Tapas? Who's Asking!

Preferred Location : Sky Market

Where we ended up : A restaurant which I cannot even pronounce the name or read the menu - "Tramontana Brindisa"

After arranging to meet a friend on Tuesday night,

I was happily surprised to find that she had a perfect little restaurant up her sleeve for us to try and for me to blog about.

It was called the Sky Market.

After getting lost several times, due to a rather crumbled printed map and without the aid of google maps, which conveniently decided to not work. We finally found it and just our luck it happened to be closed! Perfect.

So there we were two lost rangers stranded in London Bridge, wondering where to go and what to do.

UNTIL...

we stumbled across a lovely chiseled gentleman called Joe (his name actually was Joe!).

Joe if you are reading this, please do not hesitate to call me. 

Anyway Joe recommended we head to this pub called the Minories, which was situated just below Algate Station and according to him was

"just over the bridge, a quick five mintue walk"

WELL JOE, let me tell you, five minutes my ass!

 The walk over the bridge alone, was longer than five minutes.

 However, the view over London was beautiful and thinking about it I don't think I have ever walked over London Bridge before and it did lead us to some interesting conversations about the best ways to haul your self off the bridge. Concluding its all about the way one lands:

CORRECT

INCORRECT

So after what seemed like forever and all our hopes were drowned in locating the pub, our eyes fell on the Minories.

And he was right it was literally underneath the train tracks.

Now I'm not going to sit here and rave about this pub because in the end its a pub. And I don't really appreciate pubs like they should be because I don't enjoy drinking beer or ale.

YET...

it was overall an enjoyable place to sit down and have a drink, from what I could see there were a large selection of beers/ales and as a bonus they had my favourite rose wine - Zinfandel. Additionally the footie was on, a plus for the "lads" out there AND every few minutes as the trains ran overhead it caused the whole building to shake and gyrate. I felt like I was in WW2, chilling in a bomb shelter.

After finishing our drink, we were back in the same predicament, where to go eat.

 I made a quick call to Paris, to give us a recommendation or find us at least somewhere to try.

She quickly looked on our faviourite website nudge and off we went to Tramontana Brindisa

If you have not heard of this website then you need to go to it NOW- it has all the new restaurants, bars, clubs, pop up shops in London in one website.

http://thenudge.com/

Tramontana Brindisa is a newish spanish tapas restaurant in Shoreditch. There are a few more scattered around the rest of London.

 Just letting everyone know, my friend and I, walked all the way from London Bridge to Shoreditch ....in heels!

The menu was half english, half spanish, half I have no fricking clue what it says!

There were around five sections to the menu:

Tapas de la casa

Picoteo
Platitos Brindisa
Arroces Tramontana
Postres de la casa

Say What...

The prices did not seem too bad overall, each dish was 6-8 quid, but some of the dishes, for example the rice dish was 20 quid per person...it did contatin lobster, but come on!

OUR ORDER:

Grilled Lamp Chops

Pasta with prawns and cuttlefish (Fideua de sepia)

Potato stuffed with cheese and a duck egg (Patatas Tramontana)
Pepper stuffed with veggies (Pimiento de piquillo relleno)

First thing to note the the portions were too small for my liking

Look at this

We paid 8 quid for these lamb chops and were expecting a few more than two. Saying that they were tasty!

 There "were" three stuffed peppers,

BUT sheer hunger caused us to forget all photo blogging responsibilities

The pasta dish was big, i'll give them that, however it said it came with prawns (two prawns)

....CHEAP

The dish was ok - slightly bland, we both agreed it needed more seasoning.

I was just about to take this photo and they all turned to look at me with eyes like "who are you", so in sheer panic I yelled "Im a blogger" and sprinted out

VERDICT:

• If you like to eat but have limited funds don't come here
• If you have money to spend and want to try some speciality Spanish dishes give it ago - apparantly this restaurant has one of the largest range of spanish cheeses around.
• Staff were friendly and smily - very attentive :)
• Lively Environment
• Nice selection of wine - irrelevant to me because I only order the cheapest!

Here is the website and menu if you want to go and try for yourself some Spanish Tapas

http://www.brindisa.com/restaurants/tramontana-brindisa-shoreditch/

"ADIOS AMIGOS!"