Tag: Zoe

City guide: Oviedo

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If you find yourself deciding to spend a city break in Oviedo, as I did, in the run-up to your holiday you will invariably be asked the same question by everybody you tell. Where? they will all say.

And you might well struggle, as I did, and wind up explaining that it’s sort of west of the Basque Country, but near the coast, in a region of Spain called Asturias that is still largely untroubled by tourists. You’ll probably, as I did, say that it’s famous for cider and blue cheese, and for fabada, a bean stew packed with pork which has a revered status in the city.

You might also mention that Oviedo features in the Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and that Woody Allen loves the city and that there’s even a statue of him which, this being continental Europe, nobody has defaced or pulled up and lobbed into the nearest body of water. Actually, you might not mention that, because you might not know it. I knew it and I never mentioned it, because advertising that you’re a Woody Allen fan just isn’t done these days.

But in the run up to your trip, if you’re asked, you’ll probably just say that it’s west of Bilbao and mention the cider. And people will generally say “okay” or “I’ve never heard of it” and all of you will get on with your respective lives.

Having returned from Oviedo, if asked, I would instead say, firstly, that it’s one of the best cities I’ve visited for food and drink. At the end of a holiday Zoë and I always play a game where we both list the five best things we’ve eaten on the trip. Sitting having a beer on our final day in Oviedo we had to conclude that it was rarely this difficult to narrow it down, and then we went and had one last dinner which, if anything, made it even more complicated.

Asturian cuisine – and yes, it does at least slightly revolve around fabada and cachopo, an enormous slab made of two pieces of veal, cheese in the middle, breaded and fried – is very hearty indeed. Forget going to Malaga or Granada and picking over lots of small dishes: in Oviedo even a main course might be big enough that two people can quite easily share it. I am rarely defeated by meals, but even I had to wave the white flag a couple of times in Oviedo.

That might make it sound like it’s wall to wall gut-busters, but that doesn’t do the food justice. I had plenty of interesting, intelligent food across the city, and I also discovered – beyond the cider – great beer and coffee and a scene that had something for everyone. It was named Spain’s city of gastronomy last year, but even so it still feels like a relatively well-kept secret.

Not only that, but Oviedo is a handsome place. The old town is exceedingly pretty, steep streets meandering from one square to another, and there’s a beautiful cathedral, an imposing monastery and a picture perfect pastel-shaded food market. But there are also wide boulevards and, right in the centre, the Campo de San Francisco, the lungs of the city, a gorgeous and spacious park which lends itself gladly to a happy meander. On one side of its perimeter there are beautiful, brightly coloured houses on a sloping hill and you get a sense, almost, of another San Francisco.

Oviedo is not buzzy or boastful the way Malaga or even Barcelona is: it is a much more stately, sedate place and over the best part of a week I came to like it very much. It’s a grower not a shower, with nothing to prove, and it had a certain ease with itself that I very much admired. So different from many of the places I tend to visit on holiday – less scruffy, somehow more grown-up. On most of my holidays I come home with dozens of pictures of street art, snapped with my proper camera like the wannabe hipster I am. In Oviedo, there was comparatively little that I saw.

I must admit, though, that my first impressions of the city were distinctly mixed. The first day of my holiday, nothing went right. The shitty train to cruddy Gatwick decided to stop at Redhill and spit us all out with, it seems, no suggestions about how we should reach our final destination. Our plane sat on the runway for almost an hour because, and this appeared to be news to people, it needed a full tank to get to Spain and didn’t have one. The bus from Asturias airport felt like it took an eternity: the airport is far closer to Aviles than Oviedo, it turns out.

And then we decided to grab a late lunch on Calle Gascona, Oviedo’s famous cider boulevard, the one that features in every newspaper article about the place. Somehow it felt a little tired and unlovely, and grabbing a table outside at one of the places recommended by one of the broadsheets, a little too late for lunch, we felt like an inconvenience.

I won’t mention the place, although maybe I should, to encourage you not to go there, but it was not an experience for the ages. The croquetas were decent enough, the big slabs of cheese fridge-cold, the bread rock hard. A twenty Euro plate of calamari were thick bouncy straps of the stuff, no lightness or delicacy. And the American at the next table talked volubly and relentlessly at her tablemates, who appeared to be a captive audience. I think she might have been doing part of the Camino de Santiago, and I could picture her husband, back home, having a very pleasant fortnight in relative peace and tranquillity.

It turned out that she was a vet. I know this, because she mentioned it roughly half a dozen times in the space of thirty minutes, and as I dipped a piece of particularly rubbery squid through the crust on top of a purgatorial dish of alioli she started talking about prolapses and fistulas in more detail than I would personally have liked, i.e. in any detail at all. The squid bordered on inedible, the grey clouds overhead threatened rain. This doesn’t bode well, I thought to myself.

Anyway that was the last time I had a bad meal for a whole week, although it did put me off returning to Calle Gascona, and from that point onwards it was sunshine and strolls, coffee and cakes, beer and cider and terrific meal after terrific meal, and I was relieved to find that first experience a passing aberration, the exception that proved the rule, the rule being that Oviedo rules.

