Vittles Reviews: What's the Point of Spanish Food in London?
The Tollington's movida, by Hester van Hensbergen
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Before we start, we’re delighted to announce the two successful candidates for the Vittles Mentorship programme which we announced earlier this year.
Since October, Vittles editors have been working with Emefa Ansah and Saira Banu who we felt had the sort of ideas, voice and humour that sets the best writers apart. We are also very grateful to all of the 160 people who applied and look forward to developing the programme to bring in more writers in the future.
Here’s a little more from each of the mentees, in their own words!
My name is Emefa, and I’m a proud south east Londoner. I’m a second generation Ghanaian with a deep love of food, especially those cuisines which place a big emphasis on large mounds of rice. More really is more for me! I’m excited to start this mentorship and for the opportunity to learn the skills I need to share the important stories of the amazing restaurants and people in the communities that made me. Watch this space.
Hi everyone, I’m Saira! I’m Indian, raised in the Middle East and have lived in Edinburgh and London for the past seven years. Despite being surrounded by varying vibrant flavors growing up, I paid very little attention to what I ate or where I ate it. A love for food was a muscle that was exercised only after I moved. Arguably, this paved way for a lot of intentionality in the way I approached my meals. Through this mentorship, it is this intentionality I hope to further in the way I think of restaurants, the people in them, and the parts we all play.
You will be hearing more from both Emefa and Saira soon!
Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, normally written by Jonathan Nunn, who is away this week. You can read all the previous reviews here. Today’s piece is by Hester van Hensbergen, our resident Spanish food aficionada.
Vittles Reviews: The Tollington’s Movida
What's the real point of Spanish food in London? By Hester van Hensbergen
If you want Spanish food in London – anything on the broad spectrum of edible to genuinely enjoyable – there are only a handful of places you are going to go. You are heading for Soho or Mayfair to somewhere associated with an absentee executive chef with a couple of Michelin stars in Spain; to a branch of Barrafina; or to a place owned by José Pizarro. There’ll be seafood paella, the curling tendrils of an octopus, between one and three novel flavours of alioli, and a quadrant of croquetas pasted to a plate.
It can sometimes feel like London has just one Spanish restaurant. For much of the 20th century, that was literally true: it was called Martinez Spanish Restaurant (1923-1988), it occupied a suite of theatrically decorated rooms – each with its own regional character, from Old Castille to Seville – at 25 Swallow Street in Piccadilly and served, according to early reports, “good French cookery, but Spanish food also”. The place was a favourite of Spanish royalty who, like the British aristocracy, generally preferred to dine French. Even though the status of Spanish cuisine has been transformed radically since then, from something generally maligned to a near-unrivalled supremacy in global gastronomy, in London it can still sometimes feel like not all that much has changed. The regional specificity has certainly multiplied. The technical quality has improved. But this is still about restaurants as replicas: faithful copies of high-end Basque charcoal grills and Segovian asadors. Like eating inside a postcard.
A good restaurant should be its own imaginary world: not a window to Spain, but to another country altogether.
Enter Tollington’s Fish Bar, the Finsbury Park restaurant that Ed McIlroy of Four Legs, who also owns and runs The Plimsoll nearby, opened in June, itself an evolution of a wildly successful residency at the Compton Arms in Islington – both became nearly universally adored for making a good Dexter beef cheeseburger. From outside, the new bar appears as a flickering mirage: in one moment, it’s an Islington chippy, snug under a green awning, with freshly polished steel glinting through the window; in another, there’s a warm yellow glow that appears to be emanating from somewhere south of the Bay of Biscay, refracting through tumblers of garnet liquid and jumbles of hands, elbows and legs.