Lobos, London Bridge

It was while drooling over the fantastic menu at Lobos Tapas in Borough Market I realised that, just maybe, I am a massive hypocrite. If this had been an Italian restaurant, and a menu full of Italian staples such as beef carpaccio with parmesan and rocket, burrata with basil, wild boar pappardelle, etc and so on then I would be the first to criticise their lack of imagination and the identikit Italian Restaurant Clichés and condemn the whole operation as dull and derivative.

But because this is a Spanish restaurant, and because I like things like Padron Peppers, Pan Con Tomate, Iberico ham and Patatas Bravas and would be disappointed not to see them on a Spanish restaurant menu, instead of criticising Lobos' lack of imagination I will praise their drive for authenticity, and say how happy I am to see all my favourite Spanish dishes listed so comprehensively, and priced so well. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or are Spanish restaurant clichés just a whole lot more exciting than Italian restaurant clichés? Perhaps that's an argument for another time.

All that matters here and now is that Lobos, in this charming split-level space tucked beneath a railway arch in Borough Market, have since opening just 8 months ago firmly established themselves as one of the few genuine top-flight Spanish restaurants in London. Have another look at that menu - is there a single thing on it you don't want to eat? Does the idea of ham, chorizo and smoked bacon croquetas fill you with joy? Can you barely wait to get stuck into a tray of expertly hand-carved Iberico ham? Do the words "Iberico pork selection" make your heart all a-flutter? Well then, join the club.

Pan con tomate was the first to arrive, and was about a perfect a version as you could wish for. With just the right balance of tomato, oil and salt (lots of lesser tapas joints load the bread high with chopped tomato; that is not the point of this dish) spread on soft ciabatta, it was the kind of thing that reassured you that you were in safe hands. If you can get pan con tomate this right, the rest of the meal is a sure thing.

As indeed it was. You rarely see a better example of the ham carver's art than this - a neat grid of exquisitely thin morsels, each containing a nearly exact ratio of transluscent moist flesh and white fat. I held one up to the light so you can see how gloriously well it had been carved. And the beauty wasn't skin deep either - it had the deepest, richest nutty flavour of the very best Iberico ham.

Croquettas were smaller than I was expecting, and more numerous, but were otherwise still very enjoyable - little crunchy flavour bombs. If I'm being extra brutal I probably prefer the larger versions from the José Pizarro locations, whose fillings are a little more smooth and refined and casings that bit thinner and more delicate, but we still happily ate them all. How can you not enjoy deep-fried breaded parcels of ham and cheese? You can't, unless there's something very wrong with you.

Secreto Iberico (not that secreto any more but still a relative rarity) was impossible also not to love, chunks of tender pork glistening with fat and bursting with that incredible deep flavour. Accompanying it was a pile of house potato crisps doused in a powerful bright green garlic salsa which tingled addictively in the mouth. It's hard to explain to the unitiated just how much greater Iberico pork is than most if not all other types of pork. Mangalitza and Middlewhite and Old Spot all have their place and can be lovely, but proper Iberico ham from the Dehesas of Western Spain is just on another level entirely.

The only slight disappointment as far as I'm concerned was a green salad, which had quite a bitter dressing and had packed far too many layers of uninspiring and underseasoned raw courgette and lettuce into a small serving tray. In their defence, I will say that from many years of visiting Spain on holiday green salads are most definitely not this nation's speciality, and to that extent this was probably a fairly authentic Spanish green salad. Also my friend quite liked it so maybe it just wasn't for me.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Lobos, given that it's a tiny specialist restaurant in London in 2016, is that you can reserve a table. And what lovely tables, too - cute 2-seater booths done in red leather, served by enthusiastic staff (the owners are ex-Brindisa apparently) who know everything there is to know about Spanish food. True, you may have seen menus like this before if you've visited certain spots in Bermondsey and elsewhere, but who is ever going to get bored of this stuff when it's done so well?

Certainly not me. I will be going back to Lobos as many times as I can to work my way through the rest of the menu, because food like this and menus like this are to be heralded regardless of any notions of authenticity or how many other places in town are selling croquettas or padron peppers or any of the rest of it. Good food is good food, simple as. And the food at Lobos is very good indeed.

8/10

Lobos is very likely to be in the next version of the app. Meanwhile if you're in London Bridge area and Lobos is full, use my app to see where else is good. Oh and before you say anything yes, I have a new camera. Still getting to know it but it's still a step up on the iPhone I think you'll agree.

Barrafina, Covent Garden

It was on holiday in Japan a few years ago when I first heard about a strange phenomenon known as Paris Syndrome. To the Japanese, so the story goes, Paris is shorthand for everything attractive about European culture - beautiful buildings, wonderful food, museums, art galleries, shops and cafés, an idealised dreamworld concocted by vivid imaginations and (presumably helped somewhat by the French tourist board) Hollywood movies like Ratatouille or Midnight in Paris. Many Japanese are obsessed with Paris, and hold it as their life's ambition to travel there.

