Tag: Dave

Restaurant review: Lapin, Bristol

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

This might come as a surprise to you – probably not – but for the best part of the last fifteen years my friends and I have regularly taken part in something called Poncefest. Nope, not a misprint. The idea was to take a day off, invariably a Friday, and go into London together for a bit of shopping, always for fragrance, followed by a fancy lunch somewhere, then falling into a pub before getting the train home. Something like the Finer Things Club from the American version of The Office, only even finer.

Having sacrificed whatever credibility I might have had with that opening paragraph, I may as well explain. So yes, these trips usually involved shopping at one of London’s great fragrance shops – Bloom or Les Senteurs – and then a gorgeous, drawn out lunch. We’ve done Medlar in Chelsea, Soho’s famous Andrew Edmunds, Portland in Fitzrovia, Calum Franklin’s renowned pies at Holborn Dining Room and doubtless other places I’ve forgotten. We’ve even been to Oxford, enjoying a very pleasant lunch at Pompette one Friday towards the end of the year, exchanging Christmas presents and cards and eating brilliantly.

The members of the Guild Of Ponces – because I’m afraid that’s what we call ourselves – have fluctuated over time. It started as Al, Dave, Jimmy and I, but then Jimmy fell by the wayside and my stepfather Ian decided to join our number. He chose to drop out after a while, but by then we had also recruited my friend James, a man who didn’t need to seek out the ponce life, because the ponce life found him.

Like the Spice Girls, we each have our own unique identity. Al is Sartorial Ponce, because he’s always immaculately dressed: the man’s had his colours done, for goodness’ sake. Dave is Reluctant Ponce, to denote the fact that he always complains about the whole affair but secretly loves it.

Jimmy, back in the day, was Pub Ponce, and in charge for picking the post-lunch boozer. Ian, who knows more about Apple products than many people who actually work there, was Tech Ponce, and James is Preppy Ponce – or Neophyte Ponce, a title our newest member always gets, like the Baby Of The House, or New Guy in Loudermilk.

I, of course, am Grand Master Ponce. Would you expect anything else by now? Mock all you like – I’m immune these days, thanks to my childhood years in chess club and Dungeons & Dragons club (both hobbies, too late for me, are cool now). I unapologetically love Poncefests. They’ve always been a lovely miniature escape in the year, when my friends and I can catch up, more than slightly aware of how ridiculous the premise is.

Anyway, that was all well and good, but then Covid happened, and it all went quiet for Poncefest. A risk averse eighteen months meant that I saw my fellow ponces sporadically, and never all at the same time. Even after things unlocked, for some reason we were never all in the same place at once. We were like the Beatles, or the Pythons, without the acrimony. I lunched with Dave and Al a few times – once even for this blog – but a Poncefest proved elusive.

Of course, all the ponces were there for my and Zoë’s joint stag and hen do last year in Bruges, and at the wedding too, but both were part of a bigger gathering rather than a reunion per se. And then James went and put a spanner in the works by being seconded to India for nine months, and those gatherings, now five years dormant, felt more of a distant prospect than ever. So I was absolutely delighted when he returned to Blighty in the spring and talk on our WhatsApp group (the logo is a picture of Niles and Frasier Crane holding up a sign saying WILL WORK FOR LATTES) turned to getting the band back together. Would it happen?

It may not surprise you to hear that it did, and one sunny Saturday morning at the start of May I found myself bimbling round sunny Clifton, really looking forward to a long overdue luncheon. I’d bumped into people I knew outside Hart’s Bakery, straight off the train, before taking a bus to Bristol’s prettiest, if most unreal district. I stopped for a latte in the sunshine outside a little kiosk called Can’t Dance Coffee, before walking in wonder through Birdcage Walk, too taken with the glimmer of the sun through the foliage to realise I was, in fact, going in the wrong direction.

After an amble through Clifton, past the spot where I was born – it’s now been turned into flats – I found myself ruminating on all the different paths my life might have taken, and how many of them involved me never having left Bristol, or leaving but coming back to live here. Too much time alone always has this effect on me, so I grabbed a bench in the Mall Gardens, put something relaxing on my headphones and got lost in my library book. Not long after Al joined me and, because old habits died hard, we stopped in Shy Mimosa, Bristol’s excellent perfume shop, before grabbing a coffee and a taxi to our lunch venue.

Lapin was back in the centre of the city, in Wapping Wharf, a part of Bristol I knew and knew of but had almost never eaten in, unless you count a slightly underwhelming pizza at Bristol institution Bertha’s. Most of it is shipping containers, stacked two storeys high, and it boasts some of Bristol’s biggest names. Bravas‘ sibling Gambas is there, as are the likes of Root and Box-E. This year it’s been bolstered with three big names: Gurt Wings, who opened at the start of the year, to an apparently shaky start; COR‘s younger sibling RAGÙ and Lapin, which is the second site behind the owners of Totterdown’s BANK.

I should stress, by the way, that all those irksome block capitals are their choice, not mine: I guess in a city with as many good restaurants fighting for punters’ cash maybe they feel the need to shout. In any event, I’d chosen Lapin for a couple of reasons – partly because as a French restaurant it seemed especially appropriate for such a gathering and partly because it was shiny and new. On the day we visited it had been open exactly a month, by which time it had already received not one but two reviews from Mark Taylor, Bristol’s resident Reach plc hack. I on the other hand gave it a month to settle in, because that’s what I do.

