nomad9

If you’re a practiced tapas fiend (called a tapeador, according to The Oxford Companion to Food), chances are you’re like my wife. You’re a light eater who enjoys hopping from dish to dish like a bumblebee, while sipping glasses of different wines and chattering with your friends (or, in many cases, complete strangers) about the vagaries of taste or fashion or the unpredictability of the blustery winter weather. Food isn’t the tapeador’s prime concern, after all. It’s a means to an end, an enhancement, a social lubricant, an excuse for having a good time. Which means those of us who regard their dinner in more grave, elevated terms sometimes have issues with tapas. Tapas is just finger food, really, the trendy, downtown equivalent of too many canapés or hors d’oeuvre. It’s facile, precious, and, in its New York City approximation, less of a gastronomic exercise than a social one. So why jostle around in a crowded bar, picking at waxy bits of imported ham or a few oily anchovies, when a proper sit-down meal will do?

Leave it to those accomplished restaurant maestros Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich to solve this conundrum. Their newest restaurant, Casa Mono, which opened two months ago on Irving Place, along with a tiny, ancillary wine bar called Bar Jamón, is a tapas bar in wolf’s clothing. It’s a modest Spanish restaurant where the dishes are myriad and small, but the food is decidedly large. Batali’s favorite offal product, tripe, graces the menu at Casa Mono, as do rubbery coxcombs (braised, with green chilies), and sweetbreads fried like chicken in a crunchy, salty batter. These dishes can be ordered singly, with a glass of wine, in a great, tapas-like rush, or in the classic appetizer-entrée sequence. They’re served in a small, clamorous submariner’s room on thick, wooden tables or at the bar. The room’s walls are lined with bottles of fine sherries and wines, and tapeadors who choose to sit at the bar directly in front of the grill get to experience Spanish food cooked “à la plancha,” in all its smoky glory.