City guide: Montpellier (2025)

On May 23, 2025July 17, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Travel3 Comments

With the exception of Bruges, Montpellier is the city I’ve visited most in the last three years. I went pretty much on a whim back in 2022 and loved the place – so much so that I went again later in the year for my big summer holiday. And I loved the city so much that, less than two years later, it wound up being the place where Zoë and I went on honeymoon last May. We both loved that so much that we went back again this year, that same week in May, for another idyllic week eating, drinking, soaking up the sun, people watching and taking photographs.

All of this only happened because at one of the lunches I organise for readers of this blog, regular readers Phil and Kath waxed lyrical about Montpellier, giving me the clear impression that it was the best city break I’d never had. They’d stopped there almost by chance themselves, years back, and become regular visitors as a result. They got the bug. Having had that conversation with them I became a regular visitor myself, and here I am writing this. I got the bug, too. So be warned: if you get to the end of this guide you too might end up developing a fun, if costly, habit.

It does feel though like a city not many people know about, not an obvious candidate for a trip in the same way as Paris, Nice, Bordeaux or Lyon might be. So here’s my attempt to sell it to you: it is an absolute beauty, with a gorgeous old city full of winding lanes and sun-washed squares, wide palm tree-lined boulevards with trams whooshing past. It is a fantastic juxtaposition of old and new, with all that grandeur coexisting with a young, vibrant, metropolitan populace and a lively craft beer scene. It has wine, if you like that, and natural wine, if you like that too.

It has its own Arc de Triomphe and a fantastic neoclassical district, Antigone, built in the Eighties, which looks like it has been there for centuries. It has scruffy street art and plenty of fine art, it has galleries and churches and a thoroughly charming botanical garden. It has little squares like Place de la Canourgue filled with green space, lined by mansions and pavement cafes, and it has Les Arceaux, a grid of little streets under a huge and handsome aqueduct. The food market there during the week is a phenomenal plethora of everything you could want to eat and drink, at night people play skittles in the square or dine outside La Cigale.

It has two excellent indoor markets too, and those trams – in an impressive four-line network that is free for residents and a crazy twenty Euros a week for the rest of us – cover plenty of the city, heading almost all the way to the sea out east. I have never in all my time in Montpellier felt like going somewhere else, but if you do the trains are quick and easy to the likes of Nimes and Avignon – or the port of Sète, which remains on my list to visit some day.

My sales pitch doesn’t scratch the surface. I’ve not mentioned the street food scene at Marche du Lez, or gone into detail about the paintings at Musee Fabre, nor have I mentioned the rue de l’Ancien Courrier, possibly the most beautiful shopping street I have ever seen, like the Marais transplanted somewhere that is nearly always sunny, nearly always warm. I’ve not talked about the splendour of the Promenade de Peyrou, the attractive square with an incredibly photogenic water tower at one end, the Arc de Triomphe at the other.

I could go on and on, but I suspect the rest of this city guide will be long enough as it is. Because apart from Montpellier just being the most amazing place to be: to be a flâneur, to amble and loaf, to sit in the sun and watch the city living and breathing with a mixture of admiration and envy, it is also a stupendous place to eat and drink. And that of course is my focus, why I keep going back and why I’m writing a guide to some of its (many) best bits for a third time. So let’s get on with that, and hopefully once I’m done you’ll want to go there too: easyJet flies there directly from Gatwick, although if you’re time rich you could take the train there from Paris, which would also make it easier to bring back all manner of food and drink.

My previous guide to Montpellier was a bit of a halfway house, written in 2022 and updated in 2024. This one is almost completely overhauled, which means that unless I visited a place in 2024 or this month (or both) I’ve taken it out of the guide.

Many places I’ve left out might well still be good, but I can’t 100% vouch for them. If you’re a completist, you might want to consider Pastis, Reflet d’Obione, Green Lab or Le Reservoir from that guide. I’ve also removed a few places that I revisited in 2025 but didn’t like as much or that, with hindsight, have been supplanted by better options – like l’Artichaut and Popular Brewing.

Where an entry in this guide dates from 2024 I’ve made that clear, otherwise the recommendation is as fresh as they come, at the time of writing. This guide has fewer entries than the previous edition, but I know it’s still a long list. I did seriously consider slimming it down further, but in the end I didn’t: everything in here is worthy of its place.

Two other things before I get started. First of all, although this guide distinguishes between places to eat and places to drink, this is Montpellier and so the two can’t easily be separated. You can drink wonderful stuff at all of the restaurants and often eat cracking food at the bars, so the whole list is worth considering. I had some of my best meals at lunchtime, followed by an evening eating small plates in a bar.

Secondly, I’ve had a few people ask me where to stay in Montpellier. I think the old city can be tricky, because rooms are often cramped and/or expensive, and I never found an Airbnb I liked enough, despite the many advantages that come with having a kitchen and a fridge – although I suppose if I’d been eating stuff from the markets every day this guide wouldn’t exist.

I stay at Les 4 Etoiles, a guesthouse in Les Arceaux, and I can honestly say I wouldn’t recommend anywhere else. The welcome from Pierre is absolutely faultless, the breakfast – fresh fruit juice, freshly made fruit salad, baguette and pastries from a nearby bakery, good coffee – is marvellous, the rooms are wonderful and the little roof terrace comes into its own on a sunny day with a good book and a cold drink. Not only that, but the neighbourhood really does feel like a village close to the heart of the city: six minutes by tram, or a fifteen minute walk away from the centre.

I am already trying to work out when I can return. And when I do, I plan to fill some of the gaps in this guide: further research into Montpellier’s many wine bars is in order, along with a serious deep dive into the patisserie scene, something I promised last time but which is still overdue. I’m not currently in a position to judge between the varying merits of Maison Bonnaire, Clara Jung, Maison l’Oeuf and Scholler, but fingers crossed next time I will be.

Where to eat

1. Bistro Urbain

Bistro Urbain is a lovely little spot in the Écusson, the old city, and when I visited it in 2024 I had possibly my meal of the trip. I still think about the asparagus tartlet I ate there, and the magret de canard, skin seared, pink-centred, served with a terrine of courgette and rhubarb, a curveball ingredient the kitchens of Montpellier like to chuck in to a savoury course to keep you on your toes. I vowed to go there for dinner the next time I visited the city, to do it properly.

I did exactly that, and I had a wonderful meal although, in truth, it just reinforced that lunchtime diners get an astounding deal in this city because the menu didn’t differ hugely, in size, width or quality. The main difference seemed to be that two courses was not an option, so you chose between four – with a very generous amuse bouche and a choice of fish or meat main, or the “menu Pandore” where you got both main courses, but slightly less of each.

I did the latter and although I loved my meal I suspect that next time I would keep it simple. Ravioli of pork with some kind of fermented asparagus panna cotta was 40% good and 60% interesting, and I rather liked the slow-cooked tuna, given a pop with confit lemon and complexity by the addition of smoked haddock. But the other main, the shredded beef with another exceptional courgette terrine – what this restaurant can do with the humble courgette! – wild garlic, wholegrain mustard and a deep, intense jus was so marvellous that I wished I’d just had a bigger portion of that.

In that respect the menu Pandore was aptly named: at the end you kind of wished you hadn’t opened the box. But they made amends with a ludicrously moreish baba au rhum, at its heart a glossy and spiced chai ice cream that gave an old stager a new lease of life. Dinner for two with an excellent bottle of wine came to one hundred and fifty pounds – one of our only pricey meals of the trip but a steal for cooking of this quality.

I am pretty sure Bistro Urbain had a Bib Gourmand when I was deciding to visit them the first time and have lost it since. Based on my visit, that’s about as mystifying as everything else the inspectors do (how Newbury’s Woodspeen or Bristol’s Paco Tapas got a star remains beyond me: both have since been removed).

Bistro Urbain
5 rue Alexandre Cabanel
https://bistrourbain.com

2. Mahé

If Bistro Urbain was my discovery of 2024, I can say without hesitation that Mahé was my discovery of 2025. It’s a little out of the way – I ended up getting there by taking a combination of a tram and a bus – and if it wasn’t worth the detour I wouldn’t waste a moment in telling you so. But no, it is an exceptional place and I’m certain that if it was right in the centre it would be even busier and cost a darned sight more.

Mahé really is one hell of a restaurant. From the roadside, just down from the bus stop, it looks like an unexceptional, squat, concrete structure. What you don’t see until you go in is not only an extremely tasteful dining room but, beyond that, an absolutely gorgeous terrace that captures the sun, a place to completely escape from the noise beyond and, in my experience, any cares you might have.

The menu, at lunchtime, is a crazy forty Euros for three courses and this isn’t the kind of disappointing menu of compromises you’d expect at the likes of, say, London Street Brasserie. Mahé, like Bistro Urbain, gives you a narrow range of choices but that narrowness doesn’t make it any easier. I forewent the chance to eat crab ravioli – one of my favourite things – or pork with black garlic houmous and lacquered aubergine, and it would have hurt a lot more if everything I’d eaten hadn’t been so delectable.

First off, a raft of bang-on asparagus completely buried by its precious cargo of quail – enormously generous amounts of the stuff – covered in shaved foie gras and covered in a muscat reduction, the whole thing beautified with edible flowers. Dishes like this are why French restaurants bring you excellent bread, and no butter.

Even better was to follow with an astounding piece of veal, cooked pink, served with rosemary glazed carrots, a buttery pomme purée and morels that had soaked up a deep, delicious jus like sponges. This dish on its own was worth forty Euros, and might have cost it elsewhere, that it came with two friends in tow at that price almost beggared belief.

Dessert was a classic example of this region’s ingredients allowed to shine without too much mucking about: layer on layer of the lightest, most delicate pastry trapping an indulgent crème mousseline, singing with orange blossom. And under that? Loads and loads of the sweetest, brightest strawberries, quite possibly from the market I’d attended in wonder and envy that morning.

Mahé has interesting opening hours – closed two days a week, only open for lunch two days a week, only open for dinner one day a week. Only on Thursdays and Fridays can you pick a daytime or evening slot. Next time I go to Montpellier I will be sorely tempted to eat there twice.

Mahé
581 Avenue de la Pompignane
https://www.mahe-restaurant.fr

3. Ébullition

I’ll never forget the first thing I ate at Ébullition, back in 2022. It was September, the tail end of the summer, and my starter was a kind of symphony of tomatoes. In the U.K. it would have been called something naff like “textures of tomato” or “tomatoes three ways” but it was just an astounding love letter to a fruit that, somehow, is only ever magical when eaten on the continent: confit tomatoes, tomato sorbet and so on. I can’t remember the rest, but I’ll always remember how that dish made me feel.

I had the a la carte on that occasion, and then last year I had the tasting menu. I would say, actually, that both are equally valid ways to eat there. The former puts more risk on individual courses – but makes you feel like you’ve hit the jackpot when they’re good, as my rolled veal with citrus, jus and liquorice was – the latter is a proper three hour experience but has all the benefits and drawbacks of a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it approach to dishes.

I didn’t go back this year, and writing this now it’s one of my regrets. I’m not the kind of restaurant reviewer to appoint myself Michelin inspector – I leave those pronouncements to the really pompous ones – but when I wrote about Ébullition in 2022 I said their food felt a whisper away from Michelin star status. So I was absolutely delighted when I read that they’d won one this year. Far better than many starred restaurants I’ve visited in the U.K., and well worth a visit if you go to Montpellier.

Ébullition
10 Rue du Pila St Gély
https://restaurant-ebullition.eu/en/english/

4. La Cigale

Cigale was the first place I visited on my 2024 visit to Montpellier. It was a recommendation from Pierre when we checked in after a freakishly early flight from Gatwick, the kind where your airport taxi picks you up so early it’s barely worth going to sleep at all. It was just around the corner from our B&B and we sat outside, exhausted and newlywed in the blazing sunshine and had an extremely good lunch.

This year we returned for lunch on Sunday, a day when Cigale is resolutely open but many places in Montpellier are not. It was the one day of our trip when the heavens opened, a necessary clearing of the air: before that it was almost-warm and overcast with threatening clouds, after that it was nothing but sunshine. That meant that we got to eat inside, something I suspect rarely happens at Cigale, and check out their unobtrusively cool dining room which is great without ever trying too hard.

The food was every bit as good as I remembered. Haddock fritters with yoghurt, mint and coriander felt like they were a few courgettes away from being full-on Greek, but they were outrageously good all the same. It was chucking it down outside, but all sunshine on the plate. I followed it up with a steak tartare, every bit as good as the one I ate there the previous year, but Zoë had an even more covetable dish – a huge, craggy Milanese with a generous amount of Roquefort sauce on top. All that and great wine by the glass. Or, if you’re Zoë, Tripel Karmeliet on draft for a ridiculous seven Euros fifty for a pint.

