Tag: The 8+ club

Restaurant review: Lapin, Bristol

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

This might come as a surprise to you – probably not – but for the best part of the last fifteen years my friends and I have regularly taken part in something called Poncefest. Nope, not a misprint. The idea was to take a day off, invariably a Friday, and go into London together for a bit of shopping, always for fragrance, followed by a fancy lunch somewhere, then falling into a pub before getting the train home. Something like the Finer Things Club from the American version of The Office, only even finer.

Having sacrificed whatever credibility I might have had with that opening paragraph, I may as well explain. So yes, these trips usually involved shopping at one of London’s great fragrance shops – Bloom or Les Senteurs – and then a gorgeous, drawn out lunch. We’ve done Medlar in Chelsea, Soho’s famous Andrew Edmunds, Portland in Fitzrovia, Calum Franklin’s renowned pies at Holborn Dining Room and doubtless other places I’ve forgotten. We’ve even been to Oxford, enjoying a very pleasant lunch at Pompette one Friday towards the end of the year, exchanging Christmas presents and cards and eating brilliantly.

The members of the Guild Of Ponces – because I’m afraid that’s what we call ourselves – have fluctuated over time. It started as Al, Dave, Jimmy and I, but then Jimmy fell by the wayside and my stepfather Ian decided to join our number. He chose to drop out after a while, but by then we had also recruited my friend James, a man who didn’t need to seek out the ponce life, because the ponce life found him.

Like the Spice Girls, we each have our own unique identity. Al is Sartorial Ponce, because he’s always immaculately dressed: the man’s had his colours done, for goodness’ sake. Dave is Reluctant Ponce, to denote the fact that he always complains about the whole affair but secretly loves it.

Jimmy, back in the day, was Pub Ponce, and in charge for picking the post-lunch boozer. Ian, who knows more about Apple products than many people who actually work there, was Tech Ponce, and James is Preppy Ponce – or Neophyte Ponce, a title our newest member always gets, like the Baby Of The House, or New Guy in Loudermilk.

I, of course, am Grand Master Ponce. Would you expect anything else by now? Mock all you like – I’m immune these days, thanks to my childhood years in chess club and Dungeons & Dragons club (both hobbies, too late for me, are cool now). I unapologetically love Poncefests. They’ve always been a lovely miniature escape in the year, when my friends and I can catch up, more than slightly aware of how ridiculous the premise is.

Anyway, that was all well and good, but then Covid happened, and it all went quiet for Poncefest. A risk averse eighteen months meant that I saw my fellow ponces sporadically, and never all at the same time. Even after things unlocked, for some reason we were never all in the same place at once. We were like the Beatles, or the Pythons, without the acrimony. I lunched with Dave and Al a few times – once even for this blog – but a Poncefest proved elusive.

Of course, all the ponces were there for my and Zoë’s joint stag and hen do last year in Bruges, and at the wedding too, but both were part of a bigger gathering rather than a reunion per se. And then James went and put a spanner in the works by being seconded to India for nine months, and those gatherings, now five years dormant, felt more of a distant prospect than ever. So I was absolutely delighted when he returned to Blighty in the spring and talk on our WhatsApp group (the logo is a picture of Niles and Frasier Crane holding up a sign saying WILL WORK FOR LATTES) turned to getting the band back together. Would it happen?

It may not surprise you to hear that it did, and one sunny Saturday morning at the start of May I found myself bimbling round sunny Clifton, really looking forward to a long overdue luncheon. I’d bumped into people I knew outside Hart’s Bakery, straight off the train, before taking a bus to Bristol’s prettiest, if most unreal district. I stopped for a latte in the sunshine outside a little kiosk called Can’t Dance Coffee, before walking in wonder through Birdcage Walk, too taken with the glimmer of the sun through the foliage to realise I was, in fact, going in the wrong direction.

After an amble through Clifton, past the spot where I was born – it’s now been turned into flats – I found myself ruminating on all the different paths my life might have taken, and how many of them involved me never having left Bristol, or leaving but coming back to live here. Too much time alone always has this effect on me, so I grabbed a bench in the Mall Gardens, put something relaxing on my headphones and got lost in my library book. Not long after Al joined me and, because old habits died hard, we stopped in Shy Mimosa, Bristol’s excellent perfume shop, before grabbing a coffee and a taxi to our lunch venue.

Lapin was back in the centre of the city, in Wapping Wharf, a part of Bristol I knew and knew of but had almost never eaten in, unless you count a slightly underwhelming pizza at Bristol institution Bertha’s. Most of it is shipping containers, stacked two storeys high, and it boasts some of Bristol’s biggest names. Bravas‘ sibling Gambas is there, as are the likes of Root and Box-E. This year it’s been bolstered with three big names: Gurt Wings, who opened at the start of the year, to an apparently shaky start; COR‘s younger sibling RAGÙ and Lapin, which is the second site behind the owners of Totterdown’s BANK.

I should stress, by the way, that all those irksome block capitals are their choice, not mine: I guess in a city with as many good restaurants fighting for punters’ cash maybe they feel the need to shout. In any event, I’d chosen Lapin for a couple of reasons – partly because as a French restaurant it seemed especially appropriate for such a gathering and partly because it was shiny and new. On the day we visited it had been open exactly a month, by which time it had already received not one but two reviews from Mark Taylor, Bristol’s resident Reach plc hack. I on the other hand gave it a month to settle in, because that’s what I do.

It was a very warm day and Wapping Wharf was full of people younger, thinner and less fearful of hangovers than me, many of them sitting outside either at Lapin or its neighbours Gambas and Cargo Cantina. The place had the glow of youth, of sunlight diffused through an Aperol Spritz, but because I partly wanted to get a sense for the room we sat inside. Dave was already there – slightly early, because he is Dave – and James joined us shortly after, slightly later than us, because he is James. The natural order was very much in place.

The dining room, by the way, is rather nice. I think the nicest thing I can say about it is that you could easily forget that you were eating in a few shipping containers joined together. I tend to associate them with street food or Boxpark, with places you don’t linger, so I was glad that they’d turned these into a very convivial space, and one where there was quite enough daylight coming in from the big floor to ceiling windows. It was pretty no-frills, but just tasteful enough: sage walls, framed retro prints, tasteful overhead lights, sturdy, timeless furniture. No Tolix chairs to jam my arse into, I’m delighted to say.

Lapin’s menu was that especially challenging kind that felt like it contained no poor choices. Half a dozen starters, or a whole baked cheese to share, and another seven mains, again with three sharing options. On another day you would be reading about asparagus with sauce gribiche, confit duck with a spring cassoulet – whatever that is – Provençal fish stew or deep fried rabbit leg: the latter turned up at a neighbouring table towards the end of our meal and made me wish I could go back and start again.

Starters stopped just short of fifteen pounds, mains ranged more widely from just under twenty to just over thirty. The sharers were more expensive – côte de boeuf, for instance, clocking in at ninety-five pounds – sides were about a fiver, desserts just shy of a tenner. Little of that, in 2025, is especially shocking. The menu, under a section marked Accoutrements, gave you an option to add a spoon of caviar or a shaving of truffle to any of your dishes, and I was surprised by that: in a place defined by taste and tastefulness it felt – dare I say it? I guess I do – ever so slightly tacky.

But before the main event, drinks and nibbles. Lapin’s selection of apéritifs was tempting and extensive, and I think the four of us chose roughly in line with our ponciness. Al, easily the most refined, kept it classic with a Lillet Blanc. James and I, the next level down, had a cidre – Galipette – which was awfully nice, although now I’ve discovered you can buy it from Waitrose and Ocado I almost want to salute Lapin for their exorbitant markup. Dave, though, chose best with something called a demi peche, a keller pils with peach syrup. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it: Dave recreated it the following weekend at home, which was an exceptionally good idea.

We had a quartet of Comte gougères with that, and I thought they were decent but perhaps not too inspiring. The filling was good, the carpeting of finely grated cheese always welcome but the pastry itself lacked the lightness of touch it needed. At twelve pounds for these, I couldn’t help but compare them with the gorgeous cheddar curd fritters I’d had at Upstairs At Landrace a few weeks before, which had cost significantly less.

Now, when I review in a pair I always feel like I have to have something different to my dining companion, to present a range of dishes. That’s less of an issue in a bigger group, so as it turned out Dave and James ordered the same starters and mains, as did Al and I. Even at the time, I have to admit that I was thinking This is the life, I’m in a lovely restaurant with three of my favourite people, the wine is flowing… and I have less to write up than I might have done. Unworthy I know, but there it is.

