Tag: Tilehurst

Café review: The Switch

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

You’ll find many people who live in Reading that love the river. The waterways that run through and bisect Reading define it in so many ways, whether it’s the feeling of elsewhere you get when you cross the water and head north into Caversham, the brilliant, slightly wild seclusion of View Island, the experience of enjoying an al fresco pint outside the Fisherman’s Cottage seeing the world go past or even just watching the infamous Caversham Princess wending its merry, noisy way past the Bohemian Bowls Club, itself situated on Fry’s Island, slap bang in the middle of the Thames.

In lockdown I became a bit of an aficionado, strolling down the river past Caversham Bridge and looking enviously at the houses on the opposite bank, wandering round Caversham Court Gardens and watching the river flow or even just having a quick amble across the Horseshoe Bridge before the sun went down. On a particularly clement day I did the thing I always told myself I should and schlepped all the way along the riverbank to beautiful, traffic-clogged Sonning. Walking through the church yard, the pub just round the corner, it felt nothing like Reading at all. It’s true: we are very lucky indeed that our town is situated at the confluence of the Kennet and the Thames.

But all that said, for me the greatest tributary in this town has always been the number 17 bus route, the grand thoroughfare that cuts through Reading from east to west. I’ve always thought that there’s an almost infinite variety to that bus route, the distinctive purple double decker starting at the Three Tuns in the east, gliding past the prosperous houses off the Wokingham Road, running alongside Palmer Park and darting across the iconic snarl of Cemetery Junction, snaking through town, past the library and the Broad Street Mall.

Then it makes its way down the Oxford Road, through all that bustle and life, the skleps and the biryani joints, the barbers and the Indian sweet shops, the stalls on the pavement groaning with fruit and veg. And at the roundabout just past the KFC, it veers left and meanders through Tilehurst, finishing up at the water tower, another of Reading’s most distinctive structures. In east Reading the gas tower has played host to its last birds, and there’s an eerie emptiness about the space where it once stood, but in west Reading they still have their landmark, beautiful and graceful as ever.

People used to talk about how you could do a pub crawl along the 17 bus route. And of course you can, if you have a burning desire to drink at The Roebuck, The Palmer Tavern, The Outlook, The Wishing Well and the Pond House. Good luck with that, if it’s your bag. But for me, the 17 bus route more represents an incredibly rich seam of excellent places to eat and drink, all of them dead easy to reach on a bus which runs pretty much every seven minutes. 

If you live anywhere near that bus route, you can get to all of these: Cakes & Cream; Tutu’s Ethiopian Kitchen; O Português; Smash N Grab; The Lyndhurst; House Of Flavours; Blue Collar Corner; The Nag’s Head; Buon Appetito; Oishi; Dee Caf and even Double-Barrelled. Who needs the Thames anyway? The number 17’s charms might be a little more rugged and raw than wafting down the river, but I know which is more accessible. More useful too, come to think of it. 

The subject of this week’s review is almost right at the western end of the 17 route: The Switch is the Tilehurst café on The Triangle, in the heart of Tilehurst Village. And alighting from the bus on a Sunday morning the first thing that struck me was that the place was packed. There was no danger of me breaking the news of The Switch to the waiting Reading world: that ship had sailed, and it didn’t look remotely like a café in desperate need of another positive review. 

And that’s because it isn’t one. It’s been open coming up for a year, and it’s clearly built up a following in Tilehurst – possibly beyond, too, because last week it won the “Prestige Award” – whatever that is – for best café in the south-east. Now, I’m always a bit dubious about these random awards, because there’s never much transparency about how and why they’re dished out. And, come to mention it, the wording of the piece announcing The Switch as a winner did sound like it had been knocked together by a committee on Mogadon. 

“An enormous amount of time and effort has been spent by Chef Antony and the owners to ensure the dishes reflect the local area, famous for its luscious fields and free range meats, which have been painstakingly incorporated into the food on offer” it said. Ah, the legendary luscious fields of Tilehurst that we’ve all heard so much about. “The judges were particularly impressed by the consistency of excellence that permeates throughout every experience diners encounter at The Switch” it continued. And you thought my reviews go on a bit!

