Wine in Tubes and French-Basque Small Plates at TAURO Pintxos Wine Bar and Grill

• Location: Enter from SocietyLounge at the Ground Floor of Atrium Building in Makati Avenue corner Paseo De Roxas, Makati City
  Operating Hours: Monday to Saturday; 5 p.m. – 2 a.m.
• Cuisine: French-Basque
• Signature drinks: In-house sangria, extensive wine collection
• Price per head: P500++

Located inside the French restaurant SocietyLounge on Makati Avenue, Tauro Pintxos Wine and Grill is the brainchild of acclaimed Chef Patrice Freuslon. Take the door to the right of the entrance of SocietyLounge and you’ll find yourself in an intimate space decked with an impressive collection of wines and a menu that will make your mouth water.

SocietyLounge hosts a lot of events throughout the week and it can get crowded on certain days, so Chef Patrice wanted to set up a smaller, more intimate space where people can talk, drink, and eat. “It’s a good time to open this concept. It’s what Filipinos like, to share some food on the table. To have a good time, good drinks, not expensive, and with friends,” he says.

Most Filipinos are familiar with tapas, little plates of bite-sized goodies to eat while drinking. But Chef Patrice wanted to serve small plates in a different way at Tauro. “What we have in the Philippines is the Spanish-Basque cuisine and this new concept is more of pintxos, some tapas, plancha (grilled on a metal plate), and sangria. More of on a French area region.”

Pintxos come with cocktail sticks that are used to keep them together. They are served on a baguette, while tapas are generally bread-less. Traditionally, they are lined up at the bar and customers pick up the skewers of the pintxos that they want. The bar charges them at the end by counting the sticks they have (kind of like how some Japanese restaurants charge you by the number of saucers you get). At Tauro, the easiest way to differentiate pintxos from tapas is that pintxos come in pairs while there are four tapas per order.

Now that you know what to eat, it’s time to know what to drink with it. Tauro stocks wine from all over the world. A selection of Old World and New World wines from Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Southwest France (none from the North) was chosen specifically to pair with the food.

Here are a few recommendations for pintxos and tapas with wine pairings from Chef Patrice:

For those who want to try smaller pours of different kinds of wine, Tauro also serves WIT, Wine in Tube. This cool concept allows you to enjoy a beautiful glass of wine without having to buy an entire bottle. You can sample an array of wines by the tube with the same quality as a traditional bottle.

Also a huge draw for Tauro is their sangria, which they make in house. Served in a glass that almost looks like a small fishbowl with a stem, Tauro’s sangria is a blend of red wine, a nice selection of fruits (this is most important), and some secret ingredients. It is quite delicious, which make this drink deceptively dangerous; you won’t realize how much you’ve had to drink because you’ll be knocking them back. It’s a steal at P295 per glass and P920 for a pitcher. Order by the glass if you want to be prudent. Or get a pitcher to share with friends. That is, if you want to share.

Tauro is an intimate space perfect for catching up with friends or even for spending some quality time with yourself. You might even make new friends at the next table. And if the friendly chef is around, ask for recommendations.

Photos by Star Sabroso