Tag: Oxford

Pub review: The Punter, Oxford

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I took a slightly roundabout route to deciding where to review this week. It was always going to be somewhere in Oxford, but the initial plan was to visit the Old Bookbinders, a gorgeous backstreet pub in Jericho that has served up affordable French food for fifteen years, with my old friend Dave. But then at the beginning of the week I got the dreaded WhatsApp from him: struck down with a bug, only just back at work, he’d be in no fit state for eating or boozing at the weekend.

I briefly contemplated going there solo, but then I recalibrated: I could try out Permit Room, the Dishoom offshoot in the centre of Oxford, instead. Unlike most people I’ve met, I’ve never eaten in a Dishoom: I save no reservations dining for holidays. But everything I read suggested that, although Dishoom might not be what it once was, Permit Room was another kettle of fish entirely.

There were only five branches, and Oxford was graced with one: the kind of chain that Reading would so dearly love to attract but never does. I was sold. I made a reservation for lunch, did my research, pored over the menu. But I didn’t wind up eating at Permit Room.

So what happened? Well, my manager happened. I was in the office last Friday and on a break between poring over spreadsheets and crafting impeccably disappointed emails we got to chatting, as we often do, about Oxford, a place where I suspect we both frequently daydream about living. That usually involves shooting the breeze about where to get good coffee, or eat good food and he happened to mention The Punter to me. Had I heard about the changes there, he asked?

The Punter has an interesting history. There’s been a pub there for 150 years, but it reopened under that name a mere 15 years ago. Then, in the height of the pandemic, it decided to remake itself as an exclusively vegan and vegetarian gastropub. The following year it appointed chef Anthony Skeats, who previously cooked at a Michelin-starred pub in Oxfordshire, and plaudits followed. It made the Good Food Guide and even featured in the Sunday Times when it was reviewed by Charlotte Ivers, the paper’s then restaurant critic.

Ivers was very much the Liz Truss of broadsheet restaurant criticism – a massive Tory who didn’t do the job for long and whose reign now feels like an aberration. And her review of The Punter was a little on the lukewarm side, but it was still a rare appearance by an Oxford establishment in the national press.

But the reason my manager asked if I’d considered The Punter, he told me, was that it was serving meat and fish dishes again. A little research confirmed that the pub had rowed back from its bold new direction. Skeats left a couple of years ago, and in February the pub launched a new menu – still 60% vegetarian, they said, but now with fish dishes. Why the volte-face, you might ask? Was it because the market just wasn’t there for an entirely meat free venue, or was it something else?

Well, according to owner Tom Rainey it was partly due to government policy but mainly down to the closure of the Botley Road, a major thoroughfare which was pretty key to being able to reach the pub at all. Rainey said that this reduced footfall to the pub by 75%, if not more.

The Botley Road was closed so Network Rail could rebuild the nearby railway bridge and add an extra platform to the station. Which doesn’t sound an unreasonable thing to do, but what was unreasonable was the sheer duration of the closure: excellent local website the Oxford Clarion described it as having reopened “after 1,258 days and £237m”. Rainey, speaking to the local media, was more to the point: he called it “three and a half years of hell”.

It’s always tricky providing background like this because my Oxford readers already know all this and everybody else might not be that interested, but to put it in some kind of context for my Reading readers: you know how the Fisherman’s Cottage went through a phase of complaining to the Chronicle about the council cutting off access to the pub? Imagine that to the power of ten, being virtually inaccessible for over three years.

Anyway, I’d like to say that I cancelled my plans to go to Permit Room because I’m a sucker for the underdog. But the truth is that after my manager told me the news about the Punter I looked it up online, and I really fancied the menu. It looked clean and tempting, and I thought a little outing to the Punter might be a lovely way to spend a Saturday. The sample menu still had vegetarian stuff on it, but half of the dishes involved meat or fish. It was as if its time as a vegetarian pub was an embarrassing episode in its past it was trying, gradually, to forget. We’ve all been there, though. I booked a table.

If the rhetorical route to the Punter was circuitous the physical one couldn’t be much more direct, now that pesky bridge has been sorted. You leave the train station and rather than striking out towards Park End Street and the Westgate, you instead turn right and within five minutes you’ve crossed a pretty little bridge and find yourself on Osney Island, right by the river, walking down East Street, a beautiful run of terraced Victorian houses. It reminded me of the Village in Reading, an enclave so close to everything, yet magically removed. You are right by the station and yet you’re utterly in the middle of elsewhere, dreaming about living in one of those houses (I looked them up: we probably can’t afford to).

And there, on the corner with South Street, is the Punter, a ridiculously attractive redbrick pub with a decent looking outdoor space. I imagine Victorian side streets used to be awash with these: places like the Punter, and the Retreat in Reading, make a good case for the survival of the fittest. Boats went past on the Thames and a gaggle of men in Lycra, all repping the Oxford Cycling Club, were gathered outside in the sun, drinking pints of cask beer. It was awfully bucolic for somewhere so near the city centre: I realised I’d never been to Osney Island before in thirty-five years of coming to Oxford, and I felt I’d missed out.

The Punter is absolutely beautiful inside. It’s a corner plot with two rooms and I was in the bigger, even more gorgeous one. Window is a noun that’s yet to transform, horrifically, into a verb, but if it ever does you could do some terrific windowing here: the bright blue frames look out on the redbrick terraces and the water, the whole thing almost more glass than wall. Vibrant, likeable art hung between each window, and the overall effect was oddly magical.

The staff had originally kindly plonked me at the one table that looked out on the river, but I asked nicely if I could move so I could see the whole room, experience all that life and light. The Punter’s well-curated Instagram feed boasts that customers come for the river and end up looking at the walls. They’re not far from the truth.

The menu was different to the one I’d seen online, which was something of a curveball, but the overall balance of it was the same: roughly half the dishes involved meat and fish, and most of the rest were vegetarian rather than vegan. Starters mostly maxed out at a tenner, mains clustered in the low twenties. Although the staff who looked after me were charming, friendly and a credit to the place, one of them owned up that the menu had changed recently and that he couldn’t advise me on some of the dilemmas it gave me. Perhaps if it had been a little more bedded in I might have chosen better.

My lunch started superbly, though. A Scotch egg from the bar snacks menu was exemplary and – to my surprise – completely vegetarian. Pea and leek took the place of sausagemeat, and a stellar job they did of it. The flavour was interesting and complex, although the advertised truffle had taken the day off, the yolk was perfectly fudgy, the crumb faultlessly light and crisp. An excellent herb mayo completed a really joyous dish that felt its money at £8.

So often vegetarian or vegan food involves ultra processed ingredients, bad karaoke renditions of meat. This was far better and infinitely more interesting. It felt like it was invented not by a vegetarian but by a meat eater who cared for vegetarians, wanted them to know the pleasure of a really good Scotch egg without betraying their ideals. I wondered whether every dish had been like this during the pub’s all vegetarian era: if so, I rather wished they hadn’t changed.

