Ole South Bank

What did we eat before tapas? Seriously, what did we eat? Did we eat?

From small suburban cafes to city bars, the word is used as an excuse to charge $11 for a bowl of approximately 11 almonds. Tapas are the sushi of the late naughties; the shark was jumped long ago.

Serving small snacks to go with drinks is a concept by no means exclusive to Spain - the Venetians have their cicchetti, the Japanese their izakaya, the Australians their dip ‘n’ chips - but the word is now a catch-all for any little plate of food.

On the back of the general fad for Spanish food there are now several excellent Spanish restaurants in Brisbane; any new one that opens is going to have to measure up.

So when I sit down at Ole, a new Spanish tapas restaurant at South Bank, on a recent Saturday night, I am excited by the menu: one page of tapas, one page of raciones (larger plates to share), and everything listed under its Spanish name.

The decor is bright and breezy, with slate floors inside, a beautifully carved wooden ceiling, and briliant yellow trim. It's not especially Spanish but it doesn't feel like a theme park either.

There's two of us dining and we decide to order several plates of tapas and two raciones to share. The smiling waitress warns us that everything comes as it’s ready rather than all at once; that's just fine.

We order croqueta de bacalao (salt cod fritters), which are my favourite thing to order on a traditional tapas menu; empanadas de atun (tuna and green olives baked in butter pastry), anchoveta y queso azul (anchovy, blue cheese and mint on sourdough toast) and palitos de queso (fried manchego with tomato jam). Each are happily priced between $3 and $4.

I consider adding a simple plate of jamon but it's breathtakingly priced - $12 for 15 grams of serrano and $18 for the same amount of the top-shelf Paleta Iberico de Bellota. Fifteen grams, by my calculations, is about one slice. These are expensive meats - the Iberico especially - but not that expensive.

For our raciones we order navajas y mejillones - preserved razor clams with mussels poached in olive oil and lemon, $19.50, and morcilla, with black sausage, pork belly, chickpeas and spinach, for $19.

We also order a glass each of sangria ($8 each) - one white and one red, both fruity, fizzing and light on alcohol. There's a short wine list with a good selection of Spanish and local wines.

The fried manchego is the first to arrive and it’s tasty, as fried cheese tends to be, but unremarkable. Next to arrive are the croquetas and empanadas, neither of which offer any detectable hint of their chief seafood components but are instead filled with a soft generic white creaminess. These are fine to eat but don't taste of much at all.

The final tapa is nowhere to be seen as the larger dishes are brought out, but we’re twice given a dish of meatballs that we didn’t order. This may be because we are served by five different staff over the course of the evening, meaning we are interrupted, however well-meaningly, far too often.

Both the raciones are good but the servings are small for the price - you’d probably need two raciones a person if you aren’t eating tapas. The black sausage in the morcilla is very good, tender and full-flavoured, but the pork belly is dry. The dish of razor clams and mussels is better - fresh, briny and wholesome.

Our final tapa, the anchovy toast, arrives as we’ve almost finished the raciones. It’s a few fresh anchovies on a piece of very ordinary blue cheese on white bread toast, rather than the sourdough listed on the menu. Simple dishes like this are more about the assembly of ingredients than cooking, and the ingredients need to be of better quality if it's going to be worth eating.

For dessert (rarely an optional course for me) there is only one choice for us: the churros ($10), those long spiced donuts with chocolate dipping sauce that's another relatively recent Spanish trend Australians can't get enough of. The apologetic waitress returns a few minutes after we’ve ordered and says they’ve unfortunately just run out. This puzzles me for two reasons: firstly, when you’re a Spanish restaurant and you’re serving churros, you shouldn't be running out at 8.30pm on a Saturday. And secondly, donut batter should be a relatively straightforward thing to mix up - unless the donuts aren't made fresh but are pre-cooked and reheated.

The rest of the dessert menu doesn’t excite us - there’s chocolate pudding with caramel icecream, a cheese plate, Pedro Ximenez icecream - but we order a crema catalina, a Spanish custard with blood orange topped with toffee. It’s excellent, the sourness of the citrus a perfect companion for the sweet, rich custard and burnt toffee. It matches beautifully with a glass of El Candado Pedro Ximenez, $9.

Ole has a great location, cheerful staff and a cuisine Brisbane loves, but needs more care from the kitchen.

gwaters@brisbanetimes.com.au

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