Restaurant reviews

Rarely does a lunch-time menú inspire me to go back for dinner. But Stush and Teng (roughly translated it means ‘the best of everything’) is Spain’s only Jamaican restaurant, and since, when I went at lunchtime there was nothing remotely Jamaican about it, a return was on the cards.

But first a quick word about lunch. A reasonable €10.50 got me a glass of wine, a lollo rosso salad enlivened by hazelnuts and pomegranates, a juicy pink lamb shank cloaked in a sticky reduction on a slab of creamy potatoes dauphinoise and an inedible lime mousse, but that’s by-the-by.

A month later, a friend and I are sitting down to dinner with some very good amuse-bouches in front of us: a shot of piping hot leek soup, a ratatouille tart and a molleja (sweetbread) topped with banana and lotus root. Unfortunately, we are the only people there, which strikes me as a crying shame, though I’m reliably informed that Friday night is booked solid. There’s a reasonably good-value tasting menu for €28, but it’s veering into a land of Italo-Spanish cooking where I don’t want to go.

Á la carte we’re torn between a seafood carpacchio with lime and island mojo (a spicy sauce), and an assortment of empanadillas criollos (seafood or meat pasties prickling with chilli peppers), which I adore. Instead we start with a deconstrución de graella criolla, which is an elegant meat-fest. Carpacchio-thin strips of pink beef that’s been lightly seared on the outside alongside meatier wafers of buey (bull meat). On the side, there’s a peppery pineapple salsa and a mellow chimichurri in which to dip the meat. We also have cachapas—a traditional Caribbean pie-cum-mash consisting of layers of smashed sweet corn and avocado, spiked with a few exotic spices and topped with grilled fresh cheese. It comes with a streak of balsamic reduction, one of fragrant chilli and the whole binds into a deeply satisfying starter that wouldn’t go far wrong as a main. Portions here are big.

The mains read equally well: duck magret in vanilla with roasted barley and cinnamon (any chef would be proud of that little concoction); salted foie with Caribbean fruits flambéed in rum and the more traditional saltfish (bacalao) and ackee (the Jamaican national fruit) with thyme risotto. Alluring as these are, I can’t resist the obvious ones: jerk chicken with rice or dumplings and goat curry (except in this case the goat is lamb).