Barrafina, Soho

I love tapas. I love the concept of sharing when dining, mostly because I'm a greedy so and so who wants to try everything on a menu and that is why tapas is perfect for me.

Emma and I headed to Barrafina, a little place on Frith Street I love so much. We arrived at around 6.45 and had to queue for about an hour.

If you're arriving after around 6.00 on any day of the week you are most likely going to have to queue. There is only space for around 30 diners, all sat around a bar-like seating area where you can watch chefs prepare the food. A mouth-watering marketing technique, that's for sure. I find myself constantly asking them "What's that? Which one is that for?"and it usually concludes with me saying "I'll have 3, please."

However if you are starving, like we were, you can have a glass of sherry and some little nibbles to tide you over while you wait.

We got ourselves started on some sherry, ham croquettas and some chorizo wrapped potato crisps.

For a "nibble", the perfect croquettas were definitely a taste of what was to come. They were packed full with oozing cheese and ham.

Once we were seated it took us all of 3 minutes to decide what we wanted. I love the charm of their hand-written specials blackboard that is passed around to all the guests.

As is with tapas, dishes come when they are ready. We started with a courgette flower filled with goat's cheese.

We then had gorgeously tender gambas al aijillo.

Then the scallop came, maybe the best scallop I've ever had, it was cooked perfectly and completely melted in my mouth.

Then from the specials board, we had the epic-looking sobrasada on toast, which consisted of goat's cheese spead on toast, along with a spreadable chorizo, topped with a duck egg. 

Ohhhh it was my favourite dish of the night. Damn delicious.

Then came the morcilla iberica (spanish black pudding) topped with quail's egg.

I really loved the heavy flavours in this, however E wasn't too keen.

Nearly done…..

Then finally came our grilled quail with al-i-oli.

Juicy tender quail, with a lovely garlic dip. However this is now the 3rd time I've had quail and I think that is a sufficient amount of times to decide that quail just isn't for me. It's not to do with the taste, I find it perfectly appealing. But it is such a small bird that it is basically bone. It is so fiddly to eat, and I am a lazy eater. I will get stuck in and dirty, but it's so difficult to get teeth around all those bones, unlike say a rib joint. I won't eat a fish with too many bones, getting bored of the boning process, so the same obviously applies to meat. Sorry quail! 

I did notice that from my angle the quail looked rather pornographic…

All limbs.

After all that, feeling thoroughly satisfied and stuffed, we obviously then went for two desserts. We chose a crema catalana, a spanish creme brûlée and a chocolate tart.

This was beautiful. A glazed, crunchy top layer which lent a gorgeous caramel flavour throughout and a lovely orangey, spiced centre. The Spanish definitely do it better than the French.

And the purely decadent and rich chocolate tart. A perfect end to a perfect evening.