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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The concept of choice in restaurants, I’ve always thought, brings out the inner Goldilocks. Too wide a menu and paralysis sets in, but if it’s too narrow you can’t help feeling straitjacketed. It’s why restaurants that only offer one or two dishes: Le Relais de Venise with its entrecôte, or Burger & Lobster with its – well, you know – have never really caught on here.
I’m reminded of the immortal words of Peter Butterworth in Carry On Abroad, an evergreen favourite of mine, when his Spanish waiter Pepe comes out with the immortal words “of course you are having choices! You can having sausage and chippings, sausage and beans or beans and chippings. That’s choices”. And believe me, I don’t think anybody would have enjoyed dining at the Palace Hotel in Elsbels.
The only time we omnivores really think it’s acceptable to restrict our choices is when we go to a restaurant that offers variations on a theme: burger restaurants, pizza parlours, Nando’s. And yes, Nando’s does technically serve stuff that isn’t chicken but that’s hardly the point, because nobody goes there for that. If somebody at a table at Nando’s is eating a halloumi burger, you can be very confident that they don’t eat chicken and have been dragged there by some inconsiderate sod who does.
Then, of course, there’s the other occasion when we feel as if we have no choice: because there’s something on the menu that we must have, or always order. But those things, as I discovered when I counted down Reading’s top 50 dishes a couple of years ago, are hugely subjective. My wife might be unable to visit Kungfu Kitchen without ordering their deep fried fish, and believe me she is, but other people would mount an equally passionate case for the sweet and sour aubergine, or the lamb with cumin.
Besides, the better the restaurant – like KFK, or Clay’s – the less likely it is, really, that there’s a single must-order dish. What are the chances that a kitchen so skilful would produce just the one thing everybody has to eat? Pretty slim, if you ask me.
No, generally the concept that a restaurant has something you must try, a legendary dish in the making, is another by-product of hype, and usually comes out of the mouths of critics when they visit somewhere, soon after it opens. I’ve tried Brutto’s coccoli, Town’s saffron risotto and Kolae’s fried prawn heads, all acclaimed as instant classics when those venues opened, and they varied from quite nice to very good. Were any of them dishes those restaurants should be exclusively associated with? Not really. Two of them weren’t even the best thing I had in those meals, but it shifts newspapers to rave.
So no, restaurants that become synonymous with a single dish are rare in general, and I don’t think Reading has any to speak of. But that makes the subject of this week’s review even more unusual, because it does occupy that very niche territory. The Chester Arms is an Oxford pub just off the Iffley Road, east from Magdalen Bridge but a smidge closer to it than the Magdalen Arms. It has been under its current management for over ten years. And it’s very much famous for one thing in particular, its steak platter.
Now, it feels wrong to me for most restaurants to describe their own dishes as famous. I still remember the overblown, unsubstantiated hype for The Botanist’s hanging kebabs, for instance, which were more hanging than famous. It’s a bit like restaurants keeping a certificate in their window from over ten years ago, or restaurant bloggers describing themselves as ‘multi award-winning’ when they have, in fact, won none. Famous is something other people are meant to say about you, not how you describe yourself.
And yet in the Chester Arms’ case, you might make an exception. The pub’s homepage describes them as “home of the famous steak platter” and the dish has its own page on their website. It’s the creation of head chef Hamzah Taynaz – although Companies House makes it seem like he might have parted company with the pub over the summer – and it looks like a doozie: onglet cooked rare or medium rare, chips, béarnaise, cabbage with bacon, dressed salad. £50 for two people, or £70 for three, which on paper at least is impressive value; it was £30 and £45 back in 2015, but it’s been a bruising decade.
The thing, though, is this: I have been told to visit the Chester Arms numerous times, by people I know and by people who’ve tipped me off online. It’s been the place at the top of my Oxford to do list for quite a while – I would have reviewed it last month were it not for a medical misadventure – and every single person who has told me to go there has mentioned the steak platter. Some of them had eaten it, and raved about it. Others hadn’t, but left me in no doubt that if they did go there it’s exactly what they would order.
In fact, when I went to Arbequina last month I happened to be on the same train as someone I follow on Instagram, and when I messaged her to ask where she’d eaten in the city I was unsurprised to find that she had gone to the Chester Arms. “We had a great meal there” was her verdict. “It lived up to the hype for us.” So finally, last weekend, I got my chance to try it for size.
My plus one for this meal was my old friend and Oxford compadre Dave, and as we had a pre-lunch latte in Peloton Espresso’s very agreeable back garden I told him that this meal made him, with the exception of Zoë, my most capped plus one. Not bad going for a man who valiantly resisted joining me on duty until a couple of years ago, I told him.
“I thought you’d expect me to have opinions about everything!” he laughed. “And I’m too easy-going for that, I just want to eat nice food. But then I realised that actually you aren’t fussed about all that, so now I don’t mind tagging along.”
