The Old-School Spanish Restaurant Gets the Respect It Deserves
Not terribly long ago, Spanish restaurants were abundant in this part of Manhattan, but a good number have died off in recent years. El Faro, among the oldest of the crew, opened in 1927 and closed in 2012; Sevilla, which opened a few blocks away a decade or so later, still stands, as one of the last of the Old Guard. This type of spot was not a regional showcase, like the chef Alex Raij’s Txikito, or Ernesto’s, the Basque restaurant on the Lower East Side run by Ryan Bartlow, Bartolo’s chef and owner. Nor was it a looser Spain-inspired joint, like Cervo’s. Instead, it was a truly and properly and even a bit generically Spanish restaurant, offering big hunks of meat; ruby shavings of jamón iberico; little dishes of dressed vegetables; gloppy ensaladilla rusa, that baffling yet compelling Spanish-potato-salad staple; and soupy rice gloriously brackish with shrimp-shell fumé. These restaurants weren’t good, necessarily—culinarily speaking, they often teetered on the edge of downright bad—but they had verve, and style, and a paradoxical sort of louche stateliness that made them irresistible.
Happily, recent years have brought some promising signs of this species’ return—and with better food, this time, as at the revamped El Quijote, in the Chelsea Hotel, a dusty old paella joint reborn, in recent years, as a sparkly high-roller dinner spot. With Bartolo, Bartlow seems to be mounting his own sort of conservationist argument: that Spanish food doesn’t need reinvention; it just needs respect. The restaurant asks something of you, in the way that a good Spanish restaurant does: you dress up a little. You arrive on time. You get a cocktail and you get wine. You settle in with a plate of jamón, silky and fat-streaked, or blood-black rounds of sliced morcilla, both served with puffy, cracker-like pan soplao imported from Spain’s Panadería Jesús and printed, photogenically, with the Bartolo logo, and you and your dining companion look happily at each other in the glowy indoor twilight.
