Ibai, London EC1: ‘A swanky restaurant that lacks any pomposity’

Despite being one of the loveliest parts of London, the area around St Paul’s Cathedral is not especially known for eating out. Winding lanes, cobbled streets, ancient history standing side-by-side with spanking new architecture … And now Ibai, a short walk from Little Britain, as mentioned in Great Expectations, and next door to the wildly underrated 901-year-old church of St Bartholomew the Great. Tourist-level prettiness: 100%. Actual tourist draw in peak-season August: zero. Not even the pigeons bother lingering around here.
Specialising in Basque cuisine and serving from noon until 10pm Monday to Friday, Ibai is a brooding, gothically dramatic jewel of an 80-seat restaurant. It is capacious, as a former warehouse tends to be, with rich oak colours, crisp, white tablecloths and several vast, convivial booths for group dining. It’s sort-of industrial, sort-of fancy pirate ship and definitely striking, a mood helped very much by the fact that our Spanish server had a resplendent Salvador Dalí moustache and took our orders in the manner of Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition. If the food had turned out to be atrocious, I’d still go back to Ibai, because I developed a massive soft spot for the place even before I’d finished my first drink.
Ibai seems to have positioned itself as a Basque-influenced steak restaurant that specialises in Galician blond rib, which for non-steak readers is a VIP cow that’s reared in a very particular way and for much longer than your typical cattle. Any steak aficionados who adore Lurra or Donostia, both co-founded by Ibai’s Nemanja Borjanović, will be aware of Txuleta, his renowned Galician meat supplier and its complex, highly textured, high-fat beef.
Yet to focus purely on those fancy steaks would, I feel, misrepresent Ibai as a macho joint designed mainly for finance bros to stuff their faces with beef while swilling back old-world reds. You could, in fact, eat here without so much as touching a steak, or even meat, because it has a complex, fully formed menu of Basque and French ideas, featuring octopus, turbot, king crab and red prawns, or carabineros. If you’re feeling flush, order those prawns raw in a neat tartare, topped perhaps with some optional Oscietra caviar. The octopus is a rich, smoky spin on marmitako, a Basque tuna stew, mated with pipérade, a traditional pepper and onion stew, and the result is a dark red pot of tentacles, alliums and yielding sweet peppers in a sauce that’s made to be scooped up with baguette.
In fact, some of the strongest, most unusual dishes on Ibai’s entire menu are to be found in its starters section. It would be easy, for example, to overlook “tender sweetcorn with black truffle”, thinking it all sounds a bit healthy, but it turns out to be a buttery, truffley Galician chowder that will live long in the memory. The beef tartare is uniquely, well, bright red, made vivid by espelette pepper. There’s also a “croque Ibai” sandwich, which is not for the meek, with boudin noir, melted tomme de brebis cheese and a layer of those aforementioned carabineros.
For vegetarians, meanwhile, there is charred cauliflower with Ossau-Iraty cheese, hazelnuts and parsley, perhaps with a side of braised leeks with mustard. For non-vegetarians, however, it would be remiss not to try at least some of the beef, be it black angus “by Miguel Vergara from Castile and Leon”, Galician blond “by Xose Portas in Pontevedra” or full-blood wagyu from Norfolk, all cooked under the watchful eye of Richard Foster, former head chef at Chiltern Firehouse.
Ibai is certainly a swanky restaurant, but it lacks any pomposity. The staff aren’t tugging their forelocks or raising an eyebrow at an elbow on the table. It’s a serious restaurant with fairly serious prices that doesn’t expect you to take life seriously. There’s very little on offer that’s picky-uppy, although if you’re dining lightly at one of the counter seats, there is a plate of noir de bigorre ham with crisps to nibble on over a glass of something red, maybe alongside some paté Basque with truffle honey.
The pudding list, if the steaks don’t end you, is worth the trip alone. For one thing, there is my ultimate death-row dessert, the lesser-spotted pain perdu, here served with hazelnuts and rum, as well as a creamy, slightly wobbly gateau Basque with summer berries. Don’t write Ibai off as a steakhouse for city boys; it’s much, much more than that. This hulking Basque pleasure palace signals that opulence and living it large are very much still “in”.