A Tapas Tasting; Downtown Kalamzoo's Fandango Bistro

Tucked into a little corner on Burdick Street within the Kalamazoo Mall, Fandango Tapas Bistro provides a mildly exotic night-spot for various twenty-something year olds to go out and sample Spanish cuisine.

First and foremost, Fandango is a night-hopping sort of place. There is no lunch crowd, as they are open for 5 hours, from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday. There is a big, semi-circle bar, tiled in the style of a Spanish ranch, which takes up most of the space. Little fern plants stand guard next to the liquor rack and a lonely LCD television keeps the single avid sports watcher’s attention.  Orange-red, swipe-painted walls are decorated with various, generic, Spanish covered paintings there to evoke a sense of exotic night life. Low lights hang and there are tall-tables all around. The place has energy, decent cocktails, and a quick and helpful serving staff that guides you on your little culinary adventure into Hispania.

Tapas are a finicky food—you get a little for a lot. By no means is Fandango cheap. Prices range from $6 to $12 for tapas dishes, and my waitress recommended that we order 2 to 3 dishes per person throughout the night. While it isn’t necessary to follow their advice, you are going to want to take a smattering of this and that from the menu—this is the devilish thing about these small dishes—your eyes and stomach won’t leave you with much of a choice. When I went, I ordered 4 different dishes and a dessert to split, which ended up running to about $40 without tip.

But that is the price you pay for intimacy. As I previously mentioned, the whole place is packed into the Kalamazoo Mall, a black-Lego block of an awning that takes up the kitty corner across from the Kalamazoo Gazette—and that is it. According to the owners, the place seats 87 individuals at maximum capacity, but I can’t imagine ‘comfortably’ being thrown in there afterwards. The place is built more like a coffee joint in downtown Chicago, with the bar taking up about half of the floor space and the kitchen smashed in further behind it. Whether you like it or not, you are going to become familiar with that 25-year old law student sitting behind you, her 3-minute jogging routine, her various previous flings she’s had over the past month, and the 28-year old bachelor who is agreeing with her about as furiously as he is trying to get in her pants.

That closeness follows through past the social bubble popping, however, and communicates through the food. For those of you not familiar with the idea of tapas, the whole idea is grabbing little bites of everything. You know when you went to the buffet as a kid: grabbed a buffalo wing here, a taquito there, and then plopped that pizza puff that looked way too tempting sitting in all that grease right in the middle of the plate on top of all the other food you got? Imagine that, except with goat cheese, chicken, seafood, and other nibbles of Spanish cuisine, served in individual skillets or bowls just a little bit larger than a man’s hand. One should go here in an attempt at satisfying their palate rather than their stomach, so don’t expect to loosen any belt notches.

Which is perfect, really; bloating would ruin a meal at Fandango. Each dish, such as the patatas bravas for example; sautéed potatoes, garlic and onions, topped with a perky pepper sauce that sizzles on your lips and the tip of your tongue, is designed to be a snippet of flavor and texture. The animal fat the dish is cooked in will stick with you for the rest of the night, and the crispness of the thin slices potatoes can’t help but bring baconized potato chips to mind.  You think “wow, that was unique” and go on and order something else off the 40-plus menu of snacklets and appetizers.

The meal will truly hinge around that first tapa, though—and that was what concerned me. The aforementioned patatas bravas will definitely be a conversation (and meal) starter, but when it came to some of the other dishes I grew a bit disenchanted. The cheesy roasted eggplant, thinly sliced eggplant served with a delicate cheese crust and a red sauce on the side, was hearty at a first, but ended up tasting a bit too much like sit-down pizza, as well as being a bit rubbery. I also feel it is important to mention that is was so salty that my chapped lips began to throb while eating it, leaving me to gulp down water like a cowboy in a Spaghetti western just in from the desert. And what I had hoped to be a enlivening end to evening ended up being a bit of letdown, as the habanero chicken that had been glaring at me from the menu all night and sounded so sadistically promising with its sweet glaze and Scoville searing sauce ended up tasting more like Asian chicken with some sweet sauce on top.

The mango shrimp cocktail, what is basically a bowl of shrimp smothered in your average cocktail sauce presented charmingly in a glass goblet with bits of mango thrown in with and a bit of a lime zest for flavor, however, grew on me.  It wasn’t over complicated, nor presented many ‘unique’ or ‘exotic’ flavors, but served as nice talking food, occasionally biting at you with a fruity after taste combined with a touch of the sea.

But these are only four dishes, not even a tenth of the tapas menu, and that is not including the variety of flatbreads, paella, and salad dishes that are served as well—although ordering these would be akin to ordering a hamburger at a high-end Italian restaurant after pouring ketchup all over your breadsticks. One should go in with a group of friends and take a little nibble, sometimes it only takes one bite to get hooked.

Frankly quite full,

-E. Clark