I started my first company when I was twenty five in an old banana warehouse in Covent Garden. Around the corner was the impossibly glamorous and massively expensive Neal Street Restaurant. It was Antonio Carluccio's statement restaurant, beloved of every media type and their massive (in those days) expense budgets.

 

I never ate there - running a startup where I could barely pay for a tube fare, it was out of sight. But by the time I had started my third company I had moved up in the world and Carluccio had moved down with the opening of his eponymous chain of high street restaurants and our worlds were in harmony. But before we delve into this, let’s rewind and add a touch of culinary history.

As most of you will know, Antonio Carluccio was a larger than life Italian-born chef, restaurateur, and food writer who went on to become one of the most beloved figures in British culinary culture. Born in Salerno in 1937 and raised in Northern Italy, Carluccio developed a deep appreciation for the regional traditions of Italian food from a young age. He moved to the UK in the 1970s after some time spent in Germany as a wine merchant, eventually opening a delicatessen in Neal Street, Covent Garden. This would grow into the unachievable for me, but highly celebrated Neal Street Restaurant, where Italian food was taken on a step from the traditional pasta and dessert trolley Italians to be found around Soho and further afield in the 80s.

Of course, Carluccio gained wide recognition for his books, television appearances, and his charmingly passionate advocacy of "MOF MOF" cooking — "Minimum of Fuss, Maximum of Flavour." - his warm, avuncular style and deep respect for simplicity and seasonality made him a favourite. With regular television appearances he helped demystify Italian cooking for a British audience, and he mentored and collaborated with numerous chefs, most notably Gennaro Contaldo. He was also a pioneer of foraging, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of mushrooms and foraged ingredients derived from scouring the Lombardy hills often incorporated into his cooking and writing.

His presence lives on thanks to regular Saturday Kitchen appearances, but perhaps his most enduring legacy in the public sphere is the high street restaurant chain that bears his name: Carluccio’s. Founded in 1999, the chain aimed to bring high-quality, accessible Italian food to mainstream UK diners, combining a café, food shop, and informal dining in a single concept. While the business eventually went public and changed hands, with the great man selling his final shares in 2010, Carluccio, the name lives on as a legacy, despite going bust during the pandemic and now being part of the Boparan Restaurant Group (who also own Giraffe, Ed’s Easy Diner, Gourmet Burger, Cinnamon Collection and Harry Ramsden’s amongst much else).

But back to my story and the offices of my third company in Clerkenwell in the 1990s had a Carluccio's, ironically nearly next door to the reverend St John's in St John's St, and also another branch pretty close to my home in North London. They became regular haunts and always provided a dependable meal in the evening or at lunchtime, or even breakfast, where you could take a date or a business contact as much as host a party for ten. At the same time I had offices in Milan and Rome and Carluccio's had none of the originality or spontaneity, but the trattoria style was very well done and a welcome addition to British high streets.

 

I loved the Italian trattoria concept, along with an expensive deli for an upsell, somewhere you could have their legendary ’full Italian’ breakfast (pancetta instead of bacon, sourdough for toast..) or a pastry at eight, a cappuccino at eleven, a great lunch, a bottle of wine after work, which often turned into a three course meal with a final flourish of limoncello and then leave with cannoli, or at Christmas a massive panatone, or another bottle of limoncello..

 

But like every chain eatery in the UK it slowly lost connection to its owner. But I never lost my soft spot for the royal blue that I remember from that unapproachable Neal St restaurant and is still used in its branding today.

 

So, when I moved to Reading it was comforting to have one not so far away on Forbury Gardens. Today, as everything in East Reading closes or lies empty, it is actually our closest restaurant. It has been a regular and dependable spot, and the staff, both front of house and back of house have remained largely consistent, friendly and welcoming throughout this time. Always a good sign (but with a caveat to follow).

 

Thirteen or so years on, it was high time to go and do a review.

 

Now, Reading is not blessed with Italian restaurants. Indeed, there are precious few European independents. You can get a crepe but Cote is your only French option. Germany seems well served with, er.. fast food kebabs. Spanish, well there's the Lido, but er... O!Portuges closed. There are Polish and Romanian restaurants which are on my shortlist, a couple of Greeks, but Europe is badly served. Food is the first business immigrants set up when they have no other way to generate income and Europeans have been far too rich for far too long to partake.

