Salt Yard, London (020 7637 0657)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £60

In the past couple of years, restaurants serving food 'tapas style' have become as common as fleas on hedgehogs. In London, there's a Swedish place that does it. There's an English chop house, an Indian kebab restaurant and a flashy Gordon Ramsay joint. There are so many now that it has become easy to forget that, done right, tapas itself can be rather good, too. Note the casual snobbery of that 'done right'. Tapas restaurants are like that: they occupy a sub-culture all of their own which plays to both ends of the gastronomic scale. At one end, tapas places are for people who don't go to restaurants. It's a jug of sangria for the ladies, and defrosted prawns fried to a shrivel in burnt butter and garlic. It's a lazily made tortilla and patatas bravas with a processed tomato sauce of such lurid redness that if you smeared it on the extras in Casualty nobody would be able to tell the difference.

At the other end of the scale, however, tapas restaurants are about expert sourcing of ingredients. They are about attention to detail, and knowing the size of the acorns fed to the pig that became the ham. It's for the propeller heads among whose number, naturally enough, I count myself. I like caring about the pig-acorn thing, because it puts me in touch with my inner snaggle-toothed peasant. In short, diehard belly-obsessed gastronomes think that showing an interest in quality tapas lends to them a patina of authenticity.

While tapas places are common, good ones are not. Salt Yard is one of the good ones. Upstairs there's a dimly lit bar, where music throbs and drinkers nibble plates of cheese and charcuterie. Downstairs is the dining room, which is, depending on your point of view, either cosy or cramped. Certainly seats are close enough together to allow for the stealing of food from the next table, a temptation which was tough to resist.