Tag: wine

Restaurant review: No. 11 Bistro, Pangbourne

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This might be hard to believe, but a couple of years ago I nearly ended up moving to Pangbourne.

Well, sort of. Zoë and I were quite happy in our little house in the Village, and then one day I got a call from our lettings agent. Those calls were never welcome events: they usually involved our landlord wanting to hike the rent, knowing that if we pointed out that there was a clause in our tenancy agreement we’d suddenly find her serving notice under it. But this time it was a courtesy call to let us know that our landlord was selling up. No specifics were given, but at some point in the not too distant future we would suddenly have two months to find somewhere new to live. 

We started looking immediately. And one of the places we looked at online, and asked to view in the flesh, was an attractive-looking flat in a converted property in Pangbourne, close to the station. That we considered Pangbourne at all probably tells you more about the state of the rental market in Reading than it does about the flat in question. Even so, in the time between putting in the enquiry and being told, naturally, that it had already gone I started to convince myself that living in Pangbourne might be rather nice.

I decided that an eight minute train into Reading was really no different to a bus ride to the centre of town. Besides, it might be fun to live away from the hubbub. Pangbourne was pretty and prosperous, it had a lovely butcher and a cheese shop. And I could still write the blog, couldn’t I? It would just mean evening trips into town, or eating at restaurants on my way home from the office. I could make it work, I told myself.

In the end, that was a parallel life I never got to live, and I wound up in my house in Katesgrove after all. But I couldn’t help wondering, as Zoe and I mooched round Pangbourne on a sunny Saturday, if I would have been happy there. The butcher, Green’s, is fantastic, with its old-school kiosk where you still pay for your bounty: their pork, apricot and chilli sausage roll made me very happy that evening, and their steak and Stilton pie knocks the spots off anything Sweeney’s can rustle up. And the cheese shop is marvellous – I left with a Comte, a triple cream, a very salty blue and a smoked goat’s cheese, along with all manner of crackers and biscuits.

Nino’s Italian Deli is a great spot to sit in the sunshine and watch the world meander past, and the cornucopia of goodies on the shelves was tempting, as were the hefty focaccia sandwiches. But the coffee, a tad bitter and burnt, couldn’t match Reading standards. Nor could it at Artichoke, a café slightly further out of the village. That said, it had friendly staff, a pleasant decked front terrace – albeit one with a view of a Londis – and an almost Mediterranean feel. I put a picture on Instagram, with the caption Costa del Pangbourne.

I hadn’t ventured to RG8, though, for some Sliding Doors-themed day trip to another part of my personal multiverse: I was in Pangbourne to check out No. 11 Bistro. It opened its doors to the public at the start of June, and if the blurb I’d read came straight out of central casting – it’s never poor quality produce from miles away knocked up with supreme indifference, is it? – it still sounded worthy of investigation.

It was, after all, an independent bistro from a restaurateur who had worked at London Street Brasserie and Marlow’s Hand & Flowers. Not bad going for a chap who first featured in Berkshire Live of all places back in 2014, plating up at The Kitchen in Reading College as a 16 year old head chef. I could only imagine how proud he must feel, opening his own place now.

A prospect like No. 11 would have sparked considerable interest had it opened in Reading: heaven knows people, including me, like to complain that the town centre lacks this kind of restaurant. However, as we’ve learned over the last few years, Reading doesn’t attract good independents often enough, so a trip to Pangbourne was in order. Time to seek out what Muddy Stilettos termed “a fun new dining experience” – or, as human beings tend to put it, a good meal.

No. 11 has taken the site which was occupied by Italian institution Nino’s Trattoria for 13 years, and the restaurant’s first Instagram post was nicely worded: Meston clearly recognised that Pangbourne residents would probably say he had big shoes to fill.

I never ate at Nino’s, but Meston has wisely left the attractive dining room largely as it was in its previous incarnation, simply changing the wood panelling from sage to oxblood. Otherwise it is as it was: handsome, well lit through the big windows. I was very happy to learn that they had aircon, and delighted that it was so effective: a few groups were out on the terrace, but even on the Costa del Pangbourne it was far too warm for such antics.

