it enormously touching that it had survived all this time, a little time capsule of Merrie England in the Thirties which managed to be wholesome and beautiful rather than some kind of billboard for the bullshit Britain Brexiteers want us to return to. My dad wasn’t even born when it welcomed its first visitors, and wouldn’t be for over sixteen years.

I’ve spent much of the winter and spring watching Gilmore Girls and Zoë would quite like to live in Stars Hollow rather than Reading (although I’d run out of places to review very quickly). But Bekonscot might give it a run for its money: at the risk of channelling my inner Bill Bryson, it is an utterly magnificent place and I rather feel everybody should go there and experience the sense of wonder at least once.

Everywhere I looked the attention to detail was incredible – there was a railway with multiple stations, a cable car, a harbour, a pier, a gorgeous deco Tube station. A football match played out by the riverbank, the picture house advertised a motion picture starring Oscar Winna and Carrie Zmatik, folks danced round the maypole outside a handsome church, the little train chuffed from one stop to the next, adults and kids towered over every diorama, peering, fascinated, taking photos.

And there I was with my brother, on the first day of this new phase, going round a model village together, somehow a lot more adult than we had been a couple of days before, or the month before that. That makes it all sound sad, which it wasn’t completely, but it was poignant all the same. Would my dad have enjoyed Bekonscot? He was an engineer, he would have appreciated the precision. But the answer is that I didn’t know, and now I had no way of finding out: now that, that is sad.

It’s just over a five minute drive from Bekonscot to Seer Green, proudly proclaimed on the signs as “The Cherry Pie Village”. It really is a gorgeous place, and the Jolly Cricketers is in a beautiful spot one side of the churchyard. Even the church, in the sunshine, was delightful: tables and chairs out in case you wanted to stop and rest, a cafe inside with its own Instagram account. And the pub was a picture postcard perfect spot, wisteria running along the top of the racing green window frames. It could easily have belonged in Bekonscot too, if only it had been a lot smaller.

It was made up of two rooms, a larger bar and a smaller dining room, although I imagine you can eat in either. The staff told us it was a quiet lunchtime so we could sit anywhere, and they very kindly let us expand into a table that would ordinarily seat six, my brother, my stepmother, Zoë and me. Sun poured through the windows, and the cricketing theme was worn lightly: a ball on the mantelpiece, the menu broken into sections saying Warm Ups, Openers, Main Play. It was an extraordinarily handsome space, somehow a very classic dining room transplanted into a gorgeous old pub without remotely jarring.

One of the nice things about going to a place like the Jolly Cricketers in a large group is being freed of the tyranny of having to choose something different to everybody else. And – I can’t imagine why – all four of us were in the mood to eat our feelings that day, so we attacked every section of the menu and gave ourselves permission to order without fear of hesitation or repetition.

My brother had an alcohol free beer, Zoë and my stepmother tried the alcohol free gin and tonic and I, the sole drinker, regretted not being able to order a bottle from the wine list, especially because the pub stocked fascinating-looking natural wines from Woodfine, a winery in the village. I consoled myself during the meal with a Spanish Chardonnay which was extremely good and a Rioja which was even better. Even so I suspected that the real treats were further down the wine list – especially a Saperavi and a Xinomavro, both around the £50 mark.

Now, on to the food – and before you judge, I’d just like to say again that it was a very particular set of circumstances. First, the Scotch egg. We had two of these between the four of us and I absolutely adored it, the pork coarse and judiciously seasoned, the Burford Browns spilling golden secrets, a smattering of salt flakes to sprinkle on top. It took me back to the glory days of the Lyndhurst, and made me wish I had a pub doing food like this within walking distance. The yolk was a little runny for my stepmother’s personal taste, the lack of brown sauce or any other condiments won Zoë’s seal of approval: on balance, a palpable hit.

Even better were the cubes of crispy Chiltern pork in a cairn with a little bowl of apple sauce for dipping. These were simple, bronzed and moreish beyond measure, and if I ever sweep to power every licensed establishment will have to offer this dish or something like it. I doubt many would make it seem as easy as the Jolly Cricketers did, though: such simplicity, just pork, salt and apple.

I regret the fact that we only ordered one portion of these, and I stand by that despite the sheer quantity of what we got through, but it was indisputably excellent value at £8.50.

The last of our trio was padron peppers, ordered because Zoë loves them; my stepmother, not unreasonably, said “I can make those at home”, and I’ve always felt I can take or leave them.

But if you do like padron peppers, and plenty of people do, these were as good an example of the genre as you’ll find. I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of serving them with aioli, mainly because I’ve never seen that done before, but the padron pepper expert among us was very happy with them. Also £8.50 for these, which I found a tad strange: the crispy pork felt like a much better return on investment.

I didn’t take a picture of my starter, even though I was sure I had. Can you believe I still make rookie mistakes like that after nearly thirteen years? I’m going to plead extenuating circumstances and tell you that my crispy squid was a knockout, beautifully fried, still tender, plenty of it. You could eat it with a fork, and I started out that way, but once it cooled enough for me to pick it up and dab it in a simple but exquisite dip of honey, soy and garlic I abandoned decorum and did exactly that.

This is a dish you see on pub menus fairly often, but you would struggle to find it executed as well as the Jolly Cricketers do: this would, I discovered, turn out to be a theme. The pub’s menu doesn’t lean too heavily on provenance, but it does say that fish and seafood come from Newlyn’s Flying Fish, a name I recognise which inherently inspires confidence.

My brother was torn but ended up going for the asparagus. He really enjoyed it, and it had plenty going on with sumac labneh, cherry tomatoes and olives, a moat of the most arresting-coloured extra virgin. I didn’t eat this, so I won’t sit in judgement too much, but just the four spears felt a little underbalanced and it didn’t look like the sourdough crumb made its presence felt. It was the most expensive starter on the menu at £12.50 and I was glad I hadn’t ordered it myself, but for all I know it probably – as wankers like to put it – “ate well”.

I think the people who really ate well – because repeat after me, dishes don’t eat well, people eat well – were Zoë and my stepmother, who went for the French onion soup. The pub had said recently on Instagram that it was back on the menu by popular demand, and that demand was echoed at my table. It really did look the part, a deep brown panacea packed with onion, topped with a hulking permacrust of molten cheese studded with epic croutons.

And in case that wasn’t enough for you, there was also a thick wodge of excellent bread speckled with caraway seeds: not necessarily that French, but a very welcome interloper. “It was maybe ever so slightly too sweet from the onions” Zoë told me later, “but that’s niggling. Besides, the cheese more than made up for it.”

By this point it looked like we might be the only lunchtime customers in the dining room that day (which goes to explain why the pub also offers a locals set menu lunchtimes and evenings during the week). But if anything, that just made the service even better, without ever being too much. We were always asked if we were happy with each course, just at the moment when we had finished our first mouthfuls and established that yes, we truly were.

Drinks kept coming as we needed them, and we were always asked whether we wanted more just at the point when one of us was thinking that more were in order. There is a real talent to this, especially to do it and make it seem telepathic, and that the Jolly Cricketers’ young and enthusiastic team was so very good at it was one of the many happy discoveries of our lunch.

