There’s a neat symmetry to proceedings this week. Last week I found myself in London, on a bus to parts unknown and this week, although I’m back in Reading, it was a very similar experience. Because I was on the trusty number 1 bus heading out west to Calcot. Yes, Calcot. Have you ever been there, apart from to visit IKEA, unless you happen to live there? Did you know Calcot has restaurants?
Well, for a long time it didn’t. And then in the summer of 2020, The Avenue Deli opened in a little run of shops. The name was a bit confusing, because from what I could see it was definitely a café and brunch spot, not a deli. But despite that, and despite opening in the worst summer for hospitality since records began, it built up a decent reputation: I suspect that, like Tilehurst’s The Switch, it benefitted from serving a community that doesn’t have anything else remotely like it.
But then last November, The Avenue announced that an Indian restaurant, The Coriander Club, was opening next door. The implication was that the two businesses were connected, a shared owner presumably, and The Coriander Club talked about offering an authentic taste of Punjabi cuisine. And since then the word of mouth has been good, and the restaurant’s well-maintained Instagram feed paints an interesting picture of food very much on the western edge of Reading.
The trend for sleek, upmarket Indian restaurants is still one with some momentum round these parts. It all started with House Of Flavours many years ago, of course, but more recently the likes of Tilehurst’s Zyka, Chilis in town and Masakali at the bottom of the Caversham Road have tried to slightly reboot the curry house – to make it more of an interesting destination and less of an autopilot ritual of a Friday or Saturday night.
I don’t include Clay’s Kitchen in that, because Clay’s has rather gone beyond that, just as its reputation has spread far beyond Reading. But even if Clay’s is the undisputed champion, there are a lot of Reading restaurants following in its wake, happy to go after a piece of that action. But, and no offence if you live in Calcot, in Calcot? It merited investigation – and I don’t get on a bus to Calcot for nothing, you know (“you really went out to the boondocks this week” was my friend Ivor’s take when I mentioned it the following night over a beer).
My companion this week was Liz, who had kindly answered the call when I recently asked for volunteers to join me on duty. I’d met Liz at a couple of my readers’ lunches and had no doubt that she’d bring something to the whole reviewing experience: a polymath and campanologist who had spent a year living in Beijing and worked at the university, she was also a proud resident of the Oxford Road who had given me countless tip-offs about new spots opening there over the last year or so. You can thank her, for instance, for my knowing about DeNata.
I thought that picking somewhere in Calcot would be a fitting choice for my West Reading correspondent, but somehow as the bus trundled past the tower blocks of Southcote and the spot where Radio 210 used to live it felt a bit like Calcot, in West Reading terms, was even more remote than Woodley on the other side of town. On the way, I discovered all sorts of snippets about Liz – that she didn’t hold with online shopping, that she didn’t eat bananas or eggs. I love those little details: they’re so often some of the most interesting things about people, minor details that somehow sketched the bigger picture.
“Have you ever been to Calcot? Apart from for IKEA, obviously.”
“Actually yes I have! Some of my fellow bell-ringers live there, so I’ve occasionally picked them up.”
I knew, on paper, that people must live in Calcot and it was just that I’d never met any of them, but I was still a little surprised.
“And is there anything there? Apart from the big Sainsbury’s and this restaurant, I mean.”
“No, not really.”
The Coriander Club is on the ground floor of one of those little runs of shops you see everywhere in the suburbs – in Calcot, in Woodley, in Caversham Park Village or in Emmer Green – and it is indeed right next to the bigger Avenue Deli. I think it used to be a chip shop until the owners of Avenue Deli took it over, and they’d made the most of it with some fetching outside space which would have been terrific on a warmer evening.
But even more surprising, to me, was how nice it was inside. The Coriander Club’s dining room isn’t the biggest – maybe twenty-four covers – but I was struck by what a good job they had done with it. The tables were well proportioned, the seats comfy, a little luxe and completely untacky; whenever I go to a new restaurant and discover they haven’t just thrown money at a bunch of Tolix chairs I mutter a little prayer of thanks. The big windows let light in and although the room was on the loud side it was more hubbub than din. Some rooms you just have a good feeling about: this was one of them.
I couldn’t help but compare it with the dim and unsuccessful dining room at Bombay Brothers, when I visited it last month. And, in contrast with my recent trip to Vegivores, they put us at a larger table that seated four, rather than putting us on one of the tables for two.
And the other thing to say about the hubbub in The Coriander Club is that it just goes to show the transformative effect customers have on a restaurant – that little room was almost full when we got there and completely full not long after that. On a Tuesday night, that’s good going. It reminded me of the buzz at Tilehurst’s Vesuvio, another oasis in a gastronomic desert, and one its locals have taken to their hearts.
