Tag: wine

Restaurant review: Cuttlefish, Oxford

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“This should be lovely” said my dear friend Jerry as we took a table in the window at Cuttlefish, a couple of minutes’ walk away from the far side of Oxford’s Magdalen Bridge. “A fish restaurant!”

I was spending Good Friday with Jerry, in what I rather hoped would become an annual tradition – last year we spent it lunching at Gees – and as is habitual I had given him a range of options to choose from in advance. He passed on the London candidates I gave him: only the smaller plates appealed at Andrew Edmunds and The Hero, and the offal-heavy selection at Borough Market’s Camille was dismissed in a split second. That left Oxford, where Jerry was tempted by No. 1 Ship Street but thought, on balance, that Cuttlefish had more to tempt him.

All this worked out rather well, in truth. People have been bemoaning the lack of a fish restaurant in Reading for a long time – the easily pleased since Loch Fyne closed eight years ago and the more exacting since long before that. The nearest thing to it we have, I suppose, is Henley’s Shellfish Cow, but it always feels to me like a restaurant where they chose the name because they liked the pun and everything else followed from there.

Given that lacuna in Reading’s food scene a short hop to Oxford to see if there was anything suitable sounded like an excellent idea. Besides, after my last Oxford review there was a request to install Jerry as my permanent Oxford correspondent for all long boozy lunches: let it not be said that I never, ever give the people what they want. So Jerry and I rocked up at the start of the long weekend, the sun finally out, ready to investigate.

My preliminary research, however, had given me a bit of a sinking feeling, not that I told Jerry that. The fanciest thing about the website was Cuttlefish’s fetching logo, but lurking beyond that was a menu that seemed a little bit strange, a little bit cheap, a little too large and somewhat lacking in fish. Sure, they sold oysters and caviar and seafood platters, but for a fish and seafood place there appeared to be little fish on the menu.

Perhaps, I told myself, it was all in the daily specials depending what they could get that day. But it also felt a little all over the place, with classic fish and chips sitting uneasily next to squid ink spaghetti and “mixed seafood and chicken paella”.

Maybe some of that could be explained away as overlap with the La Cucina, the Italian restaurant next door under the same ownership. But that was before you got on to the five different types of burger, the steak frites, the brunch menu featuring eggs benedict and chorizo tortilla. Nothing about it shouted that Cuttlefish was a restaurant which had decided to focus on doing a few things very well.

That was sort of borne out by the dining room. It didn’t boast loads of jarring nauticalia, and the pictures on the walls were tasteful black and white numbers. But the Tolix chairs – would that I could go back in time and buy shares – felt low rent, as did the vinyl tableclothes meant, seemingly, to imitate planks of driftwood, which rather clashed with the attractive bare wooden floorboards. Never mind: we took a nice spot in the window and I wedged my arse into a Tolix. Behind Jerry, I could see that the paintwork of the bay windows was a little tired.

Service was lovely and friendly, but it started off shakily and never quite recovered. Jerry is a lovely and self-effacing man who always puts other people first, the kind who volunteers to take the crappy single bed in a communal Airbnb. Maybe it’s his Irish Catholic upbringing, but he is congenitally predisposed not to want his own way, to the point where he sometimes apologises even for having a preference.

I discovered this at lunch because, given that we were at a fish and seafood restaurant, I rather assumed that we’d be attacking a Picpoul de Pinet or an albariño, a riesling or a Chablis. Cuttlefish’s wine list, as you would expect, boasts all of those things, although it never gives a vintage and, in some cases, also neglects to mention the producer. But it was on this day, after years of friendship and several meals on duty, that I discovered that Jerry doesn’t especially care for white wine.

“I’m really sorry” he said, getting that apology in early. “But we can have white if you want.”

I stopped and thought. This was news to me, and I’ve been out for lunch with Jerry numerous times – including twice in Oxford – where I’ve pressed on and ordered a bottle of white without ever realising that Jerry only really enjoys red.

“No, don’t be silly! I’m not a purist about drinking white with fish.”

So we asked our server for help and that’s where our problems began. It felt like there was an unbridgeable language barrier between us, because I was unable to explain, somehow, that we wanted tips on which the lightest and fruitiest of the reds on the wine list was. It didn’t give many clues and there were no obvious candidates like, say, a Fleurie. It didn’t help that this part of East Oxford is a mobile reception not spot: no Vivino to come to the rescue.

“Do you mean the red wine that’s the least strong?” she said.

“No, I mean – which is the fruitiest. You know, not heavy. Which one would go best with fish?”

You’d expect the reds on this list to have been selected with this eventuality in mind, but perhaps not.

“Well, there is the Picpoul de Pinet” she said.

“No, I mean reds. That’s a white wine.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if I was expressing myself exceptionally poorly (if you’ve read enough of my reviews, you’ll know that sometimes happens). The pause lengthened into a silence, and I wondered if time was standing still. No: Jerry was still moving.

“I will get my colleague.”

By the time he arrived we’d given up and settled on a French malbec. This server smirked slightly as we ordered it, as if it was a bad choice, but really, by that point we’d done quite enough deciding and wanted to do some drinking.

It was called Beauté du Sud and the markup on it was reasonable to the point of baffling: £32 for a wine that will apparently set you back £25 retail. If I’d paid £25 for it retail I’d be beyond disappointed, but in a restaurant it wasn’t bad: not too heavy but perhaps a little jammy. Tom Gilbey would probably have had something to say about the sugar levels.

So by this point my hopes were not high, and that was compounded by another cardinal sin: our starters must have come out about five minutes after we ordered them, and you probably know by now how much I love that i.e. not very. But that’s almost the last bit of criticism you will hear from me, because from this point onwards – against all the signs and much to my bemused pleasure – nearly everything was rather good.

Take my calamari, for instance. They even looked pedestrian, and I was half expecting to wade my way through a bowl of breaded rubber bands. So imagine my surprise when I found they were delicious, lightly dusted with a coating that adhered, had crispness, and that they were tender without the slightest twang of elastic.

Dressed with liberally squeezed lemon and then dipped into a ramekin of golden aioli, they were the kind of dish the idea of this restaurant promised, a promise the reality of the restaurant looked as if it would renege on. It wasn’t the hugest portion for £9, but I liked it too much to care about that.

And would you believe that Jerry’s starter was equally good? He’d ordered crab, white and brown, with toast, and it was a simple and surprising – that word again – dish.

“This is so much nicer than those meagre pots you get at the supermarket” enthused Jerry, and he was right. I love the purity of white crabmeat but the dark meat is where the flavour is and this was rich and thought through, with a slowly building heat in the mix which, again, you might not expect. Even the tiger-striped block of toast was considered, was the perfect thing to load the stuff onto. I always think salads are padding in a dish like this, and this one definitely was, but even without it this felt like a very creditable way to spend £11.

By this point the restaurant was still less busy than you’d hope it to be on a long weekend, but there was a regular, if small, trickle of customers arriving and leaving. The people watching potential couldn’t match a spot in North Oxford, or down the Cowley Road, but Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so that didn’t matter.

We were having such a good natter that I didn’t even spend my time worrying that our mains would turn up as quickly as our starters did, so I was pleasantly surprised – yes, surprise once more – when they turned up a very agreeable half hour or so later.

That said, I wish they’d given mine a little longer. The blackboard propped up outside the restaurant had promised two specials but one had already gone by the time we turned up at half-one, so I chose the other, the octopus. And on paper this dish had everything I could have wanted: firm, roasted baby new potatoes with a flash of bronzed skin, a little carpet of still-crunchy samphire, a beautiful sauce with plenty of sweet cherry tomatoes.

It almost was, and could have been, a taste of the Mediterranean (of Greece, where the octopus is usually previously frozen because stocks have never quite recovered from all that madcap dynamite fishing they used to do).

But the problem was that octopus is a tricky beast to get right and, unlike everything else the kitchen tried, their sure touch deserted them here. It was a proper chewy workout for the jaws, more than I would have liked, and it made me apprehensive about my forthcoming dental appointment and the inevitable top up of masseter botox which would follow. If I showed my dentist a picture of this octopus, perhaps he’d give me slightly more this time.

Only the narrow end of the octopus, blackened and crispier, was easy to eat. Even having said all that, I liked the dish so much that I was prepared to be forgiving: to get so close to the perfect dish, somehow, made me celebrate the 90% they had achieved rather that the 10% where they had fallen short. The whole thing sang with summer flavours, made the crummy weather of the previous week feel like an optical illusion, and for £18 I thought that was no mean feat.

Jerry very much enjoyed his fritto misto, although I think it was more his thing than mine. One element, the calamari, was shared with my starter, but the other components were a couple of enormous prawns, some pieces of whiting and a lot of whitebait. You might, as Jerry does, like whitebait rather a lot, in which case I’m delighted for you, but I personally never eat anything that can beat me in a staring content. And whiting might be a perfectly worthy fish – the bit I had tasted decent enough – but somehow it felt a little basic to me.

Then again, this fritto misto was £15, so can you complain? Pricing at Cuttlefish was a little erratic, with many of the mains costing little more than some of the starters. I guess I had been conditioned to think it should have been more expensive, but then again it’s not like they were dishing up whole Dover soles or thick steaks of swordfish. I’d have liked it a little better, I think, if they had been.