Pacing was, too: it could be so easy when a kitchen isn’t mega-busy to get into a rat-a-tat rhythm and pepper you with course after course in quick succession. But the pub understood not to do that and actually, on that day of all days, the time and space we were given was one of my many favourite things. By the time our mains arrived, we were ready but not hankering – how could you hanker when we’d been determined to try so much of the menu? – but they were still a happy sight.

Three of us had chosen the pork belly – from Stockings Farm, less than ten minutes’ drive away – which makes my job far easier than it could have been. On paper it sounded like an unmissable dish: pork belly, crab cake, pak choi and a soy and garlic sauce, so many wonderful things coexisting on a plate. And if it wasn’t quite perfect it was close enough that I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but indulgent. Because it all worked, it just could have worked slightly better and come together a little more.

The pork was truly magnificent – a whopping striated slab of the stuff, crispy-edged but yielding at its core, some of the best pork belly I’ve had in as long as I can remember (or at least since the crispy pork earlier on). And the pak choi offered an excellent contrast, cooked absolutely bang on. But I would have liked the crab cake to be a little crispier too, a bit less crumbly and to have more of the ginger that was meant to feature. And it needed sauce to bring it together – a proper quantity of it, not a thin trickle that had made its way to the perimeter of the plate, like it was trying to make a break for it.

The crab cake was just a question of preference, but the lack of sauce meant that this dish, made of exceptional parts, didn’t quite cohere into a whole. It made me wish I’d kept the rest of my ramekin of soy, honey and ginger from the squid, because pouring that over this pork and the crabcake would have been the missing piece. Without it, what could have been a perfect dish had to settle for mere excellence.

We’d opted for a solitary portion of chunky chips to provide carbs, and in honesty the crabcake was spudded up enough that we probably didn’t need them. But thank goodness we ordered them anyway, because they were textbook: stubby and crunchy, beautifully done with a little side order of rustling scraps in the bottom of the bowl. My stepmother had a couple too, declaring them infinitely better than the fries that came with her main.

That main was a huge pot of mussels – Welsh, apparently – almost as much still life as treat, gently steaming in their bath of marinière sauce. They were pronounced triumphant and my stepmother worked through them with what looked to me like a combination of diligence and joy. You could have a smaller portion as a starter with what the menu winningly refers to as “mopping bread” or a larger one with fries.

I think, with the benefit of hindsight, my stepmother would have liked the bigger portion with a few slabs of that caraway-speckled bread. But hindsight is always perfect and probably, if we’re being brutally honest, we could all find more laudable uses for it than ordering better at lunch. I said that making mistakes when you order in a restaurant is an essential part of making sure you can find reasons to return and I believe that, even if it’s positively glass half full by my standards.

We split 3-1 on dessert, too, but before that we asked our server about the whole cherry pie thing: why was the village famous for that?

“Do you want the nice answer, or the honest one?” she said. I do love a situation where those two answers are not the same, so of course I asked for the latter. And she told us that Seer Green used to have, for some reason, mass graves and that the cherry orchards were planted on top of those, although the sanitised version was just that the village really loved cherries and had become famous for exporting them to London. She also told us that the cherry pie on the menu was a speciality, and I promise the story behind the village’s nickname was not why we swerved it.

Zoë couldn’t resist crumble, having seen it on the menu, and she rhapsodised about her order. It was apple and blackberry, topped with a gorgeous golden rubble of biscuit, served with an ice cream resplendent with vanilla specks. It prompted a big discussion at the table about the acceptable crumble to fruit ratio: I, conditioned by the Royal Berks no doubt, thought it should be 2:1, while my stepmother would have preferred it the other way round. Zoë, ever the moderate, liked it best 50:50. Which was this, I asked her later? My stepmother would have loved it, she told me.

The rest of us had the Basque cheesecake, unusually with chocolate sauce rather than fruit. The slightly warm, exceptionally rich dark chocolate sauce made this dessert, but without it it would have been rather like Snoop Dogg, i.e. slightly too baked for my liking. I like a Basque cheesecake to retain a little wobble, this was a very solid affair. That might have been a conscious choice given the accompaniment, but I wasn’t sure.

Similarly, the menu paired this with a manzanilla, which might have worked if it was just the cheesecake, but the chocolate sauce was crying out for a PX, or a dessert wine of some kind. The menu suggests pairings for all the desserts but none of them are anything sticky: I have struggled to find fault with the Jolly Cricketers, but I’d love it if they fixed that.

We didn’t really want the afternoon to end, in this beautiful pub in this beautiful part of the world on the first day of a strange new phase. So we had coffee – which was extremely good, something I never expected – and eventually, with a heavy heart, we settled up. Lunch for four, pretty much four courses with plenty of drinks and coffee, came to £310 with a 10% service charge thrown in.

I was chatting to our server and she asked where we came from, so I explained that we were from all over, really: Reading, Windsor, New South Wales, and told her why we’d been in the area. And she was so lovely and so sorry for our loss, which happens a lot lately, and I told her not to be sorry. Because I couldn’t think of a better place to be on that day, or better people to be there with.

If I lived near the Jolly Cricketers I would be there all the time, and if a pub like the Jolly Cricketers was near me I might not write a blog any more. It would exert a pull like the Lyndhurst, and you’d find me there whenever I’d had a hard day. And there is a carpe diem message here going back to the very beginning of this: if there’s a restaurant you keep meaning to visit, go there. One day it might not be there, or you might not be. And if there’s a person you keep meaning to call, or take down the pub, or go to that restaurant with, do that too.

My dad would have loved The Jolly Cricketers. It’s a crying shame he wasn’t there that day. But he was, really, wasn’t he? At least in a few of the ways that matter.

The Jolly Cricketers – 8.8
24 Chalfont Road, Seer Green, HP9 2YG
01494 676308

https://thejollycricketers.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Namak Mirch

On March 6, 2026March 6, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Graeme and I are a fine pair when I meet him on Cemetery Junction for our trip to Namak Mirch. He had an operation on his foot in January and is standing there, crutch in hand, wearing trainers for the first time since being discharged: his wife has given him a lift to our meeting point. My injury is more invisible these days – people can only see the beginning of the cursive scar that flows from my elbow to my shoulder when I wear short sleeves – but I still can’t lift much, not until the man who sliced me open is happy with the x-rays.

I crossed the border into my fifties a couple of years ago, Graeme is not far off it: in the pub after dinner we agree that getting old is no fun, even though a viable alternative is yet to be discovered. Graeme says that it seems as if one minute you don’t feel old and then suddenly the tipping point comes and almost immediately you do; I know what he means, and feel like, for me, that happened at the end of last year. I’ve had one of those tough weeks when you feel far older than you want to be. But still, one benefit of ageing is that over time friends become old friends, and you can meet them for dinner.

