Miller & Carter at Oracle Riverside

Let's discuss the US of A. It's a country where I have lived on both coasts, took a company public on NASDAQ and was even briefly married to a girl from Michigan. Yet today I believe that it is the biggest problem facing people in the UK. Forget the desparate economic refugees fleeing their collapsed and war torn countries for a better life on our hallowed shores on inflatable tyres, forget the EU and Brexit. No, our problem is that the UK is little more than a vassal state to the good ol' USA these days.

You want to advertise your local business to people in Reading ? Well, you'd better pay Google or Meta or NextDoor or Checkatrade (ah, sorry, they're Canadian owned..). If you want to sell or buy stuff, pay your Amazon or Etsy tax. And then everything you buy or sell involves another tax to US giants Mastercard or Visa. And then they go and stick tariffs on our goods and threaten to back the Argies over the Falklands because we won't partake in a stupid war they started and now can't finish.

Worse still is the cultural appropriation, with Halloween taking over from Bonfire Night and schoolkids going to 'proms' and sticking 'like' in between every other word.

You see what I mean ? Odious orange leader aside, we have a problem with the USA - and don't get me started on food. I never remember a memorable meal in all my time in the USA. passable, yes, but usually in the USA food means fuel. Even their recipes seems to involve throwing a can of Campbell's soup on some meat and baking it in the oven.

They gave us McDonalds, KFC, Popeyes, Wendys, and Miller & Carter.

OK, I'm being disingenious again, the first Miller & Carter's was opened by English pubco Mitchell & Butler in 2006 in Penn, Wolverhampton.

But steak houses are quite a thing in the US. In the UK you go to a pub after work. In the US if there is serious business to discuss you're off to a steak restaurant - when I lived in New York City I was often to be found at the city's most famous historic and classic steakhouses such as Keens and Gallaghers in Midtown Manhattan and Peter Luger's in Brooklyn.

Smith & Wollensky has an outpost on The Strand in London, catering for homesick bankers and US tourists as far as I can tell, but have ventured no further. So it was up to Miller & Carter to take the great American steakhouse to the English provinces. I have previously eaten at a branch in Worle (look it up) and Cannock. It's worth noting that they have no branches in central London.

They have their quirks - they used to serve their steaks with a grilled lettuce segment and now serve something they call 'onion cake' and many of my friends and neighbours regard the joint (or should I say joints ? There are two in Reading and over 120 across the UK) as their favourite place to go.

So it was high time that  they featured in these pages. In the past I never made it here due to the fact that LBS and Côte were in between and that steak restaurants are not my favourite foodstuff.

Last weekend was G's sixtieth birthday, so a debrief was called for after a wonderful bash down at his gorgeous pile in Arborfield. Apparently we went through fifty bottles of champagne before we started to drink and eat. Dear me. He and his wife K are generous to a fault and, after all, you're only 60 once... He worked for his whole career for a major US corporation who produce much of the software you probably use and has travelled extensively in the US. Now that he is retired he still can't keep away and this was a sejourn before he headed off to the national parks of Utah and Idaho, provided the orange one hasn't turned them into oilfields by then.

The location of this branch is Oracle Riverside two doors down from Côte and in the bit eventually set for demolishing and redevelopment as flats. 

Outside it's dull - no pavement seating, which seems to be the very point of this rather glum location (many US steakhouses are based in in windowless 'lots' in my experience). Demolition and rebuilding might be for the best. Having an eating and drinking location by the canal might once upon a time have seen like a genius idea, but it has turned into a culvert that floods all too often and has none of the charm of the many lovely riverside locations which we have in our town. But the best Reading can do in its usual brutalist way is The Oracle Riverside and The Back Of Beyond Spoons. It's tragic that Bel & The Dragon closed down, The Island off Caversham Bridge has been empty for a decade and that the outlets in Huntley Wharf remain empty.

