Flamenco Everyone

You can't go to Spain and not see flamenco. There's probably a law on the books somewhere. Certainly everyone you talk to about Spain will go, "So did you see any flamenco?". And you'll have to say no, and feel like a horse's ass, and the person you're talking to probably won't even believe you actually went to Spain. They will assume you are a lying dog. We had to go see flamenco. So for our last night, we did.

Flamenco, in briefest terms, is a fast-paced and athletic dancing style with its origins in Andalusia, Spain's southernmost region. The word flamenco did not come into use until the 19th century, and is now used to refer to all components of a flamenco performance: song, dance, and guitar playing. Flamenco is a result of the great melting pot that is Spain, composed of Arabic, Sephardic, Gypsy, and Andalusian cultures, with additions from Cuba and Latin America. It is taken extremely seriously as an academic subject by many in Spain, and "flamencologists" produce considerable quantities of research and commentary on this vastly rich art form. Flamenco in practice is considerably different from the rose-in-teeth stuff we're exposed to in popular American culture: at it's best, it is fiery, intense, and hyper-sexualised, with a flurry of color and angular, fierce motion that is evocative of Spanish modern art.

The Flamenco Corral de la Moreia is located in central Madrid, close to pretty much everything. Madrid is not flamenco's home base - that's Andalusia - but as Madrid is Spain's largest city and its face to the world, good flamenco venues exist. It's a small and well respected venue, and provides both a nice dinner, booze, and a lovely show for a (not insignificant) amount of euros. It's been in operation since 1957 and has hosted various celebrities and world figures. The space was surprisingly small and intimate, which I believe is a fine thing in the context of an intensely personal form of expression.

If I'm not an art critic, I'm really not a dance critic (occasional viewing of "So You Think You Can Dance aside). Here are the photographs, at least. It's a beautiful and intense thing to witness. I'm particularly fond of the music - I was reminded of how excellent flamenco guitar in non-kitschy restaurant scenarios can be. The powerful voices are also magnificent - you can't help but recall the morning call at the mosques (a sound I got a bit accustomed to in India, and still like). It's a melting pot art form.


The seeming grand dame of the show.








It's an incredibly athletic dance mode. The women are all ripped like prize fighters while retaining an essential feminine sensuality. This is not ballet (and I like it far more).









The Corral de la Moreia talks up its food, and the menu is certainly ambitious for a dinner and a show type venue. I found the food perfectly acceptable, but not entirely special - and extremely expensive!. You're paying for the ambience more then for haute cuisine. The food does look muy hermosa.




A large and overwrought salad complete with a whole prawn and a rather offputting dollop of liquified cheese. I think it may have been trying to be foam.



A simple appetizer of (you guessed it) grilled prawns. These were fresh and large, and fulfilled their prawny little potential.



This was billed as a fancy variant on gazpacho, but it was, in fact, just plain old gazpacho. I was disappointed, hoping for the chunky and delightfully fresh liquid salad that a fine gazpacho can be.


I had, as usual, the monkfish. This was a competent preparation of one of my favorite fishes and the addition of Spain's always-tasty prawns pretty much guranteed I'd approve. Nothing special. I wish monkfish had wider recognition in the USA.


My dad ordered the buey, Spain's cave-man sized ox steak. It was tasty and rare in the middle, although I didn't find the flavor to be distinct from other varieties of bovine. Incidentally, buey means "large crab" in Galicia. Might want to keep that in mind if you find yourself looking at a menu in Santiago. It could happen.

My mom ordered the salmon, which she reported was okay and rather reminiscent of airline food. Such is the fate of salmon in many restaurant's hands.



I chose mango sorbet with mint and raspberry sauce for my dessert. Always a classic. The raspberry sauce drizzled around the plate is exceedingly 1997, but at least there were no sun-dried tomatoes on it.


Vanilla ice cream with honey, chocolate straws, and cookies. This was pretty excellent - honey ice cream doesn't get nearly enough love. It's easy to forget how good simple stuff can be. And it's purty.

The Reina Sofia, Madrid

Statue outside the museum.

The Reina Sofia is Madrid's biggest modern art museum, a disarmingly huge building filled up with Spain (and the world's) finest creations. It is best known, of course, for the Guernica, Picasso's strangled and horrifying rendition of the brutal bombing attack upon a small Basque town. The Reina Sofia has one of the world's most extensive assortment of the works of Picasso, Dali, Miro, Juan Gris, Julio Gonzalez, and Jorge Oteiza, among other well known names. But it also boasts other fine, fine works - in particular an excellent assortment of Spanish photography from the early 20th century, Goya's lithographs of the Napoleonic years, cubists paintings, bizarre installations, and other good stuff. I am not a student of art, merely an observer, an appreciator: I approach modern art museums rather like funhouses. I am looking for something to titillate me and hold my interest. In that respect the Reina Sofia succeeds admirably.