We had a couple of side dishes – Jerry because his main needed one and me because I’m greedy. My zucchini fritti were thick, soggy and under-battered, lacking salt or fun. Jerry’s french fries almost certainly came out of a packet and were served in the sort of miniature frying basket that dreary observational comics on Twitter used to slag off ad infinitum. I didn’t finish my courgette fries because they felt like empty calories. Jerry didn’t finish his frites because he just didn’t have room: I half expected him to apologise to our server for that.

After an impressive run I guess it was always a risk that the weird service would return and cause a dip, and so it did. We were asked if we wanted to order dessert, we asked if we could finish our wine first and were told “well, the kitchen is closing”. Nothing on Cuttlefish’s website says that it does that and, indeed, people were still taking tables shortly before that. But never mind: the dessert menu was full of staples like brownies, cheesecake and sticky toffee pudding and they did offer a glass of an unspecified Sauternes if you wanted to push the boat out, no pun intended.

Jerry went for ice cream, a classic Neapolitan trio of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. I don’t know if they were supplied by others or made by the restaurant, but they were as pleasing as their pastel shades might lead you to believe they would be. A couple of the scoops had ice crystals in them, which strangely left me with the impression they were less likely to be bought in, but either way it was a solidly nice and thoroughly unexciting dessert.

I picked from the specials, most of which were dessert with extra booze, be it a pastel de nata with a glass of port or an affogato with Frangelico on the side. I genuinely loved my two spheres of lemon sorbet with limoncello, and thoroughly enjoyed anointing the former with the latter. It felt like the kind of dessert you don’t see on menus much these days, a resolutely old school, tried and tested combo.

As it gradually melted to become the kind of Slush Puppy Oliver Reed would have considered a decidedly good time, I started to feel increasingly well disposed to Cuttlefish, despite its repeated efforts to stop me becoming so. £10 for this, and despite somehow costing more than the larger £7 selection of ice creams I couldn’t say I felt begrudging.

“This has been so nice” said Jerry. “So much better than those snouts and bollocks and trotters in London would have been.”

When our bill arrived it was only £113, not including tip, which did nothing at all to dissipate our collective goodwill. I think Jerry liked Cuttlefish more than I did, but Jerry is also a man who will take the single bedroom in an Airbnb to make his friends happy. In short, he’s just a spectacular human being. And yet I liked Cuttlefish too: I may be a crabby sod who needs to be worn down or won over, but I get there in the end. Once I do I’m as much of an advocate as anybody.

After that our afternoon took a happy, well-rehearsed trajectory. We wound our way to the Star Inn on Rectory Road, one of my two favourite Oxford pubs. Jerry sipped Asahi and I glugged Steady Rolling Man and, despite the utter lack of mobile reception, we got by the way people did in the days before smartphones, by simply chatting and gossiping and not looking things up when we didn’t know them, because there was no way of doing so.

We got into a chat with the academic at the next table, mainly because Jerry fell slightly in love with Nico, her greyhound, but he told himself it was okay that he couldn’t get away with dognapping Nico. “Greyhounds don’t lick”, he said to me. “I need a dog that’s going to show me proper affection.”

Nico’s owner told us stories about the fates faced by ex-racing greyhounds – she adopted him after an unsuccessful month-long career as a racing dog – and both of us came away from the conversation bitterly opposed to racing in all its forms. I have become a cat person in my middle age, but I’ll always make an exception for greyhounds.

It was in short a textbook Oxford outing, the kind to which I’ve become extraordinarily attached. I’m already looking forward to the next one, especially now I have a mandate from my readership to take Jerry out for lunch in the dreaming spires at every available opportunity.

I am increasingly aware lately that happiness can be fleeting, and you have to appreciate it as it happens, rather than simply realising further down the tracks with the benefit of hindsight. I had a brilliant time, and I don’t want these trips to Oxford – on Good Friday or otherwise – to ever come to an end. Fortunately, the city seems to have plans to keep me more than occupied.

En route to the Star I spotted a pub, the Port Mahon, which has decided to specialise in rotisserie chicken and mentally I made a note to put it near the top of my to do list. Once we got to the Star I couldn’t help but notice that they now have a permanent pizza trader. One who also serves a pint of dough balls in garlic butter and Parmesan: I saw them turn up at a neighbouring table, and it took all my strength not to order some. Next time. Or the time after that.

Cuttlefish – 7.4
36 St Clement’s Street, Oxford, OX4 1AB
01865 243003

https://www.cuttlefishoxford.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Chez Dominique, Bath

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This week’s review comes from Bath, and from a restaurant I visited with my old friend Dave, and those of you with good memories might recall that I was last in Bath on duty roughly a year ago, also with Dave in tow. We ate at Upstairs At Landrace, which I liked a great deal, and afterwards we drank great beer at The Raven, and when I wrote it up I said that I had a feeling national restaurant critics visited Bath every few years when they fancied a genteel day out on expenses.

I’m not completely devoid of self-awareness, I promise, and here I am almost a year after my last visit having a thoroughly genteel day out with Dave. I can see why the broadsheet gang always include the city on their tour of the provinces.

So this day was in some respects similar to my trip to Bath last year – great pre-prandial coffee, excellent afternoon beers at The Raven, carefully selected lunch venue as the meat in that sandwich, good company and wide-ranging chat about stuff and nonsense from start to finish. But we are a more careworn pair this year, and we agree over lattes at Bath café Picnic that, so far at least, 2026 has delivered us both a bit of a beating.

Dave has to have a tooth out in the not too distant future, his second in far too short a space of time. My arm is still a work in progress, my dad is in hospital and my central heating went bust for the whole of the coldest week of the year. Dave magnanimously decides that I win in the Shit 2026 stakes: “whenever I think how bad my start to the year is”, he tells me, “I remember yours and I know it’s worse”. Only his recent holiday to York – “think of the city guide you could write!” he says – and my imminent trip to Màlaga are chinks in the gloom. That and a good lunch of course, a break from our sea of troubles. But where to go?

As is traditional, I gave Dave a range of options and let him pick his favourite. But I think maybe this time I rather led the witness – he was never going to pick Beckford Bottle Shop now he has given up drinking wine, and Root was probably a little too plant-driven for him. So the clear winner was Chez Dominique, a French restaurant just the other side on Pulteney Bridge, on a street that in any other city might be especially beautiful but in Bath is simply one of countless lookers.

Chez Dominique, named after the owners’ first child, celebrates its tenth birthday in the summer, and in that time it has built up the kind of solid reputation that swerves boom and bust hype in favour of cultivating a lasting fan base as a neighbourhood restaurant. It has featured in the Good Food Guide multiple times, and Tom Parker Bowles raved about it six years ago on that year’s annual trip to Bath to expense a catch-up with his old mucker Reach plc hack Mark Taylor: the irony of me saying this is not lost on me.

But apart from that single mention in the media Chez Dominique has stayed in its very attractive, distinctly Georgian lane, offering, among other things, a ridiculously reasonable prix fixe menu – £22 for two courses, £27 for three – every lunchtime. That kind of money didn’t feel very 2026 at all, but I can’t say it didn’t add to the temptation, so we ambled over the bridge with empty stomachs, high hopes and expectations just about held in check.

Chez Dominique’s dining room is long and thin and it somehow looked dated without being passé. Something about it felt like how dining rooms looked twenty years ago, a vague sense reinforced by seeing the Papyrus font on the menu. Maybe it was the relative immunity from some of the trends of modern restaurants – no brick walls or crappy chairs, everything in a tasteful shade of bluish teal, mirrors just the right side of rustic on the wall.

I disliked the spider lights, which always strike me as a little H.R. Giger, but perhaps that’s me (that reminds me: when does the new series of Interior Design Masters start on BBC One?). But it was a likeable space, and they got even more in my good books by giving us one of the best tables in the place, a table big enough for four next to the fireplace which gave me a great opportunity to people watch over Dave’s shoulder.

The place was almost empty when we arrived, but just as people are apparently eating dinner earlier I think they also lunch later: practically every table was occupied by the time we were halfway through our lunch, and some of them with their second diners of the sitting. The demographic was cheery, prosperous and in the main older even than us: put that way it made sense that the only newspaper to cover Chez Dominique had been the Mail On Sunday.

Chez Dominique’s menu, Papyrus and all, was not without its temptations but not without its frustrations either. At lunchtime it is indeed 2 courses for £22 or 3 for £27, although the starters and mains are also individually priced for some reason which escaped me. Some of the dishes – both starters, on this occasion – came with supplements. Side dishes cost extra.

So far, so straightforward, but the specials on the blackboard were also individually priced – at between £25 and £34 – with supplements ranging between £5 and £14. Oh, and there was a chateaubriand for two which cost £75, and presumably if you ordered that your starters and desserts were at list price. The whole thing felt unnecessarily ornate, like they were determined to stick to looking as if they had a prix fixe however much everything else threw it out of whack.

“I have to do maths to work out how much everything is going to cost” said Dave. “I don’t really want to do maths at lunch.” We agreed that it just would have been easier to charge the same amount for most of the starters, most of the mains etc. so you didn’t have to muck about with the intricacies of pricing. That too would have involved doing maths, come to think of it, but never mind. We kicked off with a can of alcohol-free IPA from local brewery Electric Bear – saving our units for later, you see – and it wasn’t bad although, as with most things I’ve had from Electric Bear, I’m always aware that I’ve had better from nearby Bristol or Cheltenham.

