Most Americans think tapas means appetizers. Small plates. Overpriced bites you order before the real food arrives. That misunderstanding has been doing a lot of damage to a lot of menus for a long time.
In Spain, tapas are not a course. They are a way of spending an evening. You go to a bar, you order a few things, you drink, you talk, you order a few more things. There is no entrée waiting at the end. There is no defined arc from start to finish. The meal is the conversation, and the food is what you eat while the conversation is happening. You might be at the same table for three hours. You might move to a different bar and start over. The food is almost incidental to the rhythm — and yet the food is also the whole point, because the best tapas are made with the same care as anything else in a serious kitchen, just without the ceremony.
That is what Si Tapas on Allen Street has been selling since 2009. Ildefonso Jimenez opened the first tapas bar in Texas — Café Madrid — in 1990, and when circumstances put him back at square one nearly two decades later, he built a second restaurant with the same philosophy and a better room. He is from Madrid. He has been doing this longer than most Dallas restaurants have existed.
The Room
The building is an old white cottage on Allen Street, and from the outside you might drive past it without slowing down. That’s part of its personality. Inside, the bar greets you first — small, warm, the kind of bar that makes you want to sit down before you’ve even decided to stay. Beyond it, the dining room settles into the back of the house, low-lit and comfortable, with tables close enough together that the room has a collective energy without being loud. Windows look out to the patio and the small garden. The walls carry soccer memorabilia, bottles of wine, the accumulated presence of a room that has been lived in properly.
The patio is the best seat in the house on a good evening. It is enclosed and green and private in a way that patios in this city rarely manage. When it’s working — the right temperature, the right table, a bottle of something cold — you forget you’re on Allen Street. That’s what Jimenez was going for. It shows.
The staff know the menu. That matters more than it sounds. At a restaurant with 30-plus tapas on each side of the menu, the servers need to be able to tell you what pairs with what, what to order first, what the kitchen does best on a Tuesday versus a Saturday. At Si Tapas, that knowledge is present and offered without pretension. Nobody is performing expertise. They just know the food.
What to Order
The Gambas al Ajillo is the dish that tells you whether a Spanish kitchen knows what it’s doing. Shrimp in olive oil, garlic, and guindilla pepper — three ingredients, nothing to hide behind. The shrimp needs to be cooked correctly and the garlic needs to be golden without burning. The version here is right. Order bread to finish the oil.
The Patatas Bravas are the other standard. Crisp outside, yielding inside, served with spicy brava sauce and aioli. These are the potatoes you remember eating at 1 a.m. at a bar in Barcelona and then spend the rest of your life trying to find a version of at home. The ones at Si Tapas are among the best in Dallas.
The Serrano Ham Croquettes separates a kitchen with patience from one just going through motions. The béchamel has to be made right — thick enough to hold its shape, loose enough to go almost liquid when the crust breaks. These are correct. The ham running through the filling gives each one a cured depth that makes them difficult to stop eating.
The Seared Tuna with Four Styles of Ground Pepper is the most-ordered dish on the menu. The tuna is properly seared — a thin cooked exterior giving way to an almost-raw center — with the four-pepper crust adding layers of heat. It has become a signature because it earns it.
The Oxtail Stew is for the long evening. Braised until the collagen has dissolved into the sauce and the meat pulls apart without resistance. This is Andalusian in spirit — the kind of preparation that takes most of the day and rewards the patience. Order it with something red from Ribera del Duero and take your time with it.
The Tortilla Española — the Spanish potato omelette — served at room temperature, barely set in the center, is the most purely Spanish thing on the menu. It is not a hot dish. It is exactly what it is.
The Chicken in Saffron Wine Sauce is the entrée that surprises people who came in thinking they’d order a few small things and leave. The sauce is built around real saffron and a white wine reduction that gives it color and brightness without going heavy. It arrives over rice. You will finish all of it.
For the paella: it’s available as a tapa or entrée, and a full wood-fire paella for the table is available with 24-hour advance notice for four or more people. If you can plan ahead, do. The socarrat — the toasted crust at the bottom of the pan — is the reward for doing it right, and they do it right.
The Angulas al Ajillo — baby eels in garlic sauce — is the dish that stops most American diners cold for a moment before they order it. Angulas are juvenile European eels, born in the Sargasso Sea and spending up to three years drifting back to the coasts of Northern Spain before fishermen net them at night from river mouths. They arrive at the table in a cazuela — an earthenware bowl — cooked briefly in hot olive oil with garlic and a dried pepper, eaten with wooden utensils because metal is said to interfere with the flavor. The texture is soft, somewhere between fine pasta and a gentle chew. The flavor is mild almost to the point of neutrality. Wild angulas have become expensive enough that a processed imitation called gulas is now standard in most Spanish restaurants. Si Tapas lists this dish by its authentic name.
Other things worth ordering: the Montaditos — toasted bread with toppings, including a blue cheese crema and a tomato marmalade with cabrales and pine nuts — the Sautéed Artichokes, and the Sobrassada, a cured spreadable sausage from the Balearic Islands seasoned with paprika. Finding sobrassada on a menu in Dallas is unusual enough to be worth mentioning.
The Wine
The list is organized by Spanish province, which is the correct way to do it and the way most American wine lists avoid because it requires the staff to explain it. Si Tapas explains it.
Rioja is the anchor — Tempranillo-based, red fruit and cedar, familiar to most Spanish wine drinkers in America. A Rioja Crianza or Reserva alongside the oxtail or the lamb chops is a pairing that has been working for centuries.
Ribera del Duero grows the same grape at higher elevation on the Castilian plateau and produces wines that are darker and more structured than their Rioja counterparts. They need food — the charcuterie, the lamb — and they reward patience in the glass.
Rías Baixas in Galicia is where Albariño comes from. Light, bright, citrus and green apple with a mineral salinity that comes from the Atlantic proximity. Cold with the gambas or the mussels or the seafood paella, it is one of those pairings that makes everything else seem like an approximation.
Jerez is the home of Sherry, and this is where Si Tapas earns real respect from anyone who knows Spanish wine. A proper Fino — bone dry, pale, nutty, electric with salt — is the correct way to open a tapas meal. It goes with olives, anchovies, cured meat, anything briny or salty. Manzanilla, from the coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, carries a sea air quality that nothing else replicates. Amontillado develops hazelnut richness as it ages beyond the fino stage. Sherry gets talked about as a curiosity in American restaurants. At Si Tapas it is treated as what it actually is: one of the most food-compatible wines in the world.
Catalonia brings Cava — traditional-method sparkling wine, earthy and apple-forward, made from indigenous grapes outside Barcelona. The house sangria is made with Spanish wine and real fruit, not the sweetened concentrate that passes for sangria at most places.
Bottles run from around $30 to $200. The affordable range is well chosen and genuinely worth ordering from rather than something to apologize for.
Happy hour runs Monday through Thursday 4 to 7 p.m. with $2 tapas and drink specials. Sunday brunch adds $2 mimosas from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Both are the same kitchen, the same food, the same wine. That’s the thing about Si Tapas — there is no downshift for the cheap seats.
Si Tapas is at 2207 Allen Street in the State Thomas neighborhood of Uptown. Open daily 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 11 p.m. Phone: (214) 720-0324.
