And Now, Time Out for Tapas

By Mimi Sheraton.

Antipasto, move over! Hors d'oeuvres, make room! The new rage in appetizer assortments hails from Spain, and its name is tapas. Although at first glance the word looks a little like something spelled backward, tapas has a meaning all its own. In Spain, at the sherry-sipping hours before lunch and dinner, bars offer an array of small dishes, hot and cold, to whet appetites for dinner and develop a thirst for further drinking. The convivial custom is popular from Barcelona to Seville, but Penelope Casas, in her cookbook Tapas: The Little Dishes of Spain (Knopf), speculates that it began about a century ago in Andalusia, the home of sherry. Customers in wine bars and taverns were given slices of ham and sausage placed over the mouth of the glasses. The verb tapar means to cover, so the edible lids were called tapas.

What they have begun to mean to American restaurateurs is a new way to attract the gastronomically curious and diet-conscious, who prefer to sample a progression of small dishes rather than limit tasting options to one large main course. Labeled grazers by the restaurant industry, this generally young and trendy clientele is flocking to tapas bars from coast to coast.

"I'm a very eclectic eater," says Terry Johnston, as she nibbles her way through doll-size portions, of stuffed mushrooms, marinated beans, and potato salad with capers at the tapas restaurant in the Broadway department store in Glendale, Calif. "I've been to Spain," Johnston confides, "and this is a bit of nostalgia." For Don Kenway, the store's vice president for food services, offering tapas in a department-store setting is a gamble. He is pleased with the progress the small cafe has made since it opened in December. "It's an educational process," he says. "Some people confuse Spanish food with Mexican and think that it is hotly spiced. But as customers begin to understand tapas, they give them a better reception."

"Tapas leave you hanging. They give you a little bit so you have to have some more," says Fernando Martinez, a Mexican who works as a restaurant chef in Washington but snacks off-hours on miniportions of mussels in vinaigrette sauce, meat-filled puff pastries, and avocado stuffed with shrimp at El Bodegon, a Spanish restaurant in the capital. Jose Lopez, one of the owners of the successful El Bodegon, reports that tapas got off to a slow start in % Washington three years ago. "The biggest problem was people not knowing about tapas," he says.

No such hesitation prevented the immediate success of one of the liveliest and best tapas restaurants, Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba! in Chicago, which opened last December. The look at Ba-Ba-Reeba! is lively and typical. The room is a jam- packed maze of tables, counters and bars, with all the tapas symbols in place: hanging hams and sausages, ropes of garlic and peppers, and sides of dried salt codfish. Noise, music, tiles and fake Spanish paintings (a not- quite- Picasso Guernica here, a playful pseudo-Miro there) attract yuppies of all ages, who begin to line up at 6:30 every evening. Among the more delectable possibilities: red beans with snails, a layered potato omelet, white beans with clams, and deep-fried eggs. Usually on hand are steak with chili corn sauce, stuffed squid, eggplant and tomato combinations and even small portions of main-course dishes like paella. The tiny portions range in price from $1.50 to $5.50, and the check grows as drinking induces hunger and a hat-over- the-windmill attitude develops toward the mounting total.

The model for Ba-Ba-Reeba! and for many other U.S. outposts is the Ballroom, New York City's best tapas tavern and one of the first in the country. The chef and co-owner, Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, is a virtuoso of the meal-in- miniature. To the standard array of morsels, he adds innovations such as chicken in curry, headcheese in a satiny pimiento puree, slivers of crackling crisp roast pig and seviche of scallops. Rojas-Lombardi has his three tapas cooks prepare 25 choices each day, and his menu also lists eight or ten conventional main courses, both Spanish and Continental. "About 65% of our business is now tapas," says the chef, who offers them all day and evening, and for supper in the Ballroom's adjoining cabaret. He makes weekly trips to the Island Club on Williams Island in North Miami, where he supervises tapas as well as the rest of the food operation.

"Tapas is being naturalized," says the trim-bearded, tall-toqued chef. "We include many non-Spanish dishes. Anything that suits the idea." He cites such Italian entries as pasta, salads of mozzarella, basil and tomato, and caponata, the Sicilian eggplant relish. Add to that the steak tartare, fish chowder and salmon with aquavit and dill served at the Tapas Restaurant located in north Cambridge, Mass., and it is clear that tapas have be come all-around citizens of the world.

With reporting by William Hackman/Los Angeles