Tag: wine

Restaurant review: No. 1 Ship Street, Oxford

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Oxford, probably my favourite city in which to review restaurants, ostensibly has little in common with Reading. One has pretty old buildings and winding lanes, a shopping mall that doesn’t bump off your will to live in the space of five minutes, a bustling market with food, drink, coffee and cheese and shedloads of independent retail. The other has Forbury Gardens and a very good bus network.

That sounds like I’m doing Reading down. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Oxford complements Reading nicely: if there’s something you wish Reading had, you may well find it thirty minutes down the train tracks. And to be fair to Reading, Oxford may beat it for wine bars – because it has some and no, Vino Vita doesn’t count – and it has some lovely old pubs, but Reading is streets ahead when it comes to craft beer. Oxford is brilliant, but it has no Nag’s Head.

One thing they do have in common, though, is that their best restaurants are rarely found in the centre. Reading has some solid restaurants inside the IDR – your Me Kongs, and Mama’s Ways – but they’re the exception rather than the rule: it’s mostly chains and I suspect it always has been. The independent restaurants chasing that status right in the centre are probably London Street Brasserie and The Reading Room, neither of which quite pulls it off, but beyond that you might find yourself heading north of the river, or west down the Oxford Road.

Oxford is similar. If you overlaid the Oxford restaurants I’ve reviewed over a map of the place, it would look like my metaphorical attempts to hit a bullseye down the pub: everything everywhere but in the middle. Out east you have the Cowley Road, Iffley Road and St Clements, all with great places to eat, and Headington beyond that. Head north and you reach Little Clarendon Street before the myriad of choices available in Jericho or Summertown. But what about the centre?

Oxford has a mall, the Westgate, and it’s nicer than the Oracle. But that means it still gets chains, just fancier ones. It has the kind Reading doesn’t attract: Mowgli; Shoryu Ramen; Six By Nico. Notably it has a branch of award-winning small chain Beefy Boys – it would have been a coup, if they had chosen Reading. But in the rest of the centre it’s largely a mix of chains we have, chains we used to have and chains we can probably live without. It has Cosy Club, for people who wish the Lounge group were fancier, and The Ivy, for people who wish Cosy Club was, I don’t know, more showy.

Oxford readers would probably be the first to tell me that’s a slight oversimplification. Oxford has a few long-standing central restaurants with a durable fan following, like Chiang Mai Kitchen or Edamame: it tells you something about their longevity that I’ve eaten at both, each case long before I started writing this blog. It has a branch of Permit Room, the Dishoom offshoot that is so far limited to a mere five locations nationwide.

Beyond that, if you’re talking more upmarket restaurants, it has Quod, a buzzy brasserie on the ground floor of the Old Bank Hotel owned by the same group as Gee’s. And the conversion of the old Boswell’s department store into a hotel has given the city Treadwell, a new all-day restaurant whose menu looks a bit like somebody took Quod’s, gave it to the kitchen and said “make it quirkier”: whether fish and chips needs kimchi tartar sauce is anybody’s guess.

Having lost all my Reading readers with seven paragraphs about Oxford, and all my Oxford readers with seven paragraphs which aren’t about the restaurant I’m reviewing this week, let’s finally get to the point and talk about No. 1 Ship Street, the subject of this week’s review. It’s resolutely small and independent, it’s been open for nine years this summer and it’s very much in the city centre, just off the pedestrianised hellscape of Cornmarket Street, just around the corner from the Covered Market.

Chef Owen Little has been there from the very start, and No. 1 Ship Street shows no signs of slowing down as it reaches the end of its first decade, having been named last November as one of OpenTable’s Top 100 U.K. restaurants: to put this in perspective, nowhere in Reading featured on that list, and nowhere else in Oxford did either. I explained all this – fortunately for him in far less depth than I have here – to my dear friend Jerry as we had a pre-prandial beer in Teardrop, the tiny pub in the Covered Market.

