Porto Part I: Presuntisco

I recently (ok, now about two weeks ago) went to Porto, Portugal for the weekend. It was a beautiful town that was heavy on tourists, which was fine since I was there as one and had no intention of posing as a Porto local. Our first dinner was at a place called Presuntisco. It was right along the river, meaning the atmosphere and setting was absolutely perfect for a couple embarking on their first ever trip together.

Apparently the custom in Portugal is for the servers to set a plate of starters down in front of you and if you want to eat it you can, but if you do, you pay for it. We had a plate of three things set in front of us: cheese (akin to feta) in olive oil, some sort of mashed tuna salad, and some olives. We chose to eat only the cheese, which was actually not bad. The chili flakes sprinkled in the oil gave the cheese a nice subtle kick that paired well with the saltiness.

Complete with an aperitif of a local Port wine 

We then ordered the dates wrapped in ham, fried sardines, grilled octopus and grilled cod. We figured since we were in a place that is known for its seafood we should just go for it. The ham wrapped dates were delicious. The smokiness and saltiness from the ham cut the sweetness of the dates perfectly. My only complaint is that I would have liked the dates to be a little softer in texture since they were somewhat toothsome (best word I could use to describe it).

Nothing ham doesn't make better

The fried sardines were nice even if there was a crunch of grit from the parts that had not been cleaned properly. They could have been a little crispier since they were simply dredged in flour then fried in a pan. Tempura style or something similar definitely would have been the way to go.

Wish they had left the heads on...

The best thing we had was the grilled octopus. It was amazingly tender and tasted like...well...octopus, but really good octopus. It wasn't in the slightest bit fishy. It had the perfect amount of char to it and the crunchy little suckers on the tentacle itself were fantastic.

Big meaty tentacles of octopus, delish.

Easily the worst dish of the night and trip. The cod. Perhaps it was bacalao (salt cod) that had simply not been re-hydrated properly, or maybe it was just overdone (and I mean WAY overdone) on the grill. Regardless it was bad. It was dry, not flakey and tender as good bacalao or regular cod should be. I was pulling strings of the dry cod out of my teeth for the rest of the trip. Only saving grace were the silky smooth roasted red peppers and the deliciously bitter broccoli rabe.

Everything was sprinkled with paprika, but even that couldn't save this dish

Final Grade: B+, €69,00 for two, not cheap, but not overly expensive especially considering where we were eating (tourist central, right on river). Besides the disastrous cod dish, everything was quite tasty.

Ruffle Chips

I deviate from regular posts about restaurants and real food and instead divert my attention to the wonders of the Spanish vending machine. In it I discovered a bag of chips, standard. But it was flavored with....jamon!! I had to try them since this blog does have ham in the title and this bag of chips seemed to walk the line between fake (spam) and real (ham). 

Not Spam, But Jamon....flavored chips

The first bite I took was crunchy as Ruffles should be. I then got hit with the unmistakeable flavor of jamon, not great jamon, but it captured the most basic essence. However it dissolved into a fake bacon flavor, which then lead to a combination bacon/fake barbeque taste that was somewhat bizarre. It was smokey, yet tasted a little meaty. 

Final Grade: C+, for the price (€0,90) it was a better than average bag of chips, but let's face it the novelty factor made it taste a little better.

Casa Lucio - Go here, but you might need a reservation

I've been lacking in posts recently and I apologize. I've stopped doing reviews of everywhere I'm eating since most of the meals have been average. Unless one of these small places has something extraordinary or is completely awful, I probably will not review it. However this is definitely a place worth reviewing.

Casa Lucio. My girlfriend and I were actually looking for another restaurant, Taberna Bilbao, but I had copied down the wrong address thanks to Google maps so we ended up nowhere close to it. Fortunately we went down Cava Alta, a street in the neighborhood called La Latina, and I felt myself pulled by the hand, barging through people left and right. My girlfriend recognized where we were and had been talking up one dish that was served at Casa Lucio for a good week and a half. We walked into the restaurant through a nondescript door (all the doors out front look the same, very confusing) and we emerged onto a tapas bar to our left and a few tables in front of us. We stood around for a few minutes until a waiter came up to us, I stumbled through my Spanish and he got the idea that we had no reservation. He told us to wait and he'd be right back.

