Mimo London
Samantha Laurie rustles up tapas at Borough Market’s new award-winning cooking school...
I love a cooking class – it’s a chance to spend time on something I normally rush – and Spanish is my all-time favourite cuisine, so when the opportunity to review the latest addition to the London cooking scene came up, a Basque school with a first-rate reputation for delivering masterclasses on the tiny, but exquisite pintxo dishes of Northern Spain, I jumped at it.
Mimo arrived in Borough Market earlier this year, its first UK venture and fifth outpost after San Sebastian, Mallorca, Seville and the Algarve. It was set up by Londoners, Jon and Nicole Warren over a decade ago, when Jon, then a City banker, visited San Sebastian on holiday and fell in love with its food culture, giving up his job to work as a hotel bellboy and run guided tapas tours around his adopted home. Having met Nicole carrying her bags to her room, the pair set about carving a niche in the city’s burgeoning culinary scene, eventually founding a gourmet shop and a cookery school in one of the city’s most prestigious hotels.
It’s an inspiring tale – and Mimo’s new home in the beautiful former Trustee House in Borough Market shows how far it has come. It’s a supremely elegant set up: from the swish Chef’s Table at the top of the building, where you can dine and chat to Basque-born head chef, Jose Lasaba and his team as they dish up a tasting menu, to the sunny ground floor communal kitchen with its gleaming surfaces and top-end equipment, this is high-end terrain.
There are lots of experiences on offer here from family classes, ‘meet the trader’ market tours, wine tastings and cooking experiences of all kinds, including Basque dishes, modern British cuisine and courses in bread and pasta making. There’s even a Christmas Hamper Tour – with expert-led tastings of cheese, preserves and charcuterie to package into your own customised hamper.
I’m here for Tapas Cooking Course: The Classics, a four-hour whirl through the tricks and tips of Spanish tortilla, ham croquetas, seafood paella, cod-stuffed peppers, squid rice with aioli and Galician-style octopus, followed by crema Catalana. Some I’ve attempted at home before (with mixed results), others I’ve tried on cooking courses in Spain, but rarely have I seen such an Epicurean display of ingredients as the one that greets us: glistening plates of giant prawns, octopus and squid, wooden platters overflowing with fresh fruit and vegetables, beautifully displayed and sourced directly from neighboring Borough Market.
Vanessa our chef/teacher explains the aim of the course – to marry traditional Iberian style to the finest home-grown British produce – and once the six of us (the course caters for up to 12) are clad in our chefs jackets, she begins with the basics: how to chop garlic and onions correctly, teaching us which bit of the leek to use (all of it) and getting us started on the perfect rice (don’t drain it or “you’ll throw its spirit away!”).
She's a treasure trove of advice on seasoning ("more salt!") and which oils work best (a mix of olive oil and vegetable oil together) and throughout, she stages a valiant attempt to change some culturally ingrained bad habits (we Brits are apparently much too quick to reach for the wooden spoon when we should just leave a dish alone and unstirred – "Colour is flavour!")
With cooking, chopping and (not) stirring tasks shared between us, we make quick progress and at mid-morning, we break for nibbles and the first of many glasses of Basque wine, beginning with a lightly sparking Flysch Txakolina, poured from up high to give it maximum aeration.
It’s a perfectly choreographed morning – as the prawn shells and fish bones bubble away for our paella stock, we are busy stuffing peppers with a delicious cod and béchamel sauce. Lunch comes in several parts, as it does in all the finest Spanish restaurants. The squid rice and the octopus are a revelation, but the piece de resistance we all agree is the paella, heaving with squid, mussels and the most flavoursome rice I’ve ever eaten. I'll definitely be rethinking my stirring from now on.
Tapas Cooking Course: The Classics cost £175 per person. We have a special 2 for 1 reader offer on all cooking courses, which you can use until April 2020. Book by calling 0203 807 8229 or emailing London@mimofood.com and use the code SHEENGATE241
