REVIEW | Pinchjo’s Tapas Bar, West Didsbury

IT'S NOW impossible to walk a whole block in Manchester city centre without stumbling across a Spanish restaurant. We are positively wading through piles of paella with tapas coming out of our ears. But the main armada was preceded by smaller suburban outposts such as Chorlton’s San Juan (reviewed here) and Pinchjo’s in Didsbury.

...to be honest, we found the whole experience slightly divisive

Unfortunately, I can’t rely on many worldly-wise autobiographical tales of sipping sherry in tapas bars in Madrid or Seville, but I did pay a visit to Barcelona this year. Also, as part of the job, I have run the gamut of Manchester bodegas and recently unintentionally spent an eye-watering amount of money eating at Brindisa, the London restaurant outpost of the renowned Spanish wholesalers. So that’ll have to do for ‘comparable tapas experience’ on my CV.

Burton Road is so overflowing with bistros, bars and belly-busting balti houses, it could probably warrant us specially launching a Didsbury Confidential. This smallish neighbourhood restaurant is simply fitted out with wooden tables, bench seating with brightly striped cushions, and a few tables outside for those rare evenings of British summertime. They’ve definitely not overdone the Spanish theme here. No flashes of bright red and yellow, no flamenco (the music was mainly chilled out 90’s R&B) and no bull.

Seafood paella with parsley and lemon

Pinchjo’s doesn’t want to pin itself down too much; after all, the Spanish were famous conquistadors, absorbing much from other cultures, so they describe themselves as serving ‘traditional and modern Mediterranean sharing dishes plus cocktails and Spanish beer’. The menu is simple and the prices reasonable, you’ll not find the likes of El Gato Negro’s fancy Gillardeau Oysters, Yuzu Juice and Pickled Cucumber here. In fact, ask a group of friends to shout out the first ten tapas dishes they can think of and that’s pretty much Pinchjo’s menu (well, apart from croquetas, the ubiquitous fried bread-crumbed flavoured ovals; they’re noticeably absent for some reason); you will find small portions of several types of paella, tortilla, patatas bravas, albondigas, gambas, calamares, chorizo and so on.

We managed to catch the special offer with all tapas only £4.50 between 5pm-7pm, Monday-Thursday. It probably works out well for the restaurant with many customers reapportioning their projected budget towards the wine list instead. This too is compact and reasonably priced, so we bypassed the cocktails this time and went straight for a chilled bottle of Casa Albali Rosado (£17, menu says £16.50), a slightly sweet rosé with a touch of strawberries and summer about it.

Gambas pil pil

Dishes rightly arrive as soon as they’re ready and in no particular order. We ordered six we thought might give us the best measure of the place. Seafood paella with parsley and lemon (£6.95) was a yellow bowl of sunshine. The glistening rice still retained just the right amount of chew, but came in its own bowl, so there were no satisfying scrapings to work at. It contained bands of squid, peas and an odd number of fat king prawns that had us negotiating like a pair of seasoned stock brokers. It was a smidge under-seasoned, not such a bad thing when most seafood paellas are saltier than a pirate’s pantaloons, but a squeeze of the apportioned lemon wedge balanced it back up.

More oddly-numbered king prawns arrived in the form of gambas pil pil (£6), bubbling in oil infused with hot dried chillies and slivers of garlic, which helped even up the seafood trade negotiations. This popular tapas dish never typically comes with bread (and it doesn’t here), though it seems a shame to waste all that full-flavoured oil. You can buy bread and olives for £3.95.

The only unexpected dish on the menu was Pinchjo’s 'street salad' (£5.95), a tall, teetering pile of not-very-Spanish finely shredded cabbage, radish, onion, carrots, chillies, coriander and lime which is a challenge for staff to get to the outside tables in one piece on a windy day. My husband wasn’t having any of this inauthentic intruder, but I was a fan of fresh crunch in amongst all the requisite oiliness.

Street salad

Patatas bravas

Patatas bravas (£4.95) topped with a tomatoey sauce were neither the best nor worse I’ve ever had, but the decent dusting of smoked paprika packed a warmly welcome punch. Our final dish was Morcilla 'Spanish black pudding' (main image), whuch came sliced, fried and topped with chestnut mushrooms, peppers and green beans, hinting at impending autumn.

My husband preferred the dish more than I did, but to be honest, we found the whole experience slightly divisive. I think I’ve been a bit spoilt with the obsessive authenticity of the likes of Iberica and Tapeo or swept away by the elegance of El Gato. Pinchjo’s is a relaxed neighbourhood bar offering a stream of small plates to accompany a decent drinks selection as and when required, where you can happily feed and water two people for less than £50. If that doesn’t exemplify the requirements of a typical tapas bar, then what does?

Pinchjo’s, 192 Burton Road, Manchester, M20 1LH. Tel: 0161 4342020

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