I really enjoy spending my Sundays hiking to small, very very old towns in the mountains of Catalunya. It´s a great way to burn calories, be under the sun and to collect Instagram snaps of plazas that look like they were taken in the 16th century. These towns are usually pretty similar: they each have…
I only learned about Belle Isle Seafood Restaurant a few years ago, only a few years after having spent almost three years living a ten minute walk from it, and a ten minute walk from not much else. I spent three years commuting daily for an hour from East Boston to Cambridge, from Orient Heights…
As the weather cools and days become shorter our priorities begin to change too. We bid adieu to those light dinners on a terrace, those chilled boquerones en vinagre, those carefree beers with olives and cigarettes. We embrace instead the comforts of home: blankets, socks and sweaters, the joy of being inside where it’s warm and soft…
“It’s our hamburger. It’s small and it’s wet,” said my new Turkish friend. We had spent the day roaming the narrow alleys of Kadıköy Market on the Asian side of Istanbul, and I had stuffed my face with room temperature street mussels, minced meat flatbreads and a sketchy looking sandwich made with frozen fish from Norway. I had a…
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 was our first getaway together from Barcelona; a two-hour drive up the coast to the border and an hour more upward and inward into France. He had kept our destination a secret until we rolled into the quaint town of Carcassonne, passing the beautifully lit Château Comtal en route to our inn. As I peered through the…
That Best Bite 