My starter was one of the ones with a supplement, the ones that Make You Do Maths, and for what it’s worth it was one of the cleverest, most interesting things we ate. Tuna came beautifully seared, still very pink in the middle, in a little cairn surrounded by fun stuff – ribbons of pickled fennel, slices of blood orange and pinkish blobs of rhubarb sriracha. I’ve never had rhubarb sriracha, and before this dish I’d have struggled to tell you what I expected it to taste like.

But its combination of tartness and heat properly zhuzhed up what would otherwise have been a far more classical, but still very enjoyable, plate of food. Did it justify the £3 supplement? It’s one of those questions: in terms of the ingredients and processes, quite possibly. But I imagine that it was also probably the Starter Most Likely To Leave You Peckish. I’ve seen other pictures of this dish on social media which suggest the restaurant is still playing around with the plating of this one. The impression was that it still felt a little like a work in progress.

Dave did far better with the conventional choice. We have similar taste when it comes to menus, and on another day it would have been me ploughing through the pork terrine. Fortunately, he is always happy to offer a forkful, and it just confirmed to me that Chez Dominique’s version was faultless: dense and delicious, all killer (or, technically speaking I suppose, all killed), bound in bacon and festooned with everything that was good – capers, apple, what I think might have been chicory.

Dave especially liked the golden raisins which gave the whole thing a slight pop of sweetness. I’d have preferred a little proper bread to a couple of toasts bordering on melba, but I might just have been trying extra hard to find fault because I was jealous.

Our starters took about ten minutes to turn up after we’d ordered, and when our server, who was excellent, asked how they were I told her they were very nice and that we were really in no rush. And Dave, who reads this blog and has known me an extremely long time, gave me a look that said do you have to be like this? Poor Dave, always delighted to be at lunch with his friend – however bad a year I’m having – but now coming to accept, reluctantly, that a restaurant reviewer invariably comes with the territory. Well, he does until the bill is paid anyway. After that he fucks off so the two of us can beetle onwards to a pub.

“I would have been fine with the experience you had at the Devonshire“, he told me. But if he wasn’t so easily pleased and so happy with the path of least resistance would we still be friends, over thirty-three years after we met on his very first day at university? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Because Dave has proved to be such a marvellous friend, so many years on, he let me choose first from the mains even though I invariably let my dining companions call shotgun. I didn’t even have to play the ‘having a terrible year’ card, it was just a given. That’s how I ended up with the pick of the specials section, and was rewarded with the veal t-bone. “Surely nothing bad ever comes in a t-bone?” said Dave, and it was hard to disagree with him.

And yet, it was good rather than great. The veal was quite enjoyable, although not the biggest, and it was cooked past blushing. Which I didn’t mind, actually: I liked the fact that I wasn’t asked how I wanted it. But the best things about it – and this is not how it ought to be – were everything else. I adored the roasted pears, plonked indecorously on top, and I really liked the thick disc of black pudding, British rather than boudin noir. But I wanted the cider sauce it came with to be rich and indulgent, and this felt slightly thin and bland. Thin in both senses: I wanted it to taste of more, and I wanted more of it.

Was this a £34 dish (or a £14 supplement dish, if you have your slide rule handy)? Maybe, maybe not. In fairness it came with fries, which were exceptional (“they’re like really good McDonalds fries” was Dave’s verdict, and he was not wrong) and a spot-on, very well-dressed salad. I added some carrots in tarragon butter, which I really didn’t need: five carrots in not quite enough rather nice butter for £5. Far from unpleasant, but the salad would have been enough.

Dave had his second choice, which would have been my second choice too, the monkfish. I am wont to say that you don’t see it on as many menus these days and yet here we are, in Bath for the first time since last year and Dave has eaten monkfish as a main at both of those meals. Maybe it’s a Bath thing. And again, the faint praise came out a little too quickly. Dave didn’t mind the monkfish, and loved the samphire and mussels. But, as with the t-bone, the sauce was what let it down.

“I just expected more depth” said Dave. “I think about that fish soup you wrote about at Pompette, and I wanted something with that kind of punch.” And he was right, I tasted Dave’s and as crab bisques go it was a little underpowered. Everything felt a little toned down, when French food is meant to be where sauces reach their evolutionary summit. The kitchen that was playing it safe here didn’t feel like the same kitchen that would rustle up a rhubarb sriracha: someone didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions. Dave had some new potatoes with this, but I also shared the frites because they were just too good to hog.

Having complained a little about the mathematical rigmarole of Chez Dominique’s menu, I will say this for it: none of the desserts comes with a supplement – unless you order multiple cheeses, but let’s not get into that – which means that ordering one costs an extra fiver. Rude not to, and practically mandatory if you ask me. There are four on the menu, and we tried a couple with a glass of Sauternes each: £12.50 for the dessert wine, but in an unimpeachable 125ml pour.

Dave’s orange, olive oil and polenta cake was quite delightful, and far softer and more delicate than it looked at first sight. It had more of that blood orange that featured in my starter, and plenty of flaked, toasted almonds and if I had ordered it I think I would have been pretty pleased. I would also, in the back of my mind, have been remembering the cake I had at Manteca a few years ago, because comparison is the thief of joy: that’s what makes me a hoot at parties.

My dessert, the vanilla bavarois, felt like it had been pre-portioned and come out of the fridge. It was decent enough but, like my tuna starter, made you spend as much time noticing the negative space than it did the stuff that didn’t entirely fill it. It was very similar to a panna cotta, and I always tend to like those, and all three of my nubbins of rhubarb were nice. My chantilly cream, speckled with vanilla, was nice. It was all nice. Isn’t that nice? Exactly.

“I think if you’re going to serve a dessert in a glass like that, the dessert needs to come a lot closer to the rim of the glass than it does there” said Dave. Nicely put.

A very companionable hour and three quarters had elapsed, and we flagged someone down for the bill, quite happy to pay it irrespective of whatever supplements or arcane calculations had been involved. Our three courses apiece – including three dishes with varying supplements, our sides and drinks and what have you – came to just over £164, with the 12.5% service charge thrown in. Our lunch in Bath the previous year had cost a little less, with a couple fewer drinks, which makes Upstairs At Landrace look both superb and a bargain.

We settled up with no compunction whatsoever and raced off to the Raven, where as luck would have it one of the best tables in the place became available minutes after we arrived. Many beers followed, and then a boozy meander to the station – I managed to persuade Dave to take a train home an hour later than the one he’d planned to, which I always count as a personal triumph – and we agreed that this formula of coffee, lunch and the pub in Bath remained a winning one, even if the filling in this particular sandwich, this time, had been pleasant rather than spectacular.

I remember watching a video last year on Instagram of some bloke judging a pizza competition. I don’t know whether it was pizza fatigue or just a general lack of vocabulary, but slice after slice was pronounced “solid”. “Oh, that’s a solid effort” he said, after chowing down on one. “Solid pizza, that one” he said after the next. Everything was solid, as if pizzas being liquid or gaseous was even an option. Solid, the word you use when it’s not bad but you don’t really know what else to say.

And yet it’s the word I keep coming back to when I try to encapsulate Chez Dominique. It is emphatically a good restaurant – not an outstanding one, but definitely a good one. You could reliably have a relatively enjoyable meal there, and if you lived in Bath you might go there a few times a year.

Does it justify a detour from further afield? Probably not. They are lucky in that city to have it as a neighbourhood restaurant, I suppose, but some of that might just be that those people are lucky to have that as a neighbourhood. It’s always hard to separate the two, I find, when a restaurant is situated somewhere lovely.

Sadly, the reason why French restaurants, the likes of Paulette or Pompette, exert such a pull is that there hasn’t been anything remotely like that in Reading since Forbury’s closed. But Chez Dominique didn’t remind me, truth be told, of any of those places. It felt more like a higher spec version of Oxford’s Pierre Victoire, the prices slightly hiked and the offering slightly widened.

But even so, if you moved both Chez Dominique and Pierre Victoire to Reading and put them on the same street it would be one of the very few times in my entire life when I’m given a choice of two similar things and I wind up picking the cheaper option. The rest of the time, the only supplement I could really do with is to my income.

Chez Dominique – 7.6
15 Argyle Street, Bath, BA2 4BQ
01225 463482

https://www.chezdominique.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Arbequina, Oxford

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Late last Saturday morning I was sitting outside Missing Bean on Turl Street with my great friend Jerry, drinking a gorgeous latte in the summer sun, about to tuck into a pain au chocolat with impeccable lamination; I remember thinking that, on a day like that, there felt like no better place to be than Oxford in the sunshine. The train up from Reading had been packed, and we’d stood in the vestibule making conversation with our fellow captives, two young polite Swedes with perfect teeth and an Australian who had fought her way there to the loo and, realising how spacious it was, was tempted to lock herself in there for the rest of the trip.

And when we got to Oxford – well, it was a Saturday in August and the weather was fine, so naturally the city was packed. A curious blend, throngs of tourists swarming round Radcliffe Square, the Bodleian and the Covered Market but also packs of graduands, in their gowns, on their way to the Sheldonian Theatre for their final rite of passage. The Oxford year isn’t like the calendar year and this all happened on the very outskirts of it – one academic year ended, another not quite ready to begin, the city reclaimed by residents before the whole thing started again in October.

Nonetheless, from where we were sitting the view was gorgeous, the food and drink were excellent and the people watching was close to unparalleled. I’d asked Jerry if he was free on the off chance at very short notice and had been delighted that he was, and at this point we were barely an hour into what would turn out to be another effortless nine hour chinwag, punctuated by this walk or that, this spot of shopping or another, lunch, coffee, beer garden, train home. Even at the start of the day, I knew it would be a good one: with Jerry, it always was.

