In this post-Christmas detoxification our initial attempts at decreasing our considerable turkey-inflated girth have proven futile. After all, how can one truly RoF about town whilst dining solely on small garden salads and tap water? We were in quite a quandary as to what to do.... until we had that thought-shower of tapas.

Tapas, with it's small plates full of favour, is surely the detox-er's best friend? It's incredibly tasty and, because of the portion size, we can lie to ourselves and think it must be low in fat and calories (after all detoxing is mainly a mental battle).







A Spanish foodie pirate

Thus, with glee and merriment several weeks too late, we ventured to Westbourne Grove (one of our favourite groves) in order to visit El Pirata Detapas (the Tapas Pirate apparently). You may already have heard of the place as it has an excellent reputation - and its handsome chef has also been busy plugging away on TV shows such as Ramsey's Best Restaurants and Masterchef: The Professionals.


The food was magnificent. Seriously. We went in hoping to lose weight but the burden of fantastic taste, excellent cooking, great combinations and pure greed meant we were never going to manage it. We had fantastic calamari squid, carpaccio of octopus, peppers, cured meats, braised pork cheeks and a fantastic paella/risotto type thing with squid ink.

The kitchen here has a clearly deserved reputation for turning out inspired dishes - taking innovative approaches to traditional recipes and using hitherto unpopular produce (e.g. cheap pork cheeks). Not just that, but they also thrown in some fantastic wizardry and use the most modern of modern cooking techniques that Heston would be proud of.

In short, tapas sounds like it would help our mission to detox, but it has only made us all the more hungry for such fantastic cooking. Best of all, they do an amazing value lunch set menu - if only RoF Towers would re-locate...

http://www.elpiratadetapas.co.uk/