Restaurant review: Bosco Pizzeria, Bristol

On January 17, 2025January 16, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Zoë and I wound up in Bristol on the Saturday before Christmas because my friend James was having a barbecue to mark the end of what he refers to as the “grilling season”. Its boundaries are somewhat amorphous, because James likes to barbecue at almost any opportunity, but as far as I can gather the grilling season starts around Easter and ends at some point before New Year’s Eve. I can’t say that with any confidence though, because I wouldn’t put it past James to grill meat in the dead of winter too: it would make more sense to you, if you’d met him.

But anyway it was an evening do, and that left me with one final lunch in Bristol before the year was out. And rather than try the hot new place – assuming I knew where the hot new place was, of course – or one of the Bristol restaurants on my radar like Bank, Native Vine or The Clifton, I decided to go for a safe bet. What can I say: it was the end of the year, my last opportunity to eat on duty in 2024 and, just this once, I wanted a guarantee of what the festive season always promises, comfort and joy. So I chose Bosco Pizzeria, situated near the top of Whiteladies Road, before it meets The Downs.

I first went to Bosco the best part of a decade ago, when it was very much Bristol’s pizza pioneer, and although I hadn’t been back for some time I always had it down as a reliable banker for somewhere good to eat in the city. Since it first opened its fortunes had ebbed and flowed, opening a second branch in Clifton, closing it and reopening it, closing the Whiteladies Road branch due to Covid and then taking a long old time to reopen due to a fire. Other branches in Cheltenham and Bath had followed, and a sister restaurant called Pizzucci offering a more American, less Italian experience down the Gloucester Road.

But I’d always seen it as a sure thing, and a standout even as other pizza restaurants came and went in Bristol. I reckoned it was as good as Flour and Ash – the original one on the Cheltenham Road that Jay Rayner got worked up about that is, not the sanitised relaunched one on Whiteladies Road which I haven’t visited. And for my money it was better than the much-hyped Bertha’s on Wapping Wharf, which wasn’t quite as good as I’d expected it to be. I couldn’t definitively say it was the best pizza in Bristol: after all I don’t live there, and I’m yet to try the likes of Pizzarova or CanCanPizza, but I could say that it took some beating.

And it was a lovely, busy spot the Saturday before Christmas. They’d slightly rejigged it since I was last there, the front section buzzy and full of smaller tables, the one out back made up of booths for larger groups. You could sit up at the bar, which some people were doing, and it had that lovely air of a place where people, like me, were putting their cares to one side for a couple of hours and treating themselves. Christmas decorations were tasteful and muted, wreaths in the window, baubles running along the tops of the banquettes. My wife took a photo of me, sitting there all happy: I liked it enough to use it as a Facebook profile picture.

Bosco’s menu was split into sections – about half a dozen if you count salads, which personally I rarely do. Apart from salads there were cicchetti, a selection of meats and cheeses, plenty of permutations of pizza, a small range of pasta dishes priced as mains and a few bigger dishes (or, as they put it, “large plates”) – ribollita, parmigiana and what have you. It was, I reflected as I tried to make choices, exactly the kind of menu you always hope to see in mainstream Italian chains but never do. It struck me as the sort of place Maidenhead’s Storia was aiming to be. Zoë sipped a very good negroni, I sipped arguably an even better negroni sbagliato and gradually we honed our selection, sequencing them like a mix tape.

The first slight stutter came when we ordered. I said we’d like a couple of cicchetti, then a mixture of meats and cheeses, then our pizzas.

“We’ll bring out all the smaller dishes at the same time, is that okay?” said our server.

Now, I very much wanted to say no, actually, we’re really happy to be here and we’re in no rush so can we have the cicchetti first, then the other bits and then the pizza, like we asked for? And I would have done, but my wife gave me a look which very clearly said could you not be a restaurant reviewer, just this once? so I kept my mouth shut. It hasn’t stopped me mentioning it here, obviously, but it did irk me – what was the rush? It had that feel that Wagamama always has, that the kitchen’s convenience is the primary concern, not your experience.

And it did literally all come out at once, in the space of a couple of minutes, causing not just a sequencing problem but a logistical one too, the table barely big enough to hold five small plates at once. We prioritised the calamari, as the only hot dish we’d asked for, and it was decent but flawed. The thing I’m always watching out for here is the bounce and twang of squid that needed to be fresher, and Bosco avoided that pitfall. But in its place were brittle sticks of squid, almost like Clifton Nik-Naks, which managed to be both pale and overcooked. We squeezed the lemon, dipped in the aioli but neither could totally redeem the raw materials.

The anchovies also misfired. These were billed as coming with salted butter – as they had at Brutto – and focaccia, and almost did but didn’t quite. Instead they came with very good focaccia but swimming in extra virgin, oilier than a Bluesky reply guy, shallot finely diced on top. Is it wrong that I took against them for still having the skin on? Maybe, but it fooled me for a second into thinking these were more like vinegary boquerones than taut, salty anchovies. That wasn’t right – they were intensely salty – but somehow the texture of them didn’t feel quite as I expected.

It was either cognitive dissonance or cognitive disappointment, but I couldn’t work out which. Three anchovies for seven pounds felt a little steep, but I guess you were paying for the focaccia as well. And I liked the focaccia, as I said, and I know it wouldn’t have gone as well with butter as with olive oil. But the whole thing felt a tad disjointed.

Bosco has always excelled for cheese and charcuterie, and the menu gives you an appealing range of both which you can mix and match in the most middle class multibuy of all time. My favourite of the cheeses was the one I neglected to photograph, a gorgeous Robiolo which was soft but not stinky, complex without being overpowering. It was great with the focaccia, which begged the question of how you’d eat it if you hadn’t ordered the anchovies. Almost as good was a Gorgonzola dolce which I liked and Zoë loved – simultaneously sweet and salty and very well balanced.

But again, without the focaccia it might have been messy to eat. I know that this kind of thing – getting in nice cheeses and cured meats, keeping the former well and slicing the latter thinly – is more about buying than cooking, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that many Italian restaurants don’t do this very well. Bosco’s years of experience showed in this respect, in cultivating excellent suppliers, buying the best stuff from them and not mucking it up. It can’t be that easy: if it was, it wouldn’t be so rare.

Oh, and the coppa was divine. Clearly sliced there and then, not exhumed from leaves of plastic, with that dryness and nuttiness that marks out the best specimens. This was the one thing that didn’t need bread at all, it just needed to be picked up and polished off, with or without a soupçon of cheese. The natural order had been restored, and I remembered just how good Bosco can be. We flagged someone down for another couple of sbagliatos: even though our reservation had been for a late lunch, the dining room showed no signs of thinning out.

Maybe the staff had got the message that we weren’t in a rush, or maybe they were just too busy to rush us, but there was a decent interval between our plethora of small plates and the main attraction.

Either way I was reminded, during that time, of lots of things: what a nice room it was, and how my many visits there had all been at different stages in my life, during a decade where almost everything about my life – what I did for a living, who I did it for, where I lived and who I lived there with – had changed, the only constant being this blog. I’d never been to Bosco with Zoë, and it made me happy to share this room with her at the end of a year itself full of changes.

I was also reminded, almost as much, just how nice a well made negroni sbagliato can be, but that’s probably beside the point.

Zoë and I reverted to type in ordering our mains, that comfort and joy thing again. Her pizza was the ventricina, a very Zoë choice with spicy salami, chilli oil and honey. She loved it, as I expected she would, and it showcased what Bosco did really well – an exemplary base, a chewy, bubbled crust with plenty of blistering, a deep tomato sauce, winningly fruity. This was as good an advert for Bosco as you could hope for, and at thirteen-fifty I thought it was solid value, especially benchmarked against restaurants closer to home like Zia Lucia.

That I didn’t enjoy my pizza as much just goes to show that you can get the fundamentals bang on and then fluff it with the whistles and bells. I too had asked for my archetypal pizza preference, sometimes called the Neopolitan and sometimes, as here, the Venetian. Either way, it’s the old anchovy, olive, caper trifecta and it’s always my go to when I visit a pizza place, providing it’s on.

The base was still exemplary, so was the sauce, so what went wrong here? A few things, really. The anchovies were unevenly distributed, Franco Manca style, leaving a reasonable amount of surface area salt-free. And the anchovies (skinless this time, to be fair) were too much fish and not enough salt, although that might have been a personal preference.

And what about the capers? Apparently they were fried in this case, which can work brilliantly – Buon Appetito used to do this – but they seemed anonymous. There weren’t enough of them, and what there were didn’t contribute the acetic sharpness I wanted. This pizza is meant to be all about salt and vinegar, but instead it was more fish and mild disappointment.

Hey ho. It wasn’t a bad pizza, it just wasn’t as good as I knew it could be. The slightly haphazard timing, coupled with our gluttony, meant we ate too much too quickly and were too full for dessert, so we settled up. Our meal, including two negronis apiece and an optional 12.5% service charge, came to just over one hundred and six pounds. I didn’t begrudge that: besides, they had Aesop handwash in their very fetching loos, and that stuff doesn’t pay for itself. We called up an Uber and prepared ourselves to have a few drinks with James and Liz ahead of the official end of the grilling season. Well, maybe after a nap to sleep off some of those carbs.

It was a lovely evening, incidentally. The beers flowed thick and fast – James is the man who has turned his garage into a micropub – and the conversation was enormous fun. We got to bed well after midnight, too tired for the traditional couples debrief. But during the gathering somebody who knows that I write this blog asked me if I’d gone anywhere on duty at lunchtime and I said yes, I’d been to Bosco.

“I hear it’s not as good as it used to be, would you agree with that?” I was asked.

And the binary answer, although the world’s always more complicated than binary answers, is yes, I do agree. On my previous visits, Bosco was the place you wish would open near you, the place that could teach every Italian chain a thing or two. On this visit, although it was still good, it was closer in quality to those chains at their very best. The gap had narrowed, and not because the chains have upped their game. This is the point, often combined with expansion, at which independent restaurants need to take care.

But anyway, on that night – and, writing this now – it didn’t seem to matter quite so much. It was a very agreeable lunch, if not a perfect one, tucked away at the end of the year. If you asked me where to go for a rock solid reliable pizza in Bristol, I would still probably pick Bosco; it’s earned that latitude, because we go way back. And if one opened in Reading, all the Sarv’s Slices and Dough Bros in the RG postcode wouldn’t stop me paying it a more than occasional visit. Next time you’re in Bristol, if you want an absolute banker, I think Bosco is still that.

Bosco Pizzeria – 7.6
96 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2QX
0117 9737978

https://www.boscopizzeria.co.uk

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Feature: The 2024 Edible Reading Awards

On December 27, 2024September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Features, Uncategorized4 Comments

Last year, I got Covid at the start of December and the rest of the month was a bit of a write-off, and although I enjoyed writing about the best restaurants of the year – who wouldn’t? – the experience was dulled by my still hanging out of my arse. It was like going round the supermarket when you’re really not hungry. This year has been another isolated Christmas at home, because Zoë came down with the flu just before Christmas Eve. So it’s been just the two of us, eating everything we’ve stocked up in the fridge, missing out on a plethora of family celebrations. On the plus side, we managed to watch the Gavin and Stacey finale: every cloud.

I’m still waiting to contract flu myself, and fully expect that it will turn up in time to torpedo New Year, or the annual trip to Bruges, But in the meantime I’ve just been sitting a fair distance from my poorly wife and sleeping with the window cracked open, mainlining chocolate and looking enviously at everybody’s lavish celebrations on Christmas Day. Everybody’s tables were groaning with roasted meat and bronzed spuds, and everyone looked so happy.

On Christmas Day afternoon as Zoë slept upstairs I watched The Holdovers and felt a real affinity for anybody else feeling alone on the big day. I put something on Threads to that effect: nobody responded to it, so I made another cup of tea and reached for more chocolate.

Anyway, all that means that writing up my annual awards this year is more like going round the supermarket when you’re fucking ravenous and everything looks good. Because I’ve eaten so well this year, in Reading and elsewhere in the U.K., at home and abroad. That makes narrowing things down fun but agonising, involves running through a list of all the brilliant things you’ve eaten but may not get to sample again.

It was after all the year I gave out two of my highest ever ratings in Reading (and one of my lowest), and a handful of very high ratings elsewhere, mostly in London, although a rare 9.0 came from elsewhere in England.

It was also a year of confounded expectations, where the places you expected to be good were mediocre or middling and some of the best meals I had were from unsung, hype-free places. I like that a lot, to be honest. The day you can guess a rating for a review before you even read the thing is the day that you’re doing something that could be replaced by AI – although, as food writer Andy Lynes discovered this year, that day may come sooner than you think.

