You’ll have to forgive me, because in the normal run of events I announce my award winners at the end of the year, wrapping everything up in a bow so we can all get on with a fresh twelve months. I’m tardy this time, partly because writing these is still more laborious than it would normally be (I won’t go into all that again) and partly because, having dodged the flu/lurgy/Covid that Zoë invariably gets over Christmas most years, she’s managed to get clobbered with a chest infection instead, right on New Year’s Eve. So the house has become a little hospital ward in its own right, and writing has taken a back seat. Never mind: better late than never.
You’d think the extra deliberation time would make writing these awards easier, but if anything it’s had the opposite effect. It’s been a good year for Reading food, with plenty of good, interesting places opening in and around the town centre. But the majority of those new places – the best of them, anyway – are squarely in the casual dining sector, offering pizzas and burgers, the stuff that influencers tend to review. We’ve not had a similar rise in other kinds of restaurants, and when I asked on my Facebook page what people would like to see more of in 2026 the comments, all full of hope and optimism, made for quite a frustrating crib sheet of many of the things Reading still lacks.
No specialist fish restaurant, no proper gelato parlour, no Mexican restaurant. No Latin American cuisine of any kind, come to think of it (“it’s hard to get Samoan chop suey round here” said possibly the most niche comment I received). A lot of people identified that we still lack a tapas restaurant, something I’ve been moaning about since the earliest days of this blog, when we had a bad one. Many others wanted a good, independent Italian restaurant and a French bistro: French food is having a proper moment in London, but that has not extended this far west yet.
Some people wanted things which required the geography (and possibly the climate) of Reading to be different – more al fresco dining and rooftop bars – and others expressed more general aspirations we can all get behind. “Less greedy landlords” said one person and, not necessarily changing the subject, “less John Sykes” said another. Everybody wanted lower rents for independents, a utopia we’ve been waiting for long enough to know it won’t happen. One comment wanted to see “a realisation by landlords that it’s better to have a good tenant paying less than you’d like than to have an empty unit paying you nothing at all”: don’t we all? “I just want a decent bagel bakery” read one plaintive cry.
It’s hard not to feel discouraged, reading all that. And doubly so for me, because a reasonable proportion of my reviews last year were of places outside Reading, in the surrounding countryside or further afield, in Bristol, Oxford, Bath or London. And I know there’s a degree of cherry-picking going on – I don’t pick places a train ride away unless I’m confident they’ll be worth the journey – but the restaurants I’ve encountered on my travels often have what Reading lacks.
And I don’t see places like that opening in Reading, not on the evidence of last year or any year since 2018. We don’t have a pub like the Three Tuns, a bar like Newbury’s Parched, a restaurant like Seasonality, a bakery like U. Bakery or a tapas spot like Arbequina. We have pizza and burgers, and pizza and burgers have their place, but it’s starting to feel a tad lopsided.
So these awards have something of a split personality, because this year I’m giving out awards for dishes and restaurants in Reading, but also for those further afield. I’ve had some excellent food in Reading, but the very best of what I’ve eaten in most cases, as this list clearly shows, has involved some travel. I sincerely hope 2026 closes the gap.
That isn’t intended to imply that you can’t eat wonderful food in Reading. Because you really can, and narrowing the awards down to a winner and two honourable mentions has been difficult in many cases. To give you an idea, I couldn’t find room for dishes – all excellent – by Kungfu Kitchen, Pau Brasil, The Moderation, and Good Old Days among the final winners, and an extra week or two of head-scratching didn’t make that any easier. But if deciding between Reading dishes was difficult, possibly deciding between dishes outside Reading was just a little more fun; one was an agonising choice of who went where on the podium, the other a somewhat more satisfying wander down memory lane.
Anyway, without any further ado let’s get on with opening another year’s set of sealed envelopes. I hope you enjoy this, even if you find much to disagree with in it. Here’s hoping the decisions are even more problematic when this all comes round again at the end of the year.
STARTER OF THE YEAR (Reading): Frittatini, Amò Italian Street Food
Amò’s pasta fritti, breadcrumbed, fried pucks of pasta with either ragu or – even better – aubergine and tomato are not always available, but when they are, they’re an absolute must order. I can’t remember how many times I ate them last year, I just know that it wasn’t enough. “They were beautiful things, and when I sit down in six months or so to write my annual awards it’s hard to imagine they won’t feature in some shape or form” I said when I ate them for the first time. I know I’m not always right, and doubtless you do too, but I was right about that.
