Ah, DC. Let's get some Spanish food!

This is one of those posts where the pictures have been uploaded for a WEEK over at Flickr, yet they've escaped being blogged over here so I could rant about nasty Austin restaurants and spend too much time reading about Super Tuesday results.

GOBAMA!

Anyway, you may remember that we spent a long weekend in DC in January?  Well, that Sunday we drove downtown with my aunt and grandmother to meet up with my uncle for a bit of museuming.

First stop - the National Gallery!  More specifically, the I.M. Pei-designed East Wing.

Unfortunately, the building leaks - it suffers from a little bit of the old form over function problem.  Though it wasn't actually raining while we were there, there were buckets scattered haphazardly through the lobby.  Condensation, maybe, since it was 23 degrees outside!  Fahrenheit!  Yowza!

My friends who live in Boston and Chicago and other points north are cursing me right now. 

The National Gallery is... interesting.  Great, even.  It better be, with a name like that.  They have a good bit of Calder, not just in the form of the enormous mobile they've got hanging in the lobby:

They also have a small room stuffed to the gills with Calder, where I got in trouble for taking this picture.  There hadn't been any signs in the rest of the museum, and I was happily snapping away (they're all blurry... oops).  I walked into the Calder room and took a few pictures before a large guard in ill-fitting pants - not that uniform pants ever really fit anyone well - walked over to me and said,

"Ummm... what are you doing?"

I was a little surprised, since I thought it was obvious, so I may have stammered that I was taking a picture.  "Ma'am, you didn't read the sign," she said, and pointed over my left shoulder.  Oops.

Oh well.  At least she didn't confiscate the camera and demand baksheesh...

We also enjoyed various other portions of the museum, including some cutouts done by Matisse in the last few years of his life.  Interestingly simplistic.

This whole time, my grandmother, who'd been up since 7 AM and had breakfast pretty soon thereafter, was getting more and more ravenous.  After a brief stop in the gallery's awe-inspiring gift shop, where we bought a little something for the nephlet, we walked down the street for lunch at a place my uncle was recommending.

Jaleo.  Here in Austin, we only have one fairly mediocre tapas place that we haven't visited in years.  Come to think of it, Malaga may be due for a retry.  Anyway, yay for tapas!

After being seated immediately and shrugging off the topmost of our many layers, we were presented with pickles.  Luckily, because we were having to hold Nana back from chewing on the table.  I also gave her my airline peanuts.

After a good bit of discussion, the five of us ordered thirteen dishes.  Hey, they're small!  It's tapas!  Yay tapas!

We also ordered a delicious bottle of crisp sherry with a slight tang - Manzanilla la Gitana.  Though my family was pretty skeptical, having mostly been introduced to sherry as either a sweet after-dinner drink or in its cream form, everyone who tried it really liked it.  Yum, good sherry.

Thank goodness a basket of bread was the next thing to hit the table.

The bread was good and fairly crusty, though it was unfortunately right at room temperature.  The olive oil, on the other hand, was delicious and peppery with lots of vegetable notes. 

While we waited for the dishes we'd ordered to begin making their way out of the kitchen, Husbear took a couple of shots of the restaurant.

Lots of natural light made picture-taking in here easy.  Some of the tables were topped with intricate mosaics and a large mural that looked a bit like a meeting between Kahlo and O'Keefe covered a wall.

We only had a couple of minutes to wait.

First out, Ensalada de remolacha con citricos - a frisee salad topped with beet shavings and quarters, nicely supremed citrus segments, and picon cheese, a creamy Spanish blue.  Not an earth-shattering pairing, but a solid one.  Plus, it managed to convert my beet-suspicious vegetarian uncle!

Barely behind our salad arrived the Espinacas a la Catalana - quick-sauteed spinach with pine nuts, raisins, and apples.  One of the standouts.  So good, in fact, we ordered another dish of it immediately.  The spinach must have been in the pan for just seconds, long enough to wilt and get a nice oily sheen.  I don't know where the comforting savoriness came from here - perhaps the pine nuts - but the bitter, sweet, and savory were balanced oh so well. 

