Last update - 00:00 04/01/2007
Dining Out / Tapas that fail to excite
By Daniel Rogov
Until two months ago, the ground floor of 18 Ha'arba'a Street housed Leventini, a quasi-Mediterranean bistro that offered simple food at reasonable prices. The fates are fickle, however, and the restaurant did not succeed, as so often happens. The owners closed for a while, redecorated and re-opened as Paco. Although the restaurant has a broad menu and calls itself a tapas bar, the orange brick-faced bar that dominates the large space indicates that especially during the late night hours, this is as much a bar as a restaurant.
As is the case at many Spanish tapas bars, many of the dishes can be ordered in large or small portions, and we decided to go with the latter for as broad a tasting as possible. We were pleasantly surprised to find that many of even the "small" offerings were quite generous. On the other hand, to our disappointment, not many of the dishes we tried were particularly rewarding.
One of the first dishes we sampled was calamari, shrimp and mussels in what was called a crab bisque. It had little in common with a true bisque: It was somewhat diluted, and its taste and aroma were powerful to the point of being appalling - perhaps it was not quite fresh enough. The shrimp and calamari were good, but the mussels were gray, soft and grainy, due either to their inferior quality or to overcooking. The sweet potato chunks added to the seafood were superfluous.
We continued with a hot portion of shrimps and Jerusalem artichokes in a lemon and chili sauce. The dish was fresh and tasty, and the lemon sauce, rich in butter, was good enough to finish off with the bread we ordered.
We continued with meat-based tapas. The first dish was chicken wings in a well-made hot, sweet sauce, but the wings were so tough that it was hard work to eat them. Another dish was chorizo sausages listed on the menu as "chorizos from hell"; even the waitress warned us these were hot indeed. The chorizos were tasty, but truth be told, they were not the least bit hot. A seviche of drumfish on toast was refreshing but not at all exciting, and the tartar of sea bream, in which the small cubes of fish were tossed with bits of avocado and tomato, disappointed.
These offerings were followed by a bowl of calamari rings with aioli sauce. The calamari was breaded and fried, but was not at all crisp, and the sauce was not as rich in garlic as it should have been. We also sampled a tomato and avocado salad that was generous enough in size, but the tomatoes were not nearly ripe enough. From there we moved on to slices of beef fillet in a Rioja wine sauce. The meat arrived far too well-done - I had not been asked how I wanted it - and was dry and chewy. The only flavor in the dish was the peppery brown sauce spooned on top. Finally we tasted the patatas bravas, a small portion of potato cubes that had been deep-fried and topped with a lightly piquant red-pepper sauce. The dish was reasonable, but failed to excite at all.
Including closing espresso coffees, our bill for two came to NIS 276, to which a bottle of Tempranillo of Marques de Riscal added NIS 108. The service was excellent and the atmosphere, at least during the early evening hours, was pleasant, but the quality of the dishes was not nearly enough to tempt me to return.
Paco, Bar de Tapas: 18 Ha'arba'a Street, Tel Aviv. Open daily 7 P.M.-2 A.M. Tel: (03) 561-1870.