Tag: The Lyndhurst

Pub review: The Bell, Waltham St Lawrence

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews, Uncategorized2 Comments

This week’s review hasn’t quite gone according to plan. Originally I was going to review The Lyndhurst, which came under new management back in May. It’s fair to say that it’s had a chequered time since then, with the new landlords complaining vociferously to the Reading Chronicle, more than once, about what they said were false claims that they planned to turn the place into a sports bar.

The way they refuted that was interesting, I thought. We’re just installing a fruit machine, just like every other pub, they said. We’re just putting in a jukebox, like every other pub. Nuts, really. They’d replaced the managers of the best food pub Reading had ever seen, and their mission was to be just like everybody else. They missed the obvious point: if you’re just like everybody else, why should we drink at yours?

Anyway, I largely stayed out of it – because I know I could easily be seen as partial – but from their Facebook page they looked a lot like a sports bar to me. During Euro 2024 it was all badly generated AI images of three lions wearing England shirts and drinking pints of lager in a generic pub, or one especially tasteless – and arguably xenophobic – picture of a lion mauling a bull to coincide with the England-Spain match. But I’m probably just a woke snowflake, because I also winced when the pub described the rumours flying around as “Chinese whispers”.

They then decided to do food, so they put a menu up on Facebook and a few people – not me, I should add – were critical of it. “Please keep your comments to yourself” the pub said. Then they closed for nearly a week, not the first time they’d shut at very short notice. As previously, they blamed having work carried out, but it looked suspiciously like a sulk. All very strange, and I’ve lost track of the number of people who have messaged me saying what the fuck is going on at the Lyndhurst? My reply is invariably the same: God only knows.

But then at the end of July they announced that they’d taken on a new chef, Chef Roots. Now, I’ve never had his food but I know of him by reputation – he cooked for a while at the Roebuck, and at the Three Tuns, and in lockdown he ran a street food business called Pattie N’ Pulled which had its fans. I thought this was a very smart move by the new management – take on a known chef and try to recapture your reputation as a food pub. It all sounded very promising.

I was even prepared to overlook just how weird the menu the pub put out was. If anything in it was correct it was by accident, and every time you looked you spotted a different clanger. Some items were in a completely different font for no particular reason. The pricing was random – £11.96 here, £24.97 there, £4.60 somewhere else. And the spelling mistakes – oh my goodness. Buttet milk chicken, paremsan fries, oniom rings, triple cooled chips. It was all a bit Officer Crabtree.

So once I found out that Chef Roots was cooking at the Lyndhurst I was interested in going back, and I had a volunteer to come with me. That was none other than Matt, who made the very wise decision of proposing to my sister in law recently, which means he’s as good as family. So we agreed a date, when I was back from holiday. I was looking forward to it.

Then it all went tits up when I discovered that Chef Roots had barely lasted a week before moving on from the Lyndhurst, a development which the Lyndhurst decided not to report. And then more weirdness emanated from the pub. A recent Google review – one star, of course – was posted by a guy who was just verbally abused by the regulars as he walked past the smoking area with a friend and his dog. He put up footage from his phone which appeared to bear this out: it was a really uncomfortable watch.

And then someone posted on Reddit about the Lyndhurst’s Sunday lunch was, and she wasn’t pulling her punches. “Unseasoned. Small portions. Cold vegetables. Misleading menu. Said ‘homemade’ Yorkshire puddings and when I inquired about allergens the waitress brought out a frozen bag of Aldi’s own Yorkshire pudding” she said. “Actually speechless at how bad the food was.”

So I sent Matt a WhatsApp: Looks like we won’t be reviewing the Lyndhurst, the chef has already sacked it off. And Matt replied. Anywhere else we can review? Well, I can ride shotgun while you do it. And that’s when I thought of the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, a cosy pub I had loved when I first reviewed it nine years ago. I’d been back since, but not for a long time, and it felt ripe for a revisit. So this week Matt picked me up and we headed off down the A4 in search of dinner. It was the first time I’ve ever been chauffeured to a review in a Porsche, and I very quickly decided that I could get used to it.

Much what I said when I visited the Bell in 2015 is equally true today, on face value at least: Waltham St Lawrence is still a pretty village and the pub is the jewel in its crown. It’s almost the platonic ideal of a village pub, and you got a whiff of woodsmoke as you walked in. But the one thing that was different was a slight change of the guard – back then it was run by twin brothers Iain and Scott Ganson, but last year Iain left to become the new head chef at Thames Lido. So was it business as usual at the Bell, or had things changed?

Paying it a visit on a Tuesday night it was almost empty with just a few regulars at the bar. “You can sit anywhere you like” said the chap after I told him we had a reservation, and although the front room was tempting we decided to go for the dining room, a less casual space up some stairs. Even so, that was stripped back and neutral – I seem to remember on a previous visit that there was feature wallpaper of some kind, but instead it was a calm, tasteful room. We were the only people in it, which gave my dinner date with my future brother-in-law a strangely intimate feel, like they’d opened just for us.

Still, we both enjoyed getting a word in edgeways for a change. I love my in-laws dearly, but the men in the family are like the men in Sex And The City: you might enjoy it when they crop up, but everybody knows they aren’t the feature attraction. It’s all about the women, one-upping one another with their increasingly funny stories, and the best thing you can do is enjoy the ride (or, if you’re my father-in-law, tidy up after everybody and/or hide in the garage). So here Matt and I were, talking for a whole evening in some strange inversion of the Bechdel Test.

The menu the night we visited was decidedly compact: four starters, three mains (one meat, one fish, one vegetarian) and three desserts. I seemed to remember from past experience that there used to be more on offer, and although I may have been wrong the evidence suggested we’d been unlucky that night: a picture on Instagram later in the week showed an additional main course that would have expanded the options a little. But no matter, although the menu was almost narrow enough to be constricting we both found things to order. Starters hovered around a tenner, mains were scattered more widely around the twenty pound mark.

But first, drink – and the first indication of interesting things at the Bell. They won Reading CAMRA Cider Pub Of The Year this year, and it showed, with a blackboard listing plenty of interesting choices including Tilehurst’s Seven Trees Cider. And the wine list was full of temptation, all of it available by the glass. I couldn’t choose between a couple and Ganson, who was behind the bar that night, kindly let me try some of each (even if the locals heckled him, saying that this was uncharacteristic generosity for a Scot). He even didn’t complain when I decided to go for a third instead, although they were all gorgeous, and let me try some of that. It was a Priorat, from Catalunya – Priorat is always worth trying, if you find it on a list – and I thought it was terrific at ten pounds a glass.

I seem to remember years ago having a conversation with the Bell on Twitter saying that more places should bring back the 125ml glass of wine, or the 250ml carafe. Well, although they do serve 125ml glasses they’ve gone one step further by using a Coravin for seemingly all of the bottles on the list. “It means we can offer about forty wines by the glass” said Ganson, which for me would almost be reason enough to visit the Bell on its own, especially if you have a nice chap driving you home in a Porsche.

“I’d also like a pint of bitter shandy please, which bitter do you recommend?”

“Hoppit” said Ganson without hesitation, and so Matt got a shandy made with Loddon’s finest, which he seemed to like.

Matt had the best of the starters, and I didn’t realise until much later that it was essentially the starter I’d ordered and enjoyed nine years ago. A slab of pigeon terrine came bound in bacon, served with a couple of beautifully burnished slices of griddled toast and – always the clincher – a trio of cornichons. Matt enjoyed this, but because his manners were impeccable he let me try some and I thought it was knockout – slightly gamey, the texture spot on, no hint of bounce or jelly to be seen. Matt also let me have all of his cornichons, but I think that was because he didn’t like them, rather than down to his impeccable manners.

I did less well, but only by a whisper. My selection of charcuterie from Cotswold-based Salt Pig had nearly everything you could hope for, and most of it was very enjoyable. Coarse rounds of chorizo, fatty ribbons of pancetta, superb pork collar. Only the spiced pork loin underwhelmed, and although I had enough cornichons, that was partly because I’d inherited Matt’s.

