This Pioneer Square restaurant is hard to spot — but it has stellar tapas (2024)

Tapas Angel is worth a visit, though getting to this Pioneer Square restaurant demands some effort.

On my recent trek to the bistro, there was a dash through a sketchy alley, a hop over a chewed-up street, and a leap of faith into a dust bowl of construction debris before I stumbled upon the front door.

In a city with all sorts of industry challenges — high costs of food and labor and frequent property crime, for instance — Tapas Angel faces the additional hurdle of doing business in a construction zone in a neighborhood still trying to find its pre-COVID groove.

Despite scant foot traffic in the area, Tapas Angel has stayed in business because Diego Escobar, the chef and owner, believes it’s worth keeping around. He’s not wrong: This tapas bar is quite good, featuring a Pan-Latin menu with nods to the Iberian Peninsula.

I’ve walked past this block on Yesler Way dozens of times and, until recently, didn’t really take note of this tapas bar. With just a handful of Yelp reviews dating to Tapas Angel’s September opening, I reckon most folks haven’t.

It doesn’t help that heavy-duty construction equipment sometimes obstructs the restaurant’s facade. Or that someone walked off with the sandwich board Escobar plopped out front to proclaim that he’s still open.

Sure, you may have trouble finding Tapas Angel. But you won’t have trouble figuring out who runs the show.

At Tapas Angel, Escobar doubles as maître d’, server, bartender, sommelier, busboy and dishwasher. When the tickets pile up, he jumps behind the line to help his line cook.

This avuncular chef from Colombia never stops moving. The only thing that pauses even less than him is his chatter.

Here he comes with a plate of deep-fried empanadas, with a Cuban-inspired ground pork filling steeped in a tomato-peppery sauce, and a vegetarian version with melted mozzarella interspersed with cremini mushrooms and spinach. Both were stellar — though more memorable was the vegetarian turnover with a molten core fragranced with truffle oil.

Is his Cuban sandwich, with a whorl of citrusy roasted pork shoulder, ham and Gouda, better than Seattle’s gold standard at Un Bien? No, but it still rates a notch or two better than many Caribbean pork sandwiches in the city. And with a basket of yucca fries, the sandwich can easily feed two for dinner.

Like many restaurants that focus on South American and Cuban comfort food, Tapas Angel turns to a familiar playbook: Escobar’s arepa corn cake, made from white corn that he ground and stuffed with queso fresco, tastes creamy, sweet and cheesy, like a good polenta.

His Cuban comfort classic ropa vieja consists of flank steaks that have been braised to a shredded consistency and confited. The meat pops with onions and chilies, but it’s subtly seasoned such that the beef still tastes like itself. As leftovers, it remained remarkably moist a day later, instead of stringy-dry.

More interesting is his shared plate, solomillo oloroso, a pan-seared pork tenderloin that mimics steak au poivre with its creamy, tingly peppercorn sauce with a raisin-y whisper of sherry.

Sherries, along with Mediterranean staples like tomato, olive oil and sofrito sauce, form the bases for Escobar’s cooking.

So does seafood, though not all the dishes worked on my visits.

The seared octopus, cooked Galician-style with sweet paprika and roasted potato, falls on the rubbery side. The seared rockfish, tucked in blue corn tortillas with a black bean puree, a cucumber salad and a jerk sauce, didn’t add up to a coherent dish.

But then came a superb seafood dish that did: the arroz melroso, a Valencia specialty that Escobar delegates to no one. If you request it, he drops everything and heads to the kitchen, ladling the fish broth over the short-grain bomba rice for 20 minutes with olive oil and dry sherry.

The finished product resembles a soupy risotto. It’s served tableside, bubbling hot in a mini Dutch oven so that the al dente grains soften by the time you get to the bottom of the pot. Perfume-y with saffron, the dish comes with copious amounts of rockfish fillets, Manila clams, mussels, scallops, calamari and shrimp.

Escobar owned or cooked at cafes in San Francisco, Colombia, and Valencia, Spain, for 15 years before he opened his tapas bar in Pioneer Square last fall. He remains bullish on Seattle, though he didn’t know what he was signing up for once the jackhammering started in the spring under the city’s nearby Pioneer Square pedestrian infrastructure project.

“What are you going to do, man?” Escobar said with a shrug.

With the weather warming up, the chef recently launched lunch service, only to 86 it a week later. He couldn’t make it viable with all the jackhammering noise and the construction dust out front, Escobar said.

City officials say the sidewalk expansion is scheduled to be completed sometime this summer. Escobar is hoping the city means early summer so he can make up for lost revenue.

When the construction equipment is gone, Escobar plans to relaunch lunch service and add a 20-seat sidewalk cafe, hoping to take advantage of sunny weather and game day foot traffic.

But if you care about restaurants in this city, and you want them to stick around, you shouldn’t wait that long to dine out at Tapas Angel — or at any neighborhood restaurant, for that matter.