Dave was, I had to concede, probably correct. He likes to make much of how low maintenance he is, by which he means that he’ll generally do whatever you like and doesn’t have strong preferences. In the past I may have found that a tad frustrating, but as a dining companion for a restaurant reviewer, it turns out, it’s pretty much a dream CV. Besides, Dave quite rightly pointed out that for our forthcoming holiday to Bruges I had insisted on the dates, insisted on a hotel, changed my mind and picked another hotel and so on and so on, so maybe I quite liked having a low maintenance friend after all.
The Chester Arms is another of those lovely backstreet boozers I didn’t even know existed and like the Star off Cowley Road, it reminded me a little of Reading’s Nag’s Head and the Retreat, only built to a different scale. It was a big, handsome corner plot with a decent-sized garden and inside it was a very attractive room with wooden floorboards, large sturdy tables ringed by fetching booths and plenty of natural light. It was a properly gorgeous space which made me think, as so often, that I really missed the Lyndhurst.
Having said that, I do have to say that some of its tables were more equal than others. The place was absolutely packed – you have to book quite far in advance if you want a table – and without much in the way of soft furnishings, which made it a cacophonous place to be. The two tables nearest to us were the handsome ones for larger groups but our little table with unforgiving chairs, near the kitchen, next to a stack of high chairs, felt like one they put in the seating plan because they could, not because they should.
In fairness the table directly in front of me was possibly even worse. The large group settled in nearby was full of people who were young, exuberant and happy to be there. I love Dave dearly, but we could only manage one of those three. “They’re probably all catching up at the end of their summer holidays, ready for term to begin” he said equably, and I felt even older than usual.
The Chester Arms’ menu was compact in the way you’d expect when most people are there for the feature attraction: a handful of nibbles, only three starters to speak of and three main courses which were not the steak platter. One of them was a vegetarian mezze selection (“perfect as a starter to share, or to be enjoyed as a main for one”) which had, by the looks of it, strong Nando’s halloumi burger energy. The starters were under a tenner, all mains save the steak platter hovered around twenty pounds.
Now, to get this out of the way from the off, our service was brilliant from beginning to end. Our server was young, American, properly charming and looked after we two avuncular has-beens perfectly, and I can’t say enough good things about her. With one exception, which is that I saw a blackboard with specials being shown to other tables later in the afternoon but we were never told about it or given a chance to look at it. In an ideal world it just said, in big cursive script, Stop fooling yourself, we all know you’re having the steak platter but, as I didn’t see it, I can only guess.
Dave was reluctant to have a starter in case the steak platter turned out to be too much, which did make me wonder if some kind of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers situation was going on, but I managed to persuade him to share the most appealing starter with me. Actually it might have been the absolute best thing I ate all afternoon, so I half wished I’d just pressed on without him. Lamb koftas were a trio of plump nubbins, beautifully coarse and with just the faintest whiff of offal to them, really gorgeous stuff.
They came with flatbreads which felt bought in, but which were good nonetheless, a small stack of guindilla and what was described as green tahini. I’m not really sure what that was, because tahini is a paste with a very distinctive taste and texture and this was none of those things, and it didn’t have a particularly strong note of sesame, but I quite liked it anyway. Dave was unconvinced by it, but won over by the koftas. He let me have the spare one, because he’s a good egg, and even though they were almost more faggot than kofta it did make me wonder what a Chester Arms mixed grill would be like. That had better not have been on the specials menu.
We had a while to catch up after that because each steak is cooked to order and takes, if the menu is to be believed, 45 minutes. So he sipped his pint of alcohol free Rothaus, and I had a pale from DEYA: we were both keeping our powder dry for a more substantial session post lunch. I didn’t know at the time – I learned this from Instagram after the fact – that landlady Becca Webb had just come back from a tasting tour in Bilbao with her wine suppliers, and if I had I might have paid closer attention to the wine list. Next time.
Anyway, Dave and I had a good old chinwag, if constantly drowned out by the relentless, unforgivable youngness of people at our neighbouring tables, as we struggled gamely with the heat from the nearby kitchen. The problem with a restaurant where everybody orders the same thing is that each time it comes out from the kitchen you perk up, think it’s yours and then realise it’s going to another table. But in a way it’s genius, because it raises your anticipation over and over again, and every passing platter looked amazing.
Besides, it distracted me from Dave giving me a litany of people he knew, roughly our age, who were either seriously or terminally ill. They don’t call your fifties ‘sniper’s valley’ for nothing, and after I’d heard about three of them my fight or flight health anxiety kicked in and I asked him, ever so nicely, to stop. Is this what we’ve got to look forward to? I wondered to myself.
I can’t imagine anybody’s life expectancy would be enhanced by what turned up at our table about half an hour after our starters, but just look at it. You’d shave a few days off the end of your life for one of these, wouldn’t you?
It’s difficult to give any kind of scale with a photograph like that but trust me, that serving plate was substantial. Our two serving plates were on the smaller side, but that just gave you an excuse to go back again and again: not for nothing did the pot of utensils on our table include forks, sharp knives and a little set of steak tongs.
