El Coto is located on Leazes Park Rd in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, a short walk away from Eldon Square. I…read morevisited here for lunch to take advantage of their tapas offer.
I was disappointed with my experience overall, arriving back home from Barcelona just a couple of weeks ago, I truly felt like I had crash-landed back in the UK.
The interior was freaky and strange - I entered through what looked like an old abandoned pub on a side street, you have to walk through an abandoned bar area to get through to the main restaurant area, through a very narrow corridor - it just felt bizarre, and I didn't know if I was heading to my death or walking into an abandoned building.
There is also a very loud doorbell - which I presume alerts the staff members when someone walks in because of this, it just seems so uncomfortable to be going around the restaurant, too.
The menu is extensive and has a wide range of dishes; I liked how they had common allergens labelled on their menu, including the dishes that could be gluten and dairy-free. The menu did seem larger than other tapas locations I've visited, and this could be part of the problem - they surely can't do every dish well. I also found the menu to be vastly complicated for a tapas bar...
I ended up going for three tapas dishes to make up the offer - the tapas paella, chorizo cooked in wine and Patatas bravas. It certainly tasted authentic either; the chorizo was partially cold, and perhaps only half of it was warm, it lacked flavour and the red colour one would usually associate with chorizo. The potatoes looked anaemic; they also didn't taste of anything, and it was the first time I'd ever been served them without the Aioli. The paella, which is the dish I was most looking forward to, was almost inedible, the rice was clumped together, and the chicken was tough, it tasted like it just wasn't fresh and perhaps had been prepared a day or two before, it was reheated for sure.
The staff member who served me seemed disinterested, and it always seemed her mind was somewhere else when she was serving our table.
I've really tried to cut down on handing out one-star reviews lately, as I'm trying to see positives in a business but I'm truly struggling here unfortunately. 1*