By now we all know the drill when a tapas restaurant opens. The owners will deck it out to look like a Spanish country tavern, with lots of weathered (or at least weathered-looking) wood, soft lighting, maybe some hanging farm implements, probably some candles. It’s all meant to look very rustic.

The owners of Zipi Zape, an excellent new tapas joint in Williamsburg, have taken a different approach. The place is named after a classic Spanish comic strip, whose title characters smile out from a big sign above the restaurant’s entrance. Framed comic strips are hung on the walls, and even the men’s and women’s restroom doors are designated by male and female cartoon characters. So much for rustic. But this is no children’s theme restaurant or cooler-than-thou hipster hangout – it’s done very taste fully, and the comics seem more like art than pop culture.

There are three seating options: The bar is lovely and already feels nicely lived-in, plus the wafting fragrances of garlic and olive oil make it one of the best-smelling bars in town, but it isn’t large enough to handle a group. Al fresco fans may prefer to sit in front of the restaurant, but the sidewalk is so steeply sloped that it’s hard to keep things from sliding off the table. The best bet is the small but comfortable dining room.

Upon sitting down, you’re presented with a small dish of pickled garlic cloves. The cloves retain the crunch of raw garlic but the flavor is mellow, making for a lovely starter, and a nice change from the usual bowl of olives.

Two musts are the chorizo in brandy sauce ($5) and chicken with garlic and white wine ($4.50). Not only is the chorizo spicy and the chicken juicy, but both dishes arrive sizzling in small ceramic vessels, and their oily sauces are smoky and rich – irresistible for sopping up with bread. Whatever else you order, get these.

The kitchen also shows an impressively light touch with frying, which is best illustrated with two seafood dishes. The first is baby calamari ($7), a paper basket of gorgeously fried rings and tentacles. The other is Chilean merluza ($8.50), a white-fleshed fish similar to hake. The little nuggets are briny and salty, a perfect match for the accompanying herb-flecked French fries. They’re also great on a sandwich ($6).

As you’d expect at a Spanish eatery, Serrano ham shows up in many guises. It’s available on toast ($6.50 an ounce), on a sandwich ($6.60), as part of a fine platter of Spanish ham and sausages ($12), and, most intriguingly, wrapped around bite-size hunks of fried blood sausage ($4).The frying crisps up the sausage’s texture, and the ham mellows its flavor – a wonderful pairing.

The most sublime pork offering, however, is a platter of roast pork medallions ($6.50), served with a white wine pimento sauce. Hearty and juicy, it’s the most entree like item on the menu, and the one I was least inclined to share with my tablemates.

There are several excellent cold tapas, including an exemplary Spanish omelette ($3.50) and an even better Galician omelette studded with small pieces of chorizo ($4.50). Both are eggy but not too dense or heavy. Speaking of eggs, little skewers of hardboiled quail eggs with green peppers ($1.50 each) are delectable as well. And speaking of quail, a leg and thigh of quail escabeche ($4.50) finds the cooked meat treated with a sweet sherry marinade with chopped vegetables – delicious.

Most of the other cold tapas are served on toast and are priced by the piece. The best one is boquerones – that’s vinegar cured anchovy filets – and caperberries ($1.50 each). While you’re at it, get a few of the savory black olive pate ($1.25 each), the Portuguese sardines with fresh tomatoes ($2.50 each), the hefty New Zealand mussels with a tangy vinaigrette ($1.50 each), and the red peppers stuffed with tuna ($3 each), all of which are superbly executed.

No matter what you order, there are a few options that essentially function as vegetable side dishes, pairing well with almost everything else on the menu. The best of these is the patatas bravas ($4), hunks of potato in a spicy romescu sauce. Also worthwhile are white asparagus ($4), mushrooms in garlic ($5), and, of course, marinated olives ($2.50).

Inevitably, there were a few duds. Boiled octopus ($12) was a pile of rubbery blandness that everyone at my table shunned after one bite (“I’ll just tell the kitchen you were too full to finish it,” said our waiter as he took it away, with an inflection that suggested we weren’t the only ones under whelmed by this particular dish). And fried bechamel croquettes ($5.50) were a runny mess that would have benefited from a thicker bechamel sauce.

In classic Spanish fashion, Zipi Zape doesn’t serve dessert. The thinking behind this traditionalist approach is that tapas aren’t an actual meal – they’re just a nosh, a warm-up for a real supper that will be eaten later. That may work fine in Spain, but not in New York, where people treat tapas as a full dinner. As quibbles go, however, this is a minor one. And no dessert means more room to order another tapa or two.