Tugga
312-314 Kings Road, SW3
(020-7351 0101)

After years of denigrating Spanish food (and the Spanish generally) as brown, greasy, suspicious and available only in tiny portions, it seems that the British have, overnight, gone tapas crazy. Or, at least, crazy for the principle of tapas, so long as it is applied to food that is not Spanish.

But as long as the food on the menu is Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, British, French or Polish, it seems you can’t sit down in a new restaurant without the waiter sidling over to explain that it is a “grazing” menu, and that the courses are very small, so that you should order about a million of them. And he will be at pains to tell you how laid-back the concept is (even as he straightens his bow-tie and flicks a spot of lint from his silk jacket), and how you should plan to share everything, and try a bit of this and a bit of that, and throw tasty morsels at each other across the table, and, hell, just take off your clothes and roll around in the soup, like they do in Europe.

There is Graze, for example, where they do it with hit-and-miss experimental stuff (molecular gastronomy with most of the wrong molecules); and Le Cercle, where they do it with southwest French cuisine de terroir; Pengelley’s, where it’s all about South-East Asia; Glas, where they do it in Swedish; Amaya, where you nip in for twelve quick Indians, and so on. The tapas approach is now so ubiquitous that I half expect to go into McDonald’s and be told, “We suggest you start with a Chicken McNugget, then perhaps a fry, a smear of milkshake on a huge plate, and then a cheeseburger for the table to share.”

And now there is the Gordon Ramsay-backed Maze, whose menu the great man himself has described as “modern tapas”. But it isn’t, really. I have just come back from Andalusia, where tapas is still quite often what it was in the beginning: a tiny unpaid-for morsel on a small plate that arrives on top of your copa to keep the flies out. And there are no flies at Maze, so there’s no need to cover anything.

And it’s not just that. Tapas is about sharing a dozen razor clams in the bar with the good clams, and a couple of drinks, and then some ham in the place across the square with the great ham, and a couple of drinks, and then some prawns in the prawn place next to the convent, and a couple of drinks… and it’s all about not getting too hammered while crawling from bar to bar over a long evening – in the middle of which you may or may not sit down for supper as well.

But if you were to try to crawl from Le Cercle in Sloane Street up the road to Pengelley’s, for the ham hock in vinegar, and then to Glas in Borough for some herring, then to Amaya in Motcomb Street for a kebab, out to Graze in W9 for the fiddlehead fern fritters, rounding off at Maze in Grosvenor Square, you would be crawling for a week, and your knees would be bleeding.

So with no disrespect to the exceptional Maze, which really merits not just a dedicated single review, but at least three of them, I plan to look at it alongside a new Portuguese restaurant on the Kings Road called Tugga, to help us understand each restaurant in the context of the Neo-tapasist movement.

You see, Tugga is simple, direct, and pretty close to what I think of as a tapas joint. The whole of the front was wide open to the street (albeit a street where the log-jammed 4x4s are strung out like sausages in both directions) and the music was dancey and loud because the staff liked it that way, and nobody seemed bothered that the place was empty.

We sat at the bright, colourful, stripy front of a wooden room that crept back into darkness and where downstairs a lot of young Portugeezers and Portugals were having cocktail-making lessons. We ordered from the petiscos menu (“petiscos” is not Portuguese for “tapas”, “tapas” is Spanish for “petiscos”) and were fed in fits and starts by considerate, friendly people. Not like the ones in the 4x4s.
There was rich, shiny pata negra ham in hastily carved squares, stout octopus tentacles in parsley vinaigrette, and a bowl of joyful jellied cartilage called “pickled Bizaro pig’s ear”. A strong, glossy slick of Serra cheese was similar to Vacherin and the marinated sea bass was sharp and fresh and ceviche-like. My only criticism was that I was brought duck despite having ordered lamb, and it was crap. So I’d say “avoid the duck”, except it didn’t work for me.

For Maze I have not a word of criticism – except to say that if what it serves is tapas then my arse is the King of Spain. Show up on a Saturday night and order just a beer and a mouthful of the wood-fired squab with four-spice celeriac, spring cabbage purée, date and bacon sandwich, and they will thrash you to death with a napkin.

Instead, book a table, go, and do what they tell you to do: order about six dishes and just marvel at assured, imaginative cooking that is, at times, almost poetic. These are not sharing dishes, mind, the waiter was very clear about that. You are to order, and then put an arm round your plate like a 12-year-old protecting exam answers. You might even have to spank the wandering hands of Hispanic gannets, should they mistake this creamy-leathered, fine-linened, beautifully polished L-shaped
dining room in Grosvenor Square for some Museo del Jamón off the Gran Via in Madrid, and start poking about on your plate. For this, as I say, is not tapas. This is build-your-own degustation menu. And it works wonderfully.

The chef, Jason Atherton, is a Ramsay protégé in his mid-thirties with plenty of Koffman, Ladenis and El Bulli miles on the clock who is certainly fit to take his place in the front row of the team photograph alongside Wareing, Hartnett, Sargeant, et al (Ramsay is the one in the middle with his foot on the ball and the cup in his hands).

Ice-cool pressed foie gras is layered with smoked eel that not only focuses the mouthful but is also sort of cheeky. And the soy that protects the honey-roasted quail from being swamped by the saffron chutney is mischievous, too. Marinated strips of daikon, thin as the tuna carpaccio they accompany, but crunchier, are equally playful, and so is the marinated beetroot with the Sairass cheese. And you just don’t get cheekier than two little poached eggs rolling on mid-season English asparagus, slender as grass, with pink grapefruit hollandaise and “young almonds”.

It’s a mad, marvellous thing, is Maze. The delicious paradox being that all this apparent irreverence is made possible by awesomely sophisticated cheffery. Severely grown-up pork cheeks, braised to a deep brown with honey and cloves, mock their own pigginess with chorizo and cocoa beans. The grilled spring lamb comes with its sweetbreads, hooray, but those sweetbreads are rolled in cinnamon – wow. You relax into a perfect broad bean and pea risotto and go for a mouthful of sea bass, but there you find candied aubergines. Brilliant. For pudding the peanut and jam sandwich provides a full belly laugh, the chocolate fondant with cardamom caramel, ice-cream and sea salt, a wry, approving titter.

So the little silver cutlery racks by each place are a bit Bournemouth B&B and the “wine flights” can spank you pretty hard on the part of your arse that is not the King of Spain (drinking wine by the glass, I did £250 on lunch for three) – but whatever questions this tapas, grazing, tasting fashion has been trying to ask about the way we eat, Maze has all the answers.

Maze
Meat/fish: 9
Cooking: 9
Other: 8
Score: 8.67
Price: As above, with the acknowledgment that tapas range from £3.50 to £8.50

Tugga
Meat/fish: 7
Cooking: 6
Other: 7
Score: 6.67
Price: About £70 for two with wine

E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good, and maybe we’ll go there together

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