When I returned from holiday, thoroughly passionate about telling people why this grand yet modest city deserved more credit, I realised that because I’d been unable to find a decent guide to Oviedo in the run-up to my trip I’d just have to write one. So here it is, and I hope that if you’re considering an expedition to this most classy of cities – or have already decided on one, and have come here through the vagaries of Google looking for advice – it helps you to make the most of what I found to be a downright wonderful place.

And when you fly home, tell people that it’s not all about cider and blue cheese, because there’s miles more going on than that. Oviedo deserves a legion of ambassadors, and I for one am proud to be one. Fingers crossed this piece helps to create a few more.

1. La Corte de Pelayo

The evening after that awful lunch on Calle Gascona we had dinner at La Corte de Pelayo, on one corner of the Campo de San Francisco, and my holiday experienced the great reset.

It’s one of those places where from the moment you walk through the front door, you know that everything will be absolutely fine until the moment you leave: smooth, attentive service, a cosy, classic dining room and pockets of delighted diners everywhere you look. It’s been going for over 20 years, although that makes it a positive newborn compared to some of the businesses that feature in this city guide, and it had that air that it was probably exactly the same when it first opened and would be exactly the same in 2045. I loved that about it.

I was determined to immerse myself in Asturian food, so I ordered their fabada – which, I should add, is on the menu as a starter. I haven’t experienced anything quite like it: the pot of beans was brought to the table and ladled, with great ceremony, into the bowl in front of me before being set down on the table, in case I wanted a top up. The compango, a long plate with pork, pork sausage and morcilla, was placed nearby, looking for all the world like a carnivore’s idea of the best petit fours ever, for you to cut and add however you liked.

It was truly heavenly: the beans firm and creamy, the pork lending smoke and salt, the whole thing giving me complete clarity on why this dish, in this region at least, has attained a mythical status. I understood why every year they give out awards for the best fabada Asturiana (they also do this for cachopo, as we will see, and for Pote Asturiano for that matter), and why La Corte de Pelayo had been a finalist in those awards several times.

Don’t get me wrong, the meal had other dishes in it too. Zoë ate gorgeous jamon ibérico, sliced by hand as it should always be, and we shared some pixin, pieces of fried monkfish. She had secreto ibérico as a main, and I had an extraordinary shoulder of lamb, presented on the plate like one of those flying birds that adorned the walls of so many Seventies living rooms. There was an apple tart that made me very happy indeed, and a glass of ice cider – a drink I came to love far more than cider itself during my time in Oviedo.

But it was the fabada I have thought about countless times since. I put pictures of the meal on my Facebook page and a reader who knows Oviedo well told me to enjoy the city. I asked him if he had any recommendations and he said “I’m afraid you’ve been to the best place already!” I don’t know about that, because it turned out that there were many other superb meals to be had. But I didn’t order fabada again.

La Corte de Pelayo
Calle San Francisco, 21
https://lacortedepelayo.com

2. Cocina Cabal

Cocina Cabal, where I had lunch on my second day in Oviedo, was a thoroughly sophisticated spot. From the very start, when we waited by the gorgeous bar out front and had cold beer straight from the tank, to the bit where we were led into a tasteful, muted dining room and given a menu awash with temptations I liked it very much. It’s named after chef Vicente Cabal and most of the tables have a view of the open kitchen, although I had an even better view of my wife.

Everything was clever, pretty and carb-free – qualities I have aspired to for many years but seem fated never to attain – and although I found the plating somewhere between “fussy”, “geometric” and “designed by a serial killer” I thoroughly enjoyed all of what I ate. Octopus and stellar pork, edged with exceptionally light crackling, was a new take on surf and turf for me, and although I wasn’t entirely sure any of it went with celeriac purée or mango chutney I was happy to spend a few minutes eating (and completely failing to make sense of) it.

My veal with sweetbreads and salsify showed similarly worrying presentation, all parallel lines and artful smears, but I rather liked it, even if it could have done with more sweetbreads. But then, what dish couldn’t? Dessert was a white chocolate sphere full of passionfruit mousse that melted away when dark chocolate sauce was poured on it, an idea which I think was cutting edge quite some time ago, but I appreciated the execution all the same.

But perhaps the trick was in how you ordered. Zoë enjoyed two colossal ingots of foie gras with apple and Pedro Ximenez, and outrageously good suckling pig with a bright and moreish kumquat purée, so arguably the menu just had cheffier and less cheffy stuff, and I, ever the ponce, had skewed towards the former. Nevertheless it was a very good meal, and even pushing the boat out with wine and (more) ice cider it still cost us something like £160. When I consider some of the meals I’ve spent that on in the U.K. of late, I start to have dark thoughts.

Looking at Cocina Cabal’s menu again now, I see that their fabada was the best in the world back in 2022. Next time, I’m having that.

Cocina Cabal
Calle Suárez de la Riva, 5
https://cocinacabal.com

3. La Puerta de Cimadevilla

Although that fistula-ridden experience on my first day put me off Calle Gascona, it didn’t put me off sidrerias in general. It did, however, make me a bit more discerning about which ones to try, which is how we ended up at the more modern, more interesting La Puerta de Cimadevilla on Thursday lunchtime. On the edge of a pretty square in the old town, it was much less frowsty than some of its Gascona-based peers and was thoroughly fizzing with custom throughout my lunch there: we turned up early, without a reservation, but later on saw people getting turned away.

