Tops for Tapas

After a cocktail party near the Pacific Design Center, five of us crowd around two tables pushed together at Cobras & Matadors. We’re still getting our bearings, ordering water, deliberating over what to eat when I spy an old friend slouched on a banquette at a table set for 10. He’s waiting for his wine buddies, he tells me. Back at our table, two more stragglers arrive and then we’re seven. At some places, this could cause problems, but not at Cobras & Matadors. Here it’s the more the merrier.

Butcher paper covers the tables. Ladies sip wine from small, wavy-sided tumblers. (Not to worry, the staff will bring out stemware for anyone drinking a serious wine.) Vintage lightbulbs, their filaments glowing squiggles, dangle overhead like the lights strung across piazzas and outdoor cafes in Italy. At the back, a chef slides earthenware cazuelas into the stone wood-burning oven.

The Spanish words tapas, carnes, mariscos, bocadillos, postres, cafes--stenciled in gold on the front door in old-fashioned lettering that seems borrowed from cigar boxes--give an idea of what’s to be found on the one-page paper menu. It lists 18 or so tapas (the waiter will tell you about two or three more), plus a handful of entradas, or main courses, and about the same number of desserts.

We order four or five tapas, just enough to hold us until everyone arrives. First out are complimentary bowls of dusky green and purple olives slicked with olive oil and scented with cumin, followed by my contribution to the order, cockles with apples and fennel cooked in sidra, or apple cider. “I lived in England for 13 years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cockle before,” my friend Pat admits. Though they look just like thumbnail-sized clams, cockles are sweeter and more tender. We call for more bread to sop up the delicious juice.

Other tapas arrive on a long, festive platter. There’s socca, the chickpea pancake sold from bicycle carts in the old quarter in Nice, and asparagus cloaked in a walnut vinaigrette with shavings of aged Manchego, a Spanish sheep’s milk cheese. Mushrooms roasted in the wood oven are fragrant with sweet basil and hazelnuts. To the surprise of the vegetarian at our table, the menu includes a good many dishes he can eat: all of the above, plus a roasted eggplant salad with sweet peppers and tomatoes to spread on bread and a more pedestrian roasted beet salad.

Owner Steven Arroyo has an instinct for the right concept at the right moment. Boxer, his previous restaurant in this space, was an eclectic bistro manned by a series of young talents who seemed to change every six months. When Boxer faltered for the last time earlier this year, Arroyo moved quickly to redefine the restaurant, closing down briefly before reopening as Cobras & Matadors in July.

The restaurant has no wine and beer license at the moment, but Arroyo owns Bicentennial 13, the wine shop next door, which he’s transforming into an all-Spanish wine store, a first for Los Angeles (and probably the country). You can either pick up a bottle and bring it next door to drink, or tote a couple of wines from your cellar.

Back at the party, the plates are spinning around the table. Tapas in Spain are often just a bite or two. Here portions are large enough that seven of us can each get a taste. Most of the cured meats--lomo embuchado (dry-cured pork loin), jam-n (ham) and chorizo--come from a local producer. I particularly like the tiny green lentils sauteed with shreds of jam-n and the oven-roasted mussels with bits of paprika-streaked chorizo and the savory little veal and pork meatballs in sweet pepper sauce.

The single dining room is dark and sober, decorated only with huge framed prints of black-and-white family scenes from the ‘20s and ‘30s. That gent with the brilliantined hair, though, is not the poet Federico Garc’a Lorca; it’s Arroyo’s grandfather, who lived in Boyle Heights. In other scenes, his grandmother Henrietta lounges on Venice Beach under a Chinese parasol, or she boxes with a woman friend on the grass. She has the looks and the smoldering intensity of Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”

The food recalls that of Hemingway’s Spain, at least in spirit. This is exuberant stuff, rich in garlic, herbs and sheer intensity of flavor. You have to love a skirt steak embellished two ways: with a punchy anchovy butter and an equally pungent Idiazabel cheese. Cornish game hen comes in a svelte Catalan sweet-and-sour sauce that marries shallots with fruits. Grilled prawns, though, seem mingy in comparison and muted in taste. And once, the white bean stew is marred by chorizo that had gone gamy. Desserts include a credible crema caramela and a distinctly non-Spanish fruit crumble. The products are generally good, and the cooking gets better on each visit as the kitchen becomes more of a team. On that last visit, though the restaurant was packed, the food came out in a timely fashion, everything hot that was supposed to be hot, nothing forgotten.

Most impressive is the bill: Just more than $20 a person, before the tip. Even if you eat in a more conventional manner and order a tapa as a first course and one of the entradas (none of which is more than $13) all for yourself, your bill would be about the same. By the time we leave at 10:30 p.m., someone has turned up the music, and it’s impossible to hear. At my friend’s table across the room, they’re passing another magnum of Burgundy around the table. The festivities continue--without us.

Cobras & Matadors

7615 W. Beverly Blvd.

Los Angeles

(323) 932-6178

Cuisine: Spanish

Rating: **

AMBIENCE: Engaging storefront restaurant with a handful of sidewalk tables, banquettes and a wood-burning oven at the back. SERVICE: Pleasantly casual.

BEST DISHES: Asparagus and Manchego, cockles with sidra, alb-ndigas (meatballs), green lentils and jam-n, wood-oven roasted mushrooms, roast game hen, grilled skirt steak. Tapas, $3 to $7. Entradas, $9 to $13. Corkage, $5.

FACTS: Dinner nightly and Sunday brunch. Street parking. Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.