There is a Basque-inspired restaurant in London called Andanza. It’s in Bermondsey, not far from my favourite example of Guinness Trust buildings, and I’d walked past numerous times but not ever ventured in. I don’t really know why because the menu looked promising: a collection of tapas and pintxos, some of it classic, and other dishes that might be London-centric takes on playful Spanish beer food.
The restaurant is also quite beautiful to look at, as many buildings are in that busy pocket of town below London Bridge: green tiles and embossed windows from the outside; in the dining room, if you can call it that, high wooden tables hosting casual bar-style napkin dispensers, short glasses for small beers and an open kitchen behind a repurposed church pew.
Andanza is the work of restaurateurs Danny Kwiatkowski and Carl Botwright, who own the upmarket Rose pub opposite. It didn’t make sense to see the building, formerly a bookies, sitting dormant, so they snapped it up and named it Andanza, which translates as “fortune” or “fate” in Spanish. They leave the lower halves of walls to remain scuffed, as in the busy bars of San Sebastián, and salvaged blue and white tiles cover the floor.
On draught, there’s Mahon lager. And there’s plenty of vermouth. I didn’t take much notice of the wine list because my eyes were immediately drawn to the Txakoli, a dry, slightly sparkling wine from northern Spain that is traditionally poured from a height to be partnered with pintxos. It is an excellent wine, light and fresh with green apples and lemon, and I should think it will have its day in the sun in the UK before long.
The food. Far better than you might expect. This is mostly down to the fact the head chef is Paulina Irzyk, formerly head chef at Lurra, credited as the first UK restaurant to start serving Galician blond beef, and that there’s a master ham carver in situ: Javier Cerro was brought in from Bar Tozino, another Spanish restaurant in Bermondsey.
The menu is irreverent – food I would expect everyone to love. And so there’s jamon Ibérico with miniature breadsticks; pork belly, mostly just the fat, sliced thinly and sprinkled with smoky paprika; and a changing roster of croquetas that arrive sitting on a dense aioli thanks to a generous amount of egg yolk.
Pintxos too – bar snacks served on little slices of bread – though upmarket and a little outlandish to lure big-spending Londoners: crab mayonnaise is one such; a take on fish and chips, with fried potatoes and a battered hunk of hake another.
See also an impossibly tender lobster claw on a buttery crumpet; a mini cheeseburger cooked rare and sitting beneath a long, salty piparras pepper; and warm morsels of steak with caramelised onions on sourdough. All of these next to fine green beans swimming helplessly in romesco.
Importantly, none of the tapas or pintxos, which aren’t small, by the way, are over £10. There are larger dishes – brilliant I’m sure – but I didn’t bother with any of those.
There is something else enjoyable about Andanza: it is pretty much always full of Chinese tourists. A major influencer in China visited and posted on an app called the Little Red Book – Instagram, essentially – and sparked a recurrent wave of visitors eager to try the same dishes they did. It’s been the same for four years, and nearly all get the same dishes the influencer did.
It means the Andanza team has to keep the foie gras pintxos and the fried chicken with hot honey on the menu for fear of upsetting one of the restaurant’s foremost groups of customers.
I can’t imagine there are many readers of these pages in China; those of you in or sometime visitors to London: follow suit.
