Flat Iron Square

Flat Iron Square

http://www.flatironsquare.co.uk

Tatami Ramen London Review - Great Tonkotsu, Delicious Chashu ...

This time we head to London’s South Bank, at the lively Flat Iron Square foodie hub to visit Tatami Ramen, a Ramen restaurant born a few years ago in Barcelona.

Opened in London in 2016, Tatami Ramen originates from Barcelona where the owners Jason and Hugo launched their first Japanese restaurant : The Tatami Room.

Following the success of their first restaurant in Barcelona, Hugo and Jason decided to open their first franchise in London : Tatami Ramen.

Hugo, the chef operating in the Kitchen of Tatami Ramen (cf picture Above) is passionate about Japan where he has spend 15 years before deciding to start his business in Barcelona and London.

You can read the full story here Tatami Ramen is located in the great Flat Iron Square food court.

Bar Douro

Bar Douro was created as a way to bring authentic Portuguese food to London.

With ties to Portugal traced back through the family, Bar Douro has matched exquisite Portuguese wines with all the tradition of the local Portuguese food.

Restaurant Review: Bar Douro, Southwark

Vicky Mayer trades the cold, damp London streets for the warmth of Portuguese hospitality at Bar Douro in Flat Iron Square, Southwark It’s a bone-chilling Thursday night when we arrive at Bar Duoro but the welcome we get couldn’t be warmer.

Bar Douro opened in 2016 in foodie Flat Iron Square, with owner Max Graham declaring that his mission was to bring Portugal’s flavoursome food and wines to London.

Decorated in traditional hand-painted blue and white tiles with a vast white marble bar as a centre piece, fans of the sort of hole-in-the-wall places you’ll find in Lisbon and Porto will love the authenticity of Bar Douro.

Add to that a seriously good wine list that has been chosen by Max, who is part of the Churchill’s Port dynasty, you can see why Bar Douro has been so successful since it opened.

Fun, tasty and friendly – Max has created a great foodie destination in Bar Douro.

Bar Douro, Flat Iron Square, Borough: Restaurant Review - olive ...

Growing up in Porto with the founders of Churchill’s Port in Portugal, Max has been learning the tricks of the trade since he was born, and he’s now on a mission to educate Londoners about niche Portuguese wines and ports.

After heading up a Port pop up in Soho in 2013 and executing successful supper clubs at Carousel in Marylebone and Pop Brixton in 2016, Max teamed up with Bar Douro’s head chef Tiago Santos (previously of Porto’s well-regarded waterside restaurant, Casa de Chá da Boa Nova) for a three-month residency in Porto to really get to grips with Portuguese cooking techniques and traditions.

Max speaks with great knowledge and enthusiasm about wines from Alentejo, Lisbon and The Douro Valley, along with lesser-known Portuguese winemaking regions that he aims to put on the map.

As well as charismatically imparting expert wine knowledge, Max gave us a condensed history lesson, telling tales of how Portuguese Jews hid out in the hills above The Douro and disguised game as pork sausages to keep their beliefs hidden, and of ancient pig-rearing methods to produce ham to rival Spanish Ibérico.

A lesson in Portuguese dishes, wines and history, Bar Douro is a valuable addition to South London’s newest foodie hub.

Baz and Fred's Pizza, Flat Iron Square, London: restaurant review ...

The stone-baked pizzas are cooked using a Chadwick Oven, designed by Dan Chadwick in the Cotswolds, resulting in fluffy, crunchy crusts.

Choose between a classic tomato and mozzarella; a spicy chorizo, ‘ndjua and mozzarella; a Napoli salami, pesto, chilli and mozzarella; a prosciutto, Portobello mushroom and mozzarella; or goat’s cheese, caramelised onion, rocket and balsamic.

On the goat’s cheese, caramelised onion, rocket and balsamic pizza, the cheese was tangy but not too overpowering, so the sticky sweet caramelised onions still shone through.

At Baz and Fred’s, pizzas are cooked in a Chadwick Oven (designed by Baz’s godfather).

The goat’s cheese pizza maintained its crusty base to the centre, but the prosciutto version was heavy with the toppings.

Bar Douro, London SE1, restaurant review

The catalyst was superchef Nuno Mendes.

In 2015 Mendes, who had been doing wacky superchef food at Viajante, then fusion-tinged, celebrity-friendly food at the Chiltern Firehouse, returned abruptly to his Lisboetan roots and opened Taberna do Mercado, which served steak sandwiches, wobbly custard tarts, grills and petiscos or Portuguese tapas, all in the true lettuce-eating style, with any displays of supercheffery pushed firmly to the margins.

(If we were to stick with the seismological metaphors – which maybe it’s time we quietly stop doing – Taberna do Mercado would be Monte Nuovo, a neat little hill, but an actual hill, in the gigantic caldera called the Campi Flegrei near Naples, which came into being over a single week of quakes and eruptions in 1538).

restaurant review

I’m just off the plane from Lisbon when I find myself (with some difficulty: it’s hidden away in Bankside’s new Flat Iron Square complex) in Bar Douro.

But I’ve come back thrilled at the beauty of the city and starry-eyed about the food, head filled with vaguely erotic thoughts of oozing, whiffy cheeses and nutty, fat-marbled hams, of seafood, sweet and pristine, of alluring chips, yellow from their dip in seething, fragrant local olive oil.

Bar Douro offers boards of both cheeses and cured meats, so we ask if they can do us a half-and-half, which they do happily.

You can do as they do back home and have a meat sandwich – roast pork with serra cheese – for pudding, but Portuguese desserts are lush with egg yolks because the whites were used to starch wimples and headdresses in convents: here, ham-fat-laced abade de priscos and a fine pastel de nata (though it doesn’t need its accompanying cinnamon ice-cream).

Bar Douro, with its high, hard, backless stools, may not be a place to linger as we do, and the counter seating may be awkward in parties of more than three, but among the area’s collection of Turkish dumplings, Chadwick Oven pizzas, Mexican carnitas and ramen from, er, Barcelona, it shines brightest, like a Portuguese Barrafina.