It saddens me a great deal that I couldn’t give this award out to either of the runners-up. Honourable mentions go to Oishi for its exquisite prawn and leek gyoza and Club India, the pride of Winnersh, for curry leaf calamari, an almost impossibly moreish dish.
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On the Wednesday afternoon, my second full day in hospital after the accident, I put some pictures up on Facebook. Nothing special, just a picture from my bed of Dorrell Ward, my left foot poking out, and a shaky, badly photographed picture of my lunch. Well, I never thought this would be my next forthcoming restaurant review my caption read. I know the English is clumsy but in my defence I was dictating it, because typing was too challenging at that point. Besides, I’d probably just had some morphine.
The comments were immediate, plentiful and properly lovely. A couple of the funny ones stuck with me. Chronicle hitman? said one: I replied that it was more likely to be a whack job by the owners of Vino Vita. Another said that is extreme lengths you’ve gone to to obtain a review. I had the comeback in my mind – no stone left unturned, I thought I would say – but looking at my Facebook page, it seems I never posted it. Perhaps the morphine had kicked in by then: I did spend quite a lot of the time asleep, at the rare times when sleep came easily, because that way everything hurt less.
But the thing is, on some level it is a gap that I’ve never reviewed the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Because you could make an argument that it is Reading’s largest restaurant: the trust employs 7500 people, admittedly across more sites than just the RBH, and has over 800 beds. Put that way, it’s hard to imagine that even Reading’s busiest conventional restaurant feeds more people in a week.
So I suppose, in a funny kind of way, this review is sort of overdue. During my four night stay in a place that doubles as Reading’s busiest restaurant, I begin to get an idea of what an unusual beast it is.
* * * * *
I wasn’t meant to wind up an inpatient in the Royal Berks. A whole chain of things had to go wrong for me to be in the place I was and make the decision I did.
First of all, I shouldn’t have been commuting home that Monday afternoon. The previous week I’ve been off with the cold that everyone has had, the cold that wiped us all out. And I only went into the office to catch up with my boss, only to find when I got there that he’d had to take the day off at short notice. If I’d known I would have worked from home, and never made the fateful journey that led to me coming a cropper.
And my boss’s boss, seeing that I was less than 100%, told me to go home early. That played a part too. So I found myself getting off a train somewhere between four-thirty and five o’clock, cutting through Harris Arcade on my way to pick something up from the supermarket. If I’d been later, the arcade would have been closed and I wouldn’t have used it as a short cut. But all those things happened, one after another, and so a little before five I got to the Friar Street end of the arcade to find the shutter in front of the exit halfway down.
In my mind, I thought two things that weren’t necessarily true. I thought that if I headed back to the other end of the arcade, I might find that shutter down too, and then by the time I returned to where I was I’d be shut in the arcade. I also looked at the shutter in front of me and thought to myself I can squeeze under that. And in that respect, I was sort of right: I did manage to shimmy under the shutter.
The problem was that retaining my footing on the other side was completely beyond me.
I went unceremoniously flying, face first into a parked car. My glasses were smashed to pieces, my face bleeding and grazed. But that wasn’t the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was that my arm, in unbelievable pain, no longer felt like mine. I have had to tell this story more times than I can tell you: to friends, to family, to acquaintances, but also to every single NHS staff member who has spoken to me in any capacity since the accident. The first thing they ask you is to confirm your name and your date of birth. But the second thing they say, without fail, is so how did it happen?
I always start with it’s really embarrassing, followed by do you know the Harris Arcade in town? My shame is then compounded by the fact that invariably, whoever I’m talking to knows exactly where I’m talking about: I can’t even make it sound less ridiculous an accident than it was. “I’ve never heard that one before” said the very nice man that took my first x-ray after I was discharged from hospital. Many of the reactions have been variations on that theme.
My wife has heard me tell the tale many times, and has given me tips on how to make it more entertaining which I refuse to follow. Stories in her family are currency, and sitting with them watching them trade anecdotes is one of my favourite things to do, an opportunity to relax and enjoy the show. Zoë tells me that to get a big laugh I should pretend that the shutter was literally rolling down as I reached it and that I chose in an instant to slide underneath it.
But that makes me sound intrepid, or brave, or both. In reality, I’m just a dumb middle-aged man who made a bad decision and went down like an overweight sack of potatoes. The closest I’ve come to taking her advice is this: whenever I tell someone what happened I say I tried to get under the shutter like a shit Indiana Jones. Even that, I’m painfully aware, makes me sound cooler than I really am.