It was a very warm day and Wapping Wharf was full of people younger, thinner and less fearful of hangovers than me, many of them sitting outside either at Lapin or its neighbours Gambas and Cargo Cantina. The place had the glow of youth, of sunlight diffused through an Aperol Spritz, but because I partly wanted to get a sense for the room we sat inside. Dave was already there – slightly early, because he is Dave – and James joined us shortly after, slightly later than us, because he is James. The natural order was very much in place.

The dining room, by the way, is rather nice. I think the nicest thing I can say about it is that you could easily forget that you were eating in a few shipping containers joined together. I tend to associate them with street food or Boxpark, with places you don’t linger, so I was glad that they’d turned these into a very convivial space, and one where there was quite enough daylight coming in from the big floor to ceiling windows. It was pretty no-frills, but just tasteful enough: sage walls, framed retro prints, tasteful overhead lights, sturdy, timeless furniture. No Tolix chairs to jam my arse into, I’m delighted to say.

Lapin’s menu was that especially challenging kind that felt like it contained no poor choices. Half a dozen starters, or a whole baked cheese to share, and another seven mains, again with three sharing options. On another day you would be reading about asparagus with sauce gribiche, confit duck with a spring cassoulet – whatever that is – Provençal fish stew or deep fried rabbit leg: the latter turned up at a neighbouring table towards the end of our meal and made me wish I could go back and start again.

Starters stopped just short of fifteen pounds, mains ranged more widely from just under twenty to just over thirty. The sharers were more expensive – côte de boeuf, for instance, clocking in at ninety-five pounds – sides were about a fiver, desserts just shy of a tenner. Little of that, in 2025, is especially shocking. The menu, under a section marked Accoutrements, gave you an option to add a spoon of caviar or a shaving of truffle to any of your dishes, and I was surprised by that: in a place defined by taste and tastefulness it felt – dare I say it? I guess I do – ever so slightly tacky.

But before the main event, drinks and nibbles. Lapin’s selection of apéritifs was tempting and extensive, and I think the four of us chose roughly in line with our ponciness. Al, easily the most refined, kept it classic with a Lillet Blanc. James and I, the next level down, had a cidre – Galipette – which was awfully nice, although now I’ve discovered you can buy it from Waitrose and Ocado I almost want to salute Lapin for their exorbitant markup. Dave, though, chose best with something called a demi peche, a keller pils with peach syrup. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it: Dave recreated it the following weekend at home, which was an exceptionally good idea.

We had a quartet of Comte gougères with that, and I thought they were decent but perhaps not too inspiring. The filling was good, the carpeting of finely grated cheese always welcome but the pastry itself lacked the lightness of touch it needed. At twelve pounds for these, I couldn’t help but compare them with the gorgeous cheddar curd fritters I’d had at Upstairs At Landrace a few weeks before, which had cost significantly less.

Now, when I review in a pair I always feel like I have to have something different to my dining companion, to present a range of dishes. That’s less of an issue in a bigger group, so as it turned out Dave and James ordered the same starters and mains, as did Al and I. Even at the time, I have to admit that I was thinking This is the life, I’m in a lovely restaurant with three of my favourite people, the wine is flowing… and I have less to write up than I might have done. Unworthy I know, but there it is.

Dave and James were pleased with their starter, I think. A puck of deep fried pig’s head was the good part, and the forkful I had was great. Plonking a forest floor of chicory and dandelion on top of it, though, was less successful. I don’t think either is really anybody’s favourite salad ingredient – not as pointless as frisée, but not far off – and the nicest croutons in the world aren’t going to redeem that.

Al’s and my starter was similarly along the right lines but not at its destination. I adore rillette, I adore rabbit, the prospect of rabbit rillette was a nailed-down choice for me. And it was pretty pleasant – clean and ascetic rather than punchy and rustic. I loved the carrot jam, and thought the dish could have stood a bit more of it. The bread, I’m sorry to say, was unremarkable. And somehow the whole thing combined to less than the sum of its parts, even with a few rogue cornichons secreted away.

This dish troubled me, if that isn’t a silly way to put it, because I should have loved it and I’m not sure why I didn’t. It felt too nice, too well-behaved, like an attempt to create a platonic ideal of a dish rather than the dish itself. As it happened, I was of course in France the week after I ate at Lapin, but it wasn’t the meals I had in Montpellier that came to mind when I weighed up this rabbit rillette. It was the unforced, unshowy kind of dishes I had earlier in the year, at Paulette.

We also, out of pure greed, ordered another starter to attack between the four of us. Duck liver parfait was, again, a pleasant, glossy little number, hiding in its ramekin under a layer of cherry. The menu called it “pickled stone fruit” but really, it wasn’t clear that any pickling had taken place. Again, this was nice rather than knockout – and, again, it highlighted that Lapin’s bread wasn’t the best. And that you could have done with more of it.

By this point, whatever misgivings I might have had about the starters, our meal was in full swing. There’s something lovely about that interplay with good friends – that mixture of catching up and reminiscing, of mild ribbing and in-jokes. All that was helped by an extremely good bottle of wine – a Languedoc white by Domaine Montplezy, not bone dry with notes of peach and citrus.

As it happens, I found that wine the following weekend in Montpellier at the wine shop round the corner from our B&B. We bought a bottle and again that means I got a good idea of Lapin’s markups, which are considerable. But perhaps that misses the point, and perhaps ordering a whole bottle of something does too: one of the things that is genuinely impressive about Lapin is that its whole wine list is available by the glass. Someone has spent a fair amount of money with Coravin, and it gives you an enviable range of choices compared to most restaurants I can think of.

