Spring Break in Spain and Portugal: Warmer Temps and Fresher Tastes

I am hesitant to confess my love for another country's gastronomic traditions, but Spain and Portugal really gave France a run for their money this week... I dont know how to sum up all the tastes that Alyson and I enjoyed this week but I'll give it my best shot. To save you all the details I've decided to simply highlight the meals and dishes that most stood out to us. It was great having another foodie along with me for this trip and I can proudly say we never ate a bad meal in the entire 9 days we were traveling.

We started our journey early in the morning in Barcelona. Being that this was first my return to Spain in over ten years, I expected to see the Spain that I knew, which included lush countrysides, mountains and overly friendly greetings. Barcelona was very different from my expectations, and I was surprised at how urban it was. We ate at a paella restaurant that came highly recommended to us and enjoyed their terrifyingly large seafood paella, patats bravas and an entire liter of their Sangria. When the bill came we were astounded. A meal of this volume in Paris would cost between 30-40 euros per person, but we paid a mere 13 euros each and I found myself thinking that at that rate I could technically afford to eat 5 meals a day... which I didn't.... but still, tempting. The paella was so beautiful, so fresh, and so full of saffron I convinced myself I need to learn to make it on my own because I could easily finish off one of these bad boys each week.

Note: while not included in this blog, Barcelona did NOT disappoint when it came to Brunch. I'm sorry ma belle Paris, but Barcelona takes the cake in the brunch department. Improve your Bloody Mary game and then maybe I'll reconsider my ranking.

To try for brunch in Barcelona:

-Brunch and Cake

-Milk

After two nights in Barcelona, Alyson and I departed via high speed train to the south of Spain to pay a visit to Seville, a city of which I know very very little, but soon became the highlight of my trip. We disembarked from the train station once reaching Seville at around 2 pm and decided to walk the 30 min trek to our hostel as the glorious sun beat down on our newly coat-less backs. It was incredible. We turned our short walk into an 1 hour and 45 min stroll through the city, stopping to take in all that the sun was offering until we found a small outdoor cafe we found in an alleyway near the street. It was sunday and all the locals were also out enjoying the beating heat, sipping on beers after Sunday mass. We couldn't have looked more out of place with our huge backpacks and coats tied around our waists, but we were just too excited to finally be seeing the gorgeous, beating sun. We enjoyed small tapas and Sevillian beer, Cruzcampo, which is basically the only beer offered there. A worker at our hostel later explained to us that Sevillians don't fuss when it comes to their drinks, and they stick to what they know... Cruzcampo beer... and gin and tonics. It was delicious and refreshing, a perfect light summer beer.

For our first night out to dinner in Seville, we decided to skip the family style feast provided by our hostel and try out a neighborhood recommendation, La Azotea. We were told it was on the fancier side and to be prepared for nicer service and a pricier bill.... but we ended up paying 20 euros each... hm. This place was a perfect mix between an authentic Spanish tapas restaurant and a trendy hipster gastro- hangout. We stood at the bar while we waited for a table, where they let us order various tapas and indulge the bartenders and servers in the whims of Spanish cuisine. This is something I miss very much about American restaurants, where a server or manager or whoever that truly cares about the cuisine they produce want to talk and explain the origins, and importance of each and every dish. We stood there for an hour peppering them with questions while they brought us out free dishes to try here and there. They were so kind, and the Sangria was so good. When we finally reached a table, we had already enjoyed about three fourths of our meal, but due to the plethora of creative options on the menu, we were not even close to being done. At the bar we started with roasted vegetables and goat cheese, a tapa of sauted cod fish in a tomato and almond sauce, and at the table we ordered the sea bass and a salad topped with burrata. I won't go in to detail about everything but I have to talk about the insanity and cleverness that was this buratta salad. Its base were greens, surrounded by thick slices of heirloom tomatos, smothered in fresh burrata cheese and herbed jelly (yeah, idk), pesto sauce, and topped with a large scoop of lime sorbet and with crunchy pita chips stuck to the top. Being that the menu was all in Spanish I just saw the burrata and ordered it, not knowing the dish was about to be smothered in SORBET!!?! But it worked... and it was awesome... The sorbet added a subtle sweetness that fit the dish perfectly, almost like adding fruit to a salad, but the texture made it much more cohesive to the entire dish. Best of all, it was so light that you felt like you really hadn't taken up any room in your stomach by eating it. Instead, the tastes kind of just floated on your taste buds. I would eat it 10 times over if I could..

Cod fish tapa:

Grilled vegetables:

Sangria:

We ended with a chocolate lava cake, accompanied with lemon cream and dried ginger, but if that wasn't enough our server (bless his soul) decided to bring us out some honey rum as a second dessert, beautifully plated with orange peel and mint leaves.

