FOOD Spanish restaurants
ABOVE Moro is renowned for its award-winning Moorish cuisine, serving lunch and dinner, with tapas available all day. LEFT Brindisa has several restaurants, bars and shops across London importing Spanish delights from producers across the country. BELOW Igg’s Spanish restaurant was established in Edinburgh in 1989 and has several times been given an AA Rosette award. OPPOSITE Lola Rojo was considered London’s Best Spanish Restaurant by Time Out.
Eating out,
Spanish style
You no longer need to make the journey to Spain to sample authentic, high quality Spanish cuisine. Christopher Nye visits some of the best Spanish restaurants across the UK, which have won praise from some pretty tough critics, including Gordon Ramsay.
ou know Spanish food has become mainstream here when you can buy ASDA own-brand aceitunas rellenas de anchoa (olives stuffed with anchovy) for 84p a jar. Of course, you could always buy paella and chorizo in the UK, or a version of them, but recently the choice and authenticity of Spanish food available has expanded both in restaurants and at the deli counter. Largely in response to customer demand, our interest in Spanish food piqued on those cheap-flight weekends to far-flung Spanish cities. Another influence has been El Bulli in Roses, the Catalonian restaurant often quoted as the best in the world. Despite the near impossibility of getting a table there, the message is out that Spain leads the world in innovative gastronomy. Meanwhile back at home, tapas are the perfect antidote to the pub smoking ban, satisfying cravings and helping a glass of vino down in the newly pleasant, smokeless atmosphere. So, exciting tapas bars and restaurants have been popping up all over the country, and chain restaurants are getting in on the act too, with La Tasca now owning 60 stores countrywide. Of the independents, winner of Time Out’s Best Spanish Restaurant in London was Lola Rojo, in Battersea. It is owned by Antonio and Cristina Belles, who look after kitchen and front of house respectively. Cristina originally wanted to open an English tea shop in her home town of Barcelona, but when she met Antonio, fresh from working at El Bulli, he persuaded her that Britain was the place to open. Five years on and his light, adventurous take on tapas has won many fans, including Gordon Ramsay. Antonio’s influences roam freely across Spain: suckling pig with vanilla apple puree from Mallorca; lentils with chistorra (a Basque-style sausage) from Pamplona; sardines wrapped in Serrano ham from the south. It is when you break the perfectly poached egg yolk hidden away in the octopus croquettes, that you know you are dealing with a seriously superior product. While restaurants like El Bulli and Lola Rojo are linked with the sophistication of Catalonia and the north, at Moro, also in London, chef/ owners Sam and Sam Clark have been cooking the recipes they learnt when taking a long, slow campervan trip through Andalucía and Morocco
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FOOD Spanish restaurants PHOTO: jo-h at flickr.com, CC-BY
The F Word experience You’re quietly minding your own business, preparing for lunchtime service in your little Spanish restaurant in Yorkshire, when Gordon Ramsay appears in the kitchen. “It was a massive, massive shock,” says Matt Healy, second chef at El Gato Negro in Ripponden, “to see someone of Gordon Ramsay’s stature stood in our little kitchen in the middle of nowhere. It was amazing.” Cooking’s sweary superstar had traveled north having been tipped off by viewers of The F Word that a bunch of Yorkshiremen were cooking up incredible Spanish flavours. And he wasn’t disappointed. “Amazing tapas, great flavours, great balance, quite traditional, and not one Spaniard in sight – that needs to be celebrated,” said Gordon. But were they the best in Britain? To decide, Gordon invited the team to a cook-off at The F Word restaurant, against Lola Rojo, from Battersea in London. Lola Rojo with its Spanish staff and imported ingredients, went for an adventurous starter of prawns in batter served with a pipette of chive mayonnaise, against El Gato Negro’s prawns and chorizo starter. Gordon preferred the former but the voting public chose El Gato Negro. For the main course however, Yorkshire lost to London when their seabass in potato soup with raisins cooked in vinegar impressed fewer diners than Lola Rojo’s ‘suquet’, a traditional fish stew from the Costa Brava. Again, Gordon chose the suquet. The final result was decided with both teams cooking an F Word recipe for chocolate con churros, the long thin strips of deep-fried donut served with deliciously thick, dark, gloopy chocolate sauce. El Gato Negro won, when the Spanish