We had a genuinely magnificent negroni – Meston’s brother James is apparently in charge behind the bar, and on the basis of the negroni I would definitely check out the six signature cocktails on the drinks menu. It passed enjoyably as we scoured a menu which seemed determined not to make matters easy.

Provenance wasn’t really talked about, with the exception of bread from Birch, the bakery just up the road. But on paper it was the kind of streamlined menu I always like to see: seven starters, seven mains, most starters just over £10 and most mains under the £30 glass ceiling. That might make you wince, but that’s just eating out now and I imagine Pangbourne is no different in that respect to anywhere else, except that its residents are more likely to be able to afford it.

The contents of the menu might also have been tailored to the demographic: nearly all of it stayed firmly in classic territory, the pineapple and capsicum salsa with the scallops sticking out like a sore condiment. It felt a little – this isn’t necessarily a criticism – like LSB twenty years ago, and I was surprised, a little, by how many of the dishes identified as ‘seared’.

We struggled to choose starters, so decided to share three. And if each was effective individually, they somehow added up to less than the sum of their parts. Sticky pork belly bites are a dish with my and Zoë’s names on it in figurative Sharpie, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in recent reviews. No. 11’s treatment was very different to others I’ve had, and I liked it, while not being entirely convinced that others would.

Rather than have cubes of well rendered meat these were thick strips, almost like reimagined Bacon Fries, and had been cooked to be more crispy than tender. I like my smoked streaky cooked so it snaps rather than bends, so these were right up my alley, but I might be in the minority there. I really enjoyed them, though, and I loved the honey and soy – more honey than soy, really – with which they glistened. A creditable sort of Asian slaw completed the dish without feeling too much like padding.

I was also a big fan of No. 11’s salt and pepper squid. This dish is straight out of the Paul Clerehugh Book Of Classics, so I’m sure Meston learned it at London Street Brasserie. It was almost more snack than starter, in a good way: lots and lots of very narrow rings of squid, in a coating which for my money lacked that salt and pepper flavour but made up for it in texture.

I think I would have liked this even more with a squeeze of lemon and a dollop of golden aioli: it almost felt Andalusian, but serving it with sweet chilli sauce and more Asian slaw felt like a bit of a misstep. I was getting the feeling that the starter menu might mostly be fried stuff with salad.

And this is what I mean about the starters being collectively less than the sum of their parts. Because the thing I was most looking forward to, the maple glazed chicken thighs, was also fried stuff with salad. Another extremely pleasant variant of it, but fried stuff with salad nonetheless.

The meat had the right texture, whether that came from marination or not, but the coating lacked a little crispiness, ironically not a problem either the pork or the squid had. Plonking it on a carpet of little gem was far from objectionable, and the harissa mayonnaise had a nice heat to it, but these three dishes felt to me how I suspect some of my reviews must feel to you from time to time – paragraph after paragraph, all saying much the same thing.

Could we have ordered better? Possibly. But burrata and bruschetta both felt a bit bla, and I wasn’t in the mood for a chicken liver parfait. More to the point, three between two was about right in terms of size: I was glad I got to try a bit of all of them. If I’d been out with a bigger group, eating just the one starter on my own, I think I might have felt more underwhelmed. But then I do seem to be one of the only people in Reading who isn’t on Ozempic or Mounjaro: maybe No. 11 has judged its demographic wisely, and I just happen not to be in it.

It really was, however, a lovely place in which to spend a lazy Saturday lunchtime. The restaurant was sparsely occupied when we got there, but it gradually filled up and it was clear that at least some of those diners, already, were repeat customers. I could see why, because the service was really excellent – friendly, on it and very good at judging just how formal to be, or not be.

And the bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc we’d ordered was slipping down with genuine alacrity. No. 11’s wine list is good and pleasingly concise, with over half the wines available by the glass. Again, the restaurant played it safe. There was nothing orange, natural or from more esoteric countries on it, but I imagine it would be relatively hard to go wrong – unless you ordered an Italian pinot grigio, anyway.

