Fat Fowl

I have now been to the Fat Fowl three times. The first was excellent, the second good and the last mediocre. I hope this place isn’t going downhill rapidly and that it was only sheer bad luck, as it would otherwise be a great shame and a wasted opportunity.
The Fat Fowl is a bistro restaurant /​tapas bar. The rub of every tapas bar outside Spain is that they are all inevitably phoney. If you have been to Spain you will know exactly what I mean. Spaniards eat delicious (and mostly inexpensive) tapas in a myriad of bars/​restaurant. Tapas in Spain are for the most part incredibly fresh and of a huge variety. The last time I went to the Fat Fowl I therefore committed the cardinal sin of ordering tapas, with great expectations… Well, what I received was a mere travesty of tapas, really just more «tapones» than «tapas»… The spanish tortilla for example, was a stodge, the potatoes in chilly sauce just greasy, the squid rubbery and so it went on… Perhaps it was my fault, but I’d rather restaurants offered honest English cuisine than trying to copy (badly) the gastronomy of another country… And the first time I went to the Fat Fowl (a year before the last visit) it was just that, very good local ingredients imaginatively presented and served with flair. What a shame that they decided to go down the ‘exotic’ way, offering something they are clearly unable to produce. Anyway, I still think it’s worth a visit and perhaps, as I said, it was just bad luck.