If the starters were a little wobbly, the mains are where Lapin became far more sure-footed. My and Al’s skate wing was a really joyous plate of food, served in a vadouvin butter rather than the conventional beurre noisette that so often accompanies this fish. And that in itself was interesting – vadouvin is a mild curried sauce that originates from the French colonial period and you could almost taste in it the intersection between traditional and colonial French.

It wasn’t a conventional brown butter sauce dotted with capers, and instead came topped with monk’s beard, but in it you could sense some of the DNA it shared with the classic dish. It was little like those pavement cafés in Marrakesh’s Ville Nouvelle that, despite being stuck on the edge of northern Africa, feel like they carry some echo of Paris. I wouldn’t pick this over a more traditional rendition, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it.

James and Dave went for perhaps a more mainstream option from the menu, a whole truffle roasted poussin with a Madeira jus. This, to me, was probably a stronger choice – the truffle present but not dominating, the meat beautifully cooked and that jus setting off the whole shooting match. James very generously let me try some, and although I enjoyed it it didn’t make me wish I had ordered it.

That tells its own story, I guess, that I still wondered whether the real gem was elsewhere on the menu, undiscovered. But again, that might tell you more about me than Lapin: I can already picture Dave, at some point over the weekend, reading this review and thinking What is he going on about? That poussin was amazing.

The sides were a weird inversion of the natural order and a good example of how expectations can be completely confounded. The menu offers duck fat frites, and all four of us could think of nothing finer. But when we went to order four portions our server – who was excellent, as all the staff at Lapin were – suggested ever so nicely that this might be a bit monotonous and that we might want to mix it up a bit with some pomme purée.

So we did that, and were rewarded with an experience that is pretty much solely worth visiting Lapin to enjoy. The duck fat frites were decent rather than exceptional, but compared to the pomme purée they became more like “fuck that” frites. Because the pomme purée – no hint of hyperbole here I promise – was one of the best things I’ve eaten in years. Loaded with butter until it could take no more, than bathed in more brown butter, it took on a taste and texture that transcended savoury or sweet, almost with a note of toffee, or fudge.

Al told our server, when the empty dishes were taken away, that you could have served it as a dessert. He wasn’t far off: it was truly magnificent stuff.

Before dessert, three of us had an intermediate course, the Trou Normand. This is a Normandy tradition, a palate cleanser consisting of apple sorbet anointed with apple brandy. It was very good indeed, the sorbet smooth and hyper-real with the taste of apple.

The apple brandy, from Somerset, was excellent too. The menu said that you could add a glass of Calvados for an extra four pounds, although it wasn’t clear whether you would get Calvados on the side or whether the apple brandy would be swapped out for Calvados.

Whichever it was, the pricing of this felt a little awry: eight pounds felt like a lot, twelve in total for Calvados would have been like, well, like paying an extra thirteen pounds to dump a spoonful of caviar, randomly, on your main course.

Before dessert proper we’d also decided to push the boat out and order a bottle of dessert wine. Dave doesn’t do wine these days – he stayed on his demi peche during dinner – but he makes an exception for dessert wine. Again many of the dessert wines are available by the glass, and the menu pairs one with each of the desserts, but we couldn’t resist. Lapin also offered two really tempting bottles – a Rivesaltes Ambré 1978 for a slightly ridiculous amount or a 1992 vintage of the same wine for eighty pounds. Don’t judge, but we had the latter, and it was ambrosial.

Our server explained, in a “look what you could have won” kind of a way, that by most standards 1992 was still quite young for this wine but we were very happy with our choice nevertheless.

“1992, the year we met” said Dave to me, as we took our first heavenly sips. Suddenly I felt like however old the wine was, I was older still. But in any case there was much to celebrate, so I thoroughly enjoyed a wine as old as one of my oldest friendships. The wine has aged well, the friendship even better.

We tried a decent range of the desserts. I think on this occasion Al and I chose best with the St. Emilion au chocolat. I’ve never heard it called that before but it was an extremely nicely done ganache, a not ungenerous portion of it, topped, I think, with crumbled amaretti biscuit and served simply with terrific crème fraiche. I was always going to gravitate towards this dessert and, however good the others were, I would struggle not to order it again.

I think the other candidates were more workmanlike. Dave enjoyed the pain perdu with apple and vanilla ice cream, again crumbled with the good stuff to lend texture, with a shiny, sticky sauce. I expect if I ordered it I would have liked it too, and I imagine it went better with the dessert wine, in terms of colour coordination if for no other reason, than my overdose of chocolate did.

James ordered the Basque cheesecake, but neglected to take a picture. In fairness, you probably know what a Basque cheesecake looks like. Imagine one of those, with some rhubarb on the side. That’s what James had. He liked it, and Dave reminded me that it’s ridiculously easy to make which is why he never orders it in restaurants. I still have the WhatsApp message he sent me, with the recipe, favourited on my phone. One of these days.

Al is legendary for ordering two desserts, very much following in the footsteps of the great Nora Ephron who always held that this was one of the most important life lessons she ever learned. Technically if you count the Trou Normand and about a quarter of the Éclair Suzette we ordered to share between us, this meal constituted a personal best.

