Las Iguanas - Eat Latin, Big Breasts

At night, the South Bank transforms into a sight London can be proud of. Its shafts of light and subtle neon and electric signage pump a life blood through the concrete carbuncles, which in the stark honest daylight deflate any sense of pride.

Circling the Royal Festival Hall are shops and restaurant chains which come from the accepted higher end of the retail and dining spectrum. A Giraffe nuzzles alongside a Strada beneath the old Hall, and Ping Pong forms an Eastern Bloc with Feng Sushi on its west side. In prime position, jutting out on the corner of the top deck is the vibrant and colourful Las Iguanas.

Imploring you to ‘Eat Latin, Drink Latin’, and if you could get a table, you would more than likely love to. We visited at 9pm on a Wednesday evening and had to wait half an hour to get seated. To the bar, then!

It is a small, functional bar, which serves the whole restaurant and the two guys whizzing up cocktails and cracking open ice cold bottles of Cusquena coped admirably. We weren’t allowed to get our drinks on a tab, even if we were eating. With the bar area right by the bar, this seemed reasonable.

We were seated at a cute corner table, which was right by the stairs (apart from the odd clumpy footed office type it wasn’t noticeable) and scanned the A3 sized menu. The delights on offer were plentiful and straightforward to follow and we ordered from the 3 for £12 tapas option for starters and had a risotto and xinxim for mains.

The drinks were a mixed bunch. My caiprinha was, and always will be superb. It’s a very hard drink to get wrong and all about the cachaca, which at Las Iguanas is their own brand. Made at their own plantation in Brazil, it has a simple, pleasant taste – as you would expect from a drink made with only sugar cane and water – and the trick is to keep mixing the ice and the lime in the glass while you enjoy it.

The passion fruit and orange cooler for my tee-total wife, however, was a wash-out. Essentially £3 for an orange juice. No zing, no zang, and no repeat sale. The tap water was excellent.

As the calamares, chorizo and quesadilla starters swamped our little table for two, my wife decided to point out the big, perfectly formed breasts, which would be in my line of vision for the duration of my meal. Not hers - a blonde floozy who, because of this corner seating thing, was not 6 feet away and with no-one to obstruct the view. I will try and remember the food though.

The chorizo in a rioja jus, was tasty, although a little stingy with the sausage. If they are going to scrimp, maybe better to put them in a smaller dish. The quesadillas were stuffed with giant portabello mushrooms and topped with creamy brie, fired up by a beautiful, chunky salsa. The calamares come drizzled in a light aioli dressing, which used to be spicy but alas, no longer. They are small crunchy pieces that melt in the mouth. The breasts – “Are they real?” my wife enquired. I was trying to concentrate on the food, honestly.

The xinxim, a creamy chicken and crayfish concoction, is tangy and fragrant and served with green beans and plantains. The green beans are always difficult to keep warm and I don’t think they have ever reached my table above around 10 degrees. The broth itself is a guilty pleasure but there was too much of it and the poor bits of chicken looked lost. A bit like a pair of small hands cupping giant breasts.

The wife – oh there you are – was a tad disappointed by the seafood content of the Bahian risotto, which was also a bit dry and needed pepping up with some of my surplus xinxim lake. The flavours in both are fantastic and you can get every one of them in spades, however, the balance of ingredients is a bit lopsided. Unlike those perfect breasts, pulsating across the way.

We skipped the desert. A mass of naughty chocolate puds being devoured in the flightpath of zeppelin one and two may have edged me into Bill Clinton territory. The service was friendly and unobtrusive, the prices, more than reasonable for a sell-out South Bank eatery and the funbags truly….OK this has got to stop. Recommended
Price for 2 including 2 cocktails and glass of wine and service - £50
Food – 7
Drinks – 7
Atmosphere – 8
Breasts – 36DD

Mystery shopping

Tonight I assumed the nom de restaurant Mr Linehan. I went undercover in one the outlets of a chain which boasts my brother as ops manager. Having nothing else in my head at the time other than the recently scanned pages of Graham Linehan's website, I decided to steal part of his identity.

