It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that as a middle-aged man churning out two and a half thousand words a week about some restaurant or other, I’m about as far from the food and drink zeitgeist as it’s possible to be. Restaurant blogs have been dead for years, local papers too, and even the broadsheets are gradually fading away. Instagram influencers are passé too, even if Reading’s handful are still scrounging the occasional free meal (the latest from the Hilton in Kennet Island). Nope, apart from the occasional increasingly desperate Substack, food reviewing is all about TikTok and Instagram reels these days.
The most prominent is an account called Topjaw. Topjaw, for the uninitiated, consists of a posh bloke with floppy hair (who used to be a model) in front of the camera and a less photogenic bloke, presumably also posh, behind it. The posh bloke with floppy hair interviews restaurateurs in London getting vox pops about where they think you can find the best pizza, burgers, coffee and so on in the capital. He’s trying to perfect that fake almost-estuary accent posh people do when they’re trying to sound less posh, like Tony Blair used to do. He’s not managed it yet.
The usual suspects come up in those vox pops time and again – the Dalston bakery Dusty Knuckle, the Dexter burger at The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, the Soho hype factory that is new pub The Devonshire (a place where nobody can snag a reservation but there are mysteriously always tables available for celebrities, critics and, well, Topjaw). We’re never paid by any restaurant we feature, says their bio, although they’re not averse to doing paid partnerships with the likes of Bicester Village, of all places. They may not be paid a fee, but God knows if they pay for their food.
Still, all power to them: their format is quick and entertaining, and you find yourself watching it whether you like them or not. It’s already spawning imitators – mainly in Bristol, where you see some people trying the vox pop format – and maybe one day it will translate into a TV show for them, or a paid gig or an appearance on Strictly or I’m A Celebrity.
You might wonder what any of this has to do with Reading, so I should explain. A couple of months ago, during a bumper week of tosspots on Topjaw, they interviewed not only Ed Sheeran (who turns out to be as basic as you would expect) but also hereditary columnist and bigoted human bin fire Giles Coren. Coren was clearly desperate to appeal to a new demographic so was doing his usual dreary, sweary trying too hard schtick, only even more manic than usual.
But in the course of dispensing his tiresome opinions he happened to say that he thought the best pizza in London was done by Zia Lucia. “They have this charcoal base which apparently doesn’t make you fart” he added, not as hilariously as he intended. Hang on, I thought, haven’t they just opened in Reading?
Well, yes, they have. Zia Lucia opened at the start of April on St Mary’s Butts, where ASK used to be, their first branch outside London. Their website talks about their origins in Islington over 15 years ago, and they also bandy around the slightly random stat that they are the world’s 38th best pizza chain (before you get too excited, Pizza Pilgrims finished 27 places above them and the Big Mamma Group, which Coren loathes, came third). Even so a first branch outside London, coming to a town that had lost Franco Manca and Buon Appetito, felt like it was worth investigating.
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The week after you get back from holiday is the absolute worst, isn’t it? One minute you’re loafing in the sun, you can have a lie in if you want to, your hardest morning decision is where to grab coffee and then where to have lunch, your post-lunch coffee, maybe a snack, your pre-prandial drink, your dinner, your post-dinner bar of choice. On and on it goes until you’re a modern-day lotus eater, free of cares, a flâneur and a gourmand, carefree and arguably in need of detox. Little, if anything, is finer than reaching that stage.
And then it’s over. The plane touches down at miserable old Shatwick, and you’re reintroduced to the M25. When you get home your clothes all need to be washed, the fridge is bare and there’s this thing called work you have to get up for at something ridiculous like half-seven in the morning. Just like that you’re back in a life of dreary cold packaged sandwiches and cobbling together a meal plan, of not drinking during the week, watching your calorie intake and hanging in there until payday.
And even though it’s May, it seems to be raining most of the time. I don’t care how much you might love your job: objectively speaking, if you compare it to a holiday there’s only ever going to be one winner. Why does anybody do it?
