In the slippery parlance of modern restaurant-speak — a world where “viral” means overhyped and “clubstaurant” is usually code for an unbearable, Dubai-honed money pit — the word Basque tends to be a reliable synonym for bustle and smallness. Someone invokes the rich, gutsy food culture of the separatist borderland between Spain and France, and you are already off and away picturing low farmhouse beams, the giddy clamour of squished bodies at a long pintxo counter, and complex, two-bite miniatures skewered onto toothpicks.
Well, at Ibai, a new restaurant near St Bart’s hospital from Lurra founder Nemanja Borjanović, they have essentially taken this understated Basque formula and pumped it full of creatine. Occupying the rattly, capacious former factory space that was once Lino, it is a restaurant that deals in high gloss and unexpected magnitudes of massiveness. The 80-cover, haute-industrial dining room is big. The prices are big. The flavours — inspired by the French side of the Basque border — are so big they often land with the super-sized abandon of an Olympic opening ceremony.
In fact, it’s arguable that Ibai’s size and palpable, expense account-swinging virility can make it a touch disorienting. Particularly in the context of a post-Covid hospitality landscape still complicated by financial constraints and haphazard office-worker footfall, Borjanović’s newest baby (named after the Basque word for river) feels a little like a big-ticket operation beamed in from a less ruinously brassic age. But, thankfully, all that wad-waving maximalism belies cooking with plentiful thrills, rare sensitivity and a kind of unbuttoned, rugged clarity.
Few dishes embodied this as fully as the early arrivals from the kitchen of head chef Richard Foster (late of Chiltern Firehouse). First came the customary Cantabrian anchovies, smoothly saline and adrift in a fragrant pool of Arbequina olive oil, followed by a teetering Jenga pile of housemade crisps, smoked piparra peppers, and sexy, recumbent sheaves of Noir de Bigorre ham. These opening exclamation points were, it turns out, merely a warm-up act for the genuinely staggering spectacle of the croque Ibai: plumply steamed carabinero prawn, the piercing, crumbed richness of boudin noir and an oozing, melted spill of Tomme de Brebis cheese, clamped between sharply laminated triangles of bread and finished with drizzled raw honey and a sprinkling of espelette pepper. You know how the pensive Carmy Bertazzos of the food world are always telling us that restraint, and judicious subtraction, are the true markers of culinary greatness? Well, this is like a shamelessly over-the-top, butter-basted middle finger to that.
The £95, 1kg Galician blond T-bone was a bovine jigsaw, all hard blackened char and blushing lobes of meat
Maybe, after these towering highs, it was inevitable that things sagged a little. The £95, 1kg Galician blond T-bone (sourced from Txuleta, the game-changing, mature beef distributor that Borjanovic established almost a decade ago) had the drama we had been promised; a bovine jigsaw puzzle, all hard blackened char and succulent, blushing lobes of meat, delivering a ripe, lingering bass note of complex flavour to rival our glasses of a sleek, 2022 Le Chevalier red from Northern Rhône winemaker Patrick Fraser. The issue was that it just felt like far, far too much meat for two people. Yes, it was accompanied by some enjoyable sides — serviceable crisp fries, braised leeks enlivened by a resoundingly brown mustard and caper sauce, a bowl of perky peas and broad beans in an otherworldly drenching of black truffle cream. But the predominant aftertaste, especially thinking of the £30 sirloin steak frites lunchtime special we had spurned, was of having been the victims of canny upselling.
We ended lightly but luxuriously. Two shared scoops of a crisply sweet mountain cider sorbet, spiked with an added shot of rosemary and bay-infused vodka. By then, a sparsely-peopled lunch service had begun to fill with silver-haired businessmen, bead-necklaced teenagers hauled along by their wealthy parents, and black belt lunchers taking a deep sniff from their glasses of Bordeaux.
Ibai’s punchy pricing cannot be blithely hand-waved away but the lasting sense is of a thoroughly impressive paradox. It is a City boy steakhouse with sneakily daring, meticulously sourced food; a bustling, Basque asador in a shiny, sprawled air hangar of a space. And the feeling, fittingly for somewhere predicated on hunks of animal cooked over direct heat, is of slickness, primality and the best sort of throwback.