Las Iguanas is a South American, Latin food and music extravaganza with a healthy whack of cachaca thrown in. The colours are bright and the food plentiful and is a great place for large groups to sample the various tapas and multi coloured cocktails.

I will post a review, maybe not from this visit but from A visit at a later date.

Carluccio's restaurant review

Kilburn High Road used to be the hub of a thriving music scene. Before the Blockheads, Ian Dury called his group Kilburn & The High Roads. That was over 30 years ago and the road looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since. Littered with old man pubs, old men and litter, the place has more than its fair share of drunks and homeless. The shops are a jumble of bric-a-brac, charity and pound shops; Woolworths, is now closed and boarded up and was one of only a few name brands. In some ways this was quite endearing, the refusal to have a Starbucks next to a Gap next to a Starbucks lent the road a sense of grubby nostalgia, always yearning for the days of strikes and a struggling economy. its food outlets are uniformly poor. Greasy spoons and greasier chicken shacks vie for the credit crunch quid with dimly lit Italian family-run joints which are only good for taking Lefty Bompansero to get whacked. However, off the High Road, about 5 minutes walk away from The Golden Cock (it’s there, look it up) is the Little Bay restaurant and this was only 30 seconds from where we lived. This gem of an eatery is one of just five and I was fortunate enough to live only five minutes away from their Croydon outlet when I was unfortunate enough to live there. They offer well-cooked fresh ingredients for an unbelievable price and the quality is nearly always excellent. Two of you can whip in there, have three courses each, a bottle of wine and escape with change from £30. The wife and I went as often as we could and that was when the economy was bouncy and we all had thirty credit cards each. We since moved to the more affluent suburb of Earlsfield before the fat cats in the City got found out and ruined it for all of us. Earlsfield is the polar opposite of Kilburn. Instead of bearded men shouting at the traffic the streets teem with runners and hockey players jostling past suited and booted young professionals. Instead of Dev’s Bargain Basement, you will find independent wine shops and posh charity shops where you can pick up a second hand Dolce & Gabbana blouse. Instead of the Texas Chicken Lickin’ Shed you can dine out at Mel’s, Hannah’s or Willie Gunn’s, but you better take one of those credit cards (if the bank has let you keep any). When a poorly run bar shut down in October Carluccio’s sprung up in its place, almost overnight it seemed. We peered in the window and thought, ooh another pricey, posh place for Earlsfield, then we looked at the menu and the prices and thought, ooh, we may be able to eat here. So we did. While not as cheap as the inimitable Little Bay (nowhere is) Carluccio’s offers authentic Italian plates, mostly for well under a tenner. Apparently, they have been around since 1991, but they have always slipped under my radar. Maybe it’s like that phenomenon where you hear a word for the first time, then you never stop hearing that word. Maybe its not. I have walked past their places loads of times and just never noticed them. Maybe they should change their exterior to leap out at me a bit more. Come to think of it, they shouldn’t. They are always never less than full. The restaurants are light and spacious with simple chairs and tables, which echo the simple yet effective cooking they serve. We started with calamari and rice balls. The squid was competently fried and served with a simple lemon slice and lettuce, which, to be honest, is all it needs. I abhor the acidic white paste it usually comes with. Squid is a very delicate flavour and the last thing it needs is to be lost in an overpowering tartare sauce. The rice balls were firm and held together on the fork well, a creamy mozerella filling oozed from one and the other a deep, rich ragu and served with a red pepper sauce which was well justified, adding a zingy flash to the palette. I had just time to swoosh with a mouthful of fresh mint tea when the mains landed. The wife had a large plate of fresh linguine pasta, tossed with plenty of clean, fresh frutti di mare, garlic, herbs and a hint of chilli. I demolished a cold duck breast salad with firm green beans and potatoes. Generous plump green olives brought the whole dish together beautifully. There was a little too much of the olive oil and balsamic dressing but it’s a minor quibble. It is Italian cooking you don’t find on these shores very often. Keep it simple and fresh. It really is that easy. Throw in such reasonable prices and maybe we can sign the rent agreement for another year.