But would it be a good lunch? I’d thought carefully about this, because although I always have a wonderful time with Jerry when he joins me for a review I cannot say, hand on heart, that we usually have a good meal. I’m not saying that he’s a jinx, far from it, but I feel guilty that he’s joined me for some of the most middling meals I’ve had for the blog in the last few years. He was the person I took to Zia Lucia for pizza that was nothing more than pleasant, and then he also came with me to Maidenhead’s Storia for much the same experience.

Then to cap it all, the last time we lunched it was in Oxford – at Gee’s, where £200 got you a lot of disappointment. Because Jerry is so lovely, he never resents us marring our time together with mediocre food, which makes him a far better person than me. But I still feel bad about it, and I decided after that lunch in Gee’s that Jerry, more than anyone who comes out on duty with me, deserved a nice one. But where to take him?

The thing is, places I review for the blog probably fall into three categories. There are the ones I expect in advance will be good: these are more likely to happen in places like Oxford, London or Bristol that support a large and thriving restaurant scene. And then there are the places I merely hope will be good, and that hope can run the whole spectrum from reckless optimism to wishful thinking. Don’t get me wrong: I always hope for the best but sometimes, especially in Reading, that hope can border on the blinkered or forlorn.

Originally I was going to take Jerry to the Chester Arms, out off the Iffley Road, which falls into the first category. It’s famous for one thing and one thing only – its enormous steak platter, which comes groaning with handmade chips, cabbage and streaky bacon and béarnaise sauce, which they have been serving up for over fifteen years. I’ve heard about it so many times but never managed to make it there, but as we were deciding where to go Jerry dropped the bombshell: he’d just had a dental implant, so needed something a little less taxing on the molars. Would I mind if we went somewhere else?

So the subject of this week’s review falls into the rarer third category: places I have been, that I remember liking, where the mixture of hope and expectation is more of a balancing act. You don’t so much expect they’ll be good, you more hope that they’re as good as you remember. And Arbequina, the tapas restaurant down the Cowley Road, definitely falls into that category. It’s been there nine years, very much blazing the trail in that part of Oxford, and after getting a rave review in the Guardian the year after it opened it’s stayed out of the limelight, even though it’s one of only two Oxford restaurants to be mentioned in the Michelin guide.

It’s quietly done its thing. No cookbook, no appearance on Saturday Kitchen or Great British Menu, just keeping going and keeping afloat. Growth has been steady and incremental: first it expanded into the neighbouring unit four years ago and then, earlier this year, it announced that it was crowdfunding to open a second site in Oxford’s Covered Market, The council had approached them with an offer – not something that would ever happen here in Reading – and so far the crowdfunder is just over half the way there, with the restaurant still hoping to open the new site later this year.

So yes, Arbequina has history. And I have history with it too, because I’ve been eating there, on and off, for the last eight years or more. Plenty pre-COVID, when I always adored it, but only once, for some reason, since the pandemic ended. That was three and a half years ago, and it sowed seeds of doubt that maybe Arbequina wasn’t the restaurant it used to be. But I should have checked in on it long before now, and ambling across Magdalen Bridge with Jerry, in good time for our lunch reservation, I found myself getting excited about a reunion with somewhere that used to be one of my favourite places.

It’s in the fun part of the Cowley Road, past the restaurants Florence Pugh’s dad used to own, past Spiced Roots, but just before brilliant café Peloton Espresso, or Truck Records, or – far further up – the turning into the food enclave of Magdalen Road. It’s a lovely site that has kept the old shop fronts from the chemist and watchmaker who used to trade there, the tasteful writing in orange sans serif on the glass the only sign of Arbequina’s name. The room inside is lovely, with unpretentious decor, a handful of tables, both low and high, and a long zinc bar where you can sit and watch all the work in the very small open kitchen.

But it was a Saturday in August, and the awning was out, and neither of us could think of anything finer than sitting out on the pavement watching the Cowley Road live and breathe, so we did exactly that. I ordered a rebujito from their cocktail menu – a drink I grew to love in lockdown but which I had for the first time at Arbequina, rather than in Andulusia – and Jerry joined me. It was fresh and zippy, a harmonious blend of the lemon, mint and that savoury note of fino.

The other thing we had right from the off, while we made up our minds about the rest, was Arbequina’s tortilla. I remembered it well enough to know that you simply had to order it, and I also knew from repeated personal experience that sharing a slice felt like a good idea right up to the point where it turned up and you could only eat half of it. So I insisted that we got a couple, and Jerry agreed – partly because he’s just a very agreeable cove and partly because I sold it as about as kind on his teeth as it’s possible to get.

But ‘kind’ undersells it, because it’s a positively indulgent treat and, however good anything else you eat at Arbequina might be, it always sets the standard for other dishes to beat. I had forgotten, over the last three and a bit years, just how good it is, but it was magnificent: so soft, only just structured on the outside and a glorious mess within.

Egg, potato, onions, thyme – that’s all there is to it, but of course that’s a hopelessly reductive way to describe a masterpiece. Jerry did better, dubbing it sumptuous. Why do I never use that word in reviews? Maybe I was waiting for this dish.

Because you could have tortilla in dozens of places, in Spain and in this country, and not approach the brilliance of this. Every forkful but the last was wonderful, and the last was wonderful yet heartbreaking. But I knew that at least not sharing it meant that last forkful took longer to arrive. It was so sweet, so exquisite that I thought I tasted things in it – maybe nutmeg, maybe cinnamon – that weren’t there.

When Ben, the manager who looked after us that day, took our empty dishes away he explained that there really was nothing else in there. The sweetness came from the onions, which were cooked for a mind-blowing twelve hours. When Jerry heard that he said “I don’t envy your gas bill” and the manager smiled. Jerry had accidentally hit on one of the reasons hospitality is so thankless right now, and he meant no harm by it.

That tortilla under our belts, it was time to take a serious look at the menu and plan our assault on it. Many of the dishes I remembered from previous visits – chicken thighs with romesco, or toast thickly spread with ‘nduja and honey – were no longer there, but the menu still read nicely. Just shy of twenty dishes, most of them at or adjacent to a tenner: only one approaching twenty quid and a last, Iberico tenderloin to share, closer to forty.

It didn’t break into sections, or flow quite the way that the menu at, say, RAGÙ did, but it had plenty of potential and so Jerry and I did what I’d done countless times before – made a list of things we definitely wanted to eat, broke it up into waves and decided to order and graze, little and often. And along with that we had a gorgeous white, an Asturian albariño blend with a certain bracing saline quality: I’d chosen it for no other reason than that I’m on holiday in Asturia soon, and fancied getting a sneak preview.

My verdict? Roll on next month. At £45 it was the most expensive white on a very compact list – four reds and four whites, mostly from Spain, and a bigger selection of natural wines from all over. But the markup was far from harsh, because I reckon it would cost you about £20 retail.

Sometimes things can be delicious because they’re simple, and Arbequina’s chorizo was a classic example. Sliced lengthways and cooked on the plancha until the outsides were caramelised and blackened, it was superlative stuff. Not cooked in wine or cider, not sliced and fancified, just cooked and served. I’d love to know where Arbequina buys it – it’s certainly not Brindisa, because theirs can be a bouncy horror compared to this.

It irked me that they gave you five of them, though, because that’s an especially tricky number to share. Well, with anybody but Jerry, anyway. “Go on, you have the last one” he said. He’s just lovely like that.

Almost as simple, even more beautiful to look at – and perfect for a sunny al fresco afternoon – Arbequina’s watermelon with jamon was a joyous dish. The melon was plump, sweet and vibrant, and very much the star of the show. But where it wasn’t quite as successful as, say, the similar dish I had at RAGÙ recently, was that the supporting players were perhaps hiding their lights under a bushel somewhat. The two bits of jamon folded on top felt slightly meagre, the honey and chilli rather lurked at the bottom of the plate, shunning the limelight.

But to be fair, if you’re comparing this with the dish at RAGÙ it’s only fair to also note that this was £8, and the Bristol restaurant’s version was over 50% more expensive.

Jerry was in no rush – I always forget that he’s not a trencherman like I am – so at this point we asked the manager if we could hold fire, sip our wine and come back to the menu. And he let us do exactly that, keeping us posted on when the kitchen would take last orders so we could have the leisurely lunch we had in mind. Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so we nattered about all sorts, only punctuated by Jerry having an almost Tourettes-like reaction to every single electric scooter going past. I love the multitudes people contain: Jerry is possibly the most affable person I know, but he really hates those electric scooters.

The one dish Jerry really wanted from the menu was Arbequina’s take on an Andalusian classic, berenjanas con miel, or fried aubergine with honey. Now, I wouldn’t have ordered this because I’ve never liked it in Spain – usually the aubergine is sliced thin and fried in a crispy batter, and drizzled in a dark sticky molasses that is a million miles from honey. It takes some doing, in my book, to make aubergine a good thing and this dish, whenever I’ve had it abroad, doesn’t pull it off.

But Arbequina’s version takes everything that could be good about that dish and junks the rest. So we got three soft, caramelised wedges of aubergine, drizzled with an ambrosial molasses without any sour, burnt note, the whole thing bathed in a mild whipped feta – almost more yoghurt than feta – and scattered with pomegranate and torn mint. Have I sold it to you? I hope so. Arbequina sold it to me, both literally and metaphorically. One to add to the vanishingly small list of aubergine dishes I actually like, most of which are on the menu at Kungfu Kitchen.