Everything about this dish was bang on or thereabouts. The onglet was cooked beautifully medium rare and, in the main was buttery and absurdly easy to cut, any tension in the fibres expertly soothed away; I appreciated the irony of eating something that was better rested, most likely, than I will ever be. The béarnaise was ever so slightly thin with a slight hit of vinegar, but it hadn’t split and went very well with the steak; I might have liked a little more, between two, and a spoon to dish it up with but as quibbles go those were minor.
The other thing I loved, though, was how complete a dish this was and how every component brought something to the table. The heap of savoy cabbage shot through with lardons was truly joyous, the chips were thick, crunchy and surprisingly good. And even the salad, which I’d dismissed in the run-up as a makeweight, was not an afterthought. It was properly dressed, and it supplied the lightness and acidity that would otherwise have been missing from the platter.
Our server had asked us if we wanted to upgrade to the platter for three (“nice bit of upselling”, said Dave) but we’d decided not to, mostly because I thought if I was reviewing the place you’d want to know if a platter for two actually served two. And my verdict is that it does: we finished all our steak and most of everything else, and even in the time between finishing and our almost empty plates being taken away we were both picking with forks – dunking a chip in the béarnaise or trawling it through the juices from the onglet, or the good stuff that was left after you’d airlifted the cabbage away. If service had been less on it, I think our plate would have ended up clean as a whistle.
I tried to send a picture of the platter to Zoë – because she’d asked, even though I imagine it would have made her seethe with resentment – and failed, because the mobile signal in that part of Oxford is like taking a day trip to 1997. Perhaps it was for the best.
Our server asked if we fancied dessert, so I asked Dave if he fancied dessert – because I’d have looked like a right fat bastard scoffing one on my own – and I was hugely relieved when he decided to join me. Perhaps the bodysnatchers hadn’t troubled his house in Wootton Bassett after all. The dessert menu was also compact: three desserts, or ice cream with Pedro Ximenez, or a selection of ice creams, or an affogato.
Another thing to like very much about the Chester Arms was the very appealing selection of digestifs, and the options of red or white port, Sauternes or PX: I had another half of the pale instead, but on another day would have veered in the direction of something smaller and sweeter. The pale, by the way, was decent if piney: not DEYA’s iconic Steady Rolling Man but a reasonable stand-in. I’d have checked it in on Untappd, but I was in 1997 so it hadn’t been invented yet.
I was tempted by something ice cream based, but the server couldn’t tell me where the Chester Arms’ ice cream came from and I wasn’t invested or entitled enough to make her ask. So instead I went for my tried and tested choice, a tiramisu. It was about as different as possible from most of the ones I’ve had recently – not loose, airy and boozy like the tiramisu at, say, Paesinos or RAGÙ. It was more old school, by which I suppose I mean inauthentic: much firmer, much denser, crammed into that Duralex glass like they’d almost forgotten to say when.
And it was gorgeous. I’d forgotten that authentic is overrated, with all the honest-to-goodness Italian food cropping up in places like Reading and Bristol, but this was a delight from first spoon to last – far, far more cream than sponge but laced with Courvoisier and Frangelico. I loved it far more than I expected to, and it made me think again that the Chester Arms might be famous for its steak platter but it had made the canny choice of ensuring that none of the other items on the menu were an also-ran.
Dave had the crème brûlée, which is just one of those dishes I never personally order. I tried a spoonful of it and it, too, was right on the money: just enough warmth, the carapace just the right thickness, the cream vanilla-speckled and exemplary.
We didn’t tarry, because by that point it was incredibly warm and both of us fancied stretching our legs. Besides, I had promised to introduce Dave to the Star and his beloved Liverpool had finished playing, so the lack of mobile reception was no longer the positive nuisance it had been. My advice is that if you’re going to spend time somewhere with absolutely no phone signal, the best idea is to do it in the company of someone where you can talk for hours without feeling the need to check your phone. So that’s exactly what I did.
Our meal for two – two and a half courses each, one of them that steak platter, and a pint apiece came to just under £100, including a discretionary 12.5% service charge which was totally earned. When you think that half of that whole bill was down to a single dish that the pub endearingly describes as a “small steak”, you have to hand it to them.
I’m really glad I finally made it to the Chester Arms – partly because it’s been an ambition for such a long time and partly because it was fascinating to try a restaurant in this country which really is synonymous with the one dish, to see if that reputation is justified. And it absolutely is – if you like steak at all, you would have a ball hopping on a train to Oxford and making your way to the Chester Arms. And if you don’t, but you know someone who does, make sure the two of you take a friend with you: you can have the fish and chips and they can have the time of their lives.
I do find myself wondering though, still: what was on that specials board? But I know that it could have had skate wing on it, or fried chicken, or countless other things, and I still would have ordered the steak platter. So does the steak platter qualify as famous? Yes, I think it probably does.