Anyway, I’d heard enough good things to want to try it. And having looked at the menu online what didn’t strike me was how they’d painstakingly incorporated all those free range meats, it was more “this doesn’t half look like the menu at Café Yolk”. And I thought it would be an interesting east/west comparison to see how it compared to its rival at the other end of the 17 bus route.

It’s quite a nice space inside, a pleasant neutral room with one feature wall with a neon sign showing the café’s logo. And actually all their branding is well done, clean and contemporary – the whole thing shows the kind of consideration and maturity you tend to associate more with chains. But it was a gorgeous morning, so I managed to bag a table on the small terrace out front. As I said, the whole place was rammed so it was a case of jumping in someone’s grave to grab a recently vacated table – not bad going at half ten on a Sunday morning.

The menu didn’t exactly scream luscious fields and free range meats, but it read extremely well none the less. You’d struggle not to find several things to choose between here: it has the traditional breakfast options, as you’d expect, a range of dishes on the sweeter side involving pancakes or French toast, an interesting brunch section and, if you want lunch, a small selection of burgers which also looked worth investigating. Prices are on the higher side, with most dishes starting at a tenner and climbing from there, but I think I might need to stop saying that so much: all of our supermarket bills are climbing, so why would we think restaurants and cafés are immune from that?

I was flying solo for this meal, so looking at the menu was more painful than usual as it was largely a bunch of options I rather fancied but had to save for a future visit. Half ten was a bit early to eat the crispy buttermilk chicken thigh burger, I decided. And I’d had French toast with bacon the day before – it’s a hard life, I know – so that ruled that out. A classic breakfast was tempting, but The Switch doesn’t name its suppliers and in my experience a bad sausage ruins a good breakfast. And last but not least, I decided against the loaded hash browns, even if they did come slathered in bacon, devilled cheese, garlic mayo and salsa.

But first things first, and the first caffeine of the day. Like Café Yolk, The Switch started using Anonymous to supply their coffee. But when prices went up, the two cafés took markedly different approaches: Yolk switched to Kingdom and slightly raised their prices, while The Switch stuck with Anonymous and raised their prices by a little more (and a sign on the wall by the counter namechecks Anonymous). Tasting my latte on a sunny Sunday morning, it was clear that The Switch had made the right decision. It wasn’t a perfect latte, the milk felt a little thin and the latte art had gone missing in action, but the quality of the beans came through. I didn’t mind paying three pounds fifty for this, even if it’s slightly on the high side by Reading standards.

When I first considered reviewing The Switch, a couple of months ago when I instead visited Dee Caf, I made some hackneyed disparaging comments about smashed avocado on toast. So for my brunch I decided to eat The Switch’s smashed avocado on toast, and now I’m going to eat my words. It was a fantastic dish – streets ahead of similar dishes I’ve tried at places like Yolk and Picnic and the closest thing I’ve tried in Reading to unlocking the genuine promise of this dish.

What I loved about The Switch’s smashed avo is that although it looked busy on the plate everything there was there for a reason and had a role to play. I’ve eaten a lot of smashed avo where all that’s been done is bashing the blessed thing into submission, and sometimes not even that, but this was superior, beautifully ripe and creamy and shot through with lime. The bacon (back bacon, but you can’t have everything) was a salty, crispy joy, and you got a darned sight more of it than you did with the equivalent dish at Yolk. Ditto both of the poached eggs, which were cooked spot on.

But it was also about the supporting players. The whole thing was dotted with racing green blobs of The Switch’s very enjoyable chimichurri adding a little zip and heat – next time I might order something where this is more centre stage. The fragments of Parmesan crisp added texture and more glorious salt, and even the crispy onions helped to add fun and definition to the dish. I didn’t even mind the foliage dumped on top, and the herby potatoes were a welcome side helping of extra carbs. If they came out of a packet, as I’ve long suspected Yolk’s do, it was a significantly better packet.

