The week after you get back from holiday is the absolute worst, isn’t it? One minute you’re loafing in the sun, you can have a lie in if you want to, your hardest morning decision is where to grab coffee and then where to have lunch, your post-lunch coffee, maybe a snack, your pre-prandial drink, your dinner, your post-dinner bar of choice. On and on it goes until you’re a modern-day lotus eater, free of cares, a flâneur and a gourmand, carefree and arguably in need of detox. Little, if anything, is finer than reaching that stage.
And then it’s over. The plane touches down at miserable old Shatwick, and you’re reintroduced to the M25. When you get home your clothes all need to be washed, the fridge is bare and there’s this thing called work you have to get up for at something ridiculous like half-seven in the morning. Just like that you’re back in a life of dreary cold packaged sandwiches and cobbling together a meal plan, of not drinking during the week, watching your calorie intake and hanging in there until payday.
And even though it’s May, it seems to be raining most of the time. I don’t care how much you might love your job: objectively speaking, if you compare it to a holiday there’s only ever going to be one winner. Why does anybody do it?
This year, for me at least, that comedown has been even more of a cliff edge than usual. Because not only was I back from holiday, but I was back from honeymoon – I got married, although I haven’t talked about it much – and my next trip away won’t involve planes, trains or automobiles but instead a white van and the removal men as I burn a week’s leave next month moving house.
So although Zoë and I did the supermarket shop as usual, with a sense of resignation, sticking to the plan wasn’t easy last week. Instead there were accidental takeaways, or wanders over to Bakery House or Honest, anything to make real life just a little more unreal, even if only for a short while. You could call it a transition phase, you could call it a soft landing. You could even call it a cry for help: probably it’s a little of all three.
On the plus side, it meant there was a slight role reversal. In the run up to my nuptials it was more difficult to persuade Zoë to come with me on duty, a combination of trying to shed that last couple of pre-marital pounds and save those last few pre-marital other pounds. Now that I’ve been elevated to the dizzy heights of husband? It turns out that Zoë can be persuaded to eat out during the week, especially if it happens to be her turn to cook.
I may have used this to my benefit, in truth. Bet you can’t be fucked to cook the salmons tonight I messaged her, as she was on the train back from London. How did you guess? came the reply. Failing at this, aren’t I. After a bit of plea bargaining – it was raining, so nowhere too far out of town (my wife does not like the rain), and nowhere that involved walking away from home only to head back (my wife also doesn’t like going back on herself) we settled for Chilis: central, a short walk from the station, potentially interesting.
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I don’t normally write reviews that are of places that have closed. It has that same whiff of smugness as reviewing drinks nobody can buy or plays that have finished their run: I’m going to make you feel bad about what you missed, they seem to say. My life is better than yours. It’s all very “if you know, you know” – another phrase I hate – only more “if you didn’t know, now you never will”.
But I’m making an exception to write about the Lyndhurst, which closed under the management of Dishon Vas and Sheldon Fernandes a couple of weeks ago, one final time. Because I don’t think anywhere that’s closed in Reading in all the time I’ve lived here – not the 3Bs, not Dolce Vita, not Mya Lacarte or the Grumpy Goat – has had this kind of effect on me, and I feel like trying to explain why. So I suppose this is for anyone who has been to the Lyndhurst in the last five years, which I expect might include a decent proportion of the people who read my blog.
Part of this is because I am feeling sentimental: as anyone who follows me on social media will know, because I haven’t stopped banging on about it, I got married a couple of Fridays ago. It was simply a perfect day. The sun shone for the first time in ages, the ceremony room in the Town Hall was serene and calm, my dear friend Jerry gave the most beautiful reading, and when I kissed my brand new bride the crowd packed into that room made a disproportionate amount of gleeful noise.
We turned round and there were our favourite people, the biggest small congregation you’ve ever seen in your life. My parents, my step-parents, my brother, his wife and his children. My boisterous, fantastic in-laws. Friends I had known for thirty or forty years, and people that had known my wife since she was at school. Newer friends, and friends who had been there since the very start of my relationship with Zoë. The friend that saved my life, time and again, in the darkest moments of my divorce. There was nothing but love and joy in that beautiful room.
A lot of the rest was a daze. An eruption of confetti on Blagrave Street, standing in a pack under the Maiwand Lion as our photographer corraled and marshalled us into groups, snapping and cajoling. Sipping a crisp glass of bubbly from nearby Veeno, being congratulated by passers-by. Everyone congratulates newlyweds, I’ve found: it’s a moving, life-affirming thing. A Reading Buses driver stopping us in the park to tell us it brought back memories of his own wedding – also in the Town Hall, also photographs in Forbury Gardens.
My wife, grinning and clutching her beautiful bouquet, as happy as I was. Wandering round the Forbury desperately seeking shade, finding spots for photos. “Look into Zoë’s eyes” said the photographer, such easy and enjoyable instructions to follow. And then, at the end of all that, all of us marching to Friar Street to hop on a vintage Reading bus, driven by Tim Wale, the legend behind Tutts Clump cider. Reading institution Paul King turned up out of nowhere and took pictures before all of us, laughing and merry, were driven away to the venue for our celebration.
When I told people I was getting married a lot of people – especially on social media – said “no pressure for your venue, right?” or “I bet the food will have to be really good”. But I never worried about it, because my celebration was being hosted by the Lyndhurst. Of all the Is to dot and Ts to cross in the run up to the big day, of all the things that blindsided us on the home stretch, I never worried once about the food. The Lyndhurst was doing it: that was all I needed to know.
I was at the Lyndhurst for their first night under new ownership, back in the summer of 2019. I’d really liked the previous management and their clever, precise food, and when they left – because the pubco hiked the rent, I imagine – I wasn’t entirely sure the new landlords would be able to match that standard. I remember there being a crowd on the first night, all the regulars happy that their community pub was open again, and the place was packed and chaotic.
There was a rabbit in the headlights feel about it, and I had my gin and tonic with slight misgivings and no idea that I was spending my first evening in what would prove to be one of my favourite places on earth. I remember they put a sign up that suggested they were only serving dinner on Friday and Saturday nights, and I called it out on Twitter. Some random local online prat had a go at me for pointing it out, but the pub just said Thanks for letting us know, we’ll change it.
I didn’t know then that that was their style all over – humble, apologetic, unfailingly polite and always, always getting shit done. The sign got changed. And then I went back to try the food, and had quite the wake-up call. A beautiful Scotch egg, a very accomplished plate of pork belly, pig’s cheek and black pudding bonbons and perhaps most significantly, a bowl of chilli nachos, everything made from scratch, from the tortillas to the guacamole. These people really knew what they were doing, I realised.