This year, for me at least, that comedown has been even more of a cliff edge than usual. Because not only was I back from holiday, but I was back from honeymoon – I got married, although I haven’t talked about it much – and my next trip away won’t involve planes, trains or automobiles but instead a white van and the removal men as I burn a week’s leave next month moving house.
So although Zoë and I did the supermarket shop as usual, with a sense of resignation, sticking to the plan wasn’t easy last week. Instead there were accidental takeaways, or wanders over to Bakery House or Honest, anything to make real life just a little more unreal, even if only for a short while. You could call it a transition phase, you could call it a soft landing. You could even call it a cry for help: probably it’s a little of all three.
On the plus side, it meant there was a slight role reversal. In the run up to my nuptials it was more difficult to persuade Zoë to come with me on duty, a combination of trying to shed that last couple of pre-marital pounds and save those last few pre-marital other pounds. Now that I’ve been elevated to the dizzy heights of husband? It turns out that Zoë can be persuaded to eat out during the week, especially if it happens to be her turn to cook.
I may have used this to my benefit, in truth. Bet you can’t be fucked to cook the salmons tonight I messaged her, as she was on the train back from London. How did you guess? came the reply. Failing at this, aren’t I. After a bit of plea bargaining – it was raining, so nowhere too far out of town (my wife does not like the rain), and nowhere that involved walking away from home only to head back (my wife also doesn’t like going back on herself) we settled for Chilis: central, a short walk from the station, potentially interesting.
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Bébé Bob closed in March 2026. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m still true to the newcomer who started out reviewing neighbourhood Sardinian restaurant Pepe Sale all that time ago. Have I managed to keep my finger on the pulse of what Reading diners really want from a meal out, or has my head been turned by all those great meals, all that fine dining, all those plaudits and mentions in the national press? It was something that crossed my mind from time to time, especially as I was sitting in Soho House – my second Soho House of the afternoon – with my friend James, polishing off a carafe of Viognier, ready to scoot across town to Bébé Bob, a restaurant which sells rotisserie chicken at just under forty pounds a head.
If any of you are still reading after that opening paragraph, I feel I should explain: James suggested going to Soho House as he’d got membership a few weeks ago. And the chance to experience life on the other side of those discreet doors, to see how the other half lives – well, how could I resist? So I accompanied him, feeling quite the bumpkin, as he scanned in using the app on his phone and the woman on reception, ultra polite and polished, greeted us by name and explained the facilities, including various roof terraces and the cinema in the basement where they did regular screenings. I tried not to look too “Home Counties hick up in London for the day”, no doubt failing miserably.
Inside everything was ridiculously tasteful, the place filled with the buzz and clamour of a newborn London weekend. I tried to be insouciant, but of course I was meerkatting every time someone went past. Would I see a celebrity? (The answer, by the way, was no.) If anything, the interior was more stylish than some of the people who wandered past, distinctly nouveau, laden down with carriers bearing the logo or one designer or another. I entertained myself trying to guess their story; tech bro; footballer’s agent; lottery-winning fish out of water. What would people have thought James’ and my story was?
But anyway, if I sound sniffy I don’t mean to; it was a fascinating experience, made more fascinating by the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be repeated any time soon. But the chair was comfy, the sunlight flooding in from the roof terrace was welcome, the people watching was Olympic standard and the Viognier was crisp and peachy. I would be a hypocrite if I tried to claim I hadn’t had a wonderful time.
But in the course of writing this I did a bit of research and there were a couple of stories a few months ago saying that Soho House had lost its exclusivity and cachet – one of them in Tatler, no less, saying effectively that they’re admitting all sorts these days. That was in March, but I would say that even if it hadn’t happened by then, the club letting me through the door in April might have signified the moment it truly jumped the shark. The following week I sent James a meme on Instagram describing Soho House as “the Freemasons for influencers”: he didn’t dignify it with a response.