It was all going so nicely, so I’m really sorry that the restaurant wobbled when it came to the mains. I’d been tempted by the herb crusted halibut, but my server told me they’d made some changes to it, doing away with the brown shrimp butter I’d so fancied. It speaks well of the kitchen that they’d identified a dish that wasn’t working and corrected course. But somewhere along the way that instinct had deserted them with my eventual choice, chicken supreme with a mushroom velouté.

First of all, with a dish like this you really need to get the skin crispy, and ideally crackling with salt. That hadn’t happened here, and although the chicken itself was judiciously cooked it did feel like the pièce de résistance was missing. The crushed potatoes it was perched on were quite nice, too, but at this point I bumped into the second, bigger problem with the dish.

Because it wasn’t a mushroom velouté by any stretch of the imagination. It was a white sauce with some mushrooms in it – perfectly decent mushrooms, including some oyster, but not ones that really lent flavour to the sauce itself. And the sauce still tasted very strongly of flour, which means that it hadn’t been cooked off. Such a basic, avoidable error.

I was sad to find this dish so middling, because everything up to this point had signalled real potential: potential that might be in need of refinement, but potential all the same. This, though, felt like the kind of mistake that would get drummed out of you at Reading College.

That dish cost £26.50, and didn’t feel its money. But Zoë’s main, the venison pavé, was pricier still at £31, which meant there was even less excuse for it to be subpar. The support acts did a good job: No. 11 makes a mean (if scrappy-looking) potato dauphinoise, their jus was decent, the Roscoff onion was a nice touch. The problem was the star of the show – here you are paying for the venison, and to cook it to beige rather than blushing felt dangerously close to being knocked up with supreme indifference after all.

Strangely the dish of seasonal greens we’d ordered on the side was spot on: consistency and timing were the problems across the piece. The restaurant could get parts of the whole right, but nailing it all at the same time seemed to be beyond them.

It was instructive to review this restaurant the week after I’d gone to Angelo’s: in both cases the restaurant was new, filled a gap in the market and had the potential to excite. In both cases dishes were priced to a level where the restaurant really couldn’t afford to make a hash of them. In Angelo’s case the highwire act had worked, but No. 11 hadn’t quite pulled it off. Restaurant dishes are more expensive than they used to be and the £20 Rubicon for main courses was crossed a long time ago. That ship has sailed, but you can’t simply charge £31 for a dish and execute it like that without losing some of your target market.

With everything up to that point comparatively scattergun, the choice to order dessert wasn’t so much about being the decider, more about gathering further evidence. Again, No. 11’s menu is compact and on the safe side: an Eton mess; a cheesecake; a brownie; a sticky toffee pudding; a cheeseboard. So I thought we were in pedestrian territory, and then No. 11 lobbed in a killer curveball by serving up one of my desserts of the year so far.

I had been dead set to try the cheesecake, which Zoë didn’t fancy (“white chocolate’s not real chocolate, it’s just sugar” was her take) but then I saw a sticky toffee pudding being carried to one of the outside tables and, despite not being my usual order by a long shot, something about it called to me. Was it that connection to London Street Brasserie again, knowing that it was always the reliable thing to order there? I’m not sure, but No. 11’s rendition is one of the best sticky toffee puddings I’ve ever eaten, anywhere.

The pudding was the perfect temperature, warm not hot, with just enough moistness, crumbliness and squidge. The exceptionally generous moat of toffee sauce – rich with burnt sugar notes, so glossy you could see your face in it – was simply impossible to fault. And the huge sphere of clotted cream on top? Utter, decadent heaven: “would you rather have it with ice cream?” my server had asked, and I had said no with a note of incredulity I forgot to conceal. Who wouldn’t want a massive globe of clotted cream on top of a dessert like this? Heathens and vegans, that’s who. Nobody else.

Honestly, forget the cheese shop and the bakery, don’t worry about the butcher’s pies and pasties, banish all thoughts of the slightly average coffee from your mind. This justified a trip to Pangbourne, all by its sweet self.

