Category: Reviews

Restaurant review: Gooi Nara

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There’s no such thing as Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay for restaurants, as far as I know. But if there was, the restaurant whose food I ate most last year is almost certainly Gooi Nara, the Korean restaurant on Whitley Street that has been there for something like ten years, if not more. And yet returning to it a couple of Saturdays ago for dinner with Zoë was the first time I’d set foot inside since I reviewed it in 2018.

The thing is, as regular readers will remember, I moved to Katesgrove a couple of years ago, which means that, along with Kungfu Kitchen, Gooi Nara is probably the closest restaurant to where I live. And what that means is that on the nights when neither of us can face cooking we know that a delivery driver won’t get lost, won’t drop other orders off en route to our house and can be trusted to turn up pronto with piping hot food from just round the corner. Over the last two years, between us, we’ve developed quite a Gooi Nara habit.

It’s no coincidence that they won my “takeaway of the year” award in 2024 – but my love of a Gooi Nara delivery has continued ever since. It is refined and perfected now to the point where Zoë and I order exactly the same thing almost every time: dakgangjeong, or Korean fried chicken, for her and tang su juk, chicken in sweet and sour sauce for me. The latter comes ready to assemble, one plastic container of gorgeous fried chicken and a tub of sweet, sharp sauce with orange and pineapple bobbing in it (I was skeptical too, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it). It has made me happy many, many times.

Sometimes we push the boat out and get some mandu, fried chicken dumplings, as well but otherwise those two and a couple of portions of rice are everything we need for a contented chomp in front of the telly after a hard day. I especially grew to love Gooi Nara when I was discharged from hospital and could only eat with one hand: I remember the first time I had their sweet and sour chicken after my accident I could only eat half, the rest popped in a LockNLock in the fridge. It was even better cold the next day: it remains the only occasion when I’ve had any leftovers at all.

That’s all well and good but I love their food so much, and always hear so many positive comments about it online, that it felt like we were doing them a disservice by only ever ordering the same two takeaway dishes. And my review was over eight years old, after all, so it felt like high time to go back. Early one Saturday evening Zoé and I took a short amble there, tracing the path of so many delivery riders in reverse, to check it out.

First things first: it was absolutely packed at 6.30pm on a Saturday evening. So much so that they could only just find room for us, tucked away at the very back with a great view of what was clearly a very successful restaurant. The decor didn’t feel like it had changed much in the intervening eight years: it still had a welcoming, homely feel, all wooden beams and faux slate walls.

The main difference, I would say, is just how well Gooi Nara appeared to be doing. It also started out very warm, and on a punishing day as the hot plate in the middle of our table got switched on it became even more sweltering.

In terms of the mix of customers, I would say that with the exception of the table next to ours later in the evening we were the only one exclusively made up of pasty Anglo-Saxons: I did envy my fellow WASPs at the other table who no doubt were getting an excellent introduction to the full gamut of the menu from people who knew exactly what to order.

It did appear, too, that Gooi Nara had a good reputation: I overheard a conversation at one of the big tables nearby to the effect that its occupants had converged at the restaurant from many places, some miles away. Maybe Gooi Nara filled that role for Southerners who couldn’t easily make it to New Malden, the Little Korea of the UK.

Gooi Nara’s menu has changed, I think, from when I visited it last. Back then I’m pretty sure it hedged its bets, with both a Korean and Japanese section, but now it’s all kind of thrown in together: edamame; takoyaki; agedashi tofu and pumpkin korokke feature, along with yaki soba and udon.

But the Korean elements of the menu are far more extensive, and the menu can be quite overwhelming with sections seemingly for everything: soup; rice; bibimbap; jeongol (or hotpot); noodles and of course Korean barbecue. The sides, to add to the confusion, appear at the very beginning, before everything they could conceivably be on the side of.

It made me wish I had my own food sherpa – is that cultural appropriation? – to guide me through the highlights of the menu, a feeling that only intensified as I saw some gorgeous dishes waft past to other tables. Was the delicious-looking tofu (I’m not even joking) that went to the table opposite the agedashi tofu, or the Korean doo-bu jeon? I decided on reflection it was the latter. And how good did the platter of various types of kimchi look when it arrived at the table next to me, a couple having one of the most Guardian conversations I’ve eavesdropped on in a very long time?

I came away from it all feeling silly and parochial, realising that really I only knew a handful of dishes on the menu and the various bits and bobs I’d ordered the best part of a decade ago. I was well aware that on this visit I would stay in my comfort zone, even if I’d insisted to Zoë that we couldn’t order any of the things we would invariably put in our takeaway order. So we ordered a couple of starters, a couple of mains and two items for the barbecue, and even then I’d say we played it extremely safe. We might have been outside it, but our comfort zone was only a short walk away.

Everything came if not all at once then really in a very short space of time. One minute we were necking our cold bottles of Cass, a perfectly decent lager I would struggle to tell apart from Asahi, Ha Noi or Singha in a blind taste test, let alone its Korean alternative Hite, and the next our grill was switched on and pretty much everything we’d ordered was cramming in on our table.

And the table looked big, but since the centre of it was given over to said grill you ended up playing the equivalent of those sliding tile puzzles trying to work out what could go where. Try to combine that with the timings of actually cooking some of your food and the whole experience became a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time, impressive training in multi-tasking. Forget my doing those six pointless LinkedIn games every morning: this would be much better at keeping me mentally sharp.

Vegetable mandu were, if anything, even more enjoyable than the chicken ones which had been dropped off by a friendly rider so many times in the last two years. A bit more crinkly and expansive than their chicken equivalents, they had a pleasingly light, grease-free texture and a filling I could almost convince myself was virtuous. Gooi Nara’s dip of soy, sesame oil, sesame seeds and quite possibly something else beginning with S had a gladdening sharpness that complemented them very nicely indeed.

A quirk of Gooi Nara’s menu is that, if it is to be believed, you get 5 chicken dumplings or 5 prawn dumplings but a strangely non-committal “5-6” vegetable dumplings. Fortunately on this occasion we got a shareable, even number, but I’m pretty sure whenever I’ve ordered the chicken mandu I’ve been given 6 of those too. Go figure, pun not intended.

Also decent were the prawn tempura, which I would say were better than they looked. In the picture below they come across as a little wan, a tad too blond, but they had a real deft lightness and, again, next to no grease. The dip they came with, almost exactly the same as the one that accompanied the mandu, was still good but the dimensions of the vessel and the size and length of those prawns made it, practically speaking, a faff: it was a bit like trying to get a pool cue in a beer glass. £12.30 for these, so as much as both of the main courses we’d chosen.

By this point we’d also started to avail ourselves of the barbecue. Sam gyap sal, unadorned sliced pork belly, turned up looking a bit like those cheap bacon-flavoured corn snacks you can get in supermarkets, and I did wonder whether we should have gone for the spicy version, but it crisped up beautifully on the barbecue, that fat rendering and permeating just enough.

We chose the pork to cook first precisely because it wasn’t marinated the way our other barbecued meat was, to try and avoid cross-contamination. We had a couple of dishes of condiments to dip them in, and I failed to make a note of either, but one was definitely soy and the other was definitely not: I think it might have been ssamjang, the traditional sauce used with Korean barbecue containing gochujang and soy beans.

It was only later that I realised we should have ordered some lettuce to wrap the pork in: it’s hidden away, chronologically speaking, in the list of side dishes at the beginning of the menu.

