The week after you get back from holiday is the absolute worst, isn’t it? One minute you’re loafing in the sun, you can have a lie in if you want to, your hardest morning decision is where to grab coffee and then where to have lunch, your post-lunch coffee, maybe a snack, your pre-prandial drink, your dinner, your post-dinner bar of choice. On and on it goes until you’re a modern-day lotus eater, free of cares, a flâneur and a gourmand, carefree and arguably in need of detox. Little, if anything, is finer than reaching that stage.
And then it’s over. The plane touches down at miserable old Shatwick, and you’re reintroduced to the M25. When you get home your clothes all need to be washed, the fridge is bare and there’s this thing called work you have to get up for at something ridiculous like half-seven in the morning. Just like that you’re back in a life of dreary cold packaged sandwiches and cobbling together a meal plan, of not drinking during the week, watching your calorie intake and hanging in there until payday.
And even though it’s May, it seems to be raining most of the time. I don’t care how much you might love your job: objectively speaking, if you compare it to a holiday there’s only ever going to be one winner. Why does anybody do it?
This year, for me at least, that comedown has been even more of a cliff edge than usual. Because not only was I back from holiday, but I was back from honeymoon – I got married, although I haven’t talked about it much – and my next trip away won’t involve planes, trains or automobiles but instead a white van and the removal men as I burn a week’s leave next month moving house.
So although Zoë and I did the supermarket shop as usual, with a sense of resignation, sticking to the plan wasn’t easy last week. Instead there were accidental takeaways, or wanders over to Bakery House or Honest, anything to make real life just a little more unreal, even if only for a short while. You could call it a transition phase, you could call it a soft landing. You could even call it a cry for help: probably it’s a little of all three.
On the plus side, it meant there was a slight role reversal. In the run up to my nuptials it was more difficult to persuade Zoë to come with me on duty, a combination of trying to shed that last couple of pre-marital pounds and save those last few pre-marital other pounds. Now that I’ve been elevated to the dizzy heights of husband? It turns out that Zoë can be persuaded to eat out during the week, especially if it happens to be her turn to cook.
I may have used this to my benefit, in truth. Bet you can’t be fucked to cook the salmons tonight I messaged her, as she was on the train back from London. How did you guess? came the reply. Failing at this, aren’t I. After a bit of plea bargaining – it was raining, so nowhere too far out of town (my wife does not like the rain), and nowhere that involved walking away from home only to head back (my wife also doesn’t like going back on herself) we settled for Chilis: central, a short walk from the station, potentially interesting.
It opened late in 2022 upstairs in Kings Walk, where Art Of Siam had closed something like seven years previously, a slightly incongruous second branch of the Indian restaurant right next to Newbury station. When I worked in Newbury I must have walked past it a hundred times and never considered going in, but I’d heard some decent reports of it. And between Christmas and New Year last December I’d had dinner there as part of a big and group with Zoë’s schoolfriends and their respective husbands and boyfriends: I’d enjoyed what I had but was deliberately enjoying myself without critically appraising it. Besides, that time of year is never the best one to judge any restaurant.
So I made a mental note to get to it in 2024, and here we were. Walking through Kings Walk – or the Village, as I think it’s technically called – I was struck again by the proliferation of restaurants on the ground floor. Bành Mì QB was still going strong and there were a handful of people in Jieli, the hotpot restaurant which opened last summer. By contrast Bombay Brothers, another newish Indian restaurant, seemed to have no more than three customers. But upstairs, in their big back room, Chilis was doing a roaring trade – plenty of tables were occupied, including a huge group of twenty diners who seemed to be having a marvellous time.
The interior of Chilis looked a little bit thrown together. Some of that was about me knowing that they’d inherited a fair amount of it – the wooden lattice on the ceiling, the panelled walls, the faux shuttered windows facing out onto the top floor of Kings Walk – from the previous occupants. But also the chairs didn’t match: some said restaurant, some said function room and only the ones in the smaller front room looked like recent purchases. And while I’m in full-on restaurant curmudgeon mode, I’m not sure about the wisdom of putting a giant TV on the wall, even if it’s showing attractive vistas on a loop. The only other place I can remember that did likewise was Bagheera, and I didn’t hugely like it there either.