Owner Ross Drummond apparently celebrated winning that award from OpenTable by giving the place a refurb for the New Year. I think it was a subtle one, because the bones of the dining room were already there: beautiful racing green walls, well-spaced tables, the whole thing sleek, luxe and unfussy. They’ve removed the slightly tacky spider lights and the tables now are gorgeous and copper-topped: Jerry, mentally making notes for his flat, was taken with those. 

It was difficult to believe that the horrors of Cornmarket Street were a stone’s throw away, but No. 1 Ship Street had created a beautiful, grown-up oasis dangerously close to its borders. I should say that we asked to be seated in the main dining room: I’m sure the one on the other side of the entrance is lovely of an evening, but I didn’t want to lunch in a windowless room on a June afternoon.

After a disappointing run of small-plates-for-sharing restaurants, some honestly described and some far less so, No. 1 Ship Street’s menu came as a blessed relief. Terms like appetisers, starters and mains might be increasingly recherché out there in the wild, but in this restaurant they were alive and well. There was no spiel about the concept, because the concept was “remember how restaurants used to be?” and the conversational gambit wasn’t “do you need me to explain the menu?” but instead my personal favourite, “are you ready to order?”

Not that we were, at first, because No. 1 Ship Street’s menu was just tricky enough. The starters seemed to be where the more experimental bent came out – burnt aubergine soup, foie gras crème brûlée, frog’s legs and the like – while the mains were more conventional. So yes, there was a burger, and a steak, and a risotto. I guess you don’t survive nearly a decade in the centre of Oxford by taking massive risks.

Starters clustered between £10 and £16, mains began at £20 and climbed up from there. If you wanted oysters, lobster, a tomahawk or the restaurant’s surf and turf (which combined the latter two and cost £160) you could spend an awful lot more, and a specials board introduced about half a dozen other options, nearly all of them fish and seafood.

It was difficult enough that we ordered some appetisers and apéritifs while we decided – and No. 1 Ship Street is that happy kind of restaurant that brings them and gives you the time and space you need for that. Jerry’s bread was good and generous, speckled with nigella seeds and very enjoyable. Good salted butter at room temperature, embossed with the name of the restaurant, was a nice touch. For £6, the bread needed to be this good, and gladly it was.

My truffle and porcini arancini were the first evidence that the kitchen might quite like being tricksy for the sake of it. They were very good, the texture acceptably crunchy and the inside studded with mushroom. Not indecent value at £6 for three either. Whether they needed to be submerged in some kind of hot truffle mayo and then carpeted in Parmesan was another matter. I thought less might have been more in this instance.

Jerry tried a bit but revealed to me that he really wasn’t a fan of truffle. And I was reminded of the recent meal where I discovered he had been humouring me all these years by drinking white wine when he only really liked red wine. It turned out that my happy memory in lockdown of sitting on a park bench with Jerry demolishing a bottle of red and inhaling a packet of Torres’ superlative truffle crisps was actually more evidence of Jerry being too nice to say he didn’t enjoy something. Let’s hope that somewhere out there he isn’t writing a blog telling the world what a terrible dining companion I am.

Never mind. The apéritifs, by the way, were knockout: mine a variant on a negroni sweetened and mollified with the substitution of amaro for vermouth and Jerry’s a champagne cocktail with a little cognac in the mix, sugar cube effortlessly effervescing at the bottom like buried treasure. We followed this up with an excellent South African Chardonnay – yes, a white – recommended by the very knowledgeable server, from the Elgin Valley. It had plenty of citrus and elegance, it was £48, and I liked it a lot. Jerry said he did too, and hopefully he meant it.

Starters were where things started to wobble. Jerry was torn between a number of options, one of which was the foie gras.

“I love it, but I know I shouldn’t, so I don’t order it these days” he told me. And I’m afraid I took that as an opportunity to deliver a tone deaf homily about not denying yourself things you like – I wish I could say it was the negroni talking, but such conduct is me all over – and so he chose it.

