Tag: Zoe

Restaurant review: Brutto, Clerkenwell

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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 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.

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Restaurant review: Kolae, Borough

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How many of the U.K.’s 100 best restaurants have you been to? I ask because it’s a thing – the National Restaurant Awards – and it came out last week.

Looking through the list, I couldn’t help but feel I was letting the side down as a restaurant reviewer: my score was a measly 7.  Some of them, like Manteca, ranked among the best meals I’ve eaten in the course of writing this blog. But there were at least a couple in that list where I thought “really?” I was pleased to see Wilsons make the list but COR, which didn’t feature, is definitely better than at least a couple of the top 100 that I’ve been to. Still, as I’ve said in the past, the delight of reading a list like this largely lies in disagreeing with it. 

Anyway, as it happens my total only ticked up to 7 because I happened to visit Kolae, a regional Thai restaurant in Borough, the week before the awards were announced. It was ranked 27th, significantly higher than any of the other places I’ve been to, which is an impressive achievement given that it opened late last year. It’s the second restaurant from the team behind Shoreditch’s Som Saa and has very quickly surpassed it in terms of profile (it probably helps that, unlike Som Saa, it doesn’t have any problematic racist incidents in its history).

What this means is that a significant number of restaurant critics have reviewed the place already: Giles Coren for the Times, Tom Parker Bowles for the Mail On Sunday, Tim Hayward for the FT, Jimi Famurewa for the Evening Standard, and Lilly Subbotin for the Independent. Even a couple of restaurant bloggers have already got in on the act, so I can honestly say I’ve rarely, if ever, read as much about a restaurant before stepping through its front door as I had with Kolae.

And the acclaim was consistent, full-throated, verging on the hyperbolic. I mean, get a load of this: Famurewa said it was a “scintillating shot in the arm”, Parker Bowles that it made “the tastebuds tumescent and the gut giddy”. Hayward, the thinking person’s least favourite broadsheet reviewer, settled for the overblown “This has just reminded me why I eat”.

It wasn’t all like that – Giles Coren spent a large part of his review name-dropping Important People He Knew, as did one distinctly regional restaurant blogger – but the important thing was that there wasn’t a single word of dissent: Kolae, according to the consensus, was magnificent.

So it had been on my radar for a while, and an afternoon off in London ahead of a gig that evening – the exceptional Jessica Pratt at Islington’s Union Chapel – gave me a chance to check it out with Zoë. It’s literally just round the corner from Borough Market, a few doors down from Monmouth Coffee, and a pre-lunchtime stroll round the market made it clear just how much competition there was for Kolae to stand out amongst: not just from traders, but nearby restaurants like Barrafina, Berenjak and Bao.

It’s a handsome site, across three storeys, which apparently used to be a coach house in a previous life. I didn’t see the first or second floors, but the ground floor was lovely, all muted concrete and exposed brick. Everything was nicely proportioned: the tables were generously sized and well spaced, and even the bar stools followed suit, being even better padded than I am. So different from, for example, sitting cheek by jowl at Manteca. The Independent summed it up thus: “there’s no other way to say it, Kolae is cool”.

We arrived for a late lunch but even then the room was full of happy-looking diners. No outside space that I saw, really, but the exterior was quite fetching, to the extent where when we left a couple of people were taking pictures sitting in front of the restaurant and uploading them to the ‘gram. “But they haven’t even eaten here!” was Zoë’s baffled assessment.

The menu, on paper at least, looks like it can’t decide whether it’s a starters and mains or small plates restaurant. All the reviews I’ve read say it’s the latter, but the menu lists three things as “smaller” and the rest as “larger” and our server said we should probably plan on three of the larger plates between two. But it’s sort of structured as starters, mains and sides and so we approached it that way. I would say everything seemed reasonably priced, too, with the smaller plates costing about six pounds and the larger ones going from ten to eighteen.

But really, a lot was fluid: at least some of the larger plates felt more like starters or sides, and at least one of the sides, which we ended up ordering, was far more like a main in its own right. Perhaps all the dishes simply identified as food – if so, all power to them. We took it as an excuse to order pretty much everything we wanted and to risk being full. From what I’ve seen, many people who have reviewed Kolae have taken exactly that approach.