* * * * *
After the accident, in shock and in pain, unable to see, I am peeled off the pavement by Elliott and Alex.
Everyone likes to think that they would stop in circumstances like these, but I think we all know that most people don’t. Elliott and Alex do. They are second year students at the university, who just happen to be in town that afternoon. They ask if I’m okay, and it soon becomes apparent that I’m not. They help me to a bench outside M&S, near the statue of Queen Victoria. They call 999 and put me on the line. The call handler suggests that I should go to the minor injuries unit in Henley. Elliott and Alex are having none of that. I call my wife, still at work, and she picks up because she knows that I never call her when she’s at work.
“Is everything okay?” she asks me. No, I reply. My arm doesn’t work, I say.
Elliott and Alex call me an Uber to get me to the RBH. Getting into it is agony, but they keep talking to me, keep me in the room, keep me distracted. They call their friends and tell them they’re running late, and they ride with me to the hospital and wait with me until my wife arrives, having rushed back from work. These people don’t know me, don’t know anything about me, but they give up two hours of their evening to stay with a stranger, one who’s in excruciating pain and blind as a bat. They only go when they know that Zoë has got home, has picked up some stuff and is in a taxi on her way to me.
We swap phone numbers, and Elliott texts me several times over the weeks ahead. I am yet to persuade him to let me pay for the Uber, but I intend to keep trying. It is the first and probably the biggest kindness I experience, but by no means the last.
After they are gone, I squint at my phone held in my one good hand and wait for Zoë. From down the corridor I hear her at reception. “I’m looking for my husband” she says, and when asked to describe me, she says “he’s big and grey”. I make a mental note never to let her forget this, but I’m just so happy she’s there.
* * * * *
My first experience of the food on the ward, the day after I am admitted, is not the best. Despite the fact that I’m pretty much unable to move, arm in a cast, dosed up with codeine and morphine like clockwork, it hasn’t registered with me that eating with one hand is going to be extremely difficult. I order cornflakes for breakfast, and then realise that sitting up in my bed to eat them is something of which I’m simply not capable. I write that off, because oddly my appetite isn’t what it usually is, and decide I can save myself for lunch.
Lunch is a vegetable risotto, glistening strangely under artificial lights that give it almost an oversaturated look, like a Martin Parr photograph. I push a couple of forkfuls into my mouth and decide these are calories I can do without. Besides, I decide that it looks more like something deposited on a pavement after closing time than the sort of thing I’m used to in pubs and restaurants. At this point, I guess I’m thinking of the Royal Berks as like an all inclusive holiday: you can always sneak in food from elsewhere.
Zoë comes to visit me every day, and between us we soon learn the ecosystem of alternatives in the hospital. The top of the tree is the M&S – “that little Marks & Spencer is a godsend”, Zoë says to me, remembering all the vegetable samosas I smuggled in for her when she spent the best part of a week on the Covid ward. I have a bag of crispy chocolate clouds on my bedside table pretty much most of the time, the challenge being to eat them before the sweltering heat makes them unviable.
And then there’s the hierarchy of coffee. Back when I lived near the hospital I used to walk to AMT for their mochas, and on hot days I’d buy a Froffee, a coffee and ice cream milkshake, and drink it in Eldon Square Gardens, soaking up the sun. I was between jobs back then, and it broke up the afternoons. But AMT’s best days are behind it, and the mocha Zoë brings me one morning is genuinely undrinkable.
Better, to my surprise, is Pumpkin: one afternoon my dear friend Jerry comes to visit me and fetches me a mocha from Pumpkin which is a hundred times better than AMT’s. He also brings me a copy of Viz and the latest Private Eye, which is the kind of thoughtful thing great friends do. I read them at night, by the light of my bedside lamp, after half nine when visiting hours are over and my knackered wife has gone home to get some rest. She keeps me company for 12 hours, every single day, and she never complains.
We aren’t used to spending nights apart, and of all of the things about this that might be one of the most upsetting. The lights are never completely off in the ward, because they’re always coming round to top up your drugs or check your blood pressure. But with my fan whirring, and the other noise abating, the Yves Klein blue curtains drawn around my bed, we send each other good night messages and pictures, and I try to quieten my mind by reading the magazines that Jerry has brought me.
