From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published August , 2007 Lola’s 2$ Esplanade Ridge: 3312 Esplanade 504-488-6946 Dinner only, seven nights. No credit cards. Spanish. Lola's is named for the mother of chef-owner Angel Miranda, who opened a Spanish restaurant in the Warehouse District during the World's Fair in 1984. At the time, it was the only restaurant in town serving a full menu of Spanish food, something few Orleanians knew anything about, and confused with the very different Mexican cuisine. That restaurant (called Altamira, in case you're wondering) closed after the Fair. Not long after, Angel opened a much smaller, less ambitious restaurant in a tiny storefront on Esplanade. Unlike the first restaurant, Lola's became a phenomenon. Because the neighbors objected to the location's having a liquor license (it wouldn't get one for years), Lola's had a bring-your-own-wine policy, which contributed as much to its popularity as the food did. (Indeed, Lola's was the local pioneer in allowing customers to bring in wine, something that's caught in a big way.) For most of its history, Lola's has been a packed house every night, with people waiting outside for the little tables jammed into the cramped room. Waiting was considered part of the dining experience there. What's the appeal? The food was good enough, but I think it's as much the loose style of the place, with its open kitchen, folk art, and New Orleans blues-funk playing on the sound system. Most of the menu stays with the basics of Spanish cooking. Paella and its pasta equivalent fideua loom large on the menu, available in four combinations (seafood, meat, vegetarian, and everything) and four sizes (feeds one to four people, depending on the size of the pan used). These are pretty good. The meat version include chicken, pork, and an herbal, non-smoky sausage. Seafood comes with shrimp, fish, squid, bay scallops, and mussels. They're made with saffron, but that component is so light that I had to ask whether it were actually in there. To begin, we find plates of cold tapas (Spanish ham, cheese, and chorizo--very good), various seafoods marinated in this or that to make other cold plates (less interesting, especially the big green mussels), and shrimp sauteed with olive oil, peppers, and a lot of garlic. And this brings up one of the most celebrated aspects of Lola's kitchen. They like garlic here, and they use it with abandon. So do I, so that works for me. The garlic mushrooms, the garlic soup (almost all the soups, come to think of it), and many of the entrees have a dominant garlic component. More about the soups. They have a surprisingly large number of them, and all are at least pretty good, made ain a very rustic style. The most ambitious is the sopa de mariscos, with most of the same ingredients that turn up in the seafood paella. The most interesting (although it seems wrong for hot weather) is the fabada, a white bean soup with ham and sausage--really rib-sticking. And the classic cold soup of Andalusia: gazpacho. The version here, which is quite authentic, is nearly pureed, instead of the chunky version more common in America. But the taste is very much the same, and very good, at that. The entree department also shows more variety than you might expect of such a small restaurant. A lot of it comes from the grill, with three kinds of fish, a very tender and flavorful pork loin. The garlic chicken comes out of the pan with the flavor of long-cooked garlic, with its nutty taste rather than the sharp one we often get in this sort of thing. When the weather turns cool, I will come back again not only for another go-round of that white bean soup, but also the lamb stew. It's another heartwarming dish--along with the warmth of the peppers in the sauce. The cooking here is good, but I wonder how it would taste with better raw materials. Many of the ingredients are standard issue things like farm-raised salmon and rainbow trout, little scallops, gigantic squid steaks, and those green-lipped mussels. All this is reflected in the moderate (but not bargain) prices. It's easier to get a table here lately, unless it's just that dining has moved later in the evening in the Esplanade restaurant row. Where Lola's remains a mainstay. And although they now have beer and wine, you can still bring your own. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.