Restaurant review: Just Momo

On April 3, 2026April 3, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

For all the people in Reading and beyond on Ozempic or Mounjaro, despite all the weeks in the last few years when I’ve joined my ever-optimistic wife on the Fast 800 diet, there remain some times when there’s a big hole in your life and only carbs can fill it.

I’m not saying carbs merit their own tier in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs the way, say, wi-fi does, but carbs are the unconditional love of food, the thing that softens the edges: no wonder we talk about lapsing into a coma after eating them. They are the thing that nearly always makes the world feel better, cosier and less harsh. Well, that and ice cream – but even I, an inveterate ice cream lover, would concede that ice cream is chiefly for the brighter months, while carbs are a friend for all seasons.

That said, carbs come into their own during our winters, which seem to take up most of the year once summer ends, with their chilly, dreich, gathering gloom that makes the soul sink. My brother was over from Australia at the start of last month on a short notice family visit and he loved the greyness, the lack of blue skies. But he felt that way because it was summer back home, and hot as balls there.

By contrast, he found shivering on the terraces watching Maidenhead United in his specially bought winter coat and gloves, his newly-purchased polyester scarf costing less than the ticket for the match, somehow magical. Even so, as he drove me home after the match he admitted that he wasn’t sure whether he could hack four months of it. I sometimes wonder how any of us do.

When it comes to epitomising carbs I know people put Italian food on a pedestal, with its twin exemplars of pizza and pasta. But I always think Nepalese food is a bit of a dark horse in this regard; I know it has other jewels, its sukuti and sekuwa, its phenomenal pressed potatoes, but when I think of Nepalese food the thing that comes to mind first is momo. And then, if I can think beyond momo, I also consider Nepalese chow mein, with the hot sauce that separates it from its Chinese sibling.

Reading is extremely lucky to have a significant Nepali community, and it means that we are well represented when it comes to Nepalese food. And that, in turn, means that Nepalese food has been bringing Reading in general, and me in particular, comfort and joy for well over a decade.

For a long time, for me, that meant momo at Sapana Home. Nearly a decade ago, in the depths of my divorce, when my flat was no longer a home I would stop at Sapana Home on my way back from the station and order ten pan-fried parcels of succour, with a mango lassi chaser. There was a specific wistfulness I felt when I finished the sixth momo and knew that the plate, and my respite, were nearly over: the Germans probably have a word for it.

In happier times there was the glorious autumn of 2017 when I discovered Namaste Kitchen, and the hospitality of Kamal, at the foot of Katesgrove. I would walk there from my little house in the Village with the slightest of provocation, any excuse at all really, and self-medicate with cider, momo and chow mein: the rest of that year, gastronomically speaking, was made up of four magnificent months.

And in the depths of the pandemic, when Kamal had moved to his eponymous kitchen on the Caversham Road, it meant delivery bikes scuttling from there to our little house in the Village when only Kamal’s carbs could shut out an attack of the glums. I must have lost count of the number of deliveries from Kamal since he opened, both at the old house and this one, and whatever those orders contain they always feature chow mein and momo: to omit them would be unthinkable. Zoë would mutiny if the former was missing, I couldn’t do without the latter.

Three weeks ago, Zoë and I got off the train at Reading and we knew it was one of those nights. We’d been to see my dad in the hospice, and it was in relative terms a good visit. He had a sheet of exercises and told us he planned to start doing them, that he had been using a walking frame to reach the bathroom in readiness for when he was discharged home. He was so set on getting back to his house and his bed: he asked me what films he should watch when he made it there, talked about the things he was looking forward to doing when his life returned to normal. And we played along, because we didn’t know how else to handle it.

His speech seemed stronger than it had been, and it was a shame to leave. But we knew he was ready for us to go because he asked what we were doing that evening, his coded signal that he wanted to get some rest. I told him we were going on a mini pub crawl with Zoë’s CAMRA compadres, an event I always enjoy, and he appeared to like that answer.

It was an evening when we could believe we’d all had a false alarm, even though the hospice staff tell you, with the wisdom of years of experience, that patients often rally soon after they reach the hospice. It was the last time Zoë would see my dad alive, but none of us knew that then.

Even though my dad was on good form, relatively speaking, those visits take something out of you, make you think, make your mind go to places you’d rather it didn’t. So when we got back into town we only had a little time to decompress before having to go to the Greyfriar, be social, talk beer and pubs and buses with Reading CAMRA’s brilliant bunch. That hole was yawning and carbs could fill it, so I thought of Just Momo.

It’s on the same run of restaurants as pizza rivals Paesinos and seemingly permanently closed Amò, but of a slightly older vintage: it opened in winter 2024, the first of those sites to start trading. And the inside is pleasant, generic and featureless: a biggish box of a room with framed pictures on the wall and a real mélange of light fittings, from traditional to modern to bare, illuminating its basic tables and chairs. Only the exposed brickwork effect around the walls was bizarre: made of 3-D vinyl rather than flat wallpaper, and oddly spongy to the touch.

The restaurant was doing well when we arrived just before seven, with a fair few tables occupied. I was going to say that most of the customers were desi, but having had a preemptive Google it seems that Nepali people don’t identify with that term, so I won’t.

Just Momo is a bit misleading calling itself that, because it also does chow mein and one other dish, chatpate. But that’s hardly grounds to complain and their menu is a visually appealing, stripped down model of simplicity. It takes possibly the two most accessible dishes in Nepalese cuisine and sticks them front and centre: you can have chow mein with the protein of your choice, you can have momo any which way, but you’re going to be eating chow mein or momo or, if you have a hole in your life that only carbs can fill, both.

I say that you can have momo any which way, but that’s not strictly true. They come steamed or fried, in chilli sauce or plain, and they are chicken, vegetable or lamb. So no kothey, or pan-fried, momo, no jhol momo in broth and no buffalo (or buff, as Nepalese menu always term it) momo of any kind. Some momo purists might find that limiting but I didn’t, even though kothey momo are usually my first choice.

I went up and ordered a couple of types of momo, because Zoë shares momo, two portions of chow mein because Zoë likes, as she puts it, personal chow mein, a soft drink for her and a sweet Nepali tea for me. All that set me back just under £40.

Fifteen minutes later, out it all came and it was extremely gratefully received. The chow mein was more than acceptable, full of veg, topped with herbs and spring onions, tumbled with thick strips of chicken, noodles with plenty of bite. It only took a forkful to remember why this dish can be such a tonic, and if it didn’t quite hit the heights of Kamal’s Kitchen’s rendition it wasn’t far off, and besides Just Momo’s location is a lot more central.

It needed the sauce it came with, but it made me think of how welcome dishes like this can be and set my mind off in a reverie of all the great noodle dishes out there, from Me Kong’s Singapore noodles with their dusting of curry powder to the soy-laced wonders of Oishi’s yaki soba. Three cuisines, one giant gastronomic group hug. The fug dispersed slightly, the spirits began to lift. Everything was working as it should.

If the chow mein was good, the momo were even better. Just Momo’s Instagram page shows them painstakingly making them by hand and these certainly didn’t feel bulk made and previously frozen. Fried lamb momo were piping hot, beautifully crispy bubbles kept from floating away by a gorgeous ballast of generously filled ground lamb. Having had these at Kamal’s Kitchen and at West Reading’s impressive Momo 2 Go I have to say that Just Momo could give either a run for their money.

Ten for just shy of a tenner still constitutes impressive value inside the IDR, where costs were prohibitive before everything got more expensive on April 1st and are only going to get worse. When I update my guide to solo dining in Reading, this place – and this dish – are going to be in serious contention. I also loved the fact that this, and all of Just Momo’s dishes, come in eco-friendly leaf plates “just the way it’s served in Nepal”, even if the green credentials you get from that are wiped out by flying them over from the motherland. I was less keen on the wooden knife and fork, but never mind.

Chilli fried chicken momo were a different permutation of brilliant but no less enjoyable. I loved the chicken filling, although I should really have had the chicken momo unadorned to make a fair comparison with the lamb: that’s next time sorted. But if I couldn’t judge them in isolation from crunchy peppers and a thick, punchy chilli sauce which clung to every crinkle of every dumpling, that was hardly a tragedy.

