la tasca, london

surprisingly good spanish at bond street. we were starving around bond street after a bout of shopping, and the food hall at selfridges didn’t really appeal (although if you have a chance go and get the peanut gelato at oddono’s there, so good) royal china is around the corner but it was a bit heavy, and so we wandered around and found la tasca.

now I am largely dubious about seeing restaurants in this class as being fantastic; I include restaurants like ASK, GBK, belle italia, caluccio in this list – and I don’t know why actually. london abounds in restaurants like this, chain restaurants that do what they do very well and that is widely accessible food food.

in any case, I was very much surprised bythe food here. it was really very good, and I think on par or better than cafe espana, which I like very much.

service was a bit slow but friendly when it was there. we had a range of food – and the portions are reasonable if not really generous. six dishes for two rather hungry girls seemed to work very well for us.

there were large prawns deliciously cooked in/with salt so the shells were almost irresistibly tasty, ciabatta (thought it more a crusty baguette) with a tasty tomato dip, a tapas-sized dish of paella with chicken and prawns, my standard tapas order of galician octopus and very very tasty fried potatoes, a spanish omelette (very good potatoes here too), and we finished off with a plate of mushrooms we ordered when the first few items failed to fill us up entirely. the mushrooms were a work of finesse, different mushrooms including dried porcini fried up. a little greasy at the bottom of the bowl, but a very good plate of food.

don’t overlook these places – they might not be the neighbourhood gems we always think we’d rather patronise, but they do very well sometimes.