We’d ordered the éclair on the advice of our server and again, it had some nice touches – the candied orange on top, the Grand Marnier infused crème diplomat inside. But again, Lapin’s touch with the choux let it down. It was leaden rather than ethereal, and took some sawing through. As a finishing touch to the meal it summed up some of the inconsistencies, and gave me something to think about.

Our meal for four, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just shy of five hundred and twenty pounds. Now, after you’ve had your sharp intake of breath, I have to say that doesn’t feel like poor value, at all, for what we had. We had something like five courses each, and even then we threw in a couple of extra things to try. We had apéritifs and two bottles of wine, one of which was from the deeper end of the list.

All things considered, I think about one hundred and thirty pounds each isn’t at all bad, for the afternoon we had. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you should feel like you get this much living for it. It made me feel sad for my poor friend Jerry, parting with a hundred pounds for an infinitely less enjoyable meal at Gee’s not too long ago. Besides, expense be damned: this was Poncefest, it’s not like we were going to settle for a Happy Meal.

You might ask, given all that, why the rating down there is what it is. You might feel that this reads higher than that, or lower, and I would have some sympathy. When I think of meals I’ve had in Bristol, Lapin is really pretty good. But something stops it, for me, being in that upper echelon, with the likes of Caper and Cure, or Marmo. Or, if you’re comparing French meals with French meals, something prevents it reaching the standard of Paulette.

I keep coming back to that rabbit rillette, pretty close to being an eponymous dish for this restaurant. I keep remembering that it was nice and clean and pure and rarefied. And it’s not because Lapin is in a shipping container, because as I said the place managed to make me completely forget that. But Lapin, for all its excellent qualities, ever so slightly felt, to me, like a brilliant piece of cosplay, more than a French restaurant.

You could say that there’s nothing wrong with that, and I might agree. But that’s what stopped it, as far as I was concerned, attaining true greatness. I wouldn’t rule it out that at some point they will get there, and I imagine enough people in Bristol will rave about it to sustain it on that journey. In the meantime, it has a single dish that almost merits a pilgrimage, even if it’s a mere side, and it played host to a marvellous, long overdue reunion. When the ponces assemble next – in a suitably effete way, I can assure you – Lapin has set a standard we’ll be very lucky to exceed.

Lapin – 8.6
Unit 14, Cargo 2, Museum St, Bristol, BS1 6ZA
0117 4084997

https://www.lapinbristol.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Upstairs At Landrace, Bath

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was not something I heard every day.

“What’s so special about it?”

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://landrace.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Kopitiam, Oxford

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Here’s a question for you – if you had decided to have lunch at a restaurant, and you knew for a fact that it didn’t take reservations, when would you get there, all things being equal? Would you turn up when it opened, bang on noon, or would you arrive early and be at the front of the queue? Or would you aim for about half one, to capitalise on the end of the lunch rush? Would it bother you, or make you anxious, or would you be blasé about the whole thing? Would you have a backup plan?

This wasn’t a hypothetical situation, because last weekend I was in Oxford with my old friend Dave and his son Leo, and I was set on having lunch at Kopitiam, a Malaysian restaurant in Summertown that received a glowing review from Tom Parker Bowles in the Mail On Sunday last December. But it didn’t take bookings, and Summertown is about a forty minute walk from the centre, so what to do?

This highlighted something of a philosophical schism between Dave and me. He would gladly have been there before the clock struck noon, ready to take the first table in the whole restaurant. “I prepare for things precisely so I don’t get anxious” he explained, although I suspected we both did equal amounts of worrying about stuff, just at different times. For my part, I thought turning up around half twelve would be more than sufficient. I knew it was Saturday lunchtime, but how busy could the place be?

It grieves me to admit that Dave was right and I was wrong: turning up bang on half past, we found every table occupied and the restaurant heaving. There were two tables out front, both with the standard-issue Tolix chairs in place, but it wasn’t quite warm enough for that kind of thing. So we went over the road to the excellent Colombia Coffee Roasters, sipped a latte and I kept a restless eye on the footfall heading to and from Kopitiam.

“It’s okay mate, if it’s still full we can always just go to Pompette a few doors down, or the pizza place on this road” said Dave equably. I didn’t understand what was going on: why was he so chilled about this after he’d been proven right? Why wasn’t he saying I told you so, the way I would have done had our roles been reversed? Honestly, you’re friends with someone for over thirty years but some days it’s like you just don’t know them at all. Leo, just turned 18 and off to Durham at the end of the month to start his history degree, sensibly stayed out of this one, and got to work on his mocha instead.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end. Half an hour later we went back and a number of tables were unoccupied, so we ensconced ourselves. The fact that so many tables had cleared so quickly suggested this was a functional lunch spot, not somewhere to linger, but we were too happy to have found space to be bothered by that.

The room was functional too – but in a way that worked, with plain, standard issue chairs and tables, faux exposed brickwork wallpaper and brightly lit pictures of all the dishes up on the wall. Now normally this would set alarm bells ringing, but somehow Kopitiam pulled it off – the saturated photos had an almost Martin Parr feel to them. And equally importantly, they all looked like food you’d actually want to eat.

Kopitiam’s menu was a tad confusing. Or really I should say menus, because you got two with no real indication of the relationship between them. The smaller one looked more Malaysian, the larger more Chinese, but the titles of the two printed menus didn’t exactly explain why this was. The smaller menu had some pictures of the food, the bigger, more generic menu, did not.