The menu changed many, many times over the next five years. They even refreshed it in April, with barely a month remaining, because they never stopped tweaking and improving. But those nachos, which over time became emblematic of the Lyndhurst, never came off the menu, not once.
I read an article in the Guardian in the run-up to my wedding about how much weddings cost these days: one couple, American needless to say, spent five thousand dollars alone on their rehearsal dinner. I liked to joke as my wedding approached that Zoë and I had taken a less conventional approach to rehearsal dinners by instead going to the Lyndhurst pretty much every week for years. And for that matter, I also had a few rehearsals of the Lyndhurst’s mass catering skills: three readers’ lunches, each one more assured, if anything, than the last.
And all that was lovely in principle, but in practice it made decisions about the menu almost impossible. Looking back through the photos on my and Zoë’s phone, of every dish captured at the bottom of Watlington Street over the course of nearly five years, made it even more difficult. So many beautiful plates of food, from which to select just nine. How could you possibly choose?
But of course it also brought back so many happy memories. Braised oxtail, wrapped up in cabbage, enjoyed when they’d barely been open a month. Saddle of rabbit, stuffed with liver and rolled in Parma ham, the equal of anything you could get in Bologna. Their crispy-skinned supreme of chicken with soft leeks and the shiniest, most comforting morel sauce. The legendary – and enormous – porchetta sandwich which graced their menu in the spring of 2021. Their confit duck poutine, which occupied an exalted place on the menu, and in my affections, around the same time.
Even towards the end new classics took their place, making life even more difficult. The monkfish tacos, which became one of the Lyndhurst’s signature dishes – so delicious, so generous, so very difficult to roll up and eat, so crammed were they with perfectly executed monkfish. The Korean chicken thigh burger, seemingly invented to make it impossible for me to cook my own dinner ever again on a Monday. Or perhaps best of all, the pork belly with plums and fried onions, in a deep, glossy sauce redolent of hoi sin. It only arrived on the menu around the start of this year, but even so I lost track of the number of times I ordered it. Even now, writing this and thinking about it I get a pang of sadness that I won’t get to eat that dish again.
I’ve made a point of trying to take almost everyone I know to the Lyndhurst at some time or another over the last five years. My family, local friends, friends from out of town, colleagues on one occasion, even my brother on his last trip to the U.K. from the other side of the world (he insisted on trying the monkfish with Bombay potatoes, and left in raptures). So I had done my level best to make sure as many people as possible at the wedding already knew how good the Lyndhurst’s food was.
But my new in-laws had never been there, and nor had some of the other wedding guests, and I couldn’t help but feel happy and proud of the pub as the canapés came round. Little cones packed with tuna, crowned with a dab of mango. Black pudding croquettes which seemed super-dense, as if they were made of more black pudding than their shell could contain: my father-in-law, not always an easy man to please with food, devoured quite a lot. Little choux buns filled with mushroom, for the vegetarians, and polenta squares topped with butternut squash, for the vegans.
And a treat I first sampled at a reader’s lunch the previous year, beetroot macarons, sweet yet salty, with a judiciously chosen core of goats cheese. “Holy shit”, my Canadian cousin Luke said to me later. “I think those might be the best things I’ve ever tasted.” And Luke eats out a lot.
I think some of our guests kept expecting the canapés to run out, because they didn’t know the Lyndhurst, but wave after wave passed through the room: no need to stand near the kitchen and grab them before they were demolished by others. No need to worry about that, or anything else. The Lyndhurst, their brilliant, well-oiled team, were completely in control. Why on earth would I worry?
The Lyndhurst opened in 2019, but within nine months or so they were plunged into the awful event we all now remember as 2020. Everywhere closed, from March to July, and when places reopened they faced a nervy, uncertain future. Many people, me included, were reluctant to go out. And then of course there was the superspreading folly of Eat Out To Help Out, followed by the many-tiered madness of various restrictions, all of which fell far short of what was really required.
I sometimes wonder how Sheldon and Dishon must have felt, celebrating the end of their first year in charge not knowing whether there would be a second. But if they ever lost hope it never showed, and although I liked the Lyndhurst a lot in 2019, it was in lockdown that I came to love them; I am lucky enough to live round the corner from the pub, and they carried on delivering to me, to my doorstep, throughout the winter of 2020.
It became a wonderful, comforting Saturday night ritual – place the order, transfer the money and then just as Strictly was about to begin there would be a knock at the door and there was Piotr holding a bag for us. If there were specials on we would invariably order them, but there was always a treat of some kind. I remember the asparagus in batter with romesco sauce, one of the best snacks of all time. I remember first the pork and then the lamb tacos, although any time the Lyndhurst did tacos was a time to cherish. I remember the beer can chicken, and the phenomenal ancho chile relish: I think I ended up with a jar of it in the fridge at one point, and used it on everything.
And I remember – how could I not? – the occasions when they had skate wing on. Classically cooked, golden and bathed in beurre noisette, scattered with capers and croutons, just waiting to be clumsily decanted on a plate and scoffed, with the simple joy of flipping the wing over at the halfway point. It might have been movie week on Strictly, or perhaps Halloween week or Blackpool week. But it was always, always Lyndhurst week.
One story I never told at the time, although I suppose I can now that Sheldon and Dishon have moved on, is that in the spring of 2021 I published a review of the Lyndhurst’s takeaway menu. I loved nearly everything I tried, but I did express a few reservations about a dish they’d just added to the menu, a chicken tikka naanza. Later that afternoon I got a message from them on Twitter: they’d been thinking about the feedback and they’d made a few tweaks as a result. Would I mind if they dropped one over so I could let them know what I thought?
Naturally I said yes, and just after five there was that knock at the door again. I split it in half and took half of it up to Zoë, who was in the spare room finishing her last conference call of the day. They’d pretty much made every change I’d suggested in the review and I know it’s me saying this, but it was damn near perfect.
One dish that the Lyndhurst never needed to change, not from day one, was their karaage chicken. I first had it in the spring of 2021 and to this day, however hard I’ve looked – and trust me, I’ve looked hard – I’ve never found a karaage anywhere else that matched it. It was my starter of choice, my first starter as a married man, and although it wasn’t the single best choice I had made that day it could well have been the second.
Although I was a takeaway customer of the Lyndhurst for quite some time, even after lockdowns eased and a lot of people went back into the pubs and restaurants, I wasn’t their last takeaway customer. That honour belonged to a chap at my office, who loves their curry night. He lives round the corner from the pub too, but with small kids he couldn’t eat in, much as he might have wanted to. So without fail every Thursday he would check Instagram, find out what the three curries on offer were, place his order and then go and collect it that evening.
