The old adage that beautiful things come in small packages (in my view) can generally be applied to the hospitality industry.  I tend to favour small scale boutique hotels over the big boys (Hilton et al) and small indie restaurants are usually of more interest to the likes of me than the chains. That is not to say that all indies are good and all chains are bad, just that your chances of getting something interesting (in a good way) seem to me to be proportionately higher at an indie. They are less likely to have bean counters micro managing the place or private equity vultures circling eagerly waiting to pick the flesh off of the bones of the place.

Small plates on the other hand can be much more of a mixed bag. In the right hands it is a way for the diner to get a fully immersive experience of what the restaurant has to offer, but in the wrong hands it is a rapacious means of increasing margins by charging mid starter to main prices for portion sizes often smaller than your average “old fashion” starters. The racking up of the bill when eating small plates stuff can be alarming.

This brings me to Poca, which has taken over the site of the much beloved and missed La Cuina (boy that lamb dish 🤤),

which has a rather interesting small plates menu.

The place come with no little pedigree with it part of a stable that included Alium in Barry (now closed) the Humble Onion in Dinis Powys (very much still open) and I am not a little pleased that it is a fair bit closer to my gaff than those two places.

It can certainly be said that when it comes to producing good food the owner,  Antonio Simone, knows his onions. I have to say I was, however, just a tad disappointed that the onion theme wasn’t followed here, with Shallot, Pearl or perhaps Scallion or Roscof (the latter my fav.) further onion themed naming options still up for grabs.

Nice interior, which doesn’t cram you in like some places.

I like the space, although the stairs are somewhat vertiginous for an acrophobe like me.

The small plates offering rather appealed as a venue for dinner with friends from Bristol, as one has quite strict dietary requirements and the menu’s mix of meat, fish and veggie dishes allowed her a good choice (without limiting the options for the rest of us).

The menu very much suggests small (plates) is beautiful rather than small is, well, just small.

One of the major issues I have with small plates is the lack of structure to the meal. Stuff can be flung out willy nilly, with seemingly no thought or logic to the order or (as per Parallel the other week) nigh on all at once such that there is no room on the table and/or it all goes cold.

Here we applied a strategy of ordering a couple of snacks, two protein dishes each (people had a try of others’ dishes, but we were not sharing per se) and then a couple of shared carbs. After a quick chat with front of house, delivery of these was appropriately staggered. The result was a very nicely paced meal.

First up was the house bread (£5 – 2 shared between 4),

a slightly inconventional focaccia (bit denser than usual, I would say) which was warm and very pleasant drenched in a fine combo of sweet, aged balsamic and grassy cold press olive oil. Personally, I would have liked a slightly lighter, more bubbly texture, with more of the trademark air pockets, and for it to have had a bit more salt on the top, but it was still very nice. Gorse’s milk bread, however, remains unchallenged as Cardiff’s undisputed bread winner.

We have the bread with some anchovies (£6 – touch ambitious pricing, I thought, for 4 not particularly large specimens – inflation to blame I suppose). These were advertised as Cadiz boquerones, but I must admit I always thought boquerones were was the white pickled (rather than salted) anchovies  Here we had a mix of the two types.

I love both styles, and these were good examples of each, but I know some people (Mrs. SF being one) are a bit leery of the salted (best) version (so be warned).

Leek potato and cheddar croquettes (£2.50 a pop) had a nice crisp outer shell and a velvety interior. A good alium hit from the leeks and a punchy mustard blob underneath added nicely to the mix.

My only minor quibble here was a slight paucity in terms of the expected funky cheddar hit.

I like the fact that they are priced individually, rather than coming in the dreaded odd number (3 usually). Division of odd numbered items into even numbered diners is a recipe for disaster in the even numbered groupings most people tend to eat in.

You don’t see chowder on a menu in the UK much these days, which I think is a shame. Very underrated comfort food, a chowder, as indeed are soups in general.

The chowder here (£11) had a good balance of seafood (plump mussels and cockles) and veg (no overloading of the potatoes), without being too rich. Samphire added a welcome crunch and salinity to temper the creaminess.

Would I have chosen brioche as the bread accompaniment? Perhaps not, with its innate sweetness and the richness of the chowder – cornbread for me with a chowder, but it went down well with the person who predominantly ate it.

Mrs. SF is a big fan of crab (preferring it over its more fêted cousin, the lobster) and immediately gravitated to the brown crab orecchiette (£13).

Cracking dish this,

with a generous portion of spankingly fresh brown crab meat, bob on cooked pasta and a crisp pangrettato spiked with salty capers and zesty lemon. Rich and full on flavoured, yet light and refreshing. Clever stuff this and one of the best pasta and seafood dishes I have tried this year.

Lamb breast (it is not lamb belly, ever) is one of those hugely underrated cuts that you all too rarely see on a menu or a butcher’s displays.  Shame that, as give it a low and slow cook and you get that perfect match of crispy fat and spoon tender, flavour packed, meat.

Poca’s treatment of the lamb breast was exemplary. Two generous discs of crisp, gamey, fat encased tender flavour packed meat.

Copious amounts of toasted hazelnuts added both texture and an extra flavour profile. Pickled red cabbage and a labneh added a touch of sourness and tang, both acting as a welcome counterpoint to the richness. The labneh was a bit thinner than I generally expect, being more a buttermilk consistency, but I actually think that benefited rather than detracted from the dish. Really good this and excellent value for the £9 price tag.

