Bibo in Shoreditch, a sophisticated Spanish restaurant by chef Dani García, was definitely a night of firsts. A pivotal moment in my restaurant-reviewing career came when, just after eating my porcini croquettes, I downloaded a decibel-monitoring app on to my phone. There was something brazenly cranky about doing so, true, and it was without doubt cringingly uncool, too, but after a certain age, you just don’t bloody care and it’s marvellous.
In Bibo’s defence, however, this had been brewing. Many restaurants these days are far too noisy. I can tell this by how, in some places, I have to lipread my guest from almost the second I’m seated or nod pointlessly while I guess the rough gist of what they’re telling me. And how, time and again, I suddenly become quite subdued, because going into detail during an anecdote is futile. Dinner with friends is all about telling stories, and stories are all about detail; they are also about timing and red herrings and withholding information until the perfect point. And none of that can happen at places such as Bibo that, my new app told me, play dance music at 84 decibels. Am I the only person who, when cooking in my own kitchen, turns down the radio to concentrate when I taste and season, as if my senses can properly focus on only one thing?
Bibo has taken over the space that restaurant fans may remember as Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster in the Curtain hotel, and now the London outpost of the Mondrian group. Bibo, in the basement, is admittedly slap-bang in central Shoreditch, so many visitors will want, nay, expect it to be loud and more like a cocktail bar or club that serves a few tapas mainly to line stomachs. But I say: no! There is something about its modern Spanish, sophisto-tapas menu, its decor and, well, its marketing as a formerly three Michelin-starred chef’s passion project that suggests it should instead feel more like spending a sultry, elegant evening in Madrid, nibbling oxtail brioche and pulpo a la gallega in a genteel, terracotta-tiled room with well-kempt floor staff bearing glugging fish jugs.
And the front of house are certainly warm, prompt and full of recommendations about your order and, on the surface at least, the place has the look and feel of a fancy-ish Spanish restaurant. The open kitchen full of harassed-looking chefs is definitely up to something.
Our first course, those aforementioned porcini croquettes, were earthy and delicate enough, but they were also lukewarm and uncrunchy. The tiny, slider-style oxtail brioche bun was one of the best dishes we tried, featuring a rich, pulled oxtail stew that had clearly had some serious TLC. On the other hand, the broccolini salad, which we were heavily sold, featured a rather sickly black sesame mayo that I had no urge to wolf down. And the signature tortilla brava was a tepid, sloppy mess, and its brava sauce and mayo topping had gone all Jackson Pollock before it reached the table.
And did I mention that the music crept ever louder with every plate? If standards are quite blasé in the kitchen, it’s not entirely surprising, because the food seems secondary here. Due to the noise levels, I missed the finer details of the explanation that came with our huevos rotos: four eggs fried tableside before being mixed into some cooked but now lukewarm chips. As any fool knows, eggs with potatoes is a timeless, winning combo both in the UK and all over Spain, but when you’re confronted with a large, oval plate of underseasoned mush, it feels more like a challenge. Butterflied bream, cooked for rather too long, came with an attractively vivid bell pepper sauce that also lacked seasoning. We rescued it with some lime wedges from another dish.
A reportedly caramelised rice pudding was again rather cold, and there had apparently been no attempt to make it enticingly crunchy and bronzed, because it came scattered with raw brown sugar. The chocolate mousse was topped with a thick layer of set chantilly cream, and was the other truly decent dish we had that night.
By this point, however, it was pushing 9pm and the noise levels were louder than a nightclub at midnight. This became especially evident when a jolly, young woman at a nearby table kept standing up, waving her arms and heading off to find the dance floor, before being reminded by her companions that she was at dinner and that those were her croquettes. Each time, she sat down thwarted, glum and incarcerated. Here I was in a restaurant that felt like a nightclub, shoving down mousse and desperate to be liberated; and there she was in a nightclub, being forced to eat a full square meal and equally desperate for freedom. Which of us Bibo is aimed at remains a bit of a mystery, but in this instance, I’ll graciously step aside.
• Bibo at The Mondrian, 45 Curtain Road, London EC2, 020-3988 4455. Open all week, noon-11pm. From about £35 a head, plus drinks and service.
• The final episode of the second series of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is released on 11 January. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts
