Yesterday evening I checked Facebook to see a post from an acquaintance named Carlos: Tuesday night was to be the last night that Ibiza was serving dinner. It would be closing operations permanently after that. In other words, today, it’s gone.
I think I ate maybe four meals at Ibiza. Maybe only three meals, even. It opened in New Haven a long time ago — more than ten years ago, and before then the space was another extraordinary restaurant, Pika Tapas — and it was many years before the Mensch and I felt we were sufficiently well-heeled to go have dinner there. That is to say, we could have swung it a long time ago, but weren’t ever sure we’d like it, and were nervous about spending a lot of money on a meal we wouldn’t enjoy. This has happened to us enough times in New Haven that we got quite conservative about eating out: when we went, it was either cheap and low-stress (if tasty), or expensive but very much the same-old-same-old (cf. Union League Cafe, a joint I love, but only feel a need to go to maybe once every year or so).
It was relatively recently, then, that we finally took a flyer on Ibiza, and my god, it was wonderful. It was just wonderful. I admit that I can barely remember what we had, but I remember that every single element of it was a delight; the drinks were perfect; the service was wonderful; and I thought, “I want to eat here once a week for the rest of my life.”
Now it is gone. The Yale Daily News reports that, as I had suspected, it came down to the landlord not being cool with the lease — Business was, by all reports, fine and dandy. I had originally posted here a complaint about Yale being a crappy landlord, because I assumed that Yale owned the property (they own the vast majority of buildings around there). But I am wrong: the landlord is local developer/real estate mogul John Wareck. Frankly, I would expect more from him, and I’m stymied as to why he wanted them out. There must be a story. Well: the story has to be one of these: either Wareck is a fool, or he’s got Big Plans. Either way, it’s a shame. I can’t think of a Big Plan that I would prefer of having Ibiza tucked sweetly into that little wedge of High Street.
I suppose now I will have to go elsewhere for Spanish food (Barcelona will do, but frankly, I liked Ibiza better). Another tack, admittedly, would be for me to learn how to cook, or at least approximate, food like the food they served at Ibiza. This is what happened with Bentara — which is still open for business. I felt like Bentara went downhill a little bit, a few years back, and instead of being just sad about it, I set to figuring out how to sort of make for myself food that I liked eating at Bentara. It’s never really the same, obviously. But I can fake my way through nasi goreng now enough that I don’t really pine for Bentara the way I used to. Ibiza, though: that will be a tall order. I don’t think I could ever replicate the kind of food they made there, in part because so much of what I ate there was seafood, and I almost never have that at home.
Tonight for dinner I will be making one of my wacky attempts at making “Chinese” food — the kind of thing I make because we almost never go out for Chinese food anymore. It will be chicken with broccoli and carrots in a sweet and spicy sauce. To be served with rice. My big tip on how to make that is, Freeze the chicken breast for a while before you slice it to cook it: it is really easy to thinly slice frozen chicken breast, and it’s damn near impossible to make attractive sliced out of chicken straight from the fridge.
Goodbye, Ibiza. We loved you so.
Long Spaghetti Night. 