Tierra Brindisa

Sibling to Borough Market’s Tapas Brindisa, this cosy restaurant is decked out in calming olive green, with a bustling open kitchen at the back. The tapas menu gives deserving space to favourites from the Borough mother ship, such as large juicy prawns cooked with garlic & chilli, & creamy Iberico ham croquetas packed with flavour. But more ambitious newcomers aren’t as consistently good: while pork cheeks with butter beans delivered tender meat in a rich sauce, quail escabeche with dried fruits failed to dazzle. Nonetheless, ingredients are impeccably sourced & even simple aperitvos such as Padron peppers are a cut above what you’ll find in most tapas joints. The reasonably priced, all-Spanish wine list comes with short, helpful tasting notes, but be warned: service can get distracted during peak times.

Reader Ratings
Overall
8.3
Food and Drink
8.6
Service
7.9
Atmosphere
7.3
Value for Money
7.6

See full review...

Spanish inquisition. Could the tapas at Tierra Brindisa rival the best of Barcelona?

Eating at restaurants run by the Spanish produce suppliers Brindisa makes me do very odd things. Like count the number of anchovies on a plate. Or look up euro-to-sterling exchange rates. It brings out the obsessive compulsive in me, which is never attractive. Here's why: a few years back, when the first of their restaurants, Tapas Brindisa, opened in London's Borough I wondered out loud whether a vertical company like theirs, which imported the produce direct from Spain, ought not to be able to pass on the obvious savings to diners in their restaurants. I focused on a plate of nine very good salted anchovy fillets sold for £8. This seemed to me like excessive profiteering. It resulted in a long to and fro with one of the company's founders - read argument - which ended with us having to agree to disagree. She felt it was reasonable that the restaurants sourced their ingredients from the wholesalers at the market rate even though they owned those wholesalers. I was unconvinced.

Now they have opened a new tapas restaurant in Soho and I can't help myself being forensic on the prices. The good news? There won't be an argument this time. To my eye, the prices have dropped in real terms. The bad news: it still ain't cheap. But then really good Iberian ingredients aren't. You want a plate of the sweetest of hams, with fat that melts on the tongue, from happy pigs raised on acorns in true piggy heaven? That will be 20 of your pounds, and you should be grateful for it. By my calculations, they won't even be making the standard 70 per cent gross profit. (Maths corner: Joselito Jamón Ibérico de Bellotta currently costs about £54 a kilo retail. Be generous and take £10 a kilo off that for wholesale. The serving is around 200 grams, so £9 a plate. Allow for VAT, and they really aren't hurting anyone. Apart from the pig.)

The important thing, of course, is what they do with those ingredients. We are, rightly, obsessed with provenance these days, but it is useless if the kitchen then takes lots of lovely stuff and tortures it to death. The chef Simon Hopkinson once said to me that he'd rather have the cheapest of factory-raised chickens cooked by someone who knows what they are doing, than the finest of organic birds, sacrificed by a numpty. I agree.
Here, they treat ingredients with the utmost care and sensitivity. It's also a smart space. Where Tapas Brindisa is all bare wood, an attempt to build a local artisanal vibe for City boys just over London Bridge, this is sleek and airy: white and olive-green tiling, a vault at the back where there is a bar next to the open kitchen. The only problem is the tables, which are tiny. A meal here is part feast, part jigsaw puzzle, as waiters and diners collaborate to find space.

It's worth the effort. As well as that ham, served the right side of room temperature, we very much liked the jamón croquettes. Sure, they are just a way to use up the offcuts from the bloody expensive ham legs, but they are a very good way to do so; the little cubes of ham are set in a solid, creamy béchamel, the cylinders rolled in breadcrumbs and fried. This is bad food for good people. More subtle was the carpaccio of cod, the thinly sliced raw fish dressed with orange and marjoram. The anchovies - six of them - came with a salad of baby gem lettuce and roasted red peppers (and cost £6.75). On the meaty side there was, of course, an impeccable piece of grilled chorizo dribbling its crimson juices into the toast below, a couple of chargrilled lamb chops which demanded expert bone nibblage, and a tender quail with sweet, autumnal fruits. All of these dishes are priced at between £5 and £8, with only a couple breaching that.