It couldn’t possibly have been as good, and I know some people think a chocolate brownie is a cake with no place on a dessert menu, but Zoë felt equally strongly about her dessert. It was, apparently, excellent, still warm and pleasingly fudgy inside. It’s not clear whether No. 11 makes its own ice cream or buys it in, but either way it also met with Zoë’s approval, speckled with plenty of vanilla seeds.

I’m sure it was lovely, but if you read this review and pick the brownie over the sticky toffee pudding I think you might be beyond my help. Either that or I haven’t done a good enough job of describing it. I tend to stay away from what I think of as school dinners dessert: anything warm, anything with custard or dried fruits and so on, but my god, that sticky toffee pudding. Did I mention that I rather liked it?

Our bill came to just shy of £200. You could spend less there, but it all adds up, from the £13 negronis to the £40 bottle of white – from the cheaper half of the wine list – to the £9 desserts, which come to think of it were probably the best value of the entire meal. It included a 12.5% service charge, and that was the area where it felt like the restaurant had been open far longer than a month: my server told us they’d make sure the wine list had a dessert wine on it by the time I ate there again, and I have every confidence that they’ll do exactly that.

So No. 11 was a little bit less expensive than Angelo’s, the subject of last week’s review, but I couldn’t help comparing the two again. Because they are both trying to do similar things, to bring something new to the centre of a community, to fill a gap. In Angelo’s case it’s opening an Italian restaurant in a location that badly needs one, conversely in No. 11’s it’s replacing an Italian restaurant which, over many years, became Pangbourne’s favourite place to eat.

They’re both tough assignments in their own way, and if No. 11 was a little uneven I think you have to show some understanding: it’s the owner’s first restaurant, not the sequel to an original that has been flourishing for years. I saw enough to think that they will get there, if they’re blessed with a patient clientele. I hope that Pangbourne supports it and this is all the beginning of a beautiful symbiotic relationship.

I never ended up living in Pangbourne and I probably never will, although it’s a very agreeable place to spend a Saturday lunchtime. But if I had, I suspect I’d have wound up at No. 11 more than once. Never mind: I’ll always have this one pleasant afternoon, when my real life ever so slightly converged with a different one that might have been mine but wasn’t. And I’ll always remember that sticky toffee pudding.

No. 11 Bistro – 7.4
11 Reading Road, Pangbourne, RG8 7LR
0118 9841333

https://www.no11restaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Angelo’s

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Have you been to Angelo’s, the new Italian restaurant in the town centre, yet?

And have you been asked whether you’ve been there yet?

The thing is, people keep asking me if I’ve eaten there, to the point where it seems like Angelo’s is the only Reading restaurant anybody is interested in. I had a readers’ lunch at the Moderation a couple of Saturdays ago and I was asked so many times I lost count – although it was a pretty boozy afternoon, so that just means “more than three times”.

Not only that, but many of the folks asking me already had an opinion: pretty ordinary, said one person that afternoon, unmoved by the wild boar ragu. Really rather good was another verdict, also delivered at the readers’ lunch. And don’t think you have to have been in order to pitch in: I saw some pictures earlier and thought ‘I can do better than that at home‘, one of my readers told me on Instagram. 

That felt like a bit of a slap across Angelo’s figurative face: I mean, I can do better than Cozze at home, but that says more about Cozze than my talents in the kitchen.

It’s easy to understand, though, why Angelo’s is such a big event. In 2024 the biggest openings of the year were the Rising Sun and Siren RG1, a chain trying to look like an independent and an independent with all the polish of a chain. Both were underwhelming at best. Last year, the headlines were grabbed by Rosa’s Thai and Cosy Club, desperately middling middle of the road fare for Reading’s middle classes, with Nua and Pho 86 quietly flying the flag for new indies in the town centre.

But this year? Unless you’re very excited about Shake Shack – in which case I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place – Angelo’s is not only the most interesting thing to open in the town centre but, in truth, the only interesting thing to open here. It’s shiny and new, it’s very central on the Station Hill development and it’s independent: the owner is also behind Ruchetta in Wokingham, which has also now been rebranded as Angelo’s. Although he’s doubtless sunk a lot of money into this high risk endeavour, there appears to be no venture capital involved.

