So, the inaugural Brighton UYE took place last night, and what a night it was - plenty of cocktails, tapas and giggles! The beautiful Brix H and myself decided to soak up the alcohol with a few dishes at the newly opened Bellota Bar.
This restaurant has recently appeared where La Tasca used to be - I never bothered with it's former incarnation as I try to stay away from chains when I can, and I never heard anything good about La Tasca anyway.
Bellota sells itself as the UK's first Cava bar. I'm not sure if this is strictly true, but it does serve a good selection of Cava's both by the bottle and the glass, and at a pretty reasonable price. We didn't try any on this occasion, choosing to stick on the red wine.
The restaurant itself is big but comfortable at the same time. We were seated in a small corner table but were moved to a bigger table shortly after ordering - we obviously needed more space to accommodate all of the dishes - true Yelpers and little piggies we are!
The menu looked really promising, we wanted to order everything! It was split in to starters, cured meats, fish, meat and vegetable sections. We ordered seven dishes to share between us and tried to get a good mix of everything. The cured lomo came out first with some deliciously fresh bread served with very good olive oil. The lomo was fantastic, the flavour was great and the texture perfect, it seemed to melt in your mouth.
Unfortunately, from this point, things went a little down hill in my opinion. All of the hot dishes came out at once, nothing was piping hot to start with and quickly cooled down, meaning many of the dishes were cold by the time we got to sample them. We tucked into the croquettes first - these are deep fried so should be piping hot, unfortunately they were only tepid. The flavour was good but not a patch on the likes of Barrafina or Jose. The Fritura mixta was a selection of deep fried seafood - cold and oily. The pimientos de Padron, normally one of my favourite tapas dishes, were bitter and undercooked. The pork cheek that we ordered was beautifully tender but was a little overpowered by the sauce, making it taste rather like a Chinese takeaway dish, certainly not like anything I have ever sampled in Spain! I've just realised while writing this review that our final dish, the steak with blue cheese sauce, never arrived. I hope we weren't charged for it.
The staff here are all English and I didn't get the impression from the food that the Chef's have much Spanish influence, although I think the ingredients are well sourced. Maybe the tapas is just meant to be an accompaniment to the Cava, but to me the most important thing should always be the food. I will give them another try once they have had chance to settle down and find their feet as I like the concept, they just don't have the finished product at the moment and there are better tapas options in Brighton. read more
