MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT

Restaurateur Monika Linton

monika linTon, 55, founded Brindisa in 1988, selling quality Spanish food. She now has five restaurants and two shops, and lives in london with her husband, rupert, and their two children. AFTER I left university, I went to Spain to teach English and fell in love with the mind-blowing food at little tapas bars in Catalonia.

When I returned home, I knew I wanted a job where I could use my Spanish and remain connected to the country so, in 1986, I started shipping Spanish wine to the UK.

I stored the bottles of Rioja in my parents’ garage. I was only 26 and the wine trade was rather pompous and unwelcoming. My true love was food.

I realised the flavours I had enjoyed in Spain were almost unheard of here — this was long before the boom in farmers’ markets. My brother had just left the City and suggested we set up a company together. The whole thing was done on a shoestring after our father lent us £1,500.

We started with cheese. There were independent producers few people knew about — even in Spain. It was only a few years after Franco’s dictatorship and the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture didn’t have the full list.

I wrote to the producers asking if I could export their oils, white tuna, legumes and cheese. It was a risk, but I won them over. I stored the food in the walk-in fridge of my parents’ milkman before I got my own warehouse and shop.

Today, 29 years on, we import everything: Iberico ham, fish, olives and beans, and our products are stocked by Amazon and Ocado.

When we opened our first restaurant in 2004 in Borough Market, I put tapas-style sharing plates on the menu. I’d imported the Spanish way of eating, too.

BrinDiSa: The True Food of Spain, by monika linton (4th Estate, £29.95).