Boqueria’s founder on twenty years of small plates, hard math, and the people who kept showing up.
By Yann de Rochefort
A month after we opened Boqueria in 2006, Giorgio DeLuca came in for dinner. Yes, that DeLuca, the one who opened Dean & DeLuca, the SoHo grocery that turned selecting an olive oil into an important status ritual.
Sitting down at an authentic Spanish restaurant in Nashville for the first time, the menu is going to look like a list of forty things with no obvious starting point. That’s not a design flaw. A tapas menu isn’t a set of options to pick one from — it’s a set of components you assemble over the course of an evening, in rounds, with the table.
An authentic Spanish restaurant in Seaport has to work three or four different ways in the same day, and Boqueria at 25 Thomson Place does — weekday lunch for people walking the waterfront, a Spanish-style brunch that runs long on weekends, an after-work bar that fills by six, and bar bites served until midnight on Friday and Saturday.
When we opened on West 19th Street in 2006, pan con tomate was $5 on the menu, menu that earned us two stars from The New York Times and changed the way the city thought about tapas. Some of the people who dined with us back then are still regulars.
An authentic Spanish restaurant in Penn Quarter has to answer a question most menus quietly dodge: which Spain? Because there isn’t one Spanish cuisine. There are regional cooking traditions that differ from each other as sharply as Provence differs from Sicily — Basque pintxos bars, Catalan seafood, Andalusian frying, Galician shellfish, Valencian rice.