Graeme moved back to Reading last year and now lives in a pretty house in Newtown, far from his previous place in Thatcham and the bucolic delights of Paggies Bar, a spot he steadfastly refused to take me to. I picked Namak Mirch for us partly because it is practically the nearest restaurant to his house – well, that or the The Fisherman’s Cottage. In the run-up to Graeme’s big move I recommended Deccan House to him ad nauseam, because I’ve enjoyed its takeaways so much in the past, but I’d received some inside information that Namak Mirch might give it a run for its money.

Namak Mirch has taken over the old spot where Star Karahi, the Pakistani restaurant so beloved of Reading’s black cab drivers, used to be. Not entirely – one of the signs outside still gives the old business’ name – but the place is definitely under new ownership. Last October I got a tip-off from Jacqui, a regular reader of the blog, that a friend of hers who previously ran a takeaway business from home had taken on the site.

Jacqui started out buying her samosas, then her Friday night curries, and then she sent me a couple of pictures of a distinctly attractive looking dinner from Namak Mirch: nothing fancy, just a lamb curry, a bed of rice, some grilled chicken wings and a simple salad. You could go past the restaurant in a car and barely notice it, and in fact I did a couple of times including a drive home from my dad’s on Christmas Day. But a glowing report from Jacqui, who knows her food, was enough to place it on my to do list.

The interior of Namak Mirch is about as no-frills as you can get. Three tables, covered with linoleum tablecloths, seat no more than a dozen people, the chairs mismatched and occasional. On our visit we were the only people there, although this was during Ramadan and a delivery driver or two did turn up while we were eating.

But there was something homely about it nonetheless. Some of the starters, snacks and other dishes were on display under the counter, cardboard starbursts in Day-Glo shades taped to the glass giving names and prices, the whole thing strangely retro. Besides that, the menu was all listed on a board overhead, the aesthetics of the greasy spoon somehow appropriated for a restaurant serving Pakistani dishes.

That menu was pretty compendious, a mixture of starters, kebab rolls, curries and biryanis, most available in multiple sizes. Over on the far right of the menu, fittingly, were the crazy choices, the burgers and cheesy chips for wackos who simply refuse to integrate.

There was also a laminated menu on the table, unbranded except for the restaurant’s name written in Sharpie, which didn’t entirely match the one over the counter, including some mixed grills and other dishes not to be found on the blackboard.

Nothing at Namak Mirch was expensive, with the costliest dishes coming in at £12.50 and most far, far below that. The snacks emblazoned on some of those highlighter coloured pieces of cardboard were the cheapest, coming in at £1 apiece.

We started with those and the friendly chap behind the counter, who told us his wife runs the kitchen and makes everything from scratch, was happy for us to order them and decide on the rest of our meal later. There isn’t really table service per se, more that your plates are plonked on the counter and you take them to the table yourself. I didn’t mind that at all, once I realised that expecting Graeme to do that was insensitive in the extreme. His barely functioning foot trumped my partly functioning arm.

So the first things we ate, along with being among the best, were unbelievably affordable. Namak Mirch’s pricing structure can be a bit chaotic, and what you read on one menu doesn’t necessarily match up with what you end up being charged. So for instance, the menu says you get six vegetable pakoras for £4.50. We didn’t know that, so just ordered the four.

They were crisp but not overdone, utterly greaseless and perfect dipped into the little tub of spicy tomato sauce or the raita on offer. I could easily have ploughed through half a dozen with Graeme, in fact I could easily have ploughed through half a dozen on my own. The four we accidentally ordered showed up on the bill at the end as costing £2. Surely some mistake, to offer terrific food at sweetshop prices?

Also costing £2 were a pair of samosas, golden and generous, packed to with minced chicken. These were Graeme’s pick of the snacks, I liked them but I feel I’ve been spoiled by the world-beating vegetable samosas at the Wokingham Road’s legendary Cake & Cream, which last time I went cost something silly like 70p a pop. Despite moving to East Reading, possibly my very favourite part of town, Graeme is yet to try Cake & Cream. I’ll let him off, though: he doesn’t need a doctor’s note for that one.

Even better, and for my money my favourite of the snacks, were the chicken aloo tikki. Deep copper-coloured irregular fritters made with chicken and potato, these – to my mind anyway – took everything that was great about the pakora and the samosas and, à la The Fly, merged them into a single unbeatable snackette. And when I say “for my money” I mean “for one pound sterling of my money”. My goodness. I could just come to Namak Mirch and eat these, if it wasn’t for the inconvenient fact that the rest of the menu is equally loaded with winners.

But I didn’t know that at this point. I was catching up with Graeme, congratulating him on his new home, discussing my recent travails and marvelling at how well a can of Tango Mango Sugar Free went with all this gorgeous scran. I already envied Graeme his new house on one of Reading’s prettiest streets, was I going to end up coveting his local restaurant as well? It felt like it was going that way.

After much reflection, an enjoyable spot of picking out our favourite dishes like we were assembling some kind of gastronomic Fantasy Football team and lots of awfully polite “no, you pick your favourite” toing and froing, Graeme and I had assembled a selection of five dishes to let us sample as much of the menu as possible. We thought we might have over-ordered, but Namak Mirch’s pricing is so reasonable, and we so reckoned we were onto a winner, that we both agreed it was a risk worth running.

When I got to the counter, that slight air of lovable chaos set in again around portions and pricing. Now, I should say that I don’t mean you get diddled with hidden expenses: I mean that you believe your dishes are going to be a certain size and cost a certain amount and then you find that actually, they are somehow magically even bigger or even cheaper. It was baffling and benevolent.

A great example is that I wanted to order us a boneless chicken biryani to share, a large dish that – on paper, at least – will set you back £11. And I was about to do exactly that, when the beaming man behind the counter told me, in the style of once famous local lush and Pride Of Reading Awards uber-ligger Chris Tarrant in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, that he didn’t want to give me that. He said that as a Ramadan special they were doing a chicken thigh biryani, not on the usual menu, for £3.99. Would I like a couple of those instead, he asked me? It was not a difficult question.

Not only wasn’t it a hard question, but it was an excellent idea. We got two exceptionally generous portions of fragrant rice, studded with tremendous pieces of chicken thigh, the whole thing pungent with cloves. I mightn’t necessarily have wanted to eat this on its own, but as a bed to absorb gravy or curry it was unimprovable. When Ramadan is over I’m sure the chicken biryani will made an excellent alternative – or keema, or paneer, both of which Namak Mirch offers. But really, £3.99? How was Namak Mirch making any money?

The wayward pricing affected a couple of other things we ordered. Graham was drawn to the lamb curry on the bone, and it was a superb choice. The lamb took minimal persuasion to leave home, so to speak, and properly go for a dip in a sauce which was rich, fruity and comforting, with a gentle heat that had me dabbing my nose only towards the end of the meal. Better still was the marrow, eased and winkled out of the bone and enriching every forkful it came into contact with. Graeme reminded me that this was why curry on the bone was better and, despite us both having all sorts of fun and games with our own bones, I couldn’t disagree.

