Random thoughts on Spanish bread

I'm not much of a bread eater. Not because I don't like it. For most of the past decade I've tried to avoid notorious allergy triggers such as wheat, dairy, sugar and alcohol (I know, I know).

In Spain, all rules were tossed aside, and I really indulged, enjoying every bite.


It may be impossible to get a bad -- or even ordinary -- piece of bread in Spain. From crispy-crusted, feather-light baguette-style loaves to long, seeded whole-wheat rolls to a giant savory fruit-and-nut concoction that must have weighed more than a kilo from the international Le Pain Quotidien franchise at Plaza Mayor, Iberian bread is the stuff of dreams.

Although I never eat sandwiches at home, in Spain it seemed like no day was complete without a bocadillo -- a crusty roll layered with garlicky fried calamari or chewy sliced jamon or rich manchego cheese or fragrant oil-packed tuna or spicy chorizo or cozy tortilla Espanola. Every tapas bar and most restaurants and bakeries sell bocadillos, usually for just a few Euros. Eat in or take out, strolling and enjoying the street musicians as you snack.

Whether filled, buttered, dipped in rich green olive oil, rubbed with tomatoes and garlic or absolutely plain, the breads of Spain were a daily delight.

Shake Shack, Madison Square Park

This popular burger joint is a rainy day fave for me, if I'm working in the neighborhood. Rainy day = shorter line. The food is good, but not so good that I would stand in line for an hour.

I like the 'shroom burger, a pair of grilled portobellos fused together with an abundance of melted cheese, topped with lettuce and tomato on a fresh, good-quality bun. It's always a bit of a surprise to bite into the crisp and juicy 'shrooms and discover the creamy muenster and sharp cheddar center.

The fries are excellent, they taste as if they've never seen the inside of a freezer. The cheeseburger is good, but not my first choice. I wouldn't stand in line for it.

Even when there's no queue, the Shake Shack isn't fast food -- everything is prepared to order so it can take 15 minutes for your meal to come out.

Eating at the nearby tables or benches in Madison Square Park is remarkably pleasant. Or get the food to go, eat at your desk and risk the envy of everyone else in the office.

Get there early to avoid the wait, or keep an eye on the website's Shack Cam.

Falafel Hut, Montclair, NJ

Went here with a group after hearing Diane Moser play the music of Mary Lou Williams, great stuff.

The Falafel Hut was closing when we got there. But the young man whom the Grumpy Diner once referred to as "the Enigma Machine" has connections in higher places. The restaurant stayed open an extra hour to accommodate us.

We ordered the Hut Big Combo (chicken kabab, beef kabab, shawrma, kofta), the Hut Sampler (hummus, tabouli, falafel, stuffed grape leaves, baba ganoush), and a salad. I have a feeling they may have added a few extra little things, these huge, delicious and varied dishes would have fed an army.

I love the Mediterranean thing, a dozen or more dishes to try, lots of garnishes and endless combinations: hot and crunchy meet cool and smooth on chewy and warm. Yum!

Isle Thai revisited

I've been avoiding this Bleeker Street Thai restaurant for well over a year because of the noise factor, which I reported on a while back.

We were looking for a hang after after a reading by author Kirpal Gordon from his new book, Ghost and Ganga, accompanied by a band led by bari saxophonist Claire Daly.

After one of us stuck a head into to the door to ensure that the music was at a background level, the Isle staff quickly and cheerfully accommodated a reservationless group of 11 people and an upright bass.

The food was very good, the service was better than I remember, the bill was reasonable and the conversation was excellent.

Isle Thai is back on my list.

Musings on paella

I love the idea of paella, but the reality leaves me cold. How can something that involves several of my favorite things (rice! saffron! seafood!) be so blah and uninteresting, kind of a Seafood Helper? It seems like the seafood is usually overcooked, the rice somewhat undercooked and the whole dish rather bland and underspiced.

Maybe I never had well-executed paella. Maybe I had to eat it in its native land, where it's practically the national dish. With my hopes high, I had paella three times in Spain.

The first was part of the menu del dia at a little cafe near the Plaza Mayor, run by a guy named Alberto. Rating: eh. Our friend the Bill-der finished it for me. Overall, the meal was ok, but the most exciting part of dining at Alberto's was when the light in the basement bathroom went out -- it was really, really dark, visions of horror movies danced through my head. I made my way upstairs safely, before a crazed, cleaver-wielding cook punished me for not cleaning my plate.