Up next was an almost equally yummy dish - Pimientos del piquillo rellenos de queso de caña de cabra a la plancha.  I can't even say that one time fast.  It's stuffed peppers, cold, stuffed with creamy tangy goat cheese.  Very nice, though I guess I thought we were over microgreens?  Apparently José Andrés isn't.

Next was the first non-vegetable to arrive - ‘Esqueixada’ de bacalao.  This is a salad of salt cod with tomato and olive oil, and I think perhaps chives and shallot.  Husbear and I have had some good bacalao (baccalà in Italy) and some mealy and bad, and this was definitely up with the best.  The texture was closer to that of raw fish, so I think we were predisposed to enjoy it, but the flavors were all nicely put together, too - salty olives, peppery/grassy olive oil, and the slight fishiness of the bacalao.

Then, well, hopping into meatier territory - chorizo!  Homemade!

For obvious reasons, we're very interested these days in homemade sausage.  Someday, I hope Husbear will have a spare minute to write about the half-pig we brought to Louisiana for Christmas and turned into sausages, boudin, loin, belly, rillettes, and head cheese... but not today, unfortunately.

This sausage was good and spicy, though I preferred the potato puree, honestly.  What's not to like about creamy wonderfulness?  The sauce was way rosemary, though, so that I wasn't as much of a fan of.

Next?  Mushrooms!  I've been to Madrid one time (and need to get back, I know) and I remember the mushrooms served at a gypsy cave restaurant very clearly.  Garlicky, with that earthy mushroom flavor and a grilled savory backnote.  These were close, but not quite.

The mushrooms came out at the same time as two other hyper-traditional tapas.  The first was the tortilla de patatas - this is the egg and potato round omelette that you can get at just about every single tapas place we visited in the various regions of Spain.  This was a good version, though again I could have done without the microgreens.   

The other was dates wrapped in bacon and fried - delicious sweet-salty little fritters.  I wonder if the dates are a hand-me-down from the Moors?  I know the bacon wouldn't be.

We had a bit of a break before the next dishes arrived, thank goodness, because we were running our of room on the little appetizer-sized plates we'd been given.  We sat back a bit, just in time to be served our last few dishes...

Trigueros con salsa de romesco re-started things.  Though Trigueros apparently translates to wheat dealers, at least according to Babelfish, here it meant asparagus, served with that most noble of Spanish sauces - romesco.  Tomatoes, almonds, vinegar, peppers, it's a very assertive sauce.  I wanted more with our wheat dealers - there wasn't really enough for us all to get a hearty taste.

This is an awful lot of dishes to blog!  At least they were mostly good to great... except this next one.  Salmón a la sidra con huevas de trucha.  Salmon with an apple sauce and trout roe, also with diced apples.  And more microgreens, yay.  Again, I start out biased against the cooked fish, which was done just fine, but the whole dish together was just too sweet.  Salmon is a pretty sweet fish, and when you back it up with lots of apple, yeah... sweet.

Lucky, then, that the next dish out was one of mine and the table's favorites, the coliflor con olivas y frutos secos.  It was quick-cooked, still toothsome cauliflower tossed with olives and dried fruit and topped with a whole lot of flavorful Spanish paprika, or pimentón.

I think I must have been getting pretty full by this time.  I know this looks like a lot of food, but please also remember that there were five of us eating... and the servings are tapas-sized, after all.

The next dish made no impression.  I think I remember it being good.  I would have thought a stew (and the chorizo) would be the perfect dish for that day, but to be honest, I preferred the other vegetables and the bacalao.

And then, the very last thing to get carted over to our table (well, with the exception of the second spinach dish) was a dish of costillitas de cordero con calabaza - lamb chops with butternut squash.  Good and grilly... but I shockingly prefer my lamb a bit rarer.  The butternut squash was good, though, as was the rich jus.

All in all, a very good meal.  Were I to go back, I think I'd stick more heavily to the vegetables - the chef has a real hand with them, and while the meat dishes aren't bad, exactly, they just didn't stand out.  With the exception of that delicious bacalao, of course, and maybe those date and bacon fritters.

