I don’t normally write reviews that are of places that have closed. It has that same whiff of smugness as reviewing drinks nobody can buy or plays that have finished their run: I’m going to make you feel bad about what you missed, they seem to say. My life is better than yours. It’s all very “if you know, you know” – another phrase I hate – only more “if you didn’t know, now you never will”.

But I’m making an exception to write about the Lyndhurst, which closed under the management of Dishon Vas and Sheldon Fernandes a couple of weeks ago, one final time. Because I don’t think anywhere that’s closed in Reading in all the time I’ve lived here – not the 3Bs, not Dolce Vita, not Mya Lacarte or the Grumpy Goat – has had this kind of effect on me, and I feel like trying to explain why. So I suppose this is for anyone who has been to the Lyndhurst in the last five years, which I expect might include a decent proportion of the people who read my blog.

Part of this is because I am feeling sentimental: as anyone who follows me on social media will know, because I haven’t stopped banging on about it, I got married a couple of Fridays ago. It was simply a perfect day. The sun shone for the first time in ages, the ceremony room in the Town Hall was serene and calm, my dear friend Jerry gave the most beautiful reading, and when I kissed my brand new bride the crowd packed into that room made a disproportionate amount of gleeful noise.

We turned round and there were our favourite people, the biggest small congregation you’ve ever seen in your life. My parents, my step-parents, my brother, his wife and his children. My boisterous, fantastic in-laws. Friends I had known for thirty or forty years, and people that had known my wife since she was at school. Newer friends, and friends who had been there since the very start of my relationship with Zoë. The friend that saved my life, time and again, in the darkest moments of my divorce. There was nothing but love and joy in that beautiful room.

A lot of the rest was a daze. An eruption of confetti on Blagrave Street, standing in a pack under the Maiwand Lion as our photographer corraled and marshalled us into groups, snapping and cajoling. Sipping a crisp glass of bubbly from nearby Veeno, being congratulated by passers-by. Everyone congratulates newlyweds, I’ve found: it’s a moving, life-affirming thing. A Reading Buses driver stopping us in the park to tell us it brought back memories of his own wedding – also in the Town Hall, also photographs in Forbury Gardens.

My wife, grinning and clutching her beautiful bouquet, as happy as I was. Wandering round the Forbury desperately seeking shade, finding spots for photos. “Look into Zoë’s eyes” said the photographer, such easy and enjoyable instructions to follow. And then, at the end of all that, all of us marching to Friar Street to hop on a vintage Reading bus, driven by Tim Wale, the legend behind Tutts Clump cider. Reading institution Paul King turned up out of nowhere and took pictures before all of us, laughing and merry, were driven away to the venue for our celebration.

When I told people I was getting married a lot of people – especially on social media – said “no pressure for your venue, right?” or “I bet the food will have to be really good”. But I never worried about it, because my celebration was being hosted by the Lyndhurst. Of all the Is to dot and Ts to cross in the run up to the big day, of all the things that blindsided us on the home stretch, I never worried once about the food. The Lyndhurst was doing it: that was all I needed to know.

I was at the Lyndhurst for their first night under new ownership, back in the summer of 2019. I’d really liked the previous management and their clever, precise food, and when they left – because the pubco hiked the rent, I imagine – I wasn’t entirely sure the new landlords would be able to match that standard. I remember there being a crowd on the first night, all the regulars happy that their community pub was open again, and the place was packed and chaotic.

There was a rabbit in the headlights feel about it, and I had my gin and tonic with slight misgivings and no idea that I was spending my first evening in what would prove to be one of my favourite places on earth. I remember they put a sign up that suggested they were only serving dinner on Friday and Saturday nights, and I called it out on Twitter. Some random local online prat had a go at me for pointing it out, but the pub just said Thanks for letting us know, we’ll change it.

I didn’t know then that that was their style all over – humble, apologetic, unfailingly polite and always, always getting shit done. The sign got changed. And then I went back to try the food, and had quite the wake-up call. A beautiful Scotch egg, a very accomplished plate of pork belly, pig’s cheek and black pudding bonbons and perhaps most significantly, a bowl of chilli nachos, everything made from scratch, from the tortillas to the guacamole. These people really knew what they were doing, I realised.

The menu changed many, many times over the next five years. They even refreshed it in April, with barely a month remaining, because they never stopped tweaking and improving. But those nachos, which over time became emblematic of the Lyndhurst, never came off the menu, not once.

I read an article in the Guardian in the run-up to my wedding about how much weddings cost these days: one couple, American needless to say, spent five thousand dollars alone on their rehearsal dinner. I liked to joke as my wedding approached that Zoë and I had taken a less conventional approach to rehearsal dinners by instead going to the Lyndhurst pretty much every week for years. And for that matter, I also had a few rehearsals of the Lyndhurst’s mass catering skills: three readers’ lunches, each one more assured, if anything, than the last.