So yes, as interesting a year in food as I’ve had in all my time writing this blog, and one with almost 50% more reviews than the previous year. That makes this year’s awards trickier in many respects, but also the shape of my life – getting married, moving house – has changed the places I eat and drink at regularly.

There may come a time when I’m just not qualified to judge this kind of thing any more, if I ever was, so perhaps this is better read as a list of my absolute favourites rather than some kind of weird tablets of stone declaring Reading’s best restaurants. Actually, put like that it should always have been read that way, so let’s hope it has been.

A lot of the great food I’ve eaten this year has been outside Reading and in the past I’ve limited the awards to Reading dishes, with two separate categories for the best non-Reading restaurants, in Berkshire and further afield. I’ve done that again this year, but it’s getting increasingly hard to take that approach. Because eating outside Reading is a salutary reminder that our town is falling behind the rising bar elsewhere: dishes like Quality Chop House’s cod roe with salt and vinegar doughnuts, Kolae’s biryani rice crackers or Lucky Lychee’s Marmite chicken would comfortably win hands down against most of their Reading rivals.

Maybe next year I’ll do things differently, in more ways than one. But until then, let’s celebrate the best of this year – and let me take the opportunity to wish you a very Happy New Year into the bargain. Last year I was at Double-Barrelled with my in-laws enjoying a very lively 90s party, this year I will be relaxing on the sofa watching something good with, hopefully, a bottle of something even better. But however you celebrate I hope you have a fantastic time, and that 2025 brings you everything you hope for.

STARTER OF THE YEAR: Chicken satay, The Moderation

One of Reading’s great dishes, I’m disappointed that it took me so long to realise the genius of the Moderation’s chicken satay and I ate it several times this year – exactly as many times, in fact, as I went to the Moderation. It was nowhere near as good when I first visited the Mod on duty, eleven years ago, but in that time they have got it as close to perfection as possible.

It makes you realise how disappointing this dish is elsewhere when you order it at the Moderation. Elsewhere, the chicken is worryingly uniform and regular, just a beige vehicle for peanut sauce. At the Moderation it’s gorgeous stuff with marination and a lick of char. And the peanut sauce isn’t just hot spicy Sun-Pat, it’s a beautiful and brooding thing with a little heat, even more gloriously chunky than I am. The attention to detail here is spot-on, and that even extends to the cup of lettuce, generously filled with little pickles.

In a year full of excellent starters, honourable mentions go to the mutton fry at Chilis, one of many great small plates offered by that restaurant, and the deliciously inventive kaleji poppers at Calcot’s Coriander Club.

CHAIN OF THE YEAR: Honest Burgers

Last year’s winners win it again this year because they remain the preeminent chain restaurant in town. In a year when we lost the likes of Brown’s and TGI Friday, more because of redevelopment than poor takings, Honest proved that you can still pack in diners by being a reliable, known quantity and not making many mistakes. It’s been a regular stop off for me in town when I get in on the train after a day at work, am eating on my own and want to take no risks.

That doesn’t make Honest sound exciting, because exciting it isn’t, but that’s no insult because I don’t think that’s what a successful chain in 2024 wants to be in the slightest. Although that said, they have widened their appeal even further to the likes of me by putting Two Flints’ excellent Santiago on tap and finally, in the Reading branch at least, offering chicken tenders.

The best illustration I can find of why Honest Burgers has won this award is this: I ate there just before Christmas, on my own, and I decided to try their Christmas burger with some tenders on the side. The burger was a little indifferent – it could have been hotter and the puck of deep fried camembert seemed to have leaked its molten contents, leaving just a crispy shell. The tenders were also warm rather than piping hot. The chips, all that said, were as good as they’ve ever been.

By Honest standards it was probably a 6 out of 10, far from the best Honest I’ve had over the years. And it was still better than most meals I could have had at any other chain restaurant in town.

Honourable mentions go to Pho, the eternal runner-up and itself a very reliable restaurant, and Zia Lucia, which may not be amazing but is perfectly serviceable and has truly excellent service. Next year I will do my best to try them both out, even when I’m just in the mood to go back to Honest.

LUNCH VENUE OF THE YEAR: DaNata Coffee & Co

Not living near the centre, and having a partner who no longer works in the town centre, has definitely narrowed my lunch experiences this year, so in the second half of the year that meant most of my lunches happened at weekends. Even so it was a happy Sunday over the summer when I wandered down the Oxford Road, and DeNata turned out to be a little glimmer of Portuguese paradise.

Everything I had was great, especially the salt cod pasteis and the feature attraction, a floury, soggy, spectacular bifana. Oh, and the pasteis de nata. So essentially everything I had was great, and when I go back next year I plan to make inroads into the rest of the menu to see if it makes me miss Lisbon even less. West Reading residents are a fortunate bunch.

Honourable mentions go to two places. One is Tasty Greek Souvlaki, where a mixed gyros remains another of Reading’s most satisfying sandwiches, and the other is Blue Collar Corner. It can be quite vendor dependent but when it has someone decent there, like recent guest spots The Burger Society and Fornoza, it’s a wonderful spot for a weekend indulgence.

OUT OF TOWN RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR (BERKSHIRE): U. Bakery, Crowthorne

I ate out less in Berkshire than usual this year, and the field was less packed than it could have been because both my on duty visits to Maidenhead this year were so underwhelming. But in any year, in any field, U. Bakery would have been a very worthy winner. You could say it’s just a cafe, or just a bakery, but that would be completely missing what a great job owner Uri Zilberman has done in the two years since opening his Crowthorne venue.

Everything is so well realised – a beautifully put together spot, comfy and Scandi with excellent branding and cheery, ultra-competent staff. But all that wouldn’t mean much if the product wasn’t up to scratch and this is where U. Bakery excels. Brilliant baked goods, gorgeous and interesting sandwiches in outstanding pretzel baguettes, thoroughly acceptable coffee. Why Reading doesn’t have somewhere like this and has to slum it with GAIL’s – their pompous capitalisation, not mine – is a mystery. And U. Bakery’s Instagram is not only a great advertisement for what they do, but also a devilishly delicious virtual shop window.

Only one honourable mention in this category – Maidenhead must try harder – which is for the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence. My revisit this year was one of my happiest on duty meals in 2024, and I was delighted to find them still firing on all cylinders.