But if I went back to the Chester Arms again, knowing what their kitchen is capable of, would I really still order the steak platter a second time? Also yes. I’d be even sadder, though, if they’d taken those lamb koftas off the menu, because it was the dish I’d want to order every time, if it was up to me. That’s choices.
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Amò reopened on 23rd July 2026 after closing in mid-December 2025, apparently for maintenance.
In the good old days, where you stood on certain binary debates was simply a way of positioning you in the world. Cream first or jam first? Plain or milk chocolate Bounty? Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? Were you a fan of the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? All these things used just to be a form of triangulation, little points on a chart that, taken together, might give someone an idea of you (and, since you’re asking: cream first; milk chocolate; salt and vinegar; the Beatles; neither).
When did that all change? 2016, I suppose, when we all became Leave or Remain, indelibly stamped, and at every stage from that point forwards. We’re always asked what side we’re on, and now it’s not a useful piece of trivia but a necessary step to place yourself on one side or another of a yawning chasm. Are you pro- or anti-Israel? Do you think J.K. Rowling is a hero or a villain? How about Farage, or Trump? Did you believe in lockdowns, masks, vaccines? Did you leave Twitter or stay? If you left, did you go to Bluesky or Threads?
Like the Tower Of Babel, we’re now all scattered to the four winds, trying to find our tribe and arguing, endlessly, with the others. It’s not a bit of fun, any more. And this is all rich coming from me, because I’m painfully aware that I’m as polarising as most. Happily, Reading faces another tricky choice now that’s potentially just as difficult, but hopefully less divisive: Paesinos or Amò?
The two pizza places opened on Kings Road, two doors and three months apart, the latest in a weird series of rivals in very close proximity, following the example of Pho and Bánh Mì QB in Kings Walk or Iro Sushi and You Me Sushi on Friar Street. What is it with that? You must be very confident in your product to open so near to a direct competitor, like Bánh Mì QB did, but with Paesinos and Amò, Iro and You Me so little time separated both arrivals that it must be an unhappy coincidence. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a new business only to find that another one a lot like yours is doing exactly the same, a stone’s throw away.
Anyway, regular readers will know that I reviewed Paesinos a month ago with my Italian friend Enza (who is, just to confuse matters, an Amò superfan) and it received a glowing write up from me. But I knew, even as I was eating there, that I needed to prioritise visiting its neighbour, if only because Enza told me that it was as good as, if not better than, the restaurant I had so enjoyed. I couldn’t go with Enza, because she was so far from impartial, and this time I took my friend Jo, also of Italian descent, last seen checking out House Of Flavours with me.
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As of April 2026 I’ve heard reports that Paesinos has parted company with its pizzaiolo, and that the quality has dipped as a result, so approach with caution.
Here’s a tip for you: if you want to discover how many Italians live in Reading just drop innocuously into conversation online, on a local Facebook page or the Reading subreddit, the question of Reading’s best pizza. Because if you do, Reading’s Italian contingent will come out of the woodwork. This calls for opinions, and they have plenty. They don’t fuck about, either.
“Being Italian and of partly Neapolitan descent, I am picky when it comes to pizza. Or better, I eat anything, but I know a good pizza from a bad one, and from a non-pizza” began Luca, on the Edible Reading Facebook page. He went on.
“The only real pizzas in Reading have been Papa Gee’s, for years. Then Sarv came, and Zia Lucia (both ok). I have recently tried Zi Tore and above all Paesinos, the latter is possibly the best in Reading. The chef and manager is Sicilian and has previously worked at the Thirsty Bear. However, Thirsty Bear make American style pizza, while Paesinos make real pizza.”
Another of my Italian readers, Franz, was more generous about the Thirsty Bear. “It’s just a different style” he said. “Italian pizza purists perhaps will take a bit to adapt (I’m Italian, but open minded). A slice of their TriBeCa, curly fries and a pint is hard to beat. It just makes me happy and satisfied.” Franz also had opinions about Zia Lucia, and its “horrible, plasticky” mozzarella.
After that Luca and Franz ended up having a fascinating conversation about whether you could find good pizza outside Italy. Franz thought it was easy to do, these days. Luca disagreed, but said you could even end up getting what he called “non-pizza” in Italy, unless you were in Campania or Sicily. Just to chuck in a curveball, the best pizza Franz ever had was in the Swedish city of Norrköping. “It was Neapolitan style and was excellent, but then they had a corner in the pizzeria that was all dedicated to Totti so that confused me from an allegiance perspective.”
I could have listened to Luca and Franz discuss these niceties all day: it seemed that if you asked two Italians you were likely to come out of the conversation with at least three opinions. Over on Reddit, other Italians were weighing in. “Zi Tore in Smelly Alley has taken the crown as the best pizza in town (in my humble, Italian, opinion)” said one. “And the pizza al taglio from Amò is even better.”
