Food review: Tinto brings casual Spanish fare and garden flair to Dempsey in Daniel and Tamara Chavez’s new venture

NEW RESTAURANT

Tinto Spanish Restaurant Blk 10 Dempsey Road #01-21 Singapore 247700 Tel: 9729-5002 Open for dinner Monday to Sunday: 5:30 pm to 10:30 pm. Lunch Friday to Sunday: 11:30 am to 3 pm.

WHERE do restaurants go when they die? If they’re lucky, they cross over the pearly divide to that eatery in the sky – their existence on earth or Amoy Street obliterated by a good renovation contractor and show-off designer.

Then there are those stuck in an awkward purgatory on earth or Dempsey village, a kind of half-in, half-out renewed existence. It’s given a brand new name and identity, but if you conduct a midnight seance – or just look really closely at the furniture – you’ll find traces of its previous life, and possibly the tenants before that.

As they say, waste not, want not. Call it sustainable recycling or clever budgeting, the new Spanish eatery Tinto has done a good job transforming the pastel preponderance of the former Moonbow into a vibrant Mediterranean playground that matches the carefree hospitality of owners Daniel and Tamara Chavez.

It’s a formula the couple perfected with their first success at Canchita – the Peruvian eatery just down the garden slope a few steps from Tinto. There, they play up natural greenery and freestyle Latin American cooking to their advantage, in a perfect harmony of food and ambience.

They lucked out with this new space – where Peruvian native Daniel revisits the Spanish food he built his career on at Ola. With strategic painting in the main dining room and a gem of a conservatory behind (thanks for the air conditioning) surrounded by a verdant landscape, it’s a tempting haunt for Dempsey acolytes with time and money to spare. 

Tinto isn’t styled so much to be the best Spanish restaurant as it is to plug a hole in this lifestyle enclave, which doesn’t have one. It’s a crowd-pleaser first, and gourmet destination maybe. A purist may laugh you right into its outdoor vegetable patch if you talk about authenticity, but the Chavezes know the Rome analogy well. That is, if the locals like paella done the way their claypot rice hawker does salted fish sar po fan, that’s what they’re going to get.

The menu is compact, with a small selection of tapas, a few options for paella and its noodle cousin fideua, and mains. The cooking is different from what we remember at the old Ola – there’s more riffing on Spanish recipes, with bolder flavours that sometimes overstep the boundaries and get in your face. 

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It’s still very new so expect some inconsistency from the kitchen, which has a tendency to overdo the seasonings and undercook other things. But overall, the ingredients are good quality, and the effort is genuine. 

You won’t find much loved favourites like jamon croqueta, pan con tomate or Spanish tortilla here. There’s S$48 Iberico ham-topped crystal bread, but we’d rather save S$20 and pick the house special Cangrejo (S$28) instead. 

It’s Spanish for crab salad and you get a good mound of it – lots of crab meat carefully tossed in mayo and flecked with avocado and sour green apple bits for contrast. There’s sour cream on the side to soften the acidity, and Melba toast to scoop up the creamy mix that tastes like it would be great in a sandwich. And it’s topped with ikura which does nothing but preen uselessly.

Tellingly, the best thing on the menu is a classic that’s not tampered with. Gambas al ajillo (S$28) are crunchy, sweet, shiny prawns bathed in a fragrant garlic chilli oil, beautifully speckled with dried chilli. We don’t stop till we run out of fluffy house bread to mop it all up, along with the satiny potato puree underneath that’s a surprise bonus. 

We’re iffy about the quirkily named Broken Omelette (S$22), which sounds like an apology for mangling a Spanish tortilla. A thick flat omelette is fattened with cream and Idiazabal cheese and good enough on its own. But sour-sweet caramelised onions are just plain busybody. It’s meant to temper the richness but you can’t get a nice bite of egg without an intrusive shot of acidity, distracting you from the sauteed mushrooms and potato crisps on top.

Torn between paella and fideua? The paella is a shade ahead, but then you would miss the two stellar giant red prawns split and splayed on top of the Fideua Carabineros & Setas (S$62 for small). They’re spilling over with rich coral and make up for the passable noodles with a cloying sweet finish. Thumbs up for the socarrat though. 

You can hear the crusty edges crackling as the Paella de Pulpo & Chorizo (S$36) is thoroughly mixed at the table. Again, subtlety isn’t an option. Dig into al dente rice grains plump from soaking up its rich saffron-infused broth, with chunks of octopus and salty chorizo, plus dollops of pepper aioli because paella can never be too rich or too thick. 

If you need a diversion, the Catalan fish stew or suquet (S$32) won’t hold a candle to its Barcelona counterpart, but it will do in a pinch. Salty, hearty, sofrito-based seafood broth is a briny home for tender fish and squid but dry prawns and clams. 

They undercook our churros so they take it off the bill, but we imagine they can be suitable spears of sugar-crusted dough when done right, dipped into luscious deep chocolate and vanilla sauces. 

At Tinto, food is secondary to ambience, but it’s the package that counts. And as it shakes off its former life, there’s plenty of time to build a new one.

Rating: 6.5