And then they do travel there, and the dissonance between the twinkling fin-de-siècle paradise they'd been led to expect and the reality of actual Paris (dog shit, graffiti, rude waiters, rude shopkeepers, French people generally) causes them to, not to put too fine a point on it, go mad. The Japanese embassy in Paris has a 24h help line for people suffering from this most extreme version of culture shock. It apparently affects a good dozen or so unfortunate people a year; I imagine them wandering bewildered around the piss-stained corridors of the Metro, clutching a Lonely Planet and sobbing.

I experienced a very similar reaction the last time I visited Barcelona. Once we'd negotiated the ludicrous parking arrangements (spaces just about big enough to accommodate a golf cart for €30 an hour), dodged the pickpockets on the Ramblas (a good 90% of the individuals there as far as I could tell), suffered half an hour in the "flagship" department store El Corte Inglés on Plaça de Catalunya (try and imagine a big branch of C&A, only not quite as glamorous or value for money) we collapsed into a restaurant near the Diagonal who charged twice as much for frozen calamari as the menu outside claimed, and didn't even do that without a great deal of huffing and puffing and long periods being deliberately ignored. Where were the friendly tapas joints, the fresh seafood, the classy cocktail bars? I diagnosed myself with Barcelona Syndrome.

There are certain cultures, then, that are much better at selling themselves outside their borders than living up to those expectations domestically. In most of France, for example, the food is just terrible - fridge-fresh patés served on square, glass plates; bland stews of mystery meats with wilted vegetables; desserts of supermarket flan. And in 25 years visiting Catalonia with the family I had perhaps two or three meals I would happily eat again. Most of the time, at best you'd get something scraped out of the freezer from a vast laminated menu; at worst raw chicken, shards of broken glass, fag ash, you name it we saw it.

But perhaps there is a cure for Paris/Barcelona Syndrome - London. The good thing about London's culinary reputation outside our borders is we don't really have one. Ask any Japanese or American what they're expecting from British cuisine and you'll hear words like "fish and chips" or "Shepherds pie" or "spotted dick", and if you set the bar that low anything from a Greene King pub menu to a 4am doner kebab is going to be a welcome surprise. But it's the very fact we don't have much of a food culture of our own (traditionally at least) that allows us the freedom to better re-interpret everyone else's; I doubt there are very few better US-style steakhouses in New York than Goodman, for example, or a better French bistro in Paris than the lovely (and friendly) Zédel in Piccadilly. And I'm willing to bet my right arm that there are no better Barcelona-style tapas bars in Barcelona than the extraordinary Barrafina, in Covent Garden.

Barrafina is apparently inspired by Cal Pep, and full disclosure here, I've never been to Cal Pep. But I have heard reports from various people who used the phrases "hype" and "doesn't live up to" in close proximity, and a quick look through the photos on their site doesn't exactly make me want to leap on the next flight to El Prat airport. But just look at the food from Adelaide St - these crab croquettas had a casing so delicate it split apart with the slightest prod from a fork, revealing a crab filling equally impressing with lightness and depth of flavour.

The carabinero are about the only single prawn you could spend the best part of £20 on and still be happy to pay more. The flesh is sweet and bouncy-white, easily prized from the soft, deep red shell. But the best thing about the carabinero isn't the tail meat but the juices hiding in the head, so intensely evocative of the ocean it's like drinking the finest seafood bisque. It seems almost impossible, in fact, that it hasn't been artifically enhanced with spices or stock but I am assured all they do is grill over charcoal then season with sea salt. Freakishly good.

Even the salads are world-beating. Heritage tomato and fragrant fennel came topped with avocado neither too mushy or too unripe. The tomatoes were stunning, and it's not often you can say that, but fennel is an absolutely perfect match, and the heady mix of fresh herbs (some mini sprigs of basil added another wonderful dimension) was helped on its way by top quality olive oil and a masterful command of seasoning. This was no such thing as "just" a tomato salad.

Gambetas (more prawns) were this time deep-fried (I think, or at least shallow fried) and - unsurprisingly - seasoned and dressed perfectly. With these particular species you can eat the shell on the tail, and so I did, enjoying the different textures and the soft, sweet taste of the sea.

It is true that you can rack up a bill of fairly frightening proportions at the Barrafinas, in fact at any Hart Bros place (they also run Quo Vadis) but that's not technically because anything they do is overpriced. It's simply a direct result of the fact that from the moment you sit down you have such a good time you never want to leave, and will try any trick in the book to prolong the happiness. Another glass of sherry? Another plate of jamon? How about another carabinero? Oh, go on then. In that jewel box of a room, served by knowledgable and obliging staff, the hours - and the wages - just drop away. But it's all worth it. Barrafina - the very finest cure for Barcelona Syndrome.

