BARcelona Tapas

Attention, Indianapolis. You now have a tapas restaurant. And it's a good one. Don't complain, don't mope, don't look all concerned and think that it's populated by shirtless girls. Tapas is easy. Easier, even, then deciding on a single entrée at a normal restaurant. Why just have the steak when you can have the steak (with Cabrales, a stout Spanish blue cheese), the shrimp (with chili oil and butter), the gazpacho, the calamari, the albondigas (meatballs in red sauce), the patatas bravas (spicy potatoes), lamb chops, AND the bread pudding. All in bite sized morsels (each dish yields roughly 6 to 10 bites, depending on what you call a bite). And every bite was genuinely delicious. I've been plotting for another chance at the meatballs. Two orders next time, as my esteemed colleague and I wrestled for the last one. I won by heaving one of the rock-hard patatas bravas at his forehead, slightly stunning him long enough for me to make off with the meatball. In an otherwise lovely and well-prepared series of dishes, only the spicy potatoes were a pretty serious disappointment. I think I chipped a tooth. It was so weird given the yummy perfection of everything else. The Cabrales tenderloin was an unctuous rare med-rare, meatballs juicy (have I mentioned how much I like the meatballs?), red sangria neither too sweet nor too reminiscent of fruit salad with wine dribbled on it, perfectly grilled tiny lamb lollypops, tender calamari in a lightly crunchy breading, buttery shrimp, spicy gazpacho, gooey and creamy and caramelized bread pudding. But the potatoes. Huh. It's a mystery.

If you're looking for a quiet place to whisper sweet nothings, stay home. Any sweet nothings will need to be conveyed with a megaphone to be heard over the 50-decibel roar. It seems to be a tapas thing. I've been to tapas places in Chicago, New York, and San Fran and they've all been absolute landing strips. Maybe it's the cumulative ordering. Instead of once, each table can, should, and does order as many as four or five times during the course of the meal. The cries for Cabrales then echo up the brick red walls, ricochet around the exposed ducts near the 20-30 foot ceiling, then descend on the unsuspecting diners at the barstool-height tables. All tapas restaurants are required to be high-ceilinged brick buildings. I think it's in the Constitution.

Now that I've done the tapas classics, I want to check out the pepper encrusted tuna, which looked fabulous, and one of the several sausage dishes. I'll give the potatoes another whirl. But if you have a leftover meatball, get ready to duck.