Now, before I tell you about everything we ate, I do have to mention heat. Because another thing my research indicated, time and again, was that the food at Kolae might be hotter than you’re used to. A few reviews don’t really talk about it – presumably because those people are hard as nails. But most go to town on it – in no particular order, the food apparently “jolts the senses like being woken at 4am by a sadistic drill instructor”, “blew my bloody head off”, is “blisteringly hot” or leaves you “teetering between burning pain and pure, unfiltered pleasure”.

Does that sound like fun to you? I have to say it didn’t really to me, so I did ask the server which dishes to absolutely steer clear of. There were about three of them. Everything we had was fine, so you won’t get any sub-Fifty Shades Of Grey hogwash in this review.

The first thing we ate was that first step outside the comfort zone. Fried prawn heads with turmeric and garlic were one of those things where you just have to suspend disbelief and give them a go, so we did. Zoë was reluctant approaching the first one but they were crunchy and distinctly moreish and that meant I didn’t have to polish off the rest on my own. I’m not sure how something from the sea could taste quite so earthy, but these did: I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed eating brains so much before, and almost certainly never will again. And yes, prawns do have brains. I know, because I Googled it.

Even better were biryani rice crackers, huge slabs of tactile delight with more than a trickle of nam jim, one of those dipping sauces which just has, and effortlessly combines, everything: sweetness, citrus and funky, salty fish sauce, infinitely more than the sum of its parts. This, for me, was the first of many moments at Kolae where I just thought: this isn’t quite like anything I’ve eaten before. Some of that is my own fault for my sheltered gastronomic life, but if anything that made me appreciate how high definition this food was.

The next few dishes, a mixture of small plates, large plates and specials, were variations on a theme and all linked with the name of the restaurant. Kolae is apparently a southern Thai technique which, as far as I can gather, involves marinating in coconut milk and spice, grilling over fire, re-marinating and re-grilling until what you get is glorious, deep and sticky.

The small plate displaying this technique was a couple of skewers with plump – or, if you get your kicks this way, “tumescent” – mussels threaded on them. I liked them, but perhaps having read so much hype about them I expected these eight mussels to be even more magnificent than they were. Worth it, perhaps, just for the novelty of seeing mussels served in such a different, faff-free way.

It was much, much more successfully deployed with chicken – in this case a huge, deboned chicken thigh which came on a skewer which surely could barely have carried its weight. This is where the technique was really at its best, the meat permeated with complexity and delight.

This kind of food makes fools of us reviewers because it exposes our narrow horizons and our limited vocabulary – I’ve seen it compared to yakitori, to laksa, to satay and to massaman. Better to be honest and say you can’t really sum up the smoke, sweetness, spice and comfort and just say that you should maybe order it so one day, you can compare other great dishes to it instead.

The third of our trilogy of skewers was bavette, topped with crispy onions. You get the idea by now, and although I enjoyed it, three different permutations of that concept was probably one too many. It was better value than the mussels, but not quite as good as the chicken.

At this point, the only question in my mind was where in the pantheon of greats Kolae would wind up nestling. The space was fantastic, the food had been eye-opening – just enough challenge, just enough fascination – and it was simply a wonderful place to be on a weekday afternoon. Every now and again flames leapt from a wok in the open kitchen, there was still hubbub even after the lunch rush had passed, and more was to come.

But that’s where things wobbled, if only slightly. Service had been wonderful, and when you got the attention of a server they couldn’t have been more helpful, but it proved increasingly difficult to flag them down. We’d finished a really gorgeous hazy IPA, Juicy Chug, by small London brewery Jiddler’s Tipple, which had gone beautifully with the small plates, but were keen to get some wine.

And we got there eventually, but if the staff had been more on it I daresay we would have drunk more. It’s a decent and interesting wine list, although the vast majority of the options by the glass were north of a tenner. I really loved my choice, a Greek malagousia and assyrtiko blend, but I think Zoë might have shaded it with her New Zealand riesling.

The first of the large plates that came out again demonstrated that this was a fluid menu where things overlapped and echoed other dishes. I’m not saying that the kale fritters were a replica of the biryani rice crackers from earlier in the meal, but they were definitely close siblings, both in terms of the crunch and complexity. This sauce was very different from the nam jim, but I got sweetness and chilli but maybe not the fermentation the menu suggested would be there. It was however another tactile triumph, although I’m not sure it really felt like a side. Perhaps I should have tried the sour mango salad with dried fish, but everything I’d read suggested that eating it would be a fast train to meltdown..