He passed by us a couple times, not looking at us, but taking down the names of other patrons who were also arriving without a reservation on a long list. I was getting a little nervous since he hadn't written down our names, but a hug and some long looks at the leg of jamon reassured me. The waiter came up to us about 10 minutes later and told us to follow him. He led us into a crowded room and sat us down at a table. Well it was more like half a table. Our knees were touching and we were right next to the table where they served the food from (it was bigger than ours.) But we were among all the locals who come in and we had a table. It was clear that they had just thrown this table together in the ten minutes that I was waiting.

You can see the tray behind our table where they served food from

We got a menu and immediately knew two things we were getting: huevos estrellados and jamon iberico de bellota (the real stuff). We were undecided about a third dish, but settled on the suckling pig. The ham came out first and was exactly how I pictured it, thin pieces of ham, glistening with fat. It was a beautiful sight. The first bite was not actually the best bite of the ham plate, the taste seemed to evolve as the night went on. At first it tasted like an amazing piece of ham, don't get me wrong, it was delicious, but as I ate more of it the taste changed. After a few more bites the ham was sweet, not in an overpowering way, but in a way that made me want to eat more and more, and that I did. You could also really taste the nuttiness of the ham, made possible by those famous acorns that true jamon iberico (de bellota) pigs feed on their entire lives. It was truly spectacular.

Look at how shiny it is. Sign of a good ham.

The huevos estrellados was next. Talk about a dish that was delicious yet incredibly simple. Good eggs, perfectly fried potatoes, runny yolks. Sounds like paradise to me. It was. The yolks made the dish as the potatoes were bathed in a delicious sauce of golden egg yolk. Really, nothing is better than a runny egg. This was no exception. I can't say much more about it without ruining it.

One...

Two...

Gone!

Suckling pig was next up, and thank the lord I've finally had my suckling pig. After going on a program trip to Segovia which by the way is KNOWN FOR suckling pig, we got roast chicken for lunch. What? Roast chicken? Albeit a very good roast chicken, but still, we were in the home of the suckling pig and we were served the other, other, other white meat? I think not. But I got mine. It was fatty, crispy skin, tender meat, I even got to gnaw on the tiny little leg and got a deliciously sticky and gelatinous [tiny] pig tendon out of the deal. Even my girlfriend who says ixnay to the atfay, had a piece of the crispy, fatty skin and while she might not have explicitly said that it was one of the best things the world has ever created, the big grin on her face said it all. The sauce underneath it was a salty pig broth, a little too salty for me, which let's face it, is saying a lot, but had it been a little less salty I would have slurped it all up with a straw.

Why do the Spaniards serve everything with fries?

Final Grade: A. Ham and eggs with a side of bacon, that was essentially our meal, just deconstructed and a little more elegant. For €63,00 it was not a cheap meal, but it was worth every euro-penny.
Definitely worth a trip for anyone. 

Santceloni Part I

This is the review I've been promising you all. It was so good that it deserves two separate posts. I cannot thank those who took me enough, it was truly a spectacular meal.

A couple weeks ago I had the amazing opportunity to go to a two star Michelin restaurant called Santceloni. I've been to some good restaurants before, but this was taken to a whole other level. The food was excellent and we got many extra courses in addition to our starters and main courses. 

We were seated and they immediately brought over a drink cart to us and poured us some Cava (Spanish version of champagne.) After that we received menus and two plates of amuses. The first was a long rectangular plate with four little bites on it. The first was sea snail in its shell. The snail was meaty and almost had the texture of a tough lobster tail (in a good way), it mostly tasted of garlic, but there was the unmistakeable after taste of snail. Second was thinly sliced octopus on a round toast. The octopus was tender, but it didn't really taste like much. The crunch of the toast and the bounce of the octopus were nice contrasts though. Then there was a small cube of fried sweetbreads. This was probably the least successful one out of all of them since it tasted like a generic fried item: it could have been anything. The final amuse on the plate was a tiny quail yolk set in a very thin, crispy wrapper. It might have been raw, but regardless it was delicious. The yolk was creamy and exploded in your mouth when you ate the whole thing. There was also a nice kick of paprika at the end that was evidently in the bottom of the wrapper, hidden from sight, but not from the bite. The second amuse plate we had was a small cockle salad. There were razor thin onions in a citrus-y sauce that balanced the ocean flavor of the cockle. 