The staff at La Puerta de Cimadevilla were lovely, and brought us much more into the whole cider-pouring experience, and it was a real joy to watch them pouring it from a great height into the corner of our wide-bottomed glasses in the traditional style, the practice of escanciar or ‘throwing’ the cider, in order to aerate it. Zoë was a little more sceptical – “they’ve all got one wet shoe” was her take on this venerable custom – but even she got into the swing of it, I think.

Incidentally, we saw next to no British tourists in our week in Oviedo and I wonder if the cider has something to do with it: imagine our nation of binge drinkers having to attract the attention of serving staff every time you wanted another sip of your drink. It would never catch on. The thing to pair cider with in these parts is blue cheese, and La Puerta de Cimadevilla’s cabrales croquetas, sweetened with honey and topped with a walnut, were a properly knockout combination.

But really, the reason we were there was to try the other pillar of Asturian gastronomy, the cachopo. La Puerta de Cimadevilla is proud of theirs, with no less than four different ones on their menu. Not only that, but they include two that have been decorated: the cachopo that was declared the best in Spain back in 2023 – there’s a poster proclaiming this on the outside of the restaurant, no less – and another that was a finalist as recently as this year.

We ordered the 2023 champion because you would, wouldn’t you? And I loved everything about it, from the slightly preposterous presentation to literally everything else. It comes on its own special bespoke board, loudly proclaiming that it is indeed the ‘El Capricho del Rey Ramiro I’ and, just as endearingly, the restaurant’s other celebrated cachopo has its own unique, subtly different board. I don’t know how you can’t slightly love a place that gets so proud of its achievements: it was certainly beyond me.

But more than that, it was simultaneously delicious and colossal. There is no question at all that you couldn’t take one of these down on your own, and even between two it almost proved beyond us. The restaurant has a whole separate page on its website talking about every painstaking element of this, from the meat that’s used to the paleta ibérica laid on top of it, from the mixture of cheeses in its gooey core to the blend of breadcrumbs, corn and cheese that make up its ultra-crunchy coating. There’s even chestnut purée in the mix somewhere, the kind of thing some dullards would describe as the hero ingredient, no doubt.

All that sounds great, but the proof is in that moment when you make your first inadequate incision into the gigantic slab of Asturian food history and understand the fuss. Before that, my only experience of this kind of dish was the Andalusian flamenquin, a cigar of pork loin, jamon and cheese that I used to think was the best breadcrumbed thing ever. The cachopo has forced me to revise my opinion somewhat, but I also suspect more research is necessary.

Equally brilliant and frustrating was the fact that the menu contained countless other things I would have loved to try that were rendered impossible by the sheer volume of cachopo you had to put away. Of all the restaurants in the guide I think this was the one Zoë most wanted to return to, to eat their tomatoes with bonito. The table next to me was so struck by a neighbouring table’s ensaladilla russa that they specifically asked what it was and I could see them making a mental note for next time. They even do a fabada – who doesn’t? – and you wouldn’t bet against it being marvellous.

La Puerta de Cimadevilla
Calle Cimadevilla, 21
https://lapuertadecimadevilla.es

4. Gloria

The night I ate at Gloria, the heavens opened and the stars aligned: it was the one time during our stay in Oviedo that it properly chucked it down, which just so happened to be the night we had a reservation at the restaurant two minutes’ walk and a few doors down from our hotel.

Not just any restaurant, though. Chef Nacho Manzano has Oviedo’s only Michelin starred restaurant, NM, situated in the El Vasco mall, a huge shopping centre I really struggled to like. But Gloria is the restaurant he shares with his sister Esther, less showy but properly lovely. Strangely I can’t tell you what the main dining room looked like because we were seated in the front room, by the bar, with just one other table, occupied by a pair of friends catching up. But actually that made it feel intimate, like private dining almost, and if I was in the zone allocated to tourists I soon found I didn’t mind one bit.

Gloria’s was another of those menus – Oviedo seemed to be full of these – where the starters and main courses cost pretty much the same, leaving you with little or no idea how to structure a meal, what was to share and what was to eat on your own; I sometimes suspected that most of the servers in Oviedo thought we should share everything and couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t. But we were helped by a brilliant server at Gloria who very firmly told us when something was too big for us to order one apiece, and everything was so delicious that we ended up sharing it all anyway.

That meant, unusually, tuna two ways – an exquisite tataki just-cooked, dressed in impeccable extra virgin olive oil and strewn with garlic, and a hefty piece of loin halved and served blushing with gorgeous tomatoes sharpened with citrus, nutty beans like edamame and crispy onion. The former was maybe too delicate to share, the latter quite the opposite, and one of the best things I ate in the entire trip.

Our server talked us into splitting arroz con pitu de caleya between us, which was probably wise but did leave me wanting more at the end. Pitu de caleya, or roadside chicken, is a noted Asturian free-range chicken, and serving it with rice in this way is something Manzano reintroduced first at his three-starred restaurant Casa Marcial. If this was the diffusion line, it felt very far from being short changed: the rice was rich beyond measure with the juices from the chicken and the chicken itself – darker, leaner and gamier than the usual fare – was glorious.

