Where small plates draw huge parties

Hillmont, the Los Feliz experiment in communal steakhouse culture, is no more. In its place, owner Steven Arroyo has installed a second version of his hypersuccessful Los Angeles tapas restaurant, Cobras & Matadors.

He’s dressed up the barebones warehouse with oversized blood red lampshades and a wall of books spray-painted red too. Amazing what a little color can do to liven up a place.

He’s also added a bar at the back, which is thronged on weekends with an East Hollywood crowd sipping any of 50 Spanish wines by the glass and hoping, against all odds, to score a table sometime in the near future. If you haven’t reserved ahead, be prepared for a long wait on the weekends.

The atmosphere is festive and young. A bachelorette party is in progress at one table, a birthday celebration at another. Nobody seems to come in twos or threes -- it’s more like sixes and eights. The original Cobras & Matadors on Beverly Boulevard is tiny by comparison. Here there’s room to sprawl, and even a few outside tables.

The menu seems larger too. It includes a section devoted to “classic Matadors” from the old place. The draw, however you order, is the small-plate format and the low prices.

On a weekend night, the kitchen was in fine form. The food came out fast, and it was all pretty good. The portions, though, are American-sized, much bigger than tapas in Spain. While no one dish is enough to make dinner, order two or three and you’ve got it.

From the “classic Matadors,” try the pa amb tomaquet, toast rubbed with tomato and topped with thin slices of Spanish ham (jamon serrano) and manchego cheese.

Sauteed green lentils are crunchy and delicious, mixed with bits of the same ham. I liked the socca cakes too, puffy chickpea flour pancakes. Other good bets: fluffy veal and pork meatballs and patatas fritas, big cubes of fried potato to dip in a romesco sauce fired up with hot pepper. Many dishes have lots of sauce. Curiously, though, they don’t bring you any bread to sop it up.

New items include grilled octopus in green sauce, Spanish-style barbecued skirt steak marinated in orange juice and paprika, and thin little lamb chops in a Port-honey sauce. The big hit at my table was the prawns, both the ones in a mojo de ajo with lots of garlic and the sugar chile prawns, lavished with both sweet and hot.

The parade of dishes stopped abruptly at dessert. But once the churros arrived, I knew why. The fat squiggles of dough were freshly fried, dusted with cinnamon and sugar, so delicious on their own they hardly needed dipping in the chocolate sauce that came with them.

The makeover from Hillmont to Cobras & Matadors is a smart one.

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Cobras & Matadors

Where: 4655 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Dinner 6 to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 6 to midnight Friday and Saturday. Beer and wine. Street parking.

Cost: Tapas, $5 to $13; bigger plates, $13 to $17; cheese plates, $10 to $20; desserts $6.

Info: (323) 669-3922