Cigala is hot. That's hot as in hot ticket, hot stuff, hot spot, not hot as in hot air, hot dog or hot money. And, to be hot, of course, it's cool - floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, white walls, wooden floor, hard surfaces, open kitchen, snazzy service, and already full to bursting and bubbling away within just a few weeks of opening - which makes it very hot indeed. That's what a couple of powerhouse reviews from influential critics and the buzz of word of mouth can do for you.
Mind you, it's not so surprising. Jake Hodges, chef/prop and moving spirit behind Cigala, had also been a moving spirit, along with Sam and Sam Clark, at that favourite Guardian executives' watering hole, Moro, when it opened for business around the corner a couple of years back. Conveniently, Cigala in Lamb's Conduit Street is not all that much further than Moro from the Farringdon Road headquarters, only in the opposite direction and towards the West End, so now the money-bags figures who throng the meeting rooms of power at the world's greatest newspaper needn't sit quite so cheek by jowl with their colleagues any more.
Not that Cigala is in any way, shape or form a clone of Moro. It has the same relaxed and confident air, sure, and it strikes the same note of youthful democracy. But, in spite of such generic similarities, it has very much a character and rhythm all of its own. Moro, of course, quite explicitly explores the connection between the cooking of Spain and North Africa through the sympathetic medium of the two Sams. Jake Hodges, on the other hand, seems to be sticking much more closely to the Spanish original - I am almost tempted to use that dread word, "authentic", here - albeit with all the Arab influences that that implies.
Take, for instance, the grilled langoustines with romesco sauce that Leonora Number 3 had as her main course. Langoustines are the closest we'll get to a real cigala among our native seafood, and these examples were appropriately sweet and juicy. The romesco sauce was made from red chilli, garlic, tomato, vinegar and ground almonds, which is a distinctively Arab touch - the almonds have the effect of adding a soft, grainy thickness to the pepper, thereby tempering the heat as well as broadening the fruitiness of the other ingredients. In order to make this assessment, I had to use my finger to scrape out the little bowl bearing the sauce. Leonora had put paid to the rest.
Her husband, Ludwig, meanwhile, was quietly working his way through grilled gilthead bream with braised sprouting broccoli and salsa churrasco, on which he lavished a great deal of praise with his customary eloquence: "Very good. This is really very good - very, very good."
He had said much the same about the gloriously rich glop of caldo Gallego that he polished off in good order as a first course. This was a soup of chorizo, butter beans and turnip tops, in which the beans had been cooked to the point of creamy disintegration. While this was indeed a glorious glop, you could still taste each of the principal ingredients, which gave it great variety when each mouthful slid down the hatch, and it was, indeed, "very good - very, very good."
My contribution, aside from ordering three glasses of very chirrupy manzanilla sherry and a bottle of Lanzaga - something of a maverick rioja, apparently, with remarkable heft, staying power, elegance and finesse - was a soup plate of clams with garlic, parsley and manzanilla, the kind of dish for which I am a complete sucker.
You can't get away from the fact that clams are a great deal of cheerfully mucky work to get to those little nuggets of rather fugitive flavour, and this dish was great fun to eat. It would have been even more so had the broth in which the clams sat been a touch less salty. My slight misgivings over the clam juices were swept aside by the pleasure of cured shoulder of pork with potatoes, turnips and spinach. If that sounds hearty, then, yes, it was - there was plenty of fat on the pig to ensure that it was tender and tasty right up to the end, but the curing had also given it a distinctive delicacy that brought a certain lightness to the dish as a whole. So that didn't last long.
I had been warned that the puddings at Cigala weren't quite on the same plane as the other courses, and my informant was right - they weren't, not by a long shot - and so it seems kinder to pass over them in silence. I am sure that they'll be sorting out the pudding department soon, because Cigala is too good and too professional an outfit not to do so sharpish, and when it does, it'll move up a point or so on the Fort ratings. In fact, by the time this review comes out, they will probably have done so already.
The bill was £140 on the nose, which is quite a lot, but not really Cigala's fault. The food side of things was a highly reasonable £60 for the three of us. The rest went on two bottles of the Lanzaga, sherries of various denominations and water - and not a single penny was wasted
