Eyre Brothers

Sometimes, restaurants survive in the strangest places. A few months ago, on my way to a meeting in Shoreditch (of all places...) I stumbled across Eyre Brothers on Leonard Street, near Old Street tube station.

Hmm, I thought to myself. This place looks interesting - but why isn't it crowded? After walking back and forth across the front door at several different times of the day, including lunch and early dinner (I had a lot of meetings), and discovering that it was never really very crowded, I decided to give it a try. And I'm really glad that I did.

Eyre Brothers
70 Leonard Street
London EC2A 4QX
+44 (0) 20 7613 5346

The restaurant is split into a dining area and a drinking area. A long bar stretches the length of the room. You can eat a full three course meal in the dining area, or sit in the drinking area, drink a lot and nibble a choice of tapas from the menu scrawled in chalk on the boards above the bar. I've done both, and both times I had a lot of fun.

First, full-scale dining. The food is Iberian in conception, and yes, that includes Portuguese. No surprise, as the eponymous chef and front of house, David and Robert Eyre, grew up in Mozambique. The co-head chef is João Cleto.

On my visit with the Pretty Lady, I had sliced octopus drizzled with paprika and olive oil to start, grilled lomo de pata negra (loin of a very tasty breed of pig) with roast potatoes as a mains, and a saffron creme brulee. All were extremely tasty, although I felt very guilty eating the octopus (they're amazingly cute and intelligent when alive, and you can actually play with them underwater if you don't frighten them away). There was a great deal of paprika in both the octopus and the lomo, but the sweet heat of Spanish pimenton is something I can't get enough of anyway. Perfectly boiled and thinly sliced octopus and soft, slightly rare, flavourful iberico - what could be better?

I can't remember what the Pretty Lady had to eat, as she actually enjoyed my choices a lot more, especially the saffron creme brulee. It was another one of those "aha!" ideas - simple, yet utterly delicious. Saffron and vanilla together are extremely tasty.

On another visit, we started by swigging sherry at the drinking area (they have several bottles, ranging from dry Inocente and Tio Pepe to sweet Pedro Ximenez, with every shade of dryness in between). Then we moved on to tapas - chorizos de picantes, prawns sizzled with garlic and chilli, fried peppers (pimentos de padron) and a salt cod tortilla. The tortilla was the best I've ever tasted, much better than the stuff available even at Barrafina, or even in Spain. Light, just holding together, the egg just set and flavourful from the salt cod. Perfection.

Eyre Brothers isn't usually very crowded, even on Friday nights at 7 pm. The staff tell me that it's due to the slightly out of the way location, but people in the know do turn up here and enjoy the food, the wine and the friendly staff. As I will in the future.

Scores:

14 July 2008: TFQ = 26, CS = 27, S = 16, AD = 8, VfM = 6. Total = 83 points.

What does this mean?