Having been restrained thus far we earned the right to spoil ourselves for the rest of the meal, so we did. A cheeseboard full of Asturias’ finest completely redeemed the dismal Calle Gascona selection from our first meal in the city, and then a chocolate cremoso topped with the smoothest hazelnut ice cream, ringed with olive oil – yes, a whole one each – brought matters to a resoundingly successful conclusion. I probably don’t need, by now, to say that the latter was accompanied with another glass of ice cider but there you go, I’ve said so anyway.

The rain had died off by the time we walked back to our hotel to do some serious digesting. How could it have persisted, after a meal so good it had the power to banish pathetic fallacy?

Gloria
Calle Cervantes, 24
https://www.estasengloria.com

5. El Fartuquin

Let’s get this bit out of the way first: no, I don’t know where the name comes from, yes, it sells the bean dish and no, I didn’t order it. So snigger if you must, but El Fartuquin was possibly the most traditional sidreria we ate at, and a very successful and popular one at that. The basement room looked like the picture above when we sat down at 9 on a Friday night, but within half an hour every table was packed. Everything about it had that assured air which seemed to permeate much of the city, and everybody was having a terrific time; I heard no English spoken anywhere.

If it was only solid by the standards of this holiday, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have been an outstanding meal in any other context. I really liked the pixin, nuggets of fried monkfish with a little pot of alioli, and I quite admired the brave plating choice to serve the skeleton of the monkfish next to it, like something cooked up by H.R. Giger, to leave you under no illusions about where those delectable morsels had come from.

I also rather enjoyed yet more pitu de caleya – I’d got a taste for it by then, you see – this time in a dark and potent stew which contained maybe a tad too much mustard for my personal liking, although I found a way to see past that. Zoë decided, more out of hope than expectation, to have her own personal cachopo and was even more defeated by it than she had been the last one. This is as good a point as any to reiterate that Asturias doesn’t do small portions: Oviedo would not, for instance, be an Ozempic-friendly city break.

I felt a little like El Fartuquin only really suffered by comparison with the other meals we had in Oviedo, rather than anywhere else, so it’s still one to consider if you find yourself in the city for an appreciable length of time and you’re disinclined to eat at the same place twice. I’d also add that, despite being a sidreria, it had an excellent list of reds, including many I’ve sampled on previous visits to Malaga. The kind pricing of wine in the city is another reason why the bill never stings anywhere near as much as it would back home.

El Fartuquin
Calle Carpio, 19
https://elfartuquin.es

6. El Ovetense

We had lunch at El Ovetense on our final full day of the holiday and it was a place I discovered entirely by chance that very morning.

How it happened was this: we were still buzzing from a very happy evening spent drinking at Cerveceria Cimmeria (number 10 on this list, just down there) and, following them on Instagram, I saw that they’d shared a beautiful picture of the place on their Instagram stories. The person who took it was a very talented local food photographer – I forget her Instagram handle – and all the photos in her grid were of food she’d cooked herself with one exception, a couple of dishes from a place called El Ovetense. And they looked good. Drop-everything-change-your-plans good.

So I did some more research, fell well and truly down the rabbit hole and found an article from last year in El Pais which left me with no doubt in my mind that I needed to snag a table there. El Ovetense, in the old town, is technically a hotel restaurant, and has been trading since 1959. The founder’s daughters Natalia and Ana run the place now, and it has achieved legendary status for two dishes. So naturally, after turning up at noon to ask Ana nicely for a table on the terrace, only to be told that they didn’t open until 1pm, those dishes are exactly what we (eventually) ordered.

One was the pollo con ajillo – chicken with garlic – which doesn’t begin to explain how incredible this dish was. Tons of the crispiest jointed chicken, skin cooked until brittle, the whole thing issuing a siren song to be parted from the bone, came festooned with industrial quantities of crunchy fried garlic, the whole lot sitting on a layer of the finest chips, which slowly became permeated with all that garlic and all those juices as the meal went on. Seventeen Euros for this, and it could easily have served two on its own. Seventeen Euros! I could honestly weep.

But the other dish, which is even more the signature of the restaurant, is their jamon asado “Serafin style”, named after the restaurant’s founder Serafin Garcia. I never got to try jamon asado when I visited Granada last year, and I felt like I’d missed out at the time, but I know now fate was keeping me waiting for this, a rendition which I can’t imagine being surpassed.

Picture a plate groaning with gorgeous sliced ham – apparently there are 16 slices per portion, carved with a special knife so fine and sharp that it’s like playing the violin. Picture that ham draped over a rubble of crunchy potatoes, and then picture a rich sauce, somewhere between a jus and a gravy, poured liberally over it all. Only Natalia and Ana handle the preparation of this dish, and they cook up to 20 kilos of ham a day for the purpose. It is the kind of dish that not only the restaurant, but also the city, deserves to be famous for.

The ham, the spuds, that gravy, the many phenomenal forkfuls made up of those elements… it was, as with many dishes in Oviedo, not for the faint hearted but one for the memory banks and the record books. We also had yet more spuds, this time in a salty and arresting cabrales sauce and we didn’t need them, with all that other food and all those permeated potatoes, but we ate them all the same because they were as fantastic as everything else.

