Where else but on Restaurant Row in Manhattan can you eat Spanish food, while listening to an Italian vocalist sing Volare? Not everyone eats Spanish specialties at Meson Sevilla, a warm, cozy walk-down spot that has a lived-in look and feel. It’s the locals, the New Yorkers, who tend to order from the Spanish listings while most of the tourists opt for the more familiar Italian fare (some think Mexican when they hear Spanish).

Stick with the neighborhood regulars and target the dishes from the Iberian Peninsula. There’s not a thing wrong with the Italian selections here (the
complimentary bruschetta is terrific) but in a city where every other restaurant is Italian and there are relatively few Spanish possibilities, it makes sense to go for them.

Meson Sevilla, a 15-year old charmer is a place of candles, stained glass,
mirrors, archways and flowers with copper pots and pans and Spanish prints on the walls and bottles of extra virgin olive oil on each table. About a year and a half ago two dynamic new owners of Spanish heritage, Benny Castro and Adolfo Perez, bought the place and are pumping new life into it.

Aside from the relative scarcity of good Spanish food in New York City, I chose it because I watched diners at other tables using their rustic, crusty bread to sop up and devour every bit of sauce on those dishes.

After sampling the husky, olive oil-soaked rounds of that bruschetta, begin, as the Spaniards do, with tapas, the tempting tid bits that go so well with everything from sherry to sangria (the fruit-filled red version of the latter is one of the best around). The separate Tapas menu offers 24 selections starting under $5 (tortilla Espanola-no relation to a central American tortilla) and topping off under $10 (Serrano ham). Various shrimp, sausage, mussel, sardine, cheese, clam, octopus and squid selections should be ordered and shared table-wide, much as the dishes of a family-style Chinese array would be.

Among the warm, well-seasoned starters were artichoke hearts flecked with savory cubes of ham, clean, fresh mussels adorned with onions, red and green peppers and mushrooms, gambas al Ajillo or tender little shrimp in a sizzling garlic sauce and rounds of chorizo or spicy, addictive Spanish sausages. Use that porous bread to siphon up the residual sauces on everyone of them and with the free cheese and ham platter that arrives soon after diners are seated. A so-called Spanish salad appetizer, though fine, turned out to be a garden-variety spinach, bacon, onion affair, but soups were the real thing. The garlic brew, dense with an egg drop-like ingredient and alive with assertive flavor and the caldo Gallego or kale and cabbage broth, punctuated with white beans, were winners.

Main courses ranged from the robust pork chops Rio Jana, enlivened with peppers, onions and wine, to the more subtle filet of sole or better yet, tilapia in a green sherry, garlic, parsley, onion sauce. Grilled shrimp are a cut above the ordinary and veal plancha or grilled seasoned slices, pounded thin, are also.

Finish with the velvety flan or crema Catalana, a Spanish-style crème brulee with a crisp, deeply browned surface.

344 W. 46th St. (btw. Eighth & Ninth Aves.), 212-262-5890.