Review: Toro, New York

It’s a long time since the area around Chelsea Markets and the old Meatpacking District was “cool” in an edgy, as opposed to Standard-ised, way. The New York outpost of Ken Oringer and Jamie Bisonnette’s tapas-style restaurant Toro, launched in 2013 after eight successful years in Boston, clings slightly – fondly, one feels – to the locale’s former industrial blankness; access is via a short exterior staircase like a truncated fire escape, on whose side the restaurant’s name is spelled out in lengths of gaffer tape. Inside, you heave aside a heavy curtain and look on to a wedge-shaped space so filled with noise you can almost see it. Somewhere beneath all the chatter and hubbub, there is (frankly unnecessary) mood music: the all-too-familiar looped whoop of “Jump Around”, a song that is now 22 years old; the House of Pain in question is probably an arthritis treatment centre.

At the far end of the wedge, beside a bar and jamón-carving station, ivy has been trained up a trellised false wall and ceiling, giving a convincing impression that you’re eating in some garden terrace, especially once the daylight from big windows facing on to Pier 57 has faded (though before it gives way to twinkling night-time lights, this view does let you admire the joggers going past in their neon outfits, little lights of MP3 players gleaming where they’re strapped to runners’ biceps, and the steady stream of men too old to be aboard the skateboards and scooters they’re riding).

All are united: they proffer to one another the slightly pained “interested” face of a person who really can’t hear what you’re saying

Away from the climbing ivy, there are artfully discoloured white girders and the usual raw walls; a room divider made of wineracks and hangers from which hang legs of hams. Like the MPD itself, the crowd at Toro isn’t grungy in the slightest: here are well-turned out, well-to-do patrons, most of them coming straight from work, and most dining in unisex groups: men with open collars, women in office-smart dresses. All are united: they proffer to one another the slightly pained “interested” face of a person who really can’t hear what you’re saying. This is a loud, buzzy, brassy space, ideal for bigger parties, not so well suited to first dates.

To the food then: as one does with tapas, we over-ordered, and were delighted with just about everything that came. The menu features pintxos, hot, cold and grilled tapas, grilled items from the parilla, substantial paellas, and charcuterie from the evocatively named Brambly Farms, up in Norfolk, Massachusetts. Escabeche oysters, the shells brimming with verjus and green strawberry, were rather teeny, but the sweet-sharp additions lifted and emphasised the raw oysters’ sea flavour rather than swamping it; a San Sebastian-ish dish of maitake and trumpet mushrooms finished with a warm egg yolk was earthy and delicious (I eschewed the menu’s suggestion I add “a cock’s comb” – evidently, once I could hear the server explain this, the actual bit o’ rooster, something I could probably live without trying).

Jamón iberico lacked the fatty, slightly gummy texture that customarily coats the inside of your mouth after one bite – and could have been a few degree warmer, too: no translucent stripes of fat here. Smoked beef heart, salty and iron-rich, is carved into wafer-thin slivers and piled on a slab of toast thickly slathered in romesco sauce. Pulpo y Cerdo – a red-curried ragu of octopus and pig’s ear, served on spaetzle – was tasty, but strayed far from Toro’s Spanish flavour palette, and the concept, what with German pasta and Asian flavours, seemed a little muddled; a more distinctive and successful fusion came with a dish that combined crispy sweetbreads with a sweet, dark fermented black bean paste curiously close in flavour to an exceptionally rich chocolate sauce. For once, these deftly put together, flavour-intense combinations aren’t misserved by being presented as “small plates”: much as I love a sweetbread, I genuinely couldn’t have eaten any more than a small serving of them. And that’s no criticism. Toro ticks all the boxes of Spanish tapas cuisine, but its most successful dishes make the leap into territories new. C

Toro, 85 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011, USA
+212 691-2360; toro-nyc.com