If you have ever been to Barcelona, you will know that the Spanish city has some of the best tapas bars in the world. If you can’t get to Spain, then Barcelona Tapas is the next best thing.

The Venue
There are four branches of Barcelona Tapas Bar y Restaurante in London, three in the City (St Botolph Street, Lime Street and Well Court) plus a fourth in Lordship Lane, Dulwich. The branch in Well Court is well hidden down an alleyway between Queen Street and Bow Lane which runs from Cannon Street to Cheapside. It’s a huge basement room with a separate bar at ground level. With a name like Barcelona, it has obviously tried to replicate the look of a Spanish tapas bar and restaurant and the colours of the decor – blue, yellow, orange – and the design of the broken patterned wall tiles says Antoni Gaudi, Catalunya’s most famous name in architecture. He is to Barcelona what Sir Christopher Wren is to London.

The Atmosphere
A Thursday lunchtime draws a typical crowd of diners and the basement restaurant is already lively - and it’s not even 1pm yet. Barcelona mostly attracts people who work somewhere in the City and it provides a nice break from the office desk to come to a place with an obvious buzz to accompany the food. In the evening there is often Spanish flamenco music to help the party atmosphere along and it’s an ideal place for a tete a tete for two or, even better, a party booking for a celebration. But even lone diners will be drawn into the atmosphere of general enjoyment. It is lively but not too noisy, striking a fair balance between the two. Eating tapas is a very communal thing where sharing of portions is inevitable. These delightful dishes certainly bring people together. If there are six of you at table, you could, say, order up to eighteen different dishes and enjoy a full range of Spanish taste sensations.

The Food
All the food served is authentically Spanish and you can even order the ingredients to take home, given some notice, for Barcelona can supply everything in the way of Spanish tapas products, from the famous Serrano or Iberico hams to peppers, mussels, asparagus spears, beans and tuna, and you can even get a paella kit including a pan, rice, paella spices, olive oil and cooking instructions.

Any meal here should begin with a plate of Serrano ham, mountain air cured ham. Made from compound fed white pigs, it has more body and flavour than our English hams. Something else to chew on while you are waiting is a portion of pimientos padron (£5.95), tiny green peppers that are sweet rather than hot, sprinkled with extra virgin olive oil and sea salt: all very moreish.

Fish and seafood loom large here and there’s a great selection – anchovies, king prawns, mussels, squid, salt cod, octopus, crab claws and sardines. The baby calamares (chipirones fritos, £4.75)) are exquisite little numbers deep-fried to make tasty and crispy morsels. But what will blow your socks off are the gambas al ajillo (£6.99), peeled tiger prawns cooked in garlic, chilli and white wine. They arrive hot and spitting straight from the oven in a ceramic dish with slivers of garlic, spikes of chilli and hot olive oil. Just the aroma is enough to take you metaphorically back to Spain (Barcelona, even) where the best garlic prawns are to be found. But it’s good to know you can also get them of the same quality in London as those served in Spain.

You don’t have to stay with the tapas snacks as you can order them as starters and then move on to more main courses such as the various paellas (meat, seafood and vegetarian), and other, more substantial dishes such as lamb with lemon and garlic, Asturian pork and white bean stew, and lamb’s kidneys in sherry and onions. There’s a choice of kebabs, pincho moruno (pork), pincho cordero (lamb) and the brocheta of chicken, for instance, or you can have them with one skewer of each meat: marvellously tender cubes of the meat marinated and grilled to perfection. Served with patatas bravas, the deep-fried potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce, or patatas al-i-oli, the garlic mayonnaise infused potatoes, they are really something else.

For dessert (all about £4) there’s Chocolate Gaudi, a white and dark chocolate mousse tart, Tarta de Santiago, an almond tart, and Crema Catalana, the home-made Catalan creme brulee, which is a creamier version of our own Cambridgeshire creams. However, arroz con leche, rice pudding with cinnamon, is a perfect finish to a brilliant meal.

The Drink
Sherry and Cava are naturally enough prominent on the wine list and both are available by the bottle or the glass, but a good range of all sorts of Spanish wines is also on the card too, from Catalunya, Rioja and Jumilla to Navarra and La Mancha. A very pleasant bottle of Penedes wine, Vina Esmeralda, 2006-7, with a mix of Muscat and Gewurztraminer grapes, is a good buy at £18.95 a bottle or from £5.50 a glass.

The Last Word
Authentic Spanish food in London served with great passion and civility in very congenial surroundings in the heart of the City.

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