Regular readers will know that my reviews last year, like much of life in 2021, could best be described using that quintessentially post-pandemic word, “hybrid”. Unlike most years, when I’d traipse to a restaurant fortnightly and write about it, last year was a mixture of all sorts – takeaways, from new restaurants and old favourites, a first (unsuccessful) dabble with restaurant DIY kits and later, as the weather improved, “proper” restaurant reviews.
Even those were an eclectic bunch. I made a point of revisiting some of the earliest restaurants I’d reviewed, with varying results. Some, like Pepe Sale and London Street Brasserie, held up nicely despite eight intervening years. Others, like Buon Appetito, had been transformed. And then there was Zero Degrees: pants then, pants now. I also reviewed a couple of places outside Reading, making it as far as Bristol and London. By 2021 standards, that was exotic stuff.
Then there were the new places in Reading. I tried to tick off as many as I could but timing, the vicissitudes of life under Covid and my personal approach to risk meant that many were al fresco visits. That made for a lovely time in the sunshine at O Português, a sublime meal at Chef Stevie’s Caribbean Kitchen and, towards the end of the year, a game attempt at shivering away outside Gordon Ramsay Street Burger.
But it also meant that my first introduction to some of Reading’s most interesting new places was as takeaways – and however good a takeaway is, it can’t match eating in the restaurant. Part of that’s the atmosphere, the hubbub and people watching. But, more prosaically, there’s the basic fact that your food comes straight to your table from the kitchen, arranged on plates by someone who isn’t you, looking all nice.
So some of last year’s big names are still waiting for a “proper”review. I’m yet to eat at Tasty Greek Souvlaki, for instance, and I feel that’s long overdue. I managed to eat at La’De Kitchen once last year, back in early May when you could only sit outside and it wasn’t yet warm enough to comfortably do so, however many blankets they brought out. But I didn’t review it: I was happy just to be there at all. And, for that matter, too cold.
One of the most noteworthy of the Class of ’21 that I haven’t visited in the flesh is ThaiGrr!: I had their takeaway last May and was blown away by it all. They put so much thought into how they packaged for delivery that I wasn’t sure the gap between eating in and having takeaway would be as marked as it was for, say, Greek or Turkish food. But I was educated on this subject by a regular reader of mine who I bump into most weeks at Blue Collar.
“You need to eat in” he said. “However good you think the fried chicken is at home, it’s miles better in the restaurant.” Given how much I’d liked it from the comfort of my own sofa this was a powerful incentive to pay ThaiGrr a visit, so on a Saturday lunchtime Zoë and I swung by to try it out. It’s in the less fashionable part of town round the back of the Broad Street Mall, on the same strip as Pepe Sale and Bierhaus. I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like the Broad Street Mall has been up and coming for as long as I can recall without ever having upped and came, so to speak.
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Over the last nine months or so, every time I’ve posted my to do list on social media and asked where people would like me to prioritise for a review the answer invariably comes back: Flavour Of Mauritius, please. That’s understandable, I think. First of all, there’s the inevitable air of novelty: Reading is excited about new places at the best of times (it’s a town, after all, that managed to get aerated about Jollibee’s) but the prospect of a Mauritian restaurant is bound to arouse the curiosity of the town’s gastronomic adventurers. What’s Mauritian food like, anyway?
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I’ve always liked Côte’s food. And I’m a big fan of eating nice meals at home, especially when the wind is howling outside and the garden is relentlessly battered with rain. So this week, I thought I’d see whether it’s possible to appreciate both at the same time.
Côte’s always been arguably my favourite of Reading’s chains and if the last two years had been anything like the two before that, I’ve no doubt that I’d have eaten there a fair few times. Grabbing one of their outside tables on a sunny day for their prix fixe when I couldn’t be arsed to cook, for example, or having a weekend brunch there and enjoying their soft, crumbly boudin noir. And if they’d been on delivery apps, you can bet you’d have read a review of that last year.
But Côte chose a different path, an interesting one that differs from most other chains – and most other restaurants, come to that. Instead of doing takeaways, in the summer of 2020 Côte launched Côte At Home, offering a subsection of their menu that can be easily heated at home. It makes sense, when you think about it: Côte prepared some of their meals in a central kitchen and finished them in the restaurant as it was, and this model converted what you could see as a pre-pandemic weakness into a distinct advantage after Covid-19 struck.