We asked for a large, were billed for a medium and I suspect a medium is what we got. You could almost believe that they knew we’d ordered a little too much but were too polite to tell us. Still, it was a princely £9.50 and would have more than served one person handsomely. On the menu it’s meant to cost £9.95, but that was Namak Mirch: nothing cost precisely what you expected it to.

Further confusion reigned with the tarka dal, something Graeme really fancied. When I ordered it, the chap behind the counter told me it came with homemade roti on a special deal – another special deal – and of course we went for that. What arrived was some perfectly credible flatbread, which had the kind of gaps and holes that said it had been made by hand back in the kitchen. I liked it. but we were too full to properly attack it. It did however suggest that Namak Mirch’s kebab rolls – freshly made in naan, according to the printed menu, merited investigation.

But we also got not one but two metal bowls of tarka dal. We said we’d only ordered one and the chap waved it away, saying we could have the second one anyway. We were hardly complaining, and we complained even less after we’d tasted it – the most perfectly soothing bowl of big, floury lentils in a sauce that gently hummed with garlic without bragging about the time and care that had gone into it. Graeme’s wife Amy is a vegetarian: between this and the paneer biryani I suspect Namak Mirch will have her bit of their next takeaway order well and truly covered.

Again, when the bill arrived it was a bit of a case of The Price Is Right. We had allegedly been charged for two portions, at a cost of £8. You could read their menu from now to the end of the day and never find a permutation of tarka dal that cost either £4 each for two or £8 for one. But either way, two bowls of that faultless dal for £8 felt like some kind of misprint, or cosmic error.

That would have been enough food, but there were a couple of other things I really wanted to try. One, the masala fish pakora, was possibly my single favourite dish of the evening, a big pile of irregular golden nuggets of fish, the coating all gram flour and herbs and the inside pearlescent, cooked no more and no less than each piece demanded. This deft touch reminded me of Kungfu Kitchen’s deep fried fish in spicy hot pot, a spiritual sibling even if it originated thousands of miles away in Chengdu.

By this point the staff had just given us a big squirty plastic bottle filled with raita, the kind kebab shops use to anoint your late night purchases, so we didn’t have to exercise restraint. I think they’d worked out that, on that evening at least, restraint simply wasn’t our bag.

Last of all, we had to try Namak Mirch’s sheekh kebabs (I say had, I mean wanted). These are £2 each or five for £9.50 and when I’d asked for four the owner said he would happily do us five for £9: I’ve never eaten anywhere where the pricing felt quite so optional. I said it would just cause a diplomatic incident if we had to share a fifth one but really, four was plenty.

Again, they looked divine and the lamb in them was superb, the texture impressive, coarse with no bounce or padding. I think they were – almost – some of the best sheekh kebabs I’ve ever had. That almost is because the spicing of these was far more clove heavy than the biryani had been, to the point where it was a little like eating a pomander-flavoured sausage. A liberal trawl through the raita took the edge off it but a slightly gentler hand in the kitchen would turn these into world-beaters to rival – well, to rival the rest of the menu really.

I had no idea what our bill would come to, but when I went up to pay all our food – which may or may not have been part of special offers, Ramadan only deals or spur of the moment decisions by the proprietor – came to just shy of £50, including a couple of soft drinks. That didn’t include a tip, and I insisted on tipping to an extent which surprised the owner. But really, we were the only customers there that night and our food was almost without exception outrageously good, and I worried about how Namak Mirch would survive charging such timid prices.

He told me that they’d only been open a few months, and that things were going well – quiet at times, busy at others, very much impacted by Ramadan, for better and for worse. He seemed delighted that we had so loved our food and reiterated that his wife, out back, made it all from scratch. I told him his friend Jacqui had recommended it to us and he laughed. “That’s my wife’s friend! They’re all my wife’s friends.”

And then, because in my experience some truly hospitable cultures and people feel bad about things like being tipped and immediately try to give you something in return, he insisted that we stop for chai and, about ten minutes later, brought us two beautiful sweetened cups of the stuff. Because that wasn’t enough, we also got a little bowl of dates stuffed with almonds. It was simply lovely: my friend and I sat there sipping our chai as our cups sat on that lino tablecloth, we ate our dates, we watched the traffic hum past, heading into town, and we both reflected on just how good a meal it had been.

Neither of us had missed alcohol at all, either, but that’s because we knew that when we were done we could manage the short walk to the Hope & Bear, which had an acceptable pale for me and an impressive range of single malts for Graeme. We still had plenty to discuss but we did keep coming back to one particular topic, which was just how good Namak Mirch was. On that night, when both of us really needed that kind of warmth and hospitality for our own various reasons, Namak Mirch was a beacon of how things should be, and I was deeply thankful for it.

I hope other people make a pilgrimage there, even if working out the menu and pricing might be beyond even the intellect of Hannah Fry, and that they discover what I discovered. For my part I’m already wondering when I can go back, because I knew before the meal was even over that this one fell into the category of restaurant Zoë likes to describe as why didn’t you take me? Graeme, I have a feeling, might be back even sooner. He lives round the corner after all, the jammy bastard.

Namak Mirch – 8.5
251 London Road, Reading, RG1 3NY
0118 9669492

https://namakmirchonline.co.uk

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Bar review: Bigfoot, Oxford

On February 6, 2026February 8, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

This might be the first time I’ve been able to say this in over 30 years of working for a living, but my boss – he doesn’t read this blog, so I can get away with admitting this – is one of my favourite people. He’s a few years older than me, but I suspect he’s hired in his image and our politics, our cultural references, our general outlook on life and our regular Guardian reading match up nicely. I couldn’t help but think of him the evening I stopped by Bigfoot, a little spot on Oxford’s Cowley Road specialising in cocktails and tacos.

The thing is, my boss – like me – is a big music fan, always on the hunt for new bands to listen to. Unlike most people I know, his taste in music didn’t stop in an arbitrary year, preserved in aspic, leaving him just listening to old favourites. His Spotify Unwrapped is interesting every December, and we often swap recommendations: without him I wouldn’t have discovered the loping lo-fi jangle of Talking Kind, or the weird and wonderful 70s Algerian funk (I’m not making this up) of Ahmed Malek.

Unlike me, my boss is still a regular gig-goer, especially in Oxford where he watches all sorts of bands in all kinds of ramshackle venues. He took his wife to see a band called Shit Present last year on her actual birthday, without a shred of irony, and she joined him without complaint. That’s quite some marriage, I imagine.

My boss reports a consistent phenomenon at those gigs. The band is invariably young, lean and hungry, in the foothills of its twenties and having the time of its life. And the audience? “They’re all 6 Music dads like me” he says, ruefully. It happens when he goes to see Bar Italia, or Stick In The Wheel, or some band I’ve never heard of playing music you could describe without irony as a soundscape. His ears like a challenge.

When I stopped in Bigfoot, I got an inkling of how he must feel. Because everybody in there was young, from the head honcho behind the bar with his beard/beanie/fisherman’s jumper combo to the friends catching up at the table in the window, to the chaps behind me who were mansplaining to one another about “the societal pressures on women” without any women at their table, as if they had a fucking clue. Outside, in the January cold, a table of four young women directed subtle evils towards me, the mouldy old fiftysomething nabbing one of the only spots inside all to myself.

