Culinary Adventures

I had some tremendous meals in Barcelona, let me tell you about them:

Friday (13/8): After ambling around the Gothic district for a few hours, Lauriane and Elise broke off to meet a friend, leaving Dave, Ryan, and I to fend for ourselves for dinner. I checked my treasure map and found that La Lonja de Tapas (big props to Dot Kelleher) was right around the corner. Our palates had no idea what was about to hit them. My first night, I had some tapas at a bar near Las Ramblas and overpaid for what I later learned were pretty subpar tapas. Dave and Ryan had a similar experience in their first day and, after a later experience never to be described, we vowed never to eat anywhere near Las Ramblas – the restaurants know they will be getting tourist customers who will eat there once and move on, the food is terrible and expensive, not too mention the obnoxious street vendors interrupting your meal.

Moving on, we find a major intersection and track down La Lonja de Tapas, which just looks like any old hole-in-the-wall restaurant. However, once you head in to use el baño, the inside has the décor of a 5-star restaurant. We take seats at a table outside and are given a saliva-inducing menu. For the first round, Ryan orders a goat cheese and tomato salad and Dave orders meatballs. I was a little incredulous that one would order meatballs at a classy restaurant in Barcelona, but the dish quickly arrives and exposing my misguided notions. The meatballs are breaded and topped with an exquisite sauce; these are not meatballs, American staple/comfort food, this are Gourmet Meatballs. Touché Dave. As soon as we finish the first course, our plates are replaced by the main meal: Dave gets chicken skewers marinated in soy sauce and sesame seeds, Ryan has an amazing diced salmon dish seasoned in dill and sesame, and I have a grilled steak topped with duck foie gras. The foie gras just melts in my mouth while I chew on the well-cooked steak. Each stolen bite of Ryan’s salmon forces me to drop my fork and knife and savor the moment before starting the next delectable taste.

We leave the table perfectly sated. This was the lightest of our fantastic meals, which is probably for the best, considering our meal the next night.

Saturday (14/8): Ryan and I had heard of a local delicacy called paella and we vowed to find out exactly what that was. Fortunately, I had received a primo recommendation by Alex Baddock, to go to La Fonda. Again, from the outside it just looked like a little restaurant on the corner, but when we enter it appears to be a two-story eating palace. It was a bit empty, but we realized that 19:30 (7:30PM for y’all in the States) is a little early for dinner in Barcelona.

We literally have no idea what paella is, so we order appetizers figuring that the Spanish are staying true to their tapa-sized portions. Our starters are all larger than we expected: Dave’s macaroni with Bolognese sauce alone was as filling as the meal the night before (so Ryan and I helped him out), Ryan had a large-yet-intricate salad, and I had a stellar gazpacho (I polished off the bowl with my bread to get every last drop). I also had my first real sangria in Spain. Dave and Ryan are sober, so I ordered the smallest quantity I could – a ½ liter pitcher full of fruit, rose wine, and a hard liquor of some sort (presumably brandy?). Before it came out, we debated how large we thought our 3-person paella would be. Were the appetizers large because paella is small or would the entrée be proportionally larger than the appetizer like at most restaurants?

When the paella pan (literally a steel pan) took up the vast majority of our table, we had our answer. A rice base was filled with mussels, squid, fully shelled prawn, as well as bits of sausage, beef, and pork. Dave didn’t want any mussels, so Ryan and I divided those up; they didn’t look like they had any sauce, but they were delicious, I have no idea what they did to them. Turns out prawn is much like miniature lobsters, so I gave a lesson in getting the meat out of the torso. Everything mixed with the rice, which was friggin’ good, but so filling compared to every other meal we had in Spain thus far. Dave and Ryan threw in the towel heading into the fourth quarter of the dish. Fueled by my sangria, I channeled my inner Joey Chestnut (or Kobayashi, whoever eats paella better) to clean that pan off. Honest to goodness, I wasn’t hungry until 14:30 the next day. We weren’t the least bit surprised that La Fonda was packed with a line stretching down the street when we left. I’ve never had another paella to compare this to, but I have a hunch this was the good stuff. I can’t imagine eating it anywhere else.

Just when we thought we reached the summit of Barcelona culinary greatness, we found an entirely new plateau of excellence the next night.