This is particularly topical because last week Sarv’s Slice announced that they were leaving the Biscuit Factory, after falling out with the owners both there and in Ealing. The reaction across the internet was one of huge sadness, coupled with genuine fear for the future of the venue. But this happens against a backdrop of Reading’s pizza scene exploding, so Sarv’s Slice might have quit while they were ahead: the market has become saturated since they opened in 2023, and even more so in the last six months or so.
Let’s run through the timeline. Last year Dough Bros opened out on Northumberland Avenue, and in the summer Zia Lucia opened in town. From then, things have only accelerated: at the start of the year Paesinos opened opposite Jackson’s Corner. Then Zi’Tore opened in February, in the old Grumpy Goat site. At the end of April, two doors down from Paesinos, Reading got Amò, a joint venture between the owners of Madoo and Pulcinella Focaccia, a pizza trader who operated from their home address out in Earley.
And believe it or not, last Wednesday another pizza restaurant, Peppito, opened on the first floor of Kings Walk, John Sykes’ restaurant sweatshop. The time between pizza restaurants opening in Reading appears to have some sort of half-life, so by the time this goes to press I wouldn’t be surprised if two more places had started trading, making all this out of date.
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This might come as a surprise to you – probably not – but for the best part of the last fifteen years my friends and I have regularly taken part in something called Poncefest. Nope, not a misprint. The idea was to take a day off, invariably a Friday, and go into London together for a bit of shopping, always for fragrance, followed by a fancy lunch somewhere, then falling into a pub before getting the train home. Something like the Finer Things Club from the American version of The Office, only even finer.
Having sacrificed whatever credibility I might have had with that opening paragraph, I may as well explain. So yes, these trips usually involved shopping at one of London’s great fragrance shops – Bloom or Les Senteurs – and then a gorgeous, drawn out lunch. We’ve done Medlar in Chelsea, Soho’s famous Andrew Edmunds, Portland in Fitzrovia, Calum Franklin’s renowned pies at Holborn Dining Room and doubtless other places I’ve forgotten. We’ve even been to Oxford, enjoying a very pleasant lunch at Pompette one Friday towards the end of the year, exchanging Christmas presents and cards and eating brilliantly.
The members of the Guild Of Ponces – because I’m afraid that’s what we call ourselves – have fluctuated over time. It started as Al, Dave, Jimmy and I, but then Jimmy fell by the wayside and my stepfather Ian decided to join our number. He chose to drop out after a while, but by then we had also recruited my friend James, a man who didn’t need to seek out the ponce life, because the ponce life found him.
Like the Spice Girls, we each have our own unique identity. Al is Sartorial Ponce, because he’s always immaculately dressed: the man’s had his colours done, for goodness’ sake. Dave is Reluctant Ponce, to denote the fact that he always complains about the whole affair but secretly loves it.
Jimmy, back in the day, was Pub Ponce, and in charge for picking the post-lunch boozer. Ian, who knows more about Apple products than many people who actually work there, was Tech Ponce, and James is Preppy Ponce – or Neophyte Ponce, a title our newest member always gets, like the Baby Of The House, or New Guy in Loudermilk.
I, of course, am Grand Master Ponce. Would you expect anything else by now? Mock all you like – I’m immune these days, thanks to my childhood years in chess club and Dungeons & Dragons club (both hobbies, too late for me, are cool now). I unapologetically love Poncefests. They’ve always been a lovely miniature escape in the year, when my friends and I can catch up, more than slightly aware of how ridiculous the premise is.
Anyway, that was all well and good, but then Covid happened, and it all went quiet for Poncefest. A risk averse eighteen months meant that I saw my fellow ponces sporadically, and never all at the same time. Even after things unlocked, for some reason we were never all in the same place at once. We were like the Beatles, or the Pythons, without the acrimony. I lunched with Dave and Al a few times – once even for this blog – but a Poncefest proved elusive.
Of course, all the ponces were there for my and Zoë’s joint stag and hen do last year in Bruges, and at the wedding too, but both were part of a bigger gathering rather than a reunion per se. And then James went and put a spanner in the works by being seconded to India for nine months, and those gatherings, now five years dormant, felt more of a distant prospect than ever. So I was absolutely delighted when he returned to Blighty in the spring and talk on our WhatsApp group (the logo is a picture of Niles and Frasier Crane holding up a sign saying WILL WORK FOR LATTES) turned to getting the band back together. Would it happen?
It may not surprise you to hear that it did, and one sunny Saturday morning at the start of May I found myself bimbling round sunny Clifton, really looking forward to a long overdue luncheon. I’d bumped into people I knew outside Hart’s Bakery, straight off the train, before taking a bus to Bristol’s prettiest, if most unreal district. I stopped for a latte in the sunshine outside a little kiosk called Can’t Dance Coffee, before walking in wonder through Birdcage Walk, too taken with the glimmer of the sun through the foliage to realise I was, in fact, going in the wrong direction.
