Not everyone believes in the "do one thing and do it well" maxim. The comparison isn’t entirely apropos, but I was reminded of my Pittsburgh days during this week’s lunch. Italy and Spain may not share a border, but they share a wall, after a fashion, in South Minneapolis. La Bodega is two restaurants side-by-side, with a doorway between them. It started out as one place, serving pretty-good-if-not great tapas, and when the Twin Cities’ first (I believe) cyber café closed shop next door the owner acquired the extra space and added a second menu with pasta, pizza, and panini selections.

If someday the doorway was closed up and plastered over and each dining room given its own menu you wouldn’t be able to guess the common ownership. The decors are unrelated—the tapas side features a rustic look with wooden chairs and tables that could have been made by a village carpenter in Spain, the other has tall metal furniture and attempts, not very successfully, to essay hipness. Both places have art for sale on the walls but on this occasion one featured geometric paintings and the other mixed-media collages. Not that you should go and check out what’s for sale in the adjoining room. (You’d have to pay me money to display the artwork I see for sale in restaurants and cafés—that might be their attitude too.)

For lunch, in any case, the only seats available are the metallic ones, although you have the choice of either menu. Given the lunch business, any seats seem unnecessary. We might have been the only diners the entire while we sat. It wasn’t because it was the day after Memorial Day either—our waitress volunteered that "we don’t really have much of a lunch crowd." Between the tapas and the Italian menus, there are well over fifty dishes you can order—when was the last time you ate at a place where there were 25 times more choices on the menu than diners to order them!

With B on a diet (good thing we’re not professional reviewers) we limited ourselves to four tapas dishes including a couple of vegetarian ones. Our initial selection for the latter included a grilled eggplant but the restaurant was "out" of this ingredient (who ate it, I wonder?). We ended up with a sautéed asparagus with Castellano cheese and potato and cheese croquettes. The nonveg items we ordered were chorizo sausage with polenta and grilled garlic prawns.

The other items were better, with my pick of the lot being the sausage and polenta. The chorizo was spicy and lean and the polenta cake was firm yet creamy. This was quite a substantial dish, with a good-size sausage link and a three-inch square thick piece of polenta. (Is the engineer in me coming out this week?) The polenta was certainly the grain product of choice. The bread that came with the meal lacked not only taste but color—the most unappetizing-looking bread I’ve seen in a long time.

The asparagus were mediocre, because overcooked, but compensated for by the cheese. I’m not sure I’ve had Castellano cheese before but I liked it. It had the texture of Swiss and a mild yet distinctive acidity.

We also ordered a flan for dessert, splitting it although not down the middle—B had one bite. It was overly intense, too much vanilla and too much caramelization if that makes sense; compromising one’s diet wasn’t warranted.

Solera and La Belle Vie are testament to the fact that it’s possible to run multiple restaurants featuring different cuisines and do it well. But the odds remain against it.

The present finds The Lunch congregating at the intersection of Lyndale and Lake, on the eastern edges of Uptown. La Bodega is the first restaurant whose menu largely consists of tapas (Spanish delicacies, normally bite size, consumed with beer or wine). There are some Italian dishes on the menu as well—tired, worn-out dishes—probably because one of the owners happens to be Italian.

The restaurant is divided into two distinct parts, initially housed in a narrow, rectangular space; it later expanded into the neighboring space after the cyber café next doors went out of business. The two sides have distinctly differing personalities. The original space continues as a traditional restaurant space, somewhat rustic, with regular tables for diners, whereas the other side has the feel of a bar—not surprising considering the large bar in it—with high table seating and music that reaches decibels not conducive to a contemplative lunch. Both sides are painted in warm colors and are welcoming with the sun streaming in on a warm Minneapolis spring day. There is limited seating on the sidewalk but that seems to be a more popular option in the evening rather than at lunch. We were a bit surprised to discover that La Bodega is not very busy for lunch (something told to us in a sotto voice by our very matter-of-the-fact-type waitress) and the original restaurant side isn’t even open for lunch; besides us there were no other customers.

I started with a glass of the Raimat Tempranillo, a fine round wine with cherry highlights and hints of licorice. The tapas menu is more extensive than that of the recently reviewed Solera and is grouped into three categories: vegetarian, seafood and meat. We wanted to start with the grilled eggplant but the waitress discovered that the kitchen had run out of eggplant (a bit strange since we were the only diners). We substituted asparagus for eggplant and ordered the esparrago con queso Castellano (asparagus with Castellano cheese). The asparagus could have been crisper but nevertheless worked satisfactorily with the Spanish cheese. I wish I could say the same thing about the croquetas (potato and cheese croquettes), which were overcooked to the point where the burnt potato casing made them inedible. Complaining to the waitress elicited sympathy but also the comment that she didn’t really care for croquetas. We used the aging bread to sop up the broth served with langostinos al ajillo (grilled garlic prawns), which again were overdone to my taste. Our final dish, chorizo con polenta (grilled Spanish sausage with polenta crostini), is my favorite at La Bodega and I invariably order it when having dinner here. This is large, spicy sausage served with polenta. The sausage was spicy and flavorful but the polenta could have been firmer/crisper. We finished our meal by sharing an order of pretty good flan. My problem with flan is that if not done properly it can be either too sweet or too eggy or both; in this case it had almost the right balance. A had his espresso and our bill came to $43.00 after the waitress had—generously—removed the flan and espresso from the bill in lieu of the disastrous croquetas.

From the general tone of my review you would have guessed that lunch wasn’t entirely successful. I struggled with my rating because I have always enjoyed dining here. I like the bohemian atmosphere and the mix of bar and restaurant patrons; I even like the location. The lesson learnt is to skip the place for lunch (a common knowledge, apparently among the locals) but patronize it in the evening by all means, especially on Monday and Tuesday evenings where wine by the bottle is half-priced, and you can sit outside nursing your bottle and enjoying the odd tapas.

B