My experiences of heat at home restaurant kits, especially this year, usually left me thinking that I’d eaten a glorified ready meal at inflated prices. Côte offers a simplified version at far closer to ready meal prices, so I wanted to see if they made a case for a better heat at home model. And pricing isn’t the only difference between Côte’s model and operators like Dishpatch. They clearly benefit from scale because they deliver every day, with free delivery if you spend over forty pounds. You have to order forty-eight hours in advance, although some items qualify for express delivery, which means they reach you quicker.
It isn’t difficult to spend forty quid. Everything is crazily affordable – think five pounds for starters, ten to fifteen for mains, and a fiver for dessert – but they also sell a good range of French cheeses, plenty of wine and beer, steak, sausages and confit duck. The latter comes in at an astonishing four pounds fifty a leg, making it miles better value than my meh-fest at Andrew Edmunds. I picked up a three course meal for two, and added a couple of bottles of Meteor to nudge it over the forty pound threshold (it’s a shame they don’t add their Breton cidre to the website: they’re missing a trick there).
Another contrast between my previous restaurant DIY kit experiences and Côte At Home was how user-friendly delivery was. With the others, you pay over ten pounds for delivery and essentially, they reserve the right to turn up at any point during the day. With Côte At Home, if you pay five pounds they’ll make sure it reaches you before noon. So lo and behold, it was with me first thing in very natty packaging. Inside the box there were an impressive four ice packs, and everything was fetchingly branded. A slip inside explained that literally all of the packaging was recyclable, too. Stowing it all away in the fridge I felt properly curious and excited about the meal that lay ahead, even if it’s the hope that kills you.
This meal gave me an excuse to try out Côte At Home’s bread, which you finish off in the oven. Back in the day – by which I mean 2014 – I thought that Côte’s bread was the best in Reading, and although many bakers, artisan and otherwise, have wafted through town in the last eight years I still think Côte’s beats most restaurants round here, so I wanted to see how the heat at home stuff compares. And the answer was reasonably well – not up there with, say, Geo Café’s sourdough baguette straight out of the oven that morning (not much hits that exalted standard) but far better than the pasty part-baked baguettes you pick up from a supermarket. They throw in some salted French butter: a nice touch, but really we’d bought the bread to pair with our two starters.
Of the two, as so often, Zoë’s was better. Smoked salmon rillette was properly lovely stuff, a very generous portion in a handsome ceramic pot (“that will be handy for olives”, she said later) with just enough smoked salmon in the mix to give it a wonderfully wintry taste without overpowering matters. It was a model of simplicity – fish, crème fraîche, capers, shallots and herbs – and extremely good value at four pounds fifty. Most of the Côte at home starters are chilled, with a couple you either heat up on the hob or in the oven, but this one struck me as the pick of the bunch.
It was certainly nicer than my chicken liver parfait, also served in one of those pots. And don’t get me wrong, it was earthy, smooth and reasonably indulgent. But it was hidden under a permacrust of clarified butter that was a little too thick and too much like hard work. And fundamentally it just wasn’t the smoked salmon rillette: food envy had set in at that point, and nothing would redeem it. It did make me wish I’d ordered some cornichons to accompany it – a snip at two pounds – or better still, had the foresight to have some in the cupboard.
But again, to put this in perspective, if I’d been served this dish in a restaurant I’d have been quite happy with it. And in a restaurant it wouldn’t have cost five pounds. With all the restaurant kits I’d ordered so far it felt like the price was inflated for what you got – I’m sure Côte At Home benefit greatly from economies of scale, and having that central kitchen, but it does give you an idea just how cheaply you can deliver this model.
I’d like to say that the main course lived up to that promise, but it didn’t quite. Again, it was impressive value: a beef bourguignon for two people, with potato purée thrown in, set you back fifteen pounds, less than you’d pay for a single portion in a restaurant. But there was some inconsistency, both in how you cooked it and how it tasted. Some of Côte At Home’s dishes, like the potato purée, only come with instructions for microwave cooking and for those of us without a microwave that can be frustrating: you’d think they’ve had figured out alternative instructions by now.