The second time was at Barajas Airport while waiting for our flight to Bilbao. It was an act of sheer optimism to even consider getting paella at an airport cafeteria. I'd mentally nixed the idea, then said "paella," when I meant to say "albondigas." It was a huge portion and better than in the cafe, but more expensive. It was one of our most expensive meals in Spain, more than Casa Mingo or Cafe Gijon, which ranked way higher in every way. Bill-der finished that paella, too.

Luis, from whom we rented our cozy apartment in Barcelona, recommended eating at Barceloneta, which he credits with serving some of the best paella in the area. We headed over there on our last day in town and had a luxurious, leisurely lunch, with a view of the marina, the steeples of la Sagrada Familia, and most of Barcelona.

We started with tomato bread and a well-prepared calamari appetizer with aioli, accompanied by cava and agua minerale. The Grumpy Diner had grilled butifarra with two kinds of roasted peppers for his main course. This sausage is a mainstay of Catalan cooking, and it's easy to understand why. As soon as you taste it, you can imagine a lot of ways to prepare it.

And I ordered seafood paella with shrimp, clams, scungilli, langoustines and scallops. It was rich, redolent of saffron, but still not an earth-shaking experience. It was probably the best paella I've ever had. Bill-der wasn't there. I cleaned my plate.

But in spite of the luxe ingredients, even this paella felt like a cozy, down-home rice dish, not an elegant special-occasion meal. It's good, but what's the fuss? I feel like a heretic.

Dessert was the showstopper at Barceloneta: in my case, plum ice cream drizzled with armagnac, unbelievably luscious, sweet and smoky, hot and cold, a world of contrasts in every bite. The GD made a divine choice, crispy layers of pastry filled with a rich custard, topped with tiny, sweet, perfect strawberries sprinkled with powdered sugar, in a pool of creamy, delicate sauce.

But back to paella: Chef Jose Andres believes that paella should be cooking on every barbecue grill in America. Maybe it really is an at-home experience. Maybe this summer I can enlist the GD to join my quest to try cooking paella that will make the earth move, or at least do more than shrug.

Iridium, New York

Nobody goes to a jazz club to eat. There's that pesky minimum, which is easy to max out on a cocktail. But for nondrinkers and designated drivers, it can be very hard to order.

At Iridium last night, literally nothing on the menu appealed. My companion wanted triple chocolate cake and I advised him to make it a la mode, thus fulfilling both of our $10 minimums. However, the waitress told us food from the regular menu wasn't available, we could only order from the "late night" menu. Is there anywhere in this world where 7:30 is considered late night? Not even Disney World, says the Grumpy Diner.

We decided to split a burger, violating my rules about eating underground and eating ground meat, but so what. It arrived well after the music started, and rated an "eh," at best. It put the meat in mediocre, to steal a phrase from my pal Doc Habib, the Egyptologist from the Institute.

So during a sublime solo by pianist George Cables (is he capable of any other kind?), a waiter crouched by my companion's side to explain that the burger had been missing some of the promised toppings (no cheese, bacon, whatever). To make up for that lapse, the club wanted to treat us to coffee and dessert. Their peace offering? The chocolate cake that was the only thing we were interested in ordering in the first place!

The previous night, my friend who from this moment onward will be referred to here as "Bananas Foster," ordered the dessert of that name. She described it as a few hunks of battered, deep-fried bananas that brought to mind a plateful of deep-fried testicles. The dish had some tasty garnishes, which she enjoyed. "I ate everything but the testicles," Bananas Foster reported. She sent those wrinkled bits back to the kitchen practically intact.

Regardless of the vagaries of the kitchen and the waitstaff, we got what we came for: The Charles Tolliver band was slammin', and how could it not be with those great eccentric charts and soloists like Cables, Billy Harper, the mighty Bill Saxton, and my ol' fave Howard Johnson!

Ordering-wise, the smart move is probably to stick to water and just pay the minimum. Keep the focus on the music and skip the nonsense.

Dateline: Bilbao

I could have used two days in Bilbao, and I would have happily spent one of them without budging from our room in the Silken Gran Hotel Domine. We had a view of the Guggenheim from every part of the sleek, simply appointed room, including from the enormous bathtub. Between the beckoning bathtub and the amazing view, I didn't want to shut my eyes. I slept like Lazarus nevertheless.

We ordered coffee and hot chocolate as soon as we got up, and I spent at least a couple of hours just staring out the window. The strong coffee arrived with a pitcher of warm milk, for DIY cafe con leche. I blended it with the thick, rich, bittersweet chocolate, and gazed out the window. I could barely tear myself away from the view to write my morning pages.