Sunday (15/8): This is meal/adventure is so epic I have to preface it by introducing the characters involved:

Dave and Ryan: As individuals, they are funny, witty, smart gentlemen. But together, they are a force to be reckoned with. Their personalities and opinions clash and complement for clever banter, funny stories, and well-taken jabs all around. Dave is a health-minded individual looking to major in economics at UCLA and Ryan is chasing his life dream of becoming a professional photographer. However, the one subject they are most passionate about is food. They breakdown and analyze food with the same intensity that I reserve for sports (that's a serious compliment). I don't watch the Food Network or food shows anywhere, but if they were to start a culinary critique show, I would watch that every night. And if they need someone to find restaurants to eat at in cities around the world (and polish off any dish they don't finish), I would do that in a heartbeat - for free. I never thought I'd ever get along with anyone from Los Angeles, now I've met two and they're convincing me to even come out and visit (and it's working).

Mira: A girl we met on Saturday, who is on the craziest journey of anyone I've ever heard of (perhaps including Bilbo Baggins). Once working in San Francisco's financial district, she decided in a single day to travel Europe for 6 weeks... taking off five days later. Two-and-a-half months later, she's still overseas with no return in sight. She's been to dozens (exaggeration?) of cities in a myriad of countries and having incredible experiences at every stop. After hearing us rave about our last two dinners, she decided to come along for our third and greatest excursion.

The Adventure: What ensued played out like an episode of Seinfeld (with Dave/Ryan as Jerry/George [not sure which is which], Mira as Elaine, and me as Kramer [I'll take it]). We began by setting off for a tapas place called Txapela (which I still have no idea how to pronounce) around 9 o'clock. It was listed as across the street from the Pg de Gracia metro station, but finding which direction across puzzled us. After, no joke, half an hour of searching and a couple of useless directions by local restaurant owners - who didn't even know which road they were on, what? - we ran into a man with many words about Txapela. I don't speak Spanish, which is really crucial in Spain it turns out, but Mira is fluent and Dave can get by, so they did the interpreting. He believed that Txapela was just a tourist place with expensive low quality tapas, but that there was another place seven streets up and four streets over with far superior tapas. Not knowing what to believe and not wanting to give up on Txapela, we went around the corner to find our destination closed, so we decided to follow the stranger's advice.

Seven streets up and four streets over, we were completely lost in an unknown (but beautiful) neighborhood, probably around 10:30 or so. Having had a bite at 7, I was doing fine, but Dave and Ryan were suffering. Mira goes inside a restaurant and asks where to find The Place, the owner says, "two streets down on the left." We walk two streets down, look around, and things don't look open. We ask another local restaurant owner, his reply "two streets down." At this point, we start to get grim, wondering if we were going to get tapas or our kidneys removed. Two streets later, we ask again, they say to go left... two streets down.

Two more streets down and we are in a neighborhood I recognize! I had wandered in L'Exiample after Sagrada Familia to go to a restaurant called Paco Meralgo (a 7-star suggestion by Kip Lange), but didn't stay because there was a 30 minute wait (for one person for lunch) and I was ravenous. We decide to go to The Place or Paco Meralgo, whichever shows up first. Using my map, we stumble around aimlessly for another 10 or 15 minutes. Dave suggests we eat Baby Ruths for dinner from the 7-11-esque convenience store we pass; we consider it. We get to the end of a street and are exhausting fast, when Ryan yells "THAT'S IT!" pointing down the road. He's right, Paco Meralgo stood before us, glowing like a heavenly beacon in the middle of the dark residential neighborhood.

There's a 15 minute wait, which we gladly accept, knowing that if there's a 15 minute wait at 11:30, it has to be good. There are no words to properly describe the experience that follows. And, while I regret not bringing a camera to document the event, the photos wouldn't have done it justice.

Our waiter was the first good one we had in Catalonia; he starts out by making a joke and we immediately like him. At first glimpse at the menu, Dave and Mira realize that this is The Place that The Stranger recommended (from some mixture of words they hadn’t recognized earlier). Dave and Ryan know exactly what they're ordering; Mira and I are overcome by the choices and have the Good Waiter order for us.

