Hola, enjoy a real taste of Spain

This review was first published in April 2001

A visit to Cigala offers demographers and diners alike a rare sight: that of the findings of a poll becoming hard(ish) fact.

In a recent poll undertaken for The Observer, 26 per cent of respondents voted Spain as their favourite European country, twice as many votes as its nearest rival, France.

'It was the most popular European country among every single demographic sub-group irrespective of age, gender, social class, region, marital status or ethnicity,' was its verdict.

This would seem to mean that, whether you are a lager lout from Carlisle living the kind of life that makes The Royle Family look like Dynasty, or a 20-year-old toff inhabiting a stately home in Wiltshire surrounded by tail-coated flunkeys, you are equally likely to fancy a holiday in Iberia.

I am rampantly suspicious of polls. The sort of person who has time to respond to them obviously has nothing better to do and is not representative of the wider population. In the real world, people would rather be slumped in front of the telly with a can of Special Brew (given our Hispanophilia, perhaps that should be a San Miguel), or busy translating Moli?re (or Cervantes?) into cockney rhyming slang.

However, from my visit to Cigala I can confirm the findings of the poll. On the night I visited, Generation Flex was out en masse. Young and old, trendy and restrained, were co-existing and, indeed, eating together quite happily. There were City-types who had loosened their ties, unfastened their collars and removed their jackets.

Trendy designers were present in black suits worn with black T-shirts or black, open-necked shirts, and there were young(ish) people of the sort seen in vaguely right-on dramas on the Beeb and C4, purporting to depict life as it is lived by young(ish) professionals. If they were linked by anything, it was probably that they read The Observer and liked Spain, but only a certain type of Spain.

The Spain the Cigala customer likes is what they would call the 'real Spain', not the Spain of the Costas or General Franco, but the Spain of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and weekend breaks in Sitges, the Spain of Robert Elms and Lorca. In other words, a highly selective Spain, just as blinkered as any other national stereotype.

However, as a restaurant, Cigala is bang on. There's not one bull-fighting poster, not a single pair of castanets and certainly none of those long-necked flasks out of which you dribble foul red wine from a height, which seem to have been invented with the sole object of humiliating tourists during the Seventies. Instead it bristles with just the right amount of authenticity. You don't go to the loo, you visit 'los sevicios', and the open kitchen has the needless but charming sign 'cocina' on the wall.

The sense that this is a proper restaurant wherethe food speaks for itself is made abundantly clear by the Spartan look of the place ?all scrubbed wood and paper tablecloths. The menu is written in Spanish much as menus used to be written in French back in the days when France was our favourite holiday destination, and every middle-class dream involved a converted mill in the Dordogne rather than a finca in Andalucia.

This upset my dining companion, the fiercely proud Yann Debelle de Monthby, an ambassador for Parisian shoemaker, Berluti.