Grace and flavour: La Bodega Negra

Off to La Bodega Negra, Soho’s new enormously hot-right-now, tricky-to-access Mexican restaurant serving tacos, steaks and margaritas. ‘Tricky to access’ on two fronts. Firstly, the restaurant seems to be booked out for a long time. Long like ‘by the time you eat there some vegetables and other natural products possibly won’t be on the menu as the sun may have burned out’ long. La Bodega Negra is also tricky to access as it’s in the cellar of what appears to be a gaudy, neon sex shop. The sort of place you see tourists and men in tinted bifocals and stained boat shoes shiftily leaving with a brown paper bag of bouncing boobs and you want to shout, ‘Mate, it’s 2012, have you tried the internet? Full of boobs!’

Regardless, I love this sort of London daftness. In the past I have crawled through phone boxes to get to dinner, given secret passwords to bartenders and repeated ‘the phrase that pays’ to the maître d’ and been escorted to the fridge. La Bodega Negra is like this, with the twist being that one hovers outside the first time like a red-faced chump stage-whispering to passers-by, ‘Gosh I hope this is the restaurant.’

Rarely do I associate quirky and exclusive with excellent dinner, but with La Bodega Negra I was gloriously ‘stick that in your pipe and smoke it’ wrong. If it’s possible to lie, cheat or schmooze access to this dark basement, staffed entirely by 6ft, size 4, anatomically perfect, polite and chummy serving replicants, please do. There are some celebrities at La Bodega Negra but don’t let this put you off. They don’t eat and are only interested in looking at themselves in the back of their spoons.

On my visit I ate a basket of perfect herby grilled octopus and the best grilled corn with crema Mexicana ever. If you order the spit-roast chicken, it arrives juicy and dribbling in an earthenware pot with a treasure trove of ahogadas (drowned) potatoes underneath it, having been stewed in chicken fat. Some people say a whole chicken is too much for a woman. I invite these people to watch me in La Bodega Negra, giving the night a sort of Mexican Viking feel (if Mexican Vikings also ate chocolate fondants with mole ice cream for pudding). La Bodega Negra’s ‘sex’ vibe was fitting as some parts of my dinner felt just as good as that.

LA BODEGA NEGRA

9 Old Compton Street, W1 (020 7758 4100)