La Cigale is one of those places that is always open and always busy, true cuisine non-stop. In the morning the terrace is full of paper-reading, coffee-drinking smokers, it is packed at lunch but even in the evening, on a warm day, it buzzes long after the sun has gone down. It is well worth a visit, wherever in the city you’re staying, before exploring the beautiful backstreets of Les Arceaux. I increasingly daydream about living there, getting my meat from the butcher, my fish from the fishmonger, my cheese from the cheesemonger and most of my other needs met by La Cave des Arceaux, the superb wine shop on pretty rue Marioge.

La Cigale
7 Boulevard des Arceaux
https://www.instagram.com/la_cigale_montpellier/

5. La Morue

It has taken me over three years of coming to Montpellier to finally get round to visiting La Morue, a fish and seafood restaurant. That’s despite Phil and Kath raving about it, and Pierre repeatedly marking its location on the Montpellier map he gives us at the start of every holiday. Well, more fool me, because it’s a marvellous little spot.

It’s a very fetching place just along from Place de la Canourgue, with tables that catch the sun and a gorgeous, intricate awning that casts just enough shade. But if you do have to move in, as we did when the sun got too much, it’s an equally attractive dining room with bare tables, wicker shades and memorabilia from nearby Sète on the walls. I’ve not yet visited Sète on any of my visits to Montpellier, but after eating at La Morue I am resolved to.

The menu is largely fish and seafood and everything I had was properly outstanding. Chipirones, baby squid, were far and away the best I’ve had and even better than any of the many specimens I’ve sampled on numerous trips to Andalusia. The coating was irresistible, beautifully seasoned, the squid was tender and the lake of aioli plonked on top left me honking for the rest of the day, as you would want it to.

Zoë’s truffle risotto with grilled scallops was also exceptionally good, but I only had eyes for the ray wing. Two of them turned up on the place, luxuriating in a perfect beurre noisette, golden and crinkled at the edges, scattered with capers and samphire, and I absolutely couldn’t have been happier. A little earthenware dish of potatoes, tomatoes, courgette and yes, still more aioli was a wonderful accompaniment, but I would have been happy just with those wings.

Service was brilliant, the albariño was crisp and delicious and I sat there soaking it up, wanting to build a time machine to go back to 2022 me and tell him not to be an idiot and to go to La Morue toute suite. My lunch there felt like a holiday within a holiday – a kind of Inception-esque experience, but a really enjoyable one.

La Morue
23 rue du Palais des Guilhem

6. Rosemarie

Rosemarie occupies one of the loveliest, most sun-struck spots in the Écusson, not far from the church of Saint Roch. I didn’t make it there until 2024, a fact entirely connected to the fact that they only recently embraced online bookings and, prior to that, their phone just rang and rang. It’s probably because they were so busy, because they occupy one of the loveliest etc. etc., but finally welcoming the internet a quarter of the way through the century is a very welcome development, for me at least.

Eating there last year I was stuck that the food was a lot better than it needed to be, given their enviable spot. I liked my jambon, speckled with almonds, very much and I loved my squid ragout with red Camargue rice and olives. Returning this year the standard didn’t dip at all, and if Rosemarie’s fish croquettes didn’t quite reach the standard of the fritters at La Cigale, the apple millefeuille fell a little short of the dessert at Mahé, the food was still good enough, especially combined with the location, to make it an excellent choice.

Besides, my panzerotto, stuffed with chicken and olives, was joyous. And my main course, a slab of lamb shoulder soaked in jus, topped with lemon and resting on a spelt risotto was even better, the meat falling apart even faster than my resolve not to race through a bottle of white in the sunshine.

In other cities, you could dismiss a restaurant like Rosemarie as just standard tourist bait and maybe, even in Montpellier, it is that. But nevertheless, it’s still rather good.

Rosemarie
3 rue des Soeurs Noires
https://rosemarie-montpellier.fr

7. Les Freres Poulards

My favourite street in Montpellier isn’t its prettiest or its most photogenic. It doesn’t have stone glowing in the sun, or bunting strung overhead. Rue du Faubourg du Courreau is a dusty, scruffy road that connects the edge of Les Arceaux with the boulevards at the perimeter of the old city. At its eastern end there’s a craft beer shop, and a bakery called Flour that is almost the cliché of Instagrammable but, because this is Montpellier, still does amazing cookies. At the western end it has Lebanese restaurants and cafes where men sit outside in the late afternoon, smoking and drinking coffee. Halfway down, somewhere between those things, you’ll find Les Freres Poulards.

It does loads of other stuff on its menu, and when I sat outside last week I’m pretty sure some of my neighbouring tables were eating food from the Italian restaurant opposite – the lasagne looked good, I couldn’t help noticing – but if you go to Les Freres Poulards you’re going for the rotisserie chicken. It really is extremely good, and you get a whole chicken, a well-dressed salad, plenty of flawless frites and a little pot of jus for just over forty Euros.

The chicken lacks the whistles and bells of, say, Bonjardim, but for my money is almost as good – so tender, the skin salted, crispy and as life-affirming as it is lifespan-shortening. But you’ll eat it and really not care about that, and wonder at how everything parts company with the bone so easily. The range of starters is very small – on one visit I had herring and fried potato, which I loved, on another a couple of fried eggs in a skillet, served simply with a strip of bronzed bacon and plenty of thyme. Both were great, but you come here for the chicken. And I always do.

Les Freres Poulards
27 rue du Faubourg du Courreau

8. Le Couperet

Le Couperet is an unusual beast, a smokehouse tucked away in the old city. I first went in 2022, and although I had a blast it rather passed in a blur. I had been to two different beer spots (both in this article) already by then, taking part in the by now regular tradition of, as Zoë puts it, “tearing the arse out of it” on the first night of a holiday. I resolved to go back, but it wasn’t until this trip that I got to try it again.

It is still a really lovely little spot, and although it has tables in the street outside on this occasion I ate in the dining room, which is altogether more tasteful than you might expect with none of the ersatz Americana that blights these kinds of restaurants in the U.K. (that said, I still wish I could go back in time and buy shares in whoever it is that makes Tolix chairs).

Le Couperet’s menu is streamlined and efficient, and if anything makes this a quicker, more casual dining experience, so well suited to drinks elsewhere afterwards. It has a handful of starters, and then the main event is a “planque” with one kind of dead animal per person and as many sides as you think you can handle. And my goodness, but you do get a lot of very nice food: this meal, of all the meals of the trip, was the one deserving of the epithet Zoë gives to big portions: a gut bash (the language of Shakespeare is safe in my wife’s hands).

Don’t be fooled, though, into thinking this is quantity 1, quality 0. Everything I had was extremely enjoyable. I loved my giant pile of ribbon-thin smoky pastrami, plonked on a puddle of spiced mayo and topped with a few pickles in case Vitamin C is something you remotely care about. And then everything on that planque was spot on. There was a massive slab of smoked pork belly, crispy where it should be, meaty where it should be, wobbly where it should be – if only I could say the same about myself – knockout beef ribs, garlic bread stuffed with cheese, smoked baked potatoes with sour cream, a very creditable coleslaw.

The staff work like trojans and the chap behind the counter, who seemed to be on his own, was even more industrious, serving a whole room of happy diners with impressive energy in what must have been a very hot kitchen. They even apologised for keeping us waiting for our mains, which says to me that they are used to customers eating in a hurry. That’s a shame, because it was food worth taking time over.

At the end, when we paid, I said that we’d not been for a few years and asked how they were doing. The chef, moonlighting as a cashier, told me they had had a really tough year last year, but they seemed to be bouncing back. It made me think, as I often do about restaurants, that if you miss out on a place in one visit it might not be there for the next. I’m glad they are still around: I’ll return, and fingers crossed this persuades someone, out there in the ether, to try them too.

Le Couperet
3 rue des Tessiers
https://www.le-couperet-smokehouse-restaurant.fr/en/

9. Hop Smash Burger

Burgers are as popular in Montpellier as they are in the U.K., and the old city offers a number of options. Other places on this list, like Broc’Cafe and La Barbote, do their own versions. But I visited Hop Smash, a little spot just down the way from the church of Saint Roch, in both 2022 and 2024 and both times I had a magnificent burger. At the time, I think it was possibly the best smashed burger I’d ever had, and even now I’m not sure it’s yet been surpassed.

I do think they have shrunk them from two patties to one, and when I strolled past this year I couldn’t see any option on their menu to double up, but even so they have spot on caramelisation and crinkled, crispy edges and are an excellent quick, casual option for drinks before a night out or lunch on the run. Their fries with feta and Cajun spices are also surprisingly good and the beers – brewed especially for the restaurant, if I remember rightly – are much better than they need to be.

Hop Smash Burger
9 Rue du Puits du Temple
https://hop-smashburger.fr

10. Bravo Babette

Bravo Babette, a self-styled “sandwich social club” near the botanical gardens, is part of a new generation of Montpellier hospitality businesses I’ve seen cropping up in the last year or two. Like Deli Corner, a sandwich joint near the church of Saint Roch, it has irreverent branding and concentrates on doing a few things really well. One of them is comms in general and social media in particular. Another, it turns out, is sandwiches.

Everything is made in house – which you should be able to guarantee but can’t always, with sandwiches – and the attention to detail is quite something. My sandwich, the Domi, crammed panko-crumbed chicken breast, tonkatsu sauce and pickled red cabbage into a sturdy brioche from nearby Maison Bonnaire. But the star of the show was a kaffir lime mayo that took this combination from familiar to exceptional. Zoê’s choice, stracciatella with prosciutto cotto and pesto, was more conventional but no less worthy.

Add in the fact that you can get a side of roasted new potatoes slathered in chimichurri and a home made lemonade in a very decent meal deal and you have a winner on your hands. Bravo indeed.

Bravo Babette
31 rue Jean Jacques Rousseau
https://www.instagram.com/bravobabette/

11. Les Glaces MPL

When it comes to ice cream, I know some people rate Padova, the gelateria in the old city. I’ve been, and it’s quite nice, but it has one significant problem, which is that it isn’t Les Glaces MPL.

Les Glaces MPL is in one of the indoor food markets of Montpellier, and it does some of the best ice cream I’ve had. I like to make multiple visits on a trip, so I can try the conventional stuff at least once but also give the leftfield flavours a go. So the salted caramel and the milk chocolate are as good as any – and better than Padova’s – and if you love ice cream as I do Les Glaces MPL is a must-visit for that.

But I also have a soft spot for some of the curveballs. On my visit last year I adored the clever heat of a chocolate ice cream laced with piment d’espelette, and previously I’ve loved their strawberry, mint and basil sorbet. This time, I tried an orange zest confection that was part ice cream, part marmalade, all wonderful, and a rosemary ice cream which I mostly tried so I could say I’d eaten rosemary ice cream. When I go back, because I will go back, I will hope they have their black sesame ice cream back on, because it’s one of my favourite things to eat in the whole of Montpellier.

Les Glaces MPL
Place Alexandre Laissac
https://www.lesglacesmpl.fr

12. Des Reves Et Du Pain

This bakery is just down from the Arc de Triomphe, and on nearly every visit I have ever paid it there’s been a queue out onto rue Eugène Lisbonne. Bizarrely, on this visit I had no such trouble both times I went to Des Rèves Et Du Pain. I have no idea why, but I wasn’t complaining. It certainly wasn’t because of a drop-off in quality: their pain au chocolat is the equal of anything I’ve had in Paris, which means it’s the equal of anything I’ve had anywhere.

I can’t vouch for their patisserie, and my intel suggests there are better places in the city for that, but they also do the most incredible savoury stuff. On our final day, we went there to try and find something for a light lunch on our roof terrace before the sad taxi trundle to the airport. We were rewarded with utterly gorgeous focaccia, filled with a pea pesto, feta and walnuts, which was somehow like the Mediterranean and sunshine in sandwich form.

“Stuff from Pret is going to seem pretty shit after this, isn’t it?” I said. Zoë nodded sagely, although we both knew it was as close to a rhetorical question as you were going to get.

Des Rêves Et Du Pain
10 rue Eugène Lisbonne
https://desrevesetdupain.com

Where to drink

1. Broc’Café

I have always loved Broc’Café, a grand spot right opposite the Jardin des Plantes where you can sit on the pavement and watch the trams go by. But I think it was only on this trip that I really fully appreciated how good it was.

It is always busy and bustling, but always seems to have space. It has an exceptionally good beer list for somewhere that isn’t a craft beer spot per se, with beers on tap by Brasserie Le Detour and Prizm, who are probably my favourite local brewery. Hopstand, a 6% IPA by the former, is increasingly a regular at many places, making it Montpellier’s answer to Parka or Steady Rolling Man. On one visit there I had a beautiful cider with pineapple, again by a local producer and a wonderful surprise package.

The food looks excellent, too, and seeing burgers arrive at other tables had me rubbernecking like a motherfucker. But on one occasion, having missed out on a proper lunch and wanting a mid-afternoon snack, we went for a little slate of charcuterie, cheese, houmous, cornichons and excellent bread and it was just the perfect thing at the perfect time. I think it cost about fifteen Euros too, which made it a steal.

