No reservations, no tables, just a counter with cooks. And now OFM readers have voted the London restaurant the best in Britain
If you want to book at the OFM Readers’ Restaurant of the Year, you’re out of luck. You can’t. At Barrafina, Adelaide Street, just south of London’s Covent Garden, it’s first come first served. Executive chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s an important part of it,” she says, of the queue that builds up here, both lunch and dinner, full of people eager to land one of the prized red-leather-topped stools at the counter. “You come through that door and it’s like being in Spain. You can hear the chefs shouting orders at each other, you can see the food being cooked and you can smell it.”
Ah yes, the food. This Barrafina is one of three. Mohacho opened the first with her business partners Eddie and Sam Hart in London’s Soho a short walk away in 2007. But she freely admits her favourite menu is here. “A decade ago, when we opened on Frith Street, I really wasn’t that brave with the cooking,” she says now. “I needed to find the confidence to do the food I wanted to do. I had to get to know the customers and understand that they were willing to try these things.”
Related: Cookery masterclass: Nieves Barragán Mohacho
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