Dave and James were pleased with their starter, I think. A puck of deep fried pig’s head was the good part, and the forkful I had was great. Plonking a forest floor of chicory and dandelion on top of it, though, was less successful. I don’t think either is really anybody’s favourite salad ingredient – not as pointless as frisée, but not far off – and the nicest croutons in the world aren’t going to redeem that.

Al’s and my starter was similarly along the right lines but not at its destination. I adore rillette, I adore rabbit, the prospect of rabbit rillette was a nailed-down choice for me. And it was pretty pleasant – clean and ascetic rather than punchy and rustic. I loved the carrot jam, and thought the dish could have stood a bit more of it. The bread, I’m sorry to say, was unremarkable. And somehow the whole thing combined to less than the sum of its parts, even with a few rogue cornichons secreted away.

This dish troubled me, if that isn’t a silly way to put it, because I should have loved it and I’m not sure why I didn’t. It felt too nice, too well-behaved, like an attempt to create a platonic ideal of a dish rather than the dish itself. As it happened, I was of course in France the week after I ate at Lapin, but it wasn’t the meals I had in Montpellier that came to mind when I weighed up this rabbit rillette. It was the unforced, unshowy kind of dishes I had earlier in the year, at Paulette.

We also, out of pure greed, ordered another starter to attack between the four of us. Duck liver parfait was, again, a pleasant, glossy little number, hiding in its ramekin under a layer of cherry. The menu called it “pickled stone fruit” but really, it wasn’t clear that any pickling had taken place. Again, this was nice rather than knockout – and, again, it highlighted that Lapin’s bread wasn’t the best. And that you could have done with more of it.

By this point, whatever misgivings I might have had about the starters, our meal was in full swing. There’s something lovely about that interplay with good friends – that mixture of catching up and reminiscing, of mild ribbing and in-jokes. All that was helped by an extremely good bottle of wine – a Languedoc white by Domaine Montplezy, not bone dry with notes of peach and citrus.

As it happens, I found that wine the following weekend in Montpellier at the wine shop round the corner from our B&B. We bought a bottle and again that means I got a good idea of Lapin’s markups, which are considerable. But perhaps that misses the point, and perhaps ordering a whole bottle of something does too: one of the things that is genuinely impressive about Lapin is that its whole wine list is available by the glass. Someone has spent a fair amount of money with Coravin, and it gives you an enviable range of choices compared to most restaurants I can think of.

If the starters were a little wobbly, the mains are where Lapin became far more sure-footed. My and Al’s skate wing was a really joyous plate of food, served in a vadouvin butter rather than the conventional beurre noisette that so often accompanies this fish. And that in itself was interesting – vadouvin is a mild curried sauce that originates from the French colonial period and you could almost taste in it the intersection between traditional and colonial French.

It wasn’t a conventional brown butter sauce dotted with capers, and instead came topped with monk’s beard, but in it you could sense some of the DNA it shared with the classic dish. It was little like those pavement cafés in Marrakesh’s Ville Nouvelle that, despite being stuck on the edge of northern Africa, feel like they carry some echo of Paris. I wouldn’t pick this over a more traditional rendition, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it.

James and Dave went for perhaps a more mainstream option from the menu, a whole truffle roasted poussin with a Madeira jus. This, to me, was probably a stronger choice – the truffle present but not dominating, the meat beautifully cooked and that jus setting off the whole shooting match. James very generously let me try some, and although I enjoyed it it didn’t make me wish I had ordered it.

That tells its own story, I guess, that I still wondered whether the real gem was elsewhere on the menu, undiscovered. But again, that might tell you more about me than Lapin: I can already picture Dave, at some point over the weekend, reading this review and thinking What is he going on about? That poussin was amazing.

The sides were a weird inversion of the natural order and a good example of how expectations can be completely confounded. The menu offers duck fat frites, and all four of us could think of nothing finer. But when we went to order four portions our server – who was excellent, as all the staff at Lapin were – suggested ever so nicely that this might be a bit monotonous and that we might want to mix it up a bit with some pomme purée.

So we did that, and were rewarded with an experience that is pretty much solely worth visiting Lapin to enjoy. The duck fat frites were decent rather than exceptional, but compared to the pomme purée they became more like “fuck that” frites. Because the pomme purée – no hint of hyperbole here I promise – was one of the best things I’ve eaten in years. Loaded with butter until it could take no more, than bathed in more brown butter, it took on a taste and texture that transcended savoury or sweet, almost with a note of toffee, or fudge.

Al told our server, when the empty dishes were taken away, that you could have served it as a dessert. He wasn’t far off: it was truly magnificent stuff.

Before dessert, three of us had an intermediate course, the Trou Normand. This is a Normandy tradition, a palate cleanser consisting of apple sorbet anointed with apple brandy. It was very good indeed, the sorbet smooth and hyper-real with the taste of apple.

The apple brandy, from Somerset, was excellent too. The menu said that you could add a glass of Calvados for an extra four pounds, although it wasn’t clear whether you would get Calvados on the side or whether the apple brandy would be swapped out for Calvados.

Whichever it was, the pricing of this felt a little awry: eight pounds felt like a lot, twelve in total for Calvados would have been like, well, like paying an extra thirteen pounds to dump a spoonful of caviar, randomly, on your main course.

Before dessert proper we’d also decided to push the boat out and order a bottle of dessert wine. Dave doesn’t do wine these days – he stayed on his demi peche during dinner – but he makes an exception for dessert wine. Again many of the dessert wines are available by the glass, and the menu pairs one with each of the desserts, but we couldn’t resist. Lapin also offered two really tempting bottles – a Rivesaltes Ambré 1978 for a slightly ridiculous amount or a 1992 vintage of the same wine for eighty pounds. Don’t judge, but we had the latter, and it was ambrosial.

Our server explained, in a “look what you could have won” kind of a way, that by most standards 1992 was still quite young for this wine but we were very happy with our choice nevertheless.

“1992, the year we met” said Dave to me, as we took our first heavenly sips. Suddenly I felt like however old the wine was, I was older still. But in any case there was much to celebrate, so I thoroughly enjoyed a wine as old as one of my oldest friendships. The wine has aged well, the friendship even better.

We tried a decent range of the desserts. I think on this occasion Al and I chose best with the St. Emilion au chocolat. I’ve never heard it called that before but it was an extremely nicely done ganache, a not ungenerous portion of it, topped, I think, with crumbled amaretti biscuit and served simply with terrific crème fraiche. I was always going to gravitate towards this dessert and, however good the others were, I would struggle not to order it again.

I think the other candidates were more workmanlike. Dave enjoyed the pain perdu with apple and vanilla ice cream, again crumbled with the good stuff to lend texture, with a shiny, sticky sauce. I expect if I ordered it I would have liked it too, and I imagine it went better with the dessert wine, in terms of colour coordination if for no other reason, than my overdose of chocolate did.

James ordered the Basque cheesecake, but neglected to take a picture. In fairness, you probably know what a Basque cheesecake looks like. Imagine one of those, with some rhubarb on the side. That’s what James had. He liked it, and Dave reminded me that it’s ridiculously easy to make which is why he never orders it in restaurants. I still have the WhatsApp message he sent me, with the recipe, favourited on my phone. One of these days.

Al is legendary for ordering two desserts, very much following in the footsteps of the great Nora Ephron who always held that this was one of the most important life lessons she ever learned. Technically if you count the Trou Normand and about a quarter of the Éclair Suzette we ordered to share between us, this meal constituted a personal best.

We’d ordered the éclair on the advice of our server and again, it had some nice touches – the candied orange on top, the Grand Marnier infused crème diplomat inside. But again, Lapin’s touch with the choux let it down. It was leaden rather than ethereal, and took some sawing through. As a finishing touch to the meal it summed up some of the inconsistencies, and gave me something to think about.

Our meal for four, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just shy of five hundred and twenty pounds. Now, after you’ve had your sharp intake of breath, I have to say that doesn’t feel like poor value, at all, for what we had. We had something like five courses each, and even then we threw in a couple of extra things to try. We had apéritifs and two bottles of wine, one of which was from the deeper end of the list.

All things considered, I think about one hundred and thirty pounds each isn’t at all bad, for the afternoon we had. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you should feel like you get this much living for it. It made me feel sad for my poor friend Jerry, parting with a hundred pounds for an infinitely less enjoyable meal at Gee’s not too long ago. Besides, expense be damned: this was Poncefest, it’s not like we were going to settle for a Happy Meal.

You might ask, given all that, why the rating down there is what it is. You might feel that this reads higher than that, or lower, and I would have some sympathy. When I think of meals I’ve had in Bristol, Lapin is really pretty good. But something stops it, for me, being in that upper echelon, with the likes of Caper and Cure, or Marmo. Or, if you’re comparing French meals with French meals, something prevents it reaching the standard of Paulette.