Two other noteworthy things about Broc’Café: one is that the staff, who work their socks off, are without exception lovely, friendly, helpful and a credit to the place. The second is that although you order through them, you can pay at the end using the QR code on your table – and tip, for that matter – before being on your way without an eternal delay waiting to flag someone down. I saw this as a couple of places in Montpellier, but I don’t remember seeing it in the U.K. It’s almost as if there are some trust issues, I’d say.

Broc’Café
2 boulevard Henri IV
https://broccafemontpellier.fr

2. La Barbote

La Barbote, just round the corner from the station, is the eminence grise of Montpellier’s craft beer scene, the trailblazer that was there before the proliferation of beer across the city. It is a brewpub, and with the exception of some bottles from the likes of wild fermentation specialists Sacrilege, everything they sell on site is brewed on site.

Their beer is really lovely, and in a virtuosic array of styles. I’ve had IPAs there, DIPAs, sours and imperial stouts, and loved them all. And that doesn’t do them justice, because those are just the styles I’ll drink: on my visit this month they also had a kolsch, a triple, an altbier, a witbier with fennel, an Earl Grey pale ale and something only referred to as a “wild strong ale” (I’ll take their word for it that it was both).

La Barbote is a big space and the demographic there could teach some U.K. craft spots a thing or too – a huge range of ages, properly diverse in every way and about as far from your Brexitty “pubman” saving cask one warm flat pint at a time as is possible to imagine.

Did I mention the food? The food is great too. I always have the karaage chicken there, and if it wasn’t quite as amazing as on previous visits it was still up there with most karaage I’ve had in the U.K. – plenty of it, too, although maybe in bigger, less gnarled pieces than I’m used to. I’ve always looked enviously at the burgers arriving at other tables but been heading on somewhere else, but on this visit it was our spot for the evening so I enjoyed their classic smashed burger. It wasn’t quite at the standard of Hop Smash, but it wasn’t far off.

When I wrote up La Barbote last I finished with Zoë’s verdict that it was how Zero Degrees would be if it wasn’t shit. To give another frame of reference, and be more topical, Siren RG1 can only wish it was as good as La Barbote.

La Barbote
1 Rue des deux Ponts
https://www.facebook.com/labarbote/

3. Le Discopathe

Le Discopathe is opposite Les Freres Poulards, I have been going there for three years now and I love it very much. It specialises in craft beer and vinyl, it has upgraded its tables to rid itself of the trestle and benches so beloved by every tap yard and street food vendor and those tables catch the sun from lunchtime onwards. And, unlike most of Montpellier’s great beer places which open at 5pm, Le Discopathe is open from noon so it’s perfect for a quality beer in the sun.

On this most recent trip I visited more than once and became even more attached to sitting outside with a beer on the go, watching the world go by and occasionally getting into random conversations with people at neighbouring tables. It is one of my favourite Montpellier people-watching spots, and it would get into this guide for that alone. But the beer is really good too – usually about half a dozen options on keg, all local, although on this visit I couldn’t stray far from Brasserie Le Detour’s excellent, mega-reliable Hopstand.

It is great in the afternoon, great in the early evening, great after sundown when those tables pack with bobo types. It’s just great, I can’t stress this highly enough. The only sad thing about the tables inside is that it’s too loud to hear yourself think, although every time Zoë went inside – without exception – she heard something she really wanted to Shazam. Fortunately, you can get the same experience by keeping tabs on Le Discopathe’s excellent Instagram account, where they post banger après banger, après banger.

Le Discopathe
28 rue du Faubourg du Courreau
https://lediscopathe.com

4. Hopulus Brewpub

Hopulus, like La Barbote, is a brewpub and, like La Barbote, it exclusively serves its own beer, but the resemblances largely end there. Hopulus, in the heart of the old city, must be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever drunk craft beer, all vaulted ceilings, sturdy wooden furniture and honey-coloured stone. It’s an outstanding place, and it really helps that their beers – again, ever-changing and in an array of styles – are extremely good.

What I also love about Hopulus though is the way it challenges the link, a link that sometimes has a feeling of inevitability, between craft beer and pizza/burgers/fried chicken/other street food tropes. Because at Hopulus beer is paired, as is equally valid, with cheese and charcuterie, to triumphant effect. Sitting down with a gorgeous IPA, great bread, a salami, a nutty Comte and an entire Brillat Savarin was a transcendent experience. And that’s before you get on to their cailette, a beautiful pork faggot brought to the table just asking to be sliced thickly and enjoyed slowly.

Partway through this embarrassment of riches I wasn’t sure whether I was having one of the best meals of my trip or creating an exquisite still life. From the look of the photo above, I’m by no means convinced that they’re mutually exclusive.

Hopulus Brewpub
8 rue Collot
https://www.facebook.com/hopulus/

5. Couleurs de Bieres Nord

There are two branches of Couleurs de Bières. The bigger one in the south is in Port Marianne, a sort of modern district which feels a little like Montpellier’s answer to Kennet Island: I’ve been to Port Marianne, but only during the day. Its northern sibling, though, is a cracking little bar. It’s opposite the exotically named Stade Philippidès, and there’s something about watching people running round the track that really puts you in the mood for a cold, crisp beer.

It’s a good example of how Montpellier’s beer scene has evolved even in the time I’ve been going there. When I first visited in 2022 the beers felt more Belgian, with only a couple of beers by local ZooBrew. But returning last year, the list of beers on keg – 8 in total – was much more French, with local breweries really well showcased. It also pairs very nicely with Drapeau Rouge, the next place on this list, if you’re planning a crawl.

Couleurs de Bières Nord
48 rue du Faubourg Saint-Jaumes
https://www.couleursdebieres.fr/front-page/cdb/nord

6. Drapeau Rouge

I’d seen Drapeau Rouge on my summer 2022 visit to Montpellier, but it wasn’t until last year that I managed to pay it a visit. It’s a gorgeous brewpub in Boutonnet, a district a short walk from the old city, with eleven taps, including beers from many of Montpellier’s breweries and a couple brewed by the venue itself. It’s not the comfiest venue in the world, with many of those trestle benches beloved by anyone who’s been to a tap room or a street food market, but I loved sitting outside with a sour and feeling like I was in a part of Montpellier the tourists would never see.

I didn’t get to it this year, which means it is on the note on my phone entitled “Montpellier: next time”. I still want to give their food a go, if only because their website charmingly states that they aim to provide what they call “pub food” de qualité. I bet they do a better job of it than a bloody Wetherspoons microwave and by the looks of the menu, I’ll be on the frites loaded with smoked, spiced pulled pork, or topped with Belgian beef stew..

Drapeau Rouge
53 rue du Faubourg Boutonnet
https://drapeau-rouge.fr

7. Plein Sud

Montpellier is awash with wine and wine bars, and as we’ve established has more than its fair share of places where you can drink good and interesting beer. Is there space, too, for natural wine? The owners of Plein Sud seem to think so, and on the showing of my two visits there I very much agree with them. And the service there is so good, and so winning, that I think they could convince even the most hardened cynic.

It’s another of those beautiful spaces, all stone and wood, not far from Hopulus, with a few tables in the square outside. But really the rooms are so gorgeous – and were nicely cool on a warm spring evening – that I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. Places like Plein Sud remind me very much of Bristol, to the point where I wonder if the owners of, say, Native Vine or Marmo have been to their ilk to pick up tips. Little things like the decor, the prints on the wall and the personalised wine glasses make me think they may well have done.

Plein Sud has half a dozen natural wines by the glass – a mix of white, red, orange and pet nat – along with a couple of mixed fermentation beers from Sacrilege, cannily spotting the overlap in the Venn diagram between these two genres of booze. A lot of natural wine still gets a bad name in this country (good luck finding any in Reading, for instance) but I really enjoyed everything I had. I especially enjoyed the pet nat, a little number called Tohu-Bohu that was hard enough to order sober, let alone after a few glasses.

Plein Sud also has a lovely compact menu of stuff to eat while you explore the wine list. More compact than at Hopulus, for example, but still just big enough that you have choices and those choices aren’t straightforward. I loved the coarse rilletes, served with good bread and a handful of cornichons, and a Beaufort cheese with almost toffee notes to harmonise with the grit.

But the more imaginative stuff was if anything even better. Carpaccio of blue meat radish, carpeted with feta and bathed in really good extra virgin olive oil was a revelation, and I loved the puck of goats cheese with oil, smoked salt and spring onions. But Zoë’s favourite, as it had been on our previous visit, was something called the ‘Dome Plein Sud’, a tower of fromage blanc and goats cheese sandwiching a layer of excellent pesto, crowned with sundried tomatoes and toasted nuts. We left convinced we could recreate it at home, and irked that no U.K. supermarket was interested in saving us the trouble.

Plein Sud
16 rue de la Monnaie
https://www.instagram.com/pleinsud.montpellier/

8. Les Enfants Rouges

Wine bar Les Enfant Rouges was recommended by Pierre, the owner of our B&B, and like all his other recommendations it was utterly reliable. It spans both sides of a busy street in the old city and we only paid it a flying visit in 2024, there for a little while before dinner elsewhere. But the selection of wines by the glass was so good, the staff so accommodating and welcoming and the small plates menu so tempting that I regret not fitting it in during my trip this year.

I fear that my guide does a better job catering for beer and coffee lovers than it does for wine lovers, something I will have to rectify next time around. For what it’s worth, if you do want to do any research of your own when you visit Montpellier, my to do list of wine bars includes the following: Hotel Pinard; GlouGlou; Chez Pinot; and Les Canons.

Les Enfants Rouges
3 Plan Duché
https://www.lesenfantsrouges.fr

9. Cafe BUN

I think that previous versions of this guide had more coffee places in them, and there are more coffee places in Montpellier than I seemed to remember on this month’s visit. But really, for me, it’s simple: I went to Cafe BUN on rue des Étuves, just down from Place de la Comédie. A lot. And I highly recommend you do too. They have some space outside, the service is excellent and the coffee is exceptional. They roast their own, and once you’ve had it you don’t really look elsewhere.

Do you still want another suggestion? Okay, here goes: if you don’t fancy that go to the second branch of Café BUN, on Boulevard du Jeu de Paume. It has more seats outside, they catch the sun splendidly and you can watch the trams go past. All around that street are concept stores and little boutiques selling things you’ll want to bring home with you. The inside is much more spacious and bustling, and it has a better loo. Oh, and you can buy beans there to take home. I have a couple of unopened bags in my kitchen as I write this, and I know when they’re opened that a little bit of me – a very grateful bit – will be transported back to the city, even if only momentarily.

Café BUN
5 rue des Étuves/32 Boulevard du Jeu de Paume
https://cafebun.fr

10. Coldrip

The only other place I’d recommend for coffee is Coldrip, a sort of Australian-style brunch cafe in a very attractive square not far from the Musée Fabre. Their coffee is really not half bad, and Zoë has a real weakness for their mocha, which comes with a little pot of Chantilly cream. But really, I recommend Coldrip for the brunches. On previous visits I’ve had their crispy chicken burger, which was downright terrific, and pancakes stacked high with bacon where they leave a big old jug of maple syrup at the table for you to dispense with extreme prejudice. Again, this quality, this lack of stinginess, can come as a surprise after visiting enough cafés in the U.K.

On this occasion, though, I chose the avocado toast, to live up to my stereotypical role as a sybarite who is not yet on the housing ladder. Again, it was a beaut of a dish: great bread, which to be fair you start to take for granted in France, plenty of avocado, feta, pink pickled onions, quite a lot of top notch streaky bacon, a very well-poached egg and a cornucopia of seeds scattered with abandon. This dish made me realise that, with the exception of The Switch, nowhere back home does this dish half so well.

Coldrip is justly very successful, and has opened a second branch in Port Marianne: I tried to go there but Coldrip was closed, adding further weight to my theory that it was the Kennet Island of Montpellier.

But the original branch was busy when I went, and to be honest it always seems to be: we queued to get a table at lunchtime, and as we enjoyed our meal there were still people waiting to be seated. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was like that until mid to late afternoon every day, and it’s richly deserved. Other people may be very excited about our one or two extra branches of Café Yolk in the offing, but I would trade both of them, without hesitation, for a single Coldrip.

Coldrip
4 rue Glaize
https://coldrip-food-and-coffee.business.site

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Restaurant review: Gees, Oxford

On May 9, 2025May 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

In 2026 Gees appointed Nick Galer, formerly of The Miller Of Mansfield, as its new head chef which means this review is no longer current. I have kept it up for posterity and will re-review Gees in due course.

For my money, there are a few finer things in life than a long, leisurely Saturday lunch with a very good friend. Especially when you’re in a fetching room, in a beautiful city, faced with a cocktail, an appealing menu and excellent people watching opportunities. In fact, one of the only things finer than that is to do exactly what I’ve described above, but on a Friday, with four whole days off stretching out in front of you. So I was very happy indeed to find myself sitting in Gees’ gorgeous conservatory on Good Friday with my dear friend Jerry, Easter weekend only just beginning.

