Last year, in one of the more baffling developments in Reading’s food and drink scene, wine bar Veeno changed its name to Vino Vita. It wasn’t initially clear whether this was because the people running it had bought the business from Veeno or if something else was going on. If you read the details on Vino Vita’s website you’d be none the wiser. “We’ve rebranded, but our commitment to excellence remains unchanged” it said. “Join us as we start an exciting new chapter that expands our offerings and vision.”
More details emerged when the owners spoke to the Chronicle last month. “A big reason why we became independent was so we could have more say over the produce” said the restaurant’s Head Of Sales. “We developed our whole menu, and everything is done on site.” I remember reading the article and thinking that this potentially merited a revisit, but the main thing I took away was They have a head of sales? It felt like a role Veeno, a chain with 5 restaurants across England and Scotland, might need but that Vino Vita, a single spot opposite Forbury Gardens, probably didn’t.
So what were the differences, and had Vino Vita improved on the Veeno formula since taking their destiny into their own hands? The only way to be sure was to eat there – which clearly I did, because you’re reading this – but before that I carried out some research. Because I visited Veeno on duty nearly 8 years ago, not long after they opened, and at the time I would have said that there was plenty of room for improvement.
Vino Vita’s menu does indeed offer a slightly wider selection of dishes than Veeno’s, with more nibbles, bruschette, small plates and so on. It has about as many pasta dishes, although I’d say Vino Vita’s sound less interesting. The big difference, and again this is baffling, is the sheer volume of pizza: between conventional pizzas and Pinsa Romana, Vino Vita offers almost twice as many options as its estranged siblings.
Did Vino Vita move in this direction to compete directly with the likes of Mama’s Way, who clearly have superb access to produce? And if so, wouldn’t you maybe change course given that Reading has seen pizza place after pizza place open this year, at least two of them – Paesinos and Amò – being truly first class? I did wonder.
A couple of other strange things that came out of my homework. One was wine. Veeno’s selling point was that the wine was from their own vineyard: their selection was excellent, the vast majority of it was available by the glass and much of it was affordable. To give you an example, 7 of their 21 reds will set you back £30 or less. By contrast, Vino Vita’s 21 reds were more expensive – the cheapest was £29.95, the remainder all cost more than that.
It wasn’t clear where any of them came from either, because unlike Veeno, Vino Vita didn’t quote producers or vintages. It felt odd to split away from the parent company to offer greater choice, only for that choice to be more expensive and less informative. Like the name change, it had a hint of shadiness about it.
The other odd thing was something I discovered when making a reservation, because booking online with Vino Vita also raised some questions. The thing is, you don’t just book a table. You also have to tell them, and I’ve never seen this before, when you plan to give it back. Not only that, but you also have to say what you’re booking it for – is it for a meal or an Experience?
Yes, an Experience with a capital E, and the booking system asks you which one you want: Quattro Rossi, for example, Trip To Italy or Italian Afternoon Tea, without telling you what they are (they’re on a separate menu, but it’s odd that they don’t tell you as part of the booking Experience – sorry, I mean experience). And all those Experiences? Copied straight from Veeno. The grape didn’t fall very far from the vine, it seemed.
After all that research, I was in two minds about going to Vino Vita. Was it different enough? Was it promising enough? But one thing clinched it. Sometimes people specifically ask if they can join me for particular reviews: so for instance, when I get round to visiting Lebanese Flavours to discover whether the artist formally known as Bakery House has simply changed its name or changed for the worse, my friend Liz has called shotgun on that one.
Similarly, I can’t review Wendy’s unless it’s in the company of Kevin, a long-standing reader, because I promised him, and as he’s moved to the Cotswolds it won’t happen any time soon. In this case it was Zoë, my wife and number one dining companion, who put in a request specifically to go to Vino Vita, so I met her outside at the start of the weekend, to discover whether their commitment to excellence really did remain unchanged.
Our table wasn’t ready when we arrived, so we went out to the terrace to have a drink before our meal. It really is one of Reading’s most appealing al fresco spaces, a very pleasant spot opposite the park, strung with lights and convivial on a warm day. It was nice to spend time there before dinner, quitting as the evening became a little nippy, but it does help if you don’t mind passive smoking because there was a fair bit of that. Very Italian, I suppose.
It was, however, difficult to get attention. So by the time we did, and managed to place an order, and the nibbles came out, it was chilly enough that it felt like time to move inside. Vino Vita’s interior didn’t feel any different to when it was Veeno, and I’ve always found it a slightly disjointed set of spaces – some high tables, some low tables, a series of disconnected rooms that don’t entirely feel like they’re all part of the same establishment.
We were taken to a more conventional table to the right of the bar, in the room I’m pretty sure I ate in back in 2017. On a Friday night the place wasn’t rammed, although I suppose many of the customers were outside. Perhaps they seated all the people that had booked a table for an actual meal in the same room, and everyone else was off having their Experiences.
Our nibbles were disappointing, sub-pub stuff. I was hoping that salted almonds would be the kind of treats you get in Andalusia, burnished with oil and speckled with salt. These were out of a packet or a tub, dusty with salt and completely unremarkable. Even more nothingy were the taralli, dense little knots with the texture of sawdust. Really good taralli come spiked with fennel seeds and, with a crisp white wine, can be a delight. These weren’t really good taralli. Eight pounds for two ramekins of blandness.
We had a wine flight with these, the “VINO.VITA.BIO” which was three 70ml glasses of Vino Vita’s organic wines. The first, a verdicchio, was genuinely very enjoyable – and it was just as well that it was, because getting someone to bring some water to accompany those very dry snacks proved difficult. When we finally did manage it one of the staff brought a small bottle of water, a single glass and another glass full to the brim with ice. We had two perfectly good water glasses sitting on the table, which made it all a bit weird. “It’s funny” said Zoe. “They do have enough staff, it just feels like they don’t.”
The other two wines in that flight, by the way, were also quite nice. One, a Nero d’Avola, was decent, perfumed and very enjoyable: it didn’t go with anything we ordered, but that might be because it was tasty and none of the food turned out to be. The third wine was a Frappato, which is a new one on me, and was also perfectly drinkable.
This is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who enjoy wines on the medium end of the spectrum said the blurb on the piece of paper which accompanied the wine flight: that quote is sure to be a firm favourite amongst those who like their sentences to be completely devoid of meaning. As with the wine list, the piece of paper didn’t give useful details like producers or vintages, and you didn’t get to see the bottles or labels. Did that make for a premium experience, or Experience, when you were paying £17 for 210ml of wine?
We’d also ordered some garlic ciabatta, but our server accidentally brought over the bread selection instead. He was very apologetic, and ran off and made amends, but it was a useful exercise because the bread was a dreary-looking generic selection, none of which looked like it had been baked onsite or indeed anywhere exciting; I made a mental note not to order any of the numerous bruschetta options.
Instead we got what we’d originally ordered, four slightly sad triangles of ciabatta which had been sort of toasted, a little, inconsistently brushed with olive oil and scattered with parsley. There was some garlic there, but nowhere near the industrial quantities Italian food called for. Zoë thought this was okay, but she was being charitable. I thought that for six pounds I was having the kind of thing you could easily pick up at a supermarket.
The real crimes against Italian food, though, were to follow, in a meal where the longer it went on the worse it seemed to get. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate that than the first of the small plates we’d ordered. The menu promised stuffed courgette flowers, and I thought this would be a real test of whether they truly held all those lofty aspirations. Because a courgette flower, its head stuffed with ricotta and lemon zest, the whole thing fried in an almost translucent, lacy batter is one of the very best things you can eat.
It is serious cooking, and a menu offering it is making a claim to be serious about cooking. I still remember it being served by the Lyndhurst, when I held a readers’ lunch many years ago: Amy, the vegetarian on our table, had it all to herself and every omnivore envied her. It’s taking all my strength not to include a picture of it in this review, so you can see what it’s meant to look like. Instead, just look at that: three beige cylinders bearing no resemblance to courgette flowers at all. No light coating, instead a thick layer of stodge.
Inside, something that definitely wasn’t a courgette flower: I’m prepared to take their word for it that it was courgette, but only just. And inside that, some blend of cheeses that tasted of nothing. This was like some kind of continental reinterpretation of stuffed jalapeños you might pick up at Iceland, an affront to the promise of this dish. Providing some honey, the only thing that actually tasted of anything, didn’t rescue it. The price – £8.50 – rubbed salt in the wound.
The arancini were in the same vein. Veeno only did one kind, filled with ragu, whereas at Vino Vita you can choose between ragu, mushroom and truffle or ham and cheese. The mushroom and truffle ones didn’t taste of truffle in any way, being just claggy stodge with no crunch or crispness to the exterior. Plonking them on a shallow pool of tomato sauce, grating some cheese and unceremoniously dumping some basil in the middle neither elevated them nor disguised their inadequacy.
I’ve used that word, stodge, twice now, because nothing else encapsulates those dishes. Italian food at its best can embrace the wonder and comfort of carbs, but this seemed to prioritise filling the stomach and emptying the wallet with brutal efficiency. In fairness, these were billed as bite-sized and only cost £6, but they still weren’t worth it. When I went to Veeno, 8 years ago, I said that it felt like the kitchen was more interested in margins than food. Hold my beer, said Vino Vita.
Neither Zoë nor I managed to take a picture of one of our small plates, so you’ll have to both imagine it and take my word for it. If you read the title carpaccio of salmon and the description smoked salmon drizzled with a lemon and caper dressing and fresh rocket and think that, based on what you’ve heard so far, this is likely to be a small piece of smoked salmon draped over a hill of the kind of salad you get in a bag at the supermarket, domed to make it look like you’re getting more salmon than you are, meanly scattered with capers, you would be absolutely spot on. Give yourself a pat on the back.
This is me trying to find positives, believe it or not. But I don’t think even Pollyanna could find a positive in the final small plate, the caponata. Caponata is a wonderful thing, a cold, sweet and sour aubergine stew with olives, capers and pine nuts. It has a distinctive taste which I adore. It is not, as it was at Vino Vita, a bland mulch of aubergine and far too many tinned black olives, with no sweetness, sharpness or sourness. It didn’t even look like caponata, didn’t have that depth of colour, although you’d have to whip off all the pointless foliage that had been dumped on it to be absolutely sure.
You know who used to do a very enjoyable caponata, back in the day? Carluccio’s, of all places. You know who does the worst caponata I’ve ever tasted? That would be Vino Vita.
Now, you might just think I’m being curmudgeonly, so I have to say this in my defence: Zoë thought all of this was awful. Zoë, the woman who is able to tolerate me. Even she – especially she – found all these dishes unforgivably bad.
“There’s somebody in that kitchen who really hates Italy” was her conclusion.
“It definitely doesn’t feel like anybody in the kitchen’s ever been there.”
“What we’ve just had,” she added, “was a crap-paccio. A crap-paccio and a craponata.”
Irony of ironies, the bottle of white wine we were on by now was really very nice, with fruit and structure and, to my mind, even a little hint of licorice. And by this point we had a server who was really good and very personable, checking in on us and taking away our empties. At just over fifty pounds you’d want that bottle to be good – Vivino suggested its mark up was something like three times retail price – but however pleasant it was, I wasn’t sure how much of it you’d need to drink to make the food seem like a good idea. I was sure, though, that I wasn’t capable of putting that much wine away.
The food up to that point had been so poor that it became partly about cutting our losses. The couple at the next table had paid up and gone leaving behind the best part of a bowl of anaemic-looking pasta – the mushroom tagliatelle, at a guess – and a blond, bland pizza. So we decided to try a Pinsa Romana, the airier Roman variant as popularised in Reading by Mama’s Way. In a way, I was trying to give Vino Vita one last chance, aware that if I had a conventional pizza and was comparing it to Amò or Paesinos it would be the final nail in the coffin.