I keep coming back to that rabbit rillette, pretty close to being an eponymous dish for this restaurant. I keep remembering that it was nice and clean and pure and rarefied. And it’s not because Lapin is in a shipping container, because as I said the place managed to make me completely forget that. But Lapin, for all its excellent qualities, ever so slightly felt, to me, like a brilliant piece of cosplay, more than a French restaurant.

You could say that there’s nothing wrong with that, and I might agree. But that’s what stopped it, as far as I was concerned, attaining true greatness. I wouldn’t rule it out that at some point they will get there, and I imagine enough people in Bristol will rave about it to sustain it on that journey. In the meantime, it has a single dish that almost merits a pilgrimage, even if it’s a mere side, and it played host to a marvellous, long overdue reunion. When the ponces assemble next – in a suitably effete way, I can assure you – Lapin has set a standard we’ll be very lucky to exceed.

Lapin – 8.6
Unit 14, Cargo 2, Museum St, Bristol, BS1 6ZA
0117 4084997

https://www.lapinbristol.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Upstairs At Landrace, Bath

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

I go to Bath too rarely to know it well, but often enough to wish I knew it better. Winding through the sun-bathed stone on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon with my old friend Dave, very much following his lead, I realise how rare it is for me to walk round a city with virtually no idea where I’m going. But Dave has been coming here for years, going all the way back to the best part of thirty years ago when he first met his wife and she was living here, so I put myself in his hands for a change and just enjoy the views, all of which are sensational.

I only have a vague understanding of the city – I know where the Royal Crescent is, and the train station, and Pulteney Bridge, sort of, but beyond that my inner satnav of how all these places join together is fuzzy at best. I’ve probably been to Bath something like four times in ten years, so I follow along like a clueless tourist while Dave takes me to his favourite coffee spot, a little off the beaten track, and a very good beer shop. And then we have a bit of a wander in the growing warmth of the day, and Dave tells me about all the green space in the city, the bookshops we could visit later and, crucially, where we might drink after lunch.

Eventually we walk up Walcot Street, one of the few parts of Bath I know a little better. I would say it’s one of Bath’s most beautiful streets, but in my experience they all are. But I know it from the cheese shop, which feels like it’s been there forever, and Picnic, a café I drank at last time I visited the city. Beyond that, I mostly navigate it by memories of places that are no longer there – a Scandi interiors store I shopped at a lifetime and a marriage ago, a craft beer bar called Brewed Boy that I drank at with Zoë and her friends James and Liz, before they became my friends too.

As we stroll, Dave points out landmarks from his memories in the city, places that have survived better than the ones I recall. One, Schwartz Bros, is a burger place that looks to have been trading for the best part of fifty years – Dave remembers it from courting his wife, and that was so long ago you probably still would have called it courting. But our destination for lunch is a place neither of us has been before: Upstairs at Landrace, the restaurant that sits, as its name suggests, on top of the city’s highly esteemed Landrace Bakery.

I’d wanted to go for ages, and when Dave and I were deciding where to meet up he picked Bath over Oxford or Reading, so I saw my chance. I gave him a few options, half expecting him to go for the wine and small plates of Corkage, or the Basque tapas of Pintxo, but was very pleasantly surprised when he plumped for Upstairs at Landrace, a place I’d always liked the look of.

It received some attention in the national press three years or so ago – I get the feeling national critics pick Bath for a review every couple of years when they fancy expensing a genteel day out – but had since settled back down to just doing its business. All the reviews I’d read talked about a simple, compact, beautifully executed menu and really, what more could you ask for when lunching with a very old friend? The menu changed daily, in fact, and both Dave and I kept an eye on it in the run-up to our trip, identifying dishes we would like to eat and hoping they’d still be on offer when the weekend came.

The restaurant is a wonderfully haphazard place. You go up the stairs and although the two dining rooms are both technically on the first floor they aren’t quite on the same level. You sense that everything in the building is higgledy-piggledy, few straight lines or right angles. We were given a table in the cosier of the two rooms, near the open kitchen, all sloping ceilings and sunlight squeaking in through the windows.

It was doing nicely when we got there, on a bright spring afternoon, and it got busier during our time there. It felt like a very agreeable place for lunch, and the fact that my seat gave me a prime opportunity to snoop on plates being whizzed from the kitchen to other tables didn’t exactly do any harm.

The menu was compact and, although a continuous list of dishes, was clearly designed, by price point, to be broken up into smallest, smaller and bigger. Our excellent server, who did a brilliant job all afternoon, talked us through the whole “small plates for sharing and bigger plates for you to have to yourself” concept and we listened to it the way you listen to the safety demonstration on an airplane, being respectful although we’d both heard it dozens of times before. After all, I suppose this plane might have varied from others we’d flown on in the past. It didn’t, though. It never does.

What that meant, in practice, was the compact menu all the critics had talked about – a couple of snacks, six artists formerly known as starters, three big plates for you to have on your own and one even bigger one for sharing. Just the one side dish, “Fairy Hill mixed leaf salad”, from a place whose leaves are apparently so good the provenance deserved to be listed: we didn’t try it to find out. The small plates were between eight and fourteen pounds, the bigger ones between twenty-four and thirty, the biggest fifty-eight.

All the versions of this menu Dave and I had tantalised ourselves with in the run-up, I can safely say, had more options I fancied on them than this one did. One of the most appealing dishes – involving duck, I think – had been replaced with a “Pembrokeshire cockle vongole”, which I’m sure many people would have loved but appealed to me about as much as the mixed leaf salad. Dave, who treats eating out as a chance to indulge, wanted a bit more red meat on there, but pretty much the only dish that fitted that bill was the ribeye, and we didn’t fancy it enough.

We contemplated our relatively bad fortune while eating an excellent slice each of the bakery’s bread – a nice touch that this was complimentary – with very good, golden room temperature butter and a drink. Dave told me on the walk to the restaurant that he had pretty much given up on wine in favour of beer (and I had mentally scratched a couple of bars off my list of places we could drink later on) so he had a bottled IPA from Gilt & Flint, a Devon brewery I’d never heard of who also, apparently, supply to triple Michelin starred The Ledbury. I had a sip: it was nice enough.

I, a little jaded from a session the previous evening at the Nag’s, was tempted by a wine from Wiltshire of all places but instead had a glass of table perry from Wilding. I know next to nothing about perry except that it’s apparently the best booze we all aren’t drinking yet, and unworthily I’d picked it mostly because it was a small glass of something alcoholic that wasn’t too strong. I don’t think that’s a slogan perry makers are going to scramble to adopt, but on this showing it didn’t have enough about it to generally make me choose it over a crisp white wine. I must try harder.

The first of our sharing plates was a study in simplicity. Four very good anchovies – by Pujadó Solano apparently, seventeen quid per pack online – came glimmering in a pool of unbeatable olive oil, sprinkled with oregano, the whole affair beautified with lemon zest. “Why do I never think of having anchovies with lemon zest?” said Dave. “I’m definitely doing that at home from now on”. Otherwise this was just about buying the best of everything and putting it together, and in that sense you could say that although it was special – and at twelve pounds you’d want it to be – it somehow wasn’t out of the ordinary.

What was out of the ordinary, though, was our server coming back with a basket of little cubes of sourdough so we could personally mop up every last soupçon of that bright, herby olive oil: that I loved.

Anyway, the anchovies were the last – the only – thing we ate that was merely quite good rather than extremely good. I had seen mentions of Upstairs’ cheddar curd fritters in other reviews, I seem to recall, and I’d seen enough of them on their way to other diners before I even placed an order that I knew I had to try them.

I wasn’t quite sure, even after eating them, how they managed to make fried cheese so airy, so ethereal and yet somehow they did. They were stupendous clouds of joy – as if someone had decided to make Wotsits entirely out of cheese, serve them piping hot and cover them in yet more cheese. Eight pounds for these, and I think Upstairs At Landrace needs to rethink this whole “small plates for sharing” concept, or expressly make an exception for the fritters. I otherwise couldn’t fault our server, but she should have said “have you considered having one of those each?” Shame on her.

Although you could just as easily have said the same about the third dish we shared, the cuttlefish and sausage salad. Rarely have four words so comprehensively undersold a dish as they did on the menu. I mean, yes, it was a salad and yes, it contained cuttlefish and sausage. But that didn’t begin to do justice to what I’m already sure will be one of the most enjoyable dishes I eat all year.

I suppose there isn’t room on a menu to say “huge quantities of precisely scored, superbly cooked, tender cuttlefish”, and no room to say “the warm, slightly caramelised discs of sausage, with the tiniest hint of offal, bring a welcome hint or earthiness and, let’s face it, red meat, to proceedings”. The menu didn’t go on to add “by the way, you’ll also have warm bits of waxy potato, and while we’re at it the dressing will be impeccable, with the sharpness of capers thrown in, into the bargain”.

