Eating Around Madrid: Tastes of the New Spanish Cuisine
By Robert McGarvey
Fifteen years ago, after my first trip to Madrid, if you had asked me about Spanish food I would have said it’s fine if you like ham and cheese and bread with olives, the occasional anchovy, and some mildly potable vino tinto.
I would not have mentioned paella because what I ate in Madrid was profoundly mediocre.
Fast forward and everything is different today. Well, the restaurant paella still mainly is mediocre (just as spaghetti and meat balls in most north Jersey eateries is a pile of bland. Both probably are at their best in home cooking) but today’s Madrid is a gourmet’s delight because now there is so much diversity and a lot of it is tasty indeed. The onetime rigid Spanish hegemony has been shattered. A new culinary standard is taking shape and some of this comida Nueva is good indeed.
Start with La Canibal, an extraordinary wine bar where a coravin preservation system allows pours of glasses of very good wines at appropriate prices and there are suitable foods to pair. I officially take back my comment on the mediocrity of Spanish wine. We also had fried squash blossoms – the only time in memory that I’ve enjoyed this dish that has always before looked better than it ate. Here the good wines had a match with the food. The tab was around $60 for a couple pours of wine and the blossoms but everything about this place is right and so is the price.
Next is Chuka Ramen Bar where, yes, a good bowl of ramen is to be had. We also had a Korean fried chicken bao bun and shrimp wonton dumplings. The m.o. here is to deliver a mash up of Japanese and Chinese and a little Korean and it succeeds at about $50 for that lunch for two in a cozy restaurant a few hundred meters from the Prado. The bao bun alone is worth a stop – it’s 10 euros and the portion is generous.
Time for small bites at Comparte Bistro where the food is prepared with French techniques using mostly Spanish ingredients. A pat of butter even made an appearance on the table, the first I’d seen in three weeks of eating around Madrid. My advice: order the tasting menu, 57 euros for nine courses that included everything from vegetables and fish to steak in a mole and chocolate drizzled with olive oil. It’s mainly one or two bites of food per course, it’s not a belt busting chef’s table but rather a persuasive display of cooking talent and imagination. The tab for two including a good bottle of white from Bierzo and espressos: 159.70 euros.
And then we ate at Kuoco where we ordered the nine course tasting menu – called taste the world- and upgraded with an optional starter. Every dish was meant to be eaten as a single bite and along the way we ate shellfish, fish, duck, steak, ravioli, and in each case the flavorings were imaginative and probably nothing you’d had before. Consider the “pre dessert” which is a yuzu frozen tablet. You don’t know what that could possibly taste like? Isn’t that the point. The meal, by the way, took two and a quarter hours. Cost with a modest bottle of bierzo tinto was 227 euros for two.
About now you hunger for old Madrid. So do I (and the photo below is taken at an old restaurant in Ávila Spain where there also are good eats to be found). Probably my personal favorite in Madrid is La Sanabresa, an old time eatery that serves up home cooking and for around $3O I got a good steak with potatoes, a salad and a little cake. Nothing fancy about La Sanabresa but it has authenticity and the food is great at the price. No reservations, it’s first come, first served and the others wait in line. We went around 3 pm and there was no line. Your luck may vary. Oh, the restaurant is on Calle amor de dios – god’s love.
But before you head to La Sanabresa, you might pop into Taberna La Concha where my strong advice is to order the house vermouth cocktail, 3.5 euros, which completely changed my mind about sweet vermouth. This is a cocktail that works. Don’t stop at one, have two – and enjoy the clever free tapas. I remember a brilliant little pile of potato chips topped with a delicious anchovy sliver. But stop at two so you can make the one kilometer walk over to La Sanabresa.
That doubleheader is about as old Madrid as it gets but it shows there remains charm and value in that old. But today’s Madrid is more fun – and better tasting – with the new players on the scene. Enjoy both. Buen provecho.
Es verdad, restaurante Sanabresa, buenissimo! I am surmising you arrived there at Pza Anton Martin metro stop and went up C/ Amor de Dios from C/ Atocha. If you go further in same direction on Amor de Dios, you get to C/Huertas. Take a left there and continue just a little ways up Huertas to the corner of Huertas and C/ del Principe (3rd street from Amor de Dios) where there is a restaurant featuring Murcian cuisine, my and my wife’s favorite in Madrid (we live about half the time in Murcia, so of course). I recommend the dorada a la sal, ensalada murciana, and the berenjenas andaluz. If you have room for dessert, paparajotes are quite nice. They are lemon leaves dipped in a mildly sweetened batter and deep fried, usually sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. The first visit, we didn’t know quite how to handle them; I might have tried to eat the leaf and all, but Juan, our favorite waiter, now for 20 years or nearly, showed me that one grasps the stem and pulls the leaf out from the shell of batter. For all I know, citrus leaves might be indigestible, so if you go and try the paparajotes, display your savoir faire by not eating the leaf. It’s only there to impart a subtle lemony aroma. The other main course specialty, from which the restaurant gets its name, are the calderos, which somewhat resemble a paella meloso or caldoso; they are cooked, usualy with some seafood in a kettle (caldero) and I like them, but they are too much for me and my wife doesn’t eat much rice so we rarely order the caldero. Good hunting, señor.