Anyway, I was the one that had chosen Bébe Bob for our dinner reservation, the second half of a one day chicken festival which commenced with disappointing fried chicken at Coqfighter. I thought I was on safer ground with Bébe Bob, an offshoot of Soho’s famous/infamous Bob Bob Ricard specialising in rotisserie chicken almost to the exclusion of everything else. Their website rather spells it out, Any main course the customer wants, as long as it’s chicken or chicken. It also rather splendidly says that Fashionwear is welcome, activewear is not.
Bébé Bob opened last October and has already attracted a raft of plaudits from the people who know about these things. Grace Dent went there at the start of the year and seemed to enjoy herself, even if she called it a “chicken and chips place that thinks it is ‘it'” and made a tired joke about Margo from The Good Life. And restaurant guru Andy Hayler – recently seen enjoying Clay’s Kitchen – visited in March, lavishing the chicken with, by his standards, fulsome praise: “it was a joy (16/20)”, he raved, presumably having a lie down in a darkened room afterwards.
All good omens, then. And I have to say, the interior of Bébé Bob was one of the most gorgeous, luxe spaces I’ve eaten in for as long as I could remember. They claim it’s inspired by the Golden Age, and I can kind of see that. Everything is chic, sleek and deco, plush and subtly lit, and you’ll struggle to find a sharp edge anywhere, from the curvy, velvety chairs to the rounded corners of the wood panelling. Impeccably tasteful, too, especially the art on the walls, Kandinsky squiggles in Mondrian colours. I loved the tiled floor too, reminiscent of Clarice Cliff, although research suggests they inherited that from Folie, the previous restaurant at this site.
But overall, the whole thing was enormous fun, grand but not po-faced, and you got a sense of being on a Cunard liner in the Thirties, going from somewhere glamorous to somewhere equally glamorous. I half expected the captain to announce that we would be docking at Biarritz on the hour, or Poirot to assemble everybody in the salon and reveal the identity of the murderer.
Bébé Bob’s menu does indeed live up to that promise of chicken main courses to the exclusion of all other – and just the two kinds, Vendée for nineteen pounds a pop, or Landais for thirty-nine. The former is “raised outside for most of its life”, which does rather make you wonder about the other less enjoyable parts, while the latter is corn and milk-fed, free-range and given more time and space, apparently developing a deeper flavour as a result. Could it be worth thirty-nine pounds, though?
Grace Dent never found out, because they’d run out when she went, while Andy Hayler, always one to throw money at a problem, ordered the Landais and said it was in a completely different league to anything you could get in this country. Our server, one of a brigade of charming and efficient servers, told us they only had one of the Landais left. We reserved it.
“We were always going to go for the expensive chicken, weren’t we?” said James. We’d spent the afternoon in Soho House drinking cocktails and wine after drinks at the French House. Of course we were.
The menu says that although chicken is the only main on offer, starters are “plentiful”. In reality there were six, one of which was a salad, although I guess I wasn’t counting the three varieties of caviar also available. Starters were between twelve and twenty-two quid and I suppose could have been described as timeless or retro, depending on your perspective: that’s why Grace Dent made that crack about Margo Leadbetter.
James decided to try the prawn cocktail, possibly the archetypal starter from days gone by, and seemed to like it but not love it. The Marie Rose apparently had quite a kick to it, although it wasn’t clear where from: the menu said that cognac was involved but that didn’t explain the heat.
I had been torn between egg mayonnaise and smoked salmon, so I asked our server for advice. He immediately came down on the side of the former. “It’s a lighter dish” he went on to explain. Well, happy days, I thought: it’s been a day of excess already and I had a wedding suit to slim into and only two weeks to do it. We even turned down the offer of bread, that’s how well behaved I was trying to be.
