Everything (Else) I Ate in Spain

Or at least the highlights.

Last week, I waxed rhapsodic about our dinner at Noor, the most intense and expensive eating experience we had in Spain. But for the most part, dining out in Iberia has the opposite vibe: relaxed, leisurely and shockingly cheap. (I’ve become a little too used to crossing the $100 threshold on some totally forgettable dinners here in LA. The reverse sticker shock really got to me.) I’d be remiss if I didn’t hit on the rest of our vacation meals, which were less uptight and off-the-wall but no less worth remembering.

Sala de Despiece, Madrid

We had our first dinner at this extremely well-known restaurant, which is to a typical tapas bar what Pujol is to our local tapas spot. In lieu of a traditional menu, we were given a spreadsheet with columns for primary ingredient, secondary ingredients, region of origin and other metadata. Miraculously, we managed to assemble a solid dinner from this wall of text despite our crippling jet lag.

The dish above is a whole fried artichoke with avocado cream that, thanks to some flavored salt, tasted exactly like a Hint of Lime Tostito and hit the same addictive nexus of crispy, tangy and oily. I also ate the first of many, many octopi on the trip, this one with a smooth, emulsified riff on muhammara, the Middle Eastern red pepper spread.

I respect the intelligence of our many-tentacled friends, but not as much as I respect the craft of Spanish chefs who can cook them to a perfect consistency: charred on one end, tender on the other, not rubbery. Rule number one of cooking protein is to keep the size as regular as possible so it cooks evenly, and that’s literally impossible with octopus. I wouldn’t try this at home.

Finally, there were these mussels smothered in a funky, fudgy black garlic sauce. This I might try at home, because I impulse bought a bulb of the stuff from the farmers market and might as well chase the dragon. Shoutout to the langoustines making eye contact with us from behind the bar.

The next morning, we woke up before dawn to catch our train to Granada, because we forgot that 7:45am counts as “before dawn” in that part of the world. Putting his country in the same time zone as Poland so he could sync his watch with Hitler’s: an underrated reason to hate Francisco Franco! It also explains why everyone eats dinner at 9pm, because it feels like and should be 7pm. But I digress.

La Barra de Cañabota, Seville

With all due respect to Granada, the food there — even the free tapas it’s famous for! — was somewhat overshadowed by the Alhambra. That said, we had some insane croquettes with a subtle beef flavor; the thing about eating endless variations on a national staple is that you start to pick up on the tiny differences between them.

Our next stop was Seville, where we snagged a couple of walk-in seats at the more casual bar offshoot of a Michelin-starred seafood spot. (Having an American internal clock is its own kind of superpower — showing up at 8:30pm is like doing a 5pm drive-by back home.) We once again sat by the raw bar, where our server pointed to various fish that made up the day’s specials and explained how they were being prepared. That ended up being most of our order.

An exception was the tomato-bread stew with egg yolk and cockles above, which a couple more days in Andalusia taught me to recognize as a spin on salmorejo, which is like a thicker version of gazpacho typically served with grated hard-boiled egg (hence the yolk) and jamón (hence the briny shellfish, which offered an analogous hit of salt.) It was awesome, as was every bowl of regular salmorejo we had. And we weren’t even there during tomato season!

As two Jews with roots in the New York City area, Hunter and I were powerless to resist this plate of smoked whitefish with slivers of pan con tomate — basically a deconstructed version of a classic bagel sandwich, minus the cream cheese, caper and onions. The better to concentrate on the fish itself, I suppose.

The grand finale was this ultra-fatty fish collar slathered in roasted garlic and red peppers. You gotta get your vegetables where you can in Europe.

La Castela, Madrid

Having already recapped the most noteworthy part of our time in Córdoba, we can loop back around to Madrid, where we met up with friends and had a relatively chill weekend after a whirlwind sprint through three cities in four days. (Still clocked 20k+ steps a day, though.) For our final day of the trip, we had just one goal: a long, languorous, boozy Spanish lunch. The kind that’s technically illegal in the United States.

The problem is that Madrid is such a big city with such a thriving street life it’s a little hard to do anything spontaneously as a group of five. After our Plan A was fully booked, Hunter turned to the Guía Repsol. It’s like the Spanish version of the Michelin Guide, in that they both started as loss leaders for automotive companies (Michelin does tires, Repsol oil and gas) to get people on the roads. There’s no English language version of the app, but Google Translate and visual aids like maps make it usable enough — and it’s a reliable way to find places whose spots aren’t already blown up by Anglophone media.

La Castela was a two-minute walk away, and let us hang out at the bar before they crammed us around a tiny table. Our ultra-friendly bartender kept refilling our drinks the second we finished them, which only encouraged us to keep ordering a steady stream of small plates in sets of two or three. It was a perfect farewell meal; where else on Earth would I be served multiple forms of anchovy on the same tiny sliver of toast?

The oxtails were ridiculously rich, but somehow overshadowed by the rosemary-inflected potatoes next to them. The octopus and squid risotto with squid ink was on nearly every table in the place, for good reason. But the dish that pushed us all over the edge into dumbfounded, laughing-at-our-luck elation was this un-photogenic bowl of chickpeas with chorizo and fall-apart tender tripe.

And the whole meal was 40 Euros to boot! Somehow, we still had dinner that night, because Hunter refused to leave the continent without having a drunken street kebab.

I could continue ranting about how good this was, but I think our friend Eric’s expression while gazing adoringly at the oxtail says it all.

I’ve been back home for a couple weeks and there’s a lot of eating to catch up on, but that’ll have to wait.