When it comes to coffee the god tier is Jamaica Blue. I reviewed them, over seven years ago, but somehow I’d forgotten about their existence, or how good they were. On the morning of my discharge from hospital Zoë brings me one of their mochas, and for the first time in almost a week I am reminded of how wonderful a thing great coffee can be. It’s a small, tenuous link to my pre-accident life of little luxuries, of V60s at home or my latte at C.U.P, always at 8am, before hopping on the train to the office.
Even better than that, if such a thing is possible, is the milkshake Zoë brought me the previous afternoon from Jamaica Blue, an indulgence so lovely I could almost weep. Thick, cold, chocolatey, more fun than you would ever reasonably expect to have in a hospital. It tastes, to paraphrase Philip Larkin in another context, like an enormous yes.
* * * * *
If I didn’t rely on goodies from the M&S or from the hospital’s cafés as much as I could have done, there was a reason for that. The reason was that the food from the Royal Berks proved to be quite the surprise package.
The menus come round every morning, printed each day, a series of boxes and options to tick for the following day’s breakfast, lunch and dinner. The weeks are numbered, and the font at the top of the menu calls them Lunch and Supper, in Mistral, a typeface you know even if you don’t realise you do. It’s the one from the logo of Australian soap Neighbours, designed in the ‘50s, a beautiful cursive script that is simultaneously retro and timeless. I’ve always loved Mistral, and somehow it brings a tiny chink of sunlight into a room shrouded with blinds.
After that disappointing risotto, somehow I never have another entirely bad meal during my time in hospital. For lunch on my second full day, I have a beef curry with rice and chunks of potato and while I’m eating it, I realise that it’s actually quite good. Not just the absence of bad, although I would’ve settled for that, but decent.
The meat isn’t soft, tender, falling apart as it would be in a Clay’s curry, and the spicing isn’t complex, or even front and centre, but it’s not bouncy, fatty or gristly. The waxy cubes of potato add something, and I find that even with a broken arm, even with a hot uncomfortable cast on me, even with the fan humming and the painkillers wearing off, this is a good meal.
And then, afterwards, an even happier surprise. An apple crumble where the base is sweet, stewed apple but more importantly, the ratio of crumble to fruit is beyond reproach. And by that I mean that it’s easily two thirds crumble, a huge and joyous permacrust of biscuit so thick that I’m fearful, with only one hand, of whether I’ll be able to force my spoon through it. I manage it somehow, and the rewards are considerable.
I include a picture of my lunch with a picture of my ward as I send that first Facebook post mentioning what’s happened to me and where I have found myself. The responses flood in wishing me well, but they also do something interesting that I didn’t expect: a lot of them talk about the food. Because, and I had no idea of this, the hospital makes all of its food from scratch, on the premises, and they serve it in the restaurant as well as serving it to the patients. They could so easily use the likes of Sodexo: how wonderful it is that they choose not to.
One commenter tells me that she used to be the patient services manager for the catering department. The hard work that goes into all of those recipes is outstanding she tells me, and I can well believe it. She also sends me a lovely message with a few tips about what you can and can’t do around the menu, catering life hacks; I thank her for them but decide not to do any of them, because I don’t want to be a diva. The staff start work at 6am every day, she tells me, and work for 14 hours to ensure feeding everybody in the hospital: Reading’s largest restaurant indeed.
So many people comment along those lines, about the food, about the staff, about what a wonderful place the Royal Berks is for people when they need care the most. One of comments says how lovely the hospital’s goulash and spicy lamb are, another recommends the “cultural and religious menu”, a tip that is echoed by Zoë from her time on the Covid ward. The menu just calls it a “ethnic meal”, but I order it multiple times and am never disappointed.
Somebody else tells me that she’s been a patient at the RBH on and off for 18 months. The food is one of the highlights she tells me. It sounds silly, but all these intersecting stories, this universality of experience makes me feel less alone, and less scared. It also reinforces that even if I have very limited experience of this hospital – this is the first time I’ve ever spent the night in a hospital since I was born – the RBH is at the centre of Reading life, and it touches everybody.
It was there when my wife was taken away from our house in an ambulance late at night for a prolonged stay on the Covid ward, in the depths of winter 2021. Both of my sisters-in-law were born there, so were both of my beautiful nieces. It’s the RBH that treated my father-in-law when he had cancer, and again when he had a heart attack. And that’s just my family – but from the pile of comments I got a clear impression that it was central to countless more families than mine.
I never quite get over not hating the food. The following day I have a beef stroganoff which again, is just downright comforting and nice. The little mini packets of biscuits are by Crawfords, and are really enjoyable with a cup of hospital tea; I allow myself two sugars while I’m in hospital, it seems only right. The ice cream is lovely too, despite not resembling any ice cream I would buy for myself on the outside. You almost need to eat it first, because by the time you finished your stroganoff or your keema curry – accompanied by a little pot of dal or vegetable curry – it is a texture almost like foam.