Often I would be eating in and I would see him, we’d acknowledge each other, compare notes on which curry we were going for. I think he had the pint of beer that came with the curry – an outrageous bargain for twelve pounds, all in – but I can’t remember. But every week he was there, getting his curries, taking them. home. And every week the Lyndhurst was there, letting him: most other places would have said that the pandemic was over and they didn’t do that kind of thing any more, but not the Lyndhurst. Forget Eat Out To Help Out, they were helping him to stay home.
The last night that the Lyndhurst traded was a Thursday night, curry night. I wasn’t there because it was the night before my wedding: my fiancée (for one last night) and I went to London Street Brasserie, on the early bird set menu special, and had our first carbs and calories for quite some time. I drank English fizz and ate LSB’s excellent fish and chips, although I couldn’t finish the chips. So I didn’t make it to the Lyndhurst, but I’m pretty sure I know one person who did, one final time, for his family’s habitual takeaway.
And yes, what that also means is that my wedding day was the last day that the Lyndhurst was sort-of, kind-of open. I’d known that they were still trying to agree the rent with the pubco, and I knew that those negotiations didn’t look like they would end happily, but the Lyndhurst told me that one way or the other they would cater our wedding. The fact that they did means more to me than you can imagine, and it really felt like they were celebrating with us too. The pub, and the team, were such a big part of the wedding day that it was impossible to imagine it without them.
I found it equally impossible to pick main courses for our wedding meal. In the end we went for three options, any of which would have suited me down to the ground. Mine on the day was confit duck, the skin burnished, the meat underneath slumping helpfully from the bone, with Sarladaise potatoes, a smooth parsnip purée and the jus of the gods (the Lyndhurst had told me they could easily do a more cheffy duck dish, but this was the one I wanted).
But the main I almost wish I’d had, one final time, was that monkfish – a huge tranche of it, served on a heap of those addictive Bombay potatoes, a bright herb chutney and salad on the side. My wife had that, and I just looked on in awe and envy. My brother had it too, a wonderful gastronomic connection between his first and last meals at the Lyndhurst. So did my father-in-law: he cleaned his plate.
A couple of days after the wedding, I got a message on Facebook from a reader of my blog. He wanted to tell me something about the Lyndhurst.
He said that he’d recently gone to the Royal Berks and been told that he needed to be admitted for an emergency operation. But they said that he had just enough time to grab a meal before they would take him in. And so he went to the Lyndhurst, not far from RBH, and it just so happened that he was there in the week before they closed, eating there – just like I did – one final time. “It was a really meaningful experience” he said, “and I wouldn’t have done it without your review.”
It made me think of all the evenings that pub had made, and the fact that they probably didn’t know the half of it. Just for me alone, they had filled a very special place in my life for five years, in a way I’m not sure I’ve managed to explain. Don’t fancy cooking? Go to the Lyndhurst. Celebrating the start of a holiday? Dinner at the Lyndhurst. Back from holidays and feeling blue? The Lyndhurst it is. Finishing work at the same time as your other half, meeting in town and thinking “isn’t it burger night on Mondays?” Off to the Lyndhurst. Your brother’s last night in the country? Go on then.
But my reader’s story made me think of something else too. December 2021, when after over eighteen months on the run, playing it safe, not going into shops, not eating in restaurants, working from home, only socialising outdoors, waiting for the vaccine and the second vaccine and with the booster in touching distance, Zoë tested positive for Covid. And then she too spent time in the Berks, four fraught nights, and when she came out, after I met her outside the ward and slowly took her home, the Lyndhurst delivered me a simple order that night – just two beefburgers and chips. That was the beginning of the road to recovery, and one of my most meaningful experiences.
There was no way, though, that the beefburger was going to feature on the wedding menu. The Lyndhurst’s chocolate mousse, though, was another story. The first time it was on their menu, the first time we ordered and ate it, Zoë had that look in her eye. “We’re having that at our fucking wedding” she said. And so we did.
The rest of the evening was a riot – of my friend James’ home-brewed beer, of gin and tonic, of conversations with old friends out on the Lyndhurst’s patio. The heat and sun of the day had faded, the crowd had slightly thinned and everyone was sitting outside, chatting and mingling. My stepmother caught up with my schoolfriends, who she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. We took a last family photo before my brother and my sister-in-law headed off, their next flight a day away.
And there was more food – a buffet, of more food than I could conceive of eating. Thinking about it now, I wish I’d had more room for the charcuterie, for the chicken pakora, for every manner of bite-sized savoury delight. And because I’d asked them to, the Lyndhurst did a slider of their legendary Korean chicken burger, the dish they’d introduced in February which had made losing weight in the run-up to the wedding so challenging. I made sure I had one of those. A few people did: my mother-in-law took one home and had it the following morning for breakfast.
The next morning, town seemed to be an even more beautiful place than usual. I went and got a couple of coffees from C.U.P. to take them to our hotel, and the man behind the counter shook my hand and congratulated me. I told the hotel receptionist that my wife would be checking us out shortly – the first time I said “my wife”, the first of many. And we got to the Lyndhurst to take down the decorations, to find that the process of getting the pub ready to hand back was already taking place. A man was painting woodwork, the party was over.
Well, almost over. On the Saturday night there was a little farewell party for the pub and Zoë and I went in to say one last goodbye. Many of the regulars were there, faces I recognised from curry nights, or burger nights, or Friday nights. So many different stories intersecting with the pub the way mine had, so many different people who would miss Sheldon, Dishon and the team every bit as much as I would. When people talk about how pubs can be community hubs, they never mention how difficult it actually is to do, to manage that and still be inclusive, not some gammon pubman’s boys’ club. But the Lyndhurst did it.
And all the staff were there relaxing and chatting. Sheldon and Dishon, too, and I realised that I’d rarely seen them in the same place at once. Usually Dishon was running the front of house, Sheldon tucked away in the kitchen. But here they both were, casually dressed, laughing and, I hope, feeling the love. Dishon is moving back to Northamptonshire to be with his family, with a baby on the way. Sheldon told me he was looking forward to a break, to visiting his family in Mumbai, and after that who knows? Both of them looked like they were ready for a long rest, but proud of what they’d achieved. They should be.
I may have rarely seen Sheldon and Dishon together, but one of my favourite pictures is of the two of them, taken by a chap called Antonio, a local Instagrammer and neighbour who also loves the pub. It captures a moment, during service, of the two of them putting their heads together, of the front of house and kitchen meeting right at the point where the former ends and the latter begins. It captures something of the wonderful partnership that Reading was lucky to enjoy and, for me, something of what made the pub so magical. Neither of them had run a pub before that fateful day in the summer of 2019. Well, what a debut.