After an amble through Clifton, past the spot where I was born – it’s now been turned into flats – I found myself ruminating on all the different paths my life might have taken, and how many of them involved me never having left Bristol, or leaving but coming back to live here. Too much time alone always has this effect on me, so I grabbed a bench in the Mall Gardens, put something relaxing on my headphones and got lost in my library book. Not long after Al joined me and, because old habits died hard, we stopped in Shy Mimosa, Bristol’s excellent perfume shop, before grabbing a coffee and a taxi to our lunch venue.
Lapin was back in the centre of the city, in Wapping Wharf, a part of Bristol I knew and knew of but had almost never eaten in, unless you count a slightly underwhelming pizza at Bristol institution Bertha’s. Most of it is shipping containers, stacked two storeys high, and it boasts some of Bristol’s biggest names. Bravas‘ sibling Gambas is there, as are the likes of Root and Box-E. This year it’s been bolstered with three big names: Gurt Wings, who opened at the start of the year, to an apparently shaky start; COR‘s younger sibling RAGÙ and Lapin, which is the second site behind the owners of Totterdown’s BANK.
I should stress, by the way, that all those irksome block capitals are their choice, not mine: I guess in a city with as many good restaurants fighting for punters’ cash maybe they feel the need to shout. In any event, I’d chosen Lapin for a couple of reasons – partly because as a French restaurant it seemed especially appropriate for such a gathering and partly because it was shiny and new. On the day we visited it had been open exactly a month, by which time it had already received not one but two reviews from Mark Taylor, Bristol’s resident Reach plc hack. I on the other hand gave it a month to settle in, because that’s what I do.
It was a very warm day and Wapping Wharf was full of people younger, thinner and less fearful of hangovers than me, many of them sitting outside either at Lapin or its neighbours Gambas and Cargo Cantina. The place had the glow of youth, of sunlight diffused through an Aperol Spritz, but because I partly wanted to get a sense for the room we sat inside. Dave was already there – slightly early, because he is Dave – and James joined us shortly after, slightly later than us, because he is James. The natural order was very much in place.
The dining room, by the way, is rather nice. I think the nicest thing I can say about it is that you could easily forget that you were eating in a few shipping containers joined together. I tend to associate them with street food or Boxpark, with places you don’t linger, so I was glad that they’d turned these into a very convivial space, and one where there was quite enough daylight coming in from the big floor to ceiling windows. It was pretty no-frills, but just tasteful enough: sage walls, framed retro prints, tasteful overhead lights, sturdy, timeless furniture. No Tolix chairs to jam my arse into, I’m delighted to say.
Lapin’s menu was that especially challenging kind that felt like it contained no poor choices. Half a dozen starters, or a whole baked cheese to share, and another seven mains, again with three sharing options. On another day you would be reading about asparagus with sauce gribiche, confit duck with a spring cassoulet – whatever that is – Provençal fish stew or deep fried rabbit leg: the latter turned up at a neighbouring table towards the end of our meal and made me wish I could go back and start again.
Starters stopped just short of fifteen pounds, mains ranged more widely from just under twenty to just over thirty. The sharers were more expensive – côte de boeuf, for instance, clocking in at ninety-five pounds – sides were about a fiver, desserts just shy of a tenner. Little of that, in 2025, is especially shocking. The menu, under a section marked Accoutrements, gave you an option to add a spoon of caviar or a shaving of truffle to any of your dishes, and I was surprised by that: in a place defined by taste and tastefulness it felt – dare I say it? I guess I do – ever so slightly tacky.
But before the main event, drinks and nibbles. Lapin’s selection of apéritifs was tempting and extensive, and I think the four of us chose roughly in line with our ponciness. Al, easily the most refined, kept it classic with a Lillet Blanc. James and I, the next level down, had a cidre – Galipette – which was awfully nice, although now I’ve discovered you can buy it from Waitrose and Ocado I almost want to salute Lapin for their exorbitant markup. Dave, though, chose best with something called a demi peche, a keller pils with peach syrup. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it: Dave recreated it the following weekend at home, which was an exceptionally good idea.
We had a quartet of Comte gougères with that, and I thought they were decent but perhaps not too inspiring. The filling was good, the carpeting of finely grated cheese always welcome but the pastry itself lacked the lightness of touch it needed. At twelve pounds for these, I couldn’t help but compare them with the gorgeous cheddar curd fritters I’d had at Upstairs At Landrace a few weeks before, which had cost significantly less.
Now, when I review in a pair I always feel like I have to have something different to my dining companion, to present a range of dishes. That’s less of an issue in a bigger group, so as it turned out Dave and James ordered the same starters and mains, as did Al and I. Even at the time, I have to admit that I was thinking This is the life, I’m in a lovely restaurant with three of my favourite people, the wine is flowing… and I have less to write up than I might have done. Unworthy I know, but there it is.