I know Upstairs At Landrace’s menu is in the still fashionable Ingredient A, Ingredient B, Ingredient C format that seems to annoy me more than most, but even at its most fulsome it wouldn’t capture that detail. I suppose that’s what restaurant reviewers are for.

But my goodness, how I loved this. If all salads were like this, or even half as good, I would eat salad all the time. I’ve always loved a warm potato salad, or any potato salad dressed with vinaigrette rather than drowned in mayonnaise, and I really adore cuttlefish, which you don’t see on menus anywhere near often enough. To find all of that coalescing in one glorious plate made me very happy indeed: forget JK Rowling’s recent lamentable cigar-based bigotry: this is what happens when a plan comes together. And the company was so good that I didn’t even resent sharing it.

Although Dave was a little sad about the paucity of meat on the menu, those nubbins of sausage aside, he did console himself with monkfish, one of the meatiest denizens of the sea. And again, trust in Upstairs At Landrace was richly rewarded: this was a phenomenally cooked, very generous piece of monkfish with a beautiful colour, effectively cut into medallions. It came on top of a primavera riot – leeks, peas, celery, all the good stuff, bathed in what was apparently a pastis butter.

I can’t verify that: I did try a little of the monkfish, which I thought was exceptional, but left the shrubbery to Dave. He adored this dish though, and didn’t feel like he had missed out one bit. This was possibly a dish you wished you’d held back bread for, although I’m sure our server would have brought a little more if Dave had asked nicely.

My main, on the other hand, was a symphony of a dish. Agnolotti filled with Jersey Royals could have been starch on starch overkill, but instead were little pockets of silky comfort, the pasta with just enough bite and the filling, pleasingly, with no bite at all. The whole shebang was positively awash with brown butter and wild garlic pesto, because of course it’s the season now, and if that wasn’t enough there was more wild garlic on top. And if that wasn’t enough there was a mountain of cheese, and if that wasn’t enough a dish with more of it was left at the table for you to sprinkle with abandon.

And it was, all in all, enough, and teetering on the brink of too much. But that brink, provided you stay on the right side of it, is where legendary dishes live, and this was one of my favourite things I’ve eaten in a long time. It was so well-judged, so well done, just the right size, everything in the right proportions, everything in exactly the right place. The pesto was so beautiful that I’d have bought a jar the size of my head if I could, the pasta so well done that it’s now, for me, the best thing you could possibly do with Jersey Royals.

I’ve had a few instances recently where the menu, on turning up at a restaurant, wasn’t quite the one I would personally have chosen and yet everything was amazing. I will make the most of those, because I know there’s some Newtonian law of dining whereby, when I review somewhere in the future, the menu will have loads of things I fancy on it, I’ll order them and they won’t be anywhere near as good as I wanted them to be. Buy now, pay later.

Dave and I were fuller but not stuffed, very happy indeed and I was on my second glass of perry, as my hangover became too distant a memory to stop me acquiring another one. The tables about us had ebbed and flowed, but the place had always seemed just comfortably less than rammed. Dave and I got to talking about the times he’s joined me on a review.

“What I find weird is when we go out and have a lovely meal and then weeks later I read your review and you weren’t blown away by the food. Because then I think: are you sitting there having lunch with me and not having that good a time?”

“It’s not that at all! I always enjoy having lunch with you but then when I look back on it, and weigh it all up, the food isn’t the best part of the experience.” I probably won’t be able to convince Dave, even after over thirty years of friendship, that however good the food is his company is usually the best bit.

“I suppose it’s better this way round, though” he replied. “I wouldn’t want you telling me during the meal that you don’t rate it that much.”

“Exactly! Nobody needs someone speaking their truth that way during dinner, it just ruins the whole event.”

“But so when you say this is a really good meal, do you mean that?” Dave wondered. “Or when you eventually write this one up am I going to find it’s got a middling mark?”

“Trust me, Dave. This is going to be a really good review.” There was a pause, and I knew that my old friend wouldn’t completely believe me until he saw it. Nonetheless, I said it again for emphasis. “It’s a really good meal.”

The other thing that happened before we made our assault on dessert was that Dave asked our server where the loos were and was directed towards a door on the same floor as us. He returned eager to share something.

“Mate, before we go you have to try that toilet.”

This was not something I heard every day.

“What’s so special about it?”

“You know how normally if a loo is up some stairs you go up the stairs and then open the door? In this place you open the door, and right in front of you is a staircase. A really steep one. And the loo is at the top and, well, you’re quite close to the edge of the stairs when you do your business.”

“Really?”

“You wouldn’t want to do that after a few drinks, trust me. I expected to see a boulder coming down the stairs at me like something out of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom.”

Upstairs At Landrace’s menu is at its most compact at the end: two desserts and a cheese course is your lot. We’d already had cheese to begin with and one of the desserts, the walnut tart, was a no-go – for me, because I’m generally not wild about walnuts and for Dave because, being allergic, he takes that one step further. That just left us with one option, rhubarb, meringue and cream. Maybe Upstairs At Landrace didn’t call it an Eton mess because they’d like to cancel Eton, in which case I sympathise entirely. Maybe it was a pavlova that had done a bad job of tackling those stairs.

Whatever the explanation was, though, it was a really terrific dessert which brought matters to a close in masterful fashion. The cream, from Ivy House Farm, near Bath, was thick and ambrosial, the rhubarb still had bite, and hadn’t been stewed into sticky submission. The meringue was just the right level of chewiness and the extra touch, toasted, flaked almonds, was the icing on the cake. Twelve pounds for this, so again not cheap but ultimately worth every penny. When I looked back on the meal, now that it was done, I didn’t think there had been a single misstep. That rarely happens.

After we’d finished, I took my life in my hands and ascended the staircase to the loo, which was every bit as vertiginous as Dave had warned me it would be: the very fancy hand soap was almost worth the climb in its own right. We thanked our server and chatted briefly to her about what a good meal it was, and she said that they had a lovely mixture of locals and regulars and out of towners like us who treated it as a destination restaurant.

We both did our best to be enthusiastic and grateful without coming across as creepy uncles, but ultimately as she went to fetch the card machine we knew, as always happens, that she was probably just wondering which of those pleasant middle-aged men was the top and which was the bottom. Our lunch for two came to one hundred and twenty-eight pounds, not including service: we didn’t have a lot to drink, but without alcohol it would have been fifty-five pounds a head.

Bath seemed even lovelier, if that were possible, after such a good lunch and so we did some more ambling, including a brief browse for books at Topping & Co, before having a couple of beers outside at Kingsmead Street Bottle, discovering in the course of drinking them, that it was nowhere near warm enough to sit outside. So we headed back across town and lucked out with a great table at The Raven, one of my favourite Bath pubs. I didn’t realise they had a beer brewed specifically for them by Bristol’s Arbor Ales, a really likeable pale, but once I discovered it I knew I was staying on that for the rest of the day. As my friendship with Dave taught me many moons ago, when you find something you really like, you stick with it.

So it turns out that, like the national restaurant critics I lightly ribbed at the start of this review, I have come to Bath twice in just under two years and both times I’ve had a very good, rather genteel time of it. But I think Upstairs At Landrace is worth going to Bath for all by itself – with or without the shopping, or the coffee, or the beers, or the old friend – because it’s supremely good at what it does.

I read an article about Upstairs At Landrace ages ago, in the Financial Times, that lumped it in with the Bristol restaurant Sonny Stores and breezily dismissed them both as part of a trend of a certain kind of restaurant that’s everywhere just now. Well, the main thing that writer was eating, it seems to me, is mushrooms. Because in reality, away from generic broadsheet sighing or sneering, restaurants as good and as clever as Upstairs At Landrace, places that manage to be sleek and refined without being sterile or soulless, are vanishingly rare. Maybe they’re ten a penny in somebody’s parallel universe, but they certainly aren’t in mine.

Oh, and for the benefit of Dave – who I know occasionally reads this – see that mark below? Told you. It was a really good meal.

Upstairs At Landrace – 8.8
59 Walcot Street, Bath, BA1 5BN
01225 424722

https://landrace.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Branca, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

This probably isn’t something I should admit but even now, after nearly twelve years doing this, I’m not always the best judge of which reviews will and won’t prove popular.

I mean, some obviously do well: you all tend to want to know about the new openings and the big names as soon as possible, something I’ve been trying to get to quicker over the last year. And I know from my trips to the likes of TGI Friday and Taco Bell that if it looks like I’m going to have a bad time, you tune in. I don’t take that personally – everyone likes a hatchet job and we can all derive vicarious pleasure from the suffering of others at times.

