IODC August -- Rioja and Tapas!

The last meeting of the IODC was a record-setter!  We had twenty people join us at Brugges Braserie in Broad Ripple this month!  We had so many people that we were not all able to sit together.  Somewhat with that in mind – and always letting the members make the final suggestions on the country to celebrate next – August’s meeting of the Indy Offshore Dining Club will celebrate Spain at BARcelona Tapas in downtown Indianapolis on August 9^th at 7:00pm.  

For those unfamiliar, a BARcelona is a tapas-style restaurant serving small plates of food.  There are maybe somewhere near 100 items on the menu, all very Spanish and the majority of which seem to have a focus on ‘jamon’ (ham).  Ham is celebrated in a big, big way in Spain.  

My wife and I just returned from a trip to Spain last month and we can attest that the tapas bars are popular and everywhere.  It genuinely did seem how the majority of food was ordered and served where we visited.

This should be one of the most affordable IODC meetings yet.  Don’t care to spend a lot of money?  Get a glass of water and a single tapa.  You’re going to get a small plate of food with three or four bites worth of food for only three or four bucks.  There’s certainly a strong sense of casualness at a tapas bar that lends to only eating a small amount of food if that’s all you care to do.  This is not a place where you wait for everyone to get their food to eat.  You can’t.  With so many items on the menu being prepared in small quantities, some items come out of the kitchen right away and others take longer.  But that’s part of what makes it so much fun and lends to the sense of a casual gathering of friends.   And while I’ve been using the phrase “tapas bar” it is definitely a place where being 21 is not necessary.  “Tapas bar” is just the term coined for small-plates-style dining.

I hope you can join us for a glass of rioja and a tapa or two.  If you do plan on joining please RSVP on the Facebook event page of send a note to DrakeTotallyTravels [at] Gmail.com.  There is a small room at BARcelona Tapas that  I hope we can use for our group.  Parking right next to the restaurant is sometimes difficult to find, but if you drive on Delaware north or New York Street (Past Mass Ave) you should find street parking.  See you all there!