2024 is shaping up to be a year of changes. I got married, the Lyndhurst did a beautiful job of hosting our celebration and now they have moved on. Things happen quickly, and last Friday the Lyndhurst reopened under new management, a lady who previously ran a pub in Theale. There’s talk of it being more of a sports bar than it was in previous incarnations; locals have wished her well, and I’m sure they will all be in to check it out. I will too, and I’m conscious that when Sheldon and Dishon took the pub over I would have been the first to say they had big shoes to fill.
But fill them they did, and life moves on. And now it’s time for me and Zoë to move on, too: next month we’ll be leaving the Village, where I’ve lived so happily for seven years. So it wasn’t just greeting married life, or bidding farewell to the Lyndhurst, but the start of a period of loving living here, with all its quirks, but knowing that it will come to an end.
Everything does eventually, I suppose, but it’s important to recognise how good things are while you’re living them, rather than only later when you look back. But I will always remember the Village, and those five halcyon years when it had the best village pub anybody could hope for. I’ll remember the two men that made it happen, and that brilliant sunny day in May when the whole world was at its absolute best.
I still remember the first time I gave out a really good rating on this blog. It was towards the end of 2013, when we were all a lot younger and more carefree, and my blog had been running for just over three months. I wasn’t drunk on the power (next to nobody read the blog in those days) but even so giving out a rating in the high 8s felt like a proper stake in the ground. This is my kind of thing, that rating was saying. Go here on my recommendation and I promise you won’t regret it.
Ten years on, unlike a lot of restaurant reviewers who think their pronouncements should be on tablets of stone – why do so many of them write like they’re on coke? – it still feels like a big thing to say. And a presumptuous one, too: for me, that trepidation about writing a rave review has never quite gone away. Nor has the euphoric relief when anybody visits a restaurant on the back of one of my reviews and tells me they didn’t hate it, let alone loved it. I know the blog’s free, so nobody can ask for a refund, but I can’t give anybody back the money they’ve wasted on a bad meal.
The recipient of that first rave rating, a rating that wasn’t beaten for two whole years, was a gorgeous pub called the Plowden Arms in Shiplake. Run by married couple Matt and Ruth Woodley, it was the most beautiful spot – snug in the winter, with a fantastic garden in a little corner of South Oxfordshire for the summer. The crockery was vintage before everyone jumped on the chintz and retro bandwagon, the menu revived classics from the pages of Mrs Beeton and there was 20s jazz playing all the time. I adored it, and I went there often – with friends, with my partner, with my family, with anybody I could persuade to head to Shiplake.
Just over three years later, the Woodleys left the pub. It reopened under new management, but it wasn’t the same. You looked at the menu and thought that food was just something the management thought it should offer, all function and no passion. It was the first in a long string of disappointments, of places that had the temerity to close despite my loving them. Since then there’s been Dolce Vita and Buon Appetito, and soon there will be the Lyndhurst, but that first one stung. I wish I’d gone more often. As Andy Bernard says in The Office – the funnier version – I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.
When it closed two years later, I wasn’t surprised. It sat vacant by the side of the road, and for a while it looked like it would just be the latest pub to turn into accommodation, the latest community to lose a hub and gain a handful of extra residents with nowhere to drink. It was empty throughout Covid, but then in summer 2021 there was an interesting development: the owners of nearby Orwells announced that they had saved it from near-certain demolition and were going to open it as The Plough in early 2022.
That news was welcomed beyond the narrow confines of Shiplake: Orwells has a lot of fans, and I’m sure they liked the idea of a more affordable, more casual venture from the same people. But then something strange happened in 2022. The Plough didn’t open early that year and at some point – I suspect we’ll never know exactly why – Orwells dropped out of the picture. But the Plough did open, just before Christmas 2022, owned instead by Canadian-born Jill Sikkert, her first hospitality business after a career in interior design. Last month she appointed a new chef, Charlotte Vincent, who has been on Great British Menu and got one of her previous venues into the prestigious Top 50 Gastropubs list four years ago.
All very impressive: who needs Orwells anyway? But I would be the first to admit that the revitalised Plough isn’t the kind of venue I would normally review. A lot of that’s down to accessibility: I know that the countryside around Reading has plenty of food pubs which ordinarily would interest people, like the Dew Drop Inn at Hurley, the Crown at Burchett’s Green or even the Wellington Arms at Baughurst. But as a non-driver who relies on public transport they don’t generally fit my catchment area, so you’re more likely to hear about restaurants near a train station, like Seasonality.
Besides, you don’t need me for those kind of places because they’re the province of the website Muddy Stilettos, which you may know. They love rural gastropubs, and they gush about them in their weirdly infantilised language where things are “yummy” or “scrumptious” and go in their “tummies”, where food and drink are summed up as “scoff and quaff”. Apparently if you like this kind of restaurant you also like twee: I even read one review which referred to something called a “Michelin twinkler”, presumably this is awarded when your scoff and quaff are particularly yummy and scrumptious. Goody gumdrops!
If I say more about Muddy Stilettos – especially that their annual awards are an exercise in epic grift where they get small businesses slogging away to promote their website while giving back nothing in return – I’ll probably get in trouble, so let’s move on. I found myself reviewing the Plough because a very good friend got me one of their vouchers for my birthday last year, so Zoë and I finally found an opportunity to get there on Good Friday, at the end of our holiday, literally days before it expired. So I suppose, technically, I only paid for part of my bill: I wonder if that gives me something in common with Muddy Stilettos?
The makeover the Plough has received is quite something. In its previous incarnation it looked like a pub, like a beloved local that also happened to serve food. Now it is a really gorgeous series of rooms – you can tell Sikkert has a background in interiors – that take advantage of the pub’s good bones, its bricks and beams and parquet floors, but create something much more luxe. That said, the chairs looked better suited to lounging than dining, but that’s probably just me being a bit old-fashioned.
We were seated in a room I remembered well, having eaten in it many times when it was the Plowden Arms, and yet it felt completely familiar and totally different all at once. Even though it was the end of March there was still a nip in the air and the fire was burning, and it felt properly comforting: I can’t wait for summer to come, but I’ll miss the smell of woodsmoke.
The menu is written in that way that was modish a few years back, listing ingredients but nothing else: sea trout pastrami, mussel, apple gremolata, that kind of thing. I know this annoys some people but it didn’t bother me – it was more detailed than other examples I’ve seen and, besides, a little element of surprise when you order dishes can add to the experience. Perhaps I’m just getting soft.
As is the fashion there were snacks, starters, mains and desserts – most of the snacks just over a fiver, the starters just over a tenner, the mains between twenty and twenty six pounds, desserts a tenner. You’ll have your own views about whether that’s steep, but I compared it to what things cost at London Street Brasserie these days and decided to judge it at the end, not the outset.
