Morito

Morito is what happens when Moro’s kitchen gets asked to work at tapas speed.

Sam and Samantha Clark opened it in 2010, two doors along from their original restaurant on the same stretch of Exmouth Market, and rather than softening the format for a smaller room, they compressed it: the same Moorish and North African pantry — sumac, preserved lemon, tahini, good olive oil — but plated in rounds of small dishes meant to be ordered continuously rather than as a fixed three-course sitting.

It reads less like a spin-off than like the same kitchen shown from a different angle.

The Room

Narrow and corridor-like, with a run of counter seats facing an open kitchen where the glow of an orange-tiled bar plays off a blue wall — a small, specific bit of colour that does a lot of work in a room this tight.

There’s no real hiding from the noise here, and that’s the point: Morito is built to be loud, close, and slightly chaotic in the way a good tapas bar should be, not a quieter version of Moro squeezed into a smaller footprint. Seats at the counter, right up against the pass, are the best in the house if you don’t mind eating standing-adjacent.

What to Order

Start with the bread basket — everything is made in-house, and the za’atar flatbread, torn and dragged through olive oil seasoned with sumac, is worth ordering again once it’s gone. The fried chickpeas with pumpkin, tahini and red onion are the dish regulars keep coming back for: soft pumpkin against crisp chickpeas and sweet raw onion, finished with fresh coriander.

Crispy aubergine with feta and date molasses is the other constant, sweet-savoury in a way that’s become something of a house signature since it first appeared on the menu. The salt cod croquetas and the jamon croquetas both do what croquetas should — crisp shell, molten centre — and mackerel on flatbread is worth ordering if you want something lighter between the richer plates.

None of this is meant to be eaten in sequence; order two or three dishes at a time and keep going rather than trying to plan the whole meal at once.

The Drinks List

A tight list of cocktails and low-intervention wines that leans toward things that can stand up to sumac and preserved lemon without being flattened by them, plus a non-alcoholic selection that goes beyond the usual token soft drinks. It’s a shorter list than Moro’s next door, deliberately — this is a room built for a quick, sharp glass between plates, not a slow bottle over a long dinner.

What You Will Pay

Tapas pricing means the bill climbs quickly if you’re not paying attention — expect somewhere around £30–40 per person for a proper round of small plates and a drink or two, more if the table keeps ordering. It’s not expensive by Exmouth Market standards, but it’s easy to underestimate how many dishes two people actually need before the table feels full.

The Verdict

Morito works best as what it was built to be: a fast, loud, slightly chaotic tapas stop rather than a scaled-down version of the restaurant next door. Book if you want a table for four or more on a weekend evening, but the counter seats are genuinely the better experience for one or two people who don’t mind eating close to the kitchen noise.

It’s worth resisting the temptation to treat it as “Moro’s cheaper little sibling” — the format is different enough, and confident enough in that difference, that it earns its own visit rather than functioning as an overflow room for whichever restaurant has the shorter wait on a given night.

What’s Being Said

The sibling act works because neither restaurant is trying to be the other. Moro next door is the room you book ahead for and settle into; Morito is the one you duck into on the way past, order fast, and leave satisfied twenty minutes later — and both versions of the Clarks’ pantry hold up under very different kinds of scrutiny.

What’s notable, more than a decade and a half after Morito opened, is that the smaller room has never drifted into being a watered-down tribute act to the original. The fried chickpeas and the crispy aubergine are dishes in their own right, not compressed echoes of something better next door, which is the harder trick for any “little sibling” restaurant to pull off once the novelty of the format has worn off.

This review’s rating sits at four and a half for exactly that reason — a little-sibling dining room that never became a watered-down tribute act to the original next door.