Built out of a 18th century hospital, around a large courtyard, it's a rather linear way to lay out a musem. You wander around the columns then keep on taking the elevators up. Outdoor patios provide a good venue for large installation works.



This is the Guernica. Please tell me you've seen it. Picasso created the mural for Spain's entry into the 1937 World's Fair, in an effort to draw attention to the wholesale slaughter of civilians by combined German and Italian forces. It is an emotional flashpoint for the Basques: they have put forth multiple demands to rehouse the painting in Bilbao's Guggenheim, with no success. Picasso's statement about the painting went like this: " In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.[4]" The painting provided a gut-wrenchingly emotional portrayal of the horror that gripped the Iberian peninsula, and has loomed large in the Spanish pysche ever since.



This is a great story about Picasso and the Guernica, via the ever-useful Wikipedia: "While living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, Picasso suffered harassment from the Gestapo. One officer allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in his apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did."



One of the temporary installations is entitled, "Are Animals People?" by Peter Fischli and David Weis. The exhibit features surrealist videos of a rat and a bear chasing each other around a cavernous palace, occasionally floating through space, choking one another, or coming upon a sow and piglets (among other occurences). The videos are sort of what I imagine a furry fans lucid nightmare to be like.



There was also a retrospective on the late Juan Munoz, a Spanish artist of near-unfathomable weirdness. The late gentleman had a penchant for mannequins, large bulbous figures, and sniggering idiots in situations of profound discomfit. I didn't like him but he did succeed in mildly wigging me out. Which I guess is why we have modern art museums. (He has this mannequin, right - it's like leaning against a wall, there's a spotlight so it casts a shadow. everyone walks around, the mannequins mouth is moving soundlessly, WHAT NO STOP THAT).

One of his installation pieces is a dark room with a mousehole in the corner, the "Tom and Jerry" theme music playing non-stop. It is kind of brilliant.


"The Wasteland." Brrr.



So this guy was hanging in the stairwells. You're thomping down the stairs in an effort to bypass the super modern but slow hotel, and hello, hanging guy in the stairwell. THANK YOU, SIR.

Madrid: The Prado, and Some Inept Art Thoughts

Our last day in Spain had finally arrived. On the agenda: the Prado, the Reina Sofia, and a flamenco dinner. It was, as anticipated, hot as hell.



The Prado is, as I am sure you're aware, Spain's most majestic and celebrated art museum. Opened in 1819, it was nationalized under Isabella II in 1868, and was first enlarged in 1918. The Prado houses 1,300 paintings, and despite it's unimpressive facade, is truly immense on the inside: corridors leading into corridors, galleries one after another. It is justly considered one of the world's great art museums, and is absolutely a must when visiting Spain. (The air conditioning, incidentally, is exceptional.)



Knowledge of the Prado was lodged away inside my memory a long time ago, and only resurfeced when I arrived in Spain: I recalled reading an excellent book on Velazquez in 5th grade, remembered the contented smirk of the dog in his uberfamous Las Meninas, his willingness to accurately depict the inbred ugliness of the Spanish royal family of his time. I was looking forward to seeing his work.




Fra Angelico was a painter of the early Italian Renaissance. You have almost certainly seen his Anunciation projetcted onto a dusty classroom wall at some juncture in your school career. There are hordes of anunciation depictions here at the Prado, but this one is worthy of looking at: the slender and delicate figures, the worried and evocative expression on Mary's face, the gently supernatural color palette. They are indicative of the artistic revolution that would follow soon after Fra Angelico's masterpiece. There are in fact several copies of this painting scattered about - one is at St. Mark's Convent.



Goya's Nude Maja is helpfully described with its sister piece, portraying a clothed Maja. How convenient for different social occasions. ("Goddamit, Juanita, you forgot to switch out the paintings! And my mother law will be over in FIVE MINUTES!" )


The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch What can I say? I have this clear memory of being in first grade and leafing through a particularly gruesome book on the Black Plague in my school's library. To illustrate the concept, one of Bosch's surreal, horrifying, and incredibly imaginative was used, reproduced in living and virulent color. I recall falling in love - all those hideous unnatural monsters, lurching skeletons, innumerable tortures, a sort of sense of some great machine of life. When I came upon the Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado, it was rather like coming upon an old friend. "Oh, I remember you!" I said to myself. Bosch was from the Netherlands, born in 1453. His life and his training is a mystery - he seems to appear as some totally bizarre curiosity upon the art world, surrealism entirely earlier then it had any right to be. The exact meaning of his art is argued about endlessly in the halls of art history, but it is generally agreed he depicted religious allegory - whether his opinions on religion were heretical or not is unknown. Certainly they provide a more compelling depiction of the dangers of sin and the innumerable grotesque doings of mankind then any other religious art I've seen - or perhaps they just resonate with me more. Bosch's paintings at the Prado are located inside a delightful room devoted to grotesque and horrifying paintings of the era, many directly influenced by Bosch's little worlds of horror.