It is probably for the best that I discovered El Ovetense on my final day, completely by chance, because if I’d been there on my first day I might not have gone anywhere else and then you wouldn’t have this guide to read. But if you decide you want to visit Oviedo, this is the place to make sure you visit and these are the dishes to make sure you have. And yet, I found myself wondering – if they are this good, what other unsung gems are hiding further down the menu, when they stick two absolute showstoppers right at the top?

El Ovetense
Calle de San Juan, 6

7. Casa Fermin

My final meal in Oviedo – unless you count something wolfed down at the airport the next day, which I’d rather not – was at Casa Fermin, just down from La Corte de Pelayo and so very near to the park. It was, I suppose, the Big Fancy Meal of the holiday, and after lunch at El Ovetense I was worried our trip would end with a whimper rather than a bang.

I worried needlessly, because although Casa Fermin was very different to El Ovetense it was, in its way, as good a meal as any we had on the trip. The dining room looks a smidgen sterile in pictures but was actually a very striking one to which photographs possibly don’t do justice. The enormous tablecloths that get caught under your feet seem to be a Spanish thing – Cocina Cabal had these too – and they’re a bit Total Eclipse Of The Heart, but the space was peaceful, hushed, luxe and poised.

And the food was very good indeed, in the same kind of bracket as Cocina Cabal but with, for my money, everything taken up a notch. We eschewed the tasting menu for the à la carte and were again rewarded with a slightly confusing range of options where some dishes were small and clearly to be consumed solo, others were big and clearly designed to share and, well, with the rest it was anybody’s guess.

This, though, is where the serving staff really came into their own. We ordered a few individual things, a few dishes to share which were brought to the table already divided and what that meant, all in all, was that we kind of designed our own tasting menu with the help of our server, very much the best of both worlds.

So we had a croissant each, deeply flaky and buttery, crammed with tuna tartare and we shared a feather-light rectangle of brioche topped with a translucent film of Iberian pancetta and piled with caviar. An arroz con pulpo, similarly, was divided into two bowls and was extremely generous for two: god knows how they expected one person to polish that off as a starter and have room for everything else.

I lucked out, though, with the suckling pig. Pressed into the most divine oblong, the meat all succulent and the crackling onomatopoeically doing exactly that, it was superlative stuff. I liked the hazelnut pesto they served it with perfectly fine, but I loved the smoked pineapple purée, something I would never have anticipated in a hundred years and which was an eye-opener and a half. It even made me think that possibly, just possibly, there might be a place for pineapple on pizza, provided you smoked it first.

All of that went beautifully with a white wine from the Canary Islands which was complex with almost oxidised notes, and even though everyone at the surrounding tables seemed more classy, more genteel and an awful lot more Spanish I had an absolute whale of a time throughout my meal.

Dessert was the best way I could imagine to finish a week of miraculous meals, a sort of ice cream cheesecake made with a local cheese called Gamonèu; I’d forgotten how the Spanish love to include savoury notes in cheesecake, and this had a little pungent punch which elevated it far above the workaday. It came with a tiny moat of ice cider: I took this as a cue to have one final golden glass to match.

Casa Fermin
Calle San Francisco, 8
https://www.casafermin.com

8. Casa González Suárez

I had no real concept, before I went to Oviedo, of how different Asturias would be to Andalusia, where I’ve spent far more time. So I was expecting that, like Malaga or Granada, Oviedo would be awash with jamon shops with stacks of bocadillos in the window, ham shining under the spotlights, churrerias left right and centre and vermouth bars here and there.

Well, in my experience Oviedo is not like that. There is jamon, and I eventually chanced upon a couple of shops, and I didn’t make it to either branch of the only churreria, Churreria Guty, that I came across online. Next time, perhaps. And Oviedo is a cider city first, a wine city second and although it has a little grid of streets – the Ruta de los Vinos – around Calle Manuel Pedregal, I didn’t make it there either. I know, I know, what kind of a guide is this?

So the closest I got was Casa González Suarez, a little spot celebrating its centenary this year. It served vermouth, and had a limited menu of ham, cheese and bocadillos, and it was the perfect place for a short, casual pit stop after the morning coffee and before the afternoon amble. The ham was cut by hand, and came on a paper plate – it wasn’t bad, but I’ve had better. The cheese, also on a paper plate, was more refrigerated than I’d have liked.

The vermouth, though, and the service were splendid, and I liked the room. Lunch for the two of us cost less than twenty quid. Asturias is almost different enough to Andalusia to be a different country – they worship different ways to eat a pig there – but I enjoyed my brief, affordable excursion to the south.

Casa González Suárez
Calle Ramón y Cajal
https://casagonzalezsuarez.com

9. Cerveceria l’Artesana

If Oviedo is cider first, wine second, where does that leave beer? Well, from my homework and exploration, in a limited number of very safe hands.

Cerveceria l’Artesana, on a street parallel to Calle Gascona, was a really fun and rather popular craft beer bar which very much lived up to the usual aesthetic of those places – a long thin corridor of a room with high tables against the wall, and a bigger room up the stairs at the back which had more room but less personality. I was heartened by how many people were in there on a Wednesday night, and I liked many of the beers I had.