But the final nail in the coffin was the Pinsa Romana. The Piccante promised, if the menu were to be believed, ‘nduja and oil, roasted peppers, burrata, rocket and basil. Like all the other promises, it was an empty one. The base was crunchy, dry as a bone with no airiness or give: Mama’s Way may buy their pinsa bases in, but they were miles better than this.
The pinsa had been pre-cut into eight miserly squares, and good luck finding ‘nduja on every one, because you wouldn’t. “Nigel Farage turns up to vote more often than ‘nduja turns up to this pizza” was Zoë’s verdict. Bland unlovely bits of burrata had been placed here and there – no oil, no discernible basil and no rocket.
In the rocket’s place, obscuring just how atrocious this pinsa was – which surely must have been the prime objective – somebody had thrown random salad on top of the whole affair. This was the last straw for Zoë. “It’s meant to have rocket on it, not the contents of a fucking bag of Florette”. The whole thing was so subpar that we followed our neighbours’ example.
It’s not even that this pinsa didn’t compare well to what you could get a short walk away at Paesinos or Amò, although it didn’t. It’s that it didn’t compare well to what you could get at Zia Lucia, or Zizzi, or Pizza Express. Or Marks, or Tesco, or Aldi, or the Co-Op. And if you bought one from a supermarket and took it home, you could dot it with ‘nduja yourself and even if it was from the chiller cabinet, heated up in your oven, it would be dozens of times better than this effort. It wouldn’t cost you £15.50, either, and for that money you can enjoy the best pizza Reading currently has to offer, minutes away on Kings Road.
Our server came over to check how our food was. We said “it was fine” almost in unison, the universal English euphemism for It was bad, but I can’t face a conversation about that. Our bill came to £166, including a 12.5% service charge. A bit of me wants to say that in Vino Vita’s defence, nearly ninety of that was on wine. But even if I do say that in their defence, the rest was indefensible.
Can you tell I wasn’t a fan? I don’t think I’ve written a review like this in ages, and certainly not of somewhere independent, and I don’t take pleasure in doing it. I’m reassured that Zoë, who is positivity personified, disliked it even more than I did – because yes, it turns out that’s possible. And I don’t know what offends me most about the place. The mediocrity is bad enough, the mediocrity coupled with the laziness is worse. To combine both those things with really iffy value, at a time when Reading’s Italian scene is having something of a renaissance, is woeful.
Worse still, it made me feel like that rebrand from Veeno to Vino Vita had something else behind it. A desire to make more from less, to cut corners and conceal charging a premium. Even some of the dishes that have been tweaked from Veeno’s menu to Vino Vita’s display this – Veeno does a bruschetta with capers and Sicilian dark tuna, Vino Vita’s boasts a tuna paté. What’s the Italian for Shippams?
But just as sad is this: with the Cellar gone and Vino Vita, well, like this, Reading still doesn’t have the wine bar with excellent food that has been missing ever since the Tasting House closed after lockdown. That gap in the market remains, and on this evidence Vino Vita isn’t even trying to fill it. Maybe Notes, just opened on Station Hill, will do better: it’s not as if it could do much worse. It is bad luck for Vino Vita that I review them the week after I had one of my meals of the year – also Italian, but miles better – at RAGÙ, but Vino Vita would be bad whoever you were comparing them to.
It might have been a little different if the service had been better – Apo, formerly of Dolce Vita and Pho, and one of Reading’s great front of house operators – works at Vino Vita, although he wasn’t on duty the night I went there. But the problems are squarely on the menu and in the kitchen, not elsewhere: you could forgive the slightly disjointed interior or the relatively expensive wine if everything else was firing on all cylinders, but it didn’t even get started.
If Paesinos or Amò had more space and an alcohol license, I’m not sure what the point of Vino Vita would be. In fact, if either of them did I think it would spell curtains for Vino Vita. I might be wrong, of course, because it seemed to be doing reasonably well the night I was there and that puff piece in the Chronicle made it sound like they were going from strength to strength. Be that as it may Vino Vita achieved something I would never have thought possible, despite nearly twelve years in the reviewing game. It made me miss Veeno, and that’s not a good thing.
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I was on a run of bad luck when we turned up for dinner at RAGÙ, situated in a shipping container in Wapping Wharf, on the last night of our trip to Bristol. It’s not that I hadn’t eaten well, because I had in places, but I hadn’t eaten consistently well. My lamb kofte wrap from Matina, always a staple, felt a little under-sauced and under-seasoned, my vegetarian pizza sandwich at the Left Handed Giant brewpub was bland and stodgy.
There was a meal at a gastropub in Clifton so middling I didn’t end up writing it up, because even I can’t spend 3,500 words just saying meh, and of course there was my very brief, rather expensive dinner at Snobby’s. In that sense, it wasn’t a vintage trip.
That’s not to say that there hadn’t been some good things to eat. That rolled lamb dish at Snobby’s was magnificent, even if it stuck out like a sore thumb in the wider context of a hapless meal. The fried potatoes with truffle mayo at Left Handed Giant almost made up for that sandwich by Pizza Is Lovely, which wasn’t.
I sat outside Panunzio’s on Cotham Hill on a blazing afternoon and enjoyed a tub of the most incredible chocolate gelato (they make everything onsite), and possibly preferred it even to Swoon, the bigger name at the foot of Park Street. There were bright spots, but most of them were isolated dishes, or the highlight of a disappointing meal.
The one exception was brunch at OddShop on Whiteladies Road, eating outrageously good crumpets topped with fried chicken, chilli jam, bacon and coffee maple syrup, accompanied by the hash browns of the gods; I liked this so much I was prepared to overlook the fact that I discovered the place by virtue of Bristol’s most prominent influencer. Still, at least I paid for my meal: maybe if it had been free I also would have described it as “proper unhinged naughty scran”, but somehow I doubt it.
So the stakes were relatively high for our final dinner in the city, but I suspected RAGÙ could handle it. Back at the start of 2023, before everybody and anybody discovered it, I reviewed a little spot in Bedminster called COR, and adored it. I said at the time that I was ahead of the zeitgeist, for once, and it turned out that I was; Michelin gave it a Bib Gourmand, bloggers hopped on the bandwagon, and in the meantime COR carried on thriving, doing what they did well. I watched their progress with happiness and pride, just glad I knew them before they were famous.
Anyway, two years later they opened their second restaurant, RAGÙ, on Wapping Wharf. Where COR’s menu ranged across much of southern Europe, RAGÙ’s was very deliberately Italian, and prior to it opening COR’s head chef Vyck Colsell and some of her team went on a fact finding trip to Emilia Romagna: I remember seeing the photos on Instagram and feeling profound envy of her time in Bologna.
As it happens, Colsell has a Reading connection, having started out in Caversham’s very own, much-missed Mya Lacarte. When RAGÙ opened in March Colsell got a promotion, being confirmed as executive chef of both restaurants: to think that it all began on Prospect Street.
I was not ahead of the curve with RAGÙ, sadly. Despite booking my table back in May, by the time I got there earlier this month – as with Town – a national critic had beaten me to it. Grace Dent this time, making the most of a trip to Bristol to visit both RAGÙ and Lapin. She loved them both, although RAGÙ was the one she dubbed her new favourite restaurant of 2025. Still, only one review of consequence to measure mine against counted as pretty good going.
Whether it was the Dent factor or just a Thursday night in Bristol, the restaurant was buzzing when we turned up. RAGÙ felt much smaller than Lapin – it’s just the one shipping container, I think – and had something like half a dozen tables, the rest of the covers being up at the bar with a great view of a very open kitchen. It shares the terrace outside with its neighbour, and it was a warm enough day, but I loved being inside with all that life.
I recognised Colsell in the kitchen and one of the servers as the one who had looked after me so brilliantly on my first ever trip to COR, and taking it all in I started to get whatever the opposite of a sinking feeling is. Could one meal redeem an entire mini break? You wouldn’t have bet against it.
RAGÙ’s menu, like COR’s, is broadly structured in sections, from nibbles to smaller plates, to bigger plates you might share to the largest that you perhaps wouldn’t. This is something both restaurants are really good at, and it’s all about flow. It’s one thing to just stick dishes of varying size and cost on a menu and leave you to fend for yourself, and even some very good places are prone to doing that. But with RAGÙ’s menu you get a clear picture of how it all hangs together and how you might – wanky word alert – curate a meal.
And actually all the tables around me were doing that different ways, shuffling plates in different orders, sharing things I might not have, all finding different ways to configure a list of dishes where you would struggle to find good reasons not to order all of it. That said, I doubt there were many duos in the restaurant that night who tried quite as many of the dishes as we did. What can I say? We were greedy, hungry, delighted to be there and we had an underwhelming trend to buck. Time to roll our sleeves up and get into it.
Our first wave of dishes came, nicely spaced and paced, as it should be, to accompany aperitivi. Zoë’s negroni, which was leftfield but not heretical, was made with local Psychopomp gin and coffee-infused Campari, and received rave reviews. I had something called a Scialla which was made with Moscato d’Asti – which I’ll always unapologetically love, however unfashionable it might be – with mint and lime. A little like a rebujto, and a lot like something I could easily rustle up at home. A light whisper of a drink, gone too soon, but also, because Moscato d’Asti is something like 5%, gone without doing significant damage to the liver.
That feeling of being in safe hands began with the first thing we ate. An opening gambit of beautifully done focaccia, studded with salt and rosemary, would have been fine on its own or even better with bright extra virgin olive oil to dip. But whipped butter topped with bottarga? Utterly exquisite. My friend Al brought me some bottarga back from a recent trip to Italy: now I know exactly what to do with it.
Slightly less successful, for me, was the one thing we had from the specials board. Crocche were little balls of fried, mashed potato, served carpeted with cheese. And as an exercise in texture they were a masterclass – such a light crunch, so ethereal inside. But texture isn’t everything, and for me these lacked the oomph I would have liked, especially at seven pounds fifty for a pair.
As it was when I ate at RAGÙ’s neighbours Lapin, I mentally compared this dish to the worldbeating cheese fritters at Upstairs At Landrace, and wasn’t convinced RAGÙ’s came out on top. I keep getting told off for comparing restaurants – some random said I spent too much of the last review talking about Clay’s – but how do you work out whether something is great or merely good without comparing it to other stuff you’ve had? Honestly, some people.
My absolute favourite of the small plates we shared was what came next. Prosciutto and melon could easily be seen as a throwback, the kind of thing we all thought we should be eating forty years ago. And I’m not sure when I saw it last on a menu, mainly because I suspect it’s the province of very trad Italian restaurants and, Reading not having any of those, I never visit that kind of place. But this dish, one of the best things I ate in the meal, was 100% comeback and 0% throwback.
First of all, the prosciutto was undeniably first rate – coarse and thick, the good stuff, free from the sheen that is the clearest tell that it had spent the last few weeks incarcerated in plastic. This stuff sang, and it wasn’t alone in doing so: the hunks of Charentais melon it was draped over were deeply sweet and fragrant, soft and unmissable. That alone might have made for a knockout dish, but RAGÙ knew when to add and, crucially, when to stop. So the Sorrento tomatoes in the mix added a different kind of sweetness, another dimension, and torn basil (and, I think, some more finely chopped mint) perfected matters.
It felt like a supercharged summer from the first mouthful to the last, the kind of thing you’d love to eat at home but, because you don’t have RAGÙ’s access to ingredients, you know you never will. That said, RAGÙ’s Instagram suggests they get produce from extra-fine greengrocer Hugo’s, a few doors down from COR in Bedminster. So if you live in Bristol, you at least have a fighting chance of recreating it.
