Añada

Great food, fantastic drinks and friendly staff. The highlight was the paella, wonderfully fragrant with a generous amount of chicken and chorizo.

Absolutely amazing Spanish tapas.
The hanger steak was cooked to perfection and the coconut parfait dessert was mouth watering, along with the cream catalana — delicious!
Definitely coming back here

We had a very pleasant meal here last night. Nice and quiet; conducive to conversation. The tapas portions are small (even for tapas) but the larger plates were big enough to share. Standouts included soft shell crab and Waygu beef. The staff was delightful and the neighborhood great fun.

We had a great dinner at Anada. We arrived at 7 on a Friday night without reservations and even though the restaurant was utterly packed the hostess made sure to give us the literally last two seats available. My girlfriend and I each ordered a tasting course from the menu and by the end of dinner we had tried an eclectic and perfect range of dishes. We were thoroughly full with barely enough room for desert. The service was outstanding, couldn’t be better. Very glad we stopped in.

This small little place has all the charm, was comfortable and relaxed with great staff.
We ordered a range of tapas and raciones which were great as well as 2 of the paellas.
The different tapas were tasty — would recommend the lamb ribs and fried eggplant/​aubergine.
Was disappointed with the pork belly, nothing special at all.
The chicken paella was quite tasty. The squid ink one was just not my cup of tea.
Overall, was pretty pleasant place for a catch up and doesn’t break the bank.

Anada is an excellent Spanish restaurant/​tapas bar on Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. They have a full a la carte menu as well as a couple of tasting menus — one with nine plates, one with 12. These are generally for two people but after a brief chat with the chef my very genial waiter advised me they could do one just for me. I opted for the smaller version and was even able to Insert a couple of dishes that tickled my fancy — the stuffed calamari and the morcilla (I’m a sucker for blood pudding).
It was a hot Melbourne Saturday afternoon so I ordered a bottle of Escanciador cider which came with a glass full of ice. The first two dishes arrived soon after — a plump and tasty Coffin Bay oyster served au natural on a bed of rock salt and a sliver of lemon, and a small serve of delicious Jamon. This was followed by calamari stuffed with its own tentacles along with dill, egg and sumac, and a little glass of spicy, green gazpacho.
The morcilla was lovely — soft, rich and topped with a fried quail egg. The crisp fried onion was a great accompaniment. This was followed by a cube of pork belly served on an eggplant purée served with a simple green salad dressed with balsamic vinegarI’ve never been a big fan of pork belly and this didn’t change my mind, although the meat was well cooked and tender.
I’d finished my cider and asked the waiter to recommend a good sweet sherry. He suggested the Piedra Luenga Pedro Jiminez. Great choice — like drinking raisins, but not cloyingly sweet.
The final two courses arrived — beef cheek in a fava bean sauce, and beetroot served with a couple of dollops of sour cream. Beef cheeks usually elicit the same level of culinary excitement for me as pork belly, but this was quite good, thanks to the sauce.
The food at Anada is very good, the staff accommodating and friendly, and the wine list interesting — particularly the extensive range of sherries. My only regret was choosing the nine course tasting plate instead of the 12. My bad. I’ll know better next time.
PS I went back to Anada today after lunch in Brunswick Street with a couple of friends as we were all in the mood for some cheese. We ordered three — a manchego, a creamy goat cheese and a Valdeon blue. The first two were good, but the blue was totally past it’s use by date. You could tell by looking at it that it shouldn’t have been served, but thrown out. The half inch around the crust had turned an ugly brown colour and the smell of ammonia confirmed that it was well and truly gone. Disappointing for a restaurant of this calibre to let something like this slip through the cracks. The difference between an average restaurant and a great one is consistency and attention to detail, and on both counts Anada failed today. As a result, I’ve downgraded my rating of Anada from 4 to 3.

So all we went here for was a nice paella and a jug of sangria. Neither could be obtained. Worse thing is Unilocal reviews delivered us here so only fair to update.
Paella was bland and dry, marked up individual glasses of sangria only. Pretty sure the unwanted $ 40 worth of meagre portioned tapas we consumed while waiting were supposed to impress (the quail was the only good one) and the holier than thou air of pretentiousness that accompanied the experience certainly convinced me not to return.
Just up Brunswick st there are better Spanish dining options, please do yourself a favour & consider those instead

