Railway arch paradise: Parrillan’s terrace
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)I genuinely thought it was a wind up at first. Late on at Parrillan Borough Yards, stuffed and yet still weighing up what I made of it all, I asked if we could have the remnants of our veal shank wrapped up to go. “Yes,” said our server, hesitantly. “But you’ll have to sign something first. Just to say that we’re no longer liable when food leaves the premises.”
Friends, it was absolutely not a wind up. And so it came to pass that my trip to this vaunted opening — a blockbusting, white-hot and undeniably alluring outpost of Barrafina’s tabletop grilling spin-off — ended with the boundless glamour of, erm, health-and-safety paperwork.
Let me be clear: though the doggy bag disclaimer was a new one on me, it obviously makes some sense (modern restaurant reputations are too valuable to be left open to improperly refrigerated leftovers and a stricken diner looking for someone to sue). But, even so, something about the coldness of scribbling a waiver to get a foil-wrapped bit of meat spoke to my light befuddlement in the face of an otherwise very impressive evening. Which is to say that Parrillan, for all its poised live fire cooking and rugged Iberian good looks, can feel a little like it walks a fine line between the slick and the brusquely transactional. An impression not helped by hurriedly trained servers who haven’t got much of a clue what’s actually in the dishes they’re plonking in front of you.
Still, the allure is not to be glossed over. In contrast to the OG Parrillan in Kings Cross, this reimagined follow-up decisively shifts the emphasis from punter experimentation to chef skill. The eponymous mini parrilla grills are now a terrace-only add-on (I spotted only one table indulging) and beyond the outdoor area — a sheltered railway arch paradise of blue-and-white Mallorcan ikat chairs — it is clear that the long, smoke-wreathed open kitchen is very much at the heart of things.
Lomo Ibérico got us off to a suitably premium start: fanned petals of high-grade swine with a deep, shuddering salinity and sweetness. Butifarra de perol — an unexpectedly soft, coarse-ground sausage aboard fresh peas and an intense bacony broth — was an ode to spring freshness and textural interplay achieved through pointed undercooking. Esqueixada de serviola (a torn salad of raw fish arrayed with orange segments, pulverised tomatoes and more) resembled a kind of ceviche, with bright citrus notes and fatty seafood fighting an enthralling battle across the palate.
Lomo Ibérico got us off to a suitably premium start: fanned petals of high-grade swine with a deep, shuddering salinity and sweetness
You can see here a broader tussle between Parrillan’s two selves; between austere, tapas-adjacent dishes that feel closely aligned with Barrafina (unimpeachable pan con tomate; a pleasant but very small asparagus dish that somehow costs £15) and the showy, high-impact creations (the fateful wood-fired veal shank, which comes with plumes of rosemary-scented smoke) that also bespeak a place where the peach-spiked white sangrias flow like water. I liked elements of both these approaches. Yet there were times when the construction and price of some of the simpler numbers — griddled, creamily tender lamb sweetbreads were £22 and crying out for an accompanying sauce — jarred beside the more expressive moments.
Either way, if you are smart, then your lasting impression will be the shared pudding already colonising swathes of Instagram: a whole pineapple, hollowed-out, refilled with a pineapple-flecked crema catalana (the Spanish crème brûlée) and finished with a custom burner, like something dreamt up by a team of flamboyant blacksmiths. It is abominably good; an exuberant hit of sun-soaked escapism that alights, decisively, on Parrillan’s true identity. I would say that it’s worth signing another disclaimer for — but that would be to pretend that it were humanly possible to not finish every deliriously enjoyable scrap.
