One of the most baffling trends to afflict new restaurant construction in the past ten years has been the insistence, wherever space permits (and often where it simply does not), on offering two different “eating experiences” in the same building. Almost every new restaurant you care to mention nowadays offers both a “relaxed brasserie” and a “fine dining restaurant”, and I just don’t know why.

Well, I do know why. Money. That’s all. Some people want to go out and be fussed over by a supercilious gauleiter in morning dress, have their wine poured for them drop by drop in a noiseless morgue of a room, and, if they choose, their main course chewed for them by a flunky and dribbled into their mouths, followed by a bill of more than a hundred quid a head, while others want to neck three beers listening to dance music and have a six-quid burger thrown at them from the bar by a pierced-nippled stripper on roller skates – and restaurateurs just cannot bear to turn either customer away. So they cravenly attempt to accommodate both.

More recently still, a habit has developed of offering a delicatessen and grocery store inside or alongside your restaurant/bar/brasserie, for punters who don’t want to go out for dinner at all but whose money you nonetheless covet. Lots of good, exciting new places do this. Quite often you’re sitting in the posh quiet restaurant, listening to the thump of the bass from the brasserie while watching people queue-jump for premium pasta in the grocery section. I don’t know why they don’t go further, open up a milliner’s and mobile-phone shop next to the kitchen, why don’t they? Or a Halfords, now that would be useful.

Ten years ago, this cupiditous multitasking would have been unthinkable. If you wanted a long, slow, tightly organised and serious meal with event wine you went to Le Gavroche, Gordon Ramsay, Pied à Terre, wherever. You wanted a cheeseburger and a drive-by shooting, you went to Mickey D’s. You didn’t go into the Gavva and say, “Tell you what, Silvano, I’m not really up for this posh stuff today, could you grab us a pizza and a couple of frozen cheesecakes to take away?”

The problem for me with these restaurants of multiple possibility is the option paralysis they engender. I phone to book a table and they say, “Brasserie or fine dining?” and I freeze in the headlights of their inquiry, wondering whether or not I want a limp, truffly amuse-bouche before my double-priced soup. And do I want it enough to iron a shirt specially?

Usually I say, “Hmm, brasserie or fine dining? Good question. Let me call you back.” And then I go somewhere else because the answer is, truthfully, “Neither.” “Brasserie” to me sounds all half-arsed and clattery with giant plates and clumsy provincial waitresses and soggy fishcakes and giant glasses of soave. And fine dining (pronounced “fane daning”) is just so impossibly Hyacinth Bucket.

So when I finally became aware of what I think is called “Caleya Ibérica Food and Culture”, which has been opening on Great Portland Street in stages (like the launch sections of a moon-bound rocket, or the semi-autonomous segments of a caterpillar) since the end of last year, I was not especially surprised to see that it featured both a ground-level tapas bar and a swaggering fine dining restaurant “by” Nacho Manzano – not the Croesus-rich inventor of the ubiquitous, cardboard, guacamole dipping-chip, but a Michelin-starred chef-prop working out of the Asturian mountains.

If anyone’s going to go for the two-in-one restaurant, it’s the Spaniards. They are very much an either/or eating nation and Spanish gastronomy is a two-speed operation: stiff as a rutting flagpole or relaxed as a Friesian’s tongue. They’re either trawling the fiesta with a pastel-coloured pullover knotted round their neck, nibbling weeny tapasitas with a small bottle of manzanilla in one hand, or arriving at three-star experimental gastrodomes on prancing Andalusian horses, wearing wide-brimmed hats and giant cummerbunds.

Caleya Ibérica Food and Culture is not just a two-spot enterprise, however. Oh no. When we arrived for dinner we clocked various mezzanines containing ham shops, wineries, libraries, little table and chairs tucked away in all sorts of places… One wouldn’t have been surprised to find a traditional Valencian cobbler’s stand tucked up next to a Murcian leather-worker’s table. Indeed, as the website boasts: “We sell books, music, films and press, we show art and photography, and we host events and presentations focused on Spanish culture…”

Esther and I were booked in for “fine dining” because that was the newest departure and most relevant to the job I do here. But when we arrived they asked us again, “Fine dining or tapas?”, and we crumbled. We’d just been asked too many times. OF COURSE we didn’t want fine dining. It was 8.30pm – we were just hungry. Why on earth would we want to sit upstairs in the silent room with four other hushed couples at linen-dressed tables having smoke blown up our arse for three hours, while downstairs people were grabbing ice-cold beers from the bar and nibbling first-rate ham?

So we tapassed. And it was pretty good. Three pata negra hams on offer at £19.50 a plateful (100g, I’d guess, and not so different from deli prices) were in prime condition, though the Huelva that we chose was cut a little fat even for me. The croquetas were of the very best – light and runny and sweet; the fabada was a little watery, a little light on the meat; good squid and aïoli; excellent olives; okay pimientos de Padrón; dreary chicken over-burdened with pine nuts and prunes; a rather light sherry list for such a place but good palo cortado that went sweetly and brownly with everything.

And we paid and left, and I felt like a mug. For I had gone to a job of work but collapsed where I always collapse: bottling the big show at the last minute and taking whatever food comes quickest and easiest. Good tapas. Ring out the bells.

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