From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published February 15, 2008 Vega Tapas Cafe 3$ Old Metairie: 2051 Metairie Rd. 836-2007 Dinner seven nights. AE DC DS MC V www.vegatapascafe.com Spanish. Pan-Mediterranean. The caution lights flash whenever a chef-owned restaurant gets a new owner. And with good reason. Rarely does a takeover result in a better restaurant. In the case of Vega Tapas Café, it did. And that's saying something. Founder Allison Vega left with her husband (also a chef) for the Caribbean a few years ago, and turned the place over to the restaurant's manager, Glen Hogh. As good as Allison was, he made the restaurant even more delicious and interesting. After twelve years, Vega remains successful with an appealing menu concept many restaurants have tried, bit no others have profited by with. Save for one dish, Vega's entire menu is composed of appetizer-sized dishes. All those are small enough that even a person of average budget and appetite can enjoy a three- or four-course dinner. Some Vega diners have been known to go well beyond that, constructing multi-course menus that resemble the chef's tasting menus in the high-end places. Now and then, the restaurant runs its own tasting menus of short-term specials, usually hooking into seasonal tastes. Allison Vega set a theme for the kitchen at the beginning: it would cook from all the cuisines along both coasts of the Mediterranean. Although the tapas concept is emphatically Spanish, the dishes of that land are only slightly more numerous than those of France, Italy, Greece, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. All this appeals to a young crowd, and here they are, in a high-ceilinged, cool dining room playing music that activates the tune-out department of my consciousness. Some of the dishes are uncommon. I strongly urge you to begin the repast with taramosalata, whose description may do less than encourage you. It's a Greek dip made of fish roe (carp there, choupique here), olive oil, and bread. A ramekin of this with crisp pita bread triangles is perfect with a cocktail or a first glass of wine. Two soups. One changes daily; the other is a thick, tan broth of garlic and croutons. It has a homely aspect, but it's rich with the nutty flavor of caramelized garlic. Like everything else here, the salads are designed to be parts of a larger meal. But they're the kind most places serve as entrees. The best is the beet salad with goat cheese, spinach, and walnuts. The Caesar is mellow with pulled confit of duck legs, scattered throughout. The most expensive of the lot is the crabmeat salad, with capers and a lemon vinaigrette. Then things get meatier in the next section of the menu, where slices of tuna and beef tenderloin, each encrusted with pepper (the tuna has coriander, too), are served cool with a light dressing. I like having both of these on the table, because they perform the same duty for the palate but in subtly different ways. (And here we introduce the concept of having many dishes passed around your table of four or six, which is the most pleasurable way of eating here.) If there is any taste of New Orleans here, it shows up among the hot tapas. Shrimp "pil-pil" may be the ancestor of barbecue shrimp. The menu alleges that it comes out sizzling (it didn't, for me anyway) with a sauce of olive oil colored and flavored with crushed red pepper, paprika, and garlic. The garlic component is subtle; this has cooked long enough that its sharpness is mostly gone. The quintet of shrimp are meaty and peeled (except for that tail section nobody can explain). Also here are empanadas (imagine a small, non-sweet Hubig's pie) stuffed with the ingredients from a crawfish boil (including the sausage). Two inevitable dishes in a restaurant like this are mussels and scallops. They're good here. The former have the classic sauce of white wine and herbs, plus capers. The scallops are among the best dishes here, run up on a rosemary stems made into a skewer, grilled, and set on a smooth, thick sauce of cooked-down red vegetables. I was surprised to find frog legs, especially they way they were prepared. The coating is a tempura batter made with Abita Beer (like you could pick up which brand of beer was used to make a batter). I'm no fan of tempura, which has a way of collecting grease. As did these. But I'd be lying if I told you I didn't enjoy these small, tender legs, and the somewhat over-fried batter, too. The hot tapas include items that seem like entrees in every respect except size. Here's a small fillet of the fish of the day, crusty with almonds, pan-fried and set atop what they Spanish-style rice. There's a phyllo pastry filled with chicken, wild mushrooms, and feta cheese. Another pastry has pulled pork and pepper jelly on top. The house steak is a flatiron steak, cut from the chuck, seared and sliced before being sent to the table. That's because of an inoperable line of gristle that runs through the thing, but you won't see that. It's flavorful, and arrives napped with a cheese-flecked vinaigrette and fried potatoes. But the best chunk of red meat here is a house classic: the Moorish pork tenderloin, dusted with an aromatic spice blend and seared. It comes with a subtle horseradish sauce (if you can imagine "subtle" and "horseradish" in the same sentence). That's always been one of the best dishes here. The one entree-sized dish is the paella, which can't be made in small portions. When Vega first opened, it was one of only a few restaurants serving that Spanish rice dish. Now I'd say that several other restaurants cook it better (Laurentino's and Café Grenada, most notably), and there are too many other attractions on this menu. Vega puts out a newsletter telling of its frequent special menus. (They ran a good one on Valentine's Day.) It's worth getting--even though to me it sometimes reads like a circular for an automobile dealer, and occasionally makes references in questionable taste. The service staff is thoroughly clued in and cordial. The wine list, largely Spanish, offers a nice deal on Mondays: everything is half-price. 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.