First course: a succulent raw tuna for Mira and I, a thinner more flavorful tuna Carpaccio for Ryan, and “La Bomba” meatballs for Dave. Our tuna was great for sinking teeth into and I savored every bite. Ryan’s tuna had such flavor that it worked as a perfect alternative to our dish. Dave’s meatballs lived up to their name, and he even made a face one rarely sees outside of the bedroom, of pure unadulterated ecstasy (apparently they were burning his mouth, but he didn’t want to spit them out or douse them with water so he made an O-face through the pain).

Second dish: Dave had steak sautéed in sliced garlic, Ryan had seasoned red peppers, and Mira and I had a huge seafood platter (which we shared with the LA duo). Dave’s steak was spectacular, as were Ryan’s peppers (which may have been shishito peppers, not sure). But I still dream about the seafood platter we ate, even a week later. The clams, like the mussels the night before, didn’t look specially seasoned in any way, but were at least as delicious (and there were more of them, which doesn’t hurt). The squid looked like it had eyeballs or something looking at us, but I think they were just the suckers on the tentacles – I really have no idea – but those are a vivid part of my dreams. They weren’t fried like most calamari I’ve had, just cooked to perfection. And the prawn! Oh the prawn! Seriously, the prawn were bigger with more spices than the night before… it was as if this seafood platter took our paella as a challenge to their delectable supremacy and surpassed it in every category. There were also these longish shells filled with a squidlike fish; no idea what it was, but it was magnifico! Ryan also got a veal to finish off the second round, but I was already thinking dessert (it looked on par with the rest of the meal though).

Dessert: Dave and Ryan got a Catalan Crème Bruleé, which is slightly gooier than its French cousin and almost as wonderful. The Good Waiter ordered Mira and I something awesome, I forget the exact name. It was this French toast, but almost more fried so it was very crunchy and sweet topped with freaking incredible ice cream. Both were gone within moments of hitting the table.

The tremendous atmosphere of the restaurant, propelled by the Good Waiter, fantastic company, and brilliant food makes this a top 5 meal of my lifetime for sure. I couldn’t even write this post when I was hungry because it seemed like too much of a tease to myself. We’d tell people at the hostel about our meals and they were stupefied by how well we were eating. And we could only shake our heads when they told us about the tapas they had on Las Ramblas that evening…

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Time started sprinting all of a sudden… here’s some quick notes

·         On my last day in Barcelona, I sunbathed. Naked. Every now and then you’ve gotta shed the Puritan values, drop your pants, and lose your tan lines. When’s the next time I get to do that?

·         I got into Munich and immediately had a pork knuckle and a Bavarian beer. I loved the food in Barca, but the pork knuckle filled me up as much as anything aside from the paella. And don’t get me started on the difference between the Spanish beer (only Estrella basically) and any beer in Munich. I came down with a cold and I’m blaming it on too long without soccer or basketball and too much Estrella – I’m never drinking that swill again (until I go back).

·         Matthias and I stayed at his friend Carlo Studtmann’s place. I couldn’t have asked for a better host. He was in the middle of exams, but still took the time to settle me in, show me around, tell me where to go, and even organize my trips. A real class act. And his friends took good care of me at the beer gardens. My only wish is that the time could’ve stretched longer.

·         Also Matt and I rode bikes over to the BMW Museum. His cars are my sports, so he proved to be a great tour guide as expected. What I didn’t expect was to re-fall in love with motorcycles. The K1300 is one of the best motorcycles in the world and it can be bought in Germany for €13,000! The dealer even said it’s probably cheaper in $’s in the US than it is in €’s out here. One of the best motorcycles in the world or a really crappy car for the same price… and the motorcycle will have better gas milage… hmmmmm. Also, I could just feel the power in the bike when I got on it and just got this feeling, like I need to tame it. Maybe I’ll get a license out in Shanghai (I’m just kidding mom [or am I?])

·         I literally had the worst travel day in the history of travel days. I set off to get to the airport at 8:00 for a 13:30 flight and my train was delayed by 3 hours at the first station. Then it didn’t go to the right place so I had to transfer and I missed my flight. Re-booked and had to take 3 flights instead of one direct flight. Then they lost one of my bags… which they fortunately found about 30 minutes later. I know I’m an optimist when I’ve had the past two days I’ve had and think, “if I only have to do this once every 23 years, I should be in good shape.”

·         Now I’m sitting in my hotel in Shanghai, the skyline is lit up a mile away out our window. This is ridiculous, I can’t wait to get started.