That said, the potato puree – which I had to improvise, decant and heat up in the oven – was really very good. It was rich, silky and buttery: in short, far better than anything I could rustle up at home and streets ahead of anything you can buy in supermarkets. More expensive than an M&S “ultimate mash” (though not by much) but easily worth the money.
The problem was the bourguignon. In fairness, when I looked at it there in its plastic tray, brown sludge at the bottom and highlighter-pen-pink nuggets of bacon on top, I thought Oh dear, this just looks like a ready meal. And I was partly wrong, because some lovely alchemy happened in the oven and it came out thoroughly looking the part. And the taste was decent – the onions had softened and sweetened beautifully and the sauce, if thinner than I’d have liked, had all the right notes in the right order.
But a dish like this stands or falls on the star ingredient, and the beef was variable at best. One bit was so tough and fibrous that I gave up trying to cut through it, another was so unpleasantly gristly that I had to abort mid-chew. A dish like this about the right cuts of meat slow-cooked into submission, and there’s no excuse for something this bouncy or unpleasant. “I don’t know what you’re talking about” said Zoë. “All of mine was fine”. So it’s not all bad: if you order this you might get lucky, but don’t be surprised if your other half pulls faces.
We’d gone for a vegetable side of minted peas with baby onions and baby gem lettuce – and again, it only came with instructions for microwave cooking. It reheated just fine on the hob, though, and I liked the dish a lot – the peas still slightly nutty, the mint and garlic butter playing nicely together – but it was a tad annoying that they’d not thought about non microwave users. And the website could do more, I think, to highlight dishes that are microwave only than have a little sentence squirrelled away that says cooking instructions, ready to microwave. But again, a minor irritation in a pleasant, perfectly serviceable meal.
Although Côte At Home sells a tarte aux pommes – which you definitely don’t have to bung in a microwave – and a very tempting lemon posset, along with a cracking selection of cheese including Morbier, Roquefort and one of my very favourites, Saint Marcellin, Zoë and I both found it impossible to stay away from the chocolate mousse. And again, this was close to the restaurant experience at a far lower cost: for three pounds seventy-five you got a dish that would cost you one pound fifty more if you dined in.
And again, it was difficult to distinguish from the mousse I’ve eaten many times over the years at Côte. It was incredibly smooth and glossy, with either very fine bubbles or no bubbles at all, and if I had one criticism it would be that what’s described as a dark chocolate mousse feels about as dark as an episode of The Repair Shop. But looking back at my review of Côte eight years ago I ordered the chocolate mousse for dessert and said almost exactly the same thing. So you can hardly fault them for consistency.
So, with the exception of that unforgivably bouncy meat, Côte At Home was hard to fault. Incredibly generous portions, a routinely high level of quality, a supremely convenient delivery experience and great packaging. And of course you can add cheese, or wine, or confit duck to your order and suddenly it goes from a single meal in to a combination of a brilliant midweek supper and a trip to the deli. So why do I feel like there’s a slight underlying note of being underwhelmed in this week’s review? Do you feel that too?
I’ve been pondering that all week, and I think it comes down to the fact that a restaurant is so much more than its food. Part of they joy of eating in Côte, of what a treat it is, is how convivial it can be – the hubbub, the people watching – and that it can be done on the spur of the moment. It is, as eating out always should be, a bit of a special event. And takeaways can be like that too. I’m sure that at their best – although I’m yet to experience this myself – restaurant DIY kits also feel like a treat. And Côte At Home’s genius is also their biggest drawback: something about it feels unspecial. It really does sit in a new space between ready meals and takeaways, and it’s such a new space that I don’t really know how I feel about it.
And if you need any more evidence that this is an evolving area, you don’t have to look any further than Ocado. Because if you fire up your computer to place an order with Ocado (and if you do, I recommend the M&S “Our Best Ever Steak Pie”: it’s miles better than this week’s bourguignon) you’ll find some dishes from Côte At Home in there. You’ll also find options from Pasta Evangelists, another of the earliest ventures delivering restaurant quality food to your doorstep. And if they don’t appeal, you could just pick up a steak from Hawksmoor.