The overall effect was a plate which rounded out our order rather than just offering more of the same. And again, hats off to Just Momo for not bloating their menu with chilli this and Manchurian that, not trying to offer something for everyone the way restaurants on Reading’s newly dubbed Curry Mile – people are trying to make it A Thing – sometimes do. No Indo-Chinese or South Indian interlopers, just a tightly honed menu that offers a few Nepalese crowd pleasers. If you don’t like them, go elsewhere. But really: if you don’t like them, check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Service was lovely and friendly, as warm and sweet as my very enjoyable Nepali tea. I found myself thinking about the randomness of life as we finished our meal at Just Momo. Presumably they had their pick of the units on that run as the first tenants, and perhaps if they had chosen Amò’s spot and Amó had been forced to take their site Amò would be the ones still trading and Just Momo would have the sign outside their door for three months saying “closed for refurbishment”.

If I hadn’t liked Just Momo, I might have shaken my fist at the skies about that, but much as I miss Amò I loved Just Momo, so I was glad they dodged that bullet.

The rest of the evening was just what I needed after the day I’d had. Zoë and I joined the Reading CAMRA brigade in the pub, drank nice beers, chatted merrily about all sorts and I could almost forget, for a few hours at least, where I had been earlier in the day and what lay ahead. Drinks in a pub might have achieved that on their own, but I don’t know. I think it was the welcome of Just Momo, misnomer and all, and their array of wonderful carbs that proved the turning point. I am grateful to them for that, and I’ll be back to enjoy more of their food, on the flimsy pretext of repaying their kindness.

One little postscript, because I somehow feel I want to say it: I have had the strangest fortnight. Two weeks ago, on the date of my last review, I went to London with Zoë to celebrate my birthday. I had a wonderful lunch at The French House, wandered off to buy fragrance I wanted but did not need, photographed some Brutalism, drank Belgian beers at one of my favourite London pubs. The following morning, unexpectedly, Zoë and I were at the hospice for the last time, my dad’s room silent and cold, him finally at peace and free from pain.

And the day after that, because it had been booked for months and was badly needed, Zoë and I flew to Màlaga for our first holiday in six months. I spent a week in the warmth, happy and sad and guilty, drinking vermouth in my dad’s honour – every single time – my mending arm gently baked by the incessant sunshine. Shorts on, legs out, sandals on, living the best life I could manage, under the circumstances.

It is an incongruous experience to grieve on holiday, to feel like crying in your favourite restaurants and a beautiful hotel room with the nicest view, with your best friend. I can’t say I recommend it. I have no prior experience of this, really, and it’s weird and unsettling that it’s never constant, always intermittent. Right now it feels like it might be constantly intermittent for ever. Having a lovely time, wish you were here: I didn’t send a postcard but I thought it, often.

When we got back last Friday, we turned the heating on and unpacked and sat on the sofa, home at last. The holiday was over and impending reality was looming, nowhere near the horizon. Discussions and decisions awaited, as did conversations and condolences. I felt that hole again, the kind that carbs can pretend to fill, and because I couldn’t think what else to do, Zoë and I ordered takeaway – chow mein and momos, of course. I will say this, though: they were delicious. They almost worked.

Just Momo – 8.0
4 Kings Road, Reading, RG1 3AA
0118 2294634

https://justmomo.uk

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Zi Tore

On January 16, 2026January 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

Unlike any restaurant reviewer I know of, I publish the list of restaurants I intend to visit. It’s regularly added to as places open and people tip me off about their favourite venues, in Reading or slightly further afield, and every time I review somewhere it drops off that list – until, maybe, many years later, the time is ripe for reappraisal. From the outside, it probably just looks like a bunch of restaurants, in alphabetical order.

But the reality, for me at least, is that it’s a nuanced to do list. It’s almost more of an in-tray, never more so than at the beginning of the year, and the order in which I tackle it depends on a number of factors. Because not all of those spots have anywhere approaching equal priority in my mind, and that dictates how quickly I get round to them. I’m aware, for instance, that it’s a fair old while since I visited Newbury or Wokingham on duty: over three years for the former, nearly three years for the latter. I ought to rectify that.

Then there are the new places that I really need to review, if only because they look interesting. If not for my accident I would have reviewed Pho 86 and Nua by now, and spots like Blip and Matteo Greek Grill & Bakery also merit investigation sooner rather than later, to see if smashed burgers can take off in Tilehurst or whether at last somebody can make a go of the old Colley’s Supper Rooms site. I’m curious myself about the answers to those questions, so I need to go exploring at some point.

And of course the accident currently factors into these things. So places near the top of the in-tray, for the time being, need to be fairly close to home and at least slightly lend themselves to eating with one hand; my motor skills are gradually improving with physio, but writing one of these reviews still involves wrangling with the delights of Apple Dictation, which understands what I’m saying about as often as my wife does when her hearing aids aren’t in.

Every to do list has that one thing on it that you should have done a very long time ago, the item that sticks out like a sore thumb and makes you feel guilty. And in my case that item, the subject of this week’s review, is Italian restaurant and cafe Zi Tore, the one which took the spot on Smelly Alley vacated by the Grumpy Goat back in October 2023: yes, it really has been that long since the Grumpy Goat shut. Hicks Baker weren’t quick off the mark getting someone to jump into this particular grave, but Zi Tore opened nearly a year ago with co-owner Paolo Lanzetta, a proud Neapolitan, in the kitchen.

The Reading Chronicle covered the story as only they could, getting the name of the restaurant wrong – it’s not ‘Zia Torre’ – and accidentally giving Lanzetta dual nationality. “It has always been my dream to open a restaurant like this so people can try authentic Italian and Nepalese cuisine” they misquoted him as saying: you can’t get the staff, can you? That’s our local paper for you though, they just don’t know their calzone from their momo.

All that means that I am very long overdue checking out one of the trailblazers of the Italian invasion that hit Reading in the first half of 2025. I’ve reviewed Paesinos, reviewed Amò – not without controversy – and failed to get to Peppito’s before it closed five months after opening. But Zi Tore remained the blind spot: I tried to get there early one evening in May, only to get turned away because they seemed to be closing early, but I’ve not been back since.

And everything I’ve heard since then has been good. I’ve had comments to the effect that they’re staying open later these days, feedback borne out by their later opening hours on Google. Long-standing reader Mansoor, a man I trust on many things, said that of all of Reading’s new restaurants last year Zi Tore was the one he ended up visiting most frequently. And my friend Enza, my authority on all matters Italian, has loved Zi Tore for a long time, especially their graffe.

I’ve also heard rumours that one of Amò’s pizza chefs, short of work now that the restaurant has been closed for over a month without explanation, had crossed town to start working at Zi Tore. So that was it: slap bang at the top of the 2026 in-tray. On a drizzly weekday, during a week that was originally meant to be time off but was now filled with medical appointments, Zoë and I wandered up Smelly Alley to finally give it a whirl.

Zi Tore has done a lovely job of the exterior and the frontage and the window, with arancini and pizza slices tantalisingly on display, draws you in nicely. But beyond the counter, I found the interior a little inhospitable. It’s difficult to describe it without harking back to the site’s Grumpy Goat days, but the back room on the ground floor, where all the beer used to live, was a slightly unlovely space with a handful of tables, starved of daylight or much ambience.

Upstairs was much better, although that also brought back memories of the site’s previous life. It’s a nice space with a fetching mini mezzanine looking out over Smelly Alley, and taking the bar out had definitely created more room. But even here the furniture felt functional and a little sterile, as if they’d bought it piecemeal.

One table with makeshift bench seating could accommodate six people, one of the plum spots up by the window had an actual bench and low table – great for coffee and cake, perhaps less so for lunch. It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, Arctic: an aircon unit in the ceiling was switched off, its remote on a nearby low table set to a random 30 degrees. It all felt a little spartan, not quite finished, even though the place was on the verge of celebrating its first birthday.

