Tasca

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Tasca

Photo: Cititour.com

Contact Info:

Address: 137 7th Ave South (10th St)
City: New York, NY
Zip: 10014
map: View the Map
Phone: (212) 620-6815
Email: info@tascanyc.com
Website: http://www.tascanyc.com/

Food Info:

Cuisine: Tapas/Small Plates
2nd Cuisine: Wine Bars

Cititour Review:

I’m gonna start this review with a fairly obvious declaration. New York is a tough town to open a restaurant. Come to think of it, it’s a pretty tough town to do anything for that matter. Just getting a cup of coffee can be murder. But the restaurant business? Now there’s a hungry beast with teeth. This is especially true when you open a restaurant of a popular genre, like Spanish tapas, for instance. You leave yourself wide open to comparison with the current players. And the roster of players in this field is flooded with furiously talented chefs—Andy Nusser at Casa Mono and Bar Jamon, Alex Raij at Tia Pol, and Seamus Mullen at Boqueria, to name a few—who cook their finest in sizzling Spain-simulated environments. I don’t know if I’d get in the ring with them. But kudos to those who try.

Which brings us to Tasca, a new tapas and wine bar owned by Robert Meller, an MBA who changed careers to pursue a life in the restaurant business. Oh the glory of the food biz, always lures ‘em in. Happened to me, too, so I can understand it. Anyway, Meller has done nicely for himself. He worked for BR Guest and has run a few off the radar spots like Busby’s, Saga and Landmark Tavern before getting into the game as an owner and opening Tasca with chef Craig Wilson. Wilson is new to Manhattan and was most recently cooking in Philadelphia and at Café Paradiso in Ardmore. The pair seems to be hitting it off so far. They’ll soon open another restaurant, Central Kitchen Brasserie, just next door.

Now back to Tasca. When Katy, Steven, Sam and I had dinner there last week, the place was packed: wall-to-wall bodies, three-deep at the bar, with every table taken. The energy was a bit frantic. I had trouble getting to our table—a four-top by the floor to ceiling windows that face out to Seventh Avenue South. I was shoved and poked and prodded and practically mowed down by a woman trying to get to the door, a busser with a bus tub, and a dishwasher carrying a flat of glasses. (Note to self: wear protective padding and possibly a helmet on the next visit.) It was like rush hour in there.

Once we were seated—and offered a selection of great house-cured olives and fried flatbread with creamy, fluffy hummus—things calmed down a bit. I just watched the others bob and weave to avoid injury. It’s much more amusing to be a spectator than a participant in this particular exercise.

Like most Spanish spots, Tasca is small. Adding to its petite size, is its odd shape. It’s like an angled geometric figure they haven’t yet named (somewhere between a triangle and a parallelogram). Its major design mark comes from the serpentine white-tiled bar that’s matched with about half a dozen long stretched teardrop shaped light fixtures that look like oversized white tadpoles. Tables and chairs are dark wood and floors are tiled in colorful Gaudi-esque motifs. On the far wall, there’s a wine room stocked with a terrific selection of about 150 traditional and off the beaten path Spanish wines by beverage director Jeffrey Weinstein. I’d definitely get him involved with your wine decisions. He’s got a ton of passion and enthusiasm for Spain and a lot of knowledge to share. We had a few of bottles of AN/2, a bright, juicy, peppery wine from Majorca that we loved.

To break in the wine, we started with a couple of platters of Spanish cheeses (manchego, majon, cabrales, la serrana, monte enebro) and meat (Serrano ham, chorizo, lomo, salchichon and sobrasada). They were delicious, and beautifully arranged on long wooden paddles with membrillo, fig jam and grilled slices of raisin bread. Our waiter impressed us, giving us a mini-dissertation on each of the cheeses and meats; a Power Point would not have been out of place. As we worked our way through the platters, pulling off meats and cheeses with our fingers, Sam was marveling over how good the chorizo was. “Oh my god, The Devil Wears Chorizo!” he cried. Our conversation was slowly devolving. Soon, Steven and Sam were engaging in some raunchy talk (of course, Katy and I did not take part). But by the time we were done with our cheese and meat, someone suggested that the wooden paddles/platters that might be used for something other than cheese. Boys, behave, now. Yeah, it was one of those nights.

In any case, we made quick work of the platters of cheese and meat and soon moved on to The Big Dance—the tapas. I liked the sound of many of these little plates, but unfortunately, they read a hell of a lot better than they ate. Bummer, man. Salt cod croquettes, shaped like little missiles, were good, but they could have been cooked a little longer. They were slightly jaundiced in color, rather than the golden hue I’d hoped for. The pale fritters were accompanied by an orange alioli that was way too sweet; it tasted like liquid candy. Grilled coins of chorizo came in a cazuela with caramelized fig and balsamic syrup ($10). While I liked this dish—figs and chorizo are quite nice together—this sauce also bordered on cloying.

While Steven like the octopus grilled with paprika and lemon, I thought the flesh was mealy. The albondigas ($9), little meatballs in a pulpy tomato sauce, were, well, so sad. They were absolutely (and shockingly) flavor-free and quite hard. Save them and you can use them the next time you tee off. Sangria-braised short ribs ($11) sounded good, but they were overcooked so they weren’t nearly as flavorful as they should have been. They were served with a mushy and unnecessary sweet potato bread pudding.

Thankfully, there were some menu stars. The best of the tapas lot was a simple salad of bright juicy blood oranges and shaved ribbons of fennel ($7), and the gambas al ajillo ($13), a terra cotta cazuela stocked with plump sweet shrimp in a bath of garlic and piquillo peppers that packed a sneaky smack of heat. Wow. We loved the shrimp. But it left me wondering, if this is what the kitchen is capable of, why such inconsistency?

We decided to try to a main course to allow the kitchen to take us to a place we hadn’t yet been and they did. The whole grilled snapper ($28) was sublime. Tucked under a salty crust of skin we found loads of sweet, flaky, almost creamy-moist meat. A simple side of spinach, a grilled half a lemon, and some olives finished it with all it needed. The accompanying grilled bread was a nice touch too, if it hadn’t been hard enough to be used as a hammer. We cleaned the fish of its flesh and left only it’s bony skeleton and the rock hard bread.

Things went back down hill with dessert. Churros were undercooked and raw in the center, and crema Catalan was grainy and more like a scrambled egg custard than a smooth, silky crema. Oh dear. Get me a taxi.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Tasca. But the thing is, I’ve had so much better than this at other tapas spots around town. It’s hard to compete with the octopus (or anything for that matter) at Tia Pol, you can’t beat the chorizo with pickled piquillo peppers at Bar Jamon, and don’t even think of finding better brandade croquettes than at Boqueria. I have to say that Tasca feels careless in some ways, like there’s not enough attention being paid to the food. To their credit, the service was very good and the energy of the room, aside from being frantic and slightly dangerous, was warm and inviting. It’s a place you could happily wile away a few hours over some interesting wines from Spain and a few nice dishes—meats, cheeses, olives, hummus and the gambas—especially if you live in the neighborhood. But honestly, there’s little incentive to make a special trip to a tapas joint that doesn’t cut it when so many others do. Admittedly, comparison is a dangerous game, but it’s also inevitable in New York. In this town, in this business, someone else is always gonna shine brighter, which means by necessity that others won’t.

 

Review By: Andrea Strong

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