* * * * *
One of the comments on my Facebook page says NHS toast is up there. And there is truth in that, too: every morning my breakfast form requests white toast with butter and Marmite, and there is real comfort in eating that around 8am, when the ward starts to stutter to life and the shifts change over, when you give up hope of getting any more shut eye until the afternoon.
With only one arm, I have to ask the nurses to butter my toast and put Marmite on it. Every morning I luck out, either getting a nurse who loves Marmite or, equally likely, one who has never tried the stuff. The tub they bring is generous, and it is generously slathered on. I eat it in silent gratitude, and then I attack my sweet white tea, a drink I haven’t had for the best part of a decade.
* * * * *
Everyone says this, but it’s true: the staff at the RBH are uniformly fantastic. From the people who butter my toast to the ones who help me adjust my bed, from John, the helpful nurse on my final morning who walks me to the loo and protects my dignity to the two T-level students who are spending the week helping out on my ward, who take my blood pressure across the four days with gradually increasing proficiency, everybody is amazing. From the porters who wheel me across the hospital in my bed for a CT scan to the staff who somehow managed to roll and transfer me from my bed into the scanner – while again protecting what little dignity I have – it’s impossible to express admiration or gratitude adequately for them.
And everybody knows everybody, the porters greet each other as they pass in corridors, the way bus drivers do. The staff have an incredible spirit and I can only imagine the strain that is put under, every single day. At the time I’m simply emotional and grateful and full of feelings in a way that suggests that, the rest of the time, they’re probably buried further below the surface than they should be. I’ve spent more of the last five weeks crying then I have the five years before that.
It’s only later on, when I get home, that I feel angry that things should be so difficult for the people that work there. During the pandemic, I always neglected to stand outside my house and bash a saucepan with a wooden spoon, to clap for carers. I found it performative, I felt like it had been suggested by a government that did not care for that sector one iota, and did nothing to protect it from the virus. I told people that I did my bit for the NHS by voting Labour. But now I realise that’s also performative, only in a different way, and just as bad. I resolve to donate to the Royal Berks’ charity when I get out, to support their extraordinary work.
* * * * *
Around Thursday lunchtime Melinda, one of the nurses looking after us that day, stops by my bed and asks me if I write this blog. She follows me on Facebook, and has seen the picture of my foot in the ward. I’d know that ward anywhere, she tells me. I own up, and we have a little chat about that, a touching little moment of connection which comes out of nowhere. I tell her that if she wants to feel really proud of where she works, she should go to my Facebook page and read the comments.
I mention this anecdote on Facebook a few days later when I’m convalescing at home, and someone else pops up in the comments. Me and that same nurse had this conversation in the staff kitchen and she showed me your post and that’s how I was introduced to your page she says. It’s nice to feel social media bringing people together, because there are so many reminders day in, day out of it doing precisely the opposite.
Later on Thursday afternoon, a doctor comes by to chat to me about my discharge the following day. The junior doctors are on strike tomorrow, and everything is being prepped in advance so I can check out without any undue delays. She asks how my time in hospital has been and as I’ve done here, as I’ve done with everybody who has asked since I got home, I pretty much gush about the amazing work that happens in the Royal Berks.
“I really hope you didn’t mind the food” she tells me. “We get quite a lot of complaints about that.”
“Actually I liked it” I reply. I think about it for a second, decide to blow my cover. “I write a restaurant blog in my spare time and the food here, and the way it is managed here has really impressed me.”
“You’re not Edible Reading, are you? I’m pretty sure I follow you.”
This might be the closest to fame that I’m ever going to get, but really I’m not at the epicentre of this story. The hospital is. Mine is just one of thousands of stories about this institution, one voice straining to be heard in a gigantic choir singing its praises. That is absolutely as it should be.
When I finally leave on the Saturday, gingerly shambling out into the daylight with Zoë to the car park where my father-in-law is waiting, my relationship with the RBH is far from over. There will be x-rays, they will fit a brace, they will do more x-rays, they will determine that the brace isn’t enough, and they will decide to operate. The fracture clinic is right next to Jamaica Blue: I grab a coffee to fortify myself before every appointment.
