London - Tendido Cero

Unfortunately overshadowed by the other meals that week, Tendido Cero was nonetheless delicious tapas in a romantic setting (as most tapas places should be!). It was also the first time I attempted to take the bus, but failed (as happens quite often it seems) and took a cab. It really wasn't my fault - the bus that is supposed to come every 10-12 minutes didn't come for 30 and I was already late.

AG and I apparently both love Rioja so instead of picking the cheapest, we picked the second cheapest (we're so classy like that but I mean really, we don't know that much about wine except for what we like). The waiter kinda scrunched his face up when we ordered the wine and recommended the one for £9 more. Meh, sure, whatever! So we went with the waiter's recommendation and it was pretty good!

You know what else was pretty good? The most amazingly awesome Serrano and cheese croquettes that we ordered. These were little fried balls of melty-cheesy goodness. I didn't really detect that much ham in there but at least I saw it so it was definitely there.  We also ordered the pan con tomate y jamon Serrano. I like my pan to be toasted and rubbed with garlic. Unfortunately, they didn't toast the bread and it turned soggy from the tomato spread much faster than we would have liked it to. Did we care? No, not really, it was still delicious!

We also ordered a stew of white beans with chorizo (on second thought, maybe the spicy chorizo cooked in cider would've been better but we didn't want it to be too oily), and some crunchy (read: breaded and fried) Arzua cheese with sweet tomato marmalade, which we both agreed would have worked better towards the end of the meal since the marmalade was overwhelmingly sweet.

Lastly, the piquillo peppers stuffed with oxtail  was meh because the texture was just off, with both the peppers and the oxtail (which was actually quite flavorless) both being mushy. An then we can an unremarkable crema catalana, which is like a creme brulee but ours had cinnamon sugar on top.

It kinda sounds like our meal sucked but no, it was quite good but just not as good as it could've been. And much better than the La Tasca chain for tapas (errr...that's a not-so-nice dig from me...sorry if you ever read this AP!)