Well, I have to congratulate our server for his gift for understatement, because light doesn’t do it justice. It wasn’t egg mayonnaise as I’m used to, instead being a singly impeccable boiled egg, split open, each half adorned with a firm, salty Cantabrian anchovy. Under that, capers and herbs and a smudge of a delicious, punchy mayonnaise with a hefty hit of Dijon mustard. All very nice, but approaching amuse bouche levels for twelve pounds. I found myself wishing I hadn’t spurned the bread after all.
The thing is, whatever the quibbles about the food you couldn’t knock the location, the surroundings or the sense of occasion. We sipped our way through a very decent bottle of sauvignon blanc from the Loire, which was mentioned in Andy Hayler’s review. It was, in his own effusive words, “Forty-three pounds for a bottle that you can find in the high street for fourteen”. To give you an idea of the wine list, this was easily one of the cheapest wines on there – it was actually forty-four, but that’s inflation for you – and you could easily spend north of sixty quid without even necessarily meaning to.
Service really was lovely, but there was an interesting moment when the servers approached the table next to us with their chicken, ready to serve it with ceremony and solemnity. Our neighbours were American – I’d already clocked that from the accent – but they’d obviously spent too much time in the U.K. I could tell that from their reaction to the arrival of their main course.
“Goodness, that’s very quick chicken” the woman said. This is the kind of thing an English person would say, when what they meant was why the hell are you bringing this out almost immediately after I’ve ordered? I’d expect that in Nando’s, not somewhere like this. Which is, to be fair, the kind of thing I’d expect an American to say when rushed in a British restaurant. When she instead decided to express passive-aggressive surprise I didn’t know whether to be impressed or disappointed; James and I did lean over, after the server had gone, to express our solidarity.
Maybe you only get the delay if you order the fancy pants chicken. That would explain why ours arrived about quarter of an hour after we’d finished our starters – although even that, come to think of it, felt a little bit quick. From the text on the menu nothing about this chicken’s life had been rushed, so it was a pity this part was. It deserved better. But you had to hand it to them for the ceremony – each of us had a breast and a leg reverently placed on our plate, a poultry yin and yang, with the oyster delicately popped in the middle. And finally, thick jus was drizzled from a little jug, anointing the whole lot: I now declare the most expensive chicken you’ll ever eat in your life, open.
I know you want to know what a thirty-nine pound portion of roast chicken tastes like. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s, err, nice. I didn’t get a stunning moment of clarity where I thought “this is why!” The meat was dense, and I’d like to think I perceived the epic intensity of flavour that the experts had picked up on, but I can’t say I could. These chickens are apparently bigger, from all that time spent living the life of Riley, eating corn and drinking milk in their own sweet time, but I can’t say I felt like there was a huge amount of meat. The skin was rather pleasant, but lacked that crispiness that would have made it top tier. I almost wish I’d been able to try both types of chicken side by side: perhaps then I would have realised what all this money bought you, but as it was I wasn’t sure I had.
By way of comparison, the best rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had – so far, at least – is in a renowned Lisbon restaurant called Bonjardim. There they rub the chicken with salt and lemon until the skin is almost like cracking. It’s outstanding stuff – I once went to Lisbon on holiday and ate there twice in one trip – and as it happens the following weekend James was on a short trip to Lisbon so I told him to check Bonjardim out. True to his word he sent me a photo that induced envy and hunger and made me curse my pre-wedding diet. This shat on Bébé Bob was his pithy review, delivered via iMessage. It cost him ten Euros.
It’s especially a shame because the peripherals were all terrific. The chicken jus almost made it all worthwhile, so deep and sticky and savoury. Which of course means there was nowhere near enough of it to go round: if it had been up to me there would have been a huge bowl of the stuff, and then I might gladly have foregone the chicken. I wondered if the chicken jus was specifically Landais chicken jus, not that it would have justified the thirty-nine quid,
Also excellent was the truffled cauliflower cheese – burnished and brilliantly moreish with a good whiff of truffle without being overpowering. It had to be good for nine quid, but it pretty much was. Although to be fair, by that point after a day in Soho I might have been anaesthetised to the point where the cost of things didn’t properly register with me. It’s only money, after all. And I rather liked the potatoes, which were roasted in chicken fat. They looked when they turned up like they might be a little anaemic, carvery-grade stuff, but feeling the golden shell crack under a knife I realised they were the real deal.
