Lurra - London

I had been reading about Lurra, the new sister restaurant to Donostia, located across the street in Marylebone. We started with cocktails at Seymour Parlour, the new bar inside the recently opened Zetter Hotel in Marylebone. Lurra was tasty, particularly their delicious Galician Beef and their stuffed squid. Their G&Ts are also gorgeous. A good spot for tasty Spanish food in Marylebone and a bit fancier than Donostia.

This is the second restaurant from husband and wife team, Nemanja and Melody, on Seymour Street in Marylebone. Donostia has proved quietly popular so it made sense for them to open another just opposite called Lurra, meaning ‘land’ in Basque. It’s one of the more beautiful spaces I’ve been to recently; the overall look is like that of a millionaire’s apartment – a millionaire who clearly knows a lot about design. We were seated at the counter on comfy (but slightly wobbly) stools overlooking the tiny, buzzing kitchen.

With over two years on the clock and an accumulation of more than 250 posts, my blogging journey is something that I’ve never really reflected on until now. You know when you look at something so much that you stop seeing the ways in which it could be different, and when you get so immersed in the smaller details, that you forget to step back and look at the big picture? It’s only recently that I’ve had a re-evaluation, and decided to gut and refresh my little space on the web. I’ve deleted almost 100 of my very first posts and posts that just needed to go. I’m also knee deep in the process of reformatting, which involves going through every post that I’ve written individually and overhauling it.

It makes sense that a restaurant built around the concept of extreme specialisation, that focuses on just one or two dishes and nothing else, fails or succeeds on the basis of those one or two dishes being any good. When it works, specialisation allows a kitchen to focus on refining and improving the food to the point where you end up with something as glorious as Kanada-Ya's tonkotsu ramen, or the lobster roll from Burger Lobster. When it doesn't, you end up with any number of lazy burger joints that have no greater ambition than to copy what someone else is doing only worse and for more money. And God knows we've got enough of those already.

Oh spanien, I love you. I and my partner spend a few weeks in spanien every year and at a place especially – jerez. it is not baskenland in any way, but there are some similarities and that is its Spanish root. from the heavenly selections of meat and fish, huge selection of unique weeps and during the summer whole (almost) of spanies is totally sun-contained. the real difference between Basque and Andalusian cuisine is more about the mixes of ingredients, family traditions, various cuts of meat and seasonal differences in seafood and vegetables. in the north they expect many snacks on sticks (pintxos) and in the south they are always served on tellern (tapas). I don't spend enough time in the baskenland – but I plan to change everything in the future.