By this point, the day had already got off to a magnificent start. The train to Oxford was quiet, deserted almost, and it was the first time in as long as I could remember that it only took a couple of minutes to exit the station, a station whose abysmal design doesn’t seem to have significantly changed in the thirty or more years that I’ve been making that journey. We had a bimble round the Covered Market, we bought bread and cheese for later on, we had a beautiful latte in the Missing Bean on Turl Street, chatting away non-stop.

Jerry and I had never been to Oxford together before, so we compared our experiences of the city over coffee, looking at the connections between his mental map of the place and mine. I thought how nice it was to introduce him to some of my favourite spots, particularly as if it wasn’t for Jerry (it’s a long story) I might not know Oxford half as well as I do. The weather could’ve been nicer – the day was dry yet overcast, which never paints Oxford’s buildings in their best light – but the company was unimprovable.

I had chosen Gees for our lunch because it had been on my to-do list for quite some time. A glorious spot on the Banbury Road mainly famous for its conservatory slash greenhouse dining room, there’s been a restaurant on the site for nearly forty years, a mind-boggling record. It started out as Raymond Blanc’s restaurant, with John Burton Race in the kitchen, then five years later it became Gees and has stayed that way ever since. It’s now part of The Oxford Collection, a small and exclusive group including The Old Bank and Old Parsonage hotels, and their respective restaurants.

That length of tenure means that Gees was already trading when I turned up at Oxford in 1992, sporting terrible spectacles and even worse clothes, to study my degree alongside some of the brightest people I have ever met (and some of the thickest too, would you believe). Not, of course, that I would’ve eaten there then. As I’ve said before, my meals out were limited to regular trips to the fish and chip shop on Carfax, and the rest of the time I was either heating up an M&S chili con carne in the microwave of our communal kitchen, or enjoying – and I use that word as loosely as humanly possible – the food in my college halls.

Many Oxford colleges have an excellent reputation for food, as it happens. They also have shitloads of land and investments, and in one case their own deer park. My college had none of those things, which is probably why they accepted the likes of me: the food there was purgatorial. So Gees was for a long time a kind of mythical place, the sort of restaurant other people went to, people with wealthy parents and substantial allowances. It wasn’t until much later, probably twenty years or so later, that I went there, just once.

That too was in another life, with my then wife and a bunch of our friends who turned out, when push came to shove, to be her friends. I don’t remember much about that meal, except that it was deeply convivial, but I do remember following it up with a lot of drinks in one place or another and stopping on the way to the station for a shameful KFC. I always intended to return to Gees, but somehow I never did.

I was quickly reminded, as we stepped through the door, what an attractive place it is. Most of the seating is indeed in that big conservatory, with its banquettes, leather-backed chairs and handsome tiled floor, and it makes for a great place to eat. Even on a cloudy day the room fills with light, and something about that light, the room’s airiness, the bustle of its supremely efficient staff and the chatter from prosperous neighbouring diners created a truly brilliant atmosphere. If I gave out ratings for rooms alone, Gees would take some beating.

Gees’ menu is sort of modern European, with something from everywhere. Oysters and in-season Wye Valley asparagus were on offer, as were Serrano ham croquetas and braised octopus with romesco. But Italian dishes and ingredients tend to dominate – pizzetta, pasta, burrata, aubergine parmigiana, the list goes on. It’s as tempting a menu as any I’ve seen on my travels for a while, and on another day I could have ordered almost anything on it.

I think I read somewhere that Gees was influenced by the River Cafe, and I could imagine that in both the menu and the surroundings. Not that I’ve ever been to the River Cafe: for all the rave reviews I’ve read, paying nearly forty pounds for an asparagus starter has always been beyond my means; that said, I’m sure some of my Oxford contemporaries have been more than once. Gees’ asparagus was perhaps more keenly priced at under twelve pounds. Starters more generally weighed in at between ten and twenty pounds, pasta dishes close to twenty and main courses between eighteen and thirty-five. Not River Cafe levels, but not cheap either.

Another thing to love about an unhurried lunch is the possibility of an aperitif. So Jerry had something which the bill described as a “Bergamont Spritz”. It’s not in the drinks menu online, so I’m assuming it contained gin, some kind of sparkling wine, bergamot and – surely – a typo. I had something called a Contessa Negroni which swapped out Campari for Aperol in the classic, simple, three ingredient cocktail. You might wonder why this has never been done before, and now I can tell you: because it doesn’t taste as nice as a proper negroni.

That was all forgivable, though, because the bar snack we ordered to go with them was a real cracker – little dabs of anchovy sandwiched between two sage leaves, battered and fried. These were outrageously good, salty little treats and a really excellent idea. A far better idea than putting Aperol in a negroni, anyway. I wasn’t to realise, at that point, that my bar snack would be far and away the best thing either of us ate all day, so instead I sipped my cocktail, enjoyed the surroundings and felt pleased with the course the day was taking. At all the tables around me, people were doing much the same.

The problem is that after that, despite the room being lovely and our bottle of txakoli being cold, fresh and zippy it felt to me like Gee’s menu delivered wobble after wobble. Take my starter, which was described as venison tonnato. Now, I thought that sounded like an interesting idea: a vitello tonnato swapping our the veal for venison could, after all, possibly work. And it might still be an interesting idea, but it wasn’t in a million years what this dish was.

Instead of thinly sliced venison, you got a piece of venison fillet, cooked through without pinkness, thickly sliced and drizzled with a pale sauce that contained absolutely no tuna. Not the slightest hint of it, not even a whisper of tuna. I don’t know what it tasted of – not a lot, really – but it meant that both the main ingredients of vitello tonnato were missing, replaced with things that were damage not homage. And then there was a big pile of salad, because this starter cost fifteen pounds and they had to find ways to distract a paying customer from realising that this wasn’t in any way what they had ordered.

Ordering a salad by mistake seemed to be quite an Oxford thing: I was reminded of a similar incident at Branca when I went there earlier in the year. I didn’t mind that then, because my stealth salad at Branca was still an excellent dish. This, not so much. If it had been called “venison salad with tonnato dressing”, while not 100% accurate, I’d have had fewer quibbles. Of course, if it had been called that I’d have ordered something else.

The problem is that not only is stealth salad seemingly an Oxford thing, it’s also – to paraphrase Dr Dre – a Gees thing. Jerry’s soft shell crab with saffron aioli was nice enough, but you get an idea even from the picture below of how diddy it was. Again, salad appeared mainly to be there to fill negative space, a kind of gastronomic find the lady deception. A different salad to that accompanying my starter, with shaved fennel and olive oil. Again, not mentioned on the menu but, in truth, a large part of proceedings. Jerry gave me a forkful of his crab. There was so little that I felt guilty taking it.

Jerry is on some kind of medication that reduces his appetite (although, gladly, not where booze is concerned). He quite enjoyed this, but I think you’d have to be on that medication to find it enough. And Jerry’s drug regime came in even handier with his main course: butterflied sardines, which apparently came with tomato, sumac pickled onions and chermoula.

I try not to talk about value much in restaurant reviews these days: things cost what they cost, and restaurants need to make money. So for me to mention it, pricing has to verge on the egregious and, at twenty-two pounds, that’s why I’m bringing it up here. Here they are in their glory, all five of them. This, to me, looks like a starter. Is that all there is? you might ask. Where’s the tomato?

Well have no fear, because this dish – the generosity never starts – came with tomatoes and radicchio. Rocket, too, to match the rocket dumped in the centre of the Maltese Cross of disappointment that was those sardines. Double rocket, the treat nobody ever asked for: still, it beats pea shoots, I suppose. Why did the menu not mention that this was yet another salad? Was Gees just a glorified salad bar, and nobody had told us? Was it north Oxford’s upmarket tribute to Harvester, Gregg Wallace’s favourite restaurant? It was a puzzle and no mistake.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling that really we had just ordered exceptionally badly, because the dishes arriving at other tables looked more like actual food. A tall, substantial burger was brought to one of our neighbours, with a decent-looking portion of chips. Lamb cutlets piled high on a plate were put in front of the chap next to him, although in fairness they were on top of some little gem lettuce and peas. See? Another salad.

My main gave Gees one last chance to dish up something more convincing. And I’ll say this for my chicken cacciatore: it was not a salad. But it wasn’t great either. The pool of stretchy polenta was pleasant enough: I would probably always choose mash over polenta, but the menu clearly advertised it, so I couldn’t complain. And I did really love the sauce my chicken came in: rich with tomato, sharp with capers, studded with judiciously-cooked carrots and celery, a vegetable I always think is underrated in this context.

The chicken was the problem. I’m really partial to chicken thighs on the bone, but you have to achieve one of two things and ideally both. A crispy skin, if you can get that right, is a truly wondrous thing. But I would pass on that if the chicken is so well cooked that it flees the bone at speed, and breaks into strands. That’s when chicken thighs become properly magical. If Gees had achieved that the chicken, with that sauce and some of the polenta (if you must) would have made for splendid mouthful after splendid mouthful.

But to get both of those wrong, to have flaccid skin and firm, almost rubbery meat that needed to be prized away from the bone? That’s really not great. And to charge twenty-eight pounds for two undercooked chicken thighs that weren’t fit to grace the sauce they came in? Cheeky doesn’t even come close.

No side dish could rescue this sorry affair, though in Gees’ defence their braised leeks in feta and dill, served warm, were delightful. I’m no fan of dill, generally, yet I loved this dish and at six pounds it was better, and better value, than nearly anything else we ate. About the same size as those sardines too, come to think of it. It was a beautiful lipstick – applied to a pig, yes, but a beautiful lipstick nonetheless.

Would you have stayed for dessert? We nearly didn’t but felt like we had to see it through, like a disappointing box set. To Gees’ credit I asked who they bought their ice cream from and was told they made it in house. That probably swung it, and Jerry was delighted with his affogato, served with Pedro Ximenez.

I mean, again, if I’m being a stickler (which I am), if you swap the espresso for PX then what you have might be lovely but it’s no longer an affogato, just as the negroni wasn’t a negroni, the tonnato not a tonnato. Gees seemed to have taken Lewis Carroll, another Oxford type, very seriously when he wrote in Through The Looking Glass that “When I choose a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. Words, salad, word salad: it was all the same to Gees. Let’s call the whole thing off.

To close on a damp squib of faint praise, Gees’ ice cream is pleasant stuff. I tried vanilla and chocolate – don’t expect any leftfield flavours – and both were very good. Smooth, no ice crystals, plenty of specks in the vanilla and an excellent balanced depth in the chocolate. Two scoops for eight pounds didn’t feel like highway robbery, although it made the nine quid Gees charged for Jerry’s single scoop with a slug of Pedro Ximenez seem decidedly impudent.

What else is there to say? The whole meal, service included, came to two hundred pounds between the two of us, including an optional 13.5% service charge. The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one, because I had a lovely time and the best of company, the room is hard to fault and the service is excellent. You almost enter some kind of trance where despite the preponderance of foliage on the plate and the underwhelming nature of so much of what you eat, you still have a very nice time.

It was, food aside, as enjoyable a lunch as I’ve had this year. Just think how much of a riot we’d have had if the food was at the standard of somewhere like Upstairs At Landrace, a restaurant considerably more reasonably priced than Gees! And there’s the elephant in the conservatory, the question of cost and value. Because when the bill arrives the spell is broken, and you think about what a hundred pounds could buy you anywhere else.

I have to hand it to Gees because they are very popular and an awful lot of people have become very taken with the place. But unless we ordered very poorly, I do have to ask myself: how on earth did Gees manage that? I’m starting to feel bad for Jerry because whenever he comes out with me on duty, however nice a time we have, the food seems to be pricey and middling. Take Zia Lucia, or Storia in Maidenhead: the poor guy can’t catch a break. I will have to think much more carefully about our next meal out, because Jerry deserves some food as brilliant as he is.

To make amends, after we finished our lunch I took Jerry to the Rose & Crown on North Parade, my very favourite Oxford pub. We sat in the back room and polished off a couple of pints, and I told him how I used to drink there thirty years ago, and how it almost felt like it hadn’t changed a bit. A lovely international group – three French, one Slovenian – perched on the end of our table and we ended up in conversation about all sorts of things: the English; Brexit (always Brexit); where to eat in Montpellier; Oxford’s best restaurants, you name it. None of them mentioned Gees in that context, and I can’t say I blame them.

It was only later that I realised that the Rose & Crown, like Gees, has been under the same management since the Eighties, which means that those first drinks I had there, fresh out of university, were under the same landlords looking after me and my very good friend over thirty years later. That gave me a warm feeling in a way that nothing I ate that day managed, however lovely Gees seemed on paper. Forty years, whatever way you look at it, is one hell of an achievement, even in a city which has a track record of keeping establishments alive for many, many centuries. I am glad there are still institutions like Gees and the Rose & Crown in Oxford. But when I go back, only one of them is on my list for a return visit.

