Los Moros, 15-17 Grape Lane, York YO1 7HU (01904 636834; losmorosyork.co.uk). Small plates £6 – £10.50; large plates £14 – £26; desserts £8. Wines from £25 a bottle
There are terrific people-watching opportunities at Los Moros in York, although only if you get a window seat in the first-floor dining room. Here comes the dickie-bowed tour guide, leading a group of slack-jawed tourists around the bend in the medieval cobbled alley that joins Swinegate to Grape Lane. History records the latter to be a shortening of a filthy and anatomically descriptive name for what used to take place here; one which I would never get past the editors of a family newspaper. Look it up. Here, in the other direction, comes a long, informal parade of chaps in three-piece suits, as if just out of a meeting. Is that the badge of the Rotarians on their lapels? Or are they Freemasons? Hard to tell from up here. But, oh my, look at that explosion of facial hair. There really are some quite magnificent beards in York these days.
