Evening Standard
Jimi Famurewa headed to a new “City-boy steakhouse” from Basque meat specialist Nemanja Borjanović, the founder of Lurra, which overturns the beamed-farmhouse-with-pintxo-counter stereotype of the Spanish-French border region. Instead, he found a “haute-industrial dining room” that “deals in high gloss and unexpected magnitudes of massiveness”.
Apart from the “big prices” and the fact that the £95 1kg Galician blond T-bone steak was “far, far too much meat for two people”, Jimi felt the extravagance was a welcome “butter-basted middle finger” to notions of culinary restraint.
“The flavours — inspired by the French side of the Basque border — are so big they often land with the super-sized abandon of an Olympic opening ceremony… All that wad-waving maximalism belies cooking with plentiful thrills, rare sensitivity and a kind of unbuttoned, rugged clarity.”
Jimi Famurewa - 2024-08-04The Sunday Times
Charlotte Ivers encountered a “truly life-changing” dish this week – something she will remember on her deathbed: the twist on the good old Gallic croque monsieur from chef Richard Foster at this new French-Basque restaurant.
The ‘croque Ibai’ is a toasted sandwich stuffed with boudin noir, carabinero prawns and tomme de brebis cheese, topped with a thin film of honey. “Honestly, whose idea was that? Putting a sweet prawn in a bed of crumbly black pudding and earthy sheep’s cheese? Magnificent. There’s something almost unholy about the decadence. Then to think to add honey as the finishing touch? That’s laughing in the face of God: a Tower of Babel of a sandwich.”
Also passing muster in style were king crab rice cooked in a “truly astonishing bisque” and wagyu steak that was “an absolute masterclass” in buttery marbling.
“Now look, there are problems with this restaurant,” Charlotte insisted, in the spirit of journalistic objectivity. “The decor’s a bit industrial, the service on the slow side, and boy is it expensive. But in terms of food? You’re not having a better meal this year.”
Charlotte Ivers - 2024-08-11The Guardian
Grace Dent added her voice to the critical plaudits that have greeted this “hulking Basque pleasure palace” – a “brooding, gothically dramatic jewel of an 80-seat restaurant” between St Paul’s cathedral and Smithfield market.
With its top-notch Galician Blond and wagyu beef, “Ibai is certainly a swanky restaurant, but it lacks any pomposity”. But “to focus purely on those fancy steaks would misrepresent Ibai as a macho joint designed mainly for finance bros” when there’s a “complex, fully formed menu of Basque and French ideas, featuring octopus, turbot, king crab and red prawns”.
Better still, Grace reckoned “the pudding menu is worth the trip alone” for its pain perdu served with hazelnuts and rum.
Grace Dent - 2024-09-01The Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell added his voice to the critical consensus hailing this French-Basque steakhouse as the “modern, metropolitan, meat-eating man’s restaurant of dreams”.
The ‘croque Ibai’, their take on the croquet monsieur, is already becoming a cult dish, and William added his own poetic evocation: “Imagine prawn toast, then let the toast be prepared in heaven with angelic sorcery… It was as memorable and revelatory as seeing Venice for the first time”.
As for the king crab rice, it was worth the £85 charged even if you have to “pull your kids out of prep school, sell the holiday home, sack the butler”, while the headline diary-cow steak lived up to expectation as “the best-cooked, purple-pink-flesh, blackened-fat sirloin”.
If you ask him “where’s good in London?”, William will send you to Ibai.
William Sitwell - 2024-09-08