My main – although the concept of a main slightly falls away when it all comes at once – was the chicken dolsot bibimbap, a dish I haven’t eaten in a long time. For the uninitiated, this is rice, chicken, veg and an egg yolk brought to the table in a hot stone bowl, so it keeps cooking and sizzling as you work your way through it. I broke up and dispersed the egg and made my way through it, and by the end some of the rice had reached the crispy state known in Korean as nurungji (I suppose the closest European equivalent is the delectable socarrat at the bottom of a paella).

I would have described this dish as a little nondescript, a tiny bit bland, if it weren’t for the squeezy plastic bottle of gochujang which came with it. The more of this I added, the more I enjoyed it, and the more I enjoyed it the more I added it: I do wonder how much you’re meant to use, and how much was left in that bottle when I was done, but it turned what could have been a trudge into a frolic.

The other thing that whole experience taught me was patience. Ordinarily I would have a moan – god knows you’ve probably read enough of them – about everything arriving at the same time and forcing me to choose what to eat first.

Eating in Gooi Nara that evening, among all that good-natured, deceptively well controlled bedlam, I realised that it was probably a very English mindset: that your food is at its best the moment it arrives at your table and it’s downhill from there, that it’s a scramble to eat it before it goes cold and that too many dishes at once guarantees disappointment.

But it didn’t feel that way here. Those prawns and dumplings sat there, keeping their freshly fried heat. The pork sizzled on the barbecue, with more on the plate waiting to take their place. Our second barbecued meat hadn’t even made it to the front of the queue. And my bibimbap was still hot, gradually perfecting its texture. What was the rush? Everything would be eaten in its own good time, in the right order, with no need for conniptions.

Zoë loved her main, I don’t think I would have done. I managed to persuade her not to have her regular takeaway order, her chicken gam-poong gi, but she ordered it with prawns instead. I was expecting this to be prawns curled up, little inverted commas in a crisp coating, tossed in the gorgeous spicy sauce that makes this dish such a crowd pleaser in my house.

Instead they were fully extended like an accusatory index finger, the tempura prawns from earlier on making a reappearance with some sauce thrown in. So deeply impractical in many of the same ways as that starter, and downright impossible to eat with rice. I didn’t order them, and I certainly wasn’t allowed to try them, so it doesn’t really matter. Zoë really enjoyed it, and maybe in the free-for-all of our meal overall it didn’t really matter that they weren’t quite what I thought they would be.

The dish they didn’t go with, or at least I thought they didn’t, was Gooi Nara’s special egg fried rice with vegetables and shrimp. Zoë, again, seemed to enjoy it but I thought it was a bit steep at £11, especially considering that you could get a bibimbap for roughly 50p more. Plus I got a bit squeezy bottle of gochunjang, let’s not forget, and this looked like it badly needed that or something like it.

Finally, as we flagged in the heat, a little John Lewis portable fans valiantly whirring away to almost no avail, we barbecued the last dish in our order. By sheer coincidence I’d actually ended up ordering something from my 2018 visit to Gooi Nara – the ju-mul luk, beef with garlic and sesame oil. It was smothered in marinade there on the plate, slices much thinner and better cut than I remembered from my last encounter, and it smelled pretty amazing before it was ever even exposed to heat. As it cooked, the aroma got more and more gorgeous: perhaps we’d saved the best til last.

Tasting it at the end of the process, I rather thought we could have done. Every single piece was buttery-soft, that marination doing its work with no notes, and although it might have been nice to enclose each piece in a lettuce leaf and enjoy that contrast, I rather wonder if the lettuce might have wilted as badly as I did towards the end of an hour in that hot, noisy, oddly glorious room. By some tragedy, Zoë found herself full halfway through my final spell as the commis chef of our table. I buckled up and finished the rest: it had to be done.

Gooi Nara’s menu only has two desserts, both of which are Japanese, but we were too hot and too full to attempt either of them. Our bill for all that food and a couple of beers came to £95, not including service, and of course we were more than happy to tip: even just watching the constant parade of staff back and forward to tables, carrying a huge array of fascinating dishes without ever breaking rhythm, juggling orders for customers and brown bags out to delivery drivers, filled me with admiration.

It made me think of all the Saturday nights when we’d fired up a delivery app and our food – perfect, beautifully packed, prompt and piping hot – had arrived in what seemed like no time. Every evening that happened, the restaurant might well have been as busy as it was that evening. We emerged into the sunlight on Whitley Street feeling like we’d spent just over an hour somewhere totally not-Katesgrove, but also arguably in Katesgrove’s very best restaurant. We also resolved that, delicious and convenient though a Gooi Nara takeaway always was, we needed to visit again far, far sooner.

Rating Gooi Nara this time has been quite difficult. I definitely enjoyed it more than the previous time I went, but I have a feeling that the limitations on the rating it receives on this occasion have more to do with me than with them. So whatever mark Gooi Nara gets as a restaurant, I think this might be a review where I, as a reviewer, might struggle to scrape a 7. I have a feeling that if I’d been bolder, gone further to the perimeter of the menu, I could have enjoyed it even more and it would have done even better.

In that sense it would have been nice if Gooi Nara had, in the way that great communicators like Kungfu Kitchen, Clay’s, Kamal’s Kitchen and the Moderation do, tried more to tell the story of their food and bring newcomers in. But really, that’s not mandatory, especially when a restaurant has been going for about 10 years and is doing very nicely without having to do any of that. So much as I might have enjoyed having a bit more guidance on how to attack the menu, that was definitely a me problem, not a Gooi Nara problem.

I will be back, and when I do I will try some more esoteric dishes: if you have any recommendations drop them in the comments. In the meantime, I suspect another paper bag with my regular takeaway order lurks in my not too distant future. Eat-in, delivery: get yourself a restaurant that can do it all.

Gooi Nara – 8.1
39 Whitley Street, Reading, RG2 0EG
0118 9757889

https://gooinara.com/

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Café review: Baby Yolk

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Alexandra Langlais, the owner of Insta-friendly Erleigh Road institution Café Yolk has had a busy twelve months. In January she opened Donnington Deli opposite Yolk’s original branch in a spot formerly occupied by a car dealership, offering huge deli-style sandwiches with a free cold drink thrown in (or, if you’re cynical, a cold drink you might not want priced in). I went the morning they opened and, perhaps peevishly, was disappointed that they weren’t a deli and didn’t serve coffee; I wandered off to have an enjoyable brunch at Monty’s instead.

The deli thing was probably an overreaction – nobody criticises Calcot’s Avenue Deli, after all, for not being a deli – and I’m reliably informed that Donnington Deli has finally put coffee on the menu. But I ate there a couple of times in quick succession in its opening month and, despite being impressed with the handsome fit out, it wasn’t entirely my bag. Sometimes less is more, and Donnington Deli’s almost comically overstuffed and stodgy focaccias didn’t do it for me; the prevalence of turkey, surely everybody’s least favourite meat, on the menu was also a bit of a curveball.

I’ll be back at some point once it’s settled in to try Donnington Deli again but the place was doing a roaring trade and doesn’t need any help from me either way: Langlais clearly knows exactly what she’s doing, understands her market and is expanding her business in a careful, considered way, staying close to a community she knows well. It’s mind-blowing, really, to think that Café Yolk traded solidly for over 10 years before it even considered branching out.

The more interesting development, for me, was Yolk’s actual second branch, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, which opened on Cemetery Junction last July. It was a deliberately stripped-back sequel to its older sibling, with a far narrower menu and a greater emphasis on grab and go options. It particularly appealed to me because my favourite thing at Yolk was always the breakfast burger, and that’s what Baby Yolk has built its menu around.

But in that part of town, only open daytimes, Baby Yolk had proved challenging for me to get to for brunch or lunch, and it wasn’t clear how much capacity it had for eating in. Last week, with a rare Friday off, I found myself in that neck of the woods just in time for a late breakfast, so I decided it was a sign and made my way there to see how it measured up to the other establishments in the Yolk family.