That would be enough to make it worth checking out, but it’s also the kind of restaurant many people think Reading is sorely missing: an Italian restaurant. Not a specialist pizza restaurant like Zia Lucia, not a place that only does pasta like London’s trendsetters Padella and Bancone, or Maidenhead’s pale imitation Sauce and Flour. And not an entry level defroster like Prezzo, Zizzi or Bella Italia, either: a proper Italian restaurant. The kind we haven’t had since we lost San Sicario, the kind we were blessed with for decades when Pepe Sale was at the height of its powers.

It helps that Angelo’s kept us waiting. They signed a lease last April, and everybody expected them to open before the New Year. But due to unspecified delays an opening date never materialised; the infrequent updates on the restaurant’s Instagram page gave more of a sinking feeling than a growing sense of excitement. Finally, they opened at the end of June and the early signs were not encouraging. A very minimalist website was one thing, but a menu strewn with more typos than AI slop – who knew there were so many ways to misspell ‘mozzarella’? – was another altogether.

Fortunately both have now been amended, but Angelo’s still feels slightly like it’s fixing things as it goes along: at the time of writing it’s walk-ins only for tables of fewer than six people, and the phone number has only just been added to their Google listing. All of that, though, can add up to creating a feeling of demand – it’s good to make people work for it, sometimes – and when Zoë and I sauntered up just after six on a Thursday evening all but a couple of tables inside were already occupied.

The space is neat and compact. There’s a front section with high tables and a bar that maybe sits ten or so people, and then a dining room out back which can accommodate twenty. It was tasteful, if maybe a little lacking in character, although I liked the little booths and teal banquettes.

But the restaurant had the best accessory of all: customers. On one side of me a pair of happy friends were catching up, on the other a group of three was having an absolute ball, all loud and infectious laughter. From my seat I could see out the window across Garrard Street, to a part of town that used to look so very different. I liked this space, fashioned out of nowhere. It reminded me a little bit of Me Kong.

Angelo’s menu bore little resemblance to the typo-strewn mess that first appeared online, in more ways than one. First, it was cleaner, professional, read very well. Secondly, and this is a little strange, the points of difference were more than mere spelling errors – perhaps ten dishes have survived from that original menu, just over a month ago, and the remainder have been replaced. Was the initial menu a beta test that should never have seen the light of day, or had the restaurant already figured out that some of its dishes didn’t work? 

The other big alteration was the deletion of pizza: Angelo’s original menu offered eight, this one had removed them entirely. I think I read somewhere that this was the consequence of necessity, but I rather hope they have the courage of their convictions and stick to it: Reading has plenty of places to get pizza, but next to nowhere to get good pasta or antipasti. The menu I ordered from that night filled a yawning gap in the market – pizza, however well done, might dilute that.

Even truncated, it represented a good and interesting range, of both options and price points. The ten starters ranged from £7 to £15, and the dozen or so pasta dishes were almost uniformly between £16 and £18, unless you were itching for the black fettucine with seafood. A relatively modest six secondi were pricier, starting just below the £20 mark and marching north from there, but even so nothing seemed extortionate or unreasonable. I had loved Ruchetta when I went there on duty in 2014 but, even then, its dishes there were about as expensive as those on Angelo’s menu twelve years later.

We started with a pair of cracking Aperol spritzes, because it was summer, and the one thing on the antipasti menu that felt like a great shareable start to the meal. Zucchini fritti had survived the great menu cull, and I’d seen from other writeups that Angelo’s served these as thin, round slices rather than batons, almost creating the sensation of exceptionally upmarket chips and dip.

Did that work? Well, it did, but it could have worked a lot better. The advantage of strips is all that surface area to crisp up: these, by contrast, were limp enough that they were droopy when you picked them up. They weren’t much cop when it came to dipping them into what really was an exemplary lemon aioli. 

So there is scope to perfect them, yes, but I was surprised by how enjoyable they were, even short of perfect. The seasoning on them was excellent, brilliantly judged, and if it meant you had to use a fork and load that aioli on with cutlery – far too evolved, for food of this kind – it didn’t stop them being a particular kind of wonderful.