Some of the lines of the titanium-sheathed roofscape mimic the curves in the roads swooping around the hills beyond the museum.





An outcropping of the facade is my favorite color, a shade of cobalt I call "Egyptian laundry detergent blue." Workers -- are they curators or gardeners? -- were reflowering Jeff Koons' terrier.









The museum interior has vaulting, arching shapes, catwalks and stairways and ramps that brought to mind Wright's Guggenheim in New York.








I was more interested in the architecture than in the collections, but I was attracted to the Serras as never before. Entering the curving, embracing structures was like riding a horse into a canyon, not sure what you're going to find inside, a feeling of anticipation with a touch of wariness. The colors of the metal were amazing. There was a lot to see in the discolorations and striations, whole stories told by huge pieces of dull steel.

But what did we eat? The guidebooks, which we considered totally off the mark as to what there is to see and do in Bilbao, all strongly recommended the museum cafe. The pasta salad we had there was not just the worst meal we had in Spain, it was the worst meal we've had in memory: Several pieces of pasta, ham, cheese and eggs decorating a bowl of slimy greens. Two of us shared the salad and didn't come close to finishing it. Gross.


After we checked into our hotel the night before, we wandered around downtown and went to a couple of tapas places that I enjoyed very much: cheese, olives, tortilla Espanola, bread, pintxos (tasty combinations on toothpicks such as anchovies or sardines with olives, tiny onions, mild chilis and the like). Tapas meals are like what I call a "sneaker dinner": you drop in somewhere, have a drink and something to eat, chat, walk down the street and do it again. Repeat as desired.

We finished our visit to Bilbao with a couple of bocadillos at the absolutely gorgeous Calatrava-designed airport. They were very good. Thin slices of savory jamon serrano and manchego cheese on a light but crusty roll. I could eat that every day. Wait, I did.

Cafe Gijon, Madrid

We built up an appetite spending the morning wandering around Parque Retiro, exploring el Palacio Cristal, its impressive conservatory; enjoying a great cup of cafe con leche near a small lake with a monument to Alfonso XII (el Estanque de Retiro), checking out the Palacio Velazquez, named for its architect, Ricardo Velazquez Bosco; and dodging any number of reed players throughout the park playing the same awful version of "Autumn Leaves." (How could they all be so bad in exactly the same way? Maybe it's a union thing or a mafia thing.)


Walked through the Salamanca district,

window shopped for shoes on Calle de Agusto Figuroa, discussed lunch options and ended up at
Cafe Gijon.

The cafe, which has been around since 1888, has a nice, warm atmosphere. I think I would eat here a lot if I lived in Madrid. It's on the Paseo del Recoletos, near the Plaza Cibeles. Dozens of open-stall book sellers have set up shop along the tree-lined paseo, I like the atmosphere even if I can't read any of the Spanish-texted tomes.


We ordered from the menu del dia, a fixed-price, multi-course meal that restaurants in Spain seem to be required to offer at midday. Waiters seem to automatically bring the ala carte menu to the table, but will provide the menu del dia if you ask for it. Also known as "la comida," the menu del dia is often posted on a chalkboard outside restaurants and usually costs between 8 and 15 Euros for three courses, bread and a beverage.

Our first-course choices on this chilly Monday included smoky pimenton-seasoned gazpacho and roasted potatoes stuffed with rich bonita in a lovely, homey, golden sauce with subtle touches of saffron and curry. The soup was very good, but the potato dish was divine.

My main course consisted of two big pieces of flaky white fish in a saffron-scented sauce with mussels, shrimp and tiny clams. My companion had entrecot (a boneless rib steak), grilled medium with a side of grilled eggplant and fries. Multiple thumbs up. Mineral water, a flask of mild red wine and a basket of excellent crusty bread were included.

We finished the meal with quartered fresh pineapple, a nice balance to the previous rich courses. It was one of the best meals we had in Spain and felt like a real bargain at 12 Euros, service included.

I've already tried to replicate the potato dish at home, scooping out the center of raw Yukon gold potatoes, and filling them with a light stuffing of bonito, paquillo peppers, onion and parsley. I clustered the potatoes in a baking dish, added an inch or two of stock and baked them in the oven for an hour or so. When they were tender I seasoned the stock and thickened it a bit. Very nice.

Cafe Ronda, Ronda de Toledo, Madrid

El Rastro, held every Sunday in Madrid's La Latina/Lavapies districts, is supposed to be the largest flea market in Europe. The market goes on for blocks and blocks, with lots of old and new merchandise: vintage hardware and toys, wind-up phonographs, furniture, paintings and prints, T-shirts, Indian-print tablecloths and clothing, didn't see any tube socks, but a lot of the new stuff was of that type.

