Making music at La Tasca

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Spanish restaurant provides plentiful paella

Restaurant review by Nicholas Cullum.

He also runs the website for Ealing Acoustic, where you can get a flavour of the mood and listen to tracks from musicians playing at La Tasca.

 

People in Devon eat HUGE amounts of food, so when Janice told me she was going to be in town on Saturday evening, I thought I had better make sure she could get what she would probably want…

I chose La Tasca, because it was very unlikely that she would have come across anything like it in Bideford (which has one take-away Chinese and two Indians), and because I have been impressed by the operation every first Sunday of the month when I go to Ealing Acoustic. Add to that the tapas concept and I was fairly sure I was on safe ground.

La Tasca is a surprisingly large and atmospheric tapas bar with a plausibly Spanish feel. Regrettably, this includes playing “Spanish” music too loudly, and I realised this aversion when someone covered “Hotel California” in Spanish – utterly unnecessary! But, we were there to eat and chat and have a good time and, I have to say, we did.

Our very attentive waitress, Gabi, told us the Paella was cooked fresh and took 45 minutes, so we took her advice and ordered a couple of tapas dishes each to go with the bread and olives to fill the void. Frankly, the Patatas Riojana was as much as I needed to eat though we finished off the Gambas Pil Pil, Jamon Serrano and Croquetas de Champinones as well. Fortunately, as with all tapas, they varied in size, and, overall, represented pretty good value at roughly £3.50 each.

Then the Paella de Carne (£9.45 per head) turned up! Now, if we had either tapas or the main dish, we would have cleared our plates; but we totally failed to finish the paella purely on the grounds that we were full. That really is my only complaint. We had, like “the Indians going for an English” and ordering 20 “chips” to complete their order, completely failed to balance demand and supply! Still, the wine and digestifs (take the staff's advice – they have some nice things there that you are unlikely to have ever come across before) helped us deal with our shame.

Give it a try if you’re hungry!

 

 

September 14, 2006