The final dish in this phase of our assault on the menu was probably my least favourite, although I should say in fairness that Zoë loved it. I now realise I’ve not had friggitelli peppers before and I didn’t realise that they were dark, green, slightly bitter things, not a million miles away from padron peppers, which I’ve always been able to take or leave. They were served with confit tomato, which was actually a thin pool of liquid, and topped with grated, salted, aged ricotta.
So the fact that I didn’t like this might have been on me. Every component of it was well done – the peppers in particular were cooked nicely and slightly blackened – but I do think that its three elements didn’t cohere into a single dish. Something you sort of have to eat with a fork, sort of have to eat with a spoon, is sort of hot and sort of cold left me sort of both. But as the one outlier, it probably says more about my tastes than anything else.
That was all the sharing either Zoë or I felt like doing, so from that point onwards there was her dish and my dish all the way through to paying the bill. I don’t know whether everyone does that or not, but I remain unconvinced that some dishes – especially things like pasta – are really sharable anyway, unless you change ends at half-time, so to speak.
One thing we did share, though, was a beautiful bottle of Gavi which cost just shy of fifty pounds and felt worth it. It didn’t necessarily go with everything we ate, but having a lovely time did and it contributed its fair share to that.
Zoë, for me, ordered the other dish of the meal. Billed as fennel sausage with fregola it was really so much more than that, a bowl of the most tremendous, intense, savoury joy. I’m not used to associating fregola with comfort rather than virtue, but here it was deployed as a supporting player with crumbled sausage, a painterly swathe of gremolata and a potato crumb.
And you could look at the picture down there and not really get all that, but this was entirely about surpassing the sum of the dish’s parts. Our friends James and Liz went to RAGÙ a couple of weeks ago, partly after hearing how much we’d enjoyed our meal, and I told James that this was the one dish he should make sure he ordered. He ordered it. He loved it.
Liz’s highlight, on their visit, was the dish I had next and which, to be fair, I knew she would also love. An exceedingly generous portion of tagliolini was possibly the platonic ideal of a comforting bowl of pasta, with not a strand out of place. The pasta was thin and fine, golden with egg and carrying just the right amount of bite, the crab delicious and cossetting.
But the whole thing was offset with lemon and a little spike of chilli, because RAGÙ understood that even cosiness is improved with a touch of something waspish. And the crowning glory was a beneficent scattering of pangritata, to add that textural cherry on top. As elsewhere in the meal, RAGÙ’s genius was an understanding of just how many components to load on a dish before saying “when”, and to make that hard work and judgment look free, easy and natural.
After this we had a lovely, leisurely pause before attacking our final two savoury picks of the evening. And this one was a score draw, with both of us admiring one another’s candidates but secretly thinking we had chosen better. Mine involved what I honestly think is one of the finest things you can eat, slow-cooked shoulder of lamb, pressed into a dense, cylindrical puck, where you know that every indulgent forkful will contain nothing but the epitome of this meat at its finest.
So far so Snobby’s, you could say, but RAGÙ, as at every point in proceedings, went one step further, finishing the lamb over fire to caramelise the outside. This dish gave me almost unseemly amounts of joy, and pulling apart those shreds, loading a fork with them, along with a ragu of peas and carrots and a delirium-inducing salsa verde was a voyage of blissful discovery that could never have lasted long enough.
A meal that contained this dish, or that crab tagliolini, or the sausage and fregola combo, would have been a meal to be reckoned with. To go to a restaurant with all three on the menu, where if you arrived hungry enough and paced things just right you could eat more than one of them, was close to nirvana. And all three of the dishes I’ve mentioned clocked in at less than twenty pounds: I’ve not found many dishes offering such impressive value this year.
Zoë would argue that her main – just shy of thirty pounds, this one – was even better. Enormous, butter-soft pieces of venison came strewn with splodges of sweet Gorgonzola, the whole thing bathed in bone marrow butter and aged balsamic vinegar. Almost like a tagliata, if every single ingredient in it had been amped up to be its absolute best. Venison, so often at risk of being dry, is very rarely like this. The cheese was perfectly judged – so yes, there was salt and funk in there but not just that.
And again, the artistry of how to finish the dish was right on the money – adding the depth of the bone narrow and all the complexity that aged balsamic can bring to a dish. A bit of a theme here: RAGÙ always knows when to stop, but they don’t stop until a dish is just right, unequivocally on the money.
Now, you might look at that dish – brilliant though it is – and think this is another example of the phenomenon I observed earlier in the year at Gee’s, of being given salad in disguise. Because I’m a heathen, I might even agree with you on that, but we had a solution: more carbs (because heaven knows, the meal so far had been so lacking in them) in the form of patate schiaccate, boiled, crushed and fried potatoes which are a speciality of Calabria, or Trieste, depending on which Google result you believe.
I quite liked these, and that combination of boiling, bashing and frying made for sheer crunchy, crispy textural delight. I didn’t get masses of the rosemary or garlic, but when the potatoes have that many sharp, golden corners you overlook that completely, in my experience.
By this point, enjoying the last of our wine at our leisure, the restaurant was a calmer but equally lovely place to be. The best part of a couple of hours had passed since we took our seats, and the tables indoors had thinned out, although the terrace still hummed with a slightly more subdued energy. The sky was growing inky beyond the windows, and the staff were winding down slightly.
If anything I enjoyed watching the kitchen even more then than I had when they were busy and cooking: many writers better than me have tried to capture the camaraderie of a kitchen at many different periods in a restaurant’s day, using a variety of tools, but all I can say is that it seemed to me that I was looking at a brigade who genuinely liked one another, and that warmth and joie de vivre had permeated the whole evening.
Service throughout my meal was brilliant, from all the people who looked after us, and it managed to nail the sweet spot where it was eager to please rather than oversolicitous, enthusiastic and informal rather than slapdash or chummy. After a series of meals that had disappointed me – both in Bristol and beyond, on duty and off – it was nice to be reminded: this is what it’s supposed to be like. A night like that can make you fall back in love with restaurants.
But there was time for one last thing to eat, accompanied by nectar of a glass of dark, sticky Recioto della Valpolicella in a very generous 100ml pour. Zoë, adhering to our unwritten law that if tiramisu is on a menu at least one of us needs to order it, lucked out with a delectable wodge of the stuff, carpet bombed with cocoa. It’s had a fair amount of attention online – the influencer I referred to earlier said it was “proper unruly” and “has got edges”, the latter of which is true of pretty much anything you eat, anywhere, ever. I’m sure he knew what he meant.
But yes, it was one of the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried quite a lot. Influencer-speak described this tiramisu as “hit” with orange and nutmeg, which to the rest of us means it had orange and nutmeg in it. It didn’t bang, it didn’t slap – why are these half-wits always so drearily percussive about things? – but it was outstanding.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t resist the gelati. The two options were fior di latte gelato with aged balsamic or peach and basil sorbet, and I let you down by having two scoops of the former and none of the latter. But I couldn’t resist: I don’t think I’ve ever seen fior di latte gelato on a menu outside Italy, ice cream with the confidence to just taste of itself, no adjuncts or gimmicks, so I wanted to sample it.
I say that, but of course the adjunct was the balsamic vinegar, and it was transformational. Forget the humdrum pairing of having it with strawberries, forget tipping some Pedro Ximenez on your vanilla ice cream, this was the combination I’d been missing out on my whole life. You could try to recreate this at home, too, but everything you used would have to be unmistakably top notch, and I know that if I did it would fall short. Better to remember it here, this way, transcending sweet, salt, sour and savoury to create something that would persist in the memory.
I wish they’d brought it in a single bowl, mind you, rather than these two slightly bizarre individual portions. There, right at the end: something that looks like a criticism.
Our bill for two people – for all that food, a couple of aperitivi, an excellent bottle of wine and two glasses of dessert wine – came to just shy of two hundred and seventy pounds, including a 12.5% tip which was earned many times over. You may say that’s expensive. I say it’s exceptional value for what we had, and for an evening that I’ll remember as one of the best meals of this or any year. Only one dish – that venison – came in north of twenty pounds.
It’s funny seeing RAGÙ getting the attention that COR did not. For me, it feels like reading rave reviews of the sophomore album when you bought the debut (an experience, to be fair, I’ve also had more than once). But I’m delighted that Colsell and owners Karen and Mark Chapman are getting their moment in the sun, better late than never, because RAGÙ is as good a restaurant as you could hope to find. Despite being only a few months old, it already feels like a destination restaurant in the making.
Some people will prefer COR’s more spacious homeliness, many will make a beeline to RAGÙ for its more compact, more clamorous buzz. I can honestly say, though, that you wouldn’t go wrong with either, and you could read either’s menu and struggle mightily deciding what you could come to terms with leaving without eating. Such restaurants are rare, and any town is lucky to have one. A city with two, run by the same team, is fortunate indeed.
So it turns out a meal can redeem a holiday, after all.
RAGÙ – 9.5 Unit 25, Cargo 2, Museum Street, Bristol, BS1 6ZA 0117 9110218
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Town – or, as it’s sometimes written, TOWN – is the hot new restaurant on Drury Lane, with celebrated chef Stevie Parle in the kitchen. It’s been open a couple of months, and has already had rave reviews from every quarter. Admittedly, some of those came with caveats. Giles Coren declared at the outset that he was friends with Jonathan Downey, one of the backers – a rare piece of transparency about vested interests in this sphere – and in the process revealed that Tom Parker Bowles is too (which means it’s quite possible that Parker Bowles is also friends with Coren: and to think we’re meant to trust these people’s tastes).
So yes, in the space of just over 6 weeks, almost every national restaurant critic we have – not William Sitwell, he was probably too busy campaigning for Nigel Farage – went to Town, literally and figuratively, to almost universal acclaim. Even that chap with the bouffant who writes for the Standard whose name escapes me went there (only kidding, he’s called David Ellis and I read somewhere that his earliest restaurant memories involve Quattro: he still goes with his family and gets limoncello on the house).
I’ve written about this phenomenon before, talking about Kolae or, more recently, Brutto: that even though London has many thousands of restaurants, and the rest of the U.K. many thousands more, you will find a handful of London restaurants every year that get written up by every single reviewer. Either because they offer something interesting and different, or because the chef has a backstory or, more likely, is well-connected in the world of food.
All those channels and nothing new on: it’s all repeats. But it’s more important that they have their say on a significant new opening, than it is to give readers a range of options, so they all race to file their copy and put their stamp on it first. Plus it’s much easier for them to get to than some godforsaken place out in the regions or, heaven forbid, the North. I suppose it’s handy if you really do want to go to that restaurant, because, like Metacritic, you can cobble together a composite view from those half a dozen pronouncements.
All this makes it look like I’m late hopping on a speeding bandwagon – which is both annoying and untrue, because I booked my table at Town a week before the first review of Town came out. And that’s not because I’m some kind of incredible trendwatcher with my ear to the ground: it’s because Zoë’s birthday was coming up and I asked her to choose a venue for the big day.
Initially she wanted a table at Lasdun, the Brutalist-inspired restaurant based in the National Theatre and run by the people behind superb Hackney pub the Marksman. But then, for reasons that were never explained, they contacted us to say that they weren’t offering lunch that Friday and would we like to move it to an evening booking? We didn’t, so we didn’t, and then a few weeks later Zoë said “I’ve decided: there’s this place opening called Town”.
And this is the difference, I suppose, between a punter and a would-be pundit. In the run up to our visit, every new review was great news for Zoë – someone else liked it! our meal is going to be excellent! – whereas I quietly facepalmed and channelled Brenda from Bristol. But never mind: everyone said it was excellent, so we spent the morning bimbling round Covent Garden before heading to Drury Lane, stopping for a couple of Belgian beers at Lowlander Grand Café, a place that feels like it’s been there for my entire restaurant-going life, before making our lunch reservation.