Zi Tore’s menu had the kind of concision that pleases restaurant reviewers: seven different Neapolitan pizzas, two types of pasta – ravioli or gnocchi – with one of three sauces, a lasagne and three smaller dishes under the heading “Street Food”. That was slightly marred by a separate paper pizza menu, a recent addition perhaps, with another half a dozen pizza options. Some felt like the kind of combinations you’d get at Amò, making me wonder if the departing chef had taken a few ideas with him.

Pricing was standard issue, with pizzas ranging from £10 for a margherita all the way up to £17 if you wanted porcini, roasted potatoes and sausage (typing this, that ensemble sounds rather good to me). Pasta dishes were between £12 and £15 depending on your shape and sauce of choice, and the smaller plates were less than a fiver. The other tempting dish, the pizza fritta, was a tenner and looked like a fish out of water in the street food section of the menu.

Cakes are not on the menu, so you have to go up to the display and ask at the counter: I didn’t indulge my sweet tooth on this occasion, but the cake I saw turning up at a neighbouring table looked thoroughly decent. I didn’t see any graffe – the loop-shaped potato doughnut beloved by my friend Enza – but perhaps they’re a weekend thing.

Zi Tore also doesn’t do table service, so you go up with your order and your table number and let them have it. I ordered a couple of coffees, a couple of small dishes, a pizza and a pasta dish: all that set me back just over £44, which felt like decent value. It was certainly comparable with its peers at Amò and Paesinos, although Zi Tore’s offering is slightly different from theirs.

It’s a shame to start the year with a regular complaint about timing, but I would have liked the coffees quickly – it was cold outside and almost as cold inside – and then the small dishes, then the main events. Zi Tore wasn’t hugely busy, with about four other tables on the go when we arrived, but in reality we waited what felt like quite a while and then everything turned up a matter of minutes apart.

No matter: the coffee, the starting point, wasn’t half bad. It arrived in those tall, almost-conical glasses I slightly associate with the last century, but my latte was very enjoyable and Zoë liked her mocha. In Reading’s coffee hierarchy this wasn’t competing with the likes of C.U.P. or Lincoln – or even trying to – but it was significantly better than Madoo‘s coffee, which has always been its Achilles heel.

Small plates, turning up twenty minutes after we ordered, were a mixed bag of realised and unrealised potential. I didn’t mind the sausage and friarelli arancino, just the one for £5, but it lacked a little pep. It was lukewarm, the shell had no real rigidity to it and inside the filling wasn’t brilliantly distributed: a big knot of dense sausage meat at the bottom, almost as if it had been placed there to stop the whole thing toppling over, like a Weeble.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, more that I knew better were out there: it didn’t match Amò’s but, on the other hand, it was far better than the ones at Vino Vita.

Far, far better was the montanara, a simple but exquisite treat, a pleasingly irregular, puffy oval of fried pizza dough topped simply with tomato, mozzarella and a solitary basil leaf. This was so enjoyable, and justified a visit to Zi Tore in its own right: there’s nowhere to hide when something has so few components, and it’s a great way to showcase how good your raw materials are. At £3.50, this is one of the Reading lunch scene’s bargains, and although we shared it between two – and it was big enough for you to do that – the wise move would be to come here and order one to yourself.

But the other wise move might be to order just that, because as I was eating it I did find myself thinking if only this was hot. It was fried pizza dough, I’m sure it was as hot as balls to begin with, and I wondered what had cooled it so: was it adding the toppings, or was it the fact that it sat around until everything else was ready or almost ready? Or could it have been that the upstairs was so Siberian that you couldn’t affort to wait until after your arancino to tuck into it? I think some benefit of the doubt is probably due here: I would go again and give this another try. Even on the upper reaches of what you could describe as ‘piping warm’ it was a very good choice.

The timestamps on my and Zoë’s photos tell me that our bigger dishes arrived less than five minutes later, and it’s good that we’d finished our smaller ones or there wouldn’t have been room on the table for everything. Zoë called shotgun on the pizza, and had ordered simply, the Diavola, a relatively classic pepperoni pizza with chilli.

First things first: it looked the part, and the rim was nicely speckled, blistered and spotted. This is, for better or worse, a very classic Neapolitan pizza, with all the pluses and minuses of that genre, still enjoying its moment in the sun in Reading as it is replaced with American interlopers and hybrids (and whatever ‘London-style pizza’ is) in the capital. That’s the extent to which I keep up with pizza trends, but in theory I’m still happy with the original forebear of all these mutations.

And yet, from the bit of this pizza I tried, this wasn’t my favourite rendition of it in Reading. Everything was very loose and sloppy, more so than at Zi Tore’s rivals on the Kings Road, which meant the centre was like what I imagine sex with Rupert Murdoch must be like, a droopy challenge. I heard someone online say “if it ain’t messy it ain’t fun” at some point last year, and personally when it comes to food I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed more.

But there was other problems here. The dough would have been best in class in Reading back in the days when Franco Manca got us all excited, but with the competition from the class of ’25 it was mid table – and that’s before we get to Zia Lucia’s charcoal base and its almost mythical effects on punters’ innards.

And the pepperoni didn’t do it for me either – now, it might well have been pepperoni rather than salami, but for me the benefit of pepperoni is its narrower gauge, the amount you can fit on a pizza, all those little chalices of fat dotted across the surface. Six big discs arranged with geometric precision didn’t have quite the same curb appeal. Zoë told me she also expected more pizza and more bite – from actual chillies, rather than a dusting of chilli flakes.

Does this sound miserable? I’m so sorry if it does, because I was so hoping to like this. Especially as Zoë left about a third of it – which would not have happened at Amò or Paesinos – and, just as damningly, I didn’t take it off her hands. But I do feel more unsure in my judgment than usual, because people I like rate Zi Tore and I, too, really wanted to.

I’m afraid to say, though, that the pizza beat the pasta hands down. I’d chosen ravioli – made fresh every day onsite – rather than gnocchi, and the porcini mushroom sauce over the ragu on the recommendation of others. And again I wonder if my antennae were just out of kilter that day, because I did not like it at all.

Didn’t like any bit of it, actually. The ravioli, six very large specimens, had bottoms more thick and dense than Robert Jenrick, when I was hoping for lightness and delicacy. I also think they could have stood to be smaller, or for you to have fewer of them, although if I’d liked them you can bet I wouldn’t have said that. The filling was meant to be ricotta and parmesan, but all I got was ricotta and an aggressive blast of citrus. Not a light zing of the stuff, but the sort of brutal clubbing you associate with bathroom products.

I tried eating them without the sauce to check that my tastebuds weren’t playing up. But yes, again, an overdose of lemon. Perhaps if there had been less, and more balancing saltiness from the parmesan, which was completely missing in action, it might have worked. But as it was it didn’t, and it slugged it out with the mushroom sauce for dominance. Those two components simply couldn’t get along at all: perhaps I should have known that and not combined them but, if they didn’t go, why was it an option on the menu?

Might I have enjoyed this better if the sauce took centre stage, paired with gnocchi? I tried that on its own, too, and decided the answer was probably no. It felt somehow less than the sum of its parts, without any savoury depth from the mushrooms, which might have been porcini but I was not convinced. And again, the presentation of this was about taking a plate and trying to fill it to the perimeter with stuff, just because. I would have liked less: lighter, more delicate presentation but with punchier, better balanced flavours.

Again, the ultimate heckle. There were six ravioli. I wanted to stop after three, but thought that would seem rude: isn’t it strange how as a paying customer you can still feel like that? I contemplated leaving two on the plate but felt that even that would somehow be discourteous or ungrateful. So I ate another, and then decided I’d done my duty. I was undeniably full, make no mistake, but it had felt like a friend cooking for you in all the wrong ways.

I so wanted not to begin the year with a review like this, especially after all the hoo-ha last year every time I stepped into any Reading restaurant which was even vaguely Italian. I’m surprised, given the smear campaign I found out about, that I was even allowed on the premises at Zi Tore.

But the cosmos has well and truly taught me a lesson. I made the mistake of saying in my round up of 2025 that I might be better off giving every Italian restaurant a rating of 6.6 and saying it was ‘quite nice’ from now on, and fate rewarded me with this experience. Look at the rating below: you couldn’t make it up, but if I moved it a notch up or down I’d only be doing it so as not to look as if I was fulfilling a prophecy.