The Coriander Club’s menu is nicely sized, it seemed to me (Liz wasn’t so sure: “it’s still five pages”, she said) and although I don’t know anywhere near enough about Punjabi cuisine to know how authentic or typical it was, I know a non-generic menu when I see one. There were definitely Indo-Chinese dishes on there, and stuff from the tandoor, and more than one biryani, but there were flashes of interest dotted throughout. And they didn’t feel like they’d been dreamed up by an external consultancy, Masakali-style.
Our server, who turned out to be the owner, was charm personified. “Read the descriptions of the dishes on the menu” she said. “They really do bring it to life.” That made me feel like she had written them, and that was a good thing.
The drinks menu wasn’t bad either. They had a decent range of wines, a reasonable number available by the glass, and although I offered to split a bottle with Liz she told me that one glass was generally her limit on a school night, so I left her to her Pinot Grigio. The glass it came in, again, suggested that thought had been put into every aspect of the place. I had their IPA, Bombay Bicycle. Now, it’s not that Indian (“brewed in the UK, but inspired by India” it says on the website – of the same people who make Kingfisher) but even so I appreciated having a beer on the menu that wasn’t just a fizzy lager.
Liz doesn’t like beer – “it tastes of beer”, she said, summing up for many people beer’s greatest strength – but the owner said she should at least give it a sniff because it smelled so good. Liz had a sniff. It smelled of beer, unsurprisingly. But I liked it – it was very nice, and went well with everything I ordered, so maybe macro breweries aren’t all bad after all.
I am very conscious, especially when I review Indian restaurants, that I have a bad habit of ordering the same things – hello chilli chicken, hello gobi Manchurian – so I was determined to make sure Liz picked some of the small plates and took me out of my comfort zone. She’d had her eye on the yoghurt bombs from researching the menu, having had something very similar at Mowgli, so we made them our first port of call. And they really were quite gorgeous – crunchy spheres packed with such a well wrangled cornucopia of flavours – the cooling yoghurt, crispy sev, potatoes and chickpeas. If you were civilised, like Liz, you finished one in two bites. Because I was eating with somebody civilised, so did I.
“These are like the Mowgli ones, but slightly smaller. But that really works, because it makes them so much easier to eat. And they’re not messy at all.”
I agreed with that – I’ve had similar dishes at the likes of Bhel Puri House where the challenge, Mission Impossible style, is to eat them before they disintegrate.
“And even the presentation here is quite considered. You don’t see edible flowers on dishes at many Indian restaurants in Reading.”
My selection from the starters was the thing that intrigued me most. I wasn’t sure what to make of kaleji poppers, deep fried chicken livers in a crispy coating, but what turned up was a real delight. It was, I suppose, as close to something like chilli chicken as I got that night, but having little crispy nuggets of chicken liver in a sticky, fiery sauce was such a good idea that I’m surprised I’d never encountered it before.
There was a lot that could have gone wrong with this dish – make a mistake and the texture of the livers would be positively unpleasant – but for me it was a resounding success. “My first bit of chicken liver was just too crunchy” said Liz, “but that was the only one.”
Last of all, another dish I would never have chosen myself and a really gorgeous surprise. Bhindi fries came as a moreish take on the likes of zucchini fritti, beautiful little strips of okra coated in gram flour and fried to rustling. The only way to eat these was with your fingers, and the fact that they had a little lurking heat sealed the deal: I loved them.
I started out thinking it might have been nice if they’d come with some kind of chutney for dipping, but ended thinking they were just dandy as they were. But Liz had an even better idea.
“These would be perfect to share with a glass of wine while you make up your mind what to order. If I come back here with my Calcot friends, I’d definitely do that.”
“They should have them on a separate snacks or nibbles section, to encourage people to do that.”
Things boded well, and as we swapped anecdotes and had a good old gossip about Reading life, the pluses and minuses of leaving X and whether every town had its own equivalent of Reading Elvis, I found myself positively enthused about what was to come. Could the main courses keep up the momentum?
The answer was, mostly, that they could. Still dead set not to order what I always ordered, I went for the special that night which had been sold brilliantly by the owner. I’ve never had a scallop curry before, and this one came in a veritable sea of sauce, the comfort of coconut offset nicely with the sharp-sour quality of tamarind. It was interesting, which isn’t the double-edged compliment it might sound, and I enjoyed it a great deal: the scallops, cut into sweet slices, went better than I might have expected.
That it wasn’t perfect was no bad thing, but it just highlighted that The Coriander Club could be even better. I thought the scallops were ever so slightly overdone, but also serving the curry in such a wide, shallow dish felt unnecessarily faffy. It meant you didn’t get the full benefit of the sauce, and that spooning it onto the rice was more involved and less rewarding than it could have been. And by this point the edible flowers on everything was right on the line between accent and affectation. The Coriander Club understood a lot about flavour, but they didn’t totally grasp that less was sometimes more.
