Pazo

Pazo
1425 Aliceanna St. (at Central)
Fell's Point, Baltimore
410-534-7296
Tapas
www.pazorestaurant.com
Cost: $$$
Reservations: Recommended
Date of meal: various
National Price-Quality Frontier: Inside It
Baltimore Price-Quality Frontier: On It


I've been to Pazo twice. Once my spouse and I went; once we took my parents.

Pazo is housed in a converted factory or warehouse. It has an extremely high ceiling and a n open second floor that looks down over the main restaurant. As you come in, the left third or so of the restaurant is a bar and lounge area, with the right two-thirds is dinner seating. The restaurant is large, with (and I'm guessing here) perhaps 50-100 tables. There is a DJ booth as well. It is loud; do not go if you want to have a quiet romantic dinner.

If you want to be a young urban scenester, then Pazo is a good bet. The decor is fancy and sleek. Diners are attractive, generally young professionals; doubly so for those at the bar. They may be trying a bit hard to be cool, but they are fairly successful. The place draws lots of single, high-earning 20- and 30-somethings in Baltimore, which I guess is the goal. If an investment banker friend from New York came to visit, this is where I would take them for drinks.

While service was generally good, Pazo suffers from the usual pitfalls of large restaurants. When I called an hour ahead to say I might be 15 mins late, the person answering the phone (who was nice and professional) had to put me in touch with the manager to make sure we'd be seated. When someone other than our server brought us the wrong pizza, he said it was what we ordered when it wasn't after we asked him if it was the right pizza. When the restaurant is this big, training/monitoring of staff by management and monitoring of patrons by servers is tough. A personal touch is out of the question.

Food is mostly tapas-style small plates, though they do have entrees as well. Tapas may not be exactly the right word as food is Mediterranean more than Spanish. Prices are reasonable and about what you'd expect ($10 tapas); food is clearly a loss-leader for alcohol. From looking at the menu, dishes look great. Menu items push all the right word-buttons. For example, the Bruschetta has "Wood Roasted Red Peppers" and not just peppers. This is pretty standard at such places.

Unfortunately, the execution was spotty at best. The "Wood-grilled Eggplant Dip" was yucky. The "Tonno Crudo" (aka tuna tartare) was served in overly-large cubes on wooden skewers, which looks good until you realize that the pieces are too big to eat and the skewers impale you. The ceviche was so-so. The Pizza Catalan was quite good. My dad (who knows a lot about wine) was quite put off by how pretentious the wine service was; the server insisting on decanting a wine without knowing why when decanting wasn't necessary. Our dessert was served on a cool-looking plate so wobbly that eating from it was difficult. The food-related punch-line here is that substance clearly wins over content. I suspect that most of the people who go to Pazo don't care; they go for decent food that sounds more impressive than it is and sophisticated in a scenester environment.

I would go back if I wanted a sophisticated environment. I would definitely go back if I wanted to feel sophisticated while having drinks (particularly on an off-night, when it wouldn't be too busy to enjoy). I would not go back if I really wanted to enjoy good food.