The interior of Town is gorgeous, and all the reviews have made much of that. Everything is very luxe, very glamorous, very Sixties – Tom Parker Bowles referenced Ken Adam, David Ellis suggested Mad Men – and the attention to detail is impressive. There are curved edges everywhere, from the rounded, tiled burgundy pillars to the beautiful chrome-edged ceiling lights. The photos I’d seen in advance also focussed on the feature in the centre of the dining room, a striking kelly green window into the open kitchen.
It really is stunning, but the single press photo – used in no less than three of the reviews – made it look like this is a huge centrepiece of the entire restaurant. And that’s not entirely true. We were sat in the middle section, and I had no complaints, but if your table was nearer the outside of the restaurant I think the place would have felt far less special. And I did wonder if, like the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David keeps being seated in the “ugly section”, there was a kind of centrifugal force going on here: the outer section had more boomers in it than a British Airways flight to Malaga.
The broadsheet reviewers won’t tell you that, of course, because they never get shit tables.
Town’s menu was a funny one: despite having plenty of dishes on it, little of it jumped out at me. Starters ranged from fifteen to twenty-five pounds, mains all the way from just over twenty all the way up to ninety, although the priciest ones were to share. But I was surprised by how untempted I was by it all on paper: some of that will be my preferences, not being wild about clams – which pop up twice – and feeling generally like having steak in a restaurant like this is a bit of a waste, even if it is Wildfarmed beef (Town goes to, well, town on its provenance, with butter and cheese coming from Parle’s brother’s dairy).
Vegetarians might have found things tricky too, with just one starter and two mains to choose from, one of them being the ubiquitous hispi cabbage. The reviews I’ve read waxed lyrical about the menu, but it was rare for me to find the choice difficult for all the wrong reasons, in some cases ordering the only thing that appealed rather than the thing that appealed most. The irony isn’t lost on me that vegetarians and vegans probably feel that way a lot of the time.
But before all that we had a negroni and a couple of things from the snack section of the menu. Town’s negroni goes firmly off piste with Somerset brandy and eau de vie instead of gin in the mix: I quite liked it but, as I had at Oxford’s Gee’s, found myself wondering why people tampered with the classics.
The introductory dishes on a menu are like the opening tracks on an album: every review mentions them, although it might not cover everything else. So I’d heard all about Town’s fried sage leaves with honey and chilli, and enjoyed them every bit as much as I expected to.
The trick here was to manage to make them truly snackable, moreish and sticky without making you reach for the hand sanitiser afterwards, and in that respect they worked very well. Sorry to mention Gee’s again but ironically their version, with anchovy in the middle, was even better (mind you, it was also the only good thing I ate at Gee’s).
But the dish everybody lost their shit about was the bread: potato sourdough which came not with butter but with a little bowl of dipping gravy. I’d read so much hyperbole about this dish that I almost had an invented memory of having eaten it myself: reading a plethora of reviews will do that to you.
It brought out the purple streak in reviewers: “we all need dipping gravy in our lives” was Jay Rayner’s take on it, while Giles Coren called it “show stopping”. Tom Parker Bowles said that it “coats the lips with a lustre of sweet fat” – just no, thanks – and Grace Dent didn’t try it. But that’s Dent all over: read her reviews carefully and she talks about far more dishes than she actually eats. I know people like that.
So did it live up to all that hype? Well, no. The gravy is indeed terrific: thin, glossy, beaded with beef fat with some soft, steeped garlic in it. But I tend to think if you’re going to dip some kind of food in a liquid, that something shouldn’t be wet too. And the sourdough was a soft, slightly underbaked ball of stodge that wasn’t really up to the job of acting as a vehicle. Sometimes the line between USP and gimmick is a thin one: you didn’t need VAR to work this one out.
I had a slight sense by this point that, as with the beautiful dining room, things had been designed more for form than for function and my starter backed this up. Again, many of the reviews have lavished praise on Town’s saffron risotto with roasted bone marrow and I was very excited to try it. And it’s clearly visually imposing, to have this kind of roundel of a dish with a bridge of bone crossing a pool of risotto.
Very Instagrammable, I’m sure, and a huge hit with the critics. Grace Dent said it was “sublime”, Jay Rayner “stupidly rich” and Giles Coren went on about a “huge canoe of fat, salty marrow” (fun fact: Coren is also a canoe, although a different kind). But this dish felt like it was for looking at, not eating. My bone was decidedly short on marrow, and once you’d worked it free and into the risotto, there was nowhere to put the bone, which rather got in the way of eating the bloody thing. You ended up playing some kind of weird gastronomic Poohsticks, pushing your risotto under the bone so you could get to it.
With all those reservations, was it worth it? Well, yes and no. I liked the risotto, which was saved from anonymity by a judicious hit of citrus, and what little marrow there was was indeed outrageously good. But as a dish, it felt performative rather than knockout. Seventeen quid for that: Giles Coren said that it would have done him for lunch or dinner on its own, but maybe he’s on some kind of appetite suppressant.
Far more successful was Zoë’s choice, charred baby gem lettuce with peas and Spenwood. Town appears to have dedicated itself to the worthy pursuit of making salad both warm and interesting, and this was a great leap forward in that field. I had a forkful, loved it, and didn’t resent the fact that Zoë had ordered it and I hadn’t. Mostly, in truth, because it was her birthday. Perhaps Town’s gift was that dishes which looked unassuming on paper turned out to be worldbeating in the flesh. Which was great and all that, but how would most people ever find that out?
The reviews I’ve read of Town talk about the service in glowing terms, and again that wasn’t entirely my experience. Perhaps I was there on a bad day for them, but it felt solicitous to a fault, as if they had over-resourced and wanted to look useful. So while we were still finishing our starters, they came over and plonked down the cutlery for our main courses, which just seemed odd. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then they made a similar, more annoying mistake later on: we’ll get to that.
But anyway, we were having a lovely time, in a lovely room, we were off work for the next week and a bit and there’s something about lunch in London on Friday, when most people are at work, that always feels like a little victory. And our table was decent, the company was superb – well, for me anyway – and the bottle of Albariño we were on was going down nicely. I knew at some point, when I wrote the place up, I would need to distil how much of the excellence was down to Town and how much was down to everything else, but that was a quandary for later.
The birthday girl also chose the best main. It wasn’t even close. Pork came beautifully done, a charred crust masking perfect pinkness, a really deft piece of cooking. The menu said it came with “early season onions and burnt apple sauce”: in honesty I think the onions were close to burnt, but that’s never really a bad thing. The apple sauce, its Stygian tones matching the best bits of the pork and the onions, was quite glorious: I didn’t mind the mustard, but like most condiments it wasn’t Zoë’s bag. At thirty-two pounds, this was a relative bargain on Town’s menu and – and this is high praise – it reminded me of the sort of thing you can get at Quality Chop House.
Town was no slouch with its sides, either. Pink fir potatoes came coated and roasted in beef fat – they do like making the most of their cows at Town – and was bang on for flavour, although I’d have liked these to have a little more texture. Not at all a bad side dish, though.
Even better – by my reckoning, anyway – were the courgette fritti, a glorious mess of these served simply with a squeeze of lemon and a little of what I seem to recall was aioli. I loved these, but I do have to say they wouldn’t be for everyone: their saltiness was right at the upper limit of what I enjoy, and it’s eminently possible that I like salt more than you do. I wasn’t sure they went with anything, but they were so much fun that I also wasn’t sure they needed to.
Here’s how ridiculous the contortions I had to go through were: Zoë had picked the pork, which otherwise would have been my choice, and my two remaining options – that hispi cabbage, inexplicably, didn’t appeal – were the duck pappardelle or the Cornish lobster. I would order the pasta dish probably 99 times out of 100, but I’m very aware that this makes me a rather samey reviewer (fried chicken, anybody? Gobi Manchurian?) so, just this once, I strode confidently into the unknown.
Now, you might absolutely love lobster and so that picture below might look like heaven on a plate to you. I’ve often thought, sacrilegiously I’m sure, that it’s just a big prawn – scarred by The Lobster Room, perhaps – but I’ve also always wanted someone or something to change my mind. Town’s lobster is not, sadly, going to be the dish to do it.
It wasn’t dreadful. Some of the meat was a tad tough, took a little prizing away from the shell, but the XO sauce Town makes to go with it is absolutely stellar: savoury, intense, take-my-money-for-a-jar-of-the-stuff stuff. But where was the lardo? It’s not those white sheets you can see in the picture above: those were thin ribbons of some vegetable, celeriac at a guess. And artfully draping some foliage over proceedings, to make it look more like a still life than a £45 plate of food, didn’t fool me.
I was gratified to find it wasn’t just me, though. David Ellis ordered this dish just after they opened. “The kitchen is settling in” was his verdict on it: on this evidence, they haven’t got there yet.
After this we still had a little wine to drink, so we had a look at the dessert menu and enjoyed the room a little more, now it was less packed. And again, it wasn’t Town’s fault necessarily but the dessert menu didn’t really scratch me where I itched. I’m sure it would be a great menu for loads of you, that you’d make a beeline for the buttermilk pudding or the pandan milk cake, go crazy for the “coconut tapioca” that put me off ordering the mango with yoghurt sorbet. But by this point I’d given up on ordering something else just for the sake of it, so chocolate tart it was.
But before that I have to explain the other service mishap, which I’m afraid involves a little too much detail. I’m going to do it, though, because it illustrates how exactly Town was trying just a little too hard, and because I know if there’s one thing my readers love it’s me either coming a cropper or talking about a perceived bad experience.
So, because it was Zoë’s birthday they brought her out a little treat-sized portion of the chocolate tart, which she ate and loved. That was really kind of them. And because we loved it, we ordered a portion each, and so the staff brought out our cutlery. And then, before our dessert turned up, even though we were sitting there having a perfectly nice time, one of the over-attentive staff swooped on our table, totally unsolicited, and tried to clear the cutlery, which we actually needed, away, knocking the rest of my glass of wine over in the process.
So that was annoying, and they were perfectly nice and apologetic – although I did end up mopping it up myself – and then to say sorry they brought me a glass of the dessert wine Zoë had ordered over for me. Which, again, was kind, but I didn’t actually want it. So I topped up Zoë’s glass, at which point it transpired, as far as I could tell, that actually they hadn’t brought me the Coteaux du Layon Zoë had ordered but something cheaper. So I ended up soaked and irked, with a drink I didn’t want, having accidentally adulterated Zoë’s very nice drink, and feeling ungrateful into the bargain. Hey ho.
But yes, the chocolate tart was lovely, an oblong lozenge of indulgent ganache that tested your resolve, made you wield a fork with almost surgical precision, trying to make the experience last as long as possible. The black barley ice cream was pleasant, if surprisingly generic given that description, and even the raisins, soaked in Pedro Ximenez, were a lot of fun.
Would I have come away thinking that the base was so molecule-thin that it was hard to describe it as a tart if I wasn’t still pondering my spilled wine? Would I have noted that the hazelnut mentioned on the menu, like the lardo from earlier on, were nowhere to be seen on the plate? We’ll never know.
All that said and done I settled up, although not before taking advantage of Town’s facilities, which are exceptionally plush and luxurious and boast a gorgeous hand soap (I wish I’d remembered to take a picture). Our meal, including an optional ten per cent service charge, came to just under two hundred and ninety pounds.
I think, for what we had, that’s slightly on the steep side – but bear in mind I’m saying that from a perspective unlike that of most broadsheet reviewers who get to expense everything. But it was Zone 1, it was Covent Garden, so maybe that’s only to be expected. “Nobody gets out for under £80/head in central London any more for food you’d tell your friends about. Unless your friends like talking about pizza” was Giles Coren’s contribution on this subject, and who’s more relatable than Coren? Exactly.