The lines are getting blurred, and with that come plusses and minuses; you can get fancier versions of the convenience you’re used to, but the experience of treating yourself might lose some of its magic. Convenience, I’m increasingly starting to think, often has that effect. So I would cautiously say that you should give Côte At Home a try. I’m sure I’ll use them again, if only to enjoy confit duck and potato gratin one midweek evening (with a selection of cheese for later on). But I do worry that we’ll reach a stage, to paraphrase George Orwell, where we’ll look from ready meal to DIY kit, and from DIY kit to ready meal, and from ready meal to DIY kit again, but already it will be impossible to say which is which.
A couple of things happened last weekend that got me thinking about the cost of food, and the concept of value for money.
The first was a visit to Nirvana Spa, where the menu had been ravaged by Storm Shrinkflation. “I’m sure last time I had the halloumi salad there was more halloumi on it” said Zoe, shortly before looking up her picture of the dish from a previous visit and finding that yes, you used to get three bits of chargrilled halloumi whereas now it’s just two. For nine pounds. I would have sympathised more, but I was too busy looking at a single, tiny tranche of pork and chicken terrine, also nine pounds, and thinking “where’s the rest?” My dish, which wasn’t billed as a salad, had more salad on it than Zoë’s, which was.
It’s one matter to reduce portion size and another to increase prices but it takes a rare kind of chutzpah to, as Nirvana has, do both at once. I’d ordered a pizza as a main course, which was nine inches at most and cost all of sixteen pounds: I couldn’t help but compare it to a lunch at Buon Appetito a couple of weeks before. Food is becoming more expensive, and it’s going to become more expensive still. That’s not necessarily a problem, but you at least want to feel that it’s great quality, even if it’s not good value. At Nirvana, it just felt like they were milking a captive audience.
The second experience, at the other end of the spectrum, was this week’s takeaway, from Biryani Boyzz (yes, not one but two Zs). It’s where Punjab Grill used to be, at the top of the Oxford Road before you reach Harput Kebab, and I think it was owned by the same people as Kobeda Palace, Palmyra and Da Village, although I’m not sure if it still is. Biryani seems to be one of Reading’s new trends, with Biryani Boyzz out west and Biryani Mama (which is owned by the same people as Crispy Dosa) just opened last week in the old Ask site on St Mary’s Butts.
Incidentally, because I’m going to be typing the word “Boyzz” numerous times during this review – with gritted teeth I might add – I want to say that I truly hope abusing the letter Z in this manner is a trend that doesn’t catch on. I know Biryani Boyzz is a stone’s throw from the equally woefully named Ladz Barbers, but I think they ought to learn lessons from history: restaurants with gimmicky Zs in their name rarely do well in Reading. When Chennai Dosa changed its name to Chennai Dosa Artisanz, it was the beginning of the end for them, and the coffee shop Artizan on St Mary’s Butts doesn’t seem to have ever opened. In my taxi back from Nirvana I spotted a place on the Wokingham Road called “Milano’z Pizza”: doesn’t the word pizza provide enough Zs already?
Rant over. I’d been tipped off to Biryani Boyzz by one of my readers, who said that it had excellent reviews on Google. So I went had a look, and although the reviews on Deliveroo were less glowing it piqued my interest enough to give it a try. Besides, their eponymous dish, the chicken biryani, was a startling four pounds ninety-nine. Could it really be any cop at that price?
Biryani Boyzz’s – I hated typing that combination of letters, just so you know – menu is a mixture of Indian, Pakistani and Afghan dishes. Chapli kebab is on there, as it would be at Kobeda Palace or Da Village, but you can also order Lahori chane, butter chicken if you want something more mainstream, or paya, a stew made with lamb trotters, if you’re the adventurous kind.
The main thing that brings the menu together is its affordability. Nothing costs more than a tenner, most of it is far less than that and, of course, that biryani stands out at just under a fiver. I had to try that, so we ordered it along with a selection of starters, a couple of curries and some rice. The whole lot came to forty-five pounds, not including rider tip: not much money for quite a lot of food.
Fancy a drama-free delivery paragraph? Of course you do. So here it is: I placed my order around twenty-five past seven, I was told it would be about an hour and in reality it was with me in forty-five minutes or so. And the driver took just over five minutes to reach me from the restaurant. There you go: drama-free delivery paragraph ends. It was all perfectly packed and piping hot, just to further reduce the element of drama: if only the situation in Ukraine could de-escalate as rapidly.
