So there it was, just the other day – a telltale sign of the times. Those times were June of 1986, when I shot a black-and-white photo of then-celebrity chef Felipe Rojas-Lombardi at the Ballroom in New York City. In the suggested cutline (caption) for the photo to go with my UPI food feature, I’d felt it necessary to define tapas as “a wide variety of Spanish dishes in appetizer portions.”
Rojas-Lombardi, who’d earlier worked as the chef for American culinary icon James Beard and then as the first chef at New York’s Dean & Deluca gourmet emporium, was the darling of the tapas cutting edge in Manhattan. These were the ancestors of the “small plate crowd” that comes and goes through modern American cuisine. And I, in tapas terms, was then no more than what I am now: a teacher reading one lesson ahead of his students.
Along with flamenco music, the little bites of food called tapas may well be the most “Spanish” thing about Spain. But if some long-ago bartender hadn’t been trying to keep insects away from his customers’ sweet wine from Jerez, the idea might have gone undiscovered. Jerez (which the Spaniards, unlike their Latin American progeny, manage to pronounce Hair-ETH) is indeed a sweet wine – we know it by the anglicized name of its hometown, “sherry.” So it does attract fruit flies.
Which inspired that anonymous tender of that anonymous bar to cover the glass with a small plate called a tapa. Which inspired him, or some other Spanish bartender, to cover that plate with a round of spicy-garlicky sausage, a tiny piece of marinated grilled octopus, or whatever else the fellow could afford to give away to help his customers stick around for “just one more.” Little did anybody realize at the time, the global “small plate movement” was born.
Peruvian-born Rojas-Lombardi, who died in 1991 at only 46, was not doing tapas at the Ballroom the way I remembered tapas from Spain in the 1970s. For one thing, in Spain they were free each time you ordered a new drink or a refill. At the Ballroom, they were $18-$20 a pop, which felt like a lot of money in those days. As such, they also were a good deal more substantial than I experienced them in Spain, one olive or coin of sausage at a time. Looking back, I imagine that’s what gave us the small-plate movement. It was Spanish tapas meet Italian cicchetti meet Greek/Lebanese meze, all over the Mediterranean world.
With the success and media attention garnered by the Ballroom, many another high-profile restaurateur opened one or more tapas concepts in major cities across America. The most impressive to me was Primi, an Italian spin put forward by debonair Sicilian-born Piero Selvaggio in West Hollywood. All such places seemed to fail in short order, the takeaway being that Americans wanted bigger food, not smaller. It was the age of Supersize Me, after all.
As most Americans who travel in Spain quickly discover, that country’s tapas fixation is more than a cultural expression – it may well be a necessity. Lunchtime is Spain comes no earlier than 2 p.m. (in restaurants, except for noonday Americans, of course), but an authentic Spanish dinner might not happen until anytime between 10 p.m. and midnight. There is, therefore, a long gap during which, wonder of wonders after hearty Spanish lunch, hunger might set in.
Express this “hunger theory” to a Spaniard, however, and he or she is likely to dispute it, affectionately, we hope. No senor, simply no, tapas are not about getting hungry or, as you say, “making it” until dinner. Tapas are about socializing. No senor, I do not mean drinking, though drinking occurs. I mean meeting with friends, family, even potential business. It all happens here, senor, as in your country, but it all happens over tapas.
In general, with the launch of “tapas concepts” around the world, tapas have grown more sophisticated and sometimes even global. You never know, with today’s no-borders chefs, when Peruvian ceviche might turn up, or Korean bulgoki. Yet tapas remain forever Spanish, and as such, forever regionalized.
Interestingly, some observers now refer to Rojas-Lombardi as “America’s Most Anonymous Celebrity Chef” – and still others wonder why. After all, in 2014, the Postal Service included him in a series of stamps titled “Celebrity Chefs Forever,” along with Beard, Julia Child, Edna Lewis and Joyce Chen. All these chefs are legendary, of course, and predictably distributed across races and ethnicities, but only Rojas-Lombardi has dropped off the culinary face of the earth.
Some have asked if it was his lifestyle as an openly gay man that short-circuited his lasting fame, but then again, Beard was an openly gay man too. Though famous restaurant chefs tended to follow the French tradition of masculinity and misogyny, any number of male food critics and cookbook authors were gay. One of the most influential, Craig Claiborne of The New York Times, never missed a chance to praise Rojas-Lombardi’s cooking.
Still other observers found a simpler historical truth behind this tapas master’s “anonymity.” By dying so young, Rojas-Lombardi was gone from the scene before America (and the rest of the world outside New York) fell in love with chefs as kitchen wizards, meaning-of-life gurus and TV entertainers.
Many would say that the southern region of Andalusia is Tapas Central, between its long hot summer days and its spice-driven (though seldom heat-driven) Moorish Arab flavors. Still, every region of Spain has its own favorites tapa – yes, that’s the singular, though we dare you to stop after eating just one. Mediterranean regions of Spain specialize in seafood tapas, with meat, especially pork, ruling the roost in the dry, flat or mountainous interior.
Farther north, in the Catalonia region around Barcelona, lots of people refer to tapas as pinchos – the name referring to the toothpicks that hold most versions together as small open-faced sandwiches. In the Basque country along the Pyrenees and the French border, they’re known in the dialect as pintxos. Happily, the Basques are wise enough to ignore their own letters and pronounce the word “pinchos.”
Had he lived long enough, I’m sure Felipe Rojas-Lombardi would have pronounced the word just fine.
MEATBALLS IN SPICY CHORIZO SAUCE
The long-exotic Spanish food tradition of tapas is (or was) unique to Spain. Yet it fits our modern lifestyle remarkably well and can become an easy part of your home cooking. Here are some meatballs your friends will thank you for making.
Sauce:
½ pound ground chorizo (see Note below)
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 cups tomato sauce
½ cup beef broth
½ cup chopped pimento
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
Meatballs:
¾ cup seasoned breadcrumbs
1 ¼ cup white wine
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ pound ground beef
½ pound ground veal
½ pound ground pork
½ pound ground chorizo
½ cup chopped green onion
¼ cup chopped parsley
Additional extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
Prepare the sauce by thoroughly browning the ground chorizo in the olive oil, then straining out as much fat as possible and returning the chorizo to the pan. Add all remaining ingredients and simmer for 20 minutes to let the flavors meld. In a mixing bowl, soak the breadcrumbs in the wine for a few minutes, then combine them with all remaining ingredients. Form into small (cocktail-size) meatballs and cook in a pan with a little olive oil, in batches if necessary. Season with salt and pepper. When meatballs are all cooked, transfer them to the sauce and keep them warm. Serve on toothpicks. Serves 6-8.
Note: Spanish chefs tend to use lightly seasoned chorizo for the sauce and then, for this recipe, add cumin, coriander, paprika and other spices, maybe even a little heat. Using ground reddish-colored “Mexican-style” chorizo accomplishes the same thing.
