If you get a chance to go to Mateo bar de tapas anytime soon, I suggest you do so. The good thing about a tapas bar is that you can eat as little or as much as you want. But at Mateo, you'll probably want to eat a lot. :) Mateo only has a placeholder web site up at the moment, but the N&O has a post on Mouthful by Andrea Weigl with links to a couple of PDFs for the food and wine menus.
About those menus.... I can personally suggest the paté de hígado de pollo, the patatas bravas, and the costilla de cerdo all as being stand-out excellent, but there wasn't much on the menu that wasn't excellent. The croqueta special we had was a delight: hot little golf ball-sized croquettes filled with a delicious melty cheese mixture. The perro cerdito was fun on a stick: basically a small corn dog served with a light mustard sauce. I could go on, and I did, but I'll leave some things for you to discover. I was surprised to see no cod or olives, but there were boatloads of seafood in general, along with an olive tapenade. We missed out on the gâteau Basque, but we made up for it on the other desserts. Most of my examples above are warm dishes, but there are plenty of cool items to be scarfed.
I'd also like to say what a delight it is for someone around here to be giving sherry its due. The wine list contains at least 25 sherries: finos, amontillados, palo cortatos, olorosos, and sweet sherries. There are several straight-up Pedro Ximénezes, of which the two I had were raisiny and delicious.
I know Matt Kelly has been busting butt for months to make this place what he wants. It also looks like Michael Maller has worked hard to get a really good, creative, appropriate wine list, along with a nice full bar in general. It shows. Go eat there. It's good. :)
Contact information:
109 West Chapel Hill Street
Durham, NC 27701
1 919 530 8700
http://www.mateotapas.com/