It was meant to be a foie gras crème brûlée with vin jaune gel and toasted brioche, and I’m sorry to say this, but the resemblance stops at the photograph, and possibly before that. A crème brûlée is meant to have a satisfying burnt top and be set underneath. It’s not meant to be a murky puddle of bumf. And it’s not meant to taste so little of foie gras that you wonder, as Jerry did, whether he’d accidentally been given something from the dessert section, a theory lent credence by the pointless popcorn on top.

Poor Jerry – all the guilt of having ordered foie gras without the corresponding enjoyment of getting to eat the bastard stuff. I felt personally responsible.

I felt less bad about it, though, because my starter was also disappointing. What was billed as seared scallops with clam velouté and parsnips was in fact a thin puddle of soup with a single scallop, cut in half, three clams and a crispy disc of perpendicular parsnip.

The overall effect, apart from masterful cost control in a £16 starter, was an oversweetened, unsubtle cacophony of a dish. Just like the foie gras crème brûlée, what turned up wasn’t in the slightest what the menu implied you would be tucking into. No wonder they brought you a spoon with this one. I once ate at Oxford restaurant Gees and wondered if I’d accidentally wandered into the U.K.’s most expensive salad bar. No. 1 Ship Street, by contrast, was beginning to feel like a spenny soup kitchen in disguise.

Were the mains, when the restaurant stayed closer to the mainstream, any better? Mostly, I would say. My confit duck almost worked: the skin was gloriously crisp, the fat rendered and the flesh underneath giving in all the right ways. Perching it on a pile of wild mushrooms, enjoyable ones at that, was a bit like giving the dish platform shoes: it made it look like you got far more duck than you did.

The white asparagus was thick and generous, with just enough bite, beautifully cooked to avoid the bitterness this variety can sometimes have. “It looks like a pair of dildos” was Jerry’s unvarnished take: I laughed like a drain and warned him that I planned to quote him verbatim. This is the bit in the description where I’d love to say and a plum jus brought it all together beautifully but instead I have to say that there was a thin drizzle of blandness that didn’t add enough moisture or flavour.

This dish needed carbs and didn’t have them, so I ordered some chunky chips. And these were well done, but with the main course so unrelentingly dry there was nothing for these to soak up, or act as a vehicle for. It also means that my duck dish, with chips on the side, cost £30. That’s a lot for not quite enough, there’s no way around that.

Jerry picked better I think, moules marinière from the specials. They were plump specimens, from St Austell Bay according to the blackboard, and Jerry thoroughly enjoyed them. They came with frites, and as with No. 1 Ship Street’s chips they were well executed.

But ironically, for me, this dish had the converse problem to both those starters. The mussels were high and dry, clustered in a wide-brimmed bowl. The joy of moules marinière is the bit at the end, when all the shells have been vanquished and you’re left with a bowl of that creamy liquor, to trawl with a spoon, picking up stray mussels, to drink like broth, to dab with bread or to tip your frites into. It makes it two meals in one.

But here, that last stage was a bit like some people I see prancing around on Instagram, too shallow to be worth persevering with. It seems that No. 1 Ship Street only dished up soup when you didn’t want it to. Jerry, mind you, loved it.

Despite all that, and perhaps paradoxically, we stopped for dessert. Because despite the food not being spectacular, and in some cases being downright weird, we were still having a lovely time. No. 1 Ship Street somehow, through its gorgeous, calming room, its very pleasing booze and unstintingly charming staff, created a space where you knew, on some level, that things could and should be better but didn’t mind as much as you should.

In that sense, it was almost the inverse of so many experiences I’ve had on duty lately, restaurants I ought to have liked more than I did. Here, instead, I found myself almost willing to suspend critical judgment. Only in the moment, really, and as I write this I remember all the things they got wrong. But weirdly, remembering them is almost like trying to recall a dream. I wonder how many people No. 1 Ship Street has pulled that trick on over nearly a decade. I’m not seeking to denigrate: it’s a neat trick.