If you found it easy to guess the rating on this one, having read all this, then have a gold star, because I’ve found it very difficult to assess. The room is great, though not as great as everyone said it would be. The menu I personally found more limited than I expected. The food was quite nice, but not as amazing as the reams of breathless prose devoted to it in the papers.
It’s very strange, this. I’m not an expert, but I imagine there are countless restaurants in London better than Town. Some of them may even have opened the same month as Town did. And yet nearly everybody who reviews restaurants for a living dropped in on this place within six weeks to say how great it was.
Does it do good things for the food scene in this country that our vanishingly small number of restaurant critics all go to the same restaurants? No. Am I part of the problem by reviewing the place as well? Not sure we’re comparing apples with apples really, but possibly, yes.
Never mind. Town is quite nice, and I suppose I’m glad I went there and tried it. Nothing I ate will feature in any list I make at the end of the year, but not everybody gets on the podium. You can be a decent restaurant without managing that. Would I go again, though? Well, between the places in London that I’ve loved and would dearly like to revisit and the restaurants in the capital burning a hole in my to do list, I think the answer to that is no.
But that’s just me. Giles Coren said he’d happily go there “every day, if that’s all right with them”. But his mate owns the place, so I’m guessing he gets some kind of discount. Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure: I do not know Jonathan Downey. Not only that, but I honestly have no idea who he is.
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.
Snobby’s, a wine bar and Italian small plates spot in Redland, has everything going for it, on paper. It is on one of Bristol’s most decorated gastronomic streets, opposite the critically acclaimed Dongnae and a few doors down from freshly Michelin starred Wilsons and Little Hollows, itself the holder of a Bib Gourmand. It’s received an approving write-up in the Financial Times and floppy-haired grifters Topjaw have featured the place.
It is, you would think, a safe bet. And yet it was at Snobby’s last week that I had arguably the worst – and definitely one of the strangest – experiences at any restaurant in nearly 12 years of eating out and writing about it. So, to channel my inner John Oliver, this week, let’s have a look at that. Because in the process I suspect we’ll find out a lot about what restaurants are supposed to be for, and what happens when they start to forget that.
So what went wrong? Well, it wasn’t the room, which is a really lovely space, all pale wood tables, Hans Wegner wishbone chairs and deep green wood panelling. You enter the dining room through a buzzy terrace, and it feels like a lovely spot to while away a couple of hours.
Zoë pointed out that the banquette sat a little too high, like it had been put in by a contestant on Interior Design Masters who never ate in restaurants, but it was a minor quibble. We arrived just after 8 and although many diners were al fresco there were still plenty in the dining room.
The problem wasn’t with the menu, either. It was a compact affair with a handful of nibbles and then seven dishes, priced between nine and twenty quid. The menu recommended two plates per person, adding Don’t forget to share!
As we were trying to decide our server kindly pointed out that they were running low on focaccia, so we decided to nab a portion before any more diners took their tables and snagged the last of it. It was delicious, salty stuff cut into cuboids, brilliant dipped in olive oil and balsamic. The salted almonds, glossy with oil, were equally good. This was a promising start, we thought, five minutes in. It was, with hindsight, the last point at which any of this felt normal.
So, by then it was time to order proper food; it must have been something like twenty past eight by then. Feeling like trying as much of the menu as we could, and being in no rush, we asked our server if we could order a few dishes to be going on with, and more after that.
“I’m afraid not” he said. “It’s just that the kitchen is closing soon.”
The exact time it shut was not specified, and we were too taken aback to ask for details. Was there no wiggle room on that, we asked? Apparently not – the thing was, he said, we were their last customers of the night. At twenty past eight. What happened to we might run out of focaccia?
Never mind, we thought. We could order everything we wanted to try and at least control the order that our dishes came out in, so we could still experience something like the evening we had in mind. Would that be possible, we asked? Ah, that would happen naturally, the server said. The lamb dish we’d ordered was the thing that took most time to cook, about twelve minutes, whereas a couple of the small plates, served cold, would come out faster.
Now, you could take this to mean one of two things. One might be that the kitchen, being in the business of hospitality, understanding how to pace and sequence dishes to give diners an enjoyable meal, would space things out to maximise the enjoyment of their customers. Or it could mean that the first couple of small plates would come out almost immediately and the lamb dish twelve minutes after that. Can you guess which one happened here?
So yes, Zoë enjoyed her burrata dish, which arrived something like five minutes after we’d placed our order. It was more about buying than cooking, as this kind of dish often is, but everything was present, correct, nicely bought and displayed to its best advantage. The tomatoes, a bright array of red, yellow and green, were lovely and scattering the dish with more of those fried almonds was a nice touch, as was the slick of lush pesto anointing the whole shebang.
At exactly the same time, out came the monkfish crudo, which was less successful. It looked like a limpid pond of the stuff, micro coriander and thinly sliced radish floating on its surface, and I quite liked the orange and soya dressing and little spikes of some kind of seeds or peppercorns. But the monkfish felt too thick, coarse and meaty for the crudo treatment, and this, to me, just didn’t work.
I think it needed something more slight, translucent and refined, like the sea bass crudo I saw on the menu of another Bristol restaurant the following evening. But then maybe monkfish justified the price tag, at nearly seventeen pounds. At the price of a main in many restaurants you got a small plate here, whisked out mere minutes after we ordered it. Still, these two dishes had arrived close together, and the menu’s instructions said that we should remember to share, so perhaps it was okay.
Or it would have been if the next plate, a hot dish, hadn’t arrived literally two minutes later. Ricotta and parmesan gnudi – dumplings – came as a trio in an asparagus cream with more asparagus, petits pois and, allegedly, a miso butter.
I am not entirely sure that three dumplings encourages sharing, and I’m not sure it’s worth the best part of seventeen quid. But I’m equally sure that bringing it out at the same time that there are two other dishes already on the table hardly encourages sharing either. By the time Zoë got to trying any of this, it was lukewarm at best, as was her enthusiasm for the whole thing.
I nearly didn’t mention this, because it all happened so fast, but with all this going on and dishes turning up faster than we could make inroads into the dishes that preceded them, we also tried ordering some wine. The initial choice we’d gone for, we were told, was not cold enough, and so – amid the flurry of plates – we were also brought a possible alternative, which we didn’t massively like.
So we asked for an albariño, and the server who eventually brought it over was absolutely brilliant – enthusiastic about the wine, positive about the producer with loads of detail that brought it to life. It was the only example of great service we had all evening: Snobby’s should hang on to that person, and clone them if they can.
Meanwhile, with three dishes on our table and us struggling to eat them, along came the lamb dish we’d been told took twelve minutes to cook, approximately ten minutes after our first dishes turned up. You couldn’t fault the kitchen for efficiency, just for other things like understanding how meals are meant to work and the difference between a lovely meal out and Man v. Food.
And it’s such a pity, because the lamb dish showed, too, that you couldn’t fault the kitchen for talent. It was the nicest dish I had that night and one of the best things I ate all week – a slow-cooked, sticky, sumptuous cylinder of shoulder and leg, crying out to be pulled apart with a fork, resting on a moat of puréed cannelini beans and swimming in a decadent, reduced jus. Such a lovely dish, ruined by bringing it out as part of some kind of deranged conveyor belt.
Restaurant bloggers like to come out with a particularly wanky cliché where they say that restaurants take quality ingredients and “treat them with respect”. It’s empty nonsense, as if the alternative is to take them out, buy them a few drinks and then ghost them until the end of time.
But quite aside from that, treating ingredients with respect isn’t only about making a good dish out of them. It’s also about treating that dish with respect, serving it in a way that enables it to have its moment in the sun. That wasn’t happening here. And when you don’t treat your dishes with respect, guess what? You’re not really treating your customers with respect, either.
At the same time as the lamb, the arancino – that ideally we would have eaten closer to the start of the meal – had also materialised. Half an hour after we sat down, about fifteen minutes after we’d ordered, our five not that small dishes had all been brought to the table, leaving us scrambling to eat them before they went cold and moving our empties to the neighbouring unoccupied table for four (a minor gripe, but if they were going to bring it all out at once they could at least have put us on a table that could accommodate all that crockery: they had no other customers after all).
As for the arancino, Zoë had some and thought it was pleasant if unexceptional. It had scamorza in the middle, and a honk of truffle oil, but it was slightly big, stodgy and lacking in texture. She could only tackle a little of it and I decided that I’d rather eat the lamb, which I loved, than make inroads into the arancino.
Here’s the other thing: when a restaurant brings out five dishes – seventy-five pounds’ worth of food – in the space of ten minutes, not making any real effort to sequence them, you get too full to eat it all very quickly.
To emphasise how farcical this was, it was only around the point that the lamb and the arancino arrived that we finally got our bottle of wine. I thought it was rather nice, Zoë thought it too wasn’t quite cold enough. But we made up for that, because any residual warmth we had towards Snobby’s had well and truly vanished by then.
We struggled through some of the food, left half of the gnudi and half of the arancino, on account of it being too cold and our being too full. The plates were taken away without any questions in a strangely incurious fashion.
Normally this stage, when your empty dishes are taken away, is one for quiet and happy reflection. But instead, we both just gently fumed. You might expect that from me, but Zoë is as good-natured as they come, and this meal left her feeling positively aggrieved. It takes some going to piss her off, as her seven years and counting shacked up with me proves beyond reasonable doubt.
Chatting away about it, we couldn’t quite believe that we had been rushed through all those dishes at breakneck speed so that the kitchen could close – at twenty to nine, no less. And if the kitchen really did close early, perhaps Snobby’s should mention that to people making bookings at 8.15? Because they seemed quite happy to tell people making earlier bookings online that they only had the table for an hour and three quarters: it wasn’t as if this kind of communication was beyond them.
It got more ridiculous after that. Our food gone, and with a feeling that the wait staff were studiously avoiding asking us how it had been, we were left with the best part of a bottle of wine, with notes of stone fruit, citrus and… bleach? Yes, bleach: because at this point a strong waft of the stuff was emanating from the kitchen, obliterating any subtlety or enjoyment in the rest of our Albariño. Did the staff have a bus to catch?
Enough was enough, so we flagged down our server – the same chap who had told us the kitchen was closing and the food would come out as and when – to pay the bill and he asked us, in a perfunctory way, how it was. And that loosened the lid for both Zoë and I to say that no, actually, it hadn’t been all right. So we explained that we’d felt rushed, and not listened to, and that we couldn’t really understand how either the serving staff or the kitchen could have thought our evening was an experience anyone would willingly choose.
Zoë asked him, given that he’d previously told us the kitchen was closing, when exactly the kitchen shut. He said that it closed when the last customers had ordered. But, Zoë said, we were the last customers and we’d asked not to order all our food at once, so why were we railroaded into doing so? He had no answer to that.
Fair play to him: he listened, a little like a rabbit in the headlights, and at the end of it agreed to knock off our service charge. Which felt slightly like missing the point to me, because some of the service – especially the person who brought our wine – was excellent and really the problems were more fundamental than that. When two dishes had gone back to the kitchen half-finished, because the timing had been so completely out of kilter, a better step might have been to knock those off the bill.
And bless him, I’m sure he meant well when he said that he appreciated the feedback and that actually, it would help him in an ongoing debate he had been having with the kitchen. But what I took from that was that this had been an issue for a while, that it hadn’t been fixed, and that our crummy meal was collateral damage in the process of eventually resolving those problems.
I was delighted for their future customers who might benefit from that piece of learning, but it didn’t help us at all with our wasted evening. Our bill, with service knocked off, came to just short of one hundred and thirty-five pounds, for a meal that was over in something like thirty-five minutes. I know there is a risk, when you complain about an experience like this,that you might sound entitled. But really: would you have been happy with that?