Our last two savoury dishes were, apart from the tortilla, the highlights of the whole thing for me. I am a terrible rubbernecker in restaurants and I kept seeing a dish go past to other tables which looked eminently snackable, a giant heap of fried, crispy, golden things. But I wasn’t sure what it was, and when I asked the manager I couldn’t explain it well enough – I blame the wine – to get him to tell me what the dish was. But then Jerry wanted the prawns, so it turns out we ordered it by accident.

So these, it turns out, are Sanlucar Crystal prawns – little critters, soft shell, fried in a golden coating, dusted with chilli and served with a generous dollop of alioli. Never had them in my life, now fully wondering where they’ve been for the last fifty-one years.

And again the funny thing is that like the aubergine, this wouldn’t normally be in my wheelhouse at all. I don’t like whitebait, can be squeamish about eating things whole. I’m not one of those macho restaurant bloggers who likes to wank on about sucking the head of a prawn – they try to channel Bourdain, but really they’re Swiss Toni – and, with the exception of one meal in Kolae I’ve managed to convince myself that I really don’t want to munch on a prawn’s brains.

So why did I love these so much? I really don’t know, but I did. I keep using the word fresh in this review, or it feels like I do, but that’s what they were – so fresh, so light, so simple, with that spritz of citrus, that whisper-quiet crunch and the ozonic tang of the sea. On the Cowley Road. Now, I love the Cowley Road but I’m not going to pretend for a minute that eating these prawns there was in any way a congruous thing to do.

I hadn’t especially wanted Arbequina’s patatas bravas – I often think they’re a way to needlessly bulk up meals in tapas restaurants – but I was drawn to their more exotic sibling on the menu. And it was another really wise choice: billed as crispy new potatoes with tonnato and salsa verde, it was a real humdinger. The slices of potato, thicker than crisps but very much sharing that lineage, were stellar, a triumph of texture.

The thick slick of tonnato was perfect for dipping and dredging: I didn’t get an enormous amount of tuna from it but I did get plenty of savoury saltiness, so I’m guessing anchovies played a part. And I don’t think salsa verde showed up to this dish at all. In its place, I suppose they had deconstructed it by instead scattering everything with salt, parley and lemon zest. I probably would have preferred a salsa verde, because I love the stuff. But I’d forgotten about the salsa verde when this dish turned up so instead I just thought isn’t adding lemon zest to this clever? They knew better than I did.

By this point we’d been there the best part of an hour and a half, in which time tables had come and gone but the restaurant had kept a happy trickling momentum of customers in the sunshine. The Americans at the table next to us ordered some of that tortilla, and inexplicably left some of it: we decided, on balance, that we didn’t know them well enough to offer to take it off their hands.

We both fancied something from the dessert menu, and I talked Jerry into a red dessert wine which came in a wide, low tumbler and was like nectar. I didn’t catch the name, and my bill doesn’t give the detail, but red dessert wines are always worth a try if you find one, and I suspected it would go better with the chocolate mousse even than a Pedro Ximenez.

Other desserts are available, of course. Arbequina was offering a panna cotta, a Basque cheesecake or the almond-rich wonder that is a Tarta de Santiago. But I think chocolate mousse should be on far more menus than it is, so whenever I see one I order it – and Jerry, being kind to his vulnerable gob, followed suit. It was, as so often, the perfect way to finish a meal.

I’ve had Arbequina’s chocolate mousse plenty of times, often enough to track its evolution. It used to be a dense quenelle of the stuff – drizzled with olive oil, scattered with coarse salt, served with a torta de aciete for good measure. But over time, Arbequina’s version of this dish has changed, become less uncompromising, dropped the olive oil and become, on the outside at least, more conventional.

But don’t be fooled: it might come in a glass, the torta de aciete may have been replaced with a dome of crème fraîche but the mousse is still theirs, and still sublime. The salt now runs through the whole thing rather than just finishing it off, and it works beautifully.

It was the right way to end a lunch that had been unassailable in its rightness. Our bill came to just under £175, including tip, and nothing about it had felt out of kilter or anything short of marvellous. We settled up with glad hearts, and were on our way – the grand total of a couple of doors down to have a post-lunch coffee outside Peloton Espresso.

But then another delightful discovery lay in store – a short walk down the Cowley Road and we came to Rectory Road and the Star, the best Oxford pub I’d never been to and another long overdue discovery. It was like a cross between the best things about the Retreat and the Nag’s Head, with a huge handsome beer garden and Steady Rolling Man on tap.

So we grabbed a table, carried on chattering, beers passed, tables of people – and the people watching opportunities they presented – came and went. We had nowhere to be, and every reason to linger. Really it was the best afternoon, and one of the best things about it was knowing that at last, Jerry had got the excellent meal he deserved. Finally, I got him a nice one.

Much later on, we retraced our steps, walking east to west through Oxford, the sun setting in the distance. The pavement outside Arbequina was even busier, with people about to have one kind of outstanding dinner or another. The Cowley Road was alive, the antithesis to the stuffiness we’d encountered right in the centre. “It’s bit like the Oxford Road isn’t it?” said Jerry as we sloped back towards Magdalen Bridge. And I replied that it’s what the Oxford Road could be like, with better landlords and more imaginative restaurateurs. Still, it’s nice to dream.

Arbequina – 8.9
72-74 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JB
01865 792777

https://arbequina.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Vino Vita

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews7 Comments

Last year, in one of the more baffling developments in Reading’s food and drink scene, wine bar Veeno changed its name to Vino Vita. It wasn’t initially clear whether this was because the people running it had bought the business from Veeno or if something else was going on. If you read the details on Vino Vita’s website you’d be none the wiser. “We’ve rebranded, but our commitment to excellence remains unchanged” it said. “Join us as we start an exciting new chapter that expands our offerings and vision.”

More details emerged when the owners spoke to the Chronicle last month. “A big reason why we became independent was so we could have more say over the produce” said the restaurant’s Head Of Sales. “We developed our whole menu, and everything is done on site.” I remember reading the article and thinking that this potentially merited a revisit, but the main thing I took away was They have a head of sales? It felt like a role Veeno, a chain with 5 restaurants across England and Scotland, might need but that Vino Vita, a single spot opposite Forbury Gardens, probably didn’t.

So what were the differences, and had Vino Vita improved on the Veeno formula since taking their destiny into their own hands? The only way to be sure was to eat there – which clearly I did, because you’re reading this – but before that I carried out some research. Because I visited Veeno on duty nearly 8 years ago, not long after they opened, and at the time I would have said that there was plenty of room for improvement.

Vino Vita’s menu does indeed offer a slightly wider selection of dishes than Veeno’s, with more nibbles, bruschette, small plates and so on. It has about as many pasta dishes, although I’d say Vino Vita’s sound less interesting. The big difference, and again this is baffling, is the sheer volume of pizza: between conventional pizzas and Pinsa Romana, Vino Vita offers almost twice as many options as its estranged siblings.

Did Vino Vita move in this direction to compete directly with the likes of Mama’s Way, who clearly have superb access to produce? And if so, wouldn’t you maybe change course given that Reading has seen pizza place after pizza place open this year, at least two of them – Paesinos and Amò – being truly first class? I did wonder.

A couple of other strange things that came out of my homework. One was wine. Veeno’s selling point was that the wine was from their own vineyard: their selection was excellent, the vast majority of it was available by the glass and much of it was affordable. To give you an example, 7 of their 21 reds will set you back £30 or less. By contrast, Vino Vita’s 21 reds were more expensive – the cheapest was £29.95, the remainder all cost more than that.

It wasn’t clear where any of them came from either, because unlike Veeno, Vino Vita didn’t quote producers or vintages. It felt odd to split away from the parent company to offer greater choice, only for that choice to be more expensive and less informative. Like the name change, it had a hint of shadiness about it.

The other odd thing was something I discovered when making a reservation, because booking online with Vino Vita also raised some questions. The thing is, you don’t just book a table. You also have to tell them, and I’ve never seen this before, when you plan to give it back. Not only that, but you also have to say what you’re booking it for – is it for a meal or an Experience?

Yes, an Experience with a capital E, and the booking system asks you which one you want: Quattro Rossi, for example, Trip To Italy or Italian Afternoon Tea, without telling you what they are (they’re on a separate menu, but it’s odd that they don’t tell you as part of the booking Experience – sorry, I mean experience). And all those Experiences? Copied straight from Veeno. The grape didn’t fall very far from the vine, it seemed.

After all that research, I was in two minds about going to Vino Vita. Was it different enough? Was it promising enough? But one thing clinched it. Sometimes people specifically ask if they can join me for particular reviews: so for instance, when I get round to visiting Lebanese Flavours to discover whether the artist formally known as Bakery House has simply changed its name or changed for the worse, my friend Liz has called shotgun on that one.

Similarly, I can’t review Wendy’s unless it’s in the company of Kevin, a long-standing reader, because I promised him, and as he’s moved to the Cotswolds it won’t happen any time soon. In this case it was Zoë, my wife and number one dining companion, who put in a request specifically to go to Vino Vita, so I met her outside at the start of the weekend, to discover whether their commitment to excellence really did remain unchanged.

