Tasca at Câv, Bethnal Green, food review: ‘Flavour fiesta’
A selection of the food on offer. Photograph: courtesy Tasca at Câv
Starting a review with an adage might be pretentious, but here we go: the age-old “too many cooks spoil the broth” is a worry for any pop-up.
Tasca at Câv, a fledgling of only a month, could easily fall into this over-engineered soup, but thankfully sidesteps it with enviable grace.
In a vaulting industrial semi-circle under the clomping of the overground sits Chris Tanner and Edwin Frost’s most recent listening bar and pop-up restaurant space.
Unassuming from the outside, it unfurls on entry to a double-height polytunnel where a white ceiling and dark brown split-painted world envelops you.
Sommelier Sinéad Murdoch has picked a wine list that is 80 per cent female-owned, half Spanish or Portuguese, biodynamic, and sustainable.
Oh what spunky delights await you. Unfortunately/fortunately, my dinner date hates wine, so cocktails it is.
Tangerine highball, Yuza and Aperol kicking a tarantella in your mouth, and across the table, my dill martini is the mossy snog with forest floor that all discerning adults are looking for.
The food reflects the same level of confidence.
Brixham crab shavings sit pretty on two slices of baguette; 10 different varieties of peppercorn pack their punch and are gone all too soon.
Other morsels of miracle are the beetroot and mustia (a Sardinian sheep milk cheese) ricotta, like smoky little beet-red flowers, begging to be tossed into your gnashing jaws.
More bite-sized wonders are the gildas: little loaded cocktail sticks of flavour, worlds away from the bad party food of the 1970s, although looking rather similar. These are designed to wake your mouth up before the incoming flavour fiesta, and they do so amiably with bulbous chartreuse olives and anchovy curls.
All the above are very much on the morsel side of the spectrum so if you’re feeling flush order two each, or three. I mean, why not?
Photograph: courtesy Tasca at Câv
On to the larger plates: Orkney scallops sit in a Basque traditional sauce, a bilbaína (burnt garlic, dried chilies, and Tasca’s own cider vinegar), a bright orange pile of slices giving comforting warmth along with the expected subtle waft of the sea. Wigmore cheesy leeks are in a rather thin sauce with celeriac honey, an almost dessert play on the much-done seasonal veg.
Other fish dishes fair slightly worse, as the monkfish with smoked eel was overpowered by a strong citrus flavour coming from somewhere and even beating out that much-missed eel funk.
For a restaurant focusing heavily on Iberian cuisine, the pink fir potatoes, although looking fancier than their British cousins, were nothing to get excited about.
Throughout this accumulation of tiny licked-clean plates, we were simultaneously exploring the liquid side of Tasca (fittingly meaning bar or tavern in Spain/Portugal) and getting a little giddy doing so.
A plum Manhattan is for those wanting a sweeter fruitier experience. Picante brings fire, and a rattlesnake is as deadly as its namesake, a sweeter and dangerously drinkable margarita. Peach gimlets have Korean soju and monkish Benedictine for depth and again sweetness.
There are plenty of meatier options, but we steered away from these due to my date’s religious leanings.
Black pudding, Jambon beurre Gilda, prawn and pork cachorrinho are all available for you flesh feeders. However, a small word to the wise, these are shallow saucers where the flavour, not the weight, does the talking.
Although the most expensive thing on the menu is £24, the price will creep up alarmingly if you arrive nail-chewingly starving.
Pulled back to the solid world, we are dazzled by the simple dessert list.
A bitter chocolate crema, visually like (dare I say) a cowpat, but with salt and olive oil crafts a very grown-up dessert.
The last one puzzled us both but Sinéad (not for the first time) swooped in to explain. A Bikini is a sweet twist on the Barcelona savoury fan favourite. Iberico ham and tomme de chèvre are “sandwiched” between brioche and cooked. Then in between this rigged deckchair-looking wave is drizzled salted goat’s milk ice cream and maple syrup. All the effort is well worth it for these odd lines of cheesy, meaty melted marvel.
Surrender yourself to Tasca at Câv, you’ll appreciate it.