Spanish lessons
With his new restaurant, Toro, Ken Oringer brings the flavors -- and the fun -- of the tapas bar to the South End
Ken Oringer and John Critchley pluck slender, long-stemmed green peppers off a tray and stack them on a white plate. They're shiny, tinged with brown, and ''one out of every 10 is hot," Oringer says with a grin. ''You don't know until you get it. Fry 'em in olive oil, sprinkle 'em with sea salt, and this is an amazing bar snack."
More to the point, these peppers -- called pimientos de Padron after the town of their origin -- are ''so, so Spanish," says Oringer. ''To tell you the truth, I've never seen these in a restaurant in the United States, anywhere."
Oringer, acclaimed chef and owner of Clio and Uni in the Back Bay, hopes he can say that about many of the dishes at Toro, his tapas bar opening Monday next to Mike's City Diner on Washington Street in the South End. In a city where just about every new restaurant is Italian or Japanese, he and chef de cuisine Critchley are finalizing plans for more than three dozen tapas, from the traditionally simple pan con tomate (bread rubbed with tomato) and boquerones (marinated white anchovies) to more complicated dishes like beef tongue: smoked, then cured, then slowly cooked in fat before being thinly sliced and served with vinaigrette and lentils.
Toro's whitewashed brick walls, rough-hewn floors, stainless steel bar, and bluestone fireplace promise a modern take on a rustic idea. The menu will focus on the tapas, with a handful of larger dishes built for two or more to share: suckling pig with sherry, sauteed cote de boeuf, and two paellas.
With Toro (the name refers both to the Spanish word for bull and the Japanese word for tuna belly), the 40-year-old Oringer is branching out while scaling down, much like chefs Chris Douglass and Marc Orfaly have done in recent months with Ashmont Grill and Marco, respectively. Toro's average check size will be $25, including drinks -- a fraction of the $90 average check at Clio. With an open kitchen, service until 1 a.m., no reservations, communal tables, and 60 tightly arranged seats, Toro seems poised to facilitate a convivial sort of controlled chaos.
Oringer doesn't plan to stack Toro up against the handful of other tapas restaurants in Boston, or even against acclaimed ones in New York or Washington, D.C. ''If all goes well," he says, ''this can be on par with some of the best tapas bars in Spain."
That may sound overly confident, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Oringer. His cooking at Clio earned him a James Beard Award for best chef in the Northeast in 2001, and Uni, inside Clio at the Eliot Hotel, has drawn accolades for introducing Bostonians to the glories of contemporary sashimi. Moreover, he's been to Spain a dozen times, cooking with ''molecular gastronomist" Ferran Adria, culinary statesman Juan-Mari Arzak and daughter Elena, and Adria disciple Sergi Arola. He's every bit as comfortable, if not more so, bar hopping in the tapas wonderlands of San Sebastian and Barcelona as he is sitting for a tasting menu at a temple to high cuisine.
It was on such a bar crawl five years ago that the Toro concept popped into Oringer's head. ''It's rustic, bistro-type food, but much lighter, much simpler," he says. ''I thought, 'This would really fit a niche.' People want to eat casually, eat socially, which is what I want to do." He also wanted ''the complete opposite" of the refinement of Clio. ''It's like being an actor," Oringer says. ''I don't want to be typecast."
At the time, he was formulating the plan for Uni. Soon enough, he was tossing around thoughts of opening a taqueria, traveling to Mexico and Thailand for gustatory research, and finalizing plans to open a sashimi bar at the Bangkok Dusit Thani hotel. That project is on hold.
Closer to home -- in his own neighborhood of the South End -- Oringer was captivated by a vacant storefront near Massachusetts Avenue that had most recently been Epicurean Meat Market. That end of Washington Street has been slower to gentrify, particularly on a retail level, than the end closer to Chinatown. ''I love the grittiness, the edginess," he says. ''It's like the Lower East Side was six, seven years ago. I want Hispanics, blacks, gays, yuppies, suburbanites all socializing."
