Eddie Hart - Barrafina: a Spanish Cookbook

Our mother grew up on the Balearic island of Mallorca. Although by blood she is the slightly rare combination of Bulgarian and Scottish, she grew up living the life of a Mallorqun village girl. Our grandfather built a house in the tiny village of Estellencs, on the north-west coast, and we are lucky enough to have kept hold of it ever since. We have spent most of our summers in Mallorca since we were born, and this, combined with the Spanish influence of our mother at home, has instilled in us a great love of the country and its cuisine. Food in Mallorca is simple, but authentic and delicious. There are wonderful markets selling everything from local lamb to weaver wrasse, a highly prized fish that appears only during the month of August. There are always a multitude of members of the family willing and able to cook the lunch or dinner, and none are exempt from interference of one kind or another from the others. We tend not to venture very far from our village, which is quite remote, but scattered up and down the coast are some first-rate, if simple restaurants. The uniting factor of these humble establishments is that they use brilliant raw ingredients and do very little to them. Our passion for Spanish cuisine was born from summers spent enjoying the flavours of what was in season: roasted peppers and aubergines, mountain lamb and fish caught just off the coast.

Our appreciation of Spanish gastronomy grew still further when Eddie spent a year living in Madrid as a young student in the early 1990s. He lived with an unemployed Spanish gastronome who would spend his days playing cards and teaching Eddie to cook tortilla and croquetas. Sam lived in Barcelona for six months as part of a plan to continue his early career as a nightclub entrepreneur. Happily the nightclub project didnt progress much, and he spent his days idly wandering around the splendid Boqueria market looking for inspiration as to what to have for lunch.

It was while Sam was living in Barcelona that we came across the now legendary Cal Pep, in the El Born district of the city. Beyond a narrow door on a slightly scruffy square was a tiny L-shaped bar with twenty-three seats and all the cooking going on behind it. Holding court was the gravelly-voiced Pep himself, directing operations with a rod of iron. There was no menu, and the customers would just ask the waiter what there was that day and order accordingly. The food, mostly fish and seafood but some meat as well, was brilliant. Perfectly fresh and using wonderful ingredients, it was prepared with the utmost simplicity. Simple here does not mean easy or slapdash. Every dish that came from the kitchen was expertly and precisely cooked, and if you are not hiding behind complicated sauces that is a difficult thing to do. Every time a customer finished their food and left there was another to take their place the atmosphere was electric. Needless to say, having eaten almost all the menu and drunk half the cellar we were hooked.

This was back in 2000, and at the time London was desperately short of good Spanish restaurants, particularly tapas restaurants. After several more visits to Pep and travels around the rest of Spain (for research purposes mostly), eating at some other excellent places, we decided that a Cal Pep was what London needed in its gastronomic life. We searched and scoured central London for suitable venues as we set about fine-tuning our project. The more we thought about it the more we began to believe that London, with no high-class tapas restaurants, was not quite ready to go the whole bar only, no tables, no reservations hog. We instead opted for a restaurant with tables and chairs as normal, but with a large bar counter for our customers to eat overlooking a semi-open kitchen. That was Fino and the year was 2003.

Our first head chef at Fino, a brilliant Frenchman, Jean-Philippe Patruno, who now runs the kitchen at Barrafinas sister restaurant, Quo Vadis, knew of a Spanish sous-chef and suggested we try to poach her. We succeeded, and Nieves Barragn came to work for us two months before Fino opened. Four years passed, with Nieves working alongside Jean-Philippe at Fino, and it was beginning to become obvious to us that she was ready to take charge of a kitchen herself. It didnt take us too long to decide that what we wanted to do was return to our original idea and create a London Cal Pep, with no tables, no reservations, and all the cooking done behind the bar as close to the customer as possible and with everything on display, warts and all.

A site became available on Frith Street, in the middle of Soho, the right size for what we wanted, and we were off. We would water down the concept only by the inclusion of a printed menu (which also became our place mat). However, this would be supplemented by a selection of daily specials that would only be communicated by word of mouth, although most (the delicious seafood) would be on display on a bed of ice behind the bar.

Waiters and chefs are not used to sharing the same space, particularly not a very small (1.5 metres at its widest) corridor while in the middle of a busy service. At the beginning tempers flared as the different parties crashed into, pushed and stepped on each other. As the months went by, however, a delicate dance began to take place behind the bar, with the kitchen and waiters deftly and gracefully working within the confines of the space.

The problem with having no reservations is that you can arrive for your lunch or dinner only to discover that all the seats have been taken. We therefore decided to have a shelf behind the bar seats where it would be possible to wait and have a drink and some-thing to nibble on. It struck us that if the queue were to work and people were to keep good-humoured, two important factors would have to be adhered to. First, that the queue should move steadily in one direction so that it had a front and a back, rather than giving people a number and calling them when their seats were ready. This means that the customers can gauge their progress by their steady movement in the right direction. The next and most important factor to us about the queue was that there would be no queue-barging, ever, no matter how important the customer. We are very proud to have stuck to this principle without exception ever since we first opened. A-list Hollywood film stars, restaurant critics, business leaders and politicians, even our own mother, have to wait in line with everyone else. You might say that the system works in a dual culture of no reservations (a rather Spanish thing), with orderly queuing (a very British state of affairs)!