Richmond’s Adarra, named among the best new restaurants in America, can briefly make you forget the pandemic

In the early evening, if the weather is anything short of unbearable, the first thing to greet you when entering Adarra will likely be an empty restaurant — a hall of vacant chairs preserved in amber light.

The cozy, brick-walled dining room is a tunnel you must pass through, like an Epcot exhibit devoted to better days, on your way to a reserved seat on the patio.

For an hour or so on a cool night in late November, that stone-tiled outdoor space — heated and lit by alien propane pyramids that projected flames six feet high within glass tubes — was a place where the problems of the pandemic seemed to recede. With the sun long gone and my coat still on, I ate one of the finer meals I could expect in this or any other year.

The year-old restaurant in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood — serving vibrant small plates inspired by the luxuriantly fatted lambs and long-cured fish of Spain’s Basque country — felt like a testament to not just the resilience of restaurants, but the warmth and conviviality and sense of discovery and all of the other nice things a meal out can offer.

In other timelines, absent the pandemic that has gutted restaurants around the country, the empty dining room would perhaps be unimaginable. After all, Adarra has just been named one of the top 23 new restaurants in America by Esquire magazine.

Since opening last February, it has collected local accolades like bars under a general’s lapel: four out of four stars from the daily newspaper, restaurant of the year from the alt-weekly. “We should be printing money,” says chef and co-owner Randall Doetzer. And until March, they were, limited only by the number of cooks they could fit into their kitchen.

Instead, they’ve shrunk to a quarter of their previous capacity. Even as the temperature dips in late autumn, for the sake of safety Adarra fills its patio before the scant seats still offered indoors — and are hearteningly uncompromising about each diner wearing a mask anytime a server comes near. The reservation list must be arranged personally, depending on each day’s expected weather, by co-owner Lyne Doetzer over email.

Adarra is in some ways its own little world, a place that resembles neither Virginia nor Spain but is devoted to the peculiar culinary bounty of each, an endless parade of large flavors and small plates.

The restaurant is Basque not so much in its adherence to saffron-tinged recipes and red-pepper vizcaina sauce, though these are present, but rather in the care it takes with the ingredients it serves. There is a near-rustic dedication to imparting the flavors of the land and sea. Each dish is both disarmingly simple, and less simple than it appears.

This may mean a gossamer-thin thatch of impossibly marbled Hungarian pig, cured for three years high in Spain’s Rasillo de Cameros mountains. Or it could be a five-pack of thick sardines that taste like pure MSG, served with farm-fresh butter so ethereal it’s a bit like what would happen if the air itself got fat.

Or it’s a dish of beets grown in the chef’s parents’ garden, baked whole in salt and oil with their bright red skin still intact to impart the root’s full flavor, cold-smoked with pecan wood until its earthiness and sweetness rivals tawny port.

In any case, all meals should start the same way, with a pair of skewered Gildas — the most famous pintxo drinking bite in all of Spain, named after the equally salty and spicy casino wife played by Rita Hayworth.

The bite is simple, a skewer of anchovy curled around bright pickled peppers and thick-meated olive. But the play of fat and mineral and acidity and spice is troublingly addictive. Each pair of skewers is served alongside the bright salinity of Emilio Hidalgo fino sherry, so that the brine and depth of skewer and drink blend together until you’re not sure which is which.

But here’s the thing. From night to night, you might never bite into the same Gilda twice. The olive, perhaps a fat and aromatic Castelvetrano or a pair of Moroccan picholines, rotates according to the best of what’s available. The peppers might wander from pippara to guindilla. The anchovy, too, may change.

Produce adjusts with the seasons at many restaurants, of course. But at Adarra, even the organic butter served with your sardines might travel among various farms, depending on who’s producing.

The flavor of a delicate and earthy gnocchi dish is determined not by its title ingredient, but by the weekly mix of mushrooms offered up by local fungus farmer Paul Schofield. This might include chanterelles in the summer, shiitakes or oysters in the fall.

Meals at Adarra, as perhaps any meal during a pandemic, are a heavily improvised affair. Their character is determined by what grew nearby, or what can be imported amid supply chains with broken links, tasted on the fly by its chefs as it arrives in the kitchen.

Even if the item looks the same on the menu, its flavor and preparation will change depending on each of-the-moment meat or fish or potato. The kitchen is a recipe-free zone that Randall Doetzer says has left some former cooks complaining about the troubling vagueness of his instructions.

On one night, the restaurant might have come into a whole pasture-raised lamb from nearby Meadows Pride farm. And so customers are asked to choose among its parts, whether leg or loin or a fatty curl of lamb belly whose depth makes porkbelly feel like meat for children. The lamb is prepared with whatever herbs happen to be in the kitchen, whose proportions are adjusted based on the flavors of the current batch: sometimes more fennel, sometimes more parsley.

The lamb belly is seared on high heat to caramelize and crisp it, then braised for hours and left overnight to cool and come into its flavors before being cooked again to order. It is served over beans and mushrooms whose varieties also may change, then brightened up with a salsa verde made from the same blend of herbs used to flavor the lamb.

