Snacks: Spanish snacks
Leicester may be a long way away from Spain and its late-night café culture, but tapas is alive and well in one bar in the East Midlands city.
The Rutland and Derby Arms has used a combination of bought-in snacks, upmarket crisps and home-made products to create a tapas-style bar menu, complete with a deli counter.
Since opening in 2004, the city centre pub has built up a customer base of mostly thirtysomething professionals, drawn to the antipasti sourced from bar-snack supplier Nibblers, unusual flavours of crisps from Tyrrells, and bread, biscotti and cookies baked by the Rutland's chef.
A section of the bar is set out as the deli counter, with a range of Nibblers products presented in glass jars. The menu includes marinated mixed olives, olives with chilli, Thai nuts, wasabi nuts, Peppadew peppers filled with pesto, and sun-dried tomatoes filled with anchovy, Swedish salami and spicy salami sausage. The counter is back-lit so customers can see what's on offer, and many buy on impulse when they notice the tapas behind the bar.
"We serve the tapas on brown, earthenware plates, with the olives in the middle in a small bowl," says the Rutland's manager, Ramona Smith. "It's a very rustic look, which suits this type of food very well. With it we serve a selection of our own, home-made Mediterranean-style breads, for example, ciabatta, olive or sun-dried tomato bread.
"One of our most popular Nibblers products is the large green Greek olives filled with feta cheese. We have developed a bit of a reputation for these and people will come into the pub just for the olives alone. Our customers just love them - it's quite usual for customers to have two or three dishes of olives with their drinks. We also buy our Tyrrells crisps from Nibblers, and the more unusual flavours such as Jalapeno Chilli and Lemon and Thai Curry and Coriander are particularly popular."
Ramona believes customers' tastes have developed to appreciate more sophisticated snacks in pubs. "Deli and tapas-style products are everywhere these days. But, whereas before you could only buy, for example, olives in vinegar, premium quality products are now readily available. Customers have therefore become more discerning.
"Also, Leicester is a very cosmopolitan city. People are well travelled and are more familiar with a Mediterranean style of eating. We go through boxes and boxes of olives every week."
The Rutland's bar snack menu "bridges the gap between a bag of crisps and a meal and is another way to increase revenue," Rowena says.
"We often have groups of business people in over lunchtime and they will ask for a selection of snacks to share, or have a plate of tapas as a starter before they go into the dining room for lunch."
The Spanish flavour at the Rutland and Derby Arms is rounded off by live entertainment that includes Spanish guitar, as well as classical guitar and jazz piano.
The tapas is the latest in list of innovative schemes initiated at the food-led Rutland. It became the first pub in Leicester to go completely no-smoking when it opened in 2004 and has since won a national Clean Air Award. It serves no less than 34 different beers on draught, setting another first for the city by including draught fruit beers on the bar top.
It seems, with the success of the tapas, it can only go onwards and upwards. As they say in Spain, viva la revolución!
