Nou Bar del Poble, Peratellada

There's a part of me knows, deep down inside, that it probably is possible, if you try really, really, really hard, to have a bad meal in Spain. Burger King exist there, for a start, and although they sell alcohol as a concession to their European location I somewhat doubt they also do an arròs negre special or platter of Iberico ham to keep local sensibilities happy. And I'm sure if you went to the nearest Tex Mex off the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona or ordered fish and chips from Mike's Bar in Torremolinos it's possible you won't be served anything worth writing home about but then if you were the kind of person who wanted to eat burritos in Barcelona or fish and chips in Andalusia then perhaps that wouldn't bother you too much.

But after a recent two-week trip to Catalonia where we didn't have one single meal less than very good, and most were in fact much better than that, I came away with the impression that this is a part of the world where eating well is as vital a part of normal everyday life as electricity or hot and cold running water, and that good food is something approaching a natural human right. In the first few days we would do our research, revisit reliable old haunts and Michelin-showered sure things, and it was all lovely. But after a while we realised that we could basically plonk ourselves down anywhere, order whatever seafood they had available with a few rounds of anchovy toast, and come away deliriously happy. Oh and having spent a pittance, too - that's another thing about Spain.

Some lunch spots though were just that little bit extra special. Peratellada is a quaint fortified medieval village rising out of the paddy fields between the coast and the Girona hills, although calling it 'quaint' is understating the reality somewhat. It's a quite extraordinarily beautiful little town, with dark narrow passageways winding between cloistered town squares and 12th century town walls, the streets sometimes cobbled and sometimes hewn directly of giant masses of bedrock (Peratellada means 'carved stone'), with deep gutters cut by hundreds of years' worth of cart wheels. In the centre of town is the Castell de Peratallada, a giant late-medieval structure once the home of the same family for a few hundred years and currently going through a state of transition and closed to the public. And in front of the castle, in the corner of a pleasant open square, is a tourist information office with a few tables and chairs outside.

Hardly a likely spot for one of the best lunches of the holiday, I know - but the first clue we were onto something good was that dotted amongst the usual family-friendly offerings of nachos and burgers appeared to be some rather well-selected seafood. First to arrive was a giant plate of clams, drowning in oil and garlic and parsley, which had that fantastic bouncy chew of the best fresh bivalves and a wonderful clean, meaty flavour.

Razor clams were also top-notch, dressed in much the same way and presented just as simply and honestly. They arrived alongside pa amb tomàquet - delicate thin coca bread with just enough squishy summer tomato to let them keep their crisp and shape, and a bowl of patatas bravas, lovely crunchy little bites of fried potato draped in aioli. It was all far, far better than it needed to be for a little honeytrap bar operating out of a tourist information office.

But if the clams and tapas had been great, these Palamós prawns were life-changing. I have gone on at length on this blog previously how these giant red prawns are some of the best protein of any kind it's possible to eat, and that they are a must-order if you ever see them on a menu. You do occasionally come across similar species in London at high-end places like Barrafina, where they're called Carabineros and are still lovely, except of course in the UK they cost about £16 each. This plate of six plump, salty, expertly grilled beasties that were probably flapping around happily in the Mediterranean sea a few hours previously, were a ludicrous €18 - the kind of seafood mega-bargain that only seems to happen in this part of the world.

There were still concessions to the tourist-friendly stuff that keeps the rest of the family happy - burgers were decent (I tried a bit of the wagyu one) and a bowl of cheesy nachos had, well, plenty of cheese, and none of it was unreasonably priced, but the real story here was the seafood - incredible, fresh, cheap, expertly cooked seafood, for what in the end came to about €20 per person.

After lunch we stopped by another local favourite - Gelat Artesà de Peratallada, an interesting little independent ice cream shop specialising in, shall we say, rather unusual flavours. Alongside classics like strawberry, mint chocolate chip and coffee you can try Roquefort, or gazpacho, or even l'Escala anchovy - certainly not the kind of varieties you can drag out of the freezer at your local corner shop. Not brave enough to try the anchovy I had a bit of olive oil, which was rather lovely, so maybe next time I should go full seafood. Certainly after the stilton ice cream at 8 I'm convinced that savoury/sweet ice creams are the way forward.