So I need to at least be more nuanced when I sum up Zi Tore than to say that it’s quite nice. That doesn’t reflect the complexity of the reality, anyway, and visiting the restaurant nearly a year after it opened you can’t put the things you aren’t wild about down to growing pains or opening before they’re ready. The experience I had there is the experience I was supposed to have.

It is fantastic that a hospitality business took the space vacated by the Grumpy Goat, and that there is still one oasis of food and drink on a run which used to be synonymous with food and is now full of mobile phone repair shops nobody seems to visit (and, to be fair, Reading’s finest branch of Timpson). It’s also fantastic that it’s independent, and laudable that Zi Tore makes everything onsite and offers options you can’t get elsewhere in town that have made at least one Italian I know ecstatic and a little less homesick.

And I can see that I would return to Zi Tore, believe it or not. I’m really sorry that I didn’t love the pizza or pasta, but one of those window seats on the mezzanine with a cup of coffee, a montanara and the chance to explore some of their cake after that would very much appeal to me. Especially as the service was so good, and happy and helpful. But I don’t know if Zi Tore will survive and make enough money if all its customers order like me, or whether it really wants just to be a café given the expansion of its pizza menu and its opening hours.

Fortunately for Zi Tore I suspect not all of its customers order like me, or think like me, and Reading is a big enough place that it might well carve out a large enough share of the market keeping at what it does. But the market may well contract further in 2026, and so I wish them the best of luck. At the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Amò, closed for over a month on Kings Road, will reopen. Ironically, it might be good news for Zi Tore if it doesn’t.

Zi Tore – 6.6
7 Union Street, Reading, RG1 1EU
0118 9561531

https://www.zitore.co.uk

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Café review: Mac’s Deli

On October 31, 2025November 1, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

What were you doing when you were 21? If you’re a regular reader of this blog I imagine that, like me, you’ll have to cast your mind back to answer that question. In this sense I envy the generations after me, everything digitised, lives captured in hundreds of smartphone photos, people who can probably tell you exactly what they were doing on nearly every day of their twenty-second year.

Personally I was in my last year at university, frantically cramming for final exams I would dream about for years afterwards, navigating fraught relationships and sticking my head firmly in the sand about What Came Next and What I Would Do With My Life (thirty years of that now and counting, thank you very much).

My life was about to lose what little comfort and structure it had and, for me at least, most of the rest of that decade made up my wilderness years. I’m not sure I’d go back to being 21 if you paid me, despite all the people my age who will say “if only I knew then what I know now”. All they really mean is that they regret not getting laid more often, but we nearly all regret that.

I’ll tell you what I wasn’t doing when I was 21: I wasn’t starting my very first hospitality business, taking a massive gamble in a post-pandemic climate where the cards are stacked against restaurants, cafés and bars. But, nearly 30 years after I turned 21, that’s exactly what a chap called Mac Dsouza did.

That business was Filter Coffee House, on Castle Street, and it’s fair to say that it was an immediate success. I stopped by a couple of weeks after it opened, sampled its banana bun and was instantly smitten. So much so that about a week later, when I wrote a piece about Reading’s 50 best dishes to make 10 years of the blog, I managed to sneak that banana bun in there. I might have been relatively early on the bandwagon, but people were already talking about Dsouza’s café. By the time I reviewed it early in the New Year, its place in Reading’s affections was secured.

Dsouza, though, was not the sort to rest on his laurels. So even as the café kept trading, evolving, taking away its seating and moving to takeaway only he was working like a Trojan elsewhere. So he cropped up at Caversham’s Sunday markets to sell more coffee and treats, converting the RG4 crowd to his astonishing masala hot chocolate.

By then Filter Coffee House’s menu had expanded to include a range of affordable sandwiches, although I was more drawn to the specials they did at weekends. However you looked at it, what Dsouza achieved in a couple of years was quite something.

And what were you doing when you were 23, do you remember? I was back at my family home in a suburban terraced house in Woodley, temping in the cashier’s department of the insurance company where my brother worked. It was boring, and this was an office before smartphones, email and the internet so it’s hard to adequately convey quite how boring it was. But Labour had just put an end to eighteen years of Tory rule, and the joy was so extreme that it was almost tangible.

Despite earning fuck all, I always seemed to have enough money, possibly because my main aim at that point was to get drunk at the Bull & Chequers – midweek or weekends, back then nothing ever resulted in a hangover – and go clubbing. I was still impersonating an ostrich with reckless abandon, while my contemporaries became management consultants, solicitors and barristers. I was writing cheques for other people, putting files in alphabetical order and pretending to care what had happened in EastEnders when talking to Maureen or Eileen; everybody in my department was in their sixties, about to retire on the cusp of the information age.

When Mac Dsouza was 23 he opened his second business, Mac’s Deli. It’s not a deli at all, but a café squirrelled away on an industrial estate about a twenty minute walk from Theale station. It opened just over two months ago, and seemed to be a continuation of what he was offering at Filter Coffee House: coffee and a variety of sandwiches, this time mostly involving his own shokupan – Japanese milk bread – baked on the premises.

Dsouza documented every aspect of setting up his new business on Mac’s Deli’s Instagram page, so followers got to see the place coming together – logo first, then the fit out, then the countdown to opening. Since then Instagram has depicted an extraordinary-looking business where everything is made onsite, with even the sauces created by Dsouza rather than bought in. Weekend specials have run the gamut from 6 hour pulled pork to honey butter toast, a little nod to the legendary dish at London’s famous Arôme Bakery.

The menu at Mac’s Deli reminded me of all sorts of things. It was reminiscent of specialist sandwich slingers overseas like Montpellier’s Bravo Babette and Deli Corner, It felt a little Hackney, too, which I should add is a compliment. But it didn’t feel very Theale, which I should also add isn’t necessarily an insult. The location felt incongruous compared to everything else, and when people asked me if I planned to review Mac’s Deli I always said the same thing: “it looks very nice, but it’s a bit out of the way”.

What changed is that a couple of weeks ago my boss and I, on a Friday in the office not far from Mac’s Deli, decided to go scout out the place. So we went, we had lunch, we both absolutely loved it and I decided that I had to find a way to go back and visit on duty. I mentioned it to Zoë when I got home, showed her a photo of my sandwich and an executive decision was made: I was going back, in a couple of Saturdays time, and she was coming with me.

I doubt most people get to Mac’s Deli by taking the train to Theale and doing the flat, featureless 20 minute walk to the industrial estate. But we did, and if I didn’t already have some idea what the food would be like I might have given up halfway there. But at around that point, because Dsouza is no slouch, the signs for Mac’s Deli began appearing on fences with its distinctive winking sandwich logo and endearing font, a chequered stripe underneath, everything in blue and white.

This might sound like a silly thing to pick up on, but Mac’s Deli’s branding is so brilliantly done. Everything is that blue and white, from the billboards to the signage outside Unit 22 of the business park, to the framed prints on the walls. It’s so impressive, so fully-formed, and that branding and language even follows through to the tables and chairs and the beautiful striking wall, a solid block of Majorelle blue, behind the counter.

Don’t be fooled by the photo below, by the way: I took it after the lunch rush had gone but when we arrived, just after 1 o’clock, every single table was occupied. The room inside seats 18 people, and we only got in by squeezing on the end of the last table that wasn’t completely full. I hope the very nice couple who let us perch there have a great time on their trip to Bruges next Easter, whether they end up using my city guide or not.

Mac’s Deli’s menu largely revolves around bread, and making the most of that shokupan. So unless you want a salad or a “health bowl” (overnight oats and the like) you are picking between sandwiches or things on toast. The breakfast menu is half a dozen sandwiches, available all day, and the lunch menu adds another four, along with a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. The lunch sandwiches cost between £9 and £11 and come with home-made shoestring fries, the breakfast ones cost roughly £3 less and are a fries-free zone. I guess I can see the logic behind that.

