Tag: The 8+ club

Café review: Mac’s Deli

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

What were you doing when you were 21? If you’re a regular reader of this blog I imagine that, like me, you’ll have to cast your mind back to answer that question. In this sense I envy the generations after me, everything digitised, lives captured in hundreds of smartphone photos, people who can probably tell you exactly what they were doing on nearly every day of their twenty-second year.

Personally I was in my last year at university, frantically cramming for final exams I would dream about for years afterwards, navigating fraught relationships and sticking my head firmly in the sand about What Came Next and What I Would Do With My Life (thirty years of that now and counting, thank you very much).

My life was about to lose what little comfort and structure it had and, for me at least, most of the rest of that decade made up my wilderness years. I’m not sure I’d go back to being 21 if you paid me, despite all the people my age who will say “if only I knew then what I know now”. All they really mean is that they regret not getting laid more often, but we nearly all regret that.

I’ll tell you what I wasn’t doing when I was 21: I wasn’t starting my very first hospitality business, taking a massive gamble in a post-pandemic climate where the cards are stacked against restaurants, cafés and bars. But, nearly 30 years after I turned 21, that’s exactly what a chap called Mac Dsouza did.

That business was Filter Coffee House, on Castle Street, and it’s fair to say that it was an immediate success. I stopped by a couple of weeks after it opened, sampled its banana bun and was instantly smitten. So much so that about a week later, when I wrote a piece about Reading’s 50 best dishes to make 10 years of the blog, I managed to sneak that banana bun in there. I might have been relatively early on the bandwagon, but people were already talking about Dsouza’s café. By the time I reviewed it early in the New Year, its place in Reading’s affections was secured.

Dsouza, though, was not the sort to rest on his laurels. So even as the café kept trading, evolving, taking away its seating and moving to takeaway only he was working like a Trojan elsewhere. So he cropped up at Caversham’s Sunday markets to sell more coffee and treats, converting the RG4 crowd to his astonishing masala hot chocolate.

By then Filter Coffee House’s menu had expanded to include a range of affordable sandwiches, although I was more drawn to the specials they did at weekends. However you looked at it, what Dsouza achieved in a couple of years was quite something.

And what were you doing when you were 23, do you remember? I was back at my family home in a suburban terraced house in Woodley, temping in the cashier’s department of the insurance company where my brother worked. It was boring, and this was an office before smartphones, email and the internet so it’s hard to adequately convey quite how boring it was. But Labour had just put an end to eighteen years of Tory rule, and the joy was so extreme that it was almost tangible.

Despite earning fuck all, I always seemed to have enough money, possibly because my main aim at that point was to get drunk at the Bull & Chequers – midweek or weekends, back then nothing ever resulted in a hangover – and go clubbing. I was still impersonating an ostrich with reckless abandon, while my contemporaries became management consultants, solicitors and barristers. I was writing cheques for other people, putting files in alphabetical order and pretending to care what had happened in EastEnders when talking to Maureen or Eileen; everybody in my department was in their sixties, about to retire on the cusp of the information age.

When Mac Dsouza was 23 he opened his second business, Mac’s Deli. It’s not a deli at all, but a café squirrelled away on an industrial estate about a twenty minute walk from Theale station. It opened just over two months ago, and seemed to be a continuation of what he was offering at Filter Coffee House: coffee and a variety of sandwiches, this time mostly involving his own shokupan – Japanese milk bread – baked on the premises.

Dsouza documented every aspect of setting up his new business on Mac’s Deli’s Instagram page, so followers got to see the place coming together – logo first, then the fit out, then the countdown to opening. Since then Instagram has depicted an extraordinary-looking business where everything is made onsite, with even the sauces created by Dsouza rather than bought in. Weekend specials have run the gamut from 6 hour pulled pork to honey butter toast, a little nod to the legendary dish at London’s famous Arôme Bakery.

The menu at Mac’s Deli reminded me of all sorts of things. It was reminiscent of specialist sandwich slingers overseas like Montpellier’s Bravo Babette and Deli Corner, It felt a little Hackney, too, which I should add is a compliment. But it didn’t feel very Theale, which I should also add isn’t necessarily an insult. The location felt incongruous compared to everything else, and when people asked me if I planned to review Mac’s Deli I always said the same thing: “it looks very nice, but it’s a bit out of the way”.

What changed is that a couple of weeks ago my boss and I, on a Friday in the office not far from Mac’s Deli, decided to go scout out the place. So we went, we had lunch, we both absolutely loved it and I decided that I had to find a way to go back and visit on duty. I mentioned it to Zoë when I got home, showed her a photo of my sandwich and an executive decision was made: I was going back, in a couple of Saturdays time, and she was coming with me.

I doubt most people get to Mac’s Deli by taking the train to Theale and doing the flat, featureless 20 minute walk to the industrial estate. But we did, and if I didn’t already have some idea what the food would be like I might have given up halfway there. But at around that point, because Dsouza is no slouch, the signs for Mac’s Deli began appearing on fences with its distinctive winking sandwich logo and endearing font, a chequered stripe underneath, everything in blue and white.

This might sound like a silly thing to pick up on, but Mac’s Deli’s branding is so brilliantly done. Everything is that blue and white, from the billboards to the signage outside Unit 22 of the business park, to the framed prints on the walls. It’s so impressive, so fully-formed, and that branding and language even follows through to the tables and chairs and the beautiful striking wall, a solid block of Majorelle blue, behind the counter.

Don’t be fooled by the photo below, by the way: I took it after the lunch rush had gone but when we arrived, just after 1 o’clock, every single table was occupied. The room inside seats 18 people, and we only got in by squeezing on the end of the last table that wasn’t completely full. I hope the very nice couple who let us perch there have a great time on their trip to Bruges next Easter, whether they end up using my city guide or not.

Mac’s Deli’s menu largely revolves around bread, and making the most of that shokupan. So unless you want a salad or a “health bowl” (overnight oats and the like) you are picking between sandwiches or things on toast. The breakfast menu is half a dozen sandwiches, available all day, and the lunch menu adds another four, along with a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. The lunch sandwiches cost between £9 and £11 and come with home-made shoestring fries, the breakfast ones cost roughly £3 less and are a fries-free zone. I guess I can see the logic behind that.

The lady who took our order – service throughout was brilliant, by the way – apologised and said that we would be waiting a while. I expected that, to be honest, because the place was rammed and everyone there had arrived before us, so we waited patiently on our half of a table for four, rubbernecking as sandwich after sandwich arrived at neighbouring tables or, indeed, were brought to the couple at our table. They’d ordered two of the sandwiches we’d chosen, so Zoë got a very good idea of her impending good fortune.

The only slight quibble I had was that it would have been nice for our coffees to arrive while we were waiting on the sandwiches, but it was no biggie. They were really, really busy and I could see staff in the kitchen out back, including Mac himself. It was a veritable hive of activity.

Zoë had chosen the sandwich I tried on my previous visit to Mac’s Deli, the patty melt. Which is handy, because it means I can tell you what it’s like: otherwise I wouldn’t be able to, because it was so good that Zoë had no intention of sharing it with me. I’ve been saying for as many years as I can remember that a burger, ultimately, is just a sandwich. Well, that’s what this was, but saying it was just a sandwich was a bit like saying that Guernica was just a doodle.

So yes, the burger was outrageously good: a thick, crumbly patty of dry-aged beef, not pink in the middle but not needing to be either. Mac’s Deli buys its meat from Aubrey Allen – audaciously ambitious for a caff on an industrial estate – and that came across loud and clear. Remember all those debates about whether brioche is the right thing to contain a burger? Turns out the answer is to make excellent, almost-fluffy Japanese milk bread and then toast the outside so it holds everything together.

But there was still more, in the form of a sublime layer of caramelised onions, some American cheese and a house mayo with truffle and garlic which managed not to overpower everything else going on. Zoë, a lifelong vinegar hater, was not best pleased at the thick slabs of gherkin in the mix, mostly because they weren’t mentioned on the menu, but she picked every single one out and devoured everything else. “It’s okay” she told me, “there’s no contamination.”

She adored the patty melt, and having tried it on my exploratory trip to Mac’s Deli I could completely see why. For my money, this is not only the best burger you can buy in and around Reading but a ludicrous steal at £10.95, impeccable shoestring fries thrown in (more if you add bacon, which of course Zoë did). It was better than Honest, better than 7Bone, better than Monkey Lounge. In fairness the burgers may come close at Stop & Taste, or at Tilehurst newcomers Blip Burgers – owned by the people behind Zyka and The Switch – but Mac’s Deli’s patty melt will take some beating.

I had chosen the bacon (or Bae-Con, according to the menu) sando, and if it wasn’t quite as successful that doesn’t mean it wasn’t excellent. It was a much simpler affair, deploying the cheese and the garlic truffle mayo, swapping out the burger for a fried egg and bacon and omitting the shoestring fries. If you ate this sandwich and were then told that for an extra three quid you could have had the patty melt, I think you’d be filled with regret.

But some of the things that meant I wasn’t as wild about this sandwich were on me, not Mac’s Deli. They were up front that they were going to use that mayo and American cheese, and if I found the sandwich slightly claggy and one-note as a result, they weren’t to blame for that. I would sooner have had a slightly more conventional bacon sandwich – I’d love to see Mac’s take on brown sauce – or even one with something like gochujang that could provide the clichéd cut through slightly missing from this sando.

I’d also have liked smoked streaky bacon, and plenty of it, rather than back. But again, that’s more about me. I will say though that the egg was cooked exactly how I like it, the yolk fudgy rather than runny. Given that the menu promises the egg sunny side up, that might have been a happy accident.

