27-03-2025
William Sitwell reviews Goat on the Roof, Newbury: ‘I miss when restaurants like this were banks'
By the little 18th-century bridge over the River Kennet in Newbury, opposite Griffins the butchers, self-proclaimed 'home of the Newbury sausage', is Goat on the Roof. It's what goats do, I suppose, when they're not perching on the sides of cliffs, eating popcorn or trip-trapping about.
There's a grand arched entrance to what is an elegant townhouse building, with handsome curved windows on the ground floor, suggesting this was once a bank. It's a happy place of relaxed charm with 1950s department store decor of metal-trimmed tables and wooden chairs, and walls of a beigey yellow that slightly gives me the fear. There's a bar to sit at and a menu of what they call British tapas.
I popped in to check on the veracity of Michelin which recently awarded it a Bib Gourmand, its most useful of accolades, less ruinously spendy than a star and often more reliable, promising, as with this place, 'good quality, good value cooking'.
So you get dishes to share, which is what you get everywhere today. This of course gives you the chance to try lots of different things, but then you're left wondering how long it was since there were places where you could order something you wanted and it wasn't socially awkward to wish that other people's germy forks wouldn't get plunged into your fish. Back when restaurants like this were banks, I suppose.
First came some fabulous fresh bread with butter made from kitchen waste (what they call 'no waste'), not as terrible as it sounds, soft and yeasty; but I did hark after those days when it wasn't compulsory to be clever with butter (back when places like this were banks…).
And then a glorious dish of cheese custard, a gentle mound of cheesy softness with crunchy croutons scattered about and with some Old Winchester shavings and a throw of chopped chives. It's a great starter, a really cheering hug of a dish, one that, on a gloomy, rainy day, has the transformative power to drag anyone up from a miserable abyss.
Four standard croquettes arrived along with soft strips of squid and some very good roasted potatoes, although they came with dishes of mayo and spicy mascarpone in too wasteful a quantity. There was also cabbage, under a deluge of mayo, think spilt bucket of paint, somewhere under which was some decent, rich and nicely slippery green cabbage.
Dish of the day was a large, rustic layer of pork belly, with crackling shaped like thin chips on top and a green chilli salsa underneath. A dish of skate wing was great too, but lessened by an over-sharp and wet tartare sauce.
And then I got depressed by a plate of flageolets. They had too much bite and the dusting of herbs on top was too thick. It almost left me coughing, so a mouthful became less a sort of Parisian bistro dream and more an escape from a burning building.
I yearned for the chocolate mousse to make amends, but the two little cylinders were more pale and interesting than deeply rich and sexy. That they came bathed unnecessarily in olive oil only added to the sense of vagueness.
Some of these dishes, trying a tad too hard, shared the qualities of the mystery wine: guess the grape, region and country and you get it for free. It was an interesting white, but joyless and sugar-free; a trickle of insipid precipitation in a desert. Spanish, I thought, and better used for sherry. I got the country right and they kindly removed it from the bill and gave me a wonderfully blowsy white Burgundy.
Which is me all over: one long, simple quest for uncomplicated perfection.