Gees – 6.5
61-63 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
01865 553540

https://www.geesrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: House Of Flavours

On May 2, 2025May 16, 2026 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

It’s incredibly frustrating, in this day and age, when a restaurant doesn’t have a website. How are you supposed to figure out what you’re going to have, when you can’t spend at least fifteen minutes poring over the menu in advance of your visit?

And how can you tell when it opens and closes? You can try Google for that, of course, but different restaurants report trading hours in different ways – does closing at 8pm mean it closes at 8 sharpish, or that the kitchen closes at 8? If only they had a website you could use.

This all occurred to me last week, when I was going to visit Zi Tore, the newish Italian place on Smelly Alley that has taken the place of the much lamented Grumpy Goat. It has no website, although you can track down the menu if you try hard enough; an Italian friend of mine has been a few times and really rated it, not only encouraging me to visit but telling me all the best things to pick on the menu.

Google says that it shuts at 8, but I had done my homework here, too. Another friend was looking for somewhere quick and easy to eat in Reading a few weeks ago, prior to attending the quiz at the Allied and I suggested Zi Tore. “I wish they’d publish their opening hours somewhere” she said, not unreasonably. “I’d like to be assured that there will be delicious things available at 7pm.” But then she went (“it was completely dead”) and enjoyed the food. So that settled it.

I arranged to go there with Jo – who made a cameo appearance in this blog five years ago – safe in the knowledge that it would all work out fine. We met at Siren RG1 for a couple of beers, which was enough to persuade me that they hadn’t fixed their pricing issues from last year, and mooched over to Smelly Alley ready for pizza and pasta. Jo’s family is Italian, too, and she has strong opinions about Italian food: I was looking forward to seeing what happened when those views came into contact with Zi Tore’s dishes.

Can you see where this is going? Of course you can. We arrived at 7pm to find Zi Tore dead and the guy behind the counter turned us away. “Sorry, we close at half seven”, he said. Exasperating, really: if you want to just be a lunch place, be a lunch place. If you want to be a lunch place that does coffee in the afternoon, fair enough. But why offer pizza and pasta and close at half-seven, a full half hour earlier than you claim you do? I took a menu, so now I know exactly what they serve. It didn’t have opening times on it, either.

So there Jo and I were, standing on Union Street a couple of beers to the good like a prize pair of limoncellos. Where to go? Fortunately, I keep my to do list online, so it only took a few minutes poring over it on Union Street before we were on our way.

Some places, like Dolphin’s Caribbean Cuisine, haven’t been open long enough yet. Others, although high on my list of priorities, were already scheduled in with other people. And some, the likes of Jollibee or Biryani Mama, may even close before an evening comes where I consider dinner there and think “oh, go on then”. But there was a place I’d been keeping in my back pocket to to do this year, and Zi Tore downing tools gave me the perfect opportunity: back to House Of Flavours it was.

Restaurant review: Upstairs At Landrace, Bath

On April 25, 2025April 23, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

I go to Bath too rarely to know it well, but often enough to wish I knew it better. Winding through the sun-bathed stone on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon with my old friend Dave, very much following his lead, I realise how rare it is for me to walk round a city with virtually no idea where I’m going. But Dave has been coming here for years, going all the way back to the best part of thirty years ago when he first met his wife and she was living here, so I put myself in his hands for a change and just enjoy the views, all of which are sensational.

I only have a vague understanding of the city – I know where the Royal Crescent is, and the train station, and Pulteney Bridge, sort of, but beyond that my inner satnav of how all these places join together is fuzzy at best. I’ve probably been to Bath something like four times in ten years, so I follow along like a clueless tourist while Dave takes me to his favourite coffee spot, a little off the beaten track, and a very good beer shop. And then we have a bit of a wander in the growing warmth of the day, and Dave tells me about all the green space in the city, the bookshops we could visit later and, crucially, where we might drink after lunch.

Eventually we walk up Walcot Street, one of the few parts of Bath I know a little better. I would say it’s one of Bath’s most beautiful streets, but in my experience they all are. But I know it from the cheese shop, which feels like it’s been there forever, and Picnic, a café I drank at last time I visited the city. Beyond that, I mostly navigate it by memories of places that are no longer there – a Scandi interiors store I shopped at a lifetime and a marriage ago, a craft beer bar called Brewed Boy that I drank at with Zoë and her friends James and Liz, before they became my friends too.

As we stroll, Dave points out landmarks from his memories in the city, places that have survived better than the ones I recall. One, Schwartz Bros, is a burger place that looks to have been trading for the best part of fifty years – Dave remembers it from courting his wife, and that was so long ago you probably still would have called it courting. But our destination for lunch is a place neither of us has been before: Upstairs at Landrace, the restaurant that sits, as its name suggests, on top of the city’s highly esteemed Landrace Bakery.

I’d wanted to go for ages, and when Dave and I were deciding where to meet up he picked Bath over Oxford or Reading, so I saw my chance. I gave him a few options, half expecting him to go for the wine and small plates of Corkage, or the Basque tapas of Pintxo, but was very pleasantly surprised when he plumped for Upstairs at Landrace, a place I’d always liked the look of.

It received some attention in the national press three years or so ago – I get the feeling national critics pick Bath for a review every couple of years when they fancy expensing a genteel day out – but had since settled back down to just doing its business. All the reviews I’d read talked about a simple, compact, beautifully executed menu and really, what more could you ask for when lunching with a very old friend? The menu changed daily, in fact, and both Dave and I kept an eye on it in the run-up to our trip, identifying dishes we would like to eat and hoping they’d still be on offer when the weekend came.

The restaurant is a wonderfully haphazard place. You go up the stairs and although the two dining rooms are both technically on the first floor they aren’t quite on the same level. You sense that everything in the building is higgledy-piggledy, few straight lines or right angles. We were given a table in the cosier of the two rooms, near the open kitchen, all sloping ceilings and sunlight squeaking in through the windows.

It was doing nicely when we got there, on a bright spring afternoon, and it got busier during our time there. It felt like a very agreeable place for lunch, and the fact that my seat gave me a prime opportunity to snoop on plates being whizzed from the kitchen to other tables didn’t exactly do any harm.

The menu was compact and, although a continuous list of dishes, was clearly designed, by price point, to be broken up into smallest, smaller and bigger. Our excellent server, who did a brilliant job all afternoon, talked us through the whole “small plates for sharing and bigger plates for you to have to yourself” concept and we listened to it the way you listen to the safety demonstration on an airplane, being respectful although we’d both heard it dozens of times before. After all, I suppose this plane might have varied from others we’d flown on in the past. It didn’t, though. It never does.

What that meant, in practice, was the compact menu all the critics had talked about – a couple of snacks, six artists formerly known as starters, three big plates for you to have on your own and one even bigger one for sharing. Just the one side dish, “Fairy Hill mixed leaf salad”, from a place whose leaves are apparently so good the provenance deserved to be listed: we didn’t try it to find out. The small plates were between eight and fourteen pounds, the bigger ones between twenty-four and thirty, the biggest fifty-eight.

All the versions of this menu Dave and I had tantalised ourselves with in the run-up, I can safely say, had more options I fancied on them than this one did. One of the most appealing dishes – involving duck, I think – had been replaced with a “Pembrokeshire cockle vongole”, which I’m sure many people would have loved but appealed to me about as much as the mixed leaf salad. Dave, who treats eating out as a chance to indulge, wanted a bit more red meat on there, but pretty much the only dish that fitted that bill was the ribeye, and we didn’t fancy it enough.

We contemplated our relatively bad fortune while eating an excellent slice each of the bakery’s bread – a nice touch that this was complimentary – with very good, golden room temperature butter and a drink. Dave told me on the walk to the restaurant that he had pretty much given up on wine in favour of beer (and I had mentally scratched a couple of bars off my list of places we could drink later on) so he had a bottled IPA from Gilt & Flint, a Devon brewery I’d never heard of who also, apparently, supply to triple Michelin starred The Ledbury. I had a sip: it was nice enough.

I, a little jaded from a session the previous evening at the Nag’s, was tempted by a wine from Wiltshire of all places but instead had a glass of table perry from Wilding. I know next to nothing about perry except that it’s apparently the best booze we all aren’t drinking yet, and unworthily I’d picked it mostly because it was a small glass of something alcoholic that wasn’t too strong. I don’t think that’s a slogan perry makers are going to scramble to adopt, but on this showing it didn’t have enough about it to generally make me choose it over a crisp white wine. I must try harder.

The first of our sharing plates was a study in simplicity. Four very good anchovies – by Pujadó Solano apparently, seventeen quid per pack online – came glimmering in a pool of unbeatable olive oil, sprinkled with oregano, the whole affair beautified with lemon zest. “Why do I never think of having anchovies with lemon zest?” said Dave. “I’m definitely doing that at home from now on”. Otherwise this was just about buying the best of everything and putting it together, and in that sense you could say that although it was special – and at twelve pounds you’d want it to be – it somehow wasn’t out of the ordinary.

What was out of the ordinary, though, was our server coming back with a basket of little cubes of sourdough so we could personally mop up every last soupçon of that bright, herby olive oil: that I loved.

Anyway, the anchovies were the last – the only – thing we ate that was merely quite good rather than extremely good. I had seen mentions of Upstairs’ cheddar curd fritters in other reviews, I seem to recall, and I’d seen enough of them on their way to other diners before I even placed an order that I knew I had to try them.

I wasn’t quite sure, even after eating them, how they managed to make fried cheese so airy, so ethereal and yet somehow they did. They were stupendous clouds of joy – as if someone had decided to make Wotsits entirely out of cheese, serve them piping hot and cover them in yet more cheese. Eight pounds for these, and I think Upstairs At Landrace needs to rethink this whole “small plates for sharing” concept, or expressly make an exception for the fritters. I otherwise couldn’t fault our server, but she should have said “have you considered having one of those each?” Shame on her.

Although you could just as easily have said the same about the third dish we shared, the cuttlefish and sausage salad. Rarely have four words so comprehensively undersold a dish as they did on the menu. I mean, yes, it was a salad and yes, it contained cuttlefish and sausage. But that didn’t begin to do justice to what I’m already sure will be one of the most enjoyable dishes I eat all year.

I suppose there isn’t room on a menu to say “huge quantities of precisely scored, superbly cooked, tender cuttlefish”, and no room to say “the warm, slightly caramelised discs of sausage, with the tiniest hint of offal, bring a welcome hint or earthiness and, let’s face it, red meat, to proceedings”. The menu didn’t go on to add “by the way, you’ll also have warm bits of waxy potato, and while we’re at it the dressing will be impeccable, with the sharpness of capers thrown in, into the bargain”.

I know Upstairs At Landrace’s menu is in the still fashionable Ingredient A, Ingredient B, Ingredient C format that seems to annoy me more than most, but even at its most fulsome it wouldn’t capture that detail. I suppose that’s what restaurant reviewers are for.

But my goodness, how I loved this. If all salads were like this, or even half as good, I would eat salad all the time. I’ve always loved a warm potato salad, or any potato salad dressed with vinaigrette rather than drowned in mayonnaise, and I really adore cuttlefish, which you don’t see on menus anywhere near often enough. To find all of that coalescing in one glorious plate made me very happy indeed: forget JK Rowling’s recent lamentable cigar-based bigotry: this is what happens when a plan comes together. And the company was so good that I didn’t even resent sharing it.

Although Dave was a little sad about the paucity of meat on the menu, those nubbins of sausage aside, he did console himself with monkfish, one of the meatiest denizens of the sea. And again, trust in Upstairs At Landrace was richly rewarded: this was a phenomenally cooked, very generous piece of monkfish with a beautiful colour, effectively cut into medallions. It came on top of a primavera riot – leeks, peas, celery, all the good stuff, bathed in what was apparently a pastis butter.

I can’t verify that: I did try a little of the monkfish, which I thought was exceptional, but left the shrubbery to Dave. He adored this dish though, and didn’t feel like he had missed out one bit. This was possibly a dish you wished you’d held back bread for, although I’m sure our server would have brought a little more if Dave had asked nicely.

My main, on the other hand, was a symphony of a dish. Agnolotti filled with Jersey Royals could have been starch on starch overkill, but instead were little pockets of silky comfort, the pasta with just enough bite and the filling, pleasingly, with no bite at all. The whole shebang was positively awash with brown butter and wild garlic pesto, because of course it’s the season now, and if that wasn’t enough there was more wild garlic on top. And if that wasn’t enough there was a mountain of cheese, and if that wasn’t enough a dish with more of it was left at the table for you to sprinkle with abandon.

And it was, all in all, enough, and teetering on the brink of too much. But that brink, provided you stay on the right side of it, is where legendary dishes live, and this was one of my favourite things I’ve eaten in a long time. It was so well-judged, so well done, just the right size, everything in the right proportions, everything in exactly the right place. The pesto was so beautiful that I’d have bought a jar the size of my head if I could, the pasta so well done that it’s now, for me, the best thing you could possibly do with Jersey Royals.