Malaysian Street Food And Cafe said the bigger menu, incongruously above the prices for crispy duck, Thai green papaya salad, sesame prawn toasts and edamame. And the same dishes, appeared on both menus in some cases – but where they did, the pricing was not the same. Anyway, on examination the smaller menu looked to be the lunch menu, the larger one the dinner menu – Kopitiam’s website spelled this out, but at the time it was a head-scratcher.

That’s partly because nothing at Kopitiam was expensive, whichever menu you ordered from and whatever it was calling itself. Few starters cost more than eight pounds, most mains on the lunch menu didn’t get north of twelve. Even on the main menu dishes tended to jostle around the ten pound mark, although rice cost extra. It did prompt a lot of discussions and plea bargaining, though, around how to try the best of the menu and what might or might not be representative. I felt, in the back of my mind, like having the Chinese dishes would be copping out.

“Are we having starters as well?” asked Dave.

“You do remember who you’re having lunch with, don’t you?” I said. Honestly, you’re friends with someone for over thirty years and some days it’s like they don’t know you at all: I don’t think the words if it’s okay with you can we skip starters have ever left my lips in all the time I’ve known Dave. And Leo is an enthusiastic eater himself: I remember going to Dolce Vita with him and his dad, back when he was something like ten years old, and watching him charm the socks off the waiters by ordering the monkfish with squid ink pasta and finishing the lot (“we have many adults who don’t try that dish” said our server, rightly impressed).

Our starters came out as we sipped a fiery and enjoyable ginger beer apiece: Kopitiam has no alcohol licence, which didn’t bother me, but also didn’t have any Sarsi (a Malaysian take on root beer), which bothered me far more. They also do a plethora of other Malaysian drinks – kopi, teh tarik and Ying Yang, a blend of coffee and tea which I was tempted to order out of morbid curiosity alone.

First to arrive were lok bak, minced pork wrapped in bean curd skin and then fried until crispy. These were a tactile delight, little brittle-coated nuggets of joy crying out to be dipped in sweet chilli sauce and scoffed. Perfect for sharing, perfect for social eating, perfectly enjoyable. And if I’d never had anything like this before, as I suspect Dave and Leo hadn’t, I would have been waxing lyrical.

But the best can be the enemy of the good, and I kept casting my mind back to a very similar dish at Lucky Lychee the previous month. There the pork was coarse and crumbly, the sweet chilli sauce was home made rather than out of a bottle and I got more of the spicing: Lucky Lychee boasts a ten spice mix, compared to the five spices deployed by Kopitiam. It showed: the Winchester restaurant’s rendition was easily twice as good.

By far the single best thing we ordered was chosen because we saw it at the next table and had to have a piece of the action. It was impossibly rugged-looking fried chicken, and our neighbours somehow had the superhuman (or inhuman, depending on how you view such things) restraint to leave it there, in full view, for something like five minutes without making inroads into it.

I swear that our portion arrived and was dispatched before they finished theirs, and I wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed of that. But it was so, so good. It was half a dozen wings, in a crunchy, gnarled coating which had just the slightest hint of funk from the shrimp sauce used in the marinade. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of wings, especially when they’re sauced or tossed, because for me the reward to faff ratio is out of kilter. But these were an absolute joy to rend and gnaw, to the extent where I wondered if I was giving wings an unduly hard time.

“I think these are the crispiest wings I’ve ever had” said Dave. “I wish we’d ordered a portion each.”

“There’s nothing to stop us ordering more” I said. “We could have them for dessert. Did you know there’s a fish restaurant in Lisbon where you have a steak roll for dessert?”

Dave gave me an indulgent look that said, ever so nicely, why are you like this? But I knew I’d planted the seed about dessert chicken, so I left it at that.

Last of all, we tried a Malaysian staple, the roti canai. Now, I had high hopes for this after reading Tom Parker Bowles’ review. He said they were charred, chewy and as delicate as silk handkerchiefs. Leaving aside the fact that I’m not sure something can be all three of those things at once, Kopitiam’s roti were delicious but more like rolled-up balls of tissue – sorry for the image – than silk handkerchiefs. I liked them, and they were definitely greaseless, but in little clumps they weren’t the easiest to dip into a little bowl of an admittedly delicious curry sauce, with plenty of brooding depth.

Our mains came out while we were still eating our starters. Now, this has happened to me before in a Malaysian restaurant, one called Wau in Newbury that I visited five years ago. And I complained about it in the review, and a few people told me I was being culturally ignorant and that in Malaysian cuisine everything tends to arrive at once. So I won’t moan about that again, even though it wouldn’t be my preferred way to eat. And I suppose it explains why a restaurant that’s full at noon can find room for you thirty minutes later, so swings and roundabouts.

Dave and Leo had both chosen noodle dishes, but more different noodle dishes would be hard to imagine, despite having some of the same ingredients. Dave ordered Kopitiam’s special ho fun with not one, not two, but all of the following: prawns, squid, fish cake and pork. All that and what the menu described as an “egg gravy” on top. Something was surely lost in translation, because the words “egg” and “gravy”, next to one another, don’t scream take my money to me. But Dave seemed to enjoy it.

“The texture is a little… well… it’s kind of like mucus.”

“You can’t say that! I can’t put that in the review.” I said, fully intending to put it in the review.

“Well, it’s tasty mucus.”

“This is the thing, though, with some cuisines I think” I pontificated. “It’s just about us not having frames of reference. So we are generally a bit put off by gelatinous food, but I guess that’s because we associate that texture with sweet stuff. And nobody eats things in savoury jelly any more, apart from pork pies. It’s a tricky one with this kind of food – and it will make this review difficult to write. If you rave on it’s cultural appropriation, if you sound like you don’t understand it you just come across like Nigel Farage.”