It felt like a little bit of a waste not having dessert, but we both felt like we’d dented our wallets enough and the Elizabeth Line was calling to us. In any event, I wouldn’t have called the dessert menu plentiful either, as out of the seven desserts on offer one was a pair of chocolate truffles, a second was a shot of lemon infused vodka and a third was lemon sorbet with – yes, you’ve guessed – a shot of vodka. That gives you four proper desserts, one of which is a brownie: no wonder we passed.
And that’s when we had that ouch moment that comes in some restaurants, the moment when even though all the prices are clearly displayed throughout and you know exactly what you’re ordering, the bill arrived. Our meal for two – a bottle of wine, two starters, two chickens, two sides and some mineral water – came to just over a hundred and ninety pounds, including service. We knew it would be that much, we ordered the holy grail of chicken, nobody mugged us in an alleyway, but still. We also both mentally tracked back many of the meals we’d ordered and loved over the last few years. The vast majority of them cost less than Bébé Bob.
So that was the end of ChickenFest 2024. We hopped on the train and headed back west full of chicken and equally full of questions. Was Bébé Bob a good restaurant, an average one or a bit of a rip-off? Even as I sit down to tap out the final paragraphs on this review I’m still not entirely sure. It’s a great example of how a restaurant is more than the sum of its parts because as theatre, as an experience, I loved Bébé Bob’s silliness. The starters were decent but small, the chicken was decent but too expensive. What does that amount to? What does it all mean?
Well, search me. I imagine ninety-five per cent of you will look at the mark at the bottom and think it doesn’t reflect the meal I had, but I don’t even know what I think of the meal I had, not even now. I’ve rarely been to a restaurant that so unapologetically makes you take it on its own terms. I’m glad I went once – it’s only money – but I can’t imagine I’d ever go again. If you went and had, in the immortal words of Franck Eggelhoffer, the cheaper chicken, you might emerge having spent less and still had a very creditable meal.
But is that the point, and even then would it be enough when you think of all the excellent restaurants a stone’s throw from Golden Square? Maybe not. Bébé Bob, like Soho House, is a peek into another world, a vision of a life where most of the people there have considerably more money than I do. It was fun to visit: I had a blast. But it was even nicer to come home afterwards.
Bébé Bob – 7.0 37 Golden Square, London, W1F 9LB 020 72421000
Last May, in a bit of a departure for the blog, I reviewed two chicken places in London back to back: Portuguese Casa do Frango, just off Regent Street, and fried chicken specialists Chick ‘N’ Sours in Covent Garden. It was a day of excess with my good friend – and chicken obsessive, naturally – James, in what we dubbed ChickenFest, and we resolved at the start of the year to make it an annual event. That’s how we ended up, on a Friday in April, perched at a table in Soho, ready to do it all over again.
We had wound up in Coqfighter, because my research had suggested that it was very much an equivalent of Chick ‘N’ Sours. It started out in Boxpark, both in Croydon and Shoreditch, before opening a bricks and mortar site five years ago – on Beak Street, which is presumably an accident but a happy accident nonetheless. The reviews I’d seen had been complimentary, although more than one was comped, and they led me to expect a more stripped-down menu than at Chick ‘N’ Sours, but one done very well. Coqfighter also boasts an Instagram feed that would make most people ravenous: it certainly had that effect on me.
In the course of writing this review I went back and looked at quite a few reviews from other people, and it’s strange that literally not a single one told you anything about the room. I wonder why that is, because for me it was the wrong side of the line between functional and dysfunctional. The façade was pitch black, and beyond it the front room was very unprepossessing, One wall was gleaming white metro tiles, the other a vague terra cotta, but everything else was black too.