Some of those, like piney pale ale La Vuestra, were brewed by the venue, and others, like a very drinkable DIPA called FOMO, are by other Spanish breweries – Bilbao’s Luagar in that case. An excellent can fridge gave me the chance to reacquaint myself with the Girona brewery Soma, whose beers I’d so enjoyed the previous year in Granada.

Having got there, we were having such a good time that we stayed for food. L’Artesana’s Instagram makes much of the fact that they make all their food on the premises, and I very much got that – everything was robust, substantial and frighteningly good value. Empañadas were Venezuelan rather than Argentinian, so made with corn dough rather than pastry, more like an arepa, and were colossal and stuffed with chicken. We got two for a price you’d gladly pay for one, and both were impressively sturdy.

Fingers de pollo (for some reason they preferred fingers to goujons when lifting a word from a foreign language) were actually really good chicken tenders, again absolutely whopping and brilliant dunked in a pot of moreish honey mustard dip. The only thing that defeated me was their burger. It cost something like twelve Euros and was a behemoth, and it was the first but not the last time I didn’t clear my plate in an Oviedo venue.

You couldn’t dispute the quality, and l’Artesana even makes its own buns and burger sauce, but it was a little too thick for me, and a little too pink in the middle: close to tartare, really, underneath the crust. Never mind. I would go back, I would pick dishes that looked more like snacks and beer food and I would still leave full and happy, wallet far from dented. It was another illustration that when it comes to what you should eat with craft beer, the U.K. still has plenty to learn.

Cerveceria l’Artesana
Calle Santa Clara, 8
https://www.instagram.com/lartesana_oviedo/?hl=en

10. Cerveceria Cimmeria

My homework had identified Cerveceria Cimmeria as a place to try for beer, and early in my time in the city I clocked that it was on the same hill as La Gente – number 13 on this list – a few doors down. It was closed during the day, so it was impossible to tell what it would be like. There was a Löwenbräu sign outside, and the name of the pub was in that sort of Celtic, sort of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons font I remember well from my misspent teenage years. I couldn’t possibly have known, at that point, that I was gazing upon one of the best pubs I’ve ever had the luck to drink in.

Returning on a week night, minutes after they opened, it was a revelation. A beautiful spot with some low tables in the window and along one side, a bar and stools taking up the other half of the room. Lovely wood panels, walls covered with beer swag and everything scrupulously clean. Twelve beers on offer – including one cask handpull – and a dizzying array of styles and breweries, from Spain and beyond. The lager was Löwenbräu, the cask beer was Shepherd Neame’s very own Bishop’s Finger, but beyond that it got really interesting.

That meant excellent IPAs from Spanish giant Garage, Asturian brewery Caleya and Malandar, from Cadiz. There was an imperial stout by renowned Basqueland Brewing and, from far further east, a delectable sour by Latvia’s Arpus and another corking pale from Berlin’s Fuerst Wiacek. Not only that, but Belgium was well represented with a Lindemans and the Straffe Hendrik Tripel on the board.

I don’t think I have ever seen such a canny but compact selection of beers, such a well balanced lineup of countries and styles where I wanted to try nearly all of it. I resolved to try nearly all of it.

I didn’t realise at the time, but now I do – Cimmeria is the kingdom featured in the Conan The Barbarian stories, which might have explained the font on the outside. The place was filling up with the kind of diverse craft beer drinking crowd you never see at these places in the U.K., and Def Leppard was playing on the stereo. It was how my corner of our sixth form common room would have been back in 1991 if (a) we had been cool; (b) we’d lost our virginity; and (c) we’d been allowed to drink on the premises.

I looked at Zoë, and I could tell she was in love with the place. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was the Leppard. It was probably, in truth, a bit of both. But I was in love with it too.

All that and snacks – a bowl of crisps, popcorn or nuts with each round, and a simple but effective menu of cheeses or empañadas. We ordered a mushroom and cheese empañada each and were told they wouldn’t come out for a while because they needed to be baked properly, which is exactly the answer you want to hear, and when they arrived they were gorgeous.

We liked Cimmeria so much that it was a huge wrench to leave for our dinner reservation, and we resolved there and then to move a few things around so we could do it all over again the following night. So the next evening we were stood outside at 7, when it opened, we grabbed the same table and it was, if anything, even better than before.

Cimmeria was following both Zoë and me on Instagram by then and one of the owners, who was charm personified, told us that we had been spending our time wisely from what she could see of our travels. That was lovely of her, but none of it was spent quite as wisely as those happy hours in Cimmeria.

We left for our final restaurant of the trip happy to have found possibly the only pub I’ve been to that comes close to rivalling Bruges’ magisterial ‘t Brugs Beertje and devastated that we’d only had two short evenings there.

Cimmeria celebrated its thirteenth birthday the month before we arrived in Oviedo. I wish it many, many more very happy returns – and, speaking of returns, I can’t wait to go there again.

