Dinner out.

-
I haven’t been writing much about dinners lately, having knocked off this travelog during the time between our excursions and the dinner hour. We’ve had a couple of really great tapas dinners, including two trips back to Taller de Tapas for their cod and tuna dishes along with another night out at Lonja de Tapas for squid, grilled vegetables and ham croquettes.
Tonight we decided to break the tapas cycle and actually have a real dinner so we went to Pla de la Garsa (restaurant of the Magpie) for a genuine sit-down meal. I’d made a reservation on line, which of course did not make it into the reservation book (so much for technology) which did not matter because we got a great table. MLW had a dish of red mullet in sort of a paella form that used tiny noodles instead of rice. I had Duck Magret with a sauce of pine nuts, apricots and raisins, reduced in stale wine and honey. We both shared an excellent bottle of Tempranillo. Both dinners were superb, and the atmosphere was just wonderful – marble tables, 1950’s jazz, cool waiters – an all-around nice evening out. We shared a traditional Catalan desert called Mamelles de Pedralbes which is a medieval dish based on chilled almond milk with cinnamon, sort of a cold flan that more or less translates as “milk of the nuns,” the Pedrables being the nuns from a monastery here in Barcelona.

What a great night out! We walked back amid the early evening tourist throngs and called it a night. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A regular day

-
Image
A word or two about food. In China, dinner is a completely different event than what we are used to in the west. First of all, large quantities and a vast selection of food is brought to the table. Secondly, you don’t take your “share”; you eat a little, spin the Lazy Susan and rest a lot between mouthfuls. It’s all about turning dinner into an event for visiting. And you order so much that you leave some behind, as a gesture to the host indicating that you have been served plenty. The last two meals for me have been grand repasts. Last night the IT team went out for a traditional Shanghaiese meal in a 1930s converted row house. The trip in to our private room was down a multitude of halls and up continuous little staircases that evoked the passage into Gryffindor Tower in the Harry Potter books. The room we had was more than likely a bedroom in the home of a prosperous, pre-war family. As always, the food was delicious and interesting. A mixture of hot and cold dishes comprising the f...
Read more

NO8DO

-
Image
Last fall I decided to get a tattoo - not so much to express my individuality (as just about every other person has now done) but more to have the experience of getting needled as well as to see how having a permanent piece of portable art would make me feel. The problem was what to get. Tattoo shops are loaded with catalogs of both standard drawings and freelance work. The breadth of options is staggering if you only want something canned. My thoughts went in the other direction - I wanted something that meant something to me, characteristic of my life experience. So I thought about meaningful statements, written in Sanskrit or some other obscure language, or maybe something to do with a bicycle. Or maybe something Chinese. Or who knows, the only thing I did know was that I didn’t want a giant orange Japanese Koi wrapping around my biceps. One day it came to me. While wandering around Sevilla last year, we saw the same logo over and over, on anything that had to do with the m...
Read more

Home again

-
Image
It's always great to be back, despite the slog it takes to get here. This trip was particularly mundane, despite the length and the 24 hours of awakedness it required to complete it. On the plane I was lucky enough to have an empty seat between me and the other person in the row. Sadly she was a space-hog who assumed the gap was for her personal use and filled it with computers, blankets, reading glasses, other stuff and a 1/2 full glass of water. Did have one little traveling oddity though. When I left two Saturdays ago I sat across from a couple on the ABQ to SFO run. They were well-dressed and of an age, the kind of people I might hang out with in real life. Sitting in the SFO waiting area and munching on a turkey-avocado sandwich on a chewy croissant, I looked up and there they were, sitting across from me. We boarded the plane and once again, they had the row opposite. This being too serendipitous, I excused myself and told the man the situation. He said he recognized me but t...
Read more