One of the absolute standout dishes of the meal was – surprise surprise – Zoë’s choice. Soy braised pork belly and ribs was outstanding, in a sauce that was far more about the tightrope between sweetness and saltiness, with heat, just this once, taken out of the equation. The sauce was just gorgeous, the meat was that perfect combination of caramelised and yielding, and it was if anything another dish I hadn’t expected – more poise than bombast, in a meal that had mostly been about very forceful flavours.

And this was where the wobble came in again. We’d ordered this and a second main, a prawn and stone bass curry, and we’d asked for a couple of bowls of rice to accompany them. Our server told us that one bowl of rice would easily be enough for both dishes, and that we could always order more if we wanted to. And maybe that might have been true, but it was very hard to judge when we were waiting something like ten minutes for that second dish to come out.

And this is the drawback of small plates and large plates, starters and mains: because, rightly or wrongly, we had ordered a main each and what this meant in practice was that I sat there like a lemon wondering if they’d forgotten my order. By the time it came out, most of the rice was gone. We ordered another one to go with the fish curry, but didn’t end up using most of it.

I waited so long for my main that I didn’t even get a photo of it, which would frustrate me more if it had been more exciting. It was okay but not extraordinary, and I wonder if the staff have had to manage expectations about the heat levels in the menu following some of those hype-laden reviews, because they told me that this dish was on the hot side and reality it was more restrained than I’d expected.

It was possibly the only thing I ate, up to that point, that tasted unspecial: was that because I’d had to wait so long for it, or just because it didn’t quite match the standard elsewhere? Who knows. All the other reviewers seem to have thought it was out of this world.

Kolae’s menu only had two desserts on it, so naturally we ordered both: how could you resist the possibility that you might just eat the twenty-seventh best dessert in the country? Especially as there was a Coteaux du Layon on the menu, a dessert wine I can never see without ordering which always punches above the likes of a Sauternes (or even a Tokaji, for my money).

Zoë had the worst of it, with a dessert which left her baffled and ambivalent. Mango custard with sweet sticky rice and fresh coconut sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality was a little odd and neither one thing nor the other. The custard was pleasant enough, if not exactly singing with mango, but the layer of lukewarm rice – more claggy than sticky – left her a little cold. Looking at the reviews I’ve seen, Kolae only did one dessert for some time, and all their desserts have been kind-of permutations of what Zoë had (well, left some of) and what I ordered.

That suggests they might still be searching for the right dishes to end meals at the restaurant. On this evidence, perhaps they should keep looking.

I had the smaller, cheaper and better dessert, and arguably the more conventional one. A single sphere of coconut sorbet, gorgeously smooth, came crowned with a salted tea caramel, peanuts on the side. And again, it felt like a few good ideas in search of better execution: I liked the sorbet, I absolutely loved the caramel, I wanted the ratio of the two to be different. And just dumping peanuts next to it felt like an afterthought, when I’d have liked the whole thing to feel integrated.

As I said, previous reviews I’ve seen suggested that Kolae previously only offered one dessert which combined elements of these two. That process of evolution doesn’t feel like it’s concluded yet.

Still, we were full and happy with much to digest. At this point getting attention was a breeze, and our meal – a lot of food, three drinks apiece and a 12.5% service charge lobbed on – came to a hundred and sixty four pounds. I’ve seen a few reviews say that you could spend less, which you could, but I for one didn’t want to come away from the meal thinking anything along the lines of ‘I wonder what those chicken skewers would have tasted like?’

Hours later, after a hectic traipse round Selfridges and Liberty unsuccessfully trying to identify birthday presents, we sat in the very nice beer garden of a pub in Islington, drank two deeply expensive pints of Steady Rolling Man and talked about our meal. It’s always one of my favourite things about going on duty with Zoë, the post mortem, and few things accompany one as well as sunshine and an al fresco pint of Steady Rolling Man.

Our conclusions were fairly similar – that Kolae was extraordinary, and that we were glad we’d taken a punt on it. That the room was incredible, the location was brilliant and that there were many dishes on there the likes of which neither of us had ever had. If the overwhelming critical reaction did have a feel of mass hysteria about it, it didn’t detract from the fact that it was an excellent restaurant.