We made short work of them, we made short work of our spritzes and slowly the sun went about the business of setting outside. “I really want this to be good” said Zoë, out of nowhere.

I totally understood what she meant. After a couple of years of disappointing big names opening in the town centre, Reading could badly do with a win. I looked round this fresh, new room and these fresh, new customers, took in the bright and chatty service happening all around me. No pressure, I thought to myself.

But all those were good signs, weren’t they? And the wine list was a good sign, too: sizeable, fascinating, covering price points from entry level – including 425ml carafes, if you wanted to be moderate and affordable – all the way up to eye-watering. Moreover, it was 100% Italian, covering so many different regions you just don’t see on wine lists in Reading: Umbria; Calabria; Piedmont; Sardinia.

Looking at it made me realise, again, how much I missed Pepe Sale – and how glad I was not to have to visit Vino Vita ever again. We ordered a bottle of pinot noir from Pesaro, a place of which I’d never heard, and I really loved it – silky, fruity and balanced enough to make a fist of going with everything we ate. It was £56, and what I could find online suggests you could buy it retail for just under half that: if every markup on Angelo’s wine list is in that ballpark, wine buffs are going to have some fantastic evenings there.

My starter was sheer joy. Four handsome scallops, cooked to just the right side of jellied, could have been enough of an attraction on their own. But tumbled with sweet roasted peppers and crispy matchsticks of pancetta, they were forkful after forkful of fun. I wasn’t prepared for how much I would enjoy this dish, or how simple, how superbly done it was.

The transformative element, though, was the salmoriglio, the bright Calabrian sauce of olive oil and lemon juice that perked up a dish which was plenty perky already. The whole thing was daytime TV presenter cheerful, without the artificiality that comes priced in with that. I could eat it again and again, although it also made me look forward to the day when Angelo’s has swordfish on its menu.

This starter was £15, and yet when I compared it to the masterpiece of eking out that was, say, No. 1 Ship Street’s more expensive scallop starter, I felt as if I was robbing Angelo’s blind, not the other way round.

Zoë was equally happy with her choice, another salutary lesson in the virtues of buying good stuff and leaving it as unfucked with as possible. A generous mosaic of pink and marbled beef carpaccio, sliced almost to translucence, was laid out and scattered with rocket and Parmesan. So little to it, but so much to enjoy.

“I could have gobbled three plates of it”, she told me later. “You can quote me on that.”

Also, and I know this is an aside, but how nice it was to eat in a genuine Italian restaurant that uses balsamic vinegar, not some gloopy, sugary glaze, and only uses it sparingly when appropriate, rather than festooning everything with thick ribbons of it to make something that would otherwise taste of nothing taste of something worse. I had almost forgotten how much I liked eating in an Italian restaurant in Reading that treated its customers like adults.

Pacing was faultless – there’s a sentence you haven’t seen me write much this year – and something like twenty-five minutes later, when I was still basking in the afterglow of my starter and enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with a great bottle of red, our main courses came out. We’d ordered from the deep and the shallow ends of the menu here, more by accident than design, but I think it speaks volumes about what Angelo’s has to offer that both were equally superb in different ways.

I loved my main course so much I can’t even tell you, and I loved the fact that it was a mere pound more expensive than my starter. Carbonara is a good test of an Italian restaurant, but I doubt many pass it with flying colours the way Angelo’s did. The golden colour of a Brazil shirt, pasta impeccably al dente, the sauce clinging to every strand, full of depth and saline complexity. This was a textbook carbonara: egg yolk, pecorino, no cream, no adulteration of any kind. Purists might object that it was pancetta not guanciale, but those purists need to get out more. Besides, that thatch of bronzed strips was heaven.

By the end of it I wasn’t only planning when I could go back to Angelo’s, I was planning when I could go back to specifically eat this again. Surely I had a free evening next week to slink off for a bowl of it? If I had my way, the people behind Cozze would be sentenced to come to Angelo’s, try this once and then have to eat their subpar albino version every evening for a month. That would teach them, or at least it would if they liked food better than margins.

