Pizarro - review

The talented Spanish chef, formerly at Brindisa, has now opened his second eponymous restaurant on the crowded gastrohub of Bermondsey Street. As at the first, the tiny tapas bar Jose, enjoyment of his unpretentious food and the warm hospitality of the dining rooms is tempered by the irksomeness of a no-bookings policy.

This fashionable affectation creates buzz and churn at small places serving small plates but is surely a turn-off at a larger, more leisurely establishment such as Pizarro. Did the two parties of 10 who were there last Sunday - one in a semi-private dining room - just turn up on the off-chance? We did, at 12.45pm, immediately got a table and then deliberately dawdled over tapas-style starters before ordering mains.

Over nearly two hours - no mean feat for a long-married couple - the room remained busily convivial but never entirely full. Many tapas dishes come in multiples of three, and a troika of threesomes were tucking into them in the curvy booths opposite the open kitchen.

Whether this represents easygoing Spanish-style dining habits or the sexual proclivities of SE1, I really don't know.

Sunday's menu featured nine small plates and four puddings, all mostly around the £6 mark, and six mains in the mid-teens. The similarly sensible drinks list is long on sherries and cavas, from bog-standard to exotic, with most wines offered in 250ml carafes as well as bottles. A high-end Hidalgo Fino and Equipo Navazos Manzanilla got the starters rolling.

Flakes of Iberico ham from Manuel Maldonado were a saliva-drying blend of smoky meat and creamy, melting fat, justifying the £20 cost. The sharpness of preserved artichoke was tempered by crumbly walnuts, tiny nodules of cauliflower and an unidentified, creamily un-Spanish soft cheese. Prawns came fat and firm and spilling garlic and chilli from their heads: it's hard to muck this up but we still argued over the third one.

Stand-out starters were the pillowy and barely seared duck livers, prinked but not overwhelmed by capers and fino sherry; and light pink, almost obscenely tender quail offset by a splodge of romescu sauce. From the mains, lamb was again nicely fatty, and juicily pink, given bite and texture by its bed of dark lentils and sharp radicchio. Hake with clams, black cabbage and potatoes was another painstakingly honest dish, the flesh of the fish so soft it was almost gelatinous, the sauce complex with richly briny flavours. An assertive carafe of Cal Pla, from Catalonia's Priorat region, stood up to both.

From the puddings, cava with pear sorbet was a boozy take on the icecream floats of my childhood, while a brittle wafer of toast would have been a joke if it weren't paired with formidably intense caramel and chocolate ice cream. Although its simplicity sometimes verges on bluntness, Pizarro serves beautifully cooked, evocatively Spanish food. Book now. Oh, wait, you can't.

Pizarro
194 Bermondsey Street, SE1