Camino - King's Cross

The Regent Quarter, 3 Varnishers Yard, King’s Cross, London, N1 9FD

It's difficult to know what to do on a bank holiday. Screaming hordes of pushchairs and children descend on everything in London, turning a gentle stroll along the Regent's Canal into a fretful dodge between the shouting, blubbering, spinning, bollard tall tots that teeter on the kerbstone edge between the towpath and the water. It doesn't help that those without children decide it's a good day to attempt a personal best in the canal side stage of the Tour De France.

Gibbering with shell shock after a frenetic early afternoon walk, a restaurant seems the best place to hunker down - eat, drink, and pass the time until the watershed is up and it's safe to venture outside again. Or at least it would, were anywhere serving food on a bank holiday. Perhaps it's not publicised in restaurant circles, but as far as I'm aware the first Monday in May has been in the diary as a holiday for some time. Surely a lucrative day for those in hospitality - a two day Sunday. Time to wheel out that roast again.

It would seem not. Grain Store were only doing a bar menu, with the waitress trying her best  p*ssed off school teacher impression - we sat for ten minutes and didn't get served - while at the Filling Station you can't eat until 6 o'clock. I have money to spend adding inches to my waistline, but clearly nobody wants it.

Thank God for Camino. Open in the afternoon and serving food. Wait though, what's this? We can't sit here? We have to order here? And the kitchen will be shut inexplicably for thirty minutes? A tradition Spanish experience I see. After an early order of various tapas that the chef managed to deliver before his mid-shift nap, we were left waiting over a few drinks, while the lights went out one-by-one and the seemingly competent staff were replaced in a single swoop with every trainee waiter in the North London area. Confusion ruled supreme as food was delivered to the wrong table, eaten, cooked again, and finally arrived, along with half our cutlery but not the rest - that took a second trip.

The food, or at least what was available (how can a tapas bar run out of peppers?), was average at best. The patatas was patatasy, the chorizo chorizoy, the baked noodle and cuttlefish dish bland and uninteresting. Nothing here is spell-binding, nothing magnificent, nothing I'd eat again in any sort of hurry. Perhaps if the staff showed a little more life, competency, or training I could be gentler, but when you have to give a lesson in how to take payment for a bill, you begin to wonder if you should be paying yourself the 10%.

Eyre Brothers - Shoreditch

70 Leonard Street, London, EC2A 4QX

Think of Shoreditch and think of meat by the bucketful, pop-up stalls in car parks, hotels selling coffee, and a mile of Vietnamese restaurants on Kingsland Road. The idea of fine dining is something held further north amongst the pushchairs of Angel or further South amongst the suits of Moorgate. But there are actually plenty of places offering polished silver, black shirted waiters, proper wooden tables, and natural light - Eyre Brothers is one such place. A smart Iberian (read tapas) restaurant on Leonard Street, you’re best visiting when someone else is paying and when you’ve planned a stereotypically Spanish afternoon.

Visiting at lunchtime and hearing a pin or two drop in the restaurant, the bar seems the best place for this agoraphobe. Here you can choose from a short tapas menu that features such delights as slow cooked pig cheeks in red wine. The desire to simply stop there and order five of those dishes is a difficult one to repress, but then they do have casseroled belly pork two rungs down, so it’s a good idea to read on. The meal can be slightly stodgy if you order before the bread basket arrives. The small white rolls are moorish and perfect for wiping around the finished casseroles, soaking up every last drop of the fatty, tomatoey, garlicky goodness. Even after the sobrasada (pork paste on toast) and the pa amb tomaquet (tomatoes on toast), just one more roll was needed to finish wiping each dish clean. 

Pork isn’t actually mandatory at Eyre Brothers and the delicate anchovies, fried peppers, and prawns provided a good palate cleanser between each mouthful of meat. As does a small sip of sherry - that afternoon siesta looking ever more tempting. The prawns arrived nestled between strands of green plants, which I managed to knock deftly aside. I presume this garnish was purely decorative. The boquerones (anchovies) were slightly more challenging, my fat clumsy fingers struggling to retrieve the breakable fish without picking up the accompanying garlic and walnuts - both non-meats, but they tasted surprisingly good.

A place like Eyre Brothers, with it’s refined dishes, crisp white napkins, and lack of craft ale shows that Shoreditch can offer cuisine above that of the half-foot burger, the bucket of diablo wings, and child-sized steak. It’s a taste of things to come, possibly, as the suits from the City edge ever closer to the trendy trendy streets of Silicon Roundabout.

Tramontana Brindisa - Shoreditch

152 Curtain Rd, London, EC2A 3AT

First dates can be excruciating. Sat alone to my left the empty chair of a table for two, a cry for pity from the rest of the room. To my right, both full yet so diametrically opposed that he’d use the table for chess, while she’d use it for lines. No-one was having fun. They should have all gone home; but instead, they stay and persever. She might yet show, he might yet prove to be interesting, and perhaps the bathroom has a nice clean flat surface anyway. 

Someone could make a good TV show out of first dates. Every cringingly embarrassing moment caught on camera and yet more editorially engineered to enhance the effect. Until they do, I’ll just keep watching live dates, safe in the knowledge that when I’m on a date my suave failure to pronounce foreign words of any kind and the slick African themed pocket square protruding from my blazer pocket negate the chance of embarrassment. I am simply far too cool.

Sat between the chess player, the drug addict, and the loner at Tramontana Brindisa, I was overwhelmed and my imagination ran wild. Who knows what libellous backstory I could have constructed for each of them had I ploughed through more glasses of cava without eating dinner. The food, however, was too distracting. Blood red steak and blood red pork (it was supposed to be like that) sat alongside a cheese pasta ‘thing’ - like a lasagne, but just pure cheese - breads, and a variety of leaves. 

As with all tapas, my mind is addled when there is more plate than table in front of my eyes. I pick a spoon or forkful from each and mix the flavours, unable to distinguish between any of them as they melt and swim across my tongue. Pork, steak, cheese; steak, cheese, pork; cheese, pork, steak; broken only by bread and the odd green stalk. A tapas smoothy, with every ingredient good. A lazy review, yes; but certainly true. A creme catalana followed, studded with strawberries; with a bowl of custard, caramel, and the sweetest of all the fruits, how can you go wrong?

I left Tramontana Brindisa with my head spinning slightly from cava, my heart weighed heavy by meats and custard, and my Africa themed pocket square dangling from my pocket. Exactly how you should feel emerging from a good meal. As I wandered past, the loner since joined by a girl, clearly in a relationship of some years, and the other date? Pawn to queen's knight 4.