We finished with fresh figs, the colour of a new bruise, swamped by an avalanche of crema catalana, then blowtorched to give it the requisite caramelised shell. Best of all were tablets of bitter Rovira chocolate melting on to thin toast and dressed with olive oil and salt, served alongside a scoop of bright, fresh orange sorbet. A few weeks ago, after my Alice in Wonderland experience at El Bulli, I craved simplicity. I was taken by a friend to a top place in Barcelona for tapas. It was, as you would expect, very good. But better than Tierra Brindisa? No, not particularly. And it was certainly more expensive. Take that as a recommendation.

See full review...

Pocket-sized perfection at Tierra Brindisa

My pet bugbear with top new tapas spots like Barrafina is that you can't book. Who wants to be shivering on the pavement queuing in this weather? So the first big plus of this stylish Soho number is that it takes bookings in the front, while the chancers among us can perch on nonreserved stool tables at the back. The second plus is the cosy yet ingeniously non-cramped interior.

It's incredible what they've done with this pocket-sized place. I could almost hear tom Jones crooning Baby, It's Cold Outside as we smugly - and snugly - peered out at hail bouncing off the cobbled street. the third plus is, of course, the food. Wow, this place is good. Olives are the litmus test of any tapas joint, and these were beauties - firm, succulent Gordals with orange and oregano (£3).

From then on we couldn't fault a dish. Prawns cooked with garlic and chilli (£7) were miraculously non-fluffy, with a sauce begging to be mopped up with bread; deep-fried Monte enebro goat's cheese (£6.85) came dripping with a gorgeously zesty orange blossom honey, and the biggest hit was the meltingly tender pan-fried rare fillet steak with caramelised onion and torta de Barros cheese on toast (£12). The puddings were equally brilliant. A yummy, fudgy turron mousse hid a treasure trove of raisins macerated in sherry (£5), and Rovira chocolate on toast with beautiful blood orange sorbet boasted a sophisticated savoury twist of olive oil and salt (£5.50). The bill came in at £87, which we reckoned was fairly good value for the outstanding quality.

See full review...

Drinking Out: Review

Tierra Brindisa, located in the gossipy media capital of Soho, is perhaps not the safest of places to discuss the indiscretions of wine trade figures. But then there's something about the buzzy, fast-paced atmosphere of the place
that lubricates the vocal chords as well as the tastebuds.
The Important Wine Importer Chappie and I were engrossed in our conspiratorial chat, so we decided to order a glass of Manzanilla Pasada Pastrana, Hidalgo (£4.50/glass) and the excellent Alhambra Reserva 1925 beer (£4.25) in order to keep the speaking apparatus in good working order. The shortish sherry list, with only six biggish brands and one PX on offer, was a bit of a surprise given the tapas-led menu was just crying out for a flor hit. That said, our choices worked well with the exceptionally juicy orange and marjoram flavoured olives as well as almonds.
This is Brindisa's first foray into a more formal restaurant setting - it has an excellent existing reputation as a supplier of Spanish ingredients and owns one of London's original tapas bars at Borough Market. The restaurant version has an extended food and wine list and, hallelujah, takes bookings.
The atmosphere has an informal feel, with small tables laid out in canteen-styles rows. It was full of a blend of advertising types, ladies who do lunch and a slightly eccentric older clientele. The menu features tapa plates, offering good value at £4-£6 for Catalan spinach with pine nuts and raisins and carpaccio of cod with marjoram salad. More substantial plates such as pincho moruno (kebabs) of Iberico pork were £8.25 and steak was £12.
The wine list features only Spanish wines, with a similarly good-value range of Verdejo, Albariño, Godello, Garnacha, Tempranillo and other natives. There wasn't much of a sommelier service among the beautiful yet diffident eastern European staff, but then we didn't request help for our order of As Laxas Albariño 2006 (£24.50) - fragrant and fresh and ideal to ease the passage of the simple yet very good quality food.
Tapas invites endless picking, but we felt we achieved the right balance with five dishes of Gran Reserva loin, lentil stew with goats curd, deep fried Monte Enebro goat's cheese with orange blossom honey, battered hake and lamb cutlets. Although we did get told off by the waiter for ordering too much for the size of the table. However, they should simply have bigger tables, I felt, rather than claustrophobia-inducing dolls' furniture. All the dishes were very fresh, composed of impeccable ingredients.
The mood was buzzing and we left refreshed and uplifted, having used up our word count.