Bigfoot opened in December 2023 and has consistently offered cocktails in general, and margaritas in particular, ever since, along with tacos. It has slightly bowed to market forces since, adding beer and wine to its menu, but otherwise has continued to plough this admirable, idiosyncratic furrow. I was in Oxford with some free time for a solo meal so I thought, Why not? I forewent a table for one at somewhere more obvious and slipped into the no reservation spot early doors to snag a table.

It helps that I love that part of Oxford so much. I occasionally read some rabid panic on Facebook from someone still complaining about 15 minute cities, and I think the main problem is their lack of imagination. Because on the Cowley Road, if you stand outside Bigfoot, you are within a 15 minute walk of the Magdalen Arms or the Chester Arms. Arbequina and Spiced Roots are mere minutes away. You can buy Oxford’s best coffee at The Missing Bean, or drink in Peloton Espresso, my favourite Oxford café. What’s to dislike?

Not only that, but just across the road is the Ultimate Picture Palace, the arthouse cinema where I saw stuff like Le Samourai, Betty Blue and Paris, Texas, over thirty years ago. You can browse music in Truck Records nearby, which also happens to do good coffee.

And a very short walk from Bigfoot there’s also the Star Inn on Rectory Road, where Oxford’s best beer garden is hibernating, waiting for spring, and DEYA’s Steady Rolling Man is always on tap. I had very much enjoyed Peloton and the Star before ambling into Bigfoot, as it happens, and I was hoping that Bigfoot would complete a beautiful OX4 trifecta.

I loved the interior, all scruffy and ineffably cool, spider lights and baskets of limes hanging from the ceiling, art on the walls. A couple of cramped tables in the window had bentwood stools, and along one side of the room were what looked like bespoke benches with narrow tile partitions between them serving as tables, just deep enough to accommodate a glass or a plate of tacos.

Their curves matched the undulations of the bar, and the whole thing had a feeling of otherness that I loved. I felt like I could be in Bairro Alto, the Realejo or the 11th arrondisement, somewhere far cooler than me or, in all honesty, most of prosperous Oxford. That’s the great thing about the Cowley Road, it’s the metaphorical two fingers up that says the rest of this city might be like a supersized version of Henley on Thames but not us, buster.

The red on white menu by the bar screamed simplicity: four tacos, two of them vegetarian, all of them £2.80 a pop. They also do chips and dip, and burritos on Saturday but that’s your lot. Similarly, there were five margaritas, a couple of bottled boozy seltzers and a slightly confusing menu of what seemed to be beer and chaser combos. The beer choice was limited but considered: Modelo, the Mexican classic; the iconic American Pabst Blue Ribbon; and – this was an inspired choice – Mash Gang’s Chug IPA, one of the best AF beers made in the U.K. To complete a general feeling of bounty, the evening I was there three of the margaritas on offer were a fiver each.

I’m not a margarita aficionado but when in Rome and all that, so I gladly left my comfort zone and ordered Bigfoot’s classic, the textbook combination of tequila, agave, lime and salt. It came on the rocks – crisp, bracing and tasting every bit as boozy as I suspect it was. I don’t know which brand of tequila Bigfoot uses – I saw El Tequileño behind the bar, there might have been others – but this was the sort of cocktail I could easily see becoming habitual. Each sip, sharpened with a jag from that salted rim, was a delight.

Next time I’d be tempted to try a mezcal margarita; a look behind the bar revealed an impressive array, from multiple variants of Ojo de Tigre to La Higuera. The folks at Bigfoot are serious about being good at the narrow range of things they do.

The tacos didn’t so much subvert expectations as invert them. I expected my favourite to be the chicken thigh, but it was the most underpowered of the lot, the chipotle a little quiet, the mayo on them equally muted. White onion, too, felt like it was there to make up the numbers. But that’s not the same as saying it was bad, and if it hadn’t been outperformed by everything else on the menu maybe I would have been perfectly happy with it.

Far better were the carnitas tacos, with so much more going on: pork shoulder braised to a tangle, along with pickled red onion which provided the contrast missing from the chicken. The finishing touch – only knobbers call it a hero ingredient – was the pineapple, which made everything pop; you can argue about whether it belongs on a pizza if you want, not without justification, but it does belong in a taco. These were the wettest and messiest of the tacos, however carefully you fold them up and however precise your bite: more napkins might have been helpful.

The one I expected to like least and liked the best was the curveball, the oyster mushroom taco. Miso glazing gave it a very pleasing savoury depth and a meatiness that stopped me missing birria, or ropa vieja, or beef in any other guise; Bigfoot’s Instagram suggests they have been offering birria tacos as a special, but they weren’t on the night I visited. Of all the tacos I tried these were my favourites, with a zigzag of relatively subtle jalapeño crema and spring onion in a pick-up-sticks formation.

The tortillas were thick and soft, up to the task of holding everything in and piled high enough to introduce, nonetheless, an element of jeopardy. I don’t know if Bigfoot makes them, but a bowl of tortilla chips with salsa at a neighbouring table looked bought in: I decided not to give them a try.

I was having so much fun that I didn’t want to leave. The air was humming with the kind of great music that makes you reach for Shazam – or would do, if this part of Oxford wasn’t a mobile reception blackspot that somehow catapults you back to 1996. Outside the table of young women was playing cards, and I made a mental note to add card games to the list of things that became hip far too late for me, despite all my many hours playing cribbage on holiday after holiday in my thirties. One of the women peered balefully through the window at me. When is grandpa fucking off? the gaze seemed to say.

By this point, all the tables inside were occupied and the outside tables, too, were filling up. Where were these places when I was in my twenties, I wondered? When I was the right age to drink in these kinds of places either they didn’t exist or they did and I didn’t drink in them, most likely because I didn’t know about them.

The only place I could think of in Reading terms that had a feel anything like this was Bar Iguana, in the early Noughties. I remember going there once, nearly twenty-five years ago, and the bar staff were too busy kicking around a hacky sack to serve me. Even then I was too old for that bar, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Bigfoot was far more inclusive to the advanced in years, and the barman told me about a drink I’d eyed up heading to another table: the watermelon margarita, also on the specials menu. So naturally I had one and it was possibly more perilous than the classic margarita because it carried its alcohol content far less ostentatiously.

A chap at one of the other tables, trying to impress his date, asked the barman if it had cinnamon and star anise in it, and was very pleased with himself when it turned out that it did. I didn’t get any of that, but it was sweet and incapable of giving offence and probably dangerously boozy. The watermelon came through to the exclusion of anything else, but I quite liked that. At the end of the meal, I did dainty little watermelon burps all the way down the Cowley Road.

And I had more tacos, of course. I could claim this was to flesh out my research, but in truth it was because I liked them and to test the only one on the menu I hadn’t eaten. Nopales tacos came with cooked prickly pear cactus, refried beans, cheese and salsa roja and oddly, in some ways, they felt the most traditional ones I tried. The presence of cheese was welcome, and it turned out that cactus – or this cactus, anyway – had a texture a little like soft green peppers. I was glad I could say I’d tried it, but it didn’t outperform anything else on my little plate.