I was reminded as I approached it that businesses don’t always prosper in this location. The spot where Smash N Grab used to be was now occupied by a South Indian business called Mallu Nest, but the little hut looked like it was being gutted and it wasn’t clear whether it would reopen as Mallu Nest or something else. And of course before that it spent something like a year being the preposterously named Cozzy Bites, a smash burger place whose menu was so similar to Smash N Grab’s that you wondered if the names of the burgers had formed part of the terms and conditions of sale.

Come to think of it, before Baby Yolk came out of its shell that site was Cemetery Junction hairdresser the Funky Barnet for over 20 years, which means that – lucky Yolk – their landlord is famous Reading philanthropist John Sykes. Let’s hope they get on better with Sykes than the Funky Barnet did, given that they notoriously went to the local paper during Covid to ensure his humane conduct reached a wider audience. All that and a busy charitable foundation too: let’s get Danyl Johnson to give that man a gold plated Pride Of Reading Lifetime Award!

Still, as long as Yolk keeps making money and avoiding any kind of global pandemic I’m sure they and their landlord will rub along nicely, until it comes time to renegotiate the rent at least. But can they do that in this little corner of the Junction? I got there just after 10am, and one customer was sitting in, although there was a steady trickle of both eat-in and takeaway customers during my time there.

I loved the interior and the way Baby Yolk was styled. From the sunshine-yellow awning and shopfront to the almost space-age white shelves, showcasing Yolk’s beans and reusable cups for sale, the colour scheme is clever and witty, is bright and pops. It’s rare that the interiors of Reading hospitality businesses look this coherent and thought through, and I really appreciated it. Baby Yolk was also far bigger than I expected inside, with a mixture of high and low tables, stools, chairs and bright yellow banquettes, probably seating about a dozen people. Outside a little terrace had room for half a dozen more, and could be lovely on a sunny day.

Baby Yolk’s menu keeps it simple: five “breakfast burgers”, although the pedants among us – okay, maybe just me – could argue about whether any of the ones that don’t involve a sausagemeat patty technically qualify as burgers at all. For meat eaters you can have either sausage and egg, bacon and egg or the holy trinity of all three, for vegetarians it means egg, cheese and avocado in a bun.

Vegans get the same thing, but with scrambled tofu subbed in for the egg: I had scrambled tofu once, in 2016, and have never sought to repeat the experience. Let’s just say it was a strange time in my life.

The entry level breakfast burgers are £7 each and costs rise from there to £8.90 for the vegan not-a-burger. There are various extras you can chuck in: some, like sauce and crispy onions, are free whereas others can add up to £3 to the end product. It felt a little unfair that the vegetarian and vegan options were the most expensive things on the menu, and it also doesn’t suggest Yolk is using the fanciest meat in their sandwiches.

The majority of the menu board was given over to a plethora of beverages: frappes, smoothies, iced drinks, teas, coffees, matcha and chai. There were also some baked goods up at the counter – muffins, cookies and the like – although their price wasn’t listed. A sausage and egg burger and a latte set me back £10.70, which felt pretty reasonable, and I nabbed a table in the bay window with a good view of the room. Five minutes later, my coffee and my foil-wrapped burger were in front of me.

The first thing to say about Baby Yolk’s breakfast burger is that despite what you might think it is not a McMuffin or even Fidget & Bob’s Kennet Island homage, the O’Muffin. Part of that is the obvious: it’s a bun, not a muffin. And part is because, instead of a fried egg, Baby Yolk tops its patty with a little omelette, as its elder sibling does. Less messy, and possibly a little less indulgent.

Unlike the breakfast burger at Café Yolk the egg here doesn’t make a break for it past the perimeter of the bun. But again, this is designed for convenience and eating on the go, not attacking at a table with cutlery to hand if you need it. I didn’t mind that, but the egg itself was underseasoned: it meant the rest of the burger had to do a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting.

Similarly the patty was pleasant, if ever so slightly anaemic. When you have this dish on Erleigh Road there’s more caramelisation, more crisping of the edges. Here everything was a single texture, a perfectly pleasant spongey puck of sausagemeat which, again, could have done with more salt. All that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy this, which is unfair: I did, and it was pretty much what I needed. But was it an upmarket reimagining of a Sausage & Egg McMuffin, or just a more expensive version in a nicer room?

What saved it, I suspect, were the extras. I’d gone for HP sauce and crispy onions and the latter in particular lifted and rescued what might otherwise have been a tad workmanlike. The onions were those ones you bought in a tub, but in a thick carpet between the bun and the patty, playing off the brown sauce, they made each mouthful better. I munched away contentedly, enjoying my bay window seat and watching the comings and goings of this interesting little café. Something about its simplicity, its deliberate lack of range, appealed to me: after all, the one thing Gordon Ramsay and restaurant critics have in common these days is a strongly held conviction that menus should not try to do too much.

When I reviewed Cafe Yolk last, nearly 5 years ago, a big draw was that they had started buying coffee from Anonymous Coffee. Then they binned it off, presumably on cost grounds, and used Kingdom Coffee instead: I discovered this one sad afternoon when my takeaway latte tasted worse than one you could have picked up from Costa or Nero.

It’s unclear whether Yolk have stuck with Kingdom or even if they now get their own branded coffee roasted by someone else: although I saw their canary-coloured bags on those white shelves I didn’t go over to investigate, and it’s not clear whether they were for sale or for display only. Whoever Baby Yolk get its coffee from, I was delighted to find that it was a really serviceable, smooth latte without bitterness: a tall, generous one too for £3.70, which is pretty much the going rate for a latte nearly anywhere right now.

It is also, with the possible exception of Monty’s, the only place even vaguely in East Reading that does a latte worth ordering. The residents of New Town are quite lucky, I would say. The commuters of New Town, too, as Baby Yolk opens at 7am. The coffee was so nice, and the spot so welcoming, that I stayed longer than I intended to, nursing my coffee and cursing my bad luck that even I couldn’t justify a research-focused piece of cake at 10.30am.

It’s typical that perhaps Yolk’s most unsung move turns out to be my favourite. Baby Yolk opened last year to a comparative lack of fanfare, and significantly less comment and interest than Donnington Deli attracted less than six months later. But for what it’s worth, of all three of Yolk’s outposts Baby Yolk was the one I enjoyed most. It got everything right: I liked the concept, loved the design and enjoyed the execution.

It’s not a menu with much in the way of replay value, which might prove to be a limiting factor longer term, but it may have just enough. Also, like all of Alexandra Langlais’ businesses, it is not so concerned about getting Reading residents to cross town, as I did, to go there. It is very much targeted at its community and that community is lucky to have someone living in it who has the drive and the vision to make it a better place in which to eat and drink, whatever your preferences might be.

Yolk’s website states “Please note our Baby Yolk location is takeaway only” and they ought to change that, because it might deter people from doing what I did, wandering over on the off-chance and having a really pleasant, tranquil time watching the world go by, both inside and outside the café, the comings and goings of one of my favourite little pockets of the Ding.

Sadly Reading Old Cemetery is still closed, but my breakfast reminded me of all my happy lockdown wanderings there in the summer of 2020, a lifetime ago. If Baby Yolk had been open back then I have no doubt I would have perched outside afterwards with a coffee, or taken one with me and drunk it by the war memorial. I thought of my friend Graeme, who can practically walk past Baby Yolk on his commute to work, and simultaneously felt jealous and happy for him.