Zoë, as regular readers will know, has an annoying habit of ordering better than me. But I thought she’d erred ordering the most expensive and pedestrian-looking dish on the menu. Ribeye, mushroom, cream and brandy sauce and chunky chips. Sounds a bit blah, I told myself, and at £33 it would have to be really, really good: everything in peak condition, everything in balance, everything coming together.

So of course, to my mixed delight and irritation, it was precisely that. Steak cooked perfectly medium as requested (I’d have had it pinker, but I don’t judge) a sauce of dreams – and more than enough of it, too – and some knockout, golden, crisp-edged and nicely irregular chips. I was happy for her, even if this dish felt about as Italian as I am, but I was just as happy, if not more so, for Angelo’s. Because this was high stakes, and they had not missed. Even her side dish, spot-on tenderstem broccoli positively infused with garlic and chilli, was a winner, not an afterthought.

I had to have dessert after two magical courses like that; I wanted to give Angelo’s the chance of the kind of clean sweep that propels that rating at the bottom into the upper echelons. It was a flab-free dessert menu with limited options but, again, they were the choices you would want to see: a tiramisu, a panna cotta, an affogato, a rum baba which turned up at the table next to me and looked positively immense, in every sense of the word.

But we both, in the end, went for the tartufo cioccolato and, yet again, Angelo’s pulled something out of the top drawer. I have had these before where they’ve felt a little anonymous, like a freezer ready fancy-schmancy choc ice, something to finish your meal with when you lack the imagination for a proper dessert. I’ve had them at Pepe Sale, and even as I’ve enjoyed them, I’ve known I was slightly short changing myself. But nobody ordering this at Angelo’s is doing anything other than treating themselves in a big way.

It was a huge, cocoa-powder dusted puck of a thing, crowned with ice crystals, and we waited for our dessert wine to turn up before we made inroads. But when we did, it was just glorious. Have you heard how Wall’s ruined the iconic Feast ice cream earlier this year by swapping its chocolate ice cream for vanilla while leaving that disconcertingly nostalgic core of plasticky chocolate intact? Angelo’s has performed that trick in reverse, so at the centre of its tartufo is a core of zabaglione. It is, and I don’t use these words lightly, life-alteringly good.

So, by the way, was the dessert wine. Angelo’s offers five by the 50ml glass, and none of them are cheap. But in for a penny in for a pounding, as my wife is wont to say, so we tried the priciest, the muffato from Umbria. It was the same gold I associate with all of the meal: the gold of the summer sunshine outside, the gold of the salmoriglio, the gold of my carbonara, of that zabaglione. Maybe everything Angelo’s touches turns to gold – in truth, it was beginning to feel that way.

It was, as I said, it was a costly way to end the meal – £13.50 a glass – but I quite liked Angelo’s pricing. It felt democratic rather than random, that you could have a main course that cost the same as your starter, or a glass of dessert wine that cost almost twice as much as the dessert accompanying it. I think you could come here and eat very well indeed, yet spend more or less than we did. I’m absolutely certain that the oenophiles among you could badly bruise your debit cards at Angelo’s. But it would all happen so nicely, and you’d come away so happy, that you wouldn’t mind one bit.

Our meal for two – and bear in mind we had nibbles, and aperitivi, and dessert wines and a metric fuckton of good times – came to £200 on the nail. Personally I don’t begrudge a penny of it, and it’s worth mentioning that they leave the question of service entirely up to you. I hope they get the tips they deserve, because service was delightful from beginning to end.

I don’t want to patronise Angelo’s by saying I was not only ecstatic but relieved that eating there was such a stellar experience. But it doesn’t pay to be dishonest, so I should admit that I was relieved. I didn’t want to put the boot into yet another big money signing for the town centre, especially an independent. Even if it is underneath Ebb & Flow, a collection of performative if well-appointed shoebox apartments whose main purpose seems to be to make wealthy buy-to-let landlords wealthier still.