The furniture was also strange: little black tables, each with a couple of low little black backless stools. There was a second room out back, but it was further from the daylight and far dingier, so we decided against it. From Google image searches the tables used to be longer, communal things: that may or may not be your idea of hell, but I just felt far too old for these kind of seats. Where were you meant to put your coat? I never thought a restaurant would make me feel nostalgic about wedging my well-padded posterior into the ubiquitous Tolix chair, but Coqfighter managed it.
Coqfighter’s menu is more Honest Burgers than Chick ‘N’ Sours, all main courses and sides, no starters. Chicken came in all its permutations: burgers, wings, tenders, fried on the bone and a couple of half roast chicken options. Sides, unless they were also made of chicken – which the best sides might well be, come to think of it – consisted of a couple of types of fries, two different kinds of sweetcorn, coleslaw and a cucumber and sesame salad.
Not inspirational stuff, and I certainly didn’t see anything to rival Chick ‘N’ Sours’ profoundly good chicken toasts. But if you like fried chicken, as James and I surely did, there was plenty here to appreciate. Keenly priced, too: the most expensive dishes were twelve pounds or thereabouts, sides roughly a fiver. Coqfighter’s beer is made by Orbit, so we both had a two-thirds of their house lager and a couple of sodas while we made up our mind. The beer, really, was indistinguishable from a good macro lager like the one I’d had at the Moderation a couple of weeks before. The sodas were a surprise hit – James loved his raspberry lemonade and my sour cherry soda, more sweet than sour, was a real delight.
We ran into headwinds when we placed our order, or rather tried to. I’d earmarked a burger, so I ordered that with no problem. But James fancied the Thai style half roast chicken, Coqfighter’s take on gai yang with soy, ginger and lemongrass, only to be told by our server that it wouldn’t be ready for another forty-five minutes. This was at a quarter to one: were we happy to wait? We weren’t, so James went for his second choice, a two piece of drumstick and thigh on the bone with miso butter gravy.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t do that any more. We’re meant to be taking it off the menu.”
I have to say our server was lovely, friendly and attentive and she later told us, when we were settling up, that it was only her second day in the job. And I did feel for her, sent out to have difficult conversations with customers about how one section of the menu wasn’t available at lunchtime while another dish wasn’t available full stop. Nonplussed, James picked his third and fourth choices instead, and although he was ultra polite, as he always is, I could tell he was a little unimpressed.
Still, you can only order from the menu in front of you on the day and you can only review what you’ve ordered. With that in mind, I think I got the best of things with the chicken burger. The texture was spot on, the coating crunchy and crenellated, and I’m always happy to see a sesame seed bun rather than brioche. The menu doesn’t say whether it was thigh or breast but I think it was the former, which would always be my preference. And the plus of it being fairly compact was that you could actually pick it up and eat it without disgracing yourself or having to resort to the infra dig spectacle of using a knife and fork.
Those were the pluses. But the downside of it being compact was that it didn’t resemble any pictures of Coqfighter’s burgers I’d seen, either on their social media or other reviews. Usually the chicken offered a huge amount of elevation and poked out untidily from either side of the bun as if the bun simply couldn’t contain it, the extraneous bits practically asking to be nibbled. No such joy here. I’d chosen the honey ginger buffalo burger, thinking that it combined three of my favourite things in one magical sauce, but the end result was out of kilter, more sweetness than bite. And what was it with the sauce oozing out on to the plate like a perforated egg yolk? It just made it soggier than it should have been.