“Anyway, I’m not sure if that is a fishcake. It has the same texture as a scallop. Anybody who promises a fishcake and gives you a scallop is okay in my book.”

If Dave’s dish was our one Cantonese foray into the menu, Leo had chosen a Malaysian classic. Hokkien mee was wheat noodles rather than rice noodles, cooked in a darker, stickier sauce with the same mix of surf and turf and with, allegedly, the addition of fried pork lard, although that wasn’t visible to the naked eye. This looked more like it, and Leo polished it off without complaint. I didn’t try it, but I was struck that the noodles were broken and short, and I was grateful that I hadn’t ordered it because with my rudimentary chopstick skills I might well have ended up wearing half of it.

This is where, if I was a proper restaurant reviewer, I’d probably wank on about wok hei, whatever that is. But none of us are kidding ourselves that I am, so I won’t.

Originally I was going to have the beef rendang, because Dave had planned to order the Marmite chicken. But when he changed his mind it was up for grabs, and having enjoyed this dish so much at Lucky Lychee I wanted another bite of the cherry. And really, it was a similar experience to the lok bak – if I’d never had this dish before I probably would have loved it, but I knew how good it could be and so I knew that this fell short.

The texture was magnificent – we’d already established that Kopitiam could fry chicken like nobody’s business – so it wasn’t that. But the sauce was more honey than Marmite, more one note sweetness than harmonised salt and sugar. And there wasn’t a lot of it – what there was coated the chicken, and the chicken had all the crannies and crevices to make that happen, but that was your lot. What that meant was a few bites of reasonably enjoyable but dryish chicken, rendered drier by plain white rice, and not much else.

Partly my fault, perhaps, for ordering it from the lunch menu, and perhaps if I’d ordered a separate helping and a separate bowl of rice I wouldn’t have felt so diddled. But I don’t know, I still think at the end I would have had a whole expanse of naked rice, desperate to be covered with anything. I poured the rest of the sauce from the roti canai onto a little patch of rice and ate that. I left the rest.

“Are you okay mate? You haven’t eaten much of your rice” said Dave.

“There’s nothing to eat it with” I said, gesturing at my plate. Tell a lie: there was a little mound of undressed salad on the plate fighting it out with the rice to be the least appealing, like Robert Jenrick versus Kemi Badenoch. To my mind it was a dead heat.

Once we’d finished our mains I watched the seed I’d planted earlier playing out in Dave’s mind. He still wanted more chicken wings, but he also didn’t want to look like it was his idea.

“So I suppose we aren’t going to have more chicken wings now, are we.”

“We can have more chicken wings if you want them. Do you want more wings, Dave?”

“Well, I’ll have some if somebody else wants some.”

This is the dance you have to do with some people, and my dear old friend is one of them. Fortunately Leo is eighteen and slim and likes food and has no compunctions about it, so he said that yes, he would very much like more of the delicious chicken wings. So Dave flagged down our server, asked for some more and they arrived and we fell on them with no less gusto than the first portion. It was the perfect end to a thoroughly agreeable lunch.

I do have to say too that the service at Kopitiam is absolutely brilliant – I would say the majority of the customers in there were Chinese or Malaysian, but I didn’t feel like a sore thumb, or ever less than extremely well looked after. I guess once you’ve had the King’s stepson in there, you can easily manage plebs like me, one of my oldest friends and the apple of his eye. We settled up – our meal came to just over seventy-five pounds, not including service – and we headed off in the direction of the Rose And Crown on North Parade for a pint and a debrief.

Kopitiam, by the way, is on South Parade, which is further north than North Parade, one of those wonderful paradoxes you sometimes find, like Gary Oldman being younger than Gary Numan.

Whenever I travel a bit further for the blog, I’m aware that the stakes are higher and I try to pick places where I’m pretty certain I’ll have a great meal. “Hey, come and read about this place miles from Reading that isn’t really worth going to!” is not much of a sales pitch, and believe me, I know it. Generally I’ve had decent luck when I’ve travelled to Oxford on duty, and I’ve never reviewed a dud in the city. And I wish I could offer a more ringing endorsement of Kopitiam, but I don’t think I can.

Not that I’m saying Kopitiam is a dud. It’s not a bad restaurant, the service is brilliant and some of what I ate was excellent, but I don’t know that it’s worth travelling to Oxford to try unless you are really passionate about Malaysian food. And perhaps Malaysian food isn’t where they’re at their strongest: I saw items from the more Cantonese side of the menu turning up at other tables and the roast duck, skin all lacquered, invoked particular regret.

But also, if you do like Malaysian food and you’re taking a trip away from Reading I would say to take the train south-west, stop at Winchester and make your weekend by eating at Lucky Lychee. And if you’re in Oxford, better options exist. One of them, in the shape of Pompette, is literally the other side of the road. And you can book a table for whenever you like, which some people – and it turns out I’m one of them – seem rather to like. So there you have it. Kopitiam may not take reservations, but I’m afraid I had enough for the both of us.

