It took getting tossed by a bull in Spain at 18 for Gerardo De Anda to realize he wasn’t invincible. It took 10 years after that day running with the bulls in Pamplona for him to realize his vision for opening a Spanish restaurant in San Antonio.

It’s now open and named, appropriately, for a bull: Toro Bar + Kitchen.

Other things had to fall in place before Toro opened Feb. 2. For one, a friend with a coffee shop in Stone Oak had to reach out and ask De Anda and his sister, Vanessa De Anda, if they’d like to take over his lease. It was just a coffee bar, but it was tucked into the shaded corner of a towering, Mediterranean-style boutique shopping center, where the patio’s outsized fountain and broad canopy sail seem utterly out of place beside the sweaty desperation of the Loop 1604 frontage road.

Then the De Andas had to find someone to cook the Spanish dishes they had in mind. That happened the day they connected the restaurant’s phone, and the very first call on that phone came from Juan Carlos Bazan. He’d just come back from Spain, where he’d been cooking at Monastrell and La Taberna del Gourmet in Alicante. They had their man.

“Everything has just fallen into place when it needed to fall into place,” said Gerardo De Anda.

And so goes the experience at Toro, where so much has fallen into place so soon. And it comes at a time when Spanish food is having a hot moment in San Antonio, arriving just months after chef Jason Dady opened his own Spanish place in midtown on Grayson Street called The Bin Tapas Bar.

At Toro, the bar doesn’t run the show, but it sets the pace for an experience that can stretch several hours. Maybe a gin and tonic built with herbal Botanist gin and star anise or another one starring Treaty Oak gin, mint and cinnamon. Poured with Fever Tree tonic water, both cocktails let the gin and aromatic esthers take their turns as astringent backdrops for charcuterie and cheese boards that pull in Spanish jamón serrano, twangy Manchego cheese or the fresh Catalonian sausage called butifarra.

Sangria and tapas are natural allies, and Toro’s red-wine blend with cold fruit pulls in peach liqueur and brandy for a high-proof sting to balance the sweetness. It went especially well with three tall slices of tortilla española with potatoes in a rich omelet suspension and a tapas plate of shrimp sauteed in olive oil and chile spices with caramelized garlic.

Served in a big bowl like homefries with a heavy dusting of paprika, Toro’s version of patatas bravas left me wondering where the “bravas” part might be hiding. Certainly not in the drizzle of sauce so sparing that I found myself facing down a bowl of fries on a seasoned-salt bender. So I asked for more “bravas,” and there came a sauce as rich and breath-defying as a fire-born pesto, with a deep growl of chile de árbol and garlic in a flinty crucible of spiced oil.

Stuffed piquillo peppers brought the velvet of the peppers themselves to play piquant counterbalance to a filling of pecans, jamón serrano and cream cheese. Queso de cabra frito — fried goat cheese — was the least impressive of the tapas, a hard value at $8 for a gumball-size trio with a tough chain necklace of onions.

On the sweet side, the first proper crème brûlée I’ve had in San Antonio is Toro’s crema catalan, with a scorched and toasted shell as delicate as candy glass over custard with whip, shake and substance in balanced vanilla ratios. In that same league came torrijas, a Spanish twist on French toast, with a light crust over silky bread drenched in sweet cream.

I’ve saved paella for last, because it’s where the promise of small things is put to a larger test. On one visit, the meat-and-seafood Toro Paella scored where it counted — with rich tomato rice in a strata of textures: soft and supple at top, more cohesive and binding midway through, then crunchy at the bottom of the broad steel pan.

Some would argue that a proper paella is a rice dish at heart, and the rest is for show. If so, the mussels and pork ribs of that catch-all paella showed poorly on that visit, one gone fishy and the other grown old.

On another trip, that Toro Paella was firing all of its guns at once, with cubed pork belly, roasted chicken, mini-chorizo links, milky white shrimp and yes, the mussels and pork ribs all in top form. It was a paella, like the restaurant for which it’s named, where things had a way of falling into place.