Isabella's, Frederick

We made a foray into downtown Frederick, Maryland to check out the tapas at Isabella's, after hearing about them for years. Friday during lunch, the downtown was hopping and there were lots and lots of people at restaurants everywhere you turned. I wish Old Town Winchester had that vibe.

The restaurant doesn't look much from the outside, but inside it is quite spacious with a double-sided bar running down the center. It is certainly nicely appointed and comfortable, a bit rustic with exposed brick, stained wainscoting, and a tin ceiling. I had a lot of photos of the interior and the food, but the lighting was just too dim: few are worth seeing.

I started by running through the wine list to find something for lunch. The list is substantial but totally disorganized. In fact, it seemed pretty random. Consequently it took five times as long as it should to narrow down on a bottle of Spanish red because Spanish reds were scattered over every page of the list.

Following the bottle of Cline Mourvèdre that we drank on Wednesday, it somehow seemed fitting to order the Spanish equivalent called Monastrell (aka Mataró) for lunch today. The 2009 Hécula Monastrell from Yecla showed the same jammy earthy fruit and same lack of acid as the Cline.

For our first round of tapas we ordered albóndigas en salsa de ajo, queso frito con almendras y vinagreta, and Isabella's signature tapa, fried asparagus with aïoli.

The meatballs (albóndigas) were really lame and lacked any seasoning to speak of. The garlic sauce was like so much brown gravy. Ann put it best when she said that they taste like Salisbury steak, an uncharacteristically very polite way of saying they sucked. We ate one each and sent the rest off with the busser. I didn't take a photo of the meatballs; I don't want to remember them.

But what an awesome presentation for the asparagus! The kitchen put the aïoli in the bottom of a Champagne flute and stood three asparagus spears in that. As beautiful as it was, the asparagus needed salt and I wanted a little more character from the aïoli. I would love to reprise this dish at the restaurant by wrapping the asparagus in jamón serrano before breading and frying it. Sorry, the photo of the only dish that I wanted to remember was too blurred to post.

Goat Cheese Croquetas, in an Oil Slick

The slightly smaller than golf ball-sized goat cheese fritters were good, but where were the almonds? Absent to my palate. It was something of a travesty to plop these nice croquetas unceremoniously into the so-called vinaigrette, which was mostly an unappealing oil slick. No doubt the vinaigrette separated in the kitchen and was never remixed thoroughly. Even were the vinaigrette still emulsified, I don't think it would have added a thing to the dish.

Good Chorizo, Great Mash, Disgusting Brown Gravy

For the second round, we tried the chorizo which had really good flavor and was sitting on some pretty decent mash. But then it was drowned in some terrible brown gravy. Such a pity to spoil an otherwise good dish.

We also had the octopus styled as pulpo en salsa picante, which was pretty good but not so picante. I would have preferred some texture in the dish; it was all soft. And frankly, the octopus was lost. Ann thought it was roasted garlic at first.

"Padrón" Peppers

Next up was a plate of pimientas de Padrón. Well, not really. They were shishito peppers, none of them spicy, and they had been cooked in too much oil so that the effect was greasy. The peppers from Padrón are a thing of sublime beauty; these were not.

Octopus?

By this point we had figured out that we weren't going to have the experience we were hoping for, so we decided to wrap up lunch with another order of asparagus and the Spanish cheese plate. We reasoned that the kitchen couldn't screw up cheese. The cheese plate was really skimpy with less than one-ounce portions of four cheeses: Idiazabal, Manchego, Majorero, and Cabrales. As a restaurant owner, I will rarely complain about prices or portion size, but I did not find $13 value in less than four ounces of cold cheeses of average quality. If the cheeses had been of really great quality, there would have been no issue.

I'd go back but I'm not in a hurry to do so. I don't regret lunch there because we had a great time as we always do. But I was hoping for just a little more savvy in the dishes from what has become an institution in downtown Frederick.