Behind the ice cream cabinet at the back of the shop at Gelat Artesà was a new gin bar, where not only do they serve their own gin - Outer Gin (flavoured with various local fruits and herbs) - but will incorporate it into a quite elaborate gin and tonic where the aromatics and dried fruits are painstakingly tweezered in to a giant copa glass. This too, alongside the ice cream experience, comes very highly recommended.

As I have said, we didn't have a bad meal in Spain and I could have picked any number of astonishingly good value lunches to write about today. I picked Bar del Poble partly because of Those Prawns but also because what it represents - namely, that there are still places only a short flight away, in some of the most beautiful and tourist-trodden parts of the country, where you can eat well for very little money, a fact worth stressing to anyone from London or the US (who made up our group that day) for whom eating out for around £20 a head seems like something that last happened in about 2004. Nou Bar del Poble is not unique, but it is special. And that's worth celebrating.

9/10

The Opera Tavern, Covent Garden

There are a few restaurants - increasingly few - that despite at least one very pleasant meals at, I've for whatever reason never got around to writing up. My 40th birthday last November was an excuse to plug a few of the more glaring gaps (many thanks the Guinea Grill and Chez Bruce for countless good times), but to anywhere else I love that still remains unblogged I can only apologise and say that I'll hope to get round to it eventually. Promise.

So consider this post a very long-delayed response to so many very brilliant meals over many years at the Opera Tavern. This Italian-Spanish bistro, part of the very commendable Salt Yard group, arrived in Covent Garden at a time when decent Covent Garden dining spots were pretty few and far between. It immediately made a name for itself by offering what soon became its signature dish, a mini Iberico pork and foie gras burger, a revelation at a time when the Meatwagon's #meateasy popup in New Cross had only just got going, and Londoners had only just started discovering the joys of rare meat in a bun.

Weirdly - and slightly disappointingly - that Iberico burger appears to no longer feature on the Opera Tavern menu, at least not at time of press, but then perhaps that's for the best. These things are generally better in our memories than revisited, and there's every chance it would pale in comparison today to offerings from Bleecker burger or Zephyr in Peckham. Or maybe not. I suppose we'll never know.

What I do know is that there's still more than enough reasons to visit the Opera Tavern, burger or no burger, beginning with their excellent - I mean seriously excellent - jamon & manchego croquetas. These beautiful little mouthfuls of gooey bechamel spiked with top Iberico ham, glued into place with silky-smooth aioli, are alongside José Pizarro's, pretty much the best in town, and a must-order even if popping in briefly for no more else than a glass of cold sherry. Opera Tavern is competing in this year's "Croqueta challenge" taking place at sister restaurant Ember Yard, and on the basis of this, they stand a good chance of coming back with a (croqueta-shaped) trophy.

Padrón peppers, I realise aren't the most demanding dish a tapas restaurant could produce (even I've never managed to balls them up, and I once tried frying potatoes in a ceramic tray on the hob; it didn't end well), but are I think an essential part of any Spanish meal nonetheless. These were, as expected, all salty and crunchy in the right places but also contained a surprising number of quite spicy ones. Someone once told me that the percentage of hot padróns in any given batch is depending on the time of year - more in the summer, fewer in the winter; I'm not sure how true that is but I'm going to believe it until someone gives me a better explanation.

If I missed the nostalgic hit of the Iberico pork burger, this plate of smoky chargrilled chorizo took me right back to my first few months as a food blogger all the way back in 2007, waiting shivering in the line at Borough Market for a Brindisa chorizo roll. Here it came on a bed of chunky hummus, topped with sundried tomatoes and paprika-spiked chickpeas, and was as comforting and addictive as ever. Tapas - and Spanish food generally, outside of the most falutin' of 3* gastro-temples - is often defined by being stripped-back and simple, but there was actually quite a bit going on in this dish. It still worked, though.

Patatas bravas, invitingly golden brown but not over-crisp, arrived dusted with paprika salt and with a little pot of romesco (I think, or tomato - sorry I wasn't really paying attention I was too busy wolfing them down) sauce to dip them in. As an aside, this was a vegan dish, and like all the best vegan dishes (in fact the only good vegan dishes), it just happened to be vegan to begin with rather than being a bastardised version of something else with the dairy taken out.