I bought a puzzle of the painting at the gift shop and am still working on it. I regularly find single pieces portraying dangling limbs, toothy sea creatures, and contorted faces. The puzzle, too, is making my day better.


Luis Melendez, Still Life with Salmon and Lemon, 1772

I am a food writer, and I was most pleased with the excellent food paintings scattered throughout the gallery. They are works of unabashed realism, that indicate the pure pleasure of elemental and natural ingredients. They are naturalist works operating under the guise of cuisine. Spanish still lifes in this guise are called bodegón (after, presumably, the word bodega, which indicates a small grocery store). They are defined by intensely rendered and luminous natural ingredients superimposed against a dark background. In Spain, the paintings took on a stark and simple nature - in accordance with the Spanish aesthetic, and in direct juxtaposition to the super-luxe food paintings of the Low Countries.Within the Prado, works by Juan Sánchez Cotán and Luis Egidio Meléndez are exemplarily of the style. I remain somewhat shocked that foodies haven't seize upon these classic painters as indicators of the rich pedigree of food obsession in the Western world. I would like to have posters of these to hang in my kitchen to make me feel cosmopolitan.

The Prado featured the amazing innovation of vending machines for books. You drop a euro into the machine and a lovely little book with full color pictures pops out, explaining the paintings you are looking at in the respective room. I collected about six of them. They are lovely souvenirs.

We spent about three hours in the Prado, which allowed the outside world to get just a little bit hotter in the process. We set out into the streets nearby to find somewhere to eat, which we did: a little workingman's place, Bistro Calvin. The food was good, if not memorable, and the ambience was exactly what one might experience daily as a Madrid businessmen: congenial waiters, cheap and immense sandwiches, and a well-stocked bar.


Roast chicken with fried potatoes. Simple stuff, but this was pretty tasty, with plenty of savory chicken fat dripping into the potatoes. It's the simple Spanish cuisine that everyone gets by on, not that molecular stuff - roast chicken makes the world go round'.


You may have guessed that this is paella. We spent our time in Northern Spain, and the paella heartland is Southern Spain - it will be on the menu in some Northern enclaves but it will inevitably be bastardized and a little wrong. For these reasons, we had not had a single bit of paella during our entire time in Spain, until we ate here. I am no paella judger (having had it only a few times) but this tasted very nice: the classic combo of saffron scented rice, plenty of assorted sea creatures, chicken, and chorizo, supplemented with a squirt of lemon. So I maybe need to go to Valencia.

We decided to head to the Reina Sofia next. Which will, I suspect, require another blog post.

First day in Madrid

Madrid is set exactly in the center of Spain, and is the point from which roads and transit emanate from. It was not a particularly important city in the days of the Castilian kings, but Henry of Castile's establishment of his El Pardo outside the walls put it on the map. The official entry of Ferdinand and Isabella into the city finally connected the often warring Castile and Aragon, helping to form Madrid into a coherent whole. The capital of Spain was transferred from Toledo to Madrid in 1561, fating Madrid to be the gigantic metropolis it is today. The Spanish Civil War hit Madrid hard: it was the first city to be bombed by airplanes with the intent of harming civilians in the history of warfare. Since that dark era, the Spanish capital has experienced a renaissance, and is now the third most populous city in Europe, serving as a powerful economic and cultural center for the entire Iberian peninsula. So that's enough about that.

We stayed at the Hilton near the airport, far outside of town. This was convenient for when we would get on our flight back to the USA, but a bit of a pain in the ass in the interim. Thankfully, Madrid has a fairly new and indisputably efficient underground system, which was capable of whisking me out of hot dry suburban hell into the city center. I left my parents to avail themselves of the Hilton's bar and headed into the city to have a looksee.