The lady who took our order – service throughout was brilliant, by the way – apologised and said that we would be waiting a while. I expected that, to be honest, because the place was rammed and everyone there had arrived before us, so we waited patiently on our half of a table for four, rubbernecking as sandwich after sandwich arrived at neighbouring tables or, indeed, were brought to the couple at our table. They’d ordered two of the sandwiches we’d chosen, so Zoë got a very good idea of her impending good fortune.

The only slight quibble I had was that it would have been nice for our coffees to arrive while we were waiting on the sandwiches, but it was no biggie. They were really, really busy and I could see staff in the kitchen out back, including Mac himself. It was a veritable hive of activity.

Zoë had chosen the sandwich I tried on my previous visit to Mac’s Deli, the patty melt. Which is handy, because it means I can tell you what it’s like: otherwise I wouldn’t be able to, because it was so good that Zoë had no intention of sharing it with me. I’ve been saying for as many years as I can remember that a burger, ultimately, is just a sandwich. Well, that’s what this was, but saying it was just a sandwich was a bit like saying that Guernica was just a doodle.

So yes, the burger was outrageously good: a thick, crumbly patty of dry-aged beef, not pink in the middle but not needing to be either. Mac’s Deli buys its meat from Aubrey Allen – audaciously ambitious for a caff on an industrial estate – and that came across loud and clear. Remember all those debates about whether brioche is the right thing to contain a burger? Turns out the answer is to make excellent, almost-fluffy Japanese milk bread and then toast the outside so it holds everything together.

But there was still more, in the form of a sublime layer of caramelised onions, some American cheese and a house mayo with truffle and garlic which managed not to overpower everything else going on. Zoë, a lifelong vinegar hater, was not best pleased at the thick slabs of gherkin in the mix, mostly because they weren’t mentioned on the menu, but she picked every single one out and devoured everything else. “It’s okay” she told me, “there’s no contamination.”

She adored the patty melt, and having tried it on my exploratory trip to Mac’s Deli I could completely see why. For my money, this is not only the best burger you can buy in and around Reading but a ludicrous steal at £10.95, impeccable shoestring fries thrown in (more if you add bacon, which of course Zoë did). It was better than Honest, better than 7Bone, better than Monkey Lounge. In fairness the burgers may come close at Stop & Taste, or at Tilehurst newcomers Blip Burgers – owned by the people behind Zyka and The Switch – but Mac’s Deli’s patty melt will take some beating.

I had chosen the bacon (or Bae-Con, according to the menu) sando, and if it wasn’t quite as successful that doesn’t mean it wasn’t excellent. It was a much simpler affair, deploying the cheese and the garlic truffle mayo, swapping out the burger for a fried egg and bacon and omitting the shoestring fries. If you ate this sandwich and were then told that for an extra three quid you could have had the patty melt, I think you’d be filled with regret.

But some of the things that meant I wasn’t as wild about this sandwich were on me, not Mac’s Deli. They were up front that they were going to use that mayo and American cheese, and if I found the sandwich slightly claggy and one-note as a result, they weren’t to blame for that. I would sooner have had a slightly more conventional bacon sandwich – I’d love to see Mac’s take on brown sauce – or even one with something like gochujang that could provide the clichéd cut through slightly missing from this sando.

I’d also have liked smoked streaky bacon, and plenty of it, rather than back. But again, that’s more about me. I will say though that the egg was cooked exactly how I like it, the yolk fudgy rather than runny. Given that the menu promises the egg sunny side up, that might have been a happy accident.

One of the benefits of the sandwiches at Mac’s Deli is how sharable they are, coming in that blue gingham wrap – that colour scheme again – and sliced neatly into halves. That meant that for research purposes we could share another sandwich, the chicken caesar. There was an awful lot to like about this too, especially the chicken which was in craggy, fried tenders a million miles away from a sad, pale supermarket goujon.

So it was very much my kind of thing but again, the precise balance of flavours meant it wouldn’t be for everybody. Zoë found the caesar dressing too vinegary and, for what it’s worth, I agreed with her: that didn’t put me off it, but it did mean it slightly lacked the saltiness Caesar dressing should bring to the table. Part of that, I think, was because instead of being incorporated into the sandwich and the dressing the 30 month old Parmesan had been cropdusted over the whole shebang.

I get that this looks the part, makes for a very pleasing contribution to anybody’s Instagram grid, but for me it’s a little bit style over substance. Not only is it hard to stop the stuff going everywhere, but it meant that the flavour wasn’t completely integrated. It was however a very good advert for Mac’s Deli’s chicken caesar salad, which has all of that and bacon as standard, and the option to add extra fried chicken if you yourself are also feeling extra.

By this point the coffee had turned up, although we mostly drunk it at the end when we’d polished everything off. In my case that also included a pair of revelatory hashbrowns which I suspect had been bought in but which were elevated with a liberal dusting of rosemary salt which had a positively transformative effect. I’d love to see Mac make his own hash browns at some point: maybe that will be another weekend special, one day.

Coffee, by the way, was gorgeous – both my latte and Zoë’s flat white were impressively smooth. Bags of coffee by Square Mile, the roastery founded by patron saint of coffee James Hoffman, were on display next to the machine, although it was unclear whether they were also available to buy. But all this is a huge statement of intent – coffee by Square Mile, eggs by Beechwood Farm, meat by Aubrey Allen – and you have to hand it to Dsouza for that.

I didn’t want to leave without trying something sweet and was torn between the cookie, the brownie and the Basque cheesecake. The lady behind the counter steered me in the direction of the brownie and I’m so glad she did. I have no idea whether these are made on the premises or, as with Filter Coffee House, Mac’s Deli takes advantage of Berkshire’s network of excellent suppliers and bakers.

But whoever made that brownie knew exactly what they were doing: an outstanding brittle surface giving way to a dense, ganache-like core, the whole thing adding up to the best brownie I’ve had anywhere near Reading since the Grumpy Goat closed down. £2.50 for that, and I can’t remember the last time I spent £2.50 anywhere near so well anywhere else. The whole lunch – and bear in mind we shared three sandwiches between two – cost us £41.35.

On the walk back to Theale station, which felt nowhere near as long as the walk there had been, Zoë and I compared notes and enthused about our lunch. I have no idea why Dsouza picked that location, of all locations, for his sophomore album. Perhaps he knew something nobody else did about the demand for weapons grade sandwiches in Theale, or maybe the catering and storage facilities on that industrial estate allow him to supply to Filter Coffee House and leave the way open for further expansion.

But a smart person would put money on Dsouza knowing exactly what he’s doing, because the place was full when I went on a weekday and full when I turned up on a Saturday. Full of people who, like me during my visit, seemed unable to quite believe their good fortune. Mac’s Deli still feels like a bit of a mirage in that location – a sort of step-sibling to Stop & Taste in that respect – but if anybody eating there is pinching themselves it’s not because they want to wake up from a wonderful dream. They simply can’t believe it’s that good.

If Mac’s Deli was in the centre of Reading it would wipe the floor with many of its peers, so it might be better for all of them that it’s not. But perhaps the next one will be, because from the ambition Dsouza has displayed so far it’s hard to believe he’ll look at Filter Coffee House and Mac’s Deli and decide that such a small empire is enough for him.

Can you remember what you were doing when you were 25? Me neither. But I’m very interested to see what Mac Dsouza does in a couple of years, when he reaches that age. Until that day comes, he’s already given us an awful lot to enjoy.

Mac’s Deli – 8.5
Unit 22, Moulden Way, Calcot, RG7 4GB

https://www.instagram.com/macsdeli.uk/

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Restaurant review: Club India

On October 24, 2025October 24, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

This week’s review partly came about because of a gentleman called Andy Hayler. Now, you might not know who Hayler is, but in terms of food he’s something of a phenomenon.

The shadowy world of Michelin exists behind an impenetrable curtain, with nobody sure how they work or what dictates who gets listed, is awarded Bib Gourmands and stars – or, sometimes, has them taken away. Andy Hayler is the closest thing we have to a Michelin inspector working in plain sight. He has a blog, which has been around since the 90s, in which he has documented hundreds of meals in restaurants, giving each restaurant – and every dish – a mark out of 20.