See full review...

Tierra Brindisa W1

It’s nice to see how the other half lives. The other half in this case are those reviewers who fraternise on a fairly regular basis with the trade.

My lunching companion at this new Soho venture (part of an empire based on Borough Market’s famous Iberian food importers) contributes to various publications and is to be found at any serious industry junket. It took about 6 nanoseconds for him to be spotted by the chef: the precursor of a raft of freebies, including Cava, olives, and cod carpaccio (the dish of which the chef declared himself particularly proud)…. To his credit, though, it was my companion who spotted these items to be missing (rightly) from our bill, and reminded me to adjust my final verdict on value accordingly.

Now for an admission. We’ve personally never totally bought into the wave of foodie reverence for this venture’s elder sibling: Tapas Brindisa SE1, by Borough Market. Mentions of it in the press are invariably couched in terms of hushed foodie respect – to be fair, mirrored by success in our survey this year – but it is a somewhat expensive place, where, despite the undoubted quality of its raw materials, we don’t think the realisation of dishes always shines. And, a packed and no-nonsense venue, its interior is no great shakes.

Well, one thing you couldn’t say about this latest Brindisa venture is that they haven’t invested in the design. It’s much more ‘grown up’ than Borough. From the marble bar to the sleek Continental (slightly cold) décor throughout, there’s the feeling of a project someone has really invested in. This packed and bustling space is, however, most atmospheric around the rear bar – we didn’t feel at all shortchanged to be perched there on stools, having been unable to nab a table.

The succession of tapas reflected many of the strengths and weaknesses sometimes reported in its Borough forebear: nice idea, impeccable ingredients, but slightly iffy realisation; oh, and not cheap. Lamb chops would have tasted beautiful if they hadn’t been undercooked. A lentil and cheese goo sounded interesting... but wasn’t. Escabeche of quail was a bitty yawn. The aforementioned cod carpaccio was actually the best dish of this bunch: full of perky flavours.

Each of these cute little dishes was “over” very quickly, yet none was priced south of a fiver, so while you can eat here inexpensively, you might leave hungry. Our final dish helped on that score, however. We were relucant to finish the turrón mousse (lots of honey and almonds) with PX (sweet wine) and macerated raisins, not because it wasn’t delicious – actually it was – but because calorifically speaking each mouthful packed a punch. Coffee to finish, however, tasted neither here nor there.

So we left with a list of pros and cons. We can readily understand why the local Soho media operatives have fallen on the place; it’s easy-going yet looks smart. And it feels like it has commitment to a concept. Now all they have to do is fully carry it off.

See full review...

Top tapas comes to Soho

There’s something a bit too civilised about this tapas restaurant. Instead of finding raucous, happy punters knocking back mouthfuls of sherry around an upturned barrel, you find muted – almost solemn – diners picking away at their jamón with dainty knives and forks, with thick linen napkins on their laps. For most Spaniards, the very idea of booking ahead for tapas seems absurd. Tapas bar-hopping in Spain is an opportunity to sample deep-fried gooey ortiguillas (sea anemones) in one joint, before moving on to another for its famed costillas (ribs), perhaps.

But this is London, and diners do not flit from Barrafina to Dehesa, or Salt Yard to Tendido Cuatro – not least because you need to queue to get a seat at the first two, unless you’re dining at odd hours. What seems de rigueur in Spain doesn’t quite cut it here.

The original Tapas Brindisa, at Borough Market, has a no-booking policy, but this new Soho sibling is far more formal and reservations are advisable. But even if you haven’t planned ahead, you might just get lucky and be seated at the buzzing bar at the back of the restaurant (pictured above), right in front of the open kitchen. It’s preferrable to the dining room, which is far more impersonal and clinical, with spartan decor and awful acoustics.

The Brindisa group’s main claim to fame is its status as London’s premier importer of fantastic Spanish produce. A simple aperitivo of Gordal (Queen) olives, stuffed with marjoram and aromatic slivers of orange, were sublime – the pleasing squelch of the olive with just the right amount of bite, releasing a torrent of sweet, sour and salty flavours. A dish of Padrón peppers was a delicious game of Russian roulette as the morsels alternated between smoky sweetness and punchy spiciness. Meanwhile, a chilled glass of dry, aged manzanilla sherry (perfectly kept) carried me straight back to the salty shores of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the home of this sherry style, and the Hidalgo bodega which produced this particular bottle.

