My friend Bob is Mr Spain. I dare say you have a Mr Spain, too: a chap who is always suntanned, bested Pedro Romero once in an arm wrestle, cut two ears at the Maestranza with an orujo hangover and takes a minute and a half to say the word manzanilla (Mmmm-baaan-thhhhah-nyeeee-ah!). And years of visiting him in different parts of Spain have taught me a thing or two about what is authentic Spanish cuisine and what is not. And very little is.

At Sanlucar de Barrameda the shrimp being served with the manzanilla were not salty enough, said Bob, because they had been harvested at high tide, and so we went out in the afternoon when the tide was low to net the prawn fry floundering in the sun, and ate them there in the shallows, alive and flapping and gritty with sand, drinking from the bottle and appreciating how authentically the richness of the wine was complemented by the correctly harvested crustaceans.

At Pedraza we ate the barely born lambs of the sheep that roam in the fields beneath the village, their milk-white bodies roasted whole and ungarnished in bread ovens and served with bitter salad as has been done since the first sheep and the first ovens. But in the best cocido restaurant in Madrid we found that the cocido (a Spanish pot-au-feu served in three stages) was not now as authentic as it once had been. So we went to the place that serves nothing but razor clams à la plancha and you pay by the number of shells the old guy with the moustache thinks there are in the serried ranks of empties (like split cigar tubes) you stack on the counter-like in the Golden Age.

At Ronda the ajo blanco served at the Goyesca (when the toreros fight in authentic 18th-century costume) was a couple of degrees cooler, thanks to modern refrigeration techniques, than Goya himself would have eaten. And so we left. And later, at the fiesta in Jerez de la Frontera, the family who had the caseta where the beer was served with the authentic cooling system had unfortunately invited Francisco Rivera, the torero who no longer fights as authentically as he did before he sold his soul to the daughter of the Duchess of Alba. And so we left there, too.

But when a new Spanish restaurant called Fino opened in Charlotte Street last month, Bob was away. So I had to take someone else. Which was probably just as well.

Because Fino is not a very Spanish place at all. The huge basement dining room and bar is as clean and blonde and fresh and modern as the English girls that old, dark, dirty Spanish men dream of kissing. It is owned and run by two very English (though half-Spanish) brothers, Sam and Eddie Hart, whose family background means that they have both Spain and food coursing through their veins. And the symbiosis is a happy one.

Everything I ate was good. I don’t know whether the deep-fried squid and tiny shrimp were taken at low tide but they did well with the assortment of finos and manzanillas that I drank. As did a bowl of fat pimientos de padrón (edamame for men) and ham croquetas, and clams poached in sherry, and beautifully sweet and sticky jamón de jabugo and tortilla that was (hallelujah) wet and eggy in the middle. The service, directed by restaurant manager David Wardle (formerly the owner of Quincy’s in Cricklewood and one of the last great living Englishmen) was neither wet nor eggy but charming.

Tapas is generally filthy in England and I was impressed more than anything by the quality of the shopping, and the clarity of the presentation. I was all set to give it an unqualified hurrah. And then I went back, three days later, which is unusual for me, to check out a couple of dishes I had not yet tried. And there, at the bar, I encountered an old Spanish friend I had not seen for years, and her mother. They asked me what the food was like. And suddenly the answer was not so easy. To English women I would have said "outstanding". To Veronica (or "Beronica" as they say in Spain) and her mother I found myself saying: "It’s good. It’s very… clean. They have some very good ingredients. It’s much better than… Come on, let’s eat, and you tell me what it’s like."

So we ate together. Now, a Spanish woman and her mother are as stern a test as a place like this is going to get. Restaurant critics are as nothing.

"Es bueno, es muy bueno," said Veronica’s mother to most things. "Pero… no es español." She was disappointed that there were no croquetas of bacalao (salt cod) and found the ham croquetas OK but their breadcrumb coating was too coarse. She would have ground the crumbs finer.

The clams in sherry impressed her. "Pero no es español. It is a more Italian style. I do not think the chef is Spanish. We do not make cubes of ham in Spain… pero la cualidad es muy bueno."

I suggested the excellent morning-fresh langoustine, split in half on a drizzled pepper jus. "They are bueno, bueno," said Veronica’s mother. "Pero, in Spain we do not cut them open like this." (Bob says she’s wrong because she’s from Barcelona and thus not really Spanish. Certainly not as Spanish as Bob, who is from Primrose Hill.) She was further miffed that there were no pliers available to open the claws, and observed that I had not eaten the head of my animal. So I did. Because it’s easier than being called a poof by a charming and elegant Spanish lady.

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