Regadera

Regadera opened in 2011 and is located just by the river in Cordoba. The ground floor dining room has a wooden floor and well-spaced tables. The room seats around forty people at capacity and diners can look into the open kitchen. There were a few outside tables also with a view over the river.

The restaurant had an a la carte menu. Its wine list had forty labels with no vintages listed (bar one for some reason) and ranged in price from £19 to £180, with a median price of £24 and an average markup to retail price of just 1.7 times, which makes a change from London, where the norm is over three times retail price. Sample references were Forlong Rosado Cabernet Sauvignon at €19 for a bottle that you can find in the high street for €12, San Roman Toro at €40 compared to its retail price of €48, and La Cueva del Contador at €130 for a wine whose current market value is €83. 

Wild tuna (€22) caught in “Almadraba” style (using huge nets to catch tuna migrating from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in the spring and early summer) was served as tartare with ajoblanco (a cold soup made with almonds, bread and sherry vinegar) and wasabi. The tuna had good flavour and the ajoblanco, this version flavoured with a little coconut, went nicely with it (14/20). 

Beef tartare (€21) used Galician beef and came with horseradish ice cream. The seasoning could for me have been a little bolder but the beef was not chopped too fine and its flavour was good. The horseradish ice cream was an interesting way to deliver a gentle spicy heat to proceedings (14/20). Croquettes (€10) used Iberico ham and were pleasant though lacked seasoning and were a touch bland. However, the good aioli served with them made up for this in part (13/20). 

The star of the meal was beef cheeks (€21) with stout and cocoa glaze, served with parsnips, radishes and king oyster mushrooms. The beef cheeks were beautifully tender and their richness was nicely complemented by the bite of the radishes. This was a genuinely classy dish (16/20).

A lemon-themed dessert (€9) had lemon foam, lemon ice cream, lemon cream and lemon sponge cake. This was unremarkable but refreshing (13/20). We also had some decent coffee. The bill came to €135 (£114) each but that was mostly wine, as we splurged on the Flor de Pingus. If you instead shared a modest bottle of wine (and this list had several choices at €19) then a typical cost per person might have been around €60 (£51) or so, which seems very fair to me. This was a simple but enjoyable restaurant where the cooking and ingredient quality was better than I was expecting.