No, not mine. It was someone much cooler than me’s birthday. And that someone likes good food and drinks and even let me make the birthday plans. So, really, it felt like my birthday when the server at Bar Isabel popped the cork on our bottle of Xarel-Lo (Colet Navazos, Extra Brut, 2009 Penedès, Spain) the moment the birthday boy arrived at our table.
One cheers later and we dove into the menu. Between the six of us, we ordered a fair bit of it, starting with Iberico ham on bread:
Next, house-pickled anchovies (boquerones) with jalapeño peppers, served with the freshly fried chips from the ham photo above. These were simple, non-fishy and a good way to introduce more people to highly underrated anchovies.
In the top right corner is a Pisco Pumpkin Sour from the cocktail list below (it changes). I don’t think anyone tried the Vana White:
Then, fried and salted shishito peppers that tingled just the tiniest bit, and a dish of scallops, where each bite-sized piece was topped with a gel of some kind (those red and dark green circles). This dish is no longer on the menu — maybe it was too labour-intensive, what with the gelling and slicing all those circles placed carefully on every scallop — but it was impressive.
Next, more Spanish bar snacks (pinchos) gone upscale, including smoked sweetbreads with caramelized onions, raw tuna and sliced persimmons (now they’re serving the fish and veal with pickled green tomatoes and brown butter):
Then, small sausages with quail egg and, I think, chanterelle mushroom?
Here, morcilla (blood sausage) with side-stripe shrimp, red pepper, seaweed and fried quail egg:
And then my favourite dish — and one of the best ceviches I’ve ever eaten in my life (I spent three months in Peru eating almost nothing but ceviche): Take a whole sea bream, fillet it, make the skinned fillets into cubes to combine with creamy avocado chunks and douse in a leche de tigre blended with more avocado. Then fry the fish’s head and body and pile the ceviche on top of the crispy, crunchy carcass. Top with fried leek slices and a squiggle of hot pepper. 
You kind of need this steak, at least the birthday boy and the rest of us did.
I don’t usually even like steak, but look at the char on that beauty? It’s Cumbrae Farms’ (ethically raised) 18-oz dry-aged rib-eye. The chimichurri (parsley, garlic, vinegar and olive oil sauce) was just there to look pretty. Which it did.
The steak also went perfectly with the bottom of the bottle of Mencía red wine we ordered. It went just as well with the second bottle.
We didn’t even order dessert. But those cunning servers brought this, drenched in sherry cream.
And they brought this for lactose intolerant me. Toasted hazelnuts, marmalade, rosemary. That’s sure some way to dress up sorbet:
Then there was Scotch (above). Because a couple people at the table believe as much in good Scotch on a birthday as in sparkling wine, if not more.
Three hours later, after we’d left the restaurant, there was even “thinking whisky,” which helped the birthday boy win a 1:30 a.m. game of chess. Did I mention he’s a chess champion? Even more-than-tipsy, he could win. But he sure tried to make the first game interesting. Did I mention that my brother is also a very good chess player? They were not playing each other, but their 1:30 a.m. conversation went like this:
The birthday boy uses an opening that leads him into a precarious situation. My brother looks on, disapprovingly.
Brother: “I gave you a bunch of colourful examples of opening and you went and…”
Birthday boy: “I forgot you were a racist.”
Maybe we’d all be that awesome with some thinking whisky.
Bar Isabel
Where: 797 College St., Toronto, ON
When: Daily, 6 p.m. – 2 a.m.
Phone: 416-532-2222
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