But it felt like something was missing, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I think a little griddled toast would have lifted this, or even some caperberries, or even more cornichons (although more cornichons, like more cowbell, is just my answer to many of life’s problems). WIthout that, it felt a little unbalanced. Looking back at the Bell’s menu I saw that it included something I’d missed, whipped lardo – also from Salt Pig, I presume – on toast. I wish I’d noticed that, because it would have been delicious. Especially if it came with cornichons.

By this point I was on to a second glass of wine. Ganson had suggested another Spanish red, this time from Bierzo, a single varietal Mencia, and it was every bit the equal of the Priorat. I found myself thinking that even though the same time last week I’d been in Granada, in thirty degree heat, sitting outside a bar enjoying cold beer and tapas there were consolations to autumn – red wine, woodsmoke and cosy pubs not least. Besides, Strictly was back on the telly.

My main course bridged the gap between my week in Andalusia and the increasingly autumnal feel of things back home. I rarely order risotto, and I almost never make it myself – who has the time to stand at a stove for thirty minutes? – but the Bell’s version was made with Isle Of Wight tomatoes and Spenwood, and better British ingredients are hard to imagine. I had been spoiled by the exceptional tomatoes you get on the continent, but the ones that come out of the Isle Of Wight are absolutely the next best thing.

And it was mollifying comfort on a plate, a rich dish of sticky, nutty rice, topped with tomatoes that had been roasted and slightly dried, liberally dusted with one of my favourite cheeses which just so happens to be made down the road in Spencer’s Wood, the closest thing Blighty gets to Parmesan. On paper, this was the perfect thing to make you happier about the nights drawing in and being able to see your breath in the air – a gentle but insistent bear hug of a dish.

It was almost perfect, but not quite. I would have liked it to have been a little more seasoned, for a bit more salt to balance out the sweetness of the tomatoes. But I only decided that in hindsight, looking at a completely denuded plate, and hindsight is always a wonderful thing. I can’t remember the last time I ordered a risotto in a restaurant, but I won’t be able to say that next time I do.

Matt chose the Bambi Burger, a dish which has been on the Bell’s menu every single time I’ve visited. He wasn’t sure about it, which is how Matt discovered that he maybe wasn’t wild about venison. That meant I got to try a fair amount of it, and for what it’s worth I really loved it. Venison is a challenging meat to make burgers with, on account of it being so lean and lacking in fat, so to make something so delicious that didn’t fall into the trap of being dry and crumbly was no mean feat.

And again, hats off to the Bell for having a decent, sturdy bun and griddling it to give it the extra heft it needed. If I came back to the Bell, and hopefully I will before too long, I would make a beeline for this. The skinny chips, I suspect, were bought in: it might have been nice to have something chunkier, but they did the job.

Both of us felt like we had permission to order dessert: Matt because his main hadn’t hit the spot and me because mine had. We both gravitated towards the sticky toffee pudding – not something I’d normally order, but as the other two choices were cheese and oatcakes or an affogato I did feel my hand had been forced. I was sorry not to see the beer ice cream the Bell always used to make, which for me was one of the most intriguing and idiosyncratic things they did, but you can’t win them all.

It’s another nice echo of my original visit, because sticky toffee pudding was on the table then too. I think that the Bell has spent the last nine years perfecting it, because I loved this. It was a deep, dense delight, swathed in a cracking toffee sauce and crowned with a sphere of glossy ice cream – no clotted cream or the like here – and it made me wonder how many great sticky toffee puddings I might have missed out on over the years because of my vague prejudice against hot desserts. It was fantastic, and it helped, as the whole evening had, make me feel a little less sad about the changing of the seasons.

I could have stayed and drunk wine and chatted away until they chucked us out. But I’m not sure how much fun that would have been for Matt, who was on the Diet Coke by then. Besides, he had to be in London for work the next day so I settled up and we were on our way. Our dinner – three courses and two drinks apiece – came to ninety-six pounds, not including tip, which I thought was as good value as anything is these days in 2024. We shared trade secrets on how to manage our in-laws all the way home, and if any of them happen to be reading this I absolutely promise I’m kidding.

I was so happy to find the Bell still close to its best self, and if I’d have liked a little more breadth to the menu that was easily outweighed by the pluses – the service, that beautiful spot, the woodsmoke and the exceptional range of wine and cider. For many years, when people have asked me where they could have dinner a little drive away from Reading, the Bell has made my list – a list which shrunk when the Miller Of Mansfield closed, grew when I so enjoyed The Plough earlier in the year.

But we were getting to the point where I was recommending the Bell without having any recent experience to go on, and I felt like a fraud doing that. I’m very happy to have sorted that, and pleased that I can renew my endorsement. That I had a properly agreeable evening and a ride in a Porsche just added to my joy. Reading may have one fewer pub that does really great food and makes you feel welcome. But there are consolations to be found elsewhere, just as there are with the end of summer.

The Bell – 8.0
The Street, Waltham St Lawrence, RG10 0JJ
0118 9341788

https://thebellwalthamstlawrence.co.uk

The Lyndhurst

On By ediblereadingIn None of the above6 Comments

I don’t normally write reviews that are of places that have closed. It has that same whiff of smugness as reviewing drinks nobody can buy or plays that have finished their run: I’m going to make you feel bad about what you missed, they seem to say. My life is better than yours. It’s all very “if you know, you know” – another phrase I hate – only more “if you didn’t know, now you never will”.

But I’m making an exception to write about the Lyndhurst, which closed under the management of Dishon Vas and Sheldon Fernandes a couple of weeks ago, one final time. Because I don’t think anywhere that’s closed in Reading in all the time I’ve lived here – not the 3Bs, not Dolce Vita, not Mya Lacarte or the Grumpy Goat – has had this kind of effect on me, and I feel like trying to explain why. So I suppose this is for anyone who has been to the Lyndhurst in the last five years, which I expect might include a decent proportion of the people who read my blog.

Part of this is because I am feeling sentimental: as anyone who follows me on social media will know, because I haven’t stopped banging on about it, I got married a couple of Fridays ago. It was simply a perfect day. The sun shone for the first time in ages, the ceremony room in the Town Hall was serene and calm, my dear friend Jerry gave the most beautiful reading, and when I kissed my brand new bride the crowd packed into that room made a disproportionate amount of gleeful noise.

We turned round and there were our favourite people, the biggest small congregation you’ve ever seen in your life. My parents, my step-parents, my brother, his wife and his children. My boisterous, fantastic in-laws. Friends I had known for thirty or forty years, and people that had known my wife since she was at school. Newer friends, and friends who had been there since the very start of my relationship with Zoë. The friend that saved my life, time and again, in the darkest moments of my divorce. There was nothing but love and joy in that beautiful room.

A lot of the rest was a daze. An eruption of confetti on Blagrave Street, standing in a pack under the Maiwand Lion as our photographer corraled and marshalled us into groups, snapping and cajoling. Sipping a crisp glass of bubbly from nearby Veeno, being congratulated by passers-by. Everyone congratulates newlyweds, I’ve found: it’s a moving, life-affirming thing. A Reading Buses driver stopping us in the park to tell us it brought back memories of his own wedding – also in the Town Hall, also photographs in Forbury Gardens.

My wife, grinning and clutching her beautiful bouquet, as happy as I was. Wandering round the Forbury desperately seeking shade, finding spots for photos. “Look into Zoë’s eyes” said the photographer, such easy and enjoyable instructions to follow. And then, at the end of all that, all of us marching to Friar Street to hop on a vintage Reading bus, driven by Tim Wale, the legend behind Tutts Clump cider. Reading institution Paul King turned up out of nowhere and took pictures before all of us, laughing and merry, were driven away to the venue for our celebration.

When I told people I was getting married a lot of people – especially on social media – said “no pressure for your venue, right?” or “I bet the food will have to be really good”. But I never worried about it, because my celebration was being hosted by the Lyndhurst. Of all the Is to dot and Ts to cross in the run up to the big day, of all the things that blindsided us on the home stretch, I never worried once about the food. The Lyndhurst was doing it: that was all I needed to know.

I was at the Lyndhurst for their first night under new ownership, back in the summer of 2019. I’d really liked the previous management and their clever, precise food, and when they left – because the pubco hiked the rent, I imagine – I wasn’t entirely sure the new landlords would be able to match that standard. I remember there being a crowd on the first night, all the regulars happy that their community pub was open again, and the place was packed and chaotic.