We’d chosen three things which broadly classed as starters, and they turned out to be a bit of a motley crew. Chapli kebab, which came in a brown paper bag shiny with grease, was a far cry from the very good ones I’ve had at Da Village or, back in the day, Afghan. It didn’t have that lean, meaty muscularity I’ve always enjoyed, and the texture was a little sodden and pappy, as if it had been padded out with something. There were bits of tomato speckled in it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more. It cost three pounds: after placing the order I wish we’d added a second, but after finishing it I was glad we didn’t.
Chicken 65 was more like it, but I still came away from it liking but not loving the dish. My previous experience of the dish comes from its time on the menu at Clay’s, and I tried to put that rarefied version to the back of my mind while eating this. The flavour of it wasn’t bad, with a good whack of acrid heat but the chicken was in little pellets rather than bigger, more tender pieces and there was something slightly off-putting about that.
I’d have liked it to feel drier and less glossy – and I know this dish isn’t big on vegetation but I couldn’t help thinking that if, say, Momo 2 Go did a version of this it would have had a flash of green from some curry leaves or some coriander, whereas this was a relentless tidal wave of day-glo terra cotta. We left some of it. “I’m not even sure it was chicken” was Zoë’s verdict: feel the burn.
The last of our starters was Afghan lamb chops, which weren’t bad but weren’t exciting either. Cooked through with no blush, these were old-school chops where you got a postage-stamp sized piece of meat that was largely redeemed by bathing it in raita. To put this in perspective, you got four small chops for seven pounds, so if it wasn’t great it at least wasn’t expensive: presumably at Nirvana Spa they’d have charged you fifteen pounds for that lot. Deliveroo claims this dish is “Popular”. But then so is the Caversham branch of Costa Coffee.
Did things improve with the main courses? Well, yes and no. The yes came in the unlikely form of the butter chicken: it’s not a dish I ever really order but Zoë requested it and it was better than I was expecting. The sauce had a good, smooth sweetness which made the rice more interesting even if, again, there was only limited evidence it had ever seen any vegetables, or even just some herbs. And again, the chicken was in small, homogeneous pieces and lacked the generosity I would associate with the likes of Royal Tandoori or House Of Flavours.
But every rose has its thorn, and the thorn in this case was the chilli paneer. I think maybe I was expecting a dry chilli paneer, like the one you’d get at Bhel Puri House, whereas this was very much soft unfried cubes of paneer in a chilli sauce which took no prisoners and didn’t fuck around. My friend James has an expression for things that people like me think are hot but which wouldn’t make him bat an eyelid: he calls them “white people hot”. There’s no disgrace in that, per se: James classes Gurt Wings’ buffalo sauce as white people hot, although he’s never passed judgment on “The Gurt Locker”, their hottest sauce. I must take him to Kungfu Kitchen some time.
But it’s safe to say that Biryani Boyzz’s chilli paneer isn’t white people hot. It’s just hot. And not one of those clever, layered heats that builds momentum and pace as you work your way through a meal. No, it’s just really hot. Hot as in it makes your eyeballs leak with what might be tears, could be sweat or might just be a disgusting cocktail of both. Hot as in it clears out every sinus in your face while reaming your Eustachian tubes for good measure.
Zoë said she thought there must be something like lime pickle in it and initially I disagreed, because I rather like lime pickle, but on reflection I thought she might be on to something because lurking under the brooding heat was something that could have been sour citrus. What do I know? If I’d had another couple of forkfuls I might not have been able to taste anything until the following Tuesday. The odd thing is that, in a treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen sort of way I admired Biryani Boyzz for doing something so uncompromising. It wasn’t for me, but there might well be customers out there who would love it. Reading the last few paragraphs, you probably know whether or not you’re one of them.
I’ve saved that five pound biryani til last, just so that this review has a little twist in the tale. You know what? I quite liked it. The chicken was on the bone, which of course it’s meant to be – and although you didn’t get huge amounts of it and it needed a little persuasion to get off the bone it was perfectly nice and the rice had some flavour – more, and better balanced, than the other dishes I’d tried. Did I mention that it was five pounds? And here we return to what I was saying at the start: something either has to be good value or good quality. Nirvana was neither, and Biryani Boyzz was one of them, in places. If Nirvana’s pizza had been something like a tenner, I’d have been quietly pleased, but if Biryani Boyzz’s biryani had been a tenner I’d have been nonplussed.
