Lola Gaspar
Restaurateurs have a way of looking ill at ease, or just ill at the beginning of a new venture. After all; life savings, mortgages, pawnable goods and first-born children are often hanging in the balance. Yet in the half-dozen times I’ve been to Lola Gaspar since it opened ten months ago, the owners always appear relaxed and companionable, chatting up guests with the effortless brio of the guys you met on the train to Pamplona back in college.
Indeed the Santa Ana Artist’s Village is about as close to Europe as you’ll get in OC. With the Santora Arts Building’s ultra-baroque churrigueresque-style faςade as its bones and a pedestrian street with a trickling fountain and sunny patio in front, the reinvented pocket of downtown Santa Ana is channeling a Gaudí -studded Barcelona or even Milan’s Brera neighborhood with its side street wiles. A prickly debate has raged for at least ten years over whether this area could or should go through the pains of metamorphosis. Now the point is moot thanks to a handful of pioneering restaurants and clubs like Lola that are stimulating down town Santa Ana’s economy one glass of sangria at a time.
Inside, there are a handful of black leather booths and cute servers that sometimes wear boots to match. Hi-tops and bar stools flank the L-shaped bar. A single flat screen discreetly shows stuff like The Motorcycle Diaries or the Argentine Super Clasico soccer match while samba plays on an IPOD. Shadows cast by florid wrought iron give the haunt an ethereal vibe during lunchtime while goth-glam chandeliers add femininity at night.
Lola’s kitchen occupies the paltry square footage a larger restaurant might set aside for, say, their small walk-in, yet manages to turn out the casual, unmanipulated fare of a San Sebastian tavern. Flatbreads and tacos are decent. Caramel-like dates stuffed with pungent blue cheese and wrapped with crisp bacon have their own cult on Yelp. Seared cuts of steak, caramelized onions and cheese in a grilled tortilla rendered translucent with oil is essential comfort food while the accompanying Spanish-style potato salad is just alright.
At thirteen dollars, the roasted wild snapper is one of the more expensive things on the menu. Cooked to tender flakiness and dressed in a tangy caper beurre blanc, it could easily go for more in a formal setting on a dinner menu even without the accompanying green beans and crumbly, golden-crusted goat cheese polenta that yields to a pudding-like texture.
Let the politicos spar about whether gentrification was nefarious or the if the dominant demographic and current aesthetic of the neighborhood will continue to co-exist. I’ll be on the patio at Lola with a slightly effervescent glass of Twin Vines albarino.
Lola Gaspar 211 W. 2nd Street Santa Ana 92701 (714) 972 1172. Dinner for two, $40.00, food only.