One of the benefits of the sandwiches at Mac’s Deli is how sharable they are, coming in that blue gingham wrap – that colour scheme again – and sliced neatly into halves. That meant that for research purposes we could share another sandwich, the chicken caesar. There was an awful lot to like about this too, especially the chicken which was in craggy, fried tenders a million miles away from a sad, pale supermarket goujon.

So it was very much my kind of thing but again, the precise balance of flavours meant it wouldn’t be for everybody. Zoë found the caesar dressing too vinegary and, for what it’s worth, I agreed with her: that didn’t put me off it, but it did mean it slightly lacked the saltiness Caesar dressing should bring to the table. Part of that, I think, was because instead of being incorporated into the sandwich and the dressing the 30 month old Parmesan had been cropdusted over the whole shebang.

I get that this looks the part, makes for a very pleasing contribution to anybody’s Instagram grid, but for me it’s a little bit style over substance. Not only is it hard to stop the stuff going everywhere, but it meant that the flavour wasn’t completely integrated. It was however a very good advert for Mac’s Deli’s chicken caesar salad, which has all of that and bacon as standard, and the option to add extra fried chicken if you yourself are also feeling extra.

By this point the coffee had turned up, although we mostly drunk it at the end when we’d polished everything off. In my case that also included a pair of revelatory hashbrowns which I suspect had been bought in but which were elevated with a liberal dusting of rosemary salt which had a positively transformative effect. I’d love to see Mac make his own hash browns at some point: maybe that will be another weekend special, one day.

Coffee, by the way, was gorgeous – both my latte and Zoë’s flat white were impressively smooth. Bags of coffee by Square Mile, the roastery founded by patron saint of coffee James Hoffman, were on display next to the machine, although it was unclear whether they were also available to buy. But all this is a huge statement of intent – coffee by Square Mile, eggs by Beechwood Farm, meat by Aubrey Allen – and you have to hand it to Dsouza for that.

I didn’t want to leave without trying something sweet and was torn between the cookie, the brownie and the Basque cheesecake. The lady behind the counter steered me in the direction of the brownie and I’m so glad she did. I have no idea whether these are made on the premises or, as with Filter Coffee House, Mac’s Deli takes advantage of Berkshire’s network of excellent suppliers and bakers.

But whoever made that brownie knew exactly what they were doing: an outstanding brittle surface giving way to a dense, ganache-like core, the whole thing adding up to the best brownie I’ve had anywhere near Reading since the Grumpy Goat closed down. £2.50 for that, and I can’t remember the last time I spent £2.50 anywhere near so well anywhere else. The whole lunch – and bear in mind we shared three sandwiches between two – cost us £41.35.

On the walk back to Theale station, which felt nowhere near as long as the walk there had been, Zoë and I compared notes and enthused about our lunch. I have no idea why Dsouza picked that location, of all locations, for his sophomore album. Perhaps he knew something nobody else did about the demand for weapons grade sandwiches in Theale, or maybe the catering and storage facilities on that industrial estate allow him to supply to Filter Coffee House and leave the way open for further expansion.

But a smart person would put money on Dsouza knowing exactly what he’s doing, because the place was full when I went on a weekday and full when I turned up on a Saturday. Full of people who, like me during my visit, seemed unable to quite believe their good fortune. Mac’s Deli still feels like a bit of a mirage in that location – a sort of step-sibling to Stop & Taste in that respect – but if anybody eating there is pinching themselves it’s not because they want to wake up from a wonderful dream. They simply can’t believe it’s that good.

If Mac’s Deli was in the centre of Reading it would wipe the floor with many of its peers, so it might be better for all of them that it’s not. But perhaps the next one will be, because from the ambition Dsouza has displayed so far it’s hard to believe he’ll look at Filter Coffee House and Mac’s Deli and decide that such a small empire is enough for him.

Can you remember what you were doing when you were 25? Me neither. But I’m very interested to see what Mac Dsouza does in a couple of years, when he reaches that age. Until that day comes, he’s already given us an awful lot to enjoy.

Mac’s Deli – 8.5
Unit 22, Moulden Way, Calcot, RG7 4GB

https://www.instagram.com/macsdeli.uk/

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Restaurant review: Club India

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

This week’s review partly came about because of a gentleman called Andy Hayler. Now, you might not know who Hayler is, but in terms of food he’s something of a phenomenon.

The shadowy world of Michelin exists behind an impenetrable curtain, with nobody sure how they work or what dictates who gets listed, is awarded Bib Gourmands and stars – or, sometimes, has them taken away. Andy Hayler is the closest thing we have to a Michelin inspector working in plain sight. He has a blog, which has been around since the 90s, in which he has documented hundreds of meals in restaurants, giving each restaurant – and every dish – a mark out of 20.

I’ve rarely seen anything get lower than a 10, and very little approaches the top of his scale, but that’s because a fair amount of what Hayler has reviewed is at the highest end of dining. There was a time when he had eaten at every three starred restaurant in the entire world, although he stopped keeping up with Michelin when, as he puts it, they devalued what three stars should signify by giving them out in some territories to restaurants that were nowhere near the standards he had experienced elsewhere.

Hayler has a sort of cult, niche status in food. I’ve read a couple of pieces about him in recent years, both verging on hagiographies. He’s been described as “the best living food writer”, and I’ve read interviews that gush about his effortless recall and the esteem in which he is held by chefs and restaurateurs. He is the cognoscenti’s critic of choice and no mistake.

I think he attracts some of those plaudits because of what his reviews both are and aren’t. They don’t, in some senses, read like reviews at all, more like audits from someone scrupulous and meticulous who has forgotten more good meals than most of us will ever have. Although it doesn’t sound like he forgets many of them: why would you, when you document them all in such extensive detail?

I think the respect also comes from his refreshing lack of ego; Hayler would be the first to draw a distinction between himself and many restaurant reviewers. “I wouldn’t ever pretend I was any sort of fantastic prose master. I’m not trying to throw in a load of stuff about my journey to the restaurant and the trendy people on the table to the left” he has said, subtly throwing shade on half the piffle I come out with every week.

Don’t worry, there’s no way he meant me personally: in fact, he once described one of my pieces, about Maida Vale’s Paulette, as a “lovely review” which I found surprisingly touching. “Most of the newspaper critics want to be writers first, I want to focus on the food” he said more recently. I suspect the people who read him admire that purity of approach, and it does mean that when he thinks somewhere is dismal or overrated, which happens occasionally, it’s really very amusing.

What’s also admirable is that Hayler goes where he likes, reviews wherever he wants: money seems to be no object, and he doesn’t follow the fads. You won’t find him, for instance, reviewing Brasserie Constance, a restaurant operating out of Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage, unlike nearly every broadsheet critic over the last few weeks. Instead, his two or three reviews each week involve him going wherever he pleases, in London and abroad.

His two main weaknesses seem to be eating at the Ritz in particular and eating Indian food in general. Hayler is a regular visitor to Epsom’s Dastaan, and the little group of restaurants it has spawned in Surbiton, Richmond and Leeds. He’s also a frequent diner in Southall, and when he gave a warm review to Hounslow’s review of Crispy Dosa last November it caused a Mexican wave of regional bloggers checking out their nearest branch to touch the hem of his virtual garment (been there, done that – four years ago).

“If Mr Hayler thinks it is OK, it is a fair bet I will probably like it” one said. “You can be assured that if Andy says a restaurant is worth visiting then it really will be” said another. That’s proper soft power, and all from the opinion of a chap you mightn’t have heard of.

Hayler even came all the way west to Caversham last year to review Clay’s, something I’ve been waiting for him to do for a very long time. He gave it 14/20, which may not sound like a big deal but actually is. “Clays is a very impressive family-run restaurant, the food shows a lot of care, and the chefs are clearly putting some real effort into reproducing an authentic taste of India” he concluded, after paying particular tribute to Clay’s cabbage pakora, lamb chops and, of course, bhuna venison (Hayler also tried methi chicken, a dish he seems particularly to favour).

Seeing Clay’s reviewed by Hayler was like watching somebody you know being interviewed in the national news, and it made me proud. It didn’t make the local paper the way Grace Dent’s write-up had, but in its way it was every bit as significant. Hayler, as he said, is all about the food.

Now, by this point even my most supportive readers are probably thinking ‘this is an even more circuitous intro than usual, what has this got to do with anything?’ Well, I’ll tell you: every week Andy Hayler does a roundup on his blog, and every week the byline gives a couple of destinations. From South Kensington to Mayfair one might read, or From Piccadilly to Rome. Fancy restaurants and/or jetsetting are invariably involved. And then, at the start of the month, one made me do a double take. From Winnersh to West London, it said.

Winnersh? Our Winnersh?

It was not a misprint. Andy Hayler had come all the way to Winnersh to try out Club India, an Indian restaurant that opened back in July where the old Pheasant pub used to be. I mentioned that development when I reviewed Dolphin’s Caribbean, back in June, What I said, looking back, feels a little graceless, especially as they sent me a lovely email inviting me to a pre-launch event. I read the blurb and thought it sounded potentially interesting, but then again: Winnersh?

Andy Hayler had no such compunctions. Club India’s consultant chef had held two Michelin stars at his restaurant in San Francisco, although Hayler’s verdict on that place was that if a chef had gone there trying to pick up tips “he or she would either burst out laughing maniacally or seek to throttle any passing Michelin inspectors; possibly both”. But the head chef had headed up the kitchens at a couple of London restaurants Hayler really rated. So he went, he enjoyed it, he dished out scores out of 20 for all the dishes and, of course, he ordered methi chicken.

