Spanish cuisine has been popular in Britain for decades, but it wasn’t until the early Noughties that it hit the mainstream. Before then, chorizo, now a mainstay of British kitchens, was only available in specialist shops. Relatively few diners would’ve been able to wax lyrical about manchego.
Coveted dishes such as tortilla and paella have been around the longest. They might be the simplest to understand — eggs, rice. In fact, the Spanish omelette is believed to have arrived in Britain in 1912, paella a few years later. Gazpacho followed in the 1930s as European tourism flourished.
Still, it took another 70-or-so years for Spanish food to become ingrained in British culture, for calamari to become synonymous with pub menus and anchovies in olive oil to become one of the most leaned on dishes for Instagram.
It was thanks to London restaurants such as the now-closed Finos, and (still open) Brindisa — one of the most recognisable names on the scene (did you know they owned Perello olives?) — that paved the way for interpretation, evolution and dutiful homages to Spanish cultural nous.
The likes of Leadenhall Market stalwart La Vina should also get a nod, so too Don Pepe, which opened just off the Edgware Road in 1974 and which prompted a write-up in the French restaurant guide Les Routiers two decades later. Sadly the restaurant appears to have closed down in the time it’s taken to research this piece.
Beyond these, here are 10 restaurants you should try.
José
In Britain 20 years ago, only diehard food fans, the wealthy elite and gangsters with pads in Andalusia ate gamba blanca al ajillo con huevos rotos. Thanks to pioneering chefs like Jose Pizarro, pretty much everyone does these days. It’s the same story with croquetas, tortillas, boquerones in good olive oil and sheets of jamon Iberico glistening next to pints of Estrella. Pizarro opened his first self-titled tapas bar in Bermondsey two decades ago and has a few dotted around London today. The original is still the best. Order pan con tomate, black pudding with cuttlefish and a bottle of chilled red from Alicante.
194 Bermondsey Street, SE1 3TQ, josepizarro.com
Cambio Del Tercio
Cambio de Tercio opened in Kensington in 1995 and so might qualify as an institution 30 years on. Kylie often goes when in town. In fact, the colourful Spanish restaurant boasts a long list of celebrity regulars and might be best known for its tennis crowd: Rafa Nadal, Andy Murray, and Roger Federer are all fans. In more recent years, Carlos Alcaraz has taken on the mantle and supposedly feels at home at the restaurant. It’s a neighborhood Spanish joint in every sense bar the prices — it’s proudly high-end. Those who can manage £100-a-head will find exemplary salmon with crispy rice, blow-torched sea bream with yuzu and aji amarillo chilli, and one of Cambio’s best dishes: tomatoes cooked low and slow for eight hours with sweet oloroso sherry and Spanish blue cheese.
163 Old Brompton Road, SW5 0LJ, cambiodeterciogroup.co.uk
Ibai
It is a rare thing to have a new restaurant open in London and not hear a dud word about it. From critic to influencer, chef to food writer, pretty much everyone agrees the Basque restaurant is a good addition to the city. One of the trio behind the venture is Nemanja Borjanovic, a restaurateur widely credited to be the man to have brought ex-dairy beef to London — a word here for Lurra and Donotsia, two other Spanish restaurants worth your time and with which he’s involved — and who helps oversees the steaks. Try the Galician blond, cooked over flames in the open kitchen, and have it with French fries, salad and one of many superb wines. As for the “Croque Ibai”, a toasted sandwich made with carabinero prawns, boudin noir, and Tomme de Brebis (a semi-soft cheese from the Pyrannees), it is one of the best ways of spending £20 in town.
92 Bartholomew Close, EC1A 7BN, ibai.london
Tollington’s
Tollington’s is a Spanish-accented canteen of a restaurant situated in a former chippy, one that was essentially derelict and consigned to become another Gail’s, most likely. Instead, it quickly became the sort of place you find on holiday and become excited about — simple dishes, vermouth on tap, perky little tables in corners full of people talking about star signs. It would all be gently unassuming were it not for the hype, which rolled in like a wave in 2024. Not every dish was top tier during a recent visit but for the most part the food is sound. The simpler the better, generally: if there are crab fritters, get them, so too whatever iteration of tortilla there is; this is a place for long afternoons full of imaginative, inventive snacks, small glasses of beer and well sourced seafood.