I wanted something to buck the trend of unremitting meh that seems to afflict the RG1 postcode. I really, really did. But if I wanted Angelo’s to be decent, it was beyond my hopes that it would turn out to be quite this good. It is the best thing to happen to central Reading for ages, and the best thing to happen to a reviewer of central Reading restaurants, arguably, for even longer. So, has my enthusiasm been infectious? Does it make you want to go?

It’s worth it, believe me. I may be the latest person to ask you if you’ve eaten there yet, but I have a feeling I won’t be the last.

Angelo’s – 8.8
9 Friar’s Walk, Station Hill Square, Reading, RG1 1HP
0118 3042885

https://www.angelosdine.com

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Restaurant review: Le Champignon Sauvage, Cheltenham

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A few Fridays ago I was sitting in a café called Suffolk Coffee in Cheltenham, drinking a latte and feeling something I don’t generally experience before going somewhere on duty: genuine anticipation.

Because I don’t often review a Michelin starred restaurant for this blog – it’s only happened twice so far, and the last time was over 10 years ago. Reviewing somewhere like that is a test of the reviewer every bit as much as it is a test of the restaurant: is my palate up to the task of appreciating it? Is my writing up to the task of capturing it? Just as footballers want to play against the best opposition, reviewers want to review the good stuff. It’s why you’d never find one worth their salt on a hyperbolic quest to find, I don’t know, the best burger in the U.K. We bore too easily for that.

The anticipation was heightened by the fact that I was about to have lunch at one of the restaurants on my bucket list, Le Champignon Sauvage. Amid all the ebbs and flows of gastronomic fashion, Le Champignon Sauvage has held a Michelin star since 1995: only three U.K. restaurants have held one longer.

In those thirty-one years, Michelin has changed its mind about the kind of restaurants it wants to celebrate, accepted bungs from tourist associations to extend its guide to godforsaken places like Dubai, introduced its pointless Green Star and scrapped it. And for eighteen of those years Le Champignon Sauvage held two stars, until Michelin took the second one away in 2018. Nobody knows why.

Nobody ever does, by the way. I’ve eaten in some great restaurants, like 5 North Street in Winchcombe or Chelsea’s Medlar, which lost stars for reasons that pass all understanding. And I’ve eaten in restaurants that held a star with no idea how they managed to blag one in the first place. It is the great enigma, and for all the pontification online about restaurants that should have one, or should have two, for all the episodes of that Apple TV show with Gordon Ramsay and the posho from Topjaw I suspect it will remain an enigma for a long time.

But anyway, it’s food for thought: on a personal level, when Le Champignon Sauvage first won its star I was just about to leave university. Blogs didn’t exist. Nor did smartphones, and I wouldn’t have an email address for a few more years. Just to channel my own version of We Didn’t Start The Fire: New Labour; 9/11; the credit crunch; Covid; Will Young winning Pop Idol; President Obama; President Trump. All these seismic things would come to pass, they just hadn’t yet.

And in terms of food, St John had only just opened the year before: the food revolution in this country, such as it was, was in its crib. But this piece of history is even more striking: Le Champignon Sauvage has been run by a husband and wife team – Helen Everitt-Matthias running the front of house and her husband David in the kitchen – ever since it first opened in 1987.

Not for them chopping and changing, expanding to a group of restaurants and appointing new head chefs here and there. Instead, the two of them have put this restaurant on the map and kept it there for nearly forty years. In a country that changes its mind with the frequency of somebody whose attention span has been rotted by social media, a nation that swaps Prime Ministers like it’s bored and changing the channel, it feels like we won’t see Le Champignon Sauvage’s like again.

And the final evidence of that unique status is the thing Le Champignon Sauvage might be most famous for: David Everitt-Mathias is always in the kitchen. If he isn’t there, the restaurant is closed. He doesn’t do TV, and he has published three books in forty years. That’s it. If you eat in his restaurant, you know he has cooked your food. That’s unlike so many starred restaurants in the U.K. So I wanted to go there, while I still could, on a expedition to somewhere that embodied hospitality as a calling more than any other restaurant I could imagine.

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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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