Almeida Restaurant and Bar, 30 Almeida Street, London N1 (020 7616 8060). Tapas for two, including drinks and service, £45
Brace yourselves: at some point over the next 700 words I am going to say some nice things about a Terence Conran restaurant. After that I will probably have a long lie down. Mind you, I'm only going to say some nice things, not a whole bunch of them. That's the problem with his gaffs. They always manage to live down to my expectations. There's something about his signature gastrodomes - sleek London places such as Mezzo and Quaglinos - which feels so terribly calculating. It's a design and build approach, the barrenness of which permeates down to the plate.
This applies to all the Conran places I have tried, bar the Orrery, the Michelin-starred flagship of the empire, which has long been dominated by the character of its talented chef, Chris Galvin. Recently, Galvin stepped away from the Orrery's kitchen to become the Conran Group's executive chef, which has to bode well. One of his first projects has been the setting up of a tapas menu at Almeida in London's Islington, a newer Conran place specialising in regional French cooking.
Immediately you may spot a classic non sequitur: what is a joint specialising in regional French cooking doing offering a tapas menu? Unless, of course, we are to regard that place just south of the Pyrenees as merely another region of France. Enough with the sarcasm. Most of the dishes on the 15-strong list cost just £2; none is more than £3. At those prices they deserve to be judged on their merits.
The tapas menu is served only in the bar, a deep dug-out box of a space, its blood-red walls tiled with black-and-white photographs. It feels a little like a club-class lounge. However, some of the food - and here are the nice things I promised - is really rather good. Chief among them is the pork belly: two substantial squares, with a crisp skin and bathed in paprika-infused oil. It would be a lovely thing to eat at any price. At £2 from a Conran restaurant it's remarkable. Likewise, the serving of Serrano ham for £3 was very generous and served room-temperature warm as it should be. Three oysters at a pound-a-piece is no strain on the wallet. I also liked the generous portion of silky anchoiade, a paste of anchovies, olive oil, garlic and lemon juice with enough toasts to do it justice.
Here my encouraging words end because there weren't enough of these dishes to impress. My companion Martin, who has eaten a lot of tapas, put it perfectly: there is a point, he said, when inventive tapas dishes shade into being Surbiton dinner party canapés. And some of these did, particularly a roast tomato wrapped in Serrano ham and a single anchovy fillet, served on a tiny crouton with a curl of raw shallot. Mini chorizo sausages, instead of discs cut from a full round, just missed the point; from chorizo I want the seared, caramelised flavour of the cut side.
There were two other problems. The first was that of a list of 15 dishes - short for tapas, particularly as it included olives and salted almonds - four were off. Then there was the wine issue. Sure, they had a good list of sherries, but not a single Spanish wine on the bar list. I asked the cheerful waiter if they had any Riojas on the main restaurant list. They had run out of the one costing £30-plus, he said. The other cost £60-something. What's all that about? It is this kind of thing, the sense that someone somewhere is trying it on, which makes me inherently suspicious of Conran's restaurants. Even allowing for that pork belly, what none of this does is make a cogent argument for eating tapas at a Conran restaurant.