I felt like the same weaknesses came out in Liz’s main course, shahi paneer kofta. This was a couple of kofta made from paneer and potato and again, for me, the presentation was a little fiddly – two kofta, rising out of the sauce like a pair of sunburned knees, ringed with concentric squiggles of yoghurt. Again, I thought a more unpretentious plating would have emphasised the good things.
But maybe that’s just me being me, because Liz – like a normal person – was too busy concentrating on the good things. “This is great” she said, “and I can’t believe how light it is. You should try some.” I did, and Liz was spot on – when you think of everything that went into those koftas it screamed stodge, so there was a real deftness about the execution.
The owner had cannily suggested we might want another vegetarian dish as a side, and it’s to her credit that this felt like rounding out the meal rather than upselling: she had that kind of charisma. We picked the aloo baingaan sabji – a baby aubergine and potato curry – on her recommendation and it was very well chosen by her. A drier curry, to contrast with the other dishes we’d both ordered. Sticky cubes of aubergine and floury potato, in a masala that packed more heat than anything else we’d eaten.
I would never normally order aubergine – though I might make an exception for Clay’s baby aubergine masterpiece – and it takes some doing to get me to order a vegetarian main. And yet I really loved this dish, another great advert for stepping outside your comfort zone and accepting that, even if only sometimes, other people knew a lot better than you did.
I haven’t really mentioned our sides, and I didn’t photograph them, but they were fairly middle of the road. Liz was a little disappointed by the coriander naan – “I wanted that to be absolutely honking of coriander”, she told me later. And I could see where she was coming from: the clue’s in the name after all. If you didn’t like coriander, why would you eat there at all?
By this time, with all our eating and gassing the other punters had left, and we got talking to the owner. She’d done such a good job looking after us that Liz briefly wondered if she’d figured out the nature of our visit, but I like to think she would have been the same with any and every table. She told us they’d opened in December, and that things were going well. She did indeed run the Avenue Deli as well – she was wearing an Avenue Deli branded top that night – but was passionate about making The Coriander Club an outpost for authentic Punjabi cuisine.
“We don’t just want to be another curry house” she said, and I thought that, nine months in, she was making more than a decent fist of that. She said that they were already getting customers from the likes of Camberley, and even from as far afield as South Africa. And I thought that I could understand that, and admired her mission and how committed she was to it. By this point Liz and I had both checked the Reading Buses app, realised we were dangerously close to being stranded here on the edge of Reading and I had failed to rustle up a taxi. “I’d offer to give you a lift, but Langley Hill is closed” said the owner, and I believed her. Our bill, all told, came to eighty-seven pounds, not including tip.
“What really impressed me” said Liz as we sat in the bus shelter waiting for a 26 back into town, “was how every sauce was different. All the dishes were distinct, and I really liked that.”
I thought about it, and thought that she was spot on. I didn’t feel like components were reused between dishes – well, apart from those edible flowers – and that made their menu, all five pages of it, even more quietly convincing.
“So what happens now, in terms of writing the review. How do you do it?”
“Well, I’ll make notes on my phone pretty soon – having the pictures really helps. And normally I try to sit down and do it the next night when it’s fresh, but I can’t this week because I’m out for my friend’s birthday tomorrow. Sometimes I’ll write some of it in Notes on my phone on the way to and from work. But when I sit down and type it all out, it depends what the place was like. If I loved it, it’s easy. If it was awful it’s even easier, though you have to avoid punching down. But the worst ones are when they’re meh. Those are a slog to write, and you wonder whether they’re a slog to read.”
Anyway, I am writing this on a Thursday night, and I’m delighted to say that it’s been a breeze writing this one. I enjoyed so much of what I ate, I loved the room, the owner is quite brilliant and the incongruity of The Coriander Club, slap bang on the perimeter of Reading, runs the risk of making nowhere special into something special. There are things I think they can improve – mostly around presentation and unnecessary fiddliness – but it’s a place that gets so much right that you barely notice the things that are slightly awry.
I think they could have an interesting future ahead of them and, regardless of whether they get more customers from Camberley or South Africa, they deserve a lot more from Reading. Fingers crossed they get them, because it feels like they have that rare combination of spirit and veracity that the likes of Masakali and Bombay Brothers are still trying, unsuccessfully, to fake. And best of all, now that Calcot has a restaurant that’s genuinely worth visiting, it can finally join the club.
The Coriander Club – 7.9
98 Royal Avenue, Calcot, RG31 4UT
0118 3271211
Edible Reading 