Our table wasn’t ready when we arrived, so we went out to the terrace to have a drink before our meal. It really is one of Reading’s most appealing al fresco spaces, a very pleasant spot opposite the park, strung with lights and convivial on a warm day. It was nice to spend time there before dinner, quitting as the evening became a little nippy, but it does help if you don’t mind passive smoking because there was a fair bit of that. Very Italian, I suppose.

It was, however, difficult to get attention. So by the time we did, and managed to place an order, and the nibbles came out, it was chilly enough that it felt like time to move inside. Vino Vita’s interior didn’t feel any different to when it was Veeno, and I’ve always found it a slightly disjointed set of spaces – some high tables, some low tables, a series of disconnected rooms that don’t entirely feel like they’re all part of the same establishment.

We were taken to a more conventional table to the right of the bar, in the room I’m pretty sure I ate in back in 2017. On a Friday night the place wasn’t rammed, although I suppose many of the customers were outside. Perhaps they seated all the people that had booked a table for an actual meal in the same room, and everyone else was off having their Experiences.

Our nibbles were disappointing, sub-pub stuff. I was hoping that salted almonds would be the kind of treats you get in Andalusia, burnished with oil and speckled with salt. These were out of a packet or a tub, dusty with salt and completely unremarkable. Even more nothingy were the taralli, dense little knots with the texture of sawdust. Really good taralli come spiked with fennel seeds and, with a crisp white wine, can be a delight. These weren’t really good taralli. Eight pounds for two ramekins of blandness.

We had a wine flight with these, the “VINO.VITA.BIO” which was three 70ml glasses of Vino Vita’s organic wines. The first, a verdicchio, was genuinely very enjoyable – and it was just as well that it was, because getting someone to bring some water to accompany those very dry snacks proved difficult. When we finally did manage it one of the staff brought a small bottle of water, a single glass and another glass full to the brim with ice. We had two perfectly good water glasses sitting on the table, which made it all a bit weird. “It’s funny” said Zoe. “They do have enough staff, it just feels like they don’t.”

The other two wines in that flight, by the way, were also quite nice. One, a Nero d’Avola, was decent, perfumed and very enjoyable: it didn’t go with anything we ordered, but that might be because it was tasty and none of the food turned out to be. The third wine was a Frappato, which is a new one on me, and was also perfectly drinkable.

This is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who enjoy wines on the medium end of the spectrum said the blurb on the piece of paper which accompanied the wine flight: that quote is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who like their sentences to be completely devoid of meaning. As with the wine list, the piece of paper didn’t give useful details like producers or vintages, and you didn’t get to see the bottles or labels. Did that make for a premium experience, or Experience, when you were paying £17 for 210ml of wine?

We’d also ordered some garlic ciabatta, but our server accidentally brought over the bread selection instead. He was very apologetic, and ran off and made amends, but it was a useful exercise because the bread was a dreary-looking generic selection, none of which looked like it had been baked onsite or indeed anywhere exciting; I made a mental note not to order any of the numerous bruschetta options.

Instead we got what we’d originally ordered, four slightly sad triangles of ciabatta which had been sort of toasted, a little, inconsistently brushed with olive oil and scattered with parsley. There was some garlic there, but nowhere near the industrial quantities Italian food called for. Zoë thought this was okay, but she was being charitable. I thought that for six pounds I was having the kind of thing you could easily pick up at a supermarket.

The real crimes against Italian food, though, were to follow, in a meal where the longer it went on the worse it seemed to get. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate that than the first of the small plates we’d ordered. The menu promised stuffed courgette flowers, and I thought this would be a real test of whether they truly held all those lofty aspirations. Because a courgette flower, its head stuffed with ricotta and lemon zest, the whole thing fried in an almost translucent, lacy batter is one of the very best things you can eat.

It is serious cooking, and a menu offering it is making a claim to be serious about cooking. I still remember it being served by the Lyndhurst, when I held a readers’ lunch many years ago: Amy, the vegetarian on our table, had it all to herself and every omnivore envied her. It’s taking all my strength not to include a picture of it in this review, so you can see what it’s meant to look like. Instead, just look at that: three beige cylinders bearing no resemblance to courgette flowers at all. No light coating, instead a thick layer of stodge.

Inside, something that definitely wasn’t a courgette flower: I’m prepared to take their word for it that it was courgette, but only just. And inside that, some blend of cheeses that tasted of nothing. This was like some kind of continental reinterpretation of stuffed jalapeños you might pick up at Iceland, an affront to the promise of this dish. Providing some honey, the only thing that actually tasted of anything, didn’t rescue it. The price – £8.50 – rubbed salt in the wound.

The arancini were in the same vein. Veeno only did one kind, filled with ragu, whereas at Vino Vita you can choose between ragu, mushroom and truffle or ham and cheese. The mushroom and truffle ones didn’t taste of truffle in any way, being just claggy stodge with no crunch or crispness to the exterior. Plonking them on a shallow pool of tomato sauce, grating some cheese and unceremoniously dumping some basil in the middle neither elevated them nor disguised their inadequacy.

I’ve used that word, stodge, twice now, because nothing else encapsulates those dishes. Italian food at its best can embrace the wonder and comfort of carbs, but this seemed to prioritise filling the stomach and emptying the wallet with brutal efficiency. In fairness, these were billed as bite-sized and only cost £6, but they still weren’t worth it. When I went to Veeno, 8 years ago, I said that it felt like the kitchen was more interested in margins than food. Hold my beer, said Vino Vita.

Neither Zoë nor I managed to take a picture of one of our small plates, so you’ll have to both imagine it and take my word for it. If you read the title carpaccio of salmon and the description smoked salmon drizzled with a lemon and caper dressing and fresh rocket and think that, based on what you’ve heard so far, this is likely to be a small piece of smoked salmon draped over a hill of the kind of salad you get in a bag at the supermarket, domed to make it look like you’re getting more salmon than you are, meanly scattered with capers, you would be absolutely spot on. Give yourself a pat on the back.

This is me trying to find positives, believe it or not. But I don’t think even Pollyanna could find a positive in the final small plate, the caponata. Caponata is a wonderful thing, a cold, sweet and sour aubergine stew with olives, capers and pine nuts. It has a distinctive taste which I adore. It is not, as it was at Vino Vita, a bland mulch of aubergine and far too many tinned black olives, with no sweetness, sharpness or sourness. It didn’t even look like caponata, didn’t have that depth of colour, although you’d have to whip off all the pointless foliage that had been dumped on it to be absolutely sure.

You know who used to do a very enjoyable caponata, back in the day? Carluccio’s, of all places. You know who does the worst caponata I’ve ever tasted? That would be Vino Vita.

Now, you might just think I’m being curmudgeonly, so I have to say this in my defence: Zoë thought all of this was awful. Zoë, the woman who is able to tolerate me. Even she – especially she – found all these dishes unforgivably bad.

“There’s somebody in that kitchen who really hates Italy” was her conclusion.

“It definitely doesn’t feel like anybody in the kitchen’s ever been there.”

“What we’ve just had,” she added, “was a crap-paccio. A crap-paccio and a craponata.”

Irony of ironies, the bottle of white wine we were on by now was really very nice, with fruit and structure and, to my mind, even a little hint of licorice. And by this point we had a server who was really good and very personable, checking in on us and taking away our empties. At just over fifty pounds you’d want that bottle to be good – Vivino suggested its mark up was something like three times retail price – but however pleasant it was, I wasn’t sure how much of it you’d need to drink to make the food seem like a good idea. I was sure, though, that I wasn’t capable of putting that much wine away.

The food up to that point had been so poor that it became partly about cutting our losses. The couple at the next table had paid up and gone leaving behind the best part of a bowl of anaemic-looking pasta – the mushroom tagliatelle, at a guess – and a blond, bland pizza. So we decided to try a Pinsa Romana, the airier Roman variant as popularised in Reading by Mama’s Way. In a way, I was trying to give Vino Vita one last chance, aware that if I had a conventional pizza and was comparing it to Amò or Paesinos it would be the final nail in the coffin.

But the final nail in the coffin was the Pinsa Romana. The Piccante promised, if the menu were to be believed, ‘nduja and oil, roasted peppers, burrata, rocket and basil. Like all the other promises, it was an empty one. The base was crunchy, dry as a bone with no airiness or give: Mama’s Way may buy their pinsa bases in, but they were miles better than this.

The pinsa had been pre-cut into eight miserly squares, and good luck finding ‘nduja on every one, because you wouldn’t. “Nigel Farage turns up to vote more often than ‘nduja turns up to this pizza” was Zoë’s verdict. Bland unlovely bits of burrata had been placed here and there – no oil, no discernible basil and no rocket.

In the rocket’s place, obscuring just how atrocious this pinsa was – which surely must have been the prime objective – somebody had thrown random salad on top of the whole affair. This was the last straw for Zoë. “It’s meant to have rocket on it, not the contents of a fucking bag of Florette”. The whole thing was so subpar that we followed our neighbours’ example.

It’s not even that this pinsa didn’t compare well to what you could get a short walk away at Paesinos or Amò, although it didn’t. It’s that it didn’t compare well to what you could get at Zia Lucia, or Zizzi, or Pizza Express. Or Marks, or Tesco, or Aldi, or the Co-Op. And if you bought one from a supermarket and took it home, you could dot it with ‘nduja yourself and even if it was from the chiller cabinet, heated up in your oven, it would be dozens of times better than this effort. It wouldn’t cost you £15.50, either, and for that money you can enjoy the best pizza Reading currently has to offer, minutes away on Kings Road.

