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| - Love tapas as well as my previous Tori Miller experiences... but Estrellon just didn't do it for me.
As previous posters mentioned, you enter the restaurant and either go to the left for the tapas bar, or to the right for the dining room, which serves from both the "cena" menu, as well as the tapas menu.
The waitress explained all the dishes are meant to be shared. We ordered a couple drinks, which were good, and then also the salmon and beet appetizers. Out comes one piece of toast with a topping. How the heck do you share one little piece of toast? Why wouldn't you have two smaller pieces of toast? Annoying, but we got over it. Both were good, but not out of this world. And we skipped the $18 signature Old Fashioned - nearly $20 for an Old Fashioned in Wisconsin is sacrilegious.
Then we ordered the seafood paella. Again, comes out with three prawns, 5 clams, 5 mussels, etc. What's with the "meant for two" and giving odd numbers of key ingredients?? The waitress gave us the spoon and fork meant to scrape the socarrat, the caramelized rice on the bottom, but she should have given us an ice scraper to scrape of the burnt, black rice remnants! The bottom was clearly very black. When we asked the waitress about it, she insisted it was supposed to be that way. So a 2 second Google search stated otherwise - it's supposed to be caramelized and brown, not black - and she saw me reading about it over my shoulder and asked if we thought it was too dark. We said we did, and her response was just "oh". We ate most of it anyway - hey, we paid $55 for a pan of rice - and then ordered the basque cake.
The cake was the best part of the meal, served with custard and cranberry compote. If I came back again, it would be for the late night happy hour (bartender's choice $5 cocktails) and I would get the cake again. But there just wasn't anything that really sung to me at this place, and the laissez faire attitude about poorly prepared food just really turned me off.
Tori, we'll be back to Graze many times, but I suggest some additional training for your staff at Estrellon. There are so many good restaurants in Madison, I can't see trying this again after our first experience.
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