Eating in Spain

          In 1935 W. Somerset Maugham, my favourite writer, wrote a book about Spain called Don Fernando. One of the chapters was devoted to food. 

In Andalucía, Maugham observed, ‘you eat romantically rather than to the satisfaction of your palate.’ This, I would say, is no longer true. Take the example of Pepa y Pepe, a pleasant tapas bar that spills on to one of the streets in Málaga’s Old Town. The food there is very good: you can have albóndigas (meatballs) in a rich tomato sauce, and they do good fried fish like gambas pil pil (prawns with garlic and chilli cooked in lots of oil). 

There’s little romance about Pepa y Pepe, though. Most of the diners are foreigners and it’s a magnet for the street performers and beggars of this fine city. In the space of an hour one Tuesday evening six men of varying degrees of misery asked me for money outside this establishment. 

My interaction with one of these individuals had an element of comedy about it. He was a dirty, odd looking man, with a yellow tie round his neck but no shirt. His trade was shining shoes. After a rebuff from another group, he approached me and we locked eyes. I shook my head. He then looked down at my feet, shrugged his shoulders and looked me in the eyes again. He had an aghast expression on his face, as if to say ‘Come on! How can you walk around like that in this beautiful place?!’ I refused a second time, though, and he trudged off in search of less stubborn tourists. 

While the albóndigas in Pepe y Pepe were tasty, I would say that ordering meat dishes in Andalucía is not necessarily a wise move. In Cádiz, for instance, I ventured into a quiet place one evening and ordered a media ración (half portion) of meatballs in Pedro Ximenez sauce. The meatballs bore the awful signs of having been microwaved: some were lukewarm, others cold. I guess they’d been hanging around for a bit too, for they had an off-putting discolouration in the middle. The PX sauce had an unpleasantly gloopy texture, too, kind of like mint jelly. The only thing that was hot was the fried potatoes. I’ve rarely been in such a hurry to leave a restaurant. 

I also had a cold plate of rabo de toro (stewed oxtail) in Málaga, which left me crestfallen, for it’s a thing of beauty when done properly. Another dish which is hit or miss is patatas bravas. These can be great, as long as the sauce that is served with the fried potatoes is spicy and based on tomatoes. Too often, though, you are presented with an unappetising mixture of spicy sauce and mayonnaise. 

 These experiences lead me to think that Maugham was wrong when he advised his readers ‘to make your meal out of a single dish’ when in Spain. It’s better to order a few tapas, or small plates, because then there’s more chance of getting something you like. And the best options in Spain are cured meats like jamón ibérico and fried fish dishes. I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed when I ordered those. 

Maugham made the rather wild claim that ‘you eat much better in the north of a country than in the south’. Still, in the case of Spain, it may be true, although I have limited experience of the north. The finest meal by far that I have eaten there was in a place called Casa Zanito in the beautiful walled town of Olite in Navarra. As a general rule, though, it has to be rubbish, as anyone who has travelled in Scotland could tell you. Just try finding a decent meal in the Highlands.

The Sounds of Andalucía

          The driver reverses the coach down a slight incline then pulls up beside the bus station in Olvera. ‘Fifteen minutes’, he says, ‘to have a coffee’. With that, he gets out. We descend the steps and walk fifty metres over to the station bar. 

          The noise inside the dingy bar is almost beyond description. It's like being in a nightclub, but at three in the afternoon, and with no music playing. As for the customers making this astonishing racket, they are not boozed-up twenty-somethings looking to score, but impoverished old men jovially shouting at each other. And there are no more than about fifteen of them.

          It's truly a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. We buy a couple of beers, sit down at one of the cheap metal tables, and conduct a conversation by shouting at one another. The locals continue their mysterious game, barely noticing our presence. After 15 minutes, we get back on the bus. 

 

Arcos de la Frontera

          After leaving Olvera, we continue to the dramatic hilltop town of Arcos de la Frontera, or 'Arco', as the locals call it. It's here that we discover Andalucía is also the province of silence. As we walk its atmospheric yellow and pencil-thin streets in the cold winter night the absence of sound is uncanny. Occasionally a scooter roars past, otherwise the empty streets resound only to the rhythmic beat of our footsteps and the eternal din of crickets that drifts up from the plain below. 

 

Málaga

          Even the large cities of the south, like Málaga and Seville, are at times remarkable for their tranquillity. On a Sunday morning in Málaga the bells of the superlative cathedral break the quiet of the city’s main thoroughfare, the Alameda Principal. From the open top deck of a sightseeing bus it is the sigh of the wind and the mad jabbering of birds that resonate. 

 

Cádiz

          Then, at night, you take to the alleys and squares of the city centre. The air hums with the voices of young Spaniards drinking tiny bottles of beer from ice buckets, children talking to their parents, and foreigners – Germans, Dutch, Brits – conversing in their own tongues. Go inside an expat bar and your ears are assailed with the more familiar racket of lousy music and middle-aged men encouraging each other to drink themselves into a coma. 

          Other sounds linger in my memory: the rain that pounded down on the awning above us as we ate outside a tapas bar in Sevilla, so intense that I feared it might give way; the rooster that woke me in Arcos de la Frontera and another one, invisible, somewhere on a street in the centre of Cádiz; the guy on a quad bike tearing through the deserted streets of Arcos.

           There's a Calle Silencio in Cádiz, or 'Silence Street'. It's about a hundred metres from the Plaza de la Catedral, the city's tourist focal point. Andalucía is truly the land of incredible noise and quiet.