Brindisa began with £6,000 and a single pallet. That was the mid-80s, when Spanish food in Britain meant little more than holiday sangria and the indestructible, plastic-rinded cheese that tourists hauled home in their suitcases. 

These days, Brindisa ingredients run quietly through our menus - the smoked paprika in the labneh, the saffron in the meatballs, and the San Simón da Costa that gives our croquettes their woody depth. That cheese comes from Terra Chá, the flat green heart of inland Galicia, where the pasture is lush, the milk is creamy, and the smoke comes off barkless birch rather than oak.

Hear founder Monika Linton to talk about where it all started, why they still insist on meeting every producer in person, and what she'd want you to taste in a croquette. The conversation was led by Charlie Humphries, Caravan’s Head of Brand.

Charlie: Tell us how Brindisa began.

Monika: We made £6,000 of investment go a very long way - that was the set-up for my first pallet of product. Spain was so under-discovered in the 80s and 90s that I dreamed we would go far; it just had to. But we managed to lead it, and that is where the magic has happened. Brindisa is now a multi-million-pound wholesale and retail business - two shops, a direct-to-consumer website and restaurants - and we are still privately owned.

Charlie: You've said that selling Spanish cheese in 1990 in London was “probably the most ridiculously difficult thing to try and do.” What did people not understand about Spanish food then that they understand now?

Monika: It was so hard, but Spain’s own history explains a lot of it. Under Franco, large industry and centralisation were valued over regional, artisan foods. Making artisan cheese was considered revolutionary, almost anti-establishment, so local cheeses hardly crossed Spain, let alone reached abroad. Most of what the outside world saw on holiday was the plastic-rinded, indestructible wheels of mediocre cheese - unlike France, where excellent cheese was simply part of your trip. And most visitors went to the coastline and never saw the interior, where the animals lived and pastured, so they had no idea it existed. On top of that, Spain uses sheep’s milk for many of its cheeses, which the British weren’t familiar with and didn’t yet value. The resistance was really about how to compete with France and Italy, whose products had names and styles people already knew. Buying Spanish felt risky because it was so unknown. The adventurous chefs and shops bought from us - but at the time they were few.

Charlie: British chefs now specify Spanish ingredients by name - jamón ibérico, piquillo peppers, manchego - things that were unknown here when you started. What does that mean to you?

Monika: It means so much, because I love languages - I was a teacher in my early life - and encouraging the use of new words was key. Many chefs followed suit on their menus: they would simply write piquillo, or guindilla, judión, arrocina, so that front-of-house had to learn these things and explain them. I believe we've educated Britain in this vocabulary and increased the lexicon.

Charlie: The San Simón da Costa in Caravan’s croquettes is a Galician smoked cheese with PDO status (wikipedia.org) - not something most people in the UK have encountered. Where does it come from, and what makes it worth the effort of importing?

Monika: San Simón da Costa (sansimondacosta.com) comes from the Terra Chá area of Lugo in Galicia, around Vilalba. Terra Chá is the “flat land” of inland Lugo, Galicia’s broadest plain - green, wet and pasture-rich, a country of rivers and lagoons, and natural dairy land.

That landscape is part of the cheese’s identity: local cow’s milk, local cheesemaking and the traditional birch-smoking of that part of Galicia. It's a cow’s milk cheese with PDO protection, made in a distinctive top- or pear-like shape, ripened for a minimum of 30 days - 45 for the larger format - and then smoked over local birch. What makes it worth importing is that the smoke is delicate rather than harsh: it brings a warm, woody aroma to a creamy, semi-hard cheese that melts beautifully. It's a very specific Galician smoke, not just “smokiness.”

Charlie: What does the smoking do to San Simón specifically - and what flavour does it create that you can’t get any other way?

Monika: The smoking is the thing that makes it distinct. This isn’t simply a smoked version of a mild cow’s milk cheese; the smoke is built into the PDO method. Once the cheese has been shaped, brined and matured, it is smoked slowly over barkless birch, never in direct contact with the fire, until it develops its characteristic yellow-ochre rind. Birch gives a very particular smoke - gentle, sweet, woody and aromatic rather than tarry or aggressive. It colours the rind, perfumes the paste and leaves a warm, lingering savouriness behind the dairy richness. Liquid smoke or a generic smoked cheese gives you smoke as a surface flavour; San Simón gives you smoke integrated into the fat, the rind and the curd.

