Tu Casa - tapas, reliably
It’s a damn good tortilla.
The tortilla at Tu Casa, at the town end of Mill Road, is one of the best I’ve had - well seasoned, great texture, retaining a little bite to the potatoes and just gooey in the middle. Like the paella, they have not skimped on the olive oil. It’s a classic for a reason, and I love a simple thing done well. I take another forkful, then another.
“Why don’t I come here more often?”, I wonder, mopping up some tomato sauce with the last of the omelette, totting up the number of times I’ve eaten here over the nine or so years it’s been serving food a short walk from my front door. It isn’t many. Perhaps five?
Is it because my dining companions resent me scoffing the tortilla? Or is it because for some unaccountable reason I only tried the paella for the first time this January?
That is, after all, the dish the makes Tu Casa a touch more memorable than a good-but-not-great restaurant in a city with a lot of good-but-not-great restaurants to choose from.
Otherwise, reliable is the through line - here is a tapas dish you would expect, executed carefully and with affection. Here’s a plate of pretty darned nice anchovies, drizzled in oil. How about some garlicky prawns? I assume there’s patatas bravas? Absolutely. Fancy some meatballs? Sure - pork and beef, perfect balance, succulent, rich tomato sauce - job done well. Paint by numbers where the numbers are eights and nines on the scorecards, and nothing on offer is anywhere near as confused as that metaphor.
Among the standards, it would be easy to skip over the Pisto Manchego - don’t. They get a surprising intensity out of simple ingredients (again, olive oil is a superpower) and adding a pepper stew to our order really rounds out and brightens the selection.
Maybe do skip the croquetas. The bechamel is quite heavy, and there are more fun things to order. By which I of course mean the paella.
There’s a few paella options. I’ve tried the seafood and the chicken and vegetable. Both good, the seafood more interesting. It’s rich with oil, bright with saffron, and the rice retains some satisfying bite. There’s something unctuous about it that I wasn’t quite expecting, and that lifts it above the rest of the menu.
Understandably it takes a while to arrive. That’s fine, they warn you. But it creates a service balance issue they don’t always quite navigate around. On one of our two recent visits, there was a significant lull between finishing everything else and the paella arriving, the kind of thing tapas turning up in little waves ought to easily have smoothed over. Maybe that’s just how what we ordered shook out, but it did feel a little awkward.
“Just so you know, everything comes out as it’s ready” is no longer the aunt-scandaliser it used to be at a British table, after all. So my advice if this happens to you is to order some more wine (it’s a solid simple list), pick at the ham platter, and try not to fill up on bread.
Note
Tu Casa does not have a website I could find in less time than it took me to get bored looking, but there’s an extremely dodgy-looking booking site that will, at time of writing, actually secure you a table, just here: Tu Casa Tapas Restaurant Restaurant Info and Reservations
No, I don’t know either. It looks like an adware domain squatter’s first go with a mid 2000s pirated copy of Adobe Dreamweaver, but I typed in my real name and to date nobody has harvested my kidneys or signed me up for a Wario hentai mailing list, so you’re probably fine 🤷