Our best meal in Andalucía was a lunch in Cádiz at a pretty Paris-bistro-style restaurant named La Parisien with its terrace flooding out onto the pint-sized Plaza de San Francisco. Located in a slightly less touristy area of the historical center, the plaza offers a great place to sit and admire the 16th century San Francisco…
We left the rincón gastronómico area of the Mercado Central de Abastos satisfied but sure that the snacking portion of our culinary journey had come to an end. It was time to find a nice plaza and a restaurant terrace to sit in, with proper wine service and more substantial plates to share. It was, after all,…
On a recent excursion to Priorat wine country I acted the tour guide for my mother and my man. I lead them to the little cottage in the mountains of Montsant, which I had called home for close to six months. We walked through the town of Poboleda and had a beer on the terrace of ye olde La Venta. I…
We arrived in Cádiz after a 3-hour train ride from Córdoba, our heads still spinning from the rum garrafones of the night before and both of us hungry, especially hungry for something salty and fried. It was already 12:30 in the afternoon and all we had eaten that day (at the train station in Córdoba) was a…
We arrived in the super-Catholic Spanish city of Córdoba at 3 p.m. on Good Friday, the last day of the very somber Semana Santa (Holy Week), and braced ourselves for a long night of religious processions. The streets were packed with terrifying Nazarenos, anonymous under their cone-shaped head gear, carrying large candles, people everywhere declaring their…
It’s gotten cold up in the mountains of the Priorat as of late. While I sit in my brightly lit and climate-controlled Barcelona apartment my colleagues gather dry wood in early afternoon darkness, twigs with which to make a fire, not recreationally. There’s no marshmallows or campsite stories going around. It’s just a part of the routine. I…
Ask me about Bar Cañete and I’ll give you two thumbs up. Yes. Go there. Why? Because the food is local and traditional, yet playful and fun. The ingredients are fresh and proudly representative of the region, with a notable prominence of sardines, anchovies and acorn-fed Iberian piggy parts splattered all over the menu. There’s classic laid-back pica-pica favorites like croquetas…
There is a 2 block x 3 block area in the southeast corner of Gràcia that hosts a large portion of my favorite Barcelona eat and drink joints, and I´ve been lucky enough to have lived just around the corner from most of them since April of last year. On Bonavista I love Bodega Bonavista for their…
Since moving from Gótico to Gràcia I’ve come to appreciate more strongly the neighborhoods on the other side of Eixample. What once represented to me a type of palm tree lined Disney World in which I would lie awake until 4 a.m. waiting for the rumble of inebriated tourists to cease is now something more beautiful. I descend for special occasions…
empanada /ˌɛmpəˈnɑːdə/ : a Spanish or Latin American pastry turnover filled with a variety of savoury ingredients and baked or fried. Spanish, feminine past participle (used as a noun) of empanar ‘roll in pastry’, based on Latin panis ‘bread’. There were chapters in my life during which I pretty much depended on them for sustenance. I first…
That Best Bite 