128 TRAVEL+LEISURE | SEPTEMBER 2019
(Madrid, continued from page 127)
the tortilla in the louche and divisive
style invented in the Galician village of
Betanzos. Patricia warned us that “some
love the Pedraza style, some hate it.” We
were firmly in the love camp, though,
by not having to view the tortilla
through the lens of regional identity, we
were free to not choose sides.5
WHERE THE
MUSHROOM IS KING
El Cisne Azul (“The Blue Swan”) is a
sweaty little irrationally named
workingman’s diner with an unusual
emphasis on mushrooms. Situated in
the tiny warren of streets near the
Plaza de Chueca, the dining room has a
refrigerated case for displaying
mushrooms and a mushroom scale
behind the bar. There are sketches of
mushrooms painted on a mirror and
illustrated mushroom posters on the
wall and many mushrooms on the
menu, identified by their scientific
names and listed in exotic matchups:
Flammulina with foie gras, Pleurotus
eryngii and baby eels, Tricholoma with
sweetbreads. On the day we visited, a
man in a black tracksuit and red suede
sneakers stood at the bar eating a plate
of scrambled eggs and fried wild
mushrooms.
Food is personal, but I want to
come to a city like Madrid and spend
my hours in a place like this. No frills,
no gimmicks. At El Cisne Azul, they’re
just really into fungus.6
ON WITH THE SHOW
Some of Madrid’s restaurants are
rooted in the past but reach yearningly
toward the future of fine dining, with
varying degrees of success. At Coque,
the Michelin two-starred shrine to
Spanish gastronomy, brothers Rafael,
Diego, and Mario Sandoval pile on theBarrio de las Letras, the Gilda has
become a more substantial pre-meal
snack: sliced raw tuna is skewered with
pickled piparras peppers and a tiny
roasted onion and topped with anchovy
sauce and green-olive mayonnaise.
By contrast, the modern Basque
restaurant Arima, in the Chamberí
barrio, is bright and bustling, with a
raucous young clientele that calls out
pintxos orders and makes toasts with
many strains of cold vermouth. My wife
and I squeezed past the crowd and
found a small, serenely lit dining room.
One wall of this back room was taken
up almost completely by an arresting
black-and-white photo of restaurateur
Nagore Irazuegi’s great-grandmother
Josefa. It’s hard to imagine a
connection between Josefa’s striking,
hardscrabble visage and the face of Rita
Hayworth, but Arima’s remixed take on
the Gilda, called “Gilda Josefa 2.0,” is
both gutsy and glamorous. An excellent
anchovy fillet is laid across a little
pillow of a cracker filled with green-
chile mayonnaise and topped with a bit
of olive cream and a green “pearl” of
olive oil—a wink to modernist cuisine.
Everything else on the menu is
elemental, much of it sourced from
family farms in the north. Our server
implored us to try the guisantes de
Llavaneres, tiny sweet peas in season
just for a moment. “Like caviar,” she
said, kissing the tips of her fingers for
emphasis. She was right. “Mucha
comida,” she warned us when we
added a huge, barely cooked rib eye to
our already immoderate order. Right
again, but here, as all over Madrid,
there were too many good tastes
calling our names.4
THE HUNT
FOR PERFECTION
Every country has its culinary totems
and traditions. But not all hold them as
close as Spain does. In Grape, Olive, Pig,
Goulding nicely captures the centrality
of food to the character of this country.
More than politics or religion, what
holds the disparate regions and
populations together is “a common
pantry, a shared palate, a handful of
emblematic dishes.”
One of these crucial, inevitable
Spanish tastes—along with croquetas,
paella, gazpacho, and a half dozen
others we could argue about—is tortilla
española, the sometimes fluffy,
occasionally oozy, omelette-like cake
that is a standard-bearer of the tapas
bar. The list of ingredients is simple—
eggs, potatoes, onions, olive oil—but the
nuances are infinite. “Nothing can be
easier,” José Andrés has said, “and
nothing can be more difficult.”
You could spend a week in Madrid
just trying different variations of the
tortilla. We ate them at bars in markets
and at modernized tabernas where the
waitstaff communicated through
wireless earpieces like the Secret
Service protecting a leg of jamón. Casa
Dani, in the Mercado de la Paz, serves a
classic form, produced by the hundreds
every day. It’s golden at the edges,
bright and sticky within but just shy of
runny, with pliant caramelized onions
and potatoes that have just enough
chew to remind you they’re there. At
Taberna Pedraza, a few blocks from the
Parque del Retiro, they make something
that is more like a barely contained
puddle. Nearly flat, with yolks that run
out like liquid sunshine when cut, this isContent in this issue was produced with assistance from Blackberry Mountain; Dan
Hotels; El Al; Farmhouse Inn; GoProvidence; Heritage Madrid Hotel; Karlitz & Co.;
MacArthur Place; Madrid & Beyond; Providence Tourism Council; Uniworld Boutique
River Cruise Collection; and VP Plaza España Design.