MAIN COURSE OF THE YEAR: Short rib green curry, The Moderation

I discovered this dish on a visit to the Moderation last month with my old friend Dave: he was my plus one when I reviewed the Mod earlier in the year and when he came to visit me again he picked it for lunch because he wanted to eat their nasi goreng again. I decided to take a punt on something new on the menu – possibly to atone for having the chicken satay and crispy squid yet again – so I thought I’d give the short rib Thai green curry a chance.

I couldn’t possibly have anticipated just how good it was. A giant slab of beef, slipping off the bone and breaking into strands, in a superlative green curry sauce, peppered with green tomato and nutty peas, it was possibly my biggest surprise of the year. I have thought about it many times since. I know that this was the year I reviewed Kolae, in Borough Market, the Thai restaurant raved about by every big nob in the food media. But on a dish against dish basis, I’m not sure I ate anything there I preferred to this number.

This was a year packed with runners-up, any of which could conceivably have won this award. Even narrowing it down to two honourable mentions is positively invidious, but since I must I should give a nod to The Cellar’s exemplary chicken Milanese and Clay’s Kitchen’s yakhni pulao, possibly the most complete plate of food on a menu shimmering with highlights.

CAFÉ OF THE YEAR: Coffee Under Pressure

A year where we lost Workhouse was a tough year, and many of us found we had to make new rituals for our caffeination. But it was less challenging for me because I have always loved C.U.P. on Blagrave Street, and this was the year it took pole position in my affections. Sitting up at the window became a little ritual – bleary eyed on a weekday morning with a latter before taking my commuter train to work, relaxed with a mocha at weekends as a special treat.

This is also the year I got married, and the place I had my last coffee as a nervous bridegroom on a Friday afternoon, my first coffee as a newlywed the following morning. If you’d asked me on New Year’s Day if I could imagine a town without Workhouse in the centre, I’d have said absolutely not. But after nine months in a Workhouse free town I’ve got my head around it. If C.U.P. shut, though, I would be devastated.

Honourable mentions go to Compound Coffee – who I fear for, given the ongoing rumours about the viability of the Biscuit Factory which houses them – and Filter Coffee, who are thoroughly lovely. It’s a pity the latter has given up what little seating it had, mind you.

OUT OF TOWN RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR (OUTSIDE BERKSHIRE): Lucky Lychee, Winchester

My find of this year, and easily as good as my find of any other year, Lucky Lychee does Malaysian food in a pub in Winchester and I am still completely at a loss as to why it has so far escaped the notice of national restaurant critics. It is absolutely extraordinary, the kind of spot you wish you could pick up and drop just round the corner from wherever you happen to live.

Everything I had there when I went was phenomenal – their chicken karaage, their sublime Penang pork rolls and a main course of dreams, fried chicken in a sticky honey and Marmite sauce which took the best of both and, through some magical alchemy, made it more delicious than either could possibly have been on its own. And yet I went away sad that I’d been too full to try the rendang, or a brunch roti crammed with spiced local sausage.

I know fewer people read my out of town reviews, and that they don’t always prompt people to head to the destination in question. But I’ve been so happy that a handful of readers have gone to Winchester on the basis of this review and reported back that they liked it as much as I did. Well, almost as much anyway: my old friend Dave took his wife there for brunch. “Really good” was his verdict. “It’s a nice place.” You’ll have to take my word for it that, coming from him, that’s an A minus. I loved it so much that I’m back there tomorrow for one last visit before the end of the year.

My honourable mentions in this category come both from London and much closer to home. Quality Chop House, a London institution, was almost as fantastic as everyone says it is (which is to say that it’s still pretty fantastic), and the Plough in Shiplake was classy, polished and really well executed.

SERVICE OF THE YEAR: The Coriander Club

I’ve had excellent service nearly everywhere I’ve gone on my travels this year, but I was especially impressed by the Coriander Club, where the owner simultaneously worked her socks off while charming mine off into the process.

If I ever wanted a contrast between service where people really care about you having a good time and where people aren’t really that bothered whether you do or not, you see it in the difference between going somewhere like the Coriander Club – where the owner is passionate about the place, passionate about her food and wants you to have a fantastic time – and somewhere like, say, Bombay Brothers where the service never seemed to entirely recover from the shock of having customers at all.

The Coriander Club, on the other hand, is delighted to have customers and wants to turn them into repeat customers. My experience is that they’re very good at it.

Honourable mentions in this category go to Dough Bros, whose compact but perfectly formed team gets service instinctively right, and Clay’s Kitchen, whose young and enthusiastic squad does a fantastic job making one of Reading’s biggest restaurants feel small and intimate.

DESSERT OF THE YEAR: Strawberry pavlova, The Cellar

You don’t see pavlovas much on menus these days: restaurants are much more likely to be lazy and put on Eton mess, its accident-prone sibling. But fortunately The Cellar isn’t lazy and the resulting dessert – a graceful oval of meringue, strawberries and cream, syrup and a knockout orb of basil sorbet – is so delicious that their efforts aren’t remotely wasted.

When I reviewed The Cellar, I said “I give out awards every year for Dessert Of The Year, so thank god I went to The Cellar this week or I might have been writing a post next month saying ‘or you can just pick up a bar of Cadbury’s Top Deck from the corner shop’.” It’s almost as if I knew this moment would come, and come it did.

Having said all that, a challenger turned up right at the end of the year when I thoroughly enjoyed Thames Lido’s chocolate mousse, a classic made slightly quirky with the addition of pink peppercorns. Another honourable mention goes to DeNata’s eponymous egg custard tarts – up there with Lisbon standards, if you ask me.

NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR: Dough Bros

I’ve so enjoyed watching Dough Bros taking Reading by storm this year from its little site on Northumberland Avenue, just down the road from sister business Short Back & Vibes. They cut hair there, but they don’t cut corners at Dough Bros; right from the off they’ve made exceptional pizza – with the best flour, the best tomatoes – and have quietly plugged away hoping that if they did their best, word would get out and they would achieve Dough Bros’ stated ambition. They would transcend Whitley.

Well, they have well and truly done that. They may have started the year hoping for the best, but they end it having achieved the best. It’s genuinely heartwarming to see their Instagram stories saying that they’ve sold out of bases, week night after week night, or to see their little spot, on the edge of town, packed out with pizza enthusiasts.