It also made me miss my old house in the Village, a short walk from Baby Yolk, and all the working from home lunches I wouldn’t get to enjoy. Truth be told, it made me slightly begrudge living in Katesgrove, which could badly do with a place like this: good luck finding a drinkable latte round there. Still, Reading as a whole is better for this kind of spot, and I just hope they spring up in some of its other unsung or underserved barrios.

Until then, it’s better that a café like this is somewhere, anywhere, rather than nowhere. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we have to hope that Cafe Yolk’s flurry of activity in the last year might serve as a blueprint for other imaginative entrepreneurs. Until then, East Reading is the lucky part. As this review goes to print we’re about to experience our first true heatwave of the year, but even without that Baby Yolk is doing a decent job of making Cemetery Junction the sunny side of town.

Baby Yolk – 7.3
14 Wokingham Road, Reading, RG6 1JG
0118 3131128

https://www.cafeyolk.com

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.

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Restaurant review: Malmaison

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This week’s review came about because several weeks ago I ate at Bill’s – and yes, if you don’t mind, I’d like to explain that statement. It wasn’t my choice, I should start by saying that. My Canadian cousin Claire was visiting the country for the first time in nearly forty years, her two twentysomething kids in tow, and my mother had chosen Bill’s as the venue for lunch.

Sometimes I wonder if she does this kind of thing to troll me – she likes a bit of Carluccio’s, too – but actually, once I was there, I sort of understood why. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest buildings, overlooking the churchyard of Reading Minster, and she tends to pick it when we have visiting Canadian relatives making the trip to town. They enjoy eating in a building older than their country, I think, and knowing that right outside is a church many hundreds of years older even than that.

And indeed that proved to be true. My cousin Claire and her kids were struck by the history of things, albeit more than a little jetlagged and already in sensory overload given how exponentially busy central London is compared to their bucolic pocket of provincial Ontario. But we had a lovely time, and Bill’s menu – which plays it safe and then some – suited everybody from my vegan mum to my aunt, whose dietary choices often seem shrouded in mystery, and to Ava, Claire’s daughter who apparently almost exclusively eats chicken tenders and fries.

My aunt ate avocado on toast without complaint, Ava had a chicken burger and everybody seemed happy. Both my first cousins once removed, James and Ava, were charming, polite – well, they are Canadian – and interested, and gave me hope that the future of humanity might not be hurtling in a downward spiral to despair after all.

Although I looked them both up on Instagram the next day: James’ Instagram bio pronounced Just roll me up and smoke me when I die, while Ava’s simply said My lil titties my fat belly. That reminded me that they might have been cordial to duffers like me but they were still Gen Z, and I remained many times older than I liked to think I was.

Anyway, the point is that I expected to dislike Bill’s and to resent spending money there – I’d not been since I reviewed it over ten years ago – so I was surprised to find that not only was the room nice, the company convivial and the service charming but the food was better than inoffensive.

I had an enjoyable chicken schnitzel that they’d thrown the kitchen sink at – fried eggs, capers, pink pickled onions, gherkins and coleslaw – and it was rather nice, along with fries which I approached with dread but finished with enthusiasm. Dessert was a chocolate and salted caramel tart and, again, if it wasn’t life-altering it was still remarkably above average. Perhaps my mother knew best after all: I’m sure she would say so, in any event.

My experience at Bill’s got me thinking about the other restaurants I’d put in that bracket – reviewed them many years ago, not been impressed, never went back – and made me wonder whether any were ripe for reappraisal. After a look through my list, because many restaurants fitting that description are no longer trading, I found the perfect candidate: Malmaison.

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Restaurant review: Nando’s, Wokingham

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Here are just some of the many reasons why I should not be reviewing the Wokingham branch of Nando’s this week.

1. It’s Nando’s.

Everybody knows what eating at Nando’s is like: everyone will have an opinion about it already. This review won’t change anybody’s mind, because those minds were made up ages ago. In the opening paragraphs of a review I usually give the context, explain a restaurant’s history and all that. How long it has been around, what it does, what makes it special, all that jazz. It’s one of the things that makes the preambles to these reviews so fucking long, which I know so many of you love.

But what’s the point?

It’s Nando’s for Christ’s sake, it has its own Wikipedia page. You can look at that if you’re interested, and read about its 40 year history, its 450 branches in the U.K., yadda yadda. You can repeat the niche pedantic point I sometimes reach for, if you like, that Nando’s is technically South African rather than Portuguese. But you won’t do any of that, I’m guessing. Because it’s Nando’s, and everybody knows what eating at Nando’s is like, don’t they?

2. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is reviewing Nando’s in this day and age.

Why would you review somewhere that feels like it’s been part of the rich tapestry of British life forever? When it first opened here, John Major was Prime Minister, and what feels like an eternity later its only role in the national conversation is to be like Debenhams or Woolworths, there and taken for granted until one day it’s gone and missed, presumably by people who never spent money there.

The last time Nando’s got significant attention in the national media was 15 years ago. Miranda Sawyer wrote an article for the Observer in 2010 trying to claim that Nando’s was cool, and a burgeoning phenomenon. If that fact alone doesn’t make you feel ancient, and it certainly does me, the cultural figures she name-dropped were Tinchy Stryder and Tulisa from N-Dubz. And they weren’t even the Debenhams and Woolworths of popular music, then or ever.

Oh, and it got reviewed in the Guardian the following year by John Lanchester, the novelist who had a brief stint as the paper’s restaurant critic. He got stick at the time, but I quite enjoyed his stuff, partly because it read like C-3PO with an expense account. “I’ve been to Nando’s literally a billion times” he said, pre-dating the trend of using the word literally to mean something other than literally by literally a few years; just a guess, but I don’t think he had.

Since then Nando’s has barely troubled the broadsheets, except for Jay Rayner popping up occasionally to say that he doesn’t mind it, presumably to try hoodwink readers into thinking he’s a man of the people. The Observer published something to celebrate the chain’s thirtieth birthday, but that’s probably it until 2032. Meanwhile the chain ploughs on, without publicity, as one of the few restaurant groups in the United Kingdom that doesn’t need publicity at all.

3. Everybody has a Nando’s order.

If we do have to have identity cards – and the notion does seem to be making a comeback – I think they should contain two other pieces of info apart from your name, date of birth etc. There should be a square with a colour on it, the Farrow & Ball shade that corresponds to exactly how you like your cup of tea: just think how much time and embarrassment that would save when you visit friends and family. And there should be a little box that lists your Nando’s order.

Because everyone seems to have one, and I don’t think they deviate from it often. Every now and again we’ll try something wacky, have the pitta or the rainbow slaw or (god forbid) lemon and herb but we invariably revert to our core order. I don’t know how many combinations you can put together from the main components of the Nando’s menu, but it must be a lot: John Lanchester would probably say it’s literally billions.

So for instance the box on my ID card would say Four chicken thighs, medium, spicy rice, macho peas, halloumi on the side. Because 99% of the time, in a Nando’s, that’s what I’ll order. I didn’t, this week, just to mix things up and at least pretend to explore the menu, but the rest of the time you could put money on me eating this.

Other people, like my wife, will extol the virtues of the broccoli, and I have friends who think chicken doesn’t count if it’s not on the bone. Some far out types would even have the wing roulette on their regular order. But my point remains: the restaurant lacks any element of surprise, and what you eat there lacks it too. So why review the place?

I know some people don’t drink tea, or don’t like Nando’s. I was on a conference call last week and, to break the ice, I asked people what their Nando’s order is. “I can’t stand the place” said one of the otherwise perfectly agreeable chaps, safe in the comfort of his home office. I guess we can put those types in the same category as conscientious objectors.

