Takeaway review: Tasty Greek Souvlaki

On January 22, 2021April 22, 2022 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

To read a more recent review of eating in at Tasty Greek Souvlaki, click here.

A couple of years back – what feels like a lifetime ago, in fact – I found myself in Guildford at lunchtime on a summer’s day. I’d taken the train there, back when you could safely do that, for a mooch around and a spot of shopping (back when you could safely do that, too) and my thoughts turned to lunch, as they generally do pretty much any time from half-eleven onwards. I knew a place that did the most incredible bacon sandwich – toasted sourdough bread, plenty of just-right rashers of smoked streaky, Stokes brown sauce on top – but having marched to the top of High Street, I found it had closed down. What to do?

Salvation came in the form of a little souvlaki joint tucked away on a sidestreet near the castle, just down from a fantastic cheesemonger. The sun was out, and there was one table left outside: it was just too perfect. So we nabbed it, and fifteen minutes later I was eating a gyros wrap stuffed with meat and chips, accompanied with a glass of Cypriot beer for no other reason than just because. There was something about it – something about eating outside when it’s warm, something about the golden colour of lager caught in a ray of sunlight, that makes you feel like you’re on holiday even when you’re not. I’ve missed many things over the last twelve months, and one of them is lunches like that.

I have a long-standing love of gyros, of Greek food and of Greece in general, born of numerous holidays there over the years. When I was thirteen my parents took me to Corfu, the first time I’d ever been abroad, ever been on a plane, and I credit that holiday with kickstarting my insatiable curiosity about food. I ate stifado – rich stew with beef that fell apart, soft baby onions and the faintest hint of cinnamon – until it came out of my ears and enjoyed the lemonade, so exotic and so different from the clear, tasteless stuff back home.

The last time I went to Greece it was to Parga, a beautiful harbour town on the mainland not quite so well-known to British tourists. I remember sitting outside a little gyros shop at the bottom of the main street, having a long lazy lunch, drinking another beer and feeling like nothing could be that wrong with the world. Even seeing the frozen pillars of meat being unloaded from a van just outside could put me off my meal: it was sheer bliss.

It’s hard to believe that was over seven years ago, but Covid robbed me of a holiday last June in Rhodes. I had such wonderful plans (if you can use the word “plan” when you aim to do as little as possible) of sitting by the pool reading trashy novels and drinking beer and rosé, taking a taxi down to Lindos in the evenings to eat at restaurants and drink in bars. There’s one restaurant in the square called Mavrikos that does the most beautiful fish and seafood, and there are places that sell ambrosial frozen yoghurt, but I could guarantee that gyros would feature in that holiday too.

Back in January 2021, in the real world, Tasty Greek Souvlaki was an obvious choice for my first takeaway review of the year. It was one of the first openings after lockdown began, so one of the first new restaurants I hadn’t yet had the chance to review. It had opened on Market Place, where MumMum used to be – and heaven knows, 2020 was a difficult enough time to open a restaurant as it is without the additional handicap of being right next to Blue Collar and facing intense competition two lunchtimes a week.

Nevertheless, most of the reports I’d heard had been very good: my other half had a gyros wrap from there over the summer when they did some catering for her work and had raved about it for weeks. I’d even been on the verge of reviewing their lunchtime offering, on one of the last days when it was warm enough to sit outside, just before our second lockdown was announced. So when Friday night came around and I fired up my phone to decide what to order, Tasty Greek Souvlaki was uppermost in my mind. Could it transport me back to Greece, if only for a few happy moments?

Tasty Greek Souvlaki gives you the option of ordering for collection by phone, but if you want delivery you have the choice of the big three: Deliveroo, JustEat or Uber Eats. I opted for Uber Eats on this occasion, partly because my last two experiences with Deliveroo had been truly awful and I wanted to give Tasty Greek Souvlaki the best possible chance, and partly because I had an introductory credit with Uber Eats burning a virtual hole in my virtual pocket.

The menu gives you a wide range of options at various price points, from wraps to merida (meat on a plate with salad and chips), club sandwiches and mixed grills. You can even lob in a few additional skewers, if you’re feeling particularly hungry, and there are a handful of sides. This was well suited to takeaway food, because there weren’t really any starters: doing starters and mains by delivery always means you either have to keep something warm in the oven, eat something that has gone cold or hoover food so fast you need to mainline Gaviscon.

I wanted to try a bit of everything, and the menu had the perfect thing for me – the mixed grill for two, which includes a lamb, pork and chicken skewer, a “greek kebab”, some sausage, some pork belly and mixed gyros, along with chips, pita, salad and dips. You get all that for the princely sum of twenty-five pounds ninety-five, and although I found it hard to imagine wanting more food than that I added some halloumi to the order, more out of curiosity than anything else.

Along with the service charge, and not including the rider tip, this came to just shy of thirty-five pounds: my delivery fee was low because I live a short drive from the restaurant, so your mileage may (literally) vary.