There’s also a no-choice set lunch menu, twenty-seven fifty for three courses, which didn’t overlap with the main menu. But in honesty I think if you’re going to only offer one option on a menu it has to be more interesting than the likes of swede and carrot soup, so I gave it a miss. The Plough could learn from the likes of Quality Chop House, whose set lunch costs about the same and seriously makes you consider swerving the à la carte. Besides, that voucher was burning a hole in my satchel – in for a penny, in for a pounding, as my fiancée likes to delicately put it.
We got some snacks while we made up our mind about everything else, and they were the first indicator that it wouldn’t all be plain sailing. Homemade focaccia/blue cheese butter was the first thing we tried. Now, I don’t object to minimalist wording provided there isn’t anything significant in the dish it neglects to mention, and so long as what you’re told will be there is actually present and correct.
So the menu really should have said homemade bread/garlic butter, because that, weirdly, is what I got. The picture below is one of the dullest ever to grace my blog, but I put it there for a reason, to demonstrate that this bread wasn’t springy or spongy or aerated. It wasn’t open-crumbed at all. It wasn’t permeated with olive oil, it didn’t have salt or rosemary or anything else to zhuzh it up. The reason it was none of those things is that it wasn’t focaccia.
It was, instead, perfectly serviceable bread. And as for the butter – well, we went from the blue cheese in this must be very subtle to there’s no blue cheese at all in this, is there? before ending up at isn’t this garlic butter? The menu wasn’t just economical with words, it was a little economical with the truth too.
The second snack was a lot more enjoyable. I’ll do away with the stripped down wording from here on in, but this was a clump of battered, fried enoki mushrooms, strewn with shoots, more mushrooms (pickled, I think, but my mind might be playing tricks) and a little Walnut Whip of mushroom ketchup. This was far more like it – wild mushrooms cropped up in a few places on the Plough’s menu, and the mushroom ketchup, lending gorgeous depth, was the star of the show.
But at the risk of nit picking again, the ratio of the enoki to batter was so out of kilter that I felt like I was eating a savoury churro that just happened to have a tiny bit of mushroom in the middle. That said, if it had been described as that on the menu I might still have ordered it. Anyway, it was only a fiver.
The starters proper were more successful, and started to give me an idea of what the kitchen could do. My pork terrine wasn’t bad – a slab of pork, bound up with jamon iberico and strewn with gubbins – cups of onion with thyme crumb nestling in them, and more of those little shoots. I would have preferred some acidity in the mix – a piccalilli, or some caperberries – and without them it was nice but a little well behaved for my liking. A tad too fridge-cold, clean and pristine where it needed to be gutsy.
This came with what was billed as sourdough bread – I wasn’t sure it was sourdough but if anything, it was more open-textured than the focaccia had been. This dish felt sanitised, but it would probably have been a hit with the Muddy Stilettos crowd – every time I read a review by them, the reviewer practically apologises for having three courses and makes a tired joke about undoing the top button of her trousers. I never feel like I have to apologise to you lot for ordering too much food: it’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of you all.
Zoë had chosen scallops, a couple of plump specimens in a puddle of dashi beurre blanc, topped with some kind of sea vegetable whose name I’m sure I used to know but have since forgotten. I wouldn’t have ordered this – I’m not sure beurre blanc is improved by cross-pollinating it with dashi – but Zoë really enjoyed it. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to try any, and when I asked her for a more detailed critique she said “I fucking loved it, I’d order it again, what more do you want from me?”.
This will please fans of her expletives, and I know there are a few of you out there, but probably isn’t of practical help. She did eventually tell me under cross-examination that the scallops were beautifully cooked, the contrasting textures managed just right, but that’s all I have for you.
At this point I was feeling slightly underwhelmed, but the Plough rescued things with two exemplary and very different main courses. Fish and chips – just described as “day boat fish”, so I have no idea what it was – was outstanding. A thick cylinder of pearlescent, just-cooked fish was hugged by brilliant, almost ethereal batter. I was allowed to try a bit and it was miles better than I’d been expecting, and weirdly it made me think of my dad. He has a bit of a habit of ordering fish and chips in fancy restaurants, so I’ve seen him try it at Rick Stein’s place in Padstow, at the Beehive in White Waltham and in my opinion, the Plough’s rendition was better than either of those.
The accompaniments were bang on too – excellent peas which were crushed rather than mushy, and a tartare sauce Zoë could tolerate, which meant that it wasn’t quite vinegary enough for me. Having it with fries, although that was clearly communicated on the menu, felt a little strange to me. They were very good fries but, in an inversion of how I feel every time I look in the mirror these days, I’d sooner they had been chunky rather than skinny.
If that covers the pub classics end of the menu, my choice was cheffier and one of the best plates of food I’ve eaten this year. Lamb rump was just stellar – thick and tender, accurately seasoned, the perfect shade of pink with just the most beautiful stripe of fat, the kind of thing I could eat all day. It came with a little of everything wonderful – more onion, this time smoked, chewy and delectable nubbins of Jerusalem artichoke, a sweet and glossy puree, a little jus and, by the looks of this picture, some extra virgin olive oil thrown in for good measure.
Oh, and I neglected to mention my other favourite part of this dish – described as hash browns, they were a couple of golden pyramids of pressed and fried potato that were worth the price of admission by themselves. I truly loved this dish, and it single-handedly justified the trip to Shiplake. A few forkfuls in and that dense non-focaccia and the slightly timid terrine were completely forgotten. All was forgiven: this dish was twenty-six pounds and, I reckon, worth every penny. Even looking down at the picture I can remember how happy it made me.
As it was a little light on the veg I’d ordered some green beans on the side with pickled chilli and soy sauce. They were well enough executed, the beans with a little bite, but I didn’t think they quite worked: the sauce didn’t adhere, so you ended up with a pool of the stuff at the bottom. I’ll go for the ubiquitous hispi cabbage next time.
We both wanted dessert, which is a good sign, and we both wanted the same dessert. So we had it, unrepentantly and without loosening any garments. Again, it was good but not perfect and again, it wasn’t quite as billed. It was allegedly a dark chocolate cheesecake but, for my money, it wasn’t in any way dark. And texturally I didn’t think it entirely worked – that huge layer of chocolate was a tad gelatinous, the base so heavy and thick that you couldn’t get a spoon through it without risking injury to passers-by.
And again, it was a pity because the minor details were all excellent, from the chocolate soil on top to the blobs of yuzu gel and – especially – the warming, boozy cherries. I finished it, because it’s rude not to, but I would have liked something slimmer and more refined. That is something I often say when I look in the mirror, come to think of it.
Replete and satisfied, we asked for our bill and prepared for the trip home. And it would be remiss of me not to mention at this point that – more than once on my visit to the Plough – Zoë had raved about the bathrooms. “Seriously, you have to go to the loo before we leave” she said. “I think they’re some of the best restaurant toilets I’ve ever seen.” So I did, and they were indeed very chic and the handwash smelled magnificent. But, just as with Zoë and those effing scallops, that’s all I can remember. I wish I’d taken a picture.
Our bill for all that food, a non-alcoholic cocktail called a tropical something or other which Zoë found too sweet (and at nine pounds, a little too rich) and a couple of bottles of sparkling mineral water – because I was on antibiotics – came to a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, including a 12.5% service charge. And it feels like an insult to shoehorn the service in here, between the loos and the conclusion, because it was faultless from start to finish. We had just the right level of attention, enthusiasm and smiles from the moment we were greeted to the point where we said goodbye and went out the front door. It made me think what a boon this place must be to genuine locals, although if you live in Shiplake I imagine you had enough to be smug about even before the Plough came along.
I’ve ummed and aahed since about what I made of the Plough, on balance. In the debit column, some of the dishes were underpowered or didn’t work, and the feng shui menu didn’t always reflect what turned up on the plate. I suppose I compare it in some ways to the robust, magical cooking of somewhere like the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, and it doesn’t quite match that standard. But on the other hand, some of the dishes were exceptional, especially the mains, and the little touches with much of the food show an imagination which quite won me over. And then there’s the room, the welcome, that open fire and – yes, let’s mention them again – those bathrooms.
But the main thing I took from my trip to the Plough was a feeling of being in really capable hands, of a menu that could please almost anybody and managed to walk that very fine line where it was accessible and clever. That’s not an easy balance to strike, and many chefs or restaurants, despite their best intentions, end up falling clumsily on one side or the other. That the Plough has avoided that pitfall, and that the team have created somewhere so universal but sophisticated is a more skilful trick than you might think.
“This is the kind of place we could take your dad and stepmum” said Zoë in the car on the way back to Reading, and that’s as good a summary of its appeal as I can think of: it might mean more if you’d met them, but hopefully you get the drift. I think you could take anybody here for a meal – either for a special occasion or for no reason – and have a properly charming time.
This might not read like an out and out rave, I may not have talked about tummies or the fact that they might be awarded a Michelin twinkler at some point, but regular readers will know that this is me saying I was quietly impressed. This is my kind of thing. Hopefully, if you go here on my recommendation, you won’t regret it.
I’ve been asked about Masakali, the Indian restaurant that replaced San Sicario at the bottom of the Caversham Road, ever since it opened last November. I had a fair few messages on social media saying that it looked interesting, and when I’ve put Twitter polls up asking which of Reading’s newest openings I should visit first it’s always picked up a lot of votes. Being an awkward sod I still reviewed Minas Café, Filter Coffee House and Hala Lebanese before getting round to Masakali, but better late than never: here, at last, is the review literally some of you wanted.
I can see why people noticed Masakali. Something about the polish of its website made people dispense with their usual cynicism about yet another restaurant opening at a site which sees a new occupant every few years. The branding felt completely realised, in a way we don’t often see with new independent restaurants here. Masakali means pigeon in Hindi, and the restaurant is apparently partly inspired by A.R. Rahman’s Bollywood song of the same name: some of that might just be marketing guff, but at least they were trying.
The other thing that stood out about Masakali was the menu. Generic Anglo-Indian curries were kept to a minimum, and instead everything looked – on paper at least – properly interesting. No mix and match proliferation of protein and sauce, instead a range of more singular dishes. A few interesting cultural cross-pollinations here and there, like kulcha stuffed with truffle ghee or a chaat apparently topped with Walker’s crisps, but otherwise a good range of regional Indian dishes.
Someone had done their homework. And you know the C word was going to come up eventually, so here it is: the whole thing felt like a land grab for customers of Clay’s Kitchen rather than, say, people who went to the Bina (assuming, of course, that people still go to the Bina).
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As the proud partner of somebody who proudly works in retail, I accepted long ago that my weekends wouldn’t be like most people’s. For many years, we’d get a Saturday together if we were very lucky, a Sunday if we were a little less so. Whole weekends together were a chimera, generally speaking, and had to be booked and planned far in advance. And sometimes I’d get entire weekends to myself where I learned to like my own company better and make myself find things to do: I’m sure, on some level, they were character building.
It hasn’t all been like that. When lockdown hit and the shops shut, we were in each other’s company all day; I was between jobs back then, and all that time together felt like a present from the universe. For all the fear of getting seriously ill, all the wondering where your next supermarket shop will come from, I’ll always be grateful for that. Walks every day round the deserted business park feeling like we were in a post-apocalyptic movie, hearing Zoë on conference calls on the front step in the sunshine, the buzz of the neighbourhood WhatsApp group as everyone prepared to step outside at 6pm and wave hello. In hindsight it was a lovely time, even if I never read Proust or wrote that novel.
Then at the beginning of last year Zoë was on a secondment which meant that, for six months, she worked Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. And we got to experience together that life that we non-retailers take for granted – of shutting your laptop on a Friday afternoon, pouring that first drink and opening that glorious parcel of time that’s all yours. Living with someone in retail, I hope, makes me appreciate that privilege a lot more. It also makes me conscious of the sacrifice people in hospitality, as well as retail, make for the rest of us.
The reason I start by saying all this is that for the past six months Zoë has been on a stretch where she works every Sunday and has every Saturday off, a halfway house between the conventional 9-5 and what she had before. When that happened, I became the equivalent of those people who say they don’t like wasting the day. I proclaimed that we mustn’t squander those twenty-four precious Saturdays, that we should Go Places, See People and Do Things.
Of course now that the six months is coming to an end I have to conclude that we didn’t, really. They got eaten up with illness or other commitments, or kiboshed by train strikes, or a dozen other things. I often think of the quote falsely attributed to John Lennon, that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. But it’s not a tragedy, when I think of what we did instead – Saturday morning lie-ins, or afternoons spent in the Nag’s or at Double-Barrelled people watching or planning the next holiday. We still went places, saw people and did things, just without the Capital Letters Of Expectation.
But I really did want to tick off some restaurants, the ones I’ve always wanted to visit but never got round to. In that sense we made woeful progress. But we earmarked last Saturday, one of our final Saturdays together for a while, and after some deliberation I picked Quality Chop House, because of all the restaurants on the to do list I’ve talked about before, it’s been on there possibly the longest, always close to the top.