This is a dish which often gets a bad press, and I’ve been known to contribute to that in my time, but this was a superb example of what it can be at its best. Without the bacon it costs just shy of a tenner, and with the bacon on top it was thirteen pounds. And yes, that’s on the high side relatively speaking but when it’s done like this you don’t really begrudge them. At that price it ought to be good, and happily it is. My brunch came to just over sixteen pounds, and I’d do it all over again on Sunday in a heartbeat.

I should mention service because The Switch was all over that too. They moved me to a table outside when I asked them nicely, and when they wanted me to move to a different table so they could push two tables together and accommodate a bigger group they asked me nicely. They brought out a bowl of water for a dog-walking table nearby, and seemed to effortlessly look after everybody.

They were a lovely, happy team and I imagine they were busy that day; as I left there were people waiting to jump into my grave and nab my table, just as I’d done earlier that morning, and I’m sure I saw a few couples walk past, scan the situation, wander round the block and try again. People talk a lot about the Londonification of Reading, but in many ways The Switch felt more London than a lot of Reading places that are trying really, really hard to capture that feeling.

There’s not a lot more to say this week, you might be pleased to hear. I had a terrific time sitting outside The Switch eating my brunch, drinking my latte and doing my people watching. The demographic was a darned sight more mixed than you get at Café Yolk, so there were parents with young children, couples and friends enjoying brunch on the Bank Holiday weekend and one large group made up of three generations, the oldest of which were talking about the cost of living crisis as if it was someone else’s problem – which, as boomers, I guess it was. 

So hats off to The Switch for building something with such broad appeal, and doing it so well. I don’t know whether the Prestige Awards have any real prestige, but regardless of that The Switch gets my vote. Normally with these things the temptation is to say “I wish I could pick it up and drop it on my doorstep”, but on this occasion I’ll refrain from doing that because it feels to me that it’s absolutely where it should be. Besides, it’s honestly no trouble to get there: it’s only twenty minutes from the centre of the best town in England, on the best bus route in the world.

The Switch – 7.9
19 The Triangle, Tilehurst, RG30 4RN

https://www.theswitchcafe.co.uk

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Café review: Dee Caf

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

It’s weird, you know. I’ve been writing this blog for the best part of nine years, during which time I’ve reviewed restaurants, cafés and pubs in all manner of places. I’ve gone as far west as Bristol, as far east as London. I’ve covered Windsor and Henley, Bracknell and Wokingham, I’ve even written dispatches from further afield – from France, Spain and Belgium. So why is it, in nearly nine years, that I’ve never reviewed a single venue in Tilehurst?

Your guess is as good as mine, but I think lack of opportunity plays a big part. West Reading is a true crucible of culinary creativity, as evidenced by the likes of Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen, Momo2Go, Buon Appetito, Oishi, Kobeda Palace. And every time I trundle down the Oxford Road on the number 17 – usually for a few pints at Double-Barrelled – I see a new restaurant I’ve never heard of: I’m forever making notes of places that might feature on my to-do list. 

But somewhere west of Kensington Park, or Grovelands Road, something odd happens and you enter some kind of black spot: not of mobile reception, but of restaurants. Where are they all? Because I think in all my time writing reviews only a handful of Tilehurst establishments have even appeared on my radar. Two are Indian restaurants: one is Zyka, which won an award, but I had takeaway from there and wasn’t enormously impressed. The second is Himalayan Hotspot, which I should check out at some point (I think it’s been there forever, which is possibly the reason why I haven’t).

Then you have Tilehurst’s two cafés of note. One, The Switch, is a place which opened last September on Tilehurst Triangle. It’s co-owned by the owner of Zyka, and it looks, on paper at least, like an attempt to recreate the success of Café Yolk across town with a relatively similar menu. It’s all herbed potatoes and smashed avo and no doubt I will make my way there at some point, hopefully in less than another nine years. Maybe smashed avo will be out of fashion by then, you never know.

But my choice of venue this week is the superbly named Dee Caf, an altogether more curious beast with a very different story. It’s on Spey Road, in the heart of the Dee Park Estate, in a site which used to play host to Workhouse Coffee’s short-lived Tilehurst outpost. In September 2020, at about the worst possible time to open a hospitality business, Dee Caf opened in that space under the aegis of Tina Farrow. Farrow’s background is in education, both in the prison and food sectors, but she said she’s always loved food and wanted to create business of her own.