And all that was lovely in principle, but in practice it made decisions about the menu almost impossible. Looking back through the photos on my and Zoë’s phone, of every dish captured at the bottom of Watlington Street over the course of nearly five years, made it even more difficult. So many beautiful plates of food, from which to select just nine. How could you possibly choose?

But of course it also brought back so many happy memories. Braised oxtail, wrapped up in cabbage, enjoyed when they’d barely been open a month. Saddle of rabbit, stuffed with liver and rolled in Parma ham, the equal of anything you could get in Bologna. Their crispy-skinned supreme of chicken with soft leeks and the shiniest, most comforting morel sauce. The legendary – and enormous – porchetta sandwich which graced their menu in the spring of 2021. Their confit duck poutine, which occupied an exalted place on the menu, and in my affections, around the same time.

Even towards the end new classics took their place, making life even more difficult. The monkfish tacos, which became one of the Lyndhurst’s signature dishes – so delicious, so generous, so very difficult to roll up and eat, so crammed were they with perfectly executed monkfish. The Korean chicken thigh burger, seemingly invented to make it impossible for me to cook my own dinner ever again on a Monday. Or perhaps best of all, the pork belly with plums and fried onions, in a deep, glossy sauce redolent of hoi sin. It only arrived on the menu around the start of this year, but even so I lost track of the number of times I ordered it. Even now, writing this and thinking about it I get a pang of sadness that I won’t get to eat that dish again.

I’ve made a point of trying to take almost everyone I know to the Lyndhurst at some time or another over the last five years. My family, local friends, friends from out of town, colleagues on one occasion, even my brother on his last trip to the U.K. from the other side of the world (he insisted on trying the monkfish with Bombay potatoes, and left in raptures). So I had done my level best to make sure as many people as possible at the wedding already knew how good the Lyndhurst’s food was.

But my new in-laws had never been there, and nor had some of the other wedding guests, and I couldn’t help but feel happy and proud of the pub as the canapés came round. Little cones packed with tuna, crowned with a dab of mango. Black pudding croquettes which seemed super-dense, as if they were made of more black pudding than their shell could contain: my father-in-law, not always an easy man to please with food, devoured quite a lot. Little choux buns filled with mushroom, for the vegetarians, and polenta squares topped with butternut squash, for the vegans.

And a treat I first sampled at a reader’s lunch the previous year, beetroot macarons, sweet yet salty, with a judiciously chosen core of goats cheese. “Holy shit”, my Canadian cousin Luke said to me later. “I think those might be the best things I’ve ever tasted.” And Luke eats out a lot.

I think some of our guests kept expecting the canapés to run out, because they didn’t know the Lyndhurst, but wave after wave passed through the room: no need to stand near the kitchen and grab them before they were demolished by others. No need to worry about that, or anything else. The Lyndhurst, their brilliant, well-oiled team, were completely in control. Why on earth would I worry?

The Lyndhurst opened in 2019, but within nine months or so they were plunged into the awful event we all now remember as 2020. Everywhere closed, from March to July, and when places reopened they faced a nervy, uncertain future. Many people, me included, were reluctant to go out. And then of course there was the superspreading folly of Eat Out To Help Out, followed by the many-tiered madness of various restrictions, all of which fell far short of what was really required.

I sometimes wonder how Sheldon and Dishon must have felt, celebrating the end of their first year in charge not knowing whether there would be a second. But if they ever lost hope it never showed, and although I liked the Lyndhurst a lot in 2019, it was in lockdown that I came to love them; I am lucky enough to live round the corner from the pub, and they carried on delivering to me, to my doorstep, throughout the winter of 2020.

It became a wonderful, comforting Saturday night ritual – place the order, transfer the money and then just as Strictly was about to begin there would be a knock at the door and there was Piotr holding a bag for us. If there were specials on we would invariably order them, but there was always a treat of some kind. I remember the asparagus in batter with romesco sauce, one of the best snacks of all time. I remember first the pork and then the lamb tacos, although any time the Lyndhurst did tacos was a time to cherish. I remember the beer can chicken, and the phenomenal ancho chile relish: I think I ended up with a jar of it in the fridge at one point, and used it on everything.

And I remember – how could I not? – the occasions when they had skate wing on. Classically cooked, golden and bathed in beurre noisette, scattered with capers and croutons, just waiting to be clumsily decanted on a plate and scoffed, with the simple joy of flipping the wing over at the halfway point. It might have been movie week on Strictly, or perhaps Halloween week or Blackpool week. But it was always, always Lyndhurst week.