Dave and James were pleased with their starter, I think. A puck of deep fried pig’s head was the good part, and the forkful I had was great. Plonking a forest floor of chicory and dandelion on top of it, though, was less successful. I don’t think either is really anybody’s favourite salad ingredient – not as pointless as frisée, but not far off – and the nicest croutons in the world aren’t going to redeem that.
Al’s and my starter was similarly along the right lines but not at its destination. I adore rillette, I adore rabbit, the prospect of rabbit rillette was a nailed-down choice for me. And it was pretty pleasant – clean and ascetic rather than punchy and rustic. I loved the carrot jam, and thought the dish could have stood a bit more of it. The bread, I’m sorry to say, was unremarkable. And somehow the whole thing combined to less than the sum of its parts, even with a few rogue cornichons secreted away.
This dish troubled me, if that isn’t a silly way to put it, because I should have loved it and I’m not sure why I didn’t. It felt too nice, too well-behaved, like an attempt to create a platonic ideal of a dish rather than the dish itself. As it happened, I was of course in France the week after I ate at Lapin, but it wasn’t the meals I had in Montpellier that came to mind when I weighed up this rabbit rillette. It was the unforced, unshowy kind of dishes I had earlier in the year, at Paulette.
We also, out of pure greed, ordered another starter to attack between the four of us. Duck liver parfait was, again, a pleasant, glossy little number, hiding in its ramekin under a layer of cherry. The menu called it “pickled stone fruit” but really, it wasn’t clear that any pickling had taken place. Again, this was nice rather than knockout – and, again, it highlighted that Lapin’s bread wasn’t the best. And that you could have done with more of it.
By this point, whatever misgivings I might have had about the starters, our meal was in full swing. There’s something lovely about that interplay with good friends – that mixture of catching up and reminiscing, of mild ribbing and in-jokes. All that was helped by an extremely good bottle of wine – a Languedoc white by Domaine Montplezy, not bone dry with notes of peach and citrus.
As it happens, I found that wine the following weekend in Montpellier at the wine shop round the corner from our B&B. We bought a bottle and again that means I got a good idea of Lapin’s markups, which are considerable. But perhaps that misses the point, and perhaps ordering a whole bottle of something does too: one of the things that is genuinely impressive about Lapin is that its whole wine list is available by the glass. Someone has spent a fair amount of money with Coravin, and it gives you an enviable range of choices compared to most restaurants I can think of.
If the starters were a little wobbly, the mains are where Lapin became far more sure-footed. My and Al’s skate wing was a really joyous plate of food, served in a vadouvin butter rather than the conventional beurre noisette that so often accompanies this fish. And that in itself was interesting – vadouvin is a mild curried sauce that originates from the French colonial period and you could almost taste in it the intersection between traditional and colonial French.
It wasn’t a conventional brown butter sauce dotted with capers, and instead came topped with monk’s beard, but in it you could sense some of the DNA it shared with the classic dish. It was little like those pavement cafés in Marrakesh’s Ville Nouvelle that, despite being stuck on the edge of northern Africa, feel like they carry some echo of Paris. I wouldn’t pick this over a more traditional rendition, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it.
James and Dave went for perhaps a more mainstream option from the menu, a whole truffle roasted poussin with a Madeira jus. This, to me, was probably a stronger choice – the truffle present but not dominating, the meat beautifully cooked and that jus setting off the whole shooting match. James very generously let me try some, and although I enjoyed it it didn’t make me wish I had ordered it.
That tells its own story, I guess, that I still wondered whether the real gem was elsewhere on the menu, undiscovered. But again, that might tell you more about me than Lapin: I can already picture Dave, at some point over the weekend, reading this review and thinking What is he going on about? That poussin was amazing.
The sides were a weird inversion of the natural order and a good example of how expectations can be completely confounded. The menu offers duck fat frites, and all four of us could think of nothing finer. But when we went to order four portions our server – who was excellent, as all the staff at Lapin were – suggested ever so nicely that this might be a bit monotonous and that we might want to mix it up a bit with some pomme purée.
So we did that, and were rewarded with an experience that is pretty much solely worth visiting Lapin to enjoy. The duck fat frites were decent rather than exceptional, but compared to the pomme purée they became more like “fuck that” frites. Because the pomme purée – no hint of hyperbole here I promise – was one of the best things I’ve eaten in years. Loaded with butter until it could take no more, than bathed in more brown butter, it took on a taste and texture that transcended savoury or sweet, almost with a note of toffee, or fudge.
Al told our server, when the empty dishes were taken away, that you could have served it as a dessert. He wasn’t far off: it was truly magnificent stuff.
Before dessert, three of us had an intermediate course, the Trou Normand. This is a Normandy tradition, a palate cleanser consisting of apple sorbet anointed with apple brandy. It was very good indeed, the sorbet smooth and hyper-real with the taste of apple.
The apple brandy, from Somerset, was excellent too. The menu said that you could add a glass of Calvados for an extra four pounds, although it wasn’t clear whether you would get Calvados on the side or whether the apple brandy would be swapped out for Calvados.