It was fascinating to go into some of the old buildings and to explore these new-to-me neighborhoods. And Calle de la Cava Baja, which is supposed to have some of the best tapas bars in Madrid, sounded like a fun area to check out after el Rastro.

After wandering up and down the streets and checking out the fleas for several hours, I was ravenous and forgot all about Calle de la Cava Baja. My only requirement was to eat in an actual building rather than from a street vendor. Cafe Ronda was nearby, looked ok and seemed to be full of locals. The cafe has a half-dozen tables, a stand-up tapas bar, a remarkably pleasant and accommodating waitress, and some of the best cafe con leche ever.

I ordered a couple of tapas staples: patatas bravas and bocadillo de calamares. The patatas bravas were crisp quarters of unpeeled thin-skinned potatoes, which seemed to have been roasted rather than fried. Doesn't seem likely, considering the tiny, open kitchen, maybe they were cooked on a well-seasoned plancha (griddle). The practically grease-free spuds were topped with a thick, spicy tomato sauce, seasoned liberally with smoky pimenton. The serving was big enough to share.

Don't order a sandwich in Spain if you can get a bocadillo. Sandwiches seem to rather mundane, kind of the equivalent of bland, packaged boiled ham and yellow American cheese on Wonder bread, no toppings. Bocadillos, on the other hand, are made on crisp-crusted mini-baguettes, their chewy, light centers layered with any number of tasty fillings, it could be prosciutto-like Serrano ham, hearty manchego cheese, creamy, frittata-like tortilla Espanola, or thinly sliced spicy chorizo.

My bocadillo de calamares was full of tender rings of calamari, lightly fried and vigorously seasoned with salt and garlic. Excellent, either plain or dipped in the nice salsa brava that topped my patatas.

My tasty and inexpensive lunch -- plus two glasses of strong and sweet cafe con leche -- gave me the energy I needed to head back to el Rastro for another hour or two of digging for treasures.

La Boqueria, Barcelona

One of the great advantages of having an apartment was getting to shop at La Boqueria, Barcelona's huge covered market. We had heard about it, but we found it almost by accident. We woke up early our first day in town and decided to go out to pick up coffee and a few items to stock the fridge. Our landlord had told us where to find a little grocery store nearby. Didn't find it.











We wandered through el Barri Gotic till we got to La Rambla, where there just had to be a store ...

We followed a stream of people down an alley ... ...and found ourselves in La Boqueria, an active market since 1701.

La Boqueria is a huge space crammed with tables and stands and open stores selling everything good to eat: cheese, chocolates, divine flaky pastries filled with chocolate, long braids of sesame bread, meat from rib roasts to goat heads to feet of who knows what -- my cook's heart wanted to take home a bunch of bones to start a pot of soup. Chickens, seafood, mountains of spices, a dozen kinds of mushrooms, beautifully arranged fruits and vegetables, prepared foods, everything beautiful and fragrant and vying for my attention.

With huge self-control we managed to spend only 20 euros and not buy more than we could carry: eggs, butter (a choice of French, Spanish or Swiss, salted or unsalted, offered in various sizes and containers), potatoes, Spanish olive oil and jerez vinegar, coffee, pastries, fruit, a bit of cheese, just enough to start the day and stock our new apartment a bit.

The market was packed, it was practically impossible to get down the aisles. The variety of products offered was overwhelming -- and I wanted everything. I heard vendors speaking mainly Spanish and Catalan, with bits of English and French. Fortunately, they also spoke sign language. That was great, since my pre-coffee brain was having trouble getting around simple phrases like "mas poqueno."

We went back several times that day and over the rest of the week. In addition to bread and cheese and garlic and wine and pastries and fresh veg for salad and fruit and tapas supplies, over the next few days we feasted at home on rib roast, tuna and salmon steaks, anointed with fragrant Spanish oil, fresh herbs and garlic. Yum!

Oh, the little grocery the landlord mentioned was about 90 seconds away from our apartment and would have required a left turn out the front door instead of the left turn we took at the end of our street, just steps from the aforementioned door. The mini-mercado was nothing special, an ok place to buy paper towels and the like. I wouldn't have missed that first glimpse of La Boqueria for the world.

(BTW, Saveur magazine's June/July issue features markets around the world, including a nice spread on La Boqueria. The mag's website has a recipe from Bar Pinotxo, the tapas place in the market, which our landlord recommended. We never managed to eat there. If only every day had 29 hours and I had an even more robust appetite!)