I’ve rarely seen anything get lower than a 10, and very little approaches the top of his scale, but that’s because a fair amount of what Hayler has reviewed is at the highest end of dining. There was a time when he had eaten at every three starred restaurant in the entire world, although he stopped keeping up with Michelin when, as he puts it, they devalued what three stars should signify by giving them out in some territories to restaurants that were nowhere near the standards he had experienced elsewhere.

Hayler has a sort of cult, niche status in food. I’ve read a couple of pieces about him in recent years, both verging on hagiographies. He’s been described as “the best living food writer”, and I’ve read interviews that gush about his effortless recall and the esteem in which he is held by chefs and restaurateurs. He is the cognoscenti’s critic of choice and no mistake.

I think he attracts some of those plaudits because of what his reviews both are and aren’t. They don’t, in some senses, read like reviews at all, more like audits from someone scrupulous and meticulous who has forgotten more good meals than most of us will ever have. Although it doesn’t sound like he forgets many of them: why would you, when you document them all in such extensive detail?

I think the respect also comes from his refreshing lack of ego; Hayler would be the first to draw a distinction between himself and many restaurant reviewers. “I wouldn’t ever pretend I was any sort of fantastic prose master. I’m not trying to throw in a load of stuff about my journey to the restaurant and the trendy people on the table to the left” he has said, subtly throwing shade on half the piffle I come out with every week.

Don’t worry, there’s no way he meant me personally: in fact, he once described one of my pieces, about Maida Vale’s Paulette, as a “lovely review” which I found surprisingly touching. “Most of the newspaper critics want to be writers first, I want to focus on the food” he said more recently. I suspect the people who read him admire that purity of approach, and it does mean that when he thinks somewhere is dismal or overrated, which happens occasionally, it’s really very amusing.

What’s also admirable is that Hayler goes where he likes, reviews wherever he wants: money seems to be no object, and he doesn’t follow the fads. You won’t find him, for instance, reviewing Brasserie Constance, a restaurant operating out of Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage, unlike nearly every broadsheet critic over the last few weeks. Instead, his two or three reviews each week involve him going wherever he pleases, in London and abroad.

His two main weaknesses seem to be eating at the Ritz in particular and eating Indian food in general. Hayler is a regular visitor to Epsom’s Dastaan, and the little group of restaurants it has spawned in Surbiton, Richmond and Leeds. He’s also a frequent diner in Southall, and when he gave a warm review to Hounslow’s review of Crispy Dosa last November it caused a Mexican wave of regional bloggers checking out their nearest branch to touch the hem of his virtual garment (been there, done that – four years ago).

“If Mr Hayler thinks it is OK, it is a fair bet I will probably like it” one said. “You can be assured that if Andy says a restaurant is worth visiting then it really will be” said another. That’s proper soft power, and all from the opinion of a chap you mightn’t have heard of.

Hayler even came all the way west to Caversham last year to review Clay’s, something I’ve been waiting for him to do for a very long time. He gave it 14/20, which may not sound like a big deal but actually is. “Clays is a very impressive family-run restaurant, the food shows a lot of care, and the chefs are clearly putting some real effort into reproducing an authentic taste of India” he concluded, after paying particular tribute to Clay’s cabbage pakora, lamb chops and, of course, bhuna venison (Hayler also tried methi chicken, a dish he seems particularly to favour).

Seeing Clay’s reviewed by Hayler was like watching somebody you know being interviewed in the national news, and it made me proud. It didn’t make the local paper the way Grace Dent’s write-up had, but in its way it was every bit as significant. Hayler, as he said, is all about the food.

Now, by this point even my most supportive readers are probably thinking ‘this is an even more circuitous intro than usual, what has this got to do with anything?’ Well, I’ll tell you: every week Andy Hayler does a roundup on his blog, and every week the byline gives a couple of destinations. From South Kensington to Mayfair one might read, or From Piccadilly to Rome. Fancy restaurants and/or jetsetting are invariably involved. And then, at the start of the month, one made me do a double take. From Winnersh to West London, it said.

Winnersh? Our Winnersh?

It was not a misprint. Andy Hayler had come all the way to Winnersh to try out Club India, an Indian restaurant that opened back in July where the old Pheasant pub used to be. I mentioned that development when I reviewed Dolphin’s Caribbean, back in June, What I said, looking back, feels a little graceless, especially as they sent me a lovely email inviting me to a pre-launch event. I read the blurb and thought it sounded potentially interesting, but then again: Winnersh?

Andy Hayler had no such compunctions. Club India’s consultant chef had held two Michelin stars at his restaurant in San Francisco, although Hayler’s verdict on that place was that if a chef had gone there trying to pick up tips “he or she would either burst out laughing maniacally or seek to throttle any passing Michelin inspectors; possibly both”. But the head chef had headed up the kitchens at a couple of London restaurants Hayler really rated. So he went, he enjoyed it, he dished out scores out of 20 for all the dishes and, of course, he ordered methi chicken.

Overall he gave it the same rating, 14 out of 20, as Clay’s. “Club India was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, the food and service excellent, and at an affordable price. I wish I could say that more often these days” was his conclusion. That was good enough for me, so on a Friday night after a couple of pre-prandial beers in town Zoë and I hopped on the number 4 bus to go and see if Reading really did have a rival to Clay’s Kitchen, tucked away in – this may not be the last time I say this word slightly incredulously – Winnersh.

You can tell it’s a former pub, but the glow up is nice and, on the inside, pretty subtle and tasteful. The room I was in, at the front, was muted wallpaper and leather banquettes, but every room was slightly different and the one the other side of the bar from mine, with its tiled floor, was my favourite. When we got there around 7.30 it was already very busy with big groups and couples on dates, in full swing with a busy service ahead. Hayler said it could seat 70, which sounded about right, with outside space too.

I guess it’s easier to have more space than you need in this part of Reading than it is in Caversham, but in any case it was bustling on a Friday evening. The tables were more Winnersh than desi when I arrived, although I would say that balance shifted as the evening went on. It certainly felt like a restaurant that wanted to attract both demographics, and anybody else besides.

Our table had a good view of the room and of the very strong service. The man who seemed to be running the show, sporting an impressive man bun, thick white stripe right down the middle of his dark luxuriant beard, was a class act, but in fairness everyone who looked after us all evening was lovely, polite and enthusiastic, even the ones who seemed a little nervous. It had the swagger of a restaurant that had been there a lot longer than three months.

We started, as you might, with apéritifs and poppadoms – and if that seems like an incongruous pairing, Club India does a good job of making them feel like they go together. Zoë liked her negroni, although she wasn’t sure it tasted quite like a negroni and couldn’t put her finger on why. I had something called an Amber Signal, which I suspect featured in the Johnny Depp defamation case a few years back. It was a blend of Aperol, whisky and Drambuie and felt surprisingly grown up by my standards, something to sip slowly and mindfully. Both cocktails came in glam, exceptionally heavy-bottomed glasses that could have doubled as a paperweight or a murder weapon.

The poppadoms were splendid, by the way – warm, thin, greaseless and very hard to stop at just the one each, which is probably why we didn’t. But the chutneys were the thing: you pay £3.50 or so for these but they were all made by hand and far more interesting than the usual fare. The mango chutney was thick and rich with nigella, the raita so robust that I thought Greek yoghurt must have been involved. There was a mixed berry number which surprised, possibly mostly through novely value, and best of all an inspired shrimp chutney which we managed, being our best selves, to equitably divide despite the unworthy temptation to hog the lot.

The menu at Club India takes a long time to go from first read to decision, because you want to order most of it. It is the only restaurant I can think of in Reading with a tasting menu, at a very reasonable £45 a head, or £70 if you throw in the wine pairings, and if it had contained the dishes I’d really fancied from the à la carte you’d be reading about it right now: nevertheless, it sounded like really solid value.

But the à la carte was just too tempting – about a dozen starters, the same number of curries, some biryani dishes and plenty of vegetarian dishes which you could downsize to try as a side dish. They also had a separate vegan menu, so they could definitely make many of the vegetarian dishes without ghee. Starters ran the gamut from £5.50 to £15.95 and the most expensive main would set you back £18. Pricing, put that way, looked pretty reasonable – and although the obvious reference point for this restaurant, given my preamble, is Clay’s I also had Masakali in the back of my mind. Club India’s menu is far more streamlined than Masakali’s, and to my mind less expensive.