Overall he gave it the same rating, 14 out of 20, as Clay’s. “Club India was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, the food and service excellent, and at an affordable price. I wish I could say that more often these days” was his conclusion. That was good enough for me, so on a Friday night after a couple of pre-prandial beers in town Zoë and I hopped on the number 4 bus to go and see if Reading really did have a rival to Clay’s Kitchen, tucked away in – this may not be the last time I say this word slightly incredulously – Winnersh.

You can tell it’s a former pub, but the glow up is nice and, on the inside, pretty subtle and tasteful. The room I was in, at the front, was muted wallpaper and leather banquettes, but every room was slightly different and the one the other side of the bar from mine, with its tiled floor, was my favourite. When we got there around 7.30 it was already very busy with big groups and couples on dates, in full swing with a busy service ahead. Hayler said it could seat 70, which sounded about right, with outside space too.

I guess it’s easier to have more space than you need in this part of Reading than it is in Caversham, but in any case it was bustling on a Friday evening. The tables were more Winnersh than desi when I arrived, although I would say that balance shifted as the evening went on. It certainly felt like a restaurant that wanted to attract both demographics, and anybody else besides.

Our table had a good view of the room and of the very strong service. The man who seemed to be running the show, sporting an impressive man bun, thick white stripe right down the middle of his dark luxuriant beard, was a class act, but in fairness everyone who looked after us all evening was lovely, polite and enthusiastic, even the ones who seemed a little nervous. It had the swagger of a restaurant that had been there a lot longer than three months.

We started, as you might, with apéritifs and poppadoms – and if that seems like an incongruous pairing, Club India does a good job of making them feel like they go together. Zoë liked her negroni, although she wasn’t sure it tasted quite like a negroni and couldn’t put her finger on why. I had something called an Amber Signal, which I suspect featured in the Johnny Depp defamation case a few years back. It was a blend of Aperol, whisky and Drambuie and felt surprisingly grown up by my standards, something to sip slowly and mindfully. Both cocktails came in glam, exceptionally heavy-bottomed glasses that could have doubled as a paperweight or a murder weapon.

The poppadoms were splendid, by the way – warm, thin, greaseless and very hard to stop at just the one each, which is probably why we didn’t. But the chutneys were the thing: you pay £3.50 or so for these but they were all made by hand and far more interesting than the usual fare. The mango chutney was thick and rich with nigella, the raita so robust that I thought Greek yoghurt must have been involved. There was a mixed berry number which surprised, possibly mostly through novely value, and best of all an inspired shrimp chutney which we managed, being our best selves, to equitably divide despite the unworthy temptation to hog the lot.

The menu at Club India takes a long time to go from first read to decision, because you want to order most of it. It is the only restaurant I can think of in Reading with a tasting menu, at a very reasonable £45 a head, or £70 if you throw in the wine pairings, and if it had contained the dishes I’d really fancied from the à la carte you’d be reading about it right now: nevertheless, it sounded like really solid value.

But the à la carte was just too tempting – about a dozen starters, the same number of curries, some biryani dishes and plenty of vegetarian dishes which you could downsize to try as a side dish. They also had a separate vegan menu, so they could definitely make many of the vegetarian dishes without ghee. Starters ran the gamut from £5.50 to £15.95 and the most expensive main would set you back £18. Pricing, put that way, looked pretty reasonable – and although the obvious reference point for this restaurant, given my preamble, is Clay’s I also had Masakali in the back of my mind. Club India’s menu is far more streamlined than Masakali’s, and to my mind less expensive.

From this point on, you might find yourself wishing I adopted Andy Hayler’s much more concise method, because I’m afraid we very much went wild in the aisles picking a lot of dishes, ordering like the place might close down tomorrow. Andy Hayler might have said curry leaf calamari was good, the apricot glaze giving an extra dimension (13/20). I would say that I really loved this jumble of sticky ribbons of squid, somehow crispy and caramelised without succumbing to bounce or toughness. The menu says that it’s grandma’s recipe: I loved my grandmother very much, but I might have sacrificed her to the devil himself in return for one who could cook like this.

Just as terrific were the lamb chops, two glorious inverted commas of meat, best end blackened from the tandoor but still blushing on the inside. Up there with the best lamb chops I’ve had, and I’ve tried them at Clay’s, and at Didcot’s extraordinary Zigana’s Turkish Kitchen. At sixteen pounds you’d need them to be, but for me they delivered in spades and I was very glad we ordered them.

If you believed the menu, these came with coriander chutney and a smoked aubergine raita: it didn’t feel, from my recollection or looking at this photo, like that’s exactly what was going on. There was allegedly beetroot in the marinade, it felt like it had escaped into the smear on the plate. But to be honest whatever smudge of sauce you add, whatever spiralised veg and leaves you artfully zhuzh on top this stands or falls on the meat and the meat alone. Zoë, far more primal about these things than me, picked it up by the bone and gnawed until she could gnaw no more.

Completing our trio of starters was the only dish, apart from those poppadoms, that Andy Hayler and I both tried on our visits. 12 hour braised, spiced pulled pork rested, in a beautiful tangle, on an uttapam, a thicker, slightly spongy variant on dosa. I really wanted to try this dish for so many reasons – because it’s just absolutely up my alley, because Hayler raved about it, giving it a rare 15/20 and because I’d had something similar at a beer pairing lunch at Clay’s Kitchen last year, and that dish had been one of the best things I ate in 2024.

Did it come close? Yes. You would have struggled to put a poppadom between them, in terms of interest and quality. Clay’s version used minced pork rather than pulled pork, and there was something deeply texturally satisfying about Club India’s slow-perfected strands. Club India’s rendition had more whistles and bells, a coconut chutney, microshoots and fripperies. But if you stripped all that away, you just ended up with a small plate – from either restaurant – that would grace any starter menu, anywhere.

The spicing was a beaut, the coconut chutney went perfectly, I loved it from start to finish. We shared this, as we did the other two dishes, but I could gladly have polished one of these off solo. I could equally have said that about the other two dishes, too.

At this point the restaurant was at its liveliest, I had a gorgeous glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc on the go and I had that warm feeling that comes from knowing I’m eating at a discovery – no, not a hidden gem, but a find. The starters we’d eaten, for my money, were up there with most Indian restaurants I’d dined at, and at or around the quality I’d come to love at Clay’s.

Could Reading finally have another contender for the crown? I found myself, mid-meal, daydreaming about the rave review I would scurry home and write. Zoë was thinking that this was a place, not a million miles from Woodley, that she could persuade her parents to visit. And that wasn’t all. “Are you thinking this would be a suitable venue for one of your readers’ lunches?” she asked me. I had been doing exactly that.

So it saddens me to piss on the proverbial chips and say that the rest of the meal was a gentle descent from that summit. It didn’t end up in the slough of despond, but it settled somewhere that felt more like settling. And although that’s a shame, in the wider scheme, it doesn’t mean that anything we ate from there on in was bad, it just wasn’t quite as extraordinary.

Take the kadaknath chicken curry we’d ordered. One of the things I really liked about Club India’s range of curries was that it mixed up stuff you’d heard of – butter chicken, rogan josh, methi chicken and so on – with dishes I wasn’t familiar with. Kadakhath is a particular breed of Indian chicken that the menu says is particularly known for its gamey flavour, and Club India uses black leg chicken to get as close to that as possible. From that, I was hoping this would be a bit like Northern Spain’s pitu caleya, but this was pretty unremarkable. Breast rather than thigh, too, which reminded me how Clay’s approach to chicken curries is so different from everywhere in Reading.

That’s not to say I didn’t like it, or that I didn’t like the gravy, made with fenugreek and crushed peppercorn. I actually very much enjoyed its savoury, almost perfumed depth, those slight wintry hints of leather about it. But everything felt out of kilter. The chicken was submerged in a lake of the gravy, slightly unbalanced, and the gravy wasn’t quite interesting enough to carry things on its own, even dolloped onto some perfectly nice saffron and cumin pulao.

I’m sorry to keep mentioning Clay’s, but it was inevitable that I would in trying to benchmark somewhere like Club India. The gravies at Clay’s, each of those distinct, exceptional sauces, is so captivating that the meat is merely, in many cases, a vehicle. You clean up every last molecule in the bowl with your rice, with some bread, with your spoon, with a finger if you must. Club India didn’t quite reach that standard, which meant that the curries were just a little too wet.

Better, although still not quite there, was a curry described simply as Champaran meat. This was my favourite thing from this section of the meal, and the sauce again had depth and complexity. But what elevated this was the really terrific lamb, marinated overnight and with an almost unbeatable texture, leg at a guess, slow-cooked until it could cleave like kleftiko; this dish is cooked over charcoal in a sealed pot, which probably contributed greatly to how wonderful it was.

Again, I’d have liked it a little more sticky and a little less swimming, but that didn’t stop it being head and shoulders above most curries you’d get in Reading.

We ordered a couple of vegetable side dishes, one because I insisted and one because Zoë did. Mine was baby aubergine in a sauce with jaggery and tamarind, two of my very favourite things. And yes, a sauce that combined them was as sweet and tangy as you would expect, and I loved that. But I didn’t want a bowl of the stuff with two – just two – baby aubergines bobbing in it. And that, slightly unfortunately, is what I got.

Zoë on the other hand had put in a request for Club India’s okra stir fried with peppers and onions. If she was writing this review she would tell you that she really liked it, and for that matter that she really likes okra. But you are stuck with me, I’m afraid, and Clay’s thinly sliced, crispy take on okra is, I think, the only variant of this ingredient I have ever enjoyed. I feigned generosity telling Zoë she could finish this but she knew, deep down, that it was because I wasn’t a fan.