There was a rabbit in the headlights feel about it, and I had my gin and tonic with slight misgivings and no idea that I was spending my first evening in what would prove to be one of my favourite places on earth. I remember they put a sign up that suggested they were only serving dinner on Friday and Saturday nights, and I called it out on Twitter. Some random local online prat had a go at me for pointing it out, but the pub just said Thanks for letting us know, we’ll change it.

I didn’t know then that that was their style all over – humble, apologetic, unfailingly polite and always, always getting shit done. The sign got changed. And then I went back to try the food, and had quite the wake-up call. A beautiful Scotch egg, a very accomplished plate of pork belly, pig’s cheek and black pudding bonbons and perhaps most significantly, a bowl of chilli nachos, everything made from scratch, from the tortillas to the guacamole. These people really knew what they were doing, I realised.

The menu changed many, many times over the next five years. They even refreshed it in April, with barely a month remaining, because they never stopped tweaking and improving. But those nachos, which over time became emblematic of the Lyndhurst, never came off the menu, not once.

I read an article in the Guardian in the run-up to my wedding about how much weddings cost these days: one couple, American needless to say, spent five thousand dollars alone on their rehearsal dinner. I liked to joke as my wedding approached that Zoë and I had taken a less conventional approach to rehearsal dinners by instead going to the Lyndhurst pretty much every week for years. And for that matter, I also had a few rehearsals of the Lyndhurst’s mass catering skills: three readers’ lunches, each one more assured, if anything, than the last.

And all that was lovely in principle, but in practice it made decisions about the menu almost impossible. Looking back through the photos on my and Zoë’s phone, of every dish captured at the bottom of Watlington Street over the course of nearly five years, made it even more difficult. So many beautiful plates of food, from which to select just nine. How could you possibly choose?

But of course it also brought back so many happy memories. Braised oxtail, wrapped up in cabbage, enjoyed when they’d barely been open a month. Saddle of rabbit, stuffed with liver and rolled in Parma ham, the equal of anything you could get in Bologna. Their crispy-skinned supreme of chicken with soft leeks and the shiniest, most comforting morel sauce. The legendary – and enormous – porchetta sandwich which graced their menu in the spring of 2021. Their confit duck poutine, which occupied an exalted place on the menu, and in my affections, around the same time.

Even towards the end new classics took their place, making life even more difficult. The monkfish tacos, which became one of the Lyndhurst’s signature dishes – so delicious, so generous, so very difficult to roll up and eat, so crammed were they with perfectly executed monkfish. The Korean chicken thigh burger, seemingly invented to make it impossible for me to cook my own dinner ever again on a Monday. Or perhaps best of all, the pork belly with plums and fried onions, in a deep, glossy sauce redolent of hoi sin. It only arrived on the menu around the start of this year, but even so I lost track of the number of times I ordered it. Even now, writing this and thinking about it I get a pang of sadness that I won’t get to eat that dish again.

I’ve made a point of trying to take almost everyone I know to the Lyndhurst at some time or another over the last five years. My family, local friends, friends from out of town, colleagues on one occasion, even my brother on his last trip to the U.K. from the other side of the world (he insisted on trying the monkfish with Bombay potatoes, and left in raptures). So I had done my level best to make sure as many people as possible at the wedding already knew how good the Lyndhurst’s food was.

But my new in-laws had never been there, and nor had some of the other wedding guests, and I couldn’t help but feel happy and proud of the pub as the canapés came round. Little cones packed with tuna, crowned with a dab of mango. Black pudding croquettes which seemed super-dense, as if they were made of more black pudding than their shell could contain: my father-in-law, not always an easy man to please with food, devoured quite a lot. Little choux buns filled with mushroom, for the vegetarians, and polenta squares topped with butternut squash, for the vegans.

And a treat I first sampled at a reader’s lunch the previous year, beetroot macarons, sweet yet salty, with a judiciously chosen core of goats cheese. “Holy shit”, my Canadian cousin Luke said to me later. “I think those might be the best things I’ve ever tasted.” And Luke eats out a lot.

I think some of our guests kept expecting the canapés to run out, because they didn’t know the Lyndhurst, but wave after wave passed through the room: no need to stand near the kitchen and grab them before they were demolished by others. No need to worry about that, or anything else. The Lyndhurst, their brilliant, well-oiled team, were completely in control. Why on earth would I worry?

The Lyndhurst opened in 2019, but within nine months or so they were plunged into the awful event we all now remember as 2020. Everywhere closed, from March to July, and when places reopened they faced a nervy, uncertain future. Many people, me included, were reluctant to go out. And then of course there was the superspreading folly of Eat Out To Help Out, followed by the many-tiered madness of various restrictions, all of which fell far short of what was really required.

I sometimes wonder how Sheldon and Dishon must have felt, celebrating the end of their first year in charge not knowing whether there would be a second. But if they ever lost hope it never showed, and although I liked the Lyndhurst a lot in 2019, it was in lockdown that I came to love them; I am lucky enough to live round the corner from the pub, and they carried on delivering to me, to my doorstep, throughout the winter of 2020.

It became a wonderful, comforting Saturday night ritual – place the order, transfer the money and then just as Strictly was about to begin there would be a knock at the door and there was Piotr holding a bag for us. If there were specials on we would invariably order them, but there was always a treat of some kind. I remember the asparagus in batter with romesco sauce, one of the best snacks of all time. I remember first the pork and then the lamb tacos, although any time the Lyndhurst did tacos was a time to cherish. I remember the beer can chicken, and the phenomenal ancho chile relish: I think I ended up with a jar of it in the fridge at one point, and used it on everything.

And I remember – how could I not? – the occasions when they had skate wing on. Classically cooked, golden and bathed in beurre noisette, scattered with capers and croutons, just waiting to be clumsily decanted on a plate and scoffed, with the simple joy of flipping the wing over at the halfway point. It might have been movie week on Strictly, or perhaps Halloween week or Blackpool week. But it was always, always Lyndhurst week.

One story I never told at the time, although I suppose I can now that Sheldon and Dishon have moved on, is that in the spring of 2021 I published a review of the Lyndhurst’s takeaway menu. I loved nearly everything I tried, but I did express a few reservations about a dish they’d just added to the menu, a chicken tikka naanza. Later that afternoon I got a message from them on Twitter: they’d been thinking about the feedback and they’d made a few tweaks as a result. Would I mind if they dropped one over so I could let them know what I thought?

Naturally I said yes, and just after five there was that knock at the door again. I split it in half and took half of it up to Zoë, who was in the spare room finishing her last conference call of the day. They’d pretty much made every change I’d suggested in the review and I know it’s me saying this, but it was damn near perfect.

One dish that the Lyndhurst never needed to change, not from day one, was their karaage chicken. I first had it in the spring of 2021 and to this day, however hard I’ve looked – and trust me, I’ve looked hard – I’ve never found a karaage anywhere else that matched it. It was my starter of choice, my first starter as a married man, and although it wasn’t the single best choice I had made that day it could well have been the second.

Although I was a takeaway customer of the Lyndhurst for quite some time, even after lockdowns eased and a lot of people went back into the pubs and restaurants, I wasn’t their last takeaway customer. That honour belonged to a chap at my office, who loves their curry night. He lives round the corner from the pub too, but with small kids he couldn’t eat in, much as he might have wanted to. So without fail every Thursday he would check Instagram, find out what the three curries on offer were, place his order and then go and collect it that evening.

Often I would be eating in and I would see him, we’d acknowledge each other, compare notes on which curry we were going for. I think he had the pint of beer that came with the curry – an outrageous bargain for twelve pounds, all in – but I can’t remember. But every week he was there, getting his curries, taking them. home. And every week the Lyndhurst was there, letting him: most other places would have said that the pandemic was over and they didn’t do that kind of thing any more, but not the Lyndhurst. Forget Eat Out To Help Out, they were helping him to stay home.