Anyway, they saved some of the best for last. They make their own ice cream, and both the chocolate and salted caramel were smooth, rich, crystal-free and as good as anything you could get in George & Davis, if not quite the standard of Swoon on the High. The range of flavours was quite pedestrian, which surprised me: they save the cheffy stuff, the rose and rhubarb ice cream or the basil sorbet, to accompany Actual Desserts. £6 for two scoops with a beautifully light langue de chat was probably the bargain of the day.

Jerry was happy with his pistachio cake. I don’t know if I would have been, it was a thin, uneven slab of the stuff with something that did not look like basil sorbet. Maybe it was grape and basil sorbet – the menu, as so often, made it difficult to work out what you were going to get.

And again, that’s not necessarily a problem. In a restaurant where the words on a menu are just a jumping-off point, in the hands of the right kitchen, a meal can be a life of surprises. Underpromising and overdelivering is one of the great talents of hospitality done well, and the thing that makes memories – as much as anything does, over and above the people you bring with you. The problem with No. 1 Ship Street, for all I keep saying that it’s not a bad restaurant, is that none of the surprises, on balance, were good ones.

All that set us back £214, including the standard 12.5% tip, and more than usual I couldn’t really work out whether I’d been stiffed or not. We were there for the best part of two and a half hours, we had a marvellous time – although for me, lunching with Jerry, that was a given – and we were very well looked after.

Perhaps in the centre of Oxford, given the alternatives, No. 1 Ship Street is as good as it needs to be. Or maybe it had a bad day when I went, or I was too finicky. But I was left again marvelling at their powers of misdirection: how could they have created the semblance of a fantastic meal from such inconsistent food? Appropriately, it had the feel of being through the looking glass about it.

But I didn’t feel that way at the time, I only feel it now. At the time, Jerry and I agreed that we’d had a lovely meal, and off we strolled to the Rose & Crown to enjoy the refurbished outside space and improved beer offering. It had been another classic visit to Oxford, and if something was niggling at me it would take a couple of weeks for my reservations to fully germinate.

Restaurant reviewers are pontificators by nature, and never miss an opportunity to tell you what a restaurant Means, what it is All About. I’ve read a couple of think pieces lately about how it’s okay for a restaurant to be just good enough, in defence of the unspectacular, the “fine” or “ordinary”. Well, I suppose it’s one way to try and jazz up a boring meal, or meet your latest deadline at the Financial Times. You’ve got to have an angle.

But for the rest of us, who spend our own money, that’s not the axis you plot things on. It’s not unremarkable versus showy, hyped versus anonymous. Most of us deal in good or bad, or perhaps good enough and not good enough. No. 1 Ship Street’s failing is to try and show off, when it could just get the basics very right and send a lot of people away very happy indeed. It has the room, it has the service, it has all the ingredients to do that.

But somehow, for some reason, it chooses not to and, to give it credit, it almost gets away with it. But what do I know? If you clock up a decade slap bang in the centre of Oxford, even with the dearth of competition, you must know a thing or two. Even so, I can’t help feeling their second decade might prove more difficult.

No. 1 Ship Street – 7.0
1 Ship Street, Oxford, OX1 3DA
01865 806637

https://www.no1shipstreet.com

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Restaurant review: Carmel, Queen’s Park

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At Carmel in Queen’s Park, a restaurant usually described as some combination of Eastern Mediterranean and North African, a snack of anchovies comes with tahini and crostini. Crispy squid is served with aioli and lemon. Flatbread is topped with merguez and jalapeño relish, hispi cabbage with a macadamia dukkah. You can have slow-cooked lamb shoulder with salad and more flatbread, and something called “campfire potato” on the side.

Right, shall we wrap up there? I can give you the rating and, as people at work say when a conference call is shorter than expected, give you back fifteen minutes.

But I imagine you’re thinking No, not yet. You want to know why I picked the restaurant, what the room is like, whether I liked those dishes, what the service is like. How much it cost, and whether it was worth it. You might never have been to Queen’s Park, and want to know where it is and what kind of area it is. If I ended now – here’s the food and that’s it – you’d probably feel put out, and rushed.