10/10

Rosita, Northcote Road

"You should write it up," my flatmate said, after I'd spent the whole evening moaning about how much better José would have been for the same price, "because it's a nice, normal restaurant that nice, normal people go to. Not everyone spends every waking hour scouring geeky food websites or travelling to Hendon to spend two hours queuing for a cheeseburger. Normal people eat at places like this."

There is always room for a middle ground, and of course not every Spanish restaurant has to be - or can be - as good as José. But is it my "job" (such as it is) to make excuses for somewhere I know is charging too much for food that might have been impressive ten years ago, or brutally point out a short list of alternatives in town where you'll have a better time? However much of a smug, spoiled, elitist twerp it makes me sound.

Anyway, if I was worried about coming across as a smug, spoiled, elitist twerp I would have given up on this food blog a long time ago, so here goes. Rosita is the sister restaurant to Lola Rojo, also on Northcote Road and where I'd had a very passable but - again - slightly overpriced and uninspiring meal a few years back and never really felt compelled to go back. The USP of Rosita is that is it is nothing so humdrum as a tapas bar - it is a "sherry bar", which as we all know is far more trendy these days and has the added benefit of not actually requiring you to do anything differently other than put the words "sherry bar" above the door.

Dressed crab was decent, and although padded out with egg and bread it was almost worth the £7.50. Didn't feel massively Spanish, though, just like the filling from a crab, egg and cress sandwich put in a shell. "Rositas" were more interesting, little bitesize rolls of toasted bread filled with, in this case, a well-seasoned tuna tartar and one with duck egg and sprouts; they were fun to eat, but still felt like wedding buffet canapés masquerading as tapas.

Grilled King Prawns did at least look authentically Spanish, but suffered from having been slightly undercooked and were a bit gloopy inside - this despite the legs on the poor things being so fiercely cremated they had mostly fallen off. I wonder if this is because of the use of a Josper grill, which may get a nice darkened crust on your medium-rare beef steak but is perhaps too difficult to control on tiny delicate bits of seafood.

The biggest knowing sigh of the evening was reserved for this plate of Iberico Jamon de Belotta, which bore about as much resemblance to the silky slivers of acorn-fed loveliness available at José as a packet of Frazzles. Tough and curly as dry wood shavings, they were an £11.50 waste of time. And "cod churros with green olives" were just bizarre - the chewy sticks of "churros" tasted of nothing more than batter, and the green olives came in the form of an inedibly salty foam that the churros were planted into. It didn't work. They were £6.50.

With a bottle of the cheapest Manzanilla, the bill came to around £73, so let's return to my original point. For a bill for two of that size in José, or Pizarro, or Tramontana, or Barrafina, or Fino, you would have left having eaten some of the best Spanish food outside of Madrid. The sherry would have been ice cold (Rosita's wasn't), the seafood of the highest quality and grilled to perfection, the Iberico ham expertly carved to translucently thin. If I didn't know any better, I may have not grumbled quite so much about how better I could have spent my money. But I'm afraid I do know better, and I'm not about to make excuses for a restaurant that while not a disaster, in 2013 is simply outshone. And if that makes me a snob, and I'm pretty sure it does, I'll live with that.

5/10

Copita, Soho

There was quite an interesting reaction to my post about the new Brindisa place Tramontana in Shoreditch. Let me repeat that I had a great time there - I thought the food was very accomplished, the staff friendly and I loved what they'd done with the room and open kitchen. But, it seems, not many other people did. You can read the comments from disappointed customers yourself on the post, but as well as those, no less than food & wine writer Fiona Beckett, whose tastes normally overlap mine fairly reliably, didn't think much of it.

I'm not sure which is stranger, though - that different people could have such different reactions to a meal in the same restaurant within the space of a week, or that, given our wildly differing fetishes and foibles, we ever have enough in common to recommend a restaurant at all. I mean think about this - some people don't even like Tayyabs. I know! Madness.

Following Tramontanagate then, and given the practical impossibility of finding an objectively good restaurant, it perhaps shouldn't have been too much of a surprise that much-loved and award-winning tapas bar Copita didn't excite me as I thought it was going to. But I was mainly disappointed not because I was expecting it to be brilliant, but because I really wanted it to be brilliant - another reliable ham-and-sherry outlet in the centre of London is always cause for celebration.