It’s a curious beast, very much in the vanguard of modern British cooking and regularly topping everybody’s list of London’s 50 best restaurants, despite the waxing and waning of food trends. And you could be forgiven, from the “Opened in 1869” on the website, for thinking it’s that kind of place, a restaurant like Sweeting’s or Wilton’s that has been around for ever. But actually, Quality Chop House is more St John than Rules and although a restaurant has been on the site for over 150 years its current incarnation began in 2012, the last year when we were all proud of Britain.
Since then it has firmly established itself under head chef Sean Searley, who was in the kitchen when they first reopened. It’s expanded, too, with a sister wine bar and small plates restaurant, Quality Wines, next door. Some say it’s even better than its big sibling, but I wanted to start with the original and best, so after a pre-lunch beer at Mikkeller on Exmouth Market Zoë and I took a short wander and passed through its handsome doors. PROGRESSIVE WORKING CLASS CATERERS was etched on a panel of the window: it’s like they saw me coming.
The interior achieves what the menu also aspires to, managing to be simultaneously Victorian and timeless. There are two rooms – the more famous one with benches like pews and the second one which is less photogenic. It’s still a convivial space though, all chessboard tiles and bentwood chairs, chalkboards on the walls listing special wines by the glass (they start at over £20, just so you know). I had a feeling that although the other room had a wow factor this one might have been comfier, and we had a decent sized table, although we had to sit diagonally across from each other so as not to butt shoulder blades with the table behind.
The menu changes daily, which meant that I’d looked at it daily in the run-up, wishing that some things would hang in there until my lunch booking, happy for others to drop out. It was compact and, to me, in the same vein as St John, with a handful of snacks, four starters, three mains and a selection of the eponymous chops.
It’s a menu you have to mentally recalibrate as you read, because a couple of the snacks nudge into starter pricing (and then some, in the case of the £24 chicken liver parfait) and the starters are between £14 and £18. As for mains, if you want a chop or a steak they start at just shy of £35 and climb from there. I was expecting that, so it didn’t bother me, but it’s worth mentioning that their weekday no-choice set lunch is a more modest £29 for three courses. From a look at their Instagram, it has some corkers on it.
But before that we had a cocktail, because it was one of our last Saturdays together for a while. Zoë’s negroni was made with Lemon Pekoe gin and a smidge of 25 year old Madeira and was a knockout. My rhubarb Collins was, for my money, too sweet, the cordial all syrup and no bite. That’s not to say, though, that I didn’t finish it.
The problem with a menu that has snacks and starters on it is that you have to have more restraint than me not to order both. We paced it so the snacks came with our aperitifs and they included some of my favourite things in the whole meal. Salami was by Molinari, a San Francisco-based salumeria almost as old as Quality Chop House, and was just exquisite – thick and coarse but with no bounce or resistance. I loved it, although I’d have liked some cornichons: it reminded me of similar dishes at Oxford’s Pompette where they just leave the jar at the table and let you serve yourself with tongs.
But far better was the dish I had to talk Zoë into letting me order. Smoked cod’s roe came topped with grated, cured egg yolk and a cluster of hot salt and vinegar doughnuts, all gloriously nubbled and irregular. This dish was close to faultless, and scooping a doughnut through the roe before popping it in your mouth was a hugely tactile joy. The smoke in the roe was subtle, the vinegar on the doughnuts beautifully in check. If I had one criticism you needed a couple more doughnuts to really clear up all the roe, but I could forgive Quality Chop House a lot for introducing me to the concept of salt and vinegar doughnuts in the first place.
“This is like – hear me out” said Zoë, giving me a warning about what was to come, “posh Primula.”
“Primula tastes of cheese, not fish. Or are you saying this is like a cross between Dairylea and Shippams?”
“Maybe. And I don’t even have a problem with the vinegar. Menus should make a point of this – it should say salt and vinegar doughnuts, with hidden vinegar.”
Some people. Every bit as good were the pork shoulder croquettes, little dense dice of saddleback packed into a breadcrumbed shell and placed in the middle of a coaster of lime green leek mayonnaise. These were top notch, and although they’re listed as snacks I wish I’d had a portion to myself. I’m so used to Spanish croquetas, all light with bechamel, that I’d forgotten how good something like this could be – nothing but moreish shreds of salty pork. I eked this dish out, knowing that however well I did so it would be gone too soon.
“I don’t know why they call them croquettes” was Zoë’s feedback. “They’re definitely nuggets.”
“I don’t think they’re going to rebrand as the Quality Nugget House, true though it might be. People will get the wrong idea.”
With our snacks out of the way it was time to take the meal seriously and place a proper order. By this stage what had begun as an almost-empty dining room was full, and it made me realise just how efficient the staff were. Efficient and hard working, finding the perfect happy medium between the two unpalatable extremes of matey and glacial. Always there when you needed them, too, in a manner I associate more with eating in Paris than London.
We also ordered a bottle of wine, going eventually for an interesting-looking number from Roussilon that promised peach, herbs and smoke. It lived up to that, and I thought was about its money for just shy of sixty pounds. Initially I thought that the wine pricing was a little sharp at Quality Chop House considering they had a wine shop next door – there was very little south of forty quid – but later on I saw the wine we’d chosen on sale at Bloomsbury’s Shrine To The Vine for thirty pounds, so if nothing else their markups could be a lot steeper.
Starters built on the promise of what had gone before. I am a sucker for sweetbreads so I tend to order them whenever I see them and last year – at Paris’s Parcelles and Malaga’s La Cosmopolita – I had two sweetbread dishes which raised the bar. If anything, Quality Chop House’s rendition might have exceeded them. These were veal sweetbreads cooked in beef fat, and although the fat didn’t overpower them it did give them an almost crispy texture without sacrificing their softness.
But the supporting players were just as important. I’m used to calçots paired with romesco, and I’ve enjoyed that combination many times, but having the two of them as an accompaniment to sweetbreads was not something I’d ever considered. And it all went together so beautifully: heat, nuttiness and sweetness from the alliums. A beautiful dish.
Zoë didn’t especially fancy any of the four starters on offer so decided to grab an eponymous chop from the snacks menu. As a fun-sized demonstration of the meat they bought and how they cooked it, is was difficult to fault and came on a squiggle of cumin yoghurt, strewn with pickled chillies.
A dish made with lamb chops is one of our regular midweek staples, especially when we’re trying to cut down on carbs (did I mention that I have to lose about five stone in three months for this wedding I’m having?). And I wish when I cooked lamb chops they tasted like this – the forkful I tried was impressive stuff.
At this point I was convinced that I was halfway through a record-breaking meal: the wine was slipping down nicely, everything I’d eaten was magnificent and the room was buzzing. This was what I had told myself we’d do on Zoë’s Saturdays, and even if we’d left it late we’d saved the best until last.