To be honest, Madrid isn't charismatic at first sight. The downtown is not incredibly distinctive, as cities go, with an appearance that struck me as a 1800's Spanish city on a very large scale, with a touch of New York thrown in for good measure. There are incredibly wide avenues and roads, large quantities of triumphal fountains and monuments, and hordes of pedestrians walking about as fast as Spaniards are capable of walking (which is not very). It is pleasant enough, but it does not possess the exotic starkness of some of Spain's smaller cities. It does, however, posess enough fine dining and shopping to keep anyone busy for an incredibly long time, if you fall in for that sort of thing.

With no real destination in mind, I pointed myself to the Palace, which I figured warranted a look. I headed to the Plaza Mayor first, which is certainly a pleasant sight: finished during the Hapsburg period, it has a distinctively old-Spanish appearance, and is a good place to sit and drink when the heat gets to its ugliest summertime point. It is full of tourists and features such attractions as the Museum of Ham, but is still worth a look. It has been the scene of soccer games, bullfights, public executions and Spanish Inquisition autos-de-fe, amongst other pleasant diversions.



Right outside the Plaza Mayor, you can jump on the Calle Mayor (go figure) and enjoy a straight shot to the Palace. The Palace is certainly an imposing pile, with a pleasingly subtle blue and white color scheme and a profusion of ornamental decorations. The square grows incredibly hot during the summer, so be forewarned. Juan Carlos and the royal family actually reside in the homier (apparently) Palacio de la Zarzuela, heading to the palace for official functions and other events where royal smiling-and-waving might be called for. It's the largest palace in Western Europe in terms of sheer size. You most likely can go in but on this Europe trip I reached my personal quotient of royal residencies long ago, and there are really only so many ornate tables and jewel encrusted water closets one can look at before going completely nuts, so I just took a few photos. I rested in the gardens outside the palace for a while, watching the Segway tours go by and Madrid's home-grown skater punks playing on the cement.



Directly across the square sits the aesthetically similar Almudena Cathedral. It is brand spanking new by Madrid standards, however, only being begun in 1879. Designed in a Gothic Revival style, construction ceased entirely during the Spanish Civil war for what should be obvious reasons, and was only resumed in the 1950s. It was not officially completed until 1993, when Pope John Paul II finally put in an appearance to sanctify it. If you watched the over-the-top ornate wedding of Felipe, Prince of Asturias to Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano, you've seen the interior of the Cathedral.

I tired of gazing at royal residences and decided to walk back to the Plaza Mayor area, where I would meet my parents later in the evening. As I walked by, I noticed the Mercado de San Miguel, an absolutely alluring old market retrofitted into a modern farmer's market and eatery. Built along the same lines as the San Francisco Ferry Building, it's an excellent place to suck down some good sangria and sample the best of what Spain has to offer. Fish mongers, bakeries, meat shops, tapas joints, canned fish specialists, beer geeks, and wine sellers all have set up shop here, providing an excellent array of treats in one convenient location. I can imagine no better place to get blitzed and eat pinxtos in the area. I hung out there for a bit and took some photos. Namely of fish.


Some large flat fishes.


The horrifyingly frightening specter of the monkfish.


More terrifying monkfish, or "rape negro".


Some adorable little red fishes.


Sardines of many varietals. Lovely little quick creatures.


Dear lord, the aliens have come to roost.


Clams of various varieties.


You may guess I'm a bit taken with these monkfish mugs.


For dinner, we decided to do a tapas crawl, going off some tips I recieved on the ever-useful Chowhound and Egullet. The Calle de Cava Baja proved to be a great place to cruise for tapas and booze, well favored by locals and not entirely jacked up by dorky tourists like ourselves. Warning: if you're even vaguely bothered by smoke, avoid doing a Madrid tapas crawl, you are not going to be able to survive for long. Spain is one of Europe's last hold-outs when it comes to frenzied indoors smoking. I suggest you just work through the pain and eat tapas until your face hurts, but to each his own. Getting to Cava Baja is easy: just walk out the bottom of the plaza from the Calle Mayor, and keep going down the Calle Toledo. Make a right on Calle San Bruno and you'll be there.

Our first stop was Tempranillo on Calle Cava Baja. Most tapas joints are dual affairs: one part is stand up and the other is a more formal sit-down. We decided to stand up and order beer and house white wine. Most tapas around here are served on pieces of bread.


These two are duck with mushrooms and four cheese. Pretty tasty insofar as stuff on bread can go, but nothing particularly exciting.

Our second destination was the Taberna Juana La Loca, which can be reached by walking to the end of Calle de Cava Baja then walking into the Plaza Puerta de Moros. It's a super popular and atmospheric place, full of the young and hip of Madrid, who chain-smoke, gossip, and listen to darkly indie music over plates of excellent food. You can order pre-made food from behind the counter, which will be zapped and served quickly, or you can order off the more elaborate menu.