But never mind. This might be a consequence of Chilis’ first branch being out West Berkshire way, but they had Maharaja IPA by Renegade on their drinks list – in bottles not draft, but a welcome sight nonetheless – and it slipped down beautifully as I checked over the menu. Again as a jaded restaurant reviewer, although it could have been the post-holiday blues, it felt like it covered too much ground. I counted over thirty starters and even more mains, curries and biryanis and kottu parotha of every persuasion, along with fried rice and noodle dishes.
It was all a bit much, and the pricing was interesting too: most of the starters were north of ten pounds, many of them barely costing less than the main courses. I think part of that was because a lot of dishes, including Indo-Chinese small plates, were all lumped together as starters, when what they really were was dishes that were not curries, but the overall effect was that nearly everything cost between ten and fifteen pounds and it wasn’t necessarily easy to structure a meal.
The one thing that reassured me, though, was the restaurant’s confidence. A sandwich board outside said that if you didn’t like a dish, you didn’t have to pay for it. And the menu said something similar, that if you didn’t enjoy any dish they’d make you something else. If you didn’t enjoy the replacement either, they’d take both off the menu. That, and the general hubbub, made me think that there might be more to this place than met the eye: either the crowd at that long table were regulars, or they were about to game the system in a big way.
The last of the inauspicious signs was the delay. Now in fairness to Chilis, there’s not a lot that can be done when you turn up at a restaurant without a reservation and a table for twenty has got there just before you but not started eating yet. So although my stomach thought my throat had been cut, I also appreciate that this was just bad luck and bad timing. I found myself looking at the other, smaller groups dotted round the restaurant, thinking they were here before me, they were here before me, were they here before me?
And under those circumstances, I guess our starters turning up about forty-five minutes after we ordered wasn’t terrible going. It felt it at the time though – a combination of post-work peckishness, post-holiday blues and racing through that first beer. But here’s the thing: when they arrived, they were everything I could possibly have wanted them to be. Sizeable, piping hot and far, far better executed than I had expected. Although Chilis menu appears to span quite a lot of India, from my limited understanding, I’d tried to go for options that served as reference dishes.
I often order gobi Manchurian, hoping against hope to find something that even vaguely approaches the high water mark of Clay’s version of this dish. And I never do, finding instead something that is mulchy, oversweetened, lacking in complexity and usually a little overcooked. But what was going on here? Chilis version was good. I mean, really good. Deep, dark and sticky with good poke of heat, but also with plenty going on and, crucially, some crunch which hadn’t been dampened down by the sauce.
Ironically it cost ever so slightly more than Clay’s rendition, but it was a far bigger portion and, for my money at least, almost impossible to fault. If you gave this and Clay’s gobi Manchurian to people in a blind taste, I think it would do very well indeed.
Could it have been a fluke? It didn’t appear so from its companion. Chicken 65, appropriately, is also a dish that used to be on Clay’s menu, right at the beginning, although it’s since been removed. Again, it’s a dish I’ve ordered in many places without ever feeling like it hit the spot – I particularly remember the middling pellets of chicken which passed for this dish at Biryani Boyzz – but this was terrific. It got that slightly acrid flavour right, giving it fire and interest without being one note, and the chicken was dry, tender and rather marvellous.
I might have liked a little texture, maybe some cashews to mix things up slightly, but perhaps that’s what the shredded cabbage was intended to achieve. Zoë certainly thought so, because she ate some of it and said that it added something to the dish, but I had my eyes on the prize and didn’t bother. And as with the gobi Manchurian, this was a generous helping: if this is what having a £10 starter actually means, in 2024, I’m all for it.
With that log jam sorted and our initial ravenousness sated, with the large table ploughing contentedly through industrial quantities of food (and not, as far as I could see, asking for any replacements) the pace settled down to eminently civilised.
The Chilis selection of curries, as I said, is huge but it isn’t, at least, an infinitely configurable mix and match of protein and sauce: some dishes can be done with lamb, chicken, prawns or paneer, but not all of them. And it has more interesting regional dishes on it, alongside the less exciting kormas and jalfrezis, including some – sorry to mention them again – that I’ve only previously seen on the Clay’s menu, like chepala pelusu.
My choice was a dish I do vaguely remember from the restaurant I’ve mentioned quite enough already, gongura lamb. It’s a curry made with sorrel, or hibiscus as the menu puts it, and I remember it being fascinating and a little out of the ordinary. And again, backing up the promise on their menu, I cannot imagine anybody sending it back. The gravy was a thick, deep, savoury lipsmacking thing, equally delicious scooped up with a nicely done, thin but pliable garlic naan or swirled into rice speckled with cumin.