By the way, the other advantage of my ID card proposal is that, finally, we could work out who’s ordering the chicken livers. That would be the equivalent of having AB- blood, only rarer.

4. It isn’t even a Reading branch.

I know, I know: Wokingham. I can just hear the cries of “it’s called Edible Reading, for god’s sake” – haven’t heard those for a while, come to think of it. And despite having eaten Nando’s all over the place, from London to Gatwick to Bath, it’s true that I have a soft spot for one of Reading’s branches. The one on Friar Street, not the cacophonous enormous space of the Oracle Riverside, even though the latter is the first Nando’s I ever visited, converted by my ex-wife.

I rather like the Friar Street branch’s small and gallant attempt at some outside space, its homeliness and lack of polish compared to its larger counterpart. But it also faces an uncertain future because I suspect that, like Cosmo, it will be swept away by redevelopment. So although it was tempting, were I to review a Nando’s, to visit that one, it felt like a surefire way not to future-proof a review.

(Sorry. You get a long overdue Reading review next time.)

5. It wasn’t even my first Nando’s that week.

I’m not joking. Two days before my visit to the Wokingham branch of Nando’s, I found myself at a work offsite event on a business park at the far end of the Basingstoke Road, and for lunch our big cheese took us to Nando’s. By this time my visit to Wokingham was already in the diary, but what could I do? Say “I’m sorry but I can’t, I’m keeping my powder dry”? For Nando’s?

So the eight of us crossed the road to the Reading Gate branch of Nando’s, which is a huge, featureless glass box on the outside and strikingly spacious inside, with a second floor and everything. It felt like one of the biggest Nando’s I’ve ever visited, and the website Rate Your Nando’s – it’s honestly a thing – gives it an average rating of 4.42 out of 5 (I felt gratified to see that my favourite branch on Friar Street, with a rating of 4.73, is currently considered the fourth best in the country).

Everybody conformed to type, almost, and everybody ordered their usual. Tom, our youngest team member and not even thirty yet, ordered the fino pitta, hot, and I made a hackneyed joke about him getting home and popping his moist toilet tissue in the fridge. My boss, not a regular visitor and slightly thrown by the menu, had something called a “garlic churrasco burger” which they might have introduced since I ate at Nando’s last a couple of years ago.

There were a few curveballs, because I work with interesting folk. Our big cheese insisted on having a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup at the table – I guess it takes all sorts – and we had to stage an intervention to stop my colleague Natasha ordering the halloumi burger. Their ID cards would be on the quirky side, I think.

Afterwards we all concluded that it had been an enjoyable lunch, which had entirely lived up to expectations without ever threatening to exceed them. We went back to our meeting room to carry on achieving those pesky deliverables.

Even though it was a Thursday in a business park on the edge of Reading, the sun shining, this unspectacular, boxy branch of Nando’s was packed. We queued for ten minutes or so before they found us a table. If Nando’s has jumped the shark, nobody had told the people eating in there.

6. They treat chickens very badly indeed.

This should probably be top of the list, and for many of you I suspect it would be. In February Nando’s, along with a number of other restaurant chains including KFC, Popeyes and Wingstop, pulled out of something called the Better Chicken Commitment. And as animal welfare standards go, this was a minimal one: you could treat your chickens appallingly and still meet the requirements of the BCC.

It didn’t specify what you could feed your chickens, or that you had to let them roam outdoors, or that you wouldn’t pump them full of growth hormones. It was a very low bar, and the likes of Nando’s decided they still wanted to limbo under it.

The sticking point was that the BCC also required all those restaurants to swear off using what have been described in the media as ‘Frankenchickens’, a strain of chickens like the Ross 308 engineered to reach maturity sooner in order that they can be killed and eaten quicker. If you thought kids grew up too fast these days, spare a thought for the Frankenchickens: ready to be eaten in a mere 35 days. And they aren’t a fun 35 days, either – these breeds have higher rates of organ failure, muscle disease, premature death.

Here’s the most shameful thing of all: I know about this because hereditary columnist Giles Coren, of all people, wrote a column about it in the Times a couple of months ago. Nando’s might be a national institution but when you’re on the same side of the argument as Taco Bell and Frankie & Benny’s and you’re enabling Giles Coren to comfortably take the moral high ground, a period of reflection might be in order.

Here is the reason why you get a review of Nando’s this week.

1. My friend Jerry had never been to one before.

It’s true, I found the one person who had never been to Nando’s, my dear friend Jerry. I don’t even know how it came up but we were chatting over a pint after a very successful review in Oxford and he let slip that he had got all the way to a happy and fruitful retirement without once troubling a branch of Nando’s. That was that: I resolved there and then that he would pop his peri peri cherry, I’d be there when it happened and I’d write it up for the blog.

It would be an adventure! Besides, I was fascinated by the concept that any adult could make it to 2026 without ever setting foot in one. Forget what I thought of the place, what would Jerry make of it?

Picking Wokingham, though, was serendipity. Jerry is currently the artistic director of the Wokingham Theatre, and they were putting on one of my favourite plays, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? So Zoë and I booked tickets – I talked her into it by claiming that it was a romantic comedy – Jerry agreed to join us and we decided on an early dinner at Nando’s before strolling to the theatre.

I’ve always liked the interior of the Wokingham branch. The front room is more bog standard but I have happy memories of the space at the back with its skylight and bold tiled wall, so I was glad we were seated there. We were there at 6, and the place was still quietish: by the time we left the tables along that tiled wall were all occupied by big groups. Nobody there thought Nando’s had jumped the shark either.

Normally in my reviews there’s a bit where I talk generally about the menu, how much everything costs and so forth. Is it all right if I skip that bit this week, and we take it on trust that you know all that? Excellent. I had downloaded the Nando’s app specially for this visit – like another British institution, Wetherspoons, they try to minimise the amount of time you spend on your feet – so after a bit of plea bargaining and talking Jerry through what was good and what wasn’t, I placed our order. The whole lot came to just shy of £120.

We ordered the majority of what Nando’s classes as starters, even though I expect many regulars don’t bother. Peri peri nuts were surprisingly bland and lacking in crunch, and padded out with macadamias, which I’ve always struggled to like. They didn’t feel like incredible value at £5.25 but, perhaps more significantly, because Nando’s lists this for everything it serves, you know that a portion contains nearly 800 calories. They felt unnecessary on multiple levels.

More reliable was that ever-present, Nando’s houmous with peri-peri drizzle. Nando’s houmous was about as good as the stuff you’d get in Marks, and the drizzle added a nice piquancy, even if the contents of the bowl started to look like a clumsily popped zit. The pitta wasn’t a great advert for ordering anything that’s served in one, being doughy, stodgy and manifestly ill-suited to dipping. Loading houmous on to a pitta with a fork felt against God and against nature, but we had no real choice.

This too was nearly 800 calories, more calorific than eating half a chicken. I don’t know if that’s a good advert for putting calorie counts on menus, but it’s not a good advert for Nando’s starters. The menu actually includes an item called “Dare To Share” where you can order three starters for just over £12: I’ve never considered ordering starters, or sharing them, an especially daring act so I’m not sure what they’re driving at there. What risk are you running exactly, besides obesity?

Nando’s halloumi fries came as a moderately tanned miniature jenga stack of five pieces of halloumi. You had to hand it to Nando’s for giving you a prime number of these, almost intended to make things difficult.

If you’ve never had halloumi before, or only had Nando’s halloumi, I imagine you’d be quite pleased with these. But I couldn’t help but compare them to the far superior ones at Honest Burgers where four larger, better halloumi fries cost you less. They’re also organic, served with a cracking chipotle jam rather than a hypersweet chilli jam, and somehow, magically, contain fewer calories. I promise this is the last time I’ll mention calories: I’m not that kind of writer and I’m hoping you’re not that kind of reader.

