La Lola Tapas Bar

There is no printed menu at La Lola Tapas Bar. In the manner of a Spanish neighbourhood bar, the day's plates are chalked up by hand and change from week to week — sometimes within a single week — so a diner reads the board instead. The kitchen belongs to Miguel Pastor, who grew up in Madrid and trained as a chef in Spain, and he runs the place with his wife and co-owner Vanessa Stankiewicz, who is half-Spanish and half-Canadian. The setting leans casual and festive, closer to a Spanish bar than a formal dining room, with roughly thirty seats on Benton Street in downtown Kitchener and tables taken as often by reservation as by walk-in. The chalkboard is the menu, rewritten as the kitchen sees fit.

What lands on that board is recognizably Spanish and built for sharing. Croquetas are the constant — creamy, breaded, and present whatever else has changed. Around them the selection moves: Patatas Bravas under a spiced sauce, Gambas in garlic and oil, Albondigas, a Salmon Torta and a Brie and Onion Torta, Moroccan Pork Skewers that reach toward the wider Mediterranean, and a charcuterie platter of Spanish cured meats. Dessert runs to a Basque Cheesecake. Nothing on the list is large; the plates are meant to accumulate a few at a time until a table has assembled its own meal out of the day's offerings.

The board explains the kitchen's priorities. Croquetas stay because they are the baseline a Spanish bar is expected to do well every day, while the fillings and the plates beside them rotate so that regulars rarely order the same dinner twice. It is a deliberate way to run a menu — hold one dish steady as the signature and let everything else answer to what looked good that week. The hours follow the same concentrated logic: dinner Wednesday through Friday, with Saturday running both daytime and evening, so the cooking stays tied to a handful of focused services rather than spread thin across seven days.

Paella follows a rule of its own. It is cooked only on Fridays and Saturdays, made to order for the dining room and kept off the takeout list, because a seafood paella — shrimp, mussels, squid — is a pan meant to be served and eaten where it was cooked. That makes the weekend the paella's occasion, and La Lola carries the idea past its own tables with catered Paella Parties built around the same rice, formats scaled for a group rather than a single order. It is the one dish the restaurant will cook for a crowd but not pack into a takeout box.

La Lola is a family project before it is anything else. Pastor and Stankiewicz moved from Madrid with their children and opened the restaurant in 2019, and the Spanish training in the kitchen is why the cooking reads as the real thing rather than a North American version of it. That distinction was made official in 2026, when La Lola earned Restaurants from Spain certification, hand-delivered to the restaurant and covered at the time by local reporting. It is not the kind of recognition a kitchen can arrange for itself, and it landed on a menu that already rewrites itself by the day.

There is also a shop. Inside the same space, a small tienda sells imported Spanish wine, cheese and charcuterie, so a meal here can end with a bottle to take home rather than another plate. The bar pours wine and sangria through service, and the shelves carry the bottles behind them. It is a compact arrangement — dinner and a Spanish pantry under one roof — and it lets a visit double as a short run for labels and products that are otherwise hard to find in the region. A table comes in for croquetas and whatever the board is offering that night, and it can leave with the makings of the same meal.