Los Moros, 15-17 Grape Lane, York YO1 7HU (01904 636834; losmorosyork.co.uk). Small plates £6 – £10.50; large plates £14 – £26; desserts £8. Wines from £25 a bottle
There are terrific people-watching opportunities at Los Moros in York, although only if you get a window seat in the first-floor dining room. Here comes the dickie-bowed tour guide, leading a group of slack-jawed tourists around the bend in the medieval cobbled alley that joins Swinegate to Grape Lane. History records the latter to be a shortening of a filthy and anatomically descriptive name for what used to take place here; one which I would never get past the editors of a family newspaper. Look it up. Here, in the other direction, comes a long, informal parade of chaps in three-piece suits, as if just out of a meeting. Is that the badge of the Rotarians on their lapels? Or are they Freemasons? Hard to tell from up here. But, oh my, look at that explosion of facial hair. There really are some quite magnificent beards in York these days.
This floor show will keep you going until the food arrives, at which point your attention will turn to the table in front of you. Los Moros began life in 2015 as a North African street food stand on the Shambles Market, serving dishes drawing on owner Tarik Abdeladim’s Algerian beginnings, but without being slavishly beholden to the traditions. There are his own boldly hot merguez sausages, served with a cumin aioli. It’s a cunning exercise in spice squared. There are various ways with falafel, or wraps of chicken first marinated in saffron, rosemary and garlic, then grilled and smeared with harissa mayo. The stand quickly became a place of greedy pilgrimage in the city.
In 2018, a regular at the stall, Magdalena Chavez, offered Abdeladim the site that had been her much-loved vegan restaurant, El Piano. He decided to add a bricks-and-mortar business to the street-food operation, which continues to this day. Los Moros is a simple space of Arabesque tiled floors downstairs and stripped boards up above with a little North African art here and there. A soundtrack from bebop to Berber thrums away gently in the background. The menu language seems very much on brand: there are appearances of harissa, sumac and preserved lemons as well as a reference to a tagine. What arrives might not meet your expectations in terms of form, but content-wise it’s all there. Which is a grand way of saying that the food may not all look like the North African dishes you’re used to, but it certainly tastes right. Los Moros was recommended to me by a whole bunch of readers. The readers have good taste.
The list of small plates, priced at between £6 and £10.50, includes “Eastern fried chicken”, and very good deep-fried bird it is too, the pieces of breast bound in a shattering, golden carapace. What locates it geographically is the generous seasoning with sumac, the waft of za’atar and most importantly, the heavy scribble of a mayo enriched with the salty tang of preserved lemons. The non-meat alternative is cauliflower florets taken on the same journey through the deep fat fryer, then topped with a herb-flecked tahini dressing, both pomegranate molasses and seeds and, finally, deep-fried kale. It’s one of those dishes you pick at compulsively, while gossiping shamelessly. Abdeladim’s merguez sausages are on the menu here with cacik, a dip of yoghurt spun through with herbs and finely shredded cucumber. Some merguez can be an admittedly pleasing hit of salt, spice and lanolin. These are dense and almost subtle, until the chilli heat kicks in at the end.
The large plates are priced from the mid-teens to the low 20s, and start with a shakshuka for those who want breakfast for dinner. The chicken tagine will make some people quite cross, those people being the ones who think they have ownership of a dish because they once went on a mini-break to Marrakech, or watched Rick Stein eating one on the telly. They will expect a long-cooked stew, served in an earthenware pot, with a glazed conical lid, like the one they brought home from their mini-break. The Los Moros chicken tagine is not that. It’s a large, crisp-skinned, well-roasted breast, sliced in two and laid across hefty pucks of saffron-spiced potato. There’s a mustard-coloured and deeply savoury broth bobbing with green olives and with more of the salty sour of preserved lemons. It’s a plate of light and sunshine. By contrast a huge serving of long-braised, gravy-rich, fork-tender ox cheek, held back by a circular dam of fluffy cumin and gouda-flavoured mash, is hilariously dark and wintery. It’s where Yorkshire and North Africa meet and decide that, yes, they’re going to get along famously, and would you like to go for a pint?
The dessert list is short but fun. A light cardamom-flavoured chocolate mousse is topped with shards of meringue, whorls of cream, pieces of pistachio sponge, ground pistachios and dribbles of a passion-fruit caramel. Have a few microherbs to finish the look. There’s a lot going on in a very small space. As there is with their take on peach melba. There are dollops of peach gel, raspberries, a raspberry coulis and splodges of cream. The stars though are the “cigars” of deep-fried filo pastry, wrapped around a vanilla-flavoured filling of muhallabieh, a set cream pudding. They demand to be eaten with your fingers. And all of this, delivered by a young and efficient team who seem genuinely keen to make sure you’re having a fine old time. The wine list is mostly French and New World, with no star appearances by wines from, say, Morocco, which does seem an oversight. Then again, they do have their own Los Moros pale ale and pilsner made by Brew York.
Talking of drinks, we stopped off before dinner for a glass or four at 22 Yards, the relatively new wine merchants and bar just opposite York Minster. They sell more than 150 wines to drink in and take home or have delivered via their online shop and wine club. Most impressively, they have around 70 of those wines available by the glass. It starts modestly quaffable, but works itself up to take in over half a dozen champagnes, as well as big names from Burgundy and Bordeaux that you would generally only expect to find available by the bottle. There’s a fun-looking food menu of small and large plates that we didn’t get to try, but we did much admire their chunky, homemade pork scratchings. I think I’ve just come up with a couple more sites for that tour guide to put on their itinerary.
News bites
There’s a new book out for anybody wanting to explore the world of the UK’s Desi pubs, which combine a classic bar offering with food from the Indian subcontinent, just like the Sportsman Club in West Bromwich, which I reviewed in February. Desi Pubs: a Guide to British Indian Pubs, Food and Culture by David Jesudason, tells the story of their development as third spaces for migrant communities from South Asia from the 1960s onwards, and offers a guide to over 200 of them all over the country. It’s available to buy here.
It’s always good not to rush things, so let’s hear it for the world-renowned Grasmere Gingerbread company in the Lake District, which has opened its second shop a mere 169 years after opening the first. Grasmere Gingerbread was originally sold from Church Cottage, the home of baker Sarah Nelson, which later became the Grasmere shop. The new outlet is 20 minutes away in Hawkshead and is open every day from 10am to 4.30pm, offering coffee and a range of Cumbrian products alongside the famed gingerbread (grasmeregingerbread.co.uk).
Margate’s GB-PIZZA-CO, which was forced to close as a result of an arson attack last October, finally reopens next month. The opening menu will include a ‘no smoke without fire’ pizza, topped with nduja, chilli honey, Ashmore chilli cheese and red chillies. The monthly changing charity pizza will also return, with £1 from each purchase going to the Brain Tumour Charity in memory of Rachel Seed, one of the original founders, who died of a brain tumour in 2018 (greatbritishpizza.com).
