About us

The Tasty Tapas is a family run business based in the beautiful city of Salisbury. Our key focus is creating fantastic Spanish flavours using English ingredients.

The idea behind the Tasty Tapas has been developed over several years.  Food and cooking has always been a passion of ours. Several years ago, we started curing our own version of Jamon Iberico, using organic free-range pigs from the New Forest, the results were good but even a meat-eating family struggle to get through 20kg a year.

But why Spanish food?  We believe the Spanish cuisine offers a great variety of flavours, the Moorish influence on the flavours of the South and the delicious fresh fish that’s renowned in Andalucía. There’s also the rich stews of the central region and the world-famous reputation of Northern Spain and the Basque cooking.

The challenge was to try to recreate these flavours using the abundance of produce grown in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. We use garlic from the Isle Wight, locally grown padron peppers, (the perfect accomplishment to a beer from Galicia), tomatoes, peppers, rapeseed oils and so many other stable ingredients all from local suppliers. We found independent companies making Chorizo, Lomo, Karma Ham (very similar to Serrano ham) and a wide variety of white cheeses. As we grow, we will continually look for new suppliers and change our menu to reflect the seasons.

It is this combination of Spanish flavours and these fresh locally sourced English ingredients which we think makes the Tasty Tapas a genuinely different and delicious experience.

Just as a foot note for the pedantic, clearly it is not possible to source all the ingredients locally, we still appear to have a shortage of lemon groves in Wiltshire, although global warming may change that. Also, saffron & chickpeas are hard to source.  Where possible we will try to substitute, but sometimes in order to be authentic, we will use ingredients from outside the 3 counties.

We hope you enjoy our food, passion and service.