The space, owned by Jay Hajj of Mike's City Diner and Victoria's Diner, had never been a restaurant before, which complicated the renovation, but Oringer is trying to keep the budget to $600,000, including the $150,000 he paid Hajj for the liquor license. He hired Peter Niemitz to design the space, but unlike Niemitz's classic, clubby rooms for Eastern Standard or Union Bar and Grille, Toro is shaping up to look more like a converted warehouse loft. Niemitz thinks of it almost as an anti-design. ''It's just a palate for Ken's cooking," says the designer at a meeting to finalize lighting, barstools, and wood stains. ''Just a laid-back, low-key, ultra-casual place, very, very, very raw but with refined elements. The food is going to be the thing here."
At a staff training session last week, new manager Janet Penn tried to get a group of waiters, bartenders, and hostesses in the right frame of mind by passing around a porron, a glass carafe made for a particularly dramatic way of drinking cava. It was borrowed from Pep Vicente, a waiter from Barcelona who is coming to Toro from La Morra in Brookline. Casey Caballero of Colombia was first in line: ''Do you want me to start talking about myself first, or start drinking?" she asked. Then Caballero, who also works at Tapeo on Newbury Street, held the porron high in the air, tilted her head back, and poured so a stream of cava would arc into her mouth.
''Do you think that's something you could get your guests into?" Penn asked the group after Vicente followed suit and others tried their luck or politely declined. ''I think it could be a lot of fun."
After the introductions, Penn, who worked most recently at Barbuto, Jonathan Waxman's casual Italian eatery in New York, read through employee guidelines, then gave a short lesson in the origin of tapas. The word ''tapa" means lid in Spanish, and one theory holds that tapas began centuries ago when bartenders would cover a glass of sherry with a plate to keep flies from getting in, and later started putting snacks on the plates. Other theories connect tapas to a 13th-century doctor's decree that King Alfonso X eat smaller portions, or to the influence of the Moors, who had a long tradition in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa of eating finger foods with a drink.
Whatever the origin, the point of tapas is to socialize over interestingly flavored morsels. ''They have an amazing ability to bring people together," Penn says.
Running the kitchen at Toro will be Critchley, 28, who has traveled with Oringer to Thailand and has cooked with Sergi Arola but has never been to Spain. Instead, he has been reading everything he can get his hands on, including Internet excerpts from the 14th-century ''Libre de Sent Sovi," one of Europe's oldest cookbooks. He's been cooking like mad, squeezing in next to Clio's pastry chef in the Back Bay to test slow-cooked romesco sauce, blood sausage, salt-cod croquetas, and everything else on the Toro menu.
Some of Critchley's tests, including the blood sausage -- called morcilla in Spain -- have been so successful they've made it onto the plates of VIP diners at Clio and Uni in recent weeks. Critchley worked at Ford's Colony Country Club in Williamsburg, Va., and was a private chef in Boston for four years before joining Clio three years ago. He proved himself so quickly that Oringer let him run Uni.
Critchley's calm, unassuming demeanor is a perfect fit for Toro, Oringer thinks. ''This is a restaurant for fun," he says. ''I don't want a chef screaming at everybody. Being that I have such high standards, and he has such high standards, he's going to run it like that and I'm going to run it like that."
At the staff training session, Critchley went over the opening menu, explaining how the cooks are making their own salt cod, how the morcilla uses bread for smooth texture, how the mussels will be roasted to order in a cast-iron pan. Some of the tapas are actually Mexican in origin, such as the maiz asado, grilled corn rubbed with garlic mayonnaise, then rolled in cotija cheese and sprinkled with espelette pepper and lime. With others, an authentic result is achieved with non-Spanish ingredients or techniques. The Galician-style octopus, for instance, uses Japanese dashi to help tenderize and reduce the fishy taste of the octopus.
''We're trying to get away from everything tasting like parsley, dried pepper, and paprika," Critchley says. ''The Spanish do, too."
He and Oringer cooked up some of the Toro dishes just last week for a group including Ming Tsai, chef and owner of Blue Ginger in Wellesley. Tsai, a friend and fan of Oringer's, calls Uni and Clio ''two of the best tables in the city" and says he can already tell that Toro will probably make it three. ''I had the best ear of corn of my life" at the tasting, Tsai says, referring to the maiz asado. ''It was tremendous. And it's just an ear of corn."
Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com. 