Traveling allows the brave and curious to try the local cuisines, one of the aspects of travel that we love the most!
In Spain the afternoon meal is usually served at about 1pm, the evening meal is not served until 9 pm or later, with 8 hours between meals you may find yourself in the market for a few Tapas.
Tapas is a generic term for a variety of hot or cold appetizers, that range from olives and cheese to battered deep fried baby squid ( and lots in between, including fish roe sacks).
To stave off starvation many Spaniard’s bar hop before dinner, snacking on tapas and catching up with friends. The word tapa in Spanish means to cover. The story goes that tapas were invented to keep fruit flies out of the bar patrons Sherry in the Andalusia region of Spain.
The first Tapas started out as lowly pieces of bread to cover the Sherry glass. Apparently the owners of the bars discovered that salty tapas increased Sherry consumption and as Tapas evolved they also represented an income stream just as lucrative as the Sherry.
In North America people live to work, In Europe, it appears, people live to eat. The Spaniard’s like the Italians take their food VERY seriously, main meals are a central activity and may take several hours to enjoy. What I have learned is this– not all Tapas bars are created equally. Some are awesome and some are complete crap.
The mistake we made was over investing in an establishment before the quality of the food was revealed. The very friendly owner of one Tapas bar was an expert in getting bums into seats, he was also very good at marketing his menu.
We invested heavily, by ordering Gazpacho, salad and a variety of tapas.
The Gazpacho (cold vegetable soup) as promised was good but it was all downhill from there. The salad was wilted, covered in canned tuna, and was floating on several inches of liquid sloshing around the bottom of the bowl. The homemade chicken croquets were more like deep fried snot balls. The grouper we ordered turned out to be rubbery squid rings. All of the tapas were served on a bed of cold greasy fries.
The lesson learnt from this experience:
Speak with a local resident and ask where the best tapas are to be had. Barring this, especially if your Spanish could do with a little help is order only one thing at a time!
If the food is crap there is always another tapas bar nearby!
Salud!