The last night that the Lyndhurst traded was a Thursday night, curry night. I wasn’t there because it was the night before my wedding: my fiancée (for one last night) and I went to London Street Brasserie, on the early bird set menu special, and had our first carbs and calories for quite some time. I drank English fizz and ate LSB’s excellent fish and chips, although I couldn’t finish the chips. So I didn’t make it to the Lyndhurst, but I’m pretty sure I know one person who did, one final time, for his family’s habitual takeaway.

And yes, what that also means is that my wedding day was the last day that the Lyndhurst was sort-of, kind-of open. I’d known that they were still trying to agree the rent with the pubco, and I knew that those negotiations didn’t look like they would end happily, but the Lyndhurst told me that one way or the other they would cater our wedding. The fact that they did means more to me than you can imagine, and it really felt like they were celebrating with us too. The pub, and the team, were such a big part of the wedding day that it was impossible to imagine it without them.

I found it equally impossible to pick main courses for our wedding meal. In the end we went for three options, any of which would have suited me down to the ground. Mine on the day was confit duck, the skin burnished, the meat underneath slumping helpfully from the bone, with Sarladaise potatoes, a smooth parsnip purée and the jus of the gods (the Lyndhurst had told me they could easily do a more cheffy duck dish, but this was the one I wanted).

But the main I almost wish I’d had, one final time, was that monkfish – a huge tranche of it, served on a heap of those addictive Bombay potatoes, a bright herb chutney and salad on the side. My wife had that, and I just looked on in awe and envy. My brother had it too, a wonderful gastronomic connection between his first and last meals at the Lyndhurst. So did my father-in-law: he cleaned his plate.

A couple of days after the wedding, I got a message on Facebook from a reader of my blog. He wanted to tell me something about the Lyndhurst.

He said that he’d recently gone to the Royal Berks and been told that he needed to be admitted for an emergency operation. But they said that he had just enough time to grab a meal before they would take him in. And so he went to the Lyndhurst, not far from RBH, and it just so happened that he was there in the week before they closed, eating there – just like I did – one final time. “It was a really meaningful experience” he said, “and I wouldn’t have done it without your review.”

It made me think of all the evenings that pub had made, and the fact that they probably didn’t know the half of it. Just for me alone, they had filled a very special place in my life for five years, in a way I’m not sure I’ve managed to explain. Don’t fancy cooking? Go to the Lyndhurst. Celebrating the start of a holiday? Dinner at the Lyndhurst. Back from holidays and feeling blue? The Lyndhurst it is. Finishing work at the same time as your other half, meeting in town and thinking “isn’t it burger night on Mondays?” Off to the Lyndhurst. Your brother’s last night in the country? Go on then.

But my reader’s story made me think of something else too. December 2021, when after over eighteen months on the run, playing it safe, not going into shops, not eating in restaurants, working from home, only socialising outdoors, waiting for the vaccine and the second vaccine and with the booster in touching distance, Zoë tested positive for Covid. And then she too spent time in the Berks, four fraught nights, and when she came out, after I met her outside the ward and slowly took her home, the Lyndhurst delivered me a simple order that night – just two beefburgers and chips. That was the beginning of the road to recovery, and one of my most meaningful experiences.

There was no way, though, that the beefburger was going to feature on the wedding menu. The Lyndhurst’s chocolate mousse, though, was another story. The first time it was on their menu, the first time we ordered and ate it, Zoë had that look in her eye. “We’re having that at our fucking wedding” she said. And so we did.

The rest of the evening was a riot – of my friend James’ home-brewed beer, of gin and tonic, of conversations with old friends out on the Lyndhurst’s patio. The heat and sun of the day had faded, the crowd had slightly thinned and everyone was sitting outside, chatting and mingling. My stepmother caught up with my schoolfriends, who she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. We took a last family photo before my brother and my sister-in-law headed off, their next flight a day away.

And there was more food – a buffet, of more food than I could conceive of eating. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d had more room for the charcuterie, for the chicken pakora, for every manner of bite-sized savoury delight. And because I’d asked them to, the Lyndhurst did a slider of their legendary Korean chicken burger, the dish they’d introduced in February which had made losing weight in the run-up to the wedding so challenging. I made sure I had one of those. A few people did: my mother-in-law took one home and had it the following morning for breakfast.

The next morning, town seemed to be an even more beautiful place than usual. I went and got a couple of coffees from C.U.P. to take them to our hotel, and the man behind the counter shook my hand and congratulated me. I told the hotel receptionist that my wife would be checking us out shortly – the first time I said “my wife”, the first of many. And we got to the Lyndhurst to take down the decorations, to find that the process of getting the pub ready to hand back was already taking place. A man was painting woodwork, the party was over.

Well, almost over. On the Saturday night there was a little farewell party for the pub and Zoë and I went in to say one last goodbye. Many of the regulars were there, faces I recognised from curry nights, or burger nights, or Friday nights. So many different stories intersecting with the pub the way mine had, so many different people who would miss Sheldon, Dishon and the team every bit as much as I would. When people talk about how pubs can be community hubs, they never mention how difficult it actually is to do, to manage that and still be inclusive, not some gammon pubman’s boys’ club. But the Lyndhurst did it.

And all the staff were there relaxing and chatting. Sheldon and Dishon, too, and I realised that I’d rarely seen them in the same place at once. Usually Dishon was running the front of house, Sheldon tucked away in the kitchen. But here they both were, casually dressed, laughing and, I hope, feeling the love. Dishon is moving back to Northamptonshire to be with his family, with a baby on the way. Sheldon told me he was looking forward to a break, to visiting his family in Mumbai, and after that who knows? Both of them looked like they were ready for a long rest, but proud of what they’d achieved. They should be.

I may have rarely seen Sheldon and Dishon together, but one of my favourite pictures is of the two of them, taken by a chap called Antonio, a local Instagrammer and neighbour who also loves the pub. It captures a moment, during service, of the two of them putting their heads together, of the front of house and kitchen meeting right at the point where the former ends and the latter begins. It captures something of the wonderful partnership that Reading was lucky to enjoy and, for me, something of what made the pub so magical. Neither of them had run a pub before that fateful day in the summer of 2019. Well, what a debut.

(Photo by @simple_living_in_berkshire)

2024 is shaping up to be a year of changes. I got married, the Lyndhurst did a beautiful job of hosting our celebration and now they have moved on. Things happen quickly, and last Friday the Lyndhurst reopened under new management, a lady who previously ran a pub in Theale. There’s talk of it being more of a sports bar than it was in previous incarnations; locals have wished her well, and I’m sure they will all be in to check it out. I will too, and I’m conscious that when Sheldon and Dishon took the pub over I would have been the first to say they had big shoes to fill.

But fill them they did, and life moves on. And now it’s time for me and Zoë to move on, too: next month we’ll be leaving the Village, where I’ve lived so happily for seven years. So it wasn’t just greeting married life, or bidding farewell to the Lyndhurst, but the start of a period of loving living here, with all its quirks, but knowing that it will come to an end.

Everything does eventually, I suppose, but it’s important to recognise how good things are while you’re living them, rather than only later when you look back. But I will always remember the Village, and those five halcyon years when it had the best village pub anybody could hope for. I’ll remember the two men that made it happen, and that brilliant sunny day in May when the whole world was at its absolute best.

Takeaway review: Tortilla

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When it comes to deliveries, all dishes may be equal but some dishes are more equal than others. I got to thinking about this after last week’s disappointing meal at Dhaulagiri Kitchen, when somebody replied on Twitter and said “I guess moving to takeaway has been tough for them”. I thought that was a curious take, because all of the problems with that meal had been in the kitchen, not on the journey from the kitchen to my house: everything was packed just fine, and arrived hot enough, it just didn’t taste that special. 

It is true, though, that some dishes and cuisines lend themselves better to delivery than others. You’re on a hiding to nothing with pizza from the minute it leaves the oven, for example. And the more components you have to dish up separately, the more likely you’ll have a lukewarm plate at the end of it. With dishes where everything comes in one pot, you have a better chance that the whole thing will stay hot. This is why Kokoro is always such a good bet for delivery, and why restaurants like Zizzi and Pizza Express have set up separate brands on Deliveroo selling macaroni cheese or other pasta dishes in a tub. 