Cerveceria Cimmeria
Calle Martínez Vigil, 8
https://www.instagram.com/cimmeria_oviedo/?hl=en

11. El Lúpulo Feroz

El Lúpulo Feroz is on the outskirts of the city, out past Calle Gascona and the El Vasco mall, in the only bit of Oviedo I visited that felt decidedly residential. I wanted to try it as the third in my trilogy of craft beer places and I found that, aesthetically at least, it had much in common with l’Artesana. Their back room was a very attractive spot – blood red walls, beer memorabilia everywhere, from Belgium, Czechia and even dear old Blighty. It was oddly pleasing to see an illuminated Bass sign on the wall, the beer free from its usual connotations of little Englander pubman gammonistas.

Speaking of beer, the venue had a tap takeover by Danish brewery Amager Bryghus the night I visited, and I liked what I had. Oviedo has no verified Untappd venues for beer – not that kind of city, not yet – but I later discovered, once I’d got home, all the places I hadn’t made it to: Bär Berlin, Vivalabirra and the courageously named Cerveceria Lord Vader (let’s hope Disney never find out about that one). Plenty kept in reserve for, hopefully one day, an updated version of this guide.

El Lúpulo Feroz
Calle Indefonso Sánchez del Rio, 8
https://www.instagram.com/ellupuloferoz/?hl=en

12. Pionero Coffee Roasters

I suspect that the coffee scene in Oviedo isn’t quite as advanced as in other Spanish cities I’ve visited. The Best Coffee app, a regular staple for me on my travels in the U.K. and overseas, drew a complete blank on the city, and even further research only threw up a handful of places. One, Pionero, was in the northwest of the city, the other side of the Campo de San Francisco from the old town and so very close to my hotel, which meant a couple of very happy contemplative coffees there in the mornings before heading off to explore.

It was a very nice spot with extremely friendly, helpful staff and although the inside was quite serviceable they had a couple of tables outside with a view out onto the street, and thus people-watching, so I tended to plonk myself there. No sunshine, really, so al fresco potential was strictly limited but all the same I found it a brilliant spot to start the day. Coffee was decent – definitely a step above the generic cafe con leche – if not top tier, but Pionero also roasts and sells beans to take home. I’m very looking forward to that first V60 with them.

Pionero Coffee Roasters
Calle Marqués de Pidal
https://www.pionerocoffee.com

13. La Gente Café

La Gente is on Calle Martinez Vigil, the steep street by the monastery that is also home to Cerveceria Cimmeria. For both those reasons, it probably became my favourite street in the whole of Oviedo over the course of the week. La Gente has a lovely little terrace, overcoming the gradient of quite a challenging hill, and was far and away my favourite spot to sit, drink coffee and take in the surroundings.

I think I liked La Gente’s coffee slightly more than Pionero’s, possibly influenced slightly by the fact that their lattes are tall and generous, so more my personal thing than a cortado or a flat white. I found out from the owners of Cimmeria that La Gente had only opened at the start of the year, and what impressed me was just how part of the community it already felt, full of brunchers, chatters and even dog walkers (owners Kate and Andrew own a miniature schnauzer, Lando, who features in much of their branding).

They are brunch specialists, which means that if you go there around lunchtime you’ll struggle to get a seat and, if you’re not eating, you might well feel guilty about depriving them of a table with a higher spend. But the rest of the time it was just a brilliant space to sip latte and make a plan of attack for the day’s wandering, sightseeing and eating. The interior was absolutely lovely too, although it was a tad too warm to spend time in there.

I also liked the sense that as a business it was still evolving. On one visit I heard one of the owners and a member of staff discussing the menu for the season ahead, and I got the impression from the blurb and postings on social media that La Gente either offered, or was looking to offer, natural wine on selected evenings. Other than that, it’s worth pointing out that, like Pionero, La Gente closes pretty early during the week – so if. you do want an afternoon flat white make sure you get there before the shutters go down at 4pm.

La Gente Café
Calle Martínez Vigil, 6
https://www.instagram.com/la_gente_cafe/?hl=en

14. Diego Verdù

One thing you can rely on from a city guide of mine is that if I go somewhere in summer, I’ll find somewhere for you to eat ice cream. To be honest, even in the less clement months I can usually snaffle one but on a sunny day in Oviedo my thoughts turned to tracking down a tarrina – that is to say a tub – of something cold and captivating.

Enter Diego Verdù, an Oviedo institution which has been trading for nearly 150 years; as we’ll see in the remainder of this list, the people who make sweet treats in the city have had a very long time to become excellent at it. Diego Verdù started out making turron, but by the 1930s it had also decided to turn its hand to ice cream. And thank goodness it did, because both of its branches – the very pretty almost-original premises on Calle de Cimadevilla and the second more modern one just down from the Woody Allen statue – sorted me right out on this trip.

All the flavours that I tried were magnificent although, as befits their vintage, most of them kept it fairly establishment. I loved their chocolate, and their pistachio, but the most leftfield I tried on this visit was chocolate with pimento which I thought downright bloody great. For all I know they may occasionally experiment with yuzu, cinnamon or even cabrales – just imagine – but I didn’t see any of that on my travels.

Sitting on a bench – both branches are takeaway only – and attacking a massive tub filled with two generous scoops for less than four quid, I was quite unbothered by that. Oviedo just isn’t the kind of city for off the wall stuff, and is none the poorer for it. Unlike with coffee, Oviedo is positively enlightened when it comes to helado, and both shops are open until 8.30pm. There’s also a little kiosk on the edge of the Campo de San Francisco, which boasts many benches perfect for sitting, eating and sighing.

Diego Verdù
Calle Milicias Nacionales, 5/Calle Cimadevilla, 7
https://www.diegoverdu.com

15. Camilo de Blas

Diego Verdù is not the only Oviedo institution that’s been brilliant for longer than any of us have been on the planet. Confiteria Camilo de Blas has been in the city since 1914, although they were trading in Leon for another forty years or so before that. The thing they are most famous for, and possibly the emblematic goodie most associated with Oviedo, is the carbayon.

Now, carbayon originally referred to a huge oak tree, beloved by and symbolic of the city, to the point that natives of Oviedo called themselves carbayones. It was felled in 1879 to make way for Calle Uria, the ‘modern’ street connecting the old town to the train station which is now home to department store El Corte Ingles. That’s progress for you. That tree, I suppose was the Metal Box Building of Oviedo (one for my Reading readers there) but in 1924, the mayor of Oviedo commissioned the confiteria to create a sweet treat and this new incarnation of the carbayon, an incredible sweet pastry named after the tree, was born. That is also progress for you.

And what a treat it is. A lozenge of puff pastry filled with almond cream and then topped with a glossy layer of an exceptionally sweet coating which, depending on who you Google, either involves egg yolk or egg whites or both. Either way it also includes a lot of sugar, and makes for a very satisfying shell. This is one for those of you with a sweet tooth, like me. Zoë and I picked a couple up from their second branch on Calle Jovellanos and inhaled them on a bench in the Plaza de la Constituciòn and they were, to my mind at least, unimprovable.

“It’s like a cross between a yum yum, a frangipane and an éclair” was Zoë’s verdict, and I made a mental note of her saying that because she summed it up better than I could. All that for about £2.80 each, so cheaper than a Picnic brownie and even more indulgent. My boss likes to quote Philip Pullman, repeating the definition of an éclair as a cake that is “long in shape but short in duration”: I brought him back a carbayon and he loved it, although he was even more delighted that it was far less short in duration.

Camilo de Blas
Calle Jovellanos, 7/Calle Santa Susana, 8
https://camilodeblas.es

16. Confiteria Rialto

The third of Oviedo’s amazing venerable confectioners is Confiteria Rialto, which celebrates its hundredth birthday next year. It also has two branches in the city centre and it also sells carbayones. But the thing it’s synonymous with is Moscovitas, thin almond biscuits half coated in chocolate, to the extent that even its domain name references Moscovitas, not Rialto.

When I put some pictures on Facebook regular reader Rodrigo – the chap who told me I’d eaten at Oviedo’s best restaurant on my first night – asked if I’d tried Rialto’s Moscovitas, and fortunately I was able to post a photo of me holding one of Rialto’s distinctive red and gold bags, containing two luxurious-looking boxes of the things. But actually, I didn’t try them until I got home, when I was glum about being back in Reading and wanted a taste of elsewhere.

And once I did, I was crestfallen that I’d limited myself to just the two boxes, because they were extraordinary. Every single one irregular, every single one made by hand, each one thin and light, with just enough crunch and just enough substance, each one making you want another. Imagine the most rarefied chocolate Hob Nobs you could imagine, square it and you still wouldn’t be close. Rodrigo also told me that he has a recipe for Moscovitas which approximates to the Rialto classic, and I churlishly pooh-poohed him. Now I’ve tried them, I may have to ask him nicely.

One last tip, which is both about Rialto and Oviedo more generally, is this: Asturias Airport does a better job than nearly any airport I’ve been to of celebrating the region it serves. So you can buy – and not at exorbitant prices either – some of the city’s greatest hits, whether that’s more carbayones from Camilo de Blas, beautiful ice cider, compangas and chorizo from Calle Gascona stalwarts Tierra Astur or, last but not least, more of those Moscovitas. So if you don’t get to Rialto, you can still pick some up for your journey home. If you do, can I trouble you to get an extra box for me?

Confiteria Rialto
Calle San Francisco, 12/Calle Bermúdez de Castro, 2
https://www.moscovitas.com/en/home-2/

(Click here to read more city guides.)

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Café review: Notes Coffee

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Zoë and I were in town the Monday before our holiday, we’d finished all our errands and there was time to fit in lunch somewhere before taking the bus home to face the mountain of ironing and packing. Zoë wanted to go to Shed, which I could completely understand, and then it occurred to me – we could try out Notes, the first of the raft of hospitality businesses we’ve been promised on Station Hill, and I could get a review of it under my belt.

Zoë has been disappointed by shiny new things in Reading quite enough times, especially recently, and I suspect she had a Tuna Turner on her mind, and she was stubbornly refusing to budge. So I offered to buy her lunch, and that’s what sealed the deal.

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Restaurant review: Vino Vita

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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.

Vino Vita – 4.6
Minerva House, 20 Valpy Street, Reading, RG1 1AR
0118 9505493

https://vinovita.bar

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Restaurant review: RAGÙ, Bristol

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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

https://www.ragurestaurant.com

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Restaurant review: Town, Covent Garden

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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 Gees, 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 Gees 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 Gees).

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.

Town – 7.8
26-29 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5RL
020 35007515

https://www.town.restaurant

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