In most of the United States, if all you knew about Spain came from the Spanish restaurants in your town, you’d be laboring under the impression that everyone in Spain listens exclusively to folk music, uses too much paprika and hasn’t yet reached the Iron Age, preferring to cook exclusively in terra cotta crocks. These are places to which you go out for tapas, apparently the staple food of Spaniards. Unlike many such national minstrel shows (the red-sauce Italian, moo-shu Chinese or plate-breaking Greek), these notions are based in a reality that continues to exist; however, they should never have come to represent a nation of millions.

In New York City, there is one kind of restaurant that is sorely lacking; one that is the bedrock of Spanish food culture. It’s a small, casual bar that just happens to serve better food than it needs to, a place where eating is not the point of your evening, it’s just an ever-present element thereof. You go out to meet friends, to talk, to hang out; you have some cheese, a plate of anchovies, a little bread to keep you going. Arguing about who makes the best pan con tomate and whether to get the squid or the chorizo may be most of the conversation, but you’ll never sit in front of a massive plate, taking photos and eating in silence until the next course comes. It’s aspirational living at its best, being incredibly exacting about food while treating it with the nonchalance it deserves.

This is what you get at Bar Jamón (125 E. 17th St., casamononyc.com), the round-the-corner companion to Mario Batali’s longstanding Casa Mono. The narrow, dark-wood-lined space is unforgivingly small, the room dominated by a winding, high-topped table and a narrow marble bar at the entry that also serves as wine display and prep space. Enormous mirrors cover the walls at both ends of the room, one marked in white with the menu, the other reflecting diners’ flushed, laughing faces back to them in the shimmer of candlelight.

It is a perfectly romantic location to put your date through a surreptitious battery of tests: Are they adventurous, or will they blanch when told that the “pulpo” in pulpo with spicy garbanzos is octopus (though you might let them—more for the rest of us!)? Can they appreciate a dish almost ludicrous in its simplicity like that pan con tomate, two slices of toasted bread smeared with olive oil and tomato pulp and a judicious scattering of chunky salt? It’s the best in the city precisely because of that simplicity, relying on the quality of the sharply green oil and obscenely red tomatoes rather than chef-y theatrics to dazzle.

Should your date fail the tests, there’s plenty to drown your sorrows in a wine list that is second to none for highlighting the varietals that are routinely overshadowed by dark red malbecs and tempranillos on most round-the-world wine lists. For a lighter way to spend your night, one of the Basque txakolis is the only way to go. What is otherwise an exceptionally well-balanced, mid-weight white is made sublime by its presentation: poured in a thin stream into a small carafe from as high as your waiter’s wingspan can manage, the aeration lending a slight effervescence that lurks without overpowering the palate. Like sparkling wines it pairs perfectly with rich, fatty foods like cheeses and the eponymous jamón, but as a heavier white it works just as well with brighter, more acidic foods like olives and stuffed piquillo peppers.

Whatever you do, don’t order all at once. Get one plate at a time, linger over your (generously sized) glass of wine, people-watch, have a real conversation with your companion. In other words, get Spanish.

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Here’s one visit to New York that did not end well. Yesterday, a tourist from Barcelona was attacked by a man in a suit and tie in City Hall Park, reported Gothamist. The weapon of choice? A hammer. According to witnesses, the attacker—who supposedly “looked normal”—repeatedly struck the man with the claw end of the hammer.

The attacker, 43-year-old John Yoos, screamed about Nazis and various American presidents while striking the man, according to police. Witnesses took Yoos down to the ground and held him until police arrived. The victim suffered a fractured skill and defensive wounds, but is in stable condition according to the NY Post. His wife witnessed the whole disturbing incident.

The attack is reminiscent of another random act of violence two weeks ago on the Upper East Side, in which a crazed homeless man stabbed a young woman walking down the street. Hopefully this recent spate of summer violence calms down soon.

—Alissa Fleck

A scene from Damsels in Distress.

“I like my characters to walk in clouds,” said the great comedy director Leo McCarey. “I like a little bit of the fairy tale.”

That confession well describes the McCarey classics that execute a precarious balance between realism and fantasy—The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, Love Affair, The Bells of St. Mary’s, even his Ruggles of Red Gap (currently in revival at Film Forum)—which took a whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. McCarey’s line also describes what distinguishes the films of Whit Stillman, whose new feature, Damsels in Distress, is his first movie in 14 years.

The volunteering girls at Seven Oaks College in Damsels in Distress occupy a peculiar world, set apart from working life. They walk in the clouds of the privileged pursuits of youth, enjoying the leisure of education and idealism about politics, romance and religion—in that order of importance, though not obviously so.

Violet (Greta Gerwig), a tall, healthy sophomore, is full of private tastes and philosophies—suicide prevention and tap dancing are her causes. She’s lucky enough to head her own beautiful-girl clique, a group who support each other and invite newbie Lily (Analeigh Tipton) to join them. They’re a bouquet of eccentrics, with names like Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and archly syllabic speech. Yet, like the vulgar beer-and-cocktail boys they are attracted to, each is so pretty and engaging she conveys Stillman’s fascination with the same human qualities and conflicts that made McCarey’s films so moving.

Damsels in Distress is Stillman’s youth movie. His previous films, Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, surveyed young folk verging on the complications of adulthood, but his long absence has added charitable distance to Stillman’s take on maturity. This is, in part, his response to Mumblecore and the opportunity that movement provided for his brand of non-commercial class comedy, but Stillman is too focused and articulate to be mistaken for Mumblecore.

His awareness of class has always made him the most idiosyncratic indie. Whereas Mumblecore directors take their social advantages for granted, Stillman makes those advantages crucial to his characters’ spiritual struggles. (It’s in their romantic gamesmanship and political one-upsmanship, as when Violet jousts with the campus journalist.)

Seven Oaks is a Cloud Cuckoo Land version of a WASP enclave, the class and ethnic milieu that is now so foreign to mainstream comedy. Its identifying characteristics disappeared from view with the ’60s’ social upheaval (a loss addressed by a character in Stillman’s Barcelona, who reproves the vulgar ending of The Graduate). This setting allows Stillman to observe and conserve the moral process of people fighting off their anxieties and pursuing contentment, the telling niceties of socializing that once belonged to that forgotten genre, the comedy of manners.

By bringing a sense of manners back to the chaos of modern social license, Stillman could inspire Mumblecore to rethink itself in less slovenly terms, as a true aesthetic. (The already iconic Gerwig displays more delicate facets here than her exploitation in Greenberg.)

Stillman’s eloquent aphorisms and terse epigrams, too funny to repeat here, are spoken in an atmosphere of serenity and halation (photographed by Doug Emmett) that both satirizes and idealizes Ivy League seclusion. It is a world Violet and her gang long to escape by improving, bringing civility and joy in the courtly form of dance. This recalls how The Last Days of Disco, Stillman’s richest, deepest film, dared to look back to the waning disco era as a modern pilgrimage.

That was Stillman’s version of McCarey’s whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. His youth movie hopes strongly for our present.