Another thing to really like about the Punter was its wine list. They did have a good cask selection, and just the one interesting pale ale from Buckinghamshire’s XT Brewing, but a well-curated selection of wine – four whites, five reds – was on offer with all but one available by the glass and smaller 125ml glasses priced fairly. I can think of an awful lot of restaurants that could learn from the Punter and I loved my French pinot noir so much that I clocked up another glass. Sitting there in that room, feeling a blend of relaxation and anticipation, I decided that good things were in my future.

For my starter I was torn between the truffled rarebit and the salt and pepper squid, and my server steered me towards the latter. It was pleasant, but not quite there: bronzed, clenched fists of squid promised good texture, but under that coating they lacked the softness of the truly fresh – not bad, or even uniformly bouncy, but close enough to good that you knew they could have been better.

I liked the coating, but I don’t think it was salt and pepper. It felt like there might have been a bit of nigella seed in there, and it just about went with the mayo – which was described as sriracha aioli but I suspect was just sriracha mayo. As I write that up, describe that attempted fusion of China, Thailand and Spain, I’m aware that it sounds busy in theory. In practice it wasn’t, but it also wasn’t entirely successful.

Here’s a terrible secret, though: at this point I really didn’t care. Because the pub was so lovely, and the surroundings were so enchanting, and I was far too busy wishing I lived just round the corner to raise classic restaurant reviewer niggles like squid freshness. The cyclists kept wandering in to top up on pints of ale, the pub was slowly attracting more dog walkers.

A table of four women, all a few years younger than me, came in for their 1.30pm booking and were pure joy and camaraderie, enjoying an afternoon together and intending to make the most of it. Wine was ordered – not a bottle, the implication being that such excess would follow in due course – and they started catching up. There was something about that group that had the nicest energy: no willy-waving, no oxygen thievery, just good friends sharing stories, comparing notes, feeding off each other.

It was clear that eating at the Punter was a break from their well-trodden routine (“they know us at the usual place”, one of them conspiratorially admitted to the others) and benevolently looking on I found myself feeling sort of happy and kind of lonely. It made me want to round up all my brilliant male friends – the likes of Jerry, and Graeme, and Dave – and make them go to the pub with me, to try and build something a bit like what they had. But it was a good sort of lonely, if there’s such a thing, because I knew that I at least did have friends like that, even if they weren’t there right now.

Besides, what did I have to complain about? I was having a solo lunch in a gorgeous dining room, flooded with autumn sunshine. I could see the river from my table, and the pinot noir was delicious. And the people watching was superb: I got a little glow from seeing those four good friends set the world to rights, in a conversation that aced the Bechdel test.

I have had a difficult 12 months, with my accident and my surgery, losing my poor dad – who would have loved The Punter, like he loved everywhere – and my wife’s operation. And yet here I was, on the other side of some of that, in this little pocket of tranquil reflection. It truly is a good life, if you don’t weaken.

Then the fish and chips arrived and ruined all that.

Really, it wasn’t good. Can you tell from the photo? I nearly had the monkfish and bream stew, but my server couldn’t tell me anything about it. I almost ordered the ham hock and cheddar “open pie”, but he told me that it was a sort of casserole with a pastry lid and a layer of mashed potato on the bottom, which I thought sounded downright weird. So I picked fish and chips, a great benchmark of pub food and generally a safe bet even in the iffiest of pubs.

Yet every element of this had something wrong with it. The fish was not unpleasant – haddock, falling neatly into flakes, and the coating was suitably light. But it was a small, anaemic piece lacking the crinkles and crunch of really good batter: the squid had been better, in that respect. The crushed peas tasted of lemon, which crushed peas really shouldn’t do. The tartare sauce was just mayonnaise that had gone on an unsuccessful speed date with some chopped gherkin. I like tartare sauce, I think, to be cheap and nasty, to be napalm for the roof of your mouth the way good salt and vinegar crisps are.

And then there were the chips: my god, the chips. I am a little bit finicky about chips, and I won’t generally eat them if they don’t pass a short visual audit. You can make a case for skin-on chips, or skin-off, but for my money you can’t make a case for “suspicious black patches on”. These were just manky, and there were enough scuzzy ones – which I encountered early enough in proceedings – that it rather put me off the rest. If they were bought in, which I assume they were, the pub needs to buy better. If they weren’t, there are even fewer excuses.

Could dessert recover from that? Well, actually, yes. I’m so used to ordering chocolate mousse and it being a dollop of something loose and airy, usually drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and scattered with salt, that I’d forgotten the simple pleasures of the more orthodox rendition. This was a lozenge of denser, less bubbled mousse – you could wonder if they’d used something like gelatin, if the pub wasn’t still a little vegetarian – on a slab of chocolate sponge, a rubble of chocolate crumb on top, cherry sauce Spirographed around.

I loved it, and I was grateful to the pub for doing its best to stop me leaving full of sadness and resentment. It’s worth also adding that the pub gets its coffee from local Jericho Coffee Traders, and my latte was as good as any coffee I’ve had in a restaurant or pub for as long as I can remember. My bill came to £65, not including tip, and I told my server that I’d had a marvellous time. Which wasn’t a lie, even if those chips should have been taken across the road and drowned in the Thames.

I used to work with a chap called Phil, nearly 20 years ago, who looked like Sonic The Hedgehog and entertained me very much. He was also obsessed with shaving his scrotum and telling everybody about it, which is a story for another kind of blog entirely, and he’s now high up in project management somewhere, so thank goodness he doesn’t read this. But I was reminded of Phil, when I reflected on my meal at The Punter.

Here’s why: we all went out after work one evening for his birthday, and he decided he wanted to eat at Prezzo. I went, because I wasn’t always the gastronomically hyper-evolved being who is writing to you now. Phil looked at the menu and railed, entertainingly and at length, about the fact that it included a burger. What kind of Italian restaurant offers a burger, he ranted? And what kind of chump orders it?

You can probably guess what’s coming: the server came round, Phil ordered the burger and naturally he hated it. At the time I thought it was emblematic of Phil himself, to do something he knew he would dislike and then enjoy his chagrin more than he could ever have enjoyed his meal. But I did a Phil at The Punter, because if you look at the dishes I enjoyed – the Scotch egg, and that chocolate mousse – they were vegetarian. It was only when I wandered off track, ate the fish, that disappointment came looking for me.

I told you I saw the truffled rarebit go to another table, and it looked good. The braised Hispi cabbage with miso chimichurri that also went to that table? That looked good too. I bet the black garlic rigatoni and the celeriac steak, the porcini and pearl barley burger – all of them on the mains – were good too.

So don’t read as much as usual into the mark at the bottom of this page, because it arguably reflects as much on me as it does on The Punter. That afternoon, taken in by the menu and the cyclists and the pinot and the sunshine, I emulated Phil. I reckon vegetarians, and people who are prepared to put their prejudice to one side, will eat even better at the Punter than I did. Except for the fries: those fries were an affront.

