If you want to book at the OFM Readers’ Restaurant of the Year, you’re out of luck. You can’t. At Barrafina, Adelaide Street, just south of London’s Covent Garden, it’s first come first served. Executive chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s an important part of it,” she says, of the queue that builds up here, both lunch and dinner, full of people eager to land one of the prized red-leather-topped stools at the counter. “You come through that door and it’s like being in Spain. You can hear the chefs shouting orders at each other, you can see the food being cooked and you can smell it.”
Ah yes, the food. This Barrafina is one of three. Mohacho opened the first with her business partners Eddie and Sam Hart in London’s Soho a short walk away in 2007. But she freely admits her favourite menu is here. “A decade ago, when we opened on Frith Street, I really wasn’t that brave with the cooking,” she says now. “I needed to find the confidence to do the food I wanted to do. I had to get to know the customers and understand that they were willing to try these things.”
There are, of course, the staples expected of any Anglo-Spanish restaurant: the padron peppers and pan con tomate; the finest sliced hams and tortillas. But there is also a pronounced interest in the bits of animal that often get left behind. Alongside the paper placemat menus, with which the counter is laid, there’s a small blackboard of specials. I am invited to pick something off it that Mohacho will cook for a late lunch shared with Sam Hart. I choose tiny clams called tellines, which are sweet and salty and come in a rich puddle of the best lemony olive oil, spiked with chives.
There are lambs’ brains, breaded and deep fried, and served under a butch puree of black olives. We have dinky lambs’ kidneys, speedily roasted on the Josper grill and served on a metal rack above still-smoking charcoal. There’s suckling pig with skin like glass and a salad of yellow chicory with the best anchovy fillets. We watch each of these being cooked and plated. The very process of our lunch being assembled in front of us is, as all Barrafina fans know, a huge part of the fun.
“This is my dream food,” Barragan says, simply. She is dark-eyed and intense and watches us eat with clear pleasure, between issuing orders to her cooks. “Things like the brains may not be everybody’s favourites but there are always people who want to try.” Not that getting hold of all the ingredients was easy. “It’s better now but at first we had a struggle. We were the first in London to serve percebes,” she says, referring to the much sought-after goose barnacles harvested from the perilous coastal cliff-faces of Galicia. As to the open kitchen, that’s also a vital part of who and what they are. “You see people sitting just watching, like it’s a show. They’re not even talking to each other.”
The success sounds like it came easy. And yet, if it hadn’t been for the booming Barcelona nightclub scene around the turn of the millennium, this restaurant might never have existed at all. “After five years in Mexico City running a nightclub, I moved to Barcelona in 2000 to do the same there,” says Sam Hart, as we eat. “It quickly became clear the nightclub scene there was stitched up. So I began living in the daytime, which meant eating lunch. And the place I fell in love with was Cal Pep.”
The Hart brothers are rare in the restaurant business for being so completely open about the inspiration for their own ventures. “Cal Pep has been there for over 30 years,” says Hart. “It’s a counter with cooks working behind it. There are no reservations and just 23 seats which, as it happens, is exactly the same as at our first Barrafina. And food-wise it’s definitely an inspiration. It’s simple cookery, and seafood heavy.”
Inspired Hart may have been, but the project took time, involving a detour through the first business he opened with his brother Eddie, a standard Spanish restaurant called Fino, now closed. By the time they came to open the first Barrafina, Mohacho, originally from near Bilbao, was a sous chef at Fino. “I arrived in London in 1999, intending to stay for just six months,” she says, laughing. “I wanted to learn languages.” Then she was made head chef of the new tapas restaurant. Today, as a partner in the business, she oversees the food at all three Barrafinas – the third is on Drury Lane – working a week at each in turn.
The original, with its clean marble lines in black and grey, and its buzz and clatter, quickly garnered a huge following, as did this second when it opened in 2014. Both Mohacho and Hart agree this readers’ award is more important than most because, as Hart says, “It’s our customers.” Or as Mohacho puts it, “It’s been voted for by people who like to eat.”
So why does Hart think it’s this Barrafina that the readers have chosen? He looks pained, as if I’m asking him to choose between his children. The most he is willing to do is point to their unique points. “Frith Street has always had the buzz that you get with all the passing trade in Soho, Drury Lane is the most beautiful room, and this one has the more adventurous menu.” The Barrafinas are also defined, of course, by that controversial no-reservations policy. “I know the no-reservations policy is inconvenient for some people,” Hart says, “but on busy days we can have 50% staff to customers and we simply couldn’t afford to do it if we were waiting for people to turn up for bookings.”
The key, Hart says, is not to turn up hungry. “If you turn up very hungry and tired this won’t work for you. But if you treat the queue as before-dinner drinks – and we will serve you drinks and nibbles while you queue – then it’s a different business.” And this may be the second point that gives Adelaide Street the edge over its siblings. The original on Frith Street – soon to close due to the landlord’s development plans, and move into nearby Quo Vadis which the Harts also own – is a shoe box of a space. “There has always been a trade-off between comfort and atmosphere,” Hart agrees. “Some people like being elbow to elbow.”
Adelaide Street, on a larger corner site, just has more space. You can perch at the bar in the window with a chilled glass of cava, a bowl of salted marcona almonds before you, and watch the kitchen at work, calm in the knowledge that it will soon be your turn on one of those red-leather-topped counter stools; that soon you will have the chance to rampage through Nieves Barragán Mohacho’s gutsy, inventive and utterly compelling menu.
As culinary theatre goes, it really doesn’t get much better than that.
10 Adelaide St, London WC2
