London's Best Spanish Tapas Restaurants
Tapas is undoubtedly the best kind of food.
You get to sample loads of dishes, you share the experience with pals and it gives you a fantastic excuse to guzzle copious amounts of Spanish wine.
London has no end of tapas restaurants, which can make it extremely difficult to know where to head if you’re after something special.
To save you the trouble of scouring endless Trip Advisor reviews or asking your Facebook friends where’s good to go (with disappointing results), we’ve picked out the best tapas restaurants in the capital.
The Little Taperia
The Little Taperia is a well-designed, cosy restaurant just past Tooting Broadway. There are seats available on the marble-topped bar for quick snacks, or on their restaurant tables if you’re going out for a meal.
The dishes on the menu will undoubtedly make you want to order the lot, but it’s wise to stick to around six plates between two people and then a cheese board for dessert - which is plenty.
Prices range between £4.50 and £8 per dish. There are the simple dishes you always expect - such as patatas bravas with allioli or chilli garlic prawns - or something a little more extravagant like morcilla (which is Spanish black pudding), scotch eggs, or hake with peas and salsa verde.
The marinated octopus is incredible. The warming chickpea stew with chorizo and spinach is a warming and filling option, too.
The restaurant’s buzzing atmosphere and incredibly friendly staff make it the perfect place to eat, relax and have a great time.
By Natasha Hinde
Published Mon 27 June 2016
The Little Taperia Has Large Taste
True to form, we were the first to go and check out The Little Taperia in Tooting, and boy did it impress us. From the team behind award-winning drinking den The Little Bar, this small but perfectly formed tapas joint has brought a burst of Spanish flair to the curry mile. With authentic flavours (think juicy chorizo and swoon-inducing Scotch eggs), this is the shiny new pearl of SW17's dining scene. We just wish we had some reliable Spanish sunshine to go with it.
By Julie M Sheppard
Published May 2015
A south London pet shop has been turned into the home of great tapas
Who would have predicted that Tooting would start turning into a new Hackney or Dalston? The chat level in the place was considerable when we visited, the clientele mostly young professionals (have they all just moved into the neighbourhood?). The first page and a half of the wine list is occupied with cocktails, sherry, port and cava: you can choose between three Negronis. My Classic went down a treat with morcilla Scotch egg, the carapace made of black pudding, served on piquillo sweet peppers with star anise, a wallop of pure liquorice in your mouth.
The Spanish chef, Javier Vicente Rejas, is from Valencia by way of the Hilton hotel chain and Rules restaurant. He displays a nicely old-fashioned approach to classic Hispano cuisine: keep it simple, keep it tasty.
We ordered eight dishes between three of us. Pig cheeks were impossibly dark, sexy and mysterious, as though directed by Pedro Almodovar. A tranche of hake, lovingly cooked at only 70 degrees, was the last word in purity. Arroz negro was bomba (risotto) rice cooked to Stygian blackness in squid ink, with squid and prawns – a lovely harmony of sweet and shellfishy. My grilled octopus had been monstered, in the Galician way, by hot spices and pungent addenda – chilli, paprika, capers, parsley and pimento. It was mouth-tingling stuff.
By John Walsh
Published Sat 31 October 2015
Top 10 things you need to know about The Little Taperia restaurant
1) It’s small, in an intimate sense, and not in a ship-in-glass-bottle way, where every time you turn your head you hit the person sat behind you in the face with your hair and get caught up in each others conversations.
2) It’s the sort of place you yearn for in the midst of a stressful work day. Later, once you’ve turned off the computer and left all that behind, you’ll be sat beside a flickering candle, clutching a blackberry gin and tonic, and basking in the gentle (and oddly-calming) buzz around you.
3) Not ordering the Morcilla Scotch eggs with piquillo pepper chutney is foodie sacrilege – the bronzed breadcrumb coating is crispy and the quails egg oozes to perfection.
4) The restaurant has two rooms – the front has its own bar and high chair tables for post-work drinks, or pre-drinking-drinks, while the back room has an open kitchen and feels altogether more sheltered from the steadily increasing bustle of Tooting; the home to Sadiq Khan, no less.
5) The croquetas are as smooth and creamy as the gin. OK, the gin isn’t creamy but it tastes like you always imagine when you watch a TV advert for it.
6) Many foodies - myself included - struggle with tapas in London, suspicious of the waiter when he recommends ordering 5 or 6 dishes to share. However, you’ll spend so long proclaiming satisfied “oh”s and dissecting what makes each dish so good, that by the time it’s gone you’ll realise that you are, in fact, full.
7) Highly recommended is the Iberica Abanico (shoulder of pork) with Piquilla Peppers. You will inevitably lose yourself in the tender, perfectly cooked meat. Just try to avoid suddenly talking like a Marks & Spencer’s advert; your friends might get jealous. Then again, it is tapas, so be nice and share.
8) There is a choice of two desserts – a Santiago tart and a pile of churros with chocolate sauce. Enquire which you should go for and the table next door will probably tell you “both”.
9) After around 8.30pm on a week night the atmosphere changes and feels like sitting in a low-key but lovely bar in Central London – without the price tag.
10) This South London tapas restaurant may not have a flashy, highly sought-after postcode but it’s what’s on the inside that counts, eh?
By Anya Meyerowitz
Published 7 Apr 2016
A Spanish tapas restaurant in Tooting
It’s a lovely feeling when you study a menu and want to order everything. It’s even lovelier when you notice the reasonable prices, and realise you could do exactly that without having to raise a mortgage first. Yet talk of mortgages surrounded us at this tapas bar in Tooting, as the area’s seen a huge influx of new-to-London renters and first-homers. This demographic of up-for-it flatshares and the newly-coupled is creating a surge in fun, affordable places to eat and drink in SW17.
The menu’s the sort of thing you might find in Spain – if you’re lucky. Big prawns tasted as if they’d just been lifted out of the sea, then sautéed with chilli and garlic. Salt cod fritters arrived fresh from the fryer, perfectly seasoned and crisp with a fresh alioli. These are classic tapas, yet so often the simplest things are hardest to get right. A simple pan con tomate, sourdough bread rubbed with garlic and spread with crushed fresh tomatoes, relies on prime ingredients, and the version here matches anything we’ve eaten on the Iberian peninsula.
Little Tapería was lively and filled with smiles on our Friday-night visit. Despite not taking reservations, the staff were able to squeeze us in. As we left, good-tempered lines had formed both here and at the adjacent and equally modish Chicken Shop. Who would have thought that Tooting Broadway would become a place to pasear the time?
By Guy Dimond
Published Wed July 1 2015