It is one of the greatest contradictions of restaurants and pubs that you can have a wonderful time without having a wonderful meal, a brilliant afternoon or evening eating middling dishes. The Punter is great evidence of that. I really hope it recovers from its three and a half years of hell, and I have more than half a mind to go back. And bit of me hopes that they reverse their position on the whole vegetarian thing. It’s always better to do what you love, and if you stick at it I remain hopeful that you find the love you deserve in return.

The Punter – 7.2
7 South St, Oxford, OX2 0BE
01865 248832

https://www.thepunteroxford.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Gees, Oxford

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The more observant among you, and my regular readers out there, might well wonder if the title of this week’s review is a mistake. Because I reviewed Gees, one of Oxford’s most venerable restaurants, in May last year. Normally when I re-review a restaurant it’s some time after my original visit, and I’ve never returned to any Oxford restaurants on duty. Why would I, when I’ve only really added the city to my patch in the last couple of years?

Besides, if you are a regular reader you may well remember that when I went to Gees I didn’t like it much. I loved the room, but nearly everything I ate betrayed its promise and was tricksy for the sake of it. That meant a negroni that didn’t taste like a negroni, a tonnato that wasn’t a tonnato, an affogato that wasn’t an affogato and a £200 bill for two that wasn’t a bargain. And there was salad, lots of salad. So much of it, in fact – many dishes padded out with the stuff – that I wondered whether I’d accidentally wandered into England’s most expensive salad bar.

So why on earth would I go back there at all, let alone so soon after that?

Well, to explain that I have to give the context, do the thing that makes these reviews so long/detailed/enjoyable/unbearable (delete as applicable). Because in May, Gees announced that it had appointed a new head chef and would reopen in June with a brand new menu following a refurbishment, their second in four years. The head chef in question – and this is what made it noteworthy – was none other than Nick Galer.

Galer is an interesting figure with a varied CV. He worked under Heston Blumenthal at the Crown in Bray, but came to my attention during his eight years at Goring’s The Miller Of Mansfield. I reviewed it in 2019 and absolutely loved it, although not all my repeat visits there were quite as successful. And then he left when the pubco, Stonegate, decided to raise the rent by an eye-watering amount, because making perfectly good businesses economically unviable seems to be the only thing Stonegate is good at.

Galer then took over the kitchen at a nearby golf club following a refurbishment – lucky golfers, I’d say – before finding a more permanent gig in 2024 taking over the Pot Kiln in Frilsham, which too had decided to reopen after a refurb. Yes, another refurb: something about Galer, it seems, really makes business owners want to spruce up the place.

The Pot Kiln decided to take a new approach with Galer at the helm, reinventing itself as a sort of Basque roadside grill. I reviewed it last March and I found a lot to like, although it felt like there was friction between some of Galer’s finer, fiddlier instincts and the kind of robust and generous cooking I expected given the concept. There was plenty of good food, though, and I expected that, with time, Galer and the Pot Kiln could iron that out.

But the owners of the pub seemed to think differently, because in March of this year they announced that they were junking the whole Basque thing and going back to pub food – the kind you could find just down the road at the Royal Oak in Yattendon, owned by the same people, or indeed countless other pubs in West Berkshire.

So no wonder Galer decided to jump ship, but him rematerialising at Gees was still the kind of plot twist that made you sit up and take notice. Because when I reviewed Gees and found it so disappointing, the comments I saw in the Oxford subreddit suggested I was far from alone. Phrases like “underwhelming” or “super average for the price” were bandied around, and the overall impression was that the restaurant had been an underachiever for some time.

So the scene was set: Gees is a restaurant that has never quite found its chef, and Galer is a chef who’s never quite found his home. Had they finally found each other?

Gees’ dining room has always been a properly handsome space, a Grade 2 listed late Victorian glasshouse with a real wow factor. And the changes the restaurant has made with its newest refurb only improve matters. The little terrace along the side of the glasshouse, for example, is now under cover, although I’m not sure why you’d choose to eat there rather than the main dining room.

But the most significant change is the dining room itself. The restaurant has put in a central section made up of very attractive curved, interconnecting banquettes, which gives everything a lovely flow and breaks up what was previously a huge room. It’s a clever enhancement: I liked the room before, but this really does feel like the missing piece. It was a dreary, rainy day outside – very much one of the first days of autumn – but the place was warm, snug and welcoming. It’s also worth saying that I was there on a Tuesday lunchtime but Gee’s was nicely busy: by the time I left, in the middle of the afternoon, some tables were on their second set of occupants.

Part of that popularity, I suspect, was down to a couple of factors, one being the buzz of a new chef a few months into the assignment. But also, Gees is proper all-day dining: it is open from 9 until late every single day of the week, and even serves brunch if you’re that way inclined. All that is a rarity in north Oxford where independent restaurants tend to either only open in the evening some days, not open at all, or both.

And the menu reflected that, because it read brilliantly. Gees is not offering cuisine linked to a particular country or even region, so is broadly Modern European but with flourishes beyond that: so alongside your pizzette and pasta, your grilled squid and venison loin you can also find salmon sashimi, tandoori quail and pork belly in bak kut teh, a Malaysian meat broth. I thought it was very clever stuff – it could easily have come across as a mess, but didn’t – with touches, to my mind, of Covent Garden’s Town, one of London’s biggest openings of 2025. When I showed it to Zoë later, she said it and the dining room struck her as an upmarket version of Bill’s: it was more of a compliment than it sounds.

Making choices, over a properly enjoyable pre-prandial Bramble (light on the advertised basil but none the worse for that) was very difficult indeed. But a choice to share three starters and maximise the options reaped serious dividends. First of all, the dish I couldn’t not order: haggis pakora were properly elevated, the tempura almost impossibly ethereal but the contents within just as robust as you’d hope, the whole thing balanced in a pyramid on a moat of decidedly Mediterranean minted yoghurt.

When I went to Glasgow earlier in the year this was the kind of dish I expected to find, and thus inevitably eat, but it eluded me. To instead discover it here, in genteel North Oxford, was a very pleasant surprise.

Every bit as delightful was one of Gees’ two pizzette, with Alsace bacon and caramelised onions. I had my reservations about this when it turned up, expecting the crust to be puffier, but it thoroughly proved me wrong: the base was joyous and light, roughened with semolina flour or the like, and the batons of bacon, golden slivers of allium and cheese harmonised superbly.

I wondered whether this might be a very current take on tartiflette for the calorie-conscious, but it was probably still too indulgent for that. If I wanted any illustration of the problems weight loss jabs present for restaurants, I got it at lunch: a lady at the next table ordered a pizzette as her main course – they really aren’t big – and ended up giving more than half of it to her grown-up kids.

To complete the pan-European globetrotting of the starters, the final one was more quintessentially British. Three pieces of bone marrow, topped generously with parsley crumb, came in a little cairn with a couple of pieces of sourdough toast. If this was my least favourite of the introductory plates, it was only by a whisker: I would have liked the marrow slightly more smooshable, but it tasted terrific.

Just as necessary, though, was the beautiful salad on the side: parsley, shallot and capers, everything you needed to counterpoint the marrow, which had the richness ill-informed people tend to mislabel as unctuous. This dish served as the best single illustration of how Gees had changed, from why is there so much salad with everything? to this is the perfect salad for this dish.