The following day, I got an email from the owner of Snobby’s. I’d booked online and, having been tipped off by the staff, he contacted me via my email address. I explained to him what had gone wrong and, to his credit, he said that he needed to pick these points up with his staff. He said that he’d not been as close to the business in recent weeks, and that this was a timely reminder that he needed to do something about it. He didn’t refund anything, but did send me a voucher for the cost of the two dishes which we didn’t finish.
And that’s very decent, but I’m not sure I’d use that voucher, potentially throwing good money after bad. He said that he was sure I understood the pressure hospitality was under right now, and that the feedback would help them to survive in a competitive industry. I know that’s right, but the converse is also true: customers have less disposable income than ever before, and they simply won’t want to spend it on an experience like that. Eating out is more costly, so people do it less often, and when they do they don’t want to spend that kind of money and have an experience that feels sub-Wagamama.
The Bristol restaurateur Dan O’Regan (the owner of Lapin) writes a blog about running restaurants. In a recent piece he talked about kindness, saying that it’s “the only thing that’s ever made restaurants work”. He said that customers deserve warmth, and a feeling that they’re welcome, however much they are spending or whatever kind of meal they want to have.
I don’t say any of this out of unkindness myself. I could have not written this review, which is after all telling you not to go somewhere you might well not have gone anyway. But I did, not to vent my spleen – fun though that might be – but because this experience encapsulates something of what restaurants are supposed to do and how jarring it can feel when they drift from their purpose.
And it felt to me like Snobby’s had completely forgotten what the purpose of restaurants was, namely to look after customers, to make them feel welcome and cared for, and to prioritise their convenience over the convenience of the kitchen. Because if a restaurant’s aim is to minimise inconvenience to its staff, or even if it comes across that way, I can’t help but feel that somebody, somewhere, has put the cart before the horse.
A restaurant that does that, I think, has forgotten what restaurants are for and what makes them such wonderful places. They betray the promise that great restaurants make, the covenant they have with the customers that love them. And a meal is never just the food. It’s the food, the room, the service, the timing. In restaurants, as in comedy, timing is everything. Get that wrong and it’s closer to tragedy.
Anyway, fingers crossed that future customers benefit from the disappointing evening I had. I would really like to see Snobby’s turn things around, because it’s a lovely spot and it’s capable of cooking some excellent food. They might be redeemed, and I really hope that they are. But my voucher, I suspect, won’t be any time soon.
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It was my birthday about four weeks ago – 45 again, please don’t ask me for any documentary evidence – and I had everything mapped out. A couple of days off that week, and then the best part of the following week off into the bargain. We had an Airbnb booked in Bristol for the second week, just up the road from Wilsons and Little Hollows, and a packed itinerary of restaurants to visit, some of them for the blog and some of them just because.
I was all geared up for a week of waking up with nothing to do, of eating well and drinking well, a week of that feeling of being carefree and elsewhere, and I was so looking forward to it. I even had one day planned where we’d stay in our neighbourhood – a bacon sandwich at Wilsons Bread Shop for brunch, good coffee, a spot of mooching and lazing in the afternoon, dinner nearby and then drinks at the Good Measure, my favourite Bristol pub. It was going to be a glorious 24 hours where, just briefly, we could pretend we lived there.
It would have happened, too, but for one thing: my wife fractured a bone in her foot again, and was under strict medical advice to keep her steps to an absolute minimum. I had been running on fumes in the run-up to that mini break – we both had, really – and we were both devastated. We contemplated taking the train to Bristol, as originally planned, and taking taxis everywhere, seeing it as convalescing somewhere else, and my wishful thinking let me believe, for something like half an hour, that such a revised plan would work, would be a sensible use of time and money.
Deep down I knew we were just fooling ourselves. So the Airbnb booking was pushed out until later in the year, and I went in and individually cancelled every single restaurant booking, feeling my holiday dreams die a little more with every email confirmation. I knew it couldn’t be helped, and I knew it wasn’t Zoë’s fault, but I was in a funk. I should explain that this is a “having your birthday in March” thing: I lost two successive birthdays to Covid, the world locked down days before my birthday five years ago, so I felt like fate had already fucked with enough of my plans.
Anyway, after enough sulking Zoë and I hatched a plan: we would have a staycation instead. Not what people like to refer to as a staycation, where you go on holiday somewhere else in the country where you live, but a proper staycation where you sleep every night in your house but experience being on holiday in your home, for a change. We would do some of the things in and around Reading that we loved and others we never got round to, the week of my birthday and the week after, the only proviso being that they had to be places we could reach by bus or taxi.
So this week, instead of the usual review, you get a guide to my Reading staycation, a little What I Did On My Holidays piece. You get that for a couple of reasons. One is that so many people liked the idea that I just had to write it up. Plenty of you wanted to read this one, and someone commented on the Edible Reading Facebook page that she’d said something similar on a local group elsewhere. “I often think we should pretend we’re visiting, and spend the weekend enjoying fab coffee shops, the river and so on” she wrote, adding “We are lucky!”.
We are lucky, indeed. And the second reason why I’m writing this piece this week is that Reading, around the time that I had my staycation, had a bit of a moment where it featured in the national press more than once. First, the Sunday Times listed it as one of the Best Places To Live 2025. The writeup had a little bit of the obvious in it: the MERL got a mention, no doubt because of past glories, and the references to Paddington felt a tad clichéd. And I don’t know what Polaroids Thames Lido’s PR must be in possession of to ensure that they’re always mentioned in a piece of this kind, but mentioned they inevitably were.
Yet beyond that the Sunday Times actually managed to capture something of what makes our town special, even if they think the tap room in the town centre is run by a brewery called Silent Craft. I was especially pleased to see mentions of Blue Collar, the Harris Garden, Madoo and Mama’s Way. Someone had obviously done their research, and I speak as a source they might well have used for it. And I was thrilled to see Dough Bros, barely eight months after I reviewed them, being talked about in the national press. This felt like a writeup of Reading as it actually is, rather than the bland homogenised version Reading UK (or Reading CIC, or REDA, or whoever they are) is always droning on about.
A couple of weeks ago Reading appeared in the national papers again. The article in the The i Paper might have described it as an “average commuter town”, and spent a lot of time talking about Reading’s failed city centre bids and how easy it is to reach or leave, but even it managed to squeeze in mentions of Reading Museum, Phantom – which it said was “by the river”, for some reason – and Caversham Court Gardens. Okay, the QI klaxon still went off when the contractually obligated references to Thames Lido and the MERL popped up, as they always do, but as Reading’s most famous inmate once said, it’s still better to be talked about than not.
So, with all that said, here’s how I spent my staycation – spread across a couple of weeks – in Reading and its environs, only travelling by bus and taxi and still managing to fit in some of the very best things the town and the surrounding countryside have to offer. I hope it helps, and maybe it will tempt you to spend one of your next holidays in Reading, too. You could do an awful lot worse.
* * * * *
So where did we start, on my birthday? At the Nag’s Head, of course.
The first drink of a holiday, for me at least, is always a wondrous moment. I eschew the airport Wetherspoons, although I’ve been known to have a pre-flight Nando’s or Wagamama, and nowadays I pass on drinking on the plane, too, because British Airways is no longer what it was. But there’s something about that very first drink when you reach your destination that’s special, that first ultra-cold lager or fortifying glass of vermut, glass of Brugse Zot or industrial strength Spanish gin and tonic. By that point all your cares have dissipated, and all that remains is relaxation and indulgence.
I didn’t see any reason why it should be any different on a staycation, so our first taxi dropped us on Russell Street. And because the sun was out, albeit briefly, we started our first beer in the garden out back before coming to terms with reality and moving back inside. I’ve talked at great length before – nearly everyone has – about how brilliant the Nag’s is: how it covers all bases, how it’s a perfect summer and winter pub, great on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, the best Reading Half Marathan and Bank Holiday Monday pub.
And that’s all true, but it wasn’t until I went there as part of my staycation that I realised another wonderful side of the pub I’d never experienced: boozing there with reckless abandon, on a school night, knowing you didn’t have to work the next day. You know, like people do when they’re on holiday.
It was at its very best that night – just busy enough, but not rammed with people watching the football, tables sufficiently occupied that it had a pleasing buzz but with no frustrating queue at the bar. Sometimes I forget, too, just how good the Nag’s Head’s beer list is, but lately it has had one of two brilliant session IPAs on keg most of the time – Sonoma by Manchester’s Track and Santiago by far more local Two Flints, from Windsor. Both are great, and both give you the nursery slopes to start on before it all goes downhill and you’re on the dank, stronger stuff you know you’ll regret the next day.
Perhaps best of all, we nabbed my favourite spot in the whole place – the little table for two, right up at the bar, next to the coat hooks. Perfect for sitting side by side and looking out on that room, seeing if you’ve spotted anybody you know – to greet or to blank, both are possible – and, of course, ideally suited for just standing up, getting someone’s attention and picking your next beer.
It was blissful, and on a night like that you can easily think that Reading could do without any other pubs, as long as it still had this one. And I could have stayed all night but, like the first few drinks of a holiday, the session was inevitably curtailed by dinner plans. We had a reservation for the first night of our holiday, my birthday, all the way across town.
* * * * *
I don’t get to eat at Clay’s anywhere near as often as I would like to, for a number of reasons. One is writing this blog – having to eat somewhere new most weeks means that, unlike many people, I can’t just go there because I feel like it (and no, I’m not asking for sympathy). Another is their location. I’m sure that the residents of Caversham are delighted to have them nearby, almost as delighted as they are merely to live in Caversham, but the truth is that when they were in the centre, and I was in the centre, they were a more frequent pit stop for me.
Even so, when it’s a special occasion they are the pre-eminent choice, for me and I suspect many others. When Zoë got a promotion last year, it was Clay’s we turned up at on the spur of the moment to celebrate, and for my birthday it was hard to imagine eating anywhere else in Reading. Going through those deep ochre doors to find it warm and bustling I felt excitement, as I always do, about the prospect of eating there. Because the menu at Clay’s, even excluding their regional specials, has so many good dishes on it that you could eat a different combination every time and never get bored, especially if you go there as infrequently as I do.
I’ve never reviewed Clay’s, for reasons I explained years ago when it opened, and to my surprise I still get people approaching me via social media occasionally, even now, explaining that they’re going there for the first time and asking what they should consider ordering. Very rarely has there been a restaurant where you could so easily get away with a non-committal “oh, it’s all good”, but even so I always feel like I have to respond, all the time painfully aware that you could ask a dozen people and get a dozen slightly different answers, none of which would be wrong.
So, for what it’s worth, here’s my answer: for starters I think it’s hard to look beyond five of their small plates. The bhooni kaleji, the chicken livers that have been on the menu since the very beginning, are outstanding – if you don’t like chicken livers they’ll convert you, and if you do like them they will ruin all others. The gobi Manchurian is the elevation of a dish which is quite good all across Reading, very good at Chilis but exquisite at Clay’s. They simply will not be outdone, you see, not by anyone.
Nandana and Sharat are fried chicken fans, as am I, and their Payyoli chicken fry is as good a rendition as you will get anywhere in Reading, including Gurt Wings. It comes dusted in a rich coconut crumb and served with tomato chutney, and although I always end up sharing it I also grumble silently that it’s too good to share: it helps that of all the small plates at Clay’s it must be the least small. I also resent sharing Clay’s pork belly, which is sweetened with jaggery, sharpened with ginger and cooked until it is sticky, rendered heaven, but I do it.