James’ tenders, which are the kind of thing I always order in places like this, also looked the part but couldn’t convincingly play the part. They were nearly there but not quite, and it was all about the texture. “The seasoning of these is actually spot on” said James, “but they don’t have the crunch. They needed a little longer in the fryer.” I thought James was being fair: my instant reaction, to be honest, was that KFC does these every bit as well,
This is also the point to mention the dips because we went crazy with these and again, they promised so much but didn’t live up to it. So we had a Korean hot sauce which tasted neither hot nor Korean, and a Korean barbecue sauce which was about as Korean as I am. Neither had ever been anywhere near any gochujang, as far as I could tell: is it just the fashion now to dub things Korean when they’re nothing of the sort? Neither of these was any better than the contents of a little plastic cuboid tub from KFC or McDonalds. We also had a sambal mayo which I imagine did both sambal and mayo a disservice, and some kind of ranch thing.
“I’m pretty sure I saw them all coming out plastic bottles” was James’ observation: he had a better view of that than I did. None of them livened up the chips, which were bought in and dreary. I spotted a few grey patches on mine, which made me leave a fair amount of them, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out. Apparently they are “tossed in our house shake”, but their house shake appeared to be some kind of acrid combination of paprika and dust.
James had also gone for the wings, because he believes that chicken on the bone is always the best way to check any restaurant’s chicken. He didn’t mind these, and they were tossed not sauced – he has firmly held beliefs that this is The Only Way – but had the same kind of feedback as me about the honey ginger buffalo sauce, It tried to be three things at once and failed at all of them.
We agreed to compare notes properly on our debrief in the pub, but even from the conversation we had in the restaurant, the expressions and raised eyebrows, I had an inkling we were on the same page. Keen to get on with our day and put any disappointment behind us we settled up: it came to sixty pounds, including tip.
After a wander and a shop, we grabbed a table at the French House and a large bottle of Breton cider and carried out the post mortem. It was mid-afternoon, the time I like the French House best, and the pub was starting to fill with the kind of characters who only seem to exist in the French House at three in the afternoon. Where did they live the rest of the time? I’d missed Soho, it had been far too long.
“The funny thing is, they were doing a lot of Deliveroo” said James. “I think I must have seen eight different riders turn up in the time we’ve been having lunch.” He was right, and at least a couple had been the same rider twice – either that, or it was a glitch in the Matrix.
“In fairness, if you could eat one of those burgers at your desk you’d probably feel like you were winning at life.” I said. I had a momentary flashback to a time many years and a lifetime ago when a colleague and I picked up a family bucket from KFC, took it back to work and ate it at our desks. It was worth the funny looks we got from the people in the lift. Perhaps we should have offered them a drumstick.
“I just think about Bristol,” said James, “and the chicken at Wings Diner. It’s miles better than this.”
“And I know you didn’t rate the branch of Eat The Bird that’s opened in Bristol, but the one in Exeter was also a different level to Coqfighter.”
“I think Chick ‘N’ Sours is better than this, too.”
I took a glug of my cider and weighed up the pros and cons. I thought about that sesame chicken toast, and how nearly a year on I still remembered it.
“I think you’re right.”
So there you have it: on a simplistic level this is Bristol 1, London 0 but to bring it back to Reading – where I live – Coqfighter isn’t good enough to justify a trip to London, not even if you’re a chicken-fixated eccentric on an annual pilgrimage like James and me. It does highlight, though, that Reading is still missing someone who does this really well: that’s why, when I did my guide to how to avoid chains last week, I didn’t propose an alternative to KFC.
There’s good fried chicken at Clay’s, at Soju, at The Bap, but there’s nothing in the genre of Southern fried chicken to write home about (and yes, I’ve tried Popeyes). You only get that when Gurt Wings comes to town, which is about once a month. I think the new Siren tap room is missing a trick not specialising in this: instead they’re leading with burgers, which feels more of a 2014 Big Idea than a 2024 one. Still, I’m sure they know what they’re doing.
Never mind. Just as the best way to cope with the post holiday blues is to book the next one, the best way to handle this disappointment was also to look to the future. So James and I talked it over, over a second bottle of Breton cider, and decided: next year we’re going to widen the scope of ChickenFest to include duck. We’ll call it PoultryFest, we’ve got it all figured out. The thing is, as we wandered through Chinatown I saw some fine specimens in the windows of several restaurants, and I figured it was time to diversify. It’s important, after all, not to get too set in your ways.