Beyond that? I have a vague idea at best. Sometimes I can write up a lovely independent place in the middle of town and – well, there aren’t crickets, but it doesn’t go gangbusters in the way that a Siren RG1 or a Rising Sun might. And other times the success of a review takes me completely by surprise.

Take Gordon Ramsay Street Burger, for instance: I didn’t think that many of you would especially care what it was like. On the run up to my visit, I wasn’t even sure I especially cared what it was like. And when I went I found that it was perfectly serviceable, the kind of place you might quite enjoy if you lived in a town without Honest Burgers. Little to write home about all round, you might think, and yet it was my most popular restaurant review of the year: me having a fair to middling time at a big chain in the Oracle. Go figure.

I actually think this might be for the best, that there’s no crystal ball. Because it would get tempting just to write the crowdpleasers, and that would skew the kind of places I go to and the kind of meals I seek out. And part of my – let’s call it a job, just for the sake of argument – job here is to highlight all kinds of establishments.

The ones you know about, but also the ones you don’t. The ones you would never consider going to in a million years, or walk past thinking “I wonder what that’s like?” And the ones you may well have already been to, probably in the first month after opening, before I get round to them. If you always have a pretty good idea what, or where, is coming next then something’s probably gone wrong.

One of the impressions I do get, though, is that collectively speaking you’d like to see more Oxford reviews. I can see why: it’s only half an hour away by train and is almost the anti-Reading. It has everything Reading lacks, yet lacks all the stuff Reading has got. No widespread craft beer, but lots of handsome old boozers, the kind Reading has gradually lost. No street food, but a covered market and cheesemongers and delicatessens galore.

A big shopping mall, yes, but a completely different kind that attracts the chains that Reading still just doesn’t get. More independent retail and two independent cinemas, but crap buses. Better bookshops, but nothing like the Nag’s Head. Did I mention that it also has the Oxford Playhouse, which for all its charm South Street can’t quite match? Anyway, add the two together and you would have the perfect large town slash small city; Oxford even has a couple of universities, would you believe.

All that makes Oxford the perfect place for a weekend lunch or dinner, especially coupled with mooching, shopping, drinking coffee and people watching. So every time I put an Oxford review up it does pretty well, and I get the impression – perhaps wrongly – that you might like to see more of them. My first visit to Oxford on duty was to one of my favourite Oxford spots, The Magdalen Arms on the Iffley Road. I had a lovely time, as I expected to, and resolved to cover the city more often. Two and a half years later, I’ve written the grand total of five reviews of Oxford restaurants: time to pull my socks up.

So last weekend Zoë and I were in Oxford, on her Saturday off, and I had booked a table for two at the Oxford restaurant I’ve possibly eaten at more than any other, Branca. It’s a sort of Italian brasserie – or would be if such a thing isn’t two different kinds of cultural appropriation – and had been trading on Walton Street in Jericho for over twenty years.

And that means that, like Pierre Victoire just round the corner on Little Clarendon Street, it’s part of an elite club of restaurants that have been an ever-present in my dining life. The only thing even comparable in Reading, now that Pepe Sale is gone, is London Street Brasserie, and that tells its own story, that Oxford can hang on to these places when Reading can’t.

It helps that Jericho is such a lovely part of Oxford, less than twenty minutes’ walk from the train station but a world away from both the town and gown of the city centre. It’s all nice cafés and bars, pubs tucked away on sidestreets, the Phoenix cinema where people, me included, queued round the block to see Four Weddings thirty years ago, watering holes like Raoul’s and Jude The Obscure that feel like they’ve been there forever.

I lived in Jericho, for a strange and surreal year halfway through the Nineties, and I didn’t appreciate how gorgeous it was at the time. And now it’s so gentrified that I could never afford to do so again in this life I am struck with brutal clarity by what a terrific part of the world it is. Isn’t it always the way? Never mind. Sitting in Branca, menu in front of me, soaking it all up I could kid myself, for a couple of hours at least, that this was my place and these were my people. Good restaurants, apart from providing you with great food and wonderful drink, have a knack of giving you that, too.

In the years since it opened Branca has expanded into next door, turning it into a cafe and deli more than capable of improving your cupboards and denting your wallet. But the dining room is as it always was, a tasteful if cavernous space.

The tables nearer the front, close to the bar, are nice enough but if you can get one at the back you’re treated to a beautiful room with marble-topped tables, exposed brickwork, what looks like a Bridget Riley on the wall. There’s a view out into their courtyard through full length-windows, and the light in general is quite magical, helped by a skylight and clever use of mirrors. Even on a dreich February day it felt like spring was in touching distance.

This isn’t the criticism it might sound, but Branca’s is simultaneously the biggest and smallest menu I’ve ever seen. Big as in physically big, a one-sided sheet of something like A3 that lists everything they serve. But when you delve into the detail, it’s compact: four starters, a couple of salads, three pasta dishes, four pizzas. Four mains, a burger and a steak and a couple of specials. I felt like I had just enough choice, although if I’d fancied either of the specials I wouldn’t have felt constrained at all.

As it was, this was just on the right side of the border between streamlined and narrow. Starters clustered around the ten pound mark – don’t they always, everywhere, these days – while mains were more scattergun. A pizza was about sixteen quid, with the exception of the sirloin steak the mains stopped at twenty-five. If I hadn’t eaten at Branca before I think the menu would still have inspired confidence, that it was aiming to do fewer things better, but they’d already proved that to me time and time again.

Before any of that, a negroni apiece and some of Branca’s focaccia, which they’ve been dishing out free of charge to diners for as long as I can recall. The focaccia was great stuff, airy and speckled with salt, oily enough to make your fingers shine even before you dipped hunks of it into oil and balsamic vinegar. It made me happy to start a meal in the same way as I always had, knowing that it pretty much always presaged good things. Branca played it straight down the middle with its negroni: no fancy curveballs, just Gordon’s, Campari and Martini Rosso. It was a good reminder that stripped of any whistles and bells, the cocktail just has good bones.

Another reason I’ve always liked Branca enormously is the wine list, and more specifically that they do something so few restaurants in the U.K. do: the majority of the wines on it, around three quarters in fact, can be ordered in a 500ml carafe. So we did that and had a New Zealand sauvignon blanc for thirty quid, which was downright lovely. I got kiwi fruit and gooseberry, Zoë got a hint of melon and, for an hour or so, we managed to kid ourselves that we got wine. We became a little bit more North Oxford with every passing minute.

Most of Branca’s starters are probably a nod to the excellent deli next door: with the exception of the soup they largely involve buying well rather than cooking well. Zoë is an expert at the third part of that triumvirate, ordering well, and she had the edge with her burrata on sourdough, served with olives and cherry tomatoes. Up to a point this is something you could rustle up in your own kitchen, and we often do come summertime, but the transformative element here was a cracking red pesto. Try doing that at home seemed to be the implication and no, I wouldn’t even attempt to.

My starter left me feeling a little deceived. It was described as bresaola with a fennel, rocket and radish salad, and that description made me think it would be a cornucopia of cured beef with a little bit of greenery on top. Just how hoodwinked I had been became apparent when our server – who, I should add, was superb from start to finish – came to our table.

“Who ordered the salad?”

Neither of us, I hope I wanted to say to him, but I realised as he set the plates down that this was exactly what I had unwittingly done. And, truth be told, I felt a little conned. Three pieces of bresaola – I would say “count them”, but that didn’t take long – buried under an ambuscade of foliage is, to be honest, a salad. You can’t roll that in glitter: it is what it is. And eleven pounds for a salad and three pieces of beef felt like it could slightly mar my long and happy relationship with Branca.

And maybe it would have done but damn them, it was lovely. I always regret using the adjective “clean” to describe dishes or flavours because, like “dirty”, it’s a dimension that really shouldn’t feature in stuff you stick in your gob. So instead I would say that this was subtle, unfussy and refined, that every flavour in it was distinct, well-realised and harmonious.

Rocket seems to get a lot of stick these days but I still like it, especially compared to the twin horrors of pea shoots and watercress, two of the most pointless green things in creation. The quantity of excellent Parmesan chucked on top felt like it was by way of apology for the whole salad thing. Everything was so well-dressed and well balanced that I decided I could forgive Branca, just about. The eleven quid still felt a bit cheeky, although mainly I just wished they’d chucked some of that red pesto into the mix.

Conscious of a few recent experiences where we’d been rushed, Zoë decided to have The Conversation with our server as he came to take our empty plates. We were having a lovely time, she told him, and were really in no hurry so could they wait a while before bringing our mains? And he was brilliant with that, feeding that back to the kitchen and then coming to check with us, something like twenty-five minutes later, if we were ready for what came next.