I don’t know what 2025 holds for Dough Bros, whether that’s expansion, or new menu items, or an alcohol license, or just them carrying on doing what they’re doing and consolidating their position. But whatever they do, I and a lot of people will be watching: it must be five years or so since I’ve seen a new Reading restaurant capture hearts and minds the way Dough Bros has. I’ve had their Honey Honey pizza – pepperoni, ricotta and hot honey – many times this year, and I have no doubt there will be more in the twelve months ahead. I count myself very lucky to live not too far away.

It’s a shame I can’t give this award to three different businesses. But DeNata Coffee & Co and The Cellar, both mentioned elsewhere in these awards, also made Reading a much better place this year, in marked contrast to the flashy, big money places that so underwhelmed in 2024.

TAKEAWAY OF THE YEAR: Gooi Nara

When I moved I had to try out other takeaway options, because I could no longer rely on food from the town centre, or from the north side of town, arriving hot or intact. In the process I had some truly dreadful experiences – some because things went cold, others because they went walkabout. My unimpressed conversations with Deliveroo customer service had a very 2021 feel about them.

I tried one of the renowned Katesgrove takeaways, Home Cooking on Highgrove Street, and I couldn’t believe how poor it was. Had Chinese takeaways changed, or had I changed? Were they bad, or had I been ruined by the hi-falutin’ stuff I was used to from Kungfu Kitchen?

As a last throw of the dice I placed an order with Gooi Nara, the Korean restaurant on Whitley Street, and I was blown away by how good it was. Gam-poong gi, crispy chicken in a hot, sticky sauce that clung to its crags and dimples. Chicken thigh in a deep, almost-sweet bulgogi sauce. Seafood pancakes and chicken dumplings, with a glorious dipping sauce of soy and sesame. All the containers with a little hole cut in the corner, so nothing steamed in its plastic casket.

I loved it so much I ordered again and again in the subsequent weeks, and it was always good, never disappointing. I even had their food on Christmas Eve: Gooi Nara’s sweet and sour chicken is a plastic tray crammed with those crispy, battered bits of chicken. The sauce – thin not gloopy, properly sweet and sharp with a really well-judged hit of vinegar – came in a separate tub, to add at the end. This is a new award, and I get it might be of limited use depending on where you live, but I was so impressed with Gooi Nara. So they get an award from me.

Honourable mentions in this category go to Dough Bros – their pizzas travel brilliantly, although they might be too massive for you to revive them in your oven – and You Me Sushi. Sushi is a great thing to order for delivery because it travels so well, and I’ve rather fallen in love with You Me Sushi’s stuff this year.

RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR: The Moderation

Surprised? Me too.

But really, The Moderation has given me so much joy this year, on every visit I’ve paid to it. Whether that was on duty with my old friend Dave at the beginning of spring, when I returned for a post work drink and to take advantage of their street food special on Wednesdays, the time I went back with Zoë because she read the review and felt aggrieved at missing out, or when I went back with Dave around the end of the year.

Every visit I’ve paid to the Moderation has been brilliant, and made me regret leaving it so long before I visited it again. It is a real asset to Reading, and one I probably closed my mind to for a while because of a pointless disagreement the landlord and I had somehow concocted between us. Free of that, I can now see the Moderation as it really is – an excellent Asian and pan-Asian restaurant in a pub’s clothing, with a menu that roves all over the place and never disappoints, and which changes often enough to prove that nobody there is complacent.

I’m sure many people will read this and say I told you so, or what took you so long? to which I can only say better late than never. I’ve had so many great meals in Reading this year, and Reading is still home to many great restaurants, despite 2024’s best efforts. But I can’t think of a more deserving winner this year than the Moderation. In the year that I spent a lot of time sad about losing one of the best restaurants Reading has ever had, I am very grateful to the Mod for doing such a good job of restoring my flagging faith.

Picking runners-up in this category feels even more redundant than in the others. But my two other favourite restaurants this year, both of which have fed me very well numerous times throughout 2024, are Dough Bros and Clay’s Kitchen. They are from completely different ends of Reading’s food spectrum, very different to one another and very different from the Moderation. But if you picture those three places on a metaphorical podium, I happen to think that image says quietly wonderful things about the U.K.’s largest town.

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Restaurant review: Thames Lido

On December 6, 2024December 30, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

Can you believe that Thames Lido celebrated its seventh birthday this year? It was such an event – three articles in quick succession from the Guardian was a big deal in 2017 – and for many people it’s been a real statement piece, a special occasion restaurant that has seen off the likes of Forbury’s, Cerise and, at the start of this year, the Corn Stores. It put Reading on the map when nowhere else had, just before the two kitchens, Clay’s and Kungfu, arrived in town and changed everything.

And yet, as regular readers might know, I’ve always had a very chequered experience of Thames Lido. When I visited it on duty, over six years ago, I found things to like but wasn’t won over by the place as a whole. And on the occasions when I’ve been back, for a meal with friends or tapas by the pool, it has never completely convinced me. Consistency has consistently – irony of ironies – been the problem. There have been moments in every meal that impressed but always, somehow, an equal and opposite Newtonian disappointment.

The meal that stayed with me was one I had in the spring of 2021 with my family, just as I was emerging from a self-imposed Covid lockdown and tentatively eating outside again. We had tapas by the pool, and I had that experience – again – that some of the dishes were quite good and some were very much something and nothing. I made the mistake of posting about it on Instagram, and shortly after that I had a direct message from the head chef. It’s safe to say that dealing with criticism was not a strong suit of his.

“Looking through your account, your reviews are generally critical so may I suggest you don’t go out so much and cook a bit more at home?” he said. “I’m sure we’d all love to see the photos.”

Well, I didn’t take his advice – and I doubt he took mine in return that he might want to consider developing a thicker skin – except in one important respect, which is that I didn’t bother going back to Thames Lido after that. He left not long after those messages and for a while Thames Lido churned through head chefs like the U.K. got through Prime Ministers. I think it also had some kind of executive chef/”restaurant director” at the time – rarely a good thing – and the menu felt like it was focused more on buying and dishing up rather than cooking. So, much as others still loved the Lido, it well and truly fell off my radar.

And then, late last year, something happened which put them back on it. Out of the blue, I heard from the person handling Thames Lido’s PR, who told me that the restaurant had recently acquired a new head chef.

