The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Table talk
Michael Deacon at Sabor in London
Sabor
35-37 Heddon Street London W1B 4BR 020-3319 8130 saborrestaurants.co.uk
Star rating
★★★★ About £80 without alcohol AN APOLOGY. A few months ago I reviewed a restaurant in Brighton called Pascere. Really good food, I said – but not so sure about the layout. Like so many small, trendy restaurants these days, it has an open kitchen. A nuisance, I imagine, for the chefs (they’re under enough pressure as it is, without being continually stared at by two dozen gormless eyeballs from the dining room). But it’s also, I think, a nuisance for diners. The sheer proximity of the chefs inhibits private conversation, at least about the food. You feel a bit awkward, confiding your disappointment in the beef-cheek arancini, when the person who made them is standing well within earshot, clutching a knife.
Looking back, however, I’ve decided I was wrong to single out Pascere. Yes, it has an open kitchen. But, as I should have acknowledged, some open kitchens are more open than others. Take the open kitchen at this week’s restaurant. This one was so open I was practically sitting in it.
The restaurant was Sabor, a new Spanish place in London. And here there is effectively no division between kitchen and dining room at all. Instead the kitchen is surrounded by a bar, around which you all sit, side by side, facing the chefs, and watching them prepare your dinner mere inches from your nose. Upstairs there are proper tables, but they overlook an extremely open kitchen too. So if you and your date have anything less than ecstatic to say about the food here, I wouldn’t even
whisper it. Best just text it to each other. Then again, if you really are dissatisfied with the food, the ingredients are all so close at hand you could probably reach out and prepare them yourself.
In fairness to Sabor, this particular layout is probably the best way it could have used the space available, because it’s absolutely titchy. And not only titchy, but popular. On weekdays it opens at 5.30pm. I arrived around six, and already almost every seat round the kitchen was taken. By the time my friend and I left it was heaving. Sabor is one of those annoying London restaurants that don’t take reservations; you just have to turn up and hope there are seats available. If our experience is typical, between seven and eight there may not be.
Our welcome wasn’t the warmest: a waiter told us we could stay no longer than an hour and a half. Charming. As it turned out, though, all the food was served at such a blistering speed that, if we’d wanted, we could have left far sooner. In an hour and a half you could probably consume every item on the menu, the whole wine list and two of the chefs.
As the food is Spanish, you’ll want to order four dishes per person, each to share. Admittedly some aren’t big enough to share, such as the tiddly queen-scallop ceviche, a single shell cradling the tiniest squirt of topping. My friend loved it, and called it citrusy, fresh and sharp. I’ll take her word for it. We both had the pan tomate: toast heaped with explosively juicy tomato and a slice of cecina (which, like all dried Spanish meat, tasted like a scrap of salty raincoat). We liked the croquetas: fat, bulging balls of prawn; crispy outside, creamy inside. Then the arroz con salmonete: succulent red mullet served on a bed of rice.
From the specials board my friend ordered langoustines, which she adored: smoky, buttery and sweet. On the other hand, we didn’t get much for our money: £18.50 for some pretty meagre scrapings. I suppose that’s not really the fault of the restaurant. It’s the fault of evolution. Strong argument against intelligent design: an intelligent designer would have made langoustines the size of leopards.
No such problem with the rabo de toro (literally: ‘tail of bull’). Big hunky beef, dense but soft, deliciously glistening, and served with potato and slices of red onion. Then the quail with chicory and romesco sauce: essentially, a middle-class version of KFC. (NB: This is not a criticism. KFC is great. But if you hate to think of yourself as the sort of person who might like KFC, quail with chicory and romesco sauce represents an ideal way to pretend that you’re better than that.)
We tried two puddings. Bombas de tres chocolates (literally: ‘bombs of three chocolates’): three tubby blobs of thick honeyed stickiness, each lathered in a different types of chocolate (plain, milk, white). Then cuajada de turron (‘curd of nougat’): a syrupy, wobbly cream concoction, a bit like a Spanish panna cotta.
In short: Sabor does good food. No doubting that. The question is this. Do you mind not being able to book? Do you mind being seated directly in front of your chefs? Do you mind being squeezed so tightly between other diners that your shoulders block your ears? If your answer each time is no: try Sabor, you’ll love it. If your answer each time is yes: it isn’t for you.
Personally, I prefer dinner out to feel private, intimate, personal. Much as I liked the food at Sabor, I’d have enjoyed it even more if I hadn’t had to sit in full view of the kitchen.
We’re going to build a wall, and make Spain pay for it.
We liked the croquetas: fat, bulging balls of prawn; crispy outside, creamy inside