From this point on, you might find yourself wishing I adopted Andy Hayler’s much more concise method, because I’m afraid we very much went wild in the aisles picking a lot of dishes, ordering like the place might close down tomorrow. Andy Hayler might have said curry leaf calamari was good, the apricot glaze giving an extra dimension (13/20). I would say that I really loved this jumble of sticky ribbons of squid, somehow crispy and caramelised without succumbing to bounce or toughness. The menu says that it’s grandma’s recipe: I loved my grandmother very much, but I might have sacrificed her to the devil himself in return for one who could cook like this.

Just as terrific were the lamb chops, two glorious inverted commas of meat, best end blackened from the tandoor but still blushing on the inside. Up there with the best lamb chops I’ve had, and I’ve tried them at Clay’s, and at Didcot’s extraordinary Zigana’s Turkish Kitchen. At sixteen pounds you’d need them to be, but for me they delivered in spades and I was very glad we ordered them.

If you believed the menu, these came with coriander chutney and a smoked aubergine raita: it didn’t feel, from my recollection or looking at this photo, like that’s exactly what was going on. There was allegedly beetroot in the marinade, it felt like it had escaped into the smear on the plate. But to be honest whatever smudge of sauce you add, whatever spiralised veg and leaves you artfully zhuzh on top this stands or falls on the meat and the meat alone. Zoë, far more primal about these things than me, picked it up by the bone and gnawed until she could gnaw no more.

Completing our trio of starters was the only dish, apart from those poppadoms, that Andy Hayler and I both tried on our visits. 12 hour braised, spiced pulled pork rested, in a beautiful tangle, on an uttapam, a thicker, slightly spongy variant on dosa. I really wanted to try this dish for so many reasons – because it’s just absolutely up my alley, because Hayler raved about it, giving it a rare 15/20 and because I’d had something similar at a beer pairing lunch at Clay’s Kitchen last year, and that dish had been one of the best things I ate in 2024.

Did it come close? Yes. You would have struggled to put a poppadom between them, in terms of interest and quality. Clay’s version used minced pork rather than pulled pork, and there was something deeply texturally satisfying about Club India’s slow-perfected strands. Club India’s rendition had more whistles and bells, a coconut chutney, microshoots and fripperies. But if you stripped all that away, you just ended up with a small plate – from either restaurant – that would grace any starter menu, anywhere.

The spicing was a beaut, the coconut chutney went perfectly, I loved it from start to finish. We shared this, as we did the other two dishes, but I could gladly have polished one of these off solo. I could equally have said that about the other two dishes, too.

At this point the restaurant was at its liveliest, I had a gorgeous glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc on the go and I had that warm feeling that comes from knowing I’m eating at a discovery – no, not a hidden gem, but a find. The starters we’d eaten, for my money, were up there with most Indian restaurants I’d dined at, and at or around the quality I’d come to love at Clay’s.

Could Reading finally have another contender for the crown? I found myself, mid-meal, daydreaming about the rave review I would scurry home and write. Zoë was thinking that this was a place, not a million miles from Woodley, that she could persuade her parents to visit. And that wasn’t all. “Are you thinking this would be a suitable venue for one of your readers’ lunches?” she asked me. I had been doing exactly that.

So it saddens me to piss on the proverbial chips and say that the rest of the meal was a gentle descent from that summit. It didn’t end up in the slough of despond, but it settled somewhere that felt more like settling. And although that’s a shame, in the wider scheme, it doesn’t mean that anything we ate from there on in was bad, it just wasn’t quite as extraordinary.

Take the kadaknath chicken curry we’d ordered. One of the things I really liked about Club India’s range of curries was that it mixed up stuff you’d heard of – butter chicken, rogan josh, methi chicken and so on – with dishes I wasn’t familiar with. Kadakhath is a particular breed of Indian chicken that the menu says is particularly known for its gamey flavour, and Club India uses black leg chicken to get as close to that as possible. From that, I was hoping this would be a bit like Northern Spain’s pitu caleya, but this was pretty unremarkable. Breast rather than thigh, too, which reminded me how Clay’s approach to chicken curries is so different from everywhere in Reading.

That’s not to say I didn’t like it, or that I didn’t like the gravy, made with fenugreek and crushed peppercorn. I actually very much enjoyed its savoury, almost perfumed depth, those slight wintry hints of leather about it. But everything felt out of kilter. The chicken was submerged in a lake of the gravy, slightly unbalanced, and the gravy wasn’t quite interesting enough to carry things on its own, even dolloped onto some perfectly nice saffron and cumin pulao.

I’m sorry to keep mentioning Clay’s, but it was inevitable that I would in trying to benchmark somewhere like Club India. The gravies at Clay’s, each of those distinct, exceptional sauces, is so captivating that the meat is merely, in many cases, a vehicle. You clean up every last molecule in the bowl with your rice, with some bread, with your spoon, with a finger if you must. Club India didn’t quite reach that standard, which meant that the curries were just a little too wet.

Better, although still not quite there, was a curry described simply as Champaran meat. This was my favourite thing from this section of the meal, and the sauce again had depth and complexity. But what elevated this was the really terrific lamb, marinated overnight and with an almost unbeatable texture, leg at a guess, slow-cooked until it could cleave like kleftiko; this dish is cooked over charcoal in a sealed pot, which probably contributed greatly to how wonderful it was.

Again, I’d have liked it a little more sticky and a little less swimming, but that didn’t stop it being head and shoulders above most curries you’d get in Reading.

We ordered a couple of vegetable side dishes, one because I insisted and one because Zoë did. Mine was baby aubergine in a sauce with jaggery and tamarind, two of my very favourite things. And yes, a sauce that combined them was as sweet and tangy as you would expect, and I loved that. But I didn’t want a bowl of the stuff with two – just two – baby aubergines bobbing in it. And that, slightly unfortunately, is what I got.

Zoë on the other hand had put in a request for Club India’s okra stir fried with peppers and onions. If she was writing this review she would tell you that she really liked it, and for that matter that she really likes okra. But you are stuck with me, I’m afraid, and Clay’s thinly sliced, crispy take on okra is, I think, the only variant of this ingredient I have ever enjoyed. I feigned generosity telling Zoë she could finish this but she knew, deep down, that it was because I wasn’t a fan.

I will say this, though, Club India’s keema naan is the best I have ever had. This is another to file under ‘Zoë always orders it, and I nibble a bit without any great enthusiasm’. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve taken a bite and been confronted by weirdly scarlet, oddly bouncy mystery meat. That fate does not befall you at Club India: the meat lurking in the middle of a deliciously airy naan is properly belting stuff.

It made me want to try their sheekh kebab next time – and credit to Club India, not only do they list the provenance of some of their ingredients but the lamb for the Champaran meat comes from one place, namely North Wales, while the lamb for the sheekh kebab comes from Romney Marsh, completely the other end of the U.K. You do have to at least slightly admire that.

By this point we had checked the timetable for the bus back into town and realised that neither of the options – namely leaving in ten minutes or lingering at Club India for over an hour – were going to happen. So we embraced the concept of a taxi and rewarded ourselves with dessert. I was hoping the gajar halwa that Andy Hayler had rather enjoyed would be on the menu, but the compact selection of four had already moved on since then. It was the one area where Club India’s imagination felt like it had run out, because when one of the four options is a chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream I think, as an upmarket Indian restaurant, that you’re playing it far too safe.

Playing it safe rather defined my dessert, too. A mango cheesecake, a small dainty cylinder, was genuinely quite charming and went nicely with the diddy glass of dessert wine I’d ordered with it (a 50ml pour is on the small side, but it was £5 so it didn’t matter so much). But again, the menu promised a hint of chilli and if it was a hint it was too subtle for me. I’d have preferred a clanger of chilli, if we were picking between extremes, and it rather appeared that we were.