I will say this, though, Club India’s keema naan is the best I have ever had. This is another to file under ‘Zoë always orders it, and I nibble a bit without any great enthusiasm’. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve taken a bite and been confronted by weirdly scarlet, oddly bouncy mystery meat. That fate does not befall you at Club India: the meat lurking in the middle of a deliciously airy naan is properly belting stuff.

It made me want to try their sheekh kebab next time – and credit to Club India, not only do they list the provenance of some of their ingredients but the lamb for the Champaran meat comes from one place, namely North Wales, while the lamb for the sheekh kebab comes from Romney Marsh, completely the other end of the U.K. You do have to at least slightly admire that.

By this point we had checked the timetable for the bus back into town and realised that neither of the options – namely leaving in ten minutes or lingering at Club India for over an hour – were going to happen. So we embraced the concept of a taxi and rewarded ourselves with dessert. I was hoping the gajar halwa that Andy Hayler had rather enjoyed would be on the menu, but the compact selection of four had already moved on since then. It was the one area where Club India’s imagination felt like it had run out, because when one of the four options is a chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream I think, as an upmarket Indian restaurant, that you’re playing it far too safe.

Playing it safe rather defined my dessert, too. A mango cheesecake, a small dainty cylinder, was genuinely quite charming and went nicely with the diddy glass of dessert wine I’d ordered with it (a 50ml pour is on the small side, but it was £5 so it didn’t matter so much). But again, the menu promised a hint of chilli and if it was a hint it was too subtle for me. I’d have preferred a clanger of chilli, if we were picking between extremes, and it rather appeared that we were.

I think Zoë ordered better, although she mightn’t have agreed. Rasmalai tiramisu was, for me, far more imaginative and more in keeping with the rest of the menu. I’m not sure it was really reminiscent of either, more like the two had been put in separate machines and teleported into a blend, like something out of The Fly. But I liked it and envied Zoë, and the pleasingly squeaky sort-of-cheese in the base made it something you’d eat to experience, let alone to taste. For me that fusion, that experiment worked.

Zoë seemed to feel differently, but she does like okra and me, so there are already a couple of valid question marks against her judgment.

At the end of the night, Uber on the way, I settled the bill and found myself thinking it was generally decent value. We had a couple of aperitifs, a couple of dessert wines, I had a glass of white and then there was that onslaught – of poppadoms, of three starters, of curries and side dishes and rice and naan and dessert. We’re not going to play The Price Is Right, but when it came to £170, including a modest 10% service charge, I felt like I’d had a lot of evening for my cash. We were there nearly two and a half hours, enough time to watch multiple sittings come and go, and to watch the staff properly earning their money.

So where do you benchmark Club India, after a meal like that? Well, first of all: Winnersh and Woodley, that eastern edge of Reading, is very fortunate to have it on their doorstep. I think it will do very well, partly because it is indeed good and partly because nothing around there even comes close to it.

In terms of the kind of place it is, the most obvious comparison, for me, is Masakali; they are trying to be similar restaurants, but Club India far surpasses its predecessor on the Caversham Road.

Club India is the restaurant Masakali hopes to be when it grows up, and an illustration of the difference between having your menu dreamt up by a head chef, with some advice from a decorated chef in an advisory capacity on the one hand, and having your menu mechanically assembled by some kind of offshore committee slash agency on the other. Quality will out: Club India is way ahead of that competitor.

But as for the others? If everything else had managed to sustain the extraordinary quality of those starters, the arrival of Club India would be one of the big Reading food events of 2025. That it doesn’t is a pity, but it doesn’t change the fact that even Club India’s more ordinary dishes still feel like a cut above most places.

So if they don’t quite reach the level of Clay’s Kitchen, they should console themselves by knowing that they are in good company there, in a support group made up, pretty much, of every restaurant in Reading. But if you are comparing them to the next level down, the likes of Chilis, I think they can give a very good account of themselves.

So there you have it. I guess if I was Andy Hayler, I would have summed this up by saying, in his inimitable style, 12/20. But I’m not Andy Hayler, I’m me, and so I’ll conclude this review with that slightly enigmatic score below. It’s the only way I know.

Club India – 8.1
355 Reading Road, Winnersh, RG41 5LR
0118 3048701

https://www.clubindia.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Stop & Taste

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

The biggest trend in Reading’s food scene this year has been the proliferation of pizza places – Paesinos, Zí Tore, Amò and Peppito, all opening in the space of five months. In the space of a five minute walk, you could pass them all: you could do a pizza crawl of all four, if that’s your kind of thing. Everyone will have their favourite, or their own view of which is the best, and perhaps I will too once I’ve got round to the last couple on my to do list: one way or the other I’m sure my annual round-up and awards at the end of December will have something to say about all of that.

But if that competition is the most high-profile this year, there are a couple of smaller-scale rivalries, more under the radar, that have captured my attention every bit as much. Like the one between Vietnamese newcomers Pho 86, on St Mary’s Butts where County Deli used to be, and Thai restaurant Nua which opened just around the corner, in Bluegrass BBQ’s old home. They are competing not only with the established order – Pho and Thai Corner – but with each other, and they opened on the same day in July.

So that promises to be interesting, and I’ll do my damnedest to check them both out before the end of 2025. But even that’s not my favourite, because my favourite is the tightly-fought battle between two brand new restaurants, which opened a week apart, for Most Batshit Menu In Reading.

In the red corner you have Take Your Time, which opened in August at the top of Sykes’ Sweatshop (you probably know it better as Kings Walk) in the former Dolce Vita site, which sat vacant for over seven years. Take Your Time’s website says that it blends “Asian flavours with Western cuisine”, and Take Your Time’s menu interprets that as serving baked pork chop with an egg fried rice featuring tomato, pineapple and mozzarella, like someone put a Hawaiian pizza into Google Translate.

It also gives you the option of a chicken risotto (“chicken is slightly pink”), or “Hong Kong-style source [sic] stir fried spaghetti with pan fried ribeye steak”. Fusion? Confusion? Who knows. It would, any other time, be far and away the strangest menu I’ve read all year.

But then, a week later, Stop & Taste opened in Emmer Green in a ‘hold my beer’ scenario. Stop & Taste looked on the face of it like a standard eat in fast food place – visually difficult to distinguish from the likes of Basingstoke Road’s Kyaneez – mainly famous for having the most idiosyncratic Instagram account of all time – or Salt & Smash on Christchurch Green. But then I saw the menu and thought, and this is pretty much a verbatim transcript of my exact reaction, what the fuck is going on here?

Because Stop & Taste’s menu rivalled Take Your Time’s for eccentricity, for lack of an overarching theme. So yes, there were loads of burgers – obviously – but one of them involving tempura soft shell crab? And three different types of biryani, and oxtail tacos and fried shark bites? And a £25 lobster roll with “lobster tail poached in secret butter” and hand-minced beef patties and thick shakes and Sunday roasts made with fillet steak?

Take Your Time and Stop & Taste had two things in common – menus that invited an ADHD diagnosis and, paradoxically, names that seemed to extol the virtues of mindful eating. So I just had to visit one of them this week, and in the end I found myself taking a bus north of the river on a weekday evening. That menu at Stop & Taste was either madness or genius, and I just had to know which it was, shark bites and all.

Alighting from the bus I found Stop & Taste at the near end of a little parade of suburban shops, sandwiched between a Budgens and an off licence; if you want an idea of the passage of time the picture I found on Google Maps, from back in 2012, has branches of Blockbuster and Thresher further along. It reminded me of other suburban spots, like Coriander Club or, not too far away, Caversham Park Village’s Momo House.

But it also reminded me of my childhood in Woodley, of living round the corner from Hudson Road and of the independent supermarket where it felt like you could pick up anything, of buying sweets for a penny.

Back then, forty years ago, the best you could hope for in terms of food was fish and chips with curry sauce or a chow mein, and the idea that in the future we wouldn’t have jetpacks but would have ready access to birria tacos and soft shell crab would never have occurred to me. I do have to be honest, though, and say that if I’d appeared in a vision to 11 year old me, the ghost of dinners yet to come, and offered him the choice, he’d have picked the fancy food over the jetpack: I don’t know whether to be proud of him or ashamed.

Inside, the place was empty apart from a big table of kids who seemed to be having a lovely time but weren’t discernably eating any food: I think in all the time I was there one of them went up to the counter and ordered a giant milkshake, but that was it. I’m too old to even guess how old they were, so let’s just say they were Grange Hill age and leave it at that.

Sorry, that ages me even more, doesn’t it? I mean Waterloo Road age. If they knew how lucky they were to live within easy access of shark bites as opposed to chips with curry sauce, they were far too cool to betray it.

Otherwise the interior looked pleasant if generic, not necessarily a place to linger. I quite liked the faux marble tiles on the wall, the ceiling panel covered in artificial flowers, bare bulbs hanging down. The chairs looked remarkably similar to ones I’ve seen in many other places, although I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. I wonder if there’s a starter kit new restaurants buy? The fire safety tags still hung from under the seat pads, and everything was still shiny and new.

At least I didn’t have to wedge my arse into a ubiquitous Tolix chair, so there was that. A brightly lit sign on the wall proclaimed MORE THAN A GUILTY PLEASURE and a sign up at the counter read DON’T TAKE LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY. NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE ANYWAY. Thought provoking stuff all round.

I wasn’t sure whether this boded well at all, any of it, but the menu, illuminated over the counter, made me think again. Something about it, in the flesh, inspired confidence in a way the version I’d seen online didn’t. Part of it was the surprisingly pleasing design: all red and white, clear fonts, oddly endearing icons of burger buns and taco shells with googly eyes. And part of it again, was that array of dishes. The randomness was there, but also I had a faint inkling that you don’t get the stuff to cater this menu from Brakes. They don’t sell shark, as far as I know.