It also explains the relative popularity of sandwiches – burgers, wraps and burritos – on delivery apps, and that in turn explains why I decided to give Tortilla a try this week. Burrito restaurant Tortilla is one of those smaller chains where the blurb on the website makes it sound like a small indie business (“we’re not part of a multi-franchise nor some big soulless restaurant group”) but my cursory research suggested a slightly different picture. 

They had nearly forty branches, and had benefited from financial backing from the private equity group that controlled Yo! Sushi and from Santander – because if there’s one thing big business still seems to love, it’s the casual dining sector. Tortilla’s chairman used to run Pizza Express and had a proud track record of joining or founding hospitality businesses and then selling them off for pots of cash – more John Sykes than Jamie Oliver. So Tortilla maybe wasn’t a Taco Bell, but it certainly wasn’t a Mission Burrito either.

Tortilla was first announced as coming to Reading last February, although for obvious reasons it took a fair old while to open, not throwing its doors open until the end of October. It made the news last year, because it had to overcome objections from a neighbouring business, the dentist Reading Smiles, who were concerned about them having an alcohol licence, and about the risk of smells drifting into the dental practice. Tortilla’s response was that there was no risk of that, as almost no cooking actually took place on the premises – their beef and pork are “braised off-site”, which also enables them to open in smaller premises, like the Reading branch, without the need for extraction. 

It’s funny: this sort of thing, cooking dishes in a central kitchen, goes on throughout chain restaurants and I’m sure we’ve all eaten those kinds of meals without necessarily being aware of it. But I had to work hard not to let this prejudice me against Tortilla. After all, I had a fantastic meal when I ordered a kilo of pre-cooked rib meat from The Rib Man and heated it up on my hob at home: potentially, surely this was no different? 

And Tortilla seemed to be doing a tidy trade – every time I’d walked past the restaurant since lockdown relaxed in April the tables outside had people at them, taking part in our new national sport of gamely pretending the weather wasn’t shite. I couldn’t quite make up their mind about them on paper, so it was time to place an order with them and try to make up my mind about them in reality.

Tortilla is on all three delivery apps, although in typical fashion I only realised that once I had placed my order with Deliveroo. The menu is identical across all of them, and it largely revolves around burritos, naked burritos – that’s the contents of a burrito in a bowl, in case you have a thing against tortillas – and a few taco options. They don’t sell quesadillas or nachos for delivery, although they will sell you a DIY kit if you want to make them at home: I can’t imagine these are that popular, but life is full of surprises.

The process for ordering a burrito is remarkably like going down the line in Mission Burrito, so you have various tick boxes to pick which rice, beans, salsa and so on you want. We ordered on a Sunday evening, and they had run out of their coriander and lime rice and their guacamole, which slightly limited the options. Guacamole, incidentally, is one of the only things Tortilla makes on the premises, so it’s a particular shame they had run out. (Is it as bad as a pub running out of chips? Answers on a postcard.)

Tortilla offers the traditional fillings – carnitas, barbacoa beef and grilled chicken – along with grilled vegetables. The latter costs the same as a chicken burrito, which feels cheeky. They also serve a“vegan chilli no carne” – which has tempeh in it, although you have to go to Tortilla’s website to find that out. We ordered a couple of burritos and some tacos to share – I might have tried the tortilla chips too if they’d had any guacamole to go with them – and our meal came to just shy of thirty pounds, not including the rider tip. Tortilla’s burritos come in medium and large, with the large costing about the same as the one size offered by Mission Burrito.

Deliveries from the town centre always seem quicker and more reliable, and often come on a bike rather than in a car. This was no exception, and everything was pretty brisk: we ordered at twenty past seven, the rider was en route twenty minutes later and he took four minutes to reach our front door. When he did, he cheerfully told us that he was carrying two orders from Tortilla and so we’d have to give him our order number – that struck me as a little strange, but it hardly held things up. I wonder, if I’d been his second delivery, if I’d have been quite as happy.

Anyway, everything was hot and it was all present and correct. A number had been scrawled on one of the foil-packed burritos with a Sharpie, nothing on the other. It’s only after the meal, looking at the ticket in the bag, that I realised he had written numbers against each burrito so we could work out which was which. P for pork and B for beef might have been simpler.

This is where I also have to make a sad confession. Partly to work out which burrito was which and partly to make this review more photographically interesting, I cut my burrito in half, artfully arranged it on a plate so you could see the filling, placed it under a spotlight in the kitchen and took a picture of it. Or at least I thought I did, but looking at my camera roll it simply isn’t there. This puts a greater emphasis on my descriptive powers than any of us would like, and makes this review even less visually interesting than normal: I can only apologise. I asked for advice on Twitter, but it ranged from the impractical (courtroom style drawing please) to the sadistic (another thousand words, presumably?). I’ll spare you either option.

On to the burrito then. Mine was pulled beef with black beans, tomato rice and all the trimmings – cheese, sour cream, salsa verde, jalapeños and pickled red onions. Looking at all that, you’d have thought the biggest risk would be the flavours clashing, or being too much, but in reality the struggle was to get it to taste of anything. Really, it was almost symphonically bland. It was well packed – almost as if done by a machine, the meat firmly in the centre, so different to the haphazard arrangement of a Mission burrito – but nothing tasted of very much. 

The beef had the texture but couldn’t back it up with the taste. The red onions were still crunchy and felt like they’d had only a passing acquaintance with vinegar. If there were any jalapeños in it, they’d been picked for their inoffensiveness. The list goes on: the tomato rice had a real feeling of Bachelor’s about it, and if the salsa verde, cheese and sour cream were even in there (and having eaten it, I’m not sure they were) they added even less to proceedings than Dido Harding. Or Dido herself, for that matter. When the best case scenario is that your meal is boring because they got your order wrong, and the worst case scenario is that it’s plain boring, matters are problematic.

The carnitas burrito was a subtly different shade of meh, but meh nonetheless. I actually liked the pork more – it was saltier and just more interesting – but it had its work cut out shining in a sea of mediocrity. When I have a burrito from Mission it’s a glorious mess – it drips, it’s tricky to tackle, it’s always a challenge, but it tastes of something. You get the highs and the lows. This, by contrast, was tidy and dull, a burrito on Prozac, all the edges neatly knocked off until you barely felt anything. Maybe that was the intention, and maybe the aim is to take customers away from Taco Bell: Tortilla is better than Taco Bell, but so’s eating corrugated cardboard topped with spam.

Only the tacos showed a hint of something better. Tortilla’s chicken is grilled rather than pulled, in little pieces – I actually quite enjoyed this, although it wouldn’t be everybody’s cup of tea. But the real winner here was the salsa roja – hot and punchy and adding a dimension of flavour that had been lacking everywhere else. But even the tacos, though they were better than the burritos, weren’t better than their peers. 

The portion size was still a little underwhelming, especially when you compare it to the Lyndhurst’s outstanding chicken tinga tacos: there, you get four tacos for nine pounds, all so piled high with chicken that you can’t physically close them, and there is always plenty of guacamole. At Tortilla you get three barely-filled tacos for seven pounds fifty – I got the odd one, but mostly because Zoë had no interest in fighting me for it.

When I look at Tortilla’s footprint, I can see that it might do well in many of the locations where they’ve opened up. If it didn’t exist, it might be necessary to invent it. But this, I’m very proud to say, is Reading, and we do things differently here. We’re not like some of the identikit malls Tortilla has opened in, or the likes of Guildford; if they’d done their homework, they might have realised that Reading, of all places, doesn’t need a Tortilla. 

And although there were a couple of things at Tortilla I didn’t mind – the grilled chicken, the salsa roja, the fact that it isn’t Taco Bell – the fact remains that it will never be close to the best option for Reading residents. A few weeks ago I went to Blue Collar and tried pork and charred pineapple tacos from their new vendor El Contador, and they were miles better than anything I had from Tortilla. 

Likewise, if tacos are your thing, be they carnitas or jackfruit, you really do need to make a beeline for the Lyndhurst when they reopen. If you’re a burrito fan I think that Mission, in terms of quality, value and integrity, is streets ahead of Tortilla; writing this review has quite made me crave a Mission Burrito to remember how it’s done. And if you’re at home, and you want to order something delicious that will stay hot, cost around a tenner and make its way to your door in next to no time, a little bucket of Kokoro’s sweet chilli chicken hits the spot every time. 