Well, now you have a vague idea what it’s like to eat at Carmel, because I’m afraid it was one of those meals. Let’s get this out of the way early doors: our table was booked for quarter past eight on a Saturday night, the place was packed and I don’t think we ordered for at least 10 minutes, possibly more. 

We ordered an aperitif, and a bottle of wine for later, and snacks and small plates, and then a big plate for sharing. We ordered what looked, to me at least, like a well-considered meal with a beginning, a middle and an end. Well, a pre-end anyway, because I’m sure we’d have stayed for dessert.

Having been stung in the past by meals where everything comes out too quickly, we asked our server for advice. Should we have our aperitifs and snacks first, then order the rest? No need, she said, because the kitchen would something something something and the food would come out something something. She was inaudible and, as it turned out, a little ineffectual, but we came away reassured.

Something like 10 minutes later, our first snack came out. Then, a couple of minutes later, our second. One of our small plates came with it and then, 3 minutes later, another. We hadn’t even got close to finishing our negronis – a shame, because they were great, the gin infused with sage – and our table was already packed with food.

Every time a server walked past, towards the buzzing terrace, with more plates I got the fear that they were going to be for our table. Surely they couldn’t be? The place was rammed, we’d only just got there and they’d taken 10 minutes to even ask us what we wanted. Yet they nearly always were. 

Another 3 minutes later – thank heavens for time stamps on photos – our side dish came out, ahead of the thing it was a side dish for. And then, with grim inevitability, 5 minutes after that, out came the lamb. Absolutely ridiculous. It took 18 hours to cook and about 18 minutes to come to our table. All in all, about £115 of food arrived in the space of 15  minutes. And I have to wonder whether, at some point over the last couple of years, I started Doing Restaurants Wrong.

Because experiences like this seem to be more normal now, to the point where I wonder if it’s what some or many diners actually want. One recent review of Carmel on Google said “The service was the fastest I’ve ever seen, food was served around 10min after we ordered and it wasn’t some easy dishes”. He gave the place five stars, while describing an experience I might expect from KFC or Honest Burgers.

It wasn’t what we wanted, though. Zoë had finished a relatively early shift that night and I met her in London on an evening when we both had the next day off, so as close to a date night as we seem to get these days. We were in no rush, and I don’t think we seemed like we were. So how did it go so wrong? 

With an experience like that there’s only so good a restaurant can be, but since my whistle stop summary at the start missed out so many important details let’s fill in the blanks. Queen’s Park is lovely, and one of those bits of London that belies its proximity to the centre: in Zone 2 but a mere seven minutes from Paddington, feeling like it’s not really London at all.

And Carmel is down Lonsdale Road, a pretty cobbled lane which was absolutely humming on a warm Saturday night. Londoners were thronged outside eating and drinking – some at restaurants like Carmel or Pizza Pilgrims but many just standing outside a pub called Wolfpack, or sitting on seats which may or may not have belonged to that establishment. It felt like a drinking flashmob, to the point where I wondered if people had brought their own furniture.

Carmel is an offshoot from Haggerston grill house Berber & Q, its more grown-up sibling, and it opened in late 2021. It was joined by critically acclaimed bakery and restaurant Don’t Tell Dad at the start of 2025, the overall effect being to create another of London’s many gastronomic microclimates. 

I was tempted by Don’t Tell Dad, but the menu at Carmel read like an absolute dream. Something jumped out from nearly every item on it saying “pick me, I’m different”, little invisible exclamation marks drawing the eye here and there. Smoked taramasalata, hummus with zhug. Sumac and tahini, harissa butter and pomegranata molasses. Labneh and dukkah, fermented chilli, smoked salt, parsley pesto. 

Restaurant reviewers, or anybody with an Instagram account, are used to saying that the camera eats first, but when you read a menu like this the eyes eat first: everything flows from there. 

And the room was beautiful – I was glad we were inside rather than on that clamouring terrace because it’s such a gorgeous space, with exposed brick painted white, a white tiled bar, a long communal table and handsome Ercol chairs. It didn’t feel of its place at all, but reminded me more of places in Ghent, or Copenhagen – effortlessly cool Europe, rather than London.