More meat arrived in the form of a spicy sausage (£7.50),

that was heavy with fennel seeds (a flavour I love).  Proper meatiness to this banger, with no husk in sight. The tomato sauce was rich, but with a good level of acidity which cut through the fattiness of the sausage.

Pork belly was next, with a nicely rendered down fat cap and good proportion of fat to lean

The smokiness of the charred hispi cabbage, the anis of the fennel and the acidity and crunch of granny smith apples worked well with the fatty pork. 

Only slight issue with this dish was the crackling had not fully crisped up and was at that tacky stage where you are at risk of it welding itself to your teeth. It did so here and was a bugger to extract (with the fear of a filling coming with it).

The non meat dishes were of equal quality to their carnivore counterparts.

A beetroot rooted dish (£7.50)

married the sweetness of the beetroot, with the bitterness of chicory and the tangy sourness of goat’s cheese curd. Definitely a dish that was greater than the sum of its parts

A burrata dish (£9) was just as good,

with rich creamy cheese and a sauce billed as a roasted red pepper pesto which (to me) was more reminiscent of a romesco.  Smoked almonds added a pleasing textural contrast and again pointed more to a romesco than a pesto.

Carb. ballast was provided by two hearty portions of  new season potatoes, with “roasted garlic” aioli (a mellowed take on traditional Spanish aioli that tends to use raw garlic, which can be rather bracing and usually results in my ejection into the spare room).

The gooey melted gruyére amped up the nuttiness of the new pots and the aioli added a nice sweetness, as well as further nuttiness. I enjoyed these, but would not put them in Cardiff’s potato top tier.

As an aside, I always get a bit confused (happens a lot these days) when reference is made to garlic aioli. Aioli is an emulsion of garlic and olive oil, and thus, the garlic element is already built into the equation.  If you take the garlic out, it just becomes olive oil doesn’t it (so no actual need to refer to it)? I suspect a lot of stuff illed as aioli is actually garlic mayo.

Two of our party passed on dessert, being full,

whereas myself and the other one agreed to share the cheese plate.

Nice selection of styles, with a blue, a soft and a hard cheese, with each amongst my favourite of their respective genres.  Decent portion size and all in good nick, with (praise the Lord) a commensurate amount of crackers (bloody hate it when they only give you like 3 crackers).

The pickled walnut puree on its own was somewhat tart to say the least (even for a super sour fan like me) such that I imagine it to be what actually flows through the veins of a xenomorph. It ultra sharpness, however, when combined with the creaminess of the cheeses, actually worked rather well

The drink

On the booze front, the drinks list

has something I love to see and that is all wines being available by the glass.

To me, with the quantum leap in wine preservation technology that the coravin (one of my favourite gadgets) brings, this should be standard in any restaurant with a wine list worth its salt. That it remains a rarity for most lists to have more than a few wines by the glass (usually from the least interesting areas of the list) is a  crying shame and a missed opportunity. You may not sell a full bottle of a top cuvee, but you may well sell 6 glasses of it to various different people, not on the same table.

With 4 of us we actually skipped the by the glass option and choose a bottle of red and white to go with the rather eclectic mix of food we had ordered.

I am a big fan of white rioja (in the UK we drink bucket loads of the red, but much less of the white), with the breadth of styles on offer having evolved passed just  the oaky behemoths.

This number (£63 on the list and around the £25 mark retail, so a fair mark up by UK standards) from Conde Valdemar hit the spot nicely (albeit it still being a baby ageing wise).

It had a nice level of oak driven spice (vanilla), orchard and stone fruits fruits and a citrus infused finish. Good tangy (almost saline) freshness to this wine, but with enough oomph for it to cope with pretty much anything on the menu here. Top drop this, which will only get better with a bit more sleepy time in the bottle.

On the reds, I have always had a lot of time for Lebanese wines (and not just those from Chateau Musar).

This carignan number (£44 on the list and around £20 retail)

had a lovely nose of ripe red and black fruits, with allspice, cinnimon and a touch of leather in the nasal mix. On the palate, there was blackcurrant, black plums and cherry and a herbal finish.

Worked well with the meaty dishes, particularly the lamb.

The verdict

Poca has been one of the most eagerly awaited openings in Cardiff this year, and I think it lives up to the hype. The food is tasty with some inventive flavour combinations (be warned, nut allegists, nuts feature heavily in a number of dishes) . Despite the “small” plates driven menu, I thought the portions were actually pretty hearty.

Value wise, 4 of us left very well sated and paid just over £244 (including a well deserved tip, with service excellent – still don’t like automatically added service charges), of which over £100 was wine, in total. If you go a bit easier on the wine volumes or for something a little cheaper on the list I think £35/£40 a head is easy do-able here (a snack/bread, a couple of meaty or fishy plates each and some carbs, plus a couple of glasses of wine).

By way of balance, a couple I know felt the small plates concept didn’t work. As such it is not (it seems) for everyone, but I certainly enjoyed it.

The details

Address: Kings Road, Canton (or Pontcanna, if you like), Cardiff, CF11 9BZ.

Website: https://pocarestaurant.co.uk/