A nice touch which distinguishes Uber Eats from Deliveroo is that you pick the amount to tip the driver but that is provisionally added to the total and you reconfirm it at the end. I really liked that. I strongly believe that people should tip delivery drivers well, especially in a pandemic when they are doing work many of us wouldn’t fancy – but that strong belief has been tested over the last few weeks by Deliveroo drivers, including one who managed to get lost on the three minute drive from Bakery House to my house. I’m not convinced that some of Deliveroo’s drivers have ever been to Reading before, a view only reinforced by the fact that my last one pulled up in a black cab after I had spent ten minutes tracking him going anywhere but in the vague direction of my front door.

There were no such hairy moments with this order, and I tracked my driver making the smooth five minute journey from the restaurant to my house, only panicking slightly as he overshot and had to be waved back to the front door where we were eagerly (and hungrily) waiting for him. The order was double bagged for extra insulation, and felt hot as we rushed it into the kitchen. The whole process, from placing the order to arrival, had taken just over twenty minutes on a Friday night: not bad going at all.

Reviewing takeaways is going to involve talking about very different things to the restaurant reviews. In a restaurant, plating and presentation are all perfectly reasonable things to talk about. At home, if it looks messy you’ve nobody but yourself to blame, and you might be prioritising speed over style: who could blame you, for that matter? Instead, we get to talk packaging, so here goes: the order arrived in two cardboard boxes and a few plastic tubs – hot food in the boxes, cold food in the tubs. For the salad and dips, this made perfect sense but for the halloumi, served on a bed of lettuce, it just meant that the halloumi went colder quicker and was decidedly lukewarm on arrival.

There was no such problem with the cardboard boxes, which were nicely branded and had a reflective silver lining to keep the food hot. One was filled with herb-flecked chips and big pillowy triangles of pitta bread, the other was absolutely replete with meat, a carnivore’s delight. The photo doesn’t do justice to just how much meat there was – aside from the kebabs and sausage you can see, there was another kebab tucked away underneath along with some more pork and the whole thing was on top of an awful lot of gyros meat, both chicken and pork.

We dished it all out onto plates as quickly as we could and got stuck in. We were more interested in it being quick than photogenic, which is why you have no photo of it all on the plate: I’ll do better next time, I promise. But it worked, because, with the exception of the halloumi, everything that was meant to be hot was hot. If you’re eating at the table (as civilised people do) rather than on your lap in front of Rick Stein’s Cornwall (as I did) I can see it would make sense just to stick it all on the table and let people pitch in, especially if you grab a mixed grill as we did.

And, on the evidence of my meal at least, you definitely should. The souvlaki, ironically given the restaurant’s name, were probably the least remarkable thing we had but were still decent – skewers of well-cooked chicken, lamb and pork. The lamb could have done with being a little softer and all of them would have benefited from more evidence of marination, but they all went perfectly with the dips – both a tomato one which was more tangy than spicy and an exemplary tzatziki full of julienned cucumber and a hefty whack of garlic.

Also excellent with both dips were the chips and the pita. I don’t know if Tasty Greek Souvlaki make their own chips, but if they don’t they’re very good at making you feel like they have. They were hot, crunchy and delicious and the speckled herbs all over them – oregano, I assume – were a very nice touch. And the pita was fluffy and downright terrific – better, or at least more to my taste, than Bakery House’s. The salad was just lettuce, peppers and cucumber – undressed, uninteresting and probably just there to offset some of the guilt of everything else. Two black olives failed to rescue matters: that’s a lot of heavy lifting to expect from olives. The halloumi was the biggest disappointment, as I said earlier, served on top of more undressed leaves and left to sweat in a plastic tub.

The rest of the mixed grill was where you found the really interesting stuff. A slab of pork was described as pork belly, but felt more like shoulder, as it lacked the fatty tenderness of belly. None the less, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m always dubious about things like “village sausage” as they can sometimes have a disturbingly smooth, homogenous texture (“all eyelids and arseholes”, as my ex-wife used to say), but this one was coarse, robust and herby. The “greek kebab”, essentially a kofta, was even better – juicy and deeply moreish.

All of what I’ve described so far would easily have been enough dinner for two people. But, just as we are so often drawn to things that aren’t necessarily good for us, the thing I really couldn’t get enough of was the gyros meat. It was worth the price of admission entirely on its own – ribboned shavings of chicken and pork, some crunchy-crispy, some soft and yielding but all of it deeply savoury and utterly drenched in flavour.

There was actually more of it than we could physically eat – and that’s saying something where I’m concerned – but having left some, I felt a deep sense of sadness that I hadn’t sacrificed a mouthful of souvlaki or that pointless halloumi so I could fit more in. It stayed in the mind for the rest of the evening, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it a fair few times since.