It got better – rustic pan con tomate (country bread with tomato), daisy-fresh Catalan-style spinach with pine nuts and fat golden raisins, a zingy slab of dense chorizo atop a blanket of sweet piquillo pepper. But cod (fresh, not baccalau) carpaccio was obscenely oversalted, the accompanying orange slices and red onion doing nothing to allay the onslaught of sodium chloride.

Textures flailed in the most comforting of Spanish dishes – tortilla de patatas (potato omelette) was too dry, too cold; gluey Ibérico ham croquetas, while pleasingly crisp on the outside, didn’t trump those served at nearby Barrafina, where the melty, velvety croqueta innards could have you weeping with joy.

Things were remedied by a rich, amber-hued rare palo cortado sherry, its buttery sweetness and hints of coffee and almonds a fitting partner for a juicy pincho moruno (essentially a kebab) of rare Ibérico pork fillet; likewise for flavoursome tender lamb cutlets.

At the moment, it’s difficult to get a reservation unless you’re willing to settle for a sitting nearly a week later. With such a high calibre of cooking, and a pantry full of top-quality ingredients, it’s to be expected. Still, the surroundings could be cosier, the service more convivial – next time, we might try our luck for scoring a seat at the bar, where it feels more like a tapas joint and most likely won’t require booking.

See full review...

Never mind the boquerones

How easy is it to put together a meal of tapas? Drape a few anchovies over jamon on a hunk of bread painted with tomato and garlic; scatter almonds over a bowl of fleshy green olives; or drizzle olive oil over spicy-sweet piquillo peppers, white beans or chickpeas. That's it. Any fool can throw together some good ingredients. I should know – I do it myself, every weekend.


But the reason my weekend tapas feasts are so good is because the anchovies are the fleshy Spanish ones from Ortiz, not salty little rat-tails. The jamon is the fragrant Joselito Iberian; the almonds are crisp, golden Marcona; and the olives are Gordal Reina. The olive oil is my very special Núñez de Prado, and the piquillo peppers, alubias beans and chickpeas are all from Navarrico. Yep, I'm a Brindisa boy.

This would be a sad island to live on if it were not for Brindisa's Monika Linton, who has been bringing the best Spanish ingredients to our tables for 20 years. Her Borough Market stall opened in 1999, joined in 2001 by the Exmouth Market showroom, and in 2004 by Tapas Brindisa, a loud and lively, walk-in tapas bar.

Now, Brindisa is going beyond tapas to a more rounded dining experience with Tierra Brindisa in Soho, to be followed next month by the larger Casa Brindisa in South Kensington – not so much a chain as a bracelet.

Tierra Brindisa still serves up simple platters of jamon, bowls of almonds and unadorned cheese boards, but Spanish-born head chef, José Pizarro is smart enough to know when to just toss something on a plate, and when to do something with it. He stops short of lab experiments, preferring to tease your appetite than play with your head. So on the one hand, there is a platter of expertly carved Joselito Gran Reserva ham (£20) with its pleasing ratio of fat and lean, and on the other, a single, just-cooked, Scottish scallop, simply dusted with garlic and chilli, and accessorised with crunchy crisps of Iberico ham (£5.25), turning it into a sweet and salty treat.

A strongly paprika-laden chorizo from Leon (£5.25), is split, grilled and piled on to grilled bread with piquillo peppers – good hangover food, either before or after – while tortilla comes in long triangular wedges in well-flavoured potato or spinach versions (£4).

Portions such as these are more raciones than tapas, but one dish is more clearly a "main course" as we know it. The cazuela of arroz Caldoso (£15) is a wet, soupy Levantine rice stew loaded down with chunks of red mullet, clams, mussels and two mushy-fleshed langoustines. The soupiness takes some getting used to if you grew up with the Italian idea of risotto, but it tastes generously of the sea. It's an effortless match with a crisp, fresh 2006 Vega de La Reina Sauvignon Blanc from Rueda, a bargain at £23 from the all-Spanish list.

