Tinto is one of Jose Garces’ restaurants in Philadelphia. Garces’ second restaurant in the city, Tinto is based around the cuisine of the mountainous Basque region that forms a border between France and Spain. The decor evokes a wine-cellar: exposed brick, walls of wine bottles in little cubbies, and heavy, rough-hewn wooden tables. I love the style, but I found the space to be a little too dark, overall.

I was in town for the Thanksgiving holiday, and wanted to take my parents out to try the place. We ordered the tasting menu, in order to maximize our exposure to the restaurant’s fare.

The first thing to arrive were little bowls of marble-sized green olives and some almonds that had been smoked. The olives were good, but the almonds were really great — smokey, salty, a great thing to munch on between courses. There was also some very tasty, very thinly sliced Iberian ham and three very delicate, flakey, savory rolled pastries accompanied by a smokey tomato sauce that I really enjoyed.

Overall, we had far too many small little dishes for me to remember the details of everything. However, I do recall that I enjoyed the duck confit (with serrano ham and black cherries) the most, shortly followed by the roasted baby artichokes and pappardelle. In addition, we had some excellently prepared prawns, cooked with some chiles, served whole — so we could suck out the succulent, fried brains from their little heads. Lastly, the Revuelto de Cangrejo took the prize for the most surprising dish. It’s soft scrambled eggs with crab, peas, toast and bacon. It sounds unusual, and the individual components were almost blank and forgettable on their own. But if you piled everything on the bit of herbed toast and ate it as it was intended, everything came together wonderfully and tasted phenomenal.

The New York strip was decent, but forgettable, and a touch on the cold side. My least favorite dish was the Bomba rice, which I thought tasted too overpoweringly of the morel mushrooms used in its preparation.

For dessert, we had a shortcake with almond cream, and a flourless chocolate cake with saffron cream. The cake — really, the saffron — was the better of the two, in my opinion, although we ate both without any reservations.

The service was excellent — we were seated quickly, and the waiter and runners were knowledgable about the food and happy to answer questions we had (they did have a tendency to recite the description of each dish a little quickly, so I did miss a few details and needed to ask them for clarification the next time they came around). I really appreciated that the menu also listed the staff on the back — I think it’s nice to know the full providence of my meal, both in terms of the origins of the ingredients and by whose hand it was prepared — and it’s great to be giving the staff the credit they deserve for their hard work.

I’d happily head to Tinto again, although probably not before checking out Garces’ other establishments in the area.