In a £4.3m paella restaurant in Fitzrovia, I’m on a chair that wobbles, far from the open kitchen, at a window overlooking filthy concrete bollards outside, and feeling oddly shortchanged. According to months of social media froth, Arros QD is a hot, new, glamorous, unmissable palace of paella. Artful, strategically placed prawns, expensive rugs, blazing pans and three-Michelin-starred Quique Dacosta with his very tidy beard have bombarded the London foodie ether.
Before the doors opened to the paying public, the welcome mat was unfurled to noisemakers who matter, which meant that soon even partially sighted Trafalgar Square pigeons knew Dacosta had come to transform forever the way Britain understands the one-pan comfort food often called “the Spanish Sunday roast”.
“For people to understand us, they need to look into the fire,” Dacosta told one interviewer, channelling that type of quasi-spiritual, peak-chef earnestness that puts me in mind of the time David Blaine entered a Perspex box dangling over the Thames and London began pelting it with golf balls.
But some way through a small plate of “cheese stones” – lumps of parmesan, manchego cream and cocoa butter that look, in a Heston Blumenthal way, eerily like coal and taste exactly like charcoal-covered mini Babybels – I thought, this is not the place I was sold.
It was Arros QD’s first official Saturday evening service, and Dacosta was disappointingly not in town, although I very much enjoyed asking staff where he was, if only to see their eyes bulge like Mr Bean taking a maths exam.
His absence or my terrible table, next to the smoke alarm test panel in the least interesting room, may seem moot points, but to sell these two-person paellas that start at £38 for a standard Valencian rabbit and chicken, and quickly leap up to £50 for cuttlefish and prawn and £90 for lobster, one really must buy into the excitement of wide pans bubbling over open fires and world-class chefs shaking them. That’s shaking, not stirring – these thin, flat, meagrely topped, taupe-coloured paellas are not supposed to be stirred; they’re too delicate.
Furthermore, the rice here is cooked until its main thrust is a crisp core on the bottom of the pan with blackened parts at the edge. This may challenge anyone who has eaten a thousand paellas, and while accepting that the crunchy bottom, or socarrat, is certainly the best bit, it nevertheless feels to me that the rest of the paella should be plentiful, voluminous, perhaps fluffy, potentially saffron-coloured and certainly brimming generously with seafood. To those people, this may feel like a blackened, very stingy version.
“Can I let you into a secret?” our waitress asks in a way that aims to be bantery but is scripted. “The flavour is here underneath the rice where it’s stuck to the pan. You have to scrape. May I?”
“Please do!” I say, brightly. It’s pleasant enough: oily, white carb, slightly dry beans, decent chicken and rabbit lying atop the rice, and garlicky from the accompanying aïoli.
The “contemporary” paella is a small, rectangular pan, as thin as a kitchen tile and about 30cm long by 2cm deep, and the smoked dashi eel version derives most of its flavour from wisps of katsuobushi – dried, fermented tuna flakes – scattered on top. There’s so little eel, though, that one can remove it in three forkfuls and in the time it takes you to say, “Jesus Christ, that was £32.”
On reflection, I feel my mistake at Arros QD was having the paella, which one feels thoroughly obliged to do, because in truth the menu is vast and features the likes of skate wing in chilli miso cooked on charcoal, whole brill with lemon and parsley, and stonebass ceviche with tiger milk.
A starter I ordered mainly to be polite – a fresh kale citrus salad with cashew nuts – was an actual zinging marvel with a delightful and accomplished tomato dressing. Another starter of beef tartare, on what was essentially a large poppadom festooned with cured egg yolk and mustard seeds, was less enticing, but it was still better than those damned paellas.
I’d had a good pre-dinner Pedro Fizz cocktail (PX, amaretto, black walnut bitters and Moët) in the bar that lives on an upstairs landing and shared a bottle of Finca Calvestra with our food, but by now I sensed the bill hovering close to £150 and felt thoroughly disinclined to stay for pudding. Obviously, come the next morning, I bitterly regretted not having the giant cookie with araguani chocolate, macadamia nuts and vanilla ice-cream. But then, it was Instagram that told me this was unmissable, so that, too, could just be a bunch of arros.
• Arros QD 64 Eastcastle Street, London W1, 020-3883 3525. Open lunch all week, noon-2.30pm (3.30pm Fri & Sat, 4pm Sun), dinner Mon-Sat, 6-10.30pm (11pm Fri & Sat). From about £60 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service.
Food 5/10
Atmosphere 5/10
Service 5/10
