Restaurant: Quinta
Address: 18 Bute St, South Kensington, London, SW7 3EX
Date of visit: 29 October 2023
Time of visit: 6pm
Before we head to Guatemala, we need to revisit El Salvador briefly. When we embarked on El Salvador back in 2018 there didn't appear to be any restaurants in London serving Salvadorian food. But, thanks to Facebook, I did connect with a Salvadorian lady who was making pupusas - filled corn tortillas - for fellow countryfolk. And for those curious, like us.
Fast forward to 2023 and there is finally a restaurant in London serving pupusas and some other Savadorian dishes. That restaurant is Quinta, in South Kensington.
"Why is this relevant to Guatemala?" I hear you cry. Well it turns out this same restaurant actually specialises in Mayan food, including dishes from Southern Mexico, Northern Honduras, Belize and... Guatemala! And it seems to be the only place in the city to serve a specifically Guatemalan dish. The national dish, no less.
We arrived at 6pm on a cold Sunday evening and walked into a venue that seemed more like a cafe than a restaurant, complete with open kitchen. With no one around to ask on arrival we walked up to the kitchen to confirm our booking. A gentleman in the kitchen led us back towards the exit, offering us a table by the window. That exit door wouldn't close properly, meaning it remained quite draughty and cold for the duration of our visit, although it did eventually start to warm up a little.
Unfortunately there were no Guatemalan lagers on offer, but the menu did offer a Mexican lager I'd never had, Pacifico, which we ordered. The waiter returned shortly afterwards to tell us he had none, so we went for two bottles of Modelo which duly arrived. We were a little surprised that no glasses came with the bottles, but this wasn't an issue as we would've consumed directly from the bottle regardless.
It became quite clear quite quickly that this one gentleman was running the restaurant floor on his own. He remained very friendly throughout but was clearly quite stretched. Attentive when called upon, but just as eager to get away.
The menu was quite a familiar one to anyone acquainted with Mexican food. Tacos, burritos, rice bowls. No starters per se, but plenty of sharers: nachos, padron peppers, chicken wings to name a few.
And pupusas. This is the first time we've encountered a previously completed country on the A-to-Z with no restaurant visit, and then later found a new restaurant offering that country's food. So we had to start with some pupusas. And the following paragraph will be added to the end of 2018's El Salvador review.
The restaurant clearly specialised in pupusas, referring to itself as a "pupuseria" on its website, and a hard-to-miss neon sign in the window demanding "EAT MY PUPUSA". There are eight different pupusas offered, with a mix of a few key ingredients - black beans, cheese, pork and jalapenos. We went for two of the pupusas stuffed with all four ingredients. They were excellent. Very fresh, hot and filling. The cheese was very firm and stringy, with minced pork and jalapenos on top of the cheese. The pupusas were topped with pumpkin seeds and fresh chopped coriander and served with curtido - a pickled fermented salad - and spicy tomato salsa which were fantastic accompaniments.
For the main dish, we were only ever going to go for one thing. The only Guatemalan item on the menu, and apparently the whole of London. Fried chicken pepian. A thick curry pretending not to be a stew. Slightly annoyingly, despite asking for the pupusas to come as a starter, the mains arrived almost straight after the pupusas. This meant by the time we got round to eating the mains they had cooled down quite considerably, not helped by the door opening and closing with more frequency as the restaurant got busier. But that wasn't the sole reason. I don't think the dishes were served particuarly hot in the first place.
Which was a real shame because it was a lovely dish that wasn't allowed to shine properly. The meal was served in a large, shallow bowl with the sauce taking up one half, and the rice and pickled salad on the other half, and the fried chicken placed on top of the rice.
The chicken itself was very well fried, to the point it was quite dry on its own. But there was ample curry sauce to help with that, sauce that was quite flavoursome but not particularly spicy. It had quite a rustic, deep earthy flavour to it. The pickled salad, which involved pickled cauliflower, was an interesting addition, and actually quite a nice touch.
Despite first impressions of the dish being overwhelmed by curry sauce the proportion of rice, chicken and salad was pretty much spot on. It wasn't a particularly generous portion, but the earlier pupusas helped with that overall.
The whole visit was accompanied by a selection of pretty generic, recent pop music in the background. The rush had been and gone as we dined, and the waiter did eventually take the opportunity to come and check all was ok with the food. However it was still quite an effort later to get his attention to ask for the bill. When that did finally happen he reassured us that they would have Pacifico lager back in tomorrow.
It wasn't a bad experience by any means. The food was excellent, but the main course coming out lukewarm-to-cold, and the rushed frantic nature of the service as a result of bare minimum staffing took the shine off what could have been a very enjoyable evening. Still, I felt satisfied that we left that evening having ticked two Central American boxes in one visit.
