**Crisis? What crisis?**
Looking around the vast room at Legado, the new Shoreditch restaurant from the great Spanish chef Nieves Barragan Mohacho, you wouldn’t guess that the hospitality industry is facing its toughest ever test. The place is packed, the bare brick and concrete walls barely able to contain the mighty, joyous hubbub, and the sense, in here at least, that all is well in the world.
Barragan Mohacho is one of the pioneers of London’s new Spanish revolution, starting at Fino (a groundbreaking restaurant in so many ways), before heading up the ever-excellent Barrafina group, then moving on to open her own brilliant Sabor. Tonight, she’s very much at the centre of the action, in the huge open kitchen that seems to move as one, on the first night Legado has opened to paying punters.
Not that you’d know it, as there are no first-night nerves here—the service as smooth as gazpacho, the cooking quite simply stupendous.
There’s pan con tomate, that simplest of dishes that lives or dies by the quality of its ingredients: bread, garlic, salt, olive oil, and tomatoes. This is as good as I’ve tasted anywhere, topped with silken slivers of cecina, or air-dried beef.
Next, a Legado sandwich, where chard, more cecina, and tetilla cheese are formed into crisp, deep-fried triangles of oozing, gently beefy bliss. Basque morcilla, or blood sausage, is soft and ferrous, crowned with a fried quail’s egg and a sliver of fried bread—a dish that melds the subtle with the altogether more robust.
Slices of ripe tomato come topped with bottarga and shaved dried tuna heart; the cured fish eggs gentle, the desiccated organ a touch more pungent. It’s an astonishing combination, a mixture of mermaids’ sigh and Neptune’s roar.
Better still are the milk-fed lambs’ kidneys (a favourite at Barrafina Adelaide Street), so soft, delicate, and downright divine that even Little Bo Peep would be hard pushed to say no.
Fideua sees thin noodles stained jet-black with squid ink, complete with a punchy blob of aioli—a dish of pert pungency.
Then a quarter suckling pig, roasted in the restaurant’s wood oven, is a soaringly sublime symphony of golden, brittle skin and the softest, sweetest flesh. It’s served with a dipping broth of ethereal delicacy.
The food here is nothing short of sensational, the atmosphere electric. Beg, borrow, or steal your way to a table.
About £70 per head.
**Legado**
1C Montacute Yards, London E1
[legadorestaurants.com](https://legadorestaurants.com)