Cuts of the day
at Arzábal Retiro,
a restaurant
in the Retiro
neighborhood.
La Tasquería, an
offal-focused
restaurant in the
Salamanca district.
122 TRAVEL+LEISURE | SEPTEMBER 2019
THE ACCIDENTAL CHEF
Go to Sacha, said my Spanish friends in the
food business. Go and you’ll understand,
agreed the highly opinionated community
of well-traveled food nerds I’d polled for
recommendations on where best to begin my
exploration of the Madrid dining scene.
“Sacha? Quite frankly, impossible to have a
bad meal there,” decreed José Andrés, the
Spanish-American chef and restaurateur. “It’s
casual. Hard to describe. Go—you’ll die.”
My wife and I went, and we understood. Lunch
at Sacha was the high point of a week of amazing
eating. The food is not quite Castilian or Catalan
or Galician but rather a personal expression of the
tastes and enthusiasms of Sacha Hormaechea,
whom my friend Matt Goulding, the Barcelona-
based American author of the trenchant and
indispensable guide to the Spanish table, Grape,
Olive, Pig, described to me as “the poet laureate
of la cocina madrileña.”
The accolades, the hard-to-pin-down allure,
and the widespread allegiance to this place all
make sense when you bite into the falsa lasaña,
or “false lasagna”: a sheet of buttery, almost
transparently thin egg noodle casually tucked
around a few bites of savory txangurro, stewy
Basque-style slow-cooked spider crab. The loose
bundle is topped with gooey red sea urchin for
good measure. It all made sense when we were
1