Leaving the woeful timing issues to one side, most of what we ate was good or better. Those anchovies, for instance, were a not ungenerous four, served swimming in oil with a pickled chilli, a little tomato, swirls of black tahini and two long strips of the restaurant’s wholewheat focaccia, turned into fancy Melba toasts. It was very nice, and in the parallel universe where Zoë and I ate this, finished our negronis, decompressed and talked about our day it would have played a beautiful part of a harmonious whole.

For that matter I loved the crispy squid, which managed to get everything right – the texture inside and out, just enough give but with a roughed-up, brittle exterior that hinted at something like polenta flour in the mix. This cost £10.50, as did the anchovies: if you gave me that £21 again I’d just order the squid twice.

We tried not to be distracted from our task of finishing it by the arrival of other dishes. 

And Carmel’s Hispi cabbage deserved not to share the limelight with anything else. I know as an ingredient it’s almost as done to death as broadsheet critics complaining about its omnipresence on menus, but I still love it and my forkful of Zoë’s confirmed her good sense in ordering it.

It had the right amount of blackening, the tender leaves spot on underneath, and everything it was paired with brought out its best self wonderfully – a bracing labneh, fragrant ras el hanout and a really enjoyable dukkah which positively transformed the humdrum macadamia into something worth hoovering up. £16.50 for this, and worth every penny.

I’ve read somewhere about Carmel’s flatbreads being described as some of London’s best pizza. In fairness that was four years ago, before the capital lost its mind for pizza, and perhaps it was true then. I think it would be harder to make that case in 2026, but I did rather like it: the crust faultlessly puffy and spotted, the crater in the middle loaded with paydirt.

But the base was easily the best thing, and the stuff in the middle felt like it was fighting among itself. What was billed as merguez didn’t have the taut texture of a really good sausage, so was more pappy, like a meatball. The enormous dollop of jalapeño had a blistering heat that overpowered everything else, and the yoghurt plonked in there felt like it had one job only, to calm the jalapeño down. 

There were a few bits of onion – “petals” apparently – and allegedly some confit garlic that I didn’t get at all, but the whole thing felt shouty. This too was £16.50, and by this point I was wondering what that money would get you at Pizza Pilgrims a few doors down. More, better, slower, probably.

We just about managed to open our £40 bottle of rosé – by Judith Beck, a producer I’ve always liked – as our lamb came to the table. By that point much of the meal was behind us and 750ml of wine was in front of us, but we rolled up our sleeves and gave it our best shot. There is nothing like a cold, crisp rosé on a hot day, and this was nothing like a cold crisp rosé. We flagged a server down and asked if the wine cooler could have some actual ice in it. It was brought back with ice in it, and by the end of the meal our wine was almost cold enough.

So, the lamb. Pants, I’m afraid. It looked so good, like the platonic ideal of every kleftiko you’ve ever laid eyes on. Everything it came with was terrific, a salata mashwiya that was a sort of hot, roasted vegetable dish and a herb salad that zipped and zinged with the best of them. 

We had the campfire potato with this and it, too, was good: scorched, and smashed and smothered in salsa verde and sour cream. The lamb was perched on another of Carmel’s excellent flatbreads, which meant that all the fat slowly permeated it, which is exactly what you want. 

The fat, though. The fat was the problem. Because I know lamb is a fatty meat, and I like a bit of lamb fat, but this piece of lamb was 90% fat. A gelatinous hunk with a few scraps of well lubricated meat hitching a ride on it. That wasn’t apparent at first, but the more incisions we made the more we realised that the good stuff was vanishingly rare. The last time I saw anything wobble this much it was me, running for a bus.

I’ve read lots of comments and thinkpieces from restaurateurs saying that customers should be less English. If you don’t like something but you politely say it was nice, or fine, you’re depriving the restaurant of the chance to fix it. I was still happy to keep schtum, but when our server returned Zoë pointed out that the lamb was largely inedible blubber. So our server promised to feed that back to the kitchen and the management.