After the amuses had been downed (they were only a bite each) we were presented with what was described as the "first fish appetizer." This was a blini with a broccoli puree and golden fish roe. It was a textural fiesta. There were fish eggs popping in every bite contrasted by the silkiness of the puree and the airiness of the pancake. There was even an incredibly finely diced crunchy vegetable that I could not identify, but lent a different crunchiness to the dish. 

While there were no more fish appetizers, they did bring out another appetizer for us. Chickpeas with oxtail. The chickpeas were al dente which meant that instead of being mushy and chalky like some chickpeas are (canned for instance), these were perfectly cooked. It could have used more oxtail, but in retrospect, the chickpeas were the real star of the dish. The chickpeas and the bits of oxtail were nestled on top of what I believe was a celeriac puree. When everything was eaten in a bite it was like the most comforting, warming beef stew you've ever had. It was homey yet completely refined and appropriate for a two star restaurant. 

Crispy onions on top

Our appetizers came after a short break and everything looked stunning. Really. There was some very, very pretty food that came out to us. I ordered something simply called "Bivalve dish with fennel aroma." I was presented with a shallow dish that had three oysters, a half dozen cockles, four pieces of razor clams, and some braised baby fennel. They poured the cold fennel "aroma" table-side and to me it was reminiscent of the ocean coming up and swallowing everything at high tide. This is exactly what the dish was: ocean. Everything was very briny (found out later they actually use sea water in the dish) and tasted like the beach sans the sand. While it might not be perfect for some, the combination of fennel, fennel broth and shellfish was perfect. The anise flavor worked perfectly in countering the brininess of the bivalves. My favorite thing were the razor clams. They were sweet, chewy, and were absolutely delectable. 

Ocean in a bowl

The other three dishes ordered were lobster consomme, smoked ricotta ravioli with caviar and the vegetable stew with prawns. 

The consomme tasted like, well...think simultaneously inhaling the steam billowing out from a pot of freshly steamed lobsters while eating the tail floating in an intense lobster bisque. This is what it was. Honest to goodness lobster. Essence of lobster in a small perfect cup. 

Ah, must be in Maine no?

The ravioli was about as rich and over the top as you can get: a huge pile of caviar was generously spooned on top of each ravioli. The ravioli itself had been smoked, as opposed to smoking the ricotta and putting it inside the ravioli, and it was creamy and melt in your mouth. The saltiness of the caviar cut all that brilliantly, otherwise it would have been far too rich to eat more than two (ok, I could have choked it down sans the caviar, but still.)

 

Give me a whole bowl of these and I will be happy

I didn't actually try the vegetable stew, but it was an incredibly cool and playful interpretation. Instead of having prawns in the stew, I use the word stew lightly since they were just perfectly cooked vegetables, they were instead pounded out into an incredibly thin carpaccio and draped gently on top of the vegetables. It was beautiful, and was gone in about five minutes, so I can only assume it was delicious.    

Pre disappearing act

Everything up until this point in the meal was fantastic. Seriously. This was even down to the olive oil they served with the bread at the very beginning. Good, and I mean really good, olive oil is one of the best things in the entire world. My hunger and waistline would be challenged by the following food that came out...

 For the rest of the meal scroll down...if you dare.  

Santceloni Part II

This is the continuation of the post above, it covers the rest of the meal.