But cheap food for cheap food’s sake isn’t the holy grail some people like to think it is. Even ignoring that witless Berkshire Live article about how you can’t buy lunch in town for a quid any more (as everybody should), there can be a prevailing view in publications like Vittles that each time you get a dirt cheap meal in a restaurant you’re somehow sticking it to the man and getting one over on capitalism. But food ought to cost money, staff ought to cost money and everything ought to go through the books and be above board. I always worry that when food is cheap what you’re actually doing is just enabling a slightly different, equally unpleasant, flavour of capitalism.
Anyway, rarely have I been gladder that my takeaway reviews don’t come with a rating. Biryani Boyzz’s food is okay, and interesting in places, but I really don’t know where I’d put it if I had to find a place for it on a scale. And I’m not sure I’d order from them again, because I’d either spend more somewhere like Banarasi Kitchen or pay roughly the same amount at Momo 2 Go for very different cuisine. But I may not be Biryani Boyzz’s target market, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They didn’t lose me at that first Z, they didn’t even necessarily lose me at the second, but they probably lost me somewhere after that.
As of August 2022, Marksman is no longer partnering with Dishpatch.
Despite all the great meals I had last year, as 2022 begins I can’t help remembering the one that got away. In early December, Zoë had a weekday free and we were going to take an off peak train to Oxford to chance our arm with a quiet, off peak lunch at one of my favourite places, the Magdalen Arms. Back when I was a student nearly three decades ago, the the pub was a bit of a dive bar but, crucially, it had American pool tables and so my friend Dave and I would occasionally slope off across Magdalen Bridge for a few frames there (I invariably lost: Dave never plays a game he knows he won’t win).
In the intervening years much of that end of Oxford has gentrified, so the Cowley Road now has a great tapas restaurant in the shape of Arbequina and a wonderful cafe called Peloton Espresso. And down the Iffley Road, just past the spot where Roger Bannister first broke the four minute mile, the Magdalen Arms has been transformed into a fantastic gastropub, part of a small group including the Anchor & Hope on The Cut, one of the longest-running and most fêted exponents of that genre. It has a great menu which bursts at the seams with temptation but the main reason to go there, as far as I’m concerned, is their pie.
It comes to the table in an enamel dish, suet crust pastry still bubbling, and whether the filling is beef or chicken, the end result is always ecstasy. It serves three hungry people or two lucky, greedy ones and it remains one of the finest things I’ve ever eaten in any pub or restaurant, anywhere. I generally agree with people who say that if a pie only has a pastry lid it’s really just a stew wearing a hat, but if anything can change my mind it’s the pie at the Magdalen Arms. That trip to Oxford was kiboshed by Zoë testing positive for Covid, so it wasn’t to be. But once her recovery was well under way we both agreed that we have some unfinished business with that pie.
The only pie that ever came close to the Magdalen Arms’ was one I had in the summer of 2019. I’d just been made redundant, in circumstances that meant I was in no hurry to get another job, and this being pre-Covid I had plenty of better things to do than looking for one. So I spent a very enjoyable afternoon wandering round Shoreditch, dipping in and out of design shops, drinking lattes in edgy cafés as if I belonged there, and after work I met up with Ian, a former colleague of mine who had also hopped on the Redundancy Express but only made it as far as an office near Old Street.
We stood outside the Bricklayers Arms, enjoying our pints in plastic glasses, congratulating one another on our escape and enjoying all the people-watching Hoxton has to offer on a summer evening. We got chatting to a chap who knew the area well and when we told him we hadn’t decided where to have dinner, he told us to make a pilgrimage to the Marksman, a pub fifteen minutes further out into Hackney. So we did, and in a midcentury modern-styled dining room above the pub I had one of the best meals I’d had in as long as I could remember.
I remember a crumpet smeared with salsa verde and topped with translucent strips of barely-cooked pancetta. There was Welsh rarebit on the dessert menu – because it was that kind of place – and I ordered it, because I’m that kind of person. But best of all was the pie, another enamel dish topped with a burnished crust, underneath it strand after strand of chicken thigh infused with tarragon. By the end of the meal I began to wonder whether I too could cope with commuting to a job in London, if the post-work gastronomic options were that good. It seemed to be suiting Ian nicely.