I’ve had a few instances recently where the menu, on turning up at a restaurant, wasn’t quite the one I would personally have chosen and yet everything was amazing. I will make the most of those, because I know there’s some Newtonian law of dining whereby, when I review somewhere in the future, the menu will have loads of things I fancy on it, I’ll order them and they won’t be anywhere near as good as I wanted them to be. Buy now, pay later.

Dave and I were fuller but not stuffed, very happy indeed and I was on my second glass of perry, as my hangover became too distant a memory to stop me acquiring another one. The tables about us had ebbed and flowed, but the place had always seemed just comfortably less than rammed. Dave and I got to talking about the times he’s joined me on a review.

“What I find weird is when we go out and have a lovely meal and then weeks later I read your review and you weren’t blown away by the food. Because then I think: are you sitting there having lunch with me and not having that good a time?”

“It’s not that at all! I always enjoy having lunch with you but then when I look back on it, and weigh it all up, the food isn’t the best part of the experience.” I probably won’t be able to convince Dave, even after over thirty years of friendship, that however good the food is his company is usually the best bit.

“I suppose it’s better this way round, though” he replied. “I wouldn’t want you telling me during the meal that you don’t rate it that much.”

“Exactly! Nobody needs someone speaking their truth that way during dinner, it just ruins the whole event.”

“But so when you say this is a really good meal, do you mean that?” Dave wondered. “Or when you eventually write this one up am I going to find it’s got a middling mark?”

“Trust me, Dave. This is going to be a really good review.” There was a pause, and I knew that my old friend wouldn’t completely believe me until he saw it. Nonetheless, I said it again for emphasis. “It’s a really good meal.”

The other thing that happened before we made our assault on dessert was that Dave asked our server where the loos were and was directed towards a door on the same floor as us. He returned eager to share something.

“Mate, before we go you have to try that toilet.”

This was not something I heard every day.

“What’s so special about it?”

“You know how normally if a loo is up some stairs you go up the stairs and then open the door? In this place you open the door, and right in front of you is a staircase. A really steep one. And the loo is at the top and, well, you’re quite close to the edge of the stairs when you do your business.”

“Really?”

“You wouldn’t want to do that after a few drinks, trust me. I expected to see a boulder coming down the stairs at me like something out of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom.”

Upstairs At Landrace’s menu is at its most compact at the end: two desserts and a cheese course is your lot. We’d already had cheese to begin with and one of the desserts, the walnut tart, was a no-go – for me, because I’m generally not wild about walnuts and for Dave because, being allergic, he takes that one step further. That just left us with one option, rhubarb, meringue and cream. Maybe Upstairs At Landrace didn’t call it an Eton mess because they’d like to cancel Eton, in which case I sympathise entirely. Maybe it was a pavlova that had done a bad job of tackling those stairs.

Whatever the explanation was, though, it was a really terrific dessert which brought matters to a close in masterful fashion. The cream, from Ivy House Farm, near Bath, was thick and ambrosial, the rhubarb still had bite, and hadn’t been stewed into sticky submission. The meringue was just the right level of chewiness and the extra touch, toasted, flaked almonds, was the icing on the cake. Twelve pounds for this, so again not cheap but ultimately worth every penny. When I looked back on the meal, now that it was done, I didn’t think there had been a single misstep. That rarely happens.

After we’d finished, I took my life in my hands and ascended the staircase to the loo, which was every bit as vertiginous as Dave had warned me it would be: the very fancy hand soap was almost worth the climb in its own right. We thanked our server and chatted briefly to her about what a good meal it was, and she said that they had a lovely mixture of locals and regulars and out of towners like us who treated it as a destination restaurant.

We both did our best to be enthusiastic and grateful without coming across as creepy uncles, but ultimately as she went to fetch the card machine we knew, as always happens, that she was probably just wondering which of those pleasant middle-aged men was the top and which was the bottom. Our lunch for two came to one hundred and twenty-eight pounds, not including service: we didn’t have a lot to drink, but without alcohol it would have been fifty-five pounds a head.

Bath seemed even lovelier, if that were possible, after such a good lunch and so we did some more ambling, including a brief browse for books at Topping & Co, before having a couple of beers outside at Kingsmead Street Bottle, discovering in the course of drinking them, that it was nowhere near warm enough to sit outside. So we headed back across town and lucked out with a great table at The Raven, one of my favourite Bath pubs. I didn’t realise they had a beer brewed specifically for them by Bristol’s Arbor Ales, a really likeable pale, but once I discovered it I knew I was staying on that for the rest of the day. As my friendship with Dave taught me many moons ago, when you find something you really like, you stick with it.

So it turns out that, like the national restaurant critics I lightly ribbed at the start of this review, I have come to Bath twice in just under two years and both times I’ve had a very good, rather genteel time of it. But I think Upstairs At Landrace is worth going to Bath for all by itself – with or without the shopping, or the coffee, or the beers, or the old friend – because it’s supremely good at what it does.

I read an article about Upstairs At Landrace ages ago, in the Financial Times, that lumped it in with the Bristol restaurant Sonny Stores and breezily dismissed them both as part of a trend of a certain kind of restaurant that’s everywhere just now. Well, the main thing that writer was eating, it seems to me, is mushrooms. Because in reality, away from generic broadsheet sighing or sneering, restaurants as good and as clever as Upstairs At Landrace, places that manage to be sleek and refined without being sterile or soulless, are vanishingly rare. Maybe they’re ten a penny in somebody’s parallel universe, but they certainly aren’t in mine.

Oh, and for the benefit of Dave – who I know occasionally reads this – see that mark below? Told you. It was a really good meal.

Upstairs At Landrace – 8.8
59 Walcot Street, Bath, BA1 5BN
01225 424722

https://landrace.co.uk

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Feature: A Reading staycation

On April 18, 2025June 21, 2025 By ediblereadingIn FeaturesLeave a comment

It was my birthday about four weeks ago – 45 again, please don’t ask me for any documentary evidence – and I had everything mapped out. A couple of days off that week, and then the best part of the following week off into the bargain. We had an Airbnb booked in Bristol for the second week, just up the road from Wilsons and Little Hollows, and a packed itinerary of restaurants to visit, some of them for the blog and some of them just because.

I was all geared up for a week of waking up with nothing to do, of eating well and drinking well, a week of that feeling of being carefree and elsewhere, and I was so looking forward to it. I even had one day planned where we’d stay in our neighbourhood – a bacon sandwich at Wilsons Bread Shop for brunch, good coffee, a spot of mooching and lazing in the afternoon, dinner nearby and then drinks at the Good Measure, my favourite Bristol pub. It was going to be a glorious 24 hours where, just briefly, we could pretend we lived there.

It would have happened, too, but for one thing: my wife fractured a bone in her foot again, and was under strict medical advice to keep her steps to an absolute minimum. I had been running on fumes in the run-up to that mini break – we both had, really – and we were both devastated. We contemplated taking the train to Bristol, as originally planned, and taking taxis everywhere, seeing it as convalescing somewhere else, and my wishful thinking let me believe, for something like half an hour, that such a revised plan would work, would be a sensible use of time and money.

Deep down I knew we were just fooling ourselves. So the Airbnb booking was pushed out until later in the year, and I went in and individually cancelled every single restaurant booking, feeling my holiday dreams die a little more with every email confirmation. I knew it couldn’t be helped, and I knew it wasn’t Zoë’s fault, but I was in a funk. I should explain that this is a “having your birthday in March” thing: I lost two successive birthdays to Covid, the world locked down days before my birthday five years ago, so I felt like fate had already fucked with enough of my plans.

Anyway, after enough sulking Zoë and I hatched a plan: we would have a staycation instead. Not what people like to refer to as a staycation, where you go on holiday somewhere else in the country where you live, but a proper staycation where you sleep every night in your house but experience being on holiday in your home, for a change. We would do some of the things in and around Reading that we loved and others we never got round to, the week of my birthday and the week after, the only proviso being that they had to be places we could reach by bus or taxi.

So this week, instead of the usual review, you get a guide to my Reading staycation, a little What I Did On My Holidays piece. You get that for a couple of reasons. One is that so many people liked the idea that I just had to write it up. Plenty of you wanted to read this one, and someone commented on the Edible Reading Facebook page that she’d said something similar on a local group elsewhere. “I often think we should pretend we’re visiting, and spend the weekend enjoying fab coffee shops, the river and so on” she wrote, adding “We are lucky!”.

We are lucky, indeed. And the second reason why I’m writing this piece this week is that Reading, around the time that I had my staycation, had a bit of a moment where it featured in the national press more than once. First, the Sunday Times listed it as one of the Best Places To Live 2025. The writeup had a little bit of the obvious in it: the MERL got a mention, no doubt because of past glories, and the references to Paddington felt a tad clichéd. And I don’t know what Polaroids Thames Lido’s PR must be in possession of to ensure that they’re always mentioned in a piece of this kind, but mentioned they inevitably were.

Yet beyond that the Sunday Times actually managed to capture something of what makes our town special, even if they think the tap room in the town centre is run by a brewery called Silent Craft. I was especially pleased to see mentions of Blue Collar, the Harris Garden, Madoo and Mama’s Way. Someone had obviously done their research, and I speak as a source they might well have used for it. And I was thrilled to see Dough Bros, barely eight months after I reviewed them, being talked about in the national press. This felt like a writeup of Reading as it actually is, rather than the bland homogenised version Reading UK (or Reading CIC, or REDA, or whoever they are) is always droning on about.

A couple of weeks ago Reading appeared in the national papers again. The article in the The i Paper might have described it as an “average commuter town”, and spent a lot of time talking about Reading’s failed city centre bids and how easy it is to reach or leave, but even it managed to squeeze in mentions of Reading Museum, Phantom – which it said was “by the river”, for some reason – and Caversham Court Gardens. Okay, the QI klaxon still went off when the contractually obligated references to Thames Lido and the MERL popped up, as they always do, but as Reading’s most famous inmate once said, it’s still better to be talked about than not.

So, with all that said, here’s how I spent my staycation – spread across a couple of weeks – in Reading and its environs, only travelling by bus and taxi and still managing to fit in some of the very best things the town and the surrounding countryside have to offer. I hope it helps, and maybe it will tempt you to spend one of your next holidays in Reading, too. You could do an awful lot worse.

* * * * *

So where did we start, on my birthday? At the Nag’s Head, of course.

The first drink of a holiday, for me at least, is always a wondrous moment. I eschew the airport Wetherspoons, although I’ve been known to have a pre-flight Nando’s or Wagamama, and nowadays I pass on drinking on the plane, too, because British Airways is no longer what it was. But there’s something about that very first drink when you reach your destination that’s special, that first ultra-cold lager or fortifying glass of vermut, glass of Brugse Zot or industrial strength Spanish gin and tonic. By that point all your cares have dissipated, and all that remains is relaxation and indulgence.

I didn’t see any reason why it should be any different on a staycation, so our first taxi dropped us on Russell Street. And because the sun was out, albeit briefly, we started our first beer in the garden out back before coming to terms with reality and moving back inside. I’ve talked at great length before – nearly everyone has – about how brilliant the Nag’s is: how it covers all bases, how it’s a perfect summer and winter pub, great on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, the best Reading Half Marathan and Bank Holiday Monday pub.

And that’s all true, but it wasn’t until I went there as part of my staycation that I realised another wonderful side of the pub I’d never experienced: boozing there with reckless abandon, on a school night, knowing you didn’t have to work the next day. You know, like people do when they’re on holiday.

It was at its very best that night – just busy enough, but not rammed with people watching the football, tables sufficiently occupied that it had a pleasing buzz but with no frustrating queue at the bar. Sometimes I forget, too, just how good the Nag’s Head’s beer list is, but lately it has had one of two brilliant session IPAs on keg most of the time – Sonoma by Manchester’s Track and Santiago by far more local Two Flints, from Windsor. Both are great, and both give you the nursery slopes to start on before it all goes downhill and you’re on the dank, stronger stuff you know you’ll regret the next day.

Perhaps best of all, we nabbed my favourite spot in the whole place – the little table for two, right up at the bar, next to the coat hooks. Perfect for sitting side by side and looking out on that room, seeing if you’ve spotted anybody you know – to greet or to blank, both are possible – and, of course, ideally suited for just standing up, getting someone’s attention and picking your next beer.

It was blissful, and on a night like that you can easily think that Reading could do without any other pubs, as long as it still had this one. And I could have stayed all night but, like the first few drinks of a holiday, the session was inevitably curtailed by dinner plans. We had a reservation for the first night of our holiday, my birthday, all the way across town.

* * * * *

I don’t get to eat at Clay’s anywhere near as often as I would like to, for a number of reasons. One is writing this blog – having to eat somewhere new most weeks means that, unlike many people, I can’t just go there because I feel like it (and no, I’m not asking for sympathy). Another is their location. I’m sure that the residents of Caversham are delighted to have them nearby, almost as delighted as they are merely to live in Caversham, but the truth is that when they were in the centre, and I was in the centre, they were a more frequent pit stop for me.