There will be a day when I sit there in the Day Surgery ward for seven hours, starving and anxious, while I watch everyone else go off for their surgery, come back and go home. There will be a conversation with the anaesthetists, where I only remember the beginning and then come round, groggy and in recovery, hours later. There will be that first phone call with Zoë afterwards, when I let her know that I’m still alive and enjoy the miracle of hearing her voice again.
And there will be one more night in the hospital, back on Dorrell Ward. It might be a happy accident, or it might be deliberate, but they take me to the same ward and park my bed in the same bay. One of the nurses on duty was on duty when I first stayed in hospital. You again, she smiles. The next morning, the wife of the chap in the bed next to me comes over to talk to me and Zoë. “I’m so glad they put him in Dorrell” she tells us. “It’s the best ward in the hospital.”
I don’t know. Perhaps everybody says that. But it was hard not to feel like it was the best ward in the hospital, or that I was the best hospital in the country. Because they and their extraordinary staff took what would have been the most frightening, lonely and anxious week of my life and made it somehow a week of peace, care, healing and – let’s not forget – Marmite.
So that’s my review of the Royal Berkshire Hospital. A place of peace, care, healing and Marmite. A place that is Reading’s biggest restaurant by accident, not design, and one that happens to be a restaurant many times better than it needs to be. It’s also the most paradoxical place I will ever review. Because obviously I sincerely hope I never eat there again, and I wouldn’t wish a meal there on my worst enemy. But if you do find yourself there, and many people do, every single year, I cannot say enough good things about it. The food’s not bad, either.
The Royal Berkshire Hospital London Rd, Reading RG1 5AN 0118 3225111
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As followers on social media may already know, this will be my last conventional restaurant review for a short while. Last month I broke my arm in a nasty accident, and after a short stay in the Royal Berks, a brace, plenty of x-rays and an operation at the end of November I have been recovering at home.
As I’m currently housebound, with only one working arm, restaurant reviews will have to wait, hopefully not too long. Thank you to everybody for the well wishes I’ve received since the incident: I’m very lucky to have such kind and supportive readers.
I will publish content on the blog in the meantime, my physical condition and the limitations of Apple dictation willing, so stay tuned for that. I will try to spare you a piece on “meals you can eat at home with one hand”, (although I get the impression that genre’s less niche than you might think). For now, I hope you enjoy this review, which is of the last restaurant I visited before the accident: I’m very glad that it was at least a gorgeous meal.
For my money, the saddest words you can find when you Google a restaurant are these: temporarily closed.
They should mean one thing, but they so frequently mean another. You should be able to take them at face value, deduce that the proprietors are taking a well-earned rest, or enjoying their summer holidays. But frequently they mean quite the opposite: the restaurant has closed for good, but it hasn’t been officially confirmed yet. Those two words are like light reaching you from a dead star, a misleading proof of life.
In Reading I’ve seen this happen many times. O Português was marked as temporarily closed for several months, a Facebook post by the restaurant saying something like “be back soon” before it eventually shut for good. The same went for Buon Appetito: people turned up for reservations, only to find the place locked and bolted, no sign up and nothing on social media. The only two-word commentary anywhere? Temporarily closed.
It’s frustrating that so many restaurants fail to announce their own departure. I appreciate that it must be desperately sad when a business fails, that people are out of jobs and in some cases, an independent restaurateur’s dreams have withered and died. Perhaps telling customers, or prospective customers, is the least of their worries. But it’s a shame for customers too, especially if you’ve grown fond of a place: their closure, done that way, denies you closure.
Going temp to perm on your Google listing is the equivalent of leaving a job under a cloud. Far better to close the way the Grumpy Goat did, with one last Saturday to drink the place dry, or as Dough Bros did with its recent announcement, telling punters they had until just before Christmas to get their pizza fix.
It’s especially agonising when it’s somewhere you love. My stepmother’s favourite place to eat is a pub called the Bailiwick, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. It was stricken with the curse of temporary closure last month, with nothing on social media. Worse still, they were listed as permanently closed on OpenTable. When they subsequently posted that they would reopen, with more limited hours, having been “given a second chance” my stepmother was elated. Temporary closure, after all, is so rarely that.
It does happen sometimes in Reading, to be fair. Biryani Mama on St Mary’s Butts looked very shut, claimed they were closed for renovations (an excuse I’ve heard before from restaurants that never reopen) but, true to their word, they’re now trading again. But I have never, in all my days reviewing restaurants, seen a restaurant come back from the dead the way Oishi did.
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This week’s review partly came about because of a gentleman called Andy Hayler. Now, you might not know who Hayler is, but in terms of food he’s something of a phenomenon.
