The Bizarre Truth (12 page)

But that task is harder in a city like Madrid than in a city like Milwaukee. Milwaukee is home to several hundred-plus-year-old restaurants. If Karl Ratzch’s restaurant were ever in danger of selling its last schnitzel, the city would pass an ordinance requiring everyone to eat there once a week. There aren’t that many great restaurants in the town, and I am not calling Ratzch’s great, but its place in the city’s iconography is crucial to the local culture. At
this point there is no great tidal wave of a food zeitgeist threatening Ratzch’s or any of the other half-dozen ancient restaurants that made the city famous. The Serbian, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian dining halls that make Milwaukee a great culinary treat for committed food freaks will still be there to visit.

Madrid is a different animal. It’s truly earned its chops as one of the world’s great eating cities, and simply walking down its winding, cobblestone streets really got my taste buds going. Madrid’s food scene is made up of two very distinct culinary styles: traditional Spanish cuisine and extremely modern. I wanted to get started with a bang and raced over to have lunch at an eatery that defines cutting-edge cuisine. My first stop was La Broche, one of the country’s legendary restaurants, which is saying a lot considering that some of the most exciting, innovative cooking on the planet takes place in Spain. Chef Sergei Arola, La Broche’s chef and owner, got his chops working under culinary master Ferran Adria for many years, and his food philosophy and technical execution show it. His cooking style embodies that adventurous, bold, in-your-face cooking that Adria is known for, with an inventive, whimsical touch of what is most often called molecular gastronomy by those who need to put everything in a box with a name and a bow on it. However, Arola is supremely grounded in the strong elements of classic cooking.

Arola made four dishes for me in his kitchen, starting off with seared red prawns on olive gnocchi with an almond milk sauce. He spun fresh tagliolini pasta with seared morels, tiny smoky salty sea larvae, and Parmesan cream. Earthy and bold in the extreme. He topped the dish with an egg yolk cooked “sous-vide,” or immersed in a hot-water bath, which gave it a raw look as it sat on top of the pasta. The first bite disappeared into my mouth with an explosive essence of poached egg, a perfect complement to the pasta and cream sauce, a mad scientist’s nod to pasta carbonara.
He followed up the pasta course with a small plate of roasted sardines with black trumpet mushrooms. Simple and elegant, and the culinary harbinger of spring. The last dish went by the simple moniker of
roast beef
, which was truly the understatement of the day and demonstrates Arola’s whimsical nature. He presented me with a few paper-thin circular slices of blood sausage, or
morcilla
, served on a disc of olive-oil-fried brioche crouton cut to fit perfectly beneath it. He topped the dish with see-through ribbons of warm, seared rare beef, crowned with an aromatic baby-herbed salad with little bits of microfennel playing the role of agent provocateur. A scoop of foie gras ice cream rounded the whole plate off. It was breathtaking to gaze at, and I could have stopped right there. But prudence ruled the day and I began to eat the stack of the beef “sandwich,” scooping small espresso spoons of the foie gras ice cream onto each bite. Insanely good, and one of my alltime top twenty favorite dishes. I finished with some cheese and fruit and strolled out of the restaurant on a cloud.

How I had an appetite after I left is beyond me. However, all afternoon and evening long I managed to partake in a semi-traditional tapas crawl, stopping in every appealing tapas bar I could find, sampling small plates of
angulas
(baby eels),
pescaderos
(tiny sardines), salchichon sausage, Iberico dried cured ham, bouqerones, griddled razor clams, and dozens of other edible delights. It is often joked that Madrid’s restaurants outnumber the local populace by about three to one, and Spaniards take advantage of that fact every few hours. They not only eat—they enjoy food. And there is a big difference. Business or social conversation is an excuse for snacking, and Spaniards have no issue in partaking in a leisurely lunch or eating well into the night, often not even starting dinner until 10
P.M
. Remember, Spain is the culture that gave us tapas in the first place. There are a few ideas as to how this small-plate style of eating came to be. Some people will tell you it comes from farmworkers needing small bits of food to hold them over until the day’s main meal was served. Others claim
a Spanish king came up with the concept. By law, every drink needed to be served with a bit of food to soak up the alcohol in order to sober up the wine-guzzling workforce. In any case, it’s a brilliant idea that still shapes the local and global food scene. Frankly, I find tapas outside of Spain one of the most tiring of food trends. The whole small-plate phenomenon is an overused food cliché that has spread to nearly every corner of the world. It’s like Top 40 radio; the song is catchy, the hook is good, but when you hear it every hour on the hour it makes your head spin and you quickly tire of the song you fell in love with, killed by overexposure. But in Spain, tapas just sprouted organically. It’s a grazing culture: You eat a wonderful breakfast and spend an hour or two enjoying a leisurely lunch. Midafternoon, you might stop at a ham shop before heading home after a day of work. From 7
P.M
. until 10, you eat tapas and drink with your friends, hopping from bar to bar, finally ending your evening in a restaurant. It almost seems like work and sleep are the two things that break up one big meal. Suffice to say, Spain is my kind of place.