Next, a wonderfully colourful tomato salad, involving huge sliced bull tomatoes, smaller cherry tomatoes, a lot of salt and good olive oil, and little sprigs of micro basil. I don't blame British restaurants for using home-grown tomatoes, or the best of the Isle of Wight which I often see mentioned on menus, but the simple truth is tomatoes grow best where there's lots of sun and very little rain, and the best tomatoes are Italian, or Spanish, and I'm going to make the most of them before Brexit kicks in and they cost £10 each.

Last of the small plates were these very deftly-fried courgette flowers stuffed with Monte Enebro goats cheese and drizzled in honey. Another Spanish classic, done brilliantly, perfectly balanced vegetal bitterness with sweet honey and rich dairy, satisfying in every way. They'd be a must-order, too, if there weren't so many other must-orders.

But speaking of must-orders, we had been invited here on this occasion for a reason. The "Sharing plate of Iberico pork" is 300g of the very finest black-leg pig, roasted to such a gasp-inducing softness of texture the only way I can describe it is that it's like the slow-roast duck they do at very top Chinese restaurants like Park Chinois, where the little slices of meat just seem to dissolve on the tongue. It came with little blobs of pepper sauce, and a kind of chutney, but really this was all about the stunning main ingredient - £30 for what is surely, by some distance, the finest pork dish in London. And if you don't agree, you haven't had it yet, simple as that.

So after all these years, the Opera Tavern - stately, seasoned, sensational - is still, in 2019, the pride of Covent Garden. Sorry - to them, mainly - that it's taken me so long to put my thoughts down but better late than never, and anyway I'm convinced that their food will have found even more fans in the next decade than the last, with or without the odd gushing blog post. A confident, mature operation that barely puts a foot wrong from the menu to the service to the polished surroundings, it is as close as this part of town gets to a Sure Thing - a crowdpleaser, reliably great at what they do. And there's hardly any greater compliment than that.

9/10

The above meal, and the incredible pork platter, were comped, but I have paid for dinner at the OT about 10-15 times over the last decade, and will do many years into the future.

Brindisa, Battersea

Ever since my first taste of their Iberico croquettas back in two thousand and *mumble mumble*, I've always had a soft spot for Brindisa. In fact, originally (before José Pizarro's restaurnats stole their crown), it was more than a soft spot - I was completely in love with the Borough Market location, as indeed was most of London; on market days a table there was like gold dust. With a winning combination of friendly service, robustly flavoured (and authentic) Spanish food and that all-important buzzy atmosphere of a restaurant in demand, it was impossible not to enjoy your time here, whether it was 15 minutes for a sherry and plate of hand-carved ham, or a long, boozy trawl through the tapas menu stretching way into the afternoon.

Since then, Brindisas have spread out across London like Spanish flu. Interestingly, some of the sites flirted briefly with regional specialisation such as Shoreditch's Tramontana (Catalan, serving fideuà and calçots) and I believe another was more Basque focussed though don't ask me which one; but these days they're all just Brindisa, serving an interesting and fiercely authentic menu of classic tapas. The latest branch is in Battersea, in the Power Station development and right next to the also-well-worth-a-visit Wright Bros seafood bar. Until the Northern Line extension is finished in God knows when, it's a bit of a bugger to get to, being 15 minutes walk from the nearest station (Battersea Park) and 25 minutes walk to the nearest Tube (Vauxhall), so I can very much recommend taking the Thames Clipper which from Embankment costs £5.50 and affords some fantastic photo opportunities.

Eating with a pescatarian friend is an interesting experience in a Spanish restaurant. Mostly it's fine - with all the ways you can eat cheese, anchovies, prawns and tuna, not to mention whole roast fish and seafood paella, there's more than enough choice if red meat isn't your thing. This bar snack of anchovy 'toast' with black olive tapenade is a perfect example of the Spanish way with seafood - salty and powerfully seafoody, with some great texture contrasts, it's something you'd happily order even if you were a committed carnivore.

Dried tuna is the closest thing to pescatarian ham, and Brindisa do a fantastic version of it under a frisée lettuce, orange and pomegranete salad. Colourful and perfectly seasoned, it's another thing that's dashed to the top end of my favourite Brindisa dishes.