I can’t tell you how welcome that was, that a restaurant understood how to put the brakes on. And it really helped to make me appreciate Branca all over again – the room, that light, the chatter from neighbouring tables, that feeling that there was no rush to go anywhere or do anything that comes from a proper, leisurely lunch. Saturdays with Zoë have been at a premium recently, so I felt glad this one was far from squandered.

By the time my main came, I was ready for it, and it helped that it was a treat from start to finish. Rigatoni, giant corrugated tubes of comfort sagging under the weight of their own carbiness, came interlaced with sticky strand after strand of a long-cooked duck ragu. It may not have clung to the pasta, but it was hidden away under every single layer, a glorious, indulgent beast of a sauce.

That along would have made me almost delirious with joy on a winter’s day, but carpeting the whole lot with the crunch of herb and pecorino pangrattato and then leaving a bowl of grated parmesan at the table for you to use as unsparingly as your heart desired? I’d won at lunch. There was simply no question.

Of course, as anybody who’s married knows, you only really win at lunch if your dining companion wins too. So I was glad that Zoë, picking the other dish that jumped out from the menu, was as happy as I was. A colossal slab of pork belly, all fat rendered beautifully, would have been worth the price of admission alone. Add in a deeply savoury jus, an enormous quenelle of root vegetable mash, some firm but delicious tenderstem broccoli and a couple of crispy straws of crackling and you had a dish that could redeem the month of February single-handedly.

And the final element, the icing on the proverbial, was a salsa verde that supplied the zip and verve that stopped this all being a bit too much. Like the red pesto, a little went a long way. It also highlighted, again, that the kitchen had decided to do a few things to the very best of its ability rather than produce a bloated menu that lost its way.

“This is the first Lyndhurst-style dish I’ve had since the Lyndhurst closed” said Zoë, and I knew exactly what she meant. Very few people cooked pork belly as well as Sheldon and Dishon at the Lyndhurst, and this was the first time I’d eaten somewhere that reminded me of that. The room couldn’t have been more different, and the menu couldn’t have been much more different either, but there was that thread of brilliant hospitality that connected a restaurant I’ve loved for years and a restaurant I’ve mourned for nearly twelve months. It was nice to be reminded of it like this.

Branca’s dessert menu was also compact and really, when you stripped away the padding, it was four desserts and a range of ice cream; I’m happy to accept that a chocolate brownie classes as a dessert but things like affogato, chocolate truffles or – as was the case here – Pedro Ximenez poured over vanilla ice cream don’t really count. I found the dessert menu the least exciting bit, with most of it reminiscent of London Street Brasserie, so of course I gave Zoë carte blanche and she picked the dish I’d most likely have chosen, the chocolate nemesis.

She was very happy with it, and I daresay I would have been too. It was a tranche of deep, fudgy decadence, festooned with cocoa and squiggled with sauce, pistachio ice cream on the side. It was exactly the kind of dessert Zoë has been ordering since she first started ordering desserts many years ago, and it did not disappoint. It happens to be exactly the kind of dessert I too have been ordering, for ten years longer than her.

“It looks great” I said, which is usually my attempt to get a spoonful. “Is the texture more like a fondant, or a ganache?”

“It’s more like a brownie” said Zoë. There was to be no spoonful.

I’d asked where Branca got its ice cream from, half hoping they bought local from legendary ice cream parlour George & Davis, round the corner. They didn’t, and instead it was from Purbeck, a maker I don’t think I’ve tried.

My benchmark for these things is Jude’s – I’m still up in arms about Nirvana Spa swapping them out for the kind of stuff you get in the interval at the theatre – but I would say the ice cream at Branca came close. The chocolate was deep and smooth and studded with chocolate chips and the salted caramel was actually salted caramel with more than a hint of salt, rather than an attempt to rebadge something that’s either butterscotch or has tooth-shattering chunks of solid sugar in it. It was a fitting ending to my latest, but by no means my last, meal at Branca.

The best part of a couple of hours after we took our seats, it was time to settle up and sally forth into the streets of Jericho. Our bill for two came to just under one hundred and fifty-five pounds, including the 12.5% service charge, and paying it I thought that Branca was one of the safest bets I know of in the world of restaurants. I suppose after more than two decades it should be, but then I also remember the dwindling handful of Reading restaurants that have been here that long – places like Quattro and Sweeney and Todd – and realise that I’ve never had even a fraction of the affection for them that I do for Branca.

The rest of our afternoon, fortified by that lunch, was idyllic. We stopped at the Old Bookbinders, a ludicrously pretty backstreet boozer, for a quick half and thought that we needed to come back to try the small, perfectly formed French menu they happen to offer. We snuck into St Barnabas’ Church and gawped at the wonder of this little basilica, plonked in the middle of Jericho. We browsed paperbacks at the Last Bookshop, bought phenomenal cheeses in the Covered Market and stopped for a pre-train beer at Tap Social, wanting for nothing except a mobile signal strong enough to allow access to Untappd.

Oxford was at its finest that day, and I had that thought again: I need to come here more often. Yet the thing that really made all of that, you see, was Branca, and a reunion with an old friend of a restaurant. Lots to catch up on, but the news – getting married, moving house – was all mine. Because Branca was as it always is: classy, fetching, welcoming and utterly, utterly reliable. I’m glad I finally got round to reviewing it, and even gladder that I caught it on a day when it was very close to its best.

But if it hadn’t been, with nearly twenty years of history, I probably would have let it off. Because after all, how many restaurants can you say you’ve been going to for twenty years? I used to have more, but the ones in Reading have a habit of closing. Oxford can hold on to its institutions better, I think. But given the institutions that have been defining Oxford for nearly a thousand years, is that really a surprise?

Like I said at the beginning, I can never tell which of my reviews will do well. But I liked Branca so much that all of that feels immaterial: and that, to me, is the best reason there is to write a review.

Branca – 8.6
111 Walton Street, Oxford, OX2 6AJ
01865 807745

https://www.branca.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

If I asked most Reading residents to name Reading’s most famous restaurant, the chances are the majority of them would say either Kungfu Kitchen or Clay’s Kitchen. And that makes sense because those two, the Lennon and McCartney of Reading’s food scene, are the ones that have broken out into the national consciousness, as much as Reading ever does. If we had a round of Reading restaurants on Family Fortunes, asked 100 people to name a restaurant in Reading, those two would top the leaderboard. God knows what else would be on there – Sweeney Todd, probably, and a rogue vote for Munchees.

But that would only happen if you asked Reading residents, and is indicative of the bubble we live in. Because, last year at any rate, the most nationally known restaurant in Reading was Good Old Days Hong Kong Ltd, a nondescript Cantonese restaurant just the other side of Reading Bridge. And the reason for that is that last February it was reviewed in the Observer by journalist, jazz musician, TV show judge, relentless self-publicist and life president of the Jay Rayner Appreciation Society, Mr Jason Rayner.

He raved about the place, and explained that the chef used to cook at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, and Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel. “It feels like finding a senior chef from the Ritz… doing their own thing in your local caff” he declaimed. The unspoken implication was that this was almost as extraordinary as finding the U.K.’s greatest restaurant reviewer doing his own thing in a Chinese restaurant most Reading folk had never heard of, slumming it for the greater good. Lucky us!

Now, don’t be fooled into thinking Rayner had come to Reading specifically to review Good Old Days. He was in Reading recording an episode of his Radio 4 series, and I suspect he decided to kill two birds with one stone before heading back to London: after all, if there’s one thing people like to moan about below the line on his reviews, it’s how many of them are of London restaurants.

That roving Radio 4 series must be a positive boon, as it gives Rayner an excuse to visit parts of the country he otherwise wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. And I think we can include Reading as one of those, given that he described Caversham as “Reading’s Latin Quarter, as nobody has ever called it”. Such a charmer. But anyway, it was close enough to the station and he had a friend who recommended it, so Good Old Days it was, rather than one of Reading’s more high profile restaurants.

And he did seem to enjoy it, sort of. He said that “if… you happen to live nearby, get the food to go. Because in truth Good Old Days is a takeaway that just happens to have a few tables.” And that’s the funny thing about Rayner’s review – it didn’t make me fall over myself to visit. And I don’t think it galvanised Reading either, because I still know relatively few people who have had a takeaway from Good Old Days and fewer still who have eaten in there. The ones who have, that I’ve spoken to, have told me that it was “nice”, or words to that effect. I’ve never had an oh my god, you really must go – can I come?