By this point Jerry and I were well into a glass of South African sauvignon blanc each (and I thought he didn’t like white wine) which was perfectly unobjectionable and a snip at just over £7 for a 250ml can. Zoë was on an AF beer – Nando’s stocks Beavertown’s Lazer Crush – and we also had some water and a bottomless Diet Coke on the go.

About 15 minutes after our starters all our variations on a theme came to the table with brutal efficiency. Zoë ordered a fino pitta with medium fries, spicy rice and some rainbow slaw: the latter was my mistake, as she’d wanted the macho peas. It was, I’m told, absolutely like every other fino pitta Zoë has had in the past, because that is what Nando’s do. If I went to Nando’s for dinner tonight and ordered this dish, this is what it would look and taste like.

Because Jerry and Zoë had both ordered chicken thighs, I went for the butterflied chicken breast. Back in the old days Nando’s didn’t do chicken thighs, and the butterflied chicken breast was my go to order. It was perfectly pleasant, maybe slightly dry and lacking the textural contrast and char you get from the thighs.

To try and order things I didn’t usually order, I’d asked for this as “Sweet Heat” rather than my usual Medium. The menu boasts that this is “BBQ for the bold” and is only available for a limited time. Hobble don’t walk to a Nando’s to try it would be my advice: what did I say about how people stray from their regular order and then go back to what they know? That evening, that was me.

I also had the spicy rice, which I always order: it was slightly clumpy in a manner that raised questions but otherwise tasted exactly like every spicy rice I have ever had in the past and every one I will have in the future. The same could be said of the garlic bread, a diamond-shaped ciabatta roll halved and toasted. It had magic powers: it didn’t taste much of garlic in the moment but gave unsubtle reminders for the rest of the evening. Just as it always does: you’re getting the idea by now, I imagine.

Jerry chose the boneless thighs, my usual selection, and ploughed through them with a gusto I found oddly touching. It reminded me that I’ve wished, many times, that I could forget I’d ever read one of my favourite books or listened to one of my favourite bands so I could experience the joy of discovering them all over again, a sort of benevolent Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind where you forget not to forget but so you can be reminded.

Would I use that power to wipe the memory of my first ever Nando’s? Of course not, but watching Jerry love his chicken and wonder where it had been all his life was the next best thing, I suppose. He was our very own Miranda: o brave new world, that has such restaurants in it. Jerry chose to pair this with more of that garlic bread and another relatively new innovation from Nando’s, the “Portuguese tomato salad”. Those tomatoes could be Portuguese, but I’d be amazed if they were.

We ordered two sides, one of which was negligible and the other of which was significant. First, Nando’s macaroni cheese, which allegedly comes “with a crunchy, garlicky peri-peri crumb topping”. It does not, really. It’s a ramekin of claggy blandness with some flavourless pale rubble on top: order it if you like macaroni cheese enough to eat average macaroni cheese, otherwise don’t bother. Who am I trying to fool? It’s already either part of your regular Nando’s order or it isn’t.

Our second side was a whole chicken.

I know, it sounds a bit Henry VIII and we didn’t really need it, but I insisted because I wanted Jerry – who am I kidding, all of us, especially me – to try the product without whistles, bells, pitta, butterflying, filleting or general fucking around. Actually, for me this was probably the best thing in the whole meal and something I don’t usually think to order. Fairly plump and generous, the meat rich and not dried out, the skin scored and scorched.

Maybe this is where it all started out and Nando’s lost its way with all the variations on a theme it had to introduce over the following thirty-four years to hold people’s interest. But eating this I almost remembered what eating there the first time could be like.

Poor Jerry couldn’t tackle much of this, because he’d experienced Nando’s overload, but I made inroads into it on his behalf. It felt rude not to. A whole chicken on its own will set you back just over £17 and paradoxically, I thought it was the best value of anything we ate all evening. And yes, I’m aware that calling it a side order is an understatement and a half.

So what did we all come away making of Nando’s? Zoë said during our meal that it had aspired to a status a little like the NHS: people in the U.K. had come to expect that it would always be there, be accessible at the point of demand and be available fairly close to where they lived.

I wondered if she’d oversold it, but I looked up the most godforsaken places I’ve ever visited in this country – Runcorn and Great Yarmouth – and the former has a Nando’s a couple of miles away in Widnes. If you live in Great Yarmouth you have to go all the way to Norwich, but if I lived in Great Yarmouth I’d be looking to buy a one way ticket to Norwich at my earliest convenience.

Jerry loved it. “I’ll be going there again, or at least the Reading one” he told me later. I can well believe it, although there’s always a risk he was just being nice.

And me? Well, it remains in a particular niche – I imagine I might fancy one of my own volition every couple of years, if I can get past my misgivings about their particular brand of animal cruelty. But if a friend proposed eating there I would rarely say no, and if a work offsite happened to include a lunch there I’d feel like that was a pleasant surprise.

I imagine that, like the NHS or like Woolworths or Debenhams, I will appreciate knowing it’s there until one day the grim realities of the public finances and market forces mean it no longer is. On this evidence, though, I think that day may still be decades away, unless people start caring about chicken welfare a lot more than they do today.

So there you have it, the review of Nando’s that literally nobody needed – except maybe Jerry, but he was there anyway. I realised afterwards that I can easily count the number of bad Nando’s I’ve had on the fingers of one hand. I can count the number of amazing Nando’s I’ve had on the fingers of one hand, too: bad and amazing just aren’t what they do. Or perhaps it’s truer to say that I’ve had bad or amazing times at Nando’s, but the food had nothing to do with it in either case. Whatever. On that basis this time, with two of my very favourite people, had to be one of the best.

Nando’s – 6.7
29 Market Place, Wokingham, RG40 1AP
0118 9773220

https://www.nandos.co.uk/restaurants/wokingham

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Pub review: The Port Mahon, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

The conventional wisdom is that food trends start out in London and, like the light from a dying star, by the time they reach Reading they are just memories of something that is no longer there. Something about the eternity it takes them to hobble down the M4 strips them of any interest or novelty value, and it’s the same for restaurant chains: with a few encouraging historical exceptions, like Honest or Pho, by the time anyone opens a branch in the RG1 postcode the Fonz, waterskis strapped on, has well and truly cleared the shark.

The truth is, if anything, more nuanced and even more cheerless than that. First of all, most food trends never become a thing anyway. Every January the broadsheet food Stattos, a wan bunch of gastronomic psephologists, proclaim what the big trends of the next 12 months will be, and the majority of them never come to pass. Just as life is what happens when you’re making other plans, food trends tend to ambush everybody: nobody sees most of them coming.

Secondly, most of them never make it to Reading. You could wait a lifetime for a small plates restaurant, a tapas spot, a natural wine bar, a chop house or anything else for that matter. I don’t know what it is about our mixture of attractive affordable buildings with plenty of outside space that catch the sun, our kindly and philanthropic landlords and our imaginative and not remotely complacent local authority, but for some reason entrepreneurs look at all that and say Nah, you’re all right. What spoilsports they are.

Instead we get a Cosy Club, and a Rosa’s Thai, and a Popeyes, and a Taco Bell, and a regular attack of the glums whenever we set foot inside the IDR. Lucky, lucky us. So it goes: head to Oxford, Swindon or Newbury for tapas, small plates or natural wine, because you’re not getting that stuff in Reading.