The shadowy world of Michelin exists behind an impenetrable curtain, with nobody sure how they work or what dictates who gets listed, is awarded Bib Gourmands and stars – or, sometimes, has them taken away. Andy Hayler is the closest thing we have to a Michelin inspector working in plain sight. He has a blog, which has been around since the 90s, in which he has documented hundreds of meals in restaurants, giving each restaurant – and every dish – a mark out of 20.
I’ve rarely seen anything get lower than a 10, and very little approaches the top of his scale, but that’s because a fair amount of what Hayler has reviewed is at the highest end of dining. There was a time when he had eaten at every three starred restaurant in the entire world, although he stopped keeping up with Michelin when, as he puts it, they devalued what three stars should signify by giving them out in some territories to restaurants that were nowhere near the standards he had experienced elsewhere.
Hayler has a sort of cult, niche status in food. I’ve read a couple of pieces about him in recent years, both verging on hagiographies. He’s been described as “the best living food writer”, and I’ve read interviews that gush about his effortless recall and the esteem in which he is held by chefs and restaurateurs. He is the cognoscenti’s critic of choice and no mistake.
I think he attracts some of those plaudits because of what his reviews both are and aren’t. They don’t, in some senses, read like reviews at all, more like audits from someone scrupulous and meticulous who has forgotten more good meals than most of us will ever have. Although it doesn’t sound like he forgets many of them: why would you, when you document them all in such extensive detail?
I think the respect also comes from his refreshing lack of ego; Hayler would be the first to draw a distinction between himself and many restaurant reviewers. “I wouldn’t ever pretend I was any sort of fantastic prose master. I’m not trying to throw in a load of stuff about my journey to the restaurant and the trendy people on the table to the left” he has said, subtly throwing shade on half the piffle I come out with every week.
Don’t worry, there’s no way he meant me personally: in fact, he once described one of my pieces, about Maida Vale’s Paulette, as a “lovely review” which I found surprisingly touching. “Most of the newspaper critics want to be writers first, I want to focus on the food” he said more recently. I suspect the people who read him admire that purity of approach, and it does mean that when he thinks somewhere is dismal or overrated, which happens occasionally, it’s really very amusing.
What’s also admirable is that Hayler goes where he likes, reviews wherever he wants: money seems to be no object, and he doesn’t follow the fads. You won’t find him, for instance, reviewing Brasserie Constance, a restaurant operating out of Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage, unlike nearly every broadsheet critic over the last few weeks. Instead, his two or three reviews each week involve him going wherever he pleases, in London and abroad.
His two main weaknesses seem to be eating at the Ritz in particular and eating Indian food in general. Hayler is a regular visitor to Epsom’s Dastaan, and the little group of restaurants it has spawned in Surbiton, Richmond and Leeds. He’s also a frequent diner in Southall, and when he gave a warm review to Hounslow’s review of Crispy Dosa last November it caused a Mexican wave of regional bloggers checking out their nearest branch to touch the hem of his virtual garment (been there, done that – four years ago).
“If Mr Hayler thinks it is OK, it is a fair bet I will probably like it” one said. “You can be assured that if Andy says a restaurant is worth visiting then it really will be” said another. That’s proper soft power, and all from the opinion of a chap you mightn’t have heard of.
Hayler even came all the way west to Caversham last year to review Clay’s, something I’ve been waiting for him to do for a very long time. He gave it 14/20, which may not sound like a big deal but actually is. “Clays is a very impressive family-run restaurant, the food shows a lot of care, and the chefs are clearly putting some real effort into reproducing an authentic taste of India” he concluded, after paying particular tribute to Clay’s cabbage pakora, lamb chops and, of course, bhuna venison (Hayler also tried methi chicken, a dish he seems particularly to favour).
Seeing Clay’s reviewed by Hayler was like watching somebody you know being interviewed in the national news, and it made me proud. It didn’t make the local paper the way Grace Dent’s write-up had, but in its way it was every bit as significant. Hayler, as he said, is all about the food.
Now, by this point even my most supportive readers are probably thinking ‘this is an even more circuitous intro than usual, what has this got to do with anything?’ Well, I’ll tell you: every week Andy Hayler does a roundup on his blog, and every week the byline gives a couple of destinations. From South Kensington to Mayfair one might read, or From Piccadilly to Rome. Fancy restaurants and/or jetsetting are invariably involved. And then, at the start of the month, one made me do a double take. From Winnersh to West London, it said.