Stop & Taste’s pricing, too, was pretty keen. Most of the starters maxed out at £8, unless you wanted lamb chops or tiger prawns, and the only main coming in over £14 was that lobster roll at £25: it would be interesting to know how many of those they sell. The biryani and Indo-Chinese dishes (because yes, they had them too), the fried chicken tenders and the chargrilled peri peri chicken were all less than a tenner. I was on my own, so I had to decide how best to try as much of the menu as I could.

Going up and ordering a couple of things to start me off, I got chatting to the chap who I think was the owner. He warned me that the menu was brand new so a couple of the dishes, birria tacos and chargrilled tiger prawns, weren’t available yet. He said they’d been open for two months and that so far business was good, although it was mainly limited to Emmer Green residents. They hadn’t leafleted yet, because they wanted to prioritise the local community before looking for customers further afield. He told me, again, about their Sunday roasts: a separate menu advertised rump of beef, fillet, roast chicken, the works.

Technically they were on delivery apps, he added, but he also said something that other business owners have said to me recently, that they were reluctant to do delivery because they knew that from the moment the food was popped in a bag and loaded on the back of a bike something was lost, and what you ate was a fifteen minute drive from what they intended. So it wouldn’t surprise me if, for now, many of their deliveries don’t go far beyond Emmer Green. That said, they took a order to deliver all the way out to Spey Road while I was there: based on what was to come I imagine it was a repeat customer.

Naturally I ordered the shark bites. How could I not? Zoë and I have this game we play when I review without her where I send her pictures of the dishes and ask her to guess whether or not they’re any cop. She saw the picture down there and replied. The bites look good.

But they didn’t just look good. They were an utter delight from beginning to end, a very generous lined cardboard box stuffed with crispy, gnarled nuggets of fried fish. The lightness of touch was betrayed by this: the coating was so light, so nicely crunchy, but if you tried to eat the nuggets with the wooden fork supplied they just fell apart. I’ve never had shark before – I know they used to sell it on Smelly Alley but I never picked any up – so I didn’t know what to expect, but actually the texture was perfect for this purpose: more woolly than flaky, but very pleasantly so.

Doing away with the niceties of cutlery I simply picked them up, dipped them in the mayo and smiled an awful lot. £5.99 for these, and one of the nicest things about reviewing Stop & Taste solo was not having to share them with another living soul. I don’t know how you could come here and not order these, unless you don’t like fish, but if you do visit Stop & Taste I highly recommend trying them – unless, of course, they have replaced them on the menu with something even better. It feels eminently possible that at some point they would.

Denied the opportunity to try the birria tacos – next time, I told myself – I instead sampled the oxtail tacos, which have been on their menu since they opened. Again, I was somewhere equidistant between surprise and joy. Everything worked, and everything felt considered, from the strands of oxtail at the bottom to the excellent guacamole, full of lime and, I suspect, coriander. Putting crispy onions on top was a genius touch, adding the contrast that otherwise would have been the only thing missing.

But also, and this sounds like a minor thing but it isn’t, this was really enjoyable to eat. At the risk of sounding Goldilocks and the three bears, it was just right – feasible to eat without unhooking your jaw, carrying out some very precarious biting or winding up with half of it down your shirt. I sometimes think the reason influencers always rave about burgers, pizzas and doughnuts is that they haven’t evolved to cutlery yet. Influencers would like Stop & Taste very much, but don’t hold that against the place.

While I was eating all this and mentally recalibrating many of my preconceptions, I paid attention to what was going on around me. A number of customers came in, and the owner remembered all of them by name – remembered what they had ordered last, asked what they thought of it, remembered that, for example, one chap liked his burger without cheese (he sat at the table next to me, headphones on, thoroughly enjoying it). The owner asked me if I liked my food, too, and whether I needed anything else.

I also saw orders for deliveries come in, and the owner telling the chef that they already had an order for ten biryanis on Saturday. I listened to the chef on the phone to a supplier and heard him talking to the owner about what they needed to buy in – beef cheek for the birria tacos, and more besides.

This will sound like a silly comparison, but because it’s autumn and I need cheering up I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls, and overhearing the conversation between the owner and the chef felt a bit like hearing Lorelai and Sookie St. James discussing ingredients. Stop & Taste wasn’t the Independence Inn, and Emmer Green isn’t Stars Hollow, not by a long chalk, but for a moment I got the same kind of warm feeling I get from that fictional small Connecticut town.

As I was deciding what to order next, a woman came in jonesing for a cookie fix and chatted to the chef. He said they didn’t have any Biscoff cookies left, but they did have red velvet. “It will change your life” he said, adding that they’re made for the restaurant by a friend. The customer said she’d had one before and that it was indeed life changing – “it’s when you get to the middle” she said – but she ended up leaving with two boxed cookies to take away and a large portion of fries. I made a mental note that dessert was on the cards.

But first, I had an appointment with that soft shell crab burger. I placed my order and the owner said “it will be about ten minutes” and I wished that, like that place at the top of Kings Walk, they would take their time. Nevertheless it turned up about ten minutes later as I was sipping my Diet Coke – no alcohol licence here – and I was very glad to see it.

Because it cost the same as all the other burgers I was worried that it would be relatively cheap, potentially clumsily priced for what ought to be a premium thing, but I needn’t have worried. The soft shell crab was beautifully fried, in golden but light batter, and fitted perfectly in a sesame seed bun; I was very glad to see this rather than the standard issue brioche. A single unshredded lettuce leaf was on top, adding yet more crunch, along with a square not of American plastic cheese but cheddar.

This was easy to eat with your hands, not an open-wide-push-everything-out-of-the-side number, perfectly proportioned for simple, enjoyable eating. Not cheap for what you got, but it was soft shell crab: it shouldn’t be. The one slight blot on the copybook was Stop & Taste’s lime and scotch bonnet mayo, which turns up in several places in the menu, including that spenny lobster roll. For me, and this might be personal taste, I found it a little too sour and tart. An aioli might have been nicer, and I think it would slightly brutalise the lobster.

These were minor quibbles in a dish I never expected to find in Emmer Green and had long given up on finding in Reading full stop. I should add that the fries, which I’m guessing were bought in, were excellent. Beautifully light, no stale oil, like everything else cooked there and then and thoroughly spot on. I left a fair amount of them, but that’s because I’d gorged myself on two starters and had plans for dessert. You get the dip of your choice with the fries but they made that choice for me, I think, and gave me garlic mayo: next time I want to try their chimichurri.

When I went up to order the inevitable cookie, on the basis that I’d heard rumours it was life-changing, I got talking to the chef, whose name is Anton. He told me that he’d been a private chef for ten years before taking on this job.

“I can speak Spanish, I can speak Mandarin, you name it” he told me.

“And now you speak fluent Emmer Green!”

“Something like that” he smiled.

Then he told me that everything they made was fresh, and it all fell into place: the menu wasn’t the way it was because it was nuts and all over the shop. It was the way it was because the man in the kitchen just cooked what he loved cooking and the owner gave him the freedom to do that.

At this point I slightly regretted coming to this review on my own: partly because I’d have liked an excuse to try the tenders, have a nibble of somebody else’s pulled short rib sandwich. But also because it was starting to take on a dreamlike quality. Did Stop & Taste really exist, or was it a mirage? If I came back would I find it was just the shell of a derelict branch of Blockbuster Video?

There was time for one last crack at the menu, that red velvet cookie. And my god, after that I understood why a lady had come in to grab biscuits to take home. It looked like a conventional cookie, albeit a colossal one, and it had a pleasing crumble at the perimeter, studded with chocolate chips. But as I worked my way to the core I discovered what the fuss was about because in the middle, completely enveloped in biscuit, was a thick disc of frosting. Frosting inside a biscuit! What a time to be alive!

This biscuit cost £4.99: it is not a cheap biscuit. If you go to Stop & Taste, have the biscuit.

Finally I went up one last time.

“I’m sorry, but I need to have another of those biscuits to take home, because if my wife doesn’t get to try one it’s more than my life’s worth.”

He grinned, in a way which suggested he’d been told that or something similar more than once . There was a pause, my card payment went through and I thought that I should ask him what I ought to order next time. Before I could say it out loud, he told me anyway.

“So next time you come, you have to try our burger. I know everyone does a burger, but we buy the steak and mince it ourselves, here onsite. All our ketchup is home made, too. And you should order the lamb chops. We make our own mint sauce as well.”

So I started thinking about how easy it was to get to Emmer Green from the town centre. The challenge was finding a bus, but once you did it only took about twenty minutes. And then I pondered whether the people of Emmer Green knew yet how lucky they were, and decided that if I lived in Emmer Green I would very much enjoy lording it over Caversham about this.

My bill overall, for those two starters, that burger, a Diet Coke and my heavenly cookie came to just under £34. I ate quite a lot of food, entirely for research purposes I might add, but I would challenge anybody with a healthy appetite and/or healthy curiosity to go to Stop & Taste and not want to order a fair amount of the menu. I went on my way thanking them effusively, still not entirely sure how to do justice to the experience I’d had, and when Anton asked me to pop a review on Google I promised, not entirely dishonestly, that I would.

I don’t think I’ve encountered a surprise package quite like Stop & Taste this year, and I’d be amazed if I experience anything comparable next year. It still has a slight feeling of being a hallucination, although I will have to go back just to confirm that the whole thing wasn’t a figment of my imagination. On paper, a fast food(ish) restaurant offering burgers, tacos, lobster rolls and biryani shouldn’t make sense, but going there and experiencing it in person, I was astonished to find that somehow it did.

