Travel + Leisure USA - 09.2019

The interior of
Taberna de la Elisa.

From left: Deep-
fried suckling
pig’s head at
La Tasquería;
the dining room
at Sacha, in the
Chamartín
neighborhood.

TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM 127

And on the night we dined, there was the

accidental chef, working the room in a T-shirt that

read generation almost and the gray ponytail of

an aging rock star. He deftly smooshed the head

and carapace of a giant carabinero, the prized red

warmwater prawn of Andalusia, into a bowl set in

front of my wife. The smooshed bits of the

prawn’s head contributed to the deeply seafoody,

lick-your-bowl, reconsider-your-life-choices,

maybe-buy-a-suit-the-blue-of-these-floors-and-

relocate-to-Madrid-to-become-a-regular-here

goodness of the little puddle of prawn stew.

Moving around the table from diner to diner,

Sacha instructed us to drag the meat through the

suquet, the stew, and use the shells of the

carabineros as vessels to slurp up what was left.

We did as we were told, and we were happy.

BACK TO ESSENTIALS

After landing in Madrid on a bright spring

morning, my wife and I dropped our bags off

at the Heritage Madrid Hotel and headed straight

for the junky sprawl of El Rastro market. At Bar

Santurce, a stand-up joint a Spanish friend in

New York had recommended, we ate fried

sardines for breakfast—and felt that we’d arrived.

Madrid is big and spread out. It’s not as

immediately knowable and lovable as its culinary

rival, Barcelona. When we think of the cuisine of

Spain, we often imagine a divide between, on the

one hand, the avant-garde molecular cuisine

made famous by Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli and his

legion of followers and, on the other, the classic

staples of the tapas and pintxos bars. But Madrid is

diverse and varied and can’t be pigeonholed with

one cuisine or style of eating. “We are a mix of

weird people from all over,” my Madrileño food-

world friend Patricia Mateo told me. “So we don’t

have a proper regional cuisine. It is a cuisine of

many regions.”

What’s most exciting now in Madrid, she says,

is a post-molecular renaissance of younger chefs

revisiting the timeless dishes, eager to show what

they can do with the familiar rather than just

inventing for invention’s sake.

CONSIDER THE GILDA

The Gilda is a foundational Basque pintxo, or

little bite. Traditionally comprising a green

olive, an anchovy fillet, and a pickled guindilla

pepper, all squished together on a toothpick, it was

named for the piquant character Rita Hayworth

played in the 1946 film of the same name. At

Bistronómika, a cool little seafood-focused

restaurant with a wood-fired oven on a

cobblestoned lane in

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