Well HELLO Anada!
Mark ‘The Terrifying Sharptooth’ and I had been trying to get a booking at this restaurant for ages, and now I can finally say that it was definitely worth the wait!
The food was delicioso to say the least!
I’m talking 9 sensational dishes that we shared: 6 tapas including a boquerones (white anchovy in vinegar) with palmitos & guindilla pepper, stuffed calamari with sumac, Jerusalem artichoke soup with labneh, charcoal grilled quail with freekeh and pomegranate, rabbit empanadilla and fried cauliflower with zataar and house yoghurt, not to mention 3 raciones (mains) including slow roasted beef cheeks in Oloroso with fava bean purée, patatas tortilla with aioli and paella with chicken, calamari, mussels and saffron — can you believe that all that food plus ciders worked out to be $ 50 per head… WOWZAS!!!
The service was absolutely commendable specifically with each dish arriving just as we finished the last; i’ve never seen such efficiency from a kitchen.
The floor staff were friendly and attentive, and willing to cater to our needs from us originally asking to be moved from the bar to a table, however sitting at the bar was rather delightful, engaging in a few pleasant conversations with the bar staff.
Mark ‘The Terrifying Sharptooth’ thought the Spanish cider was delicious, and we both thought that everything from the interior to the food was pretty darn good!
If it’s Spanish that you’re craving and you can’t get into MoVida, then definitely make this restaurant your second option.
Tip: If you’re in a group of 6 or more, you’ll have to select from one of the ‘Tasting Menu’s’.

If you’re going to be a successful restaurant in the Gertrude st/​Smith st area of Collingwood you’ve got to be good and Anada is superb. Although Movida is all the rage in Melbourne when it comes to Spanish cuisine, Anada deserves to be right up there with the best of them.
The main things that struck me were:
— the knowledge, professionalism and friendliness of the staff
— the variety of the tapas and raciones, there is something here for everyone including sheep brains, rabbit enchilada, oysters, vegetarian options, paella (both seafood and meat).
— the atmosphere is superb, a classy dining experience without the pretence of many more expensive dining places.
Being tapas obviously the food menu is fairly expensive as the portions are small and the wine list is fairly pricey with the cheapest bottle of white being almost $ 50 but as a treat on that special occassion Anada is sure to please.

Ohhhhhhhh Añada.
Honestly, there is nothing to not like about this place. Añada (pronounced An-​yahda) is beyond delicious. As you may have guessed by the name, this little restaurant is of the Spanish persuasion. Serving both tapas (the itty bitty snacky sharing dishes — like Spanish dim sum) and raciones (bigger dishes) they cater to any and all dietary requirements and desires.
Having poached the sous chef from the infamous Movida, Añada was always set to make their mark on Melbourne’s restaurant scene. That said, they’ve seriously gone above and beyond anyone’s expectations.
I’ve eaten here a number of times and each experience has been nothing short of perfection on all fronts — ninja style wait staff that can refill a water glass without you noticing, dishes that are not only drool-​worthy but appear and disappear at just the right moments… and perhaps best of all, a genuinely surprising price point.
My advice? Don’t just go… put your tastebuds in the hands of the incredibly capable waitstaff and let them do the ordering for you.

I often lament the fact that tapas in Melbourne seem to be synonymous with an expensive night out and a load of wank dining. I don’t know how what was originally designed to be a simple snack made to cover your beverage from flies has become an excuse to barbeque a couple of prawns, chuck a few chilli flakes on and charge $ 20 for it or some such. But that is often what I feel tapas have become in this great city.
Anada is no foil for this fundamental cultural difference between us and our Spanish cousins. But then again the traditional tapas do cost between $ 2.00-$ 6.50 with the larger servings of ‘raciones’ costing $ 14 – 32 each.
This does not mean that this is not a very classy establishment and you won’t go away spending a good chunk of your paycheck to dine here. But it does mean you won’t go away feeling ripped off in both price and quality.
The wine list is very substantive and the staff in the place very knowledgeable and attentive. I say take your time ordering small morsels of food and drink a load of their delicious wine. That way you will get to sample a great many yummy titbits and come away having had a fun evening — who knows you may even be a little drunk.

I don’t mean to come over all zombie neophyte — or Hannibal Lecter for that matter — but Añada is the first place I ever ate brains. And churros. And it was sweet. And they were sweet. Añada is awesome. A Southern Spanish restaurant and bar also influenced by Muslim Mediterranean flavours and specialising in Tapas, Añada’s owners founded this Gertrude Street gem in 2008 after a stint at London’s River Café.
Serving both Tapas and more substantial Raciones and boasting an excellent cheese and dessert menu alongside a truly stunning wine list, Añada is quite possibly the most atmospheric, verging on romantic, little eatery on the Gertrude Street stretch. And with prices ranging from $ 2 each for Chorizitos to $ 70 per person for a Tasting Menu encompassing ‘twelve premium Tapas and Raciones over five courses, including dessert or cheese,’ there’s something for every budget and appetite.
My suggestion? A long, languid evening at Añada filled a selection of Tapas and punctuated with a couple of suggestively named Raciones. Oh, and bucketfuls of great Spanish wine recommended by Añada’s hugely knowledgeable staff. All in all a brilliant culinary discovery. But the most unexpected discovery of all? Crumbed lambs brain with pork belly and red lentils tastes uncannily like KFC; a revelation that would have saved Hannibal Lecter an awful lot of trouble.