Illustrious food blogger and holder of ‘Most Covetable
Lifestyle’ Clerkenwell Boy, has been following me around London recently.
Well, not exactly. But I do seem to have beaten him to it on
a couple of recent occasions. Nuno
Mendes’s new informal eatery, Taberna do Mercado, in Spitalfields is one such
instance.
We thought we’d try Taberna do Mercado before it became
impossible to bag a table. We turned up at 8pm on a Saturday night and had to
leave our names. After two glasses of wine at the light and arcadian Blixen, a
few doors away, we were summoned back. Our table was ready.
The whole point of Taberna do Mercado is the food, not the
fixtures and fittings. And it takes pretty legendary food to distract you from
the fact you’re sitting on uncomfortable metal chairs, at a spindly metal table,
in the deserted Spitalfields market – after hours, a graveyard of broken up
stalls and packing crates.
When we visited, the restaurant had been trading for two
weeks and it was a bit chaotic around the seams. They were admittedly
under-staffed and kept stressing their infancy, but not in an apologetic way.
But that’s how it is here. There are no airs and graces (if you want that, go
to Chiltern Firehouse). You take a tacit oath of agreement to join their
laid-back family when you come to eat here. You chinwag with the manager. You
wait a while for your wine to come. The
chef comes out to deliver your dessert. There’s one toilet and it’s in the
kitchen. Take it or leave it.
This front-of-house ‘undone’ feel is all a rug-pull really.
Because the food is certainly not haphazard.
Taberna do Mercado is about as authentic an experience of Portuguese
food as you could encounter from twelve hundred miles away. The food leaves you
weak at the knees. It’s exceptional.
The menu is exciting. It’s actually exciting. You want to
try it all, you feel emboldened to go out your comfort zone, safe in the
knowledge of the expertise of the chefs.
We had some of the house-tinned fish with crusty toasted bread
- the scallops in brown butter were historic. Had the meal
ended there, I would have been deeply satisfied.
The pork tartare in a broth with cabbage was a thing of
velvety beauty. If I found myself locked in a Groundhog Day movie conceit, the
Beef prego sandwich, served with Savora mustard and chilli oil, would be
my meal of choice to scoff over and over again, ad infinitum.
Because we couldn’t bear not to try the desserts, we squeezed
in the Abade de Priscos and port caramel. Looking like a piece of modern art in stained glass, it was exquisite in taste and texture.
Taberna do Mercado reminded me a lot of Bodega Casa Montana
in Valencia. A little locals’ hideaway
serving extraordinary tapas. A place where you perch on bar stools and eat what
comes, and where you have to duck under the bar and into a warren of stairs and
corridors to find the loo.
It seems that Nuno Mendes needs something more soulful to
counter his role as Head Chef at the resplendent Chiltern Firehouse. Here at
Taberna Mercado, the focus (the fanaticism, even) is on the food not the
Ferraris outside. And it is, indeed, soulful.