All that – seven tacos and two £5 margaritas – came to just under £34 including tip. I thanked the chap with the beard and the beanie effusively: far too effusively, probably, because I will never be cool. I expect he was grateful for my custom in the way the members of Bar Italia are grateful that my boss turns up to their Oxford gigs.

It felt like that embarrassing bit in In Bed With Madonna where Kevin Costner tells Madonna backstage on her Blonde Ambition tour that he thought her show was ‘neat’ and, after he leaves, she pretends to stick her fingers down her throat. At least I didn’t say Bigfoot was neat, or at least I don’t remember using those words.

Bigfoot doesn’t do dessert, but you have ice cream café George & Delila a few doors down – see what I mean about 15 minute cities – or you can, as I did, cross Magdalen Bridge, waft down The High and end up in Swoon Gelato. I sat at the front, in the window, with a salted caramel gelato feeling, as you do when you hit the OX1 postcode, a little less old and unhip. I didn’t mind all that anyway, but if I had the gelato would have made it all better.

I’m conscious that this review might be even more niche than usual for my Reading based readers. If you go to Oxford, you probably want a proper meal as part of a trip to the city, and stopping at a small, scuzzy bar that happens to do tacos may not really suit your purposes, unless you’re off to a gig nearby at the O2 Academy. They do lunch, I suppose, but only on Saturdays. So this one might have more appeal to locals, or that small section of my readership that lives in Oxford (or the Oxford subreddit, which is always so kind about my work).

But I thought all that and then thought sod it and decided to write it anyway. Because I keep coming back to what I said earlier on – if this bar was in Paris, or Lisbon, or Granada, and I’d visited it on a trip to one of those cities it would appear in the city guide I subsequently wrote. I would say that the place is charming and likeable, the tacos are very good and that it’s a fun place to hang out for a few drinks even if you then go on somewhere else.

I really loved it: admittedly, that was after two margaritas, and it’s possible that after three I’d have loved everyone and everything. Even so, I heartily recommend Bigfoot, if you’re anywhere near that area and in anything like the mood for what it does, especially if you combine it with Peloton and the Star, the other elements of that holy trinity. Getting old is no fun but, as friends always tell me, it beats the alternative. Finding spots like Bigfoot, however – even if it makes me feel a 6 Music dad at a happening gig – never, ever gets old.

Bigfoot – 8.1
98 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

https://bigfootoxford.com

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Restaurant review: Me Kong

On January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

When I ran through the trends in Reading’s food scene last year, two stood out: the proliferation of new, casual pizza restaurants and a similar blossoming of restaurants to cater to Reading’s Hongkonger community. Last week I explored the former at Smelly Alley’s Zi Tore so it only seemed fair, this week, to dive into the latter at Me Kong, the newest of these restaurants to open.

I identified some of these spots opening in 2025 – Woodley Food Stasian out in Woodley, Take Your Time where Dolce Vita used to be and the subject of this week’s review, which is tucked away behind Reading Library just down from The Blade next to the retro classic that is the Abbey Baptist Church. It’s a spot which somehow didn’t feel like it existed before Me Kong sprang up there: I can’t remember what, if anything, was there before.

But even that undersells the increase in restaurants catering to this market. After all Good Old Days Hong Kong, which I reviewed around this time last year, has been around since late 2023. Worse still, I missed out a couple of developments last year – YL Restaurant for one, which opened in the back of the supermarket that used to be the Warwick Arms a long time ago. And then there’s Soul Chill, a cafe that opened right opposite where I used to live on the corner of London Street and South Street. Its Google listing initially made it look like a bubble tea spot, but it boasts breakfast and lunch options.

All this, of course, springs from the introduction in January 2021 of the BNO Visa for Hongkongers, giving them the right to settle in the U.K. with a path to citizenship. Reading – always a multicultural, well-educated, polyglot place – has as a result both developed and embraced a significant Hongkonger community. With that come all the advantages of vibrancy, including – selfishly, for me – new and interesting places to eat.

Me Kong is a particular type of establishment, a cha chaan teng. These are “tea restaurants” that originated in Hong Kong in the Fifties, following on from the bing sutt, or ice room. Cha chaan tengs are often likened in print to the British greasy spoon or the American diner, but I think that’s more to try and find a term of cultural reference readers might understand. In reality they are a creature all their own, and a very eclectic one at that.

Food at a cha chaan teng is often described almost as a fusion of Chinese and European – another term often used is ‘soy sauce western’ – with dishes including Chinese ones with which you’d be familiar and more esoteric options like baked pork chop with ketchup, or macaroni soup topped with char siu. In Hong Kong cha chaan tengs are a great gastronomic leveller – swift, efficient and frequented by blue and white collar workers alike.

Plenty of my research suggested that cha chaan tengs are on the wane in Hong Kong, as for that matter greasy spoons are here, but it’s somehow fitting that a wave of them is opening in the U.K. Because I’ve read that when they first sprung up in Hong Kong in the Fifties it was because Hong Kong, run by the British, welcomed Chinese refugees. There are echoes of that, I suppose, in the situation now, seventy years later.

A taste of home, or nostalgia, makes perfect sense if you settle somewhere so far away from your roots, and last month I saw a few photos of customers queuing round the block to try Me Kong for the first time. But did this food also have the potential to win over a wider customer base?

Someone thought so ten years ago, when a restaurant literally called Cha Chaan Teng opened in Holborn, but the reviews were not good. Marina O’Loughlin, then writing in the Guardian, said the food gave her “the kind of clammy shame I’d feel if I woke up post-bender to find myself the fifth Mrs Gregg Wallace”, adding that “cha chaan tengs aren’t renowned for their cuisine”: what’s the opposite of a white saviour?

There is a difference, though. That restaurant was geared at customers of European descent, while Me Kong promises to be the real thing. So on a Tuesday lunchtime I pootled over with my great friend Jerry, who was especially interested in Me Kong because it’s probably the closest restaurant to his gorgeous, incredibly tasteful flat. Forget whether I liked it or not: I also wanted to see if Jerry could find a brilliant new local.

We got there around twenty past twelve and the place was already packed with a queue for tables, albeit one that hadn’t moved out onto the street. I will say though that although we as a nation like to think we’ve invented queuing, Me Kong has perfected it – quickly assessing each table size needed and gradually corralling us into different spots in the waiting area.

At the front there were counters showing off all of Me Kong’s baked goods – buns, pastries and the like – and so some of the people joining the queue were simply buying that stuff to take away. Nothing fazed Me Kong’s front of house, and after no more than five minutes we were ushered to a table.

Me Kong’s interior is really rather impressive, I think. On one level it’s a front room with booths, a back room with tables and a corridor connecting them. But that doesn’t even begin to do it justice, on many levels. They’ve gone all the way through the building, so the front looks out on Abbey Square and the back onto the Holybrook, and that results in a really lovely space where everything feels airy and beautifully lit.