And when she returned, she explained that it she’d spoken to them but it wasn’t possible to tell how fatty a shoulder of lamb was until you cut into it something something something and this was a very fatty cut of meat and you know, something something something. So we gave up. We considered dessert, but also considered the timings of the last pre-purgatory train home from Paddington. We left the last of our wine and cut our losses.

The bill came in the shape of a piece of perspex with a QR code, and scanning it showed that the damage came to £210, including an optional 12.5% service charge. And I was sorely tempted not to pay the latter, which is something I never, ever do, but you had to flag down a server and specifically ask for it to be removed and at that point I just thought Okay, you win. You win with your breakneck pacing and wobbly lamb and incoherent service. 

Nothing, it goes without saying, had been taken off our bill in relation to that £56 main course. 

On the way back to the Tube station Pizza Pilgrims glowed with distinct look-what-you-could-have-won energy. We made our train, it only slighly whiffed of Burger King and I resolved that this was the very last review this year where I eat somewhere that offers small and large plates, has a concept or wants you to share everything. Not without being unremittingly high direction when I place an order. If you see me doing anything to the contrary, please stage an intervention. In your own time, mind you. No rush.

Carmel – 6.7
23-25 Lonsdale Road, London, NW6 6RA
020 38482090

https://www.carmelrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Malmaison

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This week’s review came about because several weeks ago I ate at Bill’s – and yes, if you don’t mind, I’d like to explain that statement. It wasn’t my choice, I should start by saying that. My Canadian cousin Claire was visiting the country for the first time in nearly forty years, her two twentysomething kids in tow, and my mother had chosen Bill’s as the venue for lunch.

Sometimes I wonder if she does this kind of thing to troll me – she likes a bit of Carluccio’s, too – but actually, once I was there, I sort of understood why. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest buildings, overlooking the churchyard of Reading Minster, and she tends to pick it when we have visiting Canadian relatives making the trip to town. They enjoy eating in a building older than their country, I think, and knowing that right outside is a church many hundreds of years older even than that.

And indeed that proved to be true. My cousin Claire and her kids were struck by the history of things, albeit more than a little jetlagged and already in sensory overload given how exponentially busy central London is compared to their bucolic pocket of provincial Ontario. But we had a lovely time, and Bill’s menu – which plays it safe and then some – suited everybody from my vegan mum to my aunt, whose dietary choices often seem shrouded in mystery, and to Ava, Claire’s daughter who apparently almost exclusively eats chicken tenders and fries.

My aunt ate avocado on toast without complaint, Ava had a chicken burger and everybody seemed happy. Both my first cousins once removed, James and Ava, were charming, polite – well, they are Canadian – and interested, and gave me hope that the future of humanity might not be hurtling in a downward spiral to despair after all.

Although I looked them both up on Instagram the next day: James’ Instagram bio pronounced Just roll me up and smoke me when I die, while Ava’s simply said My lil titties my fat belly. That reminded me that they might have been cordial to duffers like me but they were still Gen Z, and I remained many times older than I liked to think I was.

Anyway, the point is that I expected to dislike Bill’s and to resent spending money there – I’d not been since I reviewed it over ten years ago – so I was surprised to find that not only was the room nice, the company convivial and the service charming but the food was better than inoffensive.

I had an enjoyable chicken schnitzel that they’d thrown the kitchen sink at – fried eggs, capers, pink pickled onions, gherkins and coleslaw – and it was rather nice, along with fries which I approached with dread but finished with enthusiasm. Dessert was a chocolate and salted caramel tart and, again, if it wasn’t life-altering it was still remarkably above average. Perhaps my mother knew best after all: I’m sure she would say so, in any event.

My experience at Bill’s got me thinking about the other restaurants I’d put in that bracket – reviewed them many years ago, not been impressed, never went back – and made me wonder whether any were ripe for reappraisal. After a look through my list, because many restaurants fitting that description are no longer trading, I found the perfect candidate: Malmaison.

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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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