Normally, my peroration would conclude with a rating and I’ve thought long and hard about whether to include them in takeaway reviews. The problem is that when you review a restaurant meal, you’ve reviewing a collection of factors that are all, broadly speaking, under the control of that restaurant. Whether it’s cooked right, whether it sits there under the lights too long, whether it looks like a dog’s breakfast. Whether the wait staff are lovely and welcoming, whether the room feels like a home from home. If I eat somewhere and I’m not a fan I can point out why, but it will usually be down to the restaurant.

But with takeaways there are so many variables in a chain of events which isn’t all down to the restaurant. Some are – the selection, the food, the quality, the packaging and the pricing. But equally, some significant ones are not – like who delivers it, how they deliver it and how those staff are treated and incentivised. On this occasion everything worked perfectly, but if it hadn’t and it was the driver’s fault it would seem harsh to give the meal a poor rating which, in your mind, could well reflect on the restaurant alone. Like so many things about the post-Covid reality, this is complex and nuanced and I’m reluctant to boil it down to a number.

If that doesn’t suit you, and I’ll only put it like this on this one occasion, I’d say that ordering Tasty Greek Souvlaki through Uber Eats was a four star experience. I liked a lot of what I ate, I absolutely loved some of it, I thought it was extremely good value and I would do it again. Will that do? Possibly not: I’m sure some of you will be saying “what you’ve written sounds like a five star review to me”. That’s the other thing about ratings, they always kick off that discussion about whether you’ve been too kind, or too harsh.

Let me put put it this way instead: in the good old days, I would visit restaurants, love them and start mentally planning my next meal and what I would pick from the menu before I’d even paid my bill. In this brave new world, having committed to reviewing a takeaway every week in this third lockdown, I found myself wondering when I could fit in ordering a gyros wrap from Tasty Souvlaki for lunch into the bargain.

Surely there would be one day when I simply couldn’t face yet another cheese and pickle sandwich? Would it be so terrible to accidentally find myself on Uber Eats again? Perhaps I could get a cold beer out of the fridge that day and maybe, just maybe, there would even be sunshine. To my mind, food remains one of the best forms of escapism there is, and it’s beautiful, now more than ever, to be reminded of that. On the television, Rick Stein was knocking up something magnificent in his fancy Cornish kitchen but, somehow, I found I had no food envy at all.

Tasty Greek Souvlaki
20 Market Place, Reading, RG1 2EG
0118 3485768

https://tastygreeksouvlaki.com
Order via: Deliveroo, JustEat and Uber Eats, or direct with the restaurant for collections.

Vegivores

On January 24, 2020October 23, 2024 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Click here to read a more recent review of Vegivores, from August 2024.

Vegivores was probably the most keenly-anticipated opening of last year, and certainly one of the restaurants I got asked to review most often. Not only that, but it also probably received more buzz online in the last couple of months of 2019 than anywhere else: everywhere I looked, on Twitter and Instagram, I saw people raving about the food, be it brunch or dinner. It’s no-reservations, and I heard frequent reports that it could be difficult to get a table there; the first few months are often incredibly difficult for a new restaurant, but Vegivores clearly got off to a flying start.

The buzz makes perfect sense to me. Vegivores is a proper success story – a journey (so sorry for using that word) from serving street food at Reading’s markets, every Wednesday and Friday in all weathers, to taking on permanent residence in Caversham’s precinct. That they’ve opened their plant-based restaurant next to gammon specialists the Caversham Butcher gives me enormous pleasure, even if I’m not sure whether it’s a happy coincidence or good old-fashioned epic trolling (I always get in trouble for talking about politics or Caversham, so let’s leave it at that).

And then, of course, there’s the meat-free factor: Vegivores is one of Reading’s only entirely meat free restaurants – along with Bhel Puri House and the Global Café – and that’s a sizeable market with very few players in it. It’s entirely a coincidence that I happened to review them in a month when many people are choosing to go vegetarian or vegan, but I’m sure many people doing that would have actively considered a visit to Vegivores.

I can imagine there would be many more natural people to review Vegivores than me. A proper vegetarian or vegan, for a start: I’ve never made a secret of being a meat-loving omnivore, and although I’ve been known to order meat-free starters it’s very rare for me to pick a vegetarian main course. I went through a phase a few years ago of deliberately ordering a vegetarian main course once a month when on duty, and although it definitely exposed the paucity of options for vegetarians and vegans it didn’t leave me itching to make changes to my diet. Nonetheless, I headed over to Caversham on a wet and miserable weekday evening with my other half Zoë to see whether Vegivores would change my mind about plant-based food.

The room was long, thin and nicely done – pretty intimate, with the counter and the open kitchen down one side and the tables along the other. There was plenty of tasteful almost-Scandi bare wood, although the chairs and the wooden banquette weren’t the comfiest. I liked it, even so – it probably had about 30 covers, so I can see it could easily fill up, and even on a truly dismal evening the place was about half-full. It was also nice to have a view of the kitchen, and the pass is under very fetching spotlights which means you can see other people’s food about to to be taken to their tables (and adjust your own order accordingly to have what they’re having).

