From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published February  22, 2008 RioMar 3$ Warehouse District: 800 S. Peters Reservations 525-3474. Lunch Mon.-Fri. Dinner Mon-Sat. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. www.riomarseafood.com Spanish. Latin American. The dinner you have at RioMar won't be like any other this week. Even if you conscientiously try to duplicate it elsewhere, you won't be able to. And that doesn't even require your eating razor clams or Pacific Coast sardines there--although you could. Those are specials Chef Adolfo Garcia likes to run when he can get the raw materials. Even the keywords you'd apply to a web profile of the restaurant would work for no other place: Spanish. Seafood. Central American. Zarzuela. South American. Tapas. Warehouse. A couple of months ago, Chef Adolfo and his partner Nick Bazan took over the space next door in their converted industrial building. They mostly filled it with a long bar, something they kinda needed. But what they really had in mind was the tapas bars in Spain. Tapas--the mini-appetizers whose popularity has been widening rapidly in recent years across the world--started out as a way to keep flies out of wineglasses in Spanish bars. It has gone well beyond what we think of as bar food, but that remains its natural home. My most recent dinner at RioMar was early in the evening, and the dining room had yet to fill. (It would, completely, on that Tuesday night.) But at six-thirty, the bar was well stocked with people, drinking wine and caipirinhas (the cachaca-based Brazilian cocktail, riding a wave of favor right now). Those who were eating were ordering tapas from a checklist much like the ones sushi bars use. About twenty-five items were listed, from serrano ham and Manchego cheese to fried olives and stuffed piquillo peppers, with fritters and stuffed pastries and mussels and shrimp besides. You could make a meal of that stuff. Indeed, that's the meal you would make if you came for lunch, when tapas is the entire program. My wife and I did this on a rainy afternoon a couple of weeks ago. I checked off the following for our table: marinated olives, crabmeat-stuffed piquillo peppers, tuna empanadas, sauteed potatoes with chorizo, baked oysters with spinach and more chorizo. (The chorizo here is the kind they make in Spain, which is a harder, more thoroughly cured sausage than what's sold under that name in stores hereabouts.) At the end of that parade of nibbles came my favorite dish here: zarzuela. That's the Spanish bouillabaisse, and the portion they serve at lunch for $8 can't really be called an appetizer. The tomato-red broth, fragrant with saffron and herbs, includes big shrimp, squid, mussels, clams, and fish. It's a little spicy and totally delicious, especially in these cooler weeks. Chef Adolfo showed up at the end of this repast with a pair of his famous razor clams. The chewy feet on these are bigger than their mussel-like bodies. It seems impossible that they were inside the elongated, bivalve shells. The ensemble bears more than a passing resemblance to male genitalia. Who else but Adolfo has ever served razor clams? We didn't include in this lunch a major specialty of this restaurant. Ceviche, the most widespread appetizer throughout Latin America, is raw seafood, marinated in a concoction so acidic from citrus juice that it emerges from the process with the look, texture, and taste of fully cooked. Chef Adolfo makes more variations of ceviche than most people will experience elsewhere in their lifetimes. Each is in the style of a different country. All are vividly fresh, cold, and tangy. The spiciest of the lot is the Panamanian, jacked up with habanero peppers. The most unusual is the shrimp-based Ecuadorian ceviche, whose marinade includes some tomato. You can get an assortment of all the day's offerings and share it at the table. Nothing perks the palate better. That's certainly a good starting point as you head into the dinner menu. It's more conventional, with a dozen or so actual entrees, most in the $20s. As the name of the restaurant implies, seafood dominates, with a combination of local and imported fish. Last week, the choices included ahi tuna from the Gulf and bigeye tuna from the Pacific. Local black drum and tilefish, a good Atlantic species we don't see much here. The bigeye tuna made its way, uncooked, into a thin-sliced, olive-oil-drenched appetizer with avocado and splashes of mango-habanero sauce. The Gulf tuna goes into a signature dish: a slab of grilled tuna steak wrapped with thin slices of serrano ham. That's a marvelous flavor, abetted further by romesco sauce (a blend of tomato, red bell pepper, and almonds). The black drum is at the core of a new and very good entree. They put a thick enough coat of paprika on the fish to make it look blackened (although it isn't, either in texture or spiciness). That's set in a juicy sauce ("salpicon" is the Spanish name for it) of cherry tomatoes, squid rings, chorizo, and garlic with what they call an olive broth. Delicious, and typical RioMar: I've never had anything even remotely like this before. They like fish crusty here. The “unilateral” salmon is cooked, skin on, only on that side. Enough conductive and convective heat comes up to cook it well beyond the sashimi stage, yet the fresh sea flavors of the fish are right there. If seafood is not your bag, this is probably not a good choice of restaurants. They do have a couple of meat dishes: a grilled hanger steak with yuca fries and chimichurri, the pesto of Argentina. And an intriguing pork dish--cooked for five hours, they say. But if you want to eat meat with this Latin American spirit, the owners have a better restaurant for you, La Boca, a couple of blocks away. That's almost all steak and chops. The dining rooms don't attempt to hide their history as warehouse space, but are quite pleasant, with yellow walls and ironwork sculptures. The open kitchen invites you to look in on the cooking. The big guy with the near-beard is Chef Adolfo, and engaging fellow with a lot of ideas to share. The service staff is adept, and even knows its wines. That's an accomplishment, because these are predominantly from Spain and Chile and Argentina. RioMar never misses a chance to be unique. This was a restaurant in the Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.