By this point a bottle of very good German riesling – dry but not aggressively so, with the faintest hint of effervescence – had been opened and I was watching the parade of dishes I could have tried make their way to other tables. The grilled squid and salmon sashimi looked especially good, and I realised I could easily have constructed a completely different meal here, shuffled the pack another way. And yet, in that moment, I wouldn’t have swapped anything I’d eaten for something I hadn’t ordered: no mean feat in a restaurant with such a wide and tempting menu: I took many things from my meal at Gees, but gladly FOMO wasn’t one of them.

I was drawn to many of the mains on Gees’ menu but in the end I went for something relatively basic, because the variety of it intrigued me. Gees serves a trio of sliders with a portion of beef fat chips, and they had sufficient range that I was curious about how well they’d be executed. The answer, in short, was ‘very’.

First up, a venison burger which managed to avoid the dry, crumbliness that meat can sometimes impart to a patty. Instead this had an impeccable crust and pleasing pinkness, all things savoury offset with red onion and a lozenge of foie gras. Every bit as good in a completely different way was Gees’ lamb slider, with a base of tzatziki so singing with mint that it was positively verdant: a ribbon of pickled cucumber on top was an outstanding figurative cherry.

Finally, chicken thigh – again with an impressively light crunchy coating – was served with kimchi and mayo. I think it was the least successful of the three, but again a bronze medal was nothing to be ashamed of when you looked at what else was on the podium. Honest Burgers has been doing a special recently where you can have three of their sliders with rosemary fries for something like £16: this, with three sliders properly gussied up and a helping of thick, crunchy beef fat chips, was £27.50. It felt like the upgrade was worth the money.

This dish didn’t really need anything else, but I’d ordered the zucchini fritti anyway because I find them hard to resist on a menu. Credit to Gees for using both yellow and green courgettes here, but I wanted to like these better than I did. They were limp, the coating patchy, and although they delivered a salty hit the taste couldn’t overcome the texture. They could have done with a dip, and if I’d thought I might have shelled out for some aioli but even so the courgettes were so wan that it would have been like, to borrow an old phrase, playing snooker with a rope.

I didn’t get to try a forkful of my dining companion’s main on this occasion, but the ribeye was beautifully cooked – still pink but with plenty of caramelisation, served with a bronzed banana shallot, more of those beef fat chips and a chimichurri with just enough spikiness to sharpen the focus. I’m told the runner beans, in a black pepper butter, were excellent too.

Gees’ dessert menu is a model of restraint: four desserts, an ice cream of the day made on the premises or a cheeseboard. But my companion and I were both drawn to one, the chocolate mousse, and so we ordered a couple of those along with some Moscato d’Asti, a gorgeous little treat at £6 a glass.

Now, when Bitten Oxford reviewed the revamped Gees – their second comped visit in under a year – they had some reservations about the chocolate mousse. “It wasn’t quite the right consistency, it needed to be a bit more airy” was their conclusion. Well, they may have got their food for free but they weren’t entirely barking up the wrong tree. Because it is not a mousse and I have no idea why it’s billed as one on the dessert menu.

What it is, in fact, is a chocolate cremeux. And not just any chocolate cremeux but, pretty much, the outrageously good chocolate cremeux I first had at the Miller Of Mansfield over seven years ago. It is a Nick Galer classic, right down to the superb sesame tuile delicately laid on top of it, and to eat it again after far too long made me very happy indeed. It was like being reunited with a good friend after far too long apart, and ruefully discovering that the years had been kinder to them than they were to you.

I also found discovering that thread of continuity strangely comforting: Galer’s career has taken many twists and turns since he opened the Miller Of Mansfield 12 years ago, and he’s wound up in all kinds of places serving all kinds of dishes and cuisines. And yet here, for me at least, is where I came in, where I first encountered and loved his food. It tied my whole meal up with a neat little bow, as the best desserts do, but this one had an extra bit of resonance just for me. Is it possible to be moved by a dessert? I hope the answer is yes, because otherwise I might care about this kind of thing more than is healthy.

Having almost tied my review up in a neat little bow too, I just need to add that the bill for all that came to £285. That includes a 15% service charge – that’s inflation for you – which was annoying enough to note but not sufficiently annoying that I wanted to pay less. Service was the kind of excellent that shouldn’t need that kind of quasi-mandatory recompense, but maybe in North Oxford it does. Either way I felt like New Gees was a significantly better use of money than Old Gees, which tells its own story. All that was left to do was bimble round the shops, stop for a pint in the Rose & Crown, one of my favourite pubs in the world, and catch the train home.

I don’t want to jinx it by saying this, but I hope that Nick Galer and Gees are at the beginning of a very long and beautiful friendship, now that they’ve found one another. If you ate at Gees without knowing any of the context or the backstory you would have a very good meal, and I suspect the group you went with would all find something to eat and enjoy in a menu which has been assembled with precision and intelligence to appeal to almost everybody, vegans excepted. This is where Zoë’s comparison with Bill’s is a good one, and it’s nice to see an independent restaurant stepping up to excel at what chain restaurants do annoyingly well.

But if you know any of the history – as an Oxford resident, a lover of Oxford or someone who has followed the trajectory of Nick Galer’s career – this is an even happier ending than that. Oxford has got its flagship restaurant back, Gees has got its mojo back and Galer is back where he belongs, in a kitchen belonging to a place that has invested in him. And for the rest of us, we get a very reliable place to eat in Oxford, in one of the most attractive dining rooms I can think of. With a bit of luck, Gees could become the institution it always should have been.

I hope I don’t have to re-review Gees for years and years. But I plan to go back – off duty, thankfully – many, many times.

Gees – 8.7
61-63 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
01865 553540

https://www.geesrestaurant.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Antep Kitchen, Oxford

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Taking a Friday off and meeting my old friend Dave for lunch in Oxford felt like such a good idea when we made our plans. There’s something magical about a long lunch – and especially one on a Friday, starting your weekend before most people, knowing there’s no rush to anything and that, if you choose, you still have two lazy days and lie-ins in your future. What’s not to love about that?

Reality, unfortunately, had other plans. Because the Friday we chose, a couple of weeks ago, was at the height of the latest heatwave and everything was brutal. There seemed to be no other word for it. The rail network struggled, with a slew of cancellations: my train was delayed, Dave’s stopped outside Didcot for what felt like an eternity. Finally disembarking at Oxford it felt, if that were possible, hotter even than Reading – a cruel, searing heat with no respite. All the times that anybody had ever complained about Britain’s indifferent summers were coming back to bite us: I’d say be careful what you wish for, but nobody wished for this.

I grabbed a table outside Society Café with a latte that I immediately realised was the wrong order altogether, and waited for Dave. It turned out that even being in the shade didn’t make matters much more bearable. My little John Lewis fan whirred away, its efforts close to futile, and I got sympathetic looks from the ladies at the next table: I like to say I’m built for comfort, not speed, but I was definitely not built for heat.