And yet, there were a few things that just stopped it from being truly great. The slightly disconnected service, for one, and the homogeneity of some of the menu. And the timing issues with the mains did really bug me: I get that when you bill things as large plates and say people might want to share them you may not guarantee they will all come out seconds apart, but a ten minute lag felt like a gaffe and really did take the sheen off what had otherwise been an excellent meal.

And then there were the desserts, the most underwhelming element of the whole thing. I don’t hold with all the tourists wafting round Borough Market with their naff standard issue strawberries swamped in chocolate, but I seem to remember a stall in the market offering raw milk ice cream. If I’d known what Kolae’s desserts would be like, I’d have gone there instead.

But these are, in the scheme of things, relatively minor quibbles. If you have a list of London restaurants you plan to get round to, and Kolae isn’t on it, I’d definitely recommend adding it. If you have any curiosity about this kind of food and this region, even if like me you might lack the experience or the vocabulary to express it, it’s well worth expanding your consciousness with a visit.

And if you’re slightly worried either by suggestions of apocalyptic chilli heat or the visceral horrors of munching on a plate of prawn heads, don’t worry: the former probably won’t materialise, and the latter isn’t mandatory. That’s just the hype talking – the hype that sells papers, results in reservations and gets a very good restaurant an elevated status as the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country, less than a year after it opened.

Is it the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country? I’m not sure about that. I’ve wondered, since eating there, whether it would make my top thirty meals of all time: it’s one of the highest ratings I’ve given out on this blog, but top thirty full stop? Maybe not. But the best is the enemy of the good – and whether or not Kolae is the best, the fact remains that it really is very good indeed. Just leave as many preconceptions as you can at home, and enjoy the ride.

Kolae – 8.7
6 Park Street, London, SE1 9AB

https://kolae.com

Restaurant review: Chilis

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews8 Comments

The week after you get back from holiday is the absolute worst, isn’t it? One minute you’re loafing in the sun, you can have a lie in if you want to, your hardest morning decision is where to grab coffee and then where to have lunch, your post-lunch coffee, maybe a snack, your pre-prandial drink, your dinner, your post-dinner bar of choice. On and on it goes until you’re a modern-day lotus eater, free of cares, a flâneur and a gourmand, carefree and arguably in need of detox. Little, if anything, is finer than reaching that stage.

And then it’s over. The plane touches down at miserable old Shatwick, and you’re reintroduced to the M25. When you get home your clothes all need to be washed, the fridge is bare and there’s this thing called work you have to get up for at something ridiculous like half-seven in the morning. Just like that you’re back in a life of dreary cold packaged sandwiches and cobbling together a meal plan, of not drinking during the week, watching your calorie intake and hanging in there until payday.

And even though it’s May, it seems to be raining most of the time. I don’t care how much you might love your job: objectively speaking, if you compare it to a holiday there’s only ever going to be one winner. Why does anybody do it?

This year, for me at least, that comedown has been even more of a cliff edge than usual. Because not only was I back from holiday, but I was back from honeymoon – I got married, although I haven’t talked about it much – and my next trip away won’t involve planes, trains or automobiles but instead a white van and the removal men as I burn a week’s leave next month moving house.

So although Zoë and I did the supermarket shop as usual, with a sense of resignation, sticking to the plan wasn’t easy last week. Instead there were accidental takeaways, or wanders over to Bakery House or Honest, anything to make real life just a little more unreal, even if only for a short while. You could call it a transition phase, you could call it a soft landing. You could even call it a cry for help: probably it’s a little of all three.

On the plus side, it meant there was a slight role reversal. In the run up to my nuptials it was more difficult to persuade Zoë to come with me on duty, a combination of trying to shed that last couple of pre-marital pounds and save those last few pre-marital other pounds. Now that I’ve been elevated to the dizzy heights of husband? It turns out that Zoë can be persuaded to eat out during the week, especially if it happens to be her turn to cook.

I may have used this to my benefit, in truth. Bet you can’t be fucked to cook the salmons tonight I messaged her, as she was on the train back from London. How did you guess? came the reply. Failing at this, aren’t I. After a bit of plea bargaining – it was raining, so nowhere too far out of town (my wife does not like the rain), and nowhere that involved walking away from home only to head back (my wife also doesn’t like going back on herself) we settled for Chilis: central, a short walk from the station, potentially interesting.

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The Lyndhurst

On By ediblereadingIn None of the above6 Comments

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.

(Photo by @simple_living_in_berkshire)

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.