"Tapas" is a Spanish word that, as far as I can tell, derives from the same root as the German word "blitzkrieg." Both phrases involve a sustained, merciless assault, one on the taste buds and stomach, the other on the Maginot Line. One does not eat at a tapas restaurant. One survives--endures--rises above the endless waves of meat, cheese, and vegetables.
The tapas restaurant in question is Jaleo, a cheery, airy place squeezed by Chinatown to the north and the Navy Memorial to the south. The occasion was a dinner with family friends. I played the role of a remora, the sucker-headed fish that suctions itself to a shark and eats whatever fragments are left after a feeding frenzy. My friends ordered the food; I ate it.
Like any good tactician, the restaurant softened us up first, in this case with a volley of bread. The fiends were clever; they included an olive oil dish for dunking bread fragments. It was an unfair fight. When the first dishes arrived, I was helpless, my fancy intern tie covered with bread crumbs and oil splotches.
The food never stopped. Never. The waiter came back every ten minutes carrying some new mixture of meat stuff and non-meat stuff. Peas with a poached egg on top? Sure. Garlic shrimp? We could make room for it. Salty asparagus on a bed of bright orange goo? Welcome to the table!
Two dishes stood out. The first one was remarkable for its name. When I read the menu and found a dish called the "Daniel Patrick Moynihan," I had to try it. Not sure where the name comes from. The tapas itself--a beefy sausage resting on a hill of white beans--did not look much like the former New York senator and public intellectual. Perhaps I was overthinking.
The second remarkable dish was...well, you know how everything tastes better with bacon? This tapas proved the point. First, you take a date. Not the kind you go to a movie with--the chewy figlike fruite. Next, wrap it in a bacon. And to complete this heart-stopping creation, dunk the whole thing in oil and deep-fry it. Eat one, and you would sell your soul to taste another.
What did I learn from Jaleo? First, bacon is good. Second, tapas restaurants are bad. Not bad taste-wise, but bad morally, because they transform even the humblest eater into a Brandoesque glutton. Damn you, Jaleo!
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