What is not to like? An escabeche of quail, apricots and prunes (£5.75) is wet and pallid, and I don't enjoy the so-called "country" bread, which is too namby-pamby for the tough gastronomic work it has to do. Why not just split a good roll, so that it has the extra gravitas of the crust on each base to cope with the load?

To end, a so-called "crema catalana" (£4.60) is a joyous take on the original; a light sabayon spooned over ripe figs and drizzled with sticky toffee.

Don't expect miracles from Tierra – it's just a cute little shop-front in Soho that hides a tunnel-like, slatted-wood and tiled dining-room ending in a light-filled bar and kitchen. This is Tapas Brindisa for grown-ups, where you can reserve a table, sit down and relax, match interesting food with interesting wines, hear yourself talk, and see what a good chef can do with the some of the best produce from Spain. It's a lot like my weekend lunches: simple enough, but with all the right ingredients. n

15/20

See full review...

Restaurant review: Kate Spicer at Tierra Brindisa

I always wonder how, when the time to pay comes, restaurant staff decide who to hand the bill to. I’ve had a few low-level angst moments as I have swooped in and snatched the silver tray as it makes its way, automatically, to the gent. Frequently staff ask, and this can also cause a bit of an awkward fluster, as there’s still a part of me that wants the chap to insist on paying — not because I’m one of those women who bemoans their lot in an equal- opportunities world, more that when a guy insists on paying, it often means he really likes you. Much as I’d love it if blokes paid for absolutely everything and my higher education had consisted of flower arranging and cordon bleu cookery, and I got picked up for dates by Terry-Thomas in a sports car, life ain’t like that any more. Nowadays, women are as often “in charge” of the table, picking the venue, the wine, the food and generally being the boss.

Still, every now and again a sommelier will find himself in a royal state of distress at having to communicate with a woman. This happened to me in a restaurant in Manchester a few years ago. When I asked for the wine list, so patronising was his tone I wondered if I had the outward appearance of being profoundly mentally disabled. Some staff still, at the grotty end of the Noughties, don’t like taking orders from a female. After the Police played in Hyde Park this summer, I took some young men and a visiting overseas friend of high rock’n’roll calibre to Maroush III, in Seymour Street, where I felt ignored and bullied by the maitre d’ as he pushed me into making certain decisions that left me with a bill beyond what was reasonable and a lot of sad leftover food nobody had wanted to order or eat. I won’t bang on, I’ve vented now, but it was humiliating and, safe to say, my two-decade love affair with the Maroush chain is well and truly over.

Mezze isn’t quite tapas, it being a meal in itself, while tapas is a bar food that should, eventually, lead to a meal of some kind; but it was in the spirit of mezze-style eating that my future brother-in-law, Richard, and my family member Louis managed to make a late-afternoon snack at Tierra Brindisa in Soho last for five and a half hours. Brindisa’s reputation is high. It started life as a supplier of Spanish ingredients, then opened its lauded, chaotic and authentic tapas bar in Borough Market, where its fame for excellence took root. This is its first foray into the restaurant world, and it has chosen to do it in Soho, an area already brimming with very good tapas bars.

I arrived alone, and the restaurant was empty, so I wanted to sit at the back, where an open table in front of the kitchen would have made me feel a little less solo. It was warm and a bit scruffy and unfinished back there, reminding me of Cal Pep, the Barcelona tapas bar and restaurant that everyone blatantly imitates when opening a decent tapas place outside Spain. But there was a bit of confusion over staff dinner and whether I could sit there or not. A mild hullabaloo ensued and I got in an embarrassed, blushing-to-the-roots-of-my-hair sort of state. I clattered back through to the cold main dining room. But with the help of a supporting cast of passing family and friends on their way home from work, we ate our way through nearly half the menu, and only once or twice did my trousers feel tight and only once or twice did the dishes not hit the spot. My longest lunch ever was at Cecconi’s behind Savile Row. It lasted nine hours, was extremely alcoholic and I felt sorry for those present who had real jobs to go to the next morning. But it was bliss, melting into the company, the steady flow of quips, teary laughter and all-over-the-shop conversation. This stuff doesn’t happen easily in adult life, the way it did during teenager sleepovers. Happy restaurants are the salons of my generation. I love them.