 

So, we have Zizzi's and Presto and a plethora of pizza joints. Sarv's has gone, loads of other have come in. We have Mama's Way which everyone loves but which I have an ambiguous relationship with having been used to the large Italian delis you used to be able to find at the bottom of any street in London. I'm never sure of what to buy there.

 

Then you have to go to Caversham or wider afield for some more authentic Italian cooking like PapaGee and I am eagerly looking forward to the opening of Antonio’s on Station Hill, having been a long term fan of Ruschetta in Wokingham. An honourable mention should also go to Vino Vita, now an indie wine bar with a great wine list and decent Italian food.

 

But old habits die hard and my only go to for Italian is still Carluccio's. So, in need of a review, I dragged my poor wife barely a sleep off the red eye from her company's HQ in California for a Saturday lunch.

 

Some familiar faces greeted us - the service at Carluccio's has always been exemplary and the staff have been remarkably consistent for a chain. If you haven't been, the space is an open ground floor with a few banquets and some lovely seating outside on the square just outside Forbury Gardens. Unfortunately, the site faces north, so the outside spaces has less utility than it should have on a sunny day.

You may recall that there used to be a French brasserie called Forbury’s adjacent on Forbury Place, which surely lends itself to being a piazza full of restaurants but is instead home to lawyers, estate agents and 'hot seating'. As ever, Reading’s best spaces are wasted.

 

We settled in and I noticed that it was significantly emptier than I recalled on previous Saturdays. And then came the shock as I read the menu - burgers, steaks, pizzas, in place of the good range of Italian dishes that I was long familiar with. Of course, the regulars are all there, but this move towards homogeneity is so depressing. Every pub, hotel and even food chain feel obliged to have these 'standard dishes'.

 

But burgers in Carluccio's? The poor man must be rolling in his voluminous grave. Let me add that I hate burgers. They are a pathetic excuse for cuisine. They are to cuisine what sawdust is to carpentry.

 

My poor jetlagged wife therefore tolerated a long rant gracefully, mainly thanks to having ordered us both a Limoncello spritzer upon seating, clever lady that she is.

 

As I mellowed, we ordered some food off the more traditional part of this now eclectic and far from traditional Italian menu. Sure, you can still get carbonara and lasagne, but we went for our old stalwarts. 

 

 

Calamari to start and share (they come in large and extra-large options - large was large enough). A bit chewy, but much better than anything I have tasted this far from a port in some time, with a very light batter and some mayo dressed with parsley. 

 

After finishing off our aperitifs we had moved on to some Pinot Grigio rose by the glass, which proved to be highly quaffable and washed down the seafood nicely.

 

Our mains also honed down onto Carluccio classics, eschewing the pathetic move to cater for GenZ's dreadful culinary requirements (or am I being unfair ? You can't blame post war food rationing for everything these days...)

 

 

The Beef Ragu Papardelle was great - the sauce lacked a degree of depth and the addition of black olive pieces was a new ingredient that I rather liked but which felt a bit alien and might well be actively disliked by many. The wine could have been rendered down a bit more, but beef does need some tartness in its sauce.

 

My wife had her favourite and the 'house dish' - courgette spinach basil pecorino fritters balls.

 

As ever, my fork strayed and both the courgette fritters and the big lovely penne with finely sliced courgette and a dash of chilli and lemon were delicious but utterly drowned in a sea of buttery garlic. This may be the first time that I have ever complained about too much garlic on anything, but I would swear that I can still taste it now, several days later. Oh, and there’s butter. But this remains a lovely go to dish with crunch and mellowness and ribbons of garlicky buttery herb loveliness covered tagliatelle. 

 

The dishes are always generous at Carluccio's and we rarely make it to desert, which features such classics as Tiramisu (did you know that the desert is a recent invention ? The town of Treviso in Veneto is most frequently cited as the birthplace, specifically at a restaurant called Le Beccherie, where a chef named Roberto Linguanotto and his apprentice Francesca Valori (whose maiden name was Tiramisu) are said to have invented the dish around 1969), Affogato, Cannoli, Polenta Cake, Nutella Calzone and, er.. Chocolate Bread and Butter Pudding. Or, of course, there’s Gelato.

 

But by this point, a cocktail and half of bottle of wine to the good, great service, a convivial catch up after A's business trip and with all thoughts of the intended shopping raid on Broad Street having long disappeared, we walked home through the Abbey ruins and reflected that enough of the legacy of Antonio Carluccio lives on to  keep this on our go to list – provided we didn’t have any urgent shopping to do.