I Tapas, Palo Alto

I Tapas
Traditional and "new" small plates off University Ave. in Palo Alto

Emerson Street in Palo Alto, where it crosses University, is a great place for eateries. There's the Peninsula Fountain Creamery Diner and A.G. Ferrari on Hamilton and Emerson, and Gordon Biersch, Buca di Beppo, Mantra, and Empire Tap Room in the next block away from University. On the other side of University, there's Patxi's Chicago-Style Pizza (the most authentic on the Peninsula), Evvia (the best restaurant in Palo Alto), and a new place called I Tapas that sits in the former location of Left at Albuquerque, a favorite of ours for a little while, until the food started to decline and they closed.

I can't even remember now what was there in between that incarnation and this new one, but I hope I Tapas will stick around for a while. It's fairly modern inside, with nice artwork on the walls and a close, but not crowded, dining room. We were told it would be a forty-five minute wait, but we got called not ten minutes later to come back to the restaurant for an available table.

We've done a few tapas places lately: Solera and Cascal are high standards to live up to. But I Tapas holds its own, with a nice assortment of small plates for different palates. We really enjoyed the grilled asparagus with Manchego cheese and serrano ham, the Spanish olives with roasted nuts and cheese crackers, the pulled pork BBQ with lettuce cups, and the Pinchos Morunos (skewers of lamb). The asparagus had great flavor, with just enough cheese and ham to complement it without overwhelming it. The barbecue sauce for the pulled pork was nice and tangy, and we enjoyed the innovation of putting it in lettuce cups. It was satisfyingly messy. And the lamb skewers proved to be the good kind of lamb, with some lamb flavor (not too gamy) and a really nice mix of Mediterranean spices.

If you like tapas, this is one of the better places to get it. There are so many good places to eat in Palo Alto that it's hard to get on our list, but I think we'd definitely go to I Tapas again. It's worthy of being on Emerson Street, that's for sure!

Solera

Solera, Spanish tapas in downtown Minneapolis

One of our favorite local restaurants is Cascal, a Mediterranean tapas place in downtown Mountain View, which deserves its own entry (or two) one of these days. Our Minneapolis friends, who also enjoyed Cascal, told us that Solera compares favorably to it, so when we visited Minneapolis, that was at the top of their list of places to take us.

It's a beautiful interior, dominated by red-brown brick and wood, the dining room semi-partitioned into several smaller spaces so you don't feel lost in a huge room. The tables are natural wood, polished smooth. It took a little while for us to get our server to come by, but we used that time to peruse their extensive tapas menu and decide on some options. We got the dish of olives in cava vinegar, an order of the cumin-toasted pumpkin seeds, and were told that the Chorizo-stuffed dates with smoked bacon were de rigeur. They were delicious indeed! We've become enamored of dates recently, having found nice fresh ones at our local market, and these were great ones, their sweetness meshing with the spicy sausage and smoky meat flavor of the bacon. The pumpkin seeds were good, too, the cumin adding a nice spice to the crunchy nut flavor.

For the second round, we got deviled eggs with blue crab and cumin, scallops "a la plancha" with serrano ham and saffron, kikos with Moorish spices (which turned out to be corn nuts, though the server insisted we call them "toasted corn"--they were still good), and sobrasada (a soft sausage) with quince honey and sheep's milk cheese. All of these were just as good as the first round: the eggs and scallops particularly stood out. I thought the crab and cumin went very well with the deviled eggs, enhancing the flavor without overpowering it, and the scallops were just tender and cooked perfectly.

The wine and margarita were quite good, and Solera actually has some interesting non-alcoholic drinks, including a "Pom-Pom" (pomegranate puree mixed with another fruit juice that, regrettably, slips my mind for the moment) that was pretty good. We left Solera very happy, agreeing that it compares favorably to our favorite Mountain View tapas place. Score one for Minneapolis!

Cafe Sevilla, San Diego

Cafe Sevilla
Tapas and coastal Spanish specialties

As I may have mentioned before, there is no shortage of good restaurants in San Diego's Gaslamp district, one of the reasons we love attending Comic-Con there. For Saturday night, we wanted to try to find something a little more special, and since we both love tapas, we gravitated to Cafe Sevilla on Fourth Street, after walking by it several times.

The restaurant has a great brick interior with Spanish artwork everywhere. The lighting is low in the picture, but not so low that you can't see your food or the person across from you. We were told there would be a 45-minute wait for a table for two, but just as we were saying that was fine, the manager said he had a table at the bar where we could be seated immediately. We took that, because sitting at the bar in most places still gives you access to the full menu. It may just be a little moisier and less formal, but that wasn't a problem.

Our waitress was very friendly and eager to explain anything we had questions about. She confirmed, sadly, that the andouille sausage was pork and beef, so I let Mark have all of that when our paella came.

The paella is their specialty. Fortunately, they offer a tapas version of it, which is what we got (the bottom dish in the picture), in addition to chicken croquetas (like crab cakes) and pisto manchego (cheese over stewed vegetables). The menu (PDF) is broken up not only into entrees and tapas, but also tapitas, very small plates all under $5. We ordered exclusively from the tapitas menu, except for the paella tapas, and found that three dishes plus the bread were enough for a meal.

Oh, the bread. We both love fresh bread, and there at the bottom of the tapitas menu is a fresh-baked loaf of French or olive bread. We had to get it, and it did not disappoint. It comes with a creamy garlic aioli, not too strong, and a lightly spiced red sauce. But the bread is good just on its own, the olives rich and ripe, the crust crackling and the interior soft and firm, with a flavor that doesn't get overwhelmed by the olives.

I also ordered a gazpacho, being on something of a vegetable kick lately. Gazpacho is often spicy, but this one wasn't too bad for me, just full of tomato flavor with enough seasoning that I devoured the whole thing. It came with a couple endive leaves for scooping and eating, and a slice of cucumber and half-tomato for garnish.

The croquetas surprised us, but when I say they were like crab cakes I mean that as a compliment. The outside breading provided a good contrast to the soft interior, good flavoring all around, if not particularly Spanish. The pisto manchego we enjoyed, though again nothing stood out about it; it was just good.

And the paella was terrific. In that small bowl they crammed two portions of seasoned rice and about eight different kinds of meat: a scallop, a clam, a mussel, several shrimp, some calamari, some andouille sausage, some chicken, and probably one other kind of seafood that I'm forgetting. We devoured that and then finished off the loaf of bread, and found ourselves stuffed and happy, with no room for dessert.

Mark spoke highly of the sangria; for my part, I got a pomegranate green tea that was very subtly flavored. It was bottled, so I don't know whether they get any credit for it other than picking it, but it was a nice complement to the rich flavors of the meal.

And for all that, the price was very reasonable. Unless you're famished or want something to take home, you probably don't need to order the full paella, but you should definitely at least taste the tapas. And don't forget the bread. You might need to order your own loaf.