Charlie: How do you maintain consistency of supply for something this rare - a regional cheese - at restaurant scale?

Monika: With a cheese like San Simón, consistency comes from treating it as a key ingredient rather than a garnish. We work with Quesos Prestes (quesosprestes.com), a family producer in Vilalba that has been making San Simón since 1991 and has grown from a small local cheesemaker into an export-facing business - so it's still a regional PDO cheese, but not a one-person, farm-gate supply.

The PDO gives us a framework too: registered farms and cheesemakers, official controls, certification and traceability. In 2024 the DOP had 377 farmers and nine registered cheesemakers producing more than 560,000 kg of certified cheese - small and regional, but structured. Beyond that, it comes down to long-term relationships, committed volumes and forecasting well ahead rather than ordering week to week.

Charlie: Brindisa has always insisted on visiting producers in person. Why does that matter so much to you?

Monika: From the very beginning it's been vital to understanding the scale of a maker, their context, their terroir and how their product might vary through the year. It lets us choose the right path for the food once it reaches the UK - we work hard to match the capacity and profile of a product to the right customer here. That's the ultimate in good service, but it takes deep understanding, and you only get that by going.

Charlie: Tell us about a producer you work with whom almost nobody in the UK has heard of.

Monika: Andrés García and his family - a name no one knows here, though people do know their product. We have worked with them for three decades; their dried pepper strings decorate shops and bars, and their loose varieties go into countless kitchens to make the pepper flavourings that are essential to Spanish cooking. Peppers came originally from the Americas, but they have been iconic in Spain since Columbus. I found the family in La Rioja - the garden of Spain for fruit - and insisted they supply us with pepper strings as well as loose peppers. Most of the villagers who made those strings were retiring, because demand in Spain was slowing. We revitalised the trade, and many still work today as a result of the demand we created here. That matters to us: we like to create work in rural Spain, and this is a good example of where we've managed it.

Charlie: How did the relationship with Caravan begin, and what made it a good fit? 

Monika: It began with an early cohort from New Zealand - Peter Gordon (peter-gordon.com), Margot Henderson (wikipedia.org) and Ashley Sumner - a dynamic energy that came from the other side of the world. When Peter set up The Providores we met Miles, and when he joined Caravan he took our ingredients with him. Peter had cooked with Brindisa ingredients since 1990 and taught all his chefs their value. We've hosted many trips to Spain with Miles over the years; Rudi, Cristina and Abi have all loved working with him, with plenty of fun along the way. With our wonderful late Rudi, who worked so closely with Miles, we always had a place in his kitchen - and even when the UK began making small-scale cured meats, Miles did his utmost to keep our ingredients on his menu. We treasure that long relationship. The later move into coffee, and Caravan’s relationship with Ratnesh Bagdai, my FD at Brindisa Tapas, have only deepened it.

Charlie: What would you want a diner at Caravan to understand about where those croquettes come from, beyond "good Spanish ingredients"?

Monika: That the cheese comes from the greenest part of Spain - Galicia - not unlike the UK or Ireland, where the herds graze lush pasture and give a very creamy milk. The smoke is light, because they use birch rather than oak, so it lends a hint of flavour that blends in rather than overwhelms. And what I love when I eat at Caravan is exactly that balance - vibrant colours, generous portions, flavours and cultures intermingling without any one of them shouting over the rest.

Brindisa ingredients Caravan use:

• San Simón cheese - Croquettes

• La Chinata smoked paprika - Labneh, Avocado on Toast, Smacked Cucumber and others

• Saffron stigmas - Croquettes, Broken Lamb Meatballs, Chorizo & Potato Hash

• Chorizo - Chorizo & Potato Hash

• Valdespino sherry - Chorizo & Potato Hash, Caesar salad

Want to know more about the people behind what’s on our menu? Discover the full story of our suppliers - the roasters, brewers, farmers and makers we work with - at caravanandco.com/pages/suppliers.

Or have a look at our food and drinks menus.