Even so, when it’s a special occasion they are the pre-eminent choice, for me and I suspect many others. When Zoë got a promotion last year, it was Clay’s we turned up at on the spur of the moment to celebrate, and for my birthday it was hard to imagine eating anywhere else in Reading. Going through those deep ochre doors to find it warm and bustling I felt excitement, as I always do, about the prospect of eating there. Because the menu at Clay’s, even excluding their regional specials, has so many good dishes on it that you could eat a different combination every time and never get bored, especially if you go there as infrequently as I do.

I’ve never reviewed Clay’s, for reasons I explained years ago when it opened, and to my surprise I still get people approaching me via social media occasionally, even now, explaining that they’re going there for the first time and asking what they should consider ordering. Very rarely has there been a restaurant where you could so easily get away with a non-committal “oh, it’s all good”, but even so I always feel like I have to respond, all the time painfully aware that you could ask a dozen people and get a dozen slightly different answers, none of which would be wrong.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s my answer: for starters I think it’s hard to look beyond five of their small plates. The bhooni kaleji, the chicken livers that have been on the menu since the very beginning, are outstanding – if you don’t like chicken livers they’ll convert you, and if you do like them they will ruin all others. The gobi Manchurian is the elevation of a dish which is quite good all across Reading, very good at Chilis but exquisite at Clay’s. They simply will not be outdone, you see, not by anyone.

Nandana and Sharat are fried chicken fans, as am I, and their Payyoli chicken fry is as good a rendition as you will get anywhere in Reading, including Gurt Wings. It comes dusted in a rich coconut crumb and served with tomato chutney, and although I always end up sharing it I also grumble silently that it’s too good to share: it helps that of all the small plates at Clay’s it must be the least small. I also resent sharing Clay’s pork belly, which is sweetened with jaggery, sharpened with ginger and cooked until it is sticky, rendered heaven, but I do it.

And finally, I would always tell you to try the cut mirchi chat. I have a real soft spot for this dish because I think I tried a prototype before it went on the menu, and it’s always for me been the most sharable, most snackable of all Clay’s starters: those slices of chilli and gram flour, crunchy and golden, moreish almost beyond belief. If you ask someone else, they’ll tell you to have the prawns, or the paneer majestic, or the lamb chops. And they’re right too, by the way, just differently right to me.

On this visit I decided to forego the pork belly – there were only two of us, after all – and although I regretted it I knew I was storing up a treat for next time. And if you asked me what I recommended from the main courses, I’d wax lyrical about Clay’s yakhni pulao, rice cooked in lamb bone broth, crowned with slow-cooked curried lamb. Or I’d tell you to go fancy and have the beef shin, cooked osso buco style and adorned with wild mushrooms.

If I was feeling old-school I’d recommend Nandana’s monkfish curry, sharper and more tart than her other dishes, made the way her mum does (although slightly less punchy than her mum’s version). And I would point out that the ghee roast chicken, the finest dish Clay’s ever made available to its home delivery customers, is on the menu in the restaurant, for now at least. I’d say that if you’ve never tried it you’re missing out.

But it was my birthday, and I was reminded that I ate at Clay’s before it was even born, so I had the bhuna venison, a dish I have been eating and loving now for nearly seven years. A couple of years ago I declared it Reading’s best dish, and eighteen intervening months have not changed my mind. But, because you can teach an old dog new tricks, on this visit I used a life hack I’d picked up from my friend Graeme, when we visited Clay’s earlier in the year for no other reason than because it was Friday.

“Have the keema biryani on the side, instead of the usual baghara rice”, he said. “Life changing.”

I did, and it was, and now I can’t imagine ever doing otherwise.

I have never been one of those people who goes to restaurants and takes home leftovers. I’ve always envied those people their limited appetites, or their restraint, while also wondering if they’re maybe a tad parsimonious. But on this occasion we quit while we were ahead, making room for Clay’s amazing peanut butter ice cream and a glass of dessert wine. We rolled into a taxi clutching a little plastic tub full of leftovers – some ghee roast chicken, some bhuna venison, some keema biryani. The first meal of a holiday is always special, but even having a staycation this felt as special as any dinner I’ve had away.

The following lunchtime, nursing a moderate to severe hangover and fresh from the series finale of Severance, I reheated it all in a saucepan for the two of us for lunch. The kitchen went from smelling of reed diffusers to smelling amazing in the space of five minutes, and if that jumble of flavours didn’t go I can honestly say I would never have noticed. You don’t get this luxury when you holiday abroad, I thought to myself.

* * * * *

On the Friday night, hangover largely under control, I did something I don’t do nearly often enough: I went to the theatre. I’ve always loved Progress, the proudly independent theatre on the Mount, and despite moving into the neighbourhood last year I’ve not visited anywhere near as frequently as I ought. So months ago I booked tickets for Zoë and I to watch Lovesong, Abi Morgan’s bittersweet portrait of a 40 year marriage.

As an aside, I should say that although Progress is a five minute walk from my house it’s a surprisingly difficult distance to travel by taxi. You feel faintly embarrassed even asking, and Zoë had to explain the situation to her cab driver, waggling the moonboot lest she be judged as too posh to push. But once you’re there, Progress really is quite a charming place – a little bar, full of affluent, cultured patrons and an auditorium with seats that are surprisingly comfy and spacious.

Does it ruin the overall effect to say that I didn’t love Lovesong? Probably, although I thought a couple of the performances were excellent. Some of that, I think, was down to it being a bit of a bummer: a play which ends with the husband counting out the pills so his ill wife can take her own life – sorry about the spoilers – is never going to give you that Friday feeling. It reminds me of the time when I sat down with Zoë to watch Vertigo, having told her what an incredible film it was, to be met with blank rage when the credits rolled.

“You didn’t tell me it was going to end like that!”

“What did you expect? He wasn’t going to run through the streets to get to the airport just in time to deliver a big speech and stop her getting on the plane. It’s not that kind of film.”

Honestly, she was furious: I’ve never made that mistake again.

But Lovesong, well, it induced symptoms akin to Vertigo. We took the comically short taxi journey home dead set on eating chocolate in front of the television and watching something slightly more uplifting. Like the news. Even so, I recommend adding some culture to a Reading staycation, because mine wouldn’t have been the same without it. And I can’t recommend the whole Progress Theatre experience highly enough – in fact I’ve already booked a ticket for the comedy next month, to watch the splendidly named Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. I honestly can’t wait.

* * * * *

My final meal out of the first leg of my staycation was one of the biggest treats of all, Gurt Wings at Blue Collar Corner. I have been eating Gurt’s food since they first turned up at Blue Collar in Market Place, and I remember Glen telling me how good they were before he even landed them as a semi-regular trader. I recall trekking to Market Place regularly during lockdown, back when Glen wasn’t even allowed seating, and eating my chicken on the little concrete posts opposite Picnic.

I even remember eating their slightly obscene chicken burger special, served in an iced doughnut with a strip of candied bacon on top. They did it once a year, and I reckoned once a year was enough – until I had it two years in succession, and realised that once in a lifetime was probably enough. And of course, I remember going there after Zoë was discharged from the Royal Berks with Covid, in the winter of 2021, and them giving me a big portion of chicken for her, telling me to run like the wind and get it back to her.

That kind of thing makes you a fan. I have followed the hokey cokey of Gurt opening permanently at Blue Collar Corner, then pulling out, then coming back for special occasions. In that time I’ve eaten their chicken in Bristol, from time to time, and watched them open a permanent site in Bristol’s Wapping Wharf, team up with seemingly every influencer known to man, expand their fleet and start popping up at exotic locations like Royal Wootton Bassett and finally, in January, coming to Blue Collar Corner again, back for good, Gary Barlow style.

And even though I can now have them whenever I like it doesn’t, yet, make their food feel any less special. Besides, eating it when you’re on holiday – even if it’s a Saturday when everybody else is off work too – did feel a little different, sitting on the benches, people watching and waiting for the buzzer to go off. I decided to be clever and try one of Gurt’s two influencer-inspired specials – god knows why they’ve never asked to do a collab with me – strips loaded with garlic butter and festooned with Parmesan. It was a departure from my almost habitual order – popcorn chicken “Lost In Translation”, with gochujang and sriracha – and I enjoyed it, but not enough not to slightly regret not sticking to my guns.

It helped that we had the huge blocks of halloumi too, covered in habanero chilli syrup and crumbled honeycomb. That made everything better. Afterwards I put a picture of my food up and someone, online, said the chicken to tater tot ratio seemed all wrong. My instinct was to jump to Gurt’s defence, but looking back through my many photos of Gurt’s chicken strips I had to concede that the commenter had a point.

But that’s 2025 all over: you get less, for more, and if you decide to be outraged by it you’re not only hurting yourself but the businesses you love. There are times to be aggrieved by shrinkflation – I feel a bit stabby every time I buy a 90g bar of chocolate – but when you’re on holiday is not one of them.

Our commitment to using buses to spare Zoë’s foot was so total that we then did something ridiculous. We walked from Blue Collar to the very top of the Oxford Road, just so we could get the number 1 bus from Newbury. We did that because that bus terminates halfway up Blagrave Street, a stone’s throw from C.U.P. And we did that so we could sit in our time-honoured seats up at the window, on those fetching leather stools, drinking mocha and looking out on the town.

It was a Saturday, and opposite our seats we could see the Town Hall, and the entrance we’d emerged from ten months ago, into a swarm of confetti, newlywed, dazed and happy. I always love sitting there when married couples come out, mobbed by their friends and relatives, and I remember that glorious sunny day last year when that was me. I often holiday in the same places – Malaga, Bruges, Granada, Montpellier – and some of that is about going back to places that hold such happy memories for me. It turns out that a staycation in Reading is like that, too.

* * * * *

For the second leg of my staycation, the following week, there were some chores to do. Despite having moved last summer there were still boxes to unpack, order to impose on chaos, shit to get done. I am not someone who enjoys doing those things in my time off – I moan, grumble and gripe (“when else are you going to do it, then?” Zoë asks, and then I gripe some more because I don’t have an answer). But I agreed to it, just this once, on the basis that we interspersed it with treats. And the treat I had very firmly in mind – for the first morning of the staycation, no less – was a trip to Fidget & Bob.

Fidget & Bob has changed quite a lot from the place I visited and reviewed seven years ago. Back then it stayed open til early evening, and its weekly char siu was the stuff of legend. Its scrambled eggs, too: I still think about those. But it took a cautious approach during Covid, and since then it has honed what it does to remain excellent at it, just within carefully constrained limits.

These days it’s closed Sundays and Mondays, and the rest of the week it shuts just after lunch. And Fidget & Bob’s social media is self-effacing almost to a fault: they easily spend as much time promoting their weekly delivery of excellent doughnuts from Pipp & Co as they do talking about their own gorgeous sandwiches. That is, to be fair, typical of them: they’ve always been really good, they just don’t necessarily shout about it.

In the old days I would have gone there for brunch on a Sunday, but my chances to visit it are far fewer than they once were, so my staycation presented an opportunity that I absolutely seized with both hands. And it was lovely to sit in that room again – not quite as diehard as the people outside in the plaza – and drink Fidget & Bob’s terrific coffee.

So many memories are attached to that place: it was there, for example, that I went for a celebratory lunch after having my first Covid vaccine, crammed into a room at the Madejski Stadium with people in my demographic. “I reckon it’s the first time I’ve been in a room with so many people my age in a very long time” said my friend Mike when he had the same experience. “And all I could think was, do I look that tired?“

But the big draw at Fidget & Bob is, and possibly always was, the O’Muffin, their take on the sausage and egg McMuffin. I miss their square pucks of sausage meat, served as part of a brunch with their superlative scrambled eggs, but I understand why they stopped offering that. And the O’Muffin is far from a consolation prize. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest brunches, that floury muffin bursting at the seams with sausagemeat, fried egg, American cheese.

It is one of my favourite things to eat, just as going out for brunch is one of my favourite things to do on holiday. I personally like to dip mine in a little pool of HP, much to Zoë’s horror. I also like to have it with hash browns, a coffee, another coffee and, ideally, a brownie. And, precisely because I was on holiday, that was exactly how I had it.

* * * * *

I went to Orwell’s during my staycation. You might well already know that, because I’ve written about it.

I’m not going to repeat all that, but it did make me think about the benefits of a staycation. Because if I went on holiday, if I did a city break somewhere, I would plan loads of meals out. Some would be casual, some would be higher end. But often on holiday I might push the boat out for one of my meals and go somewhere fancy – Palodu in Malaga, for example, Parcelles in Paris, Bruut in Bruges or Michelin starred Reflet d’Obione in Montpellier. And yet, in this country, I wouldn’t necessarily do that: I seem to associate that kind of meal with going on holiday.

So here is another benefit of a staycation in Reading: giving yourself permission to do those things, the things that might otherwise be inextricably linked with going abroad. Maybe this is just me, and you’re all much better at allowing yourselves those luxuries. But, for me at least, it was lovely to be on holiday in Reading and to think right, what do I never get to do, and where have I always meant to go? As thought experiments go, it was an especially enjoyable one. Like my commenter said, all the way back at the start of this piece, it’s nice to pretend you’re visiting.