The evening menu was nicely compact, with a small selection of starters and nibbles (most around the six or seven pound mark) and eight main courses, with an additional special on the night we visited. There was a bit of duplication – a couple of the starters appeared as larger versions in the main courses – but even so I felt like it was a decent range and I easily could have ordered numerous dishes in both sections. If you’re used to being confined to the one token plant-based dish on the menu in restaurants, seeing this might well make you drop to your knees and weep salty tears of gratitude.

The menu doesn’t specifically list items as vegetarian or vegan, and Vegivores’ website doesn’t use either V word, so it wasn’t entirely clear to me whether the yoghurt, mayonnnaise, ice cream and so on were vegan, although I assumed they were. It was a good drinks list, too – wines were all organic, there were some excellent bottled beers and ciders (most either organic or local or both) and a couple of local beers on draft. I had a Santo by Siren Craft – priced at three ninety-five for two thirds of a pint – and Zoë had a bottle of alcohol-free Riedenburger. It didn’t make her feel any happier about being on antibiotics.

Zoë and I both picked starters which could also be ordered as mains, to try and give a better view of the full range of the menu. Mine was the “fishless cakes”, a vegan take on fishcakes with smoked tofu instead of cod or haddock, and some nori to boot. The presentation was attractive, with the three cakes bookended with lemon slices and topped with what was meant to be caper salsa but contained a grand total (I counted: I’m sad like that) of one caper.

As a dish I found it problematic – the taste was pleasant, although the smoke didn’t come through strongly, but the texture let it down. It was so crumbly that it didn’t hold together at all, and that lack of structure meant it didn’t feel like either a fishcake or a potato cake, instead being strangely mealy. I very much liked the dill mayo, which had a sharp taste reminiscent of salad cream, and I would have liked more capers to add acidity.

Zoe’s dish had similar challenges. Tofu skewers came with a ramekin of satay sauce, and although the satay itself was delicious with plenty of depth and complexity the tofu needed more by way of texture, even if it was going to inevitably lack flavour of itself. Interestingly, if you order this as a main course the skewers come covered in the sauce: that might be a better way to serve the starter. Zoë’s favourite bit of the starter was the pickled ginger cabbage which came with it, and I agreed – it suggested the kitchen’s strengths might lie with plants rather than meat substitutes.

I think I would have been disappointed by either of those dishes as a main course, which is why I was so relieved that our main courses, when they arrived, stepped things up considerably.

I had changed my order after seeing the barbecue jackfruit burger up at the pass, and it was a very interesting dish. I’d managed to make it to 2020 without ever eating jackfruit (although I’ve heard it described as the vegan answer to pulled pork many times) and it’s definitely an ingenious substitute. I enjoyed its fibrous texture, married with a slightly-sour barbecue sauce, and it played perfectly against the smashed avocado underneath. But, as with the fishless cake, it didn’t quite hold together as a patty which made for an even messier, sloppier experience than, say, an Honest burger. I liked the creole slaw it came with, dry and mayo-free with a faint hint of something like chipotle, but I wasn’t convinced by the herby potatoes where the texture hinted of being pan-fried without enough oil to properly bring them to life.

Zoë on the other hand adored her main – makhanwala, a vegetable curry with salad, chutney, yoghurt and rice. I only got a forkful but I tended to think she had ordered better than me: it had heat and plenty of depth, the cauliflower was terrific and had a little bite and the decision to use brown rather than white rice made the whole thing substantial, warming and hugely comforting. It was a wonderful thing to eat as the rain lashed the precinct outside and, crucially, it was the only savoury course that didn’t make me slightly miss meat. Zoë also ordered (but didn’t really need) a side order of bread: the four slices felt a little unspecial for £2.50 and I’ll take a lot of convincing that there’s a satisfactory vegan alternative to butter.

The dessert menu was pretty compact, but we both managed to find something on it to order. My melon and prosecco sorbet was a clever idea and beautifully presented with berries, mint and edible flowers, and it tasted fresh and clean. I would have liked the prosecco to come through more, but the real issue was the texture, with big ice crystals in each scoop. I liked it, but I’m not sure I six pounds liked it. Vegivores has a pretty decent selection of dessert wines, so I had my sorbet with a glass of golden passito: it could have been lovely, but it needed to be served chilled. I didn’t mention that at the time because I didn’t think they could have fixed it, and I’d rather have slightly cold dessert wine than no dessert wine at all – in any case, the sorbet was quite cold enough to make up for it.

Zoë was far happier with her brownie with vanilla ice cream. I know there’s some debate about whether brownies belong on a dessert menu (I have a friend who likes to say it’s not a dessert, it’s a cake: it’s a hill he’d gladly die on). That philosophical debate aside, I also thought the brownie was decent but – again – texture was an issue. It tasted good, but was crumblier than a truly great brownie should be. I didn’t know whether the ice cream was vegan or not – that cryptic menu again – but it was possibly a good sign that I couldn’t tell.

