Tugga, 312-314 King's Road, London SW3 (020 7351 0101).
Meal for two, including wine, £85
I am often asked to name my favourite restaurant, which is like being asked to name my favourite limb. They each do different jobs, but I still love them all (apart from my feet - only a pervert could love my feet). Anyway, the point is made: I have many favourite restaurants, depending on the occasion. But there is one measure I can apply that would lead me to a definitive answer: the restaurant I use the most. That has to be the Gallery, a Portuguese piri-piri grill house (256A Brixton Hill, London SW2; 020 8671 8311). In the back there is a sweetly eccentric sit-down restaurant, into which you are buzzed by the staff, where they serve hefty dishes of salt cod with prawns and clams, or slabs of chargrilled meat.
I prefer to get takeaways. I love their chargrilled chicken with piri-piri sauce, their spare ribs, their butch chorizo. Some of that, a few chips, salad and bill of £18 for two and I am very happy indeed. I probably visit twice a month, and would do so more often if my wife would let me.
Unfortunately this is not a review of the Gallery. It is a review of a new 'contemporary Portuguese' restaurant, which I hated. The food is grim, the decor worse. Inside it looks like the interior designers threw up after a surfeit of summer fruits. Or, as my wife put it, as if it had been designed by a committee of seven-year-old girls screaming, 'Pink, pink, pink.' It is garish and unsettling. The music is loud. The lighting fades up and down. Most of the tables are occupied by swarthy men in their forties and women in strappy dresses 20 years their junior.
The menu is divided into petiscos - Portuguese tapas - starters and mains, and if this is what they are eating in Lisbon, though I doubt it is, I feel only pity. Among the starters is octopus risotto ProvenÀal. I didn't know Grasse was in Portugal. In the mains there's duck confit with Parmentier potatoes infused with black truffle, which screams Perigord. In short, a bit of salt cod aside, the big dishes are a bizarre pan-European hotpotch.
We went for the tapas, and apart from the Pata Negra ham - hand sliced and served correctly at room temperature - everything we ate was truly horrible. Tuna with black beans was a dull sandwich-filling mush. Chunks of octopus in an oily sauce were bland and listless.
A chicken pie was 80 per cent cold, soggy puff pastry, 20 per cent indeterminate animal. A plate of Portuguese cheeses was another reminder of why France always takes first prize in this competition, and a trio of brutal sausages, including chorizo and a black pudding, made me wish they were Spanish. Worst of all was a bowl of pickled pig's ear, which was all sludge and cartilage.
The usual response to criticism like this is that the food is authentic, and perhaps it is, but that's not the same as good. Remember, when the peasants first decided to pickle the pig's ear it wasn't in the spirit of gastronomic invention. It was by dint of poverty. Poverty has produced some good dishes, but this isn't one of them. The bill, including one glass of wine, was an outrageous £60. Half that and at least I wouldn't have felt stung as well as queasy. We gave up and went down the road to Ed's Easy Diner for pecan pie, and wished that we had visited the nicer bit of Portugal on Brixton Hill instead.
ports of call
Three eateries packed with Iberian flavour
Star Inn, The Street, Lidgate, Suffolk (01638 500275)
Recent winners of Abbott Ale's 'Perfect Pub' Award, the Star Inn manages to be both a casual watering hole and an ambitious dining pub. The landlady hails from Catalonia, so alongside the roast lamb and daube of beef you'll find such signature dishes as authentic paella valenciana, sabada asturiana (bean and sausage stew) and daily specials like salmon a la gallega. All followed by treacle tart or cheesecake, of course.
Lisboa Antiga, The Old Red House, The Square, Hadlow, Kent (01732 851489)
This airy, whitewashed restaurant has its own vine room with real grapes and an all-Portuguese wine list to accompany the Portuguese food. People travel for miles for the fish and seafood (including the famous bacalhau), but there are also hearty casseroles of rabbit, and a 'cook your own steak' cooked at the table on a stone, along with prawns. Owner Antonio Marcelino is no newcomer to the business - he ran O Fado on London's Beauchamp Place for a decade, and has just opened a second branch of Lisboa Antiga there.
Pig Finca, The Old Bakery, The Promenade, Kingsbridge, Devon (01548 855777)
World music, Spanish strings and even Piaf tribute bands all have their day at this lively cafe cum bistro, where a focus on food from North Africa, Spain and Portugal results in toothsome mezze, dishes of sizzling prawns al pil pil and the very garlicky pollo al ajillo.
Sue Webster
