Morito - Farringdon Tapas - July 2011

Where: Morito, Farringdon
With who: The Ginger Prince
How much: £35 a head for 8 shared plates, with a glass of fino each (slightly spoilt by remembrance of Jose's Manzilla) and a carafe of decent if forgettable house red.
Come here if: you're too old for Shoreditch, but want to sit on the street eating tapas watching hipsters cycle by.

The concept of the post beer bite definitely changes as you get older. I remember the days, particularly with the Ginger Prince, when a dirty kebab or a curry take out from Tooting High Road's finest were the best we could hope for after a night on the ales.

Civilisation is a wonderful thing. A couple of artisan pale ales in Farringdon's recently opened Craft Beer Co. started off the evening, followed by a stroll along Exmouth Market and a sherry while waiting for a space to open up at reservation free Morito.**

I'm a sucker for small sharing foods, helping me avoid 'other people's dinner envy' for a fraction of the price of a tasting menu. Even though we don't have the culture to support lanes of tiny little tapas bars here, there are enough decent places where you can shovel down plates of Spanish influenced nibbles.

Unlike bigger and slightly more upmarket neigbour Moro (the one your parents will really approve of) there are no reservations at the orange formica clad bar, where sharp elbowed trendies joust with local suits for space to pile their terracotta plates and baskets of fresh soft roundels and densely spiced flat breads made in Moro's bakery next door.

The bread is essential. Warm if you're lucky, moreish either way. It soaks up the fresh olive oil bottled on each table and its soft, open structure is perfect for scooping up little piles of za'atar (a piquant Arab herb mix on the table with the salt). The za'tar is a giveaway that this isn't a typical tapas bar, but one heavily influenced by Spain's Southern and Middle Eastern neighbours.

We started with one of the most remote of these influences, a soft, silken, oil infused Iranian Borani. Pureed beetroot with feta, dill and walnut was a perfect accompaniment to the breads and vanished swiftly with another Moorish dish of soft spiced lamb mince served on creamy roast aubergine. Lest there was no crunch to the meal, we sampled salt cod croquettas, soft fish yielding under a buttery breadcrumb carapace so good we followed it almost instantly with another plate, this time of jamon and chicken, a little too mushy inside but forgivably so. I was less forgiving of a dish of Butifarra sausage. Four thin discs drowning in an over oily mass of soft white beans, oddly tepid and served with a splodge of garlicky aioli.

I can never resist pimientos de Padrón when they appear on a menu, here a good value £3.50, hot, flame charred and oiled like tiny green Lucha Libre wrestlers, the rare 'Hot One' threatening to kick your throat in. No luck tonight, though they provided a sharp salty contrast to a menu a little steeped in oil and cream. A final hurrah came with a small wooden platter of crisp baby squid. We realised half way through that they were whole, inch long tubes of fried fry or battered baby. Either way it felt like piscine infanticide on an epic scale.
Busy and buzzy even at 9.30 on a Tuesday night there was a wait, this really is somewhere you stumble into rather than a planned 'eat at eight' mission. If you want that, go to the slightly more upscale Moro next door. Just make sure you eat well enough to drown out any envy of the snake hipped youth hanging outside.
** My 15 year old self just re-read that line and cried big tears.

The Corner Room at Bethnal Green Town Hall - July 2011

Sometimes getting to the place is half the fun... Nuno Mendez (he of Viajante and the Loft Project) brings you The Corner Room. A proper unmarked, no entrance, n information New York speakeasy of a restaurant hidden in a boutique hotel in Bethnal Green. Finding it is like playing hipster hide and seek.

When you eventually guide your way through the too cool for signage, Wallpaper* fetishising hotel front of house that hosts the chic little bistro and breakfast room (if you can even guess the name of the hotel I'll be impressed) you arrive, weary and a little fecked off from the effort in a dainty white, light, tiled space, carved out of the surrounding institutional marble like a Habitat styled hobbit hole. Despite the eulogising that surrounds stablemate Viajante, the Corner Room is currently unmarked territory, certainly we had no problems with a 2 for 7, but it did fill rapidly and there's no booking. Get there early because let's face it, you're unlikely to be just passing.

Starters come in around £6 and most mains are £12. Seasonal and interesting, a baby brother of the more studied El Bulli school influenced food artistry next door, I could have gone for any combination. You'll have to pop in and check the menu as they've got no phone number and no details on the website. I eyed up a wonderful dish of heritage (read weird coloured and shaped) tomatoes with mozzarella and what looked unseasonably like asparagus (caveat, was paying attention to my companion's conversation, may not have been asparagus)

Judging by some of the more rabidly positive comments posted online already, one of the house hits looks to be a wonderfully balanced squid dish, meltingly tender tubes served with Jersey Royal potatoes, seaweed and samphire sitting on a slick of squid ink and a glorious fennel infused oil. It makes the other starter, a ceviche of stone bass, seem slightly muted. A good wedge of firm white fish, but none of the scattered oils and 'erbs really cut through with any conviction.

It was a main of two halves too (slightly). Turbot poached with artichoke and pancetta was pleasant enough, it didn't set my world alight, but anywhere else would have been a solid thumbs up. Next to a slow cooked and pink centred lozenge of pork served with a Portuguese bread pudding it very much drifted into second place. The herby sponge is baked with red pepper before being fried in butter, a crisp fluffy smack of taste against the soft pork flesh.

We didn't have time for any of the desserts available for a fiver at the bottom of the menu but did sample an excellent grassy fresh Portugeuse Vinho Verde from a short but functional wine list with prices hovering around the late 20's. It feels a lot like Angela Hartnett's, similarly excellent, Whitechapel Gallery Dining Rooms, itself a diffusion range from a chart topping talent capable of filling the intimate space many times over. If I lived close enough to either, I'd be there weekly.

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