As a result we get our own micro trends which often seem to have nothing to do with what’s going on anywhere else, like the year we got a glut of sushi restaurants, or biryani places, or pizza spots. And the funny thing is, the result of everyone trying to jump on those bandwagons is that nothing is sustainable. Biryani Mama closed recently on St Mary’s Butts, and Biryani Boyzzz has been fined shitloads of cash for poor hygiene: perhaps all those Zs are reflective of the fact that they fell asleep at the wheel.

And remember our influx of great pizza restaurants last year? By all accounts Paesinos has sacked its chef, Amò is still closed due to challenges with the building for nearly five months and counting (read into that what you will) and since Dough Bros has changed hands it’s removed all pork and ‘nduja from its menu, leaving you instead with turkey ham and “spicy beef chunks”. Fair play to them, I suppose, but that’s not Dough Bros any more. All that’s left is Zi Tore, which is the gastronomic equivalent of Ringo being the last surviving Beatle.

This year’s Reading trends are, to me at least, profoundly depressing because they reflect a poverty of culinary imagination, of degradation disguised as progress. You might get excited about vans serving jacket potatoes, and Reading now has a couple, but I remember when the Broad Street Mall having a Spud-U-Like made it a figure of fun, not a lifestyle destination. Are we really meant to see this as an improvement? Did people ever really think “fuck an affordable bistro, what this town really needs is a jacket spud loaded with tuna and cheese?” I hope not.

The other Reading food trend this year has been the munch box, a phenomenon with its own Wikipedia page, highlighting its origins in Scotland (“the selection of foods included in some boxes has been criticised for being nutritionally poor” Wikipedia says, with a talent for understatement). So naturally, for the times when a baked potato is too cheap and cheerful and you want to splash out, why not go crazy and buy a munch box? Treat yourself.

“I’ve found the best munch box in Reading” said some goon on Instagram recently, coming to you live from a car park. That’s great: I’m sure the whole town will sleep easier now. It’s all very low rent, but that’s 2026 for you. Nobody can afford rent.

A trend which emerged last year in London was one I would dearly love to see in Reading: rotisserie chicken. The Observer called it about this time last year and, late to the party as ever, the Telegraph chimed in to that effect in January. Both mentioned London venues like Borough Market’s Café François and Shoreditch’s Knave Of Clubs along with Bébé Bob, which so underwhelmed me a couple of years ago. “The rise of luxe rotisserie chicken”, enthused the Observer. “How France’s most famous market food became a cult British hit” was the Telegraph‘s summary.

It’s true, though. Rotisserie chicken is huge on the continent, and nowhere to be seen in Blighty and I personally consider that a terrible pity. When I remember Montpellier, where the twice weekly food market under the aqueduct boasts multiple traders, all selling delectable looking chicken, I think it’s a great shame that it’s never caught on here. And that’s just markets, but the restaurants! When I recall the glories of eating at Montpellier’s Les Freres Poulard or Lisbon’s Bonjardim I wonder what’s taken this movement so long to even consider crossing the water.

So imagine my surprise earlier in the month when I discovered that this particular trend – with lightning speed, in the scheme of things – had bypassed Reading completely and taken root in Oxford. I’d just had lunch at Cuttlefish with my dear friend Jerry and, on the way to our pub for the afternoon, we walked past another pub, the Port Mahon. I’m incapable of doing that kind of thing without rubbernecking for a menu and there, on a sign out the front, it boasted ROTISSERIE CHICKEN and, come to think of it, OUR FAMOUS £5 NEGRONIS. They had me at the chicken, the negronis were just a bonus: I made a mental note to investigate further.

Back home I did some research and the pub looked promising. Although it’s been around since 1710, it seems that a couple of years ago it came under new ownership and, by the looks of it, decided to focus on food, taking on chef Paolo Cangiano. A new dining room followed last year, as did positive reviews on both of the main Oxford food websites. Although the majority of those visits were comped: Bitten Oxford extracted 3 free meals from the Port Mahon in the space of 7 months but, of course, all views remain their own.

Nonetheless I saw enough to nudge it to the top of my list so last week, on the most glorious Saturday the U.K. has seen so far this year, Zoë and I hopped on a train to investigate, stopping only to collect a lot of cheese in the Covered Market, sample one of Hamblin Bakery’s excellent sausage rolls and grab a pre-lunch coffee in Peloton Espresso’s wonderful back garden. Spring had well and truly arrived, and I’d had my first sunshine pints in the Last Crumb the weekend before, after a brilliant and buzzing readers lunch. So this is what al fresco life in Britain can be like, I remembered thinking.

The pub is actually very handsome. I think it’s a Greene King (although that isn’t necessarily an obstacle to doing amazing food) and the labyrinth of rooms inside, all on slightly different levels, is cosy and attractive, all bentwood chairs, pews and red curtains. On my wander through I managed to somehow miss the dedicated dining room completely, but from the pictures I’ve seen it’s also a lovely, grown-up space.

That makes the Port Mahon somewhere you could go for food or just for drinks, and from the interior I could easily imagine doing either. But we were greeted by Cangiano himself and asked where we fancied sitting, and the outside space called to us. Again, it’s surprisingly large and much of it catches the sun, and it was a thoroughly agreeable spot with bunting, covered areas and a real feeling of lightness and buzz.

It reminded me – in Oxford terms – of the sadly departed Jam Factory, which used to be one of my favourite spots to stop for a pint before catching a train home: I still miss that place. It also reminded me, to talk about Reading for a moment, that nowhere in Reading boasts outside seating this pleasing where you can also get really good food. The Nag’s has a great beer garden but limited food, Park House is pleasant enough for both but not stellar. That the Rising Sun is as good as it gets rather sums up the state of affairs: I haven’t updated my guide to al fresco dining in Reading since 2022, but perhaps I’ll just put up a page saying Don’t bother.

It was too hot a day for those £5 negronis, and a pint of something cold and refreshing was required. I was pleasantly surprised by the Port Mahon’s selection, so although it had macro lagers and ciders in spades there were just enough pales to make it interesting: the sessionable A Little Faith by Northern Monk and Pale Fire by Pressure Drop. The latter was our choice and it was absolutely what the moment demanded. The sun beat down, and our first sip – this was rather a late kick-off given a happy time at StageCraft the night before – made everything right, all grievances forgotten.

The Port Mahon has, I would say, pulled together a very pleasing menu. A good array of snacks, all of which lend themselves to sharing, five starters and eight mains sent out all the right signals about not trying to do too much, and if I hadn’t gone with rotisserie chicken on my mind I could have tried countless other dishes. Next time, perhaps I’ll try the meatball pappardelle or the butterflied seabream with orange and fennel salad. But it also gave me confidence that next time the menu might well be different: after all, this set of dishes was very different to the one I’d seen online.

You could potentially argue that the pricing was slightly wayward, with some of the snacks coming in more expensive than the starters, but I thought that was to suggest they were bigger portions to share. Again, a pub where you could drink great IPAs in the sunshine and keep yourself topped up on beer snacks sounded like something I would love in Reading. And nothing was expensive, really: starters maxed out at £8.50, only a couple of mains were north of £20.

One dish that seemed to have been on the Port Mahon’s menu since they reopened and Cangione came on board was the pub’s pork belly bites in soy, honey and sesame and, rotisserie chicken aside, they were the first name on the team sheet. They were a winner, a tumble of nicely caramelised cubes, fat rendered enough and the glaze sticky, sweet and potent with a slight building heat. I would have put these in the beer snacks section, personally, but what do I know about menu taxonomy?

Either way these were a real pleasure and the kind of dish any menu could find room for somewhere: about as different from their siblings last week at the Jolly Cricketers as I am from my sibling but, just like me and my own sibling, equally lovable. Also they were £8.50, so better value than either of us.

