La Rueda

Went to dinner here on Saturday night.
Had the spicy potatoes, baby squid, spicy sausage and multiple beers
The restaurant was very busy inside so the staff were able to sit us outside and set-​up some heaters for us, wonderful service and the food and drinks were served quickly
I have heard some not so great reviews of this place, but I found it to be a nice restaurant with good for and great service
Recommending it, and I will be returning for sure :)

Wanted to like this place but some of the tapas were really not good while others were decent. It’s okay but not worth the money. Crowd gets pretty fun as it gets late so that’s a big plus.

So I’ve been coming here since I was 7 years old. My dad’s Spanish and this is his favourite restaurant & is still a Spanish family run business like it was 20 years ago (yup same family, different generation)
Yes it’s gone through its ups & downs — especially with the gentrification of Clapham and trying to fit in with the cool trendy young people vibe that clapham now has. However — La Rueda isn’t really cool, hip & trendy. What it does do is great tasting authentic traditional tapas, (try the octopus — it’s delicious!) décor is traditionalist to the old Spanish era and most of the waiters– who are normally Spanish or Portuguese — always aim to give great service.
The place is family friendly — I’ll often see on a Friday/​Saturday eve young children eating with their parents, which is rare for most of the other clapham bars & restaurants.
The main two downsides are the desserts & the toilets. The desserts aren’t fresh unlike the tapas & main dishes so I wouldn’t particularly recommend them. And the toilets really do need a refurb as they’re pretty much falling apart.

I have been to the chain in Ealing Broadway, the atmosphere is calming, is nice for a lunch but in the evening is really lovely for a romantic date.
The service is prompt and friendly, they are really helpful
The starters are amazing specially the seafood and the steak is wonderful
The portions are large so it’s definite winner
The drinks selection is fruit juices and wines, beers
I ordered
The steak
Starters of calamari and seafood
I would recommend the place for a visit

Dinner
I went there with my friends, three of us together. We had so many small plates.
Ham
Chili
Olives
Anchovies
Asparagus
Omelette
Paella
It was just amazing. The quality wasn’t bad but not so many people were around. Well it was quiet so it worked for us.

Alright! My first night in London moving here and LOL on fourth of july, the hubby and i decide to go to a Spanish place ! We both got a glass of house wine (red), which was fine for a house wine but the gems were really what we ate!
We ordered the arroz con pollo as well as the veggie paella. the paella blew me away-​i have never had such a flavorful vegetarian paella dish! hubby liked the chicken — really tender meat and deliciously flavored rice. beats even the places i’ve been to in SF! nice start to my time here :)

So, during the last of the summer months my Spanish partner, our native Spanish speaking friend and myself met up for a drink and we thought La Rueda would be the place. We bought some drinks paid for them and enjoyed the evening. As we were having a good time we decided to have some food so various tapas was ordered. The verdict from my partner was ‘it’s as good as you are going to get outside of Spain’ (that is a big compliment by the way LOL). We paid for the tapas, but as the night was young decided to have another drink. The drinks arrived and were paid for.
In summary the prices were reasonable and the food was good. So why a one star rating? Because I could not do a no star review!
We left the restaurant had crossed the road and we walking down the street, when one of the waiters came chasing after us yelling we hadn’t paid. There were lots of people about on the high street and sat outside the restaurant, so been accused of theft in front of them all was not nice. So we went back to the restaurant where we had paid 3 times! and saw the manager.
Mistakes can be made, but it’s how they are dealt with that show the worth of a business. The ‘okay, you can go’ we got from the manager is obviously not acceptable, so that’s 3 customer who will never return who have told all their friends what happened and a negative review on Qype.

it feels like spain when you go there the music, the food, amazing!

I doubt very much if La Rueda on Clapham High St would have appeared on my radar but for the fact that it’s one of the few places in London that serves up the Valencian noodle dish, fideuá. This tapas bar is more than a bit old fashioned with a very clichéd Spanish feel about it. It was so clichéd that you could imagine that you were in Spain albeit twenty years ago.
The décor wasn’t the only thing retro about this place as our selection of tapas lacked the sophisticated sheen that you find in the classier Spanish joints. That said what they lacked in quality, they made up for in quantity. Although they could afford to be generous with potatoes. Sadly they weren’t as generous with the paprika and an insipid sauce accompanied the patatas bravas.
Of the rest, the seafood was the least worst. The calamares and sardinas a la plancha were passable with the pick of the bunch being the garlicky prawns in the gambas al pil pil. The rinones al jerez (kidneys in sherry sauce) was also OK but the accompaniment of chips puzzled me. There was also nothing wrong with the chorizo iberico but it isn’t that hard to arrange out some chorizo then wait for it to reach room temperature. I can’t remember anything at all about the pollo al ajillo (chicken in garlic) or the empanadillas de atun (mini tuna pasties).
Following the unremarkable tapas was the fideuá, a dish that I have eaten just once before about ten years ago in Barcelona. I was therefore a bit nervous at rating this dish without much of a benchmark to measure it against. Thankfully, my mate who as a frequent business visitor to Valencia was very familiar with fideuá was in attendance to provide expert opinion.
The fideuá de pollo y marisco included plenty of chicken and seafood. If anything our complaint was that there weren’t enough noodles in this dish. Otherwise, it was a tasty moreish dish with the short fideo noodles absorbing the flavours from the seafood. The lack of noodles aside, my mate thought it compared well to the fideuá, he had in Spain, although it was a good few years since he last ate it.
The desserts were the worse part of the meal; they looked cheap and artificial and were most likely ‘bought in’. The low point was the very yellow vanilla ice cream that came with my Tarta de Santiago.
On the plus side, the restaurant was very buzzy and full of large groups having a good time. It was at this moment, I realised that people didn’t come here to track down fideuá, they came to carry on the party. In fact being a tapas bar, it’s pretty ideal for those groups where some want to carry on boozing whilst others want to eat.
Service was OK although it did deteriorate as the evening wore on as evidenced by a cock-​up in the coffee order that left my friend without her cappuccino. The cost was £100 between the four of us or £25/​head including a round of drinks and service.
Whilst Fideuá is rare in London and La Rueda knocks out a decent version, it isn’t that good that you’d pay a special visit to this dated tapas bar.

fantastic food, great spanish music, excellent service, great place to organise a birthday party, or just have fun with friends