Our Brindisa epic did not see us stop eating for longer than 45 minutes. From 5pm until 10.30pm we took sips of wine and sherry, but in nearly six hours drank only one bottle of wine, a few glasses of house (both red and white were good, a mark of respect for the customer, I always think) and a few glasses of sherry, which probably still puts us in rehab turf, but counts as a sober occasion for me. Richard, who is professionally expert in food and wine, and a spangophile, or whatever it is you call a Spanish-loving person, thought the sherries and wines were kept perfectly. We had a nerdy conversation about whether it is correct to serve sherry in a champagne flute, and on the merits of stemless wine glasses. Other than that, the liquid aspect of our visit was just perfect. A £35 bottle of mencia had character, structure and — that word so loved by Victoria Beckham when describing her recent collection of dresses — class. My faith in sherry was reborn. Just the tiniest sips fill your mouth with flavour, but it really does suck without food. I particularly loved the salty manzanilla and the dark and sticky palo cortado that smelt of orange and toffee.

Highlights from the menu included some fat gordal olives stuffed with juicy orange and sprinkled with marjoram, a plate of sweet Joselito pata negra ham, and some mojama with pear. Mojama is a sort of tuna jerky, with an intense smoky flavour a bit like botargo; the slice of pear would have been a perfect pairing, if it hadn’t been so hard and tasteless. Catalan spinach with pine nuts and raisins was barely cooked, but warmed through enough to make the leaves tender. I managed to eat it twice in this long, greedy shift. Similarly, a herb salad was genuinely herby, crunchy and full of green flavours. We were divided over the tortilla and ham croquettes. The tortilla was too much floury potato and not enough egg, and underseasoned; the croquettes were a bit gluey, but my sisters, who dropped in for a mere hour or two, said both were perfect examples of Spanish comfort food.

The more substantial dishes were patchier in quality. Quail escabeche, a poached and mildly pickled, pallid-looking little bird that came with softened dried fruits, had a sweet-and-sour broth that we all fought over. But good bits of hake came in a soggy and sweaty batter, which I am sure wasn’t intended. A lentil stew with curd cheese was intensely savoury and satisfying. The cazuela, a fish stew with rice, was rubbish, all the shellfish entirely lacking any sparkling quality, tasting at times distinctly, and clearly wrongly, earthy. The cheese selection ranged across the savoury spectrum, and all came with perfect personal companions, like a quince, some bold little black grapes or a fig cheese. This and a glass of wine would usually have done me for supper, but on we went, into pudding. Between us we struggled with Rovira chocolate on toast, speckled with salt and drizzled with olive oil, but its temperature, nigh on frozen, stopped the flavour flooding out.

The waiting staff, aside from the managers, seemed ignorant about elements of the menu. One said: “Manzanilla, like vanilla.” I don’t usually mind about this, but Brindisa should have known better. For a name that suggests utter correctness in all things Spanish, they should have tutored their staff on the menu and wine list. But then you look at the prices, and, while the wine list isn’t a bargain, it’s reasonable, and the dishes all hover around the five-quid mark. They need to improve, though, with the stiff competition in the area. Louis, who lived in Spain for some time, said Brindisa would not tempt him away from his devotion to the two Fernandez & Wells cafes over the road. I’d go back: it’s early days, and it will improve, undoubtedly, and it holds some good memories for me. And good memories are all a restaurant needs to leave you with for you to want to return.

See full review...

Turn into top tapas

I didn't mean to go to Tierra Brindisa at all. What I wanted to tell you about was a little place called Kokeb in an unlovely street behind Pentonville prison where owner and chef Gete doles out some genuinely splendid Ethiopian food – all those thrillingly zingy, berbere-laced wots and firfirs and tibs (my favourite dish name: derek tibs, which sounds like the boy at school with his glasses Sellotaped together). And, of course, the acres of flannelly, slightly sour injera bread ('If you don't take a doggy bag,' says Gete, 'I charge you double').

Her food is properly home-made: lovingly prepared and served with genuine warmth, grace and hospitality. But due to absolutely rubbish research on my part, I find out belatedly that Gete has been doing her thing for appreciative locals – no, not the jailbirds – for more than nine years and therefore, by nobody's standards, qualifies as news.