Service was excellent all evening – engaged, friendly, interested and clearly passionate about Vegivores. Our server had been working there since it opened in October and she was obviously very proud of what they’d achieved in a short space of time. Our meal for two – three courses and a couple of drinks each – came to seventy-two pounds, not including tip: decent value, overall.

Writing restaurant reviews is a funny thing: the act of mentally digesting your meal can carry on long after you’ve left the place. Sometimes the passage of time makes you appreciate just how good a meal was, sometimes the initial enthusiasm fades away and distance removes enchantment. In the case of Vegivores I thought about it far longer than I normally do, because it involved considering other angles: should I be comparing it with other plant-based food, or with everything I’ve eaten? Did it have to be “good for vegan” or good full stop?

I got assistance from an unlikely source. Vegivores’ co-owner Kevin Farrell was interviewed in November by the excellent Bloody Vegans Podcast (even if you’re not a vegan it’s worth checking out their interview with Tom Bursnall, the owner of Miami Burger: eye-opening doesn’t begin to do it justice) and listening to the interview helped enormously when trying to decide how to approach Vegivores.

In it, Kevin said that not using the V word was a deliberate choice because of the connotations often attached to that word (only last year the Guardian of all places published an article simply entitled “Why do people hate vegans?”). So although everything is suitable for vegans – vegan mayo, vegan yoghurt, vegan ice cream, oat milk as the default in all hot drinks – that explained why the menu didn’t expressly say so. I sort of understand the reasoning, but I still think it wouldn’t do any harm to be clearer.

He also said that he wanted not only to offer an entirely plant-based menu but to show that eating a plant-based diet could be healthy as well as tasty (no doubt with other restaurants like Miami Burger in mind). So, for instance, Vegivores is proud of not deep-frying anything. Again, it makes perfect sense, but it also might explain why my fishless cakes lacked a bit of structure and my herby potatoes were a tad wan.

But the thing that struck home most was Kevin saying that the restaurant gets, and is keen to attract, an omnivore clientele as well – so not just vegans and friends of vegans but presumably people who are considering a vegan lifestyle or simply want to cut down their meat consumption, whether that’s for environmental reasons, health reasons or of course unease about the way animals are treated.

That’s the point where I realised that rating them as a vegan restaurant, rather than a restaurant pure and simple, was missing the point. Patronising, too: I remember many years back when I reviewed Nibsy’s tying myself in knots deciding whether to talk about gluten. I admire Vegivores for wanting to be thought of as a restaurant that happens to be vegan (although they would no doubt use a different term) rather than a vegan restaurant, with the many associations attached to that phrase.

So did Vegivores do enough to convert this omnivore? Not quite, I think. Much of the time they were close on flavour, and I do think it’s impressive to offer a vegan mayonnaise or vegan ice cream which don’t feel like they involve any compromises. But food is also about texture, and that’s where I felt Vegivores fell down somewhat, whether it was crumbly fishcakes, that brownie, or jackfruit that didn’t really hold together. It still felt to me like something was missing and – with the exception of the vegetable curry, probably the most conventional and “authentic” dish we tried – none of it was quite powerful enough to make me feel like constraining my choice by eating there.

You may well disregard this as the preconceptions of an omnivore who is too much of a carnivore to be completely open-minded. Perhaps that’s true, but at least I acknowledge that possibility. Many people whose opinions I respect love Vegivores – Zoë enjoyed her meal far more than I did, for instance – so I may have to accept that this is one occasion where I just don’t quite get it. I love their story, I admire what they’re trying to build but it’s difficult for me to envisage an occasion when Vegivores would be my first choice. Not that it matters: there’s huge integrity to what they’re doing and I’m sure they will do extremely well.

I will say this, though – whether or not I fully appreciated Vegivores, they are one of the most significant restaurants to open in Reading for a very long time. It’s a clear statement of intent to every restaurant – in Caversham and in the rest of Reading – that pays lip service to meat-free food just for the sake of having an item on the menu, or to exploit the vegan pound. Vegivores is coming for those restaurants: if they carry on doing that, Vegivores will take their customers and their business and go from strength to strength. Even though they weren’t quite my cup of tea, they’ll absolutely deserve to.

Vegivores – 7.1
41 Church Street, RG4 8BA
0118 9472181

https://www.wearevegivores.com

Zest

On December 6, 2019August 1, 2022 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Zest closed in August 2022. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

How good is your memory for faces? I was in Brighton over the summer, sitting outside a particularly patchouli-scented café in the Lanes, when I thought I recognised the woman walking past my table and nipping inside. It bugged me for about five minutes until I realised where I knew her from: she’d served me in Workhouse Coffee what must have been a couple of years ago. Reading is a small town, and the longer you live there the more chances you get to accumulate memories, or scraps of memories, and to spot people you dimly recognise from your past: that person used to work at the same office as me a few years ago; that person was briefly my housemate in 2001 and never used the shower; there’s a friend I lost in the divorce.