My tapas crawl that evening ended at the Museo del Jamón, a small chain of ham restaurants that are really cathedrals of worship for eaters like myself. The name roughly translates in the most dorky of ways as “the museum of ham.” But the idea that great cured meats are under glass and safely away from overeager mouths, accessed only by an audio tour headset, is far from the case. Stroll into the store and all around you are belly-button-high marble counters behind which are more types of cured sausages, cured meats, meat salads, and traditional salume-style fare than you’ve ever seen in your life, hundreds and hundreds of varieties. Of course, they offer the all-star Iberico dried and cured hams as well as Serrano hams, Spain’s version of prosciutto. Their Bellota ham was arguably the finest cured ham I had ever eaten; you could taste the wild-pig goodness, the acorn and hazelnut diet, the delicate salting and air drying, and the thin yellow fat streaked through the meat and rimming the edges of each slice tasted
almost as divinely musty as the season’s first truffle. And at over $100 a pound, it better be good! I have often wondered why a Museo del Jamón doesn’t exist in New York. No one can resist the siren song of salchichon and cured ham of such high quality. Back home, the best Iberico, black-footed pig legs sell in some stores for hundreds of dollars a pound. And you have to buy a considerable amount in a store, or pay the markup to eat it in a restaurant, but at the Museo, if you’re a pork junkie like I am, you create your own tasting experience. Point at five or six items in the deli case and ask for two slices of each. You can pay by the gram if you like. They’ll gladly place your selections on a piece of a brown butcher paper and plunk it down in front of you at the counter. There are no chairs, just a bar with a foot railing you can lean up against. You eat some smoked and cured pork, some cheese, some olives, and some insanely fresh crusty bread and drink some inexpensive wine, beer, or orange juice. I know OJ isn’t the beverage that first comes to mind when you think of ham, but the sweet, slightly sour, seasonal Spanish orange juice freshly squeezed one glass at a time is my beverage of choice here. It cuts through that fatty, porky goodness like a bunker-buster missile. That salty, smoky pork flavor paired with oranges just drives me crazy. It’s like chocolate-chip cookies and milk. I’m not too proud to admit that I fed my pork jones at Museo del Jamón almost every single day I was in the city. Don’t judge me! You would do the same thing.

So after stuffing my face for a couple of days, including a
percebes
(goose-neck barnacles) pig-out of Roman proportions at La Trainera, the best traditional seafood restaurant in Madrid, I’d sufficiently worked up the stamina to eat at Casa Botin. According to the
Guinness Book of World Records
, Casa Botin is the oldest restaurant in the world. The restaurant is scenically located on a narrow, cobblestone street about a block off the Plaza Mayor, which was the site of the heretical trials and subsequent witch burnings during the Spanish Inquisition. Botin cooks everything over wood in the same stoves and oven that have been pumping out suckling
pigs and lambs every day since 1725. The ancient structure houses many small dining rooms, and shows its age with its tilted stairs, antique window casements, servers who look pulled right out of central casting, and ecstatic customers slurping down bowls of the classics: squid braised in its own ink and stewed partridge with polenta.

I spent most of my morning in the granite-floored kitchen, piling logs into the stove and cooking with the Botin staff, none of whom is younger than sixty. Hanging out in the kitchen has its perks. I scarfed down as much pig as I could handle, as well as plenty of
angulas
, freshly plucked at night as they make their way up from the Sargasso Sea. The kitchen prepares the delicacy using a simple glazed clay pot about five inches wide, heated to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it’s hot enough, they add olive oil, garlic, and a single dried hot chili. Next, they dump four or five tablespoons of these baby eels, which look a lot like vermicelli noodle pieces with eyes, into the pot and swirl it around with a wooden fork. By the time it comes to your table, they are cooked. An order costs up to $150, but it’s a unique dish you’re not going to find anywhere else. It’s quite a treat.