When Dave arrived we quickly ruled out any more hot beverages and decided on a drink before lunch, opting to get our schlep into East Oxford out of the way first and reward ourselves with a pint. We ruled out taking a bus on the basis that they would be purgatorial, but it’s hard to imagine they could have been more punishing than the walk we did. The High, wide and handsome, was frying in the sunshine with no relief to be found anywhere. We headed over Magdalen Bridge, hot and bothered, and I could already feel the ghost impression of the sunburn on my forehead yet to come.

It didn’t help that Dave’s first choice of watering hole turned out to be closed until 4, or that my backup plan didn’t open until an hour even after that. So eventually, a full three quarters of an hour later, we wound up in the almost-shady and very fetching terrace of the Rusty Bicycle while I drank a pint of cider with indecent haste and wondered if I would ever stop sweating.

Huge, gorgeous-looking chicken burgers turned up at the adjacent tables and I was very tempted to junk this whole restaurant reviewing lark for the day and stay there. Have a burger, drink some of Dodo Pubs’ excellent peach lager, chat and resolve to move no further than walking to the bar or the loo, until it was time to go home. And I nearly suggested it, too, because something about that gruelling heat made doing anything – moving, thinking, deciding – close to impossible.

But we had an appointment with Turkish restaurant Antep Kitchen on the Cowley Road, a place that had been on my list to visit for well over five years. In lockdown, when reviewing restaurants was out of the question, I ran a series of interviews on my blog with some of the great and the good of Reading. It was my tribute to the weekly Q&A in the Guardian, which I read without fail every Saturday.

One of the questions I asked was What one restaurant do you wish you could pick up and drop in Reading?, and when I interviewed Mohamad Skeik, then manager of Reading institution Bakery House, Antep Kitchen was one of the places he chose. And I remember thinking that if the manager of Bakery House said somewhere in Oxford could match it for grilled meats I really should go there one day.

Six years on Skeik has parted company with Bakery House, but his recommendation had always stayed with me and gradually, as I worked my way through reviewing restaurants in Oxford, it moved closer and closer to the top of the list.

It’s been open for nearly 9 years, the name being taken from Gaziantep, the Turkish city widely thought to be the culinary capital of the country and the birthplace of owner Bilal Gilgil. Going inside my first overwhelming sentiment was relief, because despite a huge charcoal grill the full length of the open kitchen, the aircon was on full blast and I experienced a feeling of coolness for the first and only time that day.

Once that euphoria had worn off, I took in my surroundings. It’s quite an attractive restaurant, busy on a Friday lunchtime, with tasteful banquettes and tables, bare brick walls and a plethora of woven lightshades descending from the ceiling in the bigger back room, the one with booths and less natural light. I imagine that space comes in very handy on a hectic Friday or Saturday night – I also imagine it would be hard to hear yourself think there – but I was glad they’d put us in the smaller front room. There’s even a little terrace on the pavement, although you’d have to be certifiable to have eaten there that day.

The thing that really struck me was the sheer diversity of the clientele at Antep Kitchen – all ages, all demographics, all types and sizes of groups seemed to be taking the opportunity to lunch here, from friends to couples to families: they even managed to find space for a pair of middle-aged men on the verge of heatstroke. I was especially impressed by the number of solo diners I saw, all women, who came in, took a table on their own, ordered something off the grill, read a book, ate their food, paid their bills and went on their way.

If Antep Kitchen was anywhere near me I’d be sorely tempted to follow their excellent example of a lunchtime, especially as you can get a two course set menu until 4pm for £14, and they throw in a soft drink with that. But we hadn’t travelled all that way in such arduous circumstances to pick off the set menu, so we immersed ourselves in Antep’s full repertoire. It is a huge menu full of familiar sights, which makes the whole process harder than you’d think. Cold mezze cost no more than £6.50, hot mezze max out at £8.50 and unless you’re having a Turkish pide most of the mains range between £17 and £25.

The majority of those come off the grill, as you’d expect, but there are other options like moussaka, kleftiko and güveç, or Turkish casserole: I doubt Antep Kitchen was shifting many of those, though, on a very hot day. And although there were a couple of vegetarian mains on the menu – vegetable kebab, vegetable güveç – I don’t honestly think you’d bring a vegetarian here unless you didn’t much care for them.

That said, it just so happens that both of our starters were vegetarian. Stuffed vine leaves have been a weakness of mine since that first childhood family holiday to Corfu in 1987 – yes, I am that old – and I’ve always been a sucker for a well-executed one, that freshness of rice and mint, that tang of lemon, that taut green casing.

They always catapult me back to that summer, when I was so skinny, so nerdy and so very English and was suddenly confronted with a different life of heat, indolence and amazing food. But powerful though nostalgia is, I could see through it and realise that these were perfectly good but not amazing. Allegedly they feature both pine nuts and blackcurrant: I could only discern the former, but didn’t miss the latter.

Antep’s falafel were good, too, but felt like an exercise in portion control. Four dense nuggets, very different from their crisp-shelled Lebanese cousins, were genuinely very nice – made with chickpea and broad bean and with the hugely enjoyable surprise of huge, firm chickpeas in their core. I liked them a lot, and they came perched on a smear of houmous that I also quite liked. A little basket of pleasing airy pide came along shortly after, and the whole thing worked well. But at £7.50 did I expect a few more falafel and maybe a little less padding, like the handful of salad from a bag whose main purpose was to squat on half the plate? Possibly.

None of that felt enormously important at the time. We were cool, at last – have I mentioned that it was a hot day? – and we had food in front of us, and a cold beer. An Efe Draft which, confusingly, is not on draft but actually comes in a squat, round glass bottle. And besides we had pushed the boat out for our main, a sharing platter that served two to three people, which meant that as two ravenous people we were about to eat very well indeed.

But being the day it was, nothing had gone completely to plan and nor did this. I will say that the platter which came out was so huge, and our table so packed, that some serious Tetris had to take place to fit everything on, removing some of our starter plates, shifting beer glasses and water glasses and so on. But that might tell you more about the size of the tables, on reflection.

It also tells you something about pacing – this came out five minutes after our starters, which came out ten minutes after our order. Usually I know I’d have a right old whinge about that but I do sometimes know how to read the room, and this kind of room, menu and pricing are for unapologetically casual dining. So my knickers remained untwisted, which under the circumstances was probably for the best.

Here it is. It rather flattered to deceive.

Now, in fairness there was much to like here. It was a greatest hits trawl through the grill section, so you got a skewer of chicken shish, a skewer of lamb shish, a lamb kofte, a skewer of lamb ribs and what might have been two skewers of chicken wings. In terms of quality, you would struggle to fault any of it. The chicken wings were surprisingly good, with excellent char: I broke the habit of a lifetime and ate them with my fingers, without my usual prissiness. And the chicken shish was better still, the marination working its magic.

And those were probably the least impressive things on offer. Lamb ribs were a new one on me but rewarded the effort, the fat glossy and sweet, the whole affair genuinely succulent and a proper revelation; it made me wonder just how good Antep Kitchen’s lamb chops might be, and whether they matched the masterpieces down the train line at Didcot’s Zigana. The kofte was another standout: coarse, gnarly, expertly seasoned and with caramelisation that wasn’t to the detriment of the core.

