When arriving to dine at the second London restaurant of a man known as “The Godfather of Spanish cuisine in the UK”, expectations are pretty high. José Pizarro’s eateries have sprung up across the city, each one serving his acclaimed tapas but putting its own spin on the ambience. At Pizarro on Bermondsey Street, the atmosphere is casual but classy, with a combination of simple wooden tables and a beautifully tiled bar.
It is a very comfortable space. The room is large and quite busy, but each table feels like it exists in its own little bubble. The happy hubbub of background noise makes the restaurant homely, not overly noisy. The service style reflects this sense of comfort, with smiley, enthusiastic waitstaff who immediately made us feel very well taken care of. Upon arrival, we were served some Cava - a delicious, personal touch which showed us from the very beginning that our enjoyment was an absolute priority.
We decided to keep it simple with our choices from the Pica Pica menu, and sample some padrón peppers (£6.50) alongside the croquetas de jamón (£9.50). The padrón peppers arrived in a piping hot heap, freshly and generously salted. A good plate of pimientos is a solid start to any meal, and whilst it seems difficult to get them wrong, Pizarro demonstrated that you can definitely get them right. The croquetas were melt-in-mouth delicious, and mercifully plentiful - one dish came with six little croquetas, which felt, as compared to many similarly-pitched restaurants, like a surprisingly generous amount of bang for your almost-ten bucks. The croquetas are, in my opinion, a must-order.
Alongside our Pica Pica, we enjoyed the beetroot salad (£8) from the Starters to Share. This, again, was good value: the dish that arrived was pretty substantial. It was tasty, but I got the sense that it didn’t quite know what it was trying to be. The almond sauce — a slightly grainy, nondescript layer of creaminess coating the bowl — removed the dish from the realm of traditional salads, but didn’t conclusively place it anywhere else. It seems counterintuitive to wish to have received less food, but I wonder if this dish would work better if it were a bit smaller, and one didn’t take enough bites to start questioning what kind of thing they were eating.
If the beetroot was a slight miss, however, the gamba roja (£14) was a total hit. This was a sight to behold on the plate - maybe twenty tiny prawns in a gorgeous long line atop a tomato and spicy oil base. The true fishiness of the fish was sufficiently evocative of mediterranean holidays to take us far away from our London Bridge setting. Paired with a chilli margarita (“it just says margarita on the menu,”, our waitress tells us, “but I like to tell people that it’s an option"), the salt and spice and acidity was perfection. This dish felt individual and exciting, and would definitely be one to order again.
Whilst we had been told that the dishes would come as and when they were ready, we got a little twitchy in the time it took for our ox cheek cannelloni (£30) to arrive. Perhaps this was a blessing though — this was another substantial dish, and having waited a while meant that we’d built up an appetite for it. One singular cannellono (?) as opposed to many cannelloni, this was creamy and filling, with tasty ox cheek that was maybe just a little too prone to disintegration to make for a relaxing dining experience.
After this, we enjoyed another break whilst we waited on our desserts. The salted caramel and chocolate tart (£8.50) was a triumph for my dining companion, for whom this is an ideal dessert option. For me, I loved the flan con nata (£5), which was smooth and creamy and delicious. We finished on a real high, feeling satisfyingly full and very contented with our night.
There was so much to love on the Pizarro menu, and the staff were brilliantly warm, seeming genuinely invested in how we were doing. Not every single dish would score full marks, but the range of options is undeniably exciting and extensive, and a sense of simple enjoyment of food permeates the whole space. José Pizarro is doing big things - catch some of them on Bermondsey Street.