After spending some quality time in the kitchen, I headed to a table to enjoy my whole suckling pig. More baby pigs, which are usually under a month old or weigh less than seven pounds, are consumed in Spain than in any other place in the world. The staff there was quite proud of me, looking on as I pried open the skull and made quick work of the ears, snout, cheeks, and brains, saving the tongue for last. Everybody in Spain eats this way, so I wasn’t the only one in the dining room getting up to my elbows in pig head. And this wasn’t my first trip to Botin, either. In the mid-1970s I went to Spain with my dad and our friends the Vales, with whom we traveled around the world on a regular basis. This meal at Botin was exactly the same as the one I ate there nearly forty years ago, except a little more expensive. Growing up in a family that placed a premium on collecting the most honest and authentic
food experiences we could muster certainly made me the globetrotting immersionist that I am. Eat first, ask questions later.

I was in town only a few days, so in true Spanish fashion, I headed to La Bola for a second lunch. La Bola isn’t as old as Botin, but it’s been open since the early nineteenth century. As I walked through its door, admiring the gorgeous woodwork and old-world leaded windows, I imagined what Madrid must have looked like 200 years ago. The city used to be filled with taverns, somewhere in the range of eight or nine hundred. Today, they’re a culturally endangered species. Only sixty or seventy taverns remain, which is very sad. La Bola boasts an all-female kitchen, with a median age of seventy years. Everybody, and I mean everybody, heads there for one reason only: the legendary
cocido madrileño
.

Cocido madrileño is a very rich dish, and it makes for a one-pot progressive meal that every braised-food junkie needs to check out. The women start with a large decorative but highly functional clay pot, which resembles a flower pitcher, and fill it with lamb, pork, poultry, sausage, vegetables, and chickpeas, topping it off with a homemade broth that in and of itself makes a stunning restorative. They stack these pitchers upright, allowing them to essentially percolate on a wood-burning stove for hours. Once you order your cocido, a server takes the pitcher directly from the kitchen to your table, pouring the broth into a bowl filled with cooked fideos, thin Spanish egg noodles a little bit thicker than angel-hair pasta. It makes a lovely soup, and you eat that part of the dish first. When you’ve finished your soup, they dump the smoked meats and chickpeas onto the plate, serving it with small pots of sea salt, pickled hot peppers, and a puree of smoked and fresh peppers as condiments. Add the baskets of crusty bread to the table and you have a meal of legendary proportions.

After a midafternoon siesta (thank God for that traditional resting period), I went back to the streets for another tapas crawl with some friends.

…

We ended up spending the better part of the night at a restaurant that moved me like no other I’ve visited before or since. It was a crumbling establishment named Taberna Antonio Sánchez, after the son of the bullfighter who started the restaurant in 1830. Since opening nearly two centuries ago, the place has been owned by a succession of bullfighters, passed down from one to the other like a family heirloom. Today, the tavern lies in the hands of a seventy-year-old former bullfighter named Paco. Located near the Plaza de las Cortes & Huertas, at number 13 Mesón de Parades, this classic
taberna
is chock-full of bullfighting memorabilia, including the stuffed head of the animal that gored the young Sánchez.

Paco toured me around the tavern, pointing out the tables where famous writers like Ernest Hemingway came to eat, drink, and write late into the evening. The decor in this place is all original-tables, chairs, and even the wineglasses. They still use the ancient dumbwaiters, and house the kegs where they still store and serve the famous Valdepenas wine the taberna was renowned for. Paco led me by hand to the dark paneled walls where three unique works by the famed Spanish artist Zuloaga still hang. Zuloaga had his last public exhibition in this restaurant.

Nothing has really changed over the years in this historical Madrilenian tavern; the zinc countertops on the bars are still in use, photographs of old-time bullfighters like the legendary Frascuelo or Lagartijo still hang on the walls. The marble pedestal tables still are in use, the same tables where the authors of the Generation of ’98—the group of creative writers born in the 1870s, known best for their criticism of the Spanish literary and educational establishments and whose major works fall in the two decades after 1898—argued late into the night. There are still the crumbling old posters advertising “torrijas” for 15 cents or warning customers that spitting on the floor is forbidden. The restaurant
was most famously used as the setting for a scene in Pedro Almodóvar’s film
The Flower of My Secret
.