So can I get a table at any of the myriad hot new openings in town? Can I heckaslike. (At this point feel free to insert your own credit-crunch-my-arse type expostulation.) Andaman: 'Sorry, madam'; Giaconda Dining Room: 'Er, sorry, fully booked – and for the whole of next week.' Vanilla Black, a newish vegetarian restaurant – no problem getting a table there, surely? Um, no chance. The people at Murano (or should that be the Gordon Ramsay Empire Call Centre?) virtually snigger in my ear. Hence my hurtling into Tierra rather earlier than I would have liked.

But fear not: Tierra Brindisa is not an operation ever likely to be caught on the hop. Within a couple of weeks of opening, it's already running like clockwork, bursting at the seams with Soho's early adopters – diners rhubarbing away about green-lighting and optioning and other self-important whatnot.

We order some marjoram-scented, orange-stuffed, fat Gordal olives with our glasses of rare palo cortado sherry – like a luscious cross between the lightness of the finest aged amontillado and the sultry depths of an oloroso. These are without doubt, the best olives I've tasted. Seriously. We briefly contemplate just scarfing a tonne of them, washed down by vats of the sherry and leaving it at that.

But we plough on and everything we eat is glorious. I wasn't entirely blissed out by the small chain's original branch in Borough but that wasn't about food quality, more the fact that it's unbookable; jostling at the bar for a small sherry and an almond is not my idea of fun. Here food is, if anything, even better – and you get to eat it in the comfort of your own table.

Allow me another small gush about the croquetas. Four stout, crisp-crumbed torpedoes of silky gorgeousness studded with nutty Iberico ham on a nest of deep-fried curly parsley – oh my. Or teeny lamb cutlets, perfectly rosy, with romesco sauce fragrant with sweet pepper and crunchy with chunks of hazelnut. Or freshly hand-cut, precious acorn-fed Joselito jamón. Or pearly hake in a light batter with pungent, velvety aioli. There's a great, gutsy assembly of halibut, toasty little chunks of squid and chorizo with a spiky garnish of tomato and coriander.

The place itself is spartanly pretty, if that's not an oxymoron, almost Scandinavian in its use of blond wood and sage-y green. The only nod to any kind of Spanish theming is a vast tin of La Chinata smoked paprika lurking in a corner and, here and there, the odd terracotta pot.

If I have to criticise – and believe me, I'm struggling – it's that we're killed a little by kindness, an insistence by the lovely staff on waiting till one small dish is finished before the arrival of the next when what we're really hoping for is a big old onslaught: there's nothing I love more than a table groaning with excellent Iberian scoff. A herb salad, aromatic with mint and parsley and sweet with a moscatel wine dressing, is violently over-salted.

That ravishing Joselito ham is served in a fairly bijou portion for an enthusiastic £20 (like all the new-wave tapas places, prices can spiral if you're as greedy as I am). Oh, and the phone, positioned right at the doorway, has the loudest, most jarring ringtone. But that's it. Everything else is a blast.

Some of my favourite London restaurants are Spanish, but each has its downside: El Faro is miles away from anything (unless you're in Docklands); Barrafina is always queued out; Dehesa's tables are wildly uncomfortable unless it's sunny enough to sit outside. Tierra Brindisa suffers from none of these shortcomings and for that I love it. Apparently there's yet another shoot of the burgeoning empire about to blossom this November in South Ken – Casa Brindisa – with a delicatessen in the basement and a jamóneria on the ground floor. I'll be there.

See full review...

Top marks for Tierra

Far it be from me to punish Tierra Brindisa for Tendido's bad behaviour. So it's lucky I genuinely thought Tierra was the better of the two.

Well-sourced, interesting tapas are doled up in a little room whose decor is a world away from the familiar bullfights and sangria clichés of many Spanish-style venues.

Some items on the menu will be familiar to patrons of the Borough Market branch -the excellent deep-fried Monte Enebro goat's cheese with orange blossom honey, for instance. But there are also bolder, more unusual additions, such as cod carpaccio with red onion, oranges and marjoram, and quail escabeche with dried fruit. These were droolingly good: the dense, salty cod particularly well matched with the sharp-sweet oranges.

Best of all were some superbly simple prawns with garlic and chilli, the shellfish so fresh and tender they were almost crumbly.

