Morito

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http://www.morito.co.uk

morito - review

You squeeze through the door into the bustling little room and take your seat at a tiny table, crammed in with a couple of mates, on which is a basket of those weird little dog biscuits that the Spanish love and a roll or two, and you look up at the white board over the counter and you grab a guy and you point up at it and you go, “I’ll have one of those, and one of those, and two of those, and – how big is that?

And then the food starts coming: tiny puntillitas, the babiest of baby squid, no bigger than spiders, deep-fried, dry and salty; three discs of freshest scallop in albariño; gözleme, a soft flatbread served hot in triangles with feta and spinach; some stunning fried chickpeas, like crispy corn snacks, with chopped tomato; chunkily chopped raw venison, rich and ferrous, barely seared with a piquillo pepper sauce; beetroot borani, which is a pale pink, beetrooty fool (why do I think of Ed Balls?)

studded with feta and walnuts; a giant, dark brown, rather oily kibbe, exploding with ground lamb and pine nuts; deep-fried Cornish anchovies as big as sardines, incredibly fresh, to be snarfed down heads and all; some okay croquetas de jamón; an unusual, pale, crunchy tabouleh; a fold of ham on tomato toast and oh, oh God, the chicarones de Cadiz, which were little dark chunks of pork belly, slow-roasted with cumin and lemon, that were sweet and dry and sour and salty; and some big juicy lamb chops charred at the edges and then, then the stand-out dish.

Not just the stand-out but the stand-up dish, as in stand up and applaud: for the fideos with prawns, saffron and aïoli, which are little inch-long strands of vermicelli-like pasta, cooked in a serious prawn stock and served with some lean, lithe little prawns and a splodge of fantastic, light, not-too-garlicky aïoli – is a perfect thing.

The very best way to eat pasta: not in a great big giant bowl of survival carbs that bore the hell out of you before you’ve even started, but just a couple of mouthfuls of firm, sticky, mouthfilling richness.

welcome to morito hackney road

Best Spanish Breakfast in London Morito Exmouth Market - olive ...

Breakfast in Spain is an important occasion when friends and acquaintances gather in tapas bars over churros and pan con tomate, with a strong coffee and sometimes even a glass of wine before 9am.

Morito on Exmouth Market is bringing Spanish breakfast traditions and rituals to London.

Since opening in 2010, Morito’s cooking has focused on Spanish and Middle Eastern dishes with unique twists, and this continues on the breakfast menu.

From 8am on weekdays and 9am on weekends, try dishes such as the Full Catalan, inspired by the flavours of Catalunya – butifarra (spiced sausage), morcilla (Spanish blood pudding) and crisp migas (breadcrumbs) with fried egg and roast tomatoes.

Morito’s breads and baked goods have made a name for themselves over the years, and the chefs have ensured that the repertoire has been extended to breakfast bakes – super crisp and flaky coca bread for the pan con tomate, homemade sourdough (make your own here with our expert guide) for the revueltos eggs, and fluffy saffron and almond buns to take away.

Fay Maschler reviews Morito: The flavour of summer comes east ...

That blameless white pillowy cheese mizithra served with the wild greens called horta; dakos (barley rusks) gently knuckling under their sopping topping; slices of bottarga gleaming like amber; rabbit haunted with cinnamon; mealy fava with grilled octopus; floppy chips acting as garnish; mastic from Chios lending its resinous notes and enhanced whiteness to dessert — for someone who loves Greece (e g, me) this Cretan bias to the menu at Morita in Hackney is as seductive and stirring as a Psarantonis melody.

The chef, who has come from Sam and Samantha Clark’s Moro, is Marianna Leivaditaki, whose family owns a restaurant in Crete.

On the first visit some structure is imposed but on the second occasion a first course of cod with spring garlic  — turbot on the plancha sadly having run out — gets the meal off to an odd start when pan con tomate, here beautifully daintily constructed, can and should do that.

Oloroso sherry and sweet stewed onions lend a faintly sumptuous quality to matter-of-fact cod and the garlic a bit of naughtiness but it stays an odd way to be obliged to start a meal, especially when the remains of the powerful negroni — a particularly effective one — would have worked much better with, say, bottarga on its lightly toasted bread.

Sauces that come with some of the dishes such as the peppery almond and orange mojo with asparagus and the pistachio purée let down by juices that surround chargrilled quail with pomegranate, deserve a more bounteous serving of bread than the five tiny seeded slices served for £2.50.

Restaurant: Morito, London EC1 | John Lanchester | Food and drink ...

Here, the first wave of 1980s tapas bars concentrated on the traditional British strengths of drinking our heads off and being charged £8 in return for the chef opening a tin of anchovies.

British tapas have moved on from there, but maybe not enough yet, so every genuine attempt at the Spanish version of tapas is a good deed.

And Spanish tapas have moved on, too, in the direction of more ambitious and innovative cooking, and funkier locations, within the traditional tapas format: "nuevo tapas", they call it.

Morito is a tapas bar right next door to the famously successful Moro in Clerkenwell; it's run by the same people, Sam and Sam Clark, and occupies a spot that used to belong to the legendarily good Spanish deli Brindisa.

All were delicious – the scallop in albariño sauce especially so – but we did feel the portions were on the very small side of small, and you need to order a lot of these tapas dishes to make a meal.