Another one of my favourite things to eat in a tapas bar isn't just pescatarian, or even vegetarian. Ciabatta rubbed with good Spanish tomatoes, garlic and olive oil is one of a tiny number of completely vegan dishes that doesn't miss a dairy element at all, and is usually - as it was here - the highlight of a tapas spread.

I liked the idea of serving half a Torta de Cañarejal cheese, upended and warmed through like a mini fondue bucket, with breadsticks to dip. Unfortunately getting any greasy cheese to stick to the smooth breadsticks proved impossible, so we resorted to scooping out lumps of torta with a spoon and then sticking a mini breadstick in them, a tribute to Alan Partridge's savoury 99. Still, this worked well, and it was an excellent cheese. A sheep's milk, incidentally, from Castilla y León.

Although I was quite happy to lean towards the fish and seafood options, there are a couple of things on any tapas menu that, if available, I am literally incapable of leaving without ordering. One, of course, is a plate of Iberico Bellota ham, surely if not one of the world's finest foodstuffs of any kind then the world's actual finest foodstuff of any kind. Carved into neat squares, each containing just the right amount of fat-flesh ratio, this was some good ham work, although I'm guessing due to this odd location being largely deserted during daylight hours, the first few slivers were slightly - only slightly - on the dry side.

The second is a dish made famous by José, Secreto Iberico, a steak from those same acorn-fed pigs, seared rare and here served with a romseco sauce. Though the flavour was wonderful, as it always is, this arrived rather cold and could have done with a far more aggressive char to give it a bit of colour and texture. I'm not sure if Brindisa Battersea have access to a charcoal pit - I'm guessing they don't - and while this doesn't really affect the serving cheese and ham, for the roast meats you really miss it. The version at José in Bermondsey remains the ultimate.

Next, a lesson in Spanish restaurant authenticity. On the menu, this soup was described as "Sopa de Ajo al Punto Picante" and while some more knowledgable diners may know what usually constitutes a bowl of "Sopa de Ajo al Punto Picante" in mainland Europe, I don't think it was unreasonable of my pescatarian friend to rely on the description underneath, "Traditional spicy garlic soup & egg", and assume she could eat it. It arrived, she tasted it, and called over the waitress.

"Excuse me, does this soup have meat in it?"

"Oh, just a tiny bit of ham."

...which is all very charming and Spanish, but faintly irresponsible for a modern restaurant in London. Anyway, I ended up finishing it off alongside my own ham and Secreto, and though it was admittedly lovely - deep and complex with a gently poached egg swirling about in it for extra richness - it was a dish too far for comfort.

To fill the gap left by the soup, my friend ordered a couple of scoops of ice cream for dessert, which were decent if a little miniscule. But no real harm done, I suppose.

Despite the odd slip-up, though, Brindisa, even after all these years and with the choice of Spanish restaurants in London that much more wide-ranging than when they first started doing their thing, is still a reliably excellent place to eat. With a bone dry manzanilla and a glass of rioja, and cossetted by superb service, the evening was just as enjoyable in its own way as when I made the trip also by Clipper to Wright Bros a few months earlier. Clearly, the brains behind the Battersea Power Station complex know a good restaurant when they see one, and this latest incarnation deserves to to just as well as all the rest. I'll almost certainly be back myself.

7/10

I was invited to Brindisa and didn't see a bill. I'm guessing the damage would have been about £50/head.

El Asador at Sabor, Regent St

If you have even the most passing interest in great Spanish food in London, chances are you've heard of Barrafina. Across three locations in Central London, these gleaming, marble-decked temples of Iberian gastronomy have, along with Jose Pizarro's emponymous gaff in Bermondsey, set a new level for the cuisine in the city, and done more for the image of high-end Spanish food than almost anyone else I can think of. It's a bit too easy to enjoy yourself in Barrafina - once the sherry starts flowing and you've picked your favourite crustaceans from the cold bar, you settle in for the long haul, ordering and snacking and slurping and ordering again, until you've racked up a bill so big you're not sure if the extra zeroes are from that extra bottle of La Gitana or alcohol-induced double-vision.