I do feel a little sad for Tortilla: it’s not exactly as if they’ve done anything wrong, but they’re not quite good enough. It’s not them, you see. It’s us.

Tortilla
4-6 Broad Street, Reading, RG1 2BH
https://www.tortilla.co.uk/locations/reading/

Order via: JustEat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats

Takeaway review: The Lyndhurst

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The Lyndhurst is under new management as of June 2024 and does not currently offer takeaway. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

It’s been a month since I started publishing takeaway reviews, and the feedback has been fantastic: I really appreciate all the social media posts, comments, Retweets and emails from people who have discovered new places to order from as a result. It’s lovely, too, that so many people have told me that reading a new review every week makes life feel a tiny step closer to normality. I feel that way too, and by my reckoning we have at least another six more reviews to look forward to after this one before lockdown is eased to the extent where we can all eat outside once more, assuming that the weather – and those pesky virus variants – play ball.

I said that I would predominantly focus on restaurants I haven’t previously reviewed, which means that the last month has been one leap into the unknown after another – some very good, some terrific and some best forgotten (I actually had a very nice email from the Forbury Hotel inviting me in for a comped meal when they reopen and asking me to take my review down in return: you can probably guess how that discussion went). 

By contrast, this week’s review is a return to an old favourite, and about as close to a home fixture as you can get on this blog. The Lyndhurst, the gastropub on Watlington Street, is the closest restaurant to my house, and by my reckoning I’ve probably ordered takeaway from them more in the last year than from anywhere else. And that means that I do have to add a caveat before we get under way: the team at the Lyndhurst have hosted one of my readers’ lunches, so I am not anonymous to them. 

Even so, I’ve seen enough of their customer service, and looked enviously at enough photographs of their dishes taken by other people, to be confident that I don’t get special treatment as a paying customer. In fact, the Lyndhurst is so modest about its cooking that I fully expect them to be amazed to see themselves featured in the blog this week. It frustrates me that they never shout as much about their food as I’d like them to, so I’ll just have to do it for them.

So why the Lyndhurst this week? Their delivery has always felt a bit of a well-kept secret. They started it in the summer and they continued to offer it on the side when they reopened as a restaurant in July, although it never felt like something they promoted very strongly. I made regular use of it in the second half of last year, and had emotional reunions with many of my favourite dishes: the phenomenal chilli beef nachos, their superb katsu chicken burger, that Scotch egg. 

But the Lyndhurst never stayed still for long, so new dishes were always cropping up. There was a chicken dish with a stunning morel sauce that blew me away, another with both pork belly and presa Iberica which livened up several wintry Saturday evenings in front of Strictly and a take on poutine featuring confit duck that had instant classic written all over it. But when Reading went into Tier 4, followed swiftly by a third national lockdown, the Lyndhurst decided to take a break. January passed without a peep, and I found myself worrying about what the future held for them.

Worrying unduly, as it turned out: at the start of February the Lyndhurst announced that it was returning for takeaways. The menu looked good, too, with the old favourites still in place – burgers, fish and chips, the legendary nachos – but supplemented with brand new dishes many of which, like chicken tinga tacos, steak arepas and feijoada, showcased a new Latin American direction. 

That in itself might have been enough to prompt me to review them, but the clincher was that gradually over the last few weeks the Lyndhurst have been ramping up their delivery options. Initially the pub only delivered to the surrounding areas, but when they relaunched on the 4th February they specified that they would deliver within a mile of the pub. Last week that delivery radius was extended to two miles, which opens it up as a realistic option to people across Reading. 

I live just down the road, so I’ve been able to try their food all along, but I thought it was time to review it so everybody else could see what they might have been missing out on. Besides, that whole modesty thing (again) means that most people probably don’t know that the Lyndhurst delivers that far afield. The pub has started mentioning it, almost as if in passing, but sometimes on social media talking isn’t enough and you have to do a little more: not the hyperactive look-at-me-look-at-me style of some businesses, but at least raising your voice somewhat.

The Lyndhurst serves food on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and on Sunday lunchtimes. I booked in a delivery for Saturday evening relatively early in the week and spent a few days idly looking at the menu, trying to work out whether to go for the tried and tested or whether, in the spirit of all those leaps into the unknown, I should pick dishes I knew less well. But I didn’t finalise my order until Saturday lunchtime, because the Lyndhurst also supplements their regular menu with a small selection of specials and I wanted to wait to see what they were.

The Lyndhurst uses specials cleverly, as a way of testing dishes that may graduate to the permanent menu. Not only that, but they told me a little while back that apart from the core dishes they were thinking of changing everything on the menu on a regular basis. So technically much of the menu could class as a special, and it’s possible that by the time this review is published some or all of the dishes I ordered may have been replaced.

Even without the specials, the menu is just the right size and, cleverly, it only loosely distinguishes between starters and mains. Prices range from about eight to fourteen pounds, with most dishes hovering around the ten pound mark. You can tell, from the pricing and the dishes, which ones are technically starters, but when you’re ordering takeaway and everything comes at the same time those distinctions are less useful.  

What is helpful, though, is how smartly the menu has been put together: many of the Lyndhurst’s dishes – tacos, nachos, Korean chicken wings – make excellent sharers, which makes it a lot of fun for bigger households. It also helps – and I know this from extensive personal experience – that portions across the board are really generous. By way of illustration, and bear this in mind when you see the pictures further down, I have pretty large dinner plates. Everything the Lyndhurst dishes up, without exception, manages to make them look small.

Tempting though the specials were, I had got it into my mind that this might be one of my last chances to try some of the dishes on the main menu, so I made my selection, paid the Lyndhurst and spent the rest of my Saturday happy in the knowledge that dinner was taken care of. It arrived bang on the dot at the requested time, and the paper bag which came out of the insulated box was perfectly hot and full of goodies. Laying them out on the kitchen worktop I was struck by the effort that the Lyndhurst puts into its packaging – everything was sturdy, well thought out and recyclable, and everything held its heat superbly.

My previous experience of feijoada – a Brazilian stew with beans – was at Katesgrove’s Pau Brasil where I’d found it gelatinous, stingy and bland. Nobody would accuse the Lyndhurst’s version of any of those things – it was a meaty symphony of a dish, deep, rich and absolutely delicious. I had it shortly after they added it to the menu and at that point it felt a little bit like they’d thrown the kitchen sink at it – so many different types and cuts of meat, along with chunks of sausage that felt suspiciously close to frankfurters. But the Lyndhurst is always tweaking, revising and improving, and the version that arrived on Saturday night was an impeccable v2.0, streamlined with all the kinks ironed out.

There were big, tender pieces of meat along with several ribs, all of which shed their bounty with minimal persuasion, and many more slow-cooked, tangled strands. The black beans added bite and texture, and the crowning glory – pretty much literally – was a good slab of pork belly, soft and yielding underneath but with an exemplary salty layer of crackling on top. I think the Lyndhurst understands how to cook pork belly better than any kitchen I can think of, and the whole thing added up to an embarrassment of riches. 

It came with fluffy white rice, deep, verdant shreds of spring greens and – a good flash of colour in a predominantly brown dish – a few slices of orange. I didn’t realise these were a traditional accompaniment to feijoada but it turns out that they are, and having eaten them with the stew I could completely understand why. This dish costs thirteen pounds fifty, and at that price I somehow felt as if I was conning the Lyndhurst, even though they’re the ones who set it. If it even remotely sounds like your sort of thing, I strongly advise you to grab some before it comes off the menu, to be replaced no doubt by something equally splendid.

The other “main”, so to speak, was the steak arepas. An arepa is a Venezuelan dish made from ground maize dough, a little like a bun made of cornbread, and my previous experiences of them had been mixed to put it lightly. I’d had them in Reading a long time ago, when we briefly had a Venezuelan restaurant called Arepas Caffee, and I renewed my acquaintance last year when Pabellon brought their award-winning arepas to the Blue Collar-hosted British Street Food Awards.

I could tell that Pabellon’s were streets ahead of Arepas Caffe’s, but both times I found them hard to love – there was something fluffy, almost woolly, about the texture that I just couldn’t take to. But the Lyndhurst’s version was absolutely a case of third time lucky.

