From late 2019 until the spring of 2024 The Lyndhurst boasted some of the best food Reading has ever seen: varied, exceptional quality, ludicrous value. Since then, the pub has become a perfect enc…

A couple of Fridays ago I was sitting outside a very pleasant café called Butter Beans, a minute away from Richmond’s beautifully refurbished Art Deco train station, experiencing what could s…

I meet Graeme off his train back from London. He is smartly dressed and layered up, because he has come from work and because he knows that it’s autumn. I am slightly parky in shorts and a sh…

The more observant among you, and my regular readers out there, might well wonder if the title of this week’s review is a mistake. Because I reviewed Gees, one of Oxford’s most venerabl…

The thing that struck me last week when I walked into Eatnua Thai Street Food (I’ll call it Nua from now on, if you don’t mind), the restaurant that opened last summer in the spot previously occupi…

There’s an exhibition on at the Willis Museum in Basingstoke called I Grew Up 90s, and speaking as someone who tried and failed to grow up back then I felt I had to go and experience it, even…

This might be hard to believe, but a couple of years ago I nearly ended up moving to Pangbourne. Well, sort of. Zoë and I were quite happy in our little house in the Village, and then one day I got…

Have you been to Angelo’s, the new Italian restaurant in the town centre, yet? And have you been asked whether you’ve been there yet? The thing is, people keep asking me if I’ve e…

A few Fridays ago I was sitting in a café called Suffolk Coffee in Cheltenham, drinking a latte and feeling something I don’t generally experience before going somewhere on duty: genuine anti…

Having written about and celebrated Reading and its independent scene for nearly 13 years, one thing that has always irritated me is people who live to run the place down. You see them popping up o…

Taking a Friday off and meeting my old friend Dave for lunch in Oxford felt like such a good idea when we made our plans. There’s something magical about a long lunch – and especially o…

This is my third city guide to Bruges: I put the first one out back in 2022, and then I wrote another one two years later which I’ve been updating piecemeal ever since. Both times it shared t…

Oxford, probably my favourite city in which to review restaurants, ostensibly has little in common with Reading. One has pretty old buildings and winding lanes, a shopping mall that doesn’t b…

At Carmel in Queen’s Park, a restaurant usually described as some combination of Eastern Mediterranean and North African, a snack of anchovies comes with tahini and crostini. Crispy squid is served…

The 21st of July last year might have seemed like a perfectly normal Monday to you, but in food and drink terms it was an eventful day for Reading. Lincoln Coffee finally opened its big new site on…

Stroud is lovely. Have you been? It’s so easy if you live in Reading: there’s a direct train that sets off once an hour, takes an hour and drops you close to the heart of things, less t…

There’s no such thing as Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay for restaurants, as far as I know. But if there was, the restaurant whose food I ate most last year is almost certainly Gooi Nara, the…

I first visited Glasgow over a decade ago, twice in quick succession, and came away thinking that it was absolutely one of my favourite cities I had ever been to. I loved the grand scale of its str…

Alexandra Langlais, the owner of Insta-friendly Erleigh Road institution Café Yolk has had a busy twelve months. In January she opened Donnington Deli opposite Yolk’s original branch in a spo…

This week’s review came about because several weeks ago I ate at Bill’s – and yes, if you don’t mind, I’d like to explain that statement. It wasn’t my choice, I …

Here are just some of the many reasons why I should not be reviewing the Wokingham branch of Nando’s this week. 1. It’s Nando’s. Everybody knows what eating at Nando’s is li…

There are many restaurants I would love to visit but know, realistically, that I never will. You only have so many hours in the day, weeks of annual leave and pounds in your current account. I may …

I’ve talked about this before, but it helps when you’re writing a restaurant review to have some kind of hook, some reason why you decided, this week of all weeks, to check that particular venue ou…

“This should be lovely” said my dear friend Jerry as we took a table in the window at Cuttlefish, a couple of minutes’ walk away from the far side of Oxford’s Magdalen Bridg…

For all the people in Reading and beyond on Ozempic or Mounjaro, despite all the weeks in the last few years when I’ve joined my ever-optimistic wife on the Fast 800 diet, there remain some t…

This week’s review comes from Bath, and from a restaurant I visited with my old friend Dave, and those of you with good memories might recall that I was last in Bath on duty roughly a year ag…

Could you eat exactly the same thing day in, day out, for weeks on end? Fifteen years ago I worked in an office, back in the good old days when people actually liked going into the office every day…

Graeme and I are a fine pair when I meet him on Cemetery Junction for our trip to Namak Mirch. He had an operation on his foot in January and is standing there, crutch in hand, wearing trainers for…

This review begins, as a couple of mine have before, outside the Missing Bean on Turl Street in Oxford, a little before noon. I have grabbed a couple of seats outside on the cramped little benches,…

Does the world need another review of the Devonshire, described by Esquire as “the buzziest pub in the world”? Quite possibly not, because since opening at the start of November 2023 everybody has …

One of the constant criticisms of Reading, throughout most of my time writing this blog, has been its lack of what people consider to be a special occasion restaurant. The town centre and its surro…

This might be the first time I’ve been able to say this in over 30 years of working for a living, but my boss – he doesn’t read this blog, so I can get away with admitting this &#…

If you plan it right, one of the great joys of this restaurant reviewing lark is that no two weeks need be the same. One week you’ll be in the town centre trying out pizza and pasta, the next…

When I ran through the trends in Reading’s food scene last year, two stood out: the proliferation of new, casual pizza restaurants and a similar blossoming of restaurants to cater to Reading’s Hong…

Unlike any restaurant reviewer I know of, I publish the list of restaurants I intend to visit. It’s regularly added to as places open and people tip me off about their favourite venues, in Re…

You’ll have to forgive me, because in the normal run of events I announce my award winners at the end of the year, wrapping everything up in a bow so we can all get on with a fresh twelve mon…

I imagine that you are reading this in the strange hinterland that is the time between Christmas and New Year. Whether you’re working, “working from home but not really” or have t…

On the Wednesday afternoon, my second full day in hospital after the accident, I put some pictures up on Facebook. Nothing special, just a picture from my bed of Dorrell Ward, my left foot poking o…

As followers on social media may already know, this will be my last conventional restaurant review for a short while. Last month I broke my arm in a nasty accident, and after a short stay in the Ro…