The easy thing would be to say, as restaurant reviewers like to do, that Stop & Taste is just what Emmer Green needs or, more grandly, that it’s just what Reading needs. I won’t do that, for a couple of reasons. First of all, what do I know? I don’t live in Emmer Green, for all I know its residents might be very happy with their current takeaway arrangements. Secondly, I’m long past pronouncing what Reading needs, because when I do that none of it happens anyway. I’m no kind of pundit, not really.

So instead I’ll say this: on that slightly cold, murky night in October, Stop & Taste was exactly what I needed. Not only because it fed me well and because I felt looked after. Not only because I got the rosy glow of watching a place looking to find its own spot in a community. Not only because of that cookie, either.

But also because it’s good to retain that capacity for curveballs, to occasionally still be surprised and to be reminded that even if you think you understand how everything works, now and again something will come along and teach you that even after 12 years you can’t judge a book by its cover. The jolt that prevents you becoming jaded is always necessary, and never comes a moment too soon. I’ll try and learn from that, but because it’s me I wouldn’t bet on it.

My bus dropped me at Reading Station just as Zoë hopped off the train from work. I was catching another bus home, she was heading to a CAMRA meeting, our clocks not quite synchronised yet. So I met her outside the station, all pleased with myself, and handed over the cardboard box with the red velvet cookie in it. I didn’t get the rapturous reception I was hoping for – where were my brownie points? – but I figured that it was because she hadn’t tasted it yet. Forty-five minutes later I was relaxing on the sofa when my phone pinged with a message from her. Just two words.

That cookie, it said.

Stop & Taste – 8.2
3 Milestone Way, Emmer Green, RG4 8XW
0118 3044981

https://www.instagram.com/stop._and_.taste/

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Pub review: The Chester Arms, Oxford

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The concept of choice in restaurants, I’ve always thought, brings out the inner Goldilocks. Too wide a menu and paralysis sets in, but if it’s too narrow you can’t help feeling straitjacketed. It’s why restaurants that only offer one or two dishes: Le Relais de Venise with its entrecôte, or Burger & Lobster with its – well, you know – have never really caught on here.

I’m reminded of the immortal words of Peter Butterworth in Carry On Abroad, an evergreen favourite of mine, when his Spanish waiter Pepe comes out with the immortal words “of course you are having choices! You can having sausage and chippings, sausage and beans or beans and chippings. That’s choices”. And believe me, I don’t think anybody would have enjoyed dining at the Palace Hotel in Elsbels.

The only time we omnivores really think it’s acceptable to restrict our choices is when we go to a restaurant that offers variations on a theme: burger restaurants, pizza parlours, Nando’s. And yes, Nando’s does technically serve stuff that isn’t chicken but that’s hardly the point, because nobody goes there for that. If somebody at a table at Nando’s is eating a halloumi burger, you can be very confident that they don’t eat chicken and have been dragged there by some inconsiderate sod who does.

Then, of course, there’s the other occasion when we feel as if we have no choice: because there’s something on the menu that we must have, or always order. But those things, as I discovered when I counted down Reading’s top 50 dishes a couple of years ago, are hugely subjective. My wife might be unable to visit Kungfu Kitchen without ordering their deep fried fish, and believe me she is, but other people would mount an equally passionate case for the sweet and sour aubergine, or the lamb with cumin.

Besides, the better the restaurant – like KFK, or Clay’s – the less likely it is, really, that there’s a single must-order dish. What are the chances that a kitchen so skilful would produce just the one thing everybody has to eat? Pretty slim, if you ask me.

No, generally the concept that a restaurant has something you must try, a legendary dish in the making, is another by-product of hype, and usually comes out of the mouths of critics when they visit somewhere, soon after it opens. I’ve tried Brutto’s coccoli, Town’s saffron risotto and Kolae’s fried prawn heads, all acclaimed as instant classics when those venues opened, and they varied from quite nice to very good. Were any of them dishes those restaurants should be exclusively associated with? Not really. Two of them weren’t even the best thing I had in those meals, but it shifts newspapers to rave.

So no, restaurants that become synonymous with a single dish are rare in general, and I don’t think Reading has any to speak of. But that makes the subject of this week’s review even more unusual, because it does occupy that very niche territory. The Chester Arms is an Oxford pub just off the Iffley Road, east from Magdalen Bridge but a smidge closer to it than the Magdalen Arms. It has been under its current management for over ten years. And it’s very much famous for one thing in particular, its steak platter.

Now, it feels wrong to me for most restaurants to describe their own dishes as famous. I still remember the overblown, unsubstantiated hype for The Botanist’s hanging kebabs, for instance, which were more hanging than famous. It’s a bit like restaurants keeping a certificate in their window from over ten years ago, or restaurant bloggers describing themselves as ‘multi award-winning’ when they have, in fact, won none. Famous is something other people are meant to say about you, not how you describe yourself.

And yet in the Chester Arms’ case, you might make an exception. The pub’s homepage describes them as “home of the famous steak platter” and the dish has its own page on their website. It’s the creation of head chef Hamzah Taynaz – although Companies House makes it seem like he might have parted company with the pub over the summer – and it looks like a doozie: onglet cooked rare or medium rare, chips, béarnaise, cabbage with bacon, dressed salad. £50 for two people, or £70 for three, which on paper at least is impressive value; it was £30 and £45 back in 2015, but it’s been a bruising decade.

The thing, though, is this: I have been told to visit the Chester Arms numerous times, by people I know and by people who’ve tipped me off online. It’s been the place at the top of my Oxford to do list for quite a while – I would have reviewed it last month were it not for a medical misadventure – and every single person who has told me to go there has mentioned the steak platter. Some of them had eaten it, and raved about it. Others hadn’t, but left me in no doubt that if they did go there it’s exactly what they would order.

In fact, when I went to Arbequina last month I happened to be on the same train as someone I follow on Instagram, and when I messaged her to ask where she’d eaten in the city I was unsurprised to find that she had gone to the Chester Arms. “We had a great meal there” was her verdict. “It lived up to the hype for us.” So finally, last weekend, I got my chance to try it for size.

My plus one for this meal was my old friend and Oxford compadre Dave, and as we had a pre-lunch latte in Peloton Espresso’s very agreeable back garden I told him that this meal made him, with the exception of Zoë, my most capped plus one. Not bad going for a man who valiantly resisted joining me on duty until a couple of years ago, I told him.

“I thought you’d expect me to have opinions about everything!” he laughed. “And I’m too easy-going for that, I just want to eat nice food. But then I realised that actually you aren’t fussed about all that, so now I don’t mind tagging along.”

Dave was, I had to concede, probably correct. He likes to make much of how low maintenance he is, by which he means that he’ll generally do whatever you like and doesn’t have strong preferences. In the past I may have found that a tad frustrating, but as a dining companion for a restaurant reviewer, it turns out, it’s pretty much a dream CV. Besides, Dave quite rightly pointed out that for our forthcoming holiday to Bruges I had insisted on the dates, insisted on a hotel, changed my mind and picked another hotel and so on and so on, so maybe I quite liked having a low maintenance friend after all.

The Chester Arms is another of those lovely backstreet boozers I didn’t even know existed and like the Star off Cowley Road, it reminded me a little of Reading’s Nag’s Head and the Retreat, only built to a different scale. It was a big, handsome corner plot with a decent-sized garden and inside it was a very attractive room with wooden floorboards, large sturdy tables ringed by fetching booths and plenty of natural light. It was a properly gorgeous space which made me think, as so often, that I really missed the Lyndhurst.

Having said that, I do have to say that some of its tables were more equal than others. The place was absolutely packed – you have to book quite far in advance if you want a table – and without much in the way of soft furnishings, which made it a cacophonous place to be. The two tables nearest to us were the handsome ones for larger groups but our little table with unforgiving chairs, near the kitchen, next to a stack of high chairs, felt like one they put in the seating plan because they could, not because they should.

In fairness the table directly in front of me was possibly even worse. The large group settled in nearby was full of people who were young, exuberant and happy to be there. I love Dave dearly, but we could only manage one of those three. “They’re probably all catching up at the end of their summer holidays, ready for term to begin” he said equably, and I felt even older than usual.

The Chester Arms’ menu was compact in the way you’d expect when most people are there for the feature attraction: a handful of nibbles, only three starters to speak of and three main courses which were not the steak platter. One of them was a vegetarian mezze selection (“perfect as a starter to share, or to be enjoyed as a main for one”) which had, by the looks of it, strong Nando’s halloumi burger energy. The starters were under a tenner, all mains save the steak platter hovered around twenty pounds.

Now, to get this out of the way from the off, our service was brilliant from beginning to end. Our server was young, American, properly charming and looked after we two avuncular has-beens perfectly, and I can’t say enough good things about her. With one exception, which is that I saw a blackboard with specials being shown to other tables later in the afternoon but we were never told about it or given a chance to look at it. In an ideal world it just said, in big cursive script, Stop fooling yourself, we all know you’re having the steak platter but, as I didn’t see it, I can only guess.

Dave was reluctant to have a starter in case the steak platter turned out to be too much, which did make me wonder if some kind of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers situation was going on, but I managed to persuade him to share the most appealing starter with me. Actually it might have been the absolute best thing I ate all afternoon, so I half wished I’d just pressed on without him. Lamb koftas were a trio of plump nubbins, beautifully coarse and with just the faintest whiff of offal to them, really gorgeous stuff.