But the real surprise package for me was the lamb shish: I am so used, even in Greek or Lebanese restaurants that I rate, to making excuses for the shish, finding it more leather-adjacent than I would like. I won’t do that any more, because Antep Kitchen proves that it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way: these were expertly marinated and cooked, with phenomenal texture and a little blush, and I could order and eat them all the live long day.

But again, that padding reared its head. The way it was dished up, with a sheaf of unnecessary rocket heaped on top, felt like it was meant to distract you slightly from the way the protein had been rationed. It came with a single grilled chilli, which I liked, and half a tomato which was distinctly under. And you got both rice and grains: the latter, giant couscous with a faint red hue and, again, whole chickpeas here and there, was well worth the time. The rice less so.

And then there was the salad, which was good but huge, topped with pomegranate and sumac, with a certain pleasing heat and grit. But at the end of the meal there was a lot of salad left, and quite a lot of rice, and that made me think it was out of kilter. It made me wonder whether, if you’d had that shish as your main, you’d have got one skewer or two, because the five things we had felt only just enough between two. I wouldn’t have wanted to split that between three – not unless one of them was a vegetarian, in which case I’d have gladly donated my salad.

Dave tended to agree, I think, and he isn’t as much of a gannet as I am. He liked it, though (“this is far more my kind of thing than fine dining” he said, which made me wonder if he’d quite forgiven me for lunch at Juliet). We did agree, on balance, that it was perhaps another kofte away from being truly satisfying. At least it left room for dessert, I told myself.

Before that, though, we looked at the drinks menu. Neither of us felt like chugging another Efe, but I was intrigued by a few of the things in the soft drinks section. I asked about ayran first, as I’ve always rather liked it, only to be told that they didn’t have any. So that left something called Salgam, billed as refreshing Turkish turnip juice. Did I dare give it a go? I asked one of the brigade of dapper, waistcoated servers.

“The Salgam – is it sweet?”

He gave me the kind of smile that’s hard to read.

“No, it’s spicy.”

How bad could it be, I thought? So I ordered it. And then I found out.

Salgam comes in a bottle with TURNIB on it in block capitals, and an illustration of a barrel with what looks like some kind of mutant cross between a turnip and a giant spider ominously climbing out of it. Tasting it, it didn’t really taste of turnip at all, but of pickle juice. Which I don’t necessarily mind, in its place, but this didn’t feel like its place. I took a slurp with my straw, and Dave enjoyed my discomfort in the way only a very old friend can.

“It’s sort of like a Bloody Mary where they’ve forgotten the vodka and swapped the tomato for, err, turnip.”

“You’re selling it to me, mate.”

“I think for solidarity you should drink what’s left in bottle.” He reluctantly agreed, and took about as long to finish it as I did my whole glass. Maybe it was delirium from the long walk to the restaurant, but I found myself laughing uncontrollably.

“They have a barrel on the bottle” I told Dave, “but this has clearly been made by scraping the bottom of it.”

“It’s not great.”

“The thing is, the more I have of it, the worse it gets.”

I thought to myself that ordering the Salgam was the right decision. It’s what Anthony Bourdain would have told you to do, I suppose, although I’m not sure how good a role model he turned out to be. Anyway, by the time I’d finished it I didn’t dislike it so much, although that might just have been the Gaziantep equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. Subsequent research has shown that it isn’t even primarily made of turnip, instead being largely the fermented juice of pickled carrots “flavoured with aromatic turnip”, which is surely the best kind of turnip.

I’m glad I tried it, anyway, and that’s more than I can say about, for example, the novels of Zadie Smith.

We closed with desserts which were variations on a single theme but, between them, were strong enough to redeem some of the flaws that had gone before. Dave’s kadayifi was a brick of that familiar Shredded-Wheat-a-like, baked in sweet syrup and carpet-bombed with pistachio, topped with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream. It looked the part, and tasted good enough that Dave didn’t envy the baklava turning up at the next table: four generous pieces, clustered round more of the ice cream.

I think, uncharacteristically, I did better. I’d seen a video of the restaurant making their künefe on social media and it completely sold me on it: two layers of that crispy fried dough sandwiching a gooey core of stretchy cheese. The same syrup – the whole thing swimming in it, instead – and the same festooning of pistachio, but for me an infinitely more satisfying dessert. One of more contrasts and extremes, the syrup heightening the peaks of sweetness and yet, somehow, the cheese adding an almost savoury note that stopped it all being oppressive.

Our bill for two came to £113.30, not including service – and I thought the service was very good, even if they didn’t stage an intervention when I tried to order fermented pickled carrot juice. You could eat there for less, especially on the set, but I think there are probably better ways to spend money there than ours. Have a main each, stay away from the platter and maybe make the most of the wine list: Antep Kitchen stocks half a dozen Turkish wines, and none will set you back more than £30 a bottle. As we left the restaurant I saw, out on the pavement, a huge pallet loaded with charcoal, and I wondered whether the coals would get hotter than I’d felt.

Our day in Oxford ended as it began: stagger to a pub, have a pint in the beer garden and find that the beer garden is intolerable. Take the pint inside and find that inside is also intolerable. In the end we wound up drinking alcohol free beer at the Tap Social pub in the Covered Market, finding that “least hellish” was the best we could settle for. Dave’s train home stopped in Didcot for reasons that were never explained beyond the general inadequacy of our rail network, he took two hours to get home and missed some of the evening’s World Cup match. It was not our finest meal out together, but we concluded that it was still a better way to spend Friday than being at work.

And Antep Kitchen played a part in that: not only because of its excellent air conditioning but because it’s a brilliant illustration of, as Mohamad Skeik said in 2020, a restaurant you would love to pick up and drop on your doorstep. Any neighbourhood would be lucky to have it, and its neighbourhood definitely is. But is it worth crossing the country to visit? Much as I liked it I am less sure of that, but I’m really glad I’ve tried it. Just bear in mind some of the other things I’ve said that about recently: Salgam, I’m looking at you.

Antep Kitchen – 7.5
228-230 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1UH
01865 247555

https://www.antepkitchen.co.uk

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Restaurant review: No. 1 Ship Street, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Oxford, probably my favourite city in which to review restaurants, ostensibly has little in common with Reading. One has pretty old buildings and winding lanes, a shopping mall that doesn’t bump off your will to live in the space of five minutes, a bustling market with food, drink, coffee and cheese and shedloads of independent retail. The other has Forbury Gardens and a very good bus network.

That sounds like I’m doing Reading down. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Oxford complements Reading nicely: if there’s something you wish Reading had, you may well find it thirty minutes down the train tracks. And to be fair to Reading, Oxford may beat it for wine bars – because it has some and no, Vino Vita doesn’t count – and it has some lovely old pubs, but Reading is streets ahead when it comes to craft beer. Oxford is brilliant, but it has no Nag’s Head.