Kopitiam – 7.0
Suffolk House, 19 South Parade, Summertown, Oxford, OX2 7HN
01865 454388

https://kopitiamoxford.co.uk

Pub review: The Moderation

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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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Restaurant review: Pick Up Point, Swindon

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Pick Up Point closed in July 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

At the end of last summer, in a move which surprised me as much as anybody, I got on a train and went to boldly review where no blog had been before. Swindon, to be precise. I voyaged to Swindon’s Old Town and found a brilliant enclave of great coffee, craft beer, ice cream along with a Victorian park that made the Forbury look a tad lacking. And I also found, returning to Old Town institution Los Gatos, a superb tapas restaurant of exactly the kind Reading has always lacked. I loved the whole experience, and I promised myself I’d be back before too long.

It took me four months, but last weekend I found myself in Swindon again, alighting at its unloveable station and walking round the corner to grab a bus into Old Town, one bound for the splendidly named Middle Wichel. It wasn’t exactly the same personnel as last time – I was seeing my old friend Dave, but our mutual friend Al couldn’t join us. And it wasn’t the same itinerary, either: the last time I was in Swindon summer was rallying one final time and you could eat ice cream opposite Ray’s, have an al fresco coffee in the Town Gardens. On this visit, we had to forego those pleasures, but even the regret of having to do so reminded me how fetching Old Town is when the weather is fine.

Never mind. Many of the fundamentals were unchanged. I met Dave at the brilliant Pour Bois for a latte, and then we beetled off to the Hop Kettle tap room for the first of many gorgeous beers. Firmly ensconced, we proceeded to do what we’ve been doing on a regular basis for over thirty years, shooting the breeze about all sorts. I handed him his belated fiftieth birthday present and heard about his celebratory trip to Cologne, we talked about the rapidly solidifying plans for my wedding this year, and then we just got on to talking about everything and nothing: his family, my family, his work, my work, the future and the good old days.

It was all perfectly in harmony: no conversational heavy lifting to be done, and no awkward silences, just the latest instalment in a long, meandering conversation which has lasted all of my adult life. We both know where the bodies are buried, when to talk and when to listen, when to be serious and when to take the piss. It was lovely: when you have a friend that old, and that good, you can do that stuff anywhere. You could catch up in a Wetherspoons and still have a thoroughly agreeable time. But it struck me, as the hours flew by on that winter afternoon, that I would have struggled to think of a better venue for it than Old Town.

The other thing that was different about this visit to Swindon was that, much as I love Los Gatos, I had somewhere else in my sights for dinner. I’d been tipped off about Pick Up Point, a burger joint literally next door to Hop Kettle which is only open in the evenings. Chef Josh West started out cooking burgers at the tap room four years ago, but opened his own restaurant in late 2021. I couldn’t find out much about it online – Swindon might have even less local media than we do – but their well-curated Instagram made everything look terrific. The clincher though was that my Swindon man in the know, Donovan Rosema of excellent local roaster Light Bulb Coffee, rated the place. That was good enough for me.

It’s a very assured, very polished space. “This is more London than Swindon” was Dave’s verdict as we looked around, and I think that was a fair summary. With dark walls dressed with interesting art, an attractive zinc-topped bar, conspiratorial lighting, low tables and booths, it was more Brooklyn than Bassett. I think there was a second dining room out back, although I didn’t get a look at it. Having said all that, my one reservation about it was that the bit of the restaurant where they seated us had higher tables and – a bit of a bugbear of mine, this – backless stools. It felt a little like an afterthought compared to the lower tables elsewhere, and I did look enviously at the better stools up at the bar.

You might think this doesn’t really matter for casual dining, or that the dining room wasn’t designed for two men on either side of their fiftieth birthday, and you might have a point.

Pick Up Point knows how to put a menu together. I realised in the run up to this visit that the last time I reviewed a burger restaurant was Bristol’s Asado, just over a year ago, and since then I think I’ve only had burgers in Honest. And I like Honest, but their choice of burgers always feels limited, especially if you don’t fancy whatever special they have on. By contrast, Pick Up Point has half a dozen beefburgers, one chicken burger and one vegetarian or vegan option, along with a couple of specials. And they all have something a little different about them – one with pancetta and blue cheese, another with kimchi and gochujang. Even the names – “Cease & Desist”, “Heisenberger” – steered clear of the dreary ladz puns you sometimes get in this kind of establishment.

Burgers are between twelve and fourteen pounds, not including fries, so slightly more expensive than the likes of Honest. But the menu achieved what you always want a menu to manage: it intrigued me. And the sides on offer did too – not just fries, wings and slaw, although even those had interesting variations and additions. The wings were Korean, the slaw came with sweet chilli and coriander. I had looked at a menu online which suggested they did confit potatoes as well as fries, and I was very excited about trying that, but on the day something else was in its place. So we ordered that instead, along with another side and a couple of burgers.

Service was outstanding throughout, if endearingly amused that these two duffers had chanced upon their restaurant. Of course everybody was impossibly younger and cooler than me, but we’re reaching the stage where I could walk into most restaurants in Britain and that might be the case, so I’m trying not to lose too much sleep over it. I couldn’t persuade Dave to go crazy and have a rum punch (and the next morning I was very thankful that he talked me out of it) so I had a half of Kellerbier from Bristol’s Moor Beer and Dave, more sensible than me, went for a ginger beer.

Our food came out about twenty-five minutes after we sat down, which I thought was nicely paced. I had chosen the “Hand Of God”, which came with chimichurri and smoked paprika mayo, and I thought it was absolutely exceptional. The burger was tender, well seasoned and had a marvellous char to it, the chimichurri and the smoked paprika complemented it beautifully. It was so good, in fact, that it’s surprisingly difficult to write about: happiness, as they say, writes white. And I’m worried that some of the things I loved about it are going to sound like faint praise, but maybe you’ll read them and agree with me so here goes.

