If I were clever I’d claim that this post was timed exactly to coincide with Mexico’s The Day of The Dead. If I were really clever I’d tie in The Day of The Dead’s purpose to remember lost family members with Fonda’s literal meaning of a small, family run restaurant, and go one further by explaining this brand spanking new place on Heddon Street, not even four weeks old, is from the team at Kol, Chef Santiago Lastra’s Michelin starred ode to Mexican food with seasonal British ingredients. But it’s not. It’s because I was told to eat here because literally everyone else has eaten here, and that the impossible tables to get are about to be even more impossible over the coming weeks. It’s purely coincidental that The Day of The Dead is on the Saturday I’m rushing out the writing ahead of the Sunday Broadsheets. I’m not clever, merely widely competitive.
Alas we did eat, five-thirty on the dot, glass of wine outside watching others being turned away, then inside to a restaurant that looks like it could have been designed on The Sims, brash and colourful and geometric. Slivers of crisp totopos, uniform in rectangular shape with a take on a silik pak dip using pumpkin seed, pine, and green chilli. The only non-British ingredients imported are corn for the tortillas and dried chillies, meaning that gooseberries come in for limes to great effect on margaritas, and pistachio steps in for avocado on a guacamole without the carbon footprint. Expect those copied around the country.
They have a comal in the corner from which the starters come. Baja taco, with beer battered cod, is a light, chunky fish finger, to be rolled-up in a wheat tortilla filled with pickled cabbage and habanero cream. And tetela, a Mexican triangle straight out of The Sims again, filled with a chorizo and potato mix. Both are mild mannered – the tetela way too much so – in need of the various salsas that wind up the sides of the candle holder. These salsas are constantly replaced throughout the meal. If there is any value at Fonda, it is here.
It’s not with the lobster al pastor quesadillas, yours for £34. The dominant flavour is the cheese, the shaved lobster meat a decadent back note. It’s good, maybe very good, but hard to justify ordering again. I’d get the beef again, if only for the tortilla’s, as good as any you’ll eat in this country. The meat is braised down in a rich, smoky gravy, a base for the mole that’s deep in chocolate and ancho chillies and a ring of pickled onions. Pile it high on the tortilla, add as much salsa as the chin can muster and enjoy. Maybe don’t order the refried beans that have the texture of baby food and replicate much of the profiles in the mole. Desserts are as good as any prior moment; a wonderful chocolate sorbet with chilli oil and the most perfect rice pudding with baked quince and the lingering smokiness of mezcal. That rice pudding is utterly sensational.
It would be impossible to finish off Fonda without mentioning the Glaswegian girl who served us, quietly brilliantly at her job and proving that truly excellent service can improve any meal. The bill works out at £100 per head, and it’s hard to see the value at that price. I loved parts of Fonda, enjoyed most of the rest of it, and they manage to bridge the vast ocean between Mexico and Britain successfully. It’s clever. Maybe too clever. But it’s fun, and I’ll take that.
8/10
