Not seeing the query, I can't say what's going on, but, on a guess, you're probably seeing some sort of bad parameter sniffing issue where the plan you generated after tuning is different than the one generated using the RECOMPILE option. The added time you're seeing is more than likely the time it takes to recompile. So... are you more likely to be IO bound or CPU bound? That's the trade-off you're presented with. RECOMPILE is creating a new plan, each time, possibly a better plan (as shown by the reads improvement), but it comes at the cost of additional CPU power, each and every time the query is called.

Which is better? It depends on your situation and the load on the system.