We really, really didn't want to go back out in the cold, but eventually we couldn't put it off any further.  While walking over to my uncle's car, we stopped in a great little gallery where Husbear and I discovered an already well-known artist and came fairly close to dropping $900 we REALLY don't have right now on a very cool print of apples fighting it out.

Here's Robert C. Jackson's website, if you've been wondering what we'd really love for our fourth anniversary (May 30!).  I love this whole series, but especially this one, "Operation Food Fight."

After that, we went over to the Hirschorn Museum, which is mostly full of the kind of modern art that leaves me cold... though they did have some more Calder.

They also had an exhibit showing a piece of performance art wherin a woman carved hundreds of names on herself (gay and lesbian people who'd been victims of gay-bashing attacks, if I remember correctly) and pressed papers against her wounds, creating a print of their names in blood.

Well... I guess it made an impression.

My favorite exhibit in the museum, however, was out in the hall.

Wait, what's that say?

Oh.

Comments

[maryn]

Jaleo is fantastic. but i'm so sad you missed the patatas bravas - i know they're as much of a cliche as a tortilla, but Jaleo's are awesome! (though it is so lame to tell you that after you've left the town where the restaurant is, so you have no hope of going back for a second round...)

[girlie]

Maryn, now I'm even more disappointed... we actually ordered the patatas bravas, but they never arrived! Or showed up on our bill. We had so much food that we just forgot until later. Dangit.

By the way, your Chiang Mai link was wonderful!

[D]

Heya Girlie,

Thanks for dropping by my blog. I used to update it a lot more often but my new lifestyle in NYC is making that rather difficult. Nevertheless, I was inspired by THIS post to finally put up my post on Jaleo when I was there last Thanksgiving! It's so interesting to see that two totally different people from different parts of the world have been to similar places for kickass food, like ben thanh market in Saigon =). If it makes you feel any better, I ordered the patatas bravas at Jaleo and thought them rather decent but nothing really to shout about.

Cheers and kindest regards,
D

[girlie]

D, that is a strange coincidence! I'm always curious how other people react to the same things I do... and I really had no idea Jaleo is as popular as it seems to be!

I feel better, though still quite curious, about the patatas bravas... when we were in Madrid, we ordered the patatas con dos salsas from some little corner place, hoping for culinary ecstasy, and received fries topped with ketchup and mayo.

Can't wait to read your review of Jaleo - and Ben Thanh!

[spong]

hey rachel, i like your blog. the pics of food look so nice. and now i'm hungry... i will def keep an eye on your blog since you update often.

[girlie]

Aw, thanks, Spong! I know I should update more often than I do, but now that we're back in the States, it can be hard to get fired up. At least we have lots of archives...

[Paolo]

Girlie, further props on the writing... and extra propperinos on being able to describe a meal you had a week ago in such detail.

[Amy]

I just came across this post and, I must say, I'm now depressed. I'm not only a huge Jose Andres fan (please check out his new PBS show - it's on ant 10.30AM on Saturday here in NYC), but also I am a huge tapas fan. I do like it traditional. There are too many annoying places that try too hard to reinvent the tapa. After spending a week in Madrid, I realized how comforting and delicious the simple things were. I still want to give Jose's restaurants a try, but this post didn't really sell it to me...maybe I was expecting more? But thanks for a great post and, even better, all the pictures. I'm curious, is tripe or pig's ears on the menu? I'm not sure most Americans would order it, but it is truly a Madrileno specialty and would be cool if he felt like he could take the risk putting it on his menu. - Amy @ http://www.neverfull.wordpress.com

[Girlie]

Thanks, paulo! Appreciate the propperinos.

Amy, nope... I didn't see pig ear or tripe on the menu. Now that you mention it, the omission is surprising. And I agree that it's a hard line to walk, reinventing traditional food. The food at Jaleo was good, but I wouldn't cross multiple state lines for it. His cooking show does sound interesting, though!

[adam]

nice spread of food...i would like to recruit you both to join the microgreens eradication council that i've recently founded. their reign of garnish control must be stopped.

[eurofoodie]

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