Two and a half years later, that meal crossed my mind again when I was on the website for Dishpatch, who offer heat at home meals from a variety of well-regarded London restaurants. Because lo and behold, there was a meal kit from the Marksman, the centrepiece of which was a pie. Not That Pie – this one was beef, rather than chicken, but a pie nonetheless. The winter was in full swing, Omicron was too and there are only so many times you can be slightly disappointed by a takeaway before you fancy a break, so I thought Fuck it and pulled the trigger on an order. It was that dead zone between Christmas and New Year, and I thought it would be nice to have something to look forward to in January.
I ordered the feature attraction with all the sides, extras and add-ons, which came to seventy-three pounds, not including shipping. More than a takeaway would cost, but potentially less than a meal in their restaurant might be. My only previous experience of reviewing a restaurant DIY kit, early in 2021, had been very hit and miss, but I thought it was time to give the concept another try. After all, eating in a restaurant still felt like a somewhat distant prospect.
The box arrived last Friday in the appointed slot, although DPD kindly delivered it to a house round the corner and we had to retrieve it from their recycling bin: nice to know that, even with a heat at home kit, there’s scope to struggle with the delivery experience. But Dishpatch were beyond reproach when it came to packaging : everything was packed with ice and insulated with the same Woolcool lining Clay’s uses for its heat at home option. It was all clearly labelled, well boxed up and vacuum-packed. A fancy-looking brochure gave you all the cooking instructions and, laudably, a separate sheet explained that all of the packaging was either recyclable or compostable.
The following night we opened a bottle of wine and set about cooking and demolishing as much of our order as possible. Again, you can’t fault Marksman for making it as easy as possible and the instructions for nearly all of it were the same – heat a baking tray to two hundred degrees, line it with parchment and cook each dish for however long it needs. And this reminded me of the edge heat at home options have over conventional takeaways – the opportunity to take your time and eat everything in an order, to experience starters, mains and desserts again without having to leave the house or scramble to eat it all before something gets cold.
First up we tried one of the extras, the truffle sausage roll. A mere twenty-five minutes in the oven and what came out was glorious – bronzed and beautiful, the sausagemeat coarse and herby. I thought the truffle in it was on the subtle side – more of a whisper than a honk – but I enjoyed it far too much to feel cheated. “That’s the best sausage roll I’ve ever had” was Zoë’s verdict, and casting my mind back I struggled to think of one better, although the one I sampled last year from Wokingham’s Blue Orchid Bakery came a close second. That said, this one was eight pounds: I did find myself wishing I’d had the foresight to order two.
Our second starter – you’ve got to love heat at home kits for taking the shame out of ordering two starters – was an interesting beast. What looked like plain bread rolls were in fact milk buns crammed with curried lamb, served with a yoghurt dip. It’s billed as an Anglicised version of the char siu bun, although the more famous version served at the pub is beef and horseradish instead. I liked it, and it was definitely the most interesting thing I ate from the menu, but it still seemed a tad modest and unassuming. I expected some lacquer on the buns, perhaps, or more oomph from the filling. The best thing about it was the fantastic yoghurt dip, bursting with lime and a lick of salt, topped with crispy curry leaves – but would it have killed them to give you more of it? This cost twelve pounds, and although I enjoyed it it still felt like slightly too much for slightly too little.
I had a sinking feeling that the pie would underwhelm as I prepped it to go in the oven. For once it wasn’t about the faff of cooking it, because it couldn’t have been simpler: they provided you with an enamel dish, the pastry was ready-rolled and ready to drape on top, there was even a little sachet of eggwash to brush over the top. No, the problem was the filling. The pictures on Dishpatch’s website show the platonic ideal of a pie, the golden crust and the rich sauce underneath, a tangle of slow-cooked beef, broken up into fine ribbons, the sauce rich and sticky. Inside my vacuum-packed bag? Three – yes, I counted – dense nuggets of beef. That was it.
The Dishpatch website talks about the beef in some detail. “We keep the meat in big chunks when slow-braising so that they really hold the moisture”, says the co-founder. I can understand that, but you would think that in the process of making the filling they’d then shred the stuff so you reaped the benefits. Instead, there they were, floating in the sauce as if they’d been introduced to it literally at the last minute. Imagine a pie where each quarter contained a solitary piece of meat, and one quarter contained no meat at all. I don’t have to imagine it, because I ate it: it felt like a very expensive, not very impressive ready meal.
