Dinner at Tapagria Spanish Tapas Restaurant happened on their patio, where they transformed the parking lot as much as possible by covering a section with AstroTurf, a tarp, and string lights. The simple tables weren’t fancy, but the ones found outside at restaurants in Barcelona aren’t either - try to block out the cars and imagine yourself surrounded by the historical architecture of Spain.

Perhaps think of it as being on La Rambla where it’s crowded, hectic, and there’s tons of kitschy things happening on the iconic street. And like a La Rambla restaurant, which is typically geared towards tourists, you’ll find an extensive menu of Spanish favourites at Tapagria: pintxos (small sandwich bites), tapas (different small dishes), larger sharing plates, and paella (a rice popular rice dish that is made to be shared).

While waiting the 45 minutes for a paella, it’s important to get a few small bites to tide the stomach over. The truffle paste and Manchego pintxos ($12) was a strongly flavoured bite with the truffle dominating against the delicate toast and the buttery cheese binding things together. It’s tasty but given its powerful flavour is best eaten last amongst the sandwiches.

Surprisingly, for something that’s cooked in fat the duck confit pintxos ($14) were a little dry. Tapagria puts a dollop of mango chutney on top - a nice pairing with the fowl – but there wasn’t much of the condiment, so it didn’t really hydrate or flavour much. Perhaps a drizzle along with a condensed red wine reduction would help to give this pintxo some pizazz.

I enjoyed the nice creamy texture of the jamon croquettas ($12) but found the varying pieces of ham mixed in them confusing – one bite included diced pieces, so it was almost like having a croquette with sweeter chorizo, while another had pulled pieces. Truthfully, I was expecting slivers of thinly sliced jamon to be ribboned amongst the silky potatoes. Nonetheless, the dish’s flavours were on point.

Still, the paella de Tapagria ($56) was the star of the show. It’s a creation that can’t be rushed as you want to let it sit until there’s a bit of a crust on the bottom. While it wasn’t covered with a lot of ingredients, there was enough shrimp, squid, clams, chorizo, and chicken to go with the shallow flavourful rice. Some reviews claim it’s too salty, but I found it be seasoned nicely and like the hint of chili that makes an appearance. 

The caramel flan ($12) was very thick, possibly from the Spanish recipe incorporating condensed milk compared to the whole milk that’s used in French crème caramel. It feels like you’re eating a cheesecake (without the cheese flavours) that’s covered in a thinned caramel sauce. While not necessarily terrible, I do prefer the delicate crème caramel consistency and will stick with the churros or Spanish toast next time.

The most important part of the meal is to just take your time with it … arguably this may be difficult with the one and a half hour seating limits, but during our dinner wasn’t actually enforced. It’s the conversation over sips of wine and bites of food that really creates the Spanish experience and that is well within your control.  

Meal Choices and Pricing

With 28 recipes available each week, Hello Fresh offers the most choice and was a breeze to find three meals to order. They also have extras - dessert and sides (veggie plate, garlic bread) – you can add on to really round out the meals and even extend a two-person kit to feed a family of three.

You’ll pay more for these options, $13.15 per portion (assuming three meals for two people) or $79 a week, which was the priciest out of all the companies I tried. This is also just the base price, as like their competitors, they also charge more for quicker 20-minute options (+ $2.99 a serving), special occasion recipes (think Father’s Day), or multi-protein meals (+$9.99 a serving).

Customer Service and Ordering

You can pick meals and skip deliveries up to five weeks in advance. Their skipping option was more difficult to find as you need to go into week and click the “edit delivery” button to navigate to the skip options. Then, there’s also a question asking customers why they’re skipping the week, which I find to be an annoying and unnecessary feature.

What is useful about the “edit delivery” area is that you can change the delivery date for each week individually (i.e., some weeks you can have it come on Sunday while others on Thursday) and even the plan option (i.e., three meals versus four meals) without having to change the entire subscription. From a customization standpoint, Hello Fresh is a leader with this feature and they deliver six days of the week in Toronto (everyday but Friday) so creates flexibility.

Ease of Cooking

As we entered spring, Hello Fresh started dedicating recipes for the BBQ, which is a great idea as I really would rather not turn on the oven during the warm weather. The cheesy brie and beef burger was delicious, a honking thick beef patty and more than enough brie to create a gooey decedent bite. I was just a little miffed about the recipe’s suggestion to add an egg to the beef mixture for a firmer patty – if anything it made it waterier and didn’t bind together as well, causing the patty to break apart easier.  

Even the potatoes get finished on the grill in a foil-pouch. Just put them on 10-minutes earlier than what the recipe calls for as we found them still undercooked after the burger was ready so ended up eating them separately.

Compared to other companies, Hello Fresh also didn’t require as many tools – most recipes only call for two pots and/or pans.  A recipe like the barramundi and brown butter lemon sauce with roasted potatoes and sugar snap peas could have easily become a multi-tool recipe with competitors. With Hello Fresh, there was just a sheet pan to roast the potatoes and everything else was prepared in a frying pan (with recipe actually saying to use the same one) making clean up easier.