While Barrafina was earning its Michelin stars and countless other gushing reviews (not least from yours truly) its head chef was one Nieves Barragan, who with front of house José Etura were to be seen most days in at least one of their restaurants. It was an usually subtle double-act - kitchen dynamics dictated they necessarily had to spend most of the evenings communicating via the occasional barked question across a noisy dining room - but it worked, and the warmth and energy they brought to proceedings was no doubt a huge part of the Barrafina success story.

But now, it's time for the next chapter. Barragan and Etura have left the Hart Bros' empire to set up Sabor, in a brightly lit spot down a slightly dingy alleyway off Regent St, and at first glance the influences and tributes are obvious. There's the large open kitchen full of busy, smartly-dressed chefs. There's the handwritten chalkboard menus of interesting daily seafood. And there of course is a pile of crushed ice covered in a heaving spread of fresh fish, crabs, carabinero prawns, razor clams and all the other delicacies from British shores that until Rick Stein intervened, used to be packed onto the backs of lorries and sent to France and Spain.

Part of me had hoped that the opening of a new place may allow Barragan and Etura to move away from the whole Barrafina communal seating model. Call me a spoiled old grump, but I do not like sharing my personal space with a complete stranger, and if there's anything going to stop me getting in the queue at Barrafina, or indeed any of the other top restaurants where that kind of seating is the main option (Kiln, the Barbary, Padella) it's that. Sadly, on both floors of Sabor (apologies, I wasn't paying too close attention but I think upstairs is called Asador and has a slightly different menu; I can't remember the website booking page asking me which I wanted, but I may have just not noticed) it's mainly large tables, and I'm afraid I could barely hide my horror when asked to squeeze in between two parties on high bench seating. Fortunately our waiter took pity on us and we eventually got away with being sat by the wall, but I'm sure a few tables of two wouldn't have hurt. Or, as I say, maybe I'm just a hopeless grump.

Anyway, negatives out of the way I can concentrate on the positives. The food, for example, which is as good as it's ever been from these guys. Red prawns, served simply and beautifully on a wooden board, had plump little bodies and heads packed full of that briney, bisquey seafood flavour.

It's incredibly difficult to get things like monkfish tempura right, at least I assume it is as so many versions of this ostensibly straightforward dish have been disappointing, but this was basically perfect. Greaseless, moist, with a good smooth mayo (not too thick or too thin), they were a great little fishy snack, and we polished them off quickly.

Pulpo a fiera is (thank you Google) a Galician dish, involving boiling the animal in a copper cauldron. The texture is quite unbelievable, so soft and silky that they're almost textureless, and I admit at first it took a bit of getting used to. of course, thanks to some lovely spicing - oil and paprika at least but possibly much else besides - there was plenty else to enjoy about them but I did slightly miss a bit of crunch from the tentacles. But then who am I to suggest an improvement to a Nieves Barragan dish?

Finally the famous tortilla, in the Basque style so runny inside with lots of soft sliced potato, every bit as impressive here as when I tried it all those years ago at Barrafina. It's also worth mentioning not only that Sabor make more effort than most Spanish restaurants with the vegetarian options, and that £7.50 for this very generously sized item means you could probably get away with ordering just this and perhaps a snack and sample some of the best Spanish food in London for under £15/head.

Our bill was slightly more than that. But with a bottle of wine we still got away with £36.22 a head, which really isn't bad at all considering the effort going into the menu here. And more than likely I'll be back, without a pescatarian friend next time, to try their whole Segovian suckling pigs to share (£190) or a txuletón or two (£85). For that, I'll need a group, maybe ten people or so. And come to think of it, in that case, I'll probably need one of those big tables so we can all tuck in at once. Oh that's what they're for...

8/10

Tapas Room, Broadway Market Tooting

I've never been short of reasons to visit Tooting; it is, after all, home of my beloved Apollo Banana Leaf, one of London's best (and best value) Sri Lankan restaurants; to Spice Village, the Tayyabs of the South, serving a fantastic menu of authentic Punjabi dishes; and a whole host of other interesting South Indian and Sri Lankan joints all up and down Tooting Road. It's a genuine food destination, and the fact it's only 20 minutes on the 219 bus from my house is, for someone otherwise stuck with the less-than-inspiring selection of restaurants on Lavender Hill (Mien Tay excepted), a real godsend.

