Ibai, London EC1: ‘A swanky restaurant that lacks any pomposity’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

I developed a soft spot for the place even before I’d finished my first drink

Despite being one of the loveliest parts of London, the area around St Paul’s Cathedral is not especially known for eating out. Winding lanes, cobbled streets, ancient history standing side-by-side with spanking new architecture … And now Ibai, a short walk from Little Britain, as mentioned in Great Expectations, and next door to the wildly underrated 901-year-old church of St Bartholomew the Great. Tourist-level prettiness: 100%. Actual tourist draw in peak-season August: zero. Not even the pigeons bother lingering around here.

Specialising in Basque cuisine and serving from noon until 10pm Monday to Friday, Ibai is a brooding, gothically dramatic jewel of an 80-seat restaurant. It is capacious, as a former warehouse tends to be, with rich oak colours, crisp, white tablecloths and several vast, convivial booths for group dining. It’s sort-of industrial, sort-of fancy pirate ship and definitely striking, a mood helped very much by the fact that our Spanish server had a resplendent Salvador Dalí moustache and took our orders in the manner of Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition. If the food had turned out to be atrocious, I’d still go back to Ibai, because I developed a massive soft spot for the place even before I’d finished my first drink.

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