They came with flatbreads which felt bought in, but which were good nonetheless, a small stack of guindilla and what was described as green tahini. I’m not really sure what that was, because tahini is a paste with a very distinctive taste and texture and this was none of those things, and it didn’t have a particularly strong note of sesame, but I quite liked it anyway. Dave was unconvinced by it, but won over by the koftas. He let me have the spare one, because he’s a good egg, and even though they were almost more faggot than kofta it did make me wonder what a Chester Arms mixed grill would be like. That had better not have been on the specials menu.

We had a while to catch up after that because each steak is cooked to order and takes, if the menu is to be believed, 45 minutes. So he sipped his pint of alcohol free Rothaus, and I had a pale from DEYA: we were both keeping our powder dry for a more substantial session post lunch. I didn’t know at the time – I learned this from Instagram after the fact – that landlady Becca Webb had just come back from a tasting tour in Bilbao with her wine suppliers, and if I had I might have paid closer attention to the wine list. Next time.

Anyway, Dave and I had a good old chinwag, if constantly drowned out by the relentless, unforgivable youngness of people at our neighbouring tables, as we struggled gamely with the heat from the nearby kitchen. The problem with a restaurant where everybody orders the same thing is that each time it comes out from the kitchen you perk up, think it’s yours and then realise it’s going to another table. But in a way it’s genius, because it raises your anticipation over and over again, and every passing platter looked amazing.

Besides, it distracted me from Dave giving me a litany of people he knew, roughly our age, who were either seriously or terminally ill. They don’t call your fifties ‘sniper’s valley’ for nothing, and after I’d heard about three of them my fight or flight health anxiety kicked in and I asked him, ever so nicely, to stop. Is this what we’ve got to look forward to? I wondered to myself.

I can’t imagine anybody’s life expectancy would be enhanced by what turned up at our table about half an hour after our starters, but just look at it. You’d shave a few days off the end of your life for one of these, wouldn’t you?

It’s difficult to give any kind of scale with a photograph like that but trust me, that serving plate was substantial. Our two serving plates were on the smaller side, but that just gave you an excuse to go back again and again: not for nothing did the pot of utensils on our table include forks, sharp knives and a little set of steak tongs.

Everything about this dish was bang on or thereabouts. The onglet was cooked beautifully medium rare and, in the main was buttery and absurdly easy to cut, any tension in the fibres expertly soothed away; I appreciated the irony of eating something that was better rested, most likely, than I will ever be. The béarnaise was ever so slightly thin with a slight hit of vinegar, but it hadn’t split and went very well with the steak; I might have liked a little more, between two, and a spoon to dish it up with but as quibbles go those were minor.

The other thing I loved, though, was how complete a dish this was and how every component brought something to the table. The heap of savoy cabbage shot through with lardons was truly joyous, the chips were thick, crunchy and surprisingly good. And even the salad, which I’d dismissed in the run-up as a makeweight, was not an afterthought. It was properly dressed, and it supplied the lightness and acidity that would otherwise have been missing from the platter.

Our server had asked us if we wanted to upgrade to the platter for three (“nice bit of upselling”, said Dave) but we’d decided not to, mostly because I thought if I was reviewing the place you’d want to know if a platter for two actually served two. And my verdict is that it does: we finished all our steak and most of everything else, and even in the time between finishing and our almost empty plates being taken away we were both picking with forks – dunking a chip in the béarnaise or trawling it through the juices from the onglet, or the good stuff that was left after you’d airlifted the cabbage away. If service had been less on it, I think our plate would have ended up clean as a whistle.

I tried to send a picture of the platter to Zoë – because she’d asked, even though I imagine it would have made her seethe with resentment – and failed, because the mobile signal in that part of Oxford is like taking a day trip to 1997. Perhaps it was for the best.

Our server asked if we fancied dessert, so I asked Dave if he fancied dessert – because I’d have looked like a right fat bastard scoffing one on my own – and I was hugely relieved when he decided to join me. Perhaps the bodysnatchers hadn’t troubled his house in Wootton Bassett after all. The dessert menu was also compact: three desserts, or ice cream with Pedro Ximenez, or a selection of ice creams, or an affogato.

Another thing to like very much about the Chester Arms was the very appealing selection of digestifs, and the options of red or white port, Sauternes or PX: I had another half of the pale instead, but on another day would have veered in the direction of something smaller and sweeter. The pale, by the way, was decent if piney: not DEYA’s iconic Steady Rolling Man but a reasonable stand-in. I’d have checked it in on Untappd, but I was in 1997 so it hadn’t been invented yet.

I was tempted by something ice cream based, but the server couldn’t tell me where the Chester Arms’ ice cream came from and I wasn’t invested or entitled enough to make her ask. So instead I went for my tried and tested choice, a tiramisu. It was about as different as possible from most of the ones I’ve had recently – not loose, airy and boozy like the tiramisu at, say, Paesinos or RAGÙ. It was more old school, by which I suppose I mean inauthentic: much firmer, much denser, crammed into that Duralex glass like they’d almost forgotten to say when.

And it was gorgeous. I’d forgotten that authentic is overrated, with all the honest-to-goodness Italian food cropping up in places like Reading and Bristol, but this was a delight from first spoon to last – far, far more cream than sponge but laced with Courvoisier and Frangelico. I loved it far more than I expected to, and it made me think again that the Chester Arms might be famous for its steak platter but it had made the canny choice of ensuring that none of the other items on the menu were an also-ran.

Dave had the crème brûlée, which is just one of those dishes I never personally order. I tried a spoonful of it and it, too, was right on the money: just enough warmth, the carapace just the right thickness, the cream vanilla-speckled and exemplary.

We didn’t tarry, because by that point it was incredibly warm and both of us fancied stretching our legs. Besides, I had promised to introduce Dave to the Star and his beloved Liverpool had finished playing, so the lack of mobile reception was no longer the positive nuisance it had been. My advice is that if you’re going to spend time somewhere with absolutely no phone signal, the best idea is to do it in the company of someone where you can talk for hours without feeling the need to check your phone. So that’s exactly what I did.

Our meal for two – two and a half courses each, one of them that steak platter, and a pint apiece came to just under £100, including a discretionary 12.5% service charge which was totally earned. When you think that half of that whole bill was down to a single dish that the pub endearingly describes as a “small steak”, you have to hand it to them.

I’m really glad I finally made it to the Chester Arms – partly because it’s been an ambition for such a long time and partly because it was fascinating to try a restaurant in this country which really is synonymous with the one dish, to see if that reputation is justified. And it absolutely is – if you like steak at all, you would have a ball hopping on a train to Oxford and making your way to the Chester Arms. And if you don’t, but you know someone who does, make sure the two of you take a friend with you: you can have the fish and chips and they can have the time of their lives.

I do find myself wondering though, still: what was on that specials board? But I know that it could have had skate wing on it, or fried chicken, or countless other things, and I still would have ordered the steak platter. So does the steak platter qualify as famous? Yes, I think it probably does.

But if I went back to the Chester Arms again, knowing what their kitchen is capable of, would I really still order the steak platter a second time? Also yes. I’d be even sadder, though, if they’d taken those lamb koftas off the menu, because it was the dish I’d want to order every time, if it was up to me. That’s choices.

The Chester Arms – 8.4
19 Chester St, Oxford, OX4 1SN
01865 790438

https://chesterarmsoxford.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Amò Italian Street Food

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Amò closed in mid-December, apparently for maintenance, with no indication of when, or whether, it will reopen. I have left the review up for posterity.

In the good old days, where you stood on certain binary debates was simply a way of positioning you in the world. Cream first or jam first? Plain or milk chocolate Bounty? Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? Were you a fan of the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? All these things used just to be a form of triangulation, little points on a chart that, taken together, might give someone an idea of you (and, since you’re asking: cream first; milk chocolate; salt and vinegar; the Beatles; neither).

When did that all change? 2016, I suppose, when we all became Leave or Remain, indelibly stamped, and at every stage from that point forwards. We’re always asked what side we’re on, and now it’s not a useful piece of trivia but a necessary step to place yourself on one side or another of a yawning chasm. Are you pro- or anti-Israel? Do you think J.K. Rowling is a hero or a villain? How about Farage, or Trump? Did you believe in lockdowns, masks, vaccines? Did you leave Twitter or stay? If you left, did you go to Bluesky or Threads?

Like the Tower Of Babel, we’re now all scattered to the four winds, trying to find our tribe and arguing, endlessly, with the others. It’s not a bit of fun, any more. And this is all rich coming from me, because I’m painfully aware that I’m as polarising as most. Happily, Reading faces another tricky choice now that’s potentially just as difficult, but hopefully less divisive: Paesinos or Amò?

The two pizza places opened on Kings Road, two doors and three months apart, the latest in a weird series of rivals in very close proximity, following the example of Pho and Bánh Mì QB in Kings Walk or Iro Sushi and You Me Sushi on Friar Street. What is it with that? You must be very confident in your product to open so near to a direct competitor, like Bánh Mì QB did, but with Paesinos and Amò, Iro and You Me so little time separated both arrivals that it must be an unhappy coincidence. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a new business only to find that another one a lot like yours is doing exactly the same, a stone’s throw away.

Anyway, regular readers will know that I reviewed Paesinos a month ago with my Italian friend Enza (who is, just to confuse matters, an Amò superfan) and it received a glowing write up from me. But I knew, even as I was eating there, that I needed to prioritise visiting its neighbour, if only because Enza told me that it was as good as, if not better than, the restaurant I had so enjoyed. I couldn’t go with Enza, because she was so far from impartial, and this time I took my friend Jo, also of Italian descent, last seen checking out House Of Flavours with me.

