La Tasca

Every time I walk past a branch of La Tasca I'm drawn to the menu.  Until now I've never tried tapas food despite always fancying it.  Rob and I have been making an effort to try out new restaurants, cafes and bars around Portsmouth rather than returning to places we know we like over and over again, so last week it was La Tasca's turn.

We ordered a glass of wine,  a beer and a bit of bread with an oil and balsamic vinegar dressing (heart-eyed emoji) and set to work on the menu - we ended up ordering a huge range of tapas to share so we could try a bit of a range.  We went for meatballs in a tomato sauce, barbeque ribs, spiced chicken wings, deep fried calamari wings, deep fried king prawns and a paella.  I had all good intentions of photographing it, but when it arrived I just couldn't help myself and we tucked in.

Rob absolutely adored every part of it, however I preferred some dishes to others.  I loved the ribs, the chicken wings and the meatballs - they were delicious.  I could have eaten 20 more of the ribs, so tasty.  Although the paella rice was lovely, I am not a chorizo lover and it was all I could taste, but I'm sure you'd love it if you like chorizo.  I was most looking forward to the king prawns because I'm a huge fan of seafood, but they were really tasteless, as was the calamari which was a bit of a shame.  We still managed to clear all of the plates though!

Once we'd had a bit of a rest and a chat, we ordered the sharing desert platter (photographed above) because I'm a sucker for churros after family holidays to the French coast when I was younger.  This was the absolute start of the show, everything was to die for.  We had plenty of churros dusted with sugar and a chocolate sauce to dip them in, small pieces of creamy cheesecake, cubes of mouth-watering chocolate brownie, a few sweet strawberries and a little pot of vanilla ice cream.  La Tasca was worth visiting just for this!

We visited the branch in Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, but I know there's quite a few across the UK.  We went on a Thursday night so it wasn't packed, but it was busy enough to have a nice atmosphere.  The service was great - our waitress was really lovely and we had a lovely time.

Now we just have to decide where to try next :)