Nothing out of the ordinary there – it seemed to happen every few months at the time – but this time they had picked someone interesting. Thames Lido had gone for Iain Ganson, previously at the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence where he’d cooked with his brother Scott for the best part of twenty years. That made it somewhere I needed to revisit. Ganson’s food, like his brother’s, had always been exceptional and it had the potential to revitalise Thames Lido, which felt like it had been cosplaying founder Freddy Bird – not brilliantly, I might add – ever since he’d left.

So I politely turned down the PR’s very kind offers to attend pop-up guest nights at Thames Lido (and endure the horrors of what they described as “a little media table”) but I made a mental note that I had to go back before 2024 was out to find out whether the menu was remade in Ganson’s image or, like a covers band in a hotel lobby, he was playing somebody else’s hits. And finally, at the start of December at the beginning of a week off with Zoë, I made it there on a Tuesday lunchtime to try and find out the answer.

Restaurant review: Brutto, Clerkenwell

On November 15, 2024November 20, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Every year, without fail, a handful of new U.K. restaurants get hyped beyond measure. Every critic goes there, usually within the space of a fortnight, and every critic raves in their own hyperbolic way. Those places become impossible to book, if booking them were ever possible in the first place, and move into the heart of smugness: proper “if you know, you know” territory. These London restaurants – it’s always London, of course – are invariably hailed as evidence that it’s the most exciting food city in the entire world, mainly by restaurant reviewers living in London and writing for the national papers (or, perhaps more understandably, the Evening Standard).

So last year, it was all about Mountain in Soho and Tomos Parry’s cooking over fire (“can a dish be too good for itself?” wibbled Tim Hayward in the FT). Or Bouchon Racine, Henry Harris’ bistro. Jay Rayner described himself as a “huge dribbling admirer”, presumably to put people off booking a table, or for that matter ever eating again. And of course, there was Kolae, but you already know whether that’s good, don’t you?

And this year? Everyone has lost their collective marbles over Josephine Bouchon, Claude Bosi’s earthy Lyonnais restaurant on the Fulham Road, and Giles Coren, Tom Parker Bowles and Jay Rayner all went to the Hero in Maida Vale seemingly in the same fortnight. Giles Coren dined with Camilla Long, which means that for once he might have had an even worse time than his dining companion. I have a friend who everybody loves, who never has a bad word to say about anybody: you should hear his vitriol on the subject of Camilla Long.

Of course, the hype beast to end all hype beasts, this year, has been the Devonshire, the Soho pub run by the chap behind Flat Iron and Oisin Rogers, the closest thing the U.K. has to a celebrity pub landlord who isn’t Al Murray. Nearly all of the U.K.’s broadsheet restaurant reviewers descended on the Devonshire, mystifyingly all being able to land a table despite it being nigh-on impossible to do so, unless you’re famous. It’s almost as if there’s one rule for civilians and one rule for everyone else. Almost.

Coren even went all meta, writing in his review about being desperate to file his copy first despite seeing Tom Parker Bowles and Charlotte Ivers in there literally at the same time as him (Grace Dent, always at the cutting edge, finally got round to it last month). Still, nobody was going to match Coren for overstatement: “It’s just insane, what they’re doing” he gushed, about a pub taking the unprecedented steps of serving beer and cooking food.

It would be temping to review The Devonshire, if I could ever get a table. I used to know Rogers, a little, over a decade ago, and even got drunk with him a couple of times; he’s enormous fun, and a very canny operator. You have to take your hat off to someone who has always managed to keep in with whoever is making the weather in the notoriously bitchy world of London food, and Osh has managed simultaneously to be on good terms with everybody from Fay Maschler to the restaurant bloggers of the late Noughties and early Tens, all the way through to those tacky toffs from Topjaw. He’s always known exactly who to have onside, and is possibly even better at doing that than he is at running a pub.

But actually, I’d be more likely to go to his previous place, the Guinea Grill, which everybody thought did the best Guinness in London before Rogers jumped ship, and which also does the kind of steaks, puddings and pies people associate with the likes of Rules. All that without having to bump into the likes of Ed Sheeran? Count me in. And it’s interesting to me, that: you have places like Rules, or St John, that have been there for ever, and you have places like the Devonshire that are the new upstarts. Between those two types of restaurant? Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing at all.

But how can restaurants ever go from being the hot new thing to becoming institutions when everybody’s attention spans have been destroyed by social media, influencers and restaurant critics desperately craving the new? And what becomes of the flavour of the month when things settle down and the bandwagon rolls on to the next place, and the place after that? That’s why this week, after meeting Zoë from work up in the big smoke, catching the Elizabeth Line to Farringdon with what felt like a thousand West Ham fans and gulping down a handful of Belgian beers at the beautiful Dovetail pub, we mooched across to Brutto for our evening reservation there.

Brutto, you see, was one of The Restaurants Of 2021. Critics flocked to it that year, not necessarily because a trattoria modelled on the restaurants of Florence was what the capital was crying out for, but because this was the comeback restaurant of restaurateur Russell Norman. Norman’s Polpo group of restaurants, fifteen years ago – no reservations, small plates, typewritten menus on brown paper, Duralex glasses – probably did as much as any other to change the way people ate in London. It’s just insane what they did, as Giles Coren might have ineptly said.

I went to Polpo a little just after it opened, and offshoot Polpetto after that, and they were brilliant places to eat, although they never entirely overcame that feeling, when the bill arrived, that you’d spent too much on too little. But then came the unwise expansion, including branches in Bristol and Brighton, and then came the crash: Norman made his exit in 2020, and now only two branches remain.

And then, pretty much a year ago, Norman died suddenly and was mourned by seemingly everybody in the food world. Yet even if you never ate at one of his places, the likelihood is that in the last fifteen years you have eaten at least somewhere that has done something differently because of one of Norman’s restaurants from all that time ago, and that in itself is an interesting and far-reaching legacy.

Reading all that back it sounds like a bit of a downer, but I find it hard to imagine anybody walking into Brutto would feel down for long. I can think of few dining rooms that make you feel happier to be in them – it was simultaneously snug and buzzy, with tables full of people thoroughly enjoying their Saturday nights and others sitting up at the bar, making the most of Brutto’s fabled £5 negronis.