Winnersh? Our Winnersh?
It was not a misprint. Andy Hayler had come all the way to Winnersh to try out Club India, an Indian restaurant that opened back in July where the old Pheasant pub used to be. I mentioned that development when I reviewed Dolphin’s Caribbean, back in June, What I said, looking back, feels a little graceless, especially as they sent me a lovely email inviting me to a pre-launch event. I read the blurb and thought it sounded potentially interesting, but then again: Winnersh?
Andy Hayler had no such compunctions. Club India’s consultant chef had held two Michelin stars at his restaurant in San Francisco, although Hayler’s verdict on that place was that if a chef had gone there trying to pick up tips “he or she would either burst out laughing maniacally or seek to throttle any passing Michelin inspectors; possibly both”. But the head chef had headed up the kitchens at a couple of London restaurants Hayler really rated. So he went, he enjoyed it, he dished out scores out of 20 for all the dishes and, of course, he ordered methi chicken.
Overall he gave it the same rating, 14 out of 20, as Clay’s. “Club India was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, the food and service excellent, and at an affordable price. I wish I could say that more often these days” was his conclusion. That was good enough for me, so on a Friday night after a couple of pre-prandial beers in town Zoë and I hopped on the number 4 bus to go and see if Reading really did have a rival to Clay’s Kitchen, tucked away in – this may not be the last time I say this word slightly incredulously – Winnersh.
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The biggest trend in Reading’s food scene this year has been the proliferation of pizza places – Paesinos, Zí Tore, Amò and Peppito, all opening in the space of five months. In the space of a five minute walk, you could pass them all: you could do a pizza crawl of all four, if that’s your kind of thing. Everyone will have their favourite, or their own view of which is the best, and perhaps I will too once I’ve got round to the last couple on my to do list: one way or the other I’m sure my annual round-up and awards at the end of December will have something to say about all of that.
But if that competition is the most high-profile this year, there are a couple of smaller-scale rivalries, more under the radar, that have captured my attention every bit as much. Like the one between Vietnamese newcomers Pho 86, on St Mary’s Butts where County Deli used to be, and Thai restaurant Nua which opened just around the corner, in Bluegrass BBQ’s old home. They are competing not only with the established order – Pho and Thai Corner – but with each other, and they opened on the same day in July.
So that promises to be interesting, and I’ll do my damnedest to check them both out before the end of 2025. But even that’s not my favourite, because my favourite is the tightly-fought battle between two brand new restaurants, which opened a week apart, for Most Batshit Menu In Reading.
In the red corner you have Take Your Time, which opened in August at the top of Sykes’ Sweatshop (you probably know it better as Kings Walk) in the former Dolce Vita site, which sat vacant for over seven years. Take Your Time’s website says that it blends “Asian flavours with Western cuisine”, and Take Your Time’s menu interprets that as serving baked pork chop with an egg fried rice featuring tomato, pineapple and mozzarella, like someone put a Hawaiian pizza into Google Translate.
It also gives you the option of a chicken risotto (“chicken is slightly pink”), or “Hong Kong-style source [sic] stir fried spaghetti with pan fried ribeye steak”. Fusion? Confusion? Who knows. It would, any other time, be far and away the strangest menu I’ve read all year.
But then, a week later, Stop & Taste opened in Emmer Green in a ‘hold my beer’ scenario. Stop & Taste looked on the face of it like a standard eat in fast food place – visually difficult to distinguish from the likes of Basingstoke Road’s Kyaneez – mainly famous for having the most idiosyncratic Instagram account of all time – or Salt & Smash on Christchurch Green. But then I saw the menu and thought, and this is pretty much a verbatim transcript of my exact reaction, what the fuck is going on here?
Because Stop & Taste’s menu rivalled Take Your Time’s for eccentricity, for lack of an overarching theme. So yes, there were loads of burgers – obviously – but one of them involving tempura soft shell crab? And three different types of biryani, and oxtail tacos and fried shark bites? And a £25 lobster roll with “lobster tail poached in secret butter” and hand-minced beef patties and thick shakes and Sunday roasts made with fillet steak?
Take Your Time and Stop & Taste had two things in common – menus that invited an ADHD diagnosis and, paradoxically, names that seemed to extol the virtues of mindful eating. So I just had to visit one of them this week, and in the end I found myself taking a bus north of the river on a weekday evening. That menu at Stop & Taste was either madness or genius, and I just had to know which it was, shark bites and all.
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Edible Reading 