Especially that last bit. Despite it being on my to do list for almost a year, every time I mention it to someone in terms of joining me there on duty they ask if we can go somewhere else instead; people just didn’t seem to fancy the place. In that respect, Rayner’s review is a remarkable one – if you can praise food and still leave people lukewarm about going to a restaurant you definitely have some kind of skill, albeit not one most restaurant reviewers would want to develop.

Very few of the comments on the Observer review were from people in Reading, and what ones there were were evenly split between Don’t give the secret away and We went there on your recommendation and it was awful. So it looked like there was a gap in the market for a reliable review of Good Old Days, and I was happy to fill it.

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Restaurant review: Brutto, Clerkenwell

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Every year, without fail, a handful of new U.K. restaurants get hyped beyond measure. Every critic goes there, usually within the space of a fortnight, and every critic raves in their own hyperbolic way. Those places become impossible to book, if booking them were ever possible in the first place, and move into the heart of smugness: proper “if you know, you know” territory. These London restaurants – it’s always London, of course – are invariably hailed as evidence that it’s the most exciting food city in the entire world, mainly by restaurant reviewers living in London and writing for the national papers (or, perhaps more understandably, the Evening Standard).

So last year, it was all about Mountain in Soho and Tomos Parry’s cooking over fire (“can a dish be too good for itself?” wibbled Tim Hayward in the FT). Or Bouchon Racine, Henry Harris’ bistro. Jay Rayner described himself as a “huge dribbling admirer”, presumably to put people off booking a table, or for that matter ever eating again. And of course, there was Kolae, but you already know whether that’s good, don’t you?

And this year? Everyone has lost their collective marbles over Josephine Bouchon, Claude Bosi’s earthy Lyonnais restaurant on the Fulham Road, and Giles Coren, Tom Parker Bowles and Jay Rayner all went to the Hero in Maida Vale seemingly in the same fortnight. Giles Coren dined with Camilla Long, which means that for once he might have had an even worse time than his dining companion. I have a friend who everybody loves, who never has a bad word to say about anybody: you should hear his vitriol on the subject of Camilla Long.

Of course, the hype beast to end all hype beasts, this year, has been the Devonshire, the Soho pub run by the chap behind Flat Iron and Oisin Rogers, the closest thing the U.K. has to a celebrity pub landlord who isn’t Al Murray. Nearly all of the U.K.’s broadsheet restaurant reviewers descended on the Devonshire, mystifyingly all being able to land a table despite it being nigh-on impossible to do so, unless you’re famous. It’s almost as if there’s one rule for civilians and one rule for everyone else. Almost.

Coren even went all meta, writing in his review about being desperate to file his copy first despite seeing Tom Parker Bowles and Charlotte Ivers in there literally at the same time as him (Grace Dent, always at the cutting edge, finally got round to it last month). Still, nobody was going to match Coren for overstatement: “It’s just insane, what they’re doing” he gushed, about a pub taking the unprecedented steps of serving beer and cooking food.

It would be temping to review The Devonshire, if I could ever get a table. I used to know Rogers, a little, over a decade ago, and even got drunk with him a couple of times; he’s enormous fun, and a very canny operator. You have to take your hat off to someone who has always managed to keep in with whoever is making the weather in the notoriously bitchy world of London food, and Osh has managed simultaneously to be on good terms with everybody from Fay Maschler to the restaurant bloggers of the late Noughties and early Tens, all the way through to those tacky toffs from Topjaw. He’s always known exactly who to have onside, and is possibly even better at doing that than he is at running a pub.

But actually, I’d be more likely to go to his previous place, the Guinea Grill, which everybody thought did the best Guinness in London before Rogers jumped ship, and which also does the kind of steaks, puddings and pies people associate with the likes of Rules. All that without having to bump into the likes of Ed Sheeran? Count me in. And it’s interesting to me, that: you have places like Rules, or St John, that have been there for ever, and you have places like the Devonshire that are the new upstarts. Between those two types of restaurant? Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing at all.

But how can restaurants ever go from being the hot new thing to becoming institutions when everybody’s attention spans have been destroyed by social media, influencers and restaurant critics desperately craving the new? And what becomes of the flavour of the month when things settle down and the bandwagon rolls on to the next place, and the place after that? That’s why this week, after meeting Zoë from work up in the big smoke, catching the Elizabeth Line to Farringdon with what felt like a thousand West Ham fans and gulping down a handful of Belgian beers at the beautiful Dovetail pub, we mooched across to Brutto for our evening reservation there.

Brutto, you see, was one of The Restaurants Of 2021. Critics flocked to it that year, not necessarily because a trattoria modelled on the restaurants of Florence was what the capital was crying out for, but because this was the comeback restaurant of restaurateur Russell Norman. Norman’s Polpo group of restaurants, fifteen years ago – no reservations, small plates, typewritten menus on brown paper, Duralex glasses – probably did as much as any other to change the way people ate in London. It’s just insane what they did, as Giles Coren might have ineptly said.

I went to Polpo a little just after it opened, and offshoot Polpetto after that, and they were brilliant places to eat, although they never entirely overcame that feeling, when the bill arrived, that you’d spent too much on too little. But then came the unwise expansion, including branches in Bristol and Brighton, and then came the crash: Norman made his exit in 2020, and now only two branches remain.

And then, pretty much a year ago, Norman died suddenly and was mourned by seemingly everybody in the food world. Yet even if you never ate at one of his places, the likelihood is that in the last fifteen years you have eaten at least somewhere that has done something differently because of one of Norman’s restaurants from all that time ago, and that in itself is an interesting and far-reaching legacy.

Reading all that back it sounds like a bit of a downer, but I find it hard to imagine anybody walking into Brutto would feel down for long. I can think of few dining rooms that make you feel happier to be in them – it was simultaneously snug and buzzy, with tables full of people thoroughly enjoying their Saturday nights and others sitting up at the bar, making the most of Brutto’s fabled £5 negronis.

The dining room is kind of split level, and I guess the room at the front would be the one you’d ideally want to be sitting in, with its banquette and framed pictures arranged haphazardly on the teal wall behind (“it’s like Alto Lounge, but not shit” was Zoë’s take). But we were closer to the bar at a surprisingly good table next to a pillar, and although there was a distinct hubbub, and an effortlessly cool soundtrack seemingly pitched at Gen X duffers like me, it was never uncomfortably loud.

It really was a marvellous place, from the gingham tablecloths to the napkin lightshades to the candles stuffed into wicker-chianti bottles, and I loved it. It had that feeling of otherness I adore, the restaurant as a cocoon, where for the next couple of hours you could kid yourself that you’d walk out of the door at the end of your meal and be somewhere completely different.

It was, however, and I might as well get this out of the way now, dark. It started out as atmospheric, but as the evening went on it started to reach Dans Le Noir levels of stygian gloom. A lovely spot to be in, to drink and talk, but the practicalities of doing some of the things you ideally want to do in a restaurant, like read your menu or see what you were eating, were severely curtailed.

A solitary votive candle in the middle of our table wasn’t really going to help with that, even if the staff – who were on it throughout – replaced it very efficiently when it sputtered and went out. I got told off for getting the torch out on my phone to try and read the menu. Zoë told me that I was ruining the atmosphere for everybody, and I’ve since discovered that this is allegedly a boomer thing to do, for which I can only apologise.

Once Zoë had taken some pictures with her phone, in night mode, naturally, and AirDropped them over to me, I managed to get a decent look at the menu, which was of course typewritten. It was everything you’d want it to be, mostly: compact, affordable and interesting. Starters were mostly under a tenner, pasta dishes were closer to twenty and so were the secondi, with the exception of Florentine steak which is sold by weight. I think in the past I’ve seen these listed up on a blackboard, so as to say that when they’re gone they’re gone. Maybe they’d already gone, because our server didn’t mention them to us.

The thing you don’t notice on the menu, at first, is that there’s no fish to be seen anywhere. I saw it written on a mirror in the dining room that Brutto doesn’t serve fish, and although it’s often not my first choice it was still odd to see it completely excluded. It gave the dishes on offer a certain brownish hue, or that could have been the dim lighting, but I suppose it worked on a nippy evening with London well on its way to winter. And it’s not as if I minded, much. The negroni was fierce and medicinal and, lest we forget, only a fiver and, on top of those Belgian beers from earlier on, positively knocked the edges off the day.

I don’t sense that Brutto’s menu has changed enormously since it was first reviewed three years ago, because many of the dishes on offer were talked about in those initial reviews. One definitely was – coccoli, which translates as “cuddles”, and is little fried bits of dough with prosciutto and a small pot of tangy stracchino cheese. Remember when I said that these restaurants attract bucketloads of hype? Jimi Famurewa, then of the Standard said that they were “one of the year’s best dishes”.