The Taste Test

The recipes did have fewer flavouring components compared to others as most do not come up spice mixtures, instead relying on the ingredients themselves and salt and pepper. So, something like the barramundi I found a little bland.

Nonetheless, for dishes that use flavourful ingredients, I didn’t miss the spice kits. The gnocchi Bolognese had a lovely zest tomato sauce and when combined with the consommé, vegetables, and parmesan was a tasty dish.

While I would have like the cheesy chicken enchiladas to be saucier, they were still great and easy to prepare frying everything in a pan, wrapping the ingredients into a tortilla and baking with cheese and sauce on top. For a dish like this, Hello Fresh did include the necessary spices to make the meal taste like Tex Mex.

There were a lot of good vegetarian recipes as well. The Philly style portobello hoagies smartly calls for chefs to remove the gills from the portobello, so you’re left with a less watery mushroom that once mixed with peppers, onions, cheese, and spicy mayo makes you realize you don’t need the beef. And Hello Fresh uses Beyond Meat as an ingredient for some of their vegetarian recipes if you’d rather go for a fake protein.

Environmental Factors

I did like that Hello Fresh uses little packaging compared to others, even if it can sometimes create a slight detriment to taste. It’s a simple solution: pick up a couple of multi-purpose seasonings and use those to supplement the recipes that need a flavour boost. Creating less waste and helping the environment is worth it.

Conclusion

For those who do not mind paying a bit more, Hello Fresh was a great experience. Overall, I had a lot of success with their recipes and the amount of choice and flexibility with deliveries is helpful for those who like to plan. And if you’re going to use delivery services regularly, finding one that uses less packaging is also a great touch.

There is pent up demand within households – that’s what’s frequently being said about the torrent of money that’s about to flow through the Canadian economy once the flood gate opens. I can see why they’re predicting this: once my friend scored a reservation at the new Stock Bar, the roof top and street-side patios at Stock T.C, we wouldn’t bail even though Toronto was hit with a day of rain. Under normal conditions, we would have rain checked the patio and gone for an indoor dining experience. But since that wasn’t possible in June, and we had already been relegated to takeout and delivery for months on end, we were going anyways.

We saw umbrellas over the tables in photos and thought we’d take a chance. It’s a bet that paid off as we scored one of the last tables where everyone would be properly shielded from the elements. I bet Stock T.C wished they invested in more umbrellas to ensure more tables could get the full coverage – despite the plethora of umbrellas, when they’re placed only to protect from sun, it means few tables are usable.

So, was the risk worth it? Under normal conditions, the food would be a disappointment. The tagliatelle all’astice ($45) was so over seasoned. It’s perplexing why the chef felt a dish with lobster and marinara – two fairly flavourful ingredients – would need so much salt and pepper. The crustacean became lost, they could have thrown in any protein, a neutral chicken would have worked better. And for a high price point, the pasta had a lot of cherry tomatoes and probably a claw-worth of lobster. I’d pass on the pasta.

The Stock steak frites ($26) was decent – the beef was a little chewy, but that’s also expected from a lean sirloin that’s cooked perfectly to medium rare. If I were Stock T.C, I’d leave the steak uncut. Sure, the presentation will not look as nice, but it will help the protein retain it’s heat more as a common complaint is the steak arrives cold and dry. I wouldn’t say it was dry, but the temperature was a problem.

Perhaps the best dish of the night was the funghi e burrata ($26) pizza, but even this wasn’t something I’d rave about. I enjoyed the ingenuity of pairing burrata with mushrooms (typically it arrives with basil or prosciutto), as the earthy fungi gives an interesting twist with the creamy cheese. Yet, since I had this last, the pizza had two things going against it: 1) it tasted bland… after the salty pasta anything would seem tasteless; and 2) the crust, while nice and thin, had become hard from the cold.

If people are sharing dishes amongst a table, the restaurant should recommend having the pizza come between the appetizers and the main, or even act as the starter if the table isn’t getting anything. That would help ensure people are eating the pie at its peak.

The pizza would have made for a nice interlude between the prosciutto con gnocco fritto ($17) and the steak and pasta. Even the fritto, fried pieces of puffed dough, had cooled by the time they reached the table. Nonetheless, they had a lovely aroma, and the prosciutto was shaved thin enough that even the heat of your hand starts to warm the fat enough to stick to the pastry. Since it was my first bite of freshly prepared food since 2020, that fritto was freaking fabulous.

Eating outside always presents the chefs with challenges and deteriorates the taste of a dish. And with restaurants trying to recoup lost revenue, survive with limited occupancy, and deal with rising ingredient costs, menu prices will be higher than the historical norms. In the end, expect to pay more for dishes that aren’t at their best.