Not only that, but it felt polished and finished in a way new establishments so often don’t: the colour of the wood panelled counter; the tasteful banquettes; the bright line drawings on the wall, everything seemed really considered. And the branding, from the menus to the cups to the napkin dispensers, was extremely well thought out. I got the impression this wasn’t their first rodeo: I’d be surprised if it was their first restaurant, for that matter. It felt fully formed.

I should also mention that Jerry and I were, at the point when we sat down, the only customers of European descent in the place. But I never felt conspicuous, because the staff were just so terrific from start to finish. One server explained to us that they really wanted to promote this kind of food, and I got that impression throughout the meal.

In fact, I’m jumping the gun by saying this but I’ve never been to a restaurant where the staff were quite so keen to tell you what the gorgeous-looking dish that had turned up at another table was (“that’s the braised eggplant with garlic sauce” one of them told me, as I admired a delectable-looking pot on my left).

Me Kong’s menu, on a ring-bound set of cards with that impressive branding, was a proper box of delights with an awful lot going on. One section featured noodles, either dry or in soup, along with five set meals, another common feature in a cha chaan teng. These gave you the option of some Hong Kong classics – ham macaroni soup, say, or char siu macaroni soup – paired with a bun and either fried egg or omelette.

A large section of rice dishes again led with a staple of the cha chaan teng, baked pork chop with cheese and tomato sauce on rice. Many of these dishes were more on the fusion side, so were perhaps more for purists. Another page of the menu featured four clay pot dishes and five stir fries, and another page of snacks offered dishes like deep fried chicken leg with curly fries – again, an authentic cha chaan teng choice – along with a full range of options from the bakery.

I would say that with the exception of that aubergine dish, which looked like it might have had minced pork in it, there wasn’t much for vegetarians here. The page marked Vegetables featured various green veg with garlic or oyster sauce, but would feel limited if that was your lot. There was, however, plenty here for the cost-conscious. The most expensive dish on the menu was south of £15, those set meals were less than a tenner.

Plenty of decisions for Jerry and I to make – but first, tea. Me Kong does sell alcohol (Sapporo on draft, or Guinness) but I really wanted to try the Hong Kong milk tea, another speciality of this kind of restaurant. It’s hard to describe but imagine a very strong cup of PG Tips, souped-up builder’s tea, served with condensed milk, a very pleasing shade of deep amber, and you wouldn’t be far off. I put a sugar in it, but on reflection wished I’d added more.

I don’t normally put a picture of a cup up on the blog, especially one where you can see so little, but: see what I mean about the branding?

I’d read online that Hong Kong milk tea is strained through a sock, or something like it (hopefully one exclusively used for this purpose), often multiple times, to achieve a particular level of smoothness. I can’t say whether a hosiery department was involved, but it did have a certain pleasing consistency. Maybe it was the note of Carnation, or the power of imagination, but whatever it was I enjoyed it.

Jerry originally wanted to try a yuen yueng, a blend of coffee and tea also particular to cha chaan tengs, but they didn’t have any Hong Kong coffee so he joined me in a tea. He liked it, but less than me: when we had a follow up drink I opted for more of the same, and he had an iced lemon tea – specifically requested as slightly less sweet on the excellent advice of the table next to me.

Before I talk about the food, I did want to say something about that. I’ve already said that the staff were really keen to explain other dishes and illuminate us on the cuisine of Hong Kong. But I’ve never eaten in a restaurant where that evangelism so extended to the other customers, too. During our meal the tables on either side of us were occupied by multiple parties – restaurants like this tend to be brisk – and so we got to rubberneck all manner of delights. Not only that, but the people ordering them were more than happy to tell us what they were.

All that meant that although we played it relatively safe with our order we saw more than enough to work out what to have next time. That macaroni soup topped with satay beef looked like an interesting, comforting order, but I was even more intrigued by a dome of rice crowned with an omelette draped over it, the whole thing then decorated with vertical strips of char siu. The traditional pork chop baked with cheese came in an earthenware dish, the kind you might associate with a lasagne, and I got a sufficiently good look to decide I’d leave that one to the experts.

Nicest of all were the lovely pair of civil engineers on my left. They worked in Thames Tower and had found out about the place and one, whose family were from Hong Kong, had decided to bring her colleague along to see if it recaptured the food of her memories.

She ordered a clay pot dish that I considered but been put off ordering because of the mystery meat component of “Chinese sausage”, and she even kindly let me sample a bit. It was delicious, with a sort of air dried texture like salami and a complex, fragrant flavour. I made a note not to let it deter me next time.

So yes, I chose the conventional option, the black bean chicken pot. But I am so happy that I did, because it was simply outstanding. A hefty pot full to bursting with boneless chicken thigh, skin on, cooked absolutely bang on so it was firm but had just enough give, no evidence of the velveting that can sometimes make chicken off-putting. Huge bits of spring onion, caramelised until heavenly, coexisted with all that chicken and extra goodies: little cubes of potent ginger and plenty of equally burnished nubbins of garlic.

But all that would be nothing without the sauce, a black bean sauce of ridiculous savoury depth, a glossy number with notes of Marmite which clung to everything: to the pot, to every crevice of chicken, to each layer of onion, each piece of ginger and garlic, every grain of steamed rice. This was deliciously viscous stuff, and I made it a mission to ensure that I left as little of it gleaming at the bottom of that black pot as I possibly could.

There is a part of me that is very tempted, just after noon on Friday when this review goes up, to find myself in that place again eating exactly this dish: it was that good.

Jerry had chosen every bit as well as me, going for the Singapore vermicelli with char siu and prawn. This was a magnificent one-stop shop, a very generous tangle of rice noodles tumbled through with chilli, prawns, strips of pork, beansprouts and fried egg. The menu described it as spicy, our server said it wasn’t so hot. Having tried a few forkfuls, I’d probably split the difference and say it was nicely challenging.

What saved it from chilli overload was a certain nuttiness, although I’m not sure where it came from. Perhaps it was the curry powder, an essential component of this dish which gives it its ochre hue. Professor Wikipedia advises me, pleasingly, that Singapore noodles have nothing to do with Singapore but are also a post-war Hong Kong creation.

The thing that made me happiest about these noodles was how much Jerry loved them. He told me he could happily see himself coming here of an evening, ordering these and sitting there taking it all in: he added that previously his go to had been the pad thai at Rosa’s Thai but that this was easily a rival for it. Getting people to eat at Me Kong instead of Rosa’s Thai is, I suppose, as good a mission statement for this blog as any: I’m glad it had that effect on my friend if nothing else.

But I can also see exactly what he meant about it being a space where you’d want to spend time. It was so busy, so beautifully efficient and well run, and so popular – with friends, with couples, with families. Small children were everywhere, but for a moment you could forget you were in the U.K. because they were, without exception, impeccably behaved.

The word that jumps out at me – that restaurants don’t always aim for and in any case don’t hit often enough – is fun. Everything about Me Kong was a riot, from its cheerful, charming staff to its delighted, curious kind customers. How could anybody experience that and not want to be part of it again?