High quality Spanish anchovies served with pita points and a kind of rich red pepper hummus dip. This was a tasty combination that hadn't occurred to me before, and would be nice to recreate at home.


A simple serving of boneless pork chop, cheese, and Spanish pepper. This was tender and tasty, a bit like a stripped down version of a Philly cheesesteak.


A delicious tortilla, or Spanish potato omlette. This was gigantic and filled with deliciously flavorful caramelized onions - a real treat in the tortilla category.


A sort of duck ravioli wrapped in cheese and topped with bacon - how could this not be delicious? Juicy and flavorful in the interior. Nice stuff.

For dessert, we headed back over to the Mercado de San Miguel, where we perused the considerable gelato and sorbet selection. My mom chose a passion fruit and pineapple flavor. Which came with a parrot stuck in it. (It now lives in our potted plant).

And took the subway back and went to bed. We'd do the Prado and explore more of the city the next day, our last in Spain.

On the Way to Madrid

We were leaving Lekeitio this morning for Madrid, where we would spend a few days prior to flying home. This meant another haul through the plains of Castile and Leon to the capitol, where we would be accompanied by 90's tunes (as invariably played on Spanish radio stations) and large quantities of curiously flavored chewing gum. We blew through Vitoria, Burgos and Lerma on the AI, headed down to Madrid.

Around 2:00 lunch time, we found ourself in one of the many small (but at one point terrifically important) towns out in the dusty desert. This area of Castile and Leon is renowned for its roast lamb, another in a long line of Spanish towns with a curious and slightly distressing affinity for eating babies. Ananda de Duero is especially renowned for its roast lamb, but as it was about a 20 minute detour from the freeway and we wanted to get to Madrid, we wrote it off.

As we blew up the highway past Ananda de Duero, we saw a heavily advertised restaurant next to a hotel and decided to stop there. Upon getting inside, we found ourselves in a restaurant that appeared to have been lifted out of 1965 Arizona (on the tourist trail) and dropped directly into the dusty not-much of Spain. Wood beams, animal heads, and a tan and orange color scheme figured. I was immediately rather charmed.

They had a full service and rather large restaurant, and we decided to go with that option, mostly because dad was totally down for lamb. As we sat down and perused the menu, we noticed everyone around us was chowing down with gusto upon cave-man sized portions of roast lamb, little lamb legs poking up out of their bowls. Paydirt or profoundly disturbing, depending on how you see it. (I reiterate my public service announcement that vegans should avoid the Iberian peninsula at all costs).



For starters, we had a tremendous Spanish style salad with the usual tuna, asparagus, tomato, and sardine. A green salad in Spain inevitably entails a tremendous amount of delicious oil packed tuna and some white asparagus (green asparagus appears to be outlawed). I will definitely die of iodine poisoning in Spain.



My main course was artichoke hearts with clams, a simple and surprisingly delicious dish. It reminded me almost of a Chinese dish with its delicately flavored wine sauce. The clams were perfectly cooked, and the tender asparagus hearts provided a perfect complement that hadn't occurred to me before. I'm going to have to learn how to make this.



My mom had Castilian soup, a traditional dish on these dry plains. It even comes in it's own distinctive bowl! As she discovered, it's not exactly a *light* dish - this appeared to be bean and bread soup with an incredible quantity of miscellaneous pig parts in it, some unidentifiable. The flavor was porky, fatty, and rich. It's soul food for the pig obsessed Castilian. I derived great pleasure from watching Mom carefully examine her spoonful in an attempt to ID what, exactly, that thing was.



My dad had the cordero, or roasted lamb. A giant portion of lamb came in a bowl (catching the gamey and delicious juice,) a plantitive little leg sticking out the top. This is the kind of food Castilian kings probably ate around their tremendous dining tables, grunting and scratching themselves and throwing bones to the dogs. It was needless to say very tasty indeed, with tender, uber-rich meat and crispy, delicious skin.

After lunch, I explored the large and incredibly kitschy gift shop attached to the restaurant, which featured every Spanish themed piece o 'crap imaginable to man. Stuffed bulls, curious gummy candy, baked goods from every inch of Castile, pickled pork feet, you name it they got it, along with obscene Basque t-shirts.





I wandered over to the ice-cream freezer and was reduced to laughter when I saw what was on offer. Surely you can spot it the ever-so subtle racism. Also: a strawberry ice cream pop in the shape of feet? The cheesecake love disc?



They also had a healthy sized specimen of Castile and Leon's punch cake - a marzipan sponge cake filled with cream. It is delicious.

We were soon back on the road, headed toward Madrid. Which I will discuss tomorrow.