On Howard Street, in Antique Row, within striking distance of MICA, Peabody, and Penn Station, is the new, smoky, amazing Gambrino's of Spain. I guess you can already tell that this is going to be a good review. It's a carryout place with two tiny tables and soccer on the television. The centerpiece is a huge pit filled with hot charcoal that they rake with a huge. iron, shovel-like thing.
They charbroil ribs, they charbroil chicken; they do steak, shrimp and pork loin. And you can tell it's Baltimore -- there's fried whiting on the menu (more people should eat whiting, it's a delicious fish, it's dirt cheap, and it's easy to cook). They even deliver orders that cost over $10, which is the really good news. One bizarre note about the menu, though: there's a tuna sandwich. Now, I like tuna sandwiches, but I'm not sure how a tuna sandwich can benefit from smoking charcoal. Maybe they just have a sort-of-healthy sandwich to placate the doctors who work at the hospital across the street.
At least they have fairly serious servings of flan: big hunks of custard, eggy goodness covered in caramel sauce. They wiggle around their plastic containers, and they have some ingredient I can't place. They have some spice, maybe cinnamon, maybe coriander. There's certainly a lovely smokiness to the caramel, pushed almost to the smoking point, and the custard has a smooth yet brown bottom. I crave this custard.
I had a half-order of ribs. It was huge. It was tremendous. I can eat an awful lot of food, and I went there awfully hungry, and I was defeated by the half order of ribs. My point is, they serve you a lot of food. You get three ribs, a huge pile of French fries, and about a quart of puffy, tender saffron rice. They hand it to you in an aluminum tray, half the size of a hotel pan (for the uninitiated, a half-hotel pan is what they use for steam trays at the cafeterias on the Hopkins campus as well as Peabody, and most of your buffet bars. Those things, in cafeterias, carry about twenty servings of whatever it is -- spaghetti, hamburgers, etc.). At Gambrino's, they carry one person's food. Actually, they carry half an order of one person's food. It's kind of scary.
The ribs were really good. I had to walk with them to a park before sitting down and eating, and they cooled a bit, but still, they were delicious. There was the flavor of the meat itself, and there was the beautiful barbecue sauce -- sweet, tangy and thick with a little spice. The best part of anything to do with charcoal, though, is the smoky flavor. While these ribs weren't cooked in a pit for a day and a half, they were cooked over actual coals and in actual hot smoke. There's char, there's caramelization, there are blackened bits of meat on the ribs. The only problem with this is that the ratio of the serving is about perfectly flipped. Three ribs, handful of French fries, quart of rice. I'd rather have six ribs, cup of rice, and a handful of fries. That's a full order, though, at a price of 13 bucks instead of seven.
My habitual dining companion for these reviews, who is much funnier than I am (but didn't pull off anything that's making it into the review this time) had a steak sandwich. This is basically a cheese steak with worse cheese on great bread. The beef tastes like a medium-well hamburger, and there's lettuce, tomato, the normal stuff. It's got American cheese though. American cheese is always bad, although this is a better sandwich than that wretched thing I ate at Cobber's. This is more like an alliance of flavor than the decisive Battle of Waterloo for flavor, which, by the way, is a comparison that my dining buddy made, and so, in the end, he earned himself a place in this review -- well done. The real triumph of the sandwich is the bread. It's the best roll I've seen on a sandwich in the city. It's good stuff.
I only wish I'd had the charbroiled chicken -- which, by the way, they serve as either a whole or a half of the entire bird. I want the pork loin, I want the shrimp, I want the whiting. I don't want the tuna sandwich, but I'm still heading back to Gambrino's in a hurry.
Gambrino's of Spain
885-889 N. Howard St.
(410) 523 9700
Location: Mt. Vernon
Hours: 11 a.m.- 8 p.m.
Monday-Saturday
Price: $5-$10