We also went for the buffalo cauliflower wings, from the snack section of the menu. These were a bit pricier at £12.50 but, as I’d suspected, very much sized to share. They were very close to spot on, but with something like this it’s human nature to focus on how they fall short. So I really loved the pub’s buffalo sauce, which had exactly the kind of acrid, vinegary heat I’m looking for. The little bits of what I thought were fried onion on top were a nice touch, along with a little verdant flash of herbs. And the cauliflower was nicely done, not too soft, not too unyielding.

If I’d known in advance that it would be a sort of mulch of cooked cauliflower in a superlative buffalo sauce I might have still ordered it and, as I did, I would have enjoyed it. But I’d like the coating to have crunch and to adhere, and for the whole thing to be tossed in the sauce at the end and brought to me tout suite before everything started to go awry and soggy. That didn’t happen here, I don’t think, and it was the only thing marring what would otherwise have been another perfect beer snack.

The chicken wings, at the same price, might have pulled this off better but I really couldn’t be doing with all the faff. I would have these again in the hope that the pub pulls them off, and if it didn’t I would be a little disappointed but, as I did this time, I would still eat every last morsel.

The biggest disappointment, for me, was the focaccia. It was, to be fair, only £4 but it was dense and doughy, no air, no crust and no crackle, just some spongey, cakelike cuboids that were a little bit too much like hard work. I’m not sure what the dip in the middle was: it looked like mayo but had a sizeable whack of vinegar. But the focaccia had a job to do anyway ensuring that not an iota of the buffalo sauce, or the soy and honey glaze, went to waste. No harm done, ultimately.

Service from everybody in the pub, from the chef to the cheery chap behind the bar to the servers who brought our food out, was bright and infectious, and the Port Mahon gave the impression of being a happy little brigade. We were asked whether we wanted our main course straight away or wanted to wait a while and – rather uncharacteristically, I guess – we told them to bring it on. That’s rotisserie chicken for you: it realigns the priorities.

Sometimes, when I eat on duty without Zoë, we play this little game where I send her pictures of my food and ask her to guess whether it was good or not. Let’s play it now: what do you reckon to this?

First things first: this is a really generous plate of chicken and gubbins for two people, for just over £32. I think the Port Mahon has taken a tip or two from the Chester Arms’ legendary steak platter without, like Headington’s Six Bells, ripping it off lock, stock and barrel. So you get everything you could possibly want on that steel plate, no need for sides or add-ons.

And everything that goes with it is corking: the big, handsome lettuce leaves pooled with Caesar dressing, the substantial croutons with just enough give, the little sunshine-yellow ramekin of what they call ‘Mahon mayo’ (surely Mahonnaise?), they’re all marvellous. You could almost make yourself a Caesar salad with this, although the menu already boasts one which also includes eggs, bacon and anchovies and a healthy dose of I-almost-wish-I’d-ordered-that.

But the Caesar salad would omit the chicken fat potatoes, and they really are very nice indeed. The texture of them was ideal, the crunch to fluff ratio almost impossible to fault. I’d have liked that chicken fat to make its presence more felt, I’d have liked them saltier, but I’d like many things I won’t get and that, in some way I don’t fully grasp, will eventually make me a better person. Possibly.

That’s all well and good, you’re asking, but what about the chicken? And well you might. Well, like a lot of it, it was a lot of the way there. The leg meat was a tiny bit tough, almost gamey, and there wasn’t perhaps as much of it as I’d hoped. But the succulence of the breast made up for that, and the flavour that had permeated it did too: I don’t know whether the Port Mahon brines it, but I got lemon and I enjoyed the green sauce that had been sparingly drizzled over it. All that was truly serviceable, and then some.

But the other thing it really missed, the thing that makes rotisserie chicken so miraculous, was crispy skin. If you get that right, a lot of the other stuff either falls into place or, more likely, just doesn’t seem so important. It was the single biggest thing that the Port Mahon needs to work on, whether that’s by rubbing with salt and lubricating with butter or any other form of chicken-centric witchcraft, but a rotisserie chicken with slightly elastic skin is one that hasn’t lived up to its potential. Trust me on this: as someone with a lifelong track record of not living up to mine, in the words of Jason Lee in Mallrats, we can smell our own.

The dessert menu just has three items on it, and despite the retro appeal of a raspberry ripple Arctic Roll, the chocolate tart got both our votes. What a strange dessert it turned out to be! I mean, it was delicious: the ganache rich and pleasingly irregular, the pastry dense if perhaps slightly underbaked. I really loved the boozy cherries, both of them, and the little heap of crème fraîche they perched on: crème fraîche would always be my accompaniment for a dessert this rich.

But the size of it was just so strange, such a thin sliver. I know it was only £6.50, and perhaps that’s how the Port Mahon keeps it at that price, but it felt jarring. Somebody had a protractor in that kitchen, and they liked it slightly more than they liked customers: considering the manifest generosity on display everywhere else on the menu, this felt like a blip.

I might have stayed longer and ordered more drinks but Oxford’s best beer garden, in the shape of the Star on Rectory Road, was beckoning and I was conscious that Zoë had never been there before. So we settled our bill – £95, including service charge – and were on our merry way.

The rest of the day was another reminder of everything that makes Oxford a great city – pints of Steady Rolling Man at the Star, a sneaky Swoon gelato on the way to the station and a beer at Tap Social in the Covered Market when we realised we had time before taking the train we wanted. I am very lucky that my Oxford reviews always do quite well in terms of readership, but then it’s never a chore to write about somewhere with such abundant charm.

Reading’s part-time visiting academic and full time transphobe Julie Bindel recently wrote a laughable article in the Spectator – of course it was the Spectator – about how she couldn’t stand gastropubs. It was so full of bad, inaccurate observations that at first I mistook it for a Michael McIntyre routine, but Bindel’s central assertion, under the sophisticated and nuanced headline I hate gastropubs, was that pubs should stick to cheese sandwiches and Scotch eggs, and of course she had a swipe at sourdough and triple-cooked chips, because apparently it’s still 2010.

Just to generalise further about a world Bindel doesn’t actually live in, these pubs are apparently all staffed by “blokes with sleeve tattoos and beard oil”: it’s a wonder she didn’t throw in the word ‘new-fangled’ while she was at it. To be fair, her article also included the quote “As a rule, I am not a fan of pubs” which rather makes you wonder why the Spectator paid her to write an article that is essentially a big steaming heap of Bean Soup Theory.

Still, it’s nice to know that Bindel can be wrong on multiple topics: I guess the Brexiteer ghouls who read the Speccie lap all that up. The point is, call them pubs or call them gastropubs – who really cares? – but either way they are, in all their forms, a big part of how people eat in this country in 2026. And when they’re done well, they are terrific places to eat and drink, or just drink, or pick at snacks with a really good pint. Getting hung up on what you call them completely misses the point that they’re an essential element of food culture here.

Whether they are the centre of village life, like the Jolly Cricketers, or bravely trying to do something else with a centuries-old boozer like the Port Mahon, they matter. And even if the Port Mahon doesn’t get everything right, it does enough to deserve plenty of support while it works on the rest. I liked it a lot, I’m rooting for it and I’m sad that Reading, for all its pubs, doesn’t have anyone even trying to offer something like this.

That’s another food trend that hasn’t really bothered with our town. I’d love an excellent independent food pub, I would really love somewhere doing rotisserie chicken like the very best of the stuff on the continent. Both of them in a single venue? Don’t be ridiculous: it will never happen.

The Port Mahon – 7.7
82 St Clements St, Oxford, OX4 1AW

https://www.theportmahon.com

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