Bravas Tapas

Picturesque were commissioned to build Bravas Tapas bar. We transformed a greasy spoon cafe into a smart and contemporary rustic tapas bar.

Fay’s review :

On a balmy evening the week before last I was talking on the phone to my friend Caroline, who was staying in a hotel overlooking the beach in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Saying goodbye, I thought fretfully, “I want water puckering, the masts of boats clinking conversationally, the dwindling sun playing catch with ripples…” I then remembered reading about the newly launched restaurant Bravas Tapas and, commandeering Reg, headed for St Katharine Docks downstream from the Tower of London.

Known to me, gastronomically speaking, for The Dickens Inn, The Medieval Banquet — “sword-fighting knights and dancing wenches” — and a necklace of chain restaurants including The Slug and Lettuce, Ping Pong and Café Rouge, the Taylor Woodrow marina development that in the 1970s briskly saw to the destruction of many of the original warehouses was probably not going to be visually reminiscent of the Basque coast — and it wasn’t.

What Bravas Tapas does have, though, is a waterfront terrace with tables, an American chef who has worked in Barcelona and done stages at Mugaritz and Akelarre, plus a hands-on investor once involved in the launches of Hakkasan and Yauatcha — in other words, not a slouch in understanding how restaurants best work.

A recent article in New York Magazine has described at length — as American articles are wont to do — the concept of “hardcore coddling”. This involves restaurant management researching and anticipating every whim and preference of a customer and assiduously attending to it. There is no hardcore coddling at Bravas Tapas.

That is, of course, completely appropriate in such an establishment but at first getting the attention and co-operation of staff seems unnecessarily effortful. But when a generous plate of slices of cured ham from an acorn-fed pig — where salt and time challenges meat to mature and fat to become ethereal — is put down and pa amb tomàquet (tomatoes melted in olive oil on grilled bread) follows soon after, a rhythm is initiated that continues to deliver diversion, surprise and gratification in equal measure. And we grow to appreciate the stern quality of the waitresses in white T-shirts and blue jeans.

We are sitting at a rough-hewn table — part of the style — with a view of raw materials displayed and chefs working. A blackboard flags up morcilla de burgos sliders with green-apple slaw and Idiazabal cheese. Got to have that rice-stiffened back pudding with its cumin breath in a bun. We also order Moorish-spiced lamb chops with rosemary alioli.

I haven’t told Reg that morcilla is black pudding because he would recoil; blind tasting, he loves it unconditionally. Chops are alarmingly ruddy but the penetrating seasoning renders them mellow. Before these comes gazpacho served in a large claret glass self-consciously designed to lie on its side. In it sit raw vegetables and croutons, the purée being poured at the table. Radishes and shaved onions provide gradations of crunch and eliminate that ghastly aura of the ratatouille of the future that can haunt gazpacho. The only disappointing assembly at dinner is fried calamari listed as chipirones. The batter has taken over, squid has knuckled under.

We finish with torta de Santiago, but wait for my description of lunch for more on that. We are content, charmed, not least by the bottle of Alaia and the Spanish Linguaphone tape in the loos, where I hang on long enough to decline a verb.

On another clement day I return for lunch. I am coming to terms with the marina at St Katharine Docks being my beach. The menu has changed in part and I am able to style a different meal, starting this time by asking for a glass of manzanilla — oddly there are no sherries mentioned on the drinks list — and roasted Marcona almonds ingratiatingly flavoured with orange zest, while I wait for my friend Joe, who is always late.

He arrives and we are tickled pink by foie gras-stuffed quail crisped in a version of pancetta served in a nest on which little green icing-sugar birds perch and which contains a hollowed egg containing dark, intense Pedro Ximénez sherry for dipping. Brava potatoes are edgy, salty cubes served with a dip of whipped alioli with a vehement tomato salsa.

Smoked sardine montadito (crisp bread base) is another assembly as pleasing to the eye as the palate with pickled red onions, white garlic and springy green micro-herbs all playing their parts as foils to the oily fish. The defining garlic of salsa donostiarra is best enjoyed in almost-burnt slices on top of the tranche of seabass. Hake or monkfish would have been more resilient load-bearers.

Here comes chef Victor Garvey. “You are lucky,” he says, “we have just taken the torta de Santiago from the oven.” It is warm, yielding, fudgily perfect, made all the more so, if such a thing is possible, by acerbic morello cherry ice cream, poached fruit and a scattering of almonds. Who needs the Pyrénées-Atlantiques now?

Fay Maschler - https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/restaurants/fay-maschler-reviews-bravas-tapas-a3709441.html