Eating my steak arepas I was struck by how often it’s the sandwich, not the filling, that lets a dish down – I’ve lost count of the amount of brioches I’ve waded through that disintegrate long before the burger is finished, or bread that simply doesn’t have the oomph to live up to what’s stuffed between the slices. No such problem with these arepa – they were robust, burnished things, perfect for holding together and with a beautiful flavour that worked alongside, rather than fought against, the filling.

And there was certainly no problem with the filling either: tons of steak, most of it tender, a couple of bits slightly chewier, with rocket, red onion and a combination of two sauces that elevated the whole shebang. One was a deep, dark spicy sauce a little like mole that gave the dish punch and heft, the other was a bright, tangy chimichurri that deftly nudged the contrast dial (little tubs of both were provided in case you wanted even more: I did).

This is again a good point to talk about the Lyndhurst’s generosity: one arepa would be a fantastic steak sandwich, accompanied by the Lyndhurst’s chips which are, for my money, the best takeaway chips I’ve ever had anywhere, all crunch and rustle and salt. You actually get two arepa for your money, and “money” in this case means the almost comically generous sum of ten pounds fifty. I said it earlier on, but I have big dinner plates: look at this picture, and see if you can see much room left on this one.

Our third dish was the chicken tikka naanza, and this felt like the only misfire of the meal. The chicken tikka itself was beautifully done, but the naan felt heavy rather than fluffy and generous though the topping of cheese was, it felt dangerously close to just being a chicken pizza. I would have liked to see a more unconventional tomato base with fire and spice in it, a lighter, crustier base, a bit less emphasis on the cheese and the chicken being given more of a chance to shine – and perhaps a raita on the side rather than the garlic mayo that came with it. The Lyndhurst’s garlic mayo is incredible, don’t get me wrong (so good you’ll wish you’d saved it for your sandwich the next day), but it felt like a misstep.

That said, it wasn’t a bad dish by any means: even the Lyndhurst’s less outstanding dishes are better than many restaurants’ star players. More to the point I think the fault probably lies with me, because it delivered absolutely what it said on the tin. I just think, with hindsight, that what it said on the tin perhaps wasn’t for me. 

Our three dishes came to just under thirty-two pounds. That doesn’t include a delivery charge – the Lyndhurst doesn’t charge for delivery, but you do have to spend over twenty-five pounds unless you’re ordering for collection. That said, you absolutely can and should tip them – which I always manage to do, usually after a decidedly Mrs Doyle exchange with them where I insist that I will and they insist that I mustn’t. Their food is crazy value, to the extent that I worry about them making a profit, so tipping is the least I can do.

And for those of you considering delivery, it’s really very easy to spend twenty-five pounds with the Lyndhurst: I see they’ve added a black pudding Scotch egg to their specials for this weekend, so just keep adding those until you’ve passed the threshold (and if you find yourself with more black pudding Scotch eggs than you can physically eat, just let me know and I’ll meet you on the street corner of your choice).

I make no bones about being so unreservedly positive about the Lyndhurst. I think we’re incredibly lucky to have such a good, inventive kitchen in town constantly experimenting and innovating, doing brilliant food which is simultaneously very unfussy but involves a huge amount of thought and hard work. They can be apologetic and reserved about their food in a way that reminds me of Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen, Reading’s other great food introverts – perfectionist, always critical of their own efforts and deeply uncomfortable with bigging themselves up. And yet on quality alone, their food – like Clay’s – shouts from the rooftops. 

It will be all I can do not to get in touch with them between finishing writing this and it being published on Friday morning to book another delivery slot for Saturday night – in fact, they single-handedly present one of the biggest obstacles to my ongoing project to keep making those leaps into the unknown, ordering from new restaurants and different kitchens, trying to unearth more gems for you, boldly going where no restaurant reviewer has been before. But that’s my problem. On the other hand, if you live within two miles of Watlington Street and you feel even remotely peckish you suddenly have one fewer problem than you did ten minutes ago: if that’s you, I truly envy you.

The Lyndhurst
88 Queens Road, Reading, RG1 4DG
0118 9503888

http://www.thelyndhurstreading.co.uk/
Order via: Direct through the pub, Thursday to Sunday

Feature: Less than a tenner

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Is it me, or did New Year used to be a bit less, well, preachy? Nowadays we’re bombarded with things you ought to do – eat vegan food for a month, or quit drinking, or drink lots of local beer to compensate for everybody who’s quitting drinking. It’s a hard enough month at the best of times – back at work, no longer allowed to eat chocolate whenever you like. Depressed by the scales, depressed by the sales not selling anything you fancy, and it’s so bloody dark all the time. The last thing anybody needs in January, if you ask me, is a sermon.

So I’m not going to do a feature about vegan food in Reading, or where you should go to try beers from our many excellent local breweries, or which tap room is the best. Instead, this piece covers the one truly universal thing about January whoever you are: it’s a long time since the last pay day, a long time until the next and everybody is on a budget. So this feature is about the best food you can get in Reading for not much money, something I hope we can all get behind.

I’ve tried to limit this to genuine stand-alone items. Obviously I could have included plenty of starters, but nobody turns up to a restaurant, orders a starter and leaves. So, ideally, every item on this list could be eaten on its own as the feature attraction, and every one costs less than ten pounds. That does tend to push it more in the direction of lunch than dinner, but there are still at least half a dozen items on this list that you could happily eat for an early evening meal.

Having already decided which dishes I’d include I posed the question on Facebook and got a raft of answers which reminded me just how much good food in Reading didn’t quite make the cut for me. I was sad not to be able to make room for anything from Blue Collar’s Peru Sabor, for anything from Perry’s, Franco Manca, Kings Grill, Bakery House or Sapana Home. That so many good places are excluded, I hope, shows how tricky making this selection was.

Anyway, I hope this comes in handy – all of them have been extensively road-tested by me, and all come highly recommended. Happy budgeting, and good luck if you are forgoing meat, booze or indeed anything else this month. Rather you than me!

1. Chilli beef nachos, the Lyndhurst

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first: no surprises here, especially after I awarded it Starter Of The Year in my end of year awards. But, as I said then, it’s substantial enough to eat in its own right, or to snack on with drinks. Anyway, I’ve said quite enough about these nachos lately, so instead I’ll quote my occasional dining companion Martin: after he had them for the first time last month he said “All I can say is now I realise everyone else is doing chilli wrong. And doing nachos wrong too. Fantastic dish!” And he knows what he’s talking about, because he’s the poor sod who had to endure the unique gastronomic experience of the doner meat nachos at German Doner Kebab. I’ll save you the effort of scrolling down: they don’t feature later on in this list. (88 Queens Road, RG1 4DG)

2. Jerk chicken, rice and peas, Sharian’s Cuisine

I’ve never been a fan of CHOW, the Friday street food market run in conjunction with Reading’s shadowy Business Improvement District. I’ve always thought it was a shame the market isn’t run by the better, more imaginative, more Reading Blue Collar Food who operate on Wednesdays in the same location. But what CHOW does have – which always generates huge queues – is Sharian’s Cuisine, and their jerk chicken, rice and peas is a thing of wonder. The chicken is spiced, charred and smoky, you get tons of it and they tell you, ever so nicely, that you’re being a wuss if you opt for the milder of the two hot sauces on offer. The weather isn’t quite conducive to eating it al fresco right now, but just you wait. (Market Place, RG1 2DE, Friday lunchtimes only)

3. Chilli paneer, Bhel Puri House

One of Reading’s iconic dishes, and one I’ve been raving about for the best part of six years. Caramelised cubes of paneer, crunchy peppers and spring onion and powerful green chillies lurking in there if you feel especially brave. I went through a phase of cheating on the chilli paneer with the saucier, stickier paneer Manchurian, I even went through a particularly depraved phase of ordering both of them at once. I dallied with the vada pav, too, but I always go back to the chilli paneer. It never lets you down. (Yield Hall Lane, RG1 2HF)

4. Ajika chicken wrap, Geo Cafe

There are many contenders for Reading’s finest sandwich: more than a few of them feature in this list. But, for my money, Geo Café’s chicken wrap is arguably the best. Georgian food tastes like nothing else you’ve ever eaten, and Georgian flavours transform this dish completely. The combination of fiery spice from the ajika and the pungency of baje (a Georgian sauce made from walnuts) is both otherworldly and habit-forming.

