Tapas or not tapas

It’s a bit of a surprise that Spanish food hasn’t really taken off in India

At Soak, Ravi Bajaj’s tapas bar in New Delhi’s Greater Kailash-1, we’re watching as someone celebrates a birthday. Trays of tapas circulate—liver pate with crisp bread, fish with a coriander and mango salsa, bacon curled around sausages, haloumi, parma ham on thick bread, watermelon and feta salad. There’s great wine, as there should be at any self-respecting tapas bar, and the conversation flows easily. The only thing wrong with this picture is that Soak’s one of the very few full-fledged tapas bars in India.

It’s always surprising to me that the Spanish passion for tapas hasn’t officially caught on in this country. The tradition of serving tapas—small bites, the word drawn from the name for the slice of stale bread used to cover wine glasses as protection from flies — is a venerable one in Spain, and tapas bars pull in crowds everywhere from New York to Edinburgh. It’s meant for countries where you party like the Spaniards — moving from one place to another, circulating among sets of friends, grazing rather than dining, eating in little conversational bites.

I’m told (I’ve never been) that Spain’s cities have as much rivalry and specialist competitiveness among tapas bars as Delhi does between kabab shops: there’ll be the old-timers, the places known for the excellence of their bacalao or their fried quail’s eggs, the upstarts reinventing tapas according to the exuberant tenets of molecular gastronomy, the traditionalists who’ll complain if the pulpo alla gallego isn’t absolutely fresh octopus cooked in the classic Gallician way, with no departures allowed.

In Edinburgh at Festival time, the tapas bars do roaring business; the imported olives are compensated for by the high quality of the local fish, and the cold tapas of pickled vegetables are exactly what you need to counteract the effects of too much whisky.

Given the Indian passion for cocktail snacks, and for teatime snacks, and for post-prandial snacks, it’s interesting that we have so few genuine tapas bars. The menu at Soak, and at places like Sevilla and Olive, offer a partial explanation: it’s not that easy to get some of the ingredients for classic tapas. Fresh white anchovies, the salted cod for bacalao, the minuscule squid that make up puntillitas — these are not yet Indian standards, not even in cities by the sea.

But the Tapas Bar at the new Aman does some of the classics in style — patatas bravas, which is far more tricky to get right than the description of fried potato cubes indicates, really good grilled prawns, and as you would expect from the Aman, an excellent cheese selection, matched, my companion informs me, by very superior Castillian wine.

The pleasure of a great tapas bar is in being served robust but not excessive portions of food that bears the same relationship to cocktail snacks as a Ducatti bears to a mobike.

It’s also about the slightly childish pleasure of being able to nibble at several things instead of having to choose just one, with the guarantee that these will be fresh rather than have the slightly fatigued air of even the best buffet tables.

The wine’s important — in fact, many purists argue that a bar that serves anything other than wine, as the ones in India do, can’t be properly called a tapas bar. But you’re really there for the conversation and for the food, and the best tapas bars will source the freshest, most regional specialities.

The first few Spanish restaurants in India never caught on — unlike Italian food, Spanish food here has an identity crisis, which is bizarre because it comes so close to the Indian palate. But as more places do tapas menus in Bombay, Delhi and other metros, the Spanish armada might yet sneak in, stealth bombing our palates with familiar and yet utterly foreign flavours.

[Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi-based editor and writer]