May 2021 - Food

Where To Eat This Month: Meson Don Felipe

All the very best theatre bars and restaurants have, to my mind, a touch of stagey, unpredictable magic to them. Perhaps this is the romantic, former drama nerd in me speaking — the person who brought, a possibly unnecessary, Poitier-level seriousness to playing a Munchkin in a 1996 school production of The Wizard Of Oz. But, like a good play, I think these places have their own hallucinatory power. I am thinking, here, of the dreamlike daytime whirl of Joe Allen. Or The Phoenix Arts Club, where scarcely believable, wine-lipped Soho characters used to stagger around. And time, Vegas-style, would dissolve in the windowless gloom.

And I am also thinking, perhaps most vividly, of Meson Don Felipe: the riotous Waterloo tapas bar that, by dint of its proximity to The Old Vic and Young Vic, has long been as integral to the London theatre experience as tubs of interval ice cream and seats with insufficient legroom.

If you are one of those who have stumbled in since restaurateur Philip Diment opened it in 1987, you will know that little about Meson Don Felipe makes any kind of logical sense on paper. Not the starkly lit space, dominated by a wooden horseshoe bar that stretches out so far you often have to crab-walk around the ever-thrumming room. Not the raised, encircling tables, which are so small any sizeable food order will involve a Tetris-like plate arrangement. And not — most famously — the in-house Spanish guitarist, teetering on a comically tiny elevated stage like a sort of Flamenco Elf on the Shelf. All I know is that, rather than resembling a tired museum exhibit, Meson Don Felipe felt rambunctious, spry and utterly unique. It is a long-running culinary production. But one with plenty of life in it yet.