The dining room is kind of split level, and I guess the room at the front would be the one you’d ideally want to be sitting in, with its banquette and framed pictures arranged haphazardly on the teal wall behind (“it’s like Alto Lounge, but not shit” was Zoë’s take). But we were closer to the bar at a surprisingly good table next to a pillar, and although there was a distinct hubbub, and an effortlessly cool soundtrack seemingly pitched at Gen X duffers like me, it was never uncomfortably loud.

It really was a marvellous place, from the gingham tablecloths to the napkin lightshades to the candles stuffed into wicker-chianti bottles, and I loved it. It had that feeling of otherness I adore, the restaurant as a cocoon, where for the next couple of hours you could kid yourself that you’d walk out of the door at the end of your meal and be somewhere completely different.

It was, however, and I might as well get this out of the way now, dark. It started out as atmospheric, but as the evening went on it started to reach Dans Le Noir levels of stygian gloom. A lovely spot to be in, to drink and talk, but the practicalities of doing some of the things you ideally want to do in a restaurant, like read your menu or see what you were eating, were severely curtailed.

A solitary votive candle in the middle of our table wasn’t really going to help with that, even if the staff – who were on it throughout – replaced it very efficiently when it sputtered and went out. I got told off for getting the torch out on my phone to try and read the menu. Zoë told me that I was ruining the atmosphere for everybody, and I’ve since discovered that this is allegedly a boomer thing to do, for which I can only apologise.

Once Zoë had taken some pictures with her phone, in night mode, naturally, and AirDropped them over to me, I managed to get a decent look at the menu, which was of course typewritten. It was everything you’d want it to be, mostly: compact, affordable and interesting. Starters were mostly under a tenner, pasta dishes were closer to twenty and so were the secondi, with the exception of Florentine steak which is sold by weight. I think in the past I’ve seen these listed up on a blackboard, so as to say that when they’re gone they’re gone. Maybe they’d already gone, because our server didn’t mention them to us.

The thing you don’t notice on the menu, at first, is that there’s no fish to be seen anywhere. I saw it written on a mirror in the dining room that Brutto doesn’t serve fish, and although it’s often not my first choice it was still odd to see it completely excluded. It gave the dishes on offer a certain brownish hue, or that could have been the dim lighting, but I suppose it worked on a nippy evening with London well on its way to winter. And it’s not as if I minded, much. The negroni was fierce and medicinal and, lest we forget, only a fiver and, on top of those Belgian beers from earlier on, positively knocked the edges off the day.

I don’t sense that Brutto’s menu has changed enormously since it was first reviewed three years ago, because many of the dishes on offer were talked about in those initial reviews. One definitely was – coccoli, which translates as “cuddles”, and is little fried bits of dough with prosciutto and a small pot of tangy stracchino cheese. Remember when I said that these restaurants attract bucketloads of hype? Jimi Famurewa, then of the Standard said that they were “one of the year’s best dishes”.

I don’t know about that, but they were rather enjoyable. More doughnut than doughball, and pleasant enough with little slivers of ham and a small dollop of the cheese; there wasn’t enough stracchino, but I imagine there never is. But the problem with hype, however old it is, is that it almost sets you up against something. I bet the people who raved about these would have sneered at good old Pizza Express. It reminded me of a restaurant in Shoreditch I used to love called Amici Miei which did a similar dish to this, but far better and completely unsung. But then it hadn’t been opened by Russell Norman, that was the problem.

The other starter was three things that in isolation are hard to beat. Very fine, extremely salty anchovies, with decent salted butter and sourdough from St John just down the road. It’s impossible to argue with this really, even if it involves no cooking, and all three things were good. Zoë adored it, I wasn’t convinced it was really any more than the sum of its parts. In fairness though, this dish was just over a tenner and even in Andalusia seven anchovies of this quality might well set you back more than that.

By this point we were on the red wine, The wine list is all Italian, with lots to enjoy, provided you can read the bastard thing. Bottles start at thirty-six pounds and ascend quickly into three figures from there, and we settled for a Montepulciano closer to the shallow end for sixty-two pounds. which retails for eighteen quid online. Was it worth sixty-two pounds? We’ve established over eleven years that I don’t know a lot about wine, but I’d say maybe not.

For me the pasta dishes were probably Brutto’s greatest strength, and easily the thing I most enjoyed. I’d been tempted by pappardelle with rabbit, but in the end the classic tagliatelle with ragu was too hard to resist. And it was as close to perfect as this dish gets in this country, fantastic al dente ribbons of pasta and a rich, sticky ragu that hugged its curves closely. I’ve always been somewhat sniffy about this widely-held belief that there should be more pasta than sauce, but eating this, for once, I got the point. Everything felt like it was completely in order, in absolutely the right proportions.

Because Brutto is a homage to the trattoria of Italy, they left a bowl of grated Parmesan at your table, with a spoon. But because we were still in London, there wasn’t a lot of Parmesan in it.

For me if anything, Zoë chose even better. Her gramigna, a little spiral shape from Emilia-Romagna, came – as it does in that region – tumbled with sausage and friarelli and was a real joy. But don’t be fooled by the brightness of these pictures from Zoë’s iPhone: by this point it was getting more and more difficult to see what was going on. Even so, these two dishes, to me, highlighted that when it came to pasta dishes restaurants like Brutto or Bancone are still light years ahead of well-intentioned pretenders like Little Hollows in Bristol or bandwagon jumpers like Maidenhead’s Sauce And Flour.

I complained recently that Reading was still lacking a really good Italian restaurant and someone popped up and said “what about Vesuvio?”. And I said that I was looking for somewhere more genuinely Italian and less like a better reimagining of Prezzo, with more interesting secondi. But actually, I got that wrong: what’s really missing is brilliant pasta like this. Pepe Sale had that, back in the day. So did San Sicario. But since then, this kind of carb-centric comfort has been missing from Reading, and it’s a poorer place for it.

Speaking of secondi, to eat that course at Brutto it does help if you like beef. Three of the options are beef-driven (possibly four, depending on what’s in the bollito misto) and the roasted squash, virtuous though it doubtless was, just didn’t appeal. I had chosen the peposo, a slow-cooked stew of beef shin in a sticky, reduced sauce shot through with whole black peppercorns. And I liked it – it sort of reminded me of a stifado, although with no reliance on tomato or those maverick shallots that make the Greek dish such a delight.