Amò is, as I’ve said before, something of a joint venture between Madoo, the founding father of Reading’s Italian quarter which opened four and a half years ago, and Pulcinella Focaccia, a business that sold pizza and focaccia for delivery from premises out in Earley and has been trading for a couple of years; I’d never had food from the latter, but I’d heard plenty of good things. And arriving at Amò on a weekday evening I was struck that, in terms of branding and decor at least, it felt fully formed in a way that Paesinos didn’t so much, or Madoo for that matter.

Everything was tasteful and unfussy without being Spartan, with a bare wood floor and tables, seats and benches. It seated somewhere between fifteen and twenty people, so significantly more spacious than the likes of Mama’s Way or Paesinos, and it had a nicely calm feel to it. Amò’s logo was in the middle of a deep red swatch of paint on the wall behind the counter, and resting on that counter was possibly one of the most tempting displays in Reading.

Amò very cleverly changes up its offering around the time people start finishing work, so until 5pm you can try pizza al taglio or something from a changing array of Italian street food. They also, I think, offer focaccia sandwiches during the day, although most of them had gone when Jo and I turned up around half seven. After 5pm the sandwiches drop away but instead, alongside the slices of pizza and street food, you can order a whole pizza from a more varied menu.

The street food was all very tempting, all things that I would challenge anybody not to fancy eating. Arancini, croquettes, mozzarella bites and frittatini – fried pasta – were all tributes to the time-honoured method of coating something in breadcrumbs and frying it until it was golden, crispy and alluring. The lighter side of Amò’s offering is keenly priced, too. Most of the street food dishes are around a fiver, pizza by the slice is less than that and they do multibuys if you want two stuffed focacce or two slices of pizza. Whole pizzas top out at about fifteen pounds, unless you add sausage or Parma ham to one of the options.

And Amò’s pizza menu struck me as very clever, because – either by accident or design – it kept the overlap with its neighbour’s pizzas to a minimum. Amò has a list of the classics, of course, so you can have a margherita, or prosciutto cotto and mushroom, or sausage and friarielli. But on the other side of the small, laminated menu, you find loads of less conventional options, far more interesting than the kind of things you could find at Zia Lucia or even, dare I say it, Amò’s neighbours.

That meant pizza with a purple sweet potato base, topped with cacio e pepe cream, guanciale and sweet potato crisps, or pizza with a pistachio cream base and mortadella. Others had a truffle cream base, or pumpkin cream, or even a cavolo nero base (“it’s the gourmet version of the salsiccia e friarielli”, Enza had told me, when I was looking for recommendations).

You may find all of that a bit leftfield, or it might whet your appetite for wandering off Reading’s beaten pizza track. I think for me, though, it was neither: I chalked those up as things to try once I had road tested the classics.

But first, Jo and I had a chinotto each and ordered some of those smaller dishes to kick things off. And as we waited for them, she told me about her childhood holidays by the coast, near Salerno, buying balls of mozzarella as big as your head from some beachside hut and eating them with bread, nothing else required. It was brilliant, Jo said, but it did slightly ruin the mozzarella you can easily get in this country; like me, Jo considers it a seriously underrated cheese.

As so often I felt a little pang for a childhood I didn’t have, listening to Jo. But then there was something to be said for sitting in a caravan in Devon, rain drilling on the roof, eating hog’s pudding cooked in a frying pan – always with tinned tomatoes on the side – watching Roland Rat on TV-am, knowing that the evening would be spent playing cards and watching reruns of Shogun (the original, not the superb remake). Maybe those memories would sound exotic to an Italian: on balance, though, I guessed not.

Amò’s mozzarella bites may not have been the size of my head, but they were gorgeous nonetheless. Crisp-crumbed spheres, golden but not overdone, the shell holding just-molten-enough mozzarella, they were a proper delight. I might have had them with something to dip them into, but it was a minor quibble with something so delightful. So was the fact that however carefully I ate them, with my hands at least, a little liquid sprayed out, leaving incriminating marks on my shirt. I was too happy to care, and the attentive staff quickly brought extra napkins.

At five pounds fifty for four, they could have been the bargain of the meal, if not the month, but for the fact that we also ordered two of the frittatini. These are yours for three pounds fifty, or six quid for two, and come in two flavours. If you go to Amò, my advice is to make sure you have one to yourself or, as Jo and I did, order one of each and share. They’re a bit fiddly to break up – that crisp carapace presents resistance when you’re relying on a wooden fork – but they reward the effort, with dividends.

They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form. And their form – big, irregular golden pucks – belied just how wonderful they were on the inside.

Picture an arancino, but instead of risotto rice visualise a cluster of little tubes of pasta, and rather than a molten core, imagine the whole thing bound together with sauce. In terms of taste, contrast, texture and sheer tactility I’m not sure I can think of anything finer, and writing this paragraph I am deeply aggrieved that I cannot eat one right this minute, or indeed by the end of the day.

This is where Amò are an especially smart bunch, because during the day you could pitch up, have a chinotto, a slice of pizza or a sandwich crammed with porchetta and provolone, and add one of these for a mere three pounds fifty. That’s almost the price of subscribing to this blog for a month and, although it pains me to say it, it’s even better value.

Jo and I both loved the meaty version but would you believe that the vegetarian option, with fried aubergine and tomato, was even better? Jo described it as like being “slapped in the face with flavour” and believe me, apart from that fried pasta, nothing or nobody would get away with slapping Jo in the face with anything. One of the best things I’ve eaten this year, no notes at all.

Jo was very keen to try one of the pizzas by the slice, with meatballs on it, so that turned up next, thoughtfully cut up to share, a meatball perched precisely in the centre of each quadrant. This too was cracking, although I suspect the base on the pizza al taglio is slightly different to that on the whole pizza. The meatballs, in particular, were excellent – coarse and lacking in suspicious, smooth bounciness. It also, by the looks of it, was only available by the slice so, again, well worth adding to a lunch order.

By this point, as our full-sized pizzas arrived, the carbs were taking their toll, and we were already prepared to ask if some of our leftovers could be boxed up – something that rarely happens to me, because it’s rare that my capacity is defeated by a restaurant.

Jo made it a few slices into hers, the piccantina, which was topped with salami, mushrooms and Gorgonzola. I didn’t try it, and from a cursory glance I thought the porcini were common or garden mushrooms, but Jo had no complaints. She’d told me earlier in the evening that she hadn’t had pizza for a while: Jo is on a monthly treatment regime where anything she eats the next day tastes vile and puts you off whatever you ate for the foreseeable future. One of those next days had involved pizza, and Amò’s piccantina resuscitated her love for the stuff. That in itself is no mean feat.

I on the other hand had deferred to Enza’s judgement and ordered the sausage and friarielli. As so often with white pizza, it had a bit more structural integrity, so less of the Neapolitan droop you might get with other pizzas. And the base was admirable, nicely puffy with plenty going for it. You couldn’t fault the generosity either, with nuggets of crumbled sausage very, very liberally deployed.

There was very little not to like about the pizza, and if I was clutching at straws I might say that I’d have liked the sausage to have more of a whack of fennel, but that’s a minor thing. It was so well orchestrated with the friarielli that it was impossible to argue: this was a pizza without complexity or variety that kept it focused and hit the target.

I managed about half of mine, and the staff were nice as pie about bringing a couple of boxes so we could take our leftovers home. Everything we had ordered – all that food, four cans of soft drink – came to fifty-five pounds, which is a steal, and then we went to the Allied for a debrief. Two pints of forgettable macro fizzy booze at the Allied set us back nearly sixteen pounds, which is very much not a steal.

For once, I can also report back on the leftovers. Jo had hers cold the next day – no slice for her beloved dog Diesel, this time – and sent me an iMessage: tastes even better this morning, cold from the box, outstanding! I on the other hand revived mine in the oven on my lunch break, working from home, and it was the best lunch I’d had in ages. I wasn’t sure if my slight lull that afternoon was down to the carbs or a Teams call that felt especially like a trudge. Let’s put it down to the latter.

Having talked about Amò for all these paragraphs, I know I should return to my opening theme and compare it to its neighbour Paesinos. But it’s not easy to do.

If they were top trumps cards, Amò would win in a number of categories. It’s more versatile, on account of having a focused lunch offering as well as pizzas in the evening. It has arguably a wider range of sides and small plates. It’s bigger, too, with far more potential to eat there in larger groups; if you go to Paesinos as a four, you either won’t get in or you’ll take up two-thirds of the restaurant. Its pizzas are more imaginative and unconventional, so more of a challenge to the Neapolitan hegemony elsewhere in town.

On that basis, you’d have it down as a resounding victory for Amò and, for some of you, that might well be the case. On the other hand, Paesinos sticks to the classics, both for pizza and for its smaller dishes. I think its soft drink selection – and neither is licensed – is better and more interesting. The cannoli and tiramisu are worth the price of admission alone. And, speaking completely as a novice in these things, I think Paesinos’ dough and base may have the edge.

But the main reason why taking a Top Trumps approach doesn’t work is that Paesinos, for me, has a little something extra. There’s no Italian equivalent of je ne sais quoi, as far as I know, but there’s a small dash of magic in the smaller restaurant that means that rationally, although I know Amò has a huge amount going for it, it’s impossible to pick a winner.

So yes, I’ve reflected and reflected and it’s impossible to put a cigarette paper between these two places. The only thing you can put between them, it turns out, is another restaurant – called Just Momo, which helpfully doesn’t just do momo. So the rating down there reflects that: call it a cop out, if you will, but I stand by it.

Let’s not divide ourselves by being Team Amò or Team Paesinos, because as a town we can be better than that. Hopefully enough of you will pick each side that both places will continue to trade for years to come. Because the truth is that there’s one real winner in this contest, and that’s Reading.

Amò Italian Street Food – 8.6
2-4 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
07500 619775

https://amoitalianstreetfood.co.uk

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