One story I never told at the time, although I suppose I can now that Sheldon and Dishon have moved on, is that in the spring of 2021 I published a review of the Lyndhurst’s takeaway menu. I loved nearly everything I tried, but I did express a few reservations about a dish they’d just added to the menu, a chicken tikka naanza. Later that afternoon I got a message from them on Twitter: they’d been thinking about the feedback and they’d made a few tweaks as a result. Would I mind if they dropped one over so I could let them know what I thought?

Naturally I said yes, and just after five there was that knock at the door again. I split it in half and took half of it up to Zoë, who was in the spare room finishing her last conference call of the day. They’d pretty much made every change I’d suggested in the review and I know it’s me saying this, but it was damn near perfect.

One dish that the Lyndhurst never needed to change, not from day one, was their karaage chicken. I first had it in the spring of 2021 and to this day, however hard I’ve looked – and trust me, I’ve looked hard – I’ve never found a karaage anywhere else that matched it. It was my starter of choice, my first starter as a married man, and although it wasn’t the single best choice I had made that day it could well have been the second.

Although I was a takeaway customer of the Lyndhurst for quite some time, even after lockdowns eased and a lot of people went back into the pubs and restaurants, I wasn’t their last takeaway customer. That honour belonged to a chap at my office, who loves their curry night. He lives round the corner from the pub too, but with small kids he couldn’t eat in, much as he might have wanted to. So without fail every Thursday he would check Instagram, find out what the three curries on offer were, place his order and then go and collect it that evening.

Often I would be eating in and I would see him, we’d acknowledge each other, compare notes on which curry we were going for. I think he had the pint of beer that came with the curry – an outrageous bargain for twelve pounds, all in – but I can’t remember. But every week he was there, getting his curries, taking them. home. And every week the Lyndhurst was there, letting him: most other places would have said that the pandemic was over and they didn’t do that kind of thing any more, but not the Lyndhurst. Forget Eat Out To Help Out, they were helping him to stay home.

The last night that the Lyndhurst traded was a Thursday night, curry night. I wasn’t there because it was the night before my wedding: my fiancée (for one last night) and I went to London Street Brasserie, on the early bird set menu special, and had our first carbs and calories for quite some time. I drank English fizz and ate LSB’s excellent fish and chips, although I couldn’t finish the chips. So I didn’t make it to the Lyndhurst, but I’m pretty sure I know one person who did, one final time, for his family’s habitual takeaway.

And yes, what that also means is that my wedding day was the last day that the Lyndhurst was sort-of, kind-of open. I’d known that they were still trying to agree the rent with the pubco, and I knew that those negotiations didn’t look like they would end happily, but the Lyndhurst told me that one way or the other they would cater our wedding. The fact that they did means more to me than you can imagine, and it really felt like they were celebrating with us too. The pub, and the team, were such a big part of the wedding day that it was impossible to imagine it without them.

I found it equally impossible to pick main courses for our wedding meal. In the end we went for three options, any of which would have suited me down to the ground. Mine on the day was confit duck, the skin burnished, the meat underneath slumping helpfully from the bone, with Sarladaise potatoes, a smooth parsnip purée and the jus of the gods (the Lyndhurst had told me they could easily do a more cheffy duck dish, but this was the one I wanted).

But the main I almost wish I’d had, one final time, was that monkfish – a huge tranche of it, served on a heap of those addictive Bombay potatoes, a bright herb chutney and salad on the side. My wife had that, and I just looked on in awe and envy. My brother had it too, a wonderful gastronomic connection between his first and last meals at the Lyndhurst. So did my father-in-law: he cleaned his plate.

A couple of days after the wedding, I got a message on Facebook from a reader of my blog. He wanted to tell me something about the Lyndhurst.

He said that he’d recently gone to the Royal Berks and been told that he needed to be admitted for an emergency operation. But they said that he had just enough time to grab a meal before they would take him in. And so he went to the Lyndhurst, not far from RBH, and it just so happened that he was there in the week before they closed, eating there – just like I did – one final time. “It was a really meaningful experience” he said, “and I wouldn’t have done it without your review.”

It made me think of all the evenings that pub had made, and the fact that they probably didn’t know the half of it. Just for me alone, they had filled a very special place in my life for five years, in a way I’m not sure I’ve managed to explain. Don’t fancy cooking? Go to the Lyndhurst. Celebrating the start of a holiday? Dinner at the Lyndhurst. Back from holidays and feeling blue? The Lyndhurst it is. Finishing work at the same time as your other half, meeting in town and thinking “isn’t it burger night on Mondays?” Off to the Lyndhurst. Your brother’s last night in the country? Go on then.