Whichever it was, the pricing of this felt a little awry: eight pounds felt like a lot, twelve in total for Calvados would have been like, well, like paying an extra thirteen pounds to dump a spoonful of caviar, randomly, on your main course.
Before dessert proper we’d also decided to push the boat out and order a bottle of dessert wine. Dave doesn’t do wine these days – he stayed on his demi peche during dinner – but he makes an exception for dessert wine. Again many of the dessert wines are available by the glass, and the menu pairs one with each of the desserts, but we couldn’t resist. Lapin also offered two really tempting bottles – a Rivesaltes Ambré 1978 for a slightly ridiculous amount or a 1992 vintage of the same wine for eighty pounds. Don’t judge, but we had the latter, and it was ambrosial.
Our server explained, in a “look what you could have won” kind of a way, that by most standards 1992 was still quite young for this wine but we were very happy with our choice nevertheless.
“1992, the year we met” said Dave to me, as we took our first heavenly sips. Suddenly I felt like however old the wine was, I was older still. But in any case there was much to celebrate, so I thoroughly enjoyed a wine as old as one of my oldest friendships. The wine has aged well, the friendship even better.
We tried a decent range of the desserts. I think on this occasion Al and I chose best with the St. Emilion au chocolat. I’ve never heard it called that before but it was an extremely nicely done ganache, a not ungenerous portion of it, topped, I think, with crumbled amaretti biscuit and served simply with terrific crème fraiche. I was always going to gravitate towards this dessert and, however good the others were, I would struggle not to order it again.
I think the other candidates were more workmanlike. Dave enjoyed the pain perdu with apple and vanilla ice cream, again crumbled with the good stuff to lend texture, with a shiny, sticky sauce. I expect if I ordered it I would have liked it too, and I imagine it went better with the dessert wine, in terms of colour coordination if for no other reason, than my overdose of chocolate did.
James ordered the Basque cheesecake, but neglected to take a picture. In fairness, you probably know what a Basque cheesecake looks like. Imagine one of those, with some rhubarb on the side. That’s what James had. He liked it, and Dave reminded me that it’s ridiculously easy to make which is why he never orders it in restaurants. I still have the WhatsApp message he sent me, with the recipe, favourited on my phone. One of these days.
Al is legendary for ordering two desserts, very much following in the footsteps of the great Nora Ephron who always held that this was one of the most important life lessons she ever learned. Technically if you count the Trou Normand and about a quarter of the Éclair Suzette we ordered to share between us, this meal constituted a personal best.
We’d ordered the éclair on the advice of our server and again, it had some nice touches – the candied orange on top, the Grand Marnier infused crème diplomat inside. But again, Lapin’s touch with the choux let it down. It was leaden rather than ethereal, and took some sawing through. As a finishing touch to the meal it summed up some of the inconsistencies, and gave me something to think about.
Our meal for four, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just shy of five hundred and twenty pounds. Now, after you’ve had your sharp intake of breath, I have to say that doesn’t feel like poor value, at all, for what we had. We had something like five courses each, and even then we threw in a couple of extra things to try. We had apéritifs and two bottles of wine, one of which was from the deeper end of the list.
All things considered, I think about one hundred and thirty pounds each isn’t at all bad, for the afternoon we had. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you should feel like you get this much living for it. It made me feel sad for my poor friend Jerry, parting with a hundred pounds for an infinitely less enjoyable meal at Gee’s not too long ago. Besides, expense be damned: this was Poncefest, it’s not like we were going to settle for a Happy Meal.
You might ask, given all that, why the rating down there is what it is. You might feel that this reads higher than that, or lower, and I would have some sympathy. When I think of meals I’ve had in Bristol, Lapin is really pretty good. But something stops it, for me, being in that upper echelon, with the likes of Caper and Cure, or Marmo. Or, if you’re comparing French meals with French meals, something prevents it reaching the standard of Paulette.
I keep coming back to that rabbit rillette, pretty close to being an eponymous dish for this restaurant. I keep remembering that it was nice and clean and pure and rarefied. And it’s not because Lapin is in a shipping container, because as I said the place managed to make me completely forget that. But Lapin, for all its excellent qualities, ever so slightly felt, to me, like a brilliant piece of cosplay, more than a French restaurant.
You could say that there’s nothing wrong with that, and I might agree. But that’s what stopped it, as far as I was concerned, attaining true greatness. I wouldn’t rule it out that at some point they will get there, and I imagine enough people in Bristol will rave about it to sustain it on that journey. In the meantime, it has a single dish that almost merits a pilgrimage, even if it’s a mere side, and it played host to a marvellous, long overdue reunion. When the ponces assemble next – in a suitably effete way, I can assure you – Lapin has set a standard we’ll be very lucky to exceed.
Lapin – 8.6 Unit 14, Cargo 2, Museum St, Bristol, BS1 6ZA 0117 4084997
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