172 Tollington Park, Finsbury Park, N4 3AJ, tollingtons.shop
Sabor
The much-loved Basque chef Nieves Barrigan opened Sabor in 2018 and it was soon bestowed a Michelin star. The restaurant traverses Spain and its culinary nous, from the tapas joints of Andalusia to the seafood restaurants of Galicia, the meat-laden asadors of Castile in between. The restaurant is divided accordingly, split into sections dedicated to these very different types of cooking. Any would serve you emphatically and any would transport you to a lively region of Spain. Whether you want octopus and morcilla or fried calamari with chilli jam is up to you.
35-37 Heddon Street, W1B 4BR, saborrestaurants.co.uk
Tasca
Not strictly Spanish — Tasca borrows techniques, flavours and traditions from France and Portugal too — but is all the better for its amalgamating of Iberian flavours, and its place is merited here. The menu is huge fun, meandering from pork and prawn cachorrinhos (grilled sandwiches found in working class snack bars in Iberia) to crab on toast. It would be wise to settle in for a long evening to explore the wine list, hugely accessible thanks to the expertise of sommelier Sinead Murdoch. And then to snack on octopus gildas before confit duck rice, beetroot and ricotta tartlets and monkfish with white beans full of flavour and guile.
255 Paradise Row, E2 9LE, cav255.london
Morito
A word here for the fashionable tapas joint Morito, without which Tollington’s probably wouldn’t exist. It might be fair to say Morito was the first of the new-age, a place that helped to pioneer London’s embracing of gildas, whipped feta and better tomatoes. To visit is to accept we must all pay more attention to ingredients. To ask, “What is life without ajo blano?” and to say, “It’s actually quite important that I more assuredly acquaint myself with escalavida so that I might impress visiting in-laws”. You get the idea. Morito is fabulous. Have the crispy chickpeas, the fried aubergine and the salt cod.
Hackney, Exmouth Market (above), morito.co.uk
Andanza
By virtue of when it opened — in November 2020 — Andanza never got the attention it deserved. You may remember there was something else consuming the world’s attention. But recently this tapas bar in an old betting shop has become the place to go, and rightly so: not only is it a looker with all its clever details — hand-carved oak counter, a TV showing silly old programmes from the Eighties — but the food is gorgeous too. Go for foie gras pintxo, great long octopus legs slung over crinkled potatoes and a Spanish-inflected slider with manchego and green salsa. There’s a generous wine list as well: be sure to try the Txacoli, a lightly sparkling, super dry wine from northern Spain, if you haven’t before.
66 Weston Street, SE1 3ST, andanza.co.uk
Mountain
Tomos Parry is a chef who wears Loewe suits at lavish awards ceremonies in Torino. He deserves to: Mountain, his Basque-inspired follow up to Brat, sits in 88th on the World’s Best Restaurants list, is pretty much always full, and brings the best Welsh produce imaginable to Soho. It is cooked with all the flair of a portly and moustached chef from Bilbao. That is to say, the food is bouncing, boozy; langoustines might arrive with spicy mayonnaise and omelettes — the talk of the town when the restaurant opened in 2023 — come in pillowy magnificence, eggs folding like waves over spider crab and curls of black truffle.
16-18 Beak Street, W1F 9RD, mountainbeakstreet.com
Meson Don Felipe
Like Don Pepe, Meson Don Felipe is another old-time, family run fixture, one that has stood the test of time. That might be testament enough. Does it serve the best Spanish food in London? Obviously not. It doesn’t need to. The menu still explains what patatas bravas is, for crying out loud — “chips!” — but, you see, there is absolutely nothing wrong with sitting down to croquetas de atun, sardinas fritas and albondigas, not least when you would leave with change from £30. A rarity in London today. In any case, it’s a charming little restaurant, the service is hectic but happy, the wine list is more interesting than some might suppose, and the dining room brings a fairly authentic energy.
53 The Cut, SE1 8LF, mesondonfelipe.co.uk