In 2013, the first year of this blog, I reviewed the grand total of fourteen Reading restaurants (don’t hold it against me, I only started in August). And there must have been something about those very first venues, because the majority of them are still going strong: Picasso, The Warwick, The Lobster Room, Kyklos and Forbury’s are no longer with us but the other nine are still going over ten years later. I won’t list them all because I don’t want to jinx anything in the here and now – 2024 is hard enough as it is – but you get the idea: for those restaurants still to be trading, a decade on, is truly no mean feat.
But time has passed and those reviews have become increasingly out of date; they might have reflected what a restaurant was like back in those days, when I wasn’t yet forty and mistakenly thought I had the rest of my life figured out, but you couldn’t necessarily use them now with confidence. So over the last couple of years I’ve been gradually revisiting the survivors from the class of 2013 to write new reviews and see how it all went so gloriously right. And generally, with the exception of Zero Degrees, I’ve had some good meals in the process.
Not only that, but I’ve left some of those Reading institutions delighted that they’re still with us. In a world where everything seems to change beyond recognition, more and faster, with every passing day, I was relieved to find that London Street Brasserie, for instance, was still a reliable benchmark in the centre of town. I was pleased that Pepe Sale, at the time freshly under new management, was recognisable as the place I had so loved on my first ever review. And returning to Café Yolk I found that the slightly iffy brunch place I wrote off eleven years ago had blossomed into a polished and Instagrammable performer.
All those places were older and wiser, as you would expect: I, on the other hand, was probably just older, but you can’t win them all. And that brings us to the subject of this week’s review, The Moderation, a place I really should have revisited long before now. When I went there in December 2013 I remember thinking they’d had an off night, because I’d eaten there a few times before that visit and always enjoyed it. I tried to say something to that effect in my review, but ultimately I was a little underwhelmed.
Back then the Moderation was part of a little chain, under the name Spirit House, along with the Warwick Arms on Kings Road, now closed. I’m pretty sure that at one time or another that group also included The Queens Head up on Christchurch Green and even the Lyndhurst, in a far earlier incarnation. The theme with those places was that they did pub food with a sideline in Thai food, as was the fashion ten years ago, and when I went to the Moderation on duty I found it a little unspecial, not bad by any means perhaps not quite as good as the Warwick in the centre of town.
In the intervening ten years I’ve been back a few times, but only really for drinks. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Moderation’s garden, a natural suntrap that never seems to get the plaudits it deserves, but the location has always been a little tricky for me: if I’m in that area I’m probably at Phantom instead, and if I was crossing into Caversham I’d wind up at the Last Crumb. So despite being fond of the Moderation I’ve made it there rarely.
I’m also not sure I’d have been entirely welcome there anyway, because I blotted my copy book with them a few years ago. It was in the run up to the 2019 General Election, when the Tories had selected car crash candidate Craig Morley to fight Reading East and he turned up in the constituency, not a place he knew well by the sounds of it, with Sajid Javid for a spot of campaigning. They were photographed pulling pints behind the bar at the Mod before scooting over to the Caversham Butcher, presumably to massage some gammon, and I’m afraid I might have been less than my usual diplomatic self about that on social media.
Anyway, there’s been a lot of water under Caversham Bridge since then. Craig Morley is now just a surreal footnote in Reading’s history, I’ve been known to purchase the occasional sausage at the Caversham Butcher and I reckoned it was about time I reassessed the Moderation. After all, Alok Sharma visited But Is It Art in the summer of 2020, maskless, less than a week after displaying Covid symptoms in the House Of Commons, and I still buy all my birthday cards there. So last Saturday I headed there with my old friend Dave, visiting from sunny Swindon, to honour a reservation we’d made – in his name, just to be on the safe side.
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