Dee Caf is run as a CIC, with clear links to the community it serves, and that’s obvious both from a visit to their website and to the café, in a myriad of ways. The café has a community fridge every week for people in need, runs a food bank and has equipment for litter picking (pickers are rewarded with a hot drink for their efforts). It also provides free sanitary products, runs community events for locals and has a refill station in the corner. There’s even an event for dads on Saturday mornings where they can turn up, meet other dads and enjoy a bacon sandwich and a coffee for a fiver.

On paper, at least, it looked more Fidget & Bob than Café Yolk. But all those laudable intentions didn’t necessarily mean the food was great, so on a Saturday lunchtime I headed over with Zoë – pre-Double Barrelled – to give the place a try. It was a short, slightly meandering walk from the 17 bus stop opposite the Pond House pub, and when you reach Dee Caf it does have the feel of an oasis about it, all tasteful big windows and cheery bunting. You could think you were in Copenhagen, or Rotterdam, on a sidestreet far from home; having never been to Tilehurst, I suppose technically I was. 

Inside it was plain, unassuming but agreeably homely, flooded with light from those almost full-length windows. And again, you got that sense of community from everything – art on the walls, shelves selling plants, Tilehurst Honey (the beekeeper also lives locally) and some very cool-looking postcards of the Dee Park Estate, taken by a local photographer. The menu, on an almost floor to ceiling board, also listed all of the community initiatives underneath in brightly coloured, friendly-looking script. 

It was a good and attractively priced menu, very much centred around brunch and lunch. Sandwiches tended to cost around four pounds and many of them looked far more interesting than standard issue: the “samostie”, for instance, a toastie with veggie samosa mix and yoghurt chilli chutney, or a halloumi sandwich with a lime, garlic and chipotle mojo. And it was hard not to love anywhere that offers a fish finger bap elevated by the addition of salt and vinegar crisps. Breakfasts looked more conventional, but had everything you could possibly want and, at seven pounds fifty, looked like cracking value.

There were also pastries, but I got the impression Dee Caf had had a busy Saturday morning – all those dads descending on it, perhaps – because they’d almost run out when I got there. But they too are bought locally, along with the bread and, on Fridays, eclairs from Davy at Wolseley Street (which, having tried them at Geo Café, I can confirm are bloody lovely). Dee Caf also uses a local butcher for all of its sausages, bacon and what have you; eggs, as so often with Reading indies, are from Beechwood Farm. 

All the ingredients were in place for a terrific meal so naturally I had that feeling of trepidation while we waited for our order to turn up. There were two members of staff working in the open kitchen behind the counter and both were unfailingly lovely from start to finish. So we got to watch them cooking our orders, too, although I felt a little intrusive gawping as they danced around one another fetching things from the fridge, slicing black pudding, making our lunch. It also meant that I saw the flames coming off the frying pan at a key moment and one of the staff rushing over to shake the pan and turn the heat down (“I think I’ve just flambéed your mushrooms” she called over, brightly apologetic).

First to turn up was our coffee, in enamel mugs, and that gives me a chance to get the worst of it out of the way first. My latte had that burnt acrid taste I associate with Reading’s less impressive cafés and I thought that was a real shame. Don’t get me wrong, I still had a second cup because I wanted to linger longer, but it needed more sugar than I’d usually put in to try and knock off the sharp edges. I think Dee Caf uses Kingdom Coffee, as do Café Yolk these days, and either the coffee’s not great or it’s not being made as well as it could be. Given the disappointing coffee I had from Yolk after they stopped buying from Anonymous, I think it may well be the former.

Salvation arrived, though, in the shape of quite one of the nicest breakfasts I’ve had in a long time. Dee Caf’s full English really was an embarrassment of riches, and I’m delighted to say I enjoyed practically all of it. The black pudding, cooked until it had ventured from crumbly to crispy, was beautifully earthy, the bacon (back rather than streaky, but you can’t have everything) was wonderfully substantial, salty stuff. And the sausages were gorgeous: I tend to think a full English stands or falls on the quality of the sausages and these – coarse, with proper depth of flavour – were miles better than I expected.