For me the mains didn’t reach the same heights, but it didn’t change the fact that if I’d had them in any other restaurant they would have easily made my top ten of the year. I decided to eschew, rather than chew, the chops so I’d chosen the fish course – a firm, bronzed slab of pollock sitting in a moat of crab bisque, a blob of aioli behind it and some wild garlic reclining, wilted and louche, on top.
That all sounds superb, and it wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t blown away the way I had been by the smaller courses. The fish was perhaps a few seconds too well-cooked, the bisque lacking in savoury depth. I wasn’t sure the aioli added much. Was I being ultra-critical because everything else had been so fantastic? Possibly.
Zoë on the other hand had opted for the double chop combo, following up her lamb starter with an immense pork loin chop. It was Saddleback, again, and it was undeniably a terrific, whopping piece of meat. It was so beautifully cooked, the meat tender and nowhere near dry, the fat softened to the point where it was the best thing on the plate. I was allowed a fair bit of this – 400g is a big old chop – and it made me suspect that picking the fish dish was tantamount to, as a friend once put it, going to Nando’s and having the prego steak roll.
Both dishes were lacking in carbs or veg, and you have to order those separately. Maybe it was those snacks at the start, but neither of us could work up much enthusiasm for a bitter leaf salad with grapefruit (which didn’t feel like it went with anything we’d chosen) or squash with rosemary. We did, however, gravitate towards Quality Chop House’s confit potatoes. It’s a dish they’ve become known for, perhaps more than any other, and it has inspired a lot of imitations. It was also the one dish I was determined not to leave Quality Chop House without trying.
And yes, they were every bit as good as that picture down there makes them look. Hefty cuboids made up of many thin layers of spud, pressed and then fried until the outside is a salty, brittle treat. If you like starch in general, or potatoes in particular, I’m prepared to go out on a limb and say that this is a death row dish. I am struggling to thing of anything – the crispiest chip, the most buttery mash, the creamiest dauphinoise – that quite matches this as the apex of potato perfection. Personally I probably wouldn’t have piped mustard on them. But it’s their place, so they can do what the hell they like.
But the strange thing is this – I loved them, but I wasn’t sure they really went with either of our mains. That, and the lack of some kind of veg, made the meal feel a little lop-sided, a tad needlessly beige. Was I being ultra-critical because everything else was so good? There’s that question again.
Having dessert, under these circumstances, was a foregone conclusion. But first we finished our wine and had a look at the dessert wines on offer. Many of them were available by the glass, and the menu does recommend some pairings with desserts, but when I noticed a Riesling by excellent German producer Staffelter Hof my decision, and Zoë’s, were made. I’ve enjoyed their wines both at Clay’s and Marmo, but didn’t know they did a dessert wine. And it was outstanding – golden and sweet, sticky but not sickly.
Zoe’s choice of dessert, under any other circumstances, would have been mine. And it was a lovely, classic piece of work, a cheesecake with a thin but exquisite biscuit base and a layer of mandarin orange and something called “blood orange sherbert” on top. It was as good an example of a cheesecake as you’ll find, but fundamentally it was just a cheesecake.
I think I picked better: I had the ice cream. And yes, fundamentally you could say it was “just” ice cream but that would fail to do it justice. It was an olive oil ice cream made from eye-poppingly expensive Capezzana olive oil, and it was the best ice cream I’ve had in this country. Easily up there with anything I’ve had abroad, too. I’ve not had olive oil ice cream in many years but here the oil permeated everything, giving the ice cream a perfumed, grassy note that took it up several levels.
The whole thing was drizzled with olive oil that collected brightly at the bottom of the bowl, waiting to be scooped up. And each spoonful had a little crunch of salt crystals. This dish wasn’t sweet or savoury – it was far too clever to pick a side in that way. It thumbed its nose at being either and was instead authentically, enchantingly itself. It cost ten pounds, one of the least expensive dishes of the meal, and was worth every penny: if I could teleport any one dish from the Quality Chop House to my sofa right now, as I write this, it would be this one.
We had outlasted a few tables that had arrived after us – such quitters – and as our bill came with a couple of pieces of white chocolate fudge we chatted with our server. We asked if we could buy the wine we’d had at the wine bar next door and she said no, because they’d made a conscious decision to stock completely different wines there. “It’s nice for us, because it means when we go there for a meal we get to try something new” she said, adding that the staff happily ate in the restaurant or the neighbouring bar on their own dollar because the food was so good.
“The thing is, people come for the chops but I think everything else on the menu is so good. Like the fish you ordered. And you really need to come back during the week, because the set menu is amazing.”
Our bill, with service included, came to about two hundred and eighty pounds. I know that might be the bit where many of you wince – don’t I know there’s a cost of living crisis on? – and I could say that we ordered a digestif and a dessert wine each, a decent bottle of white and four courses.
But it is difficult to deny that unless you’ve having that set lunch menu during the week, Quality Chop House is a pricey restaurant. When I compare it to Manteca, across town, where we ate easily as much food last year and spent three quarters of that amount, it drifts firmly into special occasion territory. But then Manteca was 2023, and this is 2024, and a lot of restaurants are going to the wall. Even having only been there the once, I’d like it if Quality Chop House wasn’t one of them.
After my meal I knew Quality Chop House was extremely good, but I also knew I needed to reflect to figure out just how good it was. And the answer, I think, is very, but not without a handful of bet-hedging caveats. It is classic and timeless and that is a big part of its strength. You won’t be buffeted by food trends or forced to eat anything that’s been freeze dried or agitated into a foam. You’ll have a gorgeous, comforting meal in a space that feels like it could have existed and looked like this at any time in the last hundred years. You’ll experience superlative service, and come away knowing that you’ve treated yourself.
And yet there is a slight niggle that stops me giving it one of the highest ratings I’ve ever awarded. Brilliant though it is, it is pricey. The menu is a tad unbalanced, as I said. And the most interesting things on it are at the beginning and at the end, which is why I understand the plaudits that have been heaped on Quality Wines next door.
Because as much as I liked seeing a hulking great chop set down in front of us, there was a bit of me that would have preferred a restaurant that stuck to the snacks and the small plates, and maybe offered wines at more approachable prices. This venue was great, I enjoyed it and I’m so glad I went there. But that venue, the venue I might have liked Quality Chop House to be, sounds like it’s literally next door.
But never mind. After many of the things I’ve eaten this year – for the blog or for fun, mindfully or mindlessly, out and dressed up or in my comfies on the sofa, in company or alone – are firmly in the past I will still remember that afternoon of chat, laughter and leisure. And I’ll remember that ice cream. Any restaurant that can make memories like that is okay in my book.
Quality Chop House – 8.8 92-94 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3EA 020 72781452
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