Tasca

Got that? Perhaps you'd like a drink? In southern Spain, that means a fino, a cold dry sherry with a bitter finish. Although Tasca lists only one, it is the Lustau manzanilla papirusa ($3), one of my all-time favorites. And, for something sweet, the Lustau moscatel ($4) is a real treat. The rest of the wine list, a nearly all-Spanish list of reds and whites, combines quality and value quite well.

We start with the wines, because true tapas are bar snacks. This tasca has a long list of the standards, which begin for me with fried squid ($4), here just lightly floured before crisp-frying and served with a red mayonnaise from Andalusia. Another classic is the potato omelet that was the original tortilla ($2.75). It's sliced like pie, and Tasca's slice is handsome, but could be oilier -- for flavor as well as tradition.

More interesting morsels include croquetas de pollo ($3.95), being, yes, chicken croquettes and peas, in an ancient Romesco sauce of almond and garlic. Julius Caesar might have had these with a quick fino (and liked them, too). Brandade de bacalao ($4.50) is a fair shot at the Provençal brandade de morue, in either language a paste of salt cod, potato, and some garlic. At Tasca, the chefs add a topping of manchego cheese. But, with too much flavor soaked out of the salt cod, it becomes mostly a mashed potato gratin. Confit de pato ($4.75) isn't the spiciest cured duck, but it makes a nifty tapa with red cabbage.

Gambas al ajillo ($4.25) is just a small skillet of scampi, but the garlic oil is good chance to use up the grainy bread, if you haven't already dispatched it with the peppery garlic-bean spread supplied. And either use of bread, of course, requires another fino.

About the only tapa at Tasca I didn't like was the escabeche de sardinas ($3.75), an effort to pickle a cooked fresh sardine that made for a lot of work to eat some fishy-tasting fish. But what's great about tapas is that the fun of little bites isn't compromised by one or even two losers, and the price of these plates makes it easy to experiment beyond your usual tastes.

A sleeper on this menu is the ensalada tasca ($3.75). Although there is a mention of "organic greens," what actually comes to the table is a good-sized salad of expensive mesclun, perhaps from the nearby Bread & Circus store. Some really good olives make it officially Spanish and even more remarkable. The only error is winter tomatoes. But it's an understandable mistake, since in Spain pink tomatoes are always delicious, even in the winter.

Tasca also has a page of entrees, moderately priced, but they are not the best dining strategy. We passed on the paellas, which are very seldom successful in a restaurant, to try pollo al vino tinto ($9.50), actually a rather comforting dish of something very like chicken cacciatore, and not much colored by the eponymous red wine. Boned chicken with onions, mushrooms, and red bell peppers is nondescript and comforting over much of the world.

Pechuga de pato ($12.25) is a sautéed duckling, with a nice berry sauce. The duckling was well-flavored, but the Spanish way of cooking ducks develops neither crispy skin nor juicy meat -- it's an anti-Peking duck. With this came a side of summer squash, tomato, and onion that was as universal as the chicken stew, and some decent rice.

Desserts are more promising, including a crema catalana that was a sort of lighter crème brûlée and a pastel Basque that turned out to be a surprising banana pie with what I would most easily describe as a Heath-bar crust.

Tasca succeeds mostly because of the atmosphere, which somehow conveys Spanish warmth without a lot of decorative objects and with no bullfight posters. The food is not seriously authentic, but it's close enough in a restaurant category that is still quite rare in New England. Is it the candles, the wood, the cast iron, the plates on the walls, the terra cotta jugs, the ubiquitous Gypsy Kings tapes? Something here suggests Spain. It may be the number of large family groups -- one of which looked and sounded Iberian-- that I noticed on both visits.

We recently went to Walt Disney World as a family, and, though dining out was not our main mission, I took a few notes and tried to get beyond the dog-plays-piano attitude. At least one eating place, the North Point dining room in the Wilderness Lodge, was a fine restaurant by any standard, with a focus on wild foods of the Pacific Northwest. The Wilderness Lodge overall is a bizarre parody of Yellowstone Park, but you get used to it.

There are no great lessons for Boston restaurateurs at Disney World, but there are a couple of small lessons I would like to pass on, such as that middle Americans will buy and eat Moroccan food if there is belly dancing. And that even very fancy dining rooms are not fatally compromised by having a kids menu with $3.50 hamburgers and macaroni and cheese.

Of course, it is not easy to keep up fiber levels at Disney World. And the virtualization of everything, already rampant in Florida, reaches even greater heights in the dining areas. The only whole orange I saw in five days (and oranges were once the only industry in Orlando) was a California navel on the buffet at Chef Mickey's.