But the supporting players were good too. It’s hard to muck up baked beans, and they didn’t, although I know they’re not everybody’s cup of tea. The mushrooms were a bit charred, sadly, by the flambéeing incident, but I liked them all the same, and in fact blackening the cherry tomatoes had at least softened them and intensified their sweetness. I’m always happy with anybody who serves up hash browns, even if they’re from a bag in the freezer as these probably were, and there was real butter on the toast. The bread is allegedly sourdough from a local bakery: it didn’t feel particularly special, but I enjoyed it anyway. 

The one thing that was slightly weird was my solitary poached egg: given that Dee Caf also does a “half English” with half of the stuff on the full English you do wonder how they dish up half an egg. When you think that they charge one pound sixty for half a dozen eggs you’d think they could stretch to a couple with breakfast. Goodness knows how insubstantial it would have looked if I’d asked them to scramble it.

Zoë, ever the millennial, hadn’t been able to stay away from that smashed avocado. She had it in “The Avo”, Dee Caf’s toasted sandwich with avocado, crispy fried chorizo, runny egg and chipotle. Doesn’t that sound fantastic? And I’m reliably informed it was, the base of avocado picking up the the golden bounty of the egg yolk, the brick red fat from the caramelised cubes of chorizo, all crispy at the edges, and of course the kick of the chipotle. Was I allowed to try a mouthful? No I bloody wasn’t. Can I hold that against her? Absolutely not.

It was easy to tell the staff, when I went up to settle our bill, how much we’d enjoyed our food. Our bill came to twenty two pounds, not including tip, which felt like good value to me. And the lady who took my card payment enthused about the place, told me where they get their meat from (Carl Woods in Sonning Common: I’ve half a mind to make a detour there and pick some stuff up) and was clearly every bit as passionate about Dee Caf as the owner. 

There had been a steady flow of people coming in to grab food or takeaway coffees as we finished our lunch, and as we left for an appointment with a few pints of Double-Barrelled’s finest, I found myself thinking how lucky those locals were to have Dee Caf nearby. I could well imagine stopping there on a regular basis, for a pot of tea and a pastry, or a lunchtime sausage sandwich. And I’d love somewhere like that near me, but instead my local is Café Yolk. Dee Caf – unpretentious, thoroughly decent and full of heart – is almost as different from Café Yolk as The Repair Shop is from Love Island. They’re both television programmes, just as Dee Caf and Café Yolk are both cafés and Jess Phillips and Rebekah Vardy are both human beings. But really, the resemblance stops there. 

So the people of Tilehurst, and the Dee Park Estate, have a proper little gem in Dee Caf. But is it worth a detour out that way if you don’t live in the area? I think the answer is probably yes, especially if you can tie it in to a trip to Double Barrelled, or a walk around McIlroy Park (I still haven’t been, but I’m reliably informed that it’s a lovely spot). But then I’ve been known to take the bus to Kennet Island just to have brunch at Fidget & Bob: Dee Caf very much strikes me as its kindred spirit out west. It’s a wonderful example of how you can build community, and the role excellent food can play in that. I won’t leave it so long before I return to Tilehurst to review somewhere else – but a bit of me might hesitate, if only because I don’t want to mar the place’s unblemished record.

Dee Caf – 7.8
12 Spey Road, Tilehurst, RG30 4DG
0118 9960478

https://www.deecaf.co.uk

Takeaway review: Zyka

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I’m easily old enough to remember a time before delivery apps and dark kitchens, before the weird and wonderful world of restaurants running side hustles, diffusion brands or heat at home kits. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, for most people, takeaway meant a curry, a Chinese meal or fish and chips from the local chippy. The closest you got to fusion food was having curry sauce (or in my case, sweet and sour sauce from Woodley’s Hong Kong Garden – still going strong, would you believe) on your chips. They were, in all respects, simpler times.