But now, Tooting has "gone all Brixton" and the indoor Broadway Market (not to be confused with its namesake in Hackney, or indeed Tooting Market which is also something different) these days plays host to the kind of eclectic group of music stores, bottle shops and counter restaurants that will be very familiar to anyone who's ever wandered through Market Row SW9.

One of the newest arrivals in Broadway is the Tapas Room, a little side project from the Donostia Social Club gang and so already bearing quite a good pedigree. The menu is short - only 3 hot dishes, the rest of it mainly cheese and charcuterie - and simple; there's no leg of jamón ibérico de bellota being carved, for example (there's no room, for a start), and no fancy cuts of presa or secreta seared in a charcoal-fired Josper grill. It's closer, in fact, to the kind of stripped-back tapas bar you might find on the streets of Spain than the big-name flagship London-Spanish restaurants such as José or Barrafina.

And yet, in simplicity there is often great beauty. Pan con tomate is basically the Tapas Room in a single dish - bright and cheery, straightforwardly enjoyable but also clearly with a good knowledge of Spanish food having gone into it, it was the best I've tried since Barrafina, and as anyone who's ever tried that will tell you, that's a hell of a compliment. Everything was right about this - excellent quality tomatoes seasoned with big crystals of sea salt, a faint burn of garlic and - most importantly - lightly toasted ciabatta that's not too chewy. A pan con tomate masterclass.

Chicken liver parfait was also a fine example, with a good smooth, light texture and good rich flavour. It came with a pickled fig - presumably pickled in-house though don't quote me on that - which played the part of the chutney which would usually arrive with a chicken liver parfait.

If I was to criticise any aspect of this combined cheese and charcuterie platter - and I will, because that's why you're here - it would be to say that I do not like to see the cheeses touching each other on a board. Cheese is not like ice cream; you shouldn't be eating any more than one kind in one mouthful, and cross-contamination (especially with stronger cheeses) sullies the experience. That said, they were all good cheeses (Picos blue, a washed-rind manchego and a really lovely soft goats whose name I really should have made a note of), served at the correct temperature and so they just about got away with being stacked up like Jenga blocks. And the sausages were all great - a Catalonian fuet, an Iberico salsichon and Basque chorizo which all packed a huge flavour.

At the risk of repeating myself, both hot dishes were also, well, great. First white asparagus, gently charred on the grill and dressed in a romesco/pesto-style combo with a few toasted almonds on top, it was a perfect showcase for this seasonal delicacy.

And then, best-till-last, a giant slab of soft morcilla, toasted to crunchy on the edges but soft and fluffy inside, with a couple of fried quail's eggs on top like big cartoon eyes. Like everything that had come before, it was expertly constructed and confidently presented, unfussy but eminently enjoyable.

With so many fantastic Spanish restaurants in London at the moment, it's very easy, despite our best intentions, to get a bit blasé when yet another lovely little spot appears serving cheese and charcuterie and fried morcilla with quail's eggs. So it's important to never make the mistake of thinking running a place like this is easy - we just happen to have a huge number of very talented people here at the moment, who are serving some of the best Spanish food outside of Spain (and, let's face it, inside of Spain as well) for a price (under £20 a head for the food above) that only the most miserly would grumble at. Yes, there are fancier, more expensive and more elaborate places to eat Spanish food, but this is a cuisine defined by its sheer variety. Surely there's Tapas Room for everyone?

8/10

We were invited to Tapas Room and didn't pay.

Encant, Covent Garden

The last post on this blog was about Dickie Fitz, an Australasian bistro in Fitzrovia that managed to be both hugely entertaining and genuinely innovative, serving a style of Asian-Western fusion food that has rarely been seen in the capital before. I would have enjoyed my meal there even if I was already familiar with things like "short soup" and "baked eggplant with tofu and miso" but the quality of the cooking combined with the thrill of discovering something new made it all that much more memorable. There's nothing nicer than being surprised.