And will someone please take on The Lower Old Ship Inn and turn it into the pub that this part of Reading really needs ? It is finally for sale as Geene King finally see some sense. But I suspect that finding a buyer in this current culinary climate will be tough.

Inside it's plush and luxurious as any steak restaurant world over should be. It's a large space with probably a hundred covers, but on a Friday lunchtime barely six people graced the place. Our waitress said that their Caversham outpost in the old Grosvenor pub was even quieter.

We sat by the window and tackled the various menus. One for cocktails and drinks. one for wines, one for food and the other for the lunchtime deal. I want the printing contract for Miller & Carter. There was me thinking that the internet was going to put printers out of business, but it seems restaurants seem obliged to visit large pieces of printed cards at you. Or maybe they just want to obscure you from your dining companions.

That said, they do a very generous lunchtime deal. A starter and main course for twenty quid and change, with a desert added for another four quid or so, which is what we settled on. The set menu features a decent choice of starters and just the right portions. Mushroom and cheese for G and the chicken bites for me.

The mushrooms had a decent depth of flavour and the Cheddar cheese on top was fine until it dried out. There were some small toasts on the side. It was passable.

My fried chicken pieces with a dipping sauce were surprisingly good. Crisp. well seasoned and sharp with a glaze and a tamarindy sweet chilli dip. 

We could also have had calimari, a soup or a Cesar salad with avocado. Checking back on the menu when writing this it seems that some of the dishes have been changed  with the current choice of calimari, spiced cauliflower, pork belly, burrata, the sticky chicken and baked camembert.

We had started off with a bottle of Albarino which was very decent - dry and slightly fruity.

As ever we were nattering away endlessly about conversations that we had already had and the characters I had met anew despite having been mates with G for over thirty years. Our attentive waitress hovered many times as we completed our course before we finally allowed her to clear the table. And this is where service in a restaurant falls down.

As soon as our starters were cleared, our mains arrived seconds later, barely warm.

The two small fillet stakes (at a £8 premium) had been clearly waiting on the pas for some time. I say small, but I did not eat all of mine. Both were medium rare and cooked bang on, if missing some caramelisation. Larger steaks are available as part of the deal for a £10 supplement - this is clever prix fixe marketing).

The weird onion bhaji loaf ( which apparently traces its American restaurant roots back to mid-20th-century Chicago-area establishments like Hackney's and the 1970s rise of the Tony Roma's BBQ chain) and a fried tomato were the accompaniments.

You can add a sauce for an ungenerous £3.95. I had peppercorn and G had bearnaise. Just watch that bill mount up. The lunchtime menu also offers burgers, cod, a risotto, half a chicken and BBQ ribs. All the foodstuffs.

The dishes come with either chips or a tomato salad sides. We shared. Both sides were generous, but the chips were soggy and pretty ug. The salad was fine - rocket, red onions and heritage tomatoes. By now we had moved on to a red Rhone - the Chateauneuf du Pape is decent value at just over £50.

Now, I just can't get by that onion cake that is even more weird than the burnished lettuce they used to serve. It is a big greasy and unpleasant - onions obviously go well with beef, but this was just strange. I'll ask for it to be left off the plate next time.

Now, since the dessert is included in the menu (OK, we paid four quid more for it), we both decided on the salted caramel profiteroles. In for a penny, in for twenty three pounds ninety five. They came with a sauce and a dipping sauce and were perfectly fine but the dough was totally covered in the topping. It just seemed like an afterthought from the freezer.

It was a nice meal. A good meal even. Just right for two old blokes in their sixties with a decent amount in their pensions and lots of things to discuss. I can see why so many of my neighbours like the place so much, but steak is something I left behind in the US - their corn oil-fed GM meat is amongst the many things I do not miss about the USA, but G will pack his suitcase and make up for that, no doubt.

For myself, I would boycott Miller & Carter over that onion loaf alone, but boycotting Meta, recently proven to be damaging to our children's welfare as well as our pockets and shopping from UK retailers instead of Amazon might be a better, if inconvenient, place to start.