Determined to cover as much of the menu as possible we stayed for some sweet treats and this was when, maybe, Me Kong’s sure touch faltered ever so slightly. I wanted to try the real staples here, so we started with a pineapple bun: no pineapple is involved, but it got the name because the sugar crust on top can, apparently, vaguely resemble a pineapple. I rather liked this – it reminded me of an iced bun, but with a crust rather than icing on top. Worth trying so you can say you’ve tried it, absolutely, but I don’t know when I’d feel a hankering for one again.

I really expected to love the French toast, another Hong Kong signature, but it didn’t quite hit the spot. Two slices of white bread, joined together with a thin mortar of punchy peanut butter, came fried and brought to the table with a little pack of Anchor butter to melt on top. Jerry said that those cultural references – Anchor butter, builder’s tea – added to that feeling of nostalgia, and I could see where he was coming from.

But for me this was just a little too stodgy, a little too light on the fun considering how many calories were involved. Ironically it needed to be more indulgent: the very nice civil engineer at the next table told me that often this was served with maple syrup, which would have utterly transformed it, but the server told me that they didn’t do tweaks or customisation for anybody, which I respected.

We didn’t finish it, because as an experience it was just a tad too grubby: I didn’t feel, as Marina O’Loughlin did, shame equivalent to waking up married to Gregg Wallace, but perhaps something comparable, like having a mucky dream about Nadine Dorries.

The last of our trio of desserts was a similar experience: I’d asked for an egg tart and been told that we’d have to wait twenty minutes for a fresh batch to come out of the oven. So we did, and when it came it was still warm and the pastry, buttery and short, was truly exemplary.

And yet I wanted to like the filling so much more than I did. I don’t know whether I was expecting the appealing wobble of a pastel de nata, or the nutmeg-dusted propriety of its English relative, but this was more egg white than egg yolk, somewhat lacking in richness and far more like blancmange that had found itself a very nice house. Again I wouldn’t order it again but I’m glad I tried it and for £1.70, only 10p less expensive than the pineapple bun, it was not an expensive mistake.

Our bill for everything came to just over £54, and there were two remarkable things about it. One is that if you order food they knock a very specific 51p off the price of each of your drinks, so they each cost £2.99. The second is that the service charge they add is only 8%: I questioned this with our server saying it wasn’t enough, and he laughed. “Next time you can tip a hundred pounds!” he said.

He also told me – and this might be useful to you, though it wasn’t to me – that if you spend over £40 they have a deal where you can get free parking at the Queens Road Car Park.

I hope the tip is so low because the staff there don’t need to rely on it to be fairly paid, because they very much deserve that. All of them were just terrific, and I know this has a strong whiff of and everyone stood up and clapped, but it’s true: practically every one of them said thank you to Jerry and I as we walked through the restaurant on our way out. I sent the pictures of our food to Zoë later as I was relaxing at Jerry’s with a cup of tea and a medicinal glass of red, and got exactly the reply I was expecting: perhaps you’ll take me some time soon.

This is precisely the kind of review, and the sort of restaurant, I wanted to kick off the year with. Me Kong is an absolute blast, brilliantly run and happens to do some excellent food, and I scoped out enough options on my first visit to give me plenty of food for thought on my second, third and fourth – if I can tear myself away from that chicken in black bean sauce, that is. It is already incredibly busy in a way most Reading restaurants in January would kill for, but I can see that continuing even after the novelty value has died off.

But what I also loved about it was how inclusive it was, how keen it was to tell its story far and wide. That spirit deserves to be returned in kind by Reading’s restaurant-goers. And it also made me a little proud of Reading: that our diverse, happy, tolerant town can still attract people like that and businesses like this, despite all the naysayers and bigots in the comments section of the Reading Chronicle.

I think if you read this blog you’re not like those people, and I think you’d find an awful lot to like at Me Kong. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the months ahead, I see some of you there. I certainly won’t be in Rosa’s Thai, that’s for sure.

Me Kong – 8.4
St Laurence House, Abbey Square, Reading, RG1 3AG
0118 3431543

https://www.facebook.com/MeKongReadingUK/

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Restaurant review: Oishi

On December 12, 2025February 27, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews

As followers on social media may already know, this will be my last conventional restaurant review for a short while. Last month I broke my arm in a nasty accident, and after a short stay in the Royal Berks, a brace, plenty of x-rays and an operation at the end of November I have been recovering at home.

As I’m currently housebound, with only one working arm, restaurant reviews will have to wait, hopefully not too long. Thank you to everybody for the well wishes I’ve received since the incident: I’m very lucky to have such kind and supportive readers.

I will publish content on the blog in the meantime, my physical condition and the limitations of Apple dictation willing, so stay tuned for that. I will try to spare you a piece on “meals you can eat at home with one hand”, (although I get the impression that genre’s less niche than you might think). For now, I hope you enjoy this review, which is of the last restaurant I visited before the accident: I’m very glad that it was at least a gorgeous meal.

For my money, the saddest words you can find when you Google a restaurant are these: temporarily closed.

They should mean one thing, but they so frequently mean another. You should be able to take them at face value, deduce that the proprietors are taking a well-earned rest, or enjoying their summer holidays. But frequently they mean quite the opposite: the restaurant has closed for good, but it hasn’t been officially confirmed yet. Those two words are like light reaching you from a dead star, a misleading proof of life.

In Reading I’ve seen this happen many times. O Português was marked as temporarily closed for several months, a Facebook post by the restaurant saying something like “be back soon” before it eventually shut for good. The same went for Buon Appetito: people turned up for reservations, only to find the place locked and bolted, no sign up and nothing on social media. The only two-word commentary anywhere? Temporarily closed.

It’s frustrating that so many restaurants fail to announce their own departure. I appreciate that it must be desperately sad when a business fails, that people are out of jobs and in some cases, an independent restaurateur’s dreams have withered and died. Perhaps telling customers, or prospective customers, is the least of their worries. But it’s a shame for customers too, especially if you’ve grown fond of a place: their closure, done that way, denies you closure.

Going temp to perm on your Google listing is the equivalent of leaving a job under a cloud. Far better to close the way the Grumpy Goat did, with one last Saturday to drink the place dry, or as Dough Bros did with its recent announcement, telling punters they had until just before Christmas to get their pizza fix.

It’s especially agonising when it’s somewhere you love. My stepmother’s favourite place to eat is a pub called the Bailiwick, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. It was stricken with the curse of temporary closure last month, with nothing on social media. Worse still, they were listed as permanently closed on OpenTable. When they subsequently posted that they would reopen, with more limited hours, having been “given a second chance” my stepmother was elated. Temporary closure, after all, is so rarely that.

It does happen sometimes in Reading, to be fair. Biryani Mama on St Mary’s Butts looked very shut, claimed they were closed for renovations (an excuse I’ve heard before from restaurants that never reopen) but, true to their word, they’re now trading again. But I have never, in all my days reviewing restaurants, seen a restaurant come back from the dead the way Oishi did.

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