dining out

Cuchi Cuchi (617) 864-2929 795 Main Street (Central Square), Cambridge Open Mon–Sat, 5:30–11 p.m. AE, Di, MC, Vi Full bar No valet parking Street-level access

I’m afraid that most of us associate cuchi cuchi with Charo, a dubious ’70s celebrity best remembered as a frequent guest on the TV series The Love Boat. Charo was born in Spain and plays flamenco guitar; her story is that Cuchi was the nickname of her childhood pet, an otherwise mean dog named Cuchillo (knife) who taught her how to wiggle. But this Cuchi Cuchi is a tapas bar. No hot dogs on the menu, no shrimp wiggle, nothing much that requires a knife, and why it’s decorated like an 1890s French bordello, I can’t say. But I will say I stopped noticing anything about the décor when the first plates hit the table, and so will you. Charo may be a silly entertainer, but this Cuchi Cuchi has seriously great food.

Cuchi Cuchi is also fairly bold in betting the entire menu on chef Jared Hargreave’s small plates. There are no meat-potatoes-vegetables entrée plates, and no designated appetizers, so the menu forces you to pick your dishes and decide in what order to roll them out. This is initially confusing, but it gets easier after a drink or two. Tops on the drink menu is the Cuchi julep ($9), a pleasantly sour version that tastes more like lime peel than mint. The wine list is full of novelties, with a number of items under $30. We had a glass of Zenith pinot noir ($6) from New Zealand, and an El Chaparral grenache ($7) from Navarre, Spain, and they were both rather soft, fruity, and a little spicy, with the nod going to the pinot noir.

The breadbasket foretells great things to come, with a crusty, dense Portuguese country loaf, sliced fine with a tasty little dish of chicken-liver pâté. Our first wave of plates included roast lobster tail in vanilla beurre blanc ($15), coconut squid ($8), stuffed small eggplants ($9), and a soup special of pumpkin with coconut and onion flavors ($7). The eggplant is exquisitely broiled with goat cheese, a spicy tomato sauce, and a lagniappe of fried zucchini. The lobster tail is a wonderful lesson in less is more, as presenting the split tail without the lobster (watch for bisque) seems to magnify the flavor and effect. The vanilla butter sauce seems to appear mostly in the underlying mashed potatoes, enough for flavor and not enough to cloy. The squid (though cleverly stacked into a crab shape) is the only weak spot, a somewhat greasy frying job partly redeemed by a chipotle-flavored sauce, smoky and hot.

More? Beet-and-potato salad ($8) is a single stack of golden beet and Yukon Gold chips, glued together with something derived from sour cream and chives. Wow! Lamb porterhouse ($13) was the hit of the evening, a modest T-bone chop with a rich flavor, a glaze sauce, and some caramelized onions. Order this, fake a frown, and don’t share a bite. Lamb stew, however, is four small cubes of meat and some onions and carrots in a weak broth. Maybe you can order this later at night, when it has cooked down more. Risotto ($8) is a filler-upper. It looks like a little plate of green rice pudding, but it’s full of butter and cheese and a little onion, just as it should be. I think risotto was meant to be a small plate, not a side order or a main course. Fried long beans ($7) are the Chinese kind that don’t have a lot of flavor by themselves. The Chinese solve this problem with bits of fried pork, garlic, or hot bean paste. Chef Hargreave has come up with a different angle, working a surprising tarragon flavor into the beans, and garnishing them with deep-fried vegetable shavings that are as sweet as doughnuts, but almost insubstantially light.

Desserts do make up a separate course, and a very nice one. Tea ($3) is served as a china pot of hot water, which should work, but then our waiter couldn’t locate the caddy of tea bags that were to go into the water, so it ended up hard to brew. Decaf ($3) was very good, almost as strong as espresso. With it you’ll want chocolate banana-bread pudding ($8), even though this is deconstructed into banana-bread French toast, chocolate sauce, fried bananas, and banana ice cream. An ice-cream sundae ($7) follows the minimalist path: a small parfait dish of good ice cream, great chocolate sauce, and superb whipped cream. A chocolate rum ball ($7) is like the inside of a chocolate truffle, with a dusting of praline adding more of an accent than the alleged rum. No problem. Creamy, dreamy cake ($7) is the only weak dessert, not creamy or dreamy enough, or perhaps lacking enough custard to offset the pretty but unripe berries and the sponge cake.

The music of an early evening seemed to skirt Charo herself, starting with bossa nova and working into the Gipsy Kings. I still don’t know why every new restaurant plays the Gipsy Kings, but it’s sort of reasonable for a tapas place to so, even one with a menu that roams the Mediterranean beyond the flamenco zone proper.

I don’t get the antique lamps and black ceilings, but maybe it’s one of those things that put a contemporary spin on nostalgia, like wearing Doc Martens and bell-bottoms at the same time. Wood paneling painted bright yellow, blond-wood floors, and cherry tables are fine, and so is a long dining room behind a long bar. I didn’t encounter enough of a crowd to get a feel for the scene, but you will.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com