BUT WHEN I ARRIVE AT THE RESTAURANT around 10 a.m. on a late-summer Friday, Emiliano Sanz is all smiles as he shows off that suckling pig.
The mood here is industrious but relaxed; lunch is still a couple of hours away, and these days, it s not much of an ordeal, anyway. Twenty years ago, when that last article was written, Tio s was mobbed by its Friday lunch crowd; chefs made a massive platter of seafood salad at the beginning of the shift, to be served from a cart, and it would be decimated by 2 p.m.
Nowadays, though, there are only a handful of tables at lunch most of them on the large side, celebrations of some sort. If you want seafood salad, it will be made to order in the kitchen. A sous chef there are three or four working right now diligently spoons a dark golden sauce through a metal strainer into a cylindrical container, where it will join 21 others in a steam tray on the counter.
The sauces and soups form a spectrum of browns, from the warm ochre of this bisque sauce to the deep purply brown of the black-bean soup and the bright russet of the tomato sauce. There is truffle sauce and lemon sauce, onion soup and green sauce. At night, another nine sauces will squeeze into the steam bath as well: creamy champagne sauce, rich veal demiglaze.
Emiliano is busy chopping whole chickens into sections; a sous chef does the same with a box of beef tenderloins. In an era of portion control and pre-cut ingredients, Tio s keeps it old school. Maybe I m too old-fashioned, admits Emiliano, a stocky, animated man whose thinning gray hair is concealed by a mesh chef s toque.
I just think it s better to cut things yourself. Their knives slice through as if bone and meat were warm butter. The one the man slicing tenderloins wields is roughly the length of my forearm.
They are sent out to be sharpened professionally every other week, but Emiliano says staff has to hand-sharpen them after about three days of use. The restaurant will go through approximately two cases of beef tenderloin tonight, says Emiliano; each case holds some 80 to 85 pounds of beef. At 10:55, the first man in a red blazer comes in.
These are the headwaiters. Tio Pepe s service has three tiers: Headwaiters who take orders and answer customer questions, runners (blue blazers) who bring food from the kitchen to the table, and bussers (gold blazers) who clear plates and refill water. Servers work in teams of three, with one of each.
The wait staff starts up on prep work. One man carefully arranges chrysanthemums and carnations in tiny vases, brushing open the petals to make the blooms look fuller. Another whittles candles to fit into a brass light fixture.
Two headwaiters chop yellow apples and oranges for the sangria. They ve already set up the liquids they ll need: 12 three-liter boxes of red wine, seven boxes of white, five large bottles of brandy, 16 of triple sec. That ll all be gone at the end of the night, says one waiter, gesturing with his knife.
The waiter is named Michael Link and he jokes that, with 20 years in the job, I m the new kid. I ask him what s changed at Tio s over the years. He shrugs, still chopping fruit.
The prices have gone up with inflation, he says. That s about it. Link is notable as one of the very few perhaps the only staff members for whom Spanish is not his native language.
Other members of the staff come from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic . . .
and, of course, Spain. This is the origin of Tio Pepe: Long ago, in the bleak years that followed the Spanish Civil War, there was a small town outside of Madrid called Cascajares, where unemployment and poverty had reached crushing proportions, just as they had everywhere else in Spain s rural countryside. And so the young men of the village began moving to the city, just as young men were doing throughout the country.
The first Cascajaran to do so wound up finding work in a restaurant he wasn t a chef by trade, but a job was a job. And he invited a cousin to come work with him. And that cousin invited another cousin.
And so on. Eventually, this town of some 500 inhabitants came to lay claim to 50 or 60 chefs. (Today, many of them gather each August for a weekend-long festival.
) One of those chefs was Pedro Sanz, who went to work with relatives at a Madrid restaurant when he was 13; he, in turn, invited Emiliano to work with him when Emiliano turned that same age. Then Pedro visited New York for the 1964 World s Fair and decided to stay in the United States. The elder Sanz worked for a while at the now-defunct Peter Lucas restaurant in Roland Park, where people quickly began telling each other about the talented Spaniards working in the kitchen.
When Pedro decided to open his own place in a subterranean spot on Franklin Street, his new fans followed him. And so, after a few years, did Emiliano. The man who tells me this whole story is Miguel Sanz, Pedro s nephew.
(He and Emiliano are related, but distantly Sanz is evidently a common last name in Cascajares.) Miguel is a quiet, gracious man who frequently hesitates before speaking, as if trying to find the most carefully worded response he can to any question. He was finishing up a master s degree in engineering at Johns Hopkins when his uncle Pedro passed away; he wound up never using that degree, instead taking over as co-owner and general manager of the restaurant.
Things happen, he says with a slight smile. Miguel takes me on a tour of the restaurant. A series of expansions have created a warren of small interconnecting rooms whose individual sizes mask the restaurant s true scale.
The Spanish art on the walls is the same that hung there when the place first opened. Those walls themselves are spotlessly white; Miguel says they repaint a room each week, rotating through all of them. I gaze at the wall before us, the lines of its individual stones softened to blurry suggestions; there must be 40 coats of paint on there, I comment.
Oh, more than that, says Miguel, sounding surprised that I would guess so low. After the tour, we stand at the small, dark bar by the front door, waiting for the lunch crowd, such as it is. You have to compare it to before they opened Harborplace, says Miguel.
It s probably half of what it was then. Harborplace was a killer for our lunch business here. Indeed, Tio Pepe has never depended on foot traffic; it is a destination restaurant.
But now that the downtown crowd can walk to plenty of restaurants, there s no need for them to drive up to Franklin Street, much less scour the streets for parking. As if to confirm that, a group of a half-dozen women in their sixties come in, apologizing to the one member of their party who s been waiting for them. We were here at 12, but we had a hard time parking, one explains.
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