But my reader’s story made me think of something else too. December 2021, when after over eighteen months on the run, playing it safe, not going into shops, not eating in restaurants, working from home, only socialising outdoors, waiting for the vaccine and the second vaccine and with the booster in touching distance, Zoë tested positive for Covid. And then she too spent time in the Berks, four fraught nights, and when she came out, after I met her outside the ward and slowly took her home, the Lyndhurst delivered me a simple order that night – just two beefburgers and chips. That was the beginning of the road to recovery, and one of my most meaningful experiences.

There was no way, though, that the beefburger was going to feature on the wedding menu. The Lyndhurst’s chocolate mousse, though, was another story. The first time it was on their menu, the first time we ordered and ate it, Zoë had that look in her eye. “We’re having that at our fucking wedding” she said. And so we did.

The rest of the evening was a riot – of my friend James’ home-brewed beer, of gin and tonic, of conversations with old friends out on the Lyndhurst’s patio. The heat and sun of the day had faded, the crowd had slightly thinned and everyone was sitting outside, chatting and mingling. My stepmother caught up with my schoolfriends, who she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. We took a last family photo before my brother and my sister-in-law headed off, their next flight a day away.

And there was more food – a buffet, of more food than I could conceive of eating. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d had more room for the charcuterie, for the chicken pakora, for every manner of bite-sized savoury delight. And because I’d asked them to, the Lyndhurst did a slider of their legendary Korean chicken burger, the dish they’d introduced in February which had made losing weight in the run-up to the wedding so challenging. I made sure I had one of those. A few people did: my mother-in-law took one home and had it the following morning for breakfast.

The next morning, town seemed to be an even more beautiful place than usual. I went and got a couple of coffees from C.U.P. to take them to our hotel, and the man behind the counter shook my hand and congratulated me. I told the hotel receptionist that my wife would be checking us out shortly – the first time I said “my wife”, the first of many. And we got to the Lyndhurst to take down the decorations, to find that the process of getting the pub ready to hand back was already taking place. A man was painting woodwork, the party was over.

Well, almost over. On the Saturday night there was a little farewell party for the pub and Zoë and I went in to say one last goodbye. Many of the regulars were there, faces I recognised from curry nights, or burger nights, or Friday nights. So many different stories intersecting with the pub the way mine had, so many different people who would miss Sheldon, Dishon and the team every bit as much as I would. When people talk about how pubs can be community hubs, they never mention how difficult it actually is to do, to manage that and still be inclusive, not some gammon pubman’s boys’ club. But the Lyndhurst did it.

And all the staff were there relaxing and chatting. Sheldon and Dishon, too, and I realised that I’d rarely seen them in the same place at once. Usually Dishon was running the front of house, Sheldon tucked away in the kitchen. But here they both were, casually dressed, laughing and, I hope, feeling the love. Dishon is moving back to Northamptonshire to be with his family, with a baby on the way. Sheldon told me he was looking forward to a break, to visiting his family in Mumbai, and after that who knows? Both of them looked like they were ready for a long rest, but proud of what they’d achieved. They should be.

I may have rarely seen Sheldon and Dishon together, but one of my favourite pictures is of the two of them, taken by a chap called Antonio, a local Instagrammer and neighbour who also loves the pub. It captures a moment, during service, of the two of them putting their heads together, of the front of house and kitchen meeting right at the point where the former ends and the latter begins. It captures something of the wonderful partnership that Reading was lucky to enjoy and, for me, something of what made the pub so magical. Neither of them had run a pub before that fateful day in the summer of 2019. Well, what a debut.

2024 is shaping up to be a year of changes. I got married, the Lyndhurst did a beautiful job of hosting our celebration and now they have moved on. Things happen quickly, and last Friday the Lyndhurst reopened under new management, a lady who previously ran a pub in Theale. There’s talk of it being more of a sports bar than it was in previous incarnations; locals have wished her well, and I’m sure they will all be in to check it out. I will too, and I’m conscious that when Sheldon and Dishon took the pub over I would have been the first to say they had big shoes to fill.

But fill them they did, and life moves on. And now it’s time for me and Zoë to move on, too: next month we’ll be leaving the Village, where I’ve lived so happily for seven years. So it wasn’t just greeting married life, or bidding farewell to the Lyndhurst, but the start of a period of loving living here, with all its quirks, but knowing that it will come to an end.

Everything does eventually, I suppose, but it’s important to recognise how good things are while you’re living them, rather than only later when you look back. But I will always remember the Village, and those five halcyon years when it had the best village pub anybody could hope for. I’ll remember the two men that made it happen, and that brilliant sunny day in May when the whole world was at its absolute best.