BAR 44
Westgate Street, Cardiff
029 2009 0444 / www.bar44.co.uk/cardiff
Bar 44 are an ambitious micro-chain, this much is obvious. Their ‘tapas y copas’ restaurants now number three: when the Cardiff branch opened last summer, it followed Bar 44 Penarth (founded in 2013) and Cowbridge (dating back to 2002). You get the feeling there’ll be more to follow. It seems they have ice cream dreams, too: our vivacious server claims they’re trying to sell their salted almond caramel ice cream recipe to a company with deep pockets. I don’t blame them: it’s absolutely stunning.
That was the denouement, though, and our food this evening was so consistently great it warrants beginning at the beginning. Even if, in understood tapas style, our manoeuvring through the dishes was somewhat ramshackle. Huge, meaty Gordal olives and sourdough with splendid tomatoes and bucolic slices of jamon stoked the gustatory fires. The first de facto tapas to arrive is Monte Nebro, a goat’s cheese aged for 30 days and replete with a penicillin rind – which sounds vaguely daunting, if healthy, but gives it a blue cheese-like flavour of matchless depth.
The raves keep coming: pickled mackerel flirts with sweet and sour receptors alike and comes with escabeche that’s almost like a deconstructed chutney. Morcilla (black pudding) is dense, rich and smoky as Laphroaig and is paired with a hen’s egg whose white tastes like custard. Lamb neck with beef and pork chistorra (sausages) deliver a comparable dose of the meat hits. A single, sizeable, not easily shareable but reportedly superb sea bass fillet perches on a cylinder of Russian salad. And calçots – Catalan spring onions the size of leeks – are baked and charred, eaten with fingers and water bowls, although three of these Triffids is overkill.
In addition to the sainted salted caramel concoction, a ‘Spanglish trifle’ is brought out for dessert. Once I’ve finished invoking the ghost of Percy Thrower and dug through the ridiculously deep chocolate topsoil, it’s good, especially a jelly that tastes tangibly of the hedgerow. All that and a very decent bottle of viñas del vero house red comes to £70 for two. It’s absolutely worth treating yourself, as Bar 44’s output is a country mile beyond generic tapas, (micro)chain or not.
words and photos NOEL GARDNER