* * * * *

On the Friday, the post chores treat was a trip to Geo Café in Caversham. One chore, which was all Zoë and for which I take no credit, was to get our garage looking like this.

I don’t know when I got a garage that looks like a branch of Oddbins: it just kind of happened. I used to have a basement at the old house, and Zoë moved in and then next thing I knew she was buying racks off eBay and turning it into a beer repository. Then came the fridge, humming away and full of IPAs. I knew there were also boxes and crates of lambics under an old coffee table, ageing better than I have, but I’m not sure I realised the enormity of it.

And then we moved house, and moving the booze was an ordeal. So many boxes, so many bags and bags for life. Beers Zoë bought years ago, whole crates of Orval she was ageing “for an experiment”. Several bottles of gin we’d got as presents but not started drinking. And of course the wine – wine bought on trips away, wine bought on holiday, a couple of wines left over from our wedding, bottles of fizz given to us as gifts.

“Don’t worry, I’ll build you something” my father-in-law said to Zoë when he saw the space we had in the garage. And I believed him: my father-in-law is like a cross between the Wombles and MacGyver, he picks stuff up on his travels and is just very good at turning them into tangible things. One day he arrived with a bunch of wood, and the next thing you knew he had constructed this bespoke booze storage. Shortly after we moved in last year somebody tried to break into our garage – unsuccessfully, I might add. If someone managed it now I think we’d find them the next morning, comatose.

During the staycation we made a conscious attempt to make inroads into our stock levels, moving stuff into the fridge for drinking, picking some beers we’ve wanted to try for a while, opening one of the nicest white wines in our collection on a beautiful warm day. Didn’t even scratch the surface.

* * * * *

Another advantage staycations have over holidays – or not, depending on how you see these things – is the chance to catch up with friends. So I was delighted to make it over to Geo Café on a warm sunny afternoon, sit in the Orangery and have a good natter up with Keti, my friend who owns the place. Talking to Keti is one of my absolute favourite things to do, catching up on the comings and goings of Caversham and Henley life, hearing about her family and her kids.

It’s also a great way to keep yourself mentally sharp: Keti usually has three conversations with you simultaneously, and will effortlessly change lane from one to another seemingly at random, forcing you to keep up. It’s more effective, I suspect, than doing Sudoku. So Zoë and I stretched our legs out in the Orangery, drinking beautiful coffee and hearing all Keti’s news. I had an utterly marvellous plate of bacon and eggs – I may have been slightly hungover again, but what are holidays for? – and felt thoroughly fortified by the whole experience. It was, as people say, good for the soul. Seeing Keti’s new dog, who was absolutely adorable, was good for the soul too.

We had plans to be at Loddon Brewery that afternoon, but Keti refused to let us call a taxi. “Zezva will drive you” she said, in a way that suggested she wouldn’t hear anything to the contrary, from Zezva or from us. And so Zezva drove us out to Dunsden Green in the sunshine in his lipstick-red BMW, a recent acquisition of which he was very proud, and we settled into the leather seats and enjoyed south Oxfordshire whooshing past. A frequent part of holidays, for me, is finding my favourite café: but I did that in Reading, to be honest, long ago.

* * * * *

I had never been to Loddon before, so this is where you can all shout at the screen that you’ve known for a very long time that it’s extremely nice and question, with some justification, what took me so long.

It’s a beautiful spot, in the middle of nowhere, and I can see that for those of you who live nearby, or like yomping across the countryside from Emmer Green, dogwalking or otherwise, it must feel like a blessed place. It has a little farm shop – not extensively stocked, but nice all the same – and tables outside, and sitting there with a cold pint of Citra Quad, on a day just warm enough to allow for it, I got why the place is held in such reverence.

That weather didn’t last, but heading inside to their covered terrace if anything I liked it even better. “It reminds me of Buon Appetito” said Zoë, and I could see that, could see how the sun-dappled terrace and clear corrugated roof conjured up memories of the courtyard where I’d had so many memorable meals in the summer of 2022.

Loddon is kind of a craft beer tap room reimagined for affluent, rural, cask beer types. I don’t say that as a criticism, but at mid-afternoon on a Friday in March I was possibly the second youngest person there, and I was drinking with the youngest.

All that changed around five, and the demographic became fascinating: people finishing landscaping work nearby, coming in wearing their uniforms; young couples; mums with their kids, taking advantage of the boardgames stored inside. I loved how random it seemed, although I’m sure if I knew the place and the area better all those connections would make sense, and not be happenstance.

I’d also wanted to go to Loddon because I wanted to try the food. It used to be done by an outfit called Proper Takeout, but they now had a permanent site at the tap yard, and had rebranded themselves Proper Kitchen. They do different dishes on different days of the week – burgers on Thursdays, pizza on Saturdays, roasts on Sundays and so on. But on Fridays it was fish and chips, and I very much fancied checking it out.

The team behind Proper Kitchen are James Alcock, who used to work at Mya Lacarte and Thames Lido, and Nick Drew, who used to be head chef at Thames Lido. I rather offended him when he worked there, which I wrote about here, but fortunately for me he didn’t seem to recognise me when I went up and placed our order. If he did he was too professional to say, and if he gobbed in my tartar sauce it was too delicious for me to notice.

Almost everything we had from Proper Kitchen, would you believe, was knockout. Some of the best fish and chips I’ve had for a long time, combining pearlescent, flaky fish with light, lacy batter, the whole thing served on a pile of extremely good chips. The tartar sauce had that great combination of comfort and bite, and the battered halloumi, three thick squares of the stuff, was possibly my favourite thing of all. Only the frickles – big and watery, the batter just a tiny bit too sparse – slightly let the side down, but I was far too happy with everything else to care.

The taxi we booked to bring us home was late getting to Dunsden Green – I think they’d given the job to someone right in the middle of town, which forced us to spend an extra half hour there. It was about as far from a hardship as I could imagine: I went up to the bar, got us a final half each to finish on, and we sat there enjoying ourselves, aware that everybody else’s evening was several pints away from coming to an end.

* * * * *

Would you be put off eating somewhere if it only had four dishes on the menu? This issue reared its ugly head on our final dinner of the staycation, when a taxi whizzed us down the A4 to the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, one of my favourite pubs. Zoë has been there without me, for something to do with Reading CAMRA, and I went there last year without her to review it. But we’d not eaten there together since before the pandemic, and a holiday afforded a chance to remedy that.

But everything went wrong. We’d initially booked for lunch, but ten minutes before our cab was due to arrive we discovered a leak under the kitchen sink. So we needed to do something about that, and the booking and the cab were rearranged for the evening. It is a beautiful pub, and although the sun had gone down by the time we got there it was still a gorgeous, cosy place with that whiff of woodsmoke.

And yes, there were only four main courses on the menu, but that didn’t matter because one of them was made of magic words: 12 hour slow cooked lamb shoulder and so really, it didn’t matter what any of the other choices were. Except that our waiter sauntered over and, by way of introduction, told us they had run out of the lamb shoulder. No matter, we thought: the Bell’s venison burger was magnificent, and always on the menu, so the fallback option would do nicely.

Then the waiter wandered back and advised us that actually, they had also sold out of the venison burger. So a cancelled and reorganised booking and a pricey taxi later, I was presented with a choice between the fish course and a vegetarian risotto. Normally I get hangry when I don’t know where I’m going to eat on holiday but this was a new one on me: getting hangry because I wasn’t wild about either of my two possible dishes. If it hadn’t been for the sixty minute round trip, I’d probably have gone elsewhere.

But that just shows how little I know, because despite that setback I had the most fantastic meal. It started with the Bell’s selection of beers – a gorgeous IPA on keg by Mad Squirrel Brewery, and an even better one on cask by Swindon’s Hop Kettle, a brewery I love but whose stuff I never seem to see anywhere. And then, ordering from the menu, even with those limitations, everything was beyond top notch.

That meant sourdough toast golden and shining with melted whipped lardo, great charcuterie with a cairn of cornichons, all mine, in the middle of the plate. It meant a pigeon Caesar salad – who knew there was such a thing – which was a riot of game bird, immaculately dressed lettuce, bronzed croutons and lashings of grated cheese. And it meant the risotto I had been so sniffy about, a stodgy, starchy puddle of the stuff which combined elasticity and comfort, shot through with the first of the season’s asparagus, perked up with lemon and blanketed with Spenwood. Who needs twelve-hour slow cooked lamb shoulder anyway?

And then, because it was right at the very beginning of spring and because the Bell is very good at it, a sticky toffee pudding. It turns out that it’s okay to go to a place that only has two choices on the menu, provided it’s as trustworthy as the Bell. I shall never doubt them again, if only because Zoë said I told you so more than once on the taxi ride home.

* * * * *

I never like the final day of a holiday. Zoë likes to have a bit of a last day in our destination, leaving your bags with the hotel and taking one last wander before a late afternoon flight. For me, I can never enjoy that – although I’ve tried – so I would rather get up and go, taxi to the airport after checkout and have some of the day at home.

But there is something to be said, at the end of a holiday, for revisiting your favourite places before you start the sad journey back. And a staycation made that so much easier, and gave me the chance to right the biggest wrong of the week into the bargain. So Sunday lunchtime, mini-jetlagged from the clocks going forward, found us back at Blue Collar Corner, and this time I placed the Gurt order I should have made the first time.

They might be called Gurt Wings, but for me it’s always been about their JFC, their popcorn chicken. It’s the most generous, the most delicious and the most photogenic thing they do – chicken thigh, marinated in soy, fried up and then bathed in gochujang, striped with sriracha mayo and speckled with sesame. I remember the dark days before Gurt did popcorn chicken, and I remember trying an early prototype and thinking: yes, this. This is what you should be doing.

I am delighted they’ve never taken it off the menu since, and it will be months before I go to Gurt, order something else and realise, again, that I shouldn’t have strayed from the true path. Some places you visit on holiday have a signature dish, and if you ignore that you might as well not eat there at all. Afterwards we took that bus across town again, and had one more mocha in the window at C.U.P. It’s odd: normally I am sad about returning from holiday but happy to be reunited with my creature comforts, my stuff, my bed. How strange, and strangely welcome, to have a holiday where you’re never parted from them.

* * * * *

One final postscript before I take my leave of you this week.

A couple of days ago I was tagged on Instagram by a couple, readers and subscribers to the blog, who were on holiday in Bruges. They had been using my guide to the city, and I saw a picture of De Kelk, one of my favourite Bruges bars. I sent one of them a message to see how they were getting on, and I got the loveliest messages back. They’d eaten at a Bruges restaurant I loved, Bij Koen en Marijke, on the previous night and I was sent a picture of the two of them posing with Marijke. Marijke was beaming: everybody looked like they were having a marvellous time.

But the loveliest part was the next bit. My reader told me that she’d been eating at the restaurant with her husband and they got talking to a couple at the next table, who were from Sydney. They asked the Australian couple how they’d chanced upon Bij Koen en Marijke and – and I promise I’m not making this up – they were told “we found it on a great blog called Edible Reading”. How nice is that? That somehow out there in the universe, halfway across Europe, two couples who read my blog, living continents apart, both ended up in the same cracking restaurant on an April evening in Bruges. It’s a small world, sometimes.

I am pretty sure that people – from all kinds of places, not just Reading – use my guides to Bruges, Malaga and Granada to help them have a delicious holiday in those cities. And that makes me very proud indeed. But I know that if I published a piece called “City guide: Reading” it wouldn’t get anywhere near the same footfall (it would also be dishonest, of course, because wishing Reading was a city doesn’t make it so). So nobody will ever chance upon this piece of writing and decide, from somewhere else in the U.K. or Europe, to plan their next holiday in Reading. And that’s fine: those articles in the Sunday Times or The i Paper aren’t going to have that effect, either. I know people are missing out, but I won’t be able to convince them.

So the only people I might be able to persuade to have a holiday in Reading are those among you – and I knew many of you reading this will fall into this category – who already live here. And for what it’s worth, having done it, I heartily recommend a staycation in Reading. Stay in your own bed, plan to really make the most of spending time here without having to go to work, make time to revisit your favourites or discover something new. I’m so glad I gave it a shot, and it won’t be the last time I do. See our town slightly through the eyes of an outsider and you might fall in love with it a little, all over again. I certainly did.

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Where to eat

1. Bistro Urbain

2. Mahé

3. Ébullition

4. La Cigale

5. La Morue

6. Rosemarie

7. Les Freres Poulards

8. Le Couperet

9. Hop Smash Burger

10. Bravo Babette

11. Les Glaces MPL

12. Des Reves Et Du Pain

Where to drink

1. Broc’Café

2. La Barbote

3. Le Discopathe

4. Hopulus Brewpub

5. Couleurs de Bieres Nord

6. Drapeau Rouge

7. Plein Sud

8. Les Enfants Rouges

9. Cafe BUN

10. Coldrip

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