And the lamb – well, it’s rare that I eat lamb in Reading’s Indian restaurants without a little trepidation that, like Russian roulette, you’ll chance upon the one gristly, bouncy bit that taints all the ones that are left. No such worry here – every piece was tender enough to break under a fork, and to mix in with that sauce. I’d got there a tad grumpy, through the rain, I’d waited a fair old while for the food to start coming – and yet here I was, definitely smiling.
Of course, the best restaurants are good at giving you something off the beaten track, if you want it, or letting you have the tried and tested if that’s what you need. After a day working to the core of the bone in the capital, followed by a train trek back home, Zoë was in the mood for the latter and so she went for butter chicken, many people’s benchmark for Indian restaurants across the country. And again, judged on its merits, for what it was, it was difficult to fault. The sauce had enough about it not to be a bland, sweet thing, and although it had a real feel of cosseting comfort about it, it wasn’t boring.
Zoë couldn’t finish it – because the portions at Chilis are so generous, not because it was disappointing – so I ate enough to understand why it’s my Australian family’s go-to choice when they hit an Indian restaurant in Reading. And crucially, this dish and my dish didn’t share a base sauce that had just had chunks of meat plonked in at the death. They didn’t both rely on chopped tomatoes and a generic masala mix. All four dishes we’d had were distinct, distinctive and interesting. And they represented the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what was on the menu.
Although Chilis does offer dessert – including gulab jamun, kheer, kulfi and nine different home made ice creams – we were just on the right side of obscenely full by then, so we paid up. I’ve not mentioned service, which does them a disservice because everybody who looked after us was uniformly lovely, interested and attentive. I don’t know if they felt like they had to be extra nice to make sure we didn’t feel like an afterthought with that massive, profitable table in the middle, but it didn’t feel like that.
No, I felt as special and welcome as I have anywhere, and I really felt like they cared that I had a good time, cared whether I liked the food. Our meal – all that food and four beers – came to ninety-six pounds, including a 12.5% optional service charge which they thoroughly deserved. Not cheap, but I left feeling full and happy, the post honeymoon comedown briefly at bay.
I’m aware that I’ve mentioned Clay’s a few times in this review and I can imagine this might attract predictable eye rolls from the usual suspects. In a way, I know it’s unhelpful – Clay’s is a proper outlier both in Reading and further afield, a restaurant that has been lauded in the national press and which, for my money, is better (and better value) than at least one Michelin starred Indian restaurant that I’ve been to. It is, in Reading terms, a once in a generation restaurant.
But it’s relevant here because I ordered a few dishes that I’ve had at Clay’s – and, sometimes, elsewhere. And if Chilis’ versions of them didn’t match that standard they really weren’t anywhere near as far off as you might expect. Masakali, for instance, tried to emulate Clay’s look and menu (and colour scheme) but, when I visited, never came close on quality or value. So having got that piece of benchmarking out of the way, where does Chilis sit among the rest of Reading’s Indian restaurants?
Well, that’s where it’s interesting. Comparisons with the casual, exclusively vegetarian options – SKVP, Madras Flavours, Bhel Puri House and Crispy Dosa – are tricky because it’s hardly like with like. Ditto for the plethora of biryani options available in town (and there are a lot). But when you look at Chilis’ actual peers and competitors, the likes of House Of Flavours, Pappadams, Royal Tandoori, even Masakali and Bagheera, the mid-market Indian restaurants across town, it’s hard not to conclude that, for food at least, Chilis can match any of them.
It’s by no means perfect: the room needs a little love, and the timings were a little skewed on the night, albeit for understandable reasons. But the welcome, the food – especially those small plates – and that Maharaja IPA redeemed practically all of that.
I keep coming back to that confidence in the menu, a confidence you see for the first time on the board outside before you even set foot through the front door. If I’d been a small print (or a big sandwich board) merchant and asked them to swap out one or more of my dishes, Chilis’ service is so good that I’ve no doubt they would have done it without batting an eyelid. But also, based on what I ate at least, I can’t imagine they get that request often.
Chilis – 8.2
The Village, Kings Walk, RG1 2HG
0118 9500446
Edible Reading 