And in those days, having a good takeaway nearby was like gold dust: if you discovered one close to home, you made the most of it. At the end of the last century I lived in Nottingham for a year, and just round the corner from my house in Sherwood was the most incredible Indian takeaway. The flavour has probably been enhanced with a powerful dusting of nostalgia, memory’s answer to MSG, but the Fridays when we got food from there and sat down in front of something from Blockbuster Video were happy evenings indeed.

I’ve never found anything comparable in Reading. I used to live just around the corner from Kings Chef on the London Road, and I had their Chinese takeaway from time to time but it largely left me unmoved. And back when it was open, I would happily wander over to the now sadly defunct Seaspray to grab fish and chips which were still hot when I got home. But doing restaurant reviews for eight years meant that, until the pandemic hit, I never had much cause to use takeaways. And now the proliferation of delivery services, third parties on bikes and scooters and all that means that there’s probably too much choice. You channel hop meals the way you channel hop TV programmes or, as I remember from my days on Tinder, actual human beings.

Ordering from Zyka, the subject of this week’s review reminded me slightly of the old days. No Deliveroo or Uber Eats for them, so you just have to contact them and tell them what you want. Although you can order online (and they even take Apple Pay), so it’s not quite as basic as getting a leaflet through your door and ringing them up. And why did I choose Zyka? I thought you’d never ask: it’s because it won an award recently.

Not at the British Curry Awards, which were announced this week and gave prizes to the likes of Benares in Berkeley Square and Cheltenham’s brilliant Prithvi (“we’re building back balti” said the Prime Minister in a by all accounts cringeworthy recorded message). And not at the English Curry Awards, which were awarded in October and where winners included Wokingham’s Mumbai, either. Zyka won at the Curry Life Awards, also held October, where they were one of twenty-one restaurants to win “Best Curry Restaurants Of The Year”. With hindsight, there are a lot of different curry awards and a lot of winners: perhaps they should have some kind of unification bout, like they do in the wrestling. 

Anyway, a fair few people have asked for this review, off the back of that award, so I figured it was about time. “They’ve been excellent for many years”, one person told me on Twitter, adding that they’d diversified by opening The Switch, a Tilehurst café which looks, on paper at least, like an attempt to create a West Reading equivalent of Café Yolk. “The menu doesn’t look that inspiring” said a friend of mine. “It’s not a patch on House Of Flavours” was another piece of feedback I heard: I guess if there was universal consensus I’d never need to review anything.

For what it’s worth, I think my friend was right about the menu. It’s pretty generic, with the same dishes you’d find anywhere else. Starters are mainly bhaji, samosas and a few options from the tandoor, and then there’s a tandoori section and largely the same curries offered with either lamb, chicken, seafood or vegetables and paneer. Another section is entitled “House Favourites”, which makes you think this might be where the specialities live, but no: that’s where you find your bhuna, dopiaza, korma, dansak and so on. 

In fairness to Zyka, and I may end up saying this a few times in this review, it may well be very different if you eat in the restaurant. The menu makes a point of saying that they’ve selected the dishes on the takeaway menu to ensure that they travel well – and I understand this might make some dishes unsuitable but I was still a little surprised not to see something off the beaten track on the menu. Because they’ve won an award. 

Anyway, my order for two people – poppadoms, a couple of starters, two mains, a vegetable side and some rice – came to a smidgen over fifty pounds. They charged three pounds for delivery and a nebulous extra quid under “surcharge”, whatever that means. I got a text saying that my meal would be with me in about an hour and then, just like in the old days, we sat back and waited.

He was at the door ten minutes later than predicted, but because I didn’t have the facility to endlessly, pointlessly track his whereabouts I just assumed it was because he’d left a little later than planned rather than because he got lost. And everything was piping hot and in a rather natty branded carrier bag. So far everything had gone like clockwork, and the only thing left was to eat the damned thing.

And that, I’m afraid, is where things didn’t quite come together. I’d chosen one of their curries that wasn’t generic, the murg haryali, chicken with mint and coriander: “a touch of sweetness and spice”, said the menu. I have fond memories of a similar, Kermit-green dish from Bhoj many years ago, aromatic and whiffy with garlic. This, I’m afraid, wasn’t that: it’s true that there was a bit of spice, but mostly there was sweetness – an odd, saccharine, artificial sweetness. You got the mint, but not really the coriander, and the chicken, tikka-tinged, was in big and slightly homogeneous pieces. I didn’t finish it, and it tasted a little – that word again – generic.