Sushi isn’t really known to be comfort food - in fact, it’s what I turn to when I’m needing a ‘lighter meal’. Still, there is one type of sushi that I would consider to be comfort food and that’s when it’s prepared aburi-style: rice topped with protein and a generous layer of mayonnaise that is blasted with a blowtorch so that the mayo seeps into the protein. Usually, it’s finished off with one or two ingredients to give it that final flavour and garnish.

Comfort sushi is what you’ll find at Project Fish. Their oshi aburi served as a single order or part of a platter. At first glance, I wouldn’t have thought jalapenos would pair nicely with salmon, but in the salmon oshi ($14) it adds a bit of crunch and peppery bite that cuts through the otherwise rich fatty salmon. I could have done without the cracked black pepper, which adds a gritty hard texture and would suggest sumac, a spice that’s zesty but could melt into the background, as an alternative.

The small platter ($38) is a great option if you like variety.  There’s three pieces of the salmon oshi and that evening also included:

• Saba oshi - cured mackerel simply adorned with miso aioli. It’s decent, but some pickled or fresh green scallion would have brought it to another level.
• Basil shrimp oshi – while you can’t really taste the herb amongst the all the other ingredients, I did like the chopped black olives that complimented the sweet shrimp with a salty finish.
• More aburi shrimp arrives in an unpressed form. Although it looks really like the oshi, Project Fish adds truffle oil into the mayo to create a decadent bite.
• All the rich flavours are balanced off with simple salmon nigri, a spicy cooked fish roll that has quite the powerful kick of heat, and pieces of lightly sweetened tamago that could even double as dessert.

With 23 pieces of sushi and a small container of edamame, the small platter could almost feed two if you are not too hungry - add on another roll, appetizer, or oshi if you’d like a more fulsome meal. Plus, I love that fact that it comes in an environmentally friendly paper box instead of all that plastic that needs to be thrown away.

The Neo Tokyo roll ($18) tempted my husband but wasn’t a hit for me. I’m not sure why they added ‘Tokyo’ to the name … with the sweet and slightly spicy gochujang sauce slathered over it, I would have thought ‘Neo Seoul’ roll would have worked better. Or perhaps even ‘Neo Dallas’ roll as it seemed borne from an eclectic diverse neighbourhood from the American south: there’s the Korean gochujang sauce but also a spicy jalapeño relish, and possibly even habanero mixed with the tobiko so that you get a spicy kick.

There was just too much of surimi or fake crab meat salad and not enough other ingredients to round out the maki. The tempura bits should have added crunch but were soggy with all the condiments and I couldn’t taste any of the cucumber that was mentioned on the menu. Overall, it was just too saucy and soft for my taste.

Oh well, sometimes you can’t win them all. Luckily with our overzealous ordering there was so much food that I didn’t need the Neo Tokyo roll to leave me fully comforted and satisfied.  

Every time I have a craving for eggplant parmigiano ($18), Parmigiano Trattoria is where I go to get a fix. They are wizards with the dish, taking thinly sliced eggplant and coating it in finely crushed breadcrumbs to create a delicate crispy crust. It’s then smothered with enough mozzarella to give it that lovely pull and baked in a fresh marinara sauce. The smell of fried eggplant and tomato sauce that wafts up before the first bite… just try not to salivate.

When I cracked the plastic lid off the black container and glanced at the four hefty slices of the parmigiano that smell was such a nice reminder of the dine-in days. Indeed, the crispy edges on the eggplant where no where to be found after steaming during delivery, but the tomato sauce was as delicious as ever, though needed a bit more salt. Somehow the portions were even bigger, the parmigiano accompanied by another container filled with sautéed vegetables and spaghetti. It was if Parmigiano Trattoria was welcoming me home with two meals.

There was more than enough for two in the baked chicken pasta ($18) as well. This arrived closer to the typical al dente with the chicken and pasta coated in a creamy tomato cheese sauce as well as roasted peppers and spinach thrown in to lighten up the dish. While it tastes creamier than other rosé-sauce pastas, it doesn’t feel heavy. Possibly because Parmigiano Trattoria thins out the sauce.

The good thing about getting all your food at the same time is the ability to combine dishes. I found the garlic shrimp ($12.50) a little plain on their own but combined with the spaghetti with tomato sauce instantly enhanced both dishes.

While the romaine in the Caesar ($9) salad was starting to pinken at the edges, the lettuce was still crisp and juicy. This salad does take some prep work as you’ll need to toss it with the dressing yourself. But it does keep it from getting soggy and allows you to control how much of the thick house-made dressing you want to add - It’s fairly flavourful so I’d gradually build up to taste.

As I write this post, the patios have just opened in Ontario. Let’s continue this momentum and get to the next stage when we can dine indoors again. That’s when I can finally return to Parmigiano Trattoria and have their beloved eggplant parmigiano in all it’s freshly baked glory.