And finally, I would always tell you to try the cut mirchi chat. I have a real soft spot for this dish because I think I tried a prototype before it went on the menu, and it’s always for me been the most sharable, most snackable of all Clay’s starters: those slices of chilli and gram flour, crunchy and golden, moreish almost beyond belief. If you ask someone else, they’ll tell you to have the prawns, or the paneer majestic, or the lamb chops. And they’re right too, by the way, just differently right to me.
On this visit I decided to forego the pork belly – there were only two of us, after all – and although I regretted it I knew I was storing up a treat for next time. And if you asked me what I recommended from the main courses, I’d wax lyrical about Clay’s yakhni pulao, rice cooked in lamb bone broth, crowned with slow-cooked curried lamb. Or I’d tell you to go fancy and have the beef shin, cooked osso buco style and adorned with wild mushrooms.
If I was feeling old-school I’d recommend Nandana’s monkfish curry, sharper and more tart than her other dishes, made the way her mum does (although slightly less punchy than her mum’s version). And I would point out that the ghee roast chicken, the finest dish Clay’s ever made available to its home delivery customers, is on the menu in the restaurant, for now at least. I’d say that if you’ve never tried it you’re missing out.
But it was my birthday, and I was reminded that I ate at Clay’s before it was even born, so I had the bhuna venison, a dish I have been eating and loving now for nearly seven years. A couple of years ago I declared it Reading’s best dish, and eighteen intervening months have not changed my mind. But, because you can teach an old dog new tricks, on this visit I used a life hack I’d picked up from my friend Graeme, when we visited Clay’s earlier in the year for no other reason than because it was Friday.
“Have the keema biryani on the side, instead of the usual baghara rice”, he said. “Life changing.”
I did, and it was, and now I can’t imagine ever doing otherwise.
I have never been one of those people who goes to restaurants and takes home leftovers. I’ve always envied those people their limited appetites, or their restraint, while also wondering if they’re maybe a tad parsimonious. But on this occasion we quit while we were ahead, making room for Clay’s amazing peanut butter ice cream and a glass of dessert wine. We rolled into a taxi clutching a little plastic tub full of leftovers – some ghee roast chicken, some bhuna venison, some keema biryani. The first meal of a holiday is always special, but even having a staycation this felt as special as any dinner I’ve had away.
The following lunchtime, nursing a moderate to severe hangover and fresh from the series finale of Severance, I reheated it all in a saucepan for the two of us for lunch. The kitchen went from smelling of reed diffusers to smelling amazing in the space of five minutes, and if that jumble of flavours didn’t go I can honestly say I would never have noticed. You don’t get this luxury when you holiday abroad, I thought to myself.
* * * * *
On the Friday night, hangover largely under control, I did something I don’t do nearly often enough: I went to the theatre. I’ve always loved Progress, the proudly independent theatre on the Mount, and despite moving into the neighbourhood last year I’ve not visited anywhere near as frequently as I ought. So months ago I booked tickets for Zoë and I to watch Lovesong, Abi Morgan’s bittersweet portrait of a 40 year marriage.
As an aside, I should say that although Progress is a five minute walk from my house it’s a surprisingly difficult distance to travel by taxi. You feel faintly embarrassed even asking, and Zoë had to explain the situation to her cab driver, waggling the moonboot lest she be judged as too posh to push. But once you’re there, Progress really is quite a charming place – a little bar, full of affluent, cultured patrons and an auditorium with seats that are surprisingly comfy and spacious.
Does it ruin the overall effect to say that I didn’t love Lovesong? Probably, although I thought a couple of the performances were excellent. Some of that, I think, was down to it being a bit of a bummer: a play which ends with the husband counting out the pills so his ill wife can take her own life – sorry about the spoilers – is never going to give you that Friday feeling. It reminds me of the time when I sat down with Zoë to watch Vertigo, having told her what an incredible film it was, to be met with blank rage when the credits rolled.
“You didn’t tell me it was going to end like that!”
“What did you expect? He wasn’t going to run through the streets to get to the airport just in time to deliver a big speech and stop her getting on the plane. It’s not that kind of film.”
Honestly, she was furious: I’ve never made that mistake again.
But Lovesong, well, it induced symptoms akin to Vertigo. We took the comically short taxi journey home dead set on eating chocolate in front of the television and watching something slightly more uplifting. Like the news. Even so, I recommend adding some culture to a Reading staycation, because mine wouldn’t have been the same without it. And I can’t recommend the whole Progress Theatre experience highly enough – in fact I’ve already booked a ticket for the comedy next month, to watch the splendidly named Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. I honestly can’t wait.
* * * * *
My final meal out of the first leg of my staycation was one of the biggest treats of all, Gurt Wings at Blue Collar Corner. I have been eating Gurt’s food since they first turned up at Blue Collar in Market Place, and I remember Glen telling me how good they were before he even landed them as a semi-regular trader. I recall trekking to Market Place regularly during lockdown, back when Glen wasn’t even allowed seating, and eating my chicken on the little concrete posts opposite Picnic.
I even remember eating their slightly obscene chicken burger special, served in an iced doughnut with a strip of candied bacon on top. They did it once a year, and I reckoned once a year was enough – until I had it two years in succession, and realised that once in a lifetime was probably enough. And of course, I remember going there after Zoë was discharged from the Royal Berks with Covid, in the winter of 2021, and them giving me a big portion of chicken for her, telling me to run like the wind and get it back to her.
That kind of thing makes you a fan. I have followed the hokey cokey of Gurt opening permanently at Blue Collar Corner, then pulling out, then coming back for special occasions. In that time I’ve eaten their chicken in Bristol, from time to time, and watched them open a permanent site in Bristol’s Wapping Wharf, team up with seemingly every influencer known to man, expand their fleet and start popping up at exotic locations like Royal Wootton Bassett and finally, in January, coming to Blue Collar Corner again, back for good, Gary Barlow style.
And even though I can now have them whenever I like it doesn’t, yet, make their food feel any less special. Besides, eating it when you’re on holiday – even if it’s a Saturday when everybody else is off work too – did feel a little different, sitting on the benches, people watching and waiting for the buzzer to go off. I decided to be clever and try one of Gurt’s two influencer-inspired specials – god knows why they’ve never asked to do a collab with me – strips loaded with garlic butter and festooned with Parmesan. It was a departure from my almost habitual order – popcorn chicken “Lost In Translation”, with gochujang and sriracha – and I enjoyed it, but not enough not to slightly regret not sticking to my guns.
It helped that we had the huge blocks of halloumi too, covered in habanero chilli syrup and crumbled honeycomb. That made everything better. Afterwards I put a picture of my food up and someone, online, said the chicken to tater tot ratio seemed all wrong. My instinct was to jump to Gurt’s defence, but looking back through my many photos of Gurt’s chicken strips I had to concede that the commenter had a point.
But that’s 2025 all over: you get less, for more, and if you decide to be outraged by it you’re not only hurting yourself but the businesses you love. There are times to be aggrieved by shrinkflation – I feel a bit stabby every time I buy a 90g bar of chocolate – but when you’re on holiday is not one of them.
Our commitment to using buses to spare Zoë’s foot was so total that we then did something ridiculous. We walked from Blue Collar to the very top of the Oxford Road, just so we could get the number 1 bus from Newbury. We did that because that bus terminates halfway up Blagrave Street, a stone’s throw from C.U.P. And we did that so we could sit in our time-honoured seats up at the window, on those fetching leather stools, drinking mocha and looking out on the town.
It was a Saturday, and opposite our seats we could see the Town Hall, and the entrance we’d emerged from ten months ago, into a swarm of confetti, newlywed, dazed and happy. I always love sitting there when married couples come out, mobbed by their friends and relatives, and I remember that glorious sunny day last year when that was me. I often holiday in the same places – Malaga, Bruges, Granada, Montpellier – and some of that is about going back to places that hold such happy memories for me. It turns out that a staycation in Reading is like that, too.
* * * * *
For the second leg of my staycation, the following week, there were some chores to do. Despite having moved last summer there were still boxes to unpack, order to impose on chaos, shit to get done. I am not someone who enjoys doing those things in my time off – I moan, grumble and gripe (“when else are you going to do it, then?” Zoë asks, and then I gripe some more because I don’t have an answer). But I agreed to it, just this once, on the basis that we interspersed it with treats. And the treat I had very firmly in mind – for the first morning of the staycation, no less – was a trip to Fidget & Bob.
Fidget & Bob has changed quite a lot from the place I visited and reviewed seven years ago. Back then it stayed open til early evening, and its weekly char siu was the stuff of legend. Its scrambled eggs, too: I still think about those. But it took a cautious approach during Covid, and since then it has honed what it does to remain excellent at it, just within carefully constrained limits.
These days it’s closed Sundays and Mondays, and the rest of the week it shuts just after lunch. And Fidget & Bob’s social media is self-effacing almost to a fault: they easily spend as much time promoting their weekly delivery of excellent doughnuts from Pipp & Co as they do talking about their own gorgeous sandwiches. That is, to be fair, typical of them: they’ve always been really good, they just don’t necessarily shout about it.
In the old days I would have gone there for brunch on a Sunday, but my chances to visit it are far fewer than they once were, so my staycation presented an opportunity that I absolutely seized with both hands. And it was lovely to sit in that room again – not quite as diehard as the people outside in the plaza – and drink Fidget & Bob’s terrific coffee.
So many memories are attached to that place: it was there, for example, that I went for a celebratory lunch after having my first Covid vaccine, crammed into a room at the Madejski Stadium with people in my demographic. “I reckon it’s the first time I’ve been in a room with so many people my age in a very long time” said my friend Mike when he had the same experience. “And all I could think was, do I look that tired?“
But the big draw at Fidget & Bob is, and possibly always was, the O’Muffin, their take on the sausage and egg McMuffin. I miss their square pucks of sausage meat, served as part of a brunch with their superlative scrambled eggs, but I understand why they stopped offering that. And the O’Muffin is far from a consolation prize. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest brunches, that floury muffin bursting at the seams with sausagemeat, fried egg, American cheese.
It is one of my favourite things to eat, just as going out for brunch is one of my favourite things to do on holiday. I personally like to dip mine in a little pool of HP, much to Zoë’s horror. I also like to have it with hash browns, a coffee, another coffee and, ideally, a brownie. And, precisely because I was on holiday, that was exactly how I had it.
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I went to Orwell’s during my staycation. You might well already know that, because I’ve written about it.
I’m not going to repeat all that, but it did make me think about the benefits of a staycation. Because if I went on holiday, if I did a city break somewhere, I would plan loads of meals out. Some would be casual, some would be higher end. But often on holiday I might push the boat out for one of my meals and go somewhere fancy – Palodu in Malaga, for example, Parcelles in Paris, Bruut in Bruges or Michelin starred Reflet d’Obione in Montpellier. And yet, in this country, I wouldn’t necessarily do that: I seem to associate that kind of meal with going on holiday.
So here is another benefit of a staycation in Reading: giving yourself permission to do those things, the things that might otherwise be inextricably linked with going abroad. Maybe this is just me, and you’re all much better at allowing yourselves those luxuries. But, for me at least, it was lovely to be on holiday in Reading and to think right, what do I never get to do, and where have I always meant to go? As thought experiments go, it was an especially enjoyable one. Like my commenter said, all the way back at the start of this piece, it’s nice to pretend you’re visiting.
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On the Friday, the post chores treat was a trip to Geo Café in Caversham. One chore, which was all Zoë and for which I take no credit, was to get our garage looking like this.
I don’t know when I got a garage that looks like a branch of Oddbins: it just kind of happened. I used to have a basement at the old house, and Zoë moved in and then next thing I knew she was buying racks off eBay and turning it into a beer repository. Then came the fridge, humming away and full of IPAs. I knew there were also boxes and crates of lambics under an old coffee table, ageing better than I have, but I’m not sure I realised the enormity of it.