Chicken features quite heavily in this list, but this – made with free-range corn-fed chicken thighs from Vicar’s – is stupendous stuff. A wrap will set you back six pounds. Many would argue that Geo Café’s khachapuri, flat soda bread stuffed with an ingenious blend of three cheeses, should be in this list too, to which I can only say that making these decisions is harder than you might think. (10 Prospect Street, RG4 8JG, daytime only)

5. Curry night, The Lyndhurst

The Lyndhurst make this list twice because this is simply too good, in terms of quality and value, not to include in its own right. Every Thursday they offer a choice of three different curries, rice and a naan bread and a pint for nine pounds and ninety-nine pence (as you can see, when I went they threw in an onion bhaji in for good measure). The curries are all interesting and miles from kormas and bhunas, with dishes from Mangalore, Goa, Kerala and Sri Lanka, among others. I loved my visit last year, and it won’t be long before I’m back there – so much better than spending a similar Thursday in Wetherspoons making the tills ring and the microwave ping. (88 Queens Road, RG1 4DG, Thursday evenings only)

6. Tuna Turner, Shed

Another entry which will surprise nobody, and another dish which will probably make the cut if Reading Museum ever does an exhibition on iconic Reading food, the Tuna Turner is a truly legendary toasted sandwich and one of the very best things you can eat of a lunchtime. Superior tuna mayo, sweet slivers of red onion, plenty of cheese and jalapeños – very much the secret weapon – all conspire to be so much more than the sum of their parts. I think it’s something about the way the cheese melts, somehow seeps through the gaps in the sourdough and then forms a beautiful, glistening, caramelised crust.

If you’re there on a Friday lunchtime, and Shed is doing the Saucy Friday with scotch bonnet chilli chicken, rice and peas, macaroni cheese and coleslaw that dish, also far less than a tenner, runs the Tuna Turner pretty close. (8 Merchants Place, RG1 1DT, daytime only)

7. Lamb kothey momo, Namaste Momo

Namaste Momo is in a funny little spot on the border between Woodley and Earley, an area not blessed with its restaurants. Only one bus really runs that way from the town centre, and after a certain time it only ventures out once an hour. But, for all that faff, I highly recommend a pilgrimage there because their momo are worth it.

They are made by hand and in all their forms – in a hot, thickened chilli sauce, steamed or deep fried – they justify the journey. For me, it’s when you pan fry momo that you get that bang-on midpoint of taste and texture, the contrast of char and chew and the gorgeous filling inside. Speaking of fillings, the minced, spiced, seasoned lamb is my favourite – if it was served as a slider you could sell out any hipster gaff in the town centre. But we all know better than hipsters, don’t we, and these momo are perfect just the way they are. (392 London Road, RG6 1BA)

8. Scrambled eggs, Fidget & Bob

I’ve had some truly terrible scrambled eggs in my time. I once stayed over with a then-friend in Chichester and she microwaved eggs into grey pellets – I gamely ate the lot, because I didn’t want to seem rude, but really it could have been polystyrene and I might have had a better meal. I’ve tried to learn to make them myself, with guidance from the sainted Delia, and they come out okay but not great. The truth is that Fidget & Bob have ruined me for all other scrambled eggs. For five pounds you get three golden-yolked Beechwood Farm eggs, scrambled with probably more butter than I’m comfortable knowing about (that’s the great thing about eating in restaurants: ignorance is bliss) and certainly with more skill than I can manage.

They come with plenty of buttered seeded toast although extras – hash browns, nicely crispy back bacon, that legendary slab of sausagemeat loaf – are all available. They shouldn’t push the price over a tenner unless you’re really going loco, either due to gluttony or a hangover. Another great way to spend less than ten pounds in Fidget & Bob, every Tuesday night, is to go for their quite wonderful char siu pork. (The Piazza, Whale Avenue, RG2 0GX, Tuesday to Sunday)

9. Sweet chilli chicken, Kokoro

One of my very favourite things to eat for an early solo dinner or a particularly indulgent lunch, Kokoro’s chilli chicken is a crunchy, sticky, fiery, garlic-studded tub of one hundred per cent fun. A regular sized portion is pretty big and a large portion (which costs a princely additional pound) is absolutely gigantic: both come in comfortably below the ten pound mark.

The quality varies – some batches make your eyes water and your nose run, some are milder. Sometimes you get smaller, crunchier bits of chicken, sometimes they are huge, plump things (but always with that wonderful coating). But even on a relatively bad day, Kokoro’s chilli chicken is a miraculous thing. It comes with rice or noodles – I’ve always found the noodles a bit too much like hard work, but your mileage may vary. Writing this has made me seriously consider having it for lunch today, which I suppose is almost as bad as laughing at your own jokes. (29 Queen Victoria Street, RG1 1SY)

10. Challoumi wrap, Purée/Leymoun

To do the confusing bit first: for reasons I don’t completely understand, sometimes Sam Adaci runs a street food van called Purée, sometimes it’s called Leymoun. Purée operates out of a distinctive green van, Leymoun is more nondescript. I don’t know the rhyme or reason of why there are two different names and two different vans. He is at Blue Collar in the market square every Wednesday and CHOW in the same place on Fridays, and sometimes you can find the Purée van parked on Broad Street at other times. But if you’re ever near either van at lunchtime, join the queue and order a challoumi wrap. They cost six pounds, they are absolutely crammed with wonderful stuff and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

The chicken is spiced and cooked on the griddle before being finely chopped, and the halloumi is salty but not too squeaky (for a while Sam was having his own Brexit-proof halloumi specially made in London: not sure if he still does). Add the pickles, and the chilli sauce, and the garlic sauce and you have an overstuffed messy marvel of a sandwich where every mouthful gives you something ever so slightly different and you always want there to be another mouthful. “Purée/Leymoun” is also a bit of a mouthful, come to think of it, but it remains a must-eat at lunchtime, even if the van can be a tad elusive. They also do freshly-made falafel which are a beautiful meat free alternative. (Market Place, RG1 2EQ, Wednesday and Friday lunchtimes only. Also on Broad Street: times vary)

11. Com chien, Pho

I quite like Pho, even if I’ve never managed to learn to love the eponymous dish: soup plus noodles just isn’t for me. This means I’ve never developed the fervour for it that other restaurant bloggers seem to manage. But they do have an absolute ace up their sleeve in the form of their com chien, a generous fried rice dish with shreds of chicken, chewy little savoury dried shrimp and many, many flecks of chilli. This dish, sort of a Vietnamese nasi goreng, is wonderful for blowing away cobwebs. You can tell it’s hot because when you order it, the staff invariably ask if you’ve had it before – with the same trepidation barbers used to show when they asked if I really wanted a grade two all over. You can top it with an optional fried egg, but I like it just fine as it is. (1 King’s Road, King Street, RG1 2HG)

12. Samosas, Cake & Cream

I was tipped off by Mansoor, a regular reader, about this place that sold the best samosas in Reading. It is called Cake & Cream, and it’s off the Wokingham Road, just after the row of shops and before the Three Tuns. Their main thing is big, impressive-looking cakes, but they also have a little whiteboard near the front detailing the savoury stuff they sell. Samosas are about 75 pence each, and they also sell pakora, paneer pakora and bhajis by weight, almost like a savoury sweetshop.

The samosas really are everything Mansoor promised they would be: full of a rich and surprisingly spicy potato masala, the pastry spot on and the whole thing piping hot and utterly addictive. They come with a sauce which is tangy, sweet and hot in equal measures, although they’re just as magnificent without it. The service is very friendly and the chap always seems thoroughly surprised to see me – oh, and the pakora are also tremendous. There are tables at Cakes & Cream, and I’m sure some people eat there, but I always take my bag and scarper onto the first 17 bus I can find, counting the minutes until I can tuck in back at home. You get jealous looks from your fellow passengers, although that might just be my imagination. (11-13 St Peters Road, RG6 1NT)