Casa Madeira, 46b Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TL (020 7735 0592). Starters £4-£9.50, mains £7.50-£20.50, pastel de nata £1.50, wines from £14.99 Sometimes restaurants call to me. Sometimes I just don’t listen. Casa Madeira is one of those restaurants. I have driven past it hundreds of times. It is on my route home from the centre of London: south over Lambeth Bridge, right along Albert Embankment, and there it is tucked into the railway arches under the line from Waterloo. The pavement here, in the shadow of the MI6 building, edges a wide terrace given over to outside dining. Over the years I have glanced at the tables beneath the umbrellas as I have passed, at clusters of people leaning in over their plates, and thought that it looked like fun. I’ve thought I should go there. Then I haven’t gone there. Still, I’ve eaten some of Madeira’s food. You may well have done, too. These arches were originally occupied by the Madeira Bakery and Café, which opened in the 1980s and specialises in pastéis de nata, burnished Portuguese tarts in their cups of pure flaky pastry, which always make life better. Business boomed and by 2005 they had to move to a dedicated production site in Wandsworth. On a good day they can make 30,000. If you’ve ever eaten a pastel de nata in London, it probably came from them. They converted the arches into a trio of businesses. To the left is a spartan café. To the right is a well-stocked deli. In the middle is the restaurant. They also have a bar a short distance away on South Lambeth Road, the heart of London’s Portuguese community, but this is the mothership. Needing somewhere by which to mark a particular moment in my life, I book a table for six. The fact is I love the most familiar bits of the Portuguese repertoire. I was once properly addicted to the food served at a grill house on Brixton Hill, originally called the Gallery. They did the best piri piri chicken, a spatchcocked wonder of smoky char and chilli and salt. They did fabulous grilled ribs and chorizo, a denser, meatier version than its Spanish cousin. They did a small number of things very well. Back behind the takeaway was a hilarious, windowless restaurant, with a minstrel gallery and kitsch murals where they served ludicrously good value mixed grills, and dishes of clams and thumb-thick prawns. One of the owners died, the remaining owner sold up, the quality deteriorated and then a fire closed them altogether for a year or two. I miss the Gallery. So instead, here I am at last, on the outside terrace at Casa Madeira, beneath umbrellas equipped with heaters that cast a ripe orange glow and then cut out for a minute of gloom, before suddenly reilluminating. Around us sits a mixed crowd – suited and booted men who I decide are spies from MI6, a younger set in serious puffas against the cold rippling off the Thames just over the road, a few families. Uniformed waiters work these tables, vigorously. The service has a sweet and solicitous air to it. There’s a lot of opening out of stands at the side of each table for trays from the kitchen. While there are certainly enough waiters, there may not be quite enough people working the grill out back given a couple of lengthy waits. Cultivate patience. But the food, when it arrives, is everything. I feel foolish for not having been here before. Rugged bread arrives with little foil-lidded pots of a salty sardine or mackerel pâté. We all dig in. I remind the other elders at the table that it’s a snap for the fish paste of our youth. We conclude that’s why we like it. We place an order of dishes to share. Thick lengths of taut-skinned chorizo arrive perched in custom-designed terracotta dishes with a well of booze at the bottom to be ignited. Broad blue flames gutter and spin for a good few minutes at the end of the table. It lends hunks of the chorizo a welcome char and splits the skin so the juices run. We have a deep bowl of thumbnail-sized white clams, in a garlicky broth which demands to be finished off by the bread, and grilled prawns which have been split open and generously smothered with piri piri sauce. Mains are variations on the same theme, which is what we’re here for. There is very little in the way of flummery coming out of that kitchen. It is solid ingredients, treated with due care and attention. There are mixed grills, with chicken and pork escalopes, a little more chorizo and the stars of the show, expertly trimmed lamb chops. We have grilled sardines, their silvery skins blistered and curled, so that the flesh comes away from the bone, and a stew of pork with more clams which provides further opportunities for bread moppage. Chips are hot and crisp. Salads are fresh and vinegary. We finish, of course, with a pastel de nata each and they are still warm, so everything is perfect. The pastry flakes down our coats. The sweet, set custard coats our mouths. Prices are reasonable and in places extraordinary. The specials blackboard offers a whole turbot for three or four people for £55. I’m told it needs to be sold today and that normally it would be around £75. I tell him about the £135 at Brat at Climpson’s Arch. He laughs. “We couldn’t charge that here,” he says. I’m sure they couldn’t. That’s not a complaint. At the end they bring us each a thimble glass of a dark, caramel-coloured madeira and we toast what is, for me, a last night of freedom. As restaurants are finally opening up, I am closing down. The next day I will begin two weeks of self-isolation ahead of the hip replacement I’ve been banging on about elsewhere in this newspaper. It’s also one of the reasons, alongside the small matter of a raging pandemic, I’ve not been leaving London. I will start reviewing again across the whole of the UK as soon as I can. So enough with the complaining emails already. Magazine deadlines being what they are, this piece was written before it happened, but you’re reading it after the deed has been done. I will already have been fitted with a spiffing new ceramic hip. I will be part man, part crockery. So no swanning around those restaurants for me for a short while. Instead, some fabulous people will be keeping my seat at the table warm, by telling you about restaurants they love. See you very soon. News bites The news of new openings keeps coming. Edinburgh-based chefs Sam Yorke and Tomás Gormley, with experience between them working with Tom Kitchin, the late Andrew Fairlie and at the Lookout by Gardeners Cottage, are to turn their pop-up supper club into a permanent fixture. The high-end Heron will open this summer on a site on The Shore in Leith, and will have an à la carte menu that will change every few weeks. At the other end of Britain in Lewes, West Sussex, chef Richard Falk, who spent five years at Robin Gill’s highly regarded Dairy in south London, is to open Fork. He’s describing the modern British menu as ‘innovative yet accessible’, which is a phrase broadly open to interpretation. The opening menu promises flank steak with salsa verde and smoked bone marrow, lamb rack and offal with wilted gem, anchovy and capers and English strawberries with whipped yoghurt, elderflower and feuilletine. Visit fork-lewes.co.uk. And (kind of) between the two in Manchester, the Deansgate Square development has just welcomed the arrival of Atomeca, an all-day venue with a drink offering from the award-winning bartending brothers Joe and Daniel Schofield and wine expert James Brandwood. To soak it all up there’s a short Spanish-inflected food menu of cheese and charcuterie plates, tostadas and habas fritas. At atomeca.co.uk.