And then we moved house, and moving the booze was an ordeal. So many boxes, so many bags and bags for life. Beers Zoë bought years ago, whole crates of Orval she was ageing “for an experiment”. Several bottles of gin we’d got as presents but not started drinking. And of course the wine – wine bought on trips away, wine bought on holiday, a couple of wines left over from our wedding, bottles of fizz given to us as gifts.
“Don’t worry, I’ll build you something” my father-in-law said to Zoë when he saw the space we had in the garage. And I believed him: my father-in-law is like a cross between the Wombles and MacGyver, he picks stuff up on his travels and is just very good at turning them into tangible things. One day he arrived with a bunch of wood, and the next thing you knew he had constructed this bespoke booze storage. Shortly after we moved in last year somebody tried to break into our garage – unsuccessfully, I might add. If someone managed it now I think we’d find them the next morning, comatose.
During the staycation we made a conscious attempt to make inroads into our stock levels, moving stuff into the fridge for drinking, picking some beers we’ve wanted to try for a while, opening one of the nicest white wines in our collection on a beautiful warm day. Didn’t even scratch the surface.
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Another advantage staycations have over holidays – or not, depending on how you see these things – is the chance to catch up with friends. So I was delighted to make it over to Geo Café on a warm sunny afternoon, sit in the Orangery and have a good natter up with Keti, my friend who owns the place. Talking to Keti is one of my absolute favourite things to do, catching up on the comings and goings of Caversham and Henley life, hearing about her family and her kids.
It’s also a great way to keep yourself mentally sharp: Keti usually has three conversations with you simultaneously, and will effortlessly change lane from one to another seemingly at random, forcing you to keep up. It’s more effective, I suspect, than doing Sudoku. So Zoë and I stretched our legs out in the Orangery, drinking beautiful coffee and hearing all Keti’s news. I had an utterly marvellous plate of bacon and eggs – I may have been slightly hungover again, but what are holidays for? – and felt thoroughly fortified by the whole experience. It was, as people say, good for the soul. Seeing Keti’s new dog, who was absolutely adorable, was good for the soul too.
We had plans to be at Loddon Brewery that afternoon, but Keti refused to let us call a taxi. “Zezva will drive you” she said, in a way that suggested she wouldn’t hear anything to the contrary, from Zezva or from us. And so Zezva drove us out to Dunsden Green in the sunshine in his lipstick-red BMW, a recent acquisition of which he was very proud, and we settled into the leather seats and enjoyed south Oxfordshire whooshing past. A frequent part of holidays, for me, is finding my favourite café: but I did that in Reading, to be honest, long ago.
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I had never been to Loddon before, so this is where you can all shout at the screen that you’ve known for a very long time that it’s extremely nice and question, with some justification, what took me so long.
It’s a beautiful spot, in the middle of nowhere, and I can see that for those of you who live nearby, or like yomping across the countryside from Emmer Green, dogwalking or otherwise, it must feel like a blessed place. It has a little farm shop – not extensively stocked, but nice all the same – and tables outside, and sitting there with a cold pint of Citra Quad, on a day just warm enough to allow for it, I got why the place is held in such reverence.
That weather didn’t last, but heading inside to their covered terrace if anything I liked it even better. “It reminds me of Buon Appetito” said Zoë, and I could see that, could see how the sun-dappled terrace and clear corrugated roof conjured up memories of the courtyard where I’d had so many memorable meals in the summer of 2022.
Loddon is kind of a craft beer tap room reimagined for affluent, rural, cask beer types. I don’t say that as a criticism, but at mid-afternoon on a Friday in March I was possibly the second youngest person there, and I was drinking with the youngest.
All that changed around five, and the demographic became fascinating: people finishing landscaping work nearby, coming in wearing their uniforms; young couples; mums with their kids, taking advantage of the boardgames stored inside. I loved how random it seemed, although I’m sure if I knew the place and the area better all those connections would make sense, and not be happenstance.
I’d also wanted to go to Loddon because I wanted to try the food. It used to be done by an outfit called Proper Takeout, but they now had a permanent site at the tap yard, and had rebranded themselves Proper Kitchen. They do different dishes on different days of the week – burgers on Thursdays, pizza on Saturdays, roasts on Sundays and so on. But on Fridays it was fish and chips, and I very much fancied checking it out.
The team behind Proper Kitchen are James Alcock, who used to work at Mya Lacarte and Thames Lido, and Nick Drew, who used to be head chef at Thames Lido. I rather offended him when he worked there, which I wrote about here, but fortunately for me he didn’t seem to recognise me when I went up and placed our order. If he did he was too professional to say, and if he gobbed in my tartar sauce it was too delicious for me to notice.
Almost everything we had from Proper Kitchen, would you believe, was knockout. Some of the best fish and chips I’ve had for a long time, combining pearlescent, flaky fish with light, lacy batter, the whole thing served on a pile of extremely good chips. The tartar sauce had that great combination of comfort and bite, and the battered halloumi, three thick squares of the stuff, was possibly my favourite thing of all. Only the frickles – big and watery, the batter just a tiny bit too sparse – slightly let the side down, but I was far too happy with everything else to care.
The taxi we booked to bring us home was late getting to Dunsden Green – I think they’d given the job to someone right in the middle of town, which forced us to spend an extra half hour there. It was about as far from a hardship as I could imagine: I went up to the bar, got us a final half each to finish on, and we sat there enjoying ourselves, aware that everybody else’s evening was several pints away from coming to an end.
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Would you be put off eating somewhere if it only had four dishes on the menu? This issue reared its ugly head on our final dinner of the staycation, when a taxi whizzed us down the A4 to the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, one of my favourite pubs. Zoë has been there without me, for something to do with Reading CAMRA, and I went there last year without her to review it. But we’d not eaten there together since before the pandemic, and a holiday afforded a chance to remedy that.
But everything went wrong. We’d initially booked for lunch, but ten minutes before our cab was due to arrive we discovered a leak under the kitchen sink. So we needed to do something about that, and the booking and the cab were rearranged for the evening. It is a beautiful pub, and although the sun had gone down by the time we got there it was still a gorgeous, cosy place with that whiff of woodsmoke.
And yes, there were only four main courses on the menu, but that didn’t matter because one of them was made of magic words: 12 hour slow cooked lamb shoulder and so really, it didn’t matter what any of the other choices were. Except that our waiter sauntered over and, by way of introduction, told us they had run out of the lamb shoulder. No matter, we thought: the Bell’s venison burger was magnificent, and always on the menu, so the fallback option would do nicely.
Then the waiter wandered back and advised us that actually, they had also sold out of the venison burger. So a cancelled and reorganised booking and a pricey taxi later, I was presented with a choice between the fish course and a vegetarian risotto. Normally I get hangry when I don’t know where I’m going to eat on holiday but this was a new one on me: getting hangry because I wasn’t wild about either of my two possible dishes. If it hadn’t been for the sixty minute round trip, I’d probably have gone elsewhere.
But that just shows how little I know, because despite that setback I had the most fantastic meal. It started with the Bell’s selection of beers – a gorgeous IPA on keg by Mad Squirrel Brewery, and an even better one on cask by Swindon’s Hop Kettle, a brewery I love but whose stuff I never seem to see anywhere. And then, ordering from the menu, even with those limitations, everything was beyond top notch.
That meant sourdough toast golden and shining with melted whipped lardo, great charcuterie with a cairn of cornichons, all mine, in the middle of the plate. It meant a pigeon Caesar salad – who knew there was such a thing – which was a riot of game bird, immaculately dressed lettuce, bronzed croutons and lashings of grated cheese. And it meant the risotto I had been so sniffy about, a stodgy, starchy puddle of the stuff which combined elasticity and comfort, shot through with the first of the season’s asparagus, perked up with lemon and blanketed with Spenwood. Who needs twelve-hour slow cooked lamb shoulder anyway?
And then, because it was right at the very beginning of spring and because the Bell is very good at it, a sticky toffee pudding. It turns out that it’s okay to go to a place that only has two choices on the menu, provided it’s as trustworthy as the Bell. I shall never doubt them again, if only because Zoë said I told you so more than once on the taxi ride home.
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I never like the final day of a holiday. Zoë likes to have a bit of a last day in our destination, leaving your bags with the hotel and taking one last wander before a late afternoon flight. For me, I can never enjoy that – although I’ve tried – so I would rather get up and go, taxi to the airport after checkout and have some of the day at home.
But there is something to be said, at the end of a holiday, for revisiting your favourite places before you start the sad journey back. And a staycation made that so much easier, and gave me the chance to right the biggest wrong of the week into the bargain. So Sunday lunchtime, mini-jetlagged from the clocks going forward, found us back at Blue Collar Corner, and this time I placed the Gurt order I should have made the first time.
They might be called Gurt Wings, but for me it’s always been about their JFC, their popcorn chicken. It’s the most generous, the most delicious and the most photogenic thing they do – chicken thigh, marinated in soy, fried up and then bathed in gochujang, striped with sriracha mayo and speckled with sesame. I remember the dark days before Gurt did popcorn chicken, and I remember trying an early prototype and thinking: yes, this. This is what you should be doing.
I am delighted they’ve never taken it off the menu since, and it will be months before I go to Gurt, order something else and realise, again, that I shouldn’t have strayed from the true path. Some places you visit on holiday have a signature dish, and if you ignore that you might as well not eat there at all. Afterwards we took that bus across town again, and had one more mocha in the window at C.U.P. It’s odd: normally I am sad about returning from holiday but happy to be reunited with my creature comforts, my stuff, my bed. How strange, and strangely welcome, to have a holiday where you’re never parted from them.
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One final postscript before I take my leave of you this week.
A couple of days ago I was tagged on Instagram by a couple, readers and subscribers to the blog, who were on holiday in Bruges. They had been using my guide to the city, and I saw a picture of De Kelk, one of my favourite Bruges bars. I sent one of them a message to see how they were getting on, and I got the loveliest messages back. They’d eaten at a Bruges restaurant I loved, Bij Koen en Marijke, on the previous night and I was sent a picture of the two of them posing with Marijke. Marijke was beaming: everybody looked like they were having a marvellous time.
But the loveliest part was the next bit. My reader told me that she’d been eating at the restaurant with her husband and they got talking to a couple at the next table, who were from Sydney. They asked the Australian couple how they’d chanced upon Bij Koen en Marijke and – and I promise I’m not making this up – they were told “we found it on a great blog called Edible Reading”. How nice is that? That somehow out there in the universe, halfway across Europe, two couples who read my blog, living continents apart, both ended up in the same cracking restaurant on an April evening in Bruges. It’s a small world, sometimes.
I am pretty sure that people – from all kinds of places, not just Reading – use my guides to Bruges, Malaga and Granada to help them have a delicious holiday in those cities. And that makes me very proud indeed. But I know that if I published a piece called “City guide: Reading” it wouldn’t get anywhere near the same footfall (it would also be dishonest, of course, because wishing Reading was a city doesn’t make it so). So nobody will ever chance upon this piece of writing and decide, from somewhere else in the U.K. or Europe, to plan their next holiday in Reading. And that’s fine: those articles in the Sunday Times or The i Paper aren’t going to have that effect, either. I know people are missing out, but I won’t be able to convince them.
So the only people I might be able to persuade to have a holiday in Reading are those among you – and I knew many of you reading this will fall into this category – who already live here. And for what it’s worth, having done it, I heartily recommend a staycation in Reading. Stay in your own bed, plan to really make the most of spending time here without having to go to work, make time to revisit your favourites or discover something new. I’m so glad I gave it a shot, and it won’t be the last time I do. See our town slightly through the eyes of an outsider and you might fall in love with it a little, all over again. I certainly did.
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