Q&A: Adam Donnelly

When did you open Segovia?
December 1st, 2009.

And it’s your restaurant — you own it?
Yes, me and Carolina own the restaurant…We were living in London, England — I was working out there — and the building came up for sale in Osborne [Village], and Carolina’s parent’s ended up buying the building. We had just started talking about starting a restaurant and I worked at a Tapas bar in London… before we even saw the building they bought it, and we started renovating it.

Why a Spanish Tapas bar?
It’s the style of food we first tried when we were in London, and there’s nothing like that in Winnipeg, and we really liked going out and instead of the three course, typical —Carolina would have a plate, I would have a plate. We just really liked tapas where we shared everything, talked about it — it seemed more intimate and a lot more fun to try a bunch of different stuff.

Are there any tapas bars in Winnipeg now?
There’s a couple that have started emerging I guess, that call themselves “tapas” … there’s sort of larger places as well.

Is there anything about Segovia that renders it distinctly “Winnipeg”?
The prices are pretty low compared to other places I’ve been! (laughs) That’s something when I’m making a menu that I try to think about … there’s nothing over $20 on the menu… that would be one thing… and the produce that we use too, especially in the summer. We get most of our produce from farmers and our meat — our pigs are local, the pork belly we use is local, so yeah, as much as possible we try to use local products.

Segovia is located in Osborne Village. What is the area known for?
There are lots of bars and restaurants around… It’s an area in the city that a lot of people go to at night.

Why “Segovia” for the name?
It’s a city in Spain. After we came back [from London]— well, my brother got married so we came back to Winnipeg to check out the restaurant, and then we went to Spain for a month to travel around Spain and get ideas for the restaurant. Segovia was one of our favourites — it’s a historical city just outside of Madrid — it has a huge Roman aquaduct running throughout the whole city… it‘s very, very beautiful. That’s why we picked the name.

What makes Segovia unique?
We always change our menu; we like to use different products that not a lot of people in Winnipeg use. We sometimes have horse on the menu, sometimes elk on the menu … we had an elk tartare last time when you were here and again the menu’s completely changed. We try to get into different stuff that no one’s doing in the city.

You said horse and elk?
Yep, we did an elk tartare on the last menu. We always try to have some sort of tartar or raw preparation. We always have pork belly and scallops.

Does Segovia use sustainable produce?
If we have halibut — the shrimps right now we get from Florida and they’re farmed sustainably. Prawns are a very popular tapas dish, but we never had it on the menu because we could never get a sustainable source for them until about a month ago [so] we just added it to the menu. So yeah, we’re very conscientious about that.

You created all of the dishes?
Yes. We smoke a lot of things too, we have a smoker in the back so that’s another thing we like to do.

I sat at the bar when I visited the restaurant and watched the food being prepared. Is that the traditional style of a tapas bar in Spain?
On the first page of our menu, we have very traditional tapas. And there’s usually always an open kitchen in a tapas bar. Usually it’s just a bar and the kitchen is behind the bar. You just kind of watch… It’s pretty simple though. Traditional Spanish tapas is super, super simple; we kind of just made it a little fancier. • 

» segoviatapasbar.com


Chef and owner of Segovia

Photo Courtesy: Ian McCausland