I don’t know about that, but they were rather enjoyable. More doughnut than doughball, and pleasant enough with little slivers of ham and a small dollop of the cheese; there wasn’t enough stracchino, but I imagine there never is. But the problem with hype, however old it is, is that it almost sets you up against something. I bet the people who raved about these would have sneered at good old Pizza Express. It reminded me of a restaurant in Shoreditch I used to love called Amici Miei which did a similar dish to this, but far better and completely unsung. But then it hadn’t been opened by Russell Norman, that was the problem.

The other starter was three things that in isolation are hard to beat. Very fine, extremely salty anchovies, with decent salted butter and sourdough from St John just down the road. It’s impossible to argue with this really, even if it involves no cooking, and all three things were good. Zoë adored it, I wasn’t convinced it was really any more than the sum of its parts. In fairness though, this dish was just over a tenner and even in Andalusia seven anchovies of this quality might well set you back more than that.

By this point we were on the red wine, The wine list is all Italian, with lots to enjoy, provided you can read the bastard thing. Bottles start at thirty-six pounds and ascend quickly into three figures from there, and we settled for a Montepulciano closer to the shallow end for sixty-two pounds. which retails for eighteen quid online. Was it worth sixty-two pounds? We’ve established over eleven years that I don’t know a lot about wine, but I’d say maybe not.

For me the pasta dishes were probably Brutto’s greatest strength, and easily the thing I most enjoyed. I’d been tempted by pappardelle with rabbit, but in the end the classic tagliatelle with ragu was too hard to resist. And it was as close to perfect as this dish gets in this country, fantastic al dente ribbons of pasta and a rich, sticky ragu that hugged its curves closely. I’ve always been somewhat sniffy about this widely-held belief that there should be more pasta than sauce, but eating this, for once, I got the point. Everything felt like it was completely in order, in absolutely the right proportions.

Because Brutto is a homage to the trattoria of Italy, they left a bowl of grated Parmesan at your table, with a spoon. But because we were still in London, there wasn’t a lot of Parmesan in it.

For me if anything, Zoë chose even better. Her gramigna, a little spiral shape from Emilia-Romagna, came – as it does in that region – tumbled with sausage and friarelli and was a real joy. But don’t be fooled by the brightness of these pictures from Zoë’s iPhone: by this point it was getting more and more difficult to see what was going on. Even so, these two dishes, to me, highlighted that when it came to pasta dishes restaurants like Brutto or Bancone are still light years ahead of well-intentioned pretenders like Little Hollows in Bristol or bandwagon jumpers like Maidenhead’s Sauce And Flour.

I complained recently that Reading was still lacking a really good Italian restaurant and someone popped up and said “what about Vesuvio?”. And I said that I was looking for somewhere more genuinely Italian and less like a better reimagining of Prezzo, with more interesting secondi. But actually, I got that wrong: what’s really missing is brilliant pasta like this. Pepe Sale had that, back in the day. So did San Sicario. But since then, this kind of carb-centric comfort has been missing from Reading, and it’s a poorer place for it.

Speaking of secondi, to eat that course at Brutto it does help if you like beef. Three of the options are beef-driven (possibly four, depending on what’s in the bollito misto) and the roasted squash, virtuous though it doubtless was, just didn’t appeal. I had chosen the peposo, a slow-cooked stew of beef shin in a sticky, reduced sauce shot through with whole black peppercorns. And I liked it – it sort of reminded me of a stifado, although with no reliance on tomato or those maverick shallots that make the Greek dish such a delight.

But you know how you feel when you see a picture of a moment you don’t fully remember and you’re not sure if the photograph itself is inventing a memory you didn’t really have? Usually that experience dates back to childhood, but I have it when I look at the picture Zoë took of my main course. I know this is what I ate, the photo has my hand in it and the date stamp to prove it. But for me it was just a pool of blackness. You never quite knew what you were eating, or whether this would be your last big chunk of beef. I’ve always understood the saying that you eat with your eyes, but maybe not as well as I did after having this dish at Brutto. And however convivial the atmosphere was, this is where it took something away for me.

I didn’t need a great view of the roast potatoes I’d ordered on the side to know that they weren’t the best roast potatoes. Decent enough, but lacking that contrast of crunch and fluff that would have come if they’d been parboiled, and scuffed up, and cooked properly in really hot fat. Without that, they were just ballast.

Zoë infinitely preferred her main, which was a variation on the same theme. The same roast potatoes, which she viewed more kindly than I had. A slab of pink roast beef, the fat on the outside mellow and puckered, sitting in a little pool of jus. It needed the peas with pancetta that she ordered with it – I’d have liked these à la Française, with a little cream, although I know that’s missing the point in a Florentine trattoria. Anyway Zoë loved it, although she did admit that it was a tad dry. But if there’s anything our marriage proves – six months and counting – it’s that she has far lower standards than I do.

We had a fair bit of wine left, so we drank that and chatted about all sorts before making any decisions about desserts. Now Zoë works in London she is there every Saturday, and usually knocks off at eight o’clock, so by the time our evening begins, most weeks, it’s time for bed. A rare date night in the capital was a precious thing, and so neither of us was in a rush to bring it to an end. But desserts also meant digestivi, and that meant a Frangelico for her and an Amaro del Capo for me. It’s one of my favourite amaros, with something like 29 botanicals, though the one that leaps to the surface for me is mint.

I could have nursed that for some time, and maybe even had another, but the dessert menu only had a few things on it (putting pear and almond cake on there twice, once with ice cream and once without isn’t fooling anybody). Anyway, one of the items on the dessert menu was tiramisu, which meant that we were both contractually obligated to have one. Is it the dessert I order most often when I’m on duty? It definitely feels that way, and Brutto’s is up there with the best I’ve had – miles better than Little Hollows’, better than Sonny Stores‘, better than anything I’ve had in Reading, even including the wonder of Sarv’s Slice or the sadly departed Buon Appetito.

It properly contained multitudes, managing to be substantial yet airy, innocent yet boozy, simultaneously just the right size and nowhere near big enough. I loved it, and it reminded me that on the many occasions that I skip dessert when eating on duty I’m leaving the play before the final act, taking the book back to the library with the last fifty pages untouched. Brutto understands that a good meal has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that tiramisu was a more than worthy way to bring the curtain down.

With all that done, it was time to settle up and pray that the Elizabeth Line could get us back to Paddington before we were forced to catch one of those final trains back to the ‘Ding, the ones everybody refers to as the Burger King Express.

Our meal – a couple of negronis each, that bottle of wine, four courses each and a pair of digestivi – came to just over two hundred and fifty pounds, including an optional 12.5% tip. I know that’s a fair amount of money, but we had plenty of food and didn’t stint on the wine. Personally, I think Brutto is keen value, although probably more so in its starters and pasta than in its mains or wine list. I could have spent less and enjoyed myself just as much, and if I went again I imagine I would.

But would I go again? That’s the question, isn’t it. And it prompts the time-honoured answer, which goes like this. London is so blessed with restaurants – there are easily a handful of other great places to eat less than a ten minute walk from Brutto – that places have to be truly amazing to keep you visiting time and again. That drives quality, I’m sure, and it makes restaurants work hard for custom.

And maybe that also goes to answer the other question, of why it’s hard for anything to become an institution when somewhere else is always, always coming down the tracks. Back when I was on Tinder (what a fun three months that was) I deplored the way it effectively made you channel hop human beings, with their own lives and aspirations and back stories. Whatever. Next! But the way the food media works does the same thing with a lot of restaurants: one minute you’re the hottest ticket in town, the next you’re old hat.

So I had a lovely meal at Brutto and it taught me a lot about what restaurants do at their best and their worst. I have rarely felt, in a restaurant in the U.K., more like I was part of something brilliant and bigger than me. But ultimately one of the many things that united us that night was being together in the darkness. If that’s not a metaphor for something I don’t know what is. Maybe I’m just too old for all that.

Brutto felt like a neighbourhood restaurant in search of a neighbourhood. And speaking of neighbourhoods, if somewhere like Brutto opened in Reading you can bet I would be there on its opening night, and often after that. The fact that Reading can’t attract and maintain restaurants like this really puts the lie to all the old tut spouted by the likes of Hicks Baker that the town centre isn’t dying on its arse.

But while Reading still doesn’t have places like this, it still has that one thing Reading-haters always extol the virtues of: a train station you can use to get anywhere else. You could do a lot worse than make a reservation, hop on a train and find yourself here, in a place that isn’t quite Italy, isn’t quite London, but most definitely isn’t Reading. I know that’s not exactly hype, but it’s the best I can do.

Brutto – 8.4
35-37 Greenhill Rents, London, EC1M 6BN
020 45370928

https://brutto.co.uk