What a gem of restaurant!!
My salsa friend Hilary has been helping me in my Yelp quest to find new places to eat before salsa on Friday evenings. We have fairly much eaten out Epsom and Ewell and are having to travel further afield to find new restaurants
It was thanks to that policy that we uncovered El Rincon at Tattenham Corner. First bonus mark was when we arrived 20 minutes before they opened and the owner welcomed us in and said they would open the kitchens early as we had to get to salsa
From conversing with the owner, we found out that El Rincon has been there for 17 years and their chef is authentically Spanish. He was able to make some recommendations between the main menu and the tapas menu. Being piggy, ooops I mean, in trying to get some energy for the some energetic salsa to come, we opted for paella as well as 2 tapas dishes.
Second bonus mark was a complementary bowl of manzanilla olives, which had a wonderful mild and sweet/nutty flavour. No over-salty cheap olives here and the owner gave us a bowl of free ones purely because he was proud of them and wanted us to sample them. Some lovely white and brown bread also appeared on the table at the same time
Hilary chose probably the best dish of the evening - mejillones, mussels cooked in Pernod, cream and tarragon with walnuts. The mussels were nice and plump and the sauce divine with the tarragon lending just enough aniseed flavour to bring the whole dish together. The bread was heavenly when dipped in the sauce
We also had albondigas (meatballs) in tomato sauce. Nice but we would have enjoyed a little more kick to it.
Then the paella arrived, cooked in a proper paella pan and having taken an appropriate amount of time to cook for us to know that it was cooked fresh. The waiter brought it out on a trolley and dished it onto our plates
The sign of a good paella is meant to be the soccarat (means lightly toasted in Catalan) , the golden brown crust on the bottom of the pan and you need a proper paella pan to produce it. Well, there was soccarat; there was chicken, shellfish and saffron-infused rice cooked to al dente perfection. Perfect paella
Time and 2 full tummies meant that we couldn't indulge in dessert tonight but as we said on leaving tonight,"Hasta luego!" (See you soon!)
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