So please, if you are ever in Seville, do me a favor and go to La Azotea, I miss it already.

Also: a must in Seville is the Mercado Lonja del Barranco, a closed roof market with 20+ stands featuring extremely reasonably priced Spanish classics. There's a paella bar, tapas stand, fresh fish market, juice bar, olive stand etc... We went at least once a day and ate the various types of shellfish they had to offer. You choose your fish from their daily selection and they prepare it in front of you.

Last on our trip was Lisbon, Portugal. A place I've been wanting to venture to for years, probably just because it is the name of my favorite Bon Iver song (which is actually about Lisbon, Ohio but who's really cares, right?). Anyway, Portugal to me has always seemed like the more exotic, older, more foreign and less visited Spain. This proved to be so so true. Lisbon was beautiful, old and unretouched. We spent our first day there exploring the narrow and hilly streets, getting lost in the oldest parts of the city and stopping to take ariel photos once we reached the top of the (many) cobblestone climbs. Once rightfully worn out we stopped for a small snack by the ocean in Lisbon's main square, Praca de Comercio.

Later that night we searched and searched for a dinner place, determined not to fall to the traps of the tourist places outside our hostel. We stayed right downtown in Baixa, basically the center of old Lisbon. Alyson ended up finding a place on yelp (not my fav, but I swallowed my pride) that came highly recommended because it was somewhere that Anthony Bourdain had been on his No Reservations Lisbon segment in Lisbon. Now THIS was something I could get behind. Its called Cervejario Ramiro and its known for having some serious seafood. We knew we hit the jackpot when we walked into a fully packed room of loud Portuguese natives with knapkins tucked in their shirts, hammering at lobsters the size of footballs, sipping on chilled white wines and shoving buttered bread in their mouths faster than you could say crab rangoon. We were SO out of place but it didn't matter so we ordered the cheapest bottle of white wine and set to work. Being that the menu was all in Portuguese and listed by weight of the seafood, we relegated ourselves to being "those tourists" and ordered our dinner by pointing at things we saw on nearby tables or passing us in the hands of servers. It was hilarious. We ended up ordering garlic roasted shrimp and garlic sauteed clams which had to have been the most satisfying garlic dish I've ever had. Accompanied with never ending, gooey buttered bread we decided that after the clams and shrimp that we were ready to take on more. So what do we do? Point at a crab swimming nearby in their fresh seafood tanks and say "we want him." After a short lesson by the server on how to crack the swimming crab with our plastic mallets (yeah forget metal shell crackers and tiny forks in the States, these guys gave us judge-like gavels the size of our forearms and 4 inch by 4 inch chopping blocks to whack at our crab.) He had to come help us at various times in the meal, but the meat inside was definitely worth it. I am a firm believer in eating seafood when it is available to you, and not forcing the production to serve you when the season doesn't permit (aka farm-to-table), so allowing myself to indulge in the natural coastal offerings of Portugal was rewarding. Here's a few pics of our meal:

Finally, on our last day in Lisbon we visited their gastronomic market, owned and operated by Time Out, the online magazine giving recommendations on the best things to do in each city worldwide. They transformed this covered market, now called Time Out Mercado de Ribeira into a foodie heaven. It features food from the city's most loved restaurants and chefs and best of all, each dish and item served is tested and approved by Time Out's team of culinary professionals. So essentially anything you order is bound to be good. Definitely a stop for any foodie while in Lisbon.

Alyson and I were not about to leave Portugal without first trying traditional Portuguese wines and ports, so for our last night in Lisbon we walked across the street from our hostel to a place called Bebedoura which came extremely well reviewed and regarded on many travel sites. It's a wine bar and specializes in northern Portuguese wine and ports. The food was simple and fantastic, ranging from fresh salads, to sardines (a Portuguese staple) doused in spicy olive oil and displayed on cornbread toasts to our favorite: the calamari stew. It was so simple, yet so fresh and delicious that we contemplated ordering a second after finishing it. Each calamari was stuffed with the housemade cornbread, and the whole thing was simmered and stewed in a fresh tomato sauce with cubed fingerling potatoes. Unfortunately the lighting in the restaurant did not permit for great picture quality, so this one will have to be left up to your imagination. We finished our meal with two red ports, a tawny and a ruby, stopping to listen to the manager (who also doubled as our server) explain the differences in the two. I learned that red tawny ports are lighter in color because they are aged in wood barrels, which allows some of the color to seep out of it over time. Ruby is a simply more sweet version of a red port, but produced in the same region of Duoro Valley in Portugal. Pictured below are our two ports, and the chocolate cake (which also happened to be doused in port wine).

If you've stuck around to reach the end, thank you, and I promise the next post won't be so long. I won't apologize for the pictures though, because c'mon how good does that all food look ;)