Barrafina

Press Reviews (1)

• Gills Coren (25th June 2007)
  8.75 (meat/fish 8, cooking 8, authenticity 9, water 10)
  
  Giles’s review is a hymn of praise to the “staggering” cuisine at this new – but already much-celebrated – Soho tapas bar. Like a lot of this week’s reviews, there seems to a lot of evocation going on. “Beautiful, golden, wet little eggy tortillas fried in their own pans; sizzling croquetas of cheese and ham, light and savoury and better than I have ever had in Spain (where gloopy cornflour stodge balls are ubiquitous); tiny, foetal little squidlings (described to us as chipirones, although Bob says these were really puntillitas), floured, barely stunned in boiling oil, crispy, furtive, wriggling; the freshest razor clams snapping with life…”. It not just bite-sized dishes either. “There’s all sorts of proper cooking, too; lamb cutlets, grilled quail, sweetbreads with capers, morcilla with peppers, all that stuff.”