Ours tasted like no other lamb we’ve tried: a sliver of belly crisped and tender at once, lightly mineral and maybe even grassy, and perilously rich without being unbalanced.

A secret to the plate, one you’d probably never guess, is anchovies, a fish unfairly maligned because of the terrible canned versions that arrived on far too many pizzas. But when sourced carefully, the fish can be wee but powerful bombs of umami. Doetzer uses them to add invisible depth to the lamb plate’s bright salsa verde.

Adarra’s anchovy salad appetizer is wonderful by itself, a fennel-stranded plate of funk and lemony brightness. But the restaurant is also one big game of hide-the-anchovy, using the fish where you’d least expect it.

Doetzer uses the fish the same way Vietnamese chefs might use shrimp paste or fish sauce, as an umami-packed additive to bring out the fullness of other flavors and lower the need for salt. He adds them also to his garlic shrimp plate, to boost the crustaceans to booming volume.

A smoked mussel plate, perhaps the most unexpected and satisfying dish of the night, also made use of an anchovy-amped salsa verde.

The mussel plate came about, in part, because Doetzer couldn’t stand the overcooked smoked oysters that arrived in tins. And so Adarra brings in mussels fresh in their shells from Prince Edward Island, where they are vinegared and plumply steamed in herbs, and cold-smoked onsite.

The bivalves are served naked, in herb-lined rows atop orzo that’s been bathed in the blackness and umami of squid ink. It looks for all the world as if the mussels were farmed fresh from the soil of an inky sea. And it tastes much the same, a balanced ecosystem of acidity, earthiness and oceanic depth.

Surprise is perhaps the most assured offering at Adarra. It is a place where you just have to let things happen, and trust that they will be good.

Heck, beyond a few wines by the glass, there is no wine list, even — though the cellar is uncommonly deep with naturally fermented and interesting wines from the new and old country, curated by owners who are both level 2 sommeliers.

Instead, tell your waiter your flavor preferences or the wines you’ve enjoyed before, and a bottle will appear — almost all in the $35-$60 range — after the whole staff bounces around your predilections in the back of house to arrive at something from their shelves. Maybe it will be an unclassifiable red from maverick Czech winemaker Milan Nestarec, maybe a rare allocation from legendary Spanish house Escoda-Sanahuja, known for its experimental wines made in amphorae, or from native Spanish grapes.

The cocktail menu, put together by Norfolk native Jas Singh, contains equal surprise, as on an unusually balanced and full-textured take on the Singapore sling, made with unfiltered sake and much less sweetness than the drink is known for. A cheekily named “But Really, Why Wouldn’t You Be Anti-Fascist” is a gentle and meal-friendly take on a Negroni, using floral Japanese gin.

Each drink is classed on the menu by mouthfeel, and by its complexity of flavor. But even the least complex — a pebble-iced “No Jacket Required” play on a tiki swizzle — contains bracing alpine flavors and intense toasted coconut. These will come on strong at first, but mellow and integrate as the drink’s ice melts.

A meal at Adarra, over time, takes on the character of intimate conversation, prodded along by uncommonly gracious and knowledgeable staff. Each item, each off-kilter drink or unexpectedly full-flavored fish conserva, is like a story you’d never heard in quite this form. And at least on our visit, none was off-color, nor overstayed its welcome.

And so at the end of your meal, when you are asked to take your cloth napkin to the bin by the door, so servers won’t have to touch fabric that you’ve also touched, it is also a sudden re-awakening to the world you’d left behind: a year of virulently contested election results and rising death counts and untried vaccines, where everyone seems a little afraid of each other.

But for an hour at least, with not a single dodgy pandemic moment, Adarra was able to achieve what we’ve always relied on restaurants at their best to do — and what we should hope they’re still here to do on the other side of this pandemic.

It made me forget all of that.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com

If you go

The spot

Restaurant Adarra, 618 N 1st St, Richmond

The vibe

Small plates, Basque-inspired restaurant with uncommon devotion to high-quality brined fish preserves, cold smoked seafood and pasture raised lamb, with natural wines and ambitious cocktails on a heated patio

Order this

Literally nothing went wrong on our visit — a rarity anyhwere — but always a Gilda pintxo and a fish conserva or two, and you won’t go wrong with a lamb dish or smoked mussels

Hours: 5 p.m. to 9 pm. Wednesday to Sunday

COVID protocols: Priority to heated patio seating, masks required when talking to your also-masked servers, distanced tables, distanced service, cleaning, guests must dispose of own napkins

Food prices: Snacks, $6-$9; small plates, $10-$18; cheese board, $17. Expect to order 2-3 small plates per person.

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Drinks: Limited wines ($12-$13), beer ($7-$8), cider ($5) and vermouth ($5) by the glass; near-unlimited wines by the bottle, mostly around $30-$60; cocktails, $11-$14.

Kid-friendly? Just don’t.

Vegan/veg/gluten: The gluten-free will have little trouble here. Pescatarians could have a party. Vegetarian options are limited, thoguh they can be accommodated. But watch out for secret anchovies.

Disabled-access? Yup

Reservations? Exclusively, via email at info@restaurantadarra.com

Parking: Street, probably gettable within a block

Contact: 804-477-3456, restaurantadarra.com