L'Oculto Cocina - Wine Bar - Shop
Spanish restaurant · Brockley
325 Brockley Rd, London SE4 2QZ, United Kingdom
"Saturday lunchtimes at L’Oculto in Brockley now mean paella, a new feature of the multitasking tapas restaurant, wine bar, and shop. Service starts at 1 p.m. for takeaway. The restaurant is currently open for dining-in Thursday evening through to Sunday lunchtime. L’Oculto shop is open in the early afternoon and it’s the ideal retailer for gourmand preppers anticipating another lockdown. There are plenty of high-end canned goods (a peculiarly Spanish obsession), including squid, mussels, sardines, and partridge, as well as cheeses, and an excellent selection of biodynamic wines." - Hester van Hensbergen
"A wine shop-cum-tapas bar serving a lavish array of Spanish ingredients, each dish at L’Oculto is a stand-out. The establishment is a labour of love from the owners of Flavours of Spain, an import business that buys all of of its sherry, cheese, ham and cava directly from suppliers across the Iberian Peninsula. Locals pack the restaurant to sip minimal intervention wines and snack on the creations of Galician chef Irene Loreno Muñoz: standards like pan con tomate and sweet flan with sherry cream are excellent, but watch out for specials like tortilla vaga, an open tortilla of runny eggs, poached onion, sea urchin caviar and fried parsley." - David Paw
"L’Oculto is one of those places that people like to keep ‘secret’ because it’s a cut above its peers in so many respects. Ana and Teresa started out as importers of food and wine, supplying unusual ingredients to chefs including Heston at The Fat Duck. They moved on to Brockley Market before hosting pop-ups and finally opened a first 25 cover restaurant which doubles as a wine shop. The produce is stellar, mainly because it’s imported directly from Spanish producers. Wines are focused on the low intervention, organic and biodynamic; plates of pulpo a la Gallega fly out of the kitchen, tender octopus gleaming underneath grassy olive oil and a rusty dusting of sweet and hot paprika. Try it with the Jose Aristegui Mencia — a light red wine which makes for a slightly less obvious but excellent pairing." - Helen Graves