I had just seen a video shot at Next (a restaurant in Chicago, everyone should look it up on youtube, it’s the same people who did Alinea, which you should also look up) that showed an antique duck press (see picture above) being used to create a sauce for the duck dish they were doing. Needless to say I was incredibly excited to see a duck press sitting on a table in the entrance of the restaurant. I knew as soon as I saw the press I would be ordering the duck. They brought the duck out whole and carved it on a table next to us. The breast, legs and wings were carved off and the carcass hacked into manageable pieces to fit into the time machine-esque press. The press was used to extract the blood and other juices from the duck and those juices were then mixed with a reduction sauce to make a wonderfully rich and intense sauce. The duck itself was cooked very rare, but the meat was so flavorful that I think it would have lost a little bit if it had been cooked longer. It was a little tricky to eat since it wasn’t cut for you, but I wrestled through it and had some amazing duck. 

Whole duck pre-pressing

The duck was presented in two servings, the breast and leg served with the pressed duck sauce and caramelized pears, the wings served with a simple salad. The pears worked perfectly with the saltiness of the duck sauce and the gaminess of the duck, providing a touch of burnt sweetness that lingered  after you had swallowed a perfect bite. After the first serving I was pretty full, but who am I to turn down a second helping of something delicious? Fried chicken wings meet duck wings. If some place served duck wings instead of chicken wings, I would be there every day. Such a different taste and with the layer of crispy fat that rendered duck has, it was succulent, fatty and yummy all in one. The salad was there.

Look at the sheen on the sauce, yummy bloody, fatty goodness.

Words of wisdom: anything slow braised will be good. The white veal knuckle came out as a huge piece of meat-on-bone, Flintstone sized. This was no exception to my words of wisdom, except for the fact that it was not good, but excellent. The meat was set upon a velvety potato puree (yes, a glorified mashed potato, but luscious and amazing). There was a crisp layer of skin that encased the outer layer of meat and provided a nice textural contrast. It was heavy, delicious, rich and there was so much that our table couldn’t finish everything, although we certainly tried. 

Served on a silver platter

When we first walked into the restaurant the first thing we were greeted with was a huge table packed full of cheese. It was a rectangular wooden table with at least 40 different types of cheese on it. Instead of dessert we opted for a tasting of cheeses. When we ordered the cheese, two waiters picked the table up and brought it over to serve us tableside. It was an astounding array of cheeses, but one that I was more than happy to attack. Our waiter recommended that we try a selection of cheese exclusively from Spain. He deftly picked out seven cheeses ranging from a soft cheese to manchego to a strong bleu. I alas cannot remember each and every cheese, but aside from the soft cheese and the bleu, they were fairly sharp in taste and quite similar in texture. Our favorite was the soft cheese, delicious with the quince paste (cut the saltiness of it). It was slightly sharp yet had a mild finish. The manchego was good, but I've never really been a fan of it so I wasn't as thrilled as I was with the first cheese. Now bleu cheese and I have never gotten along well. Its been harsh, overbearing and all around unpleasant to eat in anything, but I tried to put all that in the past and mend the broken fence. It was surprisingly good, and by all accounts it was quite bleu-y. Make no mistake, it tasted like a bleu cheese, but it had a fruity undertone that made it quite enjoyable and the taste dissipated quite quickly. An excellent selection, I was quite happy to have tried entirely Spanish cheeses.

Bleu cheese at 9 o'clock

At the end of the cheese course we were all ready to waddle out, but the meal wasn’t finished yet. They brought out an absurd dessert tower that had little sweet delicacies scattered all over it. They were actually quite light, and despite the fact that I was stuffed beyond stuffed, I sampled one of each. Honestly I couldn’t tell you what each thing was since there about eight different options, but they were tasty.  

Final Grade: A+, service, atmosphere, food, all were amazing. The waiters were coordinated in their movements while placing new plates, silverware and food, something I have never seen before. The food was delicious, one of the best meals of my life. Everything was refined and yet there was a certain playfulness to the whole meal that I enjoyed immensely. I was lucky enough to be part of this meal and I will forever savor the evening. 