But you know how you feel when you see a picture of a moment you don’t fully remember and you’re not sure if the photograph itself is inventing a memory you didn’t really have? Usually that experience dates back to childhood, but I have it when I look at the picture Zoë took of my main course. I know this is what I ate, the photo has my hand in it and the date stamp to prove it. But for me it was just a pool of blackness. You never quite knew what you were eating, or whether this would be your last big chunk of beef. I’ve always understood the saying that you eat with your eyes, but maybe not as well as I did after having this dish at Brutto. And however convivial the atmosphere was, this is where it took something away for me.

I didn’t need a great view of the roast potatoes I’d ordered on the side to know that they weren’t the best roast potatoes. Decent enough, but lacking that contrast of crunch and fluff that would have come if they’d been parboiled, and scuffed up, and cooked properly in really hot fat. Without that, they were just ballast.

Zoë infinitely preferred her main, which was a variation on the same theme. The same roast potatoes, which she viewed more kindly than I had. A slab of pink roast beef, the fat on the outside mellow and puckered, sitting in a little pool of jus. It needed the peas with pancetta that she ordered with it – I’d have liked these à la Française, with a little cream, although I know that’s missing the point in a Florentine trattoria. Anyway Zoë loved it, although she did admit that it was a tad dry. But if there’s anything our marriage proves – six months and counting – it’s that she has far lower standards than I do.

We had a fair bit of wine left, so we drank that and chatted about all sorts before making any decisions about desserts. Now Zoë works in London she is there every Saturday, and usually knocks off at eight o’clock, so by the time our evening begins, most weeks, it’s time for bed. A rare date night in the capital was a precious thing, and so neither of us was in a rush to bring it to an end. But desserts also meant digestivi, and that meant a Frangelico for her and an Amaro del Capo for me. It’s one of my favourite amaros, with something like 29 botanicals, though the one that leaps to the surface for me is mint.

I could have nursed that for some time, and maybe even had another, but the dessert menu only had a few things on it (putting pear and almond cake on there twice, once with ice cream and once without isn’t fooling anybody). Anyway, one of the items on the dessert menu was tiramisu, which meant that we were both contractually obligated to have one. Is it the dessert I order most often when I’m on duty? It definitely feels that way, and Brutto’s is up there with the best I’ve had – miles better than Little Hollows’, better than Sonny Stores‘, better than anything I’ve had in Reading, even including the wonder of Sarv’s Slice or the sadly departed Buon Appetito.

It properly contained multitudes, managing to be substantial yet airy, innocent yet boozy, simultaneously just the right size and nowhere near big enough. I loved it, and it reminded me that on the many occasions that I skip dessert when eating on duty I’m leaving the play before the final act, taking the book back to the library with the last fifty pages untouched. Brutto understands that a good meal has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that tiramisu was a more than worthy way to bring the curtain down.

With all that done, it was time to settle up and pray that the Elizabeth Line could get us back to Paddington before we were forced to catch one of those final trains back to the ‘Ding, the ones everybody refers to as the Burger King Express.

Our meal – a couple of negronis each, that bottle of wine, four courses each and a pair of digestivi – came to just over two hundred and fifty pounds, including an optional 12.5% tip. I know that’s a fair amount of money, but we had plenty of food and didn’t stint on the wine. Personally, I think Brutto is keen value, although probably more so in its starters and pasta than in its mains or wine list. I could have spent less and enjoyed myself just as much, and if I went again I imagine I would.

But would I go again? That’s the question, isn’t it. And it prompts the time-honoured answer, which goes like this. London is so blessed with restaurants – there are easily a handful of other great places to eat less than a ten minute walk from Brutto – that places have to be truly amazing to keep you visiting time and again. That drives quality, I’m sure, and it makes restaurants work hard for custom.

And maybe that also goes to answer the other question, of why it’s hard for anything to become an institution when somewhere else is always, always coming down the tracks. Back when I was on Tinder (what a fun three months that was) I deplored the way it effectively made you channel hop human beings, with their own lives and aspirations and back stories. Whatever. Next! But the way the food media works does the same thing with a lot of restaurants: one minute you’re the hottest ticket in town, the next you’re old hat.

So I had a lovely meal at Brutto and it taught me a lot about what restaurants do at their best and their worst. I have rarely felt, in a restaurant in the U.K., more like I was part of something brilliant and bigger than me. But ultimately one of the many things that united us that night was being together in the darkness. If that’s not a metaphor for something I don’t know what is. Maybe I’m just too old for all that.

Brutto felt like a neighbourhood restaurant in search of a neighbourhood. And speaking of neighbourhoods, if somewhere like Brutto opened in Reading you can bet I would be there on its opening night, and often after that. The fact that Reading can’t attract and maintain restaurants like this really puts the lie to all the old tut spouted by the likes of Hicks Baker that the town centre isn’t dying on its arse.

But while Reading still doesn’t have places like this, it still has that one thing Reading-haters always extol the virtues of: a train station you can use to get anywhere else. You could do a lot worse than make a reservation, hop on a train and find yourself here, in a place that isn’t quite Italy, isn’t quite London, but most definitely isn’t Reading. I know that’s not exactly hype, but it’s the best I can do.

Brutto – 8.4
35-37 Greenhill Rents, London, EC1M 6BN
020 45370928

https://brutto.co.uk

Restaurant review: Deccan House

On September 27, 2024December 30, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews

Last year, a couple of gentlemen called Jez and Ken came to a readers’ lunch I held at Clay’s, and they’ve been to every lunch I’ve organised since. They are great company, clearly great friends, both a little older than me. Jez has a line in impressively busy shirts and the personality to carry them off, which is something I envy.

My most recent readers’ lunch was also at Clay’s, and Jez mailed me to express his regret that he couldn’t make it. It was his birthday that day, he said and his wife was organising something for him. What he didn’t know was that his wife had organised something on another day, and had asked Ken to take him to the readers’ lunch as a birthday surprise. Ken asked me if I could find space for them both and happily I could, so he got to celebrate his birthday with sixty or so equally hungry Reading food fans. I love it when things like that come together.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this is that earlier in the year – about six months ago – I got messages from Jez and Ken, independent of one another, urging me to put Deccan House on my radar. It’s a little place on Cemetery Junction between the stained glass shop and Ye Babam Ye, ostensibly doing Hyderabadi food: Jez and Ken had gone for dinner there, and both of them were impressed. Jez said it was the first time he’d tried dosa (he sent me a picture, “with my glasses included for scale”). Ken said that although it was a very different proposition to Clay’s he had really enjoyed the food.