Our server came over to check how our food was. We said “it was fine” almost in unison, the universal English euphemism for It was bad, but I can’t face a conversation about that. Our bill came to £166, including a 12.5% service charge. A bit of me wants to say that in Vino Vita’s defence, nearly ninety of that was on wine. But even if I do say that in their defence, the rest was indefensible.

Can you tell I wasn’t a fan? I don’t think I’ve written a review like this in ages, and certainly not of somewhere independent, and I don’t take pleasure in doing it. I’m reassured that Zoë, who is positivity personified, disliked it even more than I did – because yes, it turns out that’s possible. And I don’t know what offends me most about the place. The mediocrity is bad enough, the mediocrity coupled with the laziness is worse. To combine both those things with really iffy value, at a time when Reading’s Italian scene is having something of a renaissance, is woeful.

Worse still, it made me feel like that rebrand from Veeno to Vino Vita had something else behind it. A desire to make more from less, to cut corners and conceal charging a premium. Even some of the dishes that have been tweaked from Veeno’s menu to Vino Vita’s display this – Veeno does a bruschetta with capers and Sicilian dark tuna, Vino Vita’s boasts a tuna paté. What’s the Italian for Shippams?

But just as sad is this: with the Cellar gone and Vino Vita, well, like this, Reading still doesn’t have the wine bar with excellent food that has been missing ever since the Tasting House closed after lockdown. That gap in the market remains, and on this evidence Vino Vita isn’t even trying to fill it. Maybe Notes, just opened on Station Hill, will do better: it’s not as if it could do much worse. It is bad luck for Vino Vita that I review them the week after I had one of my meals of the year – also Italian, but miles better – at RAGÙ, but Vino Vita would be bad whoever you were comparing them to.

It might have been a little different if the service had been better – Apo, formerly of Dolce Vita and Pho, and one of Reading’s great front of house operators – works at Vino Vita, although he wasn’t on duty the night I went there. But the problems are squarely on the menu and in the kitchen, not elsewhere: you could forgive the slightly disjointed interior or the relatively expensive wine if everything else was firing on all cylinders, but it didn’t even get started.

If Paesinos or Amò had more space and an alcohol license, I’m not sure what the point of Vino Vita would be. In fact, if either of them did I think it would spell curtains for Vino Vita. I might be wrong, of course, because it seemed to be doing reasonably well the night I was there and that puff piece in the Chronicle made it sound like they were going from strength to strength. Be that as it may Vino Vita achieved something I would never have thought possible, despite nearly twelve years in the reviewing game. It made me miss Veeno, and that’s not a good thing.

Vino Vita – 4.6
Minerva House, 20 Valpy Street, Reading, RG1 1AR
0118 9505493

https://vinovita.bar

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Restaurant review: Town, Covent Garden

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Town – or, as it’s sometimes written, TOWN – is the hot new restaurant on Drury Lane, with celebrated chef Stevie Parle in the kitchen. It’s been open a couple of months, and has already had rave reviews from every quarter. Admittedly, some of those came with caveats. Giles Coren declared at the outset that he was friends with Jonathan Downey, one of the backers – a rare piece of transparency about vested interests in this sphere – and in the process revealed that Tom Parker Bowles is too (which means it’s quite possible that Parker Bowles is also friends with Coren: and to think we’re meant to trust these people’s tastes).

So yes, in the space of just over 6 weeks, almost every national restaurant critic we have – not William Sitwell, he was probably too busy campaigning for Nigel Farage – went to Town, literally and figuratively, to almost universal acclaim. Even that chap with the bouffant who writes for the Standard whose name escapes me went there (only kidding, he’s called David Ellis and I read somewhere that his earliest restaurant memories involve Quattro: he still goes with his family and gets limoncello on the house).

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, talking about Kolae or, more recently, Brutto: that even though London has many thousands of restaurants, and the rest of the U.K. many thousands more, you will find a handful of London restaurants every year that get written up by every single reviewer. Either because they offer something interesting and different or because the chef has a backstory or, more likely, is well-connected in the world of food.

All those channels and nothing new on: it’s all repeats. But it’s more important that they have their say on a significant new opening than it is to give readers a range of options, so they all race to file their copy and put their stamp on it first. Plus it’s much easier for them to get to than some godforsaken place out in the regions or, heaven forbid, the North. I suppose it’s handy if you really do want to go to that restaurant, because, like Metacritic, you can cobble together a composite view from those half a dozen pronouncements.

All this makes it look like I’m late hopping on a speeding bandwagon – which is both annoying and untrue, because I booked my table at Town a week before the first review of Town came out. And that’s not because I’m some kind of incredible trendwatcher with my ear to the ground: it’s because Zoë’s birthday was coming up and I asked her to choose a venue for the big day.

Initially she wanted a table at Lasdun, the Brutalist-inspired restaurant based in the National Theatre and run by the people behind superb Hackney pub the Marksman. But then, for reasons that were never explained, they contacted us to say that they weren’t offering lunch that Friday and would we like to move it to an evening booking? We didn’t, so we didn’t, and then a few weeks later Zoë said “I’ve decided: there’s this place opening called Town”.

And this is the difference, I suppose, between a punter and a would-be pundit. In the run up to our visit, every new review was great news for Zoë – someone else liked it! our meal is going to be excellent! – whereas I quietly facepalmed and channelled Brenda from Bristol. But never mind: everyone said it was excellent, so we spent the morning bimbling round Covent Garden before heading to Drury Lane, stopping for a couple of Belgian beers at Lowlander Grand Café, a place that feels like it’s been there for my entire restaurant-going life, before making our lunch reservation.

The interior of Town is gorgeous, and all the reviews have made much of that. Everything is very luxe, very glamorous, very Sixties – Tom Parker Bowles referenced Ken Adam, David Ellis suggested Mad Men – and the attention to detail is impressive. There are curved edges everywhere, from the rounded, tiled burgundy pillars to the beautiful chrome-edged ceiling lights. The photos I’d seen in advance also focussed on the feature in the centre of the dining room, a striking kelly green window into the open kitchen.

It really is stunning, but the single press photo – used in no less than three of the reviews – made it look like this is a huge centrepiece of the entire restaurant. And that’s not entirely true. We were sat in the middle section, and I had no complaints, but if your table was nearer the outside of the restaurant I think the place would have felt far less special. And I did wonder if, like the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David keeps being seated in the “ugly section”, there was a kind of centrifugal force going on here: the outer section had more boomers in it than a British Airways flight to Malaga.

The broadsheet reviewers won’t tell you that, of course, because they never get shit tables.

Town’s menu was a funny one: despite having plenty of dishes on it, little of it jumped out at me. Starters ranged from fifteen to twenty-five pounds, mains all the way from just over twenty all the way up to ninety, although the priciest ones were to share. But I was surprised by how untempted I was by it all on paper: some of that will be my preferences, not being wild about clams – which pop up twice – and feeling generally like having steak in a restaurant like this is a bit of a waste, even if it is Wildfarmed beef (Town goes to, well, town on its provenance, with butter and cheese coming from Parle’s brother’s dairy).

Vegetarians might have found things tricky too, with just one starter and two mains to choose from, one of them being the ubiquitous hispi cabbage. The reviews I’ve read waxed lyrical about the menu, but it was rare for me to find the choice difficult for all the wrong reasons, in some cases ordering the only thing that appealed rather than the thing that appealed most. The irony isn’t lost on me that vegetarians and vegans probably feel that way a lot of the time.

But before all that we had a negroni and a couple of things from the snack section of the menu. Town’s negroni goes firmly off piste with Somerset brandy and eau de vie instead of gin in the mix: I quite liked it but, as I had at Oxford’s Gees, found myself wondering why people tampered with the classics.

The introductory dishes on a menu are like the opening tracks on an album: every review mentions them, although it might not cover everything else. So I’d heard all about Town’s fried sage leaves with honey and chilli, and enjoyed them every bit as much as I expected to.

The trick here was to manage to make them truly snackable, moreish and sticky without making you reach for the hand sanitiser afterwards, and in that respect they worked very well. Sorry to mention Gees again but ironically their version, with anchovy in the middle, was even better (mind you, it was also the only good thing I ate at Gees).

But the dish everybody lost their shit about was the bread: potato sourdough which came not with butter but with a little bowl of dipping gravy. I’d read so much hyperbole about this dish that I almost had an invented memory of having eaten it myself: reading a plethora of reviews will do that to you.

It brought out the purple streak in reviewers: “we all need dipping gravy in our lives” was Jay Rayner’s take on it, while Giles Coren called it “show stopping”. Tom Parker Bowles said that it “coats the lips with a lustre of sweet fat” – just no, thanks – and Grace Dent didn’t try it. But that’s Dent all over: read her reviews carefully and she talks about far more dishes than she actually eats. I know people like that.

So did it live up to all that hype? Well, no. The gravy is indeed terrific: thin, glossy, beaded with beef fat with some soft, steeped garlic in it. But I tend to think if you’re going to dip some kind of food in a liquid, that something shouldn’t be wet too. And the sourdough was a soft, slightly underbaked ball of stodge that wasn’t really up to the job of acting as a vehicle. Sometimes the line between USP and gimmick is a thin one: you didn’t need VAR to work this one out.