It was a real pity, because the sauce was delicious and you really got the rich softness of the onions in there (slow cooked in beef fat for over an hour, apparently). There was a beautiful savoury, salty note too that had me checking the list of ingredients for anchovies. But with no meat to bulk it up, it felt a bit watery. And the three bits of beef you did get weren’t “super succulent” (I’m quoting the Dishpatch website again), just dense and needing a fair bit of aggression with a knife and fork to break them up. I suppose you could describe them as big, but only in relative terms: one had a rich vein of unappealing fat in it, too. A bad pie, as I learned many years ago at Sweeney & Todd, is worse than no pie at all, because it’s a betrayal of the beautiful concept of pie itself. I’m afraid this was a bad pie.
I should also mention the cost. This was thirty-five pounds, and my only comparable experience of heat at home, really, is ordering vacuum-packed curries from Clay’s. For the money I spent on this pie and an accompanying pressed potato side dish, you could pick up two curries from Clay’s and two portions of rice and end the meal replete and enraptured. By my reckoning, you’d get twice as much food. Whether this means that Marksman is overpriced or Clay’s an absolute steal I’m not sure. Probably the latter, although the truth might be somewhere between the two.
The pressed potato side dish, by the way, was disappointing. That word again. The blurb sold it beautifully – thinly sliced potatoes layered, pressed and fried until crisp, what could possibly be bad about that? – and I was hoping it would be a heat at home equivalent of the legendary confit potato they serve at Quality Chop House in Farringdon. But it came out wan rather than crispy, and lacking in flavour. It didn’t help that it was drowned – literally and figuratively – by that sauce, the pie-filling-that-wasn’t-a-filling. In the course of researching this I discovered that Quality Chop House does its own heat at home option where a pie for two costs seventeen pounds: perhaps I should review them next.
That was all the meh I could take for one night, so we saved dessert for the following evening. Again, it sounded magical on paper – chocolate puddings with a salt toffee sauce and plenty of Jersey cream. Again, it was incredibly easy to cook. You just eased the puddings out of their foil cases and baked them in the oven with a dollop of the sauce on top while you heated the rest on the hob.
And again, they just came out badly. They sunk in the oven to flattened discs with an impregnable caramel perma-crust on top, sad parodies of the glossy pictures in the brochure. The sauce hadn’t thickened, so it pretty much had the same texture as the cream, and the end result was a chewy puck submerged in a lukewarm lake of something which combined the worst aspects of cream and a salt caramel sauce. Twelve pounds for something Gü, it pains me to say, does better. This is the one dish I couldn’t bring myself to take a photo of: it just looked too forlorn.
The strange thing about this experience is that I can’t really fault Dishpatch. Unlike the likes of Deliveroo and Uber Eats they take responsibility for the food they sell, so after I filled out my survey they sent me a lovely email and gave me a partial refund. And their packaging and delivery was spot on: they run a very polished operation. The problem was with the food, and for once I can properly compare like with like, because I’ve eaten in the Marksman. My meal there a few years back was beautiful, but this was nowhere near the same quality for broadly the same cost. It’s like the joke that kicks off Annie Hall: “This food is terrible.” “I know, and such small portions.”
Of course, it isn’t really that simple. I know, rationally, that heat at home kits have different overheads to absorb: fancy packaging, vacuum-packing kit, training, the cost of a delivery supplier and so on. The problem DIY kits like this one have is that even though you know all that, on a gut level it still feels like you’re paying restaurant prices for a substandard home experience. Perhaps I haven’t found the right ones yet, Clay’s excepted.
On the plus side, it leaves plenty of room for improvement in 2022. But for now, my second brush with restaurant delivery kits left me feeling surprisingly appreciative of conventional takeaways, with all their wayward drivers drifting down the IDR away from my bloody house, all the timing issues, the lukewarm pizzas I’ve endured and all the other vicissitudes I grappled with last year. It left me feeling almost nostalgic, even. If nothing else, your disappointment is (a) instant and (b) cheaper. If I’m to have disappointments this year, and statistically it seems likely, I’d like them to be as instant, and as cheap, as possible. It’s not much of a mission statement, but the last couple of years have taught me to manage my expectations.
Edible Reading 