Tapeo

Tapas bars in Spain won great popularity with visitors because they are the only places to serve food at hours when jet-lagged tourists get hungry. Such as 6 p.m. -- when many Spaniards are still recovering from lunch with a languid promenade in the village square. Or 8 p.m., while the evening's activities are just beginning. Or 10 p.m., especially in Madrid. (Diners there won't actually sit down until midnight, when they eat what we might call supper.) Spaniards get up early, eat hot chocolate pudding and corn crullers for breakfast, grab a coffee at mid-morning, pack in a humongous lunch by noon, sleep it off, and then horse around with tapas until the latest fashionable dining hour on the planet.

Tapas were designed to fill the gaps, but some of these small dishes are so tasty that the gaps may have evolved to make time for the tapeo, or tapas scene -- for which this restaurant is named. To re-create the crowded sensation of the Madrid night spots, this picturesque bar has only 10 stools. As in Spain, quarry-tile floors and stucco walls make for lots of reflected sound. Tapeo has two dining rooms, one above and one below Newbury Street level, and these are also loud and crowded in the Spanish way.

So things begin with a drink at the bar. The sangria is excellent and popular, but there is also a selection of five cold dry sherries, generically called fino. I ordered the Alvear Montilla ($3.50), an old friend from southern Spain that is hard to find in the United States. Montilla is actually a town well inland from Jerez, producing a lighter, dryer style of fino with the characteristic refreshing bitterness that makes it so good with food.

Seated at last, we start with garlicky white-bean spread on a yeasty, heavy bread. Tapas can be ordered off long lists of hot and cold plates on the main menu or off a seasonal list of inspiraciones . The current sensation is baby eels in oil and garlic ($12.50). The eels are a few inches long, as fine as vermicelli, and so heavily garlicked that there is no real eel experience involved. It's a conversation piece. More familiar tapas include grilled sardines ($5.50), slices of chorizo ($4), and the traditional piece of potato omelet -- a tortilla, but no relation to the Mexican flatbread. I thought the tortilla here had too many mix-ins (red bell pepper, peas), and tended to fall apart.

An unusual tapa was albondigas de salmon ($6), basically salmon meatballs in an old-fashioned sauce of capers and dill. Such Continental cooking persists in Spain, and even becomes tapas when the portions are small enough. For a non-tapa appetizer, sopa de ajo ($4.50) is a truly excellent garlic soup -- green, intensely garlicked, with one crouton to contrast its smoothness and complexity.

My favorite of our dinners was the zarzuela ($18), a seafood soup-stew whose name is also the term for comic opera and many farcical situations in daily life. With a fine broth flavored with saffron and anisette, this is more like bouillabaisse than a lot of Boston restaurant bouillabaisse. I also liked the Catalonian-style sauce in the mar i muntanya ($17) -- yes, that would translate as surf 'n' turf. Shrimp lobster and chicken were the contents, but the sauce was rich with almond, saffron, and perhaps a hint of chocolate.

Paella Valenciana ($18) is never a smart thing to order in a restaurant. There are too many issues of timing with such a complicated pilaf. In this one, the chef switched to long-grain rice, undercooked it, used too much salt, and overcooked the pork and littleneck clams. The dish was enormous, served in a 10-inch skillet, and featured plenty of delicious shrimp, squid, chicken, mussels, and fresh lemons.

Cordero asado ($17) was even better eating, but a worse travesty on the great suckling lamb roasts of northern Spain. What you get in Boston is lean, steak-like slices of a roast of lamb, perhaps butterflied leg, with a pleasant coating of herbs and garlic. And that is certainly delicious, especially if you never go to Spain for the real thing, which has a crispy skin and juicy meat, like Peking duck. In Boston, the garnishes were small ear-shaped pasta, very nicely done, and a sweet-and-(very) sour green cabbage.

Tapeo has a superb, all-Spanish wine list, with excellent collections of Rioja and sherry, and less familiar regional bottles. There are even some quaffable whites. Our bottle was a Basque country white listed as "Txacoli (Getaria) '94" ($28, $4.50 per glass). It's a fine, aromatic wine, obviously fresh -- scented with apples -- and crisp, even spritzy.

Among the desserts, we perhaps most enjoyed "ubiquitous flan" ($3.50), for the joke as well as the hint of orange-flower aroma. A crèpe filled with fruit and chocolate sauce ($6) was popular at our table, as was poached pear with coffee-flavored pastry cream and fresh mint ($5.50). I thought arroz con leche ($4.50) would be rice pudding -- which it was, but gussied up unfortunately with caramelized crust and expensive berries.

We had an hour wait after a half-hour was predicted. Otherwise, service was fine, and the décor in all rooms set the tone well. Beautiful platters hang on the walls, as they do outdoors in southern Spain, and the al fresco theme is also advanced with various false roofs and gables of hurricane tile. Bright blue tables and red chairs put us into a land of great oil paintings. Both the foods and the artifacts are of diverse Spanish regions, yet the center holds in this restaurant (perhaps better than it has in Spain's modern history).