I had a slight sense by this point that, as with the beautiful dining room, things had been designed more for form than for function and my starter backed this up. Again, many of the reviews have lavished praise on Town’s saffron risotto with roasted bone marrow and I was very excited to try it. And it’s clearly visually imposing, to have this kind of roundel of a dish with a bridge of bone crossing a pool of risotto.

Very Instagrammable, I’m sure, and a huge hit with the critics. Grace Dent said it was “sublime”, Jay Rayner “stupidly rich” and Giles Coren went on about a “huge canoe of fat, salty marrow” (fun fact: Coren is also a canoe, although a different kind). But this dish felt like it was for looking at, not eating. My bone was decidedly short on marrow, and once you’d worked it free and into the risotto, there was nowhere to put the bone, which rather got in the way of eating the bloody thing. You ended up playing some kind of weird gastronomic Poohsticks, pushing your risotto under the bone so you could get to it.

With all those reservations, was it worth it? Well, yes and no. I liked the risotto, which was saved from anonymity by a judicious hit of citrus, and what little marrow there was was indeed outrageously good. But as a dish, it felt performative rather than knockout. Seventeen quid for that: Giles Coren said that it would have done him for lunch or dinner on its own, but maybe he’s on some kind of appetite suppressant.

Far more successful was Zoë’s choice, charred baby gem lettuce with peas and Spenwood. Town appears to have dedicated itself to the worthy pursuit of making salad both warm and interesting, and this was a great leap forward in that field. I had a forkful, loved it, and didn’t resent the fact that Zoë had ordered it and I hadn’t. Mostly, in truth, because it was her birthday. Perhaps Town’s gift was that dishes which looked unassuming on paper turned out to be worldbeating in the flesh. Which was great and all that, but how would most people ever find that out?

The reviews I’ve read of Town talk about the service in glowing terms, and again that wasn’t entirely my experience. Perhaps I was there on a bad day for them, but it felt solicitous to a fault, as if they had over-resourced and wanted to look useful. So while we were still finishing our starters, they came over and plonked down the cutlery for our main courses, which just seemed odd. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then they made a similar, more annoying mistake later on: we’ll get to that.

But anyway, we were having a lovely time, in a lovely room, we were off work for the next week and a bit and there’s something about lunch in London on Friday, when most people are at work, that always feels like a little victory. And our table was decent, the company was superb – well, for me anyway – and the bottle of Albariño we were on was going down nicely. I knew at some point, when I wrote the place up, I would need to distil how much of the excellence was down to Town and how much was down to everything else, but that was a quandary for later.

The birthday girl also chose the best main. It wasn’t even close. Pork came beautifully done, a charred crust masking perfect pinkness, a really deft piece of cooking. The menu said it came with “early season onions and burnt apple sauce”: in honesty I think the onions were close to burnt, but that’s never really a bad thing. The apple sauce, its Stygian tones matching the best bits of the pork and the onions, was quite glorious: I didn’t mind the mustard, but like most condiments it wasn’t Zoë’s bag. At thirty-two pounds, this was a relative bargain on Town’s menu and – and this is high praise – it reminded me of the sort of thing you can get at Quality Chop House.

Town was no slouch with its sides, either. Pink fir potatoes came coated and roasted in beef fat – they do like making the most of their cows at Town – and was bang on for flavour, although I’d have liked these to have a little more texture. Not at all a bad side dish, though.

Even better – by my reckoning, anyway – were the courgette fritti, a glorious mess of these served simply with a squeeze of lemon and a little of what I seem to recall was aioli. I loved these, but I do have to say they wouldn’t be for everyone: their saltiness was right at the upper limit of what I enjoy, and it’s eminently possible that I like salt more than you do. I wasn’t sure they went with anything, but they were so much fun that I also wasn’t sure they needed to.

Here’s how ridiculous the contortions I had to go through were: Zoë had picked the pork, which otherwise would have been my choice, and my two remaining options – that hispi cabbage, inexplicably, didn’t appeal – were the duck pappardelle or the Cornish lobster. I would order the pasta dish probably 99 times out of 100, but I’m very aware that this makes me a rather samey reviewer (fried chicken, anybody? Gobi Manchurian?) so, just this once, I strode confidently into the unknown.

Now, you might absolutely love lobster and so that picture below might look like heaven on a plate to you. I’ve often thought, sacrilegiously I’m sure, that it’s just a big prawn – scarred by The Lobster Room, perhaps – but I’ve also always wanted someone or something to change my mind. Town’s lobster is not, sadly, going to be the dish to do it.

It wasn’t dreadful. Some of the meat was a tad tough, took a little prizing away from the shell, but the XO sauce Town makes to go with it is absolutely stellar: savoury, intense, take-my-money-for-a-jar-of-the-stuff stuff. But where was the lardo? It’s not those white sheets you can see in the picture above: those were thin ribbons of some vegetable, celeriac at a guess. And artfully draping some foliage over proceedings, to make it look more like a still life than a £45 plate of food, didn’t fool me.

I was gratified to find it wasn’t just me, though. David Ellis ordered this dish just after they opened. “The kitchen is settling in” was his verdict on it: on this evidence, they haven’t got there yet.

After this we still had a little wine to drink, so we had a look at the dessert menu and enjoyed the room a little more, now it was less packed. And again, it wasn’t Town’s fault necessarily but the dessert menu didn’t really scratch me where I itched. I’m sure it would be a great menu for loads of you, that you’d make a beeline for the buttermilk pudding or the pandan milk cake, go crazy for the “coconut tapioca” that put me off ordering the mango with yoghurt sorbet. But by this point I’d given up on ordering something else just for the sake of it, so chocolate tart it was.

But before that I have to explain the other service mishap, which I’m afraid involves a little too much detail. I’m going to do it, though, because it illustrates how exactly Town was trying just a little too hard, and because I know if there’s one thing my readers love it’s me either coming a cropper or talking about a perceived bad experience.

So, because it was Zoë’s birthday they brought her out a little treat-sized portion of the chocolate tart, which she ate and loved. That was really kind of them. And because we loved it, we ordered a portion each, and so the staff brought out our cutlery. And then, before our dessert turned up, even though we were sitting there having a perfectly nice time, one of the over-attentive staff swooped on our table, totally unsolicited, and tried to clear the cutlery, which we actually needed, away, knocking the rest of my glass of wine over in the process.

So that was annoying, and they were perfectly nice and apologetic – although I did end up mopping it up myself – and then to say sorry they brought me a glass of the dessert wine Zoë had ordered over for me. Which, again, was kind, but I didn’t actually want it. So I topped up Zoë’s glass, at which point it transpired, as far as I could tell, that actually they hadn’t brought me the Coteaux du Layon Zoë had ordered but something cheaper. So I ended up soaked and irked, with a drink I didn’t want, having accidentally adulterated Zoë’s very nice drink, and feeling ungrateful into the bargain. Hey ho.

But yes, the chocolate tart was lovely, an oblong lozenge of indulgent ganache that tested your resolve, made you wield a fork with almost surgical precision, trying to make the experience last as long as possible. The black barley ice cream was pleasant, if surprisingly generic given that description, and even the raisins, soaked in Pedro Ximenez, were a lot of fun.

Would I have come away thinking that the base was so molecule-thin that it was hard to describe it as a tart if I wasn’t still pondering my spilled wine? Would I have noted that the hazelnut mentioned on the menu, like the lardo from earlier on, were nowhere to be seen on the plate? We’ll never know.

All that said and done I settled up, although not before taking advantage of Town’s facilities, which are exceptionally plush and luxurious and boast a gorgeous hand soap (I wish I’d remembered to take a picture). Our meal, including an optional ten per cent service charge, came to just under two hundred and ninety pounds.

I think, for what we had, that’s slightly on the steep side – but bear in mind I’m saying that from a perspective unlike that of most broadsheet reviewers who get to expense everything. But it was Zone 1, it was Covent Garden, so maybe that’s only to be expected. “Nobody gets out for under £80/head in central London any more for food you’d tell your friends about. Unless your friends like talking about pizza” was Giles Coren’s contribution on this subject, and who’s more relatable than Coren? Exactly.

If you found it easy to guess the rating on this one, having read all this, then have a gold star, because I’ve found it very difficult to assess. The room is great, though not as great as everyone said it would be. The menu I personally found more limited than I expected. The food was quite nice, but not as amazing as the reams of breathless prose devoted to it in the papers.

It’s very strange, this. I’m not an expert, but I imagine there are countless restaurants in London better than Town. Some of them may even have opened the same month as Town did. And yet nearly everybody who reviews restaurants for a living dropped in on this place within six weeks to say how great it was.

Does it do good things for the food scene in this country that our vanishingly small number of restaurant critics all go to the same restaurants? No. Am I part of the problem by reviewing the place as well? Not sure we’re comparing apples with apples really, but possibly, yes.

Never mind. Town is quite nice, and I suppose I’m glad I went there and tried it. Nothing I ate will feature in any list I make at the end of the year, but not everybody gets on the podium. You can be a decent restaurant without managing that. Would I go again, though? Well, between the places in London that I’ve loved and would dearly like to revisit and the restaurants in the capital burning a hole in my to do list, I think the answer to that is no.

But that’s just me. Giles Coren said he’d happily go there “every day, if that’s all right with them”. But his mate owns the place, so I’m guessing he gets some kind of discount. Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure: I do not know Jonathan Downey. Not only that, but I honestly have no idea who he is.

Town – 7.8
26-29 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5RL
020 35007515

https://www.town.restaurant

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