Parque Casa de Campo

Some friends and I took a trip to Casa del Campo, a large park in the very west of Madrid. When we go to the park I was underwhelmed. We may have been in a desert: dust everywhere, dust covered trees, dusty paths, dust clouds. The point I'm making is that it wasn't green and luscious like one expects when hearing the word "park." 

We ended up getting extremely hungry while walking around this dust bowl and when we arrived at a small lago (lake) there were a bunch of restaurants surrounding the outside of it. We stopped in at one and when we asked for a menu the waiter shot us a dirty look and came back about 10 minutes later with one menu for the three of us. Apparently we were supposed to have memorized the menu. I looked at the menu and the decision for me was simple: chorizo frito. That's right, fried chorizo. 

I have not met anyone who does not like crispy, spicy, greasy, chorizo. If you don't like it, don't tell me. But seriously, seeing fried chorizo on the menu nearly made me start salivating right there. The waiter delivered a decently sized shallow bowl piled high with delicious, hot, crunchy, and damn near perfect nuggets of chorizo. Spicy, salty, hints of a slight smokiness, it was heaven. My mouth is watering right now while writing this, as sick as that sounds.

Ah...prettier than Monet

My friend ordered a tortilla espanola. A favorite among the Spaniards it is simply a large mass of potato and egg. Generally boring, this one lived up to the expectation. HOWEVER! Guess who was there to rescue it? Chorizo grease!! Not even the actual sausage, the grease. Sopping up some of the yummy grease drippings with the mundane egg-potato mixture transformed it into, well...a sponge and vessel for the worth-its-weight-in-gold-grease. 

Note the red stains of chorizo grease

Ignore the butchering, it is not indicative of how I actually cut food

Final Grade: A. Yes, an A. Some small, mediocre restaurant next to a cheesy little lake can serve me a simple bowl of fried chorizo and I will go crazy. The tortilla can be damned, but it did serve a purpose. We split the check and for €6,00 I got the best meal I've had in Madrid thus far (except for the big review coming up, I'm just building the hype now). Definitely worth the long Metro ride and the dusty trails. 

 

El Rincòn de Goya

I'm reviewing mostly smaller places right now, but I do have a long review coming up of a restaurant I had the privilege of going to. However that takes time to write, so here is one of three smaller food joints I have gone to.

A small tapas restaurant set downstairs, I found this place with a couple other people while we were just walking around. The exterior looked friendly enough and the inside looked small and intimate. Just the place I've been looking, for aesthetically at least.

The menu was huge, which either boded well or was an ominous sign (too many items could mean less attention to each dish.) Turns out it was somewhere in between. I ordered the fois gras with asparagus, bacalao with aioli, and to be a little adventurous I ordered the blood sausage with egg.  Everything came on a very nice piece of rustic toast, which made it convenient to eat.

The fois with asparagus came with a deep pink sauce on top. Needless to say I was a little skeptical of it, but I tried it and discovered it was not a reduction of bubblicious, but rather a raspberry sauce. Interesting. The sweetness of the sauce actually worked quite well with the fois, cutting through the richness of the liver. The asparagus was fine, but a little overcooked.

Next came the bacalao with aioli. If it was salt cod, I couldn't tell. It seemed like they had taken a frozen fish, cut some slices off of it and reheated it in a microwave. This was the least successful for me, made much worse by the guest appearance of some raisins. Yes, probably Sun-Maid. 

My favorite dish was definitely the blood sausage. Something about the irony of it (pun intended), the almost tinny quality that you get when eating anything that has cooked blood, is actually quite appealing. This blood sausage was earthy, rich, deep in flavor that was boosted by the presence of a nice wave of cumin whenever you swallowed a bite. The quail yolk provided a sauce to the dish and the red peppers added a sweetness that was bright and fresh.

Top clockwise: blood sausage w/red peppers and quail egg, bacalao w/aioli, raisins and pinenuts, fois w/asparagus and asparagus

Final Grade: B-, the meal cost €12,50 for those three dishes and a glass of beer, so it wasn't the cheapest. Nor was it the greatest, but it was definitely not the worst (that of course goes to Tapas 44, which I realize now I've plugged more than any other eatery on here).