I think Zoë ordered better, although she mightn’t have agreed. Rasmalai tiramisu was, for me, far more imaginative and more in keeping with the rest of the menu. I’m not sure it was really reminiscent of either, more like the two had been put in separate machines and teleported into a blend, like something out of The Fly. But I liked it and envied Zoë, and the pleasingly squeaky sort-of-cheese in the base made it something you’d eat to experience, let alone to taste. For me that fusion, that experiment worked.

Zoë seemed to feel differently, but she does like okra and me, so there are already a couple of valid question marks against her judgment.

At the end of the night, Uber on the way, I settled the bill and found myself thinking it was generally decent value. We had a couple of aperitifs, a couple of dessert wines, I had a glass of white and then there was that onslaught – of poppadoms, of three starters, of curries and side dishes and rice and naan and dessert. We’re not going to play The Price Is Right, but when it came to £170, including a modest 10% service charge, I felt like I’d had a lot of evening for my cash. We were there nearly two and a half hours, enough time to watch multiple sittings come and go, and to watch the staff properly earning their money.

So where do you benchmark Club India, after a meal like that? Well, first of all: Winnersh and Woodley, that eastern edge of Reading, is very fortunate to have it on their doorstep. I think it will do very well, partly because it is indeed good and partly because nothing around there even comes close to it.

In terms of the kind of place it is, the most obvious comparison, for me, is Masakali; they are trying to be similar restaurants, but Club India far surpasses its predecessor on the Caversham Road.

Club India is the restaurant Masakali hopes to be when it grows up, and an illustration of the difference between having your menu dreamt up by a head chef, with some advice from a decorated chef in an advisory capacity on the one hand, and having your menu mechanically assembled by some kind of offshore committee slash agency on the other. Quality will out: Club India is way ahead of that competitor.

But as for the others? If everything else had managed to sustain the extraordinary quality of those starters, the arrival of Club India would be one of the big Reading food events of 2025. That it doesn’t is a pity, but it doesn’t change the fact that even Club India’s more ordinary dishes still feel like a cut above most places.

So if they don’t quite reach the level of Clay’s Kitchen, they should console themselves by knowing that they are in good company there, in a support group made up, pretty much, of every restaurant in Reading. But if you are comparing them to the next level down, the likes of Chilis, I think they can give a very good account of themselves.

So there you have it. I guess if I was Andy Hayler, I would have summed this up by saying, in his inimitable style, 12/20. But I’m not Andy Hayler, I’m me, and so I’ll conclude this review with that slightly enigmatic score below. It’s the only way I know.

Club India – 8.1
355 Reading Road, Winnersh, RG41 5LR
0118 3048701

https://www.clubindia.co.uk

CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE

Pub review: The Three Tuns, Henley

On October 10, 2025October 10, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

Can you believe it’s the best part of a decade since I reviewed anywhere in Henley? I didn’t realise that until I sat down to write this review, and I was so surprised that I thought it was a mistake. But no, there it was: June 2016, a visit to the Little Angel, just over Henley Bridge from the not-so-little Angel On The Bridge with its popular riverside terrace. I quite liked the place, and ate there again a couple of years later at a friend’s wedding reception, but even so I’ve not written up a Henley restaurant or café for nearly ten years.

Was it a lack of options, general neglect or just one of those things? I’m not entirely sure, but I do remember keeping a vague eye on Henley and although a couple of new places have sprung up since my last trip on duty none of them had tempted me quite enough: the Hart Street Tavern is meant to be decent, but I seem to recall that it’s run by the same team as the Bottle & Glass, so I wasn’t in a mad rush to scarper to Henley to check it out. And there’s Shellfish Cow, I suppose, a sister restaurant to Wallingford’s surf and turf specialists, but again I just wasn’t sufficiently curious. A dodgy pun doesn’t necessarily make for a great restaurant.

I remember taking a solo trip to Henley almost exactly a year ago. I must have been influenced by my public transport-loving wife, because I did it mostly to try out the brand new Aqua, Reading Buses’ number 28 which now runs frequently from Friar Street to Bell Street, winding through Playhatch and Shiplake, picking you up from Berkshire and dropping you off in Oxfordshire, a world away.

Once there, I’d found myself completely at a loss as to where to lunch.

My finger was nowhere near the pulse, so all I really knew was that I didn’t fancy going back to anywhere I’d reviewed in the past. I could have gone to Geo Café, of course, on the off-chance that my friend Keti, the owner, was there but I felt like I should show some sense of adventure. A wander round Henley, which was still as pretty as ever, suggested that most of the options were starters-mains-desserts places rather than spots for a light lunch.

I was almost stumped, and I ended up in a café slash deli just down from the Town Hall, opposite where Henley used to have an utterly preposterous Harrods café, a place which simultaneously managed to seem posh and lower the tone, the way new money can.

Although the Harrods café closed some time ago, my lunch venue was clearly its spiritual successor. I had a solitary crumpet, the diameter of a coffee cup, topped with some smoked salmon and a poached egg. For fun, I put the picture on social media and asked people to play The Price Is Right: it cost me an eye-watering £12, and at least half of the guesses I got thought it would come to even more than that. It was middling, the coffee was worse. Afterwards I strolled to Geo Café and, over far better coffee, resolved that a sense of adventure was overrated.

But Henley’s scene isn’t as stagnant as you might think. Echoes, an outpost of Phantom Brewing, has opened there and does very good beer, served by an enthusiastic team. Flyte, a bar offering a combination of tacos and cocktails, opens next month. Last March Dominic Chapman, the Michelin starred chef formerly of the Royal Oak at Paley Street and the Beehive at White Waltham opened his eponymous restaurant in the Relais hotel at the bottom of Hart Street. Little by little, things are starting to change in Henley.

And then there’s the Duke, a curious beast, a pub which opened in January where Mexican restaurant Pachangas used to be. It started trading at the beginning of the year, and an article in the Henley Standard made all the right noises about everything being cooked over fire, an emphasis on small plates and all that other stuff everybody says.

At first all went well, and they paid for a London blogger to come up and review what looked like a surprisingly stingy selection of dishes from the menu. He enthused, giving it an 8/10 which probably would have been a 6 or a 7 if the food hadn’t been free, but since then the menu seemed to have drifted closer and closer to the mainstream, and then last week the pub abruptly announced on social media that it was shutting until further notice “to rebuild our team”, which suggests that all is not going swimmingly.

Neither the Duke nor Restaurant Dominic Chapman has troubled the guide books or restaurant inspectors, which made it even more of a curveball when last month Michelin added sixteen venues to its guide and one of them was in Henley. Out of nowhere, seemingly, they had listed the Three Tuns, the pub on the market place next to superlative Henley butcher Gabriel Machin. Part-owned by the butcher, too, as it was a joint venture between Machin’s owner Barry Wagner and Nigel Sutcliffe, who runs the also-listed Oarsman in Marlow.

The intent was to take advantage of that fantastic produce, to be a sort of chophouse in the Oxfordshire town. As for the Three Tuns’ success this year, meteoric only just does it justice: it reopened in May, and in September it was listed by Michelin. Nobody knows exactly what brings restaurants to the attention of the inspectors – who still seem to have a blind spot where Clay’s is concerned – but however it happened, being noticed after four months is exceptional going.

When I learned that, I resolved that I needed to get there as soon as possible. But it also gladdened me enormously, because the pub used to be a favourite of mine ten years ago, when it was run by Mark and Sandra Duggan, and I ate there frequently in another life, reviewing it in 2014. The last time I went, just before the Duggans left the pub, was with Zoë, just after we got together. I remember having an exquisite Caesar salad, so good it was bittersweet.

Because I was glad Zoë got to try it before it changed hands, but sad about all the meals we wouldn’t have there. And that listing in Michelin raised my hopes that, much like my blog, it too could have a second era that surpassed its first. So Zoë and I alighted from the Aqua last Saturday and went to investigate, stopping at Echoes on the way for a few pre-prandial pales and a very happy chance encounter with readers Steve and Tracy.

I should add that Zoë insisted, by the way – both on joining me for this one and on taking the bus to get to Henley. Neither of these facts will surprise regular readers.

Subscribe to continue reading