15 years ago. It is one of Nigel Slater’s favourite restaurants and won The Observer’s Best Restaurant Award in 2009 with Moorish flavours that, Slater observes, remind you of “orange blossom-filled courtyards, almonds, capers, garlic, saffron, rosewater, mint and yoghurt”. But you don’t need to stay in London to get the fulsome flavours of Spain in the UK. The Yorkshire village of Ripponden is lucky enough to have Simon Shaw as a resident. The former executive chef at Harvey Nicholls was so impressed during a ‘Taste of Spain’ promotion at the store that he started making endless weekend trips to Barcelona (35 in all), Cadiz, Madrid and San Sebastián. “I was blown away by the produce they use, and the amazing markets, but most of all, the passion with which they cook,” he says. His most popular dish is Syrian lentils. “It’s very simple, with onions and cumin and lentils, cooked in the spicy water from the ‘bravas’ and finished with coriander, diced vegetables and lemon juice. People love it”. In Edinburgh, Igg’s has become a national institution since its owner Ignacio Campos set it up 21 years ago, having originally arrived in Scotland from Teruel looking for a girl he’d met from Dundee. The restaurant divides into Igg’s, the fine dining version, and Barioja, serving tapas in a convivial and funky atmosphere next door. It’s popular both with the smart set from the Scottish parliament and the law courts nearby, and with tourists and students looking for fun. Pinchito, in London, serves the utterly divine churros with chocolate for breakfast. Maybe not quite the same as when sitting in a stylish café in the Puerta del Sol, watching the Madrileños go by, but lovely all the same. At Pinchito you can also take a paella masterclass from the Valencian head chef, learning where to source the best ingredients and finishing with a wonderful shared meal with plenty of sangria and fino. You can get those authentic paella ingredients – as well as whole Iberico ham legs, chorizos, boqerones, ‘mojama’ air-cured tuna, cheeses and much else – all over Britain now, thanks to Brindisa, which opened in Borough market in 1997. It was started by a young English woman, Monika Linton, who wanted to offer Londoners, and now the whole country, those flavours she had loved on long, hot, Spanish holidays. They now run several restaurants too. The name Brindisa comes from ‘brindis’, the Spanish word meaning to raise a toast. But in Britain we can all raise a glass to the suppliers, café owners and restaurateurs who are bringing us the sunshine flavours of Spain.
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team undercooked the batter slightly – though Cristina Belles was quick to defend her Spanish husband Antonio’s cooking, pointing out that this isn’t a proper pudding anyway in Spain, but a breakfast snack. Either way, for both restaurants the increase in trade as a result of the TV show has been astonishing, with both regularly being fully booked. “People come all the way down from Newcastle and Manchester to El Gato Negro now,” says co-owner Simon Shaw, while Lola Rojo is now the undisputed star of south London gastronomy. But don’t take our word for it.
LEFT Main chef Ignacio Campos at Igg’s selects only the finest ingredients. BELOW Pinchitos in London offers great tapas in an informal setting. OPPOSITE One of Brindisa’s London restaurants.
Q Contacts Lola Rojo Northcote Road,
El Gato Negro
Battersea and Wandsworth Bridge Road, Fulham www.lolarojo.net Brindisa Borough Market; Broadwick Street, Soho; and Exhibition Road, South Kensington www.brindisa.com
Ripponden, West Yorks www.elgatonegrotapas.co.uk Pinchito Featherstone Street and Bayley Street, London www.pinchito.co.uk Igg’s, Jeffery Street, Edinburgh www.iggs.co.uk
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