But while the food was great, service was shambolic, with dishes going to the wrong tables, delayed wine and confusion over the bill. Still, it was only the third night at the restaurant and we were given our wine free to compensate, so there's clearly a will to do better. Plus we weren't chased out by the waiters, so bonus points for that.

TIERRA BRINDISA

Go to Dos Hermanos web page

Many years ago – this was when Borough Market was yer actual market and not just a place for tourists to gawp – I ordered a whole Joselito Gran Reserva Jamon from Brindisa as a Christmas present for my Dad. A few days before the big event a nice lady called Monika rang up and told me sorry, but they’d had to give my ham to Harvey Nicks. I was pretty distraught. A day before I was due to drive up North a courier van arrived from Brindisa bearing the ham and Christmas was saved. My father was thrilled and I got weekly packets of the best ham money can buy for the whole of January.

Fast forward about ten years and I’m sitting in front of a plate of perfectly cut Jamón Ibérico de Bellota from Joselito in Guijuelo which costs £20 plus service. A hell of a lot more expensive than it was all those years ago. It’s still great stuff though and if you’re going to splash out then there is no better place to do it than at Tierra Brindisa in London’s West End.

There’s more too: fat olives stuffed with orange and majoram, a huge diver caught scallop served complete with roe and topped by crisp Serrano ham and Chorizo de Leon with Piquillo Peppers that delivered a massive hot pimenton hit.

Monte Enebro Cheese with Orange Blossom honey: a classic from the Borough branch was present and correct. Battered Hake suffered from a slightly spongy covering but the accompanying aioli was the business.

The croquetas here are made with Ibérico ham. I may not be able to call them the best croquetas in London, but that's only because I haven't eaten in every Tapas bar in the capital. They were so good I considered saving some for HS for about, oh. at least half a second.

Tapas Brindisa in Borough has been a big success for the few years it’s been open so it seems natural to roll out the concept and join the other playas in the area: Salt Yard and Dehesa, Fino and Barrafina, Fernandez & Wells. This can sometimes mean a drop in standards but on my visit everything save a glass of manzanilla that wasn’t sufficiently chilled (my life is full of such miseries) was tiptop. This may have been owing to the fact that chef José Pizarro was watching over proceedings but I like to think that the staff can maintain these standards when he leaves to open the next branch.

¡Buen Provecho!

Tierra Brindisa

Go to Dos Hermanos web page

Many years ago – this was when Borough Market was yer actual market and not just a place for tourists to gawp – I ordered a whole Joselito Gran Reserva Jamon from Brindisa as a Christmas present for my Dad. A few days before the big event a nice lady called Monika rang up and told me sorry, but they’d had to give my ham to Harvey Nicks. I was pretty distraught. A day before I was due to drive up North a courier van arrived from Brindisa bearing the ham and Christmas was saved. My father was thrilled and I got weekly packets of the best ham money can buy for the whole of January.

Fast forward about ten years and I’m sitting in front of a plate of perfectly cut Jamón Ibérico de Bellota from Joselito in Guijuelo which costs £20 plus service. A hell of a lot more expensive than it was all those years ago. It’s still great stuff though and if you’re going to splash out then there is no better place to do it than at Tierra Brindisa in London’s West End.

There’s more too: fat olives stuffed with orange and majoram, a huge diver caught scallop served complete with roe and topped by crisp Serrano ham and Chorizo de Leon with Piquillo Peppers that delivered a massive hot pimenton hit.

Monte Enebro Cheese with Orange Blossom honey: a classic from the Borough branch was present and correct. Battered Hake suffered from a slightly spongy covering but the accompanying aioli was the business.

The croquetas here are made with Ibérico ham. I may not be able to call them the best croquetas in London, but that's only because I haven't eaten in every Tapas bar in the capital. They were so good I considered saving some for HS for about, oh. at least half a second.

Tapas Brindisa in Borough has been a big success for the few years it’s been open so it seems natural to roll out the concept and join the other playas in the area: Salt Yard and Dehesa, Fino and Barrafina, Fernandez & Wells. This can sometimes mean a drop in standards but on my visit everything save a glass of manzanilla that wasn’t sufficiently chilled (my life is full of such miseries) was tiptop. This may have been owing to the fact that chef José Pizarro was watching over proceedings but I like to think that the staff can maintain these standards when he leaves to open the next branch.

¡Buen Provecho!