The reason I mention this is that when we turned up at Zest on an icy winter’s evening, the owner recognised me immediately as a former customer of hers. I used to eat at Zest’s town centre sibling restaurant, the sadly-missed LSQ2 (where Handmade Burger is now), but even so it was an impressive feat of recall: I frequented LSQ2 the best part of ten years ago, and I expect she has seen hundreds of diners since then. And yet here we both were – her still trading nicely out at Green Park and me a few pounds heavier, far older and greyer (if not necessarily wiser) but still alive and kicking.

LSQ2 closed in 2012 (the GetReading article announcing the news tried to suggest that every cloud had a silver lining because Cosmo was about to open on Broad Street) but Tony and Sally Cole’s first restaurant, since rebranded as Zest, has been operating at Green Park for fifteen years, offering a combination of classic modern British food and dishes which reflect their time spent in Australia and New Zealand. I still remember a dish of sashimi-grade tuna with a slick of sesame that LSQ2 used to do – I ordered it every time I went there, until they took it off the menu because they felt the tuna wasn’t sustainable.

There are a few reasons why I’d never got round to reviewing Zest before now. It never quite made it to the top of my to do list, and I think that’s because I always got the distinct impression that it was more intended for people working on the business park, and corporate diners, than members of the public. The opening hours, not entirely clear from the website, didn’t help. It’s only generally open Monday to Friday, but you get mixed messages – in one place on the site it says it’s open 5 until late, in another it says their menu is served until 9pm and if you try to book online the latest table it will give you is at 8pm (with a clear instruction that you need to place your order by 8.15, because the kitchen closes).

Arriving at half seven with my other half Zoë didn’t necessarily alter that impression – there were a few tables occupied, one of them a large booking, but all seemed to be coming to the end of their meals: we were the last new customers that evening. Zest is actually quite an attractive space, all dark wood and big windows looking out over water. In the thick fog, with light trying to break through from the nearby offices and car parks, it was all a bit Blade Runner, and if the furniture felt slightly chain hotel it didn’t put me off. The lighting, as you’ll see from the photos, was a little more intimate than I’d like, although it didn’t help that a few bulbs were out.

Zest was running a reduced à la carte menu alongside a Christmas menu when I visited, although the prices weren’t unreasonable for either and you were allowed to mix and match. The only real difference was that mains on the Christmas menu were a few pounds more expensive and came with roasted vegetables and Brussels sprouts, whether they went with the dish or not (but more of that later).

In general starters were seven or eight pounds and, if you visit outside the festive season, most mains will cost you around fifteen. It was a very good menu with more than a few tempting choices, and I’m glad to say that no compromises were made in bringing you this review. There’s definitely an Asian influence to an otherwise modern European menu with Thai and Indonesian dishes sitting alongside more traditional ones – we tried a little from both, in the interests of balance.

My starter was one of the nicest things I’ve eaten this year. Pork belly (triple-cooked according to the menu, although I saw no real evidence of that) came in generous cubes with tender meat and glossy fat, all coated in a gloriously funky, fishy XO sauce, with pak choi, spring onion and big, fragrant coriander leaves. There was a lime aioli advertised, and something that looked like that was definitely drizzled over the pork, but it couldn’t break through the stronger flavours in the dish, not that I cared in the slightest.

The only misfire was the crackling on top, which left me fearing for my fillings. A lighter touch would have been better, and in honesty the dish wouldn’t have missed it: it also ruined the picture below, or at least that’s my excuse. In any case, I was too delighted with everything else to mind. I let Zoë try a couple of pieces, partly because it was the season of goodwill but mainly because food that good deserves to be shared, regardless of whether it’s December or June.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d won at starters, but Zoë was very happy with hers. “I want to try the Scotch egg because I’d had a few to compare it to”, she said, and it was a very attractive specimen, served on what was called “curry mayonnaise” but felt to me more like a katsu sauce, more fruity than fiery. It could have done with more of the advertised coriander salsa verde but even so I thought it was a really good example – what felt like panko breadcrumbs, beautiful texture, peppery sausagemeat and yolk at just the right consistency.

“Is it better than the Lyndhurst’s?” I asked Zoë.

“Better than the one they do now, and up there with the one the previous owners did” was the reply.

The wine list at Zest may reflect the fact that most of their diners drive home afterwards, with a compact selection: most of it is available by the glass, and only a couple of bottles north of thirty pounds. We had a very drinkable French pinot noir for twenty-eight pounds which I thoroughly enjoyed – although our waiter intervened to stop me pouring it myself, which felt a little unnecessary. He was the only person looking after us all evening and I couldn’t quite shift the fear that he resented us for making him work late: nice enough, but a little distant and slightly lacking in warmth.

Our main courses, both from the Christmas menu, came out a little quicker than I might have liked, adding to the feeling that we were keeping staff from their loved ones. It’s never easy, I suppose, for a kitchen to sit on their hands when they only have two dishes left to prepare, but I do wish they’d left it a little longer.

However, again, that felt like a minor quibble once I started eating the food. My beef rendang was truly beautiful. My previous experience of this dish had been at Newbury’s now-defunct Wau, and at the time I thought I’d had a very good rendang. This, though, was streets ahead – not sickly-sweet and overreliant on coconut but complex and aromatic, shot through with hints of star anise. Similarly, the beef hadn’t been cooked into mush – it was still in distinct pieces which only fell apart when you tried to load them onto a fork. Again, there was plenty of coriander and the sharp crunch of ribbons of lightly pickled carrot on top was an excellent touch.

This was a marvellous dish, perfect on a Baltic Reading evening, and I am pretty sure it is usually on Zest’s à la carte menu, so try it if you go. As it was on the Christmas menu it was served with a fair few roasted heritage carrots (many of them a pleasingly deep shade of purple), and although they didn’t go in the slightest with an Indonesian curry it didn’t stop them being delicious.

Zoë’s lamb shank was a more conventionally Christmassy affair, and very good it was too – a gigantic piece of meat, cooked into soft surrender. The sauce was deep, with a little sweetness from balsamic vinegar and soft onions and the mash was suitably creamy and smooth. This went much better with the roasted vegetables and with the surprisingly good Brussels sprouts, sliced thinly and served with cream and a little speckle of pancetta. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this dish also features on the menu all year round, and it’s well worth ordering. I would have liked the advertised mint salsa to make an appearance, but the dish managed fine without it.

It took a while for the waiter to ask us if we wanted to look at the dessert menu, and I felt guilty about saying yes: he asked in the same way that I ask Zoë if she wants help hanging the laundry out i.e. hoping against hope that the answer will be no. But if they don’t want people to order dessert, Zest will have to make the menu a lot less tempting – even the usual suspects had twists that made you want to find out how they looked off the page and on the plate. It’s also worth mentioning that Zest’s cheeseboard is a veritable Greatest Hits of local cheeses – Barkham Blue, Waterloo, Wigmore and Spenwood, all for eight pounds fifty.

My dessert was probably the weak link of the meal. Chocolate tart with meringue and Clementine sorbet sounded beautiful, and the flavours were all present, correct and harmonious. But the texture was wrong – the chocolate was not the solid ganache I was expecting, but a molten pool, as if it had escaped from a fondant. It didn’t stop it being enjoyable, a rarified Terry’s chocolate orange encased in light buttery pastry, but it wasn’t quite what I had hoped.

If I’d won out on starters, Zoë drew level with dessert. I feared a white chocolate and Bailey’s cheesecake would be too sickly but actually it was sweet but not excessively so, a big block of indulgence heavy on filling and light on base. The passionfruit curd underneath stopped the whole thing being too one-dimensional, but given that I was only allowed one small forkful it’s hard to comment further, beyond wishing that I’d ordered it myself.

Dinner for two, including a pre-added 10% service charge, came to just over a hundred pounds – and actually, ordering off the á la carte isn’t any more or less expensive than the three-courses-for-thirty-pounds festive menu. To my mind, that makes the latter remarkably generous and I left the restaurant with a full stomach, a spring in my step and a couple of money off vouchers for next month which I may well end up using.

It’s easy to get jaded when you review a restaurant every fortnight, easier still when it’s a Cozze, a Lemoni or a Pantry. So I’m delighted that, even if by accident rather than design, I’ve saved one of the best meals of 2019 until almost the very last. I didn’t come away from Zest convinced that they were necessarily packed on most weekday evenings, and that lack of clarity probably goes some way to explaining why the pacing of the meal was a little rushed and the service sometimes felt a tad diffident.

But – and this is far more important – I did come away from Zest wishing I had visited a long time ago, and convinced that I might have unearthed one of the best local restaurants you’ve never considered going to. It’s easily accessible by bus from the town centre, it’s affordable by taxi on the way home and it serves delicious, interesting food (it’s as if they’ve been doing it, without much fanfare, for the best part of fifteen years). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Zest that a buzzier room full of more customers wouldn’t solve – and personally, I plan to play my own small role in helping with that in the New Year. I suspect if you went you’d find it memorable: chances are, they’d come to remember you too.

Zest – 8.0
Lime Square, 220 South Oak Way, Green Park, RG2 6UP
0118 9873702

http://www.zestatlimesquare.co.uk/home.html

The Last Crumb

On November 22, 2019September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

Reading’s pub scene has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in the second half of 2019, despite pubs closing day in day out all over the country. The Lyndhurst reopened under new management and is now dishing up some really impressive food: last week I went there and had saddle of rabbit, stuffed with chicken liver and wrapped in Parma ham, up there with any rabbit dish I’ve had in Bologna. Then the Retreat was saved from an uncertain fate by a buy-out and is going from strength to strength with a new wine list, a far bigger presence online and, thankfully, the magnificent Brian still behind the bar.

