Telephone: 020 7405 1717
Address: 54 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1
Lunch, including wine and service, £60.
When I was 14, I took to wearing 12-hole, steel toe-capped Doc Marten boots. This was because, despite my middle-class upbringing in the cherry-blossom suburbs, I was desperate to become the kind of boy my mother had warned me about. I was certain that the correct footwear was what I needed, that it would make me appear very hard indeed. As I realised a few years later, the reality was altogether sadder: as an adolescent I had, by choice, started wearing shoes so sensible as to make a chiropodist's heart beat faster with pleasure. They did not pinch. They gave marvellous support. And they protected me against injury. Not so much hard, then, as hardy.
Which all goes to show that, while some fashions are as silly and nipple-chafing as a chicken-wire basque, others also happen to be eminently worthwhile. The current and growing vogue for authentic Spanish food - at least in London - has to be one of them. It began with Moro, a clam's throw away from The Observer 's offices, which opened on Exmouth Market in April 1997, with a gutsy menu of Iberian and North African dishes which proved that Spanish food does not have to begin and end at platters of curling, cooling tapas. Their cookbook is published in May by Ebury Press. More recently, the ludicrously named Paell'Ya opened in south London offering platefuls of what are, by all accounts, very good versions of the quintessential Spanish rice dish; likewise Claudio Pulze's upmarket Cuisine Collection restaurant group has opened El Rincon to good reviews. (I can only report as I read, having not been there; I don't get out much, you know.)
Now comes Cigala, which also wanted to call itself El Rincon but had to dump the name because the other lot had got there first. Just to add to the sense of this being a small restaurant genre, the chef and owner at Cigala, Jake Hodges, was formerly a partner in Moro, and the manager and a few of the other staff used to work there, too. You probably don't give a damn about this sort of stuff, but believe me, in the world of Spanish restaurants they talk of nothing else.
Being at the cutting edge of food fashion, the restaurant is a bright white minimalist space of stripped floorboards and plain, bleached-out surfaces, with an open kitchen in one corner. You definitely wouldn't want to have a nose bleed in there for fear of introducing too much colour into the room and frightening the waiters. It is, though, perfect for lunch on a sunny winter's day, the room flooding with watery light. The effect is utilitarian and business-like without being severe - and the service equally so.
My companion, a Pat who is not my wife, is a long-standing fan of Moro and was eager to try the food at what is, almost, its offspring. We began with a glass of dust-dry fino sherry, a taste for which I consider to be almost as much a sign that you have reached adulthood as the ability to hear the William Tell Overture without shouting, 'Hi Ho Silver Away!' I'm not sure I could yet pass that test, but I did like the crisp bite of the sherry.
The menu, which changes daily, has half-a-dozen starters and main courses, all moderately priced, the more so at lunchtime, when there is a three-course set menu for £18. Happily, everything we wanted was also on that set menu, not that we were entirely sure what that everything was. My starter of partridge escabeche, for example, came with herb salad and something called banderillas. According to Pat, banderillas are the spear-type things with which bulls are dispatched during bull fights. It brought to mind the troubling image of tiny little game birds being brought to ground by cape waving, pert-buttocked young men wielding sharp, oversized weapons: on this plate, happily, it was just a fancy name for a cocktail stick spearing some pickled chillies and olives.
The partridge was not a true escabeche, in which the meat is 'cooked' from raw in citrus juice. It clearly had been cooked before hand. But that is only an observation, rather than a complaint. It was a lovely piece of tender, sprightly bird, stridently seasoned. Pat began with a simple salad of red peppers, tomatoes and green beans which was, she said, the straightforward assembly of great ingredients she had hoped it would be.
For her main course, she had grilled red mullet with escalivada, which turned out to be a kind of soft, Spanish ratatouille, complete with the smoky, char-grilled taste of the roasted peppers. It was, she said, terrific, and from the mouthful I was allowed, I agreed. I had the classic combination of marinated pork with clams in a rich tomato and wine sauce, the remains of which I despatched with lumps of their thick crusty bread. It was bold, rib-sticking stuff.
There were only two pudding choices on the set menu, so we had them both. An apple flan was more of a custard and, while there was a touch of the nurseries to the dish, it was not at all cloying. The whisky tart was a true confection: ice cream on the bottom, whisky-soaked sponge in the middle and crisp toffee on the surface. I mean, really, what's not to like?
Had we ordered these dishes off the carte, the bill for food would have come in at £45. Using the set menu it cost just £36, which really is good value for uncluttered and deft regional cooking of this calibre. With our sherries, water, coffee and service, the total bill only just broke £50 which, again, is a bit of a steal. What's more, I'm sure they wouldn't even bat an eyelid if you ate there wearing Doc Marten boots, and next time I go there I just might try it. Now that really would be cool.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