One thing they do have in common, though, is that their best restaurants are rarely found in the centre. Reading has some solid restaurants inside the IDR – your Me Kongs, and Mama’s Ways – but they’re the exception rather than the rule: it’s mostly chains and I suspect it always has been. The independent restaurants chasing that status right in the centre are probably London Street Brasserie and The Reading Room, neither of which quite pulls it off, but beyond that you might find yourself heading north of the river, or west down the Oxford Road.

Oxford is similar. If you overlaid the Oxford restaurants I’ve reviewed over a map of the place, it would look like my metaphorical attempts to hit a bullseye down the pub: everything everywhere but in the middle. Out east you have the Cowley Road, Iffley Road and St Clements, all with great places to eat, and Headington beyond that. Head north and you reach Little Clarendon Street before the myriad of choices available in Jericho or Summertown. But what about the centre?

Oxford has a mall, the Westgate, and it’s nicer than the Oracle. But that means it still gets chains, just fancier ones. It has the kind Reading doesn’t attract: Mowgli; Shoryu Ramen; Six By Nico. Notably it has a branch of award-winning small chain Beefy Boys – it would have been a coup, if they had chosen Reading. But in the rest of the centre it’s largely a mix of chains we have, chains we used to have and chains we can probably live without. It has Cosy Club, for people who wish the Lounge group were fancier, and The Ivy, for people who wish Cosy Club was, I don’t know, more showy.

Oxford readers would probably be the first to tell me that’s a slight oversimplification. Oxford has a few long-standing central restaurants with a durable fan following, like Chiang Mai Kitchen or Edamame: it tells you something about their longevity that I’ve eaten at both, each case long before I started writing this blog. It has a branch of Permit Room, the Dishoom offshoot that is so far limited to a mere five locations nationwide.

Beyond that, if you’re talking more upmarket restaurants, it has Quod, a buzzy brasserie on the ground floor of the Old Bank Hotel owned by the same group as Gee’s. And the conversion of the old Boswell’s department store into a hotel has given the city Treadwell, a new all-day restaurant whose menu looks a bit like somebody took Quod’s, gave it to the kitchen and said “make it quirkier”: whether fish and chips needs kimchi tartar sauce is anybody’s guess.

Having lost all my Reading readers with seven paragraphs about Oxford, and all my Oxford readers with seven paragraphs which aren’t about the restaurant I’m reviewing this week, let’s finally get to the point and talk about No. 1 Ship Street, the subject of this week’s review. It’s resolutely small and independent, it’s been open for nine years this summer and it’s very much in the city centre, just off the pedestrianised hellscape of Cornmarket Street, just around the corner from the Covered Market.

Chef Owen Little has been there from the very start, and No. 1 Ship Street shows no signs of slowing down as it reaches the end of its first decade, having been named last November as one of OpenTable’s Top 100 U.K. restaurants: to put this in perspective, nowhere in Reading featured on that list, and nowhere else in Oxford did either. I explained all this – fortunately for him in far less depth than I have here – to my dear friend Jerry as we had a pre-prandial beer in Teardrop, the tiny pub in the Covered Market.

Owner Ross Drummond apparently celebrated winning that award from OpenTable by giving the place a refurb for the New Year. I think it was a subtle one, because the bones of the dining room were already there: beautiful racing green walls, well-spaced tables, the whole thing sleek, luxe and unfussy. They’ve removed the slightly tacky spider lights and the tables now are gorgeous and copper-topped: Jerry, mentally making notes for his flat, was taken with those. 

It was difficult to believe that the horrors of Cornmarket Street were a stone’s throw away, but No. 1 Ship Street had created a beautiful, grown-up oasis dangerously close to its borders. I should say that we asked to be seated in the main dining room: I’m sure the one on the other side of the entrance is lovely of an evening, but I didn’t want to lunch in a windowless room on a June afternoon.

After a disappointing run of small-plates-for-sharing restaurants, some honestly described and some far less so, No. 1 Ship Street’s menu came as a blessed relief. Terms like appetisers, starters and mains might be increasingly recherché out there in the wild, but in this restaurant they were alive and well. There was no spiel about the concept, because the concept was “remember how restaurants used to be?” and the conversational gambit wasn’t “do you need me to explain the menu?” but instead my personal favourite, “are you ready to order?”

Not that we were, at first, because No. 1 Ship Street’s menu was just tricky enough. The starters seemed to be where the more experimental bent came out – burnt aubergine soup, foie gras crème brûlée, frog’s legs and the like – while the mains were more conventional. So yes, there was a burger, and a steak, and a risotto. I guess you don’t survive nearly a decade in the centre of Oxford by taking massive risks.

Starters clustered between £10 and £16, mains began at £20 and climbed up from there. If you wanted oysters, lobster, a tomahawk or the restaurant’s surf and turf (which combined the latter two and cost £160) you could spend an awful lot more, and a specials board introduced about half a dozen other options, nearly all of them fish and seafood.

It was difficult enough that we ordered some appetisers and apéritifs while we decided – and No. 1 Ship Street is that happy kind of restaurant that brings them and gives you the time and space you need for that. Jerry’s bread was good and generous, speckled with nigella seeds and very enjoyable. Good salted butter at room temperature, embossed with the name of the restaurant, was a nice touch. For £6, the bread needed to be this good, and gladly it was.

My truffle and porcini arancini were the first evidence that the kitchen might quite like being tricksy for the sake of it. They were very good, the texture acceptably crunchy and the inside studded with mushroom. Not indecent value at £6 for three either. Whether they needed to be submerged in some kind of hot truffle mayo and then carpeted in Parmesan was another matter. I thought less might have been more in this instance.

Jerry tried a bit but revealed to me that he really wasn’t a fan of truffle. And I was reminded of the recent meal where I discovered he had been humouring me all these years by drinking white wine when he only really liked red wine. It turned out that my happy memory in lockdown of sitting on a park bench with Jerry demolishing a bottle of red and inhaling a packet of Torres’ superlative truffle crisps was actually more evidence of Jerry being too nice to say he didn’t enjoy something. Let’s hope that somewhere out there he isn’t writing a blog telling the world what a terrible dining companion I am.

Never mind. The apéritifs, by the way, were knockout: mine a variant on a negroni sweetened and mollified with the substitution of amaro for vermouth and Jerry’s a champagne cocktail with a little cognac in the mix, sugar cube effortlessly effervescing at the bottom like buried treasure. We followed this up with an excellent South African Chardonnay – yes, a white – recommended by the very knowledgeable server, from the Elgin Valley. It had plenty of citrus and elegance, it was £48, and I liked it a lot. Jerry said he did too, and hopefully he meant it.

Starters were where things started to wobble. Jerry was torn between a number of options, one of which was the foie gras.

“I love it, but I know I shouldn’t, so I don’t order it these days” he told me. And I’m afraid I took that as an opportunity to deliver a tone deaf homily about not denying yourself things you like – I wish I could say it was the negroni talking, but such conduct is me all over – and so he chose it.

It was meant to be a foie gras crème brûlée with vin jaune gel and toasted brioche, and I’m sorry to say this, but the resemblance stops at the photograph, and possibly before that. A crème brûlée is meant to have a satisfying burnt top and be set underneath. It’s not meant to be a murky puddle of bumf. And it’s not meant to taste so little of foie gras that you wonder, as Jerry did, whether he’d accidentally been given something from the dessert section, a theory lent credence by the pointless popcorn on top.

Poor Jerry – all the guilt of having ordered foie gras without the corresponding enjoyment of getting to eat the bastard stuff. I felt personally responsible.

I felt less bad about it, though, because my starter was also disappointing. What was billed as seared scallops with clam velouté and parsnips was in fact a thin puddle of soup with a single scallop, cut in half, three clams and a crispy disc of perpendicular parsnip.

The overall effect, apart from masterful cost control in a £16 starter, was an oversweetened, unsubtle cacophony of a dish. Just like the foie gras crème brûlée, what turned up wasn’t in the slightest what the menu implied you would be tucking into. No wonder they brought you a spoon with this one. I once ate at Oxford restaurant Gees and wondered if I’d accidentally wandered into the U.K.’s most expensive salad bar. No. 1 Ship Street, by contrast, was beginning to feel like a spenny soup kitchen in disguise.

Were the mains, when the restaurant stayed closer to the mainstream, any better? Mostly, I would say. My confit duck almost worked: the skin was gloriously crisp, the fat rendered and the flesh underneath giving in all the right ways. Perching it on a pile of wild mushrooms, enjoyable ones at that, was a bit like giving the dish platform shoes: it made it look like you got far more duck than you did.

The white asparagus was thick and generous, with just enough bite, beautifully cooked to avoid the bitterness this variety can sometimes have. “It looks like a pair of dildos” was Jerry’s unvarnished take: I laughed like a drain and warned him that I planned to quote him verbatim. This is the bit in the description where I’d love to say and a plum jus brought it all together beautifully but instead I have to say that there was a thin drizzle of blandness that didn’t add enough moisture or flavour.

This dish needed carbs and didn’t have them, so I ordered some chunky chips. And these were well done, but with the main course so unrelentingly dry there was nothing for these to soak up, or act as a vehicle for. It also means that my duck dish, with chips on the side, cost £30. That’s a lot for not quite enough, there’s no way around that.

Jerry picked better I think, moules marinière from the specials. They were plump specimens, from St Austell Bay according to the blackboard, and Jerry thoroughly enjoyed them. They came with frites, and as with No. 1 Ship Street’s chips they were well executed.

But ironically, for me, this dish had the converse problem to both those starters. The mussels were high and dry, clustered in a wide-brimmed bowl. The joy of moules marinière is the bit at the end, when all the shells have been vanquished and you’re left with a bowl of that creamy liquor, to trawl with a spoon, picking up stray mussels, to drink like broth, to dab with bread or to tip your frites into. It makes it two meals in one.

But here, that last stage was a bit like some people I see prancing around on Instagram, too shallow to be worth persevering with. It seems that No. 1 Ship Street only dished up soup when you didn’t want it to. Jerry, mind you, loved it.

Despite all that, and perhaps paradoxically, we stopped for dessert. Because despite the food not being spectacular, and in some cases being downright weird, we were still having a lovely time. No. 1 Ship Street somehow, through its gorgeous, calming room, its very pleasing booze and unstintingly charming staff, created a space where you knew, on some level, that things could and should be better but didn’t mind as much as you should.

In that sense, it was almost the inverse of so many experiences I’ve had on duty lately, restaurants I ought to have liked more than I did. Here, instead, I found myself almost willing to suspend critical judgment. Only in the moment, really, and as I write this I remember all the things they got wrong. But weirdly, remembering them is almost like trying to recall a dream. I wonder how many people No. 1 Ship Street has pulled that trick on over nearly a decade. I’m not seeking to denigrate: it’s a neat trick.

Anyway, they saved some of the best for last. They make their own ice cream, and both the chocolate and salted caramel were smooth, rich, crystal-free and as good as anything you could get in George & Davis, if not quite the standard of Swoon on the High. The range of flavours was quite pedestrian, which surprised me: they save the cheffy stuff, the rose and rhubarb ice cream or the basil sorbet, to accompany Actual Desserts. £6 for two scoops with a beautifully light langue de chat was probably the bargain of the day.

Jerry was happy with his pistachio cake. I don’t know if I would have been, it was a thin, uneven slab of the stuff with something that did not look like basil sorbet. Maybe it was grape and basil sorbet – the menu, as so often, made it difficult to work out what you were going to get.

And again, that’s not necessarily a problem. In a restaurant where the words on a menu are just a jumping-off point, in the hands of the right kitchen, a meal can be a life of surprises. Underpromising and overdelivering is one of the great talents of hospitality done well, and the thing that makes memories – as much as anything does, over and above the people you bring with you. The problem with No. 1 Ship Street, for all I keep saying that it’s not a bad restaurant, is that none of the surprises, on balance, were good ones.

All that set us back £214, including the standard 12.5% tip, and more than usual I couldn’t really work out whether I’d been stiffed or not. We were there for the best part of two and a half hours, we had a marvellous time – although for me, lunching with Jerry, that was a given – and we were very well looked after.

Perhaps in the centre of Oxford, given the alternatives, No. 1 Ship Street is as good as it needs to be. Or maybe it had a bad day when I went, or I was too finicky. But I was left again marvelling at their powers of misdirection: how could they have created the semblance of a fantastic meal from such inconsistent food? Appropriately, it had the feel of being through the looking glass about it.

But I didn’t feel that way at the time, I only feel it now. At the time, Jerry and I agreed that we’d had a lovely meal, and off we strolled to the Rose & Crown to enjoy the refurbished outside space and improved beer offering. It had been another classic visit to Oxford, and if something was niggling at me it would take a couple of weeks for my reservations to fully germinate.

Restaurant reviewers are pontificators by nature, and never miss an opportunity to tell you what a restaurant Means, what it is All About. I’ve read a couple of think pieces lately about how it’s okay for a restaurant to be just good enough, in defence of the unspectacular, the “fine” or “ordinary”. Well, I suppose it’s one way to try and jazz up a boring meal, or meet your latest deadline at the Financial Times. You’ve got to have an angle.

But for the rest of us, who spend our own money, that’s not the axis you plot things on. It’s not unremarkable versus showy, hyped versus anonymous. Most of us deal in good or bad, or perhaps good enough and not good enough. No. 1 Ship Street’s failing is to try and show off, when it could just get the basics very right and send a lot of people away very happy indeed. It has the room, it has the service, it has all the ingredients to do that.

But somehow, for some reason, it chooses not to and, to give it credit, it almost gets away with it. But what do I know? If you clock up a decade slap bang in the centre of Oxford, even with the dearth of competition, you must know a thing or two. Even so, I can’t help feeling their second decade might prove more difficult.

No. 1 Ship Street – 7.0
1 Ship Street, Oxford, OX1 3DA
01865 806637

https://www.no1shipstreet.com

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Pub review: The Port Mahon, Oxford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.theportmahon.com

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

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