That’s all well and good, but when the pub in question undergoes a more dramatic makeover people can be a little sniffier. The Eldon Arms closed and reopened in September as the Weather Station, with a few locals lamenting the loss of the name. I’ve been a few times since the reincarnation and it does some interesting beers, although sitting on a hard stool and using a barrel for a table is maybe designed for customers far younger and cooler than me: I soon found myself longing for a proper seat, which is around the point where I sloped off to the Retreat.

Finally, Caversham’s Prince Of Wales, at the top of Prospect Street, was acquired by Dodo Pubs who have spent a fair bit of time and money rebranding it as the Last Crumb. This provoked more complaints about losing the name, which I found harder to understand: surely there are quite enough pubs around the country called the Prince Of Wales? (I bet nobody would have objected it had been called the Duke Of York). Anyway, it’s not as if the people up in arms had frequented the pub back when it was the Prince Of Wales – everything I’d ever heard about the place suggested you wouldn’t go in unless you were up to date on your tetanus jabs.

I was delighted by the news that Dodo Pubs had taken on the Prince Of Wales, because I’ve always been a fan of the Rickety Press, their outpost in north Oxford’s Jericho – a lovely pub that does a good range of beers and ciders and very credible pizzas and burgers. When my Canadian family came to visit the U.K. earlier in the year and we went for a day trip to Oxford, I booked us in to the Rickety Press knowing it would suit everyone – craft enough for my twentysomething cousin and unpretentious enough for my 80 year old uncle. We had a lovely meal there, and I found myself wishing there was somewhere similar in Reading. And then my wish was granted, so my other half Zoë and I headed over on a weekday night to see whether the Last Crumb lived up to the promise of its sibling.

The Pantry

On November 1, 2019September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews6 Comments

Once upon a time, in the town of Reading, there was a bar called the 3Bs. It was named after the three famous alliterative cornerstones of Reading – beer, biscuits and bulbs – and, for those of us who remember it, it was one of the best bars there was. It was part of the Town Hall, and long before the Oakford ever opened it was the place you congregated in after work – unless your friends wanted to drink in O’Neills, in which case you made new friends. When the tables appeared outside, near the statue of Queen Victoria, you knew that summer was on the way.

It even featured, albeit briefly, in the opening episode of 1997 police show Crime Traveller, around the 3:45 mark in this video, as maverick cop (aren’t they always) Jeff Slade, played by ex-EastEnders bad boy Michael French, zooms through the Town Hall Square on a motorbike, scattering people and tables as he pursues a generic baddie in a boxy car all the way to the Queens Road car park. Around that time I was temping in Apex Plaza (which also features in the chase sequence) and it was all very exciting. As I recall, my brother bought a sandstone-coloured blouson, trying to emulate Jeff Slade, but it was all a little too Sergio Georgini. Ah, the Nineties.

My favourite memories of the 3Bs, in as far as I can remember anything, were of Bohemian Night, its weekly live music evening. A friend and I would always turn up early, sit near the front and drink almost enough to make the music sound good. Compered by AF Harrold (now a published author, then a jobbing performance poet working in Blackwells – remember when we used to have a Blackwells?) it was the Reading’s Got Talent of its day.

This involved various earnest acoustic solo acts and duets, a little spoken word, a shouty man who called himself “Preacher John” and another chap called “Reverend John H” who did an extremely offensive song about the sadly departed Princess Of Wales. There was also a bewildered pensioner called “Mr David” who would shamble on stage and perform roughly half a joke without getting to the punchline and then start singing snatches of My Way. It looked like he may have slept in a bin.

Only at Bohemian Night could a young chap wearing a fuzzy wig bound up to the mike, all puppyish enthusiasm, and announce “I’m Dunstan McFunkstan, and I’ve got a bag of comedy!” (if he honestly did, it was empty). And that’s before we get to the performance poetry, which was usually my cue to go up to the bar. Every now and again someone with genuine talent would show up at Bohemian Night and I’d enjoy their act, safe in the knowledge that I would never see them again. I loved it: I went every week without fail.

All good things must come to an end, and the 3Bs closed in 2011. Then, last July, the council announced that it would be reopening in the autumn. Signs were up by October 2018 declaring that it would be called Lains. Well, the council is as good at opening restaurants on time as it is at filing accounts, because it wasn’t until September this year that it finally opened, having changed its name in the meantime to The Pantry. The council’s announcement was full of the usual buzzwords about how the “Executive Chef” (why a café needs an executive chef is anybody’s guess) would use local produce to create a “scrumptious and inventive menu”. That was all the incentive I needed to take a trip down memory lane one weekday lunchtime with my other half Zoë, herself a fan of the 3Bs from back in the day.

Edible Reading

Tag: Zoe