The first problem was with the Iberico ham, and given my hopeless addiction to the stuff I find it quite hard to forgive problems with Iberico ham. It was £15 for a fairly mean portion - close to the same amount that José sell for £9 - and was pretty badly carved, shredded and hacked into weird irregular bits and pieces, much of it dry and chewy. The flavour was still good, but the way it had been treated made me sad inside.

The rest was better, fortunately. Mussel croquettas weren't anywhere near as weird as they sound, in fact they were better than those at Tramontana, with a nice golden crust and creamy filling. Crispy cauliflower & piquillo sauce began enjoyably, delicately encrusted and seasoned well, but the sauce was underpowered and there wasn't enough of it, so very soon all you were eating was fried cauliflower and wishing you weren't. A lamb bun with harissa was very good though, my favourite overall, with tender chunks of slow-cooked lamb and a good kick from the harissa.

We got a cheese board too but as the waitress merely dumped them and ran off without explaining what they were, I can't tell you much about them other than I liked the gooey goat's and spongey blue, but the harder (mountain?) cheese was a bit bland. £11, mind.

With the cheapest bottle of sherry, itself a whacking £39, the total for two came to £88 and it's really in the value-for-money department that Copita loses most of its stars. The food was good, but not extraordinarily so, and I'm sure Soho rents have as much of an effect on the bill as the cost of ingredients which were generally of a high standard, but I couldn't help feeling that we didn't get a great deal for our £44 a head and had we been hungrier and thirstier the results could have been disastrous. Then again, perhaps you'll visit yourself, have a great time for a pittance and wonder what the hell I was moaning about. Such is the strange business of writing about restaurants.

6/10

Copita have been in touch to point out that their cheapest sherry is £15 for a half bottle, so a bit cheaper than the £39 full bottle we had.

Bar Pepito, Kings Cross

Spanish cuisine is one of the things that London seems to have been doing very well of late; I've never had anything less than a great meal in all of the Brindisa outposts, and places like Dehesa and Salt Yard are consistently excellent, so I was understandably frothing with anticipation at the prospect of visiting London's first, dedicated sherry bar. The idea appealed hugely, and seemed eminently sensible. Think of how many "fusion" restaurants are actually any good - when was the last time you went anywhere that did an excellent fish and chips AND an excellent Thai green curry? It just doesn't happen. The key to a good restaurant or bar is not to try and be all things to all people, but to focus on what you're good at, and do just that one thing VERY well. You won't find Tayyabs putting chicken korma on the menu because some people don't like spicy food - those people just won't go to Tayyabs. And quite right too.


I would have happily blown my own hard-earned cash on an evening supping chilled Tio Pepe and folding in slivers of freshly-carved Jamón ibérico, and in fact very often have, but I was lucky enough to be invited to Bar Pepito on the press night, and didn't pay for any of it. This report, then, comes with the usual caveats that apply to many of these press launches - they give you far more free booze than is good for you, the service is eager to impress, and the PR people are charming and informative. But I have a very strong suspicion that even without any of this, I still would have fallen in love with the place. First of all, it's a lovely little spot, tucked away in an old warehouse around the back of Kings Cross, with attractive bare brick walls and and a very authentic Iberian feel. Secondly, the quality of the tapas is absolutely top notch. Not only do they have a wonderful selection of Spanish cheeses (albeit sweating slightly in the heat of the room - an airconditioning unit will be required to get them through the summer months I think), but they also have a qualified "Master Carver", who last night was expertly carving a leg of genuine pata negra into a plateful of delicate wafer-thin morsels.


And last but not least, the sherries. Despite the owners being Gonzalez Byass they have a commendably liberal selection from other producers, neatly categorized into 'Manzanilla', 'Amontillado', 'Fino' and so on. The Tio Pepe Fino (£3.50 a glass) was as good as ever, but I also managed to try a glass of a sweeter 'Matusalem' (£5.50) which went very well with the cheeses. I'm a complete sherry novice, and I'll leave it to others far more knowledgeable and qualified than me to go into more detail on the drinks, but I thought they were both superb.


Sounds like the perfect bar, so far, doesn't it? And that's kind of the problem. It is. And in a part of town crying out for just this kind of post-work casual-but-different drop-in spot. And it's attractive, and reasonably priced (a plate of that lovingly-carved, top-quality Iberico is £15, a steal compared to some places), and friendly. But it's absolutely tiny. With barely a half dozen customers Bar Pepito would feel buzzy - in full flow on a Friday night I'd be very worried you wouldn't fit inside at all. But then again, the courtyard outside has tables and chairs, and soon summer will be here and happy customers will spill outside with chilled Fino and plates of ham and all will be well with the world. Until then, I strongly urge you to visit Bar Pepito before the secret's out and it's packed to the rafters every night. Because it will be. You mark my words.


I was invited to review Bar Pepito. Initially they will open Wednesday to Saturday from 5pm until midnight.