Actually there is one thing nicer than being surprised - being surprised again. I freely admit that when I booked Encant I wasn't expecting much more than another post-José tapas joint, plates of silky Iberico ham, sherry, blistered Padron peppers in a little terracotta bowl and perhaps some nice grilled meats. I'd heard good things on the grapevine, but this was after all still Covent Garden, an area of town where the unofficial motto for restaurants has traditionally been "if you can make a fortune being shit, why bother being good?". I chose it as a venue for a quiet family dinner, smug in the knowledge I knew exactly what was coming. Oh yeah, Spanish restaurants in London? I've got their number.

Of course, and by now you'll know where this is going, I was completely and utterly wrong about Encant. Things started familiarly enough in the form of a gazpacho soup, though even this stalwart was a top example, fresh pea shoots and crunchy radish livening a thick, umami-rich tomato base, gently toasted croutons providing more texture and a lick of oil. If it didn't taste so lovely I perhaps would have been a bit irritated by the wacky upended wineglass presentation, but as it is I'll let it slide.

"Galician Seaweed Salad" came rolled up like sushi, beautifully presented with evenly-rolled sliced avocado containing a good amount of crunchy seaweed. With vegetarian dishes like this - in fact in all dishes, but particularly vegetarian ones - the difference between success and failure is little more than proper seasoning; this dish was expertly put together and full of flavour.

Encant's croquettas involved aubergine and goat's cheese, and I was worried would be a bit slimy. But the aubergine was more of a taste than a texture, thankfully, and the cheese bound it all together and seasoned it beautifully.

Galician beef fillet (if you ever see Galician beef on a menu, order it) came with pickled mushrooms, roast hazelnut and a light truffley dressing and was also lovely. The menu described the meat itself as "cured" though I didn't detect much of that, just the smooth, soft flavour of good raw cow.

I don't envy whoever's job it was to painstakingly bone and "lollipop" these quail but I was very happy to enjoy the fruits of their labours, wrapped in Iberica pancetta and dipped in a treacly reduced Pedro Ximinez sauce.

I used to be dead set against fried oysters, thinking it was a waste to ruin the delicate flavour of these special beasties inside a thick batter. However, I've since realised there's nothing "delicate" about the flavour of oyster at all, and if anything the deep frying enhances the seafood tang and turns the experience of eating them into something else entirely. Sherry and wild almonds were a very clever foil to the shellfish, and a little blob of caviar finished them off perfectly.

Crispy prawns were probably my least favourite of the Encant dishes, partly because they were a bit bland and oily, and partly because even if they hadn't have been, and had been seasoned and fried a bit better, I still wasn't sure how something looking like it had been lifted from the freezers at Iceland should fit onto a Modern Spanish menu. Still, it was at least a talking point.

We ended on a high, though. "Poached duck egg" was a heavenly mixture of smooth-as-silk mashed potato, truffle and just-so egg, the runny yolk combining with the buttery potato and soaking into the grilled bread underneath. It didn't look like much - even my new camera struggled to define any distinguishing features - but I loved every bit of it, right down to the last velvety drop.

One final trick Encant has up its sleeve is that for all this food and a glass of wine per person the bill came to £120, which I know is a bit much to be described as 'modest' but is incredibly good value considering the Herculean effort that went into some of the dishes. Oh, and that total also includes £11 of lamb chops that I forgot to take a photo of and didn't get to eat; I didn't hear any complaints though.

It's heartening that in 2016, with pressure from investors to find a bandwagon and get on it, to laminate your menu and look for a second site, there is still room - and a market (the place was rammed, though it is only tiny) - for a wilfully offbeat experiment like Encant, beating to the rhythm of their own drums and to hell with what anyone else is doing. That it's sat slap-bang in Covent Garden and not in some converted bag shop in Haggerston is all the more impressive, and the fact it's just over the road from the very antithesis of independence and hospitality, the dreadful novelty office party venue Fire and Stone, is the icing on the cake. If you've been searching for some good news recently, and I don't blame you if you have, look no further than the happy, contented customers of 16 Maiden Lane. Where there's Iberico ham and croquettas, there's hope.

8/10

Encant may well be in the next version of the app. See what else is in Covent Garden, and elsewhere, here.



This article was edited on 19/12/16 to reflect the fact that Duende has changed its name to Encant.