Certain restaurants– most street-facing Chinatown eateries, and the pantry-sized West Village boites, for example–never let you forget that, despite the cuisine, you are still in New York. Salud, with its ample dark wood seats, whitewashed walls, rattan accents and slowly turning fans overhead, plops you right in the middle of Havana or Buenos Aires for an hour or two– so much so that you’re surprised to find yourself, after a satisfying meal, back on the sidewalks of New York. A mostly tapas joint just off the main drag of downtown’s rapidly changing South Street Seaport area, Salud brings its transportative magic to a part of Manhattan that suffers still, after Fulton Fish Market left for Hunts Point in the Bronx less than six months ago. As the smell from the old stalls slowly fades away, it is replaced by new, much more pleasing aromas coming from the new wave of restaurants and cafés moving into the neigborhood. And of course, some of the most appealing smells come from this very tapas joint.

I say ‘mostly tapas’ because Salud’s menu does offer a number of larger plates, like a ‘pollo al horno,’ a half-roasted chicken or ‘mar y tierra,’ the Spanish version of surf n’ turf, in this case a mango-glazed half lobster paired with grilled skirt steak. While these are a little pricier items than main dishes at most tapas places ($15 and $23, respectively), most of the small plates, from chicken soup to octopus stew to salads, run from $8 to $13. When Candide and I visited recently for a celebratory lunch, we ordered both large and small plates, partly out of habit (we’ve gone once or twice before) and partly because we wanted to try more of Salud’s goodies and had never had a spendy occasion worthy of the extra outlay.

Candide ordered the tostones rellenos ($9), an adorable appetizer of braised shrimp, scallop, and lobster pieces, held together by a creamy overlay of queso blanco, all stuffed into crispy fried green plantains that had been cleverly shaped into little cups. Candide thought these were fun and unusual, though I noted he wished for a bit more lobster in the cups (then again, who wouldn’t want more lobster?). In terms of presentation, this was the most unique plantain dish I’ve seen in a very long time.

Meanwhile, I was tucking into the paellita, or mini-paella ($9). This continues to be my favorite dish at Salud, and even though it does not compete with the paella I have been lucky enough to eat in Spain, it is pretty great, held together the way really good paella should, with loads of chunky pieces of shrimp and lobster throughout the rice mixture, and with a few just-opened mussels and clams nearby. Its diminutive appearance as an appetizer is inspired: at many restaurants, paella is only offered for two or more. This is excellent paella without the commitment.

Our larger plates included Candide’s seafood platter (’parrillada de mariscos’, $24), which offered an assortment of simply grilled lobster, shrimp, and scallops wreathed around a ramekin of clarified butter. The menu had promised a full half-lobster as part of this dish and, while there were a number of nice fleshy pieces hiding out between the scallops and the shrimp, this somehow did not seem like truth in advertising. For the price, this was a small disappointment. My main, the churrasco, was an Argentine-style (i.e. almost obscenely thick) piece of skirt steak, cooked medium rare and smothered with a piquant chimichurri sauce. Compared to the seafood platter, the steak was much more meat than I expected and, at $17, better value for money. The steak was also supposed to be served with a mesclun salad and tostones but oddly, Salud was out of the latter the day we went, and so substituted rice and beans. We made up for the absence of plantains by ordering an extra accompaniment of the sweet, fried maduros, which were excellent.

Two caveats to a meal that I otherwise heartily recommend: One, prices are, as mentioned, somewhat steep. However, there’s an easy solution to this issue: the very satisfactory prix fixe menu offered at lunchtime. And two, service at Salud has been known to be excruciating slow, especially when the place is busy. When asked about this, the staff responds that their food is all fresh and prepared to order–good food takes time. So if you’re among the Wall Street no-time-for-lunch crowd, you’ll fare better someplace else. But if you’ve got some time to spend in a space that makes you feel like you’re a few thousand miles to the south, Salud might just be for you.

Salud, 142 Beekman Street, between Front St. and South St. (212) 566-2220