The East Midlands The world on your plate

Date Published:

15/09/2008

Map user, Kirstie, says of Iberico World Tapas: "Fantastic food, knowledgeable and friendly staff, amazing location, beautifully decorated. Brilliant dining experience." And as I found out, there's not a pair of castanets in sight

Iberico World Tapas is tucked away underneath Nottingham's Halls of Justice in what was once a prison-holding cell for the county court above. Thankfully the décor's a lot better now - simple clean lines, light cream walls and dark woods. The only nod to Iberia is perhaps the Alhambra style mirror around the edges of the room. How refreshing not to see the castanets, fans and stuffed donkeys normally found in tapas restaurants. But then, as the name suggests, Iberico casts its net far and wide in what it defines as tapas.

I'm with owners, Daniel Lindsay and Ashley Walter. The boys opened Iberico just over three years ago (they also own the World Service restaurant in the town). They're well travelled chaps and have picked key flavours from around the globe that work in small, shareable portions. By keeping world tapas separate from Spanish influenced dishes, they avoid the pitfalls of 'fusion food' so many places fell into a few years back. The chef, Jacque Ferreira, is a South African who trained in Japan (he's currently on holiday so sous-chef, Val Petiteau, is at the helm). "The concept was built around the space and we were lucky enough to gain a chef who could do that level of cooking," says Daniel.

Small but perfectly formed

And so to the menu - "The standard of food here means people almost treat it like a tasting menu," says Ashley. We share some padron peppers, small and green and famous for one occasionally being blow-your-head-off hot. "Apart from these, there's not a lot of 'green' on our menu," laughs Daniel. A waitress comes past with two square wooden plates; one contains a selection of Spanish meats, the other, cheeses. What's nice is that each cheese comes with a compliment - fruit bread, quince jelly, that sort of thing. They look fantastic.

We move to the kitchen where Val demonstrates two dishes for me; the first is mackerel with pickled fennel, blood orange sauce and rock chives. The fennel bulbs are finely sliced, and pickled in 1l of rice wine vinegar to 1kg of sugar. He preps the plate with the sauce and fennel, griddles the mackerel and then plates up with the rock chives - simple and tasty. The second dish is belly pork. It's vac-packed and cooked in a water bath at 58˚C for 60 hours. When it's needed it's flash fried, skin side down, in a hot pan and finished in the oven. This means that the flesh is very moist and tender, but the skin is nice and crispy. Val serves this with a simple bean salad made from edamame beans, haricot beans and tomato concasse. The beans are seasoned and dressed with parsley and oil and the sliced pork has a final trickle of dark chicken stock with a touch of quince in, over it. Again, just a couple of flavours working together.

It's clear that this multi-national and multi-talented team is blending fine dining standards with the shareable and grazing elements that make tapas, and other food such as sushi, so popular. As Kirstie said, it's a brilliant dining experience.

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