euskalkultura.eus

By Leah Hyslop. My father has never been one for much parental advice, but there are two maxims of his that have stuck with me.

Once, while stumbling back drunk from a party at the village hall, he clapped his hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes and said in a haunted voice: “Never buy cheap curtains.” And his second pearl of wisdom – muttered while we were trying to find somewhere to eat on the Costa del Sol that wasn’t advertising fry-ups – was: “Avoid restaurants with pictures on the menu.”

I thought about this last piece of advice when dining at Lurra, a recent addition to the mushrooming gastronomic heaven that is Seymour Place – the Marylebone backstreet that already houses The Lockhart and Lurra’s sister restaurant Donostia. At the bottom of Lurra’s simple, one-page menu are two pictures – a cow and a fish. And ay caramba, my father could not have been more wrong.

Like Donostia before it, Lurra takes its inspiration from Spain’s rugged Basque region (the name means “land”, apparently), focusing on meat and fish cooked on traditional erretegias (wood and charcoal grills). The space is clean and elegant: white walls, pale wooden chairs, a huge wall of glass that overlooks a pretty courtyard and an open kitchen with counter seats clad in soft mint-coloured velvet. By day, the room must be all sun and air, but it has a certain early evening allure, too: dimly lit, a single candle aglow in a tumbler on each table. It would be an excellent place to bring a date – as long you don’t mind your object of desire seeing you pick bits of cow out of your teeth.

Beef, you see, is Lurra’s raison d’être. The Spanish have long enjoyed chomping on older animals (anything up to 17 years, as opposed to the paltry few birthdays the poor things get to enjoy in Britain). One of Lurra’s owners, Nemanja Borjanovic, is so messianic about these seasoned beasts that he imports them himself, selling the meat to other swish London restaurants such as Chiltern Firehouse.

On the day I visit, the picture of the cow on Lurra’s menu signifies a 14-year-old Rubia Gallega “Galician Blond”, priced at £68 for a kilo of rib-eye; the fish, a whole grilled turbot. For my guest and I, there is no competition. We merrily cast all the recent health warnings about red meat out of that stylish window and order the steak.

And what a steak it is. The staff bring it sizzling to the table on a bed of cast iron, clad in nothing but a skimpy smattering of chunky salt crystals (there are no sauces at Lurra – to smother something like this with Béarnaise would be tantamount to pouring squash into your Pol Roger). 

It is cooked, as recommended, medium rare, and is oozingly juicy under its charred crust. The flavour is so strong, so concentrated, that it fills your whole mouth and lingers – deep and complicated and pungent, almost mushroomy in patches. The thick seam of fat is rich and buttery. “I know this sounds bizarre, but it tastes like meat,” says my pal – like me, a sad child of the Eighties, brought up on turkey dinosaurs and frozen chicken breasts. We chew in rapturous silence.

The other dishes – largely small sharing plates – lack the beef’s star quality, but none disappoints. We devour fries dusted with rust-coloured paprika, dipped in a properly punchy garlicky aioli (date or not, you certainly wouldn’t want to snog anyone after those); tender prawn-and-chorizo-stuffed squid, tiger-striped from the grill and perfectly seasoned; and blistered Gernika peppers – a Basque delicacy, bright green and lip-smackingly savoury. 

Sourdough with bone marrow, the intoxicatingly meaty smell of which hits us a good 30 seconds before it arrives, is another highlight: an almost comically large hunk of bone, which we dig into with spoons, smearing the pearls of soft, smoky fat on thick slices of charred-at-the-edges sourdough. It’s like a grown-up version of boiled egg and soldiers, channelled through The Flintstones.

Afterwards, there is mamia, a traditional Basque pudding made from sheep’s milk. It is a little like a crème caramel in texture, gelatinous and soft, but oddly flavourless: I have to ladle on embarrassing, Winnie-the-Pooh quantities of honey to make it palatable. We agree it’s the kind of thing that if you’d grown up with it, you’d probably love it, but it leaves our sticky-toffee-pudding-acclimatised British tongues flailing confusedly.

Service throughout the meal is on the slow side (though they might be aiming for authentic Spanish leisureliness) but there are odd bright spots – I’m impressed when our waitress notices my unfinished pud and offers to take it off the bill. I leave swearing allegiance to the cause of the Aged Cow, and with so much iron whizzing around my body, I wouldn’t make it through an airport metal detector. Not that it matters; with such an excellent Spanish restaurant on my doorstep, it might be a while before I traipse around the playas looking for a diamond in the fry-up rough again.