I loved the fact that it wasn’t messy, that nothing fell out, that I didn’t feel like I was playing food Jenga every time I took a bite, or pushing what was left out of the comforting embrace of the bun. I loved the fact that I could pick it up and eat it with my hands, the way you used to be able to do with all burgers before they became bloated parodies of themselves. Less is more, it turns out, and I was delighted to pay a little bit more for something that not only tasted fantastic but was a pleasure to eat. I think that’s what edgier restaurant reviewers mean when they say – prepare to cringe – that a dish “eats well”. It doesn’t eat well, you do. But I do appreciate the underlying sentiment.

Dave had gone for one of the specials, a Guinness rarebit burger. This was heftier – a half pounder smothered in the rarebit, resting on a huge slab of onion. This looked a bit more challenging to eat, or would have been for me anyway, but Dave ploughed through undeterred. He’d told me earlier that day that his latest blood test had suggested he needed to work on bringing his cholesterol down again, but happily he was taking a day off from that. “The way they’ve got the Guinness flavour into this is really clever” was his verdict. Dave is not the ideal person to review restaurants with because 9 times out of 10 we’ll order the same dish, which you can’t really do when you’re writing a place up. This was the 1 time out of 10 when we didn’t, and I was a smidge envious.

The two sides were glorious. First of all, in place of those confit potatoes they served smashed potatoes with aioli. Looking at the picture below, aioli with smashed potatoes might be a more accurate description, but it was another fabulous dish, the spuds with plenty of texture, the golden aioli with a pronounced honk of garlic and a little rosemary strewn for good measure. I think with hindsight, two side dishes might not have been enough. One of these certainly wasn’t.

Even better were the crispy pork belly bites. They were crispy where you wanted them to be and yielding where you didn’t, they came carpeted with sesame and coriander, sitting in a pool of soy and ginger and they were pretty much a perfect example of this kind of thing. I read an interview with the guy behind the Pick Up Point just as they opened where he said he was a tinkerer. “I’m always experimenting, the menu is likely to change hourly” he said. I doubt he still does that (who has the time?) but even if he does he should keep his mitts off this dish: it should stay on the menu in perpetuity.

There was only one item on the dessert menu, a chocolate mousse with whipped cream. I was enormously tempted by it, as I always am when it comes to chocolate mousse. But I abandoned any plans of eating it when I realised that Dave, like me, was wondering what the Korean chicken burger (the “Seoul Survivor”) tasted like and was prepared to split one with me. So we flagged down our server and asked – if she didn’t mind, and if it wasn’t too weird – if we could order one to share. She smiled indulgently at us.

“Of course, that’s no problem. I’ll get them to cut it in half for you too.”

As she walked away I looked at Dave and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking.

“She thinks…”

“…that we’re a couple? Yep. Happens every time.”

My picture of the Korean chicken burger is even worse than most of my burger photographs because it shows you nothing. You don’t get to see the magnificent crunchy, craggy coating or the chicken, breast not thigh in this case, underneath. You don’t get to see the kimchi properly, or the gochujang. Really, it’s just evidence that we ordered it and that, ever so nicely for the two weird middle aged men who seemed a little high on life, the kitchen did indeed neatly bisect it for us. But I promise you it did have all those things – crunch and give, fire and tang – and I thought it was really beautiful.

I did think about having the mousse after that, but I decided against it. I couldn’t persuade Dave, and I knew that I would have more joy talking him into a couple more beers at the Tuppenny next door. His loved ones were in London watching Depeche Mode at the O2, and as it happens my loved one was too, and I reckoned we had another couple of hours of catching up ahead of us, even if it would pass in the blink of an eye. Our dinner came to sixty pounds, not including tip, but bear in mind we ordered three burgers that came to about two thirds of that.

I often publish reviews of places outside Reading with a little trepidation. I know some people feel like they’re hoodwinked into reading them, or don’t really care about restaurants without an RG postcode or an 0118 phone number. And I end up trying to convince you of the relevance by bringing it all back home at the end. And I will do that, in a second, but really – Pick Up Point is worth going to Swindon for. Get the train on a Saturday, have a few beers beforehand and make the time to eat here. It’s a cracking thing to do – with friends, with loved ones, even on your own. I genuinely think you wouldn’t regret it.

But there’s another reason to recommend it, which is that I think Honest so dominates the burger landscape in Reading that we don’t get anywhere, really, like Pick Up Point. 7Bone is a greasier, sloppier, more American affair, but it’s moved to Phantom now, further out of town. Gordon Ramsey Street Burger is much more well behaved than the man itself, and better than I expected it to be, but it’s not exciting, nor is it independent. Some places, like the Lyndhurst, don’t specialise in burgers but happen to do some very good ones.

But Pick Up Point is genuinely a place the likes of which we don’t have in Reading, and the last time I had a burger in Reading that matched what Pick Up Point can do it was from the sadly departed Meat Juice, at Blue Collar. I would have hopped on a train to Swindon to try Meat Juice’s burgers again, I’ll gladly repeat the journey to go back to Pick Up Point. That I happen to have one of my oldest friends a few miles down the road is just the icing on the cake.

Pick Up Point – 8.0
52 Devizes Road, Swindon, SN1 4BG

https://thepickuppoint.com