Sabor has taken root on Heddon Street, W1. If you know London only as a tourist, however briefly, you’ll have been within a whisker of this spot where chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho and front-of-house José Etura’s new place now sits. Heddon Street is a back passage, a well-trampled crevice, off Regent Street, so it’s quite literally tourist central.
“We have walked the length and breadth of London,” my northern relatives will claim after an exhausting day out, and it will turn out later that they meandered all of 900 metres from Oxford Street to Piccadilly Circus. Sabor sits between those two points. A word to the wise: it’s within emergency vermouth-on-tap supping distance of the Build-a-Bear Workshop at Hamleys, with Yzaguirre Blanco at £5 a glass and prawn croquetas that are tiny portions of heaven. But whether or not passing trade, chancing on the place, will love it as London’s food scene already loves it is open to question. For Sabor comes wrapped in a backstory, while Barragán has been adored and respected for years by the capital’s chefs, diners and even nippy critics such as myself. The coming of Sabor is a big deal.
Barrafina is the only restaurant where the food and ambience is so sparkling that I’ve never quibbled about queuing. When I think of Barragán, I’m transported back to circa-2007 and Barrafina’s tiny Frith Street original setting. I think of an earnest, quietly forceful woman running her kitchen crew like Gatwick air-traffic control. I think of her humble, yet oozily godly prawn and pepper tortilla. Beyond doubt, she and her team changed the face of Spanish dining in the UK, making it crisper, brighter, more chic. Until Barrafina, I tolerated a tapas joint in SE1 where, halfway through the patatas bravas, a man in a flamenco jacket would clip-clop in on cuban heels and strum through a semi-aggressive version of Una Paloma Blanca. Oh the humanity.
Sabor is the next step of Spanish. That’s the context behind camarones fritos topped with a runny fried egg; a plate that watches you with 1,000 shrimpy eyes and is available only at the bar. These camarones are both scene-shifting cuisine, without which no Instagram feed is updated, and something with which to threaten small children. Barragán’s rep explains why, on a wet Wednesday in March, there’s a 90-minute wait for one of the 19 seats viewing the open cooking range. Every spot at the bookable Asador upstairs is taken, too – that serves suckling pig, whole, halved or quartered, because there’s nothing the London food set loves more than faffing about with dead piglets and feigning joy at ripping off their charred ears. Asador is communal dining with strangers, if you can face that type of thing without breaking out in atopic eczema.
Sabor, it must be said, is less fun to wait for a table at than Barrafina. This is a vast space, despite its intention to seat very few, which makes the room rather echoey. Plus there’s nowhere to put bags or coats, or even any semblance of a visible queue through which to enjoy the minor British victory of “moving along”. This makes 90 minutes feel rather a long time, even with sparkling company. We drink beers and eat chicken bocadillos with spicy mayo, a shameless but enjoyable take on Burger King’s chicken royale using dark thigh meat and the oysters. A lot of the clientele are besuited male couples making business smalltalk.
Still, things cheer up once we’re seated at the dining counter proper and treading tipsily through glasses of Páramos de Nicasia 2014 and plates of pan con tomate with cecina. Two plump, shiny gambas come in an oily garlic slick for £8. A plate of freshly blanched purple sprouting broccoli comes with a beurre blanc so sumptuous that I eat it like a belted galloway let loose among the petunias. But I’m less struck by the frit mariner, a puzzling plate of soft onion, aubergine and pepper with white fish and two prawns hiding sporadically in its midst and located only via autopsy. And white pepper is scattered liberally on many of the dishes. But I fell in love with the bombas de chocolas, a trio of saucy praline- and hazelnut-flecked doughnuts: teeth-encrustingly naughty. I love the rhubarb and mascarpone tartaleta much less, despite the deftness of its pastry bed and the freshness of all its innards. It was a too-tart tartlette.
There’s lots to love here, and lots that could be a little better. But it’s still – and this is testament to Barragán and Etura – some of the best Spanish food in Great Britain.
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Sabor 35-37 Heddon Street, London W1, 020-3319 8130. Open Tues-Sat, noon-2.30pm, 5.30-10.30pm; Sun, 1-6pm. About £40 a head, plus drinks and service
Food 8/10
Atmosphere 7/10
Service 8/10
Grace’s week in other dishes
1 The breakfast muffin at Siop Shop in Manchester: sausage patty, potato rosti, egg, monteray jack cheese, tiny elegant side of brown sauce.
2 Yard Sale Pizza have opened in Leytonstone, east London, not far from my home. And they deliver. No good can come of this.