Zoë – and how many times have I had to write this in 2021? – ordered better than I did. Still giving carbs a relatively wide berth, she’d picked Zyka’s equivalent of a mixed grill, the Zyka mixed tandoori. This was fundamentally a huge plate of meat, with chicken and lamb tikka, an impressive quarter of a chicken, some prawns (“look, there’s a crustacean” was how Zoë chose to describe this development) and a seekh kebab. All lobster-red, so red it’s unreal, and all suffused with the deeply savoury notes that come from time well spent in a tandoor. 

I had a bit – I enjoyed the chicken, I thought the lamb was on the tough side. “I love the meats. I’d order the meats again” was Zoë’s verdict after this meal, although in fairness she says that after nearly any meal in which meat plays a predominant role (sometimes it’s a little like living with Captain Caveman). She’d chosen bhindi bhaji, thinly sliced okra, to accompany her rhapsody in crimson, and she thought it was decent enough, “but a little bit underseasoned”. The menu had given me the option to have this dish “desi style” for an extra pound, saying this meant the dish was “a slightly spicier and more authentic take”. I didn’t go for that, and maybe I should have, but it’s a bit weird to have to pay extra to make it taste authentic. They do seem to like their surcharges at Zyka.

The two starters, repurposed as side dishes, were fine but again, no more than that. I think it’s pretty hard to fuck up an onion bhaji, so if I say that these were good I’m not sure it’s especially glowing praise. And the samosas were a little unremarkable – full of pellets of minced lamb and peas but without any overwhelming flavour. You got two of them for a fiver, and the following day on the way back from seeing my dentist I picked up two infinitely more enjoyable ones in the legendary Cake & Cream for under two quid. Cake & Cream, as far as I know, has not been nominated for any awards, but I’d give them “Samosa Of The Year” any day of the week. There were also some poppadoms, but they always taste the same in my experience – even a bad one is usually enjoyable, provided it’s not stale.

I don’t want to sound withering about Zyka. What I had wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t great either. And this is the problem with awards: back in 2011 when Petersham Nurseries, a restaurant in a garden centre near Richmond with plain tables and no whistles and bells, won a Michelin star the chef there, Skye Gyngell, said that she wished she could give it back. The expectations of her customers changed, and they wanted to eat at a kind of restaurant she never wanted hers to be. It got too much, and she quit the following year. 

I get that expectation problem, admittedly on a different level, with Zyka. If they hadn’t won an award, maybe the upshot of this review would be “eh, it’s okay”. But because it has, it’s hard not to come away saying “how did they manage that?” I had a much more enjoyable takeaway from Banarasi Kitchen earlier in the year – which is equally well placed to serve West Reading, and much closer to you if you live across town. But the restaurant Zyka really made me miss was Bhoj. I ordered deliveries from Bhoj a few times, back in its golden age when it was still on the Oxford Road, and it never disappointed me.

I’m sure Zyka would have done brilliantly back in the days when I still had a Blockbuster Video card, when it was all leaflets folded into three and putting a call in from your landline (remember landlines?), shouting above the background noise. But the world moves on, and things change. There is so much choice, and it raises the standard: a rising tide, as I often say, lifts all boats. Although perhaps it’s a neighbourhood thing, and maybe if you’re a Tilehurst resident you count your lucky stars to have it just down the road. 

I should close by giving them the benefit of the doubt – maybe you had to be there. Maybe their full, eat-in menu has all the imagination and execution that was missing from my meal this week. And I know a restaurant is so much more than the food, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their welcome is warm, their service superlative. I’ll make a point of checking them out in person in the New Year, and I look forward to them making me eat my words. But, for now at least, I’d rather eat elsewhere.

Zyka
6 Park Lane, Tilehurst, Reading, RG31 5DL
0118 9427788

https://www.zyka.co.uk
Order via: Direct from the restaurant