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Dalia brings wood-fired Spanish cuisine to South Boston
The menu includes tapas, paella, and a Spanish wine list served inside a lavish space from Assembly Design Studio.
The Broadway Restaurant Group is at it again, bringing a new concept to its home turf of South Boston that puts as much detail into the menu as it does the space.
RESTAURANT OPENINGS
Dalia opens Thursday in an expansive space that feels an ocean away from its Southie door step. Broadway Restaurant Group, known for neighborhood spots like Lincoln Tavern and Hunter’s, as well as the highly-decorative (and Italian) spaces like Prima and Capri, is making its first foray into Spanish cuisine with the new chef-driven concept.
And to be sure they’re good at it, they’re sourcing heavily from the rich culinary nation, from kitchenware to ingredients and the wine.
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“A lot of people have used the [description] that they feel they’re being transported to Spain,” said Nick Dixon, executive chef at Dalia and culinary director at Broadway Restaurant Group.
Boston is a crowded market when it comes to Spanish restaurants. All of them have some kind of tapas program and offer a Spanish wine list. Pintxos are a part of the Boston diner’s lexicon, thanks to staples like Tasca and newcomers like Zurito. We’ve got paella, jamón, and of course croquetas.
Dalia will serve all of those Spanish menu fixtures, some with fun twists. But what Dixon said is the focus of Dalia is wood-fired cooking, done in an open kitchen on sourced-from-Spain Josper grills. It wasn’t hard to hire a team of chefs to cook Spanish food on high-caliber Spanish grills, Dixon added.
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“The wood-fired cooking suite that’s in the middle of the restaurant, for me, is like a Ferrari,” Dixon said.
There’s a section of the menu dedicated to the cooking suite that includes both shareable plates and entree dishes. One plate worth sharing, Dixon said, is the wagyu rib cap ($22), thinly sliced, skewered, and cooked on the Robata grill. It’s then served with a sherry ponzu sauce and chimichurri.
Dalia’s tapas also get the wood-fire treatment, taking ingredients like calamari and cooking it in a grill basket. The noodle-like slices of calamari are prepared like dan dan noodles, pairing them with a sauce made from Iberico pork and garlic soy sauce ($17).
Tapas, crudo, and other shareable dishes run between $9 and $22. Bigger entrees, like the wagyu ribeye filet with olive oil mashed potatoes or the New Zealand lamb paired with smoked eggplant, are priced between $45 and $170.
There are also three types of paella available in two sizes, like the Valencia, which brings chicken, chorizo, and shellfish together. These dishes run from $18 to $38.
Dixon is also hopeful that Dalia’s wine list, put together by wine director Dominic Tramelli, will bring back vino-imbibing. The by-the-glass list is exclusively Spanish and also relatively affordable (as low as $11), and the bottle list is mostly Spanish, with some additions from Portugal, France, and the U.S.
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Its cocktail menu ($15), from beverage director Katie Kelly, also utilizes Spanish ingredients. Spanish red wine and red vermouth pair with Dr. Pepper and lime in the Daliamotxo, while a kiwi-inflused fino sherry adds to the gin and vermouth in the freezer-chilled Porrón Star Martini.
There are special sections for gin and tonics and sangrias, as well as four available mocktails.
Guests can watch their meal prepared in a row of multiple seats that line an open window into the kitchen. Or they can squeeze into a red, velvet banquet, grab a table in the Spanish-tiled dining room under a glass skylight, or take a stool at one of the restaurant’s three bars.
Joining Broadway Restaurant Group again to design this space was Assembly Design Studio.
“The space is rather large, but our goal was to make it feel very cozy and intimate, so we did a lot of rooms within rooms,” said Erica Diskin, who owns Assembly with her husband, Michael Diskin.
Rather large is right. Dalia has 226 seats, and it’s made to feel like a different experience in each section of the restaurant, Diskin said. You can get a fireside cafe, a chef’s table experience by the kitchen, or a dinner “under the stars” thanks to that skylight, all in one restaurant.
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Maybe that’ll keep people coming back, for fancier date nights on Saturday, or for more casual after-work bites with friends. In the coming months, the space will also operate as a cafe during the day, offering